By Jonah Goldberg
Saturday, February 18, 2017
Since most of this “news”letter is going to vex friends,
let’s start with something that all right-thinking people can agree upon: If
Neil deGrasse Tyson wants to continue being considered an intellectual, he
should really stop talking (or at least stop tweeting).
Just before I started to pound out this dyspeptic cri de
coeur of consternation, I saw this amuse-bouche
of vapidity:
Almost all armed conflict in the
history of the world came about because opposing sides believed different
things to be true.
Now, in a reductionist kind of way, this is obviously
true. When two people, two tribes, or two nations fight, they tend to have
profound disagreements about who should win.
But the idea that people almost always go to war because
they believe different things to be true is really quite ridiculous. Did
Caesar, Alexander the Great, or Genghis Kahn have a giant war map in front of
them demarking which nations agreed with them and which didn’t? “Oh, I would
dearly love to conquer Gaul, will someone find out if they disagree with us on
something?”
What, pray tell, do Crips and Bloods really disagree on?
(Note: I have no idea if they still exist, feel free to add any other gangs:
Sharks and Jets, Dead Rabbits and the Bowery Boys, the Yancy Street Gang and Ben
Grimm, whatever.) The prime mover of their disagreements isn’t ideas but power,
status, and, probably, the money that flows from them. They might invent
grander arguments to defend their bellicosity, but those arguments are
downstream of those primary motivations. Hitler believed some awful things, but
he didn’t invade France because of his disagreements with the French. He
invaded France because he wanted to rule it. The disagreements were secondary.
David Hume said, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions,
and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” I don’t
fully subscribe to this view, but I don’t think it’s entirely wrong either.
Now Tyson is almost surely making what he believes to be
a clever point about religion. And it is certainly true that there have been
religious wars, some of them quite sincere. And some of them were populist
justifications for wars of another motivation, proving yet again that
scientific expertise doesn’t automatically transfer to other realms of study.
What he seems to want to suggest, however, is that if everyone agrees on the
majestic sovereignty of science, there will be no more conflict. His global
empire of “Rationalia” will usher in an era of eternal peace.
Not only is that incredibly, mind-bogglingly, and
incandescently absurd and extremely creepy and dangerous. It is also — wait for
it — profoundly unscientific.
Canine Flatulence
as Far as the Eye Can See (or Smell)
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote in this space:
I’m reminded of a scene from Don Quixote: A man walks into the center
of town and gathers a crowd for the show he’s about to put on. The man picks up
a dog and inserts a tube into its ass. The man then begins to inflate the
canine like a balloon. The crowd watches, fascinated. The dog grows larger and
rounder. Eventually, the man pulls the tube out and the air escapes loudly from
the poor pooch’s rectum as it runs away.
The performer turns to the crowd
and asks something like: “You think it’s easy to inflate a dog with a tube?”
That guy may be the best
dog-inflator in the world. He may have tapped into something real — the need to
see extreme reverse dog farting — but that doesn’t mean we should make him
president.
That scene came to mind Thursday as I watched the
reaction to President Trump’s press conference. My friend Mollie Hemingway
captured a very widespread sentiment out there:
"I would watch a
@realDonaldTrump press conference at any time of any day. It's just so
entertaining." #SpecialReport
And I agree with her: It certainly was entertaining in
parts. In other parts, not so much. But the problem is that entertainment value
is one of the lowest standards one can hold a president to. It’s entertaining,
apparently, to see a man stick a tube up a dog’s butt, but that doesn’t make it
art. And it may be entertaining to watch a president of the United States spill
out his id on national television like a torn net full of mackerel on a dock.
But if that’s a standard for how to judge a presidential press conference, why
didn’t we elect Charlie Sheen?
I keep hearing from conservative pundits that a lot of
people out in the “real world” thought this press conference was awesome. I’m
sure this is true. But I wonder how many conservative pundits realize that the
people who thought it was awesome are already in Trump’s amen corner (and that
these are precisely the folks that conservative pundits are most likely to hear
from — and depend on?). Does anyone seriously believe that Trump persuaded
significant numbers of people who didn’t already love him?
