This framing seems misleading to me. The ascendance of a temperementally authoritarian political movement created demand for vaguely intellectual sounding ex-post rationalizations for the facts on the ground.
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As with a lot of writing about intellectuals, political thought, etc, this focuses on a few people in the public eye. So yes, it's limited. Not sure it's wrong, however.
jul 9, 2025, 4:11 pm • 1 0 • view
Dominance isn't winning arguments, it's being repeated enough to be perceived as correct. More than half the country hears constantly that the Left is just peddling grooming and communism. They believe it
jul 9, 2025, 4:35 pm • 1 0 • view
Liberalism isn’t terribly easy to defend, but it’s not impossible. It’s fascinating to confront my friends who used to be fairly liberal with their own authoritarian arguments. “People shouldn’t say offensive things” or “alligator Alcatraz is necessary” are fairly easy to beat back.
jul 9, 2025, 7:45 pm • 0 0 • view
I mean, it's not THAT hard to defend. Pretty much every country most people would want to even consider living in is some flavor of liberal democracy, and a century & change of proposed alternatives have pretty uniformly yielded misery and horror.
jul 9, 2025, 8:01 pm • 3 0 • view
These ideas were never “dominant” in the sense of being appealing or persuasive to significant numbers of other educated people. They just got a lot of attention insofar as they put a theoretical gloss on the impulses of people who don’t themselves read books.
jul 9, 2025, 3:53 pm • 185 11 • view
You could be right. But it’s a lot harder to sustain these arguments when they’re being tried out and shown to be dismal failures.
jul 9, 2025, 3:55 pm • 0 0 • view
yes! in fact, the absence of good intellectual justification for libidinal Trumpist outrages created a STRONGER pull for these sorts of intellectual exercises, but it's a load of bunk.
jul 9, 2025, 3:55 pm • 3 0 • view
I do think fascist anti-intellectualism has increasingly been occupying positions of power, though. FOX News becoming the dominant national news outlet. NYT and WaPo's turns to the right. Rise of the podcast-based alternative media which values attention/celebrity over quality.
jul 9, 2025, 4:20 pm • 0 0 • view
It’s like there had been a spate of bear attacks, and to provide fodder for NYRB essays, the media trotted out some crank who’d written a Bear Supremacist manifesto. And everyone starts stroking their chins over the broad influence of Bear Supremacy Theory.
jul 9, 2025, 3:58 pm • 127 8 • view
The extent to which this fits into the universe posited by Much Apu About Nothing is, frankly, suspicious
jul 9, 2025, 4:35 pm • 0 0 • view
I get why we do this: People who traffic in words and theory want words and theory to contend with. At that level, the Trump era has been weirdly boring for writers. There’s a lot of horrifying action to catalogue, but nothing of any real interest to argue with.
jul 9, 2025, 4:06 pm • 214 17 • view
This explains the entire modern conservative movement as well. "Originalism" and "textualism" were just invented to provide cover to roll back the new deal and everything since the 14th amendment because white bigots didn't want to share "their" country with "those" people.
jul 9, 2025, 4:34 pm • 12 1 • view
100%
jul 9, 2025, 4:38 pm • 1 0 • view
Nope. They are grounded in centuries of jurisprudence. “The discretion of the judge is the first engine of tyranny," 4 C. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire 385 (1776-89) (Philips Samson, and Co. 1856),
jul 11, 2025, 8:17 pm • 0 0 • view
Nope. It was invented by Bork to help the GOP court bigots by providing a thin "intellectual" cover for rolling back civil rights legislation and progressive polices.
jul 11, 2025, 8:49 pm • 0 0 • view
I respectfully disagree. Bork wouldn't know these guys, and said so.
jul 11, 2025, 9:31 pm • 0 0 • view
You, uh, know this article is online, right? firstthings.com/the-end-of-d... Bork being a disgusting bigot raging against "homosexuals" and "feminists" certainly ages well.
jul 11, 2025, 9:58 pm • 0 0 • view
I opposed him back then, but his point stands,. Judges can't write law. That is what makes the Roberts Court so problematic.
jul 11, 2025, 10:11 pm • 0 0 • view
There are arguments made, of course, in cable segments and (of necessity) in court filings. But they’re uniformly unserious and trivially debunked. Answering them is housekeeping, not intellectual work. So writers & thinkers cast about for something more serious to contend with.
