A U.S. presidential term consists of 1,460 days. We have arrived now at day sixty of the Trump 2.0 Administration, or about 4.1 percent of it, assuming it completes its term in office. Thus 95.9 percent remains to be endured, a notional formula for an instant headache for many people. A neighbor on Nextdoor posted a news item the other day about Lauren Boebert, gun-toting woman-child of Colorado, proposing that the District of Columbia be renamed the District of America. So original….Boebert’s flash of creative insight no doubt interrupted her reading of yet another cereal box back panel. My neighbor’s only comment, really quite funny in context, was, “Make it stop.”
Humor is therapy these days—and many days—so fine. But it’s not going to stop, and none of this is really funny, in part because the flow of seriously alarming news has been relentless. It clearly has created a mass deer-in-the-headlights effect, so far. Courts have been mostly slow to respond, as always lately; but civil society generally has been even slower, insofar as it has responded at all. Many individuals have simply tuned out, unable to withstand the relentless foul winds. College campuses alive with protesters only a few months back—over a far away mini-war concerning people of whom they knew very little—now faced with a genuine crisis in their own country are so quiet you can hear balls drop and backbones crumble.
We were warned. White House-designate factota advertised the coming avalanche of Executive Orders before the fact, meaning before the Inauguration, as “shock and awe,” implying that overwhelming any significant resistance to Administration plans would inhere in the sheer pace of what they knew would be a source of outrage for many Americans—those terrible elites and elitists of the Democratic “deep state.”[1] What we have seen so far has in some ways been more schlock and awful what with, for example, DOGE’s playing an idiotic version of catch-and-release with Federal employees, and senior officials using an unsecured chat app to discuss war plans.[2]
We have seen some truly spectacular unprofessional and incompetent behaviors, as if the Administration as a whole, arguably un-led by the President, really doesn’t know what it’s doing, and so is instead acting on impulses partly megalothymic and partly sadistic. One could conclude that they are being really very postmodern, very wokeish, doing their “thing” solely for the subjective thrill of exercising power, for the bully joys of punching down, for the sheer love of watching their own cruelties evoke the hurt they so enjoy to see.
That would not be entirely inaccurate, but to suppose that this is all there is—nothing else to see here, just walk on by—would be a huge mistake. Consider that what we have already seen at the sixty day mark is substantively discontinuous not only from the previous administration and Trump’s own first term, but discontinuous in many ways from every precedent going back to 1789. No previous Administration has ever simultaneously attacked all three legs of the sturdy stool of American political institutions: its republican form of democracy defined by the separation of Executive, Legislative, and Judicial powers; its liberal sensibilities enshrined in the Bill of Rights; and its foundation of the rule of law, as articulated in the Constitution and its latter fifteen Amendments. These three legs—democracy, liberalism, and rule of law—are so entwined in American thinking and practice that for most citizens they merge into a hallowed whole. But they nonetheless have separate histories and ontologies, and understanding them as separate but entwined—of which more below—helps us to see that, indeed, there is some method to the Trump 2.0 Administration’s madness.
But it is not just the relentless, deliberately shocking speed of the anti-democratic, anti-liberal, and anti-lawful termite chewing that takes our breath away. The air is full of dusty debris from all that frantic chewing, making it hard for most to see what is actually happening. What is happening is that more than one kind of method and madness are simultaneously active.
The Trump 2.0 Administration is internally divided between what from an historical perspective is garden-variety populism, on the one hand, and a far more radical anti-democratic version of anarcho-libertarianism on the other. The former could reasonably be characterized as a democratic movement seeking, in its own eyes, to haul current practice away from the clutches of self-dealing plutocratic elites, to privilege again, as the Secretary of the Treasury put it earlier this month, Main Street over Wall Street. We have seen something similar several times in the past: vividly with the Jacksonian era, in a minor key with Grover Cleveland’s first election and term, with William Jennings Bryan’s Populists in 1896, and more. The later, however, can in no way be characterized as any kind of democratic, and it is truly new: It is something imaginable only in the era of the ongoing cyberlutional disruption.
