Welcome to the Postmodern Presidency
Before there was Trump, there was French theory.
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In striving to make sense of the mind-warping incoherence, corruption, and self-destructiveness of the second Trump administration, my mind often wanders back to my time in college and graduate school during the 1990s. Back then, perhaps the most pressing intellectual question we pondered about the present was whether we were on the cusp of entering a “postmodern era.”
That famously slippery phrase had many meanings and implications, but this was its core: The time of grand, unifying, “hegemonic” narratives was over. A so-called “hermeneutics of suspicion” and impulse toward “deconstructing” received theories had revealed all attempts to reach a universal, permanent truth as power-grabs attempting to conceal fundamentally political motives. Broad swathes of the left latched onto the work of French theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard as a contribution to the liberation of individuals and groups from the white, male, heterosexual writers of the West—and from the grand narratives that justified their domination.
At the time, the most cogent critics of these prophets of postmodernism could be found on the center right. The philosopher Allan Bloom’s surprise 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind, for example, suggested that what he called the “Nietzscheanization of the left” was bound to end badly. That’s because, Bloom insisted, a world no longer oriented toward universal truth would be one in which raw political will would dominate unimpeded by higher aspirations.
I don’t want to suggest that Trump or his advisors are taking their cues from Derrida or Foucault—or that we’re living in a world these and other French theorists somehow conjured into existence with their books. But I do think the political events of the past decade have vindicated the critics of postmodernism. Whatever its sources, the world of the present is permeated with deep skepticism about the grand narratives and universalistic hopes that often prevailed in the past. And amidst the wreckage of these narratives and hopes, a new right is taking advantage of the resulting confusion to wield power in a ruthless and deranging way.
A Postmodern Resurgence of Nationalism
It seems undeniable that the return of nationalism as a major force across the democratic world is downstream of a collapse in confidence about universal truths. Yes, some of its ideological boosters, like the Israeli-American philosopher Yoram Hazony, are committed to national solidarity as a positive and even necessary foundation for properly conservative politics. But it’s more common for contemporary nationalists to treat the constriction of solidarity to the nation as a response to a collapse of faith in higher and broader ideals of universalism.
The countries of the West once believed other countries and cultures would be better off adopting our political and economic arrangements, creating a world in which differences among peoples would be outweighed by an underlying similarity that united them. Our multiculturalism would be counterbalanced by a commitment to cosmopolitanism. Live where you want and how you want. Love who you want in the way you want. Worship the deity you want and in the way that seems best to you, or don’t worship any deity at all. Such a world could afford to permit, and feel like it was thriving by permitting, the easy movement of people and products. Come and go as you please. Move about the planet, and make purchases from across the planet, at will.
This internationalist liberalism—most common in the 1980s and ’90s—is what inspired deep suspicion and skepticism among postmodern thinkers. The moral content of universalism came from liberalism, an ideology rooted in the West. This meant that the higher aspirations toward a sort of worldwide tolerance wasn’t really tolerant at all. It was a parochial cultural export, imposed as a form of ideological imperialism—a cultural currency the other peoples of the world would be forced to adopt, with refusal to do so, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, issuing in the punishment of forced exclusion from international markets, the financial system, and the loans and aid provided to those willing to play by the rules established by the United States and its allies. At least so postmodernist thinkers argued.
Today’s nationalists, including Trump, agree entirely with this zero-sum outlook on international affairs, though they usually reverse the moral valance: the West’s systematic imposition of its will on the world, they believe, has been a burden and a net loss for the West. Others gained while we got screwed. If we had benefitted from the arrangement, it would have been self-evidently worth continuing. But it didn’t benefit us, and the way to rectify the unfairness is for us to go our own way, acting unilaterally in aggressive pursuit of our interests without any pretense about others thriving by following our example or obeying American-authored international rules.
The Turn to Internal Tribalism
The abandonment of universal aspirations in the international arena has been accompanied, in domestic politics, by a collapse of trust in the ability of public institutions to devise and administer norms and rules in a competent and fair-minded way. Which means that nationalism abroad has been matched by partisan tribalism at home. Either Democrats run the government or Republicans do. Either civil servants seek to advance liberal-progressive ideology or they seek to advance a conservative-populist one. Neutrality is a sham. There is no third alternative, let alone one that rises dispassionately above the fray of partisanship.
Politics permeates everything, just as the postmodern critics insisted it did. The right thinks it gains an advantage by accepting this reality and acting on it without shame or apology. In doing so, it believes it will finally acquire the capacity to challenge the left’s relentless advance in the culture, move for move. The point, at every moment, is to win, and the only alternative to winning is losing, just as the only alternative to being a friend is being an enemy. That makes those from both parties who continue to focus on even-minded fairness, the rule of law, and neutral procedures little more than saps, suckers, and chumps—just like those who defend international laws, norms, and institutions.
That’s where the strange affinity between the postmodern theorists of old and Trump’s mode of governance becomes most apparent and uncanny.
