Trump’s Victory Means The Culture War Is Won. For Now…

The establishment's decline is now impossible to deny. Change is coming fast.

Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States. Again.

The media has repeatedly referred to Trump’s re-election as “The Greatest Comeback in Political History.” Only the second president in American history to be elected to non-consecutive terms (despite numerous attempts), the obstacles the Trump campaign overcame to win were overwhelming. Legal attempts to disqualify him from running by labeling him an “insurrectionist,” multiple concurrent attempts to imprison him, attempts to restrict speech favoring him as “mis-” or “disinformation,” and multiple assassination attempts inspired by claims believed by an enormous number of Americans that he was a literal fascist who would end democracy.

The scale of Trump’s overwhelming victory—including the popular vote and a trifecta—has already been thoroughly acknowledged in the obligatory op-eds and videos put out by all of America’s political pundits. But accompanying this is an under-discussed shift from Trump’s 2016 victory. 2016 was easy to see as a one-time fluke; confidence in Hillary Clinton's victory was so high that it depressed Democratic voter turnout, and there was James Comey and Russian meddling to scapegoat. Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 seemed to confirm this narrative—Trump could be seen as a last gasp of a dying political movement, still representing a significant share of Americans but doomed to extinction by an inevitable left-wing majority. This worldview evaporated in a single evening on November 6th, 2024.

Unlike in 2016, Donald Trump didn’t just win the election—he won the culture.

That doesn’t mean American culture is represented by an enthusiasm for everything Trump—many Trump voters did so reluctantly. I mean that the consensus narrative ubiquitously shared by the establishment institutions that have dominated America’s post-WWII neoliberal era (those Curtis Yarvin calls “the cathedral”) has ended. A tipping point has been crossed. Those institutions told Americans that Trump was an authoritarian monster that no decent American could support. With no remaining excuses, it’s now fully clear to everyone that a majority of Americans don’t believe their narrative anymore. The true story of this election is not the policies that will change over the next four years, but a cultural shift that will last a lifetime.

Trump won not merely by boosting traditional Republican turnout, but by fundamentally changing the Republican coalition into a populist revolt against establishment thought. He made anti-establishment ex-Democrats central figures in his campaign, namely Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard. He sought more than any major party nominee since Ronald Reagan to pull in libertarians, speaking at the Libertarian Party National Convention to court them and making concessions that inspired anti-establishment Libertarians to support him over the party’s own candidate. He promised to make America the “crypto capital of the planet,” pulling in a crypto community that opposes the establishment monetary regime. And he made alternative media appearances core to his campaign strategy, receiving over 100 million views on YouTube between his and J.D. Vance’s hours-long podcast appearances with Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Andrew Schultz, Lex Fridman, and Patrick Bet David—possibly twice as many views when considering the unknown counts from Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Kamala Harris, meanwhile, did the opposite and led the Democratic coalition further towards being the establishment’s party. Her campaign and the political action committees supporting her received more than twice as much funding from large dollar donors as Trump’s. She made Liz Cheney and other neo-conservatives—who have long led the foreign policy establishment—central figures in her campaign. When RFK Jr. contacted her campaign to negotiate his endorsement, she refused the meeting and leaked it to the press while insulting him. And while she appeared on one major podcast, she primarily relied on establishment media coverage and declined an appearance on the world’s largest podcast, Joe Rogan’s, despite Rogan being an independent-minded Bernie Sanders voter. Rogan himself has spent years under attack by the establishment press, who have transparently resented his growing influence while theirs has declined.

With Trump’s victory comes the victory of his entire coalition. In his acceptance speech, Trump recognized this “historic realignment.” He re-confirmed that he would give wide latitude to RFK Jr. in his administration, clarifying “[RFK Jr.] wants to do some things, and we're gonna let him go to it.” Theo Von and “the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan” were thanked. And while there’s been little time yet for much real work, Trump confirmed he won’t be inviting neo-conservative members of his first administration back into his second, namely Nikki Haley and Mike Pompeo. Quote tweeting libertarian thought leader Dave Smith, Donald Trump Jr. confirmed he will be focused on keeping neo-conservatives out during the transition.

With Harris’s loss comes the loss of her entire coalition. Blame has been flung around as coalition members attempt to determine what went wrong. Many Democrats want to blame Joe Biden’s choice to stay in the race so long, some the embrace of the Cheneys, others insufficient messaging about the economy, and yet others support for woke policies like taxpayer-funded gender transitions for illegal immigrants and prisoners.

These critiques are all correct but fail to recognize the deeper truth underlying them: if the establishment messaging apparatus still held hegemony, none of their mistakes would have mattered.

Were the establishment narrative still the mainstream narrative, the majority of Americans would have believed Biden was in good mental health, that the Cheneys were brave defenders of democracy rather than baby killers, that Democratic policies were helping the economy, and that woke policies are merely humane policies. Politics is less about facts than epistemology; as black sheep have, one by one, come to distrust the herd (enabled by the increase in the availability of alternative information sources, culminating in Elon Musk’s pro-free speech version of X), the herd is now smaller than those who have left it.

