Last week I spoke at a luncheon for The American Club
in Paris at the elegant Cercle de l’Union Interalliée a couple of doors down
from the U.S. ambassador’s residence and the French president’s Élysée Palace.
Drawing on articles I have written over the last six months, I tried to bring into focus developments in the United States and
Europe. What follow are my notes. The talk itself was a little more amusing
thanks to some off the cuff remarks and a very lively audience.
Happy to see an enemy of the
people like myself can still find a forum like this. …
THE REVOLT:
Klaus Schwab, the man who
gave us Davos, that literal summit of globalization, could see 25 years after
it started—and now more than 20 years ago—that something had gone badly wrong.
Indeed, Schwab was the
ultimate Cassandra, warning of doom only to discover nobody would act on his
prophecies when he predicted way back in 1996 in a piece he co-authored for the
erstwhile International Herald Tribune that ran under the
headline “Start Taking the Backlash
Against Globalization Seriously.”
Twenty-one years later, it
reads as if it were written yesterday.
Schwab warned that in many
industrial democracies the mood was “one of helplessness and anxiety, which
helps explain the rise of a new brand of populist politicians.”
(Kind of gives you a chill
when you hear that, no?)
The “lightning speed” at
which capital moved across borders, the acceleration of technological changes,
the rapid evolution of global marketing and management requirements—all
strained the existing system “to a breaking point,” said Schwab.
“This is multiplying the
human and social costs of the globalization process to a level that tests the
social fabric of the democracies in an unprecedented way.”
(And this was before the rise
of terrorism and the endless wars of this new century had begun to strain that
fabric as well.)
“Until now,” Schwab wrote in
1996—let me repeat, more than 20 years ago— “it was conventional wisdom that
technological change and increases in productivity would translate into more
jobs, higher wages. But in the last few years technological changes have
eliminated more jobs than they have created.”
(This was just as NAFTA was
getting into gear; just as Europe was about to launch its single currency.)
“It becomes apparent that the
head-on mega-competition that is part and parcel of globalization leads to
winner-take-all situations,” wrote Schwab. “Those who come out on top win big,
and the losers lose even bigger. The gap between those able to ride the wave of
globalization … and those left behind is getting wider at the national,
corporate, and individual levels….
“The way transnational
corporations have to operate to compete in the global economy means that it is
now routine to have corporations announce new profit increases along with a new
wave of layoffs,” as Schwab noted.
“Some estimates put at 3
million the number of layoffs since the end of the 1980s in the United States,
and more are expected,” said Schwab before penning a line to be remembered:
“It is no consolation for a laid-off
employee to hear analysts explain how the re-engineering of which he is a
victim will help his former employer prosper.”
“Public opinion in the
industrial democracies will no longer be satisfied with articles of faith about
the virtues and future benefits of the global economy,” he wrote. “It is
pressing for action.”
Schwab’s recommendation was
to set national priorities: training and education, overhauling communications
and infrastructure, developing policies that gave more incentives to
entrepreneurs, and adapting social policies to protect those who lose out.
Corporations, too, would have to make sure the “free market on a rampage” did
not become “a brakeless train wreaking havoc,” he wrote.
Some of that happened. But
not much. Not nearly enough. The doom of Davos Man that Klaus Schwab warned of
finally arrived 20 years later, and with names attached to it: like Brexit and,
of course, Donald Trump.
Not so long ago—a little over
a year ago—conventional wisdom among the caviar and Champagne crowd slip-sliding
around Davos streets was that Trump’s fledgling candidacy was a hiccup, or
maybe a belch, in an otherwise healthy American democracy. The Clintons were
familiar faces at Davos; Hillary’s victory seemed assured, and she could be
counted on for a steady hand at the global helm. By the beginning of this year,
they discovered the hand that will be there spends long nights typing truculent
140-character capital-letter missives onto a cell phone.
The net result is that global
leaders are looking elsewhere for a stable anchor in a stormy world, and the
countries that are stepping forward are China—Xi Jinping gave the keynote at
Davos this year—and Russia, which is at once doing everything it can to
undermine stability in the West, while also offering itself as a model.
