By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, December 28, 2022
I wrote my Los
Angeles Times column on the sadness of Donald Trump’s life
right now. I won’t reprise the whole thing here. I just want to use it as a
jumping-off point.
While I find Trump’s existence pitiable these days, I
can’t really muster much actual pity in the technical sense. Pity involves
notions of compassion and sorrow for another’s misfortune, and there are few
people in public life I’m less inclined to allocate such feelings for. Even on
issues where I am nominally on his side, I think he deserves all of the trouble
he has invited upon himself.
For instance, I do not think Congress should make his tax
returns public because I think punitively releasing tax returns is a bad
practice, even when done against people I think have it coming.
This is a liberal—in the classical sense—point. I have no
sympathy for murderers whose procedural rights have been violated by police or
prosecutors, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s okay for the state to break the
rules when it comes to guilty people. Conversely, I have a great deal of
sympathy for the desperate migrants at the southern border, but that doesn’t
mean I think we should throw all immigration laws aside. Rules matter. And they
matter the most in the hard cases because it’s always easy to apply the rules
in easy cases.
Donald Trump lied over and over again about his tax
returns. He said he’d release them, then didn’t, claiming he couldn’t because
he was being audited. He probably lied about the audit; he certainly lied that
being audited prevented him from releasing them. He broke all sorts of
rules—admittedly informal rules, but rules nonetheless—and as we’ve seen over
and over again, when one “side” breaks the rules, it gives the other “side”
psychological permission to break other rules in response. Trump invited the
predicament he’s in. He wants the rules to benefit him, never to bind him. I’m
willing to defend the rules, but not the conduct that invited the
rule-breaking.
That’s one of the sources of his pitiable plight. There
are rules to friendship that he has never observed or felt bound by. He is, by
his own telling, a man without real friends. He knows famous
and powerful people, and likes to use them in various ways—for flattery,
publicity, status, bragging rights, sex, or financial benefit. But these
relationships are all transactional. He may feel betrayed when these FINOs
(friends in name only) act in ways not in his interest, but that’s what you get
when you use people as instruments of your ambition; they end up using you,
too. And that sense of betrayal is sad because it’s evidence he doesn’t
understand what actual friendship is.
The Pursuit of Happiness
The more I think about it, the real sources of happiness
come from different forms of identity. I don’t mean identity in the political
jargon sense, but in the real-world sense of the different facets of the person
you are. The more roles you have in life, the richer your life will be. Think
about the different parts you play, starting with family: husband or wife,
father or mother, daughter or husband, brother or sister. Then there are your
friendships from different phases of your life or different aspects of your
current life: high school, college, old jobs and current ones, neighbors, your
kids’ friends’ parents, church, mosque or synagogue, bowling league, cigar shop,
whatever.
In all of these realms, you’re a somewhat different
person, shaped by different shared experiences and different sets of
obligations, institutional or otherwise. Every husband is one person to their
wife and another to their buddy at the bar. Every daughter is different with
their mother than with their sister or roommate.
Ideally, you’re not a completely different person in
every different context. There needs to be some moral or characterological core
that holds relatively constant. Maybe that core is what we mean by
integrity.
I might be wrong about the source of happiness, but I
think the lack of these different kinds of identity is a great source of
unhappiness. If your only source of identity is who you are at work, or school,
or on Saturday nights with your friends, you’ll eventually discover that’s not
enough. Saturday Night You will not only have six other days of the week to
contend with, but eventually your friends will find other sources of meaning
and identity that outrank Saturday saturnalia. Most of us know this kind of
person, in my experience usually men, who feel betrayed by buddies who start
prioritizing work, or marriage, or fatherhood over keeping the good times
rolling. Living for the weekend is great for a while, but it’s not actually a
life.
The larger point is that a rich and satisfying life
involves checking a lot of boxes, not checking the same box over and over again
until the combination of the ink and the pressure punches through the paper of
your checklist. Moreover, some of these boxes require subordinating yourself to
something greater than yourself. Virtually all meaningful institutions demand
some sacrifice of yourself and your immediate wants to the greater good of the
institution. The family is the first and most obvious example of this. You
can’t be a good father or husband, mother or wife, if you expect your family to
always put your needs first. But it’s also true of every remotely significant
institution I can think of, from the military to Congress to softball teams. In
some institutions you can be the leader who shines by example or authority. But
in other institutions you have to be at peace with being a follower if you’re
going to get anything out of it. Not every parishioner can be the pastor, not
every employee can be the boss.
The pursuit of happiness is not trod on a single road,
but on many roads that branch out from you like spokes on a wheel.
Trump and Reno
I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot for a while,
but two articles called it to mind. The first was Olyvia Nuzzi’s profile of
Trump alone at Mar a Lago, surrounded by an entourage of sycophants, mystified
and depressed by the fact that his FINOs have abandoned him. The saddest thing
about the man is he can’t understand the sources of his own sadness.
