Getting Medieval

What does Dr. Steve Keen think about the moral caliber of Trump supporters?

Dr. Steve Keen nowhere directly evaluates the “moral caliber” of Trump supporters. His public commentary, including his Substack and interviews, focuses on structural economic forces that contributed to Trump’s rise (e.g., deindustrialization, the effects of the dollar’s reserve‑currency role, collapse of manufacturing). This includes policy analysis, especially around trade, tariffs, and macroeconomic instability (e.g., his critiques of U.S. trade policy and mainstream economics). In these materials, Keen frames Trump’s political success as a symptom of long‑running economic dysfunction, not as a referendum on the personal virtue or vice of his supporters.

Across his work, Keen consistently argues that economic systems create political outcomes, including populist surges. Manufacturing decline and financialization have produced widespread economic insecurity. Voters respond to real deteriorating material conditions, even if the political expression of that response is polarizing. These themes appear repeatedly in his Substack discussions, including his analysis of how Bretton Woods dynamics and dollar dominance contributed to the conditions that enabled Trump’s rise. There is no evidence that Keen makes moral judgments about Trump supporters as a group. He does not describe them as virtuous, immoral, deluded, enlightened, or anything of that nature. His focus remains structural, not moral‑psychological.

I’ve been tracing how thinkers like Veblen, Toynbee, and others interpret the relationship between economic structure, civilizational stress, and mass political behavior. Keen fits neatly into that lineage: he treats political movements as downstream of systemic economic pressures, not as moral categories. I'm touching a very old tension inside any justice‑oriented movement like my engaged‑Buddhist friends: the difference between structural diagnosis and moral indictment. Engaged Buddhism, especially in its Western forms, carries two intertwined impulses. The Bodhisattva Ethic is a commitment to compassion, non‑blame, and seeing suffering as systemic rather than personal. The Justice Ethic is a commitment to naming harm, resisting oppression, and standing with the marginalized. These two impulses coexist — but they don’t always harmonize. When confronted with something like Trumpism, they can pull in opposite directions. The Bodhisattva impulse says:

“These voters are suffering; their choices arise from conditions.” The Justice impulse says: “These voters are enabling harm; we must oppose them.”

Most engaged Buddhists feel both, but in moments of political stress, the Justice impulse tends to dominate. Outrage becomes a form of moral clarity. So when I introduce a structural analysis — like Steve Keen’s — it can feel to them like I'm removing the moral charge from something they experience as ethically urgent. To them, it sounds like: “Don’t blame the supporters.” “It’s just economics.” “We should understand them, not oppose them.” That ain't what I'm saying.

Why can I hold the structural view without losing the moral one. Well, for one thing, the public's embrace of social Darwinism appalled me so much that I could not find a side to be on. When a poet gets a job writing instruction manuals for a computer company and starts boasting about the square footage of his house, I had a "They Live" radicalization moment. Since I was already operating from a different vantage point, I saw economic structures as the loom on which political behavior is woven. The "campus rest" observed by Abbie Hoffman became the Matrix. It was a false veneer. Populist eruptions are symptoms of deeper systemic failures. Moralizing is a secondary layer, not illuminating the primary causal engine. This is very close to Veblen’s industrial vs. pecuniary classes, Duruy’s serviceable instrumentalities vs. failing, self-serving, abusive institutions, Toynbee’s internal proletariat, MLK’s “giants” of materialism and militarism (the Universal Empire), and Keen’s financialization critique (since financialization is the self-serving institution and the tool of the Universal Empire).

Every late-stage civilization has one.

My friends, meanwhile, are operating from a moral‑phenomenological frame, not a structural one. (I think some of them LIKED the Second Gilded Age and much prefer incremental (delayed or no) change. I'm speaking in systems. They’re speaking in ethics. Both are valid, but they don’t map cleanly onto each other. I was experiencing my moral outrage when their lack of urgency blinded them to the Second Gilded Age's narcissistic supremacy lurking beneath the near fatal rut of normalcy, business hours, and approved publications. Only now has the good ship 𝘓𝘪𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘭 𝘌𝘯𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 hit the rocks of openly celebrated exploitation and universally loathed licentiousness and perversion.

Outrage is a way of maintaining moral identity. For many engaged Buddhists in the U.S., opposing Trumpism is not just a political stance — it’s a spiritual posture, a way of affirming “I stand with compassion,” “I stand with the vulnerable,” “I refuse to normalize harm.” So when I introduce structural analysis, it can feel like I'm asking them to give up a piece of their moral self‑definition. That’s why they react so intensely.

