After the Future

Some Random Thoughts on the American Character

I never quite grasped why Jefferson and Adams were so discouraged by the way the country had democratized by the 1820s. Wasn't that what they, especially Jefferson, had hoped for? I tended to dismiss their concerns as a snooty elitism. But I understand it differently now, especially in light of Trump’s ascendancy. Reading Wood, Howe, and Potter over the last several months has set me straight about that. There was a snootiness in it, but also there were good reasons for them to be appalled. 

The “populism” that dismayed Jefferson and Adams was the kind of populism that lifted Trump into power. Adams' and Jefferson’s republican ideals —and really the ideals of the entire revolutionary generation—seem quaintly naïve over against the crude, myopically interest-driven energies released after the Revolution. The most active Americans were remarkably ignorant and short-sighed, they were drunks, they were all too inclined to run with the mob, they white supremacists and nativists who exhibited a barbaric violence toward Blacks and Indians, and they indulged in a kind of grandiosity about being an American that fed their delusions and their worst instincts. America was a nasty, nasty place in the 19th Century. There is very little about it to be nostalgic about. 

The old republican ideals were payed lip service to, but played hardly any role in the dynamic realities shaping the political and economic spheres. Everything was transactional. Everybody in the private sector was on the make and in the public sector you were considered an idiot if you weren't on the take. You know the picture we have about the lawless, wild west in the period after the Civil War? That's the way it was back East before it.

It's a mentality that made America economically dynamic, for sure, but also what made it shallow and cruel. It's the America that Trump envisions when he wants to make it great again because Trump's America appeals to whatever is shallow, cruel, and short-sighted in the American character. Trump's candidacy and now his presidency have shown how fragile the norms that have suppressed what has always been there as the ugliest aspects of the American character. And what has become clearer to me is not that Trump is an aberration, but rather he is a reversion to the 19th century, pre-Progressive Era norm. He's the culmination, if not the reductio ad absurdum, of the Republican project that began with Reagan in 1980 to dismantle the reforms that made the U.S. a relatively decent place to live for a while.

What we see in Trump's kakistocracy (look it up) is very much in line with that part of the American character. The Mueller investigation seems to be approaching its climax. It seems to be big news that Cohen has come public about lying about not having contact with the Russians during Trump’s 2016 campaign. People think this is a big deal because it shows that Trump was dealing with the Russians to promote his own business interests in such a way that could compromise the country’s interests. But we know this already, and do we have any confidence that Mueller's proving it will make a difference?

The talking heads on TV keep telling us that the Trump people are second raters who cannot withstand Mueller’s attack. But it’s amazing to me that the elites in this country have put up with Trump this long, and it’s simply because the elite factions disgusted by Trump simply don’t have enough power anymore to push him out.  A piece in the NYT today sums it up:

The allure of a Mueller report lies in its imagined promise of a single, definitive truth capable of cutting through the haze of lies, confusion and “alternative facts.” But Mr. Corsi’s and Mr. Papadopoulos’s antics are a warning that this hope will inevitably fall short. Conspiracy theorists and prosecutors live in different worlds: The first, unmoored from truth; the second, devoted to proving facts beyond a reasonable doubt. Mr. Mueller has the power to charge Mr. Corsi for lying; he has already done so to Mr. Papadopoulos. Rather than crumbling, though, their falsehoods have continued to spread and grow — and they’ve taken root in the media ecosystem in which the president chooses to spend his days. 

In this environment, the question is less what Mr. Mueller will do next and more what Congress and the American people will do with the information they already have.

By now it’s clear that the special counsel is not armed with a silver bullet, not because the facts are not bad for the president but precisely because they are. If facts were enough, Mr. Trump would already have been impeached.

The Republican Party and Fox News are more than ok with Trump and his unprecedented awfulness. They represent the America that appalled Jefferson and Adams that I described above. The Republicans have become the party of incompetent ideologues and grifters who think that America is at its best when it is a crude, un-regulated circus where the most cunning kleptocrats can engorge themselves on the public teat. They want to destroy the whole American public infrastructure for reasons they don’t even understand because their ignorance, venality, and short-term thinking blinds them to the consequences of their actions. (If this isn't obvious to you already, read Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk.) But tens of millions of American think that any accusations about Trump and his cronies' corruption and incompetence is fake news. The Democrats are just as bad, they argue. How do you penetrate that kind of filter?

***

Trump doesn't frighten me nearly as much as the breathtaking stupidity, the willful ignorance, the childish resentfulness, and the ideological blindness of the Americans who allowed themselves to be conned by him. Their psychology is very similar to the kind of delusional psychology that led to the Civil War. I understand better now how this kind of ignorance and stupidity can take hold after reading Howe and Potter. At the time of the founding and even into the first couple of decades of the 19^thcentury, everyone, including southern elites, was embarrassed about slavery. It was an unhealthy thing, like smoking or drinking too much. It's something that everybody wanted to stop, but they kept procrastinating about because it would be hard to do. 

And then around 1820 with the Missouri crisis, it became clear that the slaveholders no longer wanted to give slavery up, and they started looking for ways to justify it. They were  rather like the drunk who comes up with any rationalization to keep drinking. And like the drunk who is really deeply ashamed of his having a problem, he denies it. And because he cannot face it, he becomes indignant when someone confronts him about it. He tells the person to mind his own business, and maybe takes a swing at him. 

States Rights and Nullification become the ideological justifications to beat back the busy-body northerners. Southern nationalists like Calhoun become localists in the name of protecting slavery from Federal interdict. And after 1830, in the wake of the Nat Turner slave rebellion, this shame is compounded by an intensified fear that the cruelty that they have inflicted on their slaves will in turn be inflicted on them if the slaves are ever freed. What goes around comes around is a deep source of fear for the violent and cruel. Black slaves come to represent all their repressed fear and shame, and rather than face it, they must double down to make sure they keep it repressed. This subconscious drama gets acted out in ante-bellum Slavery politics and after the war in the fantasy of the Lost Cause and the cruelty of Jim Crow. 

Anything that threatens to weaken Slaveholder control threatens to unleash all these dark, repressed, violently irrational parts of the Southern psyche. A fantasy about Southern nobility and gentility begins to develop. Southern elites begin to think they are not morally inferior for being slaveholders, but rather morally superior to Northerners. Those Yankees don’t have the nobility of soul to understand what makes their Southern way of life so sweet, so civilized as compared to their money-grubbing, mercantile ways.

Theological digression: Everybody feels ontological shame; all humans feel that they don’t measure up, that they’ve failed, even if they cannot understand quite why. Call it original sin or whatever you please; it's just built in to the human condition. And so much of human motivation is about compensating for the feeling of shame and inadequacy that is its chief symptom. It might be a cliché, but it points to a real truth about why the greatest achievers are often those who feel most intensely this “ontological” inadequacy. It drives them to do almost anything to get rid of it.

And that's why 'pride' is considered by the wise to be among the worst human characteristics. Pride is not a sense of one's inherent dignity as someone born in the image and likeness of God. Pride is a false image of ourselves that we fabricate to overcome our sense of ontological shame. That's why the tradition has always been suspicious about human effort. It's not that effort is bad in itself, but rather that the effort is more often than not in the service of the wrong motivation--that it's a causa sui project, and as such delusional because we are not causa sui. That is the fundamental insight of the person of faith and the reason why gratitude, not pride, is the fundamental precondition of a life well lived. And this is why American culture, for all its ostensible religiosity, is fundamentally delusional. It is a prideful, greedy, and ungrateful culture through and through

And so the one thing that people cannot stand is to be accused of doing anything shameful by someone whom they see as no better. And in a kind of deep ontological sense we are right to think that our accusers are no better. We’re all projecting our deep-down ontological sense of shame onto others. And that’s why the gospels admonish us not to judge or accuse others, because more likely than not what we see in others is just a reflection of what is in ourselves that we don’t want to face.

But complementing this suppressed shame is a transcultural honor fantasy that is central to sustaining this pathology. It's called "losing face", when the "face" is the delusional construct, the mask we wear that masks the deep truth about who we are. The honor fantasy is a delusional fantasy about our identity being the same as the mask we present to the world, that part of ourselves we've constructed that’s captured in our reputation. And when that reputation is challenged as fraudulent by someone, we feel a deep, angry hostility toward whoever would shame us by doing so.

But everyone captured by the honor fantasy is by definition a fraud because the whole idea of one's 'honor' is a delusional construct designed to keep you from confronting who you really are. If you lived in ante-bellum America and other places, your honor would require you to fight to the death to defend this fantasy, because nothing is more unbearable to people who have become identified with their "honor" than to face the deep truth about their ontological inadequacy. And this, in brief, is why we fought the Civil War, and it's why so many Americans cannot admit why their vote for Donald Trump was a disaster. You must cling to the fantasy at all costs, because once it bursts there's nothing to hold onto to prevent your plunge into that deep vat of ontological shame. 

So whenever we judge or accuse others, it's more likely than not that they are just going to dig in and come to a far more rigid defense of their delusional thinking. So better not to judge, right?  But then you have this problem of an entire social system behaving toward other human beings in a way that is horrifically cruel and living in a fantasy that justifies it. And just as you have a loved one with a wife-beating problem, you can’t just do nothing. You have to intervene. And this is where things tend to go off the rails, especially when you call the police, all of whom have a wife-beating problem, metaphorically speaking. This was essentially the situation that the relatively sane and decent people had in confronting slaveholder delusions in the ante-bellum south.

Now while the Abolitionists wanted the southerners to go cold turkey, the free-soil types thought that it was impossible to tell the southerners to quit, so they adopted a strategy of containment. The Wilmot Proviso introduced in 1846 initiates a pitched battle fought not about the existence of slavery where it already existed, but about whether slavery, in principle, should be allowed in the territories opened up by the Mexican cession. Here’s it’s wording:

Provided, That, as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico by the United States, by virtue of any treaty which may be negotiated between them, and to the use by the Executive of the moneys herein appropriated, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory, except for crime, whereof the party shall first be duly convicted.

Ironically this statement is modeled on the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which was uncontroversial when formulated for reasons explained above, and it shows how much things had changed since the founding. The slaveholders didn’t want to be contained anymore. To agree to a containment policy in the new territories would be "dishonorable"; it would imply that to be a slaveholder was to be morally inferior, and the Southern honor fantasy could not be sustained if they were to give in on that.

There were other factors besides honor, of course. The economic and power dynamic was always a factor, and the southerners were justifiably afraid of being outnumbered in Congress if they didn’t match the admission of each new ‘free’ state with a ‘slave’ state. And they understandably feared that no matter what people said in 1846, they would not have the power to resist a future abolitionist congress. The slaveholders understood deep down that they were on the wrong side of history, and they did everything they could to keep the tide from rising.

