The Age of Spectacle, No. 38
Chapter 9: Saints and Cynics: Common Roots of Contemporary American Illiberalism
No housekeeping notes this time in The Raspberry Patch, except to assure you that I belatedly caught and fixed for the Substack archive some typographical crud in the January 6 “Hannah-in-Blue Debut” post. I should also apologize to those of you who may have gone to the website (www.hannahinblue.com) only to find that the payment mechanism was not at the time fully operational. I has been misinformed about that…..sorry. More illustrations of available exquisite cyanotype art pieces have since been added (I hope), and the electronic payment mechanism should be fully functional very soon, if not already by today.
Otherwise, with no further ado:
Chapter 9: Saints and Cynics: Common Roots of Contemporary American Illiberalism, part 2
. . . It is not abnormal for those most at risk in a communal emergency of any kind to be so afraid that they project confidence in leadership out of a desperate spasm of cognitive dissonance, no matter the reality of the situation—even in cases where said leadership has caused or exacerbated the emergency. It is a logic of illogic, true; but it is at least a logic of some sort. But in the case of Trump’s over-the-top mismanagement of the COVID emergency even that explanation does not suffice. Only funhouse mirrors in the mind, shaped by echo-chamber designer digital media infospheres, can fully account for it.
Recall how Donald Trump actually handled the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. What he cared about were political optics, not human lives. He wanted low fatality numbers reported, did not care if specious numbers were invented and real ones occluded, because he did not want to be pressed into locking down the economy since that, he reasoned, would hurt his chances of getting re-elected.
What was so stunning, and frightening, about his reasoning was that he could not be bothered even to hide his callous judgment because he assumed it was normal, it was what everyone does given the opportunity, and everyone knows this so why bother to hide it. This was a truly spectacular form of unabashed ego gluttony on full display; and the reaction? Republican oldsters in overwhelming numbers still claimed that Trump handled the pandemic well. They were bingeing on their own bias, as if masochistic stubbornness was itself a virtue, proving yet again that rank partisanship makes people stupid even as ideology makes them crazy.
Left to Right and Back Again
Despite important differences between illiberal Right and illiberal Left “Ripleys,” the postmodern synapse between them remains unmistakable. That is partly because a good deal of what makes the MAGA rightwing seem so berserk to people who still retain a grip on reality came originally from the countercultural and then postmodern Left. More specifically, the law of metamorphosis that serves the Right so well when it sets out to “Do a Ripley” reversal somewhat ironically finds its inner logic, just like the woke Left, in postmodernism.
The illiberal postmodern Right did not arrive at the portal of the funhouse mirrored door all at once. Years before MAGAtry discovered the metamorphic formula and learned to use it to effect Karl Rove went into the postmodernism import business by supposedly proclaiming to David Suskind, in a 2004 fit of political stupor, that the Bush 43 Administration no longer operated in a “fact-based community” but rather made its own facts that others would be left to study.[1] Looking back, that was the beginning of something large and quite awful.
Foucault, Derrida, and, though it is all but forgotten today, A.J. Ayer and his “emotivist” theories before them, are the ones, all from the Left, who insisted that there is no such thing as stable, universal truth—certainly not any truth of a moral kind. There can logically be no such thing if there is no plausible origin for it, whether extrinsic via revelation or intrinsic supposedly via natural law. So postmodernists were not making a merely common sense observation that what seemed true morally three centuries ago need not remain true for those living many generations later. Although God was already quite dead when they came along, bourgeois morality with it at the hands of Marxian “science”—Nietzsche had anyway proclaimed that deed already in April 1882 in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft—He was evidently not dead enough for 20th-century postmodernists. He needed to be killed all over again.
