No roots to pull up for sure. JD Vance is the poster boy for the fact that this rot is a kind of fungal spread. He's moved through multiple social sites that might have provided an ethical grounding for his politics––post-industrial Ohio, US military, elite east coast academia, Silicon Valley venture capitalism, normie Republicanism, rightwing Catholicism. But there doesn't seem to be any moral conviction or ethos, good or bad, that has survived his move into what seems like his real home, the MAGA extremely online dudeworld.
He disparages Popes but stands up for adult men who live to yuck it up about rape and the Holocaust.
Even aside from politics, it's beyond me how that is supposed to lead to a remoralizing of young men who are adrift so as to make them appealing enough to young women in 2025 to marry and have kids with them.
Given his concern with birthrates, he seems to wish for a world where more men like him are husbands and fathers. But he found a mate before his extreme online days. He circulated among women he appeared to respect, and had female friends who say they no longer recognize him from the Yale days.
All of those Young Republicans on the group chats, and the many disaffected young men behind them that Vance et. al. say they want to help, are marinating in online discourse that will turn off the majority of young American women.
Making birth control hard to get will only go so far. Trying to roll back professional careers for women will only work at the margins. Because at this point, anyway, you still have to get women to agree to date and marry you before you can acquire the husband and father status.
A lot of traditionalists deride their own programme because they implicitly back the notion that they can succeed only if society imposes penalties on acting any other way…much as any religion seems to be reaching a bit if their Unique Value Proposition is 'itʼs better than eternal, infinite, punishment'.
(Of course, that's judging from an Enlightenment point-of-view that says that what people want is at least not totally depraved, and might well be a decent guide to what were best to happen to them.)(…except, of course, when they reject vaccines and social democracy.)
I’ve been saying to my comrades that we will need a Nuremberg Trial of the apparatchiks of the current regime in order to try to steer away this country from the abyss. But I doubt this crop of Democrats will have the stomach for it, and too many other people on the left have a fatalist “well this country has always been like that, it’s just that the mask is now off.” Okay sure, whatever, so they just get away with it?
Fair enough, but if humans are pretty much the same all over and the Middle East now and everywhere at some time or another—yes, I'm including indigenous peoples—`not letting them get away with it' can be taken too far. More personally, one of the wiser men I've known was at his stupidest when determined 'not to be made a schmuck of'.
On a practical level, the fact that these courts would never be seen as legitimate by many lessens their usefulness could be very limited—Germany was an exception both because of the level of their devastation and because they'd had twelve recent years of an ideology that saw Victory as the ultimate endorsement of the authority of the victors.
Ya I don’t know how you fix a problem this dire without vigorous de-groyperification campaign. Once you’ve been DOGEd you gotta DOGE ‘em right back. My Canadian countrymen are cheering on any vengeance you can extract.
It’s reminiscent of the question you got in your talk about tit for tat Gerrymanders. Of course you might be sowing seeds of a future backlash. But they’ve made it pretty clear they’re gonna be sickos regardless.
It makes one sympathetic to the old-men-yelling-at-clouds about norms. Once things have gone down a bad road, hard to fix it. Also true if judicial politics in the states; other countries have managed to have judicial review without it getting quite so weird, but how the hell do you fix it when you’ve reached this point.
an entire generation of conservative youth spent their formative years binge watching anti-SJW ragebait, lurking /pol/, irony OD'ing on edgy memes, trolling as a second language, and fantasy-role-posting behind marble bust avatars and we have yet to fully account for its consequences
“On the one hand, the discourse of white supremacy did not differentiate properly between the center and the far right, and viewed racism as so endemic to the American experience that virtually everyone was culpable if they were not actively “anti-racist” in just the right way, that is to say, echoed the correct shibboleths. One might argue that recent events vindicate this account of total depravity, but in practical politics, it had the deleterious effect of not properly isolating the real threat. “ this is brilliantly put
Given that a pro-Nazi agent of Germany was ghost-writing Senatorial speeches—thanks Dr Maddow—I'd say the Browns were in pretty deep in our power-structure.
