Freddie The German

 The World Cup is off to a great start, with compelling victories, heroic losses, honest draws. However, the star of the Cup so far is not Messi, Mbappe or Yamal; it's a German tourist who has won over the country and social media. During his travels - which are mostly narrations of food he has eaten and normal American shit that he's done - he has earned the attention of sports teams and American stars. JJ Watt hooked him up with a hotel room and a bunch of swag, including a signed jersey.

There are a few things about Freddie that have people embracing him. 

First, he blanks out his face (or rather covers it with his favorite player Renaldo's). Anyone else - any American - would likely be seeking to grab those fifteen minutes of fame. They would be trying to seize their monetized moment, like the Hawk Tuah girl. This guy is just looking to have a blast and largely succeeding.

Second, I think Freddie is seeing us the way we would like to be seen. America is going through some shit right now. Trump turning the White House into a trailer park is just deeply shameful. Our politics - especially online - has degenerated to Trump's level of invective nastiness. Lies and insults shape our public discourse.

But Freddie is simply reminding us that BBQ tastes great. That Buc-ees are both hilarious and impressive. That this really is a beautiful country and that most Americans are really nice. 

People are good. A person - some more than others - can be bad, but people are generally good and most of the damage they do to the world comes from fear, pain or ignorance. This World Cup is already full of moments like Freddie's that remind us that the best way to live is with open hearts and open arms. 

What A Lovely Evening

 Last night, we saw the best half of soccer that a USMNT has probably ever played - given the stage. 

We also saw them start to chisel Trump's name off the Kennedy Center.

Small victories, maybe, but we will take what we can.

Deeply Weird

 I've been reading Yglesias for a while now. I read him because I don't always agree with him and I don't want to silo myself away from contrary takes. When he said he had been a philosophy major, I thought, "Well, that makes sense. He seems more in love with abstractions than people." When he said he had a strange neurological quirk that made it hard for him to picture things in his mind, I thought, "Well, that makes sense. He seems more in love with abstractions than people."

Today, however, he crossed a fucking line. 

It's the perfect example of thinking without feeling.

Toxic America

 I heard an argument that as bad as everything seems to be right now, it's not as bad as the 2000s. The logic - and it's sound - is that 9/11 was so traumatic we don't even talk about the anthrax scare. We fought two somewhat pointless wars. We had the 2008 financial crisis. 

Yeah, that's a lot.

There does seem to be an accelerating toxicity to America though. Part of it is just the relentless stupidity of the people in charge. Dubya Bush was pretty thick, but these idiots are just spectacularly dumb. Kash Patel chugging beers with the men's hockey team...I mean what are we doing here?

Something else caught my eye that I think is emblematic of how awful things are. 

HBO released A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, with the last episode airing last night. It's great. It masterfully moves tonally from incredibly funny to moving to tragically sad. It's "small" compared to Game of Thrones, but that's the point. Anyway, the penultimate episode was amazing and was briefly ranked on IMDB as one of the best episodes of TV...ever. OK, it probably wasn't THAT good, but who freaking cares?

Apparently fans of Breaking Bad care, because they began to review bomb IMDB to drive down the rating for that episode to preserve "Ozymandias", an ep of Breaking Bad, as the top episode of all time. When last night's show came out, Breaking Bad fans mobbed IMDB to drive down the score before the episode had concluded. 

This is all very, very silly, stupid and petty. However, it does demonstrate something about America in 2026. I would posit that the rise of the internet has created this, both by democratizing taste and elevating hostility. Democratizing taste isn't terrible, but we've seen fanbases basically revolt because the story artists are telling wasn't the story they wanted to be told. That isn't the point of storytelling. What happens is a relentless whining about the end of Lost or Game of Thrones or The Sopranos or Seinfeld. It's the dynamic of "Your Favorite Band Sucks, Actually" but amplified across a dozen online platforms.