Note carefully: Again, this was and still is not just an anodyne claim to relativize moral truth, as apologists like to argue. It was a claim that ethics has no place in philosophy at all, for the category of thought it set out to study—morality—did not exist as an independent ontological category. Only the will to power among inherently conflicting groups existed, and hegemony however attained, not truth however construed, was the name of the only game in town—and here, as already noted, Marxism and postmodernism are as one….as is, to hammer the nail in all the way, the Randian abominations at the core of the MAGAt lizard brain.
There are almost too many examples of what this looks like on the Left to count. To cite just one popular example of a quite different and hence telling sort from the aforenoted “multiracial whiteness” defense, there is zero evidence of the nearly ubiquitous urban legend, especially popular on the Left but since taken over also by the conspiracy-minded Right, that Bush Administration principals lied about weapons of mass destruction stocks and programs in Ba’athi Iraq.
There is massive evidence in the public domain that intelligence assessments were in error, the result being that public pronouncements contained some mistakes, but mistakes are not lies.[2] It is true, too, that some Administration principals, certainly including the Vice-President, exaggerated the intelligence and tried to deploy it to persuade the President, for raw political reasons, to go to war sooner than later; but as regrettable as that was, it was still not lying. On the Left, however, no distinction is allowed between mistakes and lies when it contradicts its own biases. So leftist opinion leaders “do a Ripley”—in this and most other cases a sincerely believed one—and most of the intended audience responds with a contented “moo.” When they do, those of us who were there and know better experience an astounding complex—not much of one anymore, for it’s all too predictable for that; but still.
Why does the intended audience nod the falsehood? Because if the assertions about Iraqi WMD were errors—and mistakes forwarded on from errors rather than deep state conspiracies of the hoary military-industrial complex—rather than lies, then what happens to the claim that the Iraq War was all about “blood for oil,” or some other nefarious government scheme barely complex enough for a TV show? The “blood for oil” claim made no sense to begin with, evidencing total ignorance of how international oil companies and markets work in the jurisdictional haze beyond national boundaries. But it fit the Marxoid adversary culture mold of the capitalist military-industrial-corporate conspiracy, and so it was. Ideology, being always a massively simplified thinking template, conflates by its very nature. Hence if the “blood for oil” mantra is necessarily true for ideological reasons, cognitive consistency obliges the conclusion that those in service to it are as evil as their masters and so have no compunction against lying.
No matter: You can go blue in the face trying to show a sanctimonious ideologue that he or she is wrong on the facts. There was a conspiracy, an evil conspiracy by the powerful: That’s how the woke understand everything that happens in the U.S. foreign policy/national security domain.
And not just that domain. Why are American students increasingly incapable of comprehending reading material, and why can they not write and punctuate English sentences as most could not so long ago? The “do a Ripley” answer of the Left is that this is the work of a Republican conspiracy to make people dumber so that the big corporations can more easily control and exploit them. No, it’s nothing to do with the influence of the wokeish National Education Association on academic standards. People who look more or less like adults actually believe such “not-A” things, though it often takes a normally adroit person some time to work out that they, zero-sum-addled to the core, are not trying to pull your leg.
Some still recent examples make the postmodernist point too well to resist telling. Nick Timothy, co-chief of staff to former Tory Prime Minister Teresa May, provided a few in the January 15, 2023 Telegraph: “‘There’s just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts.’ So says Prince Harry, who may be as credible a philosopher as I am a weightlifter.” True, and one one could hardly ask for a more suitable representative of the “imperial I” than the Prince.
Timothy added another example, this one looking at America from across the Pond:
Last Friday, Trevor Noah, the South African comedian and US television presenter, defended the notorious skit in which he asserted there had been a “racist backlash” in Britain when Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister. Rather than present proof of his claims, or apologise for his error, Noah argued that a joke can only be judged by its intended audience. “I wouldn’t tell a joke about South Africa the same way in South Africa as I would outside South Africa,” he explained. In other words, it mattered not that British people knew his joke to be untrue: he was making the joke for a liberal American audience, who believed it was true.[3]
In both examples Timothy was just repeating what we have long known about postmodernist cant: “Truth” is whatever power establishes as “hegemonic.” As Trevor Noah’s response illustrates, it is therefore perfectly reasonable that the tack one takes to achieve narrative hegemony may fluctuate depending on audience and context. Truth is not only relative, but is per force instrumentalized and, when necessary or useful, weaponized.
