Friday, April 25, 2025

YOU'D HAVE ANGRY ENERGY TOO IF YOU'D MADE HATING LIBERALISM YOUR ENTIRE PERSONALITY FOR DECADES

I don't like admitting this, but I understand how David Brooks feels:
I’ve detested at least three-quarters of what the Trump administration has done so far, but it possesses one quality I can’t help admiring: energy. I don’t know which cliché to throw at you, but it is flooding the zone, firing on all cylinders, moving rapidly on all fronts at once. It is operating at a tremendous tempo, taking the initiative in one sphere after another.

A vitality gap has opened up. The Trump administration is like a supercar with 1,000 horsepower, and its opponents have been coasting around on mopeds. You’d have to go back to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration in 1933 to find a presidency that has operated with such verve during its first 100 days.
I've detested 100% of what the Trump administration has done, and I certainly wouldn't say that the administration has verve, but I'll concede that, regrettably, the Trumpers have a hell of a lot of energy.

I don't agree with Brooks that it's primarily Trump's energy. Brooks writes:
Some of this is inherent in President Trump’s nature. He is not a learned man, but he is a spirited man, an assertive man. The ancient Greeks would say he possesses a torrential thumos, a burning core of anger, a lust for recognition. All his life, he has moved forward with new projects and attempted new conquests, despite repeated failures and bankruptcies that would have humbled a nonnarcissist.
Hey, you know what they say: Tiny hands, big thumos. (Actually, no -- nobody says that.) Brooks is right about Trump's "burning core of anger," but Trump spent most of his middle age getting a moderate amount of screen time on a TV show of which he was reportedly the star, even though it largely focused on non-famous contestants. Apart from that, he mostly slapped his name on buildings and other commodities (water, steaks, a fake university) built by others, until he discovered Fox News and almost accidentally became a pundit, and then a politician. He's a lazy guy. He's not a ball of energy.

Brooks is on more solid ground here:
The administration is also driven by its own form of righteous rage. Its members tend to have a clear consuming hatred for the nation’s establishment and a powerful conviction that for the nation to survive, it must be brought down.
The real reason the Trump administration seems energetic is that it's fueled by the pent-up energy of the conservative movement, which has spent decades stewing in eliminationist resentment of everything perceived as liberal. Trump is the angry figurehead, and Elon Musk supplies his own drug-fueled jitteriness (as well as army of boys for hire), but the desperate need to attack everything all at once is what you get after millions of Americans have spent years mass-consuming (and mass-producing) right-wing propaganda. Now that they've undergone this form of brain poisoning, they're consumed with the desire to reverse every form of human progress we've seen in America since 1900. Conveniently, the Heritage Foundation prepared for the Trump presidency by compiling a book longer than Ulysses on how to do just that, and an array of right-wing billionaires have kept the authors of the program well remunerated until they were ready to execute their plan.

Because this is David Brooks, he can't help blaming the old guard for their own demise at the hands of rage-fueled Trumpers. He's right that they partly brought this on themselves, but not in the way he thinks:
Trump’s offensive style takes advantage of the unique weaknesses of America’s existing leadership class....

The people who succeeded in the current meritocracy tend not to be spirited in the way Trump is spirited. The system weeds such people out and rewards those who can compliantly jump through the hoops their elders have put in front of them.

Members of the educated elite (guilty!) tend to operate by analysis, not instinct, which renders them slow-footed in comparison with the Trumps of the world. They tend to believe that if they say something or write something (ahem), they have done something. The system breeds a fear of failure that the more audacious Trump largely lacks. Such elites sometimes assume that if they can persuade themselves that they are morally superior, then that in itself constitutes victory; it’s all they need to do.
That isn't the reason the establishment failed. The establishment failed because it refused to do what people want it to do, which is make a serious dent in economic inequality and precarity. People are working hard and not getting ahead, while the rich get richer and richer. The establishment didn't want to do anything about this except tinker at the margins, and so millions of voters who weren't Trump superfans decided to vote for him because he promised to do something bold, even if they had no idea how destructive it would be.

When Brooks tries to imagine how to fight back, he frequently sounds like one of the weak-willed establishmentarians he describes:
On clarity of purpose: Trump’s opponents have still not produced the kind of one-sentence mission statement that he produces — that the elites have betrayed us, so we must destroy them.... My mission statement would be: America is great, and we will fight for what has made America great.

... Democrats will do the most good if they can stop sounding like Democrats for the time being, with all the tired rhetoric about the oligarchy and trickle-down economics.
Why does the anti-Trump movement need a goddamn "mission statement"? It's not some hipster Brooklyn startup named Sage + Acacia. Just fight the bastards.

And I see that "oligarchy" is the new "Latinx" -- the single word whose evil spell magically makes all Democrats unelectable, for reasons no one can explain. Yesterday Politico published a profile of Michigan senator and wannabe centrist savior Elissa Slotkin, in which we were told this:
Her strategy also focuses on language and tone. She said Democrats should stop using the term “oligarchy,” a phrase she said doesn’t resonate beyond coastal institutions, and just say that the party opposes “kings.”
In fact, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are drawing massive crowds in non-coastal America with a tour called "Fighting Oligarchy." Do Brooks and Slotkin object to the word "oligarchy"? Or do they object to fighting the oligarchy? Because people want that, and I sense that Brooks and Slotkin (and most mainstream Democrats) don't.

Right-wing propaganda tells Americans that elitism is cultural rather than economic, and many fall for that, but it's clear now to many people that Trump's war on propriety isn't solving any of their problems. Simply pointing out the harm done by the Trump administration is good, but harnessing class anger might be the only way to persuade Americans that there's an alternative to Trumpism that's equally vigorous.