After the Future

Left Authoritarians?

This Atlantic article entitled "The Experts Somehow Overlooked the Authoritarians on the Left" bolsters the argument I made in Naive Idealists posted on 9/6. All authoritarians, whether on the Left or Right, work with the energies of one-sided Doves, aka Naive Idealists. You don't have to be a Dove like Robespierre or John Brown to be an authoritarian. Stalin and Trump were one-sided Serpents, but even they could not have succeeded without the support of easily inflamed and manipulable Naive Idealists. While the authoritarians of the Left--the Neopuritans in the P.C./Antifa/anarchist crowd--are annoying, they pose relatively little danger, whereas the authoritarians of the Right might very well destroy American democracy, whatever its flaws and limitations.

Another difference between contemporary Right and Left authoritarianism is that authoritarian movements, especially on the Right, tend to require a personality cult to catalyze its latent energies. There is no personality on the Left who performs this function in the way that Donald Trump has done for Right authoritarians. Bernie Sanders might have been recruited for such a role by Left authoritarians, but he's no authoritarian. He's too much of a mensch to have ever assumed the role in a way that could ever have been effective. And the energies on the Left in this moment are not incendiary to the same extent that they are on the Right. In other words, the Left in the U.S. is not ripe for demagoguery in the same way that the Right is. 

The question for me at this point is whether someone like Trump is needed to sustain Right authoritarian extremism in the U.S. If Trump fades from the scene, can anyone replace him? I'm not sure about that. I don't think that Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley, or a twerp like Tucker Carlson can, but maybe there's someone else lurking on the fringes who will emerge that can. Or it could be that rank-and-file authoritarians don't care who gets in front of their parade. Maybe any figurehead will do so long as he or she tells the mob what it wants to hear. I don't know. We'll see one way or the other. 

No 'fuehrer' emerging in this sense even imaginable in the short-term future on the Left. AOC and Stacy Abrams have the charisma, but imo they, too, are too menschy, too balanced, to play such a role. But I don't know them personally and I could be wrong. Nevertheless, it's hard to imagine the energies on the American Left being catalyzed by them or someone yet to emerge in the way Trump has catalyzed the Right. Whatever the whackadoodle Right says about the threats posed by Left authoritarians, there is very little short-term danger posed by them compared to the threat posed by the Right. 

Lenin pointed out after his successful Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 that the 1905 First Russian Revolution was its dress rehearsal. The same thing might be said about the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Germany. There's good reason to fear that we will come to see J6 similarly as such a dress rehearsal. That's a threat that comes from the authoritarians on the Right, not the Left.  

One of the biggest obstacles to restraining the authoritarian Right at this moment are the one-sided Serpents that dominate the Beltway political class. They are capable of thinking only about what is in their short-term political interests, and are virtually incapable of thinking about the big picture. They see politics as a game, and they are incapable of seeing what they do as having consequences beyond what affects their narrow interests. What distinguishes the various Beltway Insider players is how they have responded to the radical way in which the game has changed since 2008. 

Some Republicans like Boehner, Ryan, Corker were shrewd enough to understand that the game has changed in such a way that they no longer wanted to play it. Others like Susan Collins, Joe Manchin, and Kristen Sinema seem clueless that the game has changed at all and continue to play by the old business-as-usual rules. And others, extreme Serpents like Graham, McCarthy, McConnell, Cruz, DeSantis, Hawley et al., recognize that the game has changed, but they still want to play--even if it their winning means destroying American democracy. They don't care so long as they come out on top. 

I think that most prominent Democrats understand what's at stake. There are few naive idealists among them. (Most Naive Idealists on the Left are in the media or in academia.) Prominent Dem pols--Pelosi, Schiff, Raskin, Sanders, and others--are both shrewd game players who also are sincerely committed to preserve and improve American democracy. The question is whether they will be able to get the clueless snakes like Sinema, Manchin, Collins, et al. to recognize that business as usual is no longer an option. If they don't, the shrewder snakes in the GOP and Right-wing media will continue to demagogue the Naive Idealists on the Right, and if they are effective in focusing the intensity of Right-wing passions, they just might find a way to win.

I don't think they will win, but there's a very good chance that they will.  

Thoughts on the Yesterday's Indictment

From Charlie Syke's Morning Shots--

Jack Smith and other prosecutors have flooded the zone with Trump’s criminality. The rapidly filling legal calendar means that 2024 will be dominated by:

• Trump the fraudster

• Trump the rapist

• Trump’s hush money payments to a porn star

• Trump’s violation of the Espionage Act

and

• Trump, the conspiracist, who tried to overthrow the government

“Each of these conspiracies — which built on the widespread mistrust the defendant was creating through pervasive and destabilizing lies about election fraud — targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.”

If only Republicans had been warned. But they bought this ticket; and this is the ride they are about to take.

I've been avoiding talking about politics on the ground if I don't have anything to say that isn't being said over and over and that doesn't fit into already established ideological bins, there's no point in writing about it. But his indictment yesterday on charges that relate to his failed coup attempt on J6 demand some acknowledgement.

I accept that American society is broken, and that it's main fissure line is defined by whether you voted for Trump even once. If you are a principled Conservative, the only option for you was to have become a Never Trumper. That so few Conservatives made that choice spoke, and continues to speak, to the deep trouble that we are in. Too many Americans see Trump as a legitimaage politician, and in doing so have defined down legitimacy and shattered any ideas of norm-al politics for years to come. Chaos 'R Us and will continue to be until there's a shift in the zeitgeist. Trump's indictments will not decrease the chaos; rather they are a harbinger of a more intense experience of chaos to come next year. 

Those of us who were appalled by Trump, who thought he was a grifter, a bull-shitting fabulist, and a demagogue, also thought that a sensible majority of Americans, both Liberal and Conservative, would see through his con. We were like Lincoln and many of the otherwise astute Northerners in 1860 who thought that saner minds would prevail and that the South would never provoke a Civil War. They were wrong then, and we were wrong in 2016. Chaos ensued, and it's not over for us yet in this recent iteration of this old American story. It's an open question as to how violent things will get. No reason for optimism because, 'Violence 'R Us'. 

A major theme in this blog since its inception provoked by the fabulism among Neoliberal elites that led to our invading Iraq in 2003 has been why are Americans are so prone to delusional thinking that seeks a violent outlet? The short answer is that without a vertical pole in our metaphysical imaginary, American society spins but without a center, and the consequent erratic,meaningless spinning leads to mass ontological dizziness. The consequences of the amputation of vertical pole began to be felt acutely by the Western cultural elite around 1850, and since then we've experienced a gradual development toward a broadening intensification of the experience of ontological dizziness. What affected mostly educated elites in the 20th century is affecting everyvbody now. 

It was aggravated by Neoliberal ideology and policies that became normative for elites since 1980 and who in their callow hubris after the collapse of the USSR thought that they should impose it on the world. And even now, despite its magnificent failures, the only class of people--mostly educated elites--who are not feeling particularly dizzy are those whose identities are in some degree still enmeshed in Neoliberal ideology and its nihilism. Why? Because of all the ways they benefit from it. (But how are their hyper-anxieety-prone children doing?)

But Neoliberalism and the cultural 'whateverism' it promotes is unsustainable for any society, and a society suffering from ontological dizziness will find a center one way or the other. And the question is whether or not it will find a true center--or whether it will just invent one around a cult of personality or some of other form of delusional thinking. 

And so as we "look forward" to what will be certainly one of the most chaotic and unpredictable election years in American history. As I've written in a series of posts earlier this year, while a Trump nomination by the Republicans looks extremely likely, it's unlikely that he will be elected in the general. Nevertheless, it's scary because, who knows--he could be elected. Those of us who thought it was impossible in '16 could very well be wrong again because we underestimate the degree to which American society suffers from ontological dizziness. Nevertheless, I am inclined to agree with those who think that the combined effect of Trump running for President while under indictment or while appealing his convictions--there is no way he'll be running from jail-- is very bad politics, and not a good thing for the Republican Party up and down the ballot. And whatever is bad for Republicans is good for America, at least in the short term. 

So better Trump than a Republican who has a better chance of winning. The MAGA wing of the GOP must be completely an utterly discredited, and the best chance of that is letting them run and watching them lose. The best possible outcome for America as 2024 will come to a close will be for Democrats to win resoundingly everywhere. Why? Not because Democrats offer any real solutions but because Democrats are the true conservatives now. Whatever you might think about their views on cultural issues, they are the political force that stands for conserving norms and traditions in the political sphere. Republicans just don't care about them anymore, and no decent Republicans can get elected if they don't not cater to their ontologically dizzy base that wants to tear the whole system down.  

