The Test of Genius

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Tiny Man Theory

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

No ordinary man could play the part that Donald Trump is playing now. No great man, either. Only the tiniest moral entity — mind, heart, character — could leave such a vacuum within the human shell. A vacuum is no mere hollow. It's a hungry hollow that endangers the world around it.

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

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

Because of the disastrous circumstances in which he was raised, Donald knew intuitively, based on plenty of experience, that he would never be comforted or soothed, especially when he most needed to be. There was no point, then, in acting needy. And whether he knew it on any level or not, neither of his parents was ever going to see him for who he truly was or might have been — Mary was too depleted and Fred was interested only in whichever of his sons could be of most use — so he became whatever was most expedient. The rigid personality he developed as a result was a suit of armor that often protected him against pain and loss. But it also kept him from figuring out how to trust people enough to get close to them.
— Mary L. Trump PhD, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man

Any chink in Donald Trump's armor becomes a vulnerability for others: an orifice through which the inner vacuum tugs violently at the outer world, sucking in what it can and wrecking much more.

And that is the whole story of the part Trump is playing now. It's the reverse of a crime novel in which the apparent obsession of a madman turns out to be explainable as a rational scheme. One can look at his welter of actions on resuming office and make out some rational objectives, but the unifying factor is obsession. After all, the revocation of certain people's security clearances or Secret Service protection serves only to inflict punishment for injuries to his pride. The rooting-out of FBI agents and government lawyers who had any part in investigating him is a wanton vendetta. The breathtaking departures in foreign policy are of a piece with his vain pretense of knowing better than anyone else when the gnawing truth is that he knows practically nothing about anything and can only trust to luck for vindication. The slashing and smashing of agencies is a grotesque mockery of small-government conservatism. It's all a tantrum, the final towering rage of one poor little rich boy who sits atop the world's highest pile of toys and still can't catch a glimpse of love. It's Donald's bitter wish-fulfillment dream, and we're in it.

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

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

You American Intellectuals

"You English intellectuals will be the death of us all."
— Exasperated revolutionary to blundering co-conspirator in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

The case of America's Democratic Party is a bit different. With us the complaint is not between revolutionaries, but between those Democrats and affiliates who just want to bring about progress and those who want to distinguish themselves as progressives. Members of the second set, uncontestedly the more intellectual, exhibit habits of thought and failures to think that could at least make us all irrelevant. Here are a few.

The mountaintop redoubt
One of Kamala Harris's liabilities as a presidential candidate was her laugh. Not the fact that she laughs, but the nature of the laugh — a mechanical hahahahahaha — and the impression that she's deploying it to cover some vulnerability or void. Trump and his supporters had a field day exploiting that laugh. It may not have made a great difference, but it must have done some harm when none was affordable. Her supporters ought to have faced that. I was one, and I did so.

A writer in The Atlantic had another idea. The result was an article that ran under the headline "Kamala Harris and the Threat of a Woman's Laugh" with the sub-head "Criticism of emotional expression has long been a weapon of choice for those wanting to cut down women in political power." Note the progression from "Kamala Harris" to "a woman" and then women, and from a certain laugh to "emotional expression" and a pattern of misogynistic mischief that "has long been" repeating itself.

Even before you get into the article, you know where it's going: up the side of a rhetorical mountain to a safe height. Instead of confronting the untoward effect of Harris's laugh (but then there might have been no article at all), it subsumes that awkward little blot on the landscape into an accommodating overview that entertains generalities and lets them float down over the actual subject like a blanket of snow.

Those who seem triggered by Harris's laugh, though, might feel the way they do for a reason. In her book The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter, the media scholar Kathleen Rowe Karlyn remarks that when women laugh on film and television, they reframe themselves as subjects rather than objects, asserting their right to an emotional response "that expresses anger, resistance, solidarity, and joy."

Suddenly it feels like 2018 or so, when creative feminist spin pieces enjoyed a seller's market, but now such an essay lacks even the faint resonance it would have had then. The essence of Kamala Harris's liability was no grand "threat of a woman's laughter." It was a personal tic, and spinning it into something noble or something positively advantageous served no purpose but to gratify people who already supported her.

This trick of managing problematic bits of reality by escaping to the rhetorical mountaintop bears a familial resemblance to the "motte and bailey" move: taking tendentious positions until challenged and then falling back on innocuous principles.

The dog-eared ace in the hole
After the election, which had failed to produce an abortion-driven groundswell for the Democratic ticket, The New York Times ran a conversation among four of its writers in which the movie Wicked serves as a text for sociopolitical critique. The headline is "Women Deserve Rage. We Have a Lot to Be Angry About." The critique sometimes goes like this:

Everyone in my world is still deeply distraught about the election. The election turned on propaganda about power and scapegoating of women and feminism. Frankly, we see the antifascism message [in Wicked] clearly because we see fascism so clearly in our everyday lives.

...

The identity politics of the film are arguably more about gender and liberalism. The long history of persecuting witches has been tied to political campaigns to acquire land, own the labor of workers and control women's economic freedom.

...

But I like female rage. I don't want it tempered with social graces. I want Elphaba to burn down whatever she wants, including Glinda if she gets in her way. Women deserve rage. We have a lot to be angry about.

Again we're abruptly transported back a few years. Some readers made it clear that they had felt the bump and found it tedious. One simply quoted "Women Deserve Rage. We Have a Lot to Be Angry About" and rejoined, "This again?" No more can a polemicist count on making the echo chamber ring with "Find your rage." But when talk turns specifically to the lost presidential election, an old community of echoes comes to life like Brigadoon.