THE REVOLTING,
which is to say the present president and the people around him:
In the dark early hours
before dawn on November 9, President-elect Donald Trump sounded like he wanted
to put back in their grimy boxes the scabrous demons that candidate Trump set
free on the American landscape. (Hmmm, that’s pretty purple prose…)
Speaking to his ecstatic
supporters, he praised his crushed opponent’s service to her country and said
it was time to “bind the wounds of division.” And one hoped for a moment that maybe, just
maybe, he could do that.
Inside the United States, he
had a mandate. He had the House and Senate. He had no discernible ideology to
constrain him. He had considerable room to maneuver—and to moderate his
positions. He had no obligation to meet the ugliest expectations of some of
those, like the Ku Klux Klan, which supported him.
We have seen already how
disappointing his leadership has been domestically. The health care debacle is
just the beginning. His signature promises to the American people—huge
infrastructure projects among them—will be, it is now clear, virtually
impossible for him to deliver.
And we are just beginning to
get a hint of what’s in store for the great wide world, a much more
complicated, more unforgiving, and ultimately much more dangerous place than he
seems to realize—dangerous like nuclear war is dangerous; dangerous like
terrorism and guerrilla quagmires are dangerous; dangerous like a global
recession or even a depression is dangerous.
Trump is first, foremost and
always a businessman, and he sees world affairs as simple transactional
matters. “We will get along with all other nations willing to get along with
us,” he told the crowd in his victory speech. “We will always put America’s
interests first, but we will deal fairly with everyone. We will seek common
ground, not hostility, partnership not conflict.”
So he will build his famous
wall, and he will make his "partner" Mexico pay for it? Not likely. Mexicans,
after the initial shock of Trump's election, now expect this construction
project will get bogged down in bureaucracy and funding issues—which is likely.
And there certainly is less enthusiasm for it in the fiscally conservative Republican
Congress than there was at
Trump's rallies.
Given the backdrop of Trump’s earlier campaign rhetoric, dictators around the world will know how to read
that phrase about getting along with all other nations willing to get along
with us: The new president of the United States, a pure pragmatist, does not
care about human rights, or women’s rights, or seemingly intangible (to him)
climate change. Not his business. Not our business. He just wants to make deals
when those suit him and, oh, by the way, tear up past agreements—on Iran’s
nuclear program, on free trade, on climate change—if they don’t. That’s the way
he always did business, and that’s almost certainly the way he’ll try to
continue to do statecraft.
The author of The Art
of the Deal, after all, thinks he’s a genius at this stuff. (One might
hope, and one surely will be disappointed.) He even thinks Russian President
Vladimir Putin called him one. (He didn’t.)
But it’s clear already that
Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and assorted ruling
thugs around the world are rejoicing at the prospect of dealing with an
American president who’ll make no moral demands, while they outmaneuver him at
every turn. After all, nobody is easier to bamboozle than a fool who thinks
he’s the smartest guy in the room.
While Trump talked about
Americans’ dreams in his victory speech, his campaign did much to destroy what
the rest of the planet thought of as the American Dream: a nation conceived in
liberty and lighting the way to freedom for oppressed peoples around the world.
There may always have been a
heavy measure of hypocrisy in that picture, but without it, as a purely
transactional player on the world scene, America is just another nation among
many. And for the traditional European establishment, that’s hard to fathom.
American troops fought to
liberate their people from Nazism, helped them rebuild with the Marshall Plan,
organized a bulwark against Soviet communism. And the Europeans themselves have
fought for seven long decades to rise from the ashes of populist nationalism
that tore the Continent apart in World Wars, slaughtering whole generations of
its children. As a consequence, these traditional Europeans have reacted with
special horror to the election results in the States.
That was evident in the
headlines right after the election.
“President Trump Gives Hatred
the Semblance of Legitimacy,” declared the headline on a major Dutch
paper, Volkskrant. The website of Business News Radio called Trump
“The Duterte of the U.S.,” alluding to the populist president of the
Philippines who’s unleashed a gruesome wave of vigilante killings in his
country.
Top
of Form
Bottom
of Form
Germany’s Zeit headlined, “The
Calamity”: “Donald Trump for a long time was just a bad joke. Now he will be president.
The world should be afraid of what this unpredictable man will come up with
next.”
