King Log and King Stork

Let’s consider the viewpoint of the people who are not enthusiastic about Donald Trump, but do not want him impeached. Contrary to what you may have heard, they are not mentally deficient, and it is possible to arrive at a reasoned understanding of them.

The Democrats are eager to impeach Trump. If they could bag Mike Pence along with him, they would jump at the chance. Say hello to President Nancy Pelosi.

This in itself is not a slam on the Democrats. Impeachment is a political process with political consequences. If the Democrats do impeach him and get a conviction, they get to reap the fruits of their actions. When the Republicans impeached Bill Clinton in 1998, they were after the same benefits, and on much less solid ground. The public rightly saw the impeachment of Clinton as a poorly-disguised attempt to overturn an election.

There are many Americans who don’t want to support the Democrats in this effort. Yes, some really think of Trump as a some sort of modern tribune of the plebs, who will lay about him and kick the asses of the Washington establishment, knocking them down a peg and restoring the Republic to the people.

But even among those who don’t think like that, there is still reluctance to sign on to the impeachment program. Many of us don’t trust the Democrats with power. Are we worse off with this guy, or the people who would replace him?

Conflicts of this sort have a long history, so long that there is an Aesop’s fable about it:

The frogs petitioned to Jupiter for a king. Jupiter heard them and threw a log into the pond. At first, the frogs were in awe of it, but it just sat there, floating in the water. Within days, the frogs were treating it with contempt.

The frogs called out to Jupiter again. “Give us a real king. This king does nothing.”

Jupiter heard the frogs and sent a stork to the pond. The stork promptly began to eat the frogs. As they fled for their lives, one frog said to another, “We should have been content with a king who does nothing.”

Trump is all over the place, and inconsistent in both his pronouncements and his actions. He has, however, avoided implementing a regulatory regime that would put further burden on small businesses. Many small business owners prioritize this much higher than any decision regarding Syria or Mexican immigrants.

Whatever happens to the economy over the next year, the Trump campaign can assert that it would have been worse if the Democrats had been running the country. This is not provably true or false, since there is no alternative United States run by Democrats, equal in all other respects, to which to compare. It is a credible claim nonetheless.

Trump’s behavior gets in his way. He makes enemies because he threatens their interests. He makes more enemies because he depends on being able to show that he is surrounded by enemies. He makes more enemies because he really likes to assert his dominance over people in public. After three years of doing that, yeah, he accumulates a lot of enemies.

These enemies actually limit the damage he can do. The Washington Post keeps a running tally of the number of Trump statements that are false or misleading. An anonymous person claiming to be within the Trump administration writes a highly critical op-ed in the New York Times. Civil servants become whistleblowers. Public resistance encourages further resistance.

So let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine a Democratic administration that uses climate change as a pretext to put the country in a perpetual state of emergency and amass power. Their first action is to tax up carbon-based energy to make it five times more expensive, seeking to reduce consumption. It works splendidly, at the cost of making ordinary Americans’ lives poorer and more difficult. If that seems like an over-the-top exaggeration of the consequences, you haven’t been listening. What kind of pushback could this administration expect? What kind of outcry would their actions receive in the mainstream media? From whence would come the whistleblowers?

The Democrats gave us a friendly reminder of their nature last September, when they issued a call to impeach Justice Brett Kavanaugh. One year before, the Democrats proved that they wanted the result they wanted, and would engage in any behaviors to obtain that result, including anonymous denunciations, character assassination and application of an ex post facto standard of behavior. Do we really want to throw these people the keys to the country?

If it were possible to leave the office of the President vacant until the next election, there might be more readiness to consider impeachment, but that is not on the table. Somebody has to lead the Executive branch of the government. Which alternative is worse? This is not an easy question to answer. Many people approach such situations with a simple rule: Stick with the devil you know.

 

Richard Rorty, Meet Donald Trump

It is unfortunate that Richard Rorty, the philosopher, did not live to see this. Rorty, who died in 2007, was a pragmatist, arguing that truth is not the representation of reality. So what is truth? This quote was circulating at the time of his death:

There is no basis for deciding what counts as knowledge and truth other than what one’s peers will let one get away with in the open exchange of claims, counterclaims and reasons.

We find that quote is not from Rorty himself, but from about about him by Charles Guignon and David R. Hiley (see New York Times obituary and correction). It is an oversimplification and not quite faithful to Rorty’s work.

Rorty argued against charges of relativism from his first book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979). Rorty was most heavily influenced by John Dewey, and it shows in his approach. Like Dewey, Rorty had an almost mystical belief that, if people just free themselves from wrong thinking, they will naturally gravitate toward living in harmonious cooperation. But this is circular and not falsifiable, because any tendency to be competitive, oppositional or tyrannical can be described as wrong thinking. We haven’t got there yet; we must try harder.

.. the point of edifying philosophy is to keep the conversation going rather than to find objective truth [Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 377].

If we are to trace the pragmatism of Richard Rorty to the pragmatism of Donald Trump, we must consider the role of crossover products exemplified by Guignon and Hiley. Rorty was writing about epistemology, the study of knowledge: how do we know what we claim to know? It is impossible to imagine a person who is primarily interested in action sitting down to read four hundred pages of epistemology. The popularizers who summarize are much more accessible, but often something is lost in the translation. As we saw at the time of Rorty’s death, the obit writers reached for a quote, but it turned out not to be from Rorty himself.

