MAGA’s Idea Men

The movement didn’t just founder over failures of execution.

On Tuesday I claimed that Election Day is no longer emotional for me. Perhaps I spoke too soon. Watching the Trumpians take their well-deserved pounding affected me more than I expected, even though I was largely expecting it, as a reader of James Heaney’s De Civitate.

Still. Wow. Talk about “voters sending a message.”

I wish there were some sort of election result that I could enjoy. I was genuinely startled by how sad I felt, watching one flipped seat after another, my mind traversing all the way back to those heady #NeverTrump days, when I still could not quite believe that the American right could go that far wrong. We weren’t really going to lie utterly supine in the path of a figure as unsavory as Donald J. Trump. Right? Right?

Truthfully, I haven’t paid much attention to the man himself in recent years. I long ago concluded that Trump is kind of a mirror image of the titular character of the film The Truman Show. Truman (played by Jim Carrey) thinks he’s just living a normal life, when in fact he is the star of a reality TV show; unbeknownst to him, the people in his life are all paid actors, and his day to day the stuff of water-cooler conversations across America. Trump thinks of himself as that guy, the star of a reality TV drama, the perpetual talk of the town. The rest of the world functions in his mind as mere props and supporting characters to his personal drama. I however do not wish to be part of The Trump Show. So I simply got on with things, tending my garden(s): Law & Liberty on one side, home and family on the other. It’s a good life, but even so, I’m grateful that I didn’t know in 2016 just how long and bleak this chapter of our politics would be. You’ve got to sip that despair-draught slowly.

Anyway, I think his show’s finally been canceled. Along with Republicans that allowed themselves to be cast as supporting characters. It’s not quite a complete wrap yet, but as a moving force in America, MAGA looks done.

So this is an odd moment: After a shellacking like that, it would feel unseemly to breeze right into the conference room with my Rebuilding Conservatism PowerPoint all ready. But I don’t want to wallow too long. Some of us have been waiting years for this page to turn. So, I’ll make that today’s topic. Can a page really turn for conservatism?

It’s hard to say. But give it a chance.

When Ross Douthat wrote the other day that, “Nothing in this sad story means that the new right is simply finished. It’s not like there is some other form of conservatism more attuned to late-2020s reality waiting in the wings,” I thought, “In the wings is a bit much to ask after all this time, but how would you know what we might be built, under less hostile conditions? What potential good ideas or promising lines of development were smothered with the ‘don’t know what time it is’ banner? Who can say what we might discover if we finally break out of the Trumpian funhouse?”

I’m not entirely Pollyannaish here. I have truly spent many hours pondering whether any substantive form of political conservatism can survive the Trumpian era. And look, there are quite a few countries in the world where conservatism seems to be little more than a bookish club at the fringes, a place for a few oddball scholars to debate literature and political theory. That could become us. America has historically been different, and I used to assume it always would be, but... ah, assumptions. And yet, I still think it’s possible. Americans retain a deep love of both tradition and freedom. Maybe we can work with that.

I hope so. Because we’ll need both those things, as our entitlement state becomes increasingly unsustainable, and our demographic problems more severe. Many of the European conservatives I know seem largely resigned to the inevitability of dramatic social collapse and widespread civil unrest as their middle-term future. They can see that their fiscal and demographic problems are pushing them towards crisis, but their people show no will or ability to adapt. It’s going to go badly for them; they already know this. Is America still “exceptional” enough to do better? Perhaps even to pilot new political solutions that might in time be adopted by others? Again, I don’t know. But if so, I feel quite sure that freedom and tradition will both be key assets.

One of the truly infuriating things about the Trump years has been the way populists take time-honored conservative principles, slap abusive labels on them (“Zombie Reaganite”, “Conservatism Inc,” “the old right”), and treat anyone still developing those lines of thought as hopelessly dated. You needn’t even trouble to argue that people’s ideas are bad; they’re gauche, which is worse. Even now, after Tuesday’s drubbing, populist apologists race forward to tell us, “We were sabotaged by the old right, and the main thing is not ever to go back there.”

Back where? Does anyone even know what “the old right” is anymore? Could our young people pick Reagan out of a lineup? No one is calling for a zombie invasion, but we do desperately need a better, more truthful conversation, which re-integrates elements of the conservative tradition that populists have deliberately excised. That’s not nostalgia. It’s not a hidebound refusal to change. Adapting timeless truths for new circumstances is what we used to call being conservative.

