The Big Shift
And the Passage from the Left/Right to the Up/Down
The Fall of the Rebel Angels, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1562
There is a spirit of suspicion and distrust plaguing our world. This has created a massive shift away from established institutions and towards decentralized alternatives. This shift is about as vast as one could imagine; it’s happening across the globe and involves just about every facet of people’s lives, particularly as it relates to their feelings about and participation in centralized, established institutions that organize public life: government, media, banking, schooling etc. I am constantly wondering, why does it seem that people are broadly turning away from almost every established institution in society and looking for decentralized alternatives? Why does it seem that so many people feel that their longstanding, established institutions have turned against their interests? Lets look a few examples of this great shift.
Politics
In politics and governments all around the world there’s been a marked rise in populist movements. Donald Trump is sometimes written off as a far-right populist and fascist, but he is largely seen in a vacuum. Trump is simply one piece of a much broader political reconfiguration. And because of an unshakeable Trump-derangement, many people fail to see him as a part of this larger pattern. But over the last decade or so, there have been numerous other chaotic, popul-ish, Trump-like figures disrupting and reorganizing their nation’s political landscape: Melonie in Italy, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Bukele in El Salvador, Orban in Hungary, Boris in the UK, Milei in Argentina, Poilievre in Canada, the list goes on.
When people no longer trust the ruling order, they opt for chaos. For better or worse, these candidates represent a widely held anti-globalist sentiment. Apart from their bombastic personalities, what draws people to these candidates is a deep sense that over the last few decades, a ruling class of global power-brokers has been knocking on their door and taking them for a ride. They believe they are victims of a globalist blob of unaccountable, unelected bureaucrats, a “deep state” that threatens their sense of identity, social norms, culture, who they are. They feel that the new regime’s ethos frames them as unwashed masses, uneducated bigots and “great replacement” conspiracy theorists for having what they believe are reasonable concerns. The fault lines between the regime-friendly and the new-populists seem to hinge primarily on issues like global economics, immigration, war, biotech, cultural identity and social and sexual norms1.
The divide between establishment/populist candidates and voters is happening both between party lines and within party lines. In recent US GOP debates, the fault lines within the republican party have been on full display. Desantis and Ramaswamy undoubtedly represent a more conservative/populist voting base and Haley/Christie represent the more center-right/establishment-friendly voters. The dividing lines here exist mostly around issues of war, crime, the border, Trump, and social/cultural issues like transgenderism and the post-Roe abortion landscape.
Also worthy of note is that the Republican debates have all been hosted and broadcasted by left-leaning establishment media networks like CNN, NewsNation, ABC, NBC, where the topics, questions, language and time is allocated, negotiated and ultimately controlled by these liberal-leaning networks.
The division we are seeing can no longer be understood as simply the continued march of leftist progressivism onto the right. Rather, the landscape today increasingly seems to indicate a burgeoning, corporate and cultural elitism that is being met by a populist pushback.
To say this another way, the traditional left-right political paradigm seems to be shifting and evolving into an up-down, or an in-out paradigm. Meaning, today it is less about how progressive-left or conservative-right you are (although that is certainly still relevant) and more about whether you will accept the new regime’s political program, or push back against it.
Let’s look at more examples of this great shift.
News/Information
The democratization of information has happened largely through the wedding of social media and the news. The number of people that now get their news from social media is 62% and growing. Social media democratizes information in a profound way; it appears to be the internet’s version of the printing press, stoking divisions that have laid latent in years past. This has all led to the creation of what I’ll call an “establishment-to-alternative-media pipeline”, a mass exodus from establishment cable news programs and legacy press outlets generally, to a number of independent, internet-based news/media alternatives found on thigs like podcasts or Substack.
In the US, conservative hosts like Glenn Beck and Dan Bongino have left Fox, and even more moderate hosts like Megyn Kelly left NBC, to build independent online alternatives. Even liberal journalists like Bari Weiss left the NYT to build her own online network on Substack, interestingly named “The Free Press,” she is one of many. Though there may be other financial or political reasons that these folks have chosen a new, more independent path, they’re part of a much broader reconfiguration in media, and they’re doing pretty well.
