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There’s a radical dissatisfaction with the social and political status quo across the democratic world. The people in charge are distrusted and despised by the public: They are thought to be in business for themselves and indifferent to the concerns of ordinary people. From government agencies to the scientific establishment, the institutions that buttress modern society have been tainted by the corruption and poor performance of the ruling elites. The public has come to view these institutions as cash cows for the haves—and an oppressive machinery for bleeding the have-nots.
How truly democratic today’s democracies are has become an open question. Negative answers trouble the political life of many nations. Everywhere the traditional parties, creatures of a decaying consensus, are in the grip of disintegration. They are being replaced by sectarian war bands that challenge the very legitimacy of the system. The public has a vague notion of what it is for but knows with terrible clarity what it stands against. A spirit of negation has inspired massive street uprisings in the style of France’s Yellow Vests and Black Lives Matter here at home, as well as the election of unorthodox populists like Donald Trump.
I analyzed the causes of this upheaval in my 2014 book, “The Revolt of the Public [ [link removed] ].” In brief, I argued that institutional elites have failed to adapt to the vast flows of information of the digital age. They reside at the top of great hierarchies that tower uneasily over a flattened socioeconomic landscape—and they want nothing to change. They crave the eternal preservation of the 20th-century regime, in which they wielded unquestioned authority and had the power to conceal their dirty secrets. In pursuit of this ideal—fondly labeled “our democracy”—they have grown ever more reactionary and antidemocratic over the decades.
In Britain and Brazil today, you can land in jail for voicing antiestablishment opinions on social media. Here in the U.S., the Biden administration erected a censorship apparatus to mute online dissidence—and, we recently learned [ [link removed] ], “debanked,” or cast out of the financial system without right of appeal, those engaged in disfavored operations such as cryptocurrency.
The Revolt Gains Legitimacy
With the triumphant second coming of Trump, the revolt of the public has entered a new phase. The cordon sanitaire that isolated the president-elect from all respectable political and cultural gatekeepers has tumbled like the walls of Jericho. Yesterday, he was Hitler—opposing him was a moral imperative. Today, having risen out of the depths of disgrace, he heads a movement that contains much of the energy and excitement to be found in this country.
Before his victory, Trump received the endorsement of brilliant and accomplished personalities like Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and Tulsi Gabbard. They shared a hostility to the abuses of the Biden administration and felt untroubled and unashamed in the presence of the new Hitler. After the election, a steady stream of repentant celebrities made the pilgrimage to the holy land of Mar-a-Lago. Joe Scarborough of MSNBC, a rabid anti-Trumpist, came to beg forgiveness. Mark Zuckerberg, whose part in the censorship scheme had been less than honorable, flew in with the prevailing winds. Even the ethereal Justin Trudeau, mandarin by blood and temperament, paid homage to the new prince.
It felt as if the doors of history, long locked and rusted in place, had suddenly groaned open to the unknown. The world looked upside down. Not long ago, NFL players were taking the knee during the national anthem to protest the very existence of Trump. In 2024, they were doing the goofy Trump dance, golf swing and all.
The normalization of Trumpism endows the revolt of the public with legitimacy it has heretofore lacked. This is a potentially fatal breach in the defenses of the old regime. Previously, politicians had to play inside the lines drawn by their institutional masters, or else be shunned as extremists, racists, fascists—morally beyond the pale of mere politics. The original cordon sanitaire was applied to Marine Le Pen and her National Rally in France. Most recently, her party received 40% [ [link removed] ] of the vote and leads a sizable contingent in parliament, yet it is treated like a pariah by every government coalition. Le Pen’s supporters are, in effect, disenfranchised. That is the point of the exercise.
Similar excommunications have been hurled at other antiestablishment parties, such as Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland. They can exist but are never allowed to govern. In Romania, judges actually nullified [ [link removed] ] the results of a presidential election because an unacceptable “far-right” populist had won. Along similar lines, the judicial persecution of Trump rested on the premise that he exerted a uniquely evil influence over “our democracy” and had to be destroyed by all available means. If Trump happens to be just another politician, that kind of concerted assault, which reflects the antidemocratic muscle of the institutions, must be taken off the table.
Once it becomes unacceptable to demonize populism, democratic politics will devolve back to a competition over the issues. That should terrify establishment parties like the Democrats. The political obsessions of the elites—open immigration, energy “transition,” race- and sex-based “equity”—are at best irrelevant to the public’s concerns, at worst highly unpopular. These pet projects can only be imposed from above as moral imperatives—as electoral issues, they are losers. Opposition to immigration, for example, has been the fuel that propelled populists to power in Hungary, Italy and Austria. The elites seem to sense this. Kamala Harris ran against the grain of her own and the Biden administration’s progressive record, and Bernie Sanders explained the U-turn by stating that [ [link removed] ] Harris wanted “to win the election.”
But if the Democrats and their institutional allies are no longer able to vilify populism, and at the same time are deprived of the progressive agenda, what is left for them to do or say? The catastrophic failure of the Biden-Harris experiment has brought elite politics to the edge of a stark ideological wilderness, where the only justification for power is the will to attain it.
The Birth of Programmatic Populism
Matters stand differently on the other side of the divide. In the most significant mutation of this second phase of the revolt, populism has begun to evolve a governing program. To grasp the consequential nature of this development, we should remember that the public’s rage against the status quo has forever been stuck on negation. The public is always against, always bashing at the institutions without offering alternatives, an approach that logically leads to nihilism—the love of destruction for its own sake.
