Notes on Viral Hegemony

How to squander a realignment

In a Washington Post column this week, Shadi Hamid argues we are already at “the beginning of the end of the Trump era.” Trump still has nearly four years left in office, but according to Hamid, the “vibe shift away from the vibe shift” has commenced. After the November election, he recalls, he briefly “thought that a new era had begun—one of Trumpian hegemony,” but now, he goes on to argue, “Trump is squandering what might have been a once-in-a-generation realignment. Already, the moment has begun fragmenting into something else, something not yet defined but unmistakably different.”

It is hard to disagree with this assessment, even if, as Hamid recognizes, it’s mostly based on unmeasurable vibes at this point. The way I’ve been thinking about it is the following. Despite the endless attempts to de-normalize him, Trump broadened his coalition in 2024, both in terms of elite endorsements and his voting base. There was indeed a possibility of a “hegemonic” Trump who would be able to channel and represent a different version of American normality and common sense than the regime that preceded him—somewhat as Barack Obama once did vis-à-vis the Bush years for a time, in part by emphasizing his moderation and willingness to work across the aisle to counteract the impression that he was an extreme or unconventional figure. (This wasn’t how Republicans saw it, of course, but judging by the 2012 results, the majority of Americans, even if they may not have loved Obama’s policies, didn’t regard him as a Kenyan anti-colonialist, any more than 2024 voters bought Democrats’ claims that Trump was literally Hitler.)

Instead, Trump is pursuing a narrower path. Although some of the policies he is pursuing are reasonably popular or even very popular, he almost invariably frames them in a manner that seems unnecessarily alienating to all but the MAGA faithful. Immigration is a case in point. Trump has a mandate for border security and tightened enforcement after the unprecedented influx of the Biden era. But by some accounts, despite making “mass deportations now” a major 2024 slogan, the new administration is deporting illegal migrants at a slower pace than its predecessor. Much of its emphasis has instead been on spectacle, some of which can only be described as trolling:

What is notable here isn’t the fact of the deportation. Deporting a convicted fentanyl trafficker would surely be one of the most popular enforcement actions a president could take. What is notable, instead, is that the official White House account used a just-released AI tool to turn this deportation into a meme that seemed designed to provoke a backlash, which could then give way to a counter-backlash in which those who objected to the joke were accused of being in favor of people dying from fentanyl overdoses. In other words, the meme is emblematic of a politics inseparable from the dynamics of online outrage cycles.

This is unsurprising, in part because Trump’s entire late-in-life political career has been defined by such cycles and his uncanny instinct for playing them to his short- to medium-term advantage. But this sort of politics, because it is entirely premised on a constant escalation of negative polarization, in which backlashes pile on backlashes pile on backlashes, seems incompatible with the achievement of any true Trumpian hegemony, which would require, among other things, assuming the sort of gravitas he insistently refuses—the sort of gravitas, indeed, to which the meme above, posted as it is to an official White House channel, stands as a repudiation. (A similar episode from last month was the ASMR video posted by the same account.)

Hamid invokes “the paradox of our political moment: permanence announces itself only to dissolve almost immediately.” In previous posts, I’ve introduced a concept, viral hegemony, that attempts to account for this paradox. Here is how I formulated it:

Viral hegemony is arrived at not through a “long march through the institutions,” but a rapid stampede across the algorithmically mediated public sphere, which the logic of the attention economy tends to push far more rapidly into cycles of extremist one-upmanship.

Viral hegemony seems to produce a kind of cybernetic negative feedback loop by which it undoes itself by the very means it builds itself up. We saw plenty of this on the woke-left end of things over the past decade, where mimetic escalations generated embarrassing excesses that ended up bringing down the same people who rode the waves of virality to prominence.

Trump’s perhaps unique achievement is that he has been able to master the waxing and waning cycles of viral hegemony over the long term in a way no other political figure has. In contrast, the viral hegemony achieved by progressivism that culminated in 2020 had no real master or “leader”: It was an ambient, directional phenomenon, an emergent herd stampede with no one truly in charge, which often ended up trampling eager participants to digital death. Trump, in contrast, has been able to immerse himself constantly in the digital feed while also standing above it and giving it direction. This perhaps points to a deeper difference between left and right of the sort Michael Clune got at when he argued a few years ago that “the right has largely maintained leader images in the shape of individuals, the left has attained a more complex form of leader image, typically moving in the direction set by the image of the most oppressed person.”

One advantage that the promulgators of the left-wing viral hegemony known as “wokeness” enjoyed in the 2010s was that they could operate atop a more solid layer of traditional Gramscian hegemony I referred to in a previous post as the “conventional late-20th century liberal racial framework.” Woke racialism in many respects opposed the post-Civil Rights common sense of mainstream culture, but at the same time was able to use certain expectations derived from that consensus to its advantage. Hence, for instance, the condescending deference to minorities that had become second nature for well-off white liberals in the late 20th century could become the basis of accepting claims like “only white people can be racist” the like. But once the cycles of viral hegemony played themselves out, the new consensus engendered by the mimetic pressures of online stigma quickly evaporated.

Similarly, the trollish version of immigration politics the administration is currently pursuing piggybacks on a more deeply ingrained common-sense consensus whose persistence the 2024 election revealed: Most people, simply put, think borders should be secure and immigration numbers should be limited. However, it isn’t hard to imagine the current spectacles of overt callousness may produce a backlash in the other direction, because something like this seems to have happened in the first Trump term—which in turn led the Biden administration to push things too far in the other direction. (I’d argue the lessons of viral hegemony can also be applied to the failings of Biden’s one-term presidency, but that’s a subject for another post.)

Hamid views the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil and other visa holders for participating in pro-Palestinian activism as Trump’s decisive pivot away from the pursuit of broad-based hegemony and toward a pursuit of mere “domination” through spectacular displays of power. I’m not sure how salient these incidents are outside the educated elite; foreigners who can be tarred by association with "terrorists" will never be a particularly popular object of sympathy (to be clear, this is why I see defending their right to due process as particularly important). But it does seem especially ominous to me that the White House is tying the fate of what might be a popular immigration enforcement agenda to the tendentious idea that non-citizens lack basic constitutional rights. My own position on this is the same as Greg Conti’s: “it is antithetical to any decent form of democracy or republicanism to have a population living among us who lack the ordinary legal remedies and protections that the rest of us have.” I suspect that, however many likes the claim to the contrary might get on X these days, most Americans also agree.

This week in Compact

• Thomas Fazi on Europe’s military buildup

• Faika El-Nagashi and Anna Zobinina on the Council of Europe’s dangerous redefinition of “women’s rights”

• Ross Barkan on the disjunction between elite Democrats’ “abundance agenda” and the party base’s surging populist discontent

• Justin Vassallo on why Democrats should take a nuanced view on Trump’s tariff agenda

• Dan McCarthy on what we really learned from Signal-gate about Trump’s foreign policy

• Grant Kaplan on the quest for the Catholic Beethoven

Thanks for reading!