THURSDAY, JANUARY 16, 2025
What they're permitted to say: Eight years ago, he gave his first speech as the American president.
The speech had a slightly unusual theme. That theme was "American carnage."
Fun fact—and at this point, is there any other kind:
In President Carter's "malaise speech." he never said the word "malaise." In this later president's "American carnage" speech, he said "carnage" only once:
TRUMP (1/20/17): ...January 20th, 2017 will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again.
The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now.
You came by the tens of millions to become part of a historic movement the likes of which the world has never seen before.
At the center of this movement is a crucial conviction: that a nation exists to serve its citizens.
Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves.
These are the just and reasonable demands of a righteous public.
But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.
This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.
For the record, the forgotten men and women of our country hadn't exactly "come by the tens of millions" on that particular day.
Perhaps that wasn't what the new president meant. There followed a deeply disordered, baldly idiotic dispute about how many people had come to the inauguration.
That baldly idiotic dispute was a harbinger of what was to come. You could call it a harbinger of the carnage which has unfolded in the past eight years.
In the passage posted above, you can see the only use of the word "carnage" that day. Given the nature of the occasion, it was widely viewed, rightly or wrongly, as an odd choice of words.
That said, the new president was saying that he would attack poverty in our inner cities, along with an education system which was leaving kids deprived of knowledge.
Beyond that, he would attack the existence crime and gangs and drugs, but also the loss of the manufacturing base which left rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the American landscape.
Language choices to the side, those were familiar objectives. Eight years later, David Brooks has now described what he sees when he looks across that same landscape.
His column was written in reaction to yesterday's Hegseth hearing. He wasn't impressed by what he saw. By the end of his column, we'd have to say that he's coming around to our own long-expressed point of view.
For the record, we disagree with Brooks' statement concerning what "we" deserve. In fact, we don't even know who he means by "we" in that declaration—but we agree with the way he concludes:
We Deserve Pete Hegseth
[...]
If you are holding hearings for a prospective secretary of defense, you would think you might want to ask him about these urgent issues...If you’re a Democrat trying to sink a nomination, you would think you’d want to ask substantive questions on life-or-death issues like these in order to expose the nominee’s ignorance and unpreparedness.
But did this happen at the Pete Hegseth hearings in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee this week? If you thought those kinds of questions would dominate the hearings, you must be living under the illusion that we live in a serious country.
We do not. We live in a soap opera country. We live in a social media/cable TV country. In our culture you don’t want to focus on boring policy questions; you want to engage in the kind of endless culture war that gets voters riled up. You don’t want to focus on topics that would require study; you focus on images and easy-to-understand issues that generate instant visceral reactions. You don’t win this game by engaging in serious thought; you win by mere attitudinizing—by striking a pose. Your job is not to advance an argument that might help the country; your job is to go viral.
Pete Hegseth is of course the living, breathing embodiment of this culture. The world is on fire and what’s his obsession? Wokeness in the military. I went through high school trying to bluff my way through class after doing none of the reading, and in Hegseth, I recognize a master of the craft. During the hearings Hegseth repeatedly said he was going to defend the meritocracy. In what kind of meritocracy is being a Fox TV host preparation for being secretary of defense? Maybe in the one Caligula fancied when he contemplated making his horse a consul.
[...]
All of this has been corrupted by the war for short attention spans. In the 19th century we had the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Today it would be the Lincoln-Douglas TikTok wars followed by “Three Takeaways From the Lincoln-Douglas Debates” followed by a panel of pundits (like me) analyzing whether Stephen Douglas helped himself with swing voters in DuPage County.
Can this kind of country prevail in a global conflict of systems? Maybe, but maybe not.
Given the broken state of our culture, can our failing nation expect to prosper—to function, to "prevail?"
We've long said the answer is no. After watching the Hegseth hearing, David Brooks has given voice to a similar point of view.
("I finished watching the hearings sick to my stomach," he says at one point in his column.)
Back in November, the incoming president said he would nominate the baldly ludicrous Matt Gaetz to be the attorney general. At that time, the ridiculous Gaetz was widely compared to Caligula's famous horse.
Before long, Gaetz was thrown under the bus. In his column, Brooks transfers the bridle to the hotheaded Hegseth, whose nomination for secretary of defense will almost surely be going through.
Then again, there is the more "qualified" Pam Bondi, who yesterday offered this mandated non-answer during her own Senate hearing:
DURBIN (1/15/25): Are you prepared to say today, under oath and without reservation, that President Trump lost the presidential contest to Joe Biden in 2020?
BONDI: Ranking member Durbin, President Biden is the president of the United States. He was duly sworn in and he is the president of the United States. There was a peaceful transition of power. President Trump left office and was overwhelmingly elected in 2024.
Posing as a flyweight, that's what Bondi said. What you see there is part of the carnage the powers that be have chosen.
To wit:
Under current tribal arrangements, a person like Bondi has been given permission to say that Biden was in fact "sworn in."
Such people are permitted to say that there was "a transition of power." They're even permitted to say that Joe Biden is the president of the United States. Indeed, they allowed to say it two times!
