Vladimir Putin surprised no one by winning reelection as Russia’s president and chief philosopher in March 2024. No one was surprised when the circular firing squad of Britain’s Conservative Party crashed in July. Only President Emmanuel Macron was surprised a few days later, when France’s parliamentary elections produced the paralyzed National Assembly that everyone else had expected. In another authoritarian Francophone state with a serious Islamist problem, a runaway debt-to-GDP ratio, and a delusional leader, Bashar Assad was not surprised by July’s parliamentary elections in Syria, where, in a constitutional arrangement of Democratic Party dreams, two-thirds of the seats were reserved for his Ba’ath Party.

As Assad discovered in December, the electoral “super year” was super bad for incumbents everywhere. In 80% of national elections, the incumbent party either lost power or was forced to share it in a coalition. Historically, being the incumbent has conferred an advantage. As we recognize a king because he wears a crown, the best way to look presidential is to be the president. Today, however, incumbency has become a handicap. A sitting president is a sitting duck, a target for popular dissatisfaction.

The unpopularity papers

In early July 2024, President Joe Biden’s approval rating in Gallup’s polling stood at 36%. This set a new low in the annals of unpopularity. Even Jimmy Carter had received 37% approval at that stage in his term. Soon afterward, Biden was informed he would not be running for reelection. His anointed heiress, Vice President Kamala Harris, also stood uniquely low in the public’s esteem.

A June 2023 NBC poll had given Harris’s performance as vice president a net-negative assessment of -17. This was the lowest net rating ever recorded for a vice president in NBC polling. In May 2003, then-Vice President Dick Cheney had a net-positive rating of +23. Only 32% of those polled approved of Harris. In May 1991, when President George H.W. Bush’s heart trouble had raised the prospect of Vice President Dan Quayle taking over, Quayle’s approval, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found, stood at 56%.

Harris’s backers, whoever they were, may have gambled on the epochal unpopularity of her opponent. Donald Trump’s approval rating had averaged 41% throughout his presidency, consistently 4 points lower than any of his predecessors. Trump ended his first term with 34% approval in Gallup’s polling. These were the lowest end-of-term approval numbers ever logged, but Trump’s record may yet be broken. In December 2024, Biden matched Trump’s 34% approval in a Marquette Law School poll.

There is nothing uniquely American about these numbers. In September, a poll by the French Odoxa firm found that 75% of French voters thought Macron was a “bad” president. Only 39% approved of Macron’s new prime minister, Michel Barnier. In December, the British polling firm Ipsos, which has assessed every prime minister since Margaret Thatcher, gave Keir Starmer the worst ratings of any British prime minister. After five months in office, Starmer had a 61% dissatisfaction rating and a net-negative rating of -34.

“Democracy is on the ballot,” Biden, Harris, and the Muppet-like White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre warned us in 2024. If you believe that, then democracy was voted out across the G7 nations. In the United States, the Democratic coalition frayed. The center turned to Trump, giving Trump the popular vote and the Republican Party a governing trifecta. In Britain, the Conservatives’ 2019 coalition split, granting Labour a majority despite its reduced vote share. In France, Germany, Canada, and Japan, governments either broke down in 2024 or hit a wall.

In France, Macron, having won and secured power by making the center ground a desert, is now powerless before the consequences. The assembly is radicalized against Macron’s centrist technocracy, and Marine Le Pen leads in polling for the 2027 presidential elections. In Germany, Chancellor Olaf Scholz and the Social Democrats lost a vote of confidence in December, forcing Scholz to call elections for February 2025. 

These will be only the fourth snap elections in the post-1945 German history. Months of negotiation will delay the formation of a new coalition. Unlike in France, the traditional party structure has held in Germany. But Friedrich Merz of the center-right Christian Democratic Union entered 2025 neck and neck with Alice Weidel, the leader of one of Europe’s most radical New Right parties, Alternative for Germany.

