Donald Trump’s resounding return to the White House, Congress, and Senate has triggered a seismic shift in American bureaucratic architecture, possibly the third most after the Civil War and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s restructuring with New Deal programs following the Great Depression. This shift appeared during the highly consequential years of competition between the USA and the People’s Republic of China, the years that will frame the world’s outlook for the next many decades. The election outcome was a flustered response of American pragmatism after decades of traditional slowness. Post-election Wall Street major indices’ record hits, Bitcoin exceptional boom, spike in Tesla shares, President-elect‘s vow to repeal Biden’s executive order on AI, and the reported Donald Trump’s call to Putin urging de-escalation in Ukraine, together model the broad contours of this transformation —a known unknown. It is about business optimism, big giants, cutting deals, less wars, non-traditionalism in international affairs, tactical intensification of trade war with China, and exclusive focus on fundamental questions pertaining to border security, tariffs, and supply chains. Moreover, preferring loyalty above competence in some key appointments will drill the American divide much deeper. Fears come along regarding the gap between the rhetoric and the capability and consequences of Donald Trump’s abruptness, his skepticism about the green energy transition, and his transactional interpretation of the American foreign policy regarding Taiwan, NATO, and the Ukraine Conflict on the US’ global soft power and associated leverages.
Many thanks to the Democrats’ lethargic presidency, Joe Biden’s hang-up with candidacy till the last moment, the Democrats’ carefully crafted ‘academics’ of the American Dream, and the liberal bias of the mainstream media and urban intelligentsia of New York and California, all failed to convince. Specifically, they failed to persuade the majority that funding transcontinental policing in Europe, South China, and the Middle East holds primacy over securing jobs, health, and education back home. Further, they could not convince Whites that multiculturalism is the central driver of Americanism instead of the definition of a White American—a 300-year convolution of English individualism and Biblical renditions. Similarly, they struggled to convince women that abortion is an existential problem larger than culture and inflation and Latinos, Blacks, and Asians that embracing diversity and appreciating more like them with flexible borders will reduce racism in American society. Lastly, they also failed to convince the majority of practicing Catholics, Muslims, and Jews on the fundamentality of LGBQT rights.
Donald Trump, however, despite his close ties with far-right radicals, high-strung bullies, and the blustering rich, with all his paradoxes and fabrication, talked straight to instincts. He pulled anxieties of a vast electoral base from the Northern States to the Mexican border, from the Atlantic East to the Pacific West. He strategized his campaign and directly addressed his voters as teachers, students, farmers, laborers, white-collars, and blue-collars. Trump’s strategy tuned in with the genesis of this age, characterized by economic stress, deconstruction of definitions, the prominence of bills over beliefs, microcosm over macrocosm, heroic solutions over institutional delays, an age of perspective as a truth and perception as a plan. Ultimately, it’s an age where straight business—even if unfair, casual, or contemptuous—takes precedence over the boring rather indecisive soulfulness of political correctness.
This phenomenon is not unique to the US; in the last European Union elections, a similar trend emerged. From the Baltic North to the Mediterranean South, young voters, fearful for their careers and jobs, disregarded messages of assimilation and integration and instead favored non-interventionism and trade protectionism. This shift led to a surge in far-right parties in Germany, France, Italy and Hungary, showing voters’ categorical indifference to the traditional variables of the European project—climate regulation, plurality, and strong institutions in Brussels and Strasbourg.
Similarly in India, enthusiasm for Narendra Modi’s growth and identity-driven economic model sidelined Congress’ pluralistic rhetoric, keeping them out of power for the last three electoral terms. Only during the last election, Congress performed comparatively better, partly due to incumbency factor and partly due to dynamic public engagement with the vibrant core, promoting the party’s participative outlook by using latest social media tools. Similarly, Pakistan’s traditional politicians face a consistent challenge from young voters as the majority of them continue to detach from the politics of dynastic patronage.
Apart from democracies, the traditionalists in authoritarian regimes like China, Iran, Russia, and the Middle East are also facing a linguistic disconnect with newly emerged vibrant cores of their polities. Iran’s young girls stood against the state’s imposition of dress codes; a large number of Russian youth fled to Europe amid the Ukraine conflict to escape military conscription; and China’s youth struggled for better working hours, salaries, and labor rights. Some of them, like Emiratis, are taking steps such as the 20-year National Youth Strategy, aiming for constructive alignment of new political consciousness with national goals by expanding its participation in decision-making and creating more opportunities to prevent possible centrifugalism.
However, unlike authoritarianism, this disconnect is systemically multiplexed in transatlantic liberalism where every voice matters and every value counts. The 2024 election results in big democracies, the EU, India, and the USA forewarning a disintegrative retreat from larger questions towards the basics: identity, security, and subsistence. People seek financial refuge amid the formidable competitiveness testing limits of their intellectual and financial enterprise. The perception that growth and plurality are mutually exclusive demands thorough diagnostics, as this will have long-term implications for the entire human discourse. Undoubtedly, liberal values, plurality, and respect for democracy and institutions are the most mature expressions of human intellectual history. But there seems to be a serious neglect after the fall of the Soviet Union, an epistemological disconnect within transatlantic liberalism and its extensions in South Asia and Latin America. It is the disconnect between traditionalists and the vibrant core of the current age—the late millennials, Z and Alpha generations—born after Francis Fukuyama’s End of History—who find no fancy in the charming vocabulary that carried away their fathers during the ideological struggle of the 20th century. They are the product of techno-feudalism—Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok. They grew up in a vulnerable America and a Europe struggling with NATO’s costly extravaganzas in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. They lived through the 2007-2009 global financial crisis, rising disparities, regulatory frameworks, and faced the cultural stress due to immigrants from the war-torn Middle East and the less developed countries of Latin America, Africa, and South Asia. The great disconnect of traditionalists with the psychosocial frame of the new human condition, together with the depthless immediateness of information and spontaneity of connectivity and expression, provide space for what Hegel calls a ‘Labor of the Negative’, a desperate response to change human condition, a willful and well-thought contempt, and continued negativity for structures and traditions.
—The Author is a columnist and member of UNFCCC and ICAN. He taught Public Policy in the National Defence University of Pakistan.
