Daddy Issues

 In his book Moses and Monotheism, Freud writes at one point that many people "have a strong need for authority which they can admire, to which they can submit, and which dominates and sometimes even ill-treats them." (Jones trans.) 

He goes on to argue that this desire comes down to us in adulthood from the ambivalence many people feel in childhood toward their fathers: at once idealized and feared, the father inspires in many children a mixture of dread—Freud's castration anxiety—as well as a desire to win his approval. And thus, in adulthood, the neurotic individual goes seeking in modern society for a substitute father who will embody these principles—cruel, authoritarian, yet capable of bestowing his mercies on those he deems suitable. 

Year of Blood and Madness

 Now that we have reached the last day of 2025, more than one person is commenting on what a truly awful year it was. And indeed, stepping back and beholding the entire thing in retrospect, it is plain just how rotten it was from the standpoint of the human spirit. We can see this most clearly by comparing how things stood a year ago with where they stand today. 

This time, a year ago, 150 innocent people had not yet been abducted from their homes and deported—in violation of a U.S. court order—to a secret torture prison in El Salvador. The man who masterminded this atrocity and willfully chose to breach court orders had not yet been rewarded for his efforts with a lifetime appointment as a federal circuit judge. 

The Weirdest Psychoanalyst

 Wilhelm Reich is surely one of the nuttiest figures ever to achieve a degree of mainstream respectability in psychiatry. I suspect the explanation lies in the fact that the entire field of Freudian psychoanalysis always lent itself to a certain degree of madness—particularly in the form of delusions of grandeur—with its arrogant reductionism—its conviction that it had found a single key to unlock all human mysteries. And so, a genuine monomaniac could easily find shelter in its ranks for decades before pushing his theories to such extremes that even his colleagues started to raise an eyebrow. 

Many of Reich's weirdest traits, after all, seem like mere amplifications and magnifications of the worst aspects of Freud. If you thought Freud had a one-track mind, after all—wait until you get a load of his wayward disciple Reich. The Viennese master may have reduced all of dream symbolism to sexuality. It was left to Reich to do him one better, and reduce all of matter and the universe to the same subject. 

The "Democratic" Opposition?

 The Nobel Committee chose this past year to honor the leader of Venezuela's opposition party, María Corina Machado, with its annual peace prize. And look, I share the world's hopes for an end to Maduro's brutal dictatorship and the restoration of free elections in Venezuela (although I reject the proposal of waging an illegal U.S. invasion or covert regime-change operation as legitimate means to get there). 

Still, it does not bode well to me that the leader of Venezuela's ostensible democratic opposition so far cannot bring herself to denounce Trump's murderous extrajudicial killings of Venezuelan citizens, his abduction of 150 innocent people to a torture prison in El Salvador, or his stripping of temporary protected legal status from hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan refugees living in the United States. 

Christmas Day Massacre

 My mom pointed out early in the day yesterday that Trump was bound to do or say something outrageous on Christmas—because he wouldn't be able to stand that people would otherwise spend the day focusing on something other than him. 

I checked the news about 4 PM though, and didn't see much. "Guess not," I shrugged. I thought we might actually be spared Trump's lunatic bids for attention, for once. 

The Infamous Ritual

 A federal judge this week rejected the government's attempt to re-detain Kilmar Abrego Garcia. She found, among other things, that Abrego was willing to depart for Costa Rica immediately, and that this country—renowned for its clement environment, low crime rates, and stable, rights-respecting, democratic political institutions—had agreed to grant him refuge. 

Nonetheless, the government had repeatedly told this federal judge that the only country willing to accept Abrego was Liberia, and that they were going to insist on sending him to this African nation, even though he has no cultural ties there, and it would place him thousands of miles further away from his family and loved ones. 

The Big Bubble Debate

 In his Short History of Financial Euphoria, John Kenneth Galbraith offers a list of tell-tale signs of a speculative mania: 1) leverage—too much debt backed by too few solid assets; 2) reinventing the wheel—fundamentally old financial ideas (usually leverage again) repackaged as bold new innovations; and 3) a younger, "supremely self-confident" generation on the financial scene that is smitten with a new technology. 

