Category: Political issues

Pearls before swine


Credit: CSpan

When in the same room as the abundant kindness and goodness of President Joe Biden, how can Republicans even stand themselves? I’ll answer my own question. Many Republicans are so far gone that they can’t even know what they are.

I did not watch Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ Republican rebuttal. But according to Heather Cox Richardson, Sanders said, “The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left. The choice is between normal or crazy.”

I have little doubt, professional liar that she is, that Sanders is so blind that she actually sees things that way. And she is far too far gone to realize that normal people, aghast at such a voluntary public display of blindness, will instantly understand that Sanders is projecting, a psychological trick that is essential to maintaining stability in the right-wing psyche. If they didn’t project their own craziness and meanness onto other people, they’d have only themselves to hate.

I never go on Twitter, but several news outlets are reporting that George Santos, an amateur liar and swine so vile that even many Republicans can’t stomach him, tweeted: “SOTU category is: GASLIGHTING!” I’m glad that I can’t even imagine what goes on in the mind of someone who can be like that and think like that.

Kevin McCarthy deserves some credit here. He was completely civil all through Biden’s speech, and he even tried to shush the outbreaks of booing and heckling from the Republican side of the room. But McCarthy has made his bed, and now we will see how long he can lie in it. McCarthy has only two choices, really. He can become more like Biden. Or he can become more like Marjorie Taylor Greene. Increasingly I think that the best solution for the world’s Republican problem is for Trump to draw off all the lunatics into a third party, enabling everyone to see what a minority of losers the deplorables are. Then the losers can glory in the acid purity of their own meanness, as they dissolve in it.

For good and decent human beings, the challenge is how to be civil to such people. For Joe Biden, as president of the United States, the standard of civility is very high (not that Donald Trump ever had any such standard). But even Joe Biden baited them and made fun of their cluelessness. He got the best of them, too, right in front of the American people, though no doubt Republicans think the opposite.

President Biden did a brilliant job of describing his vision of an America that is more just, more equal, more fair, more kind, and more prosperous. And yet the Republican Party wants us to believe that Biden’s vision is crazy. Those of us who are not Republicans should be endlessly grateful that, by the grace of God, we are not like that.

“Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.” — Matthew 7:6, King James version.

“The choice is no longer between right or left. The choice is between normal and crazy.”

The tip of another iceberg


Source: Wikimedia Commons

The media are underplaying yesterday’s arrest of Charles McGonigal, former head of counterintelligence in the New York field office of the FBI. Here is the Washington Post story:

Former FBI official accused of working for Russian he investigated

Even though we still know very little, despite the Mueller report, about Russian interference in the 2016 election and Russia infiltration of the American government at the highest levels, what we already know is so complicated that it’s hard to follow. McGonigal’s arrest ensures that more of truth is going to come out.

McGonigal’s connections are terrifying. He is connected to Putin, to the Russian mob including Oleg Deripaska, to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign manager (Paul Manafort), to James Comey, Rudy Giuliani, and Jared Kushner. In other words, McGonigal is connected to Trump.

With connections like that, it’s a certainty that McGonigal knows a lot more about Trump’s secrets and the doings of Trump henchmen. It’s also a certainty that the Department of Justice knows much more than was contained in yesterday’s news release. McGonigal has pleaded not guilty. If he flips, then we can expect to see much more of this iceberg.

If we are to believe that Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide, just as we are to believe that those Russian oligarchs recently accidentally fell out of windows and accidentally fell down stairs, then we might reasonably wonder whether McGonigal is now a candidate for suicide. There must be quite a few powerful people who don’t want him to talk.

According to the indictment, McGonigal took bribes totaling $225,000. That’s embarrassingly cheap, given the connections to billionaires with big agendas. If, like Paul Manafort, McGonigal is a right-wing true believer, then maybe a measly $225,000 is enough to get him to betray his country.

Don’t we have heretics anymore?

Babel: Or, the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. R.F. Kuang, Harper Voyager, 2022. 546 pages.