In the end it sucks the joy out of life. It makes the incessant howling of the self-centered the medium of cultural discourse. What's more, AI is coming to force this everywhere. Didn't like the ending of Game of Thrones? You can burn 5 gigawatts and a rainforest's water supply for AI to make you an ending that suits your taste. It will suck for everyone but you, but congrats, you have made a soulless piece of crap to soothe your raging id.

I love the fact that last night I could quickly find an answer to the question "Should you feed your dog leftover pesto?" (The answer is no.) The internet can be a great facilitator of knowledge - once you know how to use it and once you are aware of its limits. The churn of social media, the imperative of the algorithm that prioritizes "engagement" is absolutely toxic, and it has its roots in the Oughts and the chatrooms. It's now everywhere and it sucks. 

Alexandra Petri Is A National Treasure

 I hope at some point, her trip to the Kennedy Center is to pick up her Twain Award. Still, this will do for now. It is not actually easy to be both funny and spot on with your political satire, but what she pulls off is a brilliant sketch of Trump's inherent thirstiness and his being perpetually mired in the '70s and '80s.

No War But The Culture War

 Krugman has a long conversation with Adam Tooze about the challenges and strengths that Europe has, especially relative to the United States. One thing that struck me - there's a LOT there - is the idea of the NSS that basically divides the world into Great Power spheres of influence. That's how I read it, with Trumpist nostalgia for the 19th century reducing the world to this old idea of regional hegemons: the US in the Americas, Russia in Europe and China in Asia.

What was striking to many was the racist and antagonistic language that the NSS used to describe Europe. Tooze points out that this is really just an extension of MAGA's culture war ethos. We know how moony-eyed Trumpists get when talking about Hungary and Orban; that sort of competitive authoritarianism is their goal for America. Orban also fits into that Culture Warrior model, as much of his appeal is his anti-immigrant - really anti-Islamic - focus in European politics.

For the MAGAts, Europe is just Woke America with funny accents. I would argue that this is part of the overall lack of curiosity about the world that typifies a certain type of arrogant ignorance. What's fascinating about the Europe v US debate is how both sides of the Atlantic have such different priorities, yet they are fundamentally wealthy and successful societies. If you're from Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia or Latin America, you would want to live in the US or Europe, but if you're from the US or Europe, you'd probably only want to live in either of those places. This isn't to say either place doesn't face significant problems, rather that they are very much First World Problems.

To denigrate Europe - as the MAGAts do - is exactly the same as denigrating New York, Chicago or San Francisco. The same as hating Berkeley, Cambridge or Austin. 

Mark Twain said "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness." MAGA is service to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness. 

Kimmel

 The monologue was pretty good - emotional, concise, pointed. As Krugman noted, this is a sign that authoritarianism of the type Trump wants to impose on America is brittle and breaking. Democratic backsliding requires that the wannabe dictator is actually popular. It was amazing that even people like Ted Cruz could see the terrible overreach in using threats from the FCC to take Kimmel off the air.

The breakneck speed of Trump's lawless overreach is precisely because they fear an accountability moment. It should be the midterms, but they are working to rig those as best they can. They WAY they are rigging things  - gerrymandering - suggests that they realize the futility of trying to rig the counting or to rely on massive, militarized vote suppression. 

It's a long, long march through Trumpistan. Take some solace and shelter when you can.

Debate v Argument

 Josh Marshall takes a run at the centrist sanewashing of Charlie Kirk. The Ezra Klein argument that Kirk "did politics the right way." Marshall points out that Kirk was not a "debater" but a "debate me, bro" guy. The latter are provocateurs who use rhetorical pugilism to entertain. Lots of strawman arguing and so forth. Marshall says debate is good, but debate bros are useless.

I'm circling in on something else that I'm refining for a school talk in January.

Debate, actually, is kind of bad. Debate is a sport. There are tactics - of which people like Kirk and Ben Shapiro are good at - that can "win points" and "win" the debate. It's a zero sum exercise - as much of our politics is.

