To statements like “Surely the voters didn’t vote for this?” I’ve lately been arguing “specifically, no; generally, yes.”

It’s extraordinarily difficult to ignore or get around the type of person Trump is. (Well, difficult for some of us. If you click that hyperlink, be sure to read the addendum.) For those of us unwilling to kid ourselves about who he is and what his reelection means, it’s hard to call any of the things he’s been doing surprising, even though no one actually knew what would happen. And that holds in a more nefarious sense for the ones who seem all too happy to kid themselves about Trump. They may not have known exactly what he was going to do, but neither have they seemed the least bit surprised or troubled.

USAID is a perfect example. I don’t know one Trump supporter who had USAID on the brain last year. Now, having learned what the acronym stands for all of two weeks ago, they lecture me about it, celebrating the chaos unleashed on it, without any regard for the truth let alone for sympathy, and happily anticipate its undoing.

Did they knowingly vote for this? Technically, no. Were they hoping for something like this? Possibly, even likely. Either way, are they happy about what they’re seeing and hearing? Yeah, I think they are. It makes sense to say they voted for it. 

Same goes for the rest of the nominees and all the other chaos they bring. Each and every one of them has been scratching the itchy ears of a long-standing, deeply rooted element of the American character. (Lots of people, some more honest about it than others, despise the notion of sending even a single tax-dollar overseas as long as there is one leaky pipe somewhere in our own country. When people say chant “America first!” not only should you believe them, you should also hear what they’re really saying: “America — period!”)

To avoid any appearance of mind reading, we can say it differently and see the same thing: Specifically, I didn’t vote against this because I didn’t know exactly what was going to happen. But generally speaking, yes, I voted against precisely this. 

Or again: specifically, no; generally, yes. But I seem a minority opinion here.

I quoted Francis Fukuyama the other day — “The United States under Donald Trump is not retreating into isolationism. It is actively joining the authoritarian camp.” (I sent the piece along to a few longtime “conservative” folks, adding “Charles Krauthammer is turning in his grave.” As I’ve said before, a reference to Krauthammer’s grave seems to pull more weight than a reference to the other one.)

Fukuyama closed that piece with this:

Don’t tell me that the American people voted for such a world or such a country last November. They weren’t paying attention, and should be prepared to see their own country and world transformed beyond recognition.

… Well, shit.

Far be it from me to even think of entering the ring with Fukuyama. I agree with his piece entirely, and I think our situation is exactly as he describes it in that post.

Hoooweverrr…

If he means by that last statement that they literally weren’t paying attention, well then I don’t know what he’s talking about. But if he means “they’re getting it all wrong” or “they’re missing what’s really going on” or “their sources of information are shitty sources of information designed to mislead them and distract them” — then sure, I’m with him. But why not just say that? Why must everyone use the same useless “they didn’t vote for this” language, a phrase which, by my reading, seems capable only of disillusioning and deluding the people who use it? I want that phrase killed with fire. And as far as I can tell, there’s no reason Fukuyama needed to end his post with it.

I previously added the disclaimer that I don’t think any of my argument undoes Jonah Goldberg’s caution about assuming Trump supporters share my view of Trump and voted for him anyway; they definitely don’t. But while we may be looking at the same events, there are, as they see it, different facts attached to these events, as well as different preceding histories and different emphases within those histories — and this on top of what are genuine lies and falsehoods, however genuinely they are thought to be true.

So they’re paying attention, alright. But they’re very often paying attention to figureheads who, as Hannah Arendt would put it, “deal in intangibles whose concrete reality is at a minimum.” (How many people does that not describe?)

The journalist Philip Gibbs once wrote about a system that stoked fear and created enemies out of “human beings who prayed to the same God, loved the same joys of life, and had no hatred of one another except as it had been lighted and inflamed by their governors, their philosophers, and their newspapers.” From to Rush Limbaugh to Tucker Carlson, from Pat Robertson to John MacArthur, from John Mearsheimer to Victor Davis Hanson, that’s an inflamed process that preceded last year’s election by decades, and one that didn’t stop the day after the election. (And this is only to speak of the Right; the Left has it’s own brand of the same.)

