Bidenomics

By Finbarr Curtis

"We are very proud of Bidenomics."

Swing state voters saw Kamala Harris's endorsement of Joe Biden's economic policies many, many times in Trump's campaign ads. The clip was not only cringeworthy in retrospect. Harris seemed to be cringe laughing at the time, as if to say: "Okay, we know there is no systematic economic philosophy called Bidenomics but we are having some goofy fun with this."

In the wake of the 2024 election, one rare point of universal agreement among political analysts was that voters were not proud of Bidenomics. Hearing that inflation motivated Trump support, political analysts once again discovered that: "It's the economy, stupid." Post-election commentators asserted that pre-election commentators had overstated Trump's existential threat to democracy. Some took Trump's electoral gains across demographic groups as proof that his appeal lay in promises to fix the economy rather than in nativist rhetoric or authoritarian ambitions.

This was not Trump's interpretation. On the campaign trail, he was irritated with advice that he should focus on economic policy. His Madison Square Garden rally was awash in racial, religious, and nationalist grievance. His proposed cabinet appointments are a motley crew of characters whose primary job qualification is to own the libs. 

The reality is that while post-election analysis often fixes on an issue, there is no one thing that motivates voters. Some were drawn to Trump's offensive style while others were repulsed. While Trump made inroads among African American voters, most rejected him. The gender gap suggests that abortion along with Trump's misogynist rhetoric influenced many women. 

People voted for Trump for different, and even contradictory, reasons. His coalition was made up of at least three groups. The first was his base, the loyal Trump supporters variously described as illiberal, or populist, or nationalist, or fascist, or MAGA, or just plain patriotic. The second are Republicans who are no fans of Trump but would not vote Democrat. The third are swing voters who were unhappy with Bidenomics.

Despite their votes, members of the second and third groups often share the view that Trump is a terrible human being. Even many in Trump's base distinguish between their political support and their disapproval of his personal immorality and offensive speech. As I have argued previously, Trump's profane style and willingness to flout democratic norms dramatizes the moral impoverishment of politics to people convinced that liberalism has destroyed the government and that emergency measures are required to protect faith, family, and nation.

Harris's warning against fascism backfired by reinforcing Trump's brand as a profane and immoral strongman who defied ordinary democratic politics to fix the economy and broken government. This could have been especially true for late deciding voters who had not yet decided who to vote for, but had decided that Trump was a bad person.

Georgetown Alumnius

 By Finbarr Curtis

One lesson we have learned from the current president is that an effective way to defend implausible statements is to make more of them. By the time your critics have earnestly debunked one false claim you've moved on to ten more. This becomes overwhelming. People get worn down as political debates lose focus and any sense of proportion. For that matter, when the investigators and fact checkers start to scrutinize every single thing you say it can look like a conspiracy of those out to get you.

Most importantly, doubling down on implausible assertions makes clear that you are not playing a truth game. You are playing a power game. A power game is a test of will. Harnessing the sheer force of bluster and a refusal to concede any point, you are playing to win.

Supreme Court nominee, archetypal 1980s high school movie villain, and semi-sentient beer keg Brett Kavanaugh followed this playbook before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Critics have begun to list the false claims Kavanaugh made in his testimony. These include his desexualized redefinitions of "boof" or "devil's triangle," his assertion that the society of vomiting enthusiasts known as Beach Week Ralph Club was about his intolerance for spicy food, and so on.

Rather than sort through all of the lies, I want to focus on one. I was struck by Kavanaugh's explanation of the words "Renate Alumnius" in his yearbook. Several classmates identified this as a cryptic reference to a group of boys who claimed to have slept with a student named Renate. After learning about the yearbook, the woman stated: "the insinuation is horrible, hurtful and simply untrue."

Kavanaugh could have apologized. He could have agreed that the insinuation was untrue, and was instead a crude secret joke among boys pretending to have sexual experiences they never had. But he didn't say this. Instead, he offered the following explanation:

One of our good female friends who we would admire and went to dances with had her name used on the yearbook page with the term ‘alumnus.’ That yearbook reference was clumsily intended to show affection, and that she was one of us. But in this circus, the media’s interpreted the term is related to sex. It was not related to sex.

