Corey Robin's Blog, page 26

Reminder: Talk tonight with Keith Gessen, and Wednesday night with Eddie Glaude

Just a reminder…

Tonight (Monday), I’ll be talking with Keith Gessen about the new edition of The Reactionary Mind. We’ll be talking at 7 pm at McNally Jackson, 52 Prince Street in Manhattan.

On Wednesday, I’ll be talking with Eddie Glaude about The Reactionary Mind. We’ll be be talking at 7:30 pm at Dweck Center in the Brooklyn Public Library, 10 Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn.

I hope to see any and all of you who live in the NYC area either tonight or Wednesday night. And if you come, please make sure to say hi.

And make sure to buy the new edition. It’s already gotten its first review and there are more to come.

Upcoming Events in LA and NYC with Keith Gessen and Eddie Glaude

I’ll be doing several speaking events in Los Angeles and New York City.

On Tuesday, November 7, I’ll be delivering the E. Victor Wolfenstein Memorial Lecture at UCLA. The title of my talk is “White State, Black Market: The Political Economy of Clarence Thomas.” The talk will be at 6 pm in the Charles Young Grand Salon in Kerkhoff Hall.

On Monday, November 13, I’ll be in conversation with Keith Gessen, a founding editor of n+1 and a contributor to The New Yorker, about the new edition of The Reactionary Mind. We’ll be talking at 7 pm at McNally Jackson, 52 Prince Street in Manhattan.

On Wednesday, November 15, I’ll be in conversation with Eddie Glaude, William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University, also about the new edition of The Reactionary Mind. We’ll be be talking at 7:30 pm at the Brooklyn Public Library (Dweck Center), 10 Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn.

Hope to see you at any one of these events! If you come, make sure to say hello.

Also, since my last update, I’ve done some new interviews about the new edition of the book. Sam Seder got in deep about Trump and The Art of the Deal. My interview with Sam starts at the 14:40 mark. I also did a lengthy interview with Dan Denvir; he and I talked about the right’s ambivalence about capitalism and politics, and how that has played out from Burke to Hayek to Trump.

And the new edition is now out and available for purchase.

Because of her, it went well with him: Weinstein, Wieseltier, and the Enablers of Sexual Harassment

Part of this week’s Torah portion, from Genesis 12, tells the story of a famine in Canaan that drives Abram and Sarai (the names of Abraham and Sarah before they became Abraham and Sarah) to Egypt. As they near Egypt, Abram fears that Sarai will be sexually desired there and that he’ll be killed so that she can be taken. Abram devises a plan. Sarai should pretend to be his sister. That way, she’ll be taken but he won’t be killed in the process. “Please say that you are my sister,” he says, “that it may go well with me because of you.”

And that’s what happens. Sarai is taken by Pharaoh (none of this is described as rape; it’s all part of the Bible’s euphemistic traffic in women), who then amply rewards Abram—with herd animals, slaves, and the like—for the gift of Sarai. “And because of her,” the text says, with a nod to the earlier formulation, “it went well with Abram.”

When God learns of this transgression, God punishes Pharaoh greatly. Pharaoh returns Sarai to Abram. Abram, the enabler who served up his wife to Pharaoh, keeps his reward; indeed, it is the mustard seed of his later wealth and retinue. Because of her, it went well with him.

(According to our rabbinic intern, who delivered an amazing drash on this passage this past weekend in shul, there is a midrash or some other medieval commentary that says that the later bondage of the Jews in Egypt was in fact a punishment for Abram’s sin with Sarai. But there’s nothing in the Torah itself, I don’t think, that suggests that. Instead, it is the rapist/harasser who gets punished, not the enabler.)

Reading this story, I couldn’t help thinking, as did our rabbinic intern, of all the sexual harassment and sexual assault stories we’re now hearing about. Only I was thinking less of the pharaonic harassers and their victims than of the collaborators and bystanders, figures who have long concerned me: in this case, the assistants to Harvey Weinstein (some of them women), who helped serve up the women he harassed or raped, or the silent staffers at The New Republic who, according to the Times, witnessed some of Leon Wieseltier’s behavior—”never an ‘open secret,'” Michelle Cottle has written, just “simply out in the open”—but said nothing.

