Introduction
This is not an advocacy post for anything; it's purely an attempt to understand the current moment. I don't have any positive suggestions on policy, and only one on managing our own place in the context; otherwise just thoughts on the conflict that other people seem very upset about. Several other posts provoked these thoughts, which I will link below.
In his post on Sunday links, AVI posted an article by Rob Henderson called "The Rage of the Failing Elite." I think the piece captures the youth-ish part of the opposition: in other words, the part that isn't captured by the "Whiteness and Oldness" narrative that AVI was interrogating the other day. It's not really a new idea; I've seen versions of it for years. The notion is that we're overproducing 'elites' of various sorts among the young, who are striving for positions that really don't exist; and they are aggrieved about finding that all that effort and expense was based on an illusion.
Part I: The Oldness and Whiteness
However, I think the real rage is on the side of the white and old part of the opposition. Not because, curiously, they are either white or old (except incidentally in the latter part because it is related to the contexts of their lives). It's because they spent their whole lives as devotees of the Liberal concept that dominated politics from FDR's time (and thus was well-settled when they were growing up) through LBJ's time (when they were young and formulating their political identites). They aren't progressives or socialists or Marixsts, they're liberals who are watching this titanic order destroyed in front of their eyes.
Heather Cox Richardson, on that side, frames the issue this way during a long discussion of how much she thinks that the collapse of that state will hurt poor and weak people:
"Trump is trying to make the impasse between the parties about the shutdown, but that obscures the actual fight at hand. What is at stake is the theory behind the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act: the destruction of the modern American government that was put in place in the 1930s by Democrats under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and expanded from then until 1981 under both Democratic and Republican presidents. Today’s fight is about the cuts made by billionaire Elon Musk as head of the 'Department of Government Efficiency,' and cuts made after Musk left the administration by Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought.
"Republicans have embraced the destruction of the modern government, slashing SNAP benefits, Medicaid, cancer research, the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA), and so on. The Democrats are defending the government that has been in place since the 1930s, focused on leveling the playing field between the very wealthy and ordinary Americans. Trump is determined to resurrect the pre–New Deal system in the United States and refuses to entertain any notion that his vision will not work."
There is some structural truth to that criticism, but such a change -- though titanic -- merely parallels the changes of Woodrow Wilson or FDR or LBJ. They're just in the other direction. Yet it's legally just as permissible to change the one way as the other; and it's not unreasonable to prefer a solution that is closer to what the Constitution actually says. These systems in many ways affront the Constitution's language, passing vast power and control out of the elected government and into the unelected bureaucracy. That's not obviously more legitimate than trying to restore a more strictly constitutional order.
Part II: Kindness, Unkindness, and the Stopping of Thought
In addition to watching the institutions destroyed that they believed in, and considered part of upholding a more just and better social order, they had a general ethic of being "nice" and, even more importantly, of being "kind." All this blatant destruction is being done by people who are willing to not be nice and not be kind. Trump's mockery of them isn't nice and it isn't kind, and it enrages them as much because of that as because they're the targets of it: indeed, they seem angrier when they aren't the targets of it. They were much madder about the Mariachi videos targeting Hispanic politicians than about anything pointed at old and white liberals.
Nor are they entirely wrong about that. I tend to find Trump's antics amusing and buffoonish, meant to mock rather than to harm; and since all of these politicians very much deserve to be mocked, I often even find the mockery healthy. Most of Trump's supporters, especially the red-hat wearing, dancing on truck MAGA crowd, seem to be having a lot of fun rather than being motivated by anger or hatred. Yet some of the most repellent people of the present moment really are those -- coincidentally also usually old and white -- on Trump's side who feel a deep hate for their political opponents. They are in their way just as repellent as the young Marxists who muse about how nice it would be if more Republicans and conservatives were killed.
None of these genuinely repellent types have any real power, though. They're both of them raging away and making life less pleasant for the rest of us, but they don't actually control any levers for either side. The Democratic Party is motivated by the public sector unions and their big corporate and tech donors, to include Bezos' ex-wife who is flooding the zone with donations. They care about the donations, not really about any of the apparent things they are fighting over rhetorically.
The repellent ones on the Republican side are just angry old men whose bitterness instantly causes them to be rejected as serious by anyone at all. The Republicans will take their votes, and may performatively listen to them with social media posts, but won't actually be motivated to follow their ideas -- insofar as they have ideas, which is rare since they're too busy being angry to think. When they say something that sounds like an idea, it usually turns out to be just them applying an old heuristic from their youth to a current problem without further examination; but heuristics are shortcuts to thought, not actual thought; they're 'this usually works' ready-made solutions that can be applied without further thinking about it.
And, in fairness, those old and white liberals are also doing exactly the same thing from their side: they just have different heuristics. When you hear someone on that side saying that something is "apartheid," that's them stopping themselves from having to think further about the problem and applying a ready-made solution. There's no further examination of whether that language is appropriate, or actually a good analogy, or if there's a better analogy, or if there's even a more-generous way of considering the other side's view. Everything stops once the problem is labeled "apartheid" -- we don't need to think any further than that, we just need to oppose it resolutely and consider that side to be moral monsters. They deploy language like that all the time: genocide, apartheid, 'a kind of segregation,' 'MAGA is just like the KKK.'
Chesterton wrote a whole chapter called "The Suicide of Thought" which warns about 'thoughts that stop thoughts.' It only imperfectly applies here, but the general warning about allowing your thinking to be stopped cold with labels and heuristics carries over.
Part III: A Very Limited Sort of Solution
I feel weirdly disconnected from this fight. All of those factions believe in much larger and more powerful government and government programs than I do. Trump might be trying to overturn some of the New Deal constitutional order -- which could be rephrased, 'to restore the actual constitutional function to the Federal government' -- but he wants to replace it with a presidency as powerful as Woodrow Wilson's was, with the support of a Supreme Court and a legislative branch that would pass genuinely unconstitutional laws against freedom of speech and of criticizing the government. Meanwhile, pace Heather Cox Richardson, I still feel like the poor and the weak would be better off without government assistance, which always comes along with government control of the intimate spaces of our lives that they are offering to 'assist' us with; the lives of the poor and weak might not immediately improve by the loss of transfer payments, but eventually they would figure out how to feed and house themselves and be freer for it.
They have a lot more they agree about than any of them agree with me. It's just unpleasant to watch them being so upset all the time, driving these cycles of rhetorical conflict that occasionally -- at the fringes -- result in real but pointless violence. Even the violence isn't really going to change anything because it doesn't touch the actual levers of power.
So I've largely disconnected from politics, but I still have to deal with the older of my relatives (who are, of course, also white) who are very upset and given to explosions of rage about politics for the first time in their lives. I don't want them to win or to get their way, so I won't support their protests or striving; I'll just try to get them to talk about something besides politics while we're together.
Increasingly that's hard. The Big Show is occupying everyone's thoughts; even I'm writing about it this morning, when Aristotle would be a better use of my time. It's hard to let go of the drama thrust constantly before us, but I think it is the wisest course.
