The Devouring

I am ego, hear me roar!

Donald Trump is actually quite a simple person.  All he cares about is his ego.  He knows he’s just so amazingly awesome!  And he has the garish wealth and the hot babes to prove it.  Is there another way to measure a person’s value?  To him the world is only raw material waiting to be consumed, just a collection of objects to be possessed and people to be dominated.  And anyone who declines is an enemy to be crushed, a small person who can only be motivated by petty spite and envy, a loser.  This simplicity is sometimes lost in the blizzard of his abusive and blustering speech, but it’s always his essential motivation, his bottom line.  Everyone must worship him as he worships himself.

And that leads to his defining feature as a public figure: his utter disregard for anything else.  The demands of his ravenous monster-ego are so overwhelming that he literally can’t stop to consider any other principle, including civility, or reason, or truth.  And this gives him a kind of grotesque transparency.  He seems to have no ability to censor himself, to control his impulses, to consider the consequences of his actions.  All that matters is that his ego be sated, which, of course, it never can be.  But his comprehensive irresponsibility also gives him an advantage in any confrontation with critics, since words utterly unconstrained by meaning or consequence are tough weapons to fight against.  It’s hard to argue with someone who doesn’t care about anything but winning.

Let’s consider some of the things he doesn’t he care about.  He quite obviously feels no responsibility to civility.  He crudely denigrates Mexicans, Muslims, disabled people, etc.  He brags about how beautiful women are toys created for his pleasure, and how less attractive ones rightly earn his scorn.  Their feelings, their hardships, their dignity – those matter nothing.  Trump has even encouraged violence among his followers.  He doesn’t understand that civility matters because society cannot function if we don’t respect each other, even when we vigorously disagree.  That’s ridiculously obvious, yes.  Well, to you it is.

He feels no responsibility to the Republican Party.  When that tape appeared in which he makes dehumanizing comments about women and brags about sexually assaulting them, party leaders urged him to do everything he could to control the damage.  They begged him – in his own interests and those of down-ballot candidates – to fully apologize, to drop the issue, and to not dredge up similar actions by Bill Clinton.  Instead he doubled down, holding a press conference with Bill’s accusers from the 90’s and before, even giving them seats in the audience at the second debate.  In response, many of those party leaders, notably House Speaker Paul Ryan, have publicly distanced themselves, out of varying degrees of self-interest and moral revulsion.  But Trump’s responses throughout were never in doubt: he went on the crude offensive, first against Bill Clinton, then against those unhappy party bosses, attacking them as weak, pathetic, disloyal non-leaders.  This is an egotism so overwhelming that it can’t even get out of its own way!  A shrewder nominee would have conceded some small amount of stature by being conciliatory with his fellow party members.  But Trump can’t do that, even though it would help him win the presidency.  His narcissism is so short-sighted that it even subverts itself!

And that’s a recurring theme. There was, for instance, absolutely no electoral advantage in deliberately and repeatedly denigrating the Hispanic judge in his fraud trial, or an overweight Hispanic beauty queen from the 1990’s, or the father of a slain Muslim American soldier.  Indeed, in each of these three feuds he came off as bullying a sympathetic figure, and in each case he persisted in his attacks, thereby keeping the story alive in the public mind long after it would otherwise have died.  In each case he was incapable of doing the smart thing: ignoring the criticism and moving on.  And that almost certainly lost him votes with minorities, and probably with moderate whites as well.  But that just wasn’t as important as protecting his vanity.  His ego simply would not let him back down or let it go.

And there’s another recurring theme, his inability to apologize, to consider that he’s done anything wrong.  That is, he feels no responsibility to morality.   Right and wrong are for suckers, they are only distractions from winning.  Consider his leading part in the birther conspiracy.  For years he spread vicious rumors based on flimsy non-evidence that Barack Obama was not born in America, and was therefore unqualified to be president.  He continued to do so long after Obama released his long-form birth certificate proving he was born in Hawaii.  And when in this election year the pressure to recant grew too great, he made a mealy-mouthed non-apology in which he falsely blamed the 2008 Hillary campaign for starting the rumors and took credit for finally laying them to rest.  He took no responsibility for the damage he had done to race relations and to our political discourse more broadly.  He just blithely acted as if none of that had ever happened.

And this may be the worst of all: he feels no responsibility to the truth.  To Trump words need not correspond to reality; they’re only tools for achieving whatever his goal is at that moment (and it’s ultimately always the one goal).  Consider his remarks last August in which he called Obama and Hillary “founders” of ISIS.  When interviewing Trump, conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, who understood it made no sense to take Trump’s bizarre locution at face value, tried to prompt him to be a little more circumspect in his word choice:

Hewitt: Last night, you said the President was the founder of ISIS. I know what you meant. You meant that he created the vacuum, he lost the peace.

