Yes, conservatives, the system is broken. No, Trump’s fixes won’t work.
The Washington Post (archive.ph)
By Megan McArdle
2024-10-31 22:54:36GMT
If you’re struggling to understand how anyone could vote for Donald Trump after his behavior on Jan. 6, 2021, I suggest you read Michael Anton’s essay in the Claremont Review of Books in September 2016. Its title is “The Flight 93 Election,” after the plane that was driven into the ground by 9/11 terrorists when its passengers rebelled and made a run for the cockpit. That’s essentially what Anton was urging conservatives to do, even at the risk of crashing the plane and killing everyone on board.
That might seem overwrought to you, as it does to me. But the Flight 93 mindset remains prevalent among Trump’s supporters, and it’s worth understanding why they feel that way — though people who feel that way should also understand why the Flight 93 approach is unlikely to work.
Advocates of the Flight 93 strategy see a world where the left has gained control of the institutions that are supposed to inform, monitor and execute government policy — civil service, academia, mainstream media, professional groups and nonprofits. Elected officials set the rules, but the rules matter less than who enforces them. And the enforcers mostly belong to what election forecaster Nate Silver calls “the indigo blob”: “left-progressives, liberals, centrists, and moderate or non-MAGA conservatives” who “all share a common argumentative space” that excludes the rightmost 30 percent of the country.
Members of the indigo blob — of which I am one — often take pride in this state of affairs. They think of Democrats as the party of expertise and professionalism, of the educated and the cultured. When conservatives say that journalism or academia skews left, they are apt to retort that they do so because “reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
Yet when these experts’ power is wielded in public, conservatives can clearly see how ideology influences that supposedly disinterested pursuit of truth. I watched former Never Trumpers I knew become radicalized by the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation, in which journalistic norms were relaxed to promote unverifiable accusations — and “innocent until proven guilty” suddenly gave way to the #BelieveWomen norms of #MeToo. That was at least until Tara Reade accused Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her, at which point a healthy skepticism once more became warranted.
This is only one event of many in the litany of complaints that conservatives have about how expert knowledge is formed and expert power is wielded: public health advisers letting concerns about racial justice override more mundane priorities, such as choosing the vaccine rollout strategy that would save the most lives; doctors prescribing puberty blockers and hormones to children without sufficient evidence they were effective and, in some cases, actively working to suppress evidence suggesting they weren’t; journalists telling their audiences that videos demonstrating Biden’s decline were “cheap fakes.” With each of these events, I watched more Trump skeptics decide that the indigo blob had to be stopped, whatever the cost.
To a liberal, these examples might seem small in comparison with the public disgrace of Jan. 6, and I largely agree. But conservatives are still right that critical institutions are botching their missions and destroying public trust in their work. They’re just wrong that Trump can fix it.
They’re wrong because even a bad system is better than the personal whims of a strongman. Procedural power might be abused by the left, but the procedures protect conservatives as well as liberals. Undermining tenure might let the right unseat a few particularly outrageous progressive academics, but it will also put a target on the backs of any conservatives in the academy. And any government powers you create to check liberal media outlets and social media platforms can equally be used to go after Fox News and Truth Social.
Nor is crashing the system likely to be effective even in the short term. Trump has an extraordinary gift for unifying the left and exacerbating its worst tendencies. He’s much less gifted at governing, which is why the indigo blob remains powerful despite his best, inept efforts.
Might this time be different with a more militant set of advisers, rather than the establishment remnants who populated Trump’s administration? The truth is closer to the opposite: It will be worse this time, not better. Trump is older, less energetic and more mired in his personal grievances against the system. The No. 1 criterion for entering his administration will not be experience or vision, but a willingness to affirm, against all evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen. If he wins again, his administration will have fewer old hands who understand how the bureaucracy works and how to check its leftward drift. It will have many more neophytes with big grievances and little ability to address them.
This promises all the mistakes of the first Trump administration, only more so. Instead of the patient work of lasting institutional change, we will get even more chaotic, impetuous decisions driven by whatever flattering lackey can grab the president’s ear, or whatever Fox News story has captured his fleeting attention. He might succeed in crashing the plane. But conservatives will find little worth salvaging from the wreckage.
