As a former registered Republican and conservative, I wanted to say a few things about “conservative.” These are just random notes.
The conservative rightly looks at differences in results (so education, wealth) as part of the variability that is inevitable and exists in all nations. Same with the differences in occupations choses by women compared to men. (And I have read Thomas Sowell on this)
Still he should also reckon on the barriers that we once strongly enforced that kept African Americans and women out of various careers and even college majors.
What should the conservative position be now?
If the time for affirmative action is over now - was it never useful? As someone in college from 1969-73, African Americans were only slowly let into the first rank of colleges. Something surely needed to be done.
Or how about the vexing issue of sexual behavior. As someone who lived through the 1960s and the sexual revolution, is it really conservative to imagine that we can suppress gays? So take back their marriage rights? And how about contraception. Married for 46 years, I suggest that now contraception should be a conservative practice. That is, sex is good for marriage and contraception takes out the concern that every act is rolling the dice re pregnancy. My assumption is that most of my catholic friends have used birth control. And as for protestants and the rest - the same.
Gay marriage is just one more recognition that we all form bonds of affiliation with others. And gays are certainly a large enough minority that most of us should know at least several gays couples. They seem to love each other. Isn’t that great?
I cringe at the social justice catechism that has been thrust upon the media and the rest of us. So no, I won’t tell you my pronoun, and I will never write cis-gender except in this context. And pregnant people - makes me scream.
But if conservatives represent not reasonable people of good will, but shills and liars then the conservative voice will never have a place with reasonable people.
And no, Ted Cruz is not a conservative, he is a demagogue. So it MTG.
The conservative conferences that focus on guns and Christianity would have appalled John Adams (or Abe Lincoln).
I think that post-liberalism, at least in the form of nationalism, has been coming for a while, back to Pat Buchanan in 1992. It had its constituency but also a hard ceiling. I think some of that shifted in the mid-2000s with a hostility to immigration, for which nationalist ideology friendlier than classical liberalism.
I think Trump brings a few new things to the table. Most important on this point is that if government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, they won't consent to the legitimacy of the government unless they get their way all of the time. That's the difference between Trump and all who preceded him.
Most of TFG's supporters think they are supporting democracy, although most of them don't really understand what that means and we can't really know individually how they do or would define it. As the polls showed, the number of Rs-TFG supporters who are worried about democracy in America is substantially higher than Dems. But there are "elites" who tell them what they're doing is right and validate the delusion. The elites who consciously understand they're moving the country toward authoritarianism has reached a critical mass and their project is succeeding. They're the real threat. The ones who write hagiographies of the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal, like here: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/waiting-for-our-salazar/. Tucker Carlson clearly belongs in that club given his entirely optional touting of Orban and Putin despite no one really clamoring for it, for reasons that are not totally clear to me, although I suspect strongly he plans to run for office someday and sees himself as the future tyrant, or at least a major player in such a regime, and perhaps wants help from abroad. Charlie Sykes has asked why Tucker is doing what he's doing, and that's my answer. Brooks doesn't use the word, but the one he should have used in his write-up of the National Conservativism conference is totalitarianism, which is what it is to capture the state and then use state power to reshape and enforce culture and society. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/scary-future-american-right-national-conservatism-conference/620746/. Reshaping the culture from the top down, don't think it worked too well generally so maybe they should re-read their history. Then again, it's actually not about the culture. As Orwell wrote, the justifications change, the underlying motivation, power for power's sake, never changes. So whenever anyone talks about how their ideas are hypocritical, or impractical, or illogical, it's really missing the point. Here's a quote from the head of the Claremont Institute: “The ideal endgame would be to effect a realignment of our politics and take control of all three branches of government for a generation or two." Hmm, interesting, I feel like there might be a name for that, 30-40 years of unbroken single party rule.
So, in their own words, they acknowledge the goal is dictatorship and totalitarianism. I call it elite failure because there is now a substantial element of political, media, economic, and intellectual elite in this country that wants a dictatorship. They see themselves as our masters and us as their slaves. Why that happened, I don't know. The failure of the other elites on the right was not to stop them, but rather help and try to profit off their growing strength. The failure of other elites was not to stop them, not to blacklist them, not to refuse to do business with them or give them airtime.
I said I don't know why we developed a substantial bastion of elite support for dictatorship, but there are theories. I'm not the first to point out the parallels with the American South in the run up to the Civil War, but the parallels are striking and worth repeating. In both cases we had demographic shifts that certain elites in parts of the country (the South then/conservatives now) interpreted (wrongly, I'd argue) as meaning the perpetual decline of their political influence and permanent powerlessness, leading to economic ruin (losing their slaves then/higher taxes today). In both cases, elites told their followers (and mostly convinced themselves as well) via their media ecosystem (Southern/conservative) that they faced total cultural, economic, and even physical destruction at the hands of their enemies (Northerners/abolitionists/blacks then, liberal, atheistic "Communists" today) if they lost their political power. Given those stakes, secession, civil war, or dictatorship are preferable to most people rather then being murdered or enslaved by their enemies. Unfortunately for us, whereas the South was geographically concentrated enough to make secession appealing, the geographical lines aren't so clear cut today, so the only solution is to seize the whole country.
Here's my issue: If one man (in this case, DJT) can wreck so many American institutions in just four years, how solid were those institutions to begin with? Perhaps we need to replace our bouncy house republic with one made of steel, or at least oak and maple. One nightmare president should not have destroyed this much of the place we live ... and yet he did.
It predates DJT, back to the Reagan era and when southern Ds went R. Then the Tea Party, many of whom wanted to get rid of government. Gingrich codified it with his "Contract".
Oh, I know---Reagan started this ball rolling with his pestilent "we want to shrink government till we can drown it in a bathtub." Not his words, but his sentiment. Then, he presided over tripling the federal deficit and doubling the federal workforce. Republicans have been gangsters ever since.
One of the interesting things is that research actually indicates that ~30-40% of the population of any given democracy has authoritarian leanings but since the are equally split between left and right these people are usually unactivated.
