Learning to Appreciate Irony, Hypocrisy, and Humility in a Time That Tries Men’s Souls
Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle, No. 4
Donald Trump is a polarizing figure in a polarized political and cultural environment. As President he is a product of the latter but, moving from the first term through the Biden interregnum to the second term, also an increasingly influential recursive accelerator of that environment’s grip on We the People. For that reason alone, even more than would be the case on account of his “magnifico” personality, he tends to be the kind of public figure people either love or hate.
That raises a problem common to all polarizing personalities. Since both ignorance and high emotion elicit the mental habits of conflation, either one or the two paired up yields a result in which those who love him love everything he does as President, even when it runs against the grain (farmers take note) of their own material interests and moral instincts. It also results in those who hate him opposing and scorning everything he does, even when there may be good reasons for Administration policy choices that have little to do with Trump himself, or that even require his full awareness of those reasons. Alas, instincts in politics sometimes assume the function of hypocrisy in cultural life: an advanced wave of a new truth. Translation: Leaders do not have to actually know what they are doing to occasionally achieve something unpredictably positive, even if by accident. History is, as Emile Cioran said, irony in motion.
More to the point here, distinctions between what the President and the Administration do and the ways they do it are also in play, or should be. I can applaud some of the things the Administration says, has done, and wants to do without approving in the slightest with the ways—with the body-politic language, so to speak—in which they have done and likely will continue to do it.
The conflation of presumed motive, personality, and body language with the actual substance of policy comes easily to us as a facet of human nature, but it comes too easily—for it is irrational by the measure of human reason. Just as good intentions really often do pave the road to hell—for example, Democrats who have fallen in love with their own secular culture war idols providing an excess of red meat to MAGAvores—people we do not like much or at all can still end up doing what, in the end, is either good or in any event necessary. (There is, after all, a cloying and oft-repeating aspect of democratic political life that involves inducing “the unwilling to accept the unavoidable.”[1]) So if good intentions can pave the road to hell, can bad intentions pave the road to heaven—sometimes, at least?
The water in the American Christological goldfish bowl, water that credits intention particulates over outcome particulates, wants to scream out “no!” That notwithstanding, it’s a question to ponder, not to avoid, for we live in a Berlinian world—Isaiah Berlin, that is. We live in a world in which we must wrestle with ensembles of good but often incommensurate values, an insight he unfurled in his essay “The Originality of Machiavelli.” The human condition, Berlin instructed elsewhere, is “a complex sum of contradictory truths,” one result of which is that “philosophy comes from the collision of ideas which create problems. Life changes, so do the ideas, so do the collisions.”[2] Because things are always changing, are always in flux, intentions of whatever flavor can grow stale as the velocity of cultural life drags them into new contexts. And if that velocity for whatever reasons accelerates beyond habit and expectations, as it is doing now thanks to the cyberlution, what is stale can turn to what is moldy without our being aware of it until too late. Hold that thought, for we return to it at the end.
In what follows I want to do two things. First, I hope to show in this fourth of the Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle essay series—as I have and will try to do in all the essays in this series—how the arguments in The Age of Spectacle manuscript are valuable for understanding what is happening right now, before our very eyes. And second, I want to provoke readers into using their educated minds to make distinctions and avoid misleading themselves with conflations as we test our understanding against the data pouring forth. Much of what follows will focus on the Ukraine war and diplomacy—such as it is. But not all of it.
Now I know I’m going to piss some people off by trying to do this. Given the emotion-inflected laws of conflation, any benefit of the doubt—or outright favor—I show to anything the Trump Administration has done or is likely to do will cast me as an enemy in some folk’s minds. And anything I criticize will make me an enemy among the MAGA cultists who now number—I am sorry to remind you—in the tens of millions. Worse, we in this country are quickly morphing into a fighting mood, and I mean that literally. I am now coming to understand better what H.L. Mencken meant when he wrote back in 1918: “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”[3] And when already polarized people are in fighting moods the persuasive power of a calm, patient middle drops asymptotically to near zero. It’s likely a thankless job I here attempt; but someone has to do it. So have mercy, please.
