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I really wish that people had a better grasp on what The Average Person’s Life was like pre-industrialization. If you’re living in the global North the odds are good that your life is, in fact, better than a medieval king- yes, even with the political stuff- and would make your ancestors cry wild tears of envy.
The things that suck about your life are things that suck about the baseline human condition (at least since the invention of agriculture, but that’s 10,000 years of humanity). Yes, including all the political stuff.
The baseline human condition is “being terrified of losing the harvest and starving”, compared to that, losing a job is no big deal. (It’s bad, it can be life-upendingly bad, but it’s still not “you are guaranteed to die if you screw this up” bad for most people.)
The baseline human condition is “getting kicked around by a tin pot dictator”, whether that be a king, a baron, a warlord, or a chief; it’s taken centuries of social technology to get the world to a point where that’s Not Normal.
The baseline human condition is “losing multiple siblings and/or children at a young age to diseases that are entirely preventable”. That’s a shocking tragedy now. The baseline human condition is “being in the pathway of said tinpot dictator’s wars of conquest” and having to deal with soldiers’ pillage, looting, and worse (even if they’re nominally on your side). That is, again, a shocking tragedy– it still happens, and happens in way too much of the world, but no one is going to tell you that it’s normal.
I’m not saying that we can sit back and rest on our laurels. We can’t. I’ve been calling the pre-industrial world the “baseline human condition” for a reason- unless you’re very, very careful, that’s what your society eventually reverts to. It takes a lot of people working very hard to make sure you don’t have to live at the baseline human condition, and if you start slacking on that, you start backsliding into it.
How we treat each other- and how we use the technology, material and social, that we’ve developed to make things easier- matters. We can make the world even better than it is now. We can also make it significantly worse. The choice is ours.
…But if you know that you can reliably have food regardless of the season, you don’t live in fear of a random attack killing you tomorrow, and you can listen to music on command whenever you want? You do actually live a better life than a medieval king. Because even kings and emperors were much closer to the baseline human condition than a random farm worker in Bumfuck, Iowa is today.
#you’re probably not going to shit yourself to death. you should look up how many kings died that way. imho that in itself is a big win.#file under: reasons the ‘society should collapse so we can build a knitting & gardening utopia’ crew should be regarded as deeply unserious#or deeply unhinged
On the eve of April Fool’s Day in 1848, two sisters in Hydesville, NY, began screaming for their mother. Margaretta, known as Maggie, was 14; Catherine, called Kate, was 11. Something in their bedroom was making thumping sounds, apparently attempting to communicate with them.
The girls asked the Something to copy them as they snapped her fingers; it did. They asked it if it knew their ages; it rapped 14 times, then 11 times. The neighbors were called in to witness; everyone was agog. Arthur Conan Doyle, who discussed the sisters’ experiences in his 1926 book, The History of Spiritualism, wrote, “Over the course of the next few days a code was developed where raps could signify yes or no in response to a question or be used to indicate a letter of the alphabet.”
The otherworldly communications quickly took an unnerving turn. Harry Houdini, who told the girls’ story in his 1924 book A Magician Among the Spirits, wrote, “Some one [sic] asked the girls if a murder had ever been committed in the house. The ominous sounds of the code answered in the affirmative.” Conan Doyle reported that the girls called the spirit “Mr. Splitfoot,” a nickname for the devil.
The family abandoned the house. (Who wouldn’t.) The girls’ much older, married sister, Leah — she was 23 when Maggie was born — took Maggie and Kate to live with her in Rochester, NY. There, the young sisters amazed the neighbors by communicating with their dead children. Leah became Maggie and Kate’s manager; she was soon collecting a dollar a head (around $40 today) from people who wanted to see Maggie and Kate talk to spirits. The girls drew ever-greater crowds. In November 1849, they sold out the biggest venue in Rochester, Corinthian Hall, and demonstrated their powers for nearly 400 people. Some thought they were fakers (Scientific American magazine called them “Spiritual Knockers from Rochester”) but many were convinced. Leah took them on a national tour, keeping them to a rigorous schedule of daily private spiritualist readings and public performances.
