“The economic situation during the Biden administration eroded and degraded the average American’s ability to participate in the life of the nation as an economically self-sufficient citizen.”
The result could not be clearer: President-elect Donald Trump decisively won the presidential election of 2024. With the former President at the top of the ticket, Republicans won the Senate, retained the House, and led a nation-wide swing to win the popular vote. Meanwhile, Vice President Kamala Harris, the cipher for the left-wing of the managerial elite, failed to outperform President Joe Biden in all but a few counties in the United States. Instead of smashing the glass ceiling, the Harris campaign turned out to be standing on a glass floor. President-elect Trump smashed through this, sending the remnants of the Obama coalition, which Vice President Harris attempted to mobilize, tumbling into electoral oblivion. President-elect Trump achieved this by becoming the Caesar (a term I will discuss more later) for the disaffected middle of America.
Between 2020 and 2024, President-elect Trump gained ground in all but two states. He won approximately 56% of white voters and over 30% of the ethnic minority vote. This included almost half of Latino voters, seen most starkly in swing states like Michigan and Arizona and border states such as Texas. The Texas election result demonstrated that the racial de-polarization seen from 2016-2020 has only continued. Meanwhile, gender polarization actually lessened. Men aged 18-29 shifted right around 30 points from 2020, while women aged 18-29 also shifted toward the right, by over ten points. The 11-point gap in the Republican/Democratic female vote mirrored the marriage gap. The trans issue was also far more important than many pundits assured voters it was, and the Trump campaign expertly highlighted it in its advertising.
On election night, it became apparent that the counties with a median household annual income between $25,000—$75,000 saw President-elect Trump’s vote share climb above 70%. The Democrats are now the party of high education and high income. The net worth of the bottom half of American households grew by 8.5% in real terms during President Biden’s term. Meanwhile, this figure was 127% during President-elect Trump’s first term. Furthermore, the average disposable income of Americans grew by around 12%. This shrank to 4% under President Biden. This was reflected in the fact that, according to data compiled by The Telegraph, city grocery prices rose by 22% since January, 2021. On top of this, a gallon of fuel rose by 37%. In mid-2022, this rose to 123%. While this was going on, rents in cities also increased by 23%. The working and lower-middle classes were hardest hit.
The economic situation during the Biden administration eroded and degraded the average American’s ability to participate in the life of the nation as an economically self-sufficient citizen. The majority, who works in the physical world, saw its relative economic and social status decline. By contrast, the corporate oligarchy, managerial overclass, and their cultural enforcers in the Clerisy took full advantage of their domination in the digital world, enjoying the rise of a dematerialized economy.
This fed into the crisis of illegal immigration, which saw upward of 10 million people pour across the Southern border, enabled and pushed by the classes mentioned above. In 2023, it was estimated that there were more illegal alien encounters per month than babies born to American mothers. The foreign-born part of the population grew by 5.1 million in two years. This state-initiated invasion strained the bonds of mutual loyalty, trust, and sympathy that bind together and lubricate everyday social relations. The compact between citizens and government was strained as the social fabric frayed, as seen in places like Springfield, Ohio, Charleroi, Pennsylvania, as well as with the Democratic push to create “sanctuary cities” across the country.
These facts point to the top three reasons why President-elect Trump was so successful on election night: 1. The economy (inflation too high +24), 2. Immigration (too many illegal immigrants crossing the Southern border +23), and 3. Cultural issues (the Harris-aligned Democrats were too obsessed with “woke” cultural issues like transgenderism irrelevant to ordinary people +17). What this election revealed was that the average American still feels that there is a sense of the first-person plural of nationhood.
This election represented a reaffirmation that the primary duty of a morally legitimate government is to provide for the prosperity and peace of the people at home, as well as defense of the borders of the national community against threats from outside. The Biden-Harris government actively worked against both these duties of state. These people and the ideology they expressed were the products and reinforcers of administrative state power.
