For the Kingdoms of the Earth

“And you will cry out on that day before the king you chose for yourselves and he will not answer you on that day.”
—1 Samuel 8:18, Robert Alter translation

Artistic representation of King David

Samuel, the Hebrew leader who oversaw Israel’s transition from the age of judges to the age of prophets, specifically warned Israel what would happen if they selected a king. The monarch would seize and redistribute the best farmlands, a massive injustice to an agrarian society. He would seize Israel’s farm implements to reforge them into weapons of war. Kings would spend tax revenue on palaces while farmers squatted in huts.

This maintains a pattern recurrent throughout the Bible, the declaration that power hierarchies are inevitably unjust. To theistic minds of the post-Bronze Age Levant, human hierarchies seize power that belongs uniquely to God. As Robert Alter writes in his extensive footnotes, the God of Samuel was explicitly a Hebrew deity, and had literal political dominion over Israel and Judah. Power belonged to God; humans could only act as God’s deputies.

God’s sovereignty worked well while Israel remained poor, agrarian, and simple. A loose confederation of hill-dwelling tribes working the land with bronze implements, Israel needed little, and God provided commensurately. But the Levant witnessed the rise of political empires like Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt. Straddling the footbridge between Africa and Asia, the Levant became a necessary possession for any empire hoping to expand.

It's easy to forget, centuries removed from the “Divine Right of Kings,” that king isn’t originally a political title, it’s a military rank. Kings occasionally made and enforced laws, time permitting. But civilian laws basically existed to organize the population for military purposes: strong sons for recruitment, tradesmen to make arms, crops to resupply the front lines. As I’ve written before, the political state exists fundamentally to bolster the military.

We’re witnessing this in our time. As Israel’s pummeling of Gaza continues after over a year, international Jews loom large among those protesting the violence. While the Israeli state channels national resources toward killing despised outsiders, those who define themselves according to Jewish traditions and values are among the state’s most vocal opponents. The cleft falls along loyalty to the state versus loyalty to Judah.

As Samuel prophesied, King Saul became tyrannical and paranoid—but not without reason. As his military needs became increasingly prominent, he needed constant resupply of resources. Though Saul didn’t undertake many significant military adventures away from the Israelite homeland, his defenses against Egyptians, Philistines, and other flatlander empires became increasingly costly. In the end, Saul died defending the homeland.

Benjamin Netanyahu, acolyte
of his country's secular Priesthood

Meanwhile, as Saul became increasingly despotic, David became increasingly popular. The description of young David in 1 Samuel seems remarkably like a combination of Robin Hood and Joan of Arc, a folk hero rallying common folk against the occupying despot. David roams the Levant, gathering followers, but notably never attacking God’s anointed king. Only when Saul’s own overreach gets him killed, does David’s rabble army seize power.

My childhood Sunday School tracts always depicted this David: not necessarily rebellious, but certainly young, a friend to commoners, active and popular. The David described in 2 Samuel barely exists, because the longer David holds power in Israel, the more he resembles Saul. He’s arguably worse than Saul, because at least Saul died manning the fortifications. David instead sends others to fight, staying home himself and having sex with generals’ wives.

International Jews lived in diaspora for two millennia before Zionists reestablished the state of Israel. Jewish tradition holds that, eventually, the Israelite homeland will return, but throughout scripture, that’s always in the future. Diasporic Jews suffered massive oppression for centuries, and in places still do; but they didn’t have to absorb the moral compromise of governing an earthly kingdom. Now some do, and that’s made them massively unpopular.

Consider other world leaders chosen for their outsider status. Barack Obama and Boris Johnson both achieved national power by promising to break with stultifying political conventions. Both accomplished mere shadows of what they promised. In America, Republicans running on anti-statist platforms, like Kevin McCarthy, Paul Ryan, and Donald Trump, all needed to compromise their values to actually govern.

Oh Samuel, you warned us. Kings may require power to defend us, but power will always turn the powerful into the instruments they hated. And now it’s too late, we can’t return to our hill-country farms and our uncomplicated agrarian lifestyles. Because we, too, have become what we once hated: subjects of an occupying force that values only itself.

