The Unreal Thing

The film Dead of Night (1945) presents several tales of the supernatural in a linking story built around — no, within — a recurring dream. Since a dream belongs to a single mind, that mind's development, its struggles, and, as the case may be, its flight from reality become the medium of everything else. So much for Dead of Night. It will not recur here except in spirit.

At this moment in history, the medium of practically everything else is one wretched mind. Disgusting, but there it is. The time is past when it was possible to counsel one another against letting Donald Trump capture our attention. He is, after all, president of the United States; and that office does, after all, extend the consequences of his words and deeds to the ends of the earth. It's too much. Donald Trump, of all people! In 2016, this man-child whose name had long been a risible byword in New York City was elected president by a coalition of out-of-towners: partly people who knew nothing about him, partly people who thought they knew all there was to know from watching him play a masterful businessman on television, and partly the universal crowd of loungers itching to see something happen. By 2024, there was a new flock of sheep to be shorn, and in he came again.

Morality apart, if Donald Trump (hereinafter "Donald") were at least a shrewd manipulator of people and events pulling marionette-strings from on high, that would be something. That's what his supporters think they've got. But Donald is not on high; he's down in the muck, breathing his own miasma. It doesn't take even the expertise of pop psychology to see how that came about, having read the story of his upbringing. The infernal pairing of neglect with subjugation left him to grow up physically while becoming hollowed out mentally and morally. Most people probably have never associated with anyone so lacking in material for healthy self-esteem. Donald soon learned to cope with that lack by trying (clumsily) to present a mirror image of himself to the world. Such diametric misrepresentation is odd. Other people may meet their needs for self-flattery with a bit of inflation here and omission there, but Donald's self requires nothing less than headlong flight through the looking-glass. Others may chafe at society's failure to celebrate them and yet shrink from the degradation of bawling in society's face, but Donald is either unable to recognize the degradation or unable to keep himself from it. Who but an abjectly ignorant man would claim to know more than the experts about a wide array of subjects? Who but an abjectly incompetent one would preface "I can fix it" with "only"? As proprietor of a family business, Donald could be a little god despite his unfitness for any position of responsibility. In that private universe, created by his father, he could do as he pleased and then explain it away as he pleased with no one to tell him he was making a fool of himself. It was that universe that completed his ruin as a human being.

As president of the United States (that crazy fact again!), Donald has proceeded to treat the US Government as an enlargement of the family business. It suits not only his habit of wielding absolute power, but also his vital dependency on make-believe. Outside the bounds of a private universe, a leader must be the real thing. Inside, he can pretend. He can put on a little play in a little nursery theater, improvising as he goes and narrating all the while; ever the triumphant hero because he says so and because, for good measure, he's surrounded himself with a collection of stuffed toys who say so.

Of course, Donald is surrounded by the rest of us as well. We can see that he's making a fool of himself and say so. We can see that he's wrecking America and endangering the whole world, and we can struggle against this madness. But, as in a dream, we can't get traction; and it's not even our own dream we're trapped in, but Donald's. His madness is our medium. His curse is our handwriting on the wall, the true meaning of "MAGA" spelled out: Make America Go Away.

Monsters from the Id

You'll presently see where this is going.

In the science-fiction movie Forbidden Planet (1956), a spaceship from earth lands on a distant planet in search of an expedition that reached it years ago and then mysteriously fell silent. The would-be rescuers find two survivors, a middle-aged academic and his daughter, who are living in comfort with all modern conveniences (including a robot butler) thanks to technology developed by the planet's original inhabitants, the Krell. Their crowning achievement was a huge system, still operating after their extinction, that makes it possible to conjure up material objects from a user's thoughts. The academic, having mastered the system, has no wish to return to Earth. The daughter, having lived her whole life on this remote island in the sky, doesn't know what she's missing. (Yes, that does bring The Tempest to mind.)

The daughter takes an interest in the young commander of the spaceship. The father accordingly grows impatient for him and his companions to go away. Soon the rescuers come under attack from an invisible monster that tears its victims limb from limb and leaves footprints inconsistent with any efficiently-evolved life form. It turns out that the father's selfish wrath has manifested itself through the conjuring system in the form of a fanciful but potent thought-creature. Finally, we learn that the releasing of such "monsters from the id" into society is what drove the Krell to extinction. Those noble but flawed beings had built a noble but flawed system that achieved great power while failing to guard against wanton exploitation.

That, too, brings something to mind: the American system of government, wantonly exploited by Donald Trump, who is a slave to the basest of impulses.

And that is the whole story of the part Trump is playing now. It's the reverse of a crime novel in which the apparent obsession of a madman turns out to be explainable as a rational scheme. One can look at his welter of actions on resuming office and make out some rational objectives, but the unifying factor is obsession. ... It's all a tantrum, the final towering rage of one poor little rich boy who sits atop the world's highest pile of toys and still can't catch a glimpse of love. It's Donald's bitter wish-fulfillment dream, and we're in it.

Both Trump's apologists and his critics keep circling around that crude truth, trying to divine more complex theories of motivation and calculation populated by more actors, but it's no use. The nightmare in which we're living really is an emanation from Donald Trump's inner world. Where other malevolent actors appear, they're not influences on Trump but products of his will. Frank Bruni brings us back to this truth in a recent essay for The New York Times:

"Bad advice" is a plausible excuse only if the person you're trying to excuse had little to no part in picking his advisers or had reason to believe they weren't who they turned out to be. In Trump's case, the opposite is true. He ended up with such a wretched crew of cabinet secretaries and senior administration officials because a wretched crew is what he was after....

The Trump administration is the house that Donald built as an annex to his personality. The federal agents who have lately terrorized Minneapolis are monsters from his id. Even MAGA World is his personal creation: not a crowd of people who desired such conjurings, but of people who desired other things; drew near to the conjuror; and fell under his spell.

As the people enacting Donald Trump's will are, in their current lives, actually products of it, so are the presidential outbursts in advance of policy (or in advance of nothing) products of his personal grievances and grudges. Here is Will Gottsegen in The Atlantic yesterday:

The Trumps were indeed cut off from some financial services in 2021. But although they claim that it had to do with political bias and checking "certain boxes," there is likely a simpler explanation: the fact that, on January 6, the president fomented a riot at the Capitol and tried to overturn the results of a national election.
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And financial dealings with Trump were considered risky well before January 6, thanks to his history of business failures. In 2016, The New York Times reported that some bankers had captured the sentiment in a neat, two-word phrase: Donald risk.
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"There are certain communities that have a legacy of having been redlined out of getting access to credit and financial services," Steele said. "That's the real debanking problem." Trump's lawsuits and executive order probably won't do much to chip away at that systemic issue. The president may say that he is protecting those who face discrimination, but his goals here are, as usual, extremely personal.

