After the Future

Quote of the Day: David Frum

It was pandemonium. But it was revealing pandemonium. Who and what Trump is could not have been more vividly displayed in all the psychological reality. Debate one was not Donald Trump versus Joe Biden, or red versus blue. It was zookeepers versus poop-throwing primates.

David Frum in The Atlantic

Pretty much sums it up.

On Chickens Coming Home

Why did the chickens cross the road? Why did Caesar cross the Rubicon? 

First answer: to come home to roost. Second answer: to have his army with him to fight the aforementioned chickens, i.e., those in the Roman Senate who were about to throw the book at him.

Donald Trump is not Julius Caesar, but he finds himself in a similar predicament. Caesar was immune from prosecution so long as he was proconsul in Gaul. Once he was out of office, he was going to get slammed. So it was either prison or start a civil war. It's getting clearer every day that Trump will get slammed once he's out of office, and so it's also clear that he's a desperate man who will do anything to keep those chickens on the other side of the road. The only way to do that is to stay in office, and if he does so, it will trigger civil war. 

His survival requires that he do something desperate. If all his and the Russians' attempts to disrupt the election fail, his Rubicon will be his refusal to leave office. He doesn't have the army on his side, so we can take some comfort in that. But he has a lot of desperate people ready to do some crazy, delusional stuff on his behalf. It won't end well for him and them, but it neither will it end well for the rest of us.

It did not end well for the Romans. Civil Wars ravaged their empire for the next twenty years. But it didn't start when Caesar crossed the Rubicon. The collapse of the Roman Republic was years in the making, and so it has been with us. For us, it traces back to the Vietnam War--to the arrogance, vanity, and delusions of American power that possessed Johnson, Nixon, Kissinger, and later Brzezinski, the Iran-contra conspirators, the neocons in the Bush administrations.

But they are not completely to blame. There was also the toxic political cynicism of Republicans from Gingrich to McConnell, from Limbaugh to Fox News, the venality, hubris, and shortsightedness of our financial elites, the nihilistic materialism of our cultural elites, the ignorance and gullibility of the bread-and-circuses Americans on their couches and in their conspiratorial chat rooms. All delusional in a peculiarly American way. 

Historians will write about the trajectory from Vietnam to Trump as the the arc of American decline. It all could have played out so much differently. But the American character is essentially that of a headstrong adolescent. It leads Americans--from its best and brightest to its cranks in chat rooms--to think they know better when they haven't a clue, and they mistake foolishness for boldness, groupthink for loyalty, credulity for sincerity, wealth for intelligence, fanaticism for faith.

It's fitting that they elected a guy who in the most clownish, exaggerated way mirrors that in them. It sums us up as a nation so well. So it makes sense that he should be the guy who brings brings the post-Vietnam arc of American destruction to its logical end. 

Maybe we survive this, maybe I'm underestimating the capacity of the American character to learn from its mistakes and to grow up. But it seems pretty clear to me that there are too many Americans who are so desperately invested in their delusions that they will not leave the scene quietly but will insist on having it their way or blow things up. 

Pack the Court [Updated]

The trouble for Belkin and other Democrats is ...[in packing the court's] political feasibility—and not just because the party has to win the Senate and the White House first. Joe Biden has shown reluctance to eliminate the filibuster, which Democrats would need to do to pass a court-expansion law, and he is outright opposed to increasing the justices’ numbers, disinclined to take any radical action that would further exacerbate partisan tensions. “We need to de-escalate, not escalate,” he said during a speech in Philadelphia over the weekend. In a local-news interview last summer, he warned that Democrats would “rue” the day they packed the Court because Republicans would simply do the same the next time they were in power.

Elaine Godfrey in The Atlantic

I'm going to argue the opposite of a previous post, "De Moderatione". In that post I argued that moderation is called for in a situation in which things are so fragile and in which we need to restore some stability. Clearly Biden is the man for the job if that is our situation now, and I think it is. But even as I was writing that, the opposing arguments were gathering in the back of my mind. It comes to a head in thinking through where you stand on court packing. After some initial resistance, I am coming around to thinking it's the right thing to do even if clearly it's not the moderate thing to do.

Here's why I think Dems, assuming they win the Senate, need to ditch the filibuster and pack the courts. 

Biden thinks we can get things back to normal. He's selling a feel-good return to they things were before Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh began the destruction of our political norms and institutions during the Clinton years. He thinks the old norms can be restored. He thinks that most people in the Senate are reasonable, decent people. As a political strategy, maybe that's ok, but as a governing strategy it will be a disaster. 

