GÖPperdämmerung*

*Sure, others may give you the same old pun, such as the genial Doctor Cleveland, but will they throw in the essential umlauts? WILL THEY BOGROLL, as Smut would say.

Betty Amann in Gustav Fröhlich's Asphalt (1929). Via Fritzi.

What David Brooks meant to say ("The Post-Trump Era", New York Times, March 25 2016):

This is a thrilling moment to be a conservative!

For an entire generation, the Republican party has vegetated, stuck with the sclerotic ideology of Reaganism, which used to be conservative back in the day but is now liberal. Reaganism was based on the idea that voodoo economics, by creating more wealth for the wealthy than the wealthy could comfortably accommodate, would force them to let some of it out, and the resulting trickle would turn into a mighty tide upon which the dinghies of the lowly would float as high as the yachts of the great, but that's not true any more, though of course it was in the 1980s.

What happened? How did Morning in America turn into the Twilight of the GOP? When did the Lifting of the Boats become the Disintegration of the Drydock? How did these fresh and cheery metaphors turn anxious and bitter?

My own economic research indicates it must have been technological change, globalization, and the breakdown of family and community that turned off those leaky taps and shut the trickle down. And yet Republicans, unlike me, continued to speak, think, and breathe in Reaganish, asking Reaganish questions, offering Reaganish replies, jerking with a Reaganish reflex whenever you tapped them with that little hammer.

And then came Trump, an angel of creative destruction, and you can't get much more conservative than that concept, even though the man is even more liberal than Reagan, with his rejection of Reaganish policy foreign (he is more isolationist) and domestic (he is less anti-government).

Trumpism will not, however, replace Reaganism as the party's line. Trump himself is not to be regarded as a person in the conversation, but a phenomenon the conversation is about. Just as the moons of Jupiter or the finches of Galápagos forced the scientists of their time to rethink their most cherished premises and shift to a new paradigm, as Thomas Kuhn famously argued in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1964), so does the Trump exploding on our horizon compel us to reexamine our ideas of what conservatism is.

For according to Kuhn, scientific progress is not steady and gradual but jolted from time to time by sudden paradigm shifts. You'll be happily tooling along for long periods of normal science when everything seems to be working and then, in a time of model drift, anomalies start to get noticed and the model starts to seem less spiffy and efficient, and finally it collapses and everybody piles out to watch it blow up, stranded in some southwestern desert and about to run out of water.

That's where the Republican party is now, on a lonely highway, anguished and agitated in mutual recriminations ("I told you to turn left on the road out of Needles!"), uncertain how to proceed. They say they are depressed about Trump, but they are depressed because they are passive and psychologically defeated and their conscious and unconscious mental frameworks have stopped working.

At this point in science, however, somebody is sure to drive by in a bright new paradigm and invite everybody in ("Here, have some relativity!"), which is what Kuhn refers to as a scientific revolution, and much the same thing is bound to happen to the Republicans after Trump loses, or wins and is the worst president in history. We'll have an ideological revolution, and it'll be great!

In this way what we ought to be thinking about now isn't what we should be doing in November, whether or not to grit our teeth and vote for Hillary, but what we should be doing in January, when our new paradigm rides into town. We need to think like a cargo cult, preparing ourselves for the bounty that will arrive with the shift.

First, we should undergo a mental purge, casting aside our old presuppositions and outworn cognitive categories and transforming our fixed mind-sets into an openness to anything. Then, we should get out of the think tank and embed ourselves, like journalists with the troops in Iraq, in the hostile but exotically beautiful territory to the west of the Potomac, where eager political scientists will find a polis ripe to be studied, including colorful Trump supporters, immigrants, and African-Americans!

This is a moment for honesty, because Trump has exposed the rottenness of the consultant culture.

This is a moment for revived American nationalism, because the only way to stop a bad man with a nationalism is a good man with a nationalism.

This is also a moment for redefined compassion, because Trump is loveless, ugly, freakish, and untenable. The novel concept of a compassionate conservatism is bound to be a winner. What's that about the 2000 campaign? When was that?

This is also a moment for sociology. We've had too much economics. Time for conservatives to buy into Émile Durkheim futures. Just wait! The new conservatism is going to be so shiny and speedy and revolutionary, those leftists will be grinding their teeth in despair. 

Screenshot of the opening grafs. Just so you know that I'm not making any of this up, just heightening the chiaroscuro. Also note that "extend" in the last sentence as evidence of the copy editor's growing suicidal anomie, or catatonia as the case may be.

Update: Steve M says Brooksy shouldn't be getting too excited. The GOP will come through this crisis—pretty much the same stupid party it's been for years.