After the Future

In the meanwhile...

Yesterday I wrote about what I believe has to happen in the long run if the machines aren't going to win. By the machines winning I mean that we're at a balance point where technological development can go one way or the other: either the machines will serve human needs or humans will come to serve the machines. What resources are there now in the culture to resist the latter?

Everything is moving inevitably toward transformations defining the human future in which biological and information technologies are setting the agenda by default. This is what we should all be worried about, not petty con men like Trump and his besotted supporters. They are so many resentment-blinded Calibans who are naive enough to think the drunken clown Stephano will deliver them from the wizard Prospero. Caliban, at least, was educable. It remains to be seen whether most Trump supporters will be able to acknowledge as Caliban did in the end --

Ay, that I will; and I'll be wise hereafter
And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass
Was I, to take this drunkard for a god
And worship this dull fool!

But while I believe that unfettered techno-capitalism presents a greater threat to the human future than right-wing fanatical fantasists, no compelling defense against techno-capitalism can be mounted if the forces that care about a positive human future must waste time and energy fighting this rear-guard action against thrice-double asses and political drunkards.

Yesterday, I reiterated what I've been saying here off and on for years--a compelling mythos must emerge that synthesizes what science and religion have always provided at least since classical antiquity. Humanity flourishes when both are in balance and working in a mutually cross-fertilizing ways. Chaos ensues when one or the other dominates a society in such a way that it excludes or filters out what the other would contribute. 

When rationalism dominates, a soulless, rather mechanical, algorithmic imaginary of the human being dominates. Think Immanuel Kant or Auguste Comte or Jeremy Bentham. This in turn causes as a reaction, some times healthy, like the Romantic reaction to Enlightenment rationality, but sometimes really, really crazy as we see now in the various, bizarre cargo-cults like Q anon. 

When a fundamentalistic or rigidly dogmatic religiosity dominates, it produces theocratic autocracies that crush the human spirit and its need for free inquiry. This in turn causes an overly rationalistic reaction that becomes radially skeptical about all spiritual possibilities and often a haughty contempt for anybody who thinks there are such possibilities, and this in turn leads to the problems described in the previous paragraph. 

This is where we are now. Things are very, very fragile. Things could go really bad really quickly if balance isn't somehow restored. 

So, in the meanwhile, for me, the question is how to keep at least one eye on the long-term extinction-of-humanity threat posed by techno capitalism while at the same time dealing with the immediate cultural war between the spiritual delusionists and the rationalist nihilists. This war is a ridiculous waste of time; it's a petty squabble that is completely divorced from the real crisis that we as global humans face. It is keeping us stuck in impotent paralysis and preventing any consensus to develop in attacking the imminent threats to everybody, left or right, for whom a "humanism" and its ideals still have some inspirational power.

For me central to the humanistic ideal is the possibility of depth, of retaining the capability for an openness to the fathomless mysteries of Being. As Heidegger put it somewhere, we're too late for the gods and too early for Being, but at the very least we have to keep that option open for future generations. Opening up to those depths and resisting any developments--technical or moral--that close us down or create filters that seal us off from those depths is the very minimum that must be accomplished in the short run.

An openness to these depths is essentially dependent on our being embodied, and through our bodies embedded in nature--real nature, not virtual, new-Gnostic parodies of it--and through nature an openness to the Cosmos and its mysteries. Mortality and the body are essential elements of maintaining this openness, and any attempts to get rid of either are profoundly de-humanizing.

My guess is that for some readers this assertion is obvious but for others not. The idea of science finding a way to overcome death is the most desirable thing they can imagine. But I can't imagine anything worse if overcoming death requires becoming a disembodied consciousness or a consciousness that comes to reside in a machine of some kind. This kind of post-humanism must be resisted, but nobody is making a robust case for resistance, and so technological developments move inevitably toward it with few obstacles. 

So in the meanwhile...

On the one hand, we must vigorously combat delusion while at the same time respecting the human need for a larger sense of meaning and purpose for human history. As we have seen dramatically realized in recent years, large swaths of the population will embrace delusion unless something better fills the need. And so then on the other hand, we must develop a robust counter narrative that celebrates human possibility in such a way that it might be possible to resist the coming post-humanistic reign of the machines.

Such a narrative must honor science and critical consciousness while at the same time celebrating a second naïveté, one which enables us childlike to become open to mysteries of Being that would disclose themselves to us were we to become receptive to them. This is the way to balance, which is the precondition for renaissance and a cultural reconfiguration--perhaps even a new Axial moment in the evolution of consciousness. 

 

 

How Does this End Well?

The big question for me going forward is to what degree the craziness of the hard right in this country will retain the level of legitimacy it now enjoys? A related question is what has to happen for its grip on so many Americans to loosen? The answer to the second question is foundational for any answer for the first.

