Never Reelect a Revolutionary

To have the Messiah behind you does not make for a very comfortable position.
—Jacob Bernays

Crisis looms over the Trump movement in its moment of victory, and it is a crisis of narrative. The old accounts of who Trump is, what he has accomplished, and what he and his cause are destined to achieve no longer apply. Because this will be the second time Trump enters the White House as a revolutionary, the second time he assumes leadership promising a definitive reckoning. And politicians in general—and politicians like him in particular—aren’t supposed to have a reckoning with themselves.

Trump is one of many right-wing populists holding direct or indirect power in dozens of nations throughout the globe, some because they occupy formal leadership positions in governments, some because they function as kingmakers in coalition politics or within a political party, some—most informally—because their threat compels other political actors to adjust. Few opponents of right-wing populism hold on to hopes that the movement’s recent rise would be reducible to a parenthetical in our collective political life. It is now an entrenched element in democratic systems throughout the world.

But being entrenched is a problem for populism. Populism declares that there is a totalizing antagonism between the people and the establishment. Its raison d’être stems from the claim that elites leading the media, the government and educational and scientific institutions operate in opposition to the interests of the populations they are meant to serve. Some populists cast the difference between the two camps in terms of identity, claiming that “elites” and the “people” are fundamentally different human types. Racism can grow in this environment, but even it can be a secondary tool, a means of stylizing a deeper drive in the populist imaginary: namely, the claim that the oppositions between elites and the people are irreconcilable. For that reason, gradual reform, compromise and moderation will not do. Populism lurches toward revolution and the complete explosion of the establishment.

That’s why political success menaces the populist. How can populists justify managing the very elite institutions they were meant to destroy?

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Populists may respond to this riddle by painting their enemies in the establishment as residing outside of their reach, such as when Hungarian president Viktor Orbán claims to be fighting against the European Union and Western liberalism. Some, like the Sweden Democrats, may be lucky enough to be kingmakers for a governing administration without being formally a part of it, allowing them to shape policy while posing as outsiders. Enfranchised populists may claim that the forces they fight against are so embedded in institutions that elected politicians can’t (yet) reach them, and thus that the cause of rebellion must continue even after an electoral victory. Narratives about a deep state running the U.S. government during the first presidency of Donald Trump are an example of the latter.

These are attempts at mitigation rather than cures, however. If, for example, a deep state allegedly remains in control even after a revolutionary takeover, populism’s supporters may deem political action futile and disengage. Elected populists are thus forced into a world of gamesmanship, negotiation, compromise and management. They often become conservers, conservative even—not in the palingenetic sense of resurrecting a lost golden age but merely, and more boringly, through their incentive to maintain the world in which they flourish. Max Weber famously argued that bureaucrats will seldom cross the institutions they run, because with time their personal power and prestige depend on those very institutions.

Such is the condition for many populists throughout the world today, in what we might call an era of post-populism—an era during which yesterday’s revolutionaries now cling to the status quo, where radical “Make America Great Again” gives way to paranoid “Keep America Great.” Elected populists (and particularly reelected populists) now find themselves tasked with instilling a durable mythology that will allow supporters to maintain their commitment to the cause even as it changes.

A model for this kind of governance can be found in the paradoxical narrative of Christianity and its messiah: already but not yet. That narrative coalesces around the idea of Jesus, the revolutionary who both arrived but is expected to return in a Second Advent—the savior who has already come but not yet come. The New Testament Letters of Paul in particular elaborate the theme: Romans states that we are adopted (8:15) but still awaiting adoption in Christ (8:23); Ephesians that we are in possession of redemption (1:7) but not yet redeemed (4:30); 1 Corinthians states that we are sanctified (1:2) while 1 Thessalonians says that this will occur at the coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ (5:23-24). It is the hallmark concept of what is sometimes called inaugurated eschatology, or messianic time. Thinking this way, we accept the idea that a singular transformative moment occurred and is awaited. Thinking this way, we could accept that yesterday’s revolutionaries are destined for a Second Coming (the Parousia) in the future, and that we live during the time in between.

The Christian messiah was born, crucified, resurrected and will return again in glory to judge the living and the dead. Populism’s messiahs were not born; they campaigned and rallied. They were not crucified but elected. They ascended not into the heavens but into the state. And a final day of reckoning bringing salvation to their flock lies ahead. Meanwhile, at this moment—now—we wait, knowing what was and what will be.

Trusting that efforts begun yesterday will reach their fulfillment tomorrow allows us to experience past, present and future as one—a defining feature of messianic time. Despite its religious affiliations, this way of thinking about time has always been attractive to the most skilled populist leaders. Consider when, on March 30, 2018, more than a year into his presidency, Trump said, “We started building our wall. I’m so proud of it. We started. We started. We have $1.6 billion, and we’ve already started. You saw the pictures yesterday. I said, ‘What a thing of beauty.’” What a thing of beauty. A wall not in fact “started” then, and still nowhere near completion today, could nonetheless be an object of awe.

Upheaval and the dissolving of the existing order beckon as our imaginations skip ahead to conclusions—to the final maturation of institutions and things in our midst. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, following the German jurist Carl Schmitt, argued that we might glimpse this feature of messianic time when we experience the declaration of a state of emergency; when a government exercises its most awesome power by using law to suspend law itself. The state of emergency leaves us with no discernible legal system of prohibitions, rights or procedures. It reveals the extralegal power of government and exposes the impotence of credentialed bureaucrats and their regulations.

