I don’t like to write about politics too frequently, as it is generally a pointless and no-win exercise. I’ve been an independent since I was eligible to vote, long before it was fashionable. I was born with a fear of mobs, and I carry no water for any political party. But the broader American population would disagree, having become deeply tribal, fixed in its views and willing to curate its own facts in support of whatever faux reality it seeks to create ex nihilo. Nowadays, interfering with any of these creation narratives mostly destroys friendships and otherwise collegial relationships. Edification and intellectual growth are now processes for chumps who either “don’t know what time it is” or who refuse to believe that identity is all there is.
In an environment like that, small-scale political speech seems like so much pissin’ in the wind. And I am decidedly small-scale. But political speech can (and should) be more than venting and performance art. My goal here is not to vent but to present an argument based on available facts. Venting online is a slightly different form of speech — superficially political, typically tribal, unbalanced, and, yes, virtuous performance art. Humans naturally want to be seen as members in good standing of whatever tribe gives them purpose and meaning. Shouting into the ether through an IP port is an easy and cheap way to enhance one’s safety and status. And that is fine to an extent. But poison is determined by dose, and our culture is overdosing. My goal in writing today is neither to vent nor to contribute to that din of partisan warfare. If there is a tribe out there that coincides with these arguments, it is a coincidence that doesn’t concern me, though I do extend a brotherly hand of camaraderie, while whispering “My condolences.”
I write today to call for necessary political action. I do this fully aware that many of the people I know will respond negatively. My words will not selectively reinforce the ramparts of either of the major political tribe’s war machines, nor will they parrot any talking points du jour. I realize that such independent speech is frightening and dangerous to some. But I am well past the point of caring about how people react to full suites of facts, vs. the filtered sets that they prefer. We have a great nation to save. If you don’t think it is in peril, or if you think that either Trumpism or identitarian progressivism is going to save it… well, I have a bridge to sell you.
The President’s recent words and actions make him unfit to lead the nation, let alone the free world. Here is a small sample of attitudes, behaviors and offenses:
In general:
First and foremost, he is lawless. And we are a nation of laws.
He believes that he has absolute power to rule by executive action.
He routinely makes matters of state personal, rather than about policy.
He threatens to destroy a postwar political order that has brought relative peace and prosperity to the West.
He threatens to deconstruct a fragile monetary system that he doesn’t understand, which has enabled American hegemony for nearly eighty years.
He bullies traditional allies who defend their legitimate interests.
He favors tyrants who manipulate him through flattery.
He interferes in elections, favoring candidates based on loyalty rather than ability.
He routinely spreads disinformation through a social network that he controls.
He abuses government and manipulates policy to further his own financial interests and perceived legacy, and to seek retribution on political enemies.
More specifically:
He threatens to destroy NATO by taking Greenland by force. This would be a disaster of unimaginable proportions, and would provide aid and comfort to the enemies of America. For what it’s worth, Vladimir Putin agrees.
He abuses tariff authority that he doesn’t have, destabilizing world markets.
He previously attempted to overthrow the results an American election on false pretenses, and failed to protect his Vice President from the existential threat of a violent mob.
He continues a recent tradition of ignoring the need for Congressional authorization for obvious acts of war.
He refuses to enforce, apparently for personal political gain, a law that requires TikTok to be sold. He thus permits Chinese spyware and psychological manipulation tools to remain embedded throughout American society, in direct defiance of the will of Congress.
He has threatened to interfere with the leadership structure and policies of the Federal Reserve, based on a desire to manipulate interest rates for political gain.
He has actively sought a Nobel Peace Prize, likely as part of an obsession with Barack Obama, and has corruptly adjusted foreign policy as needed to achieve that personal goal.
He has defended the recent Venezuelan action on false pretenses, claiming it to be about drugs, which it obviously is not. The action might be justifiable on other grounds, but, regardless, it is clear that the administration had and has no follow-up plan.
He recklessly accepted an unvetted aircraft from Qatar, apparently intended to ultimately serve as Air Force One.
He has authorized and promoted a reckless and sloppy expansion of ICE that is destabilizing, dangerous and deadly.
These lists could be much longer, but are more than enough to justify removing the President through the impeachment process (which is a political not legal instrument). I will make no attempt here to list the achievements of the Trump Administration. I do not deny that such achievements exist (his successes in the Middle East, for example). I applaud some of them. That isn’t the point; this isn’t a game of offsets and net value. No amount of nutrition can offset poison. Lawlessness and demagoguery are poisons within the American system. And these have become staples of the Trump presidency. He is now threatening to cross dangerous lines, which the American people cannot allow.
