An Eclectic Questions Detour: Birthday Blues, Soundless Revelations, and a Menagerie Stampede
Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle, No. 14
Caveat lector: This TRP post is not, as promised last time, “Questions, Part 4A: If We Live Now Amid a Constitutional Extinction Event….What Next for America?” But it nevertheless does qualify, eventually—after the personal parts—as “Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle, No. 14,” and it does keep us on TRP’s weekly Friday posting schedule.
Sorry; I just have not been able to finish the extended Questions essay, and I’ll explain why when I finally get to it. But for now the process of accounting for the delay will hopefully illuminate some recent themes we’ve traversed, so that the post may redeem at least somewhat your disappointment over my failure to keep my promise.
* * *
Alas, since this past Friday’s May 30 TRP post, a lot has happened, very little of it involving reading or writing.
First, I ran smack into my 74th birthday on June 1, and I usually don’t do well with birthdays ever since my father made me feel terrible about the fact that his mother, my paternal grandma Annie, died on my 4th birthday, in 1955. So I never had a birthday party as a kid. Instead I remember my father lighting a yahrzeit candle on June 1 year by year, which was ridiculous since the date on the Jewish calendar is the proper way to mark a yahrzeit, not the date on the secular calendar. But my father could not be bothered with details of that sort; he could not read Hebrew (or much English) and so had trouble deciphering a Jewish calendar.
Anyway, this year my birthday coincided with the somewhat delayed birthday party for my granddaughter Aviva (born May 19), so I celebrated in stealth at my daughter’s house in Takoma Park amid a bunch of 7-year olds. That was pretty wonderful, all and all. I sang “The Six Thousand Year Old Man” for them, accompanying myself on a uke—I learned that song years ago off a Doc Watson album—and they loved it. A good time was had by all.
Also, second, I finally finished painting the fence—you remember that fence, right?—before the month turned over. That was a huge amount of work, involving when all was painted and done three full gallons of exterior white paint applied in a total of about 20 hours divided into four or five work segments. That’s where a lot of my time went. Phew, I’m glad that’s done.
Third, the Thursday before the last TRP post, May 29, was a particularly hectic day the effects of which I felt long afterwards. On the morning of May 29 my wife and I drove to Annapolis, to the Naval Academy, for a Celebration of Life event for Richard L. Armitage, who passed away on April 13 and about whom I wrote in this space in April 25’s “Death in the Springtime” essay. As a recovering speechwriter I was very impressed by the quality of the speeches, especially the lead address by Bill Burns, but also by Michael Powell’s comments. I saw a lot of people I’d not laid eyes on for years, kind of an out-of-body experience since everyone looked older. Almost as eerie as a high school reunion half a century after graduation.
After the Naval Academy event my wife and I drove across town to lunch with my beloved (paternal) first cousin Phyllis and her husband Dan. Then we drove home but soon sallied forth again, Scilla to choir practice and me downtown via the Red Line to Planet Word where the Niskanen Center was holding its 10th anniversary celebration. Having just been named a Senior Fellow I figured I should attend and meet more Niskanen staff. But I had to walk about four blocks in dress shoes, to match my suit and tie, from Metro Center to 925 13th Street, NW, to Planet Word, and then walk the four blocks back in order to get the Red Line to Glenmont in time for Scilla to pick me up after choir practice.
Walking those eight blocks in dress shoes hurt, since my knees are shot—especially my right knee. That, I think, plus the natural stress birthdays always call forth in my psyche, plus just one damned beer—a yummy Dogfish Head summer IPA—I drank on Shavuot to mark the ancient barley harvest (all that Rabbinic stuff about the Revelation on Sinai seven weeks after Passover is very nice…..but I’m at least as much into the ancient land celebrations that the Jewish holidays were about before the post-exilic Rabbis got hold of the storylines), plus deciding the other day with my ortho doc that I’d have knee replacement surgery next month, all that stress-inducing stuff, plus my deciding about three weeks ago that I no longer needed to take allopurinol since I had not had a gout flare-up in six years….all that, as best I can reckon, produced, of course, a gout flare-up in my right ankle Monday evening and into Tuesday. I got little sleep Monday night.
