Family in town this weekend, a pre-Thanksgiving get-together to avoid busier plans next weekend. Michael and Honey and baby here; trips to Alameda and Foster City and Berkeley; I put 100 miles on my car in three days, driving back and forth across the bay. I am grateful for being part of an extended family, on my partner’s side.
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Mostly long-form pieces today. Saving fringe bits for tomorrow.
- Peter Wehner on the intellectual and moral decline of the American right;
- Joshua Rothman on whether MAGA has any ideas, and my two big problems with the book discussed therein (about “Great Books” and the source of morality);
- How Marjorie Taylor Greene didn’t get the “joke” — that all of DC’s “talk of ideas and principles was flimflam to conceal self-enrichment at the public’s expense”;
- Contrasting Trump’s treats with what “treason” and “sedition” actually mean;
- Why Trump got along so well with Mamdani;
- Tom Nichols on Trump’s recent outbursts;
- Short items about how “MAGA” is being replaced by “America First”; how Musk and DOGE have withdrawn and left only wreckage, and no documented savings in their wake; and how Trump eliminates bad news by deleting it.
- And, listening again to Beck.
The big picture: as I said last time, the political ideals of the Enlightenment, such as those in the US Constitution, may forever remain aspirational, always undermined by rank tribalism and greed.
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The Atlantic, Peter Wehner, 22 Nov 2025: The Intellectual and Moral Decline of the American Right, subtitled “The conservative backlash against Nick Fuentes has yet to challenge the president who had him over for dinner.”
Does he contrast the present with whenever it was those things were higher? It begins by recounting the Tucker Carlson/Nick Fuentes controversy, and how other Republicans failed to disapprove of Carlson. Then about the Heritage Foundation (covered by Paul Krugman nine days ago) and how it changed to align with the Tea Party: “they transformed themselves into a kind of grassroots populist group that is fundamentally hostile to the institutions of our government.”
And became more radicalized with the arrive of Trump.
“The institution came to organize itself around Trump’s person rather than any set of ideas he might usefully advance,” the conservative intellectual told me. “They were unwilling to criticize him, which was never their approach to prior Republican presidents, even Ronald Reagan, and essentially forced their scholars to endorse whatever the administration was doing or else keep quiet.”
Again, the abandonment of principle in favor of tribalism. Here’s the closest the article comes to describing what Heritage once stood for:
Heritage has institutionally abandoned many conservative principles—free enterprise, American leadership on the world stage, constitutionalism—in favor of a grab bag of positions that track both with the priorities of the Trump administration and the particular whims of Carlson.
And, ruing the situation:
The reason Trump has been the dominant figure in world politics for the past decade rests in part on the MAGA true believers. They have a cultlike devotion to Trump, as unshakable as anything I’ve seen in my lifetime. Their moral blindness is almost incomprehensible to me. From what I can tell, they live in a twilight zone, a place of unreason, detached from reality, at least regarding politics. It’s a world where black is white, where up is down, and where Trump is good.
But at least as responsible for the Trump era are the people who knew better, or should have known better; who had concerns about Trump but kept them to themselves; and who felt most comfortable embracing the mindset of “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” They became known as “never–never Trumpers.” They rationalized, time after time after time, their support for a man whose every part of his life is touched by corruption.
When confronted with inconvenient facts, they reject them. When Trump does cruel and wicked things, they ignore them. When they need Bible verses to justify their support for Trump, they find them. When reminded about their criticisms of Bill Clinton for his ethical lapses, they dismiss them. There is always a reason to stick with Trump, to vote for him, to justify his actions, to look the other way when needed. However bad Trump was, they assured themselves and others, the Democrats were far, far worse. And so they pulled their punches. Their ethos aligns with that of the Heritage Foundation: There are no enemies to the right.
Not just tribalism, but simplistic tribalism, black and white, good vs. bad. Not like the tribalism of multiple and mutually exclusive pop culture cults, but the tribal tribalism of aligning into two opposed groups, e.g. “no enemies to the right.”
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Again, do Trump and MAGA follow any actual principles?
The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman, 22 Nov 2025: Does MAGA Have Ideas?, subtitled “A new book traces the intellectual origins of Trumpism—straight into the void.”
It begins:
In 2018, at a rally in Houston, Donald Trump articulated a distinction that was becoming central to the American right. “A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well,” Trump said. This involved “not caring about the country so much.” By contrast, he was “a nationalist.” “Really, we’re not supposed to use that word,” Trump went on. “You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, O.K.? I’m a nationalist. Nationalist! Nothing wrong. Use that word. Use that word!” The delighted crowd began chanting, “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”
False dichotomy, of course; the world is not us vs them, not a zero-sum game.
Rothman wonders how the word “nationalism” came to Trump’s attention. Then turns his attention to a new book by Laura K. Field called Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Amz link).
