Yuppie is the aesthetic and attitude. Andrew Lichtenstein / Corbis via Getty Images
Legions of Patrick Bateman lookalikes, clad in power suits and smoking cigarettes. YMCA plays on repeat. Twenty-five years on from the release of American Psycho, the Yuppies are finally back. And it’s Donald Trump who is responsible.
Yet, this isn’t just mindless nostalgia. No, the resurgence of Eighties aesthetics and the “greed is good” spirit is one half of an emerging American Dream. One that has been forged in the dynamic collision between Trump’s MAGA nostalgia and his new friendship with the tech-utopian Silicon Valley squad. Call it: Yuppiefuturism.
It is emerging from the confluence of two epoch-defining vibe shifts. One hails from the past, the other from the future. The first is the return of a bolshy American Yuppie dominance — in all its ostentatious, deal-making, power-worshipping glory. This is the Manhattan-coded spirit of an economically ambitious, Trump-voting Gen Z pining for old money aesthetics. The second is the ascendency of what has been called Right-wing progressivism, or “space fascism”. Embodied by Silicon Valley titans such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen, American Right-wing progressivism is no conservative movement: its adherents worship technology and space colonisation. Yuppiefuturism is a bastard child of both ideologies — a hybrid Nietzschean will to power, sporting a Rolex and Space Suit.
To grasp the first vibe shift, it’s essential to understand how the brash, self-promoting, deal-making demeanour of the Yuppie emerged. This ambitious and ostentatious mindset, the way the Yuppie talks and thinks, is part of a long history of oral culture from ancient civilisation to TikTok. For most of human history, culture and politics have been an oral affair. That is to say, “orality”, raw verbal communication unsupported by writing, was the default currency of dialogue — the Petrodollar of communication.
In literate societies, human cognition is shaped by structured argument, the linear development of ideas, and the permanent record that writing provides. For groups, this enables words, thoughts, and memories to be externalised, aggregated, and distributed (or gatekept) with ease. For individuals, it offers the capacity to “look things up” and deliberate.
Oral societies are built different. In his seminal 1982 book, Orality and Literature, Walter J. Ong explained that such cultures function in ways that the modern literate mind cannot comprehend. Communication requires heavy repetition to aid memorisation and ensure continuity of knowledge without written records. Discourse is often agonistic and confrontational. Storytelling must be charismatic and communal to make an impact. Epithets and mnemonics become key weapons in shaping the agenda. Society reveres the old men and women who repeat the stories of the days of old. This “politics of rizz” was the lifeblood of ancient civilisations. In Rome, a world of endless competing interests, rhetoric was the irrefutable force that legitimated power. Mark Antony’s funeral oration was said to have turned the masses against Caeser’s murderers, and re-united Rome under the leadership of the Second Triumvirate. Rhetoric was the weapon of mass seduction; it stimulated union to prevail over division.
Yet, the post-Gutenberg centuries attempted to put the politics of rizz to rest. Print media radically reduced the cost of scaling the written word. Societies went all-in on literacy. The rest is history. Print remade the world ushering in the Reformation and Enlightenment, mass democracy, double-entry accounting, peer-reviewed scientific research, novels, newspapers and all that lovely stuff. In this new era, the “politics of wordcels”, in all its majesty, would reign supreme. From Martin Luther to Alexander Hamilton, it was thought that learned men would debate, educate, and inspire a literate population to collectively reason their way to a better future. The nostalgia of oral cultures would be replaced by the unyielding march of progress.
This was but a blip. With the advent of new media, the politics of rizz began to creep out of its coffin in the 20th century. In his 1985 Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman argued that TV fundamentally altered human cognition, pushing communication and thought to the realm of entertainment. Postman explained that video fundamentally biased audiences towards what could be called screen-friendly rizz. Citing the infamous 1960 televised debate, stale and sweaty Richard Nixon was no match for slick and sunny John F. Kennedy.
This emergence of electronic media such as television and radio triggered what Ong identified as “secondary orality”.Wordcels would still depend on writing and print, but soon their communication would be inflected with rizz characteristics. In this era, silver-tongued, photogenic politicians used their charisma to captivate audiences while smoothly maintaining the machinery of literate politics. From saxophone-wielding Bill Clinton to mic-dropping Obama, this emergent fact-based rizz prospered. Yet, to engage in the politics of rizz is to risk leaving the door open to superior rizzlers. Which brings us back to the Yuppies.
