The arrival of Donald J. Trump feels like the completion of the cycle I was writing about in the early George W. Bush years. It is all too easy to get caught up in the moment, though fears are understandably high, and not think about the deep-seated anomalies and contradictions in the body politic that have brought America to the cusp of out-and-out fascism. Even if Trump’s policies turn out in the end to be not as fearsome as he has repeatedly stated, his explicit persona and policy positions take us very far out of the realm of normal democracy. It has become fashionable lately to excuse George W. Bush for being a “moderate” in comparison with Trump, but it should not be forgotten that Bush was the original American fascist; everything Trump, or a future would-be authoritarian, might do is predicated on the radical innovations Bush introduced in our political style, subverting the constitution and changing the balance between liberty and security in ways that have had permanent impact.

We need to remind ourselves that the early years of the Bush administration felt utterly radical, that the defense of freedom of speech and mobility, of the civility and respect that make a constitutional democracy work, never felt so threatened, never felt more precious and worth saving, as in those years. That feeling, unfortunately, is gone now, despite Trumpism and whatever else will follow, because the anti-constitutional innovations have become normalized. This happened particularly because the succeeding Democratic administration did not take any steps to counter, philosophically, any of the constitutional violations, or even the disrespect for science, reason and empiricism that had deeply saturated the public discourse.

Again we need to remind ourselves of how events took place in the Bush years with incomprehensible speed and bombast, of how shocking it was to deal with such phenomena as torture, rendition, black sites, enemy combatants, the loss of habeas corpus, open-ended surveillance, registration, mass deportation, stripping Americans of citizenship and political assassination — the de facto end of the Bill of Rights.

By looking back at the important polemics and tracts that came out in the middle of the last decade in response to the Bush administration’s innovations — after some time had elapsed since the instigating event of 9/11 and passions had cooled a little — we are reminded that the degree of acceptance of the new mythologies of fear was very great and the degree of skepticism toward them, even among scholars and thinkers, was minute in comparison. Over the course of the years, though there were numerous opportunities to do so, the reckoning (with crimes against humanity) never came, the accountability and ethical reevaluation of the new establishing myths of the security state never came to pass. I believe that in the long run of history, these missed opportunities to correct course will assume greater and greater importance as we proceed further along the same path.

Perhaps some of my musings about the plans the Bush administration may have had in case of a “second terror attack” might have been a little overwrought at the time. But this was the hothouse atmosphere of 2001-2003, when anything was possible, and ideas such as a Patriot Act II or total surveillance such as John Poindexter was then dreaming up, did not seem far-fetched.

One could also argue that many of the tools of surveillance and of the abridgment of movement and expression I postulated as occurring in response to a second major terror attack transpired anyway, and that there was no second terror attack because the last 16 years represent an ongoing low level of terror that never fully recedes and has already given the bureaucrats enough time to develop fearsome tools against privacy and anonymity, except that they have occurred in such secrecy, or in the guise of normal intelligence or police work, that they have attracted less attention than the announcement of, let’s say, the TIA (total information awareness) program.

A national ID (Real ID) did in fact happen later in the decade, and now that it exists it can be hardened, made more data-sensitive, or encompass greater intrusions against privacy, depending on the will of bureaucrats. Data mining, increased computer sophistication and capability, and the erosion of public faith in privacy as the primary liberal value have contributed to the worst fears I speculated about all those years ago already coming to realization.

The most dire set of worries I outlined in the early Bush era may not all have come true then, but certainly Trump’s rhetoric is headed in that direction. It is important to know exactly why Trump is not a historical anomaly, and to understand how he is rooted in a discourse that has been central to our culture for a while now. This means that 9/11 was not a passing event, but was a true revolution, persistent today, and should be expected to be the defining paradigm well into the future. Because there was no real liberal dissent toward Obama’s continuation and even strengthening of many of Bush’s extra-constitutional metamorphoses, we have become well and truly desensitized by now.

The Obama presidency is best viewed as a passing interlude between Bush and Trump. The kind of neoliberal managerialism (along with insistent minority-group identity politics, which ultimately played into white nationalism) to which Obama was beholden was bound to lead to a further collapse of democratic values, as indeed has happened. But it is important to value historical memory, and note again the forks in the road during the Obama presidency where things could have taken a different path.

If we look at fear of the “rage” of the Muslim in previous manifestations, such as Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington, Christopher Hitchens or Bernard-Henri LÃ©vy’s polemics in the early Bush years, and then we come down to Trump’s calls for a Muslim ban and almost explicit articulations of ethnic cleansing and genocide, then the Obama presidency, with the missed opportunity of the Arab Spring, yet again appears as a hopeless intermission.