It’s also worth remembering – or being informed of – the fact that these are usually normal, good-natured people who genuinely believe that the election of 2020 was in fact stolen from Donald Trump. And it doesn’t just include the small-town, blue-collar workers I usually have in mind. I know nurses and doctors, CRNAs and anesthesiologists, members of the “educated elite,” who certainly believe it as well. Even in recent months, I have been told by a surgeon, and I quote, “If you don’t believe that the 2020 election was stolen, you’re an idiot.” (Even as recent as last week, I heard a neurosurgeon say he was impressed by Trumps “maturity” in handling the Epstein files that were set to be released that day.)

As Fred Clark aptly noted in 2018, sometimes the weird fringe is the biggest part. He closed that essay with the observation that Mark Noll’s 1994 The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, “one of the most perceptive descriptions of white evangelicalism ever produced,” was a book that “everybody” read. It sold 35,000 copies. Clark contrasts this with “the world’s worst books,” the Left Behind series, which sold over 65 million copies. “I’m not suggesting that selling only 35,000 copies means it wasn’t really read by ‘everybody’ in mainstream evangelicalism,” Clark adds. “I’m suggesting that means it was. That’s the problem.”

Maybe when Fukuyama says “they weren’t paying attention” what he means to say is that they weren’t paying attention to him. That would track. I like Fukuyama when he comes across my radar, and I regard him highly — very highly. And there are lots of people who I read who read Francis Fukuyama. But nobody I know reads him. Let me repeat that: Not one single person I know reads Francis Fukuyama. It would be difficult, in fact, for me to find someone in any of my circles who would even recognize his name.

So the real question is, Who is it who is not paying attention?

Leo Tolstoy:

We ourselves carefully create such a life, taking bread and labor away from the work-worn people. We live sumptuously, as if there were no connection whatever between the dying washerwoman, child-prostitute, women worn out by making cigarettes and all the intense labor around us to which their unnourished strength is inadequate. We do not want to see the fact that if there were not our idle, luxurious, depraved lives, there would not be this labor, disproportioned to the strength of people, and that if there were not this labor we could not go on living in the same way.

It appears to us that their sufferings are one thing and our lives another, and that we, living as we do, are innocent and pure as doves. We read the description of the lives of the Romans, and wonder at the inhumanity of a heartless Lucullus, who gorged himself with fine dishes and delicious wines while people were starving: we shake our heads and wonder at the barbarism of our grandfathers,—the serf-owners,—who provided themselves with orchestras and theaters, and employed whole villages to keep up their gardens. From the height of our greatness we wonder at their inhumanity. We read the words of Isaiah v., 8:

“Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no room, and ye be made to dwell alone in the midst of the land. […]

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!

Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight! […]

Which justify the wicked for reward, and take away the righteousness of the righteous from him.”

We read these words, and it seems to us that they have nothing to do with us.

We read in the Gospel, Matthew iii., 10: “And even now is the ax laid unto the root of the tree: every tree therefore that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire,” and we are quite sure that the good tree bearing good fruit is we ourselves, and that those words are said, not to us, but to some other bad men.

We read the words of Isaiah vi., 10:

“Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn again, and be healed. Then said I, Lord, how long? And he answered, Until cities be waste without inhabitant, and houses without man, and the land become utterly waste.”

We read, and are quite assured that this wonderful thing has not happened to us, but to some other people. For this very reason we do not see that this has happened to us, and is taking place with us. We do not hear, we do not see, and do not understand with our heart.

But why has it so happened?

How can a man who considers himself to be,—we will not say a Christian or an educated and humane man,—but simply a man not entirely devoid of reason and of conscience,—how can he, I say, live in such a way, taking no part in the struggle of all mankind for life, only swallowing up the labor of others struggling for existence, and by his own claims increasing the labor of those who struggle and the number of those who perish in the struggle?

Such men abound in our so-called Christian and cultured world; and not only do they abound in our world but the very ideal of the men of our Christian, cultured world, is to get the largest amount of property,—that is, wealth,—which secures all comforts and idleness of life by freeing its possessors from the struggle for existence, and enabling them, as much as possible, to profit by the labor of those brothers of theirs who perish in that struggle.

