It’s the power, stupid
The right’s intellectuals gazed long into an abyss. And guess what?
George Packer and Jonathan Chait offer their takes on how American conservatives became reactionaries. Both critique the intellectual decay on the right while, being intellectuals themselves, overlooking the abyss.
Packer has been reading “Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right” by political theorist Laura K. Field. Several schools of thought pulled like magnetic poles at conservatism: Straussians at the Claremont Institute, post-liberal Catholic critiques of liberalism at Notre Dame and Harvard, and techno-monarchist rejection of democracy in Silicon Valley.
MAGA reactionaries, Packer explains, “believe that justice and the good life can be found only in traditional sources of faith and knowledge.” Liberalism and pluralism, they believe, “have corroded the moral and spiritual fiber of America by accommodating false ideologies and harmful groups. Their modern hero is Viktor Orbán.”
(Those harmful groups wouldn’t happen to be non-white and non-European, would they?)
The right’s dark visions need enemies to propel their movement and sharpen their focus. “The movement is, in many respects, untethered from the ordinary decency and common sense that characterize America at its idealistic best,” Field writes—“and from the pluralistic reality of the country as it exists today.”
For its part, liberalism has been asleep at the switch. Or rather, Boomers who ushered in their social revolution in the 1960s grew too settled and content to foster their own response to “a vacuum created by popular disenchantment with globalization, neoliberal economics, mass immigration, political corruption, technological power, and democracy itself.” MAGA filled it.
Chait considers the internal rifts tearing at the Heritage Foundation. Once the “intellectual crown jewel of the conservative movement,” it is today riven by “an ugly public spat over the organization’s approach to anti-Semitism.” It reveals “previously forbidden bigotries have penetrated the heart of the Trump-era Republican Party” and heralds “the brain death of the conservative movement.”
An organization that that once nurtured its young in conservative principles and catechisms has dropped its mask: “The debacle at Heritage illustrates the impossibility of abiding by the long-standing intellectual values of open debate and truth-seeking while retaining any influence in a party led by Donald Trump.” It also reveals the long-standing shallowness of said values.
Heritage fell silent as Trump demolished both the East Wing and the conservative china shop. As the strongest magnet in Washington, D.C., Trump has conservatives tacking this way today and that way tomorrow. It’s not political winds so much as the wild swings of their Trump-brand compasses. Principles they once declared as their North Star have been discarded like last year’s fashions.
Chait reviews how actors like Grover Norquist once set the conservative agenda in D.C. But then along came Fox News to pander to the Republican hoi polloi’s baser instincts:
By the Obama era, liberal critics began to notice a phenomenon that the writer Julian Sanchez called “epistemic closure,” which described the way many conservatives refused to accept the legitimacy of anything outside of conservative media.
Except Donald Trump consumed even the Fox world like he gobbles fast food:
More important, Trump grasped that the party’s rank and file had grown so detached from reality, so suspicious of mainstream purveyors of information, that large segments of it would believe anything he said, however preposterous, as long as it flattered their beliefs.
Trump’s unlikely victory in 2016 meant a) conservative audiences “had no appetite for criticism of Trump” and b) conservative elites found themselves sidelined as truth became “whatever Trump said.”
Chait concludes:
Identifying and correcting errors is an important role for a political movement’s intellectuals. Conservative critics forced George W. Bush to ultimately recognize the failure of his occupation strategy in Iraq and change course. The Democratic partisans who shouted down criticism of Biden in the run-up to the 2024 election were ultimately out-argued by those who demanded his ouster. It is impossible to fulfill this role when a lone man defines what counts as success or failure—often in self-contradictory ways and regardless of the evidence. If the Republicans hope to stay in power, it would be wise for them to recover the ability to think.
Packer and Chait write for The Atlantic. So of course their analyses come from a thinking man’s perspective. But I can’t help seeing their autopsies of conservative brain rot as exercises involving pigs and lipstick.
Trumpism has revealed conservatives’ intellectual output as window dressing for American conservatives’ baser impulses. It as if Leslie Nielsen’s starship crew unknowingly brought back with them from the burial place of the Krell civilization one of Dr. Morbius’s monsters from the id. Morbius with all his intelligence did not grasp the danger he’d unleashed because rationality had no part in it. Nor could conservative intellectuals. Trump is a creature of pure id.
Republicans gazed long into that abyss and the abyss glared back. The party succumbed to Trumpism because it stripped away its intellectual pretensions. Trumpism revealed the raw thirst for power underneath. Trying to analyze the GOP’s intellectual decay is like trying to reason with the body’s autonomic system.
Packer writes, “They’ve abandoned tradition for radicalism, careful scholarship for vulgar discourse, reason for the irrational, universal truths for narrow identities, and philosophy for partisanship.” Except worse. Trump could subsist on power alone and forgo the fast food.
“Trump’s most outrageous innovation,” Chait argues, “was dispensing with the pretense that he needed to provide reasons for his positions.” Like the planet-killing doomsday machine from the original Star Trek, he chews up whatever is in his path simply for the power. Power is his only imperative. He thought money was power until he tasted the presidency. Gold for him is huckster bling.
To see what powers his movement, read responses from Trumpish reactionaries to social media posts regarding Customs and Border Patrol arrests in Chicago and Charlotte. The deep hostility toward anyone not perceived as their tribe reveals among many professed followers of Christ an unnerving deficit of compassion and deep wells of cruelty. Jefferson cut Christ’s miracles from his Bible. MAGA cut out all the red letters and bolded Leviticus. Trump doesn’t even read.
Conservatism under Trump is not simply intellectually bankrupt. The id has no use for reason. But it does for power. The Krell learned that the hard way.
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