After the Future

Consensus Reality and Conspiracy Theories

I understand the impulse to believe conspiracy theories. It comes from a largely correct view that most people are living in a consensus trance. It comes from that feeling that Neo had before he took the red pill: Something is deeply wrong. Why does everyone around me seem to accept these attitudes and behaviors that feel so off? And so when someone comes up with an explanation for what's going on, there's a strong temptation to go with it because now we don't have to be alone in our suspicions. There are others, too,  who "get it". We're not the crazy ones. Everyone else in the consensus trance is crazy. They're asleep. We're awake. Whether or not this alternative explanation is itself just another illusion--well, there aren't many incentives to consider that as a possibility, are there? (See Note 1)

Nevertheless, the feeling that one's life is mostly shaped by one's participation in a consensus trance is real, because we are. The feeling is innate in all of us because It's born of the same sense of falsity that compelled Socrates to challenge the Athenian consensus reality in his time and as Buddha did in the India of his time. Socrates' and Buddha's critique of what is false consensus reality was not purely a negative debunking, but rather part of an effort to open people up to the the really Real. 

Our consensus reality is largely delusional. But that's not to say it's something completely made up--it does indeed have a relationship to what's really there. That was true in Scorates' day and it is in ours. Our modern social imaginary--our current consensus reality--has a pretty clear picture about the surface reality of things, but it's the spiritual part that it filters out that is problematic. It's as if we see the notes on a musical score but are incapable of hearing the music. And it's this inability to hear the music that induces us into a materialistic trance that cuts off from the deep Real, which is where the music in its fullnness originates.  

Are we near deaf, or is it that there's just so much noise now that makes that music so much harder to hear? Either way, we live in a consensus reality that makes it extraordinarly difficult to hear the music. But it's the world we live in, and we have to navigate in it in our day-to-day lives as best we can. And a part of doing what we can is to make a serious effort to listen. The trick is to discern what's signal from what's noise, and then to find a way to filter out the noise. So conspiracy theorists are correct to be skeptical that the consensus reality is mostly noise that's filtering out the signal. But they should be even more skeptical that the alternatives their conspiracy theories point to aren't just more noise.

So we must live in the world in such a way that we accept the consensus reality for what it is--a provisional working model of reality that makes it possible for us all to live together. As we need a common language, we need a consensus reality to get along, and disrupting it for the sake of disruption because you think you're so smart as to see through it is just egotistical and often mean-spirited. Smartass intellectuals do it with their sophistical debunking, but so do redneck red-pillers who think they know better than everyone else about elites who are working behind the scenes with a plan to destroy the America they love.

They think they've had the BIG INSIGHT, and maybe there's kernel of truth in what they've learned, but they are always mistaken when they think that this kernel is bigger than it is, and when they think it is the key to explaining everything. It never is. All they're doing is creating more noise by insisting that their delusional thinking is better than the conventional delusional thinking. The challenge in the long run is to develop a consensus reality that is more deeply aligned with and so disclosive of the Deep Real, i.e., a consensus reality that is attuned to the Deep Music. 

Jumping from one collective trance into another is not a solution, and so the challenge for us individually is to do what we can to live in such a way that we grow in wisdom, which means that we progressively break with our innate tendency to be entranced by gradually getting  a better grip on Reality. We do this by becoming like Socrates. We start from a position of learned ignorance--we assume we know nothing and that we are inclined toward delusional thinking--and we gradually learn to overcome our tendency toward self-delusion and self-destructive behaviors. This is a life-long process. 

How do you know if you are becoming wiser? You see yourself slipping into and out of the trance, and knowing the difference. You find that your prudential judgments prove sound with increasing frequency. And you find that the perceptions and intuitions you have that depart from "consensus reality" stand up over time as more right than wrong. You learn better to distinguish between what's music and what's noise. Or to shift metaphors, you learn to distinguish the difference between going down a rabbit hole, which leads to delusion, from finding a trail of breadcrumbs, which leads toward a better grip on the Real. 

This is what I mean by the term 'self-transcendence' as I've been using it lately. Self-transcendence is the gradual process by which we come into a deeper, truer relationship with Reality. While we can use language to make an attempt, to essay so to say, what we have learned in this ongoing developing relationship, nobody knows the truth. Some people do, however, have a deeper relationship with it.

None of us is Wise, but some are wiser. And as a society we need to develop broadly accepted cultural practices that make it easier for people to become wiser, i.e., to hear the music, or to see the bread crumbs. We need a sapiential tradition that will help people--everyone from ordinary folks to elites--to overcome their tendency toward self-delusion and self-destructive behaviors. We lost our sapiential tradition in the West in the late medieval period, and we need to restore it now in a postmodern key. 

So if there are any conspiracy theorists out there reading this post, I commend you for your skepticism regarding the consensus reality, but your theory about what's really going on is probably wrong too. It's ok to play with alternative theories as a heuristic tool, but you must never take them too seriously or become fundamentalistic or dogmatic about them. Stay away from true believers. None of us understands what's really going on, and alternative theories to the consensus reality are just as prone to deceive us as the deceptions provided by the consensus reality. 

And yet we must always make the effort to get a stronger, deeper grip on Reality. That requires that we start from the consensus reality as a baseline, that we develop a healthy skepticism about it--which is the whole point of Socratic aporia. This creates a space for the breadcrumbs to appear, so we must keep an eye peeled looking for those breadcrumbs, and when they show up, we follow them where they lead us. And if they lead us down blind alleys, then we must have the humility and intellectual honesty to recognize it, learn from the mistake, and move on. It's ok. Making mistakes is part of the process of self-transcendence. Digging in when proven wrong is moronically self-destructive. 

But also to remember even when you have significant insights, i.e., when you make deeper connections with aspects of the Real, they never tell the whole story. They are just the next step on the breadcrumb trail. 

And a final bit of advice:  If you encounter a conspiracy theorist who is making a living from it, don't believe him even if there is a kernel of truth in what he's saying. He might even be sincere, but he has too much invested in digging in rather than admitting he's wrong when the evidence proves him so. Say No to moronically self-destructive beliefs and behaviors. 

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Note 1: I think that this rejection of the consensus reality in part explains why intellectuals like Martin Heidegger, Ezra Pound, Mircea Eliade, and others were seduced by the alternative fantasies that Nazism or Fascism offered. It's not that far from what pushes so many American conservative intellectuals to embrace Trump now. Anything, they have come to believe, is better than the Liberal materialist consensus reality.

Liberals who feel comfortable in the materialist Liberal Order that is crumbling around them need to understand that rightist Traditionalist critique of modernity better than they do because they underestimate its power. I believe that we only move out of the current crisis with a progressive mindset, but it has to have different presuppositions than those that now shape Liberal progressive thinking. A new progressive mindset must not reject Liberalism so much as go beyond it, i.e., absorb its gifts and transcend it. Such a mindset, while it must be optimistic about the human future, cannot succeed unless it finds a way to retrieve and embrace the wisdom traditions these men of the Right drew from. They were more wrong than they were right, but it's the part that they got right that we need to learn from. 

The problem is that what is valid--even profound--in what they write is tainted by what seems to have been their often bizarre political commitments. Really they did that or wrote that? YIkes. They thought there was a political solution, whereas a political solutions was simply impossible for all the reasons they wanted one, which was that there was no spiritual-cultural foundation for it. Any political solution was doomed to be barbaric precisely because those on the hard Right in the 1930s trying to effect a political solution were spiritual cretins.There is no political solution unless there is first a profound spiritual-cultural transformation.

My political commitments lie mainly on the Left because the Left is more future oriented, less fanatic, and more oriented toward practical problem solving. It has its fanatics, but they are more annoying than they are dangerous when compared to the fanatics on the Right, at least in the U.S. context. The ethos on the Left is that of good intentions, while that on the Right is shot through with resentment-driven malice. But I do not expect a political solution to resolve our crisis because the Left offers close to zero when it comes to matters of the spirit. At best support of the Left in American society buys us time for something new to emerge. But the new thing, if it is to provide a true resolution, must come from outside of politics. 

Moral Parity

The former president recognized that the fact of an investigation was far more important than the results. It worked with the Benghazi investigation, about which House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy was accidentally honest, and in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, which didn’t produce charges but did hobble her presidential campaign. By the time Trump was extorting Volodymyr Zelensky by withholding defense supplies in 2019, all Trump wanted was for Ukraine to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden. He didn’t even care whether it actually happened, because the talking point is what he needed.

Each successive new gambit offers the tantalizing prospect that the crooked behavior everyone has seen on public display from Trump over the past seven years is somehow actually the product of nefarious plotting by his opponents. Now Trump is on to a new battle over his alleged absconding with presidential records, including highly sensitive information, to Mar-a-Lago. Once again, he has claims of hoaxes. Once again, they don’t hold water. Yet hope springs eternal among MAGA backers, well fertilized by manure spread by the former president. Trump’s vindication can never be failed; it can only be delayed.  

David Graham

The whole premise of MAGA is that Democrats are so corrupt, so evil, so beyond the moral pale that whatever wild accusations are made about Democrats' crimes only scratch the surface of the dark horror that lies below. Just wait--it will all come out. It's just a matter of time before it all comes to light.

"Sure," those on the religious right argue, "Trump might have crossed the line here and there, but whatever he's done is nothing compared to what these demon-possessed Democrats have done." That the evidence supports the opposite, that more corrupt Republicans get caught than Democrats by a fairly wide margin does not matter because, they think, the Dems are just cleverer in avoiding getting caught or the Liberal Media in collusion with the Deep State insures that they don't. 

The first step toward moral maturity is owning your projections, or as the gospel puts it, "Why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but fail to notice the log in your own eye?" That's really at the heart of the problem for those on the religious right in this country. They think they are morally righteous when in fact they haven't even taken most basic steps toward achieving it. Matthew goes on: "You hypocrite! First take the beam out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye."

Seeing clearly is not something that happens much in MAGA world because they are so easily manipulated to see what is not there. MAGA folks are too obsessed with seeing evil in the Other. And so they have not the moral maturity or aptitude to recognize that that they see the Other not as they are but through the lens of their own unowned wickedness.

I was talking about Tolkien in my previous post and about how 'fantasy' often finds a way to urgently illuminate truths in a way that plain prose or realistic fiction cannot. This passage from The Silmarillion is about how the fallen Valar Melkor works with ordinary, decent folk who lack the discernment that comes with moral maturity--

Long was he at work, and slow at first and barren was his labour. But he that sows lies in the end shall not lack of a harvest, and soon he may rest from toil indeed while others reap and sow in his stead. Ever Melkor found some ears that would heed him, and some tongues that would enlarge what they had heard; and his lies passed from friend to friend, as secrets of which the knowledge proves the teller wise. Bitterly did the Noldor atone for the folly of their open ears in the days that followed after.

