Anomie v. Ennui

No Labels, No Mas

I was feeling slightly overwhelmed yesterday morning, trying to catch up to the news after a week on the road, including a long drive through fierce rain on the last day, when, lo and behold…the ground began to shake. Here, in suburban New York. It wasn’t a very big earthquake—but, in my very limited experience, a quake doesn’t have to be very big to convey how puny we are, grains of sand slipping about on the shuddering rock of Mother Earth.

But I’ve been feeling like that a lot lately. so I looked up two words that came to mind:

Anomie: “In sociology, anomie is a social condition defined by an uprooting or breakdown of any moral values, standards or guidance for individuals to follow; which leads to people disrespecting their social values. Anomie is believed to possibly evolve from conflict of belief systems and causes breakdown of social bonds between an individual and the community.”

Ennui: “a feeling of weariness and dissatisfaction. Boredom.”

Both words are very much here and now. There is nothing that screams ennui like the prospect of a Trump v. Biden race. Actually, to be more precise: Maybe Trump is the candidate of anomie and Biden, ennui. I’ve written too much about Trump lately. His gilty tastelessness, selling sneakers and Bibles, has overlapped the bounds of reason in the past few weeks—turning his cult into a messianic Black Friday sale—and yet his numbers hold. How depressing. And Biden, ho-freaking-hum—he makes no effort to inspire us, aside from two tired lines in his speeches. Here are those lines: “We are—[pause]—the UNITED States of America. There’s nothing we can’t do.” But we’re not so united these days. And he never asks us to do anything. There are no attempts to knit us back together. There is no call to service or sacrifice…or even civility. Here in New York—where the presence of the National Guard has demolished the subway crime spree, the prohibitively weird mayor, Eric Adams, is asking people to take the next step: to be nicer to each other on the trains. That’s not much, but it’s something. And it remains a mystery why Biden, who seems doubly boggled by Gaza and the Border—pushed around by Bibi and Lopez-Obredor—doesn’t send the U.S, Army to patrol the southern front or, finally, just tell Netanyahu the arms spigot has been turned off pending a cease fire. (The Bibi faction in the Jewish and Evangelical communities isn’t going to vote for Grandpa Joe anyway; and the open-border Latino activists are preaching to an increasingly empty iglesia.)

So, weirdly, I found myself a little disappointed when No Labels announced that it was abandoning its search for a moderate Third Party candidate in 2024. Weirdly, because I was very much opposed to the No Labels excursion. It would have helped Trump, no question—and Biden needs all the votes he can get to prevent an Orange Apocalypse. But No Labels was different from the despicable Kennedy-West-Stein vanity candidacies; its intent was, arguably, a search for Sanity—which has been a big part of my own project for the past 50 years, always to a depressing default. I have an impressive track record of writing the worst-selling cover stories for the publications that employed me. Almost all of them involved the quest for a Radical Middle (which was actually the Cover Line for Newsweek’s worst-seller of the 1990s).

Still, I persist, homeless politically. I began as a JFK Democrat, then moved left over segregation and Vietnam, but was drifting toward Bush Republicanism—I thought Jeb Bush was an incredibly thoughtful candidate in 2016, especially on education, an issue that’s very important to me—when Donald Trump intervened with his stink-bomb populism. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were more to my taste, but they were pushing against Democrats’ Way of Knowledge, a slicing and dicing of the populace into identity groups, an appalling, myopic and anti-American enterprise. And so was the lib-Dems’ lingering, crypto-Marxist abhorrence of wealth (Americans dream of wealth). After 9/11, I spent a lot of time with the military—and was duly impressed by its ethic of service and sacrifice (and by the rigor of the military intellectuals who mentored me). The visceral, atavistic opposition to the troops by too many Dems since Vietnam seemed as out of date as their nostalgic attachment to the very-failed notion of socialism. (Again, the much-admired “socialist” Scandinavians have free enterprise economies with good health care.)

Is creative, ground-breaking moderation—a centrism that challenges the rutted bureaucracies of the current state—even possible at this late stage of our democracy? There are probably only a couple of thousand people who think like me, most of whom are writing Substack newsletters. And yet, the need to find a political entity to replace the toxic GOP and tired Dems seems paramount. Efforts like the Problem Solvers caucus (funded largely by No Labels) and the bipartisan military For Country caucus (funded by With Honor, a group that indulges my occasional advice and support) are hopeful steps in the right direction. But not enough.