Ukraine Agonistes
On this topic I and many others could write an entire book just trying to keep up with the pace and nature of events that, if one likes a metaphor, sort of resemble a 1952 “pig” Buick Roadmaster being driven at top speed by an 18-year old kid drunk on pineapple Ripple. But let’s not write a book. Let’s just pick up where we left off last time.
Last time we were at the point, before the March 18 second Trump-Putin conversation, when a Trump-(bent-elbowed) Zelensky meeting of minds for a 30-day ceasefire was put to the Russians. Some observers, not to exclude some dear friends who formerly held high DOD positions in Republican Administrations, wishfully reasoned that the unanticipated U.S.-Ukrainian coordinated proposal had put Putin in a box. Ah, Trump excelling yet again at four-dimensional diplomatic chess. Not. The Russians demurred, made a series of highly self-serving demands, vagued the actual terms of the “deal” (if I may invent a verb for the purpose of being clear), and, according to credible accounts of what happened, Trump rolled over for yet another belly rub and accepted the Russian demands.
Where this will lead is still in spin. The ceasefire being discussed, beyond its vagueness of terms, is likely to not to really diminish the intensity and pace of fighting, and might even make it worse as the two sides frantically try to improve their positions against the possibility of some future cessation of the war. When it becomes simply undeniable that Trump’s diplomacy has failed to stop the war he will invariably be impelled to blame someone (else). Who? Since Trump always punches down, that someone will again be Zelensky. So terminated then resumed U.S. material, financial, and intelligence support will likely be terminated again. Twist the elbow harder….and Zelensky will in effect surrender to its Belarusianized fate, as the Russians demand. That’s the mafia way, and that’s the sum of what Trump knows of diplomatic finesse.
And what then?[4] Well, the future of Ukrainian sovereignty at that point will rest on the winner of a race between the Europeans—mainly France, Germany, Britain, and Poland—to create some sort of workable security structure for Ukraine to deter or if necessary defeat Russian advances, and the Russians trying to expunge Ukrainian sovereignty before the European cavalry can arrive to prevent it. Which side will win that race? It will probably depend on which side is least incompetent in the key asset it needs to succeed: European integrative energies, Russian conventional military ability.
But that’s in the future. For now, the question of where this berserk excuse for a diplomatic process will carom next is a matter for only fools and prophets to say. The President’s style, which treasures ego-sating performative unpredictability, leads to a kind of permanent instability, if not process incoherence, so it is difficult to know what any sort of policy orientation, once fixed and identifiable, can survive under such conditions. Such conditions include, as we have seen in the Ukraine and Gaza cases, Trump’s use of people like Steve Witkoff and “special employee” Adam Boehler as confidantes and personal emissaries instead of his Pinocchio-ish Secretary of State—or an actual professional diplomat who knows what he or she is doing….perish the thought—to do the heavy lifting. That means that the Executive Branch departments with operational responsibility for these things are for all practical purposes cut out of the decision process….and would be at sea at the outset of any implementation process. (Trump understands none of this, for his personalist mismanagement of his own businesses over the years is one of the main reasons they have failed to prosper…..four bankruptcy filings within a 25-year period?) Knowledgeable and experienced people have been complaining for years that the NSC has gotten too large, and it has. But now, again for practical purposes, it seems to have disappeared (along with the Congress) in favor of a disconnected and still jitterbugging ad hocery.
That said, a few side developments make the general trajectory of Administration thinking pretty clear. The Executive Branch, which is the President, who is, alas, Trump, has destroyed the effort to track the kidnapping of some 30,000 Ukrainian children. It opposes all efforts to document Russian war crimes. It has ordered the IC to cease and desist from all offensive planning viz Russia. It has basically murdered Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, a huge gift to the somersaulting liars in the Kremlin who even outdo the somersaulting liars now stalking Federal buildings in Washington. It demoted Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg so that he now operates only on the Ukrainian side of the negotiation, responding to Russian complaints that he was too pro-Kyiv. There is even more, but you get the drift even without further details: It’s one roll over for a belly rub after another. There is nothing, it seems, Trump won’t do to kowtow to Putin. Surely he must mind the cleanliness of his underwear every morning these days. One wonders, too, how much energy this dog has left.