Yuppie rizz blends ruthless ambition and a polished corporate image. It’s all about unapologetically walking the walk, projecting the success of a “winner” to close the deal. Trump, as Frederic Kaufmann has described, is the very “apotheosis of the yuppie tribe” — the living breathing “avatar of American capitalism” spawned in the Reagan-era of supposed American greatness.
In 2016, Trump’s distinctive Yuppie rizz eviscerated Hillary Clinton’s wordcelery. Through a Roman mastery of orality, complete with memorable mnemonics (MAGA) and epithets (Crooked Hillary), Trump became the archetypal storyteller of old, reborn in the body of a Yuppie Caesar. Through this, deal-making Trump — like Rome’s greatest orators — skilfully crafted a coalition of contradiction by harking back to various American nostalgias. For big business, it was the Eighties era boom time. For evangelicals, it was the pre-sexual revolution Fifties. For Steve Bannon, it was the Jacksonian 1830s. While ideologically divergent, Trump’s coalition coalesced in pursuit of the destruction of their common enemy: a Democrat establishment of wordcels they see as plotting to destroy America.
In the eight years since, the media landscape has only got better for Trump. Trust in and demand for legacy media has collapsed. The explosive growth of podcasts combined with social video platforms like TikTok, Reels, and YouTube have been a boon for rizzlers everywhere. Despite the wordcel-information repression complex’s best efforts, Trump’s “tertiary orality” entirely bypasses literacy — he simply refuses to engage with cries of hypocrisy and logical inconsistency. With seeming ease, he has rizzed his way to a series of deals that any thinking wordcel would decry as paradoxical. By ignoring his wordcel critics’ calls for logic and facts, he’s won over almost everyone. Arab Americans and Orthodox Jews. Isolationists and war hawks. Podcasters and evangelicals. Wall Street kingpins and union boys. Bernie Bros and white supremacists. And in perhaps the most remarkable union of all: the nation-loving have-nots of Appalachia and the money-loving have-yachts of Silicon Valley.
Which brings us to the second vibe shift that is feeding Yuppiefuturism: the ascendency of Right-wing progressivism. If Yuppie rizz is the aesthetic and attitude, then Right-wing progressivism is the political economy. While hailing from Silicon Valley, rather than the Yuppie terrain of Wall Street, this AI Space techno-utopianism is best articulated in Marc Andreessen’s 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”. In his impassioned call for tech accelerationism, Andreessen argues that “America and her allies should be strong and not weak” and that “[e]conomic, cultural, and military strength flow from technological strength”. He blames the decline of that strength on the “anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness” ideology of the Washington establishment.
For now, Trump has managed to build an unwieldy coalition by tapping into many Americans’ disdain for this supposed “anti-greatness”. Yet, the magical glue of negative cohesion that has bound his voters together may begin to wear off as their diverging desires become more pronounced. For example, as big business and Silicon Valley’s desire for cheap foreign labour comes into conflict with the Build the Wall crowd, things may become more perilous for Trump. So, to avoid it all unravelling, Trump — like all great rizzlers — needs a spectacle that binds his voters, while blinding them to their obvious differences. He cannot take his voters to the various pasts they crave, so he’s decided to take them Back to the Future. Enter Elon Musk.
When the SpaceX founder started to gravitate towards Trump after 2020, the connection stemmed from a shared disgust for “woke” politics, censorship, and government overreach. Yet, in recent months their interest in space exploration has rocketed to the top of the agenda. In early October Trump started to explicitly link America’s return to military supremacy to reaching Mars. While no mission is planned yet, Trump declared in his inauguration speech that it is Manifest Destiny that Americans will plant a flag on Mars. To wordcels, rushing a mission to Mars would be unthinkably reckless — the technology is not ready, the window of opportunity is too narrow. Yet, in the new age of orality, where rizz and heroism rule, why not risk rocket explosion and death, if it furthers the mission of revitalised American techno-supremacy? Trump has yet to ask any astronauts for their noble sacrifice, but in the immortal words of Horace: “It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country.”
