MAGA is Failing Because It's Succeeding
Using politics to make the culture worse (and hurt a few people along the way).
I’ve had a horrible cold for the past week, which has made processing recent events in DC even more disorienting and surreal than it was already bound to be.
I went to bed congested and woke up to the US feuding with Canada. Just kidding, we’ve actually moved on to turning the Gaza Strip into beachside condos. The day before, we shuttered USAID. Also, it wasn’t just the NyQuil talking — a barely-legal lackey named “Big Balls” really has infiltrated the Treasury payments system, and J.D. Vance is defending him despite his racist tweets. All of this, improbably, is in support of an America First agenda. Ignore that none of these things hang together in any sensible way.
Or, maybe they do. Last week,
published a piece entitled “Trumpian policy as cultural policy.” In it, he explains that this blizzard of executive orders and policy decisions is not aimed at implementing useful policy changes so much as it’s aimed at changing the cultural conversation. Think about it like this:Imagine you started a political revolution and asked the simple question “does this policy change reinforce or overturn our basic cultural messages?” Every time the policy or policy debate pushes culture in what you think is the right direction, just do it. Do it in the view that the cultural factors will, over some time horizon, surpass everything else in import. […]
You will not win all of these cultural debates, but you will control the ideological agenda … Your opponents will be dispirited and disorganized, and yes that does describe the Democrats today. Then just keep on going. In the long run, you may end up “owning” far more of the culture than you suspected was possible.
Viewed through this lens, the chaos of the last week makes more sense. That is the endgame: changing the mood of this place we call the USA. Fighting with Canada isn’t about cutting down the minuscule amount of fentanyl that slips across the Northern border, it’s about bullying a weaker country to show off our might. The Vice President didn’t lobby for that racist coder because a 25-year-old’s bureaucratic expertise was desperately needed, the purpose was to make it clear that the new administration feels that racist jokes are fine. And “cutting waste” was and has almost always been a shibboleth. Killing USAID serves no practical purpose to this end (foreign aid is about 1% of the budget); the point of doing it is to show that the Trump administration is willing to break things, to be cruel to those it sees as its opposition, and to refuse to be held to its past commitments or moral codes.
The resulting chaos of this mode of politics has been insane and darkly fascinating to watch — “truly awesome,” as Damir put it last week. Political scientists will chew on this moment for decades. Legal pundits across the political spectrum are theorizing so fast that steam is rising from their keyboards. Is it a constitutional crisis? Now? What about now?
But putting a legal pin in the thing — or coining a new phrase to describe it, or IDing the political philosopher whose ideas are being taken up — seems less valuable, right now, morally, than mitigating that damage as best one can.
After all, the fired federal employees aren’t just the faceless avatars of a distant bureaucracy. They’re real people: men and women with kids, bills, a mortgage, and now a sense of fear and loss. (Some of them worked for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — they’re are the people who protected you from being scammed by your bank. Hope you’re ready to take that on yourself.)
Humanitarian aid can’t just be turned on and off like some sort of light switch. While the GOP allows Trump to “pause” USAID in order to send the message that kindness is for suckers, people will die. In South Africa alone, shutting down PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) is expected to result in the birth of 230 H.I.V.-positive babies per day.
We don’t have to care about them, is the argument of many avatars of the New Right (some of who, despite constantly making arguments based in some version of Christianity, seem oddly indifferent to taking up moral responsibilities for those outside the GOP). “So far,”
writes, “the GOP’s activist base feels no danger, only joy.”It’s no doubt dizzying and exciting — for that base, for the proponents of the “policy as culture” blitz, and for the cooly curious who get to witness “history” happening in real time. But it isn’t worth it.
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I imagine the strongest temptations among Democrats are either to respond to every outrageous move, or wait for Trumpism to hurt the economy and public health and safety so they can win in 2026 and 2028. Both would be a mistake. They’ll need their own, politically appealing plans to address Americans’ worries about disorder, broken government, an unfair economy, etc., in tandem with shining lights on the damage Trump is doing.
I am not aware of *any* coherent defense of shutting down USAID that points to specific programs and explains why they should have been shut down. In an ideal world, they would explain why those specific programs justify shutting down the whole organization by pointing out how they are fraudulent, or are unusually bad in comparison to other government programs. That is, the explanation would not just be: "I don't like these programs."
Every time I've seen someone defend the shutting down of USAID they resort to conclusory statements that are ungrounded in evidence.
Generalizations and innuendo are unavoidable in conversations on social media. But usually someone can find an article somewhere that is tightly argued and refers to specific, empirical facts that justifies, in some sense, the generalizations asserted by others. In this particular case, I haven't been able to find it.
I'm not a defender of government censorship. I've written several posts on my Substack, Metaconcepts, problematizing "misinformation" and its use by some institutions to bludgeon people.
I would be happy to read a strong argument for the closing of USAID, even if I ultimately disagreed with it. I change my mind often.
But it's more than strange to hear people justify its closing because they are mad about Fauci and covid censorship. It's also strange that they think USAID-style programs in foreign governments are somehow "autocratic" but Trump's bald threats are not. That "soft power" based in persuasion and gifts is somehow "sinister" but Trump's whims are not.
The reasoning on the right more and more *does* seem to follow guilt-by-association logic. Precisely the thing they complained about during peak "wokeness" with its threats of cancellation. A pessimist would say they are all totally deranged.