MAGA Matters! – Maverick Philosopher

What Does Populism Threaten?

Populism is a threat to a leftist internationalism that rejects national borders and denies to nations the right to preserve their cultures, the right to stop illegal immigration, and the right to select those immigrants who are most likely to be a net asset to the host country, and most likely to assimilate. There needn’t be anything white supremacist or white nationalist about populism. (By the way, white supremacism and white nationalism are plainly different: a white nationalist needn’t be a white supremacist.) And of course there needn’t be anything racist or xenophobic or bigoted about either nationalism or populism.

Populism in the Trumpian style is not a threat to liberal democracy as the Founders envisioned it, but a threat to the leftist internationalism I have just limned, an internationalism which contemporary ‘liberals’ confuse with the liberal democracy of the Founders. It is also quite telling that these ‘liberals’ constantly use the word ‘democracy’ as if it is something wonderful indeed, but they almost never mention that the USA is not a democracy but a constitutionally-based republic that allows for significant democratic input. Our republic has a stiff backbone of core principles and meta-principles that are not up for democratic grabs, or at least are not up for easy grabs: the Constitution can be amended but it is not easy, nor should it be.

Those who think that pure democracy democracy is a wonderful thing ought to realize that Sharia can be installed democratically. This is underway in Belgium and in other countries. Brussels could be Muslim within 20 years. Let enough Muslims infiltrate and then they will decide who ‘the people’ are and who are not ‘the people.’ The native Belgians will then have been displaced. Ain’t democracy wonderful?

Let enough illegal aliens flood in, give them the vote, and they may decide to do away with the distinction between legal and illegal immigration as well as the one between immigration and emigration. Ever wonder why lefties like the word ‘migrant?’ It manages to elide both distinctions in one fell swoop.

There cannot be social harmony without a raft of shared assumptions and values, not to mention a shared language. There is need of “cultural coherence.” A felicitous phrase, that. Our open, tolerant, Enlightenment culture cannot cohere and survive if Sharia-supporting Muslims are allowed to immigrate. For their ultimate goal is not to assimilate to our ways, but to impose their ways on us, eventually replacing us.

Can you show me I’m wrong?

The Passing Scene: Notes Political and Martial

If our geo-political adversaries were isolationist, we could be too. But they are not. Ergo, etc. Or is this the fallacy of Denying the Antecedent?

You may seek to withdraw from politics, but it won’t return the favor. So a certain measured engagement is unavoidable out of self-interest if for no other reason. Retreat routes include suicide, burying oneself in a monastery, and losing oneself in the private life of bourgeois self-indulgence. None of them can be recommended without reservation, but of the three the monastic route is the best. There are of course other ways of avoiding the political.

It is reasonable to hold that the power stations and other infrastructure of a rogue state that exports terror and credibly threatens to nuke the USA and Israel are legitimate military targets, despite their civilian use. But then the same goes for oil refineries, sewage disposal plants, reservoirs and water delivery systems, roads, and so on. All of these elements of infrastructure are necessary for the health and safety of the civilian population many of whom oppose the rogue regime and play no role at all in supplying them with materiel. This fact puts serious pressure on the distinction between combatants and noncombatants, and the related judgment that it is immoral always and everywhere to target noncombatants, a judgment one would surely like to uphold.

Of course, noncombatants are humans whereas the elements of infrastructure are not. But destroy enough of that infrastructure and you seriously harm and eventually bring about the death of the majority of noncombatants. And that amounts, albeit indirectly, to a targeting of noncombatants. The attackers know, after all, what the likely consequences of their actions will be.

But if we re-think the natural but facile combatant-noncombatant distinction along the foregoing lines, where will that lead us? Not to a total collapse of the distinction, but to its blurring, a blurring so messy as to make impossible any assured judgments in these matters.

One thing is clear. The current pope, Leo the XIVth, is a simple-minded fellow as he demonstrates here.

Communism and Islamism have in common their expansionism and totalitarianism. They are as little content to stay within their geographical boundaries as they are to allow a private life for those under their control. A sane political ideology stands for the rights of segregation and self-determination.