So beyond the dislocating impact of the speed with which things are happening, part of what is making most onlookers a bit dizzy are the inconsistencies so far manifest in Administration behavior. Some of what it is doing is bent on destroying the Federal administrative state’s ability to tax and regulate corporate behavior, or any behavior, so to emaciate state power. But politicizing U.S. government power ministries to intimidate and if necessary coerce both the President’s real and imagined high-profile adversaries and huge swaths of institutionalized civil society (eg., media, universities, law firms), aggrandizes state power. Just to illustrate the structural inconsistency that must emanate from this mélange, it is illogical to promote aspects of subsidiarity—return culture war-related decisions to the states, fully return education policy to states and localities, and so on—and at the same time attack the autonomy of civil society institutions necessary for subsidiarity to work.
The populist pulse within the odd but brilliantly assembled Trump 2.0 coalition is viscerally anti-pluralist, anti-immigrant, and plainly circle-the-wagons xenophobic. Some of it to the fringes oozes racism and anti-Semitism, but not all of it does. It is communalist and Christian (by identity if not also faith) in sentiment, accepts without second thought most traditional Abrahamic moral precepts, is more comfortable in rural than urban settings, is unkind to and suspicious of corporate gigantism, and not infrequently can sound proto-Luddite. It genuinely cares about the “little guy,” and, to invoke Robert Putnam’s terms from Bowling Alone, as poor as it is in bridging social trust it tends to be deep in bonding social trust. It tends to nostalgia, to looking back to presumed Golden Ages. Its rank-and-file is generally less well educated—mostly college/university virgins—does not deep read, and so is not facile with abstractions, conceptual language, and theories.
Contrarily, the anarcho-libertarian pulse is radically individualist and post-Abrahamic, disdaining all traditional bourgeois values, even denying the very ontology of morality as a category. It does not think in group terms, so any anti-pluralist or anti-immigrant energy is dissipate. It is less classically skin-color racist or anti-Semitic than it is Randian, disparaging all less able people and exalting heroic thinkers, creators, doers. It is in a sense pre-Randian, osmosing directly from Rand’s own source: Nietzsche’s übermenschen/untermenschen will-to-power dichotomy. It cares little about social trust and even less about the “little guy.” It looks firmly forward, it self-mesmerizes with theories and abstractions, and it is ruthlessly selfish.
Amid this ideal typology are some admixed personalities, to be sure. But the distinction holds up more than it breaks down. Early hints of this profound cleavage were present even before the inauguration. Let us note just two.
First, significant public disagreement emerged between the Musk faction in favor of an expanded H1-B visa program and the more standard-issue populist MAGAs opposed to all immigration on what may be fairly termed gut principle. Steve Bannon, in particular, let lose a cannonade at Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks that suggested the depth of the divide, calling Musk and Sachs “South African racists,” and Musk “a truly evil guy, a very bad guy” whose goal is a kind of “techno-feudalism”—exactly the right historical metaphor. “I will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day,” said Bannon to a Corriere della Sera interviewer. “He will not have a blue pass to the White House, he will not have full access to the White House. . . . I have made it my personal thing to take this guy down.”[3]
That didn’t happen, obviously, and Bannon then followed Musk in practicing his Hitlergruss in public. Whatever happened to Bannon’s pre-Inaugural determination? No clear answer suggests itself, but it would be a stretch to think that Bannon has changed his mind about Musk. More likely he is biding his time for Musk to self-destruct. He probably agrees with Musk’s eldest offspring that her father is a whacko “man-child” on the spectrum.
How long will Bannon have to wait? Chances are that these contradictory impulses can coexist at least for a while since Musk’s priorities and Trump’s, insofar as he has clear policy-relevant as opposed to personal priorities at this point, do not much directly overlap. Bannon may never come to wield the power he supposed he would, but it is too soon to know. Does Trump himself understand the contradiction? Doubtful, suggesting that his ability to manage the tension will prove limited.
How Trump Won
To better understand the situation we have to hand now, at the sixty-day mark, it is worth reviewing how the Trump 2.0 Administration came to power by free and fair election on November 5, 2024…..when in late November 2020 the smart money all supposed that Trump was not just down but permanently out of American political life for the duration of his.
