How to Reopen the American Mind In the midst of an existential crisis for higher education, is it even reasonable to expect the humanities to survive?
America and the Virus: ‘A Colossal Failure of Leadership’ In its destruction of American lives, treasure and well-being, this pandemic marks the greatest failure of U.S. governance since Vietnam.
Persuasion My pro-Trump friends and readers complain that the mainstream media are biased against Trump, and thus they tune us out for being unfair and piling on. ........ the more urgently we shout, the less we’re heard .......... I understand why people like Mary voted for Trump. The loss of well-paying jobs devastated places like my hometown, Yamhill, Ore. Mary spent seven years homeless, lost four relatives to suicide, and herself once put a gun to her own head, before she pulled herself together with the help of a local church. Trump talked about bringing jobs back and helping ordinary workers — so she voted for the first time in her life, for Trump. ............ his highest presidential approval numbers after being impeached .......... Trump is a charlatan who preys on my friends who trust him. Trump’s own sister has said he is a liar with “no principles,” and his former chief of staff Gen. John Kelly reportedly referred to him as “the most flawed person” he has known. .......... he has exploited my friends and then betrayed them with his policies. ............. I’m a great believer in community, in the idea that what makes countries strong is “social capital” — the web of relationships, beliefs, trust, decency and identity that make a society work. Trump has taken this social fabric and acted as the Great Unraveler. ............... He is what Proverbs 6:19 calls “a person who stirs up conflict in the community.” ................. great nations more often rot from within than suffer defeat from outside ............. I see Trump as not just a phony but also a threat. He has left the United States a more turbulent and divided nation, one close to war with itself. ................. Today the greatest threat I perceive to America’s national security isn’t from Qaeda terrorists, Russian cyberattacks or Chinese missiles. As I see it, it’s from Trump’s re-election. ............... Jani, a committed Christian, has worried about Democrats and abortion. But this time she will vote for Biden because she’s appalled at Trump’s policies toward migrants, Black Lives Matter and health care, and because “God cares about oppression, justice, the voiceless.”
Innocence I didn’t think that enough of us would indulge a would-be leader as proudly hateful, patently fraudulent and flamboyantly dishonest as Donald Trump. ......... Some 46 percent of the Americans who cast ballots for president in 2016 picked him, and as he moved into the White House and proceeded to soil it, most of those Americans stood by him solidly enough that Republicans in Congress didn’t dare to cross him and in fact went to great, conscience-immolating lengths to prop him up. ........... In him we forgave florid cruelty, overt racism, rampant corruption, exultant indecency, the coddling of murderous despots, the alienation of true friends, the alienation of truth itself, the disparagement of invaluable institutions, the degradation of essential democratic traditions.............. In a sane and civil country, of the kind I long thought I lived in, his favorability ratings would have fallen to negative integers, a mathematical impossibility but a moral imperative. In this one, they never changed all that much. ............. I’m not saying that support for him is spun entirely of malice or bias. Keen economic anxiety and profound political estrangement are why many voters turned to him ................ He tapped into more cynicism and nihilism than this land of boundless tomorrows was supposed to contain. ........... Trump didn’t draw out anything that wasn’t already there, burbling beneath the surface.
Imagination all the attention sucked up by this black hole of a president has been its own sort of loss ........ Trump is a narcissistic philistine, and he bent American culture toward him. ............ I’ve no doubt that great work was created over the past four years, but I missed much of it, because I was too busy staring in incredulous horror at my phone. ......... “More political books have sold across all formats during this presidential term than at any point in NPD BookScan history” .......... “Fiction lost out to nonfiction since 2015,” said NPD’s Kristen McLean. The decline in fiction sales began before this presidency, but during the past four years it accelerated. “Trump taking up space in our brain and crowding out our ability to think about anything else is definitely, I think, part of the phenomenon” ............ “Right now it’s all about, ‘How will this end?’” ............ “The daily clown show cuts into television’s bandwidth, both figuratively and literally, occupying space in the national conversation, and therefore our brains, that might be instead filled with, among many other things, the heir to ‘The Sopranos.’” ............. when politics are so alarming that the rest of the world seems to recede, it creates cultural claustrophobia .......... The outrage Trump sparks leaves less room for many other things — joy, creativity, reflection ............ The problem is the president, not how his victims respond to him. ............ the unprecedented progressive mobilization of the past four years ............ After four years of “This is not normal!” .......... Living in Trump’s panic-inducing eternal present is bad for art, but it’s also bad for imagination more broadly, including the imagination needed to conceive a future in which Trumpism is unthinkable. If people no longer had to throw themselves in front of the bulldozer of this presidency, there would be more energy for progress and for pleasure. Trump has blocked out the sun.