The “red pill” metaphor popular within conservative discourse demonstrates that many have long understood there’s a world outside the establishment’s Matrix, but now the Matrix knows it lost to the rebellion, we know they know they have lost to it, and they known we know they have lost to it. For the first time, there is full transparency about this reality, which itself is world-changing. The censorship regime clamping down on alleged “mis-“ and “disinformation” to maintain the establishment’s epistemological hegemony will presumably be dismantled by the Trump administration, and Tim Walz’s unconstitutional proposal to ban it and hate speech will never come to fruition. If the establishment knows they cannot defeat anti-establishment epistemology, as they now do, they’ll be forced to engage with reality outside the Matrix.

What does that mean in practice?

For decades, Republicans worked to placate the establishment media, understanding that they were evaluated through the media’s lens. This twisted many of them into believing that the Matrix’s false reality was true, causing bizarre behavior such as Mitt Romney marching in support of Black Lives Matter’s communist movement. Trump’s constant campaigning against the media has already ended such behavior, but you’ll soon see the reverse: Democrats will be forced to acknowledge anti-establishment reality to be positively evaluated by our institutions. Unlike Harris, the next Democratic presidential candidate will very likely go on Joe Rogan and make genuine efforts to appeal to his audience.

Harris will also likely be the last Democratic candidate of her kind as the party moves towards anti-establishment Bernie Sanders-like candidates. This change will not come easy; it will represent not just a minority status for but the final death of the old establishment, which requires control over powerful institutions to indeed be “the establishment.” As such, the establishment will fight hard to maintain control of the party, but 2028’s Democratic primary will feature unprecedented strength for an anti-establishment candidate. No longer will the establishment be able to credibly order the party to rally behind a Harris/Biden/Clinton-like candidate by claiming only this type of candidate can win the general election. Sanders already posed an exceptional threat to the establishment in 2016 and 2020, and only minimal additional support is needed to cross the threshold next time.

And the effect of coalitioning with neo-conservatives will be properly understood, as Democratic strategists see that for whatever establishment Republicans they won over, they lost far more anti-establishment Democrats in the process.

Neo-conservatives will further degrade into irrelevancy as the hot potato nobody wants.

However, the culture being “won” should not be misinterpreted as the end of history. The losers are not going away and will retain dominance over certain institutions. Those institutions that require the support of the masses, such as the media and political parties, will be irrevocably altered, but those of the elite for the elite will be more resilient—don’t expect academia or the fine arts to suddenly reinvent themselves. Battles will continue to be fought within all of these spaces. The New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC will continue to exist and cater to their current audience but will be seen as lesser sources of information and be forced to engage more genuinely with what’s outside their bubble. Academia will continue to entrench leftist groupthink by granting degrees and tenure to those in their bubble, but corporations will increasingly look for alternative credentials when hiring as academic graduates progressively misalign themselves with what’s valued in the outside world.

Political movements in the United States rarely fully go away, but rather morph and merge into something new to try to take power again, or continue on but become small enough that they can be ignored. In the era of self-reinforcing social media communities, those whose cognitive dissonance is powerful enough will remain in the Matrix indefinitely. Social media is currently riddled with Democrats discussing cutting off all ties with Trump voters, including canceling Thanksgiving so as not to see Trump-supporting families. As time passes, such cultists will find it harder and harder to continue to bury their heads in the sand… but many will still be able to continue for a shockingly long time.

For these reasons, although anti-establishment and anti-leftist voters can revel in their victory for now, they shouldn’t get too complacent. As author and podcaster Meghan Daum insightfully noted, while many feel free to express their support for Trump on X, Substack, and in other right-of-center spaces, far fewer are willing to do so on Instagram, Facebook, or in person with left-of-center friends for fear of rattling their relationships. That’s a reasonable fear, but the tradeoff is enabling the continuance of their maladaptive cultist behavior. And, over time, new cultural divides will emerge, bringing with them new culture wars. The authoritarians unsatisfied with the incoming order will become the new rebels, planning their next assault for when the time is right.

Since the end of this culture war doesn’t mean the end of culture wars, it’s still important to solve the divides that face Americans. I’ve written about the merits of peaceful national divorce as one solution, and I still encourage consensus-building for it; now is the time to tell left-wing localities we’re happy to let them go their own way. Less radical would be a push for increased federalism; the incentives for the federal government to take more power arguably make this solution more difficult than national divorce, but philosophically federalism is widely supported by conservative Republicans, who should be pressured to follow through on that stance while holding power.

As someone who spent the last few years professionally fighting the last culture war, I intend to dedicate my next years to trying to immunize America against the next one. The new world provides new means to create lasting change. Whatever you choose to do, don’t waste this precious opportunity.