GIN AND TACOS

There is this segment of the center-left, personified by CNN and the New York Times and candidates like Joe Biden, that believes it can get the right to stop accusing it of being far left marxist extremists if…if it just demonstrates how fair and reasonable it really is. So candidates in this mindset keep moving to the right – How can they call me a communist if I believe most of the same things they do! – and organizations in the media keep hiring right-wing hacks and both-sidesing the hell out of whatever pretenses of journalistic integrity they may once have had.

It is sad. It is like watching someone trying repeatedly to win the affection of their awful, cold, distant, loveless parent. As an outside observer you can see the pathetic futility of it, and you want to put your hand gently on their shoulder and say, "Maybe it's time to let this go, to move on with your life and stop trying to get your asshole piece of shit dad to say he loves you for the first time in 50 years." But you know the odds of getting through to your friend are so low that you don't bother.

CNN and the NYT and "let's keep moving to the right" candidates apparently can't or won't figure out that calling them leftist commie marxist extremists is the entire game plan, full stop. It has nothing to do with what they stand for, how they report the news, or anything else with a basis in reality. They are going to call you Fake News and a dangerous leftist radical no matter what, because that is what they do and that is the worldview they have chosen to adopt. Anything short of total, obsequious Fox News style right-wing ass kissing is "Fake News" and the lying liberal media. Any political figure to the left of Reagan is a communist.

And that will never stop. Never.

So every time CNN does something like hire a Trump loyalist to oversee its 2020 election coverage – Brilliant! What could go wrong! – it gets even sadder. They will be out of business someday, and as they close up the shop for the last time they still will not have figured out what they did wrong – that trying to appease the right never works and you make the product shitty and unwatchable to everyone else in the process. You ruin it, in short. You ruin it and get nothing in return.

In their fertile imaginations I suppose they think moves like this will make Fox News viewers think, "Well maybe it's time to watch some CNN!" And that's sad. It's almost unbearably sad that CNN has yet to figure out that those viewers will never love them, will never switch over to CNN, will never think or speak of CNN as anything but fake lying liberal media trash because that belief is a core tenet of their worldview.

If they have not figured this out yet there is no hope that they ever will. CNN used to be a decent news organization, like the NYT used to have a half-decent editorial page. Now they're both shit and they won over exactly zero conservatives in the process of running their own product into the ground.

It's hard to be selective when considering all of the ways in which American public discourse has gotten worse on account of the 2016 election, but my vote for the worst change is the now-constant recourse to grand conspiracies to explain (across the political spectrum) failures or bad behavior.

Like many people around the world during the Cold War developed an all-encompassing worldview based on the near-omniscience of the CIA (a view that persists to this day in much of the Middle East), people now imagine dark forces on The Internet having almost limitless power. You can't fart in some parts of the world without someone blaming the CIA for it, despite the reality that the CIA couldn't even figure out that some of its own (Ames, Hanssen) were Soviet spies.

Now there is a shadowy Other – sometimes Russia or The Kremlin, sometimes Bots, sometimes merely They – capable of engineering any imaginable outcome and a few that aren't imaginable. Your candidate lost the primaries? Rigged! Rigged by powerful conspirators! You got caught writing some embarrassing shit on your old blog? Hackers! Time-traveling hackers! And most recently, did you get caught plagiarizing (an act that, thanks to easy and ubiquitous tools like TurnItIn, is now almost ludicrously simple to detect)? The people who pointed it out are part of an "oppo campaign"! Well of course.

The fact that a phrase like "oppo campaign" or the extremely popular on social media "Kremlin op" have gone mainstream is a good sign of the extent to which reality and Tom Clancy fantasies have been conflated. A couple years ago this kind of conspiratorial thinking would have resigned any public figure to the lunatic fringe. Now nobody bats an eye. Everything is a conspiracy. Everything is a product of nefarious forces. It's like the upside-down Occam's Razor; never accept the most obvious solution when a mindlessly convoluted one wherein you become a victim will do.

