For conservatives, Donald Trump’s surge to victory warrants immense excitement. According to the Associated Press, the president-elect has won the swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, and Arizona. He even won the popular vote, signaling not only an Electoral College victory but also a nationwide mandate to govern.

Trump will be the first president since Grover Cleveland to secure two non-consecutive terms. But perhaps unlike Cleveland, Trump’s election signals a political realignment that we are only beginning to understand. It may have cataclysmic implications for the liberal international order.

Of course, this shift is ongoing and much-discussed. Ever since Trump first won the presidency in 2016, a new right-wing populism has been flipping the Republican Party on its head in slow-motion. Eight years ago, the disgruntled blue-collar workers of the rustbelt made their grievances known to all those with ears to hear and eyes to see. 

But then came 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic with the race riots it enabled after the death of George Floyd, and the American people’s subsequent decision to oust Trump for Joe Biden. It became possible to view 2016 as merely a fluke—a loud, but nevertheless short temper tantrum by a working class that would eventually recede back into the Democratic fold, rebuilding the electoral blue wall that propelled Biden to the White House (with the addition of a narrow win in Georgia).

After four years of Biden, however, Trump has been propelled back to the White House. His resounding victory saw impressive gains among various voting blocs, transcending racial and ethnic barriers, making red counties redder and red-shifting blue ones. The political realignment we are seeing has arguably cemented Trump as a permanent political force. He has once again vanquished the neo-liberal political establishment in both the Republican and Democratic Parties.

That realignment made itself clearer when prominent old guard Republicans such as Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush all endorsed Kamala Harris alongside Democrats, further accelerating the split between the GOP’s new populist base and the more conventional left- and right-wing variations of liberalism that had once predominated both parties. 

As it turns out, Americans’ disdain for our current elite class wasn’t just a fluke. It was a real political phenomenon that continued to bubble under the surface even during the Biden presidency. If Nathan Pinkoski is right that post-liberalism of a certain sort already defines the order presided over by the bipartisan elite, then this populist uprising is really a reaction against changes long in the making which have come to a head in the 2010s and early 2020s. 

Under Biden, the American Left further committed itself to a more socially progressive agenda. A hasty and botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, coupled with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and an Israeli-Palestinian conflict that threatens to escalate into full-fledged war with Iran, underscored the public’s sense that Democrat politics is no antidote to the state of perpetual war which seems to accompany liberal internationalism.

Trump’s return to the White House can no longer be understood merely as a temporary populist hissy fit, but rather as a widespread shift away from conventional modes of liberal American statecraft, whether it be in the form of Bush-era neoconservatism or the Democratic Party’s neoliberal internationalism. 

To be clear, as many others have already observed, this political realignment is far from complete, and what it eventually morphs into will mainly depend on what a second Trump Administration is able to achieve. The first Trump Administration, despite some key accomplishments, was largely hindered by poor staffing choices, which led to various power struggles that undermined Trump’s first presidency. 

Furthermore, for such a political realignment to be successful long term, it will have to provide much more than just raw populist discontent. As I argued back in July in The American Mind: conservative disdain for the current elite class is simply not enough. Upon kicking the old guard out, conservative populists will have to confront the necessity of building a new elite class over time—one that more properly encapsulates the interests of Americans and strives to lead by example rather than condescendingly lording over them. 

In other words, a second Trump administration will have the opportunity to embrace noblesse oblige, helping to foster a nobility that is obliged to take seriously the economic, cultural, and political well-being of the American public. Trump’s appointments so far have been promising, but only time will tell whether he can sustain four years of follow-through on this definitive populist mandate.