Here is my general take on what is going on now:

Within domestic US politics, partisan cycles tend to run in 40-year intervals. The Republicans were the dominant party between 1969 and 2008, which represented the transition from the hegemony of the traditional northeastern wing of the ruling class to dominance by the Sunbelt wing. The Nixon era was a transitional phase, and then Sunbelt hegemony was achieved under Reagan, Bush, Sr. Republican dominance of Congress in the 90s, and the Bush Jr. However, the terrible performance of Bush Jr and the winding down of a partisan cycle created an opportunity for the northeastern liberal establishment to make a comeback in 2008 with Obama as their frontman. Motivated by the Dutton strategy developed by the Democrats in the 70s and the Judis/Teixeira thesis of the early 2000s, the Democrats came to believe generational, demographic, cultural, economic, and partisan change would provide them with a long-term electoral majority. Consequently, the newly returned-to-power liberal wing of the ruling class adopted the PC/Woke/SJW/TH paradigm as its self-legitimating ideological superstructure, which was coopted from the academic left, left-activist culture, etc. This paradigm was dominant between 2008 and about 2023, or 15 years. It intensified during Occupy to distract from class issues toward IdPol and then during the first Trump presidency as an ideological weapon against Trumpism.

Five years ago, woke Malthusian therapeutist totalitarian humanism was at its peak. Now, it is being eclipsed by autocratic techno-feudal transhumanism, an even more radical position that exploits the rhetoric of liberal democracy, bourgeois nationalism, and cultural conservatism, as Vance’s lecture to the EU elite indicates, but which will be discarded when it’s no longer useful. Right now, this is somewhat analogous to the various phases of the French Revolution, when each group of ruling lunatics was serially succeeded by a new group of even greater lunatics.

However, influential ruling class/power elite sectors eventually began to decide that “woke” had expired its utility, as aspects of the “woke” paradigm actually threatened state security and ruling class interests (like “defund the police,” “abolish ICE,” etc.). Woke comes in many denominations, and some denominations can’t be as easily coopted as they take their anti-capitalism, anti-statism, anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism, etc more seriously. Additionally, elements of the “woke” Malthusian therapeutic statist totalitarian humanist paradigm proved to be unpopular with the general public, such as a perceived slackness at controlling crime in some major US cities (as commentators like Michael Schellenberger and Joel Kotkin have discussed), the perceived overbearing and inquisitorial nature of “political correctness” or “cancel culture,” the view that pandemic-related public health restrictions were excessive or dishonest; the view that trends regarding immigration have become excessive, the perceived fanaticism of the anti-climate change movement (which Michael Lind has identified, and the perceived extremism of the transgender movement. As Parvini has pointed out, military recruitment began to drop during the era of totalitarian humanism, in part because of the increased alienation from institutions of those cultural sectors from which military recruits are most likely drawn.

The pivotal moment was October 7, 2023, when the “woke” crowd went over to the pro-Palestine side en mass, and the Zionist elite subsequently moved to weaponize conservative/classical liberal anti-woke (Jordan Peterson, Dave Rubin, the “Triggernometry” guys, etc.), liberal anti-woke (e.g. Bari Weiss, James, Lindsay, Brett Weinstein), Islamophobic “new atheism and “cultural Christianity” (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Gad Saad, Ayaan, Hirsa Ali, etc) against the pro-Palestine movement. Additionally, aspects of the Meanwhile, Biden’s shitty performance and economic conditions indicated the Republicans, any Republican, even Trump, would win in 2024. So the power elite began to act accordingly, likely making deals behind the scenes that the lawfare campaigns against Trump would end as long as he upheld core ruling class interests. I agree with Neema Parvini that the prevailing ruling class consensus, at least among the dominant power centers, was in favor of Trump winning reelection and that Harris was a “jobber.”

If I understand Parvini’s views correctly (which I may not), his perspective is that elites manipulate public opinion by signaling what is acceptable and what is not through influencers, opinion leaders, and propaganda outlets. Such signals can be both direct and indirect, overt and covert. Meaning the elites were signaling that “it’s okay” to vote for Trump. Parvini is an elite theorist of the Italian school (Pareto, Mosca, Michels) and believes democracy doesn’t really exist. Instead, an oligarchy of elites manipulates and shapes public opinion through the means described. Ironically, this viewpoint is very similar to varieties of left-wing thought like Horkheimer’s concept of a “culture industry,” Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony, Foucault’s ideas on the relationship between discourse and power, Baudrillard’s notion of the “simulacra,” or Guy Debord’s “society of the spectacle. The bottom line is that the power elite began sending out signals to the general public that voting for Trump is now “okay.”