Surely the federal rage in Minneapolis owes much to symbolic affronts in Trump's mind: the summer of 2020; the campaign of 2024, in which Minnesota governor Tim Walz was an opposing warrior; the Somali community in Minnesota and its association with Representative Ilhan Omar, a Somali-born Trump nemesis; the political identity of the city itself. So also with Trump's gratuitous scorning of European troops who gave their lives in World War II or the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Europeans of his acquaintance offend him the way New York society does, by being superior to him without even trying. Their fallen troops offend him by having gone bravely into harm's way in contrast with his own craven avoidance of it in his time. No cruelty to others, no shame brought on the country he represents, is too great a sacrifice to Donald's burning id.

Of course, a personality cannot wield power without an engine of power to exploit. Some responsibility lies with those who designed a system requiring a moderately noble nature in its operators. Some graver responsibility lies with a society whose moderately noble nature can be subverted by a single id.

Now It Can Be Told Again

The Family Property is no Oracles of Nostradamus, but it does have its moments.

Perhaps you remember when the subject of Donald Trump's ego was on many lips and fingertips. It was around the start of his first presidency. At that time, we (in the editorial sense of the word) had this to say:

Though much of Freudian psychology has gone the way of the five-cent cigar, it retains the key to spotting the source of greatest danger with Donald Trump. It's not his ego, which distorts his sense of values, distracts him from presidential business, and makes him prey to flatterers. It's his id.

The ego has acquired a bad name over the years, but it's a friend to man compared with the id. As long as Trump follows his ego, he'll remember to do what's good for him, and not just anything he feels like doing. While it's not altogether true that what's good for Donald Trump is good for the USA, that kind of thing is better than the possibilities that arise when he follows his id. The id, if Freud is to be believed, produces things like rage and the urge to deliver crushing blows right and left. The ego knows just how the id feels but worries about getting hurt. It looks for the lasting gratification of a net gain and skips the more fleeting gratification of a tantrum that breaks all its toys. Now, the superego yearns to do the right thing regardless of self, but never mind that. We're talking about Donald Trump.
— "More Awful Than Trump's Ego" (2017)

On Biological Warfare
In 2019, the year before America's social-justice movement began its surge to excess:

Modern progressive politics made a ready basin for a confluence of two dynamics. One was this Marxist imperative to submerge individuals in classes, lest minute particulars make a mess of political clarity. The other was the universal tendency for schools of thought to seek their strong forms over time and for movements to take on the character of their firebrands. Those who are most militant in agitating for racial justice will tend to villainize whites indiscriminately. Those who are most militant in agitating against entrenched ways will tend to villainize elders indiscriminately. The tendency runs to an extreme in the case of feminism, a movement that was bound to act as a magnet for women inclined to misandrous sisterhood. And so, among today's archetypal progressives, political engagement has become war on biological class enemies.
— "Lumping Together, Pulling Apart" (2019)

Of course, that line about feminism does jar now, at a moment when the very idea of a woman (or a man) has been sideswiped by the passing hot rod of improvisational sex-and-gender politics.

On Social Mirages
As for the dead-end conceits of "people of color" and a coming "majority-minority society":

The apparent sacrifice of numerical strength that comes with the idea of discarding the POC category is not a real sacrifice. In the first place, the trend in the US population to a non-white majority is hardly more epoch-making than the Millennium Bug of 2000. As for political outcomes, it might have been guessed even before the 2020 elections that people would not necessarily vote their skin color. As for economic power and social influence, any shift as a result of demographic change ought to be so gradual that it could be overtaken by a decline in the significance of racial identity. After all, whites will not one day become a beleaguered minority. They will simply go from being a majority of the population to being the largest single category and then, perhaps, to being the second largest for years to come. Nor will power and privilege necessarily change hands in any ordained way.

In the second place, the vision of a superminority — destined to become a majority — of people united by non-whiteness is necessarily a mirage. Those members of the constituent minorities who value racial identity will prefer the thick kind to the thin. Those who devalue it will be altogether lost for purposes of aggregation. Minority people will tend to merge with the more advantaged elements of the population when possible, and not linger in the ranks of "people of color" for the sake of grim solidarity. Even now I strongly suspect that at the end of each day, when all the public talking has been done and people retire into their private lives, the words "people of color" mean the most to white progressives.
— "People of Flesh and Blood" (2020)

On the Great Squandered Opportunity
When the Democratic Party stood to benefit, possibly for decades to come, by leading a broadly popular center-left opposition to Donald Trump, its True Left wing had other ideas:

The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States gave American leftists a thrilling idea. Now, by "leftists" I don't mean people like me who merely favor a slew of progressive policies, but people for whom the policies are sacraments on an ideological altar.

The thrilling idea was that Trump, in his unprecedented awfulness, had at last opened a window of opportunity for revolution. Never had the Left been able to sell itself to many voters as an improvement on what they had. Even in the time of George W. Bush, who was pretty bad, there was no market to speak of for anything beyond center-left. The True Left had by then put down roots in the wilderness, where it ran a sort of alternative Christmas shop offering jeremiads year-round. Now, suddenly, jeremiads were in. This was either the end of democracy or the prelude to an election cycle in which anyone should be able to defeat the incumbent and his collaborators. To the Left, that prospect was a mesmerizing light in the sky, a sign that might appear once in many lifetimes. When conditions were right for anyone to win control of the US Government, the Left had a chance. The day had come to spring out of the wilderness and take the tide at the flood.
— "All in the Mind" (2021)

At that writing, the Democratic center-left had resurfaced just enough to show the face of Joe Biden although his legs, as it turned out, were firmly gripped by the Left.

On the Legacies of Marx and Lenin
We addressed two crucial questions:

First, does the most leftist element in American politics lie outside the Democratic Party? No. It ought to. Illiberal people ought to do what they can with a party of their own, and not try to operate through the main liberal party. However, everything left of center as far as the eye can see has become the implicit responsibility of the Democrats. Voters tend to think so. Republicans help them think so. Many Democrats confirm it by striving to sanewash radical positions instead of rebutting or ridiculing them. Radical leftists are going to be seen as our companions (for I am a Democrat) as long as we don't energetically dissociate ourselves from them. We need to care what trouble they court, because we're going to be in it with them.

Second, are extreme progressives — misandrous feminists, prejudiced "antiracists" — in fact Marxists? Leninists? Marxist-Leninists? Yes, that sort of thing if only in a generic way. They've imbibed red ideology, assimilated it, and adapted its forms to their own purposes. Old Bolsheviks may dislike the substitution of biological class for economic class within the red political strategy, but to these activists the strategy is the thing of value. They understand how credit accrues to people situated as members of an oppressed group and how one can discredit innocent others by submerging them in the notion of an oppressor group. Then there's the value of the Marxian mise-en-scène with its conceptual scale and its True Left vocabulary. The extremists like it for itself, no doubt, but also for the way it sells them to insecure progressives. And they share Lenin's appreciation of agitprop.
— "Bad Company" (2021)

And (much later): On the Legacy of Trotsky via Leninists

The practice known as entryism is commonly associated with 20th-century Leninist movements, whose leaders would prompt rank-and-file members to join moderate parties or politically neutral organizations for the purpose of radicalizing them from within. Today this practice is rampant on all sides, in varying degrees of calculation.