I’ve written a bunch about the MacGuffinization of
American politics in recent years. Ace of Spades coined the term to describe
how the media covered Barack Obama. They cast him as the hero of a drama and
the only goal was to see how he overcame problems. It didn’t matter if he was
wrong on policy — including the Constitution — what mattered was whether he
emerged victorious. “In a movie or book, ‘The MacGuffin’ is the thing the hero
wants,” Ace explained. “Usually the villain wants it too, and their conflict
over who will end up with The MacGuffin forms the basic spine of the story.”
Further on, Ace writes:
Watching Chris Matthews interview
Obama, I was struck by just how uninterested in policy questions Matthews (and
his panel) were, and how almost every question seemed to be, at heart, about
Obama’s emotional response to difficulties — not about policy itself, but about
Obama’s Hero’s Journey in navigating the plot of President Barack Obama: The
Movie. As with a MacGuffin in the movie, only the Hero’s emotional response to
the MacGuffin matters.
It was the MacGuffin dynamic that first made me realize
that Trump could defeat Hillary Clinton.
Now the MacGuffin thing is just a useful metaphor or
analogy. But the dynamic it captures goes to the very core of humanity. While
working on my book, I’ve come to believe more than ever that man is a
story-telling animal and that stories are what give us meaning, direction, and
passion. Hume’s point about reason being a slave to passion should be more
properly understood as “reason is a slave to narrative.” But we can talk more
about that later.
The relevant point here is that Trump was right when he
said that he didn’t divide America, it was divided when he showed up. What
concerns me is that vast numbers of conservatives who lamented the
MacGuffinized presidency and media of the Obama era have grabbed with both
hands the MacGuffinized presidency of Donald Trump.
It is entirely true that the press served as an eager
participant in the story of Obama. It is also entirely true that much of the
mainstream media is playing the reverse role in the story of Trump’s
presidency. And, it’s also the case that much of the conservative media is now playing the role they once decried in the
MSM. The same people who rolled their eyes at every clickbait headline blaring
“Watch as Jon Stewart DESTROYS” this or that Republican now cheer as Trump
rails against the “Failing New York Times”
or “Very Fake News.” It doesn’t matter that Trump’s arguments are as bogus, selective,
or disingenuous as Stewart’s. What matters is to cheer the “butt hurt” of Chuck
Todd or Jim Acosta or some other enemy.
Delegitimizing all conservatives
and the president of the United States if he’s Republican is still cool, right?
https://twitter.com/chucktodd/status/832299588052799488 …
- Mollie Hemingway
Sean Hannity has taken to calling Chuck Todd a leader of
something called “the alt-left,” a thing that is not a thing except in
Hannity’s studio. (The “alt” in “alt-right” refers to a desire to replace the
traditional Right with a new tribalist-nationalist Right. What “Left” is Chuck
Todd trying to replace? This is weak-tea Alinskyite distraction.)
I’m reminded of that old saying, “Die a hero or live long
enough to see yourself defending Chuck Todd.”
Now, that’s not entirely fair since I’ve always liked Todd,
despite our fairly frequent disagreements. But you know what I mean. And I also
agree with Mollie that the mainstream media has a lot to answer for when it
comes to how they’ve treated conservatives and Republican presidents. I’ve
written literally tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of words on this very
point. And while I think Mollie is being unfair to Chuck here, I also think she
misses the point.
When Donald Trump says any — and I mean any — negative coverage of him is fake,
he’s making a very, very different claim than that of traditional bias. He is
saying that news stories — with multiple sources from his administration,
sometimes on the record — are simply fabricated. And just because the
self-loving press idiotically takes the bait every time, handing him the mallet
to bludgeon them with, doesn’t change the fact that the president of the United
States is not only wrong, he’s lying. Yes, the New York Times gets stories wrong (News flash!), but it is not a
work of fiction.
The argument one often hears from anti-anti-Trump
conservatives is that they’re just holding the mainstream media accountable.
Fine. Do that. But if you don’t show much interest in holding a president — who is the leader of the Republican party
and maybe the conservative movement — accountable, then you’ve become an
accomplice to the hero in a MacGuffinized presidency. One can see this most
clearly when you hear radio- and TV-show hosts dismiss an argument by noting it
comes from some alleged “Trump hater.” It’s the exact same tactic liberals used
against those of us who criticized Bill Clinton. My animosity for Bill Clinton
didn’t make him play football-coach-and-the-cheerleader with an intern.
