Winning is for losers
For opposing oligarchies that are actually the same, stalemate is victory.
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At a recent gathering of the German and American liberal class, an official gave rousing remarks about the virtues of the transatlantic relationship. Weaving in personal history to make his larger geopolitical point, he concluded that the relationship — a cornerstone of what is, almost euphemistically by now, known as the “liberal world order” — must be preserved if for no better reason than the alternative is much worse. Finishing with a flourish, he was clear in message: Despite the rising danger of illiberalism, the future is still ours shape.
Applause, praise, and onto the hors d'oeuvre.
In the context of such a gathering, that is a fine concluding thought. As a vision, it makes for a better opening one. It’s nice to think that someone out there is working to flesh it out, but all signs point to the contrary. The clinking of wine glasses barely shrouds the confounding silence that follows. Shape, you say. And, how?
From Germany to the United States, and many places in between, we rarely get an answer, or even a helpful suggestion, beyond “abstract appeals to preserving the ‘international order.’” The question mark that dangles unrequited carries with it a low-intensity trepidation. You feel it when mulling about the stately room, or an equivalent bubble of liberal refuge, as guests survey the platters of finger food like passengers on the Titanic getting the last of the buffet.
“‘How’ is the ‘craft’ in statecraft,” it applies as much to domestic as it does to foreign policy, and if true that it’s atrophied then why should anyone expect — much less demand — the rest of the body politic to follow? Yes, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for, observes the Obamatic oratory that the version of global liberalism we are stuck with swims in, but don’t look for help aspiring to our better selves. As enlightened individuals, surely we can figure that out on our own.
Good times is a goal, not a strategy. When the ends are, either willfully or stupidly, confused for the means, it seems reasonable that the flock you have been leading goes looking down another path. Whether that quest is out of mere spite or actual conviction is largely irrelevant. Votes are, ultimately, zero-sum; they don’t come with caveats.
The defenders of the aforementioned order have good reason to just keep forging ahead, regardless if anyone is behind them. A pause to look around might force an uncomfortable confrontation with the failures, or at least considerable shortcomings, of the sacrosanct system their forefathers put in place — only to be neglected or unevenly enforced in the pursuit of progress, prosperity, and power. The parts that have worked are less due to the magical miracle of markets than the kind of public interventions for which, at least in leading countries today, there is little political will. Unless an acute crisis forces its invisible hand, government amounts to overstretched sanctions and knee-jerk protectionism without the sensible New Deal complement.
In the U.S., the members of the liberal establishment are as insistent as ever that their superior intellect and moral righteousness are enough to convince, or defeat, the reactionary forces that have risen up to take them on. 2024 is shaping up to replay 2020, which itself rehashed 2016 that felt like the tie of 2000, and that the weak sauce of 2004 failed to undo. If there’s any doubt that we struggle to escape the past, you can catch Jon Stewart on the Daily Show again. Thank goodness. At least there’s catharsis while waiting for something new to happen.
The democratic institutions relied on to save us right now are seriously weighing the constitutional case for making a past (and therefore any future) president a literal king, while doxxing the sitting one seeking reelection as an “elderly man with poor memory.” The official effort to rebut that investigatory detail has been less than convincing, while the supposedly pro-Biden mainstream corrupt champagne socialist media have done a solid job amplifying a fact that most people were already thinking about.
It’s a little early in the election year for an October surprise, but a bad look nonetheless. Forget Canada — Democrats can move to Brazil. There, the “Trump of the Tropics,” already barred from running for office for several years, was recently forced to surrender his passport as he risks prosecution for inciting a coup.
The Latin American giant is not the outlier when it comes to holding leaders accountable. If any country is, it’s the U.S., where no one is above the law in theory but a few are in practice. The myriad charges against Donald Trump might help determine where the line lies between the two. Even if convicted on any of them, his pathways back to the presidency remain impressive.