The sisters were an early inspiration for Spiritualism — a faith characterized by the belief in communication with departed souls. Spiritualism gained adherents throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, largely in English-speaking countries. Many families lost loved ones in the Civil War, World War I, and the great flu epidemic of 1918. Almost every household at the time was touched by death in some way. Spiritualism gave grieving people hope. At the same time, the development of and advancements in photography meant that people began seeing (apparently) documentary images of ghosts and strange ectoplasm — the supposed physical manifestation of a dead person’s energy. This too helped people believe that their loved ones could reach out to them from the beyond … with a little help from certain gifted souls, who often happened to be attractive young women. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who lost a son in the flu epidemic and whose wife believed she could communicate with the dead, became increasingly passionate about Spiritualism; Harry Houdini cynically pretended to be a medium early in his career but became increasingly determined to debunk Spiritualist trickery. Their differences wound up destroying their long friendship.
Over the years, some mediums recanted and apologized for bilking rubes. Among them were Maggie and Kate Fox. Sort of.
By 1888, the sisters were exhausted. Maggie had been widowed; she and Kate both struggled with alcohol and poverty. They’d had a falling-out with Leah, who had accused Kate of being a bad mother because of her drinking.
In September of that year, Maggie decided to confess her deceptions to The New York World. She was paid $1500, the equivalent of around $51,300 today.
As recounted by Harry Houdini in his book debunking Spiritualism, Maggie acknowledged her and Katie’s actions … but blamed Leah completely. “Katie and I were led around like lambs,” she wrote. “The rooms were jammed from morning till night and we were called upon by those old wretches … when we should have been out at play in the fresh air.” She noted that Leah got rich while she and her little sister did not. “We had crowds coming to see us and she made as much as a hundred to a hundred and fifty dollars a night. She pocketed this.”
Lithograph depicting Miss Margaretta Fox, Miss Catherine Fox, and Mrs. Fish, Currier & Ives, 1852
Maggie went on:
I loathe the thing I have been. I used to say to those who wanted me to give a séance, ‘You are driving me into Hell.’ Then the next day I would drown my remorse in wine. I was too honest to remain a ‘medium.’ That’s why I gave up my exhibitions. I have seen so much miserable deception! Every morning of my life I have it before me. When I wake up I brood over it. That is why I am willing to state that Spiritualism is a fraud of the worst description. I have had a life of sorrow, I have been poor and ill, but I consider it my duty, a sacred thing, a holy mission to expose it. I want to see the day when it is entirely done away with. After my sister Katie and I expose it I hope Spiritualism will be given a death blow.
This isn’t an apology. Maggie takes no responsibility; everything is Leah’s fault. She doesn’t acknowledge that she perpetrated harm. She focuses on her own suffering and her bravery in coming clean (very like the way Mark Wahlberg focused on his own heroism in facing his youthful, racist criminal history, which we discuss at length in our book).
Maggie did a little better at a presentation a couple of weeks later, at the New York Hall of Music. There, on October 21, in front of an audience of 2000 people, with Kate in attendance for moral support, Maggie did acknowledge her own wrongdoing.
I have been chiefly instrumental in perpetrating the fraud of Spiritualism upon a too confiding public, most of you doubtless know.
The greatest sorrow of my life has been that this is true, and though it has come late in my day, I am now prepared to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth—so help me God!
There are probably many here who will scorn me for the deception I have practiced, yet did they know the true history of my unhappy past, the living agony and shame that it has been to me, they would pity, not reproach.
The imposition which I have so long maintained began in my early childhood, when, with character and mind still unformed, I was unable to distinguish between right and wrong.
I repented it in my maturity. I have lived through years of silence, through intimidation, scorn and bitter adversity, concealing as best I might, the consciousness of my guilt. Now, thanks to God and my awakened conscience, I am at last able to reveal the fatal truth, the exact truth of this hideous fraud which has withered so many hearts and has blighted so many hopeful lives.
I am here tonight as one of the founders of Spiritualism, to denounce it as an absolute falsehood from beginning to end, as the flimsiest of superstitions, the most wicked blasphemy known to the world.
