critiques and comments on a nyt op-ed
- lucy
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
The original article these quotes were taken from is entitled "Trump Voters Love Him More Than Before. Four Conservative Columnists Pinpoint Why."
A note before we begin: there are plenty of policy disputes I have with the authors, but I don't think it is useful to litigate them here. Instead, the plan is to focus on the language and analysis used in framing their arguments.
French: In addition to the brokenism that David talks about, there’s a strong undercurrent of raw animosity in our politics. Republicans and Democrats have very negative views of each other, and many Republicans, sadly, want their opponents to suffer. They’re actually happy to see people lose their jobs or to see nonprofits lose funding if those people are perceived as part of the “deep state” or RINOs.
So, yes, Republicans want a disruptive president, but who’s being disrupted really matters — and if it’s the government or institutions that many Republicans believe are hostile to them, then Republicans are just fine with the pain. Many Republicans dislike foreign aid. Or loathe elite universities. Or hate big liberal law firms. Students and professors at elite universities have a long track record of targeting the free speech rights of their conservative colleagues, and Republicans are rationalizing their own constitutional violations as fighting fire with fire.
Lucy: He’s not saying the word, but what he’s describing here is a politics driven by envy. The drive here is purely destructive, the want for “the elites” to suffer even if that suffering yields no material benefit for themselves or for the country. I think the choice to frame this around free speech is misleading. Conservatives do feel that their free speech has been taken away from them, but the motivating drives manifesting out of that are envy and revenge. The notion that this is an attempt “to fight fire with fire” misses the point for me.
Douthat: He wants to fire federal bureaucrats, downsize and devolve the Department of Education, cut regulations — this isn’t some populist rebuke of Ronald Reagan’s conservatism; this IS Ronald Reagan’s conservatism.
Lucy: Reagan is a poor choice here because even Trump republicans who hate neoconservatives love Reagan; when they say they hate neocons that tends to be a rebuke of Bush-era republicans. Additionally, it is important to note that populism is not a policy prescription, it is a political style, a rhetorical technique. Citing certain policies to prove that a politician is or is not a populist is ineffective, or at least not impactful, for that reason.
Brooks: Progressives really have spent the last few decades excluding conservative and working-class voices from a lot of institutions. Trump has gone after these institutions big time — the universities, the Department of Education, the State Department. Of course, the MAGA crowd feels justified revenge.
Lucy: I have a couple of issues with this. First, the grouping of conservative and working-class. These are not synonymous terms now and they certainly were not a few decades ago. Working-class people 100% have been barred from many institutions, but this is not the result of progressive policy nor some nebulous form of progressive collusion: it is the result of systemic barriers to power, skyrocketing wealth inequality, and increasingly unaffordable college educations. Academia does absolutely skew liberal, but that is far from true of every institution of power. Banking?? Tech?? Consulting?? Absolutely not. The idea that conservatives have been barred from speaking may feel real to them, but it is just not reflective of reality.
Stephens: But those campus conservatives were always ideological minorities at elite colleges, and it’s where they learned to loathe the contempt they felt coming from liberal professors and peers.
Lucy: This is true to an extent, but i’d be interested to see if he would extend that same grace to a woman who says she “hates all men.” It seems to me that conservatives are allowed to support policies of vengeance over far less a slight against them compared to marginalized groups would who never be extended that grace to even vocalize anger over much more.
Stephens: You also probably think it’s no tragedy that government workers should experience the periodic layoffs that the rest of American workers have lived through since forever.
Lucy: Again, this is envy.
Stephens: The other point that can’t be emphasized enough: Trump wouldn’t be as popular as he is with his side of the country if Democrats and progressives weren’t as unpopular with most sides of the country.
Lucy: I believe this statement is correct. Also, this is envy.
French: Those of us who follow politics closely always seem to forget that we’re the strange ones. I really question how much the average rank-and-file Republican even knows about most of these early controversies. If you’re watching Fox News or other right-wing outlets, you’re hearing a lot of stories about strange, woke programs funded by U.S.A.I.D. They don’t know about the lives that are saved or the lives that are at risk.
