Whole World, Donald Trump: Dispatches from the Age of the Subtraction

An open letter to American liberals, on the occasion of the election of Donald Trump

If everyone’s a pundit, here are my credentials.

“I sometimes have a premonition that the whole Trump thing could end in a very dark place. I mean far darker than anything we’ve seen so far.” — Jeet Heer, October 16, 2016.

Dear American liberals,

This has been a month since Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States. I have been watching these events unfold from the other side of the border — I’m probably lucky that I’m on the other side of your northern border and consequently not worrying over how he’d made us pay for a hypothetical wall, but I don’t exclude the faint possibility that Trump might one day to decide to go Manifest Destiny on us, and then, well, I’d be screwed too. Just to clarify matters, I’m a native Canadian, not an American expatriate there like some of you threaten to become almost by tradition and never with much conviction. And before you say I’m just another foreign interloper — no better than The Russians who you think might have thrown the election in Trump’s favor — or that I’m not directly affected by Trump’s intended policies at the moment, I will just add this: I’m scared of what he might do. The entire world is scared. After all, the guy who is soon to be in charge is not only an immoral beast, and doesn’t have any particular aptitude for the function, but has also wondered why he couldn’t use nukes.

Trump has done the unthinkable and plunged us back into some fifties dystopia that appeared superannuated just a few years ago, when the primary perils of our age were lone angry gunmen and religious terrorism. There’s an entire checklist’s worth of antiquated threats that has suddenly become relevant again. Nukes? Check. Fascism? Check. White supremacists? Check. The Russians? Check. Even if Trump sticks to the somewhat less disquieting vision of the world that reduces it to a life-sized Monopoly board where he gets to build hotels and push his competitors into bankruptcy, there is cause enough for concern. Whenever America titubates, the entire world is at risk.

With this question out of the way, I just want to move the discussion to a tiny little point which I think deserves to be addressed. It’s a bit long, so if The Daily Show begins in five minutes, I would just bookmark this page and come back to it later. Still, I have magnanimously separated my text into parts for your convenience. If you have all the time in the world, get yourself a nice little cup of cappuccino and keep reading.

You were responsible for Donald Trump’s election. And the entire world is about to pay the price for your arrogance and complacency.

Yes, I know: how could you have gotten Trump elected when you didn’t vote for him? You hated the man. You must have said so in thousands of think-pieces and hundreds of thousands of tweets and Facebook posts. Everything he represented was anathema to you. But while you were still treating Trump’s candidacy as a joke, last year, I knew he would probably be the Republican nominee. When he finally obtained the nomination, you claimed he had no chance of winning the election, when my gut instinct was telling me that the old bastard would win. And now you act as if his victory weren’t legitimate because he won the electoral college while getting fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, in addition to other reasons, like fake news or the Kremlin stealing the victory from her.

I saw you taking to the streets and social media to say that Trump is #NotYourPresident. Of course, none of those protesters voted for him in the first place. None of you fall into that awkward situation of the “buyer’s remorse”, which is already happening to some extent among his early supporters. Unlike them, you can’t say that what Trump is doing isn’t what you voted him in office for, because you didn’t vote for him. To you, it’s just one more attempt at getting your way. You did not like Trump, you did not want him to be president, and you did not vote for him. I agree with your vote; had I been American, I would have pinched my nose and voted for Clinton. But I cannot agree with a state of affairs where you now refuse to accept the validity of the election, unless you can point to electoral irregularities — real irregularities, not shadowy characters writing in the Cyrillic alphabet — which might have tipped the scales in his favor, but so far I have seen nothing of the sort. (We will see how goes the recount in key states, which it took Jill Stein to undertake.) You have even launched a petition asking the electoral college to vote for Clinton, regardless of the states carried by the Republican candidate. It is, indeed, in the electors’ power to vote for any other candidate than the one they represent (even in the presence of some dubious state laws to the contrary), and I do hope they will exercise that power. But you would not be satisfied if they instead voted for John Kasich, as one Republican elector breaking away from Trump suggested doing, or Vice-President-Elect Mike Pence, or any other Republican, to block Trump. No, you want Hillary Clinton — in other words, the candidate that the voters in the states represented by those electors explicitly rejected. They don’t want Hillary Clinton to be president. Can’t you accept that? They don’t want her.

But you won’t take no for an answer. You want Republican electors to set aside their partisanship and submit to your own — for the sake of the American Republic, of course. But can you imagine what will happen if the electoral college installed Hillary Clinton as president instead? It would stop Trump, yes, but it wouldn’t stabilize the United States internally. If, however, the electors chose a Republican, only the most hardcore Trump supporters — some of whom are already starting to feel betrayed by their candidate anyway — would probably complain about the college’s decision. At this stage, you want to isolate the Trumpkins from the mainstream Republicans; you don’t want all of Clinton’s numerous opponents to consolidate behind Donald Trump out of spite. A garden-variety-evil Republican president is a small price to pay for warding off a genuine danger like Donald Trump.

Just remember that a few weeks ago, it was Trump supporters repeating, after the boss, that the election would be rigged. For the electoral college to select Hillary Clinton after all — even though it is perfectly within its right to do so — would be the only confirmation they would ever need that there was indeed an establishment plot against Trump. I also know that if the results had been reversed, if Trump had obtained more votes than Clinton but lost the electoral college to her, you would have been the first to say that this is how the system works and deal with it, Trumpkins. And if they had taken to the streets to protest, even as peacefully as you did, you would have been the first to call them crybabies, and their demonstrations simultaneously ridiculous and worrisome; pointless, ineffective, and a new March on Rome.

Anyone with the faintest recollection of how the election campaign played out in 2000 could have predicted you would offer a repeat performance of its worst moments, even though Al Gore lost the electoral college to George W. Bush by one vote, while Trump is well above 270 with 306. Ah yes, Decision 2000: the endless wailing, the accusations that the court ruling that followed was anti-democratic, all that riveting wonky talk of dimpled chads, and then, of course, the hallmark of your protest, when all other avenues were blocked off: blame it all on Ralph Nader. Even though the courts were spared your complaints this time, you still tried to blame third parties, even though whatever support the Green Party’s Jill Stein received could not have made the difference even if all of it had gone to Clinton, while it can be presumed that the Libertarian Gary Johnson mostly cribbed votes away from traditionally Republican voters who would probably have stayed home rather than vote for Clinton. It might make no sense to vote for a third party if you believe one of the two main candidates is a 21st-century Mussolini, but your real purpose, since 2000, was to get rid of third parties once and for all; of course you would repeat that narrative even if the election results said it was impossible. At any rate, from a purely technical standpoint, if George Bush’s election in 2000 was valid (or are you always re-fighting that?), so must be Donald Trump’s.

To be fair, I probably underestimate how acrimonious the American election of 2000 was, because my attention was distracted at the time by our own national election going on simultaneously. Your election of 2004 I remember somewhat better. It was when I seriously became wary of American liberalism, or at least as I had encountered it: the likes of Michael Moore and Al Franken, not to mention the comedy-show factories then at their peak. (They were, after all, American liberalism’s public face.) The usual American liberal sources had been reassuring their audiences that President Bush didn’t stand a chance of a second term, that whatever wave of sympathy existed for him after 9/11 had completely evaporated with the Iraq War, that he was toast, that we’d better get used to saying “President John Kerry”. I was out the night of the election, until late in the evening. I’m not sure where I first learned of the results; perhaps it was on the bus driver’s radio, or perhaps it was when I reached home and looked them up online. I had one look at the numbers, frowned, and went to bed. Not only was Bush re-elected, but it wasn’t even close. Even with my only casually paying attention to that American election from abroad, I felt betrayed. Not by hyper-partisan Republicans conservatives who could never stop lying (or so said Al Franken anyway), but by those liberals who, ostensibly, weren’t lying, as they believed every word of what they claimed — that was the most infuriating part.

It was then that I realized that American liberalism was largely comprised of wishful thinking delivered from within a bubble that failed to understand the country it would have us think it understood. Now, I was well aware of Canada’s “two solitudes”, as they are called: I am a Québécois who reads both the French- and English-language newspapers. I know that what matters in Quebec almost never gets covered in the rest of the country, and vice-versa. I thought the American equivalent was how black culture kept itself or was kept away from the decidedly white mainstream (I do not mean so-called woke culture, which is an insincere, cynical marketing ploy to flatter you out of your money); but I would never have thought that something like our two solitudes could exist among a group of white, English-speaking Americans. Only factors like class or geography could explain it — yet you went out of their way to ignore them. Education is another clear factor, but that too you chose to ignore, because you were good meritocrats: those in Flyover Country with any potential could move to the coasts, get an education, and become good liberals like you who would recognize at once the most pressing issues of the day, such as student loans. Or so that went in theory. As for the others? It was much easier, even satisfying, for you to call them idiots and abandon them to their fate, in their quietly dying places where they could embarrass no-one and certainly not hinder the cause of progress. I knew American liberalism was myopic, but its response to 2004 made me realize how smug it was. Your general contempt for democracy — a democracy that had, after all, allowed Bush to get re-elected — at last became apparent, and only increased during the following years.

President Donald J. Trump is your reward.

Much has been said, during this campaign, of epistemic closure, of social media leading to positive feedback loops where one followed what confirmed one’s previous political positions, to the extent that Republicans and Democrats might have lived in two parallel campaigns that never intersected. For my part, I cannot say I really paid attention to what American conservative media said. I do not listen to American radio. I do not have the Daily Caller as my home page. My first remark upon encountering WorldNetDaily was: this isn’t serious. Matt Drudge is still no more to me than the guy who exposed the Lewinsky scandal. Breitbart and, to a lesser extent, The Federalist I did encounter because of my research into Gamergate, but I do not read them on a regular basis, and my views are at odds with their white-nationalist and libertarian contents, respectively. Most of my news, in other words, came from the same outlets as yours: reputable broadsheets with editorial views ranging from the center-left to the center-right, like The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Guardian; magazines of opinion such as The Atlantic, The Week, and The New Republic; mostly liberal or neoliberal websites of overall mediocre quality like Salon, Slate, The Huffington Post, and Vox; and a few more esoteric choices like The Baffler and Current Affairs, even Jacobin. To this list, I added the Canadian newspapers in either language, and, extremely rarely, the odd article from France, usually a by-product of my paying attention to the elections to be held there next year. The unifying trait of all these sources was their opposition to Trump and consequently their endorsement of Hillary Clinton as the only sensible choice in this election.

The only way in which I probably differed from you is that I avoided American radio and television, except for clips I have come across by accident. I will also concede that I may have read the candidates’ actual policy positions — outside of international affairs — more distractedly than you, in part because I was unlikely to be affected by these policies, in part because I was blasé enough to think the parties would not abide by them anyway, and in part because they would still require a cooperative Congress. Instead, I paid more attention to the tone of the campaign and candidates. Also, I am not on Facebook, which may have played a key role to play during this election; but even without it, if I lived in someone’s echo chamber, it wasn’t in Donald Trump’s, but in yours.

What you probably didn’t notice was that something about your echo chamber was asphyxiating. I suspected that what mattered in it, that is to say what was built into a pressing concern either by your media or by the Clinton campaign, was probably completely irrelevant to a large part of Trump voters — either they remained unaware of it or just took it for granted. There are undoubtedly a great many racists who see an opportunity to promote their agenda in a Trump presidency, but it would be reductive to talk of Trump’s election as mainly the result of racial resentment, as Slate’s Jamelle Bouie would have it. As to a hammer everything looks like a nail, we saw Ta-Nehisi Coates complaining that Hillary Clinton’s widely-criticized remark that put half of Trump’s supporters (that is to say, in retrospect, one-eighth of eligible voters) into a “basket of deplorables” was proportionally too low. While I do not want to dismiss the racial question — especially now that Steve Bannon of Breitbart has been appointed chief strategist of the upcoming Trump administration — I am not certain that race was the primary motive of most Trump voters. The Ku Klux Klan may burn a few crosses in Trump’s honor and the white nationalists of the online Alt-Right variety might think him an ally, but I don’t think they are representative of the average Trump voter. As for misogyny, while I do not want to diminish its importance, there is a difference between refusing to vote for a woman and refusing to vote for that woman in particular; I suspect there are a great deal more voters in the latter category than there are in the former. (And really, can a misogynist who refused to vote for a woman be expected to vote for even a male Democrat?)

The Clinton campaign muddied the waters, for instance by claiming there was this new “Alt-Right” on the march. I have seen claims that it does not exist; it does exist, but it isn’t an all-encompassing term in the way the Clintonites would have had it. To me, the Alt-Right is younger, hipper, tech-savvy; those older casual racists and xenophobes in the Red states who voted for Trump would have been the first people surprised at being told they were Alt-anything. People who had never heard of this Palmer Luckey who had made his fortune convincing people to strap miniature television sets to their faces, and didn’t quite know what exactly were these memes he was funding; who were more familiar with 4-H than with 4chan; and who probably thought that Pepe the Frog was some kind of Latino Kermit. A term like “Alt-Right” was, in other words, a new vague package for some old merchandise, something the Clinton team threw at those who cast a ballot based on the perceived social respectability of their choice (hence “deplorables”) to persuade them something new and unseen and consequently terrifying was afoot. Voters — the kind who readily believe there are “millions of extremists primed to march down Main Street draped in Klan robes, a copy of Mein Kampf tucked under one arm and a Bible under the other”, as Alexander Cockburn wrote regarding the scare tactics of the Southern Poverty Law Center — who were already With Her without needing any prompting because they were already terrified of Donald Trump.

I am not dismissing the validity of these concerns. But what you couldn’t see, or chose to ignore, was that liberal media, in their treatment of such matters, went out of their way to make themselves smug and repulsive, and often made a better case for Trump than he could have himself. Here, for instance, is a sample of Salon headlines published over the course of the past year: “America, you’re stupid: Donald Trump’s political triumph makes it official — we’re a nation of idiots” ; “Who are these idiot Donald Trump supporters? Trump loves the poorly educated — and they love him right back” ; “Donald Trump is the pinnacle of American stupidity: Why his campaign consummates decades of rising anti-intellectualism” ; “Republicans really fall for this nonsense: The GOP is the party of stupid, but its voters are the deluded ones” ; “Ignorance, racism and rage: The GOP’s transformation to the party of stupid started long before Donald Trump” ; “We let the idiots take the wheel: Donald Trump, Fox News and how we let our democracy rot” ; “We must shame dumb Trump fans: The white working class are not victims” ; “Idiocracy now: Donald Trump and the Dunning-Kruger effect — when stupid people don’t know they are stupid” ; “Children’s crusade: Trump’s “movement” is a bunch of whiny, frightened infants who can’t handle democracy”. Then Salon assigned the blame for Trump’s rise right back at the conservative media without a second’s worth of introspection. But if there is something which does pierce the walls of the otherwise air-tight conservative echo chamber, it is exactly these liberal think-pieces calling Trump voters ignorant, stupid, racist, sexist, privileged, not worthy of empathy, only good for mocking and shaming, whose complaints are “not valid”. Oh, and class? Never heard of it.

In the end, if economic anxiety was probably a more useful factor in understanding Trumpism, I think it wiser to regard it, as Jeet Heer does, as for the most part a form of American Poujadism, in which the emblematic figure would be someone like “Joe the Plumber”: Trumpism as a collection of small businessmen, with an important local role to play, who are concerned about the future of their communities (but mostly their profits) and who are railing against those same economic elites that Trump points at, seemingly hypocritically. When we hear about those small communities, stagnating if not dying, from someone who actually knows their reality, it’s always from authors who made it out of there, like, these days, J.D. Vance, who of course became an instant darling in conservative and even liberal circles. This is because their books invariably end up reading like rags-to-riches stories, where the subtext is always that you can succeed if you “pull up those bootstraps”, that only losers have to stay behind, that only idiots want to stay behind, and that in a meritocracy like the glorious U.S. of A. they’re not worth anyone’s time. This was exactly the reasoning offered by Kevin Williamson of the conservative National Review, in those early days when the magazine still dared to oppose Trumpism. Talking about a town in upstate New York where the only employer was a now-closed gypsum factory, he told his readers that “if there’s nothing for you in Garbutt but penury, dysfunction, and addiction, then get the hell out. If that means that communities in upstate New York or eastern Kentucky or west Texas die, so what? If that’s all they have to offer, then they have it coming.” So much for “compassionate conservatism”.

The articles by Williamson and a few other writers like prominent “Never Trump” supporter David French (“I have compassion for families facing economic uncertainty. But compassion can’t excuse or enable self-destructive moral failures.”) only reinforced the impression that mainstream Republicans had all but abandoned their base to its fate just as they took it for granted. Jamelle Bouie suggested that what really rankled the white Republican base was realizing it was given the same dismissive treatment as poor blacks, while the insightful Michael Brendan Dougherty, at The Week, cited it as evidence that the only advice the conservative movement now had for someone living in a small town was “to move out of Garbutt and maybe ‘learn computers.’ Any investments he made in himself previously are for naught. People rooted in their hometowns? That sentimentalism is for effete readers of Edmund Burke. Join the hyper-mobile world.” And he was entirely right that this conservatism had not only betrayed its followers, but its ideological roots, and had become, on this level at least, not unlike its Democratic liberal counterpart.

This is the point that Bouie and other liberal writers usually missed: that liberals themselves had long imposed a double standard of their own on the working class. If the working class of color was poor, it necessarily was because of “institutional racism”, but if the white working class was poor, without such societal excuse (whites are “privileged”, you know), it necessarily had to be the result of one self-destructive moral failure or another — according to your meritocratic ethos, it just had to work harder. And if the white working class complained, it was always, to liberals, because of its loss of “privilege”, its inherent racism. To liberals, the working class of color could rightly blame society for its plight, while the white working class could only blame itself; the National Review writers’ only difference with what the Salon scribes might put out is that modern conservatism only acknowledges individual blame, for blacks and whites alike. For a while, this was obfuscated by the myth of small-town conservatism entertained by the Republicans, until Williamson and French openly delivered its coup de grâce. And instead of welcoming these working-class whites abandoned by traditional Republican politicians, you spurned them.

What options were left, then, to the white working class, with rightward-drifting liberals of the Clinton mold not even trying to hide their contempt for it, and movement conservatism telling it to find a nice little ditch to go die into? Ah yes, the Left was something that was left. No, when I talk of the Left, I do not mean you; I do not regard you liberals as being of the Left — maybe the Alt-Right regularly calls you leftists, but that is like Santa Claus calling everyone a southerner. You are centrists at most, and your natural instinct is to slowly drift rightward with the bulk of the Democrats. Bernard Sanders, the Vermont populist (who for that matter isn’t that much of a Leftist when looked at from the outside of a purely American context that has skewed the entire political spectrum rightward), but who in retrospect should have been the Democratic candidate, might have been able to win; but too much of what constitutes the visible part of the American Left nowadays — which, in effect, has replaced the dying labor movement — is just as removed from the reality of the working class as Republican oligarchs or liberal technocrats. It might still have a chance, if it keeps its heart in the right place or at least remembers that it has a heart; but its voice today is largely one of academic aloofness coupled with bureaucratic detachment.

The only unifying factor in today’s American Left is, fittingly, its poverty, and as soon as one looks beyond that, it falls apart. The rural population that barely graduated high school and can look forward to prolonged spells of unemployment after every new technological development, and the well-educated coastal-city millennials buckling under the weight of their student loans, who fill the pages of all those little Leftist “’zines” with their jeremiads, might be equally poor, but they have nothing in common. The former have nothing to look forward to; the latter chafe at being denied the opportunity to exploit their full potential. The former are treated like just an anonymous mass to be shaped and directed by the prospective vanguard of the latter, who make themselves seen every time, leading to a sort of Left where performance art becomes the apex of political activism of which the Occupy movement was emblematic.

Occupy Wall Street began as the brainchild of the duo behind Adbusters, was quickly taken over by academics to provide it with guidance (it’s just like the “ethnography of central Madagascar”, don’t you know?), and in the end achieved nothing because it wanted to achieve nothing. “Some commentators… want a list of demands, and they are not shy about proposing some. But perhaps the best thing about Occupy Wall Street is its reluctance to make demands,” one of the academic Occupy apologists eructated, because “what’s left of pseudo-politics in the United States is full of demands.” The same author goes on about how the Tea Party is just a marketing campaign (unlike Occupy, of course), how the Occupy goal is to return to a real form of politics, how an occupation is the opposite of a movement, how “there’s no vanguard” (never believe it, especially when it’s said by an academic), and finally this:

“ The organized labor movement started paying attention when it looked like the anarchists and the following they drew would not be easily dissuaded by bad weather or the NYPD. It is as if organized labor woke up one morning, saw that the occupation was still going strong, and said to itself “I must follow them, for I am its leader!” It beats trying to steal members from already unionized workplaces, which seems to be mostly what the unions do.”

Or perhaps it was because organized labor — supine and craven though it is — knew that its own members were not even there (probably busy, you know, working), or it saw that Occupy’s academic throat-clearing posturing would lead nowhere — that Occupy was just the means to elevate a vanguard-that-claimed-there-was-no-vanguard to the masthead of a few editorially interchangeable literary magazines all too eager to court scions of Wall Street themselves, or for the pursuit of a purely theoretical framework that wanted, by its own admission, absolutely nothing to do with the kind of “pseudo-politics” currently prevailing in the United States, even scoffing at any actual policy demands because that would have been playing the game of the “rentier class”. Better wages? Single-payer health care? Public transit? Affordable housing? Pseudo-politics, all of it. I doubt very much that unions had any time for such games of semantics.

Ah, but the frisson of revolution, now that was something to be experienced! Not surprisingly incapable of terrorizing the bourgeois, Occupy settled on merely annoying them. A re-enactment of Paris’ events of May 1968 to which one wants to answer in the exact same way as one of its contemporary critics: “Go home! You will all be notaries!” No need to go abroad, even: the Yippies provided all the evidence of where their political ideals would end up. And so, once the cold set in and the tents were removed, what had Occupy left behind? A memorable slogan, books upon books of self-aggrandizing accomplishments couched in the clarity of a Judith Butler, and, more insidiously, a model for something like Gamergate. But that is a story for another day.

Much later, Occupy, now well past its apogee, decided to actively tackle one of America’s most pressing economic problems: that problem was, of course, student debt, which, if left unaddressed, might prevent the production of more anthropologists who would carry on the march of the Left towards the inevitable victory of the proletariat, one peer review at a time. Evidently some Leftists have since turned on Occupy, citing its focus on the individual and its incapacity to make demands, but otherwise things have remained the same on that side of the political aisle: a top-heavy, Theory-laden upper caste making pronouncements on what The Left is and ought to be for, and this globally, with not that much interest in a rebuttal even when from its own side, and on the whole maddeningly passive as it waits for late capitalism to inevitably collapse by itself as it was foretold, any… minute… now…. Everything about it, beginning with the unmistakable jargon of its self-referential literature, points to a vision of the world just as sterile as the world-annihilating capitalism it so vocally seeks to replace — a vision at that so unnatural, so inorganic, that, as history has shown us, it would have to be propped up by force sooner or later. All that for a faint promise to give people the means to live, just as it disregards what there is to live for. To embrace it means to already have died.

At any rate, as much as it might have been entertaining to see them explain the minute details by which we could differentiate Trotskyist world revolution from Stalinist “socialism in one country” when the country in question has a proclivity for imperialism dressed as liberation and happens to field the world’s most powerful army, most of the writers on the Left, I believe, fall into two categories which just carry forward, far from the revolution, the Occupy method of annoying any hapless bourgeois who happens to come across them. Writers in the first category are mostly interested in it as a purely academic exercise, which is fine by me, as long as they forfeit the posture that their writings will advance any concrete political agenda. It doesn’t take long to realize, upon reading them, that they have not only given up any hope of political change, but that they are outright contemptuous of the working class. The second category embraces the Left as a means to a personally comfortable end, when they will come out of their cocoon looking like a hip version of Thomas Friedman, completing their ideological metamorphosis from one international materialism to another. The tell-tale sign will be, in the case of the first, when they finally obtain tenure, and, in the case of the second, when they give up on the little ‘zines and walk off to a mainstream publication, if not to this or that well-funded think tank like the Center for American Progress, or to something of a more libertarian bent.

If the writers in the first category sound as if they have all the time in the world, it is because they have banished the very notion of time. Their struggle is as eternal as a broken record. Their revolution is a stationary bicycle: it never moves forward, and it never falls — no danger, no disappointment. The writers in the second category, in comparison, are marked by their impatience because they would quite appreciate wielding actual political power, or else retiring at forty, thank you very much. (Most of the loud-mouthed millennials will almost certainly fall in the latter category; that entire generation will make baby-boomers look like paragons of selflessness by comparison.)

From what I have seen, writers from either category have no influence on whatever might be happening in parts of the U.S. which have just voted for Trump: with few exceptions, they would probably be uncomfortable outside their cozy self-referential milieu of the well-educated Blue-state white-collar precariat, which is the only one to read them. It is then that one realizes that the problem with this Left isn’t so much that it denies it has a vanguard, as Occupy did, but that the vanguard is all there is. For that matter, they might know about as much about practical political governance as the president-elect, because what they write has as much bearing on actual politics as the Occupy they now repudiate. They already thought that taking to the streets was an auspicious moment to launch an academic journal; had Sanders been left to their ministrations, they would have smothered him with Theory and all his work would have been in vain.

Nowhere to go for the white working class, then, but to embrace the vulgar billionaire who opened the door to, if not a better future, at least something like payback time. This I hold as the central promise of Trumpism: revenge. It would be cheap, and politically rewarding, for Donald Trump to oblige his supporters, to distract them from his breaking the rest of his promises, as the targets of their revenge — that would be you — did not vote for him, are of no use to him and are prospective enemies of his political agenda. He has no need to get personally involved: he might just decide to look the other way, drag his feet, take his time, assert his disapproval timidly (in stark contrast to his usual Twitterine fury) only to countermand it with another tweet three days later.

You could have avoided this perilous state of affairs by attempting to establish a rapport with people he drew his support from, but it was as if you thought the key to political success was to continue making yourselves as infuriating as possible until the only argument you could possibly use to convince a voter not to cast in his lot with Orange Mussolini was: “No, if Donald Trump is elected, I can assure the ignorant bigot that you are that he will not, in fact, wring my neck.” But of course you didn’t attempt to convince anyone. Waste of time, you thought. Even now, I know better than to expect you to draw the slightest lesson from any of this. You will undoubtedly do as you have always done: blame “low-information” voters gorging themselves on Fox News or Limbaugh or Breitbart or Alex Jones, while comforting yourselves that you were clever enough to not fall for their pseudo-news or Trump’s authoritarian schtick.

