Well this post is an embarrassment of riches. So many things I want to comment on. I have to restrain myself. A couple of observations.
Regarding the velocity of Trump's "just do things" that has left the entrenched opposition in such disorientation and disarray. He is assisted in this by arming himself with a team which can wield the power of AI. I made this comment a few days ago:
"AI represents a giant leap forward in analytical bandwidth. Trump’s alliance with Elon Musk makes Trump the first American president with the means to exploit AI for governance. This creates a massive informational mismatch between the legacy press and the president. Even the legislative branch and federal bureaucracy are out-gunned analytically by a President with his hands on AI. AI's ability to rapidly mine the data for outrages will leave everyone else constantly playing information whack-a-mole, as the administration steamrolls through the bureaucracy.
The Trump administration is combining high-bandwidth governing analysis with unfiltered access to realtime media platforms, like X, which bypass the curated approach preferred by the legacy media and needed by them to establish a narrative. The administration’s ability to share its analytical findings in realtime may mean that the legacy media has lost, for good, the ability to curate a narrative. They may always be a day late and a dollar short. Already, legacy media reporting is beginning to emit an aroma similar to what one gets when sitting down to a meal of last week's leftovers."
And I was intrigued by your reference to Mary Harrington's observation about "the exultant male response" to all of these doings. Immediately following the election, I conjectured that one way to understand the election was as a referendum on masculine achievement. (That post is here: https://www.keithlowery.com/p/in-the-world-of-atoms). In it, I suggested that "the material world’s resistance to alteration serves to function as its own form of discrimination against women, if by “discrimination” we mean that women should be as accomplished as men at anything they decide to undertake. But women’s experience is sometimes less an artifact of discrimination by men than discrimination by material reality itself, which has circumscribed some kinds of female achievement...Trump cut his professional teeth building physical things, altering the very form of the material world in pursuits historically associated with the physical strength more characteristic of men. And it is equally noteworthy that he attracted support from others who were likewise high achievers in the world of atoms. While Elon Musk may have started out innovating in digital bits, he has become a history altering figure for his innovation in the world of atoms. From rockets to cars, from boring machines to manufacturing technologies, the sheer breadth and success of his accomplishments in the world of atoms is without parallel and without precedent for many generations past. On the other side of the electoral contest were people who trafficked primarily in words, and laws, and regulations, and socio-political machinations. But they had little to recommend them in the form of any significant accomplishments in the world of atoms...And one suspects that men like Donald Trump and Elon Musk are unnerving to progressives precisely because their quintessentially masculine accomplishments serve as embarrassing evidence of the appalling mendacity of the entire progressive narrative."
The misandrist feminist assault on the empowered masculine ultimately turned to the destruction of an empowered feminine as well. It was a totally mercenary movement joined at the hip with the corporate/bureaucratic desire for access to, and the creation and control of, uneducated manipulative labor. The Trump/Musk reveal, that access to tax largesse for the creation of a propagandist MSM, social programs and NGO's that placed spooks and political operatives in key positions to control and subvert the truth/fact based healthy national dialogue We the People deserve is no surprise to anyone paying attention. The healthy masculine and feminine was replaced ("no such thing as a man or woman") with the surgically altered sexless sterility of the illiterate trans humanist ready for the microchip roboworker sans history, culture and mythology. Pretending anything other than inhuman avaricious greed is perpetrating the horror (not aimed at you) is self-deception. 8% of deaths in some Canadian provinces can be attributed to the
proactive staff of final solution euthanasia centers.
The desire for totalitarian one world rule by criminal financiers fronting utopian concern gave us WWI, WWII and almost managed to burn
the 20th Century to the ground. Trump is reprieve not salvation. He is only President because of the survival of our Republic's First Amendment and the human moral reason our founding fathers worked to enshrine in our Constitution. As in Starmer's England and across Europe, the Harris/Biden travesty fully intended to take those away. "Ism's" are dead. The only authentic is the human. "Tech"/AI offers an expansion of human consciousness but any machine is only as effective as the person driving it. So far those in control of it have only shown their willingness to use it for personal economic gain and control. The "greatest upward transfer of wealth in human history" has spiritually/economically impoverished Americans, destroyed institutions and scattered the walking wounded across every underpass and byway in the country.
Thanks for your great comment and thanks to the UPHEAVAL for its work in demystifying the mal pathologies attempting to subsume our Republic.
Appalling mendandacity rooted in bigotry towards us, their fellow citizens. “Never again” had the practical implication of viewing their fellow man as pigs and dangerous. Mendacity indeed.
