By Megan Dent
Monday, March 17,
2025
From its emergence, “Make America Great Again” has
doubled as a nostalgic call to action and a promise for a dramatic course
correction. Its proponents vow to rectify the wrongdoings of successive
political generations: to reclaim a set of American principles that the alleged
villains of the leftist elite have either corrupted, forgotten, or willingly
abandoned.
Many who dreaded the unprincipled, brutish chaos of Trump
& Co. nevertheless acknowledged the existence of the issues he shouted
about. Even if he described them with typical unmeasured vulgarity, Trump
wasn’t wrong to identify a southern border dysfunctional enough to no longer
resemble a border, an abandonment of common sense in favor of a professed
sensitivity to ever more obscure identity groups, and an illiberal policing of
thought and language in leading cultural and even medical institutions. The left
tacitly justified its overreach by fixating on the incorrigible sins of
America, often listed from seats of cultural privilege by those who most
benefit from America’s virtues.
There were, in other words, some issues to be dealt with,
some balance to be redressed, some pendulum that needed to begin its
oppositional swing. For many American voters, the Democratic leadership refused
to sufficiently name the scale of the problem, either because they were
unwilling to implicate themselves in its creation, or because they were
unwilling to run afoul of the set-menu
orthodoxy on immigration, race, gender, and history that their own fringe
demanded.
Some tentatively hoped that even with Trump at the helm,
MAGA’s diagnosis of voters’ discontent—which Democrats still couldn’t get a
handle on—was at least broadly accurate enough to lead to some positive
changes. At this point in the administration’s tenure, however, such hope
recedes and a grimmer reality appears. Its most unsettling feature is not Trump
being Trump—his rashness, instability, and torching of norms are all playing
out as promised—but the fact that a movement built on decrying the existential
threat of leftist activism expects us to believe that unchecked activism from
its own side will somehow produce different results.
In other words, countering the excesses of the left with
the same excesses on the right dooms those on the political right to repeat,
rather than correct, the follies of their opponents.
Take DEI. A well-intentioned goal of greater access for
minorities in an increasingly diverse country animated the DEI mission within
the Democratic Party. But subsequent manifestations of the ideology in cultural
institutions and schools destroyed faith in the project, as unpopular
racial preferencing took precedence over meritocracy, and a commitment to a
highly politicized anti-racist agenda was
mandated to the detriment of other civil liberties, such as freedom of
speech or conscience.
Biden’s executive order “to
advance an ambitious, whole-of-government equity agenda” exposed Democrats
to the charge of granting the government too much power over a nebulous issue
that arguably involved an attempt at thought control. The new “equity agenda”
represented a departure from a civil rights-era commitment to equality of opportunity,
in which meritocracy—the content of one’s character, if you like—counted more
than skin color or group identity in determining outcomes.
In his countermove, Trump could have scrapped the federal
DEI program on the grounds that unpopular activist agendas have no place in
government. Instead, he harnessed
the same overreach of federal power for his own activist agenda, not only
shutting down DEI programs in the government, but creating a list of private
companies to pursue for theirs. If voters hoped for a check on a leftward
ideology that surveilled federal employees for latent signs of racism, Trump
has delivered
its mirror image: a ban of DEI that encourages a McCarthy-style purge of the
old ideology and vows to “excise references to DEI … principles, under whatever
name they may appear,” raising the same alarm bells over freedom of speech and
conscience that DEI did.
The MAGA campaign promised an end to the broader climate
of “woke,” better characterized by political philosopher John Gray as
“hyper-liberal ideology.” One of the critiques of this ideology was its
“virtue-signalling” policy rhetoric, which promised justice, but when carried
through often worsened the causes it claimed to champion. Federal and corporate
DEI
workshops can actually make people more racist, for example. Biden’s
student debt forgiveness promised
“to ensure higher-education is a ticket to the middle class, not a barrier to
opportunity,” when in
fact, “between 69 and 73 percent of the debt forgiven accrues to households
in the top 60 percent of the income distribution.” The COVID school closures
advocated by left-leaning teachers’ unions and Democratic states disproportionately
affected poor students and students of color, while it became taboo in
progressive circles to question them at all.
In these and other issues like gender activism and
“defund the police,” rhetoric from progressive Democrats alienated their
previous working-class voters and made them the party of the elitism they
purported to topple. This is partly because to understand and advance
hyperliberal ideology requires access to money, education and networks. The
loudest voices pushing niche identity politics were likely several degrees of
insulation away from the poverty and crime that actually beleaguered people.
