ChatGPT says: Alliance Theory would interpret Jonah Goldberg, William Kristol, and the “principled constitutional conservative” Never-Trump cohort not primarily as defenders of abstract norms, but as members of a collapsing alliance network who chose to remain loyal to an old coalition even after its mass base defected.
Their original alliance position.
They were central nodes in the post-Reagan conservative super-alliance:
Neocon foreign policy elites
Free-market globalists
Constitutional originalists
Cold War national security institutions
Donor class Republicans
Prestige media and think-tank world
Their shared rivals were:
The Soviet bloc
Third World authoritarianism
Domestic New Left radicalism
Later, Islamism and rogue states
This coalition was hierarchical, elite-driven, and institutionally embedded. Its moral language was constitutionalism, democracy promotion, free markets, and rule-based order. Goldberg and Kristol were not just thinkers. They were alliance legitimizers. Their job was to provide the moral and intellectual grammar that made this elite coalition feel righteous and coherent.
The rupture.
Trump did not merely change policies. He redefined the rival map.
Suddenly, the primary enemies became:
The permanent bureaucracy
Intelligence agencies
Global trade institutions
Corporate media
Universities
Transnational NGOs
The old Republican donor class
In Alliance Theory terms, the mass base reclassified many of the Never-Trump conservatives’ core institutional allies as out-groups.
That created a transitivity crisis.
Goldberg and Kristol faced a choice:
Reassign allies and update moral language accordingly, or
Remain loyal to their existing alliance and reinterpret the populist base as the new out-group.
They chose the second.
Why their “principle” language intensified.
Alliance Theory predicts that when an alliance loses dominance, its moral vocabulary becomes more abstract, legalistic, and universalist. That is a classic coalition defense move. When you cannot win on numbers or emotional loyalty, you elevate procedural norms and legitimacy rules. You turn “our side” into “the Constitution,” “liberal democracy,” “the Founders,” “norms,” “the rule of law.”
This is not fake. It is functional.
They were not lying about caring about the Constitution.
They were using constitutionalism as a coalition-preserving signal.
Who they were really defending.
They were defending:
The foreign-policy establishment
The intelligence community
The judiciary
The prestige press
The donor class
The Atlanticist world order
The post-Cold War elite settlement
These institutions were their allies for decades. Trump and MAGA directly attacked them. Alliance Theory says loyalty to long-standing allies is cognitively and morally prior to ideological consistency.
So they reframed the conflict:
Not elite vs populist
But constitutionalism vs authoritarianism
Not institutional decay
But “norm erosion”
Not alliance shift
But “moral emergency”
Why they aligned with liberals.
Once their old coalition lost its mass base, transitivity logic kicked in.
Their enemies’ enemies became their friends.
Progressive elites, media, security agencies, and globalist Democrats now shared a rival: Trump and the populist right. So Never-Trump conservatives found themselves in a new bridging alliance, even while insisting they had not “changed sides.”
Alliance Theory predicts this exact rhetoric.
When alliances shift, actors insist values stayed constant and only “one side went crazy.”
That is how coalition realignment is experienced subjectively.
Their future.
Alliance Theory would say their long-term role is not to lead a mass coalition again. Their natural habitat is:
They will remain morally confident and culturally influential within elite institutions, but structurally disconnected from a mass right-wing base that no longer shares their rival map.
In short:
They are not traitors.
They are not heroes.
They are loyalists to a fallen alliance order who chose institutional continuity over populist transitivity.
Their “principles” are real.
Their alliance commitments are deeper.
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ChatGPT says: Alliance Theory would say the Tea Party to MAGA shift was not an ideological evolution but a coalition re-sorting driven by a change in who counted as allies and enemies.
Tea Party phase.
The Tea Party formed around a narrow alliance.
Fiscal conservatives
Small business owners
Libertarians
Constitutionalists
Anti-tax activists
Their rival set was big government, bailouts, the Fed, and Obama-era technocracy. The emotional center was procedural. Debt, deficits, constitutional limits, rule of law. It was a movement of protest inside the Republican elite order, not against that order. Its enemies were policies, not the entire ruling class.
Alliance Theory predicts such coalitions stay limited.
High ideological coherence.
Low emotional fusion.
Weak mass identity.
Little cultural or status glue.
MAGA phase.
By 2015 the rival map changed. For many voters the primary enemy was no longer “big government” but:
Cultural elites
Media
Universities
NGOs
Immigration bureaucracy
Trade and security establishments
Tech platforms
Global institutions
A much larger and more diverse set of groups now shared the same enemies.
Working-class whites
Evangelicals
Nationalists
Anti-woke parents
Deindustrialized voters
Online dissidents
Small town status-decliners
Some minorities hostile to progressive cultural power
Alliance Theory says when rival maps converge, transitivity explodes.
The enemy of my enemy becomes my friend.
Fiscal libertarians become secondary.
Cultural and status defense become primary.
Trump functioned as the focal point that made this new alliance visible to itself. He did not persuade these groups into new beliefs. He named their shared enemies and signaled unconditional loyalty against them.
Why Tea Party language collapsed.
Balanced budgets and constitutionalism did not mark in-group boundaries clearly enough.
They did not generate intense loyalty.
They did not map cleanly onto lived status conflict.
MAGA rhetoric did.
Nation.
Border.
Crime.
Media betrayal.
Elite corruption.
Cultural humiliation.
These are alliance-forming signals. Not policy programs.
Why leaders changed.
Tea Party leaders were procedural.
MAGA leaders are identity and dominance oriented.
Alliance Theory predicts that once a coalition becomes mass and existential, it stops rewarding rule-law technicians and starts rewarding boundary enforcers and symbolic warriors.
So the transition is:
From a policy protest alliance
to a civilizational identity alliance
From a coalition defined by economics
to one defined by status, culture, and loyalty
From intra-elite reform
to full elite replacement
The Tea Party was a faction.
MAGA is a people.
