Field Notes from the Second American Revolution
Trump, Musk, Bannon, Flynn, and Project 2025's Kevin Roberts are actively transforming the structure of our government. When, and how, will we fight back?
The phrase “Second American Revolution” has been in popular currency almost since the original American Revolution ended. Thomas Jefferson believed his victory in the election of 1800 comprised a Second American Revolution. High school history books categorize the War of 1812 as the Second American Revolution. Eminent historians Charles and Mary Beard, Eric Foner, and Bruce Levine, to name a few, have argued that the Civil War and the subsequent Reconstruction period was a Second American Revolution. A plausible case could also be made that the Andrew Jackson presidency, either of the Roosevelt presidencies, or the civil rights movement of the 1960s was a Second American Revolution.
Not so. In States and Social Revolutions, the Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol defines social revolutions as “rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures,” distinguished from other kinds of revolution “by the combination of two coincidences: the coincidence of societal structural change with class upheaval; and the coincidence of political with social transformation,” whereas revolutions that are merely political “transform state structures but not social structures….” None of those proposed Second American Revolutions, not even the Civil War, transformed the U.S. state structure—that is, the architecture of our government. That hasn’t happened since the ratification of the Constitution in 1789.
On the contrary, the U.S. state structure has proved remarkably durable. Since the drafting of the Constitution, there have been momentous social revolutions in France, in Russia, and in China—but no dictionary-definition revolutions, either social or political, in the United States. For the last 236 years, Americans have reliably enjoyed the same three branches of government; the same viable if flawed system of checks and balances; the same free and fair elections that became increasingly more fair and free as the decades went on. To use a metaphor: we’ve put significant additions on the old Colonial, we’ve made extensive renovations to the layout, but the original structure still stands, built on its bedrock foundation of the separation of powers.
For all the righteous blather about fealty to the Constitution, the Make America Great Again movement has made its prime objective the annihilation of the existing government. In the Trump Redux, our metaphorical old house is slated for demolition. The dwelling is being ripped to the studs, and the studs fed into Elon Musk’s “woodchipper.” What did we think the logical conclusion would be of their much-ballyhooed plan to dismantle the administrative state?
This is not an overhaul. This is an overthrow.
The Old Guard had four full years to root out the traitors and failed to do so. As I wrote in the introduction to The Age of Unreality, the Biden presidency, which we hoped would decisively win the battle for the soul of America, proved merely to be a four-year hiatus, a Delaware speed-trap on the I-95 to tyranny, as insufficient as it was brief. Merrick Garland preserved his precious “norms” at the expense of the American experiment. Before the election, John Roberts and the Leonard Leo Court granted the President near-kingly powers—which Biden never considered using but Trump will merrily exploit. And here we are.
In the long annals of the United States, we have elected good presidents and great ones, mediocrities and failures. Some, like Jackson, Lincoln, and FDR, tested the limits of presidential power. But none of the 44 previous Chief Executives—not Warren G. Harding, not Andrew Johnson, not even Richard Nixon—was as nakedly corrupt as the current occupant of the White House, or as overtly contemptuous of democracy. The vote should not have been close, but we sent him back to Washington anyway. We chose Barabbas.
What failed on January 6, 2021 triumphed on January 20, 2025. It was all part of the same sustained, coordinated assault on our democratic form of government. After the initial setback, the MAGA armies have been steadily advancing. And now the house that is our structure of state is being razed.
The Second American Revolution is drawing to its close. Democracy is on life support. The nation is under fascist occupation. And most of the country hasn’t the foggiest notion that there’s even a war on.
The narrative of Trump ushering in another American Revolution is not my invention. The MAGA thought leaders have been invoking Revolutionary War language and peacocking in Revolutionary War imagery for a solid decade now. The blown-up posters of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, the “Don’t Tread On Me” flags, the countless references to the Boston Tea Party, even the monomaniacal focus on tax reform—all of that is deliberate and of a piece. Rep. Lauren Boebert’s notorious tweet on the morning of J6 is an example of this performative gesture:
Steve Bannon’s podcast is called The War Room for a reason. “I’m not a journalist. I’m not in the media. This is a military headquarters for a populist revolt,” the felon told David Brooks of the New York Times back in July. “You’re a conservative, but you’re not dangerous. You’re reasonable. We’re not reasonable. We’re unreasonable because we’re fighting for a republic. And we’re never going to be reasonable until we get what we [want]. We’re not looking to compromise. We’re looking to win….[O]n the fundamental direction of the country, we are separate. We are two different worldviews. And those worldviews can’t be bridged.”