But if Democrats prevail in '24, as we should all hope they will, that is at best a short-term fix unless important voices from within the American soul emerge who articulate what ontological dizziness is and why it is such a profoundly destabilizing force in American--or any-- society. And then they must also develop an imagination of an American future where there is a cure for it. If this could happen in America, it would be truly a light shining on a hill. But maybe it will happen first elsewhere. It doesn't matter so long as it happens and it is broadly recognized as the next step forward. 

As I've been writing here for years, cultural problems and conflicts cannot be resolved in the political sphere. The American Civil War is a classic example: The North won in the power politics sphere, but not in the cultural sphere. Forcing people to change their values hardly ever works. The resentments fester and swell, and it's only a matter of time before they burst out in ways that debilitate the entire system. But because almost all politics lies downstream from culture, cultural warfare in the political sphere is extraordinarily hard to avoid. 

So if the real problem is ontological dizziness, what's the cure? As I argued last month, I don't think there is one until we experience a profound shift in the zeitgeist. Until then we're all like the ancient Hebrews wandering in the wilderness. There are those among us--mostly on the religious right--who long to return to the fleshpots of Egypt (aka the 1950s--and for some the 1850s). But there are also many Americans of goodwill, whether they lean conservative or liberal, who in their quiet, everyday lives provide ballast for the larger society. They put one foot in front of the other, do what must be done as conscience indicates, and they live lives of quiet integrity and hope. They do not suffer from ontological dizziness, and hopefully from out of their ranks a thoughtful, new leadership will emerge in the cultural sphere, and so consequently in the political sphere. Such leadership will succeed to the degree that it inspires most Americans to move toward a saner, ontologically less vertiginous place by the end of the century.

There can be no endlessly muddling through. Dome significant shift needs to happen. Better that it not be effected by the forces of darkness on whose behalf a guy like Trump works. 

 

Self-Transcendence, Constraints, and Social Order

Every society needs moral norms and behavioral codes. Without them we would all be in Hobbes's state of nature. The culture war that is tearing the country apart right now is about who gets to define what those codes are. The main combatants are the Left and Right wings of our Calvinist heritage--the priggish Neo Victorians on the Right and the equally priggish Neo Abolitionist Identitarianss on the Left. The Right is wrong because the old social order was unjust in its repressiveness of women and minorities; the Left is wrong because its basis for abolition is not 'justice' but 'desire'. The cultural Left seeks to abolish taboos that impede desire understood in a postmodern Freudian sense, and they find a way to do it that is insufferably moralistic. 

The intellectual vanguard on the cultural Left, at least for now, does not believe in transcendentals. For them Truth and Justice are just stuff we make up for the sake of convenience to navigate in a world that at root makes no sense. Justice is just a name for whatever is the cause of the day, which is usually what is trending in elite academic circles. For this faction on the Left, the idea that Justice is a transcendental ideal that calls a society to become its best possibility is an impossibility.  But without justice as a grounding principle, it must find something else, and it draws on forms of postmodern Freudian theory like that of Lacan, Zizek, Deleuze, and Guattari to find it--and all they's got is 'desire', which in the American context is conflated with the 'pursuit of happiness' and the freedom to determine for oneself what that happiness might be. Any attempt to argue that some desires are better than others and some may be destructively narcissistic is rejected except when it involves violence. 

So to boil the postmodern Freudian doctrine down to essentials, humans are all victims of the Oedipus complex, which is the cultural download we each receive when we are weaned and learn that we are not the center of the universe and must learn to play our role in society. These roles are cultural constructs and are  by definition repressive and as such the greatest impediment to our pursuit of happiness, and so they must be deconstructed and abolished when they are obstacles to any individual's pursuit of happiness however that might be construed. 

These roles are social constructs and as such are in flux over time, but they trace back to our premodern cultural heritage, so, for instance, the vast majority of children who are born biologically male and female must learn to play the roles of men and women, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, etc.  Daddy insists on it, and so does Mommy, perhaps even more vehemently. Those roles for men and women are different in different societies, but one gets assigned a role and one must fit into it whether one likes it or not, and mostly we humans don't like it.

I accept that humans are born polymorphously perverse, and that as a result no matter what the gender or sexual role assigned to us, it's a constraint.  And so the Oedipal desire to kill the Father is not personal; it's about the child's resentment at being constrained when she or he loses the Mother as his or her exclusive object of desire. The people who fail to make the Oedipal transition become primal narcissists--people like the fictional King Lear or the all too real Donald Trump--people whose driving force is to become once again the center of the universe as they were in the pre-Oedipal state where their wish was their desire. So what is this desire about except to restore our polymorphous perversity, which means a longing to return to a state of primal narcissism?

So all of us at that early age and continuing through life resent the constraints that were forced on us with our acculturation, some more than others depending on the configuration of the tribal codes and the roles they assign. But the resentment is always there, and so if we have not learned to own and manage these resentments, they lie festering in the soul. And when someone completely unrepressed and infantile like Donald Trump comes along, he gives permission to many for all that unmanaged, festering resentment to express itself in deeply destructive ways. And so here we are wallowing in a culture of narcissists, the Left not being much better than the Right in that regard. 

So the resentment is a problem for the powerless post-Oedipal child, and he must repress it and seek the Father's approva--or else. There's a fundamental slavishness to it as the child becomes rather like a dog seeking the approval of his master, and spirited human beings rebel in adolescence in different ways. But its why, especially in more straitlaced, repressive societies, the repressed admire the rebels among us insofar as they seek to break the taboos and assert their individuality over against the regime imposed by the symbolic Father. We all go through this in adolescence, but it's a phase for most of us that we pass through if we become successful adults. Adults understand that there are positive and negative constraints. Negative constraints keep us trapped insofar as they remain unconscious and unexamined; positive constraints become a path to liberation if chosen and worked with.

So, for instance, It's one thing to have a parent who forces his child to play a sport or a musical instrument so he can live through his child vicariously; it's another if the parent imbues a love of the sport or music in his child that inspires him to want to be the best he can be. To become the best you can be requires discipline and constraint. To give your life a shape, you have to constrain desires that if indulged would lead to shapelessness. To become an adult means to have chosen to give a shape to one's life. A man-child is either trapped by his fear of displeasing the Father or trapped in a resentful need to rebel against him. The Right tends toward the first kind of childishness; the Left toward the second. 

The adult has become of aware of his resentments and desires, has learned to own and manage them and to integrate them into a bigger, richer, shapelier possibility for becoming a full human being. So you can look at constraints as a problem or you can come to understand them as what gives a good life its shape in a life-long process of auto-poiesis and self-transcendence. In Neoplatonism, the more form a being has, the more densely real it is. So in Neoplatonic terms, true freedom is exercised in a continuous, dynamic trading in one set of constraints for another in an ongoing auto-poetic process of becoming more densely, humanly real. Another word for this intensity of form is 'virtue', and at the end of the process is what Aristotle called eudaemonia, which is the only happiness that is worthy of our desire. This sense of the word 'virtue' must be retrieved. In a society in which Calvinistic moralism is so dominant, we hear the word only in the sense of what Big Daddy wants. 

We must have constraints, but we must develop some wisdom about which constraints are healthful and which are not; we are children to the extent that we live passively with the constraints that were imposed on us children. We become adults to the degree that we come to understand those constraints and find ways to transcend them by adopting other constraints that are auto-poetic. This was the Nietzschean project, but as I'll argue below, it was in a deeper way the Socratic project. I respect those among our cultural elites who see Nietzsche as a model of self-transcendence in this mature sense. The argument that I've been making here over the years is that we have to move beyond Nietzsche to retrieve Socrates understood in the right way. 

***

Every society has constraints, aka taboos, and every society always will, and the culture war in this country right how is about who gets to define what those taboos are for our children. But the deeper, really important question is how do you decide which constraints are healthy and which are not? And the answer depends on how you define what it means to live a full human life, and about that we clearly have no consensus. And so, as suggested above, an important part of living a full human life is to develop the capacity to transcend the constraints of our acculturation, but not in a way that is completely shapeless.

