For eight long years, we’ve been meaning to find a way to help ourselves and everyone else see this political moment clearly enough for us to all react wisely together and as individuals.

With Trump and the Evil we admit defeat, hand in our resignation, and recap our exploits.

But of course we secretly wanted that last essay/overview to succeed where we had previously failed.

And so we thought: Why not just try once more?

Something Deeperism is the general worldview that we can relate meaningfully to the Truth, but not in a literal/direct/1:1 way.

It turns out that everyone is actually a Something Deeperist, because we all know deep inside that

(1) we can only understand, believe in, or care about our own feeling/thinking/acting to the degree we abide by the universal values (aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-sharing) and live in and through and for a spiritual Love that chooses everyone and that never lets anyone down (we cannot really believe in anything except the “Truth”, and any “Truth” that is not also “Love” is also incomprehensibly boring to our hearts and minds);

and, indeed,

(2) we cannot help but have faith in the universal values and a spiritual Love that is infinitely kind and infinitely careful with everyone (because to the degree we doubt such things, we doubt assumptions without which our thought is meaningless to itself);

HOWEVER, we also all know that

(3) we have a weakness for confusing our own ideas and feelings about the “Truth” (whatever we call It: self-declared nihilists can often be found desperately clutching “there is no Truth” as if it were the “Truth”) for the Truth;

but that

(4) if there is a Truth, It is prior to our ideas and feelings about It, so the best we could hope for would be to relate poetically (meaningfully relating-to with our whole conscious moment, and meaningfully pointing-towards with our feelings and thoughts; rather than capturing in literal, direct, conclusive, or exclusive insights [you cannot capture Infiniti in a finite container]);

THEREFORE, we all know that

Our only hope to become more meaningful to ourselves is to work every day to better and better organize our whole conscious moment (which includes: ideas, feelings, notions, et cetera animal parts, and the spiritual Love that must [if we are to have a hope at making sense to ourselves] shine in and through everything — including each conscious moment) around that spiritual Love.

Because we are limited but the Love we seek would have to be infinite, this operation would have to be open-ended and require constant self-analysis, -critique, and -adjustment. And there’s never a guarantee that we won’t go crazy delusional, or that aren’t already.

But still, on the whole:

We could seek every moment again and again to stay more fully aware within the tension that arises when we admit both that

(1) we humans have some sense of a Love that is All, and some sense that we cannot make sense to ourselves except to the degree with relate to that Love, and some sense that the universal values (aware, … , joyfully-sharing) and universal spiritual practices (prayer, meditation, fellowship, study, contemplation, practicing humility, loving kindness, service, and selflessness) can help keep us on the right track;

and that

(2) we will never be able to capture spiritual Love definitively, literally, exclusively, or directly (because feelings and thoughts are critical aspects of human understanding; but feelings and thoughts are finite, whereas the Love we seek is by definition Absolute/Infinite).

In that tension we can dance our way to more internal coherence (more meaningfulness-to-ourselves).

Consider how we can’t perfectly translate feelings into ideas and words; but with honest self-reflection, we can get better at communicating our own feelings to ourselves. Likewise, it seems possible that with honest self-reflection, we could get better and better at translating a spiritual Love shining through everything (including each conscious moment) into feeling, thinking, speaking, and acting.

In short,

We all know what Jesus (or, in Luke’s account, some lawyer who stood up, apparently to test Jesus) meant when he said that

the most important commandment is to love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, and our neighbor as ourself.

We all know that the only way to be meaningful to ourselves (i.e. to consciously travel with our own contemplations to our own conclusions) is to get better and better at turning our whole conscious moment towards, and living in and through and for, an explosion of selfless joyful giving — in and through a God is Love / Love is All shining through everyone and everything, blessing us all and binding us all together in the Love that never lets anyone down.

Or else what?

What other goal could mean anything at all to any of us?

