Strange Bedfellows and Long Knives
My May 2025 Locus Magazine column.
I’m on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel Picks and Shovels. Catch me in PDX at Barnes and Noble with BUNNIE HUANG on June 20. The last two stops are in London (Jul 1) and Manchester (Jul 2).
My latest Locus Magazine column is “Strange Bedfellows and Long Knives,” about the secret engine of sweeping political upheavals (like Trumpism) and their inherent fragility:
https://locusmag.com/2025/05/commentary-cory-doctorow-strange-bedfellows-and-long-knives/
Stories about major change usually focus on a group, but groups rarely achieve big, ambitious goals. Think about all the goal-oriented groups in your orbit, with missions like alleviating hunger, or beautifying your neighborhood, or changing the health-care system. They’ve been at it for decades, and while many groups do excellent work at the margins, blocking regressions and making modest advancements (or the occasional breakthrough), they’re playing a game of inches.
But sometimes — the New Deal, the civil rights movement, the Reagan revolution, Trump II — we get a wholesale, foundational, societal change. Very rarely, that’s because an existing group conceived of a devastating new tactic (think of Obama’s online campaigning in 2008), but that’s the exception. Almost always, the major upheavals in our society aren’t caused by the same people trying a different tactic — they’re the result of a coalition that forms around a shared set of goals.
Reagan rode to power thanks to the support of different groups, many of whom had cordially loathed one another for decades. Most notably, Reagan brokered a deal with evangelicals — whose movement was already organized around strict obedience to charismatic cult leaders — to end their decades long boycott of politics and show up at the polls for him:
Evangelicals hated politicians (whom they viewed as obsessed with “worldly” matters to the exclusion of the spiritual) and they really hated the finance sector (whom they damned as both amoral sons of Mammon, and also, quietly, Jewish). Right wing politicians and the financiers they relied on viewed evangelicals as stupid, superstitious, and ungovernable. But by promising to deliver culture-war stuff (racism, restrictions on abortion, homophobia) to evangelicals, and tax-cuts and deregulation to the rich, Reagan fused two groups that had been largely stalled in achieving their goals for decades, and, with the backing of that coalition, rewrote the American consensus to give each of them some of what their wanted.
But here’s the thing about coalitions: while they share some goals, they don’t share all their goals. Two groups that have identical goals aren’t actually two groups — that’s just one group with two chapters. Moreover, the divergence in coalition members’ goals are often — nearly always — in conflict. Which is to say, they want some of the same things, but there are always group members who want different, mutually exclusive, opposing things.
When coalitions are forming and campaigning, they tend to focus on their shared goals. But once they take power, it’s their differences that matter.
Think of Tolkien: the Fellowship of the Ring forms by pulling together disparate factions to join in a shared quest that culminates in a massive battle in which (spoilers) they are victorious. But in the immediate aftermath of that victory, even before the wounded and the fallen have been recovered from the battlefield, we (spoilers) witness another fight, this one between the allies, over what the post-victory order will be. This is pretty much also what happened after WWII, when (spoilers) the USSR and the USA switched from being allies to being rivals even before anyone could (spoilers) clean Hitler’s brains off the walls of his bunker.
Leftists get a front-row seat for the coalitional moves of the right, but we tend to miss the internecine struggle to claim the prize after their victories. One exception to this is Rick Perlstein, a leftist historian whose books Nixonland and Reaganland are definitive histories of the internal machinations that powered the right wing revolution. For years, Perlstein has been carefully reading the massive anthologies that the Heritage Foundation publishes in the runup to each election, in which various members of the right coalition spell out their post-victory goals. These were pretty obscure until last year, when we all became aware of the latest volume in the series, Project 2025:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/14/fracture-lines/#disassembly-manual
Perlstein read Project 2025 — all of it, not just the individual chapters that were the most lurid and apocalyptic right-wing fantasies. Because Perlstein read all 900 pages, he was able to identify something that nearly everyone else missed, that Project 2025 is full of contradictory plans that are in direct opposition to one another:
https://prospect.org/politics/2024-07-10-project-2025-republican-presidencies-tradition/
Project 2025 is usually credited to the Heritage Foundation, but it’s more accurate to say that Heritage was the anthologist of the plan, not its author. They selected and assembled chapters written by various members of the Trump coalition. Now, as anthologist, it was Heritage’s job to make as coherent a job of this as possible, but, as it turns out “as possible” wasn’t very possible.
Project 2025 contains multiple, contradictory, mutually opposed prescriptions for monetary policy, taxation, foreign policy, domestic security, government reform, taxation, and more. Normally, an anthologist editing a volume like this would serve as a kind of referee, choosing winners from among these opposing sides. That surely happens all the time in Trumpland — doubtless there are crank eugenicists, Proud Boys, and Q-addled hallucinators who have cherished goals that would never make it into Project 2025.
But the fact that Heritage couldn’t tell one (or two, or three) sides in these debates to go pound sand and elevate a single policy to canon tells us that there are opposing forces in the Trump coalition who are each so powerful that neither of them can overpower the others. These are the fracture lines in the Trump coalition, the places we should apply ourselves to if we want to neutralize the movement, shatter it back into a mob of warring factions.
As Naomi Klein says, this is something Steve Bannon has been doing to the left for years:
One of the things I’ve learned from studying Steve Bannon is he takes the task of peeling away parts of the Democrats’ coalition very seriously, and he’s done it very successfully again and again. So why wouldn’t we try to do it back to him?
https://prospect.org/culture/2025-05-13-moment-of-unparalleled-peril-interview-naomi-klein/
The Trump coalition’s fracture lines are already showing, for example, in healthcare:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/20/clinical-trial-by-ordeal/#spoiled-his-brand-new-rattle
And tariffs:
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-peter-navarro/
And Elon Musk:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/08/business/elon-musk-peter-navarro-comments-tariffs
Trump held his coalition together during the war, but history tells us that now, after the victory, is the moment when Trump’s coalition is most vulnerable, as members of that coalition realize that they won’t get the things they were promised in exchange for the blood and treasure they expended to get Trump into office.
I’ve been a Locus columnist for two decades now. It remains the journal of record for the science fiction and fantasy field, a vital source of information and community. Locus is structured as a charitable nonprofit (I’m a donor) and it depends on support from readers like you to keep going. They’re currently hosting their annual fundraiser, with many, many, many cool rewards, from signed books to the right to name a character in an upcoming novel, and beyond:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/locus-mag-science-fiction-fantasy-horror-2025#/
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/21/et-tu-sloppy-steve/#fractured-fairytales