First, Trump took advantage of real dissatisfaction with the status quo in the body politic, some of it, at least, justified. Polls have showed for years that majorities now think the country has been headed in the wrong direction, and have therefore exhibited a bias for change even when they do not understand the issues or possibilities of change at anything more than a novice’s level. That doesn’t necessarily mean their instincts are wrong, only mostly inarticulate. Campaign discourse, directed by professional consultants and pollsters, does not these days contribute to a better general understanding of those issues or possibilities either. Campaigns are about money below the table and images above it. Policy substance? Forget it.
What people actually mean by “headed in the wrong direction” is a tricky problem to parse. Some of it may be deeper and cultural in its sources rather than superficial and political—a Christian Nationalist distaste, for example, with the coarseness and salacity of popular entertainment married in their minds with moral laxity and the decay of virtue they see reflected in political life. Some of it may concern long-term trends in the political economy that have disadvantaged labor and benefitted large, politically connected corporations and banks. But certainly, in the November 2024 case, dissatisfaction with short-term fluctuations particularly in the micro-economy—notably the inflation caused by the after-effects of managing the COVID-19 supply-chain disruptions and the disbursement of too much free money by both the first Trump and the Biden Administrations—had a major impact on the outcome. For many voters many or even all of these things, and more, may have mattered. And again, these dissatisfactions were not all fanciful or unsubstantiated, so the campaign slogan “Trump will fix it” resonated for many not a little.
Second, in addition to and different from real dissatisfactions with the status quo was surrealist-borne dissatisfaction based on a fantasy apprehension of reality. It is tempting to dismiss this kind of phenomenon as marginal to the outcome, but it was anything but. Much of this surrealism was rooted in social-media internet conspiracy plotlines of several kinds, some Left-leaning but most leaning to the Right—QAnon, “deep state,” police-state hallucinations magnified by COVID mask and vaccine controversies, and still others—and clustered in virtual affinity communities at a time of increased isolation, loneliness, social trust hemorrhage, and gender role dislocations. Designer media infospheres contributed much to the social-peer power of these internet affinity groups, proving again, if any more proof were needed, that Harold Innis was right to assert at the very portal of the television era that it is a law of social dynamics that “sudden extensions of communication are reflected in cultural disturbances.”[4]
It is clear that the manufacturing and persistent marketing of Trump’s Big Lies about the November 2020 election and the events of January 6, 2021 over a four-year period was critical to his success on November 5. Most of those wanting “change” on the basis of a sincere belief that the country was “headed in the wrong direction” either did not believe the Big Lie or were prepared to overlook it, so dissatisfied were they (as I was) with Joe Biden and the prospect of Kamala Harris on issues like: organized labor and the greater importance of the microeconomy over the macroeconomy; policies concerning illegal immigration and sanctuary jurisdictions; and the whole DEI/transgender wokeness portfolio that the Democrats as a party refused to confront. But without the surrealists who bought the two Big Lies, the so-called barstool conservatives who fell for Trump’s faux-Alpha male badassery body language in a contest against another woman, and the low-information voters, so called, who were suckered by Trump’s mastery of attention-grabbing “magnifico” entertainments, even the weak 11th-hour Harris-Walz ticket probably would have won.
Probably; it’s a counterfactual, so no one really knows. But a good case can be made for calling the outcome of the November 5, 2024 voting an elected coup—a throw-up-one’s-hand-and-let-the-leader handle it form of collective exasperation. Not unusually, the best description of such a thing comes from the nexus of actual history and serious literature. Thus Umberto Eco put these words in the mouth of his character Joly, who is speaking of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1852 transformation of France’s short-lived Second Republic into an Empire: “Tyranny, you understand, has been achieved thanks to universal suffrage! The scoundrel has carried out an authoritarian coup d’état by appealing to the ignorant mob! This is a warning to us about the democracy of tomorrow.” This was no Eco fluke; a few pages later he put these words, including the key word “illiterate,” into the mouth of his character Goedsche: “. . . those who read books were already republicans by nature, and those who supported the dictator were illiterate peasants who’d been granted universal suffrage by the grace of God.”[5]
Though no two circumstances are exactly the same, this is closely enough akin to what happened in the United States on November 5, 2024 to carry the comparison: Sub-deep literate people, increasing all the time as a percentage of the adult population thanks to the entertaining distractions of the cyberlution, elected an authoritarian leader who insists, now with the help of the Supreme Court’s July 1 decision on presidential immunity and a quote from Napoleon someone gave him, that he is above the law.
