Before I go further, I want to note that I’m not claiming any special authority on this. This is just a first pass at thinking through a topic Kevin Carson raises in “Time for an Old Idea to Come Around Again?” ⋆˙⟡♡

In the tail end of the article, Kevin characterizes MAGA as refusing cooperation:

Once again, with the failure of financialization and corporate globalization, the American and other publics face the temptation of a false right-wing populism — the opposite of the kind McClaughry called for in his Human Events article, which would “reemphasize the importance of character, decency, honor, and generosity of spirit in public life.” Just like the New Right, the MAGA movement is a false populism that uses authoritarianism and tribalist hatred against the marginalized to distract us from solutions that offer the kind of genuine power over our lives that comes from solidarity and cooperation.

Is this a moral failure? An ideological misdirection? A product of authoritarian manipulation? I’m more inclined to say that MAGA is cooperating, but it is cooperating in a way that is low-cost under conditions of high threat.

Financialization undermines not only material security, but the relational conditions that support trust¹. Sustained relational threat increases sensitivity and narrows future orientation.² When cooperation becomes costly under these conditions, lower-cost coordination strategies — hierarchy, identity-based alignment, and punitive control — take its place.³ From this perspective, MAGA does not reject solidarity so much as lack access to it. Solidarity is cognitively unavailable.

Framing MAGA primarily as authoritarian distraction or tribalist hatred obscures several dynamics: authoritarianism functions as a threat-regulation strategy⁴; tribalism enables low-cost coordination under fear⁵; and hierarchy substitutes for trust when trust is unavailable.⁶

There are people who would choose to be terrible under any circumstances, but I don’t believe MAGA as a whole is opposed to cooperation. MAGA is better understood as a symptom of failed cooperative capacity.

In my framework, this looks something like the following:

1. Precondition: Long-term, diffuse threat accumulates over time, increasing gain. People become more reactive, and trust becomes metabolically expensive.

2. Threshold crossing (bifurcation): Once gain passes a certain point, small cues produce large spikes in vigilance. Ambiguity itself becomes threatening. At this stage, good-faith discourse collapses and factual claims lose their stabilizing power.

3. Cooperation becomes unavailable: Under high gain and high vigilance, cooperation drops out of the feasible action space. Cooperation requires trust, delayed gratification, and vulnerability — all of which become punishing under sustained threat. Solidarity is no longer an accessible option.

What remains viable are lower-cost coordination strategies: hierarchy organized around a perceived strong leader, identity signaling, punitive norms, scapegoating, and ritualized aggression. These strategies reduce uncertainty quickly, even when they worsen conditions in the long run.

4. MAGA as regulation strategy⁷: From this perspective, MAGA functions as a regulation mechanism rather than an ideological rejection of solidarity. It operates as a vigilance sink (“trans people, Black people, and Democrats are the enemy”), a gain stabilizer (simple narratives dampen ambiguity), and a prosthetic for agency (borrowed power through identification).

Trump collapses complexity, violates norms (signaling immunity as a regulatory shortcut rather than capacity expansion) and models domination rather than cooperation. This is attractive not because it is emancipatory, but because it lowers cognitive load, reduces felt helplessness, and restores the illusion of agency.

Moral arguments against MAGA often demand capacities that may simply not be available under high threat.

This raises a practical question: under these conditions, would the kinds of solutions Kevin points to still work?

In high-threat environments, cooperatives often struggle to sustain themselves, drifting toward informal hierarchies, purity policing, and eventual burnout or exit.⁸ Neighborhood democracy, amplified by paranoia, starts to resemble Nextdoor (lol). Decentralization under sustained threat often fragments into informal gatekeeping and conditions conducive to micro-authoritarian dynamics.⁹

In the 1970s, amid lower inequality, higher social trust, and postwar wage growth, these approaches may well have worked. Under present conditions, I’m less confident they would on their own. The question is not whether decentralization is desirable, but under what conditions it remains viable.

Without transitional regulation — safety-building, capacity restoration, and co-regulation — projects like abolition, decentralization, and solidarity politics are likely to collapse, defaulting instead to MAGA-like adaptations.

So is it “Time for an Old Idea to Come Around Again?” Maybe. But it’s also time for some new infrastructure. 𖹭

Transition, as I’m thinking about it, requires more than redistribution, justice, or moral reform alone. Alongside them, a primary function of transitional institutions should be to reduce ambient threat, stabilize gain within an agency-supporting range, and re-enable agency, so that material improvements and political reforms can actually translate into durable cooperation. Under those conditions, institutions can reliably teach cooperation, support autonomy, and enable self-management.

Redistribution, when done correctly, can help reduce gain — but under other conditions it can just as easily increase it.¹⁰ That’s why I’ve focused less on specific policy categories and more on what I think transitional institutions actually need to do. Demonstrating that something can succeed once is not the same as showing it can scale, persist, or distribute care without reproducing hierarchy.

Mutual aid plays a vital role in helping people survive crises. But survival alone doesn’t automatically restore the relational and regulatory capacities that make cooperation possible. Under sustained threat, many people remain unable to trust, plan, or participate safely, regardless of political alignment. If MAGA functions as a regulation strategy, then alternatives must regulate better: not only by meeting needs, but by rebuilding the conditions that make cooperation cognitively and emotionally accessible to everyone.