Another thing these disastrous ideologies share is contempt for truth.

Trump versus Prevost: Crudity versus Blather

Donald J. Trump issued a disgusting tweet on Easter Sunday morning. I commented on it in Political Polarization in the Age of Trump. But I fail to see the value of Pope Leo’s pious performative Easter Sunday response.

The pope continued with words directed at the current conflict in the Middle East: “The peace that Jesus gives us is not merely the silence of weapons, but the peace that touches and transforms the heart of each one of us!… Let those who have weapons lay them down!

If you threw down your weapons before Hitler, he would not be moved to do likewise, but kill you on the spot on the ground that you had thereby demonstrated your physiological decadence and unfitness for life in the only world there is. Something very similar holds for the Muslim thugs of Iran. It is utter folly to project into others one’s own values and attitudes, as if we are all the same ‘deep down’ or all ‘really want the same things.’ Bellicosity is hard-wired into some. Thugs, whether born that way or socialized into it, have no regard for your tender-hearted love of humanity.

The Islamo-theocrats have vowed to destroy Judeo-Christian civilization, and have proven their intent through countless horrific acts over many years. They cannot be reached by Prevostian pieties. And there is no small hypocrisy in Leo’s decidedly unleonine mouthings. Would he not call upon the armed might of the Italian state to crush any jihadis who descended on Vatican City to destroy its people and its treasures? Would he allow their slaughter and its destruction?

I discuss the problem in detail in Morality Private and Public. The essay concludes with some penetrating observations of Hannah Arendt from “Truth and Politics” in Between Past and Future, Penguin 1968, p. 245:

The disastrous consequences for any community that began in all earnest to follow ethical precepts derived from man in the singular — be they Socratic or Platonic or Christian — have been frequently pointed out. Long before Machiavelli recommended protecting the political realm against the undiluted principles of the Christian faith (those who refuse to resist evil permit the wicked “to do as much evil as they please”), Aristotle warned against giving philosophers any say in political matters. (Men who for professional reasons must be so unconcerned with “what is good for themselves” cannot very well be trusted with what is good for others, and least of all with the “common good,” the down-to-earth interests of the community.) [Arendt cites Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, and in particular 1140b9 and 1141b4.]

There is a tension between man qua philosopher or Christian and man qua citizen. As a philosopher and a Christian, I am concerned with my soul, with its integrity, purity, salvation. I take very seriously indeed the Socratic “Better to suffer wrong than to do it” and the Christian “Resist not the evildoer.” But as a citizen I must be concerned not only with my own well-being but also with the public welfare. This is true a fortiori of public officials and people in a position to influence public opinion. So, as Arendt points out, the Socratic and Christian admonitions are not applicable in the public sphere.

What is applicable to me in the singular, as this existing individual concerned with the welfare of his immortal soul over that of his perishable body, is not applicable to me as a citizen. As a citizen, I cannot unrestrictedly “welcome the stranger” as the New Testament enjoins, the stranger who violates the laws of my country, a stranger who may be a terrorist or a drug smuggler or a human trafficker or a carrier of a deadly disease or a person who has no respect for the traditions of the country he invades; I must not aid and abet his law-breaking. I must be concerned with public order and the very conditions that make the philosophical and Christian life possible in the first place. If I were to aid and abet the stranger’s lawbreaking, I would not be “rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.”

Indeed, the Caesar verse provides a scriptural basis for Church-State separation and indirectly exposes the fallacy of the Catholic bishops and others who seek to inject a particular personal morality into the public sphere.

Trump, Hormuz, and the End of the Free Ride: ‘Hegelian’ Geo-Pol Analysis

The following short piece by James E. Thorne will interest my geo-political commenters, Soriano and Caiati. HT: Anthony Flood.