In late December, the Times published a long analysis of Harris's unsuccessful campaign under the headline "Will the U.S. Ever Be Ready for a Female President?" The article itself examines an array of possible factors in Harris's defeat as well as arguments for and against the proposition that she lost because she was female or because she was both female and non-white. However, the headline peremptorily treats the election as a referendum on America's collective attitude toward women who run for president, and the authors finally signal that view by their choice of closing anecdotes and quotations (a common practice in high-toned journalism).

Readers overwhelmingly took the hint. Comment after comment formulaically blames the outcome of the election on misogyny or racism or a compound of the two. Immersed in that choral chant, you'd never imagine that the Democrat had been sure to face structural disadvantages and inescapable complaints, much less that she had personally failed to inspire confidence just as her white male running mate had failed to inspire it. You'd never know that the Democratic Party had vainly counted on sweeping up women's votes with the single issue of abortion. You certainly would never entertain the thought that Harris had managed to come close only because the alternative was Donald Trump. And that's the point. Misogyny and racism are great evils, but they're also great resources. One needn't respond to political failure by coming to grips with hard truths as long as one can produce a pat explanation that's at least unfalsifiable: "Harris is a woman, isn't she? She lost, didn't she? Well, there you are." The resort to ordained conclusions is a favorite means of self-deception among progressive intellectuals. We see it in the routine Marxist response to anti-communist sentiment among workers (that the workers have been duped by capitalists) and its neoracist variant (that black police officers who brutalize a black suspect, or black voters who support Donald Trump, have been infected with white supremacism). As for the many women who decline to rally around the female candidate of the day, why, they've been infected with patriarchic assumptions. Such an explanation becomes a precious ace that can be brought out, played, and returned to the hole any number of times. In political competition, though, that's a losing game.

The view from the carrel
Years ago, when confronted with the news that working-class voters were angered by illegal immigration across the southern border, which they took as a threat to Americans' livelihoods, the standard progressive response was to say that those migrants mostly did jobs Americans didn't want and that, anyway, they didn't depress wages. To this would be added the information that most illegal immigration occurred through ports of entry with people coming in on temporary visas and then staying. As for the idea of providing illegal immigrants with medical services at public expense, it was explained — by those progressives who understood that appeals to altruism wouldn't cut it — that this was a practical necessity in order to maintain public health. It was all so enlightening, if only those angry voters would read it and appreciate it like the placid intellectuals who wrote it. Moreover, there was a lot of truth in it. It just couldn't make the political issue go away. In the first place, most workaday Americans live outside the range of intellectual explainers' voices. The explainers ought to have grasped that long ago. In the second place, people don't always name their fears with rigorous precision. Brush aside the economic anxiety, and you find anxiety about a surging influx of newcomers from other cultures. One can respond by playing the dog-eared "racism" card; but if one thinks that's an adequate response, one is a careless thinker.

So it is with inflation. Many Democrats, including some professional commentators, sighed as complaints about inflation kept on coming throughout election year even though inflation had slowed markedly. They seemed to think voters ought to let that subject go if not positively rejoice at the slackening pace of price increases. They wanted people to understand that their pain was, in the great scheme of things, transitory; that their wages would presently catch up to the new level of prices. But when your wages catch up to high prices, you don't feel that all is well. You feel that you're treading water, barely. The greater failure of imagination was that of the cerebral explainers, not the viscerally resentful workers.

The guiding star
Three kings are riding across a desert on camels. It's a long journey by night.

   "Are we there yet?" asks the youngest king, not for the first time.
       "No."
   "When will we be there?"
       "When we've gone far enough."
   "Maybe we're lost."
       "Impossible. All we have to do is make straight for that star. We just haven't gone far enough."

And, yes, they get where they're destined to be by dint of pressing on in a straight line. That works for the kings in the Christmas story because God wrote the script. It's unlikely to work for followers of scripts written by mortals with theories. Nevertheless, the Left's general reaction (apart from potshots at sexism or racism) to the presidential election of 2024 was that the Democratic Party, via the Harris campaign, had not gone far enough in setting out a leftist program. Talk about faith. And these are people, in large part, who frown on religiosity.

The desperate times
Donald Trump dealt his most telling blow to truth and justice in an instant: the instant when it was known that he had won the election of 2016. The instrument with which he struck that blow was the blunt mind of the progressive elite. Within hours, enlightened Democratic youth was rumbling in the streets chanting "Not my president" and in some cases committing acts of vandalism. Cooler heads among Democrats tended, in their own way, to treat Trump's victory as somehow less than legitimate. Many seemed to feel that it was just not to be countenanced, legitimacy aside. Such is the origin story of a solipsistic Resistance that would later deplore Trump's election denial without blushing.