I’d like to sketch some concrete examples at some point, but I’m very sleepy(!!) and this is already long. I’m sure I’ll post about this topic again later on. For now, it’s just a perspective to consider.

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Footnotes:

1. Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (London: Verso, 2014); David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011).
   Both authors analyze how financialized capitalism undermines not only material security but also the social relations that sustain trust, reciprocity, and predictable cooperation. Streeck emphasizes how financialization displaces collective obligations with market discipline, eroding democratic and social institutions. Graeber shows how debt-based market systems enable exchange through impersonal, enforceable obligations that allow actors to exit ongoing relational commitments (Debt, chs. 1–2), later contrasting these with “human economies” in which economic activity remains embedded in durable social relations (ch. 5). ↩︎
2. Bruce S. McEwen, “Protective and Damaging Effects of Stress Mediators,” New England Journal of Medicine 338, no. 3 (1998): 171–179; Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (New York: Times Books, 2013); Bruce D. Perry, “Applying Principles of Neurodevelopment to Clinical Work with Maltreated and Traumatized Children,” in Working with Traumatized Youth in Child Welfare, ed. Nancy Boyd Webb (New York: Guilford Press, 2006).
   McEwen documents how chronic stress alters physiological stress regulation and heightens reactivity; Mullainathan and Shafir show how conditions of scarcity reduce cognitive bandwidth and shorten time horizons; and Perry demonstrates how sustained relational threat in development produces hypervigilance and impairs future-oriented planning. Taken together, these findings support the claim that sustained relational threat increases sensitivity and narrows future orientation. ↩︎
3. Karen Stenner, The Authoritarian Dynamic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
   Stenner shows that under conditions of normative threat, preferences shift away from pluralism, deliberation, and tolerance toward conformity, coercive enforcement, and punitive control. These authoritarian responses function as lower-cost coordination strategies, prioritizing rapid restoration of order over trust-dependent cooperation. ↩︎
4. Karen Stenner, The Authoritarian Dynamic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Stanley Feldman and Karen Stenner, “Perceived Threat and Authoritarianism,” Political Psychology 18, no. 4 (1997): 741–770.
   Feldman and Stenner demonstrate that authoritarian preferences are activated by perceived threat rather than stable ideology, intensifying support for conformity and coercive control as a means of regulating disorder. In this sense, authoritarianism operates as a threat-regulation strategy, restoring felt order under conditions of uncertainty and normative stress. ↩︎
5. Henri Tajfel and John C. Turner, “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict,” in The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, ed. William G. Austin and Stephen Worchel (Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1979); Michael Bang Petersen, “Evolutionary Political Psychology,” in The Handbook of Evolutionary Political Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
   This work shows that under perceived threat, individuals gravitate toward in-group identification as a low-cost coordination strategy, simplifying trust, enforcing norms, and reducing uncertainty through identity-based alignment. ↩︎
6. Diego Gambetta (ed.), Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Oliver E. Williamson, The Economic Institutions of Capitalism (New York: Free Press, 1985).
   Gambetta analyzes how cooperation breaks down when trust is absent or unreliable, prompting actors to rely on monitoring, enforcement, and strategic control rather than voluntary reciprocity. Williamson formalizes this substitution in institutional terms, arguing that under conditions of uncertainty and opportunism, coordination shifts from trust-based market exchange toward hierarchical governance structures designed to reduce transaction costs. Together, these accounts support the claim that hierarchy and control mechanisms often substitute for trust when trust is unavailable. ↩︎
7. Christopher Sebastian Parker and Rachel M. Blum, “Exploring the Motivations of the MAGA Movement,” in Connective Action and the Rise of the Far-Right: Platforms, Politics, and the Crisis of Democracy, ed. Steven Livingston and Michael Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025), 191–206. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197794937.003.0008.
   The authors describe status threat as “a way of understanding and coping with threatening and disturbing social environments,” which aligns with my characterization of MAGA as a threat-driven, identity-coordinated response. The chapter does not, however, engage a capacity-based account of why solidarity and cooperation become unavailable under sustained threat. ↩︎
8. Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 17 (1972): 151–164; Francesca Polletta, Freedom Is an Endless Meeting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
   Freeman documents how ostensibly egalitarian groups tend to develop informal, unaccountable hierarchies in the absence of formal structure. Polletta shows how moralized norm enforcement and identity-based standards within movements intensify emotional labor, contributing to exhaustion and exit. Ostrom demonstrates that cooperative arrangements depend on specific background conditions and often break down or centralize authority when those conditions are absent. ↩︎
9. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
   Both authors analyze how, under conditions of insecurity and institutional breakdown, formal authority often gives way to informal and coercive forms of power. Scott emphasizes the emergence of local intermediaries and patronage networks when centralized schemes fail, while Tilly shows how coercion and protection rackets consolidate authority in the absence of stable institutions. ↩︎
10. Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (New York: Times Books, 2013); Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971).
    Mullainathan and Shafir show that stable relief from scarcity can reduce cognitive load and extend time horizons, while unstable or conditional interventions often exacerbate stress and short-term thinking. Piven and Cloward document how redistributive programs administered through surveillance, conditionality, and stigma can increase perceived threat and undermine trust. Together, these accounts support the claim that redistribution can either reduce or intensify regulatory pressure depending on its design and implementation. ↩︎