I’ve been quiet here for over a month, since Trump got “shot.”
Or “shot?”
Or whatever the whole ear thing was.
This was when Biden was still running, so, like The Before Times.
What all’s happened since then? Sheesh.
The RNC. Republicans wearing maxipads on their ears. (In the 1980s, I’d have gotten in-school suspension for just publishing that sentence. No reason, that was just the eighties.)
Biden out of the running. Kamala as nominee. Tim Walz. All. The. Memes. JD Vance’s self-immolation tour. The couch, dear sweet baby Jesus, the couch. Trump at the National Association of Black Journalists. Trump “interviewed” by Elon. Trump believing Biden would wrench back the nomination at the DNC. That absolutely not happening at the DNC.
Oh, so much.
Why not write piece after piece after piece on each one of these juicy bits?
Lots of reasons.
One: I’m not a writer. I’m a janitor-custodian and light-maintenance/fixit guy. I work 40 hours a week with a body that doesn’t cooperate. Thankfully my kids are grown, otherwise not even this much effort would be possible. As it is, when I get a vague idea for a Substack, I either power it out in a day or so of righteous pissed-offness, or it takes weeks of construction in drips and drabs of however much time I find to sift through the flotsam of sparking or supporting materials that flow past me on the river of Internet and mild research. So many drafts exist in purgatory because they just went nowhere or fell under the massive, brutal wheels of Furiosa’s war rig, er, I mean, the insane news cycle—did I mention Trumpists proudly toting small plastic jars of faux (god, I hope it’s faux) JD Vance semen to troll Tim Walz or IVF or falling birth rates or something…wait! now they’re mocking Walz’s son Gus for being proud of his dad…It NEVER ends.
Writing anything of lasting value and quality takes chops, and chops get rusty with disuse. You have to care about the words in a way that I just seldom do. Oh, I care enough to get a point across in a certain window of time, and some words are more serviceable than others, so my net is widely woven. Finely-woven meshes are for people who seek truth or beauty or some merger of the two, and I’m too old, disillusioned, and tired to imagine I can aspire to such things. I just don’t want to bequeath my kids an even more fascist world than we currently have.
Maybe I don’t have a net at all. Maybe I’m just frantically bailing out the leaky-ass boat with my tiny bucket.
Which brings me to Two: So many much better writers and cultural critics and analysts are taking all this shit apart at a much faster clip than I ever could. I mean, the bulk of my waking hours are devoted to trying to prevent the drop ceilings from collapsing at work from storm-induced roof damage. I can barely keep names straight anymore. Yesterday I couldn’t place philosopher Kate Manne whenI shared this wonderful breakdown of the differences between sexism and misogyny as illustrated in the person of JD Vance. I tracked my acquaintance to her back to Episode 16 of the always excellent "In Bed With the Right" podcast with The Guardian’s Moira Donegan and Adrian Daub, which I probably listened to while vacuuming. Adrian's got a new book out as well, about cancel culture and why it’s bullshit. Anyway, it all reminded me to order Adrian’s book, and it’ll probably be three years before I get time to read it, which is why I rely on smarter, faster, on-the-beat specialists on these topics who maintain their chops by doing this on the daily to spit out the best in-the-moment commentary and analysis.
And that’s another thing, Three: There are too many topics. Just Kate Manne above will take you to misogyny, but also to fatphobia. Moira and Adrian will take you on a whirlwind tour of the many worlds (I mean, from Wagner to Taylor Swift, from Nietzsche to Jordan Peterson, from Trad Wives to Norman Mailer) opened up by gender analysis simply through one podcast. I got the reminder about Manne from Amanda Marcotte at Salon, who is great for her relentless insight into patriarchy (and SO much other stuff).
Diane di Prima wrote “NO ONE WAY WORKS / it will take all of us / shoving at the thing from all sides / to bring it down.” I’ve always resonated with the idea that if you understand one thing well enough, fully enough, it becomes a portal to all the things. So I’m very, very cool with just promoting and boosting what I see as salutary, related content that gets at a piece of (waves hands) THIS, whatever we may want to call it. The idea of insisting that yours is a voice people must listen to as the source for analysis seems saviory and celebrified and entirely the-master’s-tools. Don’t speak if you can’t improve the silence. Or in this case, the existing discourse undertaken by people smarter and more insightful than you.
