Trump and The Evil
Prefatory Remarks:
In a two-party system, the way to influence the government is to vote for the party that is generally closer to your positions, and then to work within that party to move them more towards your positions.
And, ideally, in any representative government, we voters shouldn’t think “what can this candidate do for us?” so much as we should think, “who are the candidates, and what are the circumstances, that we can work with to bring about the change we want to bring about in this nation”?
But today’s Republican Party has decided to follow a leader who has demonstrated that he is not really interested in ruling as a temporary servant of the people, but would like to rule as an autocrat and use the power of the government to maintain and exploit the power of the government. In such a case — in this case –, we have no choice but to vote for Kamala Harris, and work with her to restore health to our shared democratic republic.
Donald Trump has shown and even basically outright says (definitely there is a pattern of giving very strong hints) that he is not interested in working with the citizens to bring about the kind of win-win future everybody can feel good about, but wants to be some kind of a king, where everybody just does and says what he likes: Or else! How are We the People supposed to work with that?
If only one of two people who have a chance at becoming the next president of the United States of America wants to govern in a democracy, rather than turning our democracy into an autocracy, that really limits our options.
But hey: We still have a pretty good option — which is more than a lot of people can say –, so let’s joyfully and gratefully take it, and do the best we can with it.
Just because our authors here didn’t put it all together as well as they should’ve, doesn’t mean that we can’t still stand up for a form of government that allows its citizens to stand up for honesty, fair play, faithful stewardship, and competency in government.
– – – – – – –
Oh, this just in: To Ross — Ross Douthat is getting under our skin with his nonstop false-equivalencies.
Okay, here we are.
Election at hand.
It seems we’ve failed in our stated goal of helping the nation to all together all see things as they really are in time to together choose wisely with a gentle, yet clear and strong, voice.
But let’s try to at least tell the truth here on the cusp of the warbling* future.
*[Editor’s Note: I think he meant “wobbling”
Author’s Note: I meant like a hazy snaking heat that rises off of stones in the desert at noontime.
Editor’s Note: Okay, well, in any case, you did’t mean “warbling”.
Author’s Note: As the songbird sings, as the songbird attempts to insert himself into the morning light, as the songbird shakes with pluck and fear while the ladies wait and panthers sneak.
Editor’s Note: Whatever, dude.]
Sometimes we would think:
People just need the facts to be laid out carefully, and then they’ll rise up as one and stop Donald Trump’s evil project.
Sometimes we would think:
People just need a better way of taking in and processing this moment in time, and then they’ll rise up as one and stop Donald Trump’s evil project.
However, it would be difficult to break this overview of our writings into two separate categories of, for example, “Marshaling the facts” and “Seeking more helpful perspectives”. Because we tend to mix the two categories. Often we’ll start from one and then collapse into the other. And all through runs our notion that representative democracy is a spiritual good, and that our system of government requires We The People to work meaningfully together as a final check on madness and corruption in government. And some other philosophical and metaphysical notions that we have always felt were relevant but can never convey as well as we think we should.
We felt the evil nature of Donald Trump’s (to what degree calculated and to what degree impromptu?*) project all in and through us. And we thought we could find a way to reflect this moment through the Love that Is. And that the resulting great, unstoppable, nation-enlightening wisdom meme would surely allow us to together sidestep the error of handing power over to the man who would be king and those who would be his lackeys and/or manipulators.
*[Interviewer: We already lived through one Trump term. Why should we be expecting, possibly, a dramatically different result in a second Trump term? The consensus among experts in authoritarianism like yourself is that a second could prove really catastrophic.
Steve Levitsky, a Harvard professor and author of How Democracies Die with co-author Daniel Ziblatt: Just to begin, several cases immediately come to mind —- Nicaragua and Hungary —- where the second term around was considerably worse than the first. Autocrats learn from their mistakes. Folks whose primary goal is to concentrate power learn how to do it. In the case of Trump, we have to remember he didn’t expect to win in 2016. He had no plan. He had no experience. He had no team. Very importantly, he relied heavily on mainstream Republican Party officials and technocrats to govern. He had no clue how to manipulate the machinery of government. In fact, he was shocked and appalled to learn that the machinery of government didn’t just operate at his whim, that he was unable to manipulate a range of state institutions for his own political and personal ends.
But we never quite found the right words.
Anyway, as we’ve said:
Time is up!
So let’s do an overview of the most recent writings. We included a couple older pieces to put the project in context, and to remind everyone that we’ve been falling apart live and in public for eight years now. [See NYC Journal Politics for more from past years.]
Recommended reading style:
Don’t click on the links right yet, just read through to get an overview of our desperate flailing project.