It's hardly necessary to recount how a cohort of Americans bred in the downstream shallows of Leninism has entered and then influenced news organizations, NGOs, university administrations, local governments, and the national Democratic Party. As for the Democratic Party, left-wing enthusiasts have gained such prominence in the collective mind of the news media that they're almost universally referred to as the party's "base" although they constitute a small minority well to the left of the median Democratic voter.
— "Entrification" (2024)

On the Return of the Scourge

I am a Gentile born and bred. A product of the American South and of two long lines of relentlessly Anglo-Saxon agrarian or petty bourgeois Protestants. I mention this because I wish to treat a certain subject the way it was introduced to me: as a moral crystal with facets of human feeling and self-respect besides those of principle, but no facet of personal injury or anxiety.

When I was about 15, my father said he wanted to take me to the movies. It would be just the two of us. This was not unusual in itself. Neither was the venue: a suburban movie theater where I had enjoyed a number of Hollywood trifles and would later work part-time as an usher. What was unusual was the nature of the film. It was a documentary. It was long, and it felt endless. Not that it was boring; on the contrary, it was gripping. At its heart — its relatively brief dive into the utmost darkness of its subject — it was searing and eye-opening for a lifetime. Here was a rite of passage.

Afterwards I'd confuse the title of the film with the phrase I retained from it, the idea my father wanted to impress on me at the time: "Never again." What I had just experienced was in fact the film that established those words in the discussion of the Holocaust. I had been taken to see Mein Kampf, the landmark documentary by the German-born Swedish filmmaker Erwin Leiser.
— "Never Draws Near" (2022)

That essay goes on to note both the effects of Donald Trump's arrival in politics and those of the uncritically pro-Muslim stance adopted by many progressives over the preceding two decades.

Donald Trump did not explicitly cater to antisemitism. He could say with more than the usual accuracy that some of his best friends (and family) were Jews, even as he betrayed a garden-variety prejudice in his remarks about Jews generally and perhaps a bit more in his browsing of Adolf Hitler's speeches. He adopted pro-Israel policies in keeping with the Christian Zionism common among his evangelical Christian supporters. No doubt his own white nationalism was literal — circumscribed by a mental color barrier — and did not imply placing Jews beyond the pale. He could take them or leave them. When they faced a threat from emboldened neo-Nazis, he left them. It's unsurprising that the permissive Walpurgis Night of his ascendancy saw antisemitic violence, such as the massacre of congregants in a Pittsburgh synagogue, that seemed to burst out of history books long closed.

When a priori solidarity comes to override ethics in those "seats of liberal thought and influence" — especially the universities and the news organizations — bigotry will thrive where it once was supremely detested. If the bigot speaks from within an approved race or culture, the bigotry will pass for revealed truth. If the bigot's rhetoric starts from an unexceptionable complaint about, say, Israel's treatment of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip [as of 2022], cooperative listeners will proceed to a shared dislike of Israel — of Israelis — of Jews — under their own steam. Politically engaged students who, in earlier incarnations, might have stood with the Anti-Defamation League will now stand with the eternal antisemite as long as it manifests itself before them without fair hair or blue eyes. Progressive staffers at a major newspaper will make the workplace too hot to hold a Jewish journalist for ideological contrariness compounded by "writing about the Jews again." A member of Congress whose identity hits the sweet spot with progressives will blithely cycle through antisemitic remarks, professions of innocence, ascents to the high ground, and further descents to provocation while keeping the status of star — or at least star's best friend — in the cast of Democrats to watch.

And yet in 2022 the storm was only just gathering.

On the Game of It All

The single unifying pattern by which the game-playing character of political engagement manifests itself is the competitive spirit of individual players. Imagine being the first to notice that the term pro-choice can be construed as an affront to those women who are economically compelled to seek an abortion and boldly putting forth pro-abortion as the best term after all. This may be a sucker punch to other progressives, but it makes a splendid breakout for oneself. The principle of rolling competition animates everything. Academics will of course leapfrog to the ideological forefront opportunely. Activists will elbow their way into the vanguard of agitation. Lesser beings will vie to retail new conceits at their freshest. Still lesser ones in spirit or political acumen will scramble to stay abreast of attitudes that can keep them in the swim, bobbing safely on the waves.
— "Card Game" (2023)

On Principle and Idolatry

An extreme example of indifference to principles is the case of evangelical Christians who swear by Donald Trump, an impudently unrepentant sinner oblivious of any higher will than his own. (Seek forgiveness? "I don't bring God into that picture.") Devoutly religious people ought to have principles, to say the least. Religious faith is, after all, surrender to an elemental principle. Religious practice consists in the observance of attendant principles. Religiosity loses its character when untrammeled by principles. And that's what has happened. The most bumptious of Christian zealots, seeing a political advantage, have turned themselves into pagan idolaters.

Idolatry seems an apt term for any partisan alternative to the work of conserving common reservoirs of good. Idolatry — the worship of an artificial god that's there to dispense favors to the favored. The difference between thoroughgoing partisanship and even faltering service to impartial principles is the difference between the prayer "Make me successful" and the prayer "Make me good."
— "The Oasis of Principle" (2023)

On the Mad Mechanics of Activism

Now, in America, small clusters of political adepts sit atop gigantic levers whose tips they've wedged into the national brain.

An extreme case as to the smallness of the interest represented versus the greatness of the lever is the "trans lobby" that has lifted its constituency far above most others in sociopolitical salience. Larger interest groups with at least equally pressing needs for attention have got nothing like the activist network that operates ubiquitously, overbearingly, in service to people who have had a sex change. No lobby has ever succeeded in — or had the undreamt-of effect of — distorting shared reality in so many particulars or at such a fundamental level. It's been only a few years since the cultural Left expanded its standard string of epithets for the oppressors of society from "white male" to "white straight cisgender male"; but soon the radioactivity of the cisgender blighted the male (and female) and even the straight (and gay) in leading-edge public discourse. Then trans orthodoxy slipped its leash and begot non-binary orthodoxy. At this rate, the world in which we all need to function will lapse back, epistemically, into the primordial soup — in honor of a precious few.
— "The Archimedean Gamble" (2024)

Since then, cracks have appeared in some of the levers. At this rate, the world will keep its head above the primordial soup. Sociopolitical fashions do tend to decline after about three years: a pattern which progressive activists either fail to notice or don't mind.

On the Cachet of Otherness

Then there's bigotry. The concept of race may be a European invention, as our own social-justice authorities tell us, but bigoted non-Europeans have always managed nicely without the concept. What is race, after all, but one of many motifs for lumping people together and thereby submerging their humanity? What color is to one bigot, clan is to another, and caste is to yet another. Each classification, to the respective bigot, is a far deeper thing than any rationale for classifying that meets the eye of an outsider. "Let me tell you about those people," says the exotic oracle. "You don't know them as I do." Thus begins a bitter tale of perfidy, rapacity, exploitation, and aggression — all on the side of "those people" and all inherent in a collective character. General calumnies that would get a domestic bigot banished from one's circle may pass for revelations because one fails to reflect that there is such a thing as an exotic bigot. American society doesn't differ from others in the existence of bigotry, but in the constant grappling with it.