Spotify recently put out a chart that showed Joe Rogan was getting 11 million views per episode of his podcast. At the time this chart was posted, Tucker Carlson was the most-watched cable news program getting about 3 million viewers a night. Not-so-shockingly, Tucker has since left Fox and started his own independent online network. (Interesting side note on Rogan, on one episode while discussing CNN’s unfriendly treatment of his taking Ivermectin when he had the virus, he commented that he acquired roughly two million new subscribers in the two months directly following the debacle. This could be due to Rogan’s marketing skills or antifragility as a businessman. But I wonder if it’s also indicative of a broadening anti-establishment attitude in media).
Last year Gallup reported “Just 7% of Americans have ‘a great deal’ of trust and confidence in the [establishment] media.” This means we have actually found something that 93% of Americans can agree on today, that alone is remarkable. It is safe to say we are witnessing an astonishing and unprecedented rerouting of trust and information.
Money
We are seeing the decentralization of capital with the growing legitimization of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies which hold a $2.5 trillion dollar market cap and is growing. While very impressive, this is still relatively minor when you compare it the market cap for bigger and more longstanding investments like gold ($16 trillion), or real estate ($47 trillion). Also with apps like Venmo, people at the click of a button can send and receive funds faster than ever. Also interesting is the new ability to fundraise at a grassroots level with crowdfunding apps like gofundme and kickstarter. Today, people are able to invest money, send and receive money, and raise money in alternative and decentralized ways, all at the click of a button and faster than ever.
Education
Schooling has seen a movement towards smaller, classical education co-ops and homeschooling. After a slow and steady rise for years, an enormous spike in homeschooling followed the Covid pandemic. WAPO reported just a couple months ago that there has been a 51% increase in homeschooling nationwide just since 2017.
Also there has been a precipitous drop in respect for the traditional university experience, the AP recently reported that “Mechanic and repair trade programs saw an enrollment increase of 11.5% from spring 2021 to 2022, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. In construction trades, enrollment grew 19.3%, and in culinary programs, it increased 12.7%. Meanwhile, overall enrollment declined 7.8% at public two-year colleges, and 3.4% at public four-year institutions.” It seems the college-aged are moving away from the traditional college experience and choosing smaller, alternative schooling options.
Travel
We are also witnessing the democratization of travel with apps like Airbnb and Uber radically disrupting the tourism industry. Believe it or not there are even apps for renting private airplanes (Uber for jets?) apps like Wheels Up and FXAIR boast this capability.
Religion
It would be tempting to see the growing schisms in the Christian church as a deepening of an already existing left/right divide, and that is partly true. But today, that no longer tells the entire story. In the world of reformed Protestantism, Megan Basham has done reporting on the growing rifts in the Church. In a recent X/Twitter post about evangelicalism’s flagship publication Christianity Today, she signaled to the shift I’m highlighting here,
“Christianity Today is now Sojourners [a historically left-leaning Christian publication]… Its key editorial staff are democrats, supporting pro-abortion, pro LGBTQ candidates. The political positions it promotes trend progressive. It strives to maintain relationships with the powerful not the faithful… CT will continue to receive millions of dollars from large, left-wing foundations and big money progressive donors, but average Christians should not support it with their subscriptions or serious consideration… In the future, CT will have the same influence over mainstream evangelicalism thought and opinion as Sojourners does. Which is none.” (Emphasis mine)
Whether or not you agree with Basham, her language here represents a growing distrust in and shift away from what could be considered establishment Evangelicalism. Evangelicalism is just one strand of the Christian Church. But today, no denomination has been left untouched by this spirit of suspicion and division. Almost every subdivision of Christianity is dealing with deepening divides that point to a growing distrust in major, once-trusted Christian institutions. New churches are being planted, older more reformed and orthodox churches are growing, alternatives are emerging.
During Covid, Francis Collins who headed the NIH for many years, mingled his political establishment influence with his evangelical identity to go on tour with major megachurch pastors like Ed Stetzer, Rick Warren, Russel Moore, and Tim Keller. The purpose of Collins’ efforts was to persuade congregants to adhere to the fed’s Covid guidance (masks, vaccines, social distance etc.) or as Collins put it, to “love your neighbor”. This moralization of the mask/vax issue stoked a lot of discomfort and division in Christianity.
