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 in turn 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 yet, 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 will 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.

The Family Secret

The ancestral home contains a welcoming library. Its windows look out on shrubs and lawn, and then a thicket not too far off that nevertheless seems to mark the edge of the world. Between its bookcases hang paintings and photographs: Trumbull's Declaration of Independence, Carpenter's First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation, Rockwell's Freedom of Speech; Franklin D. Roosevelt by the fireside, John F. Kennedy on the beach, Martin Luther King on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial; and others.

Many are the happy hours you've spent with a book in one of the library's window seats, but this morning you come in an altered state of mind. Something happened during the night. To say that you had an actual visitation and not just a dream is out of the question in this day and age. If it was a dream, though, it was a forbidden one so stark that daylight can't dispel it. It placed you here in the library, not to read once again but to listen for the first time. Sure enough, you noticed a faint voice — a constant murmur that must have been present through all those edifying hours, gently buoying your mind as if it were a boat at anchor in a cove.

Somehow you knew (being in a dream) that to hear the voice clearly you must go to a certain shelf and take down a certain book. But no sooner had you taken down the book than the bookcase vanished, revealing a dark passage with one lighted patch of wall at the end. Of course you ventured in. As you approached that spot of light, you made out something hanging on the wall: another historic photograph like the ones in the library. It was of a man in a double-breasted suit smiling genially at the camera. Of course! Al Smith, the New York politician of the 1920s. And the voice — his, no doubt — was repeating his most famous words: "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?

Just then you looked down at the book you'd taken from the shelf and saw that it was Plato's Republic. Oh, gosh. What was it he said about democracy?

[assuming the character of Socrates in dialogue with Adeimantus] The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery.

Yes, the natural order.

And so tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty?

As we might expect.

Oh, well, that's just Plato, you dreamed. How do you reason with someone who yearns for a philosopher king? We all know that more advanced thinkers have come down firmly on the side of democracy. The library must be full of examples.

So you hurried back up the passage and out — to your bedroom, where you awoke to find sunshine waffling between the warm light of hope and the cold light of day. And now, fortified by a resolute breakfast, here we are back in the library. Where to begin the search for a vindication of Al Smith? With Aristotle, perhaps?

Aristotle modifies the views of his teacher somewhat and introduces an emphasis on the state (polis), or community of citizens, which ought to be governed for the common good. Unfortunately for the ideal of democracy unbound, he concludes:

Now the corruptions attending each of these governments are these; a kingdom may degenerate into a tyranny, an aristocracy into an oligarchy, and a state into a democracy. Now a tyranny is a monarchy where the good of one man only is the object of government, an oligarchy considers only the rich, and a democracy only the poor; but neither of them have a common good in view.

Taking Plato and Aristotle together, it would seem that monarchy and democracy were two routes to tyranny, the second only more circuitous than the first.

Locke, whose name is inseparable from the concept of modern representative democracy, not only asserted the primacy of the people but held them to be the originators of government itself.

To avoid the disturbances and to curb the violators of the natural state, Locke declared, men enter "political or civil society." They leave the state of nature, band together in commonwealths, and appoint a government to act as a common judge over them and to protect their rights of life, liberty, and property. Thus government is freely created by the people to protect already existing rights. It derives its power from "the consent of the governed."
— J. Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition, 213

However, Locke set a test for participation that was more discriminating than it must have seemed to him.

He insisted ... that the test for participation in government was the possession, not of property, which he assumed all men should have, but of reason. It is this element in Locke's thought which made his work a seed bed for the democratic as well as the liberal movement of the times to come. The result of a belief in "common sense" was a belief in government by the common man.
— Ibid., 214

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.

Locke insisted, and it is an important point, that man has no right to the exercise of his freedom until he attains the use of his reason; that is, until the child grows into the adult. Freedom without reason is mere license. As Locke put it, "lunatics and idiots are never set free from the government or their parents." Fortunately, most human beings are not lunatics or idiots, and "thus we are born free as we are born rational, not that we have actually the exercise of either; age, that brings one, brings with it the other, too."
— Ibid., 211-212

That abstract treatment of an important point 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. (Those unfortunate people whom Locke excludes in such brutal terms are nevertheless members of the potential US electorate.) In America's civic culture, it's an article of faith that everyone of age is qualified to vote and that everyone must be encouraged to do so. 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.

Unlike Locke, who recognized the people as the ultimate sovereign even in a constitutional monarchy such as England's, Montesquieu recognized no one entity as sovereign. He trusted only to the balancing of power against power; not just among political institutions, but also among elements of society and particularly between the aristocrats (of whom he was one) and the commoners.

In other words, the essence of Montesquieu's political philosophy is liberalism: the goal of the political order is to insure the moderation of power by the balance of powers, by the equilibrium of people, nobility, and king in the French or the English monarchy, or the equilibrium of the people and privileged, plebs and patriciate, in the Roman republic. These are different examples of the same fundamental conception of a heterogeneous and hierarchical society in which the moderation of political power requires the balance of powers.
— Raymond Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought 1 (trans. Richard Howard and Helen Weaver), 60

Montesquieu believed that the stability of a republic depended on the animating sentiment of civic virtue, which, as Aron explains, "is respect for law and the individual's dedication to the welfare of the group." A polity dependent on an overriding concern for the group as a whole, maintained by healthy rivalry between social strata, is one in which ever more democracy would be a destructive trend.