You did nothing but heap abuse on Trump voters, without even trying to convince them to vote against him. You weren’t interested in finding out what they could possibly see in that conman who would betray them as soon as he reached the White House. You didn’t try to see if they knew the conman would betray them, and only voted for him because of the discomfort he elicited in you, or because he vaguely promised them to give you, as to Hillary Clinton by threatening to “lock her up”, the punishment they thought you deserved. You didn’t even try to estimate how many of his supporters voted for him because they always voted Republican (racists!), how many did so because they detested Hillary specifically (misogynists!), how many followed him in a desperate attempt to save their jobs and communities (idiots!), and how many — and those are really the ones you must be wary of — look to Donald Trump not just as their next president, but as a revolutionary force in American politics that will forever alter the nature and functioning of government in your country.

You did none of this, even though your necks were at stake, because you thought that those people’s votes were no longer required — that your idea of the future would happen without having to ask them. It wasn’t just the result of your presumptuous nature: America’s numerous data journalists and pundits had assured you that Donald Trump would not be elected and that things were quite safe for you because, whatever he might tell his supporters, and no matter how well his party would “get out the vote”, you had the numbers.

This election was called by the poets and philosophers, the visionaries and historians, those who sensed and felt things, while the pocket-protector set remained oblivious to which way the wind was blowing. I can hear you snickering. Ridiculous, is it? Bill Mitchell, the Twitter poet-laureate with a bright future in the propaganda machine of the Trump regime, wrote one of the most memorable sentences of the campaign: “Trump’s groundgame isn’t in a computer, it’s in our hearts”. How schmaltzy! How corny! How naïve! How you laughed at it then! Are you laughing now? Are you?

I never laughed. I knew he was right.

The Numbers Racket: Politics in the Age of the Subtraction

After 2004, the year the idiots enabled Dubya’s encore performance, you embraced, more than you had done before, what could be best described as technocratic electioneering. Nate Silver, the wunderkind of FiveThirtyEight, arrived just in time for the 2008 election. You immediately took to him because — and, it turned out, only because — you liked what he told you, scientifically, would happen: the election of the first black president, then his second term. And now it was time for a woman. You thought his work, and that of others, showed you how to win elections: that by adding enough diverse demographics (women, people of color, the educated, etc., known as the Emerging Democratic Majority) you would invariably get more votes than your opponents, a monolithic block of white, working-class voters whose interests you have all but abandoned. I suspect it’s also when that insufferable phrase, “the Right Side of History”, became your unofficial motto — just a secular riff on God Is My Pollster, as it were.

Silver didn’t create this, to quote The New Yorker’s Jill Lepore, “frantic, volatile, shortsighted, sales-driven, and anti-democratic” — in one word, “Trumpian” — obsession with polling, but he is the popular, geeky face of it today. He became something of an oracle to you, more than anyone else in his field. (Vanity Fair’s James Wolcott mentions how “every time there is a Nate Silver update that looks bad for the Democrats, my e-mail box fills up with Democratic fund-raisers keying off the dire news and raising alarm to raise money”.) Yet Silver failed to predict the emergence of Trump, because, like you, he’s more concerned with the how than the why. (When he gets down to addressing the why, he might not be particularly insightful, but at least he doesn’t smugly answer, like you do every time: “the idiots got excited”.) From the beginning, Silver couldn’t understand how Trump could end up running for president, because his mind was made up that the Republican establishment would stop him. He never asked himself why Trump could be the ideal nominee: the populist sentiment that also expressed itself, on your side, through the candidacy of Bernard Sanders; the revolt of the party base after decades of political exploitation; the mystique of the Trump name in a party that worships wealth and celebrity; and a weak crop of establishment candidates which included the widely detested Ted Cruz, a robotic Marco Rubio, a limp Jeb Bush passively waiting for the presidential hand-me-downs, and the governor of a swing state practically unknown outside of it.

When Silver finally realized, in late February, after months of saying that we shouldn’t be distracted by that flash in the gold-plated pan, that Trump was going to be the Republican nominee, you reacted to his about-face by wondering — what? Nothing, as far as I can remember. I’m pretty sure I know why. You fancy yourselves the most rational people in the room. Your candidate even thought it was necessary to say: “I believe in science”. A very telling choice of words — to believe in science — that goes past science and into scientism. You praise Silver for being a hyper-rational scientist who, in a world full of pundit chatter, does not indulge in punditry: just the stats, ma’am. Meanwhile, you hold the Republicans to be irrational people. Silver failed to predict Trump, but you excused his failure because how could you possibly predict behavior that runs contrary to reason? Yet you did everything at the time but reach the sensible conclusion that Silver’s method, confronted by the fact of Trump’s nomination, was consequently so limited in its understanding of politics as to be fatally flawed. Instead, you told yourselves: the Republican Party is a circus, so it’s normal it would go for the biggest clown, but our numbers will hold and reason will prevail.

You kept on listening to Silver, even as he flubbed up on other memorable occasions. There was the Michigan Democratic primary that went to Sanders after he had called it, with 99% certainty, for Hillary Clinton, which made FiveThirtyEight a target of criticism from the Left. Beyond that, Sanders’ unexpected win might, just might, have indicated that Hillary could be in trouble in the Rust Belt. You continued to rely on Silver because you liked what he predicted would happen in things that mattered to you. Yet his justification is always that if he got it right, it was because of his brains and method, and if he got it wrong, it was because the polls he relied upon were imperfect. As he will not release his model and does not conduct any polling himself, he could never fail; he could only be failed. And the Silverian system is constructed to be fail-proof, as he quite rightly didn’t rule out a Sanders win in Michigan: one percent, after all, isn’t zero.

Am I exaggerating his legerdemain? On the day of the election, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote a column entitled “No matter who wins the presidential election, Nate Silver was right”, which ended on these lines: “Silver is just guessing. And, in the run-up to this election, he made so many guesses that at least one of them has to be correct.” Consider that in early October, Silver gave equal odds to the four following outcomes: a Clinton “landslide” won by more than eight points, an “Obamaish” Clinton win by four to seven points, a narrow Clinton win and a Trump win. People who admired Silver could be found schooling the mathematically ignorant that it meant there were 3-to-1 odds of a Clinton win. What it meant, for the rest of us, was that the guru of FiveThirtyEight would not even risk saying by how much she would win; less charitably interpreted, he was in effect saying, by claiming a Clinton landslide was just as likely as a close call, that he had no clue. Short of a surprise Stein or Johnson win, whatever happened, he could triumphantly come out saying he had called it — even a Trump victory.

It was only in the last days of the campaign, when Silver continued hedging his bets as he had always done, and as such failed to deliver the certainty of a Clinton win you had expected, that you turned on him. There went the intellectual high ground you had claimed for yourselves: you were no better than the Republicans perpetually accusing Silver of bias for predicting election results that ran contrary to their desires, even when the actual results aligned with his predictions. As far as I can tell, Silver might be clueless when deprived of his precious numbers, but he genuinely attempts to be impartial: it was only a matter of time before he would displease you. That came in the last stretch of the campaign, while you were already polishing Hillary’s coronation regalia, when he announced that he gave her odds of just two-to-one. And you couldn’t take it.

Of all these popular “data journalists”, Silver was the one who gave Trump the best odds. Under such circumstances, the morning of November 9th should has marked the end not just of Nate Silver’s credibility, but of all that data-crunching business, right? No, because, just as Trump’s nomination didn’t significantly damage Silver’s reputation — doing so would have meant acclaiming the two people behind the satirical pundit Carl Diggler for their more accurate results — your little partisan tantrum became, after the election, the cornerstone of Nate Silver’s claim of impartiality, then his vindication. A Toronto Star headline the day after the election: “Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight proves its worth with another close election prediction. The U.S. election website was one of the few that didn’t assume a landslide win for Hillary Clinton.” In other words, because nobody prominent enough could be found who actually predicted a Trump victory, the bar was lowered until we reached the person who hesitated the most before predicting a Clinton win. It happened to be Silver, but it might have been Princeton’s Sam Wang (the “new king of the presidential election data mountain”, according to Wired), who predicted Clinton would receive “at least 298 electoral votes”. In other words, nobody in that group predicted something close to the actual results. (The historian Allan Lichtman, who did predict a Trump win, said it best: “For all his acclaim, Nate Silver is only a clerk, not a scientific analyst.”) You then surpassed yourselves in hypocrisy by accusing those other data journalists, who just days before had escaped your wrath by satisfactorily predicting a Clinton landslide, of having led potential Clinton voters to become complacent enough to stay home and throw the election to Trump [1].

Late in the campaign, Nate Silver finally lost his trademark detached composure and lashed out at The Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim, who had made two specific accusations against him, both valid: of hedging his bets, and — practically a capital crime in that field — of engaging in punditry against the actual numbers. Silver had already apologized for having acted like a pundit in substantially underestimating Trump’s chances to win the Republican nomination. But it was because Silver continued to engage in punditry — even though he has no genuine political instinct to speak of — that he sensed, unlike Grim (who was firmly in the Clinton landslide camp), that something was amiss for the November vote. (“This doesn’t seem like an election in which one candidate had a 99% chance of winning tbh”, he tweeted on election night.) And what was amiss was that the polls had failed, consistently, to accurately measure Trump’s support. Perhaps Trump supporters didn’t answer opinion polls. Perhaps they lied. But why wouldn’t they decline to answer or choose to lie, when your typical response is more shrieking, mocking and shaming, more Salon think-pieces questioning their intelligence, more disdain for parts of the country you consider yourselves too evolved to possibly live in? Why shouldn’t they dodge the piercing gaze of Silverization as well as the dismissive judgement of their self-appointed betters that would inevitably follow it? The idiots did two things you should have foreseen but which of course you didn’t: they decided not to play your prediction games, and they voted.

And this terrifies you, because you are afraid of uncertainty. You cannot imagine a world in which the Nate Silvers have been proven useless — and to wit, many of you flocked back to Silver after the election, congratulated him, and let him know how grateful you were that he had tried to warn you against taking Clinton’s victory for granted, never mind your actions of a few days before when he refused to confirm her win like everyone else. You then accused those who said he got it wrong and had lost all credibility of not understanding statistics. To anyone not as invested as you in data journalism, that is just as persuasive as your approach of shaming Trump voters. How long should you rely on a meteorologist when you wake up to a downpour while he consistently forecast 30% of rain? Silver might have done well in 2008 and 2012, but this time he, like almost everyone else, underestimated Trump throughout the Republican primaries and the election campaign proper, while making serious mistakes about Sanders, such as in Michigan or Indiana. If people lie to pollsters — and your attitude has all but convinced me that they should — then what good are those predictions? I will offer a prediction of my own: your postmortem evaluation of what happened on November 8th will not lead to a dismissal of Silverization as the flawed process that it is, nor to a consideration of its nefarious effects on democracy, nor to a reflection on whom it really serves, but to a frenzied call for more Silverization. This conclusion is inevitable, because for you to come to terms with the failure of Silverization would mean the collapse of your universe.

You like Nate Silver and his ilk because they bring on a semblance of order to the world, an arrogant belief that everything could be tamed, predicted, tracked, quantified. This wasn’t the first time I noticed it. When that Malaysian airplane vanished over the Indian Ocean, I would swear it stirred up something dark within you, something you thought you had repressed but which all came back in an instant. It was as if you had personally known the passengers, but it wasn’t empathy, and the event, in itself, meant little to you. There was something else. The revealing moment was when those people usually singing the praises of our hyper-connected modern world were talking of “the terror of being off the grid”, about how unbearable it was not to know. And Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump stirred up something of a similar nature in you: the realization that the most competent people and the most advanced technical innovations were not only useless against a man who bumbled and yelled his way to the White House, but they didn’t even see it coming. And because the idiots refused to be Silverized, the Clintonian apparatus may even unwittingly have helped Trump.

Jim Newell at Slate put it best: “The ace ground game, the brilliant ad-makers, the top Hollywood talent, and the best analytics operation ever assembled? This was all a joke.” These were all supposed to be professionals, stars, The Best, as Trump would say, while Trump himself was mocked for hiring the “GOP’s worst pollster”; but the Democratic campaign could not have been more incompetent if it had turned over its polling strategy to Nate Silver, its policy strategy to Vox regulars, and its social-media strategy to Sady Doyle. It is a testament to their ineptitude that the Democrats reportedly assigned their rural outreach to a staffer located in that heartland in America that is Brooklyn, and this “just weeks before the election”. A recent Politico article mentions the anecdote of “an older woman in Flint who showed up at a Clinton campaign office, asking for a lawn sign and offering to canvass, being told these were not ‘scientifically’ significant ways of increasing the vote, and leaving, never to return”. I doubt a tour of the Rust Belt by the Clinton retinue in the last days of the campaign would have been enough to win it, but at least it should have been tried; yet the party evidently didn’t believe this was necessary. It knew better. It always knew better.

And what was this fine-tuned political machine beaten by? A single Wired headline from months ago is worth pages of political analysis: “Clinton Has a Team of Silicon Valley Stars. Trump Has Twitter.”

Ah-ha! I can already hear you say. There was the problem, then: not the Clintons, not the Democrats, not the people they hired, not you— never you! — the problem had to be Trump and the Republicans and the idiots and the deplorables and the Alt-Right and The Russians and the FBI (or, if you’re Paul Krugman: The Russians and the FBI) and the third parties and the “Bernie Bros” and Susan Sarandon and the overconfident pollsters and the electoral college and the Supreme Court and, above them all, Twitter. There are several valid issues with Twitter, especially now that Trump continues to attack his enemies through it as if he were an ordinary citizen, but you weren’t caring about any of that in the good old days when the platform was assumed to be a force for good, as in your little Middle-Eastern liberal fantasy known as the Arab Spring (which failed anyway). Many things that you were fine with before the rise of Trump are starting to horrify you. Twitter already had a bad name after a vocal part of its users became concerned with ethics in video games journalism, but after Trump’s rise it became synonymous with the worst of the internet. Facebook is now also of concern, and it’s about time, with its contribution to the creation of political echo chambers and its promotion of hoaxes, not to mention Trump billionaire supporter Peter Thiel sitting on its board — but you’re still using it, are you not?

Not only that, but now you’re at the mercy of Trump’s exploitation of the surveillance state that Barack Obama’s administration did nothing to curb, and that a President Hillary Clinton would have kept intact and likely expanded. Did you complain about it? Not really, because it lifts the veil off your dreaded uncertainty with more accuracy than ever before. You like — you want — to know. The result is that soon, state agencies like the NSA will be turned over to a man whose grudges make Richard Nixon look like a model of magnanimity by comparison. Before long, you will realize — I hope — to what purpose could be used the very Silverization of politics you have put on a pedestal, and of which I was always extremely wary, regardless of its accuracy. It was nice, of course, when you thought it would help you add up diverse demographics to guaranteed electoral victory. (Whenever you talked of people voting against their own interests — which were, needless to say, your interests — it was because they failed to align with the proper column in your calculations.) Nothing indicates that Trump and his supporters wouldn’t appreciate guaranteed electoral victory too — as long as elections are held, that is.

Because you were too busy preening yourselves with your righteousness to notice what was happening around you, convinced as you were that this-plus-this-plus-this would mean the triumph of the Right Side of History and you in office forever, we have entered the age of the subtraction. Not just the usual gerrymandering or various subtle or less-than-subtle forms of voter suppression as they now exist — within a few years, they will appear quaint and amateurish in comparison to what will then be done, openly, brazenly, and without legal recourse. Ironically, it was Nate Silver himself who made this obvious, in one of his usual self-aggrandizing tricks, when he released a map depicting a clear Trump victory if only men could vote — which launched a #RepealThe19th [Amendment] hashtag movement on Twitter that it would be a mistake to fail to take seriously. Others produced maps showing what would happen if only people of color voted, which predictably led to a #RepealThe15th hashtag — something far worse than anything you came up with so far [2].

It will be the apotheosis of Big Data. And then you will know what you have unleashed.

The Dumpster Fire of History: The Purpose of Politics is to Win

“Politicians have used you and stolen your votes. They have given you nothing. I will give you everything. I will give you what you’ve been looking for for 50 years. I’m the only one.” — Donald Trump, Bismarck, N.D., May 26th, 2016.

When the unsinkable Hillary Clinton struck the orange iceberg and started foundering before your bulging eyes, it was more than a simple political defeat: it was your horrified realization that the technocratic expertise which she represented could no longer be guaranteed a victory against the bigots, the idiots, the irrational, the forces of resentment. You thought you could campaign in any way you wanted — which meant, of course, as usual — and expect the same result regardless of what your opponent did. Your attitude regarding Hillary’s political invincibility was nothing short of presumptuous.

You can’t even say you didn’t have prior warning of what lay ahead — that was what Bernard Sanders’ refusal to fold and his occasional primary upset screamed at you, week after week. (Nathan Robinson, at Current Affairs, listed several reasons why Clinton would lose to Trump even before the Democrats officially nominated her.) Instead, you tried to assign the blame for her defeat on Sanders’ supporters even though he loyally campaigned for you after he conceded to Hillary Clinton. To be fair, I am not certain that even Sanders could have been elected president; but Sanders — rural, populist, concerned with the working class — was diametrically opposed to everything Hillary Clinton stood for, that is to say everything that, in this campaign, came to be synonymous with all that was execrable in American political life.

I will admit that an exact American counterpart of me would not have fit in one of her target demographics. But that was precisely your problem: she failed to attract almost anyone who wasn’t already a guaranteed vote for the Democrats. When she bothered to go outside safely Democratic constituencies, her reflex was to try and convince disgruntled mainstream Republicans — always the top, never the base — to provide her with a vote cushion, with the results that we have seen. (In the immortal words of New York Senator Chuck Schumer: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”) Even though I would have voted for her to prevent a Trump victory if I had been American (but if I had been American, my situation would likely have been very different from what it is here, so can I really assert with any confidence that I would have voted for her?), I failed to see much to get excited about in Hillary Clinton, in the same way I abhor our prime minister Justin Trudeau, whom you evidently admire, because he is a legacy politician whose government is home to the same old Liberal Party shenanigans we have seen up here for decades and who in no way deserves the reputation of his “sunny ways”.

For all that (justified) talk of a Trump cult of personality, didn’t you dress up your admiration for Hillary Clinton in a similar way? Doesn’t your blind admiration for our Justin Trudeau mirror in every way that of the Republicans for Vladimir Putin? Every time you lambaste a Trumpkin for naively believing that Trump would “Make America Great Again”, you should be answered with an entirely heartfelt — and widely derided — post about Hillary Clinton that appeared at Lenny Letter (a newsletter co-founded by the actress Lena Dunham), which asserted that “maybe she is more than a president. Maybe she is an idea, a world-historical heroine, light itself. The presidency is too small for her”. What was written by some of the most infamous “Shillaries” was just as delusional as anything tweeted by Bill Mitchell, except that his side won.

If I can’t see much to like in Hillary Clinton, I see why you did: her extensive experience and credentials of competence satisfied your rationality, while the first woman president was the pinnacle of your visionary liberal incrementalism. But instead of acknowledging her imperfection and urging voters to support for her anyway (if only to prevent a Trump win), you just decided to breathe deeply and exhale with the flourish of an ahhh, a breeze of fresh air. It still amazes me that some among you were evidently not even faking it. For my part, I couldn’t avoid thinking of how awkward she looked in public, how scripted her every move appeared, how you could sense that a team of highly paid specialists struggled to find anything of worth to make her campaign say, how her smile in that third debate, just as she was discussing Russian interference in such a way as to lay the bases of a new Cold War, was the quintessence of sadism — not exactly a good sign when many people already criticized her as a warmonger. You don’t have to be a Gaddafi admirer to think that her remark at the news of his death — “we came, we saw, he died” — was the epitome of tastelessness.

Yes, Hillary Clinton is an experienced politician, capable of occupying the function of President of the United States; but there is such a thing as too much baggage in politics, and she was the living example of it. It does not mean much to talk of her experience if it includes highlights such as supporting the war in Iraq, or of her numerous useful connections when the electorate — as demonstrated by the popularity of both Trump and Sanders — is sick to death of anyone who has a whiff of “The Establishment”. Even without the prevailing anti-establishment undertow, even if this had been a regular election against yet another Bush or a Cruz or any of the pitiful GOP regulars, it didn’t require investigative journalism to realize that the prevailing opinion about Hillary Clinton is that there is something repulsive about her, and that a highly polished campaign would only make it worse.

Your most egregious mistake was to assume that Trump, a political neophyte, didn’t stand a chance against career politicians, which led you to ignore everything else, from the unpopularity of his opponents (especially yours), to the anti-establishment climate, to his own fame. Trump had not only been a public figure for decades, but also had his own reality show where he burnished his public image. He knew how to exploit the media to his advantage. An election is an advertising campaign that lasts for months. That’s why you’re now incessantly complaining about “fake news”, about how we live in a “post-truth” or “post-factual” world: if only the idiots had acknowledged the objective superiority of our candidate! You can’t tolerate that this almost impossibly qualified candidate, who had been salivating over the presidency since longer than anyone cared to remember, whose way you had cleared straight to the Democratic nomination as if it were synonymous with the White House, has been beaten by a reality-show star dispensing his kernels of wisdom 140 characters at a time, because you wouldn’t compete on his level — because you couldn’t compete on his level.

Who’s the more naïve of the lot, I ask you? Those, like you, who think, after Vox’s Ezra Klein, that “the point of politics is policy”, or those, like Republicans, who know that the point of politics is the exercise of power, and that in a democracy you can’t exercise power until you have been elected to office?

That you need to be elected before you can adopt policies should go without saying, yet, just a few days ago, Vox’s Matthew Yglesias, who thought like almost everyone else that Clinton would win easily, wrote exactly this as if it were a mind-blowing discovery: “It turns out that to have a chance to govern well you need to win elections first, and nominating candidates who are good at electioneering is an important part of the process”. Yglesias isn’t even new at punditry — he practically invented the “Slate pitch” — so who can now think he ever knew anything about practical politics? This blind spot is part and parcel of Vox, but how many of you also failed to understand this? How many of you have reduced politics to the study of proposed policy (and this, invariably, within the narrow frame of what can be considered feasible by unimaginative people) or to inert columns of demographic numbers on a spreadsheet that Nate Silver deciphered for you? And so it was with Hillary Clinton: she made sense — on paper. Transposed to actual politics, everything about her was wrong. She was the wrong candidate, at the wrong time, with the wrong message delivered following the wrong approach, and who topped it all by campaigning in the wrong places; and Donald Trump, who was definitely wrong on paper, was the right man at the right time. (I might have risked calling that The Right Side of History, but I’m not that presumptuous. I just pay heed to which way the river is flowing, and I know that if you don’t want to go downstream, it might be wise to start swimming instead of floating in the water.)

Yes, Trump is unfit for the presidency. Yes, he has no cohesive or honest policy positions, as what he has proposed, with few exceptions, is either wrongheaded or goes against traditional Republican interests. But all this is secondary. By keeping your eyes on matters of policy or spelling out why he was unqualified for the presidency, you lost sight of what mattered to the Republicans and the people who eventually voted for him. What mattered was winning the White House and keeping the Clintons out of it forever. Yes, winning, regardless of the cost, with scant regard for what would happen after Trump became president, was the Republicans’ only concern. It was their variant of “Vote for the crook: it’s important”, which your side, for that matter, also used. To all these people, beating the Clintons became more important than good governance, something the Vox wonks would never understand. This is what Nate Silver fatally overlooked, in his obsession with established norms based on the premise that The Party Decides. Never did it cross his mind that the Republican Party decided to win.

It’s not as if I didn’t try to warn you that you were headed for an unpleasant surprise. But no, you were sure you had the numbers, and for most of you, Trump was a man you had already dismissed, from his Apprentice years, as an incompetent, sexist buffoon, an ambitious oaf and a compulsive grifter. He is those things; but he is much, much more. Perhaps more like a dumpster fire than light itself, but if Hillary Clinton, widely detested as she was, can be called “an epochal heroine far too extraordinary to be contained by the mere White House” with a straight face, why not Donald Trump?

If you are once again about to blame the Republican idiots for nominating Trump, you should keep in mind that it was you who unwittingly helped him cultivate the impression that only he could beat Hillary Clinton. To listen to you, not only was Hillary Clinton unbeatable and the most qualified candidate ever, but History was on her side, and the numbers could not fail her. She was, if we chose to believe you, exceptional. The Republican base, already not enamored of its party’s establishment, got the message that it could not win with an ordinary politician. The Republicans sensed that if they had any chance against Hillary, against the numbers, against History, they needed a candidate who could evoke a similar sense of inevitability. They needed someone exceptional. They found him in Donald Trump.

Were they wrong? Could you see the Republicans winning the presidency with Ted Cruz? John Kasich? Jeb Bush? Marco Rubio? Carly Fiorina? Any of the others? Can you picture any of them running against Hillary Clinton with any chance to win? Ah yes, but then you thought Trump was toast too — burned to a crisp by light itself. A keen judge of character, Trump knew exactly what to say about his opponents. His most inspired phrase was “low-energy”. The context does not even matter. It might not have been true, but it looked true (there’s your “post-truth” for you), and in this game of public relations — which is all that electioneering ever is — it was all that mattered. When Trump called his Republican opponents “losers”, he knew it would be understood by the base that they would lose to the unbeatable Hillary Clinton — but that he, Donald J. Trump, would not lose. And he was right.

With History, the numbers, a firmament’s worth of stars, the finest campaign staffers money could buy, and practically every editorial page in the country on your side, you became complacent. You forgot how to fight. You took the outcome for granted. You talked of how it was her turn, as if the rules of succession were written in stone. You treated the election as if it was just a formality. You talked of how Hillary Clinton deserved to win. For instance, Clinton supporter Melissa McEwan (of Shakesville notoriety) wrote in August that “Hillary’s Exceptional Campaign Would Defeat ANY Republican”. There never was any reckoning with reality on her part, as she kept on blathering about Hillary’s perfect campaign even after the election:

“I’m angry about a lot of things right now, but one thing I keep coming back to is how fucking hard our side worked. How hard Hillary worked. How hard her staff and volunteers worked. How hard activists who supported her worked.

Three times as many field offices. An expansive ground game. The colossal GOTV effort. The tens of thousands of words of policy. The open letters from experts in their fields. The writing, the art, the flash mobs.

And he didn’t do shit.

All he had to do was repeat bullshit talking points about her and disgorge disgusting bigotry during unscripted stream of consciousness garbage monologues, and then coast to victory on a wave of hatred.”

