Kim Il Trump: MAGA Ozymandias

And: Pinkoski On Postliberal America; Orban's Moral Illiberalism; US Reformation

Planned Kim Il Trump statue at Trump Presidential Library (source)

Woke up this morning to read that Trump is planning to address the nation tonight about Iran, and will say that the US is planning to withdraw, having achieved its goals.

That’s bullshit. The US did not really achieve its goals. The regime survived — badly bloodied, but it survived. It still has its nuclear fuel. And it controls the Strait of Hormuz. The mighty American hegemon took Iran on, and failed to defeat it. Yes, the US (and Israel) severely damaged Iran’s military capabilities — hooray! — but the Islamic regime is still in command, and now it has the global economy by the neck. Any claim of victory by the US is pure spin.

I hate to see my country lose, and hate to see the ayatollahs survive, especially with their uranium stockpiles intact. But in my reckoning (change my mind!), this is the least bad option of a selection of options that were all bad. Very bad.

For instance, forget about the oil; per the WSJ, the world is facing a serious helium shortage because of the Strait of Hormuz’s closure. You have to have helium to make chips used in AI. I bet Elon Musk and Peter Thiel got on the phone to Trump and told him that this was going to kill AI, or at least dramatically set it back. You need helium to manufacture chips.

Meanwhile, here in Europe:

The European Commission has urged people to work from home, drive and fly less, and for EU countries to urgently roll out renewables, as it warned of a prolonged energy crisis as a result of the conflict in the Gulf.

In a speech with echoes of the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, EU energy chief Dan Jørgensen said Europe was facing a “very serious situation” with no clear end in sight.

“Even if ... peace is here tomorrow, still we will not go back to normal in the foreseeable future,” he said, following an extraordinary meeting of the EU’s 27 energy ministers on Tuesday to discuss the crisis.

“The more you can do to save oil, especially diesel, especially jet fuel, the better we are off,” Jørgensen said, confirming an earlier report by POLITICO that Brussels wanted Europeans to travel less.

Energy lockdowns coming to Europe. Yes, the Europeans — especially the Germans — have screwed themselves in several ways, the Germans particularly by decommissioning their nuclear power plants. Europe’s energy system is collapsing because of a series of bad decisions at the national and European Union level. Still, this is a massive crisis, and is certainly going to push Europe into a hard recession. When there’s not enough money left to paper over the fissures in the society caused by mass migration, God help us.

Hope I’m wrong, but I don’t see any way to avoid a serious global recession caused by this energy crisis. As Jorgenson said, you can’t just say, “OK, everybody back to normal now, war’s over.” So much oil infrastructure in the Gulf has been damaged, and will take years to rebuild. This is going to be with us for a while.

What will take even longer to rebuild is any kind of good relationship between the US and its allies, especially in Europe. JD Vance gave his Munich speech in 2025, which upset the EU elites, but which was good and necessary — even the nationalist-sovereigntist European conservatives agreed. But then came Trump this year shooting his mouth off about Greenland, and making Europeans feel bullied (because they were in fact being bullied). As I wrote at the time, Trump’s foolish fatmouthing was hurting the kinds of right-wing nationalist parties who were broadly aligned with Trumpist policy goals. Americans whose basic stance is “screw Europe” have no idea how they are sawing the limb off behind them.

Now European countries will be considering whether or not it’s worth it to have American military bases on their soil. This just in:

Right, but the US launched a war of choice against Iran, without consulting European allies, even though because of their geography, many of those allies would be within range of Iranian missiles, and highly vulnerable to the loss of Persian Gulf oil, which was a predictable likelihood of a war. The Trump administration just did as it wanted, and expected Europe to obey. But after Trump’s pointless Greenland bluster, European voters turned strongly against America — again, entirely predictable. Why should they endanger themselves and their interests for a war they did not start, and weren’t consulted on?

Besides, it’s not a one-way street. Yes, the US absolutely did the military heavy lifting for most of NATO’s existence. But if the US loses its European bases, how will it project power into the Middle East and Central Asia? Did the Trump administration geniuses think about that? Europe’s greatest contribution to NATO has not been with troops or materiel, but with geography. And now, we’re probably going to lose it.

