Spring and Fall

 My sister was telling me this afternoon about her recent efforts to clean the house. When she decided to give away a pair of old sandals, she was surprised by the level of resistance she encountered from my nephew. "Mom," he said, "you can't get rid of your sandals!" He retrieved them from the give-away box, and proceeded to shed tears over the prospect of losing them. 

This struck some deeply familiar chord in me from childhood. I immediately thought of all the inanimate objects whose loss similarly grieved me at his age. One might say—but they weren't even his sandals! But I distinctly recall feeling similarly heartbroken for days as a child when my parents decided to replace the carpet in one of our rooms; and it was not even my own. 

The Tarpeian Rock

 Reading Anatole France's classic historical novel of the French Revolution, The Gods Will Have Blood, one is astounded to realize that here, in a novel published just a few years before the First World War, is a prophecy of all the madness and delusion of the century of revolution that would follow it. Of course, it is no original insight in me that the Bolsheviks ended up recapitulating all the errors and obscenities of the Jacobin Terror. But it is astounding to see just how closely the parallels ran—and how much suffering humanity might have avoided if they had heeded the lessons of France's great novel—instead of proceeding to re-enact all of its bloodiest events, just a few years after it was published. 

In France's fanatical protagonist, Évariste Gamelin—who turns himself into a mass murderer and metaphorical parricide, all through the purest of Rousseauian intentions—we find all of the sophistries that the twentieth century's own revolutionaries would later use to acquit themselves of their own atrocities. He tells himself—we are killing the enemies of the state in order that it may one day be possible that the state will no longer have to kill. We are executing for the sake of ending capital punishment. One is reminded of that absurd quotation attributed to Lenin: that he and his fellow Revolutionaries were deploying coercion only so as to bring about the abolition of all coercion...

Cricket

Friends, I won't lie to you—this week's news has been sickening. Over the last eight years, we've watched as Donald Trump steadily purged the Republican Party of anyone who had an ounce of integrity. And now that he is poised to seize power again, the only people left are the ones who have passed through that strainer. As a result, Trump's cabinet picks this week have been a kind of sycophant olympics. The people who were willing to divest themselves of every lingering shred of self-respect are now, perversely, the only ones in a position to reap the rewards. 

There are Trump's downright incendiary picks: like his proposal to install Tulsi Gabbard at the head of the nation's intelligence community—despite (or because of) the fact that she is mostly known for her eerie sympathy with America's adversaries and for being Russian state media's favorite American politician (after, perhaps, Donald Trump himself). There are the picks that smack of sheer MAGA trollery—such as proposing Matt Gaetz as the next Attorney General, or installing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the head of the nation's public health agencies. 

Jolly Escaped Asses

 One of the grossest things about this post-election week is how exuberant the U.S. stock market has been at the result. Trump campaigned on threats of mass deportation and destroying the Earth's climate—and now the country's richest seem positively gleeful about that fact. 

From a certain perspective, of course, all this makes sense in terms of crass self-interest. A Republican victory in the election almost certainly means the extension of Trump's tax cuts when they expire next year. Plus there's deregulation and all the rest of it. 

The Authoritarian Personality

 Now that the worst has happened and Donald Trump is definitely coming back to the White House, we are all experiencing the temptation to try to normalize him. It's hard to do otherwise. We have to get on with our lives, after all. Most of us don't plan to leave our native country just because a bully wins an election and threatens us. So we look desperately for any signs that might tell us: "meh, this will be survivable. He won't be so bad—or at least, no worse than he was during his first term." 

A New York Times article expresses a hope that's been on many of our minds: maybe Trump will somehow mellow out. Now that he's won the ultimate prize he sought, maybe he won't be so anxious to follow through on his threats of revenge. Maybe he will just bask in being the center of attention and forget his worst plans. "After all," Peter Baker writes, "he has essentially gotten everything he wants." But he adds: this take is almost certainly underestimating the depths of Trump's rage and resentment.

The Blood in the Streets

Truly, as Brecht once said, we live in dark times. In Amsterdam this past week, soccer hooligans mounted a series of antisemitic riots and attacks, in a city where some residents are still old enough to recall the Nazi occupation. There is a particularly disturbing resonance to the fact that this violence is coming so close to the anniversary of Kristallnacht this weekend...

Any of us who live near university campuses or major cities have probably seen similar displays of antisemitism over the past year. Many have not been as egregiously violent—but people have been threatened for wearing the Star of David or accosted for waving Israeli flags. And, at many Gaza-related protests, signs that appear to endorse the atrocities of October 7 have been more the default than the exception. One could find a "Glory to the Martyrs" banner at just about every one. 

Actually, Harris Did Everything Right

 I have no appetite for the intra-party recriminations that have dominated the conversation on the Left this past week—the "blame game," as one New York Times article put it. For one thing, it seems to me this conversation is completely unproductive. For another, it mostly seems to help Trump. Turning on our own leaders and institutions in a moment of defeat is an all-too-common left-wing vice, and I don't see how anyone benefits from it except the Right. 

But most importantly of all, I just don't think any of the recriminations ring true. Let's take them one at a time.