Since coming off Twitter I’ve had a little more time on my hands. I’d never listened to Ezra Klein’s podcast, but the title of a recent one, ‘Is Trump Losing?’ intrigued me so I gave it try. To discuss the topic Ezra had on two familiar characters: Andrew Marantz, who writes about right wing extremism and lib cultural fixations for the New Yorker, and Zach Beauchamp from Vox, who ‘covers challenges to democracy in the United States and abroad’ and ‘right wing populism.’

The podcast was weird. I don’t know if all lib media is like this, but it felt more like a social competition than anything else, the objective being to come off as the most ‘knowing’ about Trump’s ‘authoritarianism.’ (I’m not sure what to attribute this dynamic to. Is it a tendency of the over socialized just to default to socially competitive behavior? Is perpetual competition now the norm for anyone trying to stay afloat in the collapsing media industry? Did the libs not realize that narrowing the Overton window would create redundancy and over competition? [Elite overproduction can also be engineered on the demand side by narrowing the scope of what is allowed on the market.] So many questions.)

On a superficial level, Klein’s pod was predictable. Lots of references to Orbán and Bukele (I'm convinced a major reason ‘right wing extremism experts’ are so interested in those places is that Central America and Eastern Europe are both great places to travel to - I can see it: ‘For my book I need to spend major time on the ground in Budapest - we need to budget that in!’) and lots of rehashing the political spectacles the Trump administration has engineered the past few months.

What was actually surprising and interesting in turn was just how discombobulated Klein et al. seemed to be on a meta level. Underlying the question of ‘Is Trump losing?’ is the question of ‘What does Trump want?’ and Trump and MAGA are somehow still inscrutable to libs. Libs have made a number of mistakes in trying to understand Trump: they spent years on the hysterical ‘Russia collusion’ fever dream (which Klein participated in and from which he is now trying to airbrush himself out of), it turns out that spending years having ‘experts’ in academia and the media register disapproval by naming the Bad People as Bad isn’t a particularly productive endeavor, and all the cartoonish depictions of stupid and ugly populists engineered by the media to flatter their lib audience were of low informational value (who could have guessed?).

But these missteps aside, there’s an even more fundamental confusion at work, one which has underlied much of the ideological chaos of the past decade and that I sensed from Klein et al. a glimmer of recognition of. The truth is that Trump (whatever you think of him) and MAGA are not conservatives. Libs (at least since Obama) are the true conservative political entity in American society. It’s the libs who inherited control of elite legacy institutions including academia, corporate media, key federal agencies, nat sec, and prestige NGOs. It’s libs who were tasked with managing the ideological dispensations formed by WWII, the civil rights movement, and the Cold War and ensuring their continued authority and legitimacy in ideological production well after their shelf life had expired. It’s libs who are fed by a million ‘rice bowls’ tied to the current institutional order. It’s libs who produce Potemkin village political spectacles to excite and gain favor from affluent Boomers. It’s libs who engineered a repressive, authoritarian mis/ disinformation ideological surveillance apparatus that brought together academia, the media, tech, nat sec, and NGOs in service of enforcing institutional authority amidst the threats posed by technological succession. It’s libs who engineered successive moral manias and hysterias that served as justification for granting the institutions exapansive new emergency powers. And so on and so forth.

And so what then to make of ‘progressivism’? A lot of people see it simply as a scam, a fake and cynical self-critique engineered by the institutions that not coincidentally has resulted in extraordinary self-enrichment. Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn have described the emergence of a lib NGO analogue to the arms industry, another path back into the money (‘count’) room in the film Casino, which in this case is the federal (imperial) treasury with its inexhaustible supply of fiat currency. The Trump administration certainly sees things on these terms: it has made an extraordinary effort with executive powers - from DOGE, to going after universities, to collapsing US AID and the Dept of Ed, to Harmeet Dhillon ending police consent decrees - to destroy the shadow economy that undergirds progressive politics and related patronage networks.

And so that brings us to our current political moment. We now have a ‘right’ of true iconoclasts who have a litany of legitimate grievances and who want to dismantle institutions. This isn’t the lib theater kid stuff of throwing statues in the river or taking down portraits of ‘dead white guys’ or even ‘globalizing the intifada.’ It’s real. They want to raze institutions.

And we have a ‘left’ with conservative institutional interests who out of self regard, narcissism, incompetence, self entitlement, or some other factors which I still can’t comprehend have failed on the most basic terms to recognize and assume the responsibilities with which they have been tasked.

This all to say that it’s a very interesting time. How far will the right will go in its attacks on the institutions and what does it want to build in their place? How will the libs and the institutions respond and defend themselves?

On Twitter I was very lucky to have a number of conversations about the collapse of institutional authority (Epilogue) and what comes next (Prologue) with some very smart and interesting people, although thinking aloud became more and more difficult the larger my account became. On this Substack titled, ‘Epilogue/ Prologue,’ I’m seeking both to continue these conversations about what comes next and revisit some of the debacles and derangements that have shaped our current moment for which there are already revisionist efforts to reframe (‘Ackshually we were skeptical of COVID origins,’ ‘Ackshually, we were concerned that Biden didn’t look too good,’ ‘Ackshually, ackshually, ackshually,’ etc.). I’m hoping that this endeavor will be interesting to a few people, I’ll do my best not to poast slop, and I’ll try to make it worth your while to spend 5 or 10 minutes of your attention here a few times a month.