Elite Theory’s Victory over Slopulism

Back in February, the New York Times credited me with popularising the term ‘slopulism’. I encourage you to use this term as it is by far my most likely shot at ever making it into the Oxford English Dictionary. One person who has been using it is Keith Woods, in his recent new interview series, which is interesting given his continual antagonism towards yours truly over the years. What this shows is that the basic thesis of The Populist Delusion (2022) is now so thoroughly proven in both theory and practice, that its conclusions have become a kind of short-hand.

We have had quite a lot of experience now. In the months before the November 2024 American presidential election, two sets of discrete, testable predictions were put forward. One came from me, from a pure elite theory lens. The other came from Charles Haywood, from a catastrophist and populist American right lens. The actual events of 2025 and 2026 delivered a clear empirical verdict. My core testable claims (pre-election) were, as many will recall (if you don’t want to search here, you can simply read the ‘America’ section of Applied Elite Theory (2025):

1. The managerial regime had already signalled by mid-2024 that a second Trump term was tolerable — even instrumentally useful — and would be allowed to happen with minimal controversy.

2. Trump would serve as a recruitment tool, channelling working-class (disproportionately white) discontent into military enlistment to address chronic shortfalls so that they could once again die in their wars.

3. Key billionaire elites, particularly those of the pro-Israel network, had shifted or intensified support for Trump after 7 October 2023, making donor realignment a material electoral factor.

Charles Haywood’s core testable claims:

1. A decisive Trump or Republican victory would trigger significant street-level violence or riots on a scale comparable to or exceeding the 2020 George Floyd unrest.

2. Democrats would engage in large-scale cheating sufficient to cast the result into serious doubt or prevent orderly certification.

3. Israel and associated donor networks are ‘less powerful than left ideology’ and ‘orthogonal’ to the ‘Left-Right axis’.

The outcome is now settled history. Donald Trump won both the popular vote and the Electoral College by comfortable margins. Kamala Harris conceded promptly on 6 November 2024. The transition and inauguration on 20 January 2025 passed without major disruption. Protests occurred but were limited in scale and intensity — far smaller and less violent than 2020. No credible evidence of outcome-altering fraud emerged in courts or state certifications. The predicted ‘cheating on a grand scale’ never materialised. On the donor side, Miriam Adelson’s contribution exceeded $100 million to Trump-aligned efforts — one of the largest individual political donations in U.S. history. Other pro-Israel billionaires such as Bill Ackman, Larry Ellison, Paul Singer, and many others, provided substantial support. Mark Zuckerberg even swapped a blue hat for a red one. Israel was not a peripheral issue; it served as a clear vector for elite preference expression and funding. Post-election foreign-policy has comprehensively confirmed the instrumental role of these networks. They have received everything they wanted, including the Iran War, Haywood got nothing he wanted and now daily wonders why Trump is not more assertive about his domestic agenda and why he does not tame the courts.

Military recruitment data from 2025–2026 further validated the second claim. The Army, Navy, and Marine Corps reported improved enlistment numbers in the first year of Trump’s second term, with notable gains among working-class cohorts. In fact it was a 15-year record. Whether this was deliberate regime engineering or the natural result of patriotic messaging is secondary. The structural outcome matched the elite-theory expectation: a populist figure was permitted to win in part because he could redirect discontent into service for the institutions he once opposed. Haywood’s catastrophist predictions were falsified at every point. No sustained street riots or breakdown in public order followed the result. Democrats did not ‘cheat again’ in any manner that altered certified outcomes. And the pro-Israel donor factor proved to become the dominant theme of his second term rather than a neglectable side issue as Haywood once claimed. His analysis, which assumed regime brittleness and progressive willingness to risk open rupture, overestimated elites’ appetite for genuine disorder. Regimes, as Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto long understood, prefer absorption and co-option to explosion. He also underestimated the power of the Israeli lobby.

This was never merely a personal disagreement. It reflected two incompatible conceptions of power. Haywood operated from the premise that ideology is primary and power follows ideology. He expected decisive friend-enemy breaks when the regime felt threatened. My approach, rooted in Pareto and Burnham, insisted that power is primary and ideology follows power. The 2024 result was a textbook demonstration of the latter: a managed populist victory that left the managerial core largely intact while harvesting its useful energies for military recruitment and regional deterrence.

Even now, in 2026, the pattern holds. Trump’s second term has featured rhetorical confrontation with the administrative state paired with pragmatic accommodation on key issues. Donor networks continue to exert influence without surrendering control. Military recruitment efforts proceed under the banner of national renewal. These are not signs of regime collapse but of regime adaptation — precisely what elite theory predicts. The episode also reveals something deeper about the contemporary right-wing information ecosystem. In the aftermath of the election, the very term I popularised — slopulism — has begun appearing in the vocabulary of former critics. Keith Woods and others who once dismissed my analysis now casually deploy “slopulism” to describe low-effort rage content, emotional kayfabe, and vibe-driven politics that deliver entertainment rather than structural change. This linguistic adoption is telling. It shows that even those most invested in ideological rupture have quietly conceded ground to the framework that correctly predicted containment over chaos.

Slopulism thrives on the illusion of imminent rupture. It convinces audiences to invest emotion in storylines rather than in the substantive power structures behind them. It does not lead anywhere; it is just entertainment. The 2024 election provided a perfect case study. Those feeding at the trough of endless ‘the left are scorpions’ or ‘civil war is coming’ content were left with falsified predictions, while pure power analysis proved reliable.

None of this is cause for triumphalism. Elite theory offers no ideological comfort and no promise of revolutionary salvation. It simply states the iron law of oligarchy: regimes absorb outsiders, channel discontent into manageable forms, recalibrate donor alliances when incentives shift, and preserve their essential structures even while appearing to yield. That is exactly what happened in 2024–2025. Trump was not stopped; he was instrumentalised. The predicted violence did not materialise. The donor realignments mattered. The catastrophist alternative was decisively falsified. The victory here belongs not to any political faction but to the analytical method itself. By treating every movement — MAGA included — as raw material to be tested against the iron law rather than an existential bet, one gains anti-fragile distance. Predictions become falsifiable claims rather than articles of faith. When the regime behaves precisely as expected, the theory is strengthened rather than threatened. Haywood’s sincerity is not in question, but sincerity alone does not guarantee predictive power. The 2024 election supplied a clean empirical test. The regime contained the threat. It recruited from the discontented. It recalibrated alliances. And it did so without granting the outsider the power to remake the machine. Elite theory does not flatter anyone. It merely describes reality with clarity. The iron law does not mean nothing ever changes; it means meaningful change occurs only within strict limits set by circulating elites. The events of 2024–2025 confirmed those limits once again. A managed victory occurred. The predicted chaos did not. Donor realignments mattered. Slopulism was exposed. And the framework that saw it coming proved more durable than the emotional narratives that surrounded it.