When he saw that many leaned towards him, Melkor would often walk among them, and amid his fair words others were woven, so subtly that many who heard them believed in recollection that they arose from their own thought. Visions he would conjure in their hearts of the mighty realms that they could have ruled at their own will, in power and freedom. . .  .

J.R.R Tolkien, The Silmarillion, p. 69

The manipulation of the religious right, Qanon, and others in MAGA world by Melkorian lies is as old as the hills. Liberals, of course, are not immune from such manipulation, but their vulnerabilities lie in their seduction by the material abundance produced by techno-capitalism. "Let the Invisible Hand do its thing," whispers Melkor. "Don't interfere or you'll make things worse. Leave it to the Hand. All shall be free; all shall be well."  And way too many Liberals in the cultural and political spheres kneel to the Hand. 

The delusions of the Cultural Right might lead to the end of democracy in the short term, but the delusions of the Cultural Left might lead to the end of humanity in the long term. So in this sense there is moral parity: the delusions and moral immaturity of both work hand in hand to paralyze the collective will to find a cure for what most deeply ails us. But in order to be able to deal with the long-term threat, we need a vibrant, healthy, democratic open society--a society that is open to allow remedies to arise bottom up, and which has the discernment to know which remedies are delusional and which might actually work. 

The Coming Violence

These people, acting individually or in small groups, will be led not by rebel generals but by narcissistic wannabe heroes, and they will be egged on by cowards and instigators who will inflame them from the safety of a television or radio studio—or from behind the shield of elected office. Occasionally, they will congeal into a mob, as they did on January 6, 2021.

There is no single principle that unites these Americans in their violence against their fellow citizens. They will tell you that they are for “liberty” and “freedom,” but these are merely code words for personal grudges, racial and class resentments, and a generalized paranoia that dark forces are manipulating their lives. These are not people who are going to take up the flag of a state or of a deeper cause; they have already taken up the flag of a failed president, and their causes are a farrago of conspiracy theories and pulpy science-fiction plots.

What makes this situation worse is that there is no remedy for it. When people are driven by fantasies, by resentment, by an internalized sense of inferiority, there is no redemption in anything. Winning elections, burning effigies, even shooting at other citizens does not soothe their anger but instead deepens the spiritual and moral void that haunts them. 

Tom Nichols

I thought this quote from Nichols was an appropriate follow up to my post yesterday about the foolishness of some moderates who think the more prudent course is to compromise with a paranoia-driven fanaticism by refusing to hold Trump to account legally. There is no remedy for fanaticism, so compromising with it makes no sense. There is only containing it and suppressing it.

Yes, I understand that doing so will feed the paranoia. But the problem with paranoids is that their behavior and attitudes create the enemies that would not exist if not provoked by their paranoid behavior and attitudes. Once paranoia is acted out violently, it's too late to talk them down. It must be dealt with by the lawful exercise of the police powers of the state. And then, yes, the political process should address the legitimate grievances that are the underlying causes of right-wing fear and resentment--what I call ontological dizziness--insofar as that's possible. That's the purpose of my A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity series. 

In the meanwhile the forces of sanity need to contain the forces of insanity. Fanatics we shall have always among us, but J6 was a break point, and GOP complicity in abetting or condoning that violence should de-legitimate the party for all truly sane, patriotic Americans, which most Americans are. The problem is that too many Americans still don't understand what's at stake; they tend to minimize the dangers posed by this paranoia-driven fanatacism--how its inherent authoritarianism deeply threatens both the execution of fair elections and the judicious application of the rule of law. But hopefully that is changing.

True patriots must use the tools available to them to suppress the paranoia while they still have those tools available to them--the law and elections. If there are no longer fair elections or the judicious application of rule of law, there is no longer America. Moderates fear that if the true patriots use the law they will lose the elections, but if patriots don't defend the rule the law for fear of feeding the insanity, what's the point of their winning the elections? 

Update: After posting above, I read Rich Lowry NYT op ed entitled "A Defense of GOP Paranoia":

If it is too difficult now for Democrats to imagine how they might react to such a prosecution of one of their own, they might have a clearer sense soon enough. An indictment of Mr. Trump would invite retaliation, and if Republicans retake the White House, a motivated G.O.P.-controlled Justice Department could be expected to aggressively pursue a reason to indict Joe Biden over his son Hunter’s business dealings.

In the tumult over a Trump indictment, both sides will accuse the other of violating the country’s norms and traditions. But there’s no doubt that a fierce Republican response, deeply distrustful of the authorities and openly defiant, would be profoundly American.

Yes, paranoia, is deeply American.

Lowry really seems incapable of seeing what's going on in terms other than Red Team vs. Blue Team. Lowry purports to want to help Democrats and independents to understand why GOP paranoia is justified, but it seems that it is he who needs much more help in understanding why Democrats, Independents, and Never-Trump Republicans cannot understand why Trump is never held accountable for the blatantly illegal things he does. 

The assumption here is that if the FBI were to come after Biden or Obama, Democrats would be just as upset as  Republicans are that the FBI is going after Trump. Yeah, they would be if the sole justification was revenge, and not holding the accountable for egregious illegal behavior while in office.

I feel like with Lowry, heir to the Wm. Buckley legacy as editor of National Review, we're dealing with someone here whose moral development was stunted in Middle School. Buckley, whatever his limitations, was not a moral moron. Can you think for a moment, Rich, not just about what's good for the Red Team but what's good for the country?  Hunter isn't the president. You get that right? He's no threat to the good governance of the country. He, unlike Trump's kids, has no involvement with Daddy's administration. Whatever they have on Hunter is likely to be dwarfed by what they could get on the Trump kids, but have at it. Go after Hunter, if that makes you feel better. If he broke the law, indict him. Sheesh. The pettiness is breathtaking. 

Here's what Republicans like Lowry can't quite grasp. They assume that because Democrats don't share their pinched, moralistic world view, that they must be even more corrupt and immoral than they are.  But they just aren't by any objective standard. How many of Trump's, Reagan's, and Nixon's associates have been indicted? Lots. How many of Obama's? None. Is that because the FBI has a bias favoring Democrats? Hardly.  

Are there venal, corrupt Dem swamp creatures here and there?  Sure. Go after them if they actually broke the law. But go after them because they broke the law, not just because you want to get even. But there's less to go after because most Democrats believe in the rule of law in the way Republicans don't. Republicans habitually do clumsy illegal and corrupt things in a way that Dems don't. Trump is off the charts, but he's following in the footsteps of Nixon's Watergate and Reagan's Iran-Contra. The idea that Republicans are the party of law and order is facetious. More Republicans get indicted because more Republicans break the law.

Rich, If and when the Dems put up a lying, corrupt, promoter of insurrection, stealer of top-secret documents, who is the first to undermine the peaceful transfer of power in our history , and who otherwise had continuously abused the power of his office for the most venal reasons, then let's talk.  

Bin Laden Toppled More than the Twin Towers

“We anticipate a black future for America,” bin Laden told ABC News more than three years before the 9/11 attacks. “Instead of remaining United States, it shall end up separated states and shall have to carry the bodies of its sons back to America.”

Bin Laden did not win the war of ideas. But neither did we. To an unnerving degree, the United States moved toward the enemy’s fantasies of what it might become — a nation divided in its sense of itself, exposed in its moral and political compromises, conflicted over wars it did not want but would not end. When President George W. Bush addressed the nation from the Oval Office on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, he asserted that America was attacked because it is “the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world, and no one will keep that light from shining.” Bush was correct; al-Qaeda could not dim the promise of America. Only we could do that to ourselves.

Carlos Lazoda

Spencer Ackerman makes a similar if more detailed argument in Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Destablilized America and Produced Trump. Read it if you still need to be convinced that when all is said and done bin Laden's attack succeeded beyond his most optimistic expectations. Yes, he was eventually caught and killed, but he succeeded because he could count on the U.S. to respond as stupidly as possible to the 9/11 attack. Bin Laden toppled more than the Twin Towers, he toppled what was left of our collective sanity, and there's a good chance that might in turn lead to the toppling of America as an open society and liberal democracy. This isn't over.  

One of the most effective tactics of the warriors of the Near East dating back to ancient Greek and Roman times (and earlier) was feigned retreat and then counterattack. Genghis Kahn used the same tactic. I'm too lazy to look up a particular historical example, but they are numerous. Let's say the Parthian light cavalry confronts a Roman army. They play to the Roman ego by pretending to panic and hightail it. The Romans are elated and give chase until the find themselves in a trap. The Parthians turn around in a place where they have all the advantages and then decimate the Romans with their archers or some other ambush-like counterattack. Disaster ensues.

You play to the overconfidence of the foe, or you insult their manhood, ego, the need for vengeance, or use some other ploy to cloud their better judgment, and sure enough they respond with expected stupidity. Anybody who points out that maybe giving chase isn't such a good idea is pushed to the fringes--not a real patriot, a coward. So disaster inevitably ensues. You'd think Westerners would have learned by now. But Bin Laden knew that was unlikely. As Lazoda puts it quoting Richard Clark--

Clarke’s conclusion is simple, and it highlights America’s we-know-better swagger, a national trait that often masquerades as courage or wisdom. “America, alas, seems only to respond well to disasters, to be undistracted by warnings,” he writes. “Our country seems unable to do all that must be done until there has been some awful calamity.”

The problem with responding only to calamity is that underestimation is usually replaced by overreaction. And we tell ourselves it is the right thing, maybe the only thing, to do.

In other words, American complacent cluelessness was followed by fanatical vindictiveness. It's as predictable as poking a hornets' nest. The American reaction to 9/11 showed little more intelligence or shrewdness than an insect's. That kind of predictable stupidity is easy for a shrewd adversary to manipulate. 

Lance Morrow recently wrote an astonishingly stupid Wall Street Journal opinion piece entitled "You Are Living in the Golden Age of Stupidity". He gives as an example Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan. He also talks about the stupidity of the Democrats twice trying to impeach Trump likening the Democrats to Wile E. Coyote to Trump's roadrunner. This is the guy who wrote in Time magazine a few days after 9/11 " A Case for Rage and Retribution". Here's the nut of it:

A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Let's have rage... Let America explore the rich reciprocal possibilities of the fatwa. A policy of focused brutality does not come easily to a self-conscious, self-indulgent, contradictory, diverse, humane nation with a short attention span. America needs to relearn a lost discipline, self-confident relentlessness and to relearn why human nature has equipped us all with a weapon (abhorred in decent peacetime societies) called hatred... This is the moment of clarity. Let the civilized toughen up, and let the uncivilized take their chances in the game they started."

I don't know if Bin-Laden had a chance to read this article, but if he did, it would have been a very strong indicator to him that he'd succeeded.