Law’s ultimate exercise is lawlessness, just as a total victory of health care, education or science would obviate those pursuits too. And perhaps the same can be said of politics. A 2023 opinion survey revealed that over half of Americans who consumed conservative media and who had favorable views of Trump wanted a leader who would “break some rules” to affect desired changes. As Christ abolished the law by fulfilling it, so too do the populists, for the ostensible sake of law and order, seek to transcend institutions, process and politics itself in a post-constitutional state.

A world without rules and officers might sound harrowing, but it could also satisfy a desire for unmediated experience, including unmediated contact with power. This, too, is one of the promises of populism, and a reason it yearns for leaders who bypass media and speak to the people unfiltered. Few articulated this logic better than did Trump’s former speechwriter and media entrepreneur Darren Beattie. Speaking in 2023 in response to then fashionable calls for a Trumpism without Trump, he declared,

The revolution that [Trump] brought about in 2016 is the greatest threat to the establishment in decades, if not centuries. There’s a reason that the establishment is pulling out all the stops to silence, suppress and destroy not only Trump himself, but the energies associated with the movement he created. … These are things that are not subject to the traditional mechanisms of control and that’s why the establishment fears it so much. It’s not even about a specific policy. It’s about the potential energy that exists in that special connection that exists between the leader of the movement and the American people.

That’s what Trumpism is according to Beattie: energy linking leader with people. It’s the sort of thing that doesn’t need guidelines, sanctioned interpreters or even language. It could still survive if all those things perished.

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Already but not yet: messianic time is also a time of rituals commemorating the past and envisioning future deliverance. Christians celebrate the Eucharist to bring history into the present, and some turn to the arts to imagine Christ’s Second Coming. Populists indulge in such temporal play too, through events like the mass riots in Washington, D.C. and Brasília in 2021 and 2023. Though billed as protests against past elections, these events were also opportunities to perform the future, namely, the reckoning and destruction of the establishment that the faithful hoped to see. The Trump and Bolsonaro supporters were forced to turn to spectacle—a type of public theater combined with traces of a militarized coup attempt—to taste fulfillment; to stage an allegorical portrayal of what they had hoped they could achieve through politics. Historic fascism failed to produce its promised reforms, and so it consoled its followers by offering them the entertaining spectacle of war; contemporary populism attempts the same with the dramatized capitol storming.

Once elected and assimilated into the governing establishment, figures like Trump and Bolsonaro lose their claim as revolutionaries, canceling or delaying their parousial reckoning indefinitely. Thus the demand for consolation and compensation among populism’s rank-and-file who despair, not because their leaders lost, but because those leaders won.

The savior’s arrival may suspend laws and topple institutions, but after, as we enter a period of waiting, new institutions and rules emerge to keep their legacy. In the case of Christ, this new institution was the church, an incubator of structure and rigor, often the antithesis of radical fervor. We excuse the church for departing so profoundly from the nature of its rebellious figurehead, for we understand that the occasions for dramatic change are yesterday and tomorrow, but not today.

This may present a way for MAGA’s zealots to accept Trump nestling into the bureaucracy of the Republican Party and the White House. If Trump’s movement was once an engine of chaos attracting outsiders and weirdos—forcing us to contend with the unpredictability of a leader lacking ideology and convictions but teeming with charisma—all that is bound to vanish. His party, his government will soon run through a familiar world of formalized litmus tests aimed at uniformity and preservation. That is the point of the infamous Project 2025, after all: a means of preventing divergence and rationalizing and implementing some pieces of a haphazard political milieu.

Those bound to be on the outs in the reelected revolutionary regime see these signs too. Take Nick Fuentes, a prominent online voice for the alt-right, who shortly after Kamala Harris announced her candidacy declared: “The Trump movement is dead, it’s dead. The real shit lords, the real 4chan people, the channers—all the people from 2016 that brought the meme energy are now gone. They have either quit politics entirely, they are liberal, they are Nazis, you know, they’re something else, but they’re not on the Trump side. You know who is on the Trump side? GOP shills.” The demographic turnover Fuentes observed promises to bring about a new stasis where little happens that is unexpected and unplanned, brought to you by a man who saw fit to silently sway to music on stage for forty minutes at a campaign rally rather than taking live questions.

Trump’s diehard supporters would tell you that I’m wrong. Against the political theology I’ve offered here, they might suggest one of their own: that Trump the father begot a son, Vice President-Elect J.D. Vance. Or that Vance is St. Paul to Trump’s Jesus, as Steve Bannon put it. The Ohio politician could be the one to take the unrefined spirit of Trump and clarify and channel it into a coherent agenda, after which its real moment of societal spread could commence.

Think of the uncommon blend of left economics and cultural conservatism that Vance derived partially from Trump’s ramblings, and for which he has become an articulate spokesperson; if Europe teaches us any lesson, it is that this blend is a formidable foe for established politics, from the center-right to the far left. If it actually came to pass in America, it wouldn’t mire us in cyclicality like the old left-right battles over the marginal tax rate, nor freeze us in messianic time. It would bring rupture and ignite linearity and, if not progress, then a frontierism serving those who seek opportunity over obligation and eros over civility.

Standing in the way of that future? The instincts of a man who suffers no friends; who sees and attacks rivals everywhere. These are the instincts that led Trump to churn through partners and allies during his first term, and which might lead him to cannibalize Vance during his second. Instincts that we once regarded as chaotic, but which now—were they to consume the radical change-agent in his midst—would keep things still, just a little longer.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore (Flickr, CC / BY-SA 2.0)

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