Instead, I think we need to argue more and debate less. Arguing seems angrier, but I don't think that's the way to look at it. When I would get into arguments in college, it was fun! Even arguments with my dad were engaging. The key thing, though, is not see at argument as a win-lose situation. When you argue, you have to defend your position. To the degree that you attack the other person's position, it should be from the perspective of trying to actually understand what they are saying, rather than creating a strawman to disassemble. 

The best arguments that I have had are ones where I come either better understand their position and better understand my own. It's a process of discovery, not a zero-sum contest. 

Losing that has crippled public discourse. 

Oh No

 Not Robert Redford...

Making America Weird

 There's a lot of weirdness in Trumpistan. This is an inevitable byproduct of populism, which is driven by feelings of inadequacy in a culture that centers on expertise. Elite expertise - even ostensibly benign expertise like medical experts - is suspect because it comes from "elites".

The most obvious example of this is, of course, RFK Jr's crazy ass shit. This is part of the strange "wellness culture" that exists around sundry forms of quackery. Almost all of these are various forms of fraud or ignorance, though there is some evidence around what could be called non-western medicine. What's more, people feel unhealthy because as you get older your body starts to decline. It's called aging and people are scared to death of it. The idea that there is some secret sauce to keep you young and healthy is very appealing and people will divorce themselves from reason in its pursuit. 

Ironically, "Big Pharma" might have unlocked a true "miracle" with these semaglutide medicines like Ozempic. This has led to an online backlash because taking a pill that gives you all sorts of health benefits - weight loss, diabetes, addiction - is "cheating" instead of eating a bonkers diet and chopping four cords of wood every day or whatever nonsense these nutballs come up with.

The implications for public health from RFK and his crew of loons are real. People will die needless if he really starts attacking vaccine mandates. Children, children will die. However, there are other forms of weirdo nonsense that imperil us for the next four years.

I remain convinced that we will have a Crypto bubble before 2028. Crypto is a perfect example of broligarchic, glibertarian nonsense. Money has more or less always been a product and function of the state. Coins bore the heads of caesars, kings and emperors. The ability to manage one's currency is fundamental to modern economics. Crypto is an attack on this function and posits that removing this from the realm of the state will...something? Freedom? Freedumb?

Basically, Crypto is the perfect bubble asset, as it is based on nothing but the agreed on value of it. While Crypto-Bros would argue the same is true of a fiat currency, that ignore the extraordinary wealth and power of even the weaker states. 

My fundamental rule for economics is that anyone who says "This time will be different" is a fool, and we know what happens to a fool and their money. Pouring wealth into the random asset of Crypto will grow a bubble - it's inevitable. We've already seen one Crypto bubble, and when the next one bursts, it will take down bigger financial institutions.

Then there is AI. This is less Populist weirdness and more Tech-Bro, but we are moving headlong towards a technology that has the potential to destroy large segments of the economy. If we really do deport millions of people, people like Musk will try and replace them with robots. 

What could possibly go wrong?

At the root of this populist moment around the world is the access people now have to all sorts of knowledge, but they have access to it without wisdom or context. Also at its roots is the broad dissatisfaction with the world. 

My own theory is that life has literally never been easier, and we simply aren't wired for that. Our brains - wired for threats and deprivation - are running underloaded and hot. We see peril where it doesn't exist, because we are wired to look for it. This accounts for our Anxious Age, and in this time of societal anxiety, we look for solace in certitude. The problem is, actual science is uncertain - that's what makes it science. Doubt, revision, challenging...all of those are essential to intellectual growth. 

Populism replaces that skepticism with ferocious certainty. Trump is both profoundly ignorant and profoundly confident. A man those close to him have described as an idiot projects brilliance to a people who saw him on their TeeVee play a savvy business man. 

Populist moments in history tend to fade, because they tend to fail. The American Populist movement of farmers in the late 19th century gave birth to a Progressive movement that centered technocratic governance. 

While history does not strictly repeat itself, we can hope that it once again rhymes.

Missing The Damned Point

 Paul Campos notes a recent focus group where someone said that Trump reminded him of Walter White in Breaking Bad or Tony Soprano and they find that a positive.

