Academics Are Stoking MAGA Hysteria

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, April 03, 2024

 

New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall’s weekly dispatch is enlightening fare, and not just for his often-astute observations on the state of American politics. Edsall has developed a knack for soliciting revealing quotes from his sources, lulling them into a sense of false security only to tease out their most intemperate inner thoughts.

 

Edsall’s latest is no exception. His piece on “Donald Trump and the MAGA agenda” notes, unremarkably enough, that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee is consolidating Republican-leaning donors, activist organizations, and think tanks behind his campaign. And these forces are assembling not just for the purpose of winning the presidential election; they actually plan to doing something with the power they seek. So far, not much in the way of revelations.

 

But the agenda these disparate groups intend to pursue remains murky. The MAGA movement’s priorities shift depending on whom you’re speaking with, and Donald Trump’s relatively ambiguous policy preferences outside arenas like trade and immigration complicate the effort to formulate a coherent platform. But Trump’s detractors don’t have to know the particulars to render a verdict on the nefarious thoughts percolating under all those red hats.

 

“These are detailed plans to take full control of various federal departments and agencies from the very start and to use every power available to implement radical ethnonationalist regulations and action plans,” Harvard professor of government and sociology Theda Skocpol told Edsall. The Republican apparatus is engaged in “full prep for an authoritarian takeover, buttressed by the control Trump and Trumpists now have over the G.O.P. and its apparatuses,” she added.

 

Well, that sounds pretty bad. Skocpol’s assessment makes no distinctions, however, between mainstream conservative groups like the Federalist Society, populist-adjacent organizations like the Heritage Foundation, and MAGA maximalists, like onetime Trump speechwriter and immigration hawk Stephen Miller. Ask any of these groups or their representatives, and they would probably provide a free education in the tensions between them and their political bedfellows. And yet, no such education is needed to discern the difference between, for example, Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who prosecuted some of the Trump campaign’s claims regarding election fraud in 2020, and the Trump-appointed judges who tossed some of those claims. Flattening those distinctions to preserve the notion that Trump’s allies are united in an “ethnonationalist” plot to engineer an “authoritarian takeover” of the United States reveals more about the accuser than her subjects.

 

Edsall’s sources didn’t stop there. Lawrence Rosenthal, the chairman and founder of something that calls itself the “Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies,” outbid his fellow eschatologists. He denounced the “free-market fundamentalists” on the right, heaped Marxian scorn on Trump voters for rejecting their own “economic interests,” and fretted over the rise of “Christian nationalism.” All the threadbare hysteria to which conservatives are accustomed. But that’s not to say Rosenthal wasn’t capable of innovation.

 

“The model here is by now explicitly Orbanism in Hungary — what Viktor Orban personally dubbed ‘illiberal democracy,’” he asserted. “Illiberal regimes claim legitimacy through elections but systematically curtail civil liberties and checks and balances, structurally recasting political institutions so as to make their being voted out of office almost unrealizable.”

 

In a subtle, perhaps even unintended, rebuke, Edsall follows Rosenthal’s garment-rending denunciation with the Federalist Society founder Leonard Leo’s explication of his organization’s mission statement: “To maintain and expand human freedom consistent with the values and ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States.” Whatever one thinks of Orbanism, this ain’t it.

 

Indeed, after devoting a conspicuous portion of the column to detailing the remunerative benefits enjoyed by Republicans in positions of national authority — a feature of public life hardly exclusive to the GOP — Edsall concedes that the groups coming together in support of Trump aren’t doing so in deference to his instincts. Rather, they’re trying to constrain him.

 

“One function of the project,” Edsall wrote of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, “is to put as much ideological muscle as possible behind Trump to ensure that if he wins the White House again, he does not wander afield.” And the agenda Edsall highlights that has so terrified his sources is exceedingly banal: “Restore the family as the centerpiece of American life.” “Dismantle the administrative state and return self-governance to the American people.” “Defend our nation’s sovereignty, border, and bounty against global threats.” “Secure our God-given individual rights to live freely” in accordance with “what our Constitution calls ‘the Blessings of Liberty.’”

 

Of all the quotes to pull from Heritage’s project, the author chose a series of platitudes that overlap with status quo ante conservative political philosophy. A reader might reasonably conclude at this point that the column’s objective is to erase the distinctions between Reagan-style conservatives and MAGA populists.

 

I am perhaps more suspicious than many on the right of Donald Trump’s disposition toward American civic conventions. His explicit rejection of conservatism bodes ill for his political project, and his conduct during the transition from his administration to Joe Biden’s represented an abhorrent rejection of the constitutional order. That shouldn’t be dismissed offhand by liberty-loving Republican voters.

 

But drawing as broad a circumference around the Republican Party as possible and branding it all “authoritarian” only denudes what should be a sharp, specific critique of discrete conduct. If everything is “authoritarian,” nothing is. And if academicians and activists react to the commonplace with the same theatrical convulsions they display when confronted with genuinely extraordinary misconduct, that will only make them easier to ignore.