By and large, populists have followed the same route. They have railed against the system but lacked a positive program. Once elected, they are placed in the awkward position of being in charge of a system they detest, resulting in a flurry of symbolic gestures—flying on commercial airlines [ [link removed] ], for example—and in untrammeled nihilistic rhetoric.
So it was with the first Trump administration. We heard, loud and clear, what Trump was against: immigration, the news media, Nancy Pelosi, etc. He often spoke in crudely nihilistic terms. But what was his positive vision for the country? It was hard to say. Trump was trapped in a life-and-death struggle with his political antagonists—maybe it’s unfair to expect soaring ideals from him at that juncture. But the fact remains that his energies, during his first term of office, were concentrated on negation.
This time around, all thoughts are turned to action. Trump’s ambitious program will advance on many fronts—unshackling the economy and restoring the worth of citizenship, for example—but the main strategic thrust is an effort to tame Leviathan, that is, to narrow the democratic gap between modern government and the public. Trump means to grapple with, and if possible cauterize, the festering sources of revolt. His instrument will be the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, an advisory group [ [link removed] ] led by Musk and Ramaswamy that aims at “sweeping changes,” including the dismantling of “antidemocratic” structures in the federal behemoth. Redundant units and regulatory agencies lacking explicit congressional approval are certain to fall, with proportionate “reductions in force.” The goal appears to be to enhance accountability as well as to increase efficiency and savings.
Many factors explain the transformation from Trump 1.0 to the current program-oriented upgrade. Four years of exile in Mar-a-Lago brooding over his first term may well have deepened Trump’s sense of mission. Proximity to lively minds like Musk’s and Ramaswamy’s no doubt enlarged his thinking. The big win on November 5 opened the way for big changes. All this is true. But Trump in his second term also has had the advantage of a precedent and a precursor. An important element in the elaboration of his governing program, I believe, was the strange and sudden rise of Javier Milei in Argentina.
Milei and the Chainsaw Approach to Government
Superficially, Milei is the very model of a 21st-century populist: big hair, foul mouth, prone to outrageous statements, always at the center of attention. Like Trump, he was a TV and YouTube personality rather than a member of the political class. Yet Milei differs from the breed in two significant respects. One, he’s a trained economist. He can dazzle an audience with technical jargon. Two, he’s a fanatical libertarian who worships at the altar of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. He ran for president on a program to fix the moribund Argentine economy by drastically shrinking the bloated and intrusive Argentine government—his symbol was the motosierra, or chainsaw, with which he proposed to hack away at that tentacular monster.
Once elected, Milei made good [ [link removed] ] on the threat. He has sharply devalued the currency, killed most subsidies, laid off 50,000 public employees, privatized or eliminated entire ministries—and these activities were conducted in a spirit of magnificent showmanship. The effect on the economy has been mixed, but this much is clear: Despite the pain of the amputations, Milei remains a popular figure, and he has persuaded [ [link removed] ] the public that the chainsaw strategy—cutting government—is preferable to raising taxes.
Trump’s economic instincts are far from libertarian. In fact, as Branko Milanovic has observed [ [link removed] ], he appears to be an old-fashioned mercantilist. His fixation with tariffs would have elicited a stern corrective lecture from Friedman. Musk and Ramaswamy, however, are zealous advocates of the free market, and there can be no question that Milei’s antibureaucratic onslaught has set the example for DOGE that the two men expect to follow.
Here, parenthetically, we see the confusion of doctrines attendant on Trump having attracted a band of talented eccentrics, not only the DOGE leaders but also Gabbard, Robert Kennedy Jr. and J.D. Vance, who are united in their repudiation of the status quo but disagree about much else. Whether harmony can flow from this chorus of soloists will depend on the president-elect’s skill as a conductor.
DOGE, in any case, was set up with Trump’s blessing and appeals to his populist inclinations—after all, it endows with programmatic reality his old promise to “drain the swamp.” The federal bureaucracy has been condemned, as in a horror movie, to wait, with mounting panic, for the advent of a chainsaw massacre. As for the contradictions of the Trump coalition, these could be reconciled with a hybrid strategy: protectionist and mercantilist in its face to the world but radically libertarian in its approach to government and the domestic economy.
Can such a chimerical construct work? We will find out soon enough.
What we learn will determine the sense and direction of our political crisis. The crucial question is whether the system can be reformed. Evidently, Trump was elected to do just that. To the extent that he can persuade his voters that change is possible—that their revolt was a legitimate gesture, armed with a militant program—Trump can begin to restore the public’s trust in the institutions and the principles that sustain them, very much including democracy.
There’s a human dimension to reform, too. It has long been apparent that our current elite class must be replaced by people who feel at home in the 21st century. By recent standards, including that of his first-term cabinet, Trump’s new advisers and appointees are relatively youthful. Vance is 39, Gabbard, Ramaswamy and Kash Patel are in their 40s, while Musk, at 53, is somewhere between a perpetual child and an elder statesman. Besides enjoying the full vigor of life, members of this crowd have few memories of Vietnam, Watergate or even Monica Lewinsky. Their eyes are fixed on the present and the future—beyond the digital culture that so distresses our decrepit elites to the next tidal waves of disruption, such as artificial intelligence and blockchain technology.
Of course, the odds are stacked against them. Failure is more likely than not. But it would be the crowning irony of Trump’s improbable trajectory if the motley collection of pirates and adventurers presently around him turns out to be the next American ruling class.

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