Why Are Some Conservative Thinkers Falling for Trump?
American intellectuals haven’t felt the allure of authoritarian, illiberal politics this strongly in a long time.
.. In 1953, Czesław Miłosz published The Captive Mind, which described how a series of Polish intellectuals came to embrace Stalinism. Miłosz detailed the role that “coercion” and “personal ambition” played in their ideological transformation.
.. “To belong to the masses is the great longing of the ‘alienated’ intellectual,”
.. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. observed that “against the loneliness and rootlessness of man in free society,” totalitarianism “promises the security and comradeship of a crusading unity.”
.. First, they admire his campaign’s raw, unbridled energy. The Trump movement, according to the Wall Street Journalcolumnist Peggy Noonan, radiates “dynamism.”
.. The “Journal of American Greatness” makes explicit what Noonan, Hanson, and Gingrich imply: that America’s current system of government is illegitimate.
.. A second asserts that the United States is “post-Constitutional.”
.. A tyrant, Strauss argues, takes absolute power by overthrowing a constitutional republic. A Caesar also takes absolute power, but only when a constitutional republic has already collapsed on its own.
.. “Caesarism is not tyranny. It is rather a sub-species of absolute monarchy, in which the monarch is not an unjust usurper but the savior of a country with a decayed republican order that can no longer function.” By overthrowing a depraved and unaccountable elite, Trump would reassert “the people’s sovereignty” and “their natural right to rule themselves.”
.. In May, she wrote that Trump’s fans want him to be “a human bomb that will explode by timer under a bench in Lafayette Park and take out all the people but leave the monuments standing.” These are ghastly metaphors. Obviously, Noonan is not endorsing revolutionary violence. But she’s writing sympathetically about the people’s supposed desire for it. And she’s doing so on behalf of a candidate who incites actual violence.
.. Because Trump represents the people and the people distrust the media, which are part of the corrupt ruling class, Trump has the right to slander and impede the media’s work. In Hannity’s words, “They deserve what they get.”
.. For Trump, popularity equals truth.
That’s why, when he’s ahead, he spends so much time citing polls. He understands that in American public discourse, it’s hard to say the people are wrong.
.. America is a democracy because the people’s voices count. But it is a liberal democracy because freedom of the press, independence of the judiciary, and the rule of law are not subject to popular vote.