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ChatGPT says: Alliance Theory would read the rise and evolution of Alternative for Germany (AfD) as a sequence of coalition discoveries, failures, and partial consolidations rather than as a simple story of “radicalization” or ideological drift.
Phase 1. The technocratic protest alliance.
AfD began as a narrow, elite-led coalition: economists, ordoliberal conservatives, small-business owners, and EU-skeptical professionals. Their shared rival was the Brussels monetary regime and the German political class that had imposed euro bailouts. This was a status-high, low-emotion alliance. It lacked mass transitivity. Working-class voters, cultural conservatives, and identity-threatened Germans did not yet see themselves in the same camp.
Alliance Theory predicts such coalitions remain marginal. They have similarity but not scale. No deep interdependence. No shared existential threat narrative.
Phase 2. Migration shock and alliance expansion.
The 2015 refugee crisis rewired the rival map. Suddenly, multiple groups discovered they had the same perceived enemies:
Eastern German status-decliners
Working-class voters facing housing and welfare competition
Cultural conservatives
Anti-Islam activists
Anti-globalist nationalists
Some former Left voters alienated by cosmopolitan elites
Merkel’s government, EU institutions, NGOs, and media formed a single hostile bloc in their eyes. Transitivity exploded. “The enemy of my enemy” logic unified groups that had never coordinated before. AfD became the focal coordinator of this new super-alliance.
This is when AfD stops being a euro-skeptic party and becomes a civilizational-defense party. Alliance Theory predicts that ideology will follow alliance, not the reverse. Immigration, Islam, identity, and sovereignty become central not because of abstract doctrine but because they define the new in-group and out-group most sharply.
Phase 3. Internal factional war.
Once the super-alliance forms, internal hierarchy struggles begin. Technocrats, national-conservatives, and ethnonationalists compete to define the coalition’s moral center. The eastern “Flügel” faction pushes a harder identity boundary. Western moderates fear losing elite bridges and institutional legitimacy.
Alliance Theory says this is inevitable. Large coalitions either:
Broaden and institutionalize, or
Narrow and radicalize to intensify loyalty
AfD oscillates between these strategies. One wing wants transitivity with conservative elites and business. The other wants purity and moral intensity, even at the cost of isolation.
Phase 4. Containment and counter-coalition.
The German establishment responds by building a massive negative-transitivity wall: intelligence surveillance, media cordon sanitaire, party exclusion, moral stigmatization. From an alliance perspective, this is not about “values.” It is about preventing AfD from forming bridging ties with the security state, civil service, or moderate middle class. The goal is to keep AfD’s alliance structurally incomplete.
Alliance Theory predicts the consequence:
External pressure strengthens in-group cohesion, heightens victim narratives, and accelerates radical boundary-hardening in parts of the coalition, especially in East Germany where interdependence among AfD voters is already high.
Future trajectory.
Three structural paths are possible.
Institutional bridging.
If AfD moderates enough to gain transitivity with parts of the conservative establishment, police, military, and business, it could become a governing nationalist party like the Lega or Sweden Democrats. That requires sacrificing its most radical faction and signaling reliability to elite allies.
Regional entrenchment.
AfD becomes a dominant eastern-German mass party, a permanent counter-elite with high loyalty but limited national reach. This is already partly happening. Alliance Theory predicts long-term stability but limited governing power.
Purity spiral.
If exclusion intensifies and bridging remains blocked, the coalition may shrink but radicalize further, becoming an identity-hardened subculture rather than a national contender. Emotional loyalty rises, electoral ceiling falls.
In alliance terms, AfD’s fate does not depend on whether its ideas are “right” or “wrong.” It depends on whether it can expand transitivity beyond a grievance-based mass bloc and become a coordinator between popular anger and institutional power.
Its rise shows how quickly new alliances can crystallize when rival maps realign.
Its future will be determined by whether it can move from insurgent identity-coalition to governing super-alliance without triggering internal schism or external isolation.
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ChatGPT says: Alliance Theory would read Nigel Farage not as an ideologue who “discovered” Euroscepticism, but as a coalition entrepreneur who correctly identified a latent alliance and then became its most effective focal point.
His early marginality.
For years, Farage sat on the fringe of British politics. UKIP had coherent positions but no mass coalition. The establishment Conservative–Labour super-alliance dominated: City of London finance, Brussels institutions, managerial civil service, BBC, universities, and much of the business class. Their shared rival map defined nationalism, immigration restriction, and popular sovereignty as parochial or dangerous. Farage’s early career looked quixotic because his natural allies, working-class voters, small business owners, culturally conservative provincials, had no transitivity. They did not yet see themselves as one bloc.
The Brexit realignment.
Alliance Theory predicts that when multiple groups discover they share the same enemies, a new super-alliance can crystallize rapidly. That is what the EU question did. It revealed that:
Deindustrialized northern workers
Southern English small proprietors
Cultural traditionalists
Anti-immigration voters
Anti-establishment libertarians
National sovereignty intellectuals
all had the same rival set: Brussels technocracy, metropolitan elites, and the managerial class.
Farage became the focal coordinator of this newly visible alliance. Not because of policy detail, but because he signaled similarity, transitivity, and loyalty with extraordinary clarity. Pub culture, anti-PC rhetoric, emotional nationalism, and relentless naming of enemies all functioned as alliance markers.
His success in 2016 was the moment transitivity locked in. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” logic unified voters who previously voted Labour, Conservative, or not at all.
Why he never fully converted this into personal office.
Alliance Theory explains this too. The Brexit coalition needed a charismatic symbol to break the old order, but once the enemy was wounded, it also needed institutional bridges: parliamentary discipline, legal continuity, and elite defection. Boris Johnson and the Tory right provided those bridges. Farage, by contrast, was too pure a coalition signaler and too weak an institutional broker.
So the alliance used him as a catalyst, then partially displaced him with a figure who could connect the insurgent bloc to state power.