So I drank a lot of water and peed a river or two, took colchicine, suffered some…..and by 10 am Wednesday the ankle was much better; by noon it felt as though the flare-up had never happened. So I decided to stay outside in the garden and do a variety of tasks until my knee hurt so badly that I’d have to quit, and then I could start drafting my TRP essay. Good plan; didn’t work though, since, to my surprised delight, my knee never did start hurting badly enough to make me quit. (Could it be my experiment with the Celadrin gell-tabs my cousin Paula persuaded me to try as a last-gasp effort before surgery?)
So I kept working in the garden, and tried to fix up the chicken coup so sparrows could not gain entrance to steal the food and threaten our pets with benefits with avian flu. I was enjoying each and every moment here at Chicken Belch Farm on a beautiful day relishing my quick recovery, but that meant Wednesday saw no drafting of an essay, since by dinner time I was too tired to do anything requiring brain mobilization. So Scilla and I watched a slightly dated episode of “Escape to the Country,” one of our favorite Britbox shows, which took place on the Isle of Skye. The Isle of Skye looks very beautiful, and it is also where Talisker is made, Talisker being my favorite single malt scotch that I used to drink before my gout problem warned me off of everything stronger than wine.
* * *
Is that all of this post’s personal threat-clearing? Not quite. Yesterday, Thursday, I still could have written most of “Questions, Part 4A” and then touched it up this morning before posting. But yesterday morning was the school year’s last PIP class, which was a potluck celebration as per usual, and which I would not have missed for anything. What’s PIP?
The Parent-Infant-Program is an immersive ASL experience for deaf children younger than three years old, at Gallaudet University here in Washington, the world’s only deaf university founded in 1864 during the Lincoln Administration. During the school year it meets every Tuesday and Thursday morning in the Kendell Building of the Clerc Center. PIP is run by a senior teacher, in this case by a women who lost her hearing due to disease at age 5, and a younger assistant. Also present usually are two interpreters who translate ASL into sounded English for parents and grandparents who are learning ASL, and who translate sounded English into ASL for the teachers and the several deaf parents of the children. One of the translators who was with us this year is a CODA (child of deaf adults), so is fluently bi-symbolic, so to speak.
On a given Tuesday or Thursday morning PIP hosts about: four, five, or six deaf children, some, like our 15-month old granddaughter Joni Pearl who have had CI surgery (CI=cochlear implants), but most who have not and will not for one reason or another; maybe 6-8 assorted parents and grandparents on average; and the two teachers and two translators. Additionally, special program staff show up from time to time to do presentations, and the group visits the library, the STEAM room, the outdoor playground weather permitting, and the playroom as well as being in the dedicated PIP classroom.
Yesterday was the last day, retirement day, for PIP’s senior teacher after three decades of dedication to the early education of deaf children. So it was a special day in more ways than one. Food was eaten, gifts were exchanged, tears of multivalent emotion were cried.
I am a man of words, sometimes (some say) too many words. But I do not have words adequate right now to express my gratitude to the Gallaudet deaf community for teaching me so much about real community, about aspects of neuroscience I had never even thought about (and which are reflected in the Age of Spectacle manuscript), and about how it really feels to live with a sensory handicap—since in a group of people using ASL at warp speed I am the one who is handicapped. I’m still just an ASL beginner, better at passive comprehensive than I am at actively signing. Our son and daughter-in-law, Joni’s parents, are pretty much fluent in ASL by now, and when Joni is at PIP she doesn’t wear her CIs….so she will become fluent, too, as she grows. Scilla took ASL classes at Gallaudet and is far better at it than I am. So is daughter Hannah and even our aforementioned 7-year old granddaughter Aviva.
Here is an example of a question I never thought to ask myself (or anyone else)--yes, again, the questions that turn out to be the most important are often the ones that go unasked. When hearing people in quiet moments commune with the “narrator” inside their heads, what does that narrator “sound” like? It sounds like them when they speak to others (or themselves…..). But a profoundly deaf person, once old enough to have that budded out sense of interiority common to humans, does not have inside his or her head a “sounding” narrator. That cannot be, since they have never heard a sound; the whole phonology of language is missing in their effort to translate symbols into concepts. So I asked a profoundly deaf member of this semester’s PIP community, the father of one of the children whose own parents are also deaf, how his sense of interiority works. Answer: His silent and also unseen “narrator” signs in ASL, his first language, and so he “sees” in his mind’s eye his own inner dialogue rather than “hears” it in his mind’s ear like hearing people do. Further: In dreams, which hearing people navigate via their own and others’ spoken narrators interacting, he (and other deaf people) navigates with ASL and, he told me via sign, frequently with a presumption of telepathy. (I’m still pondering that….)