We all know that we all share the same fundamental spiritual Reality and the same fundamental spiritual values (or else life is too lonely and boring to believe in, understand, or care about*), and that we humans can therefore share meaning; and so when we pretend that we cannot relate meaningfully enough to each other to share meaning and work together, we are ignoring what is most important and fundamental about human life for details — details that we are using as excuses in order to ignore what is most important and fundamental.

*[Also: we learn via empathy (my mother stubs her toe; I map her facial and physical reactions to my own emotions; and thereby I learn what she means with, “Ow!” and “that hurts!” and “God damn chair!”). And so if others are not fundamentally the same as we are, we don’t know what all that we’ve learned by interacting with them means. And so if others are not fundamentally the same as we are, we have no clue what to do with most everything we “know”.]

Liberal representative government is a spiritual good because this form of government allows the citizens to share meaning and to serve as a final check on madness, corruption, and blatant evil in government.

In liberal representative governments, the government protects the rights of individuals to speak their mind without retribution either from the government or from other factions, and the leaders serve only temporarily and at the will of the governed.

Together, this safety from retribution and temporary and ballots-based leadership allows the citizens to stand up for the universal values in public life without having to sacrifice their own safety, standing, or finances. That is something wonderful. It doesn’t mean the citizens will be virtuous, but it means that one can be rewarded for honesty, fair play, selfless service, competent stewardship, and other virtuous behaviors; and that one can defend those values without getting squished/silenced by the nation’s leadership.

In a tyranny, the nation’s leadership is not serving temporarily at the citizen’s pleasure and within the restrictions of checks and balances on their power, but is instead primarily in the business of maintaining and exploiting the power of the government.

In the USA you can still stand up and say that Donald Trump is lying about having the 2020 election stolen from him, and that we in fact have a great deal of testimony from Republicans from his own administration detailing how he attempted to steal that election, and that Trump’s promising to use the power of the government against political foes and the power of the military against dissenting citizen voices is not acceptable. In Russia, Putin is actively hunting down not just vocal expatriate opposition members, but even those Russian citizens living abroad who step out of line a little bit*. That’s a huge difference. And it isn’t just a lucky break: it is the way things should be.

*[Putin is doing something almost no one is noticing (Lilia Yapparova in The NY Times September 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.

…

]

It is fun to be an American. It is fun to tussle over ideas and then go home knowing that you are not going to be blown up for disagreeing, and that the other side will respect the election results even if the voters decide upon you and your ideas. In the US, we keep the fight in the realm of ideas. And while people may get away with crimes and corruptions, the system itself is enough on the side of equality under the law, fair play, honesty, and competency that you can fight against crime and corruption without fearing for your life. And you may even be able to win sometimes when you stand up against dishonesty, cruelty, idiocy, and incompetence in government, or in the economy, or et cetera. That is a wonderful blessing.

How can we share the rights and responsibilities of a free people if we do not share meaning and respect everyone as full humans — as homes to the same spiritual Love without which our own feeling/thinking/acting is meaningless to us? We can’t. And so how lucky we are that liberal representative democracies are based upon the assumption that all humans share the same fundamental spiritual core! That is to say: our form of government is based on the assumptions that(1) we can and should love the Love that chooses everyone with everything we are, and that we can and should recognize that Love shining out of everyone else, and that (2) we all can and should stand up for the universal values, and that (3) our government should not punish us for standing up to evils within our government. That is to say: this form of government presupposes those core beliefs and values without which none of our feeling/thinking/acting can mean anything to any of us.

Liberal representative governments are spiritual goods because they create an environment where we are safe to seek the Truth as we see fit and to tell the truth as best we can, and where we are empowered to share meaning with everyone because the structure of our government assumes we are all spiritual equals and that no one should be allowed to amass enough power to oppress others — not the wealthy, not the leaders, not the criminal masterminds.