His repeated returns.
Farage’s pattern of leaving, returning, resigning, and re-emerging fits alliance logic. He is activated when:
The governing coalition loses transitivity with the populist base
Elite figures appear to betray the original rival map
The alliance’s identity weakens and needs re-polarization
He reappears to re-sharpen boundaries, re-moralize enemies, and restore victim narratives. This is classic role specialization. Some figures govern. Others maintain coalition identity.
His future prospects.
Alliance Theory would say Farage’s relevance depends entirely on whether the populist-national coalition in Britain feels betrayed or satisfied.
If the post-Brexit order stabilizes and delivers material and symbolic goods, Farage fades into historical catalyst status.
If the alliance fractures, if immigration remains high, if sovereignty feels hollow, if cultural elites regain dominance, then Farage or someone with his exact signaling profile becomes necessary again as a boundary-hardener and loyalty focal point.
He is unlikely to be prime minister because his function is not institutional coordination. It is alliance crystallization and moral polarization. Every large coalition needs such figures at moments of formation and crisis, and then often sidelines them during normal governance.
In short, Alliance Theory sees Farage as:
Not a policy thinker
Not a mere demagogue
But the man who revealed a hidden alliance, gave it a shared enemy map, and supplied the emotional glue that allowed it to recognize itself as a people.
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ChatGPT says: Alliance Theory would interpret William F. Buckley’s career as the successful construction, policing, and stabilization of a conservative super-alliance, with the Birch purge as a textbook case of coalition boundary enforcement rather than ideological refinement.
Buckley’s historical task was not to articulate “true conservatism” in the abstract. It was to assemble a coalition capable of governing. That coalition had to link:
Business elites
Anti-communist Cold Warriors
Religious traditionalists
Southern segregationists in transition
Free-market intellectuals
Cold War national security institutions
These groups did not naturally cohere. Their moral languages, class interests, and historical grievances were different. Alliance Theory predicts that in such situations, a successful coalition entrepreneur must do three things:
Define a shared enemy
Create transitivity among factions
Expel elements that threaten external alliance viability
The John Birch Society created a transitivity crisis.
Birchers shared one rival map with the right, communism, but they violated a deeper transitivity constraint: they classified the U.S. government, the military leadership, and even Eisenhower as communist agents. That meant they treated as enemies precisely the institutions Buckley needed as allies for the conservative coalition to be electorally and geopolitically viable.
In alliance terms, Birchers were not “too extreme.” They were misaligned. They attacked high-value bridging nodes: the CIA, the presidency, the officer corps, NATO. This made them toxic to:
Donors
The national security establishment
Mainstream voters
Catholic and Jewish anti-communists
Cold War liberals drifting right
If Buckley allowed them to remain central, the entire conservative alliance would have failed the transitivity test. The coalition would have been classified by the wider system as conspiratorial, disloyal, and unfit to rule. No amount of philosophical coherence could compensate for that.
So Buckley’s purge was not about truth. It was about alliance geometry.
He did three things that Alliance Theory predicts successful coalition leaders must do.
First, boundary hardening.
He publicly declared the Birchers outside the legitimate in-group. This was not to persuade them but to signal to wavering allies that the movement would not define them as enemies.
Second, reputational sacrifice.
He accepted internal conflict and short-term fragmentation to preserve long-term alliance viability. Alliance Theory says leaders who fail to sacrifice factional extremists lose broader coalitions.
Third, transitivity repair.
By expelling the Birchers, he realigned conservative moral language with the rival map of the military, intelligence services, business elites, and Cold War centrists. The conservative movement could now say, with credibility, “We are the loyal opposition, not the paranoid fringe.”
Buckley’s entire career fits this pattern.
He defended McCarthy long enough to preserve anti-communist intensity, then distanced himself once McCarthy threatened institutional allies.
He flirted with segregationist arguments, then pivoted once the coalition required Black and Catholic inclusion.
He tolerated libertarians and traditionalists, even when philosophically inconsistent, because alliance breadth mattered more than ideological purity.
He cultivated Jewish intellectuals and Catholic theologians to bridge ethnic and religious divides inside the anti-left coalition.
National Review was not a philosophy journal. It was an alliance-coordination organ.
From an Alliance Theory perspective, Buckley’s genius was not that he found the “true” conservative doctrine. It was that he intuitively understood which factions could coexist in a durable governing alliance and which would cause catastrophic transitivity failure.
The Birchers were not expelled because they were wrong.
They were expelled because they made too many of Buckley’s necessary allies into traitors.
That is the core alliance logic.
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The sharpest analysis I’ve heard about Dennis Prager came in 2020 when philosopher Paul Gottfried said: “[Dennis Prager is] an intellectual vulgarian of a kind I have rarely encountered in this world. He has said such ridiculous things about history, fascism, democracy, that it is hard for me to bestow any respect on his intellectual accomplishments.”
On Jan. 24, 2026, Gemini said:
Paul Gottfried’s assessment highlights the friction between academic philosophy and the strategic moralizing that Alliance Theory describes. Gottfried, a scholar of intellectual history and a paleoconservative, evaluates Prager by the standards of historical accuracy and logical consistency. When he calls Prager an intellectual vulgarian, he is reacting to the way Prager flattens complex history to serve a specific rhetorical purpose. What Gottfried sees as a lack of respect for history is actually the functional application of alliance logic.
Prager often redefines terms like fascism or democracy so they can be used as weapons against his modern rivals. For instance, Prager’s repeated claim that the Nazis were a left-wing movement serves to link his current rivals—secularists and progressives—to the most vilified group in history. To a historian like Gottfried, this is a distortion of the historical record because it ignores the nationalist, traditionalist, and anti-marxist roots of the Nazi party. To Prager, however, this is a necessary attributional bias. If he can frame fascism as an internal failure of the Left, he protects the Right from being associated with it while simultaneously demonizing his opposition.