How could men have fallen into such astounding error?

How could they have come to such a state that they can neither see nor hear nor understand with their heart what is so clear, obvious, and certain?

One need only think for a moment in order to be terrified at the way our lives contradict what we profess to believe, whether we be Christian or only humane educated people.

Christopher Sanford’s case for Cricket is excellent. And reminds me of Stanley Hauerwas’s case baseball.

Here’s Sanford:

Cricket is surely the perfect corrective for a TikTok generation characterized by its need for instant gratification and its ever shorter attention span. At least as enacted in its longer form, it’s a sport that demands patience and perseverance. Imagine a single continuing contest where you leave the field on a Monday evening feeling mildly apprehensive about your team’s prospects, but then return to see a collective rallying of spirits by Wednesday afternoon, leading to an ultimate moment of fulfillment the following Friday lunchtime. That’s an international test match for you. Life itself can be measured out by the ebb and flow of such an event, and by the manner in which we, whether as players or spectators, react to it. Cricket can be a hard, and sometimes even quite a thrilling, affair. But it is also a game of profound thought, whose appeal doesn’t necessarily rely on a fixation with winning, and, as such, it is a thing of deep beauty in our presently debased world. […]

Cricket teaches us those virtues of patience, endurance, and magnanimity that give the sport a wider dominion in life than any mere obsession with individual statistics or results. Whether a public bred on our mainstream American sports can accommodate itself to such values should make for a fascinating spectacle in the years ahead.

And here’s Hauerwas in his book The Character of Virtue. He writes to his godson, “Baseball is America’s greatest gift to civilization. It is a slow game of failure. If you win half the time, that’s considered very good.”

That baseball is the great American sport indicates that there is hope even for America. Americans pride themselves on speed, but speed is often just another name for violence. And as I suggested in some of my earlier letters to you, America is a very violent country. That we are so has everything to do with our impatience. But we do have baseball as an alternative to war.

He then quotes David James Duncan in his novel The Brothers K:

I cherish a theory I once heard propounded by G. Q.Durham that professional baseball is inherently antiwar. The most overlooked cause of war, his theory runs, is that it is so damned interesting. It takes hard effort, skill, love and a little luck to make times of peace consistently interesting. About all it takes to make war interesting is a life. The appeal of trying to kill others without being killed yourself is that it brings suspense, terror, honor, disgrace, rage, tragedy, treachery and occasionally even heroism within range of guys who, in times of peace, might lead lives of unmitigated blandness. But baseball is one activity that is able to generate suspense and excitement on a national scale, just like war. And baseball can only be played in peace. Hence G. Q’s thesis that pro ballplayers—little as some of them want to hear it—are basically a bunch of unusually well-coordinated guys working hard and artfully to prevent wars, by making peace more interesting.

Hauerwas adds, near the closing of this letter to his godson,

Your father may well try to convince you that some game called cricket is actually more a game of peace than baseball, but you’ll discover that baseball is far more compelling. At the very least, I promise to take you to ball games in order for you to learn from baseball the habits of peace. Which is but a reminder that the patience of nonviolence is not an ideal, but rather lies at the heart of the practices and habits that sustain our everyday life. As I’ve suggested, our very bodies were given to us so that we might learn to be patient.

Whether it’s baseball or cricket, I’m certainly persuaded.

One more quote from Hauerwas, which precedes the above in the same letter:

My point here is that you will be brought up in the church, and you will be frustrated by the people who make up the church. You may even become as angry as I am with other Christians. But you must also be patient, which means you must be as ready to forgive as to be forgiven. The community necessary to be the church takes time—time determined by patience. You’ll be frustrated by the time it takes for people to be who God would have us be, but remember that God has given us all the time in the world so that we might be patient with one another…

…Patience, at least the kind of patience I’ve tried to suggest is the very heart of God, seems like a pretty heavy burden to put on a child. But if you think about it, it’s also a pretty heavy burden to put on someone as impatient as I am. Which is just a way of reminding us both that the virtues aren’t recommendations for individual achievement. The truth is that we can be patient only through being made patient through the patient love of others. That is the love I see surrounding you, making it possible for you to begin to acquire patience.