And I couldn’t help thinking that all of those enablers, those collaborators and bystanders, were motivated not simply by confusion or uncertainty, which many of us feel when confronted with injustice, not simply by timidity or fear, which many of us also feel, but also by a fear laden and laced with ambition, which, again, many of us feel—a sense that if I cooperate with this monster, or if I keep quiet, if I look away, maybe I’ll be okay, even advance; if I don’t, my career will be ruined. “Covetousness begets fear,” declared the radical Gerrard Winstanley during the English Civil War, “and this makes a man to draw the creatures to him by hook or crook, and to please the strongest side.”

And I couldn’t help thinking, finally, that though Pharaoh was punished, it went well with Abram.

What’s wrong with the discourse of norm erosion?

We’ve now had, in less than 20 years, two presidents elected over and against the expressed preferences (not in a poll, but in actual ballots) of the majority of the voters. I think most Democrats, liberals, and leftists would agree that both of these presidents were or are disasters. So these two elections were democratic catastrophes on both procedural and substantive grounds.

Yet the single most important determinant of these two disasters—the fact that we have a Constitution that creates an Electoral College that privileges the interests of states over persons—cannot, by the terms of the discourse, be counted as a norm erosion. Indeed, when it comes to this main determinant of the Electoral College and how it works, there was no norm erosion in 2000 or 2016; the system worked exactly as it was designed by the text (I’m deliberately setting aside the Supreme Court decision in 2000 because that would get us into a whole other realm of controversy).

So we have a discourse of norm erosion that allows us to reel in shock at the way that Trump talks to senators, governors, and citizens, but that discourse has nothing to say about the very system, the very text, that produced this president that talks in this terrible and shocking way.

Indeed, insofar as some of the peddlers of that discourse believe that these cherished norms ultimately issue from the system and the text itself, and that it is that system and that text that need protecting, one can say that the discourse of norm erosion actually prevents us from tackling the very system, the very text, that produced this president that talks in this terrible and shocking way.

Forty Years of The Firm: Trump and the Coasian Grotesque

In his classic article “The Nature of the Firm“—which I wish would be put on the list of required reading for political theorists; it really should be in our canon—the economist R.H. Coase divides the economic world into two modes of action: deal-making, which happens between firms, and giving orders, which happens within firms. Coase doesn’t say this, but it’s a plausible extrapolation that making deals and giving orders are, basically, the two things businessmen know how to do.

In the last year, it’s occurred to me, on more than one occasion, that Trump is a Coasian grotesque. Making deals and giving orders: that’s all he knows how to do. Except that he doesn’t. As we’re seeing, he’s really bad at both.

Regardless of whether he’s good or bad at the ways and means of the firm, what Trump definitely doesn’t know is politics. Authority, legitimacy, persuasion, leadership: these are arts that Trump is completely unpracticed at, and it shows. When it comes to wielding power in the political sphere—I’m not talking about executive orders, of which Trump has issued many, and which are a sign of his weakness, not his strength; I’m talking about exercising power that requires the assent and cooperation of other political actors—he’s completely out of his league.

There’s a reason for that: the conception of he power has—such as it is and however bad he is at it—is drawn from the Coasian world of the firm. To that extent, we can read Trump’s failure not simply as a referendum on Trump, not simply as a referendum on the Republican Party, but more largely and more importantly, as a verdict on 40 years of politics in the United States. For what neoliberalism has meant, among other things, is not simply the rise of markets and money and all the rest; it has also meant, as Wendy Brown has argued so compellingly, the rise of economic modes of reason and their insertion into politics. Not just their insertion, but their domination. Such that our entire conception of political leadership is drawn from the world of the firm (that’s not Brown’s argument; it’s my tangent to her argument).

This is not a story of the rise of Reagan or the Republican Party. It’s a completely bipartisan story. It was Jimmy Carter, in 1975, who helped begin the story, when he launched his presidential campaign with the claim: “I ran the Georgia government as well as almost any corporate structure in this country is run.” Four decades later, managing a firm no longer provides a standard of leadership. It is the substance of leadership.

A substance, as we are now seeing, that is increasingly irrelevant to the challenges of our age. Trump’s problem is not that he’s bad at making deals or giving commands. Even if he were good at that, it’d not be sufficient to manage the crises of his coalition. A different sort of art is called for, one that is not drawn from the firm.

If we had a real political opposition, if we had a real left, they’d be using Trump not as an example of right-wing lunacy or Republican perfidy; he’d be Exhibit A of Forty Years of the Firm.