The splits in Christianity seem to be no longer defined simply by left/right differences, or even Catholic/Protestant denominational differences, but by orthodox/modern differences, and whether or not a church or denomination aligns itself with the new establishment pieties. When you see a rainbow flag hanging outside of a church today, this is less about liberal theological drift and more about elite colonization and the signaling of the new regime’s values. It is worth noticing that the rainbow flag being flown outside of churches is the same flag being flown outside of many US embassy’s around the world. It expresses the dominance of our modern elite’s new imperialistic project. “Globohomo” is a pejorative, internet slang term that was created to capture this sentiment.
I’m sure there are many more and even better examples of what I’m describing here. For times’ sake, let us move on to a bigger question.
Why?
Why is this happening? Why are so many turning away from central, established institutions and looking for alternatives? Why do so many people feel that their longstanding institutions have turned against them?
The Establishment
Just in my lifetime, I believe there has been a major change in what I would call the US political “establishment”. Growing up, there was a sense that the establishment was characterized by American republicanism. Take for example that from 1969-2013, 28 out of these 44 years claimed a republican president. The Bush dynasty dominated the better part of two decades of American politics. 9/11 and the 2008 economic crisis were defining moments, and the republican ethos was characterized by being pro-war, big business and small government. Bush and Cheney’s patriot act was a signpost of the establishment’s centralization of power, and depending on your politics, a deep violation of everyday American’s privacy and trust.
Massive shifts in sentiment started to occur and we saw a Horseshoe Theory affect start to emerge. People on both the left and right saw the fed wield unprecedented power, they saw things like the Patriot Act and the Snowden debacle as deeply unsettling. Since the end of George W. Bush’s second term and the inauguration of the Obama era, we have continued to witness more of this shift. Standard notions of what is considered the “establishment” or what is left and right type political behavior have become less predictable.
JD Vance, a right-wing populist-style senator from Ohio was recently found linking arms with the UAW union during a strike. Ron DeSantis, republican governor of Florida has routinely used state power to disincentivize and attack the Disney empire. Also, don’t forget that in 2016, Trump collapsed the “blue wall” when he won a number of blue rust belt states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania that most people thought Hillary had in the bag. Prior to 2016, the last year a republican won Michigan was 1984; that’s 7 consecutive US presidential elections where a democrat won Michigan, until Trump in 2016.
Today, the Democratic party, historically known as the party of the little guy, seems to be charting a new path. Biden used OSHA to federally mandate the Covid vax on 80 million Americans. The Twitter files revealed that the Biden administration, the FBI, and major democrat politicians laundered their political influence via Twitter upper management in an effort to silence, censor or stop average Americans from speaking/sharing in the public square.
The Durham report was damning and everyone could see with their own eyes that Trump’s “Russia Hoax” claims were credible. Some of the very Dems who like to call their opponents “conspiracy theorists,” were clearly shown to be actual conspirators themselves.
Today, the “establishment,” and our two-party system broadly, appears to be evolving into what looks more like a “uniparty” as professor Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame describes. The new populists have noticed that in the last 30 years or so, the political system appears to have transcended party lines and evolved into what they see as a war-loving, boarder-hating, socially-liberal, center-left bureaucratic blob. Whether the candidate is left or right, there is a sense that no matter who we elect, we seem to get more of the same: more war, more LGBTQ, more immigration etc.
During the Covid pandemic, people were introduced to Dr. Anthony Fauci and learned that he was the highest paid federal employee and had worked at the highest levels of the federal government for close to 40 years. People felt the weight of his unelected influence and the sweeping policy that followed. When I was a kid we listened to “I’m Just A Bill” by Schoolhouse Rock to learn how bills became law. In a post-Covid world however, people have become attuned to the influence of long-term, unelected bureaucrats who were protected from democratic accountability. Today, language used to describe entrenched bureaucrats like “deep state” or “swamp creatures” doesn’t sound as conspiratorial or unreasonable as it once did to the average voter.
Again, this points to the transformation of today’s politics which seems to be shifting from traditional left/right party lines, to an establishment/anti-establishment paradigm. The left-right is becoming the in-out, or the up-down. A new uniparty vs. populist showdown is emerging. This growing anti-elitist indignation may also explain why so many Bernie voters ended up voting for Trump in 2016, something that left many scratching their heads.
