After the election.

It's a new world.

You all know the details by now. Against a massive media machine, despite “Russia Russia Russia,” notwithstanding "all the Hitler accusations, against an enemy that tried to imprison and kill him, Donald Trump won the US Presidential election. Massively. The popular vote. The electoral college. And every swing state.

Trump didn’t just win a vain popularity contest. He wasn’t running against a candidate that presented no significant policy differences. This wasn’t picking the colour of a car, having settled in advance on the model and the make. With minimal hyperbole, the election represented two fundamentally different paths not only for America but for the world.

Accordingly, El Salvador’s philosopher king Nayib Bukele, the first foreign leader to congratulate Trump, posted on X that:

No matter your political preference or whether you like what happened or what’s yet to happen. But I’m certain you don’t fully grasp the fork in human civilization that began yesterday.

Think about that. Regardless of your political position, and regardless of whether you celebrated Trump’s win, like I did with my circles, or cried over it with hysteria, you don’t fully grasp what happened. Bukele is indicating that there’s a yet hidden significance of the election for the history of human civilization.

Some of you can surely sense that a momentous change has taken place. The builders are emboldened, and why wouldn’t they be? As Musk posted on election night when the results were becoming obvious:

America is a nation of builders.

Soon, you will be free to build.

Cryptonauts and bitcoin maximalists, too, are celebrating. They finally have a friend, and more than a friend, in the administration after Biden’s cold shoulder. The “anti-woke” crowd is celebrating what promises to be a repeal of the insanities and inanities of “cancel culture.” World leaders are sitting up and taking notice that American authority is returning to the world stage. Etc. etc.

Everything feels freer and better already.

There are signs for all to see.

But is their meaning completely clear? Is it only the surface level of political culture and political economy, as important as it is, that has changed? Or is there a deeper dimension to these changes?

What are the deepest roots of “the fork in human civilization” that began with Trump’s win? Remember that for some serious theorists and observers, especially Dugin, the election stood for a metaphysical, eschatological battle, one in which the very essence of the human being as such was at stake. Does the hidden civilizational significance of Trump’s win go that far?

America, like its President-Elect, dodged a bullet. Trump was spared (or saved) and received the mandate of heaven. America, too, was spared the unbearable scenario of a Kamala victory, and it seems thereby to have received renewed confirmation of its manifest destiny. There are two natural responses to this special moment. One is to charge forward into energetic action. It is the way of the warrior. Trump is old and he will get tired but he has been tireless in setting the example so far. It’s an example his friends will follow. The second, however, is to stop and think.

We expect there to be some soul searching among those Democrats who still have one, as they seek to make sense of their abysmal electoral performance. But there should be some soul searching on the winning side too, by which I mean nothing more or less than philosophical inquiry into the hidden depths, obscure meaning, and concealed truths of transformative events such as we have all recently observed. That’s what it may take to begin to unravel Bukele’s hint concerning what we don’t yet fully grasp about Trump’s win. Even more than that. We do not only stop to think about what has happened to America, but this renewed thoughtfulness, so long suppressed, is itself part of the miracle and the mystery.