Peace in Our Time

Megyn Kelly made peace with His Hairness earlier this week.

She went to the Tower and no doubt sat across what must be the epitome of the power desk. It’s so passé, but does anyone doubt that the chairs that one occupies in that office, across from that desk, while luxuriant, also requires you to sit on the edge lest you risk sinking into complete submission.  

In other news Karl Rove is quietly speaking to donors, telling them that Hairness can win, and gearing up his billion dollar Super-PAC, American Crossroads to support the candidate.

Every political season sees old rivals, sometimes even bitter ones, come together to defeat the candidate of the opposing Party. It will happen eventually with Sanders and Clinton and their supporters, and it is happening as we speak with the disreputable and repugnant Cruz and the long line of “establishment” Republicans that endorsed him after dropping out themselves. 

For all the early fire of the massive slate of GOP candidates, and the constant jostling to show themselves as independent and anti-establishment, as the race as winnowed to just the three, the fourteen previous losers have shown themselves to be exactly the type of craven whores many Republican voters suspected they were all along. The endorsements by Christie, Carson, Graham, Cruz, Jindal, and Bush have been completely lacking in any principle beyond politics. Though he has literally no chance of the nomination beyond the wildest Hail Mary in American political history, I say good for Kasich. By staying until the end he gets to avoid- at least for the moment—an endorsement of one or the other of the remaining truly repugnant politicians. For now, Kasich gets to hold onto some small shred of his dignity.     

It’s understandable that the average voter would look at this surrender to form as politics as usual. Cynicism is completely baked into the political calculations of even the most committed voter in either Party.  It’s easy to overlook what a soulless maneuver the armistice between His Hairness and Rove, FOX News-- and what is likely to be a long line of Conservative apparatchiks— actually is.  

For starters there is no reason to pretend that the Never-Trump conservatives ever had an ounce of soul or principled political morality. The Republican Party has a record with a through line that runs back to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan of cynical coalition building which used sizable chunks of whatever “ism” fit the electorate at the moment. Racism as an organizing tool is not a foreign idea to this crew, and as late as the Bush Presidency National campaigns were built at least in part on using homophobia as a wedge issue. Bush’s brain, Karl Rove, developed that one all by himself.    

Now, like Captain Renault, the GOP establishment is shocked, shocked to find their bitter and divisive tactics being deployed so effectively by His Hairness. Their challenge? Hairness is a policy windsock  using their “ism’ tactics to overturn their chosen political order. Revulsion is the language that almost all of his GOP opponents choose, but in most quarters the protests are not a matter of revulsion, so much as having their cover be completely blown. Hairness has scorched so much fertile political soil that tactics Republicans have deployed for decades now have the stench of hate attached to them. In a super charged social media environment where the electorate is already undergoing dramatic demographic transformation, direct nods to hate speech are going to be hard to mold into national coalitions that can win elections. Hairness has gone so far that many of them fear that he’s wrecked the game.

Even worse, as I mentioned from a policy perspective His Hairness is a windsock. His hate tactics are being deployed in ways almost guaranteed to destroy foundations and principles on which the Conservative movement was built. This appears to be the last straw for his most vociferous conservative opponents. He shares few, if any, of their core guiding principles of small government, low taxes, and a strong National Defense. His foolish anti-abortion rhetoric to the contrary, many fear that he’ll completely destroy the coalition of big money types and social conservatives that has formed the governing coalition of Republicans.  Who really believes the Bible is his favorite book?

He’d be good for most conservatives on Tax Policy, but he’s already indicated his willingness to break with Norquist’s ultra-orthodoxy. He exhibited completely unmoored principles in foreign and military policy, setting a course that seems to blend isolationism with a buildup in military forces unprecedented since WW II. He’s thrown red meat to conservatives on Obamacare, but indicated he’ll replace it with something better, because we can’t have people “dying in the streets”. Conservatives don’t want something better than the ACA they want Government out of Healthcare completely. The most doctrinaire want to get rid of both Medicare and Medicaid.

I still believe a majority of Americans will not stand for his election. But between his policy positions and his tactics his election would almost certainly be the end of the modern Republican Party. Many of those railing against the candidate seem to think that even his nomination could destroy the party.

All of this brings us back to this moment of Megyn Kelly going to Trump Tower to make peace, and Karl Rove back-grounding with people on how he can engage American Crossroads and its billionaire supporters to get Hairness elected. Kelly’s calculation is complex, but relatively straight forward. Press reports have said she’s getting death threats (as have GOP officials in Colorado). What in the world does she need that for? Make peace, get him on the show, watch your ratings skyrocket, and parlay that all into afternoons at 4 on ABC and interviews with J-Lo or assorted groups of the Kardashians. All she has to do his to maintain some shred of journalistic and personal integrity. Ask a few more semi-tough questions and move on.

