Vance, in short, is rediscovering political gravity. And yet he remains the Right’s most viable and promising leader, and will likely retain that status regardless of what happens in November 2026 — or even 2028. Post-Trump, he is the only figure who can hold together a Republican Party that could otherwise easily splinter into four or five mutually suspicious factions. He has maintained bridges to each of these factions, and has learned to address himself acutely to the one anxiety all share, a fear that recently found a name — France.

France functions for America’s various conservative factions as a kind of crystal ball. In the looting, arson, and rioting that tore through major French cities over the past fortnight, America’s conservative groupings see their own future: that is, unless mass migration is halted and, at least to some extent, reversed. In France, they see the tipping point already past. So many culturally incompatible newcomers have piled on, in their telling, that society, properly speaking, is no more. What remains is an agglomeration of strangers, arrayed now in hostility, now in cold peace.

Several years’ worth of public and private conversations with Vance have convinced me that this is his central animating cause, the source of both his fears and his ambitions. The various factions on the Right, he feels, might have their disagreements — among themselves and with the Left — over issues ranging from tech policy to social welfare to war and peace. But all those other discussions must take second place to the complex of issues around immigration, assimilation, demography, and social cohesion.

For Vance, those other disagreements determine the shape of the polity — whereas the migration issue determines whether Americans have a polity at all. As he has repeatedly told me, it’s impossible to build up social solidarity “if society is always in flux”.

Turmoil in France has served as a foil for American statesmen going back to the two nations’ launch as twin revolutionary republics founded on Enlightenment ideals. Among the founding generation, Thomas Jefferson went furthest in championing the French revolutionary cause. As he saw it, the Jacobins had unleashed in the Old World the same spirit that had inspired American colonists: the spirit of a freedom that could no longer accept the yoke of kings and priests.

Yes, Jefferson wrote in a 1793 letter, the French Revolution had had its excesses: most notably, the killing of “guilty persons” without trial (how had they been judged guilty without trial? Jefferson didn’t say). But these excesses were par for the course in a “struggle which was necessary”. So necessary, in fact, that “rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated”, with only “an Adam and Eve left in every country”.

Others of Jefferson’s generation disagreed. Alexander Hamilton, speaking for the conservative Federalists, followed news of the Reign of Terror with great distress. Directly contradicting Jefferson, he argued in 1793 that the difference between the American and French revolutions is “no less great than that between liberty and licentiousness” — between orderly self-government and mob rule.

The French Revolution’s assault on religion didn’t seem to bother Jefferson one bit. But to early American conservatives, it was not only blasphemous, but self-defeating. While far from orthodox in their personal religious belief and practice, the more conservative-leaning Founding Fathers saw virtue as a necessary precondition of self-government, and they held up religion, in turn, as an indispensable support to virtue.

Thus, John Adams observed of revolutionary France: “I know not what to make of a republic of thirty million atheists.” On National Fast Day on 9 May 1798, instituted by President Adams amid deteriorating relations with the French republic, the head of Yale University, Timothy Dwight, took to the pulpit to warn that “to destroy us, our enemies must first destroy our Sabbath” — as they already had in Paris.

As has often been the case since, America’s geopolitical interests dissolved these ideological boundaries. When it became undeniable that the French Revolution had empowered a new emperor with an appetite for world domination, Jefferson shrank from his earlier Francophilia. In 1802, and now President, he described Napoleonic France as “our natural and habitual enemy”. France’s encroachments on New Orleans, and along the Mississippi on what was then the western frontier, should prompt the Americans to “marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation”.

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Through the 19th century, France’s image in America more or less solidified into what it is today: as a place that riots a lot, and whose politics seesaw between the extremes of revolt and reaction. There was an undeniable element of hypocrisy in this reception. Americans had their own volatile divisions, which escalated into civil war in the middle of the century, claiming some 600,000 lives. Class struggle in Gilded Age America and in the early 20th century didn’t look so different from the Paris Commune.

Then again, which quarrelsome couple doesn’t feel better about itself while listening to the family shouting match in the apartment next door? American conservatives have long framed their society’s internal contradictions and domestic rancor as foreign. An entire genre of US conservative thought is devoted to uncovering the European — specifically German and French — roots of progressivism, to the neglect of its origins in Anglo-American liberalism.

Which brings us to today’s French anxieties on the American Right: to US fears of immigrant “no-go zones” and seething multitudes apt to riot when their “paper” country — France — defeats their real homes — Algeria, Morocco — in a football match. Fear of ill-assimilated banlieues encircling major cities like Paris and Marseilles. Fear of Islamo-gauchisme, with the white Leftists mouthing the lofty slogans and the Arab or African toughs doing the nihilistic looting, all while making it clear that their political attachment to France is all but nonexistent.

It’s easy to caricature these fears as overblown, ignorant — or, at any rate, irrelevant. American immigration and assimilation dynamics are different from those in France (and Western Europe more generally). Unlike with the French or the British, Americans haven’t struggled to define a place for the descendants of former colonial subjects — they haven’t had to deal with the transition from empire to nation-state. And it’s a cliché but nevertheless true that US culture is easier to assimilate into precisely because it’s relatively “thin”: the culture of a commercial empire with a voracious appetite for labor and dynamism.

All the same, it’s a mistake to dismiss wholesale the American Right’s current French anxieties. For starters, there is more than a kernel of truth to the American conservative diagnosis. There are sensitive areas in France where the police must tread carefully. There are mosques and imams whose preaching casts into severe doubt the very possibility of expecting political loyalty of certain communities. Take a walk through Parc Georges-Valbon and Saint-Denis into central Paris — I did so at Christmas last year — and you can’t help but feel that the rate of demographic churn is so high that, in certain areas, majority-minority distinctions completely break down, leaving only different minorities mustering different levels of street-level and institutional “strength”. France, such as it is, is something vestigial in these areas, marked only in streets named after long-forgotten saints, kings, novelists.

Riots aside, this generates what I’ve described in these pages as diversity stress: a kind of constant, low-grade anxiety associated with having to negotiate normative and linguistic differences, public-resource competition, and simple unfamiliarity. It challenges people’s expectation of order and familiarity, which is just as much a part of being human as is the taste for novelty.

While the nature and source of the migration differs between Europe and the United States, moreover, the underlying dynamic is the same: the mass movement of people from the Global South to the Global North that began in the postwar decades and was turbo-charged beginning in the mid-2010s (coinciding, for an obvious reason, with the rise of populism on both sides of the Atlantic)

Why so many in the past decade — more than a million to Europe under Angela Merkel’s Wir schaffen das regime, and some eight million in the Biden wave? Partly to shore up aging demographics and the pension systems that depend on fresh labor; partly because migration is another form of wage arbitrage for employers; and partly (above all, perhaps) because migrants can more easily reach the West, thanks to prosperity in the Global South that allows a growing subset of people to cross vast distances relatively cheaply and quickly.

The upshot of all this is that the migration anxieties that twice catapulted Trump to the White House will long outlast his messy reign. A majority of Americans might disapprove of his handling of immigration, recoiling from the performative cruelty of ICE. But those same majorities still tell pollsters that they prefer the same or lower levels of migration as today (when Trump has already sealed the southern border and drastically cut legal migration and naturalization).

The result is that immigration restrictionism will remain the American Right’s top concern for the foreseeable future. It is the one cause upon which an otherwise notoriously fractious movement can converge even after Trump leaves the historical stage. Today, the movement is divided between five main factions. We might call them the Restorationists, the Tech Accelerationists, the Christian Nationalists, the Populists, and the Catholic Solidarists. All demand less migration, albeit for different reasons and in a different tone.

Start with the Restorationists, those who hope to restore the GOP’s old ideological fusion of pro-business libertarianism, foreign-policy hawkism, and moral traditionalism. Historically, this group was the most amenable to mass migration, not least because it’s what the pro-business donor class insisted upon. But things have changed. For one thing, this faction has been chastened by the rise of Trump and Trumpism, and its most classically liberal elements have more or less defected to the Democratic Party (where they will have to contend with an ascendant democratic socialism).

More important, supporters have come to view mass migration as one of the main drivers of anti-Israel sentiment — and they’re not entirely wrong. Politicians with names like Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani are products of post-1965 immigration, when the United States threw open the gates to newcomers from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

The children and grandchildren of those migrants attended US universities where various grievance-studies courses were commonplace, where questioning American exceptionalism was de rigueur, and where campus activism meant backing Students for Justice in Palestine if you, as a member of, say, the Asian and Pacific Islander group, hoped to win support for your own pet causes. This is also why Vance, in a leaked address to the Republican Jewish Coalition, argued that anti-Israel sentiment could be mitigated by cutting migration. He was pushing on an open door: the remnants of the old-school GOP today are far less hospitable to migration than were their predecessors in the Reagan or Bush era.

Which brings us to the Tech Accelerationists — those who believe fervently that America’s salvation lies in staying ahead of China when it comes to artificial intelligence and other frontier technologies. This group, too, could historically be expected to support certain kinds of immigration to fill positions in research, data science, and the like with STEM workers from the developing world who’d work for much less than their American-born peers — and who didn’t dare demand higher wages or organize into unions, since their right to stay was often tied to a single employer.

But this, too, is changing. Like the Restorationists, the Accelerationists have been chastened by the populist tide. Insofar as they wish to remain part of the Right, they have to bargain and compromise with populism, just like every other faction. In December 2024, one of their chief spokesmen, Vivek Ramaswamy — a vocal champion of guest-worker programs — was attacked online after he blamed American cultural mediocrity for tech firms’ reliance on foreign labor (the subtext being that America still needs visa schemes that overwhelmingly benefit Asian, and specifically Indian, tech workers).

Then, too, the rise of AI and automation is rendering many lower-level tech jobs redundant, and an automated economy doesn’t need endless low-wage migrants. Here, too, Vance can bridge the gap between populists and Big Tech: as he told me in a 2024 interview for the New Statesman, immigration restrictionism is the “tech-forward” position, since the easy availability of cheap labor in certain sectors discourages firms from investing in efficiency boosting technologies.

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Of the Populists, not much need be said, since they are the most likely to oppose all immigration, legal and illegal, skilled and unskilled, for reasons that range from economic and cultural to nativism and outright racism. The Christian Nationalists form an adjacent and overlapping faction. They once served as the evangelical backbone of the old GOP but have now gone their own way, having concluded that the bargain with pro-business libertarians and foreign-policy hawks wasn’t worth the candle (the libertarians got their tax cuts, the hawks got their wars, but the Christians who marshaled the votes got… much less).

Largely because Protestantism is Christianity nationalized, this group has never been as comfortable with pro-migration moral universalism as Catholics. In places like Texas, this group’s economic anxieties about migration have blended with cultural concerns over the rapid build-out of mosques and Hindu temples associated with recent migrant flows. When Vance addresses the civilizational discomfiture brought on by mass migration in Europe, he hits this group’s sweet spot.

That leaves the Catholic solidarists (or the Common-Gooders, if you will). This group — in which, cards on the table, I count myself — isn’t exclusively made up of Roman Catholic intellectuals. But they tend to prevail and set the tone. Their objections to mass migration aren’t racial or identitarian — apart from anything else, Catholic doctrine bars that — but practical: mass migration undercuts the wages and bargaining power of American-born workers, squeezes welfare systems, and makes it harder to foster class-based solidarity. Union density in the United States is inversely proportional to migrant flows; for good reason, Whole Foods uses “heat maps” to track the risk of unionization at its stores, with those in diverse, high-migration areas seen as lowest risk, while those in relatively homogenous areas register as high-risk.

Here, again, Vance appears as a bridge figure. His Catholic conversion memoir, Communion, published this year, is in many ways a critique of the old religious Right that preached personal virtue and uplift while neglecting the material and political-economic foundations needed to shape virtuous souls. At one point in the book, he even favorably cites Herbert McCabe, an Irish Dominican friar who sympathetically engaged with Marxism and who once wrote, “The class struggle is not something we are in a position to refrain from. It is just there; we are either on one side or the other.”

Vance’s answer to those who criticize the second Trump administration for neglecting its pro-labor promise is, more or less: stop immigration first. That might be self-serving. But it isn’t illogical, for the same reason that most of the Right’s Solidarists emphasize restrictionism. At any rate, it’s what Vance believes the half of the country that elected him wants.

The danger in this tying of everything to immigration should be obvious. It can look like — and, perhaps for some, it is — an attempt to evade the domestic, homegrown sources of American malaise. But after decades in which discontent with high migration flows was pooh-poohed or written off as bigoted, there remains a lot of political space for addressing what nearly all of the Right’s factions view as a generational crisis. The negative example thrown up by France this month has been too urgent and searing to ignore.

But Nixon was no victim. While other presidents have engaged in dirty tricks against their opponents, Nixon is the only one to have had his own private criminal gang engaged in burglaries like the break-in of Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. On a tape recording from a June 17, 1971, meeting with his aides Henry Kissinger and Bob Haldeman, Nixon can be heard talking about having the Brookings Institution broken into by his goons, to retrieve files that he hoped to use to his advantage. Nixon: “I mean, I want it implemented on a thievery basis. Goddamn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.”

But Nixon’s prison-worthy crimes and his personal flaws don’t discredit “Nixonism” — defined as a governing philosophy, relevant in our day as in his, with three main features:  national-interest realism in foreign policy; economic nationalism in trade and immigration policy; and at least an effort on the part of government to be even-handed between capital and labor.  

From a Nixonian perspective, peace can only be achieved by a favorable balance of power — not by the United Nations or other international institutions, and not by a utopian “global democratic revolution” that replaces all authoritarian regimes. Free trade and protectionism are equally valid national strategies, to be adopted or rejected in the service of strategic industrial sectors and a high-wage workforce. And rather than side with employers against workers, government should act as an honest broker between business and organized labor, in the interest of labor peace and a national home market enlarged by high take-home pay, rather than by high levels of government redistribution. 

Tragically, the rival public philosophy of Reaganism — combining a crusading Wilsonian foreign policy, dogmatic support for economic globalization and mass immigration, and unremitting hostility to labor unions — dominated the Republican Party between the Reagan years and the election of Trump in 2016, to the detriment of both the party and the nation.

Start with Nixon’s realism abroad. In foreign policy, the differences between Nixonism and Reaganism are unbridgeable. Although Nixon worked from the desk of Woodrow Wilson and hung Wilson’s portrait in the Cabinet room next to Lincoln and Eisenhower, Nixon’s view of foreign policy as an arena of great-power struggles and compromises had more in common with that of American realists like Alexander Hamilton, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Cabot Lodge and European statesmen like Bismarck, Disraeli, and De Gaulle.

In a 1972 radio address, Nixon told the American people that US foreign policy must promote a “structure of peace” among great powers that rests “on the hard concrete of common interests and mutual agreements, and not on the shifting sands of naive sentimentality.”

Nixon’s predecessors had overcommitted Washington in Vietnam and elsewhere. One response was the policy of “Vietnamization,” generalized as “the Nixon Doctrine” of 1969, which declared that the United States would no longer assume full responsibility for the defense of allies through ground troops. 

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Another Nixonian response to American overextension was his outreach to China as part of a strategy of dividing Moscow from Beijing and thus splitting the communist sphere. The tactic failed to end the war in Indochina while saving South Vietnam, but Sino-American diplomacy paid off in the “second Cold War” of the 1980s, when Beijing was a de facto ally of Uncle Sam against Moscow. Nixon can’t be blamed for the deindustrialization of the United States by China’s aggressive mercantilism, which was supported by unpatriotic American corporations that presidents from Clinton to Obama tolerated after Nixon’s death in 1994.

While Reagan’s defense build-up and proxy wars with Moscow in Afghanistan and Central America contributed to the pressure on the Soviet Union, the implosion of the USSR had other causes: long-term economic decay, rising nationalism among the bloc’s constituent peoples, and Gorbachev’s refusal to crack down against dissent. Reagan’s true foreign-policy legacy wasn’t winning the Cold War; it was grafting the utopian fervor of Woodrow Wilson and other 20th-century Democratic progressives and liberal internationalists onto the formerly realist GOP.

Wilson was literally Ronald Reagan’s middle name, thanks to his father, an ardent New Deal Democrat. And Reagan, a Democrat until 1962, remained all of his life an ardent Wilsonian idealist in his approach to foreign policy. Wilson, in a speech to Congress in January 1917, before the US entry into World War I, identified the goals of American foreign policy as national self-determination, global economic liberalization, and an end to the balance of power: “These are American principles, American policies. We could stand for no others…. They are the principles of mankind and must prevail.”

True to Wilsonian ideology, in his autobiography, An American Life, Reagan asserted: “It was our policy that this great democracy of ours had a special obligation to bring freedom to other peoples.” Jeane Kirkpatrick, who served Reagan as ambassador to the United Nations, observed: “The president and many of his principal advisers see themselves as purveyors and defenders of the classical liberal tradition in politics, economics, and society.”

Rejecting the reality of conflicts of interest among states of all kinds, Reagan declared: “People do not make wars; governments do. A people free to choose will always choose peace.” Likewise, Reagan said in his 1986 State of the Union address: “We know that peace follows in freedom’s path, and conflicts erupt when the will of the people is denied.” If this “democratic peace theory” is true, then the only way to achieve a peaceful world is to promote the replacement of every authoritarian regime on earth with a liberal multiparty democracy — by example if possible, by subversion, invasion, and occupation if necessary. Wars of regime change by democratic countries are “liberation,” but not “aggression” (it helps if the would-be “liberated” country, like Iraq, Venezuela, and Iran, has major deposits of oil and gas).

Reagan’s neoconservative allies successfully lobbied for the creation in 1983 of the National Endowment for Democracy, a government-funded organization that has engaged in both overt and covert operations to destabilize or overthrow governments that Washington opposes.  Contrast this with Nixon’s statement: “We would not welcome the intervention of other countries in our domestic affairs, and we cannot expect them to be cooperative when we seek to intervene directly in theirs.”

George W. Bush was as reckless in launching the Iraq War as Reagan was cautious in limiting his administration to small-scale interventions in Lebanon and Grenada. But a prudent Wilsonian ideologue is still a Wilsonian ideologue. There is a direct line from Reagan’s messianic rhetoric to the proclamation of George W. Bush in his Second Inaugural Address: “So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” Bush’s speech merely restated Reagan’s utopian conception of US foreign policy, evident in the Gipper’s 1985 pronunciamento: “We declared the principal objective of American foreign policy to be not just the prevention of war, but the extension of freedom. And we stressed our commitment to the growth of democratic government and democratic institutions around the world.”

Trade is another source of contention between the rival governing philosophies of Nixonism and Reaganism. Nixon was a bold and unapologetic American economic nationalist. In one of several “Nixon shocks,” Nixon in 1971 dealt with a balance-of-payments problem by suspending the convertibility of the dollar to gold, blowing up the Bretton Woods system that had structured world trade and finance since the late 1940s. 

The other Nixon shocks of 1971 included combating inflation with temporary wage and price controls and imposing temporary surcharges on imports to redress the trade deficit. While these were ineffective, market fundamentalists have been wrong to blame them for the high inflation of the later 1970s, which resulted from the increase in oil prices associated with the Yom Kippur War and the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Just as he found a like-minded geopolitical realist in Henry Kissinger, Nixon found an economic nationalist ally in his Treasury secretary, John Connally, who told a group of economists: “The foreigners are out to screw us. It is our job to screw them first. Thank you for your help.”    

Fervent support for free trade was another traditionally Democratic value that Reagan helped to graft onto the historically protectionist, pro-manufacturing Republican Party. While Nixon the realist was willing to sacrifice the world economy to US national economic interests, for Reagan, as for other Wilsonians, the promotion of global free trade was inseparable from the promotion of world peace. In 1988, Reagan said: “I recognize … the inescapable conclusion that all of history has taught: the freer the flow of world trade, the stronger the tides of human progress and peace among nations.”

The few cases in which Reagan as president reluctantly and temporarily used tariffs and quotas to protect industries like cars, steel, and motorcycles were deviations from his free-market dogmatism. Again and again, Reagan unpatriotically smeared the American victims of foreign unfair trade practices by mercantilist regimes like Japan and South Korea. In a 1987 radio talk, Reagan blamed American trade deficits on the alleged inferiority of American products: “The way up and out of the trade deficit is not protectionism, not bringing down the competition, but instead the answer lies in improving our products and increasing our exports.”

In a 1987 speech in Cleveland, Reagan asserted that America’s trade deficit was a sign of strength. In 1985, Reagan asserted that the financialization of the US economy was an adequate substitute for the loss of manufacturing when he complained that trade deficit statistics did not count the “billions of dollars of foreign capital” that had been “invested in our government bonds … because we are the best and safest investment in the world today.”

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The harm done by Reagan and Reaganism to American manufacturing was not limited to rhetoric. In 1971, the Nixon administration protected the American textile industry by imposing quotas under the Trading with the Enemy Act. In contrast, Reagan vetoed the Textile Apparel and Footwear Trade Act of 1988, claiming, “This bill represents protectionism at its worst. The supposed benefits of the bill would be temporary at best. Protectionism does not save jobs. Only improved competitiveness can truly protect jobs, yet there is nothing in this bill that would encourage domestic industries to become more competitive.”  

As he had so often done before, Reagan blamed Americans instead of foreign mercantilists for the struggles of American industry in global markets, ignoring the fact that American manufacturers couldn’t compete with foreign cheap labor or foreign government subsidies.  Today, the United States has one of the world’s largest markets for textiles, but 98% of textiles sold in the country are manufactured abroad. 

Americans were shocked to learn during the pandemic that the United States is dependent upon foreign countries, including Communist China, for protective textiles and apparel. Thanks, Mr. Reagan!

In 1970, Nixon sought to defend American shipbuilding from foreign rivalry with the Merchant Marine Act of 1970, which provided a variety of subsidies for the American construction of ships engaged in foreign trade. A little more than a decade later, Reagan eliminated these subsidies for the strategic civilian shipbuilding industry on the advice of his aide Martin Anderson, a free-market extremist who, along with his wife, had been a personal disciple of Ayn Rand — the radical-libertarian guru. In 1977, before Reagan, America had 77 sea-going commercial ships on order. In 2023, thanks to Reagan and his successors who shared his indifference to the survival of America’s merchant marine, the United States had only 5, compared to China’s 1,749.

Finally, Nixonism and Reaganism differ on the subject of the government’s relationship with labor. Because the majority of the people in a modern nation are wage earners, not capitalists or managers, no nationalist politics can be authentic unless it defends the interests of the national working class. And the lack of bargaining power of ordinary workers with most employers requires that employer-labor-market power must be countervailed, either through collective bargaining or direct government regulation.

With most other Republicans, the young Nixon in 1947 voted for the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act that allowed state “right-to-work” laws. But as a presidential candidate in 1960, he declared: “As far as the right-to-work law, itself, is concerned, I oppose any such law nationally.” 

As president, Nixon opposed labor leaders aligned with the Democrats, including Leonard Woodcock of the United Auto Workers, who made it onto Nixon’s secret “enemies list.” But he courted George Meany, the head of the AFL-CIO, and he sought the support of the Teamsters Union, declaring in 1971: “It is all too often taken for granted that the daily efforts of Teamster union members are a cornerstone of the American economic structure.” In his second term, as part of his outreach to unionized workers, Nixon appointed Peter J. Brennan, of the Building and Construction Trades Council of New York, as secretary of labor. 

In contrast, of Reagan’s three secretaries of labor, two — Raymond J. Donovan and Ann McLaughlin — were former corporate executives and the third, William E. Brock, was a career politician from Tennessee. Although he had been head of an AFL-CIO-affiliated union, the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan as president broke with the tradition of earlier Republican leaders like Nixon and Eisenhower and Coolidge who attempted to at least appear even-handed toward management and labor. 

In addition to breaking a strike in 1981 by firing 11,000 federal air-traffic controllers, Reagan stacked the National Labor Relations Board with anti-union, management-aligned appointees whose decisions restricted worker rights and expanded employer power.

To lead the NLRB, Reagan appointed Donald Dotson, who claimed that unions were responsible for “destruction of individual freedom.”

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Reagan, the former “traveling ambassador” of General Electric in the 1950s, did the bidding of his corporate and capitalist backers in promoting right-to-work laws, hampering federal enforcement of worker rights, and seeking to weaken child-labor laws. Reagan also sought to supply American businesses with wage-suppressing mass immigration. In 1984, Reagan declared: “I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though, sometime back, they may have entered illegally.” 

Reagan repeated the employer-lobby propaganda line that illegal immigrants do jobs that Americans refuse to do at any wage. In a radio address in 1977, Reagan mocked “the illegal alien fuss”: “Are great numbers of our unemployed really victims of the illegal alien invasion, or are those illegal tourists actually doing work our own people won’t do?”

The major immigration law that Reagan signed, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, was a gift to cheap-labor employers at the cost of American workers. The law provided an amnesty for nearly 3 million illegal immigrants. To deter future illegal immigration, the law created penalties for employers who hire illegal immigrant workers — but thanks to business lobbying, under Reagan and his successors of both parties in the White House, including Trump, employer penalties have almost never been imposed. 

Meanwhile, to ensure that employers deprived of illegal immigrant labor did not necessarily need to hire American citizens and legal immigrants at higher wages, IRCA also increased the number of “guest workers” — a euphemism for foreign serfs with fewer rights than American workers who are indentured to their employers or labor contractors.

Not content with forcing US workers to compete with greater numbers of unfree, poorly paid “guest workers” on American soil, Reagan sought to merge America’s labor market with those of low-wage nations. During his 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan proposed a free-trade agreement between the United States and Mexico that influenced the later North American Free Trade Agreement, under which entire US industries were gutted as employers sought cheaper labor south of the border.  

In his 1988 State of the Union address, Reagan told Congress: “Our goal must be a day when the free flow of trade, from the tip of Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic Circle, unites the people of the Western Hemisphere in a bond of mutually beneficial exchange.”

Reagan’s wish was indistinguishable from that of Hillary Clinton, who in 2016 told Latin-American bankers that her “dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.…”

The Reaganite synthesis of market fundamentalism, mass immigration, crusading democratic globalism, and anti-worker labor policy weakened the United States and contributed to the backlash that brought Trump to power twice. In fairness, the dwindling and aging number of Reagan’s Old Right defenders are correct about one thing: he was “inspirational” and “sunny” and “optimistic.”

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Donald Trump borrowed his slogan “Make America Great Again” from Reagan. But in many ways, he belongs in the Nixonian tradition.

Trump’s aggressive promotion of what he considers the national interest, at the expense of allies and without moralistic rhetoric, is distinctly Nixonian. The first Trump administration’s National Security strategy in 2017 contained the line: “An America First National Security Strategy … is a strategy of principled realism that is guided by outcomes, not ideology.” 

“Out with utopian idealism, in with hard-nosed realism,” declared Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in December 2025, in a speech at the Reagan Library (the Nixon Library might have been a more appropriate venue).

The exception to Trump’s realism is the disastrous Israeli-American war against Iran, which Trump might have avoided had he followed a precept of Kissinger in the Nixon years: “Our interests shall shape our commitments, rather than the other way around.”

In trade, too, Trump is a Nixonian nationalist, replicating the Nixon Shocks of the 1970s with frequent use of tariffs and other shocking departures of his own from the former free-trade globalist consensus.

Long before Trump in 2016 declared that “I love the poorly educated,” Nixon told some of his advisers in 1971 that “when we need support on tough problems, the uneducated are the ones that are with us.” In contrast: “When you have to call on the nation to be strong — on such things as drugs, crime, defense, our basic national position — the educated people and the leader class no longer have any character, and you can’t count on them.” For this reason, Nixon rejected anti-union conservatism and told his staff that it was “vital that we continue to recognize and work with [workers] and that we not attack unions which represent the organized structure of the working man.”

But Nixon’s outreach to organized labor was sincere and consistent, unlike Trump’s, which combines symbolism — like having Teamsters President Sean O’Brien address the 2024 Republican National Convention — with standard Right-wing anti-union policies. And instead of making the case that immigration restriction, by creating tight labor markets, can force employers to raise wages, Trump has appealed to nativist racism, describing most Mexican immigrants as criminals, and accusing Haitians of eating pets, while favoring white South Africans in refugee policy. Instead of insisting on a universal E-Verify mandate on employers, Trump has ordered ICE to forgo raids on farms dependent on cheap labor and expanded programs for unfree foreign guest workers.

Trumpism, then, is an incoherent mixture of Nixonism in defense and trade policy and anti-worker and anti-safety-net policies in the Reagan-Bush tradition. Even worse, Trump in his two terms as president has emulated some of the worst aspects of Richard Nixon, from claiming effectively unlimited powers for the executive branch to weaponizing the Department of Justice and other agencies against personal and partisan enemies.

Overall, Trump has accelerated the rejection by Republicans of the transplanted Democratic globalism of Reagan and the neocons and the party’s return to its historic nationalist tradition.  Just as Nixonism is more defensible than Nixon, a thoughtful version of Trumpism without Trump after 2028 would be better than a disastrous revival of Reaganism.

Yes, that would be the same Republican Party founded by Abraham Lincoln on the slogan of “Free Labor.”

The problem the bill addresses is real. Team Trump’s crackdown against illegal immigration has deprived farmers and ranchers of the low-wage foreign workforce upon which they once relied, in defiance of US employment and immigration laws. To address the genuine short-term labor shortages, the bill proposes to raise wages in American agriculture to lure US citizens, while providing federal subsidies to farms in labor-intensive sectors to allow them to purchase labor-saving agricultural technology.

Just kidding! Thompson’s bipartisan bill neither raises wages nor subsidizes labor-saving tech. Instead, it makes raising wages and investing in tech less necessary, by increasing the number of foreign indentured servants bound for fixed terms to American agribusiness and by granting amnesty to many illegal migrants already laboring in agriculture. According to the news release announcing it, Thompson’s bill widens the availability of temporary foreign labor “for year-round operations, controls costs to restore certainty to balance sheets, and streamlines the interactions of the government agencies administering the program.”

The proposed legislation has outraged some Right-wing populists. But unsurprisingly, it is “supported by the American Farm Bureau Federation, the Western Growers Association, the National Milk Producers Federation, and more than 400 other agricultural groups across the entire industry,” according to the Thompson news release.

Today, nearly 1 in 5 workers in the United States is a foreign national. These foreign workers fall into two categories: permanent immigrant workers (aka “green-card holders”) and temporary non-immigrant workers. Green-card holders are considered permanent immigrants because it is expected that in time they will apply for naturalization as US citizens, although not all of them do. Apart from the right to vote, green-card holders have most of the rights of US citizen-workers, including the right to quit their jobs without their boss’s permission.

So-called non-immigrant workers, in contrast, form an underclass of workers on US soil with fewer rights than either US citizen-workers or green-card holders. Technically, they are “temporary,” although their fixed terms of work in the United States can be extended indefinitely. They aren’t considered immigrants, because if their fixed terms of work aren’t renewed, they are expected to return to their home countries. 

Another word for “non-immigrant worker” is indentured servant. An indentured servant is a worker who isn’t allowed by legally enforceable contract to quit his job without his employer’s permission, for a fixed period. Indentured servitude, however well paid, is temporary slavery.  

The H-2A visa in agriculture that Rep. Thompson and the agribusiness lobby are trying to expand is only one of many non-immigrant visas for foreign indentured servants laboring in the United States. Other indentured-servant visas include the H-1B visa, used by firms in Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and even universities and government agencies to replace American workers and green-card holders with unfree foreign professional workers; the H-2B, supplying the construction, landscaping, meatpacking, and other non-farm industries with unfree foreign labor; H-3 visas for employers to bring in labor in the guise of trainees; and an alphabet soup of other contract-labor visas. What they all share in common is the denial of the most fundamental rights of a free worker: the right to quit your job without your employer’s permission and without having to leave the country immediately.

