The secret life of Trumpist intellectuals

Jon Chait touches on a key aspect of Trumpism, which is the apparently impossible demands that a personalist regime embodied in the person of Donald Trump puts on its potential intellectual defenders:

American society writ large remains free, despite Trump’s desire to stamp out dissent in the media. But the conservative subculture has become an internal North Korea.

Trump’s most outrageous innovation was dispensing with the pretense that he needed to provide reasons for his positions. The source for all of his claims was his own authority-he endlessly assured audiences that he knew more about anything than anybody (“Believe me”). Those who endorsed him-at first, mostly a motley collection of has-beens or outsiders-were winners. Anybody who challenged him was a loser whom Trump would dismiss, playground-style, as crazy, weak, sick, dumb, pathetic, a liar, a bimbo, a piggy. His greatest apostasy was not his rejection of any particular set of ideas, but his categorical rejection of the whole notion of ideas.

The Trump era, at its core, is the product of the replacement of thinking with propaganda. Trump demands a kind of mindless loyalty because he’s not only impulsive, inconsistent, and petty, but also a compulsive liar. In place of any pretense of using facts and logic to make public cases for his positions, he employs slander, abuse, and threats.

In theory, one could construct a coherent defense of Trump that acknowledged this, teasing apart the president’s substantive positions from his disordered public defense. In practice, this turns out to be impossible. There is no fixed definition of Trumpist policy that can be cleanly separated from the rhetoric used to sell it. The substance can change week to week, day to day, and the measure of its truth is always whatever Trump says at any given moment. You cannot defend a personalist regime without defending the person.

A kneejerk reaction among progressives is to claim that the whole concept of a Trumpist intellectual is a contradiction in terms. This I think is wrong, although Trump himself of course is the very furthest thing from an intellectual, and, as Jon points out, his substantive positions on all sorts of issues shift with Orwellian rapidity, depending on who is flattering or bribing him at that particular moment.

This constant flip-flopping is indeed a big problem for Trumpist intellectuals, analogous to the problems faced by communist intellectuals in the 1930s who needed to toe the ever-shifting “party line.” (1984 is among other things a satire of this).

But another related problem is that, to the extent that Trumpism/MAGA does have a core of more or less consistent ideas that go beyond the personal aggrandizement of Donald Trump’s wealth and power, those ideas are or at least were positions on the unacceptable fringes of American political thought. Which is to say that Trumpism represents a form of political radicalism within the context of what used to be thought of as the postwar political consensus in American politics.

The most interesting aspect of John Ganz’s When the Clock Broke is his detailed discussion of a pair of fringe intellectual figures from the 1980s and early 1990s, who after their deaths became the ideological godfathers of the Trumpist takeover of the Republican party. These are the self-described “paleo-libertarian” Murray Rothbard, and the white nationalist Sam Francis. (The term godfather here references that both Rothbard and Francis were big fans of the Mafia as a model of social organization, or rather of the idealized Mafia of the first two Coppola films, as contrasted with the far more realistic portrayal of mob life in Scorsese’s Goodfellas, which both of them disliked precisely for that reason).

Rothbard and Francis both spent their lives — they died in 1995 and 2005 respectively — on the margins of movement conservatism, always too radical for the Republican establishment, but developing almost cult-like followings among the hardcore reactionaries that would eventually form the MAGA base. Rothbard was an anarcho-capitalist and Francis was a white supremacist, and Ganz tells the fascinating story of how they ended up both reflecting and helping to bring about an alliance between these two strands of radical right-wing thought. Hence Rothbard’s coinage of the concept of paleo-conservatism, which was intended as basically a synthesis of Pat Buchanan-style reactionary Old Right America First ideology, and, speaking slightly anachronistically, the Silicon Valley authoritarianism of techie billionaires, led by people like Peter Thiel.

The core ideas Rothbard and Francis each either advanced themselves or were willing to ally with for pragmatic purposes were:

White supremacy

Anti-government libertarianism/anarchism

Reactionary patriarchy

Personalist authoritarianism

All these ideas, at the time that Ganz’s book focuses on — the early 1990s — were at least putatively considered at least highly problematic if not definitively beyond the pale in respectable conservative circles (The meteoric career of David Duke, which Ganz covers in detail, illustrates this well).

35 years later, they are all at the very core of Trumpism, which is one reason Ganz’s book is so valuable. It’s part of the roadmap of how we got from there to here.