History Readings

On the opening of a book or the looking into a manuscript, I listen for the sound of a voice in the first-person singular, and from authors whom I read more than once I learn to value the weight of words and to delight in their meter and cadence—in Gibbon’s polyphonic counterpoint and Guedalla’s command of the subjunctive, in Mailer’s hyperbole and Dillard’s similes, in Twain’s invectives and burlesques with which he set the torch of his ferocious wit to the hospitality tents of the world’s “colossal humbug.”

y object was to learn, not preach, which prevented my induction into the national college of pundits but encouraged my reading of history.

I soon discovered that I had as much to learn from the counsel of the dead as I did from the advice and consent of the living. The reading of history damps down the impulse to slander the trend and tenor of the times, instills a sense of humor, lessens our fear of what might happen tomorrow.

On listening to President Barack Obama preach the doctrine of freedom-loving military invasion to the cadets at West Point, I’m reminded of the speeches that sent the Athenian army to its destruction in Sicily in 415 bc, and I don’t have to wait for dispatches from Afghanistan to suspect that the shooting script for the Pax Americana is a tale told by an idiot.

The common store of our shared history is what Goethe had in mind when he said that the inability to “draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth.”

It isn’t with symbolic icons that men make their immortality. They do so with what they’ve learned on their travels across the frontiers of the millennia, salvaging from the wreck of time what they find to be useful or beautiful or true.

What preserves the voices of the great authors from one century to the next is not the recording device (the clay tablet, the scroll, the codex, the book, the computer, the iPad) but the force of imagination and the power of expression. It is the strength of the words themselves, not their product placement, that invites the play of mind and induces a change of heart.

How do we know what we think we know? Why is it that the more information we collect the less likely we are to grasp what it means? Possibly because a montage is not a narrative, the ear is not the eye, a pattern recognition is not a figure or a form of speech.

The surfeit of new and newer news comes so quickly to hand that within the wind tunnels of the “innovative delivery strategies” the data blow away and shred. The time is always now, and what gets lost is all thought of what happened yesterday, last week, three months or three years ago. Unlike moths and fruit flies, human beings bereft of memory, even as poor a memory as Montaigne’s or my own, tend to become disoriented and confused.

I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.

On Monday morning, I saw on Twitter/X that New York magazine had just published a profile of and interview with the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates about his forthcoming book (partially) about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Coates makes very clear in the interview that he endorses from top to bottom the position advocated by the most militant pro-Palestinian activists: Israel is committing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza; Palestinian resistance is equivalent in purity and righteousness to those who marched against Jim Crow in the American South during the 1950s and ’60s and against South African apartheid in the 1970s and ’80s—while Israel’s position is equivalent in wickedness to the brutalizing forces of racism and oppression in both contexts.

He thinks that low, curved handlebars contort riders into an unnatural position; that bicycles made of carbon fibre and aluminum have safety issues; and that stretchy synthetics have nothing on seersucker and wool

“The whole purpose of pro riding now is to create a demand at the retail level for the really expensive bicycles,”

He is an advocate of pleasurable, unhurried riding—alone, or with family and friends—and is obsessive about comfort.

Rivendell’s bicycles are marketed as “UNracing” bikes. The frames are made of lugged, brazed steel. They have long wheelbases, luxurious chainstays, and sloping top tubes

Rivendell frames are generally outfitted with upright handlebars, leather saddles, manual shifters, platform pedals, and lush, chubby tires. They are designed to accommodate racks, baskets, fenders, and bags—whatever is useful for cross-country touring, local bike camping, and running errands

“I personally have more respect, tons of respect, for somebody who rides around town, to work, for shopping, and for fun, than somebody who does front-flips on handrails with a fifty-foot dropoff on one side.”

He sees the glorification of speed—personal bests, constant quantification, metrics, leaderboards—as discouraging to entry-level riders who might otherwise enjoy life with a bike.

These days, some mainstream bikes incorporate electronics requiring batteries and firmware: shifters that change gears at the press of a button, or power meters that collect data on a rider’s output. “So many basic things are being teched out of existence,”

He saw this as a function of business incentives: electronics break or need replacement; an upgrade is always around the corner.

Petersen’s objections are practical but also philosophical. As bikes become higher-tech, riders lose skills and agency. “A lot of sports have been watered down,” Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, told me. “People are bicycling, but they have a motor. And people are climbing, but they’re climbing indoors. They’re riding big waves, but they’re being pulled in by Jet Skis. Yet there are a few people that are bucking the trend.”

