I feel that we, as Americans, have been tripping and stumbling down the side of a mountain covered with loose rocks and gravel. You may want to walk down carefully, but a slip here and a slip there and before you know it, you're running to keep from tumbling headfirst into the gravel. Falling is painful, but the only way to stop running is to reach the bottom of the slope. Zack Beauchamp in a recent Vox article, asks "why left-wing economics is not the answer to right-wing populism." Part of the answer is a form of single-mindedness. Once you're careening down the side of the mountain, slipping and sliding on the loose gravel, you actually become focused on the immediate footing. We are, in other words, on the slippery slope of populism, focused on the latest WTF!?! pronouncement from the White House, and we don't seem to have much choice. We just hope beyond hope that we can maintain our balance until we reach rock bottom. We can only hope that at rock bottom, a bear doesn't step out of the brush or that we're not running and stumbling toward a cliff.
What set us on down the side of the mountain? Paradoxically part of the answer seems to be a sort of complacency, what Emerson called "the nonchalance of boys assured of their next meal." Emerson saw this nonchalance as an opportunity to go on to bigger and better things, a sort of Maslowian self-actualization, and those who are infected with a utopian virus will perhaps always see a glorious future. Take care of the basic security needs, and people will start reading and writing poetry and philosophy, or even better, curing cancer and eradicating racism. Probably not. Actually, it usually seem more accurate to suggest that, once freed from basic security needs, people will start bitching about other irritations. Relieved of worry about our next meal, we can get all in a tither over the lack of GMO free tofu at the local Albertsons. On a grander scale, Tony Judt outlined it rather well in his book, Ill Fares the Land, when he suggests that "social democracy has not only come to power in many countries, it has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of its founders. What was idealistic in the mid-19th century and a radical challenge fifty years later has become everyday politics in many liberal states." As its success, as Judt outlines it, "the baby boomers, entering university in the mid-60s, had only ever known a world of improving life chances, generous medical and educational services, optimistic projects of upward social mobility and -- perhaps above all -- an indefinable but ubiquitous sense of security." As a consequence of its success, the new left of the late 60s could then turn their attention from social economic goals, to social justice goals for blacks, students, women, immigrants and the LGBTQ community, all of which led us down the primrose path to identity politics.
Beauchamp makes a similar point. He writes,
Since World War II, Western European politics has been structured by the ideals of social democracy. From Germany to France to Sweden to Italy, every nation adopted some version of the basic social democratic vision — a mixed-market economy defined by both private property and deep government involvement, with high levels of taxation and sometimes stifling government regulation of the private sector, in exchange for a generous social welfare system that offers things like universal health care and free or heavily subsidized education.
Not so much the US where we've always rejected really deep government involvement, though we've accepted involvement deep enough to insure basic medical care for the poor and elderly through medicaid and medicare, provide temporary assistance against penury through TANF as well as a basic income for the disabled and the retired through Social Security. The Affordable Care Act, of course, was a small step in the direction of social democracy. It provided high cost/low benefit medical insurance for a broad swath of Americans, but at least it was medical insurance that would cover catastrophic accident or illness. "The social democratic project, by the numbers, has worked pretty well," as Beauchamp tells us.
The 10 countries with the lowest poverty rates in the world are all in Europe (the US ranks 34 out of 35 total countries in the OECD, an organization of wealthy countries). Researchers have also found clear correlations between the size of a country’s welfare state and social mobility, indicating that countries that provide citizens with extensive benefits, like Norway and Denmark, can help them better provide for themselves down the road. Indeed, the countries that score highest on surveys of national happiness aren’t the richest or the ones with the nicest weather — they’re ones located in frigid Scandinavia, a region defined principally by its exceedingly generous welfare states.
All of which creates a puzzle, "Why did voters who by and large benefit from social democracy turn against the parties that most strongly support it?" Beauchamp answers in much the same way as Judt, suggesting a similar irony that "the European left is the victim of its own success." He then goes on to reference Ronald Inglehart, who "argues that the combination of rapid economic growth and a robust welfare state have provided voters with enough economic security that they could start prioritizing issues beyond the distribution of wealth — issues like abortion, same-sex marriage, and, most crucially, immigration."