Noah and Shoah: Purification by Violence from the Flood to the Final Solution

In shul this morning, I was musing on this passage from Genesis 8:21, which was in the parsha, or Torah portion, we read for the week:

…the Lord said to Himself: “Never again will I doom the earth because of man, since the devisings of man’s mind are evil from his youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living being, as I have done.”

This statement comes just after the Flood has ended. God commands Noah to leave the ark, to take all the animals with him. Noah does that and then makes an offering to God. God is pleased by the offering, and suddenly—out of nowhere—makes this resolution: I won’t do this again. I won’t drown the world, destroy its ways (“So long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease”) or its beings, again.

This is no sudden moment of humanitarianism on God’s part. There’s not even a hint of regret or remorse in the passage. But it is an acknowledgment on God’s part, a resolution born of a sad realization, that the Flood was a mistake. Born of a very wrong-headed idea.

The original idea of the Flood was not to destroy all of creation, to rid God of God’s work. If that were the case, why tell Noah to build an ark for him and his family and the animals? No, the idea was to destroy all that part of creation that was evil and wicked and tainted—but to separate and save a remnant of goodness that would be the seed of a new civilization.

The destruction of the Flood, in other words, was violence of a particular and familiar kind: a purifying, separating violence of the sort we so often see in ethnic cleansing or genocide. Get rid of the stain, which can be located in a specific people or place, separate the remnant from that stain, and you can begin again, with goodness and virtue and purity.

What is God’s realization? It doesn’t work. Stains are everywhere, evil is everywhere, you can’t murder your way to goodness, you can’t purify through violence. Other ways must be found, other means are necessary. This isn’t an argument against political violence or even violence, which have their strategic uses. It’s an argument against the notion that violence can purify, that violence can make a people spiritually, morally, whole.

The ethnic cleansing/genocide comparison came to me while reading another passage in Genesis, not long before this one. It’s just before the Flood begins. Noah has built the ark, as God commanded. He’s gathered all manner of animal and his family. And then God commands them to go in. It’s not clear if they go up or down into the ark; if they ascend or descend. But in they go, silently as far as we know, two by two. The passage ends with this terrible sentence:

And the Lord shut them in.

I had never thought it before, but the passage reminded me of descriptions of Jews going into the gas chambers. There’s a particularly visual moment I had in mind from the movie Denial, about the Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt who is sued for libel by David Irving. In one scene, Lipstadt and her attorney travel to Auschwitz on a research mission, and as they’re looking around Auschwitz, they come upon a gas chamber, which is preceded by a long downward ramp. Something people would walk down and from which they would enter the chamber, where they would then be shut in.

For some reason, the passage I read, culminating in “the Lord shut them in,” called that scene to mind. Only in the Bible, the genocide works in reverse: those who are shut in the ark are saved; everyone else is destroyed.

If the comparison offends or horrifies you, I completely understand. I was jarred by it myself; it made me uncomfortable. And I don’t raise it to be provocative or to over-share a thought better kept to myself. Because the more I thought about it, the more the resonances between the Flood and the Final Solution, between Noah and Shoah, came.

So it’s clear, as I said, that God knows the Flood was a mistake, on a massive scale. And it’s a mistake, as I said, born of this terrible idea: that you can murder your way to purity, that you can remove the stain by separating out a part of a people and destroying the rest. This is why, immediately following that realization, God makes a covenant with Noah. Every time it rains, there will be a rainbow: a sign of God’s promise that God will never again destroy the earth by flood (or other measures, the passage seems to suggest). This is the famous “rainbow sign,” which figures in that couplet from a black spiritual—God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time—that gave the title to James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.

(How we square that promise from God with the multiple mass murders and cleansings that follow in the Bible—from Sodom and Gommorah to the Israelites slaughtering the Canaanites—is another story.)

But after God makes this promise, we come to the Tower of Babel story. That story, I would argue, is an epilogue to the story of the Flood. It is about humanity’s own encounter with the very impulse that God has just indulged and then renounced.

The men and women who build the Tower of Babel are not unlike God in the Flood. Traditional interpretations see that imitation of God as the sin, the wrong, at the heart of the Tower of Babel story. The men and women who built the tower, the argument goes, were inspired by hubris, they wanted to be as high as God, and so on.

But read against the Flood, the Tower of Babel suggests a different interpretation: the sin was not wanting to be like God. The sin was to repeat the same mistake God had just made with the Flood: that is, wanting to purify your way to unity by separating yourselves from the rest of humanity.