When we talk of a “regime” we mean, as Leo Strauss put it, “that whole, which we today are in the habit of viewing primarily in a fragmentized form; regime means simultaneously the form of life of a society, its style of life, its moral taste, form of society, form of state, form of government, spirit of laws.” From the 1930s on, the old American regime of a constitutional republic and system of representative democracy has been subject to what interwar journalist Garet Garrett called a “revolution within the form.” American society is ruled by a managerial regime, fast approaching a “Total State.” State and corporate bureaucracies are intertwined, managers in both seamlessly cycling between government posts, non-profit sinecures, and board positions. This “overclass” is a dominant rather than creative minority. It is alienated from the people of the nation, to which it is obligated, and sees itself as the chief node in an imperial project that grew out of and was formalized in the wake of World War II.
Underpinning this is a worldview that combines hedonism, meliorism, and utopianism with cosmopolitanism and scientism. This worldview and its ideological expressions seek the replacement of the bourgeois order (and accompanying ideology) as the guiding worldview and moral goal of society. This underlying worldview is communicated by the organs of elite culture and by the elite four-year colleges. These have become de facto seminaries for increasingly hereditary members of the managerial regime to acquire the necessary academic credentials to gain access to the managerial system in the corporate, political, or cultural realms. In the process, students are inculcated into the worldview of the regime.
The Total State employs the might of information manipulation and digital domination to treat governance as a system of control. Under this dispensation, “defending our democracy” is now code for “defending the institutions of the Total State,” while actual democratic attempts to wrest back control are damned as “populism.” Myths about “neutral institutions” and the “rule of law” are cover for a Schmittian form of friend-enemy governance to be used against “populist” enemies. The ever-expanding machinery of managerial governance is used against the American people, seen most starkly in the turning of the security apparatus of the Global War on Terror inward to deal with “extremists” at home.
Related to this, the managerial elites have absorbed and entrenched the woke New Moral Order, whereby race, gender, and sexual minorities that were oppressed in the past are sacralized in the present. (Wokeness was the number one issue for swing voters, by the way.) This ideology is part of the sacramental political theology of the managerial regime. Its inner logic demands constant vigilance and evermore strenuous efforts against “populist” heretics and non-liberal apostates. This revolutionary seeking after enemies as a means of demonstrating one’s zeal for the cause serves only to shred the social bonds of society. This expresses itself in a Cluster-B society, a combination of personality pathologies that find political expression and increasingly shape the patterns and structures of America’s entire culture since 2016. This pathocracy sees argumentation replaced by accusation, weaponizes compassion in service to compliance and conformism, and moves from a culture of competence and accomplishment to one of victimhood and self-pity. All of this is enforced through threats of social ostracism, professional ruination, and even physical confrontation. This collective psychosis at the highest levels of society imperils civilization itself.
The elites who believe in and enforce this pathological Woke Moral Order make up only 6-8% of the population. This should not be surprising. According to sociologist James Davison Hunter, as important as the ideas and the individuals that hold them are, the institutions and networks that comprise the social, political, economic, and cultural structures of society translate these into political power and cultural change. Such “work of world-making and world-changing are, by and large, the work of elites: gatekeepers who provide creative direction and management within spheres of social life. Even where the impetus for change draws from popular agitation, it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites.”
This reflects the reality that any complex society will have an elite, in politics, economics, and culture. Any elite class needs a vision of the good, what the Italian political scientist Gaetano Mosca called a “political formula” that offers a framework through which choices can be made. Such a worldview acts to legitimize the power of the ruling class as the rightful authority. The elites who espouse wokeness do not do so merely because of amoral power-seeking: Most of them sincerely believe it. Look no further than the Harris campaign for evidence of this.
It is here that we get a glimpse of what President-elect Trump’s victory represents: a reformation of the Total State and the restoration of political sovereignty over supposedly de-politicized administration. This includes gutting the administrative structures of the Total State through reinstating Schedule F to effect mass firings of bureaucrats, along with clearing out the national security and intelligence agencies that launched a campaign of resistance and subversion during the President-elect’s first term. There are also plans to investigate, dismantle, and punish those in the Censorship-Industrial-Complex, who weaponized the digital realm for the regime’s political purposes. These direct counters to the Total State are of a piece with President-elect Trump’s immigration restrictions and illegal migrant expulsions; his trade programs; and foreign policy retrenchment. Such efforts require administrators to implement them, and this cannot be achieved if those administrators are hostile to the political goals they are tasked with carrying out and the political figures they are meant to work with.