That last part, I think, is key. People who spout this stuff when they are caught red-handed don't even care how plausible their stories sound. It simply is a matter of reframing the story to make themselves victims. Once they construct a victimhood narrative, then supporters innately get defensive and rally. It doesn't have to be true, just plausible. And we are living in an era in which the commonly accepted definition of "plausible" is rapidly expanding.

Donald Trump is a weak president on the path to what can only be described as a failed presidency. I won't bore you with the extended "Neustadt is still the best" dive into the political science, especially since Matt Glassman already covered that exhaustively and there's little I can add to it.

That is not to say, Donald Trump's ideas are bad (they are) or that he is a terrible person (he is). It is to say that he is really, really bad at being president. He is an almost comically bad negotiator, and the one absolutely unassailable conclusion Neustadt drew is that bargaining and negotiation are the keys to a president getting anything he wants. Since the president lacks power to simply command Congress and other actors to obey him, he has to find a way to convince them that his interests are worth pursuing.

In that way and by any other measure, he simply is awful at this. A guy the media uncritically allowed to pitch himself as some kind of master Deal Maker is, in reality, so bad at negotiating that it's getting a little hard to believe. Alternating between braying invective and transparently insincere appeals for "unity" is a sign of how weak and ineffectual he is. Neustadt is an old piece of political science and many other interpretations of presidential power have since been written, but I am one of the many who believe he fundamentally got it right (if not in every detail). Presidents who can't negotiate are failures.

That said, I've been thinking a lot lately about how – now and in the future – to incorporate Trump into the minor national pastime of evaluating and ranking presidents. That's unimportant in the grand scheme of things. But other than looking at the small data set, declaring Trump an outlier, and pretending these four years didn't happen I see his presidency as incompatible with any attempt at analysis – including Glassman's (wholly accurate) application of Neustadt.

Here's the thing: Donald Trump isn't even trying to be president in any sense that the job of the president is understood. An analogy might illustrate my point best. Imagine you wanted to rank the (53 x 2) 106 quarterback performances in the Super Bowl. But you didn't have 106 quarterbacks – you had 105, and then this one guy who showed up on game day wearing a loincloth, swinging around a baseball bat, and making no effort to play the game at all. He simply showed up, preened for the crowd, and screamed "Fuck you!" at the referees for three hours.

In one sense, you could easily look at that list and say he is 106th of 106. But in another sense you can't even rank him on the same list as the others. It's not merely that he played a bad game (as players 104 and 105 obviously did). It's that he was playing an entirely different game that nobody else during, before, or since was playing. His goals and motives were wholly his own and largely inscrutable.

It is entirely possible that aside from Trump's commitment to rapacious tax cuts for the wealthy and his puerile obsession with The Wall, there is nothing he is even trying to do. In that light it is incorrect to say he's a weak, crappy president. He simply isn't the president at all in any meaningful sense. He spends most of his day doing nothing. He is on vacation more than he is in the White House. His goal seems to be nothing more than getting attention (at which he is very good, thus he probably considers himself a success by that criterion).

In the end it's an apples / oranges problem. Forty-four presidents were attempting to drive a bus, and then you have this other guy who wanted to blow up the bus and refused to drive it. It's not clear at all that the 45th guy even belongs in the conversation. There's a difference between doing something poorly and simply not doing it at all.

Liberals spook easily, a reasonable response to a political lifetime of limited success in elections and – notably – some defeat snatched from the jaws of victory experiences like 2016. I get it. The sky is always falling, everything will turn out badly somehow, and the worst will inevitably happen. Frankly that's not a bad set of expectations; at least it turns the successes into pleasant surprises.

But listen. Just try to trust me on this one, even though you won't and possibly can't trust me or anyone else who tells you this: Howard Schultz's candidacy is a joke. And not in the way Trump's candidacy was a joke that appealed really strongly to a demographic that actually exists. It's the kind of joke everyone will forget about rapidly and will get more embarrassing the longer it is drawn out.

