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A Post Election Symposium on Trump's Epochal Victory

Will Anything Ever be the Same?

Paul R. Grenier, James W. Carden, Daniel DeCarlo, and Ethan Alexander-Davey

Nov 8

[Photo Credit: by Gage Skidmore]

Three themes in particular stand out in the following Landmarks forum on the meaning of Trump’s landslide win. The first theme is hope. Each of our four authors expect a Trump administration will at least try to confront the most obvious sources of America’s recent physical and moral decay. Alexander-Davey and Grenier find hope, for example, in the Trump team’s readiness to overhaul our corrupted agricultural and food production systems. Carden and DeCarlo are grateful that the nation has dodged a bullet – the bullet of a continuation, under Kamala Harris, of democratic party elite incompetence.

The second theme that stands out is America’s need for new institutional ‘elites,’ something that both Alexander-Davey and Grenier suggest can only be resolved by a thorough overhaul of America’s whole approach to education.

Finally, all agree on the overriding importance of keeping neocons as far away from the newly elected president as humanly possible. – The Editors

Buckle Up

The 2024 election is best read as a referendum on the last four years. From his unprecedented attempt to jail the leader of the political opposition, to his waging of a completely unnecessary and dangerous proxy war against Russia, to his material, financial and moral support for a genocide, Joe Biden proved himself to be among the least competent, least scrupulous chief executives the country has ever had the misfortune to endure. He serially misled the country as to the risks these policies posed to the security of the country while effectively outsourcing crucial and fateful decisions on these and other matters to foreign nationals and their unduly powerful domestic lobbies.

Kamala Harris had three months and $1 billion to salvage her party’s chances at keeping the White House. It wasn't enough. And it wasn’t enough because no amount of slick advertising or celebrity endorsements could take the stink off Biden’s record. The idea floated early and often by the Harris campaign and its surrogates, that castrati like Doug Emhoff and Tim Walz possessed wide electoral appeal, was deeply misguided. Still worse was the idea that the likes of Adam Kinzinger and Liz and Dick Cheney represent the very best of us. Allegations that Trump presents a “fascist” threat to the country only highlighted the cynicism and historical ignorance of his opponents.

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As we bid farewell to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris we should be realistic about what comes next. For Trump to succeed, he will have to banish the idea from his head that his first term was some kind of phenomenal success (it wasn't). He must avoid repeating the big mistake he made in his first term—that of handing over so much power and responsibility to Jared Kushner and the neocons. One bright spot is that Trump will almost certainly be the last in a disastrous run of Baby Boomer presidents (Clinton, Bush, Biden, Trump). It is possible (though perhaps not probable) that a generational shift will bring about a welcome turn toward competence and normalcy in our politics with the inevitable Vance v. Newsom presidential contest in four years’ time.

Until then, fasten your seatbelts.

-James W. Carden

Trump Just Destroyed America's Progressive Establishment, Possibly for Good

As we all now know, Trump shocked the world on Tuesday night and won the election in what, for all intents and purposes, was a complete landslide. The historic nature of Trump’s win cannot be understated at this point, as it is even more significant than his surprise victory in 2016 (and likely by a large margin).

When Trump entered office in 2016, his administration was a shambolic mess, and his opponents in both the GOP and the Democratic Party were ready and waiting to throw out everything in their arsenal in order to sabotage his agenda (confused and incoherent as it was at the time). This time he is in precisely the opposite position; his transition team is already hard at work implementing a precise and ruthless agenda; in addition, the Democratic Party and its appendages in academia and the traditional media have never been weaker. There is a real sense that they are exhausted and already mentally defeated. Gone are the calls to join ‘The Resistance’ against Trump or take to the streets to ‘peacefully protest’ replaced by a sense of general listlessness and resignation.

Years of exhausting lawfare against Trump and wildly embellished conspiracy theories involving Russia and various other allegedly nefarious actors led liberals nowhere and served to expend their precious mental and emotional reserves. Meanwhile, Biden’s first and only term turned out to be a complete disaster, coinciding as it did with sustained inflation, surging housing prices, and a general sense of societal chaos and disorder that Americans could see every time they stepped outside their front doors in the form of out-of-control homelessness and rampant property crime (to say nothing of his embrace of insane transgender ideology).

Biden’s uncritical support for Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s scorched earth war on Gaza and Lebanon was the last straw, particularly for those on Biden’s left and even for many within his own liberal base.