So we can see a cultural evolution at work here if we stand far enough back in time. Before contemporary facticity termites got down to business, say about half a century ago, it was common to hear the view—later coined in gold by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in the form of “everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts—that reality could not in the end be ignored. We all nodded approval. Then came the relativization of truth, and so Moynihan’s locution became in effect, “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, and to select facts to fit them.” Some demurred, other mooed. And now we have come to the identity politics/postmodernist point: “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions because they feel right, facts don’t exist anyway apart from how we feel about them, and so we can invent facts if we like to illustrate how we feel.” Moo, moo, moo.
To exert power in the supposed absence of facts, one may even deploy the law of metamorphosis by knowingly crafting screenplays that invent actors and episodes in historical narratives out of whole cloth
to mislead audiences in the name of supposedly higher, eternal truths. . . . The crime is always exploitation, and the currency is always victimhood because that is what the theories say. The truth must be bent to fit the template, and, handily enough, the theory tells us the truth is malleable anyway.[6]
Of course this is mainly highbrow pretense that goes particularly well with soy meat substitutes and kombucha. People who mouth such tripe do not really believe it in a practical pinch, as it proven by the fact that a postmodernism-addled parent worried about a very sick child will, in America at least, take the child to a pediatrician rather than to a medi-pedi salon or a Tarot card reader.
Another example on the Left of what happens when someone thinks that everything is in our heads concerns Confederate statuary and the obsession among some to do away with all of it. But in actually—that pesky real world, in other words—this is a complex issue with many sides, not a two-valued simplicity at all.
Three distinct historical phases of Confederate statuary can be identified and the motives and context differ for each: statuary constructed and placed in the two decades following the Civil War; statuary associated with the Ku Klux Klan-abetted “lost cause” mythology of the early 20th century; and statuary and naming conventions associated with the anti-civil rights backlash of the 1950s and early 1960s. Sound non-magical arguments for removing said statuary from public places can therefore be constructed for the third and probably the second contexts, but less sturdily so for the first. In all cases removal should be balanced against the value of the statues as opportunities for teaching moments about history.
That is simple enough. But there is more that needs saying here, and thus we come upon complexity.
The Civil War tore a huge hole in the soul of the American nation, and when it ended nearly every sentient adult realized an acute need for healing. To accomplish it, as President Lincoln himself wisely emphasized, “malice toward none” became the watchword. That obligated the watchmen of American culture to create a civil-religious tone of respect for the defeated side as well as for the victorious one. It obligated a deeper understanding of motives, too, than the simplistic racist/anti-racist dichotomy of the rhetorical extremists who drove the nation into the war in the first place.
Naming and respecting those deeper human motivations functioned as a means of joint penance, of national atonement for the sin of having fallen into the war. As the late Michael Peter Smith put it so beautifully in a lyric to his song “Spoon River,” inspired by Edgar Lee Masters’s poetical masterpiece of that name:
All of the riverboat gamblers are losing their shirts
All of the brave union soldier boys sleep in the dirt
But you know and I know there never was reason to hurt
When all of our lives were entwined to begin with
Here in Spoon River.All of the calico dresses, the gingham and lace
Are up in the attic with grandfather’s derringer case
There’s words whispered down in the parlor, a shadowy face
The morning is heavy with one more beginning
Here in Spoon River.Come to the dance Mary Perkins I like you right well
The union’s preserved, if you listen you’ll hear all the bells
There must be a heaven, God knows I’ve seen mostly hell
My rig is outside, come and ride through the morning
Here in Spoon River.
