Like its 20th-century predecessors, today’s far right longs for the purported glories of the ancient world, all while fetishizing modern technology.
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Weeks into his second presidential term, Donald Trump is moving ahead with what his former confidant Steve Bannon called “deconstructing the administrative state.” Led by Elon Musk’s advisory task force on government efficiency, this effort has already produced a wave of headlines and controversies.
Far from preserving the status quo, as would befit a “conservative” government, the current administration seeks to reshape our future to mirror an idealized past. This peculiar form of “progress” grafts cutting-edge technologies of surveillance, information control, and mass murder, along with hefty doses of techno-optimism, onto a nostalgic Christian ethnonationalism. Whether Trumpism is actually fascist or not is beside the point: despite its futuristic trappings, it is less forward-looking than even the stagnant liberal politics it repudiates.
This mixing of past mythologies with present-day technology has a clear historical precedent. In the mid-1980s, historian of Nazism Jeffrey Herf coined the term “reactionary modernism,” which combined “great enthusiasm for modern technology” with a “rejection of the Enlightenment and the values and institutions of liberal democracy.” Herf showed how reactionary modernists in interwar Germany tarred abstract, intellectual, and profit-focused practices as “Jewish” and “socialist” while glorifying the tangible, “spiritual,” and entrepreneurial. In contrast to “civilization,” which they coded as Jewish, proto-Nazi and Nazi thinkers admired “culture,” which they believed could only be produced by people of German blood.
Today the Trump administration and its Silicon Valley handmaidens are dusting off the reactionary modernist playbook. The blob of ideas that formed the basis of historical Nazism has, in the intervening century, rolled like a boulder through assorted ideological trash heaps, steadily accumulating material. To Nazism’s borrowings from Teutonic legend and Eastern mysticism, today’s Silicon Valley far right adduces the Horatio Alger myth, Misesian economics, and puerile science-fiction fantasies freely cribbed from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or Stranger in a Strange Land.
As we’re quickly learning, the results of this reactionary futurism are chaotic at best. Trump’s first act of radical reshaping was to order numerous (probably illegal) budget cuts. On January 28, 2.3 million federal employees received an email with the subject line “Fork in the Road” that offered eight months of pay and benefits in exchange for their immediate resignation. By February 1, the administration had evidently granted Musk’s task force access to “sensitive Treasury data, including Social Security and Medicare customer payment systems.” On February 7, forced leave began for thousands of employees of USAID, a foreign aid agency that has cultivated American soft power abroad since 1961. Other government bodies Trump and Musk seek to gut or abolish include the departments of Education and Agriculture, as well as the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency. The goal is to cut the federal payroll by some 75 percent. Neither Musk nor any other Trump affiliate has indicated where the funds thus “saved” will subsequently go.
Many of these measures proceed directly from Project 2025, which stresses a “continued alignment between agency leadership and White House priorities.” Despite its euphemistic language, Project 2025 plainly announced the incoming government’s intention to self-immolate. Voters who avoided reading that document or the copious news coverage dedicated to it could also have attended to Musk’s promise to cause suffering to all Americans without exception (“Everyone’s going to have to take a haircut”).
One clue that the nation isn’t in for a simple McKinseying — in which a business is asset stripped until it collapses — is the involvement of Musk. His particular brand of “efficiency” is supposed to be “disruptive” in a way that promotes “innovation.” Yet as Twitter’s shareholders know all too well, Musk’s interventions do not so much propel a company into the radiant capitalist future as pull it back into an unprofitable past. Trump 2.0’s program similarly represents not a new golden age but a regression — toward models of disease control, economic growth, and environmental stewardship that other developed nations have long since discarded.
The very slogan “Make America Great Again,” with its telltale final word, “again,” suggests that arriving at future utopia will require a reversal of progress. Both Project 2025, with its genteel circumlocutions, and Trump, with his performative crudeness, couch the proposed trajectory in terms of reversing or rolling back or undoing Biden- or Obama-era policies. In 2016, Trump’s attempts in this direction were ham-fisted and inefficient. But as of 2025, it looks as though the peeling back will be directed by tech oligarchs with a reputation for getting things done — “future-oriented” by definition.
Among Trump’s boosters are self-described “techno-optimists” like Marc Andreessen who predict that “our descendents [sic] will live in the stars.” Immune to irony, these men are cozying up to the new administration, parlaying their conservative bona fides into lucrative government contracts for OpenAI, Palantir, and SpaceX. But tech’s commitment to cost cutting stops at its own front door. The industry’s latest innovation, artificial intelligence, consumes water and electricity the way the Ford F-150 consumes fuel.
