Andrew Sullivan’s recent assault on Trump in New York Magazine — “The Case Against The People” — is so bad I am loathe to waste pixels on it, viewing it as little more than the conditioned Pavlovian drool one has come to expect from illiberal liberal commentary on The Donald. You know it’s going to be bad when a mere quick scan pulls up multiple instances of “fascism,” “fascist,” “neo-fascist,” and so on and so on. (God, is there no decent Marxist criticism anymore? At least they bothered to trace phenomena back to actual causes.) But some pieces are so bad one is honor-bound to call them out as examples of what not to do.
The “alarm bells,” to use one of the other cliches universal in all such productions, begin to sound when the ad hominem attacks start; but they really sound when the author feels safe enough to admit personal revulsion. Says Sullivan, “And so, as I chitchatted over cocktails at a Washington office Christmas party in December,” [nice upper-class social signaling there] “and saw, looming above our heads, the pulsating, angry televised face of Donald Trump on Fox News,” [another great marker — what, Sullivan watches Fox? Does Trump’s “pulsating (?), angry face” never appear on PBS? What kind of face “pulsates,” anyway?], I couldn’t help but feel a little nausea permeate my stomach. And as I watched frenzied Trump rallies… the nausea turned to dread.”
The nausea… the dread… Well, to our misfortune, he recovered, and began writing. Surprisingly, Sullivan’s first argument proved to be a right-wing screed straight out of National Review, not to say numerous white nationalist web sites. His argument: democracy leads to diversity, diversity leads to all sorts of differences which by definition sap social cohesion, and then, as Yeats says, “things fall apart, the center cannot hold… “
One might expect Andrew to follow the logic of his critique and say, “Friends of Democracy, let us pull back from all this diversity before we go over the brink! Immigration moratorium now! Hispanics, learn English! Trannies, get back in your jockey shorts!” But, of course, if he said that, his article would never appear in New York Magazine.
No, we are committed to diversity, which he seems to assume means that we as a society are doomed to fall apart, which means that when the chaos becomes intolerable, some brute beast will weld it all back together by undemocratic brute force. Needless to say, this is not the suave and urbane Obama, acting by executive fiat, ordering assassinations, supporting invasions, ordaining bombings; no, it’s pulsating, angry Trump — who has never misused political power because he’s never even had any political power. Nonetheless, Trump’s the Coming Darkness. We can be sure of that as we chitchat over our cocktails because… well, we just can. I mean… look at that hair.
Sadly the full all-out assault on Trump has to wait till Sullivan wades through several boring pages of re-stating others’ off-topic arguments. First we have to put up with several repetitions of Plato’s observation that democracies inevitably turn into tyrannies. They do? Britain’s been a democracy in many respects since the Magna Carta in 1215. Sharia law may be just around the corner, but it hasn’t turned fascist yet. Canada started out democratic. Still is. New Zealand ditto. Australia ditto. Granted, there were a swatch of fascist European states and Communist dictatorships a while back. But hey: they seemed to have hopped more from monarchies (or post-WW1 chaos) to tyrannies, actually; and then from tyrannies to democracies.
What does any of this have to do with Trump? Nothing. Oh, but we need to understand democracies simply ache for brutish takeover, because they do, and that Trump is just such a prefect brute, fertively lurking and thirsting, like the Undead in B movies, preparing to tyrannize. Are there, like, any actual statements of intent that he wishes to rule unopposed, i.e., has he said, “Kill the Supreme Court,” or even Rosie O’Donnell, that sort of thing? No. If anything, he’s stresses his Art Of The Deal negotiating skills. Why is he pushing his abilities to work with people if he wants to tyrannize over them? Because he’s a cunning swine!
The next long boring stretch is a recital about how the Founding Fathers, in their wisdom, knew that the hoi polloi were far too dumb to rule themselves, and so, under a veneer of democracy, these wise autocrats slipped in numerous nifty barriers to gut any actual democratic rule. Sullivan assures us this was a noble move, blithely shuffling Jim Crow and others anti-democratic practices and episodes behind the curtain. All we need to know is that misshapen and loathsome Trump is trying to remove these wise barriers to the electorate’s dim stupidity.
Can one imagine Sullivan in 2008 arguing that Obama, winning the popular vote in the primaries, should have them re-routed elsewhere because of the nausea and dread that a possible black President aroused in the author? No. But this is Trump. Naturally we should take down democracy in order to stop him. If we don’t he may take down democracy! To save the village we have to destroy it!
