VUCA! What a lovely acronym: volatile, unpredictable, complex, ambiguous. It rolls off the tongue and hits the sweet spot of the present moment in history. It captures in four letters the inherent intractability of an increasingly networked world linked by information, technology exchanges and dependencies, trade, population movement and economic trends – and, of course, our physical environment.
It’s also the Trumpian moment, and with him in charge of the USA it feels as if the VUCA Quotient of the world has just doubled. He’s probably the most consequential President of the USA, for good or ill, in recent decades at least. Maybe forever?
It is necessary to talk seriously about Trump, because we’re venturing into new and threatening terrain. We need to start by understanding that there are no credentialed experts in predicting the future, or indeed understanding the present and past. That does not mean that all opinions are equal – far from it – but ultimately it falls to us. We the ordinary citizens are going to have to become our own experts.
So here I want to talk briefly and in relatively broadbrush strokes about Trump, the Man and the Moment. I’ve been reading a lot about him, and this article is written to clarify my own thoughts. Much of the news and opinion (assuming one can separate the two) is agenda-driven or just noisy posturing. It requires some genuine effort to even begin to interpret the rush of events within some realistic context.
But first, Trump the Man. Many will agree with Eric Kaufmann’s description: “He is an immoral, corrupt, bullying narcissist…” and would probably add a few other adjectives to that short list. But Kaufmann actually supports Trump, up to a point:
“The primary rotten timber that the Trump administration is challenging is the cultural left’s capture of the modern western university. This ideological dominance lies at the heart of the problem of progressive illiberalism, which is the primary threat to academic freedom on campus.”
Not the whole story
So maybe Trump’s abundant odious qualities are not the whole story.
Another part of the relevant personal story is that Trump, at the start of his eighth decade, decided to take on the complacent Republican establishment and the entire Democratic Party machine from nowhere – and WON. Ponder on that for a moment. And from before he took office right through to the present moment, the utterly humiliated and enraged Establishment and their foot-soldiers have been throwing everything they have at him.
From lawfare, to slander, to impeachment (sorry, impeachments) to assassination attempts (x2), the onslaught was unending, comprehensive and vicious. Trump did lose the next election but won again in 2024 at the age of 78, his energy and appetite for combat apparently undimmed, but now with some of the elite as well as grassroots, battle-hardened veterans in his support base.
Frankly, Trump is a unique phenomenon of irrepressible animal spirits, charisma, and vitality. He’s the Genghis Khan of 21st-century democratic warfare, but while that may have been a necessary pre-condition for victory, it will not be sufficient in the judgement of history.
Besides his unique personal characteristics, the other legs of the tripod which brought him electoral victory were:
Firstly, a uniquely rotten and ineffectual Democratic Party machine reaching the end of its lifespan, and,
Secondly, the threatened collapse of the global order in the face of internal decay and schism within the major democracies and external challenges from authoritarian powers, a resurgent global Islamist theocracy, and assorted mafia states and criminal enterprises in an increasingly VUCA-larised world.
The Ideological Dimension
It’s impossible to evaluate the Trumpian Moment in history without reference to the competing ideologies in play. This is an enormous and very complex topic which is poorly understood by the ordinary citizen and the pundits alike.
For present purposes I simply want to point out that the political domain is structured by sets of competing and sometimes overlapping ideologies. This is likely to be broadly accepted by most readers, but a brief word on the nature, origins and role of ideology in human affairs is in order.
Ideologies are narratives which purport to give meaning, purpose, and moral justification to political behaviour. They serve to co-ordinate and justify collective action and to mobilise group members to sacrifice in the defence of the collective. They arise out of political competition and historical memories and myths, as articulated by leaders emerging from within the collective.
We are of course familiar with many competing ideologies which may be religious or secular. After the initial phase of articulation, ideologies may evolve and split in response to ongoing challenges. Assigning some to divine origins and/or a sacred status protects ideologies against critical analysis (and change), and justifies various forms of punishment against opponents or apostates.
Humans are all ideological by default, some more so than others. Even defeated ideologies rarely disappear completely, since they reflect deep-seated psychological features within the human psyche and a fundamental need for coordination and mobilisation. They are invariably linked to the earthly ambitions and power of elites who are also the chief beneficiaries.
With this highly simplified account of the general phenomenon, we need to look at the main competing camps in the USA and the Western-aligned world more broadly. Up to now these polities were linked by the adherence to a collection of related ideologies under the broad banner of Democracy.
The rise of Democracy in the past couple of centuries has been associated with unparalleled prosperity, peace, and technological innovation. it was associated also with military and diplomatic power, with decisive victories in World War II and in the following decades of competition with the Soviet Union and its communist allies.
By the end of the 20th century, it seemed to some that Democracy, especially Liberal Democracy, was the only viable form of governance for a civilised world, and that although serious challenges remained, the indications were good for its ultimate pre-eminence throughout the world. Sceptics, like Samuel Huntington, remained, but the dominance of the democratic West seemed secure.