What specific political position did Montesquieu hold and what overall effect did his theories have? He was certainly not a democrat. The separation and balance of powers was opposed to democracy, and, in Montesquieu's scheme, social or political change could only come about through the concert and agreement of the three powers. He was, then, a liberal conservative or a conservative liberal, arguing in favor of a limited, balanced, constitutional government, i.e., government on the English model.
— Bronowski and Mazlish, 274

Voltaire and Rousseau are no help at all. Voltaire, who famously exalted freedom of speech, was downright contemptuous of democracy. He favored an enlightened monarchy. Rousseau praised direct democracy, which is feasible only in small city-states, while placing quaint restrictions on the representative democracy that interests us.

What we call democracy he calls elective aristocracy; this, he says, is the best of all governments, but it is not suitable to all countries. The climate must be neither very hot nor very cold; the produce must not exceed what is necessary, for, where it does, the evil of luxury is inevitable, and it is better that this evil should be confined to a monarch and his Court than diffused throughout the population. In virtue of these limitations, a large field is left for despotic government.
— Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy, 674

Well, then, what about the thinkers of the American Revolution? How would they have responded to Al Smith's applause line, those words that echo through our ancestral home? Isn't there a single, solitary one of them who unconditionally advocated democracy?

That would be Thomas Paine. He championed the principles of equality, liberty, and innate rights. As he detested monarchy and aristocracy, he advocated democracy. However, his advocacy followed from a belief in the natural rights of every human being that made democracy the obvious, unexamined, choice.

The system of representation provides for everything, and is the only system in which nations and governments can always appear in their proper character.
— Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Part II, Chapter IV

Paine was much more an activist in the causes of American independence and human rights than a theorist of political systems. Though his writings are rich in the spirit of democracy, they're not the place to look for a projection of its tendencies and pitfalls in practice.

James Madison was convinced that the evils of democracy would destroy it in its unfiltered (direct) form, a system of majority rule in which "there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party, or an obnoxious individual," and that the cure was to filter democracy through the medium of enlightened representation.

The two great points of difference between a Democracy and a Republic are, first, the delegation of the Government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.

The effect of the first difference is, on the one hand to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a 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.
— Federalist No. 10

Even that cure takes a great deal for granted; and it has never, in living memory, been less granted than it is today.

Alexander Hamilton needed no prompting to acknowledge the evils of democracy. He would cure them with the firmly moderating influences of a strong executive and an influential aristocracy.

All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government. Can a democratic assembly, who annually revolve in the mass of the people, be supposed steadily to pursue the public good?
— Speech to the Constitutional Convention, June 18, 1787

John Adams was no more sanguine about democracy itself. In A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787-88), he stressed the need for a complex form of government with checks and balances in addition to representative democracy; which brings us back to Montesquieu's overriding concern. Thomas Jefferson, though strongly pro-democracy, brings us back to Locke's underlying concern:

Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to; convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty.
— Letter to James Madison, December 20, 1787

Benjamin Franklin, in his telegraphic declaration of "[a] Republic, if you can keep it," acknowledged the fragility of even a constitutional representative democracy. His worry that such a republic would come to no good end echoes the pessimism of Plato, Aristotle, Voltaire, Hamilton, and John Adams — who wrote, late in life,

Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide.
— Letter to John Taylor, December 17th, 1814

Most of the "democratic thinkers" had higher hopes than that. Still, with all but Paine the focus was on finding a basis for good government; not on idealizing the demos.

❖

We of the present-day Democratic Party, and Americans to the left of that party, have settled into the habit of idealizing the demos. It came most naturally to those on the far left — the certified Left — where ideology was wont to express itself in posters of rosy-cheeked workers striding into the dawn with sledgehammers and spades on their shoulders. It has come consequently to liberal Democrats, for whom the Left, despite its philosopher-king tendencies in practice, remains custodian of the shrine to popular sovereignty. Whatever one's position on this or that policy, one can hardly afford to be a Democrat and yet appear unsound on the subject of democracy.

So, in the age of Trump, prominent Democrats warn that American democracy is in danger. The boy Donald, in his ultimate tantrum, upends the rule of law; destroys the balance of power between the Executive and Congress; mocks the sentiment of civic virtue; slashes the sinews of the republic — and yet the Democratic response revolves around concern for democracy. That's ironic, considering that it was "more democracy" that gave us President Donald J. Trump.

In 2016, less than fifty years had passed since the advent of the modern US presidential primary election. There had been primary elections of one kind or another in various parts of the country since the late nineteenth century, but by the middle of the twentieth century the selection of presidential nominees by the major parties had come to be more tightly controlled by delegates to the national conventions; and thus by deal-brokering party leaders. After street protests against the Democratic convention (and a brutal response by the Chicago police) in 1968, the Democratic Party acted to make the nominating process more democratic by means of binding primary elections and caucuses. The Republican Party followed suit in the 1970s. Note that the convention delegates became bound by the primary results.

