"I can kind of understand why Machiavellian Republicans would spew conspiracy theories.... What I don’t understand is why some Democrats are hopping on this bandwagon."

Writes David Brooks, in "The Epstein Story? Count Me Out." (NYT).

They may believe that the Epstein file release will somehow hurt Trump. But they are undermining public trust and sowing public cynicism in ways that make the entire progressive project impossible. They are contributing to a public atmosphere in which right-wing populism naturally thrives. 

I have been especially startled to see Ro Khanna, a House Democrat and one of the most impressive politicians in America, use the phrase “the Epstein class” in his public statements.

"People like Trump and Putin are not politicians; they are artists who create alternate realities."

"They tell stories, invent alternative facts, enact daily dramas, construct show trials and reinvent religions — they build a world. In their world, the people who felt humiliated are now dominant and doing the humiliating. Russia felt humiliated by the West in the 1990s. Many working-class American voters have felt humiliated by coastal elites for decades. In this alternative world, the snobs suffer. People support an authoritarian not because they like this or that policy but because they embrace the authoritarian’s artistic vision. Performance artists like Trump and Putin can be dishonest, offensive and outrageous, but there is one rule: They must never be boring."

Writes David Brooks, in "Imagining What’s in Trump’s Brain" (NYT)(gift link).

I'm expending one of my gift links on this one because this snippet, taken out of context, gives rise to the question Are artists authoritarians?

Brooks is "imagining what's in Trump's brain" and we're stuck with the added task of imagining what's in Brooks's brain when he's imagining what's in Trump's brain. Trump is an artist because he's imagining — conjuring up an "alternative world" that is satisfying to the downtrodden. But don't all politicians depict the world in a somewhat abstract and fictional framework? They impose a narrative. They choose which facts to highlight, while their opponents select other facts from the big bag of "facts." The "coastal elites," the "snobs," have their creative narratives too... and this David Brooks column is one of them.

Quite apart from Trump and Brooks, I am fascinated by the question Are artists authoritarians? I am reminded of something I blogged 20 years ago: "To be a great artist is inherently right wing."

"I particularly like the line where you said Trumpism is seeking 'to amputate the higher elements of the human spirit — learning, compassion, science...'"

"'... and the pursuit of justice, and supplant those virtues with greed, retribution, ego and appetite.' There’s some very good stuff here. But I’ll tell you where I take issue with you. You talked about a miasma of passivity that seems to have swept over the anti-Trump ranks. I don’t think that’s true at all. I think that you’ve seen this ['No Kings'] movement grow. I think that what is making things difficult is, in our history, I think it’s fair to say that we have never confronted a government that was willing to break the law as freely — not just break norms, which they haven’t cared about for a long time, but break the law as freely."

Said E.J. Dionne to David Brooks in "Trump Has a Religion. What Do Democrats Have? Mamdani might be working in Democrats’ favor. But what about 'No Kings'?" (NYT)(video of the whole conversation here, on YouTube) .

"The critics of Christian nationalism sometimes argue that it is a political movement using the language and symbols of religion in order to win elections."

"But the events of the past week have proved that this is a genuinely religious movement and Charlie Kirk was a genuinely religious man. The problem is that unrestrained faith and unrestrained partisanship are an incredibly combustible mixture. I am one of those who fear that the powerful emotions kicked up by the martyrdom of Kirk will lead many Republicans to conclude that their opponents are irredeemably evil and that anything that causes them suffering is permissible. It’s possible for faithful people to wander a long way from the cross."

Writes David Brooks, in "We Need to Think Straight About God and Politics" (NYT).

Charlie Kirk was a genuinely religious man... but Charlie Kirk is the one who was killed. He is no longer alive in this world and capable of acting or speaking to us. He is now as usable as political people want him to be. 

Brooks speaks of the danger that "many Republicans" will use Kirk to establish that "their opponents are irredeemably evil and that anything that causes them suffering is permissible." I suppose anything is possible, but I would think that Christians are the last to call other people "irredeemable." And it seems to be the left who have been falling prey to the ideation that their opponents are "irredeemably evil." Maybe what you fear in others is the very thing you yourself tend to do.

"Something happened to literature when the center of gravity moved from Greenwich Village to M.F.A. programs on university campuses."

