Today’s 93rd post of The Raspberry Patch from its inception on January 4, 2024 resumes where we left off in July, the 91st post on July 18 promising renewal by Labor Day, and the 92nd on July 23 being a send-off poem to lightly sweeten the interregnum….for those who care about such things. The occasion for the hiatus was my knee-replacement surgery on July 24. I knew from experienced counsel that the surgery would knock me for a proverbial loop, hence the anticipated need for a break from our weekly posting schedule. I can now assure you that yes, it did. I’m recovering well, but since (almost) no one likes to hear old men engage in organ recitals, that’s all I’ll say about my recent medical adventure. (Unless someone is foolish enough to ask for more.)
I have I think appropriately titled today’s post “Here I Go Again.” That’s the title of a 1964 single by The Hollies (it’s also the title of a 1969 Smokey Robinson and the Miracles song, but that’s not what I had in mind when I thought to use it here.). I never much liked the Hollies song, in part because it is about the endlessly trite theme of falling in love again despite the heartache caused by the time before. But it does, accidentally in this case I feel safe in saying, contain a lyric fragment that expresses an underlying angst I’ve lately been sensing: “What can I do when there’s nothing I can do?”
You know very well what I’m getting at, don’t you? We’re not alone in feeling this way. Indeed, a great many of us are frustrated by the enormities being exuded by the world these days, not least here in the once-United States. The waves are so high that they encourage a sense of helplessness. If powerful media and high-status universities and law firms bend the knee so easily to run and hide, what can one person do?
But, as I have recorded in TRP before, “optimism is a force multiplier,”—sayeth an old boss; so by logical inference pessimism is morally unconscionable. Since we’re deploying lyrics as signaling arrows, let me add that one of my very favorite musicians wrote this lyric back in 1998, “Sooner or later, we’ve got to pick ourselves up, off of the ground, and keep going.” That’s right, Chris Hillman (and, just by the way, his entire “Like a Hurricane” album will knock your socks off if you don’t know it, and have any musical sense at all), and that time is now.
As TRP readers know, before the surgery hiatus our posts focused on the not-remote possibility of a constitutional extinction event sometime next year in the context of the midterm elections. Evidence from recent days only makes my view of its likelihood firmer. For example, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said on “Hannity” on August 25 while discussing (actually creatively fulminating about) crime in Chicago:
The Democrat party does not fight for, care about or represent American citizens. It is an entity devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gangbangers, and illegal alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic terrorist organization.
That, folks, is proto-fascist speech possibly preliminary to banning the Democratic Party from running in future U.S. elections. Note that it came from a very senior White House official, not from some Crown Royal-logged Republican Congressman who can’t spell “martial.” It sounds to me like part of preparations for yet another fake-national emergency rationale, this one for suspending the Constitution sometime next year. And it fits with the larger picture being painted, or crayoned, by MAGA conflict entrepreneurs generally.
We have been treated lately to a series of Administration WWF-inspired stunts designed to divert attention from the vultures-come-home-to-roost Epstein File fiasco. We’ve beheld the clownish Federal “occupation” of Washington, DC, the threat to indict Barack Obama and others over the 2016 Russia “hoax” on the basis of bowdlerized intelligence so blatant that even a typical 12-year old could get a laugh out of it, the semi-random firings of more responsible professionals from the armed services, the CDC, and elsewhere and their replacement by rank unqualified butt-snorklers, and the list is as we know a long one.
Things being what and as they are, no one not hiding under a rock can get a good rest from the onslaught these days. For the Trump White House knows very well that it functions within a political attention economy in which shameless lying and endless bumper-sticker length repetition have become assets rather than liabilities in a postmodern, and particularly post-literate, swamp of fact-free conspiracy surrealism. That swamp is characterized—as the Age of Spectacle manuscript, some will recall, has been at pains to point out—by a mythic rather than a rational cognitive syntax. A mythic cognitive predisposition must be the dominant priming mechanism at work among those who for one reason or another have forfeited the characteristics of the epigenetically-endowed reading brain, as numerous scholars from Walter J. Ong to Maryanne Wolf—to mention two of my favorites—and many dozens of others over recent decades have shown us, and instead elected to ride the rails of the digital age’s New Orality back to a time when unity of feeling and timeless swirling metamorphoses held all in thrall. Ah, the days of shamanistic leaders and magical efficacy sparking out nearly everywhere…well: No need to review Bulfinch’s Mythology; just look out the window, if you dare.