I never agree with Arendt about Eichmann and fascism. The roots are deep. First psychologically, as in Theweleit’s Male Fantasy (U. Minnesota, see intro by me and Anson Rabinbach) second see George Mosse’s work from several points of view. History of religion wasn’t Arendt’s strong suit. Think of the film The White Ribbon as a counter-argument to her position.
With the Senate structure lopsided in their favor and generational control of the Supreme Court, the Republican Party being brought to heel simply is not on the menu in any of our lifetimes.
I wish it were otherwise, but we've got to see the world as it is. The anti-MAGA coalition as currently construed is checkmated.
I think I might be echoing Matt Yglesias here, apologies, but the fall of the republic is far more imaginable that the Democratic Party winning a Senate race in Arkansas. Until that changes we're just shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.
I suppose the Yglesian response would be that it's not so much dooming as demanding the question of how do we win a Senate race in actually existing Arkansas? His prescription for that is laughably substandard and naive, but I do feel like that's fundamentally the right question as a matter of politics.
And it's precisely because of the dynamics you describe in this piece. It's not clear how willing or able anyone is to isolate "the bad ones" from the broader right anymore. A bigger picture realignment is the more plausible hope.
It suddenly seems to me that some of those Orthodox Jews willing to back these people aren't bothered by the antisemitism because that's what they _expect_ from non-Jews, but believe that there are some with whom they can work.
If Democrats were any organized, they'd be thinking already about it, about what they can do and about how they can do it in a way that is at the same time efficient but also extremely and ostentatiously disciplined and lawful. There should be a systematic documentation of abuses that are committed right now, in order to be able to make cases to root out the people who did them ; thinking about how to conduct lay offs in a way that is accepted (including by those who are laid off) ; and a focus on rebuilding a professional culture which can include a part of the recruits. There are little things imo which are as long lasting and as difficult to counter as a wave of bad recruitements for civil servants... In France we had a drop in cop numbers after 2010 because of president Sarkozy's policy of not replacing one civil servant over two retiring ; after we had the terrorist acts in 2015 people realized we didn't have enough cops anymore and president Hollande made mass recruitements with lowered standards. Shortly after, the cases of police violence became much more numerous, because many of the new recruits did not have the professional standards and/or the psychological aptitudes to do this job correctly. And there was no policy of recruiting white supremacists !
PS : caution is necesary in any way but even more right now when talking about this, seeing how MAGA will seize upon anything to give some veneer of justification to the purge they started out as soon as they arrived back in power.
Y'know I had an early stage experience of this in my hometown back in the -70's, when I took a couple of years off before going back to complete college. The guy was a friend of mine. He'd been a loud McGovern supporter in '72.. He got hired by the local Republican Party to work out a the mechanics of a gerrymander of the local city council, which he proceeded to do, discussing the details with me and other friends as he went along. At the time he was still a freebooting hippieish liberal sort. Then I came home to visit in the holiday season of 1980. I met with him, and we talked. He related to me that he had turned into a complete reaganite. Just as in the quote above, this guy was swallowed up and he did conform.
As to the outcome of his gerrymandering project, it was implemented in that city in the early '80's. It worked so well that even as late as 2010, a 60-40 Democratic city was represented by a Republican majority city council.
I believe this little 1970's gerrymandering project may well have been proof of concept for the Republican gerrymandering push that went into high gear after 2010. Were there other places where this was happening in the late 1970's? I dunno. But it sure was happening in that city.
A possible bright-spot: the current gang in power feel so thoroughly their right to do as they will* that there are very likely many hired in ways not conforming to law as interpreted by any court not primarily interested in not being put into the cornfield, and perhaps the more laxly the more ideoligically attractive to the gang, making it easier for the purging itself to stay within the letter of the law.
The efflorescence of the rot started with Reagan, both in our institutions and in the emboldened fringes, acquiesced to and endorsed by that deeply unpleasant man.
No roots to pull up for sure. JD Vance is the poster boy for the fact that this rot is a kind of fungal spread. He's moved through multiple social sites that might have provided an ethical grounding for his politics––post-industrial Ohio, US military, elite east coast academia, Silicon Valley venture capitalism, normie Republicanism, rightwing Catholicism. But there doesn't seem to be any moral conviction or ethos, good or bad, that has survived his move into what seems like his real home, the MAGA extremely online dudeworld.