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Supporters of these varieties of indentured servitude tend to be found among business-class conservatives and libertarians who like to quote Adam Smith. But the 18th-century Scottish political economist would have recognized today’s American indentured-servant programs for what they are: versions of unfree labor, albeit versions less harsh than chattel slavery.

Speaking of 18th-century Scottish coal workers and mine workers who were bound to their employers, Smith wrote: “They can be sold, it is true, but then it is only in a certain manner. When the work is sold all the colliers or salters which belong to it are sold allong with it…” He contrasted this kind of indentured servitude, along with highly restrictive apprenticeship programs in guilds, with “perfect liberty,” defined as “the right of a worker to change his trade as often as he pleases.”

Convinced that unfree labor of all kinds is less efficient than the labor of free workers paid adequate wages, Smith argued that the reason for the near-universality of unfree labor in various forms was the psychology of slaveowners and business owners, who were willing to sacrifice efficiency and economic growth to the pleasure of lording it over their underlings. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote: “The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen.”

Indeed, all of the arguments made by the indentured-servant lobby for more foreign contract labor could also be made to justify legalizing slavery again in America. Take consumer prices. In the US workforce as a whole, illegal immigrants make up around 5%, with the number rising to as much as a fifth in construction, crop production, and food processing.

According to Goldman Sachs, in a tight labor market with lower immigration, consumer prices for some goods might go up. Why? Because employers would have to pay higher wages and pass along the costs of decent wages to consumers. Oh, the horror! But this argument applies to slavery as well. If only employers were allowed to use slave labor in the fields once again, then consumer prices might go down.

The Republican Party was founded in the 1850s to oppose the expansion of slavery. During the Civil War in 1862, the GOP-dominated Congress enacted and President Lincoln signed into law a bill that sought to prevent Southern slaveowners from importing “coolies” or indentured servants from China and India. Today, however, reflecting the capture of the party of Lincoln by former reactionary Southern and Western Democrats, many Republican members of Congress and every Republican president in the past generation, including Donald Trump, have consistently favored expanding access to unfree foreign serfs by individual American corporations.

In explaining why ICE should not raid farms, for example, Trump has used a weird neo-Confederate argument. According to Trump, speaking in the summer of 2025, “we have a lot of cases where ICE would go into a farm and these are guys that have been there 10 or 15 years, and the farmers know them — it’s called farmer responsibility. Or owner responsibility. But they’re going to be largely responsible for these people. And they know these people. They’ve worked at the farms for 15 years.”

Of course “these people” have sometimes worked for the same farmers “for 15 years.” Many of “these people” are rented to a single farm owner or corporation for repeated, fixed terms by a single labor contractor acting as a labor broker. If the stability of the workforce is a goal, then old-fashioned lifelong chattel slavery is even better than fixed-term indentured servitude. In the Old South, slaveowners often referred to their enslaved workers as “family” and boasted that they were more responsible for their welfare than cruel Northern capitalists who had to lure free labor by paying wages.

Which brings us to Irony No. 2. The dominant economic philosophy of the GOP until recently has been libertarianism. Libertarians claim to favor radical individual freedom — except for the freedom of certain categories of legal foreign workers on US soil to quit their jobs and seek others without the permission of their employers. 

The libertarian philosopher Murray Rothbard, one of the founders of the Cato Institute, argued that “voluntary” slave contracts should be legal. The celebrated libertarian theorist Robert Nozick, in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, published in 1974, agreed with Rothbard that individuals should have the right to sell themselves into slavery, answering, “I believe that it would” to the question of whether “a free system will allow [an individual] to sell himself into slavery.”

So maybe the libertarian supporters of unfree indentured servitude on American soil are consistent after all. Unlike Rothbard, Nozick did not argue that the law should allow parents to sell their unwanted children or allow them to starve to death. Rothbard: “The law, therefore, may not properly compel the parent to feed a child or to keep it alive…”

These two groups — pro-servitude Republicans and libertarian ideologues — are joined by conservatives who are confused about economics in a technological society, treating America as if it were a plantation economy like that of the Old South or the slave societies of Cuba and Brazil. Today’s Republican conservatives claim to favor economic growth, industrial development, and technological progress. But importing foreign serfs retards all three. While unfree labor in various forms may increase overall output in tobacco, cotton, or avocados, large numbers of low-wage workers undermine the formation of a national home market of prosperous worker-consumers to support advanced manufacturing industries. And cheap labor undermines technological progress, because it reduces the incentive of employers to limit labor costs by either replacing workers with machines or by investing in machines to make individual workers more productive.

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Then there is the pseudo-nationalist argument for importing unfree foreign serfs to labor on American farms. If American farmers can’t import unfree, low-wage workers from Mexico to pick avocados, then the American avocado industry might lose market share in the United States to Mexican imports. Beware the avocado gap!

This argument persuades neither libertarians nor America First populists. Libertarians have no objection to cheap imports from foreign countries, including imports that are cheap because foreign wages are lower. And protectionists would answer that if there is a vital national interest in protecting the American avocado industry, then let it be protected by tariffs. The Trump administration sided with the libertarians in this case, by exempting Mexican avocados from tariffs.

When all other arguments are exhausted, one plaintive cry is heard: Will nobody think of the small farmers? Indeed, what about small farmers and other small employers addicted to imported, unfree labor? Won’t they suffer, if they have to pay free workers higher wages and can’t afford to invest in labor-saving technology in compensation? 

They may well suffer — the way that Southern planters suffered when they were forced to pay their workers instead of owning them, and the way that other employers suffered later when child labor was outlawed. Good riddance to small capitalists who are so incompetent at business that they can’t make enough profits to pay their workers a living wage, after paying their other expenses, and demand that the government supply them with a never-ending stream of foreign serfs.

Here is a very simple test that can distinguish genuine pro-worker Republicans and Democrats from pseudo-populist mouthpieces of employer interests: support the abolition of all non-immigrant worker visas. There should be only two categories of workers employed in the United States: citizen-workers and legal permanent resident green-card holders with the right to apply for citizenship. All workers on American soil, whether citizens or green-card holders eligible for citizenship, would have the right to quit their jobs at will and seek other jobs in the United States.

In the 2020s and ’30s, we must adopt a gender-neutral version of the slogan of the antislavery Free Soil Party of the 1840s and ’50s: “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men.” 

In the mid-2010s, Greer was a rising star within mainstream conservative journalism. In 2018, it was revealed that he had written for Richard Spencer’s white-nationalist website Radix a few years earlier, where he made arguments about topics such as the “Jewish role” in promoting multiculturalism. He had already left The Daily Caller for several months before his dox. But henceforth, he would be in essence canceled from movement conservatism.

As Greer points out in Whitepill, his career would have easily survived the revelations about his past today. The things he was saying in 2014 on white-nationalist websites are often scarcely distinguishable from the talking points of major Right-wing influencers and GOP elected officials today. “We know our country’s better than yours,” Megyn Kelly told Haitian immigrants recently, adding: “We don’t want you.… Go back to fucking Haiti.” Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee refers to Zohran Mamdani as “little Muhammad” and demands that New York’s mayor be stripped of his citizenship and deported. Rep. Brandon Gill, meanwhile, has complained about Indians working at 7-11 stores — this, despite his wife being of Indian heritage. 

Greer’s new book is a victory lap celebrating what has been accomplished. The title is a reference to taking the white pill, which in online circles refers to being happy about a given state of affairs, in contrast to the black pill, which signifies the loss of hope — both being a spinoff of the red and blue pills made famous by The Matrix. The lesson of his book is that white nationalists have won. But it leaves the thoughtful reader wondering what the point of this race-based politics is supposed to be.

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Full disclosure here: I have known Greer since his alt-Right days. I wrote for some of the same websites, though my politics have obviously gone in a different direction. I now reject white identitarianism of all kinds. My doxxing came in summer 2023. For this reason, I briefly appear as a character in Whitepill, with Greer using me as one example to demonstrate that by the time my former views were unearthed, people could survive revelations that they once expressed racist and other reactionary views. 

Whitepill is essentially a history of the American Right from the Obama era to the present, with a particular focus on race and identity issues, such as DEI, affirmative action, and, above all, immigration. There is not a lot here that is going to surprise anyone who has followed the news over the last decade: from the rise and fall of the Tea Party to the killing of Trayvon Martin; and from the Henry Louis Gates controversy and the resulting beer summit to then-candidate Donald Trump’s comments on immigrants in his 2015 launch speech and the summer of George Floyd. 

The bulk of the book might be a valuable read for young people not old enough to remember the Obama era, or those who only recently started following politics. But for those of us who have kept up with current events over the last 10-plus years, particularly developments on the American Right, there is limited value in most chapters. 

The point of the book is to demonstrate just how much has changed on the Right. The most interesting parts are the author relaying his first-hand account of the transformation. In 2015, Greer was one of the first people at The Daily Caller to support Trump. It marked him as an outcast, and colleagues thought that it was a joke; he built a “wall” of books around his desk in order to show his support for Trump and his signature border proposal. 

Greer’s takeaway from this is that the mainstream movement’s stalwarts in those days were “lame.” He was, and remains, outraged that conservative activists and journalists were uninterested in race and immigration issues, instead stressing deregulation and free markets. Greer’s alt-Right circle, in contrast, featured “a heroin addict with sociopathic tendencies, an unstable taxi driver who couldn’t control his racial outbursts, and one likely federal agent who tried to recruit us into a militia.” For those who weren’t there, it is useful to stress just how marginalized white identitarian attitudes and adjacent opinions were across the political spectrum in the pre-Trump era.

Now, Greer asserts, most prominent figures in conservatism share at least some of these views. This might be an overstatement. Much of the Christian Right remains theologically immune to the racist appeal, and likewise, there are many who haven’t adopted based signaling and racial slurs in the populist bargain.  Nevertheless, as Trump’s hard-line immigration positions and the quotes above from the likes of Kelly and Ogles demonstrate, the author is correct about the general direction of travel.

He celebrates Tucker Carlson for bringing identity issues to the forefront of American conservatism, and the transformation of the late Charlie Kirk, spending five pages documenting his move toward immigration restrictionism and a pinched account of national identity. He correctly points out that Republican voters are motivated primarily by identity-related concerns, rather than economics, which is what created an opening for Trump and more intellectually minded nativists to take over the party. He’s backed up here by a large amount of political science data, which I’ve written about before.

That doesn’t mean that Greer is completely satisfied with the direction of modern conservatism. He thinks it’s too conspiratorial, for one thing. Indeed, it was Greer who coined the term “Insane Clown Party” to highlight Republicans’ growing fascination with topics like UFOs and Satanic pedophile rings. He also has little patience for religious debates on the Right, perhaps limiting his intellectual horizon, since American Christianity has at various points — and sometimes simultaneously — challenged and upheld white supremacy. 

The bigger question is: what exactly is all this for? This is the question that Whitepill never answers, and Greer’s other work likewise avoids. This book is meant to convince those who, like the author, reduce identity and belonging to race and then prioritize racial identity concerns over all else. For Greer, other issues (such as economics or foreign policy) are of secondary importance at best. They matter only insofar as they might promote immigration restrictionism and defeat multiculturalism. Greer doesn’t like conspiracies or abstract intellectualizing as part of a political movement mainly because they make it more difficult to achieve his larger goals. 

What Greer never does is explain what exactly he believes and why. His project is an insular one, proceeding from the unstated assumption that the reader will agree with him on the importance of winning on the issues white identitarians care about; all that’s left are discussions of tactics and strategy. For example, when Greer addresses abortion, it’s from the perspective that those focused on the issue are causing dissension within the Republican coalition. He calls on pro-lifers to be grateful for what Trump has done, and calls on the Right to tune them out as political liabilities. But what if you actually believe that abortion is murder? He makes no attempt at explaining how abortion issues should fit into the white-nationalist project, except from the perspective of its political impact.

To be sure, he’s honest enough to sometimes acknowledge that his own preferred policies are unpopular, as he does on mass deportation. But in that case, he explicitly says that Trump should do it anyway (which is what pro-lifers want on abortion, too). There’s something unprincipled about this approach to political analysis, though one can easily discern the underlying logic. Greer wants to submit to public opinion — that is, until the need comes to get tough on immigration. Because on that issue the Republicans need to forge ahead and do what’s best for the country.

In order to piece together why Greer believes that identity issues need to be paramount, one has to gather stray comments. He tells us that H-1B visas threaten to harm American workers, and that mass immigration has made cities like Minneapolis “hotbeds of Third-World corruption and politics dominated by ethnic spoils.” But he doesn’t elaborate on these points. One might ask for some data on the H-1B issue, or whether Somalis in Minneapolis, an extremely small portion of new arrivals to the country, are representative of immigrants as a general matter. Mainstream MAGA pretends that immigration leads to much higher levels of crime, but Greer seems aware that this is not true in the aggregate. By not taking up such false narratives, he is left with few tools to make the positive case for his hardline positions. 

It is important to note that Greer rejects the label of white nationalist. To him, though, this rejection simply implies that he accepts the American system and doesn’t aspire to form an ethnostate. However, this is precisely what I would call a worldview that prioritizes maintaining white demographic dominance and cultural primacy. Why else consider every single form of immigration a threat, and why else should anti-white racism, especially after the vibe shift, remain such a high priority? Greer doesn’t explain, but it all makes sense in the context of a racialist worldview.

To Greer, the victory chronicled in Whitepill means that today we can just call this conservatism. It follows that white identitarianism has so successfully swept the Right that Greer doesn’t even feel the need to make the first-order case for his beliefs.   

But that leaves him vulnerable to all sorts of counterarguments (which, again, he doesn’t even bother acknowledging). Even as white identitarianism has ascended, one justification after another for limiting immigration has fallen by the wayside. It was once said new arrivals would boost crime. But crime has consistently fallen — despite some localized disorder and anecdotes that the Trump 2024 campaign pointed to as representative of the effects of immigration (they weren’t, statistically speaking).

Then there is the argument about migrants pushing the electorate to the Left. In her 2015 book ¡Adios, America!: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third-World Hellhole, Ann Coulter argued that nonwhites can be expected to vote Democratic indefinitely into the future; hence, conservatives had to close the border if they hoped to win on any other issue. In 2024, however, naturalized immigrants may well have voted majority-Republican. Now, conservatives are reduced to complaining about competition for tech jobs, despite tech workers not making up any significant part of their coalition, and the American tech industry being such an overwhelming success that it is powering the rest of the economy and putting us at the forefront of the most important industry in the world.

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Some of the MAGA faithful may not see such points clearly, but Greer does. Still, he refuses to intellectually tackle them. Instead, the emotional response to immigration comes first, and justifications are simply put forward on an ad hoc basis. As the intellectual case for restrictionism gets weaker, conservative attachment to nativism only becomes more firmly entrenched. 

The main premise of Whitepill is undeniably true. On the whole, Republicans have moved toward white identitarianism. This being America, even many of our white identitarians are diverse, with names like Nick Fuentes. But there is practically no reflection here on why that is something to celebrate. The worldview presented lacks any larger conception of the good, or a belief in a politics that places an emphasis on virtue. 

To take one example, while Greer laments immigration as a threat to American culture, he is indifferent to the fact that it was his political hero, Trump, who attempted an insurrection. Greer plays down the events of Jan. 6 and ignores the larger context of what we know about Trump trying to overturn the results of the presidential election he lost. What matters is Trump, and the larger Republican Party, as vessels for demographic politics. Even when Greer admirably breaks with his own tribe, as in the case of his denunciation of conspiracy theories, it is a matter of political pragmatism in the service of his larger goals, rather than due to a commitment that honesty and truth are valuable for their own sake.  

Greer has some virtues that are rare among his political tribe. He doesn’t, for example, drink the entire glass of MAGA Kool-Aid. He doesn’t believe that Haitians eat dogs and cats. Nor does he conveniently adopt socialist economic views to oppose immigration. Nonetheless, he is an avatar of a strand of conservatism that centers white identitarianism — without being able or willing to articulate why. 

As a pragmatist, Greer understands that identity politics for white people has worked, and can continue to be a powerful force into the future. But the sad intellectual and ethical state of his type of Right wing politics, and the hollow nature of his attempts to defend what it has become, show why even smarter versions of white identitarianism are degrading and ultimately morally poisonous.

Yet responsible progressives and populists seeking a more restrained foreign policy would do well to study the sources of his success: how he was able to advance his expansive foreign-policy vision through the great vicissitudes of the past three decades, even as his own party’s base turned against foreign interventionism. A more restrained foreign policy won’t succeed unless the restrainers master Graham’s arts.

Graham — a son of the working class, who raised his teenaged sister after their parents died young — had an overabundance of what the ancient Greeks called phronesis: the practical wisdom essential to effective political activity. Politics is an art of prudence, of making practical judgments, adding allies, and compromising wherever possible — while putting up a fight when absolutely necessary. Principle and ideas matter, but the practicing politician can’t, and shouldn’t, hold himself to the same standards as the philosopher or even the journalist.

Graham understood this. Maybe he understood it a little too well, but in the final analysis, he got closer to the truth of politics than did most of his enemies.

Nowhere was this more apparent than his response to the rise of Donald Trump and Trumpism. Like many others in the Republican establishment, Graham initially balked at the former New York developer and reality-TV barker’s bid to take over the party of Lincoln. “If we nominate Trump,” he warned on social media during the 2016 GOP primary, “we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.”

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Once Trump became inevitable, Graham made his peace. And thereafter, he remained doggedly loyal, championing most of the president’s domestic issues and rising to his personal defense in the face of the underhanded lawfare that bedeviled Trump for the better part of a decade. Graham came around forcefully in recognizing the Russiagate hoax for what it was and resisted the first impeachment attempt over Trump’s “perfect” Ukraine phone call (remember that?). The South Carolinian also understood Trump’s almost-compulsive need to vent — to have somebody around to shoot the shit with. And he made himself constantly available, over the phone and on the golf course.

Graham’s loyalty and personal warmth paid dividends and gathered compound interest, which he would then cash out when it came time to promote his pet causes. He could disagree with Trump — over his Syria withdrawal, the Afghan drawdown, and the Ukraine war — without blowing up the relationship. And during the second term, his proximity allowed him to push for the hawks’ holy grail: a full-on war with Iran.

To note all this isn’t to endorse the substance of any of these policies. But Graham’s record tends to vindicate those inside the Trump administration — many of them opposed to the late senator’s agenda — who wish restrainers in Congress could be a bit more strategic. The likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie dynamited their Trump ties over antiwar principle; Graham went to the afterlife having gotten his Iran war.

Beyond his masterful management of Trump, Graham was also a consummate legislator of the old-school, Tip O’Neill variety: clubby, compromising, and surprisingly willing to break with the Right when a measure served the national interest (by his lights). For example, he backed the Biden administration’s CHIPS and Science Act, aimed at bolstering the domestic semiconductor industry, as well as the 2022 bipartisan gun-safety bill. Such across-the-aisle efforts didn’t endear him to the small-government faithful, and he earned his 59% lifetime score from the keepers of Republican orthodoxy at Heritage Action. But bipartisanship built up political capital on the Hill that he could expend elsewhere.

Like the best of modern lawmakers, moreover, Graham was a master at directing oodles of federal development cash to his home state. Visit his X account, and you’ll see most of his feed devoted to showcasing the bacon he brought home as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee: a Coast Guard base in Charleston, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration facility (also in Charleston), a federal grant to replace 18 bridges across the Palmetto State, and on and on. It’s true that Graham was a beneficiary of Israel Lobby and defense-industry largess. But he likely wouldn’t get re-elected if it weren’t for his relentless developmentalism (or pork-barrel politics, if you must).

Even as he relished congressional wheeling-and-dealing, Graham could be ferocious in a fight. For my money, his single best moment as a lawmaker came during the 2018 confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. As the holes in rape accuser Christine Blasey Ford’s account were widening in public view, Graham publicly excoriated the Democrats who’d used her in a quest to destroy Kavanaugh.

“What you wanna do is destroy this guy’s life, hold his seat open, and hope you win in 2020,” Graham said, his body and voice shaking. “You’ve said that, not me.… I would never do to [Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor] what you’ve done to this guy. This is the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics.” The oration is well worth watching in full. To me, it was the decisive pivot that made Kavanaugh’s eventual confirmation possible.

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Finally, and perhaps most crucially, Graham stood for a comprehensive account of why American power is good, and what its exercise on the world stage is meant for. His worldview was, as one writer for Responsible Statecraft has noted, essentially that of an old Cold Warrior: unbending support of proxies and allies against larger nation-state adversaries, the passionate if hypocritical and uneven promotion of democracy abroad.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, that worldview lost its coherence and salience. The sheer hyperactivity to which it gave rise over the past quarter-century drove Washington into more than one quagmire, dissipating American power and corroding its domestic foundations. Graham-ism has now reached its apotheosis in Trump’s Persian Gulf War III, which has forced the president to choose between prolonged economic pain or an embarrassing quick exit.

Yet the lesson for the restraint camp — my camp, as it should be clear — is that we need some larger moral vision or story, a plausible substitute for Graham-ism. “Get out of everywhere all at once” is no more credible or responsible than his “Fight everyone, everywhere, all at once.” I’m not sure we have such a substitute on hand. Likewise, if Graham overestimated the reserves of American power, I sometimes worry that the restraint camp underestimates them. The passing from the stage of the likes of Graham and Sen. Mitch McConnell provides an opening for developing such ideas and translating them into political action.

Graham’s Senate career offers a template for the sort of practical wisdom the task requires. He was as wise as a serpent, if too far from the innocence of a dove.

Trump’s bizarre and abrasive style, to be sure, couldn’t be more different than that of the Bush dynasty. And his idiosyncratic tariff policy is a genuine break with what went before. But in most areas, Trumpism is simply Bushism gilded by a tacky coat of paint. In political terms, Donald Trump is the brother-by-a-different-mother of Dubya and Jeb!  

Pop quiz: which of the three last Republican presidents has launched a major war of choice against a populous Persian Gulf country — George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, or Donald Trump? If you answered all three, you are right. Republican presidents began all three Gulf Wars: the First Gulf War of 1991, the Second Gulf War of 2003-2011, and the Third Gulf War of 2026-?.

Second question: which of the last three Republican presidents had, as his major legislative accomplishment, a tax cut that disproportionately benefited the rich and corporations? If you answered all three — the two Bushes and Trump — you are, again, correct.  

Third question: which of the last three Republican presidents successfully promoted the expansion of legal guest-worker programs for cheap-labor industries like agriculture and hospitality? Once again, the answer is both Bushes and Trump.  

Fourth and final question: which of the last three Republican presidents signed laws or authorized regulations to boost the number of rich foreigners who could buy green cards, as a ticket to American citizenship? You guessed it, both Bushes and Trump. In politics as well as policies, the Trump administration increasingly looks like a continuation of the post-2000 Republican norm: pro-war, pro-business.

To see why, it helps to examine the electorate. Over the past decade, much has been made of a supposed “realignment” between the two parties and Trump’s success in attracting a formerly Democratic-leaning working class into the Republican column. Yet this was always overstated. In reality, Trump didn’t create a party realignment, and he hasn’t significantly reshaped one.  He has inherited the Bush Republican Party — a new American political party that coalesced in the Nineties and 2000s.

In 2024, the only two religious groups that viewed Trump favorably were white evangelical Protestants (67%) and white Catholics (51%). Trump won four-fifths of the white evangelical vote in 2016, 2020, and 2024. But his margin was only a slight improvement over Mitt Romney in 2012 (who won 78% of the same group), John McCain in 2008 (74%), and George W. Bush in 2004 (78%). History, then, shows a gradually expanding share of white-evangelical votes for any and all Republican presidential nominees, not a sudden surge under Trump in 2016. 

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With the white working class as a whole, Trump — who won 62% in 2016, 59% in 2020, and 66% in 2024 — did only marginally better than GOP nominees since 1980, from highs under Ronald Reagan (56% in 1984) and Romney (56%) to a low of 45% with McCain. That this reflects the evolution of the GOP, rather than the unique charisma of Trump, is evident from the fact that in the 2022 midterms, Republican congressional hopefuls won 66% of the working class, the same rate as Trump in 2024.  

The Republican share of the white working class is boosted by ultra-Republican white evangelicals. As the University of Pennsylvania’s John J. Diulio points out, “in 2016 and 2020, Trump won a majority of white evangelical working-class voters, but he lost a majority of white non-evangelical working-class voters. He lost them again in 2024.” White, working-class Americans who were not evangelical Protestants preferred Harris to Trump by a margin of 52 to 45.

Add regional dynamics, and it becomes even clearer that the Trump party is simply the Bush party, only with vulgar rhetoric. The Bush GOP is based in the former territory of New Deal and Jacksonian Democrats — the Confederacy and Appalachia. Its constituents, like small-business owners and working-class evangelicals, are those who formed the base of the Democratic Party for most of its history.

Eight out of 10 white Southerners were Democrats in 1950s, and as recently as 1992, Republicans had only a two-point advantage in the white South. By 2020, two-in-three white Southerners identified with the Republican Party.

Opposition to the civil-rights movement was a factor, but if racism were the only one then white Southerners should have completely abandoned the Democrats by 1968 or 1972. Instead, cultural conservatism with respect to religion, sex, and censorship, along with a distinctively martial version of Southern patriotism, combined with the increasing progressivism of national Democrats, gradually drove many white Southern Democrats into the Republican Party between the Seventies and the 2000s.

Today Republicans from the South hold more than 50% of the seats of the Republican House majority. In the Senate, the Republican majority leader and the Republican majority whip are from South Dakota and Wyoming, respectively, while the Republican conference chair is from Arkansas, the Republican policy boss is from West Virginia, and the Republican senatorial committee chair is from South Carolina.  

In hindsight, John McCain’s 2008 candidacy was a link in the soft transition of the party of Bush into the party of Trump. Having co-sponsored a bill providing amnesty for illegal immigrants with Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy in 2005, in 2008 McCain opposed any amnesty. And to bolster his pseudo-populist bona fides, McCain chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.  

In foreign policy, McCain — a Vietnam veteran and former POW and the descendant of military officers whose extended family owned a Mississippi plantation until after World War II — was one of the most consistently bellicose members of the hawkish wing of the GOP. During his presidential campaign, to the tune of the Beach Boys song “Barbara Ann”, McCain sang “Bomb bomb bomb Iran.” Had McCain been elected president, America might have waged all-out war against Iran a decade and a half ago.

Constituent interests, not the theories of Curtis Yarvin or Patrick Deneen, explain the policies of the post-Nineties GOP, under Trump and the Bushes alike. In terms of counties rather than states, the American red-county economy is predominantly exurban and rural and dominated by three kinds of industries: extractive resource industries like oil and gas and coal; the federally funded defense industries and the local businesses and jobs that military spending supports; and low-wage industries, most notably agriculture and services. Republican economic policy reflects the economic interests of employers and investors in red counties across America.

In 2019, 55% of all primary energy — chiefly oil, natural gas, and coal — was produced in the United States came from six mostly red states: Texas, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and North Dakota, with the Lone Star State accounting for 41% of all US crude production. Naturally, the Republican Party supports the mantra “drill, baby, drill” (and “mine, baby, mine”) and opposes the Green New Deal, with its goal of phasing out all fossil-fuel use in the United States and the world in favor of renewables.

By far the most important social base of the Bush-to-Trump Republican Party, and the greatest influence on Republican economic policy, is made up of small-business owners who, according to the Stanford Business Review, “represent a distinct, Republican-leaning constituency.”

Business owners are a minority of Republican voters; the majority of voters in both parties are mostly wage earners. But they are overrepresented among GOP primary voters, lobbyists, staffers, and politicians. Apart from professional and technical services, small businesses are concentrated in construction, natural resources and mining, trade, transportation and utilities, manufacturing, and leisure and hospitality. Republican-leaning billionaires and mega-corporations draw the ire of progressives and some conservative populists, but the party’s center of gravity is found among provincial Republican millionaires. Small and regional capital, not big business, forms the social power base of the Trump party and that of the Bushes before him.

You don’t have to be a Marxist to understand that mainstream Republican economic policy reflects the economic interests of this sector of capital. Compliance with federal, state, and local regulations is a bigger challenge for small-business owners than for large, managerial corporations, so it isn’t surprising that Trump 2.0 would hire Elon Musk and Russell Vought to theatrically cut regulations, fire federal bureaucrats, and dismantle government agencies. 

For most small businesses, wages plus benefits and payroll taxes are the greatest cost. Mainstream Republican policies toward American workers under Trump and the two Bushes form a consistent policy designed to minimize the bargaining power of workers in wage negotiations and to make workers so economically desperate they will be compelled to take jobs with poor pay and bad working conditions.  

Some of these policies — such as unremitting hostility to organized labor — have obvious benefits for cheap-labor small businesses. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump pretended to show respect for unionized workers by inviting Teamsters President Sean O’Brien to speak at the Republican National Convention. Less than a month later, in a social media conversation with Elon Musk, Trump told Musk: “You’re the greatest cutter. I look at what you do. You walk in and say, ‘You want to quit?’ I won’t mention the name of the company but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK. You’re all gone.’ ”

Trump was evidently unaware that federal law prohibits the firing of striking workers. The United Auto Workers union immediately filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, a New Deal-created agency that Musk is suing on the specious claim that it has been unconstitutional from the beginning. In January 2025, having returned to the White House, Trump crippled the NLRB by illegally firing a board member, removing the board’s quorum.

Crushing unions and dismantling the NLRB are only two of the strategies used by mainstream Republicans, including Trump, to shift the balance of power in wage negotiations from workers to employers. Tight labor markets that result from low immigration and low workforce participation by mothers of young children can create a seller’s market in labor that strengthens the power of workers, male and female, to demand higher wages. To this end, employer lobbies dominated by Republican-leaning small-business owners for decades have supported mass low-wage immigration and promoted the employment of mothers of young children.  

The US Chamber of Commerce, the National Small Business Association, and the National Federation of Independent Business all support expanding guest worker programs, whose workers, unlike green card holders (legal permanent residents), don’t qualify for a path to citizenship and voting. According to an NFIB spokesperson, “our members support an enforceable guest worker program and expanding H-2B visas for economic need.” 

The US Chamber of Commerce advocates doubling the number of immigrants. According to the NSBA, meanwhile, more than a third of small businesses employ workers who belong to one of three categories: green-card holders, temporary foreign workers, or visa holders. The NSBA advocates lifting country caps on employment-related visas, allowing unlimited numbers of non-citizen foreigners to work in the homeland. 

This is one of the surprising and little-noticed threads that tie the Bushes to Trump. As United Farm Workers comms director Antonio de Loera-Brust has noted in these pages, the Trump II administration has moved to increase the number of agricultural guest workers. This, notwithstanding its showy enforcement actions in blue cities. Far from being a radical break with Bush-era Republican immigration policy, Trump’s actual immigration policy has been a continuation of employer-first policies in substance, though not in rhetoric. 

In a cabinet meeting on 11 April, 2025, Trump said that “we have to take care of our farmers, the hotels and, you know, the various places where they tend to, where they tend to NEED people.” The second Trump administration has used a variety of methods, including extreme vetting of applications and travel bans, to reduce legal immigration to the United States by an estimated 35% and 50%, if the present rate continues over four years.  

While blockading legal immigration overall, the Trump administration has exempted the low-wage H-2 visa categories from obstructionist delays. And the administration has doubled the number of H-2 visas for low-wage workers for 2026. 

All of this shows that Trumpism is merely the higher stage of Bushism. It was George Herbert Walker Bush who signed the Immigration Act of 1990, which in hindsight was the foundation for the mass immigration of the last half century. The 1990 Act simultaneously created the EB-5 visa selling green cards to the foreign bourgeoisie, created the H1-B guest-worker visa, expanded existing guest-worker programs, and created new guest-worker categories. It also created the Temporary Protected Status program, under which President Joe Biden granted legal status to nearly a million otherwise ineligible foreign nationals.