So how does one respond to this irony? The standard answer, and the least satisfactory answer, is that social democrats should unabashedly track further to the left, emphasizing the social economic issues and their immediate impact on the people. The fight over the Affordable Care Act is a case in point. I would venture to say most Americans are deeply unconcerned about the ideological wars being waged over the Act. While they tend to empathize with their party's view of the matter, at fundament, what most American's really want is not a victory in the ideological wars, but rather affordable health care for whatever ails them when it ails them. To be honest, although for different reasons, I believe the ACA is a deeply flawed program, in part because it is, so to speak, "private insurance centric." As I have said so many times before, private industry might be more "efficient," but its efficiency is measured against a single metric -- profit. They LIKE the universal mandate, not because it increases access to health care, but because it expands the pool of those paying premiums to include those least likely to make claims. It improves profits. They do NOT like the mandate to cover pre-existing conditions for precisely the opposite reasons. It includes in the pool of those paying premiums to include those most likely to make claims, repeated and expensive claims. It degrades profits. Nowhere in this discussion, however, do we directly address the moral imperative to alleviate suffering, and it really can't be addressed directly, because the principle governing imperative of private insurance is profit, not the alleviation of suffering. Instrumental acts designed to improve profit are not necessarily discordant with the alleviation of suffering, but then too neither are they perfectly in harmony with most people's desire to have affordable health care for whatever ails them when it ails them.
The secular rationalists on the social democratic side are addressing the moral imperative to provide health care for each and all. It is a universal, and inalienable right -- the right to life -- and because it is universal, it MUST be addressed by the state. The social democrats are willing to compromise along the way to get health care for more and most, but overall they tend to favor those solutions that have been shown to move in the direction of each and all -- the public health care systems that one finds throughout Europe. One can argue that, if the efficiency of the health care system is measured by the distribution of access, public options are more, not less, efficient. More care is provided to more people for each dollar spent. Graft does enter into the picture, but it enters much as it does in the defense industry, as profit taking -- e.g the grotesquely inflated prices of patented drugs -- which, when discovered and reported, is subject to public retribution. From a purely rational point of view, it makes little difference if the $500 is deducted from my earnings each month to pay for insurance, or if $500 is deducted in taxes to pay for a national healthcare system, so long as I get the care I need when I need it. My take home pay remains the same.
The problem, of course, is that the religious authoritarians on the conservative side are addressing a completely different moral imperative -- the problem of entitlement and discipline. Although it seems something of a gaff, Jason Chffetz' comparison of the iPhone and health insurance was intended to make a moral point. From his point of view, people are endowed first and foremost, not with the inalienable right to life -- indeed, men and women had forfeited that right long ago when they succumbed to satan's temptations -- but with "free will." And so, you have Chaffetz making the assertion that, in America, people have choices between iPhones and healthcare. The validity of his point was undercut somewhat because the numbers were so ludicrously disproportionate, but to harp on that, from his point of view, misses his point -- people should and DO have choices, and they have a moral obligation to bear the burden of the consequences that flow from those choices. At every juncture, and in every way, entitlements should be resisted. Insofar as the state has chosen for you, they not only pre-empt INDIVIDUAL choice, but they remove the consequences of those choices which provide INDIVIDUAL moral discipline. They are not entirely wrong. When basic security is a given, people DO tend to, well, run amok. Judt's description of the baby boomers tends ironically to support the religious authoritarian thesis. Insofar as baby boomers were afforded basic security as an entitlement, they DID tend to run amok -- "sex, drugs, rock and roll," or "do your own thing," or "tune in, turn on, drop out" -- and "woodstock nation" stands as a sort of symbolic representation of what a nation becomes when it lacks individual moral discipline. Beauchamp suffers from a similar irony. It's not just that people have taken up the post-materialist issues of abortion, it's that people run amok. They choose to engage in abortion, engage in same sex relations, and immigrate toward the easy life rather than fix their own problems in their own lands.
