Days before the 248th birthday of the United States, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and proponent of the ghastly Project 2025 administrative plan, gloated over the Supreme Court’s contortionist ruling granting sweeping criminal immunity to the President of the United States:
Heritage Foundation president celebrates Supreme Court presidential immunity ruling: "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be" www.mediamatters.org/project-2025...
— Media Matters for America (@mmfa.bsky.social) Jul 2, 2024 at 9:09 PM
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He calls the present moment “the second American Revolution,” but it would be more accurate to say that they’re waging a counter-revolution, and, instead of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, they have Donald Trump, Mike Johnson, and Elon Musk.
What unites a Republican Party that can be a comfortable home for a narcissistic, hedonistic real estate magnate and grifter from New York; a devout Southern Baptist from Louisiana pushing for a Christian theocracy in America; and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur attached to visions of a technocratic future filled with his progeny? What’s the core value that they share?
The answer, I think, is hierarchy.
At its core, adherence to the value of hierarchy means believing that there are some people who are simply better and more worthy than others, not for what they do necessarily but because of who they are, though the relationship between “doing” and “being” is complex. And often implied in the belief is that the believer is worthy of the privilege that comes with being elevated hierarchy.
For those bound to the Christian faith, hierarchy is pervasive through core dogmatic elements. The gospels speak of the natural patriarchal order of the church, from God through the church through men down to women: “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.” (Ephesians 5:22-23). The Prosperity Gospel explains that those with wealth and privilege are favored by God to have it.
In the world of tech and Silicon Valley, their version of the Prosperity Gospel is the doctrine of Meritocracy: that free market capitalism naturally rewards good ideas, and so money, power, and influence are markers of meritorious people. Only under such a religion could someone who ran a $20 billion real estate company into the ground turn around and get a $300 million investment on a new real-estate startup just a few years later; or could a CEO who set $46 billion on fire on a product that nobody wanted and ultimately didn’t work, even going so far as to rebrand his whole company around this failed product, keep his job; or could a CEO consistently, repeatedly break promises and miss predictions and still have his every ludicrous utterance splashed in headlines across the world, pumping his company’s stock price to a value 50 times higher than what it actually earns.
And so they find resonance with a man like Donald Trump, who exists somewhere in the nexus of organized crime, celebrity, and New York high society, who only experiences the world as a hierarchy which he sits atop. He will make common cause with anyone so long as they reflect that vision back to him.
This common cause is a counter-revolution to restore hierarchy as the defining characteristic of American society. Every thread of 2024 Republican Party politics — the jingoism and xenophobia, the racism & white supremacy, the sexism & misogyny, the islamophobia & antisemitism, and “Wilhoit’s Law” that there are those whom the law is meant to bind and those whom the law is meant to protect - are the union of all of American’s strains of hierarchy. “Making America Great Again” means restoring what they see as the rightful hierarchical order.
Why did so many Americans throw tantrums at the early COVID shutdowns of cities and businesses, masking mandates, and vaccine requirements? Hierarchy.
Why was it solid policy to issue the giant grants of cash to business owners during COVID, whereas free school lunches to poor children are plain old socialism? Hierarchy.
Why did so many Americans refer to the George Floyd protests as “riots burning down the fucking country” but refer to January 6th insurrectionists as “peaceful patriots”? Hierarchy.
Why do so many Americans see no cognitive dissonance in flying both the Gadsden Flag and the Thin Blue Line flag? Hierarchy.
A large swatch of Americans - mostly white, mostly straight & cis-gendered, mostly Christian, and mostly men - are simply attached to the idea that there are some people who are just better than others and more deserving of privilege, station, and power; that there’s an order and hierarchy that must be rigidly maintained.
It’s all just about hierarchy. And once you have that lens, everything else starts to make sense.
What changed in the last twenty years 🔗
This pervasive belief in hierarchy isn’t new. It’s been deeply interwoven into the American cultural fabric since before the founding. The essence of chattel slavery is hierarchy. The Prosperity Gospel emerged in the late-19th and early-20th century America as the gilded age robber barons of the Industrial Revolution threw the country’s growing inequity into the spotlight. America inherited from the British common law the principle of coverture, explained by William Blackstone as, “The very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least incorporated or consolidated into that of the husband, under whose wing, protection, and cover she performs everything.” For the overwhelming bulk of American history, hierarchy was axiomatic.
But the arc of the last several decades, that postulated hierarchy has been gradually eroded, culminating in the elevation of a Black man to the Office of the Presidency, the Obergefell decision granting marriage equality, and the first major party Presidential candidacy of a woman — which is why the present moment is best thought of as a counter-revolution: they believe that what progress has been made must not only be stopped but undone.
