There was only one thing that jarred me in Rony Guldmann’s book, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression, and that was its serious treatment of a ridiculous Jonah Goldberg book.
I get it though. I’ve made similar mistakes many times. I’ve extended way too much charity and empathy at times works and people who don’t deserve it. With time, I’ve usually come to the realization that these bad places are widely regarded as bad because they are bad, and that the wise man should stay far away from the sewer.
Make no mistake, Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change is pure feces. To swim in it and call it refreshing takes unbelievable obtuseness.
Conservative Claims treats Liberal Fascism with notable seriousness and interpretive charity. These passages show Guldmann framing Goldberg’s work as a poignant and self-conscious project and engaging it as a substantive inversion of liberal orthodoxy.
Elevated framing and intellectual seriousness
Guldmann presents Goldberg’s book as a particularly refined and self-aware instance of conservative protest, signaling respect for its ambition and rhetorical intent:
“…the project of subduing liberalism assumes many shapes and invites endless creativity. But it is perhaps at its most poignant and self-conscious in Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, which as noted earlier was written in response to the author’s personal experience with the ‘sublimely confident’ slanders of liberals.”
He then treats Goldberg as a serious challenger of prevailing assumptions, rather than a mere polemicist:
“This is the conventional wisdom, and also the way Progressivism’s contemporary heirs, the liberal elites, like to think of themselves. But this conventional wisdom is precisely what Goldberg seeks to overthrow in arguing that Progressivism was an important source of intellectual inspiration for European fascism.”
Sympathetic reconstruction of Goldberg’s argument
Guldmann reconstructs Goldberg’s claims carefully and at length, charting the internal logic of the book without caricature:
“However, Goldberg argues that this received wisdom is mistaken and that fascism has always been a phenomenon of the Left. If we believe otherwise, this is only because the fascism label has been ‘projected onto the right by a complex sleight of hand’ by liberals eager to slough their own sins off onto conservatives.”
By elaborating Goldberg’s position this way, Guldmann treats it as a coherent counter-history worthy of detailed engagement, not dismissal.
Respectful critique without dismissal
Even when Guldmann introduces criticism, he does so with measured language that sustains Goldberg’s dignity as a serious interlocutor:
“Liberal Fascism was poorly received by scholars of fascism, and one does not have to be one to suspect that Goldberg has generated a spurious affinity between fascism and liberalism by disingenuously abstracting a few of their features away from their all-important historical contexts and philosophical rationales…”
Yet he immediately situates the book within a broader and meaningful intellectual project:
“But Liberal Fascism is at its core a conservative claim of cultural oppression. And so its ultimate purpose is less to establish the moral equivalence of liberalism and fascism as historical phenomena than to ‘level the playing field’ between liberals and conservatives as contemporary political actors.”
This language does not trivialize Goldberg’s work. It elevates it to the status of a paradigmatic text in a sophisticated ideological struggle.
The pattern of deference
Taken together, these excerpts show that Guldmann approached Goldberg less as a propagandist and more as an emblematic theorist of conservative grievance. He treats Liberal Fascism as:
• a “poignant and self-conscious” undertaking
• a serious attempt to “overthrow” liberal orthodoxy
• a coherent counter-narrative demanding detailed exposition
• a central case study in the theory of cultural oppression
Guldmann must have had such low expectations for conservative thought that he employed affirmative action to convince himself that he had found wisdom in books bereft of wisdom.
Now philosopher Rony Guldmann has written an essay revisiting Jonah Goldberg’s 2008 book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change. Rony begins: “With the Republican party’s headlong descent into fascism…”
It’s impossible for me to take such claims seriously. Fascism plays no role in American politics. It’s just a swear word. Why didn’t Rony just tell his friends, “F— the Republicans,” and leave it at that?
One way I usually engage with extreme claims such as that MAGA is fascist is to look for ways that the statement is true and ways that it is not, but in this case, it is impossible to think of ways that MAGA is uniquely fascist as opposed to dozens of other labels that contain considerable truth.
I could try to engage with a ranting homeless man who calls me a platypus, but why bother?
Trump is undoubtedly authoritarian in unique ways, just every preceding American presidency was authoritarian in unique ways. All government requires force and authority, and as government is operated by human beings, it will always operate in authoritarian ways at times.
Trump is openly enriching his family in ways that stagger the mind.
Trump is openly corrupt in contrast to the Biden family’s largely hidden corruption. I have no idea which style is worse.