I use to think, or better assume without thinking, that when profoundly deaf people read lips they did so to produce a phoneme that they then in turn translated into an ASL sign. I used to think that when profoundly deaf people spelled words for which there is no agreed sign they also did that to produce a phoneme as an intermediary step to creating a concept or a meaning. Why did I think this? Because I had failed to ask the obvious question—it’s obvious to me now but it wasn’t before—of how there could possibly be an intermediate phonemic step to get from symbol to concept when there is no phonemic consciousness? Once I realized that profoundly deaf people must go directly from symbol to meaning concept—whether that involves a visual perception of lips moving or a visual perception of ASL spell signing—I saw how challenging that must often be given the richness of English against the relative limitations of ASL.
I also suddenly saw what an idiot I had been. I now much better understood, for example, why learning to read without the phonology of language playing any role explained why profoundly deaf adults typically have gotten stuck at roughly 4th-grade reading proficiency levels, so therefore why Gallaudet and other schools for the deaf are so critical. Before Thomas Gallaudet’s invention of ASL in the early 19th century, and his son Edward’s founding of the university after his father’s death in 1851, I wondered, what was a profoundly deaf person’s interior “narrator” like?
Of course, Gallaudet University is and always has been a national school largely funded by the Federal government, and now its budget has been frozen “pending review” by the Trump Administration. Use your imagination to guess what a bunch of people who relish punching down on those who are weak, helpless, and handicapped—for example, the shockingly brutal proposed reductions in Medicaid funding—are likely to do to the Gallaudet University budget once they turn their attention to it….
It also helped me see why learning to read in languages with phonetic alphabets is harder for profoundly deaf people than learning to read in pictographic alphabets. Deaf Chinese and Japanese children still struggle to learn to read, but all else equal they struggle less than children who must learn to decipher phonetic written language systems.
And it also helped me to understand that while the natural musicality of spoken language is beyond the reach of profoundly deaf people, they can still appreciate the phonemic rhyming of poetry, albeit differently, because its rhythm imparts vibrational/tactile sensory information gained in other ways. Once I understood this, with help, I was encouraged to write a little uber-Hallmark doggerel for PIP’s senior and assistant teachers and for the two main interpreters who have been with us this school year, for inclusion in the envelopes containing the cards and gifts we gave them. (I have pasted this guttural para-poetry at the end of this post, for what little it may be worth….. Try reading it as if you cannot hear it, only read it….an experience that might rock your hearing world just a bit.)
And so much more. I have come to understand a little at least about subjects I knew nothing about, let alone now grasp more fully some subjects I did know a little about. It reminds me some of my year in Singapore, where I learned about many subjects I didn’t even know I didn’t know about. And that is why—all that above recited—I could not find the time this week to finish TRP’s extended essay on Questions that ought to be but are somehow not being much asked.
Ah, you’ve guessed it: This detour about the deaf community and what hearing people can learn from its members sort of fits anyway with the larger theme of the extended Questions essay. Fate, or happenstance, drove me to ask some new questions about deafness, and then to seek out those who could answer them for me. The same thing, I would avow, is or ought to be happening in the United States right now as it stands, possibly, on the very precipice of constitutional extinction. No one can expect to meet a major challenge if they are so distracted or afraid that they fail to ask properly targeted questions about origins and nature. But humans have this habit of thoughtlessly projecting old assumptions into the future even when the justification for trusting their utility has evaporated. That is why so many Americans think what is happening today is normal, that it will not inflect the American future in a major way, that the rubber-band will snap back like it always does. They make these assumptions, usually tacitly, because they have failed to articulate the right questions, or sometimes even any questions at all.
