Douthat is such a fraud and it says everything that's needed to know about Times executive management that they keep this intellectually and morally bankrupt fool around.
It doesn't give them "conservative" cred. It just shows them for the out of touch elites they are (and I hate using the over- and mis-used word "elite").
I watched everything I thought was good about the good ol' USA melt and then then twist into something unrecognizable under Reagan, and believed he was the worst of my lifetime. I guess I lived too long.
No, by all means, use "out of touch elites" for the Times all you want. The Times has one overriding prerogative: to conserve and entrench their own status, power, and privilege (especially as as king makers and breakers).
It's amazing how turgid and....bad 'intellectual' movement conservative writing is. Buckley wrote like an oblivious, overconfident, untalented college freshman; Will's missives sound like a dictionary in search of an editor; and they all cram in as many multi-syllabic words as possible to demonstrate how intellectually serious they are and therefore must be taken as, regardless of their bankruptcy of ideas. It's a style, really a norm I've seen repeated over and over.
Contrast that with the writing here, which is just fun to read. Is there a connection between having a truly moral center and good writing? You make the call.
No fear, JVL. You can adjust your views when you see things you didn't see before (like the racism on the Right), question that your take might not be right, and respond to your readers' criticisms ("Why don't you tell us what to do about the horrors you see coming around the corner?"). I don't think Douthat does any of that.
I've been glued to politics since I was a tween, and I can say confidently that there is no media company that provides what the Bulwark does. This is a community, full stop. It reminds me of my very best experiences in college - meaningful, respectful debate, with intelligent people, who have good intentions and a sense of humor. It's been a true lifeline through the Trump era - forever grateful for y'all ❤️
I’m going to add to that thought by saying that the Bulwark is great even without the comments, but I would love to see some of the more articulate and interesting people here (not me) write an occasional piece that could be more widely circulated to people who do not often have time for the comments. Something perhaps like letters to the editor was once upon a time when I was in high school and we were in outraged to write in and one or two of my classmates actually got published.
The only problem is they are preaching to the choir. They need to get their message out into the political ether where it will be read and listened to by other reachable voters. This problem is shared by all anti-Trump media - they do not seem to have a plan or the tools to reach a wider audience. The Bulwark is essential to our well-being and motivates us to engage - but they are too important to keep stymied in their own bubble. I hope they have staff that are dedicated to figuring this out. The world needs them!
Certainly they are preaching to the choir but I can't tell you how often I have forwarded excerpts, used opinion statements, linked to their Youtube Takes, etc... to discuss and sometimes argue political and cultural points with my MAGA/Trump-supporting circle.
This is a cherished investment in both $$ and time - including the value I get from you all as commenters.
(sorry if I violate copyright but I have been and will always be a soft rogue in legal and social mores)
But do the MAGAnuts read and, more importantly, understand and internalize what you show them, or just, as their hero does, ignore it as so much rabble and riff-raff mumblings?
The newsletter audience is the choir, but the videos are not. I think that getting their message out into the political ether is exactly why they stepped up the video content.
I'd be really happy to see them address this the next time they do a "state of the Bulwark" update - I feel like they might be reaching a wider audience than suspected, especially on YouTube.
The Match-Throwing Club is one of your best pieces of work, JVL. It's an excellent parable.
As for NATO, let's be clear; we could push Russia out of Ukraine in half a year without endangering a single American life, if we were willing to fulfill our old role as the arsenal of democracy. The problem is, the left doesn't like the 'arsenal' part, and the right doesn't like the 'democracy' part
The really important part of this Triad is part 2. It is correct. The focus on 'kitchen table issues' is trying to bribe people out of a moral crisis. Trying to bribe people out of a moral crisis is, you know, doomed to failure from the start. It's like trying to create dry water.
Where did you come up with the idea that “the left doesn’t like the arsenal part”? Since the invasion, the Democrats have pushing to arm Ukraine over Republican objections. Biden did everything he could told to supply arm, with the Republican congress fighting him every step of the way. Please give an example of Democrats objecting to arms for Ukraine. Just one, please.
I agree. People know the difference between right and wrong; it really is not that difficult to ascertain. That’s why people, even Republican voters, are upset about the way the Trump regime is treating immigrants. Same with corruption. People say “oh, they all do it,” but that’s not true. In addition, the scale of corruption right now is almost incomprehensible. Yet, there are plenty of examples to help people understand how the ultra rich and ultra powerful are taking advantage of our democratic systems and our citizenry.
As a certified commie pinko socialist, I'm all for the "arsenal of democracy" bit. And yes, Dems and liberals need to step up to the moral fight - state what you stand for, call out amorality and immorality for what it is, and make it clear that only one can remain standing. What's essential is to make it absolutely clear that morality is what you do - it's behavior, not people. If someone wants to hold (to me) reprehensible ideas, fine. If you instantiate those ideas, we have a problem. Of course some humans are so corrupted they equate to "evil." But as a general rule focusing on unacceptable behavior is on many dimensions the road to success.
“As I said yesterday: Even if America woke up in 2028 and came entirely to its senses, the damage that has already been done cannot be undone except over the course of decades.”
Agreed JVL, not just here, but abroad. In fact, Trump released his National Security Strategy yesterday, and it proves that these nefarious actors are trying to destroy the EU specifically because they are too democratic.
He claims to be the defender of democracy, while simultaneously trying to destroy Europe’s and our own. How quaint!
They see the EU as the obstacle or impediment to peace with their guardrails and law based democracies. It claims that US hegemony relies on the US controlling or having undo influence over the region, but also we will no longer support our European allies and move towards a world with three spheres of influence; aligning our long term interests with Russia and right-wing parties across the globe.
Clearly, Trump and his minions no longer believe they can lose elections, because democrats would never agree to this if they ever regain power; Yet, here we are!
If anyone still has any doubts as to whether these people would ever give up power readily or willingly, then may I suggest a good therapist, because that ship has sailed! IMHO…:)
Maybe it is weird and also too in the feelings, but whenever we get these State of The Bulwark updates, I feel like I'm on the team, too. I've subscribed to lots of publications - some I really enjoyed - and have never once felt that before. I think I'm really just echoing your concept of community, but I wanted to say it anyway.
I have never felt like part of an online community - much less one that is about the state of our state - I am so grateful the Bulwark is this for so many of us!
When I'm retired in my rocking chair and see where all the OG bulwarkers ended up in prominent areas of public life and service like under a new democratic ( lower case) administration full of the wise and young, i will feel immensely proud to have been a small part of restoring liberalism ( when its not a dirty word anymore). All the way from Australia we support you
"This brings us back to George Packer. Many on the left hesitate to say plainly that MAGA is built on racism, misogyny, and cultural dominance because:.."
I dissent partially. There are plenty of liberals and lefties that do this constantly. There are liberals-left people like you described and some/many of these people are well known/elite. Part of it is a kind of weird red-brown alliance because there is a certain kind of lefty that sees the Democratic Party as the real barrier to true socialism/revolution (TM). See also "after Hitler, us" or the "Social Democrats are the Real Social Fascists."
Part of it is elected politicians concerned about alienating soft Trumpists that they think they can convince sides.
But "MAGA is built on racism, misogyny, and cultural dominance..." is the belief of many many Democracts
I think the important parts for liberals and anti-Trumpers to remember here is that *MAGA* is racist/misogynist/xenophobic/homophobic, but that Trump voters as a whole are not. MAGA is the core, but they are not a large enough voting block on their own to put Trump into the office and they relied on low-info/low-attention swing voters to put them over the top in a national election. Liberals/anti-Trumpers need to remember that these low-info/low-attention swing voters are a moveable block and are separate from the MAGA movement. They cannot go around saying "Trump voters are racist/misogynist/xenophobic/homophobic," they need to focus on singling out the MAGA movement from that equation so that those swing Trump voters don't think you're lumping them in there with the rest and feel insulted personally as a result. "People don't remember what you say, but they remember how you treat them."
There is also a group of libertarians within MAGA, not just the SV tech guys, often the small business owners that would have been “country club” GOP in the before times. Some might be on board for the cultural aspects, mostly they just hate people telling them what they should do. I keep waiting for some of these to drop out as big government Trumpism reveals itself. Sean Duffy’s sermons instructing us to dress up to fly is going to backfire with this group…..it’s a very woke approach.
Libertarians don't care about big government telling *people* what to do, they care about big government telling *them* what to do. If the government isn't affecting their personal life choices directly they will let it trample those of others with no fucks given. It's never been about how big government gets or what it does, it's about *who* it's doing those things to for the libtardians.
Reminds me of VP candidate Palin who said "people just want the government out of their lives!" Um no. They very much want the government fucking with other people's lives, just not theirs.
You're right about many self-identified libertarians, perhaps more than would like to admit it.
But I also know people distributing red cards *because* they're libertarians, and *horrified* by what is happening to the rights of people besides themselves.
Ahh yes, the libertarian versions of pre-2015 Bulwark staff who thought that everyone else inside of their tent was also there for the raw ideology rather than the desired outcomes.
You can't *be* a libertarian for any length of time without noticing the label attracts a variety of kooks, cranks, and contrarians. Idealism merely requires insisting that ideals should matter more than that, and avoiding the too-clever-by half reasoning games that those who think themselves clever enough to pull off contrarianism are prone to, the Thielish sort of "here's why smart libertarians should be fascists" reasoning.
A healthy culture of inquiry does make room for contrarians, since the off chance they might be right is an important corrective, and for the mainstream's own epistemic hygiene. But this role for contrarians is a subordinate role, serving a mainstream that will more usually be right – not a role that self-styled "masters of the universe" like.
Too many tech- and finance-bros adopt contrarian politics as a love affair with their own cleverness and power. Even when that puts them on the right side of particular issues, it's a habit generally corrosive to clear, honest thinking.
I'll take your word for it, but libertarians being concerned about the rights of people besides themselves surprises me. To me, that makes them classical liberals. When I think of libertarians, who are considered part of the Right, I think of Ayn Rand types - "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute" (Wikipedia).
Funnily, Ayn Rand hated libertarians – though that says more about her and the control she wanted to exert over her followers than about anything else.
Not everyone likes to use the label "classical liberal" (and, confoundingly, some who do are, for some reason Trump apologists – go figure!). Cato Institute folks and journalists who have Reason Magazine somewhere on their resume often fit your idea of "classical liberal", even if they'd call themselves "libertarian". Radley Balko, Cathy Young (now at The Bulwark)...
It's paywalled as archived material now, but Matt McManus published a wonderful essay a few years back on why self-styled libertarians have been pulled apart into a faction which would fit within Cass Sunstein's big-tent liberalism and another faction (more interested in hierarchy than liberty, it turns out) who broke bad. Lacking that link, I'll link to Cass Sunstein instead:
People like Thiel are not libertarians in my opinion. They genuinely seem to want authoritarianism so long as they’re in charge. Democracy has given them the world and they’ll burn it down just to have a little bit more power.
Well, that's the funny thing about labels. They can be self-applied or externally-applied whether or not the people actually match the definition of the label.