My critique of the the Cultural Left is that while it's right about transcending oppressive cultural constraints, it's wrong insofar as it leads to social shapelessness and forms of narcissisim. We humans both need constraints and we need to transcend them, but transcendence for the sake of transcendence, the Nietzschean option, is not a foundation on which you can build a healthy society. The Socratic option is to transcend one's cultural constraints but in such a way that one comes into a deeper relationship and alignmnet with Reality. This is not a possibility on the Cultural Left because it cannot believe that there is any such thing as Reality in the Platonic-realist sense of the word.

So instead the Cultural Left, insofar as it is in thrall to the postmodern Freudians, is obsessed with sexual desire. But do we really believe sex and sex drives are what most deeply defines us? Don't we all deep down recognize that the cult of Sex Positivity takes something that's partially true and pushes it into something that's unbalanced and distorting and fundamentally empty? 

So, from my pov, the moral program proposed on the Left, insofar as it makes an idol of Desire in the post-Freudian sense, is reductive and as such offers no genuinely 'desirable' alternative to the program of the Right. And quite possibly the Left is endorsing a program that is harmful for people in the throes of ontological dizziness insofar as it endorses metaphysical meaninglessness and shapelessness at a time when we need to feel that there's something firm underfoot upon which we can take a stand.  

Using 'desire' as a criterion for defining the 'good life' is not the problem; defining what is most deeply worthy of our desire is. Desire, like the intentionality of consciousness, is always 'about' something. The most important question we need to ask ourselves is what is our desire about? In other words, what is worthy of or deepest aspirations? What kind of society might there be that would help people to shape their lives inspired by such aspirations? To make it so much about sex is shooting too low at best, and at worst promoting a narcissistically regressive infantilizaton.  

But if sex is not the main thing, what ought to be the object of our desire--on what ends, individually and as a society, should we focus our attention and energies as worthy of our deepest aspirations? Is it possible that we could come to some consensus about that? I genuinly believe that we can because in the final analysis Socrates was correct--what we all desire is the Good, and if we knew it, we would choose it. (See Note 1) I believe this deep desire for the Good is innate in all human beings, even the worst of us. We just live in a society that has no memory anymore about what that Good is as something to guide our collective cultural aspirations. 

But the taboos can only be transcended in a healthy way if there's agreement that such transcendence is in the service of the Good. If there is no mutually shared idea of the Good as a transcendental aspiration, then all you've got is desire, and one man's desire to grab a woman in the genitals because he wants to and can is equal to another's to give up her life to save someone else's. To argue otherwise is implicitly to acknowledge that there's a hierarchy, i.e., some desires are higher and more worthy than others, and that only makes sense if there is some transcendental standard that defines what is more or less worthy, more or less truthful, more or less Good, more or less Just. We all deep down recognize this. None of us are moral relativists. We just don't know how to talk anymore about what it means to be truly a moral agent, which involves the capacity for self-correction and self-transcendence. We perform instead what we think others expect of us as moral behavior--whatever the Daddies and Mommies of the Left or Right demand--rather than to be inspired by what is truly, deeply transformatively Good. 

----------

Note 1. What Socrates means to "know the Good" is another question. We mostly have opinions about what the right thing to do is that derive from our programming by to prevailing cultural conventions, which is quite different from 'knowing' the good. According to Plato/Socrates, it's possible to have right opinion, i.e., when your opinion about what is good happens to correspond with what the Good is, but that is different from knowing the Good. Knowing the Good comes from a deeper kind of disclosure that transcends convention. And because such disclosures are a possibility, convention is always vulnerable to challenge. In the Neoplatonic tradition, there are degrees of knowledge--from inklings to satori-like theophanies. But inklings are where most of us start. 

A healthy society has norms that derive from right opinion about the Good. It passes onto its children habits and attitudes that will make it easier for them aspire to the Good and to be open to its disclosures--in other words easier for them to become free adults. The segregated societies in the South clearly did not have norms that were aligned with the Good, and most people of good will recognized that. Clearly, there are other things about southern society and its customary culture that are aligned with the Good, but if it were a healthy society, it would have recognized that slavery and segregation was just wrong, and not looked for all manner of sophistical arguments to justify it.

It's in this sense that southern society has trapped too many of its citizens in such a way as to make it harder for them to become free adults. They are trapped by their resentments and find themselves incapable of transcending them. This, as suggested above, is why they have embraced an infantile nihilist like Trump. He has legitimized their resentments of the Liberal Big Daddy that shames any behaviors that are not P.C or woke, and encourages their acting these resentments out. Before Trump those resentments festered. He blew the lid off whatever contained them, and bizarre, delusional, clownishly ineptly childish events like J6 were the result. 

But societies that have mostly right opinion about the Good are not good enough unless they encourage its children to become free adults. In Calvinist societies we think of Virtue as a cage. If we lived in a Neoplatonic society, we would think of it as a trellis. That used to be the goal of a liberal education. All spirited human beings want to overcome illusion and ignorance; they want to develop a deeper and richer relatiohship with Reality. They are not satisfied to live in a shadow realm but want to live in a world where the deep Real lives and shines. And the project for Socrates was to play the role of midwife for his interlocutors, that his he sought to bring their innate capacity for recognizing the living, shining Good into awareness.  

Socrates agreed with the Sophists that most people's thinking was shaped by social conventions, and insofar as they were, they were living in a world of shadows. He disagreed with the Sophists that shadow thinking was the the only kind possible.The postmodern Freudians, like the Sophists, would argue that there are only the conventions, and our freedom--if we have any freedom at all--lies primarily in transgressing conventional constraints, i.e., saying No to Big Daddy. Is there really any more to it than that, and  is there anything truly morally serious about that for anyone older than 17? 

The naivete, if not the absurdity, of the postmodern Freudians, I hope, is apparent to most readers. It's sophisticated nonsense. Their position leads to regression toward Hobbes's state of nature which forces the social contract that creates the Leviathan--which is for Hobbesians, most of our cultural elite, a closed system in which transcendence is an impossibility. To this extent Freud was correct in Civilization and Its Discontents. Being in society creates constraints, and those constraints are the source of our resentment and violence and discontent and we long to break out. 

None of us want to live in a closed, repressive system. But we can't live in one that is completely without constraints. We want to live in a system where self-transcendence and auto-poeisis is a real possibility, but transcendence toward what? Making our Selves into what? Anything we want? But is anything we want the Good? I don't think so, and neither can anybody who thinks about it for a minute. We all deep down know there is a "Good". Why are we so afraid to acknowledge it and build a society around a collective aspiration toward it? 

The Elephant in the Room

I wrote this post in February 2006 in the middle of the Bush Administration, before the economic meltdown in '07/'08, before Obama, before Trump--but in a way anticipating him because explaining why he's more American than apple pie:

Imagine a scenario in which Karl Marx, Ronald Reagan, and an American journalist are in the room. There's also an elephant, which is owned by Ronald Reagan.  Karl Marx points out that there is an elephant in the room. Ronald Reagan, who has his reasons, says there is no elephant. He then looks at the journalist and says, "Karl Marx says there's an elephant in the room. Anybody who agrees with Karl Marx is a Communist. What are you going to report to the American people about what's in the room?"

The journalist looks at the threadbare Marx, who appears rather sullen and resentful. He looks at the elegant and affable Reagan, and thinks to himself:  "Talking about elephants doesn't look like a very good career move. Who really cares anyway? It won't be a lie if I just avoid saying anything about it. And there's so much else to talk about that Americans are really interested in."

There is an elephant in the room, and nobody in the mainstream is talking about it, and this elephant is not hard to see if you choose to look. It's the connection between wealth and power and how that connection is destroying (has destroyed?) our politcal system. It's standing there in the middle of the room, and we all know it's there, but we walk around it and pretend it isn't because to talk about it makes you sound like a Marxist.  The Ronald Reagans of the world will start to say that you're promoting class warfare.  You'll be branded as an un-American, leftist flake.

Because America is all about people having the freedom to pursue their dream, and if someone's dream is to become fabulously wealthy, and if he has the brains and the ambition to achieve it, who are the rest of us to stop him? 

