The Arc of the Moral Universe



You’ve almost won, just one more step!

Last week tens of millions of hopeful Americans and citizens around the world rang in spanking new 2021 by watching the tail end of Donald Trump’s presidency explode spectacularly on the landing strip.

Think of Trump as a metaphorical airline: he had but to taxi his presidency to the gate, walk off the plane with his carry on item in hand, go to the baggage carousel and pick up his clubs then make his way to a golf course. That would be his refuge. He would spend the rest of his days doted upon as a (quasi-) statesmanlike ex-president. He would escape prosecution for any crimes, his debts and past-taxes would be forgiven or paid for by donors, he would be warmly received by Republicans everywhere. The Trump brand would be expanded: bridges, airports and roads to nowhere would be named after him. His children would run for office. He would become the conservative gatekeeper with more prestige (and money) than he could ever have as president …

… he would whine the entire time about how unfair everyone has been to him, how the coronavirus debacle was China’s fault, that he won the 2020 election but was cheated. Trump didn’t dignify his office any more than a 10-year old girl would have, but still … he lied himself into a corner he couldn’t turn around and lie his way out of. What remains is wreckage and collateral damage that is in the process of being tabulated.

Oh well …

People knew something like this was going to be the endgame in 2016 and before. They knew Trump’s record as a fake ‘businessman’, as a TV personality, as a bigot and abuser, as a tabloid-‘Page 6’ regular, an inhabitant of New York’s cocaine fired demimonde inhabited by burned out Warhol stars and ‘celebrities’; as a client of mafia consiglieri Roy Cohn and in general a mob hanger-on; a ‘friend’ of child rapist Jeffrey Epstein. The Trump drift to politics was natural like falling off a cliff, the gap between media driven ‘civic leadership’ and depravity almost nonexistent, one being the qualification for the other.

The arc of Trump’s presidency was long but from the start it bent toward stupidity. “Aim low, you’ll get there,” instructed my wise and cruel Mom: “Never borrow any more than you can repay by working a job at 7-Eleven.” Trump never had a problem with the aiming low part. He was born conniving then drifted. He was the Formica salesman’s idea of a rich man, a Potemkin tycoon. He was squanderous; he had burned through a half-billion dollar fortune by the time he was 45. He was mean and tasteless, he lacked wit or generosity, everything about him, from his signature haircut to his overly long necktie screamed ‘phony’. He cheated at golf.

He was ‘A Man For His Time’, America’s id. In that explicit way Trump was- and still is the embodiment of the postwar waste-based economic society, we are uncomfortable because of the truth that represents. We are a stupid country. We are a denying, prejudiced, self-infatuating, vain and violent country, one that insists reality — if it exists at all — is for the little people; that workhouse capitalism is the just reward for the boot-strapless poor, that socialism/tax cuts are for the well to do; that the Ponzi scheme promoters, greedy tech billionaires, international strong arm robbers and business cheats are going to save us from ourselves, that flying cars and trips to Mars will be here tomorrow or maybe the day after. That all we must do is throw what’s left of our remaining capital into the fire and watch it burn. Trump is our man but not really; less a living person than a symbol, the outline within which we can paint ourselves any way we like.

Trump is impunity in a suit. He would never have existed if the Wall Street bankers had been prosecuted post-2008 for blowing up world finance, if firms had been allowed to fail then restructured. Trump would not have had financial support, his multiple bankruptcies would have finished him off. Once the bankers learned they could get away with murder, so did everyone else including Trump. He was also beneficiary of the corporate media crap-o-sphere that gave us ISIS. Why? Because there was a buck in it:

We grasp Islamic State instantly because we’ve spent decades and trillions of dollars perfecting ourselves until our monsters are in our image, intimately familiar because they are us … a novelty reality TV show where those voted off the island are run over by a tank. Islamic State occupies the ‘too much is never enough’ corner of Pop culture along with Charles Manson and Omar Little, Edie Sedgewick and Donald Trump. It squats at the end of the road, a toad-like squirmy headed Freddy Kruger in James Howard Kunstler’s twilight America; where “anything goes, nothing matters and nobody cares.”
 

