Adam Gopnik is a stunningly fluid and learned writer on most matters, but I think when he writes about the immediate political situation he indulges in special pleading and question-begging that he would never permit himself when writing about anything else. Tensions in the Gopnik piece relate to recent posts by my two fellow bloggers here, especially Lasksa’s disappointment (in the post and in comments) and CVFD’s stark clarity (especially in a comment here) regarding the state that the 2016 election has reached this May.
Let me say that I agree with Gopnik (and CVFD, here) in imagining the election of Trump as President of the United States a uniquely grotesque disaster for the nation. But I was for Clinton anyway against Sanders. Don’t need Trump to force me to the altar now.
So it is I who, like Nixon in China, feel free to say this: the Gopnik piece reflects a worldview I associate with a privileged New York — and New Yorker — intelligentsia so complacent about the painful inequities of our history and politics that it can be inspired to militant rhetoric only when it sees its own complacency threatened. That intelligentsia’s cultural sway, over a small but influential readership, is now aiding liberalism in dismissing, as irrelevant to combating the destruction of the nation, any of the deeper questions about the American past and future that have been raised by this election, not only explicitly by Sanders but also by the emergence of Trump, conflicts within the GOP, hostility among many on the left for 1990’s Dem policies, African American support for Clinton, etc., etc., etc.
Those things have the virtue of being at the very least interesting — hence maybe this blog — and reflect powerfully on the history of leftism, conservatism, liberalism, racism, and populism in America. But in Gopnikland, they’re not only uninteresting but damaging even to give critical attention to.
Trying to keep length under control, I’ll cite a few of the lines from the Gopnik piece that have sparked these thoughts:
- “If Trump came to power, there is a decent chance that the American experiment would be over.”
- “The right thing to do, for everyone who believes in liberal democracy, is to gather around and work to defeat him on Election Day.”
- “The radical progressives [in Weimar Germany during the Nazis’ rise] decided that there was no difference between the democratic left and the totalitarian right and that an explosion of institutions was exactly the most thrilling thing imaginable.”
The third item, a thinly disguised slam on a certain brand of Sanders supporter, wants to read 1930’s Europe through moods of the 2016 election and doesn’t pass the sniff test for me. Not saying anything like “it can’t happen here,” but while I can’t prove right here and now that the Gopnik reading is simplistic, slick, and tendentious, “the most thrilling thing imaginable” gives away the presentist bias (I know because I have it too), and a quick Wikipedia skim suggests that the apodictic tone is, shall we say, unearned.
That problem relates to the first two items, which mention “liberal democracy” and “the American experiment” as if they were fully known and agreed-upon quantities, inspiring wholehearted consensus in anybody worth talking to at a dinner party. The American experiment in what? Maybe not everybody does “believe in liberal democracy,” if that term means neoliberal capitalism unfettered: even here at the Jones house, where liberal complacency is what we do, rumors have reached us that there are other points of view on these matters. I gather some of them are actually rather cogent.
But Gopnik’s most problematic thought, for me, is here: “The nation may survive [a Trump presidency], but the wound to hope and order will never fully heal. Ask Argentinians or Chileans or Venezuelans or Russians or Italians—or Germans. The national psyche never gets over learning that its institutions are that fragile and their ability to resist a dictator that weak.”
Well, for one thing, yes, let’s go ahead and ask the Germans, maybe the leading European nation today and having no big deal in electing a female executive. That nation’s “hope and order,” though once “wounded,” seem more or less OK now. But more to the point is Gopnik’s weird suggestion — he makes it plain by his phrasing, though I think unwittingly — that the key thing now is to keep the American people (or the “psyche”) from “learning,” via a Trump election, just how weak our institutions actually are.
Man, if that’s something we’ll never get over, it’s too late to worry about it now: obviously (to everyone but Gopnik) Trump’s rise reflects longstanding tendencies and contradictions that have already revealed our institutions to be far other than what the ideology of liberal democracy might wish they were. In fact, the rise of Trump suggests that a lot of people are sick of people like Adam Gopnik telling them that if they care about the good, the true, and the beautiful there’s only one right thing to do and Adam Gopnik knows what it is. That’s an institution we might want to see fall. I well recall New Yorker liberalism finding it just unbelievable that a Sarah Palin could gain any traction with Americans; I remember the same type, a generation or so earlier, predicting that that manifest clown Ronald Reagan could never be elected president. . . .
Anyway, the “national psyche”? “Fragile institutions”? Has Gopnik never heard of settler colonialism and Indian removal? Internment camps? J. Edgar Hoover? The Bay of Pigs? Jim Crow? Assassinations? The Tonkin Gulf? The entire bundle of things summed up in the word Nixon? The Church Committee findings? Mass incarceration? Cheney? The quiz show scandals (just kidding)? All deplorable, of course, from the liberal point of view that was in fact responsible for creating most of them, but now for Gopnik it’s time for us to believe something new: Trump and Trump alone, emerging in 2016, has the daemonic power to undermine belief in our institutions’ strength and goodness, supposedly recently inherent.