They are not entirely right either. First, some things are demonstrably not choices. To cite a particularly egregious example, I remember a phrase from my childhood, heard often in my own home and around town -- "those of the negro persuasion" -- as if being black were a lifestyle choice. Of course, no reasonable person would see someone's race as a lifestyle choice, and even the most virulent white supremacist would agree that blacks do not choose to be born under the conditions of being black that prevailed throughout much of our history and to a certain extent still prevail today. Any invidious distinction applied to race seems, if not immoral, then patently unfair, in part because this whole business of individual responsibility assumes not only free will, but also equal treatment under the law and a more vaguely defined equal opportunity. A moment's reflection reveals that neither equal treatment or equal opportunity really prevail, but what to do when neither is not true? One can, of course, ignore it all with a "them's breaks" shrug of the shoulders, but one can much more easily accept the unequal conditions when one is favored by those conditions, and to most social democrats such "sucks to be you" acceptance seems to be the attitude of conservative party. It is much more difficult to accept those unequal conditions when one is handicapped by those conditions, and if there is ethical outrage, it is the ethical outrage of someone who had just discovered that the others around the table are cheating. Social democrats did not deny individual responsibility, nor did they necessarily react against a capitalist framework defined by self-interested individuals, They reacted against those arbitrary and invidious distinctions between individuals based on wholly arbitrary criteria -- race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, et cetera. To read Martin Luther King's speeches is to be reminded of the assumptions we bring to bear. Men should be judged not by the arbitrary distinctions based on "the color of their skin," but on the "contents of their character," but one can do that, if and only if we fulfill the social assumptions of equal treatment and equal opportunity.
Second, and more disturbing, however, are the moral implications of competition between "self-interested individuals," which inevitably results in winners and losers -- those who get health care with a cell phone and those who can afford only the latter. One can shine a benign light on the matter, and characterize the results as "meritocratic," but here again to see the unequal results as anything resembling meritocratic we must assume a level playing field. We do not assume the victors of a contest are "meritorious" when they have (or give themselves) a systemic advantage -- when the game is, so to speak, rigged. In the absence of a level playing field, however, what does competition between self-interested individuals mean? It means that the dominant will continue to dominate, and if they had no systemic advantage before, they will do what they can to insure that they have such going forward. There is no moral or ethical justification for this dominance beyond what can be summed up as "might makes right." For a considerable portion of human pre-history and history, this sort of alpha-ape theory of "right" prevailed, no doubt, and may well be written deeply into our genetic code, visible not only in our propensity for hierarchical patterns of deference and dominance, but in the degree to which the deferential admire the heroic stature of the dominant. It is not a straight out admiration, of course, and Harold Bloom got it mostly right, I think, when he unpacked admiration to reveal the envy and resentment of those who would, if they could, become the alpha-ape. The envy is relatively straight forward. Who wouldn't want the choice of mates? The resentment, however, is the black light of self-loathing, and if self-loathing is too strong a word, then perhaps we could say the degree to which our deference diminishes our sense of self-worth and pride. If there is a top rung in the hierarchy of deference and dominance, then too there is a bottom rung, and for all those who occupy the rungs between, there is at least the comforting assurance that, to paraphrase slightly, "at least I ain't no dalit."
