The ascension of Donald Trump to the helm of the US Government – and in particular the coup against the fundamental checks and balances of democracy being launched through Trump by Elon Musk – represents a new inflection point not just in the US political system, but in the very structure of a global order in which the US is a central hegemonic power.

Applying the planetary phase shift framework to this moment can help us illuminate both the core systemic drivers behind the resurgence of Trumpocracy, as well as its wider potential consequences.

Trumpocracy 2.0 represents a number of forces and approaches which are deeply incoherent. Trump’s blitzkrieg of executive orders demonstrates how the power of the presidency is being used to attempt to completely reshape – and truncate – the US Government.

Silicon Valley whistle-blowers are warning that Elon Musks’ Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is conducting a rapid multi-frontal assault on major US agencies to gain control of the United States’ critical information and financial systems including unprecedented access to private data of American citizens. Perhaps most crucial is Musk’s access to the US Treasury payments system and homeland security data in the context of a drive to replace federal civil servants with AI systems seeded and controlled by Musk.

Musk is trying to build a true dystopia: a deeply centralised AI technocracy with unprecedented power accruing to the US executive branch under the control of Elon Musk and his shareholders, who represent a cross-section of investors and oligarchs from the tech sector, crypto, finance and specific  fossil fuel-linked players tied to Russia, Saudi Arabia and so on.

To what end? Musk’s assault is aligned with a new vision inspiring the billionaire technology oligarchy backing Trump: the Dark Enlightenment ideology, inspired by transhumanist eugenics and scientific racism, which envisages national democracies being smashed and refashioned into a patchwork of authoritarian structures subservient to transnational techno-capital.

How is this happening?

Fifteen years ago I had warned that a far-right takeover of the liberal heartlands in the West was coming. This is now underway. I've just released a book about it, which you can learn more about here (alt-reich.com).

That forecast was informed by the core concepts in planetary phase shift theory, which provides us a powerful framework to make sense of these developments and how to respond. For the most academically rigorous articulation of this framework, check out my peer-reviewed paper in Foresight: The Journal of Futures Studies (available here paywall free).

According to this framework, both the tremendous crises and unprecedented opportunities emerging right now are part of a wider phase shift occurring on a planetary scale.

Humanity is moving through the last stages of the life-cycle of industrial civilisation. Two things are happening:

1. Our prevailing fossil fuel centric technological infrastructure is sunsetting. The thermodynamics of this process is unleashing chaos on a grand scale. As the energy return on investment of the fossil fuel system declines, incumbents are seeking to maximise near-term profits on the back of escalating prices and capitalise on the long-term inflationary effects. The cost of living crisis, and the ecological crisis that results from our exploitation of fossil fuels, are of course two sides of the same coin.

2. Simultaneously, the prevailing liberal governance paradigm including the postwar institutional order which evolved (including through the use of imperial violence) to manage this industrial system is unravelling. As the ability of the prevailing social and organising structures to manage this chaotic transition and crisis continually weakens, and clearly offers no obvious solutions, political gravity is rapidly moving away from liberal orthodoxy. Prevailing norms and values are being questioned. The result is that the far-right have been able to play on rising anxieties and legitimate grievances by blaming the symptoms of crisis (such as the migration of people) rather than the system. This is driving a resurgence of authoritarian and imperial inpulses, but now in a new postmodern context of Big Data and techno-capital.

Mass violence and genocides invariably occur in the context of large-scale crisis. The crisis creates a psychological shock that induces people to lose faith and trust in the norms they previously took for granted. When coupled with the influx of extremist ideology that deliberately Otherises 'outsider' groups, this can quickly lead to dehumanisation and at worst, genocidal acts.

This can actually be tracked empirically. As we documented here at AoT previously, there is an apparent correlation from the 1960s/70s onwards between the decline in the global EROI of fossil fuels, the long-term rise in inflation, the declining rate of global economic growth, rising inequalities, the decline in support for centrist parties and the creeping rise in support for the extreme right.

Entering a liminal space of breakdown, revolution; destruction, renewal

There are two further things also happening which are critical to bear in mind. But I'll label them 3 and 4.