BTW, you missed a few figures in your catalog of returning archetypes: warlord, mad king, child soldier….
Also, a few oldies but goodies from the previous times of the strong gods: war, famine, genocide, pandemic, massacre, invasion, slavery, rape and pillage, colonialism, religious fanaticism, crusades, autos da fe….
Finally, yes, let’s loose all that autistic masculine energy that is now boosted by unprecedented technology and is now morally unconstrained because the boys have read nothing other than Ayn Rand and adolescent-level science fiction wet dreams, and have played nothing other than solipsistic first person shooter and world domination games on their computers. What could possibly go wrong?
This is not your error, but I am alarmed by the seemingly uncritical acceptance, bordering on adulation, of the new administration’s projects - borne of an understandable relief that the insanity of the old era is apparently behind us.
There are three major areas of activity - what I consider to be the real game - that Trump did not run on at all. All the fun stuff he is doing to “dismantle” the deep state, although welcome, is distracting his base from what looks to be the true agenda: expanding the technological-monetary surveillance and control grid; building a larger and more powerful Israeli state (thereby extinguishing Palestine); and establishing a “North American Technate” as a precursor to a global government.
Many of these projects are anathema to the “America First” and libertarian elements of Trump’s support, but are being carefully framed to seem not only compatible with, but instrumental to the success of the strategy. For example: Doge’s technology is presented as essential to root out the corruption of an unaccountable bureaucracy. Christian support for the Zionist project is a counter to atheism and the threat of Islam created by tolerance in “open societies.” And a north American union is fine so long as we run things - so long as it’s OUR version of an expanded America…as if our founding constitutionalists would have countenanced such an aggressive and arrogant foreign policy. Trump is presenting himself as anti-war while not ruling our violence to re-take the Panama Canal, absorb Canada and/or “buy” Greenland. Not to mention his specific promise to annihilate Iran on behalf of Israel - as if it’s a certainty that the former was behind two assassination attempts.
The irony that Elon Musk is using all-seeing technology to unhide and unwind the “social technologies” of the deep state seems to be lost on most people. Isn’t that how it always happens? If you want to introduce a new political reality that most Americans would not accept (i.e. a Chinese-style social credit system), then start with a very unpopular target of the new approach. Who will have access to these technologies of “transparency” in the future? Not us!
I couldn’t stand where the former administration was taking us, but I am skeptical the new one will be much better. Accountability for those who are pulling the strings remains elusive.
Have you heard about Richard Day? Lawrence Dunegan’s revelations are essential learning.
As glad as I am to see DEI take some body blows, I fear we're just replacing one version of Leviathan with another. Technocratic neoliberalism is still technocratic neoliberalism regardless whether the culture leans left or right. The Machine is nothing if not flexible and accomodating.
On the question of Jewish supremacy, I think Trump's regime is unstable and a conflict is bound to happen. Most of Trump's top people are, in public at least, Zionists, and Trump has deep links to Jewish organized crime https://pikulexpedition.substack.com/p/trump-timeline-of-an-israeli-asset); but they are also mostly non-Jews and are on Twitter, so they must be aware of the evils that Jews have done to us and to America. If they were truly loyal to the Jewish cause they would have to take steps to rein in the open internet and set up "anti-disinformation" organizations, which they are not really doing.
Thanks for the excellent essay, and for the citations. Forty years from now my grandchildren will ask what it was like to be alive during Trump, and this essay will help me answer.
One question I can't shake - I know where I came from, where we came from, we being the dissident right; during the lonely years we read books, talked online, shared memes, and slowly came to reject the Long 20th Century. But where did Trump come from? He was from a completely different generation, one that seems to have totally hated the Strong Gods. There was little in the way of intellectual support for his position. Not that he would have bothered to read it. Which perhaps is how he believes it? And here he is seemingly from nowhere.
I have been asking myself a version of the same question for a while - at least since the run up to the 2016 election. I highly recommend this interview with Howard Lutnick, a Trump personal friend of 30 years, in which he talks about how Trump actually works and thinks. The Lutnick interview was the first time I began to get a coherent (or at least, less incoherent) sense of Trump the person.