Donald Trump ran for president in the election of 2016. He entered the race with the status of an eccentric political neophite, a crass libertine, and a flailing businessman. He shouldn't have stood a chance. However, he was known to millions by his long-running performance, playing himself, on a "reality" television show (which is to say a roughly-planned show on which his character was always assured of making a masterful impression). He then succeeded in dominating the Republican candidate debates with his disruptive brashness. To voters who looked no further, he had the appeal of a self-confident businessman who would "shake things up" in Washington and thrash their perceived enemies for them. His popularity snowballed in the primary elections until there was nothing left to broker at the convention. He'd smashed his way into the Republican Party and seized its nomination while its leaders looked on helplessly. Then it was on to the general election of 2016, where democracy would still have avoided a pratfall but for the electoral college system. In 2024, democracy had everything its own way and actually made Donald Trump the winner of the popular vote. Just imagine a plausible alternative to all this in a world of brokered conventions: eight years under a President Jeb Bush and then, probably, the election of a Democrat. There'd have been a lot for Democrats to dislike during the Republican years, but there'd have been no need for an elderly Joe Biden to emerge in 2020 as the only electable Democrat with the fate of the republic hanging in the balance. It wouldn't have been hanging in the balance. There'd have been no gutting of executive departments, no attempt to discredit the rule of law, no demagoguery leading toward incitement of violence against Congress. The discontent of the demos might have grown, but it wouldn't have brought us to where we are now, in August 2025: a state that's even worse for the demos than for the rich and well born.

Worse for the demos — if only the demos knew. As John Stuart Mill remarks in On Liberty,

Very few facts are able to tell their own story, without comments to bring out their meaning. The whole strength and value, then, of human judgment, depending on the one property, that it can be set right when it is wrong, reliance can be placed on it only when the means of setting it right are kept constantly at hand. In the case of any person whose judgment is really deserving of confidence, how has it become so? Because he has kept his mind open to criticism of his opinions and conduct. Because it has been his practice to listen to all that could be said against him; to profit by as much of it as was just, and expound to himself, and upon occasion to others, the fallacy of what was fallacious. Because he has felt, that the only way in which a human being can make some approach to knowing the whole of a subject, is by hearing what can be said about it by persons of every variety of opinion, and studying all modes in which it can be looked at by every character of mind.

One might preface that by noting that no fact can tell its own story if its very existence remains unknown. We must inform ourselves before we can function as the kind of person Mill is counting on: one "whose judgment is really deserving of confidence"; and that's if we bring rationality to the task as Locke expected. At least economic facts do eventually make themselves known, even to the least inquiring among us. As for comments to bring out their meaning, rest assured that some will be supplied by Donald Trump. He's certain to blame the effects of his own incompetence and malfeasance on others. It remains to be seen whether his ersatz truth will crowd out the genuine kind in the minds of enough Americans to serve his purposes. If history is a reliable guide, it will fall short at last. Trump will lose favor. Then the discontent of the demos will grow again while its collective mind turns over in its sleep.

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.

Waiting for the Wave

Now is the time to mount a resistance. Now, when it's both honorable and essential; not eight years ago, when it was at bottom a manifestation of culture shock at Donald Trump's ascent to the presidency of the United States. Then, it was a time for astute exploitation of Trump's unpopularity as a base on which to build support for a contrastingly sensible, competent, responsive Democratic coalition free of alienating tics and fads. That opportunity was missed, and so now it's time to mount a resistance.

Effective resistance does not consist in turning out for street protests or performing indiscriminate obstructionism in Congress. Before the phase of action, there must be a phase of preparation. It's been time for that phase since the first days of Trump's second administration, when it became clear that he was going to run wild. The necessary preparation requires more than a grassroots network. It requires a multilayered network that benefits from the skills, the resources, and the connections of institutional leaders. David Brooks set forth a rough outline of what is needed in The New York Times on April 17.

It's time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It's time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he's going to be stopped is if he's confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.

Peoples throughout history have done exactly this when confronted by an authoritarian assault. In their book, "Why Civil Resistance Works," Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan looked at hundreds of nonviolent uprisings. These movements used many different tools at their disposal — lawsuits, mass rallies, strikes, work slowdowns, boycotts and other forms of noncooperation and resistance.

These movements began small and built up. They developed clear messages that appealed to a variety of groups. They shifted the narrative so the authoritarians were no longer on permanent offense. Sometimes they used nonviolent means to provoke the regime into taking violent action, which shocks the nation, undercuts the regime's authority and further strengthens the movement. (Think of the civil rights movement at Selma.) Right now, Trumpism is dividing civil society; if done right, the civic uprising can begin to divide the forces of Trumpism.

Chenoweth and Stephan emphasize that this takes coordination. There doesn't always have to be one charismatic leader, but there does have to be one backbone organization, one coordinating body that does the work of coalition building.