Autopsy for an Institution

Vice President Kamala Harris

Conventionally, political parties conduct postmortems following every Presidential election. These self-reflections especially matter after a loss. If parties and their voters can accurately identify what led to the outcomes, they can reverse their losses later. When Mitt Romney failed to unseat Barack Obama in 2012, the Republican National Committee determined their message was insufficiently inclusive. How that led to the pugnacious, bigoted Donald Trump, I cannot figure.

In 2024, Democrats lost the Presidency and the Senate. The House of Representatives remains uncalled, but a Democratic upset appears unlikely. After a campaign anchored on promises to hurt POC, queer people, and dissidents, American voters decided they preferred that over a Democrat with a proven, but workmanlike, track record. With a stranglehold on American government, Republicans stand poised to unleash epoch-making pain on ordinary citizens.

Democrats probably won’t begin their postmortem until January, between the Congressional and Presidential inaugurations. However, I believe it’s necessary to commence now, while feelings remain high. Why, with so much at stake, did millions of Democratic voters stay home? Trump gained almost no absolute numbers following 2020; his majority margin apparently consists of Biden voters who sat out the Harris campaign and didn’t vote at all. How did that happen?

(There’s no concrete evidence of voter fraud; the difference apparently consists entirely of voter apathy.)

Edit: in light of new evidence, it appears that Trump did not win an outright majority. Though he came first in the popular vote, continuing counts indicate that he fell short of the 50% threshold.

Though every election has its own character, one recurrent thread remains evident throughout my lifetime: Democrats desperately want to prevent another 1968 Democratic National Convention. Bipartisan anger at Lyndon Johnson’s mishandling of the Vietnam War, coupled with Hubert Humphrey’s general unpopularity, caused streets to erupt in violence. The brutality made the Democrats look slovenly and dangerous, which handed the general election to Richard Nixon.

Former President Jimmy Carter

Beginning arguably with Jimmy Carter, the Democrats began fleeing their legacy with FDR’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society. Teddy Kennedy primaried Carter from the Left for exactly this reason. Unfortunately, this challenge fractured the Democratic coalition and helped hold the door for Ronald Reagan. In autopsying their 1980 drubbing, Democrats decided their lesson was that they needed to tack harder to the center and abandon the New Deal.

Thus commenced the Democrats’ centrist fixation, beginning with Walter Mondale’s historically milquetoast 1984 campaign. 1988 should’ve been Gary Hart’s year, until he imploded following the notorious Monkey Business photo, kicking the nomination to Michael Dukakis. But Mikey-D proved inept and subjected himself to multiple humiliations, giving us the only time since World War II that the same political party won three consecutive Presidential elections.

Dukakis, a self-identified “liberal,” tanked in 1988, but centrist Bill Clinton won in 1992. To this day, many Democrats insist that this proves voters prefer centrists. Democrats decided they needed, again, to chase the center and abandon the New Deal. I’d contend that Democrats’ 1992 victory reflects less a centrist at the top of the ticket, than the absence of Lee Atwater from inside the Republican National Committee.

Moreover, though Bill Clinton won twice, he never carried a majority. He probably wouldn’t have carried the plurality if Ross Perot, a former leading Nixon donor, hadn’t split the fiscal conservative vote twice. Facing a visibly fatigued George H.W. Bush in 1992 and an unsmiling Bob Dole in 1996, Clinton was less the popular choice of the 1990s than the candidate Americans could live with. Which isn’t saying much.

Failed candidate Michael Dukakis

Al Gore won a razor-thin plurality in 2000, but lost the procedure. But like Clinton, Gore never got the majority. Both Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004 appeared starchy and joyless on camera, which shouldn’t matter, but does. Since campaigns today are highly visual endeavors, driven by television and YouTube, candidates need visual dynamism, which Barack Obama, for all his many faults, had.

Obama, another centrist, won two straight majorities, the first Democrat to do so since FDR. But consider his opponents: John McCain and Mitt Romney, who ran two of history’s greatest room-temperature campaigns. Hillary Clinton, another centrist, got more airtime for her frequent verbal gaffes than her policies. Clinton lost to the more entertaining Donald Trump, who only lost reelection after shitting in the metaphorical swimming pool on national TV.

