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.
...
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" (2024)
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.
...
[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" (2024)
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.
...
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.
— "Absurdly Simple" (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-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.
— "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.
