Venality and Vanity
Painting the full picture of a despotic regime
Venality and vanity.
Hatred and hubris.
Farce and fascism.
We live in an era seesawing between the ridiculous and the reprehensible. We feel the urge to both laugh and cry, recoil and bear witness. How do we make sense of the full spectrum of the destruction? What lens is wide enough to take in the scale of this miserable tableau?
Metaphors struggle to keep pace. Whatever bounds of credulity we inherited from past generations are stretched to a breaking point by what is before us now.
I worry that one of the most enduring failures of the MAGA era has been our inability, shared by the press, the expert class, world leaders, and certainly the American electorate, in truth all of us, to find an aperture wide enough to let in the full extent of this president’s moral, psychological, constitutional, and temperamental unfitness for the office he holds. In truth, he would fail even the lowest bar for any role of significance or power in a fair, decent, and just society.
Consider just the last few news cycles: reposting a racist video likening the Obamas to apes; shaking down a vital transit project in his old hometown of New York unless he gets his gilded name on a train station or an airport; all while continuing his rampages against the Constitution, our allies, public health, and the security, safety, and economic vitality of our communities.
We have never seen in a president such a toxic mixture of petulance, pettiness, puerility, and perversity.
The scale of destruction and debasement is naturally overwhelming. And that is by design. He is hellbent on chaos when it serves his own base instincts for power, and those who normalize and abet his whims understand that continuous momentum and escalation are the only way to keep the grift going.
Flood the zone. Stay on offense. Move fast and break things. Own the narrative. Never explain, never apologize. Pick any catchphrase you want. The meaning is always the same: never let an opposition coalesce into a countervailing power.
Sadly, this strategy has worked far too well for far too long, thanks in no small part to feckless Democratic leadership. But the great weakness of this approach is that once it begins to stumble, it can quickly shatter. Like a ball thrown high into the air eventually plummets back to Earth. Consider the spasms of accountability with which despotic regimes so often end.
We are already seeing how the outrages of this regime are no longer defying the laws of political gravity.
The more federal forces pour into local communities like Minneapolis, the more networks of resistance emerge and expand. Voices of dissent are becoming bolder and more courageous. Poll numbers are plummeting. Election surprises are surging.
This week, we even witnessed the spectacle of a crowd loudly chanting “Fuck ICE” at a professional wrestling match. Afterwards, the referee, Bryce Remsburg, admitted he delayed the match by design to keep the chants going, writing online, “It seems like the referee may have waited to ring the bell so these could resonate longer? Oh no. Whoops.” And let’s be clear: the professional wrestling crowd is who Trump has in mind when he closes his eyes and imagines his base.
When it comes to all the horrors we are witnessing, no one among us can contend with all of it. We pick and choose our level of engagement, sometimes by necessity and sometimes by design. But that also means we cannot see everything positive that is emerging, and we can miss the full picture of the resistance itself.
We often look to 1930s Germany for parallels to our dark time, and for good reason. But maybe we should also look further back in history and closer to home. To the early 1770s, when sentiment began to coalesce in the colonies that it was time to expel a monarch and attempt a radically new form of self-government.
The very foundation of this country lies in rejecting the whims, pettiness, corruption, viciousness, and unaccountability of a foolish king. As we prepare to celebrate our 250th birthday, reupping that spirit feels like a worthy gift we can give ourselves once again.
To make sense of our time and this tyrant, we might look to the art of Georges Seurat. Like the colorful dots that sprang from his palette, our daily news cycles add detail, one point at a time, to a picture of incompetence, grift, cruelty, and buffoonery. Step back and the image comes into focus.
But tyranny is not the entire scene. We can also begin to see the uprising of conscience, morality, democracy, and justice that will restore, rebuild, and usher this nation toward a more just and hopeful future.
It’s never been more clear that, each of us a dot in the larger picture is actually more powerful than we could have imagined. Maybe it is the failure of leadership that has forced us to find our saviors in ourselves.
Thanks again, Elliot, for your cogent description of the insanity and the recognition of our responsibility to join with one another to move “through the fog” to the clarity of the sane.
I continue to be impressed by your ability to capture and distill this moment in time. I too feel like it's hard for us all to grasp how badly our country has sunk into the morass, how despicableble and low our president and his willing fools have become.
We get inerred to how only five or ten years ago we would have bet the farm that our government would never stoop so low as to routinely pull off the the atrocious behaviors we are currently witnessing. Our norms have deteriorated so badly that I fear the younger generation will be begin to see this all as normal. God help us!