In this mythology, Donald Trump has come to symbolize what it means to be a great American. He has come to represent what is finest in the American spirit. Every week on his TV show we can watch obsequious young Americans striving to be what they think he wants them to be. And in this American mythology, the rambling logic goes like this: These are the people who make our country great. Would it be better if they did nothing and collected food stamps? So sure, what if there is an elephant in the room?  He's an American elephant, and we will arm ourselves to the teeth to make sure no one does it any harm. These people and their God-given right to get rich is what our soldiers in Iraq are fighting to protect. If you don't like it, move to Cuba. Because each of us can own a piece of that elephant, if we want to.  OK, I may not own a piece now, but maybe my kids will. That elephant is what the American Dream is all about--the idea that anyone of us could someday be famous, rich, and powerful like Donald Trump.

The idea that "only in America" do the humble have the possibility to realize such ambitions is absurd, but it's a myth that serves the interests of the already rich. People with talent and drive rise in every culture, but like all the Trump wannabes, they do so by ingratiating themselves to those who already have wealth and power. And their doing so insures that the basic pyramid stays intact.

Having a Donald Trump here or there isn't a threat to republican ideals so long as he's happy to have supermodel wife and his ego massaged by Nielsen ratings. The problem lies in his reinforcing a myth that allows the crony capitalist class in our country to tighten its grip on the levers of power at the top of the pyramid.

So what's the matter with the pyramid? Isn't a pyramid inevitable? Well, you could say that pyramids are natural; they always develop where the strong dominate the weak, and pyramids define how most societies stratify when the strong are allowed to dominate the weak: wide base of very poor, middle group of retainers and courtiers performing services at the direction of those on the top.

But America was supposed to be different. It was supposed to be a society in which the the bulge was in the center, it was supposed to be a society in which not too many people would be poor and not too many people would be rich, and a society in which the power would be in the hands of the self-reliant, educated people in the middle: small businessmen, farmers, teachers, professionals--not in the hands of those sitting in corporate boardrooms. There will always be elites, for sure, but they should serve the interests of those in the middle because those in the middle should have the power.

America was not supposed to be a society dominated by a super-wealthy overclass. That was the European model that we revolted against. The American experiment was about creating a society that was not stratified in that way. Such societies, even if they have elections, are democracies in name only. In an ideal democracy, power lies with a well-informed, economically self-reliant middle. The goal is to get those at the bottom into the middle, and to protect against those at the top aggregating too much power to themselves. That's what the New Deal represented, and that Reagan/Bush GOP has come to stand for its dismantling. It has come to stand for completely opposite goals--which is to turn the country into just another stratified pyramid.

In other words the American experiment has failed to the degree that we allow it to become like every other stratified society that has existed. Maybe it's inevitable. Maybe that's what Franklin meant when he came out of the constitutional convention and in responding to someone who asked what they had made said, "A republic, if you can keep it."  I don't know if it's lost yet, but we're losing it. 

That's the elephant in the room that nobody wants to look at. We want to believe we have a republic, but it's becoming one in name only. Maybe we want to believe the elephant stands for the republic, but it is rapidly becoming  something altogether different, and we all stand around shrug our shoulders as if nothing important is happening.  We're OK with it so long as we have our bread and circuses, our beer and our reality shows.

There's been more talk in the MSM since then about income maldistribution in the U.S., but the Left is more interested in talking about transcending the gender binary, and the populist Right more interested in freaking out about the Left's sexual preoccupations. And so Trump is likely the next GOP presidential nominee, and whether or not he gets elected again, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer--and the machines get stronger--with each passing day. 

Is It Finally the End of Trump?

The front page above is from one of Rupert Murdoch's right-wing propaganda media properties. I don't know that it means much. MAGA is toothpaste that Trump squeezed out of the tube. It was always there, and now that it's out, it ain't goin' back in. If the MAGA Jacksonian base is just as Trumpy now as it ever was--and is there any reason to think it's not?--then Murdoch will get back in line once the base makes clear that they're not ready to move beyond Trump. The same is true for the Republican lawmakers who hate Trump but fear the MAGA base more. They will still have to deal with the base in the primaries, which means that they will still have to kiss the ring of the MAGA King. 

Trump is not going away unless he goes to jail. But will the indictments (if they come) that Trump faces be the nails in his coffin, or will they be incitements in MAGA world that will galvanize MAGA in support for Trump the Martyr? I don't know.

And then there's the DeSantis phenomenon. Is he strong enough to push a weakened Trump off the stage? I don't know that either. He doesn't have the "it" factor that Trump has, and if Trump runs head-to head with DeSantis, Trump will make mincemeat out of him. But DeSantis surprised me in his sound trouncing of Crist, a centrist guy whom Floridians voted in as governor before and who at least, unlike DeSantis, has a personality. But it's hard to make the case that Florida is a bellwether.  If I were DeSantis and Trump runs, I'd stay out of the race, let Trump go down in flames, then step in to save the party from complete self-immolation. 

In the next two years, unless something really surprising happens in the next week, Kevin McCarthy--or someone worse--will become Speaker of the House, and it will be interesting to see if the crazier Jacksonians like Marjorie Taylor Greene set the agenda. If so, expect endless Trump ass-kissing, expect frivolous investigations, and expect a frivolous impeachment. And we'll be hearing more about Hunter Biden than any but the MAGAiest Americans will have a stomach for.

Will enough sane House Republicans vote No on impeachment if it comes to that? Unlikely. We all saw what happened to those who went against the MAGA mob last time. All the Republicans in the House with a spine have either quit or been voted out. 

If the crazy Jacksonians set the GOP agenda in the House, that will almost certainly insure that the Dems will take the House back in '24. Is there any reason to believe Republicans are capable of learning the right lessons from the unpopularity of their fanaticism? Doubt it, but things feel very fluid right now, and who really knows?

Along the lines of what I wrote in my election day post, I'm more worried about how irrationally the MAGA world will react if they see that the Blues keep winning elections in ways that someone in their Facebook feed tells them were rigged by Venezuelan communists using Italian satellites in collusion with the American Deep State. With or without Trump the fundamentals haven't changed. And there's no reason to believe the crazies will now become sane because they didn't win the way they thought they should. Just proves they were right all along.

Will the Dems be able to wash the toothpaste down the drain? I don't think so, but they might be able to push it to the edges of the sink. To do so would require that they distance themselves from the Neoliberalism that Clinton and the DLC branded the party with in the '90s. That's a stain that won't be easy to wash out, even if it no longer represents where most rank-and-file Democrats are--or ever have been.

And then there's the cultural piece. Most everyday Dems are like most everyday Republicans. They're normies who want to be compassionate toward people who are suffering. The Dems are more attentive to the suffering of the historically marginalized, and that's a good thing, but they need to find a way to enact their compassion and their thirst for justice without coming across as virtue-signaling, sanctimonious prigs. They won't always have crazy to run against. 

Liberalism + Whatever

There are moments of transition and turmoil when liberalism appears to stand alone, and liberals sometimes confuse these moments for an aspirational norm. But nobody except Hugh Hefner, Gordon Gekko and a few devotees of the old A.C.L.U. can bear to live for very long under conditions of pure liberalism. Instead, the norm for successful societies and would-be society builders is liberalism-plus: liberalism plus nationalism (as in 19th-century Europe or Ukraine today), liberalism plus intense ethnic homogeneity (the Scandinavian model, now showing signs of strain), liberalism plus mainline Protestantism (the old American tradition), liberalism plus therapeutic spirituality (the mode of American culture since the 1970s), liberalism plus social justice progressivism (the mode of today’s cultural left), etc., etc. Something must be added, some ghost needs to inhabit the machine, or else society begins to resemble the portraits painted by liberalism’s enemies — a realm of atomized, unhappy consumers, creatures of self-interest whose time horizons for those interests are always a month rather than a decade, Lockean individuals moving in a miserable herd.

--Ross Douthat

There are many Liberalisms from the hard, classic Libertarianism of the Koch Brothers and the Cato Institute to the soft Liberal Niceness of bleeding-heart Dems, but Liberalism, whether left- or right-leaning, is the basic cultural operating system that runs American society, and as such it is essentially the ideological justification for the material conditions that Capitalism has created. And whatever the material benefits produced by Capitalism, this ideology in turn justifies its sociopathies in all its iterations from Industrial Capitalism to Consumer Capitalism to what I've been calling Technocapitalism, the thing that is warping our minds and flattening our souls as our humanity becomes more deeply disembodied and simulacral.