Why is the hard-right fantasy that America is being taken over by evil Liberals so attractive? I just spent a weekend with a family member who believes that the Democratic Party is a subsidiary of an international Jewish oligarchy that seeks to establish a new world order that will exterminate religion and freedom. He believes Putin is a good guy who is just trying to restore Christian traditions after atheistic communism, that the anti-Putin Democrats in the U.S. are bent on starting a new Cold War.

He believes that this oligarchy controls the mainstream media and so everybody getting his information from the New York Times, CNN, etc. is being brainwashed. He believes that the election was stolen because this kind of control is so powerful that it reaches into the voting machines in all the states. It's a seamless explanation impenetrable by any information that doesn't fit. Clearly this narrative makes sense of the world for him in a way that other narratives don't.

This family member is not crazy or stupid. He's a kind, thoughtful man who, who, however, spends a lot of time on the internet, and mostly talks with others who reinforce this world view. I hope my conversation with him planted some seeds of doubt that might germinate later, but while he respects me, he believes I'm being duped. He sees me as I see him. So this is the state of things. Two world views both of which see the other as being brainwashed and with no neutrally respected arbiter to mediate. 

If this were twenty years ago, I'd just shrug my shoulders and think of him as a lovable eccentric. But twenty years ago this was fringe thinking--it was in the same category as thinking that the moon landing was faked by filming it on a movie set.

Most people don't spend the time or make the effort to think things through. They just go along to get along, and so that's what frightens me about this level of delusion. More and more people are going along with this than with what has been a flawed but relatively sane mainstream or conventional narrative. The legitimacy of the conventional narrative is breaking down progressively year after years, and I don't see how to stop it. There seem to be no more conventional narratives to organize our imagination of what's real within American society, so anything goes, and this creates a situation where worst who are full of passionate intensity are carrying the day against the best who are hamstrung by their convictionless embrace of complexity.

Because anything goes without a mainstream narrative, a field opens up for the craziest and most aggressive subcultures in this potage of world views to push their way into power. This is exactly what we see going on in the right right now. They just keep telling their big lies over and over again, and more and more Americans have no resistance to it. If so many people believe it, more Americans come to reason, there must be some truth to it. What do I know? If everybody in my church believes it, well, they're good people. It must be true. it must be true. 

In most fights, those who lack conviction are going to get steamrollered by those whose convictions are passionately held, no matter how delusional. So how does this end well for the forces of sanity in America? It's clear that it can only end well if a more robust narrative emerges that is grounded in reality and which provides a satisfactory alternative for people otherwise drawn to the delusional narrative. People are not going to give up what gives their lives meaning for a narrative of complexity that doesn't fit well with their presuppositions and that they find difficult to understand. 

People are starved for meaning, and they will take it wherever they can find it. I think this is hard for Liberals to understand because many of them are quite comfortable living in a world where there need be no overarching, collective meaning narrative. It would be great if that were possible for everybody, but it's become clear that for a huge swath of the American populace it is not. This is a real problem, and it's not going away. So the challenge is to develop a meaning narrative that is both healthily realistic and that works with many of the traditional suppositions of the the people who cannot live without the overarching narrative.

The churches used to do this insofar as there were many levels of entry from the kind of simple peasant piety one found in the countryside to the kind of intellectual sophistication you found coming from great souls and minds from the early church fathers through Aquinas and Bonaventure to Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King. So the problem comes down to Liberals who are comfortable in a complex, pluralistic world where there is no one overarching meaning narrative facing down Conservatives who feel a kind of desperate need for an overarching meaning narrative. 

And while I realize it seems crazy unrealistic, it seems that some kind of socially integrating big story has to develop if the centrifugal forces working within American society don't lead to his utter disintegration. We need a coherent metanarrative in which both sophisticated cultural elites and simple ordinary folk feel that they belong in the same world and where there is mutual respect for the one by the other. 

All I know is that being religious is baked in to the human condition, and we have a choice going forward to either be overwhelmed by really bad religion or to develop a healthy alternative out of the historical cultural resources available to us. What that would look like I have no idea, but I think that something that developed a system of what Charles Taylor calls hierarchical complementarity as found in Buddhist and in Catholic or Orthodox Christian societies would provide a framework for people participating a different levels of seriousness but within a larger cosmic imaginary and a compelling theological mythopoeisis of history that is not in contradiction to what science tells us. 

I have written here for years that the I suspect that the way forward into the postmodern--i.e., whatever comes after the modern--will be a synthesis of modern critical left-brained techno thinking with a retrieval of aspects of premodern religiosity that has a more right-brained receptive approach to the mystery of being than currently acceptable, an approach, in other words that can be comfortable with sacraments and shamans as well as computers and biotechnology, that integrates the pre-Axial with the post Axial, Heidegger with Silicon Valley in a dynamically evolving coincidentia oppositorum. This is what I believe needs to happen, but how it happens I have no idea. But I feel fairly certain that unless it does, unless there is some kind of transcultural awakening or renaissance along these lines, the machines will win by default.

 

Have you know sense, sir?