Trump: No, I meant he’s the founder of ISIS. I do. He was the most valuable player. I give him the most valuable player award. I give her, too, by the way, Hillary Clinton.

Hewitt: But he’s not sympathetic to them. He hates them. He’s trying to kill them.

Trump: I don’t care. He was the founder. The way he got out of Iraq was that that was the founding of ISIS, okay?

He doesn’t care.  And why should he care about trivialities like meaning? He casually contradicts what he said last month, or yesterday, or five minutes ago, or even earlier in the same sentence.  He contains multitudes!  He emits his unacquainted-with-reality verbiage and smirks at the camera defiantly, as if sneering at the truth, “You can’t make me care.”

We could go on like this all day and all night and all day and all night tomorrow.  Consider: By telling Hillary he will put her in jail if he’s elected, and by inviting an unfriendly foreign despot to interfere in the election, he shows he doesn’t care about democracy. By repeatedly promoting false crime statistics that wildly overstate black-on-white violence he shows he doesn’t care about racial harmony.  By celebrating waterboarding for its punitive value, and advocating the summary killing of the innocent wives and children of terrorists, he shows he doesn’t care about humanitarianism or justice.  By pre-emptively warning that he can only lose if the Democrats cheat, he shows he doesn’t care about public trust.  By refusing to prepare for the debates, and by stubbornly maintaining ignorance on even the most basic subjects, he shows he doesn’t care about expertise or competence.  Everything he says and does shows he feels no respect or responsibility for anything.

Except maybe the forgotten white working class, and their understanding of America. Trump at times seems to genuinely care about these people and the way conservative economic dogma and liberal cultural disdain have wounded them.  He sees them the way they see themselves, as hard-working people fighting a system that’s working against them, and in his dismissal of all the normal considerations of politics he is their defiance, and their denial.  His supporters are mostly good people wronged by their own elites, and in those moments when he champions them he rises a little above his own squalid vanity.  He comforts them with the same fairy tale he tells himself, that his amazing awesomeness will conquer all.  He extends to them his own irresponsibility, licensing their bitter refusal to face up to the realities of modern America, and to their part in our continuing racial discord.  His ego devours them, too!  And when push comes to shove and his concern for them conflicts with the demands of that implacable ego, he casually hurts their cause by undermining his own electoral chances.  Ultimately he doesn’t really care about them, at least not enough to deserve their support.

And in the end he doesn’t even really care about being president.  Does anyone actually believe he’d like to hold all that responsibility?  He would love the power and adulation, of course.  But he would be incapable of evaluating heavy decisions, or making concessions to unfriendly realities, or controlling his impulses when his buttons are pushed.  That is, he can’t really be the President, and he knows it.  He seems to have decided to run for president partly to avenge Obama’s insults against him over his birther-ism, maybe even on a dare.  If his ego trumps even his own self-interest, is there any reason to think it won’t trump American interests as well?  This is not someone who should be let within a hundred miles of the presidency.

Obviously, anyone whose policy preferences run conservative would find it hard or impossible to vote for Hillary, even in the grim face of Trump’s blithering unfitness.  On policy, Hillary is a fairly standard professional-class liberal, with all the knee-jerk cosmopolitanism, acquiescence to inequality, and condescension toward working whites that that implies.  She’s more slippery than the average politician, but that makes her less so than a constant dissembler like Trump, just as being more corrupt than the typical politician makes her less corrupt than a dirty Manhattan real-estate developer.  And she is capable of controlling herself, of considering the consequences of her actions, of understanding her own motivations, of learning and growing, of weighing multiple considerations, of compromise, of conciliation, and of responsibility.  She is an adult; he is a screaming baby.  The choice for an honest conservative must be hard, and that conservative can only choose Trump over Hillary if he believes her policies will be so harmful to the country that they out-weigh Trump’s monumental and destructive foolishness, immaturity and irresponsibility.  And that’s a hard argument to make.

It’s not clear how Trump became the genuinely toxic character he is.  It seems likely he was born with narcissist tendencies and 70 years of yes-man sycophancy and moneyed unaccountability have drilled that narcissism deep down into the bedrock of his psyche.  But he is, in a strange way, to be pitied, like a compulsive psychopath, or a Kardashian.  He’s the bellhop of the world’s most superficial and tyrannical ego.  He’s a lost little boy at the mercy of a reality-devouring monster, and whatever was once human or touching about him is long, long gone.  There is no hope for the little Donald, his ruthless ego enslaves him and ruins him.  But it’s quite easy to keep it from ruining us.  Don’t vote for it.

