Gellnerian Inflections 3

The genealogy of anarchism, from its classical roots to its post-anarchist reconfigurations, offers an unexpectedly fertile framework for understanding the strange logic of Trumpian authoritarianism, toxic masculinity, and white supremacism. While these phenomena often appear as regressions to essentialist, hierarchical identities, they in fact represent a post-anarchic individualism: a new configuration of subjectivity and power that is anarchic in form but authoritarian in affect, performative in expression but fascistic in consequence. 

This diagnosis requires us to move beyond Carl Schmitt’s classical framework of sovereign authority and stable order. Schmitt’s conception of sovereignty hinges on the capacity to declare the state of exception in order to restore normative order. But Trump, as political subject and as symbolic figure, does not restore order, he thrives on its disintegration. The ‘state of exception’ becomes permanent. Chaos is not a precursor to order but its replacement. Trumpian authoritarianism enacts a form of power that sustains itself through the refusal of order, through theatrical incoherence and symbolic fragmentation. It is, paradoxically, a post-anarchic fascism. 

In a way, this form of rule mirrors the conceptual move in anarchist theory from classical anarchism to post-anarchism. Classical anarchists like Proudhon and Bakunin envisioned communities grounded in mutual aid and egalitarianism, rejecting centralised authority but maintaining a belief in social coherence and emancipatory solidarity. Post-anarchist thinkers - Deleuze, Guattari, Butler, Newman - displaced this coherence. They emphasised multiplicity, fragmentation, and rhizomatic flows of power. For them, the subject is not autonomous and rational, but constructed, unstable, and embedded in diffuse, performative networks. Trumpian politics mirrors this structure. It operates not through sovereign decision but through affective capture, memetic resonance, and the multiplication of contradictory subject positions. The MAGA movement, like Andrew Tate’s ‘commune,’ is not a community in any traditional sense. It is a spectacular swarm of self-branding, aggressive hyper-individuals bound together by shared fantasies of domination and grievance. The performative masculinity and racial supremacism they invoke are not rooted in essential identity. These are post-essentialist performances, rituals of affective allegiance and tribal resonance in the absence of stable categories. What appears on the surface to be a reassertion of essential identities is, in fact, a reaction formation against the collapse of those identities. 

Trumpian masculinity, for example, is not the stoic patriarchy of the 1950s, but a hyper-expressive, emotionally incontinent display of dominance that depends on the absence of coherent roles. Likewise, white supremacy in this mode is not a project of bureaucratic racial ordering (à la Jim Crow), but an incoherent, anxious flailing for symbolic centrality in a world that has ceased to grant it. These expressions are post-anarchic, not because they advance any egalitarian project, but because they emerge from the ruins of liberal and hierarchical identity alike. They do not build from liberal civil society’s voluntary, functionally differentiated associations; nor do they restore the coercive kinship or sacral pluralisms of pre-modern social orders. Rather, they thrive in the detritus of both: in a symbolic field where identity is no longer inherited or chosen, but performed, amplified, and weaponised. 

Here, the insights of Gellner, Tocqueville, and Fustel de Coulanges remain indispensable. Gellner’s analysis of the pre-civil society individual as embedded in rigid, segmentary, kin-based structures highlights a world in which social life was governed by inherited obligation, not individual will. Fustel de Coulanges, similarly, reveals that ancient ‘freedom’ was ritualistic participation in a sacralised collective, not individual autonomy. In contrast, modern civil society emerged with voluntary association, functional differentiation, and freedom of movement - a fragile, historically contingent model. But Trumpism resists this civil society model. Nor does it restore segmentary authority or inherited cohesion. It replaces voluntary association with affective capture. It mimics kinship through tribal digital formations, like Tate’s followers or alt-right communities, but without structure or responsibility. These are not “communes”, they are post-anarchic gangs: performative, fluid, unstable, but bound together through grievance, spectacle, and dominance rituals. 

