The Right-wing Intellectuals driving the Trump Revolution

A new mood seems evident in “the West” (by which is generally meant Europe and the USA). It’s best expressed in the latest post from “The Long Memo” run by US-based William Finnegan – although this one is actually written by one Martin Luz

Here in the U.S., narrative warfare is playing out as a pitched battle between two completely 

different ways of explaining the radical breakage we’re seeing daily—one from the autocratic 

right (Narrative A) and one from a pro-pluralism coalition that includes just about everyone 

else (Narrative B).

• Narrative A: Government is a tyranny against individual liberty, and the Trump administration 

is finally giving America a long-overdue and much-needed radical realignment of priorities, 

streamlined decision making, and shrinking of government to make it more efficient and 
accountable. Government is too big, too bloated, too tyrannical, and this administration is fixing it all by removing bureaucratic obstacles and entrenched interests that want to enforce their out-of-touch, anti-American ideology on everyday Americans. The administration also prioritizes American interests over international interests that cost too much and return too little. They’re using the nation’s political and economic power to get more for the American taxpayer. They are championing individual liberty here at home and refocusing the agencies of law and order to hold to account those who have misused the government to launch “woke,” radical, racialist attacks on political foes, free expression, and individual and religious liberty. And they are going to bat for American business, aiming to power growth and innovation by reducing the heavy hand of regulation and fighting anti-competitive behavior of other nations. This is the beginning of an American resurgence that gets our nation back on the right (i.e., conservative) track toward personal and economic liberty.

Narrative B: The Trump administration is gutting American democracy in an unprecedented autocratic power grab. They are removing all obstacles to authoritarian control by gutting independent offices of accountability (e.g., Inspectors General, Boards of Governors, Joint Chiefs, etc,) defanging critical media, and attacking and defunding educational institutions. 
They are assaulting the separation of powers, as well as trying to control and intimidate the 
judiciary, in a naked effort to centralize state power in the person of the executive. They are purging apolitical career civil servants to install political loyalists answerable to the executive, rather than to American citizens and the Constitution—destroying essential capabilities and expertise that have taken decades to build. 

They are instituting Orwellian “newspeak” and memory-holing critical data and information, especially scientific information: holding truth hostage to ideology. Their tactics include criminalizing dissent and intimidating private businesses that oppose their unconstitutional aims and tactics. They are intentionally creating chaos to distract from their autocratic attacks, and they’re on the verge of leaving tens of millions of Americans destitute to deliver more wealth and economic/political power to wealthy and corporate benefactors. This is a crisis moment, in which a lying power-hungry elite is seizing control of the most powerful democracy on Earth, supplanting the will of the people for their benefit, to install themselves as a permanent kleptocratic oligarchy.

Is there a middle ground? There used to be, but not so much anymore. Are there kernels 

of truth within Narrative A? Sure. But Narrative B runs much closer to the objective truth 

of our current moment. For the moment, Narrative A is the hands-down winner. 

Trump’s backers (the ones who matter) got their way, and now they’re using their 

government-is-tyranny narrative as a justification for giving us exactly what they’ve been 

promising for decades: a complete dismantling of the old order.
Meanwhile, the pluralist, pro-democracy, anti-autocracy coalition arguing Narrative B is 

stumbling badly and struggling to respond effectively. Why?
They are stuck in the past.

But as William Finnegan observes:
The same business elites forced to accept these regulations never stopped 

trying to undo them.

• They hated high taxes.

• They hated powerful unions.

• They hated financial regulations.

The Reagan-Thatcher years brought a “neoliberal” revolution based on Milton Friedman's ideas. 

Friedman argued that corporations exist solely to make money for shareholders and that any 

impingement on the private economy is akin to moral heresy.
Democrats, cornered and out of power, struck a “neoliberal compromise” with Bill Clinton, 

making a deliberate triangulation: “You let us keep much of our government spending and 

expansive social programs, and we’ll give you your low taxes, reduced regulation, and a 

massive liberalization of capital markets and trade. We’ll sell it as the best of both worlds.”
It worked a bit, enabling Clinton to turn budget deficits into surpluses. But in the long run, 

that compromise sparked a decades-long shift toward concentrated market and political power 

among a small group of wealthy elites and giant corporations.
The editor of this publication has cited some of the primary results of the neoliberal agenda’s 

dominance for decades: stagnant wages, dominating corporate monopolies, squelched competition, 

and the labor exploitation of a gig economy. On a larger scale, we are also contending with:

• Regional wealth inequality that drives immigration pressure and destabilizing backlash 

politics in developed economies, especially in Europe.

• Economic practices that are crashing through planetary boundaries in terms of species 

extinction, ecosystem collapse, endemic chemical pollution, and climate change.

• The dehumanizing financialization of everything: professional investors and huge, 

monopolistic businesses are consolidating and squeezing return out of everything from 
rental housing, to your local doctor’s office, to the local lakeside boat dock, to vending machines everywhere, right down to our attention span and social relationships.

The neoliberal compromise's structure was great for business: it provided high labor mobility, 

expanded international trade, and deep, liquid, transparent capital markets.
But it delivered devastating social outcomes: discontent and dislocation, increasing economic 

hardship and inequality, and a frustrated, angry politics that seeks increasingly extreme 

solutions to people’s pain.
The marketplace of ideas, as consistently expressed through “protest voting” on the right and 

left over the past two decades, has rendered its final determination. The jig is up.

The Forces of War Are Not Slowing Down
One has to take to heart Yascha Mounk’s caution that Anyone Who Knows What's About to Happen 

Is Lying. But in the short term, there’s plenty of directional data to indicate that conflict 

drivers that are still gaining momentum:

1. The information ecosystem has been thoroughly “enshittified,” and that’s not changing. 

2. If anything, it will get worse as unregulated AI is released into the wild and the power of 
tech oligarchs continues to grow. A recent poll showed that GOP voters believe the opposite of what’s true on almost all the key issues they claim to care about.

3. The anti-democracy disinformation and propaganda campaigns of foreign enemies are going 
nowhere (Enabled by tech oligarchs, see above.)

4. Never underestimate the staying power of autocracies even if they deliver terrible outcomes 
for citizens—e.g., on 3/16 protests against hard-right governments “swept” eastern Europe, 
including Hungary, but two days later, on 3/18, a lopsided majority in the Hungarian parliament (137-27) voted to outlaw public LGBT pride celebrations as a “child protection” measure.