Countries get in trouble when a reordering event happens that concentrates the authoritarian leaners into one concentrated political party that can suddenly win elections. (And explains historically how you get authoritarians both on the far right/ far left end of the spectrum.)
And again, it still requires a leader to activate these authoritarian leaners by actually publicly committing authoritarian acts. ( In recent history this has been helped by a cut of personality if the leader.)
1).So, reordering event concentrates authorization leaners enough to win political power.
2). Leader takes authoritarian actions while in office
3). The political party/Leader is electorally rewarded. The leader often interpretes their success as a validation of their authoritarian actions.
4). With every successive political victory actions are taken to dismantle organized resistance to their power which then allows them to take more authoritarian actions.
So 1 & 2 happened in the US. 3 was prevented from happening at least from now but if Stop the Steal officials are elected into positions that allow them to overwrite future elections or a president with authoritarian instincts is elected in 2024 then it will continue further down the slope.
So what do we thing the reordering event was in the US?
The reordering event was Barack Obama's election to office, which is where Birtherism came from, and Birtherism is where Trump's political rise came from.
More important than understanding the triggering event is understanding how the camel's back had gotten so weak over the decades that a straw could snap its spine. We've had runaway wealth inequality since the 1970's and racial/sexual awakening backlashes since the 1960's. A black liberal lawyer from an immigrant father making it into the presidency was the culmination of everything the left fought *for* since the 1960's, and everything the right fought *against* since the 1960's. For a whole lot of working class conservatives, the election of Barack Obama was to them a byproduct of immigrants and minorities getting to higher places in the increasingly-rigged meritocracy via policies like affirmative action and immigrant welfare, while the working class and middle class families who had been in this country longer than Obama's family had were struggling like a mother fucker in the wake of the '08 financial crisis. There was also the specter of islamophobia in the air after 9/11, and Barrack *Hussein* Obama sounded just a littttttle too close in name to the very people conservatives were freaking out the most about in the 00's (Muslims and gay people were the conservative minority targets of the 2000's, minorities and gay people were the conservative minority targets of the 90's).
When a whole party's politics is based on wanting to keep minorities down economically, vocationally, and culturally for the better part of 30+ years then it's not a big fuckin surprise that the nation's first black *liberal* president would generate a giant anti-minority backlash that would consume the corners of conservative politics for the next decade. Welp, here we are.
This is a fascinating question. The most obvious answer has to be the end of the Cold War. During the Cold War the authoritarian-leaners were divided between communism and fascism (or roughly, in the American context, between the Soviet sympathizers and the McCarthyite demogogues.
Those people are all basically on the same side now.
JVL, if you're not familiar with Karen Stenner's work on the authoritarian dynamic, you should be.
Stenner presents evidence that any population inevitably contains significant numbers of authoritarians, but their authoritarianism only activates under conditions of "normative threat" (threats to "oneness and sameness"). She observes, "living in a liberal democracy vastly increases the likelihood that authoritarian dispositions will be expressed in intolerant attitudes and behaviors [that is, "activated"]. Quite simply, authoritarians are never more tolerant than when reassured and pacified by an autocratic culture, and never more intolerant when forced to endure a vibrant democracy." (The Authoritarian Dynamic)
One of Stenner's cleverer experiments demonstrates that authoritarianism can be deactivated by convincing subjects aliens are approaching, uniting all earthlings against what isn't even earthly. (OTOH, COVID was an "alien invader" of sorts that gave far too few authoritarians warm, fuzzy thoughts about shared humanity.)
During the Cold War, "we" could distinguish nearly all of "us" from "them", creating normative reassurance. Unfortunately, any erosion in authority of common-held institutions creates normative threat instead. Stenner observes, "Bill Clinton -- via the loss of confidence in leaders and institutions engendered by the Lewinski scandal -- may have done more damage to the tolerance, trust, and political engagement of the American public than any leader since Nixon;"
To the Lewinski scandal, we could add dispute over the 2000 electoral count, the rise of telecommunications which can relentlessly expose us to everyone in the world unlike ourselves, an exposure some find intriguing, but which authoritarians find threatening... And eventually the sick "genius" of a marmalade Mussolini who activates the authoritarianism of his followers by claiming the intense normative threat of an election not just disputed, but "stolen" from the "real people".
Stenner advocates "stealth democracy", democracy protecting itself from the authoritarians inevitably in its midst by drawing less attention to its pluralism, and more attention to "common and unifying rituals, institutions, and processes."
Fireworks and grilling on Jul 4? The humble hot dog? Apparently vital unity shielding American pluralism! Hot dogs are such a vitiated meat product it's easy to include plant-based versions to stealthily accommodate diverse dietary habits-- just don't draw attention to the accommodation. (Hot dogs aren't Stenner's insight. Apu figured them out on the Simpsons, what, decades ago now?)
Stenner uses "libertarian" to describe the temperamental opposite of authoritarian. Me and my stupid libertarian temperament couldn't grok what was so threatening about minor changes to the National Anthem ritual at football games. Some players are kneeling now to appeal to justice and patriotism as they understand it? Odd but OK -- once I hear their reasoning, it seems plenty American to me. To authoritarians, though, that's normative threat. (Even more normatively threatening if there are other conspicuous differences between those who tend to kneel and those who don't.)
Creation of Fox News maybe? Or, maybe it was the 2008 recession, since a lot of normies felt they were screwed over while bankers were rescued, specifically by a Dem administration.
Depending on how you define it my first political memory is either my mom having to explain to me what third base was because of the presidents impeachment trial or Gore loosing the election because of few hundred votes in one state even though millions more people voted for him.
And then the Supreme Court stopping the recounting of the vote to check that Gore really did loose the election by a few hundred votes because a five year old could have designed a better ballot.
(Not necessarily the facts of what happened but how my ten year old mind processing the events.)
Maybe this wasn't the reordering event for the American population, but in hindsight it seems to be when the Republican Party as an institution was rewarded for anti democracy actions rather than reprimanded for them.
