Where do you think this is going?

A question for my readers

I just read this essay by Jonathan Last in which he sketches out four scenarios: normalcy, paralysis, rebellion, and hardening of the autocracy.

Then I read this one, by Olga Lautman, in which she argues that Musk appears to be using DOGE to build a Chinese-style surveillance state.

After the past hundred-plus days, I think anything is possible. Every structure that underpinned the stable America in which I grew up—and the reasonably stable American-led world—has crumbled or is crumbling. This isn’t an administration, it’s a revolution, and the America we knew is gone.

The whole enterprise, it struck me today, seems to have lost legitimacy. The Constitution, democracy, liberal norms, rationality—no one seems to believe in them anymore. Or if they do, they lack the power to enforce them.

So what’s left?

Weber argued that all power seeks legitimacy—a claim to rightful authority accepted by those subject to it. In Politics as a Vocation, he defined the modern state thus:

… Like the political institutions historically preceding it, the state is a relation of men dominating men, a relation supported by means of legitimate (i.e. considered to be legitimate) violence. If the state is to exist, the dominated must obey the authority claimed by the powers that be. When and why do men obey? Upon what inner justifications and upon what external means does this domination rest?

Legitimate is the interesting word. As he observed, you can’t make a state with force alone. The dominated no less than the dominators must accept that the state has the right to use force. For Weber, a regime is not legitimate because it conforms to an abstract standard, but because subjects or citizens believe it to be rightful. Legitimacy is essential to stable rule: When men cease to believe their government or their leaders are legitimate, domination must rely increasingly on coercion. Such an arrangement is expensive, brittle, and unstable.

There are three forms of legitimacy, Weber suggested. These are archetypes that rarely exist in pure form—they are hybrid in practice—but one type tends to dominate. The first is traditional authority, where legitimacy derives from long-standing customs and traditions. This form of legitimacy prevails in feudal and patrimonial systems. The rules have been sanctified by age. The monarch, the patriarch, or the tribal chief exercises power in the manner of his predecessors. In such systems, loyalty is personal. Administration is based on kinship, or personal dependency, not formal rules. Weber called this the pre-bureaucratic form of rule. He viewed it as inherently unstable in the face of the pressures of modernity.

The second form is charismatic. Here, legitimacy is a function of the extraordinary personal qualities of a leader, whom the public believes to be endowed with exceptional wisdom, heroism, vision, or superhuman qualities. Followers obey out of devotion or passion. Charismatic legitimacy is revolutionary: it breaks with tradition and rational norms. It is the legitimacy of religious prophets, revolutionary leaders, and populists like Napoleon. But if charismatic legitimacy is powerful, it is inherently unstable; it relies on the belief in the leader’s exceptional qualities, and leaders always let us down—if only by dying, but usually well before that. Over time, however, this form of legitimacy can be institutionalized, becoming one of the other forms.

The third is legal-rational—the modern form, and the form that prevailed in pre-Trump America. Based on formal rules and laws, bureaucracy is its hallmark: impersonal, hierarchical, and staffed by technically-qualified professionals. Obedience is not owed to the leader, but to the legally-defined office they occupy. This form of authority underpins the modern state and the capitalist enterprise. It is predictable. It is efficient. But as Weber wrote, presciently, in 1919, people find it dehumanizing and rigid. It locks them into what he famously called an “iron cage of rationality.”

The United States has now slipped the bonds of the iron cage. We are now proudly, fully irrational. We are waging war on our bureaucracies and the rule of law. Half the American public has attached itself to Donald Trump and legitimizes what he does by virtue of his charisma. But the other half, it seems to me, is only weakly committed to the legal-rational state, and to the extent it is, it is more because our rules and laws are traditional than because they still believe in them.

