Musk and Strangelove: Should we stop worrying and love the wood chipper?

Fresno Bee, Feb. 9, 2025

Should we worry about Elon Musk’s mandate to overhaul the government?  Musk is the world’s richest man.  He runs multiple companies.  Despite this workload, he has spare time for the Department of Government Efficiency.  He said this week that “DOGE is the wood chipper for bureaucracy.” 

Some may think Musk’s mandate should have been revoked after the strange Nazi salute incident.  But Musk gave nearly $300 million to Donald Trump’s campaign.  And the President likes him.  “Elon is doing a good job,” according to Trump, who also said, “He’s a smart guy. Very smart.”

This almost seems like some elaborate parody.  That old movie, “Dr. Strangelove,” comes to mind.  Dr. Strangelove was an expert consultant whose arm would spontaneously extend in a Nazi salute.  He had a bizarre plan to repopulate the earth after nuclear doomsday.  The satirical lesson of the film was to “stop worrying and learn to love the bomb.” 

Should we stop worrying?  When Joe Biden left office, he worried about oligarchy and technocracy.  In his farewell speech, he said, “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy.”  He further warned against, “a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country.” 

Biden, of course, assumed that democracy is valuable in itself.  But is it?  Democracy is unstable and inefficient.  Congressional logjams and partisan bickering make it difficult to get things done.  Elections disrupt the status quo.  And we, the people disagree about what is valuable and true. 

Oligarchic technocrats may think that smart efficiency experts armed with artificial intelligence can do a better job than seasoned bureaucrats and elected officials.  The problem is that we fundamentally disagree about who is smart, and what kind of expertise is valuable.  And as we are seeing, wealth buys access for cronies and kooks, while creating a facade of intelligence.

These are the fatal flaws of so-called “epistocracy,” which is a fancy word meaning “rule of experts.”  This idea goes back to Plato, who thought that the ideal society would be ruled by a wise and virtuous philosopher-king.  But there are no wise and benevolent kings.  We disagree about what counts as wisdom and virtue.  And rich oligarchs are good at pretending to care.

Jason Brennan, a professor at Georgetown University, has defended epistocracy, arguing that democracy fails because it empowers ignorant, disengaged “hobbits” and reckless, ideological “hooligans.” Brennan explains that in a democracy we put our fate “in the hands of ignorant, misinformed, irrational, biased, and sometimes immoral decision makers.”  Brennan’s solution is “rule of the knowers.” 

Expertise is obviously valuable.  We want experienced pilots to fly our planes, and smart dentists to fix our teeth.  But expertise in one domain does not necessarily transfer to another.  We don’t want dentists to fly our planes, or pilots to fill our teeth. 

Nor are experts politically or morally neutral.  Experts are mere mortals.  They have values, interests, and biases.  Smart people disagree about all kinds of things.  And sometimes even smart people do dumb things.

That’s why there ought to be checks and balances.  As James Madison said, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”  The system of checks and balances is designed for a world of hobbits, hooligans, and cronies.

Moreover, the government is not a business, an airplane, or a dentist’s office.  The law is not a machine to be tinkered with by engineers or a system to be hacked by technocratic geeks.  Rather, the legal system expresses and defends fundamental values.  It is itself the result of historical struggles for justice.  Democratic government ought to reflect the will of the people, as expressed through elections that authorize elected leaders to make decisions on our behalf and in the name of the common good. 

Biden’s warning of doomsday for democracy is worth revisiting.  But by the time Dr. Strangelove takes center stage, it may already be too late.  One hopes that our system of checks and balances is resilient enough to survive the chainsaw.  If not, we may have no choice than to stop worrying and learn to love the wood chipper. 

The Fallacy of a Golden Age

Fresno Bee February 02, 2025

Trump’s ‘golden age’ dream is a fallacy, and the golden chariot is already stuck in the mud.

In his inaugural speech, President Donald Trump said, “The golden age of America begins right now.” Really? History is haphazard. Human beings are flawed. Powers rise and fall. Every action provokes a reaction. There never was — and there never will be — a golden age.