Pax Americana America in the 2020s will remain a deeply polarized nation, rife with crazy conspiracy theories and, quite possibly, plagued by right-wing terrorism. .......... For almost 70 years America played a special role in the world, one that no nation had ever played before. We’ve now lost that role, and I don’t see how we can ever get it back. .............. And sometimes it seemed as if one of our main goals was to make the world safe for multinational corporations. ......... The Pax Americana arguably dated from the enactment of the Marshall Plan in 1948; that is, from the moment when a conquering nation chose to help its defeated foes rebuild rather than demanding that they pay tribute. ........... What, for example, is the point of a rules-based trading system when the system’s creator and erstwhile guardian imposes tariffs based on transparently bad-faith arguments — such as the claim that imports of aluminum from Canada (!) threaten national security? ............. Is America still the leader of the free world when top officials seem friendlier to nations like Hungary, where democracy has effectively collapsed — or even to murderous autocracies like Saudi Arabia — than to longstanding democratic allies? .............. We’ll start following trade rules; we’ll rejoin the Paris climate accord and rescind plans to withdraw from the World Health Organization. ......... everyone will remember that we’re a country that elected someone like Donald Trump, and could do it again. ........... the great danger, if America turns protectionist, wouldn’t be retaliation, it would be emulation ........... There will be more economic and military bullying of small countries by their larger neighbors. There will be more blatant election-rigging in nominally democratic nations.
Faith Trump’s Presidency Smashed the ‘Decency Floor’ ............ No other modern presidential candidate had talked and behaved that way. ............ And then, just when you thought the country would rise up in moral revulsion … nothing happened. Trump’s behavior got worse and worse and worse … and nothing happened. He was defying moral gravity. ......... He created more scandals than I expected … and he just kept going. One of the oft-repeated phrases about Trump during these years was: There is no bottom. ........... We’ve long had polarization, but we now have in America a crisis of legitimacy, which is a different creature. It’s the obliteration of other citizens, an assumption that the institutions, like election systems, are fundamentally frauds and are rigged. This is what Trump is exploiting now. ............ In 1997, 64 percent of Americans had a good or great deal of trust in the wisdom of their fellow citizens in making political decisions. Today only a third of Americans have a great or good deal of trust in the ability of their fellow citizens to make competent political decisions. ........ a lot of people on the hard left and the hard right now consider politics a war of all against all, where the ends justify any means. ............ Over the past four years we’ve poured out an hourly flow of anti-Trump diatribes and in almost every case they rise to the top of the charts — most liked, most retweeted, most read. ................... Even when justified, permanent indignation is not a healthy emotional state. We’ve become a little addicted to our own umbrage, addicted to that easy feeling of moral superiority, addicted to the easy affirmation bath we get when we repeat what we all believe. Trump-bashing has become a business model. ............. the awareness that our basic standards of decency are more fragile than we thought; the awareness that any year, some new leader may come along and bring us back to a world of no bottom.
Generosity “moral cynicism,” or the notion that laws and informal rules weren’t really and truly binding .............. It is cliché at this point to note that Trump has laid waste to our norms and customs, and in so doing, eroded our trust in institutions whose reputations were already in sharp decline (the media and federal government instantly come to mind), as well as our trust in our fellow Americans. .............. As a nation, we’ve lost our sense of altruistic and moral purpose, a collective will to do what is decent and right and, as sociologists like to say, “other-regarding.” Instead, we’ve been living in a state benumbed and a benumbed state, in which nihilism prevails and corruption oozes from the very top. ................. we’re enacting the zero-sum values of reality television. .......... Trump has normalized selfishness. ............ we, an extravagantly wealthy nation, suffer from an extravagant number of deaths. ......... the rich were profiting shamelessly from deregulation and small-government reforms at around the same time the epidemic of mass incarceration began. .......... the nation spun off a breakaway republic of the 1 percent. ........... Moral cynicism “taps the darker side of human nature” ............. the importance of community culture in defining neighborhoods.