And in the short run they succeeded. They controlled the Senate, and their threats of secession forced concessions that were wins for them:  In the Compromise of 1850 with its notorious Fugitive Slave Act, in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1855 that repealed the Missouri Compromise, in the Dred Scott decision in '57 that made slavery legal even in the states that had banned it, and in '58 the astonishingly fraudulent pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution for Bleeding Kansas that President Buchanan rammed through. Mitch McConnell is playing the same game. He's read his history, and he's learned a thing or two from his ante-bellum ancestors. It remains to be seen whether his victories will be as Pyrrhic. 

So the Civil War ends in slavehollder defeat. Six hundred thousand dead. For what? For Southern honor? If it was just about the money, they could have worked it out. The Civil War, like most wars, is always about something else, something deeper  and darker in the human psyche. Sometimes, a war though, knocks some sense into those who waged it, but not true for the South. The honor fantasy morphs into the Lost Cause fantasy, and a deep-seated culture of resentment develops there. Slavery ends officially, and while Black Americans get a taste of freedom for a decade or so, it's quickly back to the same old, same old as the white shame-repression fantasy reasserts itself. Black Americans find themselves getting 'repressed' in whatever way it's still possible for white people to do it. 

A part of the fantasy is still to see Northerners as soulless, money-grubbing grifters, which, of course, many are. But then this curious thing happens when Donald Trump runs for office. There is no one in the history of American politics who embodies the kind of person Southerners hate more than Donald Trump. He is the king of the grifters. He owns casinos, for gods sakes. And yet there he is, playing his blatant, pandering con, and they embrace him like a long, lost brother. So now we've got the worst of the North embraced by the worst of the South.

And we have to ask what is there in the American character in the long term to push back against this deep-seated worst? In the short term, sure, people in the mushy middle who voted for him and kakistocrats like him vote for the other party. We saw this a couple of weeks ago. Why am I not relieved? Because too many deeply awful, ignorant, delusional people beat truly decent and intelligent ones, and because it won't take long for the kakisitocrats to regroup where they've lost. They want power in a way that ordinary, decent Americans don't. Decent Americans can say No when things get egregiously bad, but they can't win in the long run until there's something truly decent to which they can say Yes. 

Donald Trump is not an aberration, he is an exemplar of a long tradition of American bad actors who have played too large a role in shaping our history. People like him and his supporters are deeply ignorant, delusional people living in a self-worth magnification fantasy. The only real cure is intervention by people who are wise and compassionate, and who can point to an alternative, reality-based meaning story that gives all Americans a robust imagination of future possibility. We have to hope and pray that some how, some way, a movement will arise in America that can promote such an alternative. I think there is a fundamental, latent decency in every human being, but you have to have a cultural story that activates it. And until we do, MAGA, or variations of it. wins by default. 

Albee's "The Goat" or A Discourse on Ontological Dizziness

Last weekend I saw a very good student production of Edward Albee's The Goat or Who Is Silvia? It's the story of Martin Gray, a successful architect and gentle, loving husband and father, someone that typifies the kind of educated, cosmopolitan person who would go and see an Edward Albee play in Blue America. Martin, however, becomes enraptured with and starts sleeping with a goat named Silvia, and the play examines how family and friends react when they learn of his breaking the bestiality taboo, and how each falls into a state that I call ontological dizziness.

Ontological Dizziness (OD) is an experience that many people are having with increasing frequency: one is walking along in a world that seems securely grounded in reality, but then finds that all the while he was walking while balancing on a fraying tightrope over an abyss--and that there's no certainty that the rope is anchored securely anywhere ahead.  Cultural Liberals and Traditionalist Conservatives in this country in their different ways experience themselves walking on firm ground, but they have been doing it in what I like to think of as Reality Simulation Orbs, and these orbs for both groups are breaking down.

By 'simulation' I mean that people, all of us, live in symbolic systems that provide models of reality that work with data given by Reality, but these symbolic systems interpret the data in any number of possible ways depending on the cultural download that runs the simulation. It's a simulation because it gives us a model of reality and not reality itself. Our acculturation runs a program that takes the data given by Reality and assembles it into patterns that make a kind of sense of it. The best simulations work with the broadest range of accurate data, but even when a simulation works with good data, it always filters out more than it lets in.

We know there's real data, and we know when our simulation fails to interpret it correctly. How? Well, when we make mistakes, i.e., when our simulation isn't reflecting accurately what's there, we pay the price. For instance, Neocons were working with a Reality Simulation in which invading Iraq and replacing Saddam Hussein would be a cakewalk. Their reality simulation worked with some data that was accurate, but their simulation failed because it filtered out too much data, data that was actually readily available, and that's what made their plan so egregiously foolish. We can't know everything, but the definition of foolishness is to reject good data because it challenges the assumptions of that govern our simulation orb. Reality has a way of asserting itself when we filter out the parts of it that insist on being taken seriously. 

I think that most human mistakes are caused by the fact that all simulation orbs--even the best of them--work with incomplete data, and so the programs that run the simulation can only provide best guesses in their interpretation of the data available to it. If the simulation program seems to work, we assume it's interpretations of the data are good enough, at least until they don't work. And because Reality is dynamic and continuously transforming, sooner or later simulations break down or need to be upgraded to make the necessary adjustments. So, for instance, it no longer works for most of us to think that the woods are full of spirits, that the gods control our destiny, that the sun rotates around the earth. Or more recently that Blacks and Native American are subhumans who deserve to be treated like the animals or just wiped from the face of the earth.

Most people live in simulations that have made the appropriate adjustments, but many have not. Those who operate in simulations that filter out important data given in a particular society's historical reality have a harder time navigating in the real world. They experience OD with greater intensity than others, and substance abuse, joining cults, or engaging in extremist politics are coping mechanisms for some victims of OD. And some feel OD with such intensity that they will do anything they think necessary to restore the simulation that gives them a sense of security and order. Some of the mass shootings we've seen in recent years are motivated by vengeance, but many of them are motivated by a need to restore the old Reality Simulation that the shooters feel is being undermined by those they shoot.

Capitalism and technological innovation are amoral, anarchic forces that have, like the proverbial bull in the china shop, destroyed every traditional culture into which it has come into contact. Either the people who live in those cultures adjust to the new data or they don't. Liberals are people who have adjusted, and Conservatives are people who have not. The strength of operating within the Liberal Reality Simulation is that it's better adapted to the creative destructive forces of techno-capitalism; the disadvantage is that is that its adaptation has left behind aspects of the older simulations that worked with real data regarding transcendent dimensions of Reality, aspects of Reality that transcended randomness and anarchic change.

The Liberal Simulation has developed in such a way that transcendent data has been filtered out. But that doesn't mean there is no such data available. Conservatives on the other hand cling to aspects of the older reality that affirms transcendence, but they do it in a a way that is deeply maladapted to Reality in a reality shaped by the creative destructive aspects of contemporary techno-Capitalism. 

Progress, until recently, has been intrinsic to the Liberal program, but the new data given by the reality of the World Wars, the dropping of the atom bomb, the unraveling of traditional cultural norms in the sixties and seventies, the failure of the Political Left almost everywhere since the 80s has led the Progressive Left to surrender to the anarchy of markets and to a rejection of any grand narratives that suggests there is anything but anarchy. And so at least among the elite in the Cultural Left, their simulation Orb no longer allows for narratives in which some kind of better future is a possibility, because the word "better" really is a word fraught with metaphysical assumptions that are no longer part of their simulation. Randomness is all, so learn to live with it. 

***

This idea of Ontological Dizziness, I would argue, is a key to understanding what Albee is up to in The Goat.At first I thought his play was going to be just another transgressive exercise in shock and norm busting, but I think he's trying to give the audience an experience of what's causing its OD. And so it struck me that the play is a rather conservative statement about the human condition, in that it seeks to point out that all human beings, even well-educated cosmopolitan, tolerant, live-and-let-live Liberals, need cultural norms and taboos, because when they are subverted, they experience OD that just as their conservative opponents do. They are more like them than they might want to acknowledge. Whether Albee thinks that's a good or bad thing, I don't know. But the underlying point seems to be that we have these filtering systems because we cannot deal with too much reality.

So, let's go with the basic Freudian/Lacanian assumption, as Albee seems to do, that all human beings are polymorphously perverse in their desires but those desires are repressed by the Oedipus Complex, the cultural download of codes and taboos that we all receive as children. Humans, no matter what their culture, have the Oedipus Complex, which generates the codes in the symbolic sphere--the Reality Simulation-- that gives humans their sense of order, an order that no sane person can live without. It creates the program--different for different cultures--that the simulation orb plays for us.

In Albee's play, Stevie, Martin's wife, finds herself precisely in this condition of Ontological Dizziness. Her Reality Simulation Orb has been shattered with the revelation that her "normal" husband is having an affair with a goat. So, after her violent, dish-throwing, furniture-overturning rant during the middle of the play when she learns about her husband's "infidelity", she goes out to find Silvia, the goat, severs her head, and hauls the carcass onto the stage in the play's final moment. It's pretty horrifying. 

After the curtain came down, the actors and directors came out to discuss the play with the audience. And I asked these very urban-hip, intelligent students whether they thought Stevie had over-reacted. "Why couldn't she be more tolerant and understanding of her husband?" I asked. I was curious to see how far their non-judgmental, anything-goes-so-long-as-you-don't-hurt-anybody ethic extended. Apparently it does not extend to bestiality.  All the students thought that Stevie's violent freak-out was completely understandable, and that this was not a play celebrating bestiality, which clearly, they all thought was horrifying.

Apparently some sexual taboos are still in place with this generation. But why should bestiality be so horrifying if taboos are just arbitrary social constructions? Isn't that what these students have come to believe about all the traditional taboos that govern the ethos of Rural America? Why is bestiality different? Martin makes clear that his relationship with Silvia was consensual, and that his love for her was reciprocated. Who are we to judge? And by what standard do we judge?

Anyway, it wouldn't surprise me if Albee was familiar with Derrida's famous 1969 essay, "Plato's Pharmacy" in which Derrida plays with the Greek word pharmakos and pharmakon. Pharmakos has the ambivalent meaning of a potion that can be both cure and poison; pharmakon is the Greek word for goat. In the play, Silvia, the goat, is a potion that both poisons and cures. It is poison as the kind of potion, like Puck's in Midsummer Night's Dream, that induces Titania to swoon for the ass-headed Bottom.

But is the potion something that creates delusion, or is it rather something that induces 'disinhibition' insofar as it lets in heretofore filtered-out aspects of Reality--in this case Martin's repressed polymorphous perversity that is no respecter of taboos in the way it eroticizes everything. Someone like Norman O. Brown (remember him?) would say that a retrieval of polymorphous perversity and its ecstasy is the goal--and even argues that its attainment is the true meaning of the Christian idea of Resurrection of the Body. A guy like Martin is closer to it than Stevie and the others who are so appalled by his breaking of this taboo. Is the pharmakon a blue pill or a red pill? Is it the red pill insofar as it dissolves the Oedipal simulation orb? Or is it the blue pill insofar as it restores the old simulation and the sense of sanity, safety, and order it provides? Or to put it another way, which pill is the poison and which the cure?

