https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/12/20/three-descriptions-of-our-current-turmoil/#comment-1121407
For context - The post by itself primarily stated -
The Scripts
1. The Authoritarian Turn. The Trump regime represents a sudden shift
into a dangerous authoritarian future. This view is mostly held by
centrists, which I think means most Democratic politicians.
2. More of the same. The Trump regime is the culmination of decades
of slow erosion of democratic society. Trump is accellerating it. This
is a more leftish view.
3. Constitutional Crisis. The Trump regime is just another
constitutional crisis, based on an electoral victory and a challenge to
the existing regime. It’s like the FDR administration creating the New
Deal. This is the view of Trump supporters and conservative
intellectuals.
Trump’s decisive Electoral College victory in 2024, after
a campaign with more sharply defined stakes than in 2016, put a popular
(if not quite majoritarian) imprimatur on such change. Following a
playbook developed during the New Deal and refined in the civil rights
era, Trump’s team is employing all the tools at its disposal to reshape
the balance of power across state and society in line with campaign
pledges to curb illegal immigration, shrink the federal workforce,
restore religion in the public sphere, and advance a “colorblind”
conception of racial equality.
The difference between the Authoritarian Crisis view and the More of
the Same view is continuity. The former suggests that the US was mostly
fine and getting better, but then Trump came along. The latter suggests
that this regime didn’t come out of nowhere, but is an acceleration of a
long process of deterioration. The Constitutional Crisis theory is
based on the idea that for some decades the US has lived under a
‘liberal hegemony”, and the second Trump regime is a counter-revolution
against that hegemony.
The authors generate a list of horribles which justify each script. I
assume we all know the horribles for the first two. The list for the
third is culture war issues, and Republican revanchism.
The MAGA movement wishes to dismantle not just a policy
here or a doctrine there but a whole edifice of laws, norms, and values
that it sees liberals as having imposed through their dogma of “living
constitutionalism” and their sway over regulatory bodies, universities,
foundations, and legacy media organizations. Although a “radical” reform
agenda of such scale may not sound very conservative, nothing less will
suffice, on this view, to overthrow the prevailing forces of
institutional and ideological control.
Actions suggested by scripts
The Authoritarian Crisis view suggests that we need to return to an
earlier era of cooperation and bipartisanship. The main goal is
decentralization of power after a turn to the concentration of power in
the Presidency.
The More of the Same partisans will want a broad array of changes in
the structure of government, and aggressive efforts to attack
oligarchical control, reactionary courts, and right-wing extremists
stuffed into government at all levels.
The Constitutional Regime Change script suggests that liberals and
others who disagree should continue with normal political opposition. If
enough people don’t like Trumpian government they can just vote the
scoundrels out.
[...]
Maybe most of the billionaires snd rank and file Trump supporters
don’t think of themselves as prejudiced in any way. But they supported
the overtly racist, xenophobic, misogynist, homophobic Trump. They
probably like science and technology, but their Senators approved RFK,
Jr., and stood by while he and Elon Musk wrecked governmental research.
There are other factors that reinforce this top-down justification
and support for hate and fear, including inequality of income and
wealth, inflation, and lack of critical thinking. But for many of us
media-inspired fear and hatred make it impossible to see the actual
causes of actual problems.
And that’s how we got here. Too many of us either wanted or ignored
the hatred and justified their votes with the lies about the economy
paid for by billionaires.
It is self contained, as an EmptyWheel thing, but it led me down two paths, both worth mention. which I shall call Diogenes in search of a conservative intellectual, and Clear and present danger.
Diogenes First
Start with the answer, then explain it - Jay Wesley Richards - who per his opening Widipedia paragraph:
Jay Wesley Richards is an American analytical philosopher
who focuses on the intersection of politics, philosophy, and religion.
He is the William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow in Heritage’s DeVos
Center for Religion and Civil Society at The Heritage Foundation.[1] He serves as an adjunct professor in the School of Business at the Catholic University of America[2] and the executive editor of The Stream and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. A former Presbyterian, Richards is now a Catholic.[3]
One of those. Like JD Vance. The link to his epiphany, links here. There is an hour long video where you can see how much you can take, or a short more contained article stating in part:
Jay grew up in a Presbyterian family in Texas. He credits his best friend growing up,
who was Church of Christ, with his knowledge of the Bible. When he went
off to college he experienced a crisis of faith from the challenges he
met in class. The writings of C. S. Lewis and the Holy Spirit brought him
back from the brink. While in seminary at Calvin College, he did a
study of the Calvinist doctrine of limited atonement. This would be the
first crack in the wall of the Calvinist edifice of his theological
system. Years later, he decided to systematically set down a list of the
controversial differences between Catholics and Protestants. To be fair
to the Catholic position, he, for the first time, read about the
Catholic doctrines as written by Catholic authors. This honest and
thorough investigation would lead him home to the holy Catholic Church.
