Happy Inauguration Day!

Inauguration Day is always one of those rare days when people (some people, at least) set aside their normal and generally wise skepticism about political rhetoric and allow themselves to believe for a moment that the sun's coming out and the roses are blooming. The incoming president is very nearly treated like a savior in some circles. People don't actually sing "Happy Days Are Here Again," but they might as well. Expect a general tone of optimism and relief in the media, and that's not entirely unwarranted. 

Then there are the others who see the inauguration as the first day of a 4-year hellscape. Later today some Fox News ranter will pick apart Biden's inaugural address, providing the key talking-points of the resistance for the next couple of years. That's particularly sad, because as Rick Stearns said on Twitter, "no president deserves blind support or categorical rejection."

But balance, fairness, and historical memory are not hallmarks of our political conversation these days. We are in for the two-party spectacle of folks suddenly loving what they once hated and hating what they once loved (ie. executive orders, deficits, etc.). The only thing that will probably remain consistent is that America will not end its occupations of Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and other far-flung places. That's the one thing that never really changes.

So, pardon me while I do not suspend my skepticism, even for a day. Nevertheless, I am delighted that Trump is slinking away at last, and I am breathing a sigh of relief that we will now have an adult as president, someone whom Americans can take seriously and not be ashamed of. 

As for the Trump presidency, I am happy with his judges, with the Abraham Accords (that should be a bigger deal), and, let's see, with the fact that he gave an award to Ricky Skaggs. As for Biden, I am going to keep careful track and at least for a while quell the instinct to criticize. As we often forget, politics ain't everything. I pray for the wisdom of moderation and compromise in the new administration, and that somehow Joe Biden can tamp down the raging animus of these times. May God be with him and his whole team.

Last Weekend of the Big Wait

 It's the last weekend of America's "big wait." 

We wait for the inauguration of a new president, pretty certain that however many qualms we may have about the next four years, they can't be worse than the last four, right?

Trump is leaving office with his lowest approval rating ever, a metric that took an inelegant swan dive after the attack of Trump-loyal terrorists on the capitol on January 6. I cannot think of another president in my lifetime who left office under such a cloud of shame (Nixon excepted). And like Nixon he brought it all on himself.

It turns out that Trump's little personality quirk--the inability to admit a loss or failing--became the trait that torpedoed his chances of leaving office with any prospect of running a viable future campaign to regain the White House. Having turned the presidency into a performance space for his own self-aggrandizing fantasies in which he self-portrays as a kind of whining Colossus at the center and source of all that is good--striding from victory to victory whilst shaming the libs at every turn--defeat was never going to be admissible. Once you build a fantasy world and base your entire reputation on it, even monetize it, well then reality becomes unacceptable. Truth becomes utterly irrelevant.

Now that he is soon to enter his post-presidential period, a time when other post-presidents committed themselves to charity work or rediscovered their love of art or retired to the farm and tended the garden, Donald will no doubt spend his days in persistent fantasy-maintenance, which will require lots of lying (as usual) and the continued attempt to monetize his feverish outrage. You thought you knew self-justification? You ain't seen nothin' yet!

No, I don't expect the gentling of Donald in his old age. He will rave, and he will retain his loyal following, but he will quickly dwindle to nothing more than an old crank leading a horde of misfits. It will all seem rather sad in the end. But in the meantime, the damage he has done to the very nature of our political debate in America, as well as to the Republican Party and Conservatism generally (which he somehow managed to hijack and redefine), will have repercussions for years to come.

The Week that Was

Well, it was a week.

I don't need to go over what happened in the past week, except to say it was one of those memorable but terrible times in our history that will always be remembered, like the JFK assassination, the Challenger explosion, 9/11. It was on that sort of scale of horror. But it wasn't a lone crank with a gun, nor was it a technological malfunction, nor a foreign invader, it was a crowd of homegrown insurrectionists violently sacking the capital and stopping the very functioning of government on a momentous day.