I ask only your kind attention and forgiveness, and as I may prove myself worthy by the step I am now taking, may you extend to me your helping hands and sustain me in the better path I have chosen.
This is better, though still not great. She uses the term fraud, and says she repents for her actions (though “repent” is a lot like “regret”; it isn’t quite “apologize” – it’s still about the speaker rather than about those the speaker harmed). She does acknowledge that she hurt people. But she still focuses more on the wrong done to her and she still asks for “pity, not reproach.” A good apology would have taken ownership of her decisions as an adult and focused still more on those she’d harmed rather than herself.
Giving the people what they wanted, Maggie proceeded to describe and demonstrate how she and her sister had made their unnerving knocking sounds. At first, while living with their parents in Hydesville, the two had tied strings to apples, hid the apples in their beds, and secretly dropped them onto the floor to scare their mother. Over time, they learned to crack their finger and toe joints at will, loudly enough to create rapping noises that seemed to come from spirits. (Houdini had earlier called out their toe-bones trick, to Conan Doyle’s annoyance.)
Some victims of spiritualism were happy to forgive Maggie. Here are two letters the newspapers received:
God bless you, for I think that you now speak the truth. You have my forgiveness at least, and I believe that thousands of others will forgive you, for the atonement made in season wipes out much of the stain of the early sin.
If, as you say, you were forced to pursue this imposture from childhood, I can forgive you, and I am sure God will; for he turns not back the truly repentant. I will not upbraid you. I am sure you have suffered as much as any penalty, human or divine, could cause you to suffer.
Forgiveness can be healing for those who opt to forgive. It doesn’t mean any of the other victims were obliged to follow suit, however. (As we like to say, apologies are mandatory; forgiveness isn’t.) We who weren’t wronged aren’t entitled to berate victims for forgiving or for not forgiving. That’s their choice.
A year later, Maggie took back her confession. Her spirit guides had told her to lie, she said! They’d been real all along! Also real was the fact that she had run out of money. She was drinking heavily. But recanting didn’t help her career; she wasn’t welcomed back into the ranks of mediums. (Most of them chose not to forgive, it seems.) Maggie and her big sister Leah never spoke again. Leah died in 1890, at 77, well-off, married to a Wall Street banker. Kate died in 1892, at 55, in a drunken binge. Maggie died – penniless and living on charity in an empty Brooklyn townhouse belonging to a friend — eight months later, at 59.
Like Fox Mulder, many still want to believe. In 1904, newspapers reported the discovery of a human skeleton inside a wall in the basement of the Fox sisters’ childhood home. Had this been the murder victim Mr. Splitfoot had told Maggie and Kate about? YES! said the Boston Journal, in a story on November 23, 1904. The discovery “clears [the Fox sisters] from the only shadow of a doubt held concerning their sincerity in the discovery of spirit communication,” the paper intoned. There was no follow-up story noting that the “skeleton” consisted mainly of chicken bones.
Faith can be unshakeable. In 1926, Conan Doyle wrote that Margaret had always been a true psychic who did not understand her own power, was gaslit by her Catholic husband who scorned Spiritualism and convinced her she was lying about her gifts, and only renounced Spiritualism because of “alcoholic excitement and the frenzy of hatred” she felt for Leah, paired with “the hope of pecuniary reward.” (Conan Doyle felt that mediums should receive salaries, so as not to be tempted by either rich jerks or the fear of poverty. How the salary system would work is unclear.)
Today, many stories about the Fox sisters hint that they may have had legitimate knowledge of the spirit realm after all.
Who can prove otherwise?
Happy Halloween.
Again, speaking as someone with scrupulosity OCD and anxiety, this whole entire mentality of “if I vote for a presidential candidate, then I, personally am responsible for each and every bad thing they do” is essentially a form of catastrophic, polarized thinking. It’s a super unhealthy way of thinking that leaves you unable to meaningfully navigate through life a lot of the time. And while you might feel morally clean, it’s actually an incredibly dysfunctional way to live because you just won’t take action when it could really matter, or the actions you do take don’t actually have a substantial chance of changing things.