So it's not surprising that Liberalism is under attack from both the Left and the Right, but mostly from the Right--whether it's the Claremonsters like Michael Anton and John Eastman, the Federalists like John Daniel Davidson, or the Integralists like Sohrab Ahmari and Adrian Vermeule, all of whom in their different ways are are at the very least dabbling in illiberalism as an antidote. The post-structuralist, Identitarian cultural Left is not against Liberalism so much as it's become its reductio ad absurdum and in doing so has given Progressives a bad name. Is there any possibility for a healthy Progressivism in a post-liberal world? I think so. More on that below. 

So both Republicans and Democrats are Liberals, and both parties assume its Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary, no matter what the individual religious or spiritual beliefs of its members. Michael Novak's theo/neocon nonsense notwithstanding, the phrase Christian Capitalism is an oxymoron. American Democrats' biggest blind spot is their assumption that Capitalist political economies are the best and really the only healthy possibility. At the same time, neither party denies that Capitalist political economies are in their essence sharklike--predatory, impersonal, cruel, vicious, untameable. The difference between them lies in that the Democrats think the shark is tameable and the Republicans don't.

So Republicans have accommodated themselves to its fundamental cruelty. They justify a politics of cruelty by asserting that it's the natural order, and it's better to be predators than prey--and if you're prey, it's your own damn fault. Pack a gun, grab what you can, and defend what's yours once you get it. The cowboy patriarch John Dutton is exemplary in this respect. And so is someone like Trump, although he and his family resemble more the Roy family in Succession. They are all barbarian warlords who understand how the "real" world works, and that the law and religion are for slaves and prey, not for the master predators they fancy themselves. 

Republicans, the "Conservative" Liberals, are probably right and in this sense they are more realistic than Democrats about how capitalism and the society it has created really works. They see Liberal Democrats as feckless in their thinking that Capitalism has a benign face, and just plain silly insofar as Dems try to be Bruce, the fish-friendly shark in Finding Nemo. You know, "Fish are friends, not food." Cute idea, but unless someone like St. Francis is his trainer, a ridiculous one. The problem with this kind of "liberal" Liberal is that they are too comfortable with Capitalism and too complacent about its fundamental nihilism and so too easily find ways to to live with it because for the most part they benefit from its predations.

So implied in the Douthat epigraph above is that that Liberalism is a cultural operating system that anybody who feels the emptiness of its nihilism finds ways to hyphenate it with what he calls "liberalism plus"--Liberalism plus nationalism, Liberalism plus mainline Protestantism, etc. The "plus" is what gives Liberalism the meaning that it can't supply on its own. But in the end all these "pluses" are simply remoras clinging to the shark's underbelly. And mainstream Protestantism might have had a genuine spiritual energy for a while that imposed some constraints on the monster, but Protestantism, especially in its Calvinist forms, was always in an uneasy tension with the beast its theology cleared the way for. Eventually the monster ate mainstream Protestantism leaving only its most fanatical forms behind, and now the shark roams free gobbling up the customs and traditions of the heartland. We call the shark's unconstrained freedom since the Reagan era Neoliberalism.

Democrats feel guilty about how they benefit from Capitalism in a way the Republicans do not, and Republicans, as a way to deal with their own repressed guilt, project their contempt for Democrats as weakness, gutlessness, or a fundamental lack of manliness. Blue America is thought of by Red America as overly populated by educated hollow men like Jamie Dutton. And as for the underclass, life is hard, they assert, and we do the weak no good to make it easier for them. Better to brand them like a cow or make them shovel out the stables, and then see if they have what it takes to become a real man. And so we get these absurd, cringey manliness performances from people who have no center--empty suits  like Don Jr., Josh Hawley, and Marco Rubio. And yet they are embraced by Red America despite the utter inauthenticity of their schtick. "They're phonies, but they're our phonies," declares Red America.

But Liberal elites on the cultural Left, rather than focussing their energies by working to remedy the class and wealth disparities from which they derive their privilege, find relief from their guilt in a performative priggishness. Is there real compassion and thirst for Justice that motivates those in the woke social justice warrior project on the Secular Left? For some, of course, yes, and I don't question their sincerity. But the ethos that frames this project is more the heir of Foucault and Deleuze than Gandhi and King. Does this cultural Left mindset allow for the possibility of Justice as a transcendental ideal? Clearly not. Whether these folks have read Foucault and Deleuze or not, the mental framework that shapes the SJW project derives from a postmodern commitment to historicism that makes any talk of transcendentals incomprehensible.

So my criticism of the post-Marxist Left, i.e., the Left that has given up on class war for culture war, is that its identitarian politics leads to a form of groundless metaphysical lostness that gives meaning and purpose to its warriors only so long as one is engaged in the liberating project to abolish taboos. But once you run out of taboos, then what? This project is only good at saying No but has nothing inspiring to which it can say Yes. 

Justice as transcendental ideal also often requires saying No to custom and taboo, but the Socratic project [See Note 1] required a saying No to clear the way for something deeper and richer to emerge to which one could say Yes. Cultural Left elites today are heirs of the Sophists, not Socrates. The distinction was significant then, and it is now. There are a lot of young idealists on the Cultural Left who sincerely believe they are warriors for Justice, but in fact, they are warriors for Nothing, i.e., warriors in the service of a negative project that clears a space for nothing except appetite.

Is there an alternative? Yes, the one pointed to by Socrates--and all the prophets and philosophers of the Axial Turn. I argue in a preliminary way in my genealogy series for the restoration of a transcendental dimension to the broader cultural imaginary. While the illiberal traditionalists horrify me, I understand where they're coming from. I think their diagnosis of the fundamental emptiness or flatness of Liberalism is mostly correct. Nevertheless, while After the Future's project has been to accept parts of the conservative critique of Liberalism, it seeks a solution that aligns with a Left politics, i.e., a progressive solution that embraces ontonormativity as a foundational experience/concept. [See Note 2]

The project on the illiberal, reactionary Right derives from an assertion of ontonormativity divorced from an intuition of it as participating in the Living Real. They focus on the empty form, not the life that gave the form its shape. And so without the life, the empty form too often becomes filled by dark, chthonic impulses that serve ends that are quite the opposite of what ontonormativity would inspire. They justify the illiberalism of their project because they believe American society needs an intervention, and that because they know better, they must rescue society from its nihilism and restore Justice and Cosmic Order to a society that has lost any sense of either. But, in fact, they don't know any better.

And yet they persuade themselves that if people don't understand it now, they'll nevertheless benefit from their tough-love intervention. Eventually those who resist will come to appreciate the benefits of having been "educated" by the new regime. So they use this appropriation of transcendental idealism to justify their illiberalism, and are either ignorant of or don't care that in the past similar justifications have legitimated the most horrifying violence. It derives its energies not from the Living Real, but from an old, anal, control-freaky impulse that leads to the auto da fe and pogrom. 

I agree that the only real solution to the nihilistic crisis that is at the heart of contemporary Liberalism is a religious one, but I have argued here for years that that the fundamental choice that lies before us as a society is not between religion and secularism but between good religion and bad. Politics as religion is always bad religion because politics--and economic striving, as well--when they become the primary source of meaning in people's lives, become parodies of religion, and as such a form of idolatry. One's participation in politics and the economy should be shaped by one's religious commitments, but they should never be substitutes for them. 

++++++++++

Note 1: In Genealogy Part 3 "Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus" I write--

Socrates' transposed the daemon's negating, apophatic function as an inner experience into outward teaching practice in his dialectical method, or elenchus. His goal was not to tell people what to think, but to get them to say, for instance, that No, justice isn't this, and it isn't that, and No, Socrates, it can't be that. Then what is it? Well that's for the individual to discover for himself once the field has been cleared of all the things that Justice cannot be. Only then is it possible, or at least more likely, to see, or better, experience what it is. 

A wise teacher must first discover for himself what the truth is, but she can't tell you what you must discover for yourself. But she can help you see why x, y, and z are not it. She can help you strip away wrongheadedness to create a space for the Living Real to reveal itself to you, to allow you to learn what you can do on your own while at the same time warning you against dead ends and bad habits that will make the task more difficult or to take longer. And once you've cleared away all that is wrongheaded, in the empty space thus created, aka, the Socratic aporia, it becomes possible for the Living Real to disclose itself to you. This is as true now as it was 2400 years ago. Heidegger's 'Aletheia' owes more to Plato and Socrates than I'm aware he gave them credit for. The Socratic elenchus makes no sense if it's just a method for debunking conventional wisdom and abstractly defining certain concepts. 