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Trump, Hormuz and the End of the Free Ride For half a century, Western strategists have known that the Strait of Hormuz is the acute point where energy, sea power and political will intersect. That knowledge is not in dispute. What is new in this war with Iran is that the United States, under Donald Trump, has chosen not to rush to “solve” the problem. In Hegelian terms, he is refusing an easy synthesis in order to force the underlying contradiction to the surface. The old thesis was simple: the US guarantees open sea lanes in the Gulf, and everyone else structures their economies and politics around that free insurance. Europe and the UK embraced ambitious green policies, ran down hard‑power capabilities and lectured Washington on multilateral virtue, secure in the assumption that American carriers would always appear off Hormuz. The political class behaved as if the American security guarantee were a law of nature, not a contingent choice. Their conduct today is closer to Chamberlain than Churchill: temporising, issuing statements, hoping the storm will pass without a fundamental reordering of their responsibilities. Trump’s antithesis is to withhold the automatic guarantee at the moment of maximum stress. Militarily, the US can break Iran’s residual ability to contest the Strait; that is not the binding constraint. The point is to delay that act. By allowing a closure or semi‑closure to bite, Trump ensures that the immediate pain is concentrated in exactly the jurisdictions that have most conspicuously free‑ridden on US power: the EU and the UK. Their industries, consumers and energy‑transition assumptions are exposed.

Continue reading “Trump, Hormuz, and the End of the Free Ride: ‘Hegelian’ Geo-Pol Analysis”

Trump’s Demand for Unconditional Surrender

Edward Feser at X:

Unbelievably reckless and immoral. As the Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe warned, the demand for unconditional surrender is a recipe for increasing rather than decreasing the tenacity of an enemy’s resistance, which will in turn tempt us to deploy ever more barbaric methods of warfare yielding ever higher numbers of civilian casualties. This was what led to the abominations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People say “If we hadn’t done that, the invasion of Japan would have been a bloodbath.” But that presupposes that an invasion aimed at securing unconditional surrender was necessary and justifiable in the first place, which it was not. That an enemy nation has done wrong does not entail a right to demand that it put itself totally under our control . . . .

Feser, drawing upon Anscombe, is making an important point. If the adversary in an armed conflict acquiesces in the demand for unconditional surrender, the adversary not only surrenders but does so in such a way as to permit the enemy to do whatever it wants to the subjugated entity, including slaughtering the latter’s entire population. This is a purely conceptual point that merely unpacks the meaning of ‘unconditional surrender.’ Call it P1.

But the leaders of no entity on the losing side of an armed conflict, least of all the Islamist entity, will agree to that, assuming that they are sane and not suicidal. Call this point P2. And so the likely, but not inevitable, effect of the demand for unconditional surrender will be to increase the tenacity of the losing entity’s resistance in almost every conceivable case. Call this proposition P3. So far, so good. Feser is on solid ground, and I agree.

But there is no necessity that the party making the demand for unconditional surrender will go on to commit atrocities to enforce compliance with the demand for unconditional surrender. In fact, the U.S. demand for U.S. — pun intended — might well be a blustery move, a feint, on Trump’s part as one might expect from such a macher who is also notoriously sloppy in his use of words. The man is a crafty transactional pragmatist who scorns the typical political and diplomatic protocols and who likes outsmarting and out-psyching his enemies.

So why is the demand for unconditional surrender immoral? How does one validly move from the conjunction of P1 and P2 and P3 to the conclusion that the demand for unconditional surrender is immoral, as Feser claims it is?

Am I missing something? (I wouldn’t put it past myself.)

Michael Anton Reviews Laura K. Field’s FURIOUS MINDS

A contribution to the understanding of TDS.

The shock of the 2016 election that first propelled Donald Trump to the White House produced a few good-faith attempts in the prestige press to understand the president’s supporters, especially among the white working class. Those days, fleeting as they were, are far behind us now. Laura K. Field’s Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is less a book than the cornerstone of an information operation. It is intended to do two things: discredit any attempt to find anything rational or worthy in Trump’s political program, and ostracize as racist psychopaths anyone who dares try.