This dynamic explains why Prager remains popular despite the scorn of academics. His audience is not looking for a nuanced historical lecture; they are looking for moral clarity and a way to signal loyalty to their own side. Prager provides a toolkit of arguments that make the conservative alliance feel morally superior. His work creates a clear map of who is a friend and who is an enemy.
Gottfried’s frustration reveals the gap between those who view ideas as tools for seeking truth and those who view ideas as tools for seeking victory. Alliance Theory posits that most political belief systems function as the latter. Prager’s success suggests that for a large portion of the public, the social utility of an idea—how well it identifies a rival or supports a friend—is more important than its historical or philosophical precision.
ChatGPT said Jan. 24, 2026:
Alliance Theory says political ideas are not driven mainly by abstract principles but by who you see as your allies and rivals, and by the need to defend allies and attack rivals in ongoing status and power conflicts.
Applied to Dennis Prager, the key is not his stated values like “Judeo-Christian morality,” “freedom,” or “Western civilization,” but the alliance structure he is embedded in and helping to stabilize.
His core alliance cluster is:
Religious traditionalists
Social conservatives
Pro-Israel Jews and Christians
Anti-woke cultural conservatives
The Republican Party coalition
American national institutions like the military and police
Anti-left intellectuals and media figures
From an alliance-theory perspective, his commentary functions as high-level coalition maintenance propaganda. He performs three main tasks.
First, ally sanctification.
Groups inside his coalition are framed as morally serious, historically grounded, and unfairly maligned. Christians are persecuted. Israel is uniquely moral. Police are heroic. Western civilization is fragile and besieged. When allies commit wrongs, he minimizes, contextualizes, or reframes them as tragic necessities or isolated failures.
Second, rival moralization.
Outgroups are not just wrong but dangerous. The left is portrayed as nihilistic, anti-civilizational, and driven by resentment. Academia, the media, and progressive elites are framed as corrupting institutions rather than neutral truth-seekers. This is classic alliance logic. Rivals are not merely mistaken, they are existential threats.
Third, bridge maintenance.
Prager’s most important structural role is holding together strange bedfellows. Free-market libertarians and religious moralists. Nationalists and global-capital elites. Jews and evangelical Christians. His rhetoric constantly supplies unifying narratives that allow these factions to see themselves as part of one moral army despite deep internal contradictions.
Alliance theory explains many of his apparent inconsistencies.
Free speech is sacred, except when speech undermines civilizational cohesion.
Small government is good, except when state power is needed to defend moral order.
Relativism is rejected, except when defending allies’ historical sins.
Universal human dignity is affirmed, except when rivals are framed as cultural pathogens.
These are not philosophical failures. They are functional features of coalition defense.
Prager is not primarily a political philosopher. He is a high-status alliance entrepreneur. His job is to:
Signal loyalty
Define the moral perimeter of the in-group
Reinterpret facts to favor allies
Convert cultural anxiety into coalition solidarity
Alliance theory predicts exactly this pattern. Beliefs are tools. Moral language is weaponry. Consistency is secondary to loyalty. The through-line is not logic but coalition survival.
Gemini says Jan. 24, 2026:
Prager succeeds because he masters the art of high-level signaling. He takes raw group interests and translates them into the language of universal morality. When he speaks of Judeo-Christian values, he defines a moral perimeter that includes his allies and excludes his rivals. This terminology functions as a badge of membership rather than a rigorous theological framework. It provides a shared vocabulary for a coalition that contains significant internal friction, such as the historically uneasy alliance between secular Zionists and Evangelical Christians.
His rhetorical tasks serve the practical needs of power. Ally sanctification creates a psychological safety net for the in-group. By framing the police as heroic or Israel as uniquely moral, he ensures that the coalition members feel righteous in their affiliations. This protects the group from the demoralizing effects of external criticism. Conversely, rival moralization transforms political opponents into existential threats. If the left is nihilistic and anti-civilizational, then any action taken to defeat them becomes a moral necessity. This is the logic of total mobilization.
The inconsistencies you noted are the most telling evidence for this theory. A philosopher values logical non-contradiction, but an alliance entrepreneur values group cohesion. If small government interferes with the defense of the moral order, the entrepreneur discards small government. The through-line is always the preservation of the alliance. Prager’s career illustrates the Pinsof point that argument is a tool used to hurt enemies and bolster friends. He provides the intellectual munitions his coalition needs to fight a cultural war without feeling the sting of cognitive dissonance.
Grok says on Jan. 24, 2026:
Alliance Theory posits that political belief systems emerge not from consistent abstract moral values (like authority, equality, or tolerance) but from dynamic alliance structures—networks of allies and rivals shaped by factors like similarity, transitivity (shared friends/enemies), interdependence, and stochastic historical events. Individuals support their allies and oppose rivals through “propagandistic biases,” including:
Perpetrator biases: Downplaying allies’ transgressions, emphasizing mitigating circumstances, or minimizing harm caused by allies.
Victim biases: Amplifying allies’ grievances, attributing malevolent intent to rivals, or engaging in competitive victimhood.
Attributional biases: Crediting allies’ successes to internal factors (e.g., hard work) and failures to external ones (e.g., unfair systems), while doing the opposite for rivals.
Dennis Prager, a prominent conservative commentator, radio host, and founder of PragerU, often weaves political analysis with cultural, religious, and historical themes. His commentaries typically align with conservative alliances in the U.S., as described in the paper: favoring groups like Christians (especially evangelicals), white working-class Americans, the military, business leaders, and Israel/Jews (as a bridge to Christian conservatives). His rivals include leftists, secularists, Muslims associated with extremism (e.g., Hamas), communists, and progressive activists. Prager’s Jewish background adds a layer, as he often forms “bridging alliances” between Jewish and Christian conservatives, emphasizing shared Judeo-Christian values against perceived secular or Islamist threats.