I'm an atheist who generally hates religion, but do you think that would have stopped the racists from labeling me a jew when they find out that I have a jewish mother even though religion is an ideology and not a genetic component? See where I'm going with this?
Was on furlough during gov shutdown and since I usually hop on here at work when automated tools are running I'd been gone for a bit. Also been busier than usual with work even after coming back due to staffing reductions. But I get in here when I can. Fridays are typically slower than Mon-Thur like it is everywhere else.
Yes yes yes. Also, focusing on the idea of "MAGA" as a specific and specifically unacceptable set of behaviors - not people - allows room for many who will not listen if they feel judged. Here is also where the leftist cultural warriors will have to take a back seat while pragmatists work on areas of agreement. But it starts with making it crystal clear that racist/misogynist/xenophobic/homophobic behaviors are unacceptable in a modern liberal democratic republic.
I think you're looking at a distinction that has no practical difference. A Trump voter may be a person who thinks having an 'R' at the helm is of utmost importance and if they have to put up with Trump, they're able to accept it. But that doesn't make them better than the true believer, who loves the racism and the misogyny that Trump brings in his baggage, it makes them worse. Because they know they're supporting a bad guy and they still do. So, whether they are MAGA or just a Trump voter, they're responsible for what he's done and anything MAGA has done. And I'm not going to forgive them that.
I would consider the type of voter you're talking about to be *within* the MAGA movement--perhaps a degree removed from the straight up racists, but those aren't the people I'm talking about in that 5-10% who put that MAGA group over the top. I'm talking about the Trump-to-Biden-to-Trump voters who haven't had an "R" next to their name all of their lives. I'm talking about low-attention/low-info swing voters here.
👏👏 Many of Trump’s voters are corporate or financial leaders who think Democrats believe spending more money on social welfare will fix everything. They are also the crowd who want fewer regulations.
You see, I've never bought the idea that there are "soft Trumpists" any more than there were soft Peronists. Democrats are looking for something they're not going to find.
Many of us Democrats do believe that MAGA is built on racism, misogyny, and cultural dominance. The problem is that many of us Democrats get moral satisfaction out of hurling e̶p̶i̶t̶a̶p̶h̶s̶ epithets at MAGA without wanting to do the hard work of addressing the culture of grievance that the bad actors in the GOP are exploiting.
This is not a problem that you can throw government money at to fix. Biden tried and it failed spectacularly. You need to reframe the appeal of the Democratic Party so that white rural voters can feel like they are not violating their identity by voting for a Democrat.
Part of this, I think, is the Tim Walz model. Tim works in Minnesota. Tim would not work in Hoboken, NJ. The Dems need to figure out how to straddle Tim Walz and Zohran Mamdani.
I'd go even further in the dissent. This idea within parts of the the left that "everything is racism" is ultimately unhelpful (as well as wrong). That's because it further entangles cultural issues with the result that the solution to (all) problems is to "fix" racism.
Even in marginal cases, this sort of thinking will lead to the wrong prescriptions. Consider, for example, "white resentment" (a form of soft racism). In contrast to a typical "hard" racist (e.g. one that thinks minorities are genetically inferior), white resentment is often driven by the feeling of a loss of standing, losing one's way in society. Many in this segment don't see themselves as racist. Rather, its about "others" being given unfair advantages and that sort of thing.
If should be easy to see that scolding these sorts about their awful racism is not going to work/help. Indeed, it probably makes things worse as it tacitly says 'yep, we are going to give these others an unfair advantage and too bad for you!'.
To be sure, systemic racism, is, of course, a real problem. However, there are many entanglements and nuances when it comes to the topic. If all you have is a hammer...
1 comment and 2 questions: 1. Do you have any examples of those Lefties who say, "After Hitler, us"? 2. The number of lefties that see the Democratic Party as the real barrier to true socialism/revolution is very small. These are the furthest left of the Far Left who themselves are about 12% of the Left (Dem/Lean Dem) (https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/beyond-red-vs-blue-the-political-typology/). 3. Does this weird red-brown alliance envision a world of true socialism without white people? Is that their racism?
Wow! Bravo in so many respects. JVL, you are an excellent writer. I look forward to reading your every post and how you challenge my thinking. Regarding your growing company, perfect guideposts, powerful yet simple structural ethos. Your success is no surprise. I could not be happier with my longtime subscription. And wow again to u/PTS_Dreaming. You nailed it! Thanks for the contribution!
I largely agree with the insights put forward in Part 2 on its merits, but not with its recommendations. The merits of that argument apply to the *MAGA movement*, which is not the entirety of those who voted for Trump in 2024. If it were only the MAGA movement voting for Trump, then we would have President Harris in the White House as we speak. The truth is that the MAGA movement is some 35-40% of the country that relies on a combination of the electoral college system + gaining an extra 5-10% of low-attention voters to put them over the top. That means that we need to rely on making sure that the MAGA movement doesn't get enough low-attention voters to put them over the top, and low-attention voters broadly do not give a shit about moral imperatives and think that political parties are equally or semi-equally corrupt. These arguments will not sway them over into the team blue column. Instead, what they care about are mostly economic issues and *some* social/cultural issues--namely the affordability crisis, inflation, the left going too far on shit like trans rights and "wokeness", crime, and immigration/border security. These are not the *only* economic and social/cultural issues they care about, but it is broadly apparent that they care about these things a great deal more than they do about political corruption and moral imperatives.
If team blue wants to starve the MAGA movement of these crucial low-info/low-attention voters then they should instead be hammering home how the current admin is fucking them over on economic issues, paired with showing them that MAGA cares more about billionaires than it does the working class. Show them how the current admin is increasing their grocery costs with tariffs, increasing their electricity bills with AI data center buildouts run amok, increasing their healthcare insurance costs by letting the ACA credits expire, and is not doing anything about home affordability that also impacts rents. And after they've done that, show them the slide deck of Trump shucking it up with all the tech billionaires while he demolishes the white house to build a ballroom and takes Qatari jet and crypto bribes while letting Honduran drug dealers and Jan 6th rioters out of jail. Make the same "Kamala is for they/them, not you" connection that Trump used in 2024, but make "they/them" into tech billionaires instead of trans swimmers and show them how Trump has not only done nothing to help them with affordability, he's actually made things more expensive for them.
I really like your new "they/them" vs "you", the average voter. Have an ad campaign with those rich dudes taking selfies at the Mar-a-Lago Halloween Orgy. "You" can't afford to buy Halloween candy, but "they" get unlimited booze while watching half naked girls dance in the Gold Ballroom. The whole thing was/is obsene.
I think both of you are right. Short term get the low info voters on-side. That will put a pause on the ongoing dismantling of the US.
When the fickle swing voters helped Biden win the first time, everyone on team democracy let out a sigh of relief. It didn't last. Long term, we need to make the 35-40% of MAGA the 5-10%. If we can't we as a society are going to teeter on the edge of authoritarianism forever.
Unfortunately, I don't know if the corruption and moral reasoning would work with MAGA considering they seem to vote for the most corrupt and immoral candidates and policies.
I don't think we ever get MAGA down to a size of 5-10% of the national electorate. You can maybe get it down to 25-35% through generational attrition, but that's going to take a lot of time. Even if 3 years from now the economy has entered recession and Trump leaves office as a total failure, MAGA will dismiss the man in the same way that Bush/Cheney became people who were never spoken about positively in conservative politics post-2009, but they will not reject the grievance ideology. At best, Trump becomes the next Bush/Cheney for the conservative movement and they drop *some* of the ideology--probably things like tariffs--but the anti-immigration/anti-liberal stuff is going to stick with them for the long haul.
I agree with this comment too. We're not going to get MAGA down to 5 to 10% anytime soon. (It will happen eventually but that's several elections off.) What you have to do is get those 15% of voters who are voting for MAGA candidates, particularly Trump.
I can say this is a pretty accurate assessment for the Trump-supporting circle I travel in. Right now they are pissed at ICE (but very pro-border protection) and everything else they are unhappy about Trump's administration is economic things and how utterly stupid the cabinet people are starting to seem (to them).
Your solution seems to be pretty good too for the people I know. I can say with certainly, the minute the Democrats start pushing woke, DEI, trans type of things, these folks will shift more right again. Dems should stay away from most of the culture stuff, for now.
Sarah Longwell and James Carville have been trying to sell dems this message for years now lol. Elected dems are *starting* to come around to it.
I sometimes wonder if Kamala running in 2024 fell in line with these voters' impressions of dems always trying to be "woke" and elect a "first" into the White House (a first woman of color president) rather than caring about the things they cared about. Like, I wonder what the outcome would have been if it were Trump vs Andy Beshear in 2024. Then again, the Biden presidency might have been a big enough disaster--in the minds of these voters--that no dem would have won that cycle regardless of who it was.
"The truth is that the MAGA movement is some 35-40% of the country that relies on a combination of the electoral college system + gaining an extra 5-10% of low-attention voters to put them over the top. That means that we need to rely on making sure that the MAGA movement doesn't get enough low-attention voters to put them over the top, and low-attention voters broadly do not give a shit about moral imperatives and think that political parties are equally or semi-equally corrupt."
This is terrific political analysis. I would put the ceiling of MAGA at no more than 35%. MAGA relies on those other voters, usually low information, who assumes both parties are corrupt and are against democracy and are voting on things like economics and some social issues. MAGA can't win general elections on its own. MAGA has to win general elections to continue to survive as a political movement post-Trump. And that ain't happening.
It's basically the same political analysis that Sarah Longwell has been saying for a long time now. The ongoing Secret Pod format in a nutshell:
Longwell: "JVL, defeating Trumpism is about moving 10% of the electorate who are low-info/low-attention swing voters back into the pro-democracy column by fielding likable/moderate candidates who run on the economic and cultural issues the swing voters consistently tell us they care about in the focus groups."
JVL: "All voters who aren't anti-Trumpers are decadent shitlings who want America to burn because they are fat/happy/bored in an economy where *everyone* is buying pleasure boats at record levels and our downfall is inevitable and we deserve this."
I like u/PTS_Dreaming's analysis. I couldn't find a single thing to disagree with. I do think there's something missing from their strategies section. What do liberals do to reduce their target cross section? Perhaps the author doesn't think our side has to change. Regardless, it shouldn't go unmentioned in such a strategy.
I think worrying about what our side needs to change to win over people isn't an inherently bad thing, but we also gotta be able to call a spade a spade. The broader culture has changed for worse over the years. We need to head that off and work to reverse it.
Yes, watching the maga inroads into our Canadian political space is disturbing and I appreciate having a pro-democracy community to learn from as I assess how best to put my energy into keeping them from gaining too much power.
Yes, we are due a restatement of our core values with rein-in of excesses. Probably have to be explicit over what earlier core values should be eliminated.
Historically, there has been a prob with Liberalism being too triumphal, which leads to complacency (I'm thinking of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the lead up to the World Wars, and gay marriage in the US as examples). Modern progressivism can be either too scolding and negative (moral convictions too particular an unyielding), or too weak and permissive (lacking strong moral convictions). We need a movement that splits the difference and has real teeth. We can build a better society, we absolutely need to, and we need to hold the line on those expectations.