Upon seeing the Tower, God notes:

Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language;

God serves here not as a judge but as a witness, as a narrator or stand-in for the reader. God observes here, for us, that the people’s oneness is the problem. (There’s a different interpretation of this passage, which focuses on how separation and division make collective action and solidarity impossible, but I want to set that aside for another day.) The people have built their way, have cloistered themselves, into oneness. It’s true that no violence is mentioned in the story, but our rabbi in shul today told us of an ancient midrash or commentary that says that in the building of the Tower, the men and women cared more about the bricks than the workers who built it. So the workers would fall from the height and no one would notice or care, but a brick would fall, and all would wail and weep. In their aspiration for wholeness and unity via separation, a holy unity that would mimic the moral purity and perfection of heaven precisely because it was so removed from the rest of the earth—”let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth”—the people of the Tower willingly countenanced all manner of murder and mayhem. Not unlike what God did in the Flood.

And how does God deal with that desire for purification by separation, that violence that they countenance on their way to unity?

Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth:

God establishes plurality, the multiplicity of peoples, the varieties of culture and language, as a condition of the world. Not as a punishment for hubris, I would argue, not as a punishment for seeking improvement or even working toward utopia, but as a reminder and a reaffirmation of what God came to realize after the Flood: purification by violence, moral wholeness by separation, final solutions—none of these is an answer to the condition of the world. They are, in fact, an assault on the condition of the world.

This, as Hannah Arendt recognized in her famous epilogue to Eichmann in Jerusalem, was the Nazis’ great crime, the crime for which Eichmann should hang. “And just as you,” she imagines a court telling Eichmann,

supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations—as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world—we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you.

 

If you don’t think that some day you’ll be looking back fondly on Trump, think again: That day has already come.

Back in March 2016, I made a prediction:

If, God forbid, Trump is elected, some day, assuming we’re all still alive, we’ll be having a conversation in which we look back fondly, as we survey the even more desultory state of political play, on the impish character of Donald Trump. As Andrew March said to me on Facebook, we’ll say something like: What a jokester he was. Didn’t mean it at all. But, boy, could he cut a deal.

When I wrote that, I was thinking of all the ways in which George W. Bush, a man vilified by liberals for years, was being rehabilitated, particularly in the wake of Trump’s rise.

Yesterday’s speech, in which Bush obliquely took on Trump, was merely the latest in a years-long campaign to restore his reputation and welcome him back into the fold of respectability.

Remember when Michelle Obama gave him a hug?

That was Step 2 or 3. Yesterday’s speech was Step 4.

For years prior to that, our image of Bush was emblazoned by the memory of not only the Iraq War, which killed hundreds of thousands of people, of not only the casual violence, the fratboyish, near-sociopathic, irresponsibility, of Bush’s rhetoric of war (remember when, after the Iraq War was over, in June 2003, Bush turned to his Administrator General there, Jay Garner, and said, “Hey, Jay, you want to do Iran?”). It was also imprinted with the memory of the laziness and incuriosity, the buoyant indifference, that got us into war, not just the Iraq War but also the war on terror (the original sin of it all, if you ask me) in the first place.

All those now pining for the pre-9/11 George W. Bush, a man who took his responsibilities to the nation—and his duty to its people—seriously, an anti-Trump who, whatever his many flaws, at least had a sense of the gravitas of his office and its burdens, might want to have a read-through to what was going down in the Bush administration ca. August 2001.

Roemer then asked Tenet if he mentioned Moussaoui to President Bush at one of their frequent morning briefings. Tenet replied, “I was not in briefings at this time.” Bush, he noted, “was on vacation.” He added that he didn’t see the president at all in August 2001. During the entire month, Bush was at his ranch in Texas. “You never talked with him?” Roemer asked. “No,” Tenet replied.

…

And there you have it. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has made a big point of the fact that Tenet briefed the president nearly every day. Yet at the peak moment of threat, the two didn’t talk at all. At a time when action was needed, and orders for action had to come from the top, the man at the top was resting undisturbed.

Throughout that summer, we now well know, Tenet, Richard Clarke, and several other officials were running around with their “hair on fire,” warning that al-Qaida was about to unleash a monumental attack. On Aug. 6, Bush was given the now-famous President’s Daily Brief (by one of Tenet’s underlings), warning that this attack might take place “inside the United States.” For the previous few years—as Philip Zelikow, the commission’s staff director, revealed this morning—the CIA had issued several warnings that terrorists might fly commercial airplanes into buildings or cities.

