The political scientist Corey Robin has been very challenging for me, in a good way, since I first read his book The Reactionary Mind a few years back. I’ve returned to his thesis throughout the Trump years as a bit of grounding during what often felt like a hopeless and inescapable shift in American history.

In this interview with David Klion, Robin argues Trump is fundamentally weak in part because the weakness of the Left has given conservatives nothing to react to, and because, like Carter before him, Trump is presiding over the end of a political age with no ability to define what’s next.

Many of the attributes people decry in Trump and his followers were primary features of the conservatism I was describing in The Reactionary Mind (and got a lot of flak from liberals for so describing). To my mind, the comparisons between Trump and Hitler or Mussolini come from people who only began thinking about American conservatism and the Republican Party when Trump came along.

This does skip some parts of the culture that have changed and are unique, if not to Trumpism, then today’s Right: the rise and dominance of right-wing media (Fox News, talk radio, and local Sinclair news stations) in many parts of the country, the distorted reality bubbles driven by social media that have QAnon conspiracy theorists in Congress, the cult of personality that surrounds Trump specifically as his family continues to scheme and grift, the politicization of every part of culture coinciding with the nationalization of politics, and the Right’s full-scale culture war. I imagine Robin would point to historical precedents for these but what does seem unprecedented today is the way they’ve all merged into a new socio-political order that has elevated a kind of white, Christian nationalism as the culmination of the GOP.

Even if you don’t fully subscribe to Robin’s thesis, the notion of reactionism as a driving political force is certainly compelling. Robin argues conservatism is fundamentally reactive in nature, somewhat paradoxically given how they tend to define themselves, an argument that I tend to find compelling. Something I’ve found frustrating and disappointing from the Left these past few years is how reactive the broader political movement has become, a riff on the “Trump derangement syndrome” that Trumpists love to sneer about. Here, Robin argues we on the Left need to, essentially, get our shit together or risk being outflanked for much longer given the inherently conservative structure of the electoral system.

I found this piece from Charlie Warzel, about the nature of hard and soft of political vs cultural power to be a good complement to Robin. Cultural change by definition veers left and brings with it a great deal of influence, which conservatives either diametrically oppose to or attempt to co-opt (and sometimes both, which is why they come off as so phony and insincere). Trump has always wanted that kind of power but has never really wielded it — even as a gossip page regular or reality TV host, he was a funhouse mirror to the deficiencies of the zeitgeist. So much of the frustration at the heart of Trumpism can be seen as a reaction to still not having the kind of cultural cachet of, say, Obama. The end result has been to instead build out an alternate reality where what they think of as culture is all there is.

Shortly after Mr. Trump’s election, pro-Trump media pundits bandied about the slogans “Conservatism is the new counterculture” and “Conservatism is the new punk rock.” But the pro-Trump media didn’t create a counterculture as much as a dangerous counter-reality — one that prods mainstream media organizations to push back harder to debunk the lies.

Virginia Heffernan offers a somewhat more optimistic view of Trump as a “pop-culture phenomenon, not an ideological one”, subject to the mercurial vagaries of fashion.