"When I got out of college I dreamed of being a novelist or playwright. I volunteered to be an extremely junior editor at a literary journal called Chicago Review. But after a few meetings I thought to myself, 'Do I really want to spend the rest of my life gossiping about six obscure novelists at the Iowa writing program?' It seemed like a small and judgmental world. Furthermore, the literary world is a progressive world, and progressivism — forgive me, left-wing readers — has a conformity problem. Even more than on the right, there are incredible social pressures in left-wing circles to not say anything objectionable.... If the social pressures right around you are powerful, you’re going to write for the coterie of people who consciously or unconsciously enforce them, and of course your writing will be small and just like everyone else’s...."

Writes David Brooks, in "When Novels Mattered" (NYT).

Brooks goes on and ends up with the prediction that the literary novel will make a comeback, but I can't figure out what's supposed to end the "incredible social pressures" that somehow keep the literary geniuses from breaking free. Why wouldn't they have done it already? They — if they exist — seem idiotically susceptible to domestication.

ADDED: Something I found myself saying to Grok: "One problem is women do most of the literary fiction reading and wom[e]n today don't take the kind of low-level misogyny that used to power man-written literature."

"If there is one word to define Trump’s atmosphere, it is 'pagan.'"

"The pagan values of ancient Rome celebrated power, manliness, conquest, ego, fame, competitiveness and prowess, and it is those values that have always been at the core of Trump’s being — from his real estate grandiosity to his love of pro wrestling to his king-of-the-jungle version of American greatness. The pagan ethos has always appealed to grandiose male narcissists because it gives them permission to grab whatever they want. This ethos encourages egotists to puff themselves up and boast in a way they find urgently satisfying; self-love is the only form of love they know...."

That's David Brooks, tending to your soul, in "How to Survive the Trump Years With Your Spirit Intact" (NYT)(free-access link).

I hadn't encountered that men-thinking-about-the-Roman-Empire meme in quite a while. Okay. Nice to see its return. Helps us understand what the men are doing these days.

Anyway, I wonder, is this analysis unfair to pagans?

If paganism is a grand but dehumanizing value system, I’ve found it necessary, in this increasingly pagan age, to root myself in anything that feels rehumanizing, whether it’s art or literature or learning. I’ve found it incredibly replenishing to be spending time around selfless, humble people....

Anything that feels rehumanizing?

Well, read the whole thing to be fair to Brooks, not that he's being fair to Trump... or to pagans. 

Looking into this blog's archive to see what I might have said about pagans over the years, I encountered this May 29, 2017 post, which focuses on a quote from Andrew Sullivan calling Trump "a pagan":

"If there’s one through line in this administration so far, it’s the amassing of power. And if there’s another through line, it’s the destruction of anything that might restrain power, and that’s bureaucracy."

Said David Brooks, quoted in "David Brooks on Why the Democrats Are Losing to Trump" (NYT)(free-access link).

Why does he keep saying "through line"? It seems to mean theme... but on a time line... or narrative... but with one clear idea... except there are 2 "through lines" in Brooks's telling. Is it a vogue phrase? I don't think I've used it or quoted it before in the 20+ year history of this blog.

But I didn't quote David Brooks to muse on the words "through line." I quoted him because I was astounded to see bureaucracy touted as if it were part of the system of checks and balances in the American constitutional system.

Or am I misreading him?

"Herman Melville captured, without endorsing, the nationalist fervor in his novel 'White Jacket': 'We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people...'"

"'... the Israel of our time. God has predestinated, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls.' Walt Whitman joined the chorus: 'Have the elder races halted? / Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas? / We take up the task eternal.' There’s no confidence like adolescent confidence, for a person or a country."

Writes David Brooks, in "How Trump Will Fail" (NYT).

I can see why this image of a wild, raw, aspiring America appeals to Trump....

Do you see why a tame, cooked, demoralized America appeals to his antagonists? 

Not for delectations sweet/Not the cushion and the slipper, not the peaceful and the studious/Not the riches safe and palling, not for us the tame enjoyment....

"Hegseth is in no danger of rising to the level of mediocrity, but next to some of his Democratic questioners, he looked like Carl von Clausewitz."

"Hegseth’s core populist conviction — repeated ad nauseam — is that the grunts on the ground know what they are doing and the pencil-necked geeks in air-conditioned offices just write nonsense regulations that get in the way. The man wasted years at Princeton and Harvard when he could have learned everything he knows by watching that Colonel Jessup speech at the end of 'A Few Good Men.'... In a healthy democracy people revere great learning on substantive issues; they understand the world is too complex to be captured in bite-size slogans; but they also appreciate the wisdom that comes from concrete experience and know that most hard calls have to be made in light of the deeply held values that have made America what it is...."

Writes David Brooks, in "We Deserve Pete Hegseth" (NYT).