He was talented but ambivalent about competing. “I know the racing scene extremely well, I know the culture really well, I’m comfortable with it, and I hate it,” he told me.

Rivendell’s employees object to descriptions of the company’s following as cultlike. “The other stuff is the cult,” Keating told me. “Putting the suit on, and going as fast as possible, and using the bars like this”—we were sitting at a table, and he hunched over his coffee cup, as if to protect it. “That’s the culty stuff, right? We’re just making nice bikes for regular people.”

In 1994, Bridgestone announced that it was shuttering its U.S. bicycle operation. Petersen told me that he had an informal standing job offer from Specialized, a major bicycle manufacturer, but that he couldn’t get excited about the changes in the mainstream market. Production was moving to China. Mountain bikes had begun to draw influence from motocross, incorporating shocks and suspension forks. The introduction of carbon fibre and titanium brought new manufacturers, including aerospace companies, into the industry.

“In the simplest terms, I think of bicycles as rideable art that can just about save the world, or at least make you happy,” he told readers. “Yet so many modern bicycles are promoted as tools for self-aggrandizement, status, and hammering the competition to a pulp, and the bikes themselves look like hoodlums, thugs, and ne’er-do-wells.”

valued function over prestige. “I am philosophically for putting cheap, really high-functioning stuff on a bike,” Petersen told me. “A twenty-eight-dollar derailleur on a thirty-five-hundred-dollar bike has a kind of beauty in itself.”

The main critique that Petersen faces is that his preferences are needlessly nostalgic. In 1990, a columnist for Bicycling dubbed Petersen a “retro-grouch,” and joked that he must be a descendant of nineteenth-century penny-farthing riders

John Podhoretz, in a 2017 Commentary article, “Explaining Trump’s Charlottesville Behavior,” offered up one piece of the puzzle

“Whose early support for Trump itself played a key role in leading others to take him seriously and help propel him into the nomination?”

Podhoretz’s prescient answer: a conspiracy-oriented constituency with little regard for truth:

I’m not talking about a base as it’s commonly understood — the wellspring of a politician’s mass support. I’m talking about a nucleus — the very heart of a base, the root of the root of support. Trump found himself with 14 percent support in a month. Those early supporters had been primed to rally to him for a long time.”

Alex Jones and Infowars, the conspiracy-theory radio show/website on which Trump has appeared for years; the radio show has 2 million listeners a week, a

the WWE, which televises wrestling and which, in 2014, could claim a weekly audience of 15 million

Based on analysis of hundreds of surveys, Jacobson concluded that:

The pervasive denial of truth has, in turn, been crucial to Trump’s continued viability.

“motivated ignorance reinforced by a right-wing pundits and social media entrepreneurs” — helps explain “the tenacious loyalty of Trump’s MAGA followers.”

In fact, there appears to be a self-reinforcing feedback loop that rewards Trump for his incessant distortions of the truth.

Republicans and Trump voters downplay the importance of the crimes charged, and large majorities refuse to admit that Trump committed such crimes anyway.

In the abstract and before the fact, a conviction on any of the felony charges would be projected to devastate Trump’s support. But once Trump was convicted in that case, the share of Republicans and prospective Trump voters who said they would not vote for a felon fell sharply.

Not only do a substantial majority of Republicans deny that Trump ever committed a serious crime as president, but an even larger majority believe he should be immune from prosecution if he did.

Motivated ignorance differs from the more familiar concept of rational ignorance in that ‘ignorance is motivated by the anticipated costs of possessing knowledge, not acquiring it.

it is not simply that the benefits of accurate political knowledge may be less than the cost of attaining it and thus not worth pursuing

American Media, the company that owns the National Enquirer, the Star, the Sun, and the Weekly World News

When expressed opinions and beliefs signal identification with a group, it is rational to stay ignorant of contradictory facts that, if acknowledged, would threaten to impose personal and social identity costs for the uncertain benefits of accurate knowledge.

Only by remaining ignorant of such facts as those can Trump supporters avoid facing the painful possibility that they might have been wrong about him and their despised enemies

Such a realization could unsettle their self and social identities, estranging them from family and friends who remain within the MAGA fold

“To be blunt, Trump supporters aren’t changing their minds because that change would require changing who they are, and they want to be that person.” Staying ignorant, deliberately or unconsciously, is thus rational

the costs of having accurate information exceed the benefits.