Well, in part it was for Socrates a debunking exercise, and that's what got him into trouble with the citizens of Athens. But Socrates would be no better than the Sophists if he were only a debunker. The elenchus makes sense only if it is a way to prepare the soul for a revelation, a theophany, an encounter with, or better, a "remembering" of the Truth that discloses itself as sacred knowledge, the Living Real, on the vertical dimension.

See also Geneaolgy Part 8 "Plato--Habitus as Heuristic"

Note 2: "Ontonormativity" is a word I first came across in John Vervaeke's YouTube series entitled Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I like his description of it as how we are often inspired--or awakened--by something that can only be described as transcendental, something that breaks into the everyday world that makes us experience ourselves and the world as failing to live up to its best possibilities. Such experiences inspire us to believe that we as individuals and the society we live in can do better. This can lead to naive idealism, but it needn't do so. Like most things on the vertical dimension, there are immature and mature versions of it. 

I spend a lot of time talking about Vervaeke in Parts 4A,4B, 5, and 6 of my Genealogy Series. In Part 6 I make the case why I find Vervaeke's insistence on understanding ontonormativity within a naturalistic framework inadequate. So I am appropriating the term in way that is congenial to my Transcendentalism that is different from Vevaeke's use of the term. My idea of ontonormativity bears some relationship to the Eastern idea of the Tao or the Western idea of Natural Law, but not in a way that is primarily intellectualized or systematized. By that I mean that the ontonormative is discerned by the supple or wise heart. It's grounded in a kind of inspired or awakened experience that breaks through our acculturation from a transcendent source. It's not derived from logic but from the cognitive capabilities of a supple heart. 

 

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. 

Quote of the Day: Charlie Sykes

When Trump says that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue without losing the support of the MAGA base, Trump is, of course marveling at his own popularity. But he is also admitting his deeply felt disdain for the rubes and marks who have fallen into his hands. Trump’s contempt for his supporters is shared by others in his orbit, including Bannon, who know that they can monetize their lies and scams by fleecing their most loyal backers.

They are counting on their marks to: (1) continue to buy the con and pony up the cash, (2) not realize that they are being lied to and ripped off.

As David Frum has repeatedly noted, victims of scams are often angrier at those who point out the ruse than at the fraudsters themselves.

But as hopeless as it might seem, somebody needs to tell them. (Source)

There's no point in trying to tell them because they're convinced they understand some deep truth that others don't. They sincerely believe they've taken the red pill, not realizing that, in fact. they have taken the blue one.  

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.  

The Moderate Fallacy against Indicting Trump

If the matter culminates in an indictment and trial of Mr. Trump, the Republican argument would be more of what we heard day in and day out through his administration. His defenders would claim that every person ostensibly committed to the dispassionate upholding of the rule of law is in fact motivated by rank partisanship and a drive to self-aggrandizement. This would be directed at the attorney general, the F.B.I., the Justice Department and other branches of the so-called deep state. The spectacle would be corrosive, in effect convincing most Republican voters that appeals to the rule of law are invariably a sham.

But the nightmare wouldn’t stop there. What if Mr. Trump declares another run for the presidency just as he’s indicted and treats the trial as a circus illustrating the power of the Washington swamp and the need to put Republicans back in charge to drain it? It would be a risible claim, but potentially a politically effective one. And he might well continue this campaign even if convicted, possibly running for president from a jail cell. It would be Mr. Trump versus the System. He would be reviving an old American archetype: the folk-hero outlaw who takes on and seeks to take down the powerful in the name of the people.

We wouldn’t even avoid potentially calamitous consequences if Mr. Trump somehow ended up barred from running or his party opted for another candidate to be its nominee in 2024 — say, Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida. How long do you think it would take for a freshly inaugurated President DeSantis to pardon a convicted and jailed Donald Trump? Hours? Minutes? And that move would probably be combined with a promise to investigate and indict Joe Biden for the various “crimes” he allegedly committed in office.

Damon Linker

Dear me. If we uphold the rule of law, the lawless won't like it. Linker seems to believe that if the Democrats don't indict the egregious criminality of Republicans that Republicans will refrain from using the law as a weapon against Democrats. Really?

Here's the problem with moderates like Linker, Brooks, et al. They think they're smarter than Democrats because they are not driven by partisan passions, which they assume is all that's driving Democrats. They think of themselves as understanding the situation better because, as moderates, they are by definition more rational and sensible, that they have a clearer view of what's happening in a way that impassioned Trump haters do not. They see the big picture, but really they don't. They have no real understanding about how their reasonableness leads to a kind of misreading of the situation. 

They are like the moderates in 1850s who thought that the more sensible Southerners would prevail and so they needed to keep compromising with Southern demands. Fugitive Slave Act? Sure, if it makes Southerners happy. But it never makes them happy because fanaticism is never satisfied with compromise. Perhaps because people like Linker are so moderate and rational they are incapable of understanding how fanaticism works. With the GOP now, as there were in the South in the 1850s, there are still some non-fanatics, but they have no influence. None. There is no possibility of compromise if there are no sane actors to compromise with. 

Moderates think that to indict Trump is to pour gasoline on the fire, but the fire has already broken loose in the forest; it's burning out of control and moving toward the cities. One of the chief symptoms of this out-of-control fire is its toleration of egregious criminality.  And as there is no compromising with a raging forest fire, so there is no compromising with the fanaticism of the  GOP; It can only be suppressed or contained.

The Democrats, for all their limitations, are cast in the role of firefighters, whether they want the job or not. And only they have the tools to suppress and contain the fire--suppress by defeating Republicans in the next two election cycles, and contain by insisting on the rule of law. For the firefighters to give up the rule of law is for them to surrender one of their most important tools to contain the spread of the fire. Linker seems to think that if you refuse to contain the fire, it will just go out on its own. Clearly that's not going to happen. Appeasing fanaticism looks weak and feckless because it is. It's a failure of nerve.

The Democrats must persuade non-fanatic Americans that they must use both tools to fight fanaticism--elections and the rule of law. Remember, Republicans are only 23% of the electorate, so the fight here is to persuade Independents that Republican fanaticism is the most important threat to their liberties, and that the rule of law is really what's at stake here. Better to make the case for the rule of law by using the rule of law, than to appear feckless in appeasing fanaticism. 

Yes, it might be too late--the fire might already be uncontainable. But it might not be, so Democrats have to use every tool they have as effectively as they can use them. And I can guarantee that if the firefighters unilaterally disarm by refusing to enforce the rule of law, the game is lost and the negative consequences that Linker predicts will ensue anyway. Does he really believe that if the Democrats are lenient with Republicans that the Republicans will be lenient with Democrats? 

Of course they won't be because to think so assumes that they are sane actors when they are not; they are fanatics. And so that's why Republicans must be kept out of power. But even if Republicans regain power, we have reason to hope that, at least in the short run, the GOP's use of the courts as a political weapon against Democrats will be as effective as their use of the courts to assert Trump's claims about election fraud. The Democrats must use the courts while they still respect the rule of law, or in the long run the courts will become precisely the political weapons that the fanatics already, wrongly, believe they are. 

Update: All the above being said, I agree with Douthat--

It seems like a reasonable presumption that the documents in question are more serious than just some notes to Kim Jong-un but that the potential incrimination falls short of Trump literally selling secrets. But that’s a presumption, not a prediction. I’ve learned to be unsurprised by Trump’s folly and venality but also by his capacity to induce self-defeating blunders among people and institutions I would have considered relatively sensible before his ascent.

So no predictions, just the warning: Don’t miss.

 

A Word about Liz Cheney

I can think of few jobs that are less desirable than being a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives. There's a reason why so many Republicans with a lick of sense and a shred of human decency retired. Only a fool would  think of it as a prize to be clung to. It's a prize only for people who have nothing more productive to do with their lives, which would include almost anything. Peter Meijer, Jaime Herrera-Butler, and now Liz Cheney "paid no price" for their vote to impeach Trump; they have all been freed to do something useful, work that will put less stress on their integrity as human beings. They should get down on their knees and thank God that they have been delivered from one of the deeper rings of hell. Their story is not a tragic one, but of liberation. The beast spit them out, and now they can recover their humanity. I congratulate them. 