To illustrate, I’ll apply Alliance Theory to two representative examples from Prager’s commentaries: his comparison of Hamas supporters to Nazi sympathizers (from a 2023 commentary) and his argument on why communism isn’t hated as much as Nazism (from a 2017 PragerU video). These show how his beliefs serve to mobilize support for allies and opposition to rivals, often via inconsistent application of moral principles— a hallmark “strange bedfellow” outcome of alliance dynamics.
Example 1: “Supporting Hamas is Like Supporting Nazis in WW2”
In this commentary, Prager equates pro-Hamas sentiments (common among some left-wing activists post-October 7, 2023) with sympathizing with Nazis during World War II. He argues that both represent moral evil, framing Israel as a defender of Western civilization against barbarism.
Alliance Structure: Prager’s allies here include Israel (as a proxy for Jews and Western democracy), the U.S. military (implied in WWII analogies), and conservative Christians who view Israel as a biblical ally. This reflects transitivity: Conservative evangelicals and Jews form a “super-alliance” against shared rivals like Islamist extremists and leftists who criticize Israel. Rivals are Hamas (and by extension, Muslim extremists) and their perceived supporters on the left, whom Prager links to anti-Semitism and moral relativism. This aligns with the paper’s depiction of U.S. conservative alliances favoring the military and religious traditionalists while opposing ethnic minorities associated with left-wing causes (e.g., Muslims in conflicts like Iraq/Afghanistan).
Propagandistic Biases in Action:
Victim Biases: Prager amplifies Jewish/Israeli grievances, portraying Hamas attacks as unprovoked atrocities akin to the Holocaust, emphasizing severity and malevolence to mobilize third-party support (e.g., from Christian conservatives). This creates “competitive victimhood” with left-wing narratives of Palestinian suffering, dismissing the latter as exaggerated or justified.
Perpetrator Biases: He downplays or ignores any Israeli actions that could be seen as transgressions (e.g., military responses in Gaza), attributing them to self-defense or necessity, while attributing Hamas’s actions to inherent evil without mitigating factors. This mirrors the paper’s example of conservatives rationalizing U.S. military collateral damage but condemning Iraqi actions.
Attributional Biases: Successes of Israel (e.g., resilience) are internal (e.g., moral superiority, divine favor), while failures or criticisms are external (e.g., biased media, leftist betrayal). Rivals’ actions (Hamas/leftists) are internally driven by hatred, not external circumstances like occupation.
This commentary doesn’t stem from a consistent moral thread like “oppose all genocide” (as Prager has defended biblical commands involving violence in his Rational Bible series). Instead, it strategically supports allies in the current U.S. alliance structure, where pro-Israel stances signal loyalty to the conservative coalition. If alliances shifted (e.g., as in historical examples where religious traditionalism aligned with leftism), Prager’s framing might adapt accordingly.
Example 2: “Why Isn’t Communism as Hated as Nazism?”
In this PragerU video, Prager argues that communism’s death toll (e.g., under Stalin, Mao) exceeds Nazism’s, yet it’s less vilified because left-wing academics and media downplay it. He calls for equating the two ideologies as equally evil.
Alliance Structure:
Allies include victims of communism (e.g., Eastern Europeans, religious dissidents) and anti-communist conservatives, tying into Cold War-era alliances where business elites and Christian fundamentalists opposed socialism. Rivals are communists/socialists, whom Prager associates with modern leftists (e.g., “cultural Marxists” in academia). This reflects stochasticity and historical contingency: U.S. conservatism fused anti-communism with free-market capitalism in the 1970s, creating “strange bedfellows” like libertarians and evangelicals. Prager, as a religious conservative, extends this to defend Judeo-Christian values against atheistic communism.
Propagandistic Biases in Action:
Victim Biases: Prager embellishes the grievances of communism’s victims (e.g., emphasizing scale and duration of harm), positioning conservatives as defenders of truth against leftist denial. This is competitive victimhood: He claims the right “owns” anti-totalitarian narratives, mirroring liberals’ focus on Nazi victims.
Perpetrator Biases: Communist atrocities are maximized with no mitigating context (e.g., ignoring geopolitical factors), while he implicitly downplays conservative-aligned historical wrongs (e.g., in other commentaries, he rationalizes slavery in the Bible as “not as bad” as modern perceptions). Nazism is a foil, but Prager has separately argued Hitler was left-wing (in another piece), attributing fascism’s evils to leftist roots to further demonize rivals.
Attributional Biases: Communism’s failures are internal (inherent ideological flaws, evil leaders), while any “successes” (e.g., social programs) are dismissed as illusions. In contrast, capitalist/Western successes are internally attributed to values like freedom, aligning with conservative allies (business elites).
This belief isn’t rooted in a principled hatred of all authoritarianism. Instead, it mobilizes opposition to leftist rivals, explaining why communism (a left-associated ideology) gets special scrutiny over other historical evils.
Broader Implications for Prager’s Body of Work
Across his commentaries, Prager’s “inconsistencies” (e.g., defending biblical polygamy/slavery while condemning modern equivalents; tolerating authoritarian figures if transitive allies) aren’t philosophical lapses but predictable outcomes of alliance psychology. His work signals loyalty to the U.S. conservative super-alliance, using rhetoric to rally support amid polarization. If Alliance Theory holds, shifting alliances (e.g., if evangelicals realigned leftward on economics) could alter his emphases without changing underlying mechanisms. This contrasts with value-based theories, which might misattribute his views to innate “authority” preference rather than strategic ally support.
In sum, Alliance Theory reveals Prager’s commentaries as patchwork narratives—ad hoc moralizations tailored to bolster allies like Israel, Christians, and capitalists against rivals like leftists and extremists—rather than coherent ideologies. This approach highlights the functional, evolutionary roots of his political rhetoric.