Most of the American students currently devoting themselves to passionate "pro-Palestinian" (effectively pro-Hamas) activism may, as thoughtful observers attest, be innocent of personal antisemitism. However, they've subscribed to a partisan view of a foreign ethnic conflict, a view in which agitation against the state of Israel is inseparably overlaid on Jew-hatred. The Columbia University campus newspaper has identified Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group allegedly linked to Hamas through a fiscal sponsor, as organizers of the protest encampments at Columbia and beyond. As far as US-based supporters of Hamas are concerned, the underlying antisemitism can remain hidden. Or it can be implicitly displayed in a callous attitude toward atrocities against Israeli civilians. Or it can be treated as a lesson long since learned by Magical Others and now imparted to green Americans: that Jews are proper objects of loathing.
— "The Magical Other" (2024)

On Keeping Outside the Big Picture

The recent attempt on Donald Trump's life is appalling. The subsequent commentary is exasperating. I start reading each of the editorials and essays I come across, only to stop after a few lines and impatiently skim the rest in search of something that cuts through the usual lamenting of what "we as a society" have come to and the pointing-out that this is no way to solve problems. It seems that the authors, when confronted with such an occurrence, are occupationally compelled to put in their thumbs and pull out plums of general meaning.

Here, the general story being told is that of a polarization balloon that was blown up bigger — and bigger — and bigger — until boom! it produced this. But there is no such linear progression. Ever since Donald Trump became president-elect in 2016, there must have been millions of people wishing with resolute vagueness that something would make him go away and marveling that no one had acted on the wish as far as we knew. There must have been more than a few who made up their minds to act but couldn't manage it. The other day, someone happened to manage it. It was not the culmination of an advancing social disease.
— "Don't Look at 'Us'" (2024)

On Hoping for America

Pride goeth before a fall. In American political life today, pride is the deadly sin that runs through all folly from one end of the spectrum to the other. Followers of Donald Trump have invested theirs in a mountebank who flatters them with a sense of mission. Their nemeses on the left, never at a loss for hubris, place them and practically everyone else outside the circle of respectful engagement. Lyndon Johnson's appeal from the Book of Isaiah, "Come now, and let us reason together," is the appeal of the many Americans who are sick of polarization, but it's lost on the deaf adders who guard the poles. In their vain certitude, they wage a shouting match reminiscent of a political joke which I shall condense to its essence: When a family find that their house is on fire, most of the members pitch in to put it out, but the proud grandfather stands bellowing at the flames, "We'll see who tires first!"

I hold out hope that America will wake from its crazy dream before my friend feels compelled to leave it and, if possible, before I'm gathered into the arms of Morpheus for good. There should be time yet. I have the relentless energy of a child who doesn't want to stop playing at bedtime; however, I understand that we children eventually fall asleep over our toys and are carried off to bed. I don't exactly mind being the one who tires first. It's just that I'd like to sink into oblivion confident that America will not soon follow.
— "If I Should Die Before We Wake" (2024)

On My Party's Need for Rebirth, Not Rebranding

From the Democratic Party's collective persona, take away the penchant for cultural experimentation. Take away the left-reactionary impulses like neoracism and degrowth mania. Take away the dim mentality that expects to hammer society into shape by dint of indoctrination. Take those things away, and what you get is a mere skeleton crew of a Democratic organization. After all, personnel is policy. Progressives demanded oversight of personnel in the nascent Biden administration; they got it; and America got policies and proclamations that, coming from Joe Biden, had the ring of ventriloquism. That is to say, the electorate got something it didn't ask for. To form a future administration free of such deceit, Democrats will have to form one free of personalities that would connive at it. That goes for congressional staffs as well. It goes for all those entities, internal and external, that should want the party to win for the common good more than they want to use the party for their own purposes.
— "Out of the Looking-Glass" (2024)

On the Confounding Littleness of Donald Trump

No ordinary man could play the part that Donald Trump is playing now. No great man, either. Only the tiniest moral entity — mind, heart, character — could leave such a vacuum within the human shell. A vacuum is no mere hollow. It's a hungry hollow that endangers the world around it.
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Any chink in Donald Trump's armor becomes a vulnerability for others: an orifice through which the inner vacuum tugs violently at the outer world, sucking in what it can and wrecking much more.

And that is the whole story of the part Trump is playing now. It's the reverse of a crime novel in which the apparent obsession of a madman turns out to be explainable as a rational scheme. One can look at his welter of actions on resuming office and make out some rational objectives, but the unifying factor is obsession. ... It's all a tantrum, the final towering rage of one poor little rich boy who sits atop the world's highest pile of toys and still can't catch a glimpse of love. It's Donald's bitter wish-fulfillment dream, and we're in it.
— "The Tiny Man Theory" (February 2025)

Intermediate aims such as the demolition of the rule of law and the reduction of the economy to an access racket serve the ultimate purposes of protecting him from the consequences of his undisciplined selfishness and providing a plush nest for his wingless soul. He carries on blighting public life, inflicting pain on innocent people, and isolating America from decent international society because blight, pain, and isolation are personal grievances calling for tenfold revenge.

With Donald Trump, everything is personal; and everything personal is going to be an affront. His first administration showed how he hates the inevitability of having more competent people around him. Even in the clown show that is his second administration, the most ridiculous figure of all is the one at the center. It was an impossibility to surround himself with dimmer bulbs, so he surrounded himself with people who unfailingly pretend that he outshines them.
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[T]he face Donald Trump presents to the world [is] not a theatrical mask, but the face of an appalling truth: that while other human beings were growing and maturing, he was not. Oh, yes, he knows it. His life has been one frenzied construction project, a ceaseless piling-up of pretenses and distractions before the door of the old nursery where his character died of neglect. He never laughs. If he ever cries, it's for the little fellow curled up in the nursery.
— "Consummation" (April 2025)

The mind that survives within Donald Trump is ruled by frustration, resentment, and vanity much more thoroughly than most minds are. This is not armchair psychologizing, but compulsively revealed truth. Donald continually certifies it in spite of himself. His mind has been crippled in most functions other than tactical cunning. Whatever the cause may be, he has physically grown to adulthood without acquiring so much as a grown-up vocabulary or the grown-up recognition that he's neither an all-round prodigy nor the hero of every story.
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Such a person is not going to act with sustained rationality or attention to anything external. Donald has no politics. No philosophy. No values independent of his needs and appetites. No grand scheme outside the canvas of an awaited full-length portrait, Great Man with Grand Scheme. His incantation of "Make America Great Again" is a pander designed — with minimal effort — to attract the discontented to himself so he can feed on them. He doesn't care about America the objectively-existing country, into which he was born and out of which his soul should fly to its reward. He cares only about America the domain of Donald Trump. If it doesn't last a day longer than he does, that's all right; just so it keeps him comfortable in the meantime.
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With that, the whole story has been told. Since the beginning of it all, its subject has not developed; only expanded to fill more space. Where Donald Trump's psyche holds sway, everything else loses the status of reality. That's always been obvious, but it's so absurdly simple, so degradingly petty, that one keeps looking here and there for evidence of something more. It's no use. Anything more is merely ornamental.
— "Absurdly Simple" (August 2025)