It should go without saying, but in a capitalist system, a rather straight line can be drawn between "might" and "money," and one doesn't need a Max Weber to see that the winners are those in possession of great deal of money and there is a portion of us that wants to believe that those graced with a great deal of money are somehow better, more meritorious than the mass of humanity. We know the game is rigged, and we know this because the opportunities available to the poor are much more circumscribed that those available to the rich -- the sort of differences revealed when Mitt Romney in a blinkered moment could suggest that people borrow a million dollars from their fathers to start a business, or when Trump characterized himself as self-made with a small loan of $200 million from his father. Then too, there are other, more subtle sorts of differences. Education, ostensibly, is a great equalizer, a great provider of opportunity, but the children of the wealthy do not attend public school, nor do they attend the local community college. They attend the "better" sorts of schools, and develop the attitudinal differences, the social networks, and the other sorts of "human capital" that augments and helps perpetuate their pecuniary capital. Inheritance rigs the system, and if we can no longer quite believe in the divine right of kingship, we can still believe in the divine rights of and to money, in part because we want to believe that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree and even inherited money comes of and confers merit, in part because money perhaps more successfully than praetorian guard perpetuates the alpha-ape right to dominance with all its attendant envy and resentment. Indeed, unlike the divine right of kingship, where envy and resentment found its outlet and opened a path of succession with a vial of poison in the king's ear or a bullet in his back, the divine right of and to money is much more secure. Indeed, as nay-sayers from Rousseau to Thoreau have suggested, the system itself is perpetuated through envy and resentment -- the invidious comparison and my need to find self-worth and pride in the possession of stuff and more stuff and the latest stuff and the best stuff. If I'm not at the top, then there is at least the comforting assurance that I have more stuff than some, and my envy and resentment can find its relief in the purchase of even more stuff.
I am suggesting that there is little moral and ethical justification for the winner-take-all laissez faire capitalism, derived from and perpetuated by inherited wealth, except the "right" that flows from and is perpetuated by the control of wealth. Those with inherited wealth will, in rather short order, see themselves as a superior sort of human being, and if not necessarily superior then certainly a different sort of human being. Implicit in what I am about to say is a "materialist" (even Marxist) assumption that values derive from the condition of one's life. This is, of course, the obverse of the moral stance taken by Chaffetz and those like him, who want to say that, in this land of opportunity, one's individual values determine one's condition in life -- that one is responsible for one's condition in life. It is to say that, in a land of self-perpetuating social class, the condition of one's life determine one's values. When we ask ourselves what one class would most value in the other, the differences become apparent. The more unequal the society the more those differences become apparent.
If one has been graced with wealth, and the "right" that flows from wealth, one values most in the others, those not so blessed, nothing more than acquiescence to an existing order that allows them to acquire without impediment, and possess with security. Acquiescence implies a willing resignation to the existing order, and is quite different than a submission that requires the direct, physical and often brutal application of force. David Frum is correct, I think, when he pooh-pooh's the Hitler analogies or for that matter the Stalin examples. The direct and brutal application of police power to gain submission isn't needed, particularly when one can gain acquiescence so easily. The dictatorships of the 20th century aimed at utopian ideals -- if not the nationalist paradise, then the worker's paradise -- and those who promise paradise often find it difficult to deliver paradise. Not surprisingly, as the failure to deliver becomes ever more apparent, ever more brutal means are necessary to maintain order and various forms of a police state emerge. The autocrats of the 20th century are not idealists. They are capitalists, and their motivation is wealth, personal wealth, and the only thing required to gain mass acquiescence to an existing status quo is that things get "better," even ever so slightly better, so the populace can bask in their complacency. The genius of capitalism resides in what it doesn't require, and it doesn't require great strides to gain acquiescence, especially not a sudden leap into paradise. It requires only a purchase on the stuff of one's immediate desires and a sense that the same purchase will prevail tomorrow. If one has not been graced with great wealth, what one values most in the other, those blessed with power and control, is little more than security in the present and hope for more in the future. Although he is off to a rocky start, and that rocky start is undermining the security provided by his predecessor, nevertheless the stock market is rising, the economy is improving, and things are in many ways looking up. Trump could be a popular president if he delivers on the "big tax cuts, big spending, and big deficits" and especially if those policies work "their familiar expansive magic" and provide rising wages, "especially for men without a college degree." Frum goes on to outline very plausible eventualities that would give the impression that things are getting "better," if only ever so slightly better. Trump does not need to deliver hugely, but he does need to deliver. If the "expansive magic" also creates rampant inflation, if an unregulated finance sector finds new ways to extend credit and capitalize on consumer default, if environmental decay comes too close to the suburbs, if the necessary health care becomes even more inaccessible for an increasing number of Americans, it all might come crashing down as it did for Bush at the end of his term. By then, however, it won't really matter if he and his cronies turn out to be, as Fitzgerald put it, "careless people" -- if "they smashed up things and creatures"-- so long as they can then retreat "back into their money" and "let other people clean up the mess they had made." Just as Bush was succeeded by Obama, Trump will be succeeded by his clean up crew, and the cycle will repeat itself, ad nauseam, just so long as the center holds and things don't fall apart altogether.
