IT’S JUST ABOUT HATE:

Inside the Ruthless, Restless Final Days of Trump’s Campaign (Tim Alberta, November 2, 2024, The Atlantic)

At the end of June, in the afterglow of a debate performance that would ultimately prompt President Joe Biden to end his campaign for reelection, Donald Trump startled his aides by announcing that he’d come up with a new nickname for his opponent.

“The guy’s a retard. He’s retarded. I think that’s what I’ll start calling him,” Trump declared aboard his campaign plane, en route to a rally that evening, according to three people who heard him make the remarks: “Retarded Joe Biden.”

The staffers present—and, within hours, others who’d heard about the epithet secondhand—pleaded with Trump not to say this publicly. They warned him that it would antagonize the moderate voters who’d been breaking in their direction, while engendering sympathy for a politician who, at that moment, was the subject of widespread ridicule. As Trump demurred, musing that he might debut the nickname at that night’s event, his staffers puzzled over the timing. Biden was on the ropes. Polls showed Trump jumping out to the biggest lead he’d enjoyed in any of his three campaigns for the presidency. Everything was going right for the Republican Party and its nominee. Why would he jeopardize that for the sake of slinging a juvenile insult? (A campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, said the nickname “was never discussed and this is materially false.”)

Over the next several days—as Trump’s aides held their breath, convinced he would debut this latest slur at any moment—they came to realize something about Trump: He was restless, unhappy, and, yes, tired of winning. For the previous 20 months, he’d been hemmed in by a campaign built on the principles of restraint and competence. The former president’s ugliest impulses were regularly curbed by his top advisers; his most obnoxious allies and most outlandish ideas were sidelined. These guardrails had produced a professional campaign—a campaign that was headed for victory. But now, like a predator toying with its wounded catch, Trump had become bored. It reminded some allies of his havoc-making decisions in the White House. Trump never had much use for calm and quiet. He didn’t appreciate normalcy. Above all, he couldn’t stand being babysat. […]

In conversations with nearly a dozen of the former president’s aides, advisers, and friends, it became apparent that Trump’s feeling of midsummer tedium marked a crucial moment in his political career, setting off a chain reaction that nearly destroyed his campaign and continues to threaten his chances of victory. Even as they battled Democrats in a race that refuses to move outside the margin of error, some of Trump’s closest allies spent the closing months of the campaign at war with one another: planting damaging stories, rallying to the defense of wronged colleagues, and preemptively pointing fingers in the event of an electoral defeat.

At the center of this tumult, people close to Trump agreed, is a candidate whose appetite for chaos has only grown—and serves as a reminder of what awaits should he win on November 5.

AT LEAST PRETEND THERE’S A STRUGGLE…:

The Fox vs. the Hedgehog (Jonah Goldberg, November 1, 2024, The Dispatch)

A quick refresher: The basic gist of Fukuyama’s argument is that liberal democracy is the best and final answer to both the “social question” and the “political question” as 19th century thinkers put it (lengthy explainer here). The long dialectal, often bloody, contest over various forms of government—monarchy, authoritarianism, fascism, communism, liberal democracy, etc.—has been settled, and liberal democracy won. Fukuyama used the term “history” in a very specialized, Hegel-drenched, way. He didn’t argue that the clock would stop and events would no longer happen. From the Hegelian perspective, the “end of history,” Fukuyama explained, “did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled.” For Marx—the quintessential hedgehog—history would end with the withering away of the state and everyone living in perfect communism. For Hegel, it would be the liberal state. […]

Anyway, one of the great, prescient insights in The End of History is that liberal democracy cultivates a kind of “boredom” that causes people to want to overthrow it. “Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause,” Fukuyama wrote. “They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.”

And there you have all the explanation you need for the post-liberal, neoreactionary, “Do you know what time it is?” right. Ditto all of the post-liberal, anti-Enlightenment, critical theorists and neo-Marxists of the left. And let’s not forget the deracinated and alienated goobers who signed up to join ISIS or the trustafarian jabroneys and grad students who simp for Hamas. It’s not monocausal, of course. But, you get my point. As I’ve said before, boredom kills.

But where does the boredom come from? “Tocqueville explained that when the differences between social classes or groups are great and supported by long-standing tradition, people become resigned or accepting of them,” Fukuyama wrote. “But when society is mobile and groups pull closer to one another, people become more acutely aware and resentful of the remaining differences.”

The narcissism of small differences is one of the great drivers of human conflict. From college faculty fights to intramural libertarian fights, to the Russia-Ukraine war, groups that are very similar often have the nastiest conflicts. There’s something about people sharing most of the same cultural, religious, and political assumptions that makes the remaining disagreements seem wildly more important than they should be. Huge differences between cultures don’t bother people the same way as small ones because the big differences aren’t threatening. European Catholics weren’t all that outraged by Confucianism, Hinduism, or Shintoism, but man, Protestants got under their skin. Why? Because Protestantism was a threat to the way Catholics defined themselves, and vice versa. You fight enemies, you hate traitors. You try to convert pagans, you punish or exterminate apostates and heretics (vast swaths of antisemitism in various eras can be chalked up to this dynamic). You see this everywhere in politics. The hard left hates “neoliberal” moderates far more than they hate conservatives, even though they agree on so much more. If the Trumpified corners of the Christian right hates anybody more than they hate David French—pro-life, devout, Christian, David French—I don’t know who that person is.

Given that a President Kamala would likely be constrained by a GOP Congress, she should offer two fake existential crises that they could work on together: establishing control over the border and the budget. Summon all Americans with a vision of sacrifice to get the government’s economic house in order and make believe we’ll be enduring major sacrifices. Recall that when Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich managed it both sides were able to take credit and government t seemed to be working.