I almost never read bestsellers, and this book reminded me why. This book makes me want to go read some Jordan Peterson or something to wash the politically correct taste out of my mouth. Please don’t misunderstand me. My own liberal political views would almost surely be classified as 100 percent politically correct. But that doesn’t mean that I think that political correctness makes for good literature. Do we really need to be harangued and hectored about what we already know? There’s something insulting and condescending about that.

R.F. Kuang’s harangues in Babel: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution, are about capitalism and British imperialism. Good grief. Isn’t it about 150 years too late for that? Then again, make that 250 years, because writers should be ahead of their time, not behind.

There was another clue that I should have checked in advance before I bought this book or spent umpteen hours reading it. That’s the rating that Babel got on Goodreads, a wretched hive of mean and mediocre-minded readers if there ever was one. Truly good books (if they get read at all) will almost always get marked down by vindictive readers ganging up to push a book’s ratings down if the book contains the slightest whiff of heresy. Goodreads doesn’t think very highly of heresy or boat-rocking. Whereas books like Babel will get mostly 5-star reviews from the hive. Babel would be boat-rocking only if Charlotte Brontë had written it, when Victoria was on the throne.

R.F. Kuang is a good writer with, obviously, a remarkably good education and many interesting ideas. But that’s no guarantee that she can write a good novel (though she can write novels that are guaranteed to get published). Sure, the world is still dealing with the consequences of British imperialism and slavery. But we know that. A novelist’s job — particularly a scholarly novelist like Kuang — is to be on the leading edge, not to grind (at great length — 546 pages) a very old axe. What could she add to what ahead-of-their-time scholars have already written?

As for the mediocrity and vindictiveness of Goodreads, check out some of the 1-star reviews of, say, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, or John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, both of which rocked the boat a little too hard. Kuang’s Babel has a higher Goodreads rating than either of them. Babel also got a slightly higher Goodreads rating that Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), which rocked the boat too much for mediocre readers and told us things that some people weren’t ready to hear. The Color Purple was not, as far as I can determine, a bestseller, and it’s on a list of the 100 books most frequently targeted for bans. Alice Walker was brave and heretical. Books like Kuang’s just invite approval.

Kuang’s characters are really very sweet, though. The atmosphere she stirs up in old Oxford is appealing. Some of her asides on linguistics are very interesting. But would you be surprised if I told you how diverse her four main characters are? One is Black, one is Chinese, one is an Indian Moslem, and one is white. The white character’s cluelessness is a foil for the what the other characters say to educate her.

Though, as I said, Kuang is a good writer, I think she lost control of this novel. Three-quarters of the way through, the dialogue loses it polish and the plotting grows careless.

But the greatest weakness of this book is plain old failure of imagination. All the gothic frills of fantasy are present, but all that remains underneath that is a rant and a harangue with no new insights. And not a whiff of heresy to redeem it.

200 years of conservative derp

The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. Corey Robin. Oxford University Press, second edition, 2018.

The last chapter of this book — written, I believe, in 2017 — is about Donald Trump. Corey Robin quotes Tony Schwartz, who was the ghostwriter for Trump’s The Art of the Deal:

“I put lipstick on a pig,” he told The New Yorker in the summer of 2016. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and make him more appealing than he is.” Schwartz’s disavowal is perplexing, though. The Art of the Deal is not a flattering or even outsized portrait of Trump. It’s a devastating — if unintentional — deflation of not only Trump the man but also the movement, party, and nation he now leads.”

This book is densely academic, but it’s not wishy-washy. I need to be careful here to distinguish between what I think about conservative intellectual discourse and what Corey Robin as an academic has to say about it. So this is me talking: Conservative discourse for 200 years, from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, has all been lipstick on pigs, no matter how high-flown it might be. My claim has a simple basis though it has taken me decades, as a liberal, to see it clearly. That is that no justification exists, not on this planet or on any planet in the galaxy, for the perpetuation of systems that sustain the hierarchy of domination and subordination.

Robin starts with Edmund Burke, 1729-1797, an opponent of democracy who expressed great sympathy for Marie Antoinette but who didn’t care a fig for the common people, whom he saw as dangerous without an aristocracy to manage them. From Burke, Robin works his way forward chronologically — Nietzsche, Hobbes, Hayek, Oakeshott, Goldwater, Ayn Rand, Donald Trump.