Perhaps.
Although from a conservative perspective it is impermissible and politically incorrect to say as much, I am beginning to think we are engaged in class warfare, though in the fog of battle it is difficult to entirely differentiate the combatants. I say this for a couple of reasons, not least that the political manifestations of war are everywhere -- as Chris Hedges might put it, "the plague of nationalism" and "the cause." Nationalism is familiar, and in part what has led to all those Hitler comparisons, including my own. It pushes what otherwise might be a laudable patriotism and national pride to an extreme, and one sees it in the "make America great again" and "America First" sloganeering, the vilification of internal minorities, particularly those with "alien" cultures and religions, and the need to fortify against an insidious force from without. Hedges quotes Danilo Kis, who says "the nationalist is by definition an ignoramus. Nationalism is the line of least resistance, the easy way. The nationalist is untroubled, he knows or thinks he knows what his values are," in part because those values are not only shared by his friends and neighbors, but repeated back to him by Fox News and his Facebook feed, and there is little need for self-reflection, much less self-doubt, because those values are simply a given. Of course we want to "make America great again," even though, when questioned, it is unclear what constitutes greatness, much less what might restore us to greatness. Of course we want to put "America First," even though, when examined, it is unclear just how we are to disentangle ourselves from the various economic, military, and political webs, most of our own weaving, much less how we do so without causing considerable damage to our exalted position in the world. Nevertheless, as Hedges put it, "lurking beneath the surface of every society, including ours, is the passionate yearning for a nationalist cause that exalts us." Hedges sees it as the kind of cause "that war alone is able to deliver," and I would add, for much of the last half century, the cold war did deliver, but despite the apocalyptic amplification of the campaign, war on terror and radical islamic terrorism hasn't quite delivered. A war with Korea might redirect the nationalist urge, but we have been down that path before, and it seems unlikely that China would forego American markets for the sake of someone so obviously a mad hatter. A real war, sufficient to our exaltation, seems unlikely, though Trump's antagonistic attitude toward virtually everyone (except Putin and Russia) seems hell bent on creating one.
It seems rather that the nationalist urge is directed internally, against those who might otherwise be seen as Americans. Although he is in every respect a decent and moral human being, I have heard a family friend talk about "democrats" as if they were an invading army, led by Satan, intent on over-throwing America and imposing foreign values in every way antithetical to his own. There is also a strong sense of having been victimized. Here again, except in the very broadest of generalities -- e.g. "they have taken away our freedoms" -- it is difficult to pin down exactly how they personally have been aggrieved, but their sense of grievance is real enough, and pervasive enough, to accommodate even the most minute discontents of American civilization. Fox News and the likes of Brietbart and other ostensibly "conservative" news media have become little more than a daily litany of aggrieved discontent, the cause of which is the government, ethnic and racial minorities, and the media. One story today reads, "New York Post reporter Dean Balsamini wore a Make America Great Again (MAGA) hat around the liberal enclaves of Manhattan and Brooklyn, New York and was cursed and condemned." Well, yes, of course, and if I were to wear a Hillary tee shirt around Mountain Home, I could expect the same. What a surprise! Another story reads, "White People Acknowledge Privilege to Make Themselves Feel Good, Avoid Addressing Racism." The body of the story was without irony, reporting on and quoting a bit of pretentious scholarship -- the sort that down to earth people love to mock -- and so it was presented as an occasion to comment, and the top comment when I opened the story, read: "Yes, white privilege. Only a white can get a job they are not qualified for merely due to being white. Only whites have white history month, or a Congressional White Caucus. Only whites have the White College Fund going for them. Only whites have quotas in their favor, because they're white. Gotta love that 'white privilege'" It drips with obvious irony, the resentment of grievance and a sanctimonious victimhood, and it isn't a mystery why "victimhood is essential fodder for any conflict," as Hedges notes, "for once a group or a nation establishes that it alone suffers, then all other competing claims to injustice are canceled out."