Actually, Mitt Romney had an interesting idea in the Wall Street Journal yesterday: No Labels should pick a side in the 2024 presidential campaign—by which he means, but can’t actually say, it should run with Biden and hope to have some moderating influence on that campaign, maybe a cabinet slot or two in the next Administration. (Paging Nikki Haley, Liz Cheney, Chris Christie, Mitt Romney?) I would take that a step further: A centrist movement in the United States should grow from the bottom up. It should work the way the Liberal Party does in New York, supporting preferred Democrats or Republicans as the case may be in local races—and sometimes running candidates of its own. There are laws in many states that prevent a proper ballot line to do that, but a national Moderation Movement could be extra-political at first and if proven a powerful force, it might eventually overtake one of the existing parties. This has happened before. The Populist Party of the 1890s was subsumed by the Democrats, when its charismatic but witless hero, William Jennings Bryan, won the donkey nomination in 1896; more important, many of the reforms proposed by the Populists—food and drug safety, trust-busting, economic regulation, the income tax, the federal reserve bank—were enacted by the Republican Teddy Roosevelt and the Democrat Woodrow Wilson over the next 20 years.

I’d sign up for a movement like that—with more contemporary reforms, of course; reforms that are necessary now but unacceptable to both parties. Which reforms are those? Stick around. I’ve got a couple of ideas to try out on you in the next few weeks.

My Book Pages

As promised, here are some of the notable books I’ve been reading this winter. Actually, I’ve already written about three of the non-fiction selections: Liz Cheney’s formidable memoir, Oath and Honor; Tim Alberta’s account of the destruction of the evangelical church by Trumpist Money-Changers and its possible redemption by honest Jesus-seekers, The Kingdom, The Power and The Glory; and Steve Coll’s magisterial rendering of America’s attempt to deal with Saddam Hussein over several presidencies, The Achilles Trap.

Actually, Coll’s work is of a certain, very attractive kind of history, based largely in contemporaneous memos, notes and diaries. Another such is Evan Thomas’s excellent The Road to Surrender, about the last days of imperial Japan, taken largely from the diaries of Secretary of State Henry Stimson and, incredibly, the Japanese Foreign Minister, Shigenori Togo.

I’m reading another such now, The Last Campaign by H.W. Brands, about the Indian wars of the 19th century, which is based on first-hand accounts by both soldiers and natives. It is, as everything Brands writes, supremely accessible and compelling.

In fiction, I haven’t read any memorable “literary” novels this winter; they’re getting a bit too self-consciously lit’ry for my taste these days. But American Dirt by Jeanine Cummings, which I’ve already written about, was a terrific and important story about the Mexican cartels. And there were two fun spy thrillers: Istanbul Passage by Joseph Kanon and Winter Work by Dan Fesperman. Both writers are smart and knowledgeable, and eschew idiot kinetics.

I’m now reading Jill Lepore’s These Truths, her history of America. I’ll probably have more to say about this book as the spring progresses, but an early note of puzzlement: As readers of The New Yorker know, Lepore is a wonderful writer. And in the early stages, there is a great deal of important—and previously neglected—stuff about the economic and social impact of slavery, and the cynical British attempt to use emancipation as a weapon in the Revolutionary War. But we get through that war, somehow, without Washington crossing the Delaware. All of a sudden, we’re at Yorktown and the Revolution—a turning point in human history—is over. What’s up with that? As readers of David Hackett Fischer’s terrific Washington’s Crossing know, the New Jersey part of the war was a vital moment in the struggle, when Washington learned to love guerrilla fighting. In fact, there is little of the joyous and liberating quest for (yes, admittedly, white) freedom in Lepore’s account. Ours may have been a partial emancipation but it was a miraculous one, to be celebrated by anyone who writes about it. Perhaps she’ll be less dyspeptic as the story progresses—I’m just getting to her account of the Constitution. It will certainly bear a close read.

Bringing It All Back Home

When I was taking road trips for Time Magazine, I often brought along musicians—not to sing or play, but to observe. Musicians just see the world from a different angle and I figured that might help me see better, too. Two of my all-time favorites, Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal, came along on different trips. They had played together in a group called The Rising Sons at the start of their careers in the 1960s, and I always hoped, and dreamed, I’d get to hear them play together again…and now they’ve released an album, an instant classic, called “Get On Board: The Songs of Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee.” This is basic, acoustic, gutbucket American stuff. It’s especially meaningful to me because I was among the last to interview Sonny and Brownie, for my biography of Woody Guthrie in 1979. The interview took place backstage, between sets, in a small club somewhere elsewhere in California. It was hilarious and rather sad: They had been playing together for 50 years—and they had stopped talking to each other! “You better ask Sonny about that,” Brownie would say and vice versa. I don’t know how long that had been going on, but musicians can be strange dudes.

Anyway, I’m so happy Ry and Taj did this. But I want more: I want to see you guys on tour. I want to tag along. Sure beats politics. Sure beats working.

Baseball Season Means…

Time for a pitch. We’re approaching 5000 followers here at Sanity Clause, but followers aren’t subscribers. We thank you for your eyes and hope the read is worth it. If so, you might consider a more formal relationship with the Sanity Tribe: