How MAGA Won the ‘Sensitive Young Man’

“I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses. It doesn’t necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident.”

—Henry Kissinger, July 2018

The “great man” theory of history lost favor a century ago, and for decades university faculty have found it quaint, vulgar, or problematic. Like other ideas that right-thinking people long ago discarded, its disreputable status hasn’t stopped many from believing in it anyway.

We’ve all heard before that Donald Trump is a pragmatist, a man of action and not ideas—he did not write a manifesto before coming to power or spend an exile in Vienna (or even Florida) developing revolutionary theories. He spent his adult life developing buildings in New York City, then starring on a reality TV show that cast him as a merciless and instinct-driven businessman.

Yet despite Trump’s lack of an explicit ideological project, or maybe because of it, his rise has coincided with a new energy in right-wing intellectual life. It didn’t start with him; some of the public intellectuals, opinion shapers, and radical bloggers who are now associated with Trumpism were writing about politics long before Trump, and have merely found in his paradigm-breaking success an opportunity to assert new ambitions. There is, however, a younger generation, who were children when Trump first ran for office, and whose political imaginations were ignited by his rise to power. They have no memories of belonging to—or being accepted by—any party or cultural milieu except Trump’s. And for them, Trump is not just a disrupter, an excuse, a historical symptom, or an accident.