And the truth is that the intellectual climate of Trumpism has always been pretty stultifying. It’s interesting to me how many traditionalists, even those disaffected with MAGA, don’t quite get this. They can see the surface ugliness, but figure that the movement has “good bones” which were never fully fleshed, due to failures of discipline or execution (or bad luck, or the nefarious old right). I think it’s mostly the other way around. Let me tell a little story here.

In 2017, when Steve Bannon’s “outside-the-box” political strategizing threw Alabama voters into a quandary, I was still nominally writing for The Federalist, although the relationship was pretty frayed. I mostly only sent them anodyne cultural pieces (because money! need money!), but the Bannon thing kindled something.

It was so ugly. I was genuinely appalled. Many will doubtless recall that Bannon used his (then considerable) influence to put forward the crazed and morally abhorrent Roy Moore as a Senatorial candidate in a very red state, spurring ferocious infighting on the right. The public defenses of Moore (including at The Federalist) were stomach-churning, but beyond that, the event threw the Bannon apologists into a frenzy. And I knew quite a few at the time. Some of my Catholic intellectual friends raved about his strategic genius and lightly-worn erudition. The word “polymath” got thrown around a lot. He was touted as the substance behind the figurehead, the learned mind that would ensure that the Trumpian Revolution amounted to more than cheap populist tricks. (They would swoon over other “idea men” in later years, most obviously J.D. Vance.)

So… I just had to do it. I realized The Federalist would probably reject me in a hot second, but the claim had to be evaluated, and somehow I felt strangely honor-bound send it to them. I’d been with that outfit almost from its very inception, writing well over a hundred columns. I had an established readership there. If it were still in my power, I had to tell them whether Trump’s brain trust truly possessed the sort of formidable mind that could stand on its own without the yes-men.

Bannon didn’t write much, so I spent several days letting him talk at me, in the car, the kitchen, doing yard work. Then I wrote my assessment, keeping close focus on that one single question. No advice for Alabama voters, no bitter rants about Trump. Just this. If we gave Bannon Polyjuice potion, and enabled him to pose as a non-white woman under an assumed name, could he (say) stroll into the Cornell philosophy workshop and hold his own? Could “the polymath” impress smart people not already enamored of him?

No, reader. He could not. They’d laugh him out of the room. He’s a dilettante in love with his own voice.

It was an absurd thing to do really, an obvious waste of time. I’m occasionally prone to these quixotic quests. I have to be clear though that I am not claiming to be a victim of injustice just because an outlet wasn’t willing to platform me. It did mean something, given our longstanding relationship, but obviously those decisions are their prerogative, and it was my own silly choice to pour time into a piece that would almost certainly be shot down. Meanwhile, I myself tell writers, “thank you, but no” almost daily. That’s not an injustice.

The point here is that I was a writer with highly relevant credentials who had built significant rapport with their readers across several years, and the question of Bannon’s intellectual caliber was genuinely pressing in that moment. They didn’t want it answered.

So, two further questions.

First, what kind of intellectual climate is likely to grow from a movement that begins by enshrining Steve Bannon as its Big Idea Man?

Second, did the movement grow much beyond that? What’s the best MAGA ever did on the level of substance and intellectual coherence? The torch passed eventually from Bannon to other figures, and I’m pretty familiar with the whole line of people who tried to step up and be Trump’s brain trust. (Many I know personally, or did at one time.) They all faced a severe structural challenge, namely, Trump’s intransigence. He doesn’t want advisors, only toadies and yes-men, so they’ve mostly been reduced to chasing after him while trying to make it look like they’re driving the bus. I’m not going to say that there were no interesting ideas in that entire landscape, but I will say that those are very suboptimal conditions for a fruitful, truth-oriented conversation.

The right has been so awful of late that it’s easy to generate explanations of Trumpism’s failure that leave its intellectual foundations unexamined. “If you’re starting a war, you should have clear objectives and some kind of end game.” “Try not to be racist, sexist, or antisemitic.” All good advice! But the fact that the fruit is bad should hardly be taken as evidence that the trunk and root structure are sound.

There are still smart conservatives having smart conversations. I don’t mean to suggest it never happens anymore. You’ll find reasonable concentrations at places like AEI or The Dispatch; smaller outfits like Law & Liberty, Public Discourse or Civitas Outlook try to do our part. I could name others. But when you get deluged like that, and find yourself at the margins, you may actually feel obliged to devote considerable energy to articulating and maintaining aspects of the tradition that are in danger of being buried entirely. Not because you’re hidebound, but simply because you’re short-staffed and working against formidable headwinds. It’s hard to build cool new things in that climate. Even if you manage it, will anyone notice?

And now, enough of all that. The moment of silence has been observed. Let’s move on and talk about freedom!