This is no longer the case, and in the following section we’ll examine it especially as it relates to the USA.
The Western Malaise
My key argument is that Liberal Democracy always carried the seeds of its own demise in the form of various Utopian movements. Here I specifically refer to Progressivism which was termed Liberalism by James Burnham in his famous book ” Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism“, published in 1964.
In essence, Burnham argued that in an obsessive attempt to achieve human perfection, extreme Liberalism (henceforth to be called Progressivism) opens the door to those dark parts of the human psyche which would destroy the fragile civilisation painstakingly being built on the back of the classical Liberal movement of the 18th and 19th centuries. Even at the height of its apparent power, Burnham claimed that the Western tide was running out.
A new book by Auron MacIntyre (reviewed by N Lyons) summarises the impact of the Progressive-Managerial Revolution this way:
“Together these factors have produced a vast, unified, self-reinforcing managerial apparatus—a regime—of public institutions, private corporations, and non-governmental organizations that moves together in near complete synchronicity, like a flock of birds. On the New Right, it’s been dubbed “The Cathedral,” in which everyone in power—from Harvard, to the press, to the White House—sings automatically from the same hymn sheet. This bears resemblance to that hallmark of totalitarian societies that the Nazis called gleichschaltung, or the sweeping “coordination” of society“
Later he goes on “Faced with the need to maintain at least a façade of democratic legitimacy, the managerial regime’s solution was, naturally, to seek to manage the will of the people. The ruling class thus became deeply involved in controlling the information the public receives and the narrative that information shapes, Hence the belief in the need to tell “noble lies” to the peasantry embraced by all our elite institutions; hence the constant media gaslighting; hence the vast, “whole-of-society” censorship-industrial complex established to manipulate the public’s “cognitive infrastructure”—in other words, our perception of reality. What we have now is most easily described as “Managed Democracy.”
In short: tyranny with a democratic facade.
After successive waves of civil rights advances, different flavours of feminism and the #metoo movement, empowered reformist zealots opened the door to the Social Justice and Critical Theory movements. What initially was welcomed, as an advance on the benefits of universal human dignity and liberty, increasingly became a stifling and tyrannical new creed imposed by an arrogant elite on the regular citizenry, hereinafter to be termed Wokism, DEI, or Cancel Culture.
The essential elements of this movement are known to every literate person. The moral universe was re-conceptualised through a social justice spectrum, with victims strung out along one end and oppressors at the others. While the precise identities of the actors in this moral drama could be altered to fit on-going political exigencies, fundamentally the oppressors were chiefly White (European, Christian) males and the oppressed were The Rest.
The oppressor-victim spectrum was not a simple line but a multi-dimensional gradient invoking racial, gender, historical, indigenous, and a multiplicity of other elements such as a variety of physical and psychological elements. These interactions fell under the rubric of intersectionality and opened the door to a potentially endless search for alleged oppressions and handicaps.
Thus, the oppressor-victim landscape had the virtue of being infinitely adjustable in the face of changing political challenges. For example, in recent times a number of white and non-white groups were assigned white-adjacent status and were punished for proximity to the White-Male oppressors-in-chief. The Asians were too clever by half, and needed to make way in the universities for under-performing groups. But even worse has been the rush to place the beleaguered Israelis (Jews more broadly) at the top of the oppressor class so as to support the openly and exultantly genocidal Islamist-Palestinian axis.
While it’s not working out quite the way it was intended, the bloodlust demonstrated by the elite White Western establishment at the prospect of further anti-Jewish pogroms has pointed the way for rogue actors within the West and outside to manipulate social justice zealotry to toxic ends.
To be clear: the poison of Woke culture has permeated virtually every major Western institution to a greater or lesser extent, both in the established Democracies and in the developing world. The extent and impact of the penetration is vastly under-appreciated by most, who imagine it is confined to a few fanatics in academia and other enclaves.
The Counter-Revolutions
Over the 75-year course of the transmutation of classical liberalism into a rampant Progressivism, there have been a number of countertrends which have proven inadequate, toxic in themselves or have been delegitimised and overwhelmed by the Woke wave. To jump to the present, there is little doubt that the election of Trump reflects a broad-based revulsion in the USA (and elsewhere) against the culture, tactics and outright authoritarian agenda of the Woke movement.
These counter-currents have coalesced into a New Right which have gathered around Trump. At present there is no single canonical version which would represent a unanimous consensus amongst Trump followers. The intellectual articulation of the New Right creed is meagre in comparison with the voluminous literature around Wokism. But these extracts from NS Lyons capture the gist.
“The Long Twentieth Century has been characterized by these three interlinked post-war projects: the progressive opening of societies through the deconstruction of norms and borders, the consolidation of the managerial state, and the hegemony of the liberal international order. The hope was that together they could form the foundation for a world that would finally achieve peace on earth and goodwill between all mankind.”