If you don't want to read any further arguments, just remember this: a man with billions of dollars, one week into a heavily covered media rollout of his supposed presidential campaign, has fewer than 60,000 followers on Twitter and 30,000 on Facebook. And half of that is journalists. The other half is people making fun of him. In another context, that's 60,000 fewer followers than *I* have on Facebook. Think about that. And this guy claims that what he's proposing to do is a thing people are clamoring for. Social media follows are a very cheap and easy thing to buy, but also to grow organically. Post literally anything people find funny, interesting, cute, etc and follows will grow because it costs the user literally nothing. Oh, this seems interesting I guess (Click!) And he can't even do that.

There simply is no audience for this outside of campaign consultants (neatly divided into two camps: people who think the West Wing was real, and people who know Schultz is a moron but are happy to take his money) and the small portion of the electorate that actually has centrist politics (which, in reality rather than in imaginations, is not many). The Democratic primary field already offers an array of options for Ned Flanders types who just want everyone to get along but don't want any policy changes, with the exception of gun control, to the left of like, John Kasich. Bloomberg. Biden. Gillibrand, probably. Maybe Booker soon. Aside from calling themselves Democrats, what is the difference between these people and Schultz?

What Schultz is banking on is someone like Sanders winning the Democratic nomination – because if that doesn't happen, his "Oh my god, look how extreme and partisan both of the choices are!" message is dead on arrival. Even if that does happen (which is unlikely) he can't answer the obvious question: in a "Far right vs. far left" election theoretically crying out for some moderate Voice of Sanity independent, why would it be him? Why wouldn't established figures with name recognition and political experience (Bloomberg? Kasich?) fill that void? Why wouldn't some billionaire who actually has a personality and isn't some forgettable, boring, cliche-spouting guy who looks like your dentist run for it? If there's one thing this country is not short on, it's rich guys who seem to think they'd be great as elected officials. Some of them can even speak in a way that doesn't make everyone sleepy.

I can't tell if this guy has the energy to make until the Spring of 2020 – until he knows who the Democratic nominee is – but if anyone around him is being honest with him this will be over quickly and he'll go slinking back to the Aspen Ideas Festival and Davos where rooms full of people will nod politely at the kind of pabulum he's selling. He is reportedly paying his consultants obscene amounts of money, so unfortunately that guarantees that at least one group of people will continue to tell him this is a great idea.

We are likely to start seeing more of this in the future, as the rich get obscenely richer and they realize that while a presidential campaign is an expensive thing, it's the kind of expensive thing that a billionaire can easily buy. But of all the world's billionaires, I can't think of one less interesting and less likely to garner any support beyond the tepid praise of Chuck Todd and Jeff Flake. Not only is Schultz the answer to a question nobody is asking, he's not even a good answer.

I went to a Catholic high school. It wasn't my choice. Like most people of the pre-millennial generations, I didn't have those "You go ahead and decide what you want" parents. My dad went to Catholic schools in Chicago as a young Polack, and such would be my lot as well.

The Covington Catholic story prompted me to think about the place I went a little more fondly. I have no memories at all of getting right-wing political messaging from the priests, nuns, or lay teachers there. Conversely, there are many clear memories of adults telling us things like "You are all very sheltered" and "You're here because your parents can afford to send you here." Our "World Religions" course, often a propaganda nightmare at Catholic schools, actually taught me some things about the world's major religions.

The thing is, it wasn't overall a Good School in any meaningful sense even though adults constantly referred to it as a Good School. I graduated barely knowing any math. It offered 3 AP classes, while the nearby public schools had a dozen. One of the teachers told us (in 1995) her salary was under $20,000. Many of the teachers were priests or nuns who had no formal training in teaching. The sports-first culture of the school was cloying.

What was clear throughout, even to people as young and naive as we were, was that going to Catholic school was above all about whiteness. Parents (not only my own, but the peer parents as well) were explicit about this. Because while I have no memories of getting right-wing indoctrination from adults at school, I remember a lot of it coming from my classmates' parents. We were sandwiched between Joliet and Chicago, and my high school was "safe" unlike the public schools (which, statistically or subjectively, are not dangerous schools by any measure). Those schools had "gangs," were "dangerous," or simply were "bad," all of which were such transparent code words that even 14 year-olds knew what they meant: they had black kids, Hispanic kids, poor kids, etc.

