Mourning in America
The view from 2025, Part 1
A bit of context
Around this date in December 2024, I was finalising the Foreword to my recent book Trauma, Art and Memory in the Postcolony (Corbet, 2024). Donald Trump had just been elected as 47th President of the USA, against all odds it seemed at the time. In that Foreword, titled ‘The view from 2024’, I wrote:
The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague has issued arrest warrants for the current leaders of Russia (2023) and Israel (2024)—an extremely rare occurrence for sitting heads of state. A criminally-convicted television celebrity has been re-elected to the Presidency of the USA, riding a wave of blue-collar identarian grievance.
There was of course a lot more, including commentary on what has come to be known as ‘The Great Awokening’, (al-Gharbi, 2024) and the assaults on EDI/DEI (Equity, Diversity and Inclusion), particularly in the USA, which were then just gathering steam. Elsewhere in the book, writing about the 2021 exhibition at New York’s New Museum titled Grief and Grievance—Art and Mourning in America, I wrote:
The works in this exhibition […] speak of a deep yearning in the USA for racial and social justice. Once tantalisingly within reach, or at least within the realm of hope, in the early twenty-first century such aspirations appear to be retreating in the face of seemingly implacable socio-political forces. These works of mourning, memory, resistance and resilience may one day provide an account for future generations— a warning, or perhaps a premonition—of a threshold moment when Britain’s oldest colony teetered on the edge of an abyss, before an existential battle for its very soul. At the time of writing nothing seems predictable. (p. 286)
The rest, as they say, is history. And history, to paraphrase thinkers like E.H. Carr and Scott Sagan, consists of things that no-one imagined could ever happen… actually happening. What follows is a reflection on the rapid development of these hitherto unimaginable events in the USA, and their echoes around the world.
The fraying of ‘Pax Americana’ (or should that be ‘Bellum Americana’?)
Keeping in mind the pitfalls of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ and knowing that, for many affluent Americans anyway, life goes on much as before, it is nevertheless apparent that more and more people are deeply concerned – make that downright freaked out – about the direction the Republic (and its ‘Grand Old Party’) is taking. This is evident in many polls of recent times, with the President’s popularity sinking as the ‘K-shaped’ economy (in part gunned by massive investment in AI) wobbles in the face of high inflation and a pessimistic ‘main street’.[1] Whatever benefits trade tariffs are purported to deliver, it is clear they are adding to the tax burden of ordinary Americans.[2] It may be too early to call a recession – the US economy is a remarkably robust and diverse ecosystem – but the signs are not encouraging, for the USA or for its trading partners.
Equally alarming, and arguably much more consequential, are the geopolitical changes that are being driven by the Trump administration. At the time of writing, a localised war aimed at regime change in Venezuela seems all but inevitable, with Colombia and Cuba also in Trump’s and Rubio’s medium-term sights. It is now clear that administration policy in Europe aims to deliver large swathes of Eastern Ukraine into the hands of a belligerent Russia; to undermine the European Union; and to weaken the resolve and resources of NATO. Is it any wonder that – multiple times daily by dissenters in his own country – Trump is described as a ‘Russian Asset’?
Into this vacuum – economic, diplomatic and military – steps an emboldened and confident China, as it is already doing throughout Asia, Africa and the Indo-Pacific, where it is increasingly perceived as a more responsible global citizen than the USA. The abandonment of American aid and soft power in these regions will take decades to repair, if it ever is. In the Middle East, unquestioning USA support for Israel stymies any real progress on Palestinian statehood, and the so-called ‘Abrahamic Accords’ (between Israel and the Sunni powerhouses of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar), while staggering on in some form, resemble transactional real estate deals aimed at benefiting the President’s cronies, rather than competent statecraft. Iran, the great Shi’ite power, along with its proxies Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Assad regime in Syria, has been militarily defenestrated for the moment, but one wonders for how long.
