David Brooks
The Moral Challenge of Trumpism
Nov. 28, 2024
By David Brooks
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Opinion Columnist
I admire Mitt Romney. He is, by all accounts, an outstanding husband and father. He built a successful investment firm by supporting successful young businesses like Staples. He served the public as head of the 2002 Winter Olympics and as a governor. As a senator, he had the courage to vote to convict Donald Trump twice, in the two separate impeachment trials, when few other Republicans did.
But as Noah Millman writes on Substack, people in the MAGA movement take a different view of Romney. In private life, Romney compliantly conformed to the bourgeois norms of those around him. In business he contributed to the bloating of the finance and consulting sector. As a politician he bent himself to the needs of the moment, moving from moderate Republican to "extreme conservative." As a senator, he sought the approval of the Washington establishment.
Millman's underlying point is it's not sufficient to say that Trump is leading a band of morally challenged people to power. It's that Trumpism represents an alternative value system. The people I regard as upright and admirable MAGA regards as morally disgraceful, and the people I regard as corrupt and selfish MAGA regards as heroic.
The crucial distinction is that some of us have an institutional mind-set while the MAGA mind-set is anti-institutional.
In the former view, we are born into a world of institutions — families, schools, professions, the structures of our government. We are formed by these institutions. People develop good character as they live up to the standards of excellence passed down in their institutions — by displaying the civic virtues required by our Constitution, by living up to what it means to be a good teacher or nurse or, if they are Christians, by imitating the self-emptying love of Christ. Over the course of our lives, we inherit institutions, steward them and try to pass them along in better shape to the next generation. We know our institutions have flaws and need reform, but we regard them as fundamentally legitimate.
MAGA morality is likely to regard people like me as lemmings. We climbed our way up through the meritocracy by shape shifting ourselves into whatever teachers, bosses and the system wanted us to be. Worse, we serve and preserve systems that are fundamentally corrupt and illegitimate — the financial institutions that created the financial crisis, the health authorities who closed schools during Covid, the mainstream media and federal bureaucracy that has led the nation to ruin.
What does heroism look like according the MAGA morality? It looks like the sort of people whom Trump has picked to be in his cabinet. The virtuous man in this morality is self-assertive, combative, transgressive and vengeful. He's not afraid to break the rules and come to his own conclusions. He has contempt for institutions and is happy to be a battering force to bring them down. He is unbothered by elite scorn but, in fact, revels in it and goes out of his way to generate it.
In this mind-set, if the establishment regards you as a sleazeball, you must be doing something right. If the legal system indicts you, you must be a virtuous man.
In this morality, the fact that a presidential nominee is accused of sexual assault is a feature, not a bug. It's a sign that this nominee is a manly man. Manly men go after what they want. They assert themselves and smash propriety — including grabbing women "by the pussy" if they feel like it.
In this worldview, a nominee enshrouded in scandal is more trustworthy than a person who has lived an honest life. The scandal-shrouded nominee is cast out from polite society. He's not going to run to a New York publisher and write a tell-all memoir bashing the administration in which he served. Such a person is not going to care if he is scorned by the civil servants in the agency he has been hired to dismantle.
The corrupt person owes total fealty to Donald Trump. There is no other realm in which he can achieve power and success except within the MAGA universe. Autocrats have often preferred to surround themselves with corrupt people because such people are easier to control and, if necessary, destroy.
In other words, MAGA represents a fundamental challenge not only to conventional politics but also to conventional morality. In his own Substack essay, Damon Linker gets to the point: "Trumpism is seeking to advance a revolutionary transvaluation of values by inverting the morality that undergirds both traditional conservatism and liberal institutionalism. In this inversion, norms and rules that counsel and enforce propriety, restraint and deference to institutional authority become vices, while flouting them become virtues."
I suspect that over the next couple of years we will see a series of running conflicts between institutionalists and anti-institutionalists — not only a power struggle over the Justice Department, the intelligence agencies, the schools and the institutions of democracy itself but also a values struggle over what sort of person we should admire, what values should govern our society. The battle is on for the hearts and souls of the coming generations.