2024 could offer Democrats the opportunity to shed the illusion of the phantom centrist voter, but it probably won’t. The party squandered precious momentum chasing crossover voters who have probably never existed. So here’s my postmortem, not only for the Democrats, but also for the entire United States:

Doing what we’ve done for fifty-six years hasn’t worked. Let’s change course before it’s too late.

Anatomy of the Un-Free Mind

Jason Stanley, Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future

Fascists, of both the small-f and large-F varieties, have a curiously adversarial relationship with history. Their entire political movement depends on myths of past national greatness, which is almost always presented as lost, but which they promise to restore. But they generally despise historians, and attempt to squelch nuanced or conflicting narratives. Briefly, they adore the idea of history, but despise the practice, especially if it requires any self-reflection.

Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley has written multiple books about how fascists, propagandists, and spin doctors use language and knowledge to strangle public discourse. This book’s title appears to promise a look at how authoritarian regimes rewrite history generally, but in practice, it focuses primarily on academia. Stanley examines how regimes inculcate a spirit, not only of ignorance, but also incuriosity, among citizens at a formative age.

First, tempting though it might be, Stanley stays substantially clear of large-F Fascists. He talks somewhat about Hitler, less about Mussolini. But he mainly focuses on current strongman authoritarian regimes, especially Putin’s Russia and Netanyahu’s Israel. He spends some time on the British colonial empire in Africa and India, his father’s scholarly specialization. And he unambiguously aims his harshest criticisms as Donald Trump’s American brand of anti-intellectualism.

In Stanley’s telling, fascists begin by constructing the purpose of historical education. Their reasoning starts from an intended conclusion—instilling a love of country and an adherence to hierarchy—and retrospectively determines how to achieve that goal. This means having institutional control of textbooks, administration, and personnel. Conservatives have made firing educators and replacing trustees a cornerstone of their recent campaigns.

The process of controlling the historical narrative closely resembles the process of creating imperial colonies; this isn’t coincidental. Autocrats create a hierarchy that, they contend, has always existed. They instill a central imperial language, and make it illegal to speak indigenous languages; not for nothing did British colonialists force the Kikuyu of Kenya onto reservations, exactly as America did to its native population. Because indigeneity is necessarily anti-authoritarian.

Jason Stanley

Here, I wish Stanley went more into how administrations silence history among adults. He describes how administrations use schools to prevent passing local autonomy and traditional identities onto the next generation. But how, other than armed force, do autocrats control adults? Stanley is vaguer here, perhaps because academics began committedly studying the process only after the atrocities of World War II. Traditional knowledge disappeared quickly, and I’m unsure how.

Mythical history looms large. That might mean presenting Germans as the genetic descendants of ancient Greece, as the Reich did (they’re not), or how schoolbook history presents George Washington as blameless, honest, and certainly not a slaveholder. Either way, it presents an innocent past that enthrones the dominant population as necessarily deserving power. This mythic past presents history as a constant decline from prelapsarian goodness, which politics must promptly reclaim.

Many critics respond by insisting that “classical education” counters authoritarian overreach. But Stanley insists that there’s no single magic machine. Classical education can empower intellectual curiosity and resistance to tyranny, if teachers focus on the questions the ancients raised, and if teachers address ways that our morality has changed. But authoritarians love using “classical education” to teach mindless adoration for the dead, which only compounds state-centered mythological ignorance.

Although Stanley focuses on history, he acknowledges this applies to all disciplines. He quotes Toni Morrison, who wrote that choosing the canon of literature is very much about choosing the national culture. When science serves the purpose of politics and industry, rather than inquiry and discovery, scientists always arrive at state-sponsored conclusions. The conventional liberal arts can improve human experience, or it can tie us to autocrats. Fascists know this.

Stanley makes no bones about his motivation. Donald Trump used executive authority to propound a national history curriculum that elided slavery, native extermination, and crackdowns on organized labor. The most extreme forms of American conservatism use the same techniques of historic erasure used to justify Putin’s imperialism or Britain’s conquest of India. Informed, politically invested citizens have a responsibility to reclaim history, both its glories and its tragedies, for the commonwealth.

