The new political era

It seems likely that on Election Day the country entered fully upon the new political era that commenced with the fateful presidential election of 2016. Donald Trump spent the last four years in the howling political wilderness, savagely set upon by every species of Big Beast — legal, financial and political — but from which he emerged as a survivor — physically, mentally and morally intact to achieve what is acknowledged to be the greatest political comeback in American history. Donald J. Trump is, without a doubt, the most remarkable American politician to hold office since 1945. Whether or not he is a genuinely great man as well is a question that only the next four years can answer.

The gradual but steady drift of American culture and politics since the 1990s toward the realization of an ideologically oriented and authoritarian society could have gone in the direction of Orwell’s brutally repressive Soviet-type dystopia, or of Huxley’s soft and therapeutic one, or a combination. Over the past four decades the great question for the United States and the social democratic West as a whole has been whether a political party, movement or coalition would — or could — resist what Jean-François Revel in the late 1970s called the “totalitarian temptation.” Trump’s election in 2016 appeared to show that such a thing was possible, while defeat in his bid for a second term in office, followed by four years of the highly ideological Biden-Harris administration, suggested otherwise. So did the political transformation of the Conservative Party in Great Britain, its defeat by Labour last July and the subsequent implementation of Sir Keir Starmer’s and his colleagues’ socialist policies.

Beginning with Barack Obama’s first presidential administration, the Democratic Party has progressively taken on the character of America’s first revolutionary mainstream party. The Biden-Harris Directorate has been attacking, frankly and unapologetically, some of the most fundamental institutions and arrangements established by the Constitution, most notably the Supreme Court as the third branch of the federal government, the reservation to the states of the right to establish voting procedures in federal elections, long-agreed-upon procedural rules governing the conduct of business in the Senate and the legal obligation of the chief executive and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces to secure the nation’s borders against foreign invasion. Now, Trump’s and the Republicans’ — not just the MAGA ones — stunning rout of Vice President Harris points toward a different and opposite future.

This is not to conclude, it goes without saying, that the revolutionary-minded “progressive” element of the Democratic Party that Biden-Harris have indulged, aided and abetted for the past four years has been defeated for all time. As the late French political philosopher Claude Polin argued, the socialist temptation — the socialist dream — has been endemic to Western societies since the late eighteenth century and will remain so for as long as Western civilization lasts. Moreover, every political victory is fleeting; as T.S. Eliot said, no cause, good or evil, is ever finally won, just as it is never permanently lost.

Nevertheless, this most recent presidential election is an angry and emphatic repudiation of the most egregious policies of the modern progressive-Democratic Leviathan that, far from being restricted to the professional political establishment, includes the corporate, legal, educational, cultural, scientific, medical and military-defense ones along with every other organized interest one might point to, among them the NGOs (nearly all of them liberal) and the powerful pro-abortion and pro-immigration lobbies, many of the latter supported — financially, politically and morally — by the churches. It was a rejection of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, of the government-mandated production and purchase of electric vehicles, of federal restrictions on drilling, mining and other types of fossil fuel production, of open borders and the defunding of police forces, of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” policies, of the legally enforceable inclusion of males on women’s sports teams and all the rest of the progressive insanity that promises slavery in the guise of freedom (or “fweedom,” as the late Kamala Harris would say).

The comprehensiveness of MAGA’s repudiation of the Democratic-progressive agenda explains by itself the Republicans’ achievement in forging a comprehensive and diverse coalition — a counter to the Rainbow Alliance — that could prove as enduring as the 1930s one created by Franklin Roosevelt that persisted into the first decade of the twenty-first century, slightly weakened by the rise of neoliberalism in the 1990s. Just how long it can last, and maintain its present influence and power, will be the test of how great Donald Trump’s achievement really is.

Meanwhile, it is at once an example and an inspiration for anti-liberal and anti-socialist parties in other Western countries, most notably Great Britain, seeking to free themselves from what the British call the Blob — the same “woke” political, business, managerial, educational and cultural elite that has just received a humiliating kick in its over-ample backside from Donald Trump and his newly expanded MAGA alliance — the kick, it may be, that will be felt around the world.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s January 2025 World edition.