When they go low...

I was talking politics with my brother-in-law the other day, as we do, and he shared with me his strategic analysis of the 2020 election. "Donald Trump is not invincible," he said. "He's like one of those bosses in a video game where you have to shoot off the armor until the weak spot opens up, then you just hit that over and over again. Like in Star Fox." I giggled tremendously. I knew exactly the analogy he had in mind. The core has appeared, I said in a surfer drawl, stand by to attack!

He then proposed an example of what he has in mind. If Trump has a fundamental weakness, it is that he actually does have a dread of humiliation. Anger, fear, condemnation seem to feed his sense of power -- power as it is always understood by people who are essentially weak in character. But actually being slighted, snubbed, mocked... there's a reason Chaplin perceived that parody can be as effective a tool against dictators, if not more so, than vilification.

My interlocutor therefore proposed an opening gambit for the debate stage. "Warren should say, 'Donald. Your fly's undone.' Just go straight for the elementary school classics."

If Trump is a schoolyard bully, and he is, why not meet him on his own terrain? If children have refined over the centuries the precision arts of humiliation, and they have, why not learn from the masters? Maybe I shouldn't even be writing this here, in case I'm stealing the element of surprise from a device the Warren campaign could have pulled off.

All of which just poses the question that keeps periodically re-materializing in our political culture, in one form or another -- the one about whether "we," at some point, ought not to descend from our horse and try out some of those low-down underhanded tactics that "they," presumptively, have used from the start to obtain power. Whether we should 'stoop to conquer,' that is to say.

Every few months, some Democrat or other will re-pose this question in a new way. It's a very satisfying conversation every time, since it presumes our current virtue, while allowing us the vicarious thrill of hypothetical villainy, with none of the consequences of actually having done something harmful or iniquitous.

I suppose the latest iteration was the recent debate over Michelle Obama's majestic phrase "when they go low, we go high," with various figures in her party declaring that that didn't "work" anymore, and proposing cynical revisions: the most famous being Eric Holder's "when they go low, we kick them." (Actual physical violence, as was hastily clarified, was not being condoned -- and I perhaps should add the same caveat for the Star Fox reference above.)

It's clear where my brother-in-law comes down on this question. He is very clearly on this side of the strategists, and not just in this conversation. We were recently driving in the car and he cited to me a quote from Cicero that he'd found in a book by Frank Luntz (there's something about 1990s Republican operatives and Cicero that I don't fully understand). I bypassed the Cicero and cut straight to the source. Frank Luntz! I roared, practically hopping up and down in my seat. Frank Luntz??

"I know he's, like, the devil," he said. "But we have to learn from these people." This quieted me somewhat. "Well, I guess I can see mastering their dark arts in order to use them against them..." I was willing to offer.

And indeed, this does have a perennial appeal for me. My heart races sometimes at the thought of 'setting the murderous Machiavel to school.' I think, yes, I'm going to go home and finally read The Art of War (either Sun Tzu's or Machiavelli's would work)! And I will emerge being able to come up with all kinds of devious stratagems!

The point in this approach's favor is that it does actually work better. Going high when they go low will fail every time, as you may have noticed. To return us to our opening example, every one of us no doubt discovered this fundamental truth in elementary school at some time or other. Attempting to achieve a moral victory was of no avail, because the superiority of the moral position was precisely the thing that was not perceived by one's tormentors. If it was, they wouldn't be behaving so abominably, now would they?

I recall once rounding upon a group of my classmates in ninth grade Biology, as they were continually interrupting the teacher with chirping noises and a strange obsession that year with squeaking the name "'Arry Po'er" in a high-pitched cockney accent. "You know, you guys are being really immature right now," I said.

Let's just say, I didn't win that round. The accusation of immaturity didn't work any better for me than it did for George McFly.

As George Eliot writes in Felix Holt, "in all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of its dullness." It is an observation that most likely applies to public quarrels as well. Eliot there is talking about a socially coarse lawyer character who embodies a certain male obtuseness that still seems familiar more than a century later, and which is by no means manifest only in our one-to-one interactions.

