Thomas Zimmer

MAGA Unreality vs the World The U.S. government is in the hands of people who are fully detached from reality. That is a major weakness for the regime – but also a source of further radicalization.

I believe MAGA will ultimately fail to consolidate authoritarian rule. But for the time being, the powers of the U.S. government are in the hands of a regime that is hellbent on imposing its unreality on America and the world.

And that is truly frightening.

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Illegal wars abroad and ICE concentration camps at home are MAGA’s version of scorched earth.

They are not merely a “distraction” – they are, for this regime, the real thing: A way for people obsessed with the destructive power they can unleash to assert dominance and feel “manly.”

The more they run into hurdles they fail to overcome, the more frustration mounts, the more attractive it becomes to the regime to focus on areas where their desire to dominate, plunder, and punish is more easily put into practice.

Where is the off-ramp?

Those on the Right and in the Republican Party who are standing with Trump today have gone so far already with and for him, and in the process became complicit in his rise, his rule, his lawlessness, his breathtaking corruption. All the bridges have been burned.

We are experiencing a heightened version of that foundational paranoid siege mentality now. It will only get worse as the leaders on the Right start thinking about what will happen to them once their project fails and they are removed from power. They fear accountability.

MAGA is also ideologically and psycho-politically incapable of moderating. It is a hysterical movement that exists in a constant state of imagined emergency. There is no room for compromise or restraint. Every crisis, every defeat only heightens their sense of being under siege.

If only the rest of us could relax and watch as the Right descends further into madness.

But MAGA controls the levers of state power. This is where the gravest danger lies: Delusion, ideology, and ineptitude are conspiring to make escalation almost inevitable.

Trumpism presents an extreme example of the pitfalls of personalism: Personalist rule with a lazy, delusional leader at the top, a bunch of sycophants and zealots around him, and a base drifting ever deeper into fantasy land – that’s not a recipe for efficient authoritarian consolidation.

As a result, this regime has so far been incapable of adapting to the changing political and public environment. Instead of acting strategically, they keep overreaching, clinging to the fantasy that “real America” stands behind them and is about to rise up in support of the MAGA vision.

Because they are perceiving the world almost exclusively through the prism of the far-right media landscape, they have their delusions constantly reflected back at them and thereby confirmed, especially by an extremist online scene that eternally lusts for violence.

Even if some people in this administration must be aware that Trump is constantly making stuff up, most of them are convinced what they are doing is popular. The degree to which the Trumpist leaders have bought into their own propaganda is astonishing.

What is striking is how no one around him is acting as a corrective to even the most outlandish nonsense Trump propagates. And that has a lot to do with the unreality bubble in which basically everyone of consequence in this regime and in MAGA land more broadly exists.

Trump has been hemorrhaging public support. A smarter, more prudent regime would have changed tactics long ago. But the Trumpists keep doubling down. What may look like mere stubbornness is actually the result of significant structural weaknesses and ideological blind spots.

We must grapple with MAGA’s unreality as both a major impediment to the Right’s authoritarian project - as well as an acute threat for the republic, the international order, and, at the risk of sounding dramatic, literally everyone else on the planet.

The U.S. government is in the hands of a disturbed authoritarian who is surrounded by people who either share his delusions, are too sycophantic to confront him, or believe the president’s delusions serve just fine as a vehicle for their own zealotry and ideological extremism.

MAGA Unreality vs the World The U.S. government is in the hands of people who are fully detached from reality. That is a major weakness for the regime – but also a source of further radicalization.

MAGA Unreality vs the World

The U.S. government is in the hands of people who are fully detached from reality. That is a major weakness for the regime – but also a source of further radicalization.

Some thoughts from my new piece:

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steady.page/en/democracy...

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MAGA Unreality vs the World The U.S. government is in the hands of people who are fully detached from reality. That is a major weakness for the regime – but also a source of further radicalization.

MAGA Unreality vs the World

The U.S. government is in the hands of people who are fully detached from reality. That is a major weakness for the regime – but also a source of further radicalization.

My new piece:

I generally try hard not to indulge in any kind of doomerism. But this shit… betting on war, betting on death - all fully legal and pushed down our throats by our tech elite overlords… It’s just so fucking infuriating.

The worst people on the planet are determining the trajectory of our species.

This shit is so unbelievably deranged. One can only hope that we, as a species, somehow and despite our worst efforts make it to a point sometime in the future when our descendants can look back at us and be aghast at how aggressively stupid we were to let this all happen.

And/or disingenuous. Who can really tell what the exact mix is with these people. Either way: Utterly disqualifying. Ahmari will keep doing Ahmari, I guess.

How Conservatives Gave Themselves Permission to Go MAGA In 2016, leading conservatives came out “Against Trump” – but soon let their disdain for “the Left” override all else. It's the story of Modern Conservatism in a nutshell

Yet another day that urgently begs the question: How the hell did we get here?

I wrote about one big piece of the puzzle: How Conservatives Gave Themselves Permission to Go MAGA

This week’s piece:

Come for a critique of the hypocrisy and cynical opportunism of conservative elites - stay for a deep dive into the history of Modern Conservatism, the continuities and radicalizations of a reactionary movement, and the permission structure that has governed rightwing politics:

Democracy Americana A newsletter on U.S. politics and history - and the ongoing struggle over how much democracy, and for whom, there should be in America

Ten years ago, leading conservatives came out “Against Trump” – but soon let their disdain for “the Left” override all else.

It is the story of Modern Conservatism in a nutshell.

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As the commitment to ultimate values and the “natural order” was never balanced by an equally strong commitment to limiting principles that could have moderated political action and drawn a clear line, where was the restraint against further escalation and radicalization supposed to come from?

Their allegiance was never to democratic principles, but to upholding (white, Christian) “civilization”. The question has always been: What if society moves away from that order? Do Conservatives accommodate – or seek to impose “civilization” against majority will?

From the start, the Conservative Movement’s intellectual leaders defined the stakes of the conflict as existential because they saw the “natural order” under assault – an order they did not believe was up to democratic deliberation; and they derided their political enemies as violent extremists.

Modern Conservatism was never just, or even predominantly, (small-c) conservative: A conservatism of limits, of conserving and preserving, was part of the mix. But the notion that such a conservatism was failing to preserve the “natural order” was a defining sensibility from the start.

And perhaps they were even necessary as a last-resort effort to fight back against the onslaught of “woke” liberalism? That certainly is the definition of “conservatism” that is lurking right under the surface here – and the sentiment that quickly came to dominate almost every corner of the Right.

Once it became clear that Trump was not secretly a liberal, most of the contributors to “Against Trump” quickly decided that the authoritarianism, the blood-and-soil nationalism, the lawlessness, the corruption were, at the very least, not a dealbreaker.