We are lucky to have had so many years of liberal representative government. “Liberal” because we are protected from vengeance from our government and our neighbors because the system is designed to keep anyone from amassing enough power to steal the right to dissent from the rest of us; “representative” because we don’t vote for all the laws and bills (we don’t have time to do that), but we do vote for temporary representatives in government, and in this way we can together steer our shared government towards the better and away from the worst — and can together keep our shared government out of the hands of those who would abuse our trust by turning our government of by and for the people into a government of by and for a top-down criminal organization.

Putin’s Russia is a thugocracy*. It is a kleptocracy**. It is not fun. It is boring and scary. Here in the good old USA we can still mix it up and then go home secure in the knowledge that nobody’s going to poison us, or that if they do, the government will be on the side of those trying to catch and stop them. It’s not perfect here, but it is still wonderfully liberating and spiritually empowering to live in the USA, where you can tell the Truth and the truths as you see fit without worrying that the government is going to slander, fine, imprison, or kill you.

*[Russian Decency by Zhena Bruno for the NY Review of Books (June 2024).

Kostyuchenko is an investigative journalist. Her new book, I Love Russia, is about power in Russia, and about the media. It is also a love letter of sorts to Novaya Gazeta, where she worked for seventeen years. Founded in 1993, Novaya Gazeta has received numerous prizes for the courage and quality of its coverage. Its journalists have been threatened, assaulted, and murdered. (emphasis from the author of “We the People”)

Once, the paper came out in print three times a week. It was available by subscription, at newsstands all over Russia and for free online. Then, in mid-March 2022, after its truth-telling about the invasion of Ukraine, newsstands stopped carrying it. Website traffic surged—to 23 million unique monthly visitors—just before new censorship laws forced the newspaper to suspend publication. It continues today, online and in exile, from Riga, Latvia, as Novaya Gazeta Europe, but has become hard to access in Russia. The state censorship agency, Roskomnadzor, blocks its web pages.

…

One person inside the police station knew that she was a journalist. The others conducted themselves as usual: drunk and stoned at HQ, watching cop shows on television, wielding their considerable power over helpless people whose crimes they made up to cover their monthly work plan. The officers worked together to fabricate these reports. This, too, is a feature of what Kostyuchenko calls decency: giving moral credence to the illegal actions that are carried out to support one’s colleagues.

…

I Love Russia ends on the other side of this border, with Kostyuchenko reporting from Mykolaiv, Ukraine. She speaks with residents whose children have been killed by Russian shelling, whose houses have been destroyed, who have been gunned down in their cars and survived. It’s painful to read.

The article wasn’t up on Novaya Gazeta’s website very long. By March 2022 the new law criminalizing the “discrediting [of] the Russian armed forces” came into force. It carries a maximum sentence of fifteen years. Kostyuchenko’s essays were taken down, and then Novaya Gazeta was shut. (Kostyuchenko’s reports from Ukraine can still be read on other platforms: they were quickly republished by Meduza, in the original Russian, and in English by n+1.) A source informed Kostyuchenko’s colleagues that a Russian battalion stationed in Mariupol had orders to kill her. Muratov told her to leave immediately. She traveled to Germany and planned to reenter Ukraine as a reporter for Meduza but fell ill, apparently poisoned.

…

The state projects an image of unified strength through its violence, censorship, and informal pressure. But it cannot hold a monopoly on the extra-juridical realm of personal ethical action. In a 2023 interview Yury Dud asked Kostyuchenko whether people within the Russian state’s security forces ever help her. Yes, she said, “these people saved my life.” They alerted her colleagues about the planned assignation. Why would they do that? “Perhaps,” she said, “because they don’t think it’s right to kill journalists. Perhaps they know my work, perhaps they are patriots of their country.” To be a patriot here is to take responsibility for protecting others from the state, despite the law, against the bosses’ commands—by your own initiative, because it’s the right thing to do. And it is this ethic that keeps Russia lively. It is the general helping Lyana retrieve her husband’s body no less than the boat captain taking Greenpeace volunteers into the tundra.