Wait. What? Stop. This is absurd. To believe Kavanaugh is to go to cuckoo land. It's not just the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee who did not believe this; no one did. There is no way on God's good earth that these Georgetown Prep students used their blurbs full of innuendo about sex and alcohol to express their mutual admiration for the intelligence and good manners of a friend.

Kavanaugh's explanation for Renate Alumnius was not intended to persuade anyone. Rather, it is a useful public story. Such stories are often banal conventions that allow people to save face, as when powerful men who are pushed out of leadership positions explain that they need to spend more time with their families. No one believes these stories, but they avoid an indelicate subject in public.

The Best People

Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen, aka The Best People

By Finbarr Curtis

The "best people" are breaking lots of laws these days. It's not every day that multiple people from a sitting president's campaign team are found to be felons. August 21st was special, however. Michael Cohen, the Trump lawyer, porn-star whisperer, and wannabe Sopranos consigliere, fessed up to 8 felony counts of tax fraud, bank fraud, and campaign finance violations. Ostrich fetishist and Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort got the bad news that a jury convicted him on 8 counts of tax fraud, bank fraud, and failing to report a foreign bank account.

Oops.

All of this is ironic if you took seriously Donald Trump's boast that he hires the best people. The lawlessness of Cohen and Manafort, following on the catch-me-if-you-can brazen illegality of past appointees like Michael Flynn, Tom Price, and Scott Pruitt, would be yet more evidence of hypocrisy from a man who ran on a law-and-order platform.

But that depends on what you mean by law. The Trump team might be hypocrites if you believe that law should be a set of predictable, consistent, and transparent rules that apply to everyone in the same way. In American history, however, calls for law and order mean almost exactly the opposite of this. Rather than treat everyone equally, law-and-order advocates want to harness the force of law to maximize protections of their own security and property. Law that provides equal protection for all citizens requires the sort of methodical, bureaucratic administration that law-and-order proponents hate. This kind of law appears slow and weak to people who demand swift justice. It's the red tape that reigns in the would-be Dirty Harry's of the world.

Trump clarified what he meant by law and order when Lester Holt, the moderator of the first presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, asked the candidates how they would heal racial divisions in America. Trump responded: "Well, first of all Secretary Clinton doesn't want to use a couple of words and that’s law and order. And we need law and order. If we don't have it, we’re not going to have a country." This answer was remarkable because the question did not ask how the candidates planned to address crime. Law and order was Trump's response to racial divisions.

Habermas Is Dead (He's Not, But Still)

Jürgen the Bear

 By Kerry Mitchell 

Ever since Jürgen Habermas, the public sphere has been pretty boring. I’m not talking about the drama that plays out in the public sphere. That drama can be as exciting as anything that happens. But the public-ness of the drama, the way in which the drama is given shape as public as opposed to private, that is a boring process. To be clear, I’m not talking about the process being boring. One can be excited to look at how that process works or not. Rather, I’m talking about the process doing the boring—not being boring, but boring. I’m talking about the process of making public as a process of boring.

Often such a line of thought highlights the civility of public discourse, the rationalization and sanitization of its subject matter, the seriousness and normalcy that it lends. Of course one could counter that making public often sensationalizes, shocks, or calculatingly manipulates to generate interest. To one who would argue in such a way I say, Jesus, God! Are you completely fucking stupid?

Notice how the counter to the counter does not bore. It excites with outrage, transgression, aggression, not so much appealing to the passions as slapping them—completely inappropriate for the public sphere. To employ such vulgarity does not bring the question into the public in an operable way. One can only leave those who utter such vulgarity to work out whatever issues they have with whoever volunteers to engage them further. But whatever and whoever are not the public. The public is everything and everybody. Vulgar exchanges are for private disputes, and their place in public is transgressive: the ones who shout death threats at each other beneath one’s window on an early morning city street. No, the proper counter to the counter, the counter to the counter made public, made appropriate for the public, belonging to the public, is the one that says yes, of course, the process of making public also excites, but within limits, is a balance of sanitization and excitement, but weighted more toward one side than the other.

