The National Interest

 For most of my life, I firmly believed that one could never err on the side of pleading for "restraint" in American foreign policy. I figured the self-interest of the nation was so obviously on the side of aggrandizement that no one needed to advocate further for that position. The political system would always select for the "hawks" and those bent on advancing U.S. power; so the "responsibility of intellectuals," in the Chomskyan sense, would always be to try to counteract this drive. 

What I didn't pay enough attention to was the possibility that there might be people whose personal self-interest was so at odds with the interests of the country that they might actually succeed in shifting our foreign policy toward the goals of our country's adversaries. I gave short shrift, I fear, to the risks posed by that group of individuals, whom the military historian Edward Creasy dubbed: "a body of intriguing malcontents, who were eager to purchase a party-triumph at the expense of a national disaster."

Heart's Needle

 I've reached that time in the fall semester when the invisible thread connecting me to my nephew and niece starts to pull. It's been too long since I've seen them. I even get paranoid and sad. How much have they changed in the interval? Do they even remember me? I tell myself it's only been a few months. But months make up whole percentage points of their existence to date. 

I hope my thoughts can somehow reach them across the invisible lines of connection. I remind myself of the words of Basil Bunting's heartbreaking poem, written to the son he never met: "Unseen is not unknown..." he said. But then he had to confess, in the stanza's closing lines, such consolations amounted only to "Words late, lost, dumb."

Avoidance Systems

 Back in 2018—the same year Donald Trump was carrying out his family separation policy at the border—I was doing all in my power not to think about politics. Part of it was that I had to spend every moment at work thinking and writing about Trump already (I worked at a human rights advocacy organization, after all). The rare chance when I had free time at home felt like an opportunity to detox from "the news." So on the weekends of that year, I spent an uncharacteristic amount of time reading about things like art history, which I took to be politically neutral. 

It's partly that I knew that, if I read about politics directly, it would carry me away. The first word on the subject would then exhaustingly force me to log onto this website, and write even more about it, and then I'd have to write about what I'd written, and there would be no escape. So I calculatedly confined my reading only to those things that I thought would inspire no further ideas or blogs on my part. And, to an extent, I appear to have succeeded. Looking back at this blog's timeline, I see that 2018 was the year with the fewest completed posts. 

What Happened?

 I talked last time about how Wilhelm Reich's diagnosis of the psychology of fascism still rings true in the Trump era, and I stand by it. But even more than the answers that Reich provides (to the question, that is, of what explains the rise of fascism) I find that his way of posing the question resonates with our time. In a sense, after all, Reich was asking the same question Hillary Clinton famously did, after unexpectedly losing the 2016 election by a hair: "What Happened?"

I'm talking here about the first, 1933 edition of the book—not so much the later sections that Reich added in 1942, which partake more of his usual sexual mumbo-jumbo (and which I confess I haven't finished yet). By 1942, obviously, the United States had entered the war, and the ultimate victory of democracy seemed a bit more assured. The 1933 sections—by contrast—were written fresh on the heels of Hitler's seizure of power, and therefore with much more urgency. 

Paging Dr. Freud

 Of all the theories put forward in the 1930s to explain the rise of fascism, I have to say that the psychoanalytic one always struck me as the least plausible. Most of the Freudian theses have not held up well over the decades, after all. But I have to say, after Tucker Carlson's bizarre pivot into a rant about "spanking," during a Trump rally yesterday—I'm going to have to give those theories a second look. 

Carlson's rant—as reported in the New York Times—is, it must be said, a masterpiece of its kind in the insane fulminations of the authoritarian personality. In one go, it managed to combine election denialism, a vague call to stage a putsch if Trump loses the vote on November 5, Southern "lost cause" Neo-Confederatism—and, most prominently, Tucker's own bizarre sado-masochistic incest fantasy. 

Talking Our Extinction to Death

 Over at my other blog—which tends to be more professionally geared—I published a piece a week ago about how Trump's recent rhetoric has gotten even more overtly authoritarian than it was before. I compared his words against the rhetoric of fictional dictators from literature, to argue that Trump's speeches read like someone's parody of the "bad guy" from some hypothetical dystopian future. 

