On The Rule of Kings

The Rise of MAFA: Make America Feudal Again

“I just don’t think it’s the right time,” Senator Joe Manchin said today, explaining his decision not to run for the presidency on a third-party ticket. “Democracy is at stake right now.”

All hail Joe Manchin. A bunch of us have been saying it for months: Donald Trump’s constituency is the most coherent in American politics. Manchin wasn’t going to take any votes from Donald’s hard-core base. Joe Biden, on the other hand, doesn’t have much of a hard core; his supporters are essentially soft-core, like me. I think he’s been a fine President, but I’m not sure how fine he’ll be when he’s 86.

But I’ve been thinking about a deeper question this week: How many people actually care if democracy is at stake? The are indications all over the globe that monarchy is humanity’s default position. There is Donald Trump appointing his daughter-in-law as Republican Party co-chair. There is Vladimir Putin supervising the death of his most potent opponent, Alexander Navalny. There is the public embarrassment of the Neo-fascist lickspittle Tucker Carlson drooling over Moscow, which I’ll get to in a bit.

In a Washington Post op-ed published today, Navalny himself laid out the stakes:

External aggression in any form, from diplomatic rhetoric to outright warfare, is [the Russian elite’s] preferred mode of operation, and Ukraine is its preferred target. This self-generated imperial authoritarianism is the real curse of Russia and the cause of all its troubles. We cannot get rid of it, despite the opportunities regularly provided by history. [Emphasis mine.]

I was at a polling station in Moscow when the Russians first tried a democratic election back in the 1990s. It wasn’t all that democratic. The most frequent question asked of the poll workers in this working-class precinct was, “Who should we vote for?” The answer, freely given by the poll workers, was Boris Yeltsin’s party. And they did, in droves. Reform was in fashion that year.

But reform is hard. Fealty is easy. For a democracy to succeed, its citizens have to do some work. They have to figure out what they want, what they believe. They often have to think about issues that don’t affect them directly—like climate change or how to keep shipping lanes open in the Persian Gulf (although the latter has a lot to do with the price of gasoline). They have to make informed choices. What a pain. It’s a lot easier to defer all those decisions to a Fearless Leader. The trade-off is this: the burden of citizenship is lifted but the will of the leader is imposed, often in trivial ways, often brutally. The most common way to impose authority and remove the guesswork is to make leadership a cross-generational family business. It is not an accident that successful tribal leaders inevitably find a shaman to proclaim: this family has the God Seal of Approval. Or as Orange Jesus put it in one of his ads, “God gave us Trump.” And this is Donald Trump’s way. It is how he runs his business. It is how he ran his first term, with Jared and Ivanka—now safe is a tropical location—in tow. No doubt, he harbors fantasies about his male children succeeding him. There are the princes Eric the Unready and Donald the Duckling (who comes with a Marie Antoinette consort, Kimberly Guilfoyle). His youngest son already has the title of Baron.

Is this the sort of thing Americans could ever tolerate? I never thought so. Americans are wild, their independence forged in the wilderness. And yet, we have been suckers for dynasties: the Adams, Roosevelts, Tafts and Kennedys. There may be a Yankee yen for liberty, but there is also—it seems—a bred in the bone desire to be led. Trump’s entirely depressing revival in the past year has been built on the assumption that he is above the law, the he is free to say or do anything he wants. Every time the Dems sue him, he grows more popular. He just loves it when they accuse him of being an incipient dictator; his flock laughs along as he (a) mocks it and (b) acknowledges, with a wink, that that’s the plan. Can anyone question that he truly intends to use the Justice Department to prosecute his critics? His support for dictators like Putin is an American embarrassment. As Nikki Haley said today, of Navalny’s death: “Putin did this. The same Putin who Donald Trump praises and defends. The same Trump who said: ‘In all fairness to Putin, you’re saying he killed people. I haven’t seen that.’”

If I had serious money, Soros-money, I’d ship planeloads of Trumpers off to Russia and see how they like it there. The Gulag is very cold this time of year. But then, the sheep bring their own blindfolds. Think of Tucker Carlson, as the excellent Nelly Bowles of The Free Press did today, quoting him:

“The city of Moscow. . . . It is so much nicer than any city in my country. . . . It is so much cleaner and safer and prettier, aesthetically, its architecture, its food, its service, than any city in the United States.” Then he goes to a grocery store and films himself shopping, filling his cart with food, checking out, and wow, it’s only $104 worth of groceries in USD! He speaks to the camera (bootlegged video here; paywalled official version here): “That’s when you start to realize that ideology maybe doesn’t matter as much as you thought. If you take people’s standard of living and you tank it through filth and crime and inflation and they literally can’t buy the groceries they want, at that point maybe it matters less what you say or whether you’re a good person or a bad person—you’re wrecking people’s lives in their country and that’s what our leaders have done to us. And coming to a Russian grocery store, ‘the heart of evil,’ and seeing what things cost and how people live? It will radicalize you against our leaders. That’s how I feel, anyway. Radicalized.”

Now, I’ve been to Moscow many times. My son lived there for several years. Outside the ornate Kremlin walls, it is one of the ugliest cities on the face of the earth—sprawled, identical proto-brutalist apartment blocks. And of course, Russian grocery prices seem very cheap when you’re blessed with American dollars to pay for them. In my experience, Tucker isn’t stupid. He was a delightful companion when we rode campaign buses together. But he has been afflicted with an idiot strain over the years, especially since he found ratings gold in right-wing populism.

It is possible that we’ve taken this democracy thing too far. Maybe the Founders were right, limiting the vote to landowners. Maybe the vote should be earned. Maybe, as Vivek the Dreadful suggested, voters should be required voters to pass a citizenship exam. Maybe democracy is too heavy a lift, especially in a nation that has absolutely no idea how terrifying life in an authoritarian state can be. I once spent two weeks in February in the old Soviet Union. There was one dish on offer in the cavernous hotel restaurant: Meat, the server said with a shrug. She might just as easily said, gristle. A Russian friend received his doctorate and celebrated by splitting a single orange with his buddies. My reaction: Getmeouttahere!

Daniel Patrick Moynihan once noted that the Kennedy family was a classic example of regression to the mean across the generations. The drop from Robert F. Kennedy to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is breath-taking evidence of that. But what if we extrapolate, what if regression to the mean is a natural human condition. What if democracy, re-launched during the Enlightenment, is a temporary state of grace—and we are destined to regress to humanity’s natural state: feudalism. What if Trump and Putin and Orban etc are playing the strong hand, and those who believe that free enterprise democracy is the happiest and most prosperous environment for humans are deluding ourselves?

Joe, can you believe that you are actually, half-seriously, raising this question? These are the times that try my soul.