Spit-Take, On a Take, Taking On Would-Be Buckets of Warm Spit
Linker, JVL, Vance, and the siren song of normal's return
Gaslighting is one of the worst things humans ever invented. Making someone question their own reality, making them wonder if they’re going crazy or if the rest of the world is—it’s just evil as hell, and we’ve been living in the glow of gaslights for a good decade at least,1 since Donald Trump slithered down that escalator.
So we watch America slide, finally, into the Swamp of Sadness that consumed Artax, the noble horse from The Neverending Story while we few, we happy few2 struggle to drag her out using only thin leather reins.
And since I can’t do anything to deprogram the MAGA hordes, what really cooks my bacon is when really smart people gaslight themselves.
I’ve kvetched before about a dude named Damon Linker, whose Substack I read, and whose biography strangely echoes a lot of my own in weird ways, like a path not taken. I wish he was my neighbor, so we could regularly argue on our respective porches. Or, perhaps more likely, escalate to residential terrorism across the back fences. You know, chopping down one another’s beloved trees, lobbing invasive weed seeds, trebucheting roadkill, that sort of thing.
Anyhow, I don’t know what Linker’s deal is. I follow him, at my expense, largely to try to figure him out. He calls himself a liberal in the sense of the post-Cold War liberal consensus, but I consider him a centrist in the sense of lacking in substance and principle a helluva lot of the time. I give him props for having rejected the world of the theocons (the title of a book he wrote after leaving the orbit of First Things journal back when they started to fly off the rails), and he says interesting things about political theory, but goddamn, he chaps my backside an inordinate amount of the time.
Maybe it’s because he’s prolific, and maybe he’s prolific because he makes money writing stuff for magazines and his Substack3, and maybe that means he feels he must be a “take-haver,” someone who must summon up an opinion even when he doesn’t have much of one, so whatever pops into his head gets turned into a piece for public consumption, good, bad, or indifferent.
Maybe it’s because Linker is a professor, and profs must strive to be open-minded in the sense that they get students of all stripes and shouldn’t indoctrinate, so he strives to see all sides of any argument. That’s good. I get that. But he’s not a prof when he writes his Substack, and so I don’t get how the waffling weirdness can’t be shut off more firmly.
Anyway.
What set me off this time is Linker’s take on the October 1 vice presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance. The general takeaway4 from it is that Walz did “fine,” caused no real damage to the Harris/Walz ticket but missed opportunities, started off nervous but improved by the end, and scored at least one or two good hits on Vance.5 Vance, by contrast, was polished and not the deeply weird creepo he’s been in countless interviews and stump speeches and doughnut shops on the trail. Instead, he…seemed like a standard-issue candidate and probably came off reasonably okay to the “undecided” voters.
To Linker, however, it’s like Vance was…I dunno…the dawning of a new age? His piece is titled, “I Have Seen the Republican Future—and It’s Less Terrible Than Trump Thoughts on JD Vance’s very good night.”
But that doesn’t really do the piece justice. Linker acknowledges…
…just how insane our politics has been over the past three election cycles—because of the enormous, looming presence of Donald Trump at the very center of it. Trump is a man of volcanic, embittered rage. He speaks as if he thinks every American spends every waking moment marinading in the sludge and bile of right-wing media. He lies and exaggerates wildly—so wildly that he makes people with so much as a toe planted in the reality-based community feel like they’re losing their minds. He radiates agitation, and provokes agitation, in his audience. He acts as if he thinks the way to win is to make the greatest possible number of Americans hate his guts.
He does all of this because he doesn’t know how to do anything else. He has a very poor grasp of policy and lacks any patience for learning more about any of it. And he knows that a sizable faction of Republican voters loves the insanity as a form of entertainment—and he’s happy to know he’s inspired these millions of Republicans to cheer for him, regardless of how many other Americans he’s inspired to curse his name and everything he stands for.
None of this is normal. Ordinary voters shouldn’t be made to feel like they’re fending off psychosis by a major-party presidential nominee for president. No right-populist politician anywhere in the world is anything like it. It’s why the American form of this worldwide phenomenon is far more dangerous than the variations on it we see vying for power elsewhere.
True, true, true. If anything? Mild. So much more can be—and has been—said.