This is a text I received from a prominent conservative Christian minutes after President Biden’s Inaugural Address: “I broke down sobbing. It’s been a long five-and-a-half years.”

Shortly after that, Scott Dudley, senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Wash., emailed me a note that said, “I never thought I would be moved to tears watching a Democratic president get sworn in, but I was. It just felt so good to hear someone who understands and loves this country and constitution, and is an honorable person, take the oath. I’m praying for healing.”

I’ve had conversations with others who tell similar stories.

Peter Wehner in today's NYT

I'm glad this conservative minister is happy about Biden's speech. I do sincerely hope that he's representative of many evangelical Christians who should have known better about who Trump was and that whatever the flaws and limitations of Liberal politicians like Joe Biden they are, especially in comparison to the kind of pols who make up the Freedom Caucus in the GOP, sane and decent human beings. 

Maybe I'm being unfair to the Rev Dudley or reading too much into his comments above, but if not him there are others to whom what I want to say here applies. They disturb me because it's just as likely that they'll hear a speech by Josh Hawley about the Pelagian Left next week that will convince them that they were wrong about Biden, and that he is, in fact, a heretical spawn of Satan. It's not decency they lack, but sense. 

They're not stupid, but they have no sense, no nose for the truth. They work in formulas and are easily manipulated by people who use language that use those formulas. And so for this reasons their Christian faith appears to provide more of an obstacle to good sense than a path toward getting some.  If they hadn't enough sense to understand what an indecent monster Trump was in the first place, there's no reason to believe that they'll be able to see through the next demagogue who gives a nice speech using all the biblical dogwhistles. 

It's deeply disturbing to me that the future of this country depends on the judgments of so many people like this, basically decent human beings, who haven't a lick of sense. 

Proud Boys See the Trump Truth

After the presidential election last year, the Proud Boys, a far-right group, declared its undying loyalty to President Trump.

In a Nov. 8 post in a private channel of the messaging app Telegram, the group urged its followers to attend protests against an election that it said had been fraudulently stolen from Mr. Trump. “Hail Emperor Trump,” the Proud Boys wrote.

But by this week, the group’s attitude toward Mr. Trump had changed. “Trump will go down as a total failure,” the Proud Boys said in the same Telegram channel on Monday.

As Mr. Trump departed the White House on Wednesday, the Proud Boys, once among his staunchest supporters, have also started leaving his side. In dozens of conversations on social media sites like Gab and Telegram, members of the group have begun calling Mr. Trump a “shill” and “extraordinarily weak,” (Source)

Duh.

I know. Trump has always been merely a useful idiot for the shrewdest actors on the hard right. Now the question is whether anyone can replace him in useful idiocy. Tucker Carlson? He's the kind of guy a skinhead could love, right? 

Regardless, and for whatever reasons, crazy or sane, it's very, very important that Trump be de-legitimated, that he come into clear view as the vulgar, cowardly fraudster that he is. This is what I hope will be the result of his and his organization's being dragged through the courts in the next year. Some people will always be Trump true believers, but even Fox is going to have to report on the evidence brought out in the coming civil and criminal court proceedings.

I think that these court proceedings will be more impactful than the impeachment trial in the Senate--unless, of course, he is convicted. I hope he is, but while this is possible, it's still very unlikely. My hope, and at this point it's only a hope, is that his time in court will strip him naked so that he will be seen by the better part of his most avid supporters--the 34% who still believe that the election was stolen from him--the way the Proud Boys have now come to see him. 

Why Trump?

Why? Why has Trump, of all people, evoked such devotion from so many Americans who should know better? Why do so many decent Americans identify with a man who is so blatantly indecent? What's at stake for them? What part of their souls have they surrendered to him? Why is the prospect of a Biden presidency so horrifying for them? What explains it? Is it a kind of mass hysteria, like a bank run or stock market panic? 

I've been writing here for years about my theory of "ontological dizziness". To summarize, people whose identities are rigidly embedded in traditional cultural meaning narratives are deeply shaken when those narratives are shaken. Do you remember that scene in The Matrix when Neo takes the pill and learns about the Desert of the Real, there's that moment of vertigo, and we all feel it with him. That's a metaphor for ontological dizziness--when we realize that our map of reality doesn't map, when what we accepted as real is revealed not to be. 

But this kind of thing happens all the time in a society where technocapitalism is in a continuous process of subverting or "maps". The question is how you respond to the dizzying rate of change. Some adapt and move on, and those who are particularly callow and superficial do it with greater ease than those who are more deeply rooted. Others with deeper roots don't find it so easy. And so when the traditional narrative, the narrative that they were acculturated into, starts to crumble, they  grab onto anything near at hand that will steady them and give them some relief from the vertigo they feel. Depending on the degree of vertigo, this inclines them in varying degrees to become vulnerable to the seductions of demagogues or cult leaders. 