True, the temptation to derangement in those early days was great. An impudently vile television personality and real-estate developer had surprised even himself and his team by capturing the presidency of the United States of America. The world was aghast. It really was disorienting, but responsible people had a duty to re-orient themselves and get to work on a wise strategy of containment that would serve also to let the electorate see a sane alternative in action. Instead, the Resistance slid and slid toward mania, pulling even senior Democrats into its vortex. Soon the logic of desperate times swallowed it up. In reaction to the cult of Donald Trump, it became a cult of desperate measures. Trump was to be opposed at every turn, reflexively and diametrically. If Trump was anti-Muslim, his progressive antagonists would be categorically, uncritically pro-Muslim. If he wanted to stop illegal immigration across the southern border, they would grandly welcome it. They would stigmatize the very word illegal and leave literal-minded Americans to work out what kind of people would obfuscate law-breaking. Activists would see opportunity in anti-Trump sentiment and respond with their wildest nostrums. Fledgling journalists would scorn the pursuit of objectivity (a pursuit without end, but a noble one) and enlist in service to the progressive cause. Online champions of the cause would routinely condemn any mention of injustice on their own side as traitorous bothsidesism or counter it with blithe whataboutism. Operatives of the Biden administration, abetted by influential sympathizers, would perpetrate a brazen fraud about the president's fitness. The respect paid to integrity had no apparent value in the currency of desperate measures, so they all disdained it.

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The Democratic Party could have systematically sealed Donald Trump's political fate during the past eight years. It got enough help from the man himself. However, the progressive elite squandered too much of the party's advantage on self-gratifying maneuvers and undisciplined gambits — all conceived without the least foresight. As for hindsight, note this report by Jess Bidgood of The New York Times after having "watched the candidates for chair of the Democratic National Committee discuss their plans for the future while showing very little interest in examining what went disastrously wrong in the very recent past."

The candidates were quick to point their fingers at outside forces, like the influence of billionaires as well as the effect that racism and misogyny had on the chances of electing the nation's first Black female president. They talked about Republicans' dominant messaging operation and Democrats' bad branding.

But when it came to evaluating the party's own role in its failures, or promising a detailed look at what went wrong? Not so much.

"We've got the right message," said Ken Martin, the leader of Minnesota's Democratic Party, who is widely seen as the race's top contender [and who did win]. "What we need to do is connect it back with the voters."
— The New York Times "On Politics" newsletter (January 31, 2025)

A message can be right for these times only when it tells of a changed party, a different political community with a different consciousness. Americans of every description call for action on great common interests and challenges — but the illuminati of the Democratic Party will keep their eyes raised to a sacred little constellation of guiding stars.

This is the perennial lesson of the Left, that one can be intellectual without being wise.

Out of the Looking-Glass

Last time, a pale companion to the US presidential election of 2024. Today, something in another key.

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Start from the assumption that the Democrats were hard pressed, no matter what they did. In the approach to the election, political analysts pointed out an inescapable structural problem: that no incumbent party had prevailed when so many voters felt that the country was "headed in the wrong direction" (polltakers' maddeningly though understandably vague formulation, to be discussed below). Moreover, the Democrats had held the White House for twelve of the preceding sixteen years. The pendulum of favor was against them.

Then contemplate the discretionary factors that seem to have compounded the structural ones unnecessarily. Therein lie the pointers to the way forward. What follows is not an attempt at expert electoral calculation, but a consumer's-eye view of the political marketplace.

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When polltakers ask voters whether the country is "headed in the right direction" or not, they're presumably trying to build a comprehensive indicator of mood. There's value in that. However, there are no pointers in it. A preponderantly negative response is just bad news for incumbents, like the little scrap of paper with a black spot on it that you get if you're a doomed character in Treasure Island. A respondent may be thinking about one or more aspects, respectively, of economic conditions or social trends or national security or governance — or about some combination thereof. We can look at the responses to more precise questions and guess at the meaning of the "wrong direction" response, but such a guess may be perturbed by wishful thinking or deliberate spin. Some commentators, for example, have attributed the Democratic defeat to the disappointment of voters who longed for a hard left turn. Others (if not the same ones in the next breath) argue that too many voters desired a turn to authoritarianism and away from social justice. Divining what most people mean when they say the country is headed in the wrong direction is a subjective exercise. Herewith, one highly subjective attempt.

The most probable and variously co-existing components of the "wrong direction" verdict are these:

• Dismay at the affective polarization of society
• Alarm at the consequences of a laissez-faire stance on immigration
• A valid, if imperfectly conceived, sense of economic injustice
• Resentment of overbearing minoritarian activism

It's pretty clear that Donald Trump was not returned to power by a popular revolt against norms, much less by white supremacism. As Isaac Saul points out in Tangle (with links), white voters were the one racial demographic that shifted toward the Democratic Party in this presidential election.

Here's a fact to consider: Kamala Harris did better with white voters than Joe Biden did, but worse with nonwhite voters. Not only that, but the group that has shifted most toward Democrats since Trump broke onto the scene is white men. Democrats lost because everyone except for white voters moved in the direction of Donald Trump this cycle. How is that for a narrative buster?

Note also that Trump did not gain support in comparison with 2020 so much as he benefited from a decline in support for the Democratic alternative. As for that decline, those who wish to blame it on misogyny are free to do so but must recognize that the heralded host of women for Kamala Harris did not show up. Before the election, the Obamas and other prominent Democrats practically declared that if Harris lost it would be because men had not backed up their women by voting for her. In the event, however, women themselves didn't vote for her in droves. An unprimed observer of the outcome would never guess that this election had been expected to signify a great divergence between the sexes or that Trump was supposed to be acceptable only to white nationalists. Among the negative lessons to be learned by Democrats, those two are high on the list.

Among the positive lessons, it seems the chief one is the least edifying: that even when a candidate is shockingly abnormal, many voters will absorb the shock and proceed to vote on issues of the day, with the most elemental concerns weighing most heavily. They'll punish the incumbent party for the things they don't like and give the opposition a chance; and in the elections of 2026 and 2028, the Democrats will be the opposition.