On Facing the Nature of Democracy

"The only cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy." Fine-sounding words. They had never disturbed your reading mind, but now they brought out a long-suppressed question: "How, exactly, would that work?" By what ineluctable process would a demos rampant on a field of politics keep itself going straight? After all, the People are but people: a notoriously mixed lot. When Jimmy Carter promised America a government as good as its people, didn't even some of his supporters sigh?
...
Locke imagined, and we liberals of "the times to come" long imagined, a demos whose common sense had advanced beyond self-satisfied folk wisdom to self-disciplined rationality. Especially in the twentieth century, we saw evidence of that advancement in the fruits of universal education. The problem is that we and Locke implicitly premised faith in democracy on certain mental powers and habits in the individual.
...
[This] supposes a universal process of maturation that brings generally satisfactory results: the ripening of basic mental competence into political competence and of reason into rationality. In life, though, results vary widely even among the mentally sound. ... To suggest that people should refrain from voting unless they've acquainted themselves with the stakes, the positions, and the personalities is to invite a sanctimonious rebuke. Like "The only cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy," "Everyone should exercise the precious right to vote" sounds fine. But how can it be a fine thing to submit vital choices to the judgement of people who are presumptively unprepared to judge? That wasn't what John Locke had in mind.
...
American Democrats, left-populists, and democratic romantics have kept a secret for so long that it now comes down from generation to generation as the forgotten grain of sand inside a pearl of received wisdom; the pearl being recognition of popular sovereignty, and the secret being that such a sovereign won't prove much wiser or more virtuous than a hereditary monarch. Granted that we the people are entitled to have our way, it doesn't follow that our way will be good for us. We're a sovereign in need of help. To the extent that we accept help in the forms of gatekeeping, power-balancing, and enlightened mediation, the result will be less democracy. To the extent that we insist on democracy, the result will be a heightened risk of disaster. Political power may be a God-given right, but political wisdom is not a God-given power.
— "The Family Secret" (2025)

❖

Of course, not everything on The Family Property bears repeating. For example, there's the piece written just two months after Donald Trump's first inauguration in which we — I, if you must know — adopt a Japanese-castle metaphor for his political defenses, with the outermost ring consisting of "dispirited Americans who thought they had nothing to lose by taking a flutter on a fleabag in the late presidential race." Then I declare, "This ring will disintegrate first and seems to be in the process already" (in March 2017, mind you). "Once the outermost ring has fallen," I continue, "Trumpist Republicanism is doomed, with or without Trump himself. The votes won't be there. America may get more demagogues, but their hopes will lie in running against the compromised Republican brand." All wrong, but I rather like it. "It's only a matter of time, then, till the second ring falls in its turn. Here we have an assortment of long-haul Republicans and fellow travelers: cynical but plausible politicians and party hacks joined by individual Americans who look to get rich or richer through Republican control of government. With Trumpism recognized as a fluke, these people will no longer tolerate the president's heresies...." Finally, I envisage Trump's "bitter-enders" holed up in the castle keep with him for the duration. That, you will notice, is basically true apart from the timing and the implied number of bitter-enders, both of which discrepancies are mere matters of digits. Still, let us not dwell on "The Three Rings of Castle Trump". The above excerpts don't do it justice, but a fuller reading would do so with a vengeance.

A Transforming Eye

It all started with Ann Radcliffe. Oh, it's true that her mystery fiction is itself derivative in this way and that. For example, a certain comic type — the servant who is easily frightened by strange happenings and excruciatingly long-winded in reporting urgent news — goes back at least as far as Plautus's play The Haunted House, which is adapted from a mostly lost Greek play. The gothic genre got its start with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. However, it was Radcliffe who first put together the spooky but sprightly kind of escapist mystery story I love.

If you haven't read any of Radcliffe's novels and intend to read only one, let it be The Mysteries of Udolpho. You might want to do so before proceeding beyond this paragraph. In that case, see you again, perhaps, in a month or two. (It's well over 600 pages.)

A writer of popular fiction working in America today might set an eerie tale in, say, eighteenth-century England for atmosphere while sparing American readers much cultural dislocation. Ann Radcliffe, working in eighteenth-century England, set The Mysteries of Udolpho in sixteenth-century France and Italy while sparing English readers. It's not quite The Mikado, but broad-mindedness about verisimilitude is the price of a good time. In return, Radcliffe gives us a damsel cut out for distress; a young chevalier cut out for heroics; a villain with a castle with hidden passages leading to surprises; a similarly-equipped Mediterranean château, said to be haunted; mysterious music in the night; and a funny servant of the type described above.

Radcliffe gives us something hypnotically beautiful as well: a prelude that immerses us in the developing sensitivity of the protagonist, Emily St. Aubert, to things mysterious.

It was one of Emily's earliest pleasures to ramble among the scenes of nature; nor was it in the soft and glowing landscape that she most delighted; she loved more the wild wood-walks, that skirted the mountain; and still more the mountain's stupendous recesses, where the silence and grandeur of solitude impressed a sacred awe upon her heart, and lifted her thoughts to the GOD OF HEAVEN AND EARTH. In scenes like these she would often linger alone, wrapt in a melancholy charm, till the last gleam of day faded from the west; till the lonely sound of a sheep-bell, or the distant bark of a watch-dog, were all that broke on the stillness of the evening. Then, the gloom of the woods; the trembling of their leaves, at intervals, in the breeze; the bat, flitting on the twilight; the cottage lights, now seen and now lost — were circumstances that awakened her mind into effort, and led to enthusiasm and poetry.

Emily seems to have inherited this enthusiasm, along with a hint at mature understanding of it, from her gentle father.

"The evening gloom of woods was always delightful to me," said St. Aubert.... "I remember that in my youth this gloom used to call forth to my fancy a thousand fairy visions, and romantic images; and, I own, I am not yet wholly insensible of that high enthusiasm, which wakes the poet's dream: I can linger, with solemn steps, under the deep shades, send forward a transforming eye into the distant obscurity, and listen with thrilling delight to the mystic murmuring of the woods."

We soon follow Emily from her idyllic home in Gascony on a journey over the Pyrenees with her father. As she ascends, her mind completes its awakening to the sublime and, at the same time, to analytical thought.

The thinness of the atmosphere, through which every object came so distinctly to the eye, surprised and deluded her; who could scarcely believe that objects, which appeared so near, were, in reality, so distant. The deep silence of these solitudes was broken only at intervals by the screams of the vultures, seen cowering round some cliff below, or by the cry of the eagle sailing high in the air; except when the travellers listened to the hollow thunder that sometimes muttered at their feet. While, above, the deep blue of the heavens was unobscured by the lightest cloud, half way down the mountains, long billows of vapour were frequently seen rolling, now wholly excluding the country below, and now opening, and partially revealing its features. Emily delighted to observe the grandeur of these clouds as they changed in shape and tints, and to watch their various effect on the lower world, whose features, partly veiled, were continuously assuming new forms of sublimity.

