One of the insights of chaos theory is that what appears chaotic at a certain level of understanding actually makes logical sense at a higher level. According to the Fractal Foundation - a fractal being a never-ending pattern - "Chaos Theory deals with nonlinear things that are effectively impossible to predict or control, like turbulence, weather, the stock market, our brain states, and so on. These phenomena are often described by fractal mathematics, which captures the infinite complexity of nature".

The Trump Ascendancy in the United States, now in its second incarnation, promises to introduce the reign of chaos in the ordering of American life. If chaos and order sound contradictory, it is because we have lazily grown used to the predictable ways of the ancien régime, both Democratic and Republican, that has ruled America relentlessly. The contradiction is only apparent because Trump actually makes sense at a higher logical level: that of the American people reclaiming the radical legacy of a country that could say "no" - to the colonial English, to Nazi Germany, to the Soviet Union, to rump Russia and to China.

Now, Americans have said "no" to their own Establishment, because it did not learn its lesson even after the dose of chaos that Trump had introduced in his first term. Biden's America turned out to be business as usual. Now, Trump's second (and last) presidential term allows him the political luxury of laying final siege to the gilded gates of the Establishment. Battening down the hatches will not work because this is no ordinary storm. It is a fractal occurrence, a natural phenomenon that is bounded only by the realities of presidential power (the need to carry Congress along with the will of the White House and the need to not run afoul of the US Supreme Court). Within those parameters, which favour Trump because the Republicans enjoy a majority in both the Senate and the House of Representatives and there is a conservative majority in the Supreme Court, Trump's legislative agenda has an extremely promising beginning. When it has run its course over the next four years, there will be a new America and a new world for better or worse. There is no point for anyone to be in denial. Trump has brought the known scheme of things to an inflexion point.

Why? Because millions of Americans wanted an inflexion point to stop the inexorable progress of an elite, deterministic system that rode roughshod over their plebeian days - the same determinism that Chaos Theory undermines by arguing that the agency of chance persists even in the most deterministic of systems. The unsuspected presence of the wayward limits the ambit of the deterministic, which would otherwise become absolutist. Trump sought to liberate the average, hardworking American from the clutches of an absolutist state in which a dismissive ruling elite treated citizens as if they were disposable possessions of the state, when every subaltern voice in American history proclaimed that the state belonged to its citizens, and not the other way around.

Trump is the voice of unheard Americans protesting against the way in which their way of life has been hijacked by elected and unelected agendas that privilege the easy rights of personal dissent over the difficult responsibilities of collective citizenship. The elite responded as all elites are wont to do: with dismissive scorn which suggested that the great unwashed were not worthy of political proximity to the sensitive noses of their democratic superiors. Trump won because he scorns the elite that scorns the masses.

The historian Walter Russell Mead, whose consistently philosophical approach to American foreign policy very few thinkers can match, recalls playfully the playwright Bertolt Brecht's wryly satirical comment on the legitimation of communist power in East Germany: "The East German communist hacks Bertolt Brecht satirised also blamed their failings on the shortcomings of the masses: 'The people have lost the confidence of the government and can only regain it through redoubled work'."

The American people lost the confidence of the Beltway: Now the joke is on the other side. And why not? For, as Mead says, "If the opponents of the American system ever succeed in bringing it down, their success is likely to come from exploiting the inner weaknesses and contradictions of the American strategy rather than defeating American arms on the battlefield". The American people want a more united sphere in their own country so that they can face up to the challenges that the world will throw at them.

Writing in Tablet, Mead makes an interesting comparison between America and France. "One way to describe America's leadership problem is to say that our leadership class has become too French. In 1682, Louis XIV moved his court and government to Versailles and began to compel the French aristocracy to take up residence in the palace. One hundred seven years later, in October 1789, his descendant and successor Louis XVI was escorted back to Paris by an angry mob. The aristocrats fled in disorder; ultimately many, like their king, would ascend the scaffold to the guillotine."

The Versailles problem in America - the problem created by detaching those in power from the companion lives of those who granted them power in the first place - is exemplified by the exclusive, cosy and boutique world of lefty-liberal Americans who bemoan ritually the sad fate of the world from within their jealous enclaves of precious privilege. Around the United States, such people "would be perfectly at home making land acknowledgments, growing heirloom vegetable varieties, and drinking fair-trade coffee cut with 'milk' made from organically grown oats". The group includes "Brooklyn trustafarians embracing carefully curated simplicity and celebrating the virtues of 'indigeneity'". Once, in unbelievably poor social taste, Marie Antoinette and her ladies-in-waiting "dressed as simple milkmaids and pretended to be innocent peasant girls". We know what happened to her. It would not have happened had she had a sense of noblesse oblige, which is the obligation of those in power to care for the people and not merely pretend to be one of them.

Trump's success in ensuring the transition to a new America is far from guaranteed. He might well be thwarted by the magisterial workings of the Establishment. But if he is not, the question will remain - Whither America? - but not Wither America?