Lucy: I’m glad we’ve finally gotten to a discussion of how the current media revolution we’re living through shapes support for Trump. Between a combination of algorithms driving narrative isolation, fueling extremism and conspiracism, and the mass proliferation of tools with which to consume and distribute information, people end up not knowing the arguments being made on the other side. I will say, though, that i’m not about to do a “both sides” jig here. The GOP has observably drifted away from any sense of objective or measurable truth in ways the Democratic Party just has not.
Douthat: Second, I would emphasize that many Americans experienced the recent period of liberal power, especially under Covidian conditions, as much more authoritarian and lawless feeling in its everyday impact — schools closed and masks mandated, ideological double standards for different forms of public gathering and protest, ideological speech codes tacitly or explicitly imposed — than anything they experienced under Trump.
Lucy: Important to note here that this is a distortion of reality. Mask mandates, school closures, and lock downs started under Trump. I’m also interested in the term “ideological speech codes tacitly or explicitly imposed.” I find it interesting due to the fact that every speech code ever implemented in the history of humanity, including free speech absolutism, is by nature ideological.
Stephens: What I see is a president doing things that are, if not outright illegal, genuinely scary, like trying to go after the Washington law firm representing Jack Smith, a former special counsel. At a minimum, Trump represents an almost unprecedented stress test to the judicial system and the separation of powers. And if he starts openly defying Supreme Court rulings à la Andrew Jackson, that’s when you’ll find me at the barricades.
Lucy: This is not an opinion I respect at all. I’m glad he thinks that these behaviors are bad, but I see no reason why defying Supreme Court order would be the red line here. It seems like an overly proceduralist view of American politics that either cannot or will not recognize that democracy can be threatened via offenses that do not threaten a procedure he personally cares about.
Stephens: That said, some of what Trump is doing is simply a turbocharged version of what his liberal predecessors did while the mainstream press remained mostly mum. Remember Barack Obama’s threats of unilateral executive action through his phone and his pen? Or Joe Biden’s almost open flouting of the Supreme Court with his student loan forgiveness schemes?
Lucy: This is honestly laughable. Obviously, executive authority has been growing for a long time and Obama and Biden have played a role in that trend. That being said, it is bonkers to compare “threats of unilateral executive action” to continued and flagrant acts of unilateral executive action. Also, I would not call Biden’s forgiveness plans “flouting.” Was his student relief plan constitutional? Likely not. Did the plan end when the Supreme Court came to that conclusion? Yes. How is that a rebuke?
French: We’ve seen this pattern throughout the Trump years. Trump will advance an illegal or unconstitutional policy, MAGA lawyers will spring to MAGA media to rationalize and justify it, and then, when even conservative judges or justices block Trump’s actions, they scream that the courts are lawless, not Trump.
Lucy: A voice of reason.
Stephens: The practice by presidents of both parties to ensure that profits are privatized and risk is socialized is a road to ruin.
Lucy: Real, based, etc.
Stephens: Terrible. I only stop to observe that all the liberals who went berserk over John Roberts’s nomination to the court 20 years ago owe the chief justice an apology, especially after his intervention in this case. He’s a model of conservative jurisprudence.
Lucy: Is this not more an indicator of the sharp right turn the republican party has taken that Roberts is now considered a moderate?
Stephens: I don’t think the military was cruel when transgender people were barred from military service for the first seven and a half years of Barack Obama’s presidency. This is an example of the deep disconnect between the moral certitudes of the part of the country that rarely serves in the military and the cultural convictions of the part of the country that often does — and on whom we all depend for our safety.
Lucy: This is an absurd argument. It was cruel to ban transgender people from serving under Obama and it would be under Trump. The message seems to be that since the part of the country “that often serves” (i.e. conservatives) hold transphobic beliefs, discriminatory hiring practices are ethical to implement. If it is not already clear, this is a policy of blatant discrimination which is not justified by the bigotry of Stephens’ “part of the country who serves.”
French: I see the matter primarily as a question of readiness, not rights. Medical transitions can be very physically challenging, sometimes including physically debilitating treatments. That can affect readiness a great deal. In that circumstance, the question is less about transgender status and more about the physical realities of complex medical procedures.
Lucy: It is true the medical transitions can pose many physical challenges, but, importantly, Trump is not preventing people in the middle of debilitating procedures from the military, he is banning all trans people regardless of where they are in their transition or if they even want certain medical interventions.
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