There are so many powerful arguments against Trump. Why do people skip them to call him fascist? I guess it’s easy, it’s popular, and it feels good.
Evolution does not incentivize us to make rigorous arguments about matters outside our control. We’re wired to live tribally, and tribal life rewards epithets for outsiders. Endearing yourself to your tribe by blasting out-groups is a happy way to navigate life and to pass on your genes. Rape can also pass on your genes. I’m not a fan of either approach but I recognize the incentives driving people to do horrible things.
Once you zoom out even a little, it becomes obvious that fascism is only one analogy among many, and not the most precise one. There is no world in which fascism is the sole or even the primary historical parallel for MAGA. You can list entire families of political movements that map onto MAGA’s structure far more tightly. Here are the clearest buckets.
I. Caesarism
A lone leader claims to speak for the real people, dismisses intermediary institutions, and treats legal constraints as petty obstacles. Caesarism captures MAGA’s personalism, its contempt for procedural limits, and its belief that the leader embodies the popular will. Fascism is a much more totalizing project. Caesarism is the cleaner fit.
II. American populism
We have our own native tradition long before Mussolini. Andrew Jackson, George Wallace, Father Coughlin, Huey Long. These movements shared the same patterns:
anointed strongman
aggressive anti-elite rhetoric
in-group victimhood
enemy scapegoats
veneration of “ordinary people”
You do not need twentieth century Europe to explain MAGA. You need America.
III. Peronism
This is the closest non-American parallel. A charismatic egotist fused with mass grievance, erratic economic policy, elite resentment, and a cult of personality that survives defeats. Peronism looks like MAGA with the serial numbers filed off.
IV. Latin American strongman populism
The pattern repeats across the region:
charismatic leader
media theatrics
clientelist loyalty networks
attacks on courts, press, and opposition
no consistent ideology
This is why political scientists classify MAGA as “personalist populism” rather than fascism.
V. Berlusconism
Italy again, but not the fascist Italy. Berlusconi used media spectacle, scandal, grievance politics, and legal brinkmanship. It was corrupt, nationalist, and chaotic, not totalitarian. The structural parallels to MAGA are far tighter than anything in the thirties.
VI. Tribalized democracy
Many countries go through periods where politics becomes a raw clash between two coalitions that see each other as existential threats. Once that happens, every side tolerates behavior from its own leader it would condemn in opponents. MAGA fits this pattern exactly. Fascism is only one extreme version of this dynamic. The broader pattern is the breakdown of cross-pressured coalitions and the triumph of identity-over-institutions politics.
VII. Strongman populism under modern media
No fascist state had partisan cable news, TikTok, or memetic amplification. MAGA is a media ecosystem as much as a movement. It is shaped by algorithms, not party cadres. This moves it closer to movements like Bolsonaroism or Duterte’s coalition.
VIII. Cults of personality in weak-party systems
Political scientists have a long record of these. They emerge wherever party discipline is weak and charismatic leaders can overshadow institutions. These movements are improvisational, contradictory, and grievance-driven. MAGA fits cleanly inside this category. Fascism is a disciplined, ideological, party-centered project. MAGA is not.
IX. Ethnic majoritarianism
Many democracies develop a politics where the majority believes it has lost cultural primacy and must “take the country back.” India, Hungary, Poland. These movements do not map neatly onto fascism but share the same cultural storyline MAGA relies on.
X. Reactionary restoration movements
These are movements attempting to restore a lost social hierarchy. They arise whenever a dominant group feels it has slipped. Reaction, not fascism, is the broader and more accurate category. Fascism is a specific historical mutant of reaction.
Once you have even this partial list, the idea that fascism is the sole or unique parallel simply collapses.
The only way someone can insist on fascism as the analogy is if they are using fascism rhetorically rather than analytically.
Rony Guldmann’s long critique of Jonah Goldberg makes a sweeping claim: that MAGA reveals the latent authoritarian impulses inside American conservatism, and that the last decade has exposed the deep psychological continuities between movement conservatism and the fascist tradition. It is an ambitious argument, but once you view it through the lens of Alliance Theory the whole structure looks different. What Rony treats as ideological essence is better explained as coalitional drift. What he calls psychological destiny is better explained as coalition incentives reshuffling their membership and moral vocabulary. Alliance Theory does not deny that MAGA resembles twentieth century authoritarian movements at the surface, but it denies the causal story Rony tries to tell about where those patterns come from.