Of course Europe has also screwed itself, because it has allowed its militaries to atrophy. Even if they make a rush attempt to build them up, they’re going to have a hell of a time finding young people within their own populations to fight for their own countries. Still, it stings to see this kind of arrogance from Trump, telling a continent that now faces energy lockdowns and a severe recession because of a war Trump started to get out there and fight for its own oil.

That’s barroom bravado, wholly unworthy of an American president. Trump will be out of office one day, but it’s hard to see the US-Europe relationship ever returning to anything like what it has been. The Europeans have now seen that it is possible for America to turn on it. I hope this forces them to do the kind of thing that Merz did regarding energy, and undertake a crash program to build up domestic energy capacity. Still, I think both the US and Europe have more to lose than gain from the way this was handled by Trump. The relationship really did need to change, but not this way. Trump has made enemies of America’s most loyal friends. Advantage: China.

Besides, the story of what Team Trump has been trying to accomplish in Iran keeps changing. This week, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that these are the war aims:

1. The destruction of Iran’s air force
2. The destruction of their navy
3. The severe diminishing of their missile launching capability
4. The destruction of their factories

The administration has been pretty consistent in this, I think. But Trump has also emphasized destroying Iran’s capacity to make nuclear weapons. In that — the most important task, but also the hardest one — he has failed. From time to time, the president has suggested regime change. And of late, he’s talked about how we need to re-open the Strait of Hormuz, but now has backed down off of it, and is telling the Europeans to do it (even though they had nothing to do with forcing the Iranians to close it). So what was this war for, really?

Trump has also killed his own movement. MAGA is dead. Sure, there will be bubble-dwelling MAGA hardliners who watch Fox News like old Bolsheviks read Pravda during the last decade of the USSR, but it’s over. Trump’s approval rating has collapsed with independent voters, who were a crucial part of his coalition. I went to CPAC a couple of years ago, and it was a total Trump cult of personality rally. This year’s turnout was anemic, with some of the Gen Z attendees — especially young men — saying “MAGA is over,” and suchlike.

Trump has also lost non-MAGA Republicans, according to survey data. Though I’m not officially Republican (I’m independent), I’m basically a Republican in terms of how I vote. I never identified as MAGA, but I supported Trump in 2020 and 2024. And I got burned, badly. One of the reasons I backed him was that I believed him when he said we wouldn’t be doing any more foolish wars. True, sometimes a nation has to fight a war, even if we don’t want to. But Trump never made a sustained and reasonable case to the American people for the Iran war, and went ahead with it without fully understanding the stakes. I don’t trust his leadership. Do you?

It was possible to put up with his various absurdities and outrages, as long as he was doing the right thing most of the time. But no more. Besides which, the domestic agenda I had hoped he would follow — sustained institutional reform to clear out DEI, and economic reform to benefit families and the working class — is dead. Hard to say his wildly erratic tariffs were a success for the average American. It seems clear now that even his better ideas, or at least his more valuable ideals, suffered badly from his inability to do basic politics and administration. We have had a GOP president and a GOP Congress for two years, but how many of his executive orders translated into law? We are not going to have a unified Republican Congress after this fall’s elections, and might not have the GOP in control of either house. We blew it.

Worse, I fear that the downstream effects of this war will force a crisis of systemic legitimacy. Look at this:

People have lost faith in the Republican president and the GOP overall, but that has not improved their faith in the Democrats. Why should it? What do the Dems stand for, aside from wokeness, and Not Being Trump? Voters may give Congress back to the Democrats this fall, but they do not, will not, and should not trust that the Democratic Party has any idea what to do with that power.

I’m thinking that Trump’s Iran adventure could mean to the US system what Russia’s loss in the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese meant to the imperial Russian governing order. The Tsar’s forces sailed into battle with a presumably inferior Asian power, and lost badly. Nicholas II was widely and correctly blamed for his inept conduct of the war. It wrecked the idea of Russian military superiority, and caused so much unrest that the Tsar was forced to agree to a constitution in 1905, weakening the autocracy. Russians had been fed up with the corruption of the Tsarist government, especially after its ineptitude in dealing with a harsh famine in the 1890s, but Russia’s humiliation in the Russo-Japanese war was a turning point.

