America's Thermidorian Reaction? (Part 2)
What Donald Trump's second presidency might mean for the trajectory of the United States.
Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)
To understand the arch of Donald Trump’s political career so far, he should be seen as a Machiavellian and monarchical figure without any concrete political ideology or ideals beyond his own self-aggrandizement. Trump has switched party loyalty on many occasions, even spending most of the 2000s as a registered Democrat. In 2015, when he threw his hat in the ring for the 2016 election, he took up the cause of right-wing populism, not because he was a genuine believer in this cause, but because this was his most viable avenue to power.
In 2016, Trump was truly an outsider candidate with the entire establishment against him, including his own party. Though the odds were stacked against him, the populist energy he had built up, fuelled by dissatisfaction with the trajectory of the United States, was able to give him the victory. However, after his 2016 win, he had more or less achieved his own personal goal of becoming president. His presidency was a lot more in line with the establishment than his candidacy was. Despite this, they never forgave Trump for throwing a spanner in their works, albeit a much smaller one than expected.
This time period gave rise to the phenomenon of Trump Derangement Syndrome, the perpetual state of emotive rage which Donald Trump evoked in the left. This began during his campaign and continued throughout his presidency. While Trump was in the White House, the Great Awokening carried on unabated in the media, academic, and corporate worlds. The phenomenon of censorship via deplatforming from Big Tech platforms began just after Trump assumed office. The Great Awokening reached its crescendo in 2020 with the second round of BLM riots in the wake of George Floyd’s death.
Trump was forced out of office in the contentious 2020 election. Even though Trump’s actual results as a president were underwhelming, the Biden Administration took the opportunity to enact its revenge against the populist right after the snub of the 2016 election. This started with the extreme measures taken against the J6 protestors but continued throughout Biden’s presidency. They went so far as to attempt to jail Trump himself along with several of his allies. The Biden Administration was by far the “wokest” the US has ever seen. A large percentage of key positions were staffed by Jews, transsexuals, or diversity hires and they vastly expanded the enforcement of DEI policies.
Some of the Biden Administration’s more egregious misdeeds included allowing about triple the number of illegals in across the border, placing thousands of “refugees” in small towns in Middle America, the FBI monitoring parents protesting anti-white curriculum in their kids’ schools, FEMA deprioritizing houses with Trump flags for disaster relief aid, or the US Army releasing LGBT themed recruitment ads. America also saw severe economic woes during Biden’s Administration with inflation getting out of hand, the disastrous end to the Afghanistan War, new geopolitical conflicts break out in Ukraine and Israel, and increased threats from China.
The difference between Trump’s 2024 campaign and that of his 2016 and 2020 runs is not so much Trump himself. Again, Trump is not an ideologically driven man, but an ego-driven one. The difference is who decided to back Trump in the 2024 Election and what motivated them to do so. I’m going to attempt to classify various agendas within the American ruling class here and explore how they have come into conflict with each other. This isn’t exhaustive, but I will identify four different agendas here and how they are playing out.
The first is the anti-white agenda. This is what is usually referred to as the cause of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” by its supporters and as “wokeism” by its critics. Various elements of this agenda include mass non-white immigration to Western countries, the demonization of the white majorities, affirmative action, and the promotion of feminism, homosexuality, and transgenderism. The goal of this agenda the demographic replacement of people of European descent in the countries which they historically were the majority. This is the cause of groups like the NAACP, the SPLC, or the Open Society Foundation.
The second agenda is managerialism. This is the push to create an all-encompassing control grid through which all aspects of modern society can be administered. Managerialism entails the vast expansion of both state and non-state bureaucracies, ever-increasing regulation and taxation, and furtherance of reliance on complex centralized systems. The COVID pandemic response was the quintessential example of managerialism in action, while Agenda 2030 and the sustainable development goals embody the ambitions of the managerialist agenda. This is the primary objective of organizations like BlackRock, the WEF, or the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The anti-white agenda known as wokeism and managerialism are not inherently linked. It’s possible to have a managerial system which isn’t woke, such as that which exists in countries like China. However, within the Western world, managerialism and wokeism are more or less unified due to the metanarratives which arose in the West simultaneously with the development of the managerial system. While they aren’t the same thing in theory, they can be understood as a unified force within the Western world. All of these managerial bodies such as BlackRock are all anti-white, and the anti-white agenda is enforced via the managerial bureaucracy. Something like ESG scores is an example of how these two agendas have been merged into one.
