Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Political theorist Alan Elrod has a good piece for Liberal Currents, arguing that the election of Trump twice should prompt introspection about what we’ve become. So we’ve invited him on to work through some of this with us on a theoretical level. Alan, good to have you on.
Sargent: So let’s start with your piece, Alan. You likened the national drift at this moment to the atmosphere surrounding Jimmy Carter’s malaise speech in the ‘70s. In particular, you pointed out that we’re in the middle of an energy crisis—this time created needlessly by Donald Trump, and also Iran, of course—as front and central as it was then. And we’re all reeling, as you put it, from Trump’s threat of Iranian genocide. The mere fact that the American president threatened civilizational erasure and genocide, threatened to kill tens of millions of people, is itself a crisis, is it not?
Sargent: Former Trump allies were appalled at this. I want to highlight how Trump reacted to that. They’ve been attacking him over the war. They’ve been attacking him over the threat of genocide. And Trump unloaded with this furious tirade that went on for hundreds of words. He attacked Alex Jones this way by saying, “Alex Jones lost his entire fortune, as he should have, for his horrendous attack on the families of the Sandy Hook shooting victims, ridiculously claiming it was a hoax.”
Elrod: I mean, to reference George Conway, who makes this argument all the time—this is what happens when you have a malignant narcissist as the president of the United States. I mean, this man is just simply not capable of thinking or feeling or conceiving really of other people beyond himself.
Sargent: You had a line in your piece which really struck me: “The president speaks to the people.” I want to apply that to this Sandy Hook case because we can see that Trump recognizes zero obligation of any kind to speak to all of the American people. This is really a fundamental fact about this presidency. At the time, people in Newtown, Connecticut begged Trump to exercise that option—to speak to the American people by denouncing the conspiracy theorizing about the shooting. He refused.
Elrod: Well, I think we can add to this that Connecticut is a blue state, right? I don’t know—Trump might have actually maybe rebuked Jones earlier if we were talking about a shooting in a place that was very pro-Trump, right? In Florida or some other place that he feels more like is his people. Because that’s the other thing, right?
He does not care about other people. And if you are seen by him as being in any way not with him, not worshipping him, not only does he not care about you, he’s like actively malicious toward you.
Elrod: Well, yeah. And it’s not like Donald Trump suddenly magically found the morally correct position on Sandy Hook. He’s not doing this because he discovered his compassion, right? He’s mad at Alex Jones for criticizing him. He does not suddenly care about these people in a way that he didn’t before this week. That’s not what’s happening.
Alan, he keeps saying he’s the one with all the leverage because the U.S. military is powerful. And again, because he’s apparently willing to wipe out their entire civilization, including tens of millions of people. But he doesn’t appear able to force Iran to reopen it. And I don’t know that he understands that. Does he get the situation at a basic level here or not? It seems like he doesn’t.
Iran’s leverage in the strait isn’t short-term—geographically they’re there forever. I mean, they have it as long as they can apply military force. And it’s clear that we haven’t been able to take that capability away. Again, I guess if he wants to use just massive destruction, if he wants to nuke Iran, he can do that.
Sargent: Well, I want to remind people as well that Donald Trump was briefed on exactly this situation. He was told about the Strait of Hormuz’s difficulties, its inherent challenges, its geographic challenges, and he just brushed it off, essentially saying, you know, we’re so strong, we can just overcome anything. And that’s what he’s discovering is not true.
Sargent: Well, that’s exactly right. Now, here’s where we get to the big questions. We’ve got pure transactional amorality, a personalist presidency that orients all decision-making around his personal interests and corruption, a sociopathic willingness to threaten to kill tens of millions of people, and staggering incompetence that’s just so bad that Trump doesn’t even know how incompetent he is. You wrote this in your piece: “We cannot pretend that we are well as a nation. No morally healthy country would put this man in power twice. We have become a morally insane, civically disordered, and self-regardingly decadent country.” Why don’t you make that case? Go ahead.
Donald Trump was president. He presided over a catastrophic mismanagement of a global pandemic. And then he led an insurrection to try to overthrow the election he lost. And then we put him back in power again. And in his reelection campaign, he wasn’t any more secretive about who he is. He was just as frank. I think it was just as clear who he was. And, did he win with just amazing majorities? No, he didn’t win 60 percent of the vote, but he won and this time he actually won the popular vote.
Sargent: Right. So I think we suck pretty bad right now. I don’t contest that, right? We are a shithole country in many ways, as he would put it. But let me just sort of offer a slightly different take on this, which I think a lot of political scientists might go for. Okay, point one is voters have always been poorly informed—but this is just a fact about politics, it’s always been the case. Voters often vote on identitarian grounds.
Point number three, a lot of the young people and a lot of the non-white working-class people—the types that Trump was able to win over—these were just low-information voters and they actually had a reason to be pissed about inflation. And they weren’t thinking beyond, get the people out who are there right now.
Now I don’t think you’re doing that, but just as a general matter, I worry that if we read too much into the meaning of that election, we sort of head down some bad intellectual paths. Am I wrong about that?
And so it’s not so much that I think there’s just 50-something percent of the country that is committed to Trumpism. But I do think there’s just a huge amount of the country that is not doing well—and I mean that in an emotional way, I mean that in a political way, civically. And so I think those conditions, so long as they persist, continue to make us vulnerable to more cycles in the future of this kind of politics.
Elrod: Yeah, they are.
Elrod: I do. I see it as a social crisis. I think it comes down to a combination of the continuing crisis of social capital that people like Robert Putnam have talked about for, at this point, decades—that people aren’t joining clubs, they’re not getting involved, they don’t know their neighbors. When that’s true and you combine it with the age of the smartphone, with increased, I think, kind of conspicuous consumption and sort of preoccupation with envy and status, then I do think you create a world where people are kind of constantly being rubbed raw by resentments and they are constantly feeling dissatisfied and they are not getting the kind of things that nurture good civic health because those opportunities are declining where they were.
And so when something as horrible as the thing in Newtown happens, that’s the sort of moment where you think you can actually hope for a little national cohesion and some civic health in a sense, like some kind of outpouring of solidarity among people. And it’s at moments like that, when you have conspiracy theorists start to really screw around with stuff, and you have presidential candidates like Donald Trump was in 2015, fueling those conspiracies, that you really throw up your arms in despair, right? The fact that he would do that at a moment when the country just is so traumatized by a moment like the killing of 20 children in an elementary school—it’s just, that makes me despair a little bit. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about that problem in the broader context of what you’re talking about.
One of the books that I have found really interesting in this moment is this excellent book—I didn’t cite it in the piece, but it’s wonderful—called The Quiet Damage by Jessalyn Cook. And it is about people whose family members have fallen into QAnon and many of them who have not come back from it. And just the damage that it wreaks on their lives, their relationships.
Sargent: Well, so just to wrap this up—in the Sandy Hook case, we had Trump show the very worst of himself, and we just had him show the very worst of himself again, by actually paradoxically allowing that there actually was a mass shooting, not indulging the conspiracy theorists. What are your parting thoughts on all this? Do we have a way out civically, other than just organizing and winning the next election or two?
Sargent: Well, Alan Elrod, that was all very beautifully said. It’s pretty dispiriting, got to say though. Alan, thanks so much for coming on.
Elrod: Thanks for having me.
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