Trump, now seventy-nine, seems already to be fading; the MAGA movement, at the height of its power, faces the increasingly urgent question of what comes next. If MAGA has good ideas, they might undergird its future. Alternatively, if it has bad or irrelevant ones, it may struggle to maintain its energy. Do the ideas associated with Trumpism lead somewhere, or are they a dead end? Can they stand on their own, without a reality star to animate them?
Here’s the central issue, perhaps:
Field, an academic based in Washington, D.C., was once a conservative, and has a lot of sympathy for various conservative viewpoints. She received an education in the “Great Books,” reading Plato and Rousseau; earned a Ph.D. in government from the University of Texas at Austin; and has spent plenty of time among the conservative intelligentsia.
… …
The New Right has a lot of very abstract ideas—not just about nationhood but about human nature, God, virtue, gender, technology, “the Common Good,” and more. One way to understand this addiction to abstraction, Field writes, is to look at a book like “Ideas Have Consequences,” an “ur-text” of American conservatism published in 1948 by Richard Weaver, an intellectual historian at the University of Chicago. Weaver’s view, Field argues, was that “without a transcendental metaphysics . . . there is nothing to limit political turpitude, and no reason for people to be good and true.” We might doubt this; we might point out that being uncertain about what’s right and wrong definitely doesn’t make you a nihilist. (In fact, the opposite is probably true.) Still, ever since, many conservative intellectuals have been convinced that “moral relativism” is a grave danger to civilization.
And
A common thread throughout “Furious Minds” is the frequency with which the New Right simply asserts truths in eternal terms, without justification or argument, and the satisfaction it takes in doing so. These supposed truths, once asserted, serve as justification for more assertions, creating a performance of certainty about what’s True.
I see two big problems here. The reverence for the “Great Books” by philosophers from hundreds or thousands of years ago is that many of their ideas have proven false, according to scientific understanding of the past century or two, and I suspect philosophy courses do not mention that. Theirs were intuitive truths, without evidence or validation by experiment. Second, morality does not depend on “transcendental metaphysics”: it has been understand for two or three decades now as part of evolved human nature, without which humanity would not have built the modern world. But conservatives rely on past authorities; they do not care to learn.
The essay ends:
It’s no surprise to find that the intellectual fabric of Trumpism is thin. What is possibly surprising is the degree to which the New Right has, through its arguments and behavior, refuted its own premises. In 2019, in a celebrated joint essay called “Against the Dead Consensus,” a group of conservative thinkers argued that liberalism and “consensus conservatism”—the old-school kind—had “long ago ceased to inquire into the first things”; it had taken for granted erroneous conclusions about “the nature and purpose of our common life.” They promised to turn America into the kind of place where values were taken seriously—where we might ask, for example, whether “the soulless society of individual affluence” was one we wanted. But it turns out that it’s liberalism that forces you to inquire into ideas, precisely because they’re uncertain, changeable, and contested. In the illiberal world created by Trumpism, you don’t have to ask—you can just proclaim. You can change on a dime, saying or thinking anything at all.
Exactly. It’s liberalism, not conservatism, that challenges conventional ideas and invites questions that challenge conventional wisdom. Because conservatives think nothing more needs to be learned, while progressives (including scientists) know there is a vast deal left to be learned.
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Some people understand what’s going on, others don’t.
The Atlantic, David Frum, 22 Nov 2025: Marjorie Taylor Greene Came So Close to Getting the Joke, subtitled “What the Georgia representative learned in Washington”
When Jack Abramoff dominated Washington lobbying in the 1990s and early 2000s, he observed that there were two kinds of people in town: those who “get the joke” and those who don’t.
Those who got the joke understood that all of the city’s talk of ideas and principles was flimflam to conceal self-enrichment at the public’s expense. Those who didn’t, didn’t.
For example,
On the same day that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene resigned, The New York Times reported accusations that President Donald Trump’s handpicked director of the Kennedy Center, Richard Grenell, had used the fine-arts institution’s $268 million budget to dole out favors and enrich friends and allies. If the claims—which Grenell disputes—are correct, Abramoff would recognize a fine example of “getting the joke.”
And,
Greene didn’t get the joke. Elected to Congress in Georgia in 2020, she became one of the loudest voices in American life for crackpot conspiracy claims: Pizzagate, QAnon, 9/11 trutherism, and a fantasy that California wildfires might have been caused by space lasers controlled by Jewish bankers. She repeated 2020-election denialism and promoted Russian President Vladimir Putin’s propaganda about his war on Ukraine.
For a long time, Greene’s seemingly fathomless gullibility qualified her as a MAGA leader in Congress. But the gullibility actually did have a limit. Sometime after her election, she began to realize that she’d been made a fool of.