One of the chief characteristics of "stupid" is not to recognize it in oneself. For someone like Morrow everyone else is stupid, never him. Let's get after them chickenshit heathen Parthians and teach them a lesson. But what's really, truly astonishingly stupid is to fall for their ploy over and over again.

Conservatives like Morrow are prodigies of projection--they never quite grasp that the stupidities that they see in others are projections of their own. Whenever you hear someone on the Right accuse the Left of something nasty, criminal, or stupid, they are almost always talking about themselves. The more unhinged the accusations, the more deeply rooted the projection. It would never occur to Morrow that it is he and the hate- and vengeance-driven minions on the Right who most resemble the benighted Mr. Coyote. As Morrow says, stupid is as stupid does. 

Update 9/12/21: "See also After 9/11 the U.S. Got Almost Everything Wrong" by Garrett Graf. An excerpt:

Rather than recognizing that an extremist group with an identifiable membership and distinctive ideology had exploited fixable flaws in the American security system to carry out the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration launched the nation on a vague and ultimately catastrophic quest to rid the world of “terror” and “evil.” [See my  post on "Naive Idealism"]

At the time, some commentators politely noted the danger of tilting at such nebulous concepts, but a stunned American public appeared to crave a bold response imbued with a higher purpose. As the journalist Robert Draper writes in To Start a War, his new history of the Bush administration’s lies, obfuscations, and self-delusions that led from Afghanistan into Iraq, “In the after-shocks of 9/11, a reeling America found itself steadied by blunt-talking alpha males whose unflappable, crinkly-eyed certitude seemed the only antidote to nationwide panic.”

Some Random Thoughts on Afghanistan

Despite whatever level of culpability Biden has for not planning the logistics of the evacuation effectively, it's also become abundantly clear that those Afghanis who supported the twenty-year American boondoggle in Afghanistan as translators, etc. should be very happy that Biden was in office rather than Trump. This withdrawal was going to be a mess no matter what. I know that Trump made the initial decision to get out, but whatever the incompetencies on display from the Biden administration, just imagine how much worse it would have been had the uber-incompetent Trump and his team of racist xenophobes still been in office.

So my hat's off to Biden for making the hard decision to take the heat from the media and the military and to go through with the withdrawal. My respect for Biden has, if anything, been increased by the events of the last couple of weeks. 

Joe Biden's only real mistake was to listen to his military and its assessments of the reality on the ground in Afghanistan. The U.S. military is astonishingly clueless in its estimations of its own efficacy, and it never learns from its mistakes. The problem for a U.S. president is that he must depend on the cluelessness of his military and the so-called intelligence community for the information he needs to make decisions. These people are obviously not stupid, but their thinking is in the service of very simplistic, fear-driven assumptions that never seem to be questioned.  I know this sounds simplistic--it is--but it's more right than it's wrong. 

If someone does question them, he or she is clearly not a team player and never gets promoted. Cluelessness is thus baked into the military culture. The clueless only promote those who have bought into the fundamental cluelessness, and so the cluelessness is ineluctably passed on from generation to generation. Nothing really changes from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. Fixing that is rather like trying to fix the racism that pervades most police departments. You don't change the fundamental elements that structure a group's culture by sending people to a training seminar. To think that works is just part of the fundamental cluelessness. 

For another example of premium-quality cluelessness, read Anne Applebaum's piece in the Atlantic. It's astonishing to me is that The Atlantic will still publish Neocon nonsense like this. This woman is operating on a planet other than earth, and on it some kind of political theory rules in a way that feels no need to accommodate the realities on the ground. She is not unintelligent; she's just naively captured by her ideological presuppositions. This is not unlike the ailment from which the military suffers. In theory Afghanistan or Vietnam or whatever should all work out very differently. We just lack the will to make the theory work. Whatever. The bottom line is that to argue that the U.S. should be fighting for liberal democracy abroad when it is at serious risk of losing it at home is just plain nutty.

To think that any country in the world would trust us now or look to us after the messes we have made every time we tried to make the world a better place is delusional. Or even now, there's a good chance that the Bannonist Right*, with the help of gerrymandering and voter suppression laws, will take over the house and senate next year and the White House in '24. Why would anybody in the world look to the U.S., teetering on the brink of illiberalism, as even a remotely decent model of liberal democracy? To think that the U.S. now has a role in modeling anything good and decent for the world is truly, deeply, clueless.

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It has struck me that 1989 was the year that the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan under similarly humiliating circumstances. And everybody knows what happened next--no more Soviet Union. It collapsed of its own dead weight and broke apart. I've been writing here for some time that the Liberal Order in the U.S. is teetering in a way that is very similar to situation of the Soviet Union in the 80s. And it's pretty clear that if Bannonistic fascism and Fox News get their way, they will push the rickety thing over for good. Goodbye America as the open society that we have known. 

Or, as I've also written, perhaps the country will just fall apart into ethno-religious areas as in the Balkans or the Soviet Union in the 90s, but in the U.S. defined more by the blue and red areas on the U.S voting maps. Or Colin Woodard's map below and his writing about "American Nations" is a good place to start thinking about how this may play out: 

How this breakup happens in practical, logistical terms is anyone's guess--will it be state by state? will it be in regional coalitions? some other possibility? But something has to give. Either one side wins the culture war or things break apart. The country is otherwise ungovernable. If the Blues win, as it should with its clear popular majorities, we should expect if not a secession movement in the Red areas, a growing number of de-stablizing, right-wing terrorist events--assassinations, bombings a la McVeigh, etc.  If, on the other hand, there is another Bannonite/revanchist takeover of the federal government as described above, it won't give up power again.

The events since Nov. 6 have shown beyond any doubt that the Republican Party has become an anti-democratic, fascistic political movement that will cross any ethical or legal line to obtain power and remain in it. November 3, 2020, to January 6, 2020 was just the dress rehearsal. And if they succeed next time, then it's a question of how the more populous, better-educated, and wealthier blue areas of the country are going to respond. Does anyone think they'll just accept such a coup? Something has to give. 

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*Perhaps I give Bannon too much credit in talking about the "Bannonite Right". But there is no other figure I can think of, regardless of his current relevance or personal hygiene, who has articulated better the religio-nationalist ideology that has the best chances of effecting a successful Right-wing takeover of the U.S federal and state governments. I believe there's a very good chance that Trump would be in power today if he had listened to Bannon rather than to have fired him. But because Trump was a fool, does not mean that others are, and whether or not Bannon plays a role in any future attempts at a fascistic takeover of the U.S., he will have been one of its most influential theorists and propagandists.

Miscellaneous Thoughts on Impeachment, Culture, and the Surveillance State

It's important that the U.S. have a post-Trump reckoning about how much damage has been done, not just by him but by his enablers. Will the impeachment play some role in that? I doubt it, since the whole point of it is simply to focus on what is already known about what Trump did before and after the insurrection. The people who want to believe his role was negligible and is being exaggerated by Democrats will continue to believe that. Trump's impeachment lawyers can say any nonsense they want and not be held accountable as they would in a normal court of law. The impeachment, unless something surprising happens, will not change any minds. It will be more political theater in a year when we're sick of political theater. A "trial" like this can only work if you have good-faith, objective jurors who want to get to the bottom of things, and that's just not a description of the U.S. Senate.

I think that far more impactful will be real trials or legal proceedings in real courts, which are not broken institutions like the Senate. Already we're seeing how Fox and Newsmax are responding to real consequences for their having no compunction about broadcasting and magnifying Trump's lies. Goodbye Lou Dobbs.

When Trump is indicted or sued, no matter how compelling the evidence presented, there will be some who will not be convinced because they are the type of people who believe the moon landing was faked, Obama was a Muslim non-citizen, and HRC and and her gal pal in elite perversity, Huma Abedin, are Satan worshipping drinkers of children's blood. A good third of the country is unreachable, but there is a third of the country in the mushy middle that leans toward Trump and that is persuadable. I think putting Trump on trial in real courts with real evidence and with a real jury will make a difference in setting the record straight about who Trump is and what damage he has done to the country. Hopefully, all this will play out over the spring and summer as we're coming out of this pandemic nightmare. The two things working together might convince Americans that some kind of positive future is possible with relatively sane, relatively decent technocrats running the government.

On the subject of technocrats, I've just finished Bart Gellman's Dark Mirror, his account of the role he played in the Edward Snowdon NSA whistleblowing drama. Gelllman is no friend of government secrecy or the surveillance state, but he's a fair-minded reporter that brings into focus the complexity of the issues involved, and my reading this book, along with my actually living through the Trump era, has changed my mostly negative perception of the people who compose the so-called Deep State.

Like Gellman, I have always been concerned about potential abuses of the enormous surveillance powers of the state. What came into focus for me in reading his book and listening to the testimony of so-called deep state operatives during the impeachment trial last year was that there are very strong restraint norms in place that actually work most of the time. The resistance to Trump's abuses by the likes of Alexander Vindman, Bill Taylor, Maria Yovanovich, Fiona Hill, and others was all remarkable for representing a culture of integrity and loyalty to the constitution rather than to a single "dude", to use Ben Sasse's term of art.

If these are the people running the Deep State, more power to the Deep State if that's what's required to contain crackpot autocrats like Trump. If anything, I was surprised they were so impotent to prevent Trump from doing the damage he did, and that was because they lived within the restraint norms their culture prescribed. So this was clarifying for me. What matters most is culture, norms, traditions. That culture of restraint held up pretty well against Trump's assault on it. 

Because this is what it comes down to: Whom do you trust? The other day I wrote about why I thought that elites of both political parties were responsible for the fragilizing of our democracy. I argued that it wasn't so much about the individuals but about the culture that shapes the elite ethos in the media, politics, and business. The Neoliberal ethos of much of corporate America, the establishment wing of the Democratic Party, and its media in its competition with with the Cowboy white-entitlement ethos of the Republican Party and its media created a political/economic system over the last thirty years that was utterly unresponsive to the needs of most ordinary Americans. Neither party was trustworthy because both were captured by a destructive elite cultural ethos that shaped their policy agendas. It's no wonder that so many Americans have developed a pox-on-both-their-houses attitude to the two-party system. And it's no wonder that the more ontologically dizzy among them would embrace insane conspiracy theories. 

Nevertheless, the Democrats produce people like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Stacy Abrams, and AOC. My argument for Bernie over Clinton in '16 was that more than anything the Democrats needed a change in culture and that's just not something Clinton was capable of effecting. (I wasn't sure Bernie could do it either, but he had a better shot at it.) But one of the things that has become clearer during the Trump years is that the Sanders/Warren wing of the party seems to have won the argument with the Neoliberal establishment wing represented by the Bidens and the Clintons--and really Obama, because he pretty much caved to it.

The ethos of the Democrats is clearly moving away from its Neoliberal assumptions shaped in the '80s and '90s toward a new ethos defined by a retrieval of a New Deal social democratic values, which is clearly what is called for in this historical moment. This is a return to its roots, roots that Democrats influenced by the Neoliberal Aspen-Institute elite mindset started to reject in the 1970s. So what we're seeing in the Democratic Party under Biden now is a much needed change in culture. 

