Two weeks ago, I published the Yes.
This is No.
I write to upset you. I write to make you doubt yourself. I write so you’ll insist how wrong I must be.
I write to make you lose hope.
I write to piss you off.
I write so you'll tell yourself (reassure yourself, really) how I overstate the case, I'm so extreme, it's not that bad, the hell with Adler, this Vitruvius guy, American Samiz-whatever. Who the hell does he think he is?
I’ll start now. (If I haven’t already.)
You’re a lobster in the pot.
How’s it feel? Yes, the water’s getting warmer, but you’ve swum in warm water before. It’s okay. It’s only the present. Nothing like the present. Who can know the future? You’ll watch your lobster-TV, tend your lobster-garden, read your lobster-books, love your lobster-family. You’ll chill. (Heh.)
In two days, on January 20, 2025, all of the usual procedures of administrative transfer of the United States government will be carried out as if everything is normal, as if, despite the Washington D.C. cold, the water isn’t actually already past warm and well on the way to hot.
As if Donald Trump did not, four years ago, incite a deadly insurrection that led to the storming of the U.S. capitol building in an attempt to overthrow the Constitutional order of the United States and illegally retain power.
As if Trump’s recitation of the presidential oath will not play as an even greater farce now than it did the first time, with full knowledge by all who hear it that he did not uphold it before and will not uphold it again.
This is the same farce that played out all this past week, and that will continue, in Senate confirmation hearings. Allowing, by process, that most of the nominees are not patently unqualified for the offices they seek by virtue of their incompetence, their moral turpitude, or both. That all are not unqualified for – should, by all reason, be barred from – the positions they aim to fill by virtue of their willingness to serve a corrupt and demonstrated insurrectionist. By virtue of their refusal, through personal loyalty and their own corrupt intent, to uphold the legality of the 2020 election result and to reject all claims of its illegitimacy.
The temperature is rising, and your fellow lobsters, your lobster-leaders, vacillate between refusal to accept that eight years of institutional resistance have completely failed and belief in the preposterous notion that still greater normalizing coexistence might serve the cause of freedom and democracy better.
The goal of opposing autocratic, Trumpist oligarchy is not that the Democratic Party win more elections. To hell with the Democratic Party, if need be – as to hell already with the Republican Party. If it is inadequate to this moment in history, it holds no greater claim on the future than its adversary.
The goal is to preserve a democratic and equitable social compact rooted in decency and a just legal order.
Coexistence is acquiescence. Coexistence is fatigue. Coexistence is submission.
Our greatest threat to any continuing American democracy takes office in two days. The second greatest threat is accepting his governance as normal, continuing to live as if life is normal, not already altered, the temperature not rising.
Coexisting with the present. Like a lobster.
Lobsters shouldn’t lie to themselves, but they always do. Or maybe it’s just that they don’t have brains and they don’t have hands. Claws are not hands. (Lobsters are not toolmakers, after all.)
Is it that they can’t feel what’s happening or that they can’t climb out of the pot?
The American reactionary movement that spent four decades clawing its way to power, finally, through Donald Trump didn't tire. It didn't succumb to fatigue, and it didn't win by cooperating with Democrats or democrats and pretending that it could manage the country reasonably well, and win elections, in cooperation with its ideological enemies.
It opposed Democrats and democracy at every possible turn and never ceased to champion its vision.
We won't save democracy by making the trains run on time. We’ll just make the trains run on time. Democrats will be train dispatchers for autocracy.
The Russian liberals under Alexander Kerensky, who took power in the February Revolution of 1917, tried to coexist with the Bolsheviks. They lost to the Bolsheviks, overthrown in the October Revolution. The German conservatives who thought they could coexist with Hitler – well, I needn’t go on.
You get the country you're willing to fight for.
What’s the fight? I outlined it in “The Americans.”
Who are the Trumpist ideologues, functionaries, and oligarchs? They go back to the nation’s founding and thread their way through its history.
They are the forces who insisted on legalized slavery at the nation’s founding. They justified every aggression against Native America, Mexico, and Native Hawaiians to expand the nation across the continent and beyond. They fought a war of secession against the U.S. itself in order to maintain an economic system built on slave labor and ideas of white supremacy. They ended Reconstruction, founded the Ku Klux Clan and the White Citizens’ Councils, and maintained the racist and oppressive system of Jim Crow for nearly a century. They accumulated the excessive wealth and political power of industrial capitalism and the first Gilded Age. They opposed the antitrust reforms of the early Twentieth Century. They opposed child labor laws, the forty-hour work week, and workplace safety laws. They opposed Women’s suffrage from the start and the Equal Rights amendment a century later. They literally fought to prevent organized labor unions, and they opposed the creation of Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare. They opposed the Civil Rights Movement and the protective legislation that followed from it. They opposed every health and environmental protection law of the late Twentieth Century. They opposed not just the Affordable Care Act but any national provision for guaranteed health insurance or care. They oppose social and financial support for maternity and childcare. They opposed legal protections for homosexuals and lesbians and every alternative sexual or gender identity that subsequently sought protection. They opposed even a legal holiday to commemorate the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. They have simultaneously exploited and villainized immigrants throughout the history of the country. They oppose any effort to uphold the rights of any group other than white males and business interests. They worked for nearly 50 years to control women’s bodily autonomy and overturn their right to an abortion. To this day, they still hope and work to destroy Social Security and Medicare and to repeal the Affordable Care Act. They pass massive tax cuts for themselves while opposing minimum wage laws.
They are the same people, the same socially embedded forces at work in the nation from the start until now. And after 236 years, they’ve won.
