On Your Toes, Head on a Swivel
One fable [?] that I find useful in politics is that of the Zen Master:
A boy receives a horse on his 14th birthday, and the people of the village say “Oh how wonderful, he got a horse!”
The Zen Master says, “We’ll see.”
A couple of years later, the boy falls off the horse and breaks his leg. And the people of the village say “How terrible!”
The Zen Master says, “We’ll see.”
A couple of years later, a war breaks out and all of the young men in the village are drafted, except the young man whose leg had been broken. And the people of the village said “How fortunate!”
You get the idea. I enjoy it because most people associate “Zen” with a feeling of serene acceptance, but I feel like it really allows my pessimism to flourish. When something seemingly-good happens, it’s easy enough to say “Eh, it’s probably worse than that.” But also, when something seemingly-bad happens, I get to say “It’s probably bad in ways you haven’t anticipated.”
In the week since Donald Trump’s reelection, there’s been quite a lot of worry among those of us who oppose him as to just what form the impending disaster of his second term is going to take. Some are convinced that we’re headed for an outright Christian Nationalist theocracy, others assume it’s going to be an oligarchy where billionaires are given positions of prominence, still others think it’ll be a kleptocracy where Trump and his band of mammon worshippers use the power of the presidency to personally enrich themselves.
Eh, we’ll see.
That reminds me of that Michael Crichton book [and later Dustin Hoffman/Samuel L. Jackson movie] Sphere where the characters unknowingly manifest their worst fears. The people who most fear a Christian Nationalist theocracy/oligarchy/kleptocracy are also most convinced it’s imminent. Personally, my main concern is not of theocracy, oligarchy, kleptocracy, or any other specific -ocracy per se. I’m most worried about kakistocracy, which is government by the worst people of society. [Which, to be fair, I think is my worst fear as far as this sort of thing goes.] Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., etc. — all of these people have varying personalities and priorities, but their most relevant characteristic is that they’re, well, terrible people. And being governed by terrible people can take any number of forms.
I will say, though, for whatever it’s worth, the prospect that concerns me least of those mentioned is theocracy. And that’s simply because Donald Trump is not a religious person in the slightest, and implementing anything approaching theocratic policies would require some sort of buy-in from the president that Donald Trump simply isn’t capable of providing. The man has had nine years to so much as fake being recognizably Christian, and has yet to do so. So why would he start now? In a certain sense, it’s Christians — particularly evangelicals — being such cheap political dates that actually lessens their influence in government. Not only has Donald Trump paid no price for making a mockery of every issue that Christian voters claim to care about — the man effectively made the Republican platform pro-choice, for God’s sake — he’s been rewarded for it. Trump hasn’t become more Christian, Christians have become more like Trump.
Rather than try to anticipate precisely what form this kakistocracy is going to take, I think it’s more beneficial to just take it as it comes. “We’ll see.” Focusing too much on a particular version of this disaster can lead to a failure of imagination. Which is to say, if you’d told me in 2016 that Trump’s first term would end with a global pandemic in which a million Americans would die, but it would become a tribal marker of Trumpism to oppose even the most basic mitigation efforts, or that Trump himself would spend two months following the 2020 election spreading ridiculous conspiracy theories about voter fraud that culminated in a violent mob of his supporters trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, I would’ve thought that was hysterical nonsense from some Raw Story intern. A failure of imagination. Similarly, if you’d told me on January 7th, 2021, that Republican primary voters would renominate Trump with hardly even nominal opposition, and that Republicans would unite behind him in the general election, I would’ve found that unthinkable. “Surely after the disgrace of January 6th, even elected Republicans would render Trump disqualified; and even if they don’t, surely the general election voters will.” Failure of imagination.