Though elemental concerns weigh most heavily, rarefied ones can tip the scales. Polling shows that the Trump campaign's ad attacking Harris over the microniche issue of sex-change services for prison inmates was markedly effective in swaying undecided voters. But the weight of that one issue is inseparable from the pre-existing weight of the overgrown trans lobby, which has gained a presence in politics and public debate far out of proportion to the size of the interest group represented or to any danger threatening that group's members. The actual rights of transgender people are protected by the 2020 US Supreme Court ruling in the case of Bostock v. Clayton County and subsequent lower-court rulings that apply its logic. Today's routine invocation of "trans rights" cloaks a demand for submission to the lobby itself. But no one can claim a right to go unchallenged in a sociopolitical venture. People know it's a bluff, and those outside the sphere of tame progressives are going to call it.

The extent to which bumptious identitarian projects hurt the Democratic Party is debatable, but hurt it they do. Now, with the campaign to dissolve the identity of woman in an acid of trans hubris and non-binary improvisation, leftist identitarianism has reduced itself to the tyranny of minority factions. This may always have been the destiny of the social-justice Left. But if the Democratic Party prefers a destiny of winning elections and thus gaining the power to do good, the minoritarian fever must break. Americans with more catholic concerns need not feel any guilt about treating it with cold water when they get the chance; and there's no chance quite like an election.

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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.

It is, of course, a dispiritingly tall order: accomplishing a reformation of the Democratic ecosystem at the level of personnel. In November, Yascha Mounk published a pessimistic and, alas, masterful analysis of the broader problem of reformation that approached its conclusion as follows:

This finally brings us to the most fundamental obstacle to a real course correction: the staffers, the donors, and the activists who are the real decision-makers in the Democratic Party. Democrats are disproportionately dependent on young staffers who have recently graduated from prestigious colleges. Many of these staffers have been socialized in the hothouse culture of campus activism in which one supposedly offensive remark can lead to lasting social ostracism. And since they stand at the beginning of their careers, they often have a greater incentive to demonstrate ideological purity than to win the next election [emphasis added].

Progressive activists outside the Democratic Party can take a cavalier attitude toward its electoral fortunes, as some openly do; but the presence of such people throughout the staffs of the party itself, of its officeholders, and of its candidates amounts to rampant entryism by agents of a competing interest, albeit a loosely defined one. Hard as it may be to replace them, the thing must be done. One of the most widely noted blunders of Kamala Harris's recent campaign, her refusal to visit the podcaster Joe Rogan for a long interview, seems to have been due to a fear of offending progressives, as represented by members of her staff, to whom Rogan is beyond the pale. Sitting for the interview might not have changed the outcome of the election, but turning up one's nose at such a chance is a luxury Democrats can't afford from here on. Party-scorning sociopolitical snobs may not care. Democrats have got to care.

Donors, be their pockets ever so deep, are a lesser concern. It's been hard to accept the idea that elections are not won by outspending the opposition, especially with journalists and political pros always calling our attention to war chests and advertising budgets, but it's a lesson Democrats were overdue to learn before the bitter experience of this past presidential election. In 2020, I donated part of my mite to the US Senate campaign of Jaime Harrison in South Carolina. Mine was part of a flood of out-of-state donations that ended in Harrison's raising more money than any other senatorial candidate in national history. Nevertheless, he lost by more than ten percentage points to the supposedly vulnerable incumbent, Lindsey Graham. This year, Kamala Harris's campaign famously raised over a billion dollars. Though they spent that and more, the best they could do was to narrow the margin of defeat in battleground states. The spending might have been done more judiciously, but probably not enough more so to matter.

"There is not a single expenditure in a different spot that would have changed the outcome of the race," said Bakari Sellers, a close ally of Ms. Harris and a former lawmaker in South Carolina. In fact, Mr. Sellers said, the campaign faced an unusual problem: "We had so much money it was hard to get it out the door."

Donors matter, of course, but not so much that they ought to be treated as customers who are always right. Donors who don't like the way the party changes can be relieved by donors who do.

As for activists, specifically those obstreperous leftists who appear to be of the Democratic Party but not in it, they and the onlooking world should be made to understand that they are not even of the party if they function as litigants and not as stakeholders. The attitude that it's not their job to help Democrats win elections (which some have proclaimed outright) should let them in for adversarial treatment just as if they represented a separate party. Since they haven't joined one or formed one, they obviously recognize that they need the vehicle of the Democratic Party more than it needs their seal of approval. Above all, the party should beware of academics and their political potions. Any party should value knowledge and expertise, but none should take its lead from academics.

Wild as these thoughts are, they unfortunately comprise the one vital seed of future prosperity for the Democratic Party. If it's out of the question to cultivate that seed, then the party will surely become a barren tract containing only a citadel of the elite.

Tyler Austin Harper, writing in The Atlantic, recounts a recent conversation with Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who posed a question for his copartisans to face: "Does the Republican Party become more economically populist in a genuine way before the Democratic Party opens itself up to people who don't agree with us on 100 percent of our social and cultural issues?" Murphy may have been speaking diplomatically out of consideration for progressive sensibilities, but the proposition of a Democratic Party that "opens itself up to people who don't agree with us on 100 percent of our social and cultural issues" implies telling voters, "Yes, we hold these positions that you abhor, but we've decided not to chastise you for disagreeing with us. You're welcome in our tent." That would be perversely ineffective. The transformation of a dim Democratic future into a bright one must begin with a transformation of the party's character. It can't remain a party characterized by people who incline toward positions that repel the median voter. The problem is not the way the party chooses to behave, but the kind of political community it is in the first place. This is not yet a problem with rank-and-file members, despite the growing proportion of progressive college graduates. It's a problem with operatives.

