A #Resistance of Manners

The other night, I was out with a friend, and we got into an argument. What got us started was that this friend, someone with a background in philosophy and with an activist bent, came out praising James Comey for standing up to the President. I know that Comey has been doing his “rehabilitation tour,” and that he’s become a darling of the mainstream pundit class as well as many members of the self-styled #resistance, but I was surprised to hear this from someone who I know to be a radical intellectual and who is no stranger activism. In fact, just to paint an accurate picture, this is someone who makes any intellectual or political critiques that I make pale by comparison. So, you can probably imagine why I was so surprised, and why this led to a really long argument (in good spirit, but still, a pretty intense argument).

My friend’s point was that despite what Comey might have done prior to standing up to the President, the act of standing up to him was one that took moral courage. But to me, it’s quite likely that Comey’s act wasn’t a moral act at all. Instead, I suspect that Comey has an idea of himself as a deeply moral person, and that in order to maintain this self-image, he felt compelled to stand up to the president. So, it wasn’t truly a moral act, but instead, it was a self-interested act by a man who wanted to retain his self-image. The fact that he’s now made a career out of promoting this self-image seems pretty good proof. And beyond this, even the title of Comey’s book, “A Higher Loyalty,” makes me cringe. To me, and maybe I’m being unfair, it’s dripping with self-righteousness. Comey seems to be saying that unlike the craven President, he himself is a man of faith, a man of deep morals, and a man who obeys “a higher call” even when it might cost him his job. But this self-righteousness wasn’t what my friend saw. What he saw was a brave and moral act that took tremendous courage.

The more we got into it, the more I became convinced of my point. For instance, I have no love for the FBI, as I’m sure is true for some of you, and I have no doubt that Comey acted in immoral ways as a function of his position with the FBI. I wasn’t aware of his particular biography when we were arguing, but among the highlights from his career, he also served as the Chief Counsel and Senior Vice President for the defense manufacturer, Lockheed Martin. And it’s hard for me to imagine how anyone with an honest sense of morality could work, especially at such high levels, for the military-industrial complex. Maybe some of you don’t see the conflict, but I suspect that if you thought more deeply about it—about how you’d be building the bombs raining down on Yemen right now—that you might find it hard to reconcile your own morality with that job. But not James Comey.

For James, his morality was entirely consistent with working for the military-industrial complex (let alone, whatever nefarious things he did at the FBI, some of which I’ll get into momentarily). And this begs the question: what was the true nature of his resistance to the President? And I suspect, as I began to suggest above, that it was little more than a revulsion towards the President’s vulgarity. It was a resistance of manners and not morality. For instance, had the President quashed the investigation into Michael Flynn in a politically savvy way, rather than by taking his cues from reruns of The Sopranos, I don’t think we’d be here. But it was the obviousness of the request, the vulgarity of it, that rubbed Comey the wrong way. There was no way for Comey to maintain his self-righteous self-image when faced with such a boorish request. But had the President managed to orchestrate a situation in which the investigation was quashed and James Comey could also keep his self-image as a “righteous” man, then Comey wouldn’t have had a problem. But Comey had to choose, and he chose his self-image rather than “lowering” himself to the level of the President.

And, this is where I think things get interesting. In making my case against Comey, I began talking about all of the things that he would have done under the Bush regime, and that would have been entirely consistent with his sense of morality, insofar as they didn’t lead to his #resistance. And the more I did so, the more I began remembering just how awful those years were, and how comparatively, these years don’t seem as bad. Which is really saying something.

But before I go any further, I want to add a note of clarification. In many ways, 2018 is worse than 2002 or 2003. You don’t have to look any further than the inequality statistics to see that this is the case, as wages have stagnated or fallen, while wealth and income inequality has grown. So, we, collectively, are worse off than we were back then. But, if you actually look at these numbers, you see that these trends began in the 1970s, and that they’ve been consistently worsening ever since. So, in broad strokes, 2018 is worse than 2003, but many of the reasons have to do with underlying economic and political phenomena that would have occurred with almost any president, and certainly with any Republican president. And my point is that when comparing DJT to GWB, I think we have to factor out all of the phenomena for which we can’t blame DJT. At the very least, it seems like we have to do so if we’re trying to explain the resistance to him, because presumably, a different Republican president wouldn’t have engendered the same backlash. And the fact that wages are shit, in other words, isn’t entirely DJT’s fault, even if he’s carrying on a trajectory that began before him.

