Jonah Goldberg
Friday, May 31, 2024
Albert Jay Nock was one of the great magazine editors. As
I have recounted before, in his Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, he
tells a story.
When he was running The Freeman (the first
one), a young writer came to look for writing opportunities. The
writer-on-the-make asked if Nock had any “sacred cows” that could not be
violated in Nock’s pages. “Yes,” he recounted in his memoir, “we had three of
them, as untouchable and sacred as the Ark of the Covenant.”
“The first one,” I said, “is that
you must have a point. Second, you must make it out. The third one is that you
must make it out in eighteen-carat, impeccable, idiomatic English.”
“But is that all?” the young man
countered.
“Isn’t it enough for you?”
“Why, yes, I suppose so, but I
mean, is that all the editorial policy you have?” the young man asked
incredulously.
“As far as I know, it is,” I said,
rising. “Now you run along home and write us a nice piece on the
irremissibility of post-baptismal sin, and if you can put it over those three
jumps, you will see it in print. Or if you would rather do something on a national
policy of strangling all the girl-babies at birth, you might do that — glad to
have it.”
Now, take it from the editor-in-chief, this is not exactly the
editorial policy at The Dispatch. I mean, we do try to live by
those three sacred cows, but I don’t think we’d stop there. What I mean is,
barring some Swiftian tour-de-force, we would not run a piece defending the
strangulation of girl-babies at birth. Or boy babies. Indeed, generally
speaking, while Steve and I haven’t put it all down on paper, there’s just an
implicit understanding here at The Dispatch that we don’t run
pieces condoning strangling babies—or pretty much any other category of human.
All I’m trying to say is that while we welcome divergent perspectives, we tend
not to run stuff—no matter how well-written—that we don’t think is factually,
morally, or intellectually defensible. This doesn’t mean we all have to agree
with it, but we set the standards a bit higher than Nock suggests above (though
I don’t think he would have actually published a piece advocating wholesale
infanticide).
Why do I bring this up? Because while I agree with our
policy of not peddling hot takes for clicks or efforts to bend principles to
fit partisan priorities, I have a soft spot in my heart for the Nockian
approach. Sometimes the conventional wisdom is unwise, reigning pieties do not
deserve to reign, and the things that aren’t supposed to be said deserve to be
said.
This is all a long-winded way of saying in the matter of
the People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump, I want to make
the case for blaming the victim.
Blaming the victim is one of those things “everyone
knows” we’re never supposed to do. Interestingly, this is not some ancient
biblical or Thomistic injunction. The phrase “blaming the victim” is barely a
half-century old. The phrase was almost
nonexistent before the 1971 book Blaming the Victim by
William Ryan. Angry at the Moynihan
Report, Ryan argued that Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s diagnosis of family
breakdown in the African American community as the driver of urban crime and
dysfunction was outrageous. It was a seminal text of the “root causes”
arguments we are so familiar with today. It took on added ideological baggage
in the context of rape and sexual assault. And—let me just say—rightly so.
Blaming women for being attacked because they dress provocatively or get drunk
in unwise situations or locations is morally reprehensible. But, as the
curmudgeonly father of a young woman, I feel compelled to say that this doesn’t
mean that women shouldn’t be mindful of their circumstances. The matter of
blame— morally and most emphatically legally—should and must reside squarely on
the criminal.
But let’s set intergenerational poverty and sexual
predation aside. As a matter of real life, we all can think of circumstances
where we, or people we know, went looking for trouble. I think most reasonable
people can hold two independent ideas simultaneously. The person who hurls a
string of F-bombs at a cop and gets a beating as a result was behaving
stupidly. Indeed, it’s fair to say—not as a matter of law, but of common
sense—that he was “asking for it.” But we can also believe that the police
officer should not have beaten the victim. We have all sorts of moral
intuitions of this sort. The teenager who thinks he’s good at parkour was an
idiot for jumping from rooftop to rooftop, and it’s tragic that he fell to his
death. But it is not as tragic as the teen who is struck by a stray bullet
while doing her homework. The hiker who is mauled by a bear for trying to take
a selfie with some cubs does not arouse the same sympathy as the visitor mauled
by a bear at a zoo because the zookeeper left the enclosure unlocked.
