The Meaning of Victory
Reflections on the 2024 Election
“Are you winning?”
That's the question from the infamous meme. And that’s also the question that gets put to natural pessimists like me on days when it is particularly hard to be a pessimist.
And it’s hard to be a pessimist this week when witnessing the historic victory of Donald Trump, retaking the presidency after 4 years in the wilderness, media censorship, political persecution, a bogus felony conviction, two assassination attempts, and a race against two well-funded incumbent Democratic politicians. And after all of that, Donald Trump won. He won everything there was to win: the Electoral College, the popular vote, and the Senate.
But, at a more spiritual level, Trump won something more grand than political office this year. In 2024 he established himself as a transformative political figure. Trump is now a man who belongs to American history. He isn't an anomaly or a clown. He is a defining piece of the fabric of the country and century that produced him. In Hindsight, history will know this period as the “Trump era”, with all his rivals from Obama and Biden to Hillary and Kamala listed as mere footnotes.
As some have said, Trump is, (for the 20th century at least) the most American American. He embodies the ethos of the late Republic, for better or worse, and only a man like him seems fit to lead the nation towards whatever future there is in store, a path that puts the 47th president on a collision course with the American deep state, the “final boss” of his legacy.
But all that is a future concern.
What greets us this week is an immediate cathartic victory as we witness Trump take back his throne while the TDS crybullies lapse into an extended meltdown. Liberal Twitter is now a long stream of breathless histrionics, progressive podcasts are 3-hour therapy sessions, and every prime-time television channel is a never-ending contest of recriminations.
Cope for the cope god.
And it's hard not to feel triumphant. It's hard not to flex. It's hard not to gloat.
But then there’s that more pressing set of questions: Did we actually win? Are we so back? Is this that turning of the tide that we have been waiting for?
Once more, I can feel my inner pessimist trying to break out. But maybe pessimism is not the right approach. Maybe, for once, I can give the sweet-talking devil his due and look on the bright side.
Could the victory we just witnessed change the course of things substantially? Is this a turning point?
As everyone familiar with history knows populist surges are supremely transient. Whatever is won by electoral gains can easily be undone by the next contest. However, this election feels different. It feels more significant. The vibes have well and truly changed.
And the vibes are not without some basis in fact.
Our enemies have become weaker over the last four years. The media’s control over the narrative is weakening. Journalists can't "current thing" news items anymore. The deep state's grip on power is loosening. And the progressive opposition is becoming increasingly demoralized in their worldview.
The rhetoric on the left right now follows the standard form. “We have to continue the fight!!” “We must carry on!” “We must persist in the long struggle for egalitarian liberal blah blah”.
But people aren't saying these things like they mean it. And the energy just isn't there. in 2024, progressives don't really want to cancel their MAGA co-workers. They can't be bothered to go out and have another big riot in the name of “the resistance” against orange Hitler. They can't quite find it within themselves to create woke 3.0 for yet another round of society-destroying hysteria. That’s not quite the reaction that one would have expected in the wake of a second Trump presidency, even a year ago.
Why is this? Well, as my friend Isaac Young points out, something seems to be critically broken in the left-wing machine, a part is missing, and the system is out of whack. The progressive movement is plugged in but it's tilting and unstable and parts of it seem to be winding down.
First, the leftist activist class is exhausted. To be fair, they always were exhausted. They always "couldn't even'. They were always “so tired”. And 21st-century progressivism was infamously characterized by “Slacktivism” and the politics of the "Lazy Girl" demographic. But as of 2024, these people are thoroughly spent. For this group 2020 was a kind of pseudo-sexual climax and now their adherents are searching around for sobriety in the awkward aftermath. Everyone everywhere went full in on intersectionality and implemented “clown world” in every major institution, and what resulted was an America covered with crime, urine, and inflation. Now most of the efforts of the progressive activists of the early 2020s are bent toward explaining away the natural consequences of their political goals’ implementation.
But worse yet, progressives increasingly have difficulty finding a consistent narrative about their own identity. Are they socialists who ape corporate HR talking points? Are they advocates for democracy who rage against populist leaders winning large electoral majorities? Are they libertines trying to get people fired for saying naughty words?
Nothing in the new left makes any sense. And the old left doesn’t fare much better.