"The Great War of 1914-1918 lies like a band of scorched earth dividing that time from ours. In wiping out so many lives which would have been operative on the years that followed, in destroying beliefs, changing ideas, and leaving incurable wounds of disillusion, it created a physical as well as psychological gulf between two epochs." The Proud Tower, Barbara Tuchman
Your essays increasingly remind me of the work of one of America's greatest popular historians. They blend sharp insights into individuals - I never thought of Dick Cheney as a proponent of an open society - with analysis of social trends on their own merits. Moreover, said analysis is rooted in appreciation for Western societies as organic entities and not abstractions/propositions. (You did the same thing with your early analyses of China.) I strongly encourage you to build on this idea of the twentieth century ending by looking at Tuchman's various dissections of the failings of Western policymakers in the first half of the long twentieth century.
I wonder how the - what I call - The Great 20th Century War (starting in 1904 with the conflict between Russian & Japan and ending in 1995 with the Bosnian conflict) might fit into your concept of Long Twentieth Century.
It seems as if the goal of the post WWII consensus was to remove the humanness from humanity. To make everything neat and tidy and predictable. The opposite of strong, messy, ambivalent, loving, hating, self-centred humans. It turns out that when you try to make humans inhuman, they lose the will to live.
Thank you for this essay. While the Allies had some justification for going to war in 1939, the aftermath was disastrous for all, as you suggested. The American Denazification programs in Germany were, in some ways, more damaging than what the Soviets did in East Germany in that regard. Some American efforts in post-war Germany seem to have become templates for what later became "Cancel Culture." A very perceptive, little-known American economist named Ralph Keeling warned about this at the time, and I discuss it a bit at.... https://williammarkley.substack.com/p/they-suffered-also-germans-in-the
Where I live, it has been a very long, bitter winter, but Trump's substantial attempts at reform make it feel like an early spring. One of Trump's strengths, I think, is that he's not an ideologue. He clearly loves America, and appreciates our Founding ideals, and of course he has been a capitalist, but I wouldn't place this in the same category that most recent ideologies fall into. Trump, like Andrew Jackson, is a nationalist, but that seems to tap into those natural bonds that most people feel--family, community, nation, people--rather than some abstraction.
Excellent thoughts as always, but I wonder if I might--not disagree--but posit a wrinkle that must be considered to truly understand the mid-20th century consensus and which, I think, needs to be considered as an aspect of the managerial consensus. Yes, Hitler served as a useful embodiment of the forces the open society wished to contain and prevent, but I take the true obsession of the original priestly cast of the managerial state was the containment of the threat of nuclear annihilation. Nationalism was and is indeed a strong god, but the immanence of the god of the mushroom cloud is surely stronger, and the original justification for these managers (I am thinking of men like my grandfathers who were both le-level federal bureaucrats in the 50s, 60s, and 70s) was not preventing a new Hitler, but preventing the bombs from flying. The Specter of Hitler seems to have replaced this concern with the collapse of the Soviet Empire (there is no other way to explain to utter lack of concern this heir of the Cold-War managerial establishment shows to poking the nuclear armed Russian bear) but I don't think this was the original justification. I am glad that the old order is passing away, we should have taken steps to dismantle it in the 90's when we had some breathing room, but now I fear it is too late. Still, we have to ask the question how a multipolar world of strong gods can avoid Armageddon in the age of nuclear weapons even more terrifying than the H-Bomb. The strong gods demand wars, and real wars at that (not the fake wars we in the West see only vaguely through our empire of screens). Perhaps I'm wrong and it was the other way around; still, it is a question we must contend with.
Trump's earliest political statements were about nuclear weapons. He talked to Ron Rosenbaum in Manhattan Inc. about wanting to negotiate between the US and USSR.
Wow, thank you for this. with everything that is going on, its helpful to stand back and look at the macro environment. Thanks for helping make sense of it
The distinction between strong gods and weak gods, while rhetorically compelling, remains a schema of thought that occludes as much as it reveals. It is an epistemic reflex rather than an ontological insight. The binary itself—though perhaps intended as a polemical tool rather than an absolute metaphysical claim—demonstrates the very structure of thought that has defined the “Long Twentieth Century”: namely, the impulse to frame political and historical transformations in terms of absolute negations. One cannot, in the final analysis, simply substitute strength for weakness or gods of loyalty for gods of openness; rather, the movement of history unfolds through the ceaseless interplay of discipline and flexibility, order and contingency, unity and dispersion.
The article’s fundamental weakness, then, is not merely that it overstates the finality of the shift it describes, but that it replicates within its own frame of analysis the very abstracted absolutism that it seeks to critique. If the twentieth century was characterized by an ideological commitment to negation, to the constant opening and dissolving of forms, then its overcoming cannot be another reactive negation—a mere return to fixed structures, traditions, and “strong gods.” It must instead be a more subtle synthesis, a dialectical resolution between structure and fluidity, wherein discipline does not harden into dogma and flexibility does not dissipate into vacuity.
