American affair Trump has closed the Republican mind

By Peter Wehner

NEW YORK: Over the past half-century, one of the books that most electrified conservatives was Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind.” Bloom, a political philosopher, warned of the dangers posed by moral relativism and nihilism, of “accepting everything and denying reason’s power.”

The book, published in 1987, sold more than a million copies and spent 10 weeks at the top of the New York Times best-seller list. It argued that the denial of truth and the suppression of reason was leading to a civilisational crisis — and the fault for this lay at the feet of the New Left.

At the time, I worked in the Reagan administration. I was a young speechwriter for William Bennett at the Department of Education, deeply interested in political ideas and the cultivation of intellectual and moral virtue. The state of higher education, which was the focal point of Bloom’s concerns, was of great interest to me. But so was his broader warning about the “relativity of truth,” the loss of moral order, the lack of critical thinking and “spiritual entropy.”

Bloom believed a truly liberal education would help people resist the “worship of vulgar success.” He lamented the failure of universities to put “the permanent questions” of human life and human meaning front and center. Taken together, those were currents of thought that I and other conservatives believed were threats to flourishing lives and a decent, just society. The poet Frederick Turner described “The Closing of the American Mind” as “the most thoughtful conservative analysis of the nation’s cultural sickness.”

Yet today it is the American right that most fully embodies the attitudes that so alarmed Bloom. We see that most clearly in the right’s embrace of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement he represents. Trump is cruel and remorseless, compulsive and vindictive, an accomplished conspiracy theorist. He delights in inflaming hatreds and shattering moral codes.

No other president has been as disdainful of knowledge or as untroubled by his benightedness. No other has been as intentional not just to lie but to annihilate truth. And no other president has explicitly attempted to overturn an election and encouraged an angry mob to march on the Capitol.

With every passing week, the former president’s statements are getting more deranged, more menacing and more authoritarian. Trump has taken to verbally attacking judges and prosecutors in his various criminal trials; mocked last year’s brutal hammer attack against the husband of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House at the time, which left him with a skull fracture; and suggested that the conduct of Mark Milley, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was deserving of execution. While doing this, Trump has expanded his lead over his nearest rival in the race for the 2024 Republican nomination to more than 40 points.

In other words, no matter how much wrongdoing Trump engages in, however outrageous and brutish his conduct, he remains wildly popular. His indecency and sulfuric rhetoric are a plus; his most loyal supporters are galvanized by the criminal charges against him, which they consider political persecution. He is their beau ideal, and he has spawned hundreds of imitators — in the presidential campaign that he is dominating, in Congress, among governors, in state legislatures and in the right-wing ecosystem. The haunting question raised by Bloom is more relevant now than it was when he first posed it: “When there are no shared goals or a vision of the public good, is the social contract any longer possible?”