This new technology is generally proclaimed  to be a game-changer that will reset all the rules of economic life. (Galbraith describes the mood as one in which "[s]omething seemingly exciting and innovative [has] captured the public imagination," creating a belief in "an investment opportunity rich in imagined prospects but negligible in any calm view of reality.")

Afraid of the Light

 Reportedly, Bari Weiss—she of the supposed "Free Press"—has used her newfound powers as head of CBS news to spike a story set to air on 60 Minutes about the torture prison in El Salvador, CECOT, to which Trump sent 250 innocent people without charge or trial earlier this year. She claimed the story needed further reporting. The journalists who worked on the segment (which had already cleared internal review) think there's another explanation. 

Indeed, it's not hard to imagine what might be in Weiss's mind here. She was brought on board specifically in order to reshape the ideological tenor of CBS News to make it more acceptable to Trump (her hiring came on the heels of a major settlement deal, after all, in which the CBS parent company Paramount agreed to pay Trump a massive cash settlement—and also conspicuously moved to take the Trump critic Colbert off the air shortly thereafter). 

Tocqueville and the Second Republic

 Alexis de Tocqueville's Recollections—his memoir of the 1848 revolution in France and its aftermath—is a fascinating book. But the portrait of the author that emerges from its pages is one very different from what one might expect, if we knew him only from Democracy in America. Gone is the intellectual humility and value pluralism that we know from Tocqueville's theoretical and sociological treatises. In its place, we find a certain moral arrogance, a snarky sense of humor (willing to mercilessly skewer his contemporaries on the point of an epigram), and a constant desire to justify himself. 

I suspect partly that Tocqueville's wish to portray himself as the hero of his own story—the man who knew all and foresaw all, and behaved at all times with superlative honor—stems from a subconscious awareness that, in reality, he played a fairly compromised role in the events he describes. He defends the temporary military dictatorship of Cavaignac, for instance—and the "state of siege" that suspended civil liberties in the wake of the June uprising of 1848—as necessary measures to save the nation. 

Blood for Oil

 Back during the Bush years, it was a stock criticism on the Left of George W. Bush's Iraq War to say that the whole thing was being fought for oil. The administration might talk a big game about democracy and freedom—we said—but really they just wanted to get their hands on a lucrative asset. 

Who knows now if this was true or not—or if it was even an important question in assessing the overall morality of the 2003 invasion—which, whatever its motive—ended up being absolutely catastrophic in its consequences. 

Malodorous Brain

 Trump's obscene statement last weekend about the death of Hollywood legend Rob Reiner was generally regarded as a new moral low—even for him. In his rambling social media remarks, Trump not only cruelly mocked the murder victims, he also insinuated (baselessly) that Reiner had been killed by an angry Trump supporter for daring to criticize the president. 

Usually—in the wake of a killing or act of mass violence—political leaders try to distance themselves and their supporters from the crime. They say: "oh no, our side is never violent; only the other side is violent."

Mr. MacLaurel

 FBI deputy director and right-wing provocateur Dan Bongino announced yesterday that he would shortly be stepping down from his role in the executive branch, seemingly to return to his previous life as a MAGA podcast host. 

During his time in the administration, Bongino was mostly known for a few conspicuous flip-flops on key investigations. As a right-wing podcaster, he had promoted conspiracy theories about the January 6 pipe-bombing case, for instance. But once he was actually serving in government, he had to defend the FBI's real investigation into the alleged attack—which ended up pointing in a totally different direction from the baseless theories Bongino had once amplified. 

Tocqueville and Predistributionism

 In my post yesterday, I portrayed Alexis de Tocqueville (not inaccurately) as a critic of universal basic income. And indeed, there's much in his first "Memoir on Pauperism" (1835) that would give aid and comfort to the critics of today's welfare state. Any "law which regularly, permanently, and uniformly gives assistance to indigents," he writes, will operate as a sort of "poisoned seed" in society (Henderson trans.). What is to be found in that sentence with which "FreedomWorks" or "Americans for Prosperity" would not agree? 