That's a culture I can trust in the hands of someone like Biden because he is a decent enough and unoriginal enough guy that I can be assured that he will go with the flow--kinda like Obama did with the Neoliberals. In many ways he's the perfect figurehead for this change of party culture--reassuring to the mushy middle while being smart enough to know which way the wind is blowing. The question is whether he will be able to effect the way the mushy American middle perceives the Democrats' that will be significant enough to prevent Republicans from returning to power in '22--or ever, at least until they return to some level of sanity.

So far so good with Biden. A lot depends on whether events will work to support the marginalization of Trumpism in the next year or so. Those events will be primarily the success of Biden's legislative initiatives and further revelations about the extent of Trump's corruption, and perhaps even revelations about his treason. I realize that people like me might be vulnerable to our own kind of conspiracy theory, but it wouldn't surprise me if it turns out that Trump was a Russian asset, whether witting or unwitting.  I'm willing to concede, however, that this might be the kind of disinformation that fits my presuppositions. We'll see. The mystery of Trump's prodigious ass kissing of Putin has yet to be explained. 

So back to Gellman's Dark Mirror. The surveillance technology is there, whether or not they are going to be used. They are going to be used, so the real question is whether they will be abused. And the only real constraint is a culture of restraint within the  institutions that have access to these technologies. I was very impressed by the way the culture and its individual technocrats in the national security community pushed back against Trump and his appointees at the time of Zelensky call and in other matters. The culture held, but it would not have held had Trump won another four years in the White House. He could have effected a change of culture by purge and forced retirements. I'm persuaded that at least for now the culture of the surveillance state is basically trustworthy. 

Laws are needed to restrict abuses, but what's more important is a culture of restraint, because if the culture is permissive about abuses, the laws won't matter. The Democrats represent a culture of restraint (Obama's respect for process is exemplary if irritating in this respect) in a way that the Republicans have proved time and time again that they don't. The line from Nixon's Watergate to Reagan's Iran Contra to Cheney's Abu Ghraib to McConnell's cynical obstructionism to Trump's besotted minions storming the Capitol is all understandable because of the fundamentally delusional thinking that is at the foundation Republican Party culture. Even the saner, principled conservative, small-government Republicans are fundamentally clueless about how the world works and what is called for by central governments at this historical moment. 

Nothing is more important in the next decade than that this political culture of delusion be de-legitimated. The surveillance state and the problems of technocracy are going to continue to present serious challenges to a viable democracy, but there is no living without them--especially if we are going into an era of hard-right domestic violent terrorism. The most important thing is that we elect elites who will be stewards of the traditions, norms, and cultures of the institutions that wield these awesome powers. Clearly the Republicans are not trustworthy stewards, and while we must hope that the forces of sanity prevail in keeping them out of power in the near future, we must always be vigilant that the Democrats don't slip into the kind of delusions that shaped their policies while captured for over thirty years by the Neoliberal Washington Consensus. 

Drift toward Authoritarianism

I am sympathetic to those who think that liberal democracy is failing, was, in fact, always doomed to failure. After all it gave us Trump, who presently is at an all time high approval rating with Gallup at 46%. The U.S. had a flawed but good run for a good quarter millennium. But it's time to return to the historical norm and that means to the strong man. People don't really like to rule themselves; they'd rather be ruled. It's far less trouble. But I still have hope that some how or other we'll get through this without becoming China or Russia, some tawdry banana republic. We're already Berlusconi's Italy. 

Nevertheless, American democracy is just failing because it has become incapable of dealing with real-world problems. All people really get worked up about is red/blue identity politics--whether my team is winning or the other guy's is.

Inaction and gridlock are the preconditions for crises that will create increasing levels of civil unrest and chaos, and civil unrest and chaos are the preconditions for an authoritarian takeover, and once the authoritarians are in place, they have the technology to stay in place for a long, long time. Surveillance technology, as currently implemented (and exported from) in China, is the future and will be increasingly used to suppress any kind of dissent--from the Left or the Right. If you're a betting man, the odds are not that China will not become more like the U.S., but that the U.S will become more like China.

To think that supporting Trump is a way to push back is fanciful at best. This line of thinking assumes that because the Deep State is against Trump, then he must be against the Deep State. He's not against the Deep State in principle, only the Deep State that opposes him. Give him two terms, and he'll find a way of coopting the Deep State to support his interests.

Trump is an authoritarian personality, and it's only his ignorance and incompetence that has prevented him from being more effective--so far. The one thing he's good at is b.s.-ing or bullying his way out of trouble. We'll see if he can keep his grift going, and with a little help from oligarchs--domestic and abroad--who see him as a useful idiot, he just might. His first hires--the Bannons,etc.--were punching way over their weight class. The new hires, smooth operators like Wm. Barr, and others like him for whom Barr is paving the way, could  very well save Trump's ass. We'll see. 

At first I couldn't understand why the Republican establishment was embracing a clown like Trump. I thought they would support some way of easing him out of office and easing a less volatile tool like Pence in. It didn't make sense to me that these wily establishment Republicans would want to tie their collective fate to Turmp.  I understand all about the base and the primary threats it poses, but I assure you, that if the power establishment wanted to get rid of Trump, they would have found a way. They'd find a way to get Fox News aligned with it, and Trump would be gone in a flash.

The only explanation that makes sense to me at this point is that there's a deep split in the conservative establishment. The first are principled conservative never Trumpers who actually care about preserving traditional norms of decency and the rule of law. The second are nihilist right-wing elites who are ruthlessly committed to entrench their oligarchic power. The latter appear to have adopted the Trump-as-useful-idiot strategy. It's not clear to me yet whether they are delusional or whether they understand things the rest of us do not. 

The people in the second group are all about power, and they are fine with authoritarianism as long as their faction holds the power, and I think that's what's at stake for them in keeping Trump propped up. If they can find a way to get him into a second term, they will have all the time they need to consolidate their control. This is a hypothesis I'm just playing with now, but I'm becoming more convinced that more and more establishment types are willing to "ruin" their reputations by associating with Trump because they don't care about the old establishment anymore--they are trying to set up a new one.

They believe, correctly, that the winners write history, and they intend to win. This is their play, and it could succeed, especially if most Democrats continue to think that Trump is an aberration, and things will return to normal when we elect Uncle Joe. Who knows what these right-wing power elites talk about among themselves, and who knows what narrative they are reinforcing to justify this play among themselves. I'm sure there's no limit to their hubris, and with it their ability to justify whatever they do as in the best interests of the country. 

***

And so for this reason, President Chaos is not the harbinger of freedom from liberal technocracy, but the harbinger of a far more repressive right-wing oligarchy. When I discuss Trump with his supporters in my family or with others, I try to understand why they think that he, despite all his admitted flaws, is better than anybody the Democrats will put up. Most Trump supporters don't see him as a wannabe Putin. They would dismiss my hypothesis as unfair and motivated by alarmist sour grapes. They just see him as an anti-establishment renegade who is stirring things up--it's good to stir things up once in a while, right?. 

I understand their discomfort with liberal technocracy and its secular, nothing-is-sacred-or-worthy-of-reverence cultural ethos, but let's face it, the Churches are as instrumental in destroying that ethos as any secular Liberals have been. From Jerry Falwell, Jr. to Bernard Law, they've been exposed for the frauds most of their clerical ilk have always been. They are, as a class, at best mediocre bureaucrats, careerists without a shred of moral or spiritual authority that exceeds that of an earnest middle manager at Wal-Mart.  

That doesn't mean that there is no spiritual vitality in the culture, but only that it's not to be found in its institutions and its managerial class. I'm a practicing Catholic, but Voltaire was right--ecrasez l'Infame. Good riddance to all that ecclesial, faux-medieval claptrap. It's time to grow up. For me as a Catholic, the only thing necessary is that the Mass be continuously celebrated and that the real faithful remain faithful, and that there be a tradition of lively "midrasnhic" reflection on the central historical mystery we celebrate as Christians. That last part is not going to come out of most chanceries and seminaries, at least not for some time to come.

I'm not saying these are bad people--neither were the segregationist Christians in the South. I'm saying they are very ordinary, socially conforming people who have no special wisdom or moral authority. They just reflect conventional wisdom, and they haven't enough deep moral sense to know when the conventional wisdom is morally wrong. That's how most people are regardless of their avowed political or religious commitments. They are just going along to get along.

The people who are the most virulent defenders of conventional morality are not defending the Good; they are defending their particular culture's Oedipus Complex. The Good, as revealed through different cultures' great prophets and philosophers, has obviously played a role in shaping these cultures' norms and taboos. It's a good thing that human sacrifice is no longer culturally acceptable. And so, of course, we measure moral progress in cultures to the degree that they have proscribed the worst forms of savagery.

But the cultures that are most evolved are those in which the cognitive capacity of the heart, i.e., the individual conscience, to know the good as something that transcends one's acculturation. Christian cultures are not the only ones in which this capacity for moral cognition has been valued, but there's a reason why freedom and individuality emerged most precociously in the West. The problem with cultures that celebrate freedom and individuality lies in that they tend to be irreverent, and that's a good thing, when clearly there are sacred cows that deserve no reverence. But conscience bows before that which is worthy of reverence. It just patiently awaits until it appears, and refuses anything and anyone who presents itself as the form without the substance. 

But the more difficult thing for these traditionalists to understand is that the real destroyer of traditional values and a sense of the sacred has been consumer capitalism. Liberalism and Capitalism are interdependent social systems and the only difference between secular Liberals and traditionalist conservatives lies in that the former accept the disruptive changes that capitalism has wrought and have adapted to it and seek to mitigate its most harmful effects, whereas traditionalist conservatives still think capitalism is great without guardrails and have no clue that ubridled capitalism has been the most powerful destroyer of the norms and traditions they cherish.

You can't disapprove of Liberalism without disapproving of Capitalism. While there are some principled conservative intellectuals like Patrick Deneen who get this, they don't get much air time on Fox News. Fox News propaganda wants its audience to believe that both capitalism and traditional values are compatible, and the only reason conservative traditions and norms have eroded is because there's a Liberal plot to exterminate everything they hold sacred. Read Deneen. He will quickly disabuse you of this mode of deluded thinking. Deneen understands that the market has commodified everything; it has become our fundamental, culture-wide metaphor for assessing value, and without a robust pushback from credible spiritual authorities, it takes the field unopposed. And without a credible spiritual foundation, a culture cannot be anything but secular, regardless of whatever ridiculous shade of lipstick religious conservatives want to gussie this pig up with. 