In our school - like most others - students are required to take English every year, math through at least Algebra II, two years of science and two years of history, and the third year of a language. Almost every student takes more science and history than that in four years.

Then they go to college.

In college, they increasingly use the experience as a commodity. Their degree is - somewhat understandably -  a commodity to be leveraged to a better paying career. College is expensive, so I get that. However, that often means that the Humanities are hollowed out. Everyone is taking business/finance classes or STEM classes, because that's where the money is.

The result, though, is the guy like Jonathan, who thinks that Walter White is doing things for anyone other than himself. At least Jonathan understands that White is the anti-hero, that he does bad things. However, the Greek tragedy of Breaking Bad is that Walter is incredibly selfish. He may start cooking meth because he has cancer and wants a nest-egg for his family after he dies, but after the cancer goes into remission, he still cooks. As he says in the end, "I did it for me."

The romance of the outlaw hero is so much bullshit. Dillinger was a psychopathic killer, not a tribune of the people. Walter White did terrible things because he liked the power. Same goes for Trump.

When people stop training their minds in the way that the Humanities train them, they wind up blinkered with a shallower understanding of the world we live in. Trump could not survive in a country that still understood critical thinking skills. (Then again, he IS cratering with those with college degrees.)

Railbird

 I had the great good fortune of going to Railbird music festival in Lexington, Kentucky this past weekend as my Christmas present. It was a helluva an experience. Artists like Noah Kahan, Lord Huron and Hozier put on absolutely killer sets. Counting Crows were weird as hell. But it was the artists I had never heard or even heard of that made it fun: Johnnyswims, Allison Russell, Nolan Taylor; plus artists I had heard but never properly placed like Trampled by Turtles and Sam Barber.

Anyway, it was fun to unplug from the internet for four days. I recommend it.

Weird Times

 There are two stories that are not political that I think testify to the weirdness of the age we live in - where "information" is abundant but unreliable.

The first is the Kate Middleton saga. It is, of course, very sad when a young mother has to confront a cancer diagnosis. There is a superficial plausibility that they wanted to take time in order to tell their kids, in order not to upset them, though there is no good time for that conversation with young children. More astonishing is that "the Firm" so bungling the media approach to this. The photoshopped picture, the complete absence until yesterday...who thought that was a good idea? Into this void, every conspiracy theory expanded. 

The second is the Shohei Ohtani gambling story. Ohtani is one of the most bankable stars in all of sports and his interpreter (perhaps) racked up huge gambling debts and money from Ohtani's account was used to pay it off. At first, Ohtani said he was helping a dear friend out, then he switched his story to one where his friend stole from him, which strains credulity.

In both cases, we have a hamfisted series of public statements though for different reasons. Ohtani commented too soon and the Royal Family not soon enough. The absence of even a cursory statement from Middleton created a set of conditions where people could fill in their own plausible and implausible theories. Ohtani committed to one story (I paid my friends debts) which became a problem because he may have violated baseball's rules and California law in doing so, so he switched his story.

There is a particular type of moral scold who is wagging their censorious finger at everyone who advanced theories about Middleton, under the guise of "she deserves privacy". Does she? Isn't she a public servant employed at the taxpayer's expense? We freaked out when the Secretary of Defense was out of commission and incommunicado for a few days, and while the Princess of Wales is considerably less important than the SecDef, it's still a public position and there were months of this rather than days.

What's more, it's increasingly harder to understand what "deserves" or "should" means anymore. There are lots of things that "should" happen, but they simply won't.  Middleton should've been able to say that she had surgery and that complications ensued that will require more treatment until she had a chance to talk to her kids. She didn't do that and - as a public figure - speculation bloomed. Did she "deserve" that? No, probably not. Is anyone - and I mean ANYONE - surprised that it happened? Similarly, baseball's rules are VERY clear about gambling. Does Ohtani deserve to be suspended for helping a friend? No, but he likely broke a sacrosanct rule and what did he actually expect?