The article further stumbles in its implicit romanticism. In its eagerness to herald the return of the hero, the warrior, the king, it ignores the conditions under which these figures arise. Strength, if it is to be more than a slogan, must be cultivated. It is not conjured into existence by a political shift; it is fostered through the refinement of virtue and the disciplined coordination of will. The decay of the “open society” was not merely a matter of its excessive permissiveness, but of its failure to nurture higher faculties of thought and action. A restoration of strength, then, cannot merely be a negation of weakness but must be an ascent toward something greater.
Moreover, the article overlooks the material substratum upon which these ideological transformations rest. The forces of globalization, economic interdependence, and technological acceleration are not mere epiphenomena of the “open society” consensus; they are structural conditions that no rhetorical invocation of “strong gods” can simply sweep away. The dialectic of discipline and flexibility is not merely an intellectual exercise but a practical necessity. Any attempt to reclaim sovereignty, to reassert national or civilizational self-determination, must contend with the economic and technological realities that structure the conditions of political action. To return to a paradigm of strength without acknowledging the transformed nature of power in the twenty-first century is to mistake the symbol for the substance.
In its political prescriptions, the article appears too quick to assume coherence where there is, in fact, only flux. The emergence of Trump as a figure of disruption is not in itself evidence of a new order. It is, rather, the expression of a transitional moment, an era in which old forms crumble before new ones have fully emerged. What the article reads as the definitive close of the twentieth century may instead be only another oscillation within a longer and more complex movement—one that does not resolve into a simple binary of strong and weak but requires a more nuanced attunement to the shifting balance of forces.
Thus, if one is to conceive of a true alternative to the “open society” paradigm, it cannot be a mere reimposition of a prior form. The lesson of history is not that societies must oscillate between weakness and strength, between disintegration and cohesion, but that they must learn to discipline without rigidifying, to open without dissolving, to act with clarity without succumbing to mere reaction. To do otherwise is to repeat, in another register, the very errors one seeks to transcend.
Master propagandist. You’re a joke. Next, you’ll be telling your gullible audience that the impending panopticon surveillance state—and its accompanying digital IDs and CBDCs—is actually a good thing. You know, because of China or illegal immigration or whatever other excuse. Yeah, we are so “winning!” Good grief.
Yes. The phrase that struck me reading this essay is "I'm a fish that just had someone present water to me in a way I actually comprehend."
And yes, I'm aware that this is exactly the same mechanism that happens when one becomes enlightened to anything, including false things. In this case I think my decades of reading (and living) politics and history has armored me against falsehoods in this area. Then again, pride goeth before a fall, so it's time to contemplate for a while.
The Strong Gods or the Gods of the Copybook Headings. Or are they the same.
It is correct to say that Hitler is the avatar of the awful part of the 20th century but why is that so since he wasn't singular. Stalin and Mao both ran up a bigger body count. Is it that Hitler targeted a particular ethnic group while Stalin and Mao were more "Kill them all and let Marx sort it out". Had Hitler won the war though I suspect the genocide of the Slavs would have surpassed the Holocaust. Hitler published a blueprint for that too and there were a lot more Slavs. And what about the other monsters that also targeted a particular ethnic group like Enver Pasha and Talat Pasha.
The Smart Kids gave Stalin and Mao a pass because they supposedly had good intentions. And Hitler, as bad as he really was, fought against Communism, so that's another reason to have emphasized his evil avatar status. As some authors have pointed out, there were many parallels between the actions of Hitler and Stalin, but I think ideology trumps all for the Left. Body counts in the long run don't matter for them, and I'm more convinced than ever that Leftism always has very dark and murderous destruction at its heart, no matter what supposedly good intentions are involved.
One could say that Hitler had good intentions--no matter how evil and destructive--since he and his fellow Nazis were advocating for their own people--Germans, Nordics, etc. But of course we all should know where the road paved with good intentions leads.
Outstanding essay. As always, I feel like your work is something to be studied and not simply read.
Well this post is an embarrassment of riches. So many things I want to comment on. I have to restrain myself. A couple of observations.