The conservative derp of, say, William F. Buckley or Bill Kristol, is no longer in the papers. But we still have conservative producers of high-flown derp such as George Will, Thomas Sowell, and Ross Douthat. Douthat is occasionally capable of making a valid point when he is not blinded by his religion. But my claim is that all conservative discourse, whether old or new, if you decompile it, contains an intentional deception, some form of self-deception, some form of fallacy, or some kind of deformity of character, simply because it tries to justify the unjustifiable. I also claim that Robin’s academic analysis supports my non-academic claim. There is always something uncaring and mean in the conservative character. One of the achievements of the Trump era was to make this meanness a public virtue and to make the supposedly Christian virtues of caring, fairness, and help for the poor and weak — now called “wokeness” — an existential threat to be beaten back and beaten down.

Keeping in mind that this book was written in 2017, Robin sees the conservative movement in a state of decline:

“In recent years, the fusion of elitism and populism has grown brittle. Movement elites no longer find in the electoral majority such a wide or ready response to their populist calls. Like many movements struggling to hold onto power, conservative activists and leaders compensate for their dwindling support in the population by doubling down on their program, issuing ever more strident and racist calls for a return to a white, Christian, free-market nation…. Unable to fund its project on the basis of the masses, at least not nearly to the extent it once did, the right increasingly relies on the most anti-democratic elements of the state: not merely the Electoral College and the Supreme Court but also restrictions on the vote.”

This book is about how conservatives use ideas. A bigger concern, which lies outside the scope of this book, is how conservatives use power, when they can get it. Conservative ideas, no matter how much lipstick, are always mean and ugly. But even more ugly is the conservative desperation to hold onto the power to dominate, so recently on display at Trump rallies or the attack on the U.S. Capitol. The conservative mind can’t see the difference between the attack on the U.S. Capitol and a BLM protest that got out of hand. Here’s the difference that I see. It’s the difference between domination and subjugation, and the refusal to be dominated and subjugated. One wants to illegally install a vile and foul-mouthed oligarch in the most powerful office in the world. The other wants justice for the murder of powerless people. That difference is as wide as the galaxy, and there is something badly wrong with a mind that can’t see the difference.

Update: Thomas Edsall’s column in today’s New York Times is about psychopathy in today’s right-wing politics: “You Don’t Negotiate with These Kinds of People”

Trump has no future other than prison


A Facebook meme

Polls from Quinnipiac University I always take with a grain of salt. And, actually, any single poll always should be taken with a grain of salt. But this particular Quinnipiac poll is so lopsided that I think it’s worth our confidence.

The poll, released November 22, found that only 35 percent of Americans consider themselves supporters of Trump’s MAGA movement. That means that Trumpism is now pretty much down to the irrational authoritarians who are motivated only by their meanness rather than anything that resembles a fact or a principle. There is a percentage below which that number will never go, because that kind of people never change. The number, I would argue, is somewhere between 25 and 35 percent. But the exact percentage doesn’t matter, because they are and always will be a minority. We need to keep in mind that, even in 2016, a majority of voters rejected Trump. It was only because of our archaic Electoral College and its amplification of rural votes that Trump got into the White House.

As I have often said here, there is not a snowball’s chance that Trump will ever again get near the White House. What remains to be seen, though, is whether the Republican Party will find a way to unload Trump to save itself, or whether Republicans (a majority of whom still believe in Trump) will ride Trump all the way down.

It’s past time for rational people to stop being afraid of Trump. Rather, just enjoy the shadenfreude of watching Trump finally taken down and disposed of by the law. When Trumpists strut and threaten, as they still do, just smirk and walk away.