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Republican foreign policy, like tax and labor policy, can be explained in terms of Republican voters and donors. Republican policy towards the Middle East is influenced but not wholly determined by support for Israel’s annexationist hard Right among evangelical Christian Zionists and Right-wing Jews, who, however, are a minority of America’s mostly Democratic Jewish voters. In 2020, after moving the US embassy, Trump declared, “and we moved the capital of Israel to Jerusalem. That’s for the evangelicals.”

And Republican policy towards Latin America is influenced by anti-communist Cuban-Americans, a crucial Florida voting bloc, who nurtured Marco Rubio. In Trump’s second term, the former senator from the Sunshine State, long associated with the hawkish wing of the GOP, has magnified his influence by holding multiple foreign policy jobs simultaneously at times — Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, and acting administrator of USAID.

The underlying divide in GOP foreign policy is among three schools of thought: global hegemonists who favor American military hegemony in every major region; balance-of-power realists or “prioritizers” who want to focus America’s limited military resources on the Chinese challenge in Asia; and neo-isolationist “restrainers.” The global-hegemony strategy’s major supporters since the end of the Cold War have disproportionately been Southern conservative hawks like South Carolina’s Sen. Lindsay Graham and Arkansas’s Senator Tom Cotton. The armed-services committees in the Senate and House are led by two Republican Southern hawks — Mississippi’s Senator Roger Wicker and Alabama’s Representative Mike D. Rogers. 

Their militarism is unusual by national standards but typical of the martial tradition of the American South. Nearly half of new military recruits are from the South, even though it contains only about a third of young adult Americans. 

The hawks whom Southern voters send to Congress ensure that the region profits from defense spending. The list of states that derive more than 3.5% of their GDP from defense contracts is dominated by states in the South and Southwest: Texas, Virginia, Arizona, Maryland, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, and Missouri (Connecticut and Maine make the list because of their Navy bases and shipyards). Meanwhile, the importance of defense spending to California’s economy has declined, as military investment in Florida has increased.

Under the two Bushes and Trump, congressional Republicans in Washington, among other things, have been subsidizing the folks back home by increasing defense spending while further ballooning deficits enlarged by their tax cuts for the rich and business. 

Under Trump as under the Bushes, the Republican Party, based in the former Confederate states, is the party of unnecessary wars, tax cuts for the rich, and anti-worker, low-wage labor-market policy. Anti-interventionist realists and restrainers and economic populists on the Right who dreamed that Trump would favor their causes may not want to hear the truth. And the truth will be resisted as well by Democrats and Never Trump Republicans who idealized the two Bushes while demonizing Trump. But the fact is that, apart from his colorful personality, Trump has been a relatively conventional post-Cold War Republican president. 

The Third Gulf War is the latest reminder that there is no Trump party and never has been, only the Bush party under new management.

There is no greater purveyor of “actually” and its new meaning than Tucker Carlson. Tune into any one of his podcasts, interviews or speeches and the adverb’s all-encompassing power is on full display. “Damn you, actually”; “He is evil, actually”; “Who is actually for open borders?”; “If there’s one lesson in American politics, it’s that people in charge lie, actually, they do!”

People in charge do lie, actually. And for many years, Carlson made a career of holding these people to account. His incisive psycho-portrait of George W. Bush as a cavalier, even callous, governor raised early alarm bells about his presidency. His puckish profile of James Carville exposed the lavish lifestyle of a man who claimed to speak for America’s downtrodden. And even in his Fox News days, his grilling of Senator Lindsey Graham over US bomb strikes in Syria gave voice to Republicans and Democrats who were skeptical about further military intervention in the Middle East.

But since leaving Fox in 2023 and starting one of the world’s most popular podcasts, such interviews have grown few and far between. In their place has emerged a far more questionable roster of guests: from Vladimir Putin to a Nazi-curious Groyper, to a former crack addict claiming to have slept with Barack Obama. To Carlson’s supporters, these guests merely signal a willingness to go where others will not. For others, including his former friends and colleagues, it prompts a basic question: what the hell happened to Tucker?

A new book by New Yorker writer Jason Zengerle attempts to answer this question. The aptly named Hated by all the Right People is neither a hit piece nor a hagiography; it is a chronology of Carlson’s ascent and descent, drawing on interviews with those who knew or worked with him. It traces the transformation of a talented young writer into what Zengerle describes as a “noxious talking head”.

Once a fledgling journalist at The Weekly Standard, Carlson soon became CNN’s youngest-ever anchor, later hosting shows at MSNBC, co-founding the Right-leaning news site Daily Caller and rising to become the most-watched host in Fox News history. He has lived many lives and yet in each one, traces of the new Tucker can be found in the old: ideological flexibility, a penchant for provocative ideas, and, above all, a desire to entertain.

As a young writer, Carlson’s stories were eclectic: a weekend with spud gun aficionados, reflections on British colonial architecture, and a trip to war-ravaged Liberia with Cornel West and Al Sharpton. They were nearly all humorous and perceptive, so much so that even Christopher Hitchens was a fan. But compared with today’s darker, more conspiratorial output, they seem almost unrecognizable. In the past month, his podcast has published episodes such as “the demonic rituals to replicate God”, “Diddy, demons and the antichrist”, and “Why are you gay?” (also featuring demons).

How can we make sense of the spud-to-demon pivot? As the book intimates, part of the answer lies in Carlson’s transition from print journalism to broadcast in the early 2000s. In print, ambiguity was an asset: euphemism, color, and nuance were the alchemy of magazine writing. Broadcast punditry rewarded the opposite. “One benefit of hosting a talk show is that it forces you to take a position on virtually everything that happens in the news,” Carlson once said. “That’s also the downside… From ‘complicated’, it’s a short trip to ‘nuanced’. Nuance, needless to say, is the enemy of clear debate.”

He discovered this truth the hard way. Installed as the conservative foil on CNN’s political debate program Crossfire, he was paired with a liberal cohost, the two trading rehearsed blows on the controversies of the day. Then Jon Stewart came. Appearing as a guest in 2004, the Daily Show host humiliated Carlson and his cohost, claiming they were “hurting America”. Turning directly to Carlson, Stewart mocked his bow tie, called him a “dick”, and dismissed the show as performance politics masquerading as journalism. The encounter quickly went viral (by 2004 standards) and Crossfire was canceled soon after.

Although Carlson went on to host another show, this time at MSNBC, the Crossfire episode left its mark. The bow tie (eventually) disappeared and so did his television career, at least for a few years. What stung most, though, was not Stewart’s mockery, but the realization that he was right: Crossfire was combative by design, and it forced Carlson to defend conservative positions he didn’t necessarily agree with.

As Zengerle writes, Carlson’s conservative politics were a direct reaction to the “weird, wild, and woolly hyperliberalism of 1970s California” that he grew up in. But his conservatism was more instinctive than ideological or academic (he flunked most of his classes anyway). There were no Buckley-esque disquisitions on the collectivist nature of higher education or Charlie Kirk-style debating tours. Instead, he preferred to play the troll: when liberal students at Trinity College protested a CIA recruiting event, Carlson scrawled “WELCOME CIA” onto a bedsheet and hung it from his dorm-room window. When he was invited by the protesters to make the case for the CIA, he took to the stage and said: “I think you’re all a bunch of greasy chicken fuckers,” before walking off.

As Carlson confessed in 2011, he was never particularly ideological: “my politics are so complicated I don’t even understand my own politics a lot of the time” — a disposition that helps to explain why he ricocheted across nearly every corner of conservative thought over the past 25 years. When he joined the Weekly Standard in the late Nineties, he was a self-described “Episcopalian neocon”. Then, after the 2001 Iraq invasion, which Carlson initially supported, he moved in a libertarian direction (ably supplementing his income as a fellow at the Cato Institute). Now, he is the country’s foremost national-populist, criticizing America’s cultural decay, forever wars, and mass migration on his podcast.

In some ways, his evolution on these issues reflects the Right’s own realignment from Bush-era conservatism to Trumpian populism. In the early 2000s, the bow-tied Carlson was a cipher for the median Republican voter: an Iraq war-supporting WASP who largely believed in free trade, tax cuts and deregulation. But as the Right moved in a more populist direction under Trump, so did Carlson. In the online parlance, he became “red-pilled”. “He is now like a mini version of Steve Bannon,” a longtime acquaintance of Carlson’s told me. “He’s an ultra non-interventionist. He doesn’t want us involved in any foreign wars, including Venezuela and Greenland.”

According to Ross Douthat, Carlson developed a “deep distrust of all institutions” that was “a transformation of mentality as much as substance” — like many on the Right. Events such as Russiagate, Covid, and the border crisis cultivated a feeling in Carlson that the ruling class was not merely negligent or incompetent, but actively “evil”. This explains why, in a recent episode of his podcast with Matt Gaetz, he asserted with absolute conviction that soldiers were being deployed to the Middle East only to die for the US government and provoke a war on its behalf.

While Douthat’s theory of Carlson’s ideological evolution may be true, it overlooks baser considerations. Following the Crossfire humiliation, Carlson took a simpler lesson from his clash with Stewart: arguments matter less than popularity. In Carlson’s mind, Stewart only “won” their debate because he was more popular. “I didn’t lose that debate,” he later said. “I thought his argument was stupid, but the more popular guy wins… He won because he’s more popular than I am.”

But for Tucker to win, he had to be popular first. After a failed stint on Dancing with the Stars in 2006 (he was knocked out in the first round) and the founding of the Daily Caller, Carlson joined Fox News in 2009. Beginning as a substitute host for Bret Baier and Sean Hannity, he ended the 2010s as the network’s most popular news host in cable TV history. “Tucker covered some really weird shit at Fox,” one former colleague told me. “But his audience loved it, which meant Fox loved it.”

This “weird shit” included a documentary on testicle-tanning, a segment on the sex life of pandas, and a special on cattle mutilations. It also featured attacks on his own party alongside praise for liberals such as Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren. “Tucker was his own island at Fox,” a former Fox employee told me. “He had his own team and they were very tight-lipped about what they were going to talk about on the show,” she said. “No one else at Fox would have any idea.” That culture of secrecy extended to fellow Fox hosts too, which occasionally resulted in clashes on air. When Carlson criticized then-Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for adding $13 billion to his fortune during Covid, Sean Hannity responded: “People can make money. They provide goods and services people want, need and desire. That’s America.”

These attacks helped to crystallize Carlson’s new persona: the preppy populist in a gingham shirt and repp tie, happily scolding elites on both sides of the aisle. But beneath the political posturing, he knew that his primary role was to entertain. Whether ululating in a high-pitched voice or staring at guests with bovine incomprehension, Carlson perfected what Charles Pierce called authentic artificiality, crafting a sarcastic, excitable persona.

Behind the easygoing façade, however, Carlson was monomaniacally focused on ratings. Unlike other cable news networks, Fox tracked viewership minute by minute, allowing hosts to see precisely how each guest or segment performed — a system he monitored closely. If a segment performed poorly or a guest overstayed their welcome, he would bristle with anger. In 2017, after learning that a guest had run long, Carlson screamed “Fuck!” in front of a visiting New Yorker writer. “Ratings at Fox are everything,” said the insider. “He would have felt that.”

That obsession didn’t end when he left Fox. If anything, it has grown stronger. Running his own podcast, unconstrained by network guardrails, and knowing what feeds the beast, Carlson burrows ever deeper into rabbit holes about who did 9/11, whether Brigitte Macron is a man, and the rise of globalist death cults — all the while raking in millions of views and lucrative sponsorships, from MyPillow to telemedicine services for pets. At the same time, he became a staunch critic of Israel (and a big fan of Qatar), flitting between legitimate criticisms of the Jewish state to more unsettling rhetoric. As well as welcoming a Holocaust denier on the show, Carlson references men “eating hummus”, Putin “kicking money changers out of the temple”, and professes a greater hatred for Christian Zionists than Nazis and jihadists.

None of these remarks individually meet the threshold of antisemitism, but each one nudges closer to the precipice. Just this week, for example, Carlson claimed that there has never been a real antisemitic movement in America — a plainly ahistorical statement that ignores events like Charlottesville in 2017, when demonstrators chanted “Jews will not replace us!” as well as the existence of groups like the National Alliance, Aryan Nations, and the KKK in the 20th century.

To his fans, Carlson is “just asking questions”, but this framing masks the cumulative effect of his commentary. By repeatedly raising topics related to Israel and, by extension, the Jews, his questions take on a rhetorical weight that goes beyond curiosity. Indeed, this was precisely what he criticised Pat Buchanan, the paleoconservative founder of the American Conservative magazine, for. “It’s this kind of relentless bringing up of topics related to Judaism,” Carlson noted in 1999: “I do believe that there is a pattern with Pat Buchanan of needling the Jews. Is that antisemitic? Yeah!”

Unlike Buchanan, Carlson has — at least publicly — not expressed an interest in running for office. If he did, there is every chance that he would perform well. All the raw materials are there: high name recognition, a huge platform, and a keen understanding of how Washington works. “If he wanted to, Tucker could easily scoop the GOP nomination in ’28,” said one acquaintance. “The base loves him.” What kind of candidate might emerge then? A MAGA-style isolationist or something new? For the first time in his life, he would be responsible for answering the very questions he has spent his career asking. That might be the most dangerous proposition yet, actually.

I have often thought that some enterprising American hack of our own times should attempt something similar (a British equivalent, for that matter, could make light work of Zahawi, Jenrick, and whoever else jumps ship to Reform). Such a book might commend itself to the Resistance Lib for good bathroom reading, much as the 191 blank pages of that gimmicky The Achievements of Kamala Harris are to be met with in MAGA homes. The Beauties and Deformities of Trump, Vance, and Rubio would, of course, include Vance calling Trump “cultural heroin” and “America’s Hitler”; Trump’s attacks on “Little Marco”, not least for his prodigious sweating; Rubio returning the volley by calling him a “con artist”; and much else besides. It would contain lots of grandstanding, lots of backpedaling, and little dignity.

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Some of the select quotations would have the added beauty and deformity of being occasionally prescient, even vindicated. “The delegitimization of the election results is something that I worry a ton about,” said Vance, beardless and cherubic, back in October 2016: “the delegitimization of the media and so forth, that really, really worries me.” Another good one resurfaced recently, for inauspicious reasons. “We’re liable to wake up one morning,” Ted Cruz warned the American electorate around the time Trump was calling his wife ugly, “and Donald, if he were president, would have nuked Denmark”.

It happens in cycles: the Republican bigwigs denounce Trump, with good reason, and then they fall lamely back in line. The coalition limps ever onward. 2016 was one long year of this agonizing process, crescendoing with the hullabaloo over the Access Hollywood tape, when several senior Republicans resolved to throw in the towel and sit the election out; it was easy enough back then, when he seemed to have no chance of actually winning. One presidency later, January 6 saw a repeat of the dynamic, in miniature, and again with the apparent security that Trump was finished for good. You could put together a Beauties and Deformities from that day alone. “There is nothing patriotic about what is occurring on Capitol Hill,” tweeted Rubio, presumably quaking in his boots in some underground bunker; “this is 3rd world style anti-American anarchy.” Today, he belongs to an administration which, as its first order of business, extended an unconditional pardon to those anti-American third-world anarchists. The administration’s position, blasted across its official channels, is that the election in 2020 was stolen, that Mike Pence was a traitor, and that the people who ransacked the Capitol had right on their side.

Now, some Republicans are pushing for full-scale annexation of Greenland: Randy Fine, a corpulent Floridian who calls himself the “Hebrew Hammer” and has earned plenty of groyper opprobrium as a result, has introduced a bill to this effect. Others, though, have done their best to keep their heads screwed on and their feet on the ground. “I’m sick of stupid”, says Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who has the distinct advantage that he will not be seeking re-election later this year. “Stupid”, in the form of slavish loyalty to the whims and passions of the President, might sometimes be an indispensable vote-winner, in GOP primaries especially. But even Tillis can’t bring himself to criticize Trump personally, preferring to do what court sycophants have always done — blame the advisors. 

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Both houses may move to block Trump from taking Greenland by force, with some congressional Republicans going as far as to warn him that this would mean the end of his presidency. Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska sums it up: “This is appalling. Greenland is a Nato ally. Denmark is one of our best friends… the way we’re treating them is really demeaning and it has no upside.”

No upside, indeed. Any talk of invading Greenland — whether or not it be followed through — is enough to spook America’s allies, indelibly cheapen its word, and upend decades of diplomacy and strategy. Trump’s erstwhile fans in Britain and on the continent — including, to his credit, Nigel Farage — are no less appalled by the whole spectacle. That it is nonetheless being cheered on in some quarters of the American Right, whether as a meme or in earnest, is as sure a sign as any of its intellectual degeneration. Indeed, such degeneration appears to be located at the very heart of the MAGA project: Stephen Miller, who has long been feted even by Trump’s European admirers as the brains behind the administration’s robust immigration policy, also appears to be the principal architect behind this belligerent and self-sabotaging turn in Trump’s foreign policy.

The online catchphrase “You Can Just Do Things” has seemed to become a license for doing things which are, as Rep. Bacon has put it, “dumb”. There are lots of things which an American president, with all his colossal might, can “just do”. He can threaten to send the gunboats to Greenland; he can bring back measles; he can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory for the Conservative Party of Canada; he can keep on pretending that 2020 was stolen, and perhaps the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to boot. All these things are perfectly possible. But all these things are dumb.

Musk’s X has turbocharged the dumbness. It often seems now as though the entire administration is built atop a foundation of mocking and memes. Trump cannot escape the Boomer’s insatiable appetite for AI slop: hence he posts videos showing him dumping shit on the “No Kings” protestors from a fighter jet. The hardline Zoomers charged with running the Twitter account of the Department of Homeland Security appear to have defter hands. There you will find a torrent of videos on the more extreme end of edgy internet humor.

Dumb, also, because unpopular; and here, again, the dynamics of X, which reward loyalty to Trump and Musk and which encourage ever more radical and eyeball-grabbing slogans, ideas, and memes, are partly to blame. Following the killing of Renée Good in Minneapolis, the Trump administration went all-in on a George Floyd Culture War Round 2, tasking JD Vance with defending the indefensible. Only 28% of Americans think her shooting was justified; 53% think the ICE agent should face criminal charges. Trump’s designs on Greenland, meanwhile, have even less popular backing. The President gazes through a White House window upon a picture of Greenland; “tap to monitor the situation,” tweets the official White House account, to 16 million views and 31,000 likes. Only 4% of those polled think it would be a good idea for the US to take Greenland by force. Trump, personally, is now extremely unpopular; it can’t be politically expedient, to give one recent example, to declare, after the murder of a beloved film director, that this was the result of “the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME”. Nothing in fact could have better vindicated Rob Reiner’s view, expressed back in 2017, that Trump was “mentally unfit” for office.

The President has a mandate. The election wasn’t just a rebuke of Harris (though lacking in achievements) and Biden (though senile); nor was it solely a matter of some post-pandemic anti-incumbency swing, or the automatic product of an economic input (by the time of the election, in any case, inflation had abated and the economy was strong). Culture wars were in play, in which Democrats had often taken the wrong side. Clearly there was a great desire to secure the border and crack down on immigration, if not quite to the point of executing middle-aged moms in the street; clearly there was a desire to make America strong again, if not to the point of bullying friendly nations with tariffs or worse. But, since obtaining that mandate, much of the American Right has memed itself into positions which are as untenable and unpopular as they are stupid.

One year, now, of the MAGA restoration; three more, at least, to go. There seem now to be some quickenings of sanity, even in the Republican Party; and for the Right in Europe, one gets the impression that this Greenland business has been something of a wake-up call. Still, more than mere murmurings are needed to start people from their stupor. Senior Republicans will have to remember what “beauties and deformities” they once hurled at Trump, and consider that they might still be true. The coalition will have to splinter; or, like Fox-North, risk being crushed under the weight of its contradictions, swept aside (the 25th amendment beckons), or, if it comes to it, forcefully rebuked by the electorate. The people in power will have to be “sick of stupid”: and, this time, they’ll have to mean it.

In the days after Hamas’s grisly assaults of October 7, 2023, which left almost 1,200 dead, including over 800 civilians, Americans backed Israel’s muscular counterattack by 50% to 45%. But Israel’s ceaseless bombardment of Gaza has left at least 50,000 dead — most of them civilians, including 12,000 children under 12. Precise numbers are hard to come by, and Israel does not permit reporters to enter the war zone. A late-July Gallup poll found that Americans now oppose Israel’s military operation by almost two-to-one.

What is most interesting about this is the partisan skew. Whereas Republican support for the Israeli war effort has remained steady at 71%, Democratic support has collapsed, from 36% to just 8%. This matters: the Democratic Party wins about 70% of the votes of American Jews, and has been their political home since they began arriving as immigrants in the 19th century. It is under pressure to become an anti-Israel party. Under the influence of Donald Trump, the party is moving Left. And opposition to Israel has been a winner for Left parties in the West. La France Insoumise, the continent’s most anti-Israel major party, won the most seats in France’s legislative elections last year. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the party’s leader, is France’s most uncompromising critic of Israel. Jeremy Corbyn, who occupies a similar spot on the British political landscape, came within a handful of seats of becoming prime minister in 2017, and now appears to be enjoying a revival.

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In July, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders forced a vote to block shipments of offensive weapons to Israel. Though it failed, it did win a solid majority (27-17) of Democrats. The situation may remind veteran Democrats of the crisis they faced after October 2002, when the party’s presidential hopefuls swallowed their misgivings and made the safe-looking vote to follow George W. Bush into the Iraq War. By the 2004 presidential election, that war had gone badly wrong, and Vermont governor Howard Dean briefly appeared likely to win the Democratic nomination on the strength of his anti-war position alone.

In 2008, Democrats reached for a candidate whom obscurity had protected from the need to vote on Iraq — Barack Obama, who at the time had been a state legislator in Illinois. In this light, the stunning emergence in New York City of Zohran Mamdani, now the odds-on favorite to become mayor of the largest Jewish city on the planet, could be a historic development. Like Obama, Mamdani is a state legislator; unlike him, he has backed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which in the United States represents the outermost edge of anti-Israel activism.

In some ways, the grounds for the American shift on Israel resemble those elsewhere in the West. Time has passed. Israelis rightly insist that Zionism dates from the 19th century, and Jewish ties to the Holy Land are ancient. But the world’s willingness to countenance Israel’s extreme measures of self-defense has everything to do with the murder of Europe’s Jews during the Second World War. It remains a lesson and a landmark. But it has passed from living memory. The media, for its part, has changed. Today public opinion is built out of on-the-spot clips from Gaza, and when Israel bars foreign correspondents, public opinion smells a rat.

In other ways, the American disillusionment with Israel is different from the rest of the West’s. No article on the Israel-Hamas conflict has done more to influence American opinion in recent months than Brown University historian Omer Bartov’s judgment in the pages of the New York Times that Israel was committing genocide. Bartov’s influence comes from his background as an Israeli war veteran, as the son of a major Israeli writer, and as a man whose distinguished scholarly career has focused on genocide in general and, in particular, on how soldiers and statesmen are led astray in the heat of battle. In a more recent interview, with the journalist Dan Wakin, Bartov tried to describe the sadness he felt in contemplating how Israel had squandered its moral capital. “It took a long time,” he said, “to build up the kind of support — in many ways, love — for Israel that exists in the United States.”

He is right. Americans may not think this is Israel’s finest hour. But they are far from thinking ill of it on a fundamental level. These fond feelings are, quite naturally, reciprocated. The main determinant of Israel’s ability to survive is its relationship with the United States: military, commercial, diplomatic and even legal. Imagine, for instance, the effect on Israel if the US were to reassert the presumption against dual citizenship that is still in its lawbooks, but has been allowed to lapse since the end of the Cold War.

Trump’s second presidential term has lent a note of paradox to the recent American turn against Israel. He is a straightforward champion of the country, his support for Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu subject to only two qualifications: first, a lingering resentment (reportedly) at Netanyahu’s having recognized Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory with undue haste; second, an unwillingness to be associated with bad TV — hence his pushback against Netanyahu for pooh-poohing allegations of famine in the Gaza Strip. Trump insisted that it was “real starvation stuff”.

Even leaving aside his willingness to risk war to join Israel’s war against Iran, Trump is as loyal a friend as Israel has. But his program benefits Israel only in a confused and contradictory way. At the center of Trumpism is the President’s project to liberate people from civil-rights law in its late, decadent “woke” stage. Twenty-first-century America turned tyrannical when progressive regulators and litigators came to realize that local governments, large corporations and private citizens could be threatened with lawsuits for almost anything they said about minorities or women, and anything that left the impression of a “hostile environment”. Trump has eliminated large parts of this system, especially as regards corporate America. He has ordered experienced civil-rights litigators in the Justice Department to stand down.

And he has paid a lot of attention to Jews. This makes electoral sense. As long as the Democratic Party was built “intersectionally” out of an ever-growing list of underprivileged beneficiaries of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Jews — for all their historic attachment to the party — have been a poor fit within it. That is because they are a rich and successful group, and the main diagnostic tool of civil-rights law is essentially a race-based conspiracy theory: if Group X has more wealth, income or academic honors than Group Y, some hidden plot, somewhere, must be to blame.

But when it comes to universities, Trump has not dismantled the powerful disciplinary apparatus of woke. He has harnessed it to his own ends, and he has done so by focusing on antisemitism — which has not been a problem in American universities since the middle of the last century. What has happened on campus is an increasing number of anti-Israel demonstrations. Trump has forced on universities an irresponsibly vague definition of antisemitism, created by the International Holocaust Remembrance Association, which assimilates many kinds of statements against Israel to run-of-the-mill antisemitism.

Trump has prompted universities to police certain genuinely disruptive campus protests — for instance, the takeover of Butler Library at Columbia University last May by 70 students who set up a “Basel al-Araj Popular University” while students were studying for finals. In a democracy with total freedom of speech, “activism” can be a way of introducing an element of intimidation into public life. The non-academic public often views American universities as places that mainly undermine the political system and only secondarily offer an education.

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On the other hand, the mildness of anti-Israel feeling among the non-academic public may in retrospect have been tied up with the de facto censorship of woke. When people speak of an Israel “lobby”, they most often mean powerful campaign-finance organizations such as AIPAC, to which many congressmen are beholden. But the debate has probably been more shaped by such groups as the Anti-Defamation League, which greet anti-Israel sentiment with organized pressure campaigns — and by a plethora of litigators, advocacy groups and unaffiliated pro-Israel campaigners.

The political scientist John Mearsheimer has credibly alleged that The Atlantic was too frightened to publish an article he co-wrote two decades ago about the Israel lobby. In the end, the story wound up being published in the London Review of Books, and a book followed in its wake. But during the high tide of woke civil-rights law, even a feebly substantiated allegation that a writer or broadcaster was a racist or antisemite placed the outlets that employed them in fear of lawsuits, boycotts and other harassment. In the early days of Trump’s second term, such fears have waned, and with them the power of pro-Israel pressure groups.

Public skepticism about Israel, meanwhile, has waxed. Certain comfortable arguments (“Israel’s fight is the fight of Western civilization”) and certain familiar solutions (the “two-state solution”) have grown contentious when we weren’t looking. The tendency of Netanyahu’s government and its defenders not to rebut criticism but simply to calumniate critics is bringing diminishing returns. As a young diplomat in the mid-Eighties, Netanyahu himself worked magic on ABC’s Nightline with bravura attacks on Israel’s foes. But he is stuck in that time. Calling starvation in Gaza a “bold-faced lie”, accusing Emmanuel Macron of “siding with Hamas” for urging an end to Israel’s blockade of aid — the tactics that once helped Netanyahu inhibit criticism may now inflame it.

Regarding American public opinion, Israel is in a delicate position. Trump’s return has made speech more free in most respects — but by no means all. For a decade now, Trumpism’s core belief has been that the Washington establishment’s priorities are a giant elite hustle. Israel has been one such priority, and it is due for a cynical reassessment. But Trump’s role as Israel’s most stalwart defender changes its symbolism and its stature — enhancing it in some contexts, detracting in others. Israel is a main target of populists. It is also populism itself.

Israel’s position in the affections of Americans is for the most part unchanged and secure. On the other hand, there is that matter of the anti-Israel activist who is set to become mayor of New York. Should Mamdani govern successfully, he could become a model for a new generation of Democratic politicians. No less important, Democrats always stand a chance in presidential elections. Taken together, that leaves Israel only one or two bad breaks away from a downgraded relationship with its indispensable backer.

Except Richard Nixon. Recent years have seen the 37th president’s social media profile transform from the familiar Tricky Dick to far more rarified heights. TikTok Nixon is a man of honor, an idealist, a preternaturally gifted statesman armed with acerbic insights into the power of the American media and eerily accurate predictions about the present-day state of Israel, Russia and China — at turns sentimental, even gossipy, but always the doughty defender of the common man.

Not that this is merely a story of some online tickers going steadily upward. On the contrary, Nixon’s social media revival matters in the grubby politics of the here and now. In an age of polarization, and one in which the young are increasingly disenchanted with democracy itself, the growing lionization of the only commander-in-chief to resign in disgrace is a red flag for the republic’s future.

At first glance, Nixon’s online persona is remarkably gentle. There’s a good reason for this: most clips are spliced from soft-soap post-Watergate interviews, when Dick was relaxedly hawking foreign policy tomes that, according to biographer Evan Thomas, were “moderately interesting and sold moderately well”. This is Nixon at rest, keen on sharing homespun wisdom about a life spent in service between his verdicts on Mao and the Shah. “What makes life mean something is purpose — a goal, the battle, the struggle,” he says in one such clip. “Even if you don’t win it.”

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Spend time in Nixonworld, though, and you’ll quickly spot clips far more brazen in their admiration for Tricky Dick. See, for instance, the excerpts from Mad Men in which Don Draper is suddenly captivated by Nixon’s 1969 inauguration address, or when he waxes lyrical about the Republican’s hardscrabble journey to the vice presidency just six years out of the navy — all before that familiar burr interrupts our regular viewing with a series of smash cuts.

Such lionization makes sense if you know where most of these clips come from: the Richard Nixon Foundation, the co-owner of the former president’s library in Yorba Linda, California, and an organization for which the sentence “it was just a burglary” is considered a fair summation of his legacy. The past year has seen the institution not only become an increasingly Trumpy meeting place for the GOP’s great and good, but also such an effective proponent of Nixon across social media that it’s booted many of the spicier White House tapes off the top tier of YouTube search results — and increased its subscriber base by 236%.

For the Nixon connoisseur, this is the historiographical equivalent of seeing the ex-president’s bullfrog jowls gurning through a beachside bodybuilder cut-out. Elements of the overall image are recognizable: Nixon’s mastery of foreign affairs, for example, or his deep-seated suspicion of the media. Yet absent from the picture is the racism, the homophobia — and, let’s not forget, the crimes.

Who watches this stuff? Despite the Boomer flavor of many of the foundation’s in-person events — you, too, can celebrate “the women and girls in your life” with a Title IX fun run — the audience most receptive to the new, hunky Nixon appear to be young, conservative-leaning voters occupying an increasingly polarized media landscape. Raised on a steady media diet of diverse perspectives, fractured across multiple social media platforms (usually TikTok), members of Gen Z are more cynical and anxious than their parents. They also find mainstream news brands increasingly untrustworthy, with only 56% of 18-29-year-olds having a “lot” or “some” trust in national news organizations. That’s down from 62% in 2016, a decline that’s even more pronounced among Millennials.

That mistrust is sharper still among young Republicans, an increasing number of whom wholeheartedly trust the news they consume from social media. Among this cohort is the intellectually impressionable manosphere, for whom Nixon has become a cause célèbre, an appeal that makes sense if you consider the former president’s image of himself as a complex loner misunderstood and maligned by the liberal establishment. “I didn’t know, until Tucker explained it on the show, about Nixon,” podcaster Joe Rogan said last June, referring to a conspiracy theory suggesting that Bob Woodward and the CIA framed the then-president for Watergate. “Nixon, who’s the most popular president in history — that was a government-orchestrated coup!”

