Today is the first day of 2025. More than any other holiday, New Year’s is a day for reflecting on the past and contemplating our future. And, in the fight to protect and advance human liberty, sound economics, and international peace, 2024 has given us a lot to reflect on.
Something that becomes clear, especially when studying primary sources from many different historical periods, is that people throughout history have tended to view their current moment as exceptionally significant and transitional. This is sometimes tied in with what’s called “presentism” and dismissed as a cognitive bias. But there is also a fair amount of truth to perpetually holding this perspective.
That is because there is no such thing as a static period of history. Change is always happening, and, at any given moment, multiple significant transitions are playing out at different scales and rates.
Right now, we too are in the middle of a lot of significant societal and civilizational changes—from the transition to a new American presidential administration to the ongoing multi-century transition to an industrialized world.
But I believe that the most significant transition our world is experiencing that will define our current historical moment more than any other is the adoption of the internet and all the important political, economic, and geopolitical changes that have come and will come as a result.
One year ago, I wrote a series of articles about that very topic. I built on a thesis advanced most comprehensively by geopolitical analyst Martin Gurri that frames the structure and control over how information is disseminated as the primary factor determining who holds power in society.
The development of writing and alphabets during the transition from the early to the late Agrarian Era—around five thousand years ago—gave rise to governments and societies led by literate bureaucratic and priestly castes. In the thousands of years that followed, countless rulers lost, expanded, ceded, and grabbed power. But the overall established political structure’s monopoly over the information space held firm until the invention and adoption of the printing press.
Printing technology brought about sweeping systemic political change—such as the Protestant Reformation and the American and French Revolutions—by allowing public sentiments that had already been present to spread outside of the ruling classes’ control.
This period of change ran from the 1500s until the end of WWI. It saw the near-complete replacement of pre-modern ruling classes with the globe-spanning post-war political establishments we know today. Political establishments whose hold on power has rested largely on their control of print and later broadcast media.
The high cost of running a major print publication and the government’s early seizure of the airways kept control over the information space mostly in the hands of a small, establishment-friendly group. That control made it relatively easy for the establishment to confine public discourse to a narrow range of “acceptable” opinions that never threatened their power. Then, as Noam Chomsky observed, the political establishment stoked vicious debate within that narrow range of opinion to hide how similar the two sides of American politics actually were to each other.
The political class thrives when the public is at each other’s throats over, for example, “socialism coming to America” through the implementation of a 39 percent top-marginal tax rate or “our descent into a fascist free-market hellscape” brought about by cutting that rate down to 37 percent. The same goes for when the debate over what to do about Washington’s chosen Hitler-of-the-moment is limited to whether we should send in the infantry or just arm and fund the locals trying to overthrow him.
If the establishment had its way, they’d continue extracting wealth from a public busy battling over whether to adopt Joe Biden or Mitt Romney’s vision for America until the end of time.
And they likely would have gotten their way if not for the internet.
As Gurri details in his book, the internet has fractured the establishment’s control over the information space even more dramatically than the printing press did with earlier ruling classes. Now, anyone with an internet connection can reach readers, listeners, and viewers directly without filters, editors, or space and time constraints.
Starting slowly in the 1990s with the impeachment of Bill Clinton and accelerating dramatically in the 2010s with the response to the Wall Street bailouts and the election of Donald Trump, the establishment’s waning ability to confine public discourse has led to real political change.
The 2016 nomination and subsequent election of a candidate that the political establishment had clearly deemed unserious and later unacceptable was a major wake-up call to those in power. They spent Trump’s first term doubling down on their confinement strategy.
A mix of censorship and demonization was deployed to silence Trump supporters and anti-establishment voices. And, while working to scrub pro-Trump perspectives from the public discourse, the establishment also tried to remove Trump from power, first weighing the use of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, and later, by trying to tie him to Russian intelligence.
When Trump left office after being impeached twice and overseeing the chaos of 2020, it almost seemed at the time like the strategy had worked.
As Trump momentarily retreated to his limited platform on Truth Social and his followers fixed their attention on the Biden administration, four criminal cases were brought against the former president. But Biden’s inability to lull the country back to a pre-2016 sleep and Trump’s return to the campaign trail set 2024 up as the ultimate test of the establishment’s confinement strategy.
Now, at the end of the year, it’s hard to conclude that the political establishment’s approach to stopping the return of the Trump movement was anything other than a complete and total failure.
Not only did Trump win after the country was subjected to years of unrelenting establishment messaging—that he was both personally responsible for all of our nation’s current problems and a literal fascist who would discontinue elections if he returned to power—but he grew more popular across almost all voter demographics.
A similar shift happened globally, with sharp repudiations of establishment incumbents happening in elections all around the world. This is far from being only an American phenomenon.
It’s hard to see the political class’s ability to confine public discourse to a limited, easily-controllable range ever returning to where it stood even a few years ago. That is a remarkably positive development for those of us who want to see an end to the interventionist, inflationist, and imperialist rackets that our government is subjecting us to.
That said, the collapse of one means of holding on to power is not the same as losing power. It took hundreds of years, after all, for the adoption of the printing press to bring about a permanent change in the world’s power structure. And 2024 also provided a preview of a much more fruitful establishment strategy that we’re likely to see used more in the year ahead: co-option.
Throughout the campaign, hawkish neoconservative elements of the right successfully maneuvered their way into Trump’s inner circle by disguising the same old establishment interventionist foreign policy as a brand new “America First” doctrine. After the election, Trump appointed Marco Rubio and Elise Stefanik—who have no meaningful differences with the foreign policy establishment—to key cabinet positions. The establishment media’s silence about these two appointments is evidence that the current political class is not worried about them at all.
More evidence of the switch to a co-option strategy can be seen in some media figures’ change in rhetoric about the incoming president and the millions of dollars big tech companies have donated to Trump’s inauguration fund.
If more establishment figures pick up on their allies’ success co-opting Trump’s foreign policy before he even enters office, we could start seeing a widespread effort, not only to co-opt the next administration, but to hijack this broader anti-establishment moment. Don’t be surprised if 2025 is the year we see the current political class start to prioritize spreading their talking points through informal digital media like podcasts over big, legacy media outlets or working to roll out accessible alternatives to decentralized technologies like Bitcoin.
Because, while dominant, the Trump movement is only one relatively moderate part of a larger anti-establishment coalition—a coalition that includes those of us who understand the need to abolish the Federal Reserve, end the interventionist rackets at work across the economy, roll back the global imperial project that’s left Americans poorer and less safe, and who recognize the power of independent media in bringing that about.
In many ways, 2024 was a test of the establishment’s resilience. 2025 will be a test of ours.
Originally Posted at https://mises.org/