The Drift first spoke with Nikhil Pal Singh at the dawn of Joe Biden’s presidency, shortly after the January 6 riots. Trump, we wrote in our introduction to that interview, was “finally, dramatically out of office,” and “efforts to historicize his tenure” had “already begun.” At the time, Singh — a professor of social and cultural analysis and history at NYU, founding faculty director of the NYU Prison Education Program, and author of two books on race in America — cautioned against the temptation to think that matters were settled. “We’re sort of caught between a type of progressive conformism on the one hand, one that speaks a language of inclusion and diversity,” he warned, and on the other hand, “a reckless right-wing vision of freedom, understood as the impunity to do whatever you want under terms of protected wealth and status, damn the consequences. And between those two poles we’ve grown massively unbalanced.”

Now, as this lack of balance seems to have tipped us into a precipitous fall, we asked Singh what the chattering classes got wrong in the interregnum between Trump’s two terms, the usefulness of historical analogies, and what about the president is truly unprecedented. 

In 2021, we discussed the ways in which Trump represents a continuation of preexisting — even foundational — tendencies in American politics, as well as a break with the past. Do you see Trump 2.0 as more of a radical rupture, and a greater threat to democracy, than his prior administration was? 

Even though I thought that Trump was going to win the 2024 election, that he was better prepared to govern this time, and that he had assembled a nastier crew of loyalists to do his bidding, I wasn’t prepared for the rapid-fire assault that he has mounted this spring on liberal institutions and the rule of law more generally. Trump 2.0 appears more committed to testing the limits of despotism via executive fiat and by empowering ideological zealots. Having said that, there is already ample evidence that Trump will again prove to be more spectacle than substance, and fall short of the aspirations that right-wing extremists have invested in his administration. It’s always hard to tell whether Trump’s failures are the result of blinding malevolence or basic incompetence; it’s generally both.

The second point I’d make is that the corruption this time around is more direct. We’re seeing a personalist, patrimonial form of rule in which the leader is not being checked in any discernible way, except perhaps by the market. This leads to capriciousness and arbitrariness, reinforced by a chorus of sycophants in Trump’s cabinet, some of whom surely know better.

I stand by the argument that Trump recapitulates existing reactionary tendencies within American political life that go back quite a long way. To argue that he represents a break, or to suggest that he’s operating outside of existing constitutional frameworks, is misleading. He is testing the limits, yes, but those limits have been tested in the past, particularly in the domain of state security and police power: when FDR interned the Japanese, when Operation Wetback was launched to deport Mexican migrants en masse in the 1950s, when the development of mass incarceration in the 1980s began to erode the rights of the accused, when the Bush administration decided to enact rendition and torture after 9/11, when the Obama administration used drones to assassinate people remotely, including an American citizen in Yemen. Is Trump operating outside of these precedents? I would say no.

To the second part of your question — is Trump 2.0 a greater threat to democracy than Trump 1.0 — I would say yes, but mainly in the sense that a democracy is not simply a writ on paper. It’s supported by norms, laws, cultural attitudes, economic processes, and the strength of institutions. We’ve been living through a longer period in which our liberal democratic project has been steadily weakening, for reasons already mentioned relating to policing and national security, but to which we might add: staggering wealth inequality, the influence of dark money in politics, and the degradation of our information ecology. Each stage of attrition has left us a little bit worse off. When do we reach a tipping point?

What should we make of the Biden interregnum? How did his presidency get us back to Trump, and why do you think the Harris campaign failed?

During Biden’s first two years, his administration passed an ambitious legislative package of public investment with the goal of reshoring manufacturing and leveraging private investment to develop American production. Above all, this was a bid to renew the logic of postwar liberalism that had been lost in the long arc of deindustrialization. Taken together, the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act were novel and positive policy initiatives, unlike anything we had seen from a U.S. administration in the neoliberal era. The most progressive elements within these bills, related to child care and support for families, were cut out. Nonetheless, combining a vision of industrial policy with fairer taxation, a commitment to the clean energy transition, and durable support for what Harris called the care economy seemed like a promising path to progressive renewal. 

Unfortunately, all of this was also framed in terms of competition with China. I will own up to being a China dove. That’s not to say that I think the country isn’t authoritarian, or that it doesn’t engage in the exploitation of its people or seek advantages in its dealings with neighbors and trading partners, like most states. But I do think it is a mistake to treat China as if it constitutes a primary threat to U.S. national security. It does so only if we imagine that defending U.S. global hegemony is the paramount concern. A more cooperative view of international relations demands a modus vivendi with China — given its size, as well as its economic and civilizational importance — not only for the sake of our own security, but also in order to address global challenges including, most obviously, war and climate change. Once it became clear that Biden’s policy was to advance the idea of a new Cold War, I became increasingly concerned. I think I said in our earlier interview that one of the major accomplishments of Trump’s first term was setting up China as our main threat and adversary. But it was Biden who established that dynamic on a more bellicose and bipartisan basis.