But Who Really Won the Election?
Now here is the key point many have failed to notice: During the campaign, how much of what Trump, Vance, and other senior campaign associates said was about democracy or the rule of law? Virtually nothing. It was about immigration, about the price of eggs, about such critical issues as Hunter Biden.
The main exception was Trump’s July 26, 2024 speech at the Turning Point Action’s “Believers Summit” audience in West Palm Beach, Florida, where he urged the members of the audience to vote, adding that, “You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”[6] The ever-ready gaffe squad was quick to discount the remark, claiming that this was just Trump being Trump, exaggerating, riffing, pulling your leg, oh ha-ha. And frankly, as much as Trump lies a normal person can be excused for not being able to master his unique signal-to-bullshit ratio. So he uttered what has turned out to be a self-damning truth as though absent-mindedly tossing a banana peel on the sidewalk, and tens of millions of voters slipped and fell on it anyway.
Two far more obscure examples might have been a wake-up call, but evidently weren’t to any significant extent.
First, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg’s Randian greed-screed The Sovereign Individual, first published in 1997, carried an introduction by Peter Thiel when it was reprinted in 2020.[7] Thiel noted that the authors missed a few things but he clearly endorsed the book’s no-borders-for-Protean-übermenschen-cyber-corporatists gist. When Thiel bought J.D. Vance an Ohio Senate seat in 2022, and then again when he promoted Vance to be Vice-President in 2024, someone should have noted this and shouted it from the rooftops. At least as far as I am aware, no one did.
Second, in early September 2024, Elon Musk amplified a theory from an account called AutismCapital that only “alpha males” can be trusted to make good decisions, and should therefore be the only ones allowed to participate in democracy. AutismCapital included a 2021 4chan screenshot of a theory that referred to “people who can’t defend themselves physically (women and low T men)” as being “very malleable to brute force manufactured consensus,” and so should be disqualified from voting. Musk’s post, from September 1, also quoted AutismCapital saying that only “high T alpha males and aneurotypical people” are able to question new information, concluding, “This is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making. Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.” Musk labeled his X post “the Reich effect.”[8] No one who knew this—and I admit to missing it at the time—and read reports that his maternal grandparents were pro-Nazi enough to emigrate to apartheid South Africa, could have been much surprised by his January 20 Hitlergruss.
But these were the exceptions, and they readily disappeared in the very low signal-to-noise ratio the clickbait broadcast media helped to create. The Trump-Vance campaign evinced no clear signal of the coming of DOGE to destroy the Federal government’s administrative capabilities. It evinced no hint of the anarcho-libertarian attack since unleashed on the constitutional parameters of American democracy. It evinced no intention of creating a Crypto Strategic Reserve, in which real tax dollars would be handed over to favored insider cyberlooters in return for worthless shit-dollars. It certainly evinced no vision of a future America where a tiny number of übermenschen techno-feudalists would pillage the commons at the expense of a vast untermenschen majority from a position inside the U.S. Government.
How did the tiny anarcho-libertarian shard of the MAGA coalition, which almost no one specifically voted to empower, manage to seize control of the White House? Simple: the logic of collective action. When a few highly motivated and likeminded people know what they want, they can get it among a much larger but diffuse group who do not know exactly what they want and are not well organized to find out. The logic of collective action works at the societal level, which is the main reason several observers over many years have posited the “iron law of oligarchy” and other related notions; but it also works within smaller contexts like that of a new administration.
If one can bear a very loose historical analogy, this was the Kerensky government rising over the ruins of a discredited status quo; but then, shockingly and within a very short time, came the equivalent of the Bolshevik putsch: the dominant rise of the anarcho-liberatarians, or what Bannon labeled the techno-feudalists.
So what then did the coup within the coup set out to do? First came the unprecedented and obviously illegal data theft of personal information from the inner sancta of the Department of the Treasury. Then came the seizure of the National Archives for purposes of subverting historical fact. Around the same time Trump fired the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Naval Operations, the Air Force Vice Chief of Staff, and the judge advocates general—the JAGs—for the Army, Navy, and Air Force. He earlier had fired seven Inspector Generals at various Executive Departments and Agencies without cause and therefore illegally, basically calling open-season for corruption and graft—great for those best able to seize the opportunity from the upper floors.