It is from the womb of that effort at a reunifying atonement that American culture produced during the century after the war a form of ecumenical respect for an array of Southern symbols.[4] Did such gestures of respect also at times help rationalize and so support then-extant segregationist state policies? Probably. Did that make the impulse to atonement wrong? No. It’s complicated, as already noted.
All that has been true for a long time, but for the woke it is no longer true because it feels wrong in an all-or-nothing, only good and evil playground of simplemindedness. More recent demands—notably one concerning the Confederate memorial designed by Moses Jacob Ezekiel and erected in 1914 at Arlington National Cemetery—illustrate the point when they conflate all three historical contexts and their very different motivations into one amorphous but presumably toxic racist root. The result is an insistence on the balm of magic: Remove the statuary and we remove not only the feared triggering phenomenon that might clutter some snowflake’s perfect life, but we also banish the events marked by the statuary from history. No statue, then what the statue is about never happened. Presto chango, the fact that two sides fought the Civil War each believing in the justness of its own point of view disappears. Just like the two Trump impeachment trials, according to Coco Puffs Greene, we can make it all just go away as if it never happened. By a similar magical logic we can presumably make vast chunks of history disappear if we ban as if “cursed” all books mentioning the fictional Huck Finn, the real Joel Chandler Harris and Robert E. Lee, and change the names of all U.S. military bases associated with the Old South.[5]
All ideologues are allergic to inconvenient facts, but only postmodernists rid themselves of their allergies by insisting that there are no facts. How convenient for woke social justice warriors that the antics of dissimulating for a good cause are all and always sheltered by the underlying epistemological premise of the ideology.[7] But how shocking when they behold right-wingers adopting identical magical metamorphic techniques learned from the Left. Did they really think they could keep all the magic for themselves, that they could maintain exclusive control over the American circus of spectacle?
The party never ends. MAGAts point to antifa as the epitome of what Democrats really, privately, believe and support. Former Rep. Matt Gaetz, for example, infamously argued that the January 6, 2021 insurrection was mostly antifa types in MAGA drag. This of course was a shameful but shamelessly told lie. Even someone with as fragile an intellect as Gaetz cannot possibly actually believe this (as someone with an even more fragile intellect, Kash Patel, seems genuinely to believe that the FBI was behind it all).
But now think: What is antifa, and how would we reasonably describe its ideology? It is a loose network of anarchists, it following logically that any such network by definition would have to be loose: It comes with the anarchist turf. So it is more than rich when the extreme end of the MAGAt spectrum, in the person of Steve Bannon, raves about destroying the establishment en toto, “burning down” the administrative/plutocratic-socialist state. What is that if not a restatement of basic anarchist goals? The only thing antifa has that Bannon lacks is a black flag.
So not only are Left and Right extremes both illiberal and both zero-sum besotted; they even agree on a central underlying ideological impulse. Even superficially current U.S. populism resembles a leftwing movement nearly as much as it does a rightwing one in the sense that the Bolsheviks, too, were anti-elitist, anti-aristocratic, envy-ridden levelers. Substitute anti-meritocratic for anti-aristocratic and you are in harmony if not completely in tune.
Once upon a time nearly all narcissistic imperial-I arrogance seemed concentrated on the Left, the New Left in particular, in sharp contradistinction to the old Left. “Rules and regulations, who needs them?; throw ‘em out the door,” sang Graham Nash in the lyrics of the 1969 CSNY antiwar anthem “Chicago.” (Nash sang it but David Crosby probably wrote that lyric.) The next year Yippie leader Jerry Rubin concluded his 1970 manifesto DO IT! with a rollicking version of an anarcho-paradise:
There will be no more jails, courts or police. The White House will become a crash pad for anybody without a place to stay in Washington. The world will become one big commune with free food and housing, everything shared. All watches and clocks will be destroyed. Barbers will go to reeducation camps where they will grow their hair long. There will be no such crime as “stealing” because everything will be free. The Pentagon will be replaced by an LSD experimental farm. There will be no more schools or churches because the entire world will become one church and one school. People will farm in the morning, make music in the afternoon, and fuck wherever and whenever they want to.
