Who are the "we" who say "That's not who we are"?

I'm reading "Trump Voters Are America Too/If he wins a second term, perhaps we’ll finally dispense with the myth that 'this is not who we are,'" by Mark Leibovich, in The Atlantic.

“This is not who we are”: The would-be guardians of America’s better angels have been scolding us with this line for years. Or maybe they mean it as an affirmation. Either way, the axiom prompts a question: Who is “we” anyway? Because it sure seems like a lot of this “we” keeps voting for Trump....

Look at the question from the other side. Why did some people feel entitled to speak for the "we" and purport to disqualify their fellow citizens as part of the "we"? Oddly, it seems that they were disincluding those they thought were insufficiently inclusive. Who's been otherizing whom? 

But Leibovich doesn't proceed to try to understand Trump voters as human beings worth knowing. He just goes on to do what a writer for The Atlantic is supposed to do and bemoan those terrible deplorables.

If Trump wins in 2024, his detractors will have to reckon once again with the voters who got us here—to reconcile what it means to share a country with so many citizens who keep watching Trump spiral deeper into his moral void and still conclude, “Yes, that’s our guy.”

"I never found Donald Trump to be remotely captivating as a stand-alone figure. He’d been around forever and his political act was largely derivative."

"His promise to 'drain the swamp' was treated as some genius coinage, though in fact the platitude had been worn out for decades by both parties. Nancy Pelosi promised to 'drain the swamp' in 2006, just as the Reagan-Bush campaign had vowed to 'Make America Great Again' in 1980. Trump said and did obviously awful and dangerous things—racist and cruel and achingly dumb and downright evil things. But on top of that, he is a uniquely tiresome individual, easily the sorest loser, the most prodigious liar, and the most interminable victim ever to occupy the White House. He is, quite possibly, the biggest crybaby ever to toddle across history’s stage, from his inaugural-crowd hemorrhage on day one right down to his bitter, ketchup-flinging end. Seriously, what public figure in the history of the world comes close? I’m genuinely asking. Bottom line, Trump is an extremely tedious dude to have had in our face for seven years and running."

Mark Leibovich sobs in "The Most Pathetic Men in America/Why Lindsey Graham, Kevin McCarthy, and so many other cowards in Congress are still doing Trump’s bidding" (The Atlantic).

ADDED: I'm contemplating the writing: "from his inaugural-crowd hemorrhage on day one right down to his bitter, ketchup-flinging end." That's kind of good, isn't it? Hemorrhage implies blood, and ketchup is used sometimes as fake blood. It's a little unmixed metaphor to discover.

Taking direction from Room Rater.

Whoa! Okay, I guess it’s back to the Rec room for me. And here i was, thinking i was making progress.

— Mark Leibovich (@MarkLeibovich) September 7, 2020

"[Y]ou could classify Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders as the pugilists in the field, whereas Mr. Buttigieg, he of the earnest manner and Midwestern zest for consensus, fashions himself a peacemaker."

I'm trying to read "2020 Democratic Candidates Wage Escalating Fight (on the Merits of Fighting)/For all the emphasis placed on the various divides among the candidates, the question of 'to fight or not to fight' might represent the most meaningful contrast" by Mark Leibovich (NYT).

I have a little trouble with "Midwestern zest for consensus."

I don't think these coastal elites who characterize midwesterners know much at all about them/us. (Should I say "us"? I've only lived in Madison, Wisconsin, a special island in the sea of the midwest, and I didn't begin living here until I was 33 years old, past my formative years, which were spent in Delaware and New Jersey, but I did grow up with a midwestern mother, though her midwest was that other college town, Ann Arbor, and I did go to college in my mother's midwestern hometown.)

It's partly my annoyance at the blithe stereotype of midwesterners as blandly nice. Is that even true? And what is this interest in superficial getting along really about? Would it really make you want a leader who acts like that too, or would you want a leader who's willing to take on the hard fighting that you won't do yourself?

Anyway... "zest" bothers me too. "Zest for consensus" — seems like too wacky a state of mind to be present throughout an entire region.