Regarding the velocity of Trump's "just do things" that has left the entrenched opposition in such disorientation and disarray. He is assisted in this by arming himself with a team which can wield the power of AI. I made this comment a few days ago:
"AI represents a giant leap forward in analytical bandwidth. Trump’s alliance with Elon Musk makes Trump the first American president with the means to exploit AI for governance. This creates a massive informational mismatch between the legacy press and the president. Even the legislative branch and federal bureaucracy are out-gunned analytically by a President with his hands on AI. AI's ability to rapidly mine the data for outrages will leave everyone else constantly playing information whack-a-mole, as the administration steamrolls through the bureaucracy.
The Trump administration is combining high-bandwidth governing analysis with unfiltered access to realtime media platforms, like X, which bypass the curated approach preferred by the legacy media and needed by them to establish a narrative. The administration’s ability to share its analytical findings in realtime may mean that the legacy media has lost, for good, the ability to curate a narrative. They may always be a day late and a dollar short. Already, legacy media reporting is beginning to emit an aroma similar to what one gets when sitting down to a meal of last week's leftovers."
And I was intrigued by your reference to Mary Harrington's observation about "the exultant male response" to all of these doings. Immediately following the election, I conjectured that one way to understand the election was as a referendum on masculine achievement. (That post is here: https://www.keithlowery.com/p/in-the-world-of-atoms). In it, I suggested that "the material world’s resistance to alteration serves to function as its own form of discrimination against women, if by “discrimination” we mean that women should be as accomplished as men at anything they decide to undertake. But women’s experience is sometimes less an artifact of discrimination by men than discrimination by material reality itself, which has circumscribed some kinds of female achievement...Trump cut his professional teeth building physical things, altering the very form of the material world in pursuits historically associated with the physical strength more characteristic of men. And it is equally noteworthy that he attracted support from others who were likewise high achievers in the world of atoms. While Elon Musk may have started out innovating in digital bits, he has become a history altering figure for his innovation in the world of atoms. From rockets to cars, from boring machines to manufacturing technologies, the sheer breadth and success of his accomplishments in the world of atoms is without parallel and without precedent for many generations past. On the other side of the electoral contest were people who trafficked primarily in words, and laws, and regulations, and socio-political machinations. But they had little to recommend them in the form of any significant accomplishments in the world of atoms...And one suspects that men like Donald Trump and Elon Musk are unnerving to progressives precisely because their quintessentially masculine accomplishments serve as embarrassing evidence of the appalling mendacity of the entire progressive narrative."
The misandrist feminist assault on the empowered masculine ultimately turned to the destruction of an empowered feminine as well. It was a totally mercenary movement joined at the hip with the corporate/bureaucratic desire for access to, and the creation and control of, uneducated manipulative labor. The Trump/Musk reveal, that access to tax largesse for the creation of a propagandist MSM, social programs and NGO's that placed spooks and political operatives in key positions to control and subvert the truth/fact based healthy national dialogue We the People deserve is no surprise to anyone paying attention. The healthy masculine and feminine was replaced ("no such thing as a man or woman") with the surgically altered sexless sterility of the illiterate trans humanist ready for the microchip roboworker sans history, culture and mythology. Pretending anything other than inhuman avaricious greed is perpetrating the horror (not aimed at you) is self-deception. 8% of deaths in some Canadian provinces can be attributed to the
proactive staff of final solution euthanasia centers.
The desire for totalitarian one world rule by criminal financiers fronting utopian concern gave us WWI, WWII and almost managed to burn
the 20th Century to the ground. Trump is reprieve not salvation. He is only President because of the survival of our Republic's First Amendment and the human moral reason our founding fathers worked to enshrine in our Constitution. As in Starmer's England and across Europe, the Harris/Biden travesty fully intended to take those away. "Ism's" are dead. The only authentic is the human. "Tech"/AI offers an expansion of human consciousness but any machine is only as effective as the person driving it. So far those in control of it have only shown their willingness to use it for personal economic gain and control. The "greatest upward transfer of wealth in human history" has spiritually/economically impoverished Americans, destroyed institutions and scattered the walking wounded across every underpass and byway in the country.
Thanks for your great comment and thanks to the UPHEAVAL for its work in demystifying the mal pathologies attempting to subsume our Republic.
Appalling mendandacity rooted in bigotry towards us, their fellow citizens. “Never again” had the practical implication of viewing their fellow man as pigs and dangerous. Mendacity indeed.
Absolutely brilliant.
Yes. Recalcitrant human nature reasserts itself.
BTW, you missed a few figures in your catalog of returning archetypes: warlord, mad king, child soldier….