Now that’s boring. Or more precisely, that bores. In the tradition of public discourse any tension that arises is enveloped and mitigated in a self-replicating and self-mollifying series of argumentative involutions. All of which brings me to the Badlands National Park Twitter Feed. 

We Apologize for Nothing Here

By Finbarr Curtis

In response to critics of President Trump’s executive order on immigration, White House Chief of Staff and Count Dracula impersonator Reince Priebus stated: “We apologize for nothing here.” While he was referring to chaos at airports, his statement follows a broader pattern of refusing even a potential apology. This is unusual. Human beings make mistakes. Apologies are ritualized practices that repair social damage and reestablish relationships among people. To never apologize is to be something other than fully human.

Priebus is aware that Trumplandia is out of the ordinary. His usage of “here” is one of a number of rhetorical moves where spokespeople have imagined Trump's White House as a new space set apart from ordinary politics, a zone where things work differently. Priebus knows that people usually feel accountable to each other, and what makes this administration exceptional is its aspiration to act without reciprocal obligations to the popular will or other branches of government.

The administration's efforts to rule by extraordinary means recalls Walter Benjamin's “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in which he wrote: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule.” Following Benjamin's outline, the immigration order begins by citing the events of September 11, 2001 as grounds for suspending existing immigration policies. That 2001 was almost 16 years ago indicates that this emergency will last as long as Steven Bannon’s imagined war to defend “Judeo-Christian civilization” persists.

And He Doeth Great Wonders, So That He Maketh Dumpster Fire Come Down From Heaven On Earth In The Sight Of Men

By Finbarr Curtis

If you type "81 percent" into google, you will find a number of stories about white evangelicals who voted for Donald J. Trump. Like all poll numbers that measure religious affiliation, 81 percent is a deceptively simple summary of a diverse set of motives and identities. One could argue that few people identify themselves as "white evangelicals" and that this category is an interpretive fiction invented by pollsters. But while 81 percent might not necessarily measure what analysts think it measures, interpretive fictions still measure something. It seems that a lot of people who meet pollsters' criteria for white evangelicals agreed with Franklin Graham when he explained: "Even thought Donald Trump has some rough edges, there's something inside of him that desires the counsel of Christian men and women, and I don't know one Christian on Hillary Clinton's team."

Evangelical Trumpophilia has perplexed observers who have wondered how an impious sexual predator from decadent New York City captured the hearts and minds of the Bible Belt. Many concluded that Christians hypocritically abandoned their religious principles. Laments about evangelical hypocrisy assume that evangelicalism is a belief system. It seems so obvious that evangelicalism is defined by theology that it hardly needs to be argued. The idea that religions are internally coherent sets of beliefs is part of common sense about world religions. Self-identified Christians, therefore, are accountable to a religious tradition whose central figure endorsed poverty and humility. Once you decide that the Sermon on the Mount is the essence of Christianity, then you can demonstrate that evangelicals betray their own beliefs when they vote for Trump.

While the charge of hypocrisy might be useful for theological finger wagging, it is analytically empty. It tells you what you think white evangelicals should do rather than explaining what they do. It might be that confusion over Trump support is a sign that an analytic framework that relies on Christian theological convictions is not effective in explaining how social actors behave.

Literati for Trump

By Finbarr Curtis

This week's election of Donald J. Trump did not surprise me as much as it did those who predicted an easy win for Hillary Clinton. The county in which I live voted 59.9 percent for Trump and so I had some idea of the intensity of his support. I watched the final debate next to a man who said he liked Trump because he "talked like a regular guy" and a few seats down from a woman who exclaimed that anyone who didn't vote for Trump was an "idiot" and yelled "You killed those people in Benghazi" as Clinton appeared on the screen.

The Saturday before the election, I was talking to someone who didn't meet the profile of the archetypal Trump supporter from the rallies. He was a financially successful college graduate who was well-traveled and happy to engage in conversation with African Americans, Latinos, and liberal college professors.  He agreed that Trump was a horrible person and had no interest in fabricated scandals about Benghazi or emails. Mainly, he liked Trump's tax cuts and promises to deregulate banks. I asked him if he was such a free trader, did he worry about Trump's call for a 40 percent tariff on China and trade wars against Mexico. He responded: "Trump cannot actually do any of that stuff. There is no way that he could get that through Congress. That's just what you tell the illiterates."

