Illusion
There’s a peculiar genre of liberal response to the resurgence of Donald Trump. The hand-wringing, slack-jawed lament that this simply shouldn’t be happening. How, after a pandemic death toll in the millions, an insurrection, a mountain of indictments, and a felony conviction, can this man be president once again? Still command a crowd? Still receive standing ovations from billionaire donors and preachers of the prosperity gospel alike? The answer, we’re told, must be disinformation, moral failure, or cultural decay. Rarely does anyone stop to consider a simpler, more uncomfortable truth. The just world theory was always rubbish.
The just world theory is the belief that the world is, at root, fair. That people get what they deserve and deserve what they get. It underwrites the fantasy of meritocracy. Sustains the bootstraps myth. The American dream. Casts suffering as a sign of personal failure. It gives the appearance of moral order to a world built on expropriation, empire, and class war. And it is utterly incapable of explaining Trump.
Trump is, in every sense, the anti-just world candidate. He is a man whose fortune was inherited and then squandered repeatedly. Whose cruelty is not hidden but flaunted. Who lies reflexively and without consequence. Who has sexually assaulted women, incited political violence, defrauded the state, and openly admired fascists. And yet, here he is. Re-elected by his party. Returned to the campaign trail. Sold worthless meme stock to his base. Re-elected by a country that knows exactly who he is. Revitalised by each new trial and mugshot.
This is not the system breaking down. This is the system. The illusion of fairness was only ever needed by those who believed the state would protect them. It was a bedtime story for the professional-managerial class, fed on TED Talks and social mobility charts. For the rest of us. The excluded, the precarious, the racialised, the global South, the working class, the idea that virtue leads to reward has always been laughable. Trump didn’t break the system. He just showed us what it was built to do.
Collapse
But it’s not just Trump. His second term has made plain what was already underway: the dismantling of liberal moral infrastructure. The courts are defied openly. Judges issue rulings the administration ignores. Law firms representing political opponents are blacklisted. Executive orders bar them from federal buildings and threaten their contracts. When judges object, the White House mocks them on X, complete with memes and jeers from cabinet ministers and staffers. These are not the missteps of a rogue actor. They are deliberate moves to hollow out what remains of legal independence. The rituals continue. Hearings, dissents, appeals. But few believe they carry any real weight. The rule of law is now theatre.
This is not some unforeseen malfunction of market logic. It’s the price of capital’s long dance with fascism. For years, the business class funded reaction and repression, assuming they could call time when needed. Now the creature kicks back. What falters in the market was already fraying in ideology; the promise that capitalism could deliver justice no longer holds even for those it once appeased.
The just world theory served the dominant class well. It made inequality seem moral. Turned poverty into pathology. Success into proof of virtue. When the liberal middle class could still afford property and university fees, they bought into it too.
But the MAGA base didn’t just wake up one day feeling betrayed. Their manufacturing towns were gutted. Their unions were broken. They were told to cede or go bust. The neoliberal state told them to adapt, pivot, retrain. While it siphoned wealth upward and let Amazon colonise their high streets. Their rage is real, but its direction has been hijacked. Not at capitalism, but at the liberal elite that told them the rules still worked. Their response is not progressive but revanchist. Build walls. Punish trans. Ban books. Take back “their” country.
Reckoning
What Trump 2.0 shows is not the breakdown of justice but the failure of the liberal imagination. The system isn’t failing. It’s functioning. It continues to reward the wealthy. Protects the powerful. Sells spectacle as accountability. The rest of us are invited to believe in a fantasy where good people win and bad people fall. But history doesn’t work that way.
Real justice begins when we stop pretending. It is not about personal redemption, but collective struggle. Not blind scales, but open conflict. It’s not moral. It’s material. It lives not in the courtroom but in the picket line. Not in the ballot box but in the commune. Justice is not a condition delivered by the state, but something forced from below, through strikes, occupations, resistance. The just world was always a lie. Trump just forces us to look at it.
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