So clearly something like this is going on with the most devoted of Trump supporters, but I still come up hard against how unlikely it is that someone so fundamentally unattractive and oafishly crooked should be able to pull off this scam. What accounts for it?

If you were yourself unattractive and oafishly crooked, it would make sense that he would be your guy, and clearly many of his supporters fit that description. But so many are not that. They are honest, decent people in distress, and the extremity of their distress has put them into a state of soul that makes Trump into this mammoth transference object. 

Jung's idea of the 'shadow' explains it best. The shadow for Jung is the part of our psyches that lives suppressed in the shadows as taboo. It's the part of us that our acculturation--or superego--defines as unacceptable behavior or attitudes. When we see others who behave in shadowy or taboo ways or express shadowy or taboo attitudes, we have powerful negative emotional responses to it. When they are people who have low social status, we unload our judgmental contempt on them, but when they are people who have high status, they give us permission to behave or express the taboo in ways we were ashamed to do before. 

One is not truly an adult until one learns how to own his projections, but this is not something most people do because so much works against it. The churches, when they function in a healthy way, help people to do it. The scriptural admonition to remove the beam in one's own eye before the splinter in those we would judge is the basic precept. But hardly anyone does it, and Liberals are no better at it than Conservatives. But nobody--nobody--sees clearly if he has not found a way to own his negative and positive projections, because we otherwise demonize those who are not demons or put onto pedestals those that they really don't belong on them. 

Trump is the Nation's shadow for a cultural superego that is defined in the mainstream media by the cosmopolitan Left. In its most extreme form, this superego is defined by the politically correct Hollywood or Silicon Valley Left, which is very much the superego of technocapitalism. There is something truly soul-deadening about any kind of priggish, moralistic thinking and judging, and the priggishness of the politically correct, technocapitalist Left is particularly noxious and soul-deadening. And the decent folks among Trump supporters see its deadliness and for good reason are outraged to be judged by such a callow standard. 

And so if I'm a decent person who is a Trump supporter, whatever ambivalence I might feel about my vestigial racism or doubts about my religious beliefs or about any of the negative elements that have shaped my acculturation, it is blotted out in the fury I feel about being judged by these callow, moralistic, Liberal techno-idiots who have absolutely no idea about how impoverished their souls or shallow their judgments. How dare they judge me! I'm a good person, and they, despite their exalted image of themselves, really are not. If they are so wrong about me, they must be wrong about nearly everything. If the choice is our team or their team, I'm doubling down in support of mine. No room now for doubts or ambivalence. 

Add to this that because of the "great sort" they probably never meet Liberals who are more kind and understanding than they are condescending and judgmental, and mostly they talk to others online or in coffee shops who share their outrage in being judged, it's understandable that they should want to double down.

All this was true before Trump. And whatever Trump might be, he is cunning in a kind of feral way. He smells opportunity, and I think when the story is fully told, we will learn of a man who ran for President to promote his brand while never expecting to get elected. But he learned after a few political rallies that he had tapped into this suppressed fury. To his surprise, he became the Shadow in Chief, the supreme transference object onto whom aggrieved traditionalists could project all their repressed emotion, including the racist complex that is the legacy of many of their ancestors. All that had become taboo since the 1960s, but that doesn't mean it's not lurking there in the shadows. And Trump, as the Nation's Big Daddy, has given huge swaths of the American public permission to bring all this repressed energy out into the open, and it's intoxicating for everyone. 

Trump clearly was exalted by it, in fact it's the only thing about being a politician that he liked. He felt all this repressed emotion being directed toward him, and it energized him, and he quickly learned that this was something that he could work with in ways that other conventional politicians could not. He quickly realized that this was the biggest opportunity for the biggest con in American history. His power came from tapping into and stoking the darkest recesses of the American Shadow, and it is fitting that we should see it on full, unrepressed display January 6.

Because Trump plays this role as transference object for his followers, it's impossible for them to see the man for who he is. It's as Percy Sledge sings when a man loves a woman--

If she is bad, he can't see it
She can do no wrong
And turn his back on his best friend
If he puts her down

When a man loves a woman
Spend his very last dime
And trying to hold on to what he needs
He'd give up all his comforts

And sleep out in the rain
If she said that's the way, it ought to be
When a man loves a woman

I think this is the only thing that explains the intensity of blind devotion that Trump receives from his supporters. If you're not in love, it's easy for you not to get it. Really? Him? And if someone you love is in love with someone bad, all you can do is hope that they snap out of it before it's too late. Because you know there's no talking them out of it. 

Now some reading this essay might accuse me of demonizing Trump, and all I can say is that I believe that when we look back on him ten years from now, I am confident that while I might be wrong about some details  the accumulated evidence will support my basic judgments about him now. I think I see him very clearly, but I am, of course, open to be proved wrong. Are you?

 

Four Years Too Late

Mr. Trump is set to depart office on Wednesday with an approval rating of 29 percent, the lowest of his presidency, according to a new poll from the Pew Research Center.