So, if we look at policy—at what DJT has done—we find that it’s not much, and that he’s certainly not much different than would have been any other Republican president. His signature piece of legislation was the tax cut, which is likely more Paul Ryan’s doing (and the Koch brothers) than anyone else, and it’s hard for me to imagine any scenario in which DTJ was in any way instrumental in passing it. Most of the time, he seems like more of a political liability than anything. For instance, if we had a different Republican president, it seems pretty likely that Obamacare would have been repealed. And this is similarly true of the Supreme Court and Federal Judiciary, insofar as the stacking of the courts is a function of longstanding and well-organized Republican campaigns, rather than of the President himself. I don’t know how far we can take this argument, nor how far I want to take it, but I can certainly imagine an alternate reality in which DJT lost the primaries and we had a different Republican president, and things were in many ways worse than they are now.

And this leaves us with the areas where he has been “successful.” At first, I thought maybe he could take credit for deregulation, but again, that seems like a Koch brothers success. So, any Koch brothers friendly Republican would have acted similarly. What’s really left then is just immigration. But perhaps I’m missing something? But it seems like even issues like voting rights and criminal justice issues might have been quite similar under other Republican presidents? And I don’t mean to frame this lightly, as we’ve seen tremendous cruelty in immigration policy, and I don’t at all want to make light of the human rights atrocity that is our current immigration reality. In fact, this probably played a role, if a very small role, in becoming a citizen myself, as who knows what the future might hold? Granted, I’m in a really privileged position, but hopefully that helps make my point. The immigration injustices are so severe that even someone in my position, an extremely privileged one, has a touch of anxiety about it.

In my extremely long winded way, I think what I’m trying to say is that much of the empirically awful parts of our current reality would likely have existed regardless of who the President was, assuming he was a Republican. A Democrat would have probably been a bit better, but if the candidate was Hillary, for example, I think it would have been fair to assume inequality would have been bad too. Granted, not as accelerated as under DJT, but as Obama and the earlier Clinton demonstrated, inequality has no problem growing under Democratic presidents, if it sometimes grows at a slightly slower pace.

And if all of this is true—and there are a lot of hypotheticals and counterfactuals in there—what exactly is everyone so pissed off about? And it seems like, at least in part, we’re back at Comey’s resistance to Trump’s vulgarity. It can’t be the policies that bother us (with the exception of immigration), it’s the personality. Trump offends our “sensibilities.” And ironically, this is exactly why he’s so popular with his constituency. His constituency loves that he points out our own hypocrisy.

For instance, in making this argument with my friend, I began to juxtapose our current outrage towards the President with the comparative lack of outrage towards George W. Bush. Granted, many people did protest Bush, but the level of popular protest was on a much more modest level. Yet, among a few of the policies that Bush initiated were two wars based on falsified evidence. These wars have not only led to hundreds of thousands if not millions in dead and wounded, but they are still underway, so that we’re almost at the point where people born after the wars started will be old enough to fight in them. Bush also initiated major tax cuts that accelerated inequality, let alone that these two wars were trillion dollar subsidies to the corporate world. And besides all of this, Bush was responsible for initiating a domestic and international surveillance program the likes of which has never existed, so that we have each basically accepted the fact that we’re all under constant government surveillance. In fact, of this surveillance, James Comey—yes, good old Jim—recently said that "There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America; there is no place outside of judicial reach." But being pulled aside and told that Michael Flynn was a good guy proved just too much!!!

Beyond this, in retreading all this old ground, I was reminded of the pervasive sense of fear that existed during the Bush regime, particularly from 9/11 through to 2005 or so. We were all terrified, running to strap “support the troops” bumper stickers onto our cars, and up in arms about the slightest sign of protest. It was a time of tremendous popular silence, where fear had inhibited any dissent. And this wasn’t just a fear of 9/11, but a fear that was coopted and manipulated to aid the Bush agenda. It was a fear that helped manufacture two wars, a fear that got us all to willingly submit to permanent and constant surveillance, and a fear that George W. Bush tried to channel into the private act of “shopping” rather than to any public display of dissent. Dissent, both in public or within the administration, was rooted out. As the President let us know, “you're either with us, or against us.”

