I find the overreaction to the US election quite amusing. Not concerning Trump’s authoritarianism, incompetence, and malice, which have already raised sufficient alarm among Americans during his first term. He may be the most unstable and dangerous person ever elected as president in our nation. But I’m talking about something else. Witnessing one chief executive after another paying homage to Trump and MAGA, with Apple, Meta, Amazon, and OpenAI donating identical $1 million to Trump’s inauguration through their chief executives or corporate accounts, there’s a sense that Trump’s election signals some sort of sweeping ideological ‘vibe shift,’ a triumph of right-wing populism over all its foes. But that is far from the truth. The reality is, we don’t know whether Trump’s second victory will have a lasting ideological impact on American politics. If Trump fails, then all the ideas he supposedly vanquished, from ‘wokeism’ to neoliberalism to Reagan-style conservatism, may well surge back. But that doesn’t mean there’s a competing movement waiting in the wings, ready to take over as the ideological or counterideological successors to Trumpism. The future doesn’t belong to populists, progressives, liberals, or libertarians. It belongs to the competent, and the first movement that truly meets the practical demands of the American people will establish a lasting political future. History teaches us a lesson here. Ever since George W. Bush’s re-election in 2004, we’ve been in a period of unusual political instability. Many Republicans believed Bush’s re-election heralded a new era of Republican political dominance—until Democrats swept Republicans out of power in the House and Senate in 2006 and reclaimed the White House in 2008. Barack Obama’s victory, along with his filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, represented a moment of Democratic triumph. At long last, the emerging Democratic majority, described by Politico as ‘a left-of-center coalition of minorities, young people, women, and knowledge economy professionals,’ was asserting itself and transforming American politics.
Read from: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/opinion/trump-hegseth-california.html