The anti-institutionalists have advantages. It's much easier to degrade and destroy than to preserve and reform. We live amid a multidecade crisis of legitimacy, during which strong voices ranging from Oliver Stone's on the left to Tucker Carlson's on the right have sent the message that everything is rotten.
But character is destiny. An administration of narcissists will be a snake pit, in which strife and self-destructive scandal will snuff out effective action. Running things is hard, and changing things is harder, and it's rarely done well by solipsistic outsiders.
Those of us in the institutionalist camp will have to learn the lessons taught by George C. Marshall. Marshall, who served as chief of staff of the Army during World War II, and was an institutionalist through and through. He was formed by Army manners. The very core of his ethic was this: I will never put my own ambitions above the needs of the Army or the nation.
Yet Marshall was no standpatter. He didn't respond to threats from outside by clinging fiercely to the status quo. He was a comprehensive reformer. When he was asked to lead the Infantry School at Fort Benning, for example, he revolutionized the curriculum. He sent units out on maneuvers maps because in real war you always have insufficient information. He shifted military training toward mechanized warfare and nearly doubled the number of hours of instruction devoted to tactics. He spent his career pushing against the stifling traditionalism that could stultify his institution.
Today it really is true that the Pentagon is administratively a mess. It really is true the meritocracy needs to be fundamentally rethought. It really is true that Congress is dysfunctional and the immigration system is broken. But positive change will come from people who have developed a loving devotion to those institutions over years of experience, not people who despise them — the modern-day George Marshalls rather than the Pete Hegseths, Tulsi Gabbards and Robert F. Kennedy Jrs.
What kind of person do we want our children to become — reformers who honor their commitments to serve and change the institutions they love or performative arsonists who vow to burn it all down?
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This is a comprehensive, well-reasoned response to the reflex of running away from trans rights. The look back at the 2004 election's slew of state gay ban initiatives is particularly instructive. Yes, it cost Kerry the election. But it was followed by Obergefell nine years later. Sometimes there are political steps back before a greater social step forward.
Anonymous, your response, too, is a well-reasoned one. I especially like your reminder that, "Sometimes there are political steps back before a greater social step forward." As a Democrat, I'm a big fan of onward and forward and upward.
There will also be unintended consequences in the so-called bathroom bill as there always are for laws based on fear and little research. Will it be illegal for a parent to take their opposite gendered child to a public single-gender bathroom? What about a caregiver with opposite gendered person with disabilities? Not every building has gender neutral facilities so what are people going to do in these situations?
Yes, please, someone primary Seth Moulton. So tired of his posturing.
I'm very pro trans rights — I am a classical liberal and believe strongly in everyone's right to free expression, including when it comes to gender expression.
That said, I think your post misses the mark on trans athletes. Women's sports were created because we are a sexually dimorphic species — it was created to honor a biological sex group, not a gender.
By making disingenuous arguments like individuals who take blockers since puberty lack bio sex advantages, but then go on to cite a volley ball player who didn't start taking hormones until their late teens / 20s (long past the start of puberty), really speaks to the mismatch. Whether or not that athlete happens to be standout isn't a relevant factor.
But most importantly to me, your post pretends that any alternative position is bigoted and lacks legitimacy. It presumes that the only correct or appropriate path forward is to reject the fundamental reason that women's sports exist. Women's sports do not exist because of gender or gender expression – they exist because we are a sexually dimorphic species.
And this, in my opinion, is the actual failing of the Democratic Party — the adoption of inflexible positions that they react to any discussion of with derision and condescension.
If Mace doesn't know how women's bathrooms work, where has she been going? Does she prefer men's rooms? Perhaps we should look into that….
I heard on the radio (CBC) that the number of transgirls who want to play in girl's sports is less than one per state. Perhaps we should make sure we say how small the number is, because from what the Republicans are saying, you get the impression that there are millions of them. Maybe it will make the Repubs look silly.
My other question — in response to Moulton's "run over my daughters on a playing field" — is, in middle school, aren't boys still smaller than girls? — Is he picturing some big 18-year-old muscle-man running over his ten-year-old girl? Maybe someone needs to introduce him to reality.
–Kim Cooper