But then we get to Linker’s view of Vance’s performance, and the focus is absolutely on the performance:
It’s true that a good part of what Vance said on Tuesday night was bullshit. He lied. A lot. (No, Trump did not work to save the Affordable Care Act when he was president. That’s just one of many examples.) Vance also flatly contradicted things he’s said in numerous interviews and speeches on the stump over the past two months. But then, Kamala Harris has reversed herself on more things than I can keep track of by this point.
And that, in a way, is my point: Vance was a normal politician in the debate. A normal politician in a debate during the general election doesn’t spend all his time throwing red meat to his party’s base. He speaks to the country as a whole—to all Americans, including those disinclined to vote for him, in the hope that he might persuade a few of them to change their minds. That’s the most normal thing in the world in democratic politics. And that’s what Vance did—and did extremely well, on a very high level….
…Vance showed us that it doesn’t have to be this way, even on abortion, even on guns. A politician can advocate for a list of policies; make an articulate, informed case for them; criticize alternatives in substantive terms; and admit faults on his own side and look for common ground for compromise with the other side to get things done for the American people.
Again: Perfectly normal, even if the policy mix is rather different than what the country has come to expect from Republicans over the past half century, and even if liberals (like myself) and progressives strongly oppose much of it. That’s what politics is supposed to be in a liberal-democratic system that works. And I, for one, felt a huge surge of relief at just how normal politics sounded for a little under two hours on Tuesday night.
And just like that, Vance has reset America back to “normal.” Just the other day, he was pounding the pulpit about Haitians in Ohio eating cats, even though he knew it was a pogrom-inciting lie that was triggering bomb-threats and event cancellations, even though he admitted he had “created” the story to get media attention.
But hey, he didn’t drop trou and verbally defecate on any large demographic during the veep debate, so all is back to normal again. JD Vance is the future of the Republican Party.
The mind boggles.
If I’m being so charitable I won’t be able to make mortgage payments for the rest of the year, I can say that Linker is trying (?) to suggest that Vance’s approach is how the GOP should reform itself going forward. As I prepare my cardboard box-house under the overpass for the long Kansas winter, I can say that Linker is showcasing Vance’s efforts as the virtuous example Republicans should follow: reaching out to undecideds, not being a poo-flinging extremist, um…um…no, I just can’t.
It’s like…it’s like…what IS it like?
It’s like saying Jodie Foster’s character in The Accused would tame the feral violence of her pinball-machine rapists by…offering them a daisy.
I’m sorry for invoking that image, folks, but damn—what fucking planet is Linker living on? What color are the skies in his world?
What makes this all so much worse is that Linker’s piece quotes a line from Jonathan V. Last, of The Bulwark, so I know Linker’s reading Last (as everyone should):
As Jonathan Last put it in his overnight reaction post about the debate, “the JD Vance on display was almost like a smoother, 2016-vintage Marco Rubio.”
Linker likes JVL’s line enough to quote it, but he doesn’t mention that Last would cat-barf all over Linker’s overall argument here: Last absolutely rejects the idea that there is any chance of going back to “normal” in the wake of Donald Trump and what he has done to the GOP, to American politics, to America.
Here’s JVL on the veep debate:
Bill Kristol says that Vance was road-testing “a kinder, gentler MAGA” and I think that’s right. Vance’s plan for the debate was clearly to create distance between himself and Trump and establish him (Vance) as the brand leader who will eventually inherit—or take—Trump’s coalition from him.
And I want to stipulate that Vance accomplished this mission as well as possible. It was a great performance.…
But at the same time, I think Vance has made a category-level mistake and that this error suggests that Vance doesn’t actually understand MAGA politics.
Because here’s the key question: Do Trump voters want a kinder, gentler version of MAGA?
Some of them do. The rump of the old Republican party—the Chamber of Commerce, the Wall Street Journal editorial page—is desperate for a polite version of MAGA.
But Trump’s secret sauce is his ability to turn out low-propensity voters who were never closely affiliated with the old Republican party. And those voters show no sign of being interested in either kinder or gentler. They want the chaos. The transgression. The violence.
We know this because during the Republican presidential primary, we tested demand in this market.
Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson offered anti-Trump Republicanism.
Mike Pence offered full-spectrum Reagan Republicanism.
Nikki Haley and Tim Scott offered fusion between MAGA and Zombie Reaganism.
And Ron DeSantis offered what D&D nerds would describe as a lawful-evil version of soft authoritarianism.
These candidates combined for roughly 22 percent of the Republican primary vote.