I hope Ms Middleton makes a full recovery and enjoys a long healthy life watching her children grow up. I hope Shohei Ohtani does not get the Pete Rose/Shoeless Joe treatment, even if he does get a lengthy suspension. I also hope that the people who are responsible for public relations can learn something from this ridiculousness. 

I Hate Agreeing With David Brooks

 Brooks wrote one of his things in The Atlantic about doomcasting. When reading Brooks in the past, I would always be about half way through it, thinking "Actually, he makes some goods points" and then BOOM he would draw some conclusion or parallel that was just idiotic. He doesn't really do that here. He does tend to focus more on leftwing doomcasting as opposed to the apocalyptic American Carnage of Trumpistan.

In particular, he does return to his hobby horse about "community" and communal norms. 

The reason I was in agreement with Brooks is that he specifically addresses the deep pessimism and cultural depression among the young. He mentions that being negative is a great way to draw clout and attention, without mentioning the algorithms that feed negativity into our brains via our screens.

At the root of a lot of this is the idea that systems are corrupt and holding people down. This may be one reason why young people have such negative views of the economy. To believe that things are terrible is very "savvy".  It's also, I really believe, wrong. We live in an age of miracles and wonders. I'm sitting in the rainforest of Argentina, typing on a personal computer that has access to the world's warehouse of information. I can find restaurant reviews for every restaurant in town, automatically translated into English. 

Is everything perfect? Of course not. Every generation is called upon to struggle with great issues. Americans must struggle to preserve representative government. Everyone must struggle with the climate issue.

I read an interesting piece about Denmark the other day. Denmark is routinely held up as the beau ideal of countries. However, Denmark's remarkable society involves very real tradeoffs. Universal health care is awesome, but that means primary care is largely assembly line medicine. Universal education is awesome but tracking exams basically rule you out of professions before you turn 20. All societies involve tradeoffs, good and bad intertwined. 

Relentless negativity serves no one but the forces that want you to turn on your neighbor or devolve into despair and inertia.

Cults

 Paul Campos hits on an important idea here: we live in an Age of Cults. These are fundamentally irrational belief systems that rely on the idea that cult members have some special knowledge that non-cult members don't have. The various cults that Campos lists are overlapping niche areas of belief (I guess Trumpism can't be considered niche) that paint a picture of "savvy" inside knowledge. 

Take the Ur-Cult: QAnon. Adherents cling to a bonkers belief with no medical or criminal evidence to support it: the harvesting of hormones from children. The messianic return of JFK, Jr. is just the icing on the crazy cake, but the basic populist idea of elites killing children has no rational basis in anything. Actual events like Epstein can be folded into the belief system as needed. 

I know that I've had students who believe in the genius of Elon Musk and the appeal of crypto, which is a sort of techno-cult. Of course, the evangelical protestants and fundamentalist Catholics who make up the Republican base constitute a form of unreasoned belief in the divine mission of Donald Fucking Trump. Belief in a form of mystical Christianity can, I guess, lead you to believe that that odious ambulatory sack of selfishness was sent her by God.  Sure, Jan.

The question Campos doesn't address is why we live in an age of Cults. If I had to guess, I'd say it's precisely because we live in an increasingly secular world. The ancient religious texts are not especially relevant in language or literal meaning to millions of Americans. Religion, for all its many faults, provides a sense of purpose and belonging. Those are largely absent in modern life. 

People adrift will cling to anything that floats, I guess. There was a time when religious "awakenings" led to reforms, but these cults aren't really about that.  

Jimmy Buffett

 I grew up with his music. He was an excellent storyteller and an adequate musician. To the degree that he influenced me, he introduced me to the idea that a ballad could economically tell a story in just three to four minutes with humor and pathos. Rest in peace.

