The Trump administration is frequently operating outside the logic of capitalist self-interest, powered by an appetite for cruelty and destruction for the sake of cruelty and destruction and an all-consuming resentment.

Insurgents and revolutionaries across the political spectrum have sought, in different ways and for different reasons, to smash the state. Until recently, however, few have been openly critical of democracy. Even its most avowed opponents, for years now, have used the language of democracy to argue for and justify its abridgment. That’s not the case anymore. Take Stephen Moore, one of Trump’s economic advisors, for example. A gold standard conservative, former president of the Club of Growth, and a member of both the Wall Street Journal editorial board and the Heritage Foundation, made his views very clear in 2016: “Capitalism is a lot more important than democracy. I’m not even a big believer in democracy.”

A good deal of what the new administration is doing is merely a continuation of previous Republican and Democratic administrations and their familiar urge to safeguard the well-being of the rich and powerful. Cutting down the welfare state undergirded Ronald Reagan’s counterrevolution and was consolidated by his successors, Republicans and Democrats alike. Feeding the war machine has been a bipartisan endeavor for as long as anyone can remember.

Yet some of the most draconian measures adopted by the new administration seem categorically different. They escape the logic of capitalist self-interest, pure and simple. They appear profoundly destabilizing, destructive for the sake of destruction, powered by an appetite for cruelty and an all-consuming resentment.

Under Trump, capitalists have been encouraged to unleash their “animal spirits,” to devour all those natural and human resources that may be profitably accumulated as capital. Unless they are checked, whether by democratic political institutions, the labor movement, or other bulwarks against rapacious accumulation, the impulse may result in social suicide — fatal, finally, to capitalist civilization itself.

A denouement of that order seems unimaginable. Yet the behavior of the ruling circles surrounding the Trump administration is emitting the pungent aroma of precisely this kind of capitalist nihilism.

Denying the children of immigrants access to Head Start programs is punitive but fiscally trivial. Chasing their parents out of the country drains the pool of low-paid labor much of US business depends on to bolster its margins. Cutting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that 41 million people, including millions of children, rely on will accelerate the already alarming decline in life expectancy.

At the same time, its effect on labor productivity — official cant calls it the “work ethic” — will be negligible or most likely negative. Eviscerating the Department of Education (DOE) may be psychically satisfying to the “anti-woke,” but it may bankrupt the very sizable educational consulting industry. Gutting grants for medical research will undermine the prospects of Big Pharma, not to mention the future health of the labor force. Forcing the poor off Medicaid is no boon to the medical-industrial complex. The newly uninsured, including many of the tens of millions of children on Medicaid, will just get sick and die — fed ”into the woodchipper,” as Elon Musk so inelegantly put it, along with the key agencies of the social state.

Heedlessly disposing of bodies and minds in this way suggests sadism, not avarice.

Read more at Jacobin.