As this comes from deep within the Hillary cult-of-personality camp, there is naturally not one line of introspection on whether, just as the best automobile racer cannot be expected to drive a lemon to victory, the best political team in the world could have taken as toxic a candidate as Hillary Rodham Clinton to the White House. Naturally, in this line of thought, the Democrats are not responsible for her defeat, whereas the general consensus, even in the mainstream media who supported Clinton just like her, was that the party blew it, through a deadly combination of neglect and arrogance. Instead, McEwan assigns blame to the candidate who “didn’t do shit”, and of course to the bigots who failed to reward the Democrats’ efforts. I’m not sure what she was expecting Trump to do — stand over an X taped on the floor so that his opponents could drop a Steinway on him?

What McEwan refuses to admit, in typical liberal fashion, is that in politics, you don’t get points for effort. I might not be American, but I’ve lived long enough in a lipstick-on-a-pig riding to know that merit, narrowly defined as aptitude for public office, has nothing to do with it. That “tens of thousands of words of policy”, as Yglesias found out the hard way, don’t mean anything in the realm of practical politics. That the only writing and art that matter in such a context are, to put it bluntly, advertising and propaganda. That the world isn’t fair.

On top of all this, if McEwan’s assessment is correct, if Trump “didn’t do shit” and still won, while your side worked “fucking hard” yet lost anyway, the Republicans were right to nominate him. Everything else is irrelevant. The corollary to her claim is that if Trump had run a similarly perfect campaign, he would likely have trounced Clinton at the polls, perhaps even in the popular vote; but McEwan would, of course, never accept such a conclusion.

In fact, it is true that Trump could have campaigned much better than he actually did. He never cared about policy, and the staffers working in his policy shop left after the old cheapskate of course would not pay them. He was naturally lazy, coasting on his name. Or perhaps he thought that campaigning according to traditional campaigning rules would not greatly affect his chances, if not negatively: he was not, after all, a regular candidate, and sold himself on not being one. If Trump’s debate performances were any indication, he did not even bother to prepare, and only confirmed his ignorance to millions of viewers. He persisted in repeating his main selling point, how great a businessman he was, which has long since been debunked by Hillary Clinton and others. He lied through his teeth, yet his lies were so clumsy anyone could see through them. Even in strictly public-relations terms, which is what I’m concerned with here, his debate performances were lackluster, without the electrifying quality of his campaign speeches. He uncharacteristically pulled his punches, at best risking an embarrassing (even by his standards) “wrong”, “you’re the puppet”, or a similar interjection, while I was practically expecting to see him let the C-word fly, as Clinton’s obvious strategy was to make him lose his temper, a game designed to show us “the real Donald Trump”, when everyone already could guess with a high degree of accuracy what “the real Donald Trump” looked like just by reading him on Twitter.

The consensus at the time was that the debates had finished him. The funny people on television had more laughs at his expense. Journalists dutifully compiled his lies for all to read. He won the election anyway. If someone could have beaten Donald Trump, it was Donald Trump himself, deliberately; and there were moments — bizarre hybrids of The Producers and Brewster’s Millions — when he seemed to realize he was out of his depth and appeared to want out of the race, but, in true Trumpian fashion, could not bring himself to simply withdraw. The only manner in which he could walk away with his self-esteem intact was to engineer his own loss while claiming the election was rigged — and before long, he started spinning that exact narrative, which made me believe this is what he was preparing for. But now that he has won the election yet still claims it was rigged against him, I doubt that engineering his own defeat so much as crossed his mind, at least consciously.

Regardless of how serious his gaffes or damning the personal revelations on his character, Trump maintained his share of the vote in the polls. Once the Republicans became convinced, in large part thanks to you, that Trump was the only candidate who could beat Clinton — again, their only objective — nothing you would uncover against him would matter to them. Newspaper exposés might be widely circulated but would soon peter out. Past behavior that indicated he would betray his base as soon as he was elected was ignored. A few dozen eviscerations by the who’s who of the late-night-television scene would have no impact, except perhaps to swell his numbers. His claim, in response to the parents of a soldier killed in the line of duty, that he too had made “a lot of sacrifices”, was shrugged off by a party base that one would have thought especially appreciative of the military. That incriminating “grab them by the pussy” tape — which confirmed Trump’s character rather than revealed anything new about it — was forgotten after a fortnight, even though few people appeared to have believed his feeble excuse that it was all “locker-room talk”. Even the morality-obsessed Christian Right rallied to support him, if only while praying for a quick impeachment after the election and his replacement by Pence, who was the ideal running mate to compensate for Trump’s shortcomings. While I had been fairly sure that Trump would win since last spring, it was at this moment that I knew for certain that he would be the next president.

When women came forward with accusations of sexual assault against him, he had the presence of mind to line up Bill Clinton’s own accusers in response. The rumors about Bill, stretching back to his time in Arkansas, had been circling around Washington for decades; it wasn’t an indictment of just the Clintons, but of all the Democratic Party. For someone like Trump to make that argument is disgusting, and brazen, and, indeed, deplorable. But it’s also brilliant. He was already against the wall. What did you want him to say? “Ja, ich bin ein Sexmonster?” There’s that old Steinway-dropping fantasy again. Donald Trump knows there is only one thing to do once cornered: attack.

And, though discomforting to admit, Trump had a point: you can’t arrogantly nominate Hillary Clinton as your candidate and evade talking about Bill. Everyone knew or at least suspected the prospective First Husband was a liability. Even the Democrats barely acknowledged his existence during the campaign, and not just because he alienated the Left wing of his party with his policies as president. Furthermore, nobody believed the halfhearted excuse that it wasn’t Bill Clinton but his wife who was running for president this time: it was safe to assume he would play a part in her administration, officially or not, and at any rate the rot would return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Those two come in tandem, with their daughter Chelsea in tow.

Given what I have seen of Trump, I do believe the accusations against him to be true, likewise for Bill Clinton; but it is important to realize that Trump capitalized on the tendency of a certain strain of feminism to believe all accusations of this nature to be true to weaponize it against itself. By talking about Bill Clinton’s behavior and claiming his wife enabled it by hushing it up, Trump neutralized the Hillary groupies who would surely make their inevitable point about “rape culture”: he deflected their attacks, and if they persisted in talking about Trump while ignoring Bill, they would expose themselves as partisan hypocrites. His strategy worked: even some Democratic supporters wanted nothing to do with Bill Clinton and blamed him for his wife’s troubles. A Slate author, for instance, assigned blame for Hillary Clinton’s woes on “three lecherous men” — Donald Trump, of course, but also her husband, and Anthony Weiner, whose investigation against, over alleged sexual text messages, was rumored to tie in with Hillary’s interminable (and overblown) e-mail server saga.

If you want to assign blame, however, stop looking around Hillary Clinton. That woman’s undeniable ambition, carried out to an unhealthy degree, and her association with a widely despised political dynasty, at a time when everyone was sick of these career politicians, have not only cost you the election, they might also cost you the Republic. If the Clintons had any shame, but of course they don’t have any, they would, for America’s sake, volunteer to exile themselves to some remote guano island, where they would be in their element; but as I read that Chelsea is already being groomed for the reboot of their interminable saga, they and the Democrats have obviously learned nothing, and will go on learning nothing, just as they will, to borrow an old phrase, forget nothing.

Nevertheless, as I’m sure Chelsea Clinton’s inevitable run for the White House in the next decade or two will benefit from the sturdiest policy proposal this side of her mother, she’ll so deserve to win.

The Shining City is Ablaze: The Demise of American Exceptionalism

“Only a secular providentialist could ask what it means ‘to be on the right side of history’.” — Jackson Lears.

The Right Side of History is a resilient notion. Even after Hillary Clinton lost, her supporters were trading the phrase as if it still went without saying — that it didn’t happen with Hillary, but that it will happen someday. If this is about one day having a female American president, why not? The United States doesn’t appear to me as a country that is so reactionary as to not contemplate voting for a woman, especially when the world has seen female reactionary leaders of still some repute; to wit, Margaret Thatcher, of whom you secretly wanted Hillary Clinton to be the American variant. There is nothing really presumptuous in saying that a woman will be elected president, or that she could occupy the function competently. It won’t be Hillary Clinton, but it could be Chelsea or Elizabeth Warren or — gasp — Sarah Palin. (This brings up an interesting question: Would the Right Side still apply if the Republicans fielded a female candidate against a male Democrat?) If the United States were indeed incapable of electing a woman, it would indicate it has failed as a country; but perhaps that is what you apprehend.

Ah, but presumptuous is a word that surrounds everything Hillary Clinton does, so the Right Side of History became all about her. It was suggested that her being the first woman in the White House would be, at first glance, revolutionary, ground-breaking, a victory for feminism. The problem is that we have been glancing at the Clintons for a quarter of a century. A victory for feminism, is it, to elect a woman who initially rose to prominence by being married to a man who once was president? A woman whose lecherous husband had implemented policies that were harmful to women? A woman whom you praised, in fact, precisely because she didn’t offer an alternative in politics, because she didn’t suggest a more caring, compassionate, in other words feminine, approach to government? What you wanted to prove, perversely, was that a woman could be just as ruthless and tough-as-nails as any man, a point that, by now, hardly requires proving. You didn’t really want a Jill Stein; you wanted Lady Kissinger.

Yet this tough-as-nails Lady Kissinger was always allowed to benefit from her sex just as voters were instructed to believe she had transcended it. The academic Katherine Cross argued, for instance, that if the first woman to have a chance at the White House was a bloodthirsty saber-rattler, it was because she was the only type of female candidate who could meet with the approval of The Patriarchy, as if the jingoism problem were caused by men and not, say, the Democrats themselves or American politics generally. Articles that spun every attack on Clinton as misogyny entered the mainstream (e.g. Time Magazine’s “Hillary Clinton’s Emailgate Is an Attack on Women”). Not voting for her was proof that “we don’t trust women”. Her getting interrupted during the debates — even when the interruption was by the moderator, whose job it is, one would assume, to interrupt — became significant: never mind the number of times the moderator also interrupted Trump, it was proof not just of the old bias canard, but once again of The Patriarchy. In those debates, if Donald Trump had called her “Hillary” — as opposed to “Secretary Clinton” as he did — just as she constantly called him “Donald”, it would have been called misogynistic. If he had insisted that she call him “Mister Trump”, it would also have been called misogynistic. There was, watching this, a certain sense that if Trump wanted nothing to do with rules, the Clinton camp was more than eager to bend them to its liking, with accusations of misogyny just another weapon in its arsenal.

Not that the high-powered media cabal surrounding Hillary Clinton, especially the pundits who relentlessly exploited the gender angle for her (and their) benefit — the Jessica Valentis, the Amanda Marcottes, the Sady Doyles — would have cared about her incapacity to offer anything to poor women, or to women of color whose name isn’t Beyoncé or Oprah. It was common knowledge that Clinton represented Lean In feminism, intended only for a small number of wealthy, well-educated or well-connected women like themselves. But certainly the poor editor at the left-leaning Guardian who ended up being stuck with the undoubtedly pitiless task of converting Ms. Valenti’s column to proper British spelling must, at Valenti’s “as wonderful as it will be to watch the first woman win the presidential election…”, have paused to ask himself: “Isn’t that the kind of thinking that would have foisted Margaret Thatcher on us nearly forty years ago for no other reason than because she was a woman?” And yes, yes, it is that kind of thinking, even though the author in question (and she’s not alone) would painstakingly point out how qualified that woman happens to be. You really thought that people would not see through your transparent charade of pretending there was anything uplifting in electing the career woman whose breaking of the glass ceiling promised to open the path to the White House for all women married to the right political insider. You might as well have been cheering for Isabel Martínez de Perón.

All of this to say that your vision was a retrograde one. You may have believed that by nominating a woman, you were fighting one of the foremost battles of today, but the baffling part is that you completely failed to realize that you were fighting it on terms that were already becoming obsolete by 1979 when Margaret Thatcher was elected: even the British put another woman in charge of their country this year and they apparently thought nothing of it. Instead of focusing so much on Thatcher, it would have been wiser for you to consider how much of today’s world harks back to 1979, for completely different reasons: Russia was expansionistic and would soon face the world’s opprobrium for its invasion of Afghanistan. Muslim extremists (Shia, but who’s checking?) toppled a westernized government. Justin Trudeau’s father was the Canadian prime minister (he lost that year’s election, but would be back within a year). Indeed Thatcher was elected, but that was in Great Britain. You are in the United States; and in the United States, there was a Democrat in the White House who’s now mostly associated with the word malaise and who would soon be replaced by a Republican, a populist celebrity running on a theme that might be slightly familiar to you: MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. In other words: Were you so blind as to not see what was right under your noses? Have you no sense of this history that, ironically, you claim to be on the Right Side of?

As Corey Robin argued persuasively, many of this generation’s pundits — and those he cites by name are liberal or neoliberal — “seem to lack the most basic gut impulse of any historically minded person: if you think something is unprecedented, it’s probably not”. For instance, in one of the many articles published as part of your ongoing love story with Justin Trudeau, Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick fawned at how his wife, Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau, “is allowed to have a hyphenated last name. How late 20th century! The first lady with two last names hasn’t been permitted here in Washington since, well, you-know-who tried it”. Yet anybody with a cursory knowledge of Canadian political history would know about Maureen McTeer, who did not even attach to her surname that of her husband, Joe Clark, who became prime minister (for the Conservatives, no less) in… 1979.

I knew that you grasped nothing in the way of history after I saw the Democratic National Convention. If there is anything that can be said about this election, it is that while the Republicans have displayed an excess of imagination, to Trump’s benefit, the Democrats have paid dearly for their lack of it. Just as the Republicans were replaying Reagan’s greatest hits, the Democrats — God knows what the Democrats were thinking, but they awkwardly skipped Bill Clinton’s checkered legacy as much as they could, even though his wife was running for president, to go well before 1979, back to the sixties. And it all fell apart. It was too arrogant, too desperate, too coarse even with all the celebrities involved. The Democrats did not even understand the myth they were attempting to weave. They were too cynical for this. For instance, they released an updated version, with the same actor, of their 52-year-old “Confessions of a Republican” warning against Barry Goldwater, while Hillary had been a “Goldwater Girl” herself. Putting a former Reagan official on display to shout that Trump was “no Ronald Reagan”, would have been a more inspired touch, even with the resulting ire of a Left that had nowhere else to go anyway, if the Democrats did not destroy everything they touched with their insistence that their own candidate did not wilt entire gardens just by walking through them. For the most part, they were more concerned with replaying a wacky version of 1968, where the old unpopular establishment warmonger decides to run again, has his main party opponent assassinated (this time figuratively), gets the nomination in the resulting tumult and of course ends up losing to Nixon.

If only you had said that you were “on the Right Side of History” because you saw what went on in the rest of the world and felt you needed to catch up with it, if not up to 2016 — where female heads of state are common and their competence recognized by practically everyone — then at least to 1979, I might have understood. But no, in your mind, you’re not bringing up the rear, you’re the trailblazers, telling other countries what they need to do, or else. But perhaps a country that has yet to implement the metric system doesn’t have anything much to teach to anyone? That is how ridiculous your country appears, when looked at from the outside. You might be liberals, but you are in love, whether you realize it or not, with American Exceptionalism, which of course Hillary Clinton firmly believes in. (Undoubtedly to court Republican voters, she even made it a selling point that Donald Trump, in spite of all his Reaganist rhetoric, does not.) All that tosh about that shining city upon a hill — you might call yourselves liberals, but you actually believe that as firmly as do neoconservatives. They too, after all, believe in The Right Side of History. With you in charge, the warships would depart all the same, just for different reasons, and I’m not even sure they would be that different.

American Exceptionalism, as I conceive of it, means that you have nothing to learn from the rest of the world, and that the rest of the world has everything to learn from you. Your failure to predict Trumpism cannot be entirely explained by your lack of historical sense: after all, you just had to look at what went on in the rest of the world not forty years ago but today. The Brexit referendum in Great Britain should have been your wake-up call, but in addition to that, we get: Putin in Russia, Duterte in the Philippines, Orbán in Hungary, Erdoğan in Turkey, the surge of the Front National in France (will it be time for a woman too?) and of Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom in the Netherlands that will likely be confirmed in elections next year, and all these other places like Poland or India where populist or reactionary governments have taken power. Let’s not even talk about the Islamic State which is just a theocratic variant. Don’t you see a trend in this? But no, it wasn’t just that you were blind to historical patterns; as good American Exceptionalists, you thought that you were immune. Your outrage at The Russians having possibly interfered with the American election, while the United States saw it as its God-given right to interfere with elections anywhere it wanted (not to mention helping along a few dictators), also demonstrated this.

That is why, even though the rest of the world is aghast at your political goings-on, the schadenfreude is hard to repress. The election to your presidency of all that is vulgar and crass and repulsive in American life — that is to say, the personification of America— at last proves that you are no longer immune, that you are no longer morally superior to the rest of the world. The election of Donald Trump is your fall from grace, and no matter what you might think, the demise of American Exceptionalism was long overdue. The city upon a hill isn’t shining, it’s ablaze, and has been for quite some time.

Pandora’s Idiot Box: The Guffaws Industry at Work

“… Those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the second world war.” — Peter Cook.

When historians will look at this election, they will inevitably talk of your failure to take Donald Trump seriously in spite of the mounting evidence that you should urgently begin doing so. It was not as if the man did not give you enough warning signs over the years. He wanted to run in 2000. He withdrew at the last minute in 2012. Even without going back that far, let us just consider the period extending from the announcement of his candidacy in June 2015 to the Republican National Convention last July. Nate Silver was still telling the media to “stop freaking out about Donald Trump’s polls” until he let it drop that he would likely be the Republican candidate. Vox was still treating him as a clicks-generating godsend until it was too late. The Huffington Post confined him to its Entertainment section until it came to its senses, last December, and started appending an editorial note to all articles about him on how “Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.”. Quite an about-face. (It wouldn’t be the last: after Trump won, the Post removed its editorial note to avoid casting doubts on his legitimacy.)

They were all fooled by Trump in exactly the way one predicted they would be fooled given their inherent flaws and blind spots. Silver was still convinced the party establishment would stop him; Vox is only concerned with dry realistic-sounding wonky policy, which isn’t exactly Donald “Build a Wall” Trump’s forte, nor the source of his appeal, which that site could never understand; The Huffington Post already covered anything and everything as if none of it really mattered, because you get what you pay for. (Perhaps I am being unfair to the few Huffington Post writers who make an effort, especially at that salary, but the rot is at the top.) Who took Trump seriously, then? The long-faced reputable newspapers did, but it was with their usual mortician’s gravitas, when treating Trump like any other candidate was just as dangerous a mistake as thinking him a harmlessly sardonic clown. Current Affairs had the best instinct of any publication I read, but that magazine probably remains very niche. A few writers at The New Republic — an outlet that is the shadow of its former self — could see that Trump was on the rise. So did the occasional ponderous piece at The Atlantic, a magazine that seems to exist for the sheer pleasure of reminding us how much on the inside it is ever since it left Boston for D.C., and as such is naturally disposed against an outsider like Trump, regardless of his qualifications. And there was Salon, as useful as a fire alarm blaring on at all times: it gets tiresome, and you stop paying attention to it long before the smoke starts filling the room.

Most media were fooled because Donald Trump developed his campaign in such a way as to foster the impression that he was clowning around. Yes, I too wonder how his own supporters felt when he, for instance, smirked as he embraced the flag . What I saw happening among you, long before Trump but with increasing frequency, is that only what you like is ever considered “serious” by your standards. You liked Hillary Clinton, ergo she was serious (which she was). You didn’t like Trump, ergo he was not. You saw Trump as a troll, a word whose meaning you likewise expanded to mean anyone saying something you didn’t like, regardless of whether he meant it. Your early verdict on Trump was, interchangeably: he’s joking, he just wants to offend, he doesn’t want to be president, he just wants to promote his hotels or a Trump TV network, he doesn’t mean a word of what he says, Vox produced an explainer with some napkin calculations proving that his promises are unrealistic, he can’t possibly be elected, and besides, he’s an idiot. Only, the joke was on you.

I can understand serious or would-be-serious outlets, with a certain idea of politics like Vox, dismissing Trump as a mere showman, an entertainer; it is impossible to forgive other entertainers who failed to realize the danger he posed. They, of all people, should have seen through the self-parody of his campaign. Above all, they should have realized they could not handle Trump in the same way they had always done with career politicians. To joke about him was to play his game, and when he saw it could be of use to him, he did not hesitate to play along, like that time he let Jimmy Fallon muss up his hair. For the most part, they regarded him as a ratings boon. The New York Times critic James Poniewozik described the conundrum of spoofing someone like Trump:

“His style has rendered him, weirdly, almost comedy-proof. Election parodies traditionally exaggerate candidates. But Mr. Trump exaggerates himself — he’s the frilled lizard of politics, inflating his self-presentation to appear ever larger. Satire exposes candidates’ contradictions and absurdities. But Mr. Trump blows past those, while his supporters cheer.

Whatever anyone thought of Mr. Trump as a candidate, the consensus was that he would be a one-man stimulus program for comedians. He’s given them plenty of material, but little of it has stuck. As Mr. Trump has defied conventional politics and confounded conventional pundits, so has he frustrated conventional satire.”

Those comedians should have been the first to realize that everything, now, comes wrapped in a layer of irony and humor — when a cartoon frog has become the symbol of a new form of hip online bigotry, when white supremacists share anime memes and entire boards adopt a posture where the more they are ironic, the more serious they really are [3].

Even the state apparatus has gotten in on the act. Last year, Ben Schwartz wrote at The Baffler on how “news, politics, policy, and cultural debate now reach us couched in jokes”, in a landscape now featuring “a smirking CIA, a healthcare overhaul that was sold via vaudeville sketch, a State Department that… vetted and approved The Interview [a film depicting the assassination of North Korea’s Kim Jong-un], and a president whose signature moment is the night he cracked jokes at a White House Correspondents’ Dinner while a U.S. Navy SEAL team invaded Pakistan to assassinate Osama bin Laden in his home”. Interestingly, Schwartz believed Trump would never be president because, among other reasons, he “feels personally threatened by public ridicule”, which was a fair assessment, but it failed to consider that (1) his followers bonded with him because they were subjected to that same public ridicule by the same source, and (2) Donald Trump, who understands public relations, would have the presence of mind to play along until he could get his revenge, in the same way Laugh-In offered Richard Nixon the opportunity to demonstrate he could indulge in self-deprecation with a fondly remembered “Sock it to me?”, an event Schwartz mentions.

Today’s foremost practitioners of American humor are too close to political power for their own good. In this they bring to mind what George Orwell said of their direct ancestor, Mark Twain, who might have been “a destroyer of humbugs and a prophet of democracy” but instead became “that dubious thing a ‘public figure,’ flattered by passport officials and entertained by royalty”, a “licensed jester” for whom business concerns were never far from his mind and who “became the world’s leading after-dinner speaker, charming alike for his anecdotes and his power to make businessmen feel themselves public benefactors”. The most high-profile occasion where this sickening proximity is now on display is the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where everyone’s a comedian, including the president. (It was rumored for a while that Trump decided to run because Barack Obama had mocked him there in 2011.) The most memorable performance of a comedian at that venue was in 2006, when Stephen Colbert mocked President Bush to his face, but Schwartz offers a less rosy assessment of the bespectacled comedian’s tour de farce: “Bush watched him, chuckled politely, and, somehow resisting the devastating power of Colbert’s monologue, managed not to resign on the spot.” And that was it. “As for Colbert, he returned to work, unharmed, by all accounts, by the NSA.”

Much has been made of comparing Trump to, among myriad film characters, the selfish entertainer “Lonesome” Rhodes in Elia Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd. This was not inappropriate, considering Trump’s all but evident contempt for his own supporters; but I found the film more prophetic on the uneasy relationship between television comedians and political power. Late in the film, Rhodes proposes to give his support to a reactionary senator with presidential ambitions in exchange for his appointment to a newly created cabinet post of “Secretary of National Morale”. The first example that came to my mind when I watched that film was Canada’s answer to Jon Stewart, Rick Mercer, once nicknamed “Canada’s unofficial opposition”, but also, as a compliment, the “Minister of Humour”.

In 2007, an Ottawa Citizen columnist wondered if Mercer, then in his late thirties but on national television since 1993, had not already reached his best-before date. His Rick Mercer Report, she wrote, “is no longer a sharp jab into the pomposity and self-delusion of politicians, having evolved into a celebration of The Star’s camaraderie with the pompous and self-deluded”. The Rick Mercer Report, the first show Mercer produced after his symptomatic move from Halifax to Toronto, is a formulaic affair in which Mercer schmoozes it up with a politician at a festival or picturesque locale in one segment, then follows it up with his trademark “rant” in which he walks down a street talking to a shaky handheld camera on some important issue of the day, with everything wedged into a Serious News Anchor format. It is, of course, still on the air, courtesy of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where one can see him telling truth to power, from support-our-troops-in-Afghanistan enthusiasm (while public opinion was souring on that mission) to telling pipeline opponents to stuff it because “this is about one part of Canada trying to get their natural resources to the world market”.

I stopped watching him years ago, but evidently a great number of Canadians still consider him a worthy radical and subversive voice. Perhaps being from Quebec (and a separatist) makes me especially attuned to how Mercer all too snugly adheres to the CBC ideal of consensual nation building (and has been amply rewarded for it: officer of the Order of Canada, honorary Air Force colonel, half a dozen honorary degrees), but your Stewarts, Colberts, Olivers and Trevor Noahs do not appear to me as different in any way, except for the absence of the Lofty Mandate of a public broadcaster: in their case, it’s all for money. Their “folksiness” — cosmopolitan suave irony having replaced the homey plain-talkin’ forthrightness of a Will Rogers or the fictional Rhodes — is just a cover that soon makes way for their coziness with the political class, as long as the politicians’ views are compatible with those of the show’s hosts, viewers, and advertisers.

These comedians are “parasites of the dysfunction they mock”, as Steve Almond wrote in 2012: “They aren’t just invested in the status quo, but dependent on it.” The success of these shows is inversely proportional to the success of their political agenda: were they not adversarial, they would be revealed to everyone as embarrassingly close to the establishment; should the porous ideological center they represent come to wield uncontested political power across the nation, they would have no reason to exist. Nobody — especially not advertisers — would tolerate for long a critique from further on the Left, on prime-time television, against the center triumphant. Nobody, likewise, would have much patience for an omnidirectional sneer carried out without fear or favor; because anyone, at any given time, could end up on the receiving end of it — instead of the usual safe targets — such a show would be denounced as divisive.

