How Deep is Your Cynicism?
I still don't hate Donald Trump
You cannot reason someone out of something they were not reasoned into.
— Jonathan Swift.
As another ant in the colony, I recognize when we have a new queen. As another citizen in the nation, I recognize when we have a new President. Given that we have, in the main, abandoned the rationalism of first principles in our politic and given ourselves over to the idiot binaries of social media aggregations, I can’t help but notice how people’s feelings about what they can talk about is heavily influenced by the election of Donald Trump.
Like a number of low key, old school, let’s call them Oakeshott conservatives, heterodox thinkers and people who understand and admire Western civilization, I was rather relieved that the Progressive agenda has been shutdown. While I’m not so sanguine that the Culture Wars are over, I’m rather confident that Nike, Victoria’s Secret and Bud Light are not going to keep marketing as if Woke memes were ascendant and on their way to transformative dominance.
What’s interesting and weird is how quickly the mechanisms of government itself have given a couple of Trump nominees a rapid slapdown as he slaps together his cabinet and plans for the next steps. I honestly don’t know how many people were killed on ‘J6’ but I’m guessing 3 or 4. As far as deadly protest goes, that’s way fewer than you average school shooting. Yet children go to school, schools without the metal detectors that the most violent neighborhoods adopted long ago. So I have a special bucket for people who can’t get over J6 and have never, as far as I know, made much of a peep about the very existence of South Sudan. (This rhetorical trick is made self-consciously, but bear with me for a minute.)
Back when I was a geopolitical neocon, I used to argue about the peaceniks who have bumper stickers that read ‘Free Tibet’ but knowingly would refuse any military action that actually accomplished that freedom. Similarly I would carp endlessly, or so it seemed to me, about those who wailed about the fate of the victims of the Janjaweed Militias. Remember Darfur? I fell for the simple-minded logic that if those poor families had 2nd Amendment rights, no gangs of thugs in pickup trucks would have had such an easy time running them out of their homes. But that’s just my civil libertarian ant logic, I can’t really tell what fraction of the American electorate makes those a high priority. So I understand the butt-hurt about J6, but really?
What really got on my nerves, and does so even more, is the derangement suffered by one of my favorite podcasters, Sam Harris. I feel a bit of pity for the self-confessed insomniac as I rarely hear him talking about meditation any longer. He wants to get into every crack he thinks Trump might leverage to move the tectonic plates of American society through politics. The first time around, I never fell for the okeydoke misrepresentation of his ‘good people on both sides’ comment for two reasons.
I accurately understood the context of his meaning, which was the parties to the civil court case about Confederate monuments.
I didn’t need the President to be my moral leader.
So today I am leading into this more ultimate question, which I begged in the post Trump for Pope, and called out more explicitly in The Trump Diversion. Does America need its government officials to be moral leaders? Can we accept the legal injunctions of the ethics of the law? Next time I meet with my prosecutor buddy, I’ll have better words for the question which is basically this:
Should the White House be Camelot?
I don’t think it should be or that it needs to be. I think the Church and State should be separate. I also think that people who don’t go to church and don’t meditate (enough) have misappropriated the roles of their equivalent prophets to media celebrity journalists, comedians and p-hackademics. I cannot by any means give a full accounting of these midwit authorities but I can assure you that in the big broadcast media, they are rather obviously partisan. As a defender of rationality, it pains me to see someone as disciplined and conscientious as Sam Harris get thrown off by Trump.
It must mean that he honestly believes that the President cannot be checked or balanced. I am not that cynical.
I am not that cynical because, even though I certainly don’t possess the financial wherewithal or national connections of someone like Sam Harris, I don’t feel threatened by the machinations of the parties. I also don’t invest a lot of hope in populist, identitarian politics. So it is at these moments that individuals like Natan Sharansky, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Douglas Murray and a long list of the dead (like Popper, Dickens, and Will Durant) give me enough chess to play in my head to not be disturbed by the obvious ethical deficiencies of deep state players. And still I haven’t heard a word about Jeff Zients.
Somebody also reminded me that Condoleeza Rice is still alive and well. How do we imagine that Phi Beta Kappas live after they have been Secretary of State? Do you think they get as bent out of shape as Sam Harris?
Not being a culture warrior but probably still not meditating enough, I will be figuring out how to re-engage with a newly chastised public on ethical subjects which are only tangential to what people call politics. Maybe the common sense we’ve lost has a second chance.