But then there’s a more upbeat reason, Four: Things are actually looking up. Since Biden bailed on the race, we’re seeing poll numbers kick up, genuine enthusiasm roll through the non-bonkers citizenry, and a real chance to deny Trump his bite at immunity, which the whole corrupt system just seems to be spooning right into his mouth while sing-songing “Here comes the aeroplane, bbbbbbbbbbbb!”
This matters. It is legitimately good news. As a lifelong depressive, I don’t usually do good news well, I’m kinda anhedonic and immune to the rah-rah of the DNC and its lead-up, but by golly, I sure have loved the vibe shift from despair to “let’s kick their weird, fashy asses” as it washes over others. There are probably a dozen things we could botch, but I’m going to keep mum about them because I don’t want to spoil this mood. I may not go in for pom-poms, but I get that they’re important for victory, and despite every one of my objections to Harris or Biden or Dems or administrative policy, one thing stands out: YOU DO NOT LET AUTHORITARIANS TAKE OVER A SUPERPOWER IF YOU CAN HELP IT.
For me, the mood shift, seeing Dems seemingly do smart and effective things for a change (they sometimes do this in campaigns, then forget how to do it in office) is a vacation. It’s just plain nice to see this stuff. I don’t have to go out of my way to comment or analyze much. If we were a neolithic tribe, I wouldn’t be one of the tribal dancers or storytellers. I’d be the broody sumbitch on a rock watching for sabretooth tigers (probably an anachronism: don’t care) coming to eat my reveling kinfolk, but right now, the revelry is loud and bright enough to confuse and disorient them pesky predators. I’m still watching, but for a moment, I can breathe a little.
The estimable John Ganz puts out “Reading, Watching” entries at his Substack with commentaries that are thoughtful, deep, and engaging. I don’t have that kind of time or ability. So be grateful that things are going well enough that I don’t have so much gloom to spread at the moment, and maybe enjoy these snippets below if you’re looking for flotsam to scoop up off the beach and turn over in your hands or minds. In a functional country, one should be able to think deepish thoughts about things that are not a radioactive dumpster fire careening at you like the bus from Speed.
Maybe we’ll get there one day.
So I mentioned Kate Manne’s piece about JD Vance above. Vance is fascinating to me while at the same time being beneath contempt. He is truly a scurrilous little worm in so many ways. And yet.
The boys at Know Your Enemy pod, Matt Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell did a good Vance episode, and it got me to thinking about the hideous little man. I have to say I can kinda relate to him. I also hate to say it. I mean, the guy’s primary psychological trait seems to be insecurity. He always tries to fit in. He got it in his head at such a young age that he’s less-than in other people’s eyes, so he doesn’t just try to fit in and be accepted, he tries to fit in and be accepted by completely absorbing the identity or ideology of the person or group he emulates, not so much losing himself in the process because he doesn’t ever seemed to have developed a self of his own at all. He’s Leonard Zelig, and while I know Woody Allen blows, that film still has a lot of shit to say about the pitfalls of modern or postmodern life. If the poor bastard had just become a person with dissociative identity disorder, he could elicit sympathy, but he just had to have a small, mean, can’t-read-a-room, I’ll-show-everybody dominance streak that led him to throw everyone under the bus and glom onto some of the worst role models ever minted.
Hey, I grew up looking for validation and worth from others, too. Maybe we all did. I was probably lucky in some was Vance wasn’t, which sounds weird given what I know about Vance, but at least my mom wasn’t bringing home a string of dudes I had to adapt to. I just had Mom and pretty-absent Dad to compare, so the archetypes were clearer. I ended up positively allergic to would-be father figures trying to co-opt or adopt me (and that included culty ideologies and institutions), maybe because my own sense of self felt tenuous and vulnerable to capture. That said, I know what it’s like to overinvest in what you think is a good cause only to become crushingly disillusioned when you see how the sausage is made, though I really doubt that explains a single one of Vance’s skin-sheddings.