3. A new potentially post-materialist technological infrastructure is emerging which for the first time could enable a circular rather than extractivist economy. Every foundational sector of production across human civilisation is experiencing major disruption thanks to disruptive technologies. Whether in clean energy or AI, this is happening. Empirical projections show that the technological landscape of how we produce everything that is critical from energy, to food, to transport and information, is therefore going to change and faster than we've ever experienced in human history. Solar electricity for instance will dominate the energy system by 2050-60 regardless of climate policies. That's not a panacea because it's still way too slow to avoid dangerous climate change and the risk of amplifying feedbacks. But the point is that the system is changing. This is the material dimension of the seeds of the next life-cycle.

4. Our prevailing social organising systems, built to govern the old, declining order, can neither manage the emerging new system nor comprehend the demise of the old, and is being thoroughly disrupted as a result. There is an inflection point opening up as the incumbent fossil fuel centric infrastructure declines while a new technological infrastructure rapidly emerges within the centralised and hierarchical structures of the industrial governance paradigm. On the one hand, we have technologies rapidly scaling which, even while being seeded and developed within prevailing centralised structures of neoliberal capitalist power, are increasingly distributing the ability to produce energy and information for instance. The new technologies are more networked and work optimally in a participatory context. But that participatory context does not yet exist in prevailing social organising systems. This is turbocharging social, cultural and political chaos because our prevailing institutions and sense-making apparatus basically are not built to understand these things. They (and therefore we) are increasingly disoriented. Meanwhile the authoritarian push from techno-capital is seeking to reinforce old paradigm ownership and control structures to restrain the transformative and decentralising effects of the emerging system.

Despite that, a 2024 global survey of 22,000 people across G20 countries commissioned by Earth4All demonstrate that in spite of all this, there are huge majorities of people across both the North and South who are desperate for change, recognise the importance of an ecologically-conscious approach, and want economic transformation. While there is a shift toward the extreme right achieved through well-funded disinformation, this is attempting to undermine, dislocate and divide a seismic global cultural shift toward transformation.

The risk is that is we move deeper into this release stage, this drives levels of social and ideological polarisation that accelerates conflict to a degree that paralyses existing governance institutions and decision-making, potentially derailing the possibility of a new life-cycle emerging.

As we’ve argued at AoT, and as my latest peer-reviewed paper shows, Holling's four stage mapping of the life-cycle of living systems is relevant on a civilisational scale – not just as a heuristic but as an empirically-grounded (though imperfect) reflection of the thermodynamics of energy and information as they move through the life-cycle of living systems at all scales.

Which suggests that everything that's happening right now is symptomatic of a movement through the third release/decline stage and the final/fourth reorganisation stage of industrial civilisation.

The death throes of the American empire

And this is why Trump's ascension matters. It's important to recognise firstly that Trump's ascension is not an isolated occurrence related solely to American politics. Rather it is part of a pattern rooted in the global systemic shifts described above, that is therefore whipsawing across the Western world.

Secondly, given the system dynamics driving this extreme radicalisation, it is obviously not going to be isolated to the West. Anyone outside the US looking on and thinking, ‘it can’t happen here’ needs to ditch that delusion. We are seeing this sort of polarisation deepening all over the world, and Musk has made little secret of the active measures already being deployed to destabilise the governments of the UK, Germany and France.

Thirdly, Trump's ascension is precisely the kind of thing that happens when incumbents don't understand, or care to understand, reality, and so double-down on the old and familiar in the search of certainty amidst rapidly escalating uncertainty. "Make America Great Again", the resort to genocidal coloniality in Gaza, the insistence on trade wars and brute force, the tearing down of (already flawed) democratic checks and balances, represent the kinds of overextension that imperial powers commit to to stave off collapse, but which invariably serve only to accelerate collapse.

Crisis is a major driver of the lurch to authoritarianism and militarism as a mechanism of control. And what’s clear is that for some time US and Western elites have disagreed over the causes and consequences of the deepening global crises we are currently experiencing. This disagreement has resulted in a real rupture whereby a new technology oligarchy with large scale control over major parts of global information systems is now spearheading a coup to takeover and dismantle the world’s most powerful democracy.