I don't claim the point was original. But it was impassioned. It was witty. At some level, I feel it was the best thing I ever wrote on that blog. 

Errata and Marginalia 028: Defoe

 Daniel Defoe, The Political History of the Devil (Mineola, New York: Dover, 2016; originally published in 1726). 

Well! That was one of the stranger books I've ever read. I have no obvious way to account for it other than to remind us that Defoe—like many of the greatest authors in history—wrote for money. This book is padded and uneven, and meanders and loses its thread, perhaps most of all because Defoe was under a deadline and needed to keep the pot boiling. 

But what sort of book is this? In Defoe's outstanding introductory chapter, he promises us a sort of biography of Satan. He tells us that he will track the progress of the Devil's actions throughout human history—from ancient times to the present. And he does it all with a witty polemical tongue that keeps us doubting exactly how literally and in what spirit he intends us to take all this. 

Aubade

 Tonight I'd had about fifteen minutes of quasi-sleep—a lucid-dreaming welsh rabbit kind of state—when I was suddenly jolted awake in terror. The past days, weeks, months, years of steadily mounting panic about the upcoming election had suddenly concentrated to a point. There was no way out. The election is only two weeks away, as of today. Our fate cannot be delayed any further. 

And no matter how much I try to convince myself otherwise, the two binary outcomes of this election are roughly equally likely at this point. Two weeks from now, I am just as likely to be living in one of those two futures as the other. 

With Malice Toward None

 The New York Times was quoting yesterday a Wisconsin progressive group that is very annoyed about the extent to which Charlie Sykes has been able to reinvent himself as a mainstream moderate, in the Trump era. A decade ago, they argue, he was a couple degrees to the right of Rush Limbaugh. He was promoting election denialism before the Kraken was even a glimmer in Sidney Powell's eye. But now, just because he's anti-Trump, everyone is suddenly cool with him?

They were particularly miffed that Harris was agreeing to an interview with him. For left-wing Wisconsinites, who remember him best for his role in the ugly Scott Walker–era fights over the so-called "right to work" law, the change is particularly jarring. As they remember him, Sykes "was the shrieking voice that there was voter fraud everywhere for 10 years," a Wisconsin progressive summarizes. "Now the mainstream Democratic apparatus has embraced him because he’s right on Trump."

The Websterians

 Look, I'm obviously enough of a Democratic Establishment type that I'm voting for Kamala Harris in this election. I've donated to her campaign as well. My mind never required making up on any of that. I was on team "unite the left in a popular front to defeat Trump" as far back as 2016. And certainly nothing that has happened since then would convince me I was wrong about that. 

But I'm not such a Democratic Party hack that I would withhold all criticism of Harris's policy positions until after the election. I recognize this is somewhat in tension with what I said just yesterday. In that post, I argued that the shameless Harris stans on social media should keep the brat summer magic going for at least a few weeks more. So maybe I'm contradicting myself here...

When Will You Find Patience?

 At some point over the summer, just when we needed it to happen, the internet suddenly discovered that Kamala Harris was cool. Overnight, her approval rating went from underwater to positive. You can see the whole process unfold on 538's tracker. The purple line improbably skyrockets starting sometime in July. Simultaneously and collectively, the nation completely changed its mind. 

I'm thrilled that it happened. It made the election winnable again. But it has also always made me nervous. Since the change was so miraculous and sudden and inexplicable to start with—I've always been scared that it could evaporate and reverse just as quickly. And already, online, I feel like I'm starting to see faint signs that this is the case. 

False Situations

 No sooner had I finished my recent post about Julien Gracq's 1951 novel The Opposing Shore than tensions flared between our real-life Orsenna and Farghestan in the Pacific: by which I mean Taiwan and the People's Republic of China. This week, the PRC military engaged in an unprecedentedly aggressive set of war games, completely encircling Taiwan in what can only be seen as a dangerous sign of escalating tensions between the countries—if not a threat of something even worse (like a looming invasion). 

