BREAKING: What we didn't do on our summer vacation!

FRIDAY, JULY 20, 2018

Sullivan gets it right:
We took five books on our summer vacation, which lasted all of four days.

We didn't get around to rereading Nietzche's The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, the subjects of a widely recycled freshman-year term paper we wrote a few years ago.

That said, Andrew Sullivan's portrait of the values of Donald J. Trump reminds us why we took it along. We offer the following excerpt, with one key passage highlighted:
SULLIVAN (7/20/18): Everything Trump did in Europe—every horrifying, sick-making, embarrassing expostulation—is, in some way, consistent, and predictable, when you consider how he sees the world. It’s not a plan or a strategy as such. Trump is bereft of the attention span to sustain any of those. It is rather the reflection of a set of core beliefs and instincts that have governed him for much of his life. The lies come and go. But his deeper convictions really are in plain sight.

And they are, at root, the same as those of the strongmen he associates with and most admires. The post-1945 attempt to organize the world around collective security, free trade, open societies, non-zero-sum diplomacy, and multicultural democracies is therefore close to unintelligible to him. Why on earth, in his mind, would a victorious power after a world war be generous to its defeated foes? When you win, you don’t hold out a hand in enlightened self-interest. You gloat and stomp. In Trump’s zero-sum brain—“we should have kept the oil!”—it makes no sense. It has to be a con. And so today’s international order strikes Trump, and always has, as a massive, historic error on the part of the United States.

There’s nothing in it for him to like. It has empowered global elites over national leaders; it has eroded national sovereignty in favor commerce and peace; it has empowered our rivals; it has spread liberal values contrary to the gut instincts of many ordinary people (including himself); it has led the U.S. to spend trillions on collective security, when we could have used that wealth for our own population or to impose our will by force on others; it has created a legion of free riders; it has enriched the global poor at the expense, as he sees it, of the American middle class; and it has unleashed unprecedented migration of peoples and the creation of the first truly multicultural, heterogeneous national cultures.
Nietzche thought "morals" were an extremely skillful trick through which the weak had gained control over the strong. This resembles the inner world Sullivan describes in his piece.

Concerning the one brief passage we highlighted:

We live in an extremely complex society. Its checks-and-balances are endlessly complex, bewilderingly ornate. Decades ago, changes in immigration laws served to create a much more complex "racial" mosaic.

We liberals are comfortable with this, if not more so. We aggressively hate those others who manage to linger a few steps behind our own incomparable greatness.

We love to talk about their alleged hate. Our own tribe's corresponding instincts go almost completely unnoticed—though only, of course, Over Here.

Concerning those ordinary people: It's one of the most revealing quotes of all time. It comes from Gene Brabender, quoted in Jim Bouton's classic book, Ball Four:

"Where I come from, we just talk for a little while. After that we start to hit."

That was the end of complex discussion out in the Pilots' bullpen. (Brabender was very large.)

Brabender would have been frustrated by the intricacies of our contemporary culture. His brain may have been wired a bit differently from yours. He might have been inclined to respect the rights and advantages of the strong. On that basis, our modern tribe would have known that we should rush to hate him.

He simply wasn't as good as we are. He wasn't as brilliant or worthy or fine. In such ways of reacting, our highly unimpressive tribe resembles one Donald J. Trump.

25 comments:

  1. Anderson Cooper, "journalist" was on Colbert talking about his live tour with Andy Cohen of Real Housewives infamy. We're all Donald Trump and no one sane believes media personalities or politicians or party activists or fired FBI directors turned media personalities care about "our democratic institutions."

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Whinin' WhitebreadsJuly 20, 2018 at 5:51 PM

      " ... no one sane ...."

      How would you know?

      Delete
  2. So we shouldn't be discriminating against better-performing Asians in favor of whites or blacks or better-performing whites in favor of blacks in employment or educational opportunity? Agree. Punishing people for their DNA is immoral.

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  3. "We liberals are comfortable with this, if not more so."

    I'm gonna go out on a ledge and make a wild assumption: not a single diversity-loving liberal has ever lost a job at Perdue chicken farm (or some such) to an undocumented worker.

    Makes your pharisaical virtue signaling so much more obnoxious -- to a normal human being, that is.

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    Replies
    1. [NY Times] "President Trump’s longtime lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, secretly recorded a conversation with Mr. Trump two months before the presidential election in which they discussed payments to a former Playboy model who said she had an affair with Mr. Trump, according to lawyers and others familiar with the recording.

      The F.B.I. seized the recording this year during a raid on Mr. Cohen’s office. The Justice Department is investigating Mr. Cohen’s involvement in paying women to tamp down embarrassing news stories about Mr. Trump ahead of the 2016 election. Prosecutors want to know whether that violated federal campaign finance laws, and any conversation with Mr. Trump about those payments would be of keen interest to them."

      Delete
    2. "not a single diversity-loving liberal has ever lost a job at Perdue chicken farm (or some such) to an undocumented worker."

      True, neither has a typical grift-loving Conservative Trump voter.
      Americans will do the jobs immigrants do, if corporate America pays them what they're worth (instead of stiffing them for their labor. Good luck getting corporate America to do that.

      Delete
    3. Also, I appreciate you using "undocumented worker" instead of "illegal"
      Let's save "illegal" for those who work on Wall Street.