The formation of a coordinating body ought to be going on now. Perhaps it is. The building of a wider, deeper network can begin at any time. However, the phase of action can't begin with any hope of success until the general public is ready for it. At present, Trump's alarming deeds have not in fact alarmed enough Americans. People who have always opposed him still do so. People who have always supported him still do so. The most crucial set, those people who chose to take a flier on him in last year's election, are in some cases frowning at what they got and in other cases contriving to justify their choice or shrugging it off with the thought that there was no good alternative; and, in still other cases, living in that state of blissful ignorance from which they roused themselves just long enough to vote. If you don't know, for example, that Trump has just fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because the latest employment data displeased him, you‘re not any closer than you were to realizing that he's trying to turn the government and the whole country into a personal Fantasy Island, with awful consequences assured. It will probably take some direct pain in the form of higher prices or unemployment or loss of access to medical services before many people are as angry as we readers of The New York Times think they ought to be.

It shouldn't be long now. Trying to rush it by telling people what to think won't bring it nearer and may push it farther back. People have got to think the first thoughts themselves and then find that a network of resistance stands ready to meet their need. People have got to feel the need for a civic uprising. That will be the beginning, when the wave starts to roll.

The Elementary Stress Test

A mind stripped down to bare skill at pursuing advantage from moment to moment could prove useful in stress-testing the systems of a society. When conceptualizing that elementary mind, you might hit first on a reptilian metaphor. However, since you want your elementary mind to have a certain capacity for operating within human systems, you need to back up just a bit and settle on the mind of Donald Trump.

Trump’s mind has often plucked the usefulness of a thing from its encumbering web of intentions and restraints. In his first term, he learned that various executive posts could be filled with “acting” officials while proper appointments awaited confirmation by the Senate. Then he used that item of knowledge to game the confirmation process so aggressively that he had more acting appointees than confirmed ones in his administration. He also learned the trick of asserting executive privilege to frustrate congressional investigations at will.

In his second term, he surged well beyond other presidents (no mean feat) in governing by executive order. He didn’t just abuse the executive order, he settled on it as his usual instrument of power. Having learned that he could work his will by signing his name to a sheet of paper, he proceeded to do so as a matter of course. Even though his own obedient party controls both houses of Congress, he prefers the act of name-signing to the process of passing legislation. He hears that some of his executive orders are illegal, but by the time the law catches up close enough to bite (if it does turn out to have teeth, which he doubts) — well, he’ll think of something. Anyway, his antagonists can’t pump all the water back over the dam.

The framers of the US Constitution saw fit to vest the president with a power which European heads of state — monarchs — traditionally possessed: the nearly unlimited power of pardon. They recognized a few real needs for such a power. Donald Trump recognized endless possibilities. Other presidents have overstepped ethical bounds in the granting of pardons. Trump knows no bounds.

The president is supposed to exercise extreme restraint in using the armed forces for domestic law enforcement, but Trump understands that violating that norm falls crucially short of trying to use them to overthrow local governments or dissolve Congress or place the country under martial law. Short of such abuse, the chain of command is going to rattle all the way down to the last link when shaken by the Commander in Chief. Trump sees that. To find that the Posse Comitatus Act contains loopholes is, with him, to find a way forward as a snake finds a way between rocks. After all, his whole life has been a slithering through loopholes and perfunctorily-kept gates.

Henry Kissinger once remarked that, in dealing with communists, one must understand that they have no rationale for declining to exploit an opportunity. The same awareness is necessary with Donald Trump. If a rule can be broken with impunity, he’ll break it. If a safeguard presupposes any degree of forbearance, or if a system depends in any part on moral rectitude, he’ll yank out that linchpin as sure as you’re born.

It could turn out to be a service to freedom and the rule of law. Suppose Trump doesn’t succeed in wrecking everything for all time. If I were a betting man, I’d bet that he doesn’t. More than a few commentators have lately taken to writing that America is no longer a democracy or a free country or a country governed by laws and that America has become an autocracy or a kleptocracy or a proto-monarchy, as though History’s moving finger had written and moved on. That implies, rashly, that Trump’s successors will have no choice but to operate on his level amid the ruins of blown-up institutions or else that only equally rapacious personalities can ever succeed him. It implies a theory of entropy that need not be accepted out of hand. Donald Trump is very far from being a Carlylean Great Man or even a sketchy template for historical influence. He’s an arrested infant, utterly self-absorbed and self-expressing; ultimately self-consuming. He lives — truly lives, thinks, feels, work-plays — in a make-believe world. At this moment, he thinks he’s managing the violent conflict between Israel and Iran the way a child puts on a paper-doll play in a little cardboard theater, narrating all the while.

THE CEASEFIRE IS NOW IN EFFECT. PLEASE DO NOT VIOLATE IT! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES!

ISRAEL is not going to attack Iran. All planes will turn around and head home, while doing a friendly “Plane Wave” to Iran. Nobody will be hurt, the Ceasefire in in effect! Thank you for your attention to this matter! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

ISRAEL, DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS. IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

This is pathetic. Outrageous when one thinks of the office held by the author, but still pathetic when one thinks of the little mind forever stunted. It's politically absurd no matter how one thinks of it: a childish projection of shadow-shapes on the surface of reality.

