Imagine showing the scenes inside the Capitol at Monday’s inauguration to a visitor from the distant, misty past of 2021. Imagine them watching as the leaders of the same American tech industry that just four years ago united to de-platform Donald Trump now crowded close around him, competing for his favor. Then think about how one might explain the larger change behind these scenes — the rapid movement from the era of “woke capital,” from a seeming alignment of all major American institutions on the side of progressive ideology to a Trumpian restoration in which the right’s cultural gains seem much larger than Trump’s electoral majority.
Even as the lords of Silicon Valley came to kiss the presidential ring, my colleague David Marchese was interviewing Curtis Yarvin, an eccentric intellectual of the outsider (now insider?) right. Yarvin is best known as a critic of democracy and a champion of digital-age monarchy, but one of the ideas that originally won him readers is less prescriptive, more diagnostic: It’s his analysis of what he called “the Cathedral,” the interlocking elite opinion-shaping institutions of our society, which tend to move in concert (leftward, in his view, always leftward) despite lacking any form of centralized control.
In one sense this sounds like a banal analysis: Of course elite institutions tend to share some sort of consensus; of course cultural gatekeepers converge on similar ideas.
But there are different degrees of consensus and convergence, and Yarvin’s argument seemed especially timely in the 2010s because the Cathedral he described seemed to become more and more intensively itself: More ideologically uniform across different institutions (universities, foundations, media, tech companies, corporate H.R. departments), more ambitious and radical in the ideas that it embraced, more lock step in the way those ideas were propagated and more inquisitorial (“Have you committed a disinformation, my child …?”) in the control it seemed prepared to exercise, through the social media companies especially, over American discourse and debate.
A lot of right-wing “post-liberal” thought, not just Yarvin’s monarchical ideas, gained adherents in this environment. There was a sense that to recognize the existence of the Cathedral was to see through liberalism itself — to realize that liberal neutrality was essentially mythical, that supposedly liberal institutions were already functionally post-liberal, that politics was an imitation game and the right needed to learn from progressive power. And what should it learn? Simply this: That the point of entering into political conflict is always to pursue hegemony, to shape and rule rather than to merely coexist.
My own view, elaborated in an essay for First Things in 2022 on the revival of Catholic integralism, was that part of this insight was correct. There is no such thing as a purely liberal society, and general liberal norms and procedures are usually filled in by a specific cultural consensus and guided by an establishment with a shared perspective on the world. Man does not live by proceduralism alone, and even within liberal parameters, any worldview that takes its own truth claims seriously — be it secular progressivism or conservative Christianity or accelerationist transhumanism — will naturally seek some form of culture-shaping power and, when the opportunity is there, hegemony as well.
But I also argued, drawing on the arguments of the Catholic theorist Jacques Maritain, that in a society like contemporary America — pluralist, individualist, decentralized and vast — any hegemony can only work if it stays soft: nudging rather than imposing, respecting a range of individual liberties and communal differences, allowing plenty of room for dissent and critique. The historical success of America’s Protestant establishment (before its post-1960s self-extinguishment) depended on this kind of light touch and deference to pluralism. And whenever the old Protestant hegemony attempted to impose too much — in its anti-Catholic spasms or its attempts to replace with gentleness of blue laws with the strictures of Prohibition — its efforts mostly came to grief. A Cathedral can rule America only if it doesn’t try to constantly run an inquisition.
This reality, I argued, had implications for the potential impact of the Great Awokening on the present-day Cathedral’s power and unity. Throughout the Trump era, progressive cultural hegemony was seemingly transitioning from a “soft” to a “hard” phase — about that much the Cathedral’s critics were correct. But it was possible, I speculated, that this transition would be inherently self-limiting, trading in the successful soft hegemony enjoyed by Obama-era liberalism for a more brittle form of power:
… it’s still an open question whether that intolerance will lead inexorably to greater power over the entire culture, or whether in a society as diverse and complex as ours the zeal of a hegemon has a self-limiting effect—generating stronger backlash when it uses power too overtly, creating new centers of resistance when it imposes theological conformity too explicitly, and imposing a Brezhnevian (or late-19th-century Bostonian) freeze that looks solid but can’t survive the heat of crisis.
Whereas the more relaxed gnostic hegemony, a more Maritainian form — think early Obama-era Hope and Change, not peak Great Awokening—might have more staying power, disarming opposition and pre-empting backlash, balancing its power and its society’s pluralism sustainably rather than risking a crackup for the sake of inquisitorial control.
In hindsight I didn’t push this argument hard enough, because just three years later exactly that kind of crackup is obviously upon us.
Now of course it may be temporary. The vibes have shifted against liberals and progressives in the past without fundamentally undermining their cultural advantage. No existing version of conservatism seems ready for its own form of hegemony, populism is a blunt-force weapon that lacks the requisite seductive power, and the A.I. models that may catechize the future still lean distinctly left. And no doubt Yarvin has a 10,000-word Substack essay teed up explaining why the Cathedral’s apparent crisis is merely a temporary setback before the inevitable next leftward ratchet (that only a Caesar can prevent).
But I do think that in the suddenness of the shift, in the tergiversation of the tech barons and the rise of the Gen Z Trumpists, you can see a case study in how a seemingly hegemonic worldview can pass very rapidly from consolidating power to squandering it, from riding roughshod over its enemies to galloping off a cliff.
A light touch, a gentle hegemony, power exercised subtly and indirectly — these are the hallmarks of a consensus built to last. And historians of cultural power may regard the past decade, from Barack Obama’s second term to Trump’s return to power, as a remarkable example of how to take an ecclesiastical edifice with every seeming cultural advantage, turn it over to the inquisitors and wake up to suddenly find yourself with nothing left except bare ruined choirs.
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