This is why post-anarchist theory is a crucial lens. Guattari’s concept of the ‘machinic assemblage’ captures how subjectivity is now shaped by networked, non-hierarchical forces, rather than by centralized authority. Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘rhizome’ claimed that power now operates in non-linear, non-sovereign ways - through replication, intensity, and contagion. Butler’s performativity claims that identity is constituted in repeated gestures, not essential traits. And Newman’s synthesis of post-structuralism and anarchism frames a political subject fractured, mobile, and produced by power, not free from it. These frameworks expose the essentialist claims of today’s racists and misogynists. Their assertion of stable identity is itself a performance, an effort to stabilize what is inherently unstable. The Trumpian subject is not an authoritarian leader in control of sovereign power. He is a node in a machinic network of performance, affect, and identification. He rules not by ordering society, but by broadcasting disorder as truth, incoherence as authenticity, and domination as freedom. 

This new form of individualism - post-anarchic individualism - is historically novel. It is not the individualism of liberal autonomy, nor the embedded individual of kinship orders. It is a post-human subject, constructed in digital swarms and symbolic collapse, guided not by reason or tradition but by affective intensities and memetic contagion. Its politics is not deliberative but viral. Its ethics is not liberal but tribal. Its solidarity is not voluntary but compelled through spectacle and threat. In this light, Trumpian authoritarianism is not a deviation from order but the logical conclusion of postmodern fragmentation. It is a politics of broken men screaming through broken symbols, stitching together identities out of resentment and performance. And it is post-anarchist theory - not Schmittian sovereignty or liberal rationalism - that offers us the best tools for making sense of this disturbing, devolved form of freedom. Trumpian chaos is in this light a feature not a bug. 

Yet this analysis must not remain descriptive. We must ask: was post-anarchism merely a neutral conceptual lens for diagnosing these emergent forms of power and identity, or was it also a formative agent - an ideological engine that actively enabled and promoted the very phenomena it now fails to reckon with? The uncomfortable truth is that many post-anarchist theorists, in their critique of liberal coherence and sovereign power, helped to midwife this new, unstable individualism without adequately foreseeing what such a subject would become once unleashed into mass political life. The celebration of de-centred agency, the valorisation of multiplicity and the performative undoing of identity, were not simply theoretical observations but ideological commitments, championed as forms of resistance. Deleuze and Guattari, Butler, and Newman each in their own way advanced a radical undoing of stable symbolic structures and universal norms. Yet now that this undoing has produced grotesque political mutations - from Trumpian spectacle to incel violence - they remain largely silent about their own complicity. The very traits these theorists once championed - fragmentation, intensity, deterritorialisation, performative sovereignty - have become central features of a new post-civil society authoritarianism. What was once theorised as subversive experimentation has congealed into a political aesthetic of domination and nihilism. And here, theory cannot absolve itself by posing as an innocent spectator. Post-anarchism must be held to account for the monster it helped birth. 

This accountability is made clear when we examine the transgender controversies that have erupted across the cultural and political landscape -controversies which also bear the unmistakable imprint of post-anarchic thought. The performative and anti-essentialist account of gender that Judith Butler advanced in Gender Trouble and Undoing Gender offered a powerful challenge to patriarchal and heteronormative structures. But it also laid the groundwork for a cultural field in which identity is disembedded from both biology and social structure, and reconstituted as a sovereign declaration of the self. In doing so, it generated the terms of a cultural crisis. On the left, it inspired a politics of liberation grounded in identity self-assertion, while on the right, it triggered an apocalyptic moral panic with both sides reacting within the same post-anarchic framework, where performativity replaces normativity, and affect trumps dialogue. Butler has repeatedly disavowed the reactionary backlash, insisting her theories are misunderstood. But the backlash is not a misreading - it is structurally entailed by the ontological deregulation post-anarchism demands. The right’s charge that gender fluidity denies reality and threatens the symbolic order is not merely bigoted - it is a distorted but intuitively accurate reaction to the collapse of shared symbolic coordinates that Butler’s theory helped initiate. At the same time, the left’s retreat into moral absolutism, where critique becomes transphobia and every hesitation is anathematized, reflects the same hyper-individualist absolutism now sacralised as self-authentication. What was once theory has become theology. And in this theological register, both sides wage war without grammar, without translation, without any common horizon. The trans controversy, then, is not an aberration; it is the clearest symptom of post-anarchism’s cultural triumph and theoretical failure. 