Pathetic inhabitants of make-believe have their places in history; but they don’t write it, much less when abetted by associates whose own talents are limited to transgression and disruption. The disruption, though it be senseless and disastrous, is not conclusive. It’s a disaster that can incidentally serve a purpose the way a wildfire revitalizes a woodland. Donald Trump has served to crack that which is breakable, and therefore impermissible, in the American system of government. He has shown that democracy, when it really gets going, may disappoint the expectations of eighteenth-century gentlemen and those of twentieth-century universally-educated men and women. He has posed an arduous task of systemic reinforcement, but he has not had the last word.

They'd Rather Be Left

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Democrat of New York) is abundantly intelligent. She has shown signs of pragmatism suggestive of a career plan in which the phase of leftist advocacy is but a stepping-stone. Nevertheless, when she addresses a crowd at the side of Senator Bernie Sanders (independent democratic socialist of Vermont), affinity will out:

It will always be the people, the masses, who refuse to comply with authoritarian regimes, who are the last and strongest defense of our country and our freedom....

Now, "the masses" is part of a political vocabulary that grates on most American ears. It suggests the new politics of old countries, in which intellectual gods reach down to touch fingertips with an agglomerated hoi polloi. So does another term Ocasio-Cortez used in the same speech, "class solidarity". That may be an accurate shorthand for what is needed in place of racial solidarity, but it's an alien code to the majority of Americans in all walks of life. To succeed in American politics at the national level, one must bow to the American ethos of individual dignity. Politicians and activists whose hearts belong to the Left simply cannot bow — not to an individualist ethos, not to the traditionalism of many working people across ethnic lines, not to the possibility of progress without progressive ideology in full regalia.

Ocasio-Cortez apparently understands the need to bow but can't quite bring herself to go beyond alluding to it. Nothing less than a cathartic repudiation of her political debut would make any difference in her own standing with the electorate, and then probably not enough. Her established divisiveness is at least as limiting as Hillary Clinton's was. It's easy, too, to portray her as a phony: the architect's daughter who laundered her life story through a post-college job as a bartender and thus can let her supporters begin the story with "Working girl walks out of a bar...." Nevertheless, she's being touted widely as a leading contender for the next Democratic presidential nomination. Within progressive circles, the familiar upward spiral of enthusiasm for "rock star" figures is occurring in chronic isolation from the currents — and the stillnesses — of actual politics.

Individual figures aside, enthusiasm for progressive articles of faith is rapidly overwhelming the initial recognition that they hurt the Democratic Party in the 2024 elections. The party's national committee has chosen as its leader a denialist who says, "We've got the right message. What we need to do is connect it back with voters." The erstwhile vice-presidential nominee, Tim Walz, a singularly gray eminence who, when photographed in the midst of orating, has the alarmed look of a school principal in a youth movie at the moment when things get out of hand, regrets that Democrats "weren't bold enough to stand up and say: 'You're damn right we're proud of these policies.'" He was referring to the faddish campaign of social coercion known as DEI, which was in retreat even as he spoke. Reaction against the outrages of Donald Trump is once again approaching symbiosis with them as Democrats prize those displays of diametric opposition that fail to click with the general public.

There are three ways, possibly all correct in various combinations, of understanding this perversity. It may be that the Democrats in question are suffering such extreme effects of intellectual incest that they really think a substantial majority of voters will start to like what they've been standing for if only the message gets through. Or it may be that they think each part of the message, such as the urgency of drastic action on climate change, is so important that there's no question of leaving it in the background; that one must simply keep expounding it. Or it may be that they find themselves in an endless game of musical chairs with other Democrats and can't bear to risk being ejected from the progressive circle.

The perversity is complicated by a false alternative: a message that concentrates on economic positions while leaving cultural ones implicitly unchanged. William A. Galston of the Brookings Institution, in a conversation with Yascha Mounk and Galston's colleague Elaine C. Kamarck, puts his finger on the fatal flaw in that strategy:

Elaine and I came to regard cultural issues as a kind of credibility threshold. That is to say, unless people thought that you shared their sentiments and values, they wouldn't really give you a hearing for your economic message. There is a kind of economic fundamentalism that's at work in a lot of progressive thinking. And to use familiar language, the idea is that economics is the base and culture is the superstructure. And that economics does a lot more to shape the culture than culture does to shape the general mindset of the electorate. And the more we thought about that, the more we concluded that that was just wrong, that that might be true for progressive intellectuals, but by and large it was not true for average Americans.

Kamarck explains,

Yeah, and it's very simple. Look, the cultural issues are emotional. They scare people, they frighten people, okay? It's something they don't like. Emotion will always trump intellect.