The White House marketing department would beg to differ: It described Trump’s first 100 hours as “Historic Action to Kick Off America’s Golden Age.” On the official White House website, a large, dramatic picture of Trump includes the motto “America is Back.” Under the motto it says, “This will truly be the golden age of America.”

But the golden chariot is already stuck in the mud. Chaos ensued immediately after Trump’s initial frenzy of executive orders, firings and funding freezes. Critics lambasted the January 6 pardons. A federal judge said Trump’s plan to end birth-right citizenship was “blatantly unconstitutional.” And pundits howled about authoritarianism, fascism and the like. In The New York Times, columnist Jamelle Bouie said Trump “wants to remake the government in his image. He wants to be king.”

Maybe that royal fantasy is at the heart of all the golden age rhetoric. Trump likes glitzy, gold-plated regalia. But I’m not convinced there is any grand strategy behind Trump’s gilded dreams. It seems more like he is throwing stuff against the wall to find out what sticks.

And that’s pretty much politics as usual: You try something. You see what you can get away with. The opposition pushes back. The lawyers get to work. And, in four years, we do it all over again.

The greed, graft and grime of humanity reduces any talk of a golden age to absurdity. In proclaiming a utopia, you will provoke inevitable backlash. Human beings are contrarian. If you say it’s perfect, I’ll say it’s flawed. We nay-say out of spite — or just for fun. Politicians turn this dialectic into performance art.

At any rate, the world is more complicated than Trumpian alchemy admits. Human lead cannot be turned into gold. The philosophers tell us that the crooked timber of humanity cannot be made straight. Applying gilded paint to crooked wood cannot conjure up a golden age.

The Founding Fathers understood this. The Constitution is designed for flawed humanity. As I explained in my book, “Tyranny from Plato to Trump: Fools, Sycophants and Citizens,” the Framers understood that human beings were not angels. They wanted to prevent the apotheosis of any mortal human being as tyrant or king. That’s why they instituted the separation of powers. As James Madison explained, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

The Framers also warned against the naïve fantasy of a golden age. Alexander Hamilton suggested it was a “fallacy” to ignore the “imperfections, weakness and evils” of humankind. He asked: “Is it not time to awake from the deceitful dream of a golden age, and to adopt as a practical maxim for the direction of our political conduct, that we, as well as the other inhabitants of the globe, are yet remote from the happy empire of perfect wisdom and perfect virtue?”

Trump is pushing the limits of Constitutional checks and balances. But those safeguards are already pushing back. Let’s hope they are sturdy enough to withstand this onslaught. It can help to study Hamilton’s claim that the gilded pipe dream is devious and dangerous.

The hallucination of utopia is at the root of many evils. It can lead to complacency or fanaticism, but none of us is perfectly wise or virtuous. And in the real world, there is no substitute for humility and hard work.

Hamilton warned that unwise leaders cause chaos when personal ambition runs amok. As he puts it, leaders “have, in too many instances, abused the confidence they possessed; and assuming the pretext of some public motive, have not scrupled to sacrifice the national tranquility to personal advantage or personal gratification.”

Which leads us back to the present pandemonium. It is ironic that the muck of the moment was introduced by Trump’s ambitious plan for a golden age. One hopes the president realizes that leadership is not marketing. It requires prudence and expertise. In a democracy, it also depends upon compromise and consultation. Wisdom humbly admits imperfection, and virtue is more substantial than any gilded dream.

Read more at: https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/readers-opinion/article299445559.html#storylink=cpy

Gratitude, Grace, and the Biden-Trump Handshake

Fresno Bee, Nov. 24, 2024

This post-election Thanksgiving, we all have the power to soften our hardened hearts.

One of the strangest scenes of this odd political year occurred when Donald Trump and Joe Biden exchanged pleasantries in the White House in front of a roaring fire on Nov. 13. Trump said “Thank you” four times within that minute-long meeting, while Biden said “Welcome,” “Welcome back” and “You’re welcome.” The men smiled and shook hands.

