An American Tragedy

 I define a dysfunctional family as a family in which one member is a god.  Such a member can be a father whose career takes them all over the world, or a mother obsessed with what the world thinks of every member, or a severely disabled or prodigiously talented child.  In each of those cases, and in others as well, the needs of all the other family members tend to give way to the chosen one's.  From 1789 onwards, the president of the United States has been, in a profound emotional sense, the father of our national family, and our emotional health depends partly on his.  We have never had a president like this one.

In relatively good times our national family functions relatively well, although like any human institution it never functions perfectly.  In such times it respects boundaries--boundaries between different branches of the government and between the government and individual citizens.  Simple courtesy, which demands that officials refer even to their political opponents with respect, is another such boundary.  The national family depends above all on a recognition of a common family interest that requires each of us, at one time or another, to sacrifice for the common good and accept that we cannot always have our own way.  And it requires respect for a relatively impartial legal system that will try to identify and punish the genuinely guilty according to relatively neutral standards.  

Our current president has built his whole career on the principle that he is unique among men and women, the best at anything he tries his hand at.  That is why he cheats at golf and proclaims his every achievement to be the greatest of its kind.  From the beginning of his career as a developer he focused on building up his image, and major media outlets cooperated because he was good copy.  At a certain point, his businesses began to fail, but he compensated by building up his brand.

Four Trump real estate properties in Atlantic City had all filed for bankruptcy by 2004, when The Apprentice first aired.  Trump seamlessly transitioned from a genuine entrepreneur who kept making bad choices, to an actor playing the role of a managerial genius to an audience of tens of millions.  The show was carefully scripted  to make him look omniscient and omnipotent, the self-image he had already created for himself.  Ratings, not the performance of the winners he picked, were its only measure of success.  Meanwhile, a big chunk of the US public got to know him every week.

I have written many times that Trump's spectacular rise in 2015-16 could never have happened if the political leadership of both parties had not lost touch with the great mass of US voters.  Only that allowed Trump to wipe the floor with a list of traditional Republican candidates and narrowly defeat Hillary Clinton in the electoral college. Trump adopted the role of savior of the country from the threats of immigration and leftist ideology.  The media establishment and the Democratic Party fought back by declaring  his election illegitimate, and the pandemic allowed Joe Biden to defeat him in 2020.  Biden failed however to restore a real bond between the president and the American people, and Kamala Harris promised nothing but more of the same.  Trump improved his standing among several key groups of voters and won both the popular vote and the electoral college.  Meanwhile, a coterie of younger Republicans planned a drastic scaling back of the federal government, a complete rejection of policies designed to halt climate change, a new crackdown on illegal immigration, and an all-out attack on certain popular ideologies that had come to dominate American universities, the mainstream media, and a growing number of corporate boardrooms.

In nine months back in power Trump and his subordinates have demonstrated a total disregard for American legal and constitutional norms, and even for the very idea of a general good which the government is supposed to serve.  The president regards the whole federal government as his own corporation, which exists for the purpose of enriching its stockholders--the economic interests that back him--and punishing his enemies.  He has staffed the highest levels of the Justice Department and certain key US Attorneys' offices with lawyers who have worked for him personally and ordered them to indict political enemies, which they are doing.  He has ordered federal troops into Democratic-led cities against the will of their mayors and governors.   He is withholding approved funds for large infrastructure projects in blue states, and he is trying to force universities to accept federal ideological controls.  He has no respect for any public official who disagrees with him, and his subordinates are purging various parts of the federal bureaucracy of people who think for themselves, including some who supported him at earlier stages of their careers.  He seems to believe, like Louis XIV, that he is the state, and he is turning the White House into his own Versailles.  Meanwhile, he is promoting himself as the greatest leader who has ever lived, who creates a booming economy, ends wars all over the world, and eliminates crime in major cities within a few weeks.

I have just finished teaching an old favorite book, Doctor Zhivago, for the first time in many years.  At the climax of the book Zhivago, whose life has been upended by the Russian revolution and civil war for several years, reflects on history.

"He reflected again that he conceived of history, of what is called the course of history, not in the accepted way but by analogy with the vegetable kingdom. In winter, under the snow, the leafless branches of a wood are thin and poor, like the hairs on an old man's wart. But in only a few days in spring the forest is transformed, it reaches the clouds, and you can hide or lose yourself in its leafy maze. This transformation is achieved with a speed greater than in the case of animals, for animals do not grow as fast as plants, and yet we cannot directly observe the movement of growth even of plants. The forest does not change its place, we cannot lie in wait for it and catch it in the act of change. Whenever we look at it, it seems to be motionless. And such also is the immobility to our eyes of the eternally growing, ceaselessly changing history, the life of society moving invisibly in its incessant transformations.