* * *
Oh, of course we could do a brief version of “that was the latest crazy week that was” during the Trump 2.0 surreality unfolding day by day. (One strains to imagine what David Frost would have done with something like the Trump 2.0 Rocky horror screen show circus back in 1964-65 when the Americanized version of the British show was on TV. But Gary Hart once told me, when during the first Trump term I asked him if he could pick up where his old friend Hunter S. Thompson had left off and do a serious parody for The American Interest, that “you can’t parody what is already a farce.” He was right; David Frost might have been overwhelmed……) So we’ll do a short one.
What items would we pick to comment upon? How about, first, Iowa Senator Joni Ernst’s Marie Antoinette moment, brought to the nation redoubled in a cemetery-sited would-be “selfie”? Slashing Medicare for those most in need of it? Well, everyone dies, she replied to an angsty audience question in an Iowa town hall meeting in which she seemed bored, so get over yourselves. She apologized next day but of course didn’t really, likening in passive-aggressive tense anyone seriously critical of the policy to someone who consorts with the tooth fairy….so a Marie Antoinette moment redux. And she closed with an invocation of Jesus Christ in which she tried but failed to sound sincere, as if by reputation Jesus was a hard-hearted realist instead of someone who actually cared about the poor, the meek, and the ill? Just how tone deaf and downright insulting can someone be, on one’s own staged camera no less? Almost makes one hope for a guillotine revival, perhaps?
Or how about, second, the President banning travel to the United States from twelve countries, citing as an example of the need for the ban the anti-Israel terrorism that took place in Colorado earlier this week? The terrorist was an Egyptian national who overstayed his visa, something he has in common with about 40 percent of the illegals in the country who never in their lives even gazed upon the U.S.-Mexican border let alone crossed it. But Egypt was not on the list of twelve countries. Here Trump was presented with an opportunity to illustrate the good sense of deporting (some) illegals, and instead he matched the example to a policy pronouncement in which the example did not fit the announcement. Incoherence, inconsistency….the perpetual parenthetical of incompetence goes on, and on, and on…..
It doesn’t stop there, not in my world. Third, then, this past week evoked some criticism of a few friends and colleagues. Let me offer two examples, both keyed to a reference point in The Age of Spectacle analysis.
First concerning my favorite Bulgarian—Ivan Krastev. Ivan is responsible, some years ago, for getting Scilla and me to Vienna for a conference of some sort. Vienna is wonderful; I remain eternally grateful for the invitation. And he and I usually agree. But.
“In a moment of growing uncertainty and mistrust,” Ivan argued in a May 31 Financial Times column, “it is easier to place your hopes in a charismatic individual than in the complex institutional machine of modern democracy. The growing appeal of personalised power is a direct result of the sense people have that they no longer understand how their democracies work.”[1]
This is right but shallow, seeing only the political manifestation of a deeper cultural current that goes unrecognized and so unnamed. Ivan is, first of all, wrong to suggest that everyone in U.S. politics steals according to rank, though many Americans are now cynical enough to think like East Europeans about the matter. That’s a problem, for when the people assume kleptocracy then kleptocracy has already won the day.
More important by far, he misses the whole mentality paradigm shift that explains why so many Americans today do not understand how democracy works and so prefer Weberian charismatic authority to his formal-legal authority: They are conceptually impoverished because they do not deep read, and so cannot think up to a level commensurate with the subject to hand. Their minds have been hurled backwards into pre-Enlightenment auras of mythical thought, so asking them to understand democracy—indeed a federal liberal democracy—is a bit like asking a typical 14th-century Englishman or Scot to foresee the supremacy of parliament over the monarchy. As we argued here in TRP’s March 7 post, what Trump represents and who he appeals to are not properly described as anti-democratic, but rather as pre-democratic.
Then there is Jonathan V. Last, one of my favorite Bulwark writers, and a man I esteem as doing the Lord’s work these days. But on June 3 Jonathan’s umbrage got the better of his judgment, and he fell into the same ditch that derailed Ivan.
Now, we two—and countless others—were following the harrowing story of Ming Li Hui down in Dunklin County, Missouri. In the town of Kennett, Missouri, a Trumpian ICE squad arrested a sweet and popular woman named “Carol” (that’s Ming Li Hui originally) born in Hong Kong in who had overstayed her visa two decades ago. She is by all accounts a friendly and well-appreciated neighbor who got married, now owns her own home, and has three children in the public schools. Aside from overstaying her visa she never broke any law. She was arrested early last month anyway and is now in jail set to be deported; this upset the people in Kennett who knew her, people who in November 2024 voted more than 80 percent for Donald Trump.