Here's Colonel Jessup:

 

And here's  Carl von Clausewitz:

Here's Wikipedia's list of Clausewitz's ideas:

"Democrats lost because everyone except for whites moved in the direction of Donald Trump this cycle."

Said the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, quoted in David Brooks's new column, "Why We Got It So Wrong" (NYT).

I thought that was a good quote, but I don't care about this column otherwise, because if you were "so wrong" before, why would I look to you for right answers now? I skimmed it. I get the impression Brooks thinks we should move beyond identity politics... now that the identity groups have trended toward Trump.

Somehow the first 2 articles I click to read in the NYT this morning both bring up Theodore Roosevelt.

1. "The Election Is Happening Too Soon" by David Brooks: "By the time Theodore Roosevelt came to the presidency in 1901, society was heaving with change. The legislative program that we call progressivism — cleaning up local government, breaking up the monopolies, regulating clean food, water and air — grew out of the cultural and civic change that was already underway. The pattern was cultural change first, then civic revival, then political reform. Today we face another great civilizational question: How can we create a morally cohesive and politically functional democracy amid radical pluralism and diversity?"

2. "It Sounded Like Dancing, Drinking and Sex. It Blew People’s Minds" by John McWhorter: "We moderns can’t feel ragtime as the hip, naughty thing it was to people when Theodore Roosevelt was president. Jazz, rock, hip-hop and so much else came in ragtime’s wake, all of them syncopated (and hip-wiggly) to degrees beyond anything [Scott] Joplin, who died in 1917, ever knew." (Interesting use of language: "hip, naughty... hip-hop... hip-wiggly....")

***

I sense a reaction to the immersion in 2024 electoral politics. Those who'd been hoping to leap forward are drawn instead into the past, and when they look back, the human marker of time who stands out is Theodore Roosevelt.

"What is drama? Mamet says it 'is the quest of the hero to overcome those things which prevent him from achieving a specific, acute goal.'..."

"That suggests that [Kamala] Harris needs to show the American people her strongest, most acute and controlling desire, the ruling passion of her soul. I know what Trump wants. He wants to dismantle the elites who he thinks have betrayed regular Americans. It’s unclear what Harris wants most deeply, other than the vague chance to do good and to be president. You don’t communicate your deepest desire when your campaign is run by a committee. Candidates who are not driven by a single, specific, compelling desire become reactive. They hedge and trim according to the polls. People can sense their cautious, calculating nature. On the other hand, those who are compelled by a single strong desire are obsessed with a well-defined problem, which touches the taproot of their soul. They are on the attack, on the move."

Writes David Brooks, in "How Harris Can Finish Strong" (NYT).

Why are we talking about drama? David Mamet's idea was about how to command the attention of the audience. If Harris is reduced to the level of needing to get us to pay attention, she is already falling far short of what it takes to become President. And somehow this brings us back to a topic that's annoyed me for a long time, which I mark with my tag "how does Kamala feel." The election is not about her feelings, and there has always been something insane about acting like it is.

The convention went so well, we were told, because the theme was joy, and Kamala was joyful. No, she wasn't, but they seem to have thought they could keep that bubble bouncing for her super-short run to Election Day. What about our feelings?

How, indeed?

A headline pair on the front page of the NYT catches my eye.

"How a Naked Man on a Tropical Island Created Our Current Political Insanity" — The naked man catches my eye, but a quick glance identifies the naked man as Richard Hatch, winner of season 1 of "Survivor," and we know that "Survivor" led to "The Apprentice," Donald Trump's big lateral move into the nation's psyche:

How tedious to find J.D. Vance in an article titled "The Secret to Tom Wolfe’s Irresistible Snap, Crackle and Pop."

This is a David Brooks essay in the NYT that starts out with some good insight into Wolfe's writing:

Wolfe was known for his style, but it was his worldview that made him. He read Max Weber at Yale and it all clicked: Life is a contest for status. Some people think humans are driven by money, or love, or to heal the wounds they suffered in childhood, but Wolfe put the relentless scramble up the pecking order at the center of his worldview. It gave him his brilliant eye for surfaces, for the care with which people put on their social displays. He had the ability to name the status rules that envelop us in ways we are hardly aware of. He had a knack for capturing what it feels like to be caught up in a certain sort of social dilemma.

There's a great photograph of Wolfe positioned in his living space, but look at the caption: "Wolfe’s goal was to be like Balzac, not JD Vance...." Oh, no. Why is Vance here (even in the negative ("not JD Vance"))? I search the page for "Vance" so I can zero in on it (rather than actually read this essay, as I'd planned):

Wolfe’s goal was to be like Balzac, not JD Vance.