Which suggests to me that one of the most bizarre features of 2016 — along with having the first politically viable female presidential candidate (in this backward country, that is), with all of her own problems, and with competencies unusual in any presidential candidate; running against everything sexist, incompetent, and retrograde in human nature — is the convenience Trump provides Gopnikian complacency, by giving it a pretext for this sudden onrush of militant urgency in its own defense.
I know whereof I speak. This is Mister Jones posting now. Keeping choices simple is what I’m all about (explained in comments there). We Joneses have Hillary signs on both the front and side lawns, out of the way of the sprinklers. I know the pitch, and I can hear the falsehood behind it, because it’s always pitched right at me.
In at The End of The World 
Can’t express how much I love this piece. I’m on my lunch break (eating at the Inn at the End of World), so a brief anecdote. I had dinner last week with a friend of two decades. This friend knows that I’m voting HRC after my primary vote for Sanders. Yet, there seemed to have been questions about my ideological purity:
1) My dinner companion explained to me that the next POTUS will get to make Supreme Court appointments; that Supreme Court justices are appointed for life; and that many of them live long times. This presumably, just in case I had forgotten it from high school, or during the elections of 92, 96, 00, 04, 08, or 12.
2) When I said, “Here’s what needs to happen after the election…”, I was interrupted “There is only one goal now.” “Right, I’m on it, but after that…” “One goal.” “I know, but to make sure we …” “Laska … one goal.”
I hope we are capable of keeping more than one thought in our head to make sure that this defeat of Trump doesn’t turn into its own orthodoxy. We had an orthodoxy after 9/11 – no time for rights, must beat the terrorists, must shout down anyone who opposes the war. Under that orthodoxy, created and enforced by our savior against Trump, we imperiled our fragile notion of rights, our budget, and the lives of some kids. We also have an orthodoxy that people running for office (one of those precious fragile rights) outside of the official party line is traitorous privilege and ego. And now there’s an orthodoxy that we mustn’t criticize or ask for any improvements of the party that will defeat Trump, we must toe the line or be collaborators in our own destruction, as bad, I’m told, as the people actually leading the charge, and abusing protestors. Which parts of liberal democracy are we worried about losing? Didn’t Churchill protect even the frivolous arts during WWII? (I’d have to ask my dinner companion if WWII counted as a defense against fascism. I think it was, and I think we still tried to remember what we were defending.) Isn’t dissent the only way to improve the status quo? If we can’t handle dissent, or even discussion, what’s the point?
One last note, and then back to work. I asked my dinner companion, if s/he was clear on why SCOTUS appointments are so important to everyone. Do people who watched their economic lives diminish in the Clinton years, take a terrible hit in 2008, and saw no improvement during the Obama years but got some SCOTUS appointments think that SCOTUS was enough? If your plans for retirement and sending your kids to college have gone out the window, if you had to sell your house and now rent, if you’re driving an old car and don’t go to the doctor for fear of bills, I wondered (not argued, wondered), how are they supposed to see SCOTUS as the most important thing out there? “Common sense” was the answer (kind of predictably – that seems to be the polite way of rolling your eyes at someone who doesn’t get it).
Let’s hope the intelligence of the protectors of our fragile Republic is enough to outweigh their detachment from and disdain of people who are getting their asses kicked election after election.
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And thanks for the link to the Gopnik piece. That couplet from Pope will come in handy when I’m talking to people who are having a hard time voting for HRC.
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Long time reader, first time commenter.
Well-done for hoisting Gopnik on his own petard. Nixon was the first thing I thought of when he went on about irreparable damage to the American psyche. I was also astonished when he Godwinned himself. You’re right to call attention to the sheer volume of neoliberal pearl-clutching in this election cycle that is drowning out deeper conversations we should be having on real issues like classism.
[Note from an ed.: If you don’t know what Godwinning is, check it out here. Asa is a keen observer of the internet, so it’s always worth following his references.]
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Thanks for posting, Asa. You’re welcome anytime. Is that your real name or did you take it from the male lead in Our American Cousin? I didn’t know what Godwinning is, but it seems an essential internet concept. Mr. Jones, I also didn’t know what “apodictic” meant. So, I’m just learning stuff all over the place today.
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I learned who (the original) Asa
GoodwinTrenchard is and what Godwinning is. Never a dull moment!LikeLike
I will add that I think Gopnik is smarter than this piece. Which means he’s being disingenuous. Like me, he was for HRC anyway and wanted all dissent to cease — so with Trump he’s seizing on an opportunity to manufacture a new case for what he already believed (there’s probably a term for that tactic in bad faith). In a weird way that trivializes what’s actually horrible about Trump. Or: elections bring out the worst in intellectuals.
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Disingenuous or seeing red while clutching pearls. I get the feeling that people are in such a panic that they desperately need to do only one of two things: 1) lash out/cry out; or 2) be in a bubble of mutual despair and support with like-minded people. Both are arguably more therapy than politicking or thinking, but it creates a mode where any kind of comment in between feels like a failure to hold the line and moves you further to the Godwin 1.