As you may recall, the mythic nations in Gracq's novel are engaged in a long-simmering conflict in which there are no active hostilities—but neither has peace been officially declared. In this regard, Gracq's fictional premise could be regarded as a stand-in for any number of real-world geopolitical conflicts dating from the twentieth century that have never been formally resolved: the uneasy truce between North and South Korea, say—or, to the point here, the dispute over the political status of Taiwan. 

The Lyncher's Mentality

 In a recent run-down of Trump's meandering interview before the Economic Club of Chicago, two writers for Rolling Stone describe a uniquely bizarre moment. It should go down in the history books as perhaps quintessential Trump. Rarely has there been an episode of his rhetorical bombast that so completely encapsulated his character and combined so many of his most disturbing obsessions. 

The conversation was supposed to be about Trump's economic policies, but of course, he seized every chance to instead redirect the discussion to his pet topics: crime and immigration. At one point, according to the reporters, he suddenly pointed to a woman seated in the audience. Trump said she was a "beautiful" woman, and added that immigrants coming across the border "will kill you." 

The Masks We Wear

 Earlier this week, J.D. Vance sat down for an unusual unscripted interview with the New York Times. One of the first things that piques one's curiosity, as it does in any conversation with Vance, is the question of how exactly he manages to look himself in the mirror. How can he live with himself, after completely reversing his positions and selling out his own values so many times over the course of his career? 

The interviewer's polite way of edging into this topic was to tell Vance that she was not sure, going into the discussion, "which J.D. was going to show up." He has so many chameleon shades. Vance's response to this was revealing: "Isn't that how most people are?" As in: doesn't everyone have this gnawing emptiness and void inside that makes them able to contort themselves into new forms without remorse? 

Poets of the Event

 If the American people do decide to elect Donald Trump again, three weeks from now—future historians will be hard pressed to explain why exactly we decided to throw out our democracy after two and a half centuries of relatively stable existence. Don't believe any of the would-be sociological explanations they may provide. The United States didn't suffer defeat in any major wars on the eve of Trump's re-election. There was no obvious national humiliation. We were not experiencing a recession or widespread unemployment. Our economy was growing and remained the largest in the world. 

We had our share of valid grounds for discontent, to be sure; our society was still rife with many of the same inequities and dispossessions that had plagued it for the last two-and-a-half centuries—but that doesn't explain why now, why in 2024. Nor do people's legitimate grievances about society explain why so many collectively hallucinated that a raving narcissistic demagogue would solve any of them (especially since he had not managed to solve them the previous time he was in office, and in fact had left the country worse off and had tried to stage a coup on his way out the door). 

Our Firebug Problem

 We truly do have a Firebug problem in this election. What I mean by that is: no matter how clearly Trump telegraphs his violent and authoritarian intentions, people simply will not believe him. Thus, our nation is in the same position as the protagonist Biedermann in Max Frisch's 1950s play, The Firebugs. The evidence keeps piling up in his attic that his newfound guests intend to start a conflagration. They even brought drums full of petrol and lots of matches. But he simply refuses to take the threat seriously. 

The New York Times reports today, for instance, on the surprisingly large share of Latino voters who support Trump. Most do not endorse, when asked, his plans for mass deportation. But they also insist that Trump does not really mean it. Reporter Jazmine Ullua writes that those who are aware of his pledges tend to "believe he will not go through with such actions, because he did not the first time he was in office." Ruth Igelnick adds: "40 percent said people who are offended by Trump are taking him too seriously." 

A Visit to the Unworld

 Surely one of the most embarrassing chapters in the modern history of the Left is the era when all the seemingly thoughtful and intelligent progressive writers were letting themselves be taken in by the dozens as dupes of the Stalinist regime. There is almost no worse genre of left-wing literature than the 1930s fellow-traveling memoir touting collective farms as a charming success (while somehow managing to avert their eyes to the purges, famine, and secret police standing stage left). 

One after another, these writers visited the fatherland of the socialist revolution, and they returned to the West to offer starry-eyed accounts of the progress they had seen. There were endless paeans to tractors, from people who had survived carefully stage-managed Intourist trips that offered them a guided tour only of the various Potemkin villages that the Soviet state wanted them to see. And all too many never dared to peek behind the cardboard cutouts to see what was on the other side.  