Ultimately, I think the dude’s just an object lesson in how trauma can fuck up someone’s psyche so bad that even they don’t realize they’re fucked up, so they just keep pushing on through in a quest to impose whatever the hell they’re into this week on everybody else in a vain quest to prove their own wounded worth. Vance needs therapy. Or needed it decades ago. This is not a reason to be nice to him now. Don’t misunderstand me. He must be crushed, mercilessly, into a pulp. But jeez, if we believe another world is possible, it’s a world where we don’t churn out broken humans like JD Vance, much less give him a path to the US Presidency.
On the subject of JD, Paul Rosenberg at Salon has this thought-provoking attempt to place Vance in some kind of context. I don’t yet know what to make of it. It kinda gives too much credit to Trump/Vance in a way, but if you view the piece as focusing on what these douches represent, or may represent, or maybe signal of what could be coming, it becomes more interesting and telling.
Basically, the framing here is whether Trump/Vance are more paleoconservative or neoconservative. Vance is really the better subject of analysis, the younger, next-gen face of the GOP. Paleos are the more old-school revanchist, nativist, straight-up white-boy racist conservatives represented by Pat Buchanan and David Duke. Neocons are the more wonkish, often Jewish leftist/even-Marxist-converts-to-conservatism who came to prominence over the paleos around the time of the George W. Bush administration.
Paleos lost out to the neocons during those Dubya years and big-mad resented it. The neos—some of whom became NeverTrumpers today—kinda-sorta believed in things like liberal meritocracy (at least for “model minorities” like scrappy Jewish intellectuals who filled out much of their ranks), and to some extent, you can see Vance peddling some of that theme of model minorities proving their acceptability through hard work: himself, one of the “good ones” from among the “white trash” of Appalachia, and his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, one of the good conservative Brown women who gives him children and lets him say lots of hideous things as he rises to power.
Vance also styles himself—sometimes—as an intellectual who simply tells those dangerous and unpopular truths about difference, which is the way neocons tended to reframe the racism and essentialized hierarchies of the paleocons back in the days of Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve: “The racists are tacky, but the data bears them out.” This is also the way the “Intellectual Dark Web” set of billionaire tech bros and venture capitalist hierarchs like to frame their utopias of stratification, while also being quite happy to welcome the grubby paleo-inspired neo-nazi types into the tent if that means they get to own and control everything in the end. Or if Catturd Amens enough of Elon’s Tweets.
So maybe Vance represents a type of new fusion trying to be born here: someone who moves among both the bottom-feeding confederate flaggers and white-ethnostaters on the one hand and the VC boys and tech oligarchs on the other, uniting the throughline of whiteness-infused patriarchy they share. William F. Buckley was the old fusionist figure, uniting the mouth-foaming Birchers and the respectable types in the form of an erudite media personality. He did so by stuffing the Birchers in a coat closet (but still listening to them rave through the door) and gussying up their concerns for palatability to the elites. (I can’t help but see Trump as a Paleocon grifter who opportunistically seized on the resentments of the passed-over paleos to enact a populist coup within the GOP to oust the snooty neocons, or at least get them to punt on liberalism and meritocracy and admit it’s all about power and hierarchy. See John Ganz’s book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.)
Since Trump’s rise, loads of energy has gone into answering the question, “What comes after Trump?” We see this in National Conservatism, the movement to collect conservative reactionary intellectuals to take the Trump phenomenon and fashion ideology around it for the future. Turns out, it’s not liberal democracy; it’s illiberal “democracy,” AKA semi-firm authoritarianism, AKA Christian Nationalism, thus explaining the surge in Viktor Orban and Hungary, the rejuvenation of Putin and fuck-them-Ukrainians and NATO-can-piss-right-off, the Dominionism of Rushdoony and Wallnau, the New Apostolic Reformation, and Seven Mountains Mandate buck-lunacy.
What comes after Trump? is also manifest in Project 2025, which, to be clear, is a blueprint for any future Republican President, though they had Trump in mind when they wrote it. And, I think, What comes after Trump? is the right question to view JD Vance through, and not just because he’s the veep nominee. That lens reveals an easy answer: Nothing—because the dude truly, epically sucks at this; Trumpism is personality cult and will crumble, at least electorally, at least at the presidential level, after TFG goes down, however that plays out.