Also, a few oldies but goodies from the previous times of the strong gods: war, famine, genocide, pandemic, massacre, invasion, slavery, rape and pillage, colonialism, religious fanaticism, crusades, autos da fe….
Finally, yes, let’s loose all that autistic masculine energy that is now boosted by unprecedented technology and is now morally unconstrained because the boys have read nothing other than Ayn Rand and adolescent-level science fiction wet dreams, and have played nothing other than solipsistic first person shooter and world domination games on their computers. What could possibly go wrong?
Idi + AI = the next Elon?
Nonsense
Why do dummies always show up
I don’t know. Why did you come?
Astute and compelling.
This is not your error, but I am alarmed by the seemingly uncritical acceptance, bordering on adulation, of the new administration’s projects - borne of an understandable relief that the insanity of the old era is apparently behind us.
There are three major areas of activity - what I consider to be the real game - that Trump did not run on at all. All the fun stuff he is doing to “dismantle” the deep state, although welcome, is distracting his base from what looks to be the true agenda: expanding the technological-monetary surveillance and control grid; building a larger and more powerful Israeli state (thereby extinguishing Palestine); and establishing a “North American Technate” as a precursor to a global government.
Many of these projects are anathema to the “America First” and libertarian elements of Trump’s support, but are being carefully framed to seem not only compatible with, but instrumental to the success of the strategy. For example: Doge’s technology is presented as essential to root out the corruption of an unaccountable bureaucracy. Christian support for the Zionist project is a counter to atheism and the threat of Islam created by tolerance in “open societies.” And a north American union is fine so long as we run things - so long as it’s OUR version of an expanded America…as if our founding constitutionalists would have countenanced such an aggressive and arrogant foreign policy. Trump is presenting himself as anti-war while not ruling our violence to re-take the Panama Canal, absorb Canada and/or “buy” Greenland. Not to mention his specific promise to annihilate Iran on behalf of Israel - as if it’s a certainty that the former was behind two assassination attempts.
The irony that Elon Musk is using all-seeing technology to unhide and unwind the “social technologies” of the deep state seems to be lost on most people. Isn’t that how it always happens? If you want to introduce a new political reality that most Americans would not accept (i.e. a Chinese-style social credit system), then start with a very unpopular target of the new approach. Who will have access to these technologies of “transparency” in the future? Not us!
I couldn’t stand where the former administration was taking us, but I am skeptical the new one will be much better. Accountability for those who are pulling the strings remains elusive.
Have you heard about Richard Day? Lawrence Dunegan’s revelations are essential learning.
https://drrichardday.wordpress.com/audio/
As glad as I am to see DEI take some body blows, I fear we're just replacing one version of Leviathan with another. Technocratic neoliberalism is still technocratic neoliberalism regardless whether the culture leans left or right. The Machine is nothing if not flexible and accomodating.
On the question of Jewish supremacy, I think Trump's regime is unstable and a conflict is bound to happen. Most of Trump's top people are, in public at least, Zionists, and Trump has deep links to Jewish organized crime https://pikulexpedition.substack.com/p/trump-timeline-of-an-israeli-asset); but they are also mostly non-Jews and are on Twitter, so they must be aware of the evils that Jews have done to us and to America. If they were truly loyal to the Jewish cause they would have to take steps to rein in the open internet and set up "anti-disinformation" organizations, which they are not really doing.
Thanks for the excellent essay, and for the citations. Forty years from now my grandchildren will ask what it was like to be alive during Trump, and this essay will help me answer.
One question I can't shake - I know where I came from, where we came from, we being the dissident right; during the lonely years we read books, talked online, shared memes, and slowly came to reject the Long 20th Century. But where did Trump come from? He was from a completely different generation, one that seems to have totally hated the Strong Gods. There was little in the way of intellectual support for his position. Not that he would have bothered to read it. Which perhaps is how he believes it? And here he is seemingly from nowhere.
It's absolutely bizarre.
I have been asking myself a version of the same question for a while - at least since the run up to the 2016 election. I highly recommend this interview with Howard Lutnick, a Trump personal friend of 30 years, in which he talks about how Trump actually works and thinks. The Lutnick interview was the first time I began to get a coherent (or at least, less incoherent) sense of Trump the person.