The third elite-driven agenda at play here is the Zionist lobby. The goal of this agenda is to garner support for the State of Israel and the Jewish community from the United States and other Western countries. This is the objective of an organization like AIPAC. There is a large overlap between the Zionist lobby and the anti-white agenda as pro-Israel Jewish organizations such as the ADL or AJC also promote leftist social causes. However, a large portion of organizations or individuals who are considered woke are not sympathetic to the State of Israel.
The last agenda of the elite I’ll cover here is the advancement of Big Tech. This one is self-explanatory. It’s the advancement of technology, driven by tech giants such as X, Google, Meta Platforms, or Amazon. Big Tech has had overlap with these other agendas. The tech industry wasn’t always particularly woke but became so following the Great Awokening, the industry plays a key role in the expansion of the managerial bureaucracy as was the case during COVID, and Jewish tech executives like Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin hold sympathies for the State of Israel.
Woke managerialism, the unification of the anti-white and managerial agendas, is the main elite agenda of the establishment. This strand holds most of the power in the EU, Britain, or Canada. Though the Zionist lobby exerts itself outside of the United States too, it has far more influence on American politics since the epicentre of the power of the organized Jewish community is in the US. For example, some countries in Europe will often vote against Israel at the UN, while the United States never will under any circumstances. Likewise with Big Tech, these companies exert themselves around the world, but they are primarily headquartered in the United States meaning American politics are of the greatest interest to these companies.
Donald Trump’s first presidency failed to deliver on many of his 2016 campaign promises, but it showed segments of the elite class that he wasn’t as much of a threat to the system as many had worried at the time. In the years since he left office, several fissures have emerged within the ruling class, which got a portion of the elite to throw their support behind Donald Trump in 2024. Trump’s right-wing populist image is little more than a surface-level aesthetic and shouldn’t be understood to reflect the true nature of his second administration. His elite backers will influence him to a much greater degree than his populist voter base will.
The bulk of the establishment backed Kamala Harris in the 2024 campaign. She received far more funding, enjoyed far more support from the managerial bureaucracy, and received far more positive media coverage. However, Trump received significant support from both the Zionist lobby and Big Tech which was able to sway the election in his favor. While he wasn’t the establishment’s choice per se, I’ll go over several reasons which I can identify as to why significant portions of the elite class switched loyalties and backed Trump in 2024.
The first is general managerial failure. The course of action pursued for the two years of the COVID pandemic has largely been acknowledged as an unmitigated disaster. Those responsible are trying to brush the entire ordeal under the rug in hopes that it is just forgotten about. While Trump was still in office for the first portion of the pandemic, the blame has been mostly placed upon the managerial bureaucracy, both in the US and around the world, which Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are much more in sync with. The disastrous response to COVID has brought about a general wariness of managerial overreach, including in some elite circles.
An extension of managerial failure is the competence crisis. Woke managerialism by its very nature erodes competence because it forces institutions to deprioritize competence in favor of the promotion of “diversity”. If a company like Boeing places the goal of “diversity” above designing aircrafts, the quality of their aircrafts will inevitably suffer. If a government agency like FEMA prioritizes “diversity” over providing disaster relief, their disaster relief is inevitably going to be less effective. The practice of affirmative action has been undermining competence in American society since the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, but the Great Awokening saw a massive expansion of DEI programs in both the private and public sectors, especially after the Summer of Floyd in 2020.
There has been a pushback against woke managerialism in the past few years as it is severely hindering companies’ ability to operate effectively. This is perhaps most notable in Big Tech. The tech industry is reliant on a high degree of competence and innovation, meaning the policies of woke managerialism are a major threat to their operations. In 2023, Elon Musk’s company SpaceX was sued by the US Government for discriminating against refugees in hiring. The Biden Administration passed an executive order imposing regulations on AI, setting the standard that AI must “advance equity and civil right”. This resulted in AI art programs being incapable of drawing white people as that could be considered “racist” or AI chatbots suggesting that allowing a nuclear explosion to occur would be preferable to “misgendering” someone.
Beyond the decline in competence, woke managerialism also places a major strain on the infrastructure of society as huge amounts of resources are wasted in the fruitless pursuit of “equity”. The number of illegal immigrants entering the United States rose exponentially under the Biden Administration. Countless initiatives were launched with the goal of “equity” in mind, none of which actually achieved their goal, but all of which cost exuberant amounts of money. Again, this isn’t anything new but ramped up significantly in the past few years.