“the paradox is that people who are fed up with the political system don’t support Trump despite Trump’s behavior and the charges against him, but, to some extent, because of his behavior and the charges against him.”

“According to our research,” Petersen added, “people who feel anger and feel threatened reach out to dominant politicians who are willing to act in aggressive and transgressive ways.

Such a personality is seen as attractive because people expect them to be able to prevail in conflicts against opponents including, in this case, the overarching political system.”

Our own research on extreme antipathy toward the political system — what we term a “Need for Chaos” — shows that such emotions are rooted in feelings of loneliness and being stuck in your place in the social hierarchy.

having an unfulfilling life and not being able to change that. American politicians and, many European counterparts, have not been able to remedy such feelings and we are seeing the result of that.

“followers strategically promote dominant individuals to leadership positions in order to enhance their ability to aggress against other groups.”

“some individuals circulate hostile rumors because they wish to unleash chaos, to ‘burn down’ the entire political order in the hope they gain status in the process.”

What drives this need for chaos?

Frustrations about status loss have been observed among members of traditionally privileged groups (e.g., white men), but actual experiences of historical injustices to members of marginalized groups can also trigger deep dissatisfaction with the political system (e.g., among Black individuals).

“there may be functional benefits to displays of destructive intent for marginalized individuals.”

First, displays of destructive tendencies may serve as hard-to-fake signals of the motivation to impose costs and, hence, operate as a general deterrence device

Petersen, Osmundsen and Arceneaux found that white men, a core Trump constituency, were unique in many respects: “White men react more aggressively than any other group to perceived status challenges. While white men do not feel highly status-challenged on average, they are more likely to seek chaos when they do.”

Group-based feelings of being unable to advance in society fuels a Need for Chaos among white men. Consistent with notions of aggrieved entitlement among historically dominant groups, many white men are preoccupied with their societal standing and react with aggression against any threat.

“How can a constituency of voters find a candidate ‘authentically appealing,’ i.e., view him positively as authentic, even though he is a ‘lying demagogue,’ someone who deliberately tells lies and appeals to nonnormative private prejudices?”

The authors’ answer:A particular set of social and political conditions must be in place for the lying demagogue to appear authentically appealing to his constituency. In short, if that constituency feels its interests are not being served by a political establishment that purports to represent it fairly, a lying demagogue can appear as a distinctively authentic champion of its interests.

The greater his willingness to antagonize the establishment by making himself persona non grata, the more credible is his claim to be his constituency’s leader. His flagrant violation of norms (including that of truth-telling) makes him odious to the establishment, someone from whom they must distance themselves lest they be tainted by scandal.

But this very need by the establishment to distance itself from the lying demagogue lends credibility to his claim to be an authentic champion for those who feel disenfranchised by that establishment.

Jan G. Voelkel, a sociologist at Stanford, noted in an email:Voters value candidates’ support for democracy but not very much. Only 13 percent defect from an undemocratic in-party candidate. Even candidates who had political scandals typically get a large share of the vote from their base.

Graham and Svolik find “the U.S. public’s viability as a democratic check to be strikingly limited: only a small fraction of Americans prioritize democratic principles in their electoral choices, and their tendency to do so is decreasing on several measures of polarization, including the strength of partisanship, policy extremism, and candidate platform divergence.”

“Most voters,” Graham and Svolik conclude,are partisans first and democrats second: Only about 13.1 percent of our respondents are willing to defect from a co-partisan candidate for violating democratic principles when the price of doing so is voting against their own party.

Partisan loyalty is crucial to Trump’s success. He has a base of support — roughly 43 to 45 percent of the electorate — that sticks with him through good and bad times.

Republican elites adopted strategies that allowed Trump to wrest power from them:

Intense partisan hostility works to Trump’s advantage in a number of ways

First, MAGA loyalists believe “the investigations against Trump are witch hunts and baseless.”

Taking this logic a step further, “people think that the other side is dangerous and that we need someone willing to do whatever it takes to stop them. That is, they think they are protecting democracy by supporting Trump.

Finally, in a polarized world, people value policy and partisan outcomes over democracy — they are willing to tolerate some authoritarianism to further their own political goals.”