]

**[The Rise of Kleptocracy: Power and Plunder in Putin’s Russia

Abstract:

In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, opaque financial flows and an equally murky network of ex-KGB officers, with its roots in the 1990s, come together in a distinctive system of corruption. This system serves dual purposes: Those at the top follow the imperative of self-enrichment, but they also find in corruption a highly effective tool for consolidating domestic political control and projecting power abroad. At home, omnipresent corruption makes property claims and business ventures contingent on the whims of the authorities, while keeping officials themselves permanently under the threat of selective punishment. Abroad, corruption serves as a key lever of Russian influence in other post-Soviet states, as well as a tool for undermining established democracies. Yet it also creates vulnerabilities that can make Russia prone to reckless and extreme measures. Although Russia’s kleptocracy is a self-sustaining system, it faces a growing backlash in the forms of international sanctions and domestic discontent.

]

It is so much more fun here, people!

It is fun to live in a nation where we can argue over politics and compete in business, but still go home friends, knowing that you are all empowered to stand up for those beliefs and values without which none of your beliefs and values have any meaning to you: Live in and through and for the Love that chooses everyone; stay within the boundaries created by the universal values (aware, clear, honest, accurate, competent, compassionate, loving-kind, joyfully-together), and make use of the universal spiritual practices as your conscious dictates. That’s the wonderful, the fun, the joyful thing about liberal representative governments: We can admit we are all in this together and live like we are all in this together — we can do this even if it means telling the government it needs to change, or even if it means telling wealthy and powerful people, or even people in government, that they have broken the law and will have to face the consequences.

We have our problems lately — including how poorly the government has represented the will of the governed*, and how much the wealth at the top has soared above everybody else’s share*. But the way to improve our situation is not by destroying liberal representative democracy; and the way to preserve liberal representative democracy is not by blowing up all its rules, norms, laws, and institutions.

*[See Part Two of our Love of Country]

A vote for the 2024 Donald Trump and his 2024 GOP is a vote for kleptocracy*, thugocracy**, and everything boring and stupid in human organization.

*[What worries me most about a Trump presidency by Caroline Fredericton for The NY Times in April 2024.
…

Recall how Mr. Trump operated in his first term. Not only did he keep his stake in more than a hundred businesses, he made it a practice to visit his properties around the country, forcing taxpayers to pay for rooms and amenities at Trump hotels for the Secret Service and other staff members who accompanied him — money that went straight into his bank accounts and those of his business partners. Those interested in currying favor with the president, from foreign governments to would-be government contractors, knew to spend money at his hotels and golf clubs. According to internal Trump hotel documents, T-Mobile executives spent over $195,000 at the Trump Washington Hotel after announcing a planned merger with Sprint in April 2018. Two years later, the merger was approved./blockquote>

…

In a kleptocracy, corruption is a feature, not a bug, where politicians apply the law inconsistently, favoring friends and punishing enemies. By controlling government assets and handing them out to friends and family — and dangling possibilities in front of would-be supporters — as well as using politically motivated prosecutions, kleptocrats cement their control of government and disempower opponents. We need only recall Russia’s erstwhile effort to create a democracy: It quickly drained away into the pockets of Vladimir Putin and his oligarchs, leading to the hopelessness and acquiescence of Russian citizens once they realized they could no longer change their situation through democratic means.

Now we face that danger at home. If Mr. Trump wins, America will have a leader invested in his own personal power, both financial and punitive, and supported by a much more capable team. When lucrative contracts are handed out to Trumpist loyalists regardless of merit and dissident voices are targeted and silenced, America’s leadership on the global stage will dissolve when it’s needed most.

The consequences will echo for generations if we lack the ability and the will to attack problems like climate change, mass migration, a new space race and multiple wars. Nothing of substance will be done, Mr. Trump’s cronies will continue to act with impunity, and millions of Americans — already worried that elites are held to a different standard than regular people are — will lose even more confidence in their government, convinced that everyone in Washington is out for himself.