It is worth examining how we got here — i.e., how it is possible that a man like Donald Trump was elected twice to run the Executive Branch of the greatest civilization in human history. The tribalism that I abhor is partly responsible, of course, both left and right. But what created the tribes? Larger currents in the international political and economic order over the past few decades weigh heavily, as do technology and seeds sown long ago within academia. And I think it is important to at least review these factors, as one must understand the past to reasonably plot a course for the future.
Some of this story has been documented so many times that it makes no sense to retell it in detail. In sum: The 1990’s were a dynamic period when the United States emerged as the world’s lone superpower, the Soviet Union disintegrated, and the internet exploded as the defining technology of our age. Partisan cable news networks got legs and cultivated audiences, as leaders of the West worked out new trade strategies in the Americas as well as a naive new posture toward China. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress, tired of their decades-long role of playing second fiddle, began to play political hard ball instead. Shortly afterward, the country went through 9/11 — and then, inexplicably, an ill-advised, multi-trillion dollar war in Iraq, the cost of which accelerated the country’s descent into deep debt — a process supervised by a House run by a Speaker chosen for his dark past and vulnerability to blackmail.
These developments were mostly visible and in the news, but less publicized policy shifts in this period deepened the distress years later. Most notably, politicians from both right and left, buoyed by internet-driven budget surpluses, conspired to expand housing opportunities in the population — while simultaneously eliminating crucial, long-standing restraints on the financial sector. The result was the 2008 financial meltdown, a global financial catastrophe that opened the curtain on the fundamental class divide that had been metastasizing in America for almost twenty years, as a result of a new international trade regime. The stage that it revealed was stark and grim, with the haze of formerly free-flowing dollars from the internet bubble now cleared and no longer obscuring reality.
Subsequent populist movements, like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, were predictable. Middle and working class people were increasingly angry, their anger fueled by the growing influence of cable news, talk radio and budding social networks. They saw few if any of the architects of the financial crash paying any kind of price for the disaster they created (often just the opposite). The true end game of the economic restructuring also became clear — a huge manufacturing shift to China and countries to the north and south, with America increasingly a service-based economy. A generation of blue collar Americans found themselves without relevant work. Towns across America simply died at the hands of the ruthless efficiencies engineered by the investment banking class. Their coalition expanded not long afterwards, as a new health care law extinguished categories of affordable health insurance that the self-employed middle class had grown to depend on.
While this was happening, the Democratic Party — traditionally the defender of the working class — rather conspicuously abandoned its role, shifting radically to the left on social issues that mattered more to its intellectual and donor classes, now teeming with tech dollars and influence. Accordingly, the second Obama term led the way into a radical rethinking of the human condition, unencumbered by the weight of a re-election campaign. These new ideas were asserted and enforced as truth, not presented as ideas worth considering.
Obviously, this is a very broad summary. I will interrupt it with an anecdote — a small, but very specific event in history, one that would shape the world that we inhabit today. The traditional White House Correspondents Dinner was held in April, 2011. Per custom, President Obama was the headliner, but the audience included one very unlikely and notable guest: TV game show host Donald Trump, who had been increasingly outspoken on the birther issue. Unsurprisingly, Obama skillfully (and mercilessly) humiliated an unamused Trump in front of an influential black tie audience. Trump had richly earned his public abasement, but that is beside the point. Many political observers believe that this is the night that the first Trump presidency was conceived.
I began this brief history with a question: What created the tribes? The best answer I can give is this: The tribes emerged out of the greed, hubris and lack of wisdom that pervaded the intellectual, political, communications and high technology social classes from 1992 - 2012.
The left-behind working class needed a savior. Having been primed and nurtured for years by sharp, repetitive rhetoric from conservative talk radio and cable news, it was ready to reject the prescriptions of the left, which by this time had moved on to loftier, utopian social dogma. Furthermore, by the end of the Obama administration it was clear that traditional Republicans were offering nothing that resonated with anyone who showers at night rather than in the morning. Still basking in the fading glow of Reagan-era priorities and the brief 9/11 afterglow, aging Republican leadership simply didn’t understand any of this. And so a constituency was born, ripe for the taking.