Still, though, I don't wish to leave the impression that Tocqueville was merely a proto-libertarian. It would be unjust to see him as a precursor to Hayek or Von Mises who rejected all forms of state intervention in the economy that might benefit the poor. Tocqueville was far too honest and clear-sighted a thinker for that. He was willing to see how a "good principle," like aiding the poor, could nonetheless sometimes yield a bad result; but he also wasn't one to throw up his hands in despair at that point and say oh, therefore, reform is always doomed; "as things are they remain" (Clough). 

Clownwashing

 Susie Wiles's unexpectedly revealing interview with Vanity Fair this week is being widely interpreted as an unforced error on the administration's part. In the course of the discussion, Wiles reportedly offered a shocking number of seemingly unvarnished opinions on her colleagues—most of which have been interpreted as damaging for the administration she serves. All of this has left many media observers baffled as to what Wiles was thinking. 

I wonder though—for my part—if there wasn't something more calculated behind this. Yes, Wiles in the interview did offer a lot of apparently damning verdicts on her boss and his friends: Trump has an "alcoholic's personality"; Vance is implied to be a cynical opportunist who made a heel-turn in his political convictions in order to advance his career; Musk is a weirdo who sleeps during the daytime; Vought is a right-wing extremist; etc. 

Distributing Dirt

 I only catch glimpses of it through the Substacks I follow, but much of the policy world has apparently been engaged in a cantankerous back-and-forth, over the past six months, about the benefits of cash aid. 

For years, pundits on both the left and the right had been drawn to universal basic income (UBI) as a potential solution to social inequity. Libertarian-leaning voices on the right applauded the idea, on the theory that it might be cheaper and easier to administer than the current bureaucratic welfare state. Meanwhile, leftists of the techno-utopian variety saw it as the only just way to share out the benefits of AI innovation and to compensate people for the inevitable job displacement that will occur from the coming wave of automation. 

The Innocent

 Of all the horrific reports to emerge from the terrorist attack this weekend at Bondi Beach in Australia, one image stands out to me: that of a mother trying to distract her toddler from the violence and mayhem unfolding around them by telling them a story. 

It brought to mind another image, from two years previously: a mother in Israel bent over her young son in October 2023, trying to distract him with a comic book in order to lessen his terror from the air raid siren that was blaring overhead. 

One Black Square

 Vladimir Putin's ongoing criminal invasion of Ukraine provoked a lot of misguided backlash against Russian people who had nothing to do with the Kremlin's actions. Suddenly, Russian opera stars were being subjected to new political tests that were not (to my knowledge) demanded of any non-Russian performers. Political actors around the world have called for measures that would collectively punish the Russian people for the crimes of their government—such as legally-questionable proposals to expropriate frozen Russian central bank assets for use in the reconstruction of Ukraine. 

But a story published in the New York Times yesterday illustrates just how wrong we are to tar all Russians with the same brush. It describes the fate of one of Russia's most popular entertainers—Ivan Urgant—who lost his job and livelihood merely because he dared to post a black square on Instagram alongside the message "No to War!" Immediately after he had issued this innocuous statement, the channel that ran his program canceled his show, citing "important sociopolitical events." 

The Invisible Future

 Those of us who mostly know about Alexander Herzen from the works of Isaiah Berlin—which is probably just about everyone in the English-speaking world who has heard of him at all—probably have a clear image in their mind of who he was, and what he stood for. Among the various Russian socialists and revolutionaries of the nineteenth century, we know, Herzen stood out as the proto-liberal; the anti-totalitarian. When others dreamed of sacrificing whole generations and civilizations on the altar of Revolution, Herzen stood apart and begged for reason, temperance, and empirical methods. 

It's the image of Herzen that found its way, for instance, into Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia—itself based on Berlin's works. Those of us who have read Berlin's Russian Thinkers will recognize this version of Herzen easily: it's the reason he became one of our liberal heroes and archetypes before we'd even read him. 

A Tale of Two Nativities

 Our ever-repulsive Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, has time and again sought to join her colleagues in the administration in a race to the bottom to see who can post the cruelest and most morally ugly meme on social media. 