What establishment Europeans
feared and fear, without question, is that Trump would inspire and invigorate
growing populist movements, from the Brexiteers to Marine Le Pen in France and
Geert Wilders in the Netherlands—people who are bent on dividing and destroying
the union of European nations as it exists.
France’s right-wing—I love
this catalogue description—France’s right-wing anti-immigrant, anti-euro,
anti-EU, pro-Russian, anti-American,
pro-Trump Marine Le Pen tweeted congratulations to Trump on his victory even before he’d given
his speech. UKIP’s Nigel Farage, Wilders, and others were not far behind.
President Putin, too, was
quick to congratulate President-elect Trump, and in a statement “expressed
confidence that the dialogue between Moscow and Washington, in keeping with
each other’s views, [will meet] the interests of both Russia and the U.S.”
Ergo, under Trump’s
transactional policies Russia expected the United States would ease or end
sanctions imposed against Russia to punish it for annexing Crimea and fueling
the civil war in Ukraine. (And maybe there will be cooperation in Syria—but
we’ll come back to that.)
In Kiev, the mood can be
described simply as “unmitigated disaster.” But in Moscow, as the American
results came, in the mood grew euphoric. Political activists and aides to
members of the Russian parliament, including members of the far-right Rodina
party, gathered at a pub to watch the results on CNN. “America has elected
Trump!” the screen announced. “Yes!!!” they shouted, then broke into the kind
of cheer you hear at soccer matches: “Olé-olé-olé-olé—Russia forward!”
In China bureaucrats were confident
the new American president is no match for them. Indeed, it was reported that
one senior official could barely suppress his grin as he told Foreign Policy, “We can handle Trump.”
One of the agreements Trump
has said repeatedly he wants to tear up is the one with Iran freezing its
nuclear program and preventing it from developing atomic weapons for years to
come. Although the arrangement reopened Iran’s economy and unfroze billions of
dollars of its assets, Iranian hardliners have not been happy with the nuclear
constraints, nor with the impression promoted by their reformist rivals that
Iran can get along easily with Washington.
How might Trump scupper the
accord? Some of the hawks around him may still think the best way to proceed is
to threaten war, and then wage it if necessary. But Trump, so proud of saying
he was against the Iraq invasion (whether he was or not) is not likely to go
along with that scenario.
“Republicans in Congress will
now be able to kill the deal by imposing conditions and penalties that would
cause Iran to walk away and the rest of the parties to blame the U.S.,” my
longtime friend Valerie Lincy at IranWatch told me.
Even to begin to try to get a
new agreement, if that truly is the objective, Trump’s going to have to have
strong international backing for new sanctions and pressure.
“If he’s rash,” I was told by
an Iran expert here in Europe with extensive ties in both Tehran and the U.S.,
“he’ll just break the deal, thinking that’s enough to take the world with
him. Wrong.”
Trump seems to forget that
Russia and China are on the U.N. Security Council, and are much closer allies
of Iran than they are of the United States. Obama worked for years to bring
them on board. They’re not going to dance to Trump’s tune soon, or ever.
And it may well be the
Iranian leadership will move no further, and will restart its nuclear program.
What then? One can only guess.
In some negotiating
situations, having an unpredictable leader might be thought helpful, as Richard
Nixon imagined when he pursued his “madman” strategy with North
Vietnam to convince Hanoi there was almost nothing he would not do. But in the
end, as we know, that didn’t turn out so well.
In the Cold War, of course,
there was also the MAD policy—Mutually Assured Destruction—but we run the risk
under the current administration of SELF-destruction. [SAD!-Self Assured
Destruction-someone chimed in from the audience.]
Which brings us to the threat
of Al Qaeda and the so-called Islamic State. The art of the deal is not
especially useful when confronting fanatics inclined to behead or immolate
anyone who fails to follow their rules. And Trump’s actions thus far do not
give him or us much insight into how he might construct an approach
dramatically different from the faltering policies of the Obama administration.
To the extent that we have heard and seen policy shifts, they promise to be in
almost every case counterproductive.
Certainly that is true of the
ones pushed by the ideologues who have had Trump’s ear.
Of course I am thinking of
Stephen Bannon.
Europe was, well, amazed when
it discovered Bannon in the wake of the Trump victory.