And now, we learn today, at this peak moment, Tenet hears about Moussaoui. Someone might have added 2 + 2 + 2 and possibly busted up the conspiracy. But the president was down on the ranch, taking it easy. Tenet wasn’t with him. Tenet never talked with him. Rice—as she has testified—wasn’t with Bush, either. He was on his own and, willfully, out of touch.

But now that’s all forgotten. Or being forgotten.

It may be, however, when it comes to Trump’s rehabilitation, that things will move faster than I predicted, that Trump won’t have to wait as long as Bush to get out of the doghouse.

After all, Sean Spicer is now up at Harvard, tutoring the hopefuls of tomorrow’s ruling class.

Visiting Fellow @Seanspicer talks to students over breakfast about the state of politics in America. pic.twitter.com/bBOkBhRKeV

— InstituteOfPolitics (@HarvardIOP) October 18, 2017

And just after Roy Moore got the nomination in Alabama, Paul Begala was quoted in Politico:

What do they say in recoveries? You have to hit bottom? I thought that, with Trump, they [the GOP] hit bottom. But, apparently not, because Moore is worse.

And there you have it, the stage is already being set. Given the relentless march rightward of the Republican Party, there will always be something worse waiting in the wings, something worse that will inevitably furnish Trump with a retrospective glow—even though it was Trump who set the stage for that something worse, in the same way that it was Bush who set the stage for Trump.

So, here’s a message to everyone on Twitter or Facebook saying, gee, I never thought I’d be saying this, but next to Trump, George W. Bush really isn’t so bad: One day, I promise you, I guarantee you, you will be saying, gee, I never thought I’d be saying this, but next to TK [that’s editor-speak for “to come”], Trump really isn’t so bad.

Unless, that is, you get out of this terrible habit of burnishing the past—something you can only do because it’s no longer in front of you—and dehistoricizing the present.

 

Was Bigger Thomas an Uptalker?

The funniest moment in Native Son (not a novel known for its comedy, I know): when the detective, Mr. Britten, is asking the housekeeper, Peggy, a bunch of questions about Bigger Thomas, to see if Thomas is in fact a Communist.

Britten: When he talks, does he wave his hands around a lot, like he’s been around a lot of Jews?

Peggy: I never noticed, Mr. Britten.

…

Britten: Now, listen, Peggy. Think and try to remember if his voice goes up when he talks, like Jews, when they talk. Know what I mean? You see, Peggy, I’m trying to find out if he’s been around Communists.

Interesting side note: how much more terrified the white power structure in that novel is of the Reds than of black people; though the two fears are obviously mingled, the anticommunist phobia is much more overt.

Other interesting side note: Along with Invisible Man, Native Son is one of Clarence Thomas’s favorite novels.

“It’s Scalias All the Way Down”: Why the very thing that scholars think is the antidote to Trump is in fact the aide-de-Trump

Mike Allen is reporting this morning:

Trump was upbeat and brought up a Kim Strassell column in The Wall Street Journal, “Scalias all the way down,” giving the president credit for “remaking the federal judiciary.”‘

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. While political scientists warn against the norm erosion of the Trump presidency—and dwell on the importance of the courts, the Constitution, and the rule of law as antidotes—the most far-seeing leaders of the conservative movement and the Republican party understand that long after Trump has left the stage, long after the Republican Party has lost its hold over the political discourse and political apparatus, it will be Trump’s judiciary—interpreting the Constitution, applying the rule of law—that preserves and extends his legacy.


 


People often ask me why I criticize this language of norm erosion, why I go after social scientists ringing the warning bell against Trump. One of the reasons is that the very terms of their analysis not only ignore the real long-term threat of Trumpism but actually hold up that long-term threat—an independent judiciary interpreting the Constitution (for that is what, in 30 years, Trump’s judiciary will be)—as somehow the answer and antidote to our situation.


 


That analysis is completely backassward, and it really does us a disservice. Trump’s real threat is not that he will destroy institutions or the Constitution; it’s that institutions and the Constitution will preserve him, long after he’s gone.

As we approach the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump’s election…

As we approach the one-year anniversary of Trump’s election, I notice an uptick in two types of commentary.

First, there’s a focus on the barrenness of Trump’s legislative record. It really is astonishing, and something we can forget amid the day-to-day sense of crisis, but compared to every modern president, Trump’s achievements in the truly political domains of the presidency—that is, those domains that require the assent, cooperation, or agreement of other politicians and the majority of citizens—have been miniscule. I rarely agree with Nancy Pelosi these days, but with the exception of the Gorsuch nomination (which, truth be told, was McConnell’s achievement, not Trump’s), she’s right:

“We didn’t win the elections, but we’ve won every fight,” she said about the legislative agenda. “We’ve won every fight on the omnibus spending bill — you know the appropriations bills and the rest. You look at everything, they have no victories!”

And as the commentary seems to be coming to realize, that barrenness reflects more than Trump’s ineptitude as a leader; it is the product of deep and perhaps irresolvable divisions within the Republican Party.

Second, there seems to be an increasing awareness of the gap between Trump’s words and his deeds. As the New York Times reports this morning: “Mr. Trump’s expansive language has not been matched by his actions during this opening phase of his presidency.” The Washington Post adds:

“This is not a ‘buck stops here’ president,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University. “His language is Trumanesque — unflinching and ‘Here’s what I’m going to do.’ But it’s just rhetoric. Once he tries to implement it as policy, he backs off. . . . He goes forward in a bully-boy fashion, but he gets his comeuppance.”

It’s not just that there is a gap between Trump’s words and deeds; it’s that his words are astonishingly weak, his rhetoric frequently impotent. Its main effect, often enough, is to get people to think the opposite—and to get others to do the opposite.

To take just one of the many recent examples: Trump was on Twitter Thursday, threatening to pull the plug on Puerto Rico, claiming that it had screwed up its finances and time was running out on helping the US territory and more than 3 million American citizens.

It was vicious, vile stuff, the kind of thing we have come to expect from Trump. What effect did it have? Within hours, the Republican-dominated House voted 353-69 to provide $36.5 billion—nearly $8 billion more than Trump had wanted—in disaster relief for Puerto Rico and other areas hit by hurricanes and wildfire. In this instance, Trump had the assistance of the Heritage Foundation, the powerful Republican lobby, which was strongly pushing Republican lawmakers to vote against the relief bill. To no avail. That’s how powerful Trump’s words can be.

In the coming weeks leading up to the anniversary of the election, expect to see more of this kind of commentary: the thinness of Trump’s first year in power, the gap between his rhetoric and action, the incoherence of the Republican Party and the contradictions of the conservative movement.

I mention all this for two, somewhat self-serving—well, very self-serving—reasons.

First, I’ve been flagging these themes from the beginning of Trump’s presidency. Despite being completely, as in utterly, wrong about the results of the November election, I have been right about what Trump’s regime would look like. Even before Trump’s Inauguration, I was setting out the possibilities of an incoherent, disjunctive presidency, one that could be usefully compared to the presidency of Jimmy Carter. In March, I wrote a piece in the New York Times that saw the healthcare debacle as a window onto the growing “existential crisis” within the GOP. In May, I reminded readers in The Guardian that there is a yawning gap between what Trump says and what he does, and that we had better pay more attention to the latter. And in August, I described the civil war developing within the GOP, which has now come out fully into the open, and why it would not necessarily spell a new round of power for the conservative movement, the way civil wars once did.

(For other commentary on the Trump era, post-election, see these pieces in Harper’s (on the dangers of a left grounding its politics entirely on fear of and opposition to Trump), and in The Guardian (on how institutions are not the antidote to tyranny; on how the real endgame of the Republicans is control of the judiciary, and more on the healthcare debacle as an augury of conservative incoherence.)

None of these positions was obvious or conventional at the time: the day after the election, the fact that an ostensibly united Trumpist GOP had assumed control of all three elected branches of the federal government seemed to virtually everyone, from the left to the right, to be the herald of a new dawn—a new fascist dawn, according to many. But having immersed myself for nearly 20 years in the conservative canon and the conservative movement, I had a different reading of the tea leaves.

Which brings me to my second point.

As many of you know, I have a new book out: The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. I say it’s a new book, and not a second edition, because as Dan Denvir pointed out to me in an interview on The Dig (soon to be broadcast), it really is a new book! Beyond a lengthy new chapter on Trump, the book is radically different in that, as the estimable Tim Schenck put it to me in this interview, “in the first edition of the book, war was clearly the dominant theme. In the new edition, you spend a lot more time on markets.” The struggle within the right over capitalism is now a major element in the book , animating nearly half the chapters. Trump is the culmination—or, depending on your view, denouement—of that struggle.

