‘The Strange Death of Make America Great Again’

Matthew Walther, in an opinion piece last week for The New York Times (gift link):

MAGA’s internal culture has always rewarded theatrical
confrontation over achievement. Boorishness commands attention,
and boors mistake attention for leverage. Pseudo-martyrdom becomes
an end in itself. Loyalty tests proliferate. Those who counsel
de-escalation find themselves subject to denunciation; prudential
disagreement is allowed to provide cover for rank bigotry.
Partisans celebrate one another for exacerbating tensions even
when exacerbation forecloses coalition building.

There is also a related problem: The Trumpist movement has
generated a lunatic array of semiautonomous online subcultures
that are largely indifferent to strategic considerations and
immune from political consequences while still exercising
influence over actors whose decisions are not so immune. The
disappearance of the informal gate-keeping function once performed
by conservative luminaries such as William F. Buckley Jr. is
probably permanent. In the absence of such authority, informed
argument exists alongside phony outrage, profiteering,
self-aggrandizement and saying things for the hell of it. The
result is not merely the radicalization that Mr. Buckley feared
but a kind of omnidirectional incoherence.