Drezner explains why his harshest criticism of the Trump administration targets the “normie” Republicans—of whom he was once one—rather than the obvious buffoons: the people who know better and enable Trump anyway are more contemptible than those who never had principles to betray. In his view, contempt should be allotted in proportion to culpability, not incompetence. The intelligent enablers who understand exactly what they’re empowering — and choose it for power and status — deserve more scorn than manifestly unqualified and honorless clowns from whom nothing could ever have been expected.
There is, somewhere in the branching manifold of possible worlds, a nearby timeline in which Dan Drezner is one of them: a card-carrying, ticket-punching, chin-stroking establishment Republican, writing measured essays about the liberal international order, and referring to the likes of Paul Krugman and me as “intelligent, but overwrought, unbalanced, and, well, shrill.” In that timeline the Drezner tut-tuts at the overexcited. He counsels patience. He is very sound.
We do not live in that timeline. God, I wish we did!
Drezner has documented and continues to document, with the patience of a Jobite naturalist cataloguing a new and horrible phylum, the American foreign policy establishment run by — I quote his field notes — “the dumbest motherfuckers alive.” I am impressed.
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Daniel Drezner R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.
Today, Drezner has these key ideas:
**A typology of complicity:**Drezner sorts Trump’s orbit into MAGA faithful, “Stormtroopers” (petty government thugs), Trump emulators, and normie Republicans — escalating by how much theyshouldknow better.**Stormtroopers are endemic, not novel:**abuse of surveillance power by career officials spans administrations (theWiredCBP story covers 2009–2022), so Trump aggravates but did not invent it.**Normalization of scandal:**Trump has made misogyny and extremism a “dog-bites-man” story, letting candidates with disqualifying scandals (Miller, Herrera) survive where earlier norms would have forced them out.**The pivotal enablers act on choice, not necessity:**figures like Mike Johnson and Bill Cassidy “have a choice” and keep choosing to empower the party’s worst elements — believing they’ve only “rented” their souls temporarily.G. Elliott Morris’s finding: subgroups retaining “Republican” identity stay Republican in the generic ballot by 37+ points despite disapproving of Trump, while subgroups without that identity defect to Democrats by 30+ points.
But the most effective mode for this type of discourse is, in its most classic form, that of the Ancient & Hermetic Order of the Shrill located in Arkham, Massachusetts:
<https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/29/looking-back-with-shrillness/>
<https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/categories-of-contempt> <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/>
The hard-working readers here at Drezner’s World have probably noticed that in my commentary about the Trump administration, a disproportionate share of my ire is targeted towards those who are perceived as the more “normie” Republicans: folks like Scott Bessent or Elbridge Colby or Marco Rubio. One can ask: why not aim more at someone who is manifestly unqualified for their job — someone like, say, Pete Hegseth?
I have a short answer and a long answer. to this question.
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The short answer is simple: it is more troubling to see folks with some degree of acumen willingly ben the knee to Trump’s whims just to have some measure of power and status. Pete Hegseth is a malevolent, buffoonish clown; I expect absolutely nothing from him and am therefore unsurprised that he’s acting like a clown who is spectacularly out of his depth. Once that recognition is made, there is really little point to making it again.
The likes of Rubio, on the other hand, are rather different. He is clearly intelligent enough to know what (and who) he is enabling and does it anyway. To the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World, that is the more contemptuous behavior, and therefore merits more comment and derision.
The longer answer, however, is that Trump’s myriad transgressions require an entirely new typology of contemptible individuals — and it is sometimes difficult to keep track of all the different subcultures of sycophancy.
For example, what should I make of the MAGA faithful, the likes of Tucker Carlson or Steve Bannon or Marjorie Taylor Greene or Nancy Mace, folks who actually believed the MAGA bullshit that Trump and his team have spewed out over the past decade? They’re all genuine bigots, which is certainly contemptible. At the same time, they also genuinely believe in at least some of the foreign policy ideas that Trump embraced over a decade ago. I can’t get exercised by them all too much — mostly because, in the end, I think they’re a marginalized group with minimal political power.
Then there are **the Stormtroopers **— the folks working in the federal government who have enthusiastically embraced what Trump is selling. You know these are the weak-minded guys who Obi-Wan handles in this scene:1
There have been a raft of recent stories about the degree to which low-level thugs have taken advantage of their government positions to revel in their ability to bully and surveil citizens. For example, Wired’s Yulia Almazova recently reported on what U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers have been doing on their computers: “In one case, a CBP officer allegedly used government databases to contact a flight attendant. In another, an officer was accused of pulling information from trusted-traveler applications to ask people out. Other CBP employees were accused of providing border-crossing data to someone involved in a ‘heated divorce.’”
Another example is DHS more generally. In the wake of organized resistance to their Minneapolis incursion, DHS decided to investigate progressive organizations. According to the New York Times’ Alan Feuer and Ernesto Londoño:
Homeland security officials used an array of invasive tactics during the first half of this year to gather information on many groups and individuals who were never accused of crimes, crossing the line that has traditionally stood between investigating criminal activity and political dissent.
