Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 183

it begins



Maybe someone will introduce Trump to WordPress and that ...

Maybe someone will introduce Trump to WordPress and that will herald the blog renaissance I’ve waited so long for. 

looking backward

I’m blogging too much, focused too much on the things of the moment, but I think the circumstances just may warrant it. It’s certainly hard for me to concentrate on anything other than the current political calamity. And since soon a new term will start and I’ll be back in my old books, here comes another round:

In my reflections on Donald Trump when he was running for President in 2016, I made one significant error: I didn’t think he would nominate responsible judges and Justices. I thought he would hand out judicial appointments like candy to friends and toadies. But it turned out that the judiciary couldn’t capture his attention, so he farmed out the decisions to others who acted on sound conservative principles. (Given how many of the very judges he appointed ruled against his recent frivolous lawsuits, precisely because they were honest conservative jurists rather than toadies, I wonder if he’s belatedly reassessing his priorities.)

But I think my more general assessment, made in June of 2016, has, except for one point, stood the test of time:

We all know what Trump is: so complete a narcissist that the concepts of truth and falsehood, right and wrong, are alien to him. He knows only the lust for power and the rage of being thwarted in his lust. In a sane society the highest position to which he could aspire is apprentice dogcatcher, and then only if no other candidates presented themselves.

If you put a gun to my head and told me that I had to vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, I would but whisper, “Goodbye cruel world.” But if my family somehow managed to convince me to stick around, in preference to Trump I would vote for Hillary. Or John Kerry, or Nancy Pelosi. In preference to Trump I would vote for the reanimated corpse of Adlai Stevenson, or for that matter that of Julius Caesar, who perhaps has learned a thing or two in his two thousand years of afterlife. The only living person that I would readily choose Trump in preference to is Charles Manson.

The one point that I can’t now affirm is that last one, but only because Charles Manson is dead.

A few months later I published an essay about the Christian defenders and celebrants of Trump, in which I described the pastors who claimed that God had revealed to them that Trump was The Chosen One — perhaps in the mode of King Cyrus of Persia — and looked toward the possibility that his presidency might run onto the rocks:

These leaders have replaced a rhetoric of persuasion with a rhetoric of pure authority — very like the authority that Trump claims for himself. (“Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”) Consequently, their whole house of cards may well collapse if the Trump presidency is anything other than a glorious success, and will leave those who have accepted that rhetoric bereft of explanations as well as arguments. Presumably the most fervent supporters of Trump will argue (as Trump himself will argue) that his failures have occurred because others have betrayed him, have rejected the man that God raised up to rescue America, but this will require the replacement of the Cyrus analogy with another one yet to be determined. We can only hope that no one compares a failed Trump to an American Jesus betrayed by American Judases.

These claims to divine revelation have certainly been perpetuated by Eric Metaxas, who claims to have all the evidence he needs right there in his heart to prove that the election was stolen, and who has asserted, in classic “name it and claim it” style, that, no matter how things appear, “Trump will be inaugurated.” I’m sure that as I speak Metaxas and the other Jericho March leaders are writing Donald Trump Superstar and are debating whether the role of Judas is to be played by Mike Pence or Mitt Romney. I’m betting on Pence. (Update: I changed my mind.) 

More soberly, in that same essay I wrote this, wrapping up my reflections on the Christian True Trump Believers:

If all this sounds like a strange fantasyland of narrative, an imaginative world of what members of the Trump administration have taken to calling “alternative facts,” that’s because it is just that. The larger, and longer-term, effect of accounts like this is to encourage Christians to abandon the world of shared evidence, shared convictions, and shared possibilities, and such abandonment is very bad news for Christians and for America.

And lo, even as I foretold, it has come to pass.

For alternatives to all this nonsense, I’d encourage you to reflect on two essays: one by Michael Gerson that I quoted yesterday, and a cautionary message, both prescient and wise, written by my friend and colleague Frank Beckwith five years ago.

scale, cont’d.

The other day I published, at the Hedgehog Review site, a little dialogue on scale, and the common human inability to understand the scale at which many of the events that affect our lives happen.

Something happens almost every day to confirm the points I make there, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a better illustration of the problem than the behavior of the people who assembled in anger at the U.S. Capitol building on Wednesday. I heard an interview with one protestor who shouted that the protestors were there because they knew they were being lied to and cheated by the deep state, by the lamestream media, by the Democrats, by RINOs — and they knew it, he said, because of “what we’ve seen with our own eyes.”

What did he mean? I can’t be sure, but I suspect that there are two chief elements to his claim.

He has almost certainly attended Trump rallies and seen massive crowds cheering the President on (something that Trump himself has often commented on, contrasting the large size of his crowds to the meager attendance at Joe Biden’s drive-in-movie-style rallies); likewise, I would bet that, wherever he might live, in his neighborhood the pro-Trump lawn signs stretch as far as the eye can see, with nary a pro-Biden sign to be found.
He has almost certainly seen video clips which, their posters falsely claim, show voting fraud in action. Those clips have been tweeted and retweeted, shared and faved, held up as evidence again and again by people disinclined to do any fact-checking.

To him, then, it is simply not possible that President Trump lost the election. The evidence of his own eyes tells him that the President won in what Trump himself called, in a since-removed tweet, “a sacred landslide election victory.”