Like refusing to vote, or voting third-party even though you know the odds of a third party candidate making it are pretty much nil (or because you’ve convinced yourself it could totally work if Everyone Just - even though we all know there is no point in history when Everyone Just), that’s dysfunctional behavior. There’s no getting around it. It’s dysfunctional behavior.
Here’s a short video from the great historian of European totalitarianism Timothy Snyder, on how authoritarian and totalitarian regimes depend on people, especially people like Jeff Bezos, obeying in advance, and how important it is for all anti-fascists not to do that.
Jonathan V. Last describes exactly what’s happening here:
ON FRIDAY, after the Washington Post’s publisher announced that the paper was suddenly abandoning the practice of the editorial page endorsing presidential candidates, news leaked that—on the very same day—Donald Trump met with executives from Blue Origin.
Blue Origin, of course, is the rocket company owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post.
This was neither a coincidence nor a case of Bezos and Trump being caught doing something they wished to keep hidden. The entire point of the exercise, at least for Trump, was that it be public.
What we witnessed on Friday was not a case of censorship or a failure of the media. It had nothing to do with journalism or the Washington Post. It was something much, much more consequential. It was about oligarchy, the rule of law, and the failure of the democratic order.
When Bezos decreed that the newspaper he owned could not endorse Trump’s opponent, it was a transparent act of submission borne of an intuitive understanding of the differences between the candidates.
Bezos understood that if he antagonized Kamala Harris and Harris became president, he would face no consequences. A Harris administration would not target his businesses because the Harris administration would—like all presidential administrations not headed by Trump—adhere to the rule of law.
Bezos likewise understood that the inverse was not true. If he continued to antagonize Trump and Trump became president, his businesses very much would be targeted.
So bending the knee to Trump was the smart play. All upside, no downside.
What Trump understood was that Bezos’s submission would be of limited use if it was kept quiet. Because the point of dominating Bezos wasn’t just to dominate Bezos. It was to send a message to every other businessman, entrepreneur, and corporation in America: that these are the rules of the game. If you are nice to Trump, the government will be nice to you. If you criticize Trump, the government will be used against you.
Which is why Trump met with Blue Origin on the same day that Bezos yielded. It was a demonstration—a very public demonstration.
But as bad as that sounds, it isn’t the worst part.
The worst part is the underlying failures that made this arrangement possible.
My friend Kristofer Harrison is a Russia expert who runs the Dekleptocracy Project. This morning he emailed, “America’s oligarch moment makes us more like 1990s Russia than we want to believe. Political scientists can and will debate what comes first: oligarchs or flaccid politicians. 1990s Russia had that in spades. So do we. That combination corroded the rule of law there, and it’s doing so here. Russian democracy died because their institutions and politicians were not strong enough to enforce the law. Sound familiar? I could identify half a dozen laws that Elon Musk has already broken without enforcement. Bezos censored the Post because he knows that nobody will enforce the law and keep Trump from seeking political retribution. And on and on. The corrosive effect on the rule of law is cumulative. The Bezos surrender is our warning bell about entering early-stage 1990s Russia. No legal system is able to survive when it there’s a class not subject to it because politicians are too cowardly to enforce the law.”
And that’s the foundational point. The Bezos surrender isn’t just a demonstration. It’s a consequence. It’s a signal that the rule of law has already eroded to such a point that even a person as powerful as Jeff Bezos no longer believes it can protect him.
So he has sought shelter in the embrace of the strongman.
Bezos made his decision because he calculated that Trump has already won—not the election, but his struggle to break the rule of law.
Donald Trump tried to overthrow the government between November 2020 and January 6, 2021. He did this more or less out in the open, and to the extent his efforts were covert, they were quickly exposed in the days immediately after the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol.
The reaction of the most powerful people in the American political system to this, starting with Mitch McConnell’s Senate Republicans, and soon moving on to Merrick Garland’s DOJ, was to do nothing about it. A great number of institutionalist Democrats spent the first couple of years of the Biden administration gaslighting themselves and the country about the fact that Trump had tried to overthrow the government, and the laws against this were not enforced. By the time any real effort to do so was finally undertaken, it was far too late to actually do it.
