What Trump's victory reveals about us

Beyond truth and tribalism

The Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault, 1818

For nearly two years now, I’ve been that guy at dinner parties predicting Trump’s return to power, collecting eye-rolls from many friends. Now that it’s happened—and yes, I realize I’m fashionably late to the post-election analysis party—I feel an unsettling sense of relief. Not because I wanted this outcome, but because watching a storm you’ve warned about finally make landfall brings its own strange comfort. Reality has caught up with the inevitable: we’ve entered a new world where our old ways of thinking have become obsolete.

The election results are a Rorschach test for America’s collective psyche. What you see in those electoral inkblots depends entirely on your information diet, your bank account, your zip code. For some of my friends and family, this marks the end of democracy itself; for others, it’s the pragmatic restoration of American strength. Both are right. Both are wrong. And this isn’t merely political disagreement. We are living in contradictions so profound that they defy simple narratives.

As someone who leads groups of men and recently became a father to a boy, I see Trump’s character as the embodiment of immature masculinity—arrogance, fragility, the need to dominate. He represents the qualities I work hard to root out in myself and in the men I work with. But will his presidency descend into the dictatorship many fear? I doubt it. The extremist rhetoric on both sides—that this is either the last gasp of democracy or the dawn of a totalitarian deep state—reveals the extent to which tribalistic thinking has become our default mode of meaning-making in the digital age.

For many outside the gravitational pull of legacy media, Trump’s victory wasn’t a shock—it felt obvious. The writing was grotesquely spray-painted across the cultural landscape for anyone willing to see beyond the polls. What I didn’t expect was the decisiveness of the win. Part of my relief is simply that Trump didn’t have the opportunity to contest the result—though he was already preparing his “rigged election” narrative in Pennsylvania, laying the groundwork to cry fraud. For a moment, please reflect on how incredibly, just undeniably fucked up that is—reasonable people are breathing sighs of relief simply because the electorate didn’t give him and team MAGA an excuse to forcefully impose their version of reality on the rest of us. As if preventing an attempted coup should be the bar for a functioning democracy.

But there’s a deeper reckoning beneath this relief: a now palpable recognition that the old ways of understanding the world are crumbling. Over the past few years, I’ve written about two intertwined phenomena: how progressive culture has devolved into moral superiority contests that valorize victimhood and alienate natural allies; and how we are transitioning into the metamodern era—a new phase that moves beyond the skepticism of postmodernism. In this always-on Information Age, binary thinking no longer serves us, and contradictions coexist in ways we’re only beginning to fathom.

Trump’s 2016 victory was a cultural earthquake, accomplishing what the most brilliant postmodern thinkers could never: it fully ushered us into the “post-Truth” era. This wasn’t just about truth splintering into subjective narratives where anyone could claim “their truth.” It taught us two seemingly opposing lessons: first, that objective truth exists and matters deeply—especially when leaders invent “alternative facts” to serve their own ends. And second, that reality itself is too vast and paradoxical to fit neatly into any single framework. Trump’s victory represented renewal for rural Americans, an existential threat for minorities and women, hope for the working class, and collapse for progressives—all at once. The 2016 election wasn’t just interpreted differently. It was experienced as fundamentally different realities, each as real as the next to those living within them.

Now, in 2024, this election shows we are never going back to the comforting illusion that we can contain the world in our ideological boxes. The question isn’t whether we’re entering a new era—we’re already here. The question is whether we can evolve at exactly the right pace:

Urgent enough to meet this moment, spacious enough to let something genuinely new emerge.

The Democratic party’s descent into its own Cultural Revolution offers a perfect case study of this collapse of meaning-making. Their desperate attempt to make Kamala Harris seem substantial—with forced memes about ‘brat summer’—revealed everything wrong with corporate marketing in an age that craves authenticity. Not just authenticity, but a raw, unfiltered connection to actual experience, however messy or flawed that might be.