About 75 percent of the public said Mr. Trump bore some responsibility for the violence and destruction of Jan. 6, which put the lives of the vice president and members of Congress at risk and resulted in five deaths, according to the survey.

And his behavior since the election — a period during which he has repeatedly tried to contest his loss, relied on conspiracy theorists for advice, encouraged supporters who do not view President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. as legitimate, and refused to concede — has cost Mr. Trump support even with those individuals who have loyally supported him up until now.

According to Pew, the share of his supporters who described his conduct as “poor” has doubled, from 10 percent to 20 percent, over the past two months. (Source)

Apparently a delusional, murderous mob storming the capitol screaming "Hang Mike Pence" was a bridge too far. I suppose we should feel some relief that there is still a line that can be crossed. I was beginning to doubt it. 

But if Trump, say, had in fact shot and killed some random person on 5th Ave., I can assure you Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan would tell us that the Democrats made him do it or that he did nothing that some Democrat hasn't done worse or that the person was a nobody who deserved to die anyway. And the above referred to 29% would enthusiastically cheer their agreement.

So it would appear that in our national makeup we must always have this thirty percent of right-wing dead enders. Even if only 29% still approve Trump, 34% still believe he won the election. That thirtyish number hasn't changed since Nixon. It's a significant number of people, but it's not enough to take over the country. We can, however, expect more violence--bombings, political assassinations, mass shootings. That will very likely be our immediate future. If Dems lose the House and the Senate in '22, it's going to get really ugly. If Republicans win the White House in '24, it's over. 

So the challenge for the other 70% is to contain the most virulent elements of the 30%. We need to defang them and render them irrelevant, and it's not at all clear whether there's the sustained resolve to do that. It starts with doing everything possible to vote the nuttiest members of the Freedom Caucus out of office in the next cycle--those, anyway, who aren't expelled if it turns out they were complicit with the mob on the 6th.  

We'll soon see if Biden has what it takes to turn things around. So far, so good. He's exceeded my expectations.

The Reckoning

In the final days of his presidency, Mr. Trump has been snubbed by foreign allies and banned from social media. Some members of his cabinet fled, and some in his own party helped deal the final blow of a second impeachment. High-profile friends, like the New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, are declining national honors to avoid being in his presence. His hometown wants little to do with him.

Mr. Trump arrived in Washington as an insurgent, an unlikely politician who defied the odds to win the White House. He departs isolated and diminished, leaving behind a Capitol transformed into a war zone, a frayed body politic and a fractured Republican Party that has been ousted from power. (Source)

Worst, of course, is the PGA's canceling a tour event at Trump National. I wonder if Jack Nicklaus is still a Trump supporter. 

We forget that when Nixon went down, a third of the country still approved of him. That's a lot of people, and the same level of support will be remain for Trump no matter what. If we're lucky, and I'm not sure we will be--but it's possible--there will come a day in the near future when most Trump supporters will be ashamed to admit it in respectable  company. It will be like admitting you're a racist or that you're into child pornography. If so, the people who continue to approve of Trump will gradually be made as irrelevant in legitimate political discourse as those who approved of Nixon. I want an America where the Jack Nicklauses of the world, who though maybe in their heart of hearts still admire Trump, will be embarrassed to admit they voted for him. 

January 6 was truly an Epiphany. It forced into the sunlight what so many Americans were either too groggy and dull-witted to see or just willfully ignored or used convoluted rationalizations to mitigate, which is that Trump is a monster, that he is the face of what is worst in the American soul, and that he awakened in his supporters what is worst in them.

We have an opportunity now after January 6 to face the fact that this is who we are; it's a part of the American psyche that should have been expiated after the Civil War but wasn't, and so now we are given another opportunity to try. There was no real reckoning after the Civil War, and there needed to be one. Germany managed it after WWII and South Africa did after the fall of apartheid. Will the coming Trump tribunals provide us that opportunity? If we're lucky, maybe. It's unlikely, but it's possible. 

As much as I would like to see the orange man in an orange jumpsuit, there's a part of me that would prefer to see Trump fade away into obscurity. I fear that his inevitable legal troubles will make him the center of another O.J. Simpson-like media spectacle, and showman that he is, he'll milk it in every way he can. He'll continue to suck up all the oxygen in the room; he'll continue his over the top gaslighting. So I might be ok with letting him go if he would just agree to leave the country if he can find another that will take him, but we know he won't do that.

And the bottom line is that the country needs this reckoning, not so much for Donald Trump's sake, but for its own sake--so that those Americans who still have some shred of decency and who are still capable of some level of shame can admit to themselves the horror show they brought upon this country. They need to see his crimes laid out in their full scope and in all their specificity. They need to see what a fraud and gangster this guy is and always was. We need at least two thirds of the country to be able to see Trump for who he is. For those who are not capable, let them shrink away into the shadows. 