Yes, the Left led the way to expressive individualism even before the market-fundamentalist version hopped on the back of the garishly painted microbus, and followed the road all the way to the princely enthronement of the “imperial I.” Now that this indulgence has migrated so massively to the MAGAt Right, the cultural rider firmly atop the ideological horse, are all you aging hippies out there still cool with that sonorous message from 1969-70? It’s sad if you’re not, for that’s your only real cultural legacy from those halcyon days.
Spectacle in Stereo
No matter where it came from originally, Left or Right, spectacle is everywhere in American culture these days, and it has fast evolved: Ripley’s Believe It or Not offerings have now become quaint as modes of excitement qua entertainment. We now have technologically enhanced decadence enabled by affluence that has moved American society as a whole so sharply up the food chain of spectacle that no one with the television age as a starting point could possibly have imagined it.
But it is political spectacle we care most about here. On the Right its vicissitudes resemble a scam P.T. Barnum would have well understood: elite entrepreneurs catering to and manipulating a mass of semi-literate rubes for the sake of their own power and pocketbooks. On the Left, illiberal utopians preaching to the less well washed appear actually to believe their own ideological psychobabble. So far, however, their actual behavior has been overwhelmingly limited to feckless virtue-signaling, to each other and, when bold enough, to despised “deplorables.” Most seem to have combined their convictions about the higher truth-value of their subjective perceptions over actual reality with their imperial-I narcissism and come up with a one-tongue-flapping form of pointless but psychologically spectacular insularity.
There is yet more commonality to note. For the better heeled and better educated MAGA types, running from Peter Thiel all the way to his favorite future President, J.D. Vance, Jonathan Last put it in language that resonates well with the Age of Spectacle:
The Trumpian revolution . . . seems to be the product of decadent boredom commingled with casual nihilism. Circumstances for our revolutionaries have never been better. They are so flush that they parade on their boats. And fly upside-down flags outside of their million-dollar suburban homes. And put stickers depicting a hogtied president on their $75,000 pickup trucks. All while posting angry memes to Facebook on their $1,000 iPhones. We are not talking about les misérables Américains.[8]
Note that Last doesn’t mention conservatism, and for good reason: There is nothing genuinely conservative about any of this.
But well-educated MAGAts are a distinct and tiny minority. MAGAt prol types, males in particular, are not conservatives either by any stretch of imaginative definition. Like their wealthier associates, they do not value humility, deferred gratification, occasionally benign manifestations of cultural inertia, going to church, or anything of the sort. They do not understand or care about conservative principles; if they know who George Will is, they despise him. They are fine with gambling, including the regressive state-sponsored kind. They are fine with any moving traffic violation they can get away with. They mostly don’t like cops, no matter what “Blue lives matter” regalia some may stick on their lawns or blue and black stripped flags they may fly from their front porches. Many have become fine with homosexuality because they are fine with anything busting out old legal and cultural constraints on hedonistic expression—so “gay” anything can become at least a vaguely positive thing by association. They’re fine with drugs, too, so long as they don’t complicate their often intimate relationship with booze.
They are, as former White House speechwriter Peggy Noonan put it, largely sullen paranoids who are a toxic mental mix of fantasy and stupidity. Some claim they measure up to the standard description of stupidity’s modus operandi; as Bonnie Garmus put it, most stupid people aren’t smart enough even to know how stupid they are.[9] This is a popular applause line, but it is misleading. It’s not just stupid people who can get caught up in fantasy escapism. As already noted, just as despair can generate utopian thinking that leaps past pragmatism and rationalism, so humiliation can generate a plunge into hedonism that, once worn thin, gives way to nihilism.
