Brooks: The challenge to institutions presented by Trumpism

By David Brooks / The New York Times

I admire Mitt Romney. He is, by all accounts, an outstanding husband and father. He built a successful investment firm by supporting successful young businesses like Staples. He served the public as head of the 2002 Winter Olympics and as a governor. As a senator, he had the courage to vote to convict Donald Trump twice, in the two separate impeachment trials, when few other Republicans did.

But as Noah Millman writes on Substack, people in the MAGA movement take a different view of Romney. In private life, Romney compliantly conformed to the bourgeois norms of those around him. In business, he contributed to the bloating of the finance and consulting sector. As a politician, he bent himself to the needs of the moment, moving from moderate Republican to “extreme conservative.” As a senator, he sought the approval of the Washington establishment.

Millman’s underlying point is it’s not sufficient to say that Trump is leading a band of morally challenged people to power. It’s that Trumpism represents an alternative value system. The people I regard as upright and admirable, MAGA regards as morally disgraceful, and the people I regard as corrupt and selfish, MAGA regards as heroic.

The crucial distinction is that some of us have an institutional mindset, while the MAGA mindset is anti-institutional.

In the former view, we are born into a world of institutions: families, schools, professions, the structures of our government. We are formed by these institutions. People develop good character as they live up to the standards of excellence passed down in their institutions; by displaying the civic virtues required by our Constitution, by living up to what it means to be a good teacher or nurse or, if they are Christians, by imitating the self-emptying love of Christ. Over the course of our lives, we inherit institutions, steward them and try to pass them along in better shape to the next generation. We know our institutions have flaws and need reform, but we regard them as fundamentally legitimate.

MAGA morality is likely to regard people like me as lemmings. We climbed our way up through the meritocracy by shape-shifting ourselves into whatever teachers, bosses and the system wanted us to be. Worse, we serve and preserve systems that are fundamentally corrupt and illegitimate: the financial institutions that created the financial crisis, the health authorities who closed schools during covid, the mainstream media and federal bureaucracy that has led the nation to ruin.

What does heroism look like according to the MAGA morality? It looks like the sort of people whom Trump has picked to be in his Cabinet. The virtuous man in this morality is self-assertive, combative, transgressive and vengeful. He’s not afraid to break the rules and come to his own conclusions. He has contempt for institutions and is happy to be a battering force to bring them down. He is unbothered by elite scorn and, in fact, revels in it and goes out of his way to generate it.

In this mindset, if the establishment regards you as a sleazeball, you must be doing something right. If the legal system indicts you, you must be a virtuous man.

In this morality, the fact that a presidential nominee is accused of sexual assault is a feature, not a bug. It’s a sign that this nominee is a manly man. Manly men go after what they want. They assert themselves and smash propriety; including grabbing women “by the pussy” if they feel like it.

In this worldview, a nominee enshrouded in scandal is more trustworthy than a person who has lived an honest life. The scandal-shrouded nominee is cast out from polite society. He’s not going to run to a New York publisher and write a tell-all memoir bashing the administration in which he served. Such a person is not going to care if he is scorned by the civil servants in the agency he has been hired to dismantle.

The corrupt person owes total fealty to Donald Trump. There is no other realm in which he can achieve power and success except within the MAGA universe. Autocrats have often preferred to surround themselves with corrupt people because such people are easier to control and, if necessary, destroy.

In other words, MAGA represents a fundamental challenge not only to conventional politics but also to conventional morality.

In his own Substack essay, Damon Linker gets to the point: “Trumpism is seeking to advance a revolutionary transvaluation of values by inverting the morality that undergirds both traditional conservatism and liberal institutionalism. In this inversion, norms and rules that counsel and enforce propriety, restraint and deference to institutional authority become vices, while flouting them become virtues.”

I suspect that over the next couple of years, we will see a series of running conflicts between institutionalists and anti-institutionalists; not only a power struggle over the Justice Department, the intelligence agencies, the schools and the institutions of democracy itself but also a values struggle over what sort of person we should admire, what values should govern our society. The battle is on for the hearts and souls of the coming generations.

The anti-institutionalists have advantages. It’s much easier to degrade and destroy than to preserve and reform. We live amid a multidecade crisis of legitimacy, during which strong voices ranging from Oliver Stone’s on the left to Tucker Carlson’s on the right have sent the message that everything is rotten.

But character is destiny. An administration of narcissists will be a snake pit in which strife and self-destructive scandal will snuff out effective action. Running things is hard, and changing things is harder, and it’s rarely done well by solipsistic outsiders.

Those of us in the institutionalist camp will have to learn the lessons taught by George C. Marshall. Marshall, who served as chief of staff of the Army during World War II, was an institutionalist through and through. He was formed by Army manners. The very core of his ethic was this: I will never put my own ambitions above the needs of the Army or the nation.

Yet Marshall was no standpatter. He didn’t respond to threats from outside by clinging fiercely to the status quo. He was a comprehensive reformer. When he was asked to lead the Infantry School at Fort Benning, for example, he revolutionized the curriculum. He sent units out on maneuvers without maps because in real war, you always have insufficient information. He shifted military training toward mechanized warfare and nearly doubled the number of hours of instruction devoted to tactics. He spent his career pushing against the stifling traditionalism that could stultify his institution.

Today, it really is true that the Pentagon is administratively a mess. It really is true the meritocracy needs to be fundamentally rethought. It really is true that Congress is dysfunctional and the immigration system is broken. But positive change will come from people who have developed a loving devotion to those institutions over years of experience, not people who despise them; the modern-day George Marshalls rather than the Pete Hegseths, Tulsi Gabbards and Robert F. Kennedy Jrs.

What kind of person do we want our children to become: reformers who honor their commitments to serve and change the institutions they love or performative arsonists who vow to burn it all down?

This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.