Appelbaum on Ezra Klein this week:
I remember having a conversation — must have been about 2017 or 2018. I was in Texas, and I sat next to some people at a dinner. And they were pro-Trump, and we started talking about that. And I asked them, you know, aren’t they bothered by Trump’s corruption? They said exactly that. No, he’s just doing in public what everybody did in private. And although, of course, that’s not true — Obama was not running a business out of the White House, and George W. Bush was not running a business out of the White House — the impression that Washington is somehow corrupt was so deep and so broad that Trump was seen as just a smarter guy who was doing it openly. So I think the impression that the system needs to be smashed, that the hypocrisy needs to be exposed and that anybody who does that is good, even if they’re offering a completely different set of values, is clearly something, again, that’s very powerful, a powerful human phenomenon that we have now, and we also had in the 1930s.
Klein responds:
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So there’s corruption, which we’ve been talking about — dark money and running businesses, and enriching yourself — but there’s also something else in that Arendt quote about virtue. To use it again, she says, “The bourgeoisie claimed to be the guardian of Western traditions, and confounded all moral issues by parading publicly virtues, which it not only did not possess in private and business life, but actually held in contempt.”
I’ve been doing this series for the show on the populist right, and so I’ve been spending a lot of time in what people on the populist right have been writing. And I’m really struck by the potency of this exact thing, this feeling that society’s current elites — like, what they like to call often, like, the managerial class, or liberals, or whoever it might be — that they’re out there telling you, you’re racist, you’re sexist, you’re bigoted, you’re backwards, you’re deplorable.
And there they are, taking millions of dollars from Goldman Sachs and jet setting all around the world, and telling you how bad climate change is while they fly in their private jets and have their big mansions. And you know, you can poke holes in this, but there is something, I think, to the power at least of this feeling, the power of what it feels like to believe that you’re being judged morally suspect by people who are themselves morally suspect, but simply control the mechanisms by which virtue is assigned.
And that — out of that comes a real desire for somebody who says, screw those mechanisms, screw who decides whether or not you’re virtuous, or kind, or good. I’m going to break this whole thing wide open.
This is how cynicism creates the conditions for the possibility of Trump. If you're openly corrupt, you are perceived as morally superior to the hypocrites who insist they are not, and then have the nerve to judge you. This is the mentality of the GOP right now. They assume that the Democrats are as corrupt and hypocritical as they are, and some, of course, are. This is why the Biden/Burisma business was so important to them. It was to draw a moral equivalence between him and Trump. But a difference in degree is a difference in kind, and the degree of corruption and hypocrisy of GOP leadership is significantly worse in degree. But that's impossible to argue with people who have swallowed the cynicism pill.
UPDATE: Is cynicism realism? From George Packer:
Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin are star political reporters for The New York Times, and their scoops in This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and the Battle for America’s Future have already made headlines. But the book is more interesting than just for perishable news that will attract ogling Washington insiders. It’s a document of decline and fall—a chronicle that should cause future readers to ponder how American leaders in the early 21st century lost the ability and will to govern. Step back from the page-by-page account of congressional Republicans’ desperate grasping for Donald Trump’s favor or the Biden administration’s struggle to pass its legislative agenda: You’re confronted with a world of almost unrelieved cowardice, cynicism, myopia, narcissism, and ineptitude, where the overriding motive is the pursuit of power for its own sake. It’s rare that a politician thinks about any cause higher than self-interest.
The book’s Democrats are at least sane, but they’re beset by petty quarrels, forever trying to solve the “identity politics’ Rubik’s cube,” and dragged down by a pervasive exhaustion; their elderly leaders are unable to grasp the brutal political forces swirling around them. The Republicans are hell-bent on the destruction of American democracy, or else too craven to stand in the way—the result is the same. Each party has a handful of impressive young politicians, but because they take governing seriously, they’re probably doomed to obscurity or defeat.
The vote to keep Democrats in control is not a vote for a solution; it's a vote for the maintenance of some level of sanity and stability. The solution has to come from a shift in the cultural sphere. How that happens I don't know, but our problems deep down are metaphysical, not political. The solution, if it is to work must involve a mythos, a theology if you will, that embraces a collective positive future possibility that is broadly embraced. In lieu of that, a regressive mythos of blood and nation will fill the vacuum. The problem with the Democrats is that they have have constructive policies but no mythos. The problem with the Republicans is that they have a mythos but no constructive policies.