This breakdown is chilling, certainly for those of us who believe in learning and inquiry, but hopefully also for anyone who just has kids, or loves a free society. Knowing history isn’t just a moral good, it’s a commitment to liberty and democracy; when governments decide what citizens may know, they control electoral outcomes. But the darkness notwithstanding, Stanley’s breakdown assures us that ignorance can be resisted. If we try.

I Can’t Trust Americans Anymore

Vice President Kamala Harris approaches the podium for her concession speech, 11/6/2024

The Associated Press called the 2024 Presidential election for Donald Trump at 3:30 a.m. where I live, and I’m ashamed to say I was awake for it. And this time, he won without the asterisk that followed his name in 2016: he became the first President Elect to win with a simple majority since Barack Obama, and only the second Republican to win outright since George H.W. Bush in 1988. A majority of Americans who could be arsed to vote, voted for this friggin’ guy.

This means that 71 million Americans (as I write) watched him promise to make it harder to be Black, Brown, gay, disabled, a woman, or a dissident, and decided they wanted that. They heard him promise to use the military to purge citizens he considered disloyal, and considered it acceptable. They heard him threaten to shoot members of his own party in the face, and said “Okay.” They watched him fellate a microphone before a mixed-age crowd, and bought what he was selling.

Edit: in light of new evidence, it appears that Trump did not win an outright majority. Though he came first in the popular vote, continuing counts indicate that he fell short of the 50% threshold.

Even beyond the policies he’s promised to enact, policies which are already costing lives, his comportment in public should be disqualifying. His revolting language about women, minorities, and nonconformists basically means that he’s expressed hatred toward someone you know, possibly someone you love. And tens of millions of Americans considered that acceptable, handing him the nuclear codes. Nothing he’s done in public dissuaded American voters.

Laying aside the question of whether he will, or even could, do everything he’s promised to do, I’m left staring at my fellow Americans, wondering what possessed us to accept this. Because he received a simple majority, a relative rarity in Presidential politics, that means that over half of voters willingly put their names behind Trump’s actions. Shielded by the anonymity of the ballot box, they gave their endorsement to everything he’s done and said for nine years.

In light of this endorsement, I’m forced to ask myself: how can I trust anyone I meet again? When meeting an adult American now, I’ll forever remain conscious that there’s a better-than-even chance this person voted for Donald Trump. Forevermore, I’ll shake hands with potential employers, contractors, landlords, new friends, dates, and ask myself: did this person vote to force my gay friends into conversion therapy? To kick my disabled friends off the payroll?

To grant the police qualified immunity in shooting my Black friends?

Okay, in fairness, not everybody will have equal odds in this sweepstakes. We know, for instance, that men were more likely to support Trump than women. We know that White people, including White women, supported Trump by wide margins. This only increases my tendency, growing since my middle twenties, to reflexively distrust White men. And I say this as a White man, that I belong to perhaps the least trustworthy demographic in America today.

Exit polls have shown several demographic breakdowns, though readers should handle such results cautiously, considering how many voters openly distrust media and pollsters. Age, race, sex, peak educational achievement, population density, and economic class played into it. Broadly stated, the older, whiter, more rural, and less financially certain someone was, the more likely they’d support Trump, and his anger-based campaign pledges.

Again, I’m incriminating myself. Among the demographic divisions that increase one’s likelihood to support Trump, I belong to most. This means I’m arguing against my own interest here. I could easily lapse into tranquility, go with the flow like a dead fish, and do okay with the upcoming administration. People who look like me probably won’t face federal pushback, if I placidly participate. Only my willingness to oppose puts me at meaningful risk.

But from that privileged position, I regard my protected status as a responsibility, not a cocoon. Too many of my fellow pasty-faced honky dudes see their position as something which needs defended, a bastion against constant attack by barbarian hordes who want our creature comforts. Given the opportunity to use our gifts to improve the world for everyone, White men have chosen to retrench ourselves, and live in a state of constant paranoia. And it shows.

I’ve read Robert O. Paxton and Timothy Snyder. Within the sloppy, vague boundaries of small-F fascism, Donald Trump meets the definition. And, as a fascist, Trump has accomplished something neither Mussolini nor Hitler accomplished: he won a straight majority. We American voters, mostly White, mostly male, and disproportionately Christian, have thrown our support behind a fascist in ways completely unprecedented. No matter what happens, we won’t walk this back easily.

