The New York Times "On Politics" newsletter yesterday quoted Elon Musk in a recent interview describing MAGA efforts to dismantle the federal government as a "revolution." And, in truth, there is something a bit "France, 1792" about the whole atmosphere under this new regime.
Conservatives, of all people, were once upon a time supposed to be the ones who knew that such a comparison was not necessarily flattering. But, oh well. Here we are. I guess all I can do now is hope that the revolutionary fever eventually subsides—as history suggests it inevitably will. I just hope I don't lose my head, in the meantime. Thermidor can't come soon enough.
What's odd about this "revolution"—though—is that—unlike, say, the Bolshevik revolution, or the abortive German revolution of 1918-9—it was not preceded by any obvious crisis. There was no humiliating national defeat or economic collapse. All of that is happening now, of course—thanks to MAGA; but it did not precede Trump's second term.
Indeed, historians will be hard-pressed to explain the extraordinary public discontent that seems to have swept Trump into office. After all, the United States was by every measure in an enviable position on the eve of the 2025 MAGA Revolution. We enjoyed global hegemony as the leader of the world's most powerful network of alliances. We had the world's most prosperous economy.
So—why did the American people choose that moment to elect someone intent on eliminating all the props of U.S. global supremacy? Why did we decide to sabotage our own economy, alienate and betray all of our allies, dismantle our systems of scientific research and higher education—at the very moment that these are all at the pinnacle of their success and the envy of the world?
One can point to a variety of problems and injustices in the preceding order (high prices, etc.) But none of them explains why now; nor were they anything close to severe enough to justify comparison with the national crises that preceded other historic revolutions in declining powers—such as Russia and Germany in the early twentieth century.
So, what's happening here?
A few weeks before the 2024 election, I offered a prediction. If the American people do decide to destroy their own democracy, I wrote, it will not be because of any deep economic or structural reason. To the contrary, it will be because they were "bored." It will be, as D.H. Lawrence put it, "for fun"—just "to upset the apple-cart/ And see which way the apples would go a-rolling."
Reading the great nineteenth century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt this weekend, I discover that he agrees with me. In his discussion of the "crises" and revolutions of history, he observes that human nature is perfectly capable of creating one just for the hell of it—just "for fun"—just for the sake of escaping "boredom" (as Julien Gracq also put it).
"In the last resort," Burckhardt writes (in his Reflections on History), "the impulse to great periodical changes is rooted in human nature, and whatever degree of average bliss were granted to man, he would one day (indeed, then more than ever) exclaim with Lamartine: La France s'ennuie." (Hottinger trans. throughout.) Which translates to: France is bored.
In other words—according to Burckhardt—it shouldn't astonish us that the United States would decide to blow itself up and shred its own sources of hegemonic success in the very hour of its triumph. We can expect nothing else of human nature. We achieved the apogee of our success as a society—and got bored with it. To borrow a phrase from Trump himself—we got "tired of winning."
It may be that the human animal is actually not built to endure stasis. As I once said to a friend, in explaining why I had decided to detonate my previously perfect professional life and go to law school instead—it was precisely the perfection of the former idyll that made me leave it. Perfection, after all, implies that nothing can change. Perfection is frozen.
In other words—I said—"perfection is death." The phrase then became a sort of mantra between my friend and me. And it turns out that Jacob Burckhardt reached the same insight: "The concept of happiness which consists of permanence of certain conditions is of its very nature false. [... P]ermanence means paralysis and death. Only in movement, with all its pain, can life live," he observes.
There is no final, permanent state of perfection or success that human societies can reach, in other words. And if we did reach it, somehow—that idyll itself would be the very first thing we would smash. It would bore us. And so we see the much-discussed "anti-incumbent bias" sweeping the world, at the very moment when liberal democracy seemed to have established a particularly excellent status quo.
I guess people were indeed "tired of winning" under the conditions of a stable, peaceful, liberal democratic U.S.-led world order. They wanted change—just for the hell of it. Just to upset the apple-cart. And, boy, are they getting it. The stock market was tanking this morning, thanks to Trump's new trade wars—and this is happening the same week he has completely sold out Ukraine.
Perhaps, on some level, this really is what people wanted. This way, at least, we won't be bored anymore. But... I have to think that pretty soon we will all be wishing for a little more boredom again. We may have been "tired of winning" as a society before. Pretty soon—we are going to get tired of losing.
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