We just have to recall the embarrassing moment when the cartoonist Garry Trudeau (of Doonesbury fame) pontificated, upon receiving an award named after a murdered journalist, on how it was inappropriate for the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists to have been “punching downward”. Meanwhile, the luminaries of American televised humor butter their bread by mocking a part of the country that — isn’t that convenient? — probably doesn’t even watch their shows, but definitely hears about getting mocked on them, yet would never consider anything remotely like taking an assault rifle to a television studio (and if someone did, he would be called the usual “lone nut”). Yet one group of this comparison is the toast of the cultural establishment, while the other is too dead to respond, which might give us a clue as to which side, exactly, is “punching downward”, and which wasn’t. For instance, Jon Stewart responded to the Charlie Hebdo killings with:

“I know very few people go into comedy, you know, as an act of courage. Mainly because it shouldn’t have to be that. It shouldn’t be an act of courage. It should be taken as established law. But those guys at Hebdo had it, and they were killed for their cartoons. A stark reminder that for the most part, the legislators and journalists and institutions that we jab and ridicule are not, in any way, the enemy. For however frustrating and outraged the back and forth can become, it’s still back and forth — a conversation amongst those on, let’s call it Team Civilization. And this type of violence only clarifies that reality.

A stark reminder, lugubriously delivered, that was immediately followed by a segment about Nazi cows.

When Trudeau paraphrased Stewart’s remarks in his speech, he pared them down to how “comedy in a free society shouldn’t take courage”. If comedy doesn’t take courage, then what is it good for? Stewart’s remarks reveal his industry for what it is: cowardly, easily distracted, barely bothering to punch, let alone upward, not really persuaded that what it does actually matters in one way or another, and convinced it will always end on a get-together of like-minded people, here, in the comfortable lounge of Team Civilization.

Can you imagine such people standing up to Donald Trump?

The dysfunction at the center of these shows is that, just as they have an obvious financial interest in the status quo, their hosts reveal (or feign), as in Stewart’s “Team Civilization”, a latent naïveté built around your cardinal virtue of Hope: things will get better, but for us to stay on the air, they mustn’t get better. If this sounds familiar, it is because it is the same dysfunctional irony in Barack Obama’s famous campaign theme: if Change happens, then Hope is made redundant; if Hope becomes an end in itself, then Change need (indeed must) never happen. The scenario that played out throughout Obama’s two terms — Hope, without Change — was a godsend for those comedians: Obama’s election pointed to something to look forward to, and the other party’s obstruction was solely responsible for not getting there, never mind the dark spots in Obama’s own record. The net result of the paralysis in Washington, accompanied by the election of the first black president, was that Hope remained intact for eight years. The problems began when all these comedians decided this was still good with Hillary Clinton, who, except (arguably) for the gender angle, offered nothing new, unlike Obama who at least marked a regime change from the Bush years, was more charismatic, was a person of color, and did not carry a quarter of a century of cumbersome political baggage in federal politics. It was difficult to keep up hope with a candidate who could have been mistaken for a Republican in any other era.

What became clear in the events leading up to Trump’s victory is that these comedians were only halfheartedly persuaded the man was dangerous in any substantially different way from the regular state of affairs in Washington: like you, they treated Trump as just another buffoon. Occasionally, there was a flash of understanding of his appeal. For instance, John Oliver understood perfectly the mystique of the Trump name. He knew there was something about Trump that was inherently frightening. Not just because Donald Trump plastered it on all his properties, reminding you that he was building a creepy personality cult around himself; there was something to Trump, etymologically, that unnerved you — its being an alteration of triumph — , and the finality of its sound, its proximity to tramp, trample. Beyond the kitsch associated with his name, the image it evoked, if only subconsciously, was one of victory and jackboots. Oliver chose different imagery to soften the blow, but he realized what he was dealing with.

But what was Oliver’s brilliant idea, then? To exorcise his name by calling him Drumpf, which the family had dropped long before Donald’s generation, and which insulted in passing every immigrant and quite a few home-bred people, most of them of color, whose name doesn’t happen to have, like “John Oliver”, a nice Anglosphere ring to it. The implications evidently escaped you, as I saw you Drumpfing up all over the Internet, even long after the joke’s best-before date. It was your modern-day idea of a secret decoder ring, shared by a few million people in a spirit of knowing exclusivity. Drumpf. A name you liked to use in lieu of actual arguments because of how the word ended in flatulence, projecting disdain and spittle alike at your enemies. I still see some of you using it today, as if you remained oblivious to the situation. LA Weekly’s Jonny Coleman summarized it best:

“This year will be remembered for its toxic fluff. Provocateurs and dime-store Howard Beales such as Seth Meyers, John Oliver, Lena Dunham and Andy Richter have demonstrated zero political efficacy. If anything, we’ll never know how much their smugness ostracized potential allies and inflamed the opposition’s base. No one — even the undereducated and marginalized — enjoys being condescended to. And yet, part of the Democratic strategy was to talk down to the citizens of America or to shame them into not voting for Trump. This sort of satire was arguably successful earlier in Jon Stewart’s run on The Daily Show, but it was fresh at the time. It had teeth and seemed to matter. But that formula has been rinsed.”

[….]

“At best these spicy take-makers help blur the lines between fiction-as-news-as-entertainment. At worst they’re radicalizing independents against their cause. All the rage in the world somehow cannot be converted to political action by the Evisceratti (even though it’s so common on the right). The Evisceratti love to paint right-wingers as racist, home-schooled, evangelical idiots — meanwhile, these are the guys who seem fairly capable of effectively mobilizing, organizing and putting aside beefs (remember how for the last 18 months the Republican Party was one splinter away from shattering entirely?) to achieve a group goal. You know, democracy.”

If Drumpf, stupid and offensive as it was, was the best that comedians could do, what hope did they have to help fight against Trump? The guffaws industry dominating the airwaves — your Daily Shows, your John Olivers, your Saturday Night Lives — mostly mined Trump for laughs, mocked and shamed and abused his followers without taking him or them seriously. The resulting humor was often awkward (e.g. a fourth-rate comedian like Sarah Silverman dressed as Hitler), and often toothless, even when it tried to be biting.

A good example of this is Saturday Night Live’s “Racists for Trump” fake ad from last March. By that time, we had already heard accounts of violence at his rallies, and more than enough examples of the candidate’s rhetoric to see where he was going. In the SNL skit, we see typical American white people carrying out apparently mundane tasks: repainting a wall, ironing linen, carrying firewood. Only it’s revealed that the painter is writing “WHITE POWER”, the woman is ironing a Klan tunic, and the firewood is intended for a cross burning. What should be terrifying in that video is not far from that word we hear quite often these days: normalization. The idyllic community on display, which may have achieved the American Dream, hides a rotten core, in the same way the Gilded Age was built on the misery of its working class. (I’m also thinking of something like The Stepford Wives, without the camp, or Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery.) Only, this sketch is not terrifying. It falls flat. It’s smarmy and self-conscious, when it should be played straight. When it is finished, it is quick to be forgotten. And crucially, racism isn’t casual-ha-ha-funny. Neither is sexual assault, which The Daily Show’s “Trump Gym” sketch failed to understand. Such subjects are not out of bounds to humor, but you have to put some effort into the writing to make it work, and these comedians neither have the time nor the inclination for it.

As surprising as it may be to some of you, humor is not always synonymous with laughter. Unfortunately, most American humor is written for laughs, by which I mean that it aims to make everything safe — even, inexplicably, when the subject matter is not — everything consensus-seeking, soothing, comforting; in other words, televised chamomile tea: nothing to leave you sleepless, which might risk offending advertisers and affect workplace productivity. It’s all garbage and you waste your life watching it and one day you’re dead. Of course there has to be a live audience or a laugh track: the folks-at-home wouldn’t know when it’s meant to be funny without one, even though American humor is as a rule incapable of subtlety. It shoots fish in a barrel, and calls it putting up a fight in a shark tank.

Resistance to Trump from those quarters? Ha! Most of those comedians you admire will turn into Adam Gopnik’s description of the later Bob Hope, “the perfect jester for the Nixon court: contemptuous of his audience and even of his role”: well-off, detached tools of the status quo, whichever it is.

And now that Trump is president, who is now back in the news? Why, the man who disappeared from the circuit when he was elected to Washington seven years ago — I mean the incomparable Al Franken, of course. I recall a line in a National Journal article claiming that the Democrat Franken, “the first in­sult com­ic to get elec­ted to the Sen­ate, cir­cuit­ously paved the way for the rise of a much dif­fer­ent type of en­ter­tain­er — Don­ald J. Trump”. In context, the article’s point (questionable, but I’ll let the wonks bicker over it) is that if Franken had not won his Senate seat in 2008 by 312 votes, after the election had first been called for his Republican opponent, the Democrats would not have obtained a (short-lived) super-majority that enabled the newly elected President Obama to push through his health care reform, “polit­ic­al back­lash be damned” — which led, or so the author argues, to the populist right-wing fury behind Trump’s candidacy. Taken out of context, however, the hypothesis that Franken paved the way for Trump is entirely true, to the extent that “circuitously” can be taken out of it.

Franken of course did not pave the way for entertainers holding political office, but think what you want about Ronald Reagan’s acting skills, the Gipper’s screen presence was almost relentlessly wholesome. Author Scott Farris argues that “Reagan was simply incapable of projecting the moral ambiguity the genre [the Western, which he remains associated with] required, and he was too nice to seem menacing in the role of villain”, which he played only once, in his last film, and “regretted doing”. Franken, in comparison, demonstrated that an entertainer’s reputation for vulgarity — and, unlike even a Schwarzenegger, it’s the only reputation Franken has — could be politically rewarding. You don’t have to be a neoconservative George W. Bush-era insider like Michael Gerson (who called Franken’s work “the Federalist Papers of lifestyle liberalism”) to realize that Al Franken is the product of an age in which vulgarity has been elevated into a virtue.

American humor is as vulgar as it is toothless; it thinks vulgarity is edgy, because it knows that a blue-haired lady with no purchasing power will file a complaint to the FCC, a complaint of course immediately disseminated to the four corners of the Internet, leading more people from advertiser-friendly demographics into thinking this particular brand of humor is imperiled and as such, must consequently be subversive, and always telling truth to power — if only to the guys responsible for the seven-second delay.

Recall how activists, usually on the Left (just think of the so-called “Dirtbag Left”) or left-liberals, argued against civility for decades. They told us this was to compensate for their lack of actual power. They told us it would lead to the (inevitable) revolution. Feminists informed us, for example, that “tone policing” was merely a way to protect privilege, a silencing tactic, and as such it was noble to revolt against it. There is some validity to concerns that civility is a means to protect privilege, that it is a silencing tactic. For instance, after Vice President-Elect Mike Pence’s controversial attendance of Hamilton, where a cast member, Victor Dixon, lectured him on his duty to protect vulnerable people like minorities, a column by The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson responded:

“Set aside that people who really feel threatened by a powerful government do not behave this way in the presence of that government’s leaders. Set aside, too, the irony of celebrity actors lecturing the VP-elect after an election in which the losing side leaned heavily on the endorsements of celebrity actors.

The cast of “Hamilton” weren’t just broadcasting their faux alarm and anxiety; they were signaling that they reject the new administration and will not be seen colluding with it — or even entertaining its leaders without protest. Imagine how a Trump voter in the audience must have felt Friday night.”

I can’t say I have much hope for the intellectual honesty of a writer who calls the mainstream media hysterical (always a telling word, etymologically), or who thinks the natural person to blame for Russian meddling is of course Barack Obama. Never mind that Dixon remained very civil in his comments. Never mind that Davidson, a white man, is hardly in a position to comment on how faux a person of color’s “alarm and anxiety” really is at the election of a president whose campaign was marked by racist incidents fueled by his own xenophobic rhetoric. Never mind that The Federalist and its ilk — always the first to dismiss a person’s feelings because of FREE SPEECH — should now be particularly concerned about how a Trump voter in the audience must have felt and would tell the actor to just shut up and act. (It also doesn’t bode well for artistic independence.) Never mind that Davidson all too obviously wants to return to the good old days when people doffed their corduroy hats at their social betters and thanking their boss at the end of their 14-hour shifts for not letting them starve on the streets.

No, what matters is that Davidson, in the same article, quotes a (genuinely awful) Jamelle Bouie column that found the notion that some Trump voters could be good people “myopic and solipsistic” at best and “morally grotesque” at worst. Davidson responds: “Why bother trying to persuade these wicked people? Better to shout them down, mock them, muzzle them by force, if possible. You don’t reason with Nazis, do you?” No, you don’t reason with Nazis. Yes, he’s right, people who feel threatened by a “powerful government” do not act this way: they wouldn’t ponderously lecture its deputy head of state, but actually resist. But what Davidson all too obviously desires, in the context of the rest of his article, isn’t active resistance: it’s more deference. And that wouldn’t have saved anyone the Nazis had in their sights.

However, any concerns I may have had with civility being a tool of privilege fly right out the window when I see how the anti-civility activists have been using it, which is somewhere between turning the tables and flipping the table. Anyone who has spent any time in one of their so-called “safe spaces” knows how that plays out: they have nothing with curbing incivility. Certain positions are considered out of bounds, a rule I presume I could be fine with, if applied honestly; but it rarely is. The people who impose them do not want to apply their rules equally, which I am certain they would defend by saying that true equality only reinforces the current power structure. So, the “safe spaces” I have seen myself were not at all about flattening the power structure but about artificially reversing it, except when it came to incivility: the result was, for example, black women being allowed to say anything they wanted, in any way they wanted, which invariably meant with absolutely no civility whatsoever, while whitey had to shut up, because if he responded on the same level (or even a substantially more polite one than his interlocutor), those with actual power in the safe space would euphemistically “ask him to leave”.

The world, however, is not a safe space. Not that you didn’t try to make it one. But what I’m currently seeing is various groups co-opting the language of victimization to justify their own incivility. Who could ever forget the white nationalists’ cry of white genocide? And what of Gamergate (occasionally compared to Trumpism, including by me), which whipped itself into indignation over a series of opinion pieces collectively known as “the Gamers are Dead articles”? Whites, gamers, the new victimized groups? It doesn’t even matter if it’s a blatant lie. White nationalists, Gamergaters and the like do what they want to do because they can, but they saw they could wrap their own causes in a semblance of righteousness which you so graciously provided them with. Now all they have to say — and you can bet they say it — is that the other side does it too. Try telling Gamergate, for instance, that it can’t try to get specific writers fired by way of advertiser pressure; it will respond that you tried the same against Rush Limbaugh. Everything it might do, you did it too. They’re not even lying about that.

The net result of this is that anyone who wants to achieve anything has everything to gain by eschewing civility, and not only those with no privilege. And this is a game that a privileged person is in a much better position to win than you. Being vulgar with him in the hope of gaining the advantage would be like trying to get into a brawl with Mike Tyson. It would be foolish, self-destructive, and would leave you without so much as the moral high ground against him. What you do doesn’t really attack him in any way, doesn’t diminish his power, won’t make him recognize the error of his ways; if anything, he can now justify being uncouth because so are you.

Picture someone who is impossibly privileged, according to any measurement you could think of: white, male, famous, rich. Now make him exceptionally uncouth because his proclivity is to do as he pleases at all times, not because he wants to play your game of pretending he isn’t privileged. He doesn’t deny he is privileged; on the contrary, he loves being privileged, he loves telling you he’s privileged, and he doesn’t care whether you like it or not. Now place him in a position where decorum used to prevail but which you did everything to undermine — such as, say, the White House.

Well, thanks to you, that just happened.

‘Hamilton’ Demolition Night: The Aesthetics of Trumpism

“An idiot aunt said “[Trump] seems powerful and confident.” I asked her if she realized that leading the free world wasn’t “Falcon Crest.””— From Twitter.

While you idled away in laughter in front of your television screens, dragging the level of the national conversation down with you, what you overlooked was fear, something the conservatives never forgot. You believed that fear was, in the post-9/11 world, an essentially Republican sentiment; in other words, you were too good for it. Whatever the problem was, it was nothing that couldn’t be addressed at a plenary meeting of Team Civilization. Meanwhile, Trump was telling his supporters to be wary of Mexican rapists lurking under every good American bed, talking about locking up Hillary Clinton and moving ahead with a Muslim registry. It was when it became clear that Trump was serious — both in intent and in election chances — that you finally started fearing him. (Vox’s Ezra Klein, for instance, wrote on election day of how “Donald Trump’s candidacy is the first time American politics has left me truly afraid”. Yes, he’s young, but surely a man who was 17 years old in 2001 must have been afraid of something before Trump.) By then, it was too late — and you soon fell back on wishful thinking, more hope now disguised as certainty: the Right Side of History, the numbers, the Silicon Valley stars. God himself could not sink this campaign.

You insisted that Trump posed a major threat to the country, but it was as if you didn’t believe it until I would say around the Republican National Convention, perhaps even later, even as late as November 9th. As Current Affairs’ Nathan Robinson argued in February, “at the same time as Trump’s opponents insist that he poses a major threat to the country, they behave as if he is a harmless clown to be prodded and mocked”. That was what made your shrill, smug, sanctimonious attitude insufferable: for purely self-interested reasons, you acted as if any minuscule transgression of your beliefs heralded the triumph of evil, while you thought the triumph of evil — in the United States at least, American Exceptionalism oblige — was a material impossibility until Trump started winning.

You spent years calling George W. Bush a fascist (and an idiot), without much regard for what fascism actually entailed, because you hated him; but just like Klein, you didn’t quite fear him. Meanwhile, you overlooked Barack Obama’s executive orders which just built on the work of this idiot predecessor because you liked him. Even Dick Cheney’s in-your-face brand of evil — real evil — became the butt of jokes, even though he was one proverbial bullet away from the presidency (and if you laughed at “in-your-face” because of some faint memory of his hunting incident, you’ve proved my point). Older generations might have known from the Nixon years that evil was not to be laughed at, but to Generation X and millennials, the reaction was that surely nobody could be that evil without faking it. And now, Trump, the clown Trump, the buffoon Trump, the fascist Trump, an endless supply of fresh material for the Olivers and the Saturday Night Lives of the world.

Even after you realized the precarious situation you were in, you acted as if you lived in some kind of Harry Potter fantasy universe where one good flick of the wand would necessarily make things right again, with minimum effort. Because evil could not triumph — if you thought it really existed — you came to believe that any action undertaken by yourselves must necessarily be good, but you failed to contemplate how these actions (as when you try getting people fired, or ask businesses to strong-arm legislators into passing laws you like) might also be used in the pursuit of evil. You thought you had the entire field to yourselves, with everyone else incompetent or inconsequential, even as you spent the last sixteen years making no headway, if not losing ground.

Carl Beijer was on to something when he suggested that “radical liberalism” could no longer comprehend the concept of a “bad leader” à la Vladimir Putin, in the same way it would be inconceivable to picture today’s Time Magazine naming a Hitler or Stalin as Person of the Year. (The last time the magazine risked clear political incorrectness was with the aforementioned Putin in 2007, when the world had not yet seen the worst of him.) Time picked Donald Trump this year, almost certainly to honor its pedestrian leap year tradition of choosing whoever happens to be elected president. Still, Time’s choice of Trump turned out to be, predictable and even subversive as it was, controversial. But Time was correct: even before he was elected, Donald Trump had altered American and world politics to such an extent he should have been picked over Clinton even if he had lost to her.

Perhaps you’ve come across Steve Bannon’s remarks to the Hollywood Reporter: “Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when they [according to the Reporter writer, ‘they’ meaning liberals and the media] get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.” I’m sure that, at his allusions to Darth Vader and Satan, your first instinct is to laugh. Don’t. Like the rest of the Alt-Right, he is at his most serious the more he appears to be joking. Suffice it to say that he’s right: you are blind.

For my part, I definitely see what is so mesmerizing about Donald Trump, just as everything about him repelled me. Ah, but I can hear you from here, telling me that if I see anything in Donald Trump, I must therefore be just another idiot. But this idiot, unlike most of you, didn’t have to pick up his jaw from the floor in the wee hours of November 9th. I still remember, also, being told a few times that because I was not American, I could not possibly comprehend American politics. So, how did I guess correctly? In part, I will concede, because I was lucky (if you can call this luck); in part because I am a pessimist; in part because I pay attention to what goes on in the rest of the world; in part because what I can see from a distance is the larger trends, while political minutiae go on outside my knowledge; but mostly because everything I read from you told me that you failed to understand the nature of Donald Trump’s appeal, leaving you incapable of competently countering it (which, to be fair, might not have worked, especially with Hillary Clinton as candidate). To wit: even now, a month after the election, you still don’t understand it, which doesn’t bode well for any of your attempts at resisting him.

Donald Trump has been elected on a political fantasy, designed to be as many things to as many people as possible, but usually in the shape of a middle finger to the political establishment. I see Trumpism as, among other interpretations, the Republicans’ ultimate retort to Barack Obama’s infamous (in their circles) “you didn’t build that”. Donald Trump is the kind of man whose career screams: Yes, I built that, and you can’t deny it because my name is on it. Not just a Great Man, Donald Trump is a Great Builder [4]. The late John McLaughlin, of The McLaughlin Group, in an exchange with Mort Zuckerman, understood this when he foresaw last year that Trump would obtain the nomination when everyone thought he would not last long:

MCLAUGHLIN: “Do you realize this man’s achievement?”
ZUCKERMAN: “I’m very, very comfortable with his achievements.”
MCLAUGHLIN: “Do you realize the buildings that he’s put up? Building contracts he’s arranged, Mort?” (Crosstalk)
MCLAUGHLIN: “ — marvels at the new buildings — they’re enormous, Trump Tower.”
ZUCKERMAN: “I never would say that I’m — excuse me a second.”
MCLAUGHLIN: “Does he get any credit for that?”
ZUCKERMAN: “I never would say that I know — let me finish one sentence, please?”
MCLAUGHLIN: “All right.”
ZUCKERMAN: “I never would say anything that I know more than you. But the real estate business, I do know more about it, OK? He’s very competent at this. I take nothing away from him. We’re not talking about his real estate skills here. We’re talking about public policy.”
MCLAUGHLIN: “Oh, yes. But you can’t divorce real estate skills as though it’s some creature from afar.”

This is the awe inherent to Donald Trump, which is catnip to entrepreneurial voters. Trump, who built three casinos in Atlantic City only to see them go under because he saturated the market; Trump, who can’t stop plugging his hotels wherever he goes; Trump, who gold-plates everything in sight before adding his name in giant letters. It would even be pointless to dismiss him as a bad businessman because, when it comes to such projects, it doesn’t even appear to be primarily a question of business; it’s a question of prestige. (Let us remember how this man of presidential mettle once bragged about now owning the tallest skyscraper in Lower Manhattan after the September 11 attacks; and you thought Freud was bunk.) Anis Shivani, a literary critic who predicted last May that Trump would win, addressed how Trump differed from the other financial elites ruling politics, even though he was one of them:

“While Trump “builds” things (literal buildings), in places like Manhattan and Atlantic City, places one can recognize and identify with, and while Trump’s entire life has been orchestrated around building luxury and ostentatiousness, again things one can tangibly grasp and hold on to (the Trump steaks!), [Mitt] Romney is the personification of a placeless corporation, making his quarter billion dollars from consulting, i.e., representing economic abstraction at its purest, serving as a high priest of the transnational capitalist class.”

As I wrote last March, “Trump is a man of concrete and steel, of glass and neon. He exudes the city as few people can…. As a man of architecture, there is a Randian side to him that the entire Paul family can only envy: a consideration of architecture is essential to understanding the appeal of Trumpism.” A few weeks later, my impression was confirmed by a Trump profile by USA Today’s Kirsten Powers:

“Trump described himself as an Ayn Rand fan. He said of her novel The Fountainhead, “It relates to business (and) beauty (and) life and inner emotions. That book relates to … everything.” He identified with Howard Roark, the novel’s idealistic protagonist who designs skyscrapers and rages against the establishment.

When I pointed out that The Fountainhead is in a way about the tyranny of groupthink, Trump sat up and said, “That’s what is happening here.” He then recounted a call he received from a liberal journalist: “How does it feel to have done what you have done? I said what have I done. He said nobody ever in the history of this country has done what you have done. And I said, well, if I lose, then no big deal. And he said no, no, if you lose, it doesn’t matter because this will be talked about forever.

“And I said it will be talked about more if I win.””

And the journalist cited by Trump — assuming Trump didn’t make him up — was on to something too. I seem to have a prodigious memory for an embarrassing number of bad films, and the one that came to mind was Tin Cup — yes, the Kevin Costner golfing flick. In the climax, Costner’s character is in a good position to win the U.S. Open, but decides to attempt an impossible shot over a lake to the green. Upon his last ball before disqualification, he succeeds. Then he realizes he has given away the U.S. Open to his rival: “My whole career, my whole life on the line, and I-I just made a 12 on the last hole of the US Open!” His girlfriend tells him: “Roy, you sure did, Roy. And it was the greatest 12 of all time. No one’s gonna remember the Open 5 years from now, who won, who lost, but they’re gonna remember your 12! My, God, Roy, it was… Why, it’s immortal! I am so proud of you!” Have you ever asked yourselves what might posterity have said of Hillary Clinton if she had won? It’s fairly certain now that Obama’s posterity will be reduced to one factor: the first black president. The rest will be summarized to his Nobel Prize, testament to a failed promise rather than actual achievement. And Hillary Clinton, whose very person screams of stubborn continuity, would likely have been little more than the first female president; Time’s profile of her as runner-up for Person of the Year mentions practically nothing except her gender. Obama will be little more than a name on a list; likewise Clinton, and if she had won, the campaign would have been one of those events on which historians would have spent more time discussing the loser than the winner. Trump is sui generis, a great man, vying for the immortality of his name. And he will be remembered.

Once you realize this, you understand how Trump, who now surrounds himself with Rand aficionados, won the White House not on paper-bound policies as Vox would have liked to read, but on a vision, something that completely eluded the Clinton camp. If I had to hazard a guess as to which position in his platform is the dearest to his heart, there is only one conclusion. It would be the most outlandish and Trumpian of the lot: that stupid wall.

Far from the object of derision his opponents made it, the wall was the cornerstone of Trump’s campaign because, to quote art critic Clement Greenberg, “the masses must be provided with objects of admiration and wonder”. With anyone but Trump, I would have considered this useless and probably impractical engineering project a cynical electioneering ploy. Not with Trump. Contra Peter Thiel, who thinks the promise of a Mexican wall isn’t meant to be taken literally (because Thiel, who otherwise harbors a similar vision for grand projects — see, for instance, his interest in seasteading — , has so far dealt, unlike Trump, in the intangible), I think Donald Trump is serious about it. I’m not sure Trump really believes his stated reasons for building it, but he knows a good pretext when he sees one. I suspect he knows that there is no rational basis for a border wall, and he doesn’t care. It’s the idea of the wall that entices him. Why? When Trump built the skyscraper in New York City that bears his name, he erected it on the site of a department store building that included Art Deco bas-relief sculptures of evidently some artistic importance. He had promised them to a museum, but instead ordered to have them destroyed. I think something of that (or perhaps something else, like 9/11) stayed in his mind — this idea that one day the Trump Tower, or indeed anything that currently bears his name, might suffer the same fate. But a wall?