Monsters in our own image: without Islamic State and its nightmarish, acid-trip violence and media savvy — and self-interested firms leaning in to profit by it — there would have been less an opening for the thuggish, media savvy Trump. Support would have been seen as too risky. As it was, the uninhibited nature of Trump and his hooligan tendencies were the products he offered for sale. He drew viewers, clicks, internet ‘likes’ and money.

The Uncounted Losses

Politicians are acutely sensitive to wind direction which is how they succeed. They are rarely leaders but highly sensitive followers attuned to trends, ever on the hunt for bandwagons to jump on. Trump’s self-inflicted political death has marooned Republicans, leaving them to their own devices on unfamiliar ground. Their choice is to either look like idiots for following Fearless Fosdick off a cliff, or for carrying his flag after he’s kaput or for believing there is something else to Trumpism besides revolution against one’s own job. The alternative is to be seen as disloyal (unpatriotic) and opportunistic. Those caught in the vortex of indecision for more than a few minutes will be seen as ‘out of touch’. What are they to do? Instantly there is a brand-new game nobody knows how to play. One clue can be detected in the behavior of the ex-Senate Majority Leader, a wily survivor type with decades of experience in saving his hide; he has jettisoned his Q-anon Gold Membership and has become an instant moderate.

Nothing is real unless it can be uploaded to Facebook.

Hundreds of Trump supporters are going to learn the hard way the difference between too-big-to-jail bankers who received bonuses and cheap loans for their crimes, and their non-banker selves who face sedition charges and 20 year prison terms. Incompetent as it is, the system is good at protecting itself.

The Trump brand died on the air strip along with Trump’s presidency (Mish Talk)

Donald Trump managed to transform Joe Biden, the establishment’s faithful servant and personification of mediocrity into a statesman before he was sworn in.

Poor Mike Pence, who wore out the knees of his trousers groveling like a dog before Trump, saw the baying, bloodthirsty mob directed against him as a reward. And this is for the crime of pricking Trump’s fantasy.

Before last week it seemed likely that Trump and his enablers would be forgiven their trespasses and escape criminal prosecution. Fast forward and it is inevitable that Trump and his associates will be prosecuted and convicted, that his lawyers will be disbarred, that Trump-supporting legislators will be removed from office and perhaps be prosecuted themselves. Trump’s singular talent as a criminal was his instinct for keeping one foot on ‘yea’ side of the law, for reaping the benefits of crimes while escaping any responsibility for them. In the end the incompetence of his loyalists betrayed him, he needed someone to tell him ‘no’, to save him from himself and there wasn’t any. What supported the ‘idea’ of Trumpism — if there ever was such a thing – is that it could not be contained or managed by conventional discoursive means, which turned out to be exactly true. Now will be constrained by being outlawed as too self-destructive.

The Big Lie

Trump claimed over and over that he really won the election, and that he had won in a landslide and that he had been cheated out of his victory by corrupted voting machines, Hugo Chavez, China and unscrupulous Commie-leaning Democrats. This was a lie but not the one that mattered. Rather, it was the lie directed toward Trump from the outside in; that he was widely popular, that he was well-liked and even loved by most Americans, despite 650,000 deaths and millions of coronavirus infections; that he was a capable manager with remarkable achievements, that he was the second coming of Abraham Lincoln. An entire ecosystem of media enterprises, talking heads, advisors, agencies and spokespersons was erected around Trump like a Dyson Sphere to protect his ego but also to nourish itself. Why would 75 million Americans vote for Donald Trump after … everything? Because, in voting for Trump they were really voting for themselves, not their aspirations — which were ground up and spat out long ago — but their persistent reality reflected in the Trump mirror.