Crisis, Fragmentation, “Soft Secession,” and the Demands of Optimism
So it’s coming, probably. But it may not come as suggested. Many qualified to judge (and others not) have pointed to the President’s advancing dementia symptoms; that could lead within a year, or before November 2028, to the invocation of the 25th Amendment and make J.D. Vance President according to proper constitutional order. That might happen under a range of scenarios, and it might obviate a constitutional extinction event for many, many years. Or it may hasten it—we don’t know.
The larger point here is that something has had to give. We as a demos in a particular polis could not keep happily going for long as we were going before the past three presidential election cycles cast a dark shadow on the basic—not marginal and happenstantial—functioning of our political system. As we have argued before, the underlying social and economic realities within which the Framers worked have changed so dramatically over more than two centuries that several basic fundaments of the U.S. political system no longer align with reality.
To sum it all up in an agonizingly brief space, the Framers saw an Adam Smithian economy of massively disaggregated market decisions that wise institutional design, buttressed by law, could aggregate into more or less stable win-win arrangements. They saw a similar circumstance when it came to political agency and choice in electing leaders; through institutional design disparate rational individual choices concerning both issues and the integrity of candidates could be summed, averaged, and fairly kept contingent against the next election. The premises of loyal oppositions and process-dominated decision-making could cool the heat of politics for the collective benefit of the commonweal. And the Framers believed that limited and self-limiting government appealed to communities of Americans who saw conscience amid faith as the lodestone of social authority, the informal ordering of human behavior natural to cooperative social mores and traditions underlaying whatever explicit institutional arrangements were build on top of them.
None of these assumptions still obtain, and despite serial and mostly successful efforts to adjust U.S. political institutions to adapt to change, and the system has been increasingly showing its age. Shopkeeper-scale market economics hasn’t accurately described reality since the first few post-bellum decades of the 19th century amid the industrial revolution’s roar, such that the core principle of liberalism—that wealth and political authority could be kept reasonably separate, as opposed to all prior corporatist arrangement in history—has long since eroded. William Graham Sumner drew back the curtain here before century’s end, and not long after Michael’s “iron law of oligarchy” ordained that money and politics would mix and maul liberal ideals whether anyone liked it or not. Not since Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion, published in 1922, has any serious American retained an immaculate conception view of the purity of democratic rationality. And no longer is the American social and moral order a predominantly implicit Protestant christological preserve; Burke’s “small platoons” can barely find any sunlight amid the growth of so many overbearing heterogeneous social accretions. Shifts in the normative environment also brought out contradictory meliorist tendencies inherent in the American heart, and the world, too, impinged: “War is the health of the State,” wrote Randolph Bourne in 1919, and his was of course right.
And now, in very recent years, the insinuations of digital age technology into our economic and political arrangements—with gigantist Net-Effect algorithmic manipulations of both our markets and our electoral processes—we have experienced another step-change alienation of our actual reality from the core ideals presumed built into the Federal order in 1787-89. These changes are so huge and have happened so relatively quickly, and nearly all large organizations are so slow and conservative, that we have yet to seriously address them. We Americans are barreling down the highway faster than ever these days…but hey, what happened to the road? Which way did it go?!
No mortal social order lasts forever, but don’t worry overly much about it. In laying out an “abyss” and a “garden” scenario, I strove to emphasize that not all the futures involving some significant degree of national fragmentation were negative ones. All will likely involve much disruption, anxiety, and danger—yes; but not all the endings read as tragedies. Some read as renewals, as challenges overcome and hopes redeemed.
Vision/Principle/Projects
In that light I offered a template for how to think about and work toward renewal and national redemption. I have not been sitting on my thumbs worrying; I have been trying to think constructively out past the onset and most intense duration of the coming storm.
To that end I proffered a vision, based on a garden. Next I proposed five principles, which I would characterize as neither Left nor Right, neither liberal nor conservative, but classically Whiggish, based on that vision. I can here rephrase them here as: (1) minimally adequate levels of social trust is the sine qua non of a viable American national society, so we must staunch its continuing hemorrhaging and build back what has been lost; (2) we must assure maximum equality of opportunity, not of station or material outcomes, for the former is the least and the latter are too much; (3) since human beings are built by and through the works of their own hands, human flourishing requires opportunity for creative and productive labor for all who are able; (4) we must patiently rebuild America’s intermediate civic institutions that bridge the gap between individuals and the state, at whatever scale it may exist in future; and (5) we must recreate limited and self-limiting government and all levels that shields the liberty and autonomy of individuals, families, and communities.
Then I described four major civic projects, some reformulated from national to state and local government levels for newly deconstructing times, pursuant to both vision and principles: enacting a Voluntary National Service/Baby Bond Program; creating a Cybermedia Temperance Movement; creating a New Pioneer Zone movement; and in due course Remodeling the House, by which I mean reducing the ratio of representative to represented. (Five post-constitutional extinction event posts ran on Fridays from June 20 through July 18, and all are available for review and free in the archives for anyone who wishes to consult them for more detail.)
