The night of November 5, 2024, the night of the elections in the United States, was the night the 20th century ended. The political and demographic analyses had been focused for months on the seven swing states, on the economy and inflation, on Joe Biden's age, Kamala Harris's charisma, or Donald Trump's uncontrollable personality. On the mobilization of Black and Latino voters, on women's votes, or performance in debates. On the attack against the former president, political violence, and the fear that one of the parties would again not accept the result. But it was not a matter of a few undecided votes, not even the confirmation of a short-term shift to the right or a referendum on democracy in danger. The 2024 elections "marked the conclusion of a process in which American society has been reorganized, a process in which a superstructure disintegrated forever and a new one crystallized in its place. A process not in one day, but one that had been developing over the last decade, and that Tuesday was the turning point, the point of no return."
This is the thesis of historian Jason Steinhauer and the prism from which he proposes to look at the end of the year and the beginning of a new era. The successful British Marxist Eric Hobsbawm dubbed the 20th century as a "short century," ranging from World War I to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Others have spoken of the "long 19th century," from the French Revolution in 1789 to the trench massacres between 1914 and 1918. Steinhauer recalls that "centuries are not defined solely by dates, but also by interconnected technologies, institutions, and ideologies that shape people's decisions and global events," and that these technologies, institutions, and ideologies do not disappear when the calendar turns a page.
For example, 9/11, which undoubtedly had an effect on mentality and geopolitics, may not have had that complete transformative capacity. The technologies of the 20th century were "mechanical and industrial, an orchestra of gears, wheels, engines, and machines. They were also large: large coal plants, gigantic oil platforms, huge cargo ships and planes, enormous newspaper printing presses, large manufacturing plants, all stirring and pumping with mechanized movements," says the historian. All thanks to assembly lines, chains, structures that extended beyond industry to education and the workforce. "Large amounts of knowledge workers were needed because the 20th century was built around experts," from engineering to diplomacy, from biology to economics, from physics to medicine.
Everything was recorded because media formats were also linear, with beginnings and endings. "Movies had beginnings, knots, and endings; newspapers started on the front page and were organized linearly in sections. To watch a movie in a theater, you were expected to arrive on time; to understand the end of a TV show, you had to watch it from the beginning." That structure, which wavered with the Twin Towers but held up nonetheless, no longer exists.
Information (and entertainment) no longer has a beginning or an end but is an infinite and permanent scroll. Series no longer have a final episode but are broadcast perpetually. Jobs are no longer for a lifetime, and many are not even in person. Politics is no longer a place full of constraints, weights, and counterweights, difficult to enter and quick to penalize outsiders, but rather rewards the opposite.
Societies "are tired of experts," as the brains behind Brexit said or the leaders of populist movements worldwide, especially during pandemics or natural disasters. Trump choosing an anti-vaccine conspiracy lover to lead the Department of Health is the perfect metaphorical nail in the coffin for the 20th century, which, short or long, began not only with the World War but also with the Spanish Flu that killed millions of people.
Analyzing Trump's presidency cannot be done by thinking about what will happen with inflation, how trade wars will affect, or even how NATO will resist.
Therefore, thinking about the agenda for the coming months, of Trump, in terms of the 20th century does not allow for a full understanding. He is the first nonlinear president, insensitive to the logic of reason but highly reactive to the logic of impulse. What he can do or change is not measured in weeks but in months or decades. The effect of his first term is felt now, years later, in the Netherlands, Italy, Argentina, or Brazil. It is not (only) Bauman's liquid modernity, that world that left behind all certainties, including those of physics, giving way to a precarious, improvisational, ephemeral, anxious, and exhausting one. It is all that and more.
Therefore, analyzing Trump's presidency cannot be done by thinking about what will happen with inflation if he imposes tariffs, how trade wars will affect GDP, or even how NATO will resist, which in the summer, as always, will hold its traditional summit to welcome the US president, the indispensable member. It is not even the political reading of a conservative Supreme Court assisting a Congress and White House of the same party. Or the social steamroller that is expected by adding to all that the program of the so-called Project 2025, drafted by conservative allies of Trumpism in the think tanks.
