Don't lose the plot

Midterm elections will take place in the U.S. on Tuesday, November 3—just ten weeks from today. And meanwhile, in news that will shock no one, the most destabilizing threat to a free and democratic American society is the president and his allies who are running the federal government.

Between now and November, you’re going to hear a lot about the need to moderate and to compromise to fight the threat of Trumpism. Thinking strategically about how to block the agenda of the goons in charge at present is a complicated question. But as a starting point, it’s critical not to let complexity of this task blind you to the political landscape before us, which is much simpler.

Let me reference just a few news items from the last week or so. With 50% tariffs imposed on some Canadian goods, Trump is launching a senseless trade war with Canada, a stalwart ally and dependable neighbor. Two more people were killed in illegal strikes in the Caribbean by the U.S. military this week, just the latest fatalities in a death toll now in the hundreds.

And in one of the strangest stories from the second Trump administration—though the story began years ago—we learned that the fanatically devoted, politically reactionary and religious extremist executive assistant Natalie Harp helps to shape the president’s understanding of the world and access to its most extreme corners. She also apparently writes disturbing letters of self-abnegation, and goes sprinting after golf carts or climbing into car trunks to accompany Trump when he goes anywhere outside the White House.

The Harp issue was brought into sharp relief earlier this month by Senator Jon Ossoff. His comments triggered a furious response from Trump allies, which sparked widespread coverage.

I’m old enough to remember that decades ago, it was common to see a candidate for state legislature proposing some wild measure, saying something openly racist or recommending executing women who get abortions. The press would cover it the way they covered exotic customs in faraway countries, and everyone would be horrified and titillated. But the general vibe seemed to be that you shouldn’t worry too much about that guy who hated black people or wanted to kill women, because he was on the fringe and would never really hold power.

Now someone (actually a few someones) with the mindset of that hateful, ignorant fringe candidate is now running the United States day in and day out. Today, I want to consider exactly where we’re at, given that state of affairs. I’ll also make the argument that we shouldn’t compromise on holding fast against delusions and hate. We shouldn’t give in to the corruption that is expanding so rapidly all around us.

I’ll look at the difference between reaching and motivating voters whose concerns you address on the one hand, and getting suckered into supporting atrocities and hate propaganda on the other. Because they’re two different things.

Bad tsar, bad boyars

There’s a cliche about governance in which people want to believe (and are sometimes encouraged to believe) that the king or the dear leader has their best interests at heart, but the bad lords and councilors around him are keeping him from knowing what is really happening in the country. The idea is that the leader would somehow step in to protect them if only he knew.

Some Trump supporters may still believe this, but their leader is a bucket filled with resentments and a howling need for affirmation, and little else. The cabinet secretaries scheming to influence him are also bad. And now we see media focus illuminate another source of malign influence—Natalie Harp.

She’s been written about for years already without ever really getting a spotlight before. Harp cheered on the January 6, 2021, coup mightily. And she’s part of an evangelical American movement that has wrought so much harm on the country. Call her Rasputin, or maybe Wormtongue. In any case, she reveres him, and represents a key constituency of the batshit portion of our society that elected him. Harp seems to think her job is to abase herself to the president, while simultaneously acting as a conduit with foreign leaders in private messages—all while her salary is paid by the public.

As Maggie Haberman said in an interview this week, “What Natalie Harp is, is a living, breathing exclamation point of how different, radically different this second [Trump] term is from term one. As much as it might have looked like there was somebody like Natalie Harp last time, existing in the government as an official in the Oval Office, there really was not. This is just so different. And it is the degree to which his belief of what is happening and this unreality bubble that he exists in has been created and sustained.”

Harp is far from the only bottom-feeder who has glommed onto Trumpism and its effects, though others are less focused on propping up Trump than on pushing the same retrograde ideas. The reversal of DEI policies and return to open bigotry that have harmed so many Black women in the job market and decimated American education have been cheered on by pseudo-intellectuals who are deeply racist and committed to eugenics as a field.