The Trump show’s last season, canceled for bad ratings


Source: Wikimedia Commons

Is the Trump nightmare over? I would say no, not quite. There’s more craziness where that came from in the packed clown car of Trump wannabes and QAnon whack jobs. But I would argue that, now that the 2022 midterm election is over, we’ll be watching Trump through the rearview mirror. He’ll keep trying to scare us, and he’ll keep trying to get into the spotlight and pretend that he’s got us right where he wants us. But even Republicans now know that Trump is a loser. For the rest of us, it’s popcorn time. No matter what happens in the next presidential election in 2024, we now have two good years of deliciously crunchy fresh-popped schadenfreude to look forward to, watching Trump whimper and whine as he is financially ruined, exposed as weak, exposed as a loser, indicted for serious crimes, and put on trial for charges that may well include espionage. As his business crimes and tax returns come to light, we’ll find out who owns him — Russians and some nasty oil people in the Middle East would be a good guess.

If Republicans take the House, then we’ll have to listen to a series of barking-mad “hearings” featuring the likes of Jim Jordan. Even if those hearings become the three-ring circus that Maga Republicans want, the circus will succeed at confusing only the sort of people who watch Fox News. We mustn’t forget that that’s barely four million people at primetime. The craziness that we can expect from a post-Trump Maga House probably would do Republicans more harm than good, because most Americans now know what Trump is. A Republican House would keep reminding decent Americans why they hate Trump. It’s also possible that “establishment” Republicans and even Fox News will try to move on, to something that actually has a chance of working in 2024.

This morning, two days after the election, it’s amazing to me how quickly the media, as foolish and fickle as always, pivoted from pumping the Republican “red wave” to heaping humiliation on Republicans because the red wave didn’t happen — puff them up, then kick them when they’re down. We should always keep in mind that the last thing the media want is competent and therefore boring government. The media, like the Republican Party, now need something new. What will it be?

What are HBO, Disney, Hulu, Amazon Prime video, etc., for after all. That’s where our entertainment should come from, not from Washington, or Mar-a-Lago, or sadistic right-wing circus tricks in places like Florida, Texas, or Arizona. One way of interpreting this election, I think, is that Americans are very tired of the circus. The Trump show has had a run of five or six seasons, same plot, same crappy characters. I’d bet a dollar, plus an 8.2 cent adjustment for inflation, that at this very moment, the grandees of the Republican Party and the media’s best creative geniuses are in meetings behind closed mahogany doors trying to come up with two new blockbuster seasons of — something, something new — to preserve their profits through 2024.

Meanwhile the White House is safe, the courts are still in working order, there’s toilet paper on the shelves, and Republican dreams of everlasting domination just took a big hit. President Biden will continue to focus on things that actually matter. Wouldn’t it be nice if the media would, too. In any case, we don’t have to be afraid of Donald Trump anymore. In the season finale, Trump will go to prison. Then he’ll be history, over in the trash heap section.

Update:

The New York Post, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, heaped scorn on Trump in today’s edition with a “Trumpty Dumpty” cover.

Another Murdoch property, the Wall Street Journal, called Trump “The Republican Party’s Biggest Loser.”

Andor and us

“Andor,” now streaming on Disney+, is the best television since Game of Thrones. We’re now nine episodes into the season’s twelve episodes. Ken called it “Star Wars for adults,” which is a good description. If the Force exists in “Andor,” it hasn’t yet made an appearance. There are no cuddly animals, no light sabers, and no Yoda-like characters who are all-knowing. These characters — like us — are on their own to deal with a world that is sinking fast into fascism. This is pure politics — a developing rebellion against the fascist Empire.

I very quickly lost interest in the new Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones spinoffs and stopped watching them. There’s room there for plenty of criticism, but neither of those two series is really worth bothering with criticism. The bottom line for me was just that I couldn’t care about any of the characters.

“Andor,” on the other hand, is loaded with characters whom we can care about, right from the first episode. Those characters who are powerless are increasingly feeling the iron boot of the Empire. Even those who are powerful (a rebel senator or two, for example) would lose their lives in a second if their cover was blown.

Episode by episode, Andor’s parallels with our current political situation become more apparent. I had been wondering how intentional this is. It seems the answer is that it’s very intentional.