And beyond any stated Trumpist policy goal, there is one that overrides them all that he does not advertise but that is known to all.
At both the state and federal levels, the Republican Party will work to control and manipulate the electoral process and the count to ensure widespread GOP victories at the next midterm election. They have already seeded the courts with ideological allies, up to the Supreme Court, to uphold these efforts. Depending on developments, they will work to ensure Trump’s counter-Constitutional maintenance of power at the next presidential election or to ensure by the same corrupt means his succession by another oligarch.
This is where we are and where we’re going, and if you don’t see it, you’re dozing off in warm-water comfort. And your comfort is a problem. The unperturbed present seeking to maintain itself, lolling in warm water until you’re scalded to death, is a problem.
Yes, one part of our problem is the Trumpist constituency, which is actually many constituencies – the vanguard, so to speak, I’ve been describing above, among others but also that vast swath of the historically and civically ignorant, who have no basis in knowledge for the shallow judgments they make. Those who, among other offenses, have railed against “elites” as if they were some occupying army of aliens, instead of fallible human beings like themselves who have worked to shape their knowledge and talents into expertise and achievement.
Writes Jonathan V. Last,
It is true that Western societies have turned against their elites. But this is not because the elites have failed, or been discredited. On the whole, the elites from our waning age were more successful and effective than their counterparts from previous eras.
Instead, we ought to consider the present moment not so much a reaction to discredited elites, but as an act of self-mutilation committed by a bored, decadent society.
“Decadent” is the meeting point between the ignorant Trumpist and – you, you lobster.
(Oh, have I offended? Pshaw! Fie! Away with you, you nick ninny, your royster, you three-penny upright!)
Read “decadent” here as comfortable, complacent.
What is it, exactly, you think this world to be?
I’ll try a couple of competitive framings for you.
1. The history of human civilization is that of people acting mostly beneficently, for the good of all, in virtuous communal wisdom applied to our brief time on Earth. “The arc of the moral universe is long and it leads toward justice.” Each act that falls short of this standard is a shocking and condemnable deviation from a prevailing goodness.
2. The history of human civilization is that of most people wishing to live in simple peace and sufficiency, but the competing lure of power and the acquisitive aggrandizement of ego has marked our time on Earth with immeasurable adversity and suffering. What great, beneficent advancements of civilization we have made represent a remarkable achievement in the light of continuing human depravity.
The rise to power of Donald Trump and his illiberal kin, not 75 years since the last time a wave of authoritarianism swept the world and wreaked horrific destruction, argues strongly for number 2. That so much good truly has been accomplished in this world in the face of such unrelenting depravity is indeed remarkable. But those accomplishments over history have cost untold hundreds of millions of lives, in war, in nobly courageous law enforcement, in individual acts of forgotten heroism, and in the victimization of the vulnerable and defenseless. They were not born, without struggle and sacrifice, from uncontested human goodness.
Unless you are very old, you, reading my words, were born in the aftermath of World War II, and if you were born in a Western democracy, especially the United States, you hit the genetic jackpot of creation. Whatever your economic status or racial or ethnic identity, there were few if any places on earth where you could have lived much better or with more opportunity, whatever the deficiencies of your circumstances. But those 75 years were not the history of the world. They appear, every day, more an anomaly. And Trump voters, spoiled, ignorant, and, as Last will have it, decadent, threw away that 235-year American achievement in attraction to the big-mouthed monster of mammon, because – the price of eggs was too high? They didn’t like wearing medical masks? They believe in Jesus but not in human decency? They don’t believe in a God of love but they do the evil god of Conspiracy beneath the surface of things?
Those people, however, are not reading me. You’re reading me, and you too, if you’re in the United States, in your own way took the gift of those 75 years for granted. You thought it was always going to be that way. You thought you were going to be able to live out your life in the beneficence of that gift, that you were going to be able to die in The Gift. You thought you were immune to the death of wars elsewhere in the world (distant like history), to destitute poverty, untreated disease, famine, concentration camps and persecution and monstrous torture. You weren’t going to be some of those very old people in Ukraine who survived the Nazi terror as children only to be bombarded by Vladimir Putin in 2022.
How nice it’s been, hasn’t it? I mean, you knew, we knew – not they, those clueless clods that have no idea — we knew what we had. Even with all of our complaints, we knew.
And you think now, especially if you’re not a particularly “political” person, that you can remain a happy lobster? Turn off the news. Don’t talk about Trump. I can’t stand to hear his name. Read your poetry, your fiction, tend your gardens, paint and take photos, go to church, love your grandchildren, play video games. Distract yourself and maybe none of it will touch you? You mostly voted for losers in elections anyway, right? What difference is it all going to make? Democracy was just a dream, self-determination was an illusion, freedom just another word for what’s on TV.
Maybe you can be a happy lobster. Who knows? Some people say they feel pain in the end, but I say they just fall asleep. We’re all gonna die anyway — why not in a hot bath?
No.
No to Trumpism.
No to normalization and submission. No to decadent docility. (I never longed so much for the disruptive, rebellious spirit of the Sixties again.) No to fatigue. No to pretending and just getting by.
No to the lobster.
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,
— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!
Charles Baudelaire, from “To the Reader,” Flowers of Evil.
AJA
Your readership and your likes, your comments, shares, and recommendations, and your free and paid subscriptions enable me in the project of my writing life. Thank you.
Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.
Hi Jay,
There is the question of what each of us can do to resist. You resist by raising the alarm. We all have to figure out where our agency lies. We do have local votes to cast. If we can afford it we have money to give to political causes that will be resistant. What else? Perhaps in a future post, you can point the way. Your words fall on my ears and shift my attention.
Yes to what you write