It shouldn't take a think tank to arrive at that insight, but rigorously progressive minds are bound to skirt it. After all, it implies that they must give way to a different set of minds within the Democratic Party. One can hardly pretend to share sentiments and values that are antithetical to one's very persona; and even the most skillful pretense would fail with the electorate. So beleaguered party strategists ponder the superficial task of messaging and not the fundamental task of metamorphosis, while internal ideologues and external pressure groups redouble their rigor.

❖

"I had rather be right than be president."
— Henry Clay, 19th-century American statesman

Henry Clay never became president. Since his notion of being right was to strive for the best available modus vivendi between slaveholders and abolitionists with a view to eventual emancipation, he can be said to have upheld his principles by striving. Moreover, he actually succeeded in maintaining peace and national unity for a time by negotiating compromises.

In the Senate, leaders of the new generation, such as Jefferson Davis, Stephen A. Douglas, William H. Seward, and Salmon P. Chase, sat with giants of other days, such as Webster, Clay, and Calhoun. It was Henry Clay who divined the high strategy of the moment. The Union was not ripe to meet the issue of secession. Concessions must be made to stop the movement now; time might be trusted to deal with it later. On 27 January 1850 he brought forward the compromise resolutions that kept an uneasy peace for eleven years. The gist of them was (1) immediate admission of California; (2) organization of territorial governments in New Mexico and Utah without mention of slavery; (3) a new and stringent fugitive slave law; (4) abolition of the domestic slave trade in the District of Columbia. Such was the Compromise of 1850.
— Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People

Before that, however, Clay's adroitness had suffered a fateful lapse. In his fourth bid for the presidency, in 1844, he obfuscated his opposition to the annexation of Texas (a slaveholding republic). The upshot was that he failed to reassure the South while losing crucial support in the North and, with it, the election. An ambiguous approach to a great moral question must have seemed intolerable to abolitionists, but history's alternative to Henry Clay was not a foursquare abolitionist. It was James Knox Polk, a slavery expansionist who set in train the series of events that led to the carnage, and the legacy, of the Civil War. Of course, we'll never know what a President Clay would have wrought.

❖

Insist on a forcefully anti-slavery president, and you may get a disastrously pro-slavery one. Insist on the most rapid advancement of the climate agenda, and you may get a devastating reversal of it. It's not just the one agenda, either. On every head, Donald Trump's second presidency is far worse for leftist objectives than any Democratic moderation would have been. Successive Republican administrations will perpetuate the harm.

It matters who becomes president. It matters who occupies a seat in Congress and not in some coffee-shop retreat for righteous losers. Therefore it matters what mix of principle and practicality a candidate or a party offers to the electorate. If the Left can't bring itself to behave like the minority faction it is, then the Democratic Party can't afford to keep it.

❖
Fight Fire with Water
You American Intellectuals
Out of the Looking-Glass

Consummation

Donald Trump is a complex human being only in the sense that he's a mess. Otherwise, the man and the political phenomenon form one sodden lump that's confoundingly simple. Observers go on trying to make out his aims and his strategies long after having learned that everything about him is just an emanation from the lump, because it's unbearable to think that the world has come to this.

At the start of Trump's first presidency, there was a spirited public debate about his mental state centered on the question whether this was a clear case of narcissistic personality disorder. February 2017 brought a letter to The New York Times, signed by thirty-five mental health professionals, noting traits typical of people who "distort reality to suit their psychological state, attacking facts and those who convey them (journalists, scientists)." It concludes,

In a powerful leader, these attacks are likely to increase, as his personal myth of greatness appears to be confirmed. We believe that the grave emotional instability indicated by Mr. Trump's speech and actions makes him incapable of serving safely as president.

The next day brought a rebuttal from another professional: the eminent psychiatrist Allen Frances, who should know.

I wrote the criteria that define this disorder, and Mr. Trump doesn't meet them. He may be a world-class narcissist, but this doesn't make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder.

To this non-professional, the requirement of distress and impairment seems odd. Perhaps it's due to the origin of psychiatry in medical science, with its assumptions of suffering and succor. At any rate, Dr Frances's defense of professional standards is by no means a defense of Donald Trump.

He can, and should, be appropriately denounced for his ignorance, incompetence, impulsivity and pursuit of dictatorial powers.

His psychological motivations are too obvious to be interesting, and analyzing them will not halt his headlong power grab. The antidote to a dystopic Trumpean dark age is political, not psychological.

Take away the technical dispute — which has, in fact, disappeared from the public forum — and the two letters to the editor merge in prophetic accuracy. It doesn't matter whether we think that Donald Trump is having more and greater episodes of mental illness or that he's wreaking havoc in a perfectly normal transport of rage. The successive cases of Donald Trump and Joe Biden dispelled any hope that the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution would ever be invoked when the president was conscious and determined to remain in office, much less when also surrounded by sycophants as Trump is now.

Trump's psychological motivations are obvious, as Dr Frances wrote eight years ago. One might add that psychological motivations are basically the only kind he's got. 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.

Consider the letter Trump wrote to Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2019:

Dear Mr. President:

Let's work out a good deal! You don't want to be responsible for slaughtering thousands of people, and I don't want to be responsible for destroying the Turkish economy — and I will. I've already given you a little sample with respect to Pastor Brunson.