In the 2014 Silicon Valley classic Zero to One, Peter Thiel — the mentor to and former boss of Vice President J.D. Vance — categorises societies based on their visions of the future. He argues societies have definite or indefinite visions of the future and are either optimistic or pessimistic. Before the Space Race ended, America was a land of definite optimists, dreaming of the future. When it did in 1975, America’s vision became less definite but remained optimistic. In recent years, Americans have slid into indefinite pessimism — a dark realm where Thiel claims the West’s nostalgic bureaucracy rots. In this vein, for Trump to Make America Great Again, he must first Make America (Definite) Optimistic Again. Silicon Valley, the world’s future factory, offers a vision to do just that.
Silicon Valley’s historical liberal allegiance previously made it a no-go zone for Trump. However, as Democrats demanded more control of AI, privacy, and speech regulation, MAGA and the tech broligarchs’ causes converged over their shared dislike of the wordcels overly censorious and controlling hand. Despite being the Masters of America’s ultimate logic-and-order based industry, Silicon Valley’s progressives believe that, in Trump, they have a president who will reverse the gradual ceding of AI dominance to China. In June 2024, Ben Horowitz, Andreessen’s legendary VC partner-in-crime and literal friend of Kamala Harris, stunned Silicon Valley with his endorsement of Trump. Horowitz declared, “We truly believe that the future of our business, the future of technology, and the future of America is at stake.” Andreessen, himself a longtime Democrat, also backed Trump in response to the Biden-Harris administration’s onslaught of tech regulation. Andreessen explained that “without the tech component, you can’t sustain the economy or the military”.
Here is the crucible of Yuppiefuturism. By harnessing unrepentant Yuppie rizz and ostentatious aesthetics with Silicon Valley’s buccaneering liberal apostate AI cowboy class, Yuppiefuturism reveals itself as the face of raw American power in 2025. For Trump, it provides a path to forge a vision of MAGA that transcends its obvious tensions. If he conjures the ultimate Mars-shaped spectacle, and accordingly American AI techno-military primacy over China, then Trump will etch his name into history as America’s Yuppie Caesar — and the purest incarnation of the rizz made flesh.
And for the rest of us? While we are only a few weeks into Trump’s presidency, the post-inauguration triumphalism still shows no signs of waning. If things keep on going the same way, then perhaps it’s time to pack your Rolex and Brioni suit and strap yourselves in. We’re off to Mars — there’s a new frontier to gentrify.
Louis Elton is a cultural researcher and strategist based in London. He writes on his Substack, Nation of Artisans.
LouisElton96 
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeErrm, so what happened with all the Theological artistry, Strategy Anthropologising and the Conceptual Consultancy then? Have you had a change of job?
Indeed. I couldn’t get past the first 3 paragraphs of this claptrap. Enough with the labels to describe every last change or innovation. It’s simply called life on earth. I guess there is less and less substantive topics to write about these days.
The Labour proposals for gerrymandering Wales might be interesting.
Also why has nobody yet been charged with stealing from the British Museum?
Finally what is going on with Nicola Sturgeon?
These are versions of the exact questions the author elides, i.e, the failure of the American left to govern, and their undeniable corruption.
A Rolex doesn’t prevent the New Yorker heading downtown from bring thrown upon the subway tracks, nor does a tech bro in the Valley want to play sidewalk hopscotch with refugees, the unhoused, and their bowel movements.
Those are issues because of a failure of governance. Very basic things like crime fighting, firefighting, and potable drinking water (Southern California has always had a dry climate) are things that governments used to do perfectly well, but have been ignored for years, in favor of identity politics and very bad “science .”
Meanwhile, Hunter’s laptop exposed a wildly corrupt family to all the world, and to the posh authoritarianism of modern leftist elites, whose takeover of our institutions is marked by incompetence.
Small wonder so many elites are themselves defecting to the GOP. From COVID to Afghanistan to mostly peaceful but fiery lootings to frightening rallies in support of Hamas, our institutions delegitimized themselves, and left us with nothing but trillions in debt and high inflation.
Quite the Lexicon, Louis but there may be something much more simple at play. As many have pointed out, Trump is a pragmatist and his superpower is making his opponents take the transgressive 20% position on every 80/20 issue.
By doing so he’s added sane Progressives to an otherwise Conservative coalition. He now has a base that wants both innovation and order. Its a really good coalition mix and Democrats know it. I suspect the Party Heads would gladly trade coalitions if they could.