Post-WWII America featured the emergence of several empowerment movements that, by the beginning of this century, began realizing unprecedented gains in broadening equity. The legal landscape shifted for women: birth control and the right to abortion gave women more ownership of their destiny outside of motherhood, Title IX opened up access to college for more women, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974 created the possibility of financial independence, and sexual harassment & gender discrimination laws made workforce participation a more equitable experience. The period saw the end of Jim Crow, the passage of the Civil Rights Act, and a centering of conversations around racial injustice in the public square. It saw a growing acceptance of non-heterosexual lifestyles, as discriminatory laws in housing, employment, and family law repressing LGBTQIA+ folx full authentic expression were rolled back and as non-heterosexual relationships gained majority public support ten years ago. Transgender folx are next, already in the throes of their own present battle for equity.
Conversely, for those traditionally privileged in America’s hierarchy, these gains came at the expense of that elevated status, particularly for white, cis-gendered, heterosexual men.
Prior to the realization of these advances in equity and equality, such men enjoyed far more unquestioned centrality as the main characters in America’s story. Such men presently represent only around 30% of our population, but whereas in an America with Jim Crow, with rampant homophobia and transphobia, without Roe, Title IX, or birth control, those men enjoyed unquestioned priority access to education, jobs, opportunity, wealth, and societal structures catering to their comfort and preferences. Women were beholden to men as economic dependents, sexual property, and second tier citizens.
Such men today face far stiffer competition, as avenues of opportunity have opened to others and as income distribution has broadened. Diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in colleges and workplaces have democratized that access away from white men’s historical privilege. The life many modern white men were raised to feel entitled to - a stable job, an affordable house, a devoted wife, a loving family, and social status - do not come as easily as was promised. They feel deprived of their birthright. They feel angry.
Extreme manifestations of this anger are easily accessible. The incel phenomenon embodies that anger and frustration most visibly: men viewing relationships with women as sexual transactional opportunities and bemoaning the feminist revolution that obliterated the economic dependency that made that transactional system viable to them. Similarly the Andrew Tate/Return of Kings phenomenon channels this anger into fantasies of violence and open embrace of misogyny.
But subtler manifestations show just how pervasive this anger and resentment around loss of privileged status can be. Consider this 2021 op-ed in the Orlando Sentinel.
In it, a middle-aged white man shares fond memories of his childhood going to Disney World, but how taking his children there as an adult, he encounters “inclusive” clothing and haircuts, the absence of characters embodying racist tropes (“Every grown-up in the room realizes that Trader Sam is not a representation of reality and is meant as a funny and silly caricature”), and the inclusive representation now present in its rides - much to his dismay. He seeks to wield his economic influence (“Disney World is going to lose us as customers if it continues down this path… if Disney drives away customers like me, Orlando loses money”).
But what I hear in his words are his lamenting that the experience of Disney World no longer exclusively centers on his comfort and preferences, that people other than cis-het white men have money that Disney is courting, and how deeply he feels entitled to a world that caters to him and validates his importance - and how he feels Disney and cultural forces relaxing adherence to hierarchy robbed him of that.
Not a polarization but a realignment 🔗
How the rise of Donald Trump sparked a metamorphosis of the Republican Party has been covered at length, particularly as the conservative elements in the GOP that still believed strongly in the rule of law (so called “Never Trumpers”) left the party in droves. Less appreciated may be the metamorphosis within the Democratic Party, and the two parties didn’t grow apart so much as political factions re-aligned across a different axis.
Until 10 years ago or so, both the Democratic and Republican Parties held tightly to hierarchy. The axis across which a person’s alignment fell at that point had to do largely with other political questions around economics and class, around foreign policy, or around social policy. But during the Obama years, that began to change.
If you’re a younger person, or even perhaps if you aren’t, you might not remember just how different the Democratic Party was before the 2010’s.
The Democrats of the Clinton years pushed policies with disproportionate consequences to communities of color, and not exactly accidentally so. The Bill Clinton presidency’s policy priorities don’t sound like modern Democratic ones. He sought to “end welfare as we know it”, painting a picture of “welfare moms” as single unemployed women (mostly Black) having children to reap the benefits of generous welfare support, successfully tying welfare benefits to having employment and limiting the extent of welfare support over time. He ran on a “tough on crime” platform that included strong death penalty support, passing in 1994 the legislation that accelerated America’s mass incarceration crisis.
The Clinton years weren’t exactly the pinnacle of gender equality either. Bill Clinton’s history as a serial womanizer was well known and understood, and yet it was not a fatal flaw to his candidacy in the eyes of the Democratic Party. During the Monica Lewinsky affair and the subsequent political theater around considering impeachment, the sin that America found most distasteful in Clinton was not that he seduced his early 20’s intern but that he lied about it, whereas Lewinsky was branded with a scarlet A and Hilary Clinton received a solid measure of blame for Bill’s infidelity.
