1. It is a good passage but I'm not sure that it does the work Douthat wants it to in rebutting the idea that Trumpism is authoritarian. Worth remember what Adorno wrote about the element of buffoonery & clowning in fascism. https://twitter.com/DouthatNYT/status/1316749351226683393

2. The thing with Adorno is that, contrary to what people who have a stereotypical idea of him might think, he really loved clowns. He was, as a scholar wrote, "a fan" of clowns, mimes, acrobats, circuses. Silliness was genuine utopian break. But he also saw the danger of clowns

3. Here's Adorno on clowns & fascism. The point about how a clownish leader (the classic fascists but more recently Berlusconi, Ford, Trump) serve as a rebuke to respectability is I think acute: the message of clowning is anti-system.

4. Pushing Adorno's point, fascist clowning serves a dual purposes for different audiences: for hard-core anti-system followers its a signal the leader despises existing order as they do. For elite conservative fellow-travellers it is plausible deniability: "he's only joking"

5. I think Douthat's account, and similar ones, suffer from an excessive focus on Trump's psychology (does this buffoon have what it takes to be Mussolini) and not enough on how that persona functions as part of larger political movement, which is more focused than he is.