Then I remember how Trump is proud of his Scottish heritage: he might have remembered the walls the Romans built there, whose remnants can still be seen across the landscape. I also think of that scene in The Bridge on the River Kwai where the British colonel is informed that a particular type of wood can last six hundred years, and eagerly starts collaborating with the Japanese in building a durable bridge. The wall, then, is more to Trump than the imperfect defense mechanism against “bad hombres” that it is claimed to be; it is a means to ensure the immortality of his name: The Antonine Wall, Hadrian’s Wall, Trump’s Wall. This will be talked about forever. Certainly Trump has started backtracking, first suggesting it would be a fence, then saying parts would be unnecessary because the border is protected by mountains and “vicious rivers” —a telling choice of adjective, very Romantic. And yet, one wonders. It is perhaps wiser, as Masha Gessen argued, to believe the autocrat.

What set Trump apart from, first his Republican rivals, then Clinton (but not Sanders), is precisely the existence in Trump and Trumpism of an aesthetic dimension — tacky and oppressive, but definitely there. Even though this Trumpian aesthetic is relentlessly upper-crust, it is capable of resonating with the middle and working classes because they know it is denigrated by the same elites who mock their sappy country music and the rest of their culture. If the Democrats had nominated Sanders, he could have evoked something Woody Guthrie might have sung about (Sanders has something of the aesthetic of the folk art, and closer to the New Deal than to the Simon & Garfunkel counterculture of the sixties on display at the Democratic National Convention), a myth to counter Donald Trump’s boorish version of the eighties. Sanders would likely have driven a wedge between Trump and his working class supporters because the only point they have in common — which the Clintonite contingent did nothing but cement — is that they know they are both laughed at, and by the same people.

If you try to understand how a billionaire can disparage others as elites as if he were not part of the elite himself, look no further than his simple claim in 2011 that “I don’t get along with rich people. I get along with the middle class and the poor people better than I get along with the rich people”. I suspect that, to the extent this might be true, the reason is entirely cultural. His (and his supporters’) use of the word elites is often synonymous with intellectuals, loosely interpreted as anyone from philosophers and artists to policy experts and mainstream journalists, but also appears to extend to a certain patrician, aristocratic breed which believes in discretion and considers cultural refinement as important a class signifier as the number of zeroes in one’s bank account. Donald Trump, in comparison, talks with the vocabulary of a fifth-grader and announces his presence in town in giant golden letters. Even though born into a rich family, he doesn’t quite qualify as Old Money, and displays all the insecure trappings of the nouveau riche — of which he is not really part either — striving, and failing, to be taken seriously by people of his class who, in the end, only respected him for his money. It was inevitable he would appeal to people who, like the Republican base, were looking for a man who embodied their life’s ambitions yet still appeared to be someone you could have a proverbial beer with (probably before he left them paying the tab).

Donald Trump is not just a wealthy man, but someone who has projected to the masses the image of what a wealthy man should look like for more than a decade on prime-time television, with a larger-than-life personality and the magnetism of a high roller who wins and loses fortunes. Trump is yet another beneficiary of the unholy wedding of wealth and celebrity that pollutes so much of popular culture and politics, but unlike most people in a similar situation, he — and this is the crucial point — is famous because he is wealthy, and not wealthy because he is famous.

Should the Democrats want to lament this state of affairs, they are hardly in a position to scold anyone. They multiplied celebrity appearances, haphazardly and recklessly, without bothering to ask what good it would do a Rust Belt blue-collar voter to be reassured that he was casting his ballot for the same candidate (or the same side of History) as Meryl Streep. It was revealing to see some of you panicking at Susan Sarandon’s endorsement of Jill Stein, when I suspect the rest of the American population remained in complete indifference as to the candidate of choice of an actress who hadn’t done much to be remembered for in recent years.

Apparently the Democrats never asked themselves the question The New Republic’s Sarah Jones asked: “If you can’t afford HBO, how likely is it you even know who Lena Dunham is, much less care about her political opinions?” Isn’t the purpose of celebrities to convince people who aren’t yet persuaded to vote for a candidate? If you’re a Republican, you’re more likely to be swayed by people you already know and like, such as Glenn Beck saying he thought Trump was “dangerously unhinged” after meeting him, than by anything Katy Perry might say. Instead, even icons of American culture who could have resonated with Trump voters supported the Democrats in woke, liberal, Clintonian terms that probably undermined their message. To wit, Bruce Springsteen, The Boss, known for his blue-collar sensitivity, talking of the “right side of history” while the songs that made him famous were more often than not about history’s losers. To wit, Michael Moore, who will be forever associated with the Rust Belt and who predicted Trump’s win, making the flawed argument that women are morally superior and calling the Flint water crisis “a hate crime based on the race hatred of this particular party” as if talking about class would not have had the same impact on the response to the crisis.

And what if the celebrity in question represented everything you thought was wrong in American culture? If you find Jon Stewart insufferable, why should you listen to him when he attempts to convince his audience — which you never were part of — to vote for Hillary Clinton (as if that audience needed convincing)? If you come across a headline that claims to have counted “13 glorious times John Oliver destroyed Donald Trump”, maybe you should ask yourself whether Donald Trump has indeed been destroyed, by Oliver or anyone else, or whether it just annoys more people into voting for him. As for Lena Dunham, she appeared in that “Sensual Pantsuit” sketch released just days before the election, for which the subtext was: We know we are being insufferable, so we will produce a sketch where we are being insufferable ironically. Only its irony meant nothing, for its admiration for Hillary Clinton was entirely sincere. It was a video that was such a perfect summation of all that is repulsive in faux-ironic American liberal culture that the Republicans might as well have urged undecided voters to watch it.

But nothing is more emblematic of the rift between the woke culture the Democrats have been draping themselves with, and the more traditional popular culture embraced by Republicans, than Hamilton, which, unlike Pantsuits on Parade or whichever, was the final insult to a large part of the population that had already been told it had lost all demographic power, wasn’t on the Right Side of History, had nothing better than to die off quietly. The final insult, because Hamilton was not content with being on the Right Side of History, it wanted to rewrite history, and for that purpose launched an attack on American history itself. From the perspective of Trump supporters, Hamilton was the obliteration of their ancestors from textbook American history, the rewriting of the past to better serve the soothing multicultural reality of the present — something that would not be out of place in a totalitarian regime, but here served with an arrogant smile as the pinnacle of progress. The show even cast the only white actor in a main part as George III, sending the clear message that here is something that has to be rejected for America to come into its own. Frankly, I don’t care about race, and I don’t belong to those seeing in these artistic decisions a call for “white genocide”; but whenever a white actor gets cast in the part of a character of color, historical or not, you liberals invariably call it “cultural appropriation” or “whitewashing”, yet Hamilton has become a cultural darling in your circles.

I wrote most of the lines pertaining to Hamilton in this text a few days before Pence’s controversial attendance of the musical. Even before the vice-presidential visit, the conservative historian Niall Ferguson wondered if Trump’s election was “in some sense, a vote against “Hamilton,’’ with its celebration of multicultural America as heir to the American Revolution”. And if I have my reservations about Ferguson, in this case, he’s right, and Donald Trump was shrewd to capitalize on Pence’s hostile reception. It wasn’t just a means for Trump, as was then suggested, to keep the media distracted from his ongoing conflicts of interest: Hamilton is everything that cultural Trumpism fights against. Hamilton is to Trump what disco music was to Reagan. This is the new front in the culture wars, with the added class dimension of a Broadway show that practically nobody has seen but everyone talks about. Trumpism is the last, desperate gasp — the “white boomers’ last gasp”, Salon delightedly noted — of a population that believes itself being deprived of its heritage in favor of all these multicultural queue-jumpers who chase success in the large cities that hold everyone’s future (the same people one can now hear whining about how the electoral college setup is unfair). And so, from America’s thousands of failing Garbutts, came a fearsome and defiant cry: NO, WE DO NOT WANT THIS. And here was Trump, the man of destiny, the man, the only man, who could bring the curtain down on this tap-dancing affront which taunted them, from away, beyond their reach, but not beyond Trump’s reach, on Broadway, the Great White Way. One can see all too well how his victory can be exhilarating: standing up to a demographically enforced Right Side of History when nobody — not the pollsters nor the pundits nor the insufferable Clinton supporters — thought it possible.

Trump’s victory occurred against overwhelming odds, a stupendous feat of strength that will enter history books, and promised to “drain the swamp”, usher in a new era that would transform the United States, if not of the entire planet, beyond recognition. After all, wasn’t Trump depicted by his own supporters as Samson, toppling the columns of the reigning world order? At last, with Trump, revenge! If we carry the metaphor to its conclusion, it’s also a death wish. There is only death ahead.

Unlike Democrats, who use celebrities for little more than pizzazz in their election campaigns, Republicans embrace not the glitz of a famous actor, but the image he projects — that is to say, his movie roles. And the movie roles have to be compatible with the Republican ethos. When Clint Eastwood shows up, they don’t see Clint Eastwood; they see the Man with No Name or Dirty Harry. Never would the Democrats, enamored though they are of celebrities, let an actor get too close to actual political power (the furthest they were prepared to try was probably with Al Franken). Too committed to policy, the Democrats, to risk nominating someone with no experience of government. Meanwhile, the Republicans put “the Gipper” in the White House and elected Arnold Schwarzenegger as the “Governator” of California. And now they voted for Donald Trump, as seen on television.

To Republicans, Donald Trump is the image of financial success, just as Eastwood, Reagan and John Wayne are the image of rugged masculinity. And fitting with his Reaganist campaign slogan, Donald Trump’s persona was something right out of the eighties: Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest… [5]. The Trump candidacy was a fantasy, and a decadent fantasy at that, but in which the man’s persona and his message were perfectly aligned. His campaign was a perfect synthesis of the nostalgia it mined. In a perverse way, it made sense.

Only it wasn’t just the Republican base which fell for mistaking the actor and his part: Trump himself did. This became apparent when he commented last year: “I love Harrison Ford — and not just because he rents my properties. He stood up for America”. I’m sure Mr. Ford is an upstanding American citizen, but Trump was referring specifically to the president that Ford played in Air Force One. He might as well have called the actor a good archeologist and a talented spaceship pilot. Ford replied: “It’s a movie, Donald. It was a movie. It’s not like this in real life. But how would you know?” Indeed, how would Trump know, with a life spent half sheltered by wealth, half playing himself in front of the cameras? And it is not just one incident: when Trump, in the second debate, went on about having a special prosecutor look into the case of Hillary Clinton, it was a scene right out of Citizen Kane, his favorite film.(I’m sure it is quite reassuring that his other favorite films include The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The Godfather, Goodfellas, and Gone with the Wind.) Trump lies, has even shown himself to be a mythomaniac: something in him wants to believe his own lies as much as he wants others to believe them. He is the hypnotist who can’t keep his eyes off his pendulum. Everything about him points to someone who cannot differentiate between fact and fiction, someone who plays the part of the hero — and it is an anti-hero, a Walter Mitty with a nasty streak — in whatever film is currently screening in his brain. Beyond his obvious incompetence for the position to which he has been elected, this is why he poses a serious threat not only to the United States, but to the world.

I know, this has been said about Reagan too; but Trump has never played anyone but himself, while Reagan —and that is why he was a mediocre actor — could never develop a character entirely independent from his real personality (a villain, for instance); upon seeing one of his films, his mother remarked: “That’s the way he is at home. He’s no Robert Taylor. He’s just himself.” Trump, in comparison, is the consummate actor. Reagan did not have the skill to create a credible character he could have lost himself into, while Trump has played himself for so long that he appears to have erased the boundary between the real Trump and the fictional Trump. In other words, his world of fantasy engulfed him and he has long since drowned in it. Even now, with the world holding its breath, and after meeting with President Obama who has offered to tutor him for the transition, he is treating cabinet appointments like an episode of The Apprentice: “Very organized process taking place as I decide on Cabinet and many other positions. I am the only one who knows who the finalists are!” Even should he be facetious and not think himself in the middle of a new concept for his reality show (which he will continue to produce), this is out of place: either he does not recognize the gravity of the situation, or he doesn’t care.

Something else is becoming obvious: in his Neuschwanstein of Manhattan, surrounded by a jewel-encrusted décor and docile lackeys at his beck and call, the man was bored. Now he is moving to the Oval Office, and already he is showing signs of boredom at the day-to-day requirements of his new function. Beware the powerful man who is bored and would rather live a life of fantasy. But it is a macabre fantasy that has enlisted millions of people in its wake — millions of people as bored as he is, and, underneath it all, desperate and awaiting final deliverance. This is Madame Bovary being played out on a national scale. It was nihilism you were really fighting over, and most of you didn’t even notice.

“Actually, it’s About Ethics in Journalism”: The Fake News Excuse

In the 1925 silent film version of Ben-Hur, Jesus Christ, at best a secondary character, is never shown directly. He is always depicted at a distance, hidden by the scenery or by a crowd, or remains off-screen with only an arm or his legs into the frame, and always bathed in light. When He appears before Pontius Pilate, an immense pillar of light indicates His presence; in a way, you could say that Jesus Christ is light itself. I’ll let the Gospel According to John pick it up from here:

18:37 Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.

38 Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all.

39 But ye have a custom, that I should release unto you one at the passover: will ye therefore that I release unto you the King of the Jews?

40 Then cried they all again, saying, Not this man, but Barabbas. Now Barabbas was a robber.

Fast forward to our self-appointed modern-day Jesus Christ (“Hillary’s life has been preparation for this very moment” — Melissa McEwan), bearing witness unto the truth to those who would hear it, and now mightily pissed off at being told that the truth is irrelevant while the populace elected the robber baron. And now, undoubtedly as will be taught to those who will come after us by the Gospel According to John Podesta (a.k.a. John the Pedestrian), this modern-day Savior went to the Cross damning our post-truth world and blaming “fake news”, mostly through Facebook, for Her predicament.

It might be tempting to agree with her. There has been so much nonsense spread around this campaign, and it is definitely an issue when someone like Stephen Bannon of Breitbart becomes part of Trump’s inner sanctum. But anything said by Hillary Clinton at this point sounds like just another cynical excuse from the Democratic Blame-Deflection Committee. If these guys one day thought they could spin that chemtrails were responsible for Hillary’s defeat, she would be right there on television, index finger pointing up, that sadistic grin on her face, talking about THE PERIL, THE PERIL FROM THE SKIES. Anything that woman and her clique do now is an embarrassment not only to herself, but also to their party and to American democracy.

Hillary Clinton just ensured that everyone now has their little conspiracy theory of the media. To the Alt-Right, it’s the Lügenpresse or “the Cathedral”. To the old Right, it’s just the usual call of “bias” and even “treason”, with violence occasionally implied (or have we already forgotten when Ann Coulter, an old pro at this, said her “only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building”?). The Left, of course, is still clutching its dog-eared copies of Manufacturing Consent, never realizing how its own playbook is being used against it. And now it’s liberals getting in on the act, binoculars glued to their dour faces, looking out for “fake news”, which, just as with the people on their Left and Right, will inevitably boil down, and very rapidly, to “stuff that I don’t agree with and is detrimental to political views I happen to hold”.

If you were serious about your stated purpose, you would have to agree not only on what is news, but also on what is fake, which takes time. Here is how I would describe it. I would first presume that you mean factual news reporting, and not punditry or even “data journalism”, because large swathes of it could be declared “fake” because it was wrong: in this case, anyone who wrote with any certainty that Hillary Clinton would win, without necessarily being Clinton hacks. (Conversely, a great many people who were right do not deserve to be congratulated if they likely would have claimed a Trump win no matter how large a Clinton landslide: I might be open-minded but I do expect intellectual honesty.) I would presume that “fake news” means news which both author and publisher know is false, and not the result of some egregious failure at fact-checking, a rogue Stephen Glass-type fabulist who would be sacked as soon as he’s found out, and not even when sources outright set out to mislead the reporter, which point to internal shortcomings of news organizations, not intent. Already here, intent is difficult to assess. I would finally presume these news items intend to deceive the reader into thinking they are true, in other words not writings at outlets that are widely known to be satirical, like The Onion, which may nonetheless fool someone who is not in on the joke. This is even more difficult to assess, because there would have to be agreement on what is a “widely known” satirical outlet, and what a normal reader is likely to believe. This, in other words, is a hornets’ nest.

Consider, also, cases where the event covered is open to interpretation; my example here will be Trump’s speech in August where he referred to “Second Amendment people”. In context, he was saying that if Hillary Clinton was elected, she would appoint a new Supreme Court justice (to replace the deceased reactionary Antonin Scalia) which would throw the balance of the court in favor of those who would limit the Second Amendment. The relevant part of Trump’s speech reads:

“ Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick — if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what, that will be a horrible day, if — if — Hillary gets to put her judges in.”

Instantly, those who were With Her were absolutely certain that Donald Trump was calling for Clinton’s assassination. But was it the case? He later clarified his statement, saying that by “Second Amendment people” he meant the political movement behind it, which is, at least, a credible claim: if the firearms lobby, spearheaded by the National Rifle Association, were not formidable, America would likely have much tighter gun control. For my part, listening numerous times to Trump’s crucial line, and before I listened to Trump’s later statement, I sensed there was really a comma between Amendment and people, completely altering the meaning: “Although the Second Amendment, people, maybe there is, I don’t know”. In my version, which was later refuted by Trump’s clarifications, he’s just addressing the crowd. Yes, the interpretation that Trump suggested Hillary Clinton should be assassinated is credible, but it isn’t the only one. (I even saw a joke — or a future Grisham potboiler — floating around that offered the reassuring suggestion Trump was talking about assassinating the judges.)

This reminds me of a short story in John Mortimer’s Rumpole series called “Rumpole and the Fascist Beast” (ha), where the barrister defends a far-right leader accused of inciting public violence by saying “the answer is… blood”. Rumpole pleads that what his client meant was not blood as in violence, but blood as in racial differences: we may find his views abject, Rumpole then argues, but what would then have been said is no longer a criminal offense. The same applies to Trump: we may disagree with him on the Second Amendment and find him loathsome, but we can do so without necessarily thinking he would call for Clinton’s assassination in a televised speech. For that matter, for a presidential candidate to suggest that supporters of the Second Amendment resort to violence — against his campaign opponent, no less — is the best argument one could have hoped to find in favor of gun control. Trump may be dumb, but he’s not that dumb [6].

But I can hear your rebuttal already: Trump suggested she should be assassinated, and one of his nutters would certainly hear it that way, yet wanted to give himself the leeway to deny having suggested it. But there is something disingenuous in claiming Trump is capable of such rhetorical subtlety while arguing he genuinely expresses himself in the language of a fifth-grader. Here it is worth quoting a Clinton campaign manager: “This is simple — what Trump is saying is dangerous. A person seeking to be the president of the United States should not suggest violence in any way.” In one way, that manager is right: a person seeking to be President of the United States should have sufficient command of the English language to not be unintentionally ambiguous, and Trump does not; but that manager had absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Trump, like Rumpole’s client, was suggesting violence. Rumpole, in that short story, was merely concerned with creating a reasonable doubt in the mind of the judge, which he did, whereas those who are With Her of course drown in their own certainties — that is, if they don’t lie outright for the benefit of the Cause. To them, there is only one interpretation, and everyone who disagrees is an idiot or a liar.

As Facebook expects readers (and almighty algorithms) to report fake news, can you imagine such people not immediately flagging as fake any news item on this event offering an alternative explanation of Trump’s remarks? Can you imagine the Republicans, with decades’ worth of experience in seeing bias everywhere, likewise not immediately reporting anything casting President Donald Trump in a bad light? And tellingly, you are concerned with “fake news”, and hardly about Facebook itself, which is clearly the problem: missing the forest for the trees and all that. And if there is a fake news problem, the problem should be tackled at the root, through investment in education to teach critical reading skills to students. (Not that Republican lawmakers would approve this, of course.) The way this debate is currently going is asking for trouble: it could open the door to something far, far worse.

I already can tell, however, that none of you are even concerned with any of this. Instead, you declare fake news to be a problem simply because the election did not go your way; because you think the great unwashed populace did not realize how unfit Trump was for office, as opposed to the qualified Hillary Clinton; because you believe the voters must necessarily have failed to come across one of the ten million articles or television reports discussing some facet or other of the Republican candidate’s thoroughly disreputable character; because they voted against their own interests; because they failed to support the only rational option (which of course happened to be yours); and finally, the icing on the cake, because of The Russians, which justifies doing anything (it’s not just the Republicans who want to return to the halcyon days of the fifties, it would seem).

What a tightrope to walk on, for a liberal, to accuse the FBI of having deliberately blown Hillary Clinton’s election (never mind the incomparable scribe H.A. Goodman, of the Huffington Post and Salon, once asking the FBI to investigate quickly so as to either clear her or, preferably, indict her and make Sanders the Democratic candidate by default), while praising the CIA’s gallant men and women of the shadows for confirming that The Russians tried to influence the vote. Considering that the likeliest involvement of The Russians was in hacking Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s e-mail account and sending the contents to Wikileaks, it was telling that your reaction to those e-mails was that we should ignore them, even if they were authentic. What you want isn’t to curb “fake news” — it’s to get rid of unwanted news.

As far as I know, nobody in the Democrats or involved in those e-mails bothered to dispute their authenticity; as such, I am tempted to regard them as genuine. And I am by no means a Wikileaks enthusiast. I still remember the era when you were fond of Wikileaks, while I was warning liberals like you, in vain, of the possible dangers of unaccountable organizations (including Anonymous) exposing government documents. If I remember correctly, what led you to begin to change your mind about Wikileaks was, all too predictably, when Julian Assange sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy to avoid answering for a rape accusation in Sweden; but I vaguely recall that some of you then attempted to dissociate Assange from Wikileaks: the man was rotten but his organization was, you thought, still fairly decent. Now you hate Wikileaks. This is not entirely because Wikileaks lost whatever existed of its mind, its morals and its prestige over the years, by exposing private information for no reason whatsoever, rambling about conspiracy theories, or becoming little more than a puppet of foreign governments, like The Russians. It is, as in your treatment of Nate Silver and everything else, that you used to like what Wikileaks offered, that what it exposed served your purpose; but shedding light on the inner workings of the Democratic Party was absolutely beyond the pale. If these e-mails had come from the Republican Party or the Trump Organization, however, you would have urged everyone to read them and hit the refresh button until your hand went numb.

Worse, when I argued there was a genuine public interest in covering the Podesta e-mails, even with all the unanswered questions and ethical quandaries surrounding them, you had the gall to start finger-wagging me about how I was unaware of how dangerous Wikileaks really was. Evidently the press agreed with me, for it has cautiously covered them, keeping in mind the uncertainty of their authenticity, their provenance, and the thorny ethical considerations involved in reporting on them, not to mention Wikileaks’ reckless approach. The e-mails were newsworthy not because they exposed many serious scandals, but because they revealed, however quotidian, the inner workings of the Democratic political machine, as Thomas Frank eloquently argued. It was mostly among people to the Left of the Democrats — people who would vote for Hillary Clinton anyway, faute de mieux — that those e-mails became of special importance. Yet to someone like academic Katherine Cross, these e-mails have no journalistic validity: “The leaks on Clinton are bloodless because they merely expose the sometimes cynical calculations and overwrought stage management that go into every political campaign.” This is the same assessment offered by Frank and others as they argued that the leaks were newsworthy: they don’t yield major scoops, but they reveal how the party works and acts, and how it would resist changing even if Clinton went on to lose the election.

Also note, here, Ms. Cross’s interesting choice of words: the leaks on Clinton, not on the Democratic Party. Everything, to Ms. Cross, is personal; for instance, her claim that Julian Assange probably has a personal grudge against Hillary Clinton, to which she adds the gender angle: “Assange is not the supervillainous demiurge of Russian espionage some liberals imagine. Rather, he is that most prosaic of Information Age figures: a small man, too easily intimidated by women, who uses the force-multiplier of the internet to revenge himself upon them.” This might be true, or it might not; a serious news organization will certainly ask itself to what end this content might have been hacked, then leaked. It’s worth mentioning that Ms. Cross validates the newsworthiness of Chelsea Manning’s documents, also released through Wikileaks, indicating that her position is not a blanket indictment of unsupervised leaks which Wikileaks represents. But in the case of the Podesta e-mails, it was not just Messrs. Glenn Greenwald and Lee Fang of The Intercept (the primary targets of Ms. Cross’s ire) who thought the leaks were newsworthy, but also The New York Times, which occasionally reported on them, as did myriad other serious news outlets. In this context, who is Ms. Cross to argue against their publication? This isn’t some Breitbartian vendetta against private individuals we’re talking about, but the inner workings of a federal political party.

Ms. Cross is quick to reveal, however, that she isn’t particularly interested in the newsworthiness of the leaks. She was, rather, urging the media not to report on them because “just *maybe*, the framing of the leaks, what gets highlighted, etc., are not really intended to help marginalized people”, as she wrote in a comment aimed at progressives who still supported Wikileaks. In this particular case, Ms. Cross’s bogeyman was David Duke: certainly Wikileaks obtaining the congratulations of a former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan ought to make you think twice, yes? It should, for those who still believe Wikileaks is a progressive force; but this obfuscates a more important question: Is it really the purpose of the press to help marginalized people? Nobody, now, believes the old comfort-the-afflicted motto, except the guffaws industry and only insofar as it doesn’t cut into its ratings; without fear or favor is closer to the ideal of the serious press today. And if the press reported on the Podesta e-mails, it’s not because it massively supports Trump; you wouldn’t find enough Trump editorial endorsements to start a campfire after a drought. Not only that, but the press is all too aware of the bleak future the Trump administration has in store for it. We have already seen the harassment of journalists at Trump rallies, threats against them fashionable enough that they are even printed on T-shirts, the resurgence of “Lügenpresse”, Trump himself threatening lawsuits and vowing to “open up those libel laws” once elected, not to mention his supporter Peter Thiel having personally bankrupted Gawker in a proxy suit. Was Ms. Cross presuming to teach the press that a Trump presidency was against its interests? Of course it knew. That it didn’t act like Ms. Cross wanted it to act, and continued to report on news items that might have been beneficial to Trump, is to its credit.