He disparages Popes but stands up for adult men who live to yuck it up about rape and the Holocaust.
Even aside from politics, it's beyond me how that is supposed to lead to a remoralizing of young men who are adrift so as to make them appealing enough to young women in 2025 to marry and have kids with them.
Good post. I mean the dude has a group chat with 20-year-old groypers, that’s who he is.
Where is his incentive for their remoralisation? (See: fulfilling lives for possible future M.A.G.A. cultists.)
Given his concern with birthrates, he seems to wish for a world where more men like him are husbands and fathers. But he found a mate before his extreme online days. He circulated among women he appeared to respect, and had female friends who say they no longer recognize him from the Yale days.
All of those Young Republicans on the group chats, and the many disaffected young men behind them that Vance et. al. say they want to help, are marinating in online discourse that will turn off the majority of young American women.
Making birth control hard to get will only go so far. Trying to roll back professional careers for women will only work at the margins. Because at this point, anyway, you still have to get women to agree to date and marry you before you can acquire the husband and father status.
A lot of traditionalists deride their own programme because they implicitly back the notion that they can succeed only if society imposes penalties on acting any other way…much as any religion seems to be reaching a bit if their Unique Value Proposition is 'itʼs better than eternal, infinite, punishment'.
(Of course, that's judging from an Enlightenment point-of-view that says that what people want is at least not totally depraved, and might well be a decent guide to what were best to happen to them.)(…except, of course, when they reject vaccines and social democracy.)
I’ve been saying to my comrades that we will need a Nuremberg Trial of the apparatchiks of the current regime in order to try to steer away this country from the abyss. But I doubt this crop of Democrats will have the stomach for it, and too many other people on the left have a fatalist “well this country has always been like that, it’s just that the mask is now off.” Okay sure, whatever, so they just get away with it?
Our allies may be Bulwark centrists. Tim Miller joked about the need for American Nuremberg Trials the other day
Feel like the Bulwark types understand the current peril better than the Dem leadership and donor class.
They’re scorned lovers of the GOP
Fair enough, but if humans are pretty much the same all over and the Middle East now and everywhere at some time or another—yes, I'm including indigenous peoples—`not letting them get away with it' can be taken too far. More personally, one of the wiser men I've known was at his stupidest when determined 'not to be made a schmuck of'.
On a practical level, the fact that these courts would never be seen as legitimate by many lessens their usefulness could be very limited—Germany was an exception both because of the level of their devastation and because they'd had twelve recent years of an ideology that saw Victory as the ultimate endorsement of the authority of the victors.
Ya I don’t know how you fix a problem this dire without vigorous de-groyperification campaign. Once you’ve been DOGEd you gotta DOGE ‘em right back. My Canadian countrymen are cheering on any vengeance you can extract.
It’s reminiscent of the question you got in your talk about tit for tat Gerrymanders. Of course you might be sowing seeds of a future backlash. But they’ve made it pretty clear they’re gonna be sickos regardless.
It makes one sympathetic to the old-men-yelling-at-clouds about norms. Once things have gone down a bad road, hard to fix it. Also true if judicial politics in the states; other countries have managed to have judicial review without it getting quite so weird, but how the hell do you fix it when you’ve reached this point.
*taps sign*
an entire generation of conservative youth spent their formative years binge watching anti-SJW ragebait, lurking /pol/, irony OD'ing on edgy memes, trolling as a second language, and fantasy-role-posting behind marble bust avatars and we have yet to fully account for its consequences
“On the one hand, the discourse of white supremacy did not differentiate properly between the center and the far right, and viewed racism as so endemic to the American experience that virtually everyone was culpable if they were not actively “anti-racist” in just the right way, that is to say, echoed the correct shibboleths. One might argue that recent events vindicate this account of total depravity, but in practical politics, it had the deleterious effect of not properly isolating the real threat. “ this is brilliantly put
Given that a pro-Nazi agent of Germany was ghost-writing Senatorial speeches—thanks Dr Maddow—I'd say the Browns were in pretty deep in our power-structure.
“Are you now, or have you ever been associated with Pepe the Frog memes?”