The socialist and Marxist movements that had a vision for humanity’s future based on billowing tomes of philosophical theory and class-based politics now remain little more than a parking area for those too white and male to fit into the left’s already existing framework of identity-based oppressions.
It’s not that the critiques about economic systems and material conditions are wrong-headed. We all know that the modern financial system is insane, and there needs to be a return to the dignity of the worker and a more fair way of distributing resources to families. However, modern socialist and Marxist politics remains nothing more than an anachronism even when promoted by relatively intelligent people like Freddie DeBoer. The eternal problem remains that all political systems have to run on human hardware. If your model of human anthropology is incorrect, your proposed system just won’t get results. Without a core understanding of how humans process power relationships, your ideology will just produce meaningless theoretical blather, no matter how much IQ or computation power you put into the effort.
Anthropology matters. However, misunderstanding human anthropology is mandatory if you want to be part of the modern left. That’s probably why no one on the left can figure out how to appeal to white men who haven’t entirely drunk their ideological Kool-Aid.
Do progressives have an understanding of white identity that isn’t based exclusively on oppression and privilege? Do they have a vision of masculinity not organized around pot smoking, pornography, and being stupid? Who knows. Who cares. Just memorize the buzzwords, consume your porn, smoke your weed, and LARP as Che Guevara.
The act is getting old.
And even for identity groups the left supports, the progressive coalition isn’t working as it should. In current year, the intersectional alliance more resembles Steve Sailer’s “circular firing squad”. The Asian and African American communities are now at blows over the issue of crime and racial preferences. The once-stalwart feminist movement is brutally divided over the issue of transgenderism. And that is not to mention the Palestinian elephant in the room: the conflict that emerged in Gaza on October 7th that tore the left asunder and severed the left’s activist class from its core benefactors.
It seems strange to think that a terrorist attack in the Middle East would trigger a political realignment in North America. But that’s how large interdependent systems work. Eventually, their complexity overwhelms the stabilizing forces that hold them together. Once a slight perturbation sends the system into shock, the various castles that comprised the power structure’s constellation collapse in a metastasizing preference cascade.
So much of what gave progressives their cultural dominance was a series of interdependent complex institutions. This made the power hard to dismantle, but also incredibly fragile, especially in places where narrative control couldn’t be maintained.
As everyone knows the progressives are dominant in the legacy media, and on most social media platforms, and they used to be dominant on Twitter. Not anymore.
What happened?
Everyone knows the answer to that question. Elon happened. But what did Elon actually do? Not as much as you might think. He just set the algorithm back to dead center, stopped the censorship, and undid the bans. And now, one year later, Twitter has organically transformed from a progressive safe haven to a premiere bastion of right-wing politics.
It turns out that modern progressive discourse doesn’t work when placed in an environment where it can be challenged with impunity. Of course, it talks a good game about its enemies. It loves uncharitably describing its political opponents in ideological echo chambers. It will even engage, on occasion, in some performative rhetoric where it cloaks moralizing lectures behind the pretense of “debate”. But there never is a real conversation. There can be no real dialectic. This is because progressive ideas cannot properly interface with reality or defend themselves under critical examination. As such, progressive engagement with non-progressives can only proceed inside an oppressive set of rules and bright lines that make sincere engagement outside their leftist norms almost impossible.
Many people want to reform the left, steer it in a more reasonable direction, and cut away its insanities. But I doubt that’s possible. Modern progressivism is so brittle that it can’t be molded by small corrective actions. The second you take a wrench to the automaton to try to move something, it threatens a cascading collapse of self-awareness. Don’t ask too many questions that might trigger a larger revelation that, well and truly, the emperor has no clothes.
The intersectional worldview of progressivism is held together, not by theory, but by a set of interlocking taboos. Once one taboo falls, it is difficult for the other bright lines to keep the believers in line with leftist orthodoxy. After a person understands that progressive notions about gender are bullshit can they stop themselves from asking similar questions about progressive notions about sex? And if sexual differences are acknowledged what about those that might exist between cultures and ethnic groups?
I know many people who are beginning to suspect that the ordinary 20th-century understanding of crime and inflation is wanting. But once these more recent pieties are questioned what about the greater sacred cows of democracy and egalitarianism?
