Douthat’s Paradox – The Dispatch

For starters, while I think all of these directions are possible, I don’t think he even begins to cover all of the possible directions things can go. His first error is in assuming that all of these scenarios depend on “who inherits Trump’s mantle and which thinkers and interests have his successor’s ear.” 

Who says Trump’s mantle is inheritable? Who says there will be a single mantle to inherit? Who says it’s a mantle anyone will want?

To be fair, on that last question, I think it’s obvious there will be politicians who will want to inherit it, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility that they’d be idiots for wanting it.  

The idea that Trump’s “mantle” is like Thanos’ gauntlet and Trump’s powers will transfer with it strikes me as wildly improbable. The incoherence that Ross correctly identifies in Trump suggests—to me at least—that the MAGA right will splinter into different factions, much the way far more coherent Reaganism and Tea Partyism did. There will be a faction that loves the bombing of Iran and a wing that will hate it, some will think nationalizing industry is great and others will feel free to admit they hate it. And so on. 

Indeed, Trump’s “mantle” is a purely literary device, because in reality there’s no such thing. After all, Trump’s imitators have had a pretty spotty record, because when people try to act like Trump they look like idiots or goons. 

Party nominations are real things, though. And if J.D. Vance gets it, there will be factions that will not defer to him the way they defer to Trump. Ditto Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Ron DeSantis, et al. Why? Well, for starters, they’re not celebrities the way Trump is. They’re mere politicians. Relatedly—and more importantly—none of them can marshal primary voters to punish opponents the way Trump can, and that’s always been the core of his political power.

Ross also seems to assume that Trump will end his presidency relatively popular. Why? He didn’t the last time. But even if he is popular with the base, such popularity is not obviously transferable. Gerald Ford inherited Nixon’s mantle and the party nomination. Fat lot of good that did him. George H.W. Bush did likewise with Reagan. He was a one-termer. In both cases the party—and the right—went in very different directions from Nixon and Reagan.

This leads to a second objection. Again, Ross isn’t explicitly writing about the end of conservatism, but all of his scenarios for how Trump will be remembered are meditations on what will become of conservatism. And in all of those scenarios, what “the right” and “conservatism” mean are some kind of continuation of Trump(ism). By the way, these scare quotes will be explained a bit further on. 

Is there really no chance for a movement of repudiation of Trumpism? I’m not saying it’s likely, certainly not in 2028. But Nixon won a massive 49-state landslide in 1972. The next Republican president to get elected was more of a repudiation of Nixonism than a continuation of it. Ross assumes that whoever eventually wins Trump’s mantle will define the direction of the right. If they win, maybe they will, for a while. But what if Vance does everything Ross is describing—inherits the mantle, unites the MAGA tribes, etc.—and then loses? It’s not obvious to me the GOP will say “let’s run this unpopular play again in 2032.”

And, the Ford and Bush senior examples aren’t the only relevant examples. A lot of Democrats voted pretty quickly to limit the presidency to two terms after FDR violated that norm. They weren’t particularly worried that FDR’s superfans would punish them for it. 

After running through the different strands of Trump-infused nationalism that could define the right—a bit too antiseptically by my lights—Ross writes, “I have my own set of preferences”:  

And, I have to say, that sounds pretty good to me. But to my ear it doesn’t sound all that different from the traditional conservatism he suggests is over. Maybe he’s trying to sneak traditional conservatism into the “big tent” in mufti—put the Gipper in a MAGA hat and hope no one notices. Or perhaps he is claiming that what he calls his “fanciful” preferences amount to a categorical departure from traditional conservatism. Or maybe he’s saying something else. I really don’t know. 

But I have a larger, more philosophical—or philogical!—objection. Throughout Ross’ essay he suggests without outright declaring that “the right” and “conservatism” are synonymous with the Republican Party or whatever positions the self-described “right” and “conservatives” believe at any given moment. I get the editorial choice. It’s the way most political commentators—including me—talk about politics, for entirely obvious reasons. 

In philosophy there’s a thought experiment called the Ship of Theseus or Theseus’ Paradox. In brief: Imagine you have a ship and, over time, you replace all the parts, the wood, the sails, the cool giant steering wheel, etc. At the end of this process, is it still the same ship?

My favorite version of this is the old Harry Anderson bit where he takes out an axe as part of a juggling routine. He tells the audience that it’s the very axe that George Washington used to cut down the cherry tree. The blade broke and had to be replaced ages ago. And just last week he had to get a new handle, but in essence it’s Washington’s axe.

Sadly, it doesn’t work that way. Things don’t have essences. Washington’s “original” axe in Anderson’s telling isn’t original because material things don’t have souls. The Mona Lisa is priceless. A near-perfect copy can be bought in the Louvre’s gift shop.

I’d love to go down an ontological rabbit hole about essentialism and haecceitism, but we don’t have the time. 