I think the main problem in the liberal order is intolerance. They were impatient with the slow progress on fighting racism, sexism, etc. so they decided to label, without trial, anyone that didn't meet their high standards as members of some sort of evil cabal and, therefore, to be shunned like the plague. This attitude makes enemies of everyone but a chosen elite and people don't like it. More to the ironic point, it engenders such a strong backlash (Trump) that it undoes much of the progress toward their goals.
Where it goes wrong on the liberal side is that they chose to fight sexual and racial intolerance with intolerance. The Tolerance Party is intolerant. Unlike the Right's intolerance, this is self-harm.
I would disagree. To be clear, I am using Liberalism in the classic sense, not as another word to mean "left-leaning" or "progressive". The "cancel culture" of progressivism might have been annoying, but it was not that big a deal and was just as prevalent on the right. If anything, Trump has shown us that racism and sexism were in fact, wide-spread and tolerated by too many who know better. These are still really big issues and we need to deal with them as a culture, not shrug them off.
Didn't say "shrug them off". You are showing a little bit of the attitude that I was talking about. Racism and sexism are still widespread but it's a lot better than it used to be (I'm 73 so have seen a bit). There has been steady improvement until wokeness raised its ugly head. One way not to fight racism is to label entire groups of people as racist or sexist. It makes enemies of those who try to do better. All that crap about "colonialism" and "whiteness" serves only to set us back. They may have their place as academic observations but not in public policy, social settings, or polite society.
To some extent I agree but don't under-estimate how much of Trump's win in 2016 was a direct result of the backlash to the "left self-righteousness" - I am appalled of ANY reason to have voted for Trump in 2020 and 2024, but I understand to some extent why he got the vote in 2016.
The problem of Reconstruction wasn't complacency by the Radical Republicans, it was being out bid as the people who made money from the war looked to make even more and invested in political influence and creating their own future.
It wasn't complacency initially, but as time went on and the public's focused changed, elected officials for increasingly weary of whack-a-moling Jim Crow laws. The next generation was complacent, not the original. And of course, there were plenty who still tried to advocate for change!
Sorry, Holmes, but your historical timeline is a little off here. The Reconstruction period ends with the presidential election of 1876 where a deal was struck that got the federal troops out of the South and out of their laws. It was after the feds left that the Jim Crow laws were established.
They need to pierce the epistemic bubble in low population density counties. All of the redistricting stuff, the Republican advantage in the Senate, all of it stems from Trump and the Red team putting up Saddam Hussein numbers in rural counties. The blue team's position will be tenuous at best and continually vulnerable to gerrymandering and the fillibuster if it remains a team of only urban enclaves.
I live in one of those red rural midwestern areas. If you do not fix the cultural aversion to liberalism, you have no hope of competing in rural areas.
It's like trying to convince Cleveland Browns fans that they should root for and send money to the Pittsburgh Steelers instead. You can point out all you want that the Steelers have a better winning record, better offensive stats, and they are consistently ranked higher in the AFC North than the Browns. Also the Steelers have six Superbowl wins and the Browns have none. Logically it would be more beneficial as a fan to switch allegiance to the Steelers from the Browns.
However we all know that is not how fandom works. It is also not how culture works. The GOP isn't just a political party for white conservative Americans. It is a lifestyle brand.
100% agreement that the GOP is not a political party, it’s a lifestyle brand.
Some people are too far gone. My family, the one I grew up with, is too far gone. They’ll never vote for a Democrat, ever, no matter what.
We can’t endlessly obsess with how to bring them to our side. They’ll never flip.
What we need to decide, right now, is that we must win the next two national elections by at least one vote, then govern like we have the Mandate Of Heaven.
The biggest impediment to this won’t be voters, or even the GOP. The biggest impediment to this will be the Democratic leadership in Congress.
Agree with this. Here is my idea of how to fix the cultural aversion to liberalism: Liberals go on a LISTENING tour of red counties in their states. This is why I support Braver Angels. That is what they do. And Reds listen to Blues too. See braverangels.org.
Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild spent months listening to two right-wing communities, one in Louisiana bayou country, one of the most polluted areas in the US, and the other in Appalachia. She wrote a book about each: "Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right" and "Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right." Any liberal who actually wants to fix the cultural aversion to liberalism should read one of both of these books.
MAGA is sort of a way of life for people and I don't think you can talk people out of something that is a profession of belief and part of their societal connections. As we are seeing, people will take jobs in those new projects and factories funded by Biden's programs and then decry the new people that come into their small spaces to take those jobs too. They will remain MAGA because they cannot change their identities. This is true of people in general...whether it's politics, religion, if it's part of who they are and their place in society they will cling to it.
This is sort of off topic, Scott, but for awhile now I've been wondering, which will come first - a woman President, or the Browns going to the Super Bowl? (They don't have to win, but just be one of the teams). I don't think either will happen in my lifetime (I'm 57).
Yes, and the vise grip on Fox News has to be fought against as well. Trump has just started his "affordability tour" where he will tell lies about how well the economy is doing and claim all kinds of impossible future policies. Fox and all the others will faithfully echo his lies. If voters hear a counter-message at all, it is dismissed by Trump's faithful as mere opposition chatter or "fake news".
I have one disagreement: I'm not sure that the advice to turn confrontation against MAGA into a moral battle is a good one.
I don't necessarily have a good alternative to that idea, but it makes me uneasy. One of the things that has disappointed me most about the last decade or so of liberal/progressive/left politics is how, despite often being avowedly secular, there often feels like there's a dogma that people are expected to adhere to. Question, even in a productive way, certain shibboleths and there were plenty of people ready to excommunicate you.
I don't think this was necessarily the intent of PTS_Dreaming's idea, but I would suggest shying away from any method of political combat that risks the creation and/or maintenance of any kind of fundamentalist viewpoint.
It's not wrong to point out that anti-DEI is just racism and misogyny. That's the point. Most Americans are not comfortable with gutter racism and open misogyny. They never have been. That discomfort over the immorality and brutality of racism is what the Abolitionist movement used to combat the institution of slavery.
The MAGA movement leaders are leaning into racism. We need to battle that and it is a moral issue and one that is moral irrespective of religion.
Certainly MLK fought segregation from a moral perspective. The civil rights movement was led by MLK's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Gospel teachings were the core of their movement but he never went around quoting the Bible.
And he didn't fight a traditional battle against segregation. They were a minority and had no physical weapons. Their weapon was Gandhi's nonviolent civil disobedience. That's why they succeeded. That's what needs to be our weapon in our moral battle.
Right/wrong is not the only axis we should be evaluating strategies on. The consequences of failure are too great to operate that way, and when you adopt strategies that are based on the idea of moral crusade you run the risk of driving yourself into a cul-de-sac of because the fact that something is ineffective or counterproductive can't withstand the moral valence of being declared "right."
We're already doing it, starting with the massively attended, peaceful and diverse No Kings demonstrations. Then the large margin of Democratic wins on Nov. 4th. Now Trump's approval is 36% (Gallup), the lowest of this term; it's only 2 points above his all-time career low point of 34% after Jan 6th. The odds that the Dems will take the House have improved and I'm even seeing discussion that they'll take the Senate too.
Further, the Trump coalition is splitting: " . . . more than a third (of 2024 Trump voters) do not consider themselves to be MAGA Republicans . . . some of them have already begun to turn on him . . . much more likely to blame Trump for the state of the economy, say he has too much power and be pessimistic about the future" (https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/28/maga-trump-voters-divide-00670647).
I think all of this tells us that their influence is declining.
As I said above, I don't have a good alternative right now. If I knew a way to tackle MAGA and also solve the infatuation of certain segments of the liberal/progressive space with dopamine hits from moral certitude at the expense of efficacy, I'd probably be working in politics instead of software engineering.
I can't believe I'm typing this, but that Reddit comment is absolutely right. None of this is about economics, its about a particular type of white, predominantly male culture that does not like seeing the world change. I also agree with the dual approach, and we need to be tying in stuff like AI, internet "bro" culture becoming increasingly open about seeing women (and girls) as objects to be used, and a bunch of obscenely wealthy people who know the law doesn't really apply to them. Education is going to need a lot of work to fix as well. We should expect the best for and from our people, and do whatever is needed to help them, but the Liberal Order can't just sit back and assume the society will just passively get better and remain conductive for liberal values.
I do think there is one thing missing: there should be a gentle cutting off of red states around non-critical things. Democrats shouldn't be doing anything about reducing their education or healthcare funding, but if Democrats at the federal level are planning some big infrastructure projects, bending over backwards to throw bones to the people calling them "godless socialists" shouldn't be priority. They don't want that help, don't give it to them while continuing to protect and help the people in those states that really need it.
I had an American History professor who made the point that while the Union absolutely won the Civil War, the Confederacy won Reconstruction and the intervening period. With Trump and the MAGA movement, they appear to have won again. We can't hope to win against them if we don't understand what we are up against.
I stand by what I said before. Everywhere I look in the Republican Party I see the same thing: A group of people singularly obsessed with one thing. They are obsessed with social order, hierarchy, and rigid enforcement of a caste system. If you look at what they’re saying and doing everything comes back to this. MAGA itself is a shorthand for this: I will restore you to your “rightful” place in the firmament of American life. Your place has been taken from you by the [Insert Boogeyman Here]. (The liberals, Jews, gays, Leftists, Progressives, etc. It can be anyone who isn’t you, really.)
They ultimately believe that there must be a rigid hierarchy of the social order, and that the law can (and must) be used to enforce that order. In order for them to be at the top of that order (as the Lord intended, or whatever) somebody must be at the bottom. Those are all of your out groups. They believe this order is not only natural but good. If you look around you can see this everywhere. Nothing else really matters to them. The cultural obsessions, societal commentary, policing of family life, etc. all comes back to this: We know what the proper order is. Every American’s life should be ordered according to our constructed hierarchy. We will use force of law to ensure the order is maintained as it should be. That’s what Republicans mean when they talk about “Law & Order.” We will use the law to enforce *our* order. People that step out of line or attempt to disrupt our order by giving freedom and equality to Americans in the out groups cannot be tolerated. Equality and equity cannot be borne because they inevitably lead to the breakdown of our rigid order and caste system. This cannot and will not be accepted. This eventually leads to domination, as you wrote about recently JVL. But it’s domination with a purpose. That purpose is ensuring the perpetuation of the order that exclusively benefits those they perceive to be “Real Americans.”
All well said and I agree completely. "All men are created equal" is what divides Americans. If you hold that value, your America is a liberal democracy. If you don't, you are illiberal and your America is an authoritarian regime who imposes a rigid hierarchy of the social order. As Laura Loomer put it after the former Afghan fighter killed a member of the National Guard, "That's it. I want a king."
Some twenty years ago I saw a book in a used bookstore, published in the early fifties, that outlined core "conservative" principles (it wasn't a John Birch publication, more of a "this is what we believe" thing). One of the principles, stated explicitly, was that humans are ordered in a hierarchy that's the natural and desired order of things. It's hardly surprising, then, that this anti-democratic belief system has metastasized into Trump and MAGA.
