In 1843, Karl Marx said religion was the opium of the people, and in 1955, Raymond Aron said Marxism was the opium of the intellectuals. Aron’s formulation was later updated in the 1973 Lindsay Anderson film O Lucky Man! to “Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.” All three formulations were plausible, but today revolution would, I think, best be described as the opium of the MAGA right.
In MAGA, conservatism has degenerated from an ideology into a rabble-rousing nihilism committed to the indiscriminate destruction of the status quo. The regulatory state, the civil service, the rule of law, and the separation of powers are all under attack for reasons nobody can articulate very well because (as in most revolutions) it’s all just a power grab. The shock troops may be working-class voters who revile coastal elites, but the strings are being pulled by the oligarchic class.
Political scientists struggle to attach a descriptive name to all this. This aspirational revolution isn’t especially conservative, and it’s populist only according to the most pejorative definition of that term. The acronym MAGA (for “Make America Great Again”) is too evasive about how far back it wants to go. A better descriptor is Trumpism, because it seems doubtful this crackpot revolution can outlive the increasingly erratic kleptocrat at its head. But what if I’m wrong, and it does?
The newest term for Trumpism is aristopopulism. When I first encountered the word, I thought it had to be the invention of some shrewd satirist. But in fact it’s the coinage of Patrick Deneen, a conservative political scientist at Notre Dame, and he isn’t kidding. Deneen first wrote about aristopopulism in his 2023 book Regime Change: Toward A Post-Liberal Future. Today, according to Elizabeth Dwoskin of The Washington Post, aristopopulism is the animating idea behind the Rockbridge Network, a “secretive organization” backed by Peter Thiel and other Silicon Valley billionaires that wants to fight woke-ism and, in Dwoskin’s words, “push unrestrained capitalism into American life.” Which in practice appears mostly to mean selling access to the Trump administration.
Deneen is no Trump fanboy. In Regime Change he calls Trump “a deeply flawed narcissist who at once appealed to the intuitions of the populace, but without offering clarifying articulation of their grievances.” But he likes what Trump started. What’s needed now, Deneen writes, is “sustained policy and the development of a capable leadership class.” Deneen reviles America’s liberal meritocratic elite, but he isn’t anti-elite; he just wants a “distinct and new elite, attuned to the requirements of the common good.” These are “self-conscious aristoi.” The term refers to the ancient Athenian nobility, but a reasonable translation would be “aristocrat.”
The Rockbridge Network is similarly straightforward in emphasizing the need for a new elite (“It is time for a new network,” its 2021 brochure states), but it’s much less starry-eyed than Deneen about who these aristoiwill be. “One way to think of Rockbridge,” the brochure continues, “is as an investment manager, a kind of political venture capital firm. It is our job to leverage our investors’ capital with the right political expertise to ensure results. We are pursuing political alpha.” No sentimental nonsense here about making the world a better place; this is the language of money.
Rockbridge Network chief Christopher Buskirk thinks we all of us aspire to run the world. “Those [who] decry the very concept of elites may be trying to conceal their own ambition to be among the elite,” he wrote in his 2023 book, America and the Art of the Possible. But “in classic political thought, aristocracy meant rule by the best, the aristos, who were expected to act for the public good.” (He means aristoi, but set that aside.) Buskirk denies that his aristos are the same as oligarchs, who lack “a sense of responsibility to use their power or influence in the public interest.” To the Post’s Dwoskin, Buskirk said: “You either have an extractive elite — an oligarchy — or you have a productive elite — an aristocracy — in every society.”
But give me a break. Extraction is Buskirk’s middle name. He co-founded the Rockbridge Network in 2019 with JD Vance, then a best-selling memoirist and Thiel protégé, later a senator, and now vice-president of the United States. Buskirk also co-founded 1789 Capital (a name that evokes the French Revolution but which Buskirk says is meant instead to evoke the Bill of Rights). The other co-founder of 1789 Capital is Omeed Malik, financial wingman to Donald Trump, Jr. The president’s son is himself a partner at 1789 Capital, and after Don, Jr. arrived, the firm’s assets miraculously climbed from $150 million to $1 billion.
Trump père is the best thing that ever happened to Buskirk. According to a September Reuters profile by Alexandra Ulmer and Joseph Tanfani, Buskirk “struggled with debt and lawsuits from collection companies” before he invested in MAGA in 2016 by starting a pro-Trump think tank called the Center for American Greatness. The nonprofit was backed by Thiel and, later, by the Bradley Foundation.
With Malik and Don, Jr. Buskirk is also co-owner of a private club in Georgetown called Executive Branch that’s basically a very expensive turnstile to do business with, well, the executive branch. The club charges up to $500,000 for a membership. It was at Executive Branch that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent almost got into a fistfight with Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte. This is all a pretty far cry from the School-of-Athens picture Buskirk tries to paint in America and the Art of the Possible.
Aristopopulism celebrates the virtues of the free market the same way Washington did during the Gilded Age. It buys and sells it. If we’re going to have an aristocracy, I’d prefer the old mugwumpy WASP one, which for all its faults took a dim view of that sort of corruption, and never troubled to don populist garb. This newfangled version is more decadent, more corrupt, more authoritarian, and more self-contradictory. You can have a populist revolution or you can have an aristocracy, but I really don’t see how you can have both.