That's the start of it and enough of it. You have the link. Surprisingly, Richards has a Google Scholar page, which intriguingly offered a link where I failed to find the item described as:
In Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism is the Solution and Not the
Problem, Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute Jay W. Richards and
bestselling author of Indivisible: Restoring Faith, Family, and Freedom
Before It's Too Late and Infiltrated: How to Stop the Insiders and
Activists Who Are Exploiting the Financial Crisis to Control Our Lives
and Our Fortunes, defends capitalism within the context of the Christian
faith, revealing how entrepreneurial enterprise, based on hard work,
honesty, and trust, actually fosters creativity and growth. In doing so,
Money, Greed, and God exposes eight myths about capitalism, and
demonstrates that a good Christian can be a good capitalist.
Is more needed? Well, there is more, so here goes, a brief eclectic trip.
I did a search = PhD Thesis of Jay W. Richards, which gave links but none to an actual thesis to read and weigh. There is a Heritage Foundation connection, what else should we expect, with a Catholic Kevin Roberts atop things there, and JD's having connections, best shown by a screen capture:
 |
| Click to enlarge and read "De Vos" |
Yes,
that DeVos thing (which includes rightwing merc Eric Prince and the Amway ponzi fortune).
An IHE bio copyrighted 2025 begins, "Jay W. Richards, Ph.D., is Director of the Richard and Helen DeVos
Center for Life, Religion, and Family, and the William E. Simon Senior
Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute." Paycheck after paycheck, including the IHE (Institute for Human Ecology) at Catholic University.
There is also the Brownstone Institute tie of some sort, out of Austin, TX. Perhaps that's not a position, but an author or speaker link of some sort. An anti-vax how-to semi-screed from a Discovery Institute "Intelligent Design" "wedge" thinker:
Richards was a fellow at the Institute for Faith, Work & Economics and the program director of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture (CSC).[6][7] He was the first fellow at the Discovery Institute to confirm the genuineness of the Wedge document.[8]
Science organizations then paid attention to the institute after the
document was published online, but Richards wrote "that the mission
statement and goals had been posted on the CRSC's website since 1996."[9] Richards has expressed climate change denial.[10][11]
Wedge.
That is my offering of "a conservative intellectual." where his intellectualism can be shown in the quality of this hit piece, (here also - double duty), or in his advocacy and/or utopian musing elsewhere. A man of character. As I've described.
Did I say, Heritage Foundatione? Heartland Institute?
Locally, Minnesota has its "conservative intellectual," Katherine Kersten. A series of posts.
Another link.
Interchangeable, perhaps, although Richards swims many more places than Kersten. In a bigger ocean. More widely traveled.
Clear and present danger
Here things shall be presented tighter. Two links. Both Heritage Foundation. Both presaging a scurvy attack MO against the health and well being of this nation. Here (https://www.heritage.org/health-care-reform), and here (https://www.heritage.org/restoring-american-wellness). Each is presented as if sound policy deliberation, while each will pick your pocked. The second of those Trojan Horse items rings Richards into its grasp.
____________________UPDATE____________ ______
This is necessary. This perniciously misleading astroturfing item
imitates a grassroots concern for a nation's health, but if you check
the personnel at the bottom, ir is entirely a De Vos center production
for Herritage, where Richards is top dog at De Vos center and the De Vos
family and their people are brutally rightwing. It has no author
attribution, directly, but it came from De Vos inside Heritage, and it
is biased that way, despite the happy family frolicking in the outdoors
at the outset:
If
you can read but not understand, "Uustainable" means they - the Project
2025 perps - intend to down fund healthcare spending, for the rest of
us, and are using tactics fit for Nazi propagandists under Goebbels -
who to my mind could have invented Heritage Foundation.
Who the
fuck frolics around with a flag, pride flag or US flag to the breeze --
nobody does. And such joyful postures are fake for the camera and
captioning. The whole item is fake, and Heritage Foundation is real, and
hence far scarier than fake. Richards? Not fake, but real in what he's
doing.
You are the target. Or a target. Truly, he, Richards, is aiming it more at semi-gullible mainstream MAGA - MHGA
susceptible minds, who cannot tell loathsome propaganda from legit
concern for you and yours. If you doubt that, see the Richards authored
thing linked below.
Richards has an agenda, he sells elixirs and fixes. He is hired to do exactly that. And he smilingly takes the paychecks.
And
that is why I find Richards to be the quintessence of "conservative
intellectual." Don't lose sight of the truth, "Conservative
intellectual" is euphemism for callous hired hit man tied to an agenda.