Gemini said on Jan. 24, 2026:
When Prager equates modern Hamas supporters with Nazi sympathizers, he engages in a process of moral branding that serves the transitivity of his alliance. By linking a current rival to the ultimate historical villain, he forces third parties to choose a side, thereby strengthening the bond between Jewish conservatives and the Christian Right. This is not necessarily an appeal to a universal principle against civilian casualties, as the analysis correctly notes his willingness to rationalize biblical or historical violence when it involves allies.
The comparison between communism and Nazism further illustrates the theory’s “stochastic” and historical elements. The American conservative alliance of the 20th century fused religious traditionalism with free-market capitalism primarily through a shared opposition to Soviet atheism. Prager maintains this alliance by framing communism as a uniquely persistent evil. His tendency to categorize Hitler as a leftist is a classic attributional bias. It shifts the “internal” cause of the Holocaust from right-wing nationalism to left-wing secularism, protecting the reputation of his own alliance while pathologizing the ideology of his rivals.
Recognition of Bridging Alliances: The analysis correctly identifies Prager’s specific role in maintaining the Judeo-Christian alliance. His Jewish identity allows him to serve as a bridge, using religious language to unite two groups that might otherwise have historical friction.
Identification of Competitive Victimhood: The focus on how Prager uses the scale of communist atrocities to “compete” with leftist narratives about Nazism or colonialism fits the Alliance Theory model of mobilizing third-party support through grievance.
Predictive Power: The conclusion that his views would shift if the alliance structure changed is the strongest test of the theory. It moves beyond a simple critique of his values and treats his rhetoric as a functional tool for coalition maintenance.
Prager’s comments on Putin are predominantly critical, portraying him as an imperialistic bully driven by ego, humiliation, and a desire to rebuild the Russian empire (e.g., in interviews and columns from 2014 onward, including discussions of the Ukraine invasion).
In the years leading up to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Prager at times prioritized a shared cultural struggle over geopolitical rivalry. For example, in 2017, he famously remarked that the news media in the West posed a far greater danger to Western civilization than Russia did. This fits the transitivity model of Alliance Theory: because Prager viewed the secular Western media as a primary rival, Russia—which under Putin presented itself as a defender of traditional Christian values—could be viewed as a secondary ally or at least a less significant threat. This “enemy of my enemy” logic allowed him to downplay the traditional threat posed by Russia to bolster his position against domestic rivals.
However, the 2022 invasion of Ukraine triggered a shift in his rhetoric that illustrates the “stochastic” or event-driven nature of alliances. Once Putin’s actions became an undeniable act of international aggression, the potential cost of maintaining a “soft” stance on Russia became too high for a commentator who prizes Western stability. Prager eventually described the invasion as as clear an act of evil as anyone can imagine.
Even with this condemnation, the alliance logic persisted in how he assigned blame. He frequently used the invasion to attack his primary rivals in the United States, arguing that bad actors like Russia, China, and Iran were only emboldened because they perceived weakness in the current American administration. This allowed him to maintain his core alliance structure:
Allies: Strong American leadership and traditional values.
Rivals: The American Left and secular institutions, whom he blamed for the global instability that allowed Putin to act.
This transition from viewing Russia as a minor concern compared to the media to viewing Putin’s actions as an “act of evil” shows that his moral framing adapts to keep his primary domestic alliances intact.
The Attention Economy
Grok says:
Perverse incentives for those making a living dispensing wisdom and punditry arise when the pursuit of financial, social, or personal rewards distorts their output, prioritizing external gains over truth or nuance. Here are the key ones:
Sensationalism for Attention: The need to stand out in a crowded media landscape incentivizes exaggerated, polarizing, or inflammatory takes. Outrage drives clicks, views, and engagement on platforms like X, where viral posts can boost visibility and revenue but often sacrifice depth or accuracy.
Audience Capture: Pundits risk becoming echo chambers for their followers’ beliefs to maintain loyalty and income (e.g., subscriptions, sponsorships). Deviating from expected narratives can lead to backlash or lost support, locking them into rigid ideological positions.
Polarization Payoff: Divisive rhetoric often generates more engagement than nuanced discussion. Pundits are incentivized to amplify tribalism or vilify opponents, as X data shows contentious posts get higher retweets and likes, reinforcing cycles of conflict.
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We argue herein that, while often conceptualized as an extreme form of anger, hatred is a human emotion distinct from anger, with unique triggers, conceptual orientations, and terminating conditions. An examination of the social conditions of our species’ evolutionary history reveals that hatred evolved to address its own distinct adaptive problem: individuals whose existence was — on balance — costly to the hater. Because a well-designed system for solving this problem would have been tailored toward neutralizing those costs, we call this hypothesis ‘the neutralization theory of hatred.’ This theory places the features of hatred within a functional framework. Specifically, we argue that hatred is triggered by cues that an individual’s existence causes fitness decrements for the hater. Cognitively, hatred orients the mind so as to view costs heaped onto the hated person as benefits to the hater — thus motivating spiteful behavior — and can be characterized as maintaining a negative intrinsic welfare tradeoff parameter toward the hated person. Behaviorally, hatred can motivate either avoidance or a predatory style cost infliction strategy that is designed to weaken, incapacitate, or terminate the target…
One of the effects of hatred is to heap costs upon the target. This means that a hateful person will likely have a negative association value toward their victim. In other words, if someone hates you, they will lie about you, look for costs to put on you, and fantasize about harming you. As a result, your life is likely to be worse off for their existence. Thus, hatred should be reciprocal. This has important implications for how hatred should express itself (see below).
Interestingly, this creates a perverse – but empirically verified prediction (Schopler & Compere, 1971) – which is that we should hate those that we have unjustly harmed. If you harm a person – you are presumably triggering hatred in them – which means that they are now an enemy who will likely work against you in the future. Thus, their continued existence is bad for you, triggering hatred.
I hope Trump realizes he went too far.
The shift toward neutralization occurs when allies stop viewing a leader as a predictable partner in a shared system. They begin to treat specific outbursts or unusual demands as noise to ignore rather than signals to address. Many European leaders moved toward a strategy of containment. They maintained the structural alliance while limiting their exposure to the personal whims of the executive. They focused on building relationships with the Department of State or the Pentagon to bypass the volatility of the White House.