It has been noted again, and again, and again, that Trump lies. In my morning email, came this piece from the NY Times, who wrote "he lies the way no American politician has lied before. The occasional untruths that other recent presidents have spoken — often unwittingly — do not compare with the frequency, intensity and deliberateness with which Donald Trump offers falsehoods." And it is all very puzzling, and one would love to see it as a sign of pathology, except that there is a pattern to the lies -- almost always a sort of fun house mirror "back at you." Trump is wrapped in the Russian interference investigations? Trump accuses Obama of something similar with his wire tapping allegations. And so it has gone, and so it will go, as Trump obsessively fights back. It is a deliberate attempt to cultivate what Hannah Arendt called "nihilistic relativism," the assertion on the one side that all politicians lie, which is no more surprising than the universal assertion that all people lie, but the "deliberateness with which Donald Trump offers falsehoods" points to a different kind of agenda. It's not that he wants us to believe his lies, as most "mainstream" politicians and most people would want us to believe their lies, but rather his blatant mendacity, coupled with attacks on a media that cannot help but point them out, suggests that he really wants us to believe nothing we hear. Hedges reminds us that "history is awash with beleaguered revolutionaries and lunatic extremists who were endowed with enough luck and enough ruthlessness to fill power vacuums," and that seems an accurate enough assessment of Trump's ascendency. He, of course, will see it as a sign of his greatness, as every dead in the wool narcissist would, but it was more a sign that neither of the mainstream parties effectively addressed a growing sense of malaise, and Trump DID actually understand and capitalize on their ineffectuality, offering up "a kind of fundamentalism." He ran as a republican, not because he was republican, but because the republican party had already aligned itself with a "dangerous messianic brand of religion, one where self-doubt is minimal," one where the universalist claims of secular rationalism had already been rejected, one where they already felt themselves to be the moral rearguard against the incursions of the modern secular state. Trump presented himself, not as a politician, but as a political messiah, and he demands not that we believe him or what he says -- it's all bullshit regardless -- but rather that we believe IN him, to profess and maintain one's faith IN him, to love him and be loved by him in return.
Nicholas Kristoff did a masterful job of satirizing not only the part religion plays in the republican party, but also its hypocrisies. I don't need to repeat it. And besides, I think Kristoff misses a crucial point. It's not about religion, per se, but more about the "cause" and imbuing it "with a religious aura." I think Hedges is right when he suggests that "already mainstream Christianity, Judaism, and Islam lie defeated and emasculated by the very forces that ironically turned them into tolerant, open institutions" -- that is to say, by the forces of secular rationalism, with science and technology in the vanguard, that have rendered mainstream religion more and more irrelevant to our daily lives -- the same forces have marginalized swaths of our population rendering them more and more irrelevant to the daily functioning of the state. It is not just the out and out deplorables who have felt "maligned, alienated, and ignored," but the rust belt workers and most of rural America, who felt maligned by a pretentious urban elite, alienated from a technological modernity and a trans-national economy, and ultimately ignored as the rubes who live in the medieval darkness of "fly over" America. Hedges paraphrases James Luther Adams, a professor at Harvard Divinity School, who warned "that we would end our careers fighting an ascendant fundamentalist movement, or, as he liked to say, "the Christian fascists." Although one needs to take Salon with a grain of salt, they write of the growth of INC christianity, part of what Mishra called the DIY evangelical religion. It's appeal, particularly among young people, resembles the appeal of the Merry Pranksters of the 60s, if not dropping acid and running naked through fields, then "the thrill of holding impromptu supernatural healing sessions in the emergency room of a large public hospital, the intrigue of ministry school class sessions devoted to the techniques of casting out demonic spirits and the adventure of teams of young people going out into public places, seeking direct guidance from God as to whom to heal or to relay specific divine messages." It provides, not an alternative to, but a parody of both mainstream religion and culture. And too, it has some of the same disconnected idealism that infused the Age of Aquarius. Salon quotes one leader as saying, “The goal of this new movement is transforming social units like cities, ethnic groups, nations rather than individuals" They set out the “seven mountains of culture” -- include business, government, media, arts and entertainment, education, family and religion -- and believe "if Christians permeate each mountain and rise to the top of all seven mountains…society would have biblical morality, people would live in harmony, there would be peace and not war, there would be no poverty.” It is woodstock nation fueled with at the narcotic of the revival tent. At some level its ludicrous, and one doubts that a disgruntled Archie Bunker in Cleveland or for that matter Mike Pence or Paul Ryan would buy into it, but there are other forms of DIY christianity, allowing those "who yesterday felt maligned, alienated, and ignored" to become "part of a nation of self-appointed agents of the divine will." The danger is not that any particular brand of fundamentalism will grow -- any more than the Dead Heads of the 60s would grow -- "so much as that modern, secular society will wither."