It can sometimes be easy to over-interpret the results of any one election, but this time feels different. There is now a palpable sense that, barring radical reforms, the Democratic Party could now be in the political wilderness for years.

Indeed, 2024 is likely to be looked back upon as the beginning of an epochal shift in American and world politics. The political earthquake that began in 2016 has now fully completed itself; the age of neoliberalism and globalism (along with the boomer politics that was their hallmark) are now officially over, and a new age has taken its place, even if its full contours are not yet fully visible.

The assumption that this new age will be one of peace and cooperation between great powers in a new multi-polar world (a sentiment recently expressed by Aleksandr Dugin of all people) is likely dubious, however.

While most of the figures of the old and discredited neocon establishment may potentially be banished in a second Trump term, a new crop of ideologues could turn out to be just as dangerous and diluted as their neoconservative and neoliberal predecessors. Figures like Eldridge Colby, Tom Cotton, Richard Grenell, Peter Thiel, and Alex Karp (all figures that will have significant influence in the incoming administration) have all advocated for an outward-facing and aggressive American foreign policy—Karp, in particular, is just as demented and dangerous as the most feral of the neocon ideologues of the past and, as head of Palantir, could potentially wield even more power.

This is to say nothing of Trump’s deep ties to Netanyahu and a potential looming conflict with Iran. Something that could take place immediately after Trump takes office if handled poorly.

In addition, the peace plan advocated by Vice President elect J.D. Vance to end the war in Ukraine, while refreshing when compared to the stance of the Biden administration, is still largely delusional and unrealistic.

In spite of all of this, Trump’s victory is a breath of fresh air, and his administration should be given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to potentially charting a better course forward for America.

At least for now.

-Daniel DeCarlo

Trump’s Promise: A Post-Liberal Perspective

In his op ed piece today for The New York Times, Daniel McCarthy makes a good point about why Trump won. The Democratic party had come to resemble a cartel, a group so used to enjoying a near monopoly on power that they had stopped caring about what real people want. From this perspective, Trump’s victory is a case of ‘creative destruction’ whereby a newcomer to the (political) marketplace topples an old order already undermined by the increasingly shoddy quality of its political ‘product.’

McCarthy acknowledges that the extent to which the ‘newcomer’ Trump’s political ideas will have staying power remains to be seen.

To be sure, there are many who doubt that Trump has any ‘political ideas’ worthy of the name, or that even if he did (and as we know from long experience) it wouldn’t matter: policy never really changes no matter who becomes president. Alexander Mercouris, in his own dissection of Trump’s victory, pushes back against such skepticism. Such policy immobility, Mercouris admits, may ordinarily be the norm – but Trump is no ordinary politician. What we have witnessed over the past more than year has proven beyond doubt that Trump’s force of personality, persistence and strength elevate him to a rarified stratum of first-rate political actors. Trump, Mercouris says, perhaps more than any president since FDR, has the capacity to make change -- and he likely will.

Change of what kind, though? Trump’s ‘populism’ points to a key element of the coming change. The power that Trump enjoys stems from the strong connection he has forged with his electorate -- which electorate happens to be the majority of the country, as it turns out. (There is no need to rehearse here the ways Trump won their loyalty. A personal favorite of my own was his making French fries in a McDonalds, and the way he treated the McDonalds staff with genuine respect and affection.)

This connection between Trump and those millions of Americans who perceive themselves as Americans is a matter not only of style, but also of substance. It speaks to a redefinition of what politics is, and who is the subject of politics. Politics in the Trump era will strive to be a politics that prioritizes what takes place at the scale of the nation state. By the same token, it will de-emphasize the global ‘rules-based order,’ the ‘Euro-Atlantic community’ and those similar large spaces that have for many decades defined political subjectivity for America’s liberal and neoconservative elites.

The danger here will be if Trump and his team fail to make the effort to understand the sources of America’s propensity for ideological universalism, as this will make them easy prey for neocons in sheep clothing seeking top jobs and promising to ‘make America great again.’ As I have argued elsewhere, neoconservatives love to wrap their schemes in abstract ‘values’ of various sorts, and their utter scorn for limits is quite compatible with at least one reading of what it means to ‘make America great’ (the word ‘great,’ after all, is highly ambiguous).

