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.<\/p>\n
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The Atlantic, Peter Wehner, 22 Nov 2025<\/strong>: The Intellectual and Moral Decline of the American Right<\/a>, subtitled “The conservative backlash against Nick Fuentes has yet to challenge the president who had him over for dinner.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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)<\/a>\u00a0and 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.\u201d<\/p>\n And became more radicalized with the arrival of Trump.<\/p>\n \u201cThe institution came to organize itself around Trump\u2019s person rather than any set of ideas he might usefully advance,\u201d the conservative intellectual told me. \u201cThey 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.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Again, the abandonment of principle in favor of tribalism. Here’s the closest the article comes to describing what Heritage once stood for:<\/p>\n Heritage has institutionally abandoned many conservative principles\u2014free enterprise, American leadership on the world stage, constitutionalism\u2014in favor of a grab bag of positions that track both with the priorities of the Trump administration and the particular whims of Carlson.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And, ruing the situation:<\/p>\n 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\u2019ve 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\u2019s a world where black is white, where up is down, and where Trump is good.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cThe enemy of my enemy is my friend.\u201d They became known as \u201cnever\u2013never Trumpers.\u201d They rationalized, time after time after time, their support for a man whose every part of his life is touched by corruption.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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.”<\/p>\n \\\\\\<\/p>\n Again, do Trump and MAGA follow any actual principles?<\/p>\n The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman, 22 Nov 2025<\/strong>: Does MAGA Have Ideas?<\/a>, subtitled “A new book traces the intellectual origins of Trumpism\u2014straight into the void.”<\/p>\n It begins:<\/p>\n In 2018, at a rally in Houston, Donald Trump articulated a distinction that was becoming central to the American right. \u201cA globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well,\u201d Trump said. This involved \u201cnot caring about the country so much.\u201d By contrast, he was \u201ca nationalist.\u201d \u201cReally, we\u2019re not supposed to use that word,\u201d Trump went on. \u201cYou know what I am? I\u2019m a nationalist, O.K.? I\u2019m a nationalist. Nationalist! Nothing wrong. Use that word. Use that word!\u201d The delighted crowd began chanting, \u201cU.S.A.! U.S.A.!\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n False dichotomy, of course; the world is not us vs them, not a zero-sum game.<\/p>\n 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<\/b><\/a>\u00a0(Amz link).<\/p>\n 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?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Here’s the central issue, perhaps:<\/p>\n 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 \u201cGreat Books,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n … …<\/p>\n The New Right has a lot of very abstract ideas\u2014not just about nationhood but about human nature, God, virtue, gender, technology, \u201cthe Common Good,\u201d and more. One way to understand this addiction to abstraction, Field writes, is to look at a book like \u201cIdeas Have Consequences<\/a>,\u201d an \u201cur-text\u201d of American conservatism published in 1948 by Richard Weaver, an intellectual historian at the University of Chicago. Weaver\u2019s view, Field argues, was that \u201cwithout a transcendental metaphysics . . . there is nothing to limit political turpitude, and no reason for people to be good and true.\u201d We might doubt this; we might point out that being uncertain about what\u2019s right and wrong definitely doesn\u2019t make you a nihilist. (In fact, the opposite is probably true.) Still, ever since, many conservative intellectuals have been convinced that \u201cmoral relativism\u201d is a grave danger to civilization.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And<\/p>\n A common thread throughout \u201cFurious Minds\u201d 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\u2019s True.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p>\n The essay ends:<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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 \u201cAgainst the Dead Consensus,\u201d a group of conservative thinkers argued that liberalism and \u201cconsensus conservatism\u201d\u2014the old-school kind\u2014had \u201clong ago ceased to inquire into the first things\u201d; it had taken for granted erroneous conclusions about \u201cthe nature and purpose of our common life.