Charitable Inconsistency

 I just finished reading James Hogg's rediscovered classic, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner—a Gothic novel on the theme of Protestant fanaticism that was published two hundred years ago, then forgotten for a century, until André Gide (who knew something about Protestant fanaticism) happened upon it in 1924 (the centennial year of its first publication). Since 2024 is now the novel's bicentennial, and its ghoulish elements befit the month of October, I suppose it is an appropriate time to write about it here. 

The novel works equally well as supernatural horror and a darkly comic satire on Calvinism. Put briefly, it tells the story of a man so thoroughly convinced of the truth of "absolute predestination" that he carries it to antinomian extremes. Since the justified have already been chosen from eternity for salvation, he reasons—then nothing they do in this life can possibly put their blessed future estate in jeopardy. Thus, they can sin with impunity. He therefore proceeds to commit murder and other atrocities, in the belief that no harm can ever come to the saints from their own actions. 

The Pursuit of Ignorance

 At a certain point in his classic autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, the titular historian and Boston scion describes his attempts as a young scholar to publish an article on the subject of monetary retrenchment. In the wake of the Civil War, the U.S. government had issued a large supply of paper currency that it allowed to exceed the extent of its gold reserves. This was the country's first experiment with fiat currency, and it was highly controversial at the time—particularly among New England conservatives—because (in Adams's telling), it was seen as an affront to the idea that money has to be backstopped—ultimately—by "intrinsic value." 

Adams—as a good son of New England (albeit one whose family always had a conflicted relationship with the forces that he shorthands as "State Street," which seems to stand in—for him—for capitalism and the financial class)—initially set out to prove that the U.S. needed to follow the path of Great Britain, and pull back its money supply in peacetime until it matched the country's gold reserves. Yet, as he set about his studies, he in fact found the opposite was the case. Britain's experience in retrenching its currency, he found, had been widely regarded as a mistake. They ought to have simply let their paper money alone. 

Weird

 This summer, Tim Walz secured his status as Harris's inevitable VP pick by delivering his immortal diagnosis of the Trump-Vance campaign: "These guys are weird." It was all-but universally conceded to be a great line—one that defined the campaign going forward. As messaging, it was brilliant. It got us out of the high-minded, lofty rhetoric that had already worn thin for people, and risked becoming a cliché, and brought us back to some awareness of the gut-level ick factor that Trump and Vance evoke. 

But there's also a potential problem with it. Namely—who ever said being weird was a bad thing? A lot of Americans bear the term with a sense of pride. Molly Ball, writing for the Wall Street Journal, profiled a big-tent right-wing conspiracist event this week, bringing together every possible variety of crank, eccentric, and oddball in the country, and she notes that many of them treated being "weird" as a badge of honor. "I consider myself a weirdo," one of them told her—in a particularly telling line. 

Cloister, Father of the Cat People

 Shortly after J.D. Vance set loose his bogus (and dangerously racist) urban legend about Haitian immigrants supposedly eating cats, it was not long before the memes started appearing on right-wing social media riffing on the theme. Several of them asserted some version of: "Kamala Harris hates cats." 

I found this odd, since just a few weeks earlier, Vance had been much in the news for calling Harris a "childless cat-lady" in a 2021 podcast. So which one was it? Is she a cat lady? Or does she detest the animal? One can say many things of someone you accuse of being a "cat lady"—but surely being anti-cat is not one of them? 

Madness!

 In the otherwise dry and policy-oriented vice presidential debate that just concluded, there was one absolutely jaw-dropping moment. This occurred when Walz got around to asking J.D. Vance point-blank whether he conceded that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.

This was a great strategy on Walz's part. Vance, throughout the night, was trying to portray himself as a reasonable and moderate person—not someone who was living in an alternative epistemic universe from the rest of us. And yet, as Donald Trump's running mate, he cannot explicitly disavow the former president's most bananas claims about things; they are, after all, the official positions of his campaign. The best Vance can do, when these things come up, is to ignore, downplay, and dodge.