The point being that Trump's ascension and his "America First" agenda are obviously an effort to stave off the 'release' dynamics of the geopolitical order in which the US-dominated unipolar order is dramatically unravelling. But as planetary phase shift theory shows clearly, drawing on CS Holling’s adaptive cycle visible in living systems at all scales, you cannot ‘stave off’ the release stage. You can’t fight entropy. You need to be able to move through it and scale the emergence of the new.

 What Trumpocracy 2.0 is doing is desperately attempting to maintain, consolidate and centralise prevailing hierarchical structures that are in decline. The ‘backsliding’ to authoritarian tools (ditching civil rights, relying on extreme tariffs) represents a resort to old practices associated with obsolete political orders which have already proven their inadequacy. Tariffs for instance worsened the Great Depression, cratered US trade relationships, reinforced the decline of global trade, and helped create the economic crisis conditions behind the Second World War and the rise of the Nazis in Germany.

Fourthly, then, the emergence of 'multipolarity' in itself offers no answers. Multipolarity is a concept born of the same industrial paradigm (it's simply the opposite of unipolar), and so is trapped by the same fundamental geopolitical strategies, interests and incentives of an unravelling inter-state system. Multipolarity in this context simply means that the previous hegemonic order policed by US and Western power is losing control. In its place, lesser powers will increasingly feel and believe they should compete by exerting similarly extreme nationalistic policies. The risk of an accelerating breakdown should not be underestimated. Trump is the fulcrum of this unfolding process.

The actions of Trump and the technology oligarchy that has enabled him could quite literally derail the transition to the next life cycle for humanity. I would emphasise that the Heritage Foundation, which launched his Project 2025 authoritarian control agenda to ramp up fossil fuels while destroying civil rights, is part of the Atlas Network of 500 odd extreme market think-tanks operating across some 100 countries. This is a global movement, and they are just getting started.

What next?

There is only one way forward, and that is through. There's no going back. We can't hope for a return to the 'normality' of what preceded Trump. The old order peaked around the 2000s and we’ve been on the ‘release’ curve downwards ever since. As the fourth and final stage of ‘reorganisation’ in our civilisational life-cycle increasingly opens up during this liminal moment, we need to build and educate at pace and at scale for the next life cycle.

It’s crucially important, as planetary phase shift theory makes unequivocally clear, to remember that the material and cultural potential of the next life cycle could be life-affirming, regenerative, joyous and prosperous in ways that were impossible for previous generations. This potential future that could benefit all humanity is endangered by the resurgence of Nazism in a new techno-utopian-fascist mould that conceals itself under the guise of anti-Nazism, whose end-point is economic, energy and ecological collapse.

It's time to stop pulling punches and recognise what is happening right now. This is the fight of our lives. It’s not just that the jackboots are back disguised as suede Oxford shoes, it’s that they might trample the last chance we have to solve our biggest global challenges by navigating to a new type of superabundant, regenerative ecological civilisation that works for all.

Faced with this apparent onslaught, the understandable temptation is to succumb to the saturation point of overwhelm – which is precisely the point of the information war currently being deployed. I get it. I feel it too.

The target is not simply our minds, but our central nervous systems, rewired through the reshaping of our brains via dopamine training designed to beat our ‘attention’ into a state of narrow subservience to the almighty algorithm. But there is no time or space to succumb to the despair and disorientation which is desired for us.

Instead, it’s time to move into our true power as agents of change, as harbingers of the next life-cycle, as individuals who stand for ethical values that truly connect us with the earth and with each other. The locus of this war is the dislocation of our collective sense-making abilities, fracturing institutions and disjointing coherent decision-making power.  

These are the battle lines ahead:

A.     We need to understand the reality of what is happening right now and learn how to communicate that clearly so more and more people can begin to recognise that what is unfolding right now is literally seen by those behind it as a war, a network insurgency, against humanity and the earth. Their aim is to shore up the prevailing industrial paradigm against those who are moving for transformative change. We need to, in short, be able to understand the Alt Reich and its agenda.

