Koos Malan: The Paleo-Western revolution of 2024/25

Key topics:

Trump’s presidency signals a return to Western civilization’s roots.
The paleo-Western revolution rejects liberal progressivism’s globalism.
Key intellectuals like Jordan Peterson support the resurgence of Western values.

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By Koos Malan*

Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 47th president of the United States clearly involves much more than a transition of government. It arguably signals a comprehensive ideological upheaval – a revolution.

Viewed in this way, 2024/25 (November 5, 2024 when Trump won the presidential election, and January 20, 2025 when he was inaugurated as president) represents an epochal change.

The year 2024/25 is most likely a year of revolutionary significance along with three other epoch-making dates of previous revolutions. They are:

The liberal – French – revolution of 1789

We usually speak of the liberal revolution as the French Revolution, since it began in Paris and consigned the then ancien régime to the past. However, its aims and repercussions were much wider than France and spread throughout the Western world and beyond.

The Bolshevik (Communist) Revolution of 1917

The Bolshevik/communist revolution began in Russia. However, it is incorrect to describe it as the Russian Revolution, because its aims were global, namely to establish a worldwide classless utopia. It similarly reached much wider than Russia.

Despite profound differences, there was an overall commonality in the two revolutions. Both were so-called progressivist: calculated to destroy the Western heritage – the Christian-Western civilization – in totality and replace it with a new progressive dispensation on the grave of the destroyed West.

The triumph of liberalism in 1989/1991

During 1989/1991, the communist variant of progressivism succumbed to liberalism. This was symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of Soviet communism, accompanied by the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

After this, Francis Fukuyama explained in his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man that the political battle of ideas had finally been won in favour of liberalism and that the history of (the battle of) ideas had therefore come to an end.

The paleo-Western revolution of 2024/2025

Now, it seems that history is being dramatically revived and that we are currently experiencing a new great revolutionary moment – thepaleo-Western revolution. Paleo refers to original or primordial, that is, a revolution in which the West is reborn, as it were, with its fundamental characteristics. Accordingly, the resurgent West rejects the follies of the revolutions and nevertheless exploits the valuable things that the first revolution brought. Above all, the resurgent West is re-identified with its paleo – its original – foundations and continues to grow accordingly. This is perhaps best captured in the Latin words ad futurum per fontes, or to the future, via the sources.

The four revolutions

Let’s briefly consider current events in the USA against the backdrop of previous revolutions.

The previous revolutions have always had long periods of grounding work and long-term impact. Dramatic changes of government that occur during these revolutions are always spectacular episodes but do not involve the revolutions themselves. The revolutions reach much deeper than the changes in government and have far-reaching intellectual, cultural and economic implications.

The revolutions each involve a new long-term dispensation characterized by a new dominant outlook on life (lewensbeskouing), new conceptions of normal and abnormal and, therefore, a new general standard of common sense, which sets the generally accepted tone in society.

This is what we are experiencing now. We may, for the time being, call the current revolution the Trump revolution, but the name is far from adequate. It only takes into account the drama of the change of government in the USA, in which the turbulent Donald Trump is central. But in reality, we have a paleo-Western upheaval, with a beginning that goes back decades and will probably be expressed in an entirely new dispensation with long-term political-cultural consequences, not only for the USA but everywhere where there is a significant Western presence – including in South Africa.

The liberal revolution

The liberal revolution began with the storming of the Bastille in Paris on July 14, 1789, soon to be followed by the macabre spectacle of the beheading of King Louis XVI on January 21, 1793, as well as numerous others.

The entire ancien régime, characterized by the Christian faith, the naturalness of the permanent hierarchy of socio-economic classes and the monarchy, had been under so-called progressive-liberal attack for decades before the eruption in 1789, which advocated a substitute liberal order.

Despite fierce resistance, the credo of liberalism became established throughout Western Europe and North America, and later elsewhere. It was embodied in the concept of universal equal individual rights. These were, therefore, called human rights, which are equally due to each individual human being, simply by virtue of the fact that you are a human being.

From the outset, the liberal revolution was inherently cosmopolitan and globalist since it rejected the recognition of any cultural or similar communities precisely because particular communities stood in the way of equal individual-based globalism.

A liberal interpretation of the founding documents of the USA – the Declaration of Independence of 1776, the Constitution and the First Ten Amendments of 1787 and 1791 (and after the Civil War, especially the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866) provided further impetus to the liberal revolution.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, liberal constitutions were established in fits and starts across the Western world. More importantly, opposition to the liberal credo was branded as backward and anti-progressive. Any behaviour or belief, however morally or otherwise reprehensible, became permissible unless there was conclusive evidence, according to the so-called harm principle, that such behaviour actually harmed a specific individual. This licentiousness was advocated by John Stuart Mill as early as 1859 in his On Liberty. In modern times, it has crossed an extreme line into what is commonly referred to as the woke ideology.

The anti-liberal forces of National Socialism and Fascism were wiped out in the Second World War, paving the way for the triumph of liberalism enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations (UN) of 10 December 1948. Thereafter, liberalism became the undisputed common sense – the standard ideology and way of life – in North America, Western Europe and elsewhere in the West, which is further explained below in the liberal progressive triumph. But first, the communist revolution.