The global economy and geopolitics are one sphere, the vigour of American democracy quite another, although of course interrelated. It can be difficult to discern the overall state of the polity, depending very much on who you speak to, but it is clearly not in rude health. Undoubtedly, significant numbers of Americans support tighter border control, even mass expulsion of illegal immigrants, and programs aimed at combatting importation of fentanyl and other narcotics are also broadly popular.[3] There is genuine ‘wokeness fatigue’, and widespread parental apprehension around gender politics. Despite this, the heavy-handed tactics used by ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), alongside the killing of supposed drug smugglers on the high seas are, quite apart from questions of legality and/or constitutionality, broadly unpopular.[4] The zealous Trumpian overreaction to all things woke, manifesting as assaults on the autonomy of Universities, Museums and cultural institutions; on law firms; on diversity and equity programs; on women; on trans and LGBTQI people; on people of colour; and by extension the freedoms of ordinary Americans; reveals a government-driven crusade which is rapidly eroding the founding principles of a tolerant and diverse society, to say nothing of the legal principle of habeas corpus. The principal enactors of these policies (Bondi, Patel, Noem, Miller, Hegseth et al) are transparently ideologically-driven, and some are manifestly incompetent. At the heart if this MAGA project, in my opinion, is a white supremacist ideology which has become increasingly respectable in conservative circles, even if few people outside of the ‘Groypersphere’ are willing to say the quiet part out loud (Hanania, 2025b). This ideology has come to be called ‘Christian Nationalism’, and although rusted-on support for Israel remains strong, this too is eroding in the face of its unconscionable and genocidal conduct in the Palestinian occupied territories, and not before time.[5] More on this my next newsletter.
Observing the USA from afar, and reading with voracious horror about the country’s daily traumas at the hands of the Trump administration, the time has come to shout from the rooftops what many American commentators have been saying for months now. Since Trump’s first term, the alarm expressed among progressive and Left-aligned commentators is echoed by large numbers of American newspaper and journal columnists of more conservative persuasion, reaching a crescendo in the closing months of 2025. These eminent thinkers of the sensible Centre include figures like David Remnick, Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, David Frum, Michelle Goldberg, Robert Reich, Susan B. Glasser and many others. There are of course many other voices to the left of centre.
Reading these writers, it appears undeniable that the USA is in the throes of a well-orchestrated authoritarian coup d’etat by a narrowly-elected, far-Right government whose clear aim is never to allow another free and fair election, bent on perpetuating its own power indefinitely. It is led by an irredeemably corrupt, cruel and vengeful grifter, rapacious property developer and sometime media celebrity – a demagog of compelling, slomo-train-crash-mesmerising televisual skill, visibly ailing and mentally deteriorating in full and excruciating view of the whole world. This is a tragedy of obscene proportions, and it remains astonishing to myself and many others that that the guardrails against the rise of a rogue President – so carefully devised by the constitution’s drafters – now appear so flimsy, albeit weakened by the complicity of a compliant legislature and activist Supreme Court, of which more below.
I speak of this tragedy as a long-term US-o-phile. For all its historical and contemporary ills, America has given so very much to the world culturally – in terms of sheer energy and innovation, as a safe haven for ideas and persecuted individuals, and as a remarkable melting-pot of the world’s cultural diversity. Émigré Palestinian essayist Edward Said famously wrote in 1984 that ‘Modern Western culture is in large part the work of exiles, émigrés, refugees’ (2000, p. 173), and in my recent book I wrote:
The USA in particular, with its successive waves of enslaved peoples and settler migration, manifests an astonishing diversity in its cultural production. The Harlem Renaissance writers, the Caribbean diaspora, Gospel, Delta Blues, Jazz, Reggae, LatinX poetry and music, Broadway musicals and theatre, ‘Afrofuturism’ and the contemporary rap of artists such as 2017 Pulitzer-prize winner Kendrick Lamar, are all indications of this unstoppable creative vibrancy.[6] The contribution of Eastern European Jewish émigrés to American culture has been immense—for example German-born Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) and Albert Einstein (1879–1955). First generation Jewish Americans whose parents migrated in the early twentieth century include 2016 Nobel Literature Laureate Bob Dylan (born Robert Zimmerman, Ukrainian heritage); Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960, German heritage); and Stephen Sondheim (1930–2021, Lithuanian heritage) to name just a few in the world of music. My point here is that popular influences of this kind are as important to the concept of North Atlantic Modernism, and indeed to the concept of Western Civilisation, as any other genealogy of philosophy and creative production, intertwined with multiple other Modernisms discussed below. (p. 27)
I mourn this America, if indeed it is over, and I wonder if I will ever travel from sea to shining sea again. At the time of writing, a new ‘proclamation’ has declared that visitors – even those from countries like Australia eligible for the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) under the ESTA system (Electronic System for Travel Authorization) – will soon need to provide five years of social media history, as well as exhaustive details of relatives and business associates. How to destroy your tourism industry 101.