On the larger matter of the Transatlantic future, things are just as vivid. Large evidence: The Administration is junking the SACEUR. For those unfamiliar with the acronymphomania of Washington, that stands for Supreme Allied Commander-Europe. The military commander of NATO has, since NATO’s 1949 inception, always been a four-star U.S. General. The first one was Dwight D. Eisenhower. But the Administration is consolidating the combatant command structure to supposedly save money, and the SACEUR will go the way of the dodo. The Europeans will have to figure out how to replace it. They will, eventually.
Small evidence: A French scientist arriving in the United States on March 9 to attend a professional conference in Houston was intercepted, interrogated, his laptop and phone taken from him, and told he could not enter the United States. Why? Because, as Le Monde reported, critical comments about President Trump found by AI-empowered monitoring of his personal property made him “a terrorist suspect.” This is nothing short of bureaucratic thuggery aimed deliberately at a French national, a national of a country with which the United States is formally allied. The TSA/DHS ciphers let the guy return to France. There is no evidence that he threatened anyone anywhere with violence, so that the terrorism accusation qualified as being full-frontally Orwellian—as if these ciphers could even define the word “terrorism” or would agree even to try….. thus we behold “the reason of unreason” blossoming forth along with spring’s daffodils and magnolias.
Is the big evidence or the small evidence the scarier of the two? I’m still head-scratching that one.
As I argued last time, the “reverse Nixon” said by some to be at the bottom of abandoning America’s democratic allies in Europe for the tender embraces of the Kremlin won’t work, even if that is what is anticipated. But maybe the dissing of the Europeans isn’t really about that. Maybe they are simply too institutionally democratic for the mobocracy-inclined populist xenophobia that rules the White House roost. Or maybe our green-eyeshade President really resents their free-riding ways to the max, not grasping that their free-riding is what has allowed us to drive the bus, choose the route, and quiet down the passengers all these many years.
So against this critique of the President’s and the Administration’s diplomatic skills, what if anything could be said that is positive? Just this: The reactive, grand-strategy impoverished patterns of U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War have become increasingly misaligned with the conditions that gave rise to those patterns. We have been left with a hyperactive metabolism, enabled by legacy investments in a global-reaching military footprint speckled with deployments and commitments all over the planet, but paired with no firm sense of priority as to what they are for. An old Navy Seal motto, reportedly coined by Denny Blair and adumbrated years ago by David Brooks, comes to mind as a good description of the situation we have drifted into: “We’re Americans: Everything worth doing is worth overdoing—and at great expense.”
We have needed to get off the flattened dime for some time now. The way the Trump 2.0 Administration has shaken the policy cage is not to my mind the right way, and the contention that the post-World War II U.S.-wrought world order is now inimical to U.S. interests is not right in the way it is argued. Nor is the idealization of machtpolitik, a new imperialism, and a balance-of-power, spheres of influence reality—created in parallel to the MAGA zero-sum, only hammers-and-nails view of domestic society—my cup of intellectual tea. Those premises applied here and abroad are flatly wrong and will prove harmful.
What is true, however, is that a great power that intends to stay great cannot assure success or stability by going passive as the world changes around it. Without a clear, cold-blooded vision of American interests and circumstances, the tendency is for innate American moralism to take pride of place in policy thinking, or to be more precise, policy feeling—so, again Vansittart, “destiny advances on those unable to think,” or on those who are unwilling to do so.
In a way, seeing the pro-Ukraine signs and flags popping up all over the place these days around the DC area reminds me of the highly moralist but otherwise mostly feckless British support for the Greek cause in its 1820s uprising against the Ottoman Empire, and similar sentiments later directed toward favored parties in the several wars that preceded Italian unification. I see in those flags and signs the reflected back-images of William Gladstone holding forth, of Lord Byron reciting “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” of Elizabeth Barrett Browning declaiming:
Happy are all free peoples, too strong to be dispossessed,
But blessed are those among nations, who dare to be strong for the rest. [5]
All very pulse-raising, but I also see Lord Salisbury over in the corner with the better understanding and arguments. He no doubt nodded assent when he read Thomas Babington Macauley’s since-become-famous remark that, “There is nothing so ridiculous as the British public in a periodic fit of morality.” Salisbury had on his side the fact that Britain had an actual empire to manage and protect, which sobered up the society’s pretense to crusader heroism during one of its protracted episodes of religious awakening. We Americans have never had more than an “empire by invitation,” as an insightful Scandinavian once put it, and we have altogether lacked the necessary imperial discipline to rein in our para-universalist moral effusions, which have led us to gratuitous tragedy from the jungles of Southeast Asia to the high mountains of Afghanistan. We have been disciplined by failure to the extent we have been disciplined at all, of which we have experienced rather a lot lately under both Democratic and Republican administrations, not by intellect and learning.