As Carlson’s characterization of Nixon implies, it’s easy to see him as a Seventies stand-in for Donald Trump offline too, with both men the undeserving victims of a snobbish liberal establishment determined to preserve its monopoly on power at the expense of the hardworking American public. Republicans are also enthusiastic in echoing Nixon’s dictum that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal” whenever they feel duty-bound to defend the former businessman (turns out, it mostly isn’t.) One good example is Ted Cruz, who has argued that democracy should be decided “at the ballot box” — even as Republicans tried to overturn the 2020 election.

It’s a superficially appealing comparison. Much has been written comparing presidents 47 and 37, mostly about their animosity toward the press, women, ethnic minorities and the rule of law. Similarities in their personalities is also a popular topic. “There is a volcanic center to both men: the ranting, the anger, the paranoid concerns; the hatred,” is how historian Timothy Naftali put it in 2018, speculating that Trump could yet engage in dodgy “Nixonian” behavior. 

They certainly liked each other. “I think that you are one of this country’s great men,” Trump wrote to Nixon in 1982, a few days after the pair had been spotted together at a dining club in New York City. In a series of exchanges, and over the course of one beautiful night in Houston, the two discussed everything from the New Jersey Admirals to the importance of using crowds as “props” during rallies. Pat Nixon even hoped The Donald himself might run for political office in future. “As you can imagine, she is an expert on politics,” wrote her doting husband, “and she predicts that whenever you decide to run for office you will be a winner!”

Trump had that letter framed, later promising he’d hang it in the Oval Office. It’s unclear if he ever did — or indeed whether it served less as a source of inspiration than a warning of what not to do in the White House. At the height of the impeachment speculation, during his first term in 2019, Trump asserted that he wouldn’t suffer the same fate as his long-dead predecessor because he’d never be cowardly enough to resign. Similarly, the 47th president bemoaned Nixon’s reluctance to let wayward staff marinate in their own insubordination before firing them. In fact, a plausible argument can be made for Trump seeing Andrew Jackson, not Tricky Dick, as his primary presidential inspiration. After all, it’s Old Hickory’s portrait, not Nixon’s letter, that takes pride of place in most Oval Office photo ops.

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But if Trump himself has left Nixon behind, his acolytes clearly haven’t. “When it comes to foreign policy,” intoned Vivek Ramaswamy during his abortive run for the GOP nomination in 2023, “the president I most admire is Richard Nixon.” The Californian’s canny insights into the Russian psyche have routinely been cited as inspiration by conservative activists for ending the war in Ukraine, a possibility left unexplored by the Biden administration. “My answer to this whole proposal of […] whether or not the Russians can be trusted is very simply: only if we make agreements which are in their interests to keep,” Nixon told one interviewer. It’s a lesson Trumpworld figures have been more than happy to absorb. “If we aren’t careful,” said ex-Trump advisor Steve Bannon, “it will turn into Trump’s Vietnam. That’s what happened to Richard Nixon. He ended up owning the war and it went down as his war, not Lyndon Johnson’s.”

Ultimately, though, these comparisons can only be taken so far. Trump’s tariffs, and his meetings with Pyongyang’s pound-shop Mao, compare poorly to the scale of the Nixon administration’s achievements in rebuilding US credibility while pretending not to lose in Indochina. That’s because the global outlook of the two men is fundamentally different. Where Trump leads his country abroad as if he were still a rapacious Eighties landlord, Nixon knew that US power rested on leveraging its fragile position as primus inter pares. 

There are, of course, other obvious differences. Where Nixon was personally brave, enlisting in 1941 despite his Quaker faith, Trump said avoiding catching STIs during the Nineties was his own “personal Vietnam” — even as he received a dubious bone spur diagnosis to avoid being drafted into the real thing. Where Trump has made the term “braggadocious” part of his personal brand, meanwhile, Nixon was so socially awkward that he couldn’t look his doctor in the eye and felt duty-bound to apologize to his researcher for chuckling at The Dick van Dyke Show.

All the same, one very obvious similarity between the two men lies in their hatred of what Nixon called the “liberal establishment” — with the former president cited as a source of inspiration among conservative thinkers. Leading the charge has been self-styled Right-wing Leninist Christopher Rufo, who, when he’s not drafting lesson plans for teachers in Florida, argues for Nixon’s elevation as the spiritual father of the modern Republican Party. The ex-president “set the stakes for the American public and established themes that still dominate American politics today,” Rufo wrote in 2023.

According to Rufo, Nixon’s plans to overhaul the bureaucracy; reestablish law and order by smashing Left-wing radical groups; and create a conservative “counter-elite” to supplant liberal reporters form an ideal blueprint for rebuilding America. The result, the activist argues, would be a truly “pluralist republic” that prizes “excellence over diversity, equality over equity, dignity over inclusion, order over chaos”.

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It’s a vision of America that the GOP has been grasping at since 1968 — but one that the conservative movement is closer than ever to achieving. Nixon’s crusade began in the mid-Sixties, in an America that was, though wracked by protests, violent crime and racial segregation, still enamored by a liberal consensus that kept Tricky Dick’s coattails short in 1972. He may have smashed George McGovern in a landslide, yet both Republicans and the public at large quickly turned against him once the full scope of the Watergate scandal came out. Now, though, the GOP dominates all three branches of the US government, egged on by a Right-wing media machine pushing it to erode the ability of its opponents to nominate judges, prevent gerrymandering, exercise the right to vote, or even guarantee a safe transition of power.

Poor Richard. While Nixon was never slow to see opponents in every corner, and certainly wanted to politically sideline as many as possible, these actions were never consciously undertaken to undermine democracy. Were he alive today and somehow operating in our political landscape, maybe things would be different. As Geraldo Rivera ruefully told Trump-supporting presenter Sean Hannity in 2019: “Nixon never would have been forced to resign if you existed in your current state back in 1972, ’73, ’74.”

Surely, though, the emergence of a new Nixon as a conservative Jeremiah is bad enough for the health of the republic. While the White House incumbent is not powerful or motivated enough to kick away the safeguards preventing him from assuming the purple, the 47% of Americans who consider a second civil war is inevitable probably think a figure like that may soon emerge. By then, voters won’t have a Nixon type to kick around anymore, but instead someone far more dangerous.

Trump has never been known for learning on the job. That’s actually what people like about him. Learning on the job suggests adaptability, a character flaw for a public that believes Washington corrupts politicians. His gifts and drawbacks are those he had in 2016 and in 1983. His attorney general nomination of Matt Gaetz, a man who would never have been confirmed by the Senate, was a classic Trump move. It was reminiscent of eight years ago.

American history has produced presidents less capable than Donald Trump — two this century — but never has one done a worse job of staffing his administration than he did in 2016. It was perhaps understandable that a civil service he had accused of corruption was not enthusiastic about his arrival. With some exceptions in the world of trade and finance, top-level bureaucrats carried out a leadership strike of the sort Ayn Rand envisioned in Atlas Shrugged. It was an impasse unprecedented in American history; perhaps the closest analogy was Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s sudden 2003 appointment as prime minister in Turkey — when he was forced to call on unaffiliated Muslim movements to fill technical positions that his pious provincials could not.

Trump found himself with the wrong Republican Party. A man committed to cleaning up government was at the head of a machine that was good for nothing except cutting government, which is a different thing. The only “Trump Republican” was Trump. Since then though, something powerful has got underway in his party — and out of his view. For all Trump’s hesitations, those who believed in the simple idea of disrupting American power relations have begun to network and organize spontaneously. The Trumpians have overrun the Republican Party, turning their conservative establishment adversaries of 2016 (Liz Cheney, for example) into Biden Democrats, and consolidating the remainder around Trump. They have also been whipped into ideological discipline by what they see as the persecution their candidate underwent — at the hands of not just the Biden Administration but also the rebellious civil service. This Trump White House will be run by the hard-driving Floridian Susie Wiles, who believes in his mission so much that she ditched Florida governor Ron DeSantis when he was riding highest in order to join it.

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The Democrats’ power to resist Trumpism, meanwhile, has evaporated. The process might be familiar to those who paid attention to the stymying of Brexit in the UK between 2016 and 2019. Brexit opponents declared in newspapers and before cameras that the British public were having second thoughts, that the execution of Brexit was a shambles, that it had been an impossible project to start with. But it didn’t look that way to the Brexiteers. It appeared the project was being sabotaged from within by a few actors who stood at chokepoints and pulled tricks: Theresa May’s negotiators, Commons speaker, John Bercow, legal activist Gina Miller and the Supreme Court. After more than three years of obstruction, Brexit passed only because of a magnificently synthesized repertoire of counter-strategies devised by Dominic Cummings.

At the same time, the United States was undergoing something analogous. The day after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, an open public resistance started with the so-called Women’s March. Twitter, at the time owned by Jack Dorsey, was aggressively policing Trump supporters’ tweets. There was also a coordinated sabotaging of the Trump Administration from inside. In September 2018 an anonymous top-ranking administration official wrote an astonishing op-ed in The New York Times titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration”, detailing techniques of obfuscation, non-cooperation and leaking within the administration. Things continued like this until Trump’s impeachment in 2019, which was the last thing that happened in the United States before Covid, just as Brexit was the last thing that happened in Britain. Trump failed where Boris Johnson succeeded.

Trumpism never found its Dominic Cummings — someone capable of purging the old party and designing a strategy for the new. In fact, it still has not. Such people are rare because they are temperamentally implausible: they must be both intensely attracted and intensely repelled by government chicanery. The closest Trump came was his aide Steven Miller, then as now described most often as his consigliere — which is a different thing.

Somehow, the tide has turned nonetheless, leaving Democrats in Washington in a mood of utter demoralization. Why, they ask, did the American public, knowing Trump better than it did in previous elections, return him to power? What they cannot see is that the public has come to see wokeness not as a progressive values system but as simply the most important of the Resistance’s bag of tricks.

Trump was indeed discredited by all the new revelations after he left office. But the Resistance discredited itself faster than it discredited him — partly through the various kangaroo-court “trials” to which Democratic Party-connected prosecutors subjected Trump, and partly through campaigns against “disinformation”, which voters rightly came to view as campaigns for censorship. Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, in October 2022, dramatically changed the ground rules of this conflict — there was no longer a reliable way for the Biden Administration to steer news coverage on social media and to bottle up coverage of its own scandals.

The new media environment has given Trump a bit of ideological breathing room. He now aims to staff his administration with activists, as he could not the last time around. There is Kash Patel, the House Intelligence Committee investigator, tapped to become director of the FBI. It was Patel who traced 2017 allegations of Russian interference to a report paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. There is Andrew Ferguson, Trump’s proposed head of the Federal Trade Commission, who sees political boycotts as “concerted refusals to deal”, and thus as anti-trust violations. There is Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic congresswoman and Trump nominee for Director of Central Intelligence, deplored by Democrats for her coolness to Biden’s Ukraine war efforts. Not all of his nominees will be confirmed — but there are at least places on the internet where a robust argument over them can take place. In the surveilled social-media environment that prevailed during his last term, they would have been caricatured and drubbed.

Enhanced access to a public megaphone has made Trump stronger against his own party too. Though he sings the praises of meritocracy, his focus is on loyalty. Pete Hegseth, nominee for defense secretary, has the right orientation for a Trumpian reform of the military: he believes it should be a place for developing “war-fighters”, and wants to purge it of woke training exercises. But his threadbare résumé (army major, TV pundit) and volatile character arose as issues in last week’s hearings. Historically, senators, with their six-year terms, have been sufficiently buffered against bullying to defy presidents on confirmation votes. Trump’s domination of Right-leaning social media, however, seems to be providing him with the information-age equivalent of parliamentary whipping. It has already worked on Iowa senator Joni Ernst, previously a skeptic towards Hegseth, who now says she will vote for him.

Trumpism held together in the face of relentless resistance because it actually turned out to be about something real, even if Trump never fully understood the varied discontents for whom he had somehow became a tribune. Time has revealed his movement as not only more anti-woke but also more multi-racial and more high-tech than it first appeared. And some Trump cadres have a more sophisticated understanding now of why and how the government is failing.

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With no stake in the old Beltway elite, they speak of power being disaggregated — radically disaggregated. It is not just that they seek innovative ways of delivering government services, like the people who urged privatization in the Eighties and public-private partnerships in the Nineties. The information-age understanding, right or wrong, is that there are certain cutting-edge things that the government shouldn’t be doing at all. Why are there two private individuals — Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos — with more ambitious space programs than NASA? What is a treasury in an age of cryptocurrencies? Might Syria’s acquisition of a neutral security force, a few trade relationships, a couple of infrastructure projects, be as good for the country as any “peace plan”? We begin to understand the wild speculation that Trump has indulged in discussing, for instance, acquiring Greenland. These could all be crazy ideas. But unlike earlier critiques of bureaucracy, they appear set to revolutionize government itself, not just the way it buys things.

Such ideas could also be the greatest source of tension in the Trump Administration. To run the world’s largest country — to say nothing of the empire connected to it — is a task of consummate intellectual complexity. Trumpism needs a lot of brain fuel, and the establishment still has a grip on most credentialed intellects. The constitutional understanding that cabinet advisers be hired with the “advice and consent” of the Senate is at odds with the role that will be played at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) by Elon Musk and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy. (Assuming the latter is not appointed to fill the Ohio Senate seat being vacated by incoming vice president J.D. Vance, as has been rumored in recent days.) But more importantly, the agenda of such informal “kitchen cabinet” appointees risks violating the basic populist economic bargain of Trumpism.

This bargain, as practiced in Trump’s first term, was to sacrifice some of GDP in order to assure its better distribution. The public seems to like it. Trump backed a strike by the International Longshoremen’s Association aimed at blocking the automation of three dozen American seaports, winning him applause from trade unions when the strike was settled in early January. But it will be costly for shippers and consumers, and the world economy is not traveling in that direction.

When Trump left office in 2021, artificial intelligence was no more than a twinkle in Silicon Valley’s eye. But the current understanding of AI complicates things terribly. As the entrepreneur Dario Amodei put it in an influential recent paper, once AI kicks in — and that could be before the end of the decade — it will allow us to compress a century’s worth of science into five or ten years. So the country that locks in a two-year advantage could dominate the world for the foreseeable future. It could be Trump’s America, but it could also be China.

An administration that looks at things this way will be desperately activist and prone to take positions that had not been thinkable just a few months before. Dark visions of technological acceleration appear likely to pit the most energetic (capitalistic) parts of the Trump base against the most loyal (populist) part. The spat between Elon Musk and Steve Bannon over visas for engineers could be only the beginning of a wider conflict. The Trump coalition, as mighty as it is, may soon face a choice between tempering the populism that is its raison d’être or incurring the wrath of the tech bosses who have rallied to its side. That is the challenge that will determine whether Trumpism outlives Trump.

In reality, Trump might be the most radically libertarian commander-in-chief in US history. This, contrary to the fears of #Resistance liberals who created an entire cottage industry devoted to fighting Trumpian dictatorship; contrary, too, to the dreams of populists, “post-liberals,” and others in the so-called New Right who imagined that Trump would reconcile American conservatism with the state and promote the use of government power for Right-wing ends.

The fascist theory of Trump remains prevalent among progressives to this day, and received a boost in the closing days of the election when a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, and former Trump chief of staff John Kelly went on record calling Trump a fascist — which allowed Harris, Hillary Clinton, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and a whole host of Democratic leaders to pile on with the fascist assertion. In The New Yorker, the Yale historian Timothy Snyder greeted the news of Trump’s electoral victory by calling Trump a fascist along with his “close fascist allies,” Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin.

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Trump is vindictive, no doubt. By one estimate, he has made more than 100 threats to “investigate, prosecute, imprison, or otherwise punish his perceived opponents”. But fascism has come to be a slippery label. As The Washington Examiner has archly put it, “fascism is anything Democrats don’t like”.

The libertarian explanation, by contrast, is becoming more plausible by the day. Trump has made no secret of his leanings in this regard. In May, he spoke at the Libertarian Party National Convention — the “first president in history” to do so, as he boasted. His address, in which he attempted to stake his libertarian credentials, was remarkably on-message: “I will be a true friend to libertarians in the White House, and I am proud to be the only president in 70 years who started no new wars. I took on the military-industrial complex. I broke the stranglehold on neocons and warmongers on the Republican Party…. I withdrew from the Paris Accord. I withdrew from the anti-gun UN arms treaty, and I withdrew from the corrupt and very expensive World Health Organization”. He concluded by saying: “We want libertarian votes because you stand for what we stand for”.

The address was a somewhat strange spectacle, since Trump was booed by the crowd through much of it. Deep-dyed libertarians from the crowd shouted that he was a “tyrant” and “had crushed our rights”; one held up a sign calling him a “wannabe dictator”. But Trump’s position was that he had simply made libertarianism work tactically by tying it to the GOP. “What’s the purpose of the Libertarian Party getting 3%?” he argued with the crowd, inviting it to join forces with him.

Trump’s October interview with Joe Rogan — featuring his largest audience of the entire election cycle — was distinctly libertarian, as well. He argued for eliminating the income tax and railed against government regulation. He declared an intent to remove all governmental impediments to business, to make government truly as small as possible.

In tandem with his tax-eliminating, government-downsizing rhetoric, Trump developed a partnership with a number of Wall Street and Silicon Valley barons, culminating in Musk throwing his massive financial weight behind the GOP ticket. The two things — the libertarian rhetoric and the new alliances in tech and finance — went hand-in-hand, resulting in policy moves that should have utterly confounded Trump’s populist fans during the campaign.

Take Trump’s stance on legislation to ban TikTok unless the social-media platform separates itself from its Chinese owners. It should have been a perfectly Trumpian policy, striking at two birds, Big Tech and “Chy-na,” with one stone. Yet Trump came out against the ban, having earlier backed it, without offering a coherent explanation. It was notable, though, that one of Trump’s big libertarian backers, the hedge-fund honcho Jeff Yass, controls a minority stake in TikTok estimated to be worth north of $30 billion as of spring 2024.

Another telling campaign moment came when Trump appeared on an X (formerly Twitter) space with Musk and congratulated the world’s richest man for swiftly firing workers who organise to defend their mutual interests. A better Harris campaign might have made more of that unguarded moment for the way it belied Trump’s pro-worker rhetoric. Even Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters and a rare trade-union leader willing to work with the GOP, was forced to accuse Trump and Musk of waging “economic terrorism”.

On immigration, too, Trump has allowed his libertarian instincts to run wild. This might appear surprising, since border restrictionism was and remains one of the signature elements of his agenda. But opposing chaos at the border isn’t incompatible with a libertarian stance. Many libertarians object to illegal migration, even as they support making it easier for labor to cross borders as a means to lowering its price.

During his campaign, for example, Trump said that the advent of artificial intelligence requires the United States to bring in “more people.” He also offered green cards to all graduating foreign university students, even those taking two-year associates degrees. These stances should have raised concerns among Trump’s populist supporters, but their enthusiasm swept all doubt.

Now, as his administration takes decisive shape, Trump is translating his libertarian instincts into personnel choices. The planned Department of Governmental Efficiency — headed by Musk and the venture capitalist Vivek Ramaswamy — is only the most visible. Musk has claimed that he could eliminate up to $2 trillion worth of expenditures from the federal government. In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Musk and Ramasaway described themselves empowering a “lean team of small-government crusaders … to cut the federal government down to size.”

Likewise, on the use of H1B visas that allow tech firms to import cheap workers, Trump sided with the likes of Musk and Ramaswamy — over and against his populist base. Last month, the president-elect told the New York Post, “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them. I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.”

Other personnel choices bespeak similar intuitions: from snubbing his first-term tariff guru Robert Lighthizer for the top job at the Treasury in favor of Wall Street stalwart Scott Bessent; to tapping Howard Lutnick, another Wall Street man who has advocated for eliminating the income tax, to serve as commerce secretary. True, there are a handful of exceptions, such as his choice to lead the Department of Labor, Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer of Oregon, a rare Republican who favors strengthening collective bargaining; and Gail Slater, an antitrust crusader nominated to the Federal Trade Commission.

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These exceptions damn Trump in the eyes of “official” Washington libertarians, who view him as not nearly pure or orthodox enough. But Trump isn’t pure or orthodox on anything, and the salient question isn’t whether he qualifies as libertarian for the purists, but the overall makeup of his political inclinations. On that front, his plans for a massive reduction in government are a better fit for libertarianism than for populism, much less fascism.

This isn’t to play down the Trump threat from a progressive perspective. Libertarianism is a naïve ideology that risks cutting deeply into the core functions of a state. What’s insidious about libertarianism is that it looks good at first. Listening to Trump talk about over-taxation and overregulation with Rogan, I couldn’t help but nod along. The problem is the erosion of state capacity and mounting red ink.

In his first term, Trump increased the deficit by $8 trillion — a direct result of tax cuts that endeared him to Wall Street while slashing the US tax base without generating any other source of revenue to replace it. This time around, Trump and the Republicans are determined to maintain his earlier tax cuts while dramatically diminishing the state. That’s a recipe for a plutocratic order that rewards those at the top, while squeezing the working- and lower-middle-class Americans who sent Trump back to the Oval Office.

There is simply no way to trim $2 trillion from the federal budget, as Co-President Musk aims to do, without eating into entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. So-called entitlement reform is deeply unpopular among nearly all social segments, Republicans and Democrats — except for the Wall Street fee-skimmers who’d benefit from administering privatized benefits and, of course, libertarian think-tankers in Washington.

Trump’s penchant for pulling all attention toward himself is reminiscent of a Mussolini type and thus seems to foreshadow an authoritarian takeover. But real authoritarianism takes work that Trump is uninvested in — and a state he’s unwilling to fund. He has a businessman’s revulsion for taxes and regulations. The other aspects of his worldview, including ones that seem to contradict his aversion to the state, amount to tactical maneuvring in service of his deeper pro-business agenda. That puts him in the libertarian camp, whether the libertarians themselves like it or not.

As a patriotic American, and as a working journalist who believes in the sanctity of that role, I should note here that the only vote I’ve ever cast in a presidential election was for Willie Nelson, the country and western star and a symbol of reconciliation between rednecks and hippies. Still, I was eager to hear what Trump would say. To be more accurate, given my level of inebriation in sub-freezing Montana weather, with snow-globe snow gently falling outside the windows of a local bar, I was eager to mix the some whiskey with the tonalities of America’s greatest living bullshit artist and teller of tall tales. Trump’s voice is a powerful source of connection to the American literary and comic tradition, going back to the Rat Pack and to Mark Twain. I was ready to hear his magnificent instrument resonate with the promise of a better future, a future filled with laughter — and joy, even.

At 3am, West Palm Beach time, Trump’s large family stood with him onstage looking chipper and attractive. They were joined there by the celebrity validators that made Trump’s third run for the White House seem less angry and more inclusive than his prior one-man shows.

At 78, Trump’s relentless pitchman’s energy is at once diminished, and at the same more genial. And no wonder. Since his loss, in 2020, when he claimed that the election was stolen from him — and his opponents claimed that he tried to seize power through illegal means — Trump had been subjected to a whole-of-society assault by the American elite that would have killed most men 20 years younger, including those who don’t eat cheeseburgers most days for lunch. After 116 indictments, an armed raid on his home, the jailing of his business associates, and the looming threat of bankruptcy, followed by two and even three in-person rallies a day for the better part of a year, which led to him being shot in the head by a would-be assassin, the fact that Trump is still standing upright, let alone greeting a crowd as President-elect, is clearly a miracle – the biggest miracle since the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, I can hear Trump saying. Now, he is about to speak. The TV above the bar remains silent.

“Honey, have you ever been in a bar before?” the bartender is asking me. For the past 10 minutes or so, we’ve been politely going back and forth about whether she can turn up the volume on the bar’s television set. All I can hear around me as Trump starts to speak is the noise of a late Tuesday night at the Wagon Wheel.

Sure, I’ve been in plenty of bars before, I answer. “Well, then you know that politics is a subject that men get angry over, and I don’t want that in my bar,” the waitress answers matter-of-factly. “You can read the captions on the TV.”

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As sensible as her precautions might seem, there’s an undertone to her replies that reminds me that I am in a town, and not in the countryside. Even out here in the West, in a solid red state that epitomises cowboy culture, it is the divide between urban and exurban places, not the division between so-called red and blue states, that is culturally defining. People living in Brooklyn Heights, or in Austin, Texas or in Missoula, Montana or in Grand Rapids, Iowa, all tend to have more in common with each other than they do with people living even a mere 20 miles away.

“For fuck’s sake, this is history,” I suggest, as I watch Trump’s lips moving. “It’s not politics. Everyone can all put their prejudices aside for five minutes s and hear the man.” She purses her lips, and signals it’s a no-go. Then she offers me a free seltzer.

“We must protect our geniuses, protect our super-geniuses”, the caption-writer translates, as Trump’s lips form grandiloquent and hilarious phrases introducing Elon Musk and his love for rockets. “We have so few of them.”

Trump is clearly one. He’s an American genius, an original of a type that began with P.T. Barnum, and also includes Elon Musk. But neither Barnum nor Musk could ever become President twice, and defeat the entire American power structure. I wish to God I could hear him speak. After overcoming 100+ indictments, and having his X account revoked, the man deserves to have his moment here, in this bar.

I don’t need to hear Trump’s stunned-looking critics in the Party commentariat speak, though. The expressions on their pallid faces say it all. They are reckoning with the extent of their loss, which is turn related to their collective sense of self-importance — which is belied both by tonight’s result and by their viewership numbers. Having cratered public trust in their profession over the past decade by routinely lying to their audience on behalf of the government, which they identified in turn with the Democratic Party, the country’s self-identified defenders of democracy can fume all they want about Trump’s authoritarian, anti-democratic, fascist, Hitlerian leanings. The rest of America is as deaf to their blather as I am.

Praising Elon Musk, the country’s most successful technologist, Trump looks more like an avuncular Caribbean vacation package or waterbed salesman than a would-be Hitler. Meanwhile, party hacks like Joy Reid and the political consultants turned “commentators” like David Axelrod, along with supposed “straight news” types like Jake Tapper of CNN, who had all long ago become indistinguishable from each other, by virtue of drinking the Party Kool-Aid are waving their hands at the cameras like they were calling for smelling salts. But once lost, the trust of an audience is hard to win back.

Trump has also lost a step or two himself. His speeches, once gorgeous arias of invective, innuendo and insult comedy, delivered with the snappy timing of a Vegas Rat Pack headliner, have been transformed into rambling arabesques, like the musings of a slightly dotty family patriarch at the Thanksgiving table. Let us bow our heads, while Loopy Uncle Donald tells us about the deal he made with a Saudi Prince on a golf course. Then everyone can eat more pumpkin pie.

Trump had also learned a trick or two along the way, though. He graciously shares the stage, and allows the importance and accomplishments of others to validate his own role as MC. His timing clearly couldn’t have been better. Five years of Covid laws, a stagnant economy, direct and indirect government censorship of social media, official lying and gaslighting on every subject from trans surgeries to the efficacy of masking to the startling numbers of illegal immigrants entering the country to the spectacle of a dottering Joe Biden being barely able to remember his own name, had left most of the country dispirited and ready for change.

As the evening ends, Trump and the political movement he founded will likely control not just the White House but also the Senate, the House, and also the Supreme Court, giving Trump an actual, real-world chance to fulfill his mandate to Make America Great Again. Even though, after a decade of near-constant repetition of the slogan by adherents and detractors, no one can say with any real certainty what it now means.

* * *

As it turns out, the American people are still allowed to vote, regardless of whether their betters decry their choices as racist, sexist, short-sighted, and above all anti-democratic. It’s a paradox that the country’s genius-level elites routinely fail to acknowledge, because they are all profoundly in agreement. We must protect our democracy from those evil anti-democratic forces, American voters, who vote for Donald Trump against the expert guidance of their betters, meaning us.

Meanwhile, the lurching of an increasingly overbearing and at the same time increasingly anarchic and incompetent American state had managed to alarm many Americans who were previously more alarmed by Trump. Over the past weeks, they have been turning out in larger numbers than anyone had imagined — defying the expressed preferences and instructions of the American’ elite’s chief tutelary figure, Barack Obama, who had campaigned very publicly and hard for Kamala Harris, often overshadowing the candidate herself. Obama’s role in the Harris campaign was truthfully less strange than the fact that the former President somehow remained in Washington after his time in the White House was over, instead taking meetings in his Kalorama mansion, which is hardly the most valuable entry in his bulging portfolio of luxury properties — which also includes high Gilded Age mansions in Hawaii and Martha’s Vineyard. But it was surely the most important, serving as the centre of his unprecedented Shadow Presidency.

As the leader of the Democratic Party, Obama was hardly a pretender to power in Washington. Rather, between 2008 and the evening of 5 November 2024, he was usually the foremost power in the land. After serving two elected terms in the White House, Obama then set up and captained the so-called “Resistance” to Trump — an activity that was contrary to all prior American norms and practices. After Trump left, Obama stayed in Washington and continued his role as unelected Party Leader during what had been advertised as the Biden Presidency.

Obama’s method of avoiding scrutiny from the pliant DC press was entirely in character, alternately drawing back into the shadows and then, out of whatever ego weakness, announcing that he was the true mover of events. Free from normative oversight or responsibility, he and his retainers could also avoid answering questions about the size or sources of his personal fortune, which was rumoured to amount to somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion. As a private citizen, Obama didn’t have to answer questions. He could have it both ways — state power, with no public responsibility.

Until he misstepped. By compelling Biden to withdraw in favour of Harris, who turned out to be an even worse candidate than a senile old man who had begun to resemble a badly taxidermied deer, Obama broke the unspoken agreement that had put him beyond scrutiny. Disappearing the sitting President from the Democratic Party ticket against his will, for reasons that were obviously contrary to what the press had been telling Americans about Biden’s incredibly acute mental functioning up, and replacing him with a candidate that no one in the party had actually voted for, required some sort of comment, however brief. It made it impossible, if only for a week or two, to maintain the fiction that Obama was simply living in Washington DC while staying out of politics. If Biden was senile, then who was actually running the country? Who had enough clout to order the President’s removal from the ticket?

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The answer in both cases was Obama. And now he was on the hook not only for Kamala Harris, but retroactively for the more general mess that he and his operatives had helped to make of the country. Everywhere from Harvard University, his alma mater, where he helped install a repeat plagiarist as the University’s President, to the Middle East, which went up in flames the moment he was able to re-animate his Iran Deal, which appeared to be even stupider — if not as expensive — as George W. Bush’s determination to transform Afghanistan and Iraq into Western-style democratic societies at the point of a gun, the Party Leader’s Midas Touch-in-reverse was evident, even if no one ever breathed a single word of criticism.

Yet Americans, of all races and creeds, felt themselves to be living in a dystopian version of Alice in Wonderland, controlled by an unseen hand — and they didn’t like it. If the elite pollsters and expert predictors who had failed to foresee a Trump win had familiarised themselves with American history, instead of parroting the talking points of Obama and his operatives, they would have seen a country eager for a renewal of the freedoms that the vast majority of Americans embrace as their birthright.

Seeing Americans as one people, with a common culture and character, shaped by a common history, is not something that America’s new elites know how to do, though. From kindergarten on, they are taught otherwise. Ivy League universities, the crucible in which the new class has been forged, base admissions and hiring decisions not on measures of objective performance, but on their ranking in the ever-shifting hierarchies of Party-sanctioned identity groups. The ability to sort Americans into bureaucratic categories like BIPOC, MENA, LGBTQ+ and other alphabet soup constructions is in fact the defining skill of Obama-era elites. It signifies mastery of in-group codes that help the Democratic Party manage its own top-down constituencies, which are regimented by political operatives and NGO organisers, paid for by billionaire foundations, and embodied in bureaucratic regulations, executive orders, census categories and other legally-binding schemes meant to overcome historical American notions of equality. That’s how the party machine operates.