Rove’s and his tribes, really all of those who feed at the trough of conservative billionaires are another matter.  These organizations employ thousands, 365 a year, 24-7. Coulter and Hannity and Limbaugh have already made their peace. What will Rove and his peeps do? The money they raise and deploy for Conservative candidates is also the money they live on and on which they feed their families. If they stop raising and spending what is their reason for being? Who’ll buy their dumb books? What do they live on? What choice do they have but to horn in on the party?

The question becomes does the candidate, the policy windsock, have the moral core to turn down the money?  Even if he does turn it down will the Rove tribes sit it out and furlough thousands. With all due respect to their principles and their outrage, no way. They will horn in on the campaign in whatever way they can. They have to. There’s much been made about how Hairness has run a self-funding campaign, but the truth is he’s spent very little money so far. He didn’t have to. Joe, Mika, Chris, Wolf, and Ailes, have taken his calls and put him up live. They’ve played hours of rallies where he’s clowned like Mussolini and preened for the cameras, then it was back to the studios where the all laughed like jackals and had a good time. Hairness won’t get away with that in a national election with the Clinton machine which has faced cannon fire before and will not be easily cowed as Bush and Rubio were. Is he willing to put a billion on the table if he comes out of the convention ten points down in the polls? What about fifteen points down? Doubtful. Even now his business is licensing, not building. He lost a fortune when his own money was on the table. He risks other people’s money now, and here comes the tribes of Karl Rove.

This election was supposed to be about tossing the money changers from the Temple. That is certainly what the Sanders campaign has been about. Hairness has used the word “establishment” in such a negative light for so long many Americans could be excused for thinking he intends to do the same.  If in the end all the money just flows to a different type of candidate, even a windsock like Trump, especially a windsock like Trump, than all of the bitter anger of this campaign will just be reinforced in its cynicism. For what we are seeing now is a pristine image of why the average American voter is so cynical: none of these people give a shit about them. Rove and his tribes need to get paid. The billions that feed them need to continue to flow, sewing confusion about why power and wealth continues to be centralized in fewer and fewer hands. The books need to continue to find an audience and the radio dials need to stay where they are. People got to get paid. This is the principle that now drives the rapprochement between his Hairness, Fox News, and Karl Rove: Greed. Greed for money or power or both. Simple fucking Greed.

A Book About Us

Years from now someone will write a book about how a self aggrandizing, unhinged, businessman with a long history of unmoored amorality comes to believe that the money isn't enough.
 
There will be a whirl of Gatsby-worthy parties, overflowing with men and women of hollow privilege. There will be overflowing, pristine, banquet tables with perfect crystal reflecting shimmering worlds of banal conversation.

We'll see how this man, familiar with the sanctuary halls of real power, came to believe that his wealth was an inadequate substitute for the exercise of the will. Seeking the penultimate recognition, the satiation of his id, he grasps for transformation. He is no failed painter, nor black-shirted Il Duce, but the rise of fascism in the middle years of the 20th is in the DNA of his aspiration.

In a society that has come to value celebrity and wealth as superior in all ways to science, discovery, and innovation he has gained some measure of celebrity. He discharges a catchphrase on TV which enters the vernacular in a way that supercharges his renown. Larger and larger than life, he becomes a cartoon characterization of what he has aspired to be. He has defined the meaning of an ALL CAPS name and it has been splattered across dozens of buildings. When seen in HD his image is replete with odd facial tics and self aggrandizing mannerisms. Only Mike Judge could have imagined the trademark hairstyle.

He has money and fame, and despite a crude narrative of a personal life, a new trophy adorns his arm, roughly in cadence to the presidential election cycle. Is it four years already?
He has nurtured a cult of personality. He has everything. And nothing. It's time for something else. 
 
He starts out slowly, having weathered many storms, training his eyes on a far-off horizon is a familiar strategy. He repeats zero sum, zero sum, zero sum, like the mantra of a crazed gunman. He doesn't just want to win, he wants his opponent to feel the pain of losing. Like his experience in business he lights on one idea after another until something sticks. He lost a fortune trying to build things before he realized the unimaginable wealth that could be generated by building a brand and letting others take all the risk.

So this birther thing had been kicking around for a while. There was a new President with Kenyan ancestry. People were freaking out. Well, not all people, but there were a lot of whites being saturated with news reports about their shrinking portion of the electorate. They were freaked out. AND, there was a lot of economic uncertainty. Everyone was freaked out by the crash.

The challenge was coming up with a way to drain some of the ugliness and some of the cheapness out of that birther commentary. Luckily for this man, celebrity, though a mile wide is only an inch deep. He was going to have to sling some manure, specks of which would land on him, but people would move on quickly. Did you hear what Kanye said? Even mass shootings of six year olds didn't seem to last in anyone's memory. If he was cynical, it was more in ways that reflected a society than in ways that created some new benchmark.