So yanking back the Pentagon’s organizational creep, bringing troops home (Syria is the most recent target, again, for that), streamlining the U.S. overseas basing footprint, and reducing the civilian personnel infrastructure that has adorned all this, is fine by me. We are in my view embarking on doing mostly the right things for mostly the wrong reasons, but that’s how life is sometimes. If we can just avoid overdoing the retrenchment, we can always build back better as needed if we have astute leadership and public support for its purposes in a hopefully forthcoming post-MAGA era.
The Economy
We thus recognize and perhaps sympathize with the sneaking suspicion that making omelets really does require breaking some eggs. Even in domestic affairs it is one thing to admit that some of the apparent ambitions of the Trump Administration are praiseworthy, but to scorn the Administration’s often illegal and hare-brained DOGEy means of trying to achieve them. But then what if conventional political means of bold, or even incremental, domestic reform are functionally unavailable given the constipation of the system at the hands of special interests, bureaucrats, and lawyers in cahoots, busily beavering away at under-tabled self-dealing?
Some examples. First, several Administration officials, not just the President, have been insisting that the U.S. economy is a disaster for ordinary people, though not for fat cats and plutocrats of varied and sundry description (and with thirteen billionaires bivouacked in the Administration they should know). Wall Street has had a great run, but we, they say, care about Main Street. Translation: We care about the micro-economy, not just the macro-economy. Fine: Let’s see you actually walk the walk now that you’ve managed to talk the talk.
In that line of talk, Treasury Secretary Bessent said on March 8 during a speech to the Economic Club of New York:
Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream. The American Dream is rooted in the concept that any citizen can achieve prosperity, upward mobility, and economic security. For too long, the designers of multilateral trade deals have lost sight of this.
He didn’t say it because he did not need to, but the trade negotiators were simply doing the bidding of the large American corporations and banks who, under the spell of globalized greed and pre-forgiven by clueless macroeconomists, were sure that it was fine, as one recent account put it, that forty or fifty manufacturing jobs be lost so that ten thousand American consumers could buy wads of cheap imports. The audience members to whom he was speaking, many of them guiltily complicit in the whole damned snooker, got the tacit message loud and clear.
I agree with Bessent on that (but not with tax cut giveaways to billionaires). Maybe Trump and Company, some of them anyway, really do care about ordinary working people, and have not set their sights solely on gulling them as if they were Cold Comfort Farm cutouts. Maybe this is what Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party look like when cobbled together fifteen years after the fact. Maybe it is why the organized trade union labor vote, which the Democrats stupidly abandoned for culture war bedroom dramas and paeans to wage-eviscerating “open borders,” went overwhelmingly for Trump this past November, punctuating a major political realignment at least as dramatic as Richard Nixon’s vaunted and not-much-less-populist Southern Strategy in 1968. There is anyway no question that Trump assembled a winning coalition not entirely unlike what FDR achieved nearly a century earlier, so political credit where it is due.
Main Street aside, the Federal government is bloated, inefficient, and impervious to serious internal self-correction. Over the past sixty or so years it has spread over the nation and the economy like a melting mountain of Velveeta. Anyone who has worked at reasonable high levels in the Executive Branch knows this is true. It does try to do too much and does much of it badly; it has over many years under both Democratic and Republican administrations usurped authorities that in a properly balanced Federal system belong with the states and local governments, where reservoirs of social trust are deepest and citizen participation is most readily achieved. It has violated the sound Whig principle of limited and self-limiting government that the Federal government needs to be bold and pattern shaping only when the states cannot reasonably be expected to see to their own business effectively.
