It’s a Very, Very Mad World
I find it hard to take.
David Rothkopf believes “We Have Descended into Utter Madness.” In support of this thesis, he summarizes recent events:
We are about to go to war against another country for no reason. Our president is delusionally barking out orders to the planet, seemingly convinced he rules the entire globe.
He commands closed the skies of a foreign land. He demands the people of another nation vote for his political ally or he will punish them. He sets free a convicted drug lord while arguing that he is waging a hemispheric battle against narco-terrorists. His minions are committing war crimes in his name, lying about their justifications, bringing disgrace on our country and our armed services.
In the wake of a tragic killing, he and his aides are making racist proclamations and promising sweeping draconian measures including banning entry to the US of all people from the “third world” and expelling from this country naturalized citizens who do not ascribe to our leaders’ ideas or political opinions. He has turned the legal apparatus of this country against his perceived opponents, even those who are only doing their duty and urging others to do theirs, even those who recognize that illegal orders are being given that are resulting in crimes for which all those involved except the president himself can be prosecuted.
His emissaries are selling out our allies and seeking to pressure them into capitulation to foreign enemies in ways that will undermine our national security and that of many of our most important friends and partners.
Starkly unqualified crackpots have been put in charge of our healthcare system and are actively seeking to undo two centuries of progress in the administration of public health. Children are already dying because they are stigmatizing vaccines, attacking science itself for ideological reasons and with utter disregard for the risks that are being created. They are responding to a climate crisis by systematically stopping programs that might contain it and accelerating those that will certainly make it worse.
Corruption is rampant, in the open, almost celebrated. The White House has been partially torn down and is being replaced by a monstrous monument to the president’s ego…one unlike any ever conceived by any past leader in our history…one that increasingly grows so out of scale with both our executive mansion and the limits of good taste that the architect and contractors are seeking to distance themselves from the project.
Heroes are called traitors. Journalists and others who seek to exercise their first amendment rights are crudely bullied or worse. Racists are being given rein make their twisted vision of what America should be into a reality enforced by the law. Armed thugs are on the march in our cities rounding up the innocent. Vital programs upon which millions depend are being shutdown. Universities are being directed away from learning, intellectual independence, the traits that made them the envy of the world and forced to bend the knee to an ideology that promotes ignorance and prejudice. With a few quick keystrokes, the mentally unstable man who is leading this country believes he can reverse every executive order of his predecessor and threaten him with prosecution.
I mean, when you put it like that . . .
He blames us. Sort of.
We are the problem.
I don’t mean you, per se, no doubt you share my views on the above. No doubt you have been railing against what we see and are profoundly disturbed by where we are.
I mean the American people. I mean the third of the electorate who apparently still support what is happening. I mean the GOP legislators who enable him and their constituents who continue to back and empower them. I mean the traditional media that continues to both-sides a profound national crisis. I mean new media that feels snark and “I told you so” and calling for outcomes that will never occur are adequate. I mean those we know who just seek to change the subject or have grown inured to all this or think it is business as usual and that it will be reversed by time without any effort from them or who assume that shaking their head and lamenting our state is somehow enough.
We have reached a point at which recent events should be demanding that every group mentioned above, that all who have enabled or tolerated or not done enough to prevent where we are now must reconsider.
Which, to put it mildly, is a hell of a collective action problem.
He eventually pivots to something more likely, but less immediate:
My sense is, as I have often written before, that while all of us have a role to play here, it is going to require a new generation of leaders and voters to step up. They will determine the tenor of the debates to come. They will determine—by whether they turn out or not—the outcomes of the elections in 2026 and 2028. They will determine what alternative course of action can be followed that can stop this era of self-destruction and find new goals and remedies and a new path forward.
The problem is that for most of Millenials and Zoomers, Trump has been a fact of political life for virtually all their time as adults. He is the norm. And so they must either come to recognize that is an illusion or they must reject that norm and demand a new one.