But of course to dwell solely on the symbolic and cultural excesses of the culture wars and Trumpism risks missing the more brutal and institutional expressions of this post-anarchic political formation. The Trump political agenda is not only a spectacle of incoherence, it is also a deeply material project of domination. The culture wars, for all their fury, are in many ways the distraction, the theatre that obscures the construction of what increasingly resembles a carceral ethno-state. Under Trump’s second administration, immigration policy has moved beyond cruelty into full-blown mass incarceration logistics: plans for military-run concentration camps, vast detention complexes, and indefinite family separations are no longer fringe possibilities, they are the architectural scaffolding of Trumpism’s return. Simultaneously, the weaponisation of the legal system has accelerated: Trump allies such as Jeffrey Clark, John Eastman, and Stephen Miller have laid the groundwork for using the DOJ not as a neutral arbiter but as a tool of political vengeance, pursuing enemies and dismantling judicial independence. The courts are no longer protectors of procedural order but instruments of sovereign chaos. Meanwhile, the grotesque pornography of domination emanates not only from Trump himself, but from his inner circle: figures like Kristi Noem, who bragged about shooting her dog in a political memoir; Matt Gaetz, embroiled in sex trafficking investigations; J.D. Vance, who now styles himself as a post-liberal patriarch; and Kari Lake, whose entire political brand is built on rage performance. These are not aberrant figures, they are emblematic of a new power elite whose authority is grounded in violent spectacle, affective volatility, and authoritarian fantasy. Their ascendancy represents not a failure of norms but their replacement by a new post-anarchic sovereignty, one that fuses cruelty, charisma, and chaos into a coherent mode of governance without governance, power without law, command without responsibility. This is the endgame of the post-anarchic subject: not freedom, but the unrestrained assertion of will over reality, of domination disguised as disruption. 

The theorists of modernity - Tocqueville, Weber, and Gellner - already foresaw the vulnerabilities of civil society and liberal pluralism when stripped of their institutional and moral scaffolding. Tocqueville warned that democracy without robust mediating institutions would collapse into soft despotism, in which atomized individuals, disconnected from genuine associations, become prey to charismatic populists and centralized power. Weber, in diagnosing the disenchantment of the world and the rise of bureaucratic rationality, saw the lurking danger of what he called the politics of the charismatic leader, where legality gives way to emotional and irrational allegiance. And Gellner, in his functionalist analysis of the transition from agrarian to industrial society, emphasized that the stability of civil society depends on functionally differentiated institutions, shared norms, and rational authority structures. In each case, they anticipated that if these fragile architectures collapsed, if pluralism were replaced by tribal gangs, if rationality were displaced by affect, if institutions ceased to function as neutral containers, then a new post-modern pluralism would emerge, one dominated not by deliberation but by spectacle, not by law but by identity performance, not by authority but by contagion. 

The Trumpian project is precisely this: a reversion beneath civil society, yet not to the sacred traditions or stable kinship orders of pre-modern life, but to a simulacral tribalism, a post-anarchic warband culture governed by performative cruelty, digital virality, and charismatic domination. Gellner’s nightmare of segmentary lineage systems without consensus mechanisms has become our postmodern reality, weaponised through social media, algorithmic affect, and the hollowing-out of institutional life. Tocqueville’s fear of the lonely democratic individual has metastasized into the rage-filled, hyper-online masculinity of Andrew Tate and Donald Trump. And Weber’s prophecy of the return of charisma has materialised not in heroic leadership but in a digital pantheon of influencers and autocrats who wield mythos without logos, affect without ethics, and power without form. 

The rise of post-anarchic authoritarianism reveals not only the bankruptcy of classical sovereignty but the profound impotence of liberalism itself, which has proven utterly incapable up to now of responding to the collapse of the civil society conditions it once presumed. Liberalism relies on institutions it no longer defends, reason it no longer inspires, and norms it no longer enforces. Its faith in proceduralism and civility has become a kind of theological remnant, impotently invoking a vanished order while new power formations - raw, affective, tribal, obscene - consolidate themselves in plain sight. The liberal subject, imagined as a rational chooser within neutral associations, is no match for the post-anarchic subject: fragmented, performative, saturated in media and rage, drifting between the pornographic communes of Tate, the white-nationalist militancy of Bannon, and the carceral megastructures of Trump’s new state. The liberal response - fact-checks, ‘norms,’ concern for decorum, is tragically insufficient, because it misunderstands the terrain. This is not a battle of ideas in a civil forum; it is a war of styles, affects, and segmentary warbands. As the rule of law gives way to weaponised courts, as immigration policy becomes ethnic cleansing in slow motion, as elite political actors revel in cruelty and domination, liberalism retreats into abstract nostalgia, unable to grasp that the rules of the political game have been rewritten. It is not that liberalism has failed to defeat Trumpism; it is that it hasn’t even seen it yet. 