Naivete The founders of this country worried obsessively about the rise of a demagogue, and the power of foreign influence on our democracy. ........... America did the unthinkable, shocking itself and the world: It put the most powerful country in the world under the control of a lying, grifting, shady carnival conductor. He had no experience in governance and no expertise. His entire life was a game of smoke and mirrors, double talk and double-dealing. ............... Even Trump, not a student of history or much else, didn’t seem to grasp the awesome power he possessed until he systematically started to test all the fences supposedly restraining him, only to realize that the only thing holding many of them up was customs and conventions. Most could be run through or pushed down. .................. We didn’t believe that in this era we could have a president who could be so regressive on issues of white supremacy, white nationalism and xenophobia. ............ “Nixon believed in a hierarchy of races, with whites and Asians much higher up than people of African descent and Latinos. And he had convinced himself that it wasn’t racist to think Black people, as a group, were inferior to whites, so long as he held them in paternalistic regard.” ............. what Trump delivered: a generational retreat into darkness. .......... that the most qualified woman to ever run would defeat the least qualified man to do so
Our Word Tuesday’s election will be seen globally as a referendum on the durability of democracy. If American democracy, long a beacon, cannot self-correct, then all democracies are at risk. ........... The presidency and dishonesty have become synonymous. ............ Hence the talk in European capitals of the need to “contain” the United States, a verb once reserved for the Soviet Union............... Allies believe a second Trump term could lead to the United States’ leaving NATO, following the decision to leave the World Health Organization. Departure from the World Trade Organization is also possible. Trump has yet to encounter a multilateral organization he does not want dead. .............. The United States has become a values-free international actor under a president who has led a values-free life. .............. Over the past four years, America has come close to exiting the global community of democracies. Trump is far more comfortable with autocrats like Putin and Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia than with a democratic leader like Merkel. (She has, for the president, the added drawback of being a woman.) ............ Human rights have all but disappeared from the American agenda. This has been evident in the brutality at the Mexican border. .............. Trump has severed America from the idea of America. ........... In the European Union the realization that it may now stand alone against Russia, China and the United States in embodying liberal democratic principles and the defense of human rights has come as a painful, if galvanizing, shock. .............. the damage is deep; the old status quo will not return. ........... A second Trump term of erratic American belligerence meeting growing Chinese assertiveness would be pregnant with the possibility of violence.
Conservatism Republicans, like the Federalist Party of yore, will consolidate power in the judiciary. Apart from that, they will have spent the past four years squandering their reputation, forsaking their principles, and trashing the kind of political culture they once claimed to hold dear. As victories go, the word Pyrrhic comes to mind. ................. Hemingway’s great line about how one goes bankrupt — “gradually, then suddenly” — seems apt. ............. Every time Trump lied, broke a promise, humiliated a subordinate, insulted a stranger, bullied an ally, tweeted something vile, said something idiotic, threatened to blow up NATO, and otherwise violated moral, political and institutional norms, his appeal among the Republican base didn’t decline. It rose. ............... Conservatives used to admire Edmund Burke. Not anymore, insofar as Burke stood for the importance of manners and morals to the health of the state. Conservatives used to admire Milton Friedman. Not anymore, insofar as Friedman stood for free trade, sound money and a balanced budget. Conservatives used to admire Scoop Jackson. Not anymore, insofar as the Washington state Democrat was a champion of the idea that human rights should stand at the center of U.S. foreign policy. Conservatives used to admire Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Not anymore, insofar as both Reagan and Bush believed in humane immigration reform, international coalition building, standing up to Russian tyrants and, when possible, making deals with Democrats. ........................ At its principled best, conservatism holds that liberal ends — the right of the individual to enjoy the maximum degree of freedom compatible with the right of his neighbor to do the same — are best secured by conservative means. Those means are the practices, beliefs and institutions that, for the most part, lie outside the state: stable families, religious communities, voluntary associations, productive businesses, the habits of a free mind. Ultimately, the goal of conservative politics is to produce competent citizens capable of responsible self-government. .............. Trump may defy the odds again and win. ........ As for the Republican Party, Trump’s re-election would make it the most potent force for anti-liberalism in the Western world today.