I'm not threatening your politics. I'm threatening their self‑story.

How can I bridge the gap without abandoning my structural clarity? One way of course is to acknowledge the moral stakes. Start where they are.

“I agree that the harm is real.” “I’m not minimizing the danger.” It's possible to reframe structural analysis as deep compassion. Not as an alternative to moral clarity, but as its extension. “If we want to prevent future harm, we have to understand the conditions that produce it.”

This aligns with the Bodhisattva impulse. Structural analysis strengthens, not weakens, justice. “If we only moralize, we miss the levers that actually change things.” This aligns with the Justice impulse.

Thich Nhat Hanh himself emphasized interdependence; the structural causes of suffering, non‑blame (tricky!), and compassionate action. This isn't  contradicting Engaged Buddhism. It's a return to its roots.

Now's a perfect time to bring Steve Hall into this — because if Keen gives us the macro‑economic skeleton of working‑class anger, Hall gives us the psychological musculature and the symbolic metabolism that animates it. Being in a direct line from the pioneers who gave us criminal profiling, Hall has a very clear, very forceful view on the subject. But crucially, like Keen, he does not frame it as a question of “moral caliber.” He frames it as a question of structural injury, symbolic humiliation, and the collapse of meaning‑making institutions.

Here's a distillation of Steve Hall’s view of working‑class anger. Hall’s analysis — especially in 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘻𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘊𝘳𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘋𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘙𝘪𝘴𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘙𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵,  and his ultra‑realist essays — centers on a few core ideas. Neoliberal capitalism produces a “damaged subjectivity.” Not “immoral people,” but people whose symbolic and material worlds have been hollowed out. He argues that stable work disappears, masculine and communal identities collapse, consumer culture becomes the only available arena for meaning, ressentiment builds as people are told their suffering is their own fault. This is not a moral judgment, it’s a diagnosis of a wound.

The working class experiences humiliation, not just deprivation. Hall is explicit: humiliation is politically explosive. He writes that the contemporary working class is economically abandoned, culturally mocked, symbolically erased, and politically instrumentalized by the Radical Right. This humiliation becomes a moral injury, but not in the sense of “they become immoral.” Rather, they feel that the world has violated its moral contract with them. And you can kiss the social contract good-bye.

Right‑wing populism offers a counterfeit form of dignity. Hall argues that movements like Trumpism provide recognition, belonging (VERY powerful), a sense of agency, and a narrative of betrayal and redemption. It’s not that supporters are morally inferior. It’s that they are symbolically starving, and the right offers calories — even if they’re junk calories. When the moral contract feels broken, antinomianism is the consequence.

Institutional conflict is why antinomianism recurs across cultures: it’s a structural possibility wherever law, charisma, and spiritual aspiration collide.

Keen doesn't blame money for this crisis, nor does he blame capitalism in general. Instead he places the blame on what I'd call institutionalized finance: the speculative private‑debt‑driven financial system created by neoclassical economics and deregulation. In unregulated private credit creation nanks create money endogenously when they issue loans. When those loans go into asset speculation, real estate bubbles, leveraged financial products, you get Minskyan instability.  Hall agrees, but places extra stress on the dominance of finance over production and the collapse of stable working‑class livelihoods and communities. He calls this a "mutation." I call it institutionalization which has put the West on an arc toward Universal Empire and the terminal decay curve.

I've spoken to right-wingers. Many literally believe that the Democrats are Satanists. Maybe this is why liberal moralism intensifies the anger.

Hall is blunt: when the professional‑managerial left responds to working‑class anger with moral condemnation redolent of cultural superiority

and therapeutic language (mea culpa) with this soap-operatic identity‑based scolding…it deepens the wound. Hall calls this “the moralizing left” — a formation that mistakes symbolic condemnation for political action.

What does Hall think about the “moral caliber” of Trump supporters? He would say the question itself is a symptom of the problem. Hall’s position is essentially that Trump supporters aren't immoral, duped, or hateful hateful by nature…but as subjects formed by a system that has stripped them of stable identities, meaningful work, and symbolic dignity. This is why Hall’s analysis pairs so well with Keen’s: Keen explains the material collapse. Hall explains the symbolic and psychological collapse. The financial system doesn’t just destabilize the economy — it destabilizes subjectivity. I would go further. I think overfinancialization has destabilized the subjectivities of its profiting practitioners. My friends see overt harm (racism, cruelty, injustice). They do not see the covert harms that preceded it. So they moralize the reaction without recognizing the wound. In mythic terms, they see the fire but not the smoldering earth beneath it.