The reason why dullness triumphs through its very dullness is precisely that a morally refined response to injustice -- a willingness to "go high," to turn the other cheek, etc. -- translates to the moral blockhead as a further sign of victory. Hazlitt has spelt it out well: "All the humility in the world will only pass [with them] for weakness and folly. They have no notion of such a thing. They always put their best foot forward; and argue that you would do the same if you had any such wonderful talents as people say. You had better, therefore, play off the great man at once -- hector, swagger, talk big, and ride the high horse over them."

It should be immediately obvious to everyone -- as it is, evidently, to Eric Holder; as it is to my brother-in-law -- that Hazlitt is right. This is the only possible way of dealing with Trump, in a moral language that he could understand.

The question, however, is whether it is worth being morally understood by Trump or not. Whether it is better to "win," in the sense of the term that he would recognize, or to be what he would consider a "loser."

I suppose it is possible to obtain political power through doing what Trump does. It worked for him. But I certainly am not persuaded that there's any intrinsic value in having Democrats in public office, at any moral cost. The reason why I want them to be in power at the moment is that they are currently -- and however temporarily -- morally superior to the alternative. If they ceased to be so -- and they could easily do it -- they would forfeit the very reason for being desirable.

One can debate the Bible's implication that it does not profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul in the process. But one can quite easily perceive, wherever one lands on that question, that the world certainly profits nothing from it.

In short, one wouldn't be a very good Democrat -- even if one got Democrats into power -- by abolishing the one thing that at the moment sets them apart from the opposition. I am thus thrust back upon the chivalrous notion encapsulated in Richard Lovelace's words, from his poem on the theme of "Going to the Wars," and forsaking his lover in the process:

I could not love thee (Dear) so much,/ Lov’d I not Honour more.

So too, I could not be such a good Democrat, did I not wish the Democrats to lose rather than become Frank Luntz.

Here, then, is where the gathering force of my desire to be more villainous always breaks. One remembers that there is a question to ask beyond whether or not something "works." There is the question of whether or not it is the right thing to do, even if it doesn't "work."

D.H. Lawrence, in his Studies in Classic American Literature, memorably derided Ben Franklin's personal Decalogue -- seeing in it the epitome of a bourgeois hypocrisy -- already fully formed, there, in the very fount and origin of capitalist ideology. Among the Poor Richard dicta he particularly dislikes is the notion that "Honesty is the best policy." ("Don't count your chickens before they hatch" also comes in for a drubbing, see below). Lawrence forces us to take that phrase a bit more literally: what Franklin was saying, after all, is that honesty is in fact the best strategic choice to obtain one's desired ends.

Which rather suggests that if it turns out not to be working so well in the service of one's desired ends, honesty should be out the window.

Writes Lawrence: "although I still believe that honesty is the best policy, I dislike policy altogether; though it is just as well not to count your chickens before they are hatched, it's still more hateful to count them with gloating when they are hatched."

Honesty and the other public virtues, then, might not actually be valuable because they lead to any end beyond themselves. They may actually require a surrender of power and office. At least at times. They may mean that we don't win. This is, after all, the essence of renunciation.

In George Orwell's essay on Tolstoy, he condemns the Russian writer for believing himself to be making sacrifices for the sake of his moral code, and then being surprised when those sacrifices actually make him less well off. In what, exactly, did he think a sacrifice would consist?

So too, Maggie Tulliver reflects, in Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, on the fact that when true renunciation takes place, it hurts, by definition: "Philip had been right when he told her that she knew nothing of renunciation; she had thought it was quiet ecstasy; she saw it face to face now,–that sad, patient, loving strength which holds the clue of life,–and saw that the thorns were forever pressing on its brow."

I am in favor, therefore, of losing. Or of being a loser in Trump's eyes. I'd prefer it a thousand times to being a person of the sort he would regard as a winner.

Another way of saying this comes from the great Tom Magliozzi, of Car Talk fame, who used to ask himself and his listeners whether they would "rather be right, or be happy." In his obituary his brother Ray noted that Tom, in his own life, always made his choice clear -- he would rather be right.