Now, in one night, the Obama machine, which he built on the model of the Chicago Democratic Party machine, and which he used to run the country, including the prestige institutions and the media, through a combination of bureaucratic capture and social pressure, accentuated by control of large tech platforms, was finally melting down. No wonder the press was in shock. None of the lines that they had been given could be reconciled with the numbers onscreen.

A reckoning will surely come. At the very least, the time has now arrived for Barack Obama to leave Washington and exit American politics, now that his Shadow Presidency — which proved to be even more counter-productive and chaotic than Trump’s first term in office — has gone down in flames.

Meanwhile, the gap between what America’s elites believe, and what the rest of the country believes, has never been wider, probably not since the late 19th century. Back then, Gilded Age America was ruled by a tight group of tycoons and their retainers who positioned themselves as the heirs to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, the President and the General who together led the Civil War. The further the Republican Party traveled from the Civil War, the more the busts of Lincoln and Grant resembled window-dressing for the extraordinary fortunes of a new oligarchy that traveled in private trains, summered in Newport, and bought every available Old Master painting in Europe to decorate their lavish houses. Economically and morally, the so-called Robber Barons — Morgans, Rockefellers, Goulds, Fricks, Carnegies, Whitneys, Harrimans — had an easy time of it, enjoying the benefits of cheap immigrant labour while flattering themselves as the rightful heirs of the Party that ended slavery. With the exception of Carnegie, a self-made Scotsman and innovative industrialist who gave away his fortune to establish America’s system of public libraries, history doesn’t remember them kindly.

The Democratic Party that Bill and Hillary Clinton built in the Nineties, and Barack Obama then took in a decidedly more radical direction after 2012, won’t be remembered kindly by Americans either. The father of the modern Democratic Party, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was the country’s greatest political leader during what became known as the American Century. Roosevelt kept the country going during the Great Depression, and set it on the path to victory in the Second World War while creating a social safety net for the poor. Remarkably, every American President up until Bill Clinton in 1992 was either a protegee of Roosevelt or at least a private in his army.

The political alliance between urban ethnic machine politicians, including black urban political leaders, and Southern whites that FDR led also undercut the power of the Wasp class, successors to the New England Puritans, who dominated America’s class system and the country’s economy following the Civil War. By curbing their cultural, political, and economic influence, Roosevelt made possible the rise of the American middle class, which made America great, and also more equal.

The Clintons’ embrace of Wall Street and of international trade treaties was the window through which America’s old elites — rooted both in the Northeast as well as in San Francisco — climbed back into history. The China trade flourished, as did Democratic Party’s new Wall Street clients — at the expense of the Party’s traditional working-and-middle class constituencies. Obama brought Silicon Valley’s formerly libertarian-oriented founders on board the gravy train by promising them protection from populists like Bernie Sanders and from his own crew of high-end Chicago shakedown artists. In return, they would pay taxes to the party through campaign and NGO contributions and DEI hiring. Through this new political wiring, Obama completed the transformation of FDR’s Democrats into Gilded Age Republicans.

It will be hard for Donald Trump to top that. But maybe he will. Maybe Elon Musk will entirely revamp the Federal government. Maybe he will actually colonise Mars. Meanwhile, if Trump understands one thing, it’s that America is not Europe, or Asia, or Iraq, or Brazil. American elites come and go, while the capacity for sudden, radical, wide-eyed self-invention and leaps of innovation remain the country’s defining trait.

What outsiders tend to miss is that America was never meant to be stable. It is and has always been an inferno, the epitome of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction. The wonder and freedom and heartbreak of American life is that, sooner or later, everything is consumed in the furnace. For all his wealth and success, Elon Musk’s children may worship other gods. His grandchildren may end up in a trailer park, smoking meth. McKinsey consultants with Harvard degrees may wind up unemployed or selling bottled war. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the country’s most eminent environmental lawyer and the closest thing the Democratic Party has to royalty, may become an antivaccine heretic, be broadly mocked and humiliated by the elite and by the less imaginative members of his own family, run for President, endorse Donald Trump, take on the Big Pharma and Big Ag, and Make America Healthy Again. Or not. All anyone can say for sure is that attempts to game the American system are doomed to failure.

The bigger lesson being that America is just too big — and too wild, and too destructive, and rooted in the idea of individual freedom — for any self-styled “elite” to ride the horse for very long, without being thrown off.

On October 7, 2023, savages murdered, raped, and kidnapped 1,200 Israeli citizens. American Jews reacted by voting for the Democrats.

This November, blacks, Hispanics, gay and straight Americans decided they’d had enough of Government corruption, incompetence, malversation, contempt, and crime and voted for a return to common sense and the protections of the Constitution. They forsook identity politics, save to identify themselves as Americans. Absent from the roll call of groups rebranding themselves as citizens were the Jews.

The Obama-Biden-Harris regime coddled Iran, the sponsor of World Terrorism; they admonished Netanyahu to exorcise “restraint”, not to go into Gaza, nor to bomb Iran. Not only did Harris “cut” him in his visit to Congress, she arguably cost herself the election, sucking up to supposed Muslim voters by bypassing Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as a running mate. She chose instead a grotesque nonentity, who’d abandoned Minneapolis to rioters.

Christian and Muslim citizens, across the country, rejected the Democrats and voted as Americans, for American power, and for peace.

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They saved the Jewish State.

A Democrat victory would have signalled Israeli isolation. Iran would have escalated, compelled Israel to strike, and brought about a World War. They had made it plain that the United States looked with disfavour on the right of the Jewish State to survive.

To my fellow American Jews: what in the world do you think you were looking at during the last four years? Jewish students were harassed and terrified on campuses receiving Government funds, antisemitic brutality was not given the status of “Hate Crimes”, our President and Vice President shunned their constitutionally mandated duties to greet the Prime Minister of not only a foreign power, but of our supposed ally. Congressionally voted funds for Israel defence were withheld by executive fiat. Our government issued continual calls for Israeli “restraint”, while withholding similar requests from Iran and her proxies.

And my fellow Jews voted for these people.

It is a mistake to suggest that he voted against his own best interests. But what is the American Jew’s benefit in voting Democratic?

The Democrats were the party of immigrants: my grandparents and parents, the first American Generation. Republicans, in my youth, were (fairly reliably) identified as Country Club Wasps — the party of Big Business, while the Dems were for the worker, the unions, and so on. Those were the party’s log-lines.

The Democrats were also the party of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, and later “Affirmative Action”, and its bastard child, DEI.

But the new arrivals voted Democrat and have continued doing so until today. Are they just “passing”?

Other minority groups have not only abandoned the Big Stick of the Left, but identity politics toute entière. They voted as citizens. They stood up, not to promote “their party”, but to protect their home. Our country.

One cannot have a country without borders. One can have one where the government mandates sexual indoctrination of children, blacklisting, persecution of political opponents — but that country will not be that United States of which we are citizens.

It is said that the most convinced liberal will change his politics when the rock comes through the window. But the rock did so a year ago, and American Jews criticised the victims for preferring existence to annihilation.

For 2,000 years, we Jews didn’t have a country. We survived by accepting the various strictures of those governments which grudgingly allowed us (intermittently) to live; and when the strictures abated (to whatever extent) we called it a blessing. And voted, for example, for Franklin Roosevelt “A friend of the Working Man”, whose administration sent thousands of potential immigrant Jews back to their deaths in the ovens.

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We grew up with the slander of “Jewish Guilt” — that the Jews were, somehow, children of Original Sin, which could only be expunged by good works, and a dedication to whatever identified itself as social justice.

But Jewish anxiety is not caused by insufficient compassion, it is caused by insufficient Judaism. We cannot escape “the hot thumbprint of God” on our hearts. If we could, we would have assimilated millennia ago.

“I am Jewish but not That Jewish,” or “but I’m not Observant,” or, “but I despise this man Netanyahu,” and so on, are the utterances of fugitives, willing to vote for their own annihilation, rather than face their Jewishness.

But in what does this Jewishness consist? Each person must, of course, answer it for him or herself. The Torah is a traditional guide; its advice, strictures and contradictions and their consideration, are certainly more productive and more rational than the absurd blather of legacy media.

The world is corrupt, and has always been so, as human nature is corrupt. The Bible teaches that is because we’ve fallen away from God; the media, because of Donald Trump and Republican deplorables.

And, yet, the Democratic Party and their chaos has been defeated by our fellow citizens.

The Gay Rights Movement’s slogan, “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it,” is wisdom. Antisemitism is not the Jews’ problem, but that of our opponents.

To my fellows, you can be proud you are an American. Do so, and you will, subsequently, be proud you’re a Jew.

I’m not a political insider, but I’m hardly a neutral observer: I count many of those now celebrating in Washington among my friends. As a Brit, citizen of Schrödinger’s 51st state, I don’t get to vote; but I broadly share that cabbie’s assessment. And for all Trump’s idiosyncrasies, he is vastly preferable to the alternative. And everyone needs to calm down: this isn’t the dawn of American fascism. Rather, Trump’s election confirms that however stagnant things remain in Britain, in Washington democracy is working as it should — and history is well and truly back. Even Francis Fukuyama agrees.

Cabbie conversations are a journalistic cliché, but my driver’s outlook tallied with that of the American electorate — and with that of the now politically ascendant American New Right. Far from representing mere bigotry, ignorance, or nostalgia, this has emerged as a bracingly radical Right-wing worldview, that’s now fully articulated, widely shared, and coherent on its own terms.

A new book marks just how far these ideas have permeated Washington’s conservative institutions — and where some of the battle lines may, perhaps, be drawn over the next few years. Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington To Save America (HarperCollins) is written by Kevin Roberts, who has served since 2021 as head of the Heritage Foundation. Heritage originated the now-notorious “Project 2025”, a 900-page policy wishlist subsequently disavowed by Trump and which, nonetheless, featured heavily in Kamala Harris’ campaigning. In the wake of the furore it caused, Project 2025 has lived on as a series of internet jokes about cartoon-villain policies such as prison camps for fat people, or trapping the souls of prominent liberals in crystals. At its heart, though, more than specific policies, lay a project of institutional rewiring, and list-building for a putative second Trump administration: the two elements analysts agreed were critically missing from Trump’s implementation strategy in 2016.

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Politics is proverbially the art of the possible; while it’s easy to spill ink on so colourful a figure as Trump, how far he’s able to deliver on his voters’ hopes rests heavily on those around him. And here, early indications are that the core aim of Project 2025 — staffing — will deliver. Notably, one of its key contributors, former ICE director Tom Homan, has already been announced as “border czar”. Nor is the personnel project confined to leaders: institutions such as American Moment, formed in 2021 to train young New Right-aligned Hill staffers, are now enjoying their titular moment. It’s a far cry from the turmoil back in 2016. In America at least, the realignment is here to stay.

What will that realignment look like? Perhaps more than the 900 pages of Project 2025, Roberts’ readable, polemical Dawn’s Early Light captures one of the key sensibilities percolating through this new (re)aligned administration. And this isn’t just a bit of policy tinkering here and there. It’s a whole worldview, that’s comprehensively displaced the 20th-century free-market outlook Roberts dismisses in his book as characteristic of “wax-museum conservatives”. Indeed, Roberts’ own 2021 appointment as director of Heritage, until relatively recently one of Con Inc’s institutional bastions, is a case in point. So, too, is the man who wrote the foreword to Dawn’s Early Light: New Right leading light J.D. Vance, now Vice President-elect of the United States.

Opponents may prefer nutpicking fringe voices in this movement, for clickbait critiques. But Roberts’ book is the fullest articulation I’ve seen to date of the mainstream version. And while nothing he proposes is “extreme”, except within the narrow Overton window set by Trump’s enemies, nor is this mere status-quo conservatism. Roberts quotes Gustav Mahler’s famous description of tradition as representing not “the worship of ashes” but “the preservation of fire”.

And fire recurs as a metaphor throughout the book, whether the light of tradition, or (figuratively) burning down rules, beliefs, and institutions perceived as inimical to national renewal. If this sets him at odds with the “fusionist” conservative settlement that preceded the New Right, it flies still more fiercely in the teeth of the Great Awokening. But this isn’t straightforwardly a partisan Republican/Democrat divide. Roberts frames his side as the “Party of Creation” in contrast to his enemies’ “Party of Destruction”, whose end goal he characterises as a “conspiracy against nature”.

This conspiracy attacks what he calls “the permanent things”: the natural family, the importance of faith, the necessity of strong community ties, the dignity of work, and the common (national) good. In aggregate, it’s a war “against ordered, civilised societies, against common sense and normal people” coordinated by “political, corporate, and cultural elites” whose interests diverge radically from “those of ordinary Americans”. But these are not, or not only, Democrats: Roberts characterises his enemies as “the Uniparty”.

Against this Uniparty, he draws a metaphor from forest management, proposing a “controlled burn” of everything that supports its continued ascendancy. What does Roberts propose to burn, and renew? He is, as he acknowledges in the book, one of the numerous Catholics that throng the New Right’s intelligentsia, and this comes through especially in the chapters on family and education. But while much of the Democrat freakout over Project 2025 centred on the document’s approach to reproductive technologies, Roberts’ framing of the family theme touches only very lightly on these contentious topics. Here, Roberts focuses instead on a distinctly Catholic-inflected call to re-order policy and the economy around the natural family, understood as the linchpin of a flourishing social fabric.

He describes how Heritage has implemented this approach internally, with a slew of flexible and remote working policies designed to support young families.He boasts that this is already paying off in a “Heritage baby boom”, along with improved ability to retain young conservative talent. In a similar way, he argues, all American domestic policy should be re-ordered with flourishing families at its heart.

His views on education are just as passionate. Roberts co-founded one of the many classical schools that have sprung up in the USA in recent decades, a movement that emphasises education as character formation via the Western canonical tradition. Against this, he sees modern mainstream schools as “godless assembly lines” whose aim, far from “shaping character”, is to create “obedient little comrades who think morality is a construct and nature is an illusion”: mere interchangeable cogs in the globalist, Uniparty machine.

I get the sense that Roberts himself might be happy to see all of America’s kids educated according to the classical model. But he stops short of proposing anything so top-down, merely prescribing “universal school choice”. But if the family and education chapters are more detailed on worldview than policy, the book gets crunchier and more combative in the chapters addressing foreign policy, the economy, and elites.

Roberts, who describes himself as a “recovering neocon” views DC’s “foreign policy Blob” as a crucial foe. This Blob comprises an alliance between “liberal internationalists” focused on globalising human rights and democracy at gunpoint, and “neoconservatives” whose interest is more American hard power. Taken together, it’s a bastion of a “woke imperialism” he views in much the same terms as my cabbie last week: that is, resources wasted on foreign entanglements of minimal relevance to America, and that would be better spent in line with the national interest.

In Roberts’ view, it’s fundamentally un-conservative to propose socially engineering other societies, let alone at gunpoint. Besides, he argues, the world has changed: the neocons’ reality has already disappeared. America is no longer the sole hegemon. It faces multipolar near-peer rivals, risks grave overstretch with military commitments on multiple fronts, and has allowed its domestic arms industry to deteriorate to a degree that throws its capacity for self-defence into question. His proposal aligns with other signals emanating from the Trump camp: burden-shifting in Europe, negotiations with Putin over Ukraine, and — significant in the light of the New Right’s overall Gramscian streak — greater transparency about foreign lobbying in Washington.

But Roberts reserves his fiercest polemic for the deracinated, deculturated, corporatist Davos class, and the “sham economy” that serves their interests. He denounces this group as “un-American”, and as having presided parasitically over a hollowing-out of America’s middle class via managerialism, de-industrialisation, and the globalisation of finance. This fake economy, he argues, should be dismantled in favour of “free enterprise and meaningful work”. He focuses particularly on those who deal with China as though it’s a friend or neutral party, when it’s better understood in Schmittian terms as a political enemy, castigating all those Americans (including Hunter Biden) in the elite class, now busily at work whitewashing, trading with, and selling assets and IP to this enemy.

Perhaps the most hot-button issue in cab-driver terms — immigration — features mainly in the negative. It’s a feature of the “globalist” worldview that seeks to dissolve borders and treat “immigrants and natives as interchangeable replacement parts” while crushing all dissent via managerial tyranny. In sum, this results in a post-national corporatism that is, he argues, “functionally the same” as “socialism”.

I found this last claim less than wholly convincing, though perhaps it plays well with mainstream Republicans. Even so, I’m curious to see how much of his programme of dismantling monopolies, “re-nationalising the elite” and waging all-out war on “consolidation, cartelization, regulatory capture, DEI mandates, and ESG” makes it from theory into practice. For much of what Roberts outlines here wouldn’t sound out of place coming from Bernie Sanders. And yet, while Trump’s shrilly apocalyptic haters are mistaken to expect his administration to be objectively more oligarchic in its funders or outlook than the one that preceded it, it’s hardly oligarch-free. And it’s reasonable to assume that these wealthy individuals are already hard at work arguing for carve-outs from any putative programme of economic populism. If Amazon plutocrat Jeff Bezos is any indication, most oligarchs are pragmatists; and Bezos is hardly the only member of the ultra-rich to have read the tea-leaves.

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Notoriously, and to the fury of Trump’s enemies, many in Silicon Valley have, too. And where this latter group is concerned, Roberts’ perspective is intriguingly ambivalent: he describes the internet as a “false frontier” that distracts Americans with navel-gazing and entrenches digital tyranny, surveillance, and the “Deep State”. But he also extols those aspects of the information revolution that enable remote working, small-scale manufacture and tech innovation — including in military technologies, such as Palmer Luckey’s Anduril drone systems. And he echoes a phrase popularised by “Little Tech” investor and Trump supporter Marc Andreessen: “It’s time to build.” Taken together, the vibe is a counter-intuitively potent mix of Catholic social teaching plus tech-optimism and a distinctively American, pluralistic frontier spirit.

What if any of this sensibility, then, will make it into the new Trumpian Normal? Everything now depends on those backstage Capitol staffing manoeuvres, and the compromises that result, both formally and within the party. Trump has enemies in both Houses as well as the permanent bureaucracy, while there are numerous factions in the broader Trumpian coalition, in addition to Roberts’ vision for the New Right. These include, for example, those Right-wing progressives for whom Elon Musk is perhaps the most notable figurehead: a faction that controls both vast piles of cash and also the world’s public square, to whom Trump arguably owes his victory, and for whom the New Right preoccupation with the natural family and the little guy are (to say the least) relatively low-priority. There are also plenty of neocons happy to play along, but who’ll in due course work to dilute anything that smells too strongly of Bernie or the Monroe Doctrine.

As for what any of this means on this side of the Atlantic, if Roberts gets his “controlled burn” and Trump his mass deportations, we might see European “far-Right” figures such as Jordan Bardella and Giorgia Meloni re-coded as the centrist social democrats they really are. From a British Right-wing perspective, too, perhaps the greatest blessing will be that, in the wake of Trump’s victory, no one will pay the blindest bit of attention to anything our moribund Tory Party does or says for at least the next four years. The realignment has landed, in America, and the New Right’s bellies are full of fire; all Anglo Right-wing eyes will be on what happens across the Atlantic. Perhaps we might even dare imagine that a spark could cross the pond: that, one day, the British Right will leave off worshipping Maggie’s policy ashes, and turn instead to preserving her radical fire.

As a patriotic American, and as a working journalist who believes in the sanctity of that role, I should note here that the only vote I’ve ever cast in a presidential election was for Willie Nelson, the country and western star and a symbol of reconciliation between rednecks and hippies. Still, I was eager to hear what Trump would say. To be more accurate, given my level of inebriation in sub-freezing Montana weather, with snow-globe snow gently falling outside the windows of a local bar, I was eager to mix the some whiskey with the tonalities of America’s greatest living bullshit artist and teller of tall tales. Trump’s voice is a powerful source of connection to the American literary and comic tradition, going back to the Rat Pack and to Mark Twain. I was ready to hear his magnificent instrument resonate with the promise of a better future, a future filled with laughter — and joy, even.

At 3am, West Palm Beach time, Trump’s large family stood with him onstage looking chipper and attractive. They were joined there by the celebrity validators that made Trump’s third run for the White House seem less angry and more inclusive than his prior one-man shows.

At 78, Trump’s relentless pitchman’s energy is at once diminished, and at the same more genial. And no wonder. Since his loss, in 2020, when he claimed that the election was stolen from him — and his opponents claimed that he tried to seize power through illegal means — Trump had been subjected to a whole-of-society assault by the American elite that would have killed most men 20 years younger, including those who don’t eat cheeseburgers most days for lunch. After 116 indictments, an armed raid on his home, the jailing of his business associates, and the looming threat of bankruptcy, followed by two and even three in-person rallies a day for the better part of a year, which led to him being shot in the head by a would-be assassin, the fact that Trump is still standing upright, let alone greeting a crowd as President-elect, is clearly a miracle – the biggest miracle since the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, I can hear Trump saying. Now, he is about to speak. The TV above the bar remains silent.

“Honey, have you ever been in a bar before?” the bartender is asking me. For the past 10 minutes or so, we’ve been politely going back and forth about whether she can turn up the volume on the bar’s television set. All I can hear around me as Trump starts to speak is the noise of a late Tuesday night at the Wagon Wheel.

Sure, I’ve been in plenty of bars before, I answer. “Well, then you know that politics is a subject that men get angry over, and I don’t want that in my bar,” the waitress answers matter-of-factly. “You can read the captions on the TV.”

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As sensible as her precautions might seem, there’s an undertone to her replies that reminds me that I am in a town, and not in the countryside. Even out here in the West, in a solid red state that epitomises cowboy culture, it is the divide between urban and exurban places, not the division between so-called red and blue states, that is culturally defining. People living in Brooklyn Heights, or in Austin, Texas or in Missoula, Montana or in Grand Rapids, Iowa, all tend to have more in common with each other than they do with people living even a mere 20 miles away.

“For fuck’s sake, this is history,” I suggest, as I watch Trump’s lips moving. “It’s not politics. Everyone can all put their prejudices aside for five minutes s and hear the man.” She purses her lips, and signals it’s a no-go. Then she offers me a free seltzer.

“We must protect our geniuses, protect our super-geniuses”, the caption-writer translates, as Trump’s lips form grandiloquent and hilarious phrases introducing Elon Musk and his love for rockets. “We have so few of them.”

Trump is clearly one. He’s an American genius, an original of a type that began with P.T. Barnum, and also includes Elon Musk. But neither Barnum nor Musk could ever become President twice, and defeat the entire American power structure. I wish to God I could hear him speak. After overcoming 100+ indictments, and having his X account revoked, the man deserves to have his moment here, in this bar.

I don’t need to hear Trump’s stunned-looking critics in the Party commentariat speak, though. The expressions on their pallid faces say it all. They are reckoning with the extent of their loss, which is turn related to their collective sense of self-importance — which is belied both by tonight’s result and by their viewership numbers. Having cratered public trust in their profession over the past decade by routinely lying to their audience on behalf of the government, which they identified in turn with the Democratic Party, the country’s self-identified defenders of democracy can fume all they want about Trump’s authoritarian, anti-democratic, fascist, Hitlerian leanings. The rest of America is as deaf to their blather as I am.

Praising Elon Musk, the country’s most successful technologist, Trump looks more like an avuncular Caribbean vacation package or waterbed salesman than a would-be Hitler. Meanwhile, party hacks like Joy Reid and the political consultants turned “commentators” like David Axelrod, along with supposed “straight news” types like Jake Tapper of CNN, who had all long ago become indistinguishable from each other, by virtue of drinking the Party Kool-Aid are waving their hands at the cameras like they were calling for smelling salts. But once lost, the trust of an audience is hard to win back.

Trump has also lost a step or two himself. His speeches, once gorgeous arias of invective, innuendo and insult comedy, delivered with the snappy timing of a Vegas Rat Pack headliner, have been transformed into rambling arabesques, like the musings of a slightly dotty family patriarch at the Thanksgiving table. Let us bow our heads, while Loopy Uncle Donald tells us about the deal he made with a Saudi Prince on a golf course. Then everyone can eat more pumpkin pie.

Trump had also learned a trick or two along the way, though. He graciously shares the stage, and allows the importance and accomplishments of others to validate his own role as MC. His timing clearly couldn’t have been better. Five years of Covid laws, a stagnant economy, direct and indirect government censorship of social media, official lying and gaslighting on every subject from trans surgeries to the efficacy of masking to the startling numbers of illegal immigrants entering the country to the spectacle of a dottering Joe Biden being barely able to remember his own name, had left most of the country dispirited and ready for change.

As the evening ends, Trump and the political movement he founded will likely control not just the White House but also the Senate, the House, and also the Supreme Court, giving Trump an actual, real-world chance to fulfill his mandate to Make America Great Again. Even though, after a decade of near-constant repetition of the slogan by adherents and detractors, no one can say with any real certainty what it now means.

* * *

As it turns out, the American people are still allowed to vote, regardless of whether their betters decry their choices as racist, sexist, short-sighted, and above all anti-democratic. It’s a paradox that the country’s genius-level elites routinely fail to acknowledge, because they are all profoundly in agreement. We must protect our democracy from those evil anti-democratic forces, American voters, who vote for Donald Trump against the expert guidance of their betters, meaning us.

Meanwhile, the lurching of an increasingly overbearing and at the same time increasingly anarchic and incompetent American state had managed to alarm many Americans who were previously more alarmed by Trump. Over the past weeks, they have been turning out in larger numbers than anyone had imagined — defying the expressed preferences and instructions of the American’ elite’s chief tutelary figure, Barack Obama, who had campaigned very publicly and hard for Kamala Harris, often overshadowing the candidate herself. Obama’s role in the Harris campaign was truthfully less strange than the fact that the former President somehow remained in Washington after his time in the White House was over, instead taking meetings in his Kalorama mansion, which is hardly the most valuable entry in his bulging portfolio of luxury properties — which also includes high Gilded Age mansions in Hawaii and Martha’s Vineyard. But it was surely the most important, serving as the centre of his unprecedented Shadow Presidency.

As the leader of the Democratic Party, Obama was hardly a pretender to power in Washington. Rather, between 2008 and the evening of 5 November 2024, he was usually the foremost power in the land. After serving two elected terms in the White House, Obama then set up and captained the so-called “Resistance” to Trump — an activity that was contrary to all prior American norms and practices. After Trump left, Obama stayed in Washington and continued his role as unelected Party Leader during what had been advertised as the Biden Presidency.

Obama’s method of avoiding scrutiny from the pliant DC press was entirely in character, alternately drawing back into the shadows and then, out of whatever ego weakness, announcing that he was the true mover of events. Free from normative oversight or responsibility, he and his retainers could also avoid answering questions about the size or sources of his personal fortune, which was rumoured to amount to somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion. As a private citizen, Obama didn’t have to answer questions. He could have it both ways — state power, with no public responsibility.

Until he misstepped. By compelling Biden to withdraw in favour of Harris, who turned out to be an even worse candidate than a senile old man who had begun to resemble a badly taxidermied deer, Obama broke the unspoken agreement that had put him beyond scrutiny. Disappearing the sitting President from the Democratic Party ticket against his will, for reasons that were obviously contrary to what the press had been telling Americans about Biden’s incredibly acute mental functioning up, and replacing him with a candidate that no one in the party had actually voted for, required some sort of comment, however brief. It made it impossible, if only for a week or two, to maintain the fiction that Obama was simply living in Washington DC while staying out of politics. If Biden was senile, then who was actually running the country? Who had enough clout to order the President’s removal from the ticket?

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The answer in both cases was Obama. And now he was on the hook not only for Kamala Harris, but retroactively for the more general mess that he and his operatives had helped to make of the country. Everywhere from Harvard University, his alma mater, where he helped install a repeat plagiarist as the University’s President, to the Middle East, which went up in flames the moment he was able to re-animate his Iran Deal, which appeared to be even stupider — if not as expensive — as George W. Bush’s determination to transform Afghanistan and Iraq into Western-style democratic societies at the point of a gun, the Party Leader’s Midas Touch-in-reverse was evident, even if no one ever breathed a single word of criticism.

Yet Americans, of all races and creeds, felt themselves to be living in a dystopian version of Alice in Wonderland, controlled by an unseen hand — and they didn’t like it. If the elite pollsters and expert predictors who had failed to foresee a Trump win had familiarised themselves with American history, instead of parroting the talking points of Obama and his operatives, they would have seen a country eager for a renewal of the freedoms that the vast majority of Americans embrace as their birthright.

Seeing Americans as one people, with a common culture and character, shaped by a common history, is not something that America’s new elites know how to do, though. From kindergarten on, they are taught otherwise. Ivy League universities, the crucible in which the new class has been forged, base admissions and hiring decisions not on measures of objective performance, but on their ranking in the ever-shifting hierarchies of Party-sanctioned identity groups. The ability to sort Americans into bureaucratic categories like BIPOC, MENA, LGBTQ+ and other alphabet soup constructions is in fact the defining skill of Obama-era elites. It signifies mastery of in-group codes that help the Democratic Party manage its own top-down constituencies, which are regimented by political operatives and NGO organisers, paid for by billionaire foundations, and embodied in bureaucratic regulations, executive orders, census categories and other legally-binding schemes meant to overcome historical American notions of equality. That’s how the party machine operates.

Now, in one night, the Obama machine, which he built on the model of the Chicago Democratic Party machine, and which he used to run the country, including the prestige institutions and the media, through a combination of bureaucratic capture and social pressure, accentuated by control of large tech platforms, was finally melting down. No wonder the press was in shock. None of the lines that they had been given could be reconciled with the numbers onscreen.

A reckoning will surely come. At the very least, the time has now arrived for Barack Obama to leave Washington and exit American politics, now that his Shadow Presidency — which proved to be even more counter-productive and chaotic than Trump’s first term in office — has gone down in flames.

Meanwhile, the gap between what America’s elites believe, and what the rest of the country believes, has never been wider, probably not since the late 19th century. Back then, Gilded Age America was ruled by a tight group of tycoons and their retainers who positioned themselves as the heirs to the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, the President and the General who together led the Civil War. The further the Republican Party traveled from the Civil War, the more the busts of Lincoln and Grant resembled window-dressing for the extraordinary fortunes of a new oligarchy that traveled in private trains, summered in Newport, and bought every available Old Master painting in Europe to decorate their lavish houses. Economically and morally, the so-called Robber Barons — Morgans, Rockefellers, Goulds, Fricks, Carnegies, Whitneys, Harrimans — had an easy time of it, enjoying the benefits of cheap immigrant labour while flattering themselves as the rightful heirs of the Party that ended slavery. With the exception of Carnegie, a self-made Scotsman and innovative industrialist who gave away his fortune to establish America’s system of public libraries, history doesn’t remember them kindly.

The Democratic Party that Bill and Hillary Clinton built in the Nineties, and Barack Obama then took in a decidedly more radical direction after 2012, won’t be remembered kindly by Americans either. The father of the modern Democratic Party, Franklin D. Roosevelt, was the country’s greatest political leader during what became known as the American Century. Roosevelt kept the country going during the Great Depression, and set it on the path to victory in the Second World War while creating a social safety net for the poor. Remarkably, every American President up until Bill Clinton in 1992 was either a protegee of Roosevelt or at least a private in his army.

The political alliance between urban ethnic machine politicians, including black urban political leaders, and Southern whites that FDR led also undercut the power of the Wasp class, successors to the New England Puritans, who dominated America’s class system and the country’s economy following the Civil War. By curbing their cultural, political, and economic influence, Roosevelt made possible the rise of the American middle class, which made America great, and also more equal.