After hearing this characterization of the mass of Trump supporters as "illiterates," I realized I was talking to someone who echoed the views of the Southern bourbon aristocracy that maintained power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through a divide-and-rule strategy.  In towns in the South, you still meet these members of old families whose names you recognize from the local streets named after their grandparents. Wealthy southerners discouraged economic populism across racial lines by helping to persuade working-class white voters that the greatest threat to them was posed by African Americans, and that big government was a tool of northerners who used minorities to exploit southern white men and women.

My interlocutor's conviction that Trump would not actually do most of the crazy stuff he promised appears to have been the conventional wisdom of Wall Street in the week after the election. In an election night post, I had attempted to imagine the economic effects of a Trump presidency if he enacted his policy proposals. But investors are gambling that this will not happen. If the markets believed that Trump would follow through on his protectionist platform, they would have plummeted. Instead, investors are convinced that Trump will be good for business. After all, Wall Street denizens are well aware of Trump's decades of outlandish promises. Trump financed every building project by making fantastic claims to rope people in and then daring his investors to sue when he did not deliver. Wall Street might be okay with this approach to the American voter

Is Donald Trump a Human Being?

By Finbarr Curtis

Donald Trump will likely win tonight's presidential debate against Hillary Clinton. By win I do not mean that he will make more cogent arguments or demonstrate a superior grasp of political reality. He will certainly not do that. Rather, Trump can consider his performance a victory if he can convince 2-4 percent of American voters that he is merely plausible.

The reason he needs only to be plausible is that his critics have warned of his monstrosity. Commentators have struggled to find a language that can communicate the outlandish quality of the preternatural threat he poses to American democracy. It seems unreal that someone can insult the disabled and prisoners of war, can make overtly bigoted statement after statement, can believe something as extreme as birtherism and disbelieve something as obvious as global warming, can funnel campaign donations to his own businesses, can pattern his campaign after a fantastically corrupt Ukrainian oligarch who made no pretense of seeking power for anything other than his own enrichment, and can inspire a general atmosphere of fascist violence throughout his campaign performances. We are repeatedly reminded that this is not normal.

But this begs the question of what one means by normal. After each time Trump says or does something that goes too far, you think this cannot be happening. But it does happen. The news cycle goes on, and you get used to it. What was previously shocking then seems like no big deal when the next outrageous event happens. All of this is either terrifying or thrilling depending on who you are. It is possible that the Trump phenomenon is as unbelievable to Trump's supporters as it is to his detractors. He inspires such messianic devotion because he redeems people who felt like they had to code or conceal their racism and sexism, and now cannot believe their own freedom to speak their minds openly without shame or apology.

Extremist Common Sensism

Rudy Giuliani is afraid that you are not scared

By Finbarr Curtis

If you see the world as an apocalyptic struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness, then you are feeling pretty affirmed right now by this week's Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Various and sundry sitcom, soap opera, and reality television stars have taken turns warning us of a dualistic battle between "common sense" and "political correctness." The nominee's son, Donald Trump, Jr., extolled the wisdom of those who avoided fancypants schools like Harvard and Wharton (from which his father graduated in 1968) in favor of an education culminating in a "Doctorate in Common Sense."

One advocate for this linguistic theory was former New York mayor and current world-record-holder-for-breaking-blood-vessels-in-his-face-while-he-yells Rudolph Giuliani, who denounced anyone who refused to name the "enemy" of the United States as "Islamic extremist terrorism." According to Rudy, shirking this label denies the obvious violent threat that lurks everywhere. It is this assertion of obviousness, of simplicity in the face of apparent chaos, that gives common sense its force. Rather than accept self-evident reality, those imprisoned by political correctness cannot speak the truth because of their paralyzing fear of hurting people's feelings.