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The Democratic Party must demonstrate the ability, but first of all the will, to take America in a direction that seems about right to most Americans. That should not strain any Democrat's basic principles. There is no popular demand for Darwinian competition or social homogeneity, any more than for Marxism or social atomization. Most people value fairness. They also value peace of mind. They want a combination of freedom to get ahead and freedom from being calamitously left behind. That's an opening for Democrats, even as Republicans show early signs of trimming their sails.

The Republican metaphor for America is a gold field suited to fortune-hunters. Let the Democratic metaphor be a community suited to good neighbors. Yes, the community will be inclusive and nurturing. It will be a community of many parts, and it will be supportive where support is needed. But the main electoral appeal should be made to core interests that unite the parts and sustain the vitality of the whole.
— "The Voyage to Restoration" (2018)

Once, that was pretty much what the Democratic Party stood for. The electorate didn't turn away from it; the party did. As avant-garde academics and social activists gained influence, the party abandoned the principle of literal inclusivity for an inclusivity-branded strategy of setting the most numerous groups back on their heels. It forsook the unity of parts for the meteoric supremacy of one little part after another and forsook the vitality of the whole for a nihilistic disavowal of the whole. Inversion and dissolution became implicit goods. In this way, the Democratic Party passed through the looking-glass.

As those last words were being set down, Matt Yglesias published an important essay in which he illuminates an actual inversion — a momentous one — in the Democratic coalition itself.

To understand the role and stature of the groups in Biden-era Washington, it's worth reading some of the old articles about Obama-era Washington and "the veal pen."

This was progressive blogger Jane Hamsher's derisive term for a "tightly-managed coalition of Democratic groups centered financially around the Democracy Alliance and organizationally around the Center for American Progress, both in turn creations of the left in exile in the Bush years." These groups had standing calls and meetings with members of the Obama administration. And their funders, the Democracy Alliance donor circle, were also major donors to Barack Obama and to Democratic Party candidates. The purpose of these coordinating calls and meetings was for the groups to speak their mind and get access to the White House and feel included in the process. But really the purpose was for the White House to tell the groups what it wanted them to say. The role of the groups was to try to generate positive press coverage for the administration, to sell progressives on the merits and necessity of compromises the administration made, and to create an "echo chamber" that amplified the administration's messages.

...

So I think ultimately, the veal pen was right all along: Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards, and it requires convincing people to vote for you in elections.

But that's not what happened. Instead, we got the Sanders insurgency, a wave of "woke" academic concepts migrating from Tumblr onto the mainstream internet, Trump's shocking win, a thermostatic swing of public opinion to the left, a surge of donations to progressive advocacy groups, "the squad," Elizabeth Warren's laser focus on personnel, and a new conventional wisdom that 2009-2010 was a huge disappointing failure rather than a big success.

The upshot of all of this is that between 2013 and 2021, the basic logic of the veal pen inverted.

Rather than mainstream progressive advocacy groups working to amplify Joe Biden's message and create good press for him, they threaten him and other Democrats with bad press unless they hew to progressive orthodoxy. This is done in collaboration with progressive staffers and like-minded journalists [emphasis added].

Yglesias goes on to note that the Republican coalition had the discipline, this year, to act on the "veal pen" principle, with anti-abortion activists and plutocrats counseling tolerance of Trump's populism and his relative moderation on abortion for the sake of winning the election.

Democratic presidential candidates would find it hard enough to campaign under either the handicap of being attacked by "the groups" or the handicap of adopting their impolitic positions, without an adverse change in the electoral map. However, The Atlantic's mercilessly attentive Jerusalem Demsas has noticed that the most adverse of changes is in fact taking place. In "The Democrats Are Committing Partycide" she writes, "Democrats' self-conception as a party that represents the future is running headlong into the reality that the fastest-growing states are Republican-led."

According to the American Redistricting Project, New York will lose three seats and Illinois will lose two, while Republican-dominated Texas and Florida will gain four additional representatives each if current trends continue. Other growing states that Trump carried in this month's election could potentially receive an additional representative. By either projection, if the 2032 Democratic nominee carries the same states that Kamala Harris won this year, the party would receive 12 fewer electoral votes. Among the seven swing states that the party lost this year, Harris came closest to winning in the former "Blue Wall" of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—at least two of which are likely to lose an electoral vote after 2030. Even adding those states to the ones Harris won would not be enough to secure victory in 2032. The Democrat would need to find an additional 14 votes somewhere else on the map.

...

Population growth and decline do not simply happen to states; they are the result of policy choices and economic conditions relative to other states. Some states lose residents because their economy hasn't kept up with the rest of the country's. But in much of blue America, including California and New York, economic dynamism and high wages aren't enough to sustain population growth, because the skyrocketing cost of shelter eclipses everything else. ... Policy failures are dragging down the Democrats' prospects in two ways: by showing the results of Democratic governance in sharp, unflattering relief, and by directly reducing the party's prospects in presidential elections and the House of Representatives.

