I am less optimistic about the election of Donald Trump than most. As he adorns the cover of Time magazine as their “Person of the Year,” as Antifa and Black Lives Matter fail to riot, as the left cannot even be bothered to feign outrage, as predictions of Civil War on the horizon melt away, and as the media collectively limps to the acceptance that he will once again be president and that the “woke era” is well and truly over, I cannot help but feel something is up. Surely, all that should signal ultimate triumph and victory, no?

Well, no. All it signals to me is that a good portion of the elites have made a tactical calculation to switch sides at a time when America faces a chronic military recruitment crisis, appears intent on threatening World War III, and, perhaps most crucially, when Israel needs its support more than ever. At this crucial moment, America needs to be competent again and to stop messing about with DEI nonsense. It needs its majority population, which has been treated abominably in recent years, to buy back into its institutions and to once more believe in “democracy” after the debacle of the 2020 election.

In 1911, the political philosopher Robert Michels coined the term “Iron Law of Oligarchy.” This concept did not simply reiterate the ideas of the other two elite theorists—Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto—that the organized minority always rules over the disorganized mass, but also explained how ostensibly dissident or upstart democratic movements end up, over a long enough period, being co-opted by the system such that they are no longer dissident at all, but rather part of the very system they started out opposing. In other words, you do not change the system; the system changes you.

Trump has been a political figure for nearly a decade, over the course of which he has seemed to utterly transform American politics, remake the Republican Party in his image, take on the hated Washington and coastal elites, and defeat them all. Nevertheless, the reality is that in 2024, the MAGA movement is not what it was in 2016. Trump’s trademark bellicose rhetoric and larger-than-life character remain, but now his outfit is much more professional, organized, better funded, and appears much more like a competent counter-elite.

Fans of Trump will tell you that he has learned his lesson. We are told we will not get a repeat of his first term, when he was in office but not really in power, because this time he has a team of avenging angels behind him: an all-star cast of Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, J. D. Vance, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and so on. Notably, he also has attracted big donors such as hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who, after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack, have switched their support from Democrat to Republican since they perceive the woke left to be hostile to Israel, something of which no one could ever accuse the GOP, and least of all Trump himself.

During this process, two other things happened: first, MAGA became much more diverse. We now have an all-singing, all-twerking cast of characters: Latinos for Trump, Transsexuals for Trump, Disabled Black Lesbians for Trump, etc. It has long struck me that MAGA has achieved in actu what the left could only ever achieve in theory, namely, it has become a truly diverse, equal, and inclusive movement. MAGA, in many respects, embodies “woke” or DEI in practice. Conservatives or Trump fans always justify this as promotion based on “merit.” That is surely cynical, since MAGA has bent over backwards to make a song and dance about its diversity over the past several years. This accords with the conservative activist Christopher Rufo’s plan—which I call “Back to Fresh Prince” (named after the 1990s sitcom)—in which Trump will bring about a more truly liberal, equal, colorblind, and race-blind America by abolishing wokery and restoring the terms of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Perhaps readers of this publication are old enough to remember Samuel T. Francis’s essays on Martin Luther King Jr. might immediately see the flaw in this plan. Yet this is the stated goal not only of Rufo but of the incoming Trump administration. It has been openly championed by the likes of Musk and Ramaswamy. 

Second, MAGA quietly dwindled back into being “classical liberals,” with Musk and Co. seeking to put Milton Friedman back on the menu. I have noticed that many Never Trumpers, including Ben Shapiro and most of the National Review writers, now seem fine with Trump. What changed? In 2016, Trump was chiefly an anti-war, anti-immigration, economic protectionist candidate. Today, he has picked a cabinet full of war hawks especially hardcore in their Israel support and billionaires who favor increasing legal immigration and following a basically Reaganite economic program. 

A lot for Ben Shapiro to cheer about, but not much actual draining of the swamp that was promised eight years ago. The Iron Law remains, it seems, undefeated. ◆