A supermajority of Republican voters went for the guy who attempted a coup, who jokes about shooting immigrants, who said he wants to be a dictator, who talks about terminating parts of the Constitution and eliminating the “vermin” and “filth” in America, possibly during “one really violent day” in which law enforcement officers are free to get rough with . . . whoever has it coming.
If you want to stick with the D&D alignment system, I’d say that Vance 4.0 tried to present himself as a chaotic-good figure. He rejects the old Republican orthodoxy, but he’s on everyone’s side! He just wants to get things done!
The thing is, Republican voters have revealed a strong preference for chaotic-evil figures. In most elections, they choose the candidate who most credibly threatens to burn everything down while promising to hurt their enemies in the most dramatic way possible.
Unless this preference shifts, a kinder, gentler version of MAGA is a political dead end.
And here’s JVL one month previous, explaining why “You Can’t ‘Move On’ from Trump: Understanding our shared, comforting fantasy” (read the whole thing):
My first mistake was not understanding that Trump had turned the mild tilt of the Electoral College into an enduring 3-point advantage.
By trading suburban, college-educated voters for rural, high-school educated voters, Trump maximized the GOP’s Electoral College efficiency. This trade turned the GOP into a permanent minority party, making it extraordinarily difficult for it to win a national popular majority. But it tilted the Electoral College system to Republicans by a minimum of 3 points in every election.…
My second mistake was believing that there would be in-party recriminations against Trump and his Republican confederates….
This was wrong not just because Trump won the presidency. It was wrong because the real war was not the general election, but a Republican civil war. Trump represented people who had voted Republican not because they liked Mitt Romney or John McCain or George W. Bush, but because those figures and their policy objectives were the closest alternative to what they really wanted.
And what they really wanted was grievance-based political violence.
Trump offered these voters the possibility of political violence—recall how he reveled in telling his 2016 rally crowds about beating up hecklers, and his rhetoric about immigrants (“we have drug dealers coming across, we have rapists, we have murderers, we have killers”) and about the need to take firm action against “the crime and terrorism and lawlessness” in American cities.
And Trump tapped into these voters’ feelings of grievance toward not just immigrants but also liberals and “elites in media and politics who will say anything to keep a rigged system in place.”
Once these voters saw that the party organization was too weak to resist this mode of operation, whole new vistas opened up before them.
The grievance aspect was important because it meant that Trump could deliver to his voters even if he lost. Trump understood that Republican voters now existed in a post-policy space in which they viewed politics as a lifestyle brand. And this lifestyle brand did not require holding electoral office.…
Which leads to my third mistake: Believing that the Republican party would snap-back to being a “normal” party.
I had always believed that in politics causality was a wheel. You turn it in one direction, then you turn it in the other direction. You set course, then you reverse course.
That view was incorrect. Political causality is like causality in most other realms: It branches. It is path dependent.
Something happens and that action or event creates an entirely new universe. Which leads to another branch. And another. There is no going back. There is never any going back. The world is contingent….
The idea that we can turn the page on Donald Trump is a fantasy.
It’s a comforting fantasy, for sure. But a fantasy nonetheless. We’ve hit too many branching points over the last decade. What is, is.2
At some point the Republican party will branch again, but it will not snap back to 2012. If anything, the dynamics inside the party—the self-selection making the party whiter, more rural, and less-educated; the desire for minority rule; the eagerness for political violence; the disinterest in governing—seem likely to push the party further away from what it was.
We can’t control the future. And we can’t control the Republican party. All we can control is ourselves.
Which starts with being clear-eyed about reality and the work ahead.
Damon Linker does not look very clear-eyed, sad to say.
Now, I’ve disagreed with JVL before, but in general, I find that he’s often thinking along the same lines I am, if not a step ahead, which is terribly disturbing, because I think he used to be at the Wall Street Journal. Ew. I just cannot dissent from what seems to be his overall take that the GOP has broken itself with Trumpism, finally yanking off its mask, finally culminating its long-term project to weaponize media and marketing and create a “conservative”6 brand identity that supersedes all deliberative and critical thought.
I have only three questions about all this, ultimately.
Will it work for the GOP? Will they succeed in implementing American Orbanism, authoritarianism, fascism in ethos and at least a good amount of policy and practice? That is, will Trump win this time? And if not, will a successor to Trump be found who can carry his tiki torch forward? The piece Linker quotes from Last argues that Vance’s VP debate performance was designed to present ol’ JD as a viable presidential candidate, with all the dangers that involves under a jealous narcissist at the top of the ticket.