In one instance, officials used administrative subpoenas to obtain more than
[three years of financial records]from the Sunrise Movement, an environmental action group, and a labor union, the Communications Workers of America. That time frame went well beyond the civil unrest in Minnesota, which was prompted by the deployment of thousands of immigration agents to the state during the winter.In another, investigators scrutinized
[three years’ worth of wire transfers]made by the nation’s biggest health care workers union, the Service Employees International Union, in what they referred to as an inquiry into “domestic terrorist financing”…
All of this is pretty vile, and the folks doing it at DHS appear not to care about how vile it is.
And yet, it is also worth noting that abuses of government power by career employees span most administrations. That *Wired *story, for example, examined CBP actions from 2009 to 2022. Stormtroopers are an endemic problem. Clearly, the Trump administration is not helping, but this is not a new phenomenon.
Then there are** the Trump emulators**, the aspiring politicians who see Donald Trump as their political lodestar and think that behaving like him, they will acquire power. The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg wrote an excellent column about the likes of U.S. Representatives Max Miller and Cory Mills, Republican House candidate Brandon Herrera, and other kindred spirits. As Goldberg notes, “Thanks to President Trump, misogyny and extremism among Republicans have become what journalists sometimes call a dog-bites-man story, something so ordinary and predictable that it breaks through only when it reaches an absurdly high threshold.” It is actually worse than that — in Miller’s case, the Trump White House overtly intervened to tell Republicans to back off their criticisms of Miller.
These folks are infuriating, and a sign of how Trump has normalized the idea of GOP candidates running despite serious scandals that would have forced a previous generation of candidates to drop out.
And yet, to the hardworking staff here at Drezner’s World, the group that is even more infuriating are **the allegedly normie Republicans. **These are the folks who have held their noses and continued to vote Republican despite all of… this… for the past ten years.
For example, Brandon Herrera has made remarks that are clearly sexist and 𝕏anti-Semitic. Despite all of this, House Speaker Mike Johnson is attending Herrera fundraisers. And as Goldberg notes in her column, “I haven’t seen much public hand-wringing about the decision of the pious Johnson to raise money for Herrera, nor debate about what his candidacy means for the Republican Party’s attitude toward women, Jews or seniors.”
Or consider this paragraph from Politico about GOP thinking regarding Max Miller: “Some Republicans argue they have no choice but to close ranks around a candidate accused by his former father-in-law, Ohio GOP Sen. Bernie Moreno, of being unfit to serve and needing psychological help; Ohio’s other Republican senator, Jon Husted, has also said Miller should resign and not run for reelection. Miller has remained defiant amid the calls to resign.” My point is that * they absolutely have a choice*.
Furthermore, they keep making their choice in a way that empowers the worst elements of their party. G. Elliott Morris recently explored the gap between Trump’s high disapproval polling and the Democrats smaller margin in the generic congressional ballot. His conclusion: “Voters who pulled the lever for Trump in ‘24 and call themselves Republicans but not conservatives stay Republican…. The pattern is hard to miss. The subgroups that keep “Republican” in their identity stay Republican by 37 points or more in the generic ballot even while disapproving of the man leading their party, — while both subgroups without it defect to the Democrats by a margin of 30-plus points. Party identity is doing a lot of work, even among Trump voters.”
Here’s a helpful chart:
It’s this group that, in the end, are the pivotal Trump enablers. Senators like Chuck Grassley or, even better Bill Cassidy.
When I see someone like Brandon Herrera or Max Miller pop up in the news, it does not take long to conclude that there’s no point condemning someone who has already lost their soul. Mike Johnson and Bill Cassidy, however, likely think that they have only rented theirss temporarily.
These are the folks for whom calumny has been sparser — but dear God do they deserve it.
<https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/categories-of-contempt> <https://danieldrezner.substack.com/>
- Brad DeLong here*: Drezner’s argument runs:
buffoons like Hegseth act badly but predictably,
so condemning them yields diminishing returns;
capable actors like Rubio possess the acumen to recognize what they’re enabling,
making their compliance a willful moral choice rather than a limitation;
therefore the marginal moral outrage should flow toward those with agency who choose complicity;
the pivotal such group is the “normie” Republican voters and senators whose durable partisan identity — not approval of Trump — keeps the coalition electorally viable.
The causal punchline: party identity, not enthusiasm, supplies Trump his governing majorities, so the quiet enablers are the true load-bearing structure. This is the core vibe of Dan’s current position.
When I see someone like Brandon Herrera or Max Miller pop up in the news, it does not take long to conclude that there’s no point condemning someone who has already lost their soul. Mike Johnson and Bill Cassidy, however, likely think that they have only rented theirs temporarily.
I do recall 24 years ago when the George W. Bush administration took office and promptly began to dismantle as much of successful Clinton-era policies as it could: policies aimed at keeping a prosperous and peaceful post-Cold War multilateral world, policies aimed at boosting economic growth, policies aimed at stabilizing federal finances, policies aimed at rolling back the rise in income and wealth inequality. They were remarkably successful at doing so, I must say. And those who we Rubin Democrats had thought were our allies in sensible neoliberalism were—whatever were their private misgivings under Chatham House rules— publicly cheering them on or at least immediately moving to distract from policy substance by expressing their shame at how the democrats had chosen a standard bearer bill. Clinton who had a huge problem with his zipper. (Yes, I am looking at you, Alan Greenspan, Glenn Hubbard, Colin Powell, and company: look in the mirror, if you dare.)
