Trump trap: Do Democrats despise their own national culture?

On Tuesday evening, Donald Trump delivered the longest State of the Union Address in American history in his usual style: Approximately one hour and 48 minutes of superlatives, confrontations, and policy declarations, spiced up with his tendency to exaggerate his administrations successes. Although by now this almost seems like deliberate trollery of all the “fact checkers” in the mainstream media. What made this State of the Union remarkable was Trump’s application of his savvy for powerful media moments. He has rightly anticipated that the Democrats hate him more than they love the country, so he (quite masterfully) ensured to make his opponents look as bad as possible. I would argue, he succeeded: The most revealing moment lasted only a few seconds, but it will produce campaign ads for years. When the president asked members of Congress to stand if they agree with the statement that the primary obligation of government is to protect its own citizens, not illegal immigrants almost all Democrat members of Congress remained seated. They did not object to a specific policy. They did not challenge a particular statistic. They refused to affirm the most elementary principle of democratic governance: That a government derives its legitimacy from, and owes its loyalty to, the people who elect it. Trump set up a trap, and the Democrats walked right into it. 

Yet there is more than mere partisanship at work. What those seated Democrats displayed was a symptom of something far deeper and exemplifies a phenomenon that the philosopher Benedict Beckeld, in a conversation I had with him on our podcast, identified as oikophobia: The settled disposition of a civilisation’s elites to despise their own culture, traditions, and people. Beckeld, whose book, Western Self-Contempt: Oikophobia in the Decline of Civilizations, traces this pattern from ancient Greece to the contemporary United States, makes a compelling case that oikophobia is not an aberration but a recurring feature of civilisational decline. The term itself was coined by Roger Scruton, who defined it as “the felt need to denigrate the customs, culture, and institutions that are identifiably ‘ours.’” But where Scruton diagnosed a cultural tendency, Beckeld identified a historical law: Prosperous states, at the height of their success, develop elites who become convinced that the very prosperity they enjoy is merely the fruit of historical injustice. The greater the achievement, the deeper the guilt. It happened in Periclean Athens, in late Republican Rome, in pre-revolutionary France, and in the British Empire at its zenith. It is happening now in the United States, and of course, Europe as well. Frustratingly enough, the one thought “the West” truly appears to have in common these days is the constant tyranny by its own supposed historical guilt, for which it has to atone by destroying itself.

What makes Beckeld’s analysis particularly useful is his insistence that oikophobia is the precise inverse of xenophobia. Where the xenophobe insists that his own culture is superior to all others, the oikophobe seeks to elevate other cultures – not to equality with, but to superiority over, his own. This is not the posture of the open-minded cosmopolitan. It is the posture of a ruling class that has lost confidence in the civilisation it is supposed to lead. And when that ruling class controls the levers of government, the consequences are no longer merely philosophical. As we see in parliaments all across the West, a significant portion of the political class can not bring itself to affirm that the government’s first duty is to its own citizens. This is oikophobia in its purest political form: Not a disagreement about how best to serve the nation, but a rejection of the premise that the nation deserves to be served at all. 

Europeans should watch this with recognition rather than bemusement, for they have been living with the consequences of elite oikophobia for far longer. Germany’s Brandmauer – the firewall against the AfD – is an institutional expression of the same impulse: The conviction that voters who prioritise national interest over transnational idealism must be quarantined from political power. The EU’s inability to formulate a coherent energy or defence strategy, even as it lectures Qatar on sustainability standards while being entirely dependent on Qatari LNG, reflects a governing class that is more comfortable regulating than governing. Brussels spent €22 billion on Russian fossil fuels in 2024 while sending €19 billion in aid to Ukraine – effectively financing both sides of a war. These are not the actions of serious people engaged in statecraft. They are the actions of oikophobes who have replaced national interest with bureaucratic procedure.

Beckeld’s historical analysis suggests that oikophobia is a late-stage phenomenon – it emerges when a civilisation has become so successful that its elites can afford to take its achievements for granted and begin to resent them. The Athenian sophists who mocked traditional piety, the Roman senators who preferred the company of foreign client kings to their own citizens, the French philosophes who idealised the noble savage – all were products of civilisations so wealthy and secure that self-contempt became a luxury the elites could afford. The costs, of course, were always borne by ordinary people. They still are. Those Democrat members of Congress who remained seated may believe they were making a statement about Trump. In reality, they were making a statement about the civilisation that elected them. And if Beckeld’s reading of history is correct, a civilisation whose leaders cannot affirm that they owe their first loyalty to their own people is a civilisation that has already begun writing its own epitaph.