There’s a certain nausea in watching a nation re-enact its own moral autopsy and call it performance art. You scroll through Politico’s leak of the “Young Republicans” group chat, where grown men with government titles type “I love Hitler” like it’s an inside joke at a frat mixer, and then you flip to The Atlantic’s piece tracing the rot line all the way to the top. Somewhere between the swastika-styled flag in a congressional office and the vice president’s shrug that these are “kids being kids,” you realize the culture of cruelty isn’t a glitch in the MAGA machine—it’s the operating system.
In the age of Trump’s permission structure, transgression has become a sport. Elon Musk performs Nazi salutes for an audience of investors, Tucker Carlson flirts with Holocaust denial for ratings, and Stephen Miller hovers in the background threatening whoever still believes in adjectives like “decent.” The message is clear: depravity is patriotic now, as long as you drape it in red, white, and grievance. What once got you expelled from polite society now gets you booked on Newsmax and invited to CPAC.
The New Normal Is the Old Disease
This isn’t moral confusion. It’s moral inversion. MAGA culture didn’t lose its compass—it smashed it and called that freedom. Packer’s essay threads the proof together: a movement that once pretended to defend “traditional values” now mocks every boundary that held civilization in place. Decency has become optional, empathy performative, cruelty aspirational.
What’s left is a carnival of nihilism. The group chat, full of staffers and aides who write policy and sign press releases, reads like a digital Nuremberg dress rehearsal. They joke about gas chambers, call slavery a “good business model,” and swap racial slurs like Pokémon cards. These aren’t anonymous trolls—they’re future chiefs of staff, speechwriters, and communications directors. When caught, their elders don’t condemn them; they defend them. “They’re just young people making jokes,” says Vice President J.D. Vance, the man who once wrote about moral decay in Hillbilly Elegy and now sells it wholesale.
From Outrage to Aesthetic
This is the logical endpoint of treating politics as entertainment. If the point is not governing but owning the libs, then anything that shocks is virtue. Outrage becomes aesthetic. “I love Hitler” is not a belief; it’s a performance meant to elicit liberal tears and likes from the algorithm. The cruelty isn’t incidental—it’s the applause line.
Elon Musk knows this. So does Tucker Carlson. So does every elected official who smiles through the chant “Hang Mike Pence” and calls it “spirited enthusiasm.” They’ve built a marketplace where moral bankruptcy is the brand, and empathy the enemy of engagement. The crowd doesn’t want ideas; it wants adrenaline. The leader doesn’t need followers; he needs reactors.
The Permission Slip from the Top
Donald Trump didn’t invent this climate, but he perfected it. He turned politics into professional trolling, where every insult is a love song to the base and every norm violated is proof of authenticity. The more grotesque the act, the more loyal the tribe becomes. Trump’s genius—if nihilism counts as genius—was understanding that shame was the final guardrail, and once he dismantled it, there’d be no speed limit left.
Now, the entire ecosystem runs on that fuel. The young operatives learn early: decency doesn’t get you promoted, audacity does. They watch their elders rewarded for cruelty and mimic it like interns taking notes. The party elders call it “energy.” The donors call it “momentum.” The rest of us recognize it as rot.
Antihuman Relativism
Packer calls it “antihuman relativism,” the descent from partisanship into moral vacuum. It’s a world where nothing is bad unless your opponent does it, where truth is whatever flatters your side, where empathy is weakness, and bigotry is proof of loyalty. You don’t have to burn books anymore; you just need to drown them in irony.
The danger isn’t the jokes—it’s the erosion they normalize. When “I love Hitler” becomes a punchline, the punchline becomes policy. The group chat becomes the focus group, the focus group becomes the platform, and before long, someone’s campaign slogan is indistinguishable from hate speech.
The Feedback Loop of Cruelty
The right’s media and money systems now reward degradation. Say something monstrous, get booked on podcasts. Double down, raise a million dollars. Offer a weak apology, get called a martyr for free speech. Each cycle feeds the next until cruelty isn’t a scandal, it’s a credential.