A French cable television report on Bannon made him look like one of the winos
living on grates in Paris, and compared Trump’s grizzled éminence
grise and newly-named White House chief strategist to Adolf Hitler’s
propaganda chief Josef Goebbels.
Never mind the citations of
rampant sexism on Bannon’s pseudo-news service, Breitbart. All he had to do was
say he’d like to expand Breitbart’s operations to France and allude to Marion
Maréchal-Le Pen as “the new rising star” on the French version of the alt-right
— I love the French term for the alt-right — the fachosphere — and Marion started gushing on Twitter … in English.
Interestingly, Bannon did not
mention Marine Le Pen, the 48-year-old woman who turned her father’s fringe
right-wing party, the National Front, into the most dynamic and aggressive
political force in the country.
Bannon talked about “the Le
Pen women” generally, as if there were so many, and then focused on the comely
Marion, a member of the French parliament who is only 26 years old and has the
xanthachroidal allure of a younger Ann Coulter or Laura Ingraham.
(I love the word
xanthachroidal. It sounds so alien! Like, “The Attack of the Xanthachroids!” In
fact, it means blonde.)
Anyway, there is a kind of
blond obsession on the far right. Have you noticed the changing spectrum of the
president’s dye-job? Must be something in the air, l’esprit du temps,
as they say.
Bannon’s support for European
far-right parties runs far deeper than his interest in Marion Maréchal-Le Pen
or the National Front. He brags about his international Breitbart
operation as “the platform” for the American alt-right, and has for years been
thinking globally, with an affinity for the United Kingdom Independence
Party (UKIP), Alternative for Germany (AfD), and the Party for Freedom (PVV) in
the Netherlands, all of which earned glowing coverage on the pages of
Breitbart.
But the election of Bannon’s
man Donald Trump as president of the United States seemed to make the “globalization”
of Breitbart and its message infinitely more plausible than it ever was before,
and politicians once considered Europe’s deplorables have been rushing to bask
in the gilded glow of Trump and Bannon.
You’ll recall that Britain’s
Nigel Farage, whose blatant and acknowledged lies helped convince his countrymen to opt out of the
European Union in the Brexit vote, was the first “world leader” to visit the
president-elect in his eponymous Fifth Avenue tower.
Farage emerged from the
meeting looking like he’d just won the jackpot at one of the pre-bankruptcy
Trump casinos, suggesting that the new president’s “inner team” was not
too happy with Tory Prime Minister Theresa May, since she’d been skeptical of
Brexit before the vote. Would that “inner team” be Bannon? In our post-factual
world, maybe we can say, “People say…” and people might even think it’s true.
Breitbart, which currently
has operations in London and Jerusalem, certainly has had plans to expand in
France and Germany with new bureaus to cultivate and promote the
populist-nationalist lines there.
That’s more than a little bit
disturbing, considering that Bannon was openly influenced by Vladimir
Lenin and the Bolsheviks, as technicians of revolution, and also – the is less
well known - by Nazi propagandist Leni
Riefenstahl, who rose to prominence
as, yes, a blonde bombshell before producing such masterpieces of propaganda as
“Triumph of the Will.”
But again, the Trumpian zeitgeist –
and the taste the president and his men have for dyed blondes - makes us
digress.
How has the Bannon program
been working?
Actually, not so well.
No European right-winger has
been identified so closely with the Trumpkins as Geert Wilders in The
Netherlands (who dyes his hair blonde, by the way).
He even tapped into Trump’s
trademark slogan. “We will make the Netherlands great again,” he liked to tweet, adding: “I will give the Netherlands back to
the Dutch because the Netherlands is our country.”
“Everywhere democratic
revolutions are underway. They will drive the elites from power,” Wilders would
say, his Twitter feed seeming to mirror Trump’s—or is it Bannon's?—at every
turn.
Similarly, Wilders had no
qualms about using the Kremlin’s RT television
network to broadcast his
message. In an interview with RT, Wilders said, “Politics will never be the same and what I call the
‘patriotic spring’ is an enormous incentive. What I say to the Europeans is,
‘Look at America, what America can do, we can do as well.’”
But the Netherlands did not
vote Wilders into power, and did not even give him the plurality he expected in
Parliament.