Then came the summary attempt to destroy USAID, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and all the radios that blunted authoritarian propaganda, all without the engagement of Congress at any level. It earlier destroyed the National Endowment for Democracy and later raided the U.S. Institute of Peace building, which is a 501©3 organization not even on Federal land. On March 20 Trump signed an order eliminating the Department of Education, again without any engagement from Congress. While all this was going on Trump asserted personal control over independent agencies such as the SEC, the FCC, the FTC, and the NLRB. The diadem in the crown of the independent agencies—the Federal Reserve—seems likely to be next on the Administration’s target list, and if it isn’t it will only be because the Fed will display unctuous anticipatory deference toward the White House.
Trump also unconstitutionally terminated birthright citizenship, killed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization (and that’s just the beginning with the UN), gutted the scientific arm of the EPA, and summarily and without warning cancelled $12 billion worth of healthcare related grants to the states. That is not even to mention the gutting of the Social Security Administration staff infrastructure, and the deep cuts to personnel at NIH, the CDC, and HHS itself.
In the meantime, the Administration’s efforts to deport illegal aliens, while less impressive in terms of numbers than even the Biden Administration’s record sixty days in, has involved numerous nonchalant illegalities—the most cruel being the deportation of a 6-year old birthright citizen girl on her way with her family to a brain cancer treatment in Texas. Then there is the specter of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem violating the Geneva Convention by using deported Venezuelan refugees, sent to Salvadoran prisons without due process, as MAGA propaganda fodder. (The fact that she was wearing a $50,000 Rolex in the staged propaganda photos just raises the level of sheer disgust, oh, maybe a notch or two.) It is passing strange—is it not?—that to punish illegal and even not-so-illegal aliens for breaking Federal law the Trump 2.0 Administration thinks nothing of breaking.…Federal law. Not strange at all; it merely illustrates Trump’s wholly instrumentalist attitude toward law in general.
Pushback? Some. The New York Times reported that already as of March 11, “at least 44 rulings have at least temporarily paused some of the president’s initiatives.” These included suspending the firing of some civil servants, blocking the termination of birthright citizenship and the final gutting of USAID, the dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, “the freezing of up to $3 trillion in federal funding to the states,” and immigration raids in houses of worships.[9]
The point of the Administration’s deliberate illegality is obviously to force the Federal courts to act or lay down and effectively die. Some have acted. But some have not, and some have acted only to be ignored and scorned by the White House. In the pushing and shoving some, like the Speaker of the House, have advocated simply eliminating entire Federal court districts in blueish parts of the country whose judges have elected not to lay down and die, as the Republican-dominated Congress has avidly done in an imitation of the last Senate of the Roman Republic in 27 BCE.
But trying to destroy the Judicial Branch’s check on Executive power has not gone quite as smoothly as hoped. The White House lost a March 5 5-4 vote over USAID when Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett voted with the liberal minority. Even more important, potentially, Trump’s ordering the Justice Department to drop an indictment for corruption against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, after Adams basically sold his soul to MAGA to avoid being jailed, resulted in the resignation of Danielle Sassoon and Hagen Scotten—two Federalist Society-approved conservative jurists who clerked for conservative SCOTUS justices.
As is widely recognized, this sets up an either/or proposition: When the Administration’s attack on the rule of law catalyzes a Supreme Court showdown, the Court will either knuckle under to Trump or it won’t. If it doesn’t, as now seems more likely than it seemed two months ago, Trump as President still has the option, for the third time in American history, of telling the Supreme Court to go screw itself. It is notorious, of course, that the SCOTUS has no independent means of enforcing its orders. It has only a broad consensus on the authority of the law and of the Constitution as the supreme law of the land.
That consensus is no more, for Trump departs from it—and he is President, elected largely by what has become a majority para-literate electorate. He will, almost certainly if it comes down to it, tell SCOTUS to go screw itself, and if a judges’ revolt ensues we may see Trump’s para-military friends, at the core of which will probably be some of the 1,600 J6 rioters he pardoned on January 21, their new brown shirts crisp and starched, arresting judges now charged, in effect, with the obstruction of injustice.