The descent from that fantastic height into the Rousillon country brings us back to worldly concerns. Meanwhile, Emily and her father have met the chevalier Valancourt and shared several adventures in the mountains before parting ways.

For narrative purposes, that 65-page excursion is a false start. Emily goes right back where she started and is then uprooted by a series of domestic events (the foremost of which, the death of her father, has occurred from natural causes on the last leg of the journey). That uprooting could have come soon after the peaceful rhythms of her life were established. However, Radcliffe accomplishes two things by taking us through the Pyrenees first. The lesser of these is the dramatic introduction of Valancourt. The greater is the setting of the mental stage for sensational things to come. As Terry Castle notes in her introduction to the Oxford University Press edition of 1998, The Mysteries of Udolpho is a novel of the mind.

[T]o dwell overmuch on the clumsy device of the "explained supernatural" is to miss a more fundamental point: that Radcliffe represents the human mind itself as a kind of supernatural entity. If ghosts and spectres are resolutely excluded from the plane of action, they reappear — metaphorically at least — in the visionary fancies of the novel's exemplary characters. Indeed, to be a Radcliffean hero or heroine in one sense means just this: to be "haunted" by the spectral mental images of those one loves. ... To be haunted, according to the novel's romantic myth, is to display one's powers of sympathetic imagination.
...
In part if not wholly, Udolpho's exorbitant popularity among eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers seems to have derived from this profoundly magical rendering of human consciousness. By giving themselves up to the nostalgic reveries of its characters, Radcliffe's readers also gave themselves up to a fantasy about mind itself: that by its godlike powers of spiritual transformation, the imagination itself might assuage longing, provide consolation, and reinfuse everyday life with mysterious and fantastic beauty.

Jane Austen, though she famously lampooned the gothic genre in Northanger Abbey, did not dismiss it. She had read The Mysteries of Udolpho and other gothic novels and evidently appreciated Radcliffe's superior examples of the genre. After all, Udolpho's Emily manages to do from the outset of her story what Northanger's Catherine fails to do until the end of hers: to rule the transforming eye with an analyzing mind. Austen's purpose was to show, affectionately, how runaway romanticism can lead to embarrassing consequences. At any rate, the delayed publication of Northanger Abbey in 1817 had the effect of reviving the market for gothic fiction.

After Emily St. Aubert's return to earth and mundane life, we face many pages in which she's distressed by cold-hearted relations and unwelcome suitors before fate brings her to Castle Udolpho and its labyrinthine mysteries. Readers who have stayed the course (or who have skipped ahead) are richly rewarded. No castle could be better endowed with suspicious inmates or unsuspected chambers and passages. Something of the sublimity we felt with Emily at the top of the world, we now feel at the entrance to an underworld.

Radcliffe presents two contending ways of proceeding into the underworld: the way of the natural mind, and that of the cultivated mind.

   "O, ma'amselle! I would not tell you for the world, nor all I have heard about this chamber, either; it would frighten you so."
       "If that is all, you have frightened me already, and may therefore tell me what you know, without hurting your conscience."
   "O Lord! they say the room is haunted, and has been so these many years."
       "It is by a ghost, then, who can draw bolts," said Emily, endeavouring to laugh away her apprehensions; "for I left the door open, last night, and found it fastened this morning."
   Annette turned pale, and said not a word.
       "Do you know whether any of the servants fastened this door in the morning, before I rose?"
   "No, ma'am, that I will be bound they did not; but I don't know: shall I go and ask, ma'amselle?" said Annette, moving hastily towards the corridor.
       "Stay, Annette, I have another question to ask; tell me what you have heard concerning this room, and whither that staircase leads."
   "I will go and ask it all directly, ma'am; besides, I am sure my lady wants me. I cannot stay now, indeed, ma'am."

She hurried from the room, without waiting Emily's reply, whose heart, lightened by the certainty, that Morano was not arrived, allowed her to smile at the superstitious terror, which had seized on Annette; for, though she sometimes felt its influence herself, she could smile at it, when apparent in other persons.

The word superstition or superstitious, which would not occur at all in a story told from Annette's point of view, occurs fifty times in this story told from Emily's — and Radcliffe's — point of view. Emily is constantly aware of the vital difference between mere receptiveness and objective observation. Though she feels the pull of superstitious terror, she bears in mind what she owes to her self-respect as a thinking person. Radcliffe never lets her down. All the mysteries Emily encounters at Udolpho and beyond turn out to have rational explanations. An uncanny thrill can be a glimpse of danger, but not of supernatural danger.

Emily's balance of sensitivity and self-awareness recommends her to us across the centuries. Despite all those elaborate sentences with commas inserted like carpet tacks, we recognize her as one of us. Her mental life has the essence of modernity. The Radcliffean model of gothic entertainment travels well and has traveled far.

With The Mysteries of Udolpho, Radcliffe set a standard of extravagance that must remain unsurpassed even by Hollywood: sojourns in two mysterious castles. Emily and Annette escape from Udolpho with Annette's resourceful boyfriend, Ludovico, and a gentleman separately imprisoned who has become devoted to Emily. That's happy enough, but it's no ending; the gentleman, after all, is not Valancourt. The book still has more than 200 pages to go. Very briefly:

The ship carrying Emily's party from Marseille across the Gulf of Lyon is nearly wrecked in a storm but succeeds in anchoring below the ancient Château-le-Blanc, just re-inhabited by members of the noble family that owns it. These kind people, who take in the weary travelers, are themselves strangers to the castle and its lore, part of which is that its north wing is infested with ghosts. Annette, fresh from her sensational adventures at Udolpho, becomes a celebrity among the frightened servants. Emily has her rationality put to the test once more.

Emily turned to look within the dusky curtains, as if she could have seen the countenance of which Dorothée spoke. The edge of the white pillow only appeared above the blackness of the pall, but, as her eyes wandered over the pall itself, she fancied she saw it move. Without speaking, she caught Dorothée's arm, who, surprised by the action, and by the look of terror that accompanied it, turned her eyes from Emily to the bed, where, in the next moment she, too, saw the pall slowly lifted, and fall again.

Emily attempted to go, but Dorothée stood fixed and gazing upon the bed; and, at length, said — "It is only the wind, that waves it, ma'amselle; we have left all the doors open: see how the air waves the lamp, too. — It is only the wind."

She had scarcely uttered these words, when the pall was more violently agitated than before; but Emily, somewhat ashamed of her terrors, stepped back to the bed, willing to be convinced that the wind only had occasioned her alarm; when, as she gazed within the curtains, the pall moved again, and, in the next moment, the apparition of a human countenance rose above it.

Screaming with terror, they both fled, and got out of the chamber as fast as their trembling limbs would bear them, leaving open the doors of all the rooms, through which they passed. When they reached the staircase, Dorothée threw open a chamber door, where some of the female servants slept, and sunk breathless on the bed; while Emily, deprived of all presence of mind, made only a feeble attempt to conceal the occasion of her terror from the astonished servants; and, though Dorothée, when she could speak, endeavoured to laugh at her own fright, and was joined by Emily, no remonstrances could prevail with the servants, who had quickly taken the alarm, to pass even the remainder of the night in a room so near to these terrific chambers.