Weber wrote at a moment of crisis. He was surrounded by imperial collapse, war, revolution, and the rise of mass politics. He was haunted by the fragility of the modern state and its institutions. Crises of legitimacy, he wrote, occur when the people no longer believe in the authority of their political institutions and leaders. This does not necessarily mean revolution: It can also mean apathy, cynicism, or a flight to charismatic alternatives.

Weber sensed uneasily that when modernity demands the replacement of divine or customary legitimacy with legality and expertise, a society feels bereft: Life has lost its meaning, its enchantment. Hence his warning: “Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness.”

When I first read that—I was about twenty?—I thought he was carrying on a bit. Polar night of icy darkness and hardness? Seriously? The modern state looked fine to me. It was 1988: I loved the legal-rational state; I loved modernity; I loved capitalism. I still do. They add up to prosperity, ease, freedom, and opportunity beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors.

But Weber clearly understood something. It is hard to explain Trump otherwise. We are living through the unfolding of Weber’s prediction. Trust in parliaments, parties, bureaucracies, the law, and—especially—rationality is deteriorating across the West, and nowhere faster than in the country most completely identified with legal-rational authority—the country that rejected traditional authority at its founding, the country most identified with science, managerialism, and modern capitalism. The rise of conspiracy theories, the ideological fragmentation, the incoherence, the alternative facts, even the rejection of modern medicine—does this not suggest something more than political polarization? It seems to me we have lost the shared belief that any authority is truly legitimate.

The dominance of legal-rational authority in the postwar West was, I thought (and I wasn’t alone), a triumph. The success and stability of our societies was proof that the law—an expression of reason—was the proper foundation of legitimacy. Our bureaucracies delivered growth, welfare, and security. Yet for vast numbers, those bureaucracies have obviously become synonymous with alienation and unresponsiveness. They strike me as a blessing. They obviously do strike others as an iron cage.

Technocratic legitimacy, based on expertise and impersonality, has unraveled. It’s often said that this is because the elites failed to perform to expected standards, but the rational solution to this problem is to improve their performance, not destroy the bureaucracies and rip up the rule of law. It seems plausible to imagine that Weber is right: We’re ripping it all up from the roots because our form of governance has left too many people bereft of a sense of meaning.

Weber predicted that when bureaucratic rationalization became intolerable, societies would search for leaders who promised to re-enchant the world—even if that promise was, as it was sure to be, false or apocalyptic. Enter Donald Trump, who exemplifies Weber’s idea of charisma—a species of charisma that is completely lost on me, but felt so powerfully by others that they would abandon what were once the fundaments of shared American values.

What makes Trump Weberian is not his abilities (irrelevant in Weber’s typology) but the belief among followers that he alone can fix it, that he is a providential, quasi-sacred figure. Trump’s authority bypasses institutions, defies norms and the law, operates through personal loyalty rather than obligation to his office. Like the prophets Weber describes, he is privy to revelatory insights: He alone perceives the truth about Washington, the economy, immigrants, the media. Attachment to Trump represents a rebellion not just against policy, but against impersonal, technocratic rule.

Most regimes today exhibit hybrid forms of legitimacy. China combines legal-bureaucratic rationality with traditional Confucian motifs and a charismatic-nationalist narrative around Xi Jinping. The United States has been oscillating between constitutional-legal structures and increasingly charismatic-personalistic leadership for some time. Trump is in a league of his own, in this regard, but the cult of personality around Obama hinted that Americans were eager for charismatic governance. The EU’s technocracy suffers from a legitimacy deficit: Europeans are not bound to it by tradition; it lacks compelling charismatic leadership; and the rational case for it, however strong it is, does not seem to be enough.

At the heart of Weber’s account is his concept of Rationalisierung, or rationalization: This, in his view, is the process that made the modern West: the increasing organization of all spheres of life—economic, legal, religious, administrative—according to predictable rules. The pursuit of control over uncertainty. The process entails a wholesale cultural and psychological transformation; it affects every aspect of the way we think, work, organize our lives, and interpret the world. What originated in Calvinist asceticism became secularized as the spirit of capitalism; what began as a religious calling is now cold, impersonal duty:

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In Baxter's view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the "saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment. But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.

