Americans increasingly suspect that the entire social order is a sort of elaborate swindle. Billions of their taxpayer dollars were found to have gone to mysterious “learing centers” with no students. Federal agencies have paid $2.8 trillion in such mistaken transfers since 2003, according to government figures. There is serious discussion about whether a clique of pedophiles was ensconced at the highest levels of society. When asked, “Do you think the system is rigged in America?” 70 percent of citizens reply “Yes.” They are waiting for someone to tell them what has gone wrong and who is to blame.
So naturally, America’s populist movement has decided that what the moment really calls for is religious Pharisaism and family values. According to the supposedly more highbrow parts of MAGA-land, America’s real problem is disenchantment and postmodernism. The reason people are unhappy is because they are irony-poisoned and atomized – possibly under demonic influence. They are addicted to doomscrolling and are being mentally poisoned by the internet.
MAGA should be destroying things for the sake of it – offering discord, a burning-away of the deadwood
It is taken for granted by various factions, some gathered around J.D. Vance, that they only have to wait for Trump to get out of the way so that they can commence the real work of populism: the moral revival of America. There is pious angst about the psychological effects of porn and calls to ban it. Jonathan Haidt wants the youngsters kicked off social media for their own good. There are mass conversions to Catholicism.
To these people the enemy is, above all, nihilism: the belief in nothing at all. Shortly after Charlie Kirk’s death, the right-wing publisher Jonathan Keeperman declared that the suspected gunman, Tyler James Robinson, was motivated by “pure, perverse nihilism.” Matt Walsh tells us in the Daily Wire that the “Democrats have adopted nihilism. They do not believe human life has any inherent worth or purpose.”
This will be news to Americans, who live under the most rigorously enforced public doctrine this side of the 17th century. You will – still – be fired from most jobs for disagreeing with certain egalitarian ideas. As we have seen with Trump 2.0, it is still taken for granted that a judge can countermand the policies that the people have just voted for – such is the belief in a transcendent“natural law” that is more important than their wishes.
The country is patrolled by militant ultraloyalists made up of people such as Tyler James Robinson, willing to use violence to defend the ideas that are still accepted by those in power almost everywhere.
The American people feel, obscurely, that something has gone very wrong, but there is still a great deal of habitual deference to the system. As the Epstein saga shows, they are still in the bad habit of blaming their problems on the ill will of individuals. Meanwhile the mood is restive. The public wants to see institutions dissolved and powerful people brought low, and they are not so fussy about the particulars.
The only person who really grasps this is Donald Trump. He has always styled himself as a cynic who can see through the lies that society tells about itself. All his political rivals used to beg him for donations, he says, and anyone who doesn’t exploit the country’s tax code is a sucker. Even now, in his full pomp, Trump still takes a certain satisfaction from exposing such contradictions.
Henry Kissinger cast him as “one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses.” Trump thinks the old ideas and the old institutions are bankrupt but does not know what should replace them; in the meantime he thinks they should give way to a new age of expediency where America is ruled by his will alone. His instrument, “The Deal,” is a perfect example. He believes in little and does not imagine how anyone else could, and so thinks that everyone can be bought. He often seems blasé about what will happen after he is gone. He is, if not quite a nihilist, then at least a scoffer and misanthrope in the extreme.
This has been the secret of his success. Trump has achieved supreme power not as a “Christian nationalist” but as a jaded insider who reached a hand out to the mob. He has offered them catharsis; he has never moralized. No one realized how much they would enjoy the humiliation of a fairly harmless functionary like Jeb Bush until it was performed for them live on television by Trump.
According to the pollster Rasmussen, Trump was never so popular with the young as when he detonated USAID. Trumpism has found success because it is America’s version of Jacobinism: the great disenchantment of society. The “dissident” intelligentsia now proposes to replace this with another go at the 1990s politics of the moral majority.
I propose the opposite. What American society really needs is more irony, more disenchantment, more postmodernism and nihilism; it needs to accelerate those forces that Trump unleashed.
MAGA’s objective is not to create a new moral settlement but to destroy the existing one. Its task is to gleefully show the American people that all the reigning values are false and that all the institutions are broken. Like DoGE during Trump’s first months back in power in 2025, MAGA should be destroying things almost for the sake of it. It should offer discord, rebellion, a general burning-away of the deadwood.
The way to win politics in the 2020s – not just elections, but the allegiance of the young and the ambitious – is to convince the people that their latent desire to destroy society is best served by you. MAGA should now fulfill its destiny and oblige them.
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