My school was not exclusively white, of course, but the cost of entry ensured that the black and Hispanic kids were sufficiently "good kids" from "good families." The Covington example seems to be one in which school officials – one priest in particular – were indeed giving the kids a heavily MAGA political message. But among Catholic schools around the country I'd be stunned if that was the norm. The Fox News rhetoric isn't coming from priests and teachers; it comes – in unbelievably heavy and consistent doses – from the kind of parent who insists that their kids attend a Catholic school. A scattered few probably have deeply held Catholic beliefs behind that motivation, and those become apparent as students get to know one another and the families. Much more common are the families who don't seem to know or care that the nearby public schools have better facilities, more "college prep" options, and in some areas far more funding. They simply want to make sure their kids, who are very Good, go to school exclusively with other Good Kids instead of the riff-raff and "Gang Bangers."

Your experience may vary. Mine was unambiguous.

Although it seems like six months have passed, it is barely a week since Trump gave his live address from the Oval Office on immigration. You've already forgotten it, no doubt. And that's not your fault. It was incredibly forgettable.

Pre-address speculation swirled around Trump making some kind of bold power move like declaring a "national emergency" to build his monument to racism and vanity. What we got instead was one of the rare occasions on which Sedated Trump shows up. Once in a great while, for reasons that only he could guess at, Trump just reads the teleprompter. He doesn't act normal per se, but he doesn't act like he acts at his rallies, for example.

And when you take Donald Trump and filter out the off-cuff insanity, when the people in the White House somehow prevail upon him to just read the goddamn speech and not go off half-cocked, you get a pretty boring result. The speech was boring. Stupid. Just a rehash of 2018 midterm election scare tactic talking points. Ooh, scary immigrants. Coming to commit crimes. Big danger. Crisis. Only a big wall can stop them.

I realized by the end of the extremely brief, extremely uninteresting address that I have grown used to the spectacle of Trump. I have grown to expect the Crazy Antics, and I do not think I am alone in that regard. When the Antics disappear and he reads straight off the prompter while looking directly and awkwardly into the camera, Donald Trump is not worth watching. He's not smart. He's not eloquent. He's not interesting. And he's so boring that I found myself in the same frame of mind I am in when I'm forced to watch NASCAR; "This is boring. Somebody crash already. Why aren't they crashing. C'mon."

That's scary. Perhaps it's just me, but to some extent I think we all (and certainly the media) have gotten hooked on the high of this guy doing crazy, random shit. When we go back, god willing, to having a normal person as president in the future, there is going to be one hell of an adjustment period. Do you even remember what it was like to have a news cycle that didn't involve Donald Trump every minute of the day? To live in a world where there isn't a new crisis in the White House every 12 hours? I'll never say I'm going to miss it, because every aspect of this has been terrible. Let me simply say that when it's finally gone, the difference will be noticeable.

The awful speech was a useful reminder of what presidential addresses used to be like – dull. Some day things may be dull again. These days, however, it's hard to remember a time when they ever were.

The explosion of conspiratorial thinking, including among liberals and the far left, is one of the most troubling developments of the last few years. There are many reasons people are attracted to conspiracy theories, not the least of which is the way they make the world vastly more interesting than it really is. "9/11 happened because the U.S. made the terrible decision to throw money and weapons at every radical jihadist willing to fight the USSR in Afghanistan, plus nobody realized the incredibly obvious fact that cockpit doors should be locked" is, if simplified, a 100% correct explanation. But it has a number of drawbacks.

For one, it requires a half-decent knowledge of history. By "history" I mean anything that happened more than a week ago, and I think we can agree without undue cynicism that most Americans' (most people, really) grasp of history is tenuous at best. The percentage of people who could give a half-accurate summary of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and the US role in it, is in the low single digits. And most of those few people got their understanding from one half-awake viewing of the highly fictionalized version in Charlie Wilson's War with Tom Hanks.