A similar racism animates the anti-immigrant purges terrorizing millions in the U.S. today. Much of the same crew also loathes women deeply and denies our physical and intellectual capacities. And trans people have been targeted in particularly virulent ways by right-wing podcasters and the president alike. Each of these kinds of hatred has been used to help return Trump to office, and with him there, the true believers and the cynics alike are destroying any remaining commitment to democracy and equality.

The success of this agenda during the first half of Trump’s second administration isn’t entirely a result of propaganda convincing passive listeners. In some cases, the hatemongers find very willing takers for the bill of goods they’re selling. I know this is true because I grew up among people who believed the same things that Natalie Harp believes, the same things that Richard Hanania believes.

I know what kind of world these people want to make. Trump doesn’t have the same desire to shape the world the true hatemongers do, with a specific structure in mind, but he has the same desire for absolute control. And the racists, the bad advisers, the misogynists, and egomaniacal tech or political leaders they prop up—none of these are people we should compromise with ideologically.

Punishment outside the U.S.

The damage underway is in no way limited to suffering inside U.S. borders. We should be equally opposed to the international politics the United States has embraced under Trump 2.0. The cuts to USAID have continued their genocidal harm, aimed at poor people of color worldwide.

As mentioned, the U.S. military, in our name, continues to kill random people at sea. We’ve also seen our armed forces acting domestically, in the form of National Guard troops abusing civilians. Still, the administration has been much quicker to use the military for illegal actions abroad: in these boat strikes, the war against Iran, and the many other bombing operations undertaken in the last year and a half.

This is of a piece with Trump’s open hostility toward our traditional allies, including countries like Denmark and Canada. As a result, his actions might come across as so shocking that they appear to be a complete rupture with prior presidents and U.S. policy. But unlike the threats against NATO allies, the larger campaign of boat bombings and military operations are actually part of a long-running continuum.

It can be argued that the boat bombings are the next step in hostilities beyond the drone strikes carried out under Barack Obama and Joe Biden. George W. Bush created offshore concentration camps, kidnapping, and torture sites in Guantanamo and elsewhere with the War on Terror, and Donald Trump has embraced all of it.

The invocation of the War on Drugs under Nixon from more than half a century ago continues to provide the basis, if dishonestly, for the boat strikes during Trump 2.0. It can seem like Trump is doing shocking things out of nowhere—and it is important to realize this administration is making every U.S. crisis significantly worse. Yet at the same time, many of the cruelties and abuses they’re inflicting are just the next phase in a specific arc of extrajudicial actions unfolding over the last quarter-century, and going even further back.

Several of those policies came about with the help of people who saw themselves as progressives compromising on moral values in ways that were seen as practical at the time. The problem is that when you surrender the moral values that create your politics, you move closer to your opponents, but they will never move closer to you. And like corruption taking over in an economy, once a society rationalizes away its moral frameworks, it can be very hard to undo.

The visions of monsters

Many of the great monsters of history started out with some shred of idealism, even if they quickly surrendered their humanity in order to slaughter their enemies and keep or expand power. But it’s important to realize that Trump has never been for anyone but himself. So even lip service to democracy or higher ideals in any meaningful sense has gone completely out the window now.

The Republican Party has surrendered entirely whatever moral arguments it tried to make in the past, and stands for none of the ideals it once purported to. When Darline Nordone—sister of the deceased Senator Lindsey Graham and the person currently appointed to his seat—muffed a question about Taiwan on a talk show a few days ago, she embarrassed herself.

But when called to account, she didn’t address the issue at hand. Instead, she assured the public that the voters of South Carolina are more concerned about stopping trans children from playing sports than they are questions of international democracy.

The reason that we’re seeing such loud calls for Democrats and leftists to compromise on their moral frameworks is because Trump has been so effective at using hatred to motivate people. He’s managed to get tens of millions to identify with him, some of them very deeply.

But many others among his voters are not people who attend to politics or who follow the nuances of legislation. Because of catchy phrases, manipulation of historic hatreds, or appeals to resentment, these voters have developed an affinity for a particular candidate or for a platform plank.

But the key is not to give in. It’s to stand on reality and democratic values and remind people that they know better, too, that not only can they demand more from their politicians, they themselves—and the country as a whole—can become more than the hatred and punishment that the Trump administration is using to divide us.