And then if something caught your eye as you were carefully following these instructions, you can later go back and see what it’s like to read it.
But first:
We are the World. Do you remember? We didn’t have a clue. We were just kids. But we knew we lived in a nation that would stand up for honesty, fair play, decency, and competency. We knew that “truth” was not whatever the Russian state news said it had to be. We knew that might didn’t make right. We knew! Don’t we still know it?
So I’ve failed. Some cut through the gut keeps me puking nonsense all day long. So I’ve failed. So I’m sorry. But what if we’re all still people here? What then?
And, anyway, what is a person but streams of better and worse impulses tumbling around the Love that is All? And what is a good philosophy or political system but a set of ideas and constructs for helping select for the better impulses — the ones that turn the whole towards the spiritual Love that is Real?
So, like, we tried and everything.
To return:
We really thought we did a good job with this 2017 essay The US is a shared culture. In it we argue that we don’t need to share a specific religious dogma to together keep our country safe for the *fundamental spiritual project that all humans must undertake in order to understand, believe in, or care about their own feelings, thoughts, and actions.
OKAY, BELOW IS A LONG ASIDE ON SOMETHING DEEPERISM AND WHY REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY IS A SPIRITUAL GOOD. YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIM IT FOR NOW. OR JUST JUMP DOWN TO THE ALL-CAPS ENDING. (ALTHOUGH IT IS KIND OF THE POINT OF THIS PROJECT.)
*[Humans can only be meaningful to themselves to the degree they organize themselves around a spiritual Love that chooses everyone, and — with the help of the universal values (aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing) poetically interpret that Love into feeling, thinking, speaking, and acting.
(The interpretation must be poetic [meaningfully but imperfectly pointing-towards, rather than literally capturing], ongoing, and ecumenical rather than literal/1:1, definitive, or exclusive because the Love we require to understand, believe in, or care about our own feeling/thinking/acting would have to be Absolute; but we are finite, and [with or without consciously using the concept “Truth”] we often confuse our own notions for the “Truth” — and that confusion amounts to worshipping our own ideas and feelings; and to the degree we do that, we shift our focus away from Pure Love [here posited as the eternal, infinite Love that all earthly loves partake of to the degree they truly love].)
The wonderful thing about liberal representative governments is that we are free to live in Love and to stand up for the universal values in public life without having to fear that the government will slander, impoverish, imprison, murder, or otherwise silence us (in a tyranny like Putin’s Russia, this kind of silencing happens from the top-down and as a matter of routine, as opposed to as an aberration from a couple bad actors, and so it is pretty much guaranteed if you try to be too honest), or that the government will allow others to similarly silence us.
That’s the joy of liberal representative: No one is allowed to oppress anyone else. Yeah, it happens sometimes; but in this kind of government, We the People have the power to correct the errors of our shared government, and the government allows us to try to do that without crushing us, or allowing others to crush us. That is a spiritual good because it means that we are free to be both publicly decent and privately safe.
Not only that!, but in liberal representative governments, the citizens are empowered to share meaning because by refereeing our shared government, we are empowered to share the universal values (aware, … joyfully-sharing) without which none of our ideas are meaningful to any of us (we humans share meaning when and only to the degree that we share the universal values as spiritual equals within a spiritual Love that chooses and is enough for everyone [that is the only Absolute that we can understand, believe in, or care about (we are not able to meaningfully follow a Reality that is not Love — because everything else tastes like chalk), and without an Absolute foundation for our feeling/thinking/acting we slip and slide forever in relative truths, which don’t really mean much to humans, because we our feeling/thinking/acting is predicated upon the assumption that some ideas really are truer than others, and some actions really are better than others]).
It is a joy to live under a government that protects the rights of the people to speak their minds without reprisals; and where the people act as a final check on madness, corruption, and tyranny in government by voting for or against temporary leaders. Here we can publicly stand up for what is right and tussle safely in the realm of ideas, and then to go home as friends — safe in the knowledge that no-one has either sufficient incentives nor sufficient power to oppress the rest of us — not the famous, not the rich, not the leaders.
Ours is a wonderful, a joyful, a spiritually-empowering, decent and competent*, and !fun! (yes!, so fun not to have to worry about having the government destroy you for doing the right thing! so fun!) type of government.
*[“decent and competent” because, unlike in a tyranny, the leadership knows that they need first and foremost to be faithful stewards of the power temporarily granted them (in a tyranny, the leadership knows it mostly just needs to stay in and exploit political power — so competent and just stewardship isn’t even a goal).]