That the truth is apparent to everyone is what makes it common. This idea has its roots in eighteenth-century Scottish Common Sense Realism. In response to idealists and skeptics who offered complicated explanations for how people came to know and talk about things, thinkers like Thomas Reid argued that people's ordinary sense of the world was trustworthy. If you had a table right in front you, then you knew it was a table because you touched it and saw it, not because you had some idea of a table in your head. If intricate philosophical arguments seemed to contradict people’s ordinary sense of reality, it was overthinking that was at fault. As Reid asserted in his 1764 An Enquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense:

Poor untaught mortals believe undoubtedly that there is a sun, moon, and stars; an earth, which we inhabit; country, friends, and relations, which we enjoy; land, houses, and moveables, which we possess. But philosophers, pitying the credulity of the vulgar, resolve to have no faith but what is founded upon reason.

Idealistic philosophers offered unnecessary confusion and doubt. For Reid, it was absurd to throw out one’s ordinary sense of the world because theories could not explain it:

But if indeed thous hast not power to dispel those clouds and phantoms which thou hast discovered or created, withdraw this penurious and malignant ray; I despise Philosophy, and renounce its guidance: let my soul dwell with Common Sense.

Reid did not despise philosophy as such, but only philosophy that required a choice between abstract thought and everyday experience. Rather than disproving what we see, smell, hear, taste, and touch, philosophy should take this sensory data as the foundation for further inquiry.

When convention speakers appeal to common sense, they reassure you that Islamic extremist terrorism is an easily recognizable thing like a table sitting in front of you. This feels good if the world seems to be a confusing and scary place. But this raises a question of what "sense" allows you to see social identities like religion or extremism, or what allows for common sense pronouncements about ethnicity or gender or race. These are not things you can ordinarily see unless what you mean by "seeing" is confirming whatever your initial intuitive impressions are. In other words, what Rudy means by common sense is a visceral, precritical response to new information, what we often call a gut reaction. He relies on immediate, intuitive reactions as a necessary preparation for sudden threats. Refusals to act on common sense leave people vulnerable in an insecure world. 

Overthinkers who challenge common sense, especially those who Rudy calls politically correct, suggest that these immediate reactions are not reliable sources of information but are instead shaped by prejudices and assumptions produced by social forces. Or to say this in a less fancy way: Trump is the candidate of common sense because common sense is where racism comes from. Common sense offers a visceral feeling of satisfaction that comes from learning that your intuitions, prejudices, and assumptions were right all along. Assuring people that political violence is an inevitable outgrowth of a scary thing called Islam affirms a view of security that cautions against waiting around to analyze complex social problems. Making generalizations about people you don't know is one way of feeling safe in a world that you don't understand. Political correctness, therefore, poses an existential threat to those hoping to "Make America Safe Again."

The Trump Campaign Is Not Taking Place

Jean Baudrillard/Donald J. Trump

By Kerry Mitchell

I have replaced "simulacrum" with "Trump campaign" in the following: "The Trump campaign is never what hides the truth—it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The Trump campaign is true." Ecclesiastes

By this I mean not, of course, that the Trump campaign is speaking the truth, but that the truth of his campaign—what his campaign is—is true: it is what it is. And what it is is nothing. There is no campaign. There is only Trump.

The absence of a conventional campaign was the subject of a recent MSNBC exposé that wondered whether the Donald could triumph while lacking a proverbial "ground game":

Donald Trump is a candidate without a campaign – and it’s becoming a serious problem. Republicans working to elect Trump describe a bare-bones effort debilitated by infighting, a lack of staff to carry out basic functions, minimal coordination with allies and a message that’s prisoner to Trump’s momentary whims. "Bottom line, you can hire all the top people in the world, but to what end? Trump does what he wants,” a source close to the campaign said.

For Trump supporters, the MSNBC report can be dismissed as a hit piece, a takedown. The article argues largely that Trump’s is a lousy version of a campaign, just as some suggest that Trump is a lousy version of a leader (but without the original, what can you do?). But there are threads within the article and other media that are much more threatening than disapproval, which is easily celebrated or dismissed depending on one’s leanings. These threads suggest not that Trump is being a bad leader, but that he is not being a leader at all. He is just being him. This suggestion is so much more threatening than disapproval as it removes the foundation upon which both approval and disapproval rest. Without such foundation political statements do not so much speak truth or falsehood as flash images that affirm or negate. Such statements are immune to argument, gaining their strength from the sense of confidence, joy, and invincibility with which they are asserted. If Trump has no campaign, if Trump is not a leader but just Trump, then the attacks on him will simply affirm this reality, breaking the feedback loop of claim and counterclaim and coming back again and again to the negation.