"The Great War of 1914-1918 lies like a band of scorched earth dividing that time from ours. In wiping out so many lives which would have been operative on the years that followed, in destroying beliefs, changing ideas, and leaving incurable wounds of disillusion, it created a physical as well as psychological gulf between two epochs." The Proud Tower, Barbara Tuchman
Your essays increasingly remind me of the work of one of America's greatest popular historians. They blend sharp insights into individuals - I never thought of Dick Cheney as a proponent of an open society - with analysis of social trends on their own merits. Moreover, said analysis is rooted in appreciation for Western societies as organic entities and not abstractions/propositions. (You did the same thing with your early analyses of China.) I strongly encourage you to build on this idea of the twentieth century ending by looking at Tuchman's various dissections of the failings of Western policymakers in the first half of the long twentieth century.
Thanks Tim, a great suggestion!
I’d like to second that: I think certain key individuals can be (often unwitting) archetypes of an era or its ideas
I wonder how the - what I call - The Great 20th Century War (starting in 1904 with the conflict between Russian & Japan and ending in 1995 with the Bosnian conflict) might fit into your concept of Long Twentieth Century.
Thank you for this! This is the best explanation of our historical moment and its context that I’ve seen. Brilliantly done!
It seems as if the goal of the post WWII consensus was to remove the humanness from humanity. To make everything neat and tidy and predictable. The opposite of strong, messy, ambivalent, loving, hating, self-centred humans. It turns out that when you try to make humans inhuman, they lose the will to live.
Thank you for this essay. While the Allies had some justification for going to war in 1939, the aftermath was disastrous for all, as you suggested. The American Denazification programs in Germany were, in some ways, more damaging than what the Soviets did in East Germany in that regard. Some American efforts in post-war Germany seem to have become templates for what later became "Cancel Culture." A very perceptive, little-known American economist named Ralph Keeling warned about this at the time, and I discuss it a bit at.... https://williammarkley.substack.com/p/they-suffered-also-germans-in-the
Where I live, it has been a very long, bitter winter, but Trump's substantial attempts at reform make it feel like an early spring. One of Trump's strengths, I think, is that he's not an ideologue. He clearly loves America, and appreciates our Founding ideals, and of course he has been a capitalist, but I wouldn't place this in the same category that most recent ideologies fall into. Trump, like Andrew Jackson, is a nationalist, but that seems to tap into those natural bonds that most people feel--family, community, nation, people--rather than some abstraction.
Excellent thoughts as always, but I wonder if I might--not disagree--but posit a wrinkle that must be considered to truly understand the mid-20th century consensus and which, I think, needs to be considered as an aspect of the managerial consensus. Yes, Hitler served as a useful embodiment of the forces the open society wished to contain and prevent, but I take the true obsession of the original priestly cast of the managerial state was the containment of the threat of nuclear annihilation. Nationalism was and is indeed a strong god, but the immanence of the god of the mushroom cloud is surely stronger, and the original justification for these managers (I am thinking of men like my grandfathers who were both le-level federal bureaucrats in the 50s, 60s, and 70s) was not preventing a new Hitler, but preventing the bombs from flying. The Specter of Hitler seems to have replaced this concern with the collapse of the Soviet Empire (there is no other way to explain to utter lack of concern this heir of the Cold-War managerial establishment shows to poking the nuclear armed Russian bear) but I don't think this was the original justification. I am glad that the old order is passing away, we should have taken steps to dismantle it in the 90's when we had some breathing room, but now I fear it is too late. Still, we have to ask the question how a multipolar world of strong gods can avoid Armageddon in the age of nuclear weapons even more terrifying than the H-Bomb. The strong gods demand wars, and real wars at that (not the fake wars we in the West see only vaguely through our empire of screens). Perhaps I'm wrong and it was the other way around; still, it is a question we must contend with.
Trump's earliest political statements were about nuclear weapons. He talked to Ron Rosenbaum in Manhattan Inc. about wanting to negotiate between the US and USSR.
Wow, thank you for this. with everything that is going on, its helpful to stand back and look at the macro environment. Thanks for helping make sense of it
The distinction between strong gods and weak gods, while rhetorically compelling, remains a schema of thought that occludes as much as it reveals. It is an epistemic reflex rather than an ontological insight. The binary itself—though perhaps intended as a polemical tool rather than an absolute metaphysical claim—demonstrates the very structure of thought that has defined the “Long Twentieth Century”: namely, the impulse to frame political and historical transformations in terms of absolute negations. One cannot, in the final analysis, simply substitute strength for weakness or gods of loyalty for gods of openness; rather, the movement of history unfolds through the ceaseless interplay of discipline and flexibility, order and contingency, unity and dispersion.