I think if you look throughout human history, this tendency would almost always be there in one form or another, and has been magnified by the wealth, power, and privilege of civilization. A number of years ago a thought emerged for me that reactionary conservatives are in some fundamental way socio-cultural evolutionary throwbacks. In terms of biological evolution, the five hundred years since the dawn of the Enlightenment is an eyeblink, and studies identifying the core elements of the "conservative" worldview have been clear about fear as the defining emotional response to change. This is important because this means being open to or desiring the reduction of anxiety provided by a strong hierarchy and father figure, real or imagined, is not an anomaly, it's human. (I'm not addressing here the evils of power, privilege, amorality, venality, etc.).
Democracy is anxiety inducing hard work, and some personalities and emotional matrices respond to this with, say, manageable anxiousness or even excitement. For many, perhaps intrinsically around 20-30% or more, the unknowns of social change or even of the universe trigger the survival response of fear, which evolutionarily was a successful survival strategy and which seeks reduction of the associated anxiety through predictable, inflexible systems.
I'm not excusing the points you make; you're spot on. But I do think the human has to undergo some serious socio-cultural evolution, and even some biological evolution (maybe through Mendelian selection, epigenetics, etc.), in order to reduce the poor fit of our DNA with the demands of fully realized liberal democracy. To return to JVL's post, identifying what you describe above as unacceptable to a sustainable democratic republic might be part of the next gen moral paradigm.
Agree with all of this, Steven. You might find the work of political psychologist Karen Stenner informative (karenstenner.com). She studies the authoritarian disposition which makes up about a third of any human community. It's an enduring personality type meaning it can't be changed, so I don't think looking to MAGA evolving is what's needed. This is what Stenner says about where we go from here as we understand that liberal democracy has now exceeded many people’s capacity to tolerate it: We need to help our fellow citizens with the authoritarian disposition to be their best selves.
"The first recommendation is really for all of us: the world is too complex for a large portion of the population to navigate without experiencing exhaustion or alarm, and this is only accelerating. In every domain of life – social, political and economic – people actually need less information, fewer choices, and greater support to make decisions that are in their interest.
"Some people have a deep need for oneness and sameness. They can no more change this than we can change our own love of diversity and complexity. Forcing their exposure to more diversity than they’re innately equipped to handle actually pushes them not to the limits of their tolerance but to their intolerant extremes.
"A true democracy ought to be able to accommodate this. We have to provide authoritarians the assistance they require to live in peace and comfort with the rest of us. This will likely require significant re-design of social and political processes to reduce what I earlier described as the 'cacophony of modern liberal democracy'.
"Society could certainly benefit from a greater abundance of unifying institutions and rituals. And we don’t need to be always loudly celebrating multiculturalism and amplifying complexity and diversity. This will surely sound like a backwards step. But liberal democracy is most secure, and tolerance is maximised, when we design systems to accommodate how people actually are. And some people will never live comfortably in a modern liberal democracy.
"We must recognise that authoritarians are not inherently evil – it’s just a different way of being human. We must tolerate diversity of personalities just like we tolerate all other kinds of difference. We cannot enemify or exclude a third of the population. At least, we can’t do these things while claiming to be a democracy. We can’t do these things and be a well-functioning society either. Human communities require some folks that seek out novelty, diversity and complexity, and others who will monitor and guard against strange and foreign and unfamiliar things. It’s the balance between us that strengthens the whole.
"It is worth remembering that no outcome can be guaranteed by freedom, including freedom. If people are free to choose, they’re free to choose un-freedom. The needs and preferences of authoritarians are of equal weight to our own and must be attended to and appropriately accommodated. They’re owed this much just as citizens in a democracy, but it’s also in our own interests to help them live in peace with everyone else" (https://hopenothate.org.uk/2020/11/01/authoritarianism).
It is WE who have evolved to value liberal democracy and "all men are created equal" who need to learn how to accommodate our fellow, authoritarian citizens.
Way back in the before times, Sen. WIlliam Proxmire (D-WI) used to deliver himself monthly of his "Golden Fleece Award." The "fleece" referred to government expenditures so daft as to, in his view, "fleece" taxpayers out of their monies. As a vehicle to demonstrate to the public the utter depravity and corruption of our current ruling clique, Dems should relaunch Proxmire's initiative notwithstanding the +/- 40 year hiatus. The environment is target rich. It will be hard to whittle things down. to one per month.
JVL I would love for you and Sarah to pay attention to the parenting styles taking hold of mainstream America. Parents of young children are leading the anti-authoritarian revolution. The liberal order is in free fall right now, Trumpism is just the start. Young millennials and older Gen Z are raising fiercely anti-authoritarian generations whether they realize it or not, and a new era of democracy is coming. Things are going to get worse even post-Trump until the new era of liberalism and democracy is ushered in.
Fair 😂 Watch how ramped up the anti-authoritarianism of parenting gets with the Bulwark Babies!! The speed with which American parenting styles are evolving/changing is incredible.
Hellionsare a necessary ingredient for social creativity in culturally turbulent times as long as this is embedded in a pro-social contract. If not we get Steve Bannon nihilism.
Not only necessary for cultural creativity, but as a constant and critical force against anti-social/authoritarian behavior. Steve Bannon was raised in an authoritarian household, he is not the hellion of which we speak. What parents of very young children in modern America are finding is that the hellions are contrarian by nature and for good reason! They are finding that the hellions are deeply emotional, naturally empathetic and worthy of respect and appropriate levels of autonomy. The hellions overwhelmingly connect with the world around them which does not feel very nihilistic.
Yep that seems to be the theme across America right now. Gens Alpha and Beta are going to see LARGE numbers of anti-authoritarians who have been raised that way from birth.
His interview with the zombie-looking Peter Thiel was something. Douhat was trying to play reasonable but it came across smug and self-righteous. Very uncomfortable.
No the point is that people should not give a damn about what Douthat says but in reality, lots of people listen to his ideas. He is very commercially viable.
Right, he’s a contradiction in terms and no one should care; which is what I got from this. JVL said:
“The Liberal Order Can’t Heal Itself,” complains the man who has spent most of his career trying to strangle the liberal order….what a fucking joke!”
My takeaway, he’s a guy who claims to be the protector of the liberal order, by spending his life destroying the liberal order!
This should sound familiar; Trump claims to be the defender of democracy, and is at the same time, is destroying our democracy; if he hasn’t done so already….:)
I would say hammer corruption and incompetence, and to that I would add unfairness. Unfairness pervades our economic and political system. It is present in everything from campaign finance to tax policy to healthcare to gerrymandering. It is a neutral concept that a vast majority of Americans support, and it can be emphasized without explicit references to redistribution, which invite shrieks of "socialism." Fairness overlaps perfectly with corruption, as corruption is nothing but unfair, but it goes much further because it encompasses a broad view of how our country and our economy should be run. In short, it should be run for the huge majority of Americans, all of whom rightly feel that it is definitely not run for them. This sentiment is shared on the right and the left. The Trump administration operates in contravention of basic values like fairness, honesty, empathy, intelligence, and basic decency. This is not hard to demonstrate. Running on the restoration of these values should be easy and effective.
Agree with this. In February, Jonathan Rauch wrote about Trump's corruption and said the Dems should run on it:
"They should pursue a relentless, strategic, and thematic campaign branding Trump as America’s most corrupt president. Almost every development could provide fodder for such attacks, which would connect corruption not with generalities like the rule of law but with kitchen-table issues. Higher prices? Crony capitalism! Cuts to popular programs? Payoffs for Trump’s fat-cat clients! Tax cuts? A greedy raid on Social Security!
"The best objection to this approach (perhaps the only objection, at this point) is that the corruption charge won’t stick against Trump. After all, the public has been hearing about his corruption for years and has priced it in or just doesn’t care. Besides, the public believes that all politicians are corrupt anyway.
"But driving a strategic, coordinated message against Trump’s corruption is exactly what the opposition has not done. Instead, it has reacted to whatever is in the day’s news. By responding to daily fire drills and running in circles, it has failed to drive any message at all" (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/corruption-trump-administration/681794/).
Whilst factually correct re corruption i fear even a coordinated approach won't stick. It's something 'over there' and its not personal. Now 'betrayed' is something that is personal. Whatever you think of James carville, he brought this up straight after nov2024 election Harris defeat.
I think you should hire PTS_Dreaming as a regular commentator. Whomever wrote this is very clear thinking and diligent in their research and conclusions. Everything they say shouts "THIS!" that most of us have struggled to get into coherent thoughts.
Top tier JVL moment in this piece. “My biggest fear is someday turning into this:”
*Crash cut to Ross Douthat*
Chefs kiss 😂
“I’m going to use a lot of 20 dollar words to obscure the fact that I’m sexually aroused by MAGA.”
Ross Douthat
Glad I work from home because this just made LOL at my desk. Oh my God. 😂
Bwahahahaha!!!
NY Times Pitchbot!
Douthat is such a fraud and it says everything that's needed to know about Times executive management that they keep this intellectually and morally bankrupt fool around.
It doesn't give them "conservative" cred. It just shows them for the out of touch elites they are (and I hate using the over- and mis-used word "elite").
I hypothesized years ago that the Times hired Douthat to make American conservatism look silly.
And they succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.
I watched everything I thought was good about the good ol' USA melt and then then twist into something unrecognizable under Reagan, and believed he was the worst of my lifetime. I guess I lived too long.
No, by all means, use "out of touch elites" for the Times all you want. The Times has one overriding prerogative: to conserve and entrench their own status, power, and privilege (especially as as king makers and breakers).
I stopped bothering to read anything that clown writes ever since that piece last year where he sounded like he'd eaten way too many edibles.
It's amazing how turgid and....bad 'intellectual' movement conservative writing is. Buckley wrote like an oblivious, overconfident, untalented college freshman; Will's missives sound like a dictionary in search of an editor; and they all cram in as many multi-syllabic words as possible to demonstrate how intellectually serious they are and therefore must be taken as, regardless of their bankruptcy of ideas. It's a style, really a norm I've seen repeated over and over.
Contrast that with the writing here, which is just fun to read. Is there a connection between having a truly moral center and good writing? You make the call.
Say what you will about the tenets of George Wills’ baseball ecomiums, at least it’s an ethos.
True. I'm exaggerating a bit, some of his writing is pretty good.
No fear, JVL. You can adjust your views when you see things you didn't see before (like the racism on the Right), question that your take might not be right, and respond to your readers' criticisms ("Why don't you tell us what to do about the horrors you see coming around the corner?"). I don't think Douthat does any of that.
Whatever he might suggest, I would definitely go in the opposite direction. Nerd is as Nerd does.
Mr. Douthat is, in his eyes, the almighty, the all seeing, the all knowing Mr. Douthat.
The rest of us, in his knowingallgloriousness, can go pound sand.
The most myopic people, without exception, are the ones who insist they know everything.
I've been glued to politics since I was a tween, and I can say confidently that there is no media company that provides what the Bulwark does. This is a community, full stop. It reminds me of my very best experiences in college - meaningful, respectful debate, with intelligent people, who have good intentions and a sense of humor. It's been a true lifeline through the Trump era - forever grateful for y'all ❤️
I fully agree. I don’t need to hear the Bulwark parrot my ideas back at me. I do need the fire in the belly that they have for aggressive journalism.