A Boomer has led the White House for the last 22 years, except for the four years it was led by the Silent Generation throwback Joe Biden. We’re apparently skipping Generation X entirely. Indeed, we currently have a Millennial in the Veep slot.
Regardless, Rothkopf here falls into the very trap that “We” have: assuming that the fix is offering a more compelling message in the next election. At the very least, that means waiting another year plus. And wishes away the structural problems with our electoral system that gave Trump a first term despite getting nearly three million fewer votes than his opponent.
For most of that first time, we were warned against “normalizing” Trump. Yet, while the news media dutifully covered his routine breaches of the norms and traditions of the office—not to mention the Constitution and lesser laws of the land—they eventually came to become The New Normal by sheer repetition. Indeed, despite instigating the Capitol Riots in a failed attempt to retain power, he was voted back into office by a strong plurality.
While a strong majority continues to disapprove of his performance in office, some 43 percent see all of the indicators Rothkopf points to and say, “Good job!” I have no idea how to counter that.
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I have to wonder if the old, white, land owning, male slaveholders who signed on to this sentiment would be among the 43% who support Trump today.
If we had different voters and leaders, things could be different!
(Sorry, but that kind of statement, which is true, strikes me as a tad hollow and in its obviousness, as well as not really meaning anything.)
And, yep:
It’s not going to be a job for Boomers or Xers; this is a job for the people who shape culture, the 45 and under, the Millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alphas. They need to write a new script and we need to fuck off and die.
@Michael Reynolds: We’ve elected under-45s to the White House precisely once, John Kennedy in 1960. He was a bit shy of 44. We have, however, elected eight who were in their 40s–nine if you count Teddy Roosevelt, who was 42 when he acceded to the office upon McKinley’s death and was just 46 when elected in his own right.
@Steven L. Taylor: Agreed. At least he doesn’t fall into the Pundit’s Fallacy that these people’s visions will happen to match his.
@Gregory Lawrence Brown:
In a word, NO. Trump’s ancestors weren’t wealthy landowners, and Trump wouldn’t be in the club after the first banko. He’d be the bitter failed shopkeeper living on community charity.
@Michael Reynolds:
My initial thought was, “that is frightening.” Not in the old man shaking his head at the kids with blue hair these days way. My concern is the degradation of depth of knowledge, learning how to think to get to what one thinks, and the erosion of meaning of accomplishment.
Examples:
-Tyler Cowen, someone who I roll my eyes at more often than not, but also someone whose insights I have thought about and occasionally cited, seems to be widely considered a polymath.
I am not denying the guy’s intelligence. But from what I understand, he has done little to advance his own field of expertise, much less multiple fields. The evidence points to him being a smart, intellectually curious person who looks into things. There is a term for that: generalist. Not a direct synonym for polymath.
But a responsible, trustworthy generalist must acknowledge the limits of their expertise. I should note that I am not accusing Cowen of that particular sin—a couple people named below do that. I am commenting on public intellectual reputation which leads to confusion among lay individuals.
Other prominent intellectuals I place in the same or a similar bucket: Matt Yglesias, Ben Shapiro (called a philosopher in a New York Times piece), Sam Harris presents himself as a neuroscientist and is cited as a philosopher by many, Musk, Hitchens.
Smart people. Curious people. Sometimes even insightful people. But not polymaths.
-Facebook described as an invention. No. It added an innovation or two on a pre-existing idea with multiple examples already in the wild. The initial key distinction was subsequently discarded within a few years and was not Zuckerberg’s idea. He executed the original idea better than anyone had previously done.
-The existence of Blinkist and other summary services. In my view, this sort of shallow collecting of ‘knowledge’ is worse than ignorance, because it skips the engagement portion of the learning process. But it confers a feeling of learning. Dandelion spores in the wind.
IIRC, a study found that older people struggle to differentiate between opinion in fact much more than younger people. Anyone please correct me if I am mistaken, but that was about differentiating between types of claims, not ability to analyze evidence quality. I suspect that no age cohort is particularly good at that, but confidence in one’s own judgment is similar between groups.