The original meaning of "zest" is the outer peel of a citrus fruit, the bright-colored part that you use to make a "twist" for a drink or grate into some dessert recipe. From there comes the figurative meaning: "Something which imparts excitement, energy, or interest; a stimulating or invigorating quality which adds to the enjoyment or agreeableness of something... Enthusiasm for and enjoyment of something, esp. as displayed in speech or action; gusto, relish" (OED). Here's the highest peak of usage, from John Keats:

O! let me have thee whole,—all—all—be mine!
That shape, that fairness, that sweet minor zest
Of love, your kiss,—those hands, those eyes divine,
That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast,
Yourself—your soul—in pity give me all,
Withhold no atom’s atom or I die
Or living on perhaps, your wretched thrall,
Forget, in the mist of idle misery,
Life’s purposes,—the palate of my mind
Losing its gust, and my ambition blind!

Compare the zestiness of consensus to the zestiness of a warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast. Oh, no! This just popped up in my head:



There's your million-pleasured breast. There's your pugilist in the field.

ADDED: Can you beat the fighter with the nonfighter? There's this fantasy that what we need now is Mr. Rogers and that Pete Buttigieg is Mr. Rogers....



(That's just one of many articles you'll find if you google Buttigieg is Mr. Rogers.)

Feel the truth: "Read the book. See if you don't feel like you are with me on that couch in the White House. And see if you don't feel alarmed..."

So said Michael Wolff on "Meet the Press" today, after Chuck Todd confronted him about "a lot of little errors" — "One page had three in one. Some of them may be copy edits, small, factual errors. But it adds up. Why shouldn't a reader be concerned about some of these mistakes?"

Wolff's answer was just "I think a reader should read the book. The book speaks for itself" and that quote I put in the post title, which I thought was a very weird answer. Wolff wouldn't defend the book and the method and care he used. He just insisted that people read the book. Questions about whether the book is true should be determined by readers simply feeling whether it's true.

That reminded me of the way Stephen Colbert presented himself years ago on the first episode of "The Colbert Report": "Now I know some of you may not trust your gut...yet. But with my help you will. The 'truthiness' is, anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news... at you."

It felt like a complete concession that the book was fiction. Because that is how fiction works. It isn't reporting, but a different way of getting to the truth. If it feels true, it is true, for the purposes of the mental life of the reader. What's out there in the real world is... oh, what is it? Is that "real world" you speak of anything at all? I'm here in my own head, where whatever is felt is.

Here's Mark Leibovich, chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, also in the above-linked "Meet the Press" transcript:

Where I am is first of all, is it possible to go any higher than number one on Amazon if you're going to write a book? I mean, this is just, it's incredible. 

No, it's not incredible. People love a hot pile of salaciousness. They love it even more than whatever hot pile they're cooking up in the pressure cooker they got for Christmas (judging from the Amazon best-seller list, which has Instant Pot recipe books at ##3 & 4).

Back to Leibovich:

I do think... there are very significant journalistic critiques that you can throw at this book. But I also think the "it rings true" truth about this is absolutely valid. 

Ah ha ha ha ha. He's buying the feel-the-truth-at-you/fiction-is-truth theory that sounded like bullshit when Wolff said it.

And part of it is what Michael Wolff has said and will say again I'm sure is that this is exactly how people around him, or many people around him at the White House, certainly Republicans on the Hill speak privately. Now, if you were to ask, probably I would say 80% of elected Republicans on the Hill, "What do you think of the president's fitness for office?" The first thing you will hear, I guarantee you, is, "Can we go off the record?"

So he's using the fiction method. Just making up something. Even putting a number on it. 80%! He hasn't asked this question of all the congressional Republicans. He just feels that if he did 80% of them would say let's go off the record. And he's feeling that at you.