B.     We need to understand the reality of the systemic shift toward an emerging new system that can harness new material capabilities in a new organising paradigm which is creating the possibility of superabundance. There is a viable, scientifically-defensible vision of a future which is worth fighting for, and which is achievable by scaling tools and ideas we already have. We need to become masters of communicating this exciting vision of what’s possible so that it can become a new centre of gravity that outweighs the dystopian destructive of the Alt Reich.

C.    We need to work in our own contexts to accelerate those levers - both material and cultural - that can supercharge the positive phase shifts to the next life-cycle and a new system. That means - taking action to accelerate key exponential technologies in a way that is regenerative and distributive, while also working to help create new ways of organising our institutions so that they optimise the former in alignment with the planet.

D.     We need to build our personal resilience and sense-making capabilities to become immune to the information war and to embody the values of the emerging earth-centric paradigm. This will be a different path for each of us. But the common denominator is that we have to lift our capacity to see and work with complexity.

E.      We need to stop allowing ourselves to become increasingly fragmented and atomised, and instead need to reach out across disciplinary, ideological and organisational boundaries to forge collective intelligence capacity. We need to create new bonds of coherence and cohesion, new cross-sector networks of seeing and action. This means we stop in-fighting over who is best at virtue signalling, and focus instead on identifying and acting on lines of collaboration. This includes proliferating new ways to reach out to and enfranchise those who disagree with us through the power of human connection and sharing.

F.      We need to upgrade our information projection capabilities and that means developing and honing new language that can resonate across political polarities, and utilising digital tools to supercharge our ideas so they can compete in this new landscape of memes and reels, and provide people, especially young people, with the tools and inspiration for the next life-cycle.

G. We need to stop being reactionary. That means going on the offensive. Instead of creating strategies of response to the death throes of the old paradigm, we need to focus on the strategies of empowerment and inspiration to fast-track awakening for the new paradigm, the new life-cycle, the next system. The former approach is always constrained by the rules of someone else's battleground (as I showed in this critique of XR). The latter approach is transcend that 'battleground' by targeting the biggest weak spots in the incumbency while maximising attention on the possibilities for a new system. We will struggle at first to absorb what this means, but we'll get there - it will not mean simply stopping what we're doing, but it will mean reorienting that in new modes and directions that refuse to conform to the expectations and boundaries established for us.

The antidote

The thing that we have on our side is this: the far-right agenda cannot succeed. By my last calculation the Trump-Musk economic plan for the US – if fully executed – would destroy some 25% of GDP for instance (when you take into account systemic cascading effects). This is without looking at the dire energy and climate implications. Trumpocracy 2.0, therefore, will fail. Every other movement around the world that seeks to replicate Trumocracy 2.0 in their nation and region will end up pursing a similar path of destruction.

In the meantime, people all over the world are going to need to know how they can hold the line. They are going to need to know how we can move through this time of chaos and regression while building and planting seeds for what comes when the Trumpocracy 2.0 crumbles.

There is ultimately only one antidote. That is to upgrade our ability to see and make decisions based on recognising the reality of the unfolding planetary phase shift; and to scale that new consciousness as far as wide as possible across our contexts and beyond.

We need to shift from the narrow, narcissistic, fragmented mode of consciousness that characterises the Alt Reich into a holistic systems awareness – what MIT's Otto Scharmer has described as moving from “ego” awareness to “eco” awareness.

The more we are able to scale this consciousness and through that process forge new networks of connection and collaboration, the more we will accelerate the emergence of a new collective intelligence capacity across communities, nations, sectors and regions that the Alt Reich cannot conquer.

For too long, we've conceived of ourselves as 'the resistance' - outsiders ceaselessly reacting on a battleground created by those at the helm of the incumbent system. This is the wrong frame, and we have to let it go. Because we're watching the system fall on its own sword, and while this is going to be incredibly and tragically destructive for so many of us, it's the beginning of the end for the old paradigm.

We are not the resistance. We are the future. And we’re about to arrive.

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