It becomes all too clear that what Ms. Cross, under the guise of journalism ethics, desires is a partisan press that only prints what it is instructed to print and should be admonished for publishing content one disapproves of — while one acts as if this content, however factual, does not exist. This approach brings to mind the time when your military blocked internet access to The Guardian because of the classified documents leaked there (more responsibly) by Edward Snowden: everyone else could read them, but not the military because that-is-an-order-yes-sir, which only an authority eminently stupid yet too feared to be laughed at could attempt to enforce.

But what this also brings to my mind is a movement which Ms. Cross herself was heavily invested in opposing, and which ironically marked a surge of interest in the otherwise boring subject of journalism ethics on Twitter: I am referring, of course, to Gamergate. It, too, wrapped its obvious political crusade under the lofty mantle of ethics in journalism, which, in practice, meant trying to purge the gaming press of unwanted viewpoints by any convenient method. Then it plunged headlong into whatever conspiracy theory reinforced its vision of the world. This call against “fake news” will, whatever its good intentions, lead to the exact same result as Gamergate tried to achieve or as if the Trumpkins had it their way: the demise of freedom of the press, its subordination to partisan and moneyed interests, and the degradation of political life.

You’re all Gamergaters now.

Whole World, Donald Trump: Glimpses of the Trumpian Age

“Every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President Trump. It’s everyone who’s ever doubted Donald, who ever disagreed, who ever challenged him. It is the ultimate revenge to become the most powerful man in the universe.” — Omarosa Manigault.

If there is a film scene which encapsulates the rise of totalitarian regimes, it is the famous number from Cabaret where a Hitler youth begins singing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” at a beer garden. In the audience are an English writer and his lover, a decadent baron. Gradually, almost everybody starts singing along. The writer then remarks to the baron, just as they are about to drive off: “Do you still think you can control them?”. Likewise, with Trumpism. The delusion that Donald Trump’s supporters can be controlled and safely returned to the fold of mainstream conservatism is the Republicans’ folly; but the idea that you can just drive off and leave it all behind, that nothing can be done about it, that it’s really someone else’s problem — that’s your impulse, liberals. In Cabaret, the English writer returns home and the aristocrat sets sail for Argentina; likewise, your plans always involve going abroad — specifically, here, to Canada.

When Trump was elected, the United States instantly turned into a gigantic Garbutt that only the idiots would want to live in and only the losers could be stuck living in. You were not idiots, you were not losers; you were of the hyper-mobile world. Of course you’d want to move, and of course you would look north. I received the news that the Canadian government’s immigration website had crashed by overload as a sick joke, one that you’ve been playing with predictable regularity since the Vietnam War. The New York Times’ Ross Douthat even wrote, I’d bet only half-jokingly, of the inevitable time “when the histories of the Trump era are written from exile in Justin Trudeau’s Canada”. (Just a hint, though: if Germany is on the warpath, you don’t seek refuge in Belgium.) Of course you’d want to leave. Or perhaps claiming you’d want to leave is just a ritual you repeat every time an election doesn’t go your way, even though you have no intention of carrying it out.

Either way, I don’t want you here.

“Emigration is an arduous, destabilizing process, even if Canada does look like America-Lite”, writes Jenna Crispin at The Baffler. That’s all Canada is to you, isn’t it? Just like America but with single-payer health care compensating for the lousy weather? It’s like when you go abroad for a vacation, to see what the natives are up to, and unfailingly ask the cab driver at the airport to make for the closest McDonald’s. Your desire to move to Canada is little more than a permanent form of tourism to most of you. You see yourselves not as immigrants — though immigrants you are, and you should be treated as such — but as colonists. You will never be anything other than American. You will inevitably take over the country and ruin it in your own image, a country that currently exists built entirely on the premise that it is Not American. A few years down the road, you’ll probably want to take up Canadian citizenship, I suppose, and Justin Trudeau — who will then be about to run for a third term, if I calculate this correctly — will be proud to have you, all those little groupies pouring in from across the border just as the rest of the country will be fed up with him.

Did you find wrecking one country such an exhilarating experience that you couldn’t wait to repeat it?

But I’m, as I said, from Quebec. I’m a native speaker of French. Your presence here means the death of my language, the eradication of my culture. I know this, because I have been well exposed to American liberalism’s views on us. You can’t shut up about privilege here, privilege there, but when it comes to preserving my language, my culture, all that ever came from you was: well, languages die off, get on with it, don’t get tied up in that. And if we take any action to prevent this, we’re racist. What you want, in effect, is for the entire world to speak English, embrace American culture, and get preoccupied with the same issues which your country never could move beyond. Ironically, I’m not and could never be a Trumpkin for the same reason: it’s difficult for me to believe that Trumpkins would not treat me as a Mexican of the North. (I also discern in Trumpism a latent anti-Catholicism which, given Trumpism’s partial ancestry, is almost to be expected; only it seems to have morphed into a specific opposition to non-Anglosphere forms of Catholicism, in favor of an American form of Catholicism which I barely recognize, as I suspect it has long since been corrupted by the Protestant majority, and of which the main sign is disdain for the current Pope.) It’s also why I wouldn’t join any English-Canadian equivalent to Trumpism, which would undoubtedly include a large share of Quebec-bashing, tacit or explicit: I might rail against Canadian multiculturalism, which is not unlike your identity politics, but I know that my objections to it, which are Quebec’s traditional objections, are incompatible with the English-Canadian objections traditionally encountered. It’s a two-front war for me: your Canadian equivalent on one side, and the rednecks on the other. But here I go, boring you with details about your prospective adoptive country that you are clearly not interested in at all. You’re Americans: you move in, you decide, you ignore what the locals have to say. As always.

You may think you’re progressive liberals, but you are no different; your self-proclaimed enlightenment often tends to make you worse. Encountering you online was quite instructive, from my perspective, in how you are not as different from Trumpkins as you like to think. I suspect that is why I at least understand the Trump voter mindset: the idea of how you think their culture is something from the past, that needs to die, that won’t die fast enough to your liking, so that you can barge in with a world-view that holds them in contempt, denies their importance to the history of the country, and insists on individual self-realization as an alternative. And just before they became permanently demographically insignificant, they used up the last of their energy to tell you off by voting for the candidate who summed up everything you despised.

I know better than to assume you’re being serious about offering any kind of meaningful resistance to the excesses of a Trump presidency, just as I know better than to assume you’re being serious about moving to Canada. Chanting “hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go” as you take to the streets is not only presumptuous, it’s more befitting a picket line or a student protest than an organized response to a pressing threat to the American Republic. Everything about you screams: we protest, but we’re not serious. Perhaps this is what they call “virtue signalling”: you want to be seen protesting, but when it escalates, when it threatens to get you involved beyond mere protest (or whenever John Oliver’s show is scheduled to start), you beeline for home. You all take a page from Arthur Chu, who wrote last year of his participation in a protest in response to the acquittal of a policeman accused of shooting two unarmed black people:

“When I see the cops I jump up on the sidewalk. I want to say my next actions were “instinctive,” but they aren’t. I know what I’m doing. I tuck my shirt in, roll my sleeves down. I’m dressed up, in my nice pants and shirt, rumpled though they are. I look like I’m out for a drink.

I blend in. I go from protester to onlooker, just like that. Because of my clothes. Because of my facial features. Because of my skin.

The cops don’t witness this transition….

Indeed, in a scene right out of “Run Lola Run,” a cop taps me on the shoulder and motions for me to get back from the edge of the sidewalk, concerned for my safety.”

Chu’s wording here is ambiguous, and more so if one has been exposed to the rest of his oeuvre. He implies that his going from protester to onlooker was necessary for his self-preservation because he was not white. But at the top of his article is a photograph suggesting the protest was primarily attended by African-Americans, which Chu himself confirms. His remarks can also be construed as saying he was in a much better position to walk away than those black people at the protest —he thinks he can walk away at his leisure, and indeed the cops leave him alone. (Interestingly, when an Asian-American policeman in New York City was convicted of manslaughter after shooting an unarmed black person, Asian-Americans rushed to complain of his sentencing; in the words of a black writer, they demanded that “justice for [the policeman] required that a perverse and very powerful type of white privilege be fully extended to Asian-Americans as well”.) Ah, but Arthur Chu is, of course, better than the rest of us, whites, blacks and Asians alike — a Certified Genius, a celebrity, a great online thinker. He even began his article with this candid admission:

“But I have to be honest. I’m tired. I’m old (I’m 31, which means I’m already overdue for the Carousel in “Logan’s Run”). I’m increasingly risk-averse. A friend recently assured me that I could do more good by writing impassioned articles from the safety of my home than by just being another anonymous body to be shoved by cops in the back of a van, which was a wonderful argument because it was exactly what I wanted to hear.”

Which he then proceeded to confirm by walking away as soon as the cops showed up, to write an impassioned article about it from the safety of his home. To others, the discomfort of the back of the police van! Ah, but Arthur Chu wasn’t anonymous, of course; he was The Famous Arthur Chu, As Seen On Television, who even “shamefacedly” (see a pattern emerging?) “talked to publicists”, “talked to ‘branding’ people” to see how he could capitalize on his fame, who dressed up his refusal to serve as a snake-oil salesman as a moral principle, and who instead embarked on the thinkpiece-and-lecture circuit as an authority on minorities and pop culture or whatever.

If American democracy collapsed and the US became a totalitarian regime, I harbor no illusions in expecting as much resistance from you as we have seen from him: all talk and no action; everyone busy writing Le Silence de la mer while the maquis is deserted. We are not there yet. But there are those who think we will be there someday who can currently be found defiantly typing #RESIST on Twitter, as if we didn’t know that those who are actually planning to resist don’t exactly advertise their plans unless they belong on a higher plane of stupidity — especially with the surveillance state soon at Trump’s command. To say the least, I have no patience for the kind of Cable Street nostalgia where the publicly proclaimed thought of resistance has supplanted the real thing, comparable to, on the pro-Trump side, ex-Congressman Joe Walsh talking of grabbing his musket if Trump lost the election: intentions which, in our world, make not the slightest bit of sense. (At least Walsh appears to have soured on Trump very rapidly.) Just as Walsh said, likely for legal reasons, that grabbing his musket really meant “participating in acts of civil disobedience”, those who advocate Cable Street-style resistance will of course do nothing of the sort. Most of them would be incapable of mounting actual resistance if it became necessary, and this I can understand: what I cannot excuse is those who think they will resist, but who, as soon as the consequences of resistance are made explicit by the Trump regime, will downgrade their involvement until they do exactly nothing — or worse.

The current form of resistance, it appears, has something to do with fighting against normalization — arguing that what Donald Trump is doing represents a break with American tradition. The problem, though, is that far from Trump being “abnormal” (or so said Ezra Klein at Vox last July), Trump is the natural consequence of American politics. Everyone saw him coming. How am I supposed to say that Trump must not be normalized when the circumstances that I see as having enabled his rise were considered normal in American politics, or at least were tolerated if abnormal, long before him? When Trump, as a political outsider, had nothing to do with the perpetuation of these circumstances, which, like tax loopholes, he merely exploited? When safeguards to prevent the ascendancy of an authoritarianism such as his were absent, or proved insufficient if not failed outright?

My impression, which is undoubtedly the impression of a large part of the world, is that the vaunted American system has been unstable for longer than anyone cares to remember, and would have collapsed on its own in a decade or two if Trump hadn’t come along and delivered a sturdy kick to it. For example:

• Donald Trump had nothing to do with Supreme Court appointments being offered to partisan hacks who undermined the political independence and legitimacy of the judiciary.
• He had nothing to do with Congressional obstruction which crippled Barack Obama’s presidency and likewise would paralyze any Democratic president, including Hillary Clinton if she had been elected.
• He had nothing to do with the gerrymandering which now almost unfailingly delivers the House, not to mention state legislatures, to the Republicans.
• He had nothing to do with the post-Citizens United failure to rein in campaign financing, and in fact he spent far less in his campaign than Clinton; as for super-PAC money, the amount for Clinton is more than double his own.
• He had nothing to do with the fondness, by Democrats and Republicans alike, for wealthy celebrities, which he merely exploited as obviously as he could by recycling Ronald Reagan’s slogan.
• He had nothing to do with “truthiness”, the clear predecessor to the “post-truth” term now in vogue, becoming not only a household term but also the Merriam-Webster Word of the Year exactly a decade ago; “post-truth” might have been selected as Oxford Dictionaries’ word of 2016, but it was coined in 1992 and has resurfaced with some regularity after 2004.
• He had nothing to do, on a similar note, with Donald Rumsfeld’s known unknowns or the citation attributed to Karl Rove about “creating our own reality” in selling the lie on which was built the Iraq War, which Hillary Clinton — in a far better position to suspect this was a lie than a self-centered billionaire — supported.
• He had nothing to do with the Clintons terrorizing one political party into fawning deference and goading the other into last-ditch defiance with no regard for what was at stake.
• He had nothing to do with general voter apathy and cynicism; the voter turnout has not even reached 55 percent this time even as the media sounded the alarm that nothing less than the future of the American Republic was at stake.
• He had nothing to do with the mess that the Republican Party had become, decades after the “Southern strategy” of the Nixon years provided the framework for its politics.
• He had nothing to do with the Tea Party brand of populism that led to offering the Republican vice-presidential slot to Sarah Palin eight years ago, a populism that could only be exploited, then let down, by the Republican establishment and which he now rode to the White House.

Even if we limit ourselves to rich guys exerting political influence, Trump was by no means the most assiduous of them: he didn’t go around funding a string of “non-partisan” Institutes for Lower Taxes on the Wealthy that would confirm, with numerous studies grounded in the most rigorous methodology, that the only proper political course of action was to lower taxes on the wealthy. (Even today, I still see serious people painstakingly attempting to draw a distinction between “think-tanks” and lobby groups, while I consider both to be essentially the same thing, some just being more obvious than others.) Donald Trump simply lacks the intellectual sophistication for it. He’s wily, but he doesn’t have the foresight, let alone the patience, for that kind of high-flying pseudo-academic entryism for plutocrats that might not pay off for years, if not decades; for that matter, all the space in his brain dedicated to long-term thinking is occupied by his innumerable grudges. Nor does he have much need for more populist forms of astroturfing, as he himself embraces the limelight, keeping himself in the public eye at all times. Unlike other billionaires, he is his own product. He is the American Berlusconi.

As for his style of governance, from what we have seen so far with the collection of generals and billionaires in his cabinet, it is as if the Business Plot just walked in through the front door — which, again, you should have seen coming after years of railing against the Kochs and their ilk. I think it hardly needs saying that Donald Trump is no friend of the working man. The Alt-Right segment which pinned its hopes for a White America on him has just been, as is it fond of saying, cucked, and the only favors its members will be thrown by the new president, on anything which actually matters to him, will be through “that Breitbart guy” Steve Bannon. As Trump is already associating with some of the most disreputable members of the establishment, those still looking forward to draining the swamp are deluding themselves: the man who couldn’t come across anyone without thinking of some way to stiff them has just added sixty-odd million people to his trophy wall.

As for his policies, Trump appears singularly attached to no policies in particular as long as the Republican establishment agrees to play along — until he can safely dispense with its approval. It is extremely likely his presidency will reside on a tripod of (1) making money off the function with little to no objection from Congress or the courts, (2) exacting revenge on anyone to have crossed him, including the press, and (3) buffing up his posterity by basking in the prestige of the presidency and the adoration of his people. This is, as far as I can discern, Donald Trump’s entire agenda; there is nothing else. Except maybe —

— well, maybe that being called “Mister President” will not be enough for him.

My historical point of comparison for Trump has remained, since last year, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who rode to the presidency of the new French Second Republic on a populist platform he never really acted upon and who, as his term of office was about to end, installed himself as emperor, like his famous uncle, after a coup d’état. I do not exclude the possibility that this might be in Trump’s plans as well, and Trump evidently considers himself more than a president, but something like an aristocrat — a Prince-President, as Bonaparte initially called himself. Bloodlines matter to Trump: he wants his family to become involved in classified political affairs even as the Republicans chastise the Clintons for being perpetual hangers-on; it can even be safely asserted that he believes in eugenics. A title of nobility his children (one of whom is named Barron) could inherit would be, in his eyes, the final consecration, the ultimate revenge on his rivals who looked down on him even though he had more than enough wealth to justify his presence among them. But if I settled my choice on Napoleon III, as he came to be known after his coup, it is because of other similarities. Bonaparte had two failed coup attempts behind him by the time he was elected, while everyone saw Trump coming ever since he announced his intention to run for president back in 1999, then again in 2012 when he withdrew just in time. Napoleon III’s international relations were marked by the same brand of clueless antagonism that I am now expecting from Trump. But the most interesting point of comparison to Trump is Napoleon III’s attraction to grand architectural and engineering projects: the Suez Canal, and Paris as we know it. Of course he was engaged in wars — but I don’t want to spoil it. You’ll soon find out.

This being said, it is as yet uncertain to me to what extent Trump will consolidate his power. The man had already demonstrated his immorality to anyone who came within his reach; now the world’s pussy is his to grab. Donald Trump might not believe in American Exceptionalism, but he believes in the exceptionalism of Donald J. Trump, and will inevitably conflate man and country. We already know he is not the kind of person to make his the sage words of Louis XII that “it is not for the King of France to avenge the injuries done to the Duke of Orleans”: the President of the United States will avenge the injuries done to Donald J. Trump. He will start wars not out of geopolitical or moral concerns, but for the vanity of one Donald J. Trump. Contrary to some Left and even liberal position that thought Trump would be a man of peace, I always knew he would be a greater warmonger than Clinton at her worst, without her knowledge of when to stop. Even The Russians, who may or may not have facilitated his election, may soon come to regret it if they did, because it is inevitable the two countries will clash, for one trivial reason or another: only one world leader can be Number One; the only explanation I can see in Russian meddling in favor of Trump is that Putin will try to gain the upper hand through a series of annexations before that happens, while Trump’s prospective competence in international affairs has been on full display for months.

Who will resist Trump? One hopes the press will do its duty, but recalcitrant news outlets will be sued into oblivion or harassed into compliance. Most of the press will just play along. The Huffington Post has already backtracked, but it would be an insult to the press to pretend Arianna Huffington’s little vanity project deserves to sit at its table. I predict that The Atlantic, which is primarily concerned with retaining its insider status, will be the first to normalize Trump’s actions now that he gets to call the shots. Similarly, the amoral Vox brats — best represented by Matthew Yglesias — will continue to produce their unsolicited wonk advice as if anyone in Washington cared. If Trump were smart, he would leave Salon as it is — ideally in a Ziploc bag to preserve its distinctive aroma — and urge his supporters to read it; he would keep his expensive legal fireworks for The New York Times and its handful of qualitative equivalents. And Silicon Valley, for that matter, appears ready to collaborate with him — in other words, all is lost.

As for the guffaws industry, we have seen already. Slate has an ongoing campaign saying it won’t normalize Trump, that he had “declared war on the press” (which is true), that “we need independent voices more than ever”, and that we should help Slate “fight back” and “hold him accountable”. The site that gave the world the “Slate pitch” and once published Matthew Yglesias, now a bastion of the free press? And how could we help Slate “fight back”? By subscribing to Slate Plus, of course, so that we could get access to gems of journalistic resistance such as “Will Late-Night Shows Help Us Laugh Through a Trump Presidency?”. What is needed, on the contrary, is a new serious in politics, to which American humor can only be an impediment.

We have already seen how the rest of the Republican establishment has not only failed to stop Trump but also rallied to him as soon as they could after their initial reluctance (except the two ex-Presidents Bush, one who is too old to care and the other who has nothing more to contribute). Among those who did not fail to disappoint is the #NeverTrump contingent, who retro-asterisked the word never beyond recognition: Never Trump, unless Clinton is the Democratic nominee; Never Trump, unless Trump is the Republican nominee; Never Trump, unless he becomes president; Never Trump, unless I have an opportunity to get on board the gravy train, etc. Never means never; it is not a word to be used lightly, and not to be pared back for mere political expediency. If #NeverTrump quickly folded after he won, it was because, for evidently most of the NeverTrumpers, it never was a moral or even ideological stance; they dressed their refusal as one (remember Ted Cruz’ conscience?), but their real message was that they thought Trump would not beat Clinton. Once his nomination was secure, and once Clinton was the Democratic pick, they had no choice but to go back and do the best they could — and hardly one of them will even so much as argue that they were wrong about Trump: opposing him, they will still say, was the right thing to do, then. If Jonah Goldberg — who once wrote a book warning against liberals’ penchant for fascism— is now giving Trump a chance, they will all do so. The hypocrisy of the NeverTrumpers is outdone by the conservative media — from the National Review to Fox News — which loudly objected to Trump before purring along as soon as he obtained the Republican nomination, and which in a decent world would be taken seriously by no-one anymore. But no, there they are, profitably railing against liberals as they follow Donald Trump’s path to damnation.

We knew that no serious opposition to Trump would come from those quarters; and now we are about to witness how useless the political and legal system are in containing him. The first to reveal its uselessness will be the electoral college, which exists to safeguard the presidency from being taken over by the very type of candidate represented by Donald Trump. If it cannot or will not keep Trump away from the White House — either because electors are forbidden to vote for anyone else by dubious state laws, or because they are selected from a large pool of sycophantic hacks who would vote for their party’s candidate even if he had promised to reduce their state’s capital to rubble if elected — then its bluff is called and it has no business continuing to exist. (Naturally, you would have electors submit to the popular vote and endorse Clinton, even as the vote in the Republican states was an explicit rejection of her, which would render the electoral college just as irrelevant.) Then, it will be the impeachment mechanism, as it is impossible, in this political climate, to conceive of a Congress with Republicans in control of both houses ever using it against a Republican president for any reason. As for the courts, well, there is a Supreme Court vacancy the Republicans kept open for the new president to fill, with more forthcoming, which will throw the majority over to the conservative faction.

Beyond this, I have no idea what will happen in the upcoming four years. Perhaps he will not run again. Perhaps he will not be in a position to run again. This is perhaps the most encouraging sign of Trump’s presidency: he is the oldest president to date, and may not have the time to consolidate his power, ensure it would be passed to any of his children, or nuke it all away. Trump would have us know as much about his health as about his wealth, which isn’t an encouraging sign, and isn’t helped by his doctor sounding like a graduate of the Theodor Morell School of Medicine. From the way things are going, just a month after his election, Trump is already behaving like a perfect kleptocrat who “seen his opportunities and took ‘em”. A stay at his Washington, D.C. hotel is apparently de rigueur among foreign diplomats, because they are very tasteful and definitely do not want to get in the good graces of the new president. He is already on the phone with other heads of state to advance his business concerns abroad, protocol, diplomatic precedents and conflicts of interests be damned — and of course, he’s still up at three in the morning to dish out abuse against the loser du jour on Twitter.

And one day, he will inevitably look north. With some luck, he will be kept busy elsewhere until he is out of office. One can always hope.

Dissolving the People: Technocratic Neoliberalism’s Final Reward

“We can get rid of the Hitlers and the Himmlers, but not the Speers.” — Sebastian Haffner (1944), via Corey Robin.

Laughs are rare to come by these days, so I had a long one when I saw an article at Vox in which Hillary Clinton “recommended Christopher Lasch’s work”, which is as if you came across a Steven Seagal profile in which he talked about the profound impact Stanislavski had on his acting. Everything Lasch wrote in later years — especially his Revolt of the Elites, published in 1994, the year of his death — presaged the predicament of American liberalism which led to the defeat of Hillary Clinton: an aloof, meritocratic liberalism, cruel and arrogant, that shirked any sense of obligation, and mostly concerned with the upward mobility and self-realization of a fortunate few.

Long before I had heard of Lasch, this had been my growing assessment of American liberalism ever since the heyday of sites like Markos Moulitas’ The Daily Kos. It is even more apparent today. In the Bush era, American liberals were telling me that The Daily Kos was a force for good, while they pointed to Charles Johnson’s pro-Bush Little Green Footballs as the exemplar of all that was vile in American politics. I now see, a decade or so later, that Johnson parted ways with the Right in 2009 and is now resolutely anti-Trump, while Moulitsas is now telling his readers: “Why should we weep for the retired coal miners who will now lose their health insurance thanks to the GOP majority — despite the best efforts of coal-state Democrats to change the outcome?” If The Daily Kos is now, in my eyes, something of a mausoleum for a certain sort of ineffectual Bush-era liberalism that gets only worse with time, Moulitsas is also the co-founder of Vox Media, of which the flagship outlet, launched in 2014, is emblematic of the kind of technocratic neoliberalism of which the Clinton Democrats were the embodiment. It may have just gone to defeat at the polls, but we haven’t seen the last of it.

Shortly after Vox’s launch, the libertarian Tim Worstall commented:

“ All of the people involved with it are bright and they’ve all climbed that greasy pole well, showing they have talent as well as smarts. But they all also seem to have a similar worldview: one where just the right pull on the right governmental lever is going to solve those complex problems. A belief in technocratic wonkery if you like. And a belief in technocratic wonkery is something that’s going to map very closely over centre of the road Democratic Party positions: just as my own prejudices lead my views to map very closely over those of the Libertarian Party (although, fortunately for my sanity, without descending into Randian nonsense).”

If anything, the following two-and-a-half years all confirmed Worstall’s fears, and with the American election under way and the disappointing campaign of the technocratic Democrats, a critical response to Vox from the Left and center-Left started raising its voice. Of the various commentaries, two are of particular interest: Nathan Robinson’s “Explaining It All To You” at Current Affairs, and David V. Johnson’s “Explanation for What?” at The Baffler. They reach the exact same conclusion while citing different evidence.

Grounded in the premise that there is too much (rather than too little) information available, Vox promises to sift through all the material and regurgitate an “explainer”, telling you everything you need to know. It also attempts to spin issues it believes are unjustly neglected, with the voice of an objective, disinterested observer, enabling what Johnson calls the “propagandistic claim that it publishes explanatory journalism rather than the opinion fare we get at The American Prospect or National Review Online”. What aids Vox in this claim is that it has no obvious vision, and openly declares itself unswayed by values or convictions; it believes in nothing, except a Clintonian status quo in which making policy becomes its own reward. Let yourselves be soothed by these words warning against political idealism, in an article informing us that “a new work of political philosophy argues that there’s no alternative to attacking one injustice at a time”:

“ If you’re climbing a mountain, you don’t need to know what the peak looks like to know what to do next. All you have to do is make sure your next step is up. Similarly, by rectifying injustices, one after another, we can just keep gaining in moral altitude. When there’s nothing left to be done, we’ve made it. We don’t need a picture of the top to get there.”