Okay, we don’t always get it right, and the government is not always as responsive to us as it should be; to the degree we maintain a liberal (as in neither the government nor any of our fellow citizens has a different legal status than the rest of us [we are equals under the law and can speak our minds and conduct our business without fear of reprisals])* representative government (leadership is temporary and serves at the pleasure of the governed)*
*[Limits to individual powers and balances on governmental powers help us keep power from consolidating, which helps us to avoid the oppression of a tyrannical, politics-is-reality/might-makes-right government (and thus remain a liberal government). And a temporary ballots-based government both anchors and is protected by these limits on and balances of power. And the freedom to speak and act one’s conscious — and maybe even win!* — is both the point and a foundational component of the whole enterprise. It all works together.
*[“and maybe even win”. That is to say, elevating good ideas and helpful behaviors is also part of the point and a foundational component of liberal representative democracies. In a tyrannical, top-down-crime type government, dishonesty, cheating, stealing, and cruelty in the name of the state are all rewarded and thus selected for. That is harmful for the nation, the leaders, and everybody else. A better government is one where public success is more compatible with abiding by the spiritual values without which none of our lives are meaningful to any of us.]
And please note that we separate church and state not because spirituality is a matter of indifference, but because combining spiritual and political authority and/or tests tempts leaders and citizens alike to lie to themselves and others about the most sacred things, and (and, as mentioned above, here we hit upon a fundamental problem with tyranny) therefore tends to select for unhelpful, rather than helpful feeling/thinking/acting.
In a liberal representative government, we can better publicly protect and share spiritual Love and the universal values because everyone is free to seek and to follow the Truth in both their private and public lives in a way that is meaningful to them — rather than having to pretend that they both understand and agree to the state sponsored “Truth” (which inevitably becomes more and more untruthful).
But more on this later.
More and more and more and nonstop obsessively round and round more of this later.]
SO THAT’S A LITTLE BIT ABOUT SOMETHING DEEPERISM AND HOW IT RELATES TO POLITICS
You might also like:
In Fun New War we react to Russia’s intervention in the 2016 presidential election. We thought: Okay, great: Now we can all focus on protecting the integrity of the vote: That’s something we should be working on anyway! And: People are not so much good or bad as they are collections of good and bad momentums, so let’s not call Putin “bad”, but merely guard against the harmful momentums flowing out of him into our elections. I don’t know. It seemed like a charming essay at the time. And we were thoroughly convinced of the metaphysics; perhaps we still are, although there’s so much blood and gunk all over the place anymore that metaphysics has begun to seem like a luxury for a later, a less self-indignant era. But wait: Surely that’s an error! Surely that’s precisely the error that we are asking the nation to resist!
As the 2020 election approached, we thought we should do an overview of Trump’s threat to democracy.
[Categories covered:
Working to Undermine the Democratic Election Process; Prepping us for more than two terms; Demanding the incarceration of political rivals; Stoking rather than refusing to condemn racism and white nationalism; A War on Truth and Accuracy (unparalleled record of dishonest statements; a willful online disinformation campaign reminiscent of dictatorships; a war on press freedoms); Undermining Checks & Consolidating Power (undermining the independence of the civil service, the judiciary, and Congress; attacking blue states); Corruption (making US foreign aid dependent upon the Ukrainian government helping Trump smear a political rival; filling top posts in regulatory agencies with industry lobbyists, etc)]
We have heard it said:
“We survived one Trump administration just fine. Why are you so worried about a second one?”
Why are we so worried?
Hmmm.
Well, that turned into a long essay:
Here is a couple excerpts from the second section of that impromptu essay:
2.
And Trump’s rhetoric has grown more and more autocratic and despotic and erratic and his talk about being dictator just for day one and “fixing everything” so his supporters don’t have to vote again and promising to use political power to go after political enemies and to use the military agains protestors and et cetera:
All that kind of talk is an abuser doing what abusers do best:
They put your hand on your shoulder, and then the next day that hand massages your neck, and then the next day it slides down your shirt, and then … :
What abusers do is they get you used to the idea of what is coming — every time that they violate you a little further they are doing two things at once: Seeing how much they can get away with right now; and getting you and everyone else used to what comes next.
Humans can be frogs swimming peacefully through slowly boiling water: That is what abusers know: People can get used to anything. All you need to do is slowly alter their base point.
With all the talking, Trump somehow makes us forget that he isn’t just talking; he actually did attack democratic norms, rules, and principles while in office.
[See above our 2020 report and the NY Time’s Believe him.
!Actually!,
out of fear of paywalls destroying democracy, we have taken the liberty of putting large excerpts from that NY Times essay here.]
Furthermore, the same principle that makes Trump good at abusing the nation makes him good at corrupting it. People’s moral compasses can also be altered by getting them used to changing norms.