The Role of Politics in the Life of a Leftist

A friend of mine is the principal partner in an accounting firm. He told me that when Trump won in 2024, one of the female CPAs in the firm, a Democrat but very good at her job, was so distraught that she had to take leave time. We both found this passing strange*: had Trump lost, my conservative friend and I would not have been pleased, but we would have taken it in stride. The CPA’s behavior is not atypical. We all know lefties who reacted similarly. Why is this? Here’s my theory.

Although leftism is not a religion, pace Dennis Prager and others who do not share my concern for precision in the use of words, it substitutes for religion in the wholly secular psychic economy of leftists. Because leftist politics is the most important thing in their lives, their “ultimate concern” to borrow a phrase from Paul Tillich, in the way that religion is the most important thing in the lives of the truly religious, leftists freak out when their candidates lose. The feel that they are losing everything, or at least the most important thing. If the very meaning of your life is wrapped up in ‘progressive’ politics, and an uncouth America-first braggart of a billionaire, a crude unclubbable gate-crasher, a crass self-promoter, a man with no class, wins all seven swing states and the popular vote to boot, your world comes crashing down. The degree of freak-out and world-collapse will of course vary from individual to individual. An extreme case is that of Rosie O’Donnell who self-deported to the Emerald Isle where she spends her days obsessing over the Orange Man. Poor Rosie thought the grass would be greener there; it turns out, however, that the legal weed she enjoyed in LaLaLand (Los Angeles) was not to be had in Ireland. “In 2008, O’Donnell said that she was not an alcoholic, and had temporarily given up alcohol to lose weight. She wrote on her blog: “‘Cause I was drinking too much, ’cause I didn’t want to any more, ’cause it is hard to lose weight when drinking, ’cause I can never have only one.”^[177] She started drinking again following President Trump’s first election victory in 2016, revealing, “I was very, very depressed. I was overeating. I was overdrinking … I was so depressed.”^[178]

My theory also helps explain why leftists are so vehement and unhinged (as witness Robert de Niro’s shameless histrionics) in their blind hatred of Trump. If politics is (or rather functions as) your religion, then, since religion presents to us saintly and divine beings such as Jesus Christ meek and mild*** for emulation, lefties thoughtlessly suppose that political figures should satisfy a similar need: they should be polite, conventionally nice people that our sons and daughter should be able to admire and look up to. Leftists, most of then anyway, want a POTUS who plays a quasi-religious role, something like a Sunday school teacher. (And not just leftists; Never-Trumpers do as well.) Now the last such Sunday-school POTUS was James Earl Carter, and you recall what a disaster he was. A good man, a nice man, but a lousy POTUS. Wasn’t he involved hands-on with Habitat for Humanity? Can you imagine Trump being so involved? He’s a builder, but not that kind of builder.

In sum, two main interconnected points:

A. For the secular left — and most leftists are secularists — politics plays in their lives the all-important roles that religion plays in the lives of the truly religious. This explains why they get so excited about politics and why they are so crushed when their ‘progressivism’ suffers setbacks.

B. And because progressive politics is (or rather functions as) their religion, lefties look to politics to satisfy their need for people to look up to and emulate. Since Trump doesn’t fill the bill, they hate him mindlessly and won’t give him credit for the numerous great things he has done for the USA and indeed the whole world, where Midnight Hammer is an example of the latter. He’s not a ‘nice man’ by cat lady standards. He doesn’t look into the camera and smile like the fraudulent and phony Joey B or clown around like Kamala. He scowls. I call it the Scowl of Minerva.

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* It’s an ersatz or substitute religion, where ‘ersatz’ and ‘substitute’ function as alienans adjectives. See here for more on such adjectives.

** The phrase “passing strange” originates from William Shakespeare’s Othello, where Desdemona describes Othello’s dramatic war stories as “strange, passing strange,” meaning extremely strange or very unusual. In Early Modern English, “passing” functioned as an intensifier, equivalent to “exceedingly.” [AI-generated]

*** Agnus dei qui tollit peccata mundi. The lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Lambs are meek and mild.