The different interplaying factors — fascism, identity politics, neoliberal economics, terror, globalization — have all come to full fruition as any perspicuous observer might have noted for many years. Just after the conclusion of the Clinton presidency, it wasn’t possible to have such clear insight into exactly what neoliberalism was, how it operated in tandem with identity politics to bring about a facetious meritocracy that was really an upsurge of what later came to be known as the 1 percent taking over every aspect of power and leaving the rest of us in the dust.

Anti-terrorism has been feeding in the years since 9/11 into a liberalism that was already radically weakened and compromised by many tendencies that elevate group protectiveness (or communitarian cohesion) over anarchic individualist impulses, a path that leaves the Bill of Rights as an afterthought.

Slowly the picture of neoliberalism as it was implemented in its second wave in the 1990s became clearer as time went by, until its full crystallization, as ideology and program, came in the lead-up to the 2016 campaign, and worldwide too the reactions against it reached a crescendo. Such was not the case even five years ago, so if one movement is toward increased repression since the fateful turn of the millennium, then the countervailing movement is one toward awareness of everyone’s true position on the power spectrum. The fog that was intentionally created in the early 2000s has lifted in a way, so that there is extreme clarity, perhaps matched only by the clarity of the 1930s, when similar forces were loose. Again, we must remember how revolutionary the Bush years were, because they define everything we’re doing now as a nation, both domestically and internationally, and how Obama was not able to fundamentally change the discourse.

If we look back at the career of Naomi Klein, we realize that populist anti-globalization never assumed the philosophical consistency and rigor, not to mention the courage, to go against the real enemy — capital — and instead remained mired in tactical issues, or took on the wrong enemies (unaccountable corporations or corporate leaders). This has made facing up to the violations of liberty nearly impossible, since dissenters usually go quickly down the confusing road of anti-globalization, which has not yet been clarified to anyone’s satisfaction.

There must be a non-neoliberal way to bring the world closer together, but neither the Naderites nor the Occupy movement nor even the Sanderistas ever made such a philosophy clear; we are going to pay a high price for this ideological confusion, because not having a clear articulation of a global cosmopolitanism, which accepts globalization in principle but shuns neoliberal globalization, has led to the false answers of Trump, a dangerous shutting down of borders and rigidification of identities.

Michael Moore made a similar error in his movie “Capitalism: A Love Story,” where he attacked not capitalism but corporate malfeasance, which is a lower order of ideological potency altogether. The question that needs to be addressed is how the progressive anti-globalization movement can set itself apart from Trumpist illiberal nationalism. All the attention on trade, because it’s presented as an external factor, creates the feeling that we can do something about it more easily than addressing fundamental questions of economic justice that are more difficult because they take us into the microeconomics of personal decision-making, into individual culpability and violence, into the implicit bargain all of us as a society have made with a particular lifestyle that is not that amenable to reform.

Another factor to keep in mind is the evolution of the liberal delusion that demographics alone would keep the Democratic Party (and progressive ideals) in power, a notion I resisted with great ferocity when it was becoming popular around 2001, and continued doing so during the troublesome elections that came later. Despite superficial gains at the presidential level, the extreme right was gaining at every other level, which meant that the cultural commitment to tolerance and pluralism among the meritocratic 1 percent was neither deep nor thick. It didn’t extend, even at the rhetorical level, to a broad enough range of people to have any impact beyond their own confined circles — a bubble that was finally exposed with the Trump ascendancy.

Relying on demographics alone — Hillary Clinton’s doomed strategy in the 2016 election — without an economic philosophy that feeds into the greatest strengths of our democracy was a course destined for failure. In an era of political party dealignment, right-wing philosophy was bound to emerge victorious, so the question now becomes whether the sources of party weakness are being addressed or if they are even understood; needless to say, such understanding is nowhere in the offing, as spectacle and celebrity, buttressed by politically correct discourse, hide the enervation of the parties, and capital in the most abstract sense dictates, behind the scenes, what is handed out for easy consumption.

Another question that has become urgent all over again is that of political obligation: When is it due, when should it be withheld, what are the criteria for the citizen to understand his own moral role in ongoing crises and emergencies, and indeed during times of “normalization.”

The past 16 years have given us a cornucopia of instigating events, labeled as emergencies of various orders by those in power, to elicit obedience from citizens. In effect, we have been propelled in these years (and this is a continuing project assuming even greater urgency in the Trump years) to define and redefine citizenship — what it means, who will interpret it, how it will play out in practice and how it must be defended or protected, extended or denied. The practice of non-cooperation or civil disobedience is integrally connected to how citizenship is defined on an ongoing basis, keeping it alive as reality rather than letting it lapse into a deadened artifact, a badge of identity that provides no political empowerment.