But the more intriguing answer is revealed by trying to see what JD Vance is supposed to be achieving, and it’s not just rallying the nation to go MAGA 2.0. I think it’s plausible to see Vance as the (lead) trial balloon for a new fusion-figure, a Buckley for the present age, the kind of racist misogynist intellectual who can walk in both worlds.
The next question is “Whose trial balloon is Vance? Who pictures him as the new fusion figure?” And there, I can’t imagine the answer is “savvy politicos.” More likely, the answer is tech billionaires, some NatCon intellectuals and Catholic integralist weirdos, and Vance himself. Vance’s problem isn’t just that he’s bad at the job; it’s that the job itself is inherently contradictory: apart from the fact that venture capitalists and tech bros have exactly zero things in common with the mirrored sunglasses set, MAGA hordes really don’t want to hear about the policy ideas of Patrick Deneen (assuming he’ll ever get specific). You don’t spend eight years soaking in Trumpist confabulation to then surface and breathe the fresh air of policy papers. You have to keep the cruelty and the punching down, but how do you wed it to the Serious Policy Wonkery That Appeals to the Elites? And, among the masses, how do you replicate that secret, celebrity, Satanic sauce that The Donald seems to have?
You can’t. The neocons may have been an offshoot of a lot of the same toxic nonsense animating conservatism all along, but at least some of them sincerely believed in it and saw themselves as respectable types, intelligent types. Some of them kinda-sorta saw themselves as having principles. And they sure had qualms about rubbing elbows with the worst of the deplorables. Too much of that socializing is a bridge too far. Some of it is snobbery, but some of it is more ideological: the meritocracy stuff mentioned above. The MAGA hordes are ignorant losers and grubby twits who exist just to elect more neocons who can properly shepherd the nation, and if they do otherwise, they become a threat.
The exposure of and universal hatred piled onto Project 2025 reveals how badly this all works out. Buckley could disavow the leaders of the worst far-right organizations while keeping their members’ warm bodies inside the conservative tent in part because he was a magazine editor, not a national political candidate. More, the foot soldiers of a lot of the nuttiest groups sorta understood that respectability was an important cover to maintain. So Buckley worked to make conservatism palatable to elite consensus by stripping the twang from the pro-Jim Crow arguments, subtracting the Afrikaans lilt from the pro-Apartheid rhetoric. When challenged, Buckley had his own barrels of ink to deploy in response, in what was, essentially, a dispute in the lofty realms of niche political journalism while most folks flipped through Reader’s Digest. Vance is supposed to wed the sensibilities of the MAGA masses to the prescriptions of Peter Thiel? While distancing himself from the insanity of Curtis Yarvin? All this while every blogger and commentator on earth looks on and calls everything out?
It just doesn’t scan. What does scan is a generational churn, in which the old school of semi-sorta respectable, principled neocons who kinda-maybe actually believed in some things dies out and gets replaced by a new generation of frothing nihilists who believe in absolutely nothing but their own ambition and power. This is why Project 2025 and Schedule F replacement of tens of thousands of career civil servants with loyal yes-men and -women is truly fucking scary. Personnel is policy indeed. You just can’t create a fusion between the paleos and the neos anymore. Like the neanderthals, neos either go extinct or get co-opted into the cult of power and become the paleo-flavored authoritarian-enablers that “post-liberalism” or “illiberal democracy” needs.
So the impossibility of this project yields the Republican veep nominee, and instead of a midwife for a post-Trump politics in America, Vance offers us the creepy genomics lab scene from Alien³ with the failed clones in tanks and Sigourney Weaver’s stellar performance of horror through an otherwise uncanny-valley character. It’s frighteningly apt that the unwilling subject of that film’s violations of bodily autonomy was the modern archetype of a strong, independent, childless, cat-lady badass. Hell, the woman was two centuries dead, after choosing to sacrifice her own life rather than be used by a soulless corporation to weaponize her body…but you can’t let a little thing like 20 decades of obsessive, systemic necrophilia deter the imperative to ignore consent.
Paging Henrietta Lacks.
The fact that Vance is atrocious at becoming the new Buckley-Trump can mean one of two things: either someone else will come along who actually has charisma, who has a track record of really winning elections on the merits of popularity (as opposed to Thiel’s checkbook) and can achieve some kind of brainy Huey Long authoritarian synthesis that Vance may be trying to embody; or, more likely, Vance’s experiment will be a wash and the GOP will simply quintuple-down on attaining power through whatever rigged and illegal means, then slap a permanent lock on that shit so they’ll never have to bother with the chance of ever losing it again.
In terms of quintupling-down on seizing, consolidating, and securing power, here’s a dispatch from Chris Geidner at LawDork on the Heritage Foundation forum-shopping its Project 2025 agenda to leverage recent SCOTUS rulings (Loper Bright, overturning Chevron deference) against almost-recent SCOTUS rulings (Bostock, which threw a bone to trans rights).
Geidner’s point is my point: Even if Trump loses, we remain in danger. I don’t care if Trump sends goons to whack the president of the Heritage Foundation for endangering TFG’s chances of regaining the White House: the plan is written. There’s no such word as “uninvent.” The strategy for dismantling the federal government and installing an authoritarian POTUS is out there, signed onto by 100 right-wing think tanks that have been around practically my entire lifespan. These people are the GOP’s brain. These thoughts cannot be unthunk.
Unless the GOP as it has mutated is thoroughly discredited and destroyed by massive popular rejection and social shunning, this will always be in their archives. Sure, you can pretend that there will be an “autopsy” or a “return to normalcy” wherein “sane, moderate, principled Republicans” seize control back and start talking again about marginal tax rates, but some of us exist in reality. The only survival strategy for the GOP is the crazy train of Trumpism, just pumping higher doses of Othering into the bloodstream of increasingly unhinged and epistemically-divorced anger-management dropouts to boost turnout and intimidate opponents.
That’s not sustainable, either, but the goal isn’t sustainability: it’s conquest. Capture enough levers of power, then pull them, closing the gates against any approach by any challengers in the future. That’s Project 2025. That’s the 6-3 majority in SCOTUS. That’s the Presidential Immunity decision. That’s the Administrative law cases decided this term.
I know we’re all relieved as hell that the Dems seem to have joy and enthusiasm and momentum right now, but we need to look at the boring old structural things, too, and view them as a long list of shit that needs to be patched with concrete, titanium, Deadpool’s and Wolverine’s freaky flesh that regenerates when injured, all glued together with radioactive nanobot adhesive that eats the souls of those who tamper with it—whatever you can imagine. Project 2025 is a To Do List of things to fix so that every one of those avenues to authoritarianism is cordoned off. SCOTUS absolutely has to be restructured in what too many people still think is too radical a way. And every single item in this long list is blockable by Republicans at practically every step of the way. They must be defeated up and down every ballot wherever possible.
Now for something completely local. Well, Kansan. But universal.
The Marion, Kansas, raid by police on their county newspaper.
This transpired a little over a year ago, on August 11, 2023. The world, literally, went nuts. We know this because we get the news about the world from the media, and the media gets royally pissed when cops raid media offices on trumped up charges with a paltry axe to grind, which was the case in tiny, Marion, Kansas.
The cops essentially hastened, if not caused, the death of 98-year-old co-owner of the Marion County Record, Joan Meyer, who went out correctly haranguing them as Hitlerian.
Stellar reporting and commentary by all sorts of outlets, not least the Record itself and other Kansas media, has kept the story alive, despite the best foot-dragging efforts by what seems to be the entirety of the “justice” system. The judge who signed off on the warrant got a slap on the wrist, if even that, and the stories don’t jive well. There’s a lack of transparency in the body that oversees judicial conduct. The KBI is mum on pretty much all of it and handed the investigation of the mess off to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, whose final report went to Kansas Special prosecutors who decided to charge the former police chief only with a low-level crime of post-hoc tampering with witness statements (text messages) and chalking the rest up to ignorance and zeal. The entire system is rushing clotting agents to seal the wound so as to preserve law-and-order legitimacy, which shit the bed the minute the cops started grabbing computers and phones.
Here’s a roundup.
KBI has tried to investigate law enforcement before — but obfuscation imperils trust
Max Kautsch
August 22, 2024 3:33 am
Marion prosecutor, wary of liability, wrote self-serving memos after raid on Kansas newspaper
Marion County Attorney Joel Ensey received immediate advice from the special prosecutor who later cleared police in the raid
By: Sherman Smith - August 16, 2024 10:48 am
Former Marion police chief charged with witness interference after raid on Kansas newspaper
By: Sherman Smith - August 13, 2024 2:46 pm
After Kansas newspaper raid, journalists remain defiant in battle for accountability
Former Marion County Record reporter Deb Gruver: ‘No, you don’t get away with this’
By: Marisa Kabas and Sherman Smith - August 9, 2024 6:30 am
News of police raiding a Kansas newspaper unfolded like ‘a novella.’ The story keeps churning.
Messy small town relationships and a corrupt local government created the perfect storm
By: Marisa Kabas and Sherman Smith - August 7, 2024 6:30 am
Special prosecutors plan to file criminal charge against police chief who led Marion raid
Report faults inadequate law enforcement investigation, clears journalists
By: Sherman Smith - August 5, 2024 1:43 pm
One year after chilling police raid on Kansas newspaper, aftershocks linger in Marion
Marion County Record reporter Phyllis Zorn and editor Eric Meyer wait for authorities to clear their names
By: Marisa Kabas and Sherman Smith - August 5, 2024 6:30 am
Judge who authorized Kansas newspaper raid escapes discipline with secret conflicting explanation
By: Sherman Smith - August 4, 2024 3:55 am
If there is no accountability—no requirement to give a satisfying answer to legitimate questions and discrepancies—there can be no legitimacy for institutions. No legitimacy? No trust.
If there are no meaningful consequences for bad actions, only slaps on the wrist or the most minor of charges, then we have a rigged justice system. One with at least two tiers of offenders, probably more gradations than that. It’s who you know and who you are and your calculated value to the system and how much damage your removal or punishment would cause, which raises the question of how much you can burn down on your way out. Yeah, that’s cynical as hell, but such things breed cynicism, and that’s the point.
In case you didn’t know, most of these systemic actors have some degree of immunity. It comes either from actual doctrines established by courts saying they are immune, or from the mere absence of chargeable offenses on the books these people could be slapped with. On top of that is the insulation of institutional protection, individual CYA and deniability, and if these folks aren’t themselves lawyers, they sure as hell know or have lawyers to consult.
Any talk of cracking down on Actor A can send waves of fear through the ranks of similarly situated professionals, because they think of instances where they, too, might be in danger of prosecution if X, Y, or Z. Accordingly, they would have to really watch their backs a lot more. They already feel like they’re under a lot of pressure. They don’t need more hassle to do what they probably think is a pretty thankless job. That’s how the ranks of the affected professions get the heebie-jeebies about accountability and consequences. Sure, some members welcome such changes, but these are likely the better practitioners; there are a lot of mediocre ones out there who can’t bring themselves to countenance the idea of stepping up their game.
So sometimes you get scapegoats—if they can keep their mouths shut. And you always get interminable delays and obfuscation and double-talk because people move on and things slide down the memory hole and outrage wanes and fades. What we have is a systemic problem, even if the drama concerns a handful of specific, truly craven twits straight out of Central Casting. It’s systemic, because the system allowed for those bumpkins to wield power and cause damage. They would have continued to do so had they not screwed the pooch so ostentatiously. You need to fix systems so these things don’t recur, not just throw out the specific bums from this particular instance.
Immunities—be they systemic insulation from consequences (often unwritten or cultural-political), legal, or merely created by the absence of any rules against the conduct—are permission slips, Get-Out-of-Jail-Free cards.
The bad news is that 333 million of us are living under a regime headed by an official with a gigantic card of that kind, thanks to the Supreme Court. The good news is that this official’s name is Joe Biden, and he doesn’t seem interested in using the card. Until and unless Trump v. United States is overturned or otherwise rejected legally, that card will be passed to each succeeding president and for him or her to use or leave in a desk drawer, based on, what, character? Expediency? The national interest as he or she sees it?
You want public officials—from the President all the way down to the cop on the beat—to carry their public trust with some degree of fear and responsibility. You want them conscious of the fact that if they screw up, they could be not just looking for another job but on the wrong side of the law and suddenly one of the bad guys.
That’s the difference between a Rule of Law and a Rule of Jim-Bob.