Assuming it doesn’t work, what becomes of the GOP? Can it collapse with so much straight-ticket identity investment and money attached to it? Third parties are born as endangered species in America. Absent a tsunami of defeat (nigh-impossible with the Electoral College and the identity-attachment so strong), how on earth can we possibly kill this now absolutely radioactive political party so it can be replaced with something sane and responsible?
No matter what happens, how do we continue to live side-by-side with our Vichy neighbors? I’m not joking at all here. I wish I didn’t have to raise this issue, but we’re all thinking it, and we either joke about it or discuss it in airlocked microcosms (dating across political lines, for instance), and it continues to loom. How do you live among X percent of a citizenry for whom Trumpism is not only perfectly fine but something to be welcomed and celebrated? I expect to tackle this question at greater length one day, but it eats at me.
When people like Damon Linker, who teaches budding political scientists and political theorists at Penn, certainly seem stubbornly resistant to the way the world is…erm, falling into fascistic chaos, I can’t help but worry.
It reminds me of the way that legal commentators—and many liberal constitutional law professors—continue to deny that the United States Supreme Court is simply playing power-maximizing Calvinball with facts, precedent, reason and people’s lives. Or how the major press outlets “sanewash” Donald Trump’s Freddie Kruegerisms on the daily, as if nothing out of the ordinary is going on here.
I get that established institutions are not supposed to preach panic. That’s kinda-sorta the opposite of their societal function, after all. That said, one of their functions is to prepare folks for what’s coming down the pike and give them accurate information about the world.
Which is, perhaps in a nutshell, why so many established institutions—and the people whose livelihoods and personal identities are tied up in their institutional roles—are failing us so utterly these days. They just cannot meet the moment, because the moment is presenting us with impending catastrophe mixed with epistemic warfare. Institutions and those who populate them do well when catastrophes either don’t happen at all (nice, steady states) or do happen and everyone acknowledges them (so they can reassuringly roll into town to address them). As a rule, institutions and their people do a really shitty job at imagining a world where they are pushed aside, made irrelevant, or transformed into the enemy. They tend to believe in their own immortality and eternal necessity. It’s a blindspot that’s rarely tested, but a really bad one to have when it becomes relevant.
Amanda Marcotte just wrote a piece about the identity politics of the Right, and I’ve been agreeing with her for several years that Idpol is all these guys have anymore. She notes that poll numbers show GOPers used to support abortion rights below 20 percent just a few years ago, but now that Roe is gone and abortion bans are real and really affecting actual people in red states, including a lot of those self-same GOPers, they’re suddenly backing reproductive rights in the 28-54 percent range.
Here she is at length, spelling it out:
The problem for [Vance] and Trump, as this polling shows, is that the cold, hard reality of abortion bans is hard to ignore, now that they're law and not just an abstraction. Post-Dobbs, "abortion" isn't just a way for MAGA voters to gloat about their self-defined moral superiority. Instead, they realize that the bans apply to MAGA and non-MAGA alike. It's shifted from cheap identity politics to real-world impacts. As these polling changes demonstrate, their actual policy preference has started to eclipse what used to move them, which was culture war nonsense.
Republican politicians win by keeping their base voters focused on phantasms and symbolic, ego-driven identity politics, rather than real world issues. It's why Trump and Vance are laser-focused on immigration. It's not just that it has no material impact on their base voters, but because it doesn't. For the average MAGA voter, stories about Haitian immigrants eating cats feel like a low-stakes way to wallow in a sense of racial superiority. Many of them don't even pause to consider how these ego-fluffing lies harm real people. To them, "Haitians" are a largely imaginary group — like the "sluts" of anti-abortion mythology — that they can feel safe hating, without considering the consequences. But suppose Trump is successful in deporting millions of people from the workforce, which economists believe would trigger an economic depression. It's safe to say these voters would not enjoy that outcome.
We can see this tension playing out in the battle over union endorsements. Regarding the brass tacks of policy, the difference between Democrats and Republicans is vast. President Joe Biden has been regarded by experts as the most pro-worker president since FDR. He's aggressively defended unions, made organizing much easier, and sent law enforcement after companies for union-busting and other shady tactics. Trump, on the other, can barely conceal his contempt for workers, and especially for unions. He praised Elon Musk for firing workers for going on strike, which is illegal. He bragged about cheating workers out of overtime pay, which is also illegal. This is why United Auto Workers endorsed the Democratic ticket, with the president Shawn Fain calling Trump a "scab."
