Neo-Royalism
The Theory That Explains Venezuela, Minnesota, Greenland, and More
Neo-Royalism: How Trumpism Is Rewriting the World Order
For Straight White American, Jesus, I’m Brad Onishi—author of the forthcoming American Caesar: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America into a Monarchy, and founder of Axis Mundi Media.
Today I want to talk about Venezuela, Greenland, and Minnesota. And I want to do that by introducing a theory that, I think, helps explain what’s happening in this country—what’s happening with ICE, immigration, cruelty, tariffs, and even the threat to invade Greenland.
The theory is called neo-royalism, and I believe it helps us understand Trumpism in ways many of us haven’t before.
Why This Moment Feels Different
As we move into 2026, it’s become clear that we’re not just dealing with “authoritarian tendencies” or a temporary democratic backslide. What we’re witnessing is something deeper: a systematic effort to dismantle liberal democracy itself and replace it with a hierarchy centered on a sovereign—one man—surrounded by loyal elites.
This aligns directly with my forthcoming book, American Caesar, and with a recent paper by political scientists Stacie Goddard (Wellesley College) and Abraham Newman (Georgetown University) titled “Further Back to the Future: Neo-Royalism, the Trump Administration, and the Emerging International System.”
Their argument maps almost perfectly onto what I’ve been researching for years.
Not the 1950s—the 1650s
We often assume Christian nationalists want to take America back to the 1950s—before civil rights, before Stonewall, before so many of the gains made in the 60s and 70s. That vision is already bad enough: racist, misogynist, xenophobic.
But what Goddard and Newman argue—and what I argue in American Caesar—is that the real goal now is to go much further back. Not before the Civil Rights Act, but before American democracy itself. Think the 1650s, not the 1950s.
The aim is to abandon the liberal democratic order that emerged after World War II and replace it with something older: monarchy.