Since those posts describing my vision/principle/projects manifesto ran and our TRP surgery hiatus began I have seen some interesting essays and other materials on what some are now referring to not as fragmentation but as “soft secession.” In particular, see Dean Blundell, “The Quiet Breakaway: How US Governors In 12 States Are Practicing Coordinated ‘Soft Secession’ From Trump’s America—Legally,” Dean Blundell (Substack), August 27, 2025, and a bit earlier see the revelatory (to me at the time) essay by Chris Armitage, “It’s Time for Americans to Start Talking About ‘Soft Secession’,” Medium, August 18, 2025. (Some grains of salt, for safety’s sake: Dean Blundell is a former shock-jock Canadian radio personality who for all anyone knows may have reached mental maturity just in time to be useful. Chris Armitage describes himself as a public policy analyst, a USAF vet, a former law enforcement officer, and a policy advisor. His “thumb” photo suggests a fairly young man. I never heard of him before mid-August, but his descriptions match Blundell’s and their facts check out well.)
This stuff definitely made me sit up and take notice since in my own July 11 TRP post I laid out the basics before ever hearing the term “soft secession.” In particular, I described what domestic policy wonks refer to as the countercyclical fiscal logic that flows money around the country so as to balance against regional economic dips, a logic that for many years now has amounted to wealthy “blue” states subsidizing less wealthy “red” states. Breaking down that countercyclical flow has many and portentous implications for the future of the Federal American state.
I generally avoid quoting myself at any length, but this post, for me and readers alike, is sort of a getting back up on the horse exercise—so an exception then (which you can skip or skim if you remember it well enough from July 11):
It’s too late to avoid a constitutional extinction event, which I see coming at and just after the November 2026 midterms. The process of deliteracization combined with mounting cyberaddiction has gone too far to expect We the People, in our current degraded condition, to resist the growing onslaught of Trumpenproletariat thymotic nihilism. . . .
I do not foresee, however, any post-democratic form of order that will be stable under crypto-governmental conditions. I expect instead the United States to fragment into state sovereignties with perhaps some regional alignments taking fairly quick shape, say in New England and the Pacific Northwest for “blue” states, the Deep South perhaps for “red” states. We already see some hints of this, with cores of influential people in some “blue” states talking about withholding revenue from the Treasury lest it be used to finance an authoritarian due-processless ICEish police state.
Here is, possibly, the rosy rub on that, however: By and large, the major “blue” states pay into the Treasury more than they receive back in benefits. In effect, “blue” state populations and economies are subsidizing relatively poorer “red” state populations and economies, and have been doing so for years. This corresponds to relatively better-educated populations subsidizing relatively less-well educated populations, which ought to surprise no one aware of the role of symbol-manipulating human capital in a post-industrial economy. If most or all the larger “blue” states secede financially from the Federal monetary system, they will be increasingly well off compared to those in “red” states that are the beating heart of the MAGA populist support base. But that beating heart may develop A-fib in a hurry: We already see with “red” state nervousness over the massive Medicaid cuts in the “big, beautiful bill” no small dollop of disillusionment and erosion in that support base.
Call it fragmentation or call it “soft secession,” it makes no big difference, especially since what is “soft” about “soft secession” now may not remain that way next year if too many knives and guns come out. Even if and even so, a fragmentation cascade—and that is what it could come to, hauling a range of improbable but nasty consequences with it at least for a time—may not be a wholly bad thing in the longer run if—big “if,” admittedly—it forces us as a demos to finally get serious about making subsidiarity work as a means to restore and even refine a true liberal democracy, or perhaps a coexisting ensemble of them, from sea to shining sea.
Yes, of course, it is a towering irony that a fake conservative administration, by posturing (and more) as a voracious despotism, might be what forces mainly liberals to think and act in a “small is beautiful” mode as regards concentrations of executive power. But if that’s what it takes to get some people to start thinking of big Federal nanny-state government as something other than inevitable or always more or less benign, then so be it. How many times do we need to repeat Emil Cioran’s insight that “history is irony in motion”? I, for one, am willing to keep doing it until I sense that it’s sunken in.
Oh That Manuscript…..
Some of you may be wondering whatever has happened, or is happening, to my Age of Spectacle manuscript. When I last described the process here in TRP, the drill was a final scouring read-through, care taken not to extend the narrative beyond January 20, 2025 lest the sirens of presentism devour any semblance of balance in the thing, and then over to an agent to see what might be made of it. So I figured I could use August—scheduled to begin just a week after the knee-replacement surgery—to do the review as I was investing myself in physical therapy, and so be done with it by today.