The right-wing fanatics, aka the GOP, are counting on this kind process moderation. They are counting on Democrats being boy scouts who follow the rules because the GOP has become so adept at using the rules to obstruct and to render the Dems powerless. The GOP will use the rules and their propaganda platform on FOX for the next four years to make the Dems seem feckless and impotent and then to ridicule them for their inability to get anything done. And this will pave the way for their return to power when they will resume their naked aggression in destroying the norms and institutions in their long-term project to turn the country into an Eastern European or Latin American-style, right-wing autarchy dominated by the 1%. 

High-minded Democrats will argue that they cannot use extremist methods to restore normalcy. They are right about that, but they are wrong to think that normalcy can be restored. There's no going backwards. A new set of norms based on effectiveness in solving problems must be fought for to establish a future normal. Past normal no longer works. The GOP understand this in a way most Dems don't. The goal is not a return to normalcy but effectiveness in governing. The Democrats will be elected for cycles to come if they actually solve problems. There will be no real stability or normalcy until we have a government that governs in a way that's responsive to the needs of most Americans. 

I think that packing the court won't de-legitimate it so much as neutralize it. It will weaken its authority in shaping policy, which should be the domain of the legislatures, who in turn are accountable to the electorate in ways that courts cannot be. But in order for the legislatures to legislate, they need to remove the obstructions that prevent them from getting anything done.

So if they are to solve problems, it starts with the filibuster and packing the court. Liberal Democrats make an idol of the Supreme Court because of the role it played starting during the Warren years of imposing policies that were unfeasible to legislate. In Roe it went too far, and I'd argue that we would not have half the political strife that we're experiencing now if the courts just left it alone and allowed individual states to make their own laws about abortion.

There are a broad range of culture war issues, but at the very heart of it is abortion. There is something deeply troubling and repugnant about abortion, and this is the Democrats' blind spot. They have come to unthinkingly see it the same way the GOP sees gun rights. It's a shibboleth of team loyalty, a form of group think, and it has, imo, created far greater long-term problems for us as a society than whatever remedies it delivered. It should have been handled in the legislatures, not imposed top-down from the courts.

So I don't think that the biggest danger posed by an ideologically right-wing court is its overturning Roe, but in its continuing to represent the interests of the 1% as it did in Citizens United and in its complicity with the GOP agenda to suppress voting rights. 

So I'm fine with neutralizing the courts. A politically neutralized court won't accomplish anything big, which is how it should be, but more importantly it will be less likely to subvert legislative efforts to make the country more democratic. And it will be less likely to obstruct the good-faith efforts of responsible legislatures to tackle practical problems associated with climate control, voting rights, income inequality, and health care. 

So pack away, Dems. I just hope Uncle Joe doesn't get in the way. 

Friday Update: David Leonhardt in his NYT Friday Morning newsletter reinforces the argument I make above:

It’s not normal anywhere else. In no other democracy do judges serve for as long as they like. In most other democracies, the highest courts are less aggressive about striking down entire laws, as Jamal Greene of Columbia Law School told me. The courts instead tend to direct legislators to fix specific parts of a law.

An all-powerful Supreme Court has also not been constant in American history, largely because the Constitution does not establish it. The balance of power between the judiciary and the other branches of government has oscillated. The past two decades, when the court has intervened to decide an election, legalize same-sex marriage and throw out multiple laws, represent a high point for what scholars call “judicial supremacy.”

All of which suggests that the future of the Supreme Court does not depend only on who the justices are. It also depends on whether future presidents and Congresses choose to accept judicial supremacy. I'm arguing that this is the time to dial back an "all powerful Supreme Court". It's anti-democratic, and Liberals have always been wrong to lean too much on the court to get the policies they want.

 

Has "Trump's America" Jumped the Shark?

When I spoke to former NBC colleagues of Mr. Zucker about his tenure there, the show they brought up most often wasn’t “The Apprentice”; it was “Fear Factor,” in which contestants were tossed in their underwear into a pit full of rats, among other grotesque stunts. USA Today described it as perhaps “the most vile program ever to air on a major network.”

“Fear Factor” didn’t age well. The show lasted six seasons, and a revival was cut short by public backlash to a stunt in which competing sets of identical twins drank donkey semen. The public got tired of it (and that donkey stunt didn’t air).

“After a while it was like, Jesus Christ,” the host, Joe Rogan, recalled in a 2019 interview. “How many times can you throw them off buildings?”

Consuming the news of the last four years has felt at times like watching “Fear Factor” and its cruel and violent strain of reality television. That’s the sensation of doomscrolling on Twitter late at night, the unending outrage cycle that has propelled cable news to its current strong and steady ratings.

