Political passions in the Trump era: Where is the reconstruction after the destruction?

Author:Noah Smith;Compiler:Block unicorn

"Men don't care what's on TV. They only care what else is on TV." - Jerry Seinfeld

N.S. Lyons is a popular essayist in the tradition of "national conservatism." His SubstackThe Upheavalis recommended reading, though I agree with less than half of what he writes. But he is well-read and well-informed, able to synthesize information from many fields, and unafraid to think deeply about the big issues in history in real time. Reading his work will help you better understand the beliefs of the modern right. On many issues, his message is something that people in the MAGA world desperately need to hear.

In a recent article titledAmerica’s Mighty Gods, Lyons points out what I believe to be a profound truth about our current historical moment. He wrote that the “long twentieth century” had a late start, not fully consolidated until 1945, but that for the next 80 years its spirit dominated our civilization’s conception of the world as it is and as it ought to be.the ideology of the open society brought “the greatest evil of thelong twentieth century.” 2000="" 2010="" leaf="" margin-right:="" margin-bottom:="" margin-left:="" letter-spacing:="" span="" text="" p="" nodeleaf="" img="" src="https://img.jinse.cn/7357166_image3.png" type="block">suppressed during the “Long Twentieth Century,” but now it’s back…

Today’s populism is… a long-suppressed, ambitious desire to take action that is long overdue, to break free from the stifling lethargy of procedural management, and to fight passionately for collective survival and one’s own interests. This is the return of politics to politics. This requires a recovery of the old virtues, including a vital sense of national and civilizational self-worth… This is what Trump, in all his ruggedness, represents: the powerful gods have escaped exile and returned to America… Trump himself is a man of action, not a contemplative… He… is the embodiment of the whole rebellious new world spirit that is overturning the old order… The audacity of Trump’s actions itself reflects more than partisan political gaming—it itself represents the overturning of the stagnation of the old paradigm; now you can just do things.

The word “thumotic” here refers to Harvey Mansfield’s use of the Greek word “thumos” to denote a political passion and drive. Francis Fukuyama spelled it “thymos,” and as early as 1992 he predicted that Donald Trump might be the perfect embodiment of the “big-hearted” American impulse to tear down the liberal establishment. Lyons thus sees Trumpism as a wild, unapologetic reassertion of masculine drive, Fight Club-style—only instead of Tyler Durden channeling it toward anarchism, Lyons sees Trump and Musk unleashing their masculine passions in dismantling the civil service. But Lyons never explains specifically how this destructive impulse might bring about the return of the “mighty god” he desires. He sees the civil service and other American postwar institutions as obstacles to the revival of roots, family, community, and faith, but he never really looks beyond the shattering of these supposed obstacles to the actual reconstruction. He just assumes it will happen naturally, or thinks it’s a problem for the future.

I’m sure he’s going to be disappointed. The Trump movement has been around for a decade, and in that time it has built absolutely nothing. There are no Trump Youth Groups. There are no Trump Community Centers, Trump Neighborhood Associations, or Trump Business Clubs. Nor are Trump supporters flocking to traditional religion; the decline in Christianity has stopped since the pandemic, but Christian belonging and church attendance remain well below turn-of-the-century levels. Republicans are still having more children than Democrats, but birth rates are falling in red states, too.

During Trump’s first term, attempts by the right to organize civic engagement were almost laughably minimal. A few hundred Proud Boys gathered to fight antifascists in the streets of Berkeley and Portland. There were smaller right-wing anti-lockdown protests in 2020. About two thousand people rioted on January 6—mostly people in their 40s and 50s. None of this led to the kind of long-term grassroots organizing that was common in the 1950s.

For a very select few, Trump’s first term was a live-action role-playing game; for others, it was just a YouTube channel.