So Martin's encounter with Silvia is like his having taken a potion that induces him to leave his particular late-modern, taboo-constrained Oedipal Reality and to enter a kind of Norman O Brown ecstasy state. Stevie and the others are appalled by the breaking of the taboo, by the disgust that is evoked by the physical act, but for Martin it's all about the ecstasy, an ecstasy he knows the others cannot understand because they have not taken the potion.The old Liberal, taboo-constrained Simulation is dissolved, and he goes into a new, polymorphously perverse orb of de-tabooed ecstatic Desire.

Is Martin ill? Or is Stevie? Or are they both? Now, to step outside the Oedipal Simulation in Freudian terms is mental illness. The degree to which one steps out determines whether one's illness is neurosis or psychosis. So do both need a cure? Which pill to take then--the red or the blue? They both are experiencing aspects of Reality outside the Oedipal System that in their case is defined by the Liberal cosmopolitan Simulation Orb. It has broken down in different ways for both; it's just that Martin does not feel the need to return to the old order whereas Stevie does, and so she acts in uncharacteristically violent ways for a tolerant, cosmopolitan liberal in order that she might restore the old order.

***

And so it struck me that one of the takeaways for these students--and all Liberal, cosmopolitan audiences--is that everybody has taboo systems, and everybody needs them, and when they are subverted, it's understandable that people react as Stevie did, And it's completely understandable that she wants to go back into the old simulation--she wants that blue pill. But if Stevie's violent reaction to the subversion of the bestiality taboo is understandable, isn't the violent reaction of Red America to the subversion of its taboos equally understandable?

The question here is not about what's right or wrong in any ultimate sense, but in just understanding the role that taboos play in keeping us sane. There is nothing absolute about superego, but we need one. The question is how to transform it so that it does its job of preserving our sanity while at the same time it becomes more permeable to a broader, richer experience of Reality.

And I would add that superego always assumes some kind of grand narrative. Collective sanity--a cure for our chronic OD--cannot be restored without there being some plausible collective imagination of future possibility that is grounded in Reality. The challenge for us is not to live without such a narrative, but to develop a good one, one that works with the real data that Reality provides for us. Reality is in large part chaotic and anarchic, but what's more important is that humans learn how to work with those energies lawfully.  

And we don't have a narrative for that yet, at least not one that has broad acceptance. But for me such a narrative will be firmly anchored in the past as well as in the future. We may never be able to live outside a Reality Simulation Orb, but we can keep developing better orbs that use higher levels of good data and are flexible enough to adapt as new, higher quality data becomes available. And that includes data given to us that transcends the anarchic, destructive forces that otherwise will continue to drive history. 

 

Quote of the Day: Christopher Browning

If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. (Source: "The Suffociationn of Democracy" in the NYRB)

I think an argument could be made that historians will judge Newt Gingrich's role as Speaker in the 90s  as the real culprit, but McConnell's role in the destruction of the Senate has been remarkable for its myopic effectiveness.. 

Thoughts on the Kavanagh Affair

When he was first nominated, I saw Kavanagh much as I saw Gorsuch: an establishment figure who leans conservative, and thought that's what you're going to get because clueless establishment Democrats allowed Donald Trump to win the election. But better someone like him than someone like Harriet Myers or Clarence Thomas, or someone else who's crazy or ignorant, in other words more like Trump. I was disturbed later to hear of his role in the Starr investigations, and of his role as a Republican operative in the early part of his career. He's different from Gorsuch in that respect. But it seemed kind of stupid for Democrats, except for the political optics, to fight his nomination. He appeared until recently to be as good as we were going to get. 

When the Blasey Ford accusation first came to light, my first reaction, as I'm sure was the reaction of many if not most Americans was--"Really, we're going back to high school now to find ways to stop these nominations?"  I realize that politics is blood sport, and that the Dems are really angry at Mitch McConnell and the way he treated Merritt Garland, but this and the timing and all the things that Republicans complained about  seemed pretty pretty low. Nevertheless, it became clear fairly quickly that the accusation was very likely true and was supported by other circumstantial facts. And let's not kid ourselves--every Republican who supports Brett Kavanagh knows that he's lying and that Blasey Ford is telling the truth. 

I don't believe for a minute that Kavanagh didn't do the things that he's accused of doing, but there's a reasonable case to be made that stuff that happened in high school and college should not be determinative of the possibilities for people thirty years later, especially if their lives and careers have been exemplary since then. But very quickly it became clear that it wasn't about what happened, but about Kavanagh's fundamental truthfulness and ability to own up and move past stupid, drunken stuff he did as a kid.

And that's where in my view he failed completely. He unequivocally denied what every honest person sees plainly is the truth, and this alone is disqualifying. Yesterday's statement before the Senate Judiciary Committee further aggravated his credibility and questions about his fitness. At this moment it remains to be seen whether there are two or three swing votes among the Republicans that will block his nomination.

For the rest of the Republicans the issue is not what's true or not, but whether they can get away with ramming his nomination through. The Republicans see this as a purely tactical problem--regular order, norms, etc. be damned.  The Dems have played their best cards and now it's up to them to do the same. Their strategy is to complain about the politics of personal destruction, and that has some traction. I can see how making public at the last minute a woman's accusation about events that happened over thirty years ago seems unfair. But politics is blood sport, and it came out, and then the question becomes how does Kavanagh and his supporters deal with it. And from my pov it's hard to imagine how they could have handled it worse. 

I think that any reasonable person would have preferred that Blasey Ford's accusations to have been taken care of behind closed doors so that Kavanagh could have made a considered decision about whether he wanted to put his family through the ugliness that was sure to follow should he choose to fight. I can understand why they suspect Feinstein of gamesmanship on this. So what? The Republicans are finally on the receiving end of tactics that they would have used themselves if the positions were reversed. But once the accusations were public, he reacted in the worst possible way by denying what would become clear to everyone is undeniable, and so this compounded his problems and boxed him into a corner. Now, not only does his behavior as a teenager and young adult raise questions about his fitness, but so does his fundamental honesty and capacity to own up to what he did. It's a pretty ugly picture. 

Kavanagh, after having been confronted with Blasey Ford's accusations, should have withdrawn or if he chose to fight it, should have fought through it with a different strategy. He should have admitted the stupidity and awfulness of his behavior as a non-adult, showed contrition for whatever harm he caused, and then focused on his productivity and accomplishments as a adult and public figure since then. He would then argue it's on that basis, not the basis of what he did as a seventeen-year-old or college kid that should determine whether he's fit to serve on the supreme court. This may or may not have worked, but at least it would have been an attempt to be honest, and it would have told us something positive about his character, his humanity, his ability to be honest with himself and the public, that whatever he did as a kid is not who he is now. And at the very least would have provided a much easier path for the Republicans and even some Democrats to vote for him. 

But that's not what he did. Instead, he presented himself in court yesterday in such a way that it's easier for me to believe that the nasty, belligerent drunk he has been portrayed as is still there lurking under the surface and will come out if provoked. He presented himself as a right-wing tribalist following Trump's dictum to deny, deny, deny. It should be clear to everyone that while clearly he's more sophisticated, as a matter of fundamental character, he is no better or more fit for office than the man who nominated him.

Zizek, McCain, Trump, and Big Daddy

I'm no expert on Slavoj Zizek, the Lacanian psychotherapist and edgy philosopher from Slovenia, but I find his distinction between the Oedipal Father Figure and the Primal Father Figure an interesting frame through which to observe the events surrounding the death of John McCain in the last week. Elites in the American media and political establishments leapt at the opportunity to lionize John McCain as an exemplar of an American code of honor and service that contrasted with Donald Trump's pettiness and self-serving venality. In Zizek's frame, McCain is an exemplar of an ethos dominated by the Oedipal Father, the mythological successor figure to the Primal Father figure for which Trump is an exemplar. These archetypes work in each of us, at levels of unconsciousness most people are unaware of. They have reality-defining power.

The Primal Father in Freud's and Zizek's mythos represents self-assertion in the service of self-gratification--the Primal Father is the crude bull moose who maintains by force a monopoly of access to the females in the herd; he has no rules, no honor except the prestige of being the herd alpha and doing as he pleases without constraint. Just try to stop him. The Oedipal father, on the other hand, represents duty in the service of group cohesiveness and a strict group code--honor, service.

The problem for Zizek is that both in their different ways create constructs that Freud called the Superego, that Zizek called the Big Other, and that I'm calling Big Daddy. The Superego works at an unconscious level to shape our feelings of guilt and of self worth insofar as we we live up to the behavior and attitudes the code demands. Our feelings of self-worth as successes or failures is determined by the Code. So in McCain's case, his sense of success as a human being depended on how well he measures up to the Oedipal superego, while Trump's sense of success depends on how well he measures up to the superego as defined by the Primal Father figure. 

In McCain's case, his family was military. His grandfather and father were both admirals. His family programmed his superego with an old-fashioned code of military stoicism, honor, service, and self-sacrifice. In many ways he lived that code, and in many ways he failed to. That's the way it is for most people for whom such a code is a strong influence in their acculturation. The superego, the internal Big Daddy, creates both an image of what one's ideal self should be, but it also represses energies that Zizek describes as perversions of the code, and are a source of continuous temptation to transgress the code. Jung calls these repressed aspects of the psyche the Shadow. 

It explains a lot of our everyday experience, for instance, why "good' girls" find "bad boys" so attractive. Bad boys represent the repressed energies that living in accordance with the Oedipal code produce. The more rigid the adherence to the code, the more repressed these energies. But one way or another they seek an outlet through transgression or 'sin'. The more repressed the dark energies, the more joyously liberated one feels when he or she transgresses them--until the guilt sets in.

But here's the thing, first noted by St. Paul in Romans 4:15: If there's no code, there's no transgression. If there's no law, there's no sin. So it follows that If there's no superego, there's no guilt. Getting rid of the superego is Zizek's project. And while Zizek sees the Church as the chief reinforcer of superego--the Church must have a law or code otherwise there would be no sinners, and if there were no sinners, there would be no need for redemption or for the Church to mediate that redemption. Well, ok, but Paul, of course, was arguing that he was liberated from the law by awakening to a deeper, transcendent source of order. But I agree with Zizek that the church often operates as if that 'awakening' had little to do with its raison d'être. 

So the Big Daddy operates in our psyche like a repressive dictator who punishes us with intense feelings of guilt and self-loathing when we fail to live up to its ideals, while at the same time it creates its perverse opposite, energies within the psyche that seek to subvert its rule and transgress its code in rebellious ways. McCain is a classic example of living the tension between being the good boy and the bad boy. His "maverickness" is related to the second, and In the past week we celebrated how he was an exemplar of the first. But we didn't talk about his partying, how he dumped his devoted first wife for a woman eighteen years younger, how he got involved in bank scandal that was related to his second wife's family's business, his ambivalent record and attitudes about race, etc. 

