Maybe I’m all wet, but my assumption until proven wrong is that the second election of Donald Trump is a complete game changer. But almost everything I read or watch in the MSM proceeds as if we’re still in an era of politics as usual, and all the old rules still apply, and so therefore do the old solutions.
This conversation between Anne Applebaum and Garry Kasparov is a case in point. They are alarmed that the things that made America exceptional—rule of law, checks and balances because of Trump makes America no longer exceptional. So their schtick amounts to: We need to ‘Make America Exceptional Again’. They get the seriousness of what is happening, but still talk as if we can get things back to normal. The kind of normal that they hope to restore is just gone.
K and A don’t talk about what conditions are necessary for a thriving democracy. The only thing that makes a gesture to that is K’s pointing out that we have a 250 year history that provides some ballast that other other authoritarian regimes don’t have. But I think that goes to the heart of the problem, which is that for a while now we have been a democracy out of habit rather than out of any deeply felt conviction.
Our democratic habits have been eroding for decades, and Trump’s first election was a klaxon alarm that something profound was happening, and the second election was the arrival of what the first warned about. If America has democracy in its future, then the conditions required that make democracy, rule of law, and checks and balances sustainable have to be in place. And people have to care enough about them to fight against the enormous pressures that seek to destroy them. Any electorate that after J6 can elect a guy who engineered it simply doesn’t care any more about what K and A care about, they are not willing to fight for democracy, because they really don’t understand it.
I agree with K and A that the things that made America exceptional are worth preserving; it’s just that fewer and fewer people understand that in any way that deeply matters to them. Ask Americans in a poll if they’re for democracy, rule of law, and checks and balances, and they’ll answer, “Sure, of course.” It’s the technically correct answer, but they answer it like I answered a catechism question in the third grade. They neither understand nor care about what the answer means. And so most Americans, like most Russians, or Hungarians or Chinese, will learn to live with whatever the authoritarians and the burgeoning American techno-capitalist oligarchy ram down their throats over the next couple of decades.
The only people who really, really care about preserving American democratic traditions are intellectuals like Anne Applebaum and Garry Kasparov. Sure there are the little old ladies who have been picketing outside the Tesla showrooms who care too. Lots of people care—probably everybody reading this post. Just not enough, though. It’s a kind of religion for such people, but it’s a religion that, like most religions these days, most people find boring. And rather than go to church, they’d prefer to stay home and watch football and play video games.
We live in a culture where anything goes. There are no longer any taboos—including the taboos that so far have protected democracy. We all live in the Age of Whatever, and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”.1 And the disease for which this decay is the symptom is cultural not political, and so the solution, if there is one, must be first cultural, and then political.
***
One of the most interesting chapters in MacIntyre’s After Virtue is entitled “Nietzsche or Aristotle”. In it, he talks about the behavior and attitudes that Captain Cook found among the Hawaiian Islanders when he arrived among them in the late 1700s. He was surprised at how lax their sexual mores were, and so doubly surprised to learn that there were strict rules against men and women eating together.
Laxness where Westerners were strict, and strictness where Westerners were lax?! What gives? When he asked the locals why men and women were not allowed to eat together, the only answer he got was “It’s taboo.” MacIntyre writes—
But when they enquired further what taboo meant, they could get little further information. Clearly taboo did not simply mean prohibited; for to say that something—person or practice or theory—is taboo is to give some particular sort of reason for its prohibition. But what sort of reason? It has not only been Cook’s seamen who have had trouble with that question; from Frazer and Tylor to Franz Steiner and Mary Douglas the anthropologists have had to struggle with it. From that struggle two keys to the problem emerge. The first is the significance of the fact that Cook’s seamen were unable to get any intelligible reply to their queries from their native informants. What this suggests is—and any hypothesis is to some degree speculative—that the native informants themselves did not really understand the word they were using, and this suggestion is reinforced by the ease with which Kamehameha II abolished the taboos in Hawaii forty years later in 1819 and the lack of social consequence when he did. (pp. 111-12).
He goes on to explain that Steiner and Douglas theorized that —
taboo rules often and perhaps characteristically have a history which falls into two stages. In the first stage they are embedded in a context which confers intelligibility upon them. So Mary Douglas has argued that the taboo rules of Deuteronomy presuppose a cosmology and a taxonomy of a certain kind. Deprive the taboo rules of their original context and they at once are apt to appear as a set of arbitrary prohibitions, as indeed they characteristically do appear when the initial context is lost, when those background beliefs in the light of which the taboo rules had originally been understood have not only been abandoned but forgotten. (p. 112).