The core problem in Rony’s essay is that he treats political movements as if they have stable, enduring characters. He assumes conservatism has a psychological architecture that stays the same across time and eventually reveals its true nature under stress. Alliance Theory starts from the opposite premise. It says political belief systems are patchworks of justifications created to serve allies and fight rivals. They are not coherent moral philosophies. They are not driven by deep commitments to any principle like liberty or equality. They are driven by group loyalty and strategic communication.
Once you take that framework seriously, the contradictions Rony highlights inside conservatism lose their explanatory power. They are not evidence of a hidden authoritarian core. They are the expected output of shifting alliances and the universal propagandistic biases people deploy on behalf of their coalitions. What Rony frames as hypocrisy or self-deception inside the conservative movement is simply what happens whenever any large alliance is under pressure. In Alliance Theory terms, the psychological engine at work is not fascist longing. It is the ordinary machinery of coalition maintenance: perpetrator biases for allies, victim biases for allies, and internal attributions for the virtues of allies. The same mechanisms operate on the left. They operate in every polarized society. Rony is treating coalition behavior as ideological essence.
Alliance Theory also dissolves the neat timeline Rony tries to draw. He argues that conservatism once maintained a thin liberal-democratic superego and that Trump liberated the conservative id. But the movement he describes was never unified by liberal democratic restraint. It was unified by a particular coalition structure that held together wealthy business interests, white southerners, Christian traditionalists, anti-communist hawks, and suburban professionals. For decades this coalition happened to create a public vocabulary of limited government and constitutionalism. Once the coalition shifted, the vocabulary shifted. There is no deeper psychological meaning in that transformation. It is coalitional realignment, not moral revelation. Alliance Theory shows this same pattern in other democracies: when coalition members change, ideological language changes. There is no need for claims about the collapse of the conservative psyche.
One of the strongest pieces of evidence that Alliance Theory fits the data better than Rony’s interpretation is that liberals and conservatives both show the same patterns of motivated reasoning once you map their allies and rivals. Conservatives downplay harms committed by the military because the military is an ally. Liberals downplay harms committed by groups aligned with their side. Conservatives say people are too easily offended but amplify grievances of their own allied groups. Liberals do the same with their allied identities. Conservatives insist on external attributions for the failures of working class whites, while demanding internal attributions for poor African Americans. Liberals mirror the same pattern in reverse. These are not fascist fingerprints. They are alliance fingerprints. They are the human default. They arise wherever rival coalitions are in conflict. Rony interprets the conservative versions of these patterns as evidence of latent illiberalism. Alliance Theory interprets them as the predictable output of coalitional reasoning, not ideological drift.
Rony frames MAGA as proof that the conservative movement always contained a submerged authoritarian longing. Alliance Theory reframes MAGA as what happens when status rivalries and coalition composition shift. The rural white underclass realigned. Evangelicals aligned even more tightly. Business elites split. Knowledge workers migrated into the Democratic coalition. Groups choose alliances based on similarity, transitivity, and interdependence, not on doctrinal fidelity. The result is an alliance structure that looks very different from the Reagan era. Once you shift the alliance structure, you shift the moral language. MAGA’s style, excess, and authoritarian aesthetics are not evidence of a deep conservative essence. They are evidence of which groups are now inside the coalition and which are outside it.
Rony also misreads the connection between grievance politics and ideology. He sees grievance as evidence of a fascist drift. Alliance Theory sees grievance as a universal tactic. Every side constructs narratives of victimhood to mobilize allies and justify aggressive behavior. Competitive victimhood happens wherever coalitions are locked in zero-sum conflicts. The rise of grievance among conservatives is not a sign that classical conservative virtues collapsed. It is a sign that their alliances changed and that propagandistic biases recalibrated. Under Alliance Theory the question is not why conservatives became aggrieved. The question is why their alliance structure made grievance strategically useful.
Finally, Alliance Theory undercuts Rony’s central claim that conservatism has revealed its core by abandoning its principled facade. He speaks as if there was a coherent ideological conservatism that MAGA betrayed. Alliance Theory says there was never such a coherence. There were only coalitions that created temporary narratives. The Reagan coalition created one narrative. The MAGA coalition created another. Neither narrative reflects an essential soul of conservatism. They reflect who the allies were, what conflicts they faced, and which tactical communications maximized support. Rony treats ideology as agent and alliance as effect. Alliance Theory reverses the causal order.