Greenland sits in a vital strategic position for Arctic security and resource management. The blunt nature of the offer forced other democratic nations to re-evaluate how they defend their sovereignty against an ally. It turned a matter of regional cooperation into a test of national pride. Leaders who once sought to bargain for favorable trade or military terms found themselves in a defensive crouch. They saw the move not as a serious real estate deal and not just as disregard for the established international order, but as an existential threat to their sovereignty. They were backed into a corner and became desperate.
The function of anger, for example, is to orchestrate bargaining tactics when others put too low a weight on the individual’s welfare; the function of gratitude is to consolidate a higher level of cooperation when the system detects that an unexpectedly high weight has been put on one’s welfare; the function of pride is to motivate the individual to publicize (and achieve) traits or acts that enhance valuation by others; the function of shame is to limit reductions in the weight placed on one’s welfare by an audience; the function of guilt is to prevent or remedy events where one put too low a weight on the welfare of another (often unintentionally), independent of whether the other will know it. Within this framework, one can distinguish guilt and shame while seeing why they are related. In guilt, the outcome to be avoided is imposing harm on valued others, something that remains even if they never discover it. In shame, the outcome to be avoided is being devalued by others. One can feel both shame and guilt about the same act, but the functions, internal recalibrations, and outputs are distinct. For example, someone who felt guilt and shame about infidelity might refrain from it, whereas someone who felt shame but not guilt about infidelity might practice it but conceal it. Future work may profitably assess similarities and differences between shame and other emotions, such as guilt and embarrassment.
Because shame (like pain) causes personal suffering and sometimes leads to hostile behavior, this emotion has been called “maladaptive” and “ugly”. However, an evolutionary–psychological analysis of the existing evidence suggests a different view: this ugly emotion may be the expression of a system that is elegantly designed to deter injurious choices and to make the best of a bad situation.
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Gemini: Critics of Donald Trump and the mainstream media often ground their arguments in the procedural sanctity of the law. They treat the Constitution and established legal norms and institutions as the primary safeguards of the American experiment. In this view, any deviation from these rules represents an existential threat to democracy because the process itself provides the only objective source of legitimacy. This focus prioritizes the stability of institutions and the adherence to precedent over immediate political outcomes.
The MAGA movement operates on a different logic that prioritizes necessity. From this perspective, the existing legal and bureaucratic structures—often labeled as the deep state—function as obstacles to the will of the people rather than its protectors. When a system appears rigged or unresponsive to significant portions of the population, the survival of the nation or its core values takes precedence over specific legal formalities. This results in a worldview where “strong rule” is viewed as a legitimate tool to achieve the common good, even if it requires stretching or breaking established norms.
This divide illustrates a fundamental tension between two different types of political legitimacy. One side sees legitimacy as something that flows from a process that the left largely controls. The other side sees it as something that flows from a leader’s ability to address urgent crises and fulfill the popular mandate. Critics view the emphasis on necessity as a slide toward authoritarianism. Supporters view the emphasis on legality as a tool used by elites to maintain a failing status quo.
The conflict becomes most visible in discussions regarding executive power. Critics point to mass firings of independent agency leaders or the impounding of funds as illegal power grabs. Meanwhile, the administration characterizes these same actions as necessary steps to dismantle a corrupt bureaucracy and return power to the voters. These two groups are not just arguing about whether an action is right or wrong. They are using entirely different metrics to define what makes an action valid in the first place.
Carl Schmitt provides the foundational intellectual framework for the priority of necessity over legality. He defines the sovereign as he who decides on the exception. For Schmitt, a legal system cannot anticipate every possible crisis or existential threat. When a state of emergency arises, the law becomes a hollow shell that fails to protect the community. The sovereign must then step outside the formal legal structure to preserve the state itself. He views the attempt to bind political life to a set of rigid rules as a liberal delusion that leaves a nation defenseless against its enemies.
In his critique of parliamentary democracy, Schmitt argues that the essence of politics is the distinction between friend and enemy. Legality is often just a mask for the power of the ruling group. If the law prevents a leader from acting against a perceived existential threat, then the law has become a suicide pact. He would likely view the current focus on necessity as an authentic expression of the political because it recognizes that the survival of a specific way of life outweighs the maintenance of a procedural checklist.
Schmitt rejects the idea of a neutral, “buffered” legal order that operates like a machine. He sees the exception as the moment where the true nature of authority reveals itself. This perspective aligns with the idea that the “spirit” of the people or the needs of the nation justify the suspension of ordinary rules. To Schmitt, a leader who refuses to act in the face of necessity because of legal constraints is not a leader at all.
This focus on the exception creates a sharp contrast with the porous identity of a modern liberal state. While critics demand a return to the rule of law, a Schmittian approach demands a return to the rule of the political. It assumes that behind every legal norm lies a political decision that the law itself cannot justify.
Trump operates within the friend/enemy distinction by categorizing the world into those who support the movement and those who seek to destroy it. This framing removes political disagreement from the realm of polite debate and places it into a struggle for national survival. He identifies the enemy not merely as a political opponent with different ideas, but as a threat to the country itself. This includes the mainstream media, bureaucratic “deep state” actors, and specific political figures. By defining these groups as enemies, he justifies the use of executive power as a necessary weapon for the protection of his followers.
This perspective creates a high-stakes environment where every policy choice or legal challenge becomes a battle in a larger war. When a leader views the opposition through this lens, the goal is not compromise but total victory. The friend/enemy distinction reinforces a collective identity among supporters, who see themselves as the “friends” being defended against an “enemy” that has ignored their needs for decades. This is why personal loyalty often carries more weight than institutional experience in his administration. Loyalty is the primary currency of the “friend” category.