Very Trumpy stuff there, but America at this moment needs an exemplar of the Oedipal Big Daddy to contrast with someone who almost in every way transgresses its codes. McCain is honored for the ways in which he strove to act honorably, and he is forgiven for the ways that he failed. That's fine, so far as it goes. He's like most everybody else that way, and his eulogizers do what almost all eulogizers do, which is to celebrate how the eulogized embodied the community's values and to overlook the ways he or she failed to. He tried and sometimes succeeded--at least he tried. Trump doesn't bother to try even in the least degree. It would be shameful for him to be honorable because within the Primal Father archetype honor is complete b.s. and hypocrisy. Power and enjoyment are the only thing that matter.

Zizek says that the Oedipal--strict social norms--Father figure shaped American society until the 1960s when it was supplanted by a version of the Primal Father figure that has shaped since then what we think of as the postmodern. The postmodern ethos is shaped by a mandate to gratify one's appetites unconstrained by traditional repressive norms and traditions. The superego of people shaped by the Primal Big Daddy commands them to satisfy his or her appetites. It has little regard for the common good or commitments that would constrain the pursuit of those appetites. This is the 'code' that took hold in the 1970s, and has played a huge role in shaping popular and elite culture. It is the perfect ethos for consumer capitalism, and is justified by a neoliberal ideology in the political and economic spheres. And is there anybody who embodies it more fully and unambiguously than Donald Trump?

But Zizek points out that rather being truly psychically liberating, the Primal Big Daddy  'superego' comes with its own set of commands, which boil down to something like this: “Thou shalt satisfy your appetites. Thou must thereby enjoy and fulfill thyself in whatever way you see fit." And so it follows that any kind of self-denial or sacrifice for a higher good is repressive and alienating. [I should point out that Zizek is somewhat muddled (if not completely bonkers) in this regard when contrasting this kind of thralldom to superego with his idea about "desire" and  "immoral ethics", for whom someone like Robespierre was an exemplar, but I don't want to get too far afield here.]

But the problem with this new command lies in that it doesn't bring real enjoyment. At best it's a kind of sterile enjoyment. A more robust form of enjoyment was a possibility in the old Oedipal regime in a way it is not for those living under the rule of the Primal Father. Before there was a liberating joy in the transgressive act, but if the new rule is to transgress without there being a broadly respected repressive code to transgress, there’s no fun in it. Enjoyment becomes a grind. We have to find new traditional constraints and taboos to become liberated from. That's where the fun is--in identifying and breaking whatever unbroken taboos are left. 

Someone like McCain always honored the code of the militarist, authoritarian Big Daddy, even if he failed on occasion to live up to it. The Primal Big Daddy has no respect for the old codes, sees them as impediments to the fulfillment of his appetites, sees those who are constrained by them as repressed fools, and finds its sense of identity and moral mission in flouting whatever vestiges of that code remain.

And that's the difference between John McCain and Donald Trump. Trump is an exemplar of the Primal Big Daddy code. McCain saw himself as a rebel because he believed in the code, but Trump isn't a rebel because there are no codes he believes in. He is a bull moose for whom there  is no rule except to do whatever satisfies his appetites. He only feels a sense of self-loathing when he fails to get what he wants. There is no honor except the prestige that comes with power and humiliating one's foes. There is no sense whatsoever of the validity of the old Oedipal honor code that requires the repression of one's appetites for the good of the community. 

The larger question is whether any society worth living in can do away with an Oedipal Big Daddy. But Is it a question of getting rid of Big Daddy or finding a source of order that subverts his influence? Zizek would probably say that any source of order is a Big Daddy and the ideology that justifies his rule, and every Big Daddy is necessarily a source of repression for those who live under his rule. And repression is by definition a bad thing and liberation is by definition a good thing. But is it, or is it that we need to be liberated from the whole repressive/transgressive system. Is such a thing possible?

I think it is, but it requires a level of self-awareness and maturity that is simply too rare at this point in our collective development to have much of an influence in shaping a truly free and yet ordered i.e., just, society. I believe with MLK that the arc of history bends toward justice, so it's not that what we do now does not matter. We must do what's there for us to do, but we must also realize that the human being's capacity for self-absorption and self-delusion cannot be underestimated, and that most people snap out of their delusions only when reality whacks them upside the head one way or the other. The greater the level of delusion, the more violent is the whack required. In the short run all manner of whacks upside the head seem a necessary precondition for any real movement forward in American society.

Liberation does not come from just transgressing the old repressive codes. Liberation comes only if one can in some way transcend the code, not just transgress it--no matter which Big Daddy's code it is. The post-Axial spiritual traditions, particularly Pauline Christianity and Buddhism, teach that it is possible. Zizek thinks it's possible, too, through his Lacanian brand of psychoanalysis. Seeing similarities and differences here is something I hope to get into in future posts. 

So this past week we were continuously exposed to people praising McCain as an exemplar of the code of honor, service, and self-sacrifice for the greater good, i.e, the American nation state. It's clear that the elite establishment approves of McCain and has nothing but disdain for Trump. And at the same time, all the Trump supporters have nothing but disdain for the elites who eulogized him in the National Cathedral on Saturday.

But the underlying values of the establishment and of Trump's supporters are an incoherent hodgepodge--sometimes praising a code of discipline and sacrifice, other time celebrating an anything-goes code of sating one's appetites however one sees fit. That's what it means to be postmodern--thinking or believing contradictory things, because most are in thrall to contradictory unconscious organization of reality that sometimes celebrates repression and at other times desire, sometimes superego, other times transgression. Most postmoderns are oblivious of their self contradictions or why what they approve or disapprove this or that has any rhyme or reason. They just feel what they feel, and you've no right to judge them. And if they should become aware of their contradictions, they just shrug their shoulders, because there's no center, no ground on which to stand to make such comparisons and judgments. 

Trump is unusual in that he is so unambiguously one thing, so completely, predictably, guiltlessly a man of predatory appetite who is so blithely oblivious of any sense of the old honor codes. He's not conflicted the way most are. He's pure in a most remarkable way for a public figure. He takes the post-sixties ethos of appetite to its extreme, and this is why I think that his libidinal, norm-crashing presidency is not to be feared in itself, but is rather a precursor for an authoritarian backlash that celebrates honor, country, service to the state. The Trump supporters will get behind such an authoritarian regime and its leader because they are not that particular about their violent Big Daddies. They only care about strength, not whether it's honorable or not.

Trump is not the real threat because he is not really an authoritarian. He's too disorganized, impulsive, and self-absorbed to think beyond his own appetites. A real authoritarian is a disciplined true believer and expects others to believe what he does and to submit to his prescribed discipline for the greater good. Trump believes nothing, and is really more a creature of the anarchic Cultural Left in that sense, as are most neoliberal, cosmopolitan elites. But he is someone who provides a gateway for someone who will be a real threat. The violent, appetitive Primal Father eventually loses to the violent Oedipal Authoritarian Father, so the real danger lies in the emergence and popular embrace of an authoritarian Big Daddy who will reassert a repressive code that everybody better get in line with or else.

Elites will embrace the arrival of this kind of Big Daddy because they're tired of the chaos and how nothing works anymore, and because they have lost faith in a democracy that makes possible the presidency of a sleazy con man like Donald Trump. They will embrace any new Big Daddy who will tell them they're better than that and who can free them from their tortured ambiguity and normlessness.

There's a a reason why the military is the only institution that Americans have not lost faith in. So the Big Daddy to come will likely be  ex-military, someone like John McCain or John Kelly, someone disciplined and organized, someone admirable according to the old service-and-honor code, reasonable seeming, upright. But when push comes to shove he will impose their code on the rest of us for the 'greater good', and we will go along because who doesn't want the greater good, especially when things seem so frighteningly chaotic?

See also Moral vs. Moralistic.

 

Cultures of Corruption

In a culture of corruption, like the ones that infected companies like Enron and continue to infect much of Wall Street and the political class in places like Washington, D.C., nobody really believes corruption is wrong. It's accepted simply as how things work, and so if you work in places like that, and you haven't developed a strong, well-established moral grounding, which very few have, you go along with corrupt practices because everybody else does. Ambitious, success-oriented young people take jobs in such places, and that's how you succeed. 

Within cultures of corruption comes a cynicism about there being no other possibility. For someone like Trump the idea of being anything but corrupt is moralistic nonsense and impossible to jibe with his idea of being a winner or to be the great success he imagines himself to be. And so his own corruption is for him and people around him simply normative, and anybody who tries to use corruption as a way of attacking him is not doing it because the attacker genuinely believes that corruption is wrong but because it’s an available weapon to be used for purely partisan purposes. I'm sure that he and hacks like Devin Nunes and Sean Hannity, et al., sincerely believe that. There is no right or wrong; there is only loyalty to the capo. It's called being a team player. We lose when they win, and vice versa, so winning is all that matters. It's that stupid, and it's that crude. 

And so Trump's defenders argue that his corruption is not a big deal, just a technicality, something that no one would care about if he wasn’t president and his accusers had no political axe to grind. Corrupt practice is what rich, white people do everyday. Nothing to see here. Let's move on.

But the American people, particularly so many who voted for Trump, wanted to drain the swamp, and I believe that many Americans, disgusted by how extreme the problem had become were desperate for an extreme solution. And so they naively took Trump at his word that he understood the culture of corruption because he himself has bribed politicians and that because he's rich he isn't vulnerable to those who want to bribe him. That made him sound honest and down to earth. And many people sincerely believed he was a successful businessman and that business people are less corrupt than politicians, so it made sense to send one to clean up the mess in Washington. No matter that he was involved in the Casino business and New York real estate world that is notorious for money laundering and that he would not make his tax returns available for public scrutiny. What could go wrong?

So anybody who knew anything about Trump's career before his candidacy knows he's a media-savvy con man, and that to have elected him was essentially to elect the Fox campaigning to clean up the corrupt chicken house. As with all con men, the fundamental mistake was to believe anything at all about anything they say. I think that many (not most) Trump voters have since the election come to their senses, enough that if the 2020 election were held today, he would lose in a historic landslide. But it's not 2020, and we are likely to have him at least until then unless some kind of pressure can be brought upon him to resign office. (Perhaps with threats to indict his children in some non-federal jurisdiction, as for instance in proceedings brought against the Trump Organization by the New York State Attorney General.)

But even if Trump were to be pushed out somehow, the fundamental problem still remains, which is that both the political and economic spheres in this country are profoundly shaped by a culture of corruption, and while Trump's presidency might expose how egregious this corruption is by his unselfconscious acceptance of it as business as usual, its cultural infrastructure remains when he goes, whether sooner or later.

So the question is whether Trump, in exposing the bankruptcy of the current system, presents the political Left with an opportunity to change things. I think in theory it does, but in practical reality it won't because the Left does not have the moral resources to effect such a change. Obama had an opportunity for significant change in the wake of widespread revulsion with the corruption on Wall Street, but he had the will or the capacity to do it. I doubt that whoever follows Trump will have more will or more capacity.

