MAGA's Downward Moral Spiral

The old conservatism is dead, and we don't really know how to get along without it

Despite the mass exodus of left-leaning professors from Twitter/X over the past two weeks—a subject I may write about in a future post—last week I had my most “successful” tweet in more than twelve years on the platform. As of Sunday morning, when I took the screenshot above, the tweet had been seen roughly 7.9 million times and liked 87,000 times.

The tweet has also provoked more than six thousand comments, a good number of them from MAGA-type Trump supporters. The point of my tweet was to mock the efforts of the Trump-supporting right to use photographs like the one I was commenting on to portray the president-elect’s nomination of Fox & Friends co-host Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense as some kind of triumph of wholesome masculinity and family-focused fertility.

Hegseth is 44 years old. He’s been married three times. He was unfaithful to his first two wives. Three of his seven children were born from his second wife. Another of the children was born of his third wife, whom he impregnated while he was still married to his second wife. The other three children come from his third wife’s previous marriage.

This isn’t the kind of thing I normally comment on—and the tweet certainly wouldn’t warrant a Substack post were it not for those thousands of MAGA responses. Over and over again they make the identical, sarcastic point, which I can summarize as follows: Oh, you guys care about morals now? That's just shocking.

If you’ve spent even ten minutes on social media arguing about politics with Republicans over the past eight years, you’re undoubtedly familiar with the move, which has become ubiquitous on the right since Donald “Grab ‘em by the Pussy” Trump first won the presidency: You say X behavior by a Republican is bad, but what about when a Democrat did X and you didn’t care? That makes you a hypocrite who lacks any standing to judge Republicans harshly.

If that were all and it were followed by the MAGA throngs combining their harsh judgment of past Democratic behavior with the consistent application of high standards to members of both parties, that would be one thing. But that’s almost never what happens. Instead, the MAGA types end up making a different and far more morally corrosive analytical move, implying that Democratic hypocrisy gives Republicans permission to disregard moral standards altogether: Democrats failed to judge bad behavior by their own officeholders harshly, therefore anything our officeholders do is fine and maybe even good, if only because rubbing it in the faces of our ideological enemies makes them squirm. And that’s all that really matters.

Requiem for American Conservatism