This Article is published in the context of JEF Europe’s Democracy Under Pressure (DUP) Action Week
This essay is the first part of a three-piece series for the Democracy Under Pressure week by Samuel Tammekann and Risto Rajala, analyzing the rise of a new American imperialism under Trump’s second administration, its ideological foundations, and the urgent need for a European response to defend democracy on the global stage.
Preword: it is still not too late to believe them
As we drafted the first version of this essay in January 2025 (as our editors can verify), we warned of the second Donald Trump administration’s ideological core: a selfish, aggressive, zero-sum worldview that openly rejects liberal notions of mutual benefit. At the time, it was still possible to dismiss this prediction as overly pessimistic or even alarmist.
But now, barely two months into this administration’s rule, our fears have been proven disturbingly accurate. What has emerged is not just a rejection of international cooperation or mutual prosperity but a fundamental rupture of the liberal order itself. Gone is the US foreign political establishment’s commitment—even if sometimes rhetorical—to global partnerships and democratic norms. In its place stands an explicitly American version of authoritarianism: “America First,” taken not as a slogan but as a literal governing strategy of true American imperialism.
This new fledgling American empire has openly disavowed the standards it once promoted: now it treats historical allies as subjects, idolizes authoritarian rulers, projects unchecked superpower influence solely for one-sized economic benefit, blackmails its allies and employs state power to wage aggressive cultural and political warfare. This convergence of nationalist populism and techno-libertarianism, shaped by billionaire interests like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Vice President JD Vance, has rapidly transformed from speculative ideological theory to reality.
Before Trump’s inauguration, we described this scenario as perhaps overly apocalyptic—a drawer doomsday fantasy. But after two months of catastrophic diplomacy, shocking press conferences, carnage in the federal institutions, including FBI and USAID, carried out by marauding “DOGE boys” led by a chainsaw-wielding centibillionaire (a whole new class symbolic of this era) our fears have been confirmed: this administration means exactly what it says. As the New York Times’s editorial board pleaded about Trump just days before the election, “Believe him.”
The essence of a true American authoritarianism
While we Europeans have, understandably, focused on explaining many ominous things with the resurgence of European fascism, we have to argue that the imperialistic-authoritarian ideology with Trump as its champion is unmistakably American in its origin, having emerged several times throughout the US history, and harkening back to the colonialistic scrambles of the 19th century.
As history rhymes, the new America First ideology, or Trumpism, would be not much unlike the original America First movement opposing US entry into the World War II, which could have doomed the whole continent of Europe into the oppression of Nazism, which, too, was supported clearly by the far-right, including, of course, that era’s own nazi-sympathizing automobile magnate, Henry Ford. It also brings into mind older, more clearly imperialist periods, such as Manifest Destiny, James K. Polk’s Mexican War and the Monroe doctrine.
It is ironic, that the populace’s rejection of the Bush–Clinton–Obama-era foreign-policy interventionist liberalism, greatly discredited by the War on Terror, the Abu Ghraib scandal, and the Snowden leaks, as costly and hypocritical, and already dark, warmongering for entrenchment and isolation – sounding peaceful in theory – is leading to a significantly worse alternative.
Indeed, as this survey from the Financial Times shows, the American right-wing electorate began shifting to the autocratic bloc, joining Russia, Turkey and China, already during Bush Jr.’s second term. So clearly it is the case that what we are seeing could also be perceived as the Republican party only now reattaching with its electorate.
The Republican party, since Reagan and “Moral Majority”, alongside many political parties in the center-right and right-wing, has been based on the combination of social conservatism and free-market ideology to counter socialism’s social and economic aspirations, in a combination often dubbed as classical liberalism or conservative liberalism (in the US, simply called “Conservatism”). So, in today’s world, where traditional centre-right has been losing ground to a more radicalized right wing, it could be thought obvious that a similar, more radicalized alliance would be founded.
So, it would be quite fitting how Trump’s opportunistic populism would eventually also be shaped by two pillars, each represented by a Vice President: first, the ultraconservative evangelical Mike Pence, who still chose to support the constitution instead of Trump; then, the technolibertarian JD Vance, Silicon Valley billionaires’ man in Washington.
The economic pillar: the technoauthoritarian ascendancy
This new imperialism, of course, cloaks its ambitions in the rhetoric of some very American values, freedom and innovation. Libertarianism, an ideology based on absolute freedom from state control, advocates for maximal unregulated autonomy and markets, where talent and hard work triumph over bureaucracy, hereditary elitism and state-enforced equality of outcome. Already from the times of the anti-regulatory industrial magnates and Tea Party funders, it has been allied with extreme corporate interests.
And as in 2024 the power lies in the digital tech industry: this pillar would be sealed by the pick of Vance as Trump’s vice president choice. Vance’s connections with the Silicon Valley’s pro-Republican venture capitalists, such as the ideologically anti-democratic Thiel (PayPal, Palantir and the first outside investor of Facebook), the “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” writer, anti-regulations billionaire Marc Andreessen, and David Sacks, another South African antiliberal investor, now Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, would assure the tech world, that their interests would continue being safeguarded.