ADDED: In the comments, some are puzzling over the phrase "See if you don't feel like you are with me on that couch in the White House" (in the quote in the post title). But it relates to something earlier in the transcript. Chuck Todd asks Wolff how he managed to become — as he claims — "a fly on the wall in the West Wing." Wolff answers:

You know, I literally kind of knocked on the door and said, “Can I come in?” and they said “Okay.” And I came in. I sat on the couch and that’s the point of view that I’ve written this book from. I mean, in the real intention of this book, is to have readers sit with me on the couch and watch what’s going on in the West Wing. I went into this with absolutely no agenda whatsoever. I have no particular politics when it comes to Donald Trump. This is really all about human nature.

Notice how much Wolff sounds like a novelist. Nothing wrong with being a novelist. But there is something wrong with reading a novel and not realizing it's a novel. Remember, recently, the internet went wild talking about the New Yorker short story "Cat Person," and it seemed rather obvious that a lot of people were just talking about it as if it were a blow-by-blow account of a real relationship? Come on, people! That's incompetent reading. Fiction is different.

AND: "Fire and Fury" takes on the burden of being "fake news." Then mainstream news media can report on the book, pass the material along, and claim not to be doing "fake news." Remember the Allcott/Gentzkow definition of fake news I've been talking about (beginning here). The definition (by 2 economists and adopted by at least some political scientists) excludes "rumors that do not originate from a particular news article." I don't accept the definition myself, but I'm seeing the gears turning in the minds of the mainstream media people who want to say things but still worry about their journalistic professionalism.

"Franken fell asleep at 2 a.m. on the night of the election and woke up with a migraine."

"For days, it was hard to think about anything besides Trump in the White House. 'There was a week or so when sleeping literally was a great thing,' Franken said. 'You go through a process of internalizing it.' In addition to the political shock, there was a broader despair over the cultural disconnect that the election laid bare. I kept thinking of an Onion headline that ran a few weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks: 'A Shattered Nation Longs to Care About Stupid [Expletive] Again.' How long does it take a culture to forge a new sensibility, whether comedic or political? Franken seemed to be struggling with this a bit. There was similar confusion in the various liberal bubbles of Washington, New York and Hollywood, whose inhabitants were the supposed keepers of the American zeitgeist — the geniuses who so spectacularly dismissed the zeitgeist that elected Donald Trump."

From the NYT article "Al Franken Faces Donald Trump and the Next Four Years/The two-term Democratic senator, who once made a living satirizing politicians, envisions an unfunny future," by Mark Leibovich. I picked that quote out of the center of the long article, but you should know that the article begins with Al Franken's observation that Trump never laughs.

I was looking to see what else Mark Leibovich has written. He inserted himself into that Al Franken article — I kept thinking of an Onion headline — right into the paragraph about Franken's headache. That seemed unusually egoistic for a NYT writer.

I looked back at my own Mark Leibovich tag and found 2 things:

"For this reason, 'This Town' contains no index; bold-face Washingtonians can’t just find their pages, see how they’re depicted, and read no more."

WaPo doesn't seem to understand that in a world of ebooks and "search inside the book" Amazon pages, you don't need to look names up in an index to see whether and where they appear in a book.

I suspect that if there's no index in this book, it's to save printing expenses and because they wouldn't want anyone to assume that if a particular name isn't in the index, it isn't in the book. Now, you might say, but maybe Amazon won't have "search inside the book" for this particular book, and if people want to do a search within an ebook, they'll have to buy the ebook, so more books will be sold. But that assumes there are cheapskates — among the super-busy Washingtonians — who would go to a physical bookstore, find the actual paper version of this book, and look up names in an index. Anyone who cares that much would just download the damned Kindle edition from Amazon, which would take about 10 seconds. The search would be accomplished in well under a minute. Even if it's overpriced at $12.74, what is your time worth? And by "you," I mean some Washington entity who is important enough to imagine he'd get mentioned in a gossipy book by a NYT reporter, and yet not important enough not to care.

Sarah Palin was a blithering idiot until she became a devious genius.

