"Trumpism" Doesn’t Exist, and Why It’s So Terrifying (Part 3)

[THIS CONTENT WAS WRITTEN BEFORE THE 2024 ELECTION, AND YET IT'S STILL AS RELEVANT TODAY -- IF NOT MORE RELEVANT -- THAN WHEN IT WAS WRITTEN.]

Narrative Mistake #3: Sanity can be restored? No, it can’t.

When Chris Christie withdrew from the 2024 presidential race he invoked the GOP’s old standby “Big Tent” narrative of consensus pluralism:

“I don’t know how anybody could want to be President of the United States if they don’t love America. And you cannot love America if you don’t love every American. Love the Americans who look different than you. Love the Americans who speak different than you. Love the Americans who think different than you. Love the Americans who believe and have faith that is different than yours. I love this country because my heart is open to every American and every person who cares about making this a better place.”^[i]

Christie and the GOP’s Big Tent storyline got crushed, while the extremists’ avenging hero storyline won in a landslide.

Over the past several decades, the small-p Republican party (i.e., voters, volunteers, local pols, and even many wealthy donors) has been more motivated by anti-pluralist, victimized hero messaging, than by pro-democracy pluralist messaging.

Accused insurrection plotter John Eastman summed up the entire mythology in defense of his actions around the J6 insurrection. His argument aligns not just with rhetoric from Trump, but also from hundreds of GOP politicians dating back to Reagan’s 1964 “A Time for Choosing” speech. Said Eastman:

“We are talking about whether we as a nation are going to completely repudiate every one of our founding principles, which is what the modern left wing – which is in control of the Democrat party [sic] – believes. That we are the root of all evil in the world and we have to be eradicated. This is an existential threat to the very survivability, not just of our nation, but of the example that our nation, properly understood, provides to the world.”^[ii]

Conservatives’ fundamental anti-truth is the idea that political opponents are domestic enemies out to destroy the “real America.”

The heroic-yet-paranoid, existential terror of mid-century conservative pioneers is now our lived reality in 2024—a lived reality defined by their desperate need for anti-truth.

Seven decades ago, national radio personality and conservative pioneer Clarence Manion attacked domestic enemies (in 1954) by complaining that America “rots from within from one-worldism, socialism, and communism.”^[iii] Even farther back, arch-conservative Senator Robert Taft warned in 1938 of the “infiltration of totalitarian ideas from the New Deal set in Washington.”^[iv]

You’ll still hear this kind of domestic-enemy storyline from just about every GOP politician and conservative activist today, as in any speech by the Heritage Foundation’s Kevin Roberts. The chief pitchman for the supposedly Trumpian “Project 2025” told his 2024 Leadership Conference that,

“America’s enemies today are not barbarians at the gate. They’re already inside. They’re already in charge, attacking our republic from within… They are coming for your freedom… and our national soul.”^[v] [emphasis original]

He is, of course, telling a whopper of a lie.

professor Paul Elliott Johnson, of the University of Pittsburgh, in his book I The People, observes that conservatives were “never as excluded as they believed themselves to be … Conservatives were not reacting to the fact that they, as people, were excluded from the political world. They were instead externalizing their disagreement with the view of the political mainstream.”^[vi]

To justify and externalize their feelings of exclusion, mid-century conservatives concocted a toxic identity narrative of persecution (the core of their anti-reality), in which they make a proprietary claim on Americanness and substitute conservatives in place of the American people.

According to Johnson:

“The modern American Right’s rhetorical form posits a uniform national population, repudiating the contingency that gives substance to democratic life… Conservative populism positions various external figures as the opposite of ‘the people’… For conservatives, the people who control and benefit from the liberal political system exist as a qualitatively different form of life from those who inhabit the ‘real’ America… [and] an alliance of minorities, arrogant bureaucrats, and elite politicians have colluded to kick ‘the people’ off center stage.”^[vii]

Hence, Kevin Roberts’ conflates conservatives’ freedom with America’s national soul; and Newt Gingrich claims that in the event of a Trump defeat the nation would become something called “post-America”; and George H.W. Bush’s strategy was to attack Michael Dukakis’ patriotism, The Economist magazine said Bush “throttled [Dukakis] with the flag.”

Conservatives’ personal co-opting of Americanness has been twisted into what Johnson calls a rhetorical Doomsday Machine:

“By enabling the conversion of almost any topic into an existential threat to an individual’s personhood, conservative populists unleashed a powerful rhetorical technique for generating visceral, hostile reactions out of the basic structures of liberal democracy.”^[viii]

More dangerous to democracy, however, is that conservatives’ heroic myth acts as a kind of insane, unstoppable anti-reality machine—subsuming not just “America” and Americanness, but also truth and reality itself.

