David Kurtz writes a newsletter which introduces the daily minutia of the news for the journalistic site Talking Points Memo. Very occasionally he steps back from the chatter and noise, folly and scandal to think about the strange times we are living. A recent such piece seems worth sharing in full:
As we come to the end of a difficult week, it’s becoming obvious that daily news coverage isn’t sufficient to capture what a deeply strange period we’re living through.
The former president is on criminal trial for making hush-money payments to a porn star he says he didn’t have sex with, while trying to stave off the three other criminal prosecutions he faces. At the same time, he is promising more post-election criminality if he loses in 2024, which is the very thing two of the remaining prosecutions are seeking to convict him for having done in 2020.
Not content to merely replay his first term, he is promising a second presidency that will be authoritarian to its core. It begins with the premise that he must exact retribution against all who have wronged him, including prosecuting the current president whom he falsely claims is behind his own legal turmoil. From there, he swears he will target disfavored classes of people – immigrants, the press, anyone whose fealty to him he perceives to be insufficient – abusing the powers of his office to inflict pain and suffering to the delight of his supporters.
He is also determined to harness the full powers of the federal government in pursuit of personal political and private ends, even and perhaps especially if that means breaking government in the process.
In the meantime, the coverage of the current president is the same tired analysis, worn thin by overuse, and utterly oblivious to the looming authoritarian threat. Complexities like post-pandemic economic policy are reduced to a thin gruel of “inflation is bad for incumbents.” The nightmarishly difficult Israel-Palestine conflict is more easily covered as an American political story about law and order, and so campus protests are forced to stand in as a poor proxy for the actual conflict in the Middle East.
In the face of what almost certainly is a significant historical moment that is full of uncertainty and unpredictability, we grasp for ways to make sense of it all but what we grab ahold of for comfort and security is oversimplification, reductiveness, and cliches. Rather than rising to the moment, we just try to cover our eyes and soothe our souls so we can endure it. It’s a temptation that’s hard to resist.
It’s in moments like these that the overconfident diagnoses and simplistic solutions of someone like Donald Trump hold their greatest allure. He offers certainty amidst the chaos, even if he has no idea what he’s talking about and doesn’t have the skill or capability to do anything about it. He’s a chaos monster: the more of it he creates, the greater the need for the snake oil palliatives he offers. He’ll make you sick to sell you his bogus curatives.
This is all happening against the backdrop of the even bigger existential threat than Donald Trump: climate change. The environmental catastrophe already underway adds layers of uncertainty that we may have never encountered before as a species. It dwarfs our political chaos. It feeds the anxiousness that makes us seek solid ground, some permanence, a place above whatever the new high water mark may turn out to be. For many people, it’s easier to find immediate security in a Trump (even if that means drowning later) than enduring the uncertainty, trying to make sense of it all, and doing the hard work of piecing together solutions.
So don’t get too caught up in the day-to-day news. There lies madness. Embrace the uncertainty, live with the dis-ease that comes with not knowing, and forswear the cheap and easy fixes offered by tawdry figures who prey on the victims of the chaos they create.
No easy fixes, but keep on keeping on ...
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