So, as we limned in Chapter 1, it is not for no reason that barstoool conservatives, as Matthew Walther has dubbed them, fulminate.[10] They tend to hate people who disrespect them, look down their moralistic noses at them, and nannypeck them with apparent impunity. They have been baited perhaps beyond the limits of reasonable patience by snooty liberals jabbering about “deplorables”—and we don’t need Mr. Walther to explain this to us, having already to hand Arlie Hochschild’s aforementioned Strangers in Their Own Land to reference. Of course, that does not excuse an insistence on being free to do whatever they want if it includes the freedom to make other people deathly ill by refusing to wear a mask in public places during a pandemic. Many a barstool conservative called this “liberty,” but present-fixated selfishness was and remains a more appropriate description.
Barstool conservatives like “Don’t Tread On Me” flags and bumper stickers, but few know the origin of that saying. Some wear a T-shirt featuring an image of Vladimir Putin that reads, “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat,” or, when that one happens to be in the laundry, a T-shirt with an image of George Washington reading, “It’s only treason if you lose.” They appear to deeply value obscenity—notably in large-lettered banners stretched over highways, but also in small “flag”-scale versions reading “F____ Biden,” “Go Brandon,” and so on. They admire those making a scene, acting out, and often enough sharing extreme porn. In short, they’re into the special province of “fuck-you”- and “fuck-that”-style spectacle.
And because they categorize Jews as members of the elite, they tend toward anti-Semitic motifs, as well. But their anti-Semitism tends to be knee-jerk subcultural, not explicitly ideological or particularly hateful. As always, skin-color racism in the United States has shielded Jews from becoming bigotry target number one. It may seem odd, but perhaps the best characterization of this kind of roughneck soft bigotry toward Jews comes from a book written in Spanish published in 1615:
Well, I can swear as an honest man that I've never said a bad word about any enchanter, and I’m not rich enough for anybody to envy me—it’s true I’m a bit of a sly old fox and I can be something of a villain at times, but it’s all covered over by the broad cloak of my simple-mindedness, which is always natural, never affected. And even if my only good point was that I believe, as I do, firmly and faithfully in God and in everything the Holy Roman Catholic Church believes, and that I’m a mortal enemy, as I am, of all Jews, that should be enough to make the historians take pity on me and treat me well in their writings.
That is none other than Miguel de Cervantes putting words in Sancho Panza’s mouth.[11]
P.J. O’Rourke once characterized affluence-fed “expressive individualism” in combination with virtue-signaling leftwing political sloganeering as throwing a decade-long temper tantrum, and enjoying it. We now understand that clots of overgrown spoiled brats are no longer a monopoly of the Left. Politicized tantrum throwing has become an entirely ecumenical, if still puerile, avocation.[12]
It may be, for example, that the episodic willingness of some MAGA Republicans (but I repeat myself) to crash the economy over its debt ceiling game of chicken with the Biden Administration wasn’t just for the sake of “burning down” the meliorist-inclined administrative state by “starving the beast” of resources--what ought by rights to be called the Grover Norquist (Future) Memorial method of destroying the Federal government. It may not be that a resultant stock market crash was deemed politically useful since it would hurt more typical upscale-urban Democratic constituencies than rural-populist Republican ones. It may have actually been the “wow now” potential of what would happen, the spectacular “you don’t see that every day” rush of the not-boring. In an attention economy even bad attention is better than no attention.
The same was true in spades of Trump’s indictment over his willful purloining of classified documents. By now even the mainstream media has begun to understand Trump’s mastery of Herbert A. Simon’s prophetic attention economy concept—despite their disgraceful complicity with it. As Astead W. Herndon put it in the June 15, 2024 New York Times, just days after the indictment was unsealed, “Do Trump’s legal challenges make him more (or less) fun? The question is awkward as it suggests that the reasons some American are drawn to politicians are divorced from the seriousness of their office.” There are, he continued, “voters who are attracted to showmanship and celebrity.” Herndon suggests that these voters are “distinct from Trump’s base and follow politics casually, if at all. . . . Perhaps you have a friend who doesn’t care about politics, but can’t believe Trump said THAT.”
