It’s no surprise to find that the intellectual fabric of Trumpism is thin. What is possibly surprising is the degree to which the New Right has, through its arguments and behavior, refuted its own premises. In 2019, in a celebrated joint essay called “Against the Dead Consensus,” a group of conservative thinkers argued that liberalism and “consensus conservatism”—the old-school kind—had “long ago ceased to inquire into the first things”; it had taken for granted erroneous conclusions about “the nature and purpose of our common life.” They promised to turn America into the kind of place where values were taken seriously—where we might ask, for example, whether “the soulless society of individual affluence” was one we wanted. But it turns out that it’s liberalism that forces you to inquire into ideas, precisely because they’re uncertain, changeable, and contested. In the illiberal world created by Trumpism, you don’t have to ask—you can just proclaim. You can change on a dime, saying or thinking anything at all. ♦

-Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker

TRUMPISM: You can change on a dime, saying or thinking anything at all. ♦