The response from Trump supporters, both in the media and in the wild, to Sean Spicer’s Saturday press conference were instructive. It basically boiled down to:
(1) The pictures are a lie. There were way more people for Trump than for Obama.
(2) Of course there weren’t as many people there for Trump, because the people who love Trump were scared off by all the violent leftist protestors. Or the increased security. Or the rain. Or whatever. Not Trump’s fault.
(3) So maybe there were a few more people at Obama’s inauguration. But who cares if Trump is having his spokesman lie about this stuff from the White House press room? The media lies all the time, and way worse. Forget about Trump and Spicer—the media are the real enemy here.
(4) Trump is playing 17-dimensional chess and his “lying” is part of the master plan. It’s a feature, not a bug. MAGA, bitches.
(Funnily enough, in his remarks to the press Spicer more or less went through this progression all by himself.)
These contradictory explanations point to the immense challenge for the people who genuinely want to create an intellectual infrastructure for Trumpism.
In theory, I’m more or less in favor of Trumpism as a political framework. I was never especially happy with True Conservatism as practiced by the Republican party in Washington and I suspect that it would be a net good if conservatism becomes more populist and more conformed to the working class, rather than the ownership class.
To take just one for-instance: Conservatism’s devotion to the free market is justified in a philosophical sense—free markets have achieved an enormous amount of good over the last two centuries. But this devotion is largely divorced from current economic realities. Government is such a leviathan that there are very few “free markets” these days. When you are told that an economic outcome is “the market speaking,” more often than not it’s really just one business, or industry, or government, having successfully used the law, or political influence, or external forces (such as monopoly or monopsony) to its advantage. When a government is as big as ours, it’s rent-seeking all the way down.
And whatever you or I might want, the government isn’t getting smaller any time soon.
It would be helpful for conservatism to acknowledge this fact and adjust its priorities. Maybe the top-marginal tax rate isn’t the most important thing in the world. (And ditto for capital gains.) Maybe increasing the supply of foreign low-skill labor at a time of rapid technological advance isn’t such a great idea. Maybe growing income inequality and slowing income mobility aren’t just left-wing talking points.
As I said, that’s just one example where the Trump program, such as it is, might be helpful. And in such instances, it could also be helpful to have some intellectuals creating a framework from which to contextualize and explain Trumpism.
Or in any case, that’s the philosophical case for something like the Journal of American Greatness or the forthcoming American Affairs. But if the last 72 hours—or the last year, for that matter—are any guide, such projects are likely to devolve into a series of post-facto rationalizations for whatever Trump has just said or done.