Likewise, my alleged feelings about Trump don’t make me wrong when I point out
he’s lying when he says he won in a historic landslide or when he insists that
his administration has been humming like a well-oiled machine.
Whether he understands what he’s doing or not, Trump’s
goal is to delegitimize any critical voices. I think he’s motivated more by
narcissism than by some evil-genius scheme, but it doesn’t really matter. What
does matter is truth. We are entering a phase where everything is measured not
by veracity, but by feeling: If certain facts make us feel like “our side” is
losing, then those facts aren’t real. If certain fictions make the other side
feel bad, then they are facts. Again, Trump didn’t create this sorry dynamic,
but he is accelerating it at blistering speed. I’m less concerned about “fake
news” than I am by fake opinions — by which I mean the widespread tendency to
score political arguments based upon how much applause they will get from your
team.
Reading Kevin Williamson’s terrific essay on President’s
Day, I’m of a mind to think the presidency has always been MacGuffinized. But
just because a problem has a long pedigree doesn’t mean the problem can’t get
worse. I know I use this line from Orwell too much (and I’m eager to hear
suggestions for substitutes), but it captures the dynamic of the moment so
well: “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and
then fail all the more completely because he drinks.” Collectively, we’re all
getting drunk on our feelings and then failing all the more completely for it.
Beinart’s Gotcha
And that reminds me, Peter Beinart, my old sparring
partner, has attempted to take National
Review to the woodshed. Let me say upfront that he makes a defensible
general point about anti-anti-Trumpism (a phrase I’ve been using for two
years). It is a safe harbor for a lot of conservatives who don’t want to be too
critical of a newly elected president who is not only popular with their
readership but who is also in the infancy of his presidency and has promised an
agenda they would very much like to see enacted.
I was anti-Trump throughout the primaries and in a
different, but still substantial way, through the election. After Trump won, I
declared myself no longer a member of “Never Trump” for the simple reason that
it was a meaningless term after he won. I could be “Never New England Patriots”
throughout the season and the playoffs, but once they won the Super Bowl, it
would be silly to say we must take back the ring. I took a wait-and-see
position because, it seemed to me, that was the only mature, patriotic, and
responsible position to take. And that’s still my position (though wait-and-see
doesn’t mean “stop telling the truth,” which is why I’ve both praised and
criticized him). Some of my colleagues at NR
are more enthusiastic about Trump, some less. But for the most part, as an
editorial matter, that’s remained our position. Also, some conservatives I know
— at NR and elsewhere — have taken
the view that the Trump presidency will end badly but there’s no good reason to
freak out now when Trump hasn’t yet earned
the freak out, especially if that means we will have lost credibility when we
may need it down the road.
The problem with Peter’s critique is that he’s
cherry-picking various columnists to construct a narrative that doesn’t hold
up. He doesn’t point to any NR editorials,
and his examples come from stand-alone columns written by writers — some of
whom don’t work for the magazine — who have the freedom to say what they want.
If guest writer X writes that Trump is a God-King, that doesn’t mean that National Review writer Y has changed his
position on anything. Moreover, Peter makes no effort to acknowledge that much
of the “anti-anti-Trump” media criticism is really quite valid. Saying the
election of Donald Trump is the equivalent of Pearl Harbor is ass-achingly stupid.
Pointing that out may be helpful to Donald Trump, but that doesn’t make it
wrong.
Lastly, the fact that National
Review runs a variety of pieces reflecting different points of view on the
right is not quite the damning charge Peter seems to think it is. Beinart was
the editor of The New Republic for
quite a long time and I know he knows that that magazine (back when it was
good) often had internal disagreements that make those at NR today seem like a fight over what kind of scones to serve at a
tea party. I have disagreements with some of my colleagues (last week’s
“news”letter was mostly dedicated to a pretty serious one with my boss), but
that strikes me as a sign of National
Review’s intellectual health. What Peter and a great many of his peers in
the liberal press need to understand better is that a failure to agree with
them on the nature of the moment isn’t necessarily
evidence of hypocrisy; it’s evidence that we are conservatives who are inclined
to take our own counsel. That this should shock anyone is a mystery to me.
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