A Female President One of my clearest memories of election night in 2016 is running into women who were going to watch the results with their daughters, so they’d get to share the experience of seeing Hillary Clinton elected president ............ she lost to one of the most awful candidates in American history. A man whose personal relationships with women seemed to hark back to the 1950s, if not the cave. ........... brought more women into the world of American politics. A record number ran for office in 2018, and a record number won. ............ A record 60 filed to run for one of the 35 Senate seats up for election this fall. Nearly half are still in the running; 20 have already won primaries. ......... you can’t help but fantasize about Amy McGrath knocking out Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. ......... We seem to be seeing more and more female candidates with résumés that include time in the armed forces.
Our Illusions Trump is transgressive, yes. But his transgressions are less a novel assault on American institutions than they are a stark recapitulation of past failure and catastrophe. ....... What is terrible about Trump is also terrible about the United States. Everything we’ve seen in the last four years — the nativism, the racism, the corruption, the wanton exploitation of the weak and unconcealed contempt for the vulnerable — is as much a part of the American story as our highest ideals and aspirations. The line to Trump runs through the whole of American history, from the white man’s democracy of Andrew Jackson to the populist racism of George Wallace, from native expropriation to Chinese exclusion. ........... There is very little about Donald Trump or his policies that doesn’t have a direct antecedent in the American past. ............ the president’s racism harkens right back to the first decades of the 20th century, when white supremacy was ascendant and the nation’s political elites, including presidents like Woodrow Wilson, were preoccupied with segregation and exclusion for the sake of preserving an “Anglo-Saxon” nation. ............. men like James Polk, who — decades removed from planter-politicians like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe — bought and sold human beings from the White House. ............. Trump does nothing more than embody Nixon’s quip to David Frost that “when the president does it … that means that it is not illegal.” ....... Trump has helped bring ugly forces out into the open, giving aid and comfort to assorted racists and white nationalists. Yet it’s also true that these groups and individuals have always been with us ............. an administration that has embraced the worst aspects of our political culture and merged them into a potent brew of destruction, lawlessness and authoritarianism. ................... the exclamation point on our consistent failure to live up to our own self-image.
Allies the damage has been profound, but, I’d argue, the cancer has not yet metastasized into the bones and lymph nodes of our nation ........... Four more years of a president without shame, backed by a party without spine, amplified by a TV network without integrity, and the cancer will be in the bones of every institution that has made America America. ........... if the message broadcast by the Statue of Liberty shifts from “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” to “get the hell off my lawn” .............. unlike any other great power that had come to impact their lives, our purpose was different. .............. historically “America’s intent, if not always its practice, has been to exhort not extort other nations; to export not exploit; to collaborate not dominate; and to strengthen a global system of rules and norms, not overturn it in order to focus exclusively on its own enrichment. ........... China’s “economy grew at almost 5 percent, without monetizing debt, while all major economies contracted. China produces more than it consumes and runs a balance of payments surplus, unlike the U.S. and many Western nations.” Even Tesla’s best-selling Model 3 car, he wrote, “may soon be made entirely in China.”
Pride We were the winners, the good guys. We had swagger and vitality and an endless sense of possibility. .......... America wasn’t perfect, God knows. I was raised here in the heart of the white patriarchy, where the Washington Monument was an apt symbol. .................. we don’t even know if the president will use the Supreme Court, midwifed by Mitch McConnell, to purloin the election. .......... In 2015, Donald Trump was agonizing over whether to go for the role as the president in “Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!” or to run for the actual presidency. ................ I have seen a lot of Republicans use bigotry to lure racists, scare Americans and win the White House. But with Trump, it is more blatant because he cuts out the middleman. ............... a soulless, rapacious Silicon Valley that keeps torquing up the algorithm for conflict and conspiracy .............. Social media and the former reality star have entwined to make cruelty and fake news central elements of the nation’s discourse. ........... “What we have lost is the sense that we are one nation, all in this together. Donald Trump is the first president in our history who has sought to divide us rather than unite us. We will heal once he leaves, but the scar will endure.” ............ The president’s spiral into lawlessness is too repellent — and frightening — to allow levity. ......... it was “as though Trump blew up the science lab, exposing the raw nerve of America’s stream of consciousness.” ........... the nest of vipers that is this White House ......... “Never has the expression ‘Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty’ been more resonant. ............ Even if Joe Biden wins, it’s not going to be easy to restore what has been lost, or to forge a new American identity. ............... Fortunately, the younger generation is more tolerant, open and committed to justice.
