MAGA Apes the Nutty Left

It is a truism that certain genres of fiction require a momentary suspension of disbelief. Something a little like that is necessary to enjoy the humor of a Matt Lewis column in The Hill.

To be fair, the subject, conservatism, has lately become so inherently absurd that my experience of the column was more like laughing for a moment until I remembered something like Oh yeah. These are the people who were supposed to be putting a stop to the unchecked nuttiness of the left. And now they're in power.

Whether you laugh or not is immaterial: The column makes some very interesting observations and comes very close to naming a profound truth.

The column overall concludes that conservatism has ceased being -- I'd say pretending to be -- about "rule of law, limited government, personal responsibility, moral clarity, fiscal responsibility and family values" and is now "whatever Trump says" it is.

Correct.

But what is Trump saying it is?

That's the interesting part, and a few of the observations will help with that:

The same people who once decried progressive efforts to reinterpret the Constitution (i.e., a belief in a "living Constitution") now embrace the idea that laws are merely suggestions -- so long as the right person is breaking them.

Constitutional originalism? That was yesterday. Today, it's all about results. If the law is inconvenient, just ignore it -- or, better yet, redefine it. [bold added]

All about results? Let's call that extrajudicial activism.

And then we have:

Take, for example, MAGA's latest absurdity: attempting to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf of America." Is our nation's real problem bodies of water with insufficiently patriotic names?

But my real beef here isn't the name change itself; it's the administration's effort to compel media outlets like the Associated Press to use the term and to punish them for refusing.

Remember when conservatives railed against leftist speech policing? When progressives insisted on new pronouns, conservatives called it Orwellian. But now, when Trump is doing the dictating, suddenly it's just good old-fashioned patriotism. The same people who fought against the concept of "deadnaming," promoted by transgender rights activists, now demand that media outlets comply with their preferred nomenclature. [bold added]

If I didn't really need to cook up a parallel name for the Trumpists' scorn for rule of law, I don't at all need to do anything like that here.

One more:

And the best part is that his supporters eat it up. The same people who used to binge watch "Red Dawn" and dress up in tricorne hats and rant about government tyranny now worship a guy who cosplays as Napoleon and kisses up to Putin. [bold added]

Lewis concludes his piece: "After all, in today's GOP, it's not about what's true. It's about what's useful."

To which I'd say, Useful? For what?

Trump, like many or most Americans today, operates implicitly on the philosophy of Pragmatism, about which the philosopher Leonard Peikoff has said in part:

The two points central to the pragmatist ethics are: a formal rejection of all fixed standards -- and an unquestioning absorption of the prevailing standards. The same two points constitute the pragmatist approach to politics, which, developed most influentially by Dewey, became the philosophy of the Progressive movement in this country (and of most of its liberal descendants down to the present day).

Trumpists reject the (also Pragmatist) "left" on a superficial level while absorbing its cultural and political methods (See Trump being praised as an Alinskyite.) but absorbing the goals of the religious right (See also Alexandr Dugin.).

This is, in a nutshell, why moderates and classical liberals (who aren't in either cult-like MAGA or "Progressive" bubble) are seeing the current circus-like spectacle of MAGA -- supposedly rebelling against the nutty left -- acting just like it, but with different pet causes and -- dare I say? -- triggers.

-- CAV