Witness today’s GOP:
If you told any of them ten years ago that they would be rallying behind a former president who (in defiance of the emoluments clause) used the power of the presidency to enrich himself*, who worked against democratic rules and norms, who spent his last month in office attempting to use the power of the Federal government to steal his way into another four years in office**, and who then used the lie that that election was stolen from him as a cornerstone of his reelection campaign, and who continues to spew anti-democratic rhetoric even as he appears to be losing his marbles:
*[Trump made up to $160 million from foreign countries as president]
**[We discuss the Jan 6 Report in part one of What we know.]
If you told today’s GOP ten years ago that they would be working to get that man back in the Oval Office and in front of the little red button that blows up the world, they would’ve said you must be joking, they would never ever ever betray their country like that, not for any amount of power, prestige or wealth.
But here they are: Giving each other little glassy-eyed smiles of encouragement as they swim through the water in the pot as the temperature slowly rises.
I imagine that We the People are up next: Yes, today we stand up for the truth; but if that gets a little scary tomorrow, then we’ll have all kinds of reasons why the right thing to do is to sit silently by as state sponsored lies become the new reality.*
*[Steve Levitsky, a Harvard professor and author of How Democracies Die with co-author Daniel Ziblatt, had an encouraging take:
I have no doubt that if Trump has a horse in the 2028 election, that he will try to use the machinery of government to tilt the playing field, and that you may see some real abuse in Republican-controlled states. There could be a certain amount of unfairness. I don’t think there’ll be anywhere near enough unfairness that people will be not be able to express themselves at the ballot box.
The Democratic Party has the advantage of being a unified opposition party, which you don’t see in places like Hungary or Nicaragua or elsewhere. It’s an electorally viable party. It has a shitload of money. And that’s not going to change. Trump is not, I think, going to be able to do what Putin did, or Orban did, or Chavez did, which is squeeze the private sector, all the private sector so much that nobody is willing to finance the opposition. That’s a really critical thing to be able to do. You can really tilt the playing field when you do two things: when you get the media to self censor, either because you put your guys in control of the media, private or public, and you bully the private sector into not financing the opposition or media. When you can do that, then you really have tilted the playing field. I don’t think Trump’s gonna be able to do that. We may well slide into a mildly authoritarian regime. I think Democrats will be able to contest and and quite possibly win.
Of course, the fact that people like your author here take heart and get hopeful from such statements shows how much all of our baseline has been moved. The interview is not always so encouraging. It is worth reading.
That prefatory remarks to that interview mentioned how the two billionaire-owned newspapers’ sudden decision to not endorse a candidate in this presidential election seems to be a bad sign — like the super-wealthy are starting to hedge their bets on the possibility of a Trump victory. Are they?
It would not be unreasonable for Bezos and Soon-Shiong to fear that the USA under Trump 2.0 could be at least something of a kleptocracy. See, for example, What I fear most about a Trump presidency by Caroline Fredericton (adviser at the Open Markets Institute, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice and a visiting professor of law at Georgetown University) for the NY Times.
In a second term, Mr. Trump will have more freedom and power to undertake grift. He has already vowed to use pardons to protect supporters and possibly even himself from efforts to curb corruption (which may explain the nonchalance with which his son-in-law Jared Kushner has greeted criticism about the conflicts of interest raised by his recent real estate investments in Serbia and Albania, as well as the Saudi, Qatari and Emirati investments in his wealth fund). And he and his political advisers are building a deep bench of committed and loyal employees who could corrode and potentially destroy mechanisms of accountability in government, paving the way for kleptocratic leaders to entrench themselves in the bureaucracy where many would be able to remain past Mr. Trump’s term. And the mere presence of a phalanx of unquestioning lieutenants in the civil service will ensure that other civil servants fear retribution for objecting to the self-enrichment.
This Combating Kleptocracy looks interesting. We did not read it. We’re running out of time.]
…
Liberal democratic republics are spiritual goods because they let you can stand up for honesty, fair play, and competency in government without endangering the standing fortune or safety of yourself or your loved ones.
That’s no small thing.
We have been so lucky.
And if we lose our representative government here and now — well, then we all are part of a great crime against humanity.
Too much drinking, I guess.
…
I keep seeing those airplane breathing cups that fall down from the overhead compartment if the oxygen supply gets low. I remember being a kid being surprised that grownups were supposed to put their own mask on first: Shouldn’t they love their children? But then I was almost immediately won over by the logic: Of course!, if the grownup goes unconscious, they’re not going to be of any use to their children! Such sound reasoning was here being promulgated at thirty thousand feet above sea level!