The republic he’s fighting for is a republic in the same way that a Soviet Socialist Republic was a republic—populist or not, he’s no small-d democrat—but Bannon is right about the irreconcilable differences of the two factions. This is a binary choice. The country can’t very well be a democracy and a dictatorship.
Disgraced former national security adviser Mike Flynn has long couched his rightwing nationalist inklings in Revolutionary War rhetoric—part of an extensive psy-op to frame corruption, criminality, and treason as some sort of patriotic enterprise. Before the election, we were in a third American Revolution:
After the inauguration, Flynn discounted the Civil War and got down to two. Note his casual use of a Benjamin Franklin quote to dress sedition in Revolutionary War garb:
And you won’t be surprised to learn that the Apartheid Nazi billionaire tasked with dismantling the so-called Administrative State—and plundering the nation’s resources (money, data, technology, land, water, etc.) in the process, to create a Russia-in-the-90s-style oligarchy—has also taken to wrapping himself in the flag. (Also note: he stole the idea from someone else, as is his wont.)
To the true believers, Donald isn’t the leader of the movement as much as the movement’s secret weapon—an instrument by which the presidency becomes a throne, and our nation’s power and wealth are redistributed to the MAGA oligarchs.
“Trump is a revolution,” Bannon tells Brooks. “Remember, General Washington, the revolution and the foundation, and then Lincoln, the birth of the new America….I hate to say this, but Trump’s the third. Trump is taking America back to its more constitutional Republic for the third time….”
Google “Second American Revolution” and many of the responses ping back to remarks that Kevin Roberts—“Cowboy Catholic,” head of the Heritage Foundation, and prime mover of Project 2025—made on Bannon’s podcast two days before Independence Day, 2024.
“In spite of all this nonsense from the Left, we are going to win,” he assured the War Room listeners. “We’re in the process of taking this country back. No one in the audience should be despairing….[W]e are in the process of the Second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be.”
Whoa, Nelly! A Second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the Left allows it to be. That was a provocative thing for anyone to say, much less the head of the Heritage Foundation, an august conservative think tank founded over half a century ago; its executive director is not some fringe podcaster, out Nazi, or QAnon freak. In that interview, Roberts confirmed that he and his comrades were openly attempting to overthrow the government (that is, after all, what “revolution” means), and he doubled down with an implicit threat of mass violence. That the threat was veiled made it no less ominous.
Distilling the theory Ted Gurr lays out in Why Men Rebel, Skocpol writes: “Political violence occurs when many people in society become angry, especially if existing cultural and practical conditions provide encouragement for aggression against political targets.” Well, tens of millions of Americans are fucking furious right now—all across the political spectrum. Trump has spent years subtly encouraging political violence; the point of his calling out specific judges by name, for example, is to foment stochastic terrorism. Other MAGA leaders, like Mike Flynn’s flying monkey and self-styled Secretary of Retribution Ivan Raiklin, have been more explicit. On the other side of the horseshoe, plenty of progressives have lionized Luigi Mangione. As for “practical conditions,” I mean, this is a nation armed to the teeth; our citizenry is better armed than most armies. Given all the powder in the keg, an uptick in political violence seems inevitable—just a matter of time. Any political rhetoric that fans the flames could make the whole thing explode. By talking like that, Roberts was openly flirting with disaster.
Even the bumbling legacy media seemed to appreciate that Roberts had crossed some sort of dangerous line. But it ended there. For the most part, the press failed to connect the dots between the Heritage Foundation, the other sponsors of Project 2025, Leonard Leo’s dark-money operations, the Dark Enlightenment thought leaders (including the now-VP JD Vance), the libertarian arm of Silicon Valley, Flynn and his acolytes, the Bannon contingent, the Christian Nationalists, and various and sundry other groups united in common cause against “the Cathedral,” “the Regime,” “the Administrative State,” and, ultimately, democracy. Trump’s disavowal of Project 2025 on the campaign trail—an obvious lie even in the moment—was enough to get the legacy media hacks off the scent. But Roberts, to his credit, has always been perfectly transparent about the movement’s intentions. I mean, they literally wrote a book about what they were planning to do!
