WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 2024
The disorder is also in Us: This morning, Ed Luce takes his place on the pile.
There he is, in the Financial Times, beating up on a famous madman and on the horse he rode out on. His column begins as shown:
Trump’s demolition of the US state
It is time to study Caligula. That most notorious of Roman emperors killed what was left of the republic and centralised authority in himself. Donald Trump does not need to make his horse a senator; it will be enough to keep appointing charlatans to America’s great offices of state.
Rome was not destroyed by outsiders. Its demolition was the work of barbarians from within.
The question of whether Trump consciously wants to destroy the US federal government is irrelevant. You measure a leader by his actions not by his heart. To judge from what Trump has done within a fortnight of winning the presidency, his path is destruction.
Other than a handful of moderate Republican senators, who may or may not have the guts to reject some of his nominees, there is little standing in his way.
As is often done, Luce says "senator" instead of "consul" when he discusses the horse, but the point he makes is the same. As he continues, he compares a string of Trump's recent nominees—specifically, Hegseth and Gaetz and Gabbard and Kennedy—to the Roman emperor's favorite extremely fast steed.
Along the way, he even trashes Musk and Ramaswamy, the crackpot co-heads of the new alleged strongman's Department of Government Efficiency. After that, he returns to the horse:
DOGE will be the advisory equivalent of X, Musk’s social media platform, which is algorithmically rigged to churn out disinformation.
Serious paring of US bureaucracy requires knowledge of what it is for. Musk and Ramaswamy routinely betray sweeping ignorance of their subject matter.
Americans might come to wish that Trump had nominated a horse to head the US Department of Health and Human Services. Instead, he has chosen Robert F Kennedy jnr, whose goal is to reverse the public science of the past couple of centuries.
So it goes, as an ancient Roman madman returns to the scene of the discourse.
Will the new version of President Trump turn out to be Caligula all over again? At this point, we can't necessarily tell you that, but we can't say that he won't.
Below, we'll offer praise for our own work–but first, we'll remind you of something we noted in Monday's report:
When the leading authority thumbnails Caligula, a banished word quickly appears:
Caligula
Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (31 August 12 – 24 January 41), better known by his nickname Caligula, was Roman emperor from AD 37 until his assassination in AD 41. He was the son of the Roman general Germanicus and Augustus' granddaughter Agrippina the Elder, members of the first ruling family of the Roman Empire. He was born two years before Tiberius was made emperor. Gaius accompanied his father, mother and siblings on campaign in Germania, at little more than four or five years old. He had been named after Gaius Julius Caesar, but his father's soldiers affectionately nicknamed him "Caligula" ("Little boot").
Germanicus died in Antioch in 19, and Agrippina returned with her six children to Rome, where she became entangled in a bitter feud with Emperor Tiberius, who was Germanicus' biological uncle and adoptive father. The conflict eventually led to the destruction of her family, with Caligula as the sole male survivor. In 26, Tiberius withdrew from public life to the island of Capri, and in 31, Caligula joined him there. Tiberius died in 37 and Caligula succeeded him as emperor, at the age of 24.
Of the few surviving sources about Caligula and his four-year reign, most were written by members of the nobility and senate, long after the events they purport to describe. For the early part of his reign, he is said to have been "good, generous, fair and community-spirited" but increasingly self-indulgent, cruel, sadistic, extravagant and sexually perverted thereafter; an insane, murderous tyrant who demanded and received worship as a living god, humiliated his Senate, and planned to make his horse a consul...
The horse appears in paragraph 3, but so does the banished word.
Did Caligula actually plan to make his horse a consul? As the lengthy profile continues, we're told that it's quite possible that he didn't.
That said, we highlight the key word "insane." We're not experts on the history, but that passage, and what follows, suggests that a certain concept was already part of human discourse when the earliest pseudo-histories of Caligula appeared.
Was the emperor Caligula some version of "insane?" We can't answer your question, but we'll once again tell you this:
Under modern rules of the road, such questions can't even be asked about our flailing nation's incoming possible strongman. Within the upper-end American press, everyone except George Conway has signed on to a basic group agreement:
Issues of medical / mental / psychological / psychiatric disorder must be disappeared in the case of our own "living God."
This agreement is widespread within our own Blue America. We offer that as a possible hint at a wider problem—a wider problem which we denizens of Blue America may not be able to see.
Is our society coming undone, as once happened with Rome? Everything is possible! To our credit, we were the first to float such a possibility—and we did it more than a decade ago, well before the Age of Trump, when we started recalling this murky prophecy by a long-forgotten star of the Blue American 1960s, the classicist Norman O. Brown:
BROWN (5/31/60): I sometimes think I see that societies originate in the discovery of some secret, some mystery; and expand with the progressive publication of their secret; and end in exhaustion when there is no longer any secret, when the mystery has been divulged, that is to say profaned...