Worst of all, anyone who has prospered in this milieu are complicit. It must be this contrast that has driven Trumpists around the bend. At any rate, it has turned liberals into targets.

Historical Examples

1. Johann Agricola and the Lutheran Antinomian Controversy (16th c.)

Agricola argued that Christians were entirely free from Mosaic law, which he said belonged “in the courthouse, not the pulpit.” Luther coined the term antinomianism in response.  Ingredients present: inner grace > law; rejection of commandments; charismatic teacher; doctrinal conflict.

2. The Ranters (English Civil War, 17th c.)

A radical sect accused of believing that the truly enlightened could not sin, because sin was a category belonging to the unenlightened. They rejected church authority and conventional morality. Ingredients present: mystical inner authority; dismissal of moral norms; social upheaval.

3. Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy in Massachusetts (1636–38)

Hutchinson taught that ministers were preaching a “covenant of works” rather than a covenant of grace, implying that moral effort was irrelevant to salvation. She was tried and banished. Ingredients present: grace > law; charismatic teacher; institutional conflict in a theocratic colony.

4. Gnostic and Early Christian Antinomians

Some Gnostic groups taught that spiritual enlightenment freed the elect from moral constraints, since matter was already corrupt and irrelevant.   Ingredients present: esoteric knowledge; rejection of moral law; dualistic cosmology.

5. Sabbatai Zevi and the Frankists (17th–18th c. Judaism)

Both movements were accused of deliberately violating Jewish law as a sign of messianic transformation—“redemption through sin.”   Ingredients present: charismatic messianic figure; inversion of law; esoteric justification.

6. Sufi Antinomians (e.g., al-Hallaj)

Some Sufi mystics were accused of antinomianism for claiming union with God that transcended legal obligations. Al-Hallaj’s ecstatic utterances (“I am the Truth”) were interpreted as dissolving the boundary between human and divine. Ingredients present: mystical union; transcendence of law; conflict with orthodoxy.

7. Tantric and Vajrayana “Left-Hand” Practices

Certain tantric traditions use ritual transgression (sexual rites, taboo-breaking) as a path to liberation, and are sometimes described as antinomian. Ingredients present: ritualized inversion; esoteric authority; deliberate violation of norms.

What does Dr. Steve Keen think about the moral caliber of Trump supporters?

Dr. Steve Keen nowhere directly evaluates the “moral caliber” of Trump supporters. His public commentary, including his Substack and interviews, focuses on structural economic forces that contributed to Trump’s rise (e.g., deindustrialization, the effects of the dollar’s reserve‑currency role, collapse of manufacturing). This includes policy analysis, especially around trade, tariffs, and macroeconomic instability (e.g., his critiques of U.S. trade policy and mainstream economics). In these materials, Keen frames Trump’s political success as a symptom of long‑running economic dysfunction, not as a referendum on the personal virtue or vice of his supporters.

Across his work, Keen consistently argues that economic systems create political outcomes, including populist surges. Manufacturing decline and financialization have produced widespread economic insecurity. Voters respond to real deteriorating material conditions, even if the political expression of that response is polarizing. These themes appear repeatedly in his Substack discussions, including his analysis of how Bretton Woods dynamics and dollar dominance contributed to the conditions that enabled Trump’s rise. There is no evidence that Keen makes moral judgments about Trump supporters as a group. He does not describe them as virtuous, immoral, deluded, enlightened, or anything of that nature. His focus remains structural, not moral‑psychological.

I’ve been tracing how thinkers like Veblen, Quigley, Toynbee, and others interpret the relationship between economic structure, civilizational stress, and mass political behavior. Keen fits neatly into that lineage: he treats political movements as downstream of systemic economic pressures, not as moral categories. I'm touching a very old tension inside any justice‑oriented movement like my engaged‑Buddhist friends: the difference between structural diagnosis and moral indictment. Engaged Buddhism, especially in its Western forms, carries two intertwined impulses. The Bodhisattva Ethic is a commitment to compassion, non‑blame, and seeing suffering as systemic rather than personal. The Justice Ethic is a commitment to naming harm, resisting oppression, and standing with the marginalized. These two impulses coexist — but they don’t always harmonize. When confronted with something like Trumpism, they can pull in opposite directions. The Bodhisattva impulse says:

“These voters are suffering; their choices arise from conditions.” The Justice impulse says: “These voters are enabling harm; we must oppose them.”