From Edsall's Column This Morning:

Bernard Grofman, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, put it this way in an email:

We would not have Trump as president if the Democrats had remained the party of the working class. The decline of labor unions proceeded at the same rate when Democrats were president as when Republicans were president; the same is, I believe, true of loss of manufacturing jobs as plants moved overseas.

President Obama, Grofman wrote,

responded to the housing crisis with bailouts of the lenders and interlinked financial institutions, not of the folks losing their homes. And the stagnation of wages and income for the middle and bottom of the income distribution continued under Obama. And the various Covid aid packages, while they include payments to the unemployed, are also helping big businesses more than the small businesses that have been and will be permanently going out of business due to the lockdowns (and they include various forms of pork.

The result, according to Grofman, was that “white less well-educated voters didn’t desert the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party deserted them.”

At the same time, though, and here I will quote Grofman at length:

More religious and less well-educated whites see Donald Trump as one of their own despite his being so obviously a child of privilege. He defends America as a Christian nation. He defends English as our national language. He is unashamed in stating that the loyalty of any government should be to its own citizens — both in terms of how we should deal with noncitizens here and how our foreign policy should be based on the doctrine of “America First.”

He speaks in a language that ordinary people can understand. He makes fun of the elites who look down on his supporters as a “basket of deplorables” and who think it is a good idea to defund the police who protect them and to prioritize snail darters over jobs. He appoints judges and justices who are true conservatives. He believes more in gun rights than in gay rights. He rejects political correctness and the language-police and woke ideology as un-American. And he promises to reclaim the jobs that previous presidents (of both parties) allowed to be shipped abroad. In sum, he offers a relatively coherent set of beliefs and policies that are attractive to many voters and which he has been better at seeing implemented than any previous Republican president. What Trump supporters who rioted in D.C. share are the beliefs that Trump is their hero, regardless of his flaws, and that defeating Democrats is a holy war to be waged by any means necessary.

In the end, Grofman said,

Trying to explain the violence on the Hill by only talking about what the demonstrators believe is to miss the point. They are guilty, but they wouldn’t be there were it not for the Republican politicians and the Republican attorneys general, and most of all the president, who cynically exaggerate and lie and create fake conspiracy theories and demonize the opposition. It is the enablers of the mob who truly deserve the blame and the shame.

Yes, the Republicans are to blame, but so are the Democrats. I'll say it again: The Dems losing the working class in the 90s during the Clinton administration was political malpractice that has led us to this point. Their nominating guys like Gore, Kerry, and Hillary was political malpractice. Obama's choosing guys like Rahm Emmanuel, Lawrence Summers, Tim Geithner and other Wall Street types as chief advisors was political malpractice, a complete misreading of the moment. 

The Republicans have crossed into an area of crazy and/or bad-faith cynicism that utterly de-legitimates them, but the Dems, who should know better, have been clueless and ideologically blinkered in their own destructive, self-serving way. That being said, the Dems seem to be in a position to learn from their mistakes and to make, finally, at this late date the necessary adjustments. It remains to be seen whether first they have the will to do it, but even if they have the will, it's an open question whether it's too late for them to use it. (Source)

Reason for Hope

During his political career, Trump has given comfort to and conferred logistical coherence upon a coalition that will not die without him—but also will not thrive. The United States is a divided nation, but only a tiny fraction of Trump’s more than 74 million voters showed up in Washington, D.C., eager to fight. The way to unite this country is to isolate acts of violence—and a leader who incites it—from legitimate expression. Trump was a north star for a certain kind of radical. Americans will be safer the more that star loses its shine.

Juliette Kayyem, former Assistant Secretary for Homeland Security

The bubble of delusion that Trump supporters inhabit has to be burst, and it starts with a strong dose of reality therapy. That means throwing people in jail--including Trump. There will always be a hardcore of nutcases who will see him as a martyr, but most Trump supporters are not that far gone. They are in a trance, and they need to be snapped out of it. A guy like Kevin Haag, whom I wrote about yesterday, is capable of living outside the bubble.

If Trump has to face real trials, with real judges and prosecutors, not political theater like impeachment proceedings, it will become clearer to many if not most Trump supporters what a criminal fraud he is. His most recent crime in inciting the riot last week is dramatic and helpful insofar as it has lowered his approval ratings to the low thirties, but I suspect it will be shown to be among the least of his crimes.

Once he's gone, it remains to be seen if there is anyone who has his peculiar charism to keep the collective insanity alive to the extent that it lives now through him. 

The entire establishment--including business and the media--has to go after Trump and his enablers with everything they have. This will drive the hardcore militants underground, and that's where they belong. It's then a matter for law enforcement and counterrorism units to deal with them, not politicians in our capitols. 

This is the moment to act. I don't care much one way or the other about the impeachment--we're way past needing symbolic but ineffective gestures at this point--but I hope law enforcement comes after him as they went after all his cronies as soon as possible. It would be fitting, if unlikely, if they were waiting for him noon next Wednesday as he walks out of the White House. 