In the end the Alliance lens gives you a cleaner, more parsimonious explanation of every pattern Rony highlights. Conservatism did not reveal a hidden fascist essence. It underwent a coalitional transformation. Its moral vocabulary adjusted. Its contradictions intensified. Its elites justified new configurations in the usual human way: by retrofitting principles to alliances. MAGA is not the culmination of conservatism. MAGA is not the culmination of conservatism. It is a new political coalition that won two of the last three presidential elections.
Two Rony Guldmanns: How Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression Would Critique Liberal Fascism Revisited
Rony Guldmann has produced two bodies of work that sit in tension with one another. His earlier scholarly book, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression, offers a structural analysis of conservative rhetoric, especially the recurring tendency to invert liberal moral prestige and recast conservatives as culturally oppressed. His later essay, Liberal Fascism Revisited, evaluates Jonah Goldberg’s arguments in light of MAGA and concludes that conservatives, not liberals, succumbed to authoritarian impulses. The question is not whether these texts contradict one another. The question is how the theoretical framework of the first would interpret the argumentative posture of the second.
The book’s thesis is straightforward. Conservatism, in its cultural-political mode, operates through a distinctive form of grievance narrative. These narratives are not literal claims about fascism, eugenics, or Progressivism. They are rhetorical moves in a broader contest for cultural status. Conservatives feel marginalized by what they perceive as a dominant liberal moral culture. To resist this dominance, they engage in “political and intellectual judo,” flipping liberal categories against liberalism itself. Accusations of liberal fascism are the clearest form of this inversion. When liberals accuse conservatives of fascistic tendencies, conservative polemicists respond by showing that liberals are the real totalitarians, the real authoritarians, the real threat to democratic culture.
In this reading, Liberal Fascism is not a historical treatise. It is a cultural claim: conservatives attempt to “level the playing field” by appropriating the moral charge of fascism and redirecting it toward their opponents. In the book, Guldmann sees this not as a pathology but as a pattern. These are “convoluted stories” conservatives tell to cope with their subordinate cultural position. They accomplish a few basic things: they invert stigma, redistribute moral blame, and reclaim a sense of dignified selfhood in a culture where liberalism defines the moral vocabulary.
Once this framework is in place, it becomes possible to see how the earlier Guldmann would interpret the later Guldmann.
Liberal Fascism Revisited is not written from the detached vantage point of the book. It is written as an evaluation: Goldberg was wrong, liberals were right, and MAGA revealed the underlying authoritarian impulses that conservatives had long denied. The tone is diagnostic, but the stance is normative. It accepts the standard liberal classification of fascism, accepts the liberal moral vocabulary as the proper yardstick, and reads MAGA’s illiberal behavior not as a coalitional mutation but as a revelation of the conservative soul.
The Guldmann of the book would recognize this shift immediately. He would say that the later essay is no longer observing the culture war from the outside. It is participating in it. The structural theory of the book holds that both liberals and conservatives use the idea of oppression to reposition themselves as moral authorities. The later essay fits the liberal version of this pattern. Where Goldberg claimed that liberals were the real fascists, the later Guldmann claims that conservatives turned out to be the fascists after all. This is not a mirror image of Goldberg’s argument in substance, but it is a mirror image in structure. The prestige of anti-fascism is being redeployed to secure a moral victory for one side of the cultural conflict.
The earlier Guldmann would also note that the later essay treats the ideological inconsistency of the right as evidence of its essence. The book warns against this move. Conservative contradictions are often strategic or rhetorical. They are improvisations in a status struggle, not psychological confessions. In the book, the meaning of a conservative polemic is not located in its factual claims but in its cultural function. The later essay, by contrast, reads MAGA as the final unveiling of conservatism’s true nature. It reifies what the book insists is better understood as a performative strategy.
Finally, the earlier Guldmann would observe that the later essay accepts the liberal cultural frame as authoritative. In the book, liberalism is described as the cultural gatekeeper: it defines the political spectrum, defines the moral meaning of fascism, and defines which groups carry stigma. Conservatives resist this cultural hegemony through inversion. The later Guldmann, in accepting the liberal classification of MAGA as fascist or quasi-fascist, is reabsorbed into the liberal narrative environment. He is no longer the observer of this environment. He is a voice within it.