Nope. Not even close. I found the manuscript in worse shape than I anticipated, and my mental stamina short of what I needed to get the job done. (The doctors are fine in telling you about the specific point of a surgery, in this case what is involved in replacing a knee joint destroyed by arthritis; but they are thoroughly lame when it comes to apprising you about how the ambient circumstances—defined by your pain, your meds, your disrupted sleep and nourishment routines, the cognitive load involved in processing a life-altering event, the extra burden your situation places on others and how that figures into daily life—will likely affect your capacity for doing any work.)
So I was bit disheartened, and then on top of that my Niskanen colleague Brink Lindsay brought to my attention a wonderful recent essay by Neal Gabler looking back on his own 1998 book Life: The Movie. As some TRP reader may remember, I esteem and abundantly cite that book in the Age of Spectacle manuscript. Gabler’s August 22, 2025 essay, “The Little Discussed Secret to Trump’s Ruination of America,” Farewell, America (Substack), applied his 27-year old analysis to current circumstances and, with the significant exception of his missing the importance of the erosion of deep literacy in all this, pretty much grabbed the brass ring. Read it for yourself; you’ll be entertained as well as edified.
Well, if Gabler has checked the box so well, I asked myself, why bother finishing my book? As in, “Everything here’s been done,” sang Dylan….remember? It can be bracing when others beat you to some of your own long-since-prepared punches. But Brink told me not to give up, and I located a few reasons beside that to get up off of the ground and keep going. One of them is that I keep finding new connections amid my argument that resonant with unfurling reality. The thing works, and the more I work on it the better it works. For example…..there is the:
The Fantasy-Prone Personality
One result of the stamina deficit I experienced after the surgery is that I ended up watching more television than I usually do. My wife likes TV stories, mostly on BritBox and from other non-U.S. sources, and sometimes of an evening I will watch with her, just to be with her, and because I’m too tired to do much of anything else. So during August she chose to watch a series called “Professor T,” a three-season multi-episode UK-set drama from 2021. The series is criminology on the decidedly weird and fey side of the tracks, but, lo and behold, in episode whatever of season three a scene played out between Professor T and his psychiatrist that unearthed a discussion about fantasy-prone personality types, and the script made it sound like a fantasy-prone personality type might be an actual real psychology/psychiatry thing. So I looked it up in some old psych books lying around the house and on the internet (but of course) and, holy gooseberries, it is an actual real psychology/psychiatry thing.
As I began to get a feel for the ambit and nature of the literature on the fantasy-prone personality type—there’s a lot of literature….—small explosions began going off in my head. First of all, I remembered being a paid volunteer back in the 1970s sometime for a Penn psych department study that tried to correlate people who had suffered an emotional trauma before age 12 with their propensity to daydream heroic or pleasant daydreams. I qualified for the study because my mother died of cancer when I was 9, and I was an only child. I vaguely recall the sheets of questions I had to rummage through and the images I had to react to; the whole thing took a few hours, I pocketed my $20, and that was that. It only dawned on me, around fifty years later, that I had probably been involved in some sort of study about fantasy-prone personality types. Did I daydream a lot in my teens and 20s as a means of temporary escape from anxieties I never could quite define exactly? Sure, I did; but then everyone did, didn’t they? Um….oops.
I don’t know if I qualified as a bona-fied fantasy-prone personality, which, according to a key study from the early 1980s encompasses about 4 percent of the U.S. population. Unlike, say, George Santos, Stephen Glass, and some other well-known fabulists of recent years, I never lost track of who I was or wasn’t to anything like that extent. But I pretty soon came to wonder, and wonder intently, if the description fit one Donald J. Trump. Could the obvious fact of his narcissism, and lately the advancement of his dementia symptoms, have led us to stop searching for more weirdness prematurely? Could be; I’m leaning that way for the time being, just for heuristic purposes.
In any event, I added a final section to Chapter 7 of the Age of Spectacle manuscript, one that obviously did not exist when I rolled out that section on TRP last year. So I here serve up that added section to complete today’s post. See what you think?
. . . .Before departing the domain of neuro-cognitive science, we would be remiss not to mention some fertile ground-for-speculation that has been tilled by psychologists and psychiatrists over roughly the past half century. There is such a thing in the literature of clinical psychology as a fantasy-prone personality type. The more one thinks about this cubby of the psychology and psychotherapy worlds, the more one wonders about its possible political relevance.