Of all the ridiculous things Greene believed, perhaps the single most ridiculous was that Trump, of all people on Earth, was leading a heroic fight against a global network of pedophiles.
It goes on.
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Slate, Paul Finkelman, 21 Nov 2025: What to Make of Trump’s Insane Suggestion About Hanging Democrats for “Treason”
Oddly, the president believes that it is criminal to urge members of the armed forces or the intelligence community to uphold the Constitution, respect the oath they took, and obey the law. Never having served in the military, the president seems not to understand that those who risk their lives to defend our nation have a legal obligation to “refuse illegal orders,” as stated by Sen. Mark Kelly, a former naval captain (which is the equivalent of a colonel in the other services). The commander in chief seems to have something different in mind for the oaths of the service members under his command. It’s unclear what that is, but certain history comes to mind. In Nazi Germany, for instance, soldiers took a “holy oath” of “unconditional obedience to the Leader of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, supreme commander of the armed forces.” Civilians took a similar oath. Our servicemen and women, by contrast, take an oath, not to any leader but to the law and the Constitution.
The article goes on to define treason and sedition in specific detail; neither, of course, justifies Trump’s call for hanging Democrats.
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Trump and Mamdani’s meeting went quite well, apparently.
Salon, Jason Kyle Howard, 23 Nov 2025: Donald Trump always falls for a handsome man in a suit, subtitled “Zohran Mamdani is just the latest babe to win POTUS’ affections”
It’s the stuff of political romance novels. A frustrated, angry bear of a president is roaring in the Oval Office about how people refuse to submit to him. …
Then: a knock on the door. His three o’clock has arrived, the same little communist he has raged against behind closed doors and before the media. “Mr. President,” the beautiful man says as he enters, extending his silver-ringed hand in a firm greeting.
The mood in the room shifts. The president studies his guest, noting his kind, steely brown eyes and neatly trimmed beard. He looks at his dark suit and flashes an approving smile.
Going on with many other examples. Trump is all surface, no substance.
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More about Trump, Democrats, and Piggy.
The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 21 Nov 2025: The President Is Losing Control of Himself, subtitled “Donald Trump’s outbursts on social media this week were different than usual.”
It would be easy merely to note, yet again, that the president is a depraved man and a menace to the American system of government. As remarkable as it is to say it, however, the outbursts of this past week are different, and were likely triggered by Trump’s panic over the release of files about his former friend, the dead sex offender Jeffery Epstein. No one should treat this new phase in the president’s aggression against democracy as just another episode in the Trump reality show.
And ending:
Americans, and especially their elected representatives, must pay attention to Trump now in a way that many of them have never thought to do before. The president of the United States is publicly howling for the arrest and execution of members of Congress, knowing that he commands a base that will take him seriously and has people in it that might act on his demands. (And no, Leavitt’s curt denials are not a reassurance.) Despite Nixon’s famous 1977 assertion, things do not become legal just because the president wants to do them. This is a new and dire development in the ongoing American constitutional crisis. The voters, Congress, and, yes, the U.S. military must all now be more vigilant than at any time in our modern history.
And indeed, there are reports of death threats against those Democrats.
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Briefly noted:
- Media Matters, 21 Nov 2025: Right-wing media figures are starting to declare “MAGA is dead”, subtitled “Some right-wing personalities are announcing the end of Trump’s MAGA movement and claiming ‘America First is ASCENDANT'” — — Many examples, with links. Not sure what the difference is between MAGA and “America First,” except that changing slogans allows conservatives to distance themselves from MAGA’s failure.
- Is DOGE dead? Politico, Sophia Cai and Daniel Lippman, 21 Nov 2025: Inside the DOGE Succession Drama Elon Musk Left Behind, subtitled “What really happened when he logged out of Washington.”
- I’ll quote Rob Latham on Facebook about this: “An in-depth—and infuriating—overview of the wilding spree Elon and his minions subjected our government to, and a sad survey of the wreckage they left behind. One of the worst examples of self-sabotage in US history. If a foreign enemy (or evil space aliens) had taken over, they could hardly have done worse.” — — His final comments echoes some of mine.
- And Jim Wright on Facebook: “DOGE never produced a single shred of evidence of fraud, chicanery, or even waste. They just cut without regard to the damage, gleeful in their arrogant wanton destruction. Musk bailed out when it became obvious DOGE was… well, a dodge.”
- The Bulwark, Catherine Rampell, 20 Nov 2025: Trump’s One Weird Trick for Eliminating Bad News: Delete It, subtitled “The disappearance of inconvenient facts and the remaking of reality.” — — To conservatives reality is whatever they say it is.
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One of my favorite albums of all time.
I’ve posted “Turn Away” two or three times before.