The other article was this
essay by R.R. Reno over at First Things. Long-time readers
might recall that I am not a big fan of Reno—nor he of me. When my book Suicide
of the West came out, he proclaimed that “Jonah Goldberg exemplifies
the decadence and dysfunction of today’s public discourse.” It was a dumb and
dishonest review, as
I wrote here. What bothered me most was Reno and his coterie were among
those intellectuals who welcomed the arrival of Donald Trump as a curative to
our political decadence rather than recognize it as the apotheosis of it.
Which is why I found his latest essay so ironic. He
begins by saying “Capitalism is best understood as the modern ambition to order
and value all available resources solely on the basis of market principles.”
This, of course, is not true (as my friend David
Bahnsen demonstrates in
his response). But even if it were true, such a claim doesn’t do what he would
like. As I wrote at length in my decadent book, capitalism is great for the
things capitalism is great for. But I know of no serious capitalist who favors
leaving every question to the market. I agree—and, again,
wrote at great length in the book he apparently didn’t read—that the family is
not a market institution (even though the market depends on families) and
should not be treated as such.
More broadly, contemporary society is drenched in
examples of political combatants—on both sides—prioritizing things other than
market efficiency. The environmental movement, for good and ill, is a response
to capitalism and Americans are fine with taking chunks of our natural
resources off the market. The culture wars are not about capitalist efficiency.
Arguments about elections, civil rights, etc. all touch on market concerns but
they aren’t about capitalism per se.
But whatever the problem with contemporary society is,
Reno sees the market as the villain. For instance, later in the essay, he makes
a very good point that “sports mania” has led to a rise in Sunday morning high
school sporting events and that this is a major threat to church attendance. He
proposes “illiberal” legislative remedies to deal with it. I think that’s
entirely defensible and really not particularly illiberal if you understand
liberalism in the context of a democratic republic. But I am at a loss as to
why capitalism is to blame for such scheduling conflicts. I’m not going to
search for examples, but I am fairly confident that many openly socialist and
communist nations scheduled athletic events during traditional church-going
hours.
The market is superior to any other economic system for
allocating economic resources, but it is not perfect and not every resource is
purely an economic resource. That is why people like me who defend
capitalism tend to put it at the end of the phrase, “liberal democratic
capitalism.”
I could go on. But what really struck me was how Trump is
precisely the kind of capitalist Reno should despise. To the extent Trump has
any meaningful connection to Christianity it is through the “prosperity
gospel,” which should be anathema to Reno. More broadly, Trump has spent
his entire life worshiping at the altar of Mammon. He considered money the
primary measure of success, meaning, and authority. The only thing more
important than money was his own celebrity, which for Trump was deeply bound up
with money. If Trump didn’t exist, he would be a strawman for all of the moral
and spiritual ills that Reno attributes to our alleged market fundamentalism.
He felt—feels—no meaningful obligation to norms of family, friendship, fair
play, honest dealings, or the constitutional order itself. But because Trump’s
manifest decadence proved useful to undermining the “old consensus” Reno
despises, he found nothing to get worked up about.
Anyway, back to my initial point. There are all manner of
people who are jealous of Donald Trump, but I think he’s a cautionary tale. He
spent his life prioritizing profit and personal fame over every other
consideration. He refused to engage in the simple reciprocities of friendship
and community, if such reciprocity required he subordinate his ego and desires
to some other good. This is why he’d rather be the head of a ruined rump of a
GOP than an important player in a viable party. He wants to be the Big Man in
every room, every relationship, every institution. He had no use for notions of
good character because good character impeded his covetous grasp like thick
mittens on the hands of a groper.
Sure, he was a black swan in that it actually got him the
presidency, but it also revealed the real man. The presidency was like a
magnifying glass that leant him the image of being a Big Man, but with the lens
gone, his smallness is on display. Nuzzi, in her New York magazine
profile of him, writes:
“As president-elect on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, he entertained everyone
from Leonardo DiCaprio to Bill Gates. Post-presidency, on the second floor of
Mar-a-Lago, he has welcomed QAnon believers and Holocaust deniers.” Why?
Because these are among the last dregs of people willing to tell him how great
he is without bursting into laughter. Sure, he will always have Sebastian
Gorka, but what solace is that?
Trump may yet have a comeback, and that would be a tragic
turn for America. But assuming he continues to spiral down the drain, Trump
will never himself be a tragic figure as he sits alone wondering why the
“quality people” want nothing to do with him. A tragic figure is someone who
meets a sorry end despite his virtues. Trump, by his own choosing, never had
use for virtue. His pathetic end—in this life and certainly in the history
books—is the direct result of his admitted vices. As I’ve said from the
beginning of all this, character
is destiny.
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