“God’s Own Country” — Power, Order, the New American Moment and "the Old Europe"

“God’s own country” has long been shorthand for the American self-image: a nation with a special mandate, sustained by faith, power, and the conviction that it is entitled—perhaps even obliged—to shape history. For decades, this sense of mission was linked to the export of freedom and democracy. Today, something else has moved to the foreground: enforcement. Not as an exception, but as a governing principle.

What has been taking shape in the United States for years is less an ideological shift to the Right than a redefinition of power itself. State authority, technology, capital, and cultural interpretation are converging. Politics is no longer primarily understood as a process, but as an operation. Speed replaces mediation; decision replaces negotiation.

At the same time, the United States is anything but monolithic. It visibly oscillates between two fundamentally different visions of order.

On one side stands a democratic-progressive model—associated with figures such as Obama, Clinton, Gore, and today’s liberal establishment—centered on climate policy, identity politics, global regulation, multilateral governance, and moral leadership. This style of politics will feel deeply familiar to Europeans. It closely resembles the European Union’s dominant approach of the past decade, including initiatives like the Green Deal.

On the other side stands MAGA—not merely as a populist protest, but as a counter-strategy. MAGA does not just criticize the progressive model; it interprets it as a strategic liability in an increasingly competitive world. Crucially, both camps share a core objective: they do not want America to fall behind technologically, economically, or geopolitically. The disagreement lies in how that objective should be achieved.

The progressive camp relies on rules, international norms, institutional legitimacy, and moral persuasion. The MAGA camp emphasizes sovereignty, power, speed, and executive authority. From this perspective, MAGA is less a mood swing than a statecraft response—born of the belief that the West is failing not because it lacks values, but because it lacks decisive capacity. Donald Trump functions less as an ideologue than as a catalyst for this shift.

The deeper strategic substance, however, is supplied by others.

J. D. Vance, now Vice President of the United States, is a key figure in this transition. Raised in the social margins of the Rust Belt and educated at elite institutions, he combines lived experience of social disintegration with a sharp critique of the liberal institutional state. To Vance, the “administrative state” is not a safeguard of democracy, but an obstacle to democratic decision-making. He represents a post-liberal Right that does not seek less state power, but a different state: more executive, more loyal, more willing to confront conflict. His position is not anti-state, but state-reconstructive—less procedure, more decision, clearer chains of responsibility.

This thinking is reinforced by actors from the tech and financial worlds. Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder, early Facebook investor, and co-founder of Palantir, supported this trajectory early on. He regards liberal democracy as slow, risk-averse, and hostile to innovation. In his view, power should reside where decisions are actually made—among founders and operators, not procedural systems.

Curtis Yarvin provides the theoretical provocation. A former software developer and political blogger, he describes Western democracy as a façade behind which an informal power network of media, universities, bureaucracies, and NGOs operates. His provocation is to formalize that power: clear authority, executive leadership, the state as an organization with a defined apex. Yarvin is not a policymaker, but he has become a reference point for those who no longer see institutional constraints as protection, but as paralysis.

Elon Musk gives this mindset visible form. As entrepreneur, platform owner, and public figure, he combines economic, technological, and communicative power. His leadership style is executive, confrontational, and deliberately impatient. Politics, in this view, is not an ordering force, but an impediment.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, represents the institutionalized variant of this power shift: artificial intelligence as a foundational technology governed by private structures, legitimized through the language of safety and progress. Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, embodies the security dimension: data analytics as a core state function, outsourced to private actors in the name of the West’s survival.

This is not a coordinated conspiracy—but it is a convergence. Sovereignty is increasingly defined by access: access to data, infrastructure, communication channels, and—above all—decision time. Politics is reconceived as an executive function.

And this is where Europe enters the picture.

Europe is not external to this conflict. The American democratic-progressive camp closely mirrors Europe’s dominant political culture of recent years: climate policy, identity politics, regulation, and multilateralism. At the same time, Europe is visibly falling behind on a global scale—technologically, economically, and strategically. Productivity, scaling capacity, capital markets, digital infrastructure, and energy costs all undermine Europe’s ability to act.

Trump-era America refuses to accept this decline. Many center-right forces in Europe refuse it as well. The diagnosis is often similar. The difference lies in execution capacity.

Europe is slower—not merely because of inertia, but because of structure: federalism, coalition governance, multi-level EU decision-making, and judicial review. These features create stability—but they also cost time. Europe’s self-restraint was historically a strength. It becomes a weakness when restraint is no longer backed by enforcement.

This also applies to the question of resilience and security. The oft-invoked “clash of civilizations” is not a conflict between Europe and Islam as a religion. It is a confrontation with political-Islamist counter-orders that claim the primacy of religious norms over state law, establish parallel structures, and legitimize violence. The central question is whether the European constitutional state remains capable of action.

Europe can afford moderation—but only if it enforces it. A state that has rules but does not apply them loses authority. Where state order weakens, counter-powers emerge. Resilience does not mean illiberal overreaction; it means precise firmness: clear boundaries, consistent enforcement, no parallel legal systems, and no political naivety toward genuinely anti-constitutional structures.

The decisive point is this: Europe does not need to become American. But it must become more serious—technologically, economically, and in terms of security. Otherwise, it will either be pressured from the outside or hollowed out from within.

“God’s own country” relies on will and enforcement. Europe relies on proportion and order. That is not a flaw—as long as order remains capable of action.

Proportion without power is impotence.
Power without proportion is barbarism.

Europe’s task is to hold both together—and to understand the American transformation not as a moral deviation, but as a strategic response.