Trump represents not the contradiction of secular Liberalism in this sense, but its apotheosis. That conservative Christians have embraced him betrays their own confusion, moral bankruptcy, and fundamental misunderstanding of the spirit of the Gospels. These are culture Christians, not genuine Christians. They are as much Christians as those church members In the bad old days who supported slavery and later segregation. The spirit of the gospels is always a challenge to culture and a call to transcend its limitations, especially the various ways it celebrates power and greed, and especially the way it makes enemies of the Other.

Tribal Christianity is an oxymoron. There is nothing--absolutely nothing--tribal about true Christianity--it is radically universalist. It is corrupted as soon as it becomes a justification of us against them, even when the 'them' are non-Christians. Tribal Christianity is a kind of mediocre social conformism that parodies Christianity. So it's not surprising that so-many people who think they're Christians are among Trump's staunchest supporters. And it's not surprising that so much of his support comes from Southerners who--good Christians though they have thought and continue think themselves to be--were ok with slavery and then later with Jim Crow.  And the strongest indicator of the mediocrity of their moral sense is their allowing themselves to be conned by this buffoonish Yankee grifter. 

So a vote for Trump started out a vote against Hillary, and a vote against Hillary was a vote against the hated Liberal establishment. I get it, but then it blossomed for many Christians into this bizarre logic that because we self-identify as God's people, and what makes us God's people is our opposition to secularizing Liberals, and secular Liberals hate Trump, then Trump must be God's instrument. Even if we are laying the foundations for a future autocratic plutocracy, at least it will be a Godly autocracy. It has to be if if it's what God's people have effected. If people really believe this kind of craziness, there's nothing that can be said to them. Reality itself will intervene at some point and give them a slap upside the head. The problem is that their delusional thinking is dragging the rest of them off the cliff with them.

But let's assume there's are still some Trump supporters who haven't gone completely off the deep end. I would ask them, what kind of alternative to liberal democracy would you embrace?  They say they don't like Hillary and patronizing cosmopolitan liberals, but so what? You're going to burn the whole thing down because you haven't been able to adapt to the world that capitalism has created? You really believe that something better will emerge out of the chaos?  You'd really be ok with the kind of Plutarchy that Koch brothers' style radical Libertarianism will bring us--has already brought us? That's what this embrace of conservative values with unbridled capitalism is turning us into. 

***

I think more than anything else it has to do with the broader crisis in meaning that has cast many Americans, particularly traditionalist conservatives, into a state of ontological dizziness. It's particularly important for certain personality types to take their cues from external cultural symbols and norms, and when those norms are fragilized by pluralistic complexity, their sense of meaning and identity are also fragilized. Most people are not independent thinkers; they need to be told what to think, and cultural norms and traditions have been the normal means to effect that through basic acculturation as children. When everything this kind of personality type has been taught as a child  is true and good is brought into question, ontological dizziness sets in. The floor has disappeared beneath them. They are free floating, and will grasp anything that will give them a sense of stability and grounding. This makes such people extremely vulnerable to demagoguery and outlandish conspiracy theories. What makes sense is anything that resonates with their acculturation and explains why their symbolic world has lost its cultural hegemony. 

So I don't think most Trump supporters are toxic racists or ignorant brutes. They're dizzy, and they just want to live in an America that feels stable and comfortable for them, and Fox News and right-wing talk radio gives them that, and so does Trump. They restore their sense of what's right because it resonates with what they were taught as children. They have not been able to adapt to a complex world in which people who have been acculturated into very different symbolic meaning systems must live cheek by jowl. They used to be ok with "different" folks so long as their traditional American Christian symbol system was dominant, but they cannot tolerate being only one among many with no cultural primacy. It's in this sense they see themselves as "real Americans" and why they see Trump as their champion. Making America great again means restoring their cultural hegemony. And this "restoration" is more important than any other economic or other mundane political consideration.

But, of course, this is a con. And as with almost every kind of hope these conservative elites cynically dangle in front of this dizzy population, it will disappoint them. Everything in Reality is pushing hard against whatever bubble they are trying to sustain to keep it out, and the only question is whether when this bubble bursts it will be too late not just for them but for the rest of us. 

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. 

Who Emerges from the Chaos?

The great fear among Trump-fearers is that he will deal with this elite opposition by effectively crushing it — purging the deep state, taming the media, remaking the judiciary as his pawn, and routing or co-opting the Democrats. This is the scenario where a surging populism, its progress balked through normal channels, turns authoritarian and dictatorial, ending in the sort of American Putinism that David Frum describes darkly in the latest issue of The Atlantic.

But nothing about Trumpian populism to date suggests that it has either the political skill or the popularity required to grind its opposition down. In which case, instead of Putin, the more relevant case study might be former President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood leader whose brief tenure was defined both by chronic self-sabotage and by the active resistance of the Egyptian bureaucracy and intelligentsia, which rendered governance effectively impossible.

The Egyptian deep state’s sabotage of Morsi culminated in a coup. This is not my prediction for the Trump era. But what we’ve watched unfold with refugee policy suggests that chaos and incompetence are much more likely to define this administration than any kind of ruthless strength. (Ross Douthat)

Trump has turned out to be what we knew him to be. We've elected to the presidency our rich, ignorant, bigoted, conspiracy-theory-obsessed uncle. It was all supposed to be a big joke, except he wasn't let in on it--still hasn't been let in on it. He hasn't a clue, but and he's actually taking it all so seriously. Sad. Awkward. Who is finally going to tell him? Not the Democrats. Chuck Schumer is our other cluelesss, if more benign, rich uncle, a foolish man who also takes himself way too seriously. Maybe it will take the friendly folks at Deep State to give Trump the tap on the shoulder to tell him the joke's over, and it's time to move on. 

Assuming Douthat is right and Frum is wrong, and I tend to agree with him with Douthat on this, all Trump will accomplish is chaos. But while I'd rather live with a regime of chaos than live with a well-organized authoritarian regime, chaos often leads to the well organized authoritarian regime. Egypt is a cautionary tale. We're not Egypt, but there are analogies to be drawn from it and other situations like it in history.

Remember all the hope that was in the streets during the heyday of the Arab Spring? How did that turn out? It was so OWS, so idealistic, so, you know, democratic. But when you sweep away the bad old guy, what did the democratic process produce? An even worse new guy--the religious fanatic Morsi. And that in turn led to the military coup. But that could never happen in America, right?

Trump must be resisted, but all that resistance energy will have been wasted if it just creates opportunities for the worst parts of our society to move in. Trump's a clown, but there are people waiting on the sidelines who are not. A sane, progressive, tough leadership that knows how power works must emerge out of this chaos. Otherwise leadership will default to the Deep State or worse. and the best case scenario will be to return to the status quo ante in which our senatorial-class elites will reassert their control.

And once they do, as a group--a few senators and other elites will protest ineffectually--ally themeselves with those elements in the Deep State--NSA, FBI, Homeland Security--to make sure that these disruptive, populist energies, whether channeled from the Left or the Right, will have little chance for making any kind of real trouble in the future. The infrastructure for suppression of any significant dissent is in place; the question is whether factions within this country will rise into positions of power who will use it for that purpose. Look at what the relatively moderate, sane Obama administration did to whistleblowers. 

But there's an opportunity here. It remains an open question though who will emerge to best exploit it. If it's to be a sane, progressive leadership, I don't see it yet. But it's early, and let's face it--anything can happen.

Thoughts on Inauguration Day

So it's done. The clown prince sits in his throne and delusion now reigns supreme. But this is not an aberration; it's a dark apotheosis, the culmination of trends in America that go back to WWII and then accelerated after Nixon. It's a culmination in the sense that it brings to its absurd telos the delusional logic of the American Right.

Outside the Deep South where this dark logic has always played a central role, it operated at the fringes of the American Soul--the Know-nothings, the Father Coughlins, the Joe McCarthys. But in the last forty years these dark angels who lived at the fringes have moved step by step to take control of the center. First with Nixon, then Reagan, then Bush/Cheney, each one worse and more delusional than the one who preceded him, and as they ascended to their thrones, they dragged the feckless Democrats along with them further and further to the right. And so after Bush/Cheney, the only place the Right could go was with someone as vulgar and thug-like as Donald J. Trump. 

I've heard people explain away his election as a freakish accident, or that we've been here before, and there's nothing to worry about, and that things will return to normal. To think this way is truly not to understand what's happening to us, but even if true, is the pre-Trump "normal" something to which any sane American wants to return? I hope not. And so with Trump I think we've crossed a line, and his election and inauguration today is the end of the line with regard to this dark forty-year trend. Either we stay here where the Right will consolidate its gains and things rigidify into a kind of suffocating, soft authoritarian or militaristic stasis--or things start moving in the other, saner direction. It is not clear to me whether the Trump presidency is the beginning of years of suffocating stasis or whether it will be the stiff wind that blows the whole delusional structure over. Either way, we're in for a bad time.

President Obama said during his last press conference that he believed in his core that we were going to be all right, but that we have to be vigilant and push back. Maybe. But I don't think any kind of push back can be truly effective if it's only to restore the pre-Trump status quo ante. Clintonism and the Washington Consensus do not provide a vision for an American future that anybody with a lick of sense truly believes is worth fighting for. HRC won the popular vote because at least a plurality of Americans recognize how truly awful Trump is, but she lost the election because she represents a system that nobody believes in anymore. 

The Washington Consensus is horrible with or without relatively decent people like Obama playing leadership roles in it, and it is deeply delusional in its foundational assumptions. It is shot through with hubris, paranoia, and a myopic thinking that serves elite interests but nobody else's. As such it is misaligned with reality, a reality that always asserts itself sooner or later and in doing so bursts the bubble that the deluded inhabit. Any hope of gently deflating this bubble is long gone, and the Trump election, if nothing else, could be be the needle that finally bursts it. It's not implausible to think that the condition of the U.S. system in the early 21st century resembles the condition of the Soviet system in the 1980s. Gorbachev was the needle that burst the Soviet bubble; will Trump be the needle that bursts ours? 

And so maybe that's what it's going to take--a Trump presidency that will heighten the contradictions between Beltway delusional normality and historical reality to such a pitch that the whole hubristic, paranoid, grasping American post-World War II system comes tumbling down, and maybe that would not be such a bad thing. Uncomfortable, scary, disruptive, destabilizing, humbling--yes, but maybe that's what is needed if America is to play any role in moving the world forward. But will their be a plan that decent Americans can rally around that will be "shovel ready", so to say?

Inevitably Trumpism will collapse and with that collapse will come the opportunity for the forces of progressive sanity and decency to clean house along with cleaning up the horrific mess he will have left behind. That is the only positive I can imagine coming out of a Trump presidency--that its inevitable, crashing failure might create an opportunity for deeper and far-reaching reforms that force a dismantlement of the American Deep State and its ideological justifications to make room for the emergence of a new prudence and realism to replace the paranoia and hubris, and a new vision of the just society to replace the neoliberalism that now justifies the interests of a predatory elite.