MacIntyre goes on to argue that in the same way that Kamehameha II abolished the Hawaiian taboo system in the early 19th century, Nietzsche abolished it in the late 19th century for Western societies. Nietzsche saw that people used moral language that had no cultural or metaphysical foundation to support it, and so it functioned in Western societies much the same way that taboo language functioned in Polynesian societies. It was just force of habit with no vital meaning. And so what we have seen since Nietzsche in America and in other Western societies, gradually, but with exponential speed since the ‘70s, first among the intelligentsia and then percolating down into popular culture, is the gleeful deconstruction of every taboo that gave Westerners their sense of what was morally acceptable or not. We live in a world where new taboos come and go, but none has any grounding, none has any justification for legitimacy except Yay or Yuk, and if you give it time, any Yuk can become a Yay, and any Yay can become a Yuk.
So the analogy that I’m making here is that as Kamehameha II was to Polynesian society, and Nietzsche was to the Western moral tradition, so is Donald Trump to American traditions of rule of law, checks and balances, and whatever sense Americans had concerning what made them exceptional. He is there to abolish what was only an old habit. And so unless Kasparov and Applebaum have a plan for restoring the original vital cultural context in which these values were originally embedded, it seems pretty unlikely, to me anyway, that their defense of American exceptionalism can succeed.2 And once it's gone, it's gone.
Most educated people over the age of 30 all say Yuk to Trump and his authoritarian program now, but what reason have, say, educated as well as un-educated Gen Zers and whoever comes after them, not to embrace Trump with with a warm Yay? They have come of age during the Trump era. They have no taboos associated with traditional democratic norms the way the generations that preceded them did. They know nothing about those norms, and most couldn’t care less about them.
So we’ve been reduced to a situation where whoever has the best vibe wins. Obama, in the final analysis, was just a vibe. Zohran Mamdani has a great vibe right now. Good for him. I hope he wins. Maybe he can do some good for everyday New Yorkers. But sooner or later the vibe crashes against the wall of reality defined by big money and its enormous power.3 Vibes aren’t enough in the long run unless those vibes are grounded in something more solid. Because, as Karl Marx said, the human condition in capitalist societies is one in which—
“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
Marx understood the problem, but had no solution. The task now is to search for something better. My bet, and MacIntyre’s, is that that better lies in a retrieval of the classical tradition—the only real answer to Nietzsche is Aristotle.4
1.M.H. Miller’s recent piece on the show wants to make the case that it’s high-minded satire, and perhaps that’s the intent. But the problem with satire these days is that there has to be an agreed upon moral framework by which the behaviors satirzed are seen as an outrageous affront to our collective moral values. That framework has no robust existence anymore, it’s just an old habit, and that’s why a lot of satire doesn’t land, and quite frankly isn’t funny. It's become algorithmic.
This was the argument I made about the dialogue and behavior of the tech billionaires in Mountainhead. Satire has to be outrageous, beyond the pale—and nothing really is anymore. And so this effort to break taboos has become boringly predictable. I don’t watch shows like Sunny or Schitt’s Creek or Succession because they are about terrible people, but because they are depressingly predictable in their pathetic search to find something that will shock us for whatever high-minded reasons they they think they are doing it.
2. This originary context was gradually destroyed to the point of obliteration over the last 150 years. First by Industrial Capitalism after the Civil War that made wage slaves of the independent artisans and mechanics, then aggravated further by consumer capitalism after WWII that homogenized Americans into a conformist mass of flaccid-souled hedonists, and then by Techno-Capitalism since the ‘90s that has plunged Americans into a simulacral dream that is now gradually sealing them off from any vital sense of what’s real. K and A’s blab proceeds as if none of this “context” matters.
3. I fear that the Mamdani campaign is an example of what I described in my previous post as acting without thinking, doing the same old thing expecting the same result. He’s doing something that might have novel a vibe about it, but is it truly original? Maybe, but I doubt it. I hope he surprises m
4. Not just Aristotle of course, but the classical tradition, that began with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and which provided the basic metaphysical and moral infrastructure for Western Civilization. This, of course, was later integrated with Jewish Christian revelation, and then later rejected by Northern European fideist Christians who thought Greek philosophy superfluous, in not an impediment, for salvation. As I said in a note in my previous post, fideistic piety can provide profoundly rich possibilities for living a good human life, but you cannot base a civilization on it. Our current skepticism about metaphysical narratives is a direct result of the Reformation rejection of Greek thought and clearing the way for the Baconian Project. Yes, it’s more complicated, but that’s what it boils down to.
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