For Gray, this is where hyperliberalism departs from more
focused historical activism that sought to end class inequality. “Once
questions of identity become central in politics,” he writes,
“conflicts of economic interests can be disregarded.” Many of the left’s
rallying cries, in other words, involved minimal real sacrifice from the
privileged. They could believe they were justice-warriors who championed the
poor while remaining almost entirely in the realm of discourse, rather than
substantially parting from their own time, money, or status.
Trump’s MAGA campaign promised an end to such
reality-estranged identity politics. But so far, we’ve only seen a different
set of elite, out-of-touch billionaires cravenly insert their own
identity-based shibboleths in place of their opponents’ mantras. Left
or right, these are still the politics of identity, and they still deflect
from the issues that face voters on the ground, while encouraging toxic,
irrational tribalism on both sides of the aisle.
A post-Biden administration could have called out the
hypocrisy of an elite-educated class who could fiscally and culturally afford
to prioritize policies’ language and political coding over their efficacy or
appeal. Instead, Trump has used the same playbook: shouting loudly to signal to
his base that he will deliver radical “justice” for them, while neglecting
pesky little details of whether or not the policies will actually work for the
groups he’s speaking to.
Brazen economic moves like tariffs may signal a grand
shakeup to Americans who feel forgotten or disadvantaged by the globalized
economy, but they are likely to only hurt American consumers by raising the
prices of goods and services across the country. Meanwhile, the DOGE chainsaw
antics—what Paul Krugman calls “austerity
theater”—has so far succeeded only in making government less effective and
has little chance of cutting federal spending in a meaningful way. The fact
that the man holding the chainsaw is the literal richest in the world and
likely invulnerable to any catastrophic fallout of his actions smacks of the
same hypocrisy of those who rallied to “defund the police” from the safety of
their affluent gated neighborhoods.
If much of the justice-signaling by the privileged left
was “virtue theater”—a performance both untethered to and masquerading real
issues—Trump’s circus show is no better. “Queers for Palestine” contains no
more irony than the party of evangelical Christians bending a knee toward a
ketamine-fueled father
of (reportedly) 14 children by four different mothers, or celebrating the
return of the misogynist Tate brothers from Romania, where they picked up charges
of human trafficking, rape, and money laundering.
Another breaking point was the far left’s moral confusion
in the immediate wake of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel. Widespread campus
protests and subsequent congressional hearings exposed disturbing antisemitic
trends on the left: either the outright celebration of murder and rape under
the guise of “resistance” or the quiet reluctance to name the event for what it
was, regardless of preexistent geopolitical issues in the region: terrorist
slaughter. Sam Harris, speaking of students at the most prestigious and
historic universities in the country, wondered
in 2024: “Were you one of these imbeciles who couldn’t figure out who the bad
guys were on October 7th?”
How are bad guys faring now? Promising
to restore common sense to American culture would surely mean a new era of
moral clarity when it comes to foreign adversaries. Instead, Trump and his
administration have contorted themselves into the same ethical backbends that
made children and elderly peaceniks in kibbutzim, at least to some Americans on
the left, the villains on the day of their own slaughter. Now, the villains for
some on the right are the legions of besieged, raped, and dead Ukrainians and
their president, Volodymyr Zelensky, whom Trump calls a “dictator” and who he
claims “started
the war” with Putin’s Russia.
At the heart of the hypocrisy lies that uncanny
resemblance between the two political poles. The writer Andrew Sullivan
describes MAGA’s governing tactics in terms often associated with hyperliberals
at the height of “woke.” For both the critical theorists on the far left and
the post-fact MAGA brigade, “truth” is fundamentally unfixed and can therefore
be contorted to meet the needs of today’s narrative or tomorrow’s explanation.
“Critical Trump Theory,” Sullivan
writes, “is unfalsifiable, irrational, and seeks to replace objective
reality with Trump’s lived experience so that, in the end, only his power
remains.”
The promise was common sense. The delivery is an
inversion of truth and morality. In the case of Ukraine, this not only deserts
an ally and desecrates American credibility on the world stage; it heralds a
dangerous split with Western allies and a departure from a liberal Western
worldview.
The mistake was ever hoping that actual historic
American values—the checks and balances, individualism, distrust of centralized
power, and inherent governmental restraint embedded in the classical liberalism
that shaped the American Constitution—occupied any space in the MAGA promise.
Some Trump champions have cheaply invoked the revolutionary nature of America’s
founding as a justification for the insurrectionary chaos of its
administration. But the careful, discerning spirit of the American Revolution,
not to mention the self-knowledge of the Founders, finds no place in the MAGA
movement.
The 18th century American Revolution grounded itself in
the cautious notion that, as John Adams warned,
“absolute power intoxicates alike despots, monarchs, aristocrats, and
democrats.” Yet we still see this intoxication play out today, as both left and
right succumb to the seductive thrill of illiberal power.
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