Yup. Brooks Brothers Riot and January 6th have a lot in common. The Brooks Brothers Riot showed Roger Stone that if you show up at the offices of certification with enough angry middle class white people, you can change outcomes. Guess who was likely waste-deep in authoritarian street gangs in the lead up to J6th on behalf of Trump's circle? Mike Flynn and Roger Stone.
That's where the J6 spirit came from. And the Loudoun County school district meeting. And the *armed* storming of the Michigan capitol during CV lockdowns. It will keep going as long as it keeps working, and "working" may be as simply defined as "things didn't go the way that liberals wanted them to in government." You can draw a straight line of acceptance of authoritarian moves from the Brooks Brothers Riot to the Bundy Ranch to January 6th to whatever comes next (if you think this is over lulz at you).
Without a social media presence, you are invisible to the masses who might buy what you're selling. Which means most people in the media--broadly speaking, including crime novelists such as myself--need to be active on social media. Yes, I persist to my friends and family. But my work doesn't persist to the thousands of people I need to buy my books in order to make my living.
Thing I like about this social medium is that you have to subscribe, and since you pay with a credit card, they know your real name even if you choose anonymity in the comments. It tends to bring a better crowd to the discussion. I like social media. But only those done well.
Me too, Shane. I also believe JVL has really cracked down on trolls and incivility. He's like a big Daddy here, making sure all the kids play nicely. I've actually become a better person for it, maybe because the space is safe enough for us to disagree without arguing. Bless our JVL for his integrity... and bless The Bulwark.
"Blow the whole thing up" and "Burn the place to the ground" were common refrains among rank-and-file Trumpites in 2015-16. They might say they meant "the old GOP." They might say "Trump is a builder!" But by lionizing someone who "isn't afraid to challenge traditional norms," they chose first of all a destroyer who would "break what needs to be broken," as one Trump intellectual said.
The more respectable line is that it's about trimming back the "administrative state" that removes decisions from democratic accountability -- which is fine as far is it goes. The idea is that the permanent bureaucracy warps the constitutional order. The promoters of Schedule F will say it's about letting a "duly elected president" enact his own agenda as the Constitution allows.
But when Donald Trump is the hero of that project -- and when Trump loyalists applaud playing hardball to prevent a Democratic president from enacting his agenda -- one has to suspect that something other than democratic accountability is at its heart. It looks more like: "A president who will do what I want should not be limited in any way -- or held accountable for illegal acts."
Trump himself clearly has an expansive view of presidential powers & immunities. His elite defenders aren't bothered by it. Instead, they attack those who insist that the president is not supposed to be a monarch.
Among hard-core Trumpites are people who suggest that democracy itself is problematic in that it allows the wrong kinds of people to gain power. And unlike much of America, they don't identify Trump as the wrong kind of person. Also in MAGA-land one can find a belief that the Constitution is defective insofar as it's informed by Enlightenment liberalism and doesn't give religion a dominant place in public life, and it allows cultural changes they dislike.
So if you delve into the world of those saying “We must restore and defend the American constitutional order," you may come upon a fantasy of repealing essential features of the Constitution and putting in place a different kind of governance.
"Break what needs to be broken." But what needs to be broken and why?
If democracy is only used to pass laws that help enforce horizontal inequality by education and wealth, then isn't that system *worth* destroying? What good is a fucked up form of democracy that basically enforces economic oligarchy/feudalism? For a lot of working class people, they'd rather have authoritarianism with a chance of their kids making it up the economic ladder than a liberal democracy where their kids are locked out of economic mobility by the people with the best education and inherited wealth. If democracy can't deliver on its promises because the economic winners are using it maliciously to keep others out, then what good is democracy if you've got a better chance making it economically by getting rid of democracy rather than maintaining it? The greed of this country's last several generation of economic winners led them to concentrate their wealth across class and fortify their children's station in life before they were even grown up--even when it destroyed the nation's meritocracy and cut people who weren't already members of their club off from ever having a chance of marrying up and joining them.
If we do end up sliding into anocracy in 2024 or beyond, it will be because the people who had it best in this country couldn't be bothered to take responsibility for the power they accumulated, using that power to live their most selfish lives instead of lifting other less-fortunate members of society up. They didn't care about how much anger they were creating against the system they were manipulating because, well, they only thought about themselves as individuals or families as opposed to citizens of a collective nation that relied on one another. The educated and wealthy went their own way since the 1970's and then got real real surprised that after about five decades of that shit people were ready to burn down democracy and eat the elites. Wake the fuck up. With great power comes great responsibility, the responsibility to use that power to help society, not just helping yourself and your family. When the well-off ignore those responsibilities, they generate rage from those left behind. When that rage builds big enough and long enough, it comes for the things that the powerful love the most: their freedoms to be greedy and selfish with their power. We'll see how long this worn out glue holds the country together, but I wouldn't bet that this experiment in democracy lasts another 50 years the way that the winners of the economic system it produces carry themselves as a culture.
I generally agree with JVL’s analysis with this caveat. I don’t think most people (whether they are followers or leaders) think about how their actions impact or don’t impact the system. When I say the system, I mean the Constitution and our system of political governance. Some are - some want to burn everything down - but many are just oblivious to consequences.
I listened to the secret podcast and I can't escape JVLs ultimate point that no matter all Sarah's sunshine unt rainbows, Hawley and Cruz are senators for life and for all the people in her focus groups who don't want trump to run, I'll bet a Yankees baseball cap that Every Single One Of Them will still vote for him.
And as our host always says, I don't know how we fix that.
“Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure.”
James Madison June 20, 1788
Virtue is what makes the constitutional bouncy house work correctly. What Trump did was to show his followers what was possible when they turned their virtue into vice.
Tom Nichol’s ‘bits and pieces’ via Twitter are necessarily reductive and loaded, being a product of Twitter as so ably sized up in the second newsletter. He defines conservatism by contemptibly counter-defining liberalism. (Intellectually,that’s not the best of the conservative tradition, so I look forward to the book.)
For the liberals I know and admire, liberty is inseparably tied to responsibility, sin is a state of human nature, virtue is hard won, virtue ethics reign, and, importantly, the past informs and enables a private person, citizen and our precious state to move forward with clarity.