The solution lies at a deeper level, and that's what makes things intractably difficulty. We need a politics that transcends "interest" if by interest we mean it's in my 'interest' to have better health care or higher paying job or whatever. The American people want more than anything else a robust moral vision of future possibility for American society. Particular policies--regardless of their utility--have to be consistent with or embedded in a vision of an American future that is simply not within the capacity of Liberal political and cultural elites--not just to deliver, but even to imagine.

Why? Because their imaginations are completely circumscribed by an ethos of utility and an ontology of negative freedom, i.e., freedom from this or that lingering premodern vestige of oppression. This simply is not enough. There is no inspiring Yes that comes in response to the program of the cultural and political Left, and so it cannot be to be a true counterbalance to the deep Evil and collective delusion that has possessed the cultural Right in this country and abroad. And so we're likely to continue our slide toward where Russia, China, Poland, Turkey, etc. are now. 

Corruption is our default condition, and there is no alternative to it unless there is a truly inspiring alternative vision of the Good Society, but to have such an alternative vision, you must have some sense that there is such a thing as T.H.E. Good. And the only way we develop such a sense of the Good is to have genuinely encountered it and to have been inspired by it.

Without that inspiration nothing much substantively good can happen. That inspiring vision of the Good is not going to come from the cultural Right, which, with the exception of some Never Trumpers, has delegitimated itself and despite its purported spiritual commitments has proved itself incapable of true moral discernment. And the Catholic Church's hierarchy (talk about a culture of corruption) continues its spiral into moral irrelevancy in the public imagination. Neither will it come from the Democratic Party or the broader cultural Left because, as suggested above, its ontological assumptions and so its imagination of future possibility exclude a vision of the Good or of any collective aspirations toward it. 

Trump (or Pence) isn't the real threat; their incompetence disqualifies them in that regard. They are harbingers. I fear who comes ten years from now, if not sooner.  So if things are truly to change, there has to be some profound shift in our collective moral imaginations. It's possible, but until it does, the bad guys win by default. 

Edsall on White Identity

In this morning’s NYT.  Key grafs:

In a 2005 paper, Cara Wong, a political scientist at the University of Illinois, and Grace E. Cho, a psychology professor at St. Olaf College, found that many whites identified with their race, but “white racial identity is not politically salient.”

Wong and Cho went on, however, to make what turned out to be a crucially important point: that since

white identity is indeed unstable but easily triggered, the danger is that a demagogue could influence the salience of these identities to promote negative outgroup attitudes, link racial identification more strongly to policy preferences, and exacerbate group conflict.

 

The rest of the article goes on to talk about how that’s exactly what happened during the Trump campaign, and continues now. It’s not about the extremists; it’s about ordinary folks who know Trump is an awful person, but who voted for him anyway because he’s the only one articulating their fears and resentments. This is what Bannon understands, and why he’s so gleeful when Liberals get sanctimonious about racial identity politics. He recognizes that it provokes these fears and resentments and pushes more and more of these people into the Trump white nationalist camp.

 

It’s hard for me to see how the Trump presidency survives into next year, but no matter how the establishment arranges for his removal, you can bet he’ll be seen as a martyred hero among these people. Getting rid of Trump does not solve the problem. A smarter Trump will come along who will take the monster he has let out of the cage and he might succeed in riding it where Trump appears so far to have failed. I don’t know who it will be, but there’s power there, and it’s too tempting for some bad actor not to find a way to channel it for his/her political ambitions.

 

The question is not whether White resentment is historically justified—that’s a rational question whose answer is irrelevant to people whose passions do not submit to rational critique.The question is what it will take to assuage the fears and resentments that fuel these political passions. 

 

In other words. what will it take to get this beast back in the cage? I don’t know that getting all huffy and condemning it is going to do the job. I wonder if the reconciliation process in South Africa after the fall of apartheid provides a model that should be considered. Something like that should have been done in the South during Reconstruction, but it wasn’t, so the old resentments still fester, and now are spreading to the upper Midwest and and elsewhere. The solution would require imagination and moral authority that is woefully missing from within our political class. 

Outrage Begets Outrage

And on and on it goes. Anytime one side sees itself as unambiguously on the side of light and righteousness, it calls up something dark and unrighteous. It's not in the people that the outrage is directed toward, but rather in the social system that binds the two in a kind of dyad. 

From the NYT this morning: 

From Ms. Hicks’s perspective, the president simply pointed out a fact: Leftists bore some responsibility for the violence, too. Of course, Nazis and white supremacists are bad, she said. But she does not believe Mr. Trump has any affinity for them. He said so himself. But she is exasperated that a significant part of the country seems to think otherwise. The week’s frenzied headlines read to her like bulletins from another planet.

“I feel like I am in a bizarro universe where no one but me is thinking logically,” she said. “We have gone so off the rails of what this conversation is about.”

Ms. Hicks, who is black and grew up in Charlotte, N.C., welcomes the public soul-searching on the meaning of Confederate monuments. She believes that the statues were erected to intimidate black people and that they should be taken down. But instead of focusing on that, she sees opponents of Mr. Trump focusing on Mr. Trump.

“This is not about me as a black person, and my history,” she said. “This is about this president and wanting to take him down because you don’t like him.”

Mr. Bannon’s departure was more noise that didn’t mean much, she said. “The show is going to go on.”

Much of what powers the love for Mr. Trump among his core supporters is his boxer’s approach to the political class in Washington and to the news media, a group that in their eyes has approached them with a double standard and a sneering sense of superiority for years.

Larry Laughlin, a retired businessman from a Minneapolis suburb, compares Mr. Trump to a high school senior who could “walk up to the table with the jocks and the cheerleaders and put them in their place.” That is something that the “nerds and the losers, whose dads are unemployed and moms are working in the cafeteria,” could never do. Mr. Trump may be rich, he said, but actually belonged at the nerd table. 

“The guys who wouldn’t like me wouldn’t like Trump,” he said. “The guys who were condescending to him were condescending to me.

“I feel like I’m watching my uncle up there. Where me and Chuck Schumer — that’s like going to the dentist,” he added, referring to the Democratic leader in the Senate.

Gregory Kline, 46, a lawyer in Severna Park, Md., who is a Republican, said he did not vote for Mr. Trump but understands that part of the president’s support comes from fury at the left, particularly the media. When there is an attack by Muslim terrorists, for example, the media reaches for pundits who say most Muslims are good. But when it is a white supremacist, “every conservative is lumped in with him,” he said.

The whole article is worth reading.

Look, I think that Trump is crazy and unfit to be president. I hope someone figures a way to get him out by the end of the year. The country (and the world) cannot live another four years with this kind of chaos and instability. But I see his presidency as an extreme symptom of what is really sick in the country right now, and Liberals are delusional if they think they are uninfected. The symptoms just manifest differently in them.

If you want to know whether or not you're infected, that anger and resentment you feel when you get morally outraged--that's it, that's the sickness. It's there in all of us, even if only in remission. And it flares up to the degree that you find your anger so intense that you can only see the people who have provoked this anger as morally inferior to you--yes, even Neo-Nazis. I know this from my own experience because I struggle with it every day. I'm sure you could find many posts on this blog where its symptoms are quite evident.

There is no side in any conflict where the bad are unambiguously bad and the good unambiguously good. Nazi Germany cannot be blamed only on the Germans; its blame should be lain on a sickness that infected all of Europe, with an etiology that can be trace back to late 19th century imperialism and nationalism and beyond, but flared into a virulent manifestation in WWI. And then rather than finding a way to heal after it, Britain and France let the disease get hold of them at Versailles, and the infection deepened, and then erupted again with an unprecedented virulence in Germany that contaminated the whole world. 

When these symptoms break out, they must be contained. Virulent race hatred and white resentment must be contained by people who are level headed and relatively sane. But moral outrage is not an effective containment strategy; it just makes things worse. It just fights the crazy with more crazy. 

HyperNormalisation: Fake Truth and Political Reality

In contemporary Russia, unlike the old USSR or present-day North Korea, the stage is constantly changing: the country is a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime, while, backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away. Surkov is at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next. It's a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it's indefinable.— Peter Pomerantsev, in "Putin's Rasputin", London Review of Books, October 2011

But none of the liberals could possibly imagine that Donald Trump could ever win the nomination. But underneath the liberal disdain, both Donald Trump in America, and Vladislav Surkov in Russia had realised the same thing--that the version of reality that politics presented was no longer believable, that the stories politicians told their people about the world had stopped making sense. And in the face of that, you could play with reality, constantly shifting and changing, and in the process, further undermine and weaken the old forms of power. --Adam Curtis, HyperNormalisation

If you haven't seen Adam Curtis's most recent documentary, HyperNormalisation, it's available on YouTube here. It's a must if you want to understand the big picture about what's happening to us. It came out in October 2016 perfectly timed to an event that its underlying argument predicts. Take notes as you watch it because there's a lot there, and his argument can get lost in all the details. It's long (2.5 hours) and complex, but it's very well put together.

Curtis is arguing that since the 1970s developments in both the West and the Middle East have crossed a line so that things are no longer manageable by politics, if by politics we mean governments enacting policies that are in any real way responsive to and accountable to the people they govern. Instead we have is politicians who essentially know that they can only implement the policies that favor the interests of a power elite who operate mostly offstage. Politicians find that they are limited to preserving some level of stability by using various methods of "perception management". Politicians enact various political dramas that keep the media and the rest of us distracted, and the power elite do what they want out of sight.

And stability correlates with the so-called Washington Consensus, which is by and large shaped by the financial sector and its Neoliberal ideology. Neoliberal theory supports this diminution of politics by essentially telling us that there is no longer any such thing as a 'citizen'; there is only the  'consumer'. The citizen has no agency; the consumer can at least vote with his pocketbook. Freedom equals the freedom to buy a Ford or a Toyota, to get health insurance or not, and any idea of freedom as the capacity for citizens to shape a better, more equitable society through the political process is dismissed as incoherent, left-wing nonsense. Don't worry about what's going on in Iraq, folks--just go shopping. This leaves the field open to the power elites to do as they please out of sight and unaccountable.

This has been going on for years now, but it seems to be moving to a whole other level with the ascension of Trump and Bannon. It' s not clear to me yet whether they are complicit with the power elite, or whether they are being played by the power elite. For in the short run it looks like the power elite is just fine with what Trump is doing because all the chaos that he's creating just gives them a smokescreen behind which they can maneuver without anyone noticing.

Before Trump's election the attempts some "citizens" made to reassert some control through politics have failed, the most famous being the Arab Spring in the Middle East and Occupy Wall Street here in the U.S. Both failed because they were about "process" and not about actually imagining a positive future society and developing a concrete plan to realize it. Naive thinking in both camps assumed that if the process is virtuous, a virtuous society will arise spontaneously from it.