They aren't permitted, to this very day, to say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election or to say that Donald Trump lost. They aren't permitted to make that blindingly obvious statement—to give a direct, responsive answer to a question of the type this tribal spear-chucker was asked.
(As a matter of loyalty, they may feel obliged to throw in an irrelevant assessment of the 2024 election—the one they weren't asked to assess. Bondi said her owner won that election "overwhelmingly." That strikes us as a stretch, but it's a breath of fresh air compared to her North Korean-adjacent avoidance of the question she was actually asked.)
Bondi's refusal to answer Senator Durbin's is part of the carnage with which we've all been left in the wake of the past eight tears.
Back in 2017, an incoming president spoke of "American carnage." Then, at the end of his term, he saddled us American citizens with an astounding amount of same.
We refer to the undisguised lunacy which followed the November 2020 election—the transparently lunatic claims from the Trump camp, followed by the transparently lunatic conduct of January 6, 2021.
The videotape of that day's violent conduct is never shown to Red America by the Fox News Channel. For ourselves, we flash on the fall of Troy, as described by Professor Knox, as we think about that day's carnage:
PROFESSOR KNOX (1990): The whole poem [known as the Iliad] has been moving toward this duel between the two champions, but there has never been any doubt about the outcome...And the death of Hector seals the fate of Troy; it will fall to the Achaeans, to become the pattern for all time of the death of a city.
The images of that night assault—the blazing palaces, the blood running in the streets, old Priam butchered at the altar, Cassandra raped in the temple, Hector's baby son thrown from the battlements, his wife Andromache dragged off to slavery—all this, foreshadowed in the Iliad, will be stamped indelibly on the consciousness of the Greeks throughout their history....
So went the carnage when sacred Troy fell. That said, it seems to us that the lunacies of the past eight years have come from more than one quarter.
Our incoming president has engaged in outright lunacy again and again and again and again, and then he's done so some more. In another form of American carnage, our brightest and best—the "highly educated" men and women of Blue America's major news orgs—have never been willing or able to describe these waves of disordered behavior for what they apparently are.
Having said that, let us add this:
After President Biden did in fact win that election, variations on carnage continued. The new president adopted unexplainable policies at the southern border—policies he never tried to explain. Nor did he ever try to explain the economic difficulties which—all across the developed world—were following the dislocation brough on by the Covid disaster.
For reasons which went unexplained, the new president kept declining to explain. In the face of what seemed to be growing evidence, tribunes of our own Blue America kept saying that nothing was wrong with his capability or with his frequently non-existent behavior.
They kept saying he was sharp as a tack. They even said that the southern border was locked up tight as a drum.
(Midway through his fourth year in office, he finally took executive actions to tighten up the border. What had he waited so long? Did anyone ever explain?)
Shortly after last November's election, the Atlantic's Tim Alberta—he had long been NeverTrump—explained what was wrong with this conduct, which almost surely helped produce our current state of American carnage:
ALBERTA (11/8/24): As someone who has spilled a lot of ink on Donald Trump's lies over the past decade—
GOLDBERG: A couple of books worth.
ALBERTA: —a couple of books worth, I just want to say this when we talk about propaganda. Arguably, the three most determinative things in this election were propaganda from the Democratic Party.
Number one: "Joe Biden is fine and totally fit to be president for another four years." He wasn't.
Number two: "The border is closed. It's under control. There's nobody coming in." That was not true.
And number three: "Hey, don't worry about inflation. Prices are fine. Bidenomics! Everything's great. You guys don't know what you're talking about. Actually, the economy is in great shape."
This is propaganda to millions of Americans who said, "None of that is true, and therefore, I don't trust you." They might not trust Trump, but they don't trust Democrats either.
This helps explain why we lost, he said. In our view, he was describing behavior which bordered on the semi-crazy.
In our view, the behavior Alberta described was less lunatic than the behavior from TrumpWorld which followed that disordered person's loss in 2020, but it was disordered conduct too. Joined by other lunacies here within our own Blue America, that disordered behavior helps explain the carnage we now face.
David Brooks seems to have come around to our own general point of view. He has stated what is blindingly obvious—it isn't clear that our failing nation can survive the waves of carnage of the past eight years.
We've been advancing that point of view for roughly a decade now. We largely agree with the conclusion Brooks draws at the end of his new column:
We live in a soap opera [flyweight] country...Can this kind of country prevail in a global conflict of systems? Maybe, but maybe not.
For ourselves, we'll go with most likely not. But even as Brooks' column appeared, the clown cars just kept rolling along at the Fox News Channel, and the clown cars were filled with flyweights.
Inevitably, the clown car "judge" had employed her favorite nickname for the governor of one of our failing nation's most important states.
She had referred to him by a nickname; instead of using his actual name, she named him simply as "Greasy." Can a large modern nation expect to prevail with clowns like this in the saddle, around the clock, at one of its most influential "news" orgs?
Bondi can't say that Biden won. On the Fox News Channel, a silly clown like Judge Jeanine is hailed for her greatness when she plays the inveterate loudmouth, day after day after day.
At the Times, they avert their gaze from this round-the-clock carnage. In his new column, Brooks has broken rank.
Tomorrow: What the flyweight said