But I need to make a subtle point. Abstract ideas have a fixed identity. The easiest place to illustrate this is math. Math is pure abstraction. The number 2 is the number 2 across space and time. (“What about quantum physics?” you ask. “Shut up,” I explain.) Numbers are what they are regardless of our perception or opinion. But abstract ideas do have analogues in the physical world. Math is useful because it lets us do all sorts of stuff in meat space, including counting: money, arrows in your quiver, how many chicken wings are left, etc. 

In human affairs, institutions form around abstractions. Or put another way, organizations are born from principles or ideas. The Republican Party, for instance, was founded around the principle(s) that dictated slavery was evil. The American Civil Liberties Union formed around the idea that civil liberties, especially free speech, were worth defending. But life happens. Slavery ended, so the GOP dedicated itself to other things, and for the last half-century or so the principles it organized around were the familiar list of philosophical priorities: limited government, free enterprise, etc. The ACLU still does some free speech stuff, but it succumbed to mission creep a long time ago. It recently joined in the defense of a ban on gas stoves in Oak Park, Illinois, because while you might have a right to protest, you don’t have a right to cook with gas. Or something. 

Think of it this way: You can claim that the ACLU “stands for” civil liberties (though I’d argue with you), but just because the ACLU wants to ban gas stoves doesn’t mean that a good civil libertarian has to take that position. Just because the Sierra Club decided to get into the anti-racism business didn’t mean environmentalists or conservationists had to support reparations for slavery or racial quotas at Harvard.

For decades, journalists have declared something or someone racist because the Southern Poverty Law Center says it is. A great many of the things the SPLC says are racist are indeed racist. But sometimes they just say things are racist because they don’t like them. The SPLC cannot make a thing racist simply by calling it racist. Either the thing itself is a racist or it’s not.

With that in mind, imagine that the GOP, under Donald Trump’s rule (and I do think, at least internally to the GOP, he’s more of a ruler than a leader) or under his successor’s rule, embraced socialism, imperialism, white identitarianism, and a kind of police-state authoritarianism that was contemptuous of civil liberties, federalism, checks and balances, and other constitutional precepts. I don’t think this requires a great leap of the imagination, more like a skip and a short jump of the imagination, if that. But let’s concede this is far-fetched for the sake of argument. Let’s also concede for our hypothetical that the GOP does all of this forthrightly, without any effort to obfuscate its new ideological commitments and priorities. 

I am open to the argument that we could still call this party “right-wing.” But is it still “conservative”? If so, what is it conserving?

My point isn’t to get into a huge terminological squabble. But as a matter of pure logic, it wouldn’t be free market, constitutionalist, etc. Why? Because in my hypothetical, it literally says it isn’t those things. And for my entire life those ideological commitments have been called, in America, “conservative.” 

Look, “Republican” is obviously just a brand name. The brand means whatever the brand is selling at the moment. If Coca-Cola decides to change the formula of Coke to orange flavor, when you order a Coke you’d get an orange-flavored beverage, regardless of personal opinions. Similarly, the “Orange Man” now rules the GOP, so the GOP is similarly orange-flavored. You get what you buy, and you get what you vote for.

“Right-wing” and “conservative” are trickier terms. Both are highly subjective and contextual. Right-wing and conservative mean different things in different places. A “conservative” in the Soviet Union was a doctrinaire Bolshevik and all that. Right-wing is even more fluid, often but not always simply meaning the opposite of the left. In much of Europe today, being (neo)liberal is considered right-wing. But these terms aren’t utterly plastic either. Once instantiated in a place, the label becomes wedded to some actual ideas and principled commitments. And some of those ideas and principles are abstract ideals that are timeless and universal.

Forget what it means to be a conservative or even a right-winger. Think of what it means to be “free market.” There’s an abstract idea that is not subjective or contextual in there. The meaning of free market is tethered to definitions outside of ourselves and the maneuverings of politicians. Over the last 300 years of Western history, being in favor of the free market has been seen as left-wing, right-wing, progressive, or conservative. But the meaning of free market itself has (largely) held constant. Like the number 2, there are real-world benchmarks for verifying how much the physical conforms with the abstract. Is there one more beer than 1 but one less than 3? If so, you have two beers. 

There are similar, though not as simple, ways of testing whether something is free-market. I won’t run through all of them. Instead, I’ll just say that there’s an Aristotelian term for politicians or intellectuals who want to nationalize industry, fix prices, subsidize politically favored industries and punish disfavored ones, yet still describe themselves as defenders of the free market: “big fat liars.”

My disagreement with Ross here is very subtle but important. Analytically, he makes many fine points—or raises many fine questions—but the underlying premise is that if the new right succeeds and simply becomes “the right,” then being “on the right” means agreeing with—take your pick—Tucker Carlson, J.D. Vance, Nick Fuentes, Peter Navarro, Don Trump Jr., Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, et al. 

Fair enough as a practical matter of punditry. But what does that make those of us who disagree? Obviously, I wouldn’t be a Republican if that crowd defined what Republican means (heck, I stopped calling myself a Republican a long time ago). But am I left-wing for bitterly clinging to what defined “the right” a mere decade ago? 