Just saying No to Trump thuggery or to the dystopian Ayn Randian vision for an American Future envisioned by the Neoliberal establishment or to the Deep State entrenched in the military and the Intelligence Community is not going to be enough. You can't repeal the dysfunction unless you have something functional to replace it with, and that's the problem. There is no robust plausible vision for a decent American future around which most sane Americans are eager to unite, at least not one with an articulate, credible spokesperson. It's possible that Elizabeth Warren might emerge to play that role. I don't know, however, whether anyone from America's senatorial class is in the best position to be that person. I think it's going to take someone like MLK. We'll see. 

Fear of the Dark Right is not a sustainable motivation for building something new and just. As soon as the dark dissipates, we will slide back into complacency, and the whole cycle repeats itself. Resistance is called for, but it's not sufficient. Pushing back will be futile unless it be in the service of creating the room for something New to occupy the space that has been cleared. We will need shovels to clear away the mess, but also to build something new that the American people can believe in.

For something New is called for, an imagination of an American future that calls upon our best, sanest, most decent instincts, and that is as emotionally robust as the resentment-driven passions that animate the Right.The Left is good at saying No; it's good at pushing its various liberation and rights agendas, but it has yet to present a positive imagination of economic justice for which the broad American public would support with enthusiasm. 

Someone, some group, must arise that can provide a plausible, inspiring, and just vision of a possible American future. Until that vision emerges, America's better angels will remain mostly impotent on the fringes, waiting for the moment when the center has cleared to make room for their return. In this I agree with Obama, that in my core I believe we will be OK in the long run. But the path we must take to get back to OK is not now clearly discernible, and things may have to get much, much worse before we can see it. 

Trump v. Deep State

For years now I've argued here that in several important respects it doesn't matter whom we elect president. Politicians come and go and with them their appointees, but the Deep State bureaucrats remain entrenched. And while there's something scary and undemocratic about that, it's also stabilizing and perhaps a cause for optimism in destabilizing times like these. Now that Trump seems determined to lock horns with the CIA, it will be interesting to see who prevails and to what degree, if at all, the strength of the Deep State plays a constraining role in the Trump presidency. 

This business about the Russian dossier might be a test case. It could be that Trump and the Right-wing cult, aka the GOP, have managed to erode American political norms and conventions so significantly that no matter how egregious, it doesn't matter what we find out about Trump's business or personal behavior. The guy is utterly shameless, and it doesn't seem to bother the GOP establishment. If anything it will probably embolden new levels of shamelessness in those who belong to it.

It's clear that the so-called conservative movement hasn't been interested in conserving anything that true conservatives care about--like norms, traditions, ethical practices--that have proved themselves valuable over time. Cheney famously said that Reagan proved that deficits don't matter, and racking up huge deficits became the new 'conservative' norm. Now Trump is proving that venality, sexual assault, and blatant lying don't matter either, especially to conservatives. He can do or say anything, and so can anybody else, so long as they are movement conservatives in good standing, and if they are shameless enough to shrug it off and stick it out. 

And so therefore since Americans in their infinite wisdom in addition to having elected this shameless, deeply foolish man to the presidency, have given him majorities in both houses, we have every reason to assume that Congress will abrogate its oversight responsibilities and do everything it can to protect Trump. For them it's no about doing the right thing. Not even remotely. The calculus is always about what increases their power and control. Rightists never care about traditions and norms; they care only about Power. 

And so it will be interesting to see if there are significant conflicts of Power within the D.C. establishment, and whether the Deep State might actually be a player that will push back against the Right. I guess it depends on how many people in the Deep State are themselves Rightists. I expect little from the Democrats. Maybe some new leaders will emerge, but Chuck Shumer and the other Dems who elected him and Pelosi minority leaders really don't get it.

But Trump's taking on the intelligence community within the Deep State? That could be a whole other kettle of fish. And this business of Trump with the Russians looks like it isn't going to go away. It might be something he'll just be able to shrug off as politically motivated mudslinging, but maybe not. Maybe there's something more going on here. And if there is and the Deep State types are not going to let it slide, then what? 

Trump is a walking, tweeting constitutional crisis waiting to happen. I find that despite myself, and perhaps against my better judgment, I'm rooting for the Deep State. I know--be careful what you wish for. I am quite aware that I haven't a clue which, the Deep State or Trumpism, is the greater evil. But that's where we are. Perhaps the best scenario is that they neutralize one another and hope that the country comes to its senses in the next four years, and that some compellingly sane alternative to all this insanity emerges. 

The Torture Report (Updated)

From an interview with Glen Greenwald:

The more you look at just how many people and institutions were involved (either actively or by looking the other way) — the doctors, the psychiatrists, the media, members of Congress — the more it starts to sound like a society-wide failure. It reminds me of what Arendt wrote about Germany (and Europe in general) in the interwar and World War II periods, how she described it as a kind of civilizational collapse. Tell me if you think I’m going too far.

I think there are several similar dynamics. For one thing, after World War II, when the full history got told, lots of people who had every way to know what was happening under their noses pretended they didn’t because the recognition of their complicity was just too painful. So they denied it and pretended they didn’t know and claimed that, had they known, they would have reacted a lot more strongly. That reminds me a lot of Tuesday’s reaction on the part of political and media circles in the United States.

And I also agree with your observation that the way in which values get jettisoned and standards get violated is incremental. It’s the frog in the boiling pot analogy; it just incrementally and slowly but inexorably keeps moving away from this point where you think you’re at [vis-à-vis norms and values], but because it’s incremental you feel like you’re always close enough to the prior point that you don’t actually feel like it’s a radical departure. And that has been the story of the United States not just under the Bush administration but for the last 13 years, where everything that happens that seems shocking becomes the justification for the next step.

So what's the next step? Do we really want to know? Is there anything anybody can do about it?

Remember how self-congratulatory the media and political class were after driving Nixon from office? They thought they proved that the system worked, that it was capable of self-correcting when things went wrong. It all seems rather quaint now, especially the idea that driving Nixon out of office was a significant corrective move, that we had then a political culture of accountability that we have since lost.

Update: Noah Millman on the report:

Willingness to torture became, first within elite government and opinion-making circles, then in the culture generally, and finally as a partisan GOP talking point, a litmus test of seriousness with respect to the fight against terrorism. That – proving one’s seriousness in the fight – was its primary purpose from the beginning, in my view. It was only secondarily about extracting intelligence. It certainly wasn’t about instilling fear or extracting false confessions – these would not have served American purposes. It was never about “them” at all. It was about us. It was our psychological security blanket, our best evidence that we were “all-in” in this war, the thing that proved to us that we were fierce enough to win.

I’ve used “we” all through this piece, and the reason is not just because America is a democracy. Our government tortured for us, not just in the sense that it is our representative nor in the sense that its motive was our protection, but in the sense that we, as a country in aggregate, really wanted the proof of seriousness that torture provided.

That’s something we’ll have to grapple with, as a country, if we’re ever to have the strength to follow our own laws and bring the guilty to justice.

Well, will we grapple with it. Obama wants to move on. We have the two legislatures after January whose thinking is shaped by Fox News. No grappling is likely to come from Washington. I hope I'm wrong, but by the middle of January this will likely all be forgotten. 

Deep State 2

The concept of the deep state has a variety of overlapping meanings, and a long heritage within historical and political analyses of famously top-heavy states like Turkey and Egypt, where powerful entrenched bureaucracies have subverted democracy or ignored it altogether. In the current American context, journalists Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady have used it to designate the far-reaching national security apparatus that was expanded so dramatically after 9/11. In an influential essay published earlier this year (which helps explain why the Obama administration is sliding toward another Middle East war), former congressional aide Mike Lofgren uses it to signify something much larger, “a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out,” comprising not just the federal bureaucracy and the intelligence agencies, but also the bankers and corporate elites.

If we were voting for or against candidates who were willing to address the power of the deep state, or at least to disclose and discuss it openly, then the midterm elections might mean something. As things stand, American electoral politics looks a lot like the circus staged to keep the kids entertained while the grownups pave over the fields and run the railroad through the middle of town. Can you blame the kids if they’re getting bored of watching the same clowns jamming themselves in and out of the same Volkswagen?

Tom Frank takes Krugman to task in his Sunday Salon column Sunday morning, but I think that Andrew O'Hehir's piece, quoted from above, is more probing. Frank still believes that Obama could have made a difference, or still could, and I just don't. Even Krugman seems to think that the president has powers over policy that I just no longer believe he has. The president isn't impotent, but he only has as much power as the Deep State allows him. That's the main thing that I've learned since 2008. Elected politicians to the federal government  mostly don't matter; it's the Deep State that matters; elected politicians in Washington succeed or fail depending on whether they serve or resist the will of the Deep State.

I'm not saying that the Deep State is some conspiratorial cabal; it's rather the 'group think' of insiders who mainly talk among themselves and are contemptuous of the democratic process because it mostly elects venal morons to congress. The key players in the Deep State like power, they understand how power works, and they serve power in order to get more of it for themselves, and so therefore no individual rises to power without first becoming its servant. I talk about that in a piece back in February about Lofgren's essay on the Deep State that my reading O'Hehir this morning reminded me about. 

The only politicians now who could make a substantive structural difference on the national level are those that challenge the "Deep State", but no politician can become powerful enough to do that effectively because the Big State, with the cooperation of the establishment media, destroys or makes irrelevant candidates who oppose it. (Howard Dean comes to mind.) At first I thought that Obama would be such a challenger, but it now seems clear to me now that the stuff he said that actually made sense he said because he (and I) didn'tunderstand scope and power of the Deep State. But when it became clear to key players in the Deep State that he was likely to win, he got "educated".

I could imagine some powerful insider having a conversation with Obama in Spring of 2008 in which he flatters him, tells him how smart he is, how great it will be for the country to have its first black president, that the world of Washington insiders is ready to embrace him and his presidency with enthusiasm: You want healthcare reform? Great--go for it--but there are rules you have to learn, and one of them is that you don't challenge the security state or it will chew you up and spit you out, and you will have squandered this remarkable, historic opportunity for black Americans and for accomplishing important things that you care about (so long as they are things that  we in the Deep State approve or just don't care about."

Obama's remarkable reversal on the FISA vote in the summer of 2008 was the first sign he had been "educated" about where the real power lies. Hilary voted for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 because she already had been 'educated' during the 90s; she knew that the Deep State wanted that invasion, and it was pointless to oppose it. Obama, who was not in any federal office in 2003, could say sane things about the invasion because he was still naive about how power in Washington works. I think that's what angered and frustrated Hillary and her supporters off so much. Obama could come out as the anti-war candidate in 2008 because he could sanelyoppose the war in 2003 when no one in the Deep State saw him as significant enough to pressure him to support it. 