“Instead of producing a utopian world of peace and progress, the open society consensus and its soft, weak gods led to civilizational dissolution and despair. As intended, the strong gods of history were banished, religious traditions and moral norms debunked, communal bonds and loyalties weakened, distinctions and borders torn down, and the disciplines of self-governance surrendered to top-down technocratic management. Unsurprisingly, this led to nation-states and a broader civilization that lack the strength to hold themselves together, let alone defend against external threats from non-open, non-delusional societies. In short, the campaign of radical self-negation pursued by the post-war open society consensus functionally became a collective suicide pact by the liberal democracies of the Western world.“
As with Trump’s first electoral victory in 2016, elements within the Progressive camp have indulged in some critical introspection following his repeat victory in 2024, but that has not lasted. A comprehensive counter-offensive is being mounted from within the Democratic Party and its allies, in the media world especially, but extending to the courts and the bureaucracies entrenched in education and other key State and non-State institutions.
Trump and his supporters have expected and welcomed this stretching of the legal and constitutional boundaries in the process. It is no exaggeration to say that this conflict is being globalised across the democracies, and is stirring up national animosities and challenging established alliances in unparalleled ways.
It’s a very high-risk strategy, and although it has achieved some early worthwhile successes in rolling back Woke excesses in the USA and elsewhere, it has opened a Pandora’s box of unintended consequences as well as a new realism in international relations. The battle goes way beyond simple ideological differences to involve issues of power and economic and political stability. The global VUCA Quotient has increased dramatically.
Summing Up
A genuine score card is not possible at this point in the game, and in any case there is no consensus around how scoring is to be kept. So, this is my personal reaction to events and commentary so far.
Early on in this article I made a distinction between Trump the Man and the Trumpian Moment in history. Of course, a sharp distinction is impossible. All major leaders leave their own personal stamp on history. One cannot discuss World War II or the Bolshevik revolution without reference to the personalities of the leaders involved, but understanding history does not end with a psychological profile of the most prominent figures.
I make this obvious point, since Trump is sufficiently addictive to moralists, tribalists and propagandists of all flavours to stop all rational discourse in its track. Of course, Trump does not stand alone, but comes with an array of supporters with differing motivations, perceptions, and personality profiles. Elon Musk and other tech bros who have come out in support of Trump differ from him and from each other in significant ways.
Talking of tech, Musk, another uniquely divisive figure, is very different from Peter Thiel or Marc Andreessen. both of whom have thrown their weight behind Trump, along with many more of the most successful and influential innovators in American history. In fact, if we run through some of the more influential figures in Team Trump, we find the full gamut: from hardcore New Right-oriented personalities like JD Vance the vice-president, to Peter Hegseth and Robert F Kennedy Jr, to Steve Witkoff to Tulsi Gabbard to Karoline Leavitt – to mention only a small sample of his unusually diverse entourage and administration.
Trump’s personal ideological promiscuity has been abundantly documented, and perhaps herein lies the problem, as seen both by some respected public intellectuals like Sam Harris, by Progressive activists and by a brainwashed and conformist managerial class more widely.
The Trump camp’s diversity, idiosyncrasies and missteps will be endlessly foregrounded, exaggerated and mocked by the counter-revolution brewing in the Establishment institutions captured by the Woke movement (see NS Lyon and Heather MacDonald for examples).
What should be celebrated as a welcome departure from timid conformity is depicted as anything from incompetent amateurism to a headlong dive into populist tyranny and lawlessness. But if we get beyond the visceral responses to ask ourselves the hard questions, we can identify the following significant achievements of Trump and his camp and the potential dangers that accompany the Trumpian revolution:
In the achievement list, the following seem the most important:
- Stopping the immigration chaos at the border and restoring some notion of law and order domestically;
- A full-out frontal attack on the proliferation of increasingly hostile and deranged DEI-Woke doctrines designed, at least in part, to entrench domestic tyranny and polarisation, and anti-Western sentiment at home and abroad. With the guardrails down, America had become vulnerable to infiltration by authoritarian forces from all quarters; in short a helpless giant; and
- Opening the door to a greater diversity of views, technological innovation and optimism.
On the negative side lie the dangers of:
- Over-extension and the possibility of serious, even existential, missteps;
- Over-exposure to counter-attacks by enemies both domestic and global;
- Unintended consequences including the breakdown of respect for law, constitutionality and norms of conduct globally; and
- A breakdown in long-established coalitions with other Western democracies, in favour of more expedient and transactional coalitions with potentially hostile powers.
Thus a broad-brush perspective on the Trumpian moment offers a hopeful break in the logjam and stasis plaguing a timid, defensive Western Civilisation. If we add to this the AI revolution and incessant technological invasion into public and private life, the wheel of history rotates faster and faster. It’s both exhilarating and terrifying and we will have to learn ̶̶- fast!
Addendum: Since writing this I feel I should have included Trump’s obsession with tariffs as a potential major negative. Two respected economic pundits have written strong critiques of Trump’s tariff addiction here and here. In general, undue bellicosity comes with a price.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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