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; 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.
Friday, October 3, 2025
Friday, August 22, 2025
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:
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.
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.
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.
Monday, August 18, 2025
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.
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.
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.
Saturday, August 9, 2025
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?
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:
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.
However, Locke set a test for participation that was more discriminating than it must have seemed to him.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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,
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,
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.
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.
Saturday, August 2, 2025
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, June 25, 2025
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 13, 2025
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:
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:
Kamarck explains,
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.
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.
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.
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.
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