Mined from the notebooks, Sunday, December 2, 2018. Posted Saturday morning, December 22.
Like father, like daughter. Ivanka Trump and her proud old man: “Consider all the energy spent trying to figure out Ivanka Trump’s true beliefs, when she’s shown that what she believes most is that she’s entitled to power and prestige…”---Michelle Goldberg, the New York Times. Photo by Andrew Harnik/AP via NPR.
From the Department of True to the Point of Banality:
It’s a fact of life that wherever there’s money to be made there will be people who want nothing more out of life than to make money, and among them there will be many who will do anything to make it and keep it.
The same is true were any vain hope or desire can be satisfied. Wherever there’s power to be had, there will be people who want only power. Wherever there’s fame to be achieved, there will be people who only want fame, in any and all its forms---celebrity, notoriety, mere popularity---there will be people who only want to be famous and don’t care what they’ll be famous for. Wherever there’s sex or the prospect of love, wherever there’s attention to be grabbed, wherever people can satisfy their vanity, ego, greed, lust, need, there will be crowds of the vain, greedy, egomaniacal, egocentric, egoistic, lustful, and desperately needy doing whatever they can to get the satisfaction they desire.
And those desires can their satisfactions are to be found in just about all walks of life, in all places of work, from the most ordinary and mundane to the highest and most celebrated and coveted. The profession or endeavor can be in itself a noble one, but that doesn’t mean that all the people attracted to it are in it to do noble things or are ennobled by doing it. Take teaching and medicine and science and religion.
Or let’s not.
It’s too depressing to think about.
The arts seem especially attractive to awful people. But that’s because artists tend to be by nature exhibitionists with a talent for self-dramatization. They seem to think it’s their duty to live out their lives in public. And it’s in their professional interest to self-promote and to do that they self-glamorize and self-celebrate. They develop the habit of telling on themselves---in their conversation as well as in their art. Plus, because on the whole they are an attractive, intelligent, humorous, and fun- and joy-filled collection of human beings---even the ones who are unhappy can feign mirth---we pay attention to them. And we envy them because they appear to live their lives in defiance of the rules and social norms and inhibitions that constrain us and make us feel trapped in our own lives. The worst human beings among them can be obscenely rewarded despite their awfulness. Sometimes for their awfulness.
Politics is another arena in which the worst human beings can be obscenely rewarded and often for being the worst sorts of human beings. Power, money, fame, love, and sex are there for the asking---and taking---and even people who go into it to do good do despicable things right along with the good things they do because they can’t resist the temptations that they’re presented with as they climb the ladder. There are too many examples to list but just for the moment consider the biographies of the finest men to hold the office of President, the men with the most virtues and fewest vices, Washington, Lincoln, TR---another fight we can have later---FDR, Truman, and Carter. All of them did terrible things for the basest of political reasons. All of them did things out of vanity, ego, anger, timidity, and even moral and political cowardice. Carter’s most salient flaw appears to be his faith in his own virtues and strengths. He seems to have thought that a man as moral and intelligent as he was certain he was couldn’t possibly make bad or unintelligent decisions. More to the point, he seems to have been convinced that anyone who opposed those decisions must be immoral or stupid or both.
I’d like to think that Obama is the single, glorious exception. And he does appear to be the most self-disciplined, least prone to temptation person not just to have been president but to have made politics their career. But we’ll see when the historians are done. I suspect, with a pang, that it will turn out that like Carter the temptation he gave into was the belief that his own moral rectitude was persuasive in itself and that it would and should carry him through every political fight he faced as president. It seems it sometimes mattered more to him to be seen doing the right thing more than doing the necessary and effective thing.
And time will tell if we are watching the beginning of President Ocasio-Cortez’s march to the White House. At any rate, whatever he political future bring, we are watching her struggle to keep her head from being turned and her energy and attention diverted by her sudden power, celebrity, and notoriety.
Imagine what must be going through her mind as she’s realizing there’s the very real possibility that she could go on quickly to be senator or governor or both and from either of those offices president. She could even skip over them and run for president as soon as she’s old enough.
Ocasio-Cortez in 2028?
Why not? People are talking excitedly about Beto in 2020.
Imagine also what she’s thinking as she becomes more and more the object of hatred, contempt, and jealousy of not only Right Wingers but her fellow Democrats and “Progressives”. Imagine being the subject of so much fascination and attention from the celebrity-machine that powers so much supposedly serious political journalism.
By the way, she appears to be handling it better than the young FDR did at a similar point in his career. When he was first elected to the much lowlier and therefore you would think less temptation-filled office of state senator, he almost undid himself through his vanity and self-importance. He appears to have thought all his fellow legislators should have recognized immediately his superior talents and abilities and deferred to him as if he was already a future president in waiting and then when he realized that wasn’t going to be how things worked fallen all over himself to placate the Democratic machine powers that be he believed he was elected to oppose and replace.