Also related to the practice of woke managerialism, another major reason for a portion of the elite throwing their support behind Trump in 2024 was fear of cancel culture. Again, this practice of firing and ostracizating those who blaspheme the doctrines of universalist egalitarianism has been going on for decades, but these witch hunts for racists, sexists, and homophobes reached fever pitch during the Great Awokening. The rise of social media made generating outrage at ideological infractions much easier, resulting in a sharp increase in the number of cancellations.
This isn’t something which only right-wingers have to fear either. Over the past decade, almost anyone could have found themselves the target of a woke lynch mob, including members of the elite class. For example, Brendan Eich, the co-founder and former CEO of Mozilla, was forced to resign when it was revealed that he had donated money to a campaign opposing gay marriage in California. The founder and CEO of Papa John’s Pizza, John Schnatter was forced out of the company he founded due to a single word he uttered out of context during a conference call. While the phenomenon of cancel culture might seem silly and trivial, this precedent is a major threat to the interests of anyone in the elite class who is not a dyed-in-the-wool true believer in wokeism. They have a lot to fear and a lot to lose.
The next issue which has caused divisions within the American ruling class is America’s geopolitical position. The United States took a major hit to its prestige following the defeat in and withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and saw two major geopolitical conflicts break out, one in Europe with the Russia-Ukraine War in 2022 and another in the Middle East with the War in Gaza in 2023. While it remains the most powerful country militarily, the United States is no longer the unrivalled global hegemon, and other powers are beginning to exert themselves. The decline in American military might is again a product of the competence crisis spurred on by woke managerialism within the US military and the overall demoralization of American society which has caused recruitment to plummet.
Related to America’s geopolitical situation are the issues facing the Zionist lobby. Support for the State of Israel worldwide has sharply declined since October 2023. Within the United States, both the Democrat and Republican parties remain ardent supporters of Israel, but among the public, fewer and fewer Americans under the age of 60 support the US’s current relationship with the country. As WWII becomes a distant memory, the unconditional sympathy which the Jewish community has received in the United States is beginning to wane.
From the right, the Zionist lobby is facing the threat of the rising nationalist sentiment among younger right-wingers. The role of the organized Jewish community in the promotion of leftist values and the deleterious effect of America’s blank cheque to Israel has turned many on the right against the Zionist lobby. From the left, they are facing the threat of universalist egalitarian values being used to condemn the actions of Israel and an increasing non-white demographic who lump Israel and Jews into the category of “white oppressors”. While the organized Jewish community has been instrumental in pushing these anti-white narratives, they now finding those same narrative being applied to them.
Trump’s elite support in 2024 mainly came from Big Tech oligarchs and elements of the Zionist lobby which saw him as the safer bet. Trump most notably received a major endorsement from Elon Musk, and also received support from others of his ilk such as Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel. Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos did not formally endorse Trump, but rather announced that they wouldn’t endorse any candidate which was taken as an endorsement of Trump by the liberal establishment who they were previously onboard with.
The organized Jewish community and the Zionist lobby was not unified in their choice of candidate. Their candidate of choice was Harris, with her receiving a larger share of Jewish money, Jewish votes, and positive press coverage from Jewish-owned media. The organized Jewish community typically supports both woke managerialism and Zionism, despite some contradictions between the two. The majority of them supported Harris because they considered her the devoted to the first agenda and good enough on the second.
However, Trump received support from a contingent of right-wing Jews for whom securing support for the state of Israel is more important than pushing leftist social policy. They felt that Trump would be their best option for getting done what they want to get done in the Middle East as soon as possible, considering the generational decline in support for Israel on both the left and right. Many of Trump’s appointees are these Christian Zionist types who lean right on most social issues, but fanatically support the State of Israel and would give them the blank cheque which the Zionist lobby is after.
What does election of Donald Trump in 2024 have in common with the Thermidorian Reaction during the French Revolution or Destalinization in the Soviet Union? First and foremost, it must be understood that just like these two historical events, what’s happening in the United States now is NOT a counterrevolution. The elites who threw their support behind Trump are not fundamentally opposed to the current consensus in the West and their goal is not to undo the cultural revolution which took place in the 1960s. Trump doesn’t really have any ideology himself while many of those supporting him such as Robert F Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Rogan, Marc Andreessen, and Elon Musk were liberals just a few years ago.