The Washington Post (archive.ph)
By Megan McArdle
2024-10-31 22:54:36GMT
If you’re struggling to understand how anyone could vote for Donald Trump after his behavior on Jan. 6, 2021, I suggest you read Michael Anton’s essay in the Claremont Review of Books in September 2016. Its title is “The Flight 93 Election,” after the plane that was driven into the ground by 9/11 terrorists when its passengers rebelled and made a run for the cockpit. That’s essentially what Anton was urging conservatives to do, even at the risk of crashing the plane and killing everyone on board.
That might seem overwrought to you, as it does to me. But the Flight 93 mindset remains prevalent among Trump’s supporters, and it’s worth understanding why they feel that way — though people who feel that way should also understand why the Flight 93 approach is unlikely to work.
Advocates of the Flight 93 strategy see a world where the left has gained control of the institutions that are supposed to inform, monitor and execute government policy — civil service, academia, mainstream media, professional groups and nonprofits. Elected officials set the rules, but the rules matter less than who enforces them. And the enforcers mostly belong to what election forecaster Nate Silver calls “the indigo blob”: “left-progressives, liberals, centrists, and moderate or non-MAGA conservatives” who “all share a common argumentative space” that excludes the rightmost 30 percent of the country.
Members of the indigo blob — of which I am one — often take pride in this state of affairs. They think of Democrats as the party of expertise and professionalism, of the educated and the cultured. When conservatives say that journalism or academia skews left, they are apt to retort that they do so because “reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
Yet when these experts’ power is wielded in public, conservatives can clearly see how ideology influences that supposedly disinterested pursuit of truth. I watched former Never Trumpers I knew become radicalized by the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation, in which journalistic norms were relaxed to promote unverifiable accusations — and “innocent until proven guilty” suddenly gave way to the #BelieveWomen norms of #MeToo. That was at least until Tara Reade accused Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her, at which point a healthy skepticism once more became warranted.
This is only one event of many in the litany of complaints that conservatives have about how expert knowledge is formed and expert power is wielded: public health advisers letting concerns about racial justice override more mundane priorities, such as choosing the vaccine rollout strategy that would save the most lives; doctors prescribing puberty blockers and hormones to children without sufficient evidence they were effective and, in some cases, actively working to suppress evidence suggesting they weren’t; journalists telling their audiences that videos demonstrating Biden’s decline were “cheap fakes.” With each of these events, I watched more Trump skeptics decide that the indigo blob had to be stopped, whatever the cost.
To a liberal, these examples might seem small in comparison with the public disgrace of Jan. 6, and I largely agree. But conservatives are still right that critical institutions are botching their missions and destroying public trust in their work. They’re just wrong that Trump can fix it.
They’re wrong because even a bad system is better than the personal whims of a strongman. Procedural power might be abused by the left, but the procedures protect conservatives as well as liberals. Undermining tenure might let the right unseat a few particularly outrageous progressive academics, but it will also put a target on the backs of any conservatives in the academy. And any government powers you create to check liberal media outlets and social media platforms can equally be used to go after Fox News and Truth Social.
Nor is crashing the system likely to be effective even in the short term. Trump has an extraordinary gift for unifying the left and exacerbating its worst tendencies. He’s much less gifted at governing, which is why the indigo blob remains powerful despite his best, inept efforts.
Might this time be different with a more militant set of advisers, rather than the establishment remnants who populated Trump’s administration? The truth is closer to the opposite: It will be worse this time, not better. Trump is older, less energetic and more mired in his personal grievances against the system. The No. 1 criterion for entering his administration will not be experience or vision, but a willingness to affirm, against all evidence, that the 2020 election was stolen. If he wins again, his administration will have fewer old hands who understand how the bureaucracy works and how to check its leftward drift. It will have many more neophytes with big grievances and little ability to address them.
This promises all the mistakes of the first Trump administration, only more so. Instead of the patient work of lasting institutional change, we will get even more chaotic, impetuous decisions driven by whatever flattering lackey can grab the president’s ear, or whatever Fox News story has captured his fleeting attention. He might succeed in crashing the plane. But conservatives will find little worth salvaging from the wreckage.