The Three-Legged Stool, Redux
Now it is time, as promised, to briefly define and connect the three legs of the stool mentioned above: democracy, liberalism, and rule of law.
Democracy is just a means for electing leaders in a popular sovereignty framework. It can take many forms. It can be a plebiscitary democracy, as was ancient Athens, albeit with a narrowly delimited franchise; that is the sort of democracy Plato refers to in The Republic. It can be a guard-railed, checks-and-balances republican form of democracy, like ours and several others. The same term is sometimes used to describe a populist mobocracy that rises suddenly and dissipates suddenly, the kind of angry froth that can destroy but not construct a political order. Or the term can be used, as 20th-century fascists sometimes used it, to describe the mystical elevation of a great leader who channels the soul of the people, a “true democracy” as opposed to a corrupted, confused, and distorted bourgeois democracy.
When Americans use the word, they mean the second of these four types. But that type of democracy cannot exist without the rule of law, and the reason is simple: defining and managing checks and balances in any political order has to be written down to work. The rules have to be objectified, and an independent judiciary must exist in order to interpret the rules whenever clarification becomes necessary. For law to be written down, it must be formal law; in Weber’s typology its authority cannot be charismatic or traditional. To be rule of law instead of rule by law it must be separated from older and looser, more fluid, oral traditions. Therefore there can be no democracy as Americans think of it without the formal authority of rule of law. Destroy that and what is left has to be some other, different and essentially pre-modern form of democracy.
So where does liberalism, the third leg of the stool, come in? Problem-solving in a rule-of-law democracy is not always easy or straightforward. Times change, cultures evolve, norms shift, and what may have seemed settled interpretations of law can become unsettled. When that happens, a sensibility for civil discourse buffers the process of conflict of interest or principle resolution. This sensibility consists of a predisposition to five things: the priority of procedure over substance, so that not every disagreement becomes a hill to die on; the postulate of a loyal opposition within a constitutional framework; the assumption that executive power gained by consensual electoral procedure can be lost by that same procedure and power transferred peaceably; acceptance of toleration and dissent to prevent the tyranny of majoritarian rule; and perhaps most important, the understanding that government must be limited and self-limiting in relation to the larger society. These five predicates of liberalism are what banish the Hobbesian presumption of social life as a war of all against all that, in the absence of a heavy-handed sovereign, would make everyone’s life nasty, brutish, and short.
In sum, democracy, rule of law, and liberalism compose a kind of round-robin of mutual support despite their having distinct histories and ontologies. We cannot have the guard-railed democracy laid down in the Constitution without rule of law, we cannot have stable rule of law over time without the sensibilities of liberalism, and we cannot trust to the sensibilities of liberalism if we do not have guard-railed and self-limiting democracy. And obviously, if We the People once too often democratically elect leaders who spurn liberalism and the rule of law, the stool collapses.
It is not incidental, therefore, that we can detect efforts within the Administration to claim that it is indeed democratic, but democratic in a superior way to the kind we devised and set in law in 1789. Remembering now Musk’s September 1, 2024 re-tweet of the AutismCapital material noted above, Musk tweeted on February 13, “If ANY judge ANYWHERE can stop EVERY Presidential action EVERYWHERE, we do NOT live in a democracy.” Vance, too, was channeling Carl Schmitt—who made basically identical arguments on behalf of the Nazis in Weimar Germany—in his February 14 Munich speech: Democracy is the people’s—that is, the volk’s—acclamation of a leader who must then be free to act boldly. That is why Vance is such a strong AfD supporter: He supports their anti-pluralist vision of a homogenous volk as compatible with his vision for America, and he knows that this is incompatible with what Schmitt called the bourgeois democracy that existed, and still exists, in Western countries. As far as Vance is concerned, Germany can again become a U.S. ally, once it stops being a bourgeois democracy.
This is why Vance insists repeatedly, utterly against the grain of the story that Americans have been telling themselves for centuries, that America’s is fundamentally a bloodline form of nationalism and not a civic nationalism—”a nation and not an idea,” as he has put it. This is about as clear a rejection of Enlightenment sensibilities as one is likely to find. More stunning, it is an atavistic and in Vance’s case likely self-conscious throwback even to pre-Abrahamic times, when ethno-bigotry was the norm and morality-cum-category of human culture did not exist.