You can get a sneak preview of these themes in various venues.

n+1 has published a lengthy excerpt from The Reactionary Mind in its current issue. Here’s a taste:

The cold war allowed — or forced — the right to hold these tensions between the warrior and the businessman in check. Against the backdrop of the struggle against communism abroad and welfare-state liberalism at home, the businessman became a warrior — Robert Welch parlayed his career as a candymaker into a crusade at the John Birch Society — and the warrior a businessman. Caspar Weinberger went from the Office of Management and Budget and the defense contractor Bechtel to the Pentagon and Forbes. His nickname, “Cap the Knife,” captured the unified spirit of the cold-war self: one part accountant, one part killer.

With the end of the cold war, that conflation of roles became difficult to sustain. In one precinct of the right, the market returned to its status as a deadening activity that stifled greatness, whether of the nation or of the elite. American conservatism, Irving Kristol complained in 2000, is “so influenced by business culture and by business modes of thinking that it lacks any political imagination.” The idea of the free market was so simple and small, sighed Bill Buckley, that “it becomes rather boring. You hear it once, you master the idea. The notion of devoting your life to it is horrifying if only because it’s so repetitious. It’s like sex.” But in another precinct, market activities were shorn of anticommunist trappings and revalorized as strictly economic acts of heroism by a class that saw itself and its work as the natural province of greatness and rule. Donald Trump hails from the second precinct, but with a twist: his approach suggests there is no heroism in business — only deals.

…

Yet there is an unexpected sigh of emptiness, even boredom, at the end of Trump’s celebration of economic combat: “If you ask me exactly what the deals I’m about to describe all add up to in the end, I’m not sure I have a very good answer.” In fact, he has no answer at all. He says hopefully, “I’ve had a very good time making them,” and wonders wistfully, “If it can’t be fun, what’s the point?” But the quest for fun is all he has to offer — a dispiriting narrowness that Max Weber anticipated more than a century ago when he wrote that “in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport.” Ronald Reagan could marvel, “You know, there really is something magic about the marketplace when it’s free to operate. As the song says, ‘This could be the start of something big.’” But there is no magic in Trump’s market. Everything — save those buttery leather pants — is a bore.

That admission affords Trump considerable freedom to say things about the moral emptiness of the market that no credible aspirant to the Oval Office from the right could.

…

TRUMP IS BY NO MEANS the first man of the right to reach that conclusion about capitalism, though he may be the first President to do so, at least since Teddy Roosevelt. A great many neoconservatives found themselves stranded on the same beach after the end of the cold war, as had many conservatives before that. But they always found a redeeming vision in the state. Not the welfare state or the “nanny state,” but the State of high politics, national greatness, imperial leadership, and war; the state of Churchill and Bismarck. Given the menace of Trump’s rhetoric, his fetish for pomp and love of grandeur, this state, too, would seem the natural terminus of his predilections. As his adviser Steve Bannon has said, “A country’s more than an economy. We’re a civic society.” Yet on closer inspection, Trump’s vision of the state looks less like the State than the deals he’s not sure add up to much.

As I mentioned, I did an interview with Tim Shenk at Dissent about the new edition. Tim got into some deep territory—Hayek, Burke, Hannah Arendt, public intellectuals, the “hate-fuck” of the right—and it’s worth listening to the whole thing. Or reading the edited transcript.

I also did an interview with Chuck Mertz of “This Is Hell!” It was a lot of fun and really gets into the nitty-gritty of my argument about Trump and why the Republicans are in the situation they are currently in.

I have more interviews in the works, so stay posted for updates on the blog. There are also reviews, I’m told, coming out, so again, stay posted.

There are two book events that you’ll also want to mark on your calendars.

On Monday, November 13, at 7 pm, I’ll be talking with Keith Gessen about the book at McNally Jackson in Soho. Keith is a novelist, a contributor to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and a founding editor of n+1.

On Wednesday, November 15, at 7:30 pm, I’ll be talking with Eddie Glaude about the book at the Brooklyn Public Library in, well, Brooklyn (at Grand Army Plaza). Eddie is a professor of religion and African-American Studies at Princeton, author of several books on pragmatism, African-American thought, and American politics, and one of the most incisive and forceful commentators on contemporary politics and ideas.

Oh, and buy the book!