And relatedly, it is true as well that borrowing and spending like the Federal government has been doing for decades in order to do too many things badly is unsustainable and, as the irascible Herb Stein said many years ago, “That which cannot go on, won’t.” But despite commission after commission on, say, reforming DOD acquisition protocols, or on making Social Security/Medicare fiscally non-train-wreckable, nothing much beyond a microscopic tweak here and there ever seems to happen. Maybe it really is like the burgeoned Federal Code, which has morphed over the years from a svelte book to a double hernia: It cannot be reformed under normal circumstances; it needs to have a stake driven through its heart—and then we may return to basic principles and, yes, build back better.
Does that mean we should forgive the illegal, unconstitutional way this objective is seemingly being pursued? Of course not. That isn’t the point, however. The point is that ends are not to be judged by the means used to pursue them, just as means should not be judged by the ends they are said, sincerely or not, to serve.
The Department of Education
Even the (obviously unconstitutional) Executive Order abolishing the Department of Education signed yesterday fits into this analysis. That Department, created in 1979—two years after the creation of the Department of Energy in the Carter Administration—did not initiate the Federal government’s interest in education policy. That portfolio existed in HEW (the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare) created in April 1953, and it can exist still, and do what it needs to do as agreed by education professionals (not politicians), without an entire separate Executive Branch department, complete with expensive overhead, devoted to it. The end of a department is not the same as the end of a function that can still be served, and ought to be served, in other ways.
As those other ways are developed in due course we would be well served by asking: Has the existence of DoEd effectively improved critical K-12 public school education in America between 1979 and today? I dare anyone to argue that it has, given the manifest decay in the quality of that education. It would have been even worse without DoEd, you contend? Keep your counterfactuals safe at home, please, where they cannot do but so much mischief.
Maybe worse, although not in the least the DoEd leadership’s fault, the “No Child Left Behind” disaster, morphed into the barely better “Race to the Top” disaster, was in no way mitigated by the existence of DoEd. On the contrary, the parasitic testing industry that has formed over the years has been objectively abetted by DoEd. Congress in effect insisted that it do so, often against the better judgment of the dedicated staffs that worked there. This utterly destructive policy, which robbed well-trained education professionals of the ability to do their critical jobs as they saw fit, was predicated on a massive and willful falsehood: that bad principals and teachers were the main reasons some schools failed to educate their charges up to standards.
This was garlic-necklace-keeps-away-elephants “reasoning.” “Failing” schools—and everyone knew and knows which ones and where they are….—were not caused by principals and teachers but by deficient parenting patterns in homes, as was decisively proven, for example, by researchers like Todd Risley and Betty Hart with their seminal “word poverty” research. But it wasn’t politically smart to fix the actual cause of the problem situated deep in sociological sub-cultural phenomena—that particularly liberal sensibilities would not abide being fingered as a problem despite the social science evidence of its truth—so education professionals were scapegoated and stigmatized with the blame instead.
This cowardly, irresponsible malarkey has been more responsible for the decline of educational achievements in recent decades even than any dumb thing the National Education Association has done. And DoEd was powerless, really, to do anything about it. If the Congress (or the Federal courts) had really wanted to do something positive about public school education in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s they would have long ago declared funding education mainly through local property taxes to be violations of the 14th Amendment, which they are, for public education funded that way will always create and then re-create structural inequalities given the de facto spatial class segregation of most neighborhoods. That would have done more good for the most needy students, of all skin hues, than anything DoEd has done since its creation. And that is something that still remains to be done without DoEd.
The Administration is basically right here: Decisions on public education funding levels in any system of self-government should be as local as possible (short of universal home-schooling, of course). If communities and whole states won’t take responsibility for educating their children properly that is their problem; in a functionally self-governing society it is the responsibility of citizens where they live, not bureaucracies in Washington far away, to make politicians do what is right and best. If We the People working locally in our own communities can’t get our political representatives to fund public education from the same revenue pot used to fund other services, and fund it properly, we deserve to suffer the consequences.
Again Mencken: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” Well, so be it. If you really believe in checked-and-balanced form of democracy then you need to believe that people have a right to make their own mistakes if despite those checks and balances they insist on them anyway. If you don’t believe in that right, then own up to being an elitist, a “nudger,” or an outright scold; raise that up a flagpole and see where it gets you these days.
