Democrats’ “Resistance” Has Sabotaged Proper HATRED of Trump
Note to Readers
The piece that follows reflects a rather novel, creative (and lazy) approach to writing political articles, or at least to writing them quickly. Its main substance — its “centerpiece” — consists of two e-mails I sent on consecutive days this week to a longtime friend, a retired philosophy professor who (along with his wife) finds himself on the opposite side of the Trump “Great Divide.”
In justification for my “labor-saving” approach, I offer two reasons. First off, my e-mails are often (as here) part of discussions with highly intelligent friends and opinion leaders whose able minds I’m attempting to persuade. As a result, I sometimes (as here, I hope) rise to a pitch of impassioned eloquence and solid argument equal to any passage in my published articles.
Secondly, the two e-mails included here — above all, the first one’s threat to rupture with old friends over Trump — serve as passionate documentation of our “interesting times” (reference to the purported Chinese curse fully intended). If civilization survives its current crisis — a humongous “if” — the included e-mails may have considerable interest for future historians. Or, perhaps they’ll have value for space alien anthropologists poring over the cultural remains of a long-vanished terrestrial species.
Some Essential Background
My friend and his wife, here referred to as the fictitious couple Bryce and Chloe, are two longtime friends, retired philosophy professors, both over a decade older than myself. I met Bryce as an undergraduate and, besides becoming a friend, he served as an important mentor to me. As a wide-ranging humanities scholar with numerous published philosophy books, he gave young, depressive me much-needed confidence in my abilities as a poet, essayist, and intellectual generally. That’s the “debt of gratitude” I refer to in my second e-mail.
Life has led Bryce, his wife Chloe, and me down wildly unexpected rabbit holes. Both are converts to Roman Catholicism, a faith I’d overdosed on in youth and have now abandoned for honest agnosticism. But considerably weirder are our political rabbit holes. Apolitical well into my late forties, the Iraq War followed by head-on confrontation with Pennsylvania fracking morphed me into a bitter progressive opponent of our damnable duopoly — and thus co-founder of the Bernie or Bust movement. But now — while more disgusted with Democrats than ever — I’m convinced (as dangerously few leftists are) that the fate of civilization itself may depend on defeating Trump. Staunch opposition to abortion (among other things) has transformed once-progressive Catholic intellectuals Bryce and Chloe into virtual apologists for that corrupt, unspeakably dangerous, reactionary, know-nothing demagogue.
As virtual Trump apologist, Bryce has taken the more open, aggressive role. Perhaps the weirdest of his personal rabbit holes is that turf battles between science and philosophy/religion — the legitimate fear of science being perverted into overreaching scientism — has warped him into a de facto (if often tacit, perhaps even unconscious) science denier. Starting with his own misguided denial of climate science (if they can’t predict weather, how can they predict something bigger like climate?), Bryce has now assembled an e-mail list in which he daily harangues old friends and colleagues about the creeping fascism in science-based attempts to limit the spread of a deadly virus.
To me, the looming fascist threat is predominantly, as it was with the Nazis, on the science-hating, truth-denying side. Bryce had declared that Trump is not a principle of metaphysical evil; to me he virtually is. If decent people have legitimate grounds to loathe Democrats, it’s because their shallow, corrupt, self-serving “Resistance” has sabotaged our ability — and need — to HATE Trump with proper, rationally based hatred. More on this after the e-mails.
Centerpiece: My Two E-mails
Bryce,
I seriously disagree. My intuition tells me Trump virtually IS a principle of metaphysical evil. Maybe it’s safer to say that, due not merely to his loathsome-but-insubstantial self but to circumstances, he’s a threat to humanity of world-historical proportions. Since part of my evidence is based on consensus climate science — which you (unlike Pope Francis) reject on no good grounds — you’re utterly incapable of seeing it. Noam Chomsky, who despite having had relatives die in the Holocaust, calls today’s Republican Party “the most dangerous organization in human history,” is, to my perception, one of the few political analysts who gets this right.
I personally feel like Cassandra (or like Winston Churchill), feeling morally obligated to warn of a danger that few on the left, right, or center see. If Trump is reelected, he is certain to ramp up drilling for “freedom fuels,” which will put him on an ever-more-violent collision course with peaceful, heroic climate activists fighting to save human civilization. I have no idea whether I’ll have the moral and physical courage to join them in peaceful civil disobedience, since I understand the grave danger of “Trump Unbound” far better than they.