But compare this to the present day. How did many of us “celebrate” DJT’s election victory? We took to the streets. Millions of us. And how did we “celebrate” his Muslim ban? We took to the streets, stopping traffic at airports, and protesting at federal courthouses. (As it goes, the courthouse where I recently took my citizenship oath was the same courthouse where massive protests broke out when the Muslim ban was announced.) And how did we “celebrate” his tax plan, or his attempt to repeal Obamacare, or his inauguration, or his .. or his … or his… We took to the streets. And regardless of how the midterms unfold, it’s clear that a spirit of protest is animating American political life. Rather than the pervasive fear of 2003, many of us are energized. And this energy, rather than the fear that defined post-9/11 America, seems to be a pervasive feature of our current reality. DJT has been so successful that his crowning achievement might be losing the House, and even possibly the Senate.

(One last example before I go on. Is everyone familiar with Maher Arar? He’s a Canadian citizen who was on family vacation in Tunisia in 2002. On returning home to Canada, he was supposed to catch a connecting flight at JFK. But at the airport, the CIA scooped him up, extraterritorially renditioned him to Syria, which was his birth country, and where he was tortured for almost a year before being released. And this was the world we lived in. A world of constant surveillance, CIA black sites, torture, extraterritorial rendition, and so on. And I bring this up not only as a reminder, but also to evoke what it felt like at the time—and I unfortunately suspect that while this isn’t a reality for most of us now, it is what it feels like for many immigrants under DJT. For instance, on returning home to JFK, there were two occasions when I was selected for “secondary screening” at JFK. Most of you probably don’t know what secondary screening is, but it’s when you go through customs, and rather than being cleared, they flag you, and send you to the back room out of sight. In my case, it was for minor mistakes with my student visa, but in 2006 when this first happened, it wasn’t lost on me that this is exactly where Maher Arar’s story began—with secondary screening at JFK. Not that I was particularly worried, as a Canadian Jew, but it was eerie to be at the same place where it all began for him. But beyond this, even though he is Canadian, as I was and am, he was renditioned to Syria his birth country. My birth country is Canada, and my father’s birth country is Israel, but both my grandparents on my father’s side came from Yemen. And my last name is Yemeni. Given that Arar was cleared of everything, no one quite knew what it might be that could lead you into the CIA’s hands, and maybe a Yemeni name was enough. Again, I wasn’t scared, so I don’t want to make it seem like I was, but these were the thoughts that I had back then, and I think that in one form or another these were the types of thoughts that many people had in many different situations. And the point is just that – that these were the thoughts we had back then. We were all scared).

When I raised all these points to my friend, convincing myself more and more that Bush was worse than DJT, his primary retort seemed to be that despite all of this, DJT was something new. He is a fascist, and this seemed to imply different political rules, and a new and different political reality. So, we might disagree with Comey under normal circumstances, decrying his complicity with the Bush regime prior to DJT, but in this new fight against fascism, Comey proved himself to be on the right side. And I think this is how many people imagine the current political struggle. It’s not Trump’s vulgarity (as I put it) that so bothers people, it’s his fascism. And this is why DJT is worse than GWB.

I do agree with my friend that Trump is a fascist, or at least, an aspiring one. And it’s the aspirational nature of his fascism that to me seems to make all the difference. I was reminded of P.T. Anderson’s film version of Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (I haven’t read the book yet). This movie (and you could add Philip K. Dick into the mix, especially with books like A Scanner Darkly, and Richard Linklater’s great film version of it), do a great job of revealing American fascism. And they’re particularly savvy when it comes to describing the way that at least one version of American fascism grew out of, and against, California’s counter culture. Think Ronald Reagan, for instance. Which is all to say, fascism isn’t anything new in the United States. In fact, and I’m sure I’m exaggerating (but I’m not sure by how much), but probably a third of the United States (or maybe just 1/3 of the male population of the United States) is a fascist, or at least sympathetic to it, as the recent election seems to prove. Shepard Fairey was onto something with OBEY! For all our Sturm und Drang, the Americans who most embrace the American tradition of liberty—I’m thinking of all those rural and suburban libertarians—are generally the most obedient ones too. And there are a lot of them.