The town mobilized in support for Carol, none of them apparently connecting their votes with its local consequence. Overwhelmingly Fox News and One America infospheroids, they swallowed whole the repeated lie that Trump would only deport gang members and felons who were in the country illegally. Their rising in support for Carol attracted “foreign” press to Dunklin County, all the way from St. Louis, where reporters learned that, as Jonathan described it, “Many people in Kennett expressed outrage that a hardworking mother had spent the past month jailed by immigration authorities.”[2]
Fine; but then Jonathan got a bit forward on his skis as he summoned the umbrage to describe the “Very Fine People” of Kennett, riffing off Trump’s description of Nazis in Charlottesville some years ago, as “idiots,” having shown:
No empathy; only special pleading. Does anyone in Kennett have the cognitive capacity to understand that a world exists outside their field of vision? Do they think Carol is the only “good” person being deported? Do they not understand that other “good” parts of America have their own Carols? Do they not understand that the “bad” parts of America—like New York City—have people like Carol, too? Do these moral monsters have any capacity for empathy for people they do not personally know?
Jonathan, please: These Trump voters are not (necessarily) idiots and they are not (necessarily) moral monsters. They are merely people who are non-deep literate and so have developed only a very narrow, concrete theory of mind. They are unable to project empathy onto people they don’t know personally and have never seen on their television screens, just as they are unable to really understand any abstract concept, say, liberal democracy, formal-legal rule of law, or really any actual political idea at all that requires even a scintilla of articulation and reflection on inked paper. They have not posed for themselves questions like those you have asked because they cannot do so, given the circumscribed ambit of their experience and education. It is plenty bad enough as it is; there’s no need to make it seem even worse.
Jonathan knows very well that Hillary Clinton’s use of the term “deplorables” in 2016 was a huge mistake. He knows that President Biden’s use of the word “garbage” more recently was another, similar kind of mistake. (Hillary’s error arguably made a real difference; Biden’s didn’t because of other even larger errors he had already made.) If some people loathe you because they think you’re demeaning them without bothering to understand the way they see the world, you’re not going to win them over by demeaning them more. These Trump voters in Dunklin County, Missouri may actually be idiots, moral monsters, and the worst people in America. But even if you, or I, believe that, it’s one thing to think it and another to write it or to say it out loud.
I’d bet my best pairs of new underwear that the 20 percent in Dunklin County who voted for Kamala Harris are mostly readers—the upper crust of professionals and teachers in the area, people with degrees from four-year colleges and universities—and that the roughly 80 percent who voted for Trump are neither professionals nor university educated: non-deep literate people, mostly likely, in other words. That’s about the percentage breakdown we would expect in a mostly rural county in Missouri.
So the idiot/monster/worst people language is not only unhelpful, it violates Occam’s Razor: You don’t need any of those rather churlish presumptions to explain the behavior at hand: All you need to know is that these non-deep literate people have a sharply truncated theory of mind that grasps only concretized, personalist forms of empathy. They’re normal people in a simpler kind of environment than Washington, DC and environs happen nowadays to be. Nothing much else to see here, really, and no need to raise your blood pressure.
Finally—and you knew this was coming—the recently burgeoning Trump-Musk throwdown, with Trump coming almost full circle as the Trump 2.0 Administration imitates a WWF bout. We’ll not review the punches thrown thus far; everyone is talking about them so there is no need. I prefer here to take credit for an I-told-you-so, and to elaborate a bit about it.