The imperial system survived, but we now know from history had been fatally weakened. Tsarism never really recovered from that loss, though it took further Russian defeats in World War I to finally cause a revolution.

America is not going to have a revolution over its humiliation by Iran. But a lot of Americans have been losing faith in our system, slowly but steadily. Confidence in institutions is low, overall. I would argue that the election of a radical like Trump in 2016 was a symptom of how rotten the two-party system had become in the first place. Republicans (and Democrats) who think Trump was the problem, and all we need to do is get rid of him, and get back to how we were doing things before, are deceiving themselves. Had most Americans thought the system was working for him, they never would have chosen Trump as president in the first place.

Now that Trump’s second presidency has failed — and it has; he’s not going to recover from this — what comes next? Another historical analogy: Weimar democracy withstood all its extremely difficult challenges throughout the 1920s, but the Great Depression broke it. The centrist governing parties were more or less paralyzed in the face of the economic crisis, and could not work out a response. As the people suffered, and suffered terribly, they radicalized. The Nazis increased their vote in 1930 by over 800 percent, and the Communists did better too. In the summer 1932 election, in the depths of the Depression, the Nazis doubled their 1930 vote — and the Communists also increased their vote share.

We are going to have an energy-based recession in the US as the result of this war. I see no realistic hope that Americans will do anything other than move to farther extremes, increasing polarization. The severity of the coming economic crisis will determine how far the Left and the Right go. An opening is being created for a Caesar figure. We have already grown accustomed to presidents depending on executive orders to govern in the face of Congressional gridlock (N.B., President Hindenburg had to more or less rule by decree, under Article 48 of the Weimar constitution, just to keep the government moving in the face of parliamentary paralysis.)

It is hard to see a particular American Caesar on the horizon — Elon Musk was not born in the US, so he can’t be president under the Constitution — but if there is demand for one, the market will produce him, as it produced Trump (see the democratic socialist John Judis’s smart essay on Trump as an accidential Hegelian figure). Maybe a Ross Perot of our time? We will see. My point is, America’s social and political instability have slowly increased over this century, and the Trumpian wrecking ball, and the aftermath of this war, are likely to accelerate those trends.

Hell, Trump already thinks he’s Caesar! Look at this video clip put out by his son Eric yesterday, a glimpse of plans for the Trump Presidential Library. It’s insane. I posted an image from it at the top. Notice the golden Kim Il Trump statue. All this megalomaniacal hubris, this cult of personality, is dying in the desert sands and at the Strait of Hormuz. Look on his Works, ye Mighty, and despair — or laugh, because if this is grandeur, it is the grandeur of rhinestone and tinsel!

What’s next? Nobody can say. We coulda had DeSantis, you know.

Pinkoski’s Postliberal Predictions

I recommend every line of this interview the brilliant young political philospher Nathan Pinkoski did with Limes, an Italian geopolitics magazine. They touch on many topics, mostly about the global economic system, the relationship of America to the world, and the turbulent changes within the American political system. Excerpts:

LIMES: Is America at risk of civil war?

PINKOSKI: Some people talk about a “cold civil war.” I find this a useful concept because it suggests that we won’t see a new Civil War, a country splitting into regions at war with one another, or ethnic conflicts like those in Bosnia. If we ever have a new civil war in the United States, it will resemble the Spanish Civil War. A nationalized conflict. It will divide homes, families, and neighborhoods. I find that highly unlikely in the short or medium term. The “cold civil war” evokes a hardening of positions, an ideological conflict perhaps without major outbursts of violence, but rooted in the idea that we can no longer live with people who hold an opposing ideology. A conflict in which the question is: wouldn’t we be better off if that ideology and its supporters didn’t exist at all, if they were no longer part of the country? In the Spanish Civil War, it was that impulse that provoked the desire to exterminate the other side and shaped the character of the conflict’s violence. In the United States, we are not at that point; however, there is the deeply destabilizing aspiration to remove the enemy from society. In the short term, this translates into low-intensity violence, political murders like that of Charlie Kirk. If you want to participate in public life, you’ll need a vast security apparatus to defend you. We’ve had attempts to kill Justice Brett Kavanaugh and J.D. Vance. Recently, someone was charged with the attempted murder of the founder of my organization, Russell Vought. Sooner or later, an assassin will succeed. To be in public life, you will need 24/7 security and surveillance. People who cannot endure that lifestyle will withdraw from the public arena. We are moving very quickly toward a low-trust society, where we hesitate to speak openly with neighbors or fellow citizens, because deep down in our hearts we fear encountering someone who wants to eliminate us.

