Trump Will Destroy Liberalism

Because He Is the Anti-Logos Candidate

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On November 6^th, 2024, Donald Trump was elected 47^th president of the United States. Few in the folkish right were surprised by this, as the media had been telegraphing its acceptance of him for months.

What is more surprising is how little fuss was kicked up over it. The protests in front of Trump Tower and elsewhere felt low-energy and perfunctory. There was no talk of a “whitelash”, nor any other gnashing of teeth. Even the tears and meltdowns of liberals felt much more forced this time around.

But the machine is not going to go down without a fight. Already there is a narrative building that we should take note of. We have been hearing that Trump represents a threat to democracy for almost 10 years now, but only now is that starting to look plausible.

The New York Times recently ran an opinion piece by a minor functionary in the Obama administration named Ben Rhodes. The piece was as hysterical as countless similar pieces for nigh on a decade now, but even so, this one rings more true than others before because of its higher degree of self-awareness. The centre-left is finally starting to understand the gravity of the situation, is finally starting to take ownership over its extreme bungling.

Democrats understandably have a hard time fathoming why Americans would put our democracy at risk, but we miss the reality that our democracy is part of what angers them. Many voters have come to associate democracy with globalization, corruption, financial capitalism, migration, forever wars and elites (like me) who talk about it as an end in itself rather than a means to redressing inequality, reining in capitalist systems that are rigged, responding to global conflict and fostering a sense of shared national identity.¹

If it seems obvious to you that “our democracy” is in fact the problem, it is not at all obvious to most Democrat voters. Beyond the puerile appeals to “fairness” and “inclusion”, democracy has a specific meaning that has emerged since roughly the 2008 financial crisis—democracy is now inseparable from technocracy.

Twitter user Callimachus (worth a follow) responded to Rhodes’ admission, explaining the seriousness of the threat to “democracy”.

This is actually pretty accurate. Trump and Harris ran for different offices, and represent different types of rule. Harris ran as a more or less replaceable, mostly symbolic head of a machine often referred to as “Our Democracy.” Trump ran as a true sovereign executive.

When somebody invokes the phrase “Our Democracy,” it’s important to understand that they’re not merely talking about holding elections. They’re talking about a set of “democratic norms” including a weak executive and rule by “expert” consensus, media, party, permanent bureaucrat.

Trump ran on a promise to fire the thing which is referred to by its supporters as “Our Democracy,” and those supporters mostly pearl-clutched and pointed and sputtered about the threat to Their Democracy. They were right to worry about losing their status with that system.

Today, the terms democracy, technocracy, and liberalism form a complex of related things that shelter the centre-leftist, and outside of which he feels feel naked and exposed. Democracy is now roughly synonymous with voting and representation; technocracy is rule by expert; and liberalism is basically proceduralism plus minoritarianism. These concepts are all in tension, and together form a kind of Escher staircase held together by dissociative logic.

Democracy means the people rule, but because that is obviously impossible, we have representation generated out of minoritarian rule. But in order to stop runaway special interests, we have constitutions and procedures which somehow enforce themselves independent of these interests. And to ensure the ship of democracy is steered smoothly, an unelected and unaccountable body of “experts” presides over the whole thing. The important thing to notice here is that every element is designed to limit the personal power of the executive. Liberals euphemistically refer to this hall of mirrors as “checks and balances” to the executive, in the same way that the multiple voices in a schizophrenic’s head act as checks and balances on his ability to govern himself.

What the Harris campaign represented was the true spirit of liberalism—rule by impersonal proceduralism, where all you need is a “rules-based order”, and if you get this order just right, the system will run automatically and without a head. As Carl Schmitt pointed out in his book Political Theology, this “constitutionalist” liberalism is the secularization of deism. It is the transformation into the political realm of a theological concept: the idea that God sets the world into motion according to certain laws and then steps away from it, leaving it to run indefinitely. In this clockwork universe, the rules themselves are sovereign, and the ruler is completely interchangeable—irrelevant, even. This is the world we have lived in for four years as the office of American president has been occupied by a vegetable.

On the other hand, the Trump campaign represented something very different, and very dangerous to that order.