“One of the great renewable resources”
“You can’t keep a good homicidal maniac down” is an essential trope from slasher films. In the zombie genre, the lingering question of, “How long can they last?” persists alongside the infectious, shambling dead.
Given the Outrage Industrial Complex extant since the 1980s, the same uncertainties apply to MAGA. How long can people addicted to daily outrage keep going before burning out?
“What used to rule the day on the American right was ‘owning the libs.’ But now they are owning one another,” writes Peter Wehner in The Atlantic. How long can political meth addicts maintain before finally, beset by paranoia, visual and auditory hallucinations, they crash and/or devour each other?
With Dominion’s massive defamation settlement against Fox News, with Tucker Carlson’s ouster from the network, and with looming legal accountability for Donald Trump, perhaps MAGA’s collapse is, if not as imminent as that Fani Willis indictment, on the horizon.
Wehner writes:
It is a lesson nearly as old as time itself: Those whose passions are inflamed—and Trump supporters are nothing if not perennially inflamed—are drawn to destruction. “Rage and phrenzy will pull down more in a half an hour, than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years,” the 18th-century conservative statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke warned.
Lack of restraint is the essence of the Trump movement. Shattering guardrails is what they find thrilling. But what MAGA adherents forget is that those guardrails exist to protect not only others, but also ourselves from excess, self-indulgence, and self-harm. There’s a reason that temperance—self-mastery, the capacity to moderate inordinate desires, balance that produces internal harmony—is one of the four cardinal virtues.
The extremism, aggression, and lack of restraint in MAGA world are spreading rather than receding. They are becoming more rather than less indiscriminate. Those who are part of that movement, and certainly those who lead it, act as if they’re invincible, as if the rules don’t apply to them, as if they can say anything and get away with anything. That has certainly been true of Trump, and it is often true of those who have patterned themselves after Trump, which is to say, virtually the entire Republican Party.
But it goes even beyond this. MAGA world directs its ridicule at those who exercise temperance, who embrace restraint, and who ask themselves what they should do rather than what they can get away with. Those who reject the ethic of Thrasymachus—the cynical Sophist in Plato’s Republic who believes might makes right and injustice is better than justice—are dismissed as weak and delicate. The denizens of MAGA world not only relish discarding guardrails; they scorn those who abide by them.
Toothlessness and destitution await as the buzz loses its kick. “Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children,” wrote Jacques Mallet du Pan in 1793, whom Wehner quotes in French. Our charge, Wehner advises, is to contain the damage.
Isn’t that every Democratic president’s inheritance after each spasm of Republican plunder? In fact, the GOP counts on it. Let ” weak and delicate” Democrats “who ask themselves what they should do” repair the damage so the plunder might begin anew after four years or eight.
As P.J. O’Rourke once said, “Hubris is one of the great renewable resources.”