So I would divide the Biden interregnum in half: initial, positive steps on the domestic economy undone, in part, by a disastrous foreign policy. Of course, it really went off the rails with Ukraine. I acknowledge the Russian aggression; we should not endorse the idea that countries can redraw borders and seize territory by force. But it is also clear that there is a long, complex post-Cold War history of NATO expansion that led us to this place. The Biden administration allowed for almost no nuance with respect to Russian concerns, nor did it open up the possibility for a different trajectory via negotiation at an earlier point in the conflict. Biden then, of course, endorsed and enabled the Israeli war on Gaza — the fatal moment for his credibility and legitimacy. A lot of Democratic pundits continue to see it as a marginal issue, but I just don’t think that is true. It was hard to avoid the sense that Biden was losing control of foreign policy in practical terms and losing any claim to moral leadership. The administration was in chaos, and its partners weren’t listening to it. That was damaging, as was Biden’s senescence, his inability and unwillingness to own up to it, and the ways it was covered up by advisers and party operatives. If Biden had stuck with the plan to serve one term, and enabled a process of succession to begin around year two, we might have found ourselves in a better place.

Harris was an obviously weak candidate, an uninspiring, inauthentic politician. She had never proven herself on the national stage or in primary contests outside California. She tried in her campaign to avoid being controversial, taking genuine risks, or even mildly distinguishing herself from Biden’s failures. It should have been clear that the argument that Trump was a threat to democracy was not going to be enough to win, given the foreign policy crises, the realities of inflation, and the fact that even if the economy was good for one set of people, it clearly wasn’t good for the majority. Trump’s greatest insight has been his recognition that the United States is in a long-standing crisis. Of course, he’s not going to be the one to fix it, but he speaks to economic and social aspects of it that are real. Harris’s campaign began to look trivial at a certain point, even though she would have been a better president than Trump.

We’ve seen a pretty lackluster response to Trump, to say the least, from elected Democratic officials. How should the party be dealing with Trump? What could activists and voters be doing to apply pressure?

This time, there has not been a capital-R resistance. There has not been the ability to cast Trump as an illegitimate figure or usurper. And many of us who oppose him feel that what we did last time didn’t work, in any case, so we have to take a more measured and calculated approach. That is not entirely wrong. But it would be a mistake to rest there. You’ve got to fire up your base if you’re going to win political campaigns. Harris did not do that. Bernie and AOC have been trying to do that with their rallies. Small-D democratic outreach is essential — we need vast civic renewal in this country in a very basic sense. Elections are ratifications of longer, underlying struggles. It is important to think and act at multiple levels to influence the conditions under which we are governed.

I don’t think it’s entirely stupid for the national Democrats to lie low and let Trump hang himself. Leaning into every controversy is not the best strategy and tends to just give Trump more oxygen. At the same time, it is essential to draw lines around fundamental principles. We have to defend basic constitutional rights and freedoms — of the press, speech, assembly; due process; habeas corpus — now under direct assault. These have not always been the left’s priority, particularly in recent years; sometimes we’ve disparaged them as formal rights not worth the paper they’re printed on. But we want them to be worth something. And in order for them to be worth something, we have to stand up for them. We also need to be able to offer an inclusive, realizable vision of a better future against the kind of zero-sum predation Trump has normalized.

Is it inevitable that social movements generate conservative backlash, or could the left have responded to the right’s provocations more effectively? 

It’s not always useful to argue about slogans, but I never liked the slogan “defund the police.” First, it was framed in terms of austerity, rather than as a positive argument about what we want to use public resources for. The substantive demands of activists — disaggregating the police, disarming the police, and diverting police functions — were too easily submerged. Second, its intensity was completely mismatched to the Covid-related spike in both serious and petty crime and disruptions to civic peace. I don’t think arguments for compassion or equal justice obviate serious and relevant concerns about public safety. Meanwhile, “wokeness” became a right-wing catch-all for many things, including discrimination against white people, challenges to gender binarism, and forms of permissiveness leading to disorder, such as anti-police attitudes. 

We should have been clearer from the beginning that opposition to private and state-sanctioned racism and racial discrimination is not “wokeness.” We should continue to defend a robust anti-racism that criticizes the way the unequal distribution of public resources, and the lack of fair equality of opportunity, generates unequal conditions. The continued operation of discriminatory practices perpetuates those unequal conditions across lines of color, but also across lines of gender and ability. All of the concerns that we now associate with “wokeness” relate to inequalities that structure the way we are able to live. They are historically produced and reproduced. However, I think that, by and large, equity discourse — the idea that an unequal situation can only be read as a manifestation of racial discrimination, for example — is a mistake. It reifies racial groups and ignores the common economic precarity that cuts across them.