Enablers, grifters, groypers and other bottom-feeders
None of the developments thus far discussed could be happening without the collusion of the ‘co-equal’ branches of the US government – the legislature and the judiciary. The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), having freed a rogue President from criminal responsibility for all ‘official acts’,[7] appears unwilling to enforce the guardrails put in place by the Constitution’s framers with just such an eventuality in mind. It is looking doubtful that the guardrails will hold, not just to this writer, but to many Americans. The parallel with Adolf Hitler’s 1933 appointment as Chancellor and subsequent Enabling Act[8] has been pointed out by many, as have Trump’s evident affection for more recent authoritarian figures like Vladimir Putin of Russia and Viktor Orban of Hungary. It is now clear that the Republican majority in the House and Senate will continue to be compliant in the face of the administration’s continuing assaults on the rule of law, to say nothing of hard-won freedoms and long-established norms of American decency and statesmanship. And, what can these institutions really do anyway, if Trump chooses to create a Praetorian Guard of ICE-adjacent militias loyal to his own personage? This is the anxious question on everyone’s lips.
As well as ‘how?’ one is also compelled to ask ‘why?’, and these questions lead towards shadowy (although not quite so opaque as they once were) zones of American politics and society which are quietly but emphatically opposed to what is commonly understood as modern, secular, democratic government. While Trump may eventually be seen by history as a one-off ‘useful idiot’, his enablers have been war-gaming these strategies for decades, and his populist appeal to blue-collar identarian grievance is the perfect Trojan Horse for their assault. Nancy MacLean’s book Democracy in Chains, (2017) panned by libertarian scholars as a piece of glorified conspiracy theorising, nevertheless laid bare the influence of Nobel economics laureate James M. Buchanan (1919-2013) on so-called ‘public choice theory’, and a generalised Right/libertarian distaste for big government and the constraints on capital and business imposed by parliamentary democracy and universal suffrage. Other influential writers have been sounding warnings for decades, none more insightfully perhaps than Hannah Arendt in The origins of totalitarianism (2022 [1951]). More recently, American writers such as Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (2018), Timothy Snyder (2018) Ruth Ben-Ghiat (2020) and Anne Applebaum (2024) have added eloquent voices of premonition and disquiet. We can’t say we weren’t warned.
Added to the historical anti-democratic theorists discussed in these books are a crop of more recent voices, among them the eminence grise of tech-bros (most notably Palantir Technologies founder Peter Thiel), various Bannonites, and Vice President J.D Vance – the improbably-named Curtis Yarvin (a.k.a. the even more improbably-named Mencius Moldbug), author of the Grey Mirror newsletter.[9] I’m not deeply familiar with Yarvin’s writing, however his signature policy appears to be a return to a form of absolute monarchy (he calls himself a ‘Jacobite’). According to a profile on Yarvin by New Yorker writer Ava Kofman, his prescription for America’s ills is ‘the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law, and the eventual transfer of power to a C.E.O.-in-chief (someone like Steve Jobs or Marc Andreessen, he suggested), who would transform the government into a heavily-armed, ultra-profitable corporation. This new regime would sell off public schools, destroy universities, abolish the press, and imprison “decivilized populations”. It would also fire civil servants en masse in policy called RAGE (Retire All Government Employees), and discontinue international relations, including security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration’(2025). Sounds familiar? Elon Musk is also a fanboy.
Whether these forces will prevail – boosted by US Office of Management and Budget Director Russel Vought and his Project 2025 backers[10] – is a matter of urgent debate, but these people do not operate in isolation. At the time of writing, the Trump-adjacent Ellison family’s corporate media vehicle Paramount Skydance has absorbed CBS, is making a play for Warner Bros., and is simultaneously manoeuvring to take over TikTok’s American operations (and crucially, to control its algorithms),[11] which would be a catastrophic concentration of oligarchic media power, even greater than the Murdoch family’s Fox empire. TikTok and its legions of young users are undoubtedly the major prize here – its demographic currently skews progressive, which the Right believes must be controlled at all costs.