More:

LIMES: How important is race in the nationalist revolution?

PINKOSKI: The top issue for people is immigration. It’s important to specify this because it relates to a broader concern: assimilation no longer works; we no longer have a unified American culture. It’s not an ethno-nationalist aspiration. It’s not an effort to preserve or restore a particular racial homogeneity. Of course, there are people who care about race, genetics, and IQ. But that is not what drives the movement; if anything, it is the anxiety stemming from the fact that mass immigration has diluted our shared culture and weakened the economy. If we survey MAGA voters, we find that few fear the country will become less white. If anything, they fear that immigrants are not incentivized to assimilate. I do think, however, that some cases require us to consider the ethnic aspect. One concerns the Somali fraud scandal. The debate is not that some particular race should be excluded from the United States. Instead, it is about noticing that some groups we have legally accepted for quite some time have very little interest in assimilating. Therefore, we remove the special legal privileges that make it easier for them to enter into our country. I think this is an acknowledgment that some tribes in the world do not find a suitable place in the United States and view the country more as one to exploit than one in which to assimilate.

Another point to consider is that we no longer live in the 1960s, when the country was 90% white and 10% Black. For the left, the central struggle for decades has been reconciliation between whites and blacks. Many debates, right up to Black Lives Matter, centered on one question: what responsibilities do the former have toward the latter? Since the country’s racial composition has changed profoundly, that debate is no longer as relevant as it once was. I believe that much of the left and the conservative old guard feel nostalgia for the clarity of debates during that biracial era. But both are thinking of a demographic map of the country that no longer exists. The real problem is the cultural fragmentation among various ethnic groups that has emerged in recent decades and whether it is still possible to revive civic nationalism.

LIMES If it isn’t, does that mean democracy becomes impossible too?

PINKOSKI: That is the real challenge. I believe immigration is a political priority precisely for this reason: if we want a homogeneous country, in the sense where everyone shares the same civic and constitutional culture, we must be able to adjust immigration accordingly. If we accept a million people a year—not to mention illegal immigration—in an already fragmented context, we make the task more difficult.

LIMES It seems to us that assimilation no longer works among Americans of different backgrounds, precisely because of what you were saying just now: mutual hatred for those who don’t think like you. Is democracy possible under these conditions?

PINKOSKI: No. If the atmosphere is so heated, if we are so fragmented, we cannot have a functioning democracy. Instead, we will have a strong security state to prevent violence from erupting. It is a different kind of government, not a democratic one. That is why the next ten years are decisive: they will show whether the experiment of mass democracy is still possible or whether it will be gradually eroded and set aside in the name of peace and stability. That is why we must follow very closely what is happening in the United States, because it is a massive political experiment to make that entire system of mass democracy work. Tensions and conflicts continue to mount. The new technological order in which we live reinforces ethnic identities and ideological loyalties. Digitalization and instantaneous communications do not consolidate equality. They do not consolidate freedom.

This is why I think we will end up with an American Caesar. I do not want an American Caesar! But I can’t figure out how we can re-establish a basic consensus of that sort needed to have a functional liberal democracy. As Pinkoski wisely avers, the new social and psychological environment we live in push us further into fragmentation. Anybody planning to repeal the Internet?

The Deep Meaning Of Hungarian Illiberalism

Here’s a really thoughtful take on Hungary by Alexandre Lefebvre, a Canadian-Australian professor and liberal political philosopher, who spent time this winter in Hungary to try to understand the system of Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party. I met Alex and gave him an interview. He was really fair-minded, and unlike 99 percent of the other foreign liberals who come here, made a good-faith effort to understand the pro-Orban Hungarians on their own terms, even though he disagrees with them. Excerpts:

Most of us raised in liberal democracies carry an unspoken image of what a normal state does. It protects rights, maintains order, grows the economy and arbitrates disputes. But when it comes to life’s deepest questions — what makes a life worth living, what sort of person one ought to become — a decent state is supposed to show restraint. It shouldn’t privilege one vision of human flourishing over another. Such matters should be left to individuals, families, churches and associations.

That posture of restraint feels natural to us. Historically, it is anything but. For most of political history, from Plato and Aristotle onward, the point of political community was understood in teleological terms: The city exists not merely to secure life, but to specify what a good life is and make it possible. Politics was about ends. It was about shaping character, cultivating virtue, honoring certain forms of excellence and discouraging others. Liberalism, in this longer view, is an anomaly and represents a hard-won attempt to step back from authoritative answers to the question of how to live well.

An anecdote is relevant. A few months ago, on X, I posted a poll asking what I should call the book I’m writing. I offered three options: my preferred title, “The Good Life State”; an earlier contender, “Soulcrafters”; and a third that riffed on the mantra of India’s Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the Hindu nationalist volunteer organization closely tied to Narendra Modi’s BJP: “We Make Man.” The results were evenly split, and I would have forgotten about the poll but for one development: it was reposted with a comment by one of the sharpest minds of the MAGA world, Adrian Vermeule, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard.

“How about you call it,” he wrote, “What Everyone Except for the Last Two Hundred Years Has Thought Political Philosophy Is About.” Teasing though he was, Vermeule was also perfectly correct.

Lefebvre acknowledges that the 16 years of Orban’s “illiberal democracy” has had its share of corruption (but this, sadly, is common throughout this region). That is usually where foreign liberals who come to Hungary begin, and end. Lefebvre goes deeper:

Hungary under the Fidesz party is best understood as a teleological regime, one ordered toward a substantive vision of the good life. It is, in other words, prepared to use state power to rank and promote those forms of life it deems worthy of honor. And it does so not only to ensure Hungary flourishes collectively, but also because it believes this is the best way for individual Hungarians to thrive.

To call Hungary teleological is not to deny its corruption or authoritarian tendencies. Fidesz’s inner circle has grown enormously rich, and the party has excelled at constitutional capture, seizing every lever of power it can. Orbán’s taste for grandeur and spectacle is well known. The zebras are real. So too is the hypocrisy, whether at the personal level — as when a pro-family Fidesz politician was caught at a gay orgy in Brussels during Covid — or in the gap between the regime’s pro-life rhetoric and the shabby healthcare it provides.

But kleptocracy and coercion alone are poor explanations for a regime’s durability or appeal. They cannot explain the slow, patient, expensive work of long-term institutional design: rewriting a constitution, refashioning public law, rebuilding an education system and pouring money into a supportive intellectual class. There are easier ways to steal.

It takes Alex, a philosophically trained liberal, to explain better what I’ve been trying to explain to Americans about Orbanism since I’ve lived here in Hungary. One more quote, from one of the drafters of the constitution the Fidesz-controlled parliament passed in 2011 to replace the old communist one:

János Csák, another member of the constitutional committee, surprised me by being even more direct: “Our constitution,” he told me, “is Aristotelian — including Aquinas and St. Augustine.” For the contemporary right, those names are something of a shibboleth, a quick signal that one is evoking the common good tradition. András Lánczi, the most philosophically minded of the Fidesz elite, argued that the constitution aims at a “spiritual rejuvenation” not only of the country but of its individual members. And the same thought runs through Orbán’s public statements. In a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson, he reframed Carlson’s suggestion of the fault line between Hungary and Western Europe being ideological as “anthropological” — a clash between liberals for whom the self stands at the center of the world, and those who believe that higher goods of family, nation and God come first.

When the leader of Hungary says that he is engaged in an anthropological revolution — or, more precisely, a counter-revolution — liberals would be wise to take him seriously, especially as he inspires imitators around the world. This deeper ambition may unlock the key to his appeal, at home and abroad.

Exactly. See, this is why Hungary is a democracy, but an “illiberal” one, in that it has a positive vision of what the good life is, versus liberalism’s professed neutrality (which isn’t really neutral, but that’s for another day).

I recommend Alex’s essay to you as a fresh take on Orbanism from someone who doesn’t agree with it, but who at least understands what it’s trying to do, versus nearly all of the takes from foreign liberals and establishment conservative types who only see FASCISM, or some other ridiculous take.

The Reformation In America — What’s Next?

There really has been a lot of good essay-writing of late. Here’s the political philosopher Joshua Mitchell reflecting on how the Reformation shaped American politics, and what’s likely to happen next. It’s a dense, complex essay that defies easy summary. Mitchell basically dwells on what it means theologically and philosophically that the United States really is a deeply Protestant nation. He uses “Hebraic Christianity” as a term for Protestantism, versus “Aristotelian Christianity” for Catholicism (and “Platonic Christianity” for Orthodoxy):

Hebraic Christianity in America gave us pilgrims with callings, not French gentlemen and destitute peasants driven to erase every last vestige of aristocratic privilege. Consider Tocqueville’s assessment in Democracy in America of the religious significance of Plymouth Rock:

This rock has become an object of veneration in the United States. I have seen fragments of it carefully preserved in several towns of the Union. Does not that sufficiently show how entirely the power and greatness of man is in his soul? Here is a stone which the feet of a few outcasts pressed for an instant, and this stone becomes famous; it attracts the attention of a great nation; its very dust is shared and carried away to distant places. What has become of the thresholds of a thousand palaces? Who cares about them?

[Wlliam F.] Buckley—indeed, the conservative movement he and [Russell] Kirk founded—never quite grasped this about America. Conservatism’s frame of reference is the European canon, not the American greats—Mather, Edwards, Emerson, Hawthorne, Lincoln, Melville, and Coolidge, to name only a few. Failing to understand the soul of America, it can never capture its heart.

Buckley and Kirk’s conservatism has played an outsized role since the 1960s, notably in its unwavering and principled objection, grounded on Rome’s claims about human nature, to the sexual revolution and the downstream social consequences by which we are plagued today. Hebraic Christianity orders the world in accordance with God’s covenants, not on the basis of a doctrine of nature of the sort Rome has long defended. With the deformation of Hebraic Christianity, those covenants were abandoned or forgotten, leaving American heirs to the Reformation without an answer to the sexual revolution. Colson is said to have remarked in the early 1990s, “Roman Catholics provide the ideas and Evangelicals provide the votes.” That was true then, and it remains more or less the state of things today. Resistance to the sexual revolution is one thing; however, providing a viable and comprehensive civilizational alternative either to the Reformation civilizational wager or to its deformations is another.

Mitchell says that the American political tradition of Hebraic Christianity is dead. The old-school Protestants who gave it to us have petered out. The Evangelicals (he considers himself to be one) can’t take it up, because their vision of faith is too privatized. The heirs to it, to Mitchell’s horror, is the identity-politics Left, which he characterizes as classical Protestantism without God:

Reformation America in its Identity Politics deformation is today an anti-Christ Hebraic Christianity—which is to say, the same yet different, the ghastly apparition of the real thing that is Hebraic Christianity, hell-bent on the destruction of that very real thing.

On the political Right, there have been three basic responses to this crisis. First, there’s a crass Trump-style rejection of collective guilt in favor of pragmatic success. There are Straussian thinkers who reject the Hebraic model in favor of Aristotelian reason to combat nihilism. And there are the postliberals, including most prominently Catholic integralists, that argue for a return to pre-Reformation models.

Mitchell concludes that the only realistic way forward in political theology, in the United States, is a reclamation of the older Protestant heritage. If the woke converted to Christianity, in a serious way (that is, not in a liberal Protestant way), then they would be re-establishing the political theology that made America. He doesn’t hold out much hope of that happening (wisely), but my sense is that he is simply correct that any attempt to plant continental European modes of political theology to American soil just won’t work. My fear is that the fight ahead will be between Trumpian pragmatism (even after Trump departs) and Woke Puritanism.