America's Thermidorian Reaction? (Part 3)

What Donald Trump's second presidency might mean for the trajectory of the United States.

Part 3 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

As I am a critic of the reigning universalist egalitarian liberal consensus, I will attempt to answer the question as to whether or not America’s Thermidorian Reaction, if successful, would be a good thing or not. Before I do that, I need to make it clear that this hasn’t happened yet, and it still remains to be seen if this move by Trump’s Thermidorians will be successful or not. Secondly, I need to make it clear that this coalition around Donald Trump does not share my worldview and I am not anointing them saviours by any means. With that said, I will argue for why this is a positive development. And since America is the global hegemon, this doesn’t only concern the United States, but the rest of the Western world too.

The argument for why the current regime becoming more moderate is a bad thing is usually that this will “put people back to sleep” and that will alleviate the pressure built up against the system. The counterargument is usually that we need “accelerationism”. I wrote an article a year and a half ago titled South Africa Discredits “Accelerationism” on the idea that positive change comes from things getting so bad that it wakes everyone up to the problem. This doesn’t work. South Africa is ten times worse than any white majority country in terms of crime, economic instability, and anti-white politics, yet there still exist white liberals in South Africa who remain egalitarians. Reality does not instantly “red pill” people.

There is also the argument that the decline in material conditions will cause the regime to lose power. This is also a misconception. The decline of a regime in material terms does not inevitably lead to its loss of internal power. Take North Korea for example. The country has been totally dysfunctional for decades, yet the Kim regime has maintained a firm grip on power. In order to avoid losing power, the Kim regime has traded all material prosperity for absolute control. The infrastructure of North Korea is a total disaster, but the government is able to maintain control of the state. Another example is the country Zimbabwe. The country’s economy collapsed in every sense in the 2000s, but the ruling party remained in control of the state. The material conditions across the Western world have declined significantly over the past few years, but none of these governments are anywhere close to losing their ability to govern.

An argument you’ll often hear in Canada or countries in Europe is that since America is the hegemon and pushes these toxic ideas on its sphere of influence, we need America to collapse and lose its influence. It’s true that these ideas originated in the United States, but the ruling classes of these other countries have long since imbibed them and now believe in them independent of America. For example, the US isn’t forcing the EU to take in unlimited migrants. The ruling class in Europe are doing so on their own accord because they are now true believers in universalist egalitarianism, and they’d remain in power even if America lost its influence.

It would also take a lot longer for the US to collapse and lose all influence than those who make this argument think it would. America is nowhere near the point of collapse and probably won’t be for decades. Again, South Africa is far worse off materially, yet it hasn’t collapsed. The US has lost significant prestige since the turn of the century, but it’s going to remain a powerful country on the world stage for years to come. Putting your hopes in a collapse is not a viable solution. Thus, for other Western countries, a more ideologically moderate America is preferable to a radical one as its influence would be less damaging.

In countries like the United States, the practices of DEI or cancel culture decrease competence, eroding the infrastructure of the country, yet strengthen the ruling ideology’s hold on power. Rolling back these practices to an extent would be the regime trading a certain amount of control for an improvement in the overall material conditions of the country. Both the Thermidorian Reaction and Destalinization were attempts to regain a degree of sanity in their respective regimes after undergoing the chaos of their most radical phases. They did, however, need to give up a degree of control in order to do so.

It was a lot less dangerous to be a royalist in France under the Directory than during the Reign of Terror. It was still a republican regime, and royalism was still repressed by force at times, but simply being a royalist no longer resulted in instant decapitation. The USSR remained communist after its various reforms in its later decades, but dissenters were no longer being shipped off to the gulags by the millions. The shift going on today in the West won’t unseat universalist liberalism. However, anti-liberal right-wing ideas have a lot more potential to gain traction if simply holding them no longer results in instant cancellation. And since America is so influential culturally, a reduction in ideological ferocity there would probably be mirrored elsewhere too.

The counterargument you’ll hear is that radicalism from the left pushes people in a rightward direction. Again, as stated earlier, South Africa shows that this does not cause a widescale awakening, but even for the people it does wake up, there has to be a route to power. Stalin’s tyranny may have gotten some to question whether the Russian Revolution had been a good idea after all, but that didn’t really do them any good if uttering that thought outside of their head would land them in front of a firing squad. People despise things like DEI, but you can’t really do anything about it if you can’t get a job because you’re white and male as was the case in many elite institutions from 2020 to 2024. Just being able to have any kind of interaction with these institutions is already an improvement.

Furthermore, the real-world conditions which make the critique of the current system necessary are not going away. Trump’s Thermidorians seem to believe that by simply emphasizing meritocracy and producing less hostile propaganda, they are going to recreate the America of the 1990s. They are going to fail in this regard because they won’t have the demographic, cultural, or economic conditions of the 1990s which made the prosperity of that era possible. California will still resemble Mexico because it will still be full of Mexicans. No longer employing black transsexuals to head HR departments and making video games which feature white men as protagonists again isn’t going to change that.

