RUTHFULLY YOURS

Anti-Trump conservatives struggle to interpret our current political moment. Some are the unfortunate victims of extreme cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome which, at this point, have permanently impaired their ability to perform political analysis. But there are others, still worth reading from time to time, who remain surprisingly blinkered by the stubborn march of history. These unfortunate conservatives seem unable or unwilling to acknowledge that the long twentieth century has come to an end. A new political analysis is needed for a moment altogether new.

Consider one scholar from whom I have learned much: Yuval Levin, who has in the past employed his background in political philosophy to explore the deep sources and undercurrents of contemporary politics. In 2014, he treated Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke as the distant founders of contemporary progressivism and conservatism, respectively. In 2016, he channeled Alexis de Tocqueville to diagnose the “fracturing of the American republic.” During the Age of Trump, he has written on the importance of renewing the fundamental institutions of American society and, most recently, on the prospects for a recovered constitutionalism to restore unity to the American polity despite our inevitable political disagreements.

For all his erudition, Levin seems unable to grasp the significance of the 2024 election. In a post-election essay for the Dispatch, he emphasizes “the continuity of our peculiar political era,” characterizing Trump’s victory as “a relatively narrow win owed almost entirely to negative polarization.” Levin dismisses the possibility that “Trump’s eccentric mix of interests and priorities” is “well aligned with the public’s hopes and fears.” In fact, he charges, “Most of what Trump himself is most eager to do, from mass deportations to steep tariffs, would likely prove fairly unpopular when actually put into practice.”

Levin also expresses a contemptuous lack of curiosity about “the motley crew surrounding Trump, whose political instincts add up to an especially incoherent jumble.” He specifically disparages Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for his alleged fixation on “tak[ing] fluoride out of our drinking water.” Levin concludes by insisting on the continued relevance of his own brand of conservatism: Trump’s “victory does not mean that Trumpian populism alone will now own the right for good.”

Levin may be wise to avoid making any sweeping prognostications in the immediate aftermath of the election. But he appears to dismiss his MAGA rivals as “incoherent” simply because they are his rivals. A more dispassionate analysis of Trump’s “motley crew” might conclude that Trump, pragmatic and civic-minded statesman that he is, is doing the old-fashioned work of coalition-building.

In 2016, Trump executed a partially successful hostile takeover of the Republican Party; the incompleteness of this takeover played a role in handicapping his first administration, staffed as it was with many old guard Republicans opposed to the MAGA agenda. This cycle, Trump has consolidated greater – though by no means total – control of the GOP, and in any case has never sought to impose ideological uniformity: hence, the presence of “dovish and hawkish, libertarian and activist, traditionalist and revolutionary, authoritarian and anti-establishment” elements in Trump’s team.

Further, in a move that would have earned any other political figure plaudits for “bipartisanship,” Trump has attracted moderate liberals to his coalition, notably RFK Jr. and Elon Musk — two independent-minded and ambitious men alienated by the Left’s stifling restrictions on speech, thought, and innovation and attracted to Trump’s new Right because of their own prior dedication to some aspect of American greatness they have discovered is compatible with the MAGA vision.

Trump’s interests and priorities in 2016 were certainly “eccentric,” as Levin says, in the literal sense: “out-of-the-center” of elite opinion, including its establishment conservative iteration. Even then, it was possible for perceptive observers to detect an emergent Trumpist “body of thought” that would put America First in trade, immigration, and foreign policy.

These remain important priorities for the second Trump administration, though perhaps not so exclusively Trumpist as they once were. As Matthew Schmitz observed on the eve of the election, Trump has made great progress in redefining the political mainstream for Republicans and Democrats alike. Schmitz details these victories in immigration and trade policy but notes that Trump’s most fundamental accomplishment has been to introduce “a change in the way political obligation is understood: It entails a clearer realization that it is permissible, and often essential, to give priority to one’s fellow citizens over those of other countries.”

This political axiom should never have been controversial in the first place. However blinkered our elites and academics may have become, any ordinary citizen understands that government should pursue the interests of its own citizens and community — to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” This also happens to be Aristotle’s criterion for good government: “Those constitutions that aim at the common advantage are in effect rightly framed in accordance with absolute justice, while those that aim at the rulers’ own advantage only are faulty, and are all of them deviations from the right constitutions.”

That it took a figure as disruptive and unorthodox as Donald Trump to remind our political class of this common sense understanding of good government is an indictment of our political and cultural elite and of the rigid ideological prescriptions that passed for sensible opinions in the pre-Trump era.

It is in this context that we should understand the larger trend of the last decade-plus, namely, the collapse of expert authority in multiple fields.

“Public health” experts beclowned themselves in their partisan, hysterical, illiberal, and criminal responses to the Covid virus, clearing the ground for the emergence of figures such as RFK Jr. and members of the broader Make America Healthy Again movement, who are focused not only on vaccines but on chronic disease, industrial food production, and similar ills afflicting the body politic.

The once-hegemonic foreign policy establishment that spent decades pouring out American blood and treasure in Afghanistan and the Middle East has been reduced to one faction among several in both parties.

Free-trade absolutists are increasingly blamed for the lousy harvests their post-Cold War policies have produced: a working class in desperate decline, a shrinking and ever-more-precarious middle class, a diminished American manufacturing sector, an empowered yet still-illiberal China.

In place of the once-ascendant globalist argument for maximal freedom of movement, the mass deportation of illegal immigrants has been revealed as the moderate, centrist position favored by the American people.

The list goes on.

In a panicked response to these and other crises of authority, legacy media, already disrupted by digital technology, have discredited themselves and the centralizing tendencies they embody. The 2024 campaign cycle was rightly dubbed the “podcast election,” and a growing portion of “the news” is now broken, dissected, and fact-checked in the freewheeling public square that is Elon Musk’s X. A critical mass of Americans — including some important elite class-traitors — who have revolted against our incompetent experts have rallied to Trump, the disruptor of the last age and inaugurator of the new; and the Democrat Party is quickly becoming the party of, by, and for the failing experts.