"Tolstoy thought of it in just this way, but he did not spell it out so clearly. He denied that history was set in motion by Napoleon or any other ruler or general, but he did not develop his idea to its logical conclusion. No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history's organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track minds, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshipped for decades thereafter, for centuries."

We cannot understand what is happening if we ignore the changes in our national forest which grew slowly over five or six decades.  Business interests in the 1970s adopted the ideas of the Powell Memorandum and embarked upon a long-term attack on the regulatory state that the New Deal had created.  Academics starting in the same decade and accelerating in the 1980s and 1990s replaced the story of the advance of western civilization with a history of oppression and resistance based on race, gender, and sexuality.  Financial manipulation and advertising replaced manufacturing and engineering skill as the motor of our economy.  The press set itself up as the ultimate arbiter of good and evil, the role that the framers reserved for our political leadership.  And our educated elite not only assumed more and more power, but also used that power to benefit itself at the expense of the more than half of the population that does not graduate from college.  Entertainers eclipsed politicians as national figures, opening up the opportunity which Donald Trump took advantage of.

Most of all, I think, the 1960s marked the beginning of a general revolt against more traditional authority of all kinds--moral authority, legal authority, political authority, and even the authority of custom.  That is the only reason that Donald Trump, who has spoken about real and presumed enemies in utterly unprecedented ways since he entered politics, could have gotten such a hearing.  Richard Nixon's tapes revealed an inner world quite similar to Trump's. Nixon too divided the world into allies and enemies and spoke frequently of setting various parts of the federal government on particular enemies and firing any civil servant who seemed to countermand his will--but both Nixon and the men around him knew that he had to moderate these impulses in real life and hide them from the American people.  Trump has not found that to be necessary.  We have for the first time a president who rejects our political and constitutional traditions, but he could not have come to power if so many of us had not lost interest and confidence in our political system first.  There is no point in assigning blame for what has gone wrong, because we cannot rewrite history and magically undo the changes that took place so gradually that we could not see them at the time.  Two centuries of an enlightened experiment in government are giving way to something very new all over the north Atlantic world.  I turn again to Zhivago and to another paragraph from the same part of the book.

"As he scribbled his odds and ends, he made a note reaffirming his belief that art always serves beauty, and beauty is delight in form, and form is the key to organic life, since no living thing can exist without it, so that every work of art, including tragedy, expresses the joy of existence. And his own ideas and notes also brought him joy, a tragic joy, a joy full of tears that exhausted him and made his head ache."

Boris Pasternak, the author of Zhivago, had translated several of the most important Shakespearean tragedies.  The United States, like Russia in 1917-21, is now in the midst of a tragedy of our own, one that began, I think in the mid-1960s, as I suggested in American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War.  Any joy must come from reverence for the great things we achieved together, the knowledge that every great nation pays for its greatness in this way from time to time, and the confidence that this will not be the end of history or of progress.

Our New Era

 Beginning, I suppose, in the early twentieth century, when the ancestor of the FBI was first created, and accelerating very rapidly during the New Deal era and afterwards, the United States federal government acquired enormous new powers, vastly increased its budget and personnel, and became involved in many more areas of American life.  All this happened, for the most part, in the spirit of the Enlightenment.  It attempted to improve American economic and social life, and also to deploy federal power to correct vast economic imbalances.  The Enlightenment, in practice if not always in theory, relied on bureaucracies operating according to impartial rules.  That was what our new federal bureaucracies, including our vastly expanded Department of Justice, claimed to do.

This process aroused considerable opposition from the beginning.  Some progressives and some conservatives feared the growth of federal power, and some of the nation's leading progressives opposed US entry into the First World War because they did not want a militarized state.  Many Republicans became apoplectic during the 1930s over FDR's expansion of federal power, which they viewed similarly to the way many liberals view the Trump Administration today.  After President Truman began trying to put the federal government behind the civil rights movement in 1948, many (but not all) white southern Democrats became deeply hostile to federal power once again as well.  In the 1960s Kennedy and especially Johnson resumed the expansion of federal power over civil rights issues and other matters, leading to the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964 and the political realignment that in 1968 reduced the Democratic presidential vote from 60 percent in 1964 to 43 percent in 1968.  That percentage reached 50 percent only once between 1964 and 2008, in 1976.

