Bret Stephens (emphasis added):
There’s a guiding logic here — and it isn’t to “own the libs,” in the sense of driving Trump’s opponents to fits of moralistic rage (even if, from the president-elect’s perspective, that’s an ancillary benefit). It’s to perpetuate the spirit of cynicism, which is the core of Trumpism. If truth has no currency, you cannot use it. If power is the only coin of the realm, you’d better be on the side of it. If the government is run by cads and lackeys, you’ll need to make your peace with them.
Make your peace, indeed.
Reflecting on Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, Martha Nussbaum points out that, up to a point, the pressure that Agamemnon felt to appease Artemis by sacrificing his daughter, and thereby resuming the campaign commanded by Zeus, had reflected a great internal struggle that was not unlike that of Abraham and Isaac. “We might, then,” says Nussbaum, “expect to see next the delicate struggle between love and pious obligation that we sense in Abraham’s equivocal words to Isaac, followed by a sacrifice executed with horror and reluctance.”
Recall that when Isaac, seeing no animal, asked what was to be sacrificed, Abraham said, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” Agamemnon is faced with a similarly awful choice, but without a happy ending. (Neither Zeus nor Artemis will be stepping in to provide the sacrifice.) But it’s not the different ending, or even the different narrative, that Nussbaum is concerned with; it’s the passion involved. No matter how resolved Abraham is to obey God, he is still essentially reluctant and grieved. Not so with Agamemnon. Rather, as Nussbaum explains, “something strange takes place.”
The Chorus had already prepared us for it in introducing their narrative: ‘Blaming no prophet, he blew together with the winds of luck that struck against him’ (186-8). The bold wind metaphor coined by the Chorus (the word sumpneō is used here, apparently, for the first time in Greek) expresses an unnatural cooperation of internal with external forces. Voicing no blame of the prophet or his terrible message, Agamemnon now begins to cooperate inwardly with necessity, arranging his feelings to accord with his fortune. From the moment he makes his decision, itself the best he could have made, he strangely turns himself into a collaborator, a willing victim.
At some point, Agamemnon ceases to blame or to justify, to understand or, it seems, even to lament. Instead, he begins “cooperating inwardly with [the winds of] necessity, arranging his feelings to accord with his fortune.” It wasn’t just that he made a difficult decision; “his attitude,” says Nussbaum, “toward the decision itself seems to have changed with the making of it.”
The thought of sumpneō should be a haunting one.
In the run-up to the election this year, I heard from a number of people about how a coalition had been formed/was forming around Donald Trump. The tone ranged from matter-of-fact pride to something more like a praised inevitability. (It was a little eerie, if I’m being honest.) Among Republicans in 2016, I knew a lot of reluctant Trump voters, and a few reluctant abstainers; in 2024, I know none. In fact, I am hard-pressed to honestly insert the word “reluctant” anywhere near these folks.
Postman-laden disclaimers about “The Media,” and filtered information, and what exactly people “know” about Trump and the Republican Party notwithstanding — there is a frightening, damning, nearly 2500-year-old warning found in Aeschylus, for anyone with ears still left to hear.
The Chorus goes on to give a most explicit description of the rationalizing — and, nota bene, therefore, passion-altering — description of what it means to “collaborate with the winds of misfortune” (emphasis added):
And when he had slipped his neck through the yoke-strap of necessity, blowing his thought in an impious change of direction, from that moment he changed his mind and turned to thinking the all-daring. For men are made bold by base-counselling wretched madness.