My view about the worth of any our lives has less to do with one's politics or admirability by whatever conventional standard but rather if when the moment demanded it you stood up and did what was required. Most people are called to do that in quiet ways that don't make headlines or are even noticed at all, and some do it in ways that are in the media glare. None can know what the mix of motives are, and it's none of our business anyway. The main thing is that each of us when we hear the voice of conscience, we hearken to it. In Cheney's case, she clearly stepped up, and I'm grateful she did. Any speculation about other motives is silly. The same is true for Mike Pence, who similarly, after four years of feckless sycophancy, did the right thing. 

I don't think this makes them losers, because they gained more than they lost. They simply did the right thing when they were called upon to do it, just like millions of decent human beings do everyday in ways less publicly visible. The only difference is that history will remember them for it, and history will forget all the others about whom we can say that whatever is left of their humanity and integrity continues to be digested in the belly of the beast that has become the Trumpian GOP. 

Theda Skocpol on Looming Illiberalism

In an inteverview in the Atlantic:

Skocpol: {Trump]’s not necessary for an authoritarian movement to use the GOP to lock in minority rule. The movement to manipulate election access and counting is so far along. I think it’s too late, and we’re vulnerable to it because of how we administer local elections.

What’s happened involves an interlocking set of things. It depends not just on candidates like Trump running for president and nationalizing popular fears and resentments, but also on state legislatures, which have been captured, and the Supreme Court. The Court is a keystone in all of this because it’s going to validate perfectly legal manipulations that really are about locking in minority rule. In that sense, the turning point in American history may have happened in November 2016.

Godfrey: The turning point toward what?

Skocpol: Toward a locking-in of minority rule along ethno-nationalist lines. The objective is to disenfranchise metro people, period. I see a real chance of a long-term federal takeover by forces that are determined to maintain a fiction of a white, Christian, Trumpist version of America.

That can’t work over the long run, because the fastest-growing parts of the country are demonized in that scheme of things. But a lot of things liberals do play into it: Democrats are the party of strong government, and they’re almost as fixated on the presidency as Trumpists are. People on the left started bashing Joe Biden less than a year into his presidency. Why won’t the president just exert his will? Well, that doesn’t work.

The hour is late. This election this fall is critical.

This supports themes I've been developing over the past year. It doesn't matter whether or not Trump's grip on the party is loosening. The party has already been corrupted by him no matter whether he runs or goes to jail. And I think it's pretty obvious to anybody who thinks about it that the southernized GOP bent on one-party rule, has no interest in preserving an open society and has enormous structural advantages that benefit it in the short run. But I've also argued that it can't retain power in the long run for the same reason that the Puritans couldn't retain power in England after Cromwell. Powermad fanatics are loathsome, and the most dynamic and affluent elements in American society simply won't put up with them.

We're not Hungary or Russia where habits of illiberalism are the historical norm. The problem for the forces of sanity in the short run is that most Americans don't think it's as bad as all that. They think that things will get back to normal again, and so the only thing that will arouse them to the reality about what is really happening is for it to happen, and that might require them to experience a good dose of illiberal minority rule. 

Is there a risk that these illiberal fanatics will find a way to consolidate power through the mechanisms of the surveillance state and the military. Yes, there is. And it would be infinitely preferable for us not to run that risk, and as Skocpol says, that's why the midterms are so important.

And it could be a lack of imagination on my part, but it seems to me that this is where American federalism is a bulwark against centralized tyranny. The New England states, most of the Mid-Atlantic states, and the states on the west coast just won't go along with it. Will a GOP Federal gov't declare martial law and occupy these states if they resist? Would the military go along with such a thing? Possibly. But it's hard to imagine such a thing being sustainable. 

And I could be underestimating the illiberal Right, but its leadership has yet to prove that it has the intelligence, discipline, and sophistication to pull something like this off in a society as dynamic and complex as that in the U.S. Whatever success in the U.S. the forces of illiberalism might have in the short run, the reality is to complex for them to control it in the long run. Roger Stone and Steve Bannon are trickster agents of chaos, not strategic geniuses. The other prominent GOP leaders are trolls and hacks who have yet to prove that they have a broader strategic perspective than winning the next news cycle. The militias are full of cranks high on their own delusional thinking. Too many are like the guy in Ohio who attacked the FBI office with a nail gun. 

Whatever the similarities on the level of cultural breakdown, and there are many, we're not the Weimar Republic of the '20s. We're much bigger, more diverse, more economically dynamic, and too allergic to federal overreach, and the fanatics on the Right will overreach. Overreaching is what they do. 

We are living in unprecedented times, and it's impossible to say how all this will play out. We are so used to thinking pessimistically, but we could be surprised by something unexpectedly positive. I do really believe in the basic decency and sanity of most Americans. The problem with them is that most don't grasp the seriousness of what we're facing. Politics is for them like sports, an entertainment, and many root for the Red Team because that's what they've always done, and most Americans have no idea how a hard turn to the Right will concretely impact their lives for the worse. They need to be aroused, but once aroused, they will push back against indecency and insanity. 

So the question before is us whether we're going to save democracy the easy way by refusing to elect Republicans or the hard way by having to endure their illiberalism. We'll find out in the midterms whether the forces of sanity are already aroused enough to resist the forces of insanity. Did anybody expect Warnock and Ossoff to win in Georgia? I know I didn't. I'm feeling more optimistic than I have in a while. We'll see soon enough if I'm just indulging in wishful thinking . 

The FBI on a Slippery Slope

As a follow-up to yesterday's post, from The Shovel

We are certainly no fans of Donald Trump--let’s make that clear from the outset. But yesterday’s raid by the FBI on the home of a former president sets a dangerous precedent.

A precedent which now means that anyone who evades taxes, attempts to undermine an election, sexually assaults women, manipulates the value of their assets, uses state resources to enrich themselves or aids and abets the overthrow of a democratically elected government will be subject to investigation. Is that the world we want to live in? Where anyone accused of insurrection can be subject to questioning from law enforcement officers?

It’s a slippery slope. Before we know it, regular citizens accused of defrauding the government, concealing evidence, manipulating financial documents, tampering with witnesses or perverting the course of justice will also be held to account. Or to put it another way, if we simply shrug our shoulders and fail to question the actions of the FBI, soon any old Joe Citizen who is suspected of ripping classified government documents into small pieces and flushing them down the toilet will be obliged to answer to law enforcement, as well as their plumber. Read more.

As Michelle Goldberg points out today in a post entitled "The Absurd Argument Against Making Trump Obey the Law", in addition to the predictable nonsense from the Rubios and McCarthys, moderate Nervous Nellies like Tim Alberta, Andrew Yang, and Damon Linker--she doesn't mention David Brooks--are wringing their hands about the implications. She goes on to point out the obvious:

What has strengthened Trump has not been prosecution but impunity, an impunity that some of those who stormed the Capitol thought, erroneously, applied to them as well. Trump’s mystique is built on his defiance of rules that bind everyone else. He is reportedly motivated to run for president again in part because the office will protect him from prosecution. If we don’t want the presidency to license crime sprees, we should allow presidents to be indicted, not accept some dubious norm that ex-presidents shouldn’t be.

This is what moderates don't seem to get: All they have is the law to fight against forces in American society that have no respect for it. If they refuse to use it, they are unilaterally disarming in a way that they will inevitably lead to the loss of the rule of law. We

Use it or lose it. We cannot be held in thrall by the threats of right-wing extremists. Fonts of conventional wisdom like Brooks--who, btw presciently thought the J6 Committee hearings would be a waste of time--should be doing everything they can to make the case to their still reasonable conservative friends that they must support the rule of law or all is lost. People in the mushy middle must come to understand that we're in a cold civil war that is becoming increasingly hot. There's no avoiding that; there's only containing it. Appeasing Right Wing paranoia hoping to avert backlash is the path to insuring the triumph of lawlessness. It must be confronted head on by using the full extent of the powers the law affords. 

Again, Goldberg--

Trump shouldn’t be prosecuted because of politics, but he also shouldn’t be spared because of them. The only relevant question is whether he committed a crime, not what crimes his devotees might commit if he’s held to account.

Gotti Residence Searched by FBI for Evidence of Crimes--and in Civil Case Takes 5th

Would we have seen any less of a defense of John Gotti if Republicans had elected him rather than Trump? Here's what they'd say:

John Gotti is a Catholic and a good family man. He's not a politician, but a successful businessman who understands how to get things done. Sure, he's not perfect, but he's all about traditional values, and he hates the sanctimonious Libs as much as I do. I love that guy, and he loves people like me. 

