Spotlight on Trump’s second term

The Summer 2025 issue of Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review has as its central theme Donald Trump’s second presidential term in the United States. ‘Undoing the Order of Things’ is the title.

What characterises the current presidency in the US is not just the severe democratic backsliding, but also the evaporation of the country’s commitments to the greater world beyond – providing humanitarian aid, brokering peace without looking for a return, promoting global climate justice, offering security to countries under unjust threat, and funding health initiatives in the developing world. Truly, the second term of Donald Trump appears to be an epoch-defining event.

There are six articles in the summer Studies relating to this theme. In ‘Trump’s return: Polanyian perspectives’, Peadar Kirby turns to Karl Polanyi’s most acclaimed text, The Great Transformation, in an effort to understand the appeal of Trumpism and of the far-right more generally. Polanyi observed that modern capitalism, which emerged from an all-embracing marketisation, proved to be incompatible with democracy. Right-wing policies have tended either to restrict the administrative state – and democratic freedoms with it – or in more recent days to replace the democratic state with ‘a kind of techno-feudal state to be run like a corporation with the president as its CEO’. Polanyi perceived that fascism in 1930s Europe was about saving capitalism by reconstituting it on a national basis through the coercive power of the state. That in effect is Trump’s project too.

Prompted by J.D. Vance’s distorted defence of Trump’s inhumane policies regarding migrants, Patrick Riordan SJ questions the merit of the postliberalism to which Vance subscribes. He is concerned that, while it rightly rejects certain aspects of liberalism, it runs the danger of ‘eroding the solid core of value of “liberty”’. Riordan makes distinctions between the many terms that invoke this quality: liberty, liberalism, liberation, neoliberalism, libertarianism, and so on. It all depends on who the subject of liberty is presumed to be. By way of setting a gold standard for liberty, Riordan examines the Second Vatican Council’s insistence on the dignity of the human person requiring that the liberties and rights of persons be respected in civil law.

Covering some of the same territory as Riordan, the present writer, in ‘J.D. Vance, Catholicism and the Postliberal Turn’, examines the world of Catholic postliberalism into which Vance stepped with his conversion in 2019. Vance described the impact that the works of French Catholic anthropologist René Girard had on him in the lead-up to his conversion, specifically his description of scapegoats; yet, the essay argues, Vance’s political behaviour since aligning himself with Trump shows a closer affinity with the vision of the German legal thinker Carl Schmitt, an advocate of authoritarianism, than with the thought of Girard.

In ‘MAGA: Making Athens Great Again, Then and Now’, Fiachra Long detects a parallel between the rise of oligarchy in 5th century BCE Athens and present-day America. In both cases politics is founded on power and on verbal manipulation. Long examines Plato’s Gorgias, in which Socrates exposes the lack of a sense of justice and of a moral stance in the rhetoric of politicians who don’t care to communicate properly, but merely use ‘decorative speech’ to sustain a ‘might is right’ regime. The propensity to deception and to violence that was evident in ancient Greece is on display today too, in the US, in Gaza, in Ukraine, and in Russia.

Mark Garavan is also concerned by the rise of a ‘might is right’ culture – just one aspect of a broader disintegration of the human in today’s world. In ‘Care and Contemplation: Pathways to Recovery’ he reflects on the deeply unsettling events of recent days – the casting out of the Other in Trump’s America, the slaughter in Gaza, climate crisis events, and the like. We have become a ‘careless’ world, a world of isolated selves that have turned inwards. The remedy Garavan proposes is firstly to become more contemplative – slow down and pay more attention – and secondly to learn to care, to change our orientation from the self to the other.

In ‘Nationhood and Europe: The Need for Nuance’, Kevin Williams is prompted by the rise of exclusivist nationalism, as well as by Trump’s dismantling of a communal order of justice and mercy, to reflect on nationhood in the context of Europe. Acknowledging that there are many fronts on which cultural unity between European nations is weak, he argues that the most important element of civic culture that holds the nations of Europe together is the acceptance of democratic ideals – respect for the rule of law and for individual freedom, plus commitment to equality and the maintenance of a distinction between religious ordinance and civil law. As such, Europe is a historic achievement that deserves to be cherished.

Apart from these six essays, there is a set of other contributions on a range of cultural topics. These include Eamon Kiernan tracing Gerard Manley Hopkins’s persistent fascination with death, Elise Lefeuvre considering the value of the Rule of St Benedict to Christian lives beyond the monastery, William Kingston arguing for the correction of Ireland’s inordinately high level of legal protection of the right to individual property, and Eileen Kane examining the stained-glass work in the Church of St John the Baptist, a Catholic church on the Clontarf Road in Dublin. Irish poet Gerard Smyth has also contributed four poems to the issue.