We have every reason to believe that Rorty would have been mortified by Donald Trump. Some people even believe that Rorty foresaw Trump in his 1998 book Achieving Our Country. Drawing on the works of others who identified fissures in American political life, Rorty wrote of a possible crisis point at which a substantial number of voters lost faith in the Dewey-Rorty future of social justice:

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen , and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. [p. 90]

However, Rorty expected this to play out in a familiar pattern:

For after my imagined strongman takes charge, he will quickly make his peace with the international super-rich, just as Hitler made his with the German industrialists. He will invoke the glorious memory of the Gulf War to provoke military adventures which will generate short-term prosperity. He will be a disaster for the country and the world. People will wonder why there was so little resistance to his evitable rise. Where, they will ask, was the American Left? Why was it only rightists like Buchanan who spoke to the workers about the consequences of globalization ? Why could not the Left channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossessed? [pp. 90-91]

Well, because the American Left was no longer interested in working people, which Rorty admitted:

It is not the sort of Left which can be asked to deal with the consequences of globalization. To get the country to deal with those consequences, the present cultural Left would have to transform itself by opening relations with the residue of the old reformist Left, and in particular with the labor unions. It would have to talk much more about money, even at the cost of talking less about stigma. [p. 91]

Rorty called for the Left to “put a moratorium on theory,” thus doubling down on pragmatism. However, Donald Trump would reveal that he was more pragmatic about his pragmatism than Rorty was prepared to be. Trump is the person least encumbered by theory of any American public figure of our time. One of the first bits of theory he tossed over the side was the idea that the future would necessarily converge on a benevolent, caring community of all Americans.

Here is a quote from another founding father of Pragmatism:

‘The true’, to put it very briefly, is only the expedient in the way of our thinking, just as ‘the right’ is only the expedient in the way of our behaving. Expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run and on the whole, of course; for what meets expediently all the experience in sight won’t necessarily meet all farther experiences equally satisfactorily.
— William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, Lecture VI (1907)

It may have been expedient for Richard Rorty, with his goals and values, to strive toward “the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.” [Achieving Our Country, p. 3] However, Donald Trump does not share these goals and values, and it is expedient for him to work toward his own goals and values, which evidently do not extend beyond his person. Neither James nor Rorty would have a leg to stand on trying to criticize Trump in pragmatic terms.

It is easy to visualize Trump as an undergraduate at Penn reading authors like Guignon and Hiley for a survey course, thinking, Yes, that exactly matches the way I want to be.  He was not going to go back to the primary sources and examine whether Rorty really said what the commentators said Rorty said. It suited Trump’s purposes; that was enough. After all, pragmatists should be pragmatic.

Trump does not stand in opposition to Rorty’s philosophy; he is the final fulfillment of it in all its irresponsible glory. It’s not Trump’s fault that he is more imaginative in the application of his pragmatism than Rorty, Dewey or the others foresaw. We have seen this movie before.

The attempt to combine freedom with equality led, and, according to Lord Acton, always will lead, to terrorism. As for Jacobinical fraternity, it has been summed up in the phrase; “Be my brother or I’ll kill you.” Moreover, the clash of a leader like Robespierre is not only with enemies of the Revolution, but with other more or less sincere revolutionary fanatics whose imaginations are projecting different “ideals.” The sole common denominator of leaders thus obstinate, each in the pursuit of a separate dream, is force.
— Irving Babbitt, Democracy and Leadership, p. 127.

The brother-lovers who lust for power will always lose out to those who lust for power for its own sake, because the latter have fewer scruples to limit their actions. This happened in France after 1789 and in the Soviet Union after 1917; it shall be ever thus. The brother-lovers never get it; as they are marched to the guillotine or the gulag, they wonder where it all went wrong. Didn’t we have the best intentions? Yeah, those are what the road to hell is paved with.

Rorty’s pragmatism serves to announce that he had nothing to learn from history. It’s all experimental. The French and Russian Revolutions were just failed experiments; we are on the right side of history. We must try harder as we strive on toward the great dream of universal equality and brotherhood. So Rorty identified the forces correctly, but was utterly wrong about the attack vector. Trump has seen enough super-rich people to know that they do not form a cohesive bloc defending their class interests at every turn. The super-rich are also susceptible to being played against one another. Since Trump is the only guy in the room with two neurons to rub together (he thinks), he is in the perfect position to assert his dominance over them, too.

What do you get the man who has everything? How about getting him elected President of the United States? Trump doesn’t really want material things for their own sake. He has reached the point of diminishing marginal returns on another hotel, another golf course or another wife. He wants to dominate other people. It is not enough for him to win; others must lose. He is only interested in money or property for the effect that these things have on other people. A day without any opportunity to demonstrate his dominance over another person is a day wasted.

He wants power, but not to force a political program on an unwilling nation. He wants real, measurable personal power, as demonstrated by obsequious behavior he can force from cabinet secretaries, senators or journalists. He’s a tyrant, but he’s a cartoon troll tyrant, only really interested in rubbing people’s faces in the dirt. He’s in it for the lulz.

If this guy is the worst thing that happens to America this century, we will have got off easy. God will have bestowed his grace on us. Yet again.