...

And the part of the American electorate that was enjoying the show may get tired of this too. If Donald Trump loses in November, that may also mark the end of this era of cable television, which he had fed and fed off, and which has left its audience divided and exhausted.

Ben Smith in the NYT

I don't know about you, but I found myself incapable of watching any of the news this weekend in the wake of RBG's death. I'm just sick of the news, and there's nothing I don't mostly know already I'm going to learn from watching it. It's all about the outrage now, and I'm sick of that, too. it. It's not that the outrage isn't warranted--it's just exhausting and numbing.

 

So after reading this piece this morning it struck me that it's more likely that exhaustion and the sense that the whole Trump schtick is getting old that will be the end of him. And it's for that reason more than any other that a fifth season of "Trump's America", won't be renewed. 

 

But maybe not. "Fear Factor" lasted six seasons, and so maybe will the Trump show even after he loses. The show will be reinvented as the setting shifts from the Oval Office to the court room. We'll be finding out about his traitorous connections to Russia and all the other ways he's used the office corruptly. Will Trump do jail time? Will Jared and Ivanka? It's all part of the show. Again we won't learn anything we don't already know, but what else are they gonna put on to keep up the ratings? Jeff Zucker probably already has it all storyboarded. 

 

 

De Moderatione

You might have thought that the Democratic and Republican Parties are different versions of the same thing, but that’s no longer true. As Jonathan Rauch of the Brookings Institution has noted, the G.O.P. is no longer a standard coalition party. It’s an anti-political insurgency that, even before Trump, has been elevating candidates with no political experience and who don’t believe in the compromise and jostle of politics.

Right now, Republicans are a culture war identity movement that suppresses factional disagreement and demands total loyalty to Trump.

The Democrats are still a normal political party. In 2020 they rejected the “base mobilization” candidates who imagine you can magically create a revolutionary majority if only you go purist.

David Brooks

I've been on the other side of this argument. I know that often the only way things get done is you start screaming and breaking things. I'd still argue that when you have a stolidly clueless establishment impervious to any ideas except what is echoed by others in the establishment, that screaming and breaking things can be effective and justified. 

But we're not living at a time where there is a stolid, complacent establishment. It has been deeply shaken by the events of the last four years. In my post from a couple of weeks ago This Moment is Different I wrote addressing Trump supporters:

I can understand why you voted for him in '16. I can understand why you wanted to send a message. I can understand why you wanted to shake things up and put the fear of God into complacent elite thinking. Message received.

By "message received" I meant that elites are no longer complacent in their thinking. They are vulnerable to make necessary adjustments, and what that means essentially is that Neoliberalism no longer has hegemonic legitimacy. 

That being said, I doubt that David Brooks got the message. He really does represent the old elite Neoliberal complacency, and that's the subtext of the column from which I excerpted the epigraph above. Nevertheless, he's right about the Republican Party and about the political process. And while I reject the implication that Warren, AOC, and Sanders, and Black Live Matters are the equivalent on the Left for what Trump, Qanon, Fox News, and the right-wing militias are on the Right, he's right that we have to return to the ordinary business of politics because for all its flaws and frustrations it's better than the chaos and violence toward which we are otherwise headed.

That's the difference between someone like Sanders and Biden on the one hand and Trump and McConnell on the other. As different as Biden and Sanders might be in their politics, they accept that the give and take of politics is the arena in which they work. That's no longer true of the Republican Party. It really hasn't been since Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh pushed it over the cliff in the 90s. 

The system is healthy when it's boring and stable, and yes when it is so it favors elites and insiders. Establishment moderates should be running things, but they need to be pushed by non-establishment outsiders. If that sounds weak, well welcome to reality, which is largely governed by the Iron Law of Oligarchy. No revolution on the Right or Left is going to change that--it's just a question of choosing the elites who will do the least harm are more likely to be pushed in a positive direction. That excludes fanatics of either the Left or Right.

And for me it's clear that the difference between Liberal elites like Biden, the Clintons, and Brooks, squishy though they may be, is that they are malleable in a way that Right-Wing elites are not. There is a fanaticism that drives Republican Right-Wing elites in a way that is alien to Liberal elites precisely because the latter are so squishy. A fanatic is not persuadable; a Liberal, by virtue of his squishiness, is. 

The definition of a political fanatic is someone who thinks it's better to burn the whole system down than to nudge it in the right direction. Are there fanatics on the Left? Of course. But AOC and Elizabeth Warren are not among them. Neither are they squishy. They are strong-willed, clear-headed, down-to-earth women with a point of view and with good arguments. Our best hope is that they will play an outsized role in persuading those in the squishy center of the Biden administration to move the country in a direction that actually deals with the underlying problems that led to Trump's election.

