The view from an upstairs window
It’s a bleak time for those of us who live in the world of ideas as much as in the real world. Today, unless gangs of violent and raging liberals egged on by Joe Biden storm the U.S. Capitol and try to prevent the Congress from certifying Trump as the winner of the November election, the Congress will … certify Trump as the winner of the November election. We liberals, creatures of the Enlightenment, can only grit our teeth and watch as democracy and the law take their course.
It’s a stunning piece of work. An elite of highly privileged people who openly hate democracy have used the institutions of democracy to advance their project of dismantling democracy. It takes a lot of lies to do that. It also takes a lot of people (77,303,573, to be precise) ignorant enough and foolish enough to fall for it.
And it also takes a lot of weakened institutions that could have stood in their way but didn’t, with the media, the justice department, and the courts at the top of the list.
I admit that, every day of late, I find myself pacing back and forth, from upstairs window to upstairs window, trying to figure out what is likely to happen in the next four years. But mostly, I think, what happens in the next four years is unpredictable.
We know what they want. We recoil at the horror of their ideas, best described as the Dark Enlightenment. We know that the men who are about to install themselves in the White House very much believe in this Dark Enlightenment and have a playbook.
But what’s unpredictable is what they actually will do, and to what degree the institutions of democracy remain strong enough to stand in their way. Even though they have a theoretical playbook, they have conflicting interests, and they are not nice people. We can expect them to waste a big part of their energy in conflict with each other, as opposed to conflict with the beast — the Enlightenment — that they all hate and want to overthrow. As JD Vance told a podcaster, “There is no way for a conservative to accomplish our vision of society unless we’re willing to strike at the heart of the beast. That’s the universities.”
Vance uses the word “conservatism” to describe the ideas that are threatened by the universities. I’d call it something else. It’s not just people that we’re up against. It’s also ideas, ideas that are very dark and very ugly.
For those of us who live in the world of ideas and thus know some history, these dark ideas, along with their ugly playbook, are things we’ve seen before. They want something that can’t be done without violence and a means of getting a lot of people out of their way. They’ve already used violence, and they’ve already made a lot of threats against people who are in their way. Now we will see how far they will go.
I went down a doom scrolling rabbit hole last night, it is sickening what is happening. I think regular news fasts are important for mental health.
Hi Chenda: Yes. It is terrifying. I have been slow with political posts lately on account of my own and others’ mental health. I do think that part of the Trumpian strategy is to constantly throw grenades — Greenland, Panama, the Gulf of Mexico — largely as a way of controlling and distracting the media and keeping everyone off balance. There were those who said, for example, that the Gulf of Mexico thing was to distract from Jimmy Carter arriving at the Capitol (if so, it worked). Trump wants to make sure that the news is about *him*, and Musk is trying to upstage him. There is just no way of guessing at this point what they actually will try to do.
Krugman points out today (at Substack) that long-term bond rates, and mortgage rates, are rising at present, even as the Federal Reserve is cutting short-term rates. Krugman says he doesn’t know what’s causing that, but one theory is that the bond market is worried about what Trump will do.
Yes I’ve been really enjoying Krugman’s new blog, I think somewhere he alluded to NYT management disliking something he wrote once.