In all of this, Democrats have been utterly disgusting, demonizing Trump for shallow, self-serving reasons rather than the things that actually make him a demon. Another public intellectual I deeply admire, Chris Hedges, brilliantly predicted the rise of someone like Trump in his book The Death of the Liberal Class. His comparison of today’s warmongering neoliberal Democrats to the Weimar liberals who, by throwing the poor and working class under the bus, paved the way for Hitler couldn’t be more apt. As to Trump’s purported defense of “religious freedom,” it has essentially been a defense of his “useful idiots” on the Christian right — whom Hedges rightly regards as Christian heretics.
Sadly, I strongly suspect your (and Chloe’s) roles as apologists for Trump is going to end our long friendship. But that is exactly what political leaders of world-historical evil do.
Bob Dylan won a Nobel Prize for Literature for writing lines (in “All Along the Watchtower”) like “Let us not talk falsely now/The hour is getting late.” Weird as such apocalyptic sentiments may sound in an e-mail, that is EXACTLY what I’m doing here.
Couldn’t be more sincere and serious,
Patrick
Hi Bryce,
I’ve had a chance to sleep on it, and I really don’t want to end our long, valuable friendship over Trump. But PLEASE understand that I’m honestly convinced, on grounds I consider rational (and that aren’t partisan or tribal in any sense), that Trump is a threat to civilization itself. PLEASE understand that if you e-mail me anything defending Trump, I WILL get angry and fight with you. I don’t want to end our friendship on that basis — and I have a debt of gratitude to you — but I PASSIONATELY hate Trump on grounds I find rational, and (mainly because you reject consensus climate science), nothing you say has a snowball’s chance in hell of changing that.
That said, I’m sorry I rashly threatened to end our friendship; when someone feels (as I do) that I’m a Cassandra warning of onrushing catastrophe, it’s hard to keep friends who disagree from catching some shrapnel.
One thing we do have in common is utter disgust with today’s Democrats, and as an olive branch I wanted to offer this superb, brilliant Glenn Greenwald video. Admiration for the heroic Greenwald is something on which we can firmly agree.
Sorry to have been so rash,
Patrick
Take-Home Lessons from My E-mails
The first lesson is one I wish to dispense with quickly. Even in these trying times, one should never be too quick to shatter old friendships. When I made the threat to sever relations with Bryce and Chloe, I felt a deep internal pang, as if something had shattered in my soul. Fortunately, a brilliant old friend (cc’d in my e-mail) next intervened, calling to say that while he agreed with most of what I said, the one thing he emphatically did not agree with was that I should rupture with old friends. He was right, but I feel I’m likewise right in taking Trump’s ability to turn friend against friend, and sibling against sibling, as a mark of his being a figure of world-historic evil.
Infinitely more important here are the take-home lessons for our imperiled body politic. Taken alongside the Glenn Greenwald video I offered Bryce as an “olive branch,” I find in Matt Taibbi’s and Katie Halper’s timely and essential interview of Aaron Maté, another journalist of rare heroism, a correctly savage, stinging indictment of today’s Democrats. By wasting three years attacking Trump based on a self-serving, tribal Russiagate narrative — now an exploded lie — Democrats have, in Greenwald’s words, “depoliticized politics” and in Maté’s words, handed Trump a “huge gift.” All the best — indeed, the essential — reasons for hating Trump are reasons of policy and governance and have nothing to do with partisan tribalism. I intend to explore Democrats’ obscene role in enabling Trump in my next piece, “Today’s Democrats: Fascist Enablers Beyond Weimar.”
Finally, the most important take-home lesson here — to play on Sinclair Lewis’s prescient book title — is that “it can happen here." I’m now firmly convinced that it — the “it” being real fascism — IS happening. Trump’s response to the deadly COVID-19 has fully convinced me of the fascist threat of granting a know-nothing megalomaniac, who has surrounded himself with equally know-nothing free-market and Christian-right ideologues, a second term he’ll inevitably read as a mandate. To quote an aphorism of sheer genius, “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.” No one could have predicted that the next fascist threat could come from a spoiled-brat, billionaire megalomaniac whose self-regard is so pure, so free from concerns outside self, that it almost makes me admire Hitler’s devotion to the Aryan race. Believe me, I intend to make this the subject of endless upcoming articles.