Ti be clear, authoritarianism is a state actor, simply one wholly unbounded a Constitutional tradition like ours, one knitted together oarh-taking-and keeping state institutions and state representatives, each deeply committed to upholding their sacred pledges to the rest of us.
Ours is not a ‘bouncy house ‘ but it clearly is a magnificent product of human imagination of a more perfect union.
That said, I am extremely grateful for young conservative minds attuned to what matters. Let us all call out Trumpism. It is anathema to conservation of our beloved Constitution and our shared prospects of a more perfect union (one with the potential to learn and self correct in an ever-contingent world), one that will hold only if our institutions, representatives, citizens, journalists and historians fully and adroitly exercise all of the virtues that enable the good, including justice and temperance.
I think in some ways we have stopped looking for the ways we are the same and are only noticing the differences. Not only that but we seem to believe that only our group has basic human values. I have seen it in rural areas and urban groups, in college liberals and holy rollers.
I have had the fortune of growing up in a conservative rural area, and then lived the last 30 years in a diverse immigrant working class neighborhood. How diverse? At one of our neighborhood street parties we had people born in 7 different countries on 5 different continents. That, skin color and language was the only real differences. They all had the same basic moral outlook, work ethic, plans for their children's future. Sure not everybody opens the door the same way and do little things that set them apart. You know the kind of ignorance that you see from tourist. But where it counts we all a much the same.
Thanks, JVL: being able to read Tom Nichols finally pushed me over the edge that I've been getting closer to for a long time to subscribe to the Atlantic. That piece is just as good as you said, and as he often does, Tom speaks for me, too.
As a life-long pro-choice person, I find him interesting because he is a genuine pro-lifer, like Mona, who backs up his beliefs with actions. His background is 180 degrees from mine, so that's intriguing as well. And he is an excellent writer.
The thing that somewhat surprises me is the idea that people are somehow *surprised* that there were people chafing at the restraints of the "Bouncy House" or that the Bouncy House "Deflating" so to say was either unforeseeable or inconceivable.
America isn't even 300 years old, there have been many "Bouncy Houses" before it where the "Shared Delusion" had one or more parties stop playing along to disastrous results. Rome is perhaps the most famous, recognized and *should be the most easy to identify* and use as a measuring stick.
We're not quite at the Brothers Gracchi but perhaps we don't need *actual* mobs of armed citizens killing a tribune/senator, however an entire party of them signing off on the death of bipartisan proceedings held in an attempt to hold gross misconduct responsible might do.
Did Trump cause post-liberalism, or a disaffection with constitutionalism? I would say he emboldened and intensified trends already operative.
Conservatives have long complained that things are skewed against them, first of all the news media and other cultural institutions, but also the permanent bureaucracy. They’ve ignored the ways our political system in combination with demographics gives disproportionate representation to Republicans – though surely that’s one reason they always voiced a commitment to the constitutional order.
The sense of being victimized by the system has been part of conservative thinking for a long time, and it’s a theme that generates passionate attachment to the cause. Trump played into the anti-institutional grievance, and along with his fanatical cult following he intensified it.
Large numbers of rank-and-file conservatives anointed Trump their one true champion against everything they saw as unfair and everything they disliked about the direction of cultural and political change. They said that people who criticized or opposed Trump were not real Americans.
That devotion to one person as the embodiment of patriotic righteousness is especially dangerous when the person in question is as pathologically self-centered and amoral as Donald Trump. It’s obvious that he regards any impediment to his desires as fundamentally wrong – even if those impediments are the law and the Constitution. The Trump cult takes the same view: If Trump says something is unfair and evil, it must be so. Trump is there to save America, so whatever goes against Trump cannot be allowed.
Conservative thought leaders should be able to see that Trump’s moral code is extraordinarily solipsistic – and maybe some of them do, but rationalize it away as long as he’s useful to their agenda. The deep thinkers of MAGA world have echoed the rank-and-file view that whatever goes against Trump must be wrong. If anyone in “the establishment” calls him out for wrongdoing or insists that even he is not above the law, it just proves that the whole system is corrupt. MAGA thinkers point to the fervent cult following to say “This is what the American People want. Establishment be damned!” And election results too, apparently.
Trump’s amorality combined with a rabid cult following, and set against institutionalists who retain some ethical standards and respect for law, encouraged some conservative thought leaders to be more radical in their critique of the system or the establishment. Instead of just complaining that the culture was going against them, they began to cast doubt on the constitutional order that allowed it to happen, and on the principle that people in government owe allegiance to the Constitution and not to a president who does what conservatives want.
In the past, conservatives seemed to have some scruples against a “by any means necessary” approach to getting what they wanted. Trump and his cult emboldened elements of the right to abandon those scruples.
Modern conservatism is not newly post-liberal. Seeds of authoritarian leader admiration were sown with Reagan. His disciples are aging boomers still finding themselves “surprised” that the dog whistles became open bigotry a mere generation or so later. Anti-union, scientific limits on private enterprise, bad blackness, police/military adoration, and the poisonous justifications of thievery embodied in trickle down have hollowed out the working class and destroyed the dreams of a middle class. Any wonder the commitment to liberal democracy has declined. Under Republican administrations, or by their out of office obstruction, the system has not worked for them. Look back JVL; listen to Joe Scarborough twist himself in knots explaining his cultist devotion to Reagan. Geez …not hard to see.
As a former registered Republican and conservative, I wanted to say a few things about “conservative.” These are just random notes.
The conservative rightly looks at differences in results (so education, wealth) as part of the variability that is inevitable and exists in all nations. Same with the differences in occupations choses by women compared to men. (And I have read Thomas Sowell on this)
Still he should also reckon on the barriers that we once strongly enforced that kept African Americans and women out of various careers and even college majors.
What should the conservative position be now?
If the time for affirmative action is over now - was it never useful? As someone in college from 1969-73, African Americans were only slowly let into the first rank of colleges. Something surely needed to be done.