And so there comes a time—I believe we are in such a time—when civilization has to be renewed by the discovery of some new mysteries, by the undemocratic but sovereign power of the imagination, by the undemocratic power which makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of all mankind, the power which makes all things new.
Professor Brown came to very hot in the 1960s, but what in the world was he talking about when he made that murky statement as part of this Phi Beta Kappa address?
All in all, we have no clear idea. Nor do we have any idea why that statement began to float up into our head more than a decade ago, when we started posting it as part in the work of this helpful site.
Initially, we believe we assumed that the murky statement must have come from one of the books which made Brown so hot, back when Vietnam was still raging. At the time, we read or attempted to read those books, just like everyone else. The books in question are these:
The books which made Brown hot:
Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press (1959).
Love's Body. New York: Random House (1966).
We read those books back in the day, just like everyone did. We have no idea how that obscure formulation from that obscure Phi Beta Kappa address ever made its way into our head.
We'll guess that the gods must have placed it there! At any rate, there was Professor Brown, suggesting that our own society had begun a process which he said would have it "ending in exhaustion."
Today, a possible modern Caligula is possibly trying to put a team of steeds in power. As he does, those of us in Blue America—the former "elf" Conway excepted—have agreed to accept a rule which forbids us from discussing the possible source of this conduct.
(Not that it would likely help if we did conduct that discussion.)
Those of us in Blue America have long been self-assured. Dating back to those same 1960s, we Blues have been certain that we're the smart and honest and principled ones, and that The Others just aren't.
(As happenstance had it, we were physically present when this unhelpful attitude began displaying itself.)
We Blues! We've signaled this belief a thousand different ways. We've rarely noticed this behavior.
Over there, The Others have.
We've long been sure that we're the smart / good / insightful ones, and that The Others just aren't. Half of them have been said to be deplorable, irredeemable. In October, our own tribe's sitting president almost seemed to say that all of The Others are "garbage."
(That may not be what the gentleman meant. On its face, it sounded like what he had said.)
As noted, we Blues are vaccinated against seeing such things. As an example of what we mean, we'll cite the recent portrait of The Others—that is to say, of "Mr. Trump's voters"—which appears below, one-word headline included.
This portrait was written by a good, decent person. Her lengthy essay appeared in print editions of this past Sunday's New York Times:
Enough
[...]
Mr. Trump’s voters are granted a level of care and coddling that defies credulity and that is afforded to no other voting bloc. Many of them believe the most ludicrous things: babies being aborted after birth and children going to school as one gender and returning home surgically altered as another gender even though these things simply do not happen. Time and again, we hear the wild lies these voters believe and we act as if they are sharing the same reality as ours, as if they are making informed decisions about legitimate issues. We act as if they get to dictate the terms of political engagement on a foundation of fevered mendacity.
We must refuse to participate in a mass delusion. We must refuse to accept that the ignorance on display is a congenital condition rather than a choice. All of us should refuse to pretend that any of this is normal and that these voters are just woefully misunderstood and that if only the Democrats addressed their economic anxiety, they might vote differently. While they are numerous, that does not make them right.
These are adults, so let us treat them like adults. Let us acknowledge that they want to believe nonsense and conjecture. They want to believe anything that affirms their worldview. They want to celebrate a leader who allows them to nurture their basest beliefs about others. The biggest challenge of our lifetime will be figuring out how to combat the American willingness to embrace flagrant misinformation and bigotry.
The Others don't "share the same reality as ours." Also, it seems that The Others are all just alike—all 76.6 million of them (and counting).
We Blues! We're very dumb about these things—and given the way our species is built, we're rarely able to see this fact about ourselves.
We voted for Candidate Harris ourselves. Something like 77 million people voted for Candidate Trump.
There's a very long list of reasons why someone may have made that decision. The author of that essay in Blue America's leading newspaper seems to be completely unable to come to terms with that fact.
We started to list some possible reasons last week, working from a statement on Washington Week by the strongly anti-Trump Tim Alberta. In the days and weeks ahead, we'll be adding to that list.
In truth, the list goes on and on and on. After that, it goes on some more.
We voted for Candidate Harris ourselves. But that list is actually real, and the essay in the New York times is itself a work of tribal "delusion."
According to Luce, Rome was destroyed by the work of insiders—more specifically, by the lunatic conduct of a certain mad emperor.
According to Luce, the same thing may be happening here. We can't flatly say that's wrong, but tribal delusion is bred in the bone and the syndrome can even be found Over Here.