Again, maybe so, because left-wing and right-wing are often really stupid labels. 

But, again, what about conservativism? Surely at least part of the point of conservatism is to conserve some things. A better understanding of conservatism depends less on conservation than continuity. The conservative project involves maintaining and sustaining certain institutions, traditions, norms, rules, laws, values, and principles over time, passing them from one generation to another. That’s why the Constitution is so central to American conservatism.  

I said I didn’t want to get into a terminological disquisition and failed. So let me pull out of it and make a more concrete point. I believe the things I believe because I think they are true. Some of my beliefs cannot be counted as anything more than opinions and personal preferences that are, bluntly speaking, true for me but maybe not for you. This isn’t a point about moral relativism. Politics, economics, and life is about trade-offs. So, an honest progressive can be in favor of much higher taxes and more intrusive government than I am. If I say that their approach will come at the cost of economic growth or freedom, and they respond, “I know, but I think it’s worth it,” that’s fine. We’ll just argue about the cost-benefit analysis. And to be clear, there are plenty of issues where I think the non-free-market position wins the argument (from food safety to child labor laws to the drug war).   

But if you argue that I’m wrong about there being any trade-offs, that’s a very different thing. If you say we can have socialism without any economic cost, or drug legalization without more overdoses, etc., that’s a very different kind of wrong. It’s wrongness of fact, not opinion.

The relevance to this conversation is that a lot of people—not just Ross—fall into a kind of argumentation or analysis that doesn’t sufficiently take into account wrongness of fact, which downgrades or erases the democratic agency, cultural preferences, or plain old wisdom of Americans. Ramesh, who shares my view that the death of traditional conservatism has been exaggerated, notes that a debt crisis could very quickly restore Paul Ryan’s reputation, while making the sinister fiscal folly of Trumpism apparent even to Trumpers.

Many of the routes Ross thinks the right might take will fail because they are based on incorrect assumptions about facts. Conservatives traditionally and typically understand this point about the left-coded socialism of Bernie Sanders or Zohran Mamdani. But many of the people calling themselves conservatives these days are blind to the very same flaws of the right-coded socialism that today goes by the name “nationalism” or “Trumpism” or “MAGAnomics,” etc.

Ross concedes that his preferences “might be fanciful,” which is a nice way of saying they’re a fantasy. It’s a nice fantasy. But the populist, nativist, nationalist, and, frankly, nihilist Eldritch energies he wants to harness to create his fantasy require limiting principles. And acknowledging limiting principles is just another way of saying that you recognize the existence of trade-offs. I see no evidence whatsoever that the new right sees any trade-offs to their agenda. More cruelty, more ugliness, more statism, will just mean more “wins.” Electorally and morally, I think that’s preposterous. If J.D. Vance fully follows through on his anti-anti-Nazi schtick, Trump’s mantle will be worthless rag, because Americans don’t like Nazis. Moreover, Nazism doesn’t really work over the long haul. 

But maybe I am wrong. Maybe the new right will succeed in replacing the conservatism that has broadly defined the right and the GOP with their weird ideology. Given that Americans don’t really like statism, I’d wager that the Democrats would stop trending toward socialism and become more free-market. But if that didn’t happen, then we’d live in a country with two statist parties, one socialist one nationalist, each rewarding different constituencies. That’s happened in plenty of countries. But even that requires both parties recognize the constitutional and moral limiting principles Ross and I both believe in. If current trends continue, we might not be talking about two statist parties trading power, we’d be talking—perhaps in secret—about one party monopolizing power.

Which brings me back to Theseus’ paradox. A darker illustration of the idea was offered by an agent of the exiled German Social Democratic Party in 1937. I first read about it in Michael Burleigh’s brilliant The Third Reich: A New History. The agent reported from Germany that what the Nazis were up to was a Theseus-like replacement of the German order. The National Socialists were creating a “counter-church,” with new dogmas and doctrines, new rites and rituals. He used a railway bridge as his metaphor to explain how they were doing it. If you want to replace a railway bridge, tearing it down and starting work on a new one creates chaos and protest. Traffic will be snarled. Shipments of goods will be delayed. So instead, the spy explained, the Nazis were methodically replacing it one beam and buttress at a time, swapping out traditional Christianity with the Nazis’ paganized version, displacing German patriotism with a new ethno-nationalism. They borrowed from engineering the concept of “Gleichschaltung”—coordination—which dictated that every institution should be bent to the new regime. The genius of this was that it allowed nominally “independent” institutions—universities, fraternities, clubs, businesses, religious organizations—to remain intact, so long as they remained loyal to the Führerprinzip.

I don’t think we’re in a similar place, in part thanks to Trump’s incoherence and laziness, and the indiscipline of the new right generally (and the unpopularity of the hard left). But the way to avoid getting to that place is by arguing that conservatism, liberalism, and constitutionalism are binding—even when our “side” loses. And that requires imbuing words like conservatism, liberalism, and constitutionalism with meaning tethered to something more timeless than an election cycle.