NOTHING TO OFFER BUT HATREDS:
Pareto Punishment: The Trump movement in its death throes. (Kevin D. Williamson, 12/15/25, The Dispatch)
Some political disputes are impossible to resolve because they involve fundamental principles—and, in some cases, fundamentally American principles: The fight over abortion, for example, pits one libertarian argument (for women’s individual bodily autonomy) against another libertarian argument (for the bodily autonomy of the unborn), at the root of which is a disagreement over a question of fact (whether there is a second individual with rights to consider). Some disputes are difficult but not impossible to resolve because they involve good-faith disagreements over preferences and priorities: Americans who are more risk averse tend to prefer a larger and more expensive welfare state and are willing to trade some quality and innovation in medical care in exchange for more certainty about prices and access to care, whereas Americans who are less risk averse are more open to approaches based on market operations, competition, and consumer choice. There is not really a correct or incorrect level of risk aversion, objectively speaking: We have different preferences based on our own situations, our own experiences, and our own temperaments. And that is precisely the kind of situation in which it is possible to come up with solutions based on, or at least adjacent to, that Pareto concept: When something is very important to the other side and not very important to you, that is the place to give in—and when something is very important to you but not very important to the other side, that is an opportunity for getting your own way.
But when political failure—or political treachery—is defined as cooperating with the other side or by giving the other side anything of importance to its partisans, then there is no room for compromise or consensus-building. At this political moment, Republicans are particularly perverse: If a Republican leader manages to win some Democratic support for a Republican proposal, this is taken by the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world as an indictment rather than as evidence of basic political skill on the simpleton’s theory that if the Democrats are for it, then it must be bad. Greene may be trying to rehabilitate her reputation lately, but that remains her fundamental orientation.
I have a sense, admittedly based on nothing more than subjective evaluation, that the Trump movement already is over, and that what we are seeing today is only its death twitches before rigor mortis starts setting in. A movement based on entirely negative deliverables—Épater la bourgeoisie!—is naturally going to be a short-lived thing. If my sense is correct, then this is a ripe moment—if anybody has the wit to make something of it. Doing that starts with looking across the table and starting the conversation: “Okay, then—what do you want?”