What should come next
No matter what happens next, a political sequence is over, and a new one is starting. Trump’s landslide victory on November 5th signaled the end of the network insurgency that shaped the last decade. Finally, an American swarm overcame a regime of accredited experts, fanatics, and criminals who used the confusion engendered by the new social media to seize control over consensus reality.
Not only economic and political power, but language, desire, and thought became battlefields. We were told to pretend that secret policemen were artists, and that sociopathic hysterics were individuals of wisdom and integrity. This is done. The strength of the regime always rested on systematic preference falsification, which rested in turn on maintaining a radical information monopoly. Once this monopoly began cracking it could not be restored.
We are now experiencing a preference cascade and a kind of mania as the American people breathe freely again. But we are beginning a cycle of extraordinary new challenges, in which success or failure will set the shape of centuries to come.
Like successful political movements before it, MAGA is now facing the danger of being co-opted as it moves from the margins into the institutional center by losing touch with the power that nurtured its strength. Already, professional cynics across all cultural sectors are recycling criticisms their colleagues were canceled for making ten years ago and being applauded by audiences eager for alibis.
The danger is reabsorbing a spirit of nihilism into a post-regime culture when this is exactly the spirit that needs to be exorcised. These are people who will say anything if they calculate it will professionally benefit them, and say nothing if they calculate that it won’t. Soon, they will say that they led the resistance. They should be run out of town.
A parallel danger presents itself in the form of the label “Woke Right” today being circulated by a popular schizophrenic and a coterie of cynical podcasters. In truth, the notion of “Woke” was always misleading. The term first emerged as a polemical label for liberal and socialist Leftists against the intersectional Leftism that crystallized after Occupy Wall Street which misdiagnosed it as a form of misguided conviction. In truth, it was always a movement of violence and nihilism which defined a lack of conviction which was also our own.
The idea of the “Woke Right” now being deployed by these same people compounds the original error by refusing to recognize that anti-white policies are explicitly codified, as affirmative action, in the DEI regime they claim they oppose. To insist that acknowledging this fact is equivalent to indulging in the “systemic racism” regime propaganda discourse is a clear sign of bad faith.
The larger point concerns the distinction between what people say and what people think in a climate of moral and political anarchy, or what Havel theorized as a “post-totalitarian” society. Personal beliefs are irrelevant; what matters are the political structures of language, and what they are used to promote and conceal.
The reason why remigration is necessary is because mass migration has been cynically used as a political weapon, not because of any xenophobic animus. This confusion itself is constructed: the regimes wielding this weapon propagate ideology corresponding to the shape of their client base to legitimate their activity and repress opposition. Conviction has nothing to do with it, only conformism and cynicism: this was the enemy, and this is what had to be smashed.
Another form of the enemy also now threatens to return from the other direction through initiatives looking to capitalize on trailblazing projects by scaling them up and invariably watering them down.
Industrializing a successful political-cultural project is necessarily difficult, since it is never transparent what made it work from the outside, or even always so clear to the authors themselves. At the same, the enterprise cannot be avoided. The critical problem is whether zeal and intelligence can be repeated and generalized. The danger is creating a cargo cult that hollows out radical gestures by transforming them into merchandise.
Ultimately there’s no value in flat repetition. Finally, entrenching political gains can only succeed as long as faith is maintained in the spirit that delivered success in the first place. What this means is acknowledging that the situation has changed and the forms and models that worked are outdated.
We need to develop new strategies for a radically altered environment in order to accomplish new goals while retaining the spirit that allowed us to succeed in the first place. Beyond the frontier of a stunning electoral victory, the problem is no longer vanquishing a political enemy but rebuilding a healthy political culture after decades of social and spiritual devastation. The task is to address the conditions which made the corruption of the last decade possible, and still maintain across swathes of the country.
Success in this mission first of all means appreciating the real strengths and weaknesses of the coalition that delivered Trump’s victory in November, and the matrix of tensions within it. MAGA was an unstable alliance of disaffected liberals, Christian conservatives, and techno-commercialist libertarians held together by opposition to tyranny, and the resolve and charisma of an extraordinary candidate.
All of these factions are authentic expressions of the American nation, and have their own contradictory agendas and blindspots. The heroic political task of the next four years will be to cement them into a permanent realignment – beyond the miracle of Trump – by developing new cultural formulas able to mediate the fractures that are certain to return.
It’s a question of moving beyond the cliché of the slogan “politics is downstream of culture” in order to understand culture as a system of spaces, and a structure of training, and to understand politics as the spearhead of cultural and spiritual goals.
What is needed is a radical reorientation of cultural and artistic production towards a hard embrace of the reality of this society. We need new forms of thinking and practice across all creative mediums: a new seriousness, a new discipline, a new passion. We need a new art and a new avant-garde, which abandons the exhausted sterility of conceptual art and returns to the spirit of poetry.
We need a proliferation of intensities enabling marvelous new encounters and genuine greatness for American artists, and the artists of the world. We’re living in an age of miracles and rockets, and titanic and unprecedented force. Nobody can continue to be satisfied with dissident poses, irony, addiction, and clout.
We need a new cinema, the American art form par excellance, re-engaged with the American genius in all of its mystical violence and savagery, in Cortez and Columbus, and the conquest of cities, and the conquest of the frontier, but also comedies, love stories, a cinema of desire and a cinema of sociological realism, of rediscovered humanity and an end to the era of autism.
We need a new academia organized around a renewed anthropology – a virile and bold academia that will strengthen the mind and the will of America rather than weaken it. Every university student should know martial arts and the Bible. The philosophical foundations of the human sciences must be excavated from underneath decades of garbage and restored to their purpose.
We need a new national “chainsaw” policy modeled on Milei’s Argentina which ruthlessly amputates the gangrenous tentacles of the administrative state, and destroys its monopolies over education and health. We need a new foreign policy that pursues American interests with ruthless clarity. We should liberate Western Europe – just like back in the good old days – not because it is easy, but because it is hard, and yet it is achievable.
We should end this ridiculous joke of the regime to the North and the grotesque Warsaw Pact parody of the country once known as Great Britain. We should bring down Starmer’s government with sanctions and tariffs, pursue cooperation with Russia, America’s world-historical brother, and impose a Territorial Control Plan modeled on Bukele’s El Salvador to finally obliterate the cancer of drug cartels.
Now isn’t the time to celebrate victory, but for prodigious, wild, and ferocious experimentation to spread the light of the new culture across America, and across the world.
Daniel Miller is IM—1776’s literary editor.