Here was the cultivation of a president like a greenhouse stuffed with tomato plants; it was an enterprise with zero barriers to entry, only the willingness of individuals to sacrifice their integrity. So many were eager to do so, the process became self-reinforcing. Trump did not matter to supporters, it was the supporters themselves who mattered, the clicks and followers and Facebook likes. Also self-interested Others: police unions, Republican politicians, commodity farmers, Big Businessmen, all of them seemed loyal enough, so did (ex-) Hollywood stars and (obscure) celebrities. Within this escapist ambit Trump’s grievances festered and became all-consuming. How could a boring non-entity like Sleepy Joe Biden win an election against America’s Favorite President without cheating? It was the outside-in lie that was the parent of all the others.

1620

Official Q-anon team merchandise, buy yours today!

And now it is all done. Americans gave Trump money and support and millions of votes and he offered freer-flowing shower heads and low-mileage automobiles … which we already had. And yet, are these not the best and highest hills to die on /slash/ cliffs to wander off of?

A: In Ponzi World, these best and highest hills are all we have left.

17 thoughts on “The Arc of the Moral Universe

  1. Ken Barrows

    Trump doesn’t have a lot to lose now, does he? So why not pardon all his sycophants on 1/19, resign that night, and then have Pence pardon him before noon on 1/20? A third of the country still approves. Pence might still think it’s the way to get the nomination in 2024.

    1. steve from virginia Post author

      Trump & Co are likely to try something like this but it won’t work. Pardons for co-conspirators won’t fly, they are admissions of guilt and they won’t keep Trump from being indicted in New York State for bank- and tax fraud, in Georgia for election interference, in DC for inciting a riot leading to the death of officer Brian Sicknick; in many states for negligent homicide/manslaughter, for self-dealing and soliciting bribes, for real estate fraud, in NYC for child rape.

      When various individuals are indicted for conspiracy against the United States, they will line up to rat out Trump (already started) and he’ll be convicted: conspiracy, sedition, also espionage. Trump may wind up being the first American president arrested, convicted in the courts and jailed for crimes committed while in office. Trump is broke (I forgot bankruptcy proceedings are unaffected by pardons) He cannot afford private counsel, respectable firms won’t take his cases, he will wind up with public defenders who will plead him out on a single count of something or other he’ll get a year and a day while his ‘followers’ reel in 20 year sentences in Supermax for conspiracy, domestic terrorism and murder.

      1. Ken Barrows

        Right you are. I see you have a Twitter poll asking when Trump’s first indictment will occur. If it doesn’t occur within a few weeks, why would it happen at all?

  2. sp gp

    Nice to see you still going Steve. Yes, Trump did himself in even as the election is highly suspicious.

    Any thoughts on the Jews or are they still off limits in your view? Only the generic “bankers” can be discussed, correct.

    Well who exactly are the bankers? Former Negro and Mexican gangbangers who finally cleaned up their act and moved on to the better paying and less risky white collar stuff?

    1. steve from virginia Post author

      The New Economic Undertow doesn’t tolerate slagging on ethnics just the same as the Classic Economic Undertow . We’re all the same, animated pieces of meat, here today, gone tomorrow.

      There is too much hate elsewhere in our comfortable bourgeois world, not enough humility. Hate is the child of vanity and ignorance. it’s a stupid child. It’s also the entertainment for people who have no enemies, a kind of leisure activity. People who have enemies respect others because it is too dangerous to do otherwise, “Know your enemy and know yourself” sez Sun Tzu. People who don’t have enemies are quick to hate because they don’t have to pay a price for it.

      It’s always better not to care, one becomes cynical but also humble, it’s a boundary state. Not caring means the person is aware that everything can be lost and he is cool with it.

      There is a lot of hate in America because Americans have no real enemies and are bored so they have to invent some.