I have worked hard to solve some of your problems. Don't let the world down. You can make a great deal. General Mazloum is willing to negotiate with you, and he is willing to make concessions that they would never have made in the past. I am confidentially enclosing a copy of his letter to me, just received.

History will look upon you favorably if you get this done the right and humane way. It will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don't happen. Don't be a tough guy. Don't be a fool!

I will call you later.

That's the president of the United States conducting direct diplomacy with another national leader. If he'd been capable of writing like a normally intelligent adult, regardless of education, he'd have done so. But, then, if he'd been capable of understanding the task and judging that he wasn't up to it, he'd have let someone prepare a draft for him. That one incident should have ended all speculation and spin about the face Donald Trump presents to the world. It's 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.

Mary L. Trump's 2020 book about her uncle, Too Much and Never Enough, bears the subtitle How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man. That seemed a bit hyperbolic, at the time. Five years on, the whole world is in fact suffering through the consummation of one man's wretched life.

❖
The Tiny Man Theory

The Rites of Spring

There are things one believes even though they're unknowable. I, for example, believe that since the advent of the elevator every child has wanted to push the button. I believe that soap bubbles will be chased hither and thither, vainly but gladly, for a brief period across generations. I also believe there's a solemn ritual that has taken place in a greater number and variety of homes than you could shake the most prolific stick at. It goes like this:

A friend of the parents who is a stranger to the child comes to dinner. On being introduced, the child hides behind her mother's legs and buries her face in the fabric that presents itself. It would be possible at this point to write down how the story will proceed to a happy ending and set aside the prediction in a sealed envelope for the child to marvel at in about an hour (if she could read). For a while, she'll listen to the grown-ups' conversation in woolly darkness. Then she'll peek out and study the visitor's face for another while. Presently she'll be standing in front of her mother, her body now relaxed though she keeps close. She'll allow herself to be implicitly included in the conversation, the grown-ups being wise enough to leave it implicit. By the time her mother must withdraw behind the kitchen counter, she'll be ready to show her toys and books. Then it won't be long till she's taken the visitor in hand, explained how one plays with the toys, and proposed a collaborative effort. When at last the dinner bell rings or the cook hollers, the new friends will troop to the table having pledged to play again. All in the space of an hour at most.

There's a lot about a child's early progress in life that you could chronicle beforehand with a fair degree of accuracy: the rite of bubble-chasing; the rite of deliberately stepping in puddles; the rite of shunning broad walkways for narrow edges to be negotiated like high wires; the rite of asking for the same story, read in precisely the same manner, again and again; and so on.

Such things are written in the stars beneath which each individual child gets to know the world. Our love for the particular child is undoubtedly infinite in itself, and yet it burgeons with adoration of the universal child. While actively studying a single child's uniqueness we passively witness the freemasonry of children and other primal elements, only slipping into the plural to note ad hoc what "they" do at this or that age; not quite accepting that they belong to an unseen society from which we have been cast out.

Before rational insight and religious belief comes pagan affirmation. In childhood we're mirthful little sylvan deities, each of us a whole string of them performing the rites of one brief existence after another. The end of an existence always grieves the surrounding grown-ups but not the child (save for one ripple of longing to be a baby again just for a little while). The child is unconscious of loss because, at least in this, nature is gentle.

Fight Fire with Water

"They've got to fight fire with fire!" "It's time to DO SOMETHING!" Such are the reader comments that have lit up the website of The New York Times since Donald Trump and his enablers started off on their current rampage.

Being told to fight fire with fire is a bit hard on Democrats in Washington when the Republicans have won control of everything. About the only "fire" that comes to mind is obstructionism of one kind or another. That's not fighting with fire, but playing with it. Some people have suggested that congressional Democrats should force a partial government shutdown next week — thereby becoming the ones directly responsible for the consequent suffering and inconvenience. Yesterday, the irrepressible Representative Al Green (Democrat of Texas) disrupted Trump's address to Congress until he was ejected, despite the party leadership's prior plea for members to maintain decorum. Other Democrats booed and shouted catcalls. They may have garnered credit with the "do something" faction of copartisans (not that they could restrain themselves anyway), but it was no way to get the country behind them. Most people just don't like heckling.

Most people just don't like street protests, either. Even demonstrators for a patently good cause risk rubbing the general public the wrong way unless they stay on their best behavior and, for good measure, look like the general public's most flattering image of itself. The famous student demonstrations against the Vietnam War, which did dissuade Lyndon Johnson from seeking re-election, did not end the war and were never viewed favorably by a majority of the American people. The world over, "most massive rallies fail to create significant changes in politics or public policies."

Behind massive street demonstrations there is rarely a well-oiled and more-permanent organization capable of following up on protesters' demands and undertaking the complex, face-to-face, and dull political work that produces real change in government.
— Moisés Naím, "Why Street Protests Don't Work" (The Atlantic, April 7, 2014)

More recent research confirms that observation and finds demonstrations becoming less productive as convening them becomes easier. Last May, Jerusalem Demsas of The Atlantic reported on a working paper at the National Bureau of Economic Research showing that efforts to organize mass demonstrations do succeed at consciousness-raising.