If we understand this, we see the deep basis of the the Trump 2.0 Administration’s behavior in its first sixty days: It has attacked democracy in its very being because it stands athwart the successful MAGA manifestation of a Big Lie based on a refusal to transfer power peacefully; it has attacked checks-and-balances by attacking an independent judiciary as well as by relegating the Congress to an inert post office box; and it is attacking liberalism by seeking to extirpate its source of sustenance in civil society. But understand well: It has done all this because it believes that the entire edifice of American liberal democracy is based on “moralistic garbage,” as Vance so plainly put it. His view is at one with those on the far Left who disparage Enlightenment thinking as inherently racist. The only difference is that Vance embraces the racism.
As for the Administration’s attack on the rule of law, and hence its chest-bumping defiance of the Supreme Court, the core conviction is even plainer: Formal law, which is to say written law in Weberian terms, is based on a presumption of the ontological reality of moral reasoning; a rejection of morality itself reduces law to its pre- and postmodern bones, as a transient hegemonic narrative that deserves mere transactional treatment as a facet of a might-makes-right world.
As to this third arm of attack, we can be brief since the particulars are well known. Even before the Inauguration Trump cowed the media; Zuckerberg, Bezos, Iger, and many others—too many others—have been revealed a hollow men who care only about position and money. Their bending the knee whetted the appetites of the Administration to next go after the universities, which, with the exceptions of Princeton and Wesleyan so far as I am aware, all buckled in a trice. They buckled so fast that they have all but invited a second wave of assault; now the Administration thinks it can gouge some more by taxing their endowments and gutting Federal student aid. The MAGA world hates university types on principle, and punching them down is intrinsically satisfying. This has only a tad at most to do with DEI policies or how college administrators handle protests. MAGA hates scholarship because scholarship seeks and engages truth, and truth—even the assertion that it exists—is the implacable enemy of the fantasist postmodern Right.
Then came the big, prestigious law firms; all of them bent to kiss the king’s shoes. For some that even was not enough obeisance. At the very prestigious law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rivkin, Wharton and Garrison LLP, Brad Karp, the head of the firm, offered to donate $40 million worth of legal time to promote some of Trump’s favorite causes.[10] This was not a one-off: A few days later the Manhattan-based Milbank law firm agreed to a deal that will provide $100 million in pro bono legal services to causes supported by Trump. This follows similar deals negotiated by Willkie Farr & Gallagher, and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & From. Capitulation, surrender, pusillanimous appeasement—does the English language contain any words really adequate to describe this sort of thing? When lawyers do not care about the integrity and independence of the law, who will?
Because the three legs of the stool are connected as they are, shattering any one of them jeopardizes the integrity of the whole. But Trump is taking no chances: He seeks to saw off all three legs, just to be sure.
Gnostic MAGA
That’s not quite all that is afoot. There is some overlap between the populist and the anarcho-libertarian parts of the Administration; for different reasons, for example, their supporters both loath the Democrats. Trump does not understand very well the contradictions between the two, partly because his own interests somehow manage to merge the parts, for he is both pro-corporatist and anti-pluralist.
For now, in any event, he has let the anarcho-libertarians run with the ball for reasons so simple they often escape notice: They have actual plans of attack, and the senior populist types really don’t. Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and Tom Homan have no plan for deporting twelve million illegal immigrants, because with the resources they have there cannot be any such plan. Something always beats nothing, and Trump, impatient as ever and eager as ever to seem Protean and grab headlines, has gone with the guys who have been ready to act.
Alas, however, the dominant anarcho-libertarians are already, just sixty days in, doing things that have alienated his swing voters, the ones who delivered all seven swing states to him this past November. The polls are clear: Trump has sunk from 4 positive points just weeks after the Inauguration to about 12 negative points now. That is the fastest evaporating presidential honeymoon ever, and the reason is clear: Chaos is not popular among most Americans; prices are not dropping but rising even before tariffs bite; and the sudden disappearance of Federal money to support the states in regard to education and health is hurting people.That and more explains why town hall meetings are getting uncomfortable for MAGA supporting Republican Congressmen. When a recession hits, it will very likely get even more uncomfortable.