The media and legal critics often struggle to counter this because they rely on the assumption of a neutral public square. They speak the language of “bipartisanship” or “procedural fairness,” which assumes everyone is essentially on the same team. Trump rejects this assumption. To him, the square is never neutral. It is always occupied by people using rules to further their own interests. By naming the enemy, he signals to his base that he understands the reality of the struggle.
This approach creates a feedback loop that strengthens both sides of the divide. Critics see the friend/enemy rhetoric as a dangerous departure from democratic norms, which only confirms Trump’s claim that they are hostile to the movement. Every investigation or legal setback is interpreted by the base as an attack by the enemy, which further justifies the necessity of a leader who can fight back without being hindered by “enemy” rules.
Alliance Theory suggests that morality and legal principles function as strategic tools rather than fixed, objective rules. From this perspective, the left’s commitment to law and institutions is not a neutral stance but a strategic one. These structures currently favor the left coalition by providing a stable environment where their cultural and bureaucratic power can be exercised through procedural hurdles. When the law serves to protect or expand the influence of the coalition, it is sacralized.
However, as you noted, this commitment shifts when the law begins to harm the coalition’s interests. This phenomenon illustrates Pinsof’s point that “moral judgments are sensitive to public signals” and depend on the social-relational context between parties.
Strategic Condemnation: Legal norms are used as weapons against rivals (such as Trump) to delegitimize them. Proponents of Alliance Theory would argue that the focus on “democracy” and “the rule of law” is an effective way to recruit third-party observers—the “public”—to side with the coalition against a common enemy.
Coalition Protection: In blue cities, the reluctance to prosecute specific crimes like gun possession or rioting when the perpetrators belong to the coalition’s demographic or ideological “family” reflects an ancestral instinct for group-based cooperation. The “fairness-based” reciprocity of the legal system is replaced by “identity-based” loyalty.
The Law as a “Boring” Tool: For the left, institutions provide a way to win without having to fight a literal war. By controlling the “referees” (the courts and the bureaucracy), they can ensure that their interests are treated as the “default” or “moral” position.
When a legal system produces an outcome that the left views as a threat to their coalition—such as a specific Supreme Court ruling—the rhetoric often shifts from “upholding the law” to “questioning the legitimacy of the court.” This highlights the fact that the underlying loyalty is to the alliance, not the abstract institution. The law is used when it works and bypassed or criticized when it fails to deliver the necessary alliance-supporting outcome.
LF: “MAGA will come up with any argument that strengthens their coalition, including the argument of necessity.”
This realization aligns with the core of Alliance Theory by stripping away the veneer of high-minded principles from both sides. If political arguments are essentially tools for coalition-building, then necessity is not a moral claim but a tactical one. It provides a flexible justification for actions that would otherwise be indefensible under a fixed set of rules. For the MAGA coalition, arguing for necessity allows them to bypass institutions they perceive as being captured by their enemies. It signals to their base that the leader prioritizes their survival over the procedural preferences of the elite.
When a group feels excluded from the “buffered” protection of the law, they naturally gravitate toward a logic of exception. By claiming that the nation is in a state of crisis, the coalition can justify a more aggressive, friend/enemy approach to governance. This is not a failure of logic but a fulfillment of the coalition’s primary goal: to protect its members and hurt its rivals. Any argument, whether it relies on the Constitution or the suspension of it, is valid as long as it successfully coordinates the group and attracts allies.
This creates a symmetry in your analysis. The left uses the “sacredness” of institutions to protect its bureaucratic and cultural advantage. The right uses the “urgency” of necessity to dismantle those same advantages. Neither side is actually tethered to the abstract concept of law or necessity. They are tethered to the interests of their respective alliances. The arguments are the weapons used in the struggle, not the reason for it.
The result is a political landscape where words like “justice,” “legality,” and “emergency” lose their universal meaning. They become tribal signals. A legal ruling is “just” if it helps the friend and “corrupt” if it helps the enemy. A policy is “necessary” if it strengthens the coalition and “authoritarian” if it empowers the rival. In this framework, truth is secondary to the utility of the claim in the ongoing power struggle.
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The modes through which Europe and Canada have sought to suppress populism involve harsh restrictions on speech, elite collusion and other expression of managerial illiberalism. And what is China’s dictatorship if not managerial illiberalism in full flower? When European elites talk about China as a potentially more stable partner than the whipsawing United States, when they talk admiringly about its environmental goals and technocratic capacity, they aren’t defending a liberal alternative to Trumpian populism. They are letting the magnet of Chinese power draw them away from their own democratic traditions.
Suppressing popular dissent through institutional power does not restore liberalism. It replaces it with a softer version of the same illiberalism practiced by authoritarian states such as China. The methods differ in degree, not in kind. The West risks losing its democratic identity by adopting the tools of the systems it claims to oppose.
As one moves further left in America and elsewhere, faith in the people gives way to faith in expert management. Complex problems such as climate change, public health, and inequality are framed as too technical for ordinary politics. The solution becomes rule by credentialed specialists rather than by persuasion of voters.
What Douthat calls “elite collusion” appears in the tight alignment between universities, federal agencies, major media, and corporate bureaucracies. Together they define the boundaries of legitimate opinion and increasingly treat dissent as a governance problem rather than a political one. Policy is shifted from legislatures to administrative agencies. Debate is displaced by compliance.
The handling of “misinformation” shows the pattern most clearly. Populist and conservative claims are not merely argued against. They are classified as dangerous and routed around through platform moderation, institutional sanctions, and informal blacklists. This is the same public private fusion Douthat observes in Europe, where speech is curtailed not by open censorship alone but by coordinated pressure across state and corporate systems.
The paradox is that all of this is justified in the name of saving democracy from instability. Yet the cure steadily dissolves democratic practice. When outcomes are insulated from voters and entrusted to a managerial class, the “will of the people” becomes something to be corrected rather than obeyed. The further left the system moves, the more democracy is treated as a problem to be managed rather than as a source of authority.
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