But the chaos that such "process" revolutions produce creates power vacuums that allow groups to move in who are clear about what they want. The military is stronger in Egypt than it was before the goings on in Tahrir Square, and does anyone think that Wall Street is less powerful after OWS? More powerful is more like it. Saying No to the bad guy isn't enough unless you have a Good guy who is ready to move in and consolidate power for the benefit of the broader common good. As long as there is no unifying consensus about what that broader common good is, the bad guys win by default.

Curtis argues that chaos and confusion are tools that work in entrenched power's favor. Who is benefitting from Trump's election most now? The economically stressed heartlanders who elected him? Of course not. Look at the billionaires and Wall Street types he's put in his cabinet. Where are the interests of heartland Americans represented in those appointments? The GOP establishment might have preferred someone who was less of a loose cannon, but they are nevertheless in a better position to take advantage of the disruptions that Trump/Bannon will create.

The model here is one already developed in Putin's Russia. From the Script of HyperNormalisation around the 2 hour, 17 minute mark:

But in Russia, there was a group of men who had seen how this very lack of belief in politics, and dark uncertainty about the  future could work to their advantage. What they had done was turn politics into a strange theatre where nobody knew what was true or what was fake any longer. They were called political technologists and they were the key figures behind President Putin. They had kept him in power, unchallenged, for 15 years. Some of them had been dissidents back in the 1970s and had been powerfully influenced by the science fiction writings of the Strugatsky brothers. Twenty years later, when Russia fell apart after the end of communism, they rose up and took control of the media. And they used it to manipulate the electorate on a vast scale. For them, reality was just something that could be manipulated and shaped into anything you wanted it to be.

But then a technologist emerged who went much further. And his ideas would become central to Putin's grip on power. He was called Vladislav Surkov. Surkov came originally from the theatre world and those who have studied his career say that what he did was take avant-garde ideas from the theatre and bring them into the heart of politics. Surkov's aim was not just to manipulate people but to go deeper and play with, and undermine their very perception of the world so they are never sure what is really happening. Surkov turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theatre. He used Kremlin money to sponsor all kinds of groups--from mass anti-fascist youth organisations, to the very opposite--neo-Nazi skinheads. And liberal human rights groups who then attacked the government. Surkov even backed whole political parties that were opposed to President Putin. But the key thing was that Surkov then let it be known that this was what he was doing. Which meant that no-one was sure what was real or what was fake in modern Russia. As one journalist put it, "It's a strategy of power that keeps any opposition "constantly confused"--a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable "because it is indefinable."

Meanwhile, real power was elsewhere--hidden away behind the stage, exercised without anyone seeing it. And then the same thing seemed to start happening in the West. By now it was becoming ever more clear that the system had deep flaws. Every month there were new revelations, of most of the banks' involvement in global corruption, of massive tax avoidance by all the major corporations, of the secret surveillance of everyone's e-mails by the National Security Agency. Yet no-one was prosecuted, except for a few people at the lowest levels. And behind it all, the massive inequality kept on growing. Yet the structure of power remained the same. Nothing ever changed, because nothing could be allowed to destabilise the system. But then the shape-shifting began.

The shape shifting is a theatrical illusion. The underlying stability of the backstage Neoliberal power structure remains constant. That is, as I understand it, Curtis's argument. Whether there is a direct parallel between what's happening in Russia and what's happening in the U.S. right now, I don't know. Nobody does because confusion is the basic program. But Bannon quite possibly is playing for Trump the role that Surkov is playing for Putin.

It's something to pay attention to as we go forward. But here's the larger point. If there is no organized, motivated, clear-sighted opposition with a clear vision of a humane, realizable political future, the bad guys win. The OWS and Arab Spring models don't work; they play into the chaos narrative that benefits entrenched power.

It's too early to tell whether the kind of opposition that has arisen in response to Trump's executive orders in the last two weeks can be sustained and disciplined. I don't know what's going to happen. But my guess is that it's motivated mostly by saying No, and that motivation diminishes as soon as there's a win. But then something new will emerge to which the opposition must say No, and then something else, and on and on until the opposition becomes exhausted playing this kind of wack-a-mole. This is a losing game unless some positive alternative can be presented and around which a plurality of Americans can unite. Until it does Trump's undermining of the old politics of accountability becomes the new hyper normal.

(First posted in 2/17)

Bannon Out, Allies with Mercers to go to War

 

According to Axios.

We'll see how this plays out, but it looks like Bannon will not go quietly as Priebus and Scaramucci did. 

A look at the Breitbart website this afternoon makes it appear that the bond between it and Bannon is as strong as ever:

This article about Ann Coulter's tweets points to the reason why Trump kept Bannon on. To fire him would be to give the Beltway elites the scalp that they demanded, and in doing so to alienate him from the most energetic element that make up his bas

It looks like this is another win for John Kelly, but this is a pretty fluid, dynamic situation.  And it looks like now that Bannon is gone, the establishment types pretty much have isolated Trump in the building, but what about his phone lines?  

Any sane person, and I believe Kelly, as conservative as he might be, is sane, knows how dangerous a loose cannon Trump is, and if I were Kelly, I would think that the only hope for the survival of the  Trump presidency is essentially to contain him, and hope that some kind of governing structure can be developed with Trump's having minimum impact on it.

This could work because Trump doesn't seem to have real any interest in governing, but it's not likely to succeed because Trump really is crazy,  and it's more likely that more stories are going to come out about Trump's stability, which will lead eventually to his removal by the 25th Amendment if all else fails. I don't know what the timing will be; it might have to wait for indictments to come down from the Mueller probe, but I don't see how Trump survives. 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Elites vs. Bannon/Trump

If Bannon goes, then the elites will have won. If he stays, then it will be interesting to see if Kelly and others stay. It might come down to some variation on some key establishment type saying either Bannon  leaves, or I do.

If Bannon stays, it will be because Trump realizes that he cannot sever his relationship from his base of aggrieved whites who elected him. Trump fears, rightly, that if Bannon goes then he, Trump, will be perceived as having caved to the Washington establishment elite and pressure form its media. And he has no desire to ingratiate himself to either. And Trump has got to be thinking that you stay at the dance with him who brought you, and that more than anybody else is Bannon and the white nationalist constituency Bannon represents. If Trump loses the white nationalist base, he will be complete isolated.

Nevertheless, the pressure might just be too great to keep Bannon on. I think Trump will resist the pressure to get rid of Bannon as long as he can, but it's hard to see how much longer he can do it. The best solution for Trump would be if Bannon would realize that his role in the administration is hurting more than it's helping his cause, and so then volunteers to leave with the promise to keep supporting Trump through Breitbart, assuming he still will have influence there. I'm sure that when Trump says "We'll see what happens" regarding Bannon it's a signal that he hoping that Bannon will voluntarily resign. Trump fears being perceived as the guy who forced him out. So a lot depends on whether Bannon is going to dig in for the long run, or retreat to fight another day. 

In the somewhat longer run, I don't know that it matters. It's just hard to imagine that this presidency can survive much longer, regardless whether Bannon stays or goes. There are larger forces at work here that make a sustainable Trump presidency unlikely. And the more embattled Trump feels, the more likely he will be to hold on to Bannon who is a street fighter like him. The establishment, sooner or later, is going to win one way or the other. Trump is just too deeply a flawed person to prevail. And while an establishment win will restore stability in the short run, the establishment will do little to ameliorate the actual underlying causes of populist rage that will continue to destabilize American society and politics. 

 

Some Thoughts on the Events in Charlottesville

On the morning of the Charlottesville riot Saturday, I just finished reading Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the American Presidency, by Josh Green. It’s essential reading if you want to understand the crossroads we’re at in this moment of our history. If you think the influence of the Right wing on this country is a temporary aberration and is mostly about old people who are aging out and will be replaced by liberal millennials, you really don’t understand what’s going on, and reading this book will help you to understand. Steve Bannon is intelligent and he's a little crazy, but he understands the energy that's in the crazy. 

I think that Liberals don’t understand how powerful Liberal Hatred is, and they better understand the causes of it if there is even the remotest chance of arresting increasing right-wing extremism. Liberals can understand why people might disagree with them. Some can understand why some people find Liberal sanctimony annoying. But does that make them hateful? That seems incomprehensible to them. Most liberals just want to live and let live. Why is there such hateful intensity directed toward them for having such an easy-going attitude?

Bannon is a Liberal Hater, and he is an aficionado of white identity politics. For him that means asserting a traditionalist Christian definition of white identity against its enemies. For Bannon the threat to that identity comes from two primary camps--cosmopolitan elites and radical Islam, but by extension his enemy is anybody who seeks to diminish what he feels is essential for the survival of his vision for America.

Bannon's hatred for Liberals, and the hatred that the alt right has for Liberals, can be understood only if you see it as they experience it, which is as a noble, romantic fantasy. And noble fantasies like this are very attractive to people, especially young people, who are in groups who feel anxious, aggrieved, and marginalized by the tradition-destroying forces of Western Liberalism. So, similarly, the Muslim kids who are secretly leaving their families for Syria to join ISIS are not at first motivated by hate, even if they become vicious haters later. They are romantics who long for an identity-affirming sense of purpose to their lives by fighting for their "noble cause".  

There is nothing more identity affirming than to have an enemy and to go on a romantic crusade against it. Attack, Attack, Attack. That’s Bannon’s mantra—and Trumps’s—and it’s a mantra that invigorates and takes all the fear and anxiety one is feeling and channels them into a noble project. You must believe that your enemy seeks your destruction, even if it doesn't, because if it didn’t then not enough would be at stake, and it wouldn’t have the drama a true. romantic crusade requires. Demonization of the enemy follows from this.

Not seeing the enemy in these terms would require instead dealing with complexity. In other words it would require boring politics as usual, and Bannon is the enemy of boring politics as usual. So boring, process-oriented Liberals are more interesting as more easily demonize when they are depicted as aggressive enemies, and so their worst characteristics are exaggerated by people like Bannon--and the whole right-wing media--to justify their crusade. I think this is a key to understanding why the Right demonizes what any objective person sees in Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer, which is two rather boring, formulaic, clueless, banal, and often feckless Liberals. (Half a cheer for a "better deal". That's a mantra that will galvanize the masses at this critical moment in our history.)

I'm not trying to justify right-wing violent extremism; I'm trying to understand why especially young people are attracted to it. It's easy to condemn extremism--and it must be condemned--but it's harder to understand its underlying causes. Nevertheless, unless an we make the effort to understand those causes, I fear the country will continue to separate out into factions not unlike those that faced off in the Civil War.  And, while it matters who was right and who was wrong on the issues--clearly the South was wrong, and clearly the central issue was slavery--there's something horribly wrong when things get to the point where the only way to settle things is to send 600,000 men to their deaths. Was it worth it considering that it took another hundred years for black Americans to get any real rights in this country? Was it worth it if we still have huge swaths of the the South who still live in a kind of bitter resentment of the LIberal machine that defeated them and who seek in every way possible to thwart and subvert it?