It’s amazing how many ideas, considered completely insane in all previous eras of human history, are adopted as default beliefs by modern people. And the rabbit hole goes down far.
There will be a lot of lefty apostates in the next several years. Many of the epic freak-outs we see among progressives are just these people dealing with premature enlightenment. A more realistic understanding of human organization is dawning.
But does that mean that the progressive age is over? Is the restoration of civilization truly imminent? Has the fourth turning come upon us?
It’s tempting to think this, especially for younger men who tend to believe that the solution to problems is subtracting away the bad actors and bad ideas so that good things can thrive.
But human politics and human society don’t work like that. Civilizations don’t perish due to individual bad actors. They don’t even perish due to individual bad ideas. Rather, decline is characterized by an absence of masculine strength and spiritual ethos. And, as such, our civilization is still very much in the mode of Spenglarian Winter.
The moral and religious foundations that characterize our society are in shambles. The natural course of entropy and degeneration is still operating in every avenue of our culture. And we are still locked in a debt-immigration cycle that, short of radical change, will eventually force most Western nations to the brink of collapse.
The progressive movement as we have known it might be in an impossible situation. It may even (in some sense) die. But all of the anti-civilizational forces that drive it are still growing, and this negative energy will eventually find political expression behind one banner or another. And we will need to deal with the problem of resisting these assaults, all while building something that can last into the future.
But what does that tell us about the victory that we just saw this last Tuesday?
That’s a much harder question.
We now have a reprieve from the direct threat of the deep state and its progressive handmaidens. Whatever else happens, the machinations of managerial leftism will be too busy with Trump to focus on the activities of the deep right. The eye of Sauron is no longer focused directly on us. The threat of cancelation and reprisal is minimal. And it will take our enemies at least a year to get this punitive apparatus back online, if they can ever get it back online.
Interested dissident parties now need to make hay while the sun shines: more organization, more art, more writing, more outreach. and more community building. The power is there for the taking, at least for a limited time, and there need to be real things and real institutions that come out of this period.
Politically speaking, the biggest challenge in the next two years will come from the remnants of the neo-con movement and the moderate right. Looking to tamp down on the radicalism of the last decade, thinkers in this camp will use the victory in 2024 as a reason to return to the comforting Boomer-style conservatism of William F. Buckley and worship of the dead constitution.
I probably don’t need to remind readers how futile this mode of thought is. It is built on a foundation of sand. It relies on the idealism of the previous century while trying to appeal to regulations that no one in the government believes in. It tries to make peace with lies to be perceived as “nice”, and consistently ignores hard realities because the left deems them “radical”. This is all fake politics. It is an obvious dead end. And we don’t have time for it anymore, not with the limited window that was given to us.
Our enemies, in one form or another, will eventually return to power and use it to attack our greater project, that’s the natural course of democracy and popular politics, that’s what we have to expect.
But why is that the case? Didn’t Trump win and isn’t he a man of destiny? Why couldn’t he just change the system to hold back the necessary chaos of hard political churn? Couldn’t he just become Caesar and end the culture war totally? Couldn’t he just create a new era in America where the old rules don’t apply?
Hypothetically, this is possible. A total Caesarean reset has happened many times in history, but I don’t think that is what is happening now.
Great man or not, Trump is too old to accomplish this task. He will take on the deep state to an extent. But 78-year-old men don’t naturally want to dismantle governments root-and-branch, much less create new ones from scratch. Furthermore, rebuilding America from the ground up would require a change in perspective that I don’t think Trump has personally undertaken. Trump would need to adopt the mindset of the Aristocrat, to not just be an officeholder but the father of the country, taking direct responsibility for the American people as his people and managing their future as his legacy.
This perspective is the only meaningful way to play politics in the 21st century, to embody the mode of nobility and adopt a people’s well-being as a personal responsibility, salus populi suprema lex esto. This would be a fundamentally different way of understanding government than the management of individual rights, as was taught to us throughout most of the 20th century. Adopting this understanding would be nothing less than a revolutionary paradigm shift in people’s understanding of human social organization. And we seem to be a long way away from that kind of philosophical shift in 2024.
The one gray lining to the silver cloud of Trump's victory is that the relatively comfortable times his second administration promises make the fundamental but necessary changes in political thought more difficult. Complacency and comfort are the enemy of all difficult human endeavors. And the new Trump administration offers both for conservatives everywhere.