Using the skills that made his catch phrase his celebrity identification he waded into the fields of media jackals and just repeated the words over and over and over and over and over. Birth Certificate. Birth Certificate. Birth Certificate. No one paid attention, but celebrity is a relentless bitch and no one looked away either. Establishment politicians condemned the obvious racism, but the country has a long history of tolerance for the most heinous acts. George Wallace should have delegitimized Nixon's Southern Strategy, but he actually created it.

Birth Certificate. Birth Certificate. Birth Certificate.

And then the birth certificate was produced. Embarrassed? No, lesson learned. More fame. More celebrity. A new catch phrase, but now in another arena, one where something real is traded. Not celebrity, well, at least something more than celebrity, POWER. He had launched a campaign to delegitimize a President based on a racist ideology and gained power.

Time to move on.

He rode down the escalator, his Slovenian wife following closely behind. Idi Amin had a chest full of medals. The Marcos' family had gold plated sanctuaries for their shoes. Mao had the Little Red Book of his sayings published in dozens of languages. He had the escalator of his tower which looked like nothing so much as another garish mall, in another faceless, nameless, upscale American City. Stores in West Palm, Short Hills, and Beverly Hills, places were wealth washes up on the curb and poor people only show up to clean.

Since then it has been a litany of the obscene. The media has focused, obsessively, on the Teflon nature of his campaign. Words that would've sunk normal candidates on a same day basis only seen to strengthen him. The extent of what can't be or is not said by the talking heads cannot be measured and may take decades to unwind. Their ratings, read greed, driven obsession with his boorish celebrity further catapulted what heretofore seemed so implausible. We ought to ask what happened, but in some little corner we try not think about it most of us know.

Fear sells. Love may be all we need, but fear, or rather an answer to it is what we really, really want.

Racism is not out of fashion, but it needed a facelift. Nixon cribbed Wallace. Reagan spoke of a shining city on the hill, but announced his campaign for the Presidency a few miles from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where Civil Rights workers Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney were killed by white supremacists and dumped into shallow graves. In his speech Reagan spoke of smaller government, cloaking his argument in the warm blanket of State's Rights. George Bush Sr. showed us grainy footage of Willie Horton walking out of prison, and Little George and his little troll, Rasputin Rove, conceived of a campaign built on statewide ballot initiatives against gay marriage. 
 
What we've heard since summer is hardly new. Mobilizing bias has been an effective method for cobbling together voting coalitions. What is a little new is the shameless, unconscionable, nearly maniacal way the us against them bias has been promulgated. The candidate has repeatedly admitted in interviews that he throws the red meat of building a wall or banning Muslims to the crowd whenever he senses passiveness. His candidacy is not a Teflon phenomenon, it is a black hole. It subsumes light in a way that makes you doubt the existence of it, or the value of lessons learned. The words spoken are neither moral or immoral. He has not put enough thought into them to achieve that level of daunting analysis. The goal of having spoken them is only the accumulation of power and the engine is the mobilization of fear. Instead of birth certificate,  Muslims, Mexicans, illegals, immigrants, women, blacks.

In Orwellian fashion he speaks of uniting people, but the coalition he seeks is white, dazzling, day after two feet of February snow, white. Skin color may be the unifying power that draws voters into his coalition, but more is required. His voters must be willing to suspend connections to logic. You've got to believe that all evidence to the contrary, the Bible is his favorite book, and then even when you know he's lying to you, even when you know that he's shamelessly manipulating you and your biases, you have to say it doesn't matter. It's a symbiotic relationship not dissimilar to going to a theatre. You know the ax isn't real, and the blood is made with food coloring, but something primal is released when you scream, and you need that.

This started off about him, and his neurotic hunger for legitimacy and acceptance, but it has turned out to be about us. The awful power that was unleashed at Nuremberg rallies from 1923 to 1938 wasn't the charisma of the hateful little Austrian. It was the millions of people who screamed for revenge, a national cleansing of their dishonor. 
 
Time will tell if his story becomes our story. There is much fear in the land, and Americans despite the optimism of our history and our founding documents is more comfortable with mean than we'll ever admit. Then there's the anger. The mother fuckers that created the disastrous collapse of 2007 and 2008 are still running their firms, richer, and fatter and happier than ever. Meanwhile millions have lost their homes, while millions more on the edge of retirement went back to work at McDonalds or Wal-Mart, the years of quiet they envisioned decimated by the greed of others. The homes they hoped to sell for smaller places near sunny beaches devalued by grifters.

I don't know how it ends. I remain hopeful, all evidence to the contrary optimistic even, but I just don't know.