Liberals, Liberal and Otherwise

When liberals go to extremes they typically become either too expedient and pragmatic – sacrificing means to ends – or they become egalitarian heroes, knights in armor slaying dragons of power and privilege.  The pragmatism is adopted from a certain strain of conservatism (consider Aristotle celebrating prudence as the highest political virtue and Burke objecting to policy based upon mere rational principle).  But the heart and soul of the liberal project has always been egalitarianism, the freeing of individuals from inequitable distributions of power.  At first it was fighting for religious dissenters against established churches; then the common man against aristocratic privilege; the individual against the state; the slave against the slave-master; the worker against the capitalist; blacks and other racial minorities against white supremacy; women against patriarchy; gays against homophobia.  In each case, liberals have been on the side of the down-trodden against entrenched interest.  And that’s how they always see themselves, even when they’re the ones wielding power.  But put expediency and egalitarian righteousness together and you have a very potent – and potentially very dangerous – combination. 

And that combination is the driving force behind the new rules and laws addressing sexual assault on college campuses.  No reasonable person denies such assault is a very real, widespread and terrible problem.  According to the Centers for Disease Control, 19% of undergraduate women have “experienced attempted or completed sexual assault since entering college.”  But19% cannot possibly be the work of a few deliberate criminals.  There must be something profoundly wrong with the sexual culture itself.  Clearly, it happens much too often that the woman feels coerced and the man either doesn’t realize or doesn’t care.  The latter case is clearly rape.  The former is not what we would normally call rape, and at least some of the time it represents little more than male inexperience and cluelessness.  But much of the time it represents something much darker, something deeply dysfunctional and destructive: egregious male narcissism and privilege.  This is male sexual power maintained through sheer physical strength, and it engenders female fear and diminishes female options.  It’s hard not to see all of this as part of the broader social problem of male domination of women.

The new rules and laws are designed to combat that privilege and domination, and they mostly do so by implementing “affirmative consent”, which defines sexual consent as ongoing, explicit agreement, not the mere absence of explicit refusal.  “Yes means yes” supersedes “No means no.” The state of California recently enacted a law mandating that all its colleges enforce sexual assault guidelines using the new, stricter definition of consent.  And many colleges across the country have instituted new procedures based upon the yes-means-yes standard. 

But many conservatives (who generally oppose feminist-inspired change) and libertarians (who generally oppose government intervention) find them objectionable, as do many liberals, some of whom have characterized the new policies as “illiberal.”  Twenty-eight members of the Harvard Law faculty recently protested against the procedures Harvard uses, complaining they “lack the most basic elements of fairness and due process [and] are overwhelmingly stacked against the accused.” Feminist lawyer Robin Steinberg worries – as reported by Judith Shulevitz in a piece titled “Accused College Rapists Have Rights, Too” – that these new types of rules “reveal a cavalier disregard for the civil rights of people accused of rape, assault, and other gender-based crimes.” 

Some supporters of the new rules deny they endanger anyone’s legal or procedural rights.  Ezra Klein, editor-in-chief of the liberal website vox.com, writes “there’s no contradiction between a fair and clear process, real protections for the accused, and an affirmative consent standard — and there's no reason one shouldn't support all of them simultaneously, as I do.”  In theory, of course, that’s true; changing the standard of sexual consent doesn’t necessarily infringe anyone’s rights.  But trying to legislate such a strict standard for an activity so inherently full of subtleties and ambiguities is asking for trouble.  And, unlike the rules for actual criminal courts, where guilt must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, a college panel can find a student guilty – and expel him and ruin his life – based upon only the preponderance of evidence.  The combination of a very high standard for consent plus a very low one for guilt moves the onus of proof from the accuser to the accused; it amounts in practice to the elimination of the presumption of innocence.  California’s new law mandates that even sex within a healthy relationship requires “affirmative consent” every time, in effect re-labeling almost all present-day sex as assault.  But the law’s defenders say not to worry, since it will only be enforced when a woman has been genuinely coerced and not in those countless everyday cases in which it legally applies.  Well, how reassuring!

But some defenders of the new law argue that such excess is necessary to effectively address the problem.  Klein is eager to put the fear of God into all men:

If the Yes Means Yes law is taken even remotely seriously it will settle like a cold winter on college campuses, throwing everyday sexual practice into doubt and creating a haze of fear and confusion over what counts as consent. This is the case against it, and also the case for it. Because for one in five women to report an attempted or completed sexual assault means that everyday sexual practices on college campuses need to be upended, and men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter.