Perhaps a democracy needs to go through a period of dictatorship and terror before it can give more than lip service to democratic norms. It’s a hypothesis that could be put to the test this year. One day the U.S. may rise to Brazil’s meager standard, but to get there it first has to figure out what dead men thought “officer” meant more than a century ago. Having to do so makes for a meek argument to countries, like Brazil, to follow America’s beacon of freedom into the hellfire of Russian revisionism, especially as they watch those values invert when applied to the Middle East.
The “rules” are in the eye of the beholder; genocide for some is “over the top” for others. But it’s good to know that Larry David is feeding Joe Biden his lines.
Fortunately for the gentry of Liberal Land, there is distraction from these moral discrepancies. Tucker Carlson and his cosplay brand of high-stakes interviewing make for well-timed comic relief. Since his prescriptions are terrifyingly wrong there is, thankfully, no reason to engage seriously with his legitimate observations, even if they do represent the real-life grievances of millions of people.
More important than their needs are Hillary Clinton’s. Evidently chastened by nothing, she is still sure she is right. We’re way past “deplorables”; the problem isn’t that she failed, but that this “fifth column” of Americans just doesn’t get it. And why? Who could possibly say.
It sounds like Hillary Clinton could use a MasterClass by Hillary Clinton. If you’ve spent your adult life at or near the peak of political power and can’t take a stab at what’s causing so much distrust, dissatisfaction, and disillusionment, it might lead some to credibly wonder if you and your ilk are fit to have spent so much time at or near the peak of political power. Dissing the people you don’t like for liking the guy who disses the people he doesn’t like is cause for some understandable confusion over what anyone stands for.
Late-stage preschool politics is upon us. I know you are, but what am I? One could almost be fooled into thinking that the Clinton Clan wants to gift the Trump Tribe the evidence for its swamp-draining conspiracies and justification for its race-baiting resentment. Carlson calls “corporate media” sellouts who lie, but he sure must like it when they spend the day talking about him. They did so, of course, as eye-rolling professionals watching a “conversation between an older man who has read a history book and fancies himself an expert and his eager nephew, who is trying to feign knowledge in a subject he failed in college.”
Such pandering would never fly at respectable media institutions — no matter how tempting the rare interview with erstwhile Chancellor Angela Merkel, who just months earlier thanked the same interviewer for the “kind words” when introducing her at an award ceremony. Merkel was famous for her reclusiveness with the media, though in Germany she is the rule when it comes to controlling what gets published. Just about anyone with even the illusion of power aggressively checks quotations for approval. What’s worse, almost all German journalists, and many foreign ones, oblige.
In that light, is Tucker Carlson much different from the “mainstream” he derides? The only substantive difference is the identity politics getting peddled.
As far as we know, at least Merkel didn’t novichok her naysayers; she only gave the guy who did years of cover. So the parallel isn’t perfect. Still, belittling the kind of softball access journalism you yourself engage in for the same clicks is probably not the glass house from which you want to throw stones at your obnoxious neighbors. Some of those stones might end up hitting the people you say you care about. And they don’t have an Iron Dome to defend themselves with.
Two ossified oligarchies face off across the picket fence, each a useful enemy to the other in a “culture” war that is always politically easier to wage than a class war. Despite all the rhetoric directed ad nauseam at the “working” or “middle” kinds, the victim of skin color is empowered and to be embraced while the victim of capital is humiliated and best avoided. The path to a more perfect union that both sides promise runs through how you were born, not what you earn — and while one side is wading into the waters of white supremacy, the other’s self-congratulatory tokenism is not much better.
By design, the war is forever unwinnable and victory over the other is not the goal. Stalemate suits; as self-righteous soldiers of the respective Cause gladly follow orders to dig deeper into their trenches of virtue, their elite commanders entrench themselves at the top of the hierarchy, running off with the loot. The real threat to them is a savvy demos with the civic and media literacy required to — as Carlson, channeling his former employer, cynically encourages — “decide for yourself.” Unless that changes, expect little to improve.
The German Republic, cast in the image of Pax Americana and often eager to import its ideas Karl May style, is taking close and copious notes. It, too, is risking constitutional crisis, as coalition calculus gets harder and political representation becomes a choice among three flavors of vanilla ice cream and a band of extremists saying the quiet part out loud. The former seems increasingly resigned to a fate of far-right rule. If you can’t beat ‘em, mimic ‘em — and meanwhile do try to at least save the judiciary from the inevitable.