My dominant feeling as I watched was disgust, with anger coming a close second. Over the last few days I have tried to make sense of it all by reading a lot of responses from news sources and pundits, listening to discussions about political ramifications, etc. Like many others, I have filled my head with this stuff. I have shared a bunch of what seemed the more insightful material on Facebook and the tone of my own words there has often reflected that disgust and anger I felt. 

The president, after inciting the rage that would later result in the evacuation of the Capital building while barbarians forced their way in at the other end, then failed to respond or, later, flubbed his response as only he could do. Muttering that the violence must stop in a strangely detached monotone, he soon moved on to his life-work of nursing his self-story, his imagined grievance-narrative, and vaguely promising that "the fight" was far from over.

Still, he had far fewer defenders than usual this time around. In the wee hours of the morning the Congress finished its work of accepting the Electoral College slates from the states and declaring Joseph Biden our next president. Now they have moved on to considering impeachment proceedings yet again. In the meantime, a host of White House staffers have tendered their resignations, and seemingly everyone who used to work at the White House has condemned their former boss. It almost seems a page has turned. I don't think the man will ever completely recover from this episode.

One of the more interesting responses (to me) was that of Al Mohler, the president of Southern Seminary. In 2016 he declined to support Trump on the grounds that character matters, famously saying that if he were to support Trump he would have to apologize to Bill Clinton. Then in 2020 he opted for the It's-a-binary-choice argument and publicly urged the re-election of the man whose character had been so damning 4 years before. 

Now, in the wake of recent events, he is withdrawing his support. For me he represents one of those people who has simply ceded his self-sought position as a prominent voice of reason or wise councilor to Christendom. All of the dark warning of his character matters phase have come to pass. There is no way he can actually claim he was right both in 2016 and 2020 and now again 2021, but that's exactly what he's doing. When you're burnishing your brand as the wise man of Evangelicalism, you can't ever admit to having once been unwise. In 2016 he said in essence that bad character inevitably leads to bad actions. But in 2021 he justifies his refusal to take anything back or to suggest he might have been wrong at any point by saying that he simply does not accept that this week's bad actions were inevitable. What he once called inevitable he says now (conveniently for him) could never have been imagined to have been inevitable.

For Mohler, as for many others, the proverbial hair-dye is dripping down the side of his face. One of the arguments he likes to make is that it was a binary choice after all (an idea I would quibble with, in any case), but of course we are not talking about whom one votes for in the privacy of the voting booth, but about whom one publicly supports (and urges others to support) as a prominent "thought leader" and so-called influencer in the world of Evangelicalism. In that he certainly didn't have a binary choice. He always did have the option to simply withhold support from either and keep quiet. 

And who will listen to his "deep thoughts" now?

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Read also:

What are the court evangelicals saying?

Then Came Rudy! Or, The Madness of King Donald (a play in too many acts)

 Joe Biden's lead in the popular vote is now more than 6 million. That's more than twice Hillary Clinton's margin. 

The president, through his lawyers, is attempting to delegitimize the vote-counting process in the mind's of his loyal supporters. Indeed, he may have largely accomplished this. His hope that state legislators in key states will somehow nullify their electoral results and appoint pro-Trump Electors seems like a Hail Mary of historic proportions. I think it is more a matter of showmanship, pandering to the yokels, proving himself a "fighter," than actual strategy.

In the early stages of this effort there was a marked difference between what his lawyers were contending in court and what the Mad, Mad World of the pro-Trump Internet was spewing forth. In the latter case, the fantastical conspiracy theories, unhinged from logic and the rules of evidence, were flung about like digital confetti, supported by You Tube videos where some guy took a screenshot of his TV on election night and yelled, "See! Proof! It's all a SCAM!"

But after some of Trump's more circumspect legal teams dropped out of the case, understandably worried that losing one's credibility in a very public way is probably not a winning business plan, then came Rudy! And things have careened downward into insanity ever since.

