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@RadioFreeTom :  Author, Professor at @NavalWarCollege & @HarvardEXT. Former Senate aide. Cat guy. Curmudgeon. Views my own.

Tom Nichols is a favorite source of mine for thought-provoking ideas. He is a #NeverTrump conservative who brings both government and academic perspectives to public policy. His latest book, The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (2017, Oxford University Press), updates the American meme of anti-intellectualism that traces back to Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963). Nichols posted this thread on Twitter today:

It's not that I disagree about policy with Trump supporters. It's that I know they don't give a shit about policy. There's no way to have a policy argument with people whose eyes are always looking up to the television for a cue from Dear Leader about what to say next. /1

As @JVLast once said, Trumpism is non-falsifiable. Whatever Trump does is right. There are no principled arguments to be had, because if Trump changes his mind or tweets something off the wall, Trumpers change their position immediately. /2

This would basically be a cult except for one thing: most Trumpers do not believe their own bullshit. Yes, some of them really are stupid enough to think Trump is a good man and all that crap, but most of them are only interested in Trump as a vehicle of social disruption. /3

Trump's smarter enablers see him as an equalizer, a way to put them on an equal footing with "elites" - oh, that word - who they think look down on them. Thing is, the elites do look down on them. For good reason. Most of Trump's sycophants are second raters, at best. /4

For them, Trump is their shot. They know he's, um, emotionally disordered, to use @Peter_Wehner's term, but they don't care: this is their one chance to grab the car keys and throw a kegger before Mom and Dad get back home. That makes talking with them about policy impossible. /5

So if it seems like I don't engage Trump's enablers on the merits of this or that Trump policy, it's because I can't take Trump's "policies" any more seriously than Trump or his minions do. It's either pure stupidity or pure careerism, and either way, it's a waste of time. /6

Yes, there are people in government trying to hold everything together. I salute them and hope they can keep the ship afloat. But they can't make policy either. They can issue directives and hope for the best, mostly hoping Trump doesn't notice and overrule them via tweet. /7

I think we'd all be less exhausted if the Trumpers would just admit that what they value from Trump is the social leveling effect he has, forcing intelligent people to respond endlessly to stupid comments and bad ideas, than continue pretending they care about "policy." /8

For myself, I am resigned that Trump will be president for as long as he's president. How it ends is up to the voters. But I don't see the need to engage in the cynical bullshittery of arguing policy with people who will change their minds on anything in nanoseconds. /9

And for the love of God, don't tell me about what Trump's Real 'Muricans in the Heartland want. I know what they want: more government action, including money, delivered with a smile, inflated respect, and pity, earned or not. Those are utterly pointless discussions too. /10

Trump is going to do what Trump is going to do. He's not liberal or conservative. It's all just the blurted thoughts of an angry, frightened man who won an office he didn't really want. We have to get through it, but we don't have to pretend we're arguing about real things. /11x

Nichols emphasizes a theme that I have long-suspected drives the rabid support of die-hard Trump supporters: A sense of grievance, of being victims, that finds release in lashing out recklessly at whatever institutions or persons they perceive as the source of their various discomforts. Some political scientists have foreseen such a trend. In a 2016 piece for Vox.com, Amanda Taub summarized their conclusions:

Authoritarianism — [meaning] not actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders. People who score high in authoritarianism, when they feel threatened, look for strong leaders who promise to take whatever action necessary to protect them from outsiders and prevent the changes they fear.

Authoritarians are thought to express much deeper fears than the rest of the electorate, to seek the imposition of order where they perceive dangerous change, and to desire a strong leader who will defeat those fears with force. They would thus seek a candidate who promised these things. And the extreme nature of authoritarians' fears, and of their desire to challenge threats with force, would lead them toward a candidate whose temperament was totally unlike anything we usually see in American politics — and whose policies went far beyond the acceptable norms.

Do we really need to be reminded that Franklin Roosevelt told us that “the only thing we need to fear is fear itself”?

It seems so, doesn't it?