This explains a big part of Trump’s appeal. The guy can sit unscripted for three hours on Joe Rogan, speaking directly to millions. Is most of what he says an exaggeration or a flat-out obvious lie? Of course. But he’s tapping into something real—a hunger for unfiltered communication in an era where politics has become reality TV and carefully crafted messaging no longer flies. It’s no wonder then that 60% of Americans under 30 approve of Trump’s transition, even as older generations look on in disbelief.

The disconnect reveals not only a generational gap but also a cultural one—a craving for something raw and unmediated, even if it comes with chaos and contradiction. Trump embodies a kind of authenticity-through-shamelessness that resonates in our exhausted political moment. Still, I’ve watched some of my more thoughtful spiritual mutuals tie themselves into knots defending him as some kind of truth-telling prophet, fundamentally mistaking bombastic, unfiltered expression for actual truth. It’s as if the very desperation for authenticity has made us willing to accept its mere performance.

This longing for authenticity exists within an information ecology that has evolved far beyond our ability to process it. Really, consider the architecture of this moment: the vast difference between what rages on our screens and what exists right in front of our faces: the trees stretching toward light, lovers holding hands in the park, children laughing at nothing in particular, the barista remembering your usual order, dogs chasing balls with pure joy, strangers catching eyes and awkwardly looking away, the wind that whispers ancient secrets our screens can never capture. We have access to all human knowledge yet struggle more than ever to know what’s true. Our phones connect us to billions yet we’ve never felt more alone. We’re witnessing both a mental health crisis and an awakening of consciousness unlike anything in history—depression and enlightenment in a strange, codependent relationship. Each week brings news that would have been unthinkable a decade ago, the future arriving faster than our stories can contain it.

This isn’t just information overload—it’s forcing us toward a more mature stage of adult development and consciousness, one that can hold multiple perspectives simultaneously without collapsing into relativism (the intellectually lazy position where we pretend all views are equally valid). What appears as pure mayhem from within our old frameworks might actually be evolution doing its necessary work, pushing us not just toward more nuanced vision, but toward a fundamentally new relationship with reality itself.

Our information ecology, until it fundamentally changes, will only intensify this process, thrusting people deeper into what philosopher and author Robert Anton Wilson called reality tunnels—coherent but limited frameworks for making sense of the world. Each tunnel has its own logic, its own facts, its own version of truth, each one a fragment of a larger picture we can’t quite grasp. The progressive tunnel sees fascism rising; the conservative tunnel sees cultural collapse; the tech tunnel sees AI salvation; the spiritual tunnel sees ascendant consciousness evolution. The temptation is to pick a tunnel and call it home. But evolution is inviting us beyond the comfort of single perspectives, asking us to develop the capacity to navigate between these realities without getting lost in any of them—to become cartographers of consciousness rather than “diehard believers” in any single map. Each contains partial truth, none contains the whole.

But when we look at these overlapping maps, these tunnels of perception, something even more destabilizing becomes clear: we’ve entered uncharted territory where reality itself breaks free of our old conceptual containers.¹ It’s too vast, too paradoxical, too alive with contradictions. We’re perpetually vibrating in a metamodern sea of gray, where the old binaries of black and white no longer function.

Yes, we might be heading toward some kind of civilizational collapse or even extinction—the signs are everywhere if you want to see them. But even that knowledge has to be held differently now. We can never know if what looks like collapse is actually rebirth, if what feels like the end might be precisely what’s needed for the next beginning. The greatest shifts in human consciousness have often emerged from periods of profound crisis. Perhaps our role is not to avoid the darkness but to develop the capacity to see within it, and to consider that even what seems like extinction might look different if we acknowledge how deeply we may have misread where evolution is leading us.

Look at the election results themselves, each a paradox that defies our usual narratives: Republicans have become the party of the working class while Democrats dominate wealthy suburbs. We swing from the Obama coalition to Trump’s base and back again, like a democracy caught in a manic-depressive cycle, each extreme generating its opposite. We haven’t elected a woman president, which undoubtedly reflects deep-seated sexism. At the same time, the Democratic party keeps coronating deeply flawed candidates and expecting gender alone to carry them to victory, as if checking identity boxes could substitute for genuine leadership.