During this years’ “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” show, Green Day, a 90’s punk band, changed the lyrics in their hit song “American Idiot,” from "I'm not a part of a redneck agenda" to "I'm not a part of the MAGA agenda.” As the song ended, the camera panned back, and a Pfizer add popped up. This struck me as odd for several reasons. Historically, the heartbeat of punk music was to express a politically anti-establishment sentiment. Trump, hate him or love him, is not known as the “establishment candidate.” He clearly takes more of an anti-establishment, populist approach and tries to appeal more to working class voters. Not to mention, his opponent Joe Biden hung his 2020 campaign on being the status quo, return-to-normalcy status quo (establishment) candidate.
To see one of the most famous “punk” bands publicly decry the more anti-establishment candidate while playing a show for a bunch of Hollywood elites behind a Pfizer ad seemed like the epitome of irony.
Final Thoughts
Remember, we unleashed the internet, arguably the most powerful and disruptive technology the world has ever seen, maybe more so than the printing press or the steam engine, within the same 10-year period that NAFTA was signed. The internet was officially born in 1983 and NAFTA, the most expansive emancipation of trade and boarders in the history of the world, was signed in 1992. In less than a decade, we witnessed the marriage of the internet and globalization. NAFTA liberalized borders for global, economic trade; the internet and social media liberalized borders for a cultural trade, and all at warp speed.
As I mentioned above, the internet and more specifically social media is like the printing press but instead of democratizing information through reading, it democratizes trade, culture, norms, identity, all through powerful media forms and all at the click of a button. Patrick Deneen has referred to what he calls a “borderlessness.” We are no longer experiencing only a blurring of borders around geography and trade, but also around cultural and even sexual identity. We have entered into an inconceivably massive phase of political and cultural reorganization. The internet plus globalization equaled a new and broad centralization of culture, wealth, customs and norms. Which has led us to the worldwide populist shakeup that we are seeing develop over the last decade or so.
Our modern elite used policy like NAFTA and this new technology called the internet to sell an economic and cultural oneness to the world, unshackling both trade and culture from border constraints. Our understanding of the world has been reimagined within the course of just a few decades, and our politics are just now catching up.
The new populists are figuring out that they too can use the internet to reorganize. The new populists are finding ways to use the internet to delegitimize central, establishment institutions (banking, education, media, religion).
I admit this great decentralization can seem paradoxical, even contradictory at times. During the same time this push for decentralization is happening, we are witnessing the greatest centralization of wealth and control in the history of the world. Tech giants masquerade as agents of democratization while acquiring control of inordinate amounts of wealth and almost all internet traffic; Google now controls 92% of the search engine market and Apple’s market cap rests at 2.1 trillion which is larger than the GDP of Italy, Canada, Brazil and Russia. Let that sink in.
The ruling elite has initiated a pushback to the pushback with unthinkably powerful platforms like Facebook (and old Twitter) censoring and controlling the flow of information. Unthinkably powerful platforms like YouTube censor and limit the visibility of certain content creators, sometimes at the government’s behest. Also worthy of note are the growing number of “context” boxes found below any YouTube video that discusses issues like abortion or climate change. These context boxes employ technocratic jargon to “educate” viewers, and instill regime values.
On the other hand, YouTube alternatives like Rumble that focus on the independence of content creators and their freedom from censorship are gaining steam. No one can predict the future, but my guess is this great push for decentralization will continue. We will continue to see a legitimization of these decentralized ways to view and create news, invest or store money, educate our children etc.
The push-pull affect will also continue. Homeschooling will see new regulations, anti-regime dissenters will continue to be censored on YouTube and Facebook, characters like Sam Bankman-Fried and the stories of their crypto scams will plague the reputation of the cryptocurrency market. Politics will get uglier and weirder. Trust in mainstream institutions will continue to decline.
Also, as we have seen with Bitcoin in El Salvador, people may continue to use their systems of self-government to elect candidates who legitimize these decentralized ways of doing life. One reason for hope may be that as the left-right continues to evolve into the up-down, important common ground may be found in interesting places. The old adage “politics makes strange bedfellows” may become increasingly relevant. We may see arms link across party lines more and more in positive ways. It may get worse before it gets better, but either way, a persistent and growing appetite for decentralization will likely continue to characterize our moment.
Of course, the populist push isn’t happening exclusively on the right. Figures like Bernie, AOC and RFK represent populist sentiments on the left and fall under subcategories like “democratic socialist” or “independent”