Tom Nichols:

I felt physically sick watching the president of the United States yell at a brave ally, fulminating in the Oval Office as if he were an addled old man shaking his fist at a television. Zelensky has endured tragedies, and risked his life, in ways that men such as Trump and Vance cannot imagine. (Vance served as a public-relations officer in the most powerful military in the world; he has never had to huddle in a bunker during a Russian bombardment.) I am ashamed for my nation; even if Congress acts to support and aid Ukraine, it cannot restore the American honor lost today.

But no matter how disgusted anyone might be at Trump and Vance’s behavior, the strategic reality is that this meeting is a catastrophe for the United States and the free world. America’s alliances are now in danger, and should be: Trump is openly, and gleefully, betraying everything America has tried to defend since the defeat of the Axis 80 years ago. The entire international order of peace and security is now in danger, as Russian autocrats, after slaughtering innocent people for three years, look forward to enjoying the spoils of their invasion instead of standing trial for their crimes. (Shortly after Trump dismissed Zelensky from the White House, Putin’s homunculus, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, posted on X: “The insolent pig finally got a proper slap down in the Oval Office.”)

Friday, February 28, 2025, will go into the history books as one of the grimmest days in American diplomacy, the beginning of a long-term disaster that every American, every U.S. ally, and anyone who cares about the future of democracy will have to endure. With the White House’s betrayal of Ukraine capping a month of authoritarian chaos in America, Putin, along with other dictators around the world, can finally look at Trump with confidence and think: one of us.

I just want to say that I’ve heard and read a dozen thoughtful, pro-Ukraine, anti-Trump folks call the whole Oval Office debacle beyond shameful, defending Zelensky to the hilt, while still a) describing it as a shouting match between Zelensky and Trump/Vance, and b) conceding some misfortune in the situation because Zelensky “does not speak fluent English.” And it’s bullshit. I’ve watched the video several times — with absolute, physically sick horror — and not only did Zelensky never raise his voice, but he was calm, measured, and well spoken against an absolute ambush by two giant, ignorant, thoughtless, poorly spoken, self-righteous, pandering, spoiled, morally gangrenous fuckheads who were controlled by one thing alone: their inability to hide their violent hatred of this man.

Though this time it’s coming up a little emotionally short for my anger toward the petty behavior (I will not offend children by calling it childish) of our two highest and democratically electedofficials, I turn again to Simone Weil:

But the will to humiliate the defeated enemy which revealed itself so loathsomely everywhere … was enough to cure me once for all of that naive sort of patriotism, I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Yesterday, I pulled Miroslav Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace off the shelf, a random act impossible to regret.

Here are a few things from his chapter on “Embrace.”

In The Killing of Sarajevo, a soldier in the Serbian army says to his best friend living in Sarajevo, the city which was, even as they spoke, being pounded with Serbian shells: “There is no choice. There are no inno-cents” (Vukovic 1993, 41). The two claims seem inseparable: since there is “no choice” —since, as the same friend will later say, it is “either us or them” — there can be “no innocents,” and since there are “no innocents” there must have been “no choice.” Though it has a ring of truth, the logic is faulty. Within the vast expanse of noninnocence whose frontiers recede with the horizon, there are choices to be made, important choices about justice and oppression, truth and deception, violence and non-violence, about the will to embrace or to exclude, ultimately choices about life and death. The “no choice” world in which people’s behavior is determined by social environments and past victimizations is not the world we inhabit; it is a world the perpetrators would like us to inhabit because it grants an advance absolution for any wrongdoing they desire to commit. Suspicion is called for when, from behind a smoking howitzer, we hear the words, “There is no choice.”

As it is undeniable that “there is choice,” so it is also undeniable that our choices are made under inner and outer constraints, pressures, and captivities. We choose evil; but evil also “chooses” us and exerts its terrible power over us.