Back on March 29 the TRP post entitled “Firehose Authoritarianism and Gnostic MAGA” laid out in simple but stark form the core contradiction within the victorious MAGA coalition, as follows:
The populist pulse within the odd but brilliantly assembled Trump 2.0 coalition is viscerally anti-pluralist, anti-immigrant, and plainly circle-the-wagons xenophobic. Some of it to the fringes oozes racism and anti-Semitism, but not all of it does. It is communalist and Christian (by identity if not also faith) in sentiment, accepts without second thought most traditional Abrahamic moral precepts, is more comfortable in rural than urban settings, is unkind to and suspicious of corporate gigantism, and not infrequently can sound proto-Luddite. It genuinely cares about the “little guy,” and, to invoke Robert Putnam’s terms from Bowling Alone, as poor as it is in bridging social trust it tends to be deep in bonding social trust. It tends to nostalgia, to looking back to presumed Golden Ages. Its rank-and-file is generally less well educated—mostly college/university virgins—does not deep read, and so is not facile with abstractions, conceptual language, and theories.
Contrarily, the anarcho-libertarian pulse is radically individualist and post-Abrahamic, disdaining all traditional bourgeois values, even denying the very ontology of morality as a category. It does not think in group terms, so any anti-pluralist or anti-immigrant energy is dissipate. It is less classically skin-color racist or anti-Semitic than it is Randian, disparaging all less able people and exalting heroic thinkers, creators, doers. It is in a sense pre-Randian, osmosing directly from Rand’s own source:
Nietzsche’s übermenschen/untermenschen will-to-power dichotomy. It cares little about social trust and even less about the “little guy.” It looks firmly forward, it self-mesmerizes with theories and abstractions, and it is ruthlessly selfish.
I then commented that:
There is some overlap between the populist and the anarcho-libertarian parts of the Administration; for different reasons, for example, their supporters both loathe the Democrats. Trump does not understand very well the contradictions between the two, partly because his own interests somehow manage to merge the parts, for he is both pro-corporatist and anti-pluralist.
For now, in any event, he has let the anarcho-libertarians run with the ball for a reason so simple it often escapes notice: They have actual plans of attack, and the senior populist types really don’t. Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and Tom Homan have no plan for deporting twelve-to-twenty million illegal immigrants, because with the resources they have there cannot be any such plan. Something always beats nothing, and Trump, impatient as ever and eager as ever to seem Protean and grab headlines, has gone with the guys who have been ready to act.
Note, too, that I had some months earlier commented in The Age of Spectacle project, rolled out in TRP on February 28:
The collective MAGA brain is on a surrealistic backwards train trip, with station stops in 1947, 1933, and at the end of the line in 1896. The itinerary is thus varyingly pre-NATO/pre-Containment, pre-New Deal, and manages to somehow combine both campaigns of that seminal year 1896: William Jennings Bryan’s anti-corporate, anti-immigration, racist, fundamentalist anti-science, and anti-urban populism with William McKinley’s hyper-industrialism and imperialism. How this menagerie stays together in one barn for long I do not know.
Now we know: It’s not staying together. The anarcho-libertarians, the techno-feudalists, have created a massive popularity drag that Trump did not anticipate and that he’s not happy about. So he’s now suddenly turning on the anarcho-libertarians, on what some call the Silicon Valley “bros,” which is just like a narcissistic heirhead who consistently roller-coasters his newfound friends only to end up soon despising them. This is liable to make Steve Bannon the happiest man in Washington. Here is what I predicted back in March:
. . . Steve Bannon, in particular, let lose a [pre-Inaugural] cannonade at Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks that suggested the depth of the divide, calling Musk and Sachs “South African racists,” and Musk “a truly evil guy, a very bad guy” whose goal is a kind of “techno-feudalism”—exactly the right historical metaphor. “I will have Elon Musk run out of here by Inauguration Day,” said Bannon to a Corriere della Sera interviewer. “He will not have a blue pass to the White House, he will not have full access to the White House. . . . I have made it my personal thing to take this guy down.”
That didn’t happen, obviously, and Bannon then followed Musk in practicing his Hitlergruss in public. Whatever happened to Bannon’s pre-Inaugural determination? No clear answer suggests itself, but it would be a stretch to think that Bannon has changed his mind about Musk. More likely he is biding his time for Musk to self-destruct. He probably agrees with Musk’s eldest offspring that her father is a whacko “man-child” on the spectrum.
How long will Bannon have to wait? Chances are that these contradictory impulses can coexist at least for a while since Musk’s priorities and Trump’s, insofar as he has clear policy-relevant as opposed to personal priorities at this point, do not much directly overlap. Bannon may never come to wield the power he supposed he would, but it is too soon to know. Does Trump himself understand the contradiction? Doubtful, suggesting that his ability to manage the tension will prove limited.