Two weeks ago, Roberts, writing in The Spectator, gave a sort of progress report of the Second American Revolution. After opening with a reference to Patrick Henry’s “Liberty or Death” speech—“one of my personal favorites”—he writes:
The good news is that we are well on our way. Right now, President Trump’s executive orders and decisive actions are systematically dismantling the deep state’s hard power. On his first day in office, he terminated all remote work arrangements for federal employees. Then, he introduced an unprecedented, deferred resignation program which convinced more than 75,000 unelected bureaucrats to resign their posts. And last month he signed a new executive order requiring all federal agencies to fire at least four people for every one person they hire. Meanwhile, the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DoGE) incredible work has undermined the regime’s soft power by exposing its waste and corruption unlike ever before.
Make no mistake, these have only been the opening skirmishes in what will be a long fight. Though President Trump’s has already delivered a major blow, the deep state remains powerful. Slowly but surely, it is forming its counteroffensive. Corrupt federal judges are blocking the President’s executive orders. Colleges and universities are disguising their DEI programs to prevent losing federal funding. Countless bureaucrats are laying low in federal agencies, waiting for the opportunity to upend the people’s agenda. Even as fewer and fewer people are tuning in, the mainstream media is still doing everything it can to disparage Trump….
We are living in the Second American Revolution. We are stronger than we’ve ever been, and we must use every moral lever of power at our disposal to restore our founding principles, recover the basic norms of Western civilization (such as the notion that men and women are different), and revive the traditional institutions of American life by restoring their original purpose.
Despite the left’s fearmongering, none of this requires violence. But it does require us to remember the promise of Patrick Henry that “millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us.”
Roberts’s characterization of the Trump/Musk actions as anything other than corrupt, oligarchical, petty, cruel, arbitrary, and profoundly antidemocratic—and therefore unequivocally unAmerican—is either irrefutable evidence of severe mental illness or willful and weaponized mendacity. In his writing, he is fond of inserting allusions to conservative heroes like Ronald Reagan (as in his foreword to Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership) or, here, Patrick Henry, and then deliberately taking the quotes out of context to make it seem like these liberty-loving legends would somehow sign on to his destruction of our democracy.
The irony is that the Second American Revolution seeks to resurrect the tyranny the first one stamped out. Seventeen seventy-six was Star Wars; 2025 is The Empire Strikes Back. We need Luke to finish his training, Han Solo to thaw, and the Ewoks to get involved right quick, or we’re looking at a bleak, regressive, Darth Vader future.
I bring all this up not to be defeatist but to properly frame the struggle. We—that is: the media, Congress, Wall Street, and the American people generally—are in denial about the grim reality of the situation. Before we can possibly build a viable resistance movement, we have to face five key facts:
1. The Second American Revolution is a war.
“We are stronger than we’ve ever been, and we must use every moral lever of power at our disposal,” Roberts wrote two weeks ago, before assuring us that “none of this requires violence.” That’s a callback to his “bloodless” comment back in July. The implication is that the MAGA side is perfectly willing to take up arms and slaughter the rest of us if need be. Is there any reason to believe otherwise? We need to stop pretending that this is all a friendly disagreement between two democratic parties. It’s not. Bannon is absolutely right when he says, “We are two different worldviews. And those worldviews can’t be bridged.” (I think a lot of Democrats realize this—it animated the seemingly disproportionate anger at the useless fool Chuck Schumer, who is hopelessly stuck in a past that no longer exists.)
2. Every day Trump stays in power it becomes harder to dislodge him.
Even if the House impeached him (which it won’t as long as his compromised bootlicker Mike Johnson remains the Speaker) and the Senate convicted him (which it very well might if a vote was cast tomorrow), do we really think he’d voluntarily leave? Who would remove him from the premises? The Praetorian Guard that is the Secret Service? The DOGE goon squad the U.S Marshals have become? The Senate Sergeant at Arms? Pete Fucking Hegseth? Good luck with that.
