Great news from Tomorrowland and the wonderful world of Science! Are you worried that you might be suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome? Do you suspect that the balance of your mind may be disturbed by the white-hot hatred in your heart toward a certain norm-shattering ex-president? Well, fear not! According to Michael Caruso, the chief executive officer of The New Republic, the most up-to-date scientific opinion says that “hating Trump can actually be healthy for you.” In a fundraising letter from September, he wrote to subscribers and would-be donors that
[w]ith bestselling self-help books with titles like Never Get Angry Again, the steady growth of meditation apps like Calm, and the rise of fads like anger management classes—part of the $2 billion stress management industry—people are spending a lot of time and money trying to keep from having a meltdown. But scientific studies show that our ability to get angry is actually part of a healthy, natural process. “Anger comes up as a warning,” a mental health counselor explained to cnn recently. “It helps us set boundaries. It helps self-preservation. It helps us be assertive and advocate for ourselves.” “Anger is a protective emotion,” agrees Jamie Mahler, a trauma specialist who literally wrote the book on Toxic Relationship Recovery. “If we need to overcome some sort of obstacle, anger can provide us with motivation to do that.”
But, added Mr. Caruso, for Trump-hating to be good for you, your anger must be constructively directed. And it just so happened that The New Republic was launching the first “Stop Trump Summit”—toward the cost of which the email’s lucky recipients were invited to funnel their anger by contributing.
In a way, I suppose it is some kind of progress for the rabidly anti-Trump New Republic to admit that their opinion is emotionally rather than rationally based, or at least that they and their all-star cast of Trump haters at the “Summit”—which included Robert DeNiro, Don Lemon, Al Sharpton, Jamie Raskin, Mary Trump, and “many others”—make no appeal to reason but only to the hatred they already share, presumably, with subscribers and contributors to the magazine. You have to be pretty deeply inflicted with Trump Derangement, I think, to find such an appeal appealing, even with the promise that those giving one hundred dollars or more will receive a “super-cool tnr tote bag.”
“A super-cool tnr tote bag” sounds like an oxymoron to me, but what do I know? Only that this kind of politicking on pure emotion, or moral indignation whipped into a frenzy by self-righteousness, is not limited to the Trump haters, though it is primarily a natural outgrowth of the neo-Marxist Left’s reduction of politics to a mere power struggle between irreconcilable classes of oppressors and oppressed. More alert to this than most of his Republican rivals, Mr. Trump has never been afraid to make himself the favorite target of the Left by hating them back. But the result, as Michael Cuenco writes a propos the conviction of Peter Navarro on a charge of contempt of Congress, is
what happens when politics is severed from its policy content or, indeed, from any larger moral objective—and becomes simply about the prosecution of feuds based on pure friend–enemy distinctions.
Of course, there is a radical asymmetry between the two sides in this struggle, as only one has the immense propaganda power of the media at its disposal for the belaboring of its putative enemy. The indictments of Mr. Trump and his followers can only have made it clear to all but the willfully blind that ours is now the politics of vendetta. The only real political question today is that of Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty: “Which is to be master—that’s all.” And the Democrats and their allies in the media, who have long had the means to criminalize political differences, are currently master.
It would be surprising, under the circumstances, if the Republicans did not try some scandal promotion of their own against their habitual persecutors, as they are now doing with the impeachment investigation of President Biden, launched with the blessing of Kevin McCarthy, then Speaker of the House, in September. To me, the case for impeaching Mr. Biden on a charge of bribery seems open-and-shut, but it is impossible to deny that the effort can be seen as a tit-for-tat response to the Trump indictments, and, before these, the Trump impeachments and the Russiagate hoax.
By the way, the larger strategic purpose of this battle of the scandals seems to me to be the same on both sides. Each is invoking scandal to induce its rival to rally around and so prop up a presumptively weak or dubious presidential candidate. Both sides thus make their target whomever they believe will be easiest to defeat. This strategy has worked spectacularly well for the Democrats with Mr. Trump, whose lead in the polls has made his Republican competitors irrelevant. It also shows signs of working in Mr. Biden’s case, since doubts within the party and the media about his age and cognitive decline appear to have been silenced following the announcement of the impeachment inquiry.
Meanwhile, the scandal culture that received a new lease on life with the Trump presidency continues on its merry way. I’d like to think that every time the media or the Justice Department discover a new Enemy of the People, ordinary, unbiased folks notice that this new enemy is always someone having second thoughts about the left-wing orthodoxies the media and the Justice Department are now dedicated to enforcing. Most recently this has happened with the doj’s opening of an investigation into Elon Musk, supposedly over his management of his businesses. Maybe there are legitimate concerns there, but does anybody believe that this would be happening if Mr. Musk were still a paid-up member of the media establishment?
Even Democrats can hardly credit the testimony before the House Judiciary Committee of Attorney General Merrick Garland that
Our job is to uphold the rule of law. That means we apply the same laws to everyone. There is not one set of laws for the powerful and another for the powerless, one for the rich and another for the poor, one for Democrats and another for Republicans.
That’s just about as believable as the “science” behind the claim that hate is good for you, and it reminds me of Chief Justice John Roberts’s claim back in 2016 that, “We [in the judiciary] don’t work as Democrats or as Republicans”—something that few can have believed even back in 2016 and even fewer can believe now in light of the rise of “January 6 jurisprudence,” though it may still be true of Chief of Chief Justice Roberts himself and one or two other Republican appointees. Nor is the politicization of the law limited to this country. Across the West, political life and culture seem to be sinking to the Merrick Garland level—that of a naked pursuit of power and partisan advantage under the thinnest and most platitudinous rhetorical cover. In the United Kingdom, Russell Brand, formerly a darling of the Left, has lately shown signs of harboring increasingly heterodox opinions. Few will therefore regard as coincidental the charges recently surfacing in the media of sexual assault from the years during which he bragged of having slept with hundreds (or possibly thousands) of women.