And nowhere does Sullivan celebrate the last time these glorious democracy-frustrating aids to wise rule were implemented, namely, in taking the White House away from the popularly-elected Al Gore, and giving it to George W. Bush, the less popular but far wiser choice of our ruling elite. That worked out just great, didn’t it?
Nor does he seem to pause at the fact that these little tweaks to stifle direct democracy seem to have gone a long way to bringing Bernie Sanders down too. (Well, we can’t have socialists and Jews in the White House, can we? Thank Beelzebub we have a pseuso-democratic system that can protect us from such horrors, instead of actual democracy.)
Yet at the same time that Sullivan celebrates this castration of democracy, he also tells us that “The days when party machines just fixed things or rigged elections are mercifully done with.” Really? Tell that to the million Coloradans whose Cruz delegates were chosen unelected. Or to the 500+ super-delegates dropped into Hillary’s pocket at the starting gate.
The next numbing stretch is a long rehash of The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer, an analysis of cultist ideology and mass movements. A well-written and well-reasoned book, to be sure, but why does Sullivan bring this particular volume up? Trump is renowned for not having an ideology. No one really knows if he’s left or right, he isn’t organizing his followers into a unique Trump party, he isn’t building paramilitary units, he doesn’t have any unique symbols or logos or marches or manifestoes.
Well… So what? Connect the hidden dots, reader: Trumpistas are the coming SS! They may look like any old Republican — mostly because Trump supporters are a majority of Republicans — but deep down, deep deep down, we know their eye is on you, liberal, judging you to see whether you are sufficiently ovenworthy for the cleansing to come.
How do we know Trump is on a par with these other scions of mass genocide? Sullivan descends to actual articulars. Trump appeared on Howard Stern! The sadist actually, cruelly, said “You’re Fired!” to actors on a Reality TV show! He actually praised Planned Parenthood! Simple yokels might believe that he did so because he found them praiseworthy; but astute Sullivan readers can be sure that post-embryonic abortions are even now being planned for those New York Magazine readers who crawled from the womb only to dare to defy the God-Emperor!
I wish the article had stayed on this more abstract level of absurdity, where one can sagely observe how emotion and language corrupt clear thinking. Sadly, when Sullivangets down to particulars, as next he does, the attack becomes becoming outright foolish.
Sullivan: “What, one wonders, could be more impossible than suddenly vetting every single visitor to the U.S. for traces of Islamic belief?”
You mean it’s impossible to look at a visa application and see if the “Muslim” box in the Religion section is checked?
Sulliivan: “What could be more make-believe than a big, beautiful wall stretching across the entire Mexican border, paid for by the Mexican government?”
Um — the Great Wall of China? The walls separating Palestinian settlements from Jewish ones in the West Bank? The miles of laser walls deployed by India on its Pakistani border that don’t involve so much as one brick?
Sulliivan: “What could be more credulous than arguing that we could pay off our national debt through a global trade war?”
How about arguing that we’ll pay off our national debt much faster by doing nothing while every other country in the world slap tariffs on our goods? Surely if we buy all their stuff and no one buys our stuff, we’ll all be rich as kings! If no one buys what we manufacture while we spend ourselves silly, of course we’ll be out of debt in no time! Gosh, if only more successful international business billionaires could get their basic economics than Andrew Sullivan…
Sulliivan: “In a conventional political party, and in a rational political discourse, such ideas would be laughed out of contention… “
Certainly. Why analyze proposals when you can mock them? That’s what rational political discourse is all about.
At this point Sullivan ditched the Plato and Hoffer and got into serious Trump-bashing. I confess I just could not get through the remaining pages. I mean, it’s not like there’s anything new. One’s eyes glaze over after paragraph after paragraph throws up the same old boilerplate phrases. Consider a sample (with occasional comments in brackets):
- “evocation of hatred… “
- “Trump uniquely dangerous… “
- “In such a shame-free media environment, the assholes often win. In the end, you support them because they’re assholes… “
- “ ‘They have to go’ was the typically blunt phrase he used — and somehow people didn’t immediately recognize the monstrous historical echoes.” [What, you missed the echo? Trump wants a new Holocaust, dummy!]…
- “ ‘There’s something going on,’ [Trump] declaimed ominously, giving legitimacy to the most hysterical and ugly of human impulses.” [And I’ll bet you thought when Trump says “There’s something going on,” he means, “There’s something going on” Ah, you trusting sap!]…
- “To call this fascism doesn’t do justice to fascism.”
- [But let’s call it fascism anyway:] “…his movement is clearly fascistic in its demonization…. “
- “Muslims and Mexicans are the new Jews” [Thank goodness for the Right of Return — think how Israel will benefit from all that vibrant diversity when Trump ships them over.]