Here's a favorite:

He Went To Paris

He went to Paris looking for answers
To questions that bothered him so
He was impressive, young and aggressive
Saving the world on his own
But the warm Summer breezes
The French wines and cheeses
Put his ambition at bay
And Summers and Winters
Scattered like splinters
And four or five years slipped away

Then he went to England, played the piano
And married an actress named Kim
They had a fine life, she was a good wife
And bore him a young son named Jim
And all of the answers and all of the questions
He locked in his attic one day
'Cause he liked the quiet clean country living
And twenty more years slipped away

Well the war took his baby, the bombs killed his lady
And left him with only one eye
His body was battered, his world was shattered
And all he could do was just cry
While the tears were falling, he was recalling
The answers he never found
So he hopped on a freighter, skidded the ocean
And left England without a sound

Now he lives in the islands, fishes the pilin's
And drinks his green label each day
He's writing his memoirs and losing his hearing
But he don't care what most people say
Through 86 years of perpetual motion
If he likes you he'll smile then he'll say
Jimmy, some of it's magic, some of it's tragic
But I had a good life all the way

And he went to Paris looking for answers
To questions that bother him so

Obey!

 Driving across the vast expanses of Ohio, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri makes one sympathetic to the idea of "flyover" country. It's...a lot. One thing that's striking is the quantity of religious billboards. There's a LOT of anti-abortion stuff, but there's also a lot of how God wants you to obey His laws and commandments. It's not a touchy-feely Jesus out in Kansas.

In some ways, this looks like the common thread between Trump - a twice divorced, serial adulterer from NYC who's never made a sincere trip to church in his life - and evangelicals who believe God demands obedience. They are both explicitly authoritarian. Racist? Sure, but I think the racism is adjacent as much as motivational. Black and Brown people are scary because they represent the horde of democrats and Democrats who are going to deny them their rightful place at the top of the hierarchy.

The sick bastard in Jacksonville notwithstanding, most of them are not animated by their racism, they are animated by their demand for obedience: from their kids, from the culture, from their women. And they extend that obedience to the leader of their cult.

It's disturbingly un-American out there in the heartland.

Conservative Leninism

 Jon Chait runs through the latest "idea" from the Rightists in America. The basic idea is that the "Woke Mob of Leftists" has subverted America through a "Long March through the institutions". For those with a passing familiarity with world history, the Long March was the Chinese Communist Party's wandering struggle through China that created a hardened cadre of leaders and soldiers who would ultimately win the Chinese civil war in 1949. Linking the fact that you can see same sex and interracial couples in Volkswagen ads with Maoist revolutionaries makes a certain amount of sense, if you think that treating minorities with decency and equality is the same as communism.

The "idea" is that the Cultural Left has burrowed its way into power via the college educated and then proceeded to poison America with ideas like "lynching is bad, actually" and "LGBTQ people deserve equal treatment." There is a superficial plausibility to the theory, as the culture really has moved away from patriarchal, Christianist white supremacy. (Insert Barbie reference here.)

The chilling implications of this theory can be seen in Florida. If - as these bigots with bid vocabularies believe - the institutions of the Deep State, Hollywood and Corporate America are corrupted by the Long March of Leftism, then the only proper recourse is to use the power of the state to destroy "Cultural Marxism" in all its forms. This leads to DeSantis' jihad against Disney and it makes up the chilling plan to use a Trump second term to hollow out the federal government.

Chait acknowledges that they have a point that many institutions no longer cater to conservative beliefs, but he also points out the basic flaws in the theory.

The first is that they dramatically overstate the extent that institutions have re-ordered themselves to become "woke". There was a lot of caterwauling by conservatives in 2022 that Putin's military was butch and macho and would destroy America's woke military. Of course, then Russia face planted in Ukraine and America's JV weapons were a big part of that. So the fact that Raytheon did a DEI statement isn't exactly the end of the fucking world.

The second flaw is that a lot of the stuff that people like Christopher Rufo and the Claremont Institute scream about was a direct result of the George Floyd protests within the context of the Trump presidency. Yes, there were some voice that talked about "defunding the police" but they were typically fringe, and Democrats have largely abandoned those positions.  