Would an actual effort to enforce the law against Trump that began on January 20, 2021, have failed anyway? Quite possibly, but we’ll never know.
What we do know is that now Trump has every reason to believe that the criminal law will never apply to him. Even his conviction in New York state court for crimes that are approximately 10,000 times less serious than those he committed on TV at the end of his first maladministration hasn’t led to any real consequences. It has turned out to be impossible to even sentence him to the slap on the wrist that he might eventually receive, assuming he isn’t re-elected to the office that he will use to wreak vengeance on all the people who decided the best way to avoid fascism was not to resist it in any meaningful way.
The coup de grace for American liberal democracy may well prove to be Trump v. United States, but that case merely told Trump explicitly what the entire system has been telling him implicitly for his entire life, and most particularly since January 6, 2021: That the law doesn’t apply to him.
The post On Tyranny: Obeying in advance appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.
If you can’t see any sense in the pro-Trump case, you’re looking at the wrong level.
“How can this election be close?”
It’s a cry of frustration I hear almost every day in one way or another, not just from Substack bloggers and TV talking heads, but also on social media and from personal friends.
Sure, there are about as many Republicans as Democrats in the country, and as many conservatives as liberals. But one of the two candidates is Donald Trump. I could easily imagine someone like Nikki Haley winning. But the case against Trump should be both obvious and compelling.
We all saw him raise a mob and send it to attack the Capitol in an attempt to overturn an election his own people told him he lost fair and square. We lived through his mismanagement of Covid, which led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary American deaths. We see him day after day, rambling incoherently through interviews and unable to answer questions about the few policies he has proposed. We see key members of his first administration — like Chief of Staff John Kelly and JCS Chair Mark Milley — warn us that he is a fascist and should never again hold an office of public trust. We hear him repeat the words of past fascist leaders, telling us that his chosen scapegoats — immigrants, in preference to Hitler’s Jews (most of the time) — are “poisoning the blood of our country” and need to be rounded up by the millions. We hear him recite the eternal tropes of racism, claiming that immigrants have “bad genes” that make them criminals, but that he himself has “great genes” that make him smart. We hear him lie, virtually with every breath, about a bad economy, soaring crime, and an immigrant crime wave — none of which exist anywhere outside his imagination.
How is this election close? How is it still possible that he could win? Is half the country as far gone as Ruben Bolling’s version of Snoopy?
If you feel this frustration, imagine what it’s like for bloggers like me. Day after day, I motivate myself with this myth: If I could only explain things clearly enough, people would understand; and once they understood, the great majority of them would do the right thing. So the prospect of another Trump presidency doesn’t just make me fear for my country, it undermines my identity.
More and more it becomes apparent that the problem isn’t that half the country doesn’t understand. Many of them actively want a fascist government that will implement the cruelty they feel in their hearts. Many who aren’t openly rooting for that cruelty refuse to understand what Trump is, and no one can make them understand against their will. They will accept any excuse for his behavior, even excuses that shift from month to month and contradict the previous excuses.
Thank you for letting me get that out of my system. Now I can try to go back to being calm and reasonable.
A few weeks ago I took a long, leisurely driving trip from my home in Massachusetts out to west-central Illinois, where I grew up. I led a church service there, and then took a long, leisurely drive back. Along the way, I saw the lawn signs in neighborhoods very different from mine, and I heard campaign ads not just for the national race, but for a variety of close Senate races.
I think I understand something now.
Fantasies of crime. In the northwest neck of Pennsylvania, road closures threw me off of I-90 and sent me through a small town that sits between Cleveland and Buffalo, but is outside the orbit of either city. In a peaceful middle-class neighborhood I saw numerous yard signs that said
Trump safety
Kamala crime
I doubt the people who live in those houses are recent victims of crime or live in any realistic state of fear. I also doubt that they have looked very deeply into the crime problem nationally. If they had, they would know that crime has been dropping for decades, and was no better under Trump than under Biden and Harris. Crime briefly blipped upward during both the Trump and Biden years of the Covid pandemic, but in recent years the long-term decline has resumed.