- [The] “single supreme leader of what can only be called a cult…. “
- ” … you can almost sense the rising rage of the collective identity venting itself against a lone dissenter and finding a catharsis of sorts in the brute force a mob can inflict…”
- “No modern politician who has come this close to the presidency has championed violence in this way… ” [Hell no. They’ve nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, flattened Dresden, invaded Iraq, Afghanistan, killed Sadam and Qaddafi and Bin Laden, built enough nukes to wipe out all life on Earth several times over. All this is nothing compared to… Donald Trump?]
- ” …stunning ferocity… “
- “Trump legitimizes potential violence… he sows the seeds for serious civil unrest.”
- “Trump celebrates torture — the one true love of tyrants everywhere… Torture and murder… Fuck political correctness… therein lies the appeal of tyrants from the beginning of time. Fuck you all balls. Irrationality with muscle… “
- “The racial aspect of this is unmissable… like all tyrants, [wait, I thought he hasn’t been elected Tyrant yet? Maybe Sullivan meant ‘like all honorary tyrants’] he is utterly lacking in self-control. Sleeping a handful of hours a night, impulsively tweeting in the early hours, improvising madly on subjects he knows nothing about, Trump rants and raves… “
- ” … a “real slave to the greatest fawning,” [?] a man who “throughout his entire life … is full of fear, overflowing with convulsions and pains… Mercurial… unpredictable… emotional as the daily Twitter stream… “
- “Trump’s ugly, thuggish populism… “
- “Neo-fascist… “
- ” …the interests of ISIS and the Trump campaign are now perfectly aligned” [?]
- “… demographics will save us. America is no longer an overwhelmingly white country… “[Phew, what a relief! Demographics just mercifully saved us from the horror of a Sanders Presidency]…
- “He’s not interested in rules… he barely understands the Constitution… Trump would make Cheney’s embrace of the dark side and untrammeled executive power look unambitious… “
- ” …vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar… “
- ” … idiotic… “
- ” …obsessed… “
- ” …fantastical and empty…
- ” …the monosyllables of a gifted demagogue…. “
- “She [Clinton] needs to grasp the lethality of her foe… “
- “Republicans desperately trying to use the long-standing rules of their own nominating process to thwart this monster… “
- “Cruz and Kasich… need to fight on, with any tactic at hand, all the way to the bitter end… And if they fail in Indiana or Cleveland, as they likely will, they need, quite simply, to disown their party’s candidate… “
- “For Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right… Trump is an extinction-level event.”
Trump is… an extinction-level event?
While I grant that Sullivan has a nicely flowing prose style, and appears to be well-read, and does even make an interesting observation or two in passing, language like this is not the language of democratic politics or reasonable discussion. Frankly, this kind of language verges on the psychotic. Trump may well turn out to be a lousy President, though it’s hard to see him turning out much lousier than the last few lousy Presidents; but, ladies and gentlemen — he’s not an extinction-level event.
Mind you, if Trump talked about anything the way Sullivan talks about Trump, I would be scared. And I have to admit I am genuinely concerned — not about Trump, but about the way the left seems to be sinking into outright blithering lunacy on this subject.
It’s no mystery why some guy in Indiana or Arkansas who’s losing his house because his job has been shipped to China, who’s listening to TV news tell him that Belgium is handing out iodine to all its citizens because it’s worried about Muslim terrorist attacks blowing up its nuclear plants, listens when Trump talks about keeping jobs at home or reducing the chances of radical Muslim terrorism. Does Sullivan really think that such guys will not vote Trump because Plato says democracies turn into tyrannies? Because Eric Hoffer thinks political extremism has analogies with cult psychology? Because Andrew Sullivan screeches for a dozen pages that Trump is not just a New York real estate guy with a touch of dyslexia but so freaking horrible that “any tactics” are justifiable when dealing “this monster”?
Yes, average people do have things they’re afraid of. Trump is winning because he’s the only one in the pack who seems to be addressing these fears in plain simple language. If the solutions Trump is recommending are unworkable, they won’t work, and next time around the ball will go to Rubio or Fiorina or some other bozo. In a subsequent live TV appearance with Chris Matthews — for which Matthews, to his credit, apologized, Sullivan went on to call Trump a “neofascist” and “a Reality TV asshole.” Is this addressing to address popular fears? Or are people like Sullivan merely wallowing in fear, and stoking it? And doing so in ways that are simply, and increasingly, ugly and mad.