It's not about what we want; it's about what's possible. Republican Right-Wing fanatics want impossibilities because they are delusional in their longing for a return to a pre-1960s American reality. Indeed, many of them wish it were the 1880s. The typical cosmopolitan Liberal is not morally superior to the typical cultural Conservative, but she is less dangerous because better adapted to reality.

Liberals did not create an anything-goes, morally nihilistic cultural milieu--consumer capitalism did. Many Liberals have adapted and found ways of living relatively decent, morally serious lives in that milieu. Conservatives have not adapted and as a result feel that they are facing extinction--and they blame Liberals for it. And they are willing to justify committing outrageously immoral violent acts because they have come to believe that their survival depends on it. But Liberals did not cause their problems. It's their own rigidity in being unable to adapt to a cultural reality that was caused by an economic system that they otherwise largely approve of.

If Americans want to change the culture, a big part of it is about changing their capitalism idolatry. David Brooks does not understand this--not really--while AOC does. But the greatest irony of all is that capitalism is the last thing the Republican Right-Wing fanatic wants to change his thinking about. He'd rather an America run by the Koch Brothers than by AOC or the "squad". Capitalism for the Republican Right-Wing fanatic is the poison that's actually killing him. He's too angry at Liberals to be clear-headed enough to understand what truly ails him and where a real cure lies. 

Milton Friedman: Proto-Sociopath

But while economists still argue over Friedman’s theories, his hot take 50 years ago for nonspecialists — the Friedman doctrine — turned a capitalist truism (profits are essential) into a simple-minded, unhinged, socially destructive monomania (only profits matter). In “A Christmas Carol,” Scrooge is redeemed when he abandons his nasty profit-mad view of life — and his name became a synonym for miserliness. Likewise, a century later, in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the banker Mr. Potter is the evil, unredeemable, un-American villain. Here was Milton Friedman telling businesspeople that they’d been tricked by the liberal elite, that Scrooge and Potter were heroes they ought to emulate.

Kurt Anderson, "How Liberals Opened the Door to [Crank] Libertarian Economics"

Milton Friedman was a crank, a fanatic Libertarian, whose views through much of his early career were relegated to the fringes. The Friedman Doctrine did not cause the problems we are dealing with now--Trumpism, huge economic inequality, intensified racial conflict--but legitimated the worst human impulses that led to their becoming as bad as they are now. Milton Friedman's ideas did not make men greedy; he legitimated greed. He removed the constraints and social norms that impeded people in business from giving their inner Scrooge or Mr. Potter free rein.

There's a direct line from Friedman to the corporate ethos that led to the 2008 meltdown and to the kind of mentality among many business types, especially on Wall Street, that leads them to embrace Trump. Like Friedman, Trump legitimates the worst human impulses. He brazenly acts out what normal people would feel ashamed to do, and so that makes people think he's honest or un-hypocritical. People see the president of the U.S. acting out their own secret, dark fantasies, and admire his "courage". But he's not courageous; he's a sociopath. 

The curious thing about Friedman is that he's an idealist about something that legitimates the worst impulses in human beings. That is a kind of sociopathy that he shares with most religious fanatics. His is a personal psychopathy that justifies Capitalist sociopathy. 

Libertarianism attracts a lot of smart people who are uncomfortable with complexity, who feel insecure at a deep ontological level, and so gravitate toward simplistic solutions that appear smart or edgy. It's the kind of thing that nerdy, emotionally stunted high schoolers get into, like reading Ayn Rand, as if she's really, really, you know, profound. But it's the kind of thing that if you don't outgrow it by your early twenties, you easily meld into the kind of sociopathic ethos that rules on Wall Street and shaped the ethos of Enron.  

Jesus said that the poor we shall have always with us. He forgot to mention that the sociopaths we shall have always with us, too. Unfortunately they're the ones who run things because normal, healthy people don't have their ruthlessness, monomania, and need to dominate. And most decent people tend to give even the worst people, if they're white and rich, the benefit of the doubt until it's too late. Any grifter or con artist understands this tendency among normal, decent human beings, and they know how to take advantage of it. 

The problem with America right now is that a grifter sociopath like Trump has shown other grifter sociopaths that there is a huge swath of the American public--40%+--who are ripe to be massively conned. Certainly more than I thought before Trump got elected--I would have guessed the number closer to 25%. There is nothing to hold back the next grifter sociopath to come along because Trump completed what Friedman began in destroying the decency norms that used to play a role in restraining what's worst in human nature. 