—
Then I thought about something I read years ago about the 60s counterculture. I wish I could recall exactly where I read it. But the author made the point that much of the focus contemporaneously and retrospectively was on the youth, but that the leaders of the counterculture, such as Timothy Leary (b. 1920), were not part of the youth cohort.
It may be worth considering whether movements we associate with youth are often driven by a cohort a generation or two prior to the current generation(s).
I’m reminded of earlier this year when Jean-Yves Le Drian, the French Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs, said, ‘European security cannot be left in the hands of ignorant voters from Wisconsin every four years.’ The quote itself indicates that Le Drian probably understands the structural problems with our electoral system better than most Americans, but nevertheless he points to the more foundational problem of an ignorant and misinformed electorate.
@Kurtz:
I’ve been worried for some time that ‘kids today’ get too much of their information/learning, predigested and via a screen. GIGO. Consider that old farts like us had an intake that was maybe 20% screen, 80% real life. Now it’s 50/50 to pull a number out of the air. In a sense they are already programmed the same way AIs are programmed.
OTOH: Educated southerners in 1860 were 100% real life. So were Mongols, Nazis, etc. etc. And we Boomers have not covered ourselves in glory despite reading more and TikTokking less.
I have two grown kids. Both are genuinely sweet, kind, thoughtful human beings. My wife and I both believe kids today are kinder than our generation was. Not as tough or as independent, maybe, but on balance I’ll take kind over tough any day. A lot of what I think of as my virtues as a man are the result of learning to cope with a fucked up world.
They’re turning away from tobacco, alcohol, even weed. Inwardly I sneer, but honestly, what am I going to believe? That we were right and they’re pussies?
I’m not overly optimistic about the future, but I don’t think they are starting from a position of accepting Trumpism as the norm. I think they see that as our bullshit, something to be put in the rearview mirror. Or whatever the public transit equivalent is.
The war with Venezuela isnt for “no” reason. It’s for profits for a company or companies.. the same reason the US invaded many countries including Iraq and also the excuse the US establishment ghouls tell themselves when contemplating the long-sought-after breakup of Russia into many smaller states.
It’s all about the resources, you see!
Smedley Butler would be proud. Or, perhaps, just accurate – and very sad at the reveal of complete and total amorality.
One fun note is that there is no more excuse of “Spreading Democracy” because that’s apparently soy and woke.
@Michael Reynolds:
I don’t think the old nightly news and the big city newspaper was any better, but it was less inflammatory.
Except in Germany and Rwanda and…
In theory, more, varied voices are better. In practice, that’s why the Tech Bros are investing in AI — what if those more, varied voices could be crafted in a lab, keep up on the current trends, and be great influencers for the great men?
The great men in question are, of course, wealthy “tech bros” who emigrated from South Africa. “Tech bros” is quotes because they’re not even tech bros, they —sigh— aspire to be tech bros.
I half expect a bloodbath as the younger generation gets in power and then exacts vengeance for all this shit. Maybe just a figurative bloodbath!
Trump isn’t the norm, but Trumpism may well be. If you destroy all governmental guardrails, but don’t control the culture, you risk pretty much anything.
Just saying, God Emperor Sock, first of their name, is a possibility. Blue hair, nonbinary and dividing America into districts like in the Hunger Games. Idaho will object to being stuck in the Square State district, but Sock knows Idaho is a square state in all but shape.
“We’re A Republic, Not A Democracy” — President-For-Life Sock writing an executive order canceling the 2040 Elections, arresting all the opposition, and replacing them with really bad cosplayers.
It sounds impossible, until you realize that key parts of the internet are open source projects written and maintained by transgender and nonbinary people with the occasional cisgender queer tossed in for variety. Sock, and people like them, control all the information you receive.
DNS servers and Routers convert people, somehow. I assume that if you really study these systems you realize “It’s an interconnected network of trust, just like how gender is a social construct…”
@Michael Reynolds:
I’d say fucking off is not necessary…