Why It Probably Gets Worse After Trump

More populist and ethnonationalist, maybe less conspiratorial

People sometimes ask what I think the future of the GOP will be after Trump. See my article on the emerging Bannon-Groyper alliance and its follow-up. To put numbers on it, I say 75% chance things will be as bad or get worse – that is, from my perspective of wanting a movement that is less ethnonationalist, populist, anti-vaxx, and conspiratorial – and maybe 25% chance things get better. I wrote about this in UnHerd.

There are two indicators we may look for in forecasting the future of a movement. The first involves examining areas in which the base and its spokesmen show resistance against the ultimate leader. There is a natural tendency to defer to the leader of a party, but tensions always exist between him, those in the middle ranks, and the base, and where the pressure points are can tell us something.

This method would have accurately predicted the Republican Party’s hard turn against immigration in the aftermath of the Bush and McCain era, during which talk radio helped dash proposals for a grand bargain supported by GOP elites. We’ve seen something similar on the Democratic side over the last year, with the party mainstream abandoning support for the Israeli war effort in response to pressure from the Left flank.

The other method involves assessing a movement’s information ecosystem. I would argue that this is a more useful guide than general public opinion within a party, since most people aren’t thinking about most issues most of the time, and it is the opinion-forming class of today within each that shapes what normies will care and vote about tomorrow. On the Democratic side, the relevant elites are the prestige press and the liberal activist class; for Republicans, it’s Fox News, major podcasts, and the community of Right-wing influencers on “X” (formerly Twitter).

Both indicators suggest that the post-Trump GOP will be more conspiratorial, more deeply in thrall to pseudoscience, and more likely to hold uncompromising attitudes toward immigrants and political opponents.

Read the whole thing here.

I’m not such a malcontent that a party has to completely agree with me to receive my support. I understand compromises need to be made and that I’m an unusual man who is unlikely to see his preferences reflected in one political movement. On abortion, for example, I have long made my peace with the fact that Republicans are pro-life. It just keeps getting worse though, with new undesirable pieces being added to conservatism, due to the cursed epistemological environment on the right. Objectionable things that didn’t even exist on the right six years ago but are now major threads include election denial, vaccine denial, banning lab-grown meat, and hostility to even high-skilled immigration.

In judging your relationship to a movement, you have to look at not only where it is right now but also where things are going. I search for intellectuals or influencers on the right who I think are a positive force while managing to have large audiences. Very few exist. When the base disagrees with Trump, I find Trump to be the more reasonable side in the dispute almost every time. And I think Trump is a corrupt criminal who wants to abolish democracy! So yeah, we probably haven’t reached the bottom.

That said, later in the piece I explain how I might be wrong.

If there are countervailing forces within the Republican Party they remain mostly hidden for now. In fairness, mainstream Republicans have put pressure on RFK over his anti-vaccine positions, and likely have stopped the Department of Health and Human Services from embracing pseudoscience even more than it has. When Trump has tried to prosecute his enemies on flimsy pretexts, he has encountered resistance even among his appointees. In order to get his indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, the president had to push out his own US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and replace him with one of his personal lawyers, over the objections of his top-two officials at the Department of Justice, one of whom had also served as his personal lawyer.

As with Jan. 6 and the events leading up to it, it is difficult to imagine a similar story involving any other Republican leader. Trump is an outlier both in terms of how flawed he is as an individual, and also in the kind of personal grip he maintains on the GOP base. Top attorneys in the executive branch aren’t Twitter influencers, and have their own code of ethics and professional norms. They will resist a leader who tries to get them to do things that are too far outside of the bounds of legality and established norms. Still, working under Trump makes the ability to draw red lines much more difficult.

In other words, perhaps I’m going about this the wrong way by just counting positions where I agree with Trump, counting the ones where I agree with the base, and then deciding Trump is better. Trump is more than the sum of his political positions. He’s a walking statement about the (lack of) honesty, intelligence, and integrity of the movement he leads. Trump by the very nature of who he is draws into the Republican coalition the worst people. He himself might not be that anti-vaxx or want to release the Epstein files, for example, but the kinds of people who like Trump have the traits that make them hostile to established medicine and embrace conspiratorial thinking. Trump uses the cognitive and psychological shortcomings of his base for his own advantage, like when he complains about Deep State conspiracies, or in the events leading up to January 6, when he found it easy to sell supporters on the idea that the election was stolen. He talks about Deep State conspiracies, and the types who believe in QAnon feel heard and become his most loyal soldiers. The funny and pathetic part of all this is that these people need a hero, and he gives them one, but always in the service of his own ego gratification and accumulation of wealth and power.

Without Trump, perhaps politics becomes boring to them and these people find some other way to occupy their time. But I think Candace and Tucker types have perfected the politics as entertainment model, so enough of them stick around. Another possibility is that the crazies remain, but they can’t consolidate behind one candidate. Imagine the Republican base is like 30% sane and 70% crazy or under the sway of crazy influencers, and maybe if the 70% are divided and overall less competent due to human capital limitations, the 30% have a chance in an inner party struggle in a way they didn’t when Trump was the leader. But the most likely successor is Vance, who might tone down the corruption, conspiracy theories, and lies, but increase the ethnonationalism and populism. MAHA is probably here to stay regardless. I’m counting that in the category of bad outcomes from my perspective, as a more focused program based around hostility to foreigners and trade can do a lot more long-term damage to the country.