Democrats who wish to avoid partycide have got to break out of the looking-glass world in which activism makes for stasis, parts bedevil the whole, service to a theory beats service to society, and then one day the election of a Republican by a demographic cross-section of the electorate elicits murmurs of "At last the country is coming together!"

That breakout won't be accomplished by persuading the people who oppose it or by striking a bargain with them, but only by dominating them with superior organization and leadership and, as necessary, driving them out. Yes, it's a wild thought. But if Demsas is right (and you know she is); if Mounk and Yglesias are right (and you know they are); then the time has come to think it. Personnel is the problem.

Lack of Character Is Destiny

Today, a pale companion to the US presidential election of 2024. Next time, something in another key.

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Donald Trump — who would have passed from any enlightened political scene four years ago, who wouldn't have gained a foothold in one eight years ago — has won both the electoral vote and, apparently, the popular vote. Let it be understood at once that the most crucial failures of enlightenment occurred far from the haunts of the people who voted for him.

Oh, it may always have been written in the stars that absurdity would stalk any country named after Amerigo Vespucci; but let's not give in to superstition. The movers of the American Revolution and the founding of the Republic were eminently serious people, not to say cognitive giants by today's embarrassing standards. They understood well enough that "of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants." How could they foresee that party politics would eventually defeat their safeguards against that fate? Even the demagogues of their acquaintance were more considerable men than Donald Trump. They themselves, regardless of political leanings or social sensibilities, were at any rate men of character. The baseness — not evil, but baseness contending with mediocrity — of political movers in our time was beyond their imagining.

A survey of those movers must begin with a reference to Donald Trump, as this one did. But many words have been written about him, and more will follow. Let's move on while keeping him in mind.

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Consider Joe Biden. The negative re-evaluation of this man can begin at once, because his negative qualities have always been in plain sight. His personal vanity, which, though not on a par with Donald Trump's, contradicts the image of a regular guy at peace with himself. His creepy tendency to fabulize and plagiarize, made only creepier by his allies' standard excuse ("That's just the way his mind works"); albeit a far cry from Trump's reality-bashing. And his selfishness — which, again, doesn't put him in Trump's company, but which does put him in the company of morally negligible career politicians everywhere. Nothing in his political life defined him like the tardy leaving of it, having subordinated his party and his country to his vainglory. He might at least have become an object of compassion if those around him had declared that he wasn't quite himself; though, in truth, he was quite himself through it all.

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Then there's Kamala Harris. As she was essentially a pawn or, at most, an anti-mover in this saga, she doesn't warrant the harshest of reckonings. She proved the weak candidate she was generally said to be before and after the burst of giddiness upon her nomination. Here was a person who had hopscotched from state politics to the presidential nomination in exactly three steps, the second and third of which consisted in being picked up and set down by Joe Biden. As for the first, her truncated term in the US Senate, she acquitted herself well in hearings and co-sponsored some legislation. However, her campaign for the 2020 presidential nomination collapsed before the first primary elections and caucuses. At that time and again during her term as vice president, the organizations under her control were known for dysfunction, demoralization, and extremely high turnover. In both of her presidential campaigns, she deployed a manic laugh that seemed a cover for the insecurity perceived by people who have worked for her. That and her habit of escaping substantive discussion through the mere churning of verbiage marked her as an empty vessel. She had never needed to be anything more in a career of riding political currents. Some observers have professed indignation at seeing yet another woman allegedly denied the nation's highest office by misogyny; but did they really want the "glass ceiling" to be broken in such a way, by such an aspirant?

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And then there's the Democratic machine. After learning to think of Trump and his surrogates as the only ones imposing on people's credulity, we — all right, I — increasingly struggled to hold back the dawn of recognition that national Democrats and their surrogates were playing a vast, ceaseless, multifarious confidence game. The word gaslighting had enjoyed a vogue in progressive rhetoric when the subject was patriarchy, with men (especially male doctors) portrayed as perpetrating mental mischief against women. Now it transpired that the Democratic Party and its associates comprised a veritable Axis of Gaslight. I had been quick enough to notice some pieces of this picture, such as the pan-progressive effort to put all brains under an ether of social-justice dogma. But I was very slow to step out of the mainstream of liberal thought about the coronavirus pandemic and entertain doubts about the science behind masking or the absence of science behind the outbreak in Wuhan. I also thought that a letter signed by more than fifty former intelligence officials was sufficient to pigeon-hole the affair of Hunter Biden's laptop as a Russian disinformation scheme. Again and again, trust proved misplaced. Then, with the reckless campaign by the Biden administration and its advocates to conceal the president's unfitness for another term of office, the keystone of Democratic credibility dropped out and the whole edifice collapsed.

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The rest are evanescent Shakespearean shadows: Jill Biden, whose assured fate is that those who liken her to Lady Macbeth will outlast those who insist on her academic title; Tim Walz, a sub-Polonius as windy as the original but too much the knucklehead (his word) to form the habit of shunning falsehood; and JD Vance, our Edmund, who diligently aids the eclipses in portending these divisions. We can expect Vance to return in a Republican production of Richard III, but in which role?

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The political scene of 2024 wouldn't give Shakespeare much new material for anything but a farce. And with what a dreary cast of characters! First Knave, Second Knave, Third Knave....

It won't do.

Veils of Fiction

This is going to be about literary fiction, not political lies. If you're in no mood for such a theme at such a time, that's perfectly understandable. Please just accept my wish for a happy Halloween before moving on.

