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.