The Ideological Offensive

History has many examples of ideological movements taking control of governments and trying to impose their personnel and agendas on bureaucracies, on the assumption that political commitment matters more than expertise and competence. I have written on one of the earliest examples, when, during the French Revolution, ideological militants took control of the country’s military, imposed the election of officers by their troops, and named men with minimal military experience to high rank, including playwrights and journalists. The experiment didn’t end well, the Revolution came within a hair of collapsing, and soon the government was backtracking and again emphasizing professional military skill and experience. The USSR came perilously close to defeat in World War II because of the ideological purges of the Red Army in the 1930’s, but at least Stalin eventually learned from his bloody mistakes, and came to trust the expert judgment of generals like Georgy Zhukov (Hitler, by contrast, kept second-guessing and overriding his own generals to the end, thereby contributing in no little measure to his own downfall). Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution represents perhaps the most extreme sustained example, with expertise targeted for its own sake. The damage to China was incalculable.

Now we are in the midst of a frightening attempt to impose an ideological agenda on the US government. But in contrast to most past examples, it is an agenda with virtually no real positive ideological content, grounded in a coherent vision of what the country should become. Perhaps that should be no surprise, given the basic ideological incoherence of Trumpism, a movement that has brought together economic populists, libertarian technocrats (a category that is itself something of a contradiction in terms), and Christian integralists. What they have in common is a hatred of liberal elites and “woke-ism,” a contempt for bureaucrats and most foreigners, and personal fealty to Donald Trump. There is nothing in the least “conservative” about any of this, and it is worth remembering that in 2017 the patron saint of Trumpism, Rush Limbaugh, changed the name of his noxious radio program from the “Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies” to the “Institute for Advanced Anti-Leftist Studies.”

Not surprisingly, it is the supposed bastions of “woke-ism” in Washington that have received the earliest, hardest hammer blows. First came USAID, and then the Department of Education. Last week, hundreds of academics received letters from the National Endowment for the Humanities with the following language: “NEH has reasonable cause to terminate your grant in light of the fact that NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda.” The president has now effectively dismantled the NEH, an action of dubious legality, since it was established and funded by Congress as an independent agency—not part of the executive branch. But in the whirlwind of chaotic change that Trump has brought to Washington, including the dubiously legal declaration of a national emergency on trade to justify the tariffs that have sent world markets into free fall, it has received little notice.

Meanwhile, last month, the National Institutes for Health, as I have written here, started to cancel any grants that had even the slightest hint of “wokeness” attached, including for research on women’s health (!). Recipients received a letter with phrasing almost identical to what I quoted above. And in a much larger, and still very much underreported development, the NIH is renewing existing grants at less than half the usual rate. Since NIH grants require routine renewal every year, in just a few months this cutting-off of the spigot could very soon decimate American biomedical research in its entirety.

And as David Ignatius has reported in The Washington Post, an agenda is very quickly being imposed on the nation’s intelligence agencies as well. Any hint of pro-Ukrainian sentiment, of anti-Russian sentiment, of opposition to or even constructive criticism of the administration’s policies is now grounds for dismissal. And in this case, the apparent judge of Trumpian ideological purity is one of the looniest, least experienced Trump advisors, Laura Loomer.

In most of the examples I cited above, the sheer need for national survival eventually prompted policy U-Turns, and the arrival of new, more pragmatic figures to positions of influence. Lazare Carnot helped save revolutionary France from going under. Stalin started to trust his generals. Deng Zhaoping set China on a dramatically new course. Tragically, in many of these cases, before the U-Turn moment arrived, attempts to block the ideologues only heightened their sense of fighting an apocalyptic battle, hardening them in their positions rather than producing any doubts or rethinking. The same is true of the Trumpists today, as Elon Musk’s X feed makes all too clear, with its constant invocation of war and apocalypse. Attempts to oppose the regime in the courts can be especially tricky, because it leads the ideologues further to question the legitimacy of the justice system itself, and by extension of the constitutional regime in its entirety. This is a world-wide pattern at present, which I wrote about for UnHerd magazine last week in relation to Marine Le Pen being banned from running for office in France.

But the danger of blowback is no reason to remain quiescent, and to hope for Trumpism’s quick collapse. That was the strategy that Democratic strategist James Carville proposed a few months ago, and it has made the party look atrociously weak. The Democrats remain, moreover, a traditional American political party, which is to say a fractious and divided one, and its leaders do not yet seem to have realized that the Republicans no longer fit this same category. The progressive wing has not yet forgiven the party leadership for its position on the Middle East and has yet to reckon with the fact that effectively helping Trump to win was a very bad strategy for achieving any of its goals.

If history is any guide (and it isn’t always), this moment of Trumpian ideological exaltation will pass. Indeed, the hotter it burns, the faster it will probably burn out. The question is how much the fires will consume in the meantime.