It is difficult to sustain fanaticism. Movements wane, especially cults. The End Days don’t come; the apocalypse is postponed by clement weather; free love carries tariffs, free-range anger has brutal consequences; memories of the founder fade and are traduced. Cultish societies tend to weaken over time, loosen their rules and eventually dissolve—the second-generation Puritans, famously, discovered that sex was a good way to produce new workers. But what to do when a toxic cult is in full flower, like today’s Trumpers? What happens when every week brings a new efflorescence of crazy—Taylor Swift, commie agent—and the rest of us grow inured to the perversity? It turns out that it may be more difficult to sustain anti-fanaticism than cultic behavior itself. It would be nice if civility were a passion rather than a habit of behavior, but in the orgy of our times—pace Yeats—the worst have all the passion. So it’s important to constantly refresh our sense of outrage over the presence of Donald Trump as an anti-democratic bilge-force in our society.
I’ve been doing that recently by reading Liz Cheney’s memoir, Oath and Honor. I was never much of a Cheney fan—she was far more hawkish than I (and so, of course, was her dad who led us into a thoroughly disgraceful war in Iraq). I assumed we didn’t have much in common. But we do share one big thing, the most important thing: We both believe in democracy. And her courage in defending democracy has been steadfast and inspiring.
It is thrilling, in a sad way, to watch Cheney apply the rigors of Sanity to her poxy Republican colleagues as the January 6 saga unfolds in the House—and to watch them fail as they fall into perdition. “The things we do for Orange Jesus,” as the morally obtuse and craven Rep. of Tennessee Mark Green of Tennessee said when he signed up to block the will of the people who voted for Joe Biden in Arizona. And there is the spectacle of the Ohio wrestling perve-enabler Jim Jordan shouting, “We need to get the ladies off the aisle,” as Trump’s fascist mob invades the House chamber. “I swatted his hand away,” Cheney writes. "Get away from me. You f—-ing did this.”
I am fascinated by Jordan. I’ve read everything I can about him, searching in vain for signs of an inner life, of something beyond lizard-brain viciousness. There is nothing. There is only the willingness to swallow every last Trump effusion, full gulp. There are only Trump’s lies about the election results which, as Cheney points out again and again, are the root cause of the January 6 riot. The House Republicans know they’re lies. The flaccid, feckless Republican leader Kevin McCarthy knows they are lies and promises Cheney, again and again, to stand up for the truth. He never does, usually at the behest of the aforementioned excrescence Rep. Jordan.
As Steve Schmidt writes, in his usual understated manner, things have only gotten worse:
Speaker of the US House of Representatives Mike Johnson is a political extremist and religious fanatic by word and deed. Like all theocrats, he is a hypocrite, and like all hypocrites, he is a cynic. He presides over a hive of unfitness, teeming with disordered personalities, crackpots, fascists, white supremacists, crooks and fundamentalists, bound together by a shared weirdness and lust for power.
And there is Trump, who watched the January 6 insurrection on television in the small dining room off the Oval Office. This is important: To Donald Trump, January 6 was just another tv show, kind of like The Apprentice. He is a man unfamiliar with reality—his family’s wealth has buffered him from it all his life—but fluent in Reality TV, as is his movement, which is both cult and TV show. He believes reality can be twisted and rewritten like an Apprentice script, without consequence. Truth, the essential contract in a democracy, can be ignored when it suits him, like all those lawyers and sub-contractors he stiffed over the years. His kool-aid legions don’t really care all that much about the substance of the man. If Theodore Roosevelt was “pure act,” as Henry Adams once said, Trump is pure attitude. He is distillate of resentment. To his legions, he is Orange Jesus because the elites crucify him with silly things, like the rule of law. Nor do his legions care about democracy. There is a simple reason for this: They have no direct experience of life without it. They do not understand their cavalier disregard for order would not be tolerated in the places Trump seems to admire most, Russia, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, North Korea. Indeed, the tide of migrants flushing our southern border have come for that very reason—they have experienced life without democracy. It sucks.
You’d think Americans would choose a more charming, easy-going candidate for dictator, someone like Willie Nelson; instead, they’ve chosen an insult comedian. Turns out, they are entertained by cruelty. Trump’s combination of self-absorption, anger and ignorance turns out to be what the people—not all the people, but too many—want.
The numb terror of it all is amplified by the arguments my podcast partner, John Ellis, has been making about how easy it will be for Artificial Intelligence to distort the campaign and for hackers to fiddle with the results. It may be difficult for anyone to prove the 2024 election wasn’t rigged—especially Trump, if he wins.
We have reached a very precarious place, narcotized by prosperity. Too many Americans believe in a nitwit form of “freedom”—the absence of restraints—and have lost track of the crucial responsibilities of democracy. That’s why Liz Cheney is so important: somehow she has managed to escape the idiot plague that has afflicted her party. She remains passionate in the cause of the Republic…and a reminder that the rest of us must not stop being outraged by Donald Trump.
And Speaking of the Elites…
I now have a candidate for Best Picture of the year: American Fiction, which we saw last night. You may know the story—a black novelist can’t get published anymore because his work is too literate and not angry enough. So he conducts a thought experiment: he writes a gangsta-banality of a novel, which becomes a huge success. Jeffrey Wright plays the author, a member of an aristocratic black family—his father, brother and sister are doctors. This is one of the few movies I’ve seen that accurately portrays the frustrations and temptations of black middle class life. No matter how excellent you are, the taxis still won’t stop for you—and white people are blind. Or worse, they assume that you’re an angry, semi-literate incendiary. To that end, there’s this: Every one of American Fiction’s white characters involved in publishing or entertainment is a condescending, guilt-ridden, puling idiot. Liberal elitists all. And it rings perfectly true in a world where Random House ordered its editors to read the simplistic charlatan Ibram X. Kendi’s honey-trap, How to be an Anti-Racist…and liberal donors gave Kendi more than $40 million to fund an Anti-Racism institute at Boston University, which he promptly squandered. I have lived in that world, watched it degenerate self-righteously into the miasma of identity politics—the Woking Dead, who have worked so diligently to undermine literacy and intellectual rigor in the upper reaches of American society. The comedy of American Fiction is all too real. Well-played, all around!
Another great piece. Doesn’t matter. Trump will be elected if not really then actually. Why? Because the forces that could have beaten him don’t have the imagination or sense to think about the next 4 years with him. (1) democrats - will debate endlessly that Biden isn’t perfect (2) the media - will play bothsideism as we go down the tubes (3) the legal profession - will find it just fine to delay all the Trump cases until he is elected (4) the Supreme Court - will do what it was hired to do - protect Trump (5) American business - already positioning to find him just fine. The list goes on.
I’m actually not a progressive at all. Im a proud right wing democrat. I do think Trump is the slimiest person ever to emerge in public life. Sorry about the No Labels group which is a pro Trump effort. Every singe vote that goes to them helps elect Trump. And after thinking about it I agree you are rude. So let’s stop.