Rush Limbaugh explicitly said so: “Conservatism is not the problem. Conservatism is the founding of this country, essentially. Conservatism isn't even really an ideology. Conservatism is just what is right, proper, decent, and moral.”^[ix]

Conservatives Now Own “Americanness” and Political Norms Are Gone for Good.

In a piece for CNN, the Rev. Dr. Russell Levinson Jr., a former advisor to George H.W. Bush, took current GOP leadership to task for supporting Trump and urged conservative voters to seek a “return to Republican norms and values that our party once embodied.”^[x]

Never going to happen. The insanity is here to stay, with no end in sight.

In a world of conservative anti-truth, “America” is not an independent entity that’s defined by negotiation and consensus; it’s not in an indefinite state of flux, ever becoming a more perfect union, as liberals like to pitch it. Conservatives are not even saying, “We’re Americans and you’re not.” Americanness isn’t a thing you attach yourself to, while knocking others out of the way. It goes much deeper than that.

To them, “America” as a discreet concept has no independent existence apart from conservatism. In fact, one could say that America is “ofconservatism,” to use a Handmaid’s Tale kind of terminology.

Moreover, America proceeds from the cultural identity and heritage of conservative persons who founded the nation (White, Christian, European). This thing called “America” is a direct manifestation of their identities, beliefs, virtues, interests, and aspirations, and no one else’s.

Pat Buchanan was never shy about his belief that, “We are a European country.”^[xi] Jerry Fallwell was adamant that, “The nation was intended to be a Christian nation by our founding fathers.”^[xii] And one of the godfathers of American Christian nationalism, Armenian immigrant R. J. Rushdooney, argued that the Constitution “was designed to perpetuate a Christian order.”^[xiii]

This sub-narrative of America as an explicitly European Christian nation, modeled on Biblical norms, is a kind of ethno-religious “Big Lie.” Katherine Stewart, in her book The Power Worshippers, explains in simple terms:

“Once upon a time… America was united around a common religion that served as the foundation of the Republic—until secularists commandeered the Supreme Court and ruined everything.”^[xiv]

Owing to the influence of Christian religiosity, we should actually call today’s conservative movement “born-again conservatism,” and we can summarize its view of America and Americanness in the most succinct possible terms:

Their origin myth holds that, “America is us—not the other way around.”

All of which brings us to the third mistake made by the anti-Trump, anti-MAGA coalition: their unyielding faith that sanity can be restored—i.e., that appeals to reason, common sense, and compromise, and campaigning on “kitchen-table issues,” will beat back the forces of extremism and bring the GOP back to its Establishmentarian, bi-partisan, pluralistic senses.

It’s a different way of stating Paul Elliott Johnson’s notion of I The People. Only conservatives can lay claim to being “the American people”; everybody else is something else.

And that particular idea has absolutely nothing to do with Trump or “Trumpism”; it stretches unbroken from the fringe activists of the 1950s to the internet trolls of the 2020s, like the alt-right’s Glenn Ellmers, who rants that, “It is not obvious what we should call these… non-American Americans; but they are something else”^[xv] (i.e., especially Mayflower-descended, White people who claim to be Americans but don’t subscribe to his idiosyncratic brand of conservatism).

In academic-speak, this personal cop-opting America, Americanness, and political authority is what Paul Elliott Johnson calls a “tautologically self-authorizing sociopolitical power structure.”^[xvi]

Moreover, exercising their power in the face of pluralistic aggression is what defines conservative heroism, which explains (maybe even predicts?) every political dysfunction we see on the American right today.

Following the logic of their personal victim mythology, enemies are no longer defined as those who disagree with conservatives; enemies are defined as those with whom conservatives disagree.

America’s enemies are defined by a projection of conservative whim, not who stands opposed to fixed conservative ideals—it’s the only credible answer to how the GOP could excommunicate conservative stalwarts like Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney.

Such a personalized victim-based catechism functions quite effectively as a coherent political belief system. So, it’s absolutely a mistake to call the GOP, as did a headline in The Atlantic in 2020, the “Party of No Content.”^[xvii]

The Party quite clearly has a coherent organizing principle: a revanchist mission in which born-again conservative heroes are so purely driven that wherever they see a threat to the real America (i.e., themselves), they can do no wrong in attacking it. It also allows them to defy facts and reality, as they do in asserting that violent J6 insurrectionists being held by law enforcement are “political prisoners” and “hostages.”^[xviii]

The GOP’s new operating principle may not express a political ideology, but the *narrative imperative* of The BIG “Big Lie” (i.e., conservatives’ identity as victimized true American heroes) is equally effective at garnering votes and money.