Unlike many of the fantasy problems Trump presents in his speeches, he at least has proposed fantasy solutions to this one: deport all those brown people with criminality in their DNA, and stop making the police follow rules.
The trans “threat”. Trans people figure prominently in several of the ads I saw. One purported to compare the Trump military to the “woke” Harris military. The scenes representing Trump were of a drill sergeant screaming abuse at recruits. The ones representing Harris showed dancers of indeterminate gender. We are supposed to draw the “obvious” conclusions that these images are typical of Trump and Harris military policies, and that the abused recruits will perform better on the battlefield than the gender-fluid recruits.
An attack ad directed at Sherrod Brown said that he voted to allow men to compete in women’s sports. An anti-Harris ad said she supported paying for the sex-change operations of criminals in prison. It concluded “Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you.” During the Olympics, Trump falsely said that a gold-medal-winning female boxer was a man who had “transitioned”, and implied that women competing against her were in danger. Republicans often attack the inclusion of transwomen in women’s sports by invoking the image of men beating up on women.
Again, these ads seem directed at people whose lives are not affected by the issues being raised. The Algerian boxer Trump attacked was not trans. The actual number of transwomen athletes in school sports is tiny — about 40 out of 500,000 NCAA athletes, according to one report — and no women’s league in any sport in the country is dominated by trans stars. The real stars of women’s sports — Caitlin Clark, for example, or Serena Williams — were identified as female at birth. Transwomen who have taken puberty-blocking drugs have only minor advantages over other high-school or college-age women. The problem of transwomen beating down “real” women is itself not real.
Of course, there is a real men-beating-women problem in our society, but Republicans do not seem concerned about it. Whenever proposed legislation would protect women — say, by closing the “boyfriend loophole” in laws the prevent domestic abusers from owning guns — the opposition will be almost entirely Republican.
Similarly, the number of trans soldiers in our military or trans inmates in our prisons is tiny. Kicking out the one or making the other pay for their own surgery is not going to perceptibly improve the daily lives of MAGA voters.
Immigrants “destroying our country”. The third major argument, which I hear more from Trump himself than in TV ads, is that immigrants are “destroying our country“. The examples Trump offers are horrifying: In Springfield, Ohio “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.” Aurora, Colorado is a “war zone”, occupied by “an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world”.
But none of that is true, and even local Republican officials push back against Trump’s false claims. Such lies can’t be aimed at winning votes in the communities he’s talking about, because local people can simply open their eyes and see that the world he’s describing isn’t real.
So the target audience must be elsewhere.
Something similar is going on in Trump’s rhetoric about American cities, especially major cities in key swing states: Milwaukee is “horrible”. Philadelphia is “ravaged by bloodshed and crime”. If Harris is elected, he claims, “the whole country will end up being like Detroit.” (Harris and Detroit struck back with this ad, about how the city has rebuilt itself: America will be like Detroit? “He should be so god damn lucky.”)
“These cities,” Trump said in a 2020 town hall. “It’s like living in hell.”
Those comments aren’t intended to earn votes in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Detroit — Democratic strongholds where people can simply open their eyes and see that on the whole life is not particularly hellish. Rather, they’re aimed at suburban and rural voters who never go to the cities because they believe terrible things about them.
What’s going on? I set out to explain how this election can be close, and so far I haven’t. If you think of politics as being about problems and solutions, none of the arguments Trump and other MAGA Republicans are making add up. They are offering to solve problems their voters don’t have, and to protect them from people who do them no harm. (Trans people, for example, have issues with their own genders, not yours. Crime in Atlanta hurts Atlantans, not people in Marjorie Taylor Green’s district, where the largest city, Rome, has 37,000 people. If undocumented immigrants affect your life, it’s probably by picking the vegetables you eat or washing the dishes in your favorite restaurant.)