…
[That’s the end of excerpts from Concerns about Trump 2.0; we added a few footnotes here that we’ve not yet added to the essay proper. That Steve Levitsky interview we linked to above is probably better than what we tossed up the other day.]
But anyway, to return to our trip down memory lane:
Just now we tried again to save the nation with a perfect summary of Reality and today’s realities. (We the People) But no, no, no we can’t seem to get it right. We start strong but fall apart as the essay wears on. And time is up.
A couple summers ago we wrote a whole book Diary of an Adamant Lover that was somehow supposed to save the country from Donald Trump and his corrupted GOP. We don’t believe anyone’s read it. We’re not sure we can recommend it. But it is in the Buy the Books page. As part of that project we put together this links page: Trump’s Threat to Democracy – 2023 Update. It’s okay, not very detailed.
Oh, and there was a tie-in to our Wisdom Meme Project. Where’s the wisdom meme we linked to for the book? Here it is: Chapter 60: Wisdom Memes.
The wisdom meme project is, of course, closely related to Something Deeperism. We haven’t worked on the Something Deeperism Institute in years. But all that talk above about how we can’t be meaningful to ourselves except to the degree we live in and through the Love that chooses everyone — that’s Something Deeperism. The two writings from the Institute that are probably most relevant to this political project are A Simpler Shared Deeperism and Duties of a Republic’s Citizenry.
With our January 2024 What we know we tried to explain how the Trumpian project was clearly an evil one. We never finished it. It has some good sections though.
So many entries! We don’t know what to recommend. The idea was to save the country through Beauty = Truth = Goodness = Justice — through a poetry so beautiful it would open us all up together to Reality as It shines and giggles through the critical elements of our present reality. But we didn’t seem to manage that.
Here’s almost at random some selections from recent months:
Weird is not the problem The problem is political evil!
In How could you be so evil? we give voice to a sense of betrayal that has become commonplace these days in this USA.
People get used to evil is similar to the above discussion of merrily boiling frogs.
We had a nice day at the park at the end of August and then we wrote Last Summer?
We were trying to make an epic poem about this political moment: Epic Irony. We didn’t finish it. We made the point that for the Founder’s project to be truly beautiful, it should go beyond them and their limitations, and so we imagine them up in heaven rooting for Kamala Harris — daughter of an Indian immigrant and a Black Jamaican immigrant — to wrest this wobbling democracy from Donald Trump and his accomplices.
One Reality is really long, and there’s a lot of philosophy and metaphysics. It almost certainly needs to be edited. It was written in response to two conservative NY Times pundits conversation about whether or not they could support Harris.
You could scroll down to the end. Like maybe to here:
And, really, everybody: Where do you draw the line? Are you waiting until it is actually too late? Maybe we could just sample autocracy? After all, it would be such a shame to give up those political gains that you won via the undemocratic advantages of small states versus larger population areas. And, well, let’s face it: getting people to agree on your policies wasn’t working. So why not see if we can hand the keys to the kingdom to a king who will do your bidding? But you know that’s not how autocracy works. And you also know that Donald Trump is unhinged, unstable, and not even a little fascinated by the concept of doing what is best for everyone.
Or maybe scroll all the way down to when we do all this hilarious imagining what conservative pundits would be saying if the Democrats were the ones signing up for four more years of Donald Trump. That part starts here:
Being an essayist with some appreciation for irony, I cannot help but hear the essays that conservatives would be writing if the shoe was on the other foot.
“It is proof of their essential Godlessness. If there was ever a question, it is clear that this party — by choosing to not just tolerate but to actively support a man who has declared open war on our democratic republic, that rare precious gem of a government of the people, by the people and for the people — has fully turned its back on the Creator. For was it not the Creator who endowed us with inalienable rights? And is a government led by the people rather than a tyrant who — let us be honest, let us learn from history! — inevitably uses the power of government to commit crimes against his own citizens (“absolute power corrupts absolutely” may be too trite for our liberal friends, whose great intellectual insight allows them to understand how this is different, how they can trust this wild, uncaged dog, with his criminally permissive handlers, to not bite his master; but I’m too simple for their wisdom — I’m just some poor fool stuck here with the facts, and I can’t help but notice “absolute power corrupts absolutely” proven true time and time again) a Godly thing? And is choosing to abandon this Godly thing to the wolves not a sin against both God and man? I say to you: A vote for anyone but the opponent of this rabid dog that has learned how to tame his handlers and that he can get away with brazenly defying his master: I say that a vote for anyone except the person who has an honest chance of stopping that person is a vote in support of political evil. Mark my words: Sooner or later, the citizenry that refuses to rein this monster in here and now: Sooner or later that citizenry will find themselves at his merciless mercy. Afterall: Once the precedent is established that this nation’s voters will not take a stand against clear and obvious attempts to subvert fair elections and the peaceful transfer of power combined with daily promises to be despot: I tell you truly, sooner or later that nation becomes a nation by for and of the tyrant.”
