The Age of Trump: Cultural Revolution and Counter-Revolution.
The victory of Donald Trump
There is one element missing from all the analyses I have seen regarding Donald Trump's election as President of the United States. It is not an alternative to the current explanations—gender, race, economic hardship etc.--but encompasses all of them and is of higher generality.
The world of values that members of what can very loosely be called the formerly Christian West inhabited before the mid-to-late 1960s was profoundly different from the values of our contemporary world.
From the 1960s and onwards, a Cultural Revolution took place that challenged and in good part overturned the cultural values that had shaped all Western/Christian societies for hundreds, in some cases thousands of years.
This Antinomian Revolution is more fundamental than any previous revolution in the history of the West, for example the French Revolution, but somehow is overlooked in our analyses of contemporary history.
For a time the challenges to the long-settled, hierarchical system of values--women's liberation, gay liberation, animal liberation, trans rights etc., etc.--were resisted or contested. Eventually almost everywhere in the West the Antinomian Cultural Revolution triumphed, at least on balance.
Now anyone who refused to speak in the new terms was criticised harshly, even silenced. The characteristic means by which the dissenters were punished was the "pile-on" of the metropolitan media and/or the social media.
The Cultural Revolution was led by people of education, wealth and cultural clout, who were the enthusiasts of the new values. At the centre of the Cultural Revolution were the Western universities. They were supported by the less privileged beneficiaries of the new world of values because it overturned in their favour the former, often centuries-old inegalitarian, taken-for-granted, hierarchies, regarding women, blacks, gays etc.
Many people eventually supported or at least deferred to the new values of the Cultural Revolution, at least in public. Many however did not. These people began to be led by well-educated, often wealthy, conservative or reactionary dissidents, think Jordan Peterson or Steve Bannon.
The dissidents found a political language in which to express the resistance of those uneasy with or hostile to the new values of the Cultural Revolution. The first term used (in the 1990s) was "political correctness", then came "cancel culture" and "woke".
Two political armies silently massed that overlapped with and then gradually, in large part at least, replaced the old political armies based on class--capitalists and workers. These are the camps of the Cultural Revolution and the Cultural Counter-Revolution.
(From the mid-1990s I called the two camps—"elites" and "ordinary people"; more recently I have called them "cosmopolitans" and "parochials".)
In Australia, for example, the division between the cosmopolitans and the parochials helps to explain the decisive failure of the referenda for the republic and an Indigenous Voice.
As so often, however, it is the United States that has pioneered the new emerging political situation.
Just as enthusiasm for the new values of the Cultural Revolution is centered in the United States among the permanent and temporary members of the universities, especially the Ivy League universities, so is enthusiasm for the values of the Cultural Counter-Revolution centred in the rural or semi-rural or suburban counties throughout the United States. A supporter of Trump will hardly be found among the faculty at Yale or Harvard. A supporter of Harris will hardly be found in a rural community in Kansas.
Because of the events of November 5 2024, Donald Trump is now the leader of the Western Cultural Counter-Revolution; the hapless Kamala Harris finds herself in the position of the defeated, even humiliated, leader of the Western Cultural Revolution that is now, increasingly, throughout the West, under threat.
Thanks for the post Robert.
However, the core achievements of the post-1950s cultural revolution are all largely safe in the hands of the counter-revolution. None of the major gains are really up for grabs with a few exceptions.
They are access to abortion (which will only be seriously curtailed in some states) and the fact that the counter-revolution also contains crazies — old style white supremacists, vaccine deniers. (But that's politics — just as the left contains Stalinists, Maoists and all kinds of riff-raff. The counterrevolution has also got all kinds of bad things associated with it from my point of view — from being hostile to climate action to being headed up by a criminal — The Donald.
But beyond that, the cultural-revolution is largely safe. There are no great resets on the rights of women, black or gay people. Just a new allergy to identity politics — which should be welcomed.
And that raises the question of what went wrong for the revolution. I'd say two things — its MO was successful in cowing centrists, preventing them from responding to extremists. Nicola Sturgeon sent a rapist who was born a man to a woman's prison. What a woman was suddenly became contentious. I guess that's a compliment to the savvy of activists who managed to put that on the agenda. But leaders of major political parties couldn't say what a woman was. New circumlocutions, genuflexions and pieties increasingly infest corporate and bureaucratic life — as sent up in the TV program Utopia. These things matter because they completely hamstring our ability to discuss difficult subjects.
We can say that domestic violence hurts aboriginal women particularly, but not that aboriginal men are major perpetrators. I'm just reading a book now by David Goodhart documenting the social costs of family breakdown. He notes that children of single-parent families have substantially higher rates of crime and poverty than the average, but that that has been airbrushed out of National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children stats so as not to stigmatise single-parent families. And on it goes.
And worst of all, the cultural revolutionaries somehow built a revolution that obliterated awareness of the unique privileges and injuries of class.
Interesting read. But 10 years late I am afraid. Pankaj Mishra has succulently argued this (and more) in his Age of Anger