For most of human history, ordinary people had no agency at all. They did not shape policy, constrain power, or bargain with elites. They worked, paid, fought, and endured. Politics happened to them, not with them. That was the norm.
The brief period when this changed was an anomaly. Mass suffrage, strong unions, welfare states, and collective bargaining gave working people leverage for perhaps a century in parts of the West. Not because leaders were benevolent, but because capital was constrained, labour was organised, and elites were frightened. Wars, industrial concentration, and the shadow of socialism forced concessions. Votes mattered because they were backed by collective power.
That settlement was never uncontested. Traditional Conservatism emerged precisely as a response to the loss of absolute power by landed and later industrial elites. It was designed to preserve hierarchy, but it understood a dangerous truth: authority without obligation invites revolt. From Edmund Burke onwards, Conservatism framed society as an inheritance, not a contract between equals, but also not a free-for-all. Power carried duties. Property implied stewardship. Order required care for those at the bottom, not out of solidarity, but prudence.
This produced a paternalistic bargain. The proletariat were constrained, but buffered. Poor relief, factory acts, housing reform, public health, and eventually national insurance were not gifts; they were stabilisers. In Britain this culminated in Benjamin Disraeli’s One Nation Conservatism, which recognised that a neglected working class would become a revolutionary one. It was not egalitarian, but it was reciprocal. And for a time, it worked.
That bargain has been dismantled. Capital is mobile. Labour is fragmented. Unions are weak. Production is automated. Parties are hollowed out. Once elites no longer feared organised labour, paternalism became unnecessary. Obligations were quietly dropped while hierarchy remained. People feel the loss, but misread it. They believe something personal was stolen from them – control, voice, sovereignty. In truth, what is disappearing is a historically unusual set of structures that once translated numbers into leverage.
Into that grief step Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, selling betrayal where there was reversion. “Make America great again.” “Take back control.” These are not programmes. They are comfort blankets. They convert the end of an anomaly into a moral injury and offer theatre in place of power.
This is not new. Revolutionary Russia ran the same con with ruthless efficiency. “All power to the Soviets” promised agency. What followed was the rapid destruction of independent unions, opposition parties, courts, and a free press. Workers were told they ruled, while a tiny cadre ruled in their name. Failure was never design. It was always sabotage. Enemies had to exist, because without enemies the fatal question would arise: if we are in control now, why are things still getting worse?
That is the point at which Trumpism begins to resemble Bolshevism, not in ideology but in method. Both recast politics as apocalypse. Society is said to be at the brink of extinction. Compromise becomes treason. Law becomes an obstacle. Evidence becomes suspect. Once survival is the frame, limits are luxuries and coercion becomes preventative rather than abusive.
Both replace agency with faith. Bolshevism subordinated reality to revolutionary truth. Trumpism does the same through loyalty. Courts, elections, statistics, and expertise are accepted only if they affirm the leader. When reality disagrees, reality is declared corrupt. This is not scepticism. It is doctrine.
Both invent enemies within. For the Bolsheviks it was wreckers, kulaks, counter-revolutionaries. For Trumpism it is the “deep state”, judges, journalists, migrants, civil servants, disloyal conservatives. The categories differ; the mechanism is identical. Opposition is not mistaken but malignant. Once that line is crossed, repression presents itself as self-defence.
Identity is substituted for agency. Rallies feel like participation. Slogans feel like action. Voting for a strongman feels like leverage. But sensation is not power. Shouting is not bargaining. Delegating everything upward is the opposite of control.
Why does this work on some and not others? Because it exploits a cluster of vulnerabilities rather than a universal flaw. Status insecurity primes grievance. An external locus of control hunts for villains. Identity fusion turns belief into selfhood, making correction feel like humiliation. Intolerance of ambiguity recoils from democratic messiness and craves a decisive hand. Add fear, and the trap snaps shut.
Those who resist are not smarter or more virtuous. They are simply more comfortable with complexity and delay. They understand that agency is collective and institutional, not personal and theatrical. Their identity is not welded to a leader. They can revise beliefs without losing face. They grasp that the anomaly was brief, and that reclaiming leverage requires organisation, not incantation.
Look at outcomes, not noise. Trump attacks unions, deregulates capital, politicises courts, and undermines elections. Farage spent decades attacking the institutions that imposed labour standards, environmental rules, and constraints on capital, then offered nothing to replace them. Flags instead of protections. Fury instead of structure. While supporters fight culture wars, the real transfer of power continues quietly.
This is where fear does the work. Truth exposes the fraud. Facts reveal weaker wages, thinner services, and vanished bargaining power. Accountability would force an admission that the promised restoration was never possible. So truth must be neutralised. Courts become enemies. Journalists become traitors. Statistics become lies. Every failure is recast as sabotage. Reality itself is treated as hostile.
That is how Trump Defence Syndrome forms, and its sister, Farage Defence Syndrome. Not as an argument, but as a reflex. Evidence becomes persecution. Law becomes “lawfare”. Reason runs backwards from conclusion to premise. If a fact harms the leader, it must be false by definition. Not debated. Erased.
Traditional Conservatism, for all its hierarchy and condescension, understood something that today’s populists do not: power had to justify itself through obligation. The old bargain was unequal, but it was reciprocal. Elites governed, but they governed with restraint, because restraint was the price of survival. When that obligation was honoured, society held. When it was breached, revolution followed.
Trumpism and Faragism tear up even that bargain. They demand loyalty without duty, obedience without protection, sacrifice without return. Where Conservatism once said “we will look after you, because order depends on it”, populism says “you are in charge”, while stripping away every institution that ever made that claim real. It is hierarchy without stewardship, authority without responsibility.
That is not a restoration of agency. It is its final liquidation.
Under authoritarianism, when truth collides with power, truth must be destroyed. Not because truth is moral, but because it is uncontrollable. History is blunt on this point. When leaders promise you agency without institutions, they are not restoring your power. They are taking what little remains.
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