A Blow to the Progressive Leviathan

And a win for the normies.

Donald Trump is accompanied by family members as he addresses supporters in West Palm Beach, Florida. | REUTERS/Brendan Mcdermid

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Friends, I regret to inform you that Our Democracy™ is over.

That is the only conclusion one can draw from the cacophonic din of emotional ejaculation amplified by mainstream media blatherskites indulging in palliative delusions on a scale unprecedented in human history.

The rightful heir to the throne — a muppet capable of nothing more than reciting bland pabulum and work-shopped bromides mixed with cringe glossolalia and saccharine vocables, who underwent an overnight ontological transformation thanks to artificial ballast provided by an array of shamelessly pliant cultural and journalistic institutions, and whose entire campaign was little more than a mimetic spectacle run by psephological morons utterly convinced that the American people would never be able to see through an elaborate act of ventriloquy — was defeated by the second coming of Adolf Hitler. As such, the march of Progress™ has been halted, and establishment elites and their lefty lickspittles are in a state of denial about the message of repudiation baked into the election results.

Unfortunately for them, that message couldn’t be more pronounced. The extent and breadth of the Democratic Party’s electoral destruction under Kamala Harris is almost impossible to overstate. Essentially the entire country shifted right, with Trump gaining support in 49 states.¹ Incredibly, some of the largest deep-blue strongholds moved right even more than many rural areas. The only demographic that didn’t swing Trump’s way was college-educated white women. As Wesley Yang put it, “Losing with some typically means winning with others and vice versa. Losing big with everyone across the board is nearly unprecedented and hard to conceive of as even possible.”

The fact that so many Church of Progress™ high priests were convinced the election outcome would be the exact opposite really underscores that these people practice a politics defined by a kind of delusional decadence tinged with an air of fantasy. The view of the country from their châteaus does not comport with reality, to put it mildly, in large part because they’re separated from the voting public by distances of culture that are increasingly unbridgeable. But rather than working to bridge that divide and recalibrate their understanding of the world, they’ve doubled down on disdain and derision. Indeed, the election postmortem phase on the Left has been driven entirely by anger and even a sense of betrayal, with some calling Trump’s victory “the greatest dereliction of civic duty by the electorate in the history of the United States,” and others asking if America is even “worth saving.”

Our moral betters genuinely believe that America’s fundamental goodness is contingent on electoral outcomes, and are therefore disgusted by what they see as the infidelity of the American electorate—specifically, the sullied, uneducated² commoners who refuse to submit to the suffocating excesses of establishment elites. Of course, this line of reasoning begins with the supposition that neither Kamala Harris nor the Democratic Party is responsible for the election outcome. Why come to grips with the hard truth when it’s so much easier to ensconce yourself in a comfortably familiar, epistemically cloistered left-wing redoubt buttressed by the notion that America is a benighted, backwards system of oppressions, and that the country itself has betrayed its own ideals.

Such a coping strategy has a calming effect on the pompous, pontificating prigs because it allows them to continue believing that they hold a monopoly on virtue, common sense, and intelligence. But consider the implications of this conclusion: presuming that a critical mass of Americans are cretinous ignoramuses motivated by antisocial pathologies and a “desire to dominate and inflict cruelty on outgroups” means they cannot be persuaded, but only contained.

The refusal to even try to understand Trump’s political appeal except in terms flattering to our self-styled democracy defenders’ beliefs is itself part of the explanation for his historic comeback. But their operating animus toward normies is essential to their self-conception, and will no doubt continue to bind all wounds and erase all short-term memory.

Condescending hatred for the disobedient, working class masses has long formed the basis of the moralistic bias informing arrogant declarations from credentialed professionals that the only reason “Trump supporters” oppose the Left’s paternalistic Progress™ project is because they’re unenlightened troglodytes pining for the past and don’t realize they’re being led to perdition by unscrupulous populists. Today, more than a week after election day, this smug contempt runs in parallel with a powerful mood of incomprehension among today’s power mad utopians.

How dare you peasants decline to genuflect before the Church of Progress™! How dare you refuse to swallow the diarrhetic bullshit propagated by the mainstream media! How dare you fail to vote for the gilded mediocrity we installed as the Party’s figurehead!

I, for one, am genuinely proud that so many Americans of all geographies and skin tones³ joined together in a coalition of repudiation against the managed civilizational decline forced upon us by mentally ill pseudo-intellectuals. Frank Furedi rightly points out that the huge support Trump gained from black and Hispanic voters is “arguably the most serious setback ever suffered by woke identity politics.” The significance of this cannot be overstated—not just because identity politics is civic poison that inhibits cross-racial solidarity by encouraging people to interpret all human sociological interactions in the most cynical way possible, but because it has become a means for the professional managerial class to retain control over society.