Meanwhile, an opposing tribe was forming out of progressive overreach. Financially insulated from the worst of the 2008 crash, and having elected an historic figure to the presidency, the intellectual left quickly consolidated victories on various fronts of its social agenda. For example, in the blink of an eye, nearly all Democratic politicians forgot their near-unanimous prior consensus on civil unions, and instead rallied behind universal same-sex marriage. Aggressive lawyers staged lawsuits that targeted any type of conscientious objection to this new reality. A bit later in the story, the Me Too movement — at its core a necessary corrective to disturbing patterns of sexual abuse seared into the fabric of many institutions — grew into something different. Many men were left wondering if and how it would ever be possible to express interest in a woman again. Driven by extremist academics, important progress in the awareness of racial issues metastasized into the exaggeration and misapplication of critical theory. Meanwhile, a small group of ideological doctors in Europe, bearing little or no scientific evidence, convinced the American medical and educational establishments that prepubescent boys and girls could be identified as transgender and should receive medical interventions.
These and other issues coalesced into what some observers call a progressive “omnicause”. Progressives united around these issues to a remarkable degree, fueled by the universal approval of the mainstream media, with discipline within the movement strictly enforced across social networks.
By 2015, with an election year on the horizon, the tribes were assembling.
On one side was a leaderless working class, frustrated and powerless, left homeless by two decades of re-engineering of the global economy, as executed by affluent, powerful people with a quasi-religious, almost mystical faith in the power of markets to ease human suffering without regulation. The working people wanted their old lives back. They wanted secure employment, community, purpose and some hope that they would not be spending their retirements begging on street corners, their kids dead from opioids. Unfortunately, like a snowball, their tribe began to collect debris, as various subgroups with their own dubious grievances toward elite culture and institutions detected a useful bandwagon. And so elements of jingoism, racism, antisemitism, militia mentality and conspiracy mongering joined the fray, quickly becoming the most audible voices of the movement.
On the other side was a disciplined, professional army of intellectuals, confident after eight years of power in Washington, intolerant of dissent, leading a progressive-minded sect of the population into what it considered a proper, next-generation rethinking of what it means to be human in a rapidly evolving secular landscape. Old modes of thought would not be tolerated. Sex was an illusion; gender was a complex and fluid expression of self. Whiteness was a symbol of old world oppression. Shells of incumbent religions would be quietly allowed, provided that they would assent to the new secular orthodoxy. Many Christian churches became social justice centers adorned with crosses.
With the armies now assembled on the field, all that was needed was a spark, the casus belli.
This was the state of affairs when Donald Trump entered the political fray for real in 2015, spewing anti-immigrant rhetoric on the way down his golden escalator. As it turned out, this was the key. Trump’s initial focus on immigration was precisely the way for a candidate — a television star — to create the one thing that will always unite an oppressed group: that is, a scapegoat. Trump stumbled on this epiphany early on, I believe by accident, but he soon recognized that he was onto something big. He knew that this would be an imprinting process, like ducklings attaching to their mother. Once this new and desperate constituency imprinted on him, he would have them for life. Including the debris that was now accumulating rapidly within the coalition.
Since that time, politicians have been pursuing one or the other of these two tribal constituencies, hardened by new internet technologies, mostly because our broken primary system requires their support. If the politicians continue to genuflect, the constituencies have no reason to alter course. And so our politics is now largely driven by a binary that emerged from, on one hand, a remaking of the international order that abandoned large swaths of the population, and, on the other hand, the further development of the progressive understanding of what it means to be human, which had been refined within academia over many decades.
The key takeaway from this understanding of how we got here is that the situation is not sustainable. Our culture, politics and economics are in an unstable feedback loop that must end soon, or we will end as a people. In 2020 the country elected a person who was clearly on the road to being non compos mentis. For four years the country was effectively run by an inner cabal of progressive ideologues, who practiced their own form of lawlessness. The country is fortunate that nothing particularly terrible happened during this time, at least on American shores (though Vladimir Putin and Hamas certainly seized perceived opportunities). The situation was obvious to most observers by the summer of 2024, as a presidential debate catastrophe removed any doubt. But America no longer has the political capacity to respond with steadying hands; we simply push harder in the other direction. And so the country re-elected a lawless man with retribution seared into his soul, supported by a cadre of dystopian revolutionaries whose concept of the world is as divorced from reality as the faux reality of its modern progressive opposition.
Someone has to break the cycle. And the time to do that is now. Republicans in Congress need to see that the Trump Era is coming to an end either way — next year, effectively if not formally. Knowing that his time is short, the man is now threatening to inflict serious and potentially fatal damage to critical international and domestic institutions. He is no longer fit to serve. It is time for the country to move on, not only from Donald Trump, but from the extreme elements of the tribes that have made him possible. I call on all reasonable, free-thinking Republicans and Democrats to join in ending this period in American history, and commit to returning this great nation to its roots in community, service, innovation and law. And this process starts by removing this President before he does something profoundly stupid. Because next year might be too late.
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