What is missing from this is a reason to keep climbing. To be fair, I am likewise wary of ideologies which insist the peak looks a certain way even if nobody has seen it; but if you aren’t even interested in finding out what the peak looks like, why exert yourself to go there? The aspiration to keep climbing, when there is no justification for it, is a form of idealism — only to this article it’s just a matter of course, something to do, going up for the sake of going up, slowly. It never asks why. Why not stay where you are, if not walk down the mountain? Why are you even on the mountain? Similarly, why should we rectify injustices if we don’t aspire to some moral ideal? Because that opens up a few interesting opportunities for incremental policy-making? The author (Will Wilkinson of the Niskanen Center) then moves on to talk about the election campaign:

That brings us back to the moral choices facing us in the current presidential election. To those entranced by a vision of utopia, the options may seem insignificant. Again we are confronted with the question: What’s the big difference, really, between a racist authoritarian thug and a hawkish imperialist technocrat? What’s worth saving in a comprehensively rigged, thoroughly unjust system?

But the truth is that our system is not so thoroughly unjust. And it is the nature of that truth that accounts for the difference between the thug and the technocrat. We are, more or less, an Open Society of diversity, mutual toleration, and free inquiry.

That’s why we have managed to gain altitude in the climb toward greater justice. That’s why, if we’re to rise higher still, it’s imperative to defend the openness we’ve got. But we can’t do that if we fail to recognize that leaders who are openly hostile to diversity and liberal toleration pose a special threat to the Open Society, and demand a special response.

What “special response” Wilkinson has in mind is left unanswered; it could range from existing political institutions reining Trumpism in (this was from last August, but with the benefit of hindsight: yeah, right) to something more Orwellian. But this excerpt is interesting in how Wilkinson implies the utopia he has in mind and condemns must necessarily be a progressive, left-leaning one, leaving unaddressed the obvious realization that Trump, too, proposed a utopia of his own to his followers (surely a man working at a think-tank named after a Reagan adviser should have known?). It takes, on the contrary, someone “entranced by a vision of utopia”, by any vision, to see that Trump’s campaign —once again, don’t mind his policies — was the vastly superior one, and that the Clinton campaign never had a chance. To say that “our system is not so thoroughly unjust”, that we should just enact policy to solve just one problem at a time, is as inspiring as the Democrats putting Barack Obama on stage to say that “America is already great” (of course it’s already great, when you’re the incumbent head of state). We saw how that turned out.

I assume this article was the equivalent of a guest column, but its ideas align perfectly with the approach to politics of Vox as a whole. The quintessential Vox article is editor-in-chief Ezra Klein’s July profile of Hillary Clinton that begins by insisting that “this is not a profile of Hillary Clinton”. The gist of it is that spending 40 minutes with Hillary Clinton, as Klein did, would completely change our perception of her. (Going without sleep, that would be 36 people per day, 13,149 people a year accounting for leap years, so she might have met all voting-age Americans — assuming they were immortal and had no kids — in time for the election if she had gotten started before Lascaux was painted.) She is “a good listener”, Klein insists. She is an “effective coalition builder”. “Her network is massive.” And then, this bewildering conclusion:

“If Clinton occupies the White House, Republicans will spend every waking moment working to recapture it — and that will mean jacking up Clinton’s negatives, reminding voters she’s a polarizing symbol of America’s toxic politics, denying her major bipartisan victories.

But Clinton will try, and there may even be moments when she succeeds. No one will ever accuse her of not having Mitch McConnell over for enough drinks. He may even like having a drink with her. He’ll probably find she’s a pretty good listener.”

There is no doubt in Klein’s mind that the Republicans would try to recapture the White House (which is what political parties tend to do when their opponents hold it) as if her capture of it in November were all but a fait accompli; the only hesitation is that opening if that is probably intended to read as once. From any other source, I would have thought that this profile was damning with faint praise with barbs awaiting anyone who read between the lines; but no, this is Vox writing about something it approves of: this is entirely on the level. Even more inexplicably, Klein fails to think through his own material, for instance his reference to her being a “polarizing symbol of America’s toxic politics”, but also these:

• He mentions that her speeches are “laundry lists she often gets criticized for”, but he insists these “are no accident” because “there is political savvy in this; after Clinton finishes an address, her campaign circulates emails carrying praise from a dizzying array of interest groups, experts, and stakeholders who heard the line they wanted to hear most. But those searching for a larger, sharper vision are often left disappointed; consensus is the enemy of inspiration.” He follows this by quoting Robert Reich, secretary of labor under Bill Clinton: “The policies she’s running on are a policy wonk’s delight. But the whole is not greater than the sum of the parts. It is hard to say what she stands for because she has not singled out a few very large, very ambitious ideas on which she would like a mandate to govern.”
• Quoting Brookings scholar Elaine Kamarck, author of Why Presidents Fail: “Successful presidential leadership occurs when the president is able to put together and balance three sets of skills: policy, communication, and implementation”. Klein then writes that “the problem, Kamarck says, is that campaigns are built to test only one of those skills”, before quoting her saying how “the obsession with communication — presidential talking and messaging — is a dangerous mirage of the media age”. Klein concludes by mentioning how “presidential primaries used to be decided in the proverbial smoke-filled room — a room filled with political elites who knew the candidates personally”.
• Klein knows of her bad relations with the press. “Compounding these potential problems is that there’s one group Clinton absolutely can’t stand hearing from: the press. She believes the media offers wall-to-wall coverage of trumped-up non-scandals that ultimately prove hollow. She resents the fact that when the stories finally fall apart, the press just moves on, but the damage lingers in the public’s view of her. And, well, she’s right.” Klein adds that Clinton’s mistrust of the press has “turned toxic”, so that now she “does things she simply shouldn’t”. For instance: “Other ex-officials give paid speeches to big banks, so why shouldn’t she? Other officials use private email accounts sometimes, so why can’t she use hers all the time? Republicans and the media really have treated her unfairly, so why shouldn’t she dodge press conferences and conceal transcripts?” Even Klein concedes that “The result is a peculiar blindness around her own behavior”.
• And finally, the question of Bernard Sanders: “Given where both candidates began, there is no doubt that Bernie Sanders proved the more effective talker. His speeches attracted larger audiences, his debate performances led to big gains in the polls, his sound bites went more viral on Facebook. Yet Clinton proved the more effective listener — and, particularly, the more effective coalition builder.” Then: “One way of reading the Democratic primary is that it pitted an unusually pure male leadership style against an unusually pure female leadership style. Sanders is a great talker and a poor relationship builder. Clinton is a great relationship builder and a poor talker. In this case — the first time at the presidential level — the female leadership style won. But that wasn’t how the primary was understood. Clinton’s endorsements left her excoriated as a tool of the establishment while Sanders’s speeches left people marveling at his political skills. Thus was her core political strength reframed as a weakness.”

In these points, all underestimating Clinton’s flaws or outright mistaking them for advantages, can be found Vox’s immense blind spot: that policy might matter, but this means nothing if you can’t sell it, or if the candidate selling it is so toxic she can’t get elected. Klein’s piece, in effect, belongs to the same piano-dropping political fantasy realm as Clinton’s most ardent supporters, like Peter Daou or Melissa McEwan; but it is being sold as a rigorous and perfectly objective assessment of Hillary Clinton that, to be fair, listed all the right facts, but with all the wrong conclusions.

What rankles is Vox’s constant denial that opinion is what it does; telling you what you need to know is Vox’s way of saying that here is what it wants you to know. (Ironically, Klein’s piece lived up to this; only the writer didn’t notice.) It is written as if it were aimed at readers smart in everything except in how to manage their nonetheless precious time. As such, I could not imagine Vox being successful, because I could not imagine the kind of policy wonks intellectually masturbating to zoning maps being content with a mere digest of any issue — and it doesn’t help that Vox has developed a reputation for being error-ridden, which must offend their desire for exactitude. At least I knew that I was not in its target audience; but I simply could not imagine the target audience for Vox being satisfied with it as it existed, when dozens of better alternatives exist. And yet there they are, the six-figure earners with graduate-school degrees, reading.

Worst of all, Vox’s content is delivered in a bratty know-it-all voice that brings to mind that episode of M*A*S*H in which a clerk affirms with absolute certainty, over the telephone, that no, you are not being shelled. It is a voice always reasserting it is superior to its readers (Vox Dei indeed), but it does not so much talk to as across the site’s readers. Often, Vox reads as if it were written for an audience of policy-makers at a conference, with the average reader as just a guest: irrelevant in any way, except to make the Vox brats appear influential. They suggest their own policies to policy-makers, and they sell policy-makers’ policies to their readers. Matthew Yglesias’ article “Against Transparency” demonstrated that in this power play, Vox identifies with the policy makers, even at the expense of its readers; it wants to be an insider, yet needs readers to be one. Its writers need a readership to be taken seriously, because their credentials would not suffice.

As for Vox’s editorial line, there is no disagreement among its critics: “the ‘explainers’ will be of one particular worldview, will be telling us how the world looks and should be run by those with that innate belief in technocratic wonkery” (Worstall); “the Vox model is premised on the idea that people shouldn’t think for themselves, that the important parts of political thought and decision-making should be outsourced to experts” (Robinson); “[the Voxplanation style] is the ideological grandstanding of the technocrat and of the professional-managerial class, whose differences with you, ordinary citizen, are not political — no, no, no — but based on expertise” (Johnson).

Meanwhile, a politician on the other side of the Pond was famously declaring, during a contentious referendum campaign six months ago, that people in his country “have had enough of experts”.

Even though Vox is American, its writers were panicking at Brexit, talking of “low-income, low-educated voters who don’t see the global order’s greatest benefits” as if the global order (some of whose movers and shakers are Vox Media investors or sponsors) were still in vogue but it was the idiots’ fault for not appreciating it (and not reading Vox, of course). But nobody reached as high a pitch as James Traub, at Foreign Policy (another publication that makes the casual reader feel like an unwanted guest), arguing that “rationalism itself is at stake and that the cynical fellow travelers of the illiberal democrats are feeding an anti-intellectual narrative”.

It is here that I must disagree, on two counts. First, there was an obvious problem of experts failing at what they claimed expertise about. If the recession continues, why should we pay heed to the same economists who have been rehashing the same talking points for nearly a decade? The alternative explanation is that those experts have forsaken any desire to serve and advance the public good, and have sold out to private interests which remunerate them handsomely for their services. Either way, the overarching problem with experts is that they have more often than not lost sight of anything that is remotely human.

The second is just a personal impression: I see a clear difference between experts and intellectuals. If every credible intellectual is an expert at his subject, not every expert is an intellectual. An expert is, for example, someone who designs military drones; an intellectual is someone questioning their ethics. An intellectual’s instinctive response is to say no and resist, until he is in a position to deliver his judgement; an expert cannot tolerate being said no and resisted. The intellectual’s unfortunate tendency is to retreat into the clouds; the expert cannot leave the world alone. Experts stroke their own ego by thinking themselves intellectuals, and will talk of anti-intellectualism if they are objected to, but they will just as virulently object to intellectuals questioning their proposals. If I respect intellectuals, I cannot escape thinking that the unintellectual experts — technicians, as I prefer to call them — are leading the world to its ruin. Not all of them, of course — I’m not about to forgo serious medical advice or take the first man off the street to design a suspension bridge — but definitely those who have come to believe they have exclusive control over the destiny of mankind, and whose sole concern is efficiency.

I still have in mind a Matthew Yglesias think-piece that is emblematic of this mindset. He wrote it while still at Slate, and no, it is not one of his classic offerings on, for example, the economic advantages of poor factory safety in Bangladesh (though that one would also qualify for this purpose). None of the Vox critics appear to have picked it up, even though they address Yglesias’ oeuvre from his Slate period. It was, rather, one of those numerous half-joking “Slate pitches” in which Yglesias is bilious at nothing less than our “broken” calendar. He helpfully suggests an alternative that can fix it:

The Republican Calendar adopted during the French Revolution, and then abandoned, points the way. It starts by tackling the most ridiculous aspect of the current calendar — months are not divisible into weeks. In the new system, there will be 12 months. Each month consists of three weeks. Each week consists of 10 days. At the end of the year there’s a five-day Christmas/New Year’s holiday. On leap years the five-day holiday will be extended to six days.

Best of all, instead of a week consisting of five workdays and two weekend days it will consist of seven workdays and three weekend days. Having 30 percent of the week be weekend time rather than the current 28.5 percent of the week has two major advantages. One is that you can maintain a constant number of hours of work per week by slightly extending the workday, which would still result in less commuting and therefore less pollution and less wasted time. The other is that it will smooth the transition to an era of higher productivity and less working. Many firms will probably find that there actually isn’t that much need to try to get people to extend their work hours. That simply making the shift from having everyone work five days out of seven to having everyone work seven days out of ten is good enough.”

Yes, I know: the French Revolution also gave us the metric system, which isn’t laughed at now. But suggesting adopting the Republican Calendar out of its context, for the sake of its precision and, above all, for productivity gains, is ridiculous. Even the top comment on the article responds in the spirit intended: “I have this recurring nightmare: I’m in a world where MY is in charge of… everything”. (Don’t we all?) Yglesias wrote his proposal in a tongue-in-cheek tone, yet eight months later, now at Vox — an outlet trying so hard to be serious it would avoid obvious “Slate pitches” — he made the case against time zones. What these proposals seek is to remake the world, with no singular vision to justify it, except more efficiency.

After Trump’s election, Vox went into high gear, warning how institutions were now at risk, but otherwise refusing to learn anything about the unpopularity of its views. It occasionally manages to make Trump look good, as when an article wrote of how he appeared to have strong-armed Ford into not relocating a plant to Mexico. Something the Vox article did not mention was that Trump had lied — Ford had no intention of moving the entire plant, just one production line — but Vox then took it upon itself to make the case for moving anyway. The author, Timothy B. Lee, first wrote of how the experts (and we must listen to the experts) think “policy changes — even drastic ones like pulling out of NAFTA and jacking up tariffs on Mexican goods — are unlikely to neutralize the powerful economic forces that have driven the flow of jobs overseas”; in other words, political power is irrelevant — unless Trump starts strong-arming businesses into staying, which, Lee quickly adds, has “terrifying implications for the long-term health of America’s economic and political institutions”. Lee was (rightly) concerned for the rule of law, but then moves on to a part headlined: “Keeping jobs in the US could have a huge downside”. Lee Voxsplains:

“Advocates of keeping automaking jobs in the US imagine that it might mean slightly higher car prices, but that that’s worth it to save more jobs for US workers. But the larger danger is that keeping jobs in the US will put US automakers at a competitive disadvantage against foreign automakers who can’t easily be forced to locate production facilities in the US. The result could be that US car companies just lose global market share against foreign competitors who locate factories overseas, leaving US autoworkers no better off in the long run.”

Presumably, then, the jobs would continue going overseas, with automakers shopping for cheaper venues until they reach the rock-bottom in wages — which would in effect mean slave labor — for the sake of their share of a global market in which an increasing number of people are priced out of owning automobiles. Ah, but it would undoubtedly ensure company headquarters would stay, apart from what can be outsourced to India or some other cheaper English-speaking country. What does it mean for automobile workers, though? Penury, and perhaps the economic destruction of their communities. And then Vox wonders why they refuse to “see the global order’s greatest benefits” and vote for a charlatan like Trump.

Vox is an easy and satisfying target, but it is just one of many in a similar vein. Whenever that brand of neoliberalism bothers to whip up a vision — something the Clintonites did not even attempt — it is instantly repulsive. If its advocates bother to step outside their comfort bubble, they will typically commit faux pas after faux pas. They will dangle the prospect of self-driving cars as something to look forward to in front of an audience of truck drivers. They will talk of a bright future in robotics to rural viewers who have never attended college. They will spin a vision of the world with a frozen smile that gives a measure of the horror lurking behind the façade. They will never accept the slightest criticism of technology itself. And they will carry on, oblivious to their vision’s evident shortcomings, repeating buzzwords after buzzwords.

For instance, here is a specimen published at Backchannel (“part of Wired Media Group”) that I came across a few weeks ago. Its author, Khan Shoieb, is a “World Economic Forum Global Shaper, Ex-Obama 2012 National Battleground States Coordinator and Communications Director for Working Families Party NY”. Shoieb, who is concerned about the rise of Trumpism and its impact on Silicon Valley, begins by stating that Trump supporter Peter Thiel’s “breed of techno-libertarianism that feels increasingly anachronistic in the Valley”; instead, “today’s techies, from Mark Zuckerberg to Ellen Pao, are instead more likely to profess a civic-minded mission, chasing pursuits that strive to optimize society as it exists rather than create it anew”. He continues: “This is a civic Valleyism that embraces its entanglement in the public sphere, armed with the conviction that it holds a special charge to tackle society’s biggest ills.” Now, you may wonder: who bestowed upon Silicon Valley that special charge? Nobody did; this is at the core of the “solutionism” that Evgeny Morozov and others have dissected: it invites itself, unasked, to solve problems (that in some cases do not even exist or, worse, the Valley created itself) on its own while undermining democracy.

None of this matters to Shoieb, who argues that Trumpism is the real peril:

“Trumpism stunned America with its exhibition of a substantial, revanchist slice of white working class voters who experience politics as a zero-sum game — a group that would rather burn the house down than witness the economic and cultural ascendancy of other identities. These are voters whose faith in institutions and procedural liberalism has collapsed; who refuse to trust the economic data on which the world runs and will not accept the outcome of the election; who have nothing to lose from being judged on the internet. And they are precisely the voters most likely to resist Silicon Valley’s attempts to embed technology into public life.”

It’s that Voxsplaining tone again, with that undeserved air of certainty, telling readers that the world runs this way and no other. But beyond that, the article makes it sound like a bad thing that those voters have “nothing to lose” from being judged on the internet — as if all they deserved was another round of robust shaming (which they can get on television anyway, should they so desire), after which they would of course realize the errors of their ways and vote for Hillary Clinton. And of course nobody, certainly not rednecks, must resist Silicon Valley in any way, hampering precious progress and prosperity. And what is his prescription for the future, then?:

“For an AI-powered utility to coordinate efficient energy use, for autonomous ridesharing to take root, for a health system to orchestrate better patient behavior, or for a government to replace cash with an intangible algorithm, citizens will have to look beyond their individual user experiences and consider whether to place their trust in larger systems, authorities, and other people.”

This goes beyond buzzword self-parody; every line of this is horrifying — from coordination by artificial intelligence, to orchestrating patient behavior (in a country where financial access to healthcare is a problem), to algorithms dictating economics, to “larger systems, authorities, and other people” which, in the context of this quotation, must necessarily mean the larger systems, authority, and people of Silicon Valley, as nobody else — from voters to politicians to the press — would have the necessary knowledge to make decisions. The Valley would become the sole source of expertise. Implementing what it wants would herald the triumph of the technocrats and the death of democracy. And it is exactly the vision of the world that neoliberalism, from Vox to Silicon Valley, has to offer.

One last quotation:

“In a normal country, the government actually does its job. And today it’s important to recognize that the government has a job to do. Voters are tired of hearing conservative politicians say that government never works. They know the government wasn’t always this broken. The Manhattan Project, the Interstate Highway system, the Apollo Program. Whatever you think of these ventures, you cannot doubt the competence of the government that got them done. But we have fallen very far from that standard. We cannot let free-market ideology serve as an excuse for decline.”

This is from a Peter Thiel speech in support of Donald Trump, following talking points he had also offered in print. Thiel’s arguments are interesting in how they obviously depart not only from his “techno-libertarian” stance but also from the usual Republican small-government line; but they are perfectly in keeping with the rest of Silicon Valley’s obsession with infrastructure, and were later echoed by Bill Gates comparing Trump’s potential to foster innovation to that of John F. Kennedy [7]. Vox’s Timothy B. Lee sniffed that Thiel was naïve about how government works, and above all naïve about Donald Trump. After quoting the lines I have reproduced above, Lee commented:

You might think this seems like an argument for Hillary Clinton — a centrist technocrat who has spent her career sweating the details of public policy. But Thiel, of course, goes in the opposite direction, endorsing a man who hasn’t shown the slightest interest in policy specifics.

Thiel seems to have constructed a fantasy version of Donald Trump and convinced himself that that’s who we’d get if Trump became president. This version of Donald Trump is a thoughtful policymaker who carefully weighs costs and benefits and pushes policy in a more rational direction.

But that Donald Trump doesn’t exist. So why is Thiel trying to will him into existence? I suspect his preference for Trump ultimately flows from a mistaken diagnosis of what’s wrong with Washington.

Here we have all the hallmarks of Vox smug discourse: an obsession with rational policy and mistaken opponents. But is Peter Thiel naïve? More importantly, can you risk thinking Peter Thiel is naïve? Thiel is a Trump supporter (and generous financial contributor to his campaign), true, but he has his own reasons. Even money aside, it was obvious he was not a regular Trumpkin. He has nothing to offer to the people living in decrepit Garbutts across America looking up to Trump to bring their jobs back. In fact, in September, he could be found telling an audience in Chicago during a lecture about globalization that their city — America’s third largest — was just another Garbutt: “If you are a very talented person, you have a choice: You either go to New York or you go to Silicon Valley.”

Peter Thiel is not a fool; nor is he evidently a pariah in Silicon Valley, as he still sits on the board of Facebook and is still a partner at Y Combinator, a “start-up incubator”. The Thiel fellowships — granted to young people who drop out of college to build startups — are the epitome of Silicon Valley expertise without intellectualism, as they regard education as nothing more than a means to a career, and an inefficient one at that. On that level, at least, is a similarity between Thiel and Trump: more concerned with doing than learning. And there is another, far more important: Thiel stands to gain from government contracts, especially those involving his ominous data firm, Palantir Technologies, which gives him a foothold in the intelligence community.

Who is more naïve, then? Thiel, or the Vox writer? More worrisome is the title given to Lee’s article: “Peter Thiel sounds like a liberal technocrat. So why is he supporting Donald Trump?” From this headline, I can already tell that Vox approves to some extent of what Peter Thiel says, but thinks he is mistaken in supporting Trump, who offered no policies to speak of. What you ought to be wary about is not that you might “mistake him for a liberal technocrat” but that you think Vox is necessarily immune to Thiel’s appeal, because it may very well mistake him for one of those technocratic leaders it appreciates so much. This technocratic leadership even has a typical physiognomy: it is enlightening to compare Thiel’s physical appearance to that of Australia’s former prime minister Tony Abbott, Italy’s outgoing prime minister Matteo Renzi, France’s presidential hopeful Emmanuel Macron (who went from Socialist advisor to lamenting that not enough people wanted to become billionaires), and the most famous of this group, Tony Blair when first elected British prime minister: the no-nonsense look, a cross between a successful executive and Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond, telling you they mean business. Some of them are more charismatic than others, but you know instinctively that they get what they want, whether you like it or not, and that it is not wise to resist.

I can see some compatibility — not perfect, but still there — between what the Silicon Valley oligarch and what Vox-style neoliberalism desires; hyper-mobility, for one, then a contempt for democracy that will only become worse at Vox since the qualified Hillary Clinton failed to win the presidency, perhaps leading more or less explicitly to “undemocratic liberalism”. Thiel, for his part, is entirely concerned about efficiency, going back to his college years when he remarked that “apartheid was a sound economic system working efficiently, and moral issues were irrelevant”. It is unlikely Vox will be persuaded by Thiel’s argument that giving the vote to women has caused democracy to go to the dogs, but it is worth noting that there is a certain disconnect at Vox between the amoral policy wonks (e.g. Klein, Yglesias, Lee) and the identity politics writers like German Lopez and Emily Crockett; we haven’t seen much of it recently because Hillary Clinton connected both, but it may reappear depending on what happens in the Democratic Party, which will of course have learned nothing and will be as dysfunctional and ineffectual as ever.

I can imagine the Vox wonks, entirely focused on governance and efficient system with not particular attachment for democracy, and many of you besides them, be attracted to the prospect of a Peter Thiel type (but not Thiel himself*) running for the White House — which I am definitely expecting one to do, as soon as Trump is done with it, and which I am expecting him, thanks to the Republicans and the residual votes provided by you, to win.

And then the world will enter darker waters still.

Additional part, added January 30th, 2017.

Their’s Not to Reason Why: Electoral College Edition

“He’s a multimillionaire. I like rich folks. Can’t nobody buy him.” — Mississippi Elector Charles Evers.

A few weeks ago, “game theory” was temporarily quite in vogue in liberal circles on Twitter, after someone by the name of Eric Garland, a “strategic analyst for businesses and government agencies”, produced a 127-tweet chain of what he thought would likely happen between Russia and the US following the election. In the interest of full disclosure, I have not read it in its entirety and have no intention to do so, but I have seen enough bona fide game theory to know that the vast majority of it is not written, as this is, in the voice of a third-rate Tom Wolfe. Even if Garland’s offering had been serious, I know I want nothing to do with game theory: it is what happens when you take political activity and place it in a Petri dish underneath a glass bell in a laboratory — controlled conditions determined by the theorist, who elaborates his scenario based on rational actors possessing all the required information (as determined by the theorist himself). It is politics without the unpredictable, fallible human element. Trump is nothing if not unpredictable and fallible.

A few hours before the Electoral College was set to choose the next president, as a joke of sorts to follow Garland’s exercise in “game theory”, I took all of five minutes to produce (using Paint) a graph to articulate my theory that the only way to prevent a Trump presidency was for the Democrats to attempt to reach an agreement with potential faithless Republican electors — the so-called “Hamilton Electors” — to vote for any other Republican but Trump. What should have been clear to the Democrats was that Hillary Clinton, regardless of how many millions of votes more than Trump she had obtained, was not going to be president: most Republicans hated Hillary Clinton; very few, if any, Republican electors could be counted upon to switch their vote to her; and even if enough Republican electors went faithless to bring Trump’s tally below 270 votes, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives would decide. If the Democrats had been serious about thinking Trump was an autocrat in the making, they would have made concerted attempts to convince the Electoral College to choose anyone but Trump for the presidency — which, in these circumstances, meant a Republican, for instance John Kasich, whose name had been circulated by one Republican elector, who wrote in the New York Times of his intent not to vote for him. With one Republican elector publicly questioning Trump’s fitness for office, telephone calls should have been made; e-mails should have been sent; something should have been attempted. As far as I can tell, the Democrats did not appear to consider any such last-ditch maneuvers, which made inevitable the postscript of their conciliatory gestures since Trump’s inauguration, only the prelude to their open collaboration.

