I’ve been spending a lot of time lately looking into how yoga philosophy offers us a vision for the future?
By which I mean, the future after Trump.
And I don’t just mean Trump the person; I mean the racist, sexist, pseudo-religious kleptocratic authoritarian extremism that Trump personifies.
It will crash and burn . . . eventually. It’s just a question of when.
Personally, I would prefer sooner than later.
But even a blue wave next November may only amount to a quick fix that doesn’t last. History tells us that resistance movements defined only by what they oppose fail.
Why?
Because resistance without a clear vision of a future in which the authoritarian can’t return is like chasing Dracula back into his coffin without driving a stake through his heart. You can try to talk yourself into believing the danger has passed, but when night falls the vampire is sure to rise again.
(Yes, I know it’s well past Halloween and you’d rather be thinking about Santa Claus than Dracula, but ICE cares about Christmas about as much as any vampire.)
Successful resistance doesn’t just put a stop to abusive authority; it makes sure the abusive authority never comes back by building something better.
And not just better than what the authoritarian offered; better than the conditions that made the authoritarian possible.
Yoga philosophy offers us a useful way to understand those conditions and change them so that authoritarianism can’t come back:
Here we find that ignorance (avidyā) is understood to be the foundation of all the other afflictions (kleśas); the soil in which the rest of the obstacles take root and grow.
Similarly, the conditions—the avidyā-soil—in which right-wing extremism took root and grew over the decades consists of not just lack of knowledge, but of a misperception of reality—a collective avidyā that allowed resentment, fear, and authoritarianism to grow.
You could go back further, but using the 1930’s as a starting point, a historically grounded characterization could look like this:
Economic avidyā: The Myth of the Isolated Individual
After Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal dramatically expanded the state’s role in economic life, a counter-movement began to take shape—one that framed collective responsibility as tyranny and equated freedom with unrestrained markets. This produced:
- A belief that economic suffering is personal failure, not a structural issue.
- A denial of interdependence, which fueled resentment against any group perceived as getting “unearned support.”
- A nostalgia myth: that America was once a self-reliant Eden ruined by government intervention and demographic change.
This is avidyā in the yogic sense: the confusion of the transient—economic cycles, demographic shifts—with the permanent: the inherent dignity of all persons.
Cultural avidyā: Whiteness as the Presumptive Center
From the 1930s onward, U.S. society carried an unquestioned assumption that “real Americans” were white, Christian, and culturally dominant.The civil rights movement contested this assumption. Many interpreted this loss of automatic centrality as oppression, a form of:
- asmitā: egoism as a bodily conception of identity
- rāga: attachment to a former social hierarchy that ensured privilege
- dveṣa: aversion to equality because it feels like loss
This set the stage for grievance politics, racialized fear, and Christian nationalism.
Political avidyā: Distrust of Institutions
Moving up to the Cold War of the 50s and accelerating in the 70s–90s, deliberate campaigns portrayed the federal government as:
- inherently corrupt
- the enemy of “real Americans”
- captured by enemies within (intellectuals, minorities, immigrants, elites)
This made it easier for authoritarian leaders to step in and claim to be the only trustworthy figure—an American version of īśvara-pranidhāna gone horribly wrong, where surrender is misplaced in a human strongman instead of in the Supreme Divinity.
In addition to providing models for understanding how we got here, yoga philosophy—and bhakti-yoga philosophy in particular—offers us an alternative vision: Dharmic Personalism.
Dharmic Personalism is the idea that belonging isn’t granted by tribe, ideology, or the state, but arises from our deeper identity as spiritual beings linked together through a common source.
It’s a kind of “social spirituality” that thrives in a civic culture shaped by responsibility, reciprocity, and reverence for the natural world, that’s supported by institutions designed to help each individual discover and express their unique contribution to collective well-being, and that celebrates diversity as a natural attribute of a harmonious whole.
So what kind of vision for the future can Dharmic Personalism provide that will change the underlying soil in such a way as to prevent racist, sexist, pseudo-religious kleptocratic authoritarian extremism from growing back?
Tune in next Sunday for the answer.
Wishing you all good fortune,
– Hari-k