Patrick Jory

Teaches Southeast Asian History. Following Australia-Southeast Asia-China relations.

[NUS Press @NUS_Press]

Thank you Muy Lang for sharing your story, in your book, but also in this marvelous interview, with @Patrick_Jory, such a sensitive interlocutor. Great stuff from @NewBooksNetwork ! Attendees of #Euroseas2026, listen on the way home...
https://t.co/PBhLyOu8Aw

[Patrick Jory @Patrick_Jory]

@peterfrankopan Really in the mode of a traditional tributary mission: the leader of the tributary state acquiesces to lots of ceremony to recognize the superior status of the emperor, before getting down to the business of (controlled) trade

[Patrick Jory @Patrick_Jory]

@DalrympleWill My favourite too!

[Patrick Jory @Patrick_Jory]

@peterfrankopan Basically it's a case of a 'mad king'

[Patrick Jory @Patrick_Jory]

@pakhead Fake? Looks similar to the other letters, just with a different addressee

[Patrick Jory @Patrick_Jory]

@GregoryVRaymond @ingshin Almost every time there is some intense political conflict at the centre, some kind of border dispute breaks out - whether in the NE or the south. The borders are of course controlled by the military. Thaksin has outlived his use to the elite and now they want to get rid of him.

[Patrick Jory @Patrick_Jory]

@GregoryVRaymond @ingshin More likely scenario: The Thai elite has manufactured a fake border dispute to arouse nationalist passions that will provide the pretext to remove Thaksin (Paetongtarn) and replace them with a much more trustable figure, Anutin?

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

This is the full text, which I translated from French:

"The Trump Revolution

I would like to try to understand the immediate cause of the Trump Revolution.

Every revolution has primarily endogenous causes; it is first and foremost the outcome of internal dynamics and contradictions within the society concerned. However, one striking thing in history is the frequency with which revolutions are triggered by military defeats.

The Russian revolution of 1905 was preceded by a military defeat against Japan. The Russian revolution of 1917 was preceded by a defeat against Germany. The German revolution of 1918 was also preceded by a defeat.

Even the French Revolution, which seems more endogenous, had been preceded in 1763 by France's defeat in the Seven Years' War, a major defeat since the Ancien Régime lost all its colonies. The collapse of the Soviet system was also triggered by a double defeat: in the arms race with the United States and by the retreat from Afghanistan.

I believe we must start from this notion of a defeat that brings about a revolution to understand the Trump revolution. The experience currently underway in the United States, even if we don't know exactly what it will be, is a revolution. Is it a revolution in the strict sense? Is it a counter-revolution? It is in any case a phenomenon of extraordinary violence, a violence that turns on one hand against the allied-subjects, the Europeans, the Ukrainians, but which expresses itself on the other hand, internally, in American society, through a struggle against universities, against gender theory, against scientific culture, against the policy of including Blacks in the American middle classes, against free trade and against immigration.

This revolutionary violence is, in my opinion, linked to defeat. Various people have reported to me conversations between members of the Trump team and what is striking is their awareness of defeat. People like J.D. Vance, the vice president, and many others, are people who have understood that America had lost this war.

For the United States, it was fundamentally an economic defeat. The sanctions policy showed that the financial power of the West was not an all-power. The Americans had the revelation of the fragility of their military industry. People at the Pentagon know very well that one of the limits to their action is the limited capacity of the American military-industrial complex.

This American awareness of defeat contrasts with the non-awareness of Europeans.

Europeans did not organize the war. Because they did not organize the war, they cannot have full awareness of defeat. To have full awareness of defeat, they would need access to Pentagon thinking. But Europeans do not have access to it. Europeans therefore situate themselves mentally before the defeat while the current American administration situates itself mentally after the defeat.

Defeat and Cultural Crisis

My experience of the fall of communism taught me, as I have said, something important: the collapse of a system is mental as much as economic. What is collapsing in the current West, and first in the United States, is not only economic dominance, but also the belief system that animated it or was superimposed on it. The beliefs that accompanied Western triumphalism are collapsing. But as in any revolutionary process, we do not yet know which new belief is the most important, which is the belief that will emerge victorious from the process of decomposition.

The Reasonable in the Trump Administration

I want to clarify that I had no principled hostility toward Trump at the start. During Trump's first election, in 2016, I was among those who admitted that America was sick, that its industrial and working heart was being destroyed, that ordinary Americans were suffering from the general policy of the Empire and that there were very good reasons for many voters to vote for Trump. In Trump's intuitions, there are very reasonable things. Trump's protectionism, the idea that America must be protected to rebuild its industry, results from a very reasonable intuition. I am myself a protectionist. I wrote books about it long ago. I also consider that the idea of immigration control is reasonable, even if the style adopted by the Trump administration in managing immigration is unbearably violent.