None of this makes the later essay invalid. What it means is that the two texts operate in different registers. The book is a meta-theory of ideological conflict. The essay is a substantive intervention within that conflict. The earlier Guldmann diagnoses how cultural groups fight over moral authority. The later Guldmann takes a side in that fight. Both roles are legitimate, but they are not the same.
In the end, the best way to capture the relationship is this: the first Guldmann is the anthropologist of ideological combat; the second Guldmann becomes a combatant. The first analyzes how narratives of oppression function. The second advances a narrative of his own. The two texts stand in ironic dialogue, not contradiction. The theoretical Guldmann would see the critical Guldmann as an illustration of the very dynamics he once mapped.
Why Rony Guldmann Over-Estimated Jonah Goldberg: A Retrospective Correction
Rony Guldmann’s early treatment of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism is unusually charitable for a book that deserved almost none. In Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression, Guldmann approached Goldberg’s argument as if it were a psychologically revealing text that required slow, even-handed excavation. That analytic posture created the impression that Goldberg’s polemic contained philosophical depth or conceptual rigor. With the benefit of hindsight—and with Guldmann’s own later reflections in “Liberal Fascism Revisited”—it is clear that this deference was misplaced. Goldberg’s book was less an intellectual challenge than a cultural performance, and the calm scholarly treatment it received distorted its true nature.
The first mistake was methodological. Guldmann’s early project sought to interpret conservative rhetoric as symptomatic of a larger emotional and cultural struggle. This required treating conservative texts, including Liberal Fascism, as worthy of interpretive labor. Rather than dismissing Goldberg’s flourishes as polemical contrivance, Guldmann treated them as clues to the conservative psyche. The analogies between Progressivism and fascism—which historians and political theorists have long regarded as unserious—were handled with care. Instead of stating plainly that Goldberg’s historical comparisons fall apart under even light scrutiny, Guldmann reframed them as rhetorical attempts to equalize the moral status of left and right. That softened the blow and inadvertently granted Goldberg a coherence he never earned.
Second, Guldmann mistook the stability of Goldberg’s argument. In his early writing, he accepted that Goldberg was engaged in an attempt to “reclaim moral parity” for the right, using the language of fascism not merely as a slur but as a serious inversion designed to expose alleged liberal blind spots. But as Guldmann later recognized, Goldberg’s work was not an earnest attempt at rebalancing the intellectual ledger. It was an opportunistic artifact of the late Bush-era conservative ecosystem—a piece of grievance merchandise constructed from strained analogies, out-of-context quotations, and the emotional hunger of a movement that felt culturally humiliated. The book was not a political theory. It was a provocation.
The third source of overestimation lies in Guldmann’s reluctance, at the time, to name what was obvious: that Goldberg’s project was not just wrong, but unserious. In the book, he frames the argument as misguided but symptomatic. In the later essay, he is noticeably sharper, acknowledging that Liberal Fascism “has not aged well,” that its warnings were refuted by events, and that its basic premise was inverted by the rise of MAGA. This sharper clarity exposes the gentleness of the earlier interpretation. Goldberg’s book was not merely off-target. It was a textbook case of projection, motivated reasoning, and ideological compensation—a fact clearer in 2025 than in 2010, but already visible even then.
Finally, Guldmann underestimated the degree to which Goldberg’s method licensed sloppiness. In the early analysis, he treated the analogical structure as a kind of intellectual move worth decoding. In retrospect, the analogies were not analytical mistakes but rhetorical tools. The book was never intended to withstand historical scrutiny. Its purpose was to supply conservatives with a cultural counter-myth. By treating the work as something more than that, Guldmann inadvertently elevated a polemic into the orbit of ideas.
The retrospective correction is simple. Goldberg did not deserve the interpretive charity he received. His book was a cultural artifact shaped by ressentiment, and while that makes it useful for diagnosing psychological dynamics within conservatism, it does not make it an argument of substance.
The New Yorker just published an essay, Does MAGA Have Ideas? It concludes:
It’s no surprise to find that the intellectual fabric of Trumpism is thin. What is possibly surprising is the degree to which the New Right has, through its arguments and behavior, refuted its own premises. In 2019, in a celebrated joint essay called “Against the Dead Consensus,” a group of conservative thinkers argued that liberalism and “consensus conservatism” the old-school kind had “long ago ceased to inquire into the first things”; it had taken for granted erroneous conclusions about “the nature and purpose of our common life.” They promised to turn America into the kind of place where values were taken seriously where we might ask, for example, whether “the soulless society of individual affluence” was one we wanted. But it turns out that it’s liberalism that forces you to inquire into ideas, precisely because they’re uncertain, changeable, and contested. In the illiberal world created by Trumpism, you don’t have to ask you can just proclaim.