These Thermidorians are also remembering the late 20th century through rose-coloured glasses. The truth is that the paradigm which they are reacting to today was already in place back then, just in a less radical form. It’s impossible to turn back the clock at all, but in order to create something resembling the era which they are nostalgic for, they’d need mass deportations and to repeal legislation like the Civil Rights Act. In other words, they’d need to violate the moral paradigm of, not only the past decade, but the past six decades, in order to regain the prosperity and stability they desire, and they don’t appear prepared to do that.

"America had no race problem in the 80s and 90s." - Classic Liberal Tech Bros

It’s worth remembering that a lie is still a lie no matter how fanatically you believe in it. Communism was just as much of a lie under Gorbachev as it was under Stalin. The punishment for questioning it might not have been starvation in a forced labour camp anymore, but the USSR was still unable to make it work because the premises it was based on were fundamentally incorrect. The same goes for colourblind universalist egalitarianism. Whether you are so emphatically anti-racist that you would destroy someone’s life over the most minor of infractions or you just want the world to resemble the Die Hard movies you liked as a teenager, you won’t get an egalitarian system to work because it’s based on a lie.

The critique of the current system will remain as relevant as ever. In fact, I’d argue that it would be even more relevant under a more moderate regime. With the crazy woke radicals, there really is no debate to be had because they are purely motivated by vicious anti-white resentment and their sole ambition is the destruction of Western civilization. So, arguments about how destructive things like third world immigration, affirmative action, or transgenderism are have no effect on them because their goal is destruction.

The goal of Trump’s Thermidorians isn’t to save Western Civilization, but to maintain the US as a high-functioning society which works for them. There actually is a degree of common ground on which a debate is to be had. And as we’ve seen time and time again, when there actually is a debate, this centrist classic liberalism loses every single time to its anti-liberal critique from the right. I don’t think that simply having the best arguments will necessarily result in positive change, but the critique of the current system will hold a lot more water with those who actually want to live in a functional society.

The Zionist lobby has operated for decades under the contradiction that they want Israel to be an ethnostate for the Jewish people while they want Western countries to be universalist liberal democracies. They’ve sustained this contradiction through the outpour of sympathy Jews received following WWII, but that sympathy is quickly running out. The pressure they are under now is that Israel doesn’t accord with the universalist egalitarian principles which Jews have played a large part in promoting for the past century. Trump 2024 is an attempt by a segment of the Zionist lobby to hold on to this contradiction for just a little longer, but this is not a long-term solution for them considering the average age those sympathetic to their cause is probably about 65.

The problem they have, which I wrote about in my article titled Dr. Goldenstein’s Monster, is that the moral paradigm they brought about is now being turned against them. I’m no friend of the Zionist lobby, but my criticism of them is not that Israel exists as a homeland for the Jews. It’s that the foreign policy of Western countries has been oriented against their own interests for the benefit of Israel. I’m fine with Jews ruling Israel as long as it’s clear that they only rule Israel and that white countries are ruled by their white majorities for their own interests. For the record, I think that a two-state solution would be optimal, and Palestine should be granted statehood, but I’m not too invested in that conflict either way.

The question the Zionist lobby will have to confront is whether or not they will continue to support a moral paradigm which is quickly turning against them. In other words, they have to decide if they care more about enacting their ethnic revenge fantasies against Europeans than they do their own survival. As we’ve seen, non-whites cannot be guilted into sympathizing with Jews and (erroneously) consider them white, thus worthy of resent. Unfortunately, the majority of the organized Jewish community seems committed to anti-whiteism even to their own detriment, but the less insane segments will need to consider how the current trends will affect their own group in the future.

Lastly, there the issue of artificial intelligence. As mentioned earlier, part of the reason for Big Tech’s shift to Trump was due to tech companies being forced to program woke ideology into their new AI projects by the Biden Administration. The assumption people like Elon Musk or Marc Andreessen seem to be under is that if AI weren’t given an ideology, it would basically sound like Bill Clinton from 30 years ago. If they genuinely program AI with the principle of truth above all else, I imagine they’ll be a little uncomfortable when they find that their chatbots sound a lot less like a 1990s liberal and a lot more like a 1920s race-realist.

This has happened before. Some earlier AI programs, when asked how best to prevent crime in US cities, gave some really politically incorrect answers. They hadn’t been programmed to adhere to egalitarian ideology, meaning they were unperturbed by the taboos set by the dominant morality of the present day. It will be interesting to see how these classic liberal tech bros react when they are confronted by an AI which doesn’t reaffirm their belief that America had it just right back when the Matrix was in theatres. Will they accept the disconcerting results they receive or do what the woke did and reprogram the AI so that it adheres to their preconceived worldview? That remains to be seen.

There has not been a counterrevolution in the United States or the West more broadly. Rather, an attempt is being made by a contingent of Thermidorians to deal with the consequences of the ruling universalist egalitarian liberal worldview being taken to its logical conclusion. However, the underlying problems with this worldview have not yet been addressed on a fundamental level. Don’t put your hopes in this cohort to turn things around, but I will remind you that it was not the Soviet Union of Stalin which fell, but the Soviet Union of Gorbochev. Trying to preserve that deeply flawed system through reform is what brought it down all together. Will the system of the present-day West undergo a similar downfall? Only time will tell.