Two Profiles

Kevin Haag, 67, a retired landscaper from North Carolina who ascended the Capitol steps as the crowd surged forward, said he did not go inside and disapproved of those who did. Even so, he said he would never forget the sense of empowerment as he looked down over thousands of protesters. It felt so good, he said, to show people: “We are here. See us! Notice us! Pay attention!”

Now, back home after several days of reflection, Mr. Haag, an evangelical Christian, wonders whether he went too far. “Should I get down on my knees and ask for forgiveness?” he said in an interview. “I am asking myself that question.”

But the experience seemed to have only hardened the resolve of others. Couy Griffin, 47, a Republican county commissioner from New Mexico, spoke of organizing another Capitol rally soon — one that could result in “blood running out of that building” — in a video he later posted to the Facebook page of his group, Cowboys for Trump.

“At the end of the day, you mark my word, we will plant our flag on the desk of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer,” he said. He paused before adding, “And Donald J. Trump if it boils down to it. (Source)

Americans who are part of the reality-based community are not at war with Kevin Haag and those among Trump supporters who are like him, but they are with the Couy Griffins. The challenge is how you defeat the Griffins while at the same time winning back the Haags.

It's interesting that Griffin would seem to be open to my argument in my post the other day, "Trump the Coward". I've been picking up since then that it is a growing sentiment within the hard right that Trump betrayed them on Wednesday. Good. 

It's still an open question for me whether without Trump's special "chaos charism" the collective insanity we've witnessed in the last four years is sustainable. I'm not at all sure, but it might be possible that without Trump, a nutcase like Griffin is just another ignorant idiot who can be pushed to the fringe. The question is how do we get to a condition of being 'without Trump'. 

But at the same time I think we're approaching the point where law enforcement has to look at these right-wing militias as posing the same kind of threat as Isis or Al-queda. After Wednesday, it's no longer possible to think about this as the just exercise of first amendment rights. And I hope an event like this and the video we've been seeing since will make Republicans recognize that this is no longer a parade they want to get in front of.  

So I'm hoping that this weekend, as they reflect on the events of the past week, heretofore Trump sycophants like Mike Pence, Lindsay Graham, and Mitch McConnell figure out that they've got more to gain and less to lose if they help the Democrats to bury Trump for good. The Trump base sees these Republican leaders now as being no better than Pelosi and Schumer, so they might as well join with them in making sure that Trump never runs for office again. That might even be an attractive prospect at this point for Cruz and Hawley, if it can be done without their public support. 

They know just as clearly as Pelosi and Schumer do that Trump is a monster and that the country would be better if he is completely delegitimated with the Kevin Haags among his supporters, i.e., anybody among them who still has an ounce of sanity and decency left to work with. McConnell and Graham don't have to worry about reelection for another six years, and Pence, if he has any sense at all--which, I know, is questionable--should be made to realize that he's not the guy who is going to galvanize right-wing populism as Trump's heir--especially now that Trump has repudiated him. 

So if they can get to a point where they understand that their political interests are no longer served by providing cover for Trump, they can pretend they care about the country to salvage their reputations and maybe their party by doing what they can to help bury Trump. It's in the best interests of the future of the GOP that the Kevin Haags in the party see that Trump is not who they wanted to believe he is. The Haags are persuadable. 

No Appeasement

I'm not going to belabor this because I think it's obvious. With the hard right we are not dealing with justifiable grievance. Are there real, understandable grievances driving them? Yes. Must the underlying causes be addressed? Yes. But if the establishment, and that's now the Democrats and principled conservatives, don't crack down on the hard right with the full force of the law, it is only going to get worse. 

It starts with Trump, of course. If you can't remove him, do everything you can to keep him tied up in lawsuits and to prevent him from ever running for office again. If it turns out that Hawley, Cruz  or members of the house worked with Capitol police to let the rioters in, they should be thrown out of office and into jail. If you can't remove Hawley, Cruz, et al., you should censure them in the most severe language possible. 

You are not at war with the majority of voters who supported Trump, most of whom are ignorant and gullibly naive. But you are at war with this militant, far-right fringe. There is no reaching out to them. They cannot be appeased. They must be jailed or otherwise pushed to the farthest reaches of the fringe. You must do this with the powers and within the constraints the law and the constitution give you, but you must also realize how these snakes hide behind the law and the constitution to subvert the law and the constitution. These are people who take advantage of the freedoms of an open society to achieve their primary mission, which is to close it down.

Free speech is sacred, but there should be strict enforcement of existing law or enactment of new legislation that makes media vulnerable to criminal prosecution if they purvey lies and propaganda that are in any way complicit in inciting, enabling, or coordinating insurrection. We can all see now that freedom of speech does not include yelling "Fire" in the public square when there is no fire. The legitimacy of this kind of speech has to be reckoned with in a new way after the events on Wednesday. It's one thing for a satirist like Limbaugh to get a laugh; it's quite another to say things that incite and then seek to legitimate what happened the other day.