More importantly, though, it's just boring. It's a boring story when it's told this way. "Some well-educated potential terrorists realized that cockpit doors are unlocked and that, as long as you aren't interested in taking off or landing, flying a modern commercial airliner can be done adequately without too much training" is not satisfying. When things happen, especially traumatic things, we want there to be some Big Plot to explain it. There isn't. There rarely is.

Add in ideology and motivated reasoning – our inherent want for certain things to be sinister because we dislike them – and the widespread seeding of ideas on the internet and we are living in the golden age of crackpot theories. QAnon might end up being the most representative aspect of this era when people study it in the future.

There is a certain subset of center-left or center-liberal people who have hatched a million strange conspiracy theories about Bernie Sanders, almost all of which have to do with Russian Propaganda, the Kremlin, Russia, Russians, and some sort of orchestrated (Russian) effort (by Russia) to create the impression that (Russian Operative) Mr. Sanders (a Russian) has a fan base when in reality he has none. In fairness to these folks, Sanders is not being treated differently – everything, in their new worldview, is a Russian plot. If something happens that is not fundamentally in line with their understanding of the world, Russia is behind it.

This manner of thinking struck me when I saw this dull Tweet from Mr. Sen. Sanders a few days ago:

If you are interested in understanding why Bernie Sanders has the dedicated following he does, that is your explanation. Unlike any other Democratic could-be with a national profile, he regularly makes reference to organized labor. No one else with a similar level of visibility does. In fact, most other possible candidates or nationally recognized leaders in the party – even Warren, who is pretty far left – run away from labor (which current orthodoxy holds is a dinosaur from earlier days) or just pays lip service to it. They mention "unions" in the abstract when they want union donations, and that's about it.

It strikes me as funny, but not incredible, that some people choose to ignore the very simple, obvious explanation – He talks about a thing some people like, and other people don't talk about it! – in favor of something convoluted and sinister. Maybe it's just more exciting that way. Maybe it helps them make sense of the world in some way I don't understand.

These things simply do not need complicated explanations unless you go looking for one. Why do people like Beto? Well, he's good looking, he's good speaking to crowds, he's pleasantly neutral (which allows people to project their own beliefs onto him), and he raised a lot of money. Why do people like Bernie? Despite his complete lack of personal charisma, he talks about things other candidates don't, and there is a subset of voters who don't care about candidate personality at all. Pretty simple.

My point is not – since I can already see people reading four sentences and rushing to the comments – that Bernie is awesome and you should love him. I simply do not think it should be – can be – any kind of mystery to understand why he has a following. He does some simple things that other candidates and national political figures don't. If other people did those things and were sincere about it, his fans would likely gravitate to those candidates as well. This isn't complicated.

Nothing is more profoundly depressing to journalists, or anyone who writes for a living, than looking at the kind of shit The Market rewards and comparing it to one's own attempts to put something decent and useful out into the world. I imagine every fiction writer slaving away on what they believe is the very best novel they can produce feels a cold, bitter spite welling up inside of themselves every time they realize EL James and her "The vampire fucked the other vampire very erotically, with his erect vampire member" fanfic are worth a billion dollars.

There are a lot of bad opinion columnists in the world, but none as bad as Bari Weiss. The reason Bari Weiss infuriates writers so much is not simple jealousy – she writes for the New York Times and she's terrible! – because a lot of shitty writers have good, high-paying jobs for major media outlets. Half of her NYT colleagues could be described the same way. It is the fact that aside from having terrible opinions, her writing literally is indistinguishable from a college newspaper opinion writer. You could go to any campus in the United States, pluck out the eagerest sophomore from the Opinion page, and stick that person in the NYT and not miss a beat. Her writing is so thick with the tropes one thought were clever and edgy at age 20 that, unless you were an undergrad journalism major at some point, I'm not sure I can explain it to you.

This week her column for the Newspaper of Record, the hallowed Gray Lady, is literally "How I spent my summer vacation." Woman goes on vacation, comes back from vacation, writes a piece about how the place she went on vacation "has a lot to teach us."