All those DEI statements and training were actually pretty pointless. I remember going through them, and for the most part, they were preaching to the choir. I can think of very little that I experienced or was taught that would change the mind of an actual bigot. There was some interesting stuff on non-binary and non-gender conforming stuff that I wasn't really clear on, but the 3-4 hours of training could've been 30 minutes. I was already sympathetic, so I was receptive to learning about it, but if you were resistant to thinking about gender that way, this training wasn't going to change your mind. 

So much of DEI stuff - including things our school did in the face of actual acts of racism - is just window dressing. We had the n-word scrawled in various places over the past few years, usually around MLK Day. We do the same things every time and it doesn't move the needle much at all, because a year or two later it happens again. But, hey! We did the stuff you're supposed to do! The same is obviously true for corporations that create a DEI position, do a weekend retreat and then promptly forget about it. Is this really a Long March through the Institutions?

The final flaw is that in accusing the Left of being on a Maoist Cultural Revolution/Long March, the Right then adopts flawed Leninist modes of thinking. I'll just let Chait lay it out:

Both tomes brim with militant sloganeering language exhorting their allies to take merciless, decisive action against the enemy. “We like to say that one must govern, but a truer expression is that one must learn to rule,” writes Milikh in one essay.

Rufo displays even more clearly Leninist thought patterns. Politics is a struggle of willpower, and the forces of his side (the counterrevolution) “must ruthlessly identify and exploit the vulnerabilities of the revolution, then construct its own logic for overcoming it … The task is to meet the forces of revolution with an equal and opposite force.” Having convinced himself of the success of the Marxist left, he believes the right must fashion itself as a mirror image.

Rufo’s self-conception as a reverse Leninist, agitating for his anti-revolution, even extends to constructing his own dialectical analysis. “The working class is more anti-revolutionary today than at any time during the upheaval,” he posits. “Their quality of life has plummeted into a revolving nightmare of addiction, violence and incarceration.” The proletariat in Joe Biden’s Amerika, immiserated into radicalization, is ready to take to the barricades.

By starting from a presumption that this is an existential threat to American values, authoritarian assholes like Rufo and Milikh can justify their own existential threat to America. There is no political figure more steeped in this thinking than Ron DeSantis. As a former Freedumb Caucus asshole, DeSantis is already neck deep in lunatic theories about Joe Biden being a closet Marxist.

What I think we might be seeing though is a retreat from the effectiveness of this sort of politics. I'm more optimistic than most on the Left.

I believe that this sort of state intrusion on people's lives that we see in DeSantis' Florida is tremendously unappealing to a sizable majority of Americans. Sure, there's a hard core of about 35-40% of American voters who eat up this nonsense, but for a lot of people, the idea that Trump was going to try and end American democracy in 2016 seemed hysterical. It's not so far fetching after 1/6 and Dobbs and the rhetoric that emanates from the fever swamps of the Right Wing Noise Machine.

There is a theory in American politics about "thermostatic elections". The basic idea is that after Democrats win, Republicans win the midterms and vice versa. This has largely been true since the 1980s, but it wasn't always true. From 1896-1932 there was a long period of Republican dominance and from 1932-1980, there was a long period of Democratic dominance.  This thermostatic process is, I believe, a product of the increasingly ideological nature of the two parties. Prior to the 1970s, there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. No more. 

With the adoption by the Right of the idea that "Cultural Marxism" (not a thing, by the way) is an existential threat that must be met by rolling back LGBTQ and women's reproductive rights and weaponizing the state against Disney etc., they will hopefully continue to reinforce the idea that they are authoritarian threats to the very idea of democratic governance. If that happens, the GOP could be discredited at least at the federal level for years to come.

In which case - hilariously - the sort of deep cultural change that Rufo and DeSantis dread will cement itself further into American life.

Young Incel Fascists Of America

 Ron DeSantis' epic fail of a campaign would be funny, if it weren't so disturbing. Right now, what's interesting about DeSantis is not his run for president, but how he and his campaign think he can get there. 

What's clear is that at least one, possibly two, of DeSantis' younger campaign workers is part of the on-line "edgelord" bullshit surrounding Nazism and incel crap. These are people deeply locked into epistemological closure, where they think they and their coterie of trolls constitutes some sort of mass movement and not just the ravings of a handful of sociopaths.