Has he done some shady things on the side? Who hasn't? Why is the FBI picking on him? The FBI has hated him from the beginning, and they've rigged the whole system against him. They hate him because we love him. And so what if took the fifth yesterday over 400 times. Why should he cooperate with a corrupt system that is persecuting him for no good reason? 

Is the spirit of Marco Rubio's comment about the events in Mar-a-Lago on Monday so far from this?--

“The F.B.I.’s actions, less than three months from the upcoming elections, are doing more to erode public trust in our government institutions, the electoral process and the rule of law in the U.S. than the Russian Federation or any other foreign adversary,” Mr. Rubio said in the letter [to the FBI]. (Source)

No, Marco, it's you and other Trump wannabes who are eroding trust in our in our institutions by refusing to allow a perfectly legal process to play out. You know it, and you don't care what real harm you are doing.

Why do people like Rubio defend this guy? Why say anything at all? We all know that Rubio will have to eat his words sooner or later, so why does he feel the need to say something so baseless and untrue?  Is it simply something so feckless as seeing in Trump a charisma that they lack and feel that their future success depends on mimicking it? Are these guys really so craven and stupid?

I've said it before--if you want to understand GOP intentions, just listen to what they falsely accuse Democrats of doing. It's an infallible guide to predict what they would do if they were in a position to do it. That's why they must be kept out of power. 

As Peter Baker points out in the same article excerpted above--

Mr. Biden has not publicly demanded that the Justice Department lock up Mr. Trump the way Mr. Trump publicly demanded that the Justice Department lock up Mr. Biden and other Democrats. Nor has anyone knowledgeably contradicted the White House statement that it was not even informed about the search at Mar-a-Lago beforehand, much less involved in ordering it. But Mr. Trump has a long history of accusing adversaries of doing what he himself does or would do in the same situation.

His efforts to politicize the law enforcement system have now become his shield to try to deflect accusations of wrongdoing. Just as he asserted on Monday that the F.B.I. search was political persecution, he made the same claim on Wednesday about the New York attorney general’s unrelated investigation of his business practices as he invoked his Fifth Amendment right to avoid testifying because his answers could incriminate him.

“Now to flip the script and falsely claim that he’s the victim of the exact same tactics that he once deployed is just the rankest hypocrisy,” said Norman L. Eisen, who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee during the first Trump impeachment. “But consistency, logic, evidence, truth — those are always the first to go by the board when a democracy comes under assault from within.”

We know that Trump has no moral compass and will say and do whatever will advance his interests no matter who else gets hurt, but we're learning from Republicans that they admire his success and seek to imitate him in almost every respect. While I feel evermore confident we will never see Trump in office again, we won't be rid of the people whose souls he has corrupted for a long time coming. 

Stop Saying that Republicans Are the Party of Law and Order

Order maybe; Law, not so much.

Too many in the punditry are talking about conservative Republicans as if they're hypocrites because they endorse the lawlessness of J6 or because they're now calling to defund the FBI. The GOP has not been a party that respects the rule of law for a long, long time--at least since the Republican Party became southernized after Nixon. The Republican Party has inherited the autocratic ethos of the Southern Democrats who have always felt that they are justified to break laws without compunction that they believe are based on liberal principles. There is nothing more liberal than the enlightenment concept "rule of law", if by it we mean that whatever legislatures produce through the democratic process. That's not the 'southern' idea about what law is about. 

I wrote Rule of Law vs. Law and Order in February 2020. Here's a relevant excerpt:

I wrote a long piece in October entitled Law and Order and the Jacksonian Right in which I argued something that I don't think most Liberals understand, which is that for Law and Order Conservatives, the emphasis is on Order, not on Law.

...Republicans see themselves as the party of law and order. I think this only makes sense if you understand that the more important word in that pairing is "order", in the sense of social order, not the political or legal one. Or to put it another way, the political and legal order has legitimacy only insofar as it is a reflection of the social order. The social order that shapes the politics of [American] social conservatives traces its roots back at least as far as the 1820s when the party of Jefferson became the party of Jackson. Then a rather primitive, premodern customary sense of American identity came to dominate in the political sphere, and in doing so replaced the modern, enlightenment imagination embraced by most of the founders. It was a collective return of the repressed. 

We were taught in school that the Jacksonian democracy was a good thing, that it made America more representative of the will of the people. We tend, however to romanticize the "people" because we were not taught that the "people" who saw Jackson as their hero couldn't have cared less about the rule of law and the kind of virtue that is necessary for a true republic to thrive. With the rise of Jacksonian democracy, the older republican imagination of America infused with Enlightenment ideals was displaced by an imaginary that legitimated the lawless, loutish, violent impulses exemplified by Andrew Jackson himself. These Jacksonian Democrats never really cared about good government; they just wanted to be left alone to do their lawless, loutish, violent thing, especially regarding their slaves, the Indians, and the Mexicans. Trump, despite his un-Jacksonian bone spurs, is Jackson redivivus. 

Law and Order is not the same as the Rule of Law. Laws are only legitimate for law-and-order Conservatives if they align with and support their traditionalist social order. Any laws that undermine that order or are out of alignment with it have for them no real legitimacy. Law-and-Order conservatives in the past have often approved lynchings, or the kind of thievery and dirty tricks that led to Watergate, or the defiance of the Bolland Amendment that led to Iran Contra, or the contravention of international law that led to the invasion of Iraq, or now the egregious, flagrant, out-in-the-open lawlessness of Donald Trump.

Conservatives feel not need to take the law seriously except when they get to use it as a club to punish their enemies. What matters is the conservative sense of order, and any illegal actions Conservatives commit need not be punished so long as they either promote the traditionalist social order or transgress it in minor ways that don't destabilize it. Shoplifting is a far more serious crime than tax fraud. 

Russia used to be an enemy of these law-and-order conservatives when it was ruled by the godless communists, but now that it is a nominally Christian, traditional-order autocracy, they see it as an ally. They are very happy to accept its help in keeping Trump in power. They are gleeful that Brennan, Comey, Yates, and all the national security types who appear on CNN and MSNBC are in such a snit about Trump's dismantling of the government and institutions they have devoted their careers to defend. 

And so this explains why Evangelical Christians support Trump. They see him as someone who is restoring the old social order. His personal behavior and lawlessness are irrelevant because they see hm as sent by God to destroy the godless secular Liberal Order. If that means destroying American democracy, so be it. Better a kingdom or autocracy where civil laws align with divine law (in the primitive lex talionis sense) than a democracy that is out of alignment with it. The authoritarian thugs, of course, don't care about the divine order; they just care about maintaining power. But they understand that they need to be seen as champions of the divine order if they are to maintain their base of support.

Liberals need to understand what they're up against with Republicans. The law is no constraint for them because they don't think it's legitimate. We're currently in a cold civil war that is likely to get very hot in the next decade. On the one side Independents and Democrats believe in the rule of law; on the other side, the southernized Republicans who don't. The latter group only believes in using power--violent power if necessary--to impose their idea of social order on everyone else. The law has legitimacy only insofar as it aligns with their idea of underlying social order, which is for them best articulated in Christian Nationalism. 

So nothing is more important than Independents and Democrats keeping Republicans out of power, and to do that they must not vote for them, and when in power they must use the full extent and power of the law to keep their lawlessness in check. 

Alex Jones Trial: Is Trump Watching?

When Jones tried to argue that he believed he was telling the truth, [Judge] Gamble clarified the difference between an alternative reality media world and a court of law. In the law, she told him, truth was actually a real thing.

“You believe everything you say is true, but it isn’t,” she pointedly told him. “Just because you claim to think something is true does not make it true. It does not protect you. It is not allowed. You’re under oath.” (Source)

I would pay good money to see Trump testify under oath about his involvement on J6 and his financial relationship with the Russian. 

Update 8/10/22: From then NYT this morning:

Donald J. Trump declined to answer questions from the New York state attorney general’s office on Wednesday, a surprising gamble in a high-stakes legal interview that is likely to determine the course of a civil investigation into his company’s business practices.

In a statement released shortly after the questioning began on Wednesday, Mr. Trump said he would invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, explaining that he “declined to answer the questions under the rights and privileges afforded to every citizen under the United States Constitution.”

After the deposition began, two sources with knowledge of the matter confirmed that he was refusing to answer questions, citing the Fifth Amendment.

First opportunity to claim the 5th of many more to come. I hope we see the video at some point.