I’m going to add to that thought by saying that the Bulwark is great even without the comments, but I would love to see some of the more articulate and interesting people here (not me) write an occasional piece that could be more widely circulated to people who do not often have time for the comments. Something perhaps like letters to the editor was once upon a time when I was in high school and we were in outraged to write in and one or two of my classmates actually got published.
I love this idea. I can think of several regular commenters who would knock it out of the park if they were asked to write an article or two.
Don’t some of those commentators already do that with their long essay style comments? I know who they are and look for them specifically…
They sure do, but you need to plumb the depths of the comments section to find them. JVL has highlighted and published at least one of these folks.
Wonderful idea! There is such diversity of life *experience* in the community that informs perspective.
agree it's the best of the college community experience.
The only problem is they are preaching to the choir. They need to get their message out into the political ether where it will be read and listened to by other reachable voters. This problem is shared by all anti-Trump media - they do not seem to have a plan or the tools to reach a wider audience. The Bulwark is essential to our well-being and motivates us to engage - but they are too important to keep stymied in their own bubble. I hope they have staff that are dedicated to figuring this out. The world needs them!
Certainly they are preaching to the choir but I can't tell you how often I have forwarded excerpts, used opinion statements, linked to their Youtube Takes, etc... to discuss and sometimes argue political and cultural points with my MAGA/Trump-supporting circle.
This is a cherished investment in both $$ and time - including the value I get from you all as commenters.
(sorry if I violate copyright but I have been and will always be a soft rogue in legal and social mores)
I do the same. The fact that many of the Bulwark "speak Republican" helps tremendously as a source to show to MAGAs.
But do the MAGAnuts read and, more importantly, understand and internalize what you show them, or just, as their hero does, ignore it as so much rabble and riff-raff mumblings?
Depends. I've converted a couple soft trump supporters in my family but not the die hards
Kudos!!🥂
The newsletter audience is the choir, but the videos are not. I think that getting their message out into the political ether is exactly why they stepped up the video content.
Totally agree. So happy to see it. I would think they have big plans to reach even more folks in 2026.
I'd be really happy to see them address this the next time they do a "state of the Bulwark" update - I feel like they might be reaching a wider audience than suspected, especially on YouTube.
You said it absolutely perfectly.
Ditto, but said much better than I could have. Thank you.
Is this a record for the likes???
The Match-Throwing Club is one of your best pieces of work, JVL. It's an excellent parable.
As for NATO, let's be clear; we could push Russia out of Ukraine in half a year without endangering a single American life, if we were willing to fulfill our old role as the arsenal of democracy. The problem is, the left doesn't like the 'arsenal' part, and the right doesn't like the 'democracy' part
The really important part of this Triad is part 2. It is correct. The focus on 'kitchen table issues' is trying to bribe people out of a moral crisis. Trying to bribe people out of a moral crisis is, you know, doomed to failure from the start. It's like trying to create dry water.
Where did you come up with the idea that “the left doesn’t like the arsenal part”? Since the invasion, the Democrats have pushing to arm Ukraine over Republican objections. Biden did everything he could told to supply arm, with the Republican congress fighting him every step of the way. Please give an example of Democrats objecting to arms for Ukraine. Just one, please.
Thought the same. Long time lib here who (and everyone I know) were IMMEDIATELY pushing our representatives to arm Ukraine.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/backlash-house-progressives-retract-letter-biden-ukraine-strategy/story?id=92063699
I agree. People know the difference between right and wrong; it really is not that difficult to ascertain. That’s why people, even Republican voters, are upset about the way the Trump regime is treating immigrants. Same with corruption. People say “oh, they all do it,” but that’s not true. In addition, the scale of corruption right now is almost incomprehensible. Yet, there are plenty of examples to help people understand how the ultra rich and ultra powerful are taking advantage of our democratic systems and our citizenry.
As a certified commie pinko socialist, I'm all for the "arsenal of democracy" bit. And yes, Dems and liberals need to step up to the moral fight - state what you stand for, call out amorality and immorality for what it is, and make it clear that only one can remain standing. What's essential is to make it absolutely clear that morality is what you do - it's behavior, not people. If someone wants to hold (to me) reprehensible ideas, fine. If you instantiate those ideas, we have a problem. Of course some humans are so corrupted they equate to "evil." But as a general rule focusing on unacceptable behavior is on many dimensions the road to success.
Bill Kristol, you may have thought you were done with war, but war wasn't done with you. There's one more regime it's time to change.
“As I said yesterday: Even if America woke up in 2028 and came entirely to its senses, the damage that has already been done cannot be undone except over the course of decades.”
Agreed JVL, not just here, but abroad. In fact, Trump released his National Security Strategy yesterday, and it proves that these nefarious actors are trying to destroy the EU specifically because they are too democratic.
He claims to be the defender of democracy, while simultaneously trying to destroy Europe’s and our own. How quaint!
They see the EU as the obstacle or impediment to peace with their guardrails and law based democracies. It claims that US hegemony relies on the US controlling or having undo influence over the region, but also we will no longer support our European allies and move towards a world with three spheres of influence; aligning our long term interests with Russia and right-wing parties across the globe.
Clearly, Trump and his minions no longer believe they can lose elections, because democrats would never agree to this if they ever regain power; Yet, here we are!
If anyone still has any doubts as to whether these people would ever give up power readily or willingly, then may I suggest a good therapist, because that ship has sailed! IMHO…:)
Yes to this. And I want to hear what the Bulwark has to say about that National Security Strategy. It's a loud alarm for me!
that national security strategy is one of the most disgusting anti-american documents a us government has ever produced. it is utterly insane.
Maybe it is weird and also too in the feelings, but whenever we get these State of The Bulwark updates, I feel like I'm on the team, too. I've subscribed to lots of publications - some I really enjoyed - and have never once felt that before. I think I'm really just echoing your concept of community, but I wanted to say it anyway.
I’m glad you feel it to. Makes me feel less like a weirdo.
I have never felt like part of an online community - much less one that is about the state of our state - I am so grateful the Bulwark is this for so many of us!
When I'm retired in my rocking chair and see where all the OG bulwarkers ended up in prominent areas of public life and service like under a new democratic ( lower case) administration full of the wise and young, i will feel immensely proud to have been a small part of restoring liberalism ( when its not a dirty word anymore). All the way from Australia we support you
Me too 🥹
That's why it's a community. You are always welcome to express yourself, and we listen and respond. ☺️
"This brings us back to George Packer. Many on the left hesitate to say plainly that MAGA is built on racism, misogyny, and cultural dominance because:.."
I dissent partially. There are plenty of liberals and lefties that do this constantly. There are liberals-left people like you described and some/many of these people are well known/elite. Part of it is a kind of weird red-brown alliance because there is a certain kind of lefty that sees the Democratic Party as the real barrier to true socialism/revolution (TM). See also "after Hitler, us" or the "Social Democrats are the Real Social Fascists."
Part of it is elected politicians concerned about alienating soft Trumpists that they think they can convince sides.
But "MAGA is built on racism, misogyny, and cultural dominance..." is the belief of many many Democracts
I think the important parts for liberals and anti-Trumpers to remember here is that *MAGA* is racist/misogynist/xenophobic/homophobic, but that Trump voters as a whole are not. MAGA is the core, but they are not a large enough voting block on their own to put Trump into the office and they relied on low-info/low-attention swing voters to put them over the top in a national election. Liberals/anti-Trumpers need to remember that these low-info/low-attention swing voters are a moveable block and are separate from the MAGA movement. They cannot go around saying "Trump voters are racist/misogynist/xenophobic/homophobic," they need to focus on singling out the MAGA movement from that equation so that those swing Trump voters don't think you're lumping them in there with the rest and feel insulted personally as a result. "People don't remember what you say, but they remember how you treat them."
There is also a group of libertarians within MAGA, not just the SV tech guys, often the small business owners that would have been “country club” GOP in the before times. Some might be on board for the cultural aspects, mostly they just hate people telling them what they should do. I keep waiting for some of these to drop out as big government Trumpism reveals itself. Sean Duffy’s sermons instructing us to dress up to fly is going to backfire with this group…..it’s a very woke approach.
Libertarians don't care about big government telling *people* what to do, they care about big government telling *them* what to do. If the government isn't affecting their personal life choices directly they will let it trample those of others with no fucks given. It's never been about how big government gets or what it does, it's about *who* it's doing those things to for the libtardians.
Reminds me of VP candidate Palin who said "people just want the government out of their lives!" Um no. They very much want the government fucking with other people's lives, just not theirs.
"You betcha!"
Well said, Travis (and good to see you back!).
I took some time off in Oct/Nov on account of certain appropriations bills not getting signed ;-)
You're right about many self-identified libertarians, perhaps more than would like to admit it.
But I also know people distributing red cards *because* they're libertarians, and *horrified* by what is happening to the rights of people besides themselves.
https://www.ilrc.org/redcards
Ahh yes, the libertarian versions of pre-2015 Bulwark staff who thought that everyone else inside of their tent was also there for the raw ideology rather than the desired outcomes.
You can't *be* a libertarian for any length of time without noticing the label attracts a variety of kooks, cranks, and contrarians. Idealism merely requires insisting that ideals should matter more than that, and avoiding the too-clever-by half reasoning games that those who think themselves clever enough to pull off contrarianism are prone to, the Thielish sort of "here's why smart libertarians should be fascists" reasoning.
A healthy culture of inquiry does make room for contrarians, since the off chance they might be right is an important corrective, and for the mainstream's own epistemic hygiene. But this role for contrarians is a subordinate role, serving a mainstream that will more usually be right – not a role that self-styled "masters of the universe" like.
Too many tech- and finance-bros adopt contrarian politics as a love affair with their own cleverness and power. Even when that puts them on the right side of particular issues, it's a habit generally corrosive to clear, honest thinking.
I'll take your word for it, but libertarians being concerned about the rights of people besides themselves surprises me. To me, that makes them classical liberals. When I think of libertarians, who are considered part of the Right, I think of Ayn Rand types - "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute" (Wikipedia).
Funnily, Ayn Rand hated libertarians – though that says more about her and the control she wanted to exert over her followers than about anything else.
Not everyone likes to use the label "classical liberal" (and, confoundingly, some who do are, for some reason Trump apologists – go figure!). Cato Institute folks and journalists who have Reason Magazine somewhere on their resume often fit your idea of "classical liberal", even if they'd call themselves "libertarian". Radley Balko, Cathy Young (now at The Bulwark)...
It's paywalled as archived material now, but Matt McManus published a wonderful essay a few years back on why self-styled libertarians have been pulled apart into a faction which would fit within Cass Sunstein's big-tent liberalism and another faction (more interested in hierarchy than liberty, it turns out) who broke bad. Lacking that link, I'll link to Cass Sunstein instead:
https://casssunstein.substack.com/p/on-classical-liberalism
People like Thiel are not libertarians in my opinion. They genuinely seem to want authoritarianism so long as they’re in charge. Democracy has given them the world and they’ll burn it down just to have a little bit more power.