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I think we posted at more or less the same time and almost about the same thing. I’m trying very much to avoid being in the “lash out/cry out” category. As you note, it’s neither “politicking or thinking”, but nothing in my years of studying politics or history equips me to quite deal with this. Mr. Trump is post-politicking and post-thinking.
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I agree that it’s the post-politics thing that’s most deadly about Trump. A Ted Cruz, to name perhaps the most nauseating alternative, exists as a successful irritant in a system involving obligations. I can never see anything — literally! — that Trump has to lose as a result of anything he does, can’t see any bad consequences for him of any action he might take, can’t see any reason to think he’ll do one thing or another in any situation. That is a new thing. And a bad one.
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It may also be that Gopnik is in full-on panic, albeit masked by his considerable erudition. Hillary’s victory has to mean something. Or, else there won’t be a victory. And, Trump can’t be an excuse to shut down all debate within the Democratic Party or to acquiesce to a return to Nineties-era Triangulation.
But, then I re-watch a movie like Thirteen Days, about the Cuban missile crisis, and try to imagine Trump in the situation room. Or any room in the West Wing. And then I watch reporters and commentators from both parties on MSNBC trying to thread the needle and not treat Trump like a normal candidate, but also having to treat him like the nominee of a once-great political party.
It’s entirely possible that by late July, my contributions to this blog will be daily posts along the theme of, “by the blood of Christ, can this really be happening?”
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You evoke my deeply repressed Catholic upbringing with this blog title if it could only be Inn at the End of the World.
I see this whole sordid mess as a media phenomena above all else. We have sped off in our own separate, individual directions and the election gives the media a chance to herd us toward a common focal point. We still crave the common topics of interest and conversation because who wants to talk about weather? But I foresee a Democratic landslide of the opposite order of Nixon in 1972 (yeah, Massachusetts!) and think what we have right now is a limited phenomena. The media proclaims Trump vote count YUUUGE! 10 million. I have more faith that this has been a protest heavily seasoned by a skilled but ultimately unelectable demagogue. How many will vote in November? 120 million? Maybe Mr. Jones does know that something is happening here but Adam Gopnik sure as hell doesn’t.
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The title of the blog. Yes, Laska had suggested “Inn” at The End of The World. But, in setting up the site, I was ignorant of the reference and preoccupied with Trump being the “end of the world” and so registered the site as “in” rather than “inn”.
Thanks for posting.
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I like the title of our blog because it makes no sense. Glad as well to see Mr. Pascal commenting here.
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Mr. Paschal and I had occasion to meet in the great state of Minnesota. He was teaching math there when the Jones brood was traveling by RV around the campgrounds. So re the anti-Trump landslide: from your lips to God’s ears, but I have two words of caution, and they are “Jesse” and “Ventura.”
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Mr. Jones, you remind me of memories that are so long ago and faint it is as if they never occurred. Mark my words, and they can’t go from my very real lips to the ears of a non-existent entity, Trump washes out worse than Sandy flooded your beloved Brooklyn (did you wish your favorite architectural icon, the Brooklyn Bridge, a happy 133rd birthday yesterday?). Yes, the bad dream that was Jesse Ventura. That is my only nightmare scenario in all of this. That Bernie stays in the race as an indy, fracturing the left and paving a way for a national embarrassing (though not that dangerous) Donald. I’m glad the blog title makes no sense. (And thanks for the welcome, CVFD.)
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Mister Jones doesn’t live in Brooklyn. I too presumed, and maybe exposed too much, in identifying BP with Minnesota. Withdrawn.
Still: Jesse Ventura.
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I enjoyed this piece. I thought Mr. Jones (by the way, is he related to Mother Jones – – because she was a badass and who wouldn’t be proud of the relation?) was right on regarding the list of shitty events in American history that liberalism has wrought. There are so many public speakers, both on the left and right, forever praising our lipsticked-pig.
Hope I’m not missing the larger point but part of what worries me with Trump is that his ascendancy is partly (or largely?) fueled not just by stupid people but by stupid people who want to burn everything. There seem to be too many dummies getting too much press as they spout off not just the “I like him cuz he say it straight” bullshit, but also the “I like him because he agrees with me when I imagine everything burning burning burning!”
I also worry that only, what – – 10%? – – of Americans know goddamned any history at all. (Did you read/hear about how a poll in both Japan and the U.S. showed a majority of citizens in both nations were ignorant to our WWII enemy relationship? Ugh.) I certainly don’t expect us to be as learned as Mister Jones, but c’mon!
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Welcome. tmandsb. Not hyperbolic, I’m afraid. No– Mister Jones has *heard* of Mother Jones –and he’s been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books — but he’s no relation.
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Oh right – – that Mister Jones – – that makes sense as you have many contacts among the lumberjacks to get the facts…
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