The hopeful among us are betting on Sahra Wagenknecht’s eponymous new party eating the young of the AfD, which has become a bit much even for France’s Marine Le Pen as she tries to appear respectable in her bid to finally obtain power. Divide the extremes so the center can hang on by default is about the best idea going right now.
Perhaps most curious of all is the FDP, which these days can be found in the back of the democracy cemetery dancing on its own grave. The Free Democrats are in favor of everything, it seems, except for what anyone actually wants. The party has not only blocked just about every major initiative of the government it’s part of, but has also opposed legislation supported by the business community it purports to love from within a European-level alliance with which it allegedly aligns.
The multi-front stonewalling could be a chess-playing tactic of its leader, Christian Lindner, to hasten the end of a coalition he never liked very much. A new election would likely bring the Christian Democrats back to power, and the cuddlier bedfellows could strike a new deal. That be some good politicking, if not for the statistical probability of the same election snuffing the FDP — polling not much better than the moribund socialists — out of parliamentary existence.
Lindner can at least take credit for sticking to his principles: no spending, no taxes, no debt. A lesser man would have long since flip-flopped in a populist last stand against the ballot-box zombies coming for him. He might as well go down swinging. When the climate kids he picks fights with have at last pried the pseudo-libertarian values from his cold dead hands, he can succumb knowing that his small band of turtlenecked followers will immortalize him atop a funeral pyre on Sylt.
They may take our Porsche, but they will never take our Freedom.
What’s an erstwhile centrist to do? The government can’t even make good on its stated desire to tweak the Basic Law by getting rid of the biologically dubious term “race.” Rewording the article on equal rights would be “too legally complicated” and, more importantly, King of Germany’s Jews Josef Schuster is against it. Because obviously the best way to remind Germans today of how obsessed they once were with the concept of “race” is to be obsessed with the concept of “race.”
The constitutional amendment would have been an enlightened move. Instead, we have to settle for the doublespeak of illiberal liberalism — what German Officialdom promotes under the confounding banner of “tolerance cannot tolerate intolerance.” The upcoming Berlinale, already dropped by several artists in protest of Germany’s confused campaign of anti-antisemitism, in turn disinvited a handful of AfD lawmakers due to the party’s views that are “deeply contrary to the fundamental values of democracy.”
That means, to maintain the cultural event’s welcoming atmosphere, these elected officials “are not welcome at the Berlinale.”
Shutting out the people whose popular power feeds off feeling shut out will surely end well. If the international film festival applied that standard equally, it would have to disinvite the representatives of every party, as they are all complicit in the “anti-democratic and discriminatory attitudes” that the festival “observes with concern … are on the rise in Germany.”
Heut is so ein schöner Tag lalalalala …
Millions of Germans would have to be disinvited, too, as they parrot the far-right positions they are simultaneously protesting, without expressing the slightest awareness of, or much interest in, the contradiction. They are all “for diversity and against antisemitism” until the former offends their (mis)understanding of the latter.
Meanwhile, the protesters protesting those protesters still have time to protest one of their own, causing the early end to a Hannah Arendt reading meant to highlight the hypocrisy of embracing expression unless it contravenes mythological concepts like Staatsräson. Apparently 88 hours — an inauspicious number — of the “Origins of Totalitarianism” was not enough to forestall a kind of it from taking over, anyway.
As always, most of German media fell short of their jobs, reporting little more than “hate speech” happened and the 100-hour program was therefore cut short.
No one in this macro tragedy, unfolding in the form of a million microaggressions expanding in all directions, comes off looking very good. Across the board, the dispiriting takeaway seems to be that no ideas are better than engaging with bad ones. Despite the alleged superiority of liberal ones, few of their proponents seem willing to risk an intellectual throwdown with lesser arguments.
That might not be out of fear of losing, but winning. Better to stay strapped into this rollercoaster to ruin we’re on, so when it runs off the tracks at least we can blame it on someone else.