Amy Wax is one of the most accomplished “intellectuals” in the pro-Trump world. The things she believes are so staggeringly stupid that it’s hard to believe she’s not engaged in performance art.
The entire interview is worth reading. It’s stunning to me that someone so incoherent could get tenure at Penn law school.
I can't resist sharing a personal anecdote re. racists and littering. In 1995-ish I was hanging out in a bar in Chicago with some friends and we somehow ended up in a conversation with a very rich, entitled white dude in his 20s who'd traveled the world.
He kept talking about how "dirty" and "uncivilized" countries in Asia and Africa were. We asked him "what do you mean by that? What's your evidence?" And then he went on a rant about littering. "There's just trash everywhere. It's not like America at all. It's disgusting."
We then asked him if he'd ever set foot inside a fraternity house at one of America's elite colleges on a Sunday morning, or walked through a park the day after July 4. He defensively said "But it's different in India." "Why?" we asked. "IT'S THE SAUCES!!!," he said.
At which point he stood up and marched away from us, never to return. Needless to say the phrase "IT'S THE SAUCES!!!" is a phrase that had a long afterlife amongst the folks I was with at that bar.
Reading that Amy Wax interview immediately reminded me of the "IT'S THE SAUCES!!!" guy. Time passes...and yet so many things just stay the same, or get worse.
This Amy Wax person is on our national radar because she participated in the National Conservatism conference that is the closest thing there has been to an intellectual justification of Trumpism. Here's a great podcast conversation about that conference. player.fm/series/know-yo…
Laugh as we might at how foolish these folks seem, the ideas circulating in the world of Trumpist intellectuals are worth paying attention to. They resonate powerfully with MAGA voters and they are quite radical.
The only elected politician who spoke at that National Conservatism conference with Amy Wax was Josh Hawley. If he is the future of the GOP (as many predict) and if the GOP has a future in American politics, then this is cause for concern.
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