Hitler or Caesar? William Shakespeare on Donald J. Trump

Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene II (emphases added)

William Shakespeare

1564 – 1616

Cassius speaks to Brutus

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus, and we petty men
Walk under his huge legs and peep about
To find ourselves dishonorable graves.
Men at some time are masters of their fates.
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
“Brutus” and “Caesar”—what should be in that “Caesar”?
Why should that name be sounded more than yours?
Write them together, yours is as fair a name;
Sound them, it doth become the mouth as well;
Weigh them, it is as heavy; conjure with ’em,
“Brutus” will start a spirit as soon as “Caesar.”
Now, in the names of all the gods at once,
Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed
That he is grown so great? Age, thou art shamed!
Rome, thou hast lost the breed of noble bloods!
When could they say, till now, that talked of Rome,
That her wide walks encompassed but one man?
Now is it Rome indeed, and room enough
When there is in it but only one man.
O, you and I have heard our fathers say
There was a Brutus once that would have brooked
Th’ eternal devil to keep his state in Rome
As easily as a king.

But: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” Proverbs, 16:18. May the Lord spare him Caesar’s fate. “Yon Cassius hath a lean and hungry look.”

His enemies are coming around, albeit partially and grudgingly. Are we mortals too much impressed by success and power? But so far, so good. Can you imagine any Democrat, let alone the foolish Kamala Harris standing up to alpha males such as Xi and Putin? Politics is not performative but practical: not a matter of perfect versus imperfect, but of better versus worse. He who lets the best become the enemy of the good will get neither.

Age, thou art shamed! Old age or this historical period? Both?

That silly goose Nancy Pelosi foolishly opined that Joey Biden is Mt. Rushmore material. No Nancy, but Trump is. Third in line behind Washington and Lincoln as historian Newt Gingrich has plausibly opined. But time will tell.

The Hegseth Correction

Was Secretary of War Hegseth’s address to the generals a bit OTT? Perhaps. But that is in the nature of a correction. The military had gone off the rails into wokery and they needed to be brought back on track. Hegseth did the job admirably. But a certain do-nothing, yap-and-scribble Beltway gal found fault. Well, look in the mirror: what did you do to stop the slide of the USA into the abyss? Trump’s traction is largely a function of pseudo-con inaction. So blame yourself for any excesses.

Is Flag Burning Speech?

In the 1989 case “Texas v. Johnson,” SCOTUS handed down a 5-4 ruling according to which flag burning was a form of speech protected by the First Amendment. Now if you read the amendment you will find no reference to flag burning. The subsumption of flag burning under protected speech required interpretation and argument and a vote among the justices. The 5-4 vote could easily have gone the other way, and arguably should have.

President Trump’s recent Executive Order has set things right:

Notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s rulings on First Amendment protections, the Court has never held that American Flag desecration conducted in a manner that is likely to incite imminent lawless action or that is an action amounting to “fighting words” is constitutionally protected. See Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397, 408-10 (1989).

The bit about ‘fighting words’ invites commentary.

Ought flag burning come under the rubric of protected speech? Logically prior question: Is it speech at all? What if I make some such rude gesture in your face as ‘giving you the finger.’ Is that speech? It is a bit of behavior, no doubt, but there is nothing verbal about it. So consider ‘Fuck you!’ which is verbal. If it counts as speech, I would like to know what proposition it expresses. The content of an assertive utterance is a proposition. Propositions are either true or false. ‘Fuck you!’ is neither true nor false; so it does not express a proposition. It expresses an attitude of disdain, disgust, hatred, contempt, bellicosity. Likewise for the corresponding gesture with the middle finger. The same goes for the burning of a flag. If someone burns a flag, I would like to know what proposition the person is expressing. There isn’t one, or at least there isn’t one that transcends the merely biographical. “I hate the nation this symbol stands for!” Say that and you are merely emoting.

