On Current Events

One of those depressingly regular attempts to clear my head by writing stuff I've been trying to avoid.

For the better part of six months, now, I have been making a very concerted effort to not write about politics and current events. There are a bunch of reasons for this, but the primary heuristic that comes into play is asking myself “Will anything be materially improved by me making a public comment about this?” The answer to this has generally been “Hahahahahaha… Of course not!” As a coastal elite(-ish) individual, it’s arguably actively counter-productive for me to make a show of being upset about things that are happening, as it just feeds the crowd whose primary goal is “own the libs.”

I’ve mostly been coming to the conclusion that my limited ability to improve… anything at the current moment lies in at least attempting to provide distraction from upsetting current events for those who would like something else to think about. Which is, of course, a list that starts with me, so you’ve been getting book and movie reviews, posts about odd little physics experiments physics, and that kind of thing. The list of people who would rather drop (or read about dropping) weighted ping-pong balls than what’s being done to and with the US Federal government isn’t terribly long (I have the post stats to prove it), but giving them (and myself) a happy distraction is about as useful a thing as I can do at present. So that’s the thing I’m doing.

This does not, of course, mean that I actually accept or endorse anything that’s going on, or that it’s easy to keep from talking about it. I do try pretty hard to steer away from conversations that just tip into “Orange Man Bad,” but it’s hard to stay out entirely when the Orange Man is so colossally Bad. Especially given the social circles that I as a coastal elite(-ish) individual move in.

It’s also kind of blocking me up in terms of writing (and even to some extent actual paid work for my day job). While I’ve been making a conscious effort to not talk about current events, that doesn’t stop me from doing a shitload of un-conscious wheel-spinning about all the dumb shit that is going on, especially since I am Excessively Online. The ambient freakout level makes it hard to concentrate on writing about anything else, which sort of undermines the whole second paragraph of this post.

So, I’m going to cave a bit and write about politics and current events, just in the interest of clearing the metaphorical decks. This is going to lump a whole bunch of shit together in one big post, which I hope will allow me to go back to talking about happier topics; if you don’t want to read this kind of thing, I’ll provide a page break/ palate cleanser in the form of the utterly preposterous video for one of the best Dire Straits songs, and then you can go do something else:

(I watched an unhealthy amount of MTV as a teenager in the 1980s, but was unaware of the existence of this video until Andrew Wheeler posted about it. So either credit or blame him for this…)

Anyway, here we go:

— First and foremost, the Orange Man is Bad. Appallingly, almost incomprehensibly Bad. As an American citizen, I am horrified basically daily by the actions of the Trump administration with regard to civil rights, rule of law, public health, economic policy, respect for human decency, international alliances, public decorum, and pretty much anything and everything else. I knew this administration was going to be a shitshow, but the scale and speed of their program of enshittification is absolutely staggering. The damage they’ve done to our national institutions and reputation won’t be repaired in my lifetime, and I say that as someone who intends to live a long fucking time.

— As recently as five years ago, there was a reasonable argument to be made that the term “fascist” was being thrown around a little too casually with regard to the Trump administration, mostly because of the general Dennis the Peasant vibe of a lot of the folks deploying the term. As recently as six months ago, I would’ve been politely tolerant of somebody arguing that a different word would be more appropriate. But, man, Trump 2.0 seems hell-bent on justifying the very worst anybody said about them prior to the election…

Though there’s a sense in which “fascist” is almost too kind— the way they’re taking a hatchet to government services isn’t targeted or competent enough to be fascist. There’s a popular meme where people say that “[such-and-so affront] is going to make me turn into the Joker,” but this “DOGE” nonsense is making me turn into Walter Sobchak:

— As an academic, I am particularly disturbed by the current administration’s indiscriminate and ham-handed attacks on the American university system, which has been one of the greatest features of the nation since WWII. Direct attacks on university personnel for their opinions or national origin, the disruption of duly approved grants and contracts, and threats to withhold or cancel further funding unless explicitly ideological demands are met are all shockingly bad. They’ve already done significant damage to the academic system, and threaten to completely shatter a system that I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say has been a pillar of modern technological civilization.

(The real cost of these moves won’t be felt until next year, though. There have already been a bunch of stories about various universities suspending graduate admissions and even rescinding offers that had been made. But the damage this will do to research is nothing compared to the shitshow that will follow from those institutions and programs not having graduate TAs when the Fall semester rolls around…)

The willful and even gleeful ignorance demonstrated by the attacks on academic research is appalling to me as an academic, but should be embarrassing even to non-academics. If you’re not a subsistence farmer in a remote jungle you have derived enormous benefit from the intellectual heritage of humanity as a whole (and if you are, I don’t understand how you’re reading this…), and the way they’re going about this is an attack on pretty much all of that.

— All that said (and you knew there would be a “that said…” coming), very little of this is without at least some element of the sowing/reaping meme:

What’s being done to civil society generally and academia specifically is an outrageously stupid overreach, but it’s at least in part a response to a wide range of overreaches in the other direction. Less stupid and less outrageous overreaches, to be sure, but overreaches all the same, by institutions and individuals who felt their positions were invulnerable and used them to undermine the very norms and ideals that protected those positions.

This does not excuse everything that’s being done, or the excruciatingly stupid manner in which it’s being done. But at the same time, elements of this are directly traceable to years spent actively sneering at ideals of objectivity or neutrality as even aspirational goals, and relentlessly politicizing absolutely fucking everything. The scale of the blowback we’re getting now is vastly worse than I would’ve expected, but that there would eventually be blowback should not have been a surprise to anyone.