]

*[How Kleptocracies work by Sarah Chayes for The Atlantic Monthly (February 2020)

Donald Trump’s decision this week to pardon several Americans convicted of fraud or corruption has garnered condemnation from many in the political establishment. The pardons were shocking to some, but to me they were eerily familiar—straight out of the kleptocratic playbook I’ve experienced and studied in a dozen other countries.

]

*[Trump reelection risks American Kleptocracy by Ahmed Baba April 2024

If you think Trump’s first term was a nightmare of corruption (100+ examples of Trump’s corruption), his second term is looking set to be a full-blown kleptocracy

This doesn’t get talked about enough: the first Trump term was a walking constitutional Emoluments Clause violation, with foreign governments seeking to fill Trump’s pockets to garner favorable treatment, no matter the foreign policy implications. Trump made $160 million from foreign countries while in office (Trump made up to $160 million from foreign countries as president) , according to a CREW investigation.

A second Trump term would bring more of this corruption but ramped up to the next level. With Donald Trump’s planned purging of tens of thousands of civil servants (Editor’s Note: Trump did this at the end of his first term, but when he lost reelection, it was too late for the changes to go into effect; this author cites Project 2025, which Trump has denounced, but this editor cannot think of a good reason to believe what Trump says [Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30573 over the four yeas of his presidency | Donald Trump’s (2024) campaign of relentless lying), we can expect Trump and his administration to issue government contracts to businesses with ties to Trump and his allies while punishing his political targets.

]

**A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for thugocracy, for the replacement of a government of by and for We the People with a criminal organization committed to maintaining and exploiting political power. How do we make this case? It strikes us as obvious, but we need to be clear for all.

First, let us accept the principle that willfully working to replace a liberal democratic republic with a thugocracy is a crime against humanity. Because, in a liberal democratic republic, humans can stand up for the universal values and for their right to live in and through spiritual Love — they can do this without the government crushing their lives into dust. But in a thugocracy, the whole point is oppressing everyone else so you can use the government as criminal organization.

Who is Donald Trump in 2024? And what is the GOP of 2024?

We’re not arguing that for sure if Trump wins this election, he will turn the US into a thugocracy. We’re simply arguing that voting for Donald Trump is voting to give power to a man who has corrupted his political party and who has shown an interest and capability for ruling as an autocrat. This isn’t even controversial. There’s piles of evidence in support of that thesis*. How could a free people freely do that? This we don’t understand, but that this free people is freely doing that seems clear to us.

*[I mean, whatever. You can read overview after overview, like we tried to do with What we know and in part two of our To Ross Douthat. But anyone can spend an hour googling and discover a very obvious pattern of Donald Trump leaning into autocracy and away from democracy — from reality-as-politics, might-makes-right and us-versus-them as political strategies, to praising dictators and disparaging our democratic allies, to hinting that he plans on refusing to concede any election he loses, to actually having tried to steal the last presidential election, to promising to use the government to go after political foes while having actively attempted to do that while in office, to … .]

Wake up, my fellow Americans!

You are driving me crazy.

What you are doing is evil.

What am I supposed to do with you?

You have hurt me so much.

What you are doing is evil.
Surely you feel it in your bones.
And by how bored you are by this man.
And yet still you will vote for him and betray yourself, the rest of us, and the soul of things.
Why?
What is the real reason?
Some of you like cruelty and us-versus-them and might-makes-right and reality-is-whatever-the-boss-says and shove-the-other-guy-onto-his-knees.
But what about everyone else?
What about those of you who are voting your conscious and will yet support this evil project?
What about those of you who just don’t like the idea of a Democrat, and/or a woman, and/or a black woman, and/or a woman of Indian descent, and/or a mixed woman being president?
What about those of you who honestly can’t see any big difference between Trump and Harris?
What about those of you who are upset with Biden and/or Harris and so will use your vote to protest them?
I don’t understand any of you.
At what point do voters set aside partisanship and other incidental certainties, and vote to keep anti-democratic fools from the highest office in the land?