Mr. Brand has always seemed a loathsome character to me, and it wouldn’t surprise me or, I imagine, anyone else if some of the claims against him turned out to be true. But it is also undeniable that his treatment of women hardly bothered anybody in the media or the government until he became a vaccine skeptic, appeared with Tucker Carlson, and started saying things that people in the media or the government just don’t say these days if they want to avoid being branded as criminals—whether in Britain or America.
Is it any wonder then that, as noticed in this space recently (see “No surrender” in The New Criterion of September 2023), Americans are losing faith in our system of justice to an unprecedented degree? Of course, this is no bad thing for those whose politics are dedicated to destroying our system of justice in order to replace it with a revolutionary alternative. Hate—a word that, like “racism,” “authoritarianism,” or “democracy,” can now apply only to one side of the political divide—feeds on itself, and those who resist being drawn into its vortex are likely to feel so emotionally bullied by both sides that they give up any hope of a peaceful or orderly political solution to the country’s problems.
There is some reason to believe that this disillusionment is actually taking place. A new poll from Pew Research shows that
a little more than a year before the presidential election, nearly two-thirds of Americans (65 percent) say they always or often feel exhausted when thinking about politics, while 55 percent feel angry. By contrast, just 10 percent say they always or often feel hopeful about politics, and even fewer (4 percent) are excited. The survey also provides people several opportunities to describe in their own words their feelings about the political system and elected officials. When asked to sum up their feelings about politics in a word or phrase, very few (2 percent) use positive terms; 79 percent use negative or critical words, with “divisive” and “corrupt” coming up most frequently.
Similar feelings of disgust with the political process seem to be showing up in Britain, at least if these recent headlines from the The Telegraph are anything to go by: “The political elite has given up on Britain”; “The Tories have given up. Britain has a government in name only”; “Britain is in a state of distress more profound than our leaders are capable of addressing”; “Britain’s high streets are becoming a no-go zone—and our incompetent elite are to blame.”
At any rate, even if the widespread feeling of political hopelessness and futility is mistaken, the media in both countries appear to be doing all they can to foster it, since it may be supposed to serve the interests of the revolutionary Left to which the media have ever more closely allied themselves. At UnHerd, the South African Wessie Du Toit recently noticed that “Britain is turning into South Africa”:
South Africans have come to regard their chaotic and inept state with a weary resignation that borders on ridicule. It is a burden to be negotiated when necessary, and fended off where possible. For some time now, Britain’s attitude to its own governing class has been moving in the same direction. New Labour alienated large parts of the traditional Left, and now Tory incompetence has led to similar cynicism among conservatives. With each perceived betrayal, more people enter the reservoir of citizens who have given up believing that Westminster can do anything remotely useful.
Insofar as this is true, it must be because the leadership of both countries has either explicitly or implicitly adopted—as has the American leadership since the advent of the Biden administration—the Marxist-Leninist view of political power, which is primarily if not solely concerned with who has it and who hasn’t. Once in power, the dominant party inevitably becomes obsessed with consolidating that power and making it permanent—invariably, these days, in the name of “democracy”—which renders the government more or less useless at performing the ordinary political business of providing for the country’s defense, maintaining law and order and a sound currency, creating the conditions for economic growth and opportunity, and educating children.
Republicans have been suckered in, again and again.
In fact, since all these things are said by the Left only to serve the white power structure—still mysteriously running things though the Democrats and their media and bureaucratic allies are in power—they must be revolutionized along with everything else. If the response of the electorate, and even large numbers of the opposition party, to this revolutionary movement, which is now scarcely even bothering to disguise itself, is mere ennui and disgust with politics in general, then surely part of the explanation is that Republicans have been suckered in, again and again, to playing the game of competitive scandals. This is a game at which they are always going to be the Washington Generals to the Left’s Harlem Globetrotters.
It would be nice to think that the gop could negotiate a deal with the Democrats wherein all the proceedings against
Mr. Trump are dropped in exchange for the dropping of all the proceedings against the Biden family, thus putting an end to the scandal wars and perhaps even to the scandal culture itself. Then we could go back to the happy days of Tammany Hall or Chicago under Mayor Daley when politicians were only corrupted by money and personal power and not by totalitarian ideology. But something tells me that the Democrats are not exactly shivering in fear over the outcome of either an impeachment trial or criminal proceedings against their guy. They don’t have to make the trade in order for Joe or Hunter or anyone else to enjoy their ill-gotten gains.
But is there no other way to put the brakes on the scandal juggernaut? As one looks at the panel of would-be gop presidential candidates, meeting to “debate” and, with their prepared one-line “zingers,” abuse or undermine each other while distancing themselves from the endlessly scandal-plagued standard-bearer whom the overwhelming majority of the party appears to prefer, one wonders whether these candidates might not do better to let scandal unite rather than divide them. Might not they go to where the party’s electorate seems to be and unanimously relinquish the pursuit of their party’s nomination—which none of them is likely to receive anyway—until the corrupt Democrat-run justice system releases its beleaguered hostage and allows him to make his case to the American people on its own merits? Perhaps even a few principled Democrats, if there are any remaining, would join in the effort to decriminalize politics and so tone down the partisan hatred. That could snap the public out of its lethargy and may also encourage Mr. Trump himself to forsake the politics of hate to concentrate on his more hopeful and positive message. It would also be what we used to call democracy, wouldn’t it?