For a moment, you might imagine it was possible to forget the acrimony of the past. But one minute of staged courtesy is unlikely to heal a broken republic. As soon as the moment ended, the spark of grace was extinguished. The pundits were quick to remind us that Trump did not invite Biden to the White House for a similar handshake in 2020, and that Trump did not attend Biden’s inauguration in 2021. Partisan animosity continued apace. And this strange ritual was revealed to be a show for the cameras, lacking in sincerity and depth.

As we gather for Thanksgiving, the Biden-Trump handshake provides food for thought. During the holidays, we hope that gratitude, forgiveness, hospitality and love can work wonders. We don’t have to hate each other. We are not bound to return tit-for-tat. Human beings are free and creative. We can choose to forgive, to forget and to turn a new leaf.

There is an important difference between ritualized civility and a deeper spirit of sincere gratitude and generosity. One could, after all, give thanks mechanically or as a matter of courtesy without actually feeling grateful. The deeper spirit of gracious generosity is not a ritualized performance. Rather, it is a way of being.

But the rituals of civil society are important. Symbolic gestures like handshakes are powerful, and virtues are developed through practice.

A student of Confucius once asked the master how to learn to be good. Confucius replied, “Overcome yourself and return to ritual.” We learn to be good by setting aside our egos and playing along with the customs of civilized life, even when we don’t want to.

We teach young athletes to shake hands at the end of a game, whether they win or lose. And we encourage our children to say “please” and “thank-you” at appropriate moments. We model civility by saying and doing these things, even when we don’t feel like it. During the holidays, these rituals reach a climax. At Thanksgiving, we ought to give a prayer of thanks, even if we don’t feel particularly grateful.

While rituals are useful, they are not enough. A deeper engagement is required for genuine spiritual development. For swords to become plowshares, profound spiritual transformation is needed. This transformative growth may depend upon what Christians call “grace” — a mysterious and renewing gift of God. It also depends upon the hard work of wisdom.

None of this occurs in a moment. Saying “I’m sorry” does not instantly make everything better. A handshake cannot magically undo animosity, nor does a kind word eradicate decades of hostility. Love takes years to develop even in the best of circumstances. Trauma, anger and guilt are not easily overcome. And resentment is a powerful poison.

It may be too much to hope that enemies can become friends, but we can become less hateful and more civil if we choose to do so.

We do have some choice in the matter: It’s not possible to force someone to feel grateful, nor can we be compelled to love or to forgive. But we can choose to extend a hand or to say “thanks” and “you’re welcome.” We can also choose to keep our egos in check while we play along with the rituals.

Things won’t get better unless we choose to make them so. As the larger world careens about us, it is important to remember that we have the power to soften our hardened hearts. We can discipline our egos and return to ritual. We can extend a welcome hand to those we have written off as enemies. We can forgive those who have wronged us. We can offer thanks, even to those we think do not deserve it. And if this proves to be too difficult, we should at least encourage our children to be more gracious than we are.

Read more at: https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/readers-opinion/article295924914.html#storylink=cpy

The Second Coming of Donald Trump and The Temptation of Hyperbole

Trump 2.0 will no doubt be as chaotic as Trump 1.0. But despite the hyperbolic effusions of the political class, the country will likely stumble along, divided among red and blue partisans and another third who simply don’t care (as I discussed in a recent column). The American Republic will not collapse with Trump’s political resurrection. Nor has the messiah returned with Trump’s second coming.

We would be wise to avoid hyperventilating and to keep things in perspective. On both left and right, the tendency to exaggerate can undermine critical thinking. 

Trump is among the worst of those who exaggerate and embellish. In his victory speech Trump said, “God spared my life for a reason.” And, “This will truly be the golden age of America.” Trump’s Christian followers were even more direct. Christian nationalist firebrand Charlie Kirk saw in Trump’s victory the “Grace of God.” And Trump’s former spiritual advisor Paula White-Cain said of Trump, ““I declare tonight that your victory is found in Jesus Christ! Rest in Him – He has you, in the name of Jesus!”

Among the less zealous right-wing commentary, there was a tendency to exaggerate the significance of Trump’s victory. Consider, the smug conclusion reached by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal, who claimed that Trump’s victory meant that “America, after its long journey through the 2010’s and 20’s, is becoming more conservative again.” 