Herndon did not call it spectaclized politics and seemed unaware of the extent to which omnipresent digital distractions have conditioned so many of us to treasure the dopamine rushes that astounding complexes produce. But he did draw attention to the many Ripleys and other two-headed carnival calves that densely populate our contemporary political culture. And he was not alone; here is how Larry Kotlikoff of Boston University put it:
Trump, as every sentient American knows, lies. He lies incessantly. He lies in broad daylight. He lies about his lies, exponentiating them as they grow stale. Lying is the mainstay of his burlesque act. His supporters love his lies. They cherish the old ones, they revel in the new ones, and they exalt in their capacity to enrage their supposed enemies. Trump is not a liar and a showman. He’s a liar showman. Lying for its entertainment value is his main act.[13]
All true, but it still takes a writer of fiction to sing the song in the perfect pith (that is not a typo), here in a light paraphrase from a book published almost a quarter century ago: “He’s lying through his teeth, and even his teeth are false.”[14]
Of what magnitude is the subset of voters who relish the lies, even knowing they are lies? Herndon cited a Democracy Fund study which found that 5 percent of Trump voters in 2016 were “disengaged from politics” and voted for him solely on the basis of “style.” But that 5 percent was, we are told, enough to make the difference in a close contest.
Herndon’s assumptions that these casual voters are distinct from Trump’s base and that their magnitude is on the 5 percent level were both likely serious undershots—as the results on November 5, 2024 bore out: Trump doubled down on his spectacle act and won big. In a sense, Donald Trump exemplifies a cultural nexus that joins the 20th-century triumph of the therapeutic and a 21st-century psychiatric circus act that never really leaves town. Very few Americans can look away from a spectacle like that, love it or hate it—one calf head crazy and the other one shrewd?….wow—which is why the commercial media simply can’t leave him alone and still serve their business model.
Herndon also likely underestimated the extent to which counter-humiliation spectacle animates the Trump base. Trump has understood it all along, however, which is why his threats to go after the “Biden crime family” and to destroy “the Deep State” have been so mesmerizing. It is why Trump posed as a superhero protecting his flock, as in tweets claiming that “they” are coming after you, but “I” am your protector. All of this malarkey tracked exactly with the stunted vocabulary and distended emotional cadences of mediocre adventure entertainment fare, with Gerbner’s mean world syndrome, and with once-countercultural revisionist assumption now spread richly to the Right that the U.S. government is the center of all evil in the country and the world. (You noticed that Tucker Carlson began to sound a lot like Noam Chomsky before being booted off the air, right?) Herndon’s assumptions also discounted how both the sense of entitled affluence and fantasy entertainment marination have turned politics into video-game-like bloodsport for many people, engrossing but—and this is the point—not really all that serious. Nihilism, after all, devalues the external as well as corrodes the internal.
It may even be, too, that the fascination with what artificial intelligence might do is luring the coders along as though they’ve just swallowed three tabs of blotter. That they simply must know what unpredictable outcome will emerge next from the GLLMMs they have created constitutes a large part of the failure, so far, to take necessary precautions to protect the species from rogue consequences posed by AI that may or may not be far-fetched. We just don’t know yet, but that’s largely the point.
Some, like the irrepressible technological optimist Ray Kurzweil, think AI is wonderful and holds boundless promise for the future, even if it is a post-human future. Others think he is whistling past the graveyard, failing to understand that a human being is about more than a capacity to ingest data for purposes of instrumental reasoning. The human mind is not so narrowly bound and not all progress is material; we feel and aspire as well as calculate and consume, treasure love and compassion as well as seek adventure and Protean heroism.