Yglesias made the absurd claim that the staffers and activists in both parties tend to be young, college educated city dwellers, which tended to tilt actual policy leftwards, as that demographic tends to be more liberal or "mainstream". While his statement was factually accurate about the staffers, the reality is that there are a lot of incredibly toxic young men going to college and then working in GOP politics.

Which of course brings me to Barbie.

Ben Shapiro - perpetually enraged 70 year old man trapped in the body of a 30 year old hobbit - has declared jihad against Barbie, because it's anti-male. That would be - unsurprisingly - a very superficial way to view that movie. The theme of the movie would seem to be the way society shapes our vision of ourselves can be unrealistic and toxic. Part of the plot involves Ken importing patriarchy into Barbieworld, and it turns out it makes him miserable, too. That's not an attack on men, but on the way we can limit ourselves by the way we conceive of ourselves through the lens of societal expectations.

Yes, that is what the Barbie movie is about.

But the petulant pissing and moaning from people like Shapiro does land on fertile ears among a lot of young men. Hell, I feel like my main job as a parent right now is making sure those ideas don't infect our sons. And those bitter incel type can connect online and create a "community" the way Nazis used to sites like Stormfront.

Anyway, Ron DeSantis bet his campaign that that type of shitheel was the key to his victory. It's similar to the way Jason Aldean wanted to appeal not only to people who want to lynch BLM protestors, but those who would buy his record as soon as the "woke mob" pointed out that it was some pretty racist shit.

Dog whistle politics were concerning when Lee Atwater pumped that filth into American politics, but not we have air raid siren politics, and I just hope it fails miserably beyond just DeSantis' campaign.

I'm Not Buying It

 There's a typical media shitshow brewing over Jason Aldean's "Try That in a Small Town."

The song is typical chest-thumping country machismo, sung by a millionaire who grew up comfortable. Ya know...authentic Nashville. The song itself is mildly problematic, but the music video took it to the next level. You could certainly interpret the song as having a pro-lynching angle, but the lyrics could be read another way, too. 

The video, however, features Floyd protest unrest and Aldean performs in front of a Tennessee courthouse that was the site of a lynching. 

Subtle.

Progressive country stars have called Aldean out, and of course Aldean - a Trump supporter - has vehemently defended the video and song. As a result, the song will become even more popular, as a segment of MAGAdom buy multiple copies of the song to "pwn the libs."

Let's assume that Aldean didn't know that he was singing a song that glorifies vigilante justice in front of the site of the lynching of an 18 year old boy. A normal person living in normal times would apologize and re-edit or re-shoot the video to use a different backdrop, because presumably everyone knows that lynching teenagers is bad.

In the world that Donald Trump ushered in seven years ago, if you do something bad - even horrific - you never apologize. You revel in the opprobrium leveled at you by people who think "woke" things like lynching teenagers is bad. The fact that certain people are appalled that you seem to endorse lynching is just "cancel culture" that you ride to increased sales, because you've been canceled so mcuh.

So, yeah, I think Aldean knew exactly what he was doing and where he was filming. Or at least someone associated with the choices in the video knew. 

The backlash was the marketing strategy.

I go back and forth about whether it would've been better if Trump had never run for president. Obviously, the Courts are a tragedy, but let's assume Generic Republican won against an unpopular Clinton. You lose the Courts anyway. So what did Trump accomplish? He coarsened everything about American civic life (culture life was already pretty coarse) and made apologies and contrition toxic to a third of the American people.

I think Trump's toxicity has had a profoundly important effect on the prospects of the Republican Party and not in a good way. (2024 will prove me right or wrong.) If we are entering into a generation of Democratic dominance caused by young people be repulsed by Trumpism, then the pain of Trump could be worth it to usher in a period of Democratic dominance.

But this toxic relationship with unabashed refusals to apologize or accommodate public norms is really, really bad. And it will outlive Trump.