Meanwhile, the so-called adults in the room have mastered the art of disassociation. They don’t condone it, they just “disapprove of the tone.” They don’t laugh, they just “refuse to take it literally.” This is how decency dies—not with a coup but with plausible deniability.
The Collapse of Shared Reality
America’s original sin wasn’t hypocrisy; it was exceptionalism. We thought our democracy was immune to the corrosion that consumed others. But the same forces that drove fascism in 1930s Europe—humiliation, grievance, tribal identity, charismatic cruelty—are now household values in our politics. The slogans have changed, the uniforms swapped for polos and MAGA hats, but the psychology is ancient.
The collapse of a shared moral vocabulary doesn’t happen overnight. It happens tweet by tweet, joke by joke, rationalization by rationalization. The Young Republicans chat isn’t an anomaly—it’s a mirror. When a vice president waves it away as “stupid humor,” he’s really saying the quiet part aloud: morality is now negotiable, and the negotiation rate is set by how many followers you have.
When Decency Becomes Corny
Packer’s final argument is that opposition must recover universal civic values—not nostalgia, but survival instinct. Yet the obstacle isn’t ignorance; it’s irony. In MAGA America, decency is corny, kindness is cringe, and civic virtue is for losers. The algorithm punishes sincerity and rewards spectacle. The question isn’t whether people know right from wrong—it’s whether they think right still matters.
We used to teach children that words have weight. Now the adults in power teach that words have leverage. Every slur, every “joke,” every meme is currency in the attention economy. The moral floor didn’t just collapse; it was sold for ad revenue.
The Price of Admission
You can trace this descent through the workplace too. A journalist questions the line, and suddenly their editor wonders if they’re “too political.” A university tries to discipline a student official who jokes about genocide, and donors threaten to pull funding. The rot travels upward because it’s profitable.
This is the part no one wants to say aloud: our institutions are not neutral. When employers keep extremists on payroll, when party committees pay salaries to men who trade in hate, they’re not bystanders—they’re accomplices. Every paycheck is a pipeline from cruelty to policy.
The Return of the Unthinkable
Every generation swears it won’t repeat history, but history is patient. It waits for the moment when the outrageous becomes routine, when the swastika in a congressional office is “just décor,” when politicians muse about “Second Amendment remedies” and voters call it “owning the libs.” The unthinkable never disappears; it just rebrands.
Trumpism’s true innovation was marketing the unthinkable as entertainment. Fascism learned to meme. The men who once goose-stepped through Europe now log on through encrypted apps and call themselves patriots. They’ve swapped torches for touchscreens, and they burn their enemies in comment sections instead of streets—so far.
A Nation of Spectators
Americans, meanwhile, scroll. We absorb the outrage like weather. Every fresh obscenity is already old news by dinner. We mock it, share it, then forget it. This is complicity disguised as exhaustion. Authoritarianism doesn’t need believers when it has bystanders.
If the next generation learns that politics is just trolling with better lighting, that cruelty is charisma, that truth is optional, then democracy becomes a stage play no one believes in anymore. And when no one believes, the strongmen don’t need permission—they already have apathy.
THE MORAL GRAVITY SECTION
There’s a line in Packer’s essay that haunts me: “Once morality becomes team identity, the floor drops out.” The floor is dropping. You can feel it in every shrug, every “joke,” every “both sides.” It’s not that people don’t know better; it’s that knowing better doesn’t pay.
What comes next isn’t tyranny overnight—it’s erosion by indifference. It’s the quiet resignation that decency is naïve, that empathy is unprofitable, that the only language power understands is contempt. The antidote isn’t nostalgia for civics class; it’s the rediscovery of obligation. To law. To dignity. To each other.
Because if the price of belonging is cruelty, the cost of silence is complicity. The children of this experiment will inherit what we normalize. Whether that’s pluralism or poison depends on who still believes that moral gravity exists, even when the crowd laughs at the pull.