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.

Moore Values

By Finbarr Curtis 

In a recent twitter exchange, the former judge, current senate candidate, and perpetual sexual predator Roy Moore accused Jimmy Kimmel of mocking "Christian values." In response to Moore's challenge to come to Alabama and settle things "man to man," Kimmel said: "Sounds great Roy - let me know when you get some Christian values and I'll be there."

In the language of the internet, Kimmel's response is generally referred to as an "own." The ownage was only further compounded when Kimmel noted that he would make the trip but leave his daughters at home. 

In the politics of resentment that drives Moore and his supporters, however, this brief exchange was only further evidence of "Hollywood elites' bigotry toward southerners." By inviting Kimmel's condescension in order to stoke a feud between Hollywood and the South, Moore performed the rhetorical alchemy that transforms the content of all political criticism into nothing other than an assault on white Christian identity. 

The reason that Moore's brand of white identity politics needs the Kimmels of the world is that there is nothing about Moore that is indigenous to Alabama. As a former Alabama voter myself, I can attest that Alabamans do not routinely attend formal political events dressed in cowboy costumes while waving a gun. Rather, Moore is a coastal liberal's caricature of Alabama. He has spent a lifetime imagining all of the things that liberals hate, and then crafted himself in this image. This negative identification gives Moore's political performances their hyperbolic, over-the-top quality. The more he offends liberal civility, the more he triggers the sort of condescension that validates his image of a spokesman for victimized white southern Christians railing against a shadowy establishment comprised of economic, political, media, and educational elites.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, a remarkable number of commentators took these self-identifications of white victimhood at face value. This resulted in an array of stories that portrayed Trump supporters as fueled by "economic anxiety." But a lawyer and judge like Moore is hardly poor or powerless. Like many vociferous Trump supporters, Moore is best described as a local elite. Local elites are the district attorneys, small business owners, and insurance salesmen who make a comfortable living in places like Gadsden, Alabama.

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

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.