Or how about the vexing issue of sexual behavior. As someone who lived through the 1960s and the sexual revolution, is it really conservative to imagine that we can suppress gays? So take back their marriage rights? And how about contraception. Married for 46 years, I suggest that now contraception should be a conservative practice. That is, sex is good for marriage and contraception takes out the concern that every act is rolling the dice re pregnancy. My assumption is that most of my catholic friends have used birth control. And as for protestants and the rest - the same.
Gay marriage is just one more recognition that we all form bonds of affiliation with others. And gays are certainly a large enough minority that most of us should know at least several gays couples. They seem to love each other. Isn’t that great?
I cringe at the social justice catechism that has been thrust upon the media and the rest of us. So no, I won’t tell you my pronoun, and I will never write cis-gender except in this context. And pregnant people - makes me scream.
But if conservatives represent not reasonable people of good will, but shills and liars then the conservative voice will never have a place with reasonable people.
And no, Ted Cruz is not a conservative, he is a demagogue. So it MTG.
The conservative conferences that focus on guns and Christianity would have appalled John Adams (or Abe Lincoln).
Your last sentence - ditto Kravitz, Rockefeller, Eisenhower, Taft and a good portion of Rs in the 50s and 60s. And Nixon.
"I would Love if the new me could expostulate with the old me. But perhaps neither ever really existed in reality".
I think that post-liberalism, at least in the form of nationalism, has been coming for a while, back to Pat Buchanan in 1992. It had its constituency but also a hard ceiling. I think some of that shifted in the mid-2000s with a hostility to immigration, for which nationalist ideology friendlier than classical liberalism.
I think Trump brings a few new things to the table. Most important on this point is that if government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed, they won't consent to the legitimacy of the government unless they get their way all of the time. That's the difference between Trump and all who preceded him.
Most of TFG's supporters think they are supporting democracy, although most of them don't really understand what that means and we can't really know individually how they do or would define it. As the polls showed, the number of Rs-TFG supporters who are worried about democracy in America is substantially higher than Dems. But there are "elites" who tell them what they're doing is right and validate the delusion. The elites who consciously understand they're moving the country toward authoritarianism has reached a critical mass and their project is succeeding. They're the real threat. The ones who write hagiographies of the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal, like here: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/waiting-for-our-salazar/. Tucker Carlson clearly belongs in that club given his entirely optional touting of Orban and Putin despite no one really clamoring for it, for reasons that are not totally clear to me, although I suspect strongly he plans to run for office someday and sees himself as the future tyrant, or at least a major player in such a regime, and perhaps wants help from abroad. Charlie Sykes has asked why Tucker is doing what he's doing, and that's my answer. Brooks doesn't use the word, but the one he should have used in his write-up of the National Conservativism conference is totalitarianism, which is what it is to capture the state and then use state power to reshape and enforce culture and society. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/scary-future-american-right-national-conservatism-conference/620746/. Reshaping the culture from the top down, don't think it worked too well generally so maybe they should re-read their history. Then again, it's actually not about the culture. As Orwell wrote, the justifications change, the underlying motivation, power for power's sake, never changes. So whenever anyone talks about how their ideas are hypocritical, or impractical, or illogical, it's really missing the point. Here's a quote from the head of the Claremont Institute: “The ideal endgame would be to effect a realignment of our politics and take control of all three branches of government for a generation or two." Hmm, interesting, I feel like there might be a name for that, 30-40 years of unbroken single party rule.
So, in their own words, they acknowledge the goal is dictatorship and totalitarianism. I call it elite failure because there is now a substantial element of political, media, economic, and intellectual elite in this country that wants a dictatorship. They see themselves as our masters and us as their slaves. Why that happened, I don't know. The failure of the other elites on the right was not to stop them, but rather help and try to profit off their growing strength. The failure of other elites was not to stop them, not to blacklist them, not to refuse to do business with them or give them airtime.
I said I don't know why we developed a substantial bastion of elite support for dictatorship, but there are theories. I'm not the first to point out the parallels with the American South in the run up to the Civil War, but the parallels are striking and worth repeating. In both cases we had demographic shifts that certain elites in parts of the country (the South then/conservatives now) interpreted (wrongly, I'd argue) as meaning the perpetual decline of their political influence and permanent powerlessness, leading to economic ruin (losing their slaves then/higher taxes today). In both cases, elites told their followers (and mostly convinced themselves as well) via their media ecosystem (Southern/conservative) that they faced total cultural, economic, and even physical destruction at the hands of their enemies (Northerners/abolitionists/blacks then, liberal, atheistic "Communists" today) if they lost their political power. Given those stakes, secession, civil war, or dictatorship are preferable to most people rather then being murdered or enslaved by their enemies. Unfortunately for us, whereas the South was geographically concentrated enough to make secession appealing, the geographical lines aren't so clear cut today, so the only solution is to seize the whole country.
Very well put.
Here's my issue: If one man (in this case, DJT) can wreck so many American institutions in just four years, how solid were those institutions to begin with? Perhaps we need to replace our bouncy house republic with one made of steel, or at least oak and maple. One nightmare president should not have destroyed this much of the place we live ... and yet he did.
It predates DJT, back to the Reagan era and when southern Ds went R. Then the Tea Party, many of whom wanted to get rid of government. Gingrich codified it with his "Contract".
Oh, I know---Reagan started this ball rolling with his pestilent "we want to shrink government till we can drown it in a bathtub." Not his words, but his sentiment. Then, he presided over tripling the federal deficit and doubling the federal workforce. Republicans have been gangsters ever since.
One of the interesting things is that research actually indicates that ~30-40% of the population of any given democracy has authoritarian leanings but since the are equally split between left and right these people are usually unactivated.
Countries get in trouble when a reordering event happens that concentrates the authoritarian leaners into one concentrated political party that can suddenly win elections. (And explains historically how you get authoritarians both on the far right/ far left end of the spectrum.)
And again, it still requires a leader to activate these authoritarian leaners by actually publicly committing authoritarian acts. ( In recent history this has been helped by a cut of personality if the leader.)
1).So, reordering event concentrates authorization leaners enough to win political power.
2). Leader takes authoritarian actions while in office
3). The political party/Leader is electorally rewarded. The leader often interpretes their success as a validation of their authoritarian actions.