The last thing I’d say is that certain kinds of maximalism and purity testing on the left make it very difficult for us to grow a bigger movement. We will need to encompass a wider range of opinions and views if we are going to win. It’s incumbent upon us to build a bigger, stronger, more resilient movement, one that’s better able to withstand disagreements — not necessarily always with unanimity, but with a sense that we, too, are pluralistic. The right has ironically become more adept at pluralism. They accommodate a lot of disagreement in order to move forward on common objectives. Leftists and progressives haven’t been as good at that in recent years. 

In 2021, you said there was no more powerful weapon in contemporary “cancel culture” than accusations of anti-Semitism. Now, critics of Israel are facing greater repression than ever before. How has the policing of pro-Palestinian speech become so extreme? 

Accusations of anti-Semitism have long been the template for regulating and denying free speech. I’m willing to entertain criticisms of progressive anti-discrimination discourse and the way it has operated. There have been moments of overreach that have dampened the freer, more open intellectual environment that we would want to see, for example, in the university. But those have been blown out of the water by this idea that discrimination against Jews is the major problem, which is now the basis for sanctioning and punishing students and withdrawing funding from universities. Obviously, it’s pretextual; the only way you can produce supporting evidence for that claim is if you adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism, which conflates criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism. We’re in a definitional war. The Biden administration — and to some degree, liberals and progressives who were unwilling to be critical on this issue — opened the door to an unholy fusion of right-wing culture warring and the policing of speech and thought.

Years ago, I thought we were making some headway on the Israel issue in this country. I was part of a group that was working on boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) strategies in 2013. There were efforts then, even in New York state, to criminalize or defund any organization that passed BDS resolutions. We met with the New York Times editorial board, and they actually wrote in opposition to the idea of bills intended to prevent BDS, which is clearly a form of nonviolent direct action that should be protected under the First Amendment. We’re allowed to criticize an unjust state. For example, South Africa was banned from the Olympics and from international cricket and rugby. Companies divested from South African business interests. Israel should have faced the same pressure, including being banned from international sporting events, for persisting in an illegal colonial occupation and maintaining the second-class citizenship of Palestinians within Israel for the past 75 years.

After October 7, we were supposed to act as though the Hamas attack wiped the slate clean of everything Israel did before that day: the occupation, expansion, seizure of land, imprisonment of dissidents, execution and torture of political opponents, ethnic cleansing of villages, war against its neighbors. We were supposed to pretend none of that ever happened. The Israel lobby also saw an opportunity to do what they couldn’t do before — what Bari Weiss couldn’t do when she tried to get Joseph Massad fired at Columbia two decades ago — and really go on the offensive to try to crush the pro-Palestine movement on campus. 

One tool the Trump administration has been wielding to police speech is the accusation not merely of anti-Semitism but of terrorism, or support for groups classified as terrorist organizations. This tactic has invited comparisons to the actions of the Bush administration in the aftermath of 9/11. How useful do you think that analogy is? 

We can draw a direct line from Bush to Trump. In both administrations, a small, insular group is able to hijack policy toward extreme gambits, producing disasters that then have to be cleaned up. But the main line of continuity is in the use of national security to ratchet up despotic power. The Bush administration used misinformation to lure the country into a large-scale war, then defended rendition and torture on the grounds of an expansive conception of executive authority. There are echoes between Guantanamo and CECOT, as well as a throughline in the framing of unauthorized immigrants as criminals or even “invaders.” The latter is part of the post-9/11 playbook, which used the idea of the “terrorist” to invoke a racialized and religious menace. In 2005 and 2006, people were running political campaigns on the idea that the border was a problem because Islamic terrorists were crossing it by disguising themselves as Mexicans. There’s a real sense of tribal identification that the GOP has been very good at harnessing: a frontier Americanism, a producerist Americanism, a white Americanism. It’s also a very patriarchal image. These normative conceptions get bundled together around the idea that we’re facing a threat from unknown, unknowable savages — barbarous people who are alien to us and don’t share our interests.

In our last conversation, I underestimated the staying power of the nativism that is so integral to right-wing politics in the United States and elsewhere. It is imperative that we chart a path away from it. I don’t know exactly how we do that, because it’s not going to be by re-accentuating racial and ethnic differences from our side. Nor will reaffirmations of a saccharine pluralism suffice — though a more robust and thoroughgoing defense of the mixed origins of most Americans might be a good starting point. Clearly, we also have to lean heavily into some kinds of political conflict. I still think the conflict that’s best to lean into is one that relates to extreme inequalities of wealth. Most of us are already aligned on this issue, since a few people have vast resources while the great majority do not.