By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, April 11, 2025
Let’s pretend Festivus came early this year. By which I
mean, I’m going to begin by airing a grievance.
The “parking spots available” sign at Reagan National
Airport is a tool of Xezbeth, Belial, or
one of the other ancient demons of deception. I once read that in an astounding
number of elevators, the “close door” button does nothing. Also, in many
cities, the “press to walk” button is just a sop to the human desire for agency
and control, but actually
does nothing. This enrages me, but nowhere near as much as the “spots
available” sign, which seems to just generate random numbers to get people to
drive through the garage like a mouse following up on a rumor about cheese at
the end of the maze. I imagine that Xezbeth, Belial, and the gang are at the
foot of Lucifer’s throne laughing their asses off as I drive in desperate
pursuit of these utterly fictional parking spaces.
Of course, I’m joking. Not about the Perfidy of the
Parking Sign, but about the demon thing. Yet, a lot of people these days aren’t
joking when they talk about demonic forces at
work in America. Tucker Carlson recently revealed
that he was attacked by a demon in his sleep. His bookshelf has a book on casting
out demons. Eric Metaxas talks about
demons all
the time. And many people sincerely
believe
that Trump critics are possessed
by demons.
We talk a lot about “demonization” in our politics these
days, but most of the time people mean it figuratively and analytically—not,
you know, literally.
What got me thinking about this was a video tweeted out
by Benny Johnson defending the market chaos as an effort to “cast out” the
demons controlling America. Now if you watch the clip, it’s reasonable to
assume he’s speaking figuratively. But I don’t know why he should get the
benefit of doubt since he calls people literal demons all the time.
One of the problems with demonization, in the political
science-y sense, is that it gives the demonizers permission to ignore not just
the humanity of political opponents but any arguments they might offer. You say
the bond markets are tanking and that is bad. The Benny Johnsons get to say,
“Not today, Satan. I’m not listening!”
I’m not going to get into the debate over whether demons
are real. My only point is that reason and facts have no purchase on the
intellect once you accept that your opponents are demons or operating on the
orders of them. Personally, I think it’s a tell that someone’s arguments are
weak once they resort to demon talk. Maybe not when someone is floating above
their bed and talking about Zuul. But I don’t want a doctor, lawyer, or
financial adviser whose first impulse is to attribute problems to demonic forces
in their analysis or prescriptions. That’s just me.
The nice thing about demonic possession talk is that it’s
honest. It puts its unfalsifiable claims out in the open for people to accept
or reject.
There are a lot of other kinds of arguments that amount
to the same kind of argument, but they hide the dybbuk in the details with
fancy language that sounds more technical, scientific, or just clever.
Arguments about “white supremacy,” “patriarchy,” “the deep state,” “globalism,”
“the Jooooz,” “the 1 percent,” often operate the exact same way. They point to something “bad” and work
backward to build the case that “hidden forces”—whether it’s the Pale Penis
People, the deep state, the bagel-snarfers or whomever—have expertly pulled
strings from their Star Chambers to make it so. The bad thing—real or
alleged—is the proof that evil human will is at work. These evil
puppeteers are what you might call secular demons for those who reject
explicitly religious talk.
This was Marx’s
view of the “Jewish spirit” running through capitalism and Hitler’s view of
the “Jewish bacillus” running through both capitalism, communism, and anything
else he disliked. And it’s the view of countless antisemites on the left and
right today. The human impulse to respond to misfortune, crisis, or mere
inconvenience and disappointment by asking “Cui bono?” is sadly wired into us. It’s not always stupid
or wrong to ask “who benefits” in a given situation. But it’s conspiratorial
madness to ask it in every situation. If, like Marjorie Taylor Greene,
you can look out the ravages of a wildfire and think Occam’s razor points to
Jews using their weather satellites to make a few shekels, you’re not—let me
say this nicely—a particularly reasonable person.
One last point on antisemitism since we’re on the cusp of
Passover. I will never stop marveling at how people can look at the history of
Jews, starting with the story of Passover itself all the way through the
hundreds—thousands?—of pogroms, inquisitions, retail cruelties and wholesale
genocide, and conclude “Man, those Jews really run everything.”
The vision of the garden and the gun.
Let’s switch gears. I tried to make a point on the solo Remnant
this morning and I don’t think I did a very good job, so I’m going to try again
here.
A quick recap: I’ve written a bunch of times about the
“English garden.” Here’s how I put it
most recently
(feel free to skip if you know this stuff by heart by now):
One of my favorite metaphorical
illustrations of how to think about the role of the state is the difference
between the English and French garden. I wrote about it in
my book and
here and
here. For those who don’t know or remember, the basic idea is that the
hyperrationalist French gardens with conic shapes, right angles, and other
geometric shapes represent one Enlightenment view of how government should
operate, imposing a human vision of nature on nature. The English garden,
meanwhile, represents a different model. It establishes a space, free of
external threats and invasive weeds, that allows the plants of the garden to
grow free into the best versions of themselves.
I find this metaphor to have enormous explanatory power
about the differences between two different approaches to politics, but also to
economics.
In politics there are people who argue that the state (or
movement, cause, faith, etc.) must be salvific. Literally, it is the view that
you can deliver the people—all of the people—to some perfect society.
The language of this political tradition is all about movement, destinations,
marching together, and the like. Nobody is left behind, everyone is included.