In a Conservative-Led Regime, Anti-Truth IS the New Normal.

The biggest danger to pluralistic democracy—and the source of our unending political insanity—isn’t politics, it’s the politics of truth.

**Given its untrue premise, today’s born-again conservative identity cannot survive and thrive except in a world of untruth.**

Conservatives are compelled to manufacture an external world in which their false identity as outsider, victimized heroes is unassailably true. Timothy Snyder, in his book On Tyranny, sums up the thoughts of German scholar and writer on totalitarianism, Victor Klemperer, about how the truth dies:

“The first mode [of how the truth dies] is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts… Demeaning the world as it is, begins the creation of a fictional counterworld.”^[xix]

What we on the outside see as delusions, bonkers conspiracy theories, and fabulist contortions are all industrious and essential attempts to establish what psychologists call “cognitive consistency.” One could also call it “narrative coherence” – i.e., creating a counterworld that reflects and validates a false identity narrative, so that it doesn’t crumble in the face of contradictory facts.

Take the “deep state” conspiracy as an example, which seems outlandish on its face. Concepts like the “deep state” are not only rational on their part, but also an absolutely narrative necessity. If there is no such thing as the deep state, and no surreptitious control emanating from the bowels of the bureaucracy, then the whole storyline of deliberate conservative victimization falls apart.

If it doesn’t exist, one must create it, or admit that the core of one’s besieged-hero identity is false.

Such realizations can be tremendously painful. We make an enormous psychic investment in our identity stories, and giving them up is psychologically costly:

“… schemas, many of which are formed early in life, continue to be elaborated and then superimposed on later life experiences, even when they are no longer applicable. This is sometimes referred to as the need for ‘cognitive consistency,’ for maintaining a stable view of oneself and the world, even if it is, in reality, inaccurate or distorted… To give up a schema is to relinquish knowledge of who one is and what the world is like.”^[xx]

Richard Sima, a neuroscientist who writes the Brain Matters column for The Washington Post, did a short article on why our brains believe lies, in which he posits that “correcting misinformation is even more challenging if it is embedded into our identity or system of belief.”

In support of this idea, he quotes Prof. Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Bristol in the UK:

“It's very difficult to rip out a plank of this edifice without the whole thing collapsing. If it is an important component of your mental model, it is cognitively very difficult to just yank it out and say it’s false.”^[xxi]

Hence, deep-state conspiracies are now a permanent feature of American politics, because giving them up would require conservatives to give up a huge chunk of their heroic, “victimized real America” identity.

The same goes for “election integrity” panics, which GOP pols have been hammering on for decades, even using it against each other.^[xxii] By narrative necessity, when a conservative candidate (i.e., “the real America”) loses, conservatives must claim the opponent’s win was illegitimate.

Why? Allowing “non-American Americans” to govern the “real America” is an oxymoron, and admitting to the fairness of elections is a tacit recognition of pluralism, which blows up conservatives’ tautologically self-authorizing power structure.

For this reason, election integrity battles are now a permanent feature of American politics; it’s also why Trump’s “Big Lie” about a stolen election landed so effectively. Conservatives’ proprietary claims on Americanness fall apart if their opponents can legitimately win elections.

The same is true of their newest boogeyman: “weaponization of government.” [former] Washington Post opinion columnist Jennifer Rubin believes that “Jim Jordon Doesn’t Understand His Job”^[xxiii] because Jordan weaponized the government to ferret out non-existent weaponization of government by Democrats.

No, Ms. Rubin. Jim Jordan understands exactly what his job is: narrative coherence. He had to fulfill the narrative and hold enemies to account for victimizing conservatives, proving the lie even where facts contradict it.

As absurd as they seem, these are all deadly serious efforts aiming toward a grand and extremely disturbing outcome: the manufacture of a fictional counterworld in which the false mythology of victimized conservative heroes can be asserted as true.

Creating what Masha Gessen calls a “power lie,” not merely to lie, but to “assert power” and assert “control over reality itself.”^[xxiv]

Former Republican strategist Stuart Stevens doesn’t know how correct he is when he warns that,

“Few people grasp… just how huge the machinery of deception is that the Republicans have erected and how long it has been in the making… Republicans are linked to a vast life-support system of lies, terrified that the truth will unplug the machine.”^[xxv]

They are never willingly going to unplug the machine, because it has become the GOP’s primary source of electoral relevance.

Asking how to bring such a Republican Party back to its senses—back to its previous “moral compass,” in Levinson’s words—is like asking how one could re-freeze a melted glacier.

