Hardly an hour goes by without some new warning that President Donald Trump and his Svengali, Steve Bannon, are laying the groundwork for a fascist America. But things are hardly ever quite so simple.

Bannon is vocally anti-liberal in the broadest sense of the term. He views liberalism – roughly, a tolerance for diversity and for individuals setting their own behavioral norms – as the scourge of society, and is quite clear that he intends to destroy it. Yet at the same time, both the inaugural address he largely crafted and his own increasingly-famous appearance at a 2014 conference at the Vatican are composed largely of themes that many liberals could embrace: He rails against the financiers and corporations that profited while the average working person's income stagnated or declined, he attacks trade deals that have undermined American manufacturing (a central progressive trope from the candidacy of Walter Mondale through to Bernie Sanders'), and he despises "crony capitalism" in which moneyed interests obtain unfair advantages and corporate welfare by buying off governments.

But Bannon's solution is not the progressives' resort to government regulation and redistribution: It's a return to the idealized Main Street capitalism of your introductory college economics course. In short, he's not into big government. In fact, he calls himself a "Leninist" because he aims to destroy the state completely as an institution.

Of course, he's not entirely consistent in this. In contrast to the president's call last week for the undoing of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, Bannon advocates increased government regulation of investment banks and financial institutions, and essentially wants them to give back their ill-gotten gains in retribution for the Great Recession. In some variants of his "Leninist" quote, he's framed his goal as the destruction of not just "the state" but of all "elites."

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Like Lenin, then, he apparently contemplates a transition period where his revolution seizes the state, uses it to smash the nobility and the kulaks, establishes the dictatorship of the proletariat, and then, ultimately, lets the state fade away into some sort of blissful, capitalist version of socialism. Caveat: Lenin's "temporary" dictatorship, and the state it seized – Bannon's apparent model – never actually faded away.

All of which may get you wondering, if Bannon hates nonconformists, how does he intend to enforce conformism without the heavy hand of the state? And the answer is: culture.

Bannon believes in a heterogeneous conformist society, uniformly following established, generally religious, norms. In fact, his critique of rapacious capitalism, while not all that different from dedicated lefties, is grounded not in some more utilitarian philosophy of "fairness" but in his Christianity. Bannon's conformism is not that of Stalin's Russia, but of the roughly-contemporary Peyton Place; his vision of America is one – socially, economically, politically, religiously – out of an idealized 1950s. To achieve conformity without government requires a social homogeneity that arguably existed back then, which leads to Bannon's vision of a fortress America more racially and religiously "pure," hence his drive to reduce the rising percentage of the population who are immigrants.

While Bannon is aware that his vision attracts anti-Semites and neo-Nazis, and appreciates that they help his cause, that doesn't make him one. Cosmopolites might find Bannon's longed-for America oppressive, much like the painting "American Gothic," but that doesn't make it oppression.

In fact, while Bannon envisions a less tolerant, less diverse, less "Bohemian" America, his vision of a "blood and soil" populism doesn't involve world domination so much as world segregation: Each culture should be given its own separate territory. But, as I've discussed here, that might lead to another World War II-type of explosion. And Bannon thinks, if not hopes, it will, because of the expansionist desires of both global Islamic jihadism and Russia's Vladimir Putin. Unlike Trump, Bannon recognizes Putin's ambitions as a threat to the U.S., but because of traditional Great Power territorial conflict, not ideological disagreement – just not as immediate as the Islamic threat.

More importantly, Trump's larger concerns are entirely different from Bannon's, which Bannon recognizes in openly referring to the president as "a blunt instrument" for achieving his goals. Trump may be intolerant in many ways, but he isn't best described as illiberal. His lifestyle, of course, has always been more cosmopolitan (at least in a Vegas sort of way) and libertine. Unlike many conservatives, he's no hypocrite who spouts moralism while behaving immorally himself. His pitch has always been essentially, and frankly, the same as Hugh Hefner's: to bring his gold-chandeliered, sex-filled fantasy life to the masses.

Trump's personality, however, is thoroughly authoritarian. But unlike the great tyrants of history, he has no Messianic desire to change the world, no ideology to impose. That would require caring about something other than himself, and he doesn't. He wants more attention than anyone, and more money. As David Frum writes in his new Atlantic magazine cover story, "How to Build an Autocracy," this makes Trump very much a man of these times. "As one shrewd observer told me on a recent visit [to Hungary], 'The benefit of controlling a modern state is less the power to persecute the innocent, more the power to protect the guilty.'" Frum explains:

Outside the Islamic world, the 21st century is not an era of ideology. The grand utopian visions of the 19th century have passed out of fashion. The nightmare totalitarian projects of the 20th have been overthrown or have disintegrated, leaving behind only outdated remnants: North Korea, Cuba. What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule-twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-optation of elites.

Matt Bai painted a similarly dispiriting picture in a recent piece asserting that Trump, like other contemporary demagogues, is less Orwell's "1984," with its "vision of fascist repression," and more Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," "with [its] trivial, substanceless society." As Bai asserted, "Trump is the perfect embodiment of a Huxleyan culture, endlessly distracted by the superficial or the spectacular. He doesn't want to control what you think – only what you think about, which is him."

The Americas Bannon and Trump envision are depressing, but not totalitarian. One is illiberal but not necessarily authoritarian, the other authoritarian but not necessarily illiberal. Both lead to a society embodying not so much the banality of evil as the evil of banality. And where they overlap is not the creation of a fascist state, but rather the opposite: The hollowing out of the state as a viable institution. And, in that, they represent not a radical departure from the modern trajectory of the U.S. (and most other countries today) but an acceleration of it.

Bannon's ultimate objective – a society that enforces conformity without a state – actually represents the socialization of regulation that I previously discussed here. It is the global village made possible by the internet, a high-tech Peyton Place in which everyone knows everyone else's business and everyone is shamed into observing at least the facade of communal values. This is the world of Uber driver and customer ratings, the world of Dog Poop Girl. It is a world in which technology democratizes and socializes everything, rendering the modern state obsolete. It is already coming.

It is a short, but troubling, step, however, from this vision of non-state social regulation to devolving the enforcement of law and order. Trump is already posing this potent threat to the nation-state's foundation – what sociologist Max Weber famously defined as "the monopoly of legitimate force." Adviser Kellyanne Conway recently suggested that Trump might simply end-run the existing state security apparatus and establish his own personal Secret Service and his own personal intelligence community.

There, of course, isn't any reason he couldn't do so as a private citizen, and even offer these services to others. After all, they already exist in the private marketplace. But the Trump years suggest the possibility of going even further. Trump has realized that technology allows him to outsource the "monopoly of legitimate force" to vigilantes acting against whomever Trump targets. Enforcement, security, intel and warfare are all increasingly leaving the state's monopoly for third-party provision; the main legacy of the Trump administration may be to further this development – from inside the U.S. government, and to Trump-controlled entities.

All of this should be concerning, but, while liberals have been warning not to "normalize" Trump for the last year, the mistake is to "abnormalize" him – exactly the WWF-type storyline on which he and his supporters thrive. It's not that there are no authoritarian, white-supremacist elements to Trump's coalition, or autocratic and racist implications to some of what Trump and Bannon will pursue, but the main challenge the country faces from this administration is actually Huxley's "trivial, substanceless society" and a hollowed-out state.