Musk, Thiel, and the other senior anacho-libertarians know what they want, and they are so far successful at manipulating Trump to get it. They are following the general game plan of The Sovereign Individual, and their morale is sustained in part by gnostic wisdom provided by an apostolic succession of ideologues even weirder than William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson. The rightwing populist masses who make up the great bulk of the MAGA virtual community have never heard of Rees-Mogg or Davidson. They have never heard of Curtis Yarvin either, but Musk and Thiel have. And they have never heard of an even deeper gnostic source, a British iconoclast named Nick Land.
According to Jonathan Derbyshire, who knew Land in his university days, Yarvin and Land have emerged as the twin lords of the Dark Enlightenment.[11] Land, he says, rhapsodized what he termed a “perfect complicity between radical innovation and profound conservatism.” China and East Asian statelets like Hong Kong or Singapore come closest to what Land regards as a model of “competent government,” and claims their lack of “social terror” is due to what he thinks are their ethnically homogenous populations.
Land, like Yarvin, believes the ideal state should function like a business. According to this theory, which Yarvin calls “neocameralism,” a properly constituted state is one that has been cured of democracy. Its guiding principle is “no voice, free exit”: Residents or clients (not citizens) of such a state have no rights, but may take their quaint backward customs elsewhere. This reminds one of the “phyles” described in Neal Stephenson’s science fiction novel Diamond Age.
Meanwhile, Land and Yarvin are said to admire Thiel’s concept of “neoreactionary” techno-commercialism, set down in a 2009 essay entitled “The Education of a Libertarian.” Thiel, an investor in Yavin’s start-up Urbit, wrote that, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” The fate of the world, he added, “may depend on the effort of a single person” able to make the world “safe for capitalism.” Who does Thiel think that person is? Trump, or Musk, or perhaps himself? But foreign-born Musk and Thiel cannot be President of the country that matters most, at least unless the Constitution is utterly debauched or discarded—and it’s still a bit too soon for Thiel to depend on that. That would make Trump into what exactly? Rider, or horse?
Sixty days down, perhaps 1,400 to go. This is going to get interesting.
[1] Just as an historical note, many observers have claimed that the volume and breadth of Trump’s post-Inaugural Executive Orders is unprecedented in American history. This is not true. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s January 1933 torrent of Executive Orders in launching the New Deal response to the crisis of the Great Depression was comparable, and comparably shocking to those inured to the status quo. Aside from volume, the two cases are not similar; certainly FDR paid little attention to any staged, spectacle aspect of what he did compared to Trump’s natural concern for ratings and attention. He acted amid what was truly a national crisis; Trump did not—he instead has created a national crisis.
[2] We may be sure the Russians captured every word, for they long ago rendered Signal hackable since the Ukrainians once used it…and the Russians collude with the Iranians hence, quite plausibly, also with the Houthis, since now so many formerly employed Russian operatives in Syria are out of a job since November.
[3] Bannon quoted in Jonathan V. Last, “Begun, the MAGA Wars Have,” The Bulwark, January 13, 2025.
[4] Innis, The Bias of Communication (University of Toronto Press, 1951), p. 13.
[5] Eco, The Prague Cemetery, pp. 177-78, 191.
[6] Quoted in Michael Gold, “Trump Tells Christians ‘You Won’t Have to Vote Anymore’ if He is Elected,” New York Times, July 27, 2024.
[7] This book is mentioned in both “The Raspberry Patch” post of March 21 and, of course, in the Age of Spectacle manuscript.
[8] See Jasmine Laws, “Elon Musk Shares Theory That Only ‘Alpha Males’ Should Vote,” Newsweek, September 3, 2024.
[9] Quoted in Larry Diamond’s comprehensive essay, “Defending Democracy in America,” American Purpose, March 24, 2025.
[10] See Charlie Sykes, “The Great Grovel Gathers Momentum,” To the Contrary (Substack), March 24, 2025.
[11] See Darbyshire, “The Philosophy behind Trump’s Dark Enlightenment,” Financial Times, March 26, 2025.