Most engaged Buddhists feel both, but in moments of political stress, the Justice impulse tends to dominate. Outrage becomes a form of moral clarity. So when I introduce a structural analysis — like Steve Keen’s — it can feel to them like I'm removing the moral charge from something they experience as ethically urgent. To them, it sounds like: “Don’t blame the supporters.” “It’s just economics.” “We should understand them, not oppose them.” That ain't what I'm saying.

Why can I hold the structural view without losing the moral one. Well, for one thing, the public's embrace of social Darwinism appalled me so much that I could not find a side to be on. When a poet gets a job writing instruction manuals for a computer company and starts boasting about the square footage of his house, I had a "They Live" radicalization moment. Since I was already operating from a different vantage point, I saw economic structures as the loom on which political behavior is woven. The "campus rest" observed by Abbie Hoffman became the Matrix. It was a false veneer. Populist eruptions are symptoms of deeper systemic failures. Moralizing is a secondary layer, not illuminating the primary causal engine. This is very close to Veblen’s industrial vs. pecuniary classes, Duruy’s serviceable instrumentalities vs. failing, self-serving, abusive institutions, Toynbee’s internal proletariat, MLK’s “giants” of materialism and militarism (the Universal Empire), and Keen’s financialization critique (since financialization is the self-serving institution and the tool of the Universal Empire).

Every late-stage civilization has one.

My friends, meanwhile, are operating from a moral‑phenomenological frame, not a structural one. (I think some of them LIKED the Second Gilded Age and much prefer incremental (delayed or no) change. I'm speaking in systems. They’re speaking in ethics. Both are valid, but they don’t map cleanly onto each other. I was experiencing my moral outrage when their lack of urgency blinded them to the Second Gilded Age's narcissistic supremacy lurking beneath the near fatal rut of normalcy, business hours, and approved publications. Only now has the good ship 𝘓𝘪𝘣𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘭 𝘌𝘯𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 hit the rocks of openly celebrated exploitation and universally loathed licentiousness and perversion.

Outrage is a way of maintaining moral identity. For many engaged Buddhists in the U.S., opposing Trumpism is not just a political stance — it’s a spiritual posture, a way of affirming “I stand with compassion,” “I stand with the vulnerable,” “I refuse to normalize harm.” So when I introduce structural analysis, it can feel like I'm asking them to give up a piece of their moral self‑definition. That’s why they react so intensely.

I'm not threatening your politics. I'm threatening their self‑story.

How can I bridge the gap without abandoning my structural clarity? One way of course is to acknowledge the moral stakes. Start where they are.

“I agree that the harm is real.” “I’m not minimizing the danger.” It's possible to reframe structural analysis as deep compassion. Not as an alternative to moral clarity, but as its extension. “If we want to prevent future harm, we have to understand the conditions that produce it.”

This aligns with the Bodhisattva impulse. Structural analysis strengthens, not weakens, justice. “If we only moralize, we miss the levers that actually change things.” This aligns with the Justice impulse.

Thich Nhat Hanh himself emphasized interdependence; the structural causes of suffering, non‑blame (tricky!), and compassionate action. This isn't  contradicting Engaged Buddhism. It's a return to its roots.

Now's a perfect time to bring Steve Hall into this — because if Keen gives us the macro‑economic skeleton of working‑class anger, Hall gives us the psychological musculature and the symbolic metabolism that animates it. Being in a direct line from the pioneers who gave us criminal profiling, Hall has a very clear, very forceful view on the subject. But crucially, like Keen, he does not frame it as a question of “moral caliber.” He frames it as a question of structural injury, symbolic humiliation, and the collapse of meaning‑making institutions.

Here's a distillation of Steve Hall’s view of working‑class anger. Hall’s analysis — especially in 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘻𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘊𝘳𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘋𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘙𝘪𝘴𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘙𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵,  and his ultra‑realist essays — centers on a few core ideas. Neoliberal capitalism produces a “damaged subjectivity.” Not “immoral people,” but people whose symbolic and material worlds have been hollowed out. He argues that stable work disappears, masculine and communal identities collapse, consumer culture becomes the only available arena for meaning, ressentiment builds as people are told their suffering is their own fault. This is not a moral judgment, it’s a diagnosis of a wound.

The working class experiences humiliation, not just deprivation. Hall is explicit: humiliation is politically explosive. He writes that the contemporary working class is economically abandoned, culturally mocked, symbolically erased, and politically instrumentalized by the Radical Right. This humiliation becomes a moral injury, but not in the sense of “they become immoral.” Rather, they feel that the world has violated its moral contract with them. And you can kiss the social contract good-bye.