Donald Trump had sex with an adult film actress while his
third wife was nursing their newborn child. He had
an affair with a former Playboy model. He denies this, but as far as I can
tell no one else does. Even Trump’s staunchest defenders don’t try—at least not
very hard—to do so. He falsely recorded his effort to pay off to Stormy Daniels
as legal expenses. He spent his entire professional life abusing the legal
system, stiffing contractors out of their fees by threatening to bankrupt them
in frivolous legal actions. As a landlord, he violated fair
housing laws. As a presidential candidate, he promised to put his business
interests in a blind trust, but once elected he didn’t and monetized the
presidency for his own benefit. Also as a presidential candidate, he led chants
of “Lock her up!” about his political opponent. He invited Russia to release
information about her. He was impeached (the first time) for abusing his
power in an attempt to intimidate a foreign leader to investigate Joe Biden for
corruption. When he tried to steal the 2020 election, he pressured his own
Justice Department to allege crimes to buttress his false claims that the
election was illegitimate. This was also around the time he encouraged a mob
that visited riotous violence upon the Capitol in an effort to intimidate Congress
out of fulfilling its constitutional duties. He’s promised to pardon people who
beat up cops on his behalf. He calls them “hostages” and plays their warbling
rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” before his rallies, like some
weak-tea Americanized version of the “Horst-Wessel-Lied.” He
defended the mob that chanted “Hang Mike Pence.” He’s argued—through lawyers in
court—and in his own words that he should be immune to any criminal charges
that stem from actions he took as president, and to a certain extent, as
ex-president. He’s vowed that when he’s president again he reserves the right
to do what he’s outraged is being done to him. I could go on, but you get the
picture.
Now, I want to be clear: Except for the misdemeanor of
false records, none of these things are proven crimes and some of them
are not crimes at all. Contrary to a lot of talking heads, politicians are not
legally barred from trying to “influence an election.” That is what running for
office is. Nor is paying off parties to adulterous engagements
illegal. If it were, I have no doubt many politicians would be in the
clink.
But as a matter of common sense, karma, moral intuition,
or whatever term you like, I am utterly incapable of mustering the slightest
sympathy for Donald Trump. If I were to publish a dictionary of common phrases,
I would put his picture next to the entry on “F—k Around and Find Out.”
His entire life has been one extended experiment with
testing, violating, and abusing the rules—some legal, some moral, some
normative—for his own benefit. The system isn’t supposed to apply to him. This,
in almost dialectic fashion, has invited responses that also violate the rules
of the system. I’ve been making this point for nearly a decade now. Trump’s
violations of norms have elicited countless violations of norms from his
opponents. That’s what happens when you break the rules: You give permission to
others to break them, too.
The amazing thing is how people go blind to the
rule-breaking of their own team. Sen. Mike Lee thinks that the prosecution of
Donald Trump is an affront to all he holds dear, invoking A Man for All
Seasons with the Democrats as Richard Rich, defenestrating the rule of
law not for Wales, “But for Biden.”
Trump’s myriad transgressions seem to be utterly invisible to him.
But as I said, we can hold two ideas simultaneously. I
think this case against Donald Trump should never have been brought. As a
matter of law—not karma—Alvin Bragg is in the wrong. I don’t necessarily
believe that he thinks he’s breaking the rules, but there’s a lot of that sort
of motivated reasoning going on with rule-breakers these days. This case would
not have been brought against anyone but Trump, as Elie
Honig and others have argued. I am unconvinced by the argument he committed
a felony. I don’t blame the jurors for reaching that conclusion. I might have
reached the same given the instructions of the judge, the evidence presented by
the prosecution, and the abysmal defense mounted by the Trump team. But I still
think the verdict is wrong.
This brings up another reason to blame Trump. He didn’t
let his lawyers mount
the sort of defense that might have gotten him acquitted. Refusing to
give an inch, he wouldn’t let them concede the affairs, or pursue a strategy
that didn’t align with what he thinks are his political and psychological
interests. “Deny everything,” and “always punch back,” are the Roy Cohn rules
Trump lives by, and why not? They’ve worked for him until now.
And they may continue to work for him. One of the
problems with the backlash that Trump invites from his enemies is that it often
elicits yet another backlash against them. The flimsiness of this case is
causing some people—and nearly all elected Republicans and most conservative
pundits—to rally to Trump. It’s not at all far-fetched to imagine that Trump
comes out of this stronger. Or he might not. No one really knows. But the
fantasy that this will be the thing that rids us of Trump has taken many
forms and has never paid off.