There are risks, of course, of making martyrs of these traitors, but the risks of not acting decisively against them are far worse because such inaction will reinforce their perception of you as weak, feckless, and unprincipled wimps who can be counted on to take the path of least resistance. They will see you as people who make a good speech but who will offer no real substantive resistance to future better organized and more violent attacks. 

Trump the Coward

If I knew anybody who was part of the riot yesterday, the first thing I'd ask him is why wasn't Trump with you when you made your assault? He said that he would parade with you the capitol, but instead he went back to the safety of the White House to watch the event on TV. It was great entertainment until his lawyers started to scare him that he might be legally liable for inciting a riot. 

Think how much more successful your insurrection would have been if he marched into the capitol with you. But that would require that he take a risk that he simply wasn't willing to make. He wanted you all to take the risk, and if you succeeded in "stealing back the election", so to say, that would be great for him, but you failed, and it didn't take long for him to  back away from you as fast as possible.

If he's so worthy of your devotion, why did he condemn the violence and say that everybody who broke the law should be prosecuted.

Why did he concede that Biden would be taking over on the 20th, and that his main goal is to insure a peaceful transition? Why doesn't he keep fighting? Why doesn't he make them drag him out of the White House on the 20th?

I'll tell you why. He's a craven coward. He's trying to save his own ass by distancing himself from the insurrection because that's what he does to everyone who becomes one way or the other inconvenient for him. He wants to avoid prosecution. He wants to avoid be removed and he wants to avoid prosecution once he does leave. He's kissing up to the powers who will have to decide to come after him when he no longer has the protection of the office. It's so obviously transparent.

Like all the brave men and women who put their lives at risk in the military, he  thinks you, too, are all suckers, and he has nothing but contempt for you. I can assure you that he's laughing at what fools you all are to put yourselves on the line for him in a way he'd never be willing to put himself on the line for you.

Why do you support this coward? Is he really any better than any other craven, self-interested establishment politician? Whatever the legitimacy of your grievances, why have you convinced yourself that this self-serving wuss is worthy to be your standard bearer?

You are being conned by Trump just as you have been conned by every establishment Republican politician that will tell you what you want to hear so that you'll vote for him, but once in office will only care about protecting the interests of the 1%. 

News Flash: Nation's Village Idiots Riot to Support the Nation's Idiot

“Who could have seen this coming? Everyone? Even dummies like me. This is the most shocking, most tragic, least surprising thing I’ve ever seen.” — STEPHEN COLBERT

And the wildest part is these MAGA marchers think Donald Trump cares about them. He doesn’t care about you. He doesn’t care about your wife or your job or your health care or the air you breathe, the water you drink. He cares about himself. And only about himself. Unless you were pushing a lawn mower, he wouldn’t let you into his golf club. He’d roll his limo right over you to get a Chick-fil-A sandwich.” — JIMMY KIMMEL

The only important consequence of this moronic, pitchfork crowd storming the capitol, besides this being the last (I hope) of a series of Trump-related national embarrassments, is that it will make it politically easier to prosecute Trump for his many crimes. He is more vulnerable today than he was on Tuesday. It was scary for those involved, but I think it's a net positive. 

Any idea that he's being treated unfairly by the media or the Democrats is no longer tenable by naive but decent Americans. He finally crossed a line and fully revealed his antipathy to democracy, decency, sanity. The Democrats' rationale for impeachment has proved completely accurate, and their warning that if he isn't stopped he'lll do worse has proved true. 

Republicans like Susan Collins, Lindsay Graham, Mitch McConnell and other GOP leaders who knew better are proved to be the feckless enablers most of us knew they were for not standing up to him. I hope this finally moves them to a mood of "enough" and to act finally to push back against all the lies and liars.

Hawley and Cruz come out of this looking like the cynical snakes that they are. 

UPDATE: David Frum wrote last night--

Schedule an impeachment vote for this very night. Stay ’til dawn. Do whatever is necessary. Avert any potential for martial law. Deny Trump command of the military; withdraw the nuclear codes. Don’t wait until the next crossed red line, until the next smashed barrier, until the next putsch attempt. Install Mike Pence right away as the 46th president and work with him to manage the transition on January 20 to Joe Biden as the 47th. Bar Trump from ever again holding office—and get ready to prosecute him for his crimes on January 21.

Act now. And everyone who acts now—even those who were most in the wrong until now—can share the credit and recognition as a protector of the Constitution. There is no time for delay.

Remove this treasonous president. Invite his own party to join the effort to remove him now, or to share now and forever Trump’s guilt.

Not likely to happen even though I agree completely that it should. But I think there are a lot more people today who would otherwise not think it was necessary to hold Trump accountable. It was more likely before yesterday that the political establishment would just say "Bygones", and "Let's move forward". There will be a bi-partisan effort to support throwing the book at Trump now, and for that I'm grateful to Trump for attempting this Keystone Kops coup. It was very clarifying.