\u201d They promised to turn America into the kind of place where values were taken seriously\u2014where we might ask, for example, whether \u201cthe soulless society of individual affluence\u201d was one we wanted. But it turns out that it\u2019s liberalism that forces you to inquire into ideas, precisely because they\u2019re uncertain, changeable, and contested. In the illiberal world created by Trumpism, you don\u2019t have to ask\u2014you can just proclaim. You can change on a dime, saying or thinking anything at all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p>\n \\\\\\<\/p>\n Some people understand what’s going on, others don’t.<\/p>\n The Atlantic, David Frum, 22 Nov 2025<\/strong>: Marjorie Taylor Greene Came So Close to Getting the Joke<\/a>, subtitled “What the Georgia representative learned in Washington”<\/p>\n 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 \u201cget the joke\u201d and those who don\u2019t.<\/p>\n Those who got the joke understood that all of the city\u2019s talk of ideas and principles was flimflam to conceal self-enrichment at the public\u2019s expense. Those who didn\u2019t, didn\u2019t.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n For example,<\/p>\n On the same day that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene resigned, The<\/em> New York Times<\/em> reported<\/a> accusations that President Donald Trump\u2019s handpicked director of the Kennedy Center, Richard Grenell, had used the fine-arts institution\u2019s $268 million budget to dole out favors and enrich friends and allies. If the claims\u2014which Grenell disputes\u2014are correct, Abramoff would recognize a fine example of \u201cgetting the joke.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And,<\/p>\n Greene didn\u2019t get the joke. Elected to Congress in Georgia in 2020, she became one of the loudest voices in American life for crackpot conspiracy claims<\/a>: Pizzagate, QAnon, 9\/11 trutherism, and a fantasy that California wildfires might have been caused by space lasers<\/a> controlled by Jewish bankers. She repeated<\/a> 2020-election denialism and promoted<\/a> Russian President Vladimir Putin\u2019s propaganda about his war on Ukraine.<\/p>\n For a long time, Greene\u2019s 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<\/a> that she\u2019d been made a fool of.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It goes on.<\/p>\n \\\\\\<\/p>\n Slate, Paul Finkelman, 21 Nov 2025<\/strong>: What to Make of Trump\u2019s Insane Suggestion About Hanging Democrats for \u201cTreason\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n 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 \u201crefuse illegal orders,\u201d 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\u2019s unclear what that is, but certain history comes to mind. In Nazi Germany, for instance, soldiers took a \u201choly oath\u201d of \u201cunconditional obedience<\/a> to the Leader of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, supreme commander of the armed forces.\u201d 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The article goes on to define treason and sedition in specific detail; neither, of course, justifies Trump’s call for hanging Democrats.<\/p>\n \\\\\\<\/p>\n Trump and Mamdani’s meeting went quite well, apparently.<\/p>\n Salon, Jason Kyle Howard, 23 Nov 2025<\/strong>: Donald Trump always falls for a handsome man in a suit<\/a>, subtitled “Zohran Mamdani is just the latest babe to win POTUS\u2019 affections”<\/p>\n It\u2019s 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. …<\/p>\n Then: a knock on the door. His three o\u2019clock has arrived, the same little communist he has raged against behind closed doors and before the media. \u201cMr. President,\u201d the <\/span>beautiful man<\/span><\/a> says as he enters, extending his silver-ringed hand in a firm greeting.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Going on with many other examples. Trump is all surface, no substance.<\/p>\n \\\\\\<\/p>\n More about Trump, Democrats, and Piggy.<\/p>\n The Atlantic, Tom Nichols, 21 Nov 2025<\/strong>: The President Is Losing Control of Himself<\/a>, subtitled “Donald Trump\u2019s outbursts on social media this week were different than usual.”<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s aggression against democracy as just another episode in the Trump reality show.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And ending:<\/p>\n 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\u2019s curt denials are not a reassurance.) Despite Nixon\u2019s 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And indeed, there are reports of death threats against those Democrats.<\/p>\n \\\\\\<\/p>\n Briefly noted:<\/p>\n \\\\\\<\/p>\n One of my favorite albums of all time.<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/media.newyorker.com\/photos\/691f6ba6d1216492434a238b\/2:2\/w_1920,c_limit\/OpenQuestions_MAGAideas_final-1.gif\")
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