But, comfortable or not, the task of accomplishing this transformation in modern people’s belief systems is the most important task ahead of the right-wing in the wake of Trump’s election. And there is a simple way to do this in our own lives by becoming the aristocrats our society needs.
And I know. This is the reactionary sentiment we have heard constantly since 2014, “Become worthy then rule”. Without context, it’s hard to even know what “aristocracy” or “worthiness” even means. But there are opportunities for these things, right in front of our eyes, every day, especially as we see the current ruling class crumbling in real time.
Ultimately, I don’t think that Aristocracy or “nobility” are difficult qualities to describe. It’s just what the French used to call “noblesse oblige”, the obligation to use your privilege for the community of people who have put their faith in you, to work for the betterment of your “people”.
But who are one’s people?
Historically, a people is defined by shared religious beliefs, shared history, and shared lineage, things that can be somewhat hard to define inside of modernity.
However, I like to think of the question in a more pedestrian way. Your “people” are just the men and women in your life who are your responsibility despite their flaws, intellectually, physically, or morally. It doesn’t matter how stupid they are. It doesn’t matter how far they let their health go down the tubes in the wake of modernity. It doesn’t even matter how much they have allowed themselves to morally degenerate. Regardless, you will always be associated with these people based on who they are. And you must take a degree of ownership in their futures, make sure that they improve, and find a better way for them to go. Acting on this central obligation is the first step to nobility.
I suppose that brings us back to the original subject of the post, my reaction to the 2024 election.
Certainly, given the extremely bad behavior of the left for the last ten years, given their lies, their mendacity, their petty vindictiveness, we may experience a temptation to spike the ball, to give the progressives a taste of their own medicine, and to let the evil-doers have just deserts. Certainly, I understand this emotion. Modern leftism has been one of the most pathological movements in the West since the end of the world wars. Progressive journalists, educators, and bureaucrats used their positions to persecute political dissidents to aggrandize their vanity. By any measure of justice, these people have behaved criminally and they deserve to lose their positions. And, as much as I would like people to “turn the other cheek”, as a political realist I know that “Tit for Tat” is the optimal political strategy and perhaps a necessary evil.
But there have to be limitations to Tit for Tat. And those limitations must begin with the concept of “your people”. Your family your friends, your coreligionists, the members of the community that will be your home regardless of how misguided and mismanaged it becomes. This is not the time to gloat over one’s family. This is not the time to take revenge on former friends who were cruel in the past. This is not the time to be as petty and childish as our enemies, not locally at least, not in our own communities.
The election we have just experienced was a shock to many people, if not for those of us on the right-wing. There are many confused people now taking a second look at the last ten years, trying to put the facts together in a way that makes sense. They need friends who offer them a face-saving way to abjure their past irrationalities and obtain forgiveness. They need friendly educators, kind mentors, and leaders who can show them a more sane way to understand reality and a better way to live. And the people who can provide these services to their community will be performing the role of nobility.
On the internet, people talk endlessly about community and leadership, but it is just iterations of a simple process: taking responsibility for the well-being of people and earning the reciprocal trust that allows deep ownership over a common future.
And as of November 5th, 2024, that role is open to us like it never has been before.
The Crown is in the gutter. Take it if you can, kings.
>The one gray lining to the silver cloud of Trump's victory is that the relatively comfortable times his second administration promises make the fundamental but necessary changes in political thought more difficult. Complacency and comfort are the enemy of all difficult human endeavors. And the new Trump administration offers both for conservatives everywhere.<
This is my primary response to the election. In Trump's first term, the right sat on its hands and did nothing for four years. Arguably more was done to push back against leftism during Biden's time in office than during Trump's. Is that going to be what happens again? I hope not, but my instinct is that's probably how things will go down. At the mass level, we still have a critical shortage of serious people. The average Trump voter is willing to check R at the ballot box but not willing to do much else. He will be content to return to his sportsball and beer while telling himself that everything is fine now.
Really fine insights. You summarize the last few election cycles accurately and more significantly succinctly. It is an unprecedented opportunity to take the moral high ground. Myself I am just having too much fun smoking weed, watching pornography and larping as Che Guevara.