You can change on a dime, saying or thinking anything at all.
ChatGPT says: I. What the New Yorker piece argues
The essay’s thesis is simple. Trumpism is intellectually hollow. The New Right said it wanted to bring back “first principles,” moral seriousness, a critique of atomized liberal modernity, and a renewed vision of the common good. But once Trump became the vessel, all of that collapsed. Trumpism became pure assertion. No doctrine. No consistency. No inquiry. No willingness to think anything through.
The piece says liberalism forces intellectual reflection because liberalism accepts uncertainty and contestation. Trumpism, by contrast, is an illiberal ecosystem where you can say anything, reverse yourself instantly, and never pay an intellectual cost.
In short: Trumpism promised depth and delivered improvisation and incoherence.
II. What the piece gets right
Trumpism is improvisational.
There is no metaphysical core. No intellectual framework. No Burkean tradition. No economic theory. It is vibes, grievance, intuition, and assertion.
MAGA leaders do not treat values as stable commitments.
They shift position instantly if the coalition demands it.
Liberalism really does force argument
Liberal pluralism requires negotiation among competing groups. That creates perpetual argumentation, which can feel exhausting but stimulates actual ideas.
The New Right contradicted itself
Writers who insisted liberalism was decadent and superficial ended up attaching themselves to a movement far more superficial.
III. What the piece misses without Alliance Theory
Alliance Theory explains all of this more cleanly and without moral mystification. It says political belief systems are not built out of principles. They’re built out of alliances. Coalitions create values, not the other way around.
Once you apply that lens, the New Yorker’s critique changes in three important ways.
MAGA is incoherent because coalitions are incoherent
The MAGA coalition contains:
white working-class voters
evangelicals
anti-immigration activists
the anti-elite petite bourgeoisie
large chunks of the business class
internet-native meme subcultures
These groups do not share a philosophy. They share enemies. Hence the inconsistent policy claims and constant reversals. This is what Alliance Theory predicts.
Liberalism doesn’t “force inquiry” because it likes truth
It forces inquiry because it is a multipolar alliance structure. Each faction demands reasons from every other faction. Liberalism’s argumentative culture is a byproduct of its coalition dynamics, not a philosophical virtue.
MAGA’s flexibility is a feature, not a bug
From an alliance perspective, MAGA’s ability to change positions instantly is a strength. In coalitional conflict, adaptability beats consistency. Ideas get treated like tactical equipment, not moral commitments.
Alliance Theory strips away the moral drama and shows you the mechanics.
IV. The deeper conflict the New Yorker piece doesn’t see
The author treats Trumpism’s lack of ideas as evidence of illiberalism. Alliance Theory reframes it as evidence of political tribalization. Once politics becomes a team sport, values become branding elements. Not commitments. Not philosophical identities.
The essay also assumes liberalism is intellectually serious while MAGA is unserious. From an alliance perspective, both sides use moral language as propaganda to defend allies and attack rivals.
Liberal intellectual self-congratulation is just the mirror image of MAGA’s performative disdain for “the elites.” Both reflect coalition needs.
V. The part the New Yorker gets completely wrong
The idea that conservatism once had a stable intellectual soul and then degenerated under Trump is wishful thinking. The old conservative consensus survived only because its coalition was stable. When the coalition changed, the ideas dissolved. That is exactly what Alliance Theory predicts.
Moral languages survive only as long as their coalitions do.
When a coalition reorganizes, the vocabulary reorganizes.
When a personality cult becomes the hub, the vocabulary follows the leader.
Trumpism is not an ideological failure. It is a coalitional transformation.
VI. The most accurate way to understand MAGA’s relationship to ideas
MAGA does not lack ideas. It treats ideas as weapons rather than commitments.
It uses slogans instead of doctrines.
It uses identity instead of argumentation.
It uses assertions instead of principles.
It uses outrage instead of persuasion.
This is not fascism and not conservatism. It is coalition politics in its rawest form.
Trumpism doesn’t fail the test of ideas because it is illiberal. It fails because it is a coalition that does not need ideas to function. Its cohesion comes from shared enemies, not shared principles.