That was, then, my exercise in “game theory”. When, however, I posted my crude graph on Twitter, made in five minutes and looking like it, I immediately started receiving replies arguing over — of all things — my methodology, over how I should have treated variables, and other minutiae. At first I thought: surely they see this is something I only spent a few minutes doing, intended as a tongue-in-cheek reference to Garland’s meme — even though I genuinely believed the political scenario I set forth, albeit a very long shot, was the only one that could now stop Trump — and are just replying in the spirit intended. It was only after I continued responding to them and they to me that I realized that no, they were entirely serious. Either they did not realize that if I wanted to write something methodologically serious, not only would it have an accompanying text, but I also would not simply post it on Twitter; or they took the opportunity to strut their expertise on the subject even though they knew my effort was tongue-in-cheek. In my view, the second possibility is far more likely: I suspect they are not unlike those who will not entertain any criticism of Nate Silver that does not concern his methodology (and especially not his moral vacuity or the impact of his work even if it were perfectly accurate). The experience left me with a bitter taste not because I was rankled at being schooled on the proper nomenclature of actual game theory but because there is something grotesque in talking of averting totalitarianism — or so went and still goes the discourse about Trump — as something so theoretical and detached from earthly concerns as to be called a payoff.

And as the results of the Electoral College vote would show just a few hours later, using game theory to predict how it would go would have been a complete waste of time. Only two Republican electors defected, and only one voted for Kasich. The “rogue Electoral College movement” described by the conservative Washington Times never materialized. Three Democratic electors in Washington State had something of an idea in voting for Colin Powell — whose name was, as far as I can tell, never mentioned, and who is about to turn eighty — another from the same state for Faith Spotted Eagle, and another in Hawaii for Bernard Sanders. And then there were the faithless Democratic electors in Minnesota and Colorado — intending to vote for Sanders and Kasich, respectively — who were simply replaced according to state laws to that effect. The function of elector having been reduced to the level of any warm body who can mark an X where he is told, we might as well dismiss all electors and ask the whiz kids in Silicon Valley to design an Electronator 3000: docile, incapable of independent thought, available in red or blue, programmed to let out, respectively, a cavernous “MAGA” or “I’m With Her” through their menacing metallic jaws, replaceable whenever they develop a conscience (the “Cruz Test”) for the former, and if their circuits are berning for the latter. Sure, they might be hacked, but at least we would know the hacks are the anomaly, not the norm.

If you want to argue against the normalization of Donald Trump, and claim that Trump represents some sinister departure from established political practice instead of being its natural consequence, begin here. Explain how the Electoral College rubber-stamped a candidate that, by almost unanimous consent among those not blinded by their partisanship or motivated by their self-interest, ticked every box on the list of what the Electoral College existed to prevent in the first place. Ah yes, the sonorous phrases of Federalist № 68, warning against Tumult and Disorder, advocating how “the choice of SEVERAL, to form an intermediate body of electors, will be much less apt to convulse the community with any extraordinary or violent movements, than the choice of ONE who was himself to be the final object of the public wishes”. See how successful they were against Trump, the arguments offered by Federalist № 68, for instance how “the process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications”. Or the following, read in the light of Russia’s preference for Trump and its involvement in the election to at least some extent (regardless of its actual impact on the vote):

“Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one querter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?”

If this made the election of Trump a travesty, there is a greater one in the selection of the electors themselves. According to Federalist №. 68, were “excluded from eligibility to this trust, all those who from situation might be suspected of too great devotion to the President in office”; yet who do we find on the New York list of electors, in addition to the State Governor, Lieutenant Governor, the Mayors of New York City and Buffalo, and a few other political insiders at various government levels, but none other than William Jefferson Clinton, former president, prospective First Husband, and quick to blame the FBI for having cost his wife the election? Can we believe a man would be allowed to stand as juror while his wife is on trial? How has it come to happen that there are more stringent rules for jury duty — in which are at stake the liberty and even the life of at most a few persons — than for the election of the man or woman who might put at risk the liberty and lives of millions if not billions of people?

I do not disagree, on principle, with the idea of the electoral college, insofar as it is not designed so as to favor one political party over another; but at present the conversation is all too predictably splitting between Republicans desiring to retain it because it currently benefits them and Democrats consequently opposing it, just as all too predictably those positions would be reversed if the Democrats came to gain the advantage from it. I am not particularly swayed by the argument that the Electoral College is nefarious, even racist (because it was originally intended for the benefit of slave owners). Above all, I want to avoid the kind of situation where stagnating rural regions lose the last of their political weight — except, presumably, in the Senate — while the presidential campaign becomes limited to courting people agglutinating around successful cities in, at most, a dozen states, whose reality and concerns (and this should be one of the main lessons of 2016) appear as far removed from the rest of the country as if they were located on the Moon. But if the Electoral College is incapable of functioning as Federalist № 68 loftily intended it to function; if states can legally force electors to follow a course of action and deprive them of their capacity of judgement; if any warm body bathing in a stew of partisan concerns can serve as elector, indeed is held as the ideal elector; then it might be in the interest of the American Republic that we slay the myth that the College is the last rampart against “tumult and disorder” by replacing it with the static points system which it has already largely become de facto, and perhaps even by abolishing it altogether.

At any rate, the 2016 election has finally demonstrated that this vaunted last rampart does not exist: as Trump was not prevented by the electors from entering the White House, nobody is ever going to be. Yet I know for certain that — assuming there is going to be a presidential election in 2020 — Federalist № 68 is still going to be quoted with obsequious deference, by both the usual straw-boater idealists and the same political hacks who have made a mockery of the principles it espoused, on how the Electoral College can, hypothetically, prevent an authoritarian, unfit demagogue with the tacit or explicit backing of a foreign power from becoming president. But not Trump. Trump clears the bar. It was already to be wondered whether the bar was so low as to be on the floor; but thanks to Trump, we now know there is in fact no bar at all.

If the Electoral College is to survive as it is, let us remember that it is an elitist contraption, intended to ensure “there will be a constant probability of seeing the station [of president] filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue”, and that because of this electors should be drawn from elites. Not the millionaires and billionaires who would relish any opportunity to decide amongst themselves, for their own benefit, who is going to be the next president, nor the technicians whose names would undoubtedly be submitted by the Democrats, but “elites” as scorned by Trump and his cohorts: intellectuals, scholars (no, not pundits), artists (no, not celebrities), people of refinement, anyone but the political operatives currently enlisted for the purpose. In other words, people who can be expected to know what is the Emoluments Clause or at least understand and why it’s not proper for a prospective president to make money from foreign dignitaries staying at his hotel, instead of believing by default in the moral superiority of “rich folks” (another lesson: never let Puritans found a country, but it’s too late for that) when everything in the biography of this particular rich man, including everything he did in the six weeks between the presidential election and the College vote, pointed to exactly the opposite. People who, at least, are capable of sacrificing their political and financial interests for the sake of the Republic, not the opposite.

Read in the context of today, Federalist № 68 is reminiscent of the three columns that are all that is left of the Roman Temple of the Dioscuri: the functionally useless testament to a past that no longer exists, now revered as the aesthetic heritage of an evanescent grandeur. The Electoral College’s appointment — anointment — of Donald Trump to the presidency with scarcely a ripple of concern, while the people “most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station” in the rest of society, who are of course too independent of mind to ever be called upon to serve as electors, were warning against him, has rendered that hallowed institution’s position untenable; yet it can be safely predicted that, as long as a simulacrum of American democracy endures, the Electoral College will go on doing as it has always done, impervious to criticism, immune to reform, outwardly impenetrable to time just as its core is dying and rotting away. It now exists between life and death, like a stuffed animal, both of this time and not, just a ritual among the many rituals that American politics still entertains for their own sake, the stuff of Broadway musicals and period films to such an extent that those appointed to the function might as well be outfitted with costumes on loan from Colonial Williamsburg and cast their ballot with goose-feather quills, and the results made public in the same way that British town criers still, by tradition, announce royal births. But at least the town criers still carry out what they are intended to do, while the Electoral College now has as much influence on political affairs as Punxsutawney Phil on the arrival of spring. “But the Charybdis of tumult! The Scylla of disorder!”, its supporters will intone solemnly, warily, just as the electors themselves vote, as they were instructed, for a Donald J. Trump to the supreme office of the modern Rome.

[*The initial version of this essay had Thiel himself running for the presidency. As pointed out by a reader below, Thiel was born in Germany, to German parents, and as such, without a constitutional amendment, is ineligible. You may think you have dodged a bullet, but there is reason to believe that there are many American-born techies of a similar bend who would gladly avail themselves of such an opportunity if it arose.]

NOTES

(These notes include material I came across after publishing the above essay. While the above text will remain unchanged, new material will be added here.)

[1] It is telling that, after a widely circulated list of the “least important writers” of 2016 included Nate Silver — alongside some of the year’s genuinely worst offenders, such as the Democratic camp’s trifecta of block, mock and shock, Sady Doyle, Amanda Marcotte, and Peter Daou — he was the only one the readers extensively attempted to defend, in the usual terms. Such people are, I find, incapable of admitting that “data journalists” like Silver, were wrong — because they would also have to admit that they themselves were wrong. If they admit any fault in Silver, it will always be that Silver occasionally behaved like a pundit: in other words, his logic failed momentarily, but soon he would be back in the saddle. What they want is a human calculator — insofar as he returns a result his readers want to read — who has banished all considerations that cannot be quantified.

While I have been extremely critical of Nate Silver, I occasionally come across criticisms of Silver that are off the mark. For example, in 2012, the author Geoffrey Dunn, at the Huffington Post, complained of how Silver dismissed an Obama speech as not “more than the sum of its parts” when the statistician’s assessment “went counter not only to those in attendance at the Time Warner Cable Arena — where tears flowed freely and the atmosphere both inside and outside the arena was electric — but to virtually every other commentator who responded to Obama’s speech? Even Steve Schmidt, the Republican field general of John McCain’s 2008 campaign, called it “powerful…just an amazing performance.” I really wish I could agree with Dunn’s larger diagnosis, because some of his points are valid, but the following part — keep in mind what happened in the last months of the Trump campaign — shows exactly why his angle of attack was wrong:

“Just this past month, when asked on CNN about Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” remarks, Silver responded: “I do know this is not the type of issue the Republicans want to be talking about when you have an unemployment rate above eight percent.” Where’s the moral outrage? He immediately juxtaposed the Akin remark with an economic statistic. Does this guy have no soul?”

There was plenty of moral outrage about Donald Trump, especially in the week following the release of the “pussy” tape. As for the commentators, they all thought he had embarrassed himself during the debates opposite Hillary Clinton, and they repeatedly claimed that Trump was definitely sunk. We saw what happened. Moral outrage is fine, but not in Nate Silver’s line of work, because all he is concerned with is whether moral outrage is quantitatively relevant. In the above excerpt, Silver was entirely correct: most Republicans didn’t care about Todd Akin’s remarks any more than they cared about Donald Trump’s. Nate Silver might have no soul, but FiveThirtyEight groupies would respond that the consideration is irrelevant. When Dunn writes that “tears and emotions never flow from a mathematical equation”, they will say that this is correct and that the reason why they read Silver in the first place is because he does not let himself be swayed by such irrational considerations. Any criticism which does not involve Silver’s methodology is irrelevant to them; besides, such a conversation, should one want to engage with such people, can only be speculative, as he does not release his model. An appeal to morality from Dunn would fall on deaf ears; he did not even “disagree much with his numbers”, so Silver’s fans would have been puzzled as to what exactly he opposed.

One of the more valid arguments against Silver — from Andrew Lindner’s “The Sociology of Silver” — is that statistical discussion “excludes all but elite readers”. Even if Silver released his model, I readily admit that I would hardly be in a position to competently nitpick it to the satisfaction of his admirers. This is the same milieu where a venture capitalist with a bachelor’s degree in computing, in response to a Jill Lepore article critical of the mantra of “disruption” especially in vogue in Silicon Valley, tweeted: “What does Jill Lepore, Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale, think about quantum entanglement?” This milieu would have us waste our time on technical details, because the only considerations which interest them are those dedicated to improving the efficiency of their quarry, i.e. if you’re going to complain about Silver’s model, come up with a more accurate one. What they refuse to debate is whether what they want is actually desirable. Just imagine how my assertion that the problem is with Silverization itself — and that Silver being perfectly right every time would make it worse — would be received by the average devotee of FiveThirtyEight.

Howard Fineman, the editorial director of the Huffington Post Media Group, called 2012 the “Nate Silver Election” because “he was the symbol and bane” and his odds-making “the ultimate reductio ad absurdum of horse race coverage”. Fineman’s points are closer to what Silver ought to be criticized for: “His rise is the perfect metaphor for a society that seems only to care about winning; it doesn’t matter how or even why, but just that it is.” A recent Current Affairs article confirmed this by citing a second-hand report that Silver said he “doesn’t give a shit” about politics. Still, Silver only reflects a reality that only an outlet such as Vox, otherwise just as obsessed with data, would ignore: that a significant part of politics is a horse race even if we hoped it were not. If we carry the analogy further, Silver is the honest yet completely amoral man who writes for the racing newspaper just for the statistical challenge; but he enables — whether he likes it or not — the shady characters with less laudable intentions, those who want the odds to go their way and make the rounds of the stables, an injection here, a sponging there, in the pursuit of their ambition. Because Silver reduces politics to electioneering, with no particular interest in policy-making except inasmuch as it can affect his predictions, he is the kind of man to know everything worth knowing about, for example, gerrymandering, and doing nothing about it except keeping it in mind when tabulating polls. However, his work provides lawmakers with all the tools required for more efficient gerrymandering — and God knows what else — just for the sake of more clicks. I cannot say whether he realizes it; but as Current Affairs wrote in late December, Silver “doesn’t actually care about politics very much in terms of its human stakes”. Everything, to him, is an abstract, a series of data points: the first step in a dehumanizing process that also gave us Donald Trump Jr.’s Skittles. [Note added January 9th, 2017.]

[2] I have no doubt that, should you have the power to do so, you would not hesitate to carry out some partisan voting restrictions of your own. For instance, Nate Silver’s findings that it was education, not income, that was the more accurate predictor of political endorsement — the less educated, the more for Trump — are probably music to your ears just as they confirm your worst fears. Undoubtedly, you would appreciate being in a position to act upon them by making sure only the properly educated people — by your standards, needless to say — were given the franchise. (Didn’t John Stuart Mill, one of the staples of liberal thought, suggest giving more votes to intellectuals?) I predict that your response would be that such a precaution would be entirely qualitative — which means, in effect, going down the road of technocracy. But soon enough, this kind of thinking devolves into, say, the rich claiming they should have more weight because they have more at stake or pay more taxes, leading to all sorts of disquieting implications.

I am not opposed, in principle, to individual votes having different weights, but only as long as I can discern in the implementation of this differential an attempt to serve that elusive ideal, the public good. If implementing such a measure is all about selfishness and political expediency — and this is really what lies at the bottom of most jeremiads of this nature, Left and Right, from intellectuals and technocrats to businessmen and white nationalists — then I will want nothing to do with it. If you want a concrete example of this self-serving mentality, there was this table which I saw being shared extensively on social media in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum:

As I did not really look into the Brexit results, I have no idea if the numbers in this table are accurate: but the question of the accuracy of the numbers is beside the point. Instead, the problem resides in that last column, handily indicating the average number of years categories of voters have left to live. The subtext is clear: why won’t those old farts bow to the will of youth or die off already? How inconsiderate of them, not to croak on their way to the polling station! This table often appeared alongside an excerpt from a complaint in the Financial Times about the referendum results by a millennial Briton by the name of Nicholas Barrett, who later expanded upon it at the same venue.

Barrett would have built a better case if he had pointed to the hypocrisy of the Leave camp leadership — how it was commanded by questionable people talking of a revolt against an “elite” of which they were obviously members themselves (Michael Gove, Tory cabinet member and Times columnist; Boris Johnson, Tory politician and former London mayor; Nigel Farage, City trader) — or to the unsavory sentiments the referendum brewed up (which culminated in the assassination of a Member of Parliament). Instead, his three points closely adhere to the neoliberal technocratic worldview: more globalization and immigration as a net economic benefit; lost opportunities for mobile Britons such as, presumably, himself (he wrote this in Italy); and the triumph of post-factual democracy: “In almost every instance, emotions trumped research, which could be easily dismissed with accusations of an ulterior elitist motive: “Well, the International Monetary Fund would say that, wouldn’t they?”” Well, of course the IMF would say that, and of course the Financial Times would publish such a letter, wouldn’t they?

Of particular relevance here is this excerpt from Barrett’s second point:

Those who voted Leave may feel powerless and ignored, but demographically they are more likely to be leading settled, retired lives with little need of a continent’s worth of opportunity. They will have to tolerate the economic chaos they have created for roughly 20 years. But millennials — those of us in our twenties and early thirties, one in five of whom are expected to make it to our 100th birthday — will now have to spend up to eight decades locked out of the union we voted to stay in. Does this count, in the parlance of the Leave campaigners, as a “democratic deficit”?

I am not sure what Barrett is suggesting, if not that the weight of votes should not be equal, and that priority should go to the people more likely to be longer affected by the result of the referendum — for instance, millennials such as himself. Perhaps his message to the boomer cohorts is merely: don’t be selfish. But who really is the selfish party here? Pensioners who, pining for some bygone era when Britannia could still pretend to rule the waves, fight against ever-deeper European integration commanded by a distant bureaucracy with a track record of never taking no for an answer, or millennials who care naught for anything that came before them, think their opportunity and self-realization is all that matters in the world? It is here that I recall these lines by G.K. Chesterton:

“Those who urge against tradition that men in the past were ignorant may go and urge it at the Carlton Club, along with the statement that voters in the slums are ignorant. It will not do for us. If we attach great importance to the opinion of ordinary men in great unanimity when we are dealing with daily matters, there is no reason why we should disregard it when we are dealing with history or fable. Tradition may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Democracy tells us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our groom; tradition asks us not to neglect a good man’s opinion, even if he is our father. I, at any rate, cannot separate the two ideas of democracy and tradition; it seems evident to me that they are the same idea.”

If democracy is not just a matter of rights but also of obligations — which these stifled millennials evidently believe, with their exhortation that voters educate themselves and think of other people’s lost opportunities as they cast a ballot — what then of obligations to tradition, to the past? Yet this reasoning is undoubtedly archaic — even problematic — to people who might well believe their ideal society is something to be found in Logan’s Run.

And in the United States, we see that argument in another form, against the Electoral College. Not all votes should be equal, those now complaining are practically saying, but strangely enough they can’t tolerate an institution like the Electoral College giving a voter in Wyoming triple the weight of one in California because, this time, this system denied Hillary Clinton the presidency. Suddenly everyone remembers the Electoral College was created to grant disproportionate power to slave owners, but everyone conveniently overlooks how this is what now prevents Wyoming — were it a swing state, that is — from being overlooked by all parties in the presidential election.

Again: who is the more selfish party here? [Note added January 3rd, 2017.]

[3] See also Emily Nussbaum’s “How Jokes Won the Election”, in the January 23rd, 2017 issue of The New Yorker. [Note added January 17th, 2017.]

[4] In 1990, Trump told Playboy, when asked of his role models, that he had “always thought that Louis B. Mayer led the ultimate life, that Flo Ziegfeld led the ultimate life, that men like Darryl Zanuck and Harry Cohn did some creative and beautiful things. The ultimate job for me would have been running MGM in the Thirties and Forties–pre-television. There was incredible glamour and style in those days that’s gone now. And that’s when you could control situations.” Trump considered real estate more profitable than the film business, but he still was something of an aesthete: “I believe I’ve added show business to the real-estate business, and that’s been a positive for my properties and in my life.” I cannot avoid thinking that his ideal film producer was a Samuel Goldwyn or David O. Selznick, independents who left a clear artistic imprint on their films, while the director, far from the auteur worship of today, was reduced to just another hired hand, replaceable at will (see, for instance, the case of Gone With the Wind, whose extensive micromanagement is revealed in Memo from David O. Selznick). Likewise, Trump is not an architect, but it is his name on the building; it is his achievement, a producer’s achievement, while the name of the building’s architect is, to the layperson at least, practically irrelevant. According to a source quoted by the Washington Post when it revealed Trump filled his cabinet with people who “looked the part”, Trump is “very aesthetic”. I believe it. (Interestingly, two people in his close circle have been film producers themselves: Steve Bannon, and his Treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin.) Trump had told Playboy, talking of any new project he undertook: “It will be the eighth wonder of the world and will create an aura that seems to work.” If his election campaign was any indication, he does have an eye for creating an aura that seems to work — something which completely eluded the Clinton camp. [Note added January 2nd, 2017.]

[5] The constant reminders of the eighties, and especially of the Eighties New York — the New York of Wall Street or The Bonfire of the Vanities, with occasional reminders of the Fifties, which, for example, Roger Ebert discerned in The Secret of My Success — in Trump’s campaign but even more so in his persona, were not just obvious, but overbearing. In the words of the New York Times’ Robert Frank: “Mr. Trump’s flash and dazzle stand in stark contrast to the new culture of wealth. In the ’80s, success meant excess, bigger was better, and wealth was meant for display. Today’s wealth culture, by contrast, is all about staying under the radar — jeans and sneakers instead of suits, whitewall minimalism rather than gold, and a Tesla in the garage, not a Rolls. They prefer the attention of signing the Giving Pledge to buying a megayacht.” Trump arrived just in time to exploit a nascent eighties nostalgia; let us just say that films like Pixels or the Ghostbusters reboot did not occur in a vacuum. [Note added January 2nd, 2017.]

[6] The eminent linguist George Lakoff offers a different interpretation from mine: ““Maybe” brings up a suggestion. “Maybe there is” suggests that there is something the “Second Amendment People” can do to prevent Hillary from taking office and appointing liberal judges who would take away what they see as their Constitutional rights. “I don’t know” is intended to remove Trump from any blame. But it acts unconsciously in the opposite way…. The way the brain works is that negating a frame activates the frame. The relevant frame for “Second Amendment people” is use of arms to protect their rights against a government threatening to take away their rights. This is about the right to shoot, not about the right to vote. Second Amendment conservative discourse is about shooting, not about voting.” I would not go as far as Lakoff here, for two reasons. First, if Hillary Clinton had been shot sometime after Trump’s remark, it would have made the most persuasive argument for gun control that one could have hoped for, and all eyes would have been on Trump as the man responsible for it. For all his braggadocio that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it, I think Trump realized he would have been finished if he had suggested the violent death of a high-profile political opponent in an election he thought he could win. Second, the “lock her up” chant among Trump supporters pointed to a more likely treatment of Hillary Clinton, which would have made shooting her redundant. (For that matter, he is now saying of locking her up: “That plays great before the election — now we don’t care, right?”)

Where I agree with Lakoff, however, is that Trump might have a limited vocabulary, but “his words and his use of grammar are carefully chosen, and put together artfully, automatically, and quickly”. In a way, Trump is a poet. Consider: “Uranium is big, big stuff because it means the ultimate. The ultimate is called nuclear. Not global warming. It’s called nuclear warming. OK?” It might sound silly, it might be something like William McGonagall could have written after watching too much anime, but it does create a clear image in one’s mind. We know what he means, we realize what he is alluding to. Can the same be said of Hillary Clinton, whose general tendency in speechifying was to sound like a policy briefing, regardless of subject? In the rhetorical arts, a bad stylist is better than no stylist at all. [Note added January 3rd, 2017.]

[7] I should have suspected that Salon would quickly — I could say capitulate, but that is hardly the right word for such a mercenary publication, so let’s say sell out to the new Trumpian order. It may still have serious writers (the critic Andrew O’Hehir, for instance), and others who, to their benefit, think they are serious. Then there are those about whom questions have to be asked, like David Masciotra, who used to write at The Federalist until mid-2014, delivering the usual right-wing talking points, before reappearing at the arch-liberal sites AlterNet and Salon before that year’s end. In the space of little more than a year, Masciotra went from writing (at The Federalist) that “the liberal obsession with inequality amounts to an attack on the free market’s most ethical attribute, because it denies, and subsequently demonizes, the results of individual choices made without coercion”, to saying (at AlterNet) how the libertarian “rejection of all rules and regulations, and the belief that everyone should have the ability to do whatever they want, is not rebellion or dissent” but “infantile naïveté”. The only continuous trait I can see here is Masciotra’s rejection of conformity. All too often, however, he not only ignores his previous conclusions but also commits the very crimes he once condemned in others. For instance, in The Federalist, he told of how “liberals are especially adept celebrating their own virtue, while obscenely flashing, and thereby shaming, the barbarians they deem less sophisticated, cultured, or progressive”; once at Salon, he affixed his byline to gems like “Who are these idiot Donald Trump supporters?” and “We must shame dumb Trump fans”, for their crime of anti-intellectualism. Was Masciotra’s Damascene conversion, sometime in late 2014, sincere? Even if it was, I tend to be wary of converts, as their desire to demonstrate their belief in their new convictions tends to make them inflexible in their doctrine.

At any rate, Salon was the proper home for such a person. What becomes obvious from a perusal of the comments on average Salon articles is that the site evidently includes a large part of readers who are there just for the pleasure of hating it. The presence there of writings from someone like Masciotra — or, for that matter, H.A. Goodman — while a somewhat more respected writer like Joan Walsh (and I’m not a fan of her in general) walked out, points to a state of affairs, widely diagnosed by mid-2016, in which Salon went from respected online pioneer to just another clickbait site, courting controversy while nominally appealing to the liberal connoisseur. I have no doubt that some, probably most, of authors of liberal persuasion whose work appears there are sincere; but why does one come away from reading Salon thinking the publication would not act otherwise if it wanted to score in its own goal? It wasn’t for nothing that I thought Salon, with its shrill tone, was a greater force for Trump than some publications on the Right. There was even an article making “A liberal case for Donald Trump”, which earned a strongly-worded rebuke from Wonkette. In other words, Salon was an open buffet offering anything and everything, as long as it claimed to be liberal.

How do we explain, however, the presence at Salon of someone like Carrie Sheffield, whose pedigree includes conservative publications like the Washington Times (where she was on the editorial board), the American Spectator, and the Daily Caller? Perhaps she is another liberal convert like David Masciotra? No. She is obviously not a liberal. Her body of work at Salon includes suggesting scrapping the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; wanting more evangelicals in office; a gem of tortuous thinking on how Paul Ryan, a notorious Ayn Rand admirer, “keeping his job as speaker is a victory in the war on poverty”; a diatribe on how “teacher union machines have created a toxic feedback loop with Democratic politicians who shield schools from true reforms, including curriculum changes that would better equip students with the STEM skills of the future”; attacking Black Lives Matter; and the occasional customary “blame Obama” piece. Why did Salon publish her, then? Because she styled herself “a conservative who was both #NeverTrump and #NeverHillary”. Of course you know where that one ended up: like the rest of #NeverTrump. Now Sheffield thinks the new president could usher in nothing less than a new Camelot. [Note added January 3rd, 2017, probably to be recycled in an update.]