Crystallization describes a world where people’s attitudes won’t be swayed, no matter what new information they get. Campaign dynamics do very little to move attitudes. Polarization is the engine of crystallization.

Well before Trump’s ascendance, key Republican leaders and strategists set the stage for his near deification within the ranks of the party.

Starting with Black civil rights in the 1960s, leaders started to take positions that would ultimately attract a different party base than the one that existed before.

Next it was opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights, with clear implications for women’s equality. Then it was a stance against L.G.B.T. rights. The G.O.P. remained steadfastly religious in its orientation, while Democrats started to embrace secularity.

The thing that ties all these issues together is a stance toward societal change. Traditional or modern, some call it closed or open.

After the defeat of Mitt Romney in 2012, Hetherington wrote, “party elites decided in their autopsy that they needed to take a more open tack in trying to attract a more racially and ethnically diverse base of support.”Trump, however, “challenged this leadership consensus. Elites lost control of the base right there — but bear in mind that Republican appeals on race, gender and sexual orientation were responsible for creating that base.”

Trump has remained a powerful, if not dominant, political figure by weaving together a tapestry of resentment and victimhood. He has tapped into a bloc of voters for whom truth is irrelevant.

The Trump coalition is driven to some extent by white males suffering status decline, but the real glue holding his coalition together is arguably racial animus.

Trump’s support, they write, is “tied to animus toward minority groups,” specifically “toward four Democratic-aligned social groups: African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims and gays and lesbians.”

Animosity toward Democratic-linked groups is strongly related to Trump approval. People who felt strong animosity toward Blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, and L.G.B.T. people were significantly more likely to be fond of Trump.

among those with the lowest level of animus toward Democratic groups, their favorability toward Trump is around 0.3 on the 0 to 1 scale. This level of favorability increases to over 0.5 among those who have the most animus toward Democratic groups, representing a 23-percentage-point increase.

For independents, this relationship doubles in size, where those most hostile toward Democratic-linked groups are about 30 percentage points more favorable toward Trump than the least hostile.

we should take note that these attitudes exist across both parties and among nonpartisans. Though they may remain relatively latent when leaders and parties draw attention elsewhere, the right leader can activate these attitudes and fold them into voters’ political judgments.

While his work was informed by a disciplined and steadfast political point of view — according to the essayist and Stanford professor Mark Greif, he was a Marxist literary critic “in a conspicuously uncompromising way” — it was not pious, dogmatic or ostentatiously topical.

Marxism was, for Jameson, both a mode of analysis and an ethical program

The novels, films and philosophical texts he wrote about — and by implication his own work too — could only be understood within the social and economic structures that produced them. The point of studying them was to figure out how those structures could be dismantled and what might replace them.

Jameson was as much a traditionalist as a radical. His prose is dense and demanding, studded with references that testify to a lifetime of deep, omnivorous reading.

For all his eclecticism he was, to a perhaps unfashionable degree, a literary critic, most at home in the old-growth forests of 19th- and 20th-century European literature, tapping at the trunks of the tallest timbers: Gustave Flaubert, Stéphane Mallarmé, James Joyce, Thomas Mann.

why, as a critic, Jameson mattered to me. And maybe, more generally, to the nonacademic, not necessarily Marxist brand of criticism that I and some of my comrades try to practice in the throes of late capitalism, a phrase he helped popularize.

He identifies “this slogan” as “the one absolute and we may even say ‘transhistorical’ imperative of all dialectical thought.”

“Always historicize!”

the opening words of “The Political Unconscious,” Jameson’s 1981 book on “narrative as a socially symbolic act.”

we have not even raised the issue of gluten or the possibility of grated Parmesan. Or, more seriously, the unequal distribution of food in a consumer economy.

there is one, just two words long, that I’ve always thought would make a great inspirational forearm tattoo.

If you are a critic, professional or otherwise, the task before you is to make sense of an artifact of the human imagination — a poem, a painting, a dish of pasta, a Netflix docuseries, whatever

What does it mean? What is its value?

To find the answers, it helps to know something about where it came from. Who made it? Under what conditions? For what purpose?

Those may not be specifically Marxist questions, but they are historical questions, and they begin a process of inquiry that may lead to Marxist conclusions.

It exists in relation to (for starters) other works of literature and gastronomy, and it changes over time. And so, of course, do you

Reading a Shakespeare sonnet in middle age is not the same as studying it in school, and what it means in the 21st century is not what it meant in the 17th

Mapping that system and tracking its changes is the work of what Jameson calls “dialectical thought.”