But while UAW did the right thing, the same cannot be said of the Teamsters, who refused to endorse this election. The Teamsters are whiter and more male than other unions, and subsequently 60% of their members are voting for Trump instead of Vice President Kamala Harris. It's easy for white, male union workers to live in the world of fantasy politics, where they're more focused on protecting their ego against admitting a Black woman could be president, rather than the real world, where the white male candidate is coming for their job protections. They are, in the internet parlance, in the "effing around" period. But if Trump gets elected and unleashes Project 2025's plans to dismantle organized labor in the U.S., it will be a finding-out season. But, as Republican women learned after the Dobbs decision, by the time you get there, it's too late to stop it.
Democrats are often accused by the pundits of being the ones who practice "identity politics," usually when they note the real world impacts of sexism, racism, and homophobia on real people. But what Republicans do is pure identity politics, a politics about ego and identity that is disconnected from material implications. Their propaganda apparatus encourages white people to wallow in sick urban legends about cat-eating immigrants, which creates the temporary thrill of feeling superior without doing anything substantive to improve their lives. Or to complain about imaginary "loose" women who use abortions as "birth control." Or to get mad about "cancel culture" or make-believe slights from liberals.
As long as they aren't feeling palpable consequences for their votes, it is more fun and satisfying for some voters to live in the constant ego-reinforcement chamber of GOP propaganda. It's a cheap thrill, to be told you're morally, intellectually, and physically superior to various "others," simply by being part of the MAGA tribe. On abortion, reality has eclipsed fantasy, as the polls show. Unfortunately, Trump's neck-in-neck race with Harris shows that far too many Republican voters have not yet received their wake-up call.
I humbly submit that a decent number of analysts, journalists, academics, and people ensconced in a wide array of perfectly commonplace institutions (from the local bank to the New York Times) simply believe that their immediate professional, class, centrist, reactionary-centrist, and/or low-information moderate “tribe” is the norm, its worldview and outlook are commonsense conventional wisdom, and nothing much will change no matter what happens in the world of politics.
Which is how they can continue to believe that things will go “back to normal” eventually, and thus fail to attend to the flashing DANGER signs all around. After all, the people flashing those signs aren’t part of the professional “tribe,” are they?
The folks telling us tectonic shit is afoot? Well, in Marcotte’s words, these institutional tribalists see themselves as “morally, intellectually, and physically superior” to them, by virtue of being comfy and tenured or well-salaried or home-owning or 401-K’d or insured or whatever.
All of which is terribly, terribly sad. Swamp of Sadness Sad, dear Artax. Because it suggests that shit’s going to have to hit the fan on issue after issue across the board, that institutions are going to have to collapse like card houses, before significant numbers of these folks cotton on.
It will be very ugly and painful. And the saddest thing is that we might have avoided it all if we’d just gotten off our asses and done the work to avoid it beforehand: by paying attention, humbly learning about how things work, following along, resisting propaganda and tunnel vision.
Mostly brain stuff.
But then again, we’re Americans.
I know, I know, only white people date it from that point. It has been going on for so much longer. But permit this white dude an indulgence for his particular acute flare of historical gaslitis.
Hey—postmodernism allows mixing Shakespeare’s St. Crispin’s Day Speech and 1980s kid flix. Get off my ass, nothing matters anymore anyway.
Sidenote: Some of you, I’m told, get messages from Substack urging you to pledge to support me monetarily, should I ever start charging for this endeavor. I do not send those. I did not authorize those. I did not know those were even going out. It’s very, very sweet when you say that you will pay for this dross. It is also very, very unlikely that I ever will charge, because it would take a reach far greater than I will ever attain to make this a serious enough gig to trigger my insane work ethic, which would be required if I were getting paid for it, and besides that…
Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls.
Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
Better to donate the $5 a month or whatever to a good cause.
With some notable exceptions, for instance, Ally Henny makes a pretty good case that the entire debate was so “civil” thanks to the utter normalization of whiteness.
Primarily—and the only one that really should matter: the “damning non-answer” about whether or not Trump lost the 2020 election.
No, it absolutely is not.