The Wikipedia article says that Diego Luna, who plays Cassian Andor, and Tony Gilroy, who is described as the “showrunner,” have said that the Andor series is about “how the disenfranchised can stand up to effect change.” Fiona Shaw, who plays Cassian Andor’s adoptive mother, is quoted in the Wikipedia article:

“Co-star Fiona Shaw described Gilroy’s political commentary in the scripts as a ‘great, scurrilous [take] on the Trumpian world,’ adding that ‘our world is exploding in different places right now, people’s rights are disappearing, and Andor reflects that. [In the show] the Empire is taking over, and it feels like the same thing is happening in reality, too.’ ”

This series is so well done that I’ve watched each episode at least twice, and some of them three times. It moves fast, and the details are important.

Are Trumpists aware that Disney is exposing their fascism and motivating the resistance? A little Googling shows that Trumpists are aware, and they’re plenty mad about it, claiming (for example) that Disney risks financial disaster if they alienate half their potential audience. Ha! According to Wikipedia, Andor has been at the top of the streaming lists.

“Andor” is worth studying from several angles, especially how the rebels and the fascists differ in their “moral foundations.” Andor’s fascists, like our Trumpists, are cruel, uncaring, and committed to iron-boot authoritarianism. The motivations of the rebels, more complex and more subtle, are being revealed in the script a bit more slowly. I’ll have more to say about “Andor” in the next few weeks.

Oligarchs and the rest of us

Politico has a must-read piece today, an interview with Fiona Hill: Fiona Hill: ‘Elon Musk Is Transmitting a Message for Putin.’ Part of what makes this interview a must-read is how it exposes the media’s inadequacy in trying to cover something as complicated as Putin’s war against Ukraine. Only a specialist and academic like Fiona Hill can see very far beneath the surface. This interview should have been in the New York Times, not in a secondary source such as Politico.

There’s another important element. Why should a rich American naïf and idiot like Elon Musk figure into this interview? Just what interests do Musk and Putin have in common? Just how often do they talk, and why? This begs a question about another rich American naïf and idiot: Donald Trump. We have never really learned what interests Trump and Putin have in common. How often have Trump and Putin used secret back-channels of communication, and why? Here we could make a long list of the world’s oligarchs, some of whom control countries such as China and Iran, and others who control “countries of particular concern” such as Hungary, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan. These oligarchs know each other. Otherwise only the banks know who most of them are. They live in a golden bubble that we common folk cannot penetrate. Only occasionally do we get scraps of information about what they do and the power they have over world events. When their interference with democratic governments is noticed, they pull out all the stops to obstruct our view, as with the matter of Russia’s interference with the American election of 2016.

Here one must speculate. Can there be any doubt that much of what drives world events occurs out of our sight, far beneath the surface, visible only to the very rich and the very powerful? Only occasionally do we see the tip of an iceberg, such as the connection between Elon Musk and Vladimir Putin.

My speculation is that the fundamental conflict driving world events today boils down to oligarchs (who can flourish only under corrupt authoritarian governments) versus the people (who can flourish only in democracies). If this is true, then it begs another question: Why do so many ordinary people, who could never possibly gain admittance to the golden bubble in which oligarchs live, admire these oligarchs and take the oligarchs’ side in this global struggle? There is nothing in it for ordinary people other than misery, exploitation, and loss of liberty, once oligarchs are sufficiently entrenched to be untouchable by the people’s power, with elections made obsolete. Deception and propaganda, of course, are the biggest part of the answer. The oligarchs not only have mastered the art of deception, they even make a profit from it. For every five of us who are pretty good at recognizing the truth, there are another five of us who are willing to pay to be deceived.

The interview with Fiona Hill should raise our awareness not only of the great danger in Europe, but also the great danger here in the United States, where a Republican Party that serves the interests of the global oligarchy might succeed in legally taking control of the United States for the purpose of corrupting the American democracy and handing the country over to the oligarchs. That this was (and is) Trump’s purpose is now completely obvious. The Republican Party is all in. A shocking percentage of the American people actually believe that they would gain from this. They’d barely have a pot to piss in unless they could get a piece of the corruption, but at least they’d own the libs. It’s a pity that we can’t send them on a visit to Russia or Iran or North Korea to get a preview of what’s in store even for those who carry water for the oligarchs. For those of us who resisted, it would be much, much worse.

Trump: How will it end?


