Eight Days to Go

The Golden Age of The Spectrum

Trump: Dictators are the smartest people. Xi controls 1.4 billion people

with an iron fist

Rogan: But dictators are evil and dangerous

Trump: Actually, we have evil people in our country.

First, let me say that I’m not cancelling my subscription to The Washington Post. I have too many friends and former colleagues who are brilliant journalists who work there; I need their insights. They need their paychecks. For the same reason, I didn’t cancel my subscription to the New York Times when they committed the obscenity of firing James Bennet because he published a perfectly legitimate—if conservative—op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton. I’ve written for both papers. I was employed by Katharine and Donald Graham when I worked at Newsweek. They were the best “owners” I ever had, supporting my reporting from Iowa to Gaza, standing up for my right to publish an anonymous novel, “Primary Colors.” Never impeding my opinions, even when they disagreed with them.

Owners are important. In my experience, the best are steeped in journalism. They are the repositories of propriety. They are guardians of civilization. They don’t print lies for money; they are willing to risk everything for the truth. They actually believe that democracy dies in darkness. Some have owned their publications for decades. They are not vanity projects—though, given the sad state of print journalism, legacy newspapers may need mega-zillionaires like Jeff Bezos to keep them afloat in these latter days…or long-standing not-for-profit foundations like the one that publishes The Guardian. (Rupert Murdoch tacks between irresponsibility--Fox—and support for real journalism like The Wall Street Journal.)

I don’t know Jeff Bezos, never met the guy—but, like most gazillionaires, he seems to live in a bubble, a rubber room of flattery and bullshit and an addiction to self-reinforcing “information” of various qualities. But not so much to other people. This is the Golden Age of The Spectrum—the arc of loneliness, of crippled communication that extends out from the emotional isolation of autism to the blazing selfishness of sociopathy. The Spectrum is populated by people like Trump, Musk, Sam Bankman-Fried…and Bezos? I just don’t know. But what these people have in common is an infantile impatience, an inability to empathize with individuals—they will, at times, support charitable causes (especially if their name goes on the building)—and a turbo-charged solipsism. They tend to be hyper-focused, which enables their remarkable success but then slides into a distorted, creased sense of reality. They are more comfortable looking at computer screens than into the eyes of normal people. They are addictively excited and sedated by video games. They surround themselves with brilliance, with quants—though in Trump’s case, not so much—but tend to shy away from those with emotional intelligence. They are bored or discomforted by the folks who make arguments on the basis of morality, as opposed to profit. They are not “at one” with the world, they are distant…and yet, they share the delusion of wisdom that comes from wall-to-wall obeisance and indulgence. And they are cowards. The Washington Post—another reason not to cancel—had a piece today about oligarchs folding in the face of Trump threats. But Bezos is worse. He violated a public trust. Here is Jonathan V. Last analyzing the decision in The Bulwark:

Bezos understood that if he antagonized Kamala Harris and Harris became president, he would face no consequences. A Harris administration would not target his businesses because the Harris administration would—like all presidential administrations not headed by Trump—adhere to the rule of law.

Bezos likewise understood that the inverse was not true. If he continued to antagonize Trump and Trump became president, his businesses very much would be targeted.

So bending the knee to Trump was the smart play. All upside, no downside.

Yeah, the “best” lack all conviction. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. You know the poem. But not all is gloom. The New York Times issued a helpful reminder in big block capitals on the front page of its Sunday Opinion Section:

DONALD TRUMP

SAYS HE WILL

PROSECUTE HIS

ENEMIES

ORDER MASS

DEPORTATIONS

USE SOLDIERS

AGAINST CITIZENS

ABANDON ALLIES

PLAY POLITICS

WITH DISASTERS

BELIEVE HIM.

Actually, it’s worse than that. Donald Trump tried to overthrow the government of the United States after the 2020 election via the fake electors scheme. He sat and watched as his barbarian horde attacked the Capitol and wounded more than 140 police officers—so much for law and order. He is a traitor.

And worse than that, he has introduced a crude, obscene, vicious and phony style of campaigning that demeans our democracy—and does violence to the dignity of our nation in a way that simply cannot be ignored by our children and grandchildren. They are being taught that this is what public life in America sounds like.

And worse than that, he simply doesn’t care about the things that many of us—liberals, conservatives, you name it—spent our lives caring about, the things that hold us together. He doesn’t care about the nuances and necessities of governance. He doesn’t understand or care about the delicate balance that needs to be maintained between economic freedom and regulation. He doesn’t care about the ethos of the U.S. military, the credo of service and sacrifice. He doesn’t care about democracy. He thinks black and brown people, and women, are inferior. He is, in short, a miserable human being—the very worst of us.

And if he wins this election, he will stain us, all of us, in history. He will define and ratify our era—a time when we lost track of simple human decency, when we paid more attention to our computer screens than to each other, a thoughtless time of gratuitous public cruelty. He is the face of the Golden Age of The Spectrum. It will be, as always, all about him and his theory of how the world works: people only act in their own self-interest. There is nothing more to life than our appetites. Freedom is the absence of rules. Faith is the absence of humility. Glory is self-aggrandizement. Goodness, kindness, empathy are for suckers—unless they have a transactional utility.

If Trump wins, the United States of America will be governed by these principles for the next four years, maybe more. If we’re lucky, our democracy will survive—with the rule of law badly dented and e pluribus unum in the trash can. It will be a Sisyphean struggle to regain our greatness. We will go down in history as fools.