Like it says up top: this is true to the point of banality. We know the world is full of awful people who get away with their awfulness. We know it’s especially true of the world of politics because it’s in the news. All the time. But maybe we know it too well.
Voters looked at Trump, saw how awful he is, and either shrugged it off, told themselves he was no worse than every other politician, or even liked it because all politicians are self-serving, self-dealing liars, con artists, and thieves so might as well for one who can beat the bastards at their own game.
This has long been the case, that voters elect con artists, thieves, knaves, and fools, sometimes for rational or at least understandable reasons, sometimes because the voters themselves are feeling thievish, knavish, and foolish themselves, sometimes just for the fun of it, and it happened here and there on this past election day, all over the country, and some of those con artists, thieves, knaves, and fools were Democrats. Oh well, people say resignedly. Politics is corrupt and corrupting. No wonder the corrupt go into it. Even good men and women are corrupted by it.
Maybe we’re too accepting of this sad fact.
But you know who doesn’t accept it because they don’t let themselves believe it even though you’d think they’d know the truth better than any of us?
Political journalists.
For all that they pride themselves on their cynicism, savvy, and smarts---all of it amounting a collective boast that they know the score, no one can put one past them---they often give in to rank sentimentalism in their coverage of politics and politicians. In some cases it is actually cynicism. If they wrote the truth about the people they cover, no one would talk to them. But time and time again they show themselves to be suckers for the idea that political world is dominated and run by noble public servants doing the best they can for the good of the country.
All of Bob Woodward’s “Fear” is based on Woodward’s absolute faith in this notion. “Fear” isn’t about Trump and his awfulness. It’s about how Woodward’s sources in the White House are containing and constraining that awfulness for the public good, even though it’s costing them their reputations and large pieces of their souls. And look at how Paul Ryan, that fatuous fool and most prodigious of hypocrites, is still being portrayed as a principled policy wonk. Look at the effusiveness of the coverage of George Herbert Walker Bush’s death.
For all his virtues---and there really weren’t that many and the ones he did possess, even his wartime courage, weren’t extraordinary, and some of what are being celebrated as virtues were really qualities of an amiable disposition and signs of good manners---he could be as cynical and ruthless a political opportunist as Nixon. But you’d never know it from all the verbal laurels already being laid at his figurative tomb.
And some pundits and journalists are looking at Trump and still expecting the “pivot”. Some of them even seem to think that he made it, they just somehow missed it, and if they keep searching they’ll find the evidence he did it.
Some of them seem convinced that he doesn’t need to. He’s doing a good job just by being himself. Their proof is in the devotion of his base whom they insist on seeing as good and decent-hearted folks who are rightfully mad as hell and can’t take it anymore, instead of as the racists, religious bigots, ignorant yahoos, and otherwise hideous men and women they’re perfectly willing to let you know that they are, you just have to listen to what they say and not what the narrative tells you to hear.
Not everyone in politics is bad, but enough are that it shouldn’t be so hard to say so. New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg has no problem saying so, and I’ve been taking the long way around to lead into the column in which she says it:
It’s tempting for those of us who interpret politics for a living to overstate the importance of competing philosophies. We shouldn't forget the enduring role of sheer vanity…
It’s not exactly a secret that politics is full of amoral careerists lusting — literally or figuratively — for access to power. Still, if you’re interested in politics because of values and ideas, it can be easier to understand people who have foul ideologies than those who don’t have ideologies at all. Steve Bannon, a quasi-fascist with delusions of grandeur, makes more sense to me than Anthony Scaramucci, a political cipher who likes to be on TV. I don’t think I’m alone. Consider all the energy spent trying to figure out Ivanka Trump’s true beliefs, when she’s shown that what she believes most is that she’s entitled to power and prestige…
Trump is hardly the first politician to attract self-serving followers...But Trump is unique as a magnet for grifters, climbers and self-promoters, in part because decent people won’t associate with him. With the exception of national security professionals sticking around to stop Trump from blowing up the world, there are two kinds of people in the president’s orbit — the immoral and the amoral. There are sincere nativists, like Bannon and senior adviser Stephen Miller, and people of almost incomprehensible insincerity…
In many ways, the insincere Trumpists are the most frustrating. Because they don’t really believe in Trump’s belligerent nationalism and racist conspiracy theories, we keep expecting them to feel shame or remorse. But they’re not insincere because they believe in something better than Trumpism. Rather, they believe in very little. They are transactional in a way that makes no psychological sense to those of us who see politics as a moral drama; they might as well all be wearing jackets saying, “I really don’t care, do u?”
You should read the whole column. Follow the link to “Maybe They’re Just Bad People” at the New York Times, but keep in mind Goldberg’s not just talking about Trump enablers and hangers-on or Trump supporters or Trump voters or Republicans or even bad people.
Vanity is the great temptation of us all. Plenty of liberal readers of the op-ed pages and plenty of liberal bloggers think that having good political opinions makes us good people.
Recent Comments