And, it’s irresistible to
note that the European leader most often compared to Donald Trump in terms of
background and style is not in the least flattered by the supposed parallels.
(pause)
Former Italian Prime Minister
Silvio Berlusconi is patently offended by the analogy. “Of course there are
some similarities in that he is an entrepreneur who decided to use his
expertise to help his country,” Berlusconi said of Trump. “But I have never
opted for protectionist or isolationist policies that would hurt the country,”
and “politics has taught me that people are not judged by programs, but by
their behavior. Let’s see him at work.”
That’s a good idea. Because
it will be based on his performance, not his tweets, that he will be judged.
And the verdict is not likely to be a happy one.
THE REVOLUTION – Which is Something More than “Resistance”
I am afraid the critical test
for Trump now and in the future is going to be how he deals with what we might
call, broadly, political violence, including Islamist-led or inspired terrorism,
but not only that. Once senses in the United States the stirrings of violent
left-wing radicalism, some of it on the fringes of movements like Black Lives
Matter, some of it more deeply hidden. There is also the danger of
disillusioned elements on the right—Trump voters who realize eventually what a
fraud he is, the extent to which he has played them for fools, and indeed betrayed
them—taking out their frustrations on government and its representatives.
But, clearly, his blustering
about Islam and ISIS was key to his campaign, and his success or failure
dealing with it will be critical to support, or the lack of it, for his
presidency.
To the extent we can discern
a strategy abroad or within the United States, almost every step he has taken
or talked about charts a pretty clear path to disaster.
As the former head of
Britain's MI6 intelligence operations, Richard Barrett, told the
BBC “The narrative of the Islamic
State is precisely what Mr. Trump appears to be confirming—that Americans are
against people of Muslim faith, they particularly discriminate against them in
favor of other people. So it is this 'them or us' type picture that the Islamic
State promotes.”
The initial implementation of
the Trump ban on refugees and visitors and immigrants and at first even green-card holders from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Sudan, Somalia,
and Yemen was wildly confused. Travelers from those countries with previously
valid visas have been stranded around the world. People fleeing religious
persecution in Iran and seeking U.S. asylum—Evangelical Christians, Jews,
and Baha'is—were turned back from
Austria where they normally would wait, usually for many months, for clearance
finally to reach asylum in the United States. (The echoes of the U.S. turning
away a ship full of Jews fleeing Germany before World War II are not lost on
historically minded Europeans, especially after Trump's White House issued a
statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day that
made no mention whatsoever of the six million Jews who died.)
One's head spins, which
probably is part of the Trump strategy: distracting from distractions.
In the face of chaos the
administration claimed the travel ban is "a
massive success." The
alt-right's alternate facts take shape as a whole alternate reality—although
this corner of the funhouse eventually was torn down by the courts.
But many of Trump's critics,
focusing on the evident racism and bigotry of his policies, are missing one
vitally important point that is key to understanding not only his strategy but
the danger it poses for the majority of the people of the United States: in the
supposed interest of fighting terrorism, Trump is attacking American cities.
Or, more precisely, he is heedlessly
jeopardizing the people who live in them and the way they live in them. And the
security implications of this campaign are frightening.
In the real world, over the
last 15 years American cities have gotten a lot harder for terrorists to
penetrate and attack because federal and local law enforcement have come to
understand and adopt some basic principles about working with, and sometimes
monitoring, very diverse communities.
About 40 percent of the
population of New York City—quarante pourcent—
for instance, was not born in the United States of America. According to
Trump’s rhetoric, including the language of his first refugee ban and
immigration decrees, that ought to make his home town a hell hole.
But New York has rarely been more at
peace or more prosperous than it was
before his election.
Thanks to Trump’s new
policies, it is unlikely to stay that way, but clearly Trump does not care. The
cities never voted for him, and they were never going to. Trump was running
against the cities, and it seems they knew it. His promised investigation of
voter fraud (remember that?) if it had happened, would have focused of course
on urban areas. There is no doubt they are the reason he lost the popular vote
by a massive margin.
As The New York Times pointed out just after the election, in Manhattan—Trump’s home borough in his home town
and ground zero for his eponymous empire—he got a pitiful 10 percent of the
vote. In Washington, D.C., his nominal new home, he got 4 percent. (I hear from
friends in Palm Beach he’s not so popular there either.)