But my point in all of this is question just how much Trump’s fascism matters, if, from an objective policy point of view, he’s been much less harmful than George W. Bush? As I earlier argued, there’s very little that you could put on DJT’s shoulders as an actual accomplishment, i.e., as something that he’s responsible for achieving, rather than something that would have happened with any Republican president. Immigration policy? For sure, that’s all DJT. A rise in overt anti-Semitic, racist, sexist, and xenophobic language and action? Yes on that too. But tax policy? Not so much. Regulation rollback? That doesn’t seem his either. Obamacare repeal? He’s chipping away at it, but he’s a failure there too, and a less incompetent Republican might have been successful.

And if all of this is the case, and I might be wrong about some, most, or even all of this, what does it matter that he’s a fascist? And what does it mean that what has managed to get the whole country up in arms are not DTJ’s policies, with the exception of immigration policy, because we can’t be offended at policies he has been too incompetent to enact. So, what is it that really bothers us?

If DTJ was not an incompetent fascist but an effective one, a fascist who managed to consolidate power, roll back civil liberties, and instill fear in his population, I would get it. That would be a terrifying reality. But we had many of those policies under GWB, coupled with the fear, and simply without the trappings of a wannabe Mussolini. And we were largely quiet. Why are we up in arms about Trump’s, so far largely failed, aspirations? Especially when the successful aspirations of GWB didn’t motivate us? And with this question, it seems to me like we might be back at the question of vulgarity. It’s the vulgarity that Trump openly wants what GWB achieved, but that GWB had the good manners to claim wasn’t a matter of his own lust for power, but rather was a matter of national security. Comey wouldn’t bow to a President who lusted for power, but he had little problem subordinating himself to a national security President who, in some ways, went much further.

Not to get too esoteric, but in arguing with my friend, I found myself referring to Thrasymachus. Arguing with Plato at the beginning of the Republic, Thrasymachus advances the claim that to live a tyrannical life is the best of all possible lives. And a tyrannical life, for Thrasymachus, is a life dedicated to one’s own selfish desires, and therefore, to the acquisition of the unbridled power that allows you to satisfy those desires. However, for Thrasymachus, deep down, this is something we all want. What therefore makes a tyrant is not that we want absolute power, because this would make everyone a tyrant. Instead, what makes a tyrant is our ability to acquire that power.

And with Trump, that seems a good explanation, no? We can recognize he’s a tyrannical personality, and he was even successful at seizing the reins of government through an election. But when it comes to actually using that power for his own ends, he’s largely a failure. He’s had some successes, and unfortunately, there will undoubtedly be more, but when it comes to what a “true tyrant” might be, at least according to Thrasymachus, he’s not that. A true tyrant would not only have the desire to be a tyrant, but he would be capable of acting as a tyrant acts, because it’s their ability to act as a tyrant that makes them a tyrant, and not some secret (or not so secret) yearning of the heart.

Which is all to say that when we judge someone, and perhaps this is especially true in the world of politics, shouldn’t we judge them based on their actions. And DJT’s actions don’t reveal an actual tyrant (or fascist), but a frustrated one. They reveal fascist dreams, but a fool’s reality. And by this measure, how does DJT come in any way close to the reality we all lived through during GWB’s time? Which isn’t to say that DTJ isn’t both terrible and dangerous, because he is, but it is maybe to say that our political judgment is suspect.

Which brings me back to James Comey. Comey saw no conflict with any of his previous roles at the FBI or as part of the military-industrial complex. There was a brief incident where he actually seemed to oppose some of the GWB surveillance program, but afterwards, he got on board with it. So, none of this—not constant surveillance, nor manufactured wars, not building bombs to drop on civilians in places like Yemen, not extraterritorial rendition, and not “enhanced interrogation”—was enough for him to rebel against GWB. But being told that Michael Flynn is a good guy who doesn’t deserve prosecution crossed a line. That’s when his “higher loyalty” called out.

Now, I know that among the people who read this there will be little love lost over Comey, and I know that many of you agree with my take on him (or something close to it). But the point of all this is mostly to try to make sense of the extreme reaction against the current President, because I think it’s pretty informative. And it’s not like I think the outrage is unwarranted, as I share it too, especially when it comes to his immigration policies and his inflammation of intolerance. But, the more I reflect on this political moment and what life was like way back in 2002, it’s hard for me to make any rational sense of why people are outraged now and not then. Or, to put it differently, I do understand why people are outraged now and not then, and I find it worrying. And it’s troubling because it’s about personality and not politics; it’s a resistance of manners and not morality.

And if this is the case, what does a successful resistance look like?