Time and again, high-level figures in the government—plus the official social media accounts of U.S. executive departments—have attempted to make light of the human suffering caused by their own policies—rendering images of crying immigrants in handcuffs into the style of "Studio Ghibli" anime; crafting "jokey" names for immigration detention camps; bragging about locking people up in torturous conditions while riffing on Sabrina Carpenter lyrics, etc. 

A Complacent Gesture of Freedom

 There was some long-overdue good news yesterday in the Abrego Garcia case. A federal judge ordered him released from ICE detention, and the government now has no immediate prospect, at least, of following through on their attempts to deport him to Liberia, or Uganda, or any of the other improbable locations they have floated as ultimate destinations, purely in order to retaliate against him for daring to assert his legal and human rights. 

All of this is surely good news. And yet: he still has to check in periodically with ICE agents. The administration has vowed meanwhile to fight "tooth and nail" to appeal Judge Xinis's order and somehow re-deport him or separate him from his family.

An Afghanistan Picture Show

 In the wake of the recent attack on two National Guardsmen in Washington, D.C., there has been a depressingly predictable wave of anti-Afghan scapegoating and stigmatizing—much of it fanned directly, of course, by our scapegoater-in-chief, Donald Trump. In the immediate aftermath of the attack, he froze all asylum hearings and banned travel for Afghan refugees (many of whom were already subject to his earlier xenophobic travel restrictions anyway). 

When the Wall Street Journal op-ed page—of all people—condemned this (correctly) as an unfair form of "collective punishment," Trump's top lieutenant Stephen Miller fired back on social media to publicly promote the idea of collectively condemning whole societies—including future generations—on the basis of the actions of one individual. "At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands," he wrote.

Burn Me!

 Based on a leaked DOJ memo exclusively reported over on Ken Klippenstein's Substack, it sounds like the administration really is going to follow through on their threats to investigate political dissidents as alleged "domestic terrorists." 

To get the ball rolling, the FBI has reportedly been tasked with compiling a list of individuals and organizations with alleged ties to "Antifa" (a quasi-fictional entity)—and who are "engaging in acts that may constitute domestic terrorism." Warning signs  supposedly include holding certain proscribed beliefs, such as "opposition to [...] immigration enforcement; extreme views in favor of mass migration and open borders; [...] radical gender ideology [;] anti-capitalism," etc. 

Slander the Murdered

 The scrutiny on Capitol Hill this week of the alleged "double-tap" drone strike on a boat in the Caribbean has revealed something profoundly disturbing: namely, the large number of our elected officials, both in Congress and the executive branch, who now just officially and publicly support the extrajudicial execution of anyone suspected of transporting drugs. 

Which—as a friend of mine pointed out the other week—places our government on the same moral level as former Philippine strongman Rodrigo Duterte—currently under arrest in the Hague for killing criminal suspects without charge or trial. That's what our supposedly democratic government has been reduced to in just eleven months of Trump's rule. 

Infernal Sadism

 So let me get this straight. In the past several months, the Trump administration has deliberately murdered more than 80 civilians in drone strikes at sea—because it claims these people were transporting drugs. 

Most of them appear to have been poor fishermen. If some of them were in fact transporting drugs (and we have nothing but the administration's say-so to believe it), they were likely trying to pick up a tempting pay-out for their families by moving a few kilos of cocaine alongside their usual catch. They were not traveling with the far deadlier fentanyl, which is trafficked over land routes—making a mockery of the administration's purported rationale for the attacks, even if it wasn't so patently spurious on its face already. 

Ruere in Servitium

 Almost a year into the second Trump administration, the mad rush of the nation's rich and powerful to demonstrate craven submission, self-degrading fealty, and "anticipatory obedience" to Trump continues apace. If we hear less about it now than we used to, it's not because it has become less common—but rather, that it has become so common as to be unremarkable. 

Any given week, the news headlines will furnish you with fresh examples. This or that major university just cut a deal with Trump and agreed to install a regime of MAGA censorship to ensure that its curriculum will henceforth be compatible with this administration's white nationalist priorities. This or that major corporation has turned another humiliating moral somersault in order to please its masters on the Potomac.