      As far as the election, this one past (including the runoff in Georgia) was the most intensely monitored and scrutinized election in US history. Biden won by 7 million votes. Trump lost fair and square, it’s that simple.

      Trump lost because he was and is a moron = zero common sense. The election was a referendum on Trump. He had many opportunities to take simple actions that would made his presidency successful and he fumbled every single one of them. He didn’t have to draw on a map with a Sharpie. He didn’t have start a trade war with China or punt his European allies or try to run his businesses while president. A professional estate manager/trustee would have kept his businesses perking along instead of them being run into the ground as Trump’s have. He could have worked at his presidency and tried harder to learn instead of playing golf, lolling around eating junk food, watching Fox on TV and wasting time with his campaign rallies. In the end, the playing, eating, watching and rallying didn’t do him any favors. He stoked the ire of his fringey ‘base’ and that didn’t do him or them any good, either.

      Regarding coronavirus response: if Trump had done simple things – quarantined every person entering the US for two weeks starting in late January when the Chinese locked down Wuhan, ramped up testing and let the public health managers do their jobs, the epidemic would have had only a modest impact and the country’s businesses great and small would not have been smashed. Trump would have been hailed. Instead, he just couldn’t help himself, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut, he couldn’t stop lying, he wouldn’t listen to anybody other than world’s biggest disappointment to his mother Rudy Giuliani, Jared Kushner and Sean Hannity. He politicized what should have been a routine administrative procedure.

      I can’t tell the future but impunity has had a good run, but the fashion has failed. The next lot of crooked businessmen are likely to rot in prison, Mexican and otherwise.

  3. ellenanderson

    If Trump had been smart he would have cut a deal with the Southern District of New York in exchange for dropping out of the race. I thought he would. I had bets on it. Shows how much I understand. But once he stayed in he had to win or he was (and is) toast. Maybe he just figured that out or he was too self absorbed to think he could lose so now he has to take it to the streets.
    It remains to be seen whether the shock of the attack in DC and whatever else happens between now and the election will actually lead to some modest improvements to the lives of ordinary living creatures including bees and trees.
    Mind you, I think that the pandemic and Trump are symptoms of environmental destruction that threatens all life. People feel it and are scared as well they should be. The most credulous and spiritually hungry among us have taken refuge in an insane fantasy world and are following some Q-grifter or grifters generated by 4-chan or 8-chan or whatever-chan. Any thoughts on that, Steve?
    We shall see whether there are enough anti-semites and elderly libertarians willing to pay to spout off on Zero Hedge. I kind of doubt it but it is a treat not to be subjected to their dreadful hate speech anymore. Plus Zero Hedge became overly partisan this year and got totally boring.
    And, by the way, I am totally flabbergasted to see much of the organic food/natural health/small farmer movement refusing to wear masks and generally acting Trumpish. I know they need to sell their vitamins (take Vitamin D3/K2 for sure, everybody) and I know that the FDA and DOA have been wretched in their policies towards small farmers and raw milk purveyors but….really. What is up with that do you think?

  4. Mister Roboto

    This obscure article pretty much says it all, albeit with an awful lot of purple prose.

    I think the biggest legacy of Trumpism will be the way it deepened and inflamed the huge, festering, throbbing psychic wound that is gashed across the country’s collective consciousness. I’ve decided I can’t read Kunstler or JMG anymore on account of the way they have been drinking ever more deeply of the Trump-Aid. Thirteen years ago, I would have though they would be the first to see what an utter narcissistic facade the man is and always has been.

    Though all is not lost for the Republicans. I have a feeling that the incoming Biden-Harris Administration will manage the shit-storms heading our way and already here so poorly that there will be another 2010-style Republican landslide come November 2022!

  5. Michael King

    Speaking of Kunstler, I found out about this blog after hearing a podcast you did with him some years ago. For that I am thankful. Sadly, he is adamant that the 2020 election was fixed on a large scale to benefit Biden. It would be naive to deny that vote fixing has a long history in US politics. See Greg Palast’s excellent work on this subject. That said, Biden won the election, full stop. Great essay Steve as you have it right. Long time reader, keep it coming and thank you.