Now we know: Bannon did not have to wait very long for Musk to self-destruct; ketamine addicts will do that. And Trump failed as predicted to control the internal contradictions in the MAGA 2.0 coalition. It is not only Musk’s political aura that is now fast fading. So is Peter Thiel’s, which means that J.D. Vance’s value in Trump’s eyes will decline unless Vance moves swiftly to realign himself with the MAGA populist wing. Being the apparently hollow opportunist he is, Vance is probably already changing his rhetorical wardrobe.
I-told-you-so moments can be sweet. But we must not rest on our laurels. The truth is that there are not just two but four discernibly different types of rightwing illiberalism dwelling together in the MAGA 2.0 coalition. No better feel for the situation can be found, I think, than that expressed in this piece of language from 1960, if you simply replace “history” with “politics”:
History, in short, is like those waterholes I have heard of in the wilds of Africa: the most vicious beasts may drink there side by side with equal nourishment.
Thus spake John Barth’s marvelous and infamous Panglossian character “Henry Burlingame III” in The Sot-weed Factor.
What are the four cohabiting, sometimes overlapping, sometimes not, illiberalisms in the Trump 2.0 coalition? They are (1) the populist, (2) the Christian nationalist; (3) the xenophobic-racist, and (4) the Randian “sovereign-individual” transnational.
The first two are similar in their deep pseudo-moral desire for majoritarian tyranny, and for social conformity. Indeed, they are highly social-communitarian to the point of being romantically neo-fascist, but show little inclination to nihilism. They redefine checks-and-balances liberal democracy in a morally monadic form and claim, Carl Schmitt-like, that theirs is the true democracy. So Trump has posed as a savior of democracy just as Hitler did, and Vance and Musk have helped make his point until very recently: “Populists who take power and then try to impose authoritarian systems of government often stylise themselves as the real defenders of democracy--it’s using culture war to legitimize their own authoritarian power grab,” recently observed Stephan Bierling of the University of Regensburg--(quoted by Guy Chazan in “Why does MAGA world hate Europe?” Financial Times, June 5, 2025).
The latter two forms of illiberalism are similar in their amoral, radically atheistic hyper-individualism. They are hyper-libertarian and neo-anarchist in body language; they reek of drug addictions and spiraling nihilism admixed with their progressively flailing hedonism.
Now that Trump and Musk are in the early stages of throwdown, tell-all mode, predicting specifically how the two-by-two array of the illiberal vicious beasts at the MAGA 2.0 watering hole will react is very difficult. Things will likely be quite fluid for a while. Well, of course.
* * *
Now, last for today, the aforementioned PIP-related doggerel. It’s not long on literary merit, I know, but what it lacks in grace it may somewhat make up for in genuine sincerity.
My ode to the retiring senior PIP teacher (with a little help from Mike Craver):
Peace and joy and love
Come from Heaven above,
Chicken and filet mignon
Come from the animal kingdom.
Life can be so confusing
But sometimes also amusing,
Caring for children is precious
Despite their quite frequent messes.
Three decades is nothing to snuff at
Time dances along in a top hat,
Next thing we know there are wrinkles
In places we used to have dimples.
What will you do in retirement
To match all that Kendall excitement?
Go sailing about on the oceans,
And nurture some brand new devotions?
What can we say at our parting?
It seemed like PIP was just starting,
Though now that it’s really near ended
Our gratitude will ne’er be suspended.
For the PIP Assistant teacher:
Every child whose heart you touch
Every one you’ve helped so much
To grow and learn, to stand and run
To see the light, to know innocent fun
Will ever remember an angel in the mist
Who upon their smile blew a sweet, sweet kiss.
For each of two PIP interpreters:
How wondrous to be bi-symbolic
Certainly beats any uni-logic;
Your hands dance like butterflies in the sun,
Your voice glides forth as chords on the run.
We’ll miss you as summer comes rolling,
But forget you? Never…memories ever unfolding.
[1] Krastev, “The court of King Donald,” Financial Times, May 31, 2025.
[2] Last, “Meet the Worst People in America,” The Bulwark, June 3, 2025. [Bold emphasis in the original.]