The Clintons’ embrace of Wall Street and of international trade treaties was the window through which America’s old elites — rooted both in the Northeast as well as in San Francisco — climbed back into history. The China trade flourished, as did Democratic Party’s new Wall Street clients — at the expense of the Party’s traditional working-and-middle class constituencies. Obama brought Silicon Valley’s formerly libertarian-oriented founders on board the gravy train by promising them protection from populists like Bernie Sanders and from his own crew of high-end Chicago shakedown artists. In return, they would pay taxes to the party through campaign and NGO contributions and DEI hiring. Through this new political wiring, Obama completed the transformation of FDR’s Democrats into Gilded Age Republicans.

It will be hard for Donald Trump to top that. But maybe he will. Maybe Elon Musk will entirely revamp the Federal government. Maybe he will actually colonise Mars. Meanwhile, if Trump understands one thing, it’s that America is not Europe, or Asia, or Iraq, or Brazil. American elites come and go, while the capacity for sudden, radical, wide-eyed self-invention and leaps of innovation remain the country’s defining trait.

What outsiders tend to miss is that America was never meant to be stable. It is and has always been an inferno, the epitome of the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction. The wonder and freedom and heartbreak of American life is that, sooner or later, everything is consumed in the furnace. For all his wealth and success, Elon Musk’s children may worship other gods. His grandchildren may end up in a trailer park, smoking meth. McKinsey consultants with Harvard degrees may wind up unemployed or selling bottled war. Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the country’s most eminent environmental lawyer and the closest thing the Democratic Party has to royalty, may become an antivaccine heretic, be broadly mocked and humiliated by the elite and by the less imaginative members of his own family, run for President, endorse Donald Trump, take on the Big Pharma and Big Ag, and Make America Healthy Again. Or not. All anyone can say for sure is that attempts to game the American system are doomed to failure.

The bigger lesson being that America is just too big — and too wild, and too destructive, and rooted in the idea of individual freedom — for any self-styled “elite” to ride the horse for very long, without being thrown off.

Amid the chorus of victory, however, choices will have to be made about the direction his populist force will take. MAGA has grown tremendously, co-existing uneasily with the party establishment, even as it has started to displace it, and incorporating new constituencies, with divergent interests and ideological orientations. Initially rooted in economic populism, MAGA now is a more unruly cultural movement united by loyalty to its leader. And as it returns to power, it stands at a crossroads.

How can MAGA avoid making the same mistakes of the first administration, while translating the popular energies it has awakened into a viable strategy? To do so, it must redefine itself once again: not just for winning but for wielding power in accordance with its own stated goals of controlling the border and rebuilding the country’s economic strength. Only a third iteration, MAGA 3.0, can fully realise the promise of Trump’s political revolution.

When Donald Trump first descended the escalator nine years ago, he opened his political career with a trail-blazing critique of globalisation with a focus on fixing America’s trade and immigration imbalances: MAGA 1.0. A radical strategy, at times its critiques of bipartisan corporate orthodoxy converged with Bernie Sanders and the populist-Left. The opening days of the first Trump Administration saw out-of-the-box proposals for a tax hike on the rich (put forward by Steve Bannon, of all people) and an expansion of public healthcare options for working-class Americans, as opposed to an Obamacare repeal.

But it was an unstable formulation. And it was soon folded into the same party leadership Trump initially opposed. The president essentially adopted Congressional Republicans’ tax cutting agenda as his own and abdicated any serious effort at comprehensive immigration reform, even coming to oppose Mandatory E-Verify under pressure from business lobbies.

Only with trade under the leadership of Robert Lighthizer did the administration seriously and consistently diverge from GOP strictures. Its final achievement was Operation Warp Speed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, one of the greatest feats of executive action in modern times, which set the template for the Biden Administration’s industrial policy. But MAGA 1.0 was a largely stillborn revolution that never had much of a chance against a still entrenched old guard.

Enter MAGA 2.0: As Trump left office in 2021, the lingering conflicts between his populist instincts and the establishment’s policy dictates were effectively suppressed. A common front of loyalty to Trump took precedence over any ideological commitments. The party’s emotional centre of gravity remained with the personality rather than with any policy. Much of the Right regrouped around the same small government ethos that had defined conservatism since Reagan. Only tariffs and the defence of entitlements remained from Trump’s original economic heresies.

While out of power, MAGA also expanded not just as a political brand but as a cultural current. It came to include many diffuse elements, including: anti-deep state former Democrats like Robert Kennedy Jr and Tulsi Gabbard; Silicon Valley tech bros such as Elon Musk and Marc Andreesen; and substantive heterodox populist conservatives J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio. It attracted more than a fair few disgruntled cranks but one of these factions, the intellectual wing of the so-called “New Right” has actually come far in developing the anti-globalisation ideas of MAGA 1.0: reining in Wall Street; reforming finance and defending workers and upgrading the defence-industrial base against a resurgent China.

The irony is that MAGA 2.0 had by then lost any genuine interest in governing, instead focusing on indulging the “vibe and tribe” identity affirmation aspects of the movement. But the upshot is that Trump campaign did not have to talk about policy much at all: Americans’ disaffection with continuing economic decline and progressive-led cultural change, particularly among the working-class, non-metropolitan and non-college-educated, was strong enough.

And so, in the immediate post-election environment, Trump partisans must hope that the next MAGA movement will take the best features of MAGA 1.0, while cutting the fat from MAGA 2.0: Vance’s post-globalised vision without the crankery and contrarianism. It must recapture the creative and ambitious policy visions of early-stage Trumpism while developing the discipline and foresight that the first term lacked. It must also complete the break with the GOP’s free-market fundamentalism by adopting a pragmatic approach that can mix strategic deregulation with state-directed guidance of key industrial sectors. But who is going to actually carry it out?

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The realisation is clear enough for both Trump himself and his die-hard followers that this is his last rodeo. The torch will eventually be passed on to a worthy successor. The day before the election, Politico interviewed Trump supporters and hinted at the difficulty of finding such a figure: Vance, Tucker Carlson, Kari Lake, Donald Trump Jr, Ron DeSantis, all elicited at best lukewarm reactions from rally-goers, who recognised Trump as a singular (and non-replicable) phenomenon. But the lack of a clear successor may be a good thing. It would allow the movement to move on from personalities and back toward the big-picture promises with which Trump launched the MAGA era.

All great American political movements united broad coalitions under a compelling alternative vision of the country; they succeeded only if they were able to displace the existing elite with a new counter-elite: from the Revolution to the New Deal and beyond, this has been the pattern of US history. MAGA 3.0 should build itself not around one politician but around one particular class. The role should go to an unheralded group at the heart of the MAGA coalition: not quite the working-class, who lack the social, political, institutional and economic capital to fulfil the function of elites, but rather the “American gentry” who fuelled Trump’s rise from the very start: the car dealers, general contractors, agribusiness owners, extractive industry magnates, franchise and factory owners, and assorted small-town millionaires, who often possess great wealth but little cultural prestige or recognition — a classic description for a revolutionary counter-elite.

Rather than a single princely political figure to take the mantle of Trump, it is they — this class of local entrepreneurial leaders — who should be crowned as the collective successors to Trump, for what are they if not a collection of mini-Trumps? The promise at the heart of MAGA, the physical reconstruction of the United States, should be entrusted to them. They could be awarded generous provision of capital in the form of subsidies, loans, and technology transfers to supercharge national productivity. This petty-bourgeois industrial policy would create jobs, helping the working-class along and the nation as a whole. Just as important, by upgrading the technological capabilities of the small-business sector and enlisting its help in stamping out the employment of undocumented workers (in fields like agriculture and construction) through a national Mandatory E-Verify scheme, the demand for illegal immigration could be reduced.

MAGA 3.0 may end up being less entertaining than the early tide of the Trump era, with more conventional politicians, your Vances and Rubios and Hawleys, courting the gentry and the other members of the coalition. But the Trump legacy could be more serious. By bulldozing the old establishment and galvanising a counter-elite, the MAGA job he started might just find success.

“More or less, more or less,” said Trump, a little timidly.

It could have been any eager kid explaining a new technology to someone almost four times his age, but what Trump said next encapsulated so much of what he has brought to American politics. “It’s the new wave,” he said, to which Ross enthusiastically agreed.

Trump’s podcast blitz over the last few months — on Kick with Ross, on X with Elon Musk, on YouTube with Lex Fridman and Theo Von, and most recently on Ben Shapiro’s podcast — showcased his ability to adapt to new media forms. This started in the Nineties, when he rose to political prominence as a regular guest on talk radio. He then became a nationwide celebrity through his starring role on reality TV’s The Apprentice. He ran for president in 2016 largely through his Twitter account and, when that was disabled in 2021, switched to his own social media platform, Truth Social. His 2024 campaign strategy hinges on his ability to reach low-information voters who wouldn’t normally pay attention to politics. (Von is a comedian and Ross an online gamer.) From the standpoint of communications, his approach has been astonishingly successful and may well return him to the White House. Really, the entire Trump phenomenon is just media studies — but why, with Kamala Harris only just appearing podcasts now, have his political opponents been so slow to learn its lessons?

Every time I try to understand our era, I find myself — like the kind of person who pulls out their pocket Bible on any occasion to check the relevant verse — reaching for Martin Gurri’s 2014 text, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri, a former CIA analyst turned media theorist, outlined the dominant dynamic of our time: it is “an episode in the primordial contest between Centre and Border” but with a new array of weapons made available to the Border. “Each side in the struggle has a standard-bearer: authority for the old industrial scheme that dominated globally for a century and a half, the public for the uncertain dispensation striving to become manifest,” he wrote.

In the past, the Border had to make do with penny presses, alternative weeklies, late-night radio stations or, simply, the power of “word-of-mouth”. But, with the public-to-public traffic of social media, the Border developed an ability to communicate with itself at a staggering volume and to change the underlying dynamics of political discourse. For Gurri, 2012 was the watershed year, in which the two-way traffic of social media became a social force of its own, eclipsing the standard establishment media organs and creating an entirely different communicative discourse that was ripe for political exploitation. Gurri self-published The Revolt of the Public and the book passed largely unnoticed, but after Trump’s 2016 victory Gurri’s now-dug-up thesis was the only explanation that really fit.

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Trump had said as much in a 2013 meeting with Republican supporters — a meeting reported on years later by Politico — in which he laid out his playbook for his longshot presidential campaign. “I’m going to suck all the oxygen out of the room. I know how to work the media in a way that they will never take the lights off of me,” Trump said. When told by an attendee that the only possible way to run was through lavish spending on paid advertisements, Trump said, “I think you’re wrong” — he would reach a “mass audience” entirely through the new possibilities afforded by earned media.

Initially denied the obvious entry points to airtime in his presidential run — he lacked endorsements and funding, and was far behind rivals like Jeb Bush and Scott Walker in access to conservative media — Trump made adroit use of the new technology. Twitter seemed juvenile for a presidential candidate — nobody else was really using it — but it allowed Trump both to make himself relatable and to take his case directly to voters. He became the protagonist of the election, and, when the establishment did what it could to sideline him, he turned the establishment into the foil of his story, attacking Megyn Kelly for her coverage of him.

Trump’s use of Twitter (and Truth Social) is, of course, well known. What’s vastly underappreciated, though, is the extent to which he’s consistently been ahead of his political rivals when it comes to social media and been able to use that playbook for other forms of new media. As a centrepiece of his 2024 campaign, Trump has, as The New York Times somewhat disparagingly put it, “embarked on a cavalcade of interviews”, appearing on podcasts, live streams, and basically any form of new media he can access.

That really shouldn’t be such a big deal. 360 million people use Twitter. 540 million people listen to podcasts. The only ones who don’t, it seems, are the grandees of the Democratic Party. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden never made effective use of social media — up until Biden’s announcement of not seeking a second term — and, even Kamala Harris, who is closer in age to digital nativity, has been a less-than-enthusiastic adopter. Meanwhile, Trump’s streamed conversations over the last month brought somewhere on the order of 100 million views.

In that same time period, when Trump was embarked on his “calvacade”, Harris made one — count it — large-audience media appearance, in front of the friendly audience of CNN. She appeared in person at a large number of rallies and was also interviewed by comedian Rickey Smiley, an ABC affiliate, and a Phoenix Univision station — none of those with anything like the reach of the podcasters Trump appeared with. The YouTube stream of the Rickey Smiley interview, for instance, has attracted a pitiful 7,000 views. Her paid ads have been saturating the airwaves, she can rely on near-universal support from establishment print media and favourable coverage from network TV, with the exception of Fox. She has an army of surrogates pushing out the campaign’s messages across a variety of media sources. And her debate performance, unlike Trump’s, only proves her confidence with established media forms.

The problem is that none of this messaging takes advantage of the unique resources of new media. New media — whether podcasts or social media — is all about casual, easygoing, personality-driven conversation. In Gurri’s terms, what is happening is that the entire society is going through an emperor-has-no-clothes realisation. The immediacy of digital resources makes social media users — who are also voters — highly sceptical of anybody who over-ceremoniously cloaks themselves in the mantle of authority. In the Twitter era, everyone — the world’s richest man, world leaders, sports stars, celebrities, whatever — is reduced in the end to a common denominator: they are individuals sitting behind a device and tapping into it, just like anybody else. From the perspective of “authority”, that’s something close to an existential threat — a difficulty in reestablishing the lineaments of majesty. But, from the perspective of a democratic politician who relies on popularity and relatability for legitimacy, it should be a golden opportunity. And, for every day that Harris doesn’t appear on general-interest podcasts, she is, essentially, leaving votes on the table. The Harris campaign seems finally, belatedly, to be recognising what should have been obvious a month ago, with Harris appearing on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podcast and with the campaign announcing a media blitz which included an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. But it may be already be too late. For every day that Harris hasn’t made a new media appearance, she has missed a chance to set the narrative for the campaign.

There is nothing whatsoever that Trump does that digital media users can’t do as well. Anybody under 40 or so can do it in their sleep. But the Democratic Party still hasn’t managed a generational handoff from the Clinton era. They both don’t recognise the power of the new modes of communication and don’t know how to exploit it. Those who do — like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — have a vast leg-up compared with the rest of the party. And, really, that is the entire explanation of the AOC phenomenon. She tweets like a pro, she’s relatable, and she makes herself the protagonist of her story. It’s not a hard playbook to emulate, but you need to be digital media-conversant to emulate it.

Instead, though, the Dems have moved in the other direction. They have come to rely on their stranglehold over traditional media. They have newspapers, network TV, public radio. They have a war chest that gives them an advantage in all traditional ad markets. And none of that is to be underestimated — that arsenal of communicative technology has enabled them to make inroads particularly with seniors, a traditionally Republican bloc.

What the Democrats, like some red-coated, overly regimented colonial army, fail to recognise, however, is that this is asymmetrical warfare. None of their preferred modes of communication make inroads into the younger or low-information voters who are, at this stage, most likely to swing the election. The Republicans already have talk radio and Fox-world. Through Trump’s media dexterity, they have done very well in social media and, now, on podcasts.

When we assess the results of this election, what we likely will assess isn’t issues or even messaging but modalities of communication. The parties have swerved into very different communications bubbles. This has been the case at least since the era of media revolutionary Rush Limbaugh and talk radio’s shift towards conservatism, while print media and network television tended to skew more liberal. But now, with media ever-more-siloed, those distinctions are only exacerbated across a variety of forms. What the Democrats are still failing to get through their heads is that it’s the newer, more dynamic communications technologies where the more effective persuasion can take place — and which require an aggressive, personable, let-it-all-hang-out approach. Harris should be more than able to hold her own in those formats. But if she doesn’t visit them, she’ll effectively be passing over undecided votes — and those votes will cost her the election.

There has been a lot of talk about imminent civil war in America, and the internet sizzles with violent discord. It’s true that whichever side wins, the other side will feel either cheated or bereft, and feelings will run high. But neither candidate stands for anything ideologically galvanising. Kamala Harris tries to be nice. Donald Trump strives for an intimidating autocratic effect, but he lacks a cohesive vision, of the sort you might find in Mein Kampf or in Mussolini’s fiery speeches, a vision that would impel millions towards self-immolation for the sake of an idea. His formerly sharp demagogic instincts running on empty, Trump seemed at least to grasp the need to fill an urgent ideological need as he desperately sought last night to get the country worked up over what he claimed was undocumented immigrants eating the pets of American citizens in Springfield, Ohio. But immigrants feasting on cats and dogs would be a poor centrepiece of, say, imperialism or antisemitism; it does not an origin of totalitarianism make. Instead, the unhinged quality of Trump’s groundless claim might well have lost him the election.

Gravely serious matters were at stake at the debate: abortion, immigration, the rule of law. But America has adapted and will adapt to permutations in policy for the first two, and the country is too stable for Trump’s most virulent autocratic fantasies to become reality. No one as obsessed with the bottom financial line as Trump is would ever risk creating anything more than rhetorical chaos. Business people hate real chaos. And unlike the Chicken Littles of the liberal media, they know fantastical bluster when they see it.

Still, after the uncertain first few minutes of the debate, the mysterious air of profound consequentiality intensified. The expectation, of course, was that a live debate without an audience, with the microphone of whoever was not speaking turned off, would be some sort of freakish Zoom meeting to end all Zoom meetings. From pandemic isolation to general post-pandemic anomie, all organised under the strict control of the debate’s moderators. The first televised debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy had also taken place without an audience, but that was just at the dawn of television, and the faces on the screen had not yet detached themselves from actual social interactions. (The handsome Kennedy won the TV debate, they say, while Nixon prevailed among those who listened to it on the radio.) As Harris and Trump walked onto the stage, Harris striding forward to shake Trump’s hand, you settled in for just another pleasurable diversion, compliments of the ubiquitous and omnipotent Screen.

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I was once at a party in Manhattan that began as a disjointed assemblage of people and then suddenly became a living organism. “Now it’s a party,” someone said to me. At the instant that Harris grasped Trump’s hand, the disconnected event started to become a debate. The note of “once upon a time” was struck. By asserting herself with a surprised Trump, who clearly had not wanted to shake her hand but had no choice but to do so once she extended it, Harris established control over her adversary. It was a fateful bookend to that fateful moment in the 2016 debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton, when Trump circled around Clinton, finally standing behind her and towering over her in order to establish his own authority and control.

The optics were remarkable. Americans don’t like short presidents; the country hasn’t had a short president in modern times. And here was Harris, short by, as it were, any measure, even with heels, deliberately making a physical contrast between herself and the much taller Trump. And, lo and behold, the bigness of offering her hand had the effect, in one stroke, of making Trump look small.

You realised then that what was at stake was not social, economic or foreign policy, not the fate of culture or the future of industrial relations. Never mind the question of whether America retains its preeminent power in the world. What was at stake last night was the question of whether the American personality still has power in its own land. Amid all the screens, and chips, and algorithms and AI, amid all the opioids and the psychiatric drugs, can the sheer force of being a particular person carry the day? And what sort of person, what type of personality, will it be?

Psychiatrists speak of narcissists who have their personal myth of greatness challenged by exploding into a rage response, and this is precisely what Harris achieved when she referred to the small size of Trump’s rallies, belittling him by talking about all the people who leave them early out of “boredom and exhaustion”. Trump combusted. From then on, he sputtered and raged and danced with his demons. He circled back to the menace of illegal immigration again and again, no matter what the subject was, despite the fact that Harris had observed, at the beginning of the debate, that he would return to immigration again and again in just that way. By the time Trump warned Americans about the wholly fictional “transgender operations on illegal aliens who are in prison” — why that would bother him remained a mystery — it became clear that he will never inhabit the White House again.

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Harris, however, brought to the event a softly riveting novelty that served the purpose of replacing the bonkers, electrifying novelty of Trump in 2016. She began as a cipher, nervously clearing her throat, her voice trembling at moments, and ended as figure of character and principle. The pundits had all complained, as if to tutor her, that the country needed to know her. Well, by the time of the debate, she was still blank and unknown. She was still someone who seemed to want to be president only to be president, as if she had nothing better to do. But then something happened.

As Trump blustered and came apart, Harris’s mediocrity fell away. As he wrecked himself on the rocks of his obsessions, her shallows became depths. She stopped clearing her throat, her trembling voice grew strong, expressions of patient affliction, alternating with a certain narrow-eyed, seething incredulity, began to flow naturally across her face. Lacking originality and charm, she drew vitality from Trump’s bile and rage. In 2016, enough Americans were mesmerised by the utter newness of Trump’s brazen iconoclasm and insults to make him president. In 2024, after a pandemic, racial convulsions, revolutions in patterns of work and in mores, Americans watched rapt last night as perhaps the most ordinary human to ever run for president responded to lies, and menace, and insults by pulling herself together into a recognisable personality. People didn’t need to know who Harris was. They watched as she became Kamala Harris.

Politics, said Lenin, is Kto-Kvo, “Who-Whom”. Last night, Americans who were pummelled by radical change over the last eight years watched a fellow “Whom” replace the dominant “Who”. Nothing is so consequential, and so riveting, in American politics, not war or peace or taxes, as the drama of becoming a person. Harris won the debate hands down. She will win the White House, too.

But appearances can be misleading. Yes, there is something called the Democratic Party and something called the Republican Party. But these entities bear little resemblance to the grassroots, mass-membership party federations that existed half a century ago. Rather, today’s organisations are made up of various groups as different from each other as from those across the aisle.

In the early decades of the American Republic, political parties were widely viewed as corrupt factions incompatible with the public interest. Yet because the US inherited the first-past-the-post-electoral system from Britain, the number of major parties had been whittled down to just two by the time of the Civil War: the Republican anti-slavery party, and the slave-holding Democrats in the Southern states.

Since then, the names of both organisations have remained the same. But until the late 20th century, they described loose, often incoherent alliances of regional power blocs. For much of the last century for instance, the Democrats were a ramshackle coalition of anti-labour Southern segregationists, northern labour union members, rural populists, and metropolitan, professional-class reformers. Meanwhile, the Republican Party was made up of liberal Republicans such as Nelson Rockefeller and conservatives such as Barry Goldwater.

Until the Seventies, conventions continued to play a central role in bringing party groups together. Delegates were considered ambassadors from around the country, representing both local political machines and rural courthouse gangs. To secure the nomination, the winning candidate had to make concessions to these various party factions, even if it meant choosing a running mate from a different wing of the party.

All of this, however, is now ancient history, in no small part thanks to two structural changes: the rise of party primaries and the deregulation of campaign finance.

In the decades since the Seventies, reformers in both parties introduced the primary process in the hope of democratising an antiquated system in which cigar-chomping state and local bosses picked candidates in smoke-filled rooms between ballots at party conventions. But the replacement didn’t work out that way. Instead, candidates are now picked in primaries, and a few caucuses, in which only small, unrepresentative shares of the eligible electorate bother to vote. In 2016 and 2020, 15% of eligible voters participated in the party primaries that selected the presidential candidates. This year, roughly 10% of eligible selected Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

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What’s more, in both parties, each small group of selectors was neither representative of their own party’s voters nor the American population as a whole. Both Democratic and Republican primary voters are more likely than voters in general to have college degrees and to have completed postgraduate study; they also have considerably higher household incomes.

As a result, there has been a shift in power from state and local party bosses, who were at least somewhat accountable to local working-class voters, to upper-middle class and rich primary voters, who vote on the basis of their values and material interests. Relatively cushioned from monthly struggles to pay the bills, these voters tend to be motivated more by culture-war issues than the rest of the electorate. For instance, while abortion dominated the Democratic primary, only one in eight voters considers it their most important issue, with most Democrats naming health care costs, the economy, and education as a priority.

Meanwhile, as the adoption of the primary system reduced the pool of voters selecting candidates, the deregulation of campaign finance all but severed the link between local communities and the politicians who purport to represent them. This crystallised in 2010, when the Supreme Court’s effective deregulation of campaign finances allowed so-called “dark money” groups to spend unlimited amounts from undisclosed donors on behalf of parties and candidates, as long as they pretended not to be affiliated with them. These donors didn’t hang around. Between 2012 and 2022, the amount spent by these groups rose from $50 million to $653 million.

Money, of course, has always been necessary for parties and individual candidates wishing to plant their platforms before the public. Decades ago, it was common practice for Democratic politicians in Texas to seek the support of the oil and gas industry and the rich families and businesses in their cities or counties. Yet now, a handful of Democratic and Republican megadonors who live in a few cities, along with corporate and non-profit lobbies, can pressure candidates even in state and local races to promote their agendas — to the extent that America’s parties are little more than fronts.

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And this partly explains why American politics is more polarised than ever. Unlike the pragmatic party bosses of the past, primary voters tend to be purists who view compromise as betrayal and would rather lose elections than surrender their principles. For their part, the megadonors who flood both parties with money are less interested in political victory than in imposing their personal views — on climate change and gender ideology if they are progressives, or on tax cuts and Social Security cuts if, like most Republican donors, they are libertarians.

The result is perhaps unsurprising, with an increasing number of American voters left without a political home. Last year, 43% described themselves as independents — a group nearly twice as large as self-described Republicans and Democrats. These independents do not share common values or views. They include libertarians who combine free-market economics with support for drug legalisation and populists who are Left-wing on economic policy but conservative on social issues.

What they have in common, however, is the sense that they’ve been betrayed by the American political system — a system that hides the reality of oligarchic domination behind the façade of old-fashioned representative democracy. When Trump and Harris take to the debate stage, their suspicions will only be confirmed.

Taken together, several commentators believe these trends mark the end of neoliberal governance and the beginning of a different consensus in Washington — and in a narrow sense they are right. Biden’s policies do harken back to aspects of the New Deal and Cold War liberalism, while the populist Right have promoted their own vision of economic reform. But, for reasons intrinsic to America’s party system, neoliberalism’s final chapter has yet to be written.

There are real obstacles to consolidating a new consensus — and they go beyond the obvious influence of each party’s most prominent donors or the rulings of conservative justices. The current geographic division of political power in the United States between conservative red regions and progressive blue ones reinforces a status quo which greatly privileges economic elites in both party coalitions and curtails the possibility of faster action on urgent issues.

Compared with the latter half of the 20th century, when Democrats and Republicans contested a broad range of states and a handful of landslide elections took place, the strategies animating today’s party coalitions are primarily defensive. Bold incursions by either party into the other’s strongholds are now uncommon. And the Democrats’ big-tent posture under Kamala Harris is unlikely to disturb this balance of power.

The regional pattern of party dominance is reflected in the small set of swing states that have determined presidential elections since the 2000 contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush. But it is illustrated just as much, if not more so, by the rise of one-party control in a majority of US states. Democrats currently hold “trifectas” (the governorship plus a majority in a state’s upper and lower chambers) in 17 states, while Republicans have a veritable lock on 23. In an echo of past “sectional” distributions of party control, geography would appear to denote ideology in the first decades of 21st-century America.

And this regional dynamic seems to go hand in hand with an accelerating political realignment or class “dealignment”. This phenomenon, wherein since the late Nineties the GOP has attracted far more working-class voters than it used to while the Left has won the vote of more and more upscale voters, appears to wary progressives and eager “New Right” thinkers alike as a harbinger of a generation-defining political realignment. But, while that is partly true, what is more salient is that the parties now coalesce support on the basis of identity-driven loyalties and deeply felt negative partisanship, and are then able to limit their economic promises, hewing instead to vague rhetoric about growth and opportunity. Campaign strategists continue to prioritise mobilising core supporters, rather than courting workers who are wavering in their partisan affiliation or engaging the country’s estimated 80 million disaffected nonvoters.

Consequently, the respective opposition party in key regions has become feeble to the point of being virtually nonexistent. Modern Democrats have been routed in several Rust Belt and Southern districts where New Deal liberals once swept the polls, while Republicanism, once a vehicle for Reaganite yuppies and wealthy suburbanites, has been reduced in the citadels of high finance and the multicultural elite to an ornery badge of non-conformity. In both cases, wage-earners who want a bigger share of the economic pie and more accountable politicians must contend with de facto one-party rule in much of the country. This is a situation that has rarely favoured more egalitarian outcomes.

The past 30 years might have altered the composition of the Republican and Democratic coalitions, but it has also calcified the power of regional and national elites. The political realignment has failed to catalyse any fundamental change of priorities in Republican strongholds. With few exceptions, Republicans, in spite of Trump’s 2016 foray into economic populism, remain beholden to big players in older extractive industries and a host of middle-men magnates. The combined lobbying efforts of these interests prevent local- and state-level Republican officials from reorienting their party branches to populist ideas. The GOP response to teachers’ strikes and unionisation drives at auto plants and Amazon distribution centres has predictably ranged from indifferent to hostile.

Conservative thinkers advocating substantive overtures to labour still have high hopes for Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, and a few other “anti-globalist” Republicans in the Senate. But remove the ever-churlish Trump from the equation and the GOP all but loses its insurgent garb. Belying Trump’s fading anti-establishment message, rising GOP leaders such as Georgia governor Brian Kemp have staked their reputation on attracting high-profile business investment and pet development projects. Ribbon-cuttings, not a showdown with American oligarchs, are what motivates them. Vintage Trumpian populism shows no sign of supplanting the traditional business conservatism that still guides local GOP elites.

By contrast, the Democratic Party certainly appears more attentive to the needs and hardships of its own lower-income base. Indeed, the party’s self-image as the vehicle of social uplift has endured despite attracting a growing share of wealthy and college-educated voters in  recent election cycles. Even though Democrats have haemorrhaged support from working-class whites, they continue to heavily draw black and other minority wage-earners as well as white progressives who want a stronger welfare state. On the basis of this alliance, it is hoped by the party’s reformers that if Harris wins the presidency she will continue to legislate in Biden’s “post-neoliberal” vein.

This optimism derives in part from stalwart Democrats’ rose-tinted view of the records of blue cities and states. As housing costs began to soar last decade, a handful of Democratic governors and mayors billed themselves as reformers ready to take on powerful real estate interests and build more affordable housing. They likewise tried to aid their working-class constituents through minimum wage hikes, paid sick leave, experiments in fare-free public transit, and efforts to raise enrolment in health insurance subsidised by the Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama’s key social programme.

Scratch beneath the surface, however, and one finds little has been done in major US cities to alleviate economic insecurity. Whether due to permitting obstacles or vested interests, the housing shortage is now a full-blown crisis. And the problem is only bound to get worse. Nationwide, a record-breaking twelve million renters now spend half their income on housing while nearly seven million units need to be built for heavily rent-burdened low-income people. This shortfall stands in contrast to Harris’s plan to build just three million homes.

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Previous efforts to ensure wages kept up with living costs have likewise proved insufficient. App-driven gig work has become ubiquitous in large metro areas, testing Democrats’ commitment to full employment and pro-worker principles. From California to Massachusetts, Big Tech has successfully fought legislation that would classify gig workers as employees and have tried to resist industry-specific minimum wage bills. Despite the Biden administration’s investments in infrastructure and clean energy, urban economies continue to reflect neoliberalism on steroids: the pace of gentrification, pushing poorer residents to outer neighbourhoods, has put them at a further disadvantage when it comes to finding decent work.

These trends have heightened the perception that Democrats cater to affluent professionals while offering, at most, minor relief to the wage-earners who provide their margin of victory in major elections. That is bad enough for a party once considered to be the tribune of workers. Rather absurdly, however, the Democratic Party’s deference to tech, real estate, and finance has been accompanied by ham-fisted choices which have exacerbated quality-of-life problems for many working families. These range from radical misjudgements influenced by social justice paradigms to less obvious but still pernicious forms of incompetence.

Most notoriously, recent ill-conceived experiments in drug decriminalisation under the framework of “harm reduction” in cities such as San Francisco, Seattle and Portland, Oregon eroded public safety enough to dampen economic activity in core neighbourhoods. Those case studies have since become a source of ridicule and embarrassment for Democrats trying to thread the needle between maintaining vibrant commercial centres and reforming the criminal justice system.