  6. Volvo740...

    I do find it interesting that Trump sliced right down the middle of the bloggers too. Kunstler, for example, seems to support Trump and argues that the Clintons / Obamas / Bidens is a bigger threat to free speech. Other sites like shtfplan are a bit more in the middle.

    I do think media has left its position as news reporters, and it’s true that it has been 4 years of constant Trump bashing. Much of it warranted – but the Russia election interference 4 years ago was bullshit IMO. I just think the Dems were poor losers then as it was Hillary’s time.

    Democracy is in a bad place now, and with the GOP in the state it is, perhaps we don’t even need an election next time. The US has one of the most sad implementations of democracy, but does this matter?

    Will Biden do anything to save the planet from suicide? Probably not. The truth is that we here in America love the fossil fuel powered lifestyle – and I don’t see anything changing that. Aside from a very strange virus and those same fuels becoming unaffordable.

    I don’t claim to know what’s going on, but the rationing “by other means” seems like a good hypothesis. My guess is TPTB are considering options of how to keep a population at bay when fuel is not as available, and I’m not ruling out that these travel bans we have in place to Canada, Europe etc is really a manifestation of Peak Oil more than anything. And if that’s the case, it makes sense that they stay.

    1. Mister Roboto

      I don’t think the media blatantly lies the way the official press of the long-gone Soviet Union did, but I do think they let their emotions about Trump and the movement behind him cloud their objectivity. It was so obvious to anyone who wasn’t drinking the Trump Derangement Kool-Aid, that it really damaged their credibility.

  7. ellenanderson

    @Volvo and MR; other than EU where do you go to get current news and analysis? I imagine you both used to read the Automatic Earth – a site that has also moved right since Nicole moved on. Every now and then I check in but am always disappointed. I have relied upon Matt Taibi at the Rolling Stone who has now moved on to something called Substack. I have to spend a lot of time looking at screens for my work and I haven’t had a TV for about 20 years so I tend to listen to a lot podcasts. I try to find a wide range of opinion, loving a lot of the new young leftie sites but some of the smartest people have the worst public speaking styles – whole paragraphs of “Well, yeah, ya know, um, I mean yeah really, I mean ya know.” I start the day with The World Socialist Website (4th International, so historic) and then see whether there is anything good on the NYT Daily. KMO has the best voice and speaking style on the C-Realm podcast except for a short period when he had some teeth pulled. Jim from Attack Ads never disappoints. For books I am reading Graeber’s Debt (finally), the End of the Mega-Machine, all of the Richard Russo novels, and anything recommended by Alice Friedeman on EnergySkeptic.com.
    I pay attention to a few places where real crazies hang out – those who believe that there will be what can only be called a ‘political rapture’ where Trump will rise up and suddenly all democrats will be arrested and locked up forever. That fantasy may end today.
    And I pay attention to people like Max Wilbur, Derrick Jensen, Jeff Gibbs and all of the producers of Planet of the Humans. I am so afraid that they are right.
    Steve should the New Economic Undertow get the book list up and running and add other media? What are all of the Undertowers reading and thinking? I assume that this site is going to be a place where trolling will be minimized so we can talk.

    1. Mister Roboto

      Well, I keep abreast of energy, economics, and Covid developments through Chris Martenson’s website. I also look at the headlines at The Automatic Earth for anything that isn’t Trumpster-trash (increasingly rare, these days). I keep abreast of political developments through the small handful of people I follow on Twitter. I also look through the headlines on Reddit.com (though the r/politics subreddit is Trump Derangement crazy-land these days, so I’m not subscribed to that one). One curious development of the Trump/ pandemic eras is that there are people I used to read all the time (Orlov, JMG, Kunstler, Cryptogon) that I avoid now like last week’s restaurant-garbage.