We have to find a way of preventing this kind of extreme factionalism from spinning out of control now as it did then. That means preventing things from polarizing to such an extent that people find that they have to choose sides. There are a lot of people who reluctantly chose Trump last year because they could not bring themselves to choose a Liberal icon. Liberals are foolish if they assume that in the long run most people, even most young people, will choose their side. Many Liberals are living in their own delusional, self-ennobling fantasy. 

I'm not concerned about understanding the psychology of the vicious psychopaths who rise to leadership in organizations like ISIS or the Neo Nazi organizations that planned the events in Charlottesville. I'm trying to understand why so many young people are attracted to these organizations, and why I fear this trend will become worse. Just condemning and shaming participation in these organizations is not enough, and it is counterproductive if  it just fuels the polarization. This is exactly what Bannon hopes for. We need to understand the social forces that are creating the conditions for the growth of these movements, and we need to understand how the smug cluelessness of many establishment Liberals plays a significant role in making things worse. 

White Natonalists in Charlottesville were chanting “You will not replace us. You will not replace us”. What does that even mean? But clearly this chant expresses their deepest fear, which is extinction. Is this paranoid? Yes, but this feeling of being under siege is very like the one that motivates Muslim kids to join ISIS. There are a lot of traditionalist conservatives who would never adopt these extremist views and behaviors, but they do not see Liberals as easy-going live-and-let live types. They see Liberals as having a very aggressive agenda to eliminate their traditionalist way of life.

Liberals don’t understand the sense of deep threat that traditionalists feel, and it’s no longer productive to dismiss those feelings as illegitimate. People feel what they feel, and when huge numbers of people feel the same way and get organized around those feelings, very bad things will happen. And so there has to be some attempt to understand it empathically. Progressives who understand the history of the Middle East have less trouble understanding the motivations of Muslims extremists. They understand that you would be paranoid too if your society was invaded and abused the way theirs was at the hands of Western Liberal imperialists. You’d be paranoid and outraged if people with a completely alien worldview came into your society and started changing the rules in ways that you were taught growing up are an abomination. Well something similar is going on with so many Americans who feel that Liberalism is changing the rules in America. 

Conservatives, not just alt-right extremists, experience liberal sanctimony and its politically correct code as a form of aggressive contempt for them and their values, and they believe that Liberals are not just people with whom they disagree, but people who are an existential threat to themselves and everything that they hold dear. Most Liberals I know would say,  “Really? That’s not what I want. Conservatives can do or say what they want so long as they don’t make me do it. We Liberals don’t impose our values on them. Why should they think they can impose theirs on us?”

But conservatives believe that’s disingenuous. They believe that Liberals have sought to do everything they can to eliminate their values and customs. They are right and wrong in thinking so. They are wrong insofar as they think that this is something the Liberals consciously intend; they are right insofar as Liberalism as an ideology has been hostile to traditional values and customs. For the last three hundred years the Enlightenment rationalist project has sought to debunk the traditional beliefs and customs as irrational and regressive. Liberals essentially saw tradition as the chief impediment to the realization of the Liberal progress fantasy. If custom could just be replaced by reason, Utopia would be achievable.

But even more powerful in its destructive effects on tradition and customary culture has been the force that Liberal ideology unleashed on the world, which is free-market capitalism. There is no force in the history of the world that has been more destructive of traditional values and customary ways of life. Liberals are simply people who are comfortable with the world that free-market capitalism and Enlightenment rationality produced, especially if they are among the better educated and affluent that have benefitted most from it.

The situation of Muslims is not unlike that of American Indians when faced with 19^th–Europeans who were classical Liberals. These Liberals were able to put the American Indian on reservations, and many would like to do the same to Muslims. Ask Sam Harris and Bill Maher who are classic Liberals in this sense. Most decent Americans feel ashamed about what our ancestors did to the American Indian. And future generations I hope will feel equally ashamed about what Europeans and Americans did to Muslim societies.

But what happened to the American Indian, to Muslim societies in the Middle East, and to traditional communities here in the U.S. follows inevitably from the creative-destructive logic of Western Liberalism: Change, innovation, growth are all that matter. When traditions and customary ways of life get in the way, they will be destroyed. Resistance is futile. Either get on the bus or get run over by it.  Well Geronimo, bin Laden, and Robert E. Lee had one thing in common. They all chose to resist the great Liberal machine. This was their ennobling fantasy and Liberals are deluded to the degree that they demonize the resisters and to the degree that they see their own cause as unambiguously morally superior.

That there is no moral equivalency between white nationalists and those who oppose them is both right and wrong. It is right in the sense that at this historical moment the kind of psychopathy that leads so many people into these extreme hate groups must be called what it is, a hateful psychopathy. It is wrong in the sense that Liberalism as an historical cultural force is perceived as having had no role in producing the psychopathy. 

We romanticize the great Native American freedom fighters Geronimo, Chief Joseph, and Sitting Bull for their resistance to the Liberal expansionist machine, but they were considered terrorists by most 19^th Century Americans. Most Americans then didn’t sympathize with the plight of Native Americans or even remotely or condemn the near genocidal policies of Americans toward them, and they don’t now understand or sympathize with how modern Liberal/capitalist forces have impacted Muslim societies, either. But when we have some distance from it, we can understand how the psychopathy of violent extremism becomes an option when any group feels that it is facing an asymmetrically powerful enemy that seeks its destruction. I'm Irish enough that in my younger days I felt some sympathy for the IRA and could rationalize its psychopathic tactics.

One man's psychopath is another's hero. But does anybody who knows anything about the cruel history of English treatment of the Irish dating back to Cromwell believe that the English had no role in producing the violent resistance against it? Is it so hard to understand how any strategy or tactic, no matter how reprehensible, is justified in the thinking of the perpetrator because there are no rules when one is fighting for one’s life. The hard thing to do is to see how this survival mentality is what shapes the psychology and thinking of so many white nationalists. We're too close to it to see the similarities; we're too sympathetic to the abuses suffered by African Americans, who even now are abused by this kind of thinking. But from 3000 feet up, it's not so hard to see the basic pattern is the same. It's about resistance to the ineluctable Liberal machine. 

Now there’s an historic irony in that the White Americans who are the inheritors of these annihilating attitudes toward Black and Native Americans and who now have similarly hateful attitudes toward Muslims, Mexicans, and other non-whites, feel that their survival is now in question. I'm sure there are many morally outraged Liberals who even wish for their annihilation. But the point is that the moral outrage just feeds the sick system and perpetuates it. It's the kind of thing that leads to 600,000 dead. It's crazy on both sides because without one the other would not have fuel enough to keeps its outrage burning.

That's what Steve Bannon and Donald Trump understand that the talking heads on TV don't. They want to feed the Liberal outrage because they know it's something that can work in their favor. And Liberal moral outrage is something they believe they can work to their advantage in the long run. I'm not sure they are right about that, and certainly I don't think that either of them is competent to effectively work these energies to their advantage, but this isn't over even if they fail. There is enormous energy born of fear of survival and identity loss that they are tapping into, and if the Progressive wing of the Democratic Party doesn't figure out a way to channel those energies in a constructive way, these energies will be coopted by the Right by default. If not by Bannon and Trump, then by someone else. 

So here's the problem as I see it if Liberal Democrats don't get a clue. Violent, heavily armed, identity-constituting gangs using terrorist tactics will be our future because there is no vital center in American society. Certainly Liberalism does not define it, and it never will because it is largely a spent historical cultural force. So we have a society in which everybody is out for himself. That's what the Neoliberal ethos embraced by the global Liberal elite has fostered in the developed world, but to a more extreme degree in the U.S.

And so all kinds of young people, no matter what their race or ethnicity, as they increasingly come to feel that the larger society is hostile or indifferent toward them, will become the domestic terrorists of the future. People like Milo Yiannopolis are showing these kids that it can be very hip, and edgy to be right wing. The infrastructure for a fascistic politics is already laid out in the gangs and drug cartels. They can be politicized, and where it's possible for them, they will infiltrate governments as they did in American cities and state governments in the twenties and thirties. For this reason, in twenty years we might look a lot more like the gangster-run Russia or some other authoritarian kleptocracy.  

Free-market capitalism is sowing the seeds that will destroy what we now cherish as an open society governed by the rule of law, i.e., what we understand to be the best thing about the Liberal society.  But this destruction will not be effected in the way Marx predicted it. In America no galvanizing a workers' movement on the Left is likely to emerge. It's more likely that the current Neoliberal ethos embraced by American and other global elites will generate tribal militias who will destroy Liberal society from the Right. Trump is the first of many thugs like him to come. 

That’s why conservatives, whom normally we think of as stuffy types who honor norms and traditions, no longer have a party. It's certainly not the GOP. It has become a force for destroying all norms and traditions in the political sphere. The Republican Party now has more the structure of a gang or cult. Its leaders don’t care about solving problems, they only seek to rig things and break any norm or law they can get away with if doing so will enable them to dominate the system. For some, its leaders, it's pure will to power, but their power base is nourished by the fear of white traditionalist group extinction and the need of these fearful people to align with the strong man who will protect them.

This is why Liberals lose time and time again in the political sphere. They think they are having a reasonable debate about ideas and practical solutions, about what works or doesn’t to solve real problems, and they don’t understand that they are in a knife fight with people who don’t care about solving problems but only about destroying you before you destroy them.

(Revised for clarity and to improve thematic emphasis 8/18)

Trump v. the "Deep State"

For my conservative friends:

So in his escalating clashes with Beltway institutions, what we’re watching is not the “deep state” trying to reassert control over policy and bring a tribune of the people low. If so I would be more often on Trump’s side (as I welcomed Brexit and entertained the case for Marine Le Pen), because populism needs a seat at the table of power in the West, and the people who voted for our president do deserve a tribune.

But Trump is not that figure. As a populist he’s a paper tiger, too lazy to figure out what policies he should champion and too incompetent and self-absorbed to fight for them.

So he’s not being dogged by leaks and accusations because he’s trying to turn the Republican Party into a “worker’s party” (he isn’t), or because he’s throwing the money-changers out of the republic’s temples (don’t make me laugh), or because he’s taking steps to reduce America’s role as policeman of the world (none are evident).

No, he’s at war with the institutions that surround him because he behaves consistently erratically and inappropriately and dangerously, and perhaps criminally as well.

Or perhaps not: All of this may still not rise to the level of impeachable offenses. But the conservatives rising to his defense need to recognize that there is no elite “counterrevolution” here for them to resist, because there is no Trump revolution in the first place.

You don’t want to sell him out to the establishment; I get it. But open your eyes: He’s already been doing that to you.

There was a while there when I feared a Trump/Bannon consolidation of the populist right, but Trump is such a self-absorbed egotist and undisciplined loose cannon that Trump/x is impossible with any kind of x. It's hard to see how he lasts until the end of the year. Something is got to give, and if nothing else it might be his health. He's in so far over his head that the strain on him has got to take a toll on this 70 year old--both physically and mentally. 