Some 118 members of the Democrats in the House and 32 Democrats in the Senate voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, which preemptively sought to bar same-sex marriage nationwide, and it was not only signed by Bill Clinton, but he proudly included its signing in his 1996 campaign ads and told the gay and lesbian magazine The Advocate in an interview that “I remain opposed to same-sex marriage… This has been my long-standing position, and it is not being reviewed or reconsidered.” The Democratic Party did not support gay marriage until Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012.
People attached to the value of hierarchy were perfectly comfortable in the Democratic Party prior to the 2010’s. You could find well-off white people living in gated communities benevolently voting Democrat. Silicon Valley billionaires were aligned with the Democrats, not so much shifting rightward as needing hierarchy to reflect their merit. In 1996 when Clinton sought re-election, Clinton lost the white vote to Bob Dole by only 3 points.
But in the 2010’s, as the political power of women, people of color, and LGBTQIA+ folx grew and found a voice in the Democratic Party, the axis that divided America’s major political parties shifted. The Democratic Party became a coalition of those rejecting traditional hierarchies, in favor of equity and inclusion; and former Democrats whose allegiance was preconditioned on accepting such hierarchies traded in their blue for red.
Five million white people who voted for Obama in 2012 voted for Trump in 2016.
The counter-revolution is inherently anti-democratic and illiberal 🔗
Those engaging in this counter-revolution of hierarchy in America immediately run into a problem: the American liberal democracy. Those who adhere to hierarchy are too few in number to impose it on the rest of us, and the American institutions that have broadened rights over the recent decades are resistant to returning to inequity. Therefore the counter-revolution must be waged through anti-democratic means, undermining liberal institutions, and revoking individual rights.
Looking through our lens, we can see though that this poses no ethical dilemma to the Republicans. They fundamentally believe their voices, votes, and preferences should count more than others. This is an important differentiation from the illiberal progressivism of a century ago, the period that saw the rise of the modern administrative state and professional bureaucrat, emerging from the anti-democratic but benevolent beliefs that people don’t know what’s best for themselves and democracy cannot be trusted to yield the best outcomes. The illiberalism of the Second American Revolution has no such benevolence, however misguided; on the contrary, it is sadistic. As Adam Serwer of The Atlantic aptly quipped, “The cruelty is the point.”
As a side note, this is John McEntee, Trump's Director of White House Personnel and the primary architect of Project 2025. On Tik Tok he said he gives counterfeit bills to homeless people so they will be arrested when they go to spend them.
— LillianOrlando (@lillianorlando.bsky.social) Jul 5, 2024 at 8:44 PM
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Not only are they the minority, demographic trends indicate they may be a permanent minority. Republicans have not won a majority of the popular vote in a Presidential election since George W. Bush in 2004. The plain reality is that the core demographics across their coalition of hierarchies are in decline.
Whereas church membership in America remained rather steady around 70% for the latter half of the 20th century, it began to drop precipitously at the start of this one; practicing Christians are no longer a majority of Americans.
The share of the population that identifies solely as white continues to be a diminishing share of the American population, according the US Census. In twenty years, non-Hispanic white people are projected to no longer be the majority of Americans.
College educations, after decades of Title IX and affirmative action, have been increasingly democratized, pushing white men to the minority in many regards. More Bachelor’s Degrees go to women now than men. More than a quarter of Black adults over 25 have a college degree now, a proportion almost double from the beginning of the century. Whereas white students were 84% of the population of college students in 1976, by 2018 that had fallen to 55%.
Democracy favors majorities, and the counter-revolutionaries simply aren’t one anymore, so anti-democratic measures are necessary. Hierarchy contextualizes the major political undertakings of the Republican Party over the last decade.
Republican efforts to gerrymander districts to disproportionately maximize their representation in legislatures are therefore appropriate means to ensure the right people’s votes count more. Consider my home state of North Carolina: it’s unquestionably a purple state, but despite Trump having carried the state by only 74,000 votes (just 1.3% of the vote), the Republican caucus in the General Assembly enjoys a veto-proof supermajority of 60% of the seats. The Republicans flipped the Tarheel State’s Supreme Court in 2022, so despite that court having rejected the post-2020 Census redistricting map as absurdly unconstitutional, the newly seated court reconsidered the case and reversed; as a result, North Carolina is primed to send a Congressional delegation where 11 out of 14 members are Republican.
Likewise, right-wing messaging around election integrity fuels baseless suspicions of secret ballot drops, voting by non-citizens, and voting machine tampering - all nonsense, but feeding the confirmation bias of their base: if they represent the “True Americans” meant lead the country, and yet they are losing elections, malfeasance is the only possibility. The results are voter ID laws certain to disproportionately disenfranchise people of color; disinformation campaigns around mail-in ballots and full frontal assaults on drop boxes that might lower the barrier to entry to vote; and the strategic shuttering of polling places to maximize the relative turnout of voters in Republican-leaning areas.