Some ‘diagonal’ voices are also worth noting. Princeton Professor of Politics Gregory Conti, writing for Compact, invokes the historical ‘estates’ of pre-revolutionary Europe as a way of understanding the emerging big tech/MAGA alliance, suggesting that it is not just a marriage of commercial convenience:
A historical analogy might be useful. In ancien régime Europe, the population was divided into three ‘estates’: the Clergy (First), the Nobility (Second), and the rest, the people, in all its multifariousness (Third). Now, we might say that Trump—with the conjunction of the highest socioeconomic reaches in Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Bill Ackman, and other such captains of industry at his side on the one hand, and the majority of non-college voters on the other—has managed to combine much of the second and third estates of modern American society, putting together his own anti-clerical coalition. And he is able to do this because the second and third estates both hate the first: our modern clergy, the professional-managerial class and the HR departments, the professors and nonprofit workers, the press and “public-interest” lawyers, and the regulatory apparatus. (2025)
Conti does not mention in this analysis what Edmund Burke dubbed the ‘Fourth Estate’ – the media. Compact’s Managing Editor Geoff Shullenberger, who in my opinion has written the definitive analysis of the anti-woke movement’s idiocies (2023), in a later article adds to Conti’s perspective, noting the dangers of ‘Silicon Valley drinking its own kool aid’ and that ‘many of its highest-profile players remain unprofitable’. He adds:
The MAGA anti-clerical coalition formed because leading figures in tech convinced themselves that what was getting in the way of their futurist dreams were the combined machinations of woke middle managers, antitrust regulators, tech journalists, and other hostile elements of the clerical caste. But with all those forces in retreat, it remains unlikely the industry will rediscover enough dynamism to deliver on its promises. Its leaders, ever unwilling to face the contradictions of their own position, will instead seek other scapegoats. (2025)
But let’s return the Fourth Estate and its contemporary manifestations. While TikTok is influential with teens and young adults, so-called ‘streamers’ and ‘twitchers’ are arguably a much more potent force among a somewhat older and more consequential voting demographic – American men under 40, and especially those without a college education. There has been a much-observed proliferation of bloggers, vloggers and streamers of all political persuasions in the last decade. Some are exclusively focussed on gaming (mostly on the Twitch platform), however many other prominent figures (with viewership in the millions) cover contemporary politics and society, and they skew towards ‘anti-woke’, but with unpredictable political positions. These celebrity streamers, often dubbed ‘brocasters’, preside over something now called the ‘manosphere’, and part of their appeal is a transgressive counter-cultural vibe, their often 3-hour sessions adopting a casual, conversational style (‘Just Chatting’) with invited guests, with topics ranging across online gaming, sports, fitness, drugtaking, politics, sex, social issues, and even erectile disfunction. Among the most influential among young American men are Theo Von (45)[12] and Joe Rogan (57)[13] – first and second in the USA popularity charts – both credited with enabling a massive 20%+ swing of young White and Latino men to Trump over a four year period between 2020 and 2024. This brocast ecosystem has been touted as a game-changer, but is likely symptomatic of societal trends which have been brewing for far longer. Significantly, and very recently, the more reputable parts of the manosphere have exhibited a turning against MAGA verities, or at least a willingness to question its most egregious excesses. I will expand on this in my next letter (The view from 2025, part 2), but first, some reflections on the manosphere’s audience.
Young, dumb and full of cum?
Young ‘cishet’ (cisgender heterosexual) men – even nerdy ones – have always been rebellious, profane, testosterone-driven, risk-taking, penis-obsessed, and prone to irreverent and transgressive humour. I know this because I once was one. Violent video games are high on their list of preferred activities, and bloody contact sports exercise an abiding allure. They all watch way too much online porn. Until these young males have settled into long-term relationships and fatherhood, and sometimes long afterwards, they tend to be obsessed with sexual conquest – a genetic and endocrinal urge to procreate. This is often combined with over-consumption of alcohol and illicit substances, pack-mentality pranks and challenges, and language and behaviour many would consider deeply misogynistic.