Oh, and then there was that one time we saved Mike Johnson’s soul. And A wife on Butterfly Wings doesn’t seem political, but then we have:
It’s great how all now falls right into place
Even Michael Johnson apologizes
for lies about the presidential race!
All’s well, and everyone wises up
Because your wife finally floated in
on beautiful gossamer butterfly wings.
And then in A Book of Evil we are again considering Mike Johnson’s betrayal of We the People. Apparently, Trump we didn’t consider to have enough moral compass to be a very interesting case; but with Mike Johnson we feel like he should know what he is doing to us, himself, our shared system for protecting us all from tyranny and its commitment lonely boring bullshit, and the soul of things. Apparently, we are hurt by Mike Johnson. We discussed Mike Johnson’s fancy footwork in service of the Donald Trump’s autocrat-style lie that any election he loses must be stolen in part four of What we know” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>What we know. But he deserves further discussion. When will we get to it? The election is almost here. Like, for example, now he’s hedging his bets about certifying the 2024 election. Basically, we accuse him of using the machinery of our form of government to try to undermine the purpose of our form of government — a government for the people rather than for the tyrant.
A recurring theme in this project is, like,”Okay, but what you are doing is evil, right? Or are we crazy? What is going on?” Crimes against humanity is a short example. Bizarro world paints the surreal experience of this moment more fully. And it is pretty short. Save the country is short and kind of continues with this theme.
The incompetence and misery of evil is an essay fragment. Evil pipeline is short.
Again we save the country is an August 2024 poem about this project and how we feel betrayed and confused and failing-flailing. On the same day we wrote At the Petri Dish, but it doesn’t seem to be about politics. It seems to be about romantic love, or just a lust that would like to evolve into romantic love; anyway, we do not at the moment discern a political angle in this piece.
Voting for democracy is enough is short. As is Considerations (maybe dull?).
We wrote three pieces in response to Ross Douthat’s article arguing on behalf of undecided voters. The first one is a frame story. The second one contains most of our arguments against his article. In that second one, we have a section about the likely difference between Trump 2016 and Trump 2024. The Founders’ Religion is the final essay in the series. All these pieces probably need to be revisited and edited.
In the Heavens. Prelude also takes place in heaven; is also a bit trippy.
We wrote a poem to the Republican National Convention To the RNC at the end of July 2024.
In Consider the real results we think about what people voting for Jill Stein or Donald Trump might be thinking versus what they will actually be supporting. It was supposed to have many more Donald Trump sections, but we abandoned the project. I guess it seemed like it would just rile people up and that can never help people to see things as they really are, which can only make them wise [See John Stewart Singer Song Writer from California’s “Cannons in the Rain” (the song is about Virginia’s secession from the union, although I didn’t realize it until somebody told me somewhere down the line)]
A free people here and now. Like a poem-essay, or an essay-poem.
A symphony. You know, to help the country.
The Night Watchman. An allegorical poem.
Big Man Nation. Donald Trump as an abuser. What is it about large-scale, mafia-equse abusers? What makes people want to kiss their rings? Some combination of worshipping power and violence & wanting to stay on the safe side of the blade?
Listen discusses kleptocracy a little.
Love of Country. A recently begun magnum opus. Not done and time is running out.
It begins with a long prayer:
Dear God,
Help us now to all together see things as they really are.
Every person in the country and the world.
To see life from the inside out and from the outside in:
Out through Reality into the various realities; in through the various realities to Reality:
This insight sloshing back and forth, from what is prior to our ideas and feelings, through our ideas and feelings, out into this shared dreaming space that of course also melts into what is prior our ideas and feelings; and sloshing back again through our shared dreaming space, and through our ideas and feelings again into the Love that chooses everyone and that shines through everything — including each conscious moment. A Love prior to our ideas and feelings. An infinite joyous giving: The one Reality: An infinite giggle of kind delight.…
In the second section of Love of Country we spend quite a while on this obsession:
Our liberal democratic republic is a spiritual good because it makes public virtue compatible with a safe, happy, successful life where you can provide for your family. Contrast this with a top-down crime-state like Putin’s Russia, where standing up for honesty, fair play, competency, and goodwill in government can get you killed — even if you’re not longer living in the country*.
*[Putin is doing something almost nobody is noticing by Lilia Lapparova for The NY Times on Sept 23, 2024
… Russian opposition figures know well that even in exile they remain targets of Russia’s intelligence services.
