Falling

 I dropped off to sleep around midnight with a glow of last-minute hope in my belly. I thought: "Harris is still going to win this. They just haven't counted all the absentee ballots in the Blue Wall states yet. Once they do, the numbers will shift in her favor." And I was chanting to myself "don't believe the red mirage... don't believe the red mirage..." as my eyes closed for the night. 

Then my eyes flew open again around three in the morning. And I made the mistake of checking the news. I couldn't help myself. I refreshed the New York Times homepage—to discover that Trump is now just one vote away from taking the electoral college. J.D. Vance is already on stage kissing the ass of the man he once called "America's Hitler," calling it the "political comeback" of the century. 

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.