The Communist revolution

The communist revolution of 1917 was similarly preceded by a long history of ideological fervour. This can be traced back especially to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels towards the middle of the nineteenth century.

After the communist success in Russia, it also triumphed elsewhere, especially shortly after World War II, with the communist takeover in China and communist victories in the wake of the Soviet Union’s triumph over Nazi Germany in several Eastern and Central European states. Communism also surged forward in other parts of the world, including Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia) and Africa. South Africa has intimate experience of this with Frelimo’s communist takeover in Mozambique and the MPLA in Angola during the mid-1970s, and eventually, the ANC takeover in South Africa, where the South African Communist Party (SACP) is part of the ruling alliance and communist beliefs significantly guide the dispensation.

Communism, in the form of left-wing parties, was also a significant presence in Western Europe and Britain after World War II. (Many Britons left socialist Britain for the greener pastures of Afrikaner-controlled South Africa during the 1960s and 1970s.) Moreover, these parties, especially the French communists, maintained close relations with the Soviet communists despite evidence of large-scale communist cruelties and abuses in the USSR.

However, communism in central and eastern Europe eventually succumbed under the weight of its own foolish economic policies and mass democratic movements. As part of this, the political cradle of communism in the Soviet Union collapsed, and the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Russia then became a conservative-nationalist power in place of the leftist communist bastion of the period 1917 to 1991.

The ANC’s continued alliance with Russia is actually nothing but absurd in view of this. Russia is now right-wing, and the ANC, just like the old Soviet Union of yesteryear, is still sharply left-wing.

China has similarly changed dramatically. Today, it is more of a state-capitalist power in part reminiscent of the centuries-old authoritarian Chinese empire of yesteryear than a communist regime.

The triumph of liberal progressivism

The triumph of liberalism encapsulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 has since continued, especially under the leadership of liberal progressivism in the USA and Western Europe.

The formidable Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle significantly restored German and French dignity after the Second World War, but since then, individual Western European countries, as well as the European Union, have thrown themselves into liberal progressivism to such an extent that Western Europe is rapidly losing its cultural character as the former centre of the West. Unless decisive forces intervene, Western Europe will disappear into globalist cosmopolitanism.

The most important element of this is the boundless influx of cultural strangers into Western Europe. Vice President JD Vance warned against this in Munich on February 14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocfcVuuuMp. According to liberal progressivism, however, this is simply right and natural. According to progressivism, all people are essentially the same and are endowed with the same universal human rights. According to it, Western Europe is not home to nations with a distinctive Western cultural heritage and identity; they are simply arbitrary aggregates of the global world, just like all other people.

In the US, too, large-scale immigration was in the recent past characteristic of the liberal-progressive triumph. It reached a peak during Joe Biden’s term and was one of the causes of Trump’s victory.

In the guise of its highly acclaimed constitution, South Africa itself was fleetingly also a bright star in liberal-progressive glory. In fact, South Africa thereby acquired a special place in liberal-progressive triumph.

The aggressive crescendo of the liberal-progressive triumph

After the liberal victory over communism in the early 1990s and Fukuyama’s proclaiming the end of history, liberal progressivism became more aggressive and radical. It also absorbed aspects of Marxism, which further intensified its radicalism. It is explicitly anti-Western and furiously struggling to eradicate what is left of the Western cultural edifice.

This has culminated in a number of extremist sub-ideologies in recent decades, especially in the USA. Wherever there is a Western footprint, including in South Africa, it has also found strong expression.

Prominent among the sub-ideologies is the colonialist criminalisation of Western heritage coupled with things like so-called critical race theory, as well as DEI and LGBTQIA+.

The colonial criminal

The West is condemned as unique in the history of humanity because of its unparalleled collective criminality.

The West began its criminal career around the world, so the argument goes, around the beginning of the sixteenth century: in North America in 1619 in Virginia; and at the southern tip of Africa in 1652 in the Cape of Good Hope. The criminality was through colonialism, including genocide, slavery, land grabbing, and several other forms of violent and similar forms of exploitation.

Westerners had to accept the blame for it, permanently atone, pay compensation, abandon all values that had been associated with the West for centuries, and finally abolish their civilization. As part of this, the leading Western states had to renounce their character as Western societies.

With this in mind, the onslaught of liberal progressivism has become increasingly fierce.

In the US, something like a new cult figure was discovered in George Floyd, for whom everyone had to perform the macabre ritual of bending the knee.

On August 12, 2024, in the very Paris where progressivism had its great inception in 1789, it also reached a hideous crescendo. It was when one of the most sacred elements of Western civilization, the crucifixion of Christ, was desecrated and mocked in front of millions when Da Vinci’s Last Supper was tainted in a repulsive transgender escapade.