The Great Election Steal of 2020 is, it has been said, the new Birtherism (another big lie that Trump was instrumental in spreading). It is also, I suspect, this generation's parallel to the myriad conspiracy theories surrounding the JFK assassination. The theories then didn't have to make sense, they didn't have to be backed by evidence, and they could often be substantially contradictory, but people believed them all. You were considered naive if you brought reason to that conversation. It was not one big lie then, but a seething Petri dish of lies, a whole cottage industry of book-hawking rumor-mongers. This is what we're in for these next few years.

Remember when it was Russians trying to undermine confidence in the electoral system? Those were the days. I think what we're seeing now, with the defeated incumbent trying to undermine the system, is the absolute lowest act of a very low president. When Never Trumpers like myself warned that "character matters," this is what we were talking about. The playing out, on the world stage, of one man's utter disregard for anything but what he perceives to be his own self-interest (and even there his perception is strangely out-of-whack). Indeed, he is a man bent away from true in a way that seems remarkably destructive. The nation means nothing to him when set against his own self-image, his brand, which means everything to him, and which justifies everything.

I think that justice will prevail and Biden will take office on January 20, but I'm guessing that the madness of King Donald will continue to play out on the media stage, before our eyes, for years to come, and it will not end well for him.

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Read also:

The United States is Buckling

Trump's Disgraceful Gambit

Reverse TDS

I understand Evangelicals voting for Trump, at least I think I do. Hey, voting is a messy business, and you never get your ideal choice. In 2016, as in all previous elections, people voted for one or the other because that one seemed less harmful than the other one. We might even get a few good things out of it: judges, etc.

All that makes sense to me, but something more is going on, something we've seen from the start, and something that has continued apace ever since. If the lesser evil rationale really explained the Evangelical or generally the conservative vote for Trump, what you would see in the course of the man's presidency would be support for the good things (the judges, etc.) and a robust critique of the not so good. But what you in fact see is an apparent unwillingness (even an inablilty, perhaps) to criticize the man, which in effect causes others to think that, well, you kind of worship the guy!

This is something I've seen time and again and it still amazes me. These people will excoriate a Democratic congresswoman for supposed antisemitism, but when an undeniably antisemitic Tweet comes from their hero, not a word. And if you bring it up, they excoriate you as an undercover lib and then change the subject (my repeated personal experience supports this observation).

One ardent Trump-supporter I know likes to say that the "Never Trumpers" just don't understand. Maybe so, but what I think she and other T-admirers don't understand is that when you put the man on a pedestal, above criticism, so that everything he says and does is treated as a positive, even if it means you have to call white black and black white, or suddenly decide that deficits don't matter and trade wars are HUGELY beneficial, even if you have to completely ignore the provocative Tweets and lunatic declarations, well that looks for all the world like hero-worship. Oh, I know they'd all deny it, but from these deniers I've heard not a whit of criticism of Trump, ever.

Oh, I know this sort of thing happens. Obama partisans did the same thing. They seemed to idolize their man, and ignored inconvenient truths or changed the subject whenever these were brought up. So it's a historic phenomenon, repeated with each presidency by true believers. It's a kind of reverse derangement syndrome.*

To take a recent example, the other day the president retweeted something that originated with Wayne Allyn Root. Root tweeted Trump was "the second coming of God." Trump thanked him and retweeted it proudly. Now, maybe Root was just joking, or using over-statement to make his point, and maybe Trump was too. But thought experiment here: let's say some nutjob on Twitter said the same think about Obama back in 2012, and Obama with a straight face retweeted it. Can you just imagine the criticism from Evangelicals then? You can bet it would have been a quite different response than . . . silence.

No one admits outright that they are treating their preferred political candidate like a hero on a pedestal, a man above criticism. As I've said, Obama's partisans did the same for him. For many, it's just a political tactic (never concede anything, not even a minor point, to your political enemies). But in addition to these political tacticians, for whom truth is less important than winning, there are also the True Believers. They don't ever criticize, because they quite literally see no evil where their hero is concerned.