In any event, as these three headline examples again tell us, we are way back on our skis in understanding what the cyber-tech revolution is doing to us, as individuals and as a society. We have traced the process forward beginning with television and pre-high-graphic movies in order to get some purchase on what is happening now, and what will happen in the future. We have a lot more to learn, but one thing we do know: The power of the cyberlution has overwhelmed supposed ideological opposites and turned them into tweedle-dee tweedle-dum caricatures of each other. That is something to know.
The borrowing from Left to Right that we have limned sometimes works the other way around, too, with some on the way Left subconsciously, it would appear, now borrowing from the wayward Right. Matthew Connelly’s argument in The Declassification Engine posits a “dark state”--hatched and populated by the adversary culture’s ever popular, omni-explanatory “military-industrial complex”--that is roughly analogous to the internet’s “dark web.” What Connelly seems to have done is taken the MAGA world’s version of the omnibus conspiracy theory of the “deep state” and re-flipped it back to the Left.[15] So we’ve gone from Left to Right and back to Left again, floated along on a stream of evolving vocabulary. Connelly might have spared himself some criticism had he taken more to heart Bernard Williams’s wise warning: “Be cautious when you choose your enemy for you will grow to be more like him.”
[1] Suskind, “Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004.
[2] Established beyond doubt in Melvin P. Leffler, Confronting Saddam Hussein (Oxford, 2023).
[3] Timothy, “The destruction of truth is at the heart of Western cultural decline,” Daily Telegraph, January 15, 2023.
[4] A trivial but telling example may be seen in the U.S. Postal Service’s stamp designs over the years. Several examples can be cited but the clearest one concerns the Final Reunions of both the Union and the Confederate armies. When the last veteran of either army died, the Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp to mark that event. So two stamps were issued with the identical design, one in red for the Union army (issued August 29, 1949) and one in gray for the Confederate army (issued May 30, 1951). The production of the ecumenical atonement subculture continued into my birth year, as well, with Irving Gordon’s once-well known song “Two Brothers,” which my third-grade class learned to sing—in harmony, accompanied by the inevitable autoharp—in 1959. The lyrics to the song are easily found on the internet.
[5] Anyone who came of age in Northern Virginia will readily note examples of renaming. First, long ago already, The Lee Highway became just Lee Highway but, more recently, it has become Langston Boulevard. Washington & Lee Senior High School has become Washington and Justice Senior High School. Jeb Stuart High School is now Justice High School, and so on. To me these changes are neither good nor bad, merely silly and superficial. One does not, because one cannot, confront the sticky legacies of slavery and segregation by pretending to make them disappear.
[6] Timothy, “The destruction of truth is at the heart of Western cultural decline.”
[7] Again, this mimics the logic of Marxism. See the definition of how Marxists used logic like a toggle switch to apply the logic of revisionism to their own needs in the now mostly forgotten analysis of Michael Polanyi. See his “The Magic of Marxism” in Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy (University of Chicago Press, 1958, 1962), pp. 227-33.
[8] Last, “This is Why You’re Exhausted by Politics,” The Bulwark, June 18, 2024.
[9] A mild paraphrase from Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry (Doubleday, 2022), p. 150.
[10] Walther, “Rise of the Barstool Conservative,” This Week, February 1, 2021.
[11] Cervantes, Don Quixote, Part II, Chapter XIII.
[12] See Jane Coaston, “The Debate Hugh Hefner Won and William F. Buckley Lost,” New York Times, March 14, 2023.
[13] Kotlikoff, “Biden Channels Trump,” Economics Matters, July 4, 2024.
[14] The actual quote refers to she and her rather to he and his: Tom Robbins, Fierce Invalids from Hot Climates (Bantam, May 2000), p. 143.
[15] So argues Gabriel Schoenfeld, I suspect correctly, in “Can AI Really Help Solve the Problem of Overclassification?” The Bulwark, February 27, 2023.