Trump’s campaign against the
ravages of “globalization,” echoing similar campaigns in Europe, is essentially
rhetoric that draws on the anger of people who feel they don’t fit in, or are
being victimized, by the dynamic urban majorities in their own countries.
In every case, arguments of
the rising demagogues are based on what Adrian Monck of the World Economic
Forum recently called “nostalgic nationalism.” Its opposite, says Monck, is
“cosmopolitanism,” an idea defined by Merriam-Webster as “having worldwide
rather than limited or provincial scope or bearing.” But in American and
European politics these days, as Monck puts it, “I don’t see many people
sticking up for cosmopolitanism.”
But nostalgic nationalism is
a very poor tool when it comes to keeping cities safe. Facts are much more
useful.
As veteran counterterror
analyst Brian Jenkins at the RAND Corporation points out, a study of all the
post-9/11 terror attacks in the United States leads to the conclusion that the
danger is posed by ideas not
refugees, or, as Jenkins puts it, “inspiration, not infiltration.”
Top
of Form
Bottom
of Form
If If Trump’s directives had been put in place the day
after 9/11—that is, on September 12, 2001— they “would not have saved a
single life,” says Jenkins.
And, this is important, not
one of those terror attacks had any connection to a Syrian refugee.
“Most of the perpetrators
were U.S. citizens,” Jenkins told me. “None were from the countries included in
the directive. That is the prevailing pattern. Jihadist terrorists are not
imported, they are manufactured in the United States. Inspiration, not
immigration, is the problem we face.”
“A city is not an abstraction
like ‘homeland,’” I wrote, “it is home, full stop, to millions of people. And
if you live here, and are part of it, what would you be willing to do to defend
it? What wouldn’t you be willing to do?
“The job of securing any big
city seems at first glance almost impossible; the results obtained in New York
almost a miracle. What’s required is an incredibly sensitive equilibrium among
disparate and contradictory forces: coercion and finesse, political expediency
and public interest; basic cop-on-the-beat police work and sophisticated
intelligence gathering; respect for the law but a willingness to bend the
rules; ostentatious spectacle and secret surveillance; lots of police on the
street, but maybe a few outside the country, cooperation with federal agencies,
but also competition.”
There is no indication that
Trump understands any of those principles, and there is every reason to believe
his executive orders and statements, item by item, will make that vital
equilibrium harder to sustain.
Consider the threat to cut
off federal funding to so-called sanctuary cities. Why do they exist? Why do
big-city police commissioners support them? Not because they feel some moral
obligation to protect undocumented immigrants, but because when you make
crime-fighting police do the work of immigration agents, crime-fighting
suffers: People do not report crimes, they do not cooperate with police, they
avoid them at all costs.
In that same vein, when you
make the point, as Trump has done with his orders and declarations, that all
illegal immigrants eventually should be booted out of the country, that all
refugees are suspect, and Muslims from seven countries—with more to come—should
be regarded as a threat, what’s the message? That a minimum of some 11 million
people in the United States, and possibly many, many more, have no stake in its
future.
They are deemed outlaws.
But that does not mean they
will leave.
It does mean they will become
much easier prey for organized crime, which will promise them ways to survive
and, yes, for terrorists who would encourage some of them to take revenge. We
have seen in Europe how closely crime and terror are connected.
One of the factors that helps
keep the peace in American cities is what’s called the American dream, which is
based on an immigrant ethic—an immigrant
ethic, not a “Protestant” ethic: the belief that a better world can be built in
a land of freedom—and that it is tied to basic respect for human dignity.
That’s what has made America
great. Period.
Meanwhile the professionals
who might question such policies—people like the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
and the Director of National Intelligence—are being squeezed out of White House
councils.
All this breaks down the
understandings that allow people to live together by the millions in peace and
security in urban America. Trump's voters in small-town America and gated
communities may be complacent, even pleased, about what he is doing. But they
were never the ones at risk.
In effect, Trump has turned a
famous phrase of Abraham Lincoln on its head. What we are saying to the world
now, and a vast swathe of our own population, is that this administration has malice toward many, and charity for none.
That is morally
reprehensible, yes. But more importantly, it is no way to keep the United
States safe.