Right‑wing populism offers a counterfeit form of dignity. Hall argues that movements like Trumpism provide recognition, belonging (VERY powerful), a sense of agency, and a narrative of betrayal and redemption. It’s not that supporters are morally inferior. It’s that they are symbolically starving, and the right offers calories — even if they’re junk calories. When the moral contract feels broken, antinomianism is the consequence.

Institutional conflict is why antinomianism recurs across cultures: it’s a structural possibility wherever law, charisma, and spiritual aspiration collide.

Keen doesn't blame money for this crisis, nor does he blame capitalism in general. Instead he places the blame on what I'd call institutionalized finance: the speculative private‑debt‑driven financial system created by neoclassical economics and deregulation. In unregulated private credit creation nanks create money endogenously when they issue loans. When those loans go into asset speculation, real estate bubbles, leveraged financial products, you get Minskyan instability.  Hall agrees, but places extra stress on the dominance of finance over production and the collapse of stable working‑class livelihoods and communiuties. He calls this a "mutation." I call it institutionalization which has put the West on an arc toward Universal Empire and the terminal decay curve.

I've spoken to right-wingers. Many literally believe that the Democrats are Satanists. Maybe this is why liberal moralism intensifies the anger.

Hall is blunt: when the professional‑managerial left responds to working‑class anger with moral condemnation redolent of cultural superiority

and therapeutic language (mea culpa) with this soap-operatic identity‑based scolding…it deepens the wound. Hall calls this “the moralizing left” — a formation that mistakes symbolic condemnation for political action.

What does Hall think about the “moral caliber” of Trump supporters? He would say the question itself is a symptom of the problem. Hall’s position is essentially that Trump supporters aren't immoral, duped, or hateful hateful by nature…but as subjects formed by a system that has stripped them of stable identities, meaningful work, and symbolic dignity. This is why Hall’s analysis pairs so well with Keen’s: Keen explains the material collapse. Hall explains the symbolic and psychological collapse. The financial system doesn’t just destabilize the economy — it destabilizes subjectivity. I would go further. I think overfinancialization has destabilized the subjectivities of its profiting practitioners. My friends see overt harm (racism, cruelty, injustice). They do not see the covert harms that preceded it. So they moralize the reaction without recognizing the wound. In mythic terms, they see the fire but not the smoldering earth beneath it.

Worst of all, anyone who has prospered in this milieu are complicit. It must be this contrast that has driven Trumpists around the bend. At any rate, it has turned liberals into targets.

Historical Examples

1. Johann Agricola and the Lutheran Antinomian Controversy (16th c.)

Agricola argued that Christians were entirely free from Mosaic law, which he said belonged “in the courthouse, not the pulpit.” Luther coined the term antinomianism in response.  Ingredients present: inner grace > law; rejection of commandments; charismatic teacher; doctrinal conflict.

2. The Ranters (English Civil War, 17th c.)

A radical sect accused of believing that the truly enlightened could not sin, because sin was a category belonging to the unenlightened. They rejected church authority and conventional morality. Ingredients present: mystical inner authority; dismissal of moral norms; social upheaval.

3. Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy in Massachusetts (1636–38)

Hutchinson taught that ministers were preaching a “covenant of works” rather than a covenant of grace, implying that moral effort was irrelevant to salvation. She was tried and banished. Ingredients present: grace > law; charismatic teacher; institutional conflict in a theocratic colony.

4. Gnostic and Early Christian Antinomians

Some Gnostic groups taught that spiritual enlightenment freed the elect from moral constraints, since matter was already corrupt and irrelevant.   

Ingredients present: esoteric knowledge; rejection of moral law; dualistic cosmology.

5. Sabbatai Zevi and the Frankists (17th–18th c. Judaism)

Both movements were accused of deliberately violating Jewish law as a sign of messianic transformation—“redemption through sin.”   

Ingredients present: charismatic messianic figure; inversion of law; esoteric justification.

6. Sufi Antinomians (e.g., al-Hallaj)

Some Sufi mystics were accused of antinomianism for claiming union with God that transcended legal obligations. Al-Hallaj’s ecstatic utterances (“I am the Truth”) were interpreted as dissolving the boundary between human and divine.  Ingredients present: mystical union; transcendence of law; conflict with orthodoxy.

7. Tantric and Vajrayana “Left-Hand” Practices

Certain tantric traditions use ritual transgression (sexual rites, taboo-breaking) as a path to liberation, and are sometimes described as antinomian. Ingredients present: ritualized inversion; esoteric authority; deliberate violation of norms.