Let me be clear: recognizing these paradoxes isn’t about playing both-sidesism. The threats are real and immediate: women are stockpiling abortion pills as Christian nationalists edge closer to power. The Republican party’s embrace of election denial and authoritarian impulses isn’t merely liberal hysteria. As

Daniel Pinchbeck

aptly observes, Trumpism represents a kind of collective trance or spirit possession gripping nearly a third of the country. While history doesn’t simply repeat, it does rhyme—and the echoes of 1930s Germany are impossible to ignore.

But reducing this to a simple morality tale misses the point entirely. Writing off Trump voters as racist Fox News zombies is as misguided as dismissing Kamala supporters as privileged CNN elites who’ve never actually spoken to the working class. We can no longer hide behind the comforting fiction that Trump supporters are simply hateful or brainwashed. The election results reveal something far more complex: his appeal speaks to a genuine desperation for change, even if that change comes wrapped in authoritarian packaging. The left’s task isn’t to feel superior but to understand why millions are rejecting a system that claims to represent them while serving other masters—even if that system is “representative democracy” itself.

This is where metamodern thinking becomes essential: the path forward requires holding these tensions with clear eyes. Each pole contains truth the other needs. I deeply believe in progressive policies—universal healthcare, climate action, basic income—while seeing how progressive culture has become a parody of itself, obsessed with moral performance rather than actual change. I believe in American leadership while knowing our interventions often breed harm. And yes, I can recognize Trump’s genuinely dangerous qualities—his ego-driven authoritarianism, his willingness to dismantle checks and balances for personal gain—while understanding exactly why millions would elect a legitimately funny showman who speaks their language over another manufactured politician. They’d rather torch a system that stopped serving them long ago than maintain our comforting illusions of democracy.

The other morning, my son was discovering his hands for the thousandth time. Watching him, I thought about what I actually want to teach him about navigating this wild world. Not some abstract wisdom about embracing complexity, but something more honest: that you can fight fiercely for what you believe while staying curious about why others believe differently. That you can see the deep flaws in your own tribe without joining the opposition. That in a world of increasing polarization, the most radical act might be refusing to choose ideological sides while still choosing to act. And that, more often than not, it’s okay not to have an opinion at all, to simply rest in the not knowing, and be present with your direct experience, just like when he’s determined to explore every single knuckle as if it holds the mysteries of existence.

The storm has made landfall. What we call it doesn’t really matter—whether it’s a metacrisis of interconnected problems or the Kali Yuga, our usual ways of making sense of the world are shattering. But maybe what we’re witnessing is not the end of democracy, but rather a transformation that we yet understand. We’re moving beyond both modernist certainty and postmodern relativism into something undefined: an awareness that can hold paradox, that sees opposing truths not as contradictions to be resolved but as tensions to be navigated. Only consciousness itself is vast enough to hold these extremes. At its core, that consciousness is love. Not the sentimental kind centered on feelings, but the fundamental openness to the full range of experience. It’s a fierce, clear-eyed understanding that can make space for both shadow and light, both MAGA coal miner and purple-haired activist, both the world as it is and the world as it could be.

As the ground beneath us keeps shifting, maybe the way forward isn’t through more sophisticated ways of being right, but through a deeper capacity to stay present with what is—even when what is looks nothing like what we thought it would be.

1. Technically, reality has always exceeded our concepts, as any seasoned meditator can attest. For centuries, the human mind has tried to compress the infinite into tidy frameworks, but those frameworks inevitably fell short. In the Information Age, this limitation has become starkly undeniable: overwhelming complexity and relentless data have shattered our comfortable illusions. We can no longer rely solely on mental models; they crumble under the weight of what we now face. Instead, we’re being invited—perhaps compelled—to move beyond abstractions into direct experience. Only through this embodied awareness can we begin to navigate the rapid evolution and paradoxes of our interconnected world.