To historicize your dinner you will need to take account of the voyages of Marco Polo, the European conquest of the tomato, the story of Italian immigrants in America and the rise of The New York Times cooking app.

But of course there is, properly speaking, no pasta without antipasto; no primo piatto without a secondo; no dinner without dessert. Those matters will also need to be investigated.

he principle is straightforward, even common-sensical.

rbidding idiom. (Transcoding; demystification; cognitive mapping:

Criticism, as he understood it, could never be, because of the complexity of its objects and its need to perpetually revise, refine and question its own procedures.

It not only steers our life choices, it also permeates daily life and negatively affects our mental health.

Beyond the right major, the not-so-secret formula for the perfect résumé demands participation in a relevant extracurricular activity, which explains the competitive process at some selective schools to join pre-professional clubs.

Last year, 315,126 undergraduates applied for the 2,700 available undergraduate intern positions at Goldman Sachs.

In the 2021-22 academic year, undergraduate institutions handed out 375,400 business degrees. Unsurprisingly, the number of students pursuing humanities has declined dramatically.

The interview process for Cornell’s Undergraduate Asia Business Society includes entering a pitch-black lecture hall, having a projector light shone in one’s face and yelling responses to questions. Getting into Yale isn’t enough: Its investing club turned away 236 applicants in 2022.

Once one snags a spot in a club, it’s straight to LinkedIn. Nearly 20 percent of people on the site are between the ages of 18 to 24, making the platform an incubator of young adult FOMO

I wondered how I missed the memo that I needed to take microeconomics. This fall at Penn there are 672 seats in the course; as of Monday, only four had not been taken. Does everyone like economics that much?

When I first got to the University of Pennsylvania in August of 2019, it felt like a daily pop quiz, one where I was graded on a language I still struggle to speak.

I heard students say things like: I think I want to work in mergers and acquisitions. Do you have any interest in that? It’s very competitive, just so you know. And: Unless it’s Goldman or J.P. Morgan, who cares?

There, we stress over whether our headshots look too high school (at the age of 18) and race to the coveted over-500-connections designation.

It sounds silly — in hindsight, it was — but that is how I felt when I was surrounded by thousands of intelligent classmates competing for the same handful of results. I’d wake up at 3:30 a.m. from the recurring nightmare that I didn’t land an internship my junior year summer

I heard people, maybe friends, endlessly discussing the “only way” to be successful. I consoled a sobbing roommate after she failed to land the job her parents expected her to get.

But what is missing in this race to perceived economic safety is the emotional toll. The number of young adults ages 18 to 25 who have had at least one depressive episode has doubled from 2010 to 2020.

Naturally, when thousands of students rush into the same handful of majors and professions, supply cannot possibly meet demand. That’s particularly true now, as openings for postgraduate tech industry jobs advertised on the student job board Handshake decreased about 30 percent this spring from the prior year

Selective colleges and universities can fix this by overhauling their on-campus recruiting systems to prevent finance and consulting firms from pushing students to commit earlier and earlier. No student should have to determine her first career path before junior year begins.

The surge has turned The Bulwark from an anti-Trump refuge into a promising media business. In an interview, Longwell told Semafor that subscriptions are on track to generate more than $5 million a year, which represents the main source of revenue for the publication.

The Bulwark is riding two converging trends in politics and media.

The publication has capitalized on the tectonic realignment that’s been happening in US politics, and serves as a kind of media escort from former Republicans on their way to support for Democratic candidates. (Weiss, in a neighboring ideological lane, offers a safe space for Democrats who can’t stomach Trump but feel their party and their flagship newspaper, The New York Times, have abandoned them, especially on campus-culture issues and Israel.)

This sometimes produces surreal scenes: Last week, a room full of 400 liberal and center-left Atlantic Festival guests erupted in applause for remarks by Kristol, once best known as the most committed media promoter of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.

The Bulwark’s YouTube explosion also offers a glimpse into what a post-cable future might look like for political news. The Bulwark’s success has been driven in large part by Miller’s natural loose on-camera persona and the interest in some of its well-known hosts like George Conway. But its growth on YouTube mirrors that of conservatives like the Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro or Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News personality, whose YouTube following rivals that of major broadcasters.