Stout-hearted Ludovico voluntarily stands watch in those terrific chambers, only to vanish during the night. And so on and so forth. Ann Radcliffe does not stint.

If you haven't read The Mysteries of Udolpho, would you care to guess what or who it is that haunts the Château-le-Blanc? Smugglers using it as a storehouse for their contraband and playing ghost to scare off the inquisitive? Ah, then you've seen that device in some movie, TV show, or comic book. No, there's an encounter with smugglers later on, but the "ghosts" in the château are pirates guarding their hidden treasure. Not quite the same thing.

Will you also hazard a guess as to whether such a tale of horror and suspense can have a happy ending — even for Ludovico? Well, well. Like me, you're steeped in the Radcliffean tradition. Nothing can surprise us anymore. Still, Radcliffe's bewitching prose alone makes this a book worth taking to bed for the approach to Halloween.

The midnight chant of the monks soon after dropped into silence; but Emily remained at the casement, watching the setting moon, and the valley sinking into deep shade, and willing to prolong her present state of mind. At length she retired to her mattress, and sunk into tranquil slumber.

❖
Benighted!
Veils of Fiction
Scrooge and Shelley

Flattery Will Get You

Donald Trump is a pusher: one who traffics in make-believe to support his own dependence. In this, he's genuine — a true slave to moonshine. Since his first term, his rare cabinet meetings have been ceremonies of ingratiation in which the participants take turns giving thanks for the blessing of so heroic a leader, not to say savior. This ritual, like the other gaudy trappings of Trump's egosphere, has gained in extravagance with his return to office.

All of us must dislike receiving flattery insofar as we recognize it for what it is. After all, flattery implies a low estimation of the recipient's intelligence. It's true that an intelligent tyrant might compel flattery in order to demonstrate the helplessness of those who must perform it, but that clearly is not the root of the matter with Donald Trump. The levels of his intelligence and his hunger for praise are too well established to leave any doubt about it. Flattery is his precious make-believe praise. He can sit and listen to it without distaste, and he can show that scene to the world without feeling that he's making a fool of himself. In the eyes of his most faithful supporters, he may be right; or at least in their mouths. However, it also may be that he's getting carried away — away, over the brink of the abyss — in this and his other aberrations combined.

Flattery holds danger for the one who swallows it. It contains no nutrients, only a false stimulant and an addictive flavor. Donald Trump is by no means the only addict.

A very long time ago, when I was just old enough to find myself moderating a panel discussion on a small radio station, I in fact did so. The panelists were university people, intellectuals of some local stature (maybe more, for it was not a university to be sneezed at). I can't recall the subject of discussion. I remember only that it was some politicized question on which they all agreed, all picked up each other's cues and took turns developing a common theme. It drove me crazy. Eventually I heard my own voice talking back, offending sweet reason with impertinent skepticism verging on rudeness. I felt an irrepressible urge to open things up, even though the result would be a frigid void. So it was. When the broadcast ended, I witnessed an actual case of people leaving in what writers call a huff. Nevertheless, the incident passed without repercussions, and one slightly senior young man who had listened in vouchsafed me a verbal pat on the back tinged with awe. That was it. Such was the size of our audience.

The things said during that panel discussion didn't strike me as patently wrong. The offense was not wrongness, but complacency. The panelists, having recognized each other as kindred spirits, formed a little eddy whose rotating current of confirmation lifted all boats; or, rather, gave them all the appearance of going somewhere. This was generations ago, as the crow flies. It was an early vision of today's enclosed left-liberal habitat. Yet to come was the reactive, mocking revival of the already-mocked Stalinist phrase politically correct. Closer at hand was the dissidence of New Deal liberals repelled by the emerging leftist orthodoxy, who would go on to be scorned as neoconservatives by their old peers. Between then and now, the running improvisation of an orthodox path through history has engendered individual fear of straying, but also collective guidance by means of call-and-response between opinion leaders and followers combined with mutual confirmation within the vanguard. The most striking example of this is the way feminism was wrenched out of its own path.

Until the mid-2010s, feminism demanded respect for womanhood, for a life grounded in certain biological factors and formative experiences. This was its essence. For a while, it strategically minimized differences between the sexes to an extreme. It sometimes seemed to be the domain of confirmed bachelorettes. But it always presupposed a fully-formed female identity. Then the political terrain underwent an upheaval. The US Supreme Court affirmed the right to same-sex marriage, and the generously funded organizations that had campaigned for that outcome found themselves without a cause. They could thank their donors and fold their tents, or they could take up a new cause and continue in operation. They took up the cause of advocacy for people who had undergone a medical change of sex. (The idea of simply declaring a change had not dawned yet.) This new thing took the social-justice Left by storm. Specifically, "trans women" were to be recognized as women in every particular. After a brief period of confusion, women in the feminist vanguard saw how the land lay and capitulated as though they wouldn't have had it any other way. Individual feminists who disagreed were ostracized, and before long they became targets of positive abuse wherever the new sex-and-gender coalition could exert its influence. All unconforming opinion would thenceforth be slurred as transphobia, and everything on the trans-activist agenda would be dubbed trans rights. In the subsequent whirl of improvisation and confirmation among leading-edge progressives, gender became fluid. Sex ceased to be binary. And so, in political circles where heightened recognition of women had recently been a core tenet, the very word woman became problematic. Female identity was then dissected into a Frankensteinian vocabulary of body parts and functions that might or might not, at the end of the day, signify a woman. Progressives had stormed the patriarchal tower where Woman was held captive — and dragged her out by the hair.

Within the progressive biosphere, flattery is sustenance. The novel claims of some enterprising organism will be flattered as the essence of progress and made to flourish for a time, while other organisms donate their lifeblood to the cause. Charismatic young New York socialists will be flattered as harbingers of an America to come and celebrated as though they had already cast a spell over the future. Yes, that again. Within some biospheres, there is no evolution.

It can seem that the future belongs to progressives by definition. But take away the assumed name progressive, and the illusion of historical advantage disappears. The compass spins. There is, after all, no determinate future in which "progressives" as we know them are awaited by a brass band. What there is, is a present in which all political actors either face reality or court disaster. The case of Trumpworld is paramount. By comprehensively denying reality, it courts comprehensive disaster: the ruin of us all. The case of Leftworld is subordinate. It courts disaster for itself and, by extension, for the Democratic Party. That brings us back to Trumpworld.

The Secret, over Lunch

About two weeks ago, fortified by a hearty breakfast, we surveyed historical perspectives on the subject of democracy and came — at least, I came — to the following conclusion:

American Democrats, left-wing populists, and democratic romantics have kept a secret for so long that it now comes down from generation to generation as the forgotten grain of sand inside a pearl of received wisdom; the pearl being recognition of popular sovereignty, and the secret being that such a sovereign won't prove much wiser or more virtuous than a hereditary monarch. Granted that we the people are entitled to have our way, it doesn't follow that our way will be good for us. We're a sovereign in need of help. To the extent that we accept help in the forms of gatekeeping, power-balancing, and enlightened mediation, the result will be less democracy. To the extent that we insist on democracy, the result will be a heightened risk of disaster. Political power may be a God-given right, but political wisdom is not a God-given power.