The Shallow State, Part Two

Keri Russell (left) and Rufus Sewell as Kate and Hal Wyler, in The Diplomat Season Two

This essay follows the prior review The Shallow State.

The first season of Netflix’s series The Diplomat turned heavily on its relationship with then-current events. A career American foreign service officer gets appointed to manage the relationship between an aged American President, who is terrified of appearing old, and an oafish British Prime Minister who opportunistically seizes a catastrophe to improve his public image. In the eighteen months since Season One dropped, global politics have shifted violently.

First, Rishi Sunak’s Tory administration imploded, culminating a decade-long train wreck that included such questionable luminaries as Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Almost simultaneously, Joe Biden removed himself from consideration for reelection as U.S. President. This set American politics up for a contest between a highly competent but anodyne Democrat, and a charismatic Republican spouting talking points plagiarized from Weimar Germany. Politics stands idle for nobody.

The Diplomat foregrounds the unelected professionals who make American and British government offices run. On the American side, this mainly includes career foreign service officer Kate Wyler (Keri Russell), who didn’t want the ambassadorship to the United Kingdom, but accepted it because it’s right. Wyler has built her career preventing impending wars and violence. The State Department thinks this makes her a good potential political candidate; she disagrees.

Season One ended with Wyler and her chief ally, British Home Secretary Austin Dennison (David Gyasi), believing they’ve discovered a conspiracy running through Britain’s government. Anybody who reads or watches thrillers regularly knows that, the more fervently characters believe something in Act One, the more thoroughly Act Three will dash their beliefs. Our only questions are: how will their expectations be upended? And, what will replace them?

This matters because the British Prime Minister isn’t elected by British voters. Though the PM traditionally must be a member of Parliament, this isn’t legally mandatory, just expected. The PM is elected by Parliament itself, and therefore is almost always the leader of the majority party. This gives the PM extraordinary power and, as Boris Johnson proved, tragically little oversight. Government conspiracies have liberty to travel quickly with little impediment.

Season Two runs two episodes shorter than Season One, primarily because it dispenses with character-building. Creator Deborah Cahn assumes you remember the characters and their relationships; she introduces few new characters this season, and no new core ensemble members. This lets her dive straight into the action, a movement made possible because Season One ended with an explosion, and lingering questions about who survived.

Allison Janney as Vice President Grace Penn

Therefore, for a show driven substantially by dialog, the pacing never feels slow and talky. Every conversation carries weight, and nobody speaks flippantly. The terse, telegraphic language packs every interaction with weight, as characters talk bullets at one another. The show bespeaks the influence of Aaron Sorkin’s similarly dialog-driven The West Wing. Probably not coincidentally, this season introduces West Wing alum Allison Janney as Vice President Grace Penn.

But this creates a difficult dynamic with the show’s real-world inspiration. Two season’s worth of events have happened in just weeks, while Anglo-American politics has whipsawed drastically over eighteen months. The aspersions cast on President Biden’s age, which Season One name-checked without mimicking, seem dated now. As Kamala Harris tries to sustain Biden’s legacy, the character of Grace Penn seems unexpectedly pointed, and potentially dangerous.

This series emphasizes an important Platonic principle: the people who most fervently desire power over others, deserve it least. One achieves political power in modern democracies by showing the people an amiable public face, but by engaging in backroom negotiations and cutting deals which push the boundaries of legality. Prime Minister Nichol Trowbridge (Rory Kinnear) is an effective leader, if he is, to the degree that he’s a terrible person.

Same goes for Grace Penn. Season One established that the American government wanted to remove Penn behind a scandal. This season establishes that Penn knows this, and seems willing to cultivate Kate as her replacement. However, Kate quickly learns that Penn faces consequences only for the scandal where she’s been caught. Like Trowbridge, Penn scaled the heights of American politics by sacrificing her morals.

Anyone who follows politics, American or international, learns quickly that purity of heart is for fools. Situations necessary for the common good, often are deeply unfair to selected individuals. Life in politics requires candidates to question which of their principles they’ll willingly abandon under pressure. This series forces Kate Wyler, a career civil servant driven by high morals, to ask these questions of herself.

And by extension, it asks us, the audience, what price we’d willingly place on our souls.