- The idea of nominalism, from a 77-year-old book, that seems to have inspired MAGA’s arrested moral development;
- Apocalyptic speculation in science fiction and in speculative maps;
- Brief items about Trump’s whitewashing of American history, teaching students how to think, and the lunacy of asking tourists to turn over their social media history.
Today’s think piece is courtesy Steven Pinker’s gift link in a Facebook post, where the title of the article appeared as “The Closing of the MAGA Mind.”
NY Times, guest essay by Laura Field, 13 Dec 2025: The 77-Year-Old Book That Helps Explain the MAGA New Right (gift link)
Pinker’s Facebook post comments:
Laura Field, a specialist in “illiberal studies,” explains one of the intellectual foundations of MAGA: that the root of all evil is the West’s rejecting a universal moral order based on religion. (She could have added to this excellent exposition that in fact many secularists are in fact “moral realists,” believing in a universal morality, but one that is based on reason & well-being rather than dogma and scripture.)
(Also discussed at Alternet here: The movement that closed the MAGA mind goes back 70 years: analysis.)
The essay itself begins:
More than any other president in recent memory, Donald Trump seems uninterested in being a president for all Americans. His hyperpartisan language (“They are sick, radical left people”) makes this clear. So does his use of the levers of power — his abuses of the pardon power, for example, and the extraordinary transformation of the Justice Department.
But it would be a mistake to see his approach as simply the result of a vindictive president who swats away norms and embraces hardball politics. Mr. Trump’s outsize persona has given cover to an extraordinary ideological radicalism in the Republican Party. The excesses of the second Trump administration would not be possible without the intellectuals who have gathered in the MAGA movement. To really understand what is happening in the United States today, we must understand the ideology and thinkers behind the MAGA New Right.
Mr. Trump’s approach to governing almost exclusively for red America dovetails with the closed philosophical mode of this group, which embraces radical anti-modernism and tends toward moral and political absolutism. In this melding, only one political party possesses truth and reality — and governs accordingly. The MAGA New Right’s contempt for liberal democracy is rooted in this alternate vision, and it rejects the various forms of pluralism and tolerance that many Americans have taken for granted.
A couple paras later:
One [of those who understands what’s happening in the US] is Richard Weaver, who wrote a book in 1948 that describes the basic contours of the New Right’s closed philosophical approach. The title of Dr. Weaver’s book, “Ideas Have Consequences,” would soon become a popular catchphrase among conservatives. It captures the spirit of the MAGA mind and the counterrevolution that we see unfolding before us.
… Dr. Weaver, who died in 1963, took aim at a philosophical concept called nominalism, the rise of which he traced to early modernity. (Think of philosophers like Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.) Nominalism involves the rejection of universal concepts and absolute truths — including transcendental moral truths. Nominalists believe that truth is embedded in the particulars of the world around us. There is no universal objective moral reality as Plato and other philosophers believed and it does not exist as an expression of the divine.
Dr. Weaver insisted that nominalism was not merely wrongheaded; it was the source of all our woes. In his introduction to “Ideas Have Consequences,” he called the shift to nominalism evil and likened it to Macbeth’s seduction by “the witches on the heath.” Like Macbeth, Dr. Weaver wrote, “Western man made an evil decision, which has become the efficient and final cause of other evil decisions.” By challenging the idea of universal objective moral reality, modern man had succumbed to individualism, relativism, materialism, historicism and politics as will to power.
And of course his notion of universal objective moral reality is what comes from *his* religion. Once again, yet again, conservatives think in black and white terms, absolute right (their own) vs the evil wrong (everyone else). The essay ends:
Many conservatives … accept that the cost of religious freedom is that they have to live alongside people with different belief systems and values and in the midst of a rambunctious culture that permits radical questioning of all kinds.
Mr. Trump and Vice President JD Vance, the kingpins of the MAGA New Right, embody a different form of politics. With particular ideas and a MAGA intellectual elite behind them, they are seeking to dominate a nation and impose their politics on those who don’t share his vision.
It is not the model that America’s founders aspired to. That country is a liberal democracy, and one of its major aspirations — and sometimes its achievement — is that it allows people who have different orientations and belief systems to live together in relative peace and freedom. That is the vision for our country that we must strive to achieve.
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How apocalyptic thinking shows up in science fiction and in some cool maps.
Big Think, Frank Jacobs, 12 Dec 2025: America’s post-apocalyptic maps reveal eerily familiar fault lines, subtitled “In post-apocalyptic fiction, imagined futures turn today’s political and cultural tensions into geography.”
Key Takeaways
• The U.S. is over, but America continues: Welcome to the chaos and violence of the world after the Fall. • As these maps show, post-apocalyptic fiction is a particularly fertile genre, and a particularly American one. • Like other strands of science fiction, it’s not really about the future — it’s about the anxieties of today.
Beginning:
The United States has ended, but America continues. The question is: How? That’s the shortest possible summary for an entire genre of U.S.-centered, post-apocalyptic fiction. Call it “America after the Fall.”
It’s a fertile genre, with plenty of maps to illustrate its dismal point. That point is not the future, but the present. Like other strands of sci-fi, post-apocalyptic fiction projects onto tomorrow the anxieties of today. And these maps of a catastrophic future are present-day America’s long, hard look in the mirror.
Of course, *all* science fiction isn’t literally about the unknowable future, but rather reflects the concerns of the era it was written in.
The article goes on to discuss books by Jack London, George R. Stewart (which I’ve reviewed here), Stephen King, Emily St John Mandel, Brin, Ballard, and others, as well as video games, TV shows and movies.
The common thread in post-apocalyptic fiction is balkanization. After the Fall, the States disunite into smaller, mutually hostile geopolitical fragments: confederacies, theocracies, city-states, tribal zones, no-man’s lands. Those fragments may be speculative, but they’re not entirely random. They reflect the anxieties that pulse beneath the surface of contemporary American life.
As many of these maps suggest. Despite the gradual unification of global society (see Pinker), humanity seems to be in a see-saw back-and-forth of progress and regression, where the latter forces are current at work in US. Those conservative forces have, in fact, floated ideas of a US Civil War and a breakdown into red and blue nations.
Note: it’s irritating that the article doesn’t provide direct links to larger graphics of these maps, so that you can read them. But there’s an easy trick to access such links: Open a graphic in a new tab, then in the URL bar, remove anything that looks like “?resize-480,270”, and then reload. Example https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Cropped-divided-states.png, an image too large to be seen in this blog post.
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Briefly noted:
- Salon, Chauncey DeVega, 13 Dec 2025: Trump is whitewashing American history, subtitled “The death of Viola Fletcher, the last survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, underscores what Trump is attacking”
- Well of course he is! It’s want MAGA wants!
- NY Times, Leighton Woodhouse, 13 Dec 2025: We Should Teach Our Students How to Think, Not What to Believe
- Well of course. But that principle aside, the article is about what various sides says about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And how teachers avoid discussing the conflict in classrooms. “Each side regards its narrative as dogma.”
- My thought: teaching how to think presupposes that there’s a real world out there, not just a bunch of stories passed down from your ancestors. I realize that sounds naive; in political controversies such as this one, there is no understanding of the real world except through stories.
- Washington Post, Editorial Board, 13 Dec 2025: The lunacy of asking tourists to turn over their social media history, subtitled “America’s closest allies are among the 42 countries in the visa waiver program targeted by Trump.”
- This is the latest notion from the Trump administration: a surveillance state. Over everyone, both foreigners and Americans. And improper thoughts (or social media posts) will be dealt with appropriately.