And it’s telling the strategic efforts the Republicans have centered in consolidating their hold on the most anti-democratic of our government bodies. The US Senate is anti-democratic by design, where the state of Wyoming and its population of 580,000 people receives as much political input as the state of California and its population of 39,000,000; a voter in Wyoming has 67 times the power of a Californian to impact the US Senate. Consequently, the Senate is only 51% Democrat despite those senators representing 36% more people than their Republican colleagues.
During the Trump administration, the Republicans spent their time in the Senate stacking the federal judiciary with partisan appointments, including the Supreme Court, as Article III courts are almost entirely unaccountable to the people and enjoy lifetime appointments. A full quarter of the 890 federal judges were appointed during Trump’s single four-year term, including a full third of the sitting Supreme Court justices. Whereas 36% of the federal judges appointed during Obama’s administrations were non-white, only 16% of Trump’s appointees were. Those judges were on average just 47 years old when they were nominated to serve their lifetime appointments.
Again, our lens shows us that none of this creates a moral hazard for them. This hierarchist’s playbook rejects the suggestion that such maneuvering could be anti-democratic because he rejects the idea that all voices deserve equal impact.
Hierarchy is intersectional 🔗
When looking at a Mark Robinson or a Marjorie Taylor Greene or a Peter Thiel - none of whom are straight, cis-gendered, white men - hierarchy provides an answer for how they could so enthusiastically support a counter-revolution that appears to put them in the cross-hairs, because the mosaic of hierarchies in the Republican coalition are intersectional. As a Black man, Mark Robinson suffers in hierarchical systems that prioritize whiteness, but as a straight, Christian man, he fervently advocates for systems of hierarchy that privilege men, heterosexuality, and Christianity. Marjorie Taylor Greene would be disempowered in dimensions of hierarchy that are strictly gendered, but she benefits from systems that advantage white women, straight women, and Christians. Peter Thiel, while he is a gay man, adheres strongly to hierarchies that justify his wealth as meritoriously accumulated and that advantage white men.
The intersectionality of privilege in hierarchy explains why, while Donald Trump’s margin with white men was +17 points, it was 10 points lower with white women, 92 points lower with black men, and 107 points lower with black women.
But, lest the Democrats take the votes of those power-down in hierarchy for granted, the hierarchical political view can also exploit the dimensions of hierarchy resonant with the power-up dimensions of otherwise minority voters. Black communities, particular ones with strong faith traditions, have been more resistant to accepting of gay, non-binary, and transgender expressions in society. Latinx voters have been amenable to Republican courtship around abortion and Latino men resonate with the traditional views of masculinity offered in hierarchy. Many Indian Americans, inheriting the cultural legacies of India’s caste system, have supremacist racial views inline with the modern Republican party.
The people and examples I’ve referenced in this entry — Trump, Musk, Kevin Roberts, John McEntee, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mark Robinson, etc. — are compelling examples because they’re unambiguous. They’re clear and plain about the judgments and prejudices informing their systems of hierarchy, but most of the time, this system of thought uses more subtle, symbolic language. The people who are on the right-wing side of this political axis do not think of themselves as racists or sexist or homophobic/transphobic. They think of themselves as good people. In a way, it’s not their fault, because hierarchy has been the unquestioned archetypal organization of our culture since before the Founding. To those whom hierarchy’s preferences have bestowed comfort and privilege, with our cultural narratives like the Prosperity Gospel or Meritocracy, they may in fact have little vantage point or appreciation for how those in the shallower ends of the privilege pool have had to endure unique, additional struggles and challenges; and in fact, to those among hierarchy’s privileged who believe that equity was achieved through the counter-cultural movements of the 1960’s, efforts at promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion can ironically appear to be hierarchical, privileging others at the expense of white people, straight people, cisgender people, and men.
In 1971, Hunter S. Thompson wrote of his experiences of life in the San Francisco Bay area during that counter-cultural movement of the 1960’s:
And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
The work began in the 1960’s, but it was not finished. It has been a process continuing ever since, with disempowered groups fighting, bleeding, and dying to establish a more equal standing in America, changing minds over years and decades. This present moment and this election is our time in that movement, but unlike Thompson, we must not be deluded into a belief in inevitability or that there is no point in fighting. With Biden having withdrawn from the 2024 Presidential Race and Kamala Harris — a woman who is both Black and Indian, who is herself childless but in a blended family with her white, Jewish husband — it becomes even more starkly critical to understand our present politics: it is a war over whether the revolution of the last 60 years that has democratized power and dismantled systems of traditional hierarchy shall proceed past America’s 250th centennial… or whether this wave has truly hit its high-water mark.
Pray it has not. Fight to ensure it. And vote accordingly.