Klein is right that something must be done to address our dysfunctional, patriarchal sexual culture, but is suffocating all sexual relations with fear of juridical authority a constructive way to do so?  Even our rather damning analysis of that undeniable dysfunction concedes that ambiguous situations can arise innocently.  But Klein’s perfectly OK with criminalizing that ambiguity:

Critics worry that colleges will fill with cases in which campus boards convict young men (and, occasionally, young women) of sexual assault for genuinely ambiguous situations. Sadly, that's necessary for the law's success. It's those cases — particularly the ones that feel genuinely unclear and maybe even unfair, the ones that become lore in frats and cautionary tales that fathers e-mail to their sons — that will convince men that they better Be Pretty Damn Sure.

It is indeed “sad” that legislating such a strict, unprecedented, unfamiliar, confusing, dangerously broad standard could harm what are essentially innocent young men, but “it’s necessary for the law’s success.”

This is the grim face of authoritarian expediency, all the more alarming for its heedlessness.  According to Klein, et al, all women are justifiably afraid of all men, and that situation must be replaced by one in which all men are afraid of legal or semi-legal punishment, even unjustified punishment.  The pro-affirmative-consent crowd may dispute it, but their position in effect is that our normal understandings of due process, presumption of innocence, and sexual ambiguity stand in the way of protecting women from the most violent and reprehensible expressions of patriarchy, and therefore must be discarded.  According to Amanda Taub, female fear of men “reinforces power imbalances that keep women out of positions of success and authority.”  And here’s Klein with the answer: “Ugly problems don't always have pretty solutions.”  Egalitarian righteousness plus thoughtless pragmatism equals liberals doing quite illiberal things.

But the point, of course, is that it’s not illiberal, not when you remember that the animating purpose of liberalism is the fight for the oppressed against the powerful.  To affirmative consent supporters, women are the oppressed and men are the powerful and anything is justified in the service of female liberation.  How can weakening the rights of oppressors itself be an act of oppression?  Habitual identification with the oppressed seems to prevent liberals from realizing that they’re actually winning the culture wars, or that they have achieved genuine social and legal power.  In this view, the state and the university are not capable of oppression, since they fight for the oppressed against the oppressors.  How can agents of liberation themselves be oppressors?  We see the same dynamic play out in liberal intolerance toward opponents of same-sex marriage.  And we should note, as does Andrew Sullivan, the heavy influence on campus culture of post-modernism, with its insistence that there is no truth independent of some political agenda, and that, as Michel Foucault put it, “politics is war by other means”; such views do not exactly make one conciliatory toward any oppressive class.  And we see why the affirmative consent doctrine has so far only been applied to academia: it’s the only place where illiberal liberals are powerful enough to get away with it.  For now.

But if self-righteous identification with the down-trodden is so inherent in liberalism then why don’t all liberals support the affirmative consent movement?  What is it that makes some liberals resist?  There are two countervailing principals at play. The first is a broader pragmatism, understood not as mere expediency, but as something more like humility, as appreciation for the limits of human action in the face of the unimaginable complexity and intransigence of human existence.  This amounts to a more tragic view of life, one in which there are no perfect solutions, no set of principles that would solve all our problems if only we applied them more thoroughly.  The more liberal liberal understands that some of our most important and desirable goals – such as liberating women from patriarchy – can conflict with others equally or more important – such as protecting individuals from authoritarian abuse.  And secondly, the wise liberal understands how particularly important it is to fight that authoritarianism, even the liberal version.  With power comes responsibility and that responsibility does not disappear simply because your goals are noble and your cause is just.  Virtuous intentions are meager protection against an overzealous or unscrupulous prosecutor armed with an ill-conceived and over-reaching law.

The broader, wiser pragmatism is – like the expediency itself – a borrowing from conservatism.  But the skepticism of juridical authority is essential to liberal thought and liberal political culture.  Go back and look at that list of historical liberal fights for the oppressed.  One of the very first is the protection of the individual against misuse by the state, which primarily takes the form of individual legal, political and civil rights.  Those rights are typically seen as inherent and inalienable, but we can understand them better as protectors of individual interest.  Libertarians typically treat them as absolutes and fail to see their instrumental nature.  And libertarians fail to perceive any oppression beyond state oppression.  Modern liberals understand how limited that view is.  They’re wise enough to see the iniquitous power relations that surround us: in capitalism, in culture, in patriarchy, in religion, in the family.  But they must insistently remember the special case of oppression that is legal oppression, the special danger of a state or a university with the power to punish and destroy.  This is how we keep liberalism honest and beneficent. Wisdom demands that we respect the destructive power of all those oppressions, while humility demands we acknowledge the limits of liberation.  But crucially, the earnest, passionate liberal hatred of oppression demands we never sacrifice the most important liberation for any other.