I really hate to link to something by Andrew Sullivan. I'm aware of
his issues ('94...), he's the type of commentator I just read privately for the sake of not having an echo chamber and to roll my eyes or nod at 40% of the time. He's been annoying me half of the time. But today's post hit me hard.
It’s been over a decade now since Grendel emerged from the forest and the metaphors are understandably tired. But a sentence in a recent Mark Helprin piece jogged my amygdala nonetheless. He described the president as someone who “behaves like a wild boar crashing through a field of well-tended crops. (Look carefully at the eyes, and you see it.)”
Yes, you do. Helprin is as far from being a leftist as one might imagine — which, of course, is precisely why he sees the feral glint in Trump’s eyes the way he does. Conservatism is prudent, diligent care for the inheritance of the past, and the shepherding of constitutional democratic governance away from the shoals of dysfunction and ideology.
In that sense, Trump is conservatism’s actual nemesis: a wild boar — psychologically incapable of understanding anything but dominance and revenge, with no knowledge of history, crashing obliviously and malevolently through the ruined landscape of our constitutional democracy.
This very Greek tragedy — conservatives killing the Constitution they love because they hate the left more — is made more poignant by Trump’s utter cluelessness: he doesn’t even intend to end the American experiment in self-government and individual freedom. He isn’t that sophisticated. He is ending it simply because he knows no other way of being a human being. He cannot tolerate any system where he does not have total control. Character counts, as conservatives once insisted, and a man with Trump’s psyche, when combined with his demagogic genius, is quite simply incompatible with liberal democratic society. Unfit.
[... blah blah, a lot of recap on the last 8 months and Sullivan's hateboner for Biden, more notable snippets under the cut]
( Read more... ) When a disaffected conservative who loves Reagan and Thatcher is in the right (no pun intended), that's really when you need to reconsider who the fuck we elected. (I disagree with the successor part, but whatever. Trump is in awful shape, I don't think MAGA will live after he dies.)
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scans_daily2025-08-10 04:19 pm