In Canada, Jagmeet Singh and the New Democratic Party ended the year by threatening to pull the rug from under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s tottering Liberal-led coalition. In Japan’s October elections, the ruling LDP-Komeito coalition fell short of a majority. As in France, Germany, and Canada, the Japanese legislature will struggle to legislate. The pundits call this the status quo. There is nothing static about it. It is a slow slide into paralysis, decay, and decline that will, sooner rather than later, antagonize voters into demanding radically different policies.

Across the G7, only one incumbent government left 2024 in better shape than it entered it. Italy used to be a byword for political dysfunction, but Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her Brothers of Italy party came through unscathed. This is because Italy, being dysfunctional, had already broken down, so it began its reconstruction earlier. When Meloni won power in 2022, she was reviled across Western media as a neofascist. The EU warned of punitive action if she dusted off the jackboots (“The new face of Italian populism,” Oct. 22, 2022). By the end of 2024, the Politico website, a reliable indicator of the managerial consensus, had picked Meloni as No. 1 in its “Class of 2025,” a “straight-talking alpha … a figure with whom Brussels, and Washington, can do business.”

Meloni is a successful incumbent. President Javier Milei of Argentina is, too. So are Prime Ministers Viktor Orban of Hungary and Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. If 2024 was, as the Financial Times put it, the “graveyard of incumbents,” a major reason is that most of the incumbents kept digging even as the hole got deeper.

Meloni, Milei, Orban, and Netanyahu are all on “the Right,” but there are significant differences between them. Milei is an economic libertarian. Orban is a protectionist. Meloni has sought to improve relations with Brussels. Netanyahu has turned Israel away from Brussels, toward the new economies of Asia. What all four of these leaders have in common with each other, and with Trump, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and the MAGA policy planners, is that they recognize that a certain way of governing has run its course.

The voters have not just fired incumbents, most of whom were mediocrities who barely made a mark. They have served notice on the incumbent ideology of 20th-century liberalism. Whether they realize it or not, they have voted to replace its bureaucratic-legal methods. These have failed to manage the economics of the key developments of the post-1990 world: mass immigration and digital technology.

The business of government

In the euphemisms of our media, the “middle class” is “hurting” from “stubborn inflation” and “high prices.” A “surge” in immigration and “concerns” about crime are causing the people to press the “hot button” on issues that the political class dares not touch. Voters across the liberal democracies are electing “populist” amateurs and “far right” outsiders. The f-word, “fascism,” is everywhere.

The official explanation for voter dissatisfaction is accurate but incomplete. The near-universal shutdown of economies and supply chains in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the near-universal printing of money at wartime levels, really has produced “stubborn inflation” and “high prices.” Life really has become more expensive. Immigration really is “surging.” Bizarre and violent crime really is surging, too, along with a toxic fauna of drug-related mental illness.

The political class collectively talks about this stuff as if it’s like the weather, beyond anyone’s control. But much of it is the result of bad policy choices and the degeneration of state capacity. Until 2016, administrations, both Democratic and Republican, chose illegal immigration as a preferable policy option to overhauling the entire immigration system or spending money on border security. When COVID-19 broke out, the Trump administration chose to shut down the economy. The Biden administration chose to prolong the agony. Both the Trump and Biden administrations chose to withhold the truth about the origins of COVID-19 from the public.

Consider Obamacare. No one forced the Obama administration to create the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare began as an ideological project. It intended to extend the 19th-century liberal goal of state capacity in healthcare provision to its furthest limits in a 21st century in which everyone lives for longer due to expensive medical treatments. This fundamental incompatibility of means and ends was augmented by passing the supervision of the healthcare henhouse to the hungry foxes of the medical industries.

The result is a bureaucratic-commercial boondoggle that has increased the reach and scale of the state but not its capacity. It has created a new bureaucracy, all of whose members owe their jobs to the Democrats. It has created new government-client relationships between federal agencies, pharma and medical industries, insurance companies, hospitals, and “healthcare providers,” all of them sponsored by the Democrats. Falling between the 19th-century age of paper and the 21st-century digital age, it produces incomprehensible and often irreconcilable documents in both formats.  