What is needed, however, is to reject abstractions in favor of embracing concretely good things: good farms, good food, good marriages, good cities and towns, good relations with other acceptable but different civilizations. J.D. Vance, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Elon Musk, and Tulsi Gabbard are already showing encouraging signs of thinking along just such concrete lines (cf. the ‘Make America Healthy Again’ slogan, and the emphasis on making healthy food products and healthy soils, etc.).

To have staying power, such a new direction will require more than a handful of new thinkers, even if they are such talented ones as the above-mentioned. What is needed, as has been noted by Vance’s friend Patrick Deneen, is a new political elite (or political ‘class’). America’s spiritually exhausted university-think tank cartel cannot produce them. One can only hope that a different, more philosophical version of Donald Trump will come along sometime soon and give education in America the good shakeup that it needs.

-Paul Grenier

An Opportunity for Massive Change, But Will it Happen?

Donald Trump has been elected. There is already a conservative majority in the Supreme Court, and Republicans will likely have a majority in both houses of Congress. This presents an opportunity for significant change in domestic and foreign policy. Will it happen?

Everything depends on the personnel advising President-elect Trump. As I have said before, he does not have clear policy positions. He only has instincts. In his first administration, he was taken in by the Paul Ryan wing of the Republican Party and distracted from the policy agenda that he ran on. That he has allied himself with other strong anti-system actors, RFK Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Elon Musk, is cause for hope.

The challenge of repudiating the American foreign policy consensus since the end of the cold war is daunting to say the least. The failed regime change experiments in the Middle East are not even the most flagrant of the foreign policy community’s blunders. The liberal internationalists, with their blind faith in free trade and democracy, have transformed a poor and weak China into our most powerful and dangerous rival, while also making our economy dependent on Chinese and Taiwanese production. And with their insane commitment to NATO expansion, they have provoked a proxy war with nuclear armed Russia which they are now losing. It boggles the mind how such a group of policy makers can claim that they are “the adults in the room.”

Trump needs to say to all of these people “You’re fired!” But even if he can do that, it will be extremely difficult to unwind our foreign entanglements. Although Trump has made it clear he thinks the proxy war in the Ukraine was a mistake, we cannot forget that it was his administration that started providing Ukraine with lethal aid. What kind of deal can he reach with Putin? Will he be able to let Putin have what he wants, namely, to keep most of the Ukrainian territory his armies have conquered, and neutral status for what is left of Ukraine? It is hard to see how Putin would agree to anything less than this. If Trump is amenable to such a deal, there will be howls of betrayal to Ukraine and “sacred democracy.”

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It is clear that a Biden-Harris-Cheney administration would have gone to war with China over Taiwan. Will Trump do more to onshore our production of microchips, or at least make deals with countries that are not claimed as the sovereign territory of the Chinese, and be prepared to let Taiwan go? These things are possible. But Trump will need advisors with a new foreign policy strategy that prioritizes some regions of the world over others, and that allows for cutting our losses in regions where American hegemony is no longer feasible.

In the Middle East, the temptation for deeper military engagement is even greater for Trump. I am least hopeful about restraint in this area. But meddling here is also, frankly, less dangerous for us.

The challenges to Trump’s domestic agenda are less daunting, especially if the Republicans will, as now appears likely, control both houses of Congress.

Ultimately, what the United States needs is a new policy elite to replace the blundering fools who have been in place since the end of the cold war. The most Trump can do is provide space for such an elite to emerge and install itself in positions of public trust.

As I suggest in a forthcoming review essay for the journal Pietas, a change of personnel in the regulatory state, the military and the national security bureaucracy is the most essential. To the regulatory agencies must be sent such experts as would have graduated from the Philip Rieff School of Sociology, the Thomas Sowell School of Economics and Social Policy, and the Wendell Berry School of Agriculture – if such institutions existed.

In the military, and among those who formulate foreign policy, realists must replace liberal internationalists. Ancient martial virtue must be restored. The lust for glory, to which all warrior classes are prone, must be tempered, as it once was, by Christian asceticism, and knowledge, from study and experience, of the limits of physical force, as well as the horrific destructiveness of modern warfare.

The country also needs a new cultural elite. If I were advising Trump, I would tell him to ask Congress for new anti-trust legislation to dissolve the six biggest media and entertainment conglomerates: Comcast, Walt Disney, AT&T, Paramount, Sony and Fox. If this could not be done, then perhaps we could hope that the media companies who have so disgraced themselves with their ridiculous propaganda over the last decade might just wither away on their own.

All of this no doubt is unlikely. But for the first time in the life of your humble servant, such things now seem at least possible.