George Bush or Dick Cheney were not the driving force behind the invasion of Iraq; the Deep State was. Bush & Cheney were simply servants of the deep state, willing servants perhaps, but servants nevertheless. That's why Cheney completely reversed himself about invading Iraq. There's that famous quote from 1991 when he worked for the first Bush when he laid out all the reasons why it would be stupid to invade Iraq:

I think that the proposition of going to Baghdad is also fallacious. I think if we we're going to remove Saddam Hussein we would have had to go all the way to Baghdad, we would have to commit a lot of force because I do not believe he would wait in the Presidential Palace for us to arrive. I think we'd have had to hunt him down. And once we'd done that and we'd gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and his government, then we'd have had to put another government in its place. What kind of government? Should it be a Sunni government or Shi'i government or a Kurdish government or Ba'athist regime? Or maybe we want to bring in some of the Islamic fundamentalists? How long would we have had to stay in Baghdad to keep that government in place? What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable? I think it is vitally important for a President to know when to use military force. I think it is also very important for him to know when not to commit U.S. military force. And it's my view that the President got it right both times, that it would have been a mistake for us to get bogged down in the quagmire inside Iraq. (At the Washington Institute's Soref Symposium, April 29, 1991)

He could talk sense then because it didn't contradict what the Deep State wanted at that time. Things changed since 1991, but not in Iraq. They changed in Washington where neocon thinking became more influential in shaping insider groupthink. What most Americans wanted was never a factor. The insiders knew that public opinion, at first negative about invading Iraq, could be easily manipulated by fear rhetoric.

It's depressing that this country would even consider giving the Republicans a majority in the Senate, but as O'Hehir points out, it has nothing to do with what people want; it's understood more like the weather. There seems to be little or no human agency involved at all. If there is any such thing as political agency anymore, it lies on the local level. 

The Deep State

I've said in a recent post that the Tea Party is right to be angry but wrong because it channels that anger in unconstructive ways. Last night on Moyers and Company, Moyers interviewed Mike Lofgren, a former Republican congressional staffer, who explains why. He's coined the term the "Deep State", and describes more precisely and effectively than I've been able to do why we in the States have become what is virtually a ceremonial democracy. It doesn't matter whom we elect, we elect them not to serve the interests of the electorate, but the interests of the Deep State. Here's  Lofgren:

Yes, there is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose. My analysis of this phenomenon is not an exposé of a secret, conspiratorial cabal; the state within a state is hiding mostly in plain sight, and its operators mainly act in the light of day. Nor can this other government be accurately termed an “establishment.” All complex societies have an establishment, a social network committed to its own enrichment and perpetuation. In terms of its scope, financial resources and sheer global reach, the American hybrid state, the Deep State, is in a class by itself. That said, it is neither omniscient nor invincible. The institution is not so much sinister (although it has highly sinister aspects) as it is relentlessly well entrenched. Far from being invincible, its failures, such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, are routine enough that it is only the Deep State’s protectiveness towards its higher-ranking personnel that allows them to escape the consequences of their frequent ineptitude. . . . 

The Deep State does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street. All these agencies are coordinated by the Executive Office of the President via the National Security Council. Certain key areas of the judiciary belong to the Deep State, such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, whose actions are mysterious even to most members of Congress. Also included are a handful of vital federal trial courts, such as the Eastern District of Virginia and the Southern District of Manhattan, where sensitive proceedings in national security cases are conducted. The final government component (and possibly last in precedence among the formal branches of government established by the Constitution) is a kind of rump Congress consisting of the congressional leadership and some (but not all) of the members of the defense and intelligence committees. The rest of Congress, normally so fractious and partisan, is mostly only intermittently aware of the Deep State and when required usually submits to a few well-chosen words from the State’s emissaries.

I saw this submissiveness on many occasions. One memorable incident was passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act of 2008. This legislation retroactively legalized the Bush administration’s illegal and unconstitutional surveillance first revealed by The New York Times in 2005 and indemnified the telecommunications companies for their cooperation in these acts. The bill passed easily: All that was required was the invocation of the word “terrorism” and most members of Congress responded like iron filings obeying a magnet. One who responded in that fashion was Senator Barack Obama, soon to be coronated as the presidential nominee at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. He had already won the most delegates by campaigning to the left of his main opponent, Hillary Clinton, on the excesses of the global war on terror and the erosion of constitutional liberties.

I wrote at the time about my disappointment in Obama's FISA vote here. That vote was the first clear sign that Obama was someone who had no problem with the Beltway rules and had no stomach for changing them. I was still hopeful that Obama would be better than that at the time, but as we all know now, that hope proved groundless.  

Lofgren also has some very good things to say about groupthink, which is the hive mentality that keeps the Deep Government from ever questioning the legitimacy of what it does:

Cultural assimilation is partly a matter of what psychologist Irving L. Janis called “groupthink,” the chameleon-like ability of people to adopt the views of their superiors and peers. This syndrome is endemic to Washington: The town is characterized by sudden fads, be it negotiating biennial budgeting, making grand bargains or invading countries. Then, after a while, all the town’s cool kids drop those ideas as if they were radioactive. As in the military, everybody has to get on board with the mission, and questioning it is not a career-enhancing move. The universe of people who will critically examine the goings-on at the institutions they work for is always going to be a small one. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

 A more elusive aspect of cultural assimilation is the sheer dead weight of the ordinariness of it all once you have planted yourself in your office chair for the 10,000th time. Government life is typically not some vignette from an Allen Drury novel about intrigue under the Capitol dome. Sitting and staring at the clock on the off-white office wall when it’s 11:00 in the evening and you are vowing never, ever to eat another piece of takeout pizza in your life is not an experience that summons the higher literary instincts of a would-be memoirist. After a while, a functionary of the state begins to hear things that, in another context, would be quite remarkable, or at least noteworthy, and yet that simply bounce off one’s consciousness like pebbles off steel plate: “You mean the number of terrorist groups we are fighting is classified?” No wonder so few people are whistle-blowers, quite apart from the vicious retaliation whistle-blowing often provokes: Unless one is blessed with imagination and a fine sense of irony, growing immune to the curiousness of one’s surroundings is easy. To paraphrase the inimitable Donald Rumsfeld, I didn’t know all that I knew, at least until I had had a couple of years away from the government to reflect upon it.

Groupthink is a dream state, the kind that one doesn't realize he's in until he wakes from it. In January I wrote this about the "institutional mind". It applies to all institutions, but particularly to the institution with the most power in the history of the world:

If I’ve come to understand anything over the years, it’s that individual human beings, even the best and worst, are always a mix of good and bad motives, but large institutions (governments, corporations, churches) the larger they get, the less ambivalent the motives that drive them. Large institutions don't do ambivalence. Their defenders will make all kinds of nuanced, clever, lawyerly arguments to justify what they do, but what in the end they do is boringly predictable, i.e., whatever serves their institutional self-interest.

That self interest is defined mainly in terms of security and control. There are always threats, real or imaginary, that justify getting more of the latter to insure the former. No argument, no matter how morally compelling, succeeds if it requires that the institution act in such a way that it threatens to undermine or diminish its security and control, no matter how much security and control it already possesses. The individuals who do the institutional will might feel ambivalently about what they do, but they do it, or the institution will spit them out.

I honestly don't know how you combat this. The Deep Government is impervious to even something like Marxist analysis and critique--it's about power, not greed, and there is no effective counterbalance, like the Proletariat, to bring it down. It's not something that the people who have positions in it control; the system instead controls them by a kind of institutional hypnosis. Does anyone think the Tea Party is going to bring it down? Talk about a group in a hypnotic dream. The Tea Party, if anything, serves its interests. Does anyone think that even electing more conscious people like an Elizabeth Warren to the presidency is going to bring it down? People like that could not do it even if they had the will to do it because government gridlock and the careerist groupthink in Congress will reisist with ferocity dismantling the trough at which it feeds. Gridlock among our elected officials isn't a bug but a feature as far as the Deep Government is concerned. If elected officials are paralyzed by tribal conflicts or care only about  corrupt, self-interested gamemanship a la Frank Underwood, the Deep Government sets policy by default; there's no united, countervailing power to restrain it. Even the Frank Underwoods are its tool.

If the Deep Government comes down, and eventually it will, it will come down from its own dead weight. Even now it is like a building that's been abandoned and has been taken over by squatters. Eventually the building will collapse from the accumulated negative consequences of its blinkered, parasitic, short-term thinking. It's interesting in a way--like watching a slow-motion implosion of a huge building, But instead of explosives that bring the structure down, it's all these bit players, who in removing beams and bricks to build fires or little shelters that serve their short-run interests, in the long run make of this building a ruin.  

The Dream Prison of Conventional Wisdom, Part II

"To dare is to temporarily lose one's footing; Not to dare is to lose one's self."

"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."                                    --Soren Kierkegaard

                                                                                    

If I’ve come to understand anything over the years, it’s that individual human beings, even the best and worst, are always a mix of good and bad motives, but large institutions (governments, corporations, churches) the larger they get, the less ambivalent the motives that drive them. Large institutions don't do ambivalence. Their defenders will make all kinds of nuanced, clever, lawyerly arguments to justify what they do, but what in the end they do is boringly predictable, i.e., whatever serves their institutional self-interest.

That self interest is defined mainly in terms of security and control. There are always threats, real or imaginary, that justify getting more of the latter to insure the former. No argument, no matter how morally compelling, succeeds if it requires that the institution act in such a way that it threatens to undermine or diminish its security and control, no matter how much security and control it already possesses. The individuals who do the institutional will might feel ambivalently about what they do, but they do it, or the institution will spit them out.

No human project is unambiguously motivated, but some Institutions like the Church, the United States, the first French Republic, and I'd argue even the USSR and the PRC moved the ball ahead because they were at least in part inspired by ideals that pointed to truths that have deep, sustaining power. But at some point the anxious institutional mind takes over and chooses to play it safe rather than to live even ambiguously in the light of its founding ideals. Those ideals are pushed to the side in the interests of security and control. Early in the institution's existence there is usually more institutional ambivalence about it, but at a certain point it crosses the line and never goes back unless forced to.

Take for instance the U.S. policy toward Latin America in the 70s and 80s. I think the historical record about Operation Condor is well established, and the story of American support for Pinochet's Chilean coup and its support for other fascist (sorry, authoritarian) governments is well established. The people of Chile democratically elect a socialist government, and because that was an affront to the security interests of the United States, its democratic principles and values are pushed aside so Americans can install an authoritarian government they can control. The Pinochet cabal might have been bastards, but they were our bastards.