Agree. One of my favorite quips about authoritarians: Q: What do you think of tyranny? A: Depends who the tyrant is.
Well, that's the funny thing about labels. They can be self-applied or externally-applied whether or not the people actually match the definition of the label.
I'm an atheist who generally hates religion, but do you think that would have stopped the racists from labeling me a jew when they find out that I have a jewish mother even though religion is an ideology and not a genetic component? See where I'm going with this?
Don't know if you haven't been around lately or if I've just missed your comments, but I'm glad to see you again!
Was on furlough during gov shutdown and since I usually hop on here at work when automated tools are running I'd been gone for a bit. Also been busier than usual with work even after coming back due to staffing reductions. But I get in here when I can. Fridays are typically slower than Mon-Thur like it is everywhere else.
Yes yes yes. Also, focusing on the idea of "MAGA" as a specific and specifically unacceptable set of behaviors - not people - allows room for many who will not listen if they feel judged. Here is also where the leftist cultural warriors will have to take a back seat while pragmatists work on areas of agreement. But it starts with making it crystal clear that racist/misogynist/xenophobic/homophobic behaviors are unacceptable in a modern liberal democratic republic.
I think you're looking at a distinction that has no practical difference. A Trump voter may be a person who thinks having an 'R' at the helm is of utmost importance and if they have to put up with Trump, they're able to accept it. But that doesn't make them better than the true believer, who loves the racism and the misogyny that Trump brings in his baggage, it makes them worse. Because they know they're supporting a bad guy and they still do. So, whether they are MAGA or just a Trump voter, they're responsible for what he's done and anything MAGA has done. And I'm not going to forgive them that.
I would consider the type of voter you're talking about to be *within* the MAGA movement--perhaps a degree removed from the straight up racists, but those aren't the people I'm talking about in that 5-10% who put that MAGA group over the top. I'm talking about the Trump-to-Biden-to-Trump voters who haven't had an "R" next to their name all of their lives. I'm talking about low-attention/low-info swing voters here.
👏👏 Many of Trump’s voters are corporate or financial leaders who think Democrats believe spending more money on social welfare will fix everything. They are also the crowd who want fewer regulations.
You see, I've never bought the idea that there are "soft Trumpists" any more than there were soft Peronists. Democrats are looking for something they're not going to find.
Many of us Democrats do believe that MAGA is built on racism, misogyny, and cultural dominance. The problem is that many of us Democrats get moral satisfaction out of hurling e̶p̶i̶t̶a̶p̶h̶s̶ epithets at MAGA without wanting to do the hard work of addressing the culture of grievance that the bad actors in the GOP are exploiting.
This is not a problem that you can throw government money at to fix. Biden tried and it failed spectacularly. You need to reframe the appeal of the Democratic Party so that white rural voters can feel like they are not violating their identity by voting for a Democrat.
Part of this, I think, is the Tim Walz model. Tim works in Minnesota. Tim would not work in Hoboken, NJ. The Dems need to figure out how to straddle Tim Walz and Zohran Mamdani.
epitaph (ep·i·taph) an inscription on or at a tomb or a grave in memory of the one buried there
epithet (ep·i·thet) a disparaging or abusive word or phrase
I am in favor of hurling an epitaph at MAGA, and it should include as many epithets as will fit.
🤣 Agree!!
Fingers got ahead of my brain. :( Thank you.
I don't know. I'm ok hurling epitaphs at MAGA.
I'd go even further in the dissent. This idea within parts of the the left that "everything is racism" is ultimately unhelpful (as well as wrong). That's because it further entangles cultural issues with the result that the solution to (all) problems is to "fix" racism.
Even in marginal cases, this sort of thinking will lead to the wrong prescriptions. Consider, for example, "white resentment" (a form of soft racism). In contrast to a typical "hard" racist (e.g. one that thinks minorities are genetically inferior), white resentment is often driven by the feeling of a loss of standing, losing one's way in society. Many in this segment don't see themselves as racist. Rather, its about "others" being given unfair advantages and that sort of thing.
If should be easy to see that scolding these sorts about their awful racism is not going to work/help. Indeed, it probably makes things worse as it tacitly says 'yep, we are going to give these others an unfair advantage and too bad for you!'.
To be sure, systemic racism, is, of course, a real problem. However, there are many entanglements and nuances when it comes to the topic. If all you have is a hammer...
1 comment and 2 questions: 1. Do you have any examples of those Lefties who say, "After Hitler, us"? 2. The number of lefties that see the Democratic Party as the real barrier to true socialism/revolution is very small. These are the furthest left of the Far Left who themselves are about 12% of the Left (Dem/Lean Dem) (https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/beyond-red-vs-blue-the-political-typology/). 3. Does this weird red-brown alliance envision a world of true socialism without white people? Is that their racism?
55 yo Dem here. We've known it was racism since the Tea Party days, and no one I know (anecdotal, but so) believes MAGA is about economics.
Wow! Bravo in so many respects. JVL, you are an excellent writer. I look forward to reading your every post and how you challenge my thinking. Regarding your growing company, perfect guideposts, powerful yet simple structural ethos. Your success is no surprise. I could not be happier with my longtime subscription. And wow again to u/PTS_Dreaming. You nailed it! Thanks for the contribution!
I largely agree with the insights put forward in Part 2 on its merits, but not with its recommendations. The merits of that argument apply to the *MAGA movement*, which is not the entirety of those who voted for Trump in 2024. If it were only the MAGA movement voting for Trump, then we would have President Harris in the White House as we speak. The truth is that the MAGA movement is some 35-40% of the country that relies on a combination of the electoral college system + gaining an extra 5-10% of low-attention voters to put them over the top. That means that we need to rely on making sure that the MAGA movement doesn't get enough low-attention voters to put them over the top, and low-attention voters broadly do not give a shit about moral imperatives and think that political parties are equally or semi-equally corrupt. These arguments will not sway them over into the team blue column. Instead, what they care about are mostly economic issues and *some* social/cultural issues--namely the affordability crisis, inflation, the left going too far on shit like trans rights and "wokeness", crime, and immigration/border security. These are not the *only* economic and social/cultural issues they care about, but it is broadly apparent that they care about these things a great deal more than they do about political corruption and moral imperatives.
If team blue wants to starve the MAGA movement of these crucial low-info/low-attention voters then they should instead be hammering home how the current admin is fucking them over on economic issues, paired with showing them that MAGA cares more about billionaires than it does the working class. Show them how the current admin is increasing their grocery costs with tariffs, increasing their electricity bills with AI data center buildouts run amok, increasing their healthcare insurance costs by letting the ACA credits expire, and is not doing anything about home affordability that also impacts rents. And after they've done that, show them the slide deck of Trump shucking it up with all the tech billionaires while he demolishes the white house to build a ballroom and takes Qatari jet and crypto bribes while letting Honduran drug dealers and Jan 6th rioters out of jail. Make the same "Kamala is for they/them, not you" connection that Trump used in 2024, but make "they/them" into tech billionaires instead of trans swimmers and show them how Trump has not only done nothing to help them with affordability, he's actually made things more expensive for them.
I really like your new "they/them" vs "you", the average voter. Have an ad campaign with those rich dudes taking selfies at the Mar-a-Lago Halloween Orgy. "You" can't afford to buy Halloween candy, but "they" get unlimited booze while watching half naked girls dance in the Gold Ballroom. The whole thing was/is obsene.
I think both of you are right. Short term get the low info voters on-side. That will put a pause on the ongoing dismantling of the US.
When the fickle swing voters helped Biden win the first time, everyone on team democracy let out a sigh of relief. It didn't last. Long term, we need to make the 35-40% of MAGA the 5-10%. If we can't we as a society are going to teeter on the edge of authoritarianism forever.
Unfortunately, I don't know if the corruption and moral reasoning would work with MAGA considering they seem to vote for the most corrupt and immoral candidates and policies.
I don't think we ever get MAGA down to a size of 5-10% of the national electorate. You can maybe get it down to 25-35% through generational attrition, but that's going to take a lot of time. Even if 3 years from now the economy has entered recession and Trump leaves office as a total failure, MAGA will dismiss the man in the same way that Bush/Cheney became people who were never spoken about positively in conservative politics post-2009, but they will not reject the grievance ideology. At best, Trump becomes the next Bush/Cheney for the conservative movement and they drop *some* of the ideology--probably things like tariffs--but the anti-immigration/anti-liberal stuff is going to stick with them for the long haul.
I agree with this comment too. We're not going to get MAGA down to 5 to 10% anytime soon. (It will happen eventually but that's several elections off.) What you have to do is get those 15% of voters who are voting for MAGA candidates, particularly Trump.
I can say this is a pretty accurate assessment for the Trump-supporting circle I travel in. Right now they are pissed at ICE (but very pro-border protection) and everything else they are unhappy about Trump's administration is economic things and how utterly stupid the cabinet people are starting to seem (to them).
Your solution seems to be pretty good too for the people I know. I can say with certainly, the minute the Democrats start pushing woke, DEI, trans type of things, these folks will shift more right again. Dems should stay away from most of the culture stuff, for now.
Sarah Longwell and James Carville have been trying to sell dems this message for years now lol. Elected dems are *starting* to come around to it.
I sometimes wonder if Kamala running in 2024 fell in line with these voters' impressions of dems always trying to be "woke" and elect a "first" into the White House (a first woman of color president) rather than caring about the things they cared about. Like, I wonder what the outcome would have been if it were Trump vs Andy Beshear in 2024. Then again, the Biden presidency might have been a big enough disaster--in the minds of these voters--that no dem would have won that cycle regardless of who it was.
"The truth is that the MAGA movement is some 35-40% of the country that relies on a combination of the electoral college system + gaining an extra 5-10% of low-attention voters to put them over the top. That means that we need to rely on making sure that the MAGA movement doesn't get enough low-attention voters to put them over the top, and low-attention voters broadly do not give a shit about moral imperatives and think that political parties are equally or semi-equally corrupt."
This is terrific political analysis. I would put the ceiling of MAGA at no more than 35%. MAGA relies on those other voters, usually low information, who assumes both parties are corrupt and are against democracy and are voting on things like economics and some social issues. MAGA can't win general elections on its own. MAGA has to win general elections to continue to survive as a political movement post-Trump. And that ain't happening.
It's basically the same political analysis that Sarah Longwell has been saying for a long time now. The ongoing Secret Pod format in a nutshell:
Longwell: "JVL, defeating Trumpism is about moving 10% of the electorate who are low-info/low-attention swing voters back into the pro-democracy column by fielding likable/moderate candidates who run on the economic and cultural issues the swing voters consistently tell us they care about in the focus groups."
JVL: "All voters who aren't anti-Trumpers are decadent shitlings who want America to burn because they are fat/happy/bored in an economy where *everyone* is buying pleasure boats at record levels and our downfall is inevitable and we deserve this."
Sarah is always right 👍
THEY LITERALLY JUST DID THIS ARGUMENT (AGAIN) ON TODAY'S SECRET POD AT LIKE 38:30/44:50/47:40 IN AND I'M DYING NOW LOL
I like u/PTS_Dreaming's analysis. I couldn't find a single thing to disagree with. I do think there's something missing from their strategies section. What do liberals do to reduce their target cross section? Perhaps the author doesn't think our side has to change. Regardless, it shouldn't go unmentioned in such a strategy.