President-elect Trump and the committed (if somewhat inchoate) movement around him represent an insurgent counter-elite to the uniparty that has controlled the lever of managerial power for decades. President-elect Trump has managed to unite the socially conservative and economically populist New Right and National Conservative movement with dissident figures from Silicon Valley. He, therefore, has both the men of ideas and the men of industry on his side, pushing his platform. Those in the political sphere whose loyalty is to a people and a place have allied with those in the technology sphere, whose vision is one of using the digital world to build in the physical world. This is against a managerial political, corporate, and intellectual world that favors primarily conforming the physical world to the digital world.
The political base that propelled President-elect Trump and his prospective counter-elite into power is reminiscent of the political class called Middle American Radicals (MARs). In the mass democracy introduced by the managerial regime, local and regional power centers were erased in service to increasingly centralized power. Meanwhile, ownership of hard property as the defining characteristic of membership in the bourgeoisie was superseded by the managerial regime. MARs consisted of a post-bourgeois, upper-working class and a lower-middle class of white ethnics and southern whites spread across the Midwest and Sun Belt states. They had usually completed high school but had not attended college and, thus, had not gained the credentials and absorbed the worldview that allowed access to the managerial elite. Catholics and southern Protestants featured heavily.
What united them when Sam Francis was writing was less their socioeconomic status than their social and political attitudes. The MARs disagreed with both the Left and the Right: They did not see the government as only favoring the rich or indulging the poor. They saw government as the instrument and servant of the rich and the poor, effecting a high-low vs. middle alliance. This has bred a feeling of exploitation and resentment directed upward toward the managerial regime, as well as downward toward those whose social pathologies threaten the stability and cohesion of the social order that the MARs depended on. As Francis wrote, the MARs share “a frustration of aspirations…an alienation of loyalties, and…a suspicion of established institutions, authorities, and values.”
The MARs label and the people it describes apply to President-elect Trump’s base today, as seen in the socioeconomic profile of his voters outlined above. These voters remembered that under his first presidency from 2017 to early 2021, the economy improved for the first time in decades, the streets were safer, their sons and daughters were not marched off to fight in any new wars, and the attempt was at least made to stem the flow of newcomers at the border. Those surprised at the surge in support for President-elect Trump among ethnic minorities, particularly Latinos, need to accept that many Latinos are today’s equivalent of yesterday’s white ethnics, with yesterday’s Reagan Democrats being today’s Trump Democrats. The trajectory from Left to Right is the same. Established Latinos are more likely to support the United States retaining its European heritage; think anti-white discrimination is a problem; and support mass deportations and immigration restrictions. Large numbers support President-elect Trump’s agenda on immigration, trade, and foreign policy. The MARs are not ideologically obsessed with shrinking the government. They want it to work better for them. The result was seen when the Associated Press called the election in the early morning hours of November 6th.
The mass democracy that we saw in action on November 5th has reinforced the century-long trend of centralizing political, economic, and cultural power. This inevitably gives rise, as Francis described it, to a form of Caesarism, whereby “A Caesarist political leader, basing his power on his personal competence and charismatic appeal, uses the mass population to undermine the institutions, traditions, and power of an existing elite and elevates a section of his mass following to the position of a new elite.” President Franklin D. Roosevelt was the inaugurator and epitome of this phenomenon. President-elect Trump is today’s Middle American Caesar, leading a coalescing counter-elite against a failed managerial regime that has been running the United States into the ground.
Whether President-elect Trump can be as transformational as Presidents such as Franklin D. Roosevelt remains to be seen. The coalition gathered around his person risks incoherence: Will it pursue what the MARs want or the small-state ideological fixations of some prominent backers? The coalition needs to be forged into a true counter-elite if it will succeed in carrying out a regime change in the sense of the definition above. This would see a transformation not only of politics, the managerial state, and the economy but also of the cultural and moral norms that underpin each of them. Even so, the possibility of such a regime change has appeared for the first time in decades.
Henry George is a columnist at Merion West, focusing on politics, political philosophy, and culture.