4). With every successive political victory actions are taken to dismantle organized resistance to their power which then allows them to take more authoritarian actions.
So 1 & 2 happened in the US. 3 was prevented from happening at least from now but if Stop the Steal officials are elected into positions that allow them to overwrite future elections or a president with authoritarian instincts is elected in 2024 then it will continue further down the slope.
So what do we thing the reordering event was in the US?
The reordering event was Barack Obama's election to office, which is where Birtherism came from, and Birtherism is where Trump's political rise came from.
More important than understanding the triggering event is understanding how the camel's back had gotten so weak over the decades that a straw could snap its spine. We've had runaway wealth inequality since the 1970's and racial/sexual awakening backlashes since the 1960's. A black liberal lawyer from an immigrant father making it into the presidency was the culmination of everything the left fought *for* since the 1960's, and everything the right fought *against* since the 1960's. For a whole lot of working class conservatives, the election of Barack Obama was to them a byproduct of immigrants and minorities getting to higher places in the increasingly-rigged meritocracy via policies like affirmative action and immigrant welfare, while the working class and middle class families who had been in this country longer than Obama's family had were struggling like a mother fucker in the wake of the '08 financial crisis. There was also the specter of islamophobia in the air after 9/11, and Barrack *Hussein* Obama sounded just a littttttle too close in name to the very people conservatives were freaking out the most about in the 00's (Muslims and gay people were the conservative minority targets of the 2000's, minorities and gay people were the conservative minority targets of the 90's).
When a whole party's politics is based on wanting to keep minorities down economically, vocationally, and culturally for the better part of 30+ years then it's not a big fuckin surprise that the nation's first black *liberal* president would generate a giant anti-minority backlash that would consume the corners of conservative politics for the next decade. Welp, here we are.
This is a fascinating question. The most obvious answer has to be the end of the Cold War. During the Cold War the authoritarian-leaners were divided between communism and fascism (or roughly, in the American context, between the Soviet sympathizers and the McCarthyite demogogues.
Those people are all basically on the same side now.
JVL, if you're not familiar with Karen Stenner's work on the authoritarian dynamic, you should be.
Stenner presents evidence that any population inevitably contains significant numbers of authoritarians, but their authoritarianism only activates under conditions of "normative threat" (threats to "oneness and sameness"). She observes, "living in a liberal democracy vastly increases the likelihood that authoritarian dispositions will be expressed in intolerant attitudes and behaviors [that is, "activated"]. Quite simply, authoritarians are never more tolerant than when reassured and pacified by an autocratic culture, and never more intolerant when forced to endure a vibrant democracy." (The Authoritarian Dynamic)
One of Stenner's cleverer experiments demonstrates that authoritarianism can be deactivated by convincing subjects aliens are approaching, uniting all earthlings against what isn't even earthly. (OTOH, COVID was an "alien invader" of sorts that gave far too few authoritarians warm, fuzzy thoughts about shared humanity.)
During the Cold War, "we" could distinguish nearly all of "us" from "them", creating normative reassurance. Unfortunately, any erosion in authority of common-held institutions creates normative threat instead. Stenner observes, "Bill Clinton -- via the loss of confidence in leaders and institutions engendered by the Lewinski scandal -- may have done more damage to the tolerance, trust, and political engagement of the American public than any leader since Nixon;"
To the Lewinski scandal, we could add dispute over the 2000 electoral count, the rise of telecommunications which can relentlessly expose us to everyone in the world unlike ourselves, an exposure some find intriguing, but which authoritarians find threatening... And eventually the sick "genius" of a marmalade Mussolini who activates the authoritarianism of his followers by claiming the intense normative threat of an election not just disputed, but "stolen" from the "real people".
Stenner advocates "stealth democracy", democracy protecting itself from the authoritarians inevitably in its midst by drawing less attention to its pluralism, and more attention to "common and unifying rituals, institutions, and processes."
Fireworks and grilling on Jul 4? The humble hot dog? Apparently vital unity shielding American pluralism! Hot dogs are such a vitiated meat product it's easy to include plant-based versions to stealthily accommodate diverse dietary habits-- just don't draw attention to the accommodation. (Hot dogs aren't Stenner's insight. Apu figured them out on the Simpsons, what, decades ago now?)
Stenner uses "libertarian" to describe the temperamental opposite of authoritarian. Me and my stupid libertarian temperament couldn't grok what was so threatening about minor changes to the National Anthem ritual at football games. Some players are kneeling now to appeal to justice and patriotism as they understand it? Odd but OK -- once I hear their reasoning, it seems plenty American to me. To authoritarians, though, that's normative threat. (Even more normatively threatening if there are other conspicuous differences between those who tend to kneel and those who don't.)
Creation of Fox News maybe? Or, maybe it was the 2008 recession, since a lot of normies felt they were screwed over while bankers were rescued, specifically by a Dem administration.
My vote is for Bush v Gore.
Depending on how you define it my first political memory is either my mom having to explain to me what third base was because of the presidents impeachment trial or Gore loosing the election because of few hundred votes in one state even though millions more people voted for him.
And then the Supreme Court stopping the recounting of the vote to check that Gore really did loose the election by a few hundred votes because a five year old could have designed a better ballot.
(Not necessarily the facts of what happened but how my ten year old mind processing the events.)
Maybe this wasn't the reordering event for the American population, but in hindsight it seems to be when the Republican Party as an institution was rewarded for anti democracy actions rather than reprimanded for them.
Which started the cycle that Trump accelerated.
Yup. Brooks Brothers Riot and January 6th have a lot in common. The Brooks Brothers Riot showed Roger Stone that if you show up at the offices of certification with enough angry middle class white people, you can change outcomes. Guess who was likely waste-deep in authoritarian street gangs in the lead up to J6th on behalf of Trump's circle? Mike Flynn and Roger Stone.
That's where the J6 spirit came from. And the Loudoun County school district meeting. And the *armed* storming of the Michigan capitol during CV lockdowns. It will keep going as long as it keeps working, and "working" may be as simply defined as "things didn't go the way that liberals wanted them to in government." You can draw a straight line of acceptance of authoritarian moves from the Brooks Brothers Riot to the Bundy Ranch to January 6th to whatever comes next (if you think this is over lulz at you).