Unfortunately, other trends only underscore the ways in which blue-city governance has become strangely inept. Since the pandemic, truancy rates and learning loss in public schools have exploded — an outcome that more and more analysts attribute to extended remote-learning protocols in Democratic districts. Those decisions had a disproportionate effect on lower-income and nonwhite students whose family breadwinners were nurses, truck drivers and warehouse packers who by definition could not work from home.

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Urban Democrats’ handling of immigration politics has also compounded tensions in their coalition. During Trump’s term, it was a point of pride among progressives to live in a sanctuary city that shielded undocumented immigrants from detention and deportation raids. The surge in migrants since 2021, however, has strained municipal resources and working-class neighbourhoods due to the pressure put on scarce housing and already-overcrowded schools.

Some on the Left insist concerns about these burdens are inherently reactionary. But for others it is a matter of public trust and effective administration. In key cities, congested streets teem with overworked “deliveristas” yoked to those very gig platforms which fail to provide a living wage; migrant mothers and children hawk snacks and cheap toys throughout parks and subways; while municipal agencies turn a blind eye to the proliferation of illegal and unsafe flats. All this has snuck up on hopeless local politicians at the same time that homelessness and evictions have spiked.

Conservatives, of course, are more than happy to pin these various challenges on misguided progressives. Yet, far from being too ambitious, Democrats’ urban governance instead reflects the extent of “policy capture” in their party. Absent a GOP fit to govern large cities, many of today’s business titans have turned to an all-too pliant Democratic Party eager to build its donor network. That relationship is unlikely to fray anytime soon, whatever one makes of the party’s episodic populism under Biden.

The truth is that if Democrats had devoted less energy to cosying up to elites and committed themselves to grand public projects and social investments in the spirit of the New Deal, fewer of their loyal supporters would be contending with extraordinary rents, mediocre jobs, underfunded transit, and underperforming schools. And a genuine record of governing “for the people” would be resonating in places which have long slipped from the party’s grasp.

One might think, therefore, that the unity displayed at the Democratic Convention is shallow and that Harris is helming a coalition susceptible to fracture. But the current state of the GOP campaign suggests Trump is no longer poised to exploit discontent in the Democratic base over their party’s contradictions and shortcomings. Nor are Republicans making the barest effort to offer a positive alternative. On the contrary, it is the Democrats who remain at once the party of government and the agents of, well, limited yet “hopeful” change.

This returns us to the regional divide which constrains the advance of a post-neoliberal order. Even if Harris wins and sticks with Biden’s flagship policies, her mandate — and thus her obligation to deliver reform — will be determined by the scale of her victory. It is certain the result will relieve elites in both parties. In fact, trench warfare between Democrats and Republicans may well revert to battles over culture, identity, and values, muffling vital issues of economic power and life chances. Until one party wages an insurgency that rallies struggling Americans of all stripes, transformational change will remain out of reach.

Urban senses that Pennsylvania, the nation’s key tipping point state, is slipping away. He fumed to me: “Trump had the big positions, the vibes, and the themes. But with Harris there are no themes except: we are not Trump and abortion.”

Flipping the script, it is Harris who now leads Trump in Pennsylvania and a series of key battleground states. But some knew this before they saw the polls. Sam Talarico, chairman of the Erie County Democratic Party has the pulse of the swing county of the nation’s swingiest state. With Biden as the nominee, Talarico witnessed a trickle of volunteers. Once Harris topped the ticket, a flood commenced. Talarico told me: “People are calling and asking, ‘what can I do?’ Canvassing and phone banking are way up. And interest is way up. There was a lot of energy that was just released once the change [Biden to Harris] was made. It is exponentially different.” And as Erie goes, so goes Pennsylvania — and with it the White House.

With money and energy, Talarico now has eight full-time staffers and dozens of volunteers. And Erie is merely a microcosm of the fundamental vibe shift in American politics. I spoke with Joe Morris, an Erie-based political science professor, who sees in the polling what Talarico senses on the ground. He told me: “Harris has completely changed the dynamics of the race. At this time, the Trump campaign is at a loss for how to manage this.” Even more ominous for the Republican is Morris’s interpretation of the political mood: “To beat a movement, you need a movement. Harris is on the threshold of being a leader of a movement, like Obama in 2008 and Trump in 2016.”

Urban’s political Spidey senses are tingling. A Harris movement, like Obama in 2008, would mean her candidacy has come to represent “change” to voters in what is most certainly a “change” election. Harris would then float above the political flotsam. This would spell political doom for Trump whose only chance at victory is an ugly slugfest in the mire. The race is still winnable for Trump. But the Harris vibe, immense crowds, record fundraising, and grassroots energy, has distracted the boss. And a distracted, sullen Trump is his own worst enemy. Urban griped: “Trump is one of the most gifted politicians, but he is also one of the most flawed. He is incredible at connecting with crowds, but he is also incredibly ill-disciplined.”

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In the weeks since Biden left the race, Trump’s utter lack of self-restraint has been on full display. His rants about the Vice President’s racial identity and vulgar social media posts have merely fuelled the Harris momentum — and vibe shift. For Urban, Trump’s self-immolation is especially galling. He knows that Harris’s liberal record makes her politically vulnerable with Erie County and Western Pennsylvania’s normie voters. He advised, “All the Trump campaign has to do is focus on the issue. If we make this about the issues, Republicans win.”

Urban is surely onto something. In Harris’s truncated 2020 presidential campaign, she delighted the progressive fringe with gun buy-backs, fracking bans, and the Green New Deal. These positions, to Urban, loom as Harris’s political Kryptonite in Western Pennsylvania. A smart pol, the Vice President has pivoted to the centre. Urban said of this: “Those are some mental gymnastics that Olga Korbut would be proud of.” But he knows that Harris’s liberal centrism is good politics. That’s why he growled: “If we listen to her [now], she sounds like a fuckin’ Republican.”

And that’s important — because while policy obviously matters, “vibes” reign supreme. Years ago, Peter Hart, the veritable Yoda of Democratic pollsters, explained why George W. Bush defeated Democrats whom voters deemed more intelligent and knowledgeable: “voters value ‘I Like’ over IQ”. If vibes didn’t precede ideology, Hillary Clinton would be finishing her second term.

It is losing campaigns and candidates who cry “stick to the issues”. Winning presidential campaigns capture the vibe by the political alchemy of personality, first, and policy, later. Like a first date, a voter must get “the feels” before they entertain the wonk of inflation reduction or stories about your awkward brother.

Urban’s “stick to the issues” steals a page from a long cast of liberal losers. In the Fifties, liberals noodled over the riddle of sustaining party loyalty in an era where old fidelities had faded. Southerners were no longer automatically voting Democrat. Northern white ethnics increasingly ignored political bosses. The liberal egghead answer was “programmatic liberalism”. In this equation, voters would decipher the meaning of issues to their own lives and vote accordingly. For the Democrats, voters were like Star Trek’s Spock or AI.

Since the Sixties, a bevy of well-intentioned liberals placed policy at the forefront of their campaigns. Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump were the result. Liberals lose because they underestimate humanity’s frailties and foibles. Conservatives win because they don’t.

The latest political science affirms this reality. Voter behaviour is dictated by emotions just as much as rational choice. Even those of us with fancy degrees are influenced by “vibe” and “tribe” more than we admit. Obama’s healthcare-for-all and Iraq War posture mattered. But he, more than Sarah Palin or Chris Dodd, dressed, talked, and lived like your coolest professor from graduate school. Plus, Obama signalled a definitive vibe turn from the Clinton-Bush era. For upwardly mobile professionals, voting Obama was tribe and vibe first, policy came second.

That’s why David Urban is partly right but mostly wrong. Kamala Harris’s 2019 policy positions should cause West Pennsylvania normies to wince. This is why Urban is begging Trump to frame the race as a choice between policy visions. But he admitted to me: “[Trump] is terrible at talking about his policy accomplishments. When he is off-prompter he is much more fired-up about the hand-to-hand political combat.”

Trump wants the political combat because he knows, more than anyone, that vibes are key. In 2016, he tapped into the nation’s sour mood and launched a movement. He, like Professor Morris, sees a nascent counter movement on the Left. Trump understands what Urban knows is true but hopes is not. The vibe, like the Dude in The Big Lebowski, always “abides”.

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Trump's fight for Pennsylvania

By James Billot

But to boost the political feels you need campaign nuts and bolts. In 2016, the Clinton campaign ignored Erie County and Western Pennsylvania, while, in 2020, Covid prevented much face-to-face canvassing. So, for 2024, Talarico is touting a “coordinated campaign” that combines his staff with a recently opened Harris office, one of 14 across Pennsylvania. Terron Sims, who helps lead the Democratic National Committee’s vote mobilisation efforts, boasted to me: “When it comes to grassroots get-out-the-vote campaigns, no one beats the Democrats. We have professionals and super volunteers who have been doing this for decades.”

And the issue for Trump is, while he understands the value of vibes, he doesn’t see that they mean less without political organisation. A local Democratic strategist admitted that the GOP’s local dysfunction fuelled Biden’s 2020 win in Erie County. Four years later, the Erie County Republicans might have new leadership, but sources report “major beef” between Trump forces and area Republicans. Local Republicans pay rent to the Trump campaign for a bit of space at the local headquarters, an arrangement that a Democratic official described as “odd”. The Harris campaign, who have the opposite agreement with local Democrats, seem to have it the right way round.

Conflict is to Trump what the sun is to organic life. But as in 2020, dysfunction could prove decisive in a close race. Urban pointed to Trump’s disregard for mail-in early voting as greatly hurting the Republicans. In the 2022 US Senate race between Mehmet Oz and John Fetterman, Pennsylvania Democrats banked 1.5 million early votes. The Democrats had won before election day. Urban, obviously frustrated with how “Trump derides early voting”, advised that “Republicans need to play by the rules in the commonwealth. We need to ensure that the voters of colour who are for us are registered.”

By mid-October, millions of Pennsylvanians will have cast their ballots. Trump has weeks to stunt the Harris vibe. In Erie and Pennsylvania, it is vibe and organisation, not the issues, that will decide this race. For now, both decisively point to Harris.

It would be easy to look at the flailing state of Trump’s campaign and pin the blame on an erratic candidate, or bad advisers, or, as so many have done, single out J.D. Vance as the source of the misfortune. But the fault lies neither with Trump nor Vance, nor any single individual. Instead, we must look back to the foundations of the modern conservative movement, for it is arguably the persistence of a distinct political culture rooted in those formative years that holds back the growth of the Republican coalition.

Since its emergence in the industrialising America of the 19th century, the Republicans had been the party of the buttoned-down business and professional classes, embodying hegemonic political capital. The Democrats encompassed those opposed to this hegemony, be they populist farmers and organised labour, rival blocs of provincial capital, and after the Sixties, the new social movements with their subaltern identities and subversive lifestyles. By 1972, they were the party of “acid, amnesty, and abortion”. Yet even as the party coalitions rested on these coordinates, the first signs of a realignment began to take place — blue-collar workers started to show a propensity to vote for Republicans such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

There was a time, therefore, between the Seventies and the Nineties, when both the ascendant yuppies of America and working-class hardhats could be kept together in the Republican coalition. As long as they could be focused on a common enemy. In those years, thinkers on the Right found such an enemy in “the New Class”, not dissimilar from its conceptual counterpart in leftist discourse, the “professional managerial class” (PMCs).

The New Class trope has ever since played a central role in conservative demonology; they are defined by their college educations (usually in some airy liberal arts field) and extremely liberal (or “weird”) social views, but above all, by their perch as administrators and functionaries in bloated, non-competitive bureaucracies like government, academia, legacy media, and NGOs. These “verbalist elites” were a self-perpetuating caste of privileged mandarins; unlike the yuppies and the hardhats, they were insulated from risk and never got their hands dirty, residing instead in an immaterial realm of symbols and abstractions. The idea of the New Class was thus a convenient foil for conservative rhetoric on both free markets and social conservatism.

The American Right sought to organise itself around fighting this mandarin-dominated liberal establishment, whose control over public-sector and cultural institutions had to be overturned before the liberation of the still-virtuous private sector could be accomplished. Enter the rise of aggressive new conservative institutions meant to take back power in Washington: multimillion-dollar think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute looked not just to crafting policy but to credentialing whole cadres of conservative appointees who could fill executive and legislative offices; while journals like National Review set the moral tone of conservatism.

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Welcome to the Taxi Driver election

By Michael Cuenco

For a time, it worked: the movement succeeded in shifting the policy agenda to the Right from the Reagan years onward. But it also came at a cost: hitherto, conservatism had largely relied on businessmen who got into activism to oppose measures they did not like. In the postwar era, businesses started to outsource this work to full-time activists. Where there had once been conservative professionals, there were now professional conservatives, represented by the likes of National Review editor William F. Buckley Jr. This shift had profound effects on the character of conservative politics, which would become intellectualised as never before. This left the movement vulnerable to real-world shocks which its theoreticians could not comprehend.

The first of at least two shocks took place in the Nineties: Democrats started to syphon private sector professionals from the GOP under Bill Clinton and the “New Democrats” who enthusiastically embraced the financial industry while remaining socially liberal; this jumpstarted the trend of educational polarisation. The next generation of yuppies thus had less reason to stick with Republicans when they could join the newly dynamic and glamorous Democrats. The Right was losing the battle for cultural prestige, thanks in no small part to the very same free market forces they unleashed, which greatly incentivised female labour market force participation and downgraded the social importance of families; hyper-financialised capitalism’s destabilising effect on culture had been wilfully overlooked. Around this time, the Republican Vice President Dan Quayle’s attack on sitcom character Murphy Brown prefigured Vance’s war on “cat ladies”, and for a time Quayle, too, seemed “weird” in light of that decade’s changing sensibilities.

A radically deregulated financial sector along with an over-hyped tech sector supercharged America’s transformation into a post-industrial and post-material simulacrum, precisely the kind of environment in which New Class-type functionaries thrive. Indeed, the line between the old New Class and the private sector PMCs of the new frictionless economy would become increasingly blurred. The sclerotic financial and tech sectors at the heart of the system ceased to be competitive in any classically capitalist sense and had come to resemble the same immovable Leviathan conservatives saw in the public sector, with an abundance of make-work “bullshit jobs”, overseen by authoritarian HR departments.

The failures of this status quo helped to put Trump in power, the second major shock. But the Trump administration suddenly veered away from its populist promise of 2016 and instead doubled down on free market fundamentalism, enacting policies that disproportionately benefitted the same corporate sectors responsible for the dysfunction. On top of this, it leaned heavily into social conservative causes, like abortion, even as popular attitudes have moved considerably towards a new centre-ground. What happened? The answer lies with the same professional conservatives, who staffed that administration and the Congressional GOP.

The Right’s apparatchiks had been frozen in the unchanging logic of their own stultified institutions, which upheld the inviolability of both free markets and social conservatism (while refusing to seriously acknowledge the tensions between them), independent of any changes in the larger social context. In effect, they became “Right-PMCs”. For the sprawling conservative think tank ecosystem in which they are bred is now no different from the rest of the New Class-dominated economy: NGO-like bureaucracies that live off donor generosity merely issue credentials and manage a vast symbolic economy of abstract ideas and officially sanctioned moral virtues. Conservatism Inc. became functionally identical to the same progressive academic establishment its polemicists routinely attack, only with one set of cultural and ideological signifiers swapped in for another.

And while these failures have de-legitimised many of the old think tanks in the eyes of younger intellectual conservatives, being college educated Right-PMCs themselves, their only response has been to come up with an alternative underground symbolic economy based on the circulation of edgy memes and reactionary ideologies. This so-called “dissident Right” merely wishes to reproduce the existing Right-PMC ecosystem but outfitted with Nietzschean and “based” dogmas instead of traditional conservative ones. But it is no less stamped by the same conceited intellectual culture that marked postwar conservatism: its advocates, like Buckley, tend to be effete, elitist, and eccentric; and many of the colourful “alternative lifestyles” (to use a euphemism) associated with the New Right arise from these reactionary online currents.

America’s cultural politics may thus be reduced to a struggle between two sets of symbol-worshipping PMCs: the overwhelming progressive majority of PMCs who coalesce around the Democrats and the Right-PMC minority who influence the Republican side. Both have beliefs that regular Americans would consider weird, but like competing sects of Brahmins in Vedic Age India, their battle is to settle whose religious doctrines and deities can appeal most to the masses of normies who toil in the fields; and the winner gets to call the other side weird. However, conservative attempts to beat progressive PMCs at this game of ruling through the maintenance of cultural-symbolic hegemony, while letting the material world decay, have come up short time and again. Probably because their rivals in the liberal establishment are far more disciplined, astute, and well-resourced.

Republicans ought to play a different game entirely. They should reclaim their historic role as the vanguard of entrepreneurial capitalism by cobbling together a coalition of economic self-interest between the two classes who are least vulnerable to ideological capture by college-educated elites: small-business elites (who tend to be very wealthy but uncultured) and the working class. In other words, an unlikely alliance who could help to reground the economy in the material realm, away from the rule of Brahmins. But this would require the Right-PMCs to restrain their own Brahmanical impulses: shifting their focus from waging endless culture war to forging a political economy that can serve this coalition’s practical interests, something they have so far proven incapable of doing. For the problem of the Brahmins on either side of the ideological divide is a classic one. As Right-PMC icon Reagan once said, it’s not that they’re ignorant, they know so much that isn’t so.

Much of the force of the new “weird” insult is directed at Vance but threatens to become contagious. Contrary to popular belief, guilt-by-association is not really a thing: attributions of guilt only make sense in terms of what an individual does, not who he stands next to. In contrast, weirdness-by-association is absolutely real. As every child in the playground instinctively knows, making friends with the weirdo who has just arrived in class can make you vulnerable to unflattering reappraisal.

Not helped by his awkward attempts at a statesmanlike public persona, Vance has been caught out by old comments of his, such as riffing about “childless cat ladies” running the Democrats. What presumably came across to Fox News fans at the time as edgy pugilism now appears to the wider world as an unnecessarily mean and aggressive attempt to sow division. The incident encapsulates the general PR problem of the popular conservative echo chamber, which for years has gloried in transgressive puerility and irony-soaked radical-posturing as a counter to the po-faced pieties of the Left — but now looks psychopathic to those normies not in on the “joke”.

Indeed, a true irony of the current situation is that the coarsening of discourse allowed by Trump and the online Right is arguably what has allowed Walz and co. to lean so heavily into cheap insults and get away with it. Even so, the sight of leading progressives enthusiastically bandying around jibes like “weird” and “creepy” is still somewhat disorienting. The robust language has a transgressive ring of danger about it, compared with the past oversensitive decade strewn with dog whistles and fig leaves everywhere they looked.

In fact, it must be highly galling for those who have built careers policing language, condemning “othering”, and deconstructing the concept of normality in the name of progress, to see their party of choice revalidating mainstream instincts and the scapegoating of social outliers in such a big way. It’s also a blow to anyone with remaining fantasies of a new enlightened political discourse on the Left: “weird” is more an instinctive expression of distaste than a rational analysis, which is partly why it works so well. Judgements of what is weird and creepy come from the gut not the brains.

A lot of scrambling is now taking place in internet circles, trying to convince the general public that the Democrats are the real weirdos. The X account Libs of Tiktok, for instance, has pronounced of Walz’s time as Governor of Minnesota: “This is the guy who signed laws requiring tampons in boys bathrooms, allows kids to get their body parts chopped off, and wants p**n in schools.” Conservative activist Christopher Rufo elaborated further: “He’s hip to ‘Gender Queer’. He loves non-binary children. He knows that graphic depictions of vibrators, blowjobs, and strap-on dildos belong in every classroom.”

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These strategies might play well to the like-minded, but in terms of convincing neutral onlookers that Republicans are not weird — which surely should be the goal — they look monumentally self-defeating. Far too much backstory is required to explain the provenance of the supposed gotchas to the casual observer, and without it the accusations look paranoid and prurient, only proving the initial point.

And whatever the results of Walz’s liberalised policies in practice, nobody who wasn’t already viciously opposed to him could think it was a fair description of his mindset that he positively “wants” porn in schools, or intentionally aims to get pictures of vibrators “in every classroom”. Rather, insofar as the man thinks about sexually explicit books in school libraries at all, he presumably frames them as equipping young minds with tools to reduce shame and help them deal with a complicated modern world. It may be a lazy and wrongheaded take, but it scarcely makes him a modern day Marquis de Sade.

This overreach on the part of his critics smacks of desperation, and is part of what generates an impression of loss of perspective amongst those doing it. It’s a fair criticism of the Left that they often only see the world they would like, and do not notice the one we actually have. But equally, those conservatives caught up in exaggerated, febrile visions of a progressive-ruled world seem unable to notice salient aspects of reality too. Things may be bad in lots of ways but they are not as bad as some apparently would wish, for the purposes of self-vindication if nothing else.

And it is not just US Right-wing commentators who suffer from this affliction. Their British counterparts are also having a moment in response to the riots of the past days, with reactions that look increasingly bizarre to those who don’t already agree with them on the basics. Here too we find an online commentariat whose dystopian prognostications and telling ellipses seem to reveal more about their own psyches than about the riots. Given the originating subject matter, there are fewer hints of suppressed sexual excitement in this case — but then again, arousal comes in many forms.

For instance, one day after rioters tried to burn down a hotel full of asylum seekers, leaving the shell covered in explicitly racist slogans, academic Matthew Goodwin published a blog implying that the Labour Party wanted you “to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears”, Orwell-style; yet he himself had no mention of this specific incident as he railed against comparatively more peaceful pro-Palestinian marches as evidence of supposedly two-tier policing. (In a previous blog, for what it’s worth, he conceded that “violence against police is never justified”.)

Bundling the Southport crime, committed by a British-born citizen for as yet unknown motives, together with past grooming gang scandals and the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, he accused Labour of “doing all they can to distract us from asking for the real reasons why our children have been blown up at pop concerts, murdered at dance classes, and subjected to industrial-scale, anti-White rape across dozens of English towns” — though fastidiously avoided spelling out the “real reasons” himself. Meanwhile over on X, Laurence Fox has been continuing his public nervous breakdown by writing cringeworthy free verse about the “Sun god cult”, and Kellie Jay-Keen (aka Posie Parker) has implied that the British public has only two real choices — the National Front or the Paedophile Information Exchange. As Donald Trump said on a different occasion, they aren’t sending their best.

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Prepare for a Hot Keir Summer

By Kathleen Stock

Nonetheless, it remains reasonable for people on both Left and Right to complain about the way mass immigration is habitually managed in this country, and to insist that not all protestors are violent rioters. They are correct to point out that the Establishment too often designates such complaints as “far-Right”, and that some institutions, including judicial ones, are making what look like unacceptably unfair decisions based on ethnic factors.

Yet when even Tommy Robinson is attempting to distance himself from the excesses of “lads in balaclavas wearing black”, talking heads who continue to sentimentalise or excuse the worst culprits over the past few days most definitely have a PR problem. Attempting to cast opportunistic recreational violence by bored dickheads as some kind of noble quest on behalf of the working classes only seems plausible if you are already desperate for it to be true.

And here too, as in the case of US commentators, the fact that most people don’t keep up with the intricacies of online political wars, and don’t have time to read endless Substacks, means they have no real idea what or who you are railing against as you churn out your hot takes. You may imagine you are bravely fighting dragons in public to widespread applause, but all they can see is you wrestling with your own shadow — and you look really weird doing it.

A quicker way of saying all this is that keyboard warriors coyly hinting at ethnonationalist sympathies still look like unsavoury losers to most UK onlookers — and thank God for that. Perhaps the figures involved don’t care — after all, as one points out, they can make a lot of money out of it — but more mainstream politicians on the Right probably should. Whatever the motives, their associates are a reputational liability. The impression they leave for neutrals of embarrassing, unpleasant weirdness is likely to be contagious, unless distancing measures are swiftly brought in.

It’s thus quite ironic that actual proof of a “Trump cult”, at least in a manner of speaking, is slowly beginning to surface now, at a point where it simply doesn’t matter anymore. Today, the US has so many problems — with more seemingly on the way — that discussing minor unsavoury details about Trump simply doesn’t elicit much of a response. But even so, a very minor and soon-forgotten civil war among many of his online supporters might be worth dwelling on, for the simple reason that it reveals that Trump might not be all that he used to be. When all is said and done, tales of his political invincibility might end up being just tales.

The online spat in question began last week, when Kyle Rittenhouse — the young man who killed several men during the series of riots following the police shooting of Jacob Blake — posted a selfie together with the retired libertarian politician Ron Paul. Rittenhouse explained that Trump wasn’t strong enough on the Second Amendment, which isn’t particularly outlandish as far as political viewpoints go in 2024 America. He then added that he was writing in Ron Paul for the presidential election, thereby implying that he wouldn’t be voting for Trump.

What followed was a veritable explosion of hatred and rage, a picture-perfect example of a “rabid Leftist” cancellation, except it was coming from the Right. People took to denouncing Rittenhouse as a lowly backstabber, a Judas in the flesh, guilty of betraying Trump. They didn’t stop there: they mocked his appearance, his weight, intimated that it would have been better if Rittenhouse had actually been shot that night in Kenosha, and that nobody should ever listen to him. Rittenhouse, who was probably quite shocked at such sheer vehemence, swiftly published a letter of apology, in which he dutifully denounced everything he’d just said and promised to be a good boy and vote for Trump.

The idea that a voter owes loyalty to a politician (and should thus simply shut up if the politician is weak on the issues the voter cares about) is a strange one to have in an electoral democracy. But the mildness of Rittenhouse’s criticism — that Trump had been weak on the Second Amendment — together with the fierceness of the anger directed at him speaks to something fairly significant: it reveals a growing sense of weakness and panic on the American Right.

The energy of 2016 is mostly gone at this point; many people I know who were quite into Trump eight years ago have now mostly checked out. And it’s not exactly a great mystery why: many of the guest speakers at the Republican National Conference were divisive, to put it mildly, and in general there’s just a sense that Trump is older and slower at age 78 than he was at age 70. More problematically, Trump’s penchant for surrounding himself with people who undermine what he’s doing — or at least undermine what many voters think Trump should be doing — does not seem to have improved over the years.

Criticisms of the kind that Kyle Rittenhouse voiced — before being forced to ritually denounce them in an online Maoist struggle session — sting today because they hit at something real. Behind every lurid tale about how Trump is going to deport a hundred million illegals over lunch break while also lowering the price of hamburgers, there lurks a growing sense of aimlessness, desperation, and fear: fear that things in America are rapidly breaking apart, that more pointless forever wars loom on the horizon, that nobody — not even Trump — will actually captain the ship. Faced with this insecurity, we can see the emergence of a growing “Trump cult”, one that exists not as a casual slur but a genuine social phenomenon.

But what, you might ask, about Kamala Harris? Surely, there’s something fairly similar going on among Democrats? The answer to that question is both yes and no. Harris appears less as the leader of a cult of personality than a very odd kind of American Gorbachev. Because Biden’s re-election campaign was an almost farcical exercise in cult-like behaviour — with grown adults repeating the obvious lie that the man was “sharp as a tack” up to the point when he was forcibly removed — Harris’s ascendancy truly does represent a form of glasnost and perestroika for Democratic voters. No longer do they have to pretend that the obviously incapable 81-year-old is the best presidential candidate in the history of the country; now they only have to contend with a politician who is merely unpopular and incompetent. After being forced to subsist on tree bark and coal shavings for more than a year, the Democratic coalition now seems quite happy at being treated to bread and water.

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On the American Right, by contrast, it’s important to note that the growing “Trump cult” is not a product of Donald Trump himself. It’s not a top-down scheme to trick people or string them along. Rather, it is a bottom-up phenomenon, and very likely a short-term one at that.

After the Second World War, the tribal Melanesian islanders created cargo cults and built improvised runways in the hope that the American planes would be convinced to return. For many of Trump’s voters today, the choice now is to either give up hope of significant improvement, or to try to meme the good old days of 2016 back into existence, while treating anyone who risks piercing the bubble with increasing hostility.

But for every person screaming at Kyle Rittenhouse and telling him to repent, you will find two or three people whose hopes for improvement through the political system have diminished substantially over the past eight years. Trump or no Trump, the MAGA Right is starting to lose its grip. Despairing at the black storm clouds on the horizon, they are desperately trying to keep the flame of faith alive, even if the tools to do so take them uncomfortably close to the Left they purport to hate. Fans of Harris, on the other hand, have already learned to live with disappointment and hopelessness. On both sides, then, in very different ways, Reagan’s promise of “Morning in America” has never felt so distant.

The episode is particularly poignant today, in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, when it appears as if the very life and unity of the republic is on the line. In light of this, 1924 offers a parable not just for Democrats but for Republicans and, indeed, all Americans, who may be interested in taking the longer-term view and envisioning how the nation might get through this darkly ominous season of disunity.

During the Twenties, the Republicans were the party of the “ins”, uniting financial and industrial interests centred in the Northeast with well-to-do farmers, professionals and businessmen from most of the rest of the country, outside the South. The election of 1920 saw the triumph of the Republicans under Warren Harding after the Wilson interlude and the First World War.

The states of the old Confederacy voted against Republicans not just out of post-Civil War bitterness but because their region had been reduced to an economic backwater, left out of the industrial development that transformed the North and consigned to be its captive market. The fact that Southern elites retained the racial hierarchy of Jim Crow on top of a half-feudal agrarian economy based on exploitation of ex-slaves and poor whites alike did not help. And for these reasons, they, along with some of the similarly underdeveloped regions in the Western periphery, saw themselves as outcasts and opponents of Northeastern capital, and were thus Democrats.

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But they were not the only segments of the country with an axe to grind. The industrial working class in many big Northern cities suffered from the effects of a highly unequal economy: shabby tenements, low wages and poor working conditions. This united them with the hinterlands and cemented Democrats as the party of the “outs”. There was, however, one problem: the ranks of the urban classes were swelled by immigrants and their children, many were Catholic or Jewish and, if not Irish, came from even more alien south and east European cultures. Meanwhile, the American South and West were — just like their Northern rivals — overwhelmingly Anglo-Protestant and were susceptible, to say the least, to xenophobic and anti-Catholic prejudice.

It’s worth mentioning that the debacle of 1924 took place before cultural affinities became the main criterion for party affiliations, as it is today. This meant that parties, the Democrats in particular, could hold constituencies with radically opposed views on identity or morality (“culture war issues”) as part of the same electoral coalition.

The intra-Democrat divide set the stage for the 1924 showdown at Madison Square Garden, to select a challenger to Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge. The two frontrunners were Governor Al Smith of New York and Senator William Gibbs McAdoo of California. The Irish-Italian Smith was a tribune of the urban proletariat, having risen from humble origins to become a forceful advocate for progressive reforms in state government. He had been supported by New York City’s Tammany Hall machine. McAdoo was a financial technocrat, originally from Tennessee, who presided over the opening of the Federal Reserve as Treasury Secretary under his father-in-law Woodrow Wilson. Working for his candidacy — though he could not acknowledge it — was the Ku Klux Klan.

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The tragedy was that Smith’s and McAdoo’s overlapping reformist tendencies could not coalesce into a coherent platform due to the enmity of their bases. Instead, they duelled over Prohibition and an anti-Klan plank. The proceedings were marred by violence between Tammany toughs and Klansmen; the nomination process stretched out across 103 gruelling ballots over 16 days. American journalist H.L. Mencken described it as “3,000 dogs in one great pit, all frantically chasing their tails”.

The announcement of a winner was as anticlimactic as it was fatal to the Democrats’ chances in the November election: stalemated delegates settled on John W. Davis, a lawyer from West Virginia, who shared neither Smith’s nor McAdoo’s talents. There was no coming together and predictably, the Democrats suffered a landslide defeat to the Coolidge Republicans, earning only 29% of the popular vote and securing only 12 states, all in the South. Intra-party tribalism persisted until the next election in 1928, when Smith won the nomination, and several ex-Confederate states bolted for the Republican candidate Herbert Hoover, rather than vote for a Catholic.