On the other side, Trump’s victory brought forth lots of dire doomsaying. In The New Republic a column by Edith Olmsted proclaimed, “Americans just elected a fascist to the White House.” Another column by Ray Marcano said democracy “died on Nov. 6, 2024. It was 248 years old.” 

Pundits and politicians are often loose with their language. Everyone can be tempted by hyperbole. But it behooves us to be more careful and precise, and to avoid the Trumpian trumpet.

I’ll leave an extended critique of the theological bluster for another column (and my forthcoming book on Christian nationalism). But suffice it to say that the American Constitution is a secular document whose First Amendment prevents the establishment of anything like Christian nationalism. I might add that God must work in quite mysterious ways to have hand-picked someone like Trump as an instrument of His will.

Now let’s think critically about the hyperbole of the secular press. Consider Peggy Noonan’s claim about the triumph of conservatism. To say that Trump’s election is a conservative victory requires lots of qualification. Conservatives like Mike Pence  and other never-Trumpers refused to endorse Trump, whose lack of moral fiber and indifference to truth is far from conservative.

The hyperventilating of the left-wing commentariat is also problematic. To say that democracy died as a result of this election is absurd. This election was fair—despite the fact that it was Trump who kept warning of rigged elections and who threatened the existence of democracy when he disputed the 2020 election. His victory in 2024 was a democratic result.

I understand the fear that Trump will undermine this system. He certainly challenged our democracy in 2020. He was wrong then. But so far, the electoral system continues to work. Trump left office then. He returned now through a legitimate process. We ought to have faith that this system will continue to operate in the future. Trump has made threats that may undermine the Constitution. The Supreme Court has offered a broad kind of immunity that might facilitate wrongdoing. And Trump will most likely prevent further investigation into his first administration. This is dispiriting. And we should remain vigilant. But democracy ain’t dead yet. 

Left-wingers also ought to be cautious in invoking words like tyranny or fascism—and the idea of “resistance” to Trump 2.0. In a post-election column Robert Reich called for “peaceful and nonviolent” resistance to Trump. He said, “We the people will resist tyranny.” And, “We will resist Donald Trump’s tyranny.”

In my book on Trump and tyranny I argued for caution with the T-word. Trump was at most a would-be tyrant with a flawed personality. But he was (and is) constrained by our Constitutional system from consolidating power into full-fledged tyranny. 

These Constitutional brakes may be wearing thin. But the system worked to prevent Trump 1.0 from subverting democracy. I agree when Reich calls for a peaceful and nonviolent response to the threat of tyranny. But it would better to describe this simply as adherence to the Constitution and its anti-tyrannical fundamentals. The separation of powers was designed to resist tyranny. This system should be embraced and strengthened. But we should be careful with loose talk about tyranny and resistance, lest our thinking become less peaceful and more extreme.

Which brings me to the F-word. During the 2024 campaign each side accused the other of fascism. The term has become a catch-all pejorative divorced from its original significance. Fascism is an authoritarian political movement that desecrates fundamental liberties in the name of ethnic-nationalist ideology. It is militaristic and state-centered. And it is dependent upon fanatical true-believers and ideologues.

It is true that Trump called his opponents (including the press), enemies of the people and that he hinted at violence and threatened his enemies with revenge. That essay in The New Republic that said a fascist has been elected to the White House lists a long litany of Trump’s dangerously transgressive language. There may be some MAGA true believers who want to see Trump embrace violent ideas that even he described as “dark.” And some Christian nationalists do in fact dream of overthrowing our secular system.

But I doubt that the majority of the Americans who voted for Trump are fascists who would support a Trump regime that tore up the Constitution, fomented violence, and persecuted religious minorities. There are Christian nationalists in our country, as well as sexists, racists, and other sordid characters. There always have been. But it is hyperbolic to suggest that the majority of Trump’s voters would support or tolerate the creation of a MAGA gestapo or the overthrow of the Constitution. 