Now with Elon Musk having gained access into the Federal Government, these new oligarchs and their DOGE disciples seem to actively seek a world governed by technological overlords and algorithmic efficiency, unshackled from the constraints of democracy or even nation-states, which some of them see to be replaced by authoritarian capitalist “free cities” competing for capital and best “terms of residence” for their inhabitants, as the Thiel-supported ideology of Dark Enlightenment claims to pursue. Their first goal has already been to establish an imperial presidency, ruling over checks and balances, or the separation of powers.
The most blatant example: Musk’s leadership of DOGE, is not just a consolidation of power; it is already an ideological experiment replacing the administrative state with corporate autocracy (like the “neoreactionary” ideologue Curtis Yarvin’s idea on dismantling the federal government, “RAGE”). The firing of thousands of civil servants and gutting of regulatory bodies and redistributionary agencies from the Federal Trade Commission to USAID, the Environmental Protection Agency to the Department of Justice, are not mere cost-cutting but the first phase of an ideological takeover.
His transformation of X (formerly Twitter) into a reactionary propaganda organ is the cultural extension of this shift: a social media network optimized for stochastic violence, harassment of journalists, and mass disinformation. It empowers especially disillusioned young men wanting a rebellion against a “rigged system” empowering feminists, progressives, immigrants, bureaucrats and cultural liberals, supported by the federal and national governments and the European Union, any ones they see their adversaries as being allied with. Not everyone can be an ultra-rich libertarian seeking freedom from regulation—so instead, they are offered a different kind of liberation: a cultural revolution, a rebellion against feminists, progressives, and democracy itself.
But what this ideology truly offers is not freedom—it is the final evolution of power without constraint. At last, libertarianism has found its own Four Freedoms: the freedom from accountability, the freedom from responsibility, the freedom to deceive, and the freedom to dominate.
The social pillar: nationalist ultraconservatism in the American way
In this the libertarian movement allied with older factions already disillusioned with the Democratic era, focused on the federal government doing them wrong and for that reason, to be dismantled. They were hardline evangelical Christians, infusioned with conspiracy theories, apocalypse-awaiting millenniarism and Christian nationalist dominionism, already forming the Tea Party movement of the 2010s along with Financial Crash -disillusioned libertarians and, as a curiosity, hardline neoclassical economists (like the ones who concurrently founded the original Alternative for Germany).
Shocked by the fast liberal progress of Barack Obama’s era, and many of them also entangled in apocalyptic conspiracy theories, causing them to fear any big-enough government or the United Nations to become a device of the soon-to-come Antichrist, “the New World Order”, or at least a liberal-controlled totalitarian surveillance state, they also championed for absolute freedoms, at least until a Democratic administration subsides. But this would never have sufficed without secular far-right nationalism. After being flared on racism, sexism and xenophobia, especially on Latino immigrants, they transformed cultural grievances into political power, with uniting all of this into one agenda of “giving us power and us getting rid of those you despise”. It’s a proposal as old as history itself, almost always ending in a catastrophe.
What is the role of president Trump in this, one may ask – we could say, of the ultimate opportunist and populist. As senator Amy Klobuchar said – the difference between Trump and Greenland is that Greenland is not for sale.
It is thus not Trump, whose dealmaking we must follow, but all those factions who he has empowered to become the new Republicans.
Now that the change is complete
The Republican Party is now firmly under the control of Trump and JD Vance, purged of internal dissent. Traditional conservatives, Reaganites, and even old-school neoconservatives have either bent the knee or been cast out. What remains is a fusion of technolibertarian and authoritarian capitalism wrapped in ultranationalist populism, chauvinistic antifeminism, and theocratic visions of the far-right evangelical movement—all joined together to uproot the liberal democratic system and the administrative state. Unlike before, when the US state apparatus was still controlled by the long-time establishment, dubbed by its opponents the “deep state”, the second Trump administration is now rapidly gaining power to do anything they want, exchanging experience for loyalty, without restraints from the party, cabinet – or even much of the judicial system. We are witnessing the birth of an imperial presidency, with sovereignty over all the other branches of government.
And this is not just about Trump. If it were, it might be a passing crisis, solvable through electoral politics, shifts in public opinion, or, the author won’t take a stand for or against it, an early demise. But the forces driving this transformation are larger than one man: a new ruling class who believe that democracy is an outdated concept, and that power should be concentrated in the hands of those wealthy and ruthless enough to seize it, with massive popular support from numerous groups who, for their reasons, believe their interests are better served by an autocratic champion than a democracy.
This is not the United States we’ve used to. This is not something that can be explained with deep analysis of the American foreign policy doctrine of the transatlantic elites we’ve accustomed to. This is a regime change, a Second American Republic – or the New American Empire.
All this has been already explained by the ones who are now in power. Believe them.
The two following parts will focus on the ideology’s onslaught on the global system, and the European Union’s role in leading the charge putting democracy, at last, on the offense.
Follow the comments:
|
