Twelve tribes of humanity find themselves in a new world after last week’s second election of Donald Trump to the presidency. Their varied reactions, though not the only possible reactions, are revealing.
Liberal pundits are plainly suffering the worst disparate impact. Among the most psychologically fragile members of the population at the best of times, they’ve been left stunned and saddened by this turning of the political worm. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow sounds more than ever like a militia leader, suddenly telling her (likely soft and comfortable) viewers to stay in shape mentally and physically in case they need to fight the government in the days ahead. She warns that we must not let the media become “state TV,” which is what most of us thought MSNBC had been for years. She wants the military to remember they can be a check on authoritarianism if need be—even as the Biden regime, the one she arrogantly defends night after night, is revealed to include FEMA officials who for weeks instructed underlings to withhold aid to any hurricane-ravaged homes that had Trump signs. This, after decades of leftist writers like Naomi Klein pretending it’s free-marketeers in a Milton Friedman mode who exploit the aftermath of crises. The Atlantic, for its part, derided “right-wing” conspiracy theorists saying FEMA was skipping Trumper houses, a day before mainstream media reports confirmed it was all true. (Elie Mystal of The Nation takes the election freakout a step farther, seeming to hate not just Trump but the country that spawned him, and warns “Trump is America.”)
Comedians’ transformation into regime propagandists before the very eyes of late-night viewers in recent years has been unsettling, not so much because they’re wrong as because of the sheer audacity, by historical standards, of assuming late-night entertainment is for only half the potential viewing public. Seth Meyers doesn’t react to things like Trump’s return with extra jokes nowadays, just with a quiet vow to somehow carry on. The far more humorless and strident Colbert said, in a near-paradox, “The majority has spoken, and they said they don’t care that much about democracy.” Jimmy Kimmel, a host who has encouraged viewers to steal candy from children and then encouraged audience members to laugh at the resulting tears, got rather choked up himself by the election results. Instead of these hosts pretending they still want big audiences, why don’t they just come out and say, “If America in general is watching, half of you can go fuck yourselves”? At least Kimmel did the public the service of showing in one remote segment that even in liberal New York City, there were normal-looking pedestrians the day after the election who not only didn’t much care that their preferred candidate Harris had lost but didn’t realize the election had already occurred.
The “NeverTrump” conservatives, to their credit, are far more attentive, whether to election returns or foreign policy details. But they’re still nuts. The Drudge Report, I’m told, is now edited by a former New York Post employee of a neocon bent, which may explain why that site spent the final weeks before the election having a flailing, shrieking case of Trump Derangement Syndrome so severe it almost makes the Lincoln Project look civil. Who needs leftist Media Matters with Trump-hating Republicans like these? Whatever you think of Trump, the election was not only a (well-deserved) defeat for government-expanding liberalism of the kind we’ve suffered for over a century but also for conservatives in the Kristol, Goldberg, Steele, Cheneys, and Bush veins, not to mention for Mitch McConnell, though he yet schemes. (The most glum of my friends post-election seems to be a moderate McCain-admirer type, not all the leftists.)
Establishment intellectuals, including some at the Times, devoted a lot of energy in recent months to the now-pointless project of worrying that Trump would concoct crazy theories to explain or reverse his anticipated election loss. They think he’s a usurper, even now. Maybe they should devote at least a little mental energy to considering that possibility that even if Trump has autocratic tendencies, left-liberalism has itself been two centuries of intellectuals counseling piecemeal, gradual coercion instead of the abrupt, one-time edicts you might get from an absolutist tyrant. That dash of nuance, that constant babble, steadily rising in volume, before new regulations, new taxes, or new surveillance methods go into effect keeps liberals feeling good about themselves, as if those who rule stealthily have every right to rule and, furthermore, are just engaged in friendly, non-violent salon chatter. But a woman in a CNN focus group said she prefers crazy to preachy in a candidate, which helps explain Trump’s victory. Online liberal commenters in one thread reacting to the CNN segment, showing that they really aren’t learning their lesson, counter that preachy just means urging people to be better, and I noticed one academic voicing her fear that people may not be able to abide lectures from a woman (such as Harris) in particular, adding that a frequent obstacle when giving advice in social work is not speaking with the voice of male authority. A woman I know who’s worked in women’s shelters, by contrast, says this is baloney and that women in such places normally crave female advice and want to avoid men, who are more likely to abuse them.