“Because my bigger political ambition is: How do you build a new center in the country that sort of refuses to engage in extreme sides of politics? And so I want to build as big a community as possible.”

In a broader government initiative, representatives from 28 countries signed a declaration in Britain last November, agreeing to cooperate on evaluating the risks of artificial intelligence. They met again in Seoul in May. But these gatherings have stopped short of setting specific policy goals.

President Biden and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, agreed when they met last year that officials from both countries should hold talks on A.I. safety. The first took place in Geneva in May.

Last October, President Biden signed an executive order that required companies to report to the federal government about the risks that their A.I. systems could pose, like their ability to create weapons of mass destruction or potential to be used by terrorists.

Government officials in both China and the United States have made artificial intelligence a priority in the past year. In July, a Chinese Communist Party conclave that takes place every five years called for a system to regulate A.I. safety. Last week, an influential technical standards group in China published an A.I. safety framework.

Among the signatories was Yoshua Bengio, whose work is so often cited that he is called one of the godfathers of the field. There was Andrew Yao, whose course at Tsinghua University in Beijing has minted the founders of many of China’s top tech companies. Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneering scientist who spent a decade at Google, participated remotely. All three are winners of the Turing Award, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for computing.

The group also included scientists from several of China’s leading A.I. research institutions, some of which are state-funded and advise the government. A few former government officials joined, including Fu Ying, who had been a Chinese foreign ministry official and diplomat, and Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland. Earlier this year, the group met in Beijing, where they briefed senior Chinese government officials on their discussion.

Governments need to know what is going on at the research labs and companies working on A.I. systems in their countries, the group said in its statement. And they need a way to communicate about potential risks that does not require companies or researchers to share proprietary information with competitors.

“If we had some sort of catastrophe six months from now, if we do detect there are models that are starting to autonomously self-improve, who are you going to call?” Dr. Hadfield said.

If A.I. systems anywhere in the world were to develop these abilities today, there is no plan for how to rein them in, said Gillian Hadfield, a legal scholar and professor of computer science and government at Johns Hopkins University.

In a statement on Monday, a group of influential A.I. scientists raised concerns that the technology they helped build could cause serious harm. They warned that A.I. technology could, within a matter of years, overtake the capabilities of its makers and that “loss of human control or malicious use of these A.I. systems could lead to catastrophic outcomes for all of humanity.”

Scientists who helped pioneer artificial intelligence are warning that countries must create a global system of oversight to check the potentially grave risks posed by the fast-developing technology.

This is the problem groups like Project 2025 set out to solve. Behind the policy playbook sits a database of around 20,000 applicants ready to be part of the next Trump administration. And that database is still growing.

To do that, the next Trump administration must first clear out or conquer the federal government that currently exists. Project 2025 is obsessed with this task and many of its 900-some pages are dedicated to plans and theories for how this might be done.

Victory will require the “boldness to bend or break the bureaucracy to the presidential will.”

This, I would say, is the unifying theory of a second Trump term. Purge or break the federal bureaucracy. Fill it with vetted loyalists. Then use its power to pass policy, yes, but also to break or conquer the other institutions in American life that so vex Trump and his supporters

The Heritage Foundation was one of these groups and Project 2025 their signature effort. In 2021, Roberts took over Heritage and retooled it into an organization dedicated to “institutionalizing Trumpism.” He sought centrality through both scale and publicity: Project 2025 was a vast undertaking, and Roberts promoted it relentlessly

The next Trump administration will do far more than the Trump campaign is describing, and Project 2025 — which was produced with input from more than 100 conservative organizations that see themselves as part of the MAGA-governing coalition — filled the void that Trump himself has left. He did not tell us what he was going to do, so Project 2025 did.

The second is that Trump’s 2024 campaign differs from his 2016 campaign in a fundamental way. In 2016, Trump ran as the destroyer of the existing Republican coalition. He won by humiliating the politicians who had held power before him, but he did not, during that campaign, attempt to replace them

so Trump presided over a kind of uneasy coalition government with the Republican Party of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. His major domestic policy projects reflected that coalition: Repeal of Obamacare was what united congressional Republicans in 2016, so that’s what the Trump administration attempted in 2017. Cutting corporate taxes is what got Speaker Ryan out of bed in the morning, so that is what the Trump administration turned to next.