  8. Volvo740...

    @Ellen I get my mainstream news from NPR. Any non-mainstream news from all the usual blogs: ourfiniteworld, clusterfuck, jameshansen (temp), co2 trends, ice sheet data, the economic collapse blog, alice friedmann, shadowstats, orlov, zensecondlife, peakoilbarrel, cassandra etc.

    Orlov drifted off in a Russian theme that I didn’t find interesting, but I noticed that his latest post was on Peak Oil — which is happening now, or did in 2019-2020. My guess is that this is it, and I revisited some old YouTube snippets yesterday. There is a goodie where a Toyota exec calls 2020 it, but basically consensus was always that 2015-2020 was the peak time, and 2020 was a stretch. Fracking/tar sands pushed it out a bit, but could not change the big picture of course.

    I find it interesting that 10 years prior to peak there was a lot of info out there. ASPO was a thing. Now, Kjell Aleklett is retired, Colin too old etc, Robert Hirsch? Today, much less discussion.

    So here we are, looking at -4% per year every year from now on. 10 years of that is going to result in a massive reduction, and anything like -30% is not going to go unnoticed. At some point shit hits the fan. (Did it already?) How are the world’s governments going to manage that? My bet is that they are not going to come out one day and tell the truth. They never have, so why change now?

  9. ellenanderson

    @Volvo
    Back when the Dems last won it was early in the early days of alternative media discussing Peak Oil. And the books by Heinberg etc were just being circulated. I think I started reading EU right after it started in 2009. People who used to refuse to talk to me about this stuff have really come around in the past 12 years. John Kerry and Gina McCarthy, now reasonably well placed in the Biden administration, are certainly well aware and seeing the problem in its wider context. How will this government communicate with the masses? It is going to have to be through TV for the moment. But maybe some of the alternate sites on YouTube will be able to go more mainstream. Cable News will have to do some scrambling to figure out how to deal with loosing Trump anyway. My PBS station, WAMC, has been all anti-trump all the time. It is headed up by a very elderly moderate neocon and I doubt he is going to go in for anything radical at this point but there are lots of other PBS stations.
    If I were in the government now I would try to figure out how to keep conservation from looking like austerity. People hate austerity. I would combine it with land re-distribution, debt jubilee and some sort of universal basic income as well as a care system including universal access to public health facilities. Those things would not only make people happier and more equal but would reduce the need for fossil resources. I worry that the media will whip people up and then start borrowing money to build big things that do more paving and deforestation and make things worse. I am hoping it is too late for that and that too many people have already caught on.
    But I do think that there will be big changes in the media and I wonder how others think that will go.

    1. steve from virginia Post author

      Reviving the ‘Books and Papers’ section is a good idea.

      Original item was a 2013 post that became buried with time, and a bit silly to update. The new version is to be found at the top of the page, it can’t be buried. As per usual please add suggestions in the comments: the more I learn the more ignorant I realize I am.

      BTW: you can keep people from seeing conservation as austerity by paying them to conserve.

      I don’t know what to call this thievish system we’ve designed around ourselves, it isn’t capitalism nor is it socialism. I’d tend toward ‘machine-ism’, that might put a light on the more ruthless and inhumane aspects of what it is we do (to ourselves).

  10. ellenanderson

    Ugh, time has gone by and I haven’t checked in. I meant to add ‘The End of the Megamachine’ to the booklist but I wanted to read most of it before doing so and I can’t seem to find the time to finish. It does seem worth reading. I have it on Kindle and am having trouble navigating so having to read the footnotes separately.
    I can see why it seemed like a good idea for every generation to come up with even more clever ways to use abundant energy. The Megamachine book details all of the horrible human sacrifices that had to be made. Makes for a ghastly read.
    I will go back and find the place to add the book. I saw it up briefly but I have been way too busy… even in this crazy pandemic.

Comments are closed.