So-called critical race theory gives further impetus to this. In many universities, it is preached as bona fide scholarship. In the end, however, it is devoid of any of that. It is hardly more than sophistry masquerading as intellectuality in the name of which hate is spit against Westerners. According to it, Westerners are not necessarily guilty of racism because of specific actions but because of their almost immutable sinful and racist nature – a system of racism in which they unknowingly participate, are guilty of, and for which they owe compensation ad infinitum.

DEI and LGBTQIA+

DEI programs of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion grew out of quite legitimate affirmative action programmes intended to be a corrective to past racial discrimination suffered by black people. They were first introduced in 1965 during the administration of Lyndon Johnson.

In recent decades, affirmative action has undergone a metamorphosis. In the guise of DEI programs, it has evolved into a full-scale ideological project of representivity, much like what we have in ANC-plagued South Africa. It has been comprehensive and enforced not only in the state sector but also in the private sector. Heterosexual Western men are the prime target of this ideology, summoned to pay the price for their evils of inequality, discrimination, patriarchy and toxic masculinity.

At the same time, the naturalness of the two genders was contested. There is actually a variety of genders it is proclaimed, and the boundaries between them are vague, arbitrary and easily interchangeable at will. The traditional value of families and households consisting of father, mother and children (and also of multi-generation families) was similarly disrupted. This type of family, anchored in marriage, had to make way for individual identities of LGBTQIA+, under rainbow flags with the same or even more elevated status than national flags. LGBTQIA+ was celebrated and imposed as the new normal.

Those who dare to oppose the articles of faith of this ideology run into the mainstream media (legacy media as it is now often called), which furiously, often hysterically, enforced the execution of this late phase of liberal progressivism.

Opponents also run into a largely sharply extreme progressive university system, particularly in the human sciences which, together with the legacy media, is brandishing the banners of the progressive revolution.

All the shades of the liberal progressive revolution were ultimately aimed at the annihilation of Western civilization. The West had to be dismantled and finally die.

However, less than three months after the spectacle of Paris on August 12, 2024, Donald Trump won the American presidential election, which now appears to be an epic moment in the paleo-Western revolution in which we now stand.

The paleo-Western revolution

Like the preceding revolutions, the paleo-revolution similarly had a run-up over several decades. It was prepared by a growing body of intellectuals and similar opinion-formers in ever more numerous institutes, think tanks, popular academic journals and similar publications, working groups, conferences and other forums. The focus areas varied. Over time, however, it became clear that the revival of Western civilization, in conjunction with the debunking and eventual dismantling of progressivism, was the common factor.

Roger Scruton and, to a certain extent, Samuel Huntington are among the many leading figures in this. In recent years, Jordan Petersen arose to leading figure among millions of young Western men (also in South Africa) with his penetrating analyses and devastating debating abilities. The name of Douglas Murray can also be mentioned.

In recent times, the podosphere – an alternative to the liberal progressive media echo chamber – has become a powerful factor, which people in the paleo-Western movement are utilizing very effectively.

The paleo-Western movement has become a powerful factor in the USA. It is also a growing force in Western Europe, Australia and South Africa. Several conferences have been held here recently on the West and the fate of the Western cultural component in South Africa. Various figures have also gained prominence for their involvement in the paleo movement.

The paleo-Western revolution restores the primordial foundations of the West as its authentic basis.

This is the essence of the Christian religion; the Athenian passion for wisdom and learning; the Roman passion for law and public order; and the freedom-seeking spirit of Western man with his unique energy of creation, discovery and experimentation, originating in Western Europe, together with those who identify with it, as it has also spread to other parts of the world.

The foundations of the paleo-Western revolution are not expressed in any fundamentalisms but in essences – essential impulses and convictions.

It is manifested not in any fundamentalist theology but in the convictions of our gratitude towards our omnipresent, gracious and forgiving God;

It is manifested not in a single dominant ideology but in the continuity of our civilization on the basis of the unbroken partnership between past, present and future generations to paraphrase Edmund Burke.

The paleo-Western revolution endorses the importance of individual freedom and responsibility, however, not of individuals as globalized atoms, like all other individuals, but embedded and nourished by communal wholes of which they form part – of families, clans, languages, ethnic communities, peoples (Afrikaans: volkere) and our Western civilization as a whole.

Western civilization finds its place not in a humanity of countless individuals – individual atoms – like all others, but in amongst other civilizations of the world: the Chinese, Orthodox (especially Russian), Indian, Japanese, and other civilizations.

In the paleo-Western revolution, Western man is not subject to progressivism’s hateful condemnation of collective criminality. In keeping with the realization of our sin, our forgiveness is to be found in God, not in any human inquisition. It also frees Westerners to continue our singular career of achievement in every field of human activity in happiness, energetically, and with sparkle, gratitude, and contentment.

The intellectual, cultural and political substance of what seems to be the paleo-Western revolution is a fascinating, necessary and comprehensive theme for further discussions. For the moment, we may conclude with the telling title of the 2023 book by Patrick Deneen, (reportedly the strongest intellectual influence on vice-president JD Vance): Regime Change – towards a postliberal future.

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*Prof Koos Malan is a constitutional jurist from Pretoria.

A previous version of this article was published in Afrikaans in Rapport.