Authoritarian dreams of global domination. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Salon has an excellent interview today with George Conway, who formerly was a Republican and a Justice Department lawyer. Conway is asked all the right questions. Conway is well positioned to be taken seriously. His answers, I believe, are spot on. Everyone should read this article, but it boils down to this: Yes, Trump is going to be indicted and convicted. But Trump also is going to try to do as much damage to the country as possible as he goes down, just as he did when he was voted out of the White House:

Trump ‘will be convicted of multiple felonies’: George Conway on the bumpy road ahead
Longtime GOP lawyer says Trump won’t take a deal and will call for MAGA violence — but his time is almost up

But even with Trump ruined and silenced, we still will be stuck with the Republican Party. Conway says:

“Trump is also going to cause damage to the Republican Party. The party is finally going to realize that Trump will take them down with him. It is going to be very ugly all around. In the end, though, it will get better. Once Trump is dealt with, there’s the other problem that must be confronted: Trump let all the termites into the basement of the house. The Big Lie and the election deniers and all the assorted lunatics who have taken up residence in the Republican Party and are now its base must be pushed out.”

Conway wisely deflects some of the deeper questions on the grounds that he is not a psychologist. I’m not a psychologist either, but I’m going to stick my neck out.

I think that one of the things that decent and reasonable people must learn, if the United States ever returns to stability and governability, is that about a third of the population are authoritarians, and that authoritarians always damage the social fabric. In more stable times, these people go about their sorry little lives, unorganized yet always doing the damage they always do. But that damage occurs in much smaller spheres — families, communities, and workplaces. But if an uber-authoritarian with a big megaphone comes along with the right lies and stirs up enough rage, then an entire country can find itself in danger. There are only two requirements: A total madman such as Donald Trump, and a megaphone to retail the lies and rage, which the right-wing media and social media have eagerly supplied to Trump and Trumpism.

It is considered shrill and rude to say it, but I believe that it has to be said. That is that the line between authoritarian and “conservative” is thin and vague. The difference is that conservatives retain their decency and moral sanity. Authoritarians do not. George Conway is a conservative, but he is not an authoritarian. Hence Conway eventually saw through Trump and felt shame for having been deceived. The great danger to democracy occurs when authoritarians and conservatives vote the same way. Combined, they come to more than 50 percent, though probably only barely more than 50 percent. It’s probably reasonable to say that about 30 percent of the population are hopeless authoritarians, and about 20 percent are conservatives who, though regressive, racist, and easily deceived, still have a grip on decency and moral sanity.

Jonathan Haidt, who is a psychologist, would have us believe that conservatives and authoritarians are just as psychologically and morally competetent as the rest of us, but that they just have different “moral foundations.” But love for authority, and the hatred of out-groups, are sorry, and dangerous, moral foundations. As I said, I’m not a psychologist, but I believe that Jonathan Haidt is dangerously wrong and has done great harm by encouraging blindness to the actual nature of authoritarianism. Conservatives teeter between clarity and delusion, as Conway says in the interview when he acknowledges his shame for voting for Trump in 2016 and for not seeing sooner what Trump really is. But authoritarians are not capable of that kind of insight, and they’re not going to change. That’s where we are today: Authoritarians quickly got on board with Trump. The Republican Party brought the easily deceived conservatives on board. Combined, they have enough power to threaten democracy and the rule of law, the barriers that stand in the way of their dream of total authority over the rest of us.

The Republican Party should have kept Trump from running for president back in 2015. One of the purposes of political parties is to screen candidates, keep out the crazies, and field candidates who will promote the party’s principles. But the Republican Party, having abandoned its principles to decay into a Trump cult, has failed again and again to do its job. My guess is that Republicans believe that sticking with Trump is their only hope for the 2022 mid-terms. But if the Republican Party retains any grip on political sanity, it will pivot away from Trump after November 8 and start to cut Trump loose, knowing that Trump is going down and that Trump as a strategy for 2024 would be a recipe for the biggest landslide against Republicans in history. Then the question will be: Will the Republican Party start to recover its political and moral sanity? Or will it find another Trump to ride all the way to hell?