I never agree with Arendt about Eichmann and fascism. The roots are deep. First psychologically, as in Theweleit’s Male Fantasy (U. Minnesota, see intro by me and Anson Rabinbach) second see George Mosse’s work from several points of view. History of religion wasn’t Arendt’s strong suit. Think of the film The White Ribbon as a counter-argument to her position.
I’m a fbig an of all those guys, and think Arendt doesn’t mean that there aren’t precedents or psychological dimensions.
With the Senate structure lopsided in their favor and generational control of the Supreme Court, the Republican Party being brought to heel simply is not on the menu in any of our lifetimes.
I wish it were otherwise, but we've got to see the world as it is. The anti-MAGA coalition as currently construed is checkmated.
I think I might be echoing Matt Yglesias here, apologies, but the fall of the republic is far more imaginable that the Democratic Party winning a Senate race in Arkansas. Until that changes we're just shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.
No dooming in the comments.
I suppose the Yglesian response would be that it's not so much dooming as demanding the question of how do we win a Senate race in actually existing Arkansas? His prescription for that is laughably substandard and naive, but I do feel like that's fundamentally the right question as a matter of politics.
And it's precisely because of the dynamics you describe in this piece. It's not clear how willing or able anyone is to isolate "the bad ones" from the broader right anymore. A bigger picture realignment is the more plausible hope.
It suddenly seems to me that some of those Orthodox Jews willing to back these people aren't bothered by the antisemitism because that's what they _expect_ from non-Jews, but believe that there are some with whom they can work.
I always love a Ribuffo reference.
The man was a chaotic scene all to himself.
just at ground level, in the streets (like Saturday) being an active Legal Observer is a working class hero and something to be.
If Democrats were any organized, they'd be thinking already about it, about what they can do and about how they can do it in a way that is at the same time efficient but also extremely and ostentatiously disciplined and lawful. There should be a systematic documentation of abuses that are committed right now, in order to be able to make cases to root out the people who did them ; thinking about how to conduct lay offs in a way that is accepted (including by those who are laid off) ; and a focus on rebuilding a professional culture which can include a part of the recruits. There are little things imo which are as long lasting and as difficult to counter as a wave of bad recruitements for civil servants... In France we had a drop in cop numbers after 2010 because of president Sarkozy's policy of not replacing one civil servant over two retiring ; after we had the terrorist acts in 2015 people realized we didn't have enough cops anymore and president Hollande made mass recruitements with lowered standards. Shortly after, the cases of police violence became much more numerous, because many of the new recruits did not have the professional standards and/or the psychological aptitudes to do this job correctly. And there was no policy of recruiting white supremacists !
PS : caution is necesary in any way but even more right now when talking about this, seeing how MAGA will seize upon anything to give some veneer of justification to the purge they started out as soon as they arrived back in power.
"They were swallowed up and conformed."
Y'know I had an early stage experience of this in my hometown back in the -70's, when I took a couple of years off before going back to complete college. The guy was a friend of mine. He'd been a loud McGovern supporter in '72.. He got hired by the local Republican Party to work out a the mechanics of a gerrymander of the local city council, which he proceeded to do, discussing the details with me and other friends as he went along. At the time he was still a freebooting hippieish liberal sort. Then I came home to visit in the holiday season of 1980. I met with him, and we talked. He related to me that he had turned into a complete reaganite. Just as in the quote above, this guy was swallowed up and he did conform.
As to the outcome of his gerrymandering project, it was implemented in that city in the early '80's. It worked so well that even as late as 2010, a 60-40 Democratic city was represented by a Republican majority city council.
I believe this little 1970's gerrymandering project may well have been proof of concept for the Republican gerrymandering push that went into high gear after 2010. Were there other places where this was happening in the late 1970's? I dunno. But it sure was happening in that city.
A possible bright-spot: the current gang in power feel so thoroughly their right to do as they will* that there are very likely many hired in ways not conforming to law as interpreted by any court not primarily interested in not being put into the cornfield, and perhaps the more laxly the more ideoligically attractive to the gang, making it easier for the purging itself to stay within the letter of the law.
*'Make the Beast Great Again'
The efflorescence of the rot started with Reagan, both in our institutions and in the emboldened fringes, acquiesced to and endorsed by that deeply unpleasant man.