This is the New Normal
Fast Capitalism
A Call for Papers: “This is the New Normal!”
Timothy W. Luke section editor
Fast Capitalism is seeking critical essays for possible inclusion in a special section about the changing dynamics of US politics during the current Trump administration. The goal is to gather both scholarly essays and political commentaries in time to present careful critical studies of the changing political realities in the United States under the leadership President Trump and his new administrative team.
These goals are important are important to attain. With each passing week since the United States of America re-elected Donald J. Trump on November 5, 2024, it is clear the country has entered a radical new phase of its history as an ethical, material and political experiment in self-government by a people seeking “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” allegedly driven by “the Spirit of 1776.” This nation once normally prided itself, as “The New Colossus,” on calling out to the world with words cast on a bronze plaque placed on the base of the Statue of Liberty in the harbor of New York City, "Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore/Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,” times have plainly changed. Such persons now are arrested coming across the Rio Grande River, sent to detention centers run by the Department of Homeland Security, and processed for a speedy return to their countries of origin on U.S. Air Force transport planes in shackles. In the meantime, President Trump is touting the sale of a five million dollar “gold card” to wealthy foreigners eager to set up shop in America without the hassles of waiting years to earn their “green cards” before naturalizing as US citizens. He hopes to sell 10 million of them to net the US Treasury $50 trillion, while attracting affluent consumers, job creators and super-rich investors to “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) as soon as 2026 – the 250th anniversary of 1776. We once asserted with regard to President Trump “this is not normal,” but history has shifted.
This cluster of disruptive changes represents only a few egregious aspects of “the new normal” of a democratic republic spiraling away in the winds of an elected autocracy.
After over a month in office, President Trump as POTUS47 is implementing what he and his MAGA supporters have planned, plotted and prepared for since 2021 after failing miserably to realize their aspirations during his first term as POTUS 45. From openly embracing some of Silicon Valley’s high-tech apex billionaires at his Inauguration Day festivities, appointing at least 20 former Fox News on-air personalities with little to no qualifications to key cabinet, agency and military posts, bullying Congress to pass the bills he wants after imperiously signing over 70 executive orders of questionable legality as he installed himself again in the White House, firing on short notice thousands of federal employees to threatening Denmark to sell him Greenland or else face America forcibly annexing it, promising to depopulate Gaza to redevelop it as “The Riviera of the Middle East,” convening peace talks in Saudi Arabia with Russia to work out a peace settlement in Ukraine on Moscow’s rather than Kyiv’s terms along with closing America’s “nuclear umbrella” over Washington’s NATO partners in Europe, is Trump aspiring to do far more than demolish “the administrative state.” Is he instead undertaking a dangerous effort to restructure the entire post-1945 world order of putatively liberal democratic peace as new configurations of militant national populist blocs of great powers vying to control weaker neighboring states, global trade, outer space and even other planets by returning to the bellicose frontier mentality of America’s “Manifest Destiny.” Can one say “This is the New Normal?”
We are calling for contributions offering critical constructive considerations of how to account for and cope with these unfolding cataclysmic changes whose “new normality” far exceeds and outstrips the inept former abnormality of President Trump as POTUS45 from 2017 to 2021.
- What are the larger implications of Elon Musk’s chaotic and convoluted “coup d'Etat against “the Administrative State” conducted through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the US and for the world at large?
- How is the American electorate feeling, which sought a government that would lower the price of eggs, reduce mortgage rates, and stop endless wars in the Middle East, instead now facing an ultranationalist oligarchy taking more and more unconstitutional steps down a road leading the United States to more openly authoritarian modes of rule?
- Are these rapid developments another expression of the gradual shift towards authoritarianism of governments around the world or a retrograde flashback to the embedded conflicts and contradictions exposed in America before the War Between the States?
- Are xenophobic, white nationalist, racist and patriarchic values returning as widely accepted practices despite all of Trump’s promises to create “a new Golden Age” for America in the coming years?
- How does shaking down the nation’s trading partners with endlessly shifting tariff deals, completing the anti-immigrant wall along the Mexican border, tearing apart the social safety net for most Americans, reoccupying Panama to control the Panama Canal or accelerating climate change to maintain fossil fuel producers in the red states underpinning electoral coalition, make America great again?
- What are the alternatives, since this ought not be accepted as “the new normal”?
We seek then papers that address Trump’s impact on governance, discourse, and democracy. We are in interested in reviewing submissions in a number of forms including: scholarly research essays, commentaries, polemics, policy proposals, biographies, etc. Please submit them to Timothy Luke twluke@vt.edu or online by May 15, 2025, for publication during Fall 2025. Early submissions are welcome!