Nothing shocking about that. Humans will rarely choose ideals over security, even if they have every reason to feel secure by most human standards. I'm sure there are some exceptions that prove the rule, but large institutions after crossing that line of no return never do it. They will only compromise when a greater threat to their security forces them to. Large institutions have their minds made up, and they are never interested in having a discussion in which it is genuinely open to a proposal unless it has a positive or neutral effect regarding its security and control interests. If representatives of a large institution sit down to talk with you about doing something that would have a substantive positive impact but could possibly have a negative impact on its security and control, they will not listen to your arguments. They will just see the conversation as an opportunity to propagandize you into accepting that its security project is in your best interests. They are not in the least open to being persuaded that anything else is more important.

We all need a certain level of security and stability in our lives to function effectively as humans, but when we allow security concerns to crowd out all others, we create hells of alienation. This is at the heart of the Gospel warning about the difficulty for the rich man entering the kingdom as it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. The rich man has the resources to buffer himself against all threats to his security, and in doing so he cuts himself off from reality and instead lives in a toxic, alienating dream prison. So do rich nation states and empires operate by the same logic, and the modern security state is one of its most toxic manifestations. These hells are, however, country club prisons for most of the people who live in it, and the inmates are mostly unaware that they are in fact prisoners, and they are unaware of the price people outside it pay to maintain them in it. 

In Part I I tried to make the argument that progress is not to be confused with heedless innovation, but rather with whether changes we experience move us toward greater levels of freedom and communion.  There is no progress if innovation simply reinforces the prison walls by lulling us into a deeper state of hypnosis or stupefaction. For Americans this stupefaction is particularly strong because of our security obsession. If anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, we'd rather not be free. Better for us just to anesthetize ourselves in any way we can, better for us just to stay passed out, unconscious, asleep. 

I assume that we all start more or less in a sleep state insofar as we accept uncritically the conventional thinking into which we have been acculturated. This is the consciousness of children whom adults seek to protect from life's evils, as they should. But if we want our children to grow into highly functioning adults, we cannot protect them forever. We cannot be like the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, who sincerely believes he is performing the highest service for the people in his care by arresting their development, protecting them by treating them like children. And so when Jesus Christ appears on the scene to invite those in the Inquisitor's care to experience deeper levels of freedom and communion, this Jesus cannot be tolerated. The Inquisitor sees him as a threat, a destabilizing influence who threatens to subvert the security state that it's his duty to preserve. He must be got rid of.

This is the human story on so many levels, but it's particularly relevant in describing how we humans become hypnotized by inquisitors in our own day--politicians, religious figures, media personalities--who tell us not to worry, they understand what we cannot, that they have our interests and safety in mind, and that we should just go back to sleep. We want to feel safe, and so we want to believe them. We find ourselves wanting very much to accept the conventional wisdom--everybody does--and we feel a twinge of anxiety when we entertain the possibility of thinking differently: to dare to think differently means to go where we will not have the protection these authorities offer us. So, yeah, what they say sounds a little fishy, but so what? It's none of my business. It's better to just roll over and go back to sleep.

***

This is a long prelude to what I originally sat down to write about, which is Costas Gavras's 1982 film, Missing, which I saw again the other night after having seen it years ago. It struck me as a much better film this time because I saw in it more than just formulaic political propaganda. It works on another level because it's a parable of awakening from the dream prison I've just described. Ed Horman (played by Jack Lemmon) is Everyman, and he's quite comfortable in his imprisonment by the security state and accepts its conventional wisdom as "reality". It’s the story of Ed's waking up from his complacent dream as he gradually comes to realize a twin horror—that his adult son has been killed by the Chilean government and that the US government was complicit in his execution. 

This is a quest story, one in which Ed Horman searches for his son, Charlie, a writer who was swept up by the military in the aftermath of Pinochet’s Chilean coup. Ed is an honest man, a devout Christian Scientist, and someone who trusts his government. He's a middle American, a member of what was called back then the 'silent majority'. He arrives in Chile after learning from his daughter-in-law, Beth (Sissy Spacek) about his son's disappearance. Ed is in immediate conflict with Beth because Beth stands outside the security state's conventional wisdom in which Ed still sleeps.

She sees the situation more clearly. She is not cynical--she is anything but. But her epistemology, so to say, allows her to entertain an alternative explanation of the facts than the ones presented by the security state that Charlie accepts. Beth and Charlie have chosen to live outside the safe zone defined by the conventional wisdom of the American security state, and have found a deeper experience of communion there. They are poor, but they have a good life in which they are creatively engaged with spirited, interesting American and Chilean friends. 

Ed sees Beth as a flake who in stepping outside of the protections provided by the security state has exposed herself and his son unnecessarily and foolishly to danger. For Ed the prospect of living outside the conventional security zone is deeply repugnant and incomprehensible. These kids, Charlie and Beth, are stick figures for him in a crude anti-establishment cartoon, and he is incapable of understanding them because of his deep alienation from them and the life they lead. 

The story is about Ed losing his footing but saving his Self. It's about his coming gradually to see the world from Beth’s perspective, and about his coming into a deeper communion with her and by proxy with his son. Ed has arrested development; he is like one of the Inquisitor's children. He is someone who has resisted all his life the invitation to grow up, even though invitations were continuously offered to him by his son. For him it was better, safer, to live estranged from his son than to grow up.

The U.S. government officials, of course, make a good show of wanting to help Ed find Charlie. But really their objective is to reinforce the security perimeter that shapes Ed's childish worldview, and they suggest in so many ways that he just go back home and back to sleep, but Charlie's disappearance has awakened him. He's up, he's roused, and his mind is clearing. He keeps digging, and gradually it becomes clear to him that the U.S embassy officials have no interest in telling Ed the truth; they care only about protecting American interests, which means reinforcing the  system that keeps the Americans safe and well fed within the country club prison, aka. the American Dream.

This following exchange occurs after Ed hears from a reliable source that Charlie was killed in the stadium. He goes to the American embassy to confront the U.S. ambassador.  My comments are in brackets:

U.S. Ambassador: We're not involved, Mr. Horman. Our position has been completely neutral. [This is the Big Lie needed to reinforce complacency of prison life. It assumes that most people will believe it because most people want to believe it, because not to believe will initiate a chain reaction that will bring down the prison walls. We resist losing our footing, and we don't like feeling dizzy.]

Ed Horman: That is a bald face lie, sir. How can you say a thing like that when you have army colonels, you have naval engineers, they're all over Viña Del Mar! [Ed has been exposed to too much evidence for him to accept that the Big Lie can be true. He wanted to believe it, but now his instinct for truth is stronger than his desire to stay safe. There's no more ambivalence--he's fully awake; he's regained his balance, and so now there's nothing for the ambassador to work with, but he gives it one last try:]

U.S. Ambassador: Please sit down. Look, it's very obvious you're harboring some misconception regarding our role here. [Misconception = any ideas or evidence that don't support the Big Lie. This statement is like the Jedi mind trick, to work with Ed's predisposition to be hypnotized by the Lie, but it doesn't work now.]

Ed Horman: What is your role here? Besides inducing a regime that murders thousands of human beings? [Ed's not having it. He's passed the point of no return. His prison walls have collapsed. He's already walked out. His gait is determined and confident.]

U.S. Ambassador: Let's level with each other, sir. If you hadn't been personally involved in this unfortunate incident, you'd be sitting at home complacent and more or less oblivious to all of this. This mission is pledged to protect American interests, our interests. [The ambassador sees that Ed can no longer be hypnotized, so he provides an honest answer: If your son's leaving the confines of the security state and its conventional wisdom hadn't made you aware that there was life outside it, you'd still be home living happily on your prison rations without a care in the world. Don't blame us; blame your son.]

Ed Horman: Well, they're not mine.[Ed is coming to realize that his real interests lie outside the security system. This was his son's gift to him, even if he had to die to give it to him.]

U.S. Ambassador: There are over three thousand US firms doing business down here. And those are American interests. In other words, your interests. I am concerned with the preservation of a way of life. [Way of life = American Dream = existence in the country club prison of the American Security State. This prison cannot exist without American political and economic dominance. This is Costas Gavras's political statement, and I accept it as true for reasons I'll explain below.]

Capt. Ray Tower, USN: And a damned good one. [So take your rations, Ed. Stop complaining, leave matters you don't understand to us, and don't leave prison or you'll end up like your son.]

Ed Horman: (Staring out the window at empty yard) Maybe that's why there's nobody out there. [Not sure what this line means. Maybe that preservation of the American way of life requires murdering anybody who opposes American interests.]

U.S. Ambassador: You can't have it both ways. [You can't have the benefits of living in prison without those living outside the prison paying to maintain you in it.]

I don't look at this as anti-American propaganda, because the story it tells is universal. The American government is behaving like all governments any where and at any time. I'm sure the real U.S. embassy officials in Chile at the time of the coup were more complicated as human beings than the way they were depicted in the film, but whatever their discomfort and feelings of moral ambiguity about what happened to Charlie, they accept that their duty is to serve the institutional will, and in that they were not caricatured. It doesn't matter what they feel; it matters what they do. 

It's not that our "enemies" hate our freedom; it's that our enemies are paying the price for our American 'way of life'. The defenders of that way of life understand that our 'enemies' have good reason to resist paying for it, and so they must be suppressed. And so they also sincerely believe, like the Grand Inquisitor, that keeping the rest of us safe and asleep is in our best interest. 

***

Part I focused on the macro theme that progress is not simply innovation, but a movement from alienation and lack of autonomy to communion and freedom. Ed Horman's story is a parable of what "progress" looks like on the micro, individual level. Ed's is the story of what it's like for any of us to hear the wakeup alarm and to dare to get up and live in the world with a greater degree of wakefulness. The context of the movie was political, but politics is only one area of our lives in which we are lulled into the dream state we experience as conventional thinking. Our work lives and religious lives are shaped by churches, schools, companies that follow the logic of the security state as much as our political lives do.

The logic of all conventional thinking follows the logic of the security state, and the degree to which we remain confined in any aspect of our life is the degree to which we remain in a state of arrested development. To leave the confines of the security systems that seek to confine us does not mean that the alienating dream dissolves all at once and that one immediately finds complete liberation from illusion; it means that you take on the life-long task of developing a greater capacity for freedom and communion. At some point a critical mass of people reach a point in the project which has a transformative effect on the collective mind, and the social imaginary changes, even for the people who are still only semi-conscious. 

This is a task that starts in freedom--it must be freely chosen--but it succeeds to the degree that it moves the toward communion. It begins with individuals as autonomous agents who accept the task as their own individual responsibility, but in accepting it, they start on a path toward greater levels of wakefulness. Taking this path requires in the beginning that one feel a little unsteady on one's feet, but the farther one moves along, the more he awakens, and the greater becomes his awareness of the communion that was there all along, but which was shrouded when he was dreaming. As we awaken, our experience of alienation from ourselves, from others, from all of creation begins to melt away. Not all at once, but gradually. But nothing changes for him who, when he hears the wakeup alarm, rolls over and goes back to sleep.