It's withering.
Our cultural civil war is real enough, but it is also a distraction -- and a tool for those who would acquire without obstacle and keep with security. Trump is not a messiah. He has little interest in biblical morality, living in harmony, ending war or poverty. He does, however, have a particular interest in his own aggrandizement and the money that contributes to it. Frum cites Larry Diamond, a sociologist at Stanford, who "has described the past decade as a period of 'democratic recession.' Worldwide, the number of democratic states has diminished. Within many of the remaining democracies, the quality of governance has deteriorated." Trump promised to fix our problems, virtually overnight, through an intervention of his own divine will. I'm not seeing it. The normally fractious democrats are aligning in opposition much as the republicans aligned in opposition to Obama, and the NY Times, today, runs a headline reading: Eyeing Trump’s Budget Plan, Republican Governors Say ‘No, Thanks.' Although they had at least 6 years to develop viable alternatives to the Affordable Care Act, it is clear that their focus had been solely on resistance, not alternatives. Like most insurgent crusaders, they had clear ideas about what they disliked, and a host of anti-government imperatives, but no real governing imperatives now that -- surprise! -- they are the governing party. It's not a matter of ideology, even the ideology of theocracy, though it mimics theocracy. Frum is mostly right when he suggests that, "outside the Islamic world, the 21st century is not an era of ideology," and one can question even the Islamic world's ideological sincerity. Mishra too gets it right, I think, when he suggests the Islamic terrorist is not altogether different from the christian terrorist who shoots up a black church. They are both self-appointed agents of what they a divine will drawn up in buckets from the dark wells of their own disgruntled resentments. In the meantime, our new president issues executive orders and he tweets. I'm sure he would be the voice from the burning bush -- would be if only he could -- but the tweet, tweet, tweet seems more the psychotic chirping of a canary isolated in a gilded cage. We are tweet, tweet, tweeting our way to oblivion. Nevertheless, "the grand utopian visions of the 19th century have passed out of fashion. The nightmare totalitarian projects of the 20th have been overthrown or have disintegrated, leaving behind only outdated remnants -- North Korea, Cuba" -- and a vacuum. What is to replace the grand utopian visions? In the end, we know that any utopian vision would end in disaster should they actually gain power -- including the sorts of utopian theocracy represented by the INC christians -- and we know this because conservative philosophers like Hayek and Berlin have laid out the devastating connection between the utopian and the totalitarian. Still, we lack a moral vision to fill the vacuum, and the incremental improvements in our material well being promised by secular rationalism doesn't seem to satisfy our deepest needs. Frum is correct, I think, when he suggests that "what is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy," wrapped in the mantle of individual liberty and religious authority, but ultimately "led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao" or genuine religious belief. "Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule-twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-optation of elites." In the end, Donald Trump
represents something much more radical. A president who plausibly owes his office at least in part to a clandestine intervention by a hostile foreign intelligence service? Who uses the bully pulpit to target individual critics? Who creates blind trusts that are not blind, invites his children to commingle private and public business, and somehow gets the unhappy members of his own political party either to endorse his choices or shrug them off? If this were happening in Honduras, we’d know what to call it. It’s happening here instead, and so we are baffled.
Well, not so much baffled, as in denial.
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