Conversely, when anyone does have anything to say that reflects badly upon him (not even necessarily a direct criticism), that person is assumed to be craven political partisans, only saying it to sully the reputation of the hero. You need an example? There are thousands. A bunch of economists predict an increased likelihood of a recession. And so the Trumpbots go into overdrive. Not by looking at the evidence presented by the economists and showing how it is being misinterpreted or how some other more positive evidence is being overlooked, but by defaming them as economists. They re in the bag for the Dems, just trying to scare people! Isn't it obvious?

The trick is to make such accusations repeatedly, but never ever bother with actual evidence. Trump's chorus of supporters practice this tactic incessantly. Ad Hominem attacks without a slice of evidence. Everyone else is the partisan, not them.

Again, even an occasional criticism would be a normal thing, a predictable thing when two rational people are having a talk about Trump (or any president). But the lack of any open criticism whatsoever is, it seems to me, a telling sign. The ad hominem attacks, a telling sign. The evidence-free assertions, a telling sign. In the fervor and haste of the moment everyone now and then reverts to these tactics, but when it's all they've got, it tells you something.

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*Presidential derangement syndromes are usually perceived as "con," not "pro." In other words, Bush Derangement Syndrome was an undue and vehement hatred of George W. Bush. Trump Derangement Syndrome describes the same phenomenon toward the current president. But I think it can also be "pro." Suchan undue admiration for the president as to make any even slight criticism seem inadmissible.

Donald Trump and Identity Politics

So when I was kid growing up in and around Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in the 60s and early 70s, I was exposed to a lot of racial and ethnic stereotyping, antisemitism, and strange conspiracy theories about the nefarious Roman Catholic Church trying to take over the country.

The John Birch Society was a thing, and I vaguely recall flyers from them. We kids were told that the Catholics were stockpiling weapons in the basements of their churches, waiting for the right moment to being the takeover. So all those summertime church bazaars with fried dough and candy apples, etc., staffed by kindly blue-haired grannies, were all just a precursor to some gigantic RC Anschluss. I well remember peering into the basement window of the St. Ignatius Church, trying to spy out the guns.

This calumny, that the Catholics were bent on taking over the country, was repeated for "the Jews." Every disgusting antisemitic trope you can think of was taken as a given in my household as well as those of most of my neighbors. Both the Catholics and the Jews, you see, had a dual loyalty problem. You shouldn't vote for Kennedy, because he was ultimately beholden to the Pope. And the Jews, their highest allegiance was to Israel, not America.

So when I first heard about President Trump's endearing tweet suggesting that all Jews who disagreed with him politically were "disloyal," it sounded like a familiar trope to me. I assumed he meant disloyal to America, but Trump later explained that he meant disloyal to Israel. So here we have a twist on the old trope. In the president's mind, Jew's need to have a dual-loyalty. The president was condemning all Jews who vote Democratic as insufficiently loyal to a foreign nation!

This seemed strange to me, and stupid, with the odor of antisemitism (making generalizations about how all Jews ought to think, condemning them if they don't think that way) wafting through the Twittersphere.But then I remembered that Trump is an eager participant in the Identity Politics sweepstakes that now seems to dominate our electoral universe. This puts religious/ethnic/racial identity above all else, and encourages voters to think that way. These "identities" are essentially upstream from politics, they are a "first thing," and therefore should shape our responses to everything else. That seems to be the idea, anyway.

On the left, Blacks are encouraged to think this way and only this way, and I'm sure that many leftist politicians would think, if not say, that any Black voter who didn't think and vote accordingly was being, well, insufficiently loyal to his race. A similar way of thinking about Whites, which should logically follow, is however deemed racist. And to think that way about Jews, well it's clearly antisemitic.

What I am saying is, it's all a crock. You can't practice this particular brand of demagoguery for some and not expect your opponents to pick up the proverbial gauntlet themselves. Because, electorally speaking, it works. Or at least seems to for now.

I would posit that saying all Jews ought to think a certain way or be branded disloyal is, yes, antisemitic. It's generalizing about a large and diverse population, and insisting on conformity to your political view. But worse, it's insisting that, and expecting that, all Jews identify first as loyal to Israel and vote accordingly.