Trump has explained away his transgressions against women in these terms, some members of his cabinet share a similar history, and large swathes of the voting public seem to be just fine with this – ‘boys will be boys’, goes the saying. ‘Locker-room antics’. ‘Just a bit of banter’. But even the perpetrators sheepishly know their proclivities are rather juvenile and unsavoury, and might baulk at their sisters or mothers being demeaned as sex objects. Not all of them are irredeemable incels and internet trolls. Some may, in other words, be potentially decent young men who care about freedom and justice, not just for themselves, but as deeply-held American values. But many are isolated, under-employed, living in parental basements, obsessively online, and starved of human love, company, interaction, purpose, community. I think of the kid in White Lotus series 1 (Quinn, played by Fred Hechinger), who finds meaning away from his phone and febrile, entitled family among the Hawaiian canoers of an Indigenous community nearby to the resort. Rudderless and perennially horny young men (and women) like the fictional Quinn are craving something, and MAGA seems to offer what they can’t find anywhere else – an illicit thrill perhaps. Broadcaster Garrison Keillor hilariously wrote in 2016:
The Trumpers never expected their guy to actually win the thing […] They only wanted to whoop and yell, boo at the H-word, wear profane T-shirts, maybe grab a crotch or two, jump in the RV with a couple six-packs and go out and shoot some spotted owls. It was pleasure enough for them just to know that they were driving us wild with dismay - by ‘us,’ I mean librarians, children’s authors, yoga practitioners, Unitarians, birdwatchers, people who make their own pasta, opera goers, the grammar police, people who keep books on their shelves, that bunch. (2016)
Keillor observed what many commentators at the time failed to notice, namely that Trumpian rallies, while highly orchestrated, are carnivalesque by nature, and that Trump is at heart a transgressive stand-up entertainer whose fans actively enjoy his gigs as social events where a degree of misrule prevails.
We need to better understand who are these millions of young MAGA-adjacent men (and their admirers), and how they might be responding to the corrupt kleptocracy rapidly establishing itself in Washington. Presumably they too have (or soon will have) retirement savings, jobs, mortgages, families. I argue that these young Americans – earlier generations of whom might well have been Democrat-inclined young idealists – ‘Kennedy’s Children’ – so easily snared by the miasma of Trumpian grievance, could just as easily be lured away from an unhinged, orange-hued grifter who in plain sight is entrenching a billionaire oligarchy at the heart of government. Might they not just as easily feel ‘the Bern’ (or a younger avatar of the progressive Vermont Senator)? Equivalent earlier generations had a progressive, counter-cultural soundtrack by the likes of Woodie Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, Pete Seger and Bruce Springsteen. Where are today’s troubadours of freedom? Where are the charismatic political leaders of the centre Left? Clearly, young Americans need a better offer – one that proffers futurity and connection, and the opportunity to grow into empathetic and engaged citizens. Somehow Pete Buttigieg (whom I admire greatly) doesn’t fit the bill. Obama came and went, but his legacy is patchy, and the current administration can be seen, at least in part, as white America’s reaction to his, well… Blackness. Atlantic writer Adam Serwer observes that ‘we are now in the second decade of a years-long temper tantrum sparked by the election of Barack Obama—not to mention the failed attempts to elect a woman to succeed him—and the effect it had on the fragile self-esteem of people like (Trump State Department official) Darren Beattie’, who opined that, ‘Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men’ (2025). Sad!
It’s race, stupid.
Many of MAGA-world’s identarian grievances are an analogue for racial resentment, and there is an increasingly-blatant agenda among Project 2025-ers to dismantle the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Serwer calls this ‘The Great Resegregation’ and he notes:
The term DEI, frequently invoked by the Trump administration, functions as a smoke screen. It allows people to think that the Trump administration’s anti-DEI purge is about removing pointless corporate symbolism or sensitivity trainings. Although it is easy to find examples of DEI efforts that are ill-conceived or ill-applied, some conservatives have leveraged those criticisms to pursue a much broader agenda that is really about tearing anti-discrimination laws out at the roots, so that businesses and governments are free to extend or deny opportunities based on race, gender, and sexual orientation if they so choose.