So, when never-Trumpers vilify the GOP for shattering norms and customs, they’re merely validating and further inciting the hard right: shattering norms and customs is the entire point. Destroying the tyranny of consensus pluralism is conservatives’ heroic mandate; accusing them of it just confirms they’re succeeding, which they love.

And when the anti-MAGA coalition insists that they can win by focusing on kitchen-table issues, they sound hopelessly naïve. When they demand a return to the previous common-sense, bi-partisan status quo, they are demanding an impossibility by “calling back to an era of liberal hegemony that conservatism already organized against and defeated.”^[xxvi]

Finally, when they demand a stop to conservative attacks on facts and truth, they are demanding that conservatives give up their only way of validating their identity—i.e., constructing a counterworld of untruth is their only way of keeping the false victim-hero identity alive.

The right spent 70+ years manufacturing a victim-based anti-reality.

To keep it going, the “deep state” must be true, and “weaponization of government” must be true, and “election theft” must be true, and “racism against white people” must be true, and on and on.

If they admit none of it is true, they have to admit their identity is false.

Psychologist John Holmes reminds us of the power of identity narratives: “For better or worse, stories are a very powerful source of self-persuasion, and they are highly internally consistent. Evidence that doesn’t fit the story is going to be left behind.”^[xxvii]

The insanity is here to stay, because the BIG “Big Lie” is here to stay, with no end in sight, with or without Trump.

The anti-reality machine chugs on at full-speed and will continue doing so until its animating lie has been dismantled. And yet, the pro-pluralism factions in American politics still cannot figure out what they’re really fighting.

WE HERE AT LITERAL MAYHEM SAW IT ALL COMING…

Part 4… America Will NOT Avoid Autocracy

^[i] Christie speech, Associated Press coverage (2024, January 10) 44:09

^[ii] John Eastman interview with Tom Klingenstein (2023, August 2) (https://tomklingenstein.com/the-john-eastman-interview-part-iii/) 22:27

^[iii] Hemmer, ibid, p.47

^[iv] Hemmer, ibid, p.18

^[v] Kevin Roberts address to the Heritage Foundation Annual Leadership Conference (2024, July 3)

^[vi] Paul Elliott Johnson, I The People: The rhetoric of conservative populism in the Unites States (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press 2022) p.7

^[vii] Johnson, ibid, p.3-4/8

^[viii] Johnson, ibid, p.210

^[ix] https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/rush_limbaugh_595416

^[x] Levinson, Dr. R. J. (2023, August 1) GOP leaders backing Trump are in a moral abyss, CNN.com(https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/01/opinions/trump-gop-leaders-republican-party-moral-decline-levenson/index.html)

^[xi] Nicole Hemmer, Partisans: The conservative revolutionaries who remade American politics in the 1990s (New York: Basic Books 2022) p.74

^[xii] Corn, ibid, p.132

^[xiii] Hemmer 1, ibid, p.113

^[xiv] Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the dangerous rise of religious nationalism (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing 2022) p.130

^[xv] Ellmers, G. (2021, March 24) “Conservatism” is no longer enough, The American Mind (https://americanmind.org/salvo/why-the-claremont-institute-is-not-conservative-and-you-shouldnt-be-either/)

^[xvi] Johnson, ibid, p.3

^[xvii] Lowrey, A (2020, August 4) The Party of No Content, The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/party-no-content/615607/)

^[xviii] Mascaro, L. (2023, March 25) Marjorie Taylor Greene’s jail visit pulls GOP closer to Jan. 6 rioters, Associated Press (https://apnews.com/article/marjorie-taylor-greene-jan-6-capitol-attack-20f06d75072a563d56a86b0ecf2d89b8#); Reilly, R. (2024 April 4) Meet some of the violent Jan. 6 rioters Donald Trump keeps calling 'hostages,' MSNBC (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/trump-republicans-jan-6-hostages-violence-capitol-police-rcna143888)

^[xix] Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (New York: Crown) p.66

^[xx] Young, Klosko & Weishaar, ibid, p.32

^[xxi] Sima, R. (2022, November 3) Why do our brains believe lies?, The Washington Post

^[xxii] —e.g., Bob Dole questioned the legitimacy of GOP primary elections in 1996; Rick Santorum told CNN that Romney somehow “rigged” the CPAC straw poll in 2012; failed tea party Senate candidate Chris McDaniel claimed that his primary opponent, Thad Cochran, "stole" the election

^[xxiii] Rubin, J (2023, March 27) Jim Jordon doesn’t understand his job, The Washington Post

^[xxiv] Masha Gessen, Surviving Autocracy (New York: Riverhead Books 2020) p.106

^[xxv] Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie (New York: Knopf 2020) pp.108 & 170

^[xxvi] Johnson, ibid, p.231

^[xxvii] Dingfelder, ibid