To summarize a bit brutally, what psychologists refer to as persistent and dysfunctional fantasy-heroic daydreaming in adults has its origins in childhood trauma, where a child is subjected to some combination of isolation and neglect, fear and radical instability, emotional coldness and insecurity. Some children—correlating to those with relatively strong eidetic memory capabilities, and a susceptibility to hypnosis—are capable of spinning very elaborate fictive dreamworlds or dreamscapes in which the child as primary actor copes with his or her anxieties by escaping to a bespoke alternative so attractive that over time the child’s ability to distinguish real from fictive may blur, and in extreme circumstances disappear as the child matures into adulthood.
These highly ornate, persisting dreamworlds are called paracosms. Clinicians refer to the neuro-cognitive predicates of the fantasy-prone personalities by reference to a kind of quatrain that to some extent varies in intensity from person to person: hyperthymesia (a condition of possessing an extremely detailed autobiographical memory); hyperphantasia (a condition of having extremely vivid mental imagery), suggestibility (an inclination to accept the suggestions of others); and limerence (a tendency to obsessive and sudden infatuation with love objects, usually but not always people).
Research conducted in the 1970s and into the 1980s estimated that about 4 percent of the U.S. adult population fell into the fantasy-prone personality category.[1] That was then; and now? We can only speculate by posing some pointed questions, for clinical evidence to answer the following set of three questions does not, possibly cannot, exist. But the speculation may work well as a heuristic device, so it is worth a moment’s pondering
First, can changes in the techno-cultural environment over a half-century effect the number and percentages of adults who fit the fantasy-prone personality category? If fantasy is more in the air, so to speak, thanks to rapid developments in high-resolution graphic presentation of sensory inputs—coupled with more leisure time for most thanks to continued high and widespread affluence—can it exacerbate, or move from latency into active states, fantasy-prone personality behaviors? Has anything significant concerning child-rearing practices changed in such a way that we might suppose kids are more in need of fantasies to assuage insecurities? Might we now be looking at not 4 percent of the adult population with manifest fantasy-prone personalities, but 14 percent, or perhaps even 40 percent? The socio-cultural normalization of heretofore shunned or otherwise suppressed behaviors can affect their frequency in other domains over time (public displays or affirmations of homosexuality being a prime case in point, among many); so could that dynamic be in play with fantasy-prone personalities, as well?
Second, at a time of raging and politically powerful conspiracy theories, even to the point that the entire edifice of U.S. politics in the Trump 2.0 Administration era is foundationally based on widespread acceptance of a twinned Big Lie, is it reasonable to expect that people with fantasy-prone personalities will become leaders of conspiracy cults and the political cadres that feed and encourage them? Is someone like Jacob Chansley simply “made” for a time like ours, just as historians have plausibly proposed for many years that certain kinds of personality types—pragmatists, idealists, Prometheans—tend to rise to prominence in certain given socio-political circumstances but not in others? Can the personality modalities of entire chunks of the political class in the United States, and in other countries too of course, be reshaped over time by novel communications-technology environments conducive to producing or enabling fantasy-prone personality types? More pointedly, might the posited regression to the mythic consciousness from a deep-literate Enlightenment/liberal one, carried back on the wings of the New Orality, have by now reshaped the recruitment and advancement rates of shamanistic personalities, including those “influencers” at the thaumaturgical periphery of the new mythic mindset? How else does a glib empty suit college dropout like Joe Rogan become so popular, one may wonder?
Third and finally here, aside from being an obvious narcissist, could Donald Trump himself, traumatized by a tyrannical father and mother who couldn’t or wouldn’t protect him, a child inured from his youngest days in worlds of fakery, fantasy, and other forms of heirheaded unreality, be a textbook case fantasy-prone personality? Has he been suggestible and affected by limerence, his love objects lately being not persons but yearnings ranging from large adulating crowds that did not and do not exist and a Nobel Peace Prize that will not exist either? Has he been in his life a persistently escapist daydreamer? What does the sum of the anecdotal evidence suggest about Trump as a fantasy-prone personality, and how, one wonders, would niece Mary Trump or Trump’s ex-wives answer this question? Might Trump’s remarkable political success be attributable in some way to the possible shift in modal personality types in the population suggested just above? The investigative imagination runneth over, don’t it?
[1] Wilson, S.C. & Barber, T.X., "The fantasy-prone personality: Implications for understanding imagery, hypnosis, and parapsychological phenomena,” in A.A. Sheikh, ed., Imagery: Current Theory, Research and Application (Wiley, 1983), pp. 340–90. The clinical literature on fantasy-prone personalities is extensive; I have mastered only a fraction of it.