I think worrying about what our side needs to change to win over people isn't an inherently bad thing, but we also gotta be able to call a spade a spade. The broader culture has changed for worse over the years. We need to head that off and work to reverse it.
Yes, watching the maga inroads into our Canadian political space is disturbing and I appreciate having a pro-democracy community to learn from as I assess how best to put my energy into keeping them from gaining too much power.
Yes, we are due a restatement of our core values with rein-in of excesses. Probably have to be explicit over what earlier core values should be eliminated.
Historically, there has been a prob with Liberalism being too triumphal, which leads to complacency (I'm thinking of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the lead up to the World Wars, and gay marriage in the US as examples). Modern progressivism can be either too scolding and negative (moral convictions too particular an unyielding), or too weak and permissive (lacking strong moral convictions). We need a movement that splits the difference and has real teeth. We can build a better society, we absolutely need to, and we need to hold the line on those expectations.
I think the main problem in the liberal order is intolerance. They were impatient with the slow progress on fighting racism, sexism, etc. so they decided to label, without trial, anyone that didn't meet their high standards as members of some sort of evil cabal and, therefore, to be shunned like the plague. This attitude makes enemies of everyone but a chosen elite and people don't like it. More to the ironic point, it engenders such a strong backlash (Trump) that it undoes much of the progress toward their goals.
Isn't that the case on both ends of the spectrum? We are talking about humans after all.
Where it goes wrong on the liberal side is that they chose to fight sexual and racial intolerance with intolerance. The Tolerance Party is intolerant. Unlike the Right's intolerance, this is self-harm.
I would disagree. To be clear, I am using Liberalism in the classic sense, not as another word to mean "left-leaning" or "progressive". The "cancel culture" of progressivism might have been annoying, but it was not that big a deal and was just as prevalent on the right. If anything, Trump has shown us that racism and sexism were in fact, wide-spread and tolerated by too many who know better. These are still really big issues and we need to deal with them as a culture, not shrug them off.
Didn't say "shrug them off". You are showing a little bit of the attitude that I was talking about. Racism and sexism are still widespread but it's a lot better than it used to be (I'm 73 so have seen a bit). There has been steady improvement until wokeness raised its ugly head. One way not to fight racism is to label entire groups of people as racist or sexist. It makes enemies of those who try to do better. All that crap about "colonialism" and "whiteness" serves only to set us back. They may have their place as academic observations but not in public policy, social settings, or polite society.
To some extent I agree but don't under-estimate how much of Trump's win in 2016 was a direct result of the backlash to the "left self-righteousness" - I am appalled of ANY reason to have voted for Trump in 2020 and 2024, but I understand to some extent why he got the vote in 2016.
The problem of Reconstruction wasn't complacency by the Radical Republicans, it was being out bid as the people who made money from the war looked to make even more and invested in political influence and creating their own future.
It wasn't complacency initially, but as time went on and the public's focused changed, elected officials for increasingly weary of whack-a-moling Jim Crow laws. The next generation was complacent, not the original. And of course, there were plenty who still tried to advocate for change!
Sorry, Holmes, but your historical timeline is a little off here. The Reconstruction period ends with the presidential election of 1876 where a deal was struck that got the federal troops out of the South and out of their laws. It was after the feds left that the Jim Crow laws were established.
They need to pierce the epistemic bubble in low population density counties. All of the redistricting stuff, the Republican advantage in the Senate, all of it stems from Trump and the Red team putting up Saddam Hussein numbers in rural counties. The blue team's position will be tenuous at best and continually vulnerable to gerrymandering and the fillibuster if it remains a team of only urban enclaves.
I live in one of those red rural midwestern areas. If you do not fix the cultural aversion to liberalism, you have no hope of competing in rural areas.
It's like trying to convince Cleveland Browns fans that they should root for and send money to the Pittsburgh Steelers instead. You can point out all you want that the Steelers have a better winning record, better offensive stats, and they are consistently ranked higher in the AFC North than the Browns. Also the Steelers have six Superbowl wins and the Browns have none. Logically it would be more beneficial as a fan to switch allegiance to the Steelers from the Browns.
However we all know that is not how fandom works. It is also not how culture works. The GOP isn't just a political party for white conservative Americans. It is a lifestyle brand.
100% agreement that the GOP is not a political party, it’s a lifestyle brand.
Some people are too far gone. My family, the one I grew up with, is too far gone. They’ll never vote for a Democrat, ever, no matter what.
We can’t endlessly obsess with how to bring them to our side. They’ll never flip.
What we need to decide, right now, is that we must win the next two national elections by at least one vote, then govern like we have the Mandate Of Heaven.
The biggest impediment to this won’t be voters, or even the GOP. The biggest impediment to this will be the Democratic leadership in Congress.
Brilliant, Scott.
Agree with this. Here is my idea of how to fix the cultural aversion to liberalism: Liberals go on a LISTENING tour of red counties in their states. This is why I support Braver Angels. That is what they do. And Reds listen to Blues too. See braverangels.org.
Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild spent months listening to two right-wing communities, one in Louisiana bayou country, one of the most polluted areas in the US, and the other in Appalachia. She wrote a book about each: "Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right" and "Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right." Any liberal who actually wants to fix the cultural aversion to liberalism should read one of both of these books.
MAGA is sort of a way of life for people and I don't think you can talk people out of something that is a profession of belief and part of their societal connections. As we are seeing, people will take jobs in those new projects and factories funded by Biden's programs and then decry the new people that come into their small spaces to take those jobs too. They will remain MAGA because they cannot change their identities. This is true of people in general...whether it's politics, religion, if it's part of who they are and their place in society they will cling to it.
This is sort of off topic, Scott, but for awhile now I've been wondering, which will come first - a woman President, or the Browns going to the Super Bowl? (They don't have to win, but just be one of the teams). I don't think either will happen in my lifetime (I'm 57).
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I vividly remember watching the Broncos end that dream as a kid!
Ah, yes. The Fumble. Sigh.
And The Drive.
Yes, and the vise grip on Fox News has to be fought against as well. Trump has just started his "affordability tour" where he will tell lies about how well the economy is doing and claim all kinds of impossible future policies. Fox and all the others will faithfully echo his lies. If voters hear a counter-message at all, it is dismissed by Trump's faithful as mere opposition chatter or "fake news".
our side has to change is a very good point with which I agree. see Sarah McBride on a politics of grace - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Zw4rAm-GsU.
I have one disagreement: I'm not sure that the advice to turn confrontation against MAGA into a moral battle is a good one.
I don't necessarily have a good alternative to that idea, but it makes me uneasy. One of the things that has disappointed me most about the last decade or so of liberal/progressive/left politics is how, despite often being avowedly secular, there often feels like there's a dogma that people are expected to adhere to. Question, even in a productive way, certain shibboleths and there were plenty of people ready to excommunicate you.
I don't think this was necessarily the intent of PTS_Dreaming's idea, but I would suggest shying away from any method of political combat that risks the creation and/or maintenance of any kind of fundamentalist viewpoint.
It's not wrong to point out that anti-DEI is just racism and misogyny. That's the point. Most Americans are not comfortable with gutter racism and open misogyny. They never have been. That discomfort over the immorality and brutality of racism is what the Abolitionist movement used to combat the institution of slavery.
The MAGA movement leaders are leaning into racism. We need to battle that and it is a moral issue and one that is moral irrespective of religion.
Certainly MLK fought segregation from a moral perspective. The civil rights movement was led by MLK's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Gospel teachings were the core of their movement but he never went around quoting the Bible.
And he didn't fight a traditional battle against segregation. They were a minority and had no physical weapons. Their weapon was Gandhi's nonviolent civil disobedience. That's why they succeeded. That's what needs to be our weapon in our moral battle.
Right/wrong is not the only axis we should be evaluating strategies on. The consequences of failure are too great to operate that way, and when you adopt strategies that are based on the idea of moral crusade you run the risk of driving yourself into a cul-de-sac of because the fact that something is ineffective or counterproductive can't withstand the moral valence of being declared "right."
So what do you propose to do in order to try and break the growing influence of the racist/misogynist influencers on the right?
We're already doing it, starting with the massively attended, peaceful and diverse No Kings demonstrations. Then the large margin of Democratic wins on Nov. 4th. Now Trump's approval is 36% (Gallup), the lowest of this term; it's only 2 points above his all-time career low point of 34% after Jan 6th. The odds that the Dems will take the House have improved and I'm even seeing discussion that they'll take the Senate too.
Further, the Trump coalition is splitting: " . . . more than a third (of 2024 Trump voters) do not consider themselves to be MAGA Republicans . . . some of them have already begun to turn on him . . . much more likely to blame Trump for the state of the economy, say he has too much power and be pessimistic about the future" (https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/28/maga-trump-voters-divide-00670647).
I think all of this tells us that their influence is declining.
As I said above, I don't have a good alternative right now. If I knew a way to tackle MAGA and also solve the infatuation of certain segments of the liberal/progressive space with dopamine hits from moral certitude at the expense of efficacy, I'd probably be working in politics instead of software engineering.
Agree with this, Hilary. I made a similar comment here: https://substack.com/@sandygsm/note/c-184621247?r=1dlvn&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web
I can't believe I'm typing this, but that Reddit comment is absolutely right. None of this is about economics, its about a particular type of white, predominantly male culture that does not like seeing the world change. I also agree with the dual approach, and we need to be tying in stuff like AI, internet "bro" culture becoming increasingly open about seeing women (and girls) as objects to be used, and a bunch of obscenely wealthy people who know the law doesn't really apply to them. Education is going to need a lot of work to fix as well. We should expect the best for and from our people, and do whatever is needed to help them, but the Liberal Order can't just sit back and assume the society will just passively get better and remain conductive for liberal values.
I do think there is one thing missing: there should be a gentle cutting off of red states around non-critical things. Democrats shouldn't be doing anything about reducing their education or healthcare funding, but if Democrats at the federal level are planning some big infrastructure projects, bending over backwards to throw bones to the people calling them "godless socialists" shouldn't be priority. They don't want that help, don't give it to them while continuing to protect and help the people in those states that really need it.
I just finished Heather Cox Richardson's "How the South Won the Civil War." It is a 200 page expansion on the Reddit comment. I highly recommend it!
I had an American History professor who made the point that while the Union absolutely won the Civil War, the Confederacy won Reconstruction and the intervening period. With Trump and the MAGA movement, they appear to have won again. We can't hope to win against them if we don't understand what we are up against.
Yes, I was going to say the response that JVL highlights 1) reads like HCR 2) reads like an academic wrote it.
I stand by what I said before. Everywhere I look in the Republican Party I see the same thing: A group of people singularly obsessed with one thing. They are obsessed with social order, hierarchy, and rigid enforcement of a caste system. If you look at what they’re saying and doing everything comes back to this. MAGA itself is a shorthand for this: I will restore you to your “rightful” place in the firmament of American life. Your place has been taken from you by the [Insert Boogeyman Here]. (The liberals, Jews, gays, Leftists, Progressives, etc. It can be anyone who isn’t you, really.)
