The Jump Ball

Today’s New York Times features an op-ed by Damon Linker, a contributing editor for the New Republic, entitled “Get to Know the Influential Conservative Intellectuals Who Help Explain G.O.P. Extremism.” The piece describes a rogue’s gallery of rightwing thinkers who openly advocate for a new Caesar to overthrow American democracy. Most of the names in the piece were unknown to me, but their message is not: the American republic has become feminized and debauched, and the only way to save the republic is to install a strongman who will steer America towards a nation in which “public life can be fully integrated with conservative forms of Christianity.”

That’s the mild form of their vision. The spicier version is represented by Costin Alamariu, who writes under the pseudonym Bronze Age Thinker. Alamariu “proposes breeding great men of strength who model themselves on pirates, disregarding laws and norms, plundering and taking anything they want and ultimately installing themselves as absolute rulers over the rest of us.” Naturally, Trump is an avatar for such men, a 1.0 version of the mythic ruler they have in mind. A better example is Vladimir Putin.

Dinker rightly asks why we should care about a cadre of obscure writers toiling for marginal rightwing journals and blogs. The answer is the people reading their words are in positions of power to move American Caesarism closer to reality. If Trump is re-elected next year and fulfills his promise to fire tens of thousands of federal workers, replacing them with people specifically loyal to him, we will be well advanced towards kissing our republic goodbye.

All of that to say this: while I obviously disagree with both the diagnosis and the cure, I am sympathetic to their view that America is teetering. Dinkler cites Patrick Deenan’s book, Regime Change, which “opens with a tableau of a decaying country with declining economic prospects, blighted cities, collapsing birthrates, drug addiction and widespread suicidal despair.” One does not have to be of any political persuasion to recognize that, indeed, the nation does have declining economic prospects, lowered birthrates, a opioid crisis, and rising suicide levels. The cause of our domestic woes? Deenan, like the other writers, naturally blames liberalism.

(I blame sociopathic capitalism and the purposeful hollowing out of America’s middle class by an oligarchic ruling class, but whatevs.)

When describing liberalism, they don’t mean liberal Democrats, they mean “ideology of individual rights and historical progress.” Defined thusly, liberalism seems like such an obvious good that it’s startling to read that any serious American thinker would advocate for its opposite. Yet that is precisely the case. Each of these thinkers would toss out the American experiment in favor a Christian dictatorship, or at least, a soft Christian fascism. In my imaginings, this new America would be a mashup between The Handmaid’s Tale and Atlas Shrugged with a soupçon of WWE Raw thrown in. Perhaps we could turn Madison Square Garden into a new Coliseum featuring a fight to the death between Alexandra Ocasio Cortez and Ibram X. Kendi?

It's a scary image for those, like me, who are neither Christian nor amenable to the misogynistic and bigoted worldview these writers profess. It’s also scary to imagine what would happen to the rest of the world if American democracy fails. For better or worse (and here I acknowledge that it has often been for the worse), this nation has led the liberal world order for almost a century.  Were we to go down, nascent and young democracies in eastern Europe, Africa, and South America would likely follow. China would swallow Taiwan, Russia would swallow Ukraine. Israel would survive, if only because our new Caesar would likely be steering us towards the Biblical apocalypse as foretold in the Book of Revelations. We would be, in other words, fucked.

Before the election of Donald Trump, I would not have imagined this fate for my country. Now it seems like a real possibility. Defeating Trump next year will do little to rid America of this threat. Another wannabe Caesar will simply leap up in his place. So far none of the pretenders to Trump’s throne have emerged as serious rivals, but one eventually will. Some handsome and charming man (and it will be a man) with none of Trump’s noxiousness but all of his fascistic tendencies, may soon emerge.

Perhaps it will be a military man – a sane Mike Flynn. Or somebody folksy – a more pugnacious Glenn Youngkin. Perhaps our new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, will run for the presidency in a few year’s time if he can figure out what happened to his “adopted” Black son.

In his article, Linker refers to the writers advocating for a new Caesar as “catastrophists.” They believe that America is so rotted that our two hundred and thirty-four-year-old Constitution must be thrown out and replaced with a Bible and an AK. America has always had such Chicken Littles, of course. The left has them, too, and I’m not immune from declaring the sky to be falling every time some politician is elected for whom I do not care. The difference between then and now is the organized and systematic effort by those in power to subvert and, ultimately, overturn American democracy. The effort has been decades in the making, fueled by billionaire donations and shiny-eyed Christian fanaticism. These people have deep pocketbooks and a love for the hereafter. They’re not quitting anytime soon.

Soon after the election of Donald Trump, I interviewed Al Franken for my podcast How To Be Amazing. I asked him whether he believed American democracy would survive the Trump presidency. At the time, he said he thought it was “a jump ball.” In other words, a 50/50 proposition. At the time, I thought he was exaggerating. I no longer do. Today I would peg the odds of America falling as closer to 60/40. A new Caesar is not only not out of the question, I would say his eventual emergence is likelier than not. Of course, we all know what happened to Caesar, but that’s a cold comfort. Some dictators fall, but others - many others - pass quietly away in their featherbeds. The world they leave behind is rarely so restful.