Shirley Jackson earned her place in the literary canon — a place now so obscure that it aptly suggests the dark interior of two pages stuck together — with disturbing tales of the supernatural, the abnormal, and the socially monstrous. They somewhat resemble the tales of Walter de la Mare in their author's willingness to leave us without comfort and even without confidence in our understanding.

The Haunting of Hill House is (though one can easily forget) a story told by an authorial third-person narrator. After just a few pages, however, the narration starts getting entangled in the mind of the protagonist, Eleanor Vance.

There has to be a first time for everything, Eleanor told herself.

Though the narrative voice remains formally objective throughout the novel, it becomes possessed by Eleanor's thoughts.

After the manner of men who see women quarreling, the doctor and Luke had withdrawn, standing tight together in miserable silence; now, at last, Luke moved and spoke. "That's enough, Eleanor," he said, unbelievably, and Eleanor whirled around, stamping. "How dare you?" she said, gasping. "How dare you?"

And the doctor laughed, then, and she stared at him and then at Luke, who was smiling and watching her. What is wrong with me? she thought. Then — but they think Theodora did it on purpose, made me mad so I wouldn't be frightened; how shameful to be maneuvered that way. She covered her face and sat down in her chair.

"Nell, dear," Theodora said, "I am sorry."

I must say something, Eleanor told herself; I must show them that I am a good sport, after all; a good sport; let them think that I am ashamed of myself. "I'm sorry," she said. "I was frightened."

...

"I wondered if you two were going to come to blows," Luke said, "until I realized what Theodora was doing."

Smiling down into Theodora's bright, happy eyes, Eleanor thought, But that isn't what Theodora was doing at all.

Since the narrative is haunted by a mentally volatile protagonist, we can enjoy imagining to what extent the strange occurrences in and around Hill House may be products of her psyche. Does she positively generate those occurrences? (After all, her family was beset by poltergeists in her childhood.) Is she the originator of a psychological contagion? Is something taking place, but not what she perceives? Or has she really been summoned to a fateful encounter with the supernatural? Laura Miller, in her introduction to the 2006 Penguin Classics edition of The Haunting of Hill House, sees reason to believe that Shirley Jackson was content with the supernatural view.

It should be said that both [Henry] James and Jackson gave every indication that they considered the ghosts in their short novels to be real within the fictional world that their books describe. Jackson, who had a lifelong interest in the occult, who dabbled in spells and liked to tell reporters that she was a witch, professed to believe in ghosts. But both of these writers were too preoccupied with the notion that people are attended by multiple, imaginary versions of themselves to be unaware of the nonsupernatural implications of their ghost stories.

So we're welcome to simply gaze at the supernatural design that's displayed before us; or to peek behind the veil and tease our brains with as many psychological puzzles as we can discern; or to draw back the ultimate veil of fiction and contemplate the psyche of the author.

Miller tells us, "Jackson seemed to see sex as an uninteresting distraction from earlier, more fundamental questions of identity." In The Haunting of Hill House, she leaves the potential for sexual dynamics among her ghost-hunters practically unexplored, though not absolutely so. When the emotionally stunted Eleanor has her head turned by the only young man in the group, Luke, it's just a flutter of puppy love. When she feels something akin to jealousy, it's just a basic craving for attention. (After spending most of her stay in Hill House wondering what the others say about her, she eavesdrops on their conversations and finds that they forget her very existence when she's out of sight. Is she the ghost, then?) However, we learn that the worldly-wise artist Theodora lives, in a tempestuous relationship, with a "friend" whose sex Jackson hides by contriving to avoid pronouns. That wholly gratuitous tease, together with Theo's behavior toward Eleanor, does hint at a sexual subtext. Robert Wise's excellent film adaptation, The Haunting (1963), gradually makes Theo's sexuality understood without ever quite naming it, even in Eleanor's outburst about "nature's mistakes" (which is not in the novel). Meanwhile, the deeply middle-aged, rather silly Dr. Montague of the novel becomes the younger, superficially masterful Dr. Markway, thereby setting up a triangle as thin but tensile as a spiderweb. Theo notices Eleanor's interest in Markway and reacts with veiled cuts. Markway seems to notice nothing, though his little gallantries may veil manipulative intent. Eleanor notices everything — if the account of her consciousness is to be believed — and suffers. Young-buck Luke, not finding his type among present company, stands back and functions as an ironic commentator. There is no "sex" whatever in this film; and yet the web vibrates.

Jackson's last completed novel, the acclaimed We Have Always Lived in the Castle, contains no supernatural elements. Instead, it contains a dormant murder mystery. The main characters, two sisters aged eighteen and twenty-eight, live with their invalid uncle in the ancestral mansion, having lost their parents and two other members of the family to arsenic poisoning some years before. The truth about that fatal dinner remains unpursued since a trial that ended in acquittal; nor will it be pursued here.

Our narrator is the younger sister, Mary Katherine "Merricat" Blackwood. After introducing herself to us, she relates a distasteful part of her life's routine: a foray into the nearby village for food and library books. The villagers exhibit hostility to the Blackwoods in varying degrees; their only friends live at some distance and seldom come calling. When Merricat has finished running her errands along a course planned to minimize encounters, she beats a retreat to the family property through a small gate that opens into a wild, overgrown wood. Be it ever so dark, it's a welcoming world to her. Now she can happily walk the rest of the way to meet her sister Constance in the garden and proceed to the most welcoming world of all: the kitchen.