They ultimately believe that there must be a rigid hierarchy of the social order, and that the law can (and must) be used to enforce that order. In order for them to be at the top of that order (as the Lord intended, or whatever) somebody must be at the bottom. Those are all of your out groups. They believe this order is not only natural but good. If you look around you can see this everywhere. Nothing else really matters to them. The cultural obsessions, societal commentary, policing of family life, etc. all comes back to this: We know what the proper order is. Every American’s life should be ordered according to our constructed hierarchy. We will use force of law to ensure the order is maintained as it should be. That’s what Republicans mean when they talk about “Law & Order.” We will use the law to enforce *our* order. People that step out of line or attempt to disrupt our order by giving freedom and equality to Americans in the out groups cannot be tolerated. Equality and equity cannot be borne because they inevitably lead to the breakdown of our rigid order and caste system. This cannot and will not be accepted. This eventually leads to domination, as you wrote about recently JVL. But it’s domination with a purpose. That purpose is ensuring the perpetuation of the order that exclusively benefits those they perceive to be “Real Americans.”
All well said and I agree completely. "All men are created equal" is what divides Americans. If you hold that value, your America is a liberal democracy. If you don't, you are illiberal and your America is an authoritarian regime who imposes a rigid hierarchy of the social order. As Laura Loomer put it after the former Afghan fighter killed a member of the National Guard, "That's it. I want a king."
Some twenty years ago I saw a book in a used bookstore, published in the early fifties, that outlined core "conservative" principles (it wasn't a John Birch publication, more of a "this is what we believe" thing). One of the principles, stated explicitly, was that humans are ordered in a hierarchy that's the natural and desired order of things. It's hardly surprising, then, that this anti-democratic belief system has metastasized into Trump and MAGA.
I think if you look throughout human history, this tendency would almost always be there in one form or another, and has been magnified by the wealth, power, and privilege of civilization. A number of years ago a thought emerged for me that reactionary conservatives are in some fundamental way socio-cultural evolutionary throwbacks. In terms of biological evolution, the five hundred years since the dawn of the Enlightenment is an eyeblink, and studies identifying the core elements of the "conservative" worldview have been clear about fear as the defining emotional response to change. This is important because this means being open to or desiring the reduction of anxiety provided by a strong hierarchy and father figure, real or imagined, is not an anomaly, it's human. (I'm not addressing here the evils of power, privilege, amorality, venality, etc.).
Democracy is anxiety inducing hard work, and some personalities and emotional matrices respond to this with, say, manageable anxiousness or even excitement. For many, perhaps intrinsically around 20-30% or more, the unknowns of social change or even of the universe trigger the survival response of fear, which evolutionarily was a successful survival strategy and which seeks reduction of the associated anxiety through predictable, inflexible systems.
I'm not excusing the points you make; you're spot on. But I do think the human has to undergo some serious socio-cultural evolution, and even some biological evolution (maybe through Mendelian selection, epigenetics, etc.), in order to reduce the poor fit of our DNA with the demands of fully realized liberal democracy. To return to JVL's post, identifying what you describe above as unacceptable to a sustainable democratic republic might be part of the next gen moral paradigm.
Agree with all of this, Steven. You might find the work of political psychologist Karen Stenner informative (karenstenner.com). She studies the authoritarian disposition which makes up about a third of any human community. It's an enduring personality type meaning it can't be changed, so I don't think looking to MAGA evolving is what's needed. This is what Stenner says about where we go from here as we understand that liberal democracy has now exceeded many people’s capacity to tolerate it: We need to help our fellow citizens with the authoritarian disposition to be their best selves.
"The first recommendation is really for all of us: the world is too complex for a large portion of the population to navigate without experiencing exhaustion or alarm, and this is only accelerating. In every domain of life – social, political and economic – people actually need less information, fewer choices, and greater support to make decisions that are in their interest.
"Some people have a deep need for oneness and sameness. They can no more change this than we can change our own love of diversity and complexity. Forcing their exposure to more diversity than they’re innately equipped to handle actually pushes them not to the limits of their tolerance but to their intolerant extremes.
"A true democracy ought to be able to accommodate this. We have to provide authoritarians the assistance they require to live in peace and comfort with the rest of us. This will likely require significant re-design of social and political processes to reduce what I earlier described as the 'cacophony of modern liberal democracy'.
"Society could certainly benefit from a greater abundance of unifying institutions and rituals. And we don’t need to be always loudly celebrating multiculturalism and amplifying complexity and diversity. This will surely sound like a backwards step. But liberal democracy is most secure, and tolerance is maximised, when we design systems to accommodate how people actually are. And some people will never live comfortably in a modern liberal democracy.
"We must recognise that authoritarians are not inherently evil – it’s just a different way of being human. We must tolerate diversity of personalities just like we tolerate all other kinds of difference. We cannot enemify or exclude a third of the population. At least, we can’t do these things while claiming to be a democracy. We can’t do these things and be a well-functioning society either. Human communities require some folks that seek out novelty, diversity and complexity, and others who will monitor and guard against strange and foreign and unfamiliar things. It’s the balance between us that strengthens the whole.
"It is worth remembering that no outcome can be guaranteed by freedom, including freedom. If people are free to choose, they’re free to choose un-freedom. The needs and preferences of authoritarians are of equal weight to our own and must be attended to and appropriately accommodated. They’re owed this much just as citizens in a democracy, but it’s also in our own interests to help them live in peace with everyone else" (https://hopenothate.org.uk/2020/11/01/authoritarianism).
It is WE who have evolved to value liberal democracy and "all men are created equal" who need to learn how to accommodate our fellow, authoritarian citizens.
Way back in the before times, Sen. WIlliam Proxmire (D-WI) used to deliver himself monthly of his "Golden Fleece Award." The "fleece" referred to government expenditures so daft as to, in his view, "fleece" taxpayers out of their monies. As a vehicle to demonstrate to the public the utter depravity and corruption of our current ruling clique, Dems should relaunch Proxmire's initiative notwithstanding the +/- 40 year hiatus. The environment is target rich. It will be hard to whittle things down. to one per month.
Excellent!
JVL I would love for you and Sarah to pay attention to the parenting styles taking hold of mainstream America. Parents of young children are leading the anti-authoritarian revolution. The liberal order is in free fall right now, Trumpism is just the start. Young millennials and older Gen Z are raising fiercely anti-authoritarian generations whether they realize it or not, and a new era of democracy is coming. Things are going to get worse even post-Trump until the new era of liberalism and democracy is ushered in.
Pay attention to it? We’re doing it!
Fair 😂 Watch how ramped up the anti-authoritarianism of parenting gets with the Bulwark Babies!! The speed with which American parenting styles are evolving/changing is incredible.
I'm raising hellions sort of on purpose. I don't want compliant, obedient kids who turn into compliant, obedient adults.
Hellionsare a necessary ingredient for social creativity in culturally turbulent times as long as this is embedded in a pro-social contract. If not we get Steve Bannon nihilism.
Not only necessary for cultural creativity, but as a constant and critical force against anti-social/authoritarian behavior. Steve Bannon was raised in an authoritarian household, he is not the hellion of which we speak. What parents of very young children in modern America are finding is that the hellions are contrarian by nature and for good reason! They are finding that the hellions are deeply emotional, naturally empathetic and worthy of respect and appropriate levels of autonomy. The hellions overwhelmingly connect with the world around them which does not feel very nihilistic.
Yep that seems to be the theme across America right now. Gens Alpha and Beta are going to see LARGE numbers of anti-authoritarians who have been raised that way from birth.
https://open.substack.com/pub/galliaanonimia674911/p/american-parenting-as-a-leading-charge?r=ca4qn&utm_medium=ios
Please explain why anyone would give a flying rat’s ass about what Russ Douhat has to say.
Not sure anyone does, Douthat serves mainly as a conduit through which to launder right-wing authoritarianism.
He uses a lot of big words which makes him palatable to The NY Times.
His interview with the zombie-looking Peter Thiel was something. Douhat was trying to play reasonable but it came across smug and self-righteous. Very uncomfortable.
That interview, & Medhi Hasan’s Jubilee, really got to me. I felt like I was being slapped in the face with a fetid fish born of the darkest 👿
I think that was the entire point….:)
No the point is that people should not give a damn about what Douthat says but in reality, lots of people listen to his ideas. He is very commercially viable.
Right, he’s a contradiction in terms and no one should care; which is what I got from this. JVL said:
“The Liberal Order Can’t Heal Itself,” complains the man who has spent most of his career trying to strangle the liberal order….what a fucking joke!”
My takeaway, he’s a guy who claims to be the protector of the liberal order, by spending his life destroying the liberal order!
This should sound familiar; Trump claims to be the defender of democracy, and is at the same time, is destroying our democracy; if he hasn’t done so already….:)
Both points are true: He is a conduit through which to launder right-wing authoritarianism, and he is very commercially viable.
I would say hammer corruption and incompetence, and to that I would add unfairness. Unfairness pervades our economic and political system. It is present in everything from campaign finance to tax policy to healthcare to gerrymandering. It is a neutral concept that a vast majority of Americans support, and it can be emphasized without explicit references to redistribution, which invite shrieks of "socialism." Fairness overlaps perfectly with corruption, as corruption is nothing but unfair, but it goes much further because it encompasses a broad view of how our country and our economy should be run. In short, it should be run for the huge majority of Americans, all of whom rightly feel that it is definitely not run for them. This sentiment is shared on the right and the left. The Trump administration operates in contravention of basic values like fairness, honesty, empathy, intelligence, and basic decency. This is not hard to demonstrate. Running on the restoration of these values should be easy and effective.
Agree with this. In February, Jonathan Rauch wrote about Trump's corruption and said the Dems should run on it:
"They should pursue a relentless, strategic, and thematic campaign branding Trump as America’s most corrupt president. Almost every development could provide fodder for such attacks, which would connect corruption not with generalities like the rule of law but with kitchen-table issues. Higher prices? Crony capitalism! Cuts to popular programs? Payoffs for Trump’s fat-cat clients! Tax cuts? A greedy raid on Social Security!
"The best objection to this approach (perhaps the only objection, at this point) is that the corruption charge won’t stick against Trump. After all, the public has been hearing about his corruption for years and has priced it in or just doesn’t care. Besides, the public believes that all politicians are corrupt anyway.
"But driving a strategic, coordinated message against Trump’s corruption is exactly what the opposition has not done. Instead, it has reacted to whatever is in the day’s news. By responding to daily fire drills and running in circles, it has failed to drive any message at all" (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/corruption-trump-administration/681794/).
Whilst factually correct re corruption i fear even a coordinated approach won't stick. It's something 'over there' and its not personal. Now 'betrayed' is something that is personal. Whatever you think of James carville, he brought this up straight after nov2024 election Harris defeat.
I think you should hire PTS_Dreaming as a regular commentator. Whomever wrote this is very clear thinking and diligent in their research and conclusions. Everything they say shouts "THIS!" that most of us have struggled to get into coherent thoughts.