The Factor of Relevancy in Trumpism

John Podhoretz, the intellectual editor of the conservative journal Commentary, tweeted this during Trump's typically deranged convention speech last night:

Before you sneer with completely appropriate contempt, consider one word: "Relevancy." Roll it around in your mind, because it's an underexplored factor in the MAGA phenomenon (and in all authoritarian grabs).

What we're seeing from our pricey ringside view of authoritiarian takeover is not just the usual greed and ambition driving enablers and go-alongs. There's also something more relateable. And this calls for an analogy!

Here's how I replied - or, actually, replied to Tom Nichols' ridicule of Podhoretz:

Twitter doesn't offer space to really drive home my point, which is about relevance. No film critic can remain relevant while calling crap movies crap. So they don't. And that's 1. normal and 2. squirmingly unpleasant for them.

Film critics are nothing like your nephew Josh who hits the multiplex to catch up on developments in the Marvel Universe or to see stuff blow up. Film critics study Bergman and Tarkovsky. They're highbrows, every one of them. But none would last a week if they let their contempt show, because they write mostly for Josh. It's an excruciating gig. Imagine if food critics were compelled to eat mostly in chains, and had to find something non-snotty to say about them, over and over and over again.

If you want to make a living at it, you can't make yourself irrelevant. You must eat the dog food, and like it. And the same is true for principled conservative writers and editors in a movement completely subsumed by Trumpism. They nearly all loathe him, but their choice is binary: play along and remain relevant, or stomp off and disappear forever and let their family starve.

You or I might indignantly demand that they take a goddam stand, even if it costs them their careers and relationships and ability to feed their children. This is because we are disgusting narcissists who see other people as two dimensional cartoons. How about you? How eager would you be to make yourself irrelevant in your world and go find yourself a new career? Let's play a game: Think of something that sucks about your line of work (I'm sure you can come up with something!), then quit, then go find another whole realm. I'll wait!

Real people play along to stay relevant. Democrats do it all the time. How often do you self-edit to avoid clashing with the expanding litany of taboo thought and speech? How hesitant are you to engage on social media with even mildly non-doctrinaire conversation? How clean do you keep your nose to avoid the withering glare of staunch mouthy cohorts, present and future? How much of yourself have you self-smothered to conform to conceits you privately consider daft?

Podhoretz' tweet was a glimmer of truth, encased in a desperate cry for help, masquerading as a snarky rebuke. Any conservative publicly rebuking Trumpism will lose career, context, and relevence. And if that sounds like the sort of brave stand you yourself would heroically take, no. No, you wouldn't. I know human beings, and here's what they do: they fantasize about being stand-up valiant people - and, under the cover of anonymity or while silently daydreaming, they'll be flamboyantly vocal, stockpiling mental evidence of their gnarly heroism. But they won’t put career and social standing at risk to take a stand. People don't do that.

And, worse of all, it's not evil. It's relateable. God help us.