I have no problem with reasonable criticism of this case
and the verdict. Why would I? I agree with much of it. Where I part company is
with the idea that this proves Donald Trump was “right” about the system. He’s
like a human monkey wrench hurling himself into the gears of the system and
then, when mangled by it, crying about how he’s a victim and that his
victimhood proves the system never worked.
It is abhorrent and reprehensible to call this case a
Stalinesque show trial. If you know anything about Stalin’s Great Terror and
say this, you are whitewashing profound evil and slandering the United States.
In Stalin’s show trials, the accused were tortured. Their families were
tortured. Victims were threatened with death—and the deaths of their
families—if they didn’t sign and repeat false confessions. Rep. Nancy Mace plays a similar
game. “There’s no difference: Putin silences Navalny, Biden’s DOJ targets
Trump. The left’s outrage over Navalny is hypocritical as they cheer on Biden’s
tyranny.”
If you know anything about Putin or Navalny and can say,
with a straight face, “There’s no difference” the best one can say in your
defense is that you are a staggering idiot. I don’t think Mace deserves such
generosity. This is not like Castro’s Cuba, as Marco
Rubio says either.
It is entirely defensible to say that this verdict
undermines faith and confidence in the judicial system. That is exactly what I
thought it would do, and so I was a skeptic of bringing it all along. But you
know what else undermines faith and confidence in the judicial system? Claiming
that we are no different than Stalin’s or Putin’s Russia.
Our legal system has never been perfect. It’s produced a
fair number of miscarriages of justice. But normally, politicians—particularly
ones who claim to be conservatives and admirers of the American experiment—do
not respond to such mistakes by defecating from a great height on their
country. But they are willing to do so, not for Wales, but for Trump.
A note on Nock.
Some readers will recall I am
a fan of much of Nock’s writing. My podcast is named The Remnant as
a modest nod to his essay “Isaiah’s
Job.”
Nock’s self-description to himself as a “superfluous man”
was a mild nod to the literary character type found in 19th-century Russian
literature. But he meant something a little different. The Russian superfluous
man, found in the novels of Pushkin, Lermontov, and others, was an aloof
nobleman, sometimes of considerable influence and power, who defied the norms
of polite society. Nock’s superfluousness was certainly aloof, but it was aimed
more at those in power. The demagogues and politicians who manipulated public
passion for their own ends exasperated him, but not to the point where he let
their exasperation cause him to mimic their effects. He believed in a remnant of decent,
somewhat stolid people who didn’t get seduced by the kulturkampfs of the
moment.
Nock is something of a cautionary tale, as he ended his
life in anti-democratic crankery and in an antisemitism that betrayed his own
previous denunciations of it. Obviously, I don’t subscribe to any of that. M.D.
Aeschliman recently penned a fascinating
corrective of Nock, William F. Buckley, and the concept of the
remnant. I don’t necessarily agree with it entirely, but he’s a brilliant
scholar and the piece is worth reading. I think whether you’re using Nock’s
version or Matthew Arnold’s, the idea stands on its own.
I bring this up in part to answer some questions posed by
readers, but mostly to make a more relevant point. I think it’s fine to be
angry about the Bragg case. I also think it’s fine to think justice was done,
or that it will be done pending appeal. Reasonable people can disagree. But I
think moments like this demand a little of that superfluousness. Watching cable
news and perusing social media last night, I felt utterly out of step with the
defining political passions of this moment. It was only when I watched
the livestream of Advisory Opinions that I heard anyone
acknowledge the conflicting truths of this case, the competing shades of gray
that define the reality and the facts.
You don’t owe anyone your passion. It’s fine to be loyal
to a party or even a politician. But you shouldn’t relinquish the keys to your
supply of anger or righteousness. The loudest voices
make the same error, but from different directions: They invest in Donald Trump
the future of America’s soul. But America is about more than Donald Trump. If
he loses in his battles, it will not be proof that America is irremissibly
lost. And if he wins, it will not be proof that America is irremissibly lost.
Both visions are predicated on a lie about this country and how it works. But
that lie can become true only if enough people decide to believe it. So don’t
give the monkey wrench that power.
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