Author: Noah Smith; Translated by: Block unicorn

"Man doesn't care what's on TV. They only care about what's left on TV." --Jerry Seinfeld

N.S. Lyons is a popular essayist in the "conservative" tradition. His Substack The Upheaval is a recommended reading, although I agree with less than half of what he wrote. But he is well-read, knowledgeable, able to integrate information from multiple fields, and is not afraid to think deeply about major historical issues in real time. Reading his work will help you better understand the beliefs of the modern right. On many issues, his message is something people in the MAGA world desperately need to hear.

In a recent article titled "The Powerful God of America", Lyons points out a profound truth I think is a moment of our current history. He wrote that the “Long Twenty Century” started late and was not fully consolidated until 1945, but in the following 80 years the ideology of its spirit that dominated our civilization’s open society about the world’s status and the right to be faced will be suppressed in the “greatest evil” of the long Twenty Century, but now it is back…

Populism today is…a long-suppressed desire for action that should have been taken long ago, to get rid of the suffocating lethargy brought by procedural management and to fight passionately for collective survival and self-interest. This is the return. This requires the restoration of ancient virtues, including the critical perception of and civilized self-worth...

This is what Trump, represented by all his roughness: the powerful gods have escaped from exile and returned to the United States... Trump himself is an actor, not a meditator... He is the embodiment of the entire rebellious new world spirit that is subverting the old order... Trump's boldness itself reflects more than partisan game - it itself represents the stagnation of the old paradigm being subverted; now "you can do things directly."

The word "thumotic" here refers to Harvey Mansfield's use of the Greek word "thumos" to indicate a passion and driving force. Francis Fukuyama spelled it as “thymos” and predicted back in 1992 that Donald Trump might be an American to destroy freedomA perfect manifestation of the impulse of "ambition" of the ideology of the ideology.

So, Lyons sees Trumpism as a wild, unapologetic male-driven re-proposition in the Fight Club style—just unlike Taylor Duden directs it to arbitrary, Lyons sees Trump and Musk unleash their masculinity passion in dismantling the civil service.

But Lyons never specifically explained how this destructive impulse would lead to the return of the "powerful god" he longed for. He sees the civil service and other American post-war institutions as barriers to revitalizing foundations, families, communities and beliefs, but he does not really go beyond the crushing of these so-called obstacles to look forward to actual reconstruction. He just assumed that this would happen naturally, or thought it was a future problem.

I believe he will be disappointed. Trump's movement has been around for a decade and during this time it has built nothing at all. There is no Trump Youth League. There is no Trump Community Center, Trump Neighborhood Association or Trump Business Club. Trump supporters have not flocked to tradition either; the Christian recession has stopped since the pandemic, but Christian belonging and church attendance are still far below the turn of the century. Republicans still have more children than Democrats, but the birth rate in Red State is also falling.

During Trump's first term, the right-wing attempts to organize citizen participation were almost ridiculously few. Hundreds of "Proud Boys" gathered to fight against anti-fascists on the streets of Berkeley and Portland. There were some smaller right-wing anti-lockdown protests in 2020. About two thousand people rioted on January 6—mostly in their forties or fifties. None of these formed the kind of long-term grassroots organizations that were common in the 1950s.

For a very small number of people, Trump's first term was a live role-playing game; for others, it was just a YouTube channel.

What about Trump's second term? There is nothing. Even the number of people gathered has dropped sharply. Conservatives who might meet out in 2017 are now huddling in the living room alone, sliding back and forth between X, OnlyFans and DraftKings, punching in the air when they read Elon Musk and his computer otakus team fired employees or Trump cut off aid to Ukraine. "You can do things directly," yet there is almost no Trump supporter actually doing anything except passively for themCome on the nominal team. Unless you are one of the few geeks who helped Elon Musk dismantle the bureaucracy, this "ambition" is completely second-hand.

You see, MAGA movement is a network phenomenon. It is another vertical online community—a group of lost roots, atomized individuals, weakly connected in vast distances through the illusory bond of ideology and identity. It doesn’t have any sense of family, community or roots for somewhere. It is a digital consumer product. It is a sub-forum. It's a fan club.

N.S. Lyons and Conservatives completely misunderstand the reasons why America abandons its roots, communities, families, and beliefs. We give up these "powerful gods" because the liberal party is too harsh on the old Adolf (Hitler). We give up on them because of technology.

In the 1920s, large-scale wealth began to emerge in the United States, and technology that gave individual humans unprecedented autonomy and control over their physical location and information emerged. Car ownership allows Americans to travel anytime, anywhere, liberate their connection to specific locations. Telephone ownership allows people to communicate from a distance. TV and radio expose them to new ideas and cultures, while the Internet exposes them to more.

So then social media and smartphones appeared. Suddenly, “society” no longer means the people in the physical space around you—your neighbors, colleagues, fitness partners, and more. First, "society" becomes a group of avatars that write text to you on the small glass screen in your pocket. Your phone becomes a place where you meet and talk to your friends and lovers, and a place where you argue and think. People's foundation has shifted from physical space to digital space.

Accumulating evidence suggests that smartphone-supported social media is associated with feelings of isolation and alienation, loneliness and loneliness, decreased beliefs, reduced family formation, and decreased birth rates. The 20th century’s automotive, telephone, television, and internet technology made American society a little disconnected, but it managed to partially resist and retain some remnants of its roots. However, smartphone-backed social media breaks through these last barriers of resistance, turning us into free particles floating in the invisible space of memes, identities and distractions.

The powerful gods proved to be more vulnerable than the new gods made by silicon.

The person who does this is more or less the person who N.S. Lyons cheers for now. whenHowever, it's not Elon Musk himself; he just makes cars and rockets. But Steve Jobs, Jack Dorsey, Zhang Yiming and a large group of entrepreneurs who follow their "ambition" to pursue huge wealth have built a virtual world that has become our most real home.

I'm not saying that they are evil in doing so. Technology has a way of moving forward in developed societies; if it can be realized, it will likely be realized. No one knows its shortcomings in advance. But ironically, N.S. Lyons now believes that this group of people who will open up a new era of foundation and community is the group of people who destroyed the old era.

But anyway, yes, this thing will fail because nothing is built up. Yes, every ideological movement assures us that a utopia will replace it after the old order is completely overturned. For some reason, utopia never seemed to have arrived. On the contrary, the so-called temporary pain and sacrifice periods are getting longer and longer, and the enthusiasm of the ideologies at the helm to blame the enemy and eradicate the revolutionary enemy is growing. At some point, one will clearly see that the promise of utopia is just an excuse to eradicate the enemy—“ambition” itself becomes the purpose.

Trump's Treasury Secretary has told us that the economic pain caused by Trump is just a "detox period", Trump blames "globalists" for stock market declines, and Trump's Justice Department blames egg prices on hoarders and speculators. If you can't recognize this plot line, you must not read much about the news or history.

Simply smashing the old order itself does not create anything. The Visigoths and Vandals built nothing on the ruins of Rome. They indulge their "ambition", plunder wealth for a period of time, and then disappear into myths and memories.

For the past fifteen years, I have watched with frustration as the real world communities and families I knew as young were torn apart, replaced by a bunch of fictional online identity movements. I'm still waiting for someone to figure out how to re-patch society-how to do what Roosevelt and the greatest generation did a century ago.