There’s a rising sentiment among Trump opponents that Democrats should basically take a dive in the first two years just to give voters the unvarnished Trump governing experience, in a manifestation of the H.L. Menken quote “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” If he wants to round up seven-to-eight figures’ worth of illegal immigrants, put them in camps, and deport them; if he wants to impose massive tariffs on all imports and drastically raise the price of consumer goods; if he wants to put an honest-to-God Fox and Friends host — and not even the main show! The weekend edition! — in charge of the military; well, we should let ‘im. It’s a sentiment to which I’m at least a little sympathetic. Even in Trump’s first term, I thought the country was perhaps too insulated from Trump’s worse instincts — and thereby too insulated from their own poor electoral choices — from the more responsible forces around Trump. If the People — and it should be noted here that I mean “the People” in the same tone as Bane from The Dark Knight Rises says “the People” — in the People want to be governed by Trump, then by-God they should get governed by Trump.
…but what if it turns out the People like it? Now, don’t misunderstand — failures of imagination aside, I don’t anticipate Donald Trump governing well. But what if…the People just like shitty governance? [You could convince me!] I knew a kid in elementary school who had a terrible habit of biting his nails, to the point that he had almost chewed them completely off. His parents tried coating his nails in this substance that was supposed to make them taste terribly and thereby discourage his habit, but damned if that weirdo didn’t actually enjoy it. So what was there to do?
I see the outcomes of a second Trump administration basically divided into quadrants: Either Trump governs as he said he would, with the deportations and the tariffs and the retribution, or he doesn’t; and either the People like it or they don’t. What happens if we land in that top-left quadrant?
I’ve been saying if Trump won, I wouldn’t be living in the country that I thought I was. And maybe that sounds overly dramatic, but it’s a hell of a thing realizing that everything you grew up believing was basically bullshit, y’know? I don’t mean to rehash my entire political upbringing, but [because I apparently committed unspeakable crimes in a past life] I’ve been interested in politics since I was single-digit years old, and I’ve always been sort of a sentimentalist about it. We’re a good and decent people, and we choose to be governed by good and decent men. We idolized leaders like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln so much that we put them on our money. One of the reasons Bill Clinton was so reviled among my political elders was because he sullied the presidency by being a bad person. He was a bullshitting draft dodger with a trail of sexual impropriety — he didn’t deserve to be in the exclusive club that included Washington and Lincoln — or hell, even Reagan. Ah, but “it’s the economy stupid,” we were famously told by Democrat strategist James Carville. He may have been more correct than even he appreciated, because now none of the qualities we were told mattered in our leaders — honesty, decency, courage, etc. — actually matter if enough of the electorate believes the cost of groceries is too high.
That’s what I think is most difficult to take — it’s not as if Donald Trump is a changed man. He’s learned nothing. If anything, he’s worse. He has never once shown contrition for any of his various misdeeds. And why would he at this point? Some 77 million Americans at best don’t care, and some subset of those look at it and think “yes, finally.” I always knew that there was an element of the electorate that had an amoral streak of “hey, as long as the trains run on time,” but I didn’t appreciate it was enough to make a majority. I see a lot of anti-Trump pundit types struggling with this fact — it messes with our sense of justice, and leads to something of an existential crisis. As in, “if this is just what the People, in all their wisdom, actually desire for our country…what’re we even doing? Why bother with any of it?”
But…we’ll see. Rather than catastrophizing, well, let the catastrophe come to us and we’ll deal with it then. To quote another Samuel L. Jackson movie character, “until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.”
Occasional Trivia
Answer from last time:
Category: Homonyms
Clue: This verb can mean to rotate a movie camera or give a bad review to the finished film.
Pan
Today’s clue:
Category: Constitutional Monarchies
Clue: The constitution of this country allows the monarch to abdicate, which has happened in 1948, 1980, and 2013.
Dispatches from the Homefront
Now that it gets dark so early, my kids are able to see features of the night sky that they don’t normally. We were doing some shopping on Monday and on the way to the car, we could see Venus just after the sun had set.
“Hey look, we can see Venus,” I pointed out.
“Isn’t it cool that we can see all the way to a whole other planet?” added my wife, trying to gin up interest in the kids.
Then my older daughter deadpanned “…Venus rhymes with ‘penis.’”
“I’m really glad that’s what you’re taking from this,” I huffed.
I will never be able to claim she’s not my child.