David Brooks in the NY Times:
It’s not sufficient to say that Trump is leading a band of morally challenged people to power. It’s that Trumpism represents an alternative value system. The people I regard as upright and admirable MAGA regards as morally disgraceful, and the people I regard as corrupt and selfish MAGA regards as heroic.
The crucial distinction is that some of us have an institutional mind-set while the MAGA mind-set is anti-institutional.
In the former view, we are born into a world of institutions — families, schools, professions, the structures of our government. We are formed by these institutions. People develop good character as they live up to the standards of excellence passed down in their institutions — by displaying the civic virtues required by our Constitution, by living up to what it means to be a good teacher or nurse or, if they are Christians, by imitating the self-emptying love of Christ. . . . We know our institutions have flaws and need reform, but we regard them as fundamentally legitimate.
MAGA morality is likely to regard people like me as lemmings. We climbed our way up through the meritocracy by shape shifting ourselves into whatever teachers, bosses and the system wanted us to be. Worse, we serve and preserve systems that are fundamentally corrupt and illegitimate — the financial institutions that created the financial crisis, the health authorities who closed schools during Covid, the mainstream media and federal bureaucracy that has led the nation to ruin.
What does heroism look like according the MAGA morality? It looks like the sort of people whom Trump has picked to be in his cabinet. The virtuous man in this morality is self-assertive, combative, transgressive and vengeful. He’s not afraid to break the rules and come to his own conclusions. He has contempt for institutions and is happy to be a battering force to bring them down. He is unbothered by elite scorn but, in fact, revels in it and goes out of his way to generate it.
In this mind-set, if the establishment regards you as a sleazeball, you must be doing something right. If the legal system indicts you, you must be a virtuous man.
In this worldview, a nominee enshrouded in scandal is more trustworthy than a person who has lived an honest life. The scandal-shrouded nominee is cast out from polite society. He’s not going to run to a New York publisher and write a tell-all memoir bashing the administration in which he served. Such a person is not going to care if he is scorned by the civil servants in the agency he has been hired to dismantle. . . .
The corrupt person owes total fealty to Donald Trump. There is no other realm in which he can achieve power and success except within the MAGA universe. Autocrats have often preferred to surround themselves with corrupt people because such people are easier to control and, if necessary, destroy.
In other words, MAGA represents a fundamental challenge not only to conventional politics but also to conventional morality. In his own Substack essay, Damon Linker gets to the point: “Trumpism is seeking to advance a revolutionary transvaluation of values by inverting the morality that undergirds both traditional conservatism and liberal institutionalism. In this inversion, norms and rules that counsel and enforce propriety, restraint and deference to institutional authority become vices, while flouting them become virtues.”
I would note the connection of this “values system” to a belief that something is terribly wrong with the world. The system has to be smashed because everything is going to hell. Why?
Really, why? So far as I can see, the world is better for most people than it has ever been, and it continues to get better. Why the rage, that insistence on blowing everything up? It isn't just MAGA people, it's anarchists and communists and cultural leftists who think that everything has to be decolonized. You no doubt remember all the people who supported Bernie but then switched to Trump; they said that the world needs a dramatic shake-up, and they don't much care who does it so long as it gets done.
I remember a conversation I had with my sons a few years ago, when they were really down on America. I said, if you think our country is collapsing, you should go to Venezuela and see what that really looks like.
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It's really agonizing watching so many American commenters recognize and point out laundry lists of textbook Fascist attributes among the Trumpists, and yet despite their insight they still can't (or perhaps won't) put two and two together and come to the realization (or make the honest admission) that what we are talking about actually is a modern form of Fascism.
"Really, why? So far as I can see, the world is better for most people than it has ever been, and it continues to get better. Why the rage, that insistence on blowing everything up?"
FWIW, it seems to me the beginning of understanding would, at least in part, lie with what you said under the heading "inflation" in your post titled "Why Trump Won." Confronted with a problem such as the one you describe, the observer shouldn't dwell on how objectively wrong a feeling is, but try to figure out why/how their "objective" data is insufficient or incomplete.
I blame superhero movies and the engrittyfication of everything.
@Anonymous
I was just thinking something somewhat similar, in the sense that when folks claim to want to "burn it all down," what many of them seem to mean is that they want public drama in which people they identify with exercise initiative. This is why Trump's ability to create and maintain drama is so important. E.g., for many, executing drug traffickers, imposing enormous tariffs, or leaving NATO may be less important than creating repeated drama around the threat of doing it.
Perhaps one can see the same in zombie and similar apocalypse-survivor fantasies. The main characters may be afraid and pursued, but they exercise dramatic initiative as well, and usually have powerful plot-armor to boot.
Indeed, I wonder if "public drama in which people one identifies with exercise initiative" may be a defining element of human political life as such.
If being part of public drama and taking initiative were a "defining" element, I think we'd have far higher turnout rates.
@Verloren
On the contrary, it could be taken as a sign that non-voters do not identify with the sorts of leaders or styles of public drama that they believe themselves to be offered.
In my observations, most people across the globe (and human history) just want the same few things - stability, prosperity, and to be left alone and not have to think too hard about things.
If things are bad, people get upset and want to rock the boat. But when things are good, you see a lot less desire for drama.
Look at mainstream America in the 1950s - people had their fill of drama in the war, and now they just wanted to settle in and live quiet, prosperous American lives. If you were a white suburban middle-class citizen, you wanted nothing to do with public drama - or at least, not domestic drama. Of course you hated the Russians and the Chinese, but you trusted that the fine men in government (largely regardless of party affiliation) were all doing their part to handle the foreign threats, and therefor the only drama mainstream Americans bothered about was local gossip and keeping up with the Joneses. Things would change in time, with overseas military failures in Korea and Vietnam, and oil crises, and counter-cultural unrest building, and the Civil Rights movement boiling over, but still...
Compare also to the 1990s, and the euphoric haze of the aftermath of the Cold War. For a while there, the biggest source of public drama we could come up with was Clinton getting caught having an affair and then (more importantly to society at the time) lying about it. Sure, there were things happening around the world that we paid attention to, like the invasion of Kuwait, and the Kosovo War, and so on - but we weren't at each other's throats about any of it, weren't embroiled in drama over it. In fact, in cases like Desert Storm, it was actually unifying for us, because we could march the troops in and achieve a patriotic victory that made everyone feel good. It took 9/11 (and our subsequent failure to recover from it) for us to start seriously fracturing and infighting again...
People generally don't want to be involved in public drama unless they're dissatisfied. Maybe that means most people are actually "apolitical"? That might work with your phrasing of "a defining element of human political life"...
...but personally, I think apathy is itself a kind of political view. If you don't care enough about the current system to want to preserve it against change, I'd say that just means the status quo is not your political preference - not that you lack a preference entirely.
All fair enough. I would emphasize that I consciously chose the article "a" in "a defining element," because I'm always cautious and skeptical about reducing anything human to one factor. Human desires are often, perhaps usually, contradictory and ambivalent, both between and within individuals. Following your lead, perhaps one should say that a desire to escape drama is as defining as the desire to have it (desiring something, and then experiencing a sort of revulsion once one has it, is a common trope, after all). (Also, of course, this continuum does not exhaust the range of important elements--like, say, power in a very raw sense.)
I suspect if one studied this closely, one would find a range of human patterns, including at either extreme people who really want to escape drama all the time, and those who need it as often as possible--with a wide range of complex and varying combinations in between.
On the 90s specifically, I don't disagree with you, but John Ganz's book, When the Clock Broke, offers an interesting alternate view. It's a good listen on Audible.
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