Identity Politics is not really a moral or ethical position, but simply a political tactic, useful to those seeking power. Trump knows he's not going to change the minds of the 79% of Jews who voted against him in the last election, but he also knows, or thinks he knows, that this kind of language will rally the White Evangelicals, many of whom support Israel. Apparently, he already has their vote, but he'd really like to legitimize through repetition the underlying presumptions of Identity Politics.

I call that a dangerous trend.

Day 19: Thinking about the next election

One of the purposes of writing down your thoughts is to find out what you're thinking. Writing it down is close kin to figuring it out. A thought that remains unexpressed (or not well expressed) is not wholly understood. Its connections and consequences, its place in the "big picture," remains unrevealed or misunderstood. Perhaps not everybody has to "spell it out" for themselves in writing. Perhaps they can pursue a thought, develop it, understand its place in a grander scheme, all without the aid of a writer's tools. That's not me though.

Not that writing it down inevitably leads to enlightenment. One can write it out and yet continue in one's own ignorance of all the implications, of the very truth or untruth of what one has written. Writing your thoughts does not guarantee that your thoughts will be improved by the process, or that they will be valuable to yourself or anyone else because they are accord with what is.

In other words, one can write out one ignorance, or one can even actively deceive by means of the written word. So writing a thought down does not make it a true thought, but if one is pursuing the truth, it might help to write it down and follow where it leads.

I write all this, which may seem utterly obvious to the reader, to justify myself in writing about politics now and then on this blog. In some ways, I'd rather avoid it, but I do need to figure out what I think on various subjects, not the least of which is who I should vote for (if anyone) in the coming election.

As a starting point, let me just say that I'm not sure. I'm undecided. The choice is between the Republican candidate, the Democratic candidate, some third party candidate, or nobody at all. In recent elections, I've tended to vote for nobody. In the last election, I was a Republican Never-Trumper and after his nomination at the Republican convention, I even disenrolled from the Republican Party.

But here we are three years later, with a political process that seems to have devolved into bitterness and invective. I spoke of this a while back in a post entitled The Politics of Vituperation. Though I was a Never Trumper last time, this time, though I dislike the president as much as ever, I am considering voting for the man. Given all my criticism of him over the past few years, that will be more or less shocking to many who know me.

Okay, there I've said it. The thought has been written down, and now I will have to see where it leads. I find I've gone on long enough for one post, so I'm going to leave it that. I might, just maybe, vote for Donald Trump!

I'll spell out the pros and cons in a future post. The choice I am facing is between Trump, a third-party candidate, or nobody, for the Democrats, it seems to me, have gone quite mad. I will spell out what I think about this in future posts, but for now, take a look at this: Wokeness Driving Gay Southern Liberal Trumpward. I'm like that fellow, someone who you would never expect to vote for Trump, so his reasoning is very interesting to me.

More on all this in coming posts.

A "Deranged" Election

I may be wrong, but it looks like the tide is turning against Donald Trump. I think he recognizes that himself, which is why he's going full-bore apocalyptic. If Hillary wins, the end is nigh. The fate of America hangs in the balance.

I suppose this sort of thinking is an undercurrent in most elections, but it has never been so pronounced, so uninhibited, as this year. Indeed, most all the arguments in favor of Trump are based on an apocalyptic view of Hillary Clinton. She is the anti-christ, bar none. The floodgates will open, the deluge shall be complete. Kiss America goodbye.

I tend not to believe end-times scenarios because, well, they've all been wrong so far. Not to say that someday someone will be right when he shouts, "It's the end of the world!" But the fact that this sort of rhetoric is applied to a politician may be something new. Where does it come from?

During the Bush II administration, the opponents of George W. Bush were so rabid at times, so extreme in their vilification of the president, so over-the-top in their ire, that Bush's defenders coined a phrase for it: Bush Derangement Syndrome. And it did seem like a form of derangement, kind of  a political-charged mental illness.