Another reasonable element, which surprises many Westerners, is the Trump administration's insistence on saying that there are only two sexes in humanity, men and women. I do not see there a rapprochement with Vladimir Putin's Russia but a return to the ordinary conception of humanity that has existed since the appearance of Homo sapiens, a biological evidence on which, moreover, science and the Church agree.

There is reasonableness in the Trump revolution.

Nihilism in the Trump Revolution

I must now say why, despite the presence of these reasonable elements, I am pessimistic and why I think the Trump experience will fail. I will recall why I was optimistic for Russia from 2002 and why I am pessimistic for the United States in 2025.

There is in the behavior of the Trump administration, a deficit of thought, an unpreparedness, a brutality, an impulsive, unreflective behavior, which evokes the central concept of The Defeat of the West, that of nihilism.

I explain in The Defeat of the West, that religious emptiness, the zero stage of religion, leads to anguish rather than to a state of freedom and well-being. The zero state brings us back to the fundamental problem. What is it to be a man? What is the meaning of things? A classic response to these questions, in a phase of religious collapse, is nihilism. We pass from the anguish of emptiness to the deification of emptiness, a deification of emptiness that can lead to a will to destroy things, men, and ultimately reality. Transgender ideology is not in itself something serious on the moral level but it is fundamental on the intellectual level because saying that a man can become a woman or a woman a man reveals a will to destroy reality. This was, in association with cancel culture, with the preference for war, an element of the nihilism that predominated under the Biden administration. Trump rejects all that. However, what strikes me currently is the emergence of a nihilism that takes other forms: a will to destroy science and the university, black middle classes, or disordered violence in the application of American protectionist strategy. When, without thinking, Trump wants to establish customs duties between Canada and the United States, while the Great Lakes region constitutes a single industrial system, I see there a destructive impulse as much as protection. When I see Trump suddenly establishing protectionist tariffs against China while forgetting that the majority of American smartphones are manufactured in China, I tell myself that we cannot be content to consider this as stupidity. It is stupidity certainly, but it is perhaps also nihilism. Let us move to a higher moral level: the Trumpian fantasy of transforming Gaza, emptied of its population, into a tourist resort is typically a high-intensity nihilist project.

The fundamental contradiction of American policy, however, I will look for it on the side of protectionism.

The theory of protectionism tells us that protection can only work if a country possesses the qualified population that would allow it to profit from tariff protections. A protectionist policy will only be effective if you have engineers, scientists, qualified technicians. Which Americans do not have in sufficient numbers. Now I see the United States beginning to hunt down their Chinese students, and so many others, those very ones who allow them to compensate for their deficit in engineers and scientists. This is absurd. The theory of protectionism also tells us that protection can only launch or relaunch industry if the State intervenes to participate in the construction of new industries. Now we see the Trump administration attacking the State, this State that should nourish scientific research and technological progress. Worse: if we look for the motivation of the struggle against the federal state led by Elon Musk and others, we realize that it is not even economic.

Those who are familiar with American history know the capital role of the federal State in the emancipation of Blacks. Hatred of the federal state, in the United States, most often derives from anti-Black resentment. When one fights against the American federal State, one fights against the central administrations that have emancipated and that protect Blacks. A high proportion of black middle classes has found jobs in the federal administration. The struggle against the federal State therefore does not integrate into a general conception of economic and national reconstruction.

If I think of the multiple and contradictory acts of the Trump administration, the word that comes to mind is dislocation. A dislocation whose direction we do not know very well.

Absolute Nuclear Family + Zero Religion = Atomization

I am very pessimistic for the United States. I will return, to conclude this exploratory conference, to my fundamental concepts as historian and anthropologist. I said at the beginning of this conference that the fundamental reason why I had believed, quite early, from 2002, in a return of Russia to stability, is because I was aware of the existence of a communitarian anthropological foundation in Russia. Unlike many, I do not need hypotheses about the state of religion in Russia to understand Russia's return to stability. I see a family, community culture, with its values of authority and equality, which moreover allows us to understand a little what the nation is in the Russian mind. There is indeed a relationship between the form of the family and the idea one has of the nation. To the community family corresponds a strong, compact idea of the nation or people. Such is Russia.