The article’s fundamental weakness, then, is not merely that it overstates the finality of the shift it describes, but that it replicates within its own frame of analysis the very abstracted absolutism that it seeks to critique. If the twentieth century was characterized by an ideological commitment to negation, to the constant opening and dissolving of forms, then its overcoming cannot be another reactive negation—a mere return to fixed structures, traditions, and “strong gods.” It must instead be a more subtle synthesis, a dialectical resolution between structure and fluidity, wherein discipline does not harden into dogma and flexibility does not dissipate into vacuity.
The article further stumbles in its implicit romanticism. In its eagerness to herald the return of the hero, the warrior, the king, it ignores the conditions under which these figures arise. Strength, if it is to be more than a slogan, must be cultivated. It is not conjured into existence by a political shift; it is fostered through the refinement of virtue and the disciplined coordination of will. The decay of the “open society” was not merely a matter of its excessive permissiveness, but of its failure to nurture higher faculties of thought and action. A restoration of strength, then, cannot merely be a negation of weakness but must be an ascent toward something greater.
Moreover, the article overlooks the material substratum upon which these ideological transformations rest. The forces of globalization, economic interdependence, and technological acceleration are not mere epiphenomena of the “open society” consensus; they are structural conditions that no rhetorical invocation of “strong gods” can simply sweep away. The dialectic of discipline and flexibility is not merely an intellectual exercise but a practical necessity. Any attempt to reclaim sovereignty, to reassert national or civilizational self-determination, must contend with the economic and technological realities that structure the conditions of political action. To return to a paradigm of strength without acknowledging the transformed nature of power in the twenty-first century is to mistake the symbol for the substance.
In its political prescriptions, the article appears too quick to assume coherence where there is, in fact, only flux. The emergence of Trump as a figure of disruption is not in itself evidence of a new order. It is, rather, the expression of a transitional moment, an era in which old forms crumble before new ones have fully emerged. What the article reads as the definitive close of the twentieth century may instead be only another oscillation within a longer and more complex movement—one that does not resolve into a simple binary of strong and weak but requires a more nuanced attunement to the shifting balance of forces.
Thus, if one is to conceive of a true alternative to the “open society” paradigm, it cannot be a mere reimposition of a prior form. The lesson of history is not that societies must oscillate between weakness and strength, between disintegration and cohesion, but that they must learn to discipline without rigidifying, to open without dissolving, to act with clarity without succumbing to mere reaction. To do otherwise is to repeat, in another register, the very errors one seeks to transcend.
Master propagandist. You’re a joke. Next, you’ll be telling your gullible audience that the impending panopticon surveillance state—and its accompanying digital IDs and CBDCs—is actually a good thing. You know, because of China or illegal immigration or whatever other excuse. Yeah, we are so “winning!” Good grief.
"what united that establishment was the open society consensus" This was the key that I was missing in my worldview.
Yes. The phrase that struck me reading this essay is "I'm a fish that just had someone present water to me in a way I actually comprehend."
And yes, I'm aware that this is exactly the same mechanism that happens when one becomes enlightened to anything, including false things. In this case I think my decades of reading (and living) politics and history has armored me against falsehoods in this area. Then again, pride goeth before a fall, so it's time to contemplate for a while.
The Strong Gods or the Gods of the Copybook Headings. Or are they the same.
It is correct to say that Hitler is the avatar of the awful part of the 20th century but why is that so since he wasn't singular. Stalin and Mao both ran up a bigger body count. Is it that Hitler targeted a particular ethnic group while Stalin and Mao were more "Kill them all and let Marx sort it out". Had Hitler won the war though I suspect the genocide of the Slavs would have surpassed the Holocaust. Hitler published a blueprint for that too and there were a lot more Slavs. And what about the other monsters that also targeted a particular ethnic group like Enver Pasha and Talat Pasha.
The Smart Kids gave Stalin and Mao a pass because they supposedly had good intentions. And Hitler, as bad as he really was, fought against Communism, so that's another reason to have emphasized his evil avatar status. As some authors have pointed out, there were many parallels between the actions of Hitler and Stalin, but I think ideology trumps all for the Left. Body counts in the long run don't matter for them, and I'm more convinced than ever that Leftism always has very dark and murderous destruction at its heart, no matter what supposedly good intentions are involved.
One could say that Hitler had good intentions--no matter how evil and destructive--since he and his fellow Nazis were advocating for their own people--Germans, Nordics, etc. But of course we all should know where the road paved with good intentions leads.
Is there really any difference between National Socialism and "Socialism in One Country".