Guilt and shame do not win elections

Just a quick round-up before I