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The Revolution Has Only Just Begun
The election of Joe Biden as president in 2020 restored the liberal world order, experts and journalists said three years ago this fall. The apparent rise of nationalism and populism contributing to the 2016 revolutions of Brexit and the election of Donald J. Trump was a passing fad, they said.
Then, Biden pulled the U.S. out of Afghanistan, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the West took the side of the latter. The US has pushed Russia, China, and other BRICS nations together. Instead of returning us to the post-Cold War liberal world order Biden has put us in the middle of a new Cold War with Russia.
In a sense, we’re already in the post-globalization period. The effort to bring major industries, such as semiconductors, back to the U.S. has been overwhelmingly bipartisan. And yet few are optimistic. While 60% of Americans say their own finances are good, only 30 percent say that about the economy as a whole.
Revolution is in the air. On Wednesday night, Fox News hosted the first Republican debate, and on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, former Fox News leader Tucker Carlson “counter-programed” Fox with an interview with Trump, which began a mischievous five minutes before the Fox debate.
Tucker’s interview with Trump was more noteworthy for manifesting the disruption of traditional news media by social media than it was for anything Trump said. Indeed, the former president seemed subdued and even sad well before Tucker raised his imminent booking at a courthouse in Georgia.
Where Fox boasted of nearly 13 million people watching the debate, X showed an astonishing 250 million views of Carlson’s interview with Trump. Even if that’s a 10-fold overestimate, twice as many people saw Carlson’s interview as watched the debate. Nearly 24 hours later, Trump returned to X, after two and half years being off the platform, to post his mug shot and the words, “Electoral Interference. Never Surrender!”
As for the Republican debate, it was stolen by a 38-year-old entrepreneur who introduced himself by unabashedly stealing an old Barack Obama line, calling himself a “skinny guy with a funny last name.”
Biotech centimillionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, who has risen in the polls to challenge Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, closed the debate by using the R-word. “The real choice we face in this primary is this: do you want a super PAC puppet or do you want a patriot who speaks the truth? Do you want incremental reform, which is what you're hearing about? Or do you want revolution? And I stand on the side of the American Revolution rather than this incrementalism."
Based on the intense reaction to his performance, Ramaswamy won over many on the Right and center-right.
“I have a history of supporting the non-politicians, from @AndrewYang to Michael Shellenberger for Governor of CA,” posted friend of Public, Melissa Chen, of The Spectator. “Each time, I was reminded that Twitter is a distortion of the real world. So, I resisted jumping on the @VivekGRamaswamy bandwagon. Until now.”
For those of us who believe that Covidism, climatism, and Wokeism are serving as substitute religions for anxious secular liberals, it has been refreshing to hear Ramaswamy articulate the linkage.
“The reason we have that mental health epidemic,” he said, “is that people are so hungry for purpose and meaning at a time when family, faith, patriotism, and hard work have all disappeared. What we really need is a tonal reset from the top saying that this is what it means to be an American.”
Few believe Ramaswamy can defeat Trump to win the Republican nomination. Ramaswamy may simply be running for vice presidential candidate; he has remained ostentatiously on Trump’s side.
The defining moment of the debate came when a Fox moderator asked the candidates if they would still support Trump as the Republican nominee even if he were convicted. Ramaswamy shot his hand up, like a contestant on a game show or like the teacher’s pet that he likely was. DeSantis looked to his left and then to his right before raising his hand.
But the simultaneous performances on Wednesday were about something much bigger than who will be the presidential candidates of 2024. It’s about revolution, both technological and political. The Internet revolution that began 30 years ago is continuing apace, while the populist political revolution on the Right has just begun.
This lag between the communications revolution and political change is a familiar one for anyone who has considered the impact of the rise of radio in the 1920s and television in the 1950s on the presidential contests of the 1930s and 1960s.
While Trump took advantage of social media in 2016, most political experts believe it had little impact on his election. By contrast, Ramaswamy’s rise came from doing all manner of podcasts, from big to medium and even surprisingly small ones.
Whether or not the “medium is the message,” podcasts on the Right certainly have one: We’re in a crisis of meaning. Some may remember that “crisis of meaning” was a mantra of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s way back in 1992. Back then, the Left’s solution was economic globalization; today, the Right’s is economic nationalism.
And under that vision, which further strengthened its grip over the Republican Party on Wednesday night, simply bringing back some microchip manufacturing from Taiwan, which is on the verge of slipping under China’s control, is just the beginning. More broadly, we could see a radical altering of the world order, with a new competition between Western liberal democracies and China and Russia for the loyalty of nonaligned nations in the developing world.
As such, the conventional wisdom was, once again, wrong. The election of Joe Biden as president in 2020 didn’t restore the liberal world order and may have even destabilized it. And it’s clear, in retrospect, that the populist and nationalist revolutions of 2016 not only weren’t a fad, they were the future.
— MS