Throughout Party history the Democrats have consistently rebranded themselves into the Fad of the Day. They don’t really stand for anything substantive. They can be normal but as they become over-confident in their righteousness, they shapeshift into a radical protest movement that sees order as an existential threat to their way of life.
As they screech, yell, insult and scold everyone that doesn’t fall in line, Trumpism just grows stronger. They’re in a doom loop of resentment and hostility and most people want no part of that. With these type of cynical, bitter enemies…Trump has a full head of steam.
This is just a superb piece of writing
“If he conjures the ultimate Mars-shaped spectacle, and accordingly American AI techno-military primacy over China, then Trump will etch his name into history as America’s Yuppie Caesar — and the purest incarnation of the rizz made flesh.”
So while he gives away strategic aspects of our past global presence to sustain his peace movement, up to and including the South China Sea, how does that play into this swaggering chutzpah. This is all being played out in the imaginations of billionaires who have very little to loose and a whole bunch to gain in the effort.
Imaginative flight of an essay….if a little overly broad-brush (although a bit of a broad-brusher myself). Wordceldom is not just being supplanted by the Rizz; its ‘Social Justice’ priesthood scribes have also been on a 40 year self destruct. And the Internet Age has also created wordcel problems even for us non-wokeys who try to maintain a sane intellectual balance between curiosity and scepticism.
As I wrote here: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias “Before the age of mass media, most people knew relatively little of the world beyond their direct experience but, what they did know, they knew intimately. Any kind of information (wordcel or rizz) about the big wide world beyond was a scarce resource. The internet has radically altered all this with profound consequences that we as a civilisation have hardly yet begun to come to terms with. Now abundant information is available in seconds. Whatever failings can be levelled at Google (particularly its recent Leftist ideological capture), the invention of the search engine thirty-odd years ago has been an absolute marvel for those able to maintain an intellectual balance between curiosity and scepticism. But it’s also been disastrously disorienting for the credulous and the university sheep-dipped groupthinkers……of whom there are now many millions”
So I enjoyed reading the article but it was hard to find its focus and perhaps that is precisely the problem with the culture it tries to describe. In the end, if we actually want to go to Mars, it takes more than aesthetics, subcultures and PR. It is a serious business.
I agree with Thiel’s and Andreessen’s calls for renewed futuristic optimism. It starts with the dreams. But then we also have to have an honest look at what kind of society was actually driving the extreme leaps forward like the space race. That society was built on the rubble and industrial powerhouses of the war. This golden age of capitalism was precisely not oligarchic. It was an optimistic time that pulled new groups into the middle class, many of whom went on to produce these technological wonders.
The great stagnation actually starts in the 80s with its market fundamentalism and financialization. The time of big inventions comes to an end and instead we start to iterate 20th century technology, often in the digital space instead of the physical world. In many cases pretty interesting stuff but not quite the big breakthroughs of the earlier 20th century. In many ways Silicon Valley is a symbol of the switch that occurred in the 80s
As a Gen X American, I can tell you it’s also the cycle of superficial aesthetics. Just like Reagan arose out of our disgust at 60s hippies and 70s promiscuous degenerates, Trump’s family–shiny, pretty, clean–play well with a Zoomer cohort weaned on divorce ( a fact they can’t change) but tired of and increasingly grossed out by Millenial rainbow “style.”
Extremely weak premise. The necessity and impact of the oral was never displaced by print. Luther, Hamilton, down to Lincoln to twain, etc., ad nauseum, all relied significantly on face to face spoken word.
Think of all the pubs, Coffee and cocoa houses. The eating societies at ivy league colleges.
This piece, indeed, a waste of ink (virtual. )
I think the weakness in the authors argument here is that all these media can be paused and replayed. In a crucial regard this makes them like the written word. The soundness of an argument can be examined at leisure – and rizz or BS doesn’t really stand that test.
Trumps disdain for ——hole countries is well known. Someone should tell him about —-hole planets.
Like Uranus?
Sorry everyone, this was just teed up….
Very good essay. And it goes with the frequent laments, among teachers, that students no longer read. They are capable of reading short, catchy posts, they listen to podcasts (and refer to them and X as news sources), but they are incapable of reading lengthy arguments. This is an issue that goes beyond Trump and his huckster skills (Trump doesn’t read either) but is a world-changing shift in communications. Well done.