Not only are most involved in this reaction former liberals, but many were also heavily complicit in the Great Awokening itself. Take someone like Mark Zuckerberg for example. Facebook was fully onboard with the massive wave of censorship which hit the internet in 2017 following Trump’s 2016 victory and colluded with the Biden Administration in 2021 to censor certain content related to COVID. While Zuckerberg wasn’t an ardent supporter of Trump, he has apologized for the flagrant partisanship of his platforms over the past few years and is now attempting to rebuild a relationship with the right. Jeff Bezos has taken similar actions with Amazon and the Washington Post, which he also owns.
Trump 2024 is a reaction to the most radical excesses of the ideas America embraced in the 1960s which have evolved into what is known as “wokeism” today and which is now the official ideology of the managerial bureaucracy. Much like how the Thermidorian Reaction put an end to the Reign of Terror and Destalinization ended the mass repression of the Stalin era, the goal of those who supported Trump in 2024 seems to be to put an end to the Great Awokening. Their goal isn’t to end the current consensus, but just to end its most radical phase which has played out over the past decade and bring back a degree of sanity.
Whether or not they will actually be able to pull this off remains to be seen. The demographic trends are still in favor of further radicalization to the left and most of the managerial bureaucracy is still staffed by true believers in universalist egalitarianism. The new Trump Administration and those associated with it are going to face significant pushback from within the system and if they aren’t ready to fight dirty, they aren’t going to win. However, if they are able to get their way, what can we expect to happen, both in the United States and in the broader West?
On the speech issue, I don’t expect there to be total freedom of speech on the internet, but I imagine that Big Tech will be less censorious than it was from 2017 to 2022. We’ve already seen an easing of censorship over the past few years since the end of COVID. This will not only impact the United States, but also other countries as these US-based tech platforms are the primary medium of speech around the world. I do not think we will be getting the internet of 2016 back by any stretch. There will still be a degree of censorship, but we might be past the peak. This can be seen with Elon Musk’s X platform. There certainly is censorship, but there’s notably less than there was on Twitter three years ago.
I also imagine that cancel culture won’t disappear entirely but become less common. If these guys get what they want, you probably won’t see people getting cancelled over such minute things as single statement made years ago. I also imagine that anti-liberal views from the right might not result in instant cancellation as they did a few years ago, if expressed in an optical manner. In that regard, the uptight atmosphere around sensitive political issues of the past few years will probably be eased a little. I do, however, expect an increase in crackdowns on anti-Zionism from the left, especially within the university system.
On immigration, it is clear that Trump’s new administration intends to maintain replacement levels of legal immigration. They might take steps to at least reduce illegal immigration, but that remains to be seen. This isn’t because Trump or those around him are opposed to the Great Replacement, but because the exponential increase in immigration under Biden is dead weight on the system. We’ve already seen the governments of both Canada and the UK walk back on the incomparably high levels of immigration they’ve had since 2021, not because they’ve had a change of heart, but because the infrastructure of these countries can’t sustain such high numbers. The Trump administration won’t reverse demographic change, but rather admit immigrants who they consider more preferable.
We’ve already seen Corporate America roll back on wokeism. Companies like Boeing, John Deere, and Harley-Davidson have all scaled back on their DEI programs. The over-the-top woke messaging we saw from major corporations over the past decade is already being somewhat reduced. Woke managerialism won’t disappear from the corporate world as the laws which mandate it are still in place, but it might be enforced with considerably less zeal than it was at its peak in the late 2010s and early 2020s.
In terms of foreign policy, the United States will most likely continue to aid it’s aligned regimes abroad, but under the Trump administration, Israel is going to be the top priority. His administration is staffed with fanatical Zionists who will give Israel whatever they want. There’s also a chance that DEI within the military will be reduced. The US Military has seen a huge drop off in terms of recruitment, performance, and prestige due in large part to the anti-white woke policies which they have enacted. With America’s geopolitical standing being challenged, a greater emphasis will probably be placed on competence and less on ideology.
The goal of this alliance between the tech bros, Zionists, and Donald Trump is certainly not to end the universalist egalitarian liberal consensus of the past 60 years, but to rein in its excesses and bring back a degree of stability. Their goals are analogous to the Thermidorian Reaction during the French Revolution or Destalinization during the Soviet era in Russia. This leaves critics of the current consensus (nationalists, paleoconservatives, traditionalists, reactionaries, etc.) who want to see a much more fundamental change in Western society with a major question. Is this development a good thing or a bad thing?
Concluded in part 3…