A vision of the Trumpian hellscape


The posthumous execution of Oliver Cromwell, 1661

My old friend Jonathan Rauch has an excellent piece in the Atlantic today, “We Don’t Have to Speculate About Trump’s Next Term: The former president and his allies have explained their plans quite clearly.” This piece is a must-read. I agree with everything Jonathan says except for one thing, which I describe below.

To me, it is incomprehensibly stupid that the Republican Party and its Trumpists believe that they can create some sort of right-wing, white-people, Christian nationalist utopia. That’s absurd. Given the power, what they actually would create is an American hellscape in which turmoil would escalate until Trump was removed from the scene, permanently. Trumpists imagined that their attack on the U.S. Capitol was some sort of popular uprising of the people, aimed at overturning tyranny. It was no such thing. It was a pathetic, tin-hat, squalid imitation of the real thing, led by and executed by the worst kind of fools, a beer-hall putsch fantasy. For an example of the real thing, take a look at photos of Sri Lankans storming their presidential palace to take down a corrupt family dynasty. The American people would not for long put up with Donald Trump as king.

I sent an email to Jonathan about his Atlantic piece:

Great piece in the Atlantic. I disagree on only one point. I don’t believe that the public would ever accept authoritarianism. I’m not sure that Trumpian authoritarianism could even creep, given that we know from the start who he is and what he is up to. Having long ago imagined the worst and having watched reality turn out twice as bad as what I imagined, I’ve also tried to imagine how we would resist. The coasts, starting in California, simply would not put up with it. I don’t think that a minority authoritarian American government could ever be anywhere close to stable. Republicans would move quickly to cut up the social safety net and enact all sorts of injustices, which would be gasoline on a fire. If elections don’t matter anymore, then MAGA types don’t matter either (or at least matter as much), and Trump’s contempt for such socially inferior creatures would start to show for those who don’t toe the line. The more cruel and showy the clampdown — which the Trumps and MAGA true believers would insist on and relish — the more determined the resistance. Inflammatory brown-shirt cruelty would be everywhere in social media, even if the media aren’t properly covering it. The far left, which is arming and which would double down and grow (see https://www.reddit.com/r/socialistra) would start to return fire. They’re weak, but as they grow I’d expect them to employ sophisticated guerrilla tactics. The intelligentsia are never powerless, especially up against a Trumpian idiocracy. The Democratic Party would have some ideas, too. I have enough faith in the American military that I think it would take Trump longer to corrupt it (meaning that they’d carry out any order that Trump gave) than we, or Trump, might think. Our NATO allies would find ways to apply pressure. Trumpian stupidity and incompetence would be a great weakness. Stability based on compliance could never be achieved, and I don’t think there is enough police power for a forced form of stability. I am confident that the people’s power to resist a tyrant is greater than a tyrant’s power to resist the law and the people. Not only are they a minority, I’d expect overall support for Trump to diminish, and quickly, not grow. I have no idea how Trump eventually would be deposed, but he would be, nor can he even live much longer. Don Jr. is far too stupid to lead the dynasty they want, though no doubt he’d love to try. They can’t shoot everybody. A couple of hundred thousand people swarming the White House, à la Sri Lanka, would be far from impossible, and that would be a start.

That said, though, I don’t think there is a snowball’s chance that Trump will return to power. I think he is legally doomed and that there is time to finish him off and lock him up (as well as some members of Congress) before January 2025, no matter where we find ourselves in January 2025. I wouldn’t be completely surprised if there are indictments ahead of the November election, since the DOJ is under increasing pressure to justify itself.

This was Jonathan’s reply:

Excellent analysis. I hope you’re right!

I think you probably are right, but we’ve already seen so much that was previously unthinkable. Nothing in my scenario is unrealistic, and most of it either already happened or was attempted and might have happened.

The most discouraging thing to me is that I now think it’s very possible that the American public–at least the necessary critical mass–would accept creeping authoritarianism of the Hungary variety, and many would welcome it. I’ve experienced a crushing crisis of confidence in the public’s understanding of and commitment to constitutional democracy. I’m quite depressed about it. See, eg…

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/08/political-extremism-fatalism-maga-threat/671234/

Your comments here, as always, are welcome.