Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.
Here’s the April 2025 Monthly Muse.
Recapitulation: Published since last month’s Monthly Muse
Contemplation
This month, I published “The Ron DeSantisification of Donald Trump,” in which I argue that DeSantis’ “Pseudo-Trumpism” has become a key inspiration for Trumpism 2.0. This is a specific phenomenon on the American right, but the DeSantisification of Donald Trump is part of a broader theme across the political spectrum in the United States: the trend toward post-proceduralism.
Libertarianism has steadily declined as a political force in the United States over the past decade. Much of this has to do with the rise of the Trumpism, which rapidly displaced the earlier hegemony of libertarian ideology on the American right. Likewise, on the left, where civil libertarianism was once a default position in the United States, some combination of third wave feminism, trans activism, and Millennial racial identitarianism moved the left in a very different direction.
The post-proceduralist transformation of the left was, until recently, most pronounced. It manifested itself as a wholesale rejection of process in American left political culture. Those accused of sexual harassment, transphobia, or racism were guilty until proven innocent. The almost obsessive consensus-building procedures of the Occupy Movement in the early 2010s had given way, at the turn of the 2020s, to meetings where the “correct” outcome had already been determined in advance.
The right criticized left post-proceduralism vociferously over the past ten years. The forces behind Trumpism 1.0, while a clear departure from mainstream right libertarianism, still held to certain assumptions about due process, free speech, and civil liberties. However, the DeSantis model in Florida demonstrated the effectiveness and (to borrow the tagline of Trumpism 2.0) efficiency of post-proceduralist policymaking. Assisted by the contradictions of classical liberalism, post-proceduralism became an increasingly alluring option for an emergent right movement intent on not just fighting, but also winning, culture war battles with the post-proceduralist left.
After the DeSantisification of Donald Trump, the left and right seem to be in competition with one another for how much they can disregard process. While the vanguard of the post-proceduralist left was a radical brand of cultural leftists, the measured center-left intelligentsia has now joined the post-proceduralist party. Indeed, post-proceduralism is one of the key tenets of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s much-discussed book, Abundance, which is heralded by many mainstream outlets as a winning strategy for the Democrats against right-wing populism. In an interview on the book, Thompson proclaims that “the liberalism of the past fifty years has become consumed by process, and not consumed by outcomes.” For Abundance Democrats, the answer to the right-wing post-proceduralism of Trumpism 2.0 is a further turn away from process.
I myself have been consumed with the question of whether process can be defended in anything but liberal terms (see “Why Free Speech?” Part 1 and Part 2). Perhaps the more pressing question is who on the contemporary American right or left even cares.
Provocation
“All we say to America is, ‘Be true to what you said on paper.’ If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn't committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I say, we aren't going to let dogs or water hoses turn us around, we aren't going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.”
—Martin Luther King Jr., “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” (1968)