This cosmos becomes autonomous, irresistible, and inescapable, and thus an iron cage—we are enclosed within a system of rules and routines from which there is no escape. Or so Weber thought.

What makes this experience so suffocating? Legal-rational governance is legitimated by impersonality: no favoritism, no charisma, no appeals to emotion. This is both the source of modern governance’s legitimacy and the cause of the alienation it engenders. Bureaucracies function according to predictable rules. They are administered by professionals who are not, in principle, acting upon personal judgment, passion, charisma, or (God forbid) family and personal loyalty. The machinery of governance is characterized by hierarchy of authority, clear division of labor, explicit rules, impersonality, and meritocracy.

Weber describes the advent of modernity as a process of disenchantment—the erosion of magical, mythical, and religious worldviews and their replacement by scientific rationality and a view of the world as intelligible and manipulable. For all the achievements of this worldview, he writes, it is also devoid of mystery, meaning, and transcendence.

When the gods leave, we are left with nothing but mechanisms. Bureaucratic rule offers order, but no purpose. Rational systems—economic markets, legal codes, bureaucratic hierarchies—develop their own internal logics. They no longer serve substantive ends such as justice or virtue, but operate for their own sake, autonomous and self-perpetuating. “Once it is fully established,” he wrote, “bureaucracy is among those social structures which are hardest to destroy ... The ‘dominant’ position of the official is largely a fiction.”

Hard to destroy, but not impossible, it seems. And without this bureaucracy, there is no modern capitalism. Trump therefore serves two masters: He promises re-enchantment through the destruction of the machine. He also promises that very soon, he will make everyone rich. He’s definitely not going to get both.

Weber writes that in the premodern world, people experienced themselves as embedded in a meaningful order, be it divine or customary. Not so the modern one. If the capitalist spirit was once fueled by religious faith, it is now a compulsory system of labor discipline. Modern man is imprisoned not by tyranny, but by the internalization of the rational system that makes modernity possible.

It strikes me that what unifies the weird coalition behind Trump is the longing for re-enchantment. The religious right seeks to escape liberal rationality and re-Christianize the political order; the Nerd Reich imagines it will meld itself with godlike AI and live forever; RFK Jr. would replace the whole apparatus of modern medicine and scientific empiricism with beef tallow and fairy dust; Trump believes that whatever he imagines is true. The irrationality is the point. The attack on the bureaucracy and the rule of law serves vulgar aims—power and grift—but it also serves metaphysical ones. It fulfills, at last, Mario Savio’s dream:

But where is this revolution going? It now seems more like the French or the Bolshevik revolutions than it does the kind of gradual authoritarian capture we’ve recently seen throughout the world. If I once thought, “I know this: I lived through it in Turkey,” I see now that this is not the same. The speed with which it’s happening, for one thing, is different, and so is the sheer Pol-Pot-Year-Zero destructiveness. Perhaps I’m not remembering this correctly, but I don’t remember feeling, with Erdoğan, that anything was now possible.

So where is it going? What do you think? After this, there will be something new—there has to be, because our old form of government is being destroyed. Will we return to a brittle semblance of normalcy—one in which we go through the motions, but no longer believe? Are we headed toward civil war? Are we entering a dark age of authoritarianism made bleaker and more protracted by the power of AI and total surveillance? Might there be a reawakening and a recommitment to Enlightenment values, even a re-founding—a Second American Republic, with a new Constitution? Which of Jonathan Last’s scenarios seems most plausible to you—or if none of them do, what does?

What will become of the world? It will no longer be led by us, but must it be led by the world’s worst and most brutal states? Does liberal democracy have a future?

What do you think? I’m genuinely curious to know where my readers imagine all of this is going. Where would you like it to go, and where do you fear it will go?