"We'll have muffins," Constance said, almost singing because she was sorting and putting away the food. "Uncle Julian will have an egg, done soft and buttery, and a muffin and a little pudding."

...

"I'm always so happy when you come home from the village," Constance said; she stopped to look and smile at me. "Partly because you bring home food, of course. But partly because I miss you."

Constance stops to look and smile at Merricat many times in the course of the story. Is it just one of the rhythms of an uneasy fairy tale? If our narrator finds her sister's smile suggestive of anything, she never lets on.

Mary Katherine Blackwood is a strange guide to follow through a fictional world. Though fourteen years younger than Eleanor Vance, at eighteen she could chance to be the more mature of the two. In fact, she's profoundly infantile. Eleanor is a socially passable adult harboring a psychochild; Merricat is altogether a child. When she zigzags through the village on her errands, she comprehends it as a game in which she loses two turns here, takes an extra turn there, and so on; all the while thinking baleful thoughts about the villagers. It's not a whimsy, but a ritual. Off the path that runs through the wild wood, she's made a hiding place in a bower so dense it keeps the rain out. She retreats there in times of distress to lie on a pallet and dwell in perfect security. This idea must be supremely appealing to the child in every reader; but in order for the author to say all she has to say to us as one grown-up to another, she must sometimes let her narrator observe things with a grown-up's informed intellect and describe them with a grown-up's — nay, with Shirley Jackson's — command of language.

Constance was perfectly composed. She rose and smiled and said she was glad to see them. Because Helen Clarke was ungraceful by nature, she managed to make the simple act of moving into a room and sitting down a complex ballet for three people; before Constance had quite finished speaking Helen Clarke jostled Mrs. Wright and sent Mrs. Wright sideways like a careening croquet ball off into the far corner of the room where she sat abruptly and clearly without intention upon a small and uncomfortable chair.

In The Haunting of Hill House, we had an authorial narrator who could assume the guise of a mentally compromised character. Here, we have a mentally compromised narrator who can assume the guise of the author. These are tricks done with veils, and thank goodness for them. Through the dark terrain of We Have Always Lived in the Castle runs a babbling brook of gallows humor personified by the courtly Uncle Julian, who is extremely well-spoken and as mad as a hatter. That lethal dinner may have killed the majority of his putative loved ones and ruined his own health, but it was the making of him as a raconteur. His pleasantries over tea with Mrs. Wright, a meek but morbidly voracious listener, are too good in context to be excerpted.

Get the book and have a happy Halloween.

If I Should Die Before We Wake

Yesterday an old friend got in touch to confide that he was thinking of leaving the United States on account of the political climate. He was writing to me because he had few like-minded friends to talk to. Ordinarily, our correspondence doesn't go much beyond exchanges of personal news occasioned by Christmas or Halloween (his favorite holiday, and one for which I have a soft spot).

I responded with unfeigned sympathy but also noted the evidence that a majority of Americans are sick of partisan polarization. Maybe it won't be much longer till sanity and common decency prevail. Then again, maybe not in our lifetimes. My friend and his wife, who at least would not be separating themselves from a family, will go on considering the option of making a break for it — but to where? Yesterday we tentatively browsed the menu of countries together till it got to be my bedtime.

Now, the phrase "my bedtime" has gained a certain complexity — I like to think of it as an elegiac echo — over the decade or so since I was diagnosed with a lymphoma that's not going away. The disease is also classified as a form of chronic leukemia, a wonderfully indolent form that just nudges me along through passages of fitfully ebbing vitality toward the night when I lay me down to sleep for the last time. I'd like to see America wake from its delirium before that.

Even in the prosaic sense, my bedtime promises otherworldly mysteries: labyrinthine dreams alternating with those treks through the dark house that are common to men of a certain age, during which I delight in looking at the clock and seeing that I still have hours to sleep. This is a pleasure I never knew in my youth, when the dead of night was just a rumored time between two drowsy moments. Last night was especially good. I awoke to a splendid thunderstorm and relished the lightning for the span of my trek before plunging back into Slumberland. This morning the wet earth only hinted at the events of the night, but I had witnessed them.

The approach of the Big Sleep doesn't promise any intra-sleep thrills that a mortal mind can contemplate. As far as my sentient self is concerned, the approach is all that remains; but that holds mysteries enough. I observe this old man and the continually rejuvenated world around him with a bemused sense that the world has the more crotchets of the two. It stuffs its manifold mind with real problems and fabricated ones, with practical solutions and theatrical ones, soon forgetting which is which in a frenzy of contention. No wonder my level-headed friend wants to go in search of his Shangri-La. The world will of course prove more durable than I will, but I can say that when there's no mirror in front of me, and especially when I'm out walking, I mistake myself for a healthy young man — except in one situation. At seventy-eight I can still sprint up a spiral stairway of twenty-eight steps and walk on. However, descending is another matter. The top of any stairway gives me pause. When I look down, the voices of childhood elders start murmuring somewhere in my head: So-and-so had a fall. Broke a hip. Bad thing at that age. Never the same after being laid up for a spell. The bone doesn't mend quite right, either. So active until that happened! All it takes is one fall, though. So I descend with care — pretty rapidly, but deliberately. Not with that brisk scuffing action whereby you float down in communion with gravity while punching the steps with the balls of your feet. I don't believe I could do it now if I tried. I dare not try.

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.