The Founders were interested in protecting reasoned dissent about matters of common interest; the typical act of flag burning by the typical flag burner does not rise to that level. To have reasoned dissent there has to be some proposition that one is dissenting from and some counter-proposition that one is advancing, and one’s performance has to make more or less clear what those propositions are. I think one ought to be skeptical of arguments that try to subsume gestures and physical actions under speech. Actually, I am more than skeptical: I am strongly inclined to deny any such subsumption.

My point, then, is that since flag burning is not speech, it is not protected speech. Of course, it does not follow that it is not in many cases an illegal act.

Am I suggesting that there should be a flag burning amendment to the U. S. constitution? No. Let the states and the localities decide what to do with those who desecrate the flag. Let’s consider some examples.

A man buys an American flag and burns it in his fireplace. Nothing illegal here.. He is simply disposing of a piece of private property in a safe manner. That is his right. The symbol is not the symbolized. Destruction of the former does not affect the latter. The spirit of the nation and its laws is not somehow incarnated in the piece of cloth, any more than the Word of God is incarnated in a copy of the Bible. (The final clause of the preceding sentence might ‘ignite’ some interesting discussions!)
Someone steals or desecrates the flag I am flying on my property. That illegal act comes under local laws.
Someone burns a flag in a tinder-dry wilderness area. That too comes under existing local and federal laws.
Someone steals or desecrates an American flag on display at a state or federal facility. That also comes under existing laws.
Someone burns a flag in the presence of others in a public place in a manner that is likely to incite imminent violence. Here is where Trump’s EO applies. We must not tolerate the incitement of violence by speech — which I have argued flag burning is not — or by such nonverbal behavior as flag burning.

Sartorial Incongruity and TDS

There’s President Trump in his expensive bespoke suit with a ridiculous red cap on his head, a “prole cap” — one size fits all! — emblazoned with “Trump was right about everything.” Gaucherie, braggadocio, exaggeration. Lefties and never-Trumping righties are ‘triggered,’ albeit in different ways, by these low-class characteristics and hate him in consequence. Their mindless hatred blinds them to the great things Mr. Trump has done for the USA and the world. Wittingly or unwittingly he drives our political enemies crazy while we of the Coalition of the Sane and the Reasonable enjoy the show. You won’t find TDS in the DSM, but it is undeniably real. How else do you explain the puerile histrionics of “Tampon Tim” Walz and the rest of his clownish colleagues?

Let me mention just two great things Trump has accomplished. He sealed the U. S. border and he set back the Iranian nuclear program for years to come. Both of these accomplishments, neither of which any Democrat could pull off, have benefited both us and the world. How does the securing of our borders benefit the world? It should be obvious: the survival of Western civilization, resting as it does on two main pillars, one Judeo-Christian, the other Graeco-Roman, depends on the USA. If we fall, it falls. No other Anglospheric nation is up to the job. The mother country, in particular, is fast becoming a woke joke.

Left and Right Opposition to Trump

The Left’s opposition to Trump is at bottom opposition to our system of government. Trump stands for the preservation of our republican form of government; the Left stands for its “fundamental transformation” (Obama), which is to say, its abolition. The never-trumping Right’s opposition to Trump is mainly to the man himself and his style which at once mesmerizes and disgusts them, so much so, that they cannot see past his style to his substance, which is in no way radical but traditional, restorative, and commonsensical.

What Our National Survival Depends On

Our great founders understood that immigrants bring their culture with them, and that some cultures are toxic to our own. They understood that there can be no comity without commonality, that immigration without assimilation is a recipe for disaster, and that unity, not diversity, is the source of our strength.

As Alexander Hamilton warned, America’s survival depends on “the preservation of a national spirit and a national character.”

“To admit foreigners indiscriminately to the rights of citizens the moment they put foot in our country … would be nothing less, than to admit the Grecian Horse into the Citadel of our Liberty and Sovereignty.”

Thomas Jefferson likewise warned that immigrants “will bring with them the principles of the governments they leave, imbibed in their early youth,” and that, as a result, they “will infuse into [our legislation] their spirit, warp and bias its direction.” Jefferson recognized that a careless approach to immigration would eventually reshape America away from her founding character.