I assume that unless Trump stooges and the Russians are successful somehow in creating enough chaos and confusion to allow Trump to steal the election (a real possibility), Biden will win in November. But unless something even more unexpected happens, it's pretty clear that Biden and the Democrats haven't the imagination or strength of mind to fix what ails us. If 40%+ of the country prefers someone as comically crackpot as Trump now, 50%+ will prefer some future grifter selling the same snake oil but with more sophistication.

They'll find all kinds of crazy ways to justify their support for him or her, but it comes down to the con man's ability to persuade people that what they feel shameful about is really ok. As Gordon Gecko said echoing Friedman, "Greed is good... it captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind." It's a great con because it makes you feel good about acting out what's worst. 

12/27/23 Update: I still think that the basic thrust of what I wrote here stands, but maybe softened somewhat by the more complex picture presented in Jennifer Burn's new book Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative. Read it and judge for yourself. Friedman, as were many other economists in the neoclassical school that became so influential in the late 20th century, was a true believer in the Cult of the Invisible Hand. He seemed to suffer from whatever the pathology is that leads people to join cults, and that cult produced beliefs and policies that, imo, are sociopathic. And is there any question that he was a fervent evangelist in the spreading of those beliefs and practices? Maybe that's too harsh. To what degree he is morally culpable is not for me to say. He started out as a New Dealer, but in later years he seemed oblivious of how his ideas had such negative impacts on the lives of ordinary people. He was in many ways just a man of his times, and when the times normalize sociopathy everybody shares in it some extent, me included. 

This Moment is Different

I know plenty of Trump supporters, and I know many of them to be people of integrity in important areas of their lives. Indeed, some are friends I cherish. But if there is a line Donald Trump could cross that would forfeit the loyalty of his core supporters—including, and in some respects especially, white evangelical Christians—I can’t imagine what it would be. And that is a rather depressing thing to admit.

Polarization and political tribalism are not new to America; fear and hatred for our fellow citizens have been increasing for decades. We’ve had plenty of presidents who have failed us, in ways large and small. But this moment is different because Donald Trump is different, and because Donald Trump is president. His relentless assault on truth and the institutions of democracy—his provocations and abuse of power, his psychological instability and his emotional volatility, his delusions and his incompetence—are unlike anything we’ve seen before. He needs to be stopped. And his supporters can’t say, as they did in 2016, that they just didn’t know. Now we know. It’s not too late—it’s never too late—to do the right thing.

Peter Wehner, The Atlantic

I think the questions I would ask a Trump supporter at this point is "What is it that you feel is such a threat to your lives that you can justify supporting this demagogue? Do you really believe that this incompetent, amoral, deeply foolish man represents a better future for America? Do you really believe that the Democrats, for all their fecklessness and cluelessness, are really out to destroy everything you love?

I can assure you that for the most part Liberals don't care about what you love enough to want to destroy it. They don't care what you believe or love, but they are willing to tolerate it. You see malice where really there is only indifference. The one thing that Liberals cannot tolerate is intolerance. I can understand why you think there are some things that cannot be tolerated, and you shouldn't tolerate them in your personal lives, and in the public square you should do what you can to persuade others to share your beliefs and practices. But you cannot force them to. It's better, much better, to live in a liberal, tolerant society than in an illiberal one that is not. 

To destroy the whole system whose core value is tolerance because you think that indifferent, clueless, liberal elites don't give you the respect you think you deserve is to cut off your nose to spite your face. It's rooted in paranoia. The basic thing about paranoia is that it tends to create self-fulfilling prophecies. The people you fear to be your enemies, even though they're not, become your enemies when you treat them as such. Acting out such paranoia quickly devolves into a death spiral. Another four years of Trump will bring down on yourselves much greater woe than whatever you think is troubling you now. The country will devolve into chaos and become the violent hell-scape that you fear. 

In the same way that Republicans have worked so assiduously to make government dysfunctional so that they can then argue that government is dysfunctional, so is Trump creating chaos to make you fear chaos. Too many conservative Americans have been seduced into thinking that they will get better government by electing the people who want to destroy any possibility of it, and now the same illogic leads them to believe that they will restore order by electing the greatest elected agent of chaos this country has ever seen. 

I can understand why you voted for him in '16. I can understand why you wanted to send a message. I can understand why you wanted to shake things up and put the fear of God into complacent elite thinking. Message received. Now there's no plausible justification for voting for him unless you really think that living in a deeply corrupt, illiberal, intolerant South American or Eastern European-style autocracy is better than what we have now. Surely you can see that we can be better than that. Right?