But it’s not just them who are in danger. There are also the hundreds of thousands of Russians who left home because they did not want to have anything to do with Vladimir Putin’s war or were forced out, accused of not embracing it enough. These low-profile dissenters are subjected to surveillance and kidnappings, too. Yet their repression happens in silence, away from the spotlight and often with the tacit consent or inadequate prevention of the countries to which they have fled.
It’s a terrifying thing: The Kremlin is hunting down ordinary people across the world, and nobody seems to care.
……
The third section is supposed to give a sense of the pre-existing weaknesses in our democracy. It’s pretty good. That’s not bragging: this section is mostly excerpts from articles other people wrote.
We can recommend reading the third section of Love of Country.
And then maybe the bit about when Fox News decided that it was really just in the business of making money, rather than in the business of telling its viewers the truth about what was going on in the world around them. That’s in the beginning of where the fourth section was supposed to go.
Yeah, read that: it could’ve been in the third section, which — as we’ve said — is pretty good, we think.
The fourth section hasn’t really been started. It is called “The turn towards evil” and is supposed to chart where various organizations betrayed democracy to a point that you might say, “this is evil”. Like for example, when Fox News chose ratings over telling the truth about the 2020 election, or when Mike Johnson used a specious supposedly constitutional argument to provide cover for Donald Trump’s anti-democratic lies about the 2020 election* — to us this kind of fancy legal footwork points to a deep and deeply wrong decision to choose partisan victories over protecting the integrity of a system of government that keeps three hundred million citizens safe from tyranny, safe from the top-down crime of a leadership that routinely and procedurally commits crimes against its own citizens in order to maintain and exploit power*.
*[As mentioned previously, the only place we spend much time on this is the fourth section of What we know.]
The end of the third section goes like this:
But have you read The Antitrust Revolution — Liberal democracy’s last stand against Big Tech by Barry C. Lynn for Harper’s October 2024 issue?
I was like, “What?! I never thought of that!”
And it seems I was not alone in this.
The author begins by discussing how James I used the power of monopolies to enforce his absolute power. He argues that the Founders designed the constitution to fight against that kind of concentration of economic power. And he discusses how FDR’s policies broke up the concentration of economic power that had been strangling the nation. And he explains how the Reagan administration undermined anti-trust laws by arguing that the purpose was merely to keep consumers benefitting from competitive advantage, rather than to work against the concentrations of economic power that monopolies create and are. Big Tech, Mr. Lynn argues, has the power to destroy businesses and people, and it needs to be reined in. And the author says that liberalism is not just ideas about equality under the law: it is a system for organizing government so that no individual or group gains too much power over the rest and where everyone is entitled to the same fair treatment; and so anti-trust laws are critical to democracy and equality under the law. Wow! Why didn’t I think of all that on my own? Is a child of the eighties necessarily a sucker of the eighties?
Oh, and guess what: He says that he helped convince the Biden administration to enforce anti-trust laws! Who knew? This was all news to me. We link to an article about the Biden administration’s pushing against the bipartisan Neo-liberalism that began with the Reagan administration (as mentioned above) in Working Song. That poem (“Working Song”) is not one of our best political poems.
And we can all watch from the comfort of our sofas as Elon Musk goes all in to get Donald Trump elected, and Bezos and Soon-Shiong instruct their respective papers to not endorse anyone, (which in both cases means, don’t endorse Kamala Harris). And Harris also doesn’t seem too be terribly interested in Biden’s pushback on forty years of bipartisan neoliberalism (i.e. the notion that anti-trust laws are just there to make sure consumers get a good deal, rather than to make sure no one can gather enough power and influence to be able to write the rules).
What should we do? I think we should vote for Kamala Harris, since she at least still believes in democracy and leaders as temporary servants of the people, and Trump believes in himself as the great kingpin who rewards those who bend a knee and punishes those who don’t. And then make sure Harris understands that We the People are anxious to rein in the Big Tech monopolies at this critical juncture before AI augments their consolidated powers in ways and to degrees we cannot predict, but do probably have sufficient reason to fear.
What is it to be a citizen in a representative government?
You don’t make the laws.
All you do is choose who represents you.
You can’t learn all the ins and outs of policy or study all the bills.
Can you referee the contest so that it selects for honest, clear, accurate, and competent?
Can you nudge the whole towards a system that resists concentrations of power, that punishes stealing lying cheating, and that rewards honest and competent service?
Can you pay enough attention and think clearly enough to choose basically-honest reasonably-plausible and win-win over all-reality-is-political conspiracy-theories and us-versus-them?
You won’t make the system perfect, and pretending you can is a favorite trick of those who would be king.
But you can nudge it gently towards the better and away from the worst.