jul 9, 2025, 4:09 pm • 130 6 • view
Eventually the desire for an enemy theory ends up shining a public spotlight on a handful of illiberal scribblers. But they’re not actually DRIVING anything. At most they’re adopted after the fact.
jul 9, 2025, 4:15 pm • 79 4 • view
All that is true, but the post-liberals may be describing a few real, solid objects lurking in the mush of an aliterate, irrational movement.
jul 9, 2025, 4:24 pm • 9 1 • view
Broken clocks being "correct" twice a day doesn't make them useful. Part of the illiberal project is identifying real problems, blaming "liberalism" (or "woke", or...), misdiagnosing them, and providing ideology-based solutions that advance the illiberal agenda without actually solving anything.
jul 9, 2025, 4:37 pm • 0 1 • view
I didn't mean to credit them with being correct. Just that they may accurately describe a couple of things about the movement's goals and underlying impulses. No correctness granted by me here.
jul 9, 2025, 4:40 pm • 2 0 • view
Nah, they're the last people to be honest about the movement they're claiming to speak for. The whole purpose is to put a respectable seeming disguise on it
jul 9, 2025, 4:28 pm • 8 1 • view
Probably a combination of all of the above, but I have much more respect for the thoughtless MAGA voter than the men who want to clarify, validate, and systematize that voter's worst instincts. They also want to use the movement to advance their pre-existing mission.
jul 9, 2025, 4:33 pm • 11 1 • view
@normative.bsky.social 💯 https://inaniludibrio.com/2025/03/25/the-most-important-thing/
jul 9, 2025, 4:12 pm • 0 1 • view
"There’s a lot of horrifying action to catalogue, but nothing of any real interest to argue with" <--- I wonder about the capacity to really contextualize or understand it, esp. on the pace. Tools are missing.
jul 9, 2025, 4:26 pm • 3 0 • view
This is a very good point with any attempt by MAGA to rationalize motive or Dems who whine about hypocrisy. Ex. “cutting programs to fund tax cuts” is really “people shouldn’t pay taxes” and “government shouldn’t provide social services, etc” ideology. Waste, fraud, abuse is a persuasive argument.
jul 9, 2025, 4:34 pm • 0 0 • view
there's also something anachronistic about this impulse because we live in the age of image politics. the "ideologues" developing MAGA's epistemic foundation/rationalization are not writers/thinkers: they're podcasters/Fox/etc. you can't argue with an image the same way! thx neil postman
jul 9, 2025, 5:08 pm • 0 1 • view
They're conservatives; they want economic austerity, they want to hurt marginalized people, and some of them want a state religion. Same shit as usual, except now, the ✨𝓪𝓮𝓼𝓽𝓱𝓮𝓽𝓲𝓬✨ is ugly hats, badly-built cars, and flag-humping AI slop.
jul 9, 2025, 9:19 pm • 0 0 • view
This is also around my theory about pattern-matching bsky.app/profile/jody...
jul 9, 2025, 4:28 pm • 2 0 • view
The more the AI can do in your society, the more risk that it’s fascist. With causation running reverse of what people think. The banality is what moves things forward toward ruin
jul 9, 2025, 4:31 pm • 1 0 • view
We Have Failed to Grapple With Lessons of Grafton
jul 9, 2025, 4:10 pm • 1 0 • view
lol, guessing you subscribe to @nogodsnomayors.com
jul 9, 2025, 4:17 pm • 0 0 • view
No, never heard of it, but I can see why you guessed that.
jul 9, 2025, 4:20 pm • 1 0 • view
But why are people voting for the bears?! Maybe we need to send reporters to bear cafes and hear important bear thoughts on the importance of eating people.
jul 9, 2025, 4:00 pm • 1 0 • view
Someone who is a bigot gets challenged on it, they search for arguments about why their bigotry is justified, send a link to a 2 hour youtube video which they don’t even watch. This activity drives demand for more nonsense through the algorithms.
jul 9, 2025, 4:15 pm • 2 0 • view
“Educated” is a pretty significant qualification.
jul 9, 2025, 4:52 pm • 0 0 • view
They are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. -sartre
jul 9, 2025, 4:11 pm • 3 0 • view
"for it is their adversary who... ...believes in words." Exactly- MAGA has no use for words, and is simply all about exertion of power by force. They couldn't care less about intellectual justifications. I can see why writers/pundits feel left out.
jul 9, 2025, 8:30 pm • 1 0 • view