NYT columnist, author of Believe, https://t.co/knRQn31ehz, host of Interesting Times, https://t.co/lHQ9JJT1Iv
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1. The idea of Trumpism as a largely virtual and performative rebellion, not a real reformation, was basically my own take on his first term; it was an attempted rebellion against decadence that felt decadent itself. The landscape of the last couple of years, though, has felt somewhat different: You could see both Trump and the pandemic as having accelerated the collapse of a prior order AND having cleared space for rebuilding. And from a conservative-leaning perspective there was some cultural and economic building going on. In education the booming classical-school movement and conservative-leaning beachheads in (red-state) higher ed. In demographics a mass movement to red states, esp. by families with kids, after Covid, and some indicators of birthrates ticking up in those states after Dobbs. In religion the end, for now, of a period of secularization and some stirrings of revival. In media the emergence of alternatives to the consolidated, woke-dominated establishment of the social-media age. In Silicon Valley/tech a partial transition from the virtual to the physical -- self-driving cars, space travel, etc., with Musk at the vanguard. Not a renaissance but (again, from a conservative perspective) green shoots. That's why I keep writing columns warning against the ways in which Trump and Musk might be squandering the moment -- because I think there really is an interesting moment here, something promising but also quite easy to let slip away.
I've written before about a "tech-trad" convergence, an alignment on anti-wokeness or birthrate concerns or just basic optimism about the intelligibility of the universe; I think that description makes sense when you're talking about JD Vance + Elon Musk.
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