“Caught in the system of exclusion as if in some invisible snare,” says Volf, “people behave according to its perverted logic.” He goes on to describe what he calls a “background cacophony of evil.”

This is the low-intensity evil of the way “things work” or the way “things simply are,” the exclusionary vapors of institutional or communal cultures under which many suffer but for which no one is responsible and about which all complain but no one can target. This all-pervasive low-intensity evil rejuvenates itself by engendering belief in its own immorality and imposes itself by generating a sense of its own ineluctability.

But it does not always remain there; these are background flames that can be stoked into bonfires. This will sound very familiar:

In extraordinary situations and under extraordinary directors certain themes from the “background cacophony” are picked up, orchestrated into a bellicose musical, and played up. “Historians” — national, communal, or personal interpreters of the past — trumpet the double theme of the former glory and past victimization; “economists” join in with the accounts of present exploitation and great economic potentials; “political scientists” add the theme of the growing imbalance of power, of steadily giving ground, of losing control over what is rightfully ours; “cultural anthropologists” bring in the dangers of the loss of identity and extol the singular value of our personal or cultural gifts, capable of genuinely enriching the outside world; “politicians” pick up all four themes and weave them into a high-pitched aria about the threats to vital interests posed by the other who is therefore the very incarnation of evil; finally the “priests” enter in a solemn procession and accompany all this with a soothing background chant that offers to any whose consciences may have been bothered the assurance that God is on our side and that our enemy is the enemy of God and therefore an adversary of everything that is true, good, and beautiful.

As this bellicose musical with reinforcing themes is broadcast through the media, resonances are created with the background cacophony of evil that permeates the culture of a community, and the community finds itself singing the music and marching to its tune. To refuse to sing and march, to protest the madness of the spectacle, appears irrational and irresponsible, naive and cowardly, treacherous L toward one’s own and dangerously sentimental toward the evil enemy.

Of course, Volf is not interested mainly in describing but in prescribing. As a Christian, he is advocating, he says, “for a nonfinal reconciliation based on a vision of [God’s] reconciliation that cannot be undone.”

Enter the “politics of the pure heart,” without which, says Volf, “every politics of liberation will trip over its own feet.”

[E]ven under the onslaught of extreme brutality, an inner realm of freedom to shape one’s self must be defended as a sanctuary of a person’s humanity. Though victims may not be able to prevent hate from springing to life, for their own sake they can and must refuse to give it nourishment and strive to weed it out. If victims do not repent today they will become perpetrators tomorrow who, in their self-deceit, will seek to exculpate their misdeeds on account of their own victimization.

The word “whataboutism” gets thrown around a lot these days, and for good reason: it’s an old idea and perpetually rehashed in the foreground cacophony of evil. Against it — facing it every time we read the news and every time we respond to the news — it’s worth asking ourselves, What are we doing with that inner realm of freedom, that sanctuary of our humanity that is granted to us every day?

This chapter also contains this beautiful reflection from Volf on the imprecatory Psalms.

Philip Gibbs:

These studies of mine, of what happened on both sides of the shifting lines in the Somme, must be as horrible to read as they were to write. But they are less than the actual truth, for no pen will ever in one book, or in hundreds, give the full record of the individual agony, the broken heart-springs, the soul-shock as well as the shell-shock, of that frightful struggle in which, on one side and the other, two million men were engulfed. Modern civilization was wrecked on those fire-blasted fields, though they led to what we called “Victory.” More died there than the flower of our youth and German manhood. The Old Order of the world died there, because many men who came alive out of that conflict were changed, and vowed not to tolerate a system of thought which had led up to such a monstrous massacre of human beings who prayed to the same God, loved the same joys of life, and had no hatred of one another except as it had been lighted and inflamed by their governors, their philosophers, and their newspapers. The German soldier cursed the militarism which had plunged him into that horror. The British soldier cursed the German as the direct cause of all his trouble, but looked back on his side of the lines and saw an evil there which was also his enemy—the evil of a secret diplomacy which juggled with the lives of humble men so that war might be sprung upon them without their knowledge or consent, and the evil of rulers who hated German militarism not because of its wickedness, but because of its strength in rivalry and the evil of a folly in the minds of men which had taught them to regard war as a glorious adventure, and patriotism as the right to dominate other peoples, and liberty as a catch—word of politicians in search of power. After the Somme battles there were many other battles as bloody and terrible, but they only confirmed greater numbers of men in the faith that the old world had been wrong in its “make-up” and wrong in its religion of life. Lip service to Christian ethics was not good enough as an argument for this. Either the heart of the world must be changed by a real obedience to the gospel of Christ or Christianity must be abandoned for a new creed which would give better results between men and nations. There could be no reconciling of bayonet-drill and high explosives with the words “Love one another.” Or if bayonet-drill and high-explosive force were to be the rule of life in preparation for another struggle such as this, then at least let men put hypocrisy away and return to the primitive law of the survival of the fittest in a jungle world subservient to the king of beasts. The devotion of military chaplains to the wounded, their valor, their decorations for gallantry under fire, their human comradeship and spiritual sincerity, would not bridge the gulf in the minds of many soldiers between a gospel of love and this argument by bayonet and bomb, gas-shell and high velocity, blunderbuss, club, and trench-shovel. Some time or other, when German militarism acknowledged defeat by the break of its machine or by the revolt of its people—not until then—there must be a new order of things, which would prevent such another massacre in the fair fields of life, and that could come only by a faith in the hearts of many peoples breaking down old barriers of hatred and reaching out to one another in a fellowship of common sense based on common interests, and inspired by an ideal higher than this beast-like rivalry of nations. So thinking men thought and talked. So said the soldier—poets who wrote from the trenches. So said many onlookers. The simple soldier did not talk like that unless he were a Frenchman. Our men only began to talk like that after the war—as many of them are now talking—and the revolt of the spirit, vague but passionate, against the evil that had produced this devil’s trap of war, and the German challenge, was subconscious as they sat in their dugouts and crowded in their ditches in the battles of the Somme.

Bret Stephens:

The vice president’s speech last week at the Munich Security Conference — in which the man who refuses to say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election lectured his audience about Europe’s retreat from democratic values — combined with his meeting with the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party, has caused a scandal because it is a scandal, a monument of arrogance based on a foundation of hypocrisy. […]

…the important point is this: Much like a certain British prime minister long ago, an American vice president went to Munich to carry on about his idealism while breaking bread with those who would obliterate democratic ideals. A disgrace.

Francis Fukuyama:

The United States under Donald Trump is not retreating into isolationism. It is actively joining the authoritarian camp, supporting right-wing authoritarians around the world from Vladimir Putin to Viktor Orbán to Nayib Bukele to Narendra Modi.… How can we tell Russia and China not to continue their conquests when we are busy trying to absorb Panama and Greenland? These foreign policy moves are completely consistent with the Trump administration’s assault on the rule of law domestically, its strengthening of executive power and its weakening of checks and balances at every point.

Joseph Goebbels, published in Der Angriff, 30 April 1928:

We are an anti-parliamentarian party that for good reasons rejects the Weimar constitution and its republican institutions. We oppose a fake democracy that treats the intelligent and the foolish, the industrious and the lazy, in the same way. We see in the present system of majorities and organized irresponsibility the main cause of our steadily increasing miseries. So why do we want to be in the Reichstag?

We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with democracy’s weapons. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem. It does not concern us. Any way of bringing about the revolution is fine by us.

If we succeed in getting sixty or seventy of our party’s agitators and organizers elected to the various parliaments, the state itself will pay for our fighting organization. That is amusing and entertaining enough to be worth trying.[…

…When democracy is near its end it will resort openly to the terror of capitalistic dictatorship that it ordinarily uses covertly. But that will not happen for some time, and in the meanwhile the fighters for our faith will enjoy parliamentary immunity long enough to broaden our fighting front such that shutting them up will not be as easy as democracy would like it to be.[…]

We are coming neither as friends or neutrals. We come as enemies! As the wolf attacks the sheep, so come we.

You are not among your friends any longer! You will not enjoy having us among you!