      Delete
  4. Yes, much of the post-WWII era's strategies are counter-intuitive. To everyone, not just Trump supporters. But, gosh, how did we ever manage to get started down the counter-intuitive road to begin with? Could it be that we tried the intuitive path and found it disastrous multiple times in a row? Why, yes, I do believe that is what happened.

    So what does a polity that understands why certain counter-intuitive choices are, in fact, the best choices do when there is another group that is completely inured to being educated as to why such counter-intuitive choices have been made? Another group that are intransigent in their unbelief?

    Perhaps insults are not helpful. But the frustration is completely understandable.

    Bob, you consistently describe the illness from the symptoms. Laudable. But what about the cure? I don't think you have any more of a clue about that than the rest of us.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Education is part of the cure. Students who come from conservative backgrounds tend to become liberal when they are exposed to ideas and history and science at the college level. Conservatives believe they are being indoctrinated but they are actually being educated. They are learning to think about problems differently, learning to know and like different people, learning to use language to resolve conflict, learning how technology works and how science can improve almost everything about our lives.

      That's why Somerby's disdain for high education bothers me so much. I see education as a way to change the intransigent in our society. Somerby sees it as elitism and pride and he has no use for the findings of any discipline. He joins the right in mocking professors and suggesting that college is unnecessary when studies show that it is not.

      So, I disagree with Somerby's framing of the problem and I especially disagree with his ridicule of things that will help.

      Somerby -- Gandhi was a highly educated man. So was MLK. Malala put her life on the line for the right of girls to attend school. Even Andrew Sullivan is highly educated. You need to stop mocking those who can make our society better and inoculate people from voting for demagogues.

      Delete
  5. Who do liberals hit? Brabender meant hit literally. Does Somerby? How much violence occurs at liberal conventions or protests compared to Trump rallies and conservative marches (e.g., Charlottesville)? Who is doing the hitting?

    I am so tired of Somerby telling us that liberals are just like knee-jerk conservatives because liberals go around shouting "lock him up" and putting journalists in need of secret service protection and liberals are always making death threats against the right.

    When liberals behave like that, Somerby might have a point, but they (we) don't. Not even close. We are not the ones responsible for the increase in hate crimes since Trump took office. We play nice.

    So why is Somerby offering this kind of equivalence

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Liberals should learn to hit, to fight. Trump is the ultimate bully. He has bullied his way to the top spot and he continues to bully his way through his presidency. The only way to deal with a bully is to punch him in the face. Democrats are weak and spineless. They wait for a special council or a porn star to do the punching for them. that will never work. And if it does, another bully he will just come along and do the same thing.

      Democrats are weak people with no balls and no courage. They don't know how to fight and don't know how to stand up for themselves. They are addicted to complaining and victimization. They hate themselves. They have a long way to go. Sorry, but people will just don't trust others that don't stand up for themselves and don't fight for what they believe in. NO ONE is going to rally around a group of people who allow themselves to be pushed around.

      Delete
    2. Stupid troll forgot its walkaway hashtag.

      Delete
  6. Somerby of course glosses over Sullivan's point: Sullivan rejects Trumpism and its illiberal tendencies.

    At any rate, it's odd that Somerby brings Nietzsche into his discussion. Nietzsche, a professor, was as anti-liberal and pro-authoritarian as one could be. He praised the elite, the strong man, and attacked the "lesser" beings, which, for him, included women, slaves, Socialists, workers, the poor, just to name a few. He was profoundly anti-Christian, and would therefore have hated MLK. He probably would have admired Trump as he admired Napoleon.

    What this philosopher's theories have to do with Somerby's point is unclear.

    Further on, Somerby says:

    "He [Brabender] might have been inclined to respect the rights and advantages of the strong."

    "On that basis, our modern tribe would have known that we should rush to hate him."

    This is wrong. "Our tribe" wouldn't hate Brabender; "they" hate the bullying, the racism, the bigotry, the authoritarianism, the fascist urges. Somerby thinks that calling out these things is equal to hating these people. When these "illiberal" tendencies permeate the elite, especially in a powerful figure like Trump, they ought to be opposed. Unless you're a pro-oligarch authoritarian, like Nietzsche.

    ReplyDelete
  7. "Concerning those ordinary people:"

    Is Somerby, like Sullivan, engaging in stereotyping of so-called "ordinary people?"

    Are they supposed to represent conservatives? Can ordinary people not be liberal? Are there ordinary people who wouldn't have the tendency to hit? What would the political affiliation of this latter group be? Isn't it impossible to say?

    Isn't Somerby stereotyping "our tribe" when he assumes they would hate Brabender?

    Is Sullivan reading minds when he says "It is possible, is it not, that Donald Trump simply believes what he says."?

    Isn't this exact kind of statement what Somerby attacked Sykes, Toobin, and Schwartz for in an earlier post , ("TRIBAL SNAPSHOTS: Antoinettes before the fall!")?

    ReplyDelete
  8. Or Bob Somerby.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Against the gut instincts of ordinary people.... like, blacks should have to give up their seats to white people on the bus or....what? This is a whiplasher.......Sullivan wrote an OK piece.... and SNAP! Bob still hates liberals... Maybe time to cut down to two posting days a week?

    ReplyDelete
  10. I wadded up fish meat and whale skin for a cookout tonight.

    ReplyDelete
  11. I need to get me some snail bone and snake meat to add to my whale wad for the cookout tonight.

    ReplyDelete
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