I could be wrong. History and human nature are unpredictable. In a symposium on my Trump book, a number of my critics suggested I was naïve and overly sanguine in my analysis of the Trump era. With Trump’s second coming, those critics might prove to be right. So let me conclude by saying that while I think we ought to be moderate and careful in our language, we also ought not be naïve. The danger of tyranny is as old as Plato, who pointed out that the moronic masses can end up voting a tyrant into power. This problem is real. No democracy lasts forever. Nothing human does. 

But there is stability in the American system, which was designed to prevent tyranny. It also helps to know that many conservatives agree with liberals that Trump 2.0 will be dangerous. I suspect that those conservatives would also agree with me that the theological fervor around Trump is both blasphemous and un-American.

Democracy is not dead yet. But we must remain vigilant. 

The rule of law vs. the will of the tyrant

Fresno Bee, Nov. 3, 2024

This week, an arsonist burned ballot boxes in Washington and Oregon. This attack on the vote is, thankfully, a rare occurrence. But it is an ominous warning of threats to our rule-governed democracy.

Our country has established an orderly, rule-governed process for elections. Unfortunately, the rules have been recently disputed, specifically when Donald Trump challenged the idea of a rule-governed process when he refused to admit defeat in 2020. Some Americans are now confused about why the rules even matter to begin with.

Sadly, a number of Americans seem to admire a willingness to break the rules. A Marist poll from April of this year found that 41% of Americans agreed that “America has gotten so far off track that we need a leader who is willing to break some rules to set things right.” Fifty-six percent of Republicans agreed with that sentiment, as did 28% of Democrats.

This result was reiterated by a more recent poll from the Public Religion Research Institute which found that a third of Americans, and 55% of Trump supporters, agreed with the need for a “strong leader willing to break the rules.”

This attitude is Machiavellian and authoritarian. What matters, from this perspective, is gaining power. It does not matter how this is achieved because the end justifies the means.

This cynical idea is morally disastrous. It can be used to justify cheating in the whole of life. The cynic thinks rules are for suckers. And for some arch-cynics, rule-breaking becomes a way of life. What matters to the Machiavellian is outsmarting the saps who follow the rules.

Tyrants think that rules are made by the powerful for their own self-interest. From this standpoint, if you can rewrite the rules to maximize your own power, you’ve won. Not only have you defeated the old system, you’ve also created a new system in your own image.

In response, we ought to reassert the value of a rule-governed world. Rules create stability, structure and order that benefit everyone. Shared allegiance to a system of rules defuses violence and helps establish the possibility of social trust and cooperation. Shared rules allow us to plan for the future and develop common projects.

We rely upon rules to think, communicate, create and build. Grammar, logic, music and mathematics are fundamentally systems of rules. The sentence you are reading now makes sense because it follows the rules of the English language. The rules of language are mostly a matter of custom and habit. They are arbitrary but also important.

Games are like that, too: You can’t make a forward pass beyond the line of scrimmage in football, despite there being no necessary reason for that rule. Someone made it up long ago, and now we just play along. But if you break the rule, you’ll be penalized. And if you refuse to play according to that rule, you are not really playing football.

The legal system is presumably less arbitrary. Some laws appear to reflect the necessary “laws of nature,” as the Declaration of Independence put it, including the self-evident right to life, liberty and happiness. But the legal system also includes conventional and arbitrary elements, including laws about driving, paying taxes and voting.

The electoral college and our winner-takes-all system of voting does not reflect a law of nature. Rather, this system is a social and historical construction. This means that the system can be changed. But there are rules for changing the system, as defined by the Constitution and its amendment process. Burning a ballot box does nothing to change those rules. Nor does refusing to concede an election.

The American system of checks and balances is supposed to prevent a tyrant from corrupting the system of rules. But that system depends upon public trust. Beyond institutional checks and balances, we, the people, need to remind ourselves that rules matter.

The Machiavellians are wrong. The end does not justify the means. And those who are willing to break the rules to gain power are a threat to the very idea of a rule-governed democracy.

Read more at: https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/readers-opinion/article294831724.html#storylink=cpy