In the end it took a crisis, namely the Crash of 1929, to weld Democrats back together in time for 1932. That year’s nominee was the man who introduced Smith as “the Happy Warrior” in 1924. Franklin D. Roosevelt did what his predecessor could not: unite the industrial working class with the hinterlands under the banner of the New Deal, despite their lingering hatreds. FDR’s administration granted relief and employment to workers at the same time as it subsidised development of the South and West. Compromises were struck, however, with respect to racial equality and labour unions in the South, whose reactionary culture could not yet countenance the pace of change (leaving it to a later era to enact Civil Rights).

But the economy sprung back into production: workers of all races and creeds as well as the backwater regions saw living standards improve from the depths of the Depression, though it took the Second World War to consolidate this progress. While McAdoo remained a Roosevelt partisan, Smith became a fierce critic, never acknowledging that the New Deal’s success rested on foundations he and his convention rival had jointly laid: its welfare-developmental state was a synthesis of their best instincts.

This optimistic moment in US history illustrates that seemingly intractable resentments between feuding tribes can be overcome by a shared agenda of sweeping material reform and renewal. But how could such a blueprint possibly be applied to today’s divided America?

It’s important to remember that beneath the “friend-enemy” tribalism that’s taken hold, the two parties are still coalitions of interests. The upheavals of both the post-2016 Right and Left stem, not so much from the working class, but from the anxieties of two rival “subaltern elites”: the small-business “gentry” class which presides over struggling de-industrialised hinterlands (not unlike the places represented by McAdoo); and the downwardly mobile professional managerial classes or “clerisy” who live in the major urban metropoles (not unlike the places represented by Smith).

Both of these factions hold outsize influence within their parties; both led the turn away from neoliberalism. And the outline of a programme to unite them has become evident in recent years. Bidenomics is, after all, the Democrats’ adaptation of the same criticisms against globalisation levelled by Donald Trump in 2016, while populist Republicans in the Senate have developed their own industrial policies closer in spirit to what the Democrats are doing than the tax cuts and austerity proposals still officially favoured by their party leadership.

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A programme of industrial redevelopment would benefit both the clerisy and the gentry: the former from the expansion of demand for managerial talent that would come with decentralisation of economic activity away from bloated prestige sectors such as finance and tech; the latter from the capital that reshoring would bring to the left-behind regions which they preside over as local elites. It would create jobs for the working class as well. That the Democrats’ national industrial policies are leading to increased investment in low-regulation, Republican-voting districts is already a sign that such a non-zero-sum modus vivendi is plausible, if the political incentive isn’t to constantly self-polarise, as Smith and McAdoo did.

What’s needed is firstly a positive vision around which the tribes can coalesce. If that doesn’t work, a period of emergency, like that of 1929-1945 may do the trick. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan and seizure of its chip industry, with all the major geopolitical and economic implications this would have for America, could be the impetus that finally brings these brawling groups together.

This is all supposing that Americans can put aside their differences, as Smith’s and McAdoo’s factions eventually did, in pursuit of something larger than themselves. This is a decade-long bet: the short-term outlook is admittedly grimmer, for the country has to stay together long enough to mount such reforms and the tensions currently on display are about as toxic as they were 100 years ago. But with an eye to the future and confidence in themselves, Americans must recognise: the only way out is through.

Trump’s heroic response to an attempt on his life is a reminder of the extent to which, even in our technologically-mediated universe, the arts of narrative manipulation and framing only reach so far. At the core of every story is a human being whose character, as expressed through his actions, will be judged favourably or not by his or her fellow humans — such stories being especially important in societies where people elect their leaders, as shown by the rapturous reception that Trump received at the opening of the party’s National Convention in Milwaukee.

Trump’s instincts under fire prove him to possess the courage of a leader, however dubious other aspects of his character may be. It is fair to surmise that there isn’t a single head of state on earth, from Emmanuel Macron to Vladimir Putin to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who wouldn’t trade a large part of their kingdoms for a photograph of themselves standing bloodied and defiant beneath their national flag, having taken an assassin’s bullet and lived. That kind of political charisma is impossible to counterfeit.     

The images of the bloodied but defiant Trump also clearly underlined the contrast between a man who at 78 retains the physical vigour and presence of mind to take a bullet in front of a crowd, then get off the ground and shape a lasting image in the moment, and his doddering rival. Now, the sport of reading the Beltway tea leaves to determine which party figurehead might head the Democratic ticket in November has been replaced by inklings of real panic. 

Even worse for the Democrats is Trump’s ability to seize the most valuable ground in American politics: the future. If most peoples on earth live their collective national lives somewhere between the past and the present, Americans have always been different. Their idea of their past is generally shaky and non-binding. Instead, Americans exist between the present and the future, which is why they do things like invent digital technology and the iPhone and send men to the moon and Mars.

In the 24 hours following the assassination attempt, Trump seized the future with two bold moves. The first was attracting the public endorsement of Elon Musk, the technologist and builder who also happens to be the single wealthiest man in America. By uniting his charisma with Musk’s, Trump showed that he is not simply the backwards-looking angry white man candidate of 2016 looking to “Make America Great Again”. Rather, he is seeking to Make the American Future Great, which is a different, more inspiring, and potentially more unifying, sentiment. To underline the importance of the future, Trump then chose a Vice Presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, who is 40 years younger than he is, anointing a successor who can inherit his movement — and who could in theory serve two terms as president after Trump’s term is done.

It’s been a while since an American political candidate was able to capture the future. Trump’s first campaign was an angry, backwards-looking affair that targeted the country’s feckless elites; Biden never bothered with the future at all. Obama, who ran his first campaign on the basis of “hope”, by his second term was largely looking abroad to repair supposed past American crimes everywhere from Iran to Cuba. A heroic Trump who has energised his base and proven his personal courage while laying claim to the future is likely to have significant appeal to American voters.

Yet, the Democratic Party is a well-functioning, massively-funded, centrally-directed machine, capable — as it did in 2020 — of rewriting election laws to its advantage and banking millions of absentee ballots in advance of the election. By contrast, the Republican Party is a ramshackle, decentralised affair whose local worthies tend to be car dealers or pillow salesmen rather than corporate Ivy League types and lawyers. The structural imbalance between the parties has suggested that Democrats could run a cardboard cut-out of Taylor Swift for the presidency in 2024 and still win — especially given the immutable presence of the polarising Trump at the top of the Republican ticket. In fact, some polls showed Biden doing better against Trump after his doddering debate performance.

Trump’s fairground heroics, therefore, hardly guarantee a win in November. To be clear, that’s because America is no longer home to a functioning two-party system, in which each of the two parties represent coalitions of regional interests and can count on the allegiance of local industries and opinion leaders. That’s a concept from political textbooks written 50 years ago. 

Since the Nineties, America has morphed from a sprawling, continent-sized democracy to a more European-style centralised federal state with a ruling class of coastal billionaires serviced by a unitary national elite. The Democratic Party is the home of the vast majority of America’s ruling oligarchy, and of the highly-paid, well-credentialed class of lawyers, consultants, researchers, media bosses, and others with degrees from a small number of elite universities who help the oligarchs do business, as well as the class of billionaire-funded NGO workers and “organisers” who harvest votes on behalf of the Party, which is both a self-enclosed life-world and a unitary socio-political machine. Unless you intend to confine your professional life to a few far-flung, largely rural states, being a Republican in such circles, or even being insufficiently “progressive”, is a sure-fire career-ender. 

By enforcing an ideological line that serves America’s billionaires in the name of the “oppressed”, and labelling discordant or disruptive views as either bigotry or Russian propaganda, the Democratic Party helps ease the glaring contradictions of the privileged classes it represents, while continuing on with the work of destroying the country’s middle-class and unionised labour markets and ensuring that the oligarchs don’t pay taxes. 

The structural importance of the Democratic Party to the new American system goes deeper, though. As the institution that mediates between the country’s oligarchy, its servant class elite, and masses of dispossessed voters, who are divided up into ever-multiplying numbers of identity groups and then set against each other, the party plays a key role in making the new American system run. It coordinates the activities of bureaucrats; the sprawling network of billionaire-funded NGOs that augments the power of the bureaucracy and the party alike; the media; and academia. The party also sets the policy and hiring agendas for America’s large corporations, to the point where, before the shooting, Trump had yet to attract the endorsement of the head of a single Fortune 500 company.

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With all that socio-economic and bureaucratic power at their fingertips, it is perhaps no surprise that Democrats had long ago argued away the need to be polite to their increasingly powerless Republican opponents. Whether you were a corporate CEO, a university president, a tech baron, or head of a major American law firms, endorsing Trump meant more than social suicide; much lesser offences have reliably resulted in being aggressively targeted by NGO-led pressure campaigns NGO-led pressure campaigns and having protesters show up at your home, as well direct targeting by a federal bureaucracy that has increasingly abandoned the pose of social neutrality in favour of enforcing Party diktats on gender, race and nearly every other subject under the sun. Republicans, with the exception of a narrow group of fellow Beltway elitists, were racist, sexist, transphobic white supremacists and insurrectionists.

One of the chief targets of the Democratic Party’s society-wide enforcement machine has been Trump himself. Since Trump left office in 2020, he has been relentlessly targeted by a series of cases that have been aggressively prosecuted by both local and federal prosecutors despite a glaring paucity of evidence to support the idea that his actions were, in fact, crimes. Actually, the legal basis for these cases was dismissed as such by authorities as various as former Democratic New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo and Democrat-appointed judges on the US Supreme Court. The recent federal case against Trump, alleging that he had committed a crime by retaining classified government documents, which resulted in a full-scale raid by armed FBI agents on his home in Florida, was thrown out yesterday by the presiding judge, Aileen Cannon, on the grounds that the appointment and funding of a special prosecutor in the case was itself “unlawful”. But the legality of the cases against Trump was never the point — which was to use the proceedings to prevent Trump from campaigning for months, while suggesting to voters that he was a criminal.

In turn, the legal onslaught against Trump and his supporters, which began even before he took office in January 2017, was only one part of a larger, incredibly well-funded, whole-of-society campaign that the Democrats launched against a man they have ceaselessly depicted not merely as the blustering, attention-seeking buffoon that he clearly sometimes is, but as a dark Hitlerian threat to democracy. In the wake of the attempted assassination, it is the other two major components of the elite anti-Trump campaign that appear most threatening to the American future.

In a pervasive information warfare campaign, Trump is depicted not as a political naif or a crude vulgarian, or as a deeply chaotic personality who can’t manage his way out of a paper bag, but as a sinister dictator-in-waiting, who must be stopped from attaining or exercising power at any price.

To support this dark view, Trump was placed at the centre of a whirl of conspiracy theories which were duly reported as front-page news on a daily basis for nearly a decade. Yet to date, there is no evidence that Vladimir Putin conspired with Trump to deny Hillary Clinton her rightful victory in 2016; Clinton lost because she was a terrible candidate who blew a perfectly winnable election. No, Trump was not a paid Russian agent who communicated with Putin through a secret server in the basement of the Alpha Bank branch in Kiev. No, Trump didn’t have a secret deal with Russian businessmen to build hotels in Azerbaijan, which allowed Putin to control him. No, Trump was not taking money from Putin through intermediaries representing the Chabad Lubavitch stream of Judaism in Russia.

Every conspiracy theory was wilder than the last, and was treated like the scoop of the century for a day or a week before disappearing without a trace. Nor was there any form of correction or consequences for the reporters and editors involved. Instead, they rewarded themselves with Pulitzer prizes. The result has been the wholesale and tragic destruction of the entire credibility of the mainstream American press. 

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Unsurprisingly, the decline in Americans being able to trust what they read, and the rise in apocalyptic political rhetoric, was matched by a corresponding rise in political violence. Trump himself was hardly innocent of involvement with political violence, even if he never exactly called the white supremacist rioters at Charlottesville “good people” — a charge that has been extensively debunked. Still, clashes between the Proud Boys (a Canadian-led Right-wing group) and other so-called patriot groups and Left-wing Antifa protesters were common in the first two years of Trump’s Presidency, lending credence to the idea that both parties were cultivating bully-boy militias. Yet, as Trump’s interest in the violent Right lessened after the first year or so of his Presidency, the Left’s reliance on violence as a political tool only increased.

Trump’s election was greeted by large-scale riots in every major American city, some of which went on for weeks. In June 2017, Steve Scalise, the Republican majority leader in the House, was nearly killed in a mass shooting by a Bernie Sanders supporter in what the Virginia State Attorney General concluded was “an act of terrorism… fuelled by rage against Republican legislators”. A year later, in June 2018, recently appointed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was targeted by a California man named Nicholas Roske, who arrived at Kavanaugh’s house with a rifle before giving himself up to police, and was then indicted for attempting to assassinate Kavanaugh. Roske told investigators that he was upset over the leaked Supreme Court draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade as well as the potential for Kavanaugh to help loosen gun laws in the country. 

The steady drum-beat of calls to public disorder from the Left during Trump’s Presidency reached its apogee in the run-up to the 2020 election, where rioters acting under various banners, from Black Lives Matter to Antifa, trashed the shopping districts of over 20 major American cities. In cities such as Portland, nightly battles between the police and Molotov-cocktail-wielding demonstrators went on for months, becoming a form of nightly street theatre in which young masked attackers threw bombs at police and federal buildings while teams of Democratic Party-aligned NGO lawyers stood ready to get offenders out of jail. As the damage mounted, and local panic increased, violent protesters in Democrat-led municipalities, most of whom turned out to be from upper middle-class Democratic families, seldom faced any consequences for their actions, with celebrities and others offering to bail them out. 

With the attempted assassination of Trump, the political and social stakes have once again been raised, in a system that seems ill-equipped to meet such a significant challenge. Any attempt at return to a procedural normalcy that was already badly weakened before Trump took office seems entirely beyond the capacity of America’s callow and insulated elites, which have lost themselves for nearly a decade in the fantasy cosplay of anti-Trump.

What we will witness over the next four months will be an election campaign pitting the hero figure of a bloodied but unbowed Trump, a man despised by nearly half the country, against the anti-democratic manoeuvrings of the country’s institutional elite, as exemplified by whichever hand-picked candidate Democratic Party insiders choose to field against him. The resulting campaign will be a game without limits, in which the level of violence seems likely to escalate — which will further diminish the interest or ability on either side to acknowledge a victory by the other. Americans are about to find out what it feels like to live in a country at war with itself — no matter who wins the presidency in November.

Looking at the names being floated over the past week, there are two possible successor generations: Generation X and millennial. Yet of those being touted — Vice President Kamala Harris, Governors Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro, J.B. Pritzker and Andy Beshear, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg — only one, Buttigieg, does not belong to Gen X (while Harris, born in 1964, straddles the line). This is a shame. For while there is little doubt that the United States is overdue for generational change, it is not at all clear that Gen X embodies the kind of change that America needs.

Both these generations have been known to chafe under the suffocating domination of their Boomer predecessors; and both have gone through phases of rebellion against the same. Yet there are also crucial differences: one generation came of age in the heyday of globalisation, before Y2K and the other reached adulthood at the tail end of it around the 2008 crash. This has resulted in two distinct forms of political consciousness. As a consequence, beneath the question of which geriatric party establishment shall hold the keys to power in the next four years, a more important one looms: which generational value set will prevail over the next 40? For the present era is a one of paradigmatic transition: the days of Reagan, Clinton, and Bush are at a close, but what will replace it is still far from certain.

To answer this, we must return to the Boomers. Born after the war, this cohort grew up amid the greatest expansion of middle-class wealth ever recorded — the product of the dynamic industrial economy left behind by the G.I. generation. By the Seventies, however, it began to stagnate, and their response was to build a new economy based largely on financialisation, real estate and tech. As a result, between 1983 and 2023, average house prices rose by 500% and the value of stocks as measured by the S&P 500 benchmark index grew by 2,800%. Cheap credit, free trade, and a tech-driven productivity boom in the Nineties combined with these trends to give the impression of an economy growing in leaps and bounds. And it paid dividends, mainly for the Boomers, who got to keep the lion’s share of the gains, amounting to half the nation’s assets ($78.3 trillion in 2023), even as later events, such as the Great Recession and the reckoning over “the China Shock” exposed the growth of this era as illusory and unsustainable.

By the 2020s, as Boomer retirements accelerate, Gen Xers and millennials are set to inherit this wealth, in what’s been dubbed “the Great Wealth Transfer“. To what end this wealth is deployed will be the defining question of the next paradigm. And it is here where the divide between the Gen X and millennial political value sets come into play.

The romantic self-image of the Gen Xers is grounded in traits such as independence and stoicism: they were the “latchkey kids”, or as Rich Cohen put it in Vanity Fair, “the last Americans schooled in the old manner [who] know how to fold a newspaper, take a joke, and listen to a dirty story without losing their minds”. In their youth, anti-political cynicism formed the basis of their own counter-counterculture against the passé idealism of the Boomers.

Yet in its maturity, around the turn of the millennium, this cohort failed to produce a properly political expression that was practically distinct from the post-Reagan status quo, which they could only assent to, notwithstanding the directionless anti-corporate currents of the Clinton years or the anti-war movement of the Bush years. After all, these were peak “End of History” decades and the free market appeared to be humming just fine. Though not as socially mobile as the Boomers and despite having had to deal with recession in the early Nineties, Gen Xers still benefited from the boom times that followed; they had an overall easier time starting careers, forming households, and joining the middle class than the later post-2008 millennial cohorts. The same individualist ethos extolled by the likes of Cohen or Bret Easton Ellis worked well within the parameters of the highly atomised post-industrial paradigm that existed before the big crash: Gen X could afford to retain the apathy and detachment of their youth because, structurally speaking, there were little to no stakes.

Of course, Gen Xers were, like everyone else, affected by the Great Recession. But by this point, their institutional conservatism had arguably been baked into their generational character; and it would, in any event, have been unlikely for them to develop revolutionary aspirations in middle age (something left to the millennials). In the contest for a Biden replacement, this conservatism is discernible, albeit very subtly concealed, in the stances and rhetoric of the Gen Xer candidates.

In a recent New York Times interview, for instance, Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, born in 1971, made her case for generational change: “We recognise that our parents’ generation has had a lot of excess. So I’m hopeful that we can really move the needle, whether it’s bringing down our nation’s debt or ensuring that we are active when it comes to climate and solidifying and protecting individual rights.” Here, strikingly, Whitmer’s unit of analysis remains “individual”. She also lists the debt as her leading issue, reflecting a scale of priorities unchanged from Boomer liberalism’s high noon in the Nineties, when fiscal rectitude, environmentalism, and social progressivism were the orders of the day.

Listening to Newsom, Pritzker or Harris, one also struggles to find awareness of political horizons outside this paradigm. Indeed, it may very well be that the whole idea of thinking in terms of material economic structures is anathema to the Gen X as well as the Boomer mindset, having been conditioned against that possibility by the “post-materialist” abundance of their formative years.

Contrast this with Buttigieg’s words when he was last a presidential contender in 2019: “A lot of this is the consequence of what you might call the Reagan consensus… The empirical collapse of that supply side consensus, I think, is one of the defining moments of this period… It turns out a rising tide does not lift all boats. Not on its own.” Where Whitmer has “the individual”, the unit of analysis here is “the paradigm” — that is, the web of structures, norms and rules which set the range of possibilities for most Americans.

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In recognising the passage of paradigms, Buttigieg is arguably closer to fellow millennials on the progressive, post-Occupy Left and the heterodox “New Right” than he is to his ostensible fellow centrist liberals from the Gen X cohort. While late Boomers like Barack Obama and Gen Xers like Jake Sullivan might have also acknowledged the need to transcend Reaganism-Clintonism, they have often had to come to their conclusions through reflection. But what is merely theoretical to them is all too real to most politically conscious millennials, who grew up in the wreckage of the old order. Unlike the Gen Xers, their youthful rebellions were explicitly political on both ends of the ideological spectrum.

In particular, there is a compelling parallel between Buttigieg and fellow millennial rising star (and prospective Trump VP candidate) J.D. Vance. Both hail from de-industrialised hinterlands, are veterans of Bush-era forever wars, and have expressed desires to break from their parties’ Boomer-era orthodoxies on political economy, even as they continue to hold opposing views on social issues. It recalls the dynamic between Clinton and Bush: they might have disagreed on abortion or gay rights, but the common denominator between them — support for financialisaton and globalisation — nonetheless underpinned the last consensus.

And today, so too might the common denominator between the millennial Right and Left give rise to a new consensus based on de-financialisation and national re-industrialisation, a worthy goal to which the flow of American capital and investment may be directed, as “the Great Wealth Transfer” begins to unfold. Unlike the Boomers, who sucked the world dry, or the Gen Xers, who failed to do anything about it, the millennials may yet leave a better and fairer country to those that follow in Generations Z, Alpha, and beyond. The elevation of a president from this generation, from either party, would likely hasten the realisation of this hopeful future.

Since then, writers from the Right, Left, and centre have all offered appreciative reassessments of his work, again focused mainly on The Culture of Narcissism and Revolt of the Elites. A third book, however, published 40 years ago this year, has received comparatively less attention.

The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times was framed by Lasch as a follow-up to Culture of Narcissism; his aim, in part, was to correct a widespread misapprehension that his 1979 bestseller had amounted to a secular “hellfire sermon” — as the New York Times review put it — castigating the moral failings of his contemporaries. Then-president Jimmy Carter, who invited Lasch to the White House to discuss the book, seemed to have read it this way. To Lasch’s frustration, he relayed what he took to be the book’s thesis in his famous “malaise” speech when he declared: “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.”

In the opening pages of The Minimal Self, Lasch assured his readers that, to the contrary, they would “find no indignant outcry against contemporary ‘hedonism’, self-seeking, egoism, indifference to the general good — the traits commonly associated with ‘narcissism.’” His complaint that his diagnosis of a “culture of narcissism” had been misused as “a journalistic slogan that merely restates moralistic platitudes in the jargon of psychoanalysis” holds true for many recent repurposings of his work, whether it is liberals decrying Trump as “narcissist-in-chief” or conservatives citing Revolt of the Elites while ridiculing pampered Left-wingers. What is too often absent is the dimension of Lasch’s work that avoids the satisfactions of indignation and instead invites us to understand those we find contemptible — and the deep sources of our own contempt.

Our increasing “concern with the self”, Lasch explains in The Minimal Self, “takes the form of a concern with its psychic survival”. The issue with the contemporary narcissist, in other words, isn’t that he demands too much, but too little. “Under siege,” Lasch wrote, “the self contracts to a defensive core, armed against adversity.” This “minimal or narcissistic self,” he goes on, “seeks both self-sufficiency and self-annihilation: opposite aspects of the same archaic experience of oneness with the world.” The underside of what looks like narcissistic grandiosity is an implacable “sense of inner emptiness”.

The error of the “moralistic indictment of ‘consumerism’”, Lasch argued, was the failure to see it “as part of a larger pattern of dependence, disorientation, and loss of control”. This pattern derives from the fundamental modern restructuring of social, economic, and political life into systems far too vast for anyone to comprehend, much less exert any control over. Adrift in “a world of giant bureaucracies, information overload, and complex, interlocking technological systems vulnerable to sudden breakdown”. individuals have lost “confidence in their capacity to understand and shape the world and provide for their own needs”.

Liberal commentators trying to make sense of the 2016 election weren’t wrong to find in Lasch’s analysis of narcissism, as Dionne put it, “unflattering jolts of recognition about Trump himself — the lover of praise, the seeker after friendly audiences, the creator of a world in which he is always at the centre”. But too often, they fell into the moralising Lasch strove to avoid in their treatment of the President and of his followers, whom they framed as grasping, self-absorbed white men wounded by their declining power and privilege — a theme most recently reiterated in the controversial book White Rural Rage. The issue isn’t that there’s nothing whatsoever to this description: rural whites, like other demographics, are indeed reeling from what Lasch called the “diminishing expectations” of the present era, as is evident in the rise of deaths of despair. But the moralising accusation of narcissism obscures the deeper sources of such collective pathologies, as well as the extent to which the accusers exhibit comparable symptoms.

A less selective reading of Lasch helps to account for what many pundits take to be the great enigma of the 2024 election cycle: how is it that a man assailed by trials and scandals that would have long since tanked the career of many politicians before him retains a lead in most polling? The answer is that the once-and-possibly-future “narcissist-in-chief” dramatises more vividly than any other public figure the beleaguered condition of the self under present conditions. His enduring hold on his followers, as well as his ability to broaden his appeal to demographics previously claimed by his rivals, speaks to the general retreat of more aspirational political sensibilities in favour of what Lasch called “the imagery of victimisation and paranoia, of being manipulated, invaded, colonised, and inhabited by alien forces”. Trump’s key achievement, in this regard, is simply survival — in the face of the overwhelming forces arrayed against him.

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That the “survivalist” vision identified by Lasch four decades ago extends far beyond Trump and his supporters can be seen in the way his most fervent opponents appeal to it as well. Upon his election in 2016, they published endless guides to “surviving Trump”, and we can be sure this genre will be revived in the event of a second term. As an ACLU official recently told The Atlantic: “All we must do is survive four years.” And yet, because his liberal opponents are busy casting Trump in the role of would-be dictator, they often can’t see why many who share their general feeling of besieged helplessness might appreciate a figure who seems to withstand a constant onslaught by his enemies with verve and humour.

It isn’t surprising that Lasch’s sobering vision was forgotten until recently. The same year The Minimal Self appeared, Ronald Reagan’s re-election campaign ran one of the most famous ads in the history of presidential contests: “Morning in America.” The ad boasted of Reagan’s record of taming inflation and lowering interest rates, declaring that “our country is prouder and stronger and better”. Reagan went on to win 49 states and, over the subsequent decade, America came out on top in the Cold War while its booming tech industry fuelled a new era of growth that consigned the dark years of “malaise” to oblivion. There was nothing minimal about America’s ambitions at the high point of unipolar hegemony: rather than a retreat into pessimistic survivalism, at least up until the financial crash of 2008, the greatest risks facing the nation were overconfidence and overreach, from the housing bubble to the Global War on Terror.

Today’s Lasch renaissance, then, reflects a return to the bleak conditions the author evoked when he described how “American technology is no longer the most advanced; the country’s industrial plant is decrepit; its city streets and transport systems are falling to pieces”. Whether they promise to “make America great again” or to “build back better”, our leaders aren’t oblivious to this predicament. But when they encounter obstacles — the Deep State, congressional gridlock, or the many other abstract systems even the most powerful of us must contend with — it is far easier to retreat into the minimalist politics of survival and promise to fend off the feared enemy for a few more years. The indefinite perpetuation of this despondent state of affairs — and not the other spectres so often conjured up by political fearmongers of all stripes — is the gravest danger we face.

In the end, no less than his mother Melania was forced to step in, clarifying that young Barron “regretfully declines to participate due to prior commitments”. Yet her assurances will have done little to dispel the notion that, as it starts to wane, the MAGA movement will be little more than a family affair.

Donald Trump Jr has, after all, been active politically since the 2016 election, spending time campaigning for several republican candidates during the 2018 midterms, and again taking an active role in the electoral campaign of 2020. His sister, Ivanka, meanwhile, was rumoured to be angling for Marco Rubio’s senatorial seat in Florida, before eventually denying such plans. Her husband, Jared Kushner, is arguably even more central: in the mythology around the Trump presidency — that of the hapless but well-intentioned monarch surrounded by devious, conniving viziers and ministers — Kushner figures prominently as one of the villains.

From the start, the extended Trump clan and their role in US politics has had something of a “dog catches car” quality to it, in at least two respects. First, many of the attempts to get the family involved have been either abortive — Ivanka’s senatorial trial balloon, Barron Trump’s potential role as a GOP conference delegate — or fairly ill-received in practice. Second, the way in which Trump has tried to make politics a “family business” increasingly gives the impression of a political movement that fundamentally doesn’t know where it is going, nor what it intends to do once it gets there.

One can here make a comparison with a figure like Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of Bill and Hillary. There was never really the sense that the various no-show, well-paid sinecures Chelsea was handed were part of some nascent movement to revive America, drain the swamp, or take back control: this was pure trading favours for access. A grift, in other words, but an honest grift: one that was never confused about what the point of it all was. The talk about nominating Barron Trump as a GOP delegate, however, came at a moment of profound confusion within both the US Right in general and the MAGA movement in particular. The American Right is increasingly losing its cohesion, and it’s starting to manifest in haphazard attempts to create a political family dynasty.

Just recently, the America First Policy Institute — a Trump-affiliated think tank — released a report detailing proposals for a more robust and solid foreign policy for Trump’s second term in office. The suggestions are revealing, because they are essentially far more belligerent on the question of Ukraine — including a desire to keep arming the country even though the US is facing its own huge financial woes and cannot adequately restock its own arms inventories — than MAGA voters themselves. Far from being radical or shocking, “America First” policy initiatives increasingly seem like the same old Washington consensus that Trump supposedly set out to destroy.

But the issues surrounding the various idiosyncrasies of the extended Trump universe now appear fairly irrelevant, at least when compared with the troubles closer to home. Trump’s decision to team up with Republican speaker Mike Johnson — a man who is widely viewed as a traitor on the Right, and has been claimed by the Democratic Party as de facto “their” man in the house of representatives — in order to bury the issue of the American border while shunting a hundred billion dollars into foreign hands might very well be seen by future historians as the moment that he destroyed his own political career.

The severity of this self-inflicted blow to his own credibility and political legacy is easy to underestimate, for the simple reason that people have been conditioned to think of Trump as a snake charmer, and his voters as fundamentally irrational; when Trump says he could shoot a man on the street in New York in broad daylight and still be as loved as before, his liberal opponents all too often make the mistake of taking him both seriously and literally.

In truth, however, Trump is hardly immortal. History is full of political figures who rise to prominence relatively quickly, only to be abandoned and cast aside just as fast. In early 20th-century Russia, the orthodox priest Father Gapon became by far the most popular leader for the nascent Russian worker’s movement, easily outcompeting the more radical socialist and communist actors for that role. It did him very little good in the long run: after Russian soldiers opened fire on a demonstration he led in 1905, it’s as if all of Russia simply forgot he ever existed and moved on to more radical politics. But even in America the time between victory and disgrace can be very, very short. Richard Nixon’s 1972 electoral victory was one of the greatest landslides in American history; two years later his political career was destroyed.

Such an outcome for Donald Trump is not just possible, it is actually very likely. He is now backtracking across a range of areas — mostly to do with foreign policy — away from an earlier posture of trying to avoid foreign adventurism. He is trying to score points by stressing his willingness to support Israel hand over fist at precisely the moment that support for Israel inside the US Right is starting to be called into question, and opposition to foreign aid in the face of a looming bankruptcy crisis is rising to record highs. Moreover, signs from the American banking sector are becoming increasingly worrying, even as the US population is carrying record amounts of credit card debt — and debt defaults are spiking. The combination of weakened enthusiasm from his own base, a chaotic and messy personnel and policy situation, and finally the very real possibility that the majority of the next presidential term will be defined by very serious domestic economic crisis — perhaps even a Liz Truss-style scare in the bond markets — has the makings of a political crisis from which not even Trump will be able to extricate himself.

In this context, the emptiness of those seeking to create a political dynasty out of Trump’s family becomes plain to see: those who seek its warm embrace exude political helplessness, just as a child crawls to his mother when he’s scared. Rather than Prince Barron riding to its rescue, the Trump clan, like the MAGA movement itself, is likely to be viewed by future historians as a political failure: unable to deal with its own contradictions or idiosyncrasies, nor able to keep up with the rising tide of discontent sweeping across America, it turns in on itself like a black hole — until, eventually, it implodes.