MAGA exemplifies what literary scholar Svetlana Boym called “restorative nostalgia,” which “does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition.” By striving to remove entire populations of “illegals,” strip away women’s bodily autonomy, and reduce sexual minorities to second-class citizens, this administration wishes to return not to 2020 or 2008 but to at least 1932, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt introduced the idea of the New Deal.
Or perhaps even earlier. Even as they champion “logic and reason,” Silicon Valley techno-futurists are irrationally mired in the very distant past. Right-wing blogger Curtis Yarvin, an engineer and acolyte of PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, pines for eighteenth-century Prussian monarchy. Then there is the singularity, a technological point of no return after which artificial intelligence will supposedly reign supreme. First popularized by Ray Kurzweil, the singularity relies on a futuristic imagination of triumphant technology at the same time that it draws deeply on archaic fears about the end of the world. Even on an individual level, the emotional underpinning of singularity theory is not optimism but simple fear of death.
As for Musk, he has followed many of his chronically online peers in becoming obsessed with ancient Rome. When he challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match for manly tech billionaire supremacy, he dreamed of a livestream in which “everything in camera frame will be ancient Rome, so nothing modern at all.” Yet for someone who claims to think about the Roman Empire “every day,” he knows very little about it, instead lightly basting his existing ideology in a vaguely Roman-flavored sauce. To bolster his arguments about “replacement theory,” Musk wrongly ascribed the empire’s decline to falling birth rates. After his Sieg Heil at Trump’s inauguration in January, Musk tried to reframe the gesture as a “Roman salute” — convinced, apparently, that ancient Romans really used the greeting (they did not).
Like its twentieth-century predecessors, today’s far right longs for the purported glories of the ancient world, all while fetishizing modern technology. A favorite figure of Weimar-era proto-Nazis was the engineer who allegedly infused his technical prowess with a “Germanic” authenticity that hearkened back to the Middle Ages. The promotion of tech entrepreneurship in American culture since 2000 or so follows a similar pattern. Even as the tech sector collapses (again), children are encouraged to privilege STEM fields over the “useless” arts and humanities, while tech moguls like Musk and the late Steve Jobs are worshiped with almost religious fervor. To be entrepreneurial, we are told, is to be consummately American.
Adherents of today’s reactionary modernism disdain anything “soft” or “unfit” (“facts don’t care about your feelings”; “own the libs”; “snowflakes”) and aggressively defend “traditional” or “authentic” values. They tout “Western civilization” while pushing the United States toward absolutist monarchy or even feudalism, forms of social organization the West abandoned centuries ago. They champion the Enlightenment without acknowledging that eighteenth-century philosophers like David Hume, Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau awakened whole peoples to the possibility that kings aren’t necessary and might be overthrown.
The “RETVRN” to which Trump’s tech industry friends aspire is not only morally bankrupt but intellectually dishonest. Their efforts to go backward will not help us recover the grandeur of antiquity, though we should expect more atavistic imperialism in the vein of “annexing Canada.” With the promised “dismantling of the administrative state,” we are witnessing a “RETVRN” to a time before the metanarrative of linear progress, to a cyclical, abstract archaism in which the operative noun is “resource” and the operative verb “extraction.” In this scheme, the past becomes a resource to be mined for politically expedient sound bites, humans mere raw material to be squeezed for man-hours, and the economy a slush fund for kleptocrats.
Reactionary modernism helps make sense of Trump’s attempted razing of federal agencies and regulatory frameworks. The point is not to foster efficiency or streamline our government as though it were a business, which would be bad enough. Instead Trump and his ministers seek to reconstruct, on the ruins of our imperfect republic, a premodern state where power flows directly from the executive, unencumbered by rule of law or accountability to the electorate.
To “RETVRN,” in this way, is not to reinstate Roman aesthetics or lifestyles but Roman cruelty, to travel back to a time before Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative and France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The revival of reactionary modernism is no harmless political steampunk. It’s an attempt to hijack the future by forcing it to repeat the past, just with slightly better gadgets.
But this era’s most important “RETVRN” may be to a state of nature. To cancel the few weak gestures our government has made toward acknowledging the humanity of the other, from our vestigial welfare state to investments in public education and environmental regulations to basic respect for minority groups, is to consign us once again to a “war of all against all.”
This article is a preview from the Spring 2025 issue of Jacobin. Subscribe here to get it and three more print editions delivered to you.