But here's the thing: there had been a Clinton Derangement Syndrome before that, and then after that there was clearly an Obama Derangement Syndrome. The signs that it is a derangement and not a valid political stance is when people are quite willing to believe and perpetuate obvious and traceable lies about the candidate, or when the content of their critique is almost entirely filled with extreme distortions of fact and apocalyptic shouting. And when reality doesn't seem to jibe with your vision, that must be explained away with elaborate conspiracy theories.

Indeed, when some is suffering from one of these syndromes, they believe that the situation is so dark that all sort of things might be tolerated in the cause of righteousness: lying, violence, and sexual depravity. When the end is nigh, it's not time to be priggish.

I contend that most of the arguments for voting for Donald Trump are very much of this falsely apocalyptic nature and as such are rooted in a Hillary Derangement Syndrome. All evil is ascribed to Hillary, while any criticism of Trump is derided as coming from a brainwashed victim of "The Establishment."

I'm not saying their isn't a valid case to be made against Hillary Clinton. And many on the right have made the case and made it well. But the thing is, a political argument against Hillary, however valid, is just not as powerful as the sanity case against Trump. Or to put it another way, this is the choice between a madman and a political hack. We know what to expect from a political opponent and know how to fight it, but put a madman in office? Who can predict the kind of turmoil and tragedy that might follow?

You see, if you consider this election a binary choice, well then, that's the choice we have. Trump's defenders want to say, but what about abortion, and what about the Supreme Court? But I just point to their candidate and say, but what about his mind?

Thoughts on last night's debate

So I watched the debate. I never watch the debate. I can't believe I watched the debate. But when Republicans started bailing on their candidate over the weekend I became curious about how Trump would respond. It seemed like a historic moment in American political history. And perhaps it almost was, if the party leaders ever seriously thought about dropping Trump from the ticket (and if that's even possible). I thought Hillary would bring the matter up ("Even your own party is turning its back on you!"), but she didn't.

This morning everyone is saying he staunched the bleeding but probably didn't make any gains among the remaining undecided voters. I think that's true. The undecideds are probably unhappy about their choice, not liking either of them much, so to win them over you'd have to overcome their distaste. In Trump's case, their distaste often has to do with his character as a human being, and nothing that he said or did last night will cause anyone to put aside their misgivings. But I do think that some of their misgivings about Clinton might have been allayed, simply by reason of the fact that she remained calm and reasonable as against his calling her the devil and talking about throwing her in jail. For that reason, I think the debate may turn out to be a marginal win for Clinton.

Sometimes, often, Trump seems like a man who spends too much time filling his mind with info gleaned from the alt-right online echo chamber. The frequent mentions of Sidney Blumenthal's name, for example, as if America should react with horror ("he's a very bad person"), or the brief mention of Michelle Obama's anti-Hillary commercials from 2008. Who cares? Some of his screeds were a mash-up of talking points gleaned from the anti-Hillary Twitterverse. The denizens of that realm may have cheered, but the rest of us were still trying to remember the question, which he hardly ever actually answered.

Real content, real depth, was lacking. But of course. That's how these things are designed. I don't care for Hillary, but she conducted herself like an adult. She wasn't "shrill," as she is so often accused of being. Knowing Trump would go low, she staked out the high ground. Against Trump that's easy enough to do. Anyone can look like an adult next to him.

If Trump was trying to intimidate Clinton by stalking around the stage while she spoke, it didn't work. I thought the question about discipline that Anderson Cooper asked was a good one. Of course Donald failed to actually answer it, but went on about how Twitter and Facebook are a form of communication. But questions about personal discipline lead our attention to the fundamental problem with Trump as a candidate and a prospective president.

Finally, in what may have been the lowest of many low points, Trump told the audience that Clinton "has tremendous hate in her heart." Again, the anti-Hillary crowd, who should know something about hate in the heart, probably cheered, but he's going to need more votes than that. To the rest of us, it just seemed like more of the usual arrogance.