Here is the state of US politics at present as I see it:

On the ground level, currents like the “populist-right,” “know-nothing” nativists, low church evangelicals, Christian Zionists, MAGAtards, and “paranoid-style” conspiracists form the “shock troops” for the GOP/Trumpism. The wider GOP voting constituency includes “barstool conservatism,” “walk away liberals,” Rust Belt economic nationalists, and anti-woke conservatives/libertarians as its “inner constituency,” and economic voters and anti-incumbency voters as the “outer constituency.” However, the real base of the GOP is the “petite bourgeoisie” or local and regional capitalism, with national industrial capitalism, Sunbelt capital, and “bourgeois nationalism” as an intermediary level within the US “Right.” At this intermediary level, we can observe a range of Republican traditions being continued or revived, including elements of Grover Cleveland, McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, Harding/Coolidge/Hoover, Taft, Eisenhower, Nixon, Nelson Rockefeller, Reagan, the Bushes, Buchanan, etc.

However, the real “owners” of the GOP since the 1950s have been the military-industrial complex and the “CIA Right” of figures like William F. Buckley. However, in recent times, even the MIC and CIA seem to have been superseded by the triumvirate of globalist financial oligarchs (e.g., the BlackRock-State Street-Vanguard axis and related interests, “foreign and domestic”), techno-feudal transhumanists (and their ideology of neo-reactionary corporate monarchism), and, of course, Zionist plutocrats behind AIPAC and the Israel Lobby.

I think the evidence supports the conclusion that Trump’s hardcore backers want him or his successor to be a “president for life” who functions as a defacto strongman dictator, even if the state formally remains a democracy (similar to Russia or Turkey). Hence, the recently introduced Congressional legislation allows Trump to have a “third term.” I suspect Trump personally wants the US presidency to become a Trump family business (similar to the Assads or Husseins in the former Ba’athist regimes in Syria or Iraq) with his kids as his appointed successors. Meanwhile, the techno-feudal oligarchs want such a figure as a defacto monarch with themselves as modern feudal nobility (similar to what we see in the Gulf States), with these “Slop Right” (term coined by Parvini) low-brow “shock troops” described above as the equivalent of the Salafist forces in the Gulf or the Muslim Brotherhood in Turkey. Obviously, the Zionists want to use US military, political, and economic power to continue a program of Zionist expansionism in the Middle East for the purpose of capturing what they consider to be the biblical “promised land” extending between the Nile and the Euphrates, ethnically cleansing various populations in the process, reducing surrounding countries to failed states like Libya, or mere satraps like Kuwait, and enhanced with today’s surveillance technology.

Those are the objectives of the neo-reactionary corporate-monarchist techno-feudal transhumanists (Musk, Thiel, Vance, Andreessen, Bezos, etc.) and the Zionists (e.g., the Adelson clan and Trump’s Kushner in-laws). As for the globalist financial oligarchs, my working hypothesis at present (drawn in part from the analysis of Shahid Bolsen) is that the globalist oligarchs first aligned themselves with liberal internationalism, national finance capitalism, and the trans-Atlantic sector of regional multinational capitalism/finance to support the Ukraine war, not to fight Russia but to weaken Europe and, by extension, America, while pushing Russia closer to China and strengthening the BRICS. Now that such has been accomplished, the oligarchs are moving rightward to coopt the national industrial capitalist class (the “national bourgeoisie” or the “lower levels of capital” as Caleb Maupin has characterized these sectors) and the related populist-nationalist parties of various countries (the alliance between the traditional working classes and the “merchant Right” that Thomas Piketty has identified) to carve up the world into a system of financial unipolarity but geopolitical multipolarity with each of the major powers having their respective spheres of influence, very similar to the 19th century.

It seems like what is going on now is a glorified version of when the New York Mafia’s Commission of the Five Families colluded to carve out their respective territories. The consensus among the global elite seems to be that Eurasia will go to Russia; Europe and North America will go to the USA; the Middle East will go to the GCC; East Asia will go to China (which means Taiwan will probably go the same direction as Hong Kong), and the Global South will go to the BRICS (which basically means China).

As I said, there seem to be three major sets of interests guiding the new administration: the transnational financial oligarchs, the techno-feudal transhumanist oligarchs, and the Zionist oligarchs. The big questions are: What will happen when their respective interests clash? Is an Eastward pivot towards the BRICS compatible with continued Zionist expansionism and techno-feudal transhumanist ambitions?

Woke Malthusian therapeutist totalitarian humanism continues to be the hegemonic ideology within the Western upper middle classes and will probably be so for a long time to come. It’s the latest incarnation of liberal Protestantism. However, at the level of the ruling class ideological superstructure, it is now being eclipsed by neo-reactionary corporate-monarchist techno-feudal transhumanism, which is an even more extreme and dangerous perspective, and is a more immediate concern than woke totalitarian humanism. It’s 1991, and techno-feudal transhumanism is grunge, while woke totalitarian humanism is hair metal. Out of the frying pan and into the fire.