Mainstreaming creeps

We’re seeing people tied to deeply racist writing and statements in the past now given prime real estate to replicate them regularly online. This kind of person can write opinion pieces for the New York Times or have a column in the Boston Globe.

Even less hateful people will suggest that rights for trans people as human beings are negotiable, or that immigrants deserve some in-between amount of the terror that has been unleashed against them, or that rounding all these camps up and putting them in camps without due process would be acceptable, if only the facilities were run slightly more humanely. They will talk about immigrants as threats instead of as the foundation of the best parts of modern America.

Meanwhile, people who have found useful applications of AI as a tool sell the concept on huge platforms, trashing people who are alarmed. There seems to be little or no acknowledgment that the corporate leaders of the AI revolution are corrupt or dodgy and don’t have the best interests of the public at heart—pushing their products in ways that are untruthful, dangerous, and damaging to vulnerable individuals, not to mention whole sectors of the economy, from artists to schoolchildren.

Individuals tend to see only their own interests, but we need to think bigger than that. And people don’t have the skills or the time to research all of it themselves on every front. If we create a possible politics for a moral society, a lot of people are ready to join it.

So when you hear the big-tent arguments, don’t think of surrendering on the issues that matter to you. Keep in mind something Hamilton Nolan posted over the weekend about a completely different issue in politics and media coverage: “Is it better to have good politics, or bad politics? Good politics. And do we just want ourselves to have good politics, or do we want everyone to share those good politics? We want everyone to have them. Yes. So if someone is insulting anyone for having good politics, that is very stupid.”

It’s okay to hold on to your good politics and market them smartly, in ways that will appeal to people and bring new voters to your coalition. And I would add that if someone suggests that you can’t win with good politics but should have bad politics because that might be more popular, the opportunism of the statement is obvious to everyone, even the people whose votes you imagine you’ll win. Yet that’s what we’re being told with regard to immigrants, to trans people, and abortion.

But in reality, the idea that embracing Republicans’ bad politics is a more practical approach isn’t even true. People are often more attached to the messaging that’s used than the policy it’s wrapped around. It’s part of a package about what kind of American to be.

And the truth is that the agenda itself—as well as the president—is deeply unpopular. Embracing that agenda is a path to ruin. You’re going to have to put forward some other package about what kind of American to be. It might as well be a good and honorable one.

What you stand for vs. what you run on

And if people say, well, liberals are annoying, and they occasionally feel exhausted by endless head games over language or intentionality, fair enough—that happens sometimes. But it’s important to note that the left is not in power. The Republicans only pretend Woke 1.0 was oppressive and omnipotent; they only claim Joe Biden is responsible for everything Americans don’t like. The elected and appointed officials in power now are responsible for what’s happening now.

I’ve talked before about diagnosing a problem versus figuring out the solution for it. The study of public health reveals those are often two different tracks. You have to know what’s wrong before you can consider how to fix it. But how to fix the country is in part a communications issue.

Going back to the medical example, seeing the problem through the eyes of patients doesn’t mean giving up on the idea of vaccines or preventive care. It means finding ways to reach the public with healthcare or policy solutions you have some rational basis for thinking will help.

In politics, you might decide that it’s better to focus your main message on corruption, because as a communications strategy that more readily draws voters to your side. But even if the voters weren’t interested in cleaning up corruption, the logical next step would not be to become pro-corruption in order to draw those voters.

They will not stop

What I know is that for the people in power today, and for the people who seriously want the same things for the country, it will never be enough to get the world they want. They have to be able to punish their opponents at will, whenever and however they like. That is the essence of Trumpism, and of the house I grew up in.

So if you are a politician, divide the political challenges into two categories: First, what is your moral vision and the policies that flow out of it? Second, what are your most effective issues with the voters you want to reach and what are the most effective ways to talk about them?

Those of us who aren’t politicians can use the same approach in a less formal way to deal with friends and relatives, or politicians in our towns, or on our school or library boards—or anyone we hope to get to adopt a more honest and fair country than the plague of vileness and decay we’re swimming through today. Meeting others where they’re at doesn’t mean embracing their intolerance and resentments. It just means knowing what you stand for, and finding some part of that they might care about.

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