Managerialism requires intermediation; intermediation requires a justifying ideology. As people like N.S. Lyons, Malcom Kyeyune, and Eric Kaufmann have detailed, the identity synthesis intrinsic to wokeness has been used to justify an expansive bureaucratic apparatus of moral oversight for the purpose of abolishing an oppressive system that supposedly permeates all interactions in society. Such an apparatus operates via a permanent caste of commissars tasked with managerial intermediation in previously independent social and economic processes extending to almost every facet of modern society, including areas once understood as foundational to the political system.

Those who threw their support behind the orange menace this time around did so for all kinds of different reasons. But I think that a lot of Americans rightly felt that a vote for Trump was a vote against what Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and others have called “the machine”—the faceless managerial regime that exercises the real power in this country by way of an all-powerful bureaucracy far removed from the legislature.

Most people have a difficult time describing this regime because it’s been normalized over the past decade as major corporations, media outlets, government agencies, nonprofits, and universities have slowly but surely adopted the same voice and agenda instead of functioning as the separate, self-interested institutions described by classical liberalism. But we’ve arrived at the point where it’s simply impossible not to notice the pervasive, extra-constitutional behemoth pulling the strings in America thanks to an unholy alliance among unelected government functionaries, paragovernmental adjuncts, and Trotsky-style entryists who’ve successfully established public-private partnerships capable of circumventing the Constitution. Equally unmistakable is the fact that this monstrosity is progressive in the sense that it blindly desires to uproot whatever currently exists and seeks to impose top-down projects of social transformation, typically by administrative fiat, so that the masses might be delivered into a newer, better, woker future by enlightened, technocratic, managerial elites and an authoritative caste of unelected, unaccountable, unassailable “experts” who run America’s key institutions.

The claim of “expertise” purports to justify all kinds of state surveillance and authoritarian social control. “Authoritarians rule through romanticizing and exalting professionalism, rank, expertise, and other such managerial values,” Walter Kirn fittingly wrote today.

The resulting progressive leviathan we’ve been living under can be traced to the Obama faction of the Democratic Party, which has successfully implemented Soviet-style, “whole-of-society” political machinery facilitating professional managerial class control of public life. As Jacob Segal has explained, the government “enacts policies and then ‘enlists’ corporations, NGOs and even individual citizens to enforce them—creating a 360-degree police force made up of the companies you do business with, the civic organizations that you think make up your communal safety net, even your neighbors.” To avoid the appearance of totalitarian overreach intrinsic to such brazen coordination, the Democratic Party has conjured up a variety of crises and moral causes — everything from Russian disinformation to the second coming of Hitler to systemic racism — as pretexts to demand ideological alignment and conformity across public and private sector institutions.⁴

This totalizing form of politics treats the Constitution as an obstacle to “social justice,” “public safety,” and the “preservation of civic health” that must be bypassed whenever possible. In addition to disregarding the democratic process and dispensing with the traditional separation of powers, it forces non-state actors to fall in line by consolidating a shadow class of functionaries who directly or indirectly work to advance and protect the party’s agenda (Progress™).

This pathocratic subversion has been extremely effective. It is the reason why the Democratic Party has been able to achieve political ends without having to engage in electoral politics; it is the reason why left-wing absolutism has triumphed over constitutional liberties, leading to the forcible imposition of bizarre progressive nostrums and cultural norms; it is the reason why the preferences of an embattled technocratic elite have been coronated.

And it’s the reason why it was so important for Donald Trump to win.

A PMC regime drunk on its own fantasies of virtue while in possession of every lever of power, and which is willing to blow up any rule or institution to maintain that command, is incompatible with democracy and stands in direct tension with the moral convictions of most Americans. And while there’s no guarantee that Trump will dismantle “the machine,” right now it at least looks like his administration is poised to make a real difference. All we can do is hope.

1. The results for Republicans as a whole were no less significant: Senate majority, House majority, state governor majority, and even state legislature majority.

2. As Harvard professor Michael Sandel has noted, one of the last acceptable prejudices is disdain for the less educated—no doubt in large part because the Democratic Party and the contemporary Left are rooted in an increasingly gentrified base, rather than working-class or middle-class people. This has been financially rewarding; the ultra-rich and their progressive foundations have consistently outraised and outspent the political Right by a margin of nearly two-to-one. Kamala Harris was given an unprecedented billion-dollar campaign war chest—three times the size of Trump’s.

3. Little known fact: Democrats have been bleeding non-white voters in every midterm and general election since 2010. As Musa al-Gharbi has shown, the Democratic Party’s gains in 2018 were driven by whites, despite weak showing from minorities, and the “red wave” that never materialized in 2022 was also thanks to whites (minority shifts helped the GOP take the House). This time, however, whites couldn’t insulate Democrats from the levels of attrition they experienced with minority voters.

4. “In a time of crisis, we cannot afford the luxury of dissent.”