You can ask not what your politicians can do for you, but rather what politicians can work with you to bring about the kind of nation that you want to live in — the kind of place where people don’t risk being squished and marginalized and silenced and dead when they stand up for truth, clarity, competency, fair play, compassion, and other values without which none of our worldviews mean anything to any of us.
We can work with Kamala Harris because she still believes in a democracy of by and for the people.
Donald Trump isn’t even really trying to pretend that that’s what he wants.
What do you want, USA?
What do you feel all in and through?
Maybe we failed at finding the song that would allow you to experience this moment as it is most essentially is; but maybe you don’t need us?
Maybe you can sense the wiser path through the scraping screeching noise?
We’ll leave you with some thoughts from Jeff McCausland, retired Army colonel and former member of the National Security Council:
…
Remembering how close Nixon brought us to nuclear war [to distract the nation from the Watergate scandal] is why I say we cannot trust Donald Trump with the presidency. I don’t think he’d hesitate to use his position as commander in chief for his personal and political benefit. We know this because he has promoted policies that threaten our military, democracy and those who call the United States home.
Multiple times in the past month alone, Trump has said he’d use the military against citizens opposed to his candidacy and he has reshared social media posts that suggest bringing his adversaries, including former President Barack Obama and former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, before military tribunals. He has repeatedly declared that the country’s biggest threat is from his political opponents, whom he has labeled “the enemy from within.”
The thought of Trump exacting retribution by politicizing the American military should terrify us all. It is antithetical to the principles that underpin our democracy, and his plans to do just that should disqualify him from entering the White House again.
The former president has repeatedly insisted that millions of undocumented immigrants must be rounded up and deported. Such a mammoth operation would require the American military, which Trump has promised to use. Imagine using American soldiers to round up, house, guard, transport and deport millions of immigrants. They would be knocking on the doors, searching for anyone who might be undocumented and placing them in camps.
He has also said he would consider using the military for domestic law enforcement in major cities without the involvement of local mayors or governors. These are all policies reminiscent of Nazi Germany, not the United States.
Because Trump has promised to “weed out military officers” ideologically opposed to him, military officers in the future might be promoted or assigned based solely on party affiliation. The members of our professional military swear an oath to the Constitution, but Trump appears to believe they should pledge a loyalty oath to him.
Trump would be unrestrained during a second term. He’d surround himself with sycophants selected for their total loyalty — not their expertise or their willingness to speak hard truths. The absence of officials willing to “speak truth to power” could be disastrous during a major crisis.
…
My three-decade military career was defined by continuous training, numerous operations, wars, strategic arms control negotiations and the study of civil-military relations. All these experiences, but especially my study of our civilian government’s relationship with the American military, contributed to my conclusion that Trump is unfit to be president.
…
And Peter Wehner’s How to prevent the worst from happening probably gives a better overview of the political moment than we ever did.
Look, nobody knows how things will be in the future, but at some point the horse that is limping and coughing blood and falling in the track and kicking at the other horses and the jockeys — at some point it becomes obvious that it is not wise to bet on that horse.
Author: Humphrey T. Dumpty
Editor: All the Kings Horses, in close collaboration with All the Kings Men
Producer: Bartley Willard
Stunt Double: Amble Whistletown
Copyright: Andy Watson
We couldn’t stop with the prefatory remarks, but now we’re moving some down to here for further review:
It is difficult to feel, think, and act very far from one’s friends and family.
One’s immediate culture becomes a kind of center for one’s reality.
But Reality is common to all, and some proposed-realities are clearly more plausible than others.
And Reality contains within It the need to seek for ever-more aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-king, joyfully-sharing feeling, thinking, speaking, and acting.
Or so we theorize — being, to our shame, more accomplished as Pure Love theorists than as true lovers of the spiritual Love that chooses and is more than enough for everyone, that explodes all bounds, that overflows, that is all there really Is.
We are not here to judge. We’re all just people. But we do feel that Donald Trump 2024 appears to be a person corrupted by success found while indulging in powerlust and notions like might-makes-right us-or-them and truth=the-will-of-the-winners; and that the GOP of 2024 has — by supporting Donald Trump and by mollycoddling and/or straight-up repeating his anti-democratic and often hateful lies — been corrupted by Donald Trump; and that as citizens of a representative government we have a right and duty to serve as a final check in madness and corruption in government; and so we should do what we can to prevent this corruption from spreading further. And, then, if we succeed with that goal, we should make it clear to Kamala Harris et al that priority #1 is to work together to ensure that government of by and for the people shall not perish from this earth, and that our raucous, continent-sprawling, self-correcting experiment in self-government will gain a new life with a gentler and thereby wider and deeper resolve.
And so on