What that man does not understand is that everything he has seen — even under the wholly untenable assumption that the viral videos show actual fraud — amounts to no more than a drop in the American electoral lake. It’s statistically insignificant; it’s not even a rounding error. He simply does not understand how big his country is, how many people vote in its elections.

And the point of my post was: That kind of understanding is extremely difficult to achieve. We are simply not cognitively wired to think on that scale. Which is why my little dialogue raises the possibility of a “School for Scale” to teach us. Because if we, all of us, don’t get a grip on these matters, we, all of us, will continue to perpetuate massive and massively consequential misunderstandings of our country and our world.

opportunity

Michael Gerson:

The collapse of one disastrous form of Christian social engagement should be an opportunity for the emergence of a more faithful one. And here there are plenty of potent, hopeful Christian principles lying around unused by most evangelicals: A consistent and comprehensive concern for the weak and vulnerable in our society, including the poor, immigrants and refugees. A passion for racial reconciliation and criminal justice reform, rooted in the nonnegotiable demands of human dignity. A deep commitment to public and global health, reflecting the priorities of Christ’s healing ministry. An embrace of political civility as a civilizing norm. A commitment to the liberty of other people’s religions, not just our own. An insistence on public honesty and a belief in the transforming power of unarmed truth.

the new strain of covid

My friends at The New Atlantis have posted an informative and slightly worrying Q&A about the new covid strain. A necessary read, even if we in America also have other things to worry about.

If you do not subscribe to The New Atlantis you really should. They are doing vital work, which they describe here.

frivolity

Dostoevsky’s Demons is often read as a denunciation of a spineless liberalism that makes way for a nihilistic radicalism. But the fundamental problem with Stepan Verkhovensky, the father of the revolutionary Pyotr Verkhovensky, is not that he’s a naïve liberal — though in fact he is that. No, what Dostoevsky ruthlessly exposes is the sheer effete frivolity of Stepan Trofimovich and people like him. Stepan Trofimovich loves playing at being a dangerous figure: pretending to explore radical ideas, enjoying his sense of himself as a fearless intellectual unrestrained by convention and tradition. He delights in the pretense because he has the serene confidence that it’s all a game: No one would ever take such ideas seriously, the existing social order could never be disrupted, his peace and comfort would remain untouchable. And the little frisson of self-delight at saying something risqué would always be available to him.

That’s Senator Josh Hawley this morning expressing his solidarity with the crowd that would soon storm the Capitol building, trash it, and parade around inside it with Confederate flags. (Yes, they’re patriots all right — but of what patria?) I’m sure he never saw it coming. Nor did my own Senator Ted Cruz. It was all a game to these senators, an enjoyable and rewarding game, to connive at the frothing-at-the-mouth rage of the Trumpistanis, to cheer them on, to pose as their advocates and spokesmen. What harm could come of it?

Trump, he loves this. He loves the bile, the wrath, the mockery. It’s a well-done steak to him, with extra ketchup. But Hawley and Cruz? I bet they are befuddled and mystified. How could it possibly have come to this? They are, then, our own Stepan Trofimoviches. It was all a game to them, until it wasn’t. They are, like him, utterly frivolous. If they had any dignity, any moral backbone, they would resign their offices. But the very frivolity that led them, and us, to this pass is the vice that will prevent them from acting honorably. I hope I am wrong, but I expect they will go to their graves thinking How could we have known?

UPDATE: I affirm every word of this by Kevin Williamson.

clarity

The events occurring in the United States Capitol building as I write offer a certain clarity about the issues I raised in a recent post. You can have America or Trumpistan. You can have a country in which leaders are chosen in democratic elections, in which citizens and their elected representatives can dissent from the will of the executive without fearing for their lives, in which other elected representatives will uphold the laws they have sworn to uphold rather than twist and pervert those laws in order to accommodate the tyrannical and the hateful, in which power is transferred in legally-guaranteed peace; or you can live in the country the people who are storming the Capitol right now want you to have. Pick. 

UPDATE: At least we know where Sen. Josh Hawley is: 

more education, more motivated reasoning

Musa al-Gharbi:

In fact, the more intelligent, educated, or rhetorically skilled one is, the less likely it becomes that someone will change their minds when confronted with evidence or arguments that challenge their priors. There are two big tendencies driving this phenomenon.

The first is that in virtue of knowing more about the world, or being better at arguing, etc. people are just better equipped to find ways of punching holes in inconvenient facts, or finding reasons to justify ‘sticking to their guns.’ Indeed, one becomes more likely to really enjoy arguing – and to engage in political research and arguments as a hobby — as they grow more intellectually and rhetorically capable.

Perhaps surprising, but also somewhat intuitive if you think about it, highly-educated or intelligent people tend to be far more ideological than the general public. They are more likely to be partisan, to be obsessed with some moral-political cause, or to use some intellectual framework or idealized model to interpret the world.

And while educated people may be less likely to discriminate against others on the basis of factors like race, they are significantly more likely to be prejudiced against people who think differently than them, or hold different ideological commitments.

Follow the links for more details. 

Planet Earth

I have a policy that I recommend to you. When I hear a politician who wants my vote, or a pundit who claims to explain what’s happening in politics and society, I ask one fundamental question: Does this person live on Planet Earth? And if the answer is No, which quite often it is, then I pay no further attention to that person.