In its early days, even hours, the new administration will anger, scare, and offend its partners and allies. It will try to end the war in Ukraine, by hook or by crook, especially for Kiev. Most likely, it will reverse some of President Biden's executive orders, such as the ban on liquefied natural gas exports or oil drilling on federal lands. It will quickly issue executive orders to restrict migration and prioritize deportations, particularly of convicted criminals, which are the simplest. There will be, in one way or another, tariffs on China and other countries, especially friends, using precedents already used in 2018. Trump will change the heads of federal agencies and announce pardons for those who stormed the Capitol in 2020. And it will start a deep deregulation process, from the financial sector to emerging legislation on driverless cars, covering everything related to CO2 emissions and climate change.
But the return of Trump, more mature, more experienced, more seasoned, and as shown in the campaign, also darker and more vengeful [a return for which Europe is not at all prepared because it reacts with codes, institutions, ideas of the past era], impacts on another level in all dimensions, especially the philosophical. Something that goes beyond laws, rhetoric, fiscal, or immigration policy.
That anti-liberalism, with illiberal versions a la Hungarian, is what can be expected, in all its facets. Commercial, diplomatic, ideological. And also democratic-institutional.
It is the war or the destruction of what it calls traditional press (legacy media), through permanent discredit, but also through other means. It is no coincidence that Peter Thiel, one of the billionaire tech gurus pulling strings, was the one who financed Hulk Hogan's lawsuit that forced Gawker's closure. From the economy and modern central banking, through cryptocurrencies. From experts, both by putting their critics in place and through Supreme Court rulings, which have gradually been relieving federal agencies of responsibilities so that judges or legislators' criteria have the final say, not scientists or experts on any subject.
Trump promised fire and destruction, and that is what millions of people want. A new era that will have less to do with the recent past than we expect. From Artificial Intelligence to driverless cars, passing through chips, and bitcoins. But above all, in philosophy. A few years ago, Professor Mark S. Weiner argued that the thinker to turn to in order to understand Trumpism and what underlies it (more than Trump himself, a brilliant interpreter and not a composer) was Carl Schmitt, for his formidable critique of the liberal state.
At the core of Schmitt's critique, which is also a recurring reference in the writings of Peter Thiel and part of the libertarian movement transformed into conservatism, is his disdain for the universal aspirations of liberalism. For Trump, and millions of Americans, that internationalist notion (again not coincidentally associated with Woodrow Wilson and the end of World War I) that places "individual rights at the center of their political communities" and believe that, in principle, those rights should extend to all can only lead to disaster. At home, with identity politics and wokism, and abroad, with wars and invasions. "Who are we if 'we' can include anyone?"
This anti-liberalism, with illiberal versions like the Hungarian one, is what can be expected in all its facets. Commercial, diplomatic, ideological. And also democratic-institutional. "From this anti-liberal perspective, there is no reason to consider Russia an absolute enemy, and there are reasons to undermine international institutions and get rid of the traditional allies of the United States. For anti-liberals, the true enemies of peace today are the nation-states and the institutions that try to impose external limits on sovereignty and conceive the political community in normative terms, rather than territorial and cultural ones. Instead, the friends of peace are the nations that are strong enough to establish political homogeneity within their borders and defend a global order of significant sovereign actors," Weiner aptly wrote.
In his first term, Trump was often discredited as merely impulsive, unpredictable, irrational, selfish, and unreliable. Two electoral victories, the foundation and leadership of a movement that has co-opted the Republican Party and transformed politics in the US and the rest of the world, demonstrate that there is much more. Looking ahead to 2025 and the years beyond, a deepening can be expected. Trumpism is not fluid, nor is it linear. It was created and perhaps will be destroyed without its leader, but it certainly transforms with its energy. Now it has a plan and is much more ambitious in its aspirations than any president since John F. Kennedy. Aspiring with his "best and brightest" from Camelot, Kennedy quickly discovered that the dream of reason produces monsters. Trump, from pure individualism, and sometimes childishness, at the opposite end of Kennedy and his experts, believes that it is not the government that causes the United States to fail, but the people who lead it. He wants his allies to respect him, his opponents to fear him, and the majority to comply. And he does not abide by the codes, consensuses, and lessons of the past.