Mulvaney is an extraordinary hack but for much of the Trump era his supporters really did accept a vast gulf between the president's promises and what actually happened in the real world.
It's interesting to think about what has made the election-fraud narrative different from the Wall, the joke of infrastructure week, the replacement for Obamacare that was always two weeks away ... to say nothing of the QAnon narrative and its constantly-unfulfilled promises.
As @matthewwalther wrote, part of the appeal of the Q story was precisely that it claimed that Trump was secretly winning amazing victories even as his official promises were so often unfulfilled:
theweek.com/articles/91585… Image
Maybe this was all destined to end once Trump left office -- a hard deadline that couldn't be blustered away or taken seriously but not literally. But I think the narrative of secret victory could have adapted even to defeat and exile (indeed, I still expect it to do so).
The difference was that while all his handlers and enablers thought Trump's BS about proving voter fraud was just the latest version of his "wait two weeks for policy X" bluster, Trump himself couldn't let go of it the way he'd let go of other promises and cons.
And somehow Trump's persistence plus the scale of fraud belief plus enablement from GOPers who thought they were still in "wait two weeks" territory created a kind of brain-meld between Q, Trump and a swathe of the right (e.g. @ericmetaxas) that hadn't fully happened before.
In that sense something really did seem different after the election: Not in Trump's character or temperament, but in the extent to which he and many supporters wanted to reify their symbolic narratives, which required first Q-world logic and then, well, what happened in DC.

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More from @DouthatNYT

13 Jan
It can be replicated with mass conversions to a stringent Dutch Calvinism.
As @TPCarney has noted, this is a national pattern:
politico.com/magazine/story… Image
Strong, institutionally-rooted religious subcultures provide some inoculation against the worst Trumpism. Unfortunately we don't have many of them any more.
Read 4 tweets
5 Jan
One response to this strong @mattyglesias take is that it's useful to think of the GOP's current position in terms of 18th-century "country party"/"court party" dynamics, where the key division is all about who rules rather than what is done with power.
slowboring.com/p/unhinged-mod…
This has always been part of the story of movement conservatism, which emerged in response to the growth of of technocracy and in opposition to its rule. But as the ideological sorting of the parties has become a geographic/class sort the dynamic has become more pronounced.
Since the end of the Cold War and the victories of Reaganism, especially the right has been an anti-liberal blocking coalition that's temporarily captured by various policy entrepreneurs -- compassionate cons, neocon hawks, Tea Party, etc.
Read 7 tweets
11 Dec 20
I suppose I think one mistake here is the belief that the American right as currently constituted can out-compete liberalism or the left in a war of competing myths and dreampolitiks and useful fictions:
amgreatness.com/2020/12/10/pla…
The one zone where the right is competitive with liberalism is in hard-power politics, and in power politics the advantage generally goes to the movement/statesman most in touch with actual reality (which is one reason why Joe Biden is the president-elect).
A conservatism that lives by fictions about its own situation can crash the American system (which seems to be what some ppl want) but it cannot govern it. And the hope of actually governing is the only non-nihilistic opportunity the right has in its conflict with progressivism.
Read 4 tweets
2 Dec 20
I would mildly suggest that this @JZmirak piece is missing an acknowledgment that a key temptation losers face is the temptation to tell themselves, "actually, we didn't really lose."
stream.org/why-we-refuse-…
I would argue that conservatism in the United States is deeply afflicted by this temptation, with the voter-fraud fixation only the starkest case.
A conservatism of winners, of the kind @JZmirak calls for, would look at the fact that the right keeps stalling out at 46, 47, 48 percent support and say, "we need to get up to 52 or 53 or 54 percent so that we actually do the things that seem so desperately needful."
Read 7 tweets
23 Nov 20
Going to argue, mildly, with this @streeterryan piece for a moment:
thedispatch.com/p/trumpism-is-…
I said mildly because I completely agree with him that Trumpism is "an anti-leftist, anti-elitist cultural stance" and that most working-class Trump supporters do not have deeply-held views on, say, the details of industrial policy.
However the survey data he cites seems to show two things. First that working-class Trump supporters are not suffering from a deep sense of economic despair: Image
Read 10 tweets
21 Nov 20
Quick Saturday thread on this entertaining Michael Lind exercise in explaining the recent arc of liberalism as the return of the WASPs:
tabletmag.com/sections/news/…
Lind stresses continuities; I would tell a somewhat similar story but stress disjunction more. I think the WASPs really did abolish themselves in the 1960s, and what has returned in social justice is an inheritor but not a resurrection.
You can under the transition from Yankee aristocracy to national meritocracy as mid-century WASPdom deciding that it had to die as a culture so that its institutions - the Ivy League above all - could not only sustain themselves but expand their power.
Read 8 tweets

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