But now Trump is the leader of the Republican coalition. He cannot credibly divorce himself from the groups working day and night to secure his victory and staff his presidency. There is no competing power center that the media or the public can assume will do the governing that so bores Trump

But Trump is not temperamentally suited to the work of managing a coalition and he has not elevated a trusted ideological consigliere to do it for him. He is a diffident, distracted ruler, and the result is dozens of groups competing for his favor and unsure of how to win it

“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, which oversaw Project 2025, said in July.

“The problem, which I had always suspected, was that very few plans survive contact with Donald Trump,” said Matthew Continetti, the author of “The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism.” “He always wants to maintain maximum flexibility and maximum maneuverability in order to improve his position at any given moment. So he was not just going to turn around and say, yes, Project 2025 is exactly what my program will be, and it’s exactly who I plan to have in my administration.”

The MAGA coalition — particularly its elected officials and Washington staffer class — has grown beyond Trump. It has more views on more issues than he does. It has absorbed more specific and unusual ideologies than he ha

t is more hostile to abortion than he is, or than he wants to appear to be. It is more committed to deregulating health insurance than he is, or than he wants to appear to be. There is a great gap between the MAGA leader who slept with a porn star and the factions in the MAGA movement that want to outlaw pornography, as Roberts proposed on Project 2025’s first page.

Trumpism is whatever Trump says it is, but MAGA is whatever his movement becomes. This is why JD Vance has been a political liability to Trump’s campaign: Vance represents MAGA as it has evolved — esoterically ideological, deeply resentful, terminally online — unleavened by Trump’s instincts for showmanship and the winds of public sentiment.

Trump is where MAGA started, but Vance and Roberts is where it is going.

Trump’s problem in the 2024 election is that he can no longer run as if he is a man alone.

A Trump administration would be full of people like Vance pursuing the agendas they believe in. In the Talento presentation I mentioned, she describes the Biden administration as “a federal leviathan that is killing our babies” and argues that “every cabinet secretary who comes into a new, hopefully Republican administration will have a pro-life agenda that they must enact.” This is not Trump’s election-year message but it would be his administration’s reality.

Another Trump administration would be filled with people pursuing agendas like this at every level, and properly so: That is what coalitions do when they win elections.

He is denying a reality of his second term that everyone else can plainly see. Project 2025 is not a perfect guide to that second term, but it the closest thing we have to one. It was all so much easier when the deep state was something Trump could complain about, rather than something he had to manage and own.

In nine years, countless Republican primary voters have moved from voting for Trump in spite of his transgressions to rejecting anyone who doesn’t transgress.

If you’re not transgressive, you’re suspicious. Decency is countercultural in the Republican Party. It’s seen as a rebuke of Trump.

While many decent people remain — and represent the hope for future reform — Trump’s Republican Party has become a magnet for eccentrics and conspiracy theorists of all stripes

Trump has set the course of the Republican Party’s cultural river for more than nine years. Fewer and fewer resisters remain, and they’re growing increasingly exhausted and besieged

Indeed, Trump in his diabolical shrewdness knows how to build and maintain his own base

He’s shed the Republican Party’s traditional commitment to life. He’ll sprint away from any policy or principle that he believes might cost him power. At the same time, he watches his crowd roar when he demonizes immigrants (MAGA’s true north star) and he sees “red-pilled” young men rally to his side when he punches hard and never backs down.

Leaders don’t simply enact policies; they dictate the cultures of the institutions they lead

I’ve compared the cultural power of a leader to setting the course of a river. Defying or contradicting the leader’s ethos is like swimming against the current — yes, you can do that for a time, but eventually you get exhausted and either have to swim to the bank and leave, or you’re swept downstream, just like everyone else.

the “crank realignment.”

The mere suggestion that Republican primary voters can and should do better is greeted by scorn and contempt.

Both parties have always been vulnerable to nominating or electing the occasional crank, but Donald Trump’s ascendance meant that a crank led the party, and the best way to join with him is to imitate him.

That’s how leaders change institutions. They make them into images of themselves.

In this case, Trump has done so explicitly. Almost all the worst figures in the Republican Party have ridden Trump endorsements to the top of their local pyramids. Robinson received Trump’s endorsement and swamped his primary opposition. Trump even called him “Martin Luther King on steroids.”

It’s possible that the Republican Party is simply too far gone, at least for now. A primary electorate that chooses Robinson over more reasonable candidates by 45 points — and a party that blames “the left” for revealing that he’s even worse than anyone knew — does not seem ready to change.