A Reckoning The political apocalypse of 2016, when Donald Trump improbably vanquished the establishment of both parties .......... when the failures in both parties and every faction were laid bare. ............. the way that center-left and center-right visions of post-Cold War “openness,” to free trade or low-skilled immigration or ever-greater-integration with the People’s Republic of China, simultaneously failed to achieve their geopolitical goals and hollowed out communities across the American heartland, creating a deadly, demagogy-ready vacuum where work and church and family used to be. .......... For the left, the revelat ions were about how its own victories within the Democratic coalition, the triumph of social liberalism over cultural conservatism, had forged a party that no longer connected with a lot of white, working-class voters ............. The major centrist project of the Trump era wasn’t a sustained reassessment of where its leaders had gone wrong; it was the hysterical overhyping of the Russia investigation, in a paranoid style that made seedy Trumpian malfeasance out to be a vast Kremlin conspiracy, the casus belli of a new Cold War. ............ His management of the pandemic has been a case study in what you might call state-incapacity libertarianism, his handling of racial protest was deliberately polarizing rather than unifying (and not even successfully polarizing, since it left the majority on the other side), and his early push for sweeping Covid relief spending gave way to indifference and distraction as the autumn phase of legislation stalled.
Apathy a boorish TV businessman, a B-list personality with a taste for the tabloid, announced one of those publicity-stunt bids for the presidency you usually hear about only in jokey montages at the end of the local news. ......... maybe it was cosmic retribution for our decadence ....... The more we look, the more he turns us off; the more he turns us off, the more we look. By the time of his inauguration, Trump was already one of the most covered, most discussed, most famous living human beings of all time. ................. Now you hear from him anywhere, everywhere, at any time. He’s there on every screen and status update, in every conversation, dream, nightmare. As subtext, he lurks within the arts, in sports, in the weather reports, in houses of worship. ............. Even now, on the precipice of an election that may finally offer an exit from this infinite loop, the end of having to think about Trump seems nowhere close. .......... Two-thirds of Americans report feeling “worn out” by the news. ........ With nearly every tweet, Trump gave us a new 10-car pileup from which we couldn’t look away. But in the process of making us look at him, Trump forced many of us to actually look for the first time. By turning us into a nation of rubbernecks, he has pushed us to reckon with why things are crashing in the first place and to examine the faulty infrastructure of our democracy. ............ Trump got us to recognize a truth long ignored in American politics: that a competent government is important. American greatness and American goodness can never again be taken for granted. His inept reign has proved that the country cannot run on autopilot, and there is no longer any basis for the lazy idea that America will always, in some automatic and reflexive way, “work things out.” ............ It is now tragically clear what happens if the federal government is left to wither, if expertise and experience is undermined and overruled, and if honesty, decency, integrity and fairness are abandoned by public officials: People die, people lose their jobs, hate and mistrust fester, long-term problems become sudden emergencies, and the country steadily loses unity and moral standing. ................. The midterm elections of 2010 and 2014 and the presidential races of 2012 and 2016 were low-engagement, low-turnout affairs. You might even say that American political life in the past decade has been determined more by the inaction of those who didn’t participate than by the actions of those who did. ............ From Day 1, there was nothing quiet or incremental about Trump. He attacked American institutions frontally and clamorously, shocked us into realizing their fragility and compelled us to stand up against his wrecking ball. .......... When Trump attacked the media, people subscribed in droves. ......... For the first time, more Americans now favor expanding immigration instead of restricting it, and a majority of Americans say they support Black Lives Matter. ......... In 2018, a wave of candidates across the country, a lot of them women and people of color, ran for office for the first time. Nearly 120 million Americans voted that year, the highest turnout for the midterms in more than 100 years. This year’s vote could shatter all records. ............. Would Democrats be talking about far-reaching reforms for our democracy — eliminating the Electoral College, expanding the Supreme Court, statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico — if we weren’t shocked by the dreadful chief executive this broken system has given us?