Obamacare was so embedded in the bureaucracy, and the bureaucracy so sympathetic to Obamacare, that the first Trump administration could summon neither the political will nor the congressional means to dislodge it. The jab-happy federal response to COVID-19 then gave a Republican-approved shot in the arm to this medical-industrial complex of the Democratic Party’s making. Meanwhile, healthcare-related government debt continues to rise. Life expectancy is declining. Everything costs more than it did before. Nothing works as well as it once did. Nobody has any idea how to fix it.

Our problems go deeper than “stubborn inflation” and “high prices.” Leviathan’s bargain, Hobbes said, offered physical security but constrained personal liberty. The modern liberal state has extended the offer from the limited goal of collective security to the infinitely expanding goals of personal safety and “equity.” Our liberal Leviathan has broadened the business of government to a degree that cannot be sustained, at least on its current methods. This is ruinously expensive. It is inimical to privacy, the cornerstone of liberty. It gives quasi-legal powers to unaccountable bureaucracies whose dysfunction and complexity have run beyond anyone’s control.

It threatens to bankrupt every liberal state. It has already bankrupted the electoral credit of the liberal system. Our politicians and bureaucrats are baffled by the popular backlash. The government got into the business of giving people what they wanted, and now the people are attacking the government.

The digital class war

The political class is not a single group. Most of its members are not even elected politicians. The “political class” is shorthand for an informal alliance comprising a small and shifting cohort of elected politicians, a surprisingly large cohort of donors, a much larger number of permanent and unelected bureaucrats, and the numberless foot soldiers of the academy, the think tanks, and the media. They, too, are incumbents of a kind. They, too, are being voted out.

Though Big Tech has been the most dynamic force in the American and global economy since the 1990s, it is not fully integrated into the political class. So far, Big Tech has only donated and advised. It has not yet governed. This will change in the second Trump administration.

Marshall McLuhan noted that it is in the nature of new media to bypass the old. But government develops more like software. Once installed, a program is kept going through patches and updates. Fully digitizing the government means installing new hardware: a new, AI-powered bureaucracy. This, Musk and Ramaswamy realize, will redefine the means and ends of government. The old political class and its clients will resist their superannuation through the traditional low-tech strategies of passive incompetence and active disdain.

The new digital class is versed in systems theory. It understands that runaway complexity can cause a “systems collapse,” an accelerating chaos of “cascade effects.” Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is an attempt to de-complexify the bureaucracy and reduce the cascade of debt and paperwork. Firing federal bureaucrats who are already “working from home” is the first step in the destruction of the old system. The software for the new system is still being written.

A piece of it was written over the Christmas holidays. The old system failed to manage the economics of immigration and technology. The new system is already debating it via online vitriol on X. The argument was over H-1B visas for foreign workers in “specialty occupations,” and especially how many Indian tech workers should receive them. Musk and Ramaswamy were both subjects and participants.

MAGA restrictionists wanted to cancel the entire visa system so that American-born workers may benefit. Some of the restrictionists objected on racial grounds alone. Musk and Ramaswamy, two immigrants who made good in tech, insisted that the smart move is for America to skim the world’s talent. Trump weighed in like a wrestling ref and called it for the tech-bro tag team: “America needs smart people.” No one suggested fixing that relic of the old dispensation, the public education system.

This skirmish suggests the outlines of the second Trump administration’s Hobbesian approach to the issues that broke the old incumbents. The state scales its role back to security, not safety. Immigration policy is no longer about massing raw numbers. It is about retaining a qualitative edge, especially in digital technology, which is now integral to national security. The business of the bureaucracy is to serve business, and technology offers scalable efficiencies.

There is nothing “far-right” about any of this. It is a traditional American blend, a pragmatic suspicion of human frailty, a millenarian hope in technology, and a Puritan demand for transparency. It is “populist” in that it speaks plainly and coincides with the mainstream of public opinion. The organizing technologies of our emerging information order are, however, as esoteric to the voters as the scribal marks on a cuneiform tablet were to an ancient Sumerian. When the voters of 2024 expelled the incumbents of a failed order, they brought us closer to the past as well as the future.