Anti-New-Yorkism

By Finbarr Curtis

Everyone understands that Ted Cruz is a terrible human being.  Even Ted Cruz seems to think that Ted Cruz is a horrible person. You can see it in the knowing smirk he makes when he says some outlandish thing designed to offend do-gooders, the twinkle in his eye he gets when he talks about carpet bombing civilians, the wry chuckle he lets out when he makes fun of women who cannot afford contraception, the sense of smug satisfaction that oozes from every pore when he calmly informs the American public that he will reduce economic inequality by cutting taxes on the wealthy, and the look of serenity that appears when he nourishes his soul by informing a nervous working woman that he would happily deport her.

Cruz is a representative of a peculiar species of conservative often found sporting bow ties on the debate teams of Ivy League schools.  This breed of conservative cites his argumentative prowess as evidence of great intelligence.  What this means in reality is that they have just enough intelligence to formulate arguments that are perfectly designed to get people to hate them, but do not have enough intelligence to do the more difficult work of persuading anyone.  Designed to provoke rather than convince, the pontifications of Ivy League Young Republicans produce a feedback loop of ubiquitous loathing that perpetually confirms their elite superiority.  Nothing makes them happier than their being hated.

Cruz's grin was stretching ear-to-ear in Thursday's GOP debate when he was asked about his accusation that Donald Trump represented "New York values."  Answering a question from Brooklyn-born Maria Bartiromo, Cruz stated: "I think most people know what that means." When Bartiromo said she did not know although she was from New York, he explained: "You might not know because you are from New York."

At first glance, this is a paradox.  Common sense would tell us that New Yorkers, those who have the experience of the Big Apple in their bones, would best understand New York values.  But Cruz is not one to shirk from logical contradictions.  Right after saying that Bartiromo might not understand because she was from New York, he upped the ante from his claim that "most people" know to "everyone" understands.  According to Cruz: "Everyone understands that the values in New York City are socially liberal, pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, focus around money and the media." There is a literal paradox here as well.  A dictionary definition of "everyone" as "every person" would include people from New York.  But New York values are comprehensible to everyone except New Yorkers.

The Coddling of American Think Pieces

By Finbarr Curtis

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt want to protect you.  Or more precisely, they want to protect you from people who are harming you by trying to protect you.  Their recent piece on the coddling of American students warns of political correctness on college campuses.  In its recent incarnation, political correctness damages young people's psyches by protecting them from the inevitable harm we all must face in the harsh real world.  Hypersensitive students invent increasingly subtle forms of racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, and ableism, and then seek to protect themselves by asking professors to make these threats visible through markers like trigger warnings on course syllabuses.

Critics of political correctness are not just talking about college. Victims of hypersensitivity nationwide have found their most prominent spokesman in current Republican front-runner Donald Trump.  When questioned by debate moderator Megyn Kelly about his disparaging comments about women, Trump responded that the "big problem this country has is being politically correct."  Trump is the perfect anti-trigger warning.  Liable to say anything at anytime, his supporters are drawn to his honesty, his willingness to tell it like it is, his refusal to cower in the face of fraudulent liberal niceness, his insistence on giving offense as a much needed lesson to losers who take offense.  Speaking truth to sensitivity feels liberating to people tired of having to politely self-censor in order to avoid charges of racism and sexism.   The Trump-For-President Movement is a twenty-first century free-hate commune where you can express all your deepest, darkest, pent-up frustrations and everything is groovy and there are no judgments.

Many who decry political correctness on college campuses are mystified by Trump's rise.  There seems to be a difference between Lukianoff and Haidt's attacks on hypersensitive students and Trump's attacks on hypersensitive journalists.  But it is worth considering whether people making the same arguments for the same purposes might have similar motives.