I don't know about you, but the last time I wrote "What I did on my vacation" I was 10.

To be certain, all that differentiates Weiss from other bad writers like David Brooks, Bret Stephens, Megan McArdle, and the like is her total lack of polish and erudite "New York Timesy" writing skill. The others share her dumb, juvenile opinions but their employers pay them for their ability to write up dumb, juvenile opinions in an Ivy Leagueish, Upper Crust, Country Club sort of way. It's the George Will trick – they are paid to say things a certain audience wants to hear in a language and manner that allows them to consider it an intelligent, worldly point of view. They want someone to make the opinions sound respectable. Thoughtful, even.

That is the whole point of someone like David Brooks or Ross Douthat, or older, less relevant past stars of the printed word like Mr. Will or Peggy Noonan. They are to modern politics what courtiers were to the courts of European monarchs; they exist to flatter. To tell people of a certain worldview that said worldview is proper, correct, respectable, intelligent and – importantly – widely shared. Yes m'lord, you are most wise! The people certainly agree with you!

And I don't understand how Weiss fits into that world. She writes literally like a child. What is the audience for this? Tech Bros want to read Megan McArdle, not Tomi Lahren. Bankers want Ross Douthat, not Charlie Kirk. People of a certain level of wealth and cultural awareness / class want to feel smart, so I understand the lucrative market for writers who can tell them that the things they believe are good and correct and widely shared in a way that makes them feel smart. What they don't want is someone who failed to progress out of writerly adolescence making them feel like they're in high school listening to a moron soft-sell upper class authoritarianism.

I get the grift. But even in the context of the grift Bari Weiss makes no sense.

Even as we try to cheer ourselves up and enjoy the holiday season, one of the realities that has been lurking just beneath the surface throughout Trump's presidency is becoming clearer: As miserable as the first two years were by any conceivable measure, this has been the *good* part. We haven't even started the bad part yet.

Though the president's actions in no way contributed to it, the national economy maintained its pedestrian growth rate since the end of the Obama era. Employment has remained pretty high, with the important caveat that much of the job market consists of low wage, no benefit service industry type jobs and Gig Economy things like Uber driving taking people out of job-seeking. The stock market, for the rarefied slice of Americans who get to benefit from such things, has performed well. It's not an economic track record anyone should crow about (not that anything could stop Trump from credit-claiming) but it certainly hasn't been an unmitigated disaster. Remember the last year of W Bush and the first year of Obama? THAT was bad. This has been just kinda mediocre.

But as you no doubt have noticed, the inevitable "correction" of the stock market is well underway (and overdue). While the stock market is not the economy or vice-versa, bear markets like this historically are a reliable indicator of economic trouble ahead.

Some critics have pointed out (correctly) that the mystery of why Trump's approval rating is so high (that is, in the low 40s instead of like 15% where it logically should be) is better understood as: Why is his approval rating so *low* given the overall positive to decent economic indicators? And that's what I mean when I say the bad part is still to come. Trump has coasted on a lot of "Well, the economy's going up so who cares!" cynicism and callousness so far. As we have seen clearly, those white suburban middle class types will put up with just about anything is the 401(k) performs. When that support softens, what do you think Trump is going to do? If this is how he behaves now, how will he behave when his approval is in the 20s like fin de siècle GWB?

Authoritarians don't have any strategy for digging themselves out of a hole except to do everything they're doing, but harder. Changing course is not a thing they're emotionally capable of doing. Authoritarianism is an endless string of doubling-downs until they're removed from power.

Additionally, while I don't recommend hanging on the every turn of Mueller's investigation it appears (as anyone with half a brain predicted from the beginning) that the news will continue to get worse on that front. The mass exodus of cabinet and White House officials appears to be accelerating, which is a reliable sign that people who know something we don't know are starting to give Trump a wide berth.

The traditional authoritarian move when the walls close in is to start a war and double down on persecuting minority populations internally. The latter is bound to keep ratcheting up until Trump is gone; at this point my hope is simply that we can get to the endpoint without the former.