The idea that Trump was going to stand up to the establishment was only plausible if Steve Bannon got the upper hand in the White House. He made his play,  but it's clear now that he was in over his head as well, and and the gig was up as soon as some in the media started referring to him as "Trump's Brain". That's something Trump fragile ego could never tolerate.

As far as Trump's troubles with the Deep State--he's brought that on himself, essential because he's a deeply, deeply foolish man. I dare say there's a constituency of people within the so-called Deep State that would have embraced him had he given them half a chance. But his ineptitude, arrogance, and truly astonishing  ignorance have caused him to exceed my negative expectations for what I expected to be a blundering, chaotic mess.

But all in all, we should be grateful the man is such a blundering fool. It prevents the Right from taking advantage in a way they otherwise might, and now it's up to the forces of sanity in the Democratic Party--it has a presence there even if a minority one--to seize the opportunity being proffered. 

Charles Taylor on the Ascendance of the Dark Right

The camp of unbelief is deeply divided— about the nature of humanism, and more radically, about its value. I want to offer another framework to understand these struggles, not as a struggle between two protagonists [belief vs. unbelief], but rather as a three-cornered, even perhaps four-cornered battle.

The entry of what I called above “the immanent counter-Enlightenment”, [Nietzsche and his epigones] which challenges the humanist primacy of life, has greatly complicated the scene. There are secular humanists, there are neo-Nietzscheans, and there are those who acknowledge some good beyond life [acknowledgers of transcendence]. Any pair can gang up against the third on some important issue. Neo-Nietzscheans and secular humanists together condemn religion and reject any good beyond life. But neo-Nietzscheans and acknowledgers of transcendence are together in their absence of surprise at the continued disappointments of secular humanism, together also in the sense that its vision of life lacks a dimension. In a third line-up, secular humanists and believers come together in defending an idea of the human good, against the anti-humanism of Nietzsche’s heirs.

A fourth party can be introduced to this field if we take account of the fact that the acknowledgers of transcendence are divided. Some think that the whole move to secular humanism was just a mistake, which needs to be undone. We need to return to an earlier view of things. Others, in which I place myself, think that the practical primacy of life [human flourishing in the Modern Moral Order] has been a great gain for human kind, and that there is some truth in the self-narrative of the Enlightenment: this gain was in fact unlikely to come about without some breach with established religion. (We might even be tempted to say that modern unbelief is providential, but that might be too provocative a way of putting it.) But we nevertheless think that the metaphysical primacy of life espoused by exclusive humanism is wrong, and stifling, and that its continued dominance puts in danger the practical primacy.

I have rather complicated the scene in the last paragraph. Nevertheless, the simple lines sketched earlier still stand out, I believe. Both secular humanists and anti-humanists concur in one part of the Enlightenment narrative, that is, they see us as having been liberated from the illusion of a good beyond life, and thus enabled to affirm ourselves. This may take the form of an Enlightenment endorsement of benevolence and justice; or it may be the charter for the full affirmation of the will to power— or “the free play of the signifier”, or the aesthetics of the self, or whatever the current version is. But it remains within the same climate which has relegated the [transcendent] beyond to the status of past illusion. For those fully within this climate, transcendence becomes all but invisible.

Of course, we might want to set aside this three-cornered picture, on the grounds that contemporary anti-humanism isn’t a significant enough movement. If one just focusses one’s attention on certain fashionable professors of comparative literature, this might seem plausible. But my sense is that the impact of this third stream in our culture and contemporary history has been very powerful, particularly if we take account of Fascism, as well as of the fascination with violence which has come to infect even Enlightenment-inspired movements, such as Bolshevism (and this is far from being the only such case). And can we exempt the gory history of even “progressive”, democratic nationalism?

If we do adopt the three-cornered picture, however, some interesting questions arise. Explaining each is somewhat of a challenge for the others. In particular, anti-humanism is not easy to explain from the Enlightenment perspective. Why this throwback, on the part of people who are “liberated” from religion and tradition? From the religious perspective, the problem is the opposite. There is a too quick and too slick explanation right to hand: The denial of transcendence is bound to lead to a crumbling and eventual break-down of all moral standards. First, secular humanism, and then eventually its pieties and values come under challenge. And in the end nihilism.

I am not saying that there is no insight at all in this account. But it leaves too much unexplained. Anti-humanism is not just a black hole, an absence of values, but also a new valorization of death, and sometimes violence. And some of the fascination it re-articulates for death and violence reminds us forcefully of many of the phenomena of traditional religion. It is clear that this fascination extends well beyond the borders of anti-humanism. As I just mentioned, we can see it also in the heirs of the Enlightenment; but also unmistakably recurring again and again in the religious tradition. Gulag and the Inquisition stand testimony to its perennial force.

But this sharp rebuttal to a too self-indulgent religious explanation poses once again a problem for exclusive humanism. If there is something perennial, recurring, here, whence comes it? We don’t lack for immanent theories of a human propensity to evil, all the way from sociobiology to Freudian speculations on a death principle. But these have their own counter-Enlightenment thrust: they put a severe limit on any hopes for improvement. They tend to cast doubt on the central Enlightenment idea that we are in charge of our fate.

At the same time, from the perspective of transcendence, some considerations seem obvious: Exclusive humanism closes the transcendent window, as though there were nothing beyond. More, as though it weren’t an irrepressible need of the human heart to open that window, and first look, then go beyond. As though feeling this need were the result of a mistake, an erroneous world-view, bad conditioning, or worse, some pathology.

Two radically different perspectives on the human condition. Who is right? Well, who can make more sense of the life all of us are living? Seen from this angle, the very existence of modern anti-humanism seems to tell against exclusive humanism. If the transcendental view is right, then human beings have an ineradicable bent to respond to something beyond life. Denying this stifles. And in fact, even for those who accept the metaphysical primacy of life, this outlook can itself come to seem imprisoning.

It is in this sense, rather than in the rather smug, self-satisfied view that unbelief must destroy itself, that the religious outlook finds anti-humanism unsurprising. From within this outlook, we might be tempted to speculate further, and to suggest that the perennial human susceptibility to be fascinated by death and violence, is at base a manifestation of our nature as homo religiosus. From the point of view of someone who acknowledges transcendence, it is one of the places this aspiration beyond most easily goes when it fails to take us there. This doesn’t mean that religion and violence are simply alternatives. On the contrary, it has meant that most historical religion has been deeply intricated with violence, from human sacrifice down to inter-communal massacres. Because most historical religion remains only very imperfectly oriented to the [transcendent] beyond. The religious affinities of the cult of violence in its different forms are indeed palpable.

What it might mean, however, is that the only way fully to escape the draw towards violence lies somewhere in the turn to transcendence, that is, through the full-hearted love of some good beyond life. A Secular Age (p. 638-39). 

Brackets are mine to help clarify Taylor's meaning. Underscoring is mine, to stress in the first instance my agreement with Taylor about the importance of the Enlightenment as a movement forward, but as such incomplete and shallow. In the second instance, to stress Taylor's prescience in 2007 about what we're seeing now in the U.S. and Europe about the (re)ascendance of the Dark Right.

I have been very impressed with Taylor's and other's renewed interest in Jasper's idea of the Axial Age. It brings a powerful clarifying distinction that helps us to understand better that the real conflict for us no longer moderns is not between religion and secularism, but between good and bad religion. More on this distinction when I have some time.

Secular liberalism is bankrupt and that's why everywhere its institutions are in decline. Either there is a renewal of the post-axial spirit of transcendent religion, or bad religion, what I have been referring to here as the Dark Right, wins by default. 

For a long essay on Taylor's A Secular Age where I go into some detail about his ideas about post axiality, see here. 

Clint Watts on Putin's Disinformation Objectives

As we noted two days before the presidential election in our article describing Russian influence operations, Russia certainly seeks to promote Western candidates sympathetic to their worldview and foreign-policy objectives. But winning a single election is not their end goal. Russian Active Measures hope to topple democracies through the pursuit of five complementary objectives:

• Undermine citizen confidence in democratic governance
• Foment and exacerbate divisive political fractures
• Erode trust between citizens and elected officials and democratic institutions
• Popularize Russian policy agendas within foreign populations
• Create general distrust or confusion over information sources by blurring the linesbetween fact and fiction

From these objectives, the Kremlin can crumble democracies from the inside out creating political divisions resulting in two key milestones: 1) the dissolution of the European Union and 2) the breakup of the North American Treaty Organization (NATO). Achieving these two victories against the West will allow Russia to reassert its power globally and pursue its foreign-policy objectives bilaterally through military, diplomatic, and economic aggression. Russia’s undeterred annexation of Crimea, conflict in Ukraine, and military deployment in Syria provide recent examples. (Clint Watts)

At first i accepted that Putin's objectives were mainly to embarrass or hurt Clinton, and that he didn't care one way or the other about Trump, and that he was smart enough to understand that Trump was too crazy to be a reliable ally. But former FBI counterintelligence guy Clint Watts pointed out in his testimony this week before the Senate Intel committee and in the article quoted from above that the Trump's election is far more disturbing than at least I imagined it to be. 

It's clearer now Russian glee about Trump's election was not just about keeping Clinton out of the White House, but in subverting American political stability. The election of one of the most ridiculous candidates for the presidency in U.S. history, as improbable as it was, makes more sense if it can be proved that Russian interference played a role that most of us thought equally improbable. Certainly no other candidate could fulfill the Russian strategic goals outlined above better than Donald Trump. 

Clearly Russian interference could only be effective if there were social and political dynamics inherent in the American society for the Russians to exploit. The Russians did not cause the Democrats to abandon the white working class; the Russians did not invent the Koch brothers and Right Wingnuttery; the Russians did not gerrymander the U.S. congressional districts after the 2010 Census; the Russians did not produce the toxic social and political attitudes that shape the thinking of people who live in the Deep South and on Wall Street; the Russians do not finance and produce Fox News; the Russians did not promote the Neoliberal policies that have pushed more and more working Americans into poverty and hopelessness.

But the Russians can take all this stupid, self-destructive stuff that Americans do to themselves and then find ways to amplify their negative effects. And we're learning that they are a lot better at it than most of us thought, but they could not be so successful if we weren't already in a self-destructive mode. The question is to what degree their amplification of our stupidity has been just enough to push us over the edge or whether we are still teetering on the edge and able to pull back from it.

I'm feeling more encouraged lately that we will be able to pull back. Trump is creating the crisis that I am cautiously optimistic Americans have needed to give them the slap upside the head to bring them to their senses. The self-deluded we shall have always with us, but there's still hope that we can push them back to the fringes where they before 1980 they festered.

BTW, read the Clint Watts articles here and here in full. They are very illuminating.  And this clip of his testimony and his interview on the Maddow show are good, too.