Let me get this straight. 'No television' = you are no longer visible, and 'no social media' means you are no longer visible. And yet, you persist.
Without a social media presence, you are invisible to the masses who might buy what you're selling. Which means most people in the media--broadly speaking, including crime novelists such as myself--need to be active on social media. Yes, I persist to my friends and family. But my work doesn't persist to the thousands of people I need to buy my books in order to make my living.
Thus, interaction on The Social Mediums.
Ironically, of course, The Bulwark is now officially a type of social medium, because JVL opened it up to comments.
Thing I like about this social medium is that you have to subscribe, and since you pay with a credit card, they know your real name even if you choose anonymity in the comments. It tends to bring a better crowd to the discussion. I like social media. But only those done well.
Me too, Shane. I also believe JVL has really cracked down on trolls and incivility. He's like a big Daddy here, making sure all the kids play nicely. I've actually become a better person for it, maybe because the space is safe enough for us to disagree without arguing. Bless our JVL for his integrity... and bless The Bulwark.
Perfectly said, DeeDee, and thanks. It is a nice site, this one.
"Blow the whole thing up" and "Burn the place to the ground" were common refrains among rank-and-file Trumpites in 2015-16. They might say they meant "the old GOP." They might say "Trump is a builder!" But by lionizing someone who "isn't afraid to challenge traditional norms," they chose first of all a destroyer who would "break what needs to be broken," as one Trump intellectual said.
The more respectable line is that it's about trimming back the "administrative state" that removes decisions from democratic accountability -- which is fine as far is it goes. The idea is that the permanent bureaucracy warps the constitutional order. The promoters of Schedule F will say it's about letting a "duly elected president" enact his own agenda as the Constitution allows.
But when Donald Trump is the hero of that project -- and when Trump loyalists applaud playing hardball to prevent a Democratic president from enacting his agenda -- one has to suspect that something other than democratic accountability is at its heart. It looks more like: "A president who will do what I want should not be limited in any way -- or held accountable for illegal acts."
Trump himself clearly has an expansive view of presidential powers & immunities. His elite defenders aren't bothered by it. Instead, they attack those who insist that the president is not supposed to be a monarch.
Among hard-core Trumpites are people who suggest that democracy itself is problematic in that it allows the wrong kinds of people to gain power. And unlike much of America, they don't identify Trump as the wrong kind of person. Also in MAGA-land one can find a belief that the Constitution is defective insofar as it's informed by Enlightenment liberalism and doesn't give religion a dominant place in public life, and it allows cultural changes they dislike.
So if you delve into the world of those saying “We must restore and defend the American constitutional order," you may come upon a fantasy of repealing essential features of the Constitution and putting in place a different kind of governance.
"Break what needs to be broken." But what needs to be broken and why?
If democracy is only used to pass laws that help enforce horizontal inequality by education and wealth, then isn't that system *worth* destroying? What good is a fucked up form of democracy that basically enforces economic oligarchy/feudalism? For a lot of working class people, they'd rather have authoritarianism with a chance of their kids making it up the economic ladder than a liberal democracy where their kids are locked out of economic mobility by the people with the best education and inherited wealth. If democracy can't deliver on its promises because the economic winners are using it maliciously to keep others out, then what good is democracy if you've got a better chance making it economically by getting rid of democracy rather than maintaining it? The greed of this country's last several generation of economic winners led them to concentrate their wealth across class and fortify their children's station in life before they were even grown up--even when it destroyed the nation's meritocracy and cut people who weren't already members of their club off from ever having a chance of marrying up and joining them.
If we do end up sliding into anocracy in 2024 or beyond, it will be because the people who had it best in this country couldn't be bothered to take responsibility for the power they accumulated, using that power to live their most selfish lives instead of lifting other less-fortunate members of society up. They didn't care about how much anger they were creating against the system they were manipulating because, well, they only thought about themselves as individuals or families as opposed to citizens of a collective nation that relied on one another. The educated and wealthy went their own way since the 1970's and then got real real surprised that after about five decades of that shit people were ready to burn down democracy and eat the elites. Wake the fuck up. With great power comes great responsibility, the responsibility to use that power to help society, not just helping yourself and your family. When the well-off ignore those responsibilities, they generate rage from those left behind. When that rage builds big enough and long enough, it comes for the things that the powerful love the most: their freedoms to be greedy and selfish with their power. We'll see how long this worn out glue holds the country together, but I wouldn't bet that this experiment in democracy lasts another 50 years the way that the winners of the economic system it produces carry themselves as a culture.
I generally agree with JVL’s analysis with this caveat. I don’t think most people (whether they are followers or leaders) think about how their actions impact or don’t impact the system. When I say the system, I mean the Constitution and our system of political governance. Some are - some want to burn everything down - but many are just oblivious to consequences.
I listened to the secret podcast and I can't escape JVLs ultimate point that no matter all Sarah's sunshine unt rainbows, Hawley and Cruz are senators for life and for all the people in her focus groups who don't want trump to run, I'll bet a Yankees baseball cap that Every Single One Of Them will still vote for him.
And as our host always says, I don't know how we fix that.
Message
“Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks—no form of government can render us secure.”
James Madison June 20, 1788
Virtue is what makes the constitutional bouncy house work correctly. What Trump did was to show his followers what was possible when they turned their virtue into vice.
James Madison is my favorite. I Love it when people quote him. I Fear when his words strike home.
Tom Nichol’s ‘bits and pieces’ via Twitter are necessarily reductive and loaded, being a product of Twitter as so ably sized up in the second newsletter. He defines conservatism by contemptibly counter-defining liberalism. (Intellectually,that’s not the best of the conservative tradition, so I look forward to the book.)
For the liberals I know and admire, liberty is inseparably tied to responsibility, sin is a state of human nature, virtue is hard won, virtue ethics reign, and, importantly, the past informs and enables a private person, citizen and our precious state to move forward with clarity.