Ronald Reagan campaigned against federal power in 1980 and 1984, but he did relatively little to decrease it, even though he created permanent large federal deficits with his tax cuts and military spending increases. George W. Bush destroyed the balanced budget that Bill Clinton had left him with tax cuts of his own, but also expanded the federal government's reach in certain areas.  Donald Trump also moved relatively cautiously in his first term.  Now, however, the situation has completely changed.

Bitter arguments over race, sex and gender have now joined with the century-old struggle over the economic role of the federal government to divide Americans as deeply, probably, as they were divided in the 1850s, and more divided than they were during the New Deal.  The Trump Administration, which represents a coalition of the fossil fuel industry, an increasing segment of Silicon Valley, the financial community, conservative supporters of the Israeli government, the religious right, and free-market ideologues, has now declared a long-term political struggle against the ideology of the Democratic Party and the institutions that support it, led by universities and certain foundations.  Discarding the idea of a federal bureaucracy operating according to impartial rules, it has begun distributing and withholding federal money arbitrarily to achieve political objectives.  Money approved by Congress for medical research and parceled out bureaucratically to universities has been blocked to force universities to abandon ideologically motived programs like DEI and to do more to stop anti-Israel protests, which they label as anti-Semitic.  And this may only be the beginning.

Based on statements by Christopher Rufo, who is not part of the Administration but seems to be closely connected to it, and leaks from Washington in the last few days, it seems that the Justice Department is contemplating cases against the Soros and Ford Foundations based on the RICO Act, which was passed to go after organized crime.  In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, they are thinking about charging those foundations with leading a criminal conspiracy to incite violence against conservatives by spreading hate speech against conservative ideas.  Rufo, a fellow of the Manhattan institute, outlined this idea here.  This concept is, to put it mildly, a remarkable stretch of the RICO Act in defiance of numerous precedents about free speech, but the recent indictment of James Comey shows that the Bondi Justice Department, prodded by the White House, is not likely to be deterred by that.  If such cases are indeed filed, they could drain enormous resources from those foundations even if they are eventually thrown out of court.   In a parallel development, today's papers report that FBI director Kash Patel has ended long-term cooperative relationships between the Bureau and both the Antidefamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center because those two groups have cited many conservatives for hate speech. 

I believe that there are ample constitutional and legal grounds to block the administration's discriminatory use of federal money, as well as further tortured legal attempts to bring down the left, but we have no idea in today's climate whether  federal courts will, or can, ensure that those laws will still be applied.  As regular readers know, I myself reject many aspects of mainstream Democratic ideology nowadays, and I also think that our leading universities need drastic reform and re-orientation.  This is not how I would like to see necessary changes come about, but history does not care what I want.  I also believe that broader forces are at work here.  More than a century ago the German sociologist Max Weber defined three kinds of authority: traditional, bureaucratic, and charismatic.  We established key elements of our bureaucracy under Franklin Roosevelt, who had charismatic authority of his own, but I don't think we have had a truly charismatic spokesman for strong federal authority since John F. Kennedy, and perhaps Lyndon Johnson in his first two years in office.  I do not think modern life can exist without bureaucracy, but we all know how stultified and frozen it can become, and we could see back in the late 1960s, if we were looking, that some aspects of human nature instinctively revolt against it, even when it is doing good.  We are watching history lurch back and forth, as it always has and probably always will. 

In that connection, I am once again teaching one of my favorite novels, Doctor Zhivago, in an older students' program at a local university.  One striking passage occurs during a house party in Moscow in the fall of 1917--after the overthrow of the Tsar, but before the Bolshevik Revolution.  Zhivago, speaking for author Boris Pasternak, makes the following speech to the guests.

"During the revolution it will seem to you, as it seemed to us at the front, that life has stopped, that there is nothing personal left, that there is  nothing going on in the world except killing and dying. If we live long enough to read the chronicles and memoirs of this period, we shall realize that in these fie or ten years we have experienced more than other people in a century.  I don't know whether the people will rise of themselves and advance spontaneously l ike a tide, or whether everything will be done in the name of  the people. Such a tremendous event requires no dramatic proof if its existence. I'll be convinced without proof.  It's petty to explore causes of titanic events. They haven't any. It's only in a family quarrel that you look for beginnings--after people have pulled each other's hair and smashed the dishes they rack their brains trying to figure out who started it.  What is truly great [or terrible--DK] is without beginning, like the universe.  It confronts us as suddenly as if it had always been there or had dropped out of the blue."

Having spent my whole life trying to uncover the causes of titanic events, I never really liked this passage--but now I think I understand it.  I would change "They haven't any" to "They have too many."  But that doesn't change the thought that much.