The rich nowadays may be less likely to lean right than are blue-collar populists. But the rich have nonetheless been unfairly assumed to be fascist sympathizers since the days of Stalin, when anyone not onboard with the Soviet program, even Trotsky, would end up declared a fascist. Then again, major Democrat donor George Soros was recently revealed as a funder of the explicitly illiberal and arguably moderately-fascist Compact magazine. The bemused reaction from the press was to see this as a contradiction, but if some leftists sincerely want to avoid authoritarianism in the coming years, they should consider the possibility that the Soros/Compact compact is no paradox, just an illiberal pincer move we’ve seen the powerful use time and again over the past two centuries. They cope with uncertainty by seeking to control everything in all political directions simultaneously. The rest of us idiots continue the factional fighting down on ground level.
The global elite more generally, whether rich or just politically well-connected, are aghast at populists such as Trump, but they can occasionally take a joke at their own expense, no doubt flattered by the attention. The very funny movie Rumours, still showing in at least one Manhattan cinema if you haven’t caught it somewhere yet, depicts the G7 leaders gathering amidst an unspecified but possibly apocalyptic global crisis to write a bland, cliché-filled official document about their hopes for the future, leading to them getting lost in the woods. The cast includes some familiar faces such as Cate Blanchett, who looks very fancy but is admirably willing to appear in offbeat, earthy projects with zombies or other monsters in them. That befits a pragmatic Australian with a buoyant nerd side. In the fragile northeastern U.S., by contrast, a Yale psychiatrist has told sad MSNBC viewers it may be best not to see Trump-supporting relatives during the holidays if they don’t feel up to it. No problem, I’m sure the Trumpers would say. Dialogue, globally grandiose or locally intimate, has its limits.
The moderates in this world might sense an opportunity in the exhaustion so many people lately express over the recurring right-left clash. One can’t help wondering if New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams, for one, is really the criminal the feds now allege or whether he was targeted by them for special attention when he started to sound lately as if he were willing to reach out to Trump, is tired of subsidizing mass immigration, and might almost be reverting to his Republican law-and-order roots. Immediately after the election, Adams announced he’d end food vouchers for migrants and vowed to work with the incoming presidential administration. Will charges against him soon be dropped, for good or ill?
The outgoing administration, by contrast, has just two months left to do anything bold it still wants to do—such as having President Biden step down to make a historic first-female-president out of Vice President Harris, who already largely eluded two primary seasons and countless potential media interviews, and could finish up with a fitting few symbolic, consolation-prize weeks as ruler of the free world. More likely, Biden will just take it easy and Harris will start spending more time with family and friends. (Nerd that I am, I’m very curious whether any of this will influence the plot of Marvel’s long-gestating Captain America: Brave New World early next year, since it may well depict a President-Elect Ross, played by Harrison Ford, turning into a red-faced, Hulk-like rage monster in between his 2024 election and his planned 2025 inauguration, leading to him being taken down by two black and one Latino superheroes and replaced before the inauguration by his running mate, who has been seen denouncing alien invaders as President Ritson in the 2026-set Secret Invasion miniseries. Keeping the fictional timeline tidy can accidentally yield real-world resonance.)
The real aliens, space aliens, are once more the topic of a House hearing today and a Senate hearing next week. There’s still time, then, for Biden to leave office as both the president who started World War III and the UFO disclosure president. Take that, history books! Or perhaps the aliens will unveil themselves on Trump’s second watch, to the delight of the increasingly unabashed conspiracy theory enthusiasts among his fans. I’m rooting for them, really.