Ti be clear, authoritarianism is a state actor, simply one wholly unbounded a Constitutional tradition like ours, one knitted together oarh-taking-and keeping state institutions and state representatives, each deeply committed to upholding their sacred pledges to the rest of us.
Ours is not a ‘bouncy house ‘ but it clearly is a magnificent product of human imagination of a more perfect union.
That said, I am extremely grateful for young conservative minds attuned to what matters. Let us all call out Trumpism. It is anathema to conservation of our beloved Constitution and our shared prospects of a more perfect union (one with the potential to learn and self correct in an ever-contingent world), one that will hold only if our institutions, representatives, citizens, journalists and historians fully and adroitly exercise all of the virtues that enable the good, including justice and temperance.
Thanks also for Bulwark.
I think in some ways we have stopped looking for the ways we are the same and are only noticing the differences. Not only that but we seem to believe that only our group has basic human values. I have seen it in rural areas and urban groups, in college liberals and holy rollers.
I have had the fortune of growing up in a conservative rural area, and then lived the last 30 years in a diverse immigrant working class neighborhood. How diverse? At one of our neighborhood street parties we had people born in 7 different countries on 5 different continents. That, skin color and language was the only real differences. They all had the same basic moral outlook, work ethic, plans for their children's future. Sure not everybody opens the door the same way and do little things that set them apart. You know the kind of ignorance that you see from tourist. But where it counts we all a much the same.
Thanks, JVL: being able to read Tom Nichols finally pushed me over the edge that I've been getting closer to for a long time to subscribe to the Atlantic. That piece is just as good as you said, and as he often does, Tom speaks for me, too.
I love Tom and subscribed, it is worth it, and not that expensive compared to others
I subscribed to the Atlantic several years ago. They do have their bias, they may piss me off but they rarely bore me.
Of all the member news letters they have Tom Nichols is the only one I am interested in.
BTW I had a NYT subscription but they still had the Judith Miller syndrome imo so they weren't trustworthy, so I dropped them
You don't like the David French pieces?
I get Tom's , David's and Conor's , and the daily one...like them all
Sometimes I read Molly Jong Fast, sometimes I like her, sometimes she irks me...lol
I know I've read some of his stuff but I've never subscribed to him, so I guess I didn't find him interesting enough to take up my time.
Which is kinda one of those how do you manage the internet things.
As they say , "Your mileage may differ"
As a life-long pro-choice person, I find him interesting because he is a genuine pro-lifer, like Mona, who backs up his beliefs with actions. His background is 180 degrees from mine, so that's intriguing as well. And he is an excellent writer.
The thing that somewhat surprises me is the idea that people are somehow *surprised* that there were people chafing at the restraints of the "Bouncy House" or that the Bouncy House "Deflating" so to say was either unforeseeable or inconceivable.
America isn't even 300 years old, there have been many "Bouncy Houses" before it where the "Shared Delusion" had one or more parties stop playing along to disastrous results. Rome is perhaps the most famous, recognized and *should be the most easy to identify* and use as a measuring stick.
We're not quite at the Brothers Gracchi but perhaps we don't need *actual* mobs of armed citizens killing a tribune/senator, however an entire party of them signing off on the death of bipartisan proceedings held in an attempt to hold gross misconduct responsible might do.
Did Trump cause post-liberalism, or a disaffection with constitutionalism? I would say he emboldened and intensified trends already operative.
Conservatives have long complained that things are skewed against them, first of all the news media and other cultural institutions, but also the permanent bureaucracy. They’ve ignored the ways our political system in combination with demographics gives disproportionate representation to Republicans – though surely that’s one reason they always voiced a commitment to the constitutional order.
The sense of being victimized by the system has been part of conservative thinking for a long time, and it’s a theme that generates passionate attachment to the cause. Trump played into the anti-institutional grievance, and along with his fanatical cult following he intensified it.
Large numbers of rank-and-file conservatives anointed Trump their one true champion against everything they saw as unfair and everything they disliked about the direction of cultural and political change. They said that people who criticized or opposed Trump were not real Americans.
That devotion to one person as the embodiment of patriotic righteousness is especially dangerous when the person in question is as pathologically self-centered and amoral as Donald Trump. It’s obvious that he regards any impediment to his desires as fundamentally wrong – even if those impediments are the law and the Constitution. The Trump cult takes the same view: If Trump says something is unfair and evil, it must be so. Trump is there to save America, so whatever goes against Trump cannot be allowed.
Conservative thought leaders should be able to see that Trump’s moral code is extraordinarily solipsistic – and maybe some of them do, but rationalize it away as long as he’s useful to their agenda. The deep thinkers of MAGA world have echoed the rank-and-file view that whatever goes against Trump must be wrong. If anyone in “the establishment” calls him out for wrongdoing or insists that even he is not above the law, it just proves that the whole system is corrupt. MAGA thinkers point to the fervent cult following to say “This is what the American People want. Establishment be damned!” And election results too, apparently.
Trump’s amorality combined with a rabid cult following, and set against institutionalists who retain some ethical standards and respect for law, encouraged some conservative thought leaders to be more radical in their critique of the system or the establishment. Instead of just complaining that the culture was going against them, they began to cast doubt on the constitutional order that allowed it to happen, and on the principle that people in government owe allegiance to the Constitution and not to a president who does what conservatives want.
In the past, conservatives seemed to have some scruples against a “by any means necessary” approach to getting what they wanted. Trump and his cult emboldened elements of the right to abandon those scruples.
Modern conservatism is not newly post-liberal. Seeds of authoritarian leader admiration were sown with Reagan. His disciples are aging boomers still finding themselves “surprised” that the dog whistles became open bigotry a mere generation or so later. Anti-union, scientific limits on private enterprise, bad blackness, police/military adoration, and the poisonous justifications of thievery embodied in trickle down have hollowed out the working class and destroyed the dreams of a middle class. Any wonder the commitment to liberal democracy has declined. Under Republican administrations, or by their out of office obstruction, the system has not worked for them. Look back JVL; listen to Joe Scarborough twist himself in knots explaining his cultist devotion to Reagan. Geez …not hard to see.