Let’s jump the gun on far-white populist nationalism and ask the big question. How should the rising populists, from Hungary to the U.S. to Britain to France, govern?

The question becomes urgent now that our Democratic friends are sounding the klaxon over the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Spencer Chretien announced Project 2025 in January 2023, over a year ago. It’s a libertarian-conservative wishlist that, I assume, Heritage has been doing every four years since whenever.

In response, President Trump has come out and done his Sgt. Schultz act: “I know nothing about Project 2025.” Of course not. Heritage wants to fundamentally transform the U.S. government, to coin a phrase. But the ordinary middle-class voter just wants the woke stuff to stop, and President Trump, far from the authoritarian dictator of liberal fantasy, is just the candidate of Americans that want to make it stop.

And at this point, President Trump doesn’t want the voters to think that he will do anything more than restore America to normalcy.

But we all know that politics doesn’t solve anything. Why? Because of Andrew Breitbart and his dictum that politics is downstream from culture. In other words, so long as our educated-class rulers define the culture, they will also define the politics, no matter how we the people vote. That’s what they are saying in Britland after the election. Britain’s politics was governed by the culture of the globalist technocratic elite before the election, and it will continue to be governed in the top-down manner that the globalist technocrats prefer. Ditto France after Le Pen dropped to third place in round two of the snap election.

Sci-fi author John C. Wright says that Breitbart’s dictum is only half the story because, he writes, “in the same way politics is downstream of culture, culture is downstream of religion.” But I say go deeper. And riffing on sci-fi author Douglas Adams, I say:

Politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, everything."

What does that mean? It means that our current politics, of the top-down rule of the educated class, issues from the universe of Newtonian mechanics, the religion of Marx, the culture of the Enlightenment, and the politics of educated-class domination.

Obviously, we are not going to reverse that overnight. But there is Hope, as Barack Obama once said.

First of all, the universe of Newton has been replaced by the universe of relativity and quantum mechanics and the Uncertainty Principle and the idea that the universe “emerges” with what George Gilder calls “surprise.” And so the top-down secular religion of Marx where godlike Communists smash the bourgeoisie and enforce equality for the proletarian gives way to a emergent religion. As I prophesy:

It will be an emergent lifeworld, a community in the world with other humans with whom we communicate and negotiate and develop moral agreement in an ongoing person-to-person process, per Jürgen Habermas.

And who or what would be God in such an emergent world? Frankly, I don’t know.

You can see that such a religion would create a culture of community, of people working together to solve problems, not to forget angel investors working to help startups. Downstream of such a culture would obviously be a politics that had very little to do. Because in an emergent lifeworld, who is the enemy?

And, frankly, that’s a problem. What do we do with men that want the Power to change the world, rather than let the world “emerge” from trial and error? Send them to Occupy Mars, courtesy of Elon Musk?

So here we are. The foundations of the liberal world order are shaking; the populists are emerging from the far-white shadows; the politicians we are electing don’t have a clue how to clean the Augean stables; ordinary middle-class people don’t want to give up their government pensions and healthcare and education; and the functionaries of the ancien régime are reduced to using the criminal law to beat their opponents.

Is it the best of times or the worst of times?

Probably neither. My faith is that, just as the pre-Newtonian worldview produced agricultural empires, and the Newtonian worldview produced a mechanical educated elite, the relativity quantum-entanglement worldview will produce an emergent world.

And there’s not a thing that any damn politician or devoted activist can do about it.

For me, it would be really nice if we humans decided to back off the current mega-government craze into something more like a face-to-face lifeworld. It would be nice if we all realized that a ruling class really has no clue how to do anything except fight world wars with other peoples’ sons and milk the economy for its supporters.

One thing is for sure. The populist crowd won’t be any smarter than the current crowd.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: Public Domain