So how do all these arguments work? Why doesn’t it matter that so many of them are easily debunked? And how do they coalesce into a coherent whole? Fortunately, we don’t have to figure this out for ourselves, because we can call in a MAGA expert: Tucker Carlson. Speaking at a Trump rally in Georgia Wednesday, Tucker pulled it all together:
If you allow people to get away with things that are completely over the top and outrageous, if you allow your 2-year-old to smear the contents of his diapers on the wall of your living room and you do nothing about it, if you allow your 14-year-old to light a joint at the breakfast table, if you allow your hormone-addled 15-year-old daughter to, like, slam the door of her bedroom and give you the finger, you’re going to get more of it, and those kids are going to wind up in rehab. It’s not good for you and it’s not good for them.
No. There has to be a point at which Dad comes home. [loud cheering] Yeah, that’s right. Dad comes home, and he’s pissed. Dad is pissed. He’s not vengeful; he loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them, because they’re his children, they live in his house. But he’s very disappointed in their behavior, and he’s going to have to let them know: “Get to your room right now and think about what you did.”
And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? “You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking, right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl. And it has to be this way. It has to be this way, because it’s true. And you’re only going to get better when you take responsibility for what you did.”
That’s not said in the spirit of hate. It’s not said in the spirit of vengeance or bigotry. Far from it. It’s said in the spirit of justice, which is the purest and best thing there is. And without it, things fall apart. …
Not only do I think Donald Trump’s going to win, I think that the vibe shift has been so profound. … What you smell around you is the return of freedom, it’s the return of the country you grew up in. …
[The Democrats] need to lose. And at the end of all that, when they tell you they’ve won: No! You can look them straight in the face and say, “I’m sorry. Dad’s home. And he’s pissed.” [1]
How does that pull it all together? Most of us don’t parent teen-age girls we wish we could spank, so how does this little vignette capture why we should vote for Trump?
Let me explain: If you’re looking for the problems of ordinary American life, you’re looking in the wrong place. Trump is not talking about how you’re going to pay for college or find a job or afford a house or get healthcare or retire without starving. The problem his campaign is all about is on a different level altogether: You feel dislocated in today’s world.
That’s why his slogan is backward-looking: Make America Great Again. When is “again”? Back in July, the folks at Salon posed that question to people at the Republican Convention:
What we found is that, whether they’re 30 or 70 years old, the typical RNC attendee thinks America was “great” when they were kids. They believe America lost its way coincidentally right at the time they were maturing into adulthood.
For whatever reason, they now find themselves living in a world very different from “the country you grew up in”. Maybe it’s all the people chattering in languages they don’t understand. Maybe it’s being told that it’s racist or sexist to talk the way they’ve always talked. Maybe it’s having to deal with people who don’t look like either men or women to them, and being told that they’re the problem when they can’t keep track of which name or pronoun to use. Maybe it’s not being able to assume that everybody’s Christian or heterosexual, or not knowing what’s funny now, or hearing music that doesn’t sound like music. Maybe it’s not being able to get a real person on the phone, or receiving 100 pieces of junk mail for every letter they actually want, or dealing with women who earn more than men. Maybe it’s not recognizing half the countries on the globe or being reminded about George Washington’s slaves or hearing “land acknowledgements” about the Native Americans who once occupied the property where they live.
The core MAGA message is that all these problems are really one problem: The world feels wrong now, because people don’t know how to behave.
All the apparent problems Trump talks about are just symbols, just ways to get his hands around this larger, more ineffable problem. Illegal immigrants, terrorists, criminals, transsexuals, women who get abortions — they’re all just people who don’t know how to behave. And that’s why it doesn’t matter if he’s making up his facts or that some particular thing never really happened. People don’t know how to behave, and they make the whole world feel weird and scary That’s real.
Similarly, all the solutions he talks about are really just symbols of one solution: We need to put somebody in charge who will be strong enough to make people behave.
That’s what Tucker spelled out: Dad needs to come home, the old-fashioned kind of Dad who yells and judges and punishes. He’ll tell the bad kids they’re bad, and he’ll keep spanking them hard until they learn to be good.
And then America will be great again, like it was when all of us were children.
[1] This clip got a lot of play on social media and elsewhere, but most of the response focused on the spanking-little-girls aspect and ignored the fascist threat at the end: Even if Kamala Harris wins, MAGA will try to install its strongman.