"If I were advising the candidates, I’d tell them to double down on weirdness."

Says David Brooks, on September 8, 2008.

Blogging that at the time, here, I said that Brooks observed that "Obama started out weird and did well, then got conventional and did less well, especially with McCain getting weird. 'Weirdness wins,' [Brooks] says."

I thought you might like to see that today, when so many people are saying "weird" at the same time and as if it's a bad thing.

Let me give you a bit more of Brooks:

"Viewed from the traditional American abundance mind-set, MAGA looks less like an American brand of conservatism and more like a European brand of conservatism."

"It resembles all those generations of Russian chauvinists who argued that the Russian masses embody all that is good but they are threatened by aliens from the outside. MAGA looks like a kind of right-wing Marxism, which assumes that class struggle is the permanent defining feature of politics. MAGA is a fortress mentality, but America has traditionally been defined by a pioneering mentality. MAGA offers a strong shell, but not much in the way of wings needed to soar. If Democrats are to thrive, they need to tap into America’s dynamic cultural roots and show how they can be applied to the 21st century. It should be said that social dynamism is more complicated than it appears at first blush. It’s not just getting on your Harley and hitting the open road. It’s not really about rugged individualism or the libertarian version of freedom as the absence of constraint...."

Writes David Brooks, in "What Democrats Need to Do Now" (NYT).

Somehow I thought you should know he's saying that. Be it known that it’s not just a matter of getting on your Harley and hitting the open road. 

"I’m not a journalist. I’m not in the media. This is a military headquarters for a populist revolt."

This is how we motivate people. This show is an activist show. If you watch this show, you’re a foot soldier. We call it the Army of the Awakened.... Immigration, spending — it’s the lack of confidence and self-loathing of their own civilization and their own culture. That’s the spiritual part that’s at the base. Immigration is just the manifestation of a loss of self-confidence. And it’s shocking...."

Said Steve Bannon, quoted in "My Unsettling Interview With Steve Bannon" (NYT) (free access link). 

The "me" is David Brooks, who says:

"Jeremy was competitive while young and felt immense pressure to demonstrate gifted achievement every day."

"'I could only work in fear. Only the fear of failure made me work in the end,' he said. As a young adult, he was paralyzed by the number of life options in front of him. He went into medicine and spent about 13 years as a medical student and doctor but eventually was hit by depression so severe, he couldn’t function. He wound up as a musician — not celebrated but enjoying himself and paying the bills...."

Writes David Brooks, in "What Happens to Gifted Children" (NYT).

"In 1877 a British philosopher and mathematician named William Kingdon Clifford published an essay called 'The Ethics of Belief.'"

"In it he argued that if a shipowner ignored evidence that his craft had problems and sent the ship to sea having convinced himself it was safe, then of course we would blame him if the ship went down and all aboard were lost. To have a belief is to bear responsibility, and one thus has a moral responsibility to dig arduously into the evidence, avoid ideological thinking and take into account self-serving biases. 'It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence,' Clifford wrote. A belief, he continued, is a public possession. If too many people believe things without evidence, 'the danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.'"

From "The Courage to Follow the Evidence on Transgender Care" by David Brooks (NYT).

Here's the essay "The Ethics of Belief."

And here's Hilary Cass's study (discussed in the Brooks column), "Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People."

The central question is too "complex" for David Brooks... that is, it involves understanding the people he doesn't want to understand.

I'm reading "What Makes Nikki Haley Tougher Than the Rest." 

It ends:

Trump... has an advantage that Haley can’t match. He is reviled by the coastal professional classes. That’s a sacred bond with working-class and rural voters who feel similarly slighted and unseen. The connection between working-class voters and a shady real estate billionaire is a complex psychological phenomenon that historians will have to unpack. But it’s a bond no amount of Nikki Haley toughness can break.

Leave it to the historians to figure out who the hell these Trumpsters were.

Why wouldn't you want to understand your fellow citizens? Your aversion to them might have something to do with their aversion to you.

Instead, Brooks writes a column about the abstraction "toughness." Politics is tough. Politicians need to be tough. Nikki Haley is tough. He muses: "I wonder if Haley would be seen as tougher if she were a man." On the toughness of women, he quotes Maya Angelou. At length!

At the end, he pivots: "This campaign is about toughness... but it’s also about identity and class." And it's here that Haley falls short. She "does better among more educated voters... and she does poorly among evangelicals, which these days is as much a nationalist identity category as a religious one."

You don't want to understand them, you want to leave them to the historians, but you are willing to cast aspersions on their religiosity and their patriotism.