In the realm of art, literature, performance, and radical pedagogy, post-anarchist sensibilities continue to inspire non-sovereign, non-instrumental practices of freedom: communal experiments, queer utopias, anarcho-aesthetic disruptions where the post-anarchic individual is not the Tate-bro influencer or the rage-fed incel militia member, but the fragmented, desiring, vulnerable subject who resists capture through irony, opacity, refusal, and relational intensity. But it is here that a crucial distinction must now be drawn, one that has too often been neglected with disastrous political consequences, between the use of post-anarchic, postmodern strategies in aesthetic practice and their misapplication as political or analytical frameworks. The experimental fragmentation, irony, and performative destabilisation that give vitality and critical edge to works by a Beckett, Burroughs, Stewart Home, or Duchamp can, in the aesthetic domain, powerfully challenge norms and unsettle ossified cultural forms. But when this same logic bleeds into political praxis or theoretical analysis, when fragmentation is mistaken for liberation, irony for critique, and aesthetic subversion for political resistance, the result is paralysis, incoherence, and a fertile terrain for reactionary appropriation. As I’m contending here, the migration of avant-garde techniques into social theory has helped produce a generation of cultural actors more attuned to symbolic disruption than to strategic coherence. Post-anarchist thought, having once offered a useful critique of rigid structures, now risks underwriting the very conditions of atomisation, nihilism, and charismatic domination it once sought to oppose. This slippage from form to content, from aesthetics to politics, has hollowed out the capacity for resistance and left critical theory complicit in the spectacle it meant to deconstruct. 

In contrast to the disavowals and evasions of post-anarchist theory, the work of Adolph Reed Jr. offers a sober, materialist alternative, one grounded not in the eroticised mystique of resistance or the narcissistic theatrics of transgression, but in a clear-eyed analysis of political economy, class structure, and institutional power. Reed insists that meaningful resistance must be collective, organized, and rooted in the everyday struggles of working people, not in identity performance, not in aesthetic negation, and not in the endless deconstruction of symbolic authority. He has been unflinching in his critique of both the neoliberal right and the identitarian left, exposing how cultural politics often serve to mystify rather than challenge the forces of exploitation and domination. Against the atomised, aestheticised, and libidinal forms of politics propagated by post-anarchist thought, Reed offers a template for praxis rooted in solidarity, universalist social democracy, and the revival of institutions capable of wielding democratic power. His vision is neither romantic nor apocalyptic. It is strategic, historically grounded, and resolutely opposed to the empty performativity that too often masquerades as radicalism. In this moment of global reaction and authoritarian resurgence, it is Reed’s unwavering commitment to structural transformation - not symbolic play - that marks the beginning of a real resistance. 

Oddly, despite their vastly different intellectual lineages, Adolph Reed and Ernest Gellner would find unexpected common ground in their shared disdain for the postmodern mystification of power and their insistence on the primacy of material structures in shaping political life. Gellner, though a liberal functionalist often dismissed by the post-structuralist left, was scathing in his critique of romantic anti-modernism and the aestheticisation of politics, especially where it masked the erosion of institutional coherence. Like Reed, Gellner believed that civil society, though flawed, was a historically rare and precious form of social organisation that could restrain domination through functional differentiation and institutional checks. Both thinkers warn against the fragmentation of political meaning into tribal affect, identity rituals, and metaphysical posturing. Where Reed sees neoliberal identity politics as a class-abdicating distraction, Gellner diagnoses the same phenomenon as the breakdown of the integrative mechanisms of modernity. In different idioms, both articulate a politics of sobriety, one that demands clarity about power, structure, and the conditions necessary for democratic life. That their critiques converge from opposite ends of the philosophical spectrum suggests not only the depth of the current crisis, but also the possibility of alliances beyond familiar partisan and theoretical divides.