‘The Strange Death of Make America Great Again’

Matthew Walther, in an opinion piece last week for The New York Times (gift link):

MAGA’s internal culture has always rewarded theatrical confrontation over achievement. Boorishness commands attention, and boors mistake attention for leverage. Pseudo-martyrdom becomes an end in itself. Loyalty tests proliferate. Those who counsel de-escalation find themselves subject to denunciation; prudential disagreement is allowed to provide cover for rank bigotry. Partisans celebrate one another for exacerbating tensions even when exacerbation forecloses coalition building.

There is also a related problem: The Trumpist movement has generated a lunatic array of semiautonomous online subcultures that are largely indifferent to strategic considerations and immune from political consequences while still exercising influence over actors whose decisions are not so immune. The disappearance of the informal gate-keeping function once performed by conservative luminaries such as William F. Buckley Jr. is probably permanent. In the absence of such authority, informed argument exists alongside phony outrage, profiteering, self-aggrandizement and saying things for the hell of it. The result is not merely the radicalization that Mr. Buckley feared but a kind of omnidirectional incoherence.

“A kind of omnidirectional incoherence” is as perfect a description as I’ve seen regarding the whole Trumpist movement in this second administration.

★ Wednesday, 31 December 2025