And so far in Trump’s second term? Nothing. Even rally attendance has dropped dramatically. National conservatives who might have gone out to meet in 2017 now huddle alone in their living rooms, swiping back and forth between X, OnlyFans, and DraftKings, pumping their fists in the air as they read about Elon Musk and his team of computer geeks firing employees or Trump cutting off aid to Ukraine. “You can just do things,” yet almost no Trump supporter is actually doing anything except passively cheering on their nominal team. Unless you’re one of the few geeks helping Elon Musk dismantle the bureaucracy, this “big-mindedness” is completely second-hand.

You see, the MAGA movement is an online phenomenon. It’s another vertical online community—a collection of rootless, atomized individuals, tenuously connected across vast distances by illusory bonds of ideology and identity. There’s nothing in it about family, community, or a sense of rootedness to a place. It’s a digital consumer product. It’s a subreddit. It’s a fan club.

N.S. Lyons and national conservatives completely misunderstand why America gave up its roots, community, family, and faith. We didn’t give up these “powerful gods” because liberals got too hard on old Adolf (Hitler). We gave them up because of technology.

The 1920s saw the beginning of mass affluence in America, along with the emergence of technologies that gave individual humans unprecedented autonomy and control over their physical location and access to information. Car ownership allowed Americans to travel anywhere, at any time, freeing them from ties to specific places. Phone ownership allowed people to communicate across long distances. Television and radio exposed them to new ideas and culture, and the Internet exposed them to even more.

Then came social media and smartphones. Suddenly, “society” no longer meant the people in the physical space around you—your neighbors, coworkers, gym buddies, and so on. First, “society” became a group of avatars writing to you on the little glass screen in your pocket. Your phone became the place where you met and talked with friends and loved ones, and where you argued about politics and ideas. People’s roots shifted from physical space to digital space.

There is growing evidence that smartphone-enabled social media is associated with feelings of isolation and alienation, loneliness and solitude, declining religious belief, reduced family formation, and lower birth rates. The 20th century technology of the car, telephone, television, and the Internet made American society somewhat disconnected, but it managed to partially resist and retain some remnants of its roots. However, smartphone-enabled social media broke through these last barriers of resistance and turned us into free particles floating in an invisible space of memes, identities, and distractions.

The powerful gods, it turns out, are more fragile than the new gods made of silicon.

The people who did this are more or less the people N.S. Lyons is cheering for now. Not Elon Musk himself, of course; he just builds cars and rockets. But Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey, Zhang Yiming, and a host of entrepreneurs who followed their “ambitious” pursuit of vast wealth, built the virtual worlds that have become our most real homes.

I’m not saying they were evil in doing so. Technology has a way of advancing in developed societies; if it can be achieved, it probably will be. No one can know its shortcomings in advance. But the irony is that the very people N.S. Lyons now believes will usher in a new era of roots and community are the same people who destroyed the old one.

But anyway, yes, this thing will fail because nothing has been built. Yes, every ideological movement promises us that after the old order is completely overthrown, a utopia will take its place. Somehow, utopia never seems to arrive. Instead, the supposed temporary period of pain and sacrifice grows longer and longer, and the ideologues at the helm grow more and more enthusiastic about blaming the enemies and eradicating the enemies of the revolution. At some point it becomes clear that the promise of utopia is just an excuse to eradicate the enemies - "having big dreams" becomes an end in itself.

Trump’s Treasury Secretary has told us that the economic pain Trump has caused is just a “detox period” , Trump blames the stock market crash on “globalists” , and Trump’s Justice Department blames hoarders and speculators for egg prices. If you don’t recognize this plot line, you must not have read much news or history.

Merely smashing the old order does not in itself create anything. The Visigoths and Vandals built nothing on the ruins of Rome. They indulged their “big minds” and looted wealth for a while, then disappeared into myth and memory.

For the past fifteen years, I have watched in dismay as the real-world communities and families I knew in my youth were torn apart and replaced by a bunch of imaginary online identity movements. I'm still waiting for someone to figure out how to piece society back together - how to do what Roosevelt and the Greatest Generation did a century ago.