To understand Trump’s view of
terrorism, and the way that plays out, one must understand first that he rules,
and is ruled by, anecdotes.
Hard facts, which are hard to
digest, do not work well for him. “I’ve seen that information around,” is his
typical refrain. Or he saw “something” on TV or heard it from “somebody,” like,
you know that thing that didn’t happen in Sweden last night. Or that thing about Obama bugging Trump Tower. And
every time he draws on these spectral anecdotes—which is almost daily—he
looks like the weak-minded tool of these nameless sources and their tweets. Or,
to be more precise, like a witless rich guy in thrall to a smart, unprincipled
intellectual con man like—not to put too fine a point on it—Steve Bannon.
You may remember what he said
about Paris.
When Trump talked at CPAC a
few weeks ago he made this statement in the midst of his usual onanistic
oratory:
“I have a friend, he’s a very,
very substantial guy. He loves the city of lights, he loves Paris. For years,
every year during the summer, he would go to Paris, was automatic with his wife
and his family. Hadn’t seen him in a while. And I said, Jim, let me ask you a
question, ‘How’s Paris doing? ‘Paris? I don’t go there anymore, Paris is no
longer Paris.’ That was four years—four or five years hasn’t gone there. He
wouldn’t miss it for anything. Now he doesn’t even think in terms of going
there.
“Take a look at what’s
happening to our world, folks. And we have to be smart. We have to be smart. We
can’t let it happen to us.”
Was Trump thinking about the
terrorist attacks of 2015? Guess not. Those were long after Jim Whatshisname
supposedly quit going to Paris.
Was it taxes? One can imagine
that would be the case if Jim were not just a visitor but a resident, but, no,
that’s not what it sounds like. Was it a heat wave in the summer? Air
conditioning’s not great in France, and the world is getting warmer. But, no,
probably that wasn’t it either.
So what was it? We won’t get
an answer because there probably isn’t one. Anecdotes are like that. As the
ironic old adage of the news business goes, they’re “too good to check.” And
Trump, who has the attention span of a restless eight year old, but without as
much curiosity, wouldn’t see a need to verify the information in any case.
There’s something more at
play here, however. Because Trump, who knows nothing about France, is pushing
an agenda and promoting politicians there, thanks to Bannon, who will be hugely destructive to France and to the
future of the European Union as a peaceful, cooperative enterprise.
Bannon’s public utterances
and occasional appearances on stage, as at CPAC, are reminders that he’s
playing what he figures is a great intellectual game with this orange-haired
Barnum as a front man. And a big part of that game, for Bannon, is to destroy
the social contracts that have developed in Europe over centuries of blood,
sweat, tears, and more blood—social compacts and compromises that have been
admired and to some extent emulated by American liberals, especially when it
comes to questions like health care and human rights. Bannon likes to posit the
press as the “enemy of the people” and himself as the enemy of “the state,”
especially that European kind of polity and policy.
Thus when Bannon talks about
the “Trump” revolution, he says it’s about “the deconstruction of the administrative state.” Interesting turn of
phrase that, using the term “deconstruction” popularized by the late French
philosopher Jacques Derrida and banalized (banalisé)
by academia ever since. What Bannon meant by it, one presumes, is not just
dismantling (which would be the usual American word) but a whole new and fluid
conception of what the state is and what it does.
This would be amusing if we
were bullshitting in a bar. Bannon’s very smart. But these conversations are
ones he’s able to have in the White House with a man who may think
deconstruction is what happened to the elegant old Bonwit Teller building
before he built Trump Tower on top of the rubble on Fifth Avenue.
As for “Jim” and his
alienation from Paris, let me say as someone who has lived in that city for
almost 30 years: it does have its problems. It’s not as pristine as it once
was. And it was shocked by the terror attacks of 2015, sure, just as New York
and Paris were shocked in 2001. But Paris is still the city of lights, not only
because it’s brilliant at night, but in the sense of the Enlightenment: la ville lumière et la ville des lumières.
If that makes Jim uncomfortable, the city can get along quite well without him.
And if Bannon wants to come spend drunken evenings in the Latin Quarter telling
us about deconstruction, that’s okay, too.
In fact, we’d much rather
have him there than in the White House.
-->
Thank you.