Lastly on this point, having people from, say, Massachusetts ensconced in a Federal bureaucracy in Washington telling people in, say, Arkansas what they should be doing in their own back yards with and for their children is not going to work or help. It is absurd to suppose that bureaucrats in Washington know and care more about the situations of children hundreds and even thousands of miles away than their own families do. No one could persuasively argue that the existence of DoEd, with its perennially limited authorities and resources, made any appreciable difference in narrowing regional disparities in educational quality.
Confirmation Bias and the Future of Democracy
The larger point here is that we must avoid trapping ourselves in overly comfortable assumptions just because, for deep readers and symbol manipulators like us, they are comfortable. The vast majority of people prefer to be told things they already believe; it just makes life so much less agitated. Confirmation bias is not just for the hoi polloi; it is the middle name of not a few intellectually gifted and fortunately educated people. But it’s not such a good thing, really. Just reflecting on the foregoing Department of Education discussion, remember what John Maynard Keynes once said: “When the facts change I change my mind; what do you do, sir?” Facing facts about what the DoEd has, and mainly has not, managed to accomplish over the past 46 years should be more important that the summary judgment—which may still be true—that Trump killed DoEd because he’s fundamentally an ignoramus who is jealous of anyone (which would be a whole lot of people) who knows more than he does and can demonstrate it. These are separate truths and should not be summarily conflated.
The trap of confirmation bias, or motivated reasoning as some call it, has been on vivid display these past eight weeks. A kind of rubber-band effect has been at work: Each time we are surprised at how bizarre things have become we still somehow expect in future to no longer be surprised by comparable stimuli. It’s a one-off, we tell ourselves, or maybe a two- or three-off—but certainly no more than that. We expect things to spring back to normal, and then they don’t. We expect it again, and then again they don’t until, for many who are not heroically diligent, the abnormal flips into becoming the new normal and we can’t remember what the old normal felt like anymore.
The reason we keep going back to home base time and time again is that a thick emotional patina accompanies the process of perceiving the deterioration of patterns and norms most of us thought were deeply entrenched in U.S. political (and national security policy) culture. We must become numb to our own expectations to move away from them as pushed and shoved, lifted and dropped, by the evidence before us.
That can be a bad thing, a surrender to forms of moral regression of the sort we have seen in history. But it is not always so. In this light consider how genuine social contrition occurs. If we are wise to resist attacks on what is right and just—like the Trump 2.0 Administration’s clear current attacks on the separation of powers and the rule of law—we are not wise always to resist change that may vault whole communities into very uncomfortable places for their own good. Let me offer a personal, but not just a personal, example.
Growing up in segregated Virginia felt entirely normal as it was happening. It was too normal for me to be either consciously unhappy or happy about it; it just was what it was. That changed pretty much before my youthful eyes as normality became problematized. I was fine with getting used to a new and improved normal, but not everyone felt that way, to put it mildly. Glen Echo amusement park, which wasn’t even in formally segregated Virginia, preferred to shut down than de-segregate its swimming pool. I don’t ever again want to see that old normal—say, the two drinking fountains and the three bathrooms at the People’s Drug Store on Lee Highway near my boyhood home. Sometimes what starts out looking and feeling strange and even discomfiting turns out much for the better.
The point is that it is unwarranted to be too sure too soon about what is going down right now. I have some strong troubling suspicions; the Age of Spectacle manuscript is loaded with them, as veteran Raspberry Patch readers know. But rushing to cognitive closure is a vulnerability driven by a nexus of insecurity and a lazy imagination, and it begs avoidance if we can swing it.
Do not get me wrong: The Trump 2.0 Administration’s still-dominant techno-feudalist wing—dominant over the garden-variety populist wing because of the logic of collective action—is following the playbook of The Sovereign Individual, that Randian greed-screed written by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson in 1997. The newer 2020 edition carries a foreword by Peter Thiel, not a coincidence I suspect. These stationary bandits, to again make use of the late Mancur Olson’s language, are the true antifa, the true anti-statist force now manifest as synapse skaters on the Great Horseshoe of ideological proclivities between utopic anarchism and radical libertarianism. They are in no way about better governance for the sake of the commons.
And by way of mood, or body-politic language, they are ecstatic riders on the hedonism/nihilism dialectic we limned in The Age of Spectacle project. They are the now elevated foot-soldiers of the Lord of the Flies, loving the cruelty and fear they mete out and the whining and hysteria they evoke—many of them probably the kinds of people who when they were kids thrilled to killing insects with magnifying glasses. As adults, they resemble those afflicted with blocked megalothymia.