The skeptics movement, by contrast, is where I got my intellectual start—always demanding evidence, preferably scientific evidence, for novel claims. But that loyalty gets tested when I see the absurd leftiness of many of that movement’s adherents. Rebecca Watson, a.k.a. Skepchick, weighed in just before the election with a particularly tin-eared video explaining that that Upstate New York squirrel named P’Nut who was seized and euthanized by authorities (along with his little raccoon buddy Fred) deserved to die, or at least that he was a genuine health hazard who shouldn’t have been raised in the potentially inhumane environs of a human home, though he looked awfully comfy and rabies-free in the numerous online videos that made him a star and made one snitch of a viewer jealous of his fame. At least Watson admits her commentary might be slightly influenced by the unpleasant experience of having a hostile squirrel throw nuts at her as a child. Snotty videos like hers are enough to make even the most rationalistic nerd want to side with mystics and mountain men over any prestigious science institute or agency, in hopes the commoners might possess more common sense than the bureaucrats in lab coats. Then again, my assurance to you in my last column that the right-wingers probably won’t be the ones sending troops to kill your pets is looking a lot more shaky as Trump reportedly contemplates putting dog-killing Gov. Kristi Noem in charge of Homeland Security. Those sorts of offices often seem to be held by men who look like hardened sociopaths, but perhaps now the position will be filled by a sociopath who looks like a dainty little, well, gnome, which may be creepier.
So-called libertarians, of course, shouldn’t be enthusiastic about most of what gets labeled “homeland security” or for that matter “national security” in the vast, wasteful, and callous federal bureaucracy, so even the right-leaning or populist among my ideological brethren shouldn’t let Trump or his cronies in the days ahead get away with calling mere travel and commerce “trafficking” in order to excuse controls and crackdowns, just as people of a markets-decrying, Vance-like bent shouldn’t call companies productive when they’re broadly popular but “profiteers” if they’re unacceptable to the political right. And anarcho-capitalists, who should by definition be the most consistent and principled libertarians, should focus on property rights, spending cuts, and deregulation, always, and not get sidetracked into supporting more morally ambiguous causes, whether right-wing or left, such as border-enforcement. Sticking by one’s kin has its place but is not the only value undergirding civilization. We shouldn’t neglect the more universalist values such as property rights and markets. Unfortunately, in politics, the bad ideas usually prevail over the good, and this presidency probably won’t be an exception. After seeing Trump triumph and the Libertarian Party’s Chase Oliver fade to obscurity in this election, some party activists such as Dave Smith may get more joy from blaming Oliver than from excoriating Trump’s authoritarian deviations, but never forget that Trump is the greater danger, not to mention the greater embarrassment. (But speaking of pragmatism and embarrassing campaigns, weren’t the Trump-friendly Mises Caucus types in the Libertarian Party the ones backing that guy who was too stoned to do an interview at the nominating convention?)
Imperfect heroes are the most one can hope for in politics, though, so let us at least give two cheers for the fact Elon Musk and Ron Paul are both talking about participating in a planned government efficiency commission under Trump. And luckily Paul understands, more than Musk or Trump, that you make government efficient by getting rid of it, not just by reshaping it in your image. I hope Vivek Ramaswamy, if he ends up being Commerce Secretary or something, understands that as well and doesn’t decide that freedom means vigorous, future-facing government action for a bold nationalist tomorrow or some such bullshit. Axe it all. Doing anything else is hollow theatrics, no matter how irreverent and wrecking-ball-like Trump sounds about it. I look forward to an administration in which the tech bro and the trad bro are friends—better them than Noem, Stephen Miller, and his ilk—but it may prove a high-risk juggling act featuring, as it were, some libertarian balls and some fascistic or just plain crony balls. And let us all remember throughout that just because dark-pagan-energy-harnessing Steve Bannon is out of jail doesn’t mean he ought to be back in the administration.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey