A Reality Check in Serious Times

The first step to properly navigating this delicate moment in America is acknowledging what’s going on. This isn’t chaos. Someone has a plan.

“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Before I caught this nasty flu going around last week, I spent some time with a group of old friends. They were mostly successful, well-educated progressives, and at lunch we ended up discussing the policy direction of the new administration. When I said the administration’s actions were obviously a well-coordinated effort to reorient twentieth-century American policy, they felt stridently confident I was entirely wrong.

My friends were sure everything that has happened over the last two months was the result of idiocy, transactional politics, and corruption, rather than any plan. I said DOGE and the executive orders seemed like a clear attempt to alter the role of the post-New Deal administrative state—undercutting important tools supporting progressive ideas. Tariffs, Ukraine, immigration, and changes in European policy were each links to fundamentally unwind the Western alliance system, and thereby retreat from America’s twentieth-century empire. My friends told me this was all an illusion.

As they saw the world, Trump is purely transactional, and his only goals are benefitting and enriching himself. Musk, they believed, is blundering. Vance is a dishonest grifter. The staff at DOGE are all dumb kids. Trump officials from the Democratic Party, like RFK, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, are compromised. Right-leaning policy entrepreneurs from the ideasphere are reactionaries just looking to own the libs. None of these people, I was assured, were working together or united around any coherent vision. I pointed out that people in the administration, and many of their well-placed ideological supporters, were expressing these goals out loud. They told me I was reading too many “right-wings blogs.”

This incident made me uneasy. I see important and potentially permanent changes happening in America, yet many intelligent and informed minds are entirely blind to it. They accept a narrative I see repeated everywhere—all of this is simply chaos that will eventually blow over, restoring the status quo. Then I watched a frustrating Joint Session of Congress that put this disconnect between what I see and what America thinks is happening on display.

I expected the president to explain exactly what his administration was now seeking to accomplish. Why pivot away from Europe and make nice with Russia? Why threaten Denmark and Canada? Is this part of a strategy to counter China? Is it meant to pull back into Fortress America? Is it to intended to gain freedom in foreign policy to reindustrialize and bolster the American economy? What is the larger agenda, where are its limits, and what should we expect next? What, ultimately, is DOGE’s plan for the bureaucracy? It’s obviously about more than saving pennies to reduce the deficit. Is there a plan to permanently reduce the administrative state? To restructure it? Is this merely a political agenda to reduce progressive power, or an effort to reorient American government around a new structure and vision? How far do they intend to go?

That is the sort of speech you would have expected at such a moment from someone like FDR or Reagan. None of these issues were discussed in the last campaign to create any sort of mandate. There has been no effort to earn a national buy-in to permanently reorient the twentieth-century model of American government. People with power are calculatedly reorienting America, but nobody has yet to make the public case. All we got was applause lines.

Then I watched the Democrats embarrass themselves in response.

I expected the Democrats to take this moment seriously, using the opportunity to raise questions and offer some counter-vision for America responding to the same concerns in a different way. Instead of such a serious response, they approached the event like rowdy college protestors shouting down a speaker. They wore cutesy matching outfits. They carried little matching signs on paddleboards with clever printed slogans, and they waved them around with disapproving little scowls. A congressman shouted at the president like a spoiled college kid disrupting an event because he knows there will be no consequences, and had to be escorted from the chamber. Everyone seemed quite pleased with themselves. They appeared to believe a serious opposition party facing the renegotiation of the foundations of the last century should use this event to throw a performative tantrum, “deplatforming” the majority party that just pummeled them in a national election.

None of this fills me with confidence.

Everyone acknowledges America is in the midst of a political realignment. They say it all the time. Watching people’s behavior, it doesn’t seem anyone truly believes it—or at least understands what this means. The very foundations of the American state are up for grabs, and anyone who chooses to grab at them can mold them into something new. To get people properly in the game during this delicate moment of history, we must frankly acknowledge what’s actually going on.

A REALITY CHECK

We need a national reality check about the root of this gravely serious moment: A powerful majority of Americans are fed up with America.

A majority of the country is not just angry at America’s elected leaders. They’re angry at its institutions, its economic system, its culture industry, its policies, and most everything else. They don’t believe America’s promises. They don’t trust America’s institutions. They don’t think the people running things care about them or are telling them the truth. They don’t feel like things are going well, or that they’re on track to get better. This is more than just anger at “elites.” It’s anger at every system put into place over the last century. An awful lot of Americans are eager to see it all renegotiated, overturned, or simply burned down.

Over the last two months, the incoming Trump administration has begun implementing a coordinated plan to do something just like that. Part of it includes renegotiating the role of America’s bureaucracy. The American bureaucracy exists in a strange constitutional gray area between the three established branches of government, and its influence in the modern American system rivals Congress, the Courts, and the President. America has never truly grappled with its proper role, papering over problems of authority and accountability. While Republicans have complained about the bureaucracy and administrative state going back to the New Deal, they weren’t eager to directly confront it, as opposed to simply clipping its wings here and there.

Under this new administration, Republicans are attempting to permanently defang the administrative state, altering its role within the government and bringing it politically to heel. This obviously is the true purpose of DOGE—not just cutting budgets and saving money. The administration is seeking to bring the bureaucracy to heel and fully subordinate it to the political branches, as well as unravel the networks of NGOs and international institutions that serve as its allies and extensions.

The administration is further seeking to unwind the Western alliance system created after the Second World War. That’s what the seeming hodge-podge of policies from tariffs, Ukraine war negotiations, saber rattling about Greenland and Panama, and JD Vance’s speech in Europe all have in common—they’re part of a coordinated effort to extricate America from its position as center of the Western alliance system. There are various reasons the administration might want to renegotiate and unwind the post-World War II order: a desire to remove itself from European and Middle Eastern entanglements to pivot to China; to encourage reindustrialization for national security; to recenter nationalism; or the belief that international institutions have become vehicles for domestic political opponents to impose power over Americans from outside the Constitutional structure. If dismantled, the results likely will be permanent.

This is not fantasy. People in the administration talk in these terms. Those aligned with the administration in the ideasphere do too. The national narrative that this is all just random action, bumbling, or corruption is clearly wrong. It’s a well-coordinated effort to implement an agenda supported by a united movement to reorient American government and its role in the world—none of which was presented squarely in the last election.

Democrats are in denial. So are rank and file Republicans who see these efforts as simply disconnected actions to “own the libs.” This is not a repeat of the first Trump administration. People are implementing stark changes in America’s direction. They have a plan and a strategy to address the anger in the electorate, and they’re implementing it—but before vetting it, explaining it, or selling it. There’s no way to be sure they know what they’re doing, or have thought through all the serious implications, because they’re not talking publicly about what’s clearly happening, and nobody is honestly discussing it or challenging it.

GET INTO THE GAME

I’m not worried people are trying to address the discontent about America. I’ve now been telling people we have to do that for years. The American people’s anger at America isn’t going to just go away. Important aspects of America aren’t working the way people expect or want. A majority of the country has lost faith. This means America is going to change. We’re going to renegotiate the twentieth-century status quo no matter what anybody wants. In fact, it should be a good thing.

The way this is playing out at the moment, however, does not inspire confidence. Republicans appear at least to understand the moment, but not how to adequately meet it. If you’re going to renegotiate the foundations of the American state, it’s essential to get the buy-in necessary to make the right changes and make them stick. To restore trust, you have to explain what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how it will improve things. Officials must openly discuss and justify their actions in press conferences, briefings, and policy papers. People advocating change must make the case in public, explain next steps, and set out the limits. Otherwise, all you accomplish is making the mess without building anything sustainable in its place.

Post-election talk from Democrats, however, gives little reason to trust the party, or its voters, to even understand the challenge, much less what they must do. They say the right words, but their actions indicate they believe this is just some weird chaotic moment that will eventually blow over leaving them back in charge. They target the problems of messaging and policy deliverables—promising to drop the annoying bits and govern better next time. The problem, however, isn’t messaging, a few boneheaded policies, tone, or the failure to hand out candy to the right groups. The problem is people don’t trust or like the system anymore. You can’t communicate yourself out of that without a real agenda of significant change.

Everyone who wants to play a role in remaking America needs to start getting in the game. They must develop ideas about where they want America to go that address this loss of faith. Then they must convince Americans they have a well-considered plan and get Americans to buy in. How do you intend to address the national discontent? How will you make the nation work better the way people expect? What are your ideas to give back power to the people who are angry, and make the system work? Whoever figures that out first wins the future of America. The good news is, if neither major party gets serious about this very soon, someone will come along to seize the moment, ushering in a new movement with fresh faces ready to lead America forward.

As a nation, it’s time to come to grips with this unsettling reality—everything is up for grabs, and people can increasingly attempt to seize this opportunity to remake America, for better and for ill. It’s our job to push them in the right direction, and hold them to account. I have zero doubts America will ultimately navigate though these choppy waters into an exciting era of national renewal. The sooner we embrace the reality of this moment, however, the quicker we will get there.

(Many thanks for everyone who subscribed over the last two weeks while I was out! I’m glad to be back and resuming the usual publishing schedule.)