Speaking of which, we may conclude this meditation where we began it, by trying better to understand the deeper reasons for what is happening, rather than conflate what ought to remain discrete, rush to judgment, condemn, gnash teeth, and wax hysterical. Let’s do that by briefly revisiting a text written in 1992.
In that year my friend and former American Interest colleague Francis Fukuyama speculated that the homogenized boredom of affluent consumerism, producing legions of self-absorbed but feckless men “with no chests” as C.S. Lewis put it—an updated version of Nietzsche’s Last Man, in other words—could boomerang into spasms of megalothymia, of men seeking sometimes spectacular ways to express the blocked masculine heroism bottled up within. One expression of this, Fukuyama worried, could be men at the helm of nations engaging in bloody and pointless prestige battles with modern weapons, perhaps men like Vladimir Putin, he of the short stature and bare equestrian-mounted chest.
More to the point we are seized with now, Fukuyama wrote at the start of the book’s last chapter, entitled “Immense Wars of the Spirit”: “. . . the absence of regular and constructive outlets for megalothymia may simply lead to its later resurgence in an extreme and pathological form.” And who, some 32 years ago, did Fukuyama name first as a possible exemplar of said extreme pathology? That’s right: Donald Trump.[6] If you don’t believe me, go look it up yourself. To see a major shard of the inner nether-logic of an election held in November 2024 from a distance of more than 32 years has to count for something.
The surrealism in high places we now behold, like everything else, has a history, and it is a history, like everything else of its kind, embedded in the great clotted, if segmented, network of human symbolic interaction we call a culture. Cultures change; as Berlin said, remember, “life changes, so do the ideas, so do the collisions.” And that means that the institutions and value hierarchies that work in one era may or may not work in eras to come. Here is how Hans Morgenthau put the point back in 1962:
. . . the philosophy and the institutions of liberalism are not the expression of eternal verities. That philosophy and those institutions arose under certain historic conditions and, hence, were bound to disappear under different historic conditions.[7]
Now, the Trump 2.0 Administration is widely accused of being anti-democratic. And it is, depending on how the adjective democratic is meant. As argued here two weeks ago, it may be less thoughtfully anti-democratic than it is thoughtlessly pre-democratic, but in practical terms that may be a distinction without much of a difference. But it is certainly anti-pluralist and determined on subverting the rule of law as understood in Weberian terms as the formal, as opposed to the traditional or charismatic, authority of law. So then this is the question we should be asking ourselves, but are for the most part too frightened to articulate: If American democracy can now twice freely and fairly within three election cycles produce a leadership so sharply antithetical to the Constitution of a republic—a guard-railed as opposed to a plebiscitary democracy—then what good is it to us anymore?
Put a bit differently, if We the People living within the spectocratic culture of the moment are so divorced from core American principles and values, what makes anyone think that the electorate will not continue to serve up such anti- or un-constitutionally minded elites long after Donald Trump has left the scene?
Where does this discomfiting thought lead us? To humility, it seems to me. Are we to conclude that American democracy has simply outlived its time, that nothing fails like antecedent success? Are we riding a Platonic or Spenglerian cycle that we can’t get off of no matter how we try? I mightily resist that conclusion, but admit to stuttering at it when I try. I do not know the answer to that question, which, perhaps above all else, is why these really are the times that try men’s souls, only differently and perhaps even more profoundly than Thomas Paine meant those words in December 1776.
[1] A phrase of Robert S. Vansittart in The Mist Procession (Hutchinson, 1958) p. 68.
[2] Berlin quoted in Mario Vargas Llosa, “Why Literature?” The New Republic, May 14, 2001, p. 32.
[3] From Mencken, Prejudices: First Series (Knopf, 1919).
[4] The best and most detailed prognostication at this point is Timothy Garton Ash, “Trump Delivers on Putin’s Plan to Ensure Ukraine Fails,” Kyiv Post, March 18, 2025.
[5] “A Court Lady”, stanza XX (1860).
[6] Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press, 1992), p. 328.
[7] Hans Morgenthau, “The Tragedy of German-Jewish Liberalism” in The Decline of Democratic Politics (University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 248.