A Family Business, by Kim Phillips-Fein – 14 October 2025

From The Nation

Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance by Melinda Cooper 2024

Ever since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, liberals and the left have struggled to understand the meaning of his rise, and that of “Trumpism,” for American politics. When Trump entered the political scene, he was hard to take seriously. In his first campaign, he seemed—initially, at least—to be a zombie headline straight from the New York Post’s“Page Six”: a faded reality-TV star, a bankrupt real estate speculator, a huckster, a creep, and a punch line. Even after he won the election, many liberals refused to recognize that he was all of those things and also the president of the United States. Having placed their hopes in Hillary Clinton, they marched to slogans like “Not My President.” Trump might be in the White House, but it was unfathomable to view him as an enduring threat. Sure, he spoke for a large minority of Americans—the prejudiced, the left-behind, the economically disadvantaged white working class, the “deplorables” (to quote Clinton herself) who were having trouble adapting to changing racial, ethnic, and sexual norms. Trumpism was a remnant of reaction, an eruption from the past. Accordingly, after 2020, many liberals, and even some on the left, came to the reassuring conclusion that while Trump and Trumpism had been a troubling interregnum, they had been supplanted by a new liberal age—a return to reason, normalcy, and science with Joe Biden at the helm. Pundits depicted Biden as the second coming of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, implying that his election would usher in a new era of public investment and social tolerance.

Then Trump won again. If the first time, he’d lost the popular vote while winning the Electoral College, now no one could deny that he was the legitimate victor and that the coalition he spoke for seemed to be growing—in 2024, Trump was able to command the popular vote and to make strides with Black and Latino voters as well. The quandary of understanding Trump, not as an electoral accident but as something more, has returned with a vengeance. Trump’s actions in office the second time around have made matters still more complicated. On one level, over the past 10months, Trump has acted like any other Republican of the past 50 years, pressing on with the party’s long-standing agenda. He has defunded essential welfare programs; he has slashed government spending and undermined government agencies; he has cut taxes for the rich. But in his aggressive use of ICE against immigrants, his campaign against trans people, his sabotage of basic science, his nationalistic belligerence, and his willingness to use government authority against private universities to make them subject to his will, he goes well beyond the conventional free-market Republican mainstream. All of this raises the question: Are Trump and Trumpism best understood as the consolidation of an elite economic program, as a nostalgia-laced brew of prejudice and rage, or as a coherent, forceful new style of authoritarian rule—and if it’s the latter, why is this happening now? How has this politics not only made its way into the center of American power but with a near majority, too? Making sense of all this is not just an abstract exercise; it raises important questions about what kind of politics the left will need to counter the nightmarish course we seem to be hurtling along.

When Melinda Cooper wrote Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance, she could not have anticipated Trump’s return to the White House or the political and intellectual dilemmas it would pose. But Counterrevolution does offer a new way of seeing Trump: It situates him as part of a larger shift in how people generate and preserve wealth, a change in the country’s underlying political economy. Whether one agrees with it or not, it offers a striking explanation for how the left might interpret the emergence and persistence of Trumpism.

Cooper argues that the American political economy in the 21st century has been defined by extreme wealth inequality and also, less noted, the accumulation of massive private fortunes. Often, people on the left have blamed neoliberalism— especially deregulation and upper-bracket tax cuts—for the income gap, and Cooper does too. But she goes farther, arguing that government austerity in the public sphere (cuts to welfare-state spending) has been accompanied by policies that encourage financial speculation through low interest rates and the practice of quantitative easing, in which the Federal Reserve uses its prerogatives to effectively support the prices of stocks and other assets.

In many ways, none of this is new. Extremes of wealth and poverty are hardly novel in the history of the United States. But Cooper points to an important difference: If, in much of the 20th century, these economic divisions were produced by major industrial corporations, collectively controlled by a community of shareholders and stock owners that included pension funds, banks, and wealthy individuals, then in today’s economy they are produced by private equity funds, financial firms, family trusts, and tech firms owned by a handful of wealthy founders.

Many commentators have been struck by the crude ideological agenda of Project 2025 (especially in regard to gender), the ferocity of Trump’s nationalism, the relentlessness of his self-promotion, and the strange combination of wheeling and dealing and brute force that Trump seems to believe qualifies as governance. But Cooper’s book clarifies that along with these cultural and stylistic qualities, there is another aspect of Trump and Trumpism that often gets overlooked: What is most distinctive about both is that they reflect the unique characteristics of a political culture and economy shaped by the private wealth and patriarchal whims of a group of entrepreneurs who have been able to wrest free of any of the structural limits that once guided economic life. The financiers, tech bros, and megalomaniacal entrepreneurs of today’s Republican Party are no longer accountable to the bureaucratic corps of middle managers that populated the mid-20th-century corporations or to large numbers of external shareholders. The authority of the private executive over the firm that he owns is echoed in Trump’s habit of governing by executive order, his penchant for making “deals,” and his ability to win the allegiance of tech billionaires like Elon Musk, who also believe in the need to free corporate founders from the hassle of answering to regulators or shareholders. It may even account for Trump’s support from the small-business owners and middle-class voters who decided that they identified more with this style of leadership than with the professional expertise represented by Kamala Harris.

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Kim Phillips-Fein is a historian of 20th-century US American politics and political economy, whose interests include the history of political institutions and ideas, the history of labor and capitalism and the history of New York City.

A Family Business, by Kim Phillips-Fein – 14 October 2025

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