So here's Mark Leibovich, writing in the NYT, about the powerful political position Sarah Palin has devised for herself:

Ms. Palin represents a new breed of unelected public figures operating in an environment in which politics, news media and celebrity are fused as never before. Her growing cast of advisers and support system could be working in the service of any number of goals: a presidential run, a de facto role as the leader of the Tea Party movement, a lucrative career as a roving media entity — or all of the above. Whether she ever runs for anything else, Ms. Palin has already achieved a status that has become an end in itself: access to an electronic bully pulpit, a staff to guide her, an enormous income and none of the bother or accountability of having to govern or campaign for office....

... Ms. Palin is quietly assembling the infrastructure of an expanding political operation....

Ms. Palin has also enlisted a small team of policy counselors to guide her through the substantive areas in which many deemed her to be lacking in 2008....

People with knowledge of the daily briefings say they are conducted by phone or e-mail. They typically include information on the day’s news, material that could be relevant to an upcoming speech, or guidance about a candidate Ms. Palin might endorse....

[T]he question of Ms. Palin’s ambitions and abilities remain as much a mystery now as when she first stormed the national consciousness 18 months ago. They warn against any notion that she has any grand plan beside keeping faith that God would help her recognize “the next open door” (a favorite Palin refrain).

What I love about all this is the extreme contrast to the way Palin was mocked when she resigned as Governor of Alaska. I, myself, did not think it was stupid, because I pictured her doing something like what she is actually doing, but I certainly remember the derision. Her political career was over. She was "toast."

A big difference between what I pictured and what she's doing is that she's staying in Alaska. I thought she needed to get out of Alaska (in order to run for President). It's innovative the way she's staying in Alaska. As a blogger, operating from my remote outpost in Madison, Wisconsin, I love that she's working through Facebook and staying rooted in Wasila, Alaska. Fox News is building a TV studio in her house in Wasila. That's so not toast.

Biden "is a distinctive blend of pit bull and odd duck whose weak filters make him capable of blurting out pretty much anything."

I was making fun of that muddle of images from a NYT article. In the comments, Reader_iam exclaimed:

OH THE VISUALS, OH THE VISUALS!
OH MY [MIND'S] EYES!
OH MY [MIND'S] EYES!

What an onslaught of imagery! An assault, really.

Freeman Hunt was all:

You mean the duck with the pit bull head dancing on a vaudeville stage with some kind of engine that requires filters coming out of its back and puffing smoke??

And Palladian made this:

Biden "has been absolutely butchering Senator John McCain across the Rust Belt this week."

According to Mark Leibovich in the NYT. The evidence? You got me. I read the whole article. Didn't notice any butchering.

Yet Joltin’ Joe has also become a fascinating Off Broadway spectacle in his own right. He is a distinctive blend of pit bull and odd duck whose weak filters make him capable of blurting out pretty much anything — “gaffes,” out-of-nowhere comments (pivoting midspeech to say “Excuse my back!” to people seated behind him), goofy asides (tapping a reporter’s chest and telling him, “You need to work on your pecs.”)

Mr. Biden’s role is red-meat serious: to pulverize Mr. McCain, lend foreign policy heft to Senator Barack Obama and be his campaign’s main ambassador to two at-risk constituencies: former supporters of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and blue-collar Democrats. He speaks to working-class voters in the harsh language of their economic trials, and summons easy rage at ear-splitting volumes.

Huh? So he's supposed to "pulverize" McCain. That's his role. But what did he do? What is the this "harsh language of their economic trials"? He recounts the story of growing up poor? How does that become "harsh language"? He "summons easy rage at ear-splitting volumes." What is "easy rage"? Completely relaxed, yet mad as hell?

Leibovich is stretching for vividness, and a lot of it just doesn't make sense. Is Biden effective? I feel like he's not but Leibovich wants to say he is.

Anyway, Drudge linked for the "You need to work on your pecs" thing. That was funny.

By the way, Biden makes Rush Limbaugh positively giddy and giggly. Example here. Oh, that link fortuitously has something I wanted to quote:

...I should have pointed this out to you last night on the plane, Snerdley, but Karl Rove literally skinned Alan Colmes alive.

Literally. Yikes! At least Leibovich didn't have Biden literally butchering McCain. Politics is quite the blood sport these days.

MORE: Here.