These priorities mesh with another part of the manosphere – one that is far more radical than Theo Von or Joe Rogan in its prescriptions for American society. Richard Hanania, author of The Origins of Woke (2023), ‘now a repentant Trump voter’ according to Geoff Shullenberger in the article cited above (2025), has exhaustively analysed the rise of so-called ‘Groypers’ within the MAGA-sphere, exemplified by Christian nationalist Nick Fuentes and his ‘America First’ movement. He writes:
If you’re a conservative now who isn’t an ethnonationalist, you’re just completely outmatched. The other side has the numbers and the energy, and there is such a thing as the internal logic of a movement. Democrats once made their entire moral universe center around oppressed minorities, so one couldn’t expect them to stand up to pushy black trans activists around 2020. The equivalent for the right now is the young male who is racist, angry, and sexually frustrated – the Groyper. People like Trump and Vance can’t denounce them, nor can supposed intellectuals like Yoram, because Fuentes is just the undistilled version of what they’re selling, which is white grievance, showmanship, and anti-liberal posturing.(2025a)
Without getting into the weeds of Fuentes and his followers’ views, it is worth noting that he comes over as highly intelligent, ironic, televisually charismatic in a slightly retro, clean-cut way (he is always dressed in a preppy necktie and blazer), and denies being either racist or antisemitic, instead advocating a form of traditional Chirstian virtue, leavened by a lacerating cynicism about American politics and media. Whatever perceived need he meets among his (over one million) followers, it is clearly a need. In the Gen Z lexicon, Fuentes’ schtick is considered to be highly ‘based’ (the adjectival opposite of ‘cringe’) – a valued attribute at the ‘Cruel Kids Table’ (see below). In this world it is increasingly OK to voice race prejudice, so long as it is done in a certain, humorous (presumably non-cringe) way. But it can be difficult to separate real beliefs from various influencer roles. In a now-renowned article for New York Magazine, columnist Brock Colyar profiled these Gen Z Cruel Kids – overwhelmingly White, young, affluent, ‘based’, MAGA supporters – who have flooded Washington DC in various roles. He writes of a January 19 inauguration event that, ‘The gathering was evidence that the youngest, most online members of Trump’s party have acquired his knack for turning the culture wars into something as entertaining as reality TV. Attention is power’. He adds, ‘it is unclear who is seriously serious about their beliefs and who is a grifter doing it for the bit. But a massive cultural realignment is taking place, and now this set of shitposters is in the same league as an entirely new Establishment, which includes not only the tech overlords but also a growing number of celebrities’. Colyar concludes that spending time with these people, ‘felt freeing, empowering, though perhaps in the same way that bullying someone does when you’re in middle school’ (2025). Ouch.
These young people are callow and impressionable, and they are responding to enabling political signals which effectively give them permission to be racist. Adam Serwer writes:
When Trump officials speak of a society that is color-blind and merit-based, they do not appear to mean meritocracy or color-blindness in the traditional sense. Instead of individual meritocracy, they seem to be advocating a racial meritocracy, in which the merit of an individual hire or admission can be assessed not by their individual accomplishments but by how well the group they are associated with fits a particular role. In this way, the Great Resegregation seeks firmer moral ground than the racial apartheid of the past. Racial disparities can be framed not as the result of discrimination, but as a fact: that white people are just better and more qualified. (2025)
Richard Hanania, in a recent article about J.D. Vance, argues that ‘he has been able to ride the train of lower-class white grievance all the way to the vice presidency, and perhaps it will get him to the top job itself. His success is perhaps the clearest indication of the degree to which conservatives no longer believe in much of anything beyond being attracted to a political style that centers around denouncing foreigners and elites’ (Hanania, 2025c).
The implications of these many perspectives will be unpacked in my next newsletter (part 2) in January 2026.
Endpiece (part 2 coming).
So where does this leave us, as 2025 draws to a close? We may be looking at a very different political landscape following the American mid-term elections in November 2026. Trump may well keel over and die, or be effectively disabled, before then – he does not appear to be a well man. The jostling for position among the mad King’s courtiers would then, of course, go into overdrive, but on present indicators, it is likely that J.D. Vance will be the next President of the USA in 2028, if not sooner. Some predict the beginning of a Trumpian dynasty, with Don Junior and Ivanka vying for the crown. Anything is possible. What seems certain is that the societal and political forces that have brought these venal people to power will not abate anytime soon, that rampant inequality will continue to worsen, and the polarisation of red and blue America will become even more pronounced. During 2025, perhaps no issue has had more political traction than that of Immigration, and not just in the USA – it is clearly an analogue for societal tensions and cultural grievance throughout the world.
Bondi beach, Australia, 14 December 2025.