If Americans want America to survive, they must reclaim the moral clarity of the Founders and say, without apology, that not every idea deserves a seat at the table and not every person who wants to be in America deserves to be here.

The ‘Paranoid’ Dems: Is Trump’s D. C. ‘Takeover’ a Prelude to Something Worse?

You decide. If you want my opinion, Dementocrat 'paranoia' is but a manifestation of TDS. Never forget: our political enemies are ever at work bringing Trump's 'inner Hitler' to light.

Related: No Entity without Identity

Trump = Hitler

Addendum (8/22): Trump's One-Week D. C. Clean-Up. Does it show that the Dems are destroying their cities by choice? It may be like this: in their race-delusionality, they think that any crackdown on crime would be racist, and their greatest fear is to be called racists.

The Sam Tanenhaus Biography of William F. Buckley

I came across it at the local library but the sheer weight of the thing dissuaded me from checking it out. I borrowed Jake Tapper's light-weight (in both senses) Original Sin instead. I cannot recommend it. William Voegli's review of Tanenhaus, William F. Buckley and the Conservative Future, I can recommend. It raises the question: Is Donald Trump the political heir of National Review's founder?

Here are its final paragraphs. The bolded portions earn the coveted MavPhil plenary endorsement.

The relationship between Buckley and Trump is also contested among conservatives. For critics like Brookhiser and Will, Trump’s coarse manner is inseparable from the coarseness of his politics. Conservatism, they argue, must be reclaimed by men of character and intellect, like Buckley and Reagan. In his review of Buckley, Brookhiser calls Trump a “malignant clown,” whose prominence within conservatism is “our problem,” not Buckley’s fault.

There appears to be no clear solution to this problem, as restoring conservatism to its status quo ante-Trump grows increasingly implausible. And the awkward fact is that Trump, over one full term and the beginnings of another, has delivered on goals that conservatives had spent generations trying to achieve.

Consider affirmative action. Since Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 executive order made it integral to federal operations, six Republican presidents—Trump (as 45) among them—held the Oval Office for a combined 32 years without rescinding it, despite a steady drumbeat of conservative criticism. In 2025, Trump (as 47) finally signed an executive order nullifying Johnson’s. His action built on the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision declaring affirmative action unconstitutional in college admissions—a decision made possible by the three justices Trump appointed in his first term.

Those same three were part of the six-justice majority that year to overturn Roe v. Wade, which conservatives had denounced for nearly half a century with little effect. And while the game is not over, it exactly wrong in The Death of Conservatism. The good conservatives are the troublemakers: those who do not accept that it is indecent to disparage and impossible to reverse liberalism’s advances. The bad conservatives are the acquiescent ones, Goldberg’s Sherpas or Michael Anton’s Washington Generals, whose role in our politics is “to show up and lose.”

Trump 47 has already done more to defund public broadcasting and the Department of Education than any of his Republican predecessors—not to mention the conservative commentators who spent decades demanding just that.

The growing number of conservatives who are pro-Trump, or at least Trump-tolerant, think that Tanenhaus got it exactly wrong in The Death of Conservatism. The good conservatives are the troublemakers: those who do not accept that it is indecent to disparage and impossible to reverse liberalism’s advances. The bad conservatives are the acquiescent ones, Goldberg’s Sherpas or Michael Anton’s Washington Generals, whose role in our politics is “to show up and lose.”

In 1955, William F. Buckley launched National Review—and the conservative movement—with the famous declaration that the magazine “stands athwart history, yelling Stop.” Within conservatism, there has long been debate over whether the yelling is the point, decrying the demise of civic and social virtues too good to endure in this benighted world, or whether the real goal is to effect some stopping. Due to changes that Donald Trump both causes and reflects, the stoppers are now ascendant over the yellers. While Sam Tanenhaus disapproves of this shift, his imperfect but valuable biography does little to dispel the suspicion that William Buckley would have welcomed it.