3. There is no viable constitutional remedy to correct course.
To re-establish a functional democracy and reclaim our standing as the leaders of the free world, the entire MAGA cancer must be excised from the political body: Trump, Vance, Speaker Johnson, the entire Cabinet, every last one of his appointees and hires. All the demons, cast out. There is no template for how that would work; Madison and Jefferson didn’t game-plan for wholesale treason. (Is there a way to compel all of the traitors to resign en masse? Maybe trading resignation for immunity?) By whatever method, they must all go, and then we must hold new elections as soon as possible—but what happens until President Ocasio-Cortez is sworn in? What does an interim government look like? Under what authority does it exist?
4. Some of the damage is irreversible.
Trillions of dollars in wealth have evaporated because of Trump’s rock-dumb tariff obsession. Decades of careful humanitarian work went up in smoke when DOGE froze payments to USAID and then blew it up. Russia has been given a lifeline, more time to rally its troops, and fewer defenses to worry about in Ukraine. Bibi is running amok in Gaza. Scientific research hit a brick wall. A new pandemic would potentially wipe a lot of us out because of RFK cuts. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of American lives have been disrupted. Europe doesn’t trust us anymore. And Canada now hates us so much that they have turned on Wayne Gretzky for going MAGA. These are just a few examples; someone could write a long book about how much damage he and Musk have already done—and they’re just getting started. This cacophony is merely the overture to a tedious, artless, interminable opera of stupid.
5. The country cannot survive four years of this.
We’re a mere 78 days into the second Trump Administration. Assuming the Redux is a “normal” four-year term of 1461 days—and, spoiler alert, if Trump is still alive and in office in 2028, he is absolutely going to run for a third term, Twenty Second Amendment be damned—95 percent of his second term is still to come. What fresh horrors await us? Hyperinflation? Martial law imposed on April 20? Roundup of dissidents and free transport to El Salvador? A deadlier pandemic? Nuclear war? It’s like heading into the finale of White Lotus: anything is possible, but the only thing we know for sure is that people we love are going to die.
It is encouraging that Kevin Roberts says we are “living in the Second American Revolution” rather than gloating about his side’s total victory. But while Revolution No. 2 may not be complete, it has already succeeded in its first task: destroying the Ancien Régime Américain (incidentally, one of the things the Unabomber goes on about in his manifesto that all these Dark Enlightenment dorks obsess over). We must take the “L” and waste no further time crying over the spilled milk of our former hegemony. To win—to have any hope of winning—we must move forward.
The silver lining here is that if MAGA can be thwarted—if we can, in their parlance, take back America—that would give us the opportunity to repair the Constitutional fault lines that work against sustained democracy. On paper, this ain’t hard: Get rid of the Electoral College. Figure out a way to make the Senate more representative of the nation as a whole (i.e., Wyoming should not have the same number of Senators as California).1 Expand the Supreme Court and/or impose term limits. Kill Citizens United like it’s a puppy and we’re Kristi Noem. Make D.C. and Puerto Rico states. That won’t put together what Trump has permanently broken, but it would strengthen our democracy going forward.
And here’s a final irony. After ten years of Trump repeating what is, to him, a meaningless catchphrase, it will be left to us, the real patriots, the true custodians of this democracy, to make America great again.
Let the Counterrevolution begin!
1 Maybe a tiered system, where top 10 in population get 3 senators, bottom 10 get 1?
Greg Olear is the L.A. Times-bestselling author of three novels and four nonfiction books, including Rough Beast: Who Donald Trump Really Is , What He’ll Do If Re-Elected, and Why Democracy Must Prevail (2024). His newest book is The Age of Unreality: Essays on Literature & Tyranny. He cohosts the weekly live show The Five 8 and hosts the PREVAIL podcast. His Substack column, PREVAIL, has run since 2019.
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Thank you, Greg Olear, for a basic compendium of the mess we're in. I have entertained the thought that we are in a (so far) bloodless coup, a war, or revolution that has been building up to this moment since the "Reagan revolution", when the idea that "government is the problem" was first introduced. This is a drive to establish a government of, by, and for the oligarchs, and their ammunition is torrents of money.
This is an accurate description of what is taking place. This is a classic fascist (anti-Marxist) counterrevolution. Trump is the nominal leader, because he has been created in the image of racist white America. He was created by Rupert Murdoch and his business allies. Now he has a life of his own and is becoming rather unwieldy. He and his reckless ally, Elon Musk, are endangering Project 2025. The counter revolution may crater in the near future. If not, it will destroy the country in the long run.