On 14 December 2025, a mass shooting took place in Bondi Beach, a suburb of Sydney, Australia. Two gunmen – apparently a father and son who were radicalised sympathisers of the Islamic State movement – fired into a crowded park where families were celebrating the advent of the Jewish festival of Hanukkah, killing 15 people and wounding many more. It is too soon to make definitive comments on these appalling events, however my next newsletter, most likely in early 2026, will take them as a starting point for an analysis of the vexed geopolitics of the Middle East, Europe and Australasia.
I wish all my readers a peaceful and prosperous festive season.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
al-Gharbi, M. (2024). We have never been woke: the cultural contradictions of a new elite. Princeton University Press.
Applebaum, A. (2024). Autocracy, Inc: the dictators who want to run the world (First edition. ed.). Doubleday.
Arendt, H., & Applebaum, A. (2022 [1951]). The origins of totalitarianism (First Folio edition ed.). The Folio Society Ltd.
Ben-Ghiat, R. (2020). Strongmen: Mussolini to the present (Norton paperback edition. ed.). W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Colyar, B. (2025). The Cruel Kids’ Table. New York Magazine. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/inauguration-trump-supporters-conservative-movement-post-maga.html
Conti, G. (2025). The Anti-Clerical Coalition. Compact. https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-anti-clerical-coalition/
Corbet, D. (2024). Trauma, Art and Memory in the Postcolony: Turning Sorrow into Meaning (1 ed.). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-70942-5
Hanania, R. (2023). The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics (First edition ed.). HarperCollins.
Hanania, R. (2025a). Groyperization Accelerating. Richard Hanania’s Newsletter / Substack.
Hanania, R. (2025b). Groypers Are Just More Honest MAGAs. Richard Hanania’s Newsletter / Substack.
Hanania, R. (2025c). JD Vance Is the White Kendi. Richard Hanania’s Newsletter / Substack.
Keillor, G. (2016). Done. Over. He’s here. Goodbye. The Fayetteville Observer. Retrieved 19 March 2024, from https://www.fayobserver.com/story/opinion/columns/more-voices/2016/11/10/garrison-keillor-done-over-he/22341685007/
Kofman, A. (2025). Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/06/09/curtis-yarvin-profile
Levitsky, S., & Ziblatt, D. (2018). How democracies die. Viking.
MacLean, N. (2017). Democracy in chains: the deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America. Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.
Said, E. W. (2000). Reflections on exile and other essays. Harvard University Press.
Serwer, A. (2025). The Great Resegregation. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/trump-attacks-dei/681772/
Shullenberger, G. (2023). The Poverty of Anti-Wokeness. Compact. Retrieved 12 January 2024, from https://compactmag.com/article/the-poverty-of-anti-wokeness
Shullenberger, G. (2025). Elon’s Great Mistake. Compact. https://www.compactmag.com/article/elons-great-mistake/
Snyder, T. (2018). The road to unfreedom : Russia, Europe, America (First edition. ed.). Tim Duggan Books.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/polls/donald-trump-approval-rating-polls.html#presidential-approval-polls
[2] https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/trump-tariffs-trade-war/
[3] https://news.gallup.com/poll/697445/americans-positive-progress-drugs.aspx#:~:text=Line%20graph.,said%20it%20was%20making%20progress.
[4] https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/53394-majorities-of-americans-disapprove-of-ice / https://www.reuters.com/world/us/just-29-americans-support-us-military-killing-drug-suspects-reutersipsos-poll-2025-11-14/
[5] https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/09/israel-has-committed-genocide-gaza-strip-un-commission-finds#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20Commission%20finds%20that%20Israel,and%20to%20prosecute%20alleged%20perpetrators.%E2%80%9D
[6] Kendrick Lamar was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Music Prize for his recoded album DAMN., released on 14 April 2017 by Aftermath Entertainment, Interscope Records and Top Dawg Entertainment, USA. Afrofuturist works include, for example, the musical works of composer/musician Sun Ra, and of science fiction writers like Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delany.
[7] Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593 (2024)
[8] In German, the Ermächtigungsgesetz, officially titled Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich, 1933 (Law to Remedy the Distress of People and Reich).
[9] Gray Mirror newsletter
[10] https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/commentary/project-2025
[11] https://lsj.com.au/articles/the-tiktok-us-deal-what-we-know-about-the-long-anticipated-change-of-ownership/
[12] https://www.theovon.com/podcast
[13] https://www.joerogan.com/