Yesterday, Matt Yglesias posted an essay on the apparent correlation between democracy and national prosperity. His thoughts led him to observe that, while democratic states are more often prosperous than autocratic ones, democracy is not essential to prosperity.

Unfortunately, the last 25 years have cast serious doubt on the theory that democracy and growth necessarily go together. China has zipped ahead of countries with considerably more democratic political systems in a way that makes it harder to dismiss Singapore or the Gulf monarchies as weird stuff happening in small countries.

A new account from Christopher Blattman, Scott Gehlbach, and Zeyang Yu suggests that regime type does matter for economic growth, but what matters is not democracy but institutionalization.

The regimes that suffer a growth penalty aren't simply autocracies, they are "personalist" regimes in which "rule is characterized by the consolidation of power and decision-making in a small group of elite decision-makers, often organized around a single person." They suggest that the People's Republic of China is likely becoming more personalistic in recent years in ways that may hurt the country's economic performance.

Yglesias goes on to reflect on the negative implications for the US economy of Donald Trump's personalism, but his observation points to a broader, positive, implication as well. If institutionalism can be the saving grace of an autocracy, surely it's the essence of good government in those regimes we call democracies; and not only from the point of view of economic performance.

After all, when we speak of "democracy" in today's world we're never speaking of direct democracy or even, so far as I know, of representative democracy without any power center other than the assembly. Nor is the assembly itself simply an array of conduits delivering streams of political will from the various constituencies. It's a place of negotiation among (one hopes) James Madison's "chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice, will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations." Sometimes it seems that we say "democracy" when we're really thinking of freedom, which does not depend on democracy either in theory or in practice. At any rate, we use the word democracy as a simple name for any of the complex liberal polities we see around us; the kind of polity, such as America's, that sustains democracy in the form of a representative assembly (an institution) checked and balanced by other power centers (institutions), all incorporated in an organism dependent on freedom and the rule of law (a unifying institution).

The thing Donald Trump threatens to destroy — the thing Democrats are called upon to preserve — is not mere democracy. It's that noble beast, The American Way.

Absurdly Simple

It started with make-believe. Donald Trump took a charmed step in his political career long before he entered politics. As a result, the people he appealed to as a politician were primed to credit him with almost magical competence. His real-world persona as a businessman was that of a serial bankrupt and deadbeat, but he'd spent years cultivating a phony-world persona — one consumed by millions of television viewers. When he appeared on the political scene in 2015, he didn't come out of nowhere; he came from the illusory scene of "reality" TV, a composite of scripting, improvisation, and motivated editing that enabled him to portray himself consistently as a masterful Big Man. Over the past ten years, political commentary has left that backstory behind. However, Trump's unusual staying power is due to the many people who quickly sank all their faith and pride in him thinking he was a proven tower of strength.

Make-believe isn't the whole story or even the start of the whole story (only of the public part), but let's take a good look around on this level while we're here.

Trump ambulance-chases international conflicts in hopes of winning the Nobel Peace Prize. That's the only reason he tries to become a peacemaker. It shows in his impatience for the principals to do his bidding as soon as he has inserted himself. Whereas serious peacemakers work long and hard to achieve real solutions, he wants to swing by and pick up credit in short order. A make-believe solution will do in a pinch, because he only cares about the personal distinction of appearing as a peacemaker. It's pathetically obvious. He lacks the self-discipline to hide it (assuming he understands how appearance defeats appearance). Anyway, going through the motions is all he's capable of.

Trump manufactures economic crises with a busy shell game of tariff threats, postponements, impositions, removals, adjustments — in an attempt to make it seem that he has tackled a problem and wrestled it to a satisfactory conclusion or thereabouts. It's the same with his improvised one-man diplomacy: a period of shadow-boxing followed eventually by a show summit that ends in acceptance of the status quo and then a claim of unspecified gains. The intervening turmoil is his childish idea of legerdemain.

Trump distills reality into numbers, a form in which he thinks he can get his hands around it and manage it as he pleases. Television ratings. Crowd sizes. The employment data reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The sheer numbers of people deported, regardless of cases or consequences. Unruly numbers must be replaced, and well-behaved ones must be maximized. Even normal politicians may have such numerological tendencies; Donald Trump lets them rip.

❖

Now let's go back to the beginning of it all and see what it tells us about our present predicament.

Because of the disastrous circumstances in which he was raised, Donald knew intuitively, based on plenty of experience, that he would never be comforted or soothed, especially when he most needed to be. There was no point, then, in acting needy. ... The rigid personality he developed as a result was a suit of armor that often protected him against pain and loss. But it also kept him from figuring out how to trust people enough to get close to them.
— Mary L. Trump PhD, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

Evidently the neediness itself didn't come to an end; nor was the development of a rigid personality accompanied by the development of anything else, including a serviceably thick skin. The suit of armor is hard, but it's compromised by chinks through which the little mind inside must watch a superior world go by while trying hatefully to suck it in. The mind that survives within Donald Trump is ruled by frustration, resentment, and vanity much more thoroughly than most minds are. This is not armchair psychologizing, but compulsively revealed truth. Donald continually certifies it in spite of himself. His mind has been crippled in most functions other than tactical cunning. Whatever the cause may be, he has physically grown to adulthood without acquiring so much as a grown-up vocabulary or the grown-up recognition that he's neither an all-round prodigy nor the hero of every story. Read the letter he wrote to the president of Turkey in 2019 and consider that he couldn't tell how ridiculous it made him look; otherwise, he wouldn't have sent it. Consider his assertion that if he'd found himself in the vicinity of a school shooting he'd have run in to stop it, even unarmed. Consider all his boasts of intuitive expertise. Consider his naked vulnerability (“No puppet. No puppet. You're the puppet. No, you're the puppet."). Consider his love of shiny objects and his indulgence in more ice cream than he gives his guests. This is an arrested infant who exhibits his infantile mentality to the world, either unaware that it disgraces him or unable to help himself.

Such a person is not going to act with sustained rationality or attention to anything external. Donald has no politics. No philosophy. No values independent of his needs and appetites. No grand scheme outside the canvas of an awaited full-length portrait, Great Man with Grand Scheme. His incantation of "Make America Great Again" is a pander designed — with minimal effort — to attract the discontented to himself so he can feed on them. He doesn't care about America the objectively-existing country, into which he was born and out of which his soul should fly to its reward. He cares only about America the domain of Donald Trump. If it doesn't last a day longer than he does, that's all right; just so it keeps him comfortable in the meantime.

❖

With that, the whole story has been told. Since the beginning of it all, its subject has not developed; only expanded to fill more space. Where Donald Trump's psyche holds sway, everything else loses the status of reality. That's always been obvious, but it's so absurdly simple, so degradingly petty, that one keeps looking here and there for evidence of something more. It's no use. Anything more is merely ornamental.