This is the worldview of all the modern totalitarian movements, and many
ancient ones. The problem is that when you try to implement the ideal, i.e. put
your idea into practice, lots of people don’t want to go where you’re trying to
take them. The totalitarians, or to be more polite, the utopians, get angry at
the slackers, wreckers, dissidents, and traitors (whether they’re class
traitors, race traitors, or traitors to the nation depends on what your
Shangri-La at the end of history looks like). Also, because you’re invincibly
confident in the righteousness and rightness of your cause, you assume that any
difficulties you run into must be the handiwork of, well, demons—literally or
figuratively. So they must be eliminated, cast out, defeated—again, literally
or figuratively.
This is where the gun comes in. By the gun, I mean actual
guns—or men carrying them—but also force. Government is force. It has a
monopoly on legitimate violence. This is one of the points that libertarians
have always understood better than any other school of politics. Defy the
government about pretty much anything and, eventually, people with guns show up
to force either compliance or punishment. Refuse to pay your parking tickets long
enough, and eventually the state, armed with guns, will come to collect.
But that’s not really the point I want to emphasize.
Government force is more supple, complex, and diverse than just sending in the
gendarmerie. The way of the gun can manifest itself with legislation,
presidential executive orders, bureaucratic regulations, or even just through
the threat of them. There’s a gun somewhere in there, but the point is that
government has force, power, and the ability to use it. (Think of it this way.
Donald Trump didn’t threaten violence against law firms with his outrageous executive
orders. But a gun will enter the picture if one of the target lawyers tries to
enter a government building in defiance of it.)
Which brings me to economics. On Monday, Trump
acknowledged the pain and turmoil he inflicted on the global economy. Then, he said,
“I don’t mind going through it because I see a beautiful picture at the end.”
That’s the salvific, French garden approach. I am going to bring all of us
to a better place, a promised land.
This way of talking and thinking about politics and
economics is hardly unique to Trump. When Barack Obama promised “fundamental
transformation” and talked about how, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,”
he was tapping into the same unconstrained vision. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth
Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, FDR, Woodrow Wilson: They have all thought
this way.
For most of my professional life I’ve been beating up on
this worldview. The idea that some politicians, surrounded by experts and
technocrats, can run or transform the economy, and deliver all of us to a
better place through the application of will, intellect, and governmental force
is what Friedrich Hayek called the “fatal conceit,”—“the idea that man is able
to shape the world around him according to his wishes.” He derived the title
from a line from Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations:
The man of system … is apt to be
very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed
beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest
deviation from any part of it. … He seems to imagine that he can arrange the
different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the
different pieces on a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces on the
chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand
impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every
single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from
that which the legislature might [choose] to impress upon it.
For most of my life, this observation drew blood almost
entirely on the left, and applause almost entirely from the right. But in
recent years, similar men of the system have proliferated on the right. The
Peter Navarros and Oren Casses try to make Trump’s actions make sense as an
explication of their system.
One of the more amusing problems they face is that Trump
hates to concede anything to their expertise, preferring to ground his
erraticism as the ingenious product of his instincts. So the right’s new
system-men have to rush in after every zig and zag and insist the “plan” is
working, like the compulsive gambler who insists every loss is proof that his
system is about to pay off.
Now, for the garden. The market system is man-made, just
as gardens are. But it is not the product of any individual will. It is a
crowdsourced network of institutions, constructed over generations of trial and
error, learned best practices, and the accumulation of common law and
legislation alike. Just as no one person knows how to make a pencil, no one
knows how to create a global system of finance and trade. But, together, over
time, we made it. And it has delivered massive abundance.
The problem with the garden system is that when it’s
working, you don’t notice its operation. You take it for granted just as you
take for granted that you will get light when you flick a switch and hot water
when you turn a faucet. When it’s operating properly, the garden system has few
active defenders or explainers. This leaves the field vulnerable to people of
the gun to promise a better way. The gun people stoke grievances and
resentments about how the status quo isn’t doing enough for you. They
insist they have a better way grounded in their own righteousness and superior
intellect. They tell us that we can keep all of the wealth we have but produce
even more wealth if we just do X or Y. We can afford so much more than what the
golden goose is giving us. But bad people—“millionaires and billionaires,”
“globalists,” corporations, Wall Street, Jooz, demons—are actively preventing
you from enjoying the salvific bounty promised by the saviors.
It is only when someone tears down or batters these
Chestertonian fences all around us that we discover those fences are there for
a reason. Few people think about the value of the dollar as the global reserve
currency or of the full faith and credit of America’s bonds until some expert
or experts act on their ignorance and ingratitude.
That’s where we are now. One man is singlehandedly taking
a plow to the garden because he is confident that he knows better than, almost
literally, everyone. And his defenders have few, if any, serious
arguments in his defense beyond “trust him.”
Perhaps paradoxically, I’ve come to wish that the
champions of the garden had a little more stomach for the way of the gun. I
don’t mean that they should use government force to impose their own private
nirvanas. I simply mean that I wish that there were more gardeners, more people
willing to deny attempts to muck with the system, to dismantle the rule of law,
to defend the norms and customs, that have made our manmade system so
successful. That’s what the keeper of the English garden is supposed to do. The
night watchman
state is small—but the watchman is still necessary.
The depressing thing about all of this is what so many on
the right have forgotten. The hopeful thing is that many others, on the right
and the left, are relearning the value of what they took for granted. I don’t
put a huge amount of faith in the notion that the lesson will be permanent,
because no lessons are. But when we get through this nonsense, it may be a
while before we have to learn it again.
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