Yet in nearly every case that the researchers examined in detail — including the Women's March and the pro-gun control March for Our Lives, which brought out more than 3 million demonstrators — they could find no evidence that protesters changed minds or affected electoral behavior.

...

Protests are crowding out the array of other organizing tools that social movements need in order to be successful — and that has consequences for our entire political system.

The something that needs doing by Democrats is not anything noisy. It's not a response that adds to the din surrounding Donald Trump or that seeks to evoke a sense of crisis before Trump has done so himself. It's a long game of noting the pits Trump digs for himself, the liabilities his minions bring on him, and the workings of his patrimonial administration. Note well, in detail, how it serves the rich and the well-connected at the expense of ordinary Americans, and store up the most damning examples. When a tale of betrayal has begun to coalesce in people's own minds, then give it voice for them. No argument is so forceful as one that's already incipient in the hearer's mind. All along, hold councils and evolve novel plans for a truly national response to Trump's malfeasance. Begin at once to instill discipline in the Democratic Party so that it can credibly recommit itself to the service of shared interests above all; above any assortment of special interests.

Don't pull Trump's chestnuts out of the fire by answering tantrum with tantrum. Let him scorch his chestnuts. Then douse the fire with the water of sane leadership.

The Test of Genius

Donald Trump has always confessed his weaknesses by asserting the opposite strengths. The premier example is his almost endearingly clumsy response to doubts about his mental fitness: "I'm a very stable genius." As always with Trump's boasts, there was none of the self-aware irony that can give éclat to otherwise struggling personalities. He was in earnest. His boast thus reinforced the doubts and left the impression that his only portion of intelligence was the low cunning which he had, at any rate, demonstrated.

Now, in the grim game to decide the fate of the republic, low cunning appears to be the essence of genius. Donald Trump has peered into the constitutional system he despises and grasped the way to defeat it in four steps:

1. Become President of the United States.
2. Work his will by means of executive action without regard for the Constitution or federal law.
3. Order his minions to ignore unfavorable judicial rulings, including those of the Supreme Court.
4. Pardon his minions as promised.

As for the president's own liability, all official acts are protected by the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. United States (2024).

Now that Trump has accomplished (1) again, who can stop him from repeating (2) — (4) until he has turned the United States of America into a literal dictatorship of the federal executive? An uncorrupted military? It would be terrible to owe the restoration of constitutional government to a military coup. Incorrupt generals would themselves abhor such a solution. Who, then? And how?

At this writing, the civilian defenders of the rule of law are mostly biding their time while Trump piles up malfeasance, inflicts pain, and presumably rouses the American public against himself. Already, people and organizations that supported him while he sowed the wind as a candidate are declaring their displeasure at the whirlwind of his presidency. An aroused public may soon be ready to back a plan for breaking up Trump's game — if a workable plan emerges from somewhere. Impeachment is a dead letter. Taking to the streets willy-nilly won't get the job done. There's got to be an intelligent plan, wisely implemented. The republic awaits a mind or two superior to Donald Trump's.

The Tiny Man Theory

"The History of the world is but the Biography of great men."
— Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship

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.

I used to work with a man who craved attention and praise every bit as much as Trump does. He was unlike Trump in most other ways but equally needy; truly love-starved, to judge from the few words he let drop about his mother. He'd boast to us of his accomplishments and then almost weep at the silence that followed. One co-worker strove mightily to help him out of his morbid state with sympathetic attention and lavish praise. He ate it up, but it made no difference in his need. The man was a perpetual vacuum. He didn't care to be otherwise, either. At some point in life he'd become aware of his obtrusive egoism and had learned the trick of declaring it when starting to speak in a group, warning that he was apt to go on and on about himself. Having done so, he seemed to think he had sidestepped any obligation to behave considerately. We were at his mercy.

It's impossible to know whether Donald Trump is aware of his egoism beyond noticing that others accuse him of it. However, there's no need to play amateur psychologist in his case. His niece has observed him with a professional eye.

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. And whether he knew it on any level or not, neither of his parents was ever going to see him for who he truly was or might have been — Mary was too depleted and Fred was interested only in whichever of his sons could be of most use — so he became whatever was most expedient. 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

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. After all, the revocation of certain people's security clearances or Secret Service protection serves only to inflict punishment for injuries to his pride. The rooting-out of FBI agents and government lawyers who had any part in investigating him is a wanton vendetta. The breathtaking departures in foreign policy are of a piece with his vain pretense of knowing better than anyone else when the gnawing truth is that he knows practically nothing about anything and can only trust to luck for vindication. The slashing and smashing of agencies is a grotesque mockery of small-government conservatism. 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.

Now the vacuum commands the whole world with its inrushing roar. Tall buildings tilt toward the tiny man from every city. Forests tremble. The oceans rear up, and the clouds lower.

But you must excuse me. I've just this minute heard a thumping at the window. It's February, two years on, and I do believe the thing is back.