If it was anything, postmodernism was an expression of skepticism about the capacity of reason to forge genuine consensus, let alone for it to achieve objective truth or knowledge. What other thinkers call “objective truth” and “objective knowledge” are merely expressions of the interest of one person or group. There is no such thing as disinterested reason, just various forms of self-interested rationalization. The claim that one possesses truth or knowledge is nothing but a power move.
There is no better distillation of this view than Donald Trump. All the way back to The Art of the Deal, he has spoken of truth as a tool for manipulation. Rather than determining what is true and then deciding what to do on that basis, Trump takes the reverse approach, first determining what he wants to do, and then adjusting what he claims to be true in order to help him accomplish it. This is why he is the first truly postmodern president.
How to Wage a Postmodern War
There are a multitude of examples of this from the first and second Trump administrations, but none is more powerful than the way the Iran War has been conducted.
When Trump ran for the presidency in 2024, he promised to end America’s “forever wars” and vowed not to start new ones. Yet he has kept the military quite active since returning to the White House, and nowhere more so than against Iran. When he opted to leap to the side of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in seeking to topple the Iranian government and eliminate its nuclear and ballistic missile programs, Trump offered no coherent explanation. He made no effort to build support in public opinion or Congress. He merely acted, as if reasoning about going to war was irrelevant and persuasion both futile and unnecessary.
He then articulated no clear or consistent goals after it became apparent that the country hadn’t undergone regime change, and the constantly shifting rationales he trotted out on his Truth Social account, together with those expressed by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, made it impossible to judge the progress, success, or failure of the operation. That sense of arbitrariness and chaos has only deepened as it’s become clearer that Trump is eager to bring the war to any kind of conclusion (it doesn’t matter what) and to move on while declaring victory.
Just after the conclusion in 1991 of the Persian Gulf War, the postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard famously published a short book that was provocatively titled The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. I’ve always considered his argument transparently ridiculous. Of course the war took place, just as the Iran War is taking place right now, despite a fragile ceasefire.
Yet what Baudrillard was pointing to back in 1991—the transformation of war into a media event broadcast to the world in eye-catching snippets that turn it into a carefully curated spectacle—really was something new at the time. But now it no longer is. We have entered the age of fully postmodern propaganda in which the powers that be don’t even bother to construct a coherent narrative to generate support for what they do. They merely act and then bombard us with shards of multiple competing and contradictory rationales, assuming we’ll be so entertained by explosions and infliction of pain that we’ll be indifferent to what’s actually transpiring—and, above all, to the fact that the White House has embraced a mode of governance that’s completely indistinguishable from tribalistic partisan spin.
I don’t know about you, but I’d be hard-pressed to come up with a more perfect example of postmodern politics than that.
Bringing Universalism Back In
That brings us back to what the original postmodernists hoped to accomplish by dethroning universal narratives. Their hope, I think, was to achieve greater liberation of individuals and groups from externally imposed oppressive constraints. But what we ended up liberated from, instead, is any notion of higher aspiration. It may be that the only way to keep liberation from collapsing into cognitive chaos that leaves us sailing on a choppy sea of endlessly churning spin is to affirm some notion of universalism.
If nature, reason, or historical progress—the traditional justifications for liberal universalism—seem too freighted with contestable assumptions, we can choose to view it in more modest terms. One option is to conceive of it as a cognitive heuristic, or what Immanuel Kant called a “regulative” principle—namely, a presumption we must make in order to orient our thinking and guide our action in the world. Think of it as a flashlight emanating from the human mind that can illuminate the darkness of the surrounding world, showing us a way to move forward that blends an appreciation for particularism with an awareness of the need to affirm what all of us share as human beings.
Regardless of whether that would catch on, we can at least acknowledge that the original critics of postmodernism, like Allan Bloom, had a point: a world in which universal truths and goods is widely denied will also be a world in which politics has been reduced to raw and ruthless assertions of power. If we want to do better than that—and we should—we need to find a way to back out of the intellectual dead end we find ourselves stuck in.
Damon Linker, a contributing writer at Persuasion, writes the Substack newsletter “Notes from the Middleground.” He is a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow in the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center.
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The article seems to treat the right’s attack on institutions as the cause of the crisis. But to many people, it looks more like a reaction to what those institutions had already become. The institutional left came to dominate universities, media, NGOs, the bureaucracy, and much of government. It used them to advance ideological goals, then described the project as neutrality, expertise, inclusion, democracy, or the rule of law.
Nationalism is not some new postmodern pathology. It is a normal and often healthy form of solidarity. The backlash is not simply a rejection of truth or universalism. It is a reaction against institutions that shifted power away from national self-government, left many working-class communities worse off, treated patriotism as suspect, and made once-mainstream views sound morally illegitimate.
That Damon Linker has chosen to ally himself with the Persuasion “brand” is a sign of healthy growth. Yes, postmodern politics has become in Hobbes’s formulation “nasty, brutish, and (hopefully) short.” I would offer just a slight variation on the use of the term “objective.” I prefer “inter-subjective,” for the reason that objectivity arises only when there are two (or more) minds that cohere on a perspective and that in turn they find others who share that perspective. It’s the long road to universalism, but short cuts may not prove as effective.