In the case of the United States, as in that of England, we are in the inverse case. The model of the English and American family is nuclear, individualist, without even including a precise rule of inheritance. Freedom of will reigns. The Anglo-American absolute nuclear family is very little structuring for the nation. The absolute nuclear family certainly has an advantage of flexibility. Generations succeed each other by separating. The speed of adaptation of the United States or England, the plasticity of their social structures (which allowed the English industrial revolution and American takeoff) largely result from this absolute nuclear family structure.

But beside or above this individualist family structure there was in England as in the United States the discipline of Protestant religion, with its potential for social cohesion. Religion, as a structuring factor, was capital for the Anglo-American world. It has disappeared. The zero state of religion, combined with very little structuring family values does not seem to me an anthropological and historical combination that could lead to stability. It is toward ever greater atomization that the Anglo-American world is heading. This atomization can only lead to an accentuation, without visible limit, of American decadence. I hope I am wrong, I hope I have forgotten an important positive factor.

I unfortunately now find only one additional negative factor, which appeared to me when reading a book by Amy Chua, a university professor at Yale who was J.D. Vance's mentor. Political Tribes. Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (2018) underlines, after many other texts, the unique character of the American nation: a civic nation, founded by the adherence of all successive immigrants to political values transcending ethnicity. Certainly. This was very early the official theory. But there was also in the United States a dominant white Protestant group, itself derived from a rather long and quite ethnic history at bottom.

This American nation has become, since the pulverization of the Protestant group, really post-ethnic, a purely "civic" nation, in theory united by attachment to its constitution, to its values. Amy Chua's fear is that of a reversion of America to what she calls tribalism. A regressive pulverization.

Each of the European nations is fundamentally, whatever its family structure, its religious tradition, its vision of itself, an ethnic nation, in the sense of a people attached to a land, with its language, its culture, a people anchored in history. Each has a stable foundation. Russians have that, Germans have that, the French have that, even if they are a bit bizarre at the moment on these concepts. America no longer has that. A civic nation? Beyond the idea, the reality of an American civic nation but deprived of morality by the zero state of religion leaves one dreaming. It even gives one chills.

My personal fear is that we are, not at all at the end, but only at the beginning of a fall of the United States that will reveal to us things that we cannot even imagine. The threat is there: even more than in an American empire, whether triumphant, or weakened, or destroyed, going toward things that we cannot imagine."

This is a link to the original text (in French: https://t.co/JP9xZwDhOn) which is actually much longer than this, as it touches on more topics than the "Trump revolution".

[Patrick Jory @Patrick_Jory]

My take on Thailand’s casino controversy, ructions in the coalition government, and Thaksin Shinawatra’s uncertain future:

https://t.co/2dB4zpPA4w

[Patrick Jory @Patrick_Jory]

@GregoryVRaymond The plot is thickening!

[Patrick Jory @Patrick_Jory]

Li Tana challenges the nationalistic framework in Vietnamese historiography in her new book, "Maritime Vietnam: From the Earliest Times to the Nineteenth Century". Check out my interview with Tana, on New Books in Southeast Asian Studies:
https://t.co/iIgnFiCXld

[Patrick Jory @Patrick_Jory]

@NuryVittachi Cheering the Australians?!

[Patrick Jory @Patrick_Jory]

@JackPosobiec MAGA is like a modern-day millenarian revolt: full of irrational religious fanaticism, always backward-looking, fearful of foreigners and the outside world, inward-looking. It's a reactionary response to a society in decline. Like all millenarian revolts it's doomed to failure

[Patrick Jory @Patrick_Jory]

@gunsnrosesgirl3 "Three Times" - Hou Hsiao Hsien

[Science girl @sciencegirl]

Two AI agents on a phone call realize they’re both AI and switch to a superior audio signal ggwave

Bypassing human speech and encoding information into sound

[Patrick Jory @Patrick_Jory]

@CarlZha that's a good one

[Patrick Jory @Patrick_Jory]

@nfergus @australian You juxtapose “atheism” with “Christianity”. But if you’re going to accept a “god”, why not many gods? After all, that has been the religious belief of most of humanity throughout most of history - hence the “conservative” position

[Patrick Jory @Patrick_Jory]

@Bergermeister23 Good one

[Patrick Jory @Patrick_Jory]

@swilkinsonbc The Bosnian Muslim genocide in the mid-1990s was about 8,000 men and boys. Perpetrators were convicted of the crime of genocide. This case is so well known it’s hard to think PM would not have been aware of it

[Patrick Jory @Patrick_Jory]

@dieworkwear I'm saying left just to make you mad