— One of the more distressing aspects of this whole situation, to me, is that I am somewhat concerned that the manner in which this is all happening is, perversely, going to make it harder to fix things when (I profoundly hope sooner rather than later) there is an opportunity to fix things. I’ve seen this stated pretty bluntly on social media (but I’m not going to spend time digging for the specific Bluesky post), in the form “While there may be reasonable critiques of the existing practices around [Thing], you shouldn’t make them now because any change would hand a win to the Bad People.”

Which, you know, I’m not in favor of handing wins to the Bad People. But on the other hand, even a stopped clock is occasionally correct about the time when a blind pig finds a truffle. If some part of the way we have been doing things has been ill-advised, we should stop doing the ill-advised thing, not just dig in to defend the indefensible simply because it happens to be one of the handful of things where the Bad People happen to be pointing in the same direction as more reasonable people.

That’s very much not the mood in online spaces, though, and I find that dispiriting.

— Speaking of things I find dispiriting, there are a bunch of smallish things that pop up again and again that make me feel like I’m taking crazy pills, including but not limited to:

• “How can you say that the Democrats need to moderate to win elections when the Republicans did the opposite and won?” To my mind, this completely inverts the correct interpretation of the 2024 election, which wasn’t an election that Kamala Harris should’ve won easily but barely lost because she was a bad candidate. It was an election that the Republicans should’ve won handily but almost lost because Donald Trump is fucking terrible. Look at every other post-Covid election prior to 2024, and what you see is that the incumbent party got waxed. If the Republicans had been able to run a moderate, they would’ve romped to victory; hell, Mitt Romney would’ve put up Reagan numbers in the Electoral College. Instead, they ran the one candidate who could and did put the result in doubt.

• There’s a common argument being pushed that the big mis-play was moving to the center, rather than further Left— that making a bid for ex-Republican voters was a misplay that cost Democrats the election. As someone who watches live sports on TV and thus saw a lot of ads during the tail end of the campaign, I find the reasoning here kind of baffling. Given that 1) Kamala Harris was not, in fact, an extreme leftist, and 2) All of the Republican advertising was devoted to painting Kamala Harris as an extreme leftist, I don’t see how you get to “We should’ve run an actual extreme leftist!” as a winning strategy via any means other than pure wishcasting.

• Similarly, I see a lot of people talking about how the current moment shows that we need to be pushing even more radical restructuring of society, pointing to the radical shit that Trump is doing. Which again, seems like a fundamental misreading of… everything. Yes, to people who were comfortable with existing institutions and paying attention, what Trump was proposing was radical change. But the way it was sold was not as some kind of revolution, but as a restoration. The entire Republican pitch was “Things used to be good, they’re not good now, we’re going to go back to how things were when they were good.” They weren’t selling this to the median voter as a radical restructuring of society, because the median voter doesn’t want a radical restructuring of society. Which is demonstrated by the recent spate of much-derided “regretful Trump voter” stories, and the rapid cratering of his approval rating as he delivers the radical change that voters who weren’t paying attention didn’t realize they were being sold. Again, the idea that there’s a huge audience out there desperate for revolutionary restructuring of society just doesn’t seem to me to hold up at all.

This is largely a “I happen to have a hammer and wow, look at all these nails!” phenomenon—super Left people whose solution to every problem is to Left harder. But it seriously makes me question why I should give any weight at all to the analysis of people who make these arguments.

— On the fraught question of “What Is To Be Done Now?”, I’ll do a little nail-spotting of my own and tap the sign saying that a lot of what’s going on with the disappointing response is a matter of time scales. If you have executive authority and a desire to mess things up, you can do that really quickly; if you’re also willing and eager to flagrantly violate norms and laws along the way, you can break shit on a staggering scale and at a shocking speed. The natural time scale for executive action is short, because it’s ultimately the decision of a small group of individuals, maybe even a single person.

Any constructive response, on the other hand, more or less has to move at the natural time scale for larger institutions— weeks and months for courts, months or years for legislation, multiple years for electoral politics. You need lots of people with varying interests to get on board, and that doesn’t happen instantaneously, even in response to shockingly fast bad actions. Those institutions can (and I fervently hope will) get there, but it requires coordination at a larger scale, and that takes time.

In the interim, unfortunately, there aren’t a whole lot of satisfying actions that can be taken. Which kind of brings us back around to where I started, with the question of “What action can I take that would materially improve the current situation?” The answer, unfortunately, may well turn out to be “go read a book/ watch a movie/ do physics experiments/ touch grass to preserve your sanity for a time when some better option is available.”

— I’d lose my Licence to Blog if I didn’t include at least some links to other recent commentary, so here’s a piece by Dan Drezner on the timescale thing, and another by Jeff Maurer on cathartic flailing. They’ve both got links to lots of other stuff if you want to spend more time reading about this.

— If, on the other hand, you would prefer some encouragement to touch grass, here’s a picture of a cardinal from a photo hike I took last weekend:

Eat your heart out, Ralph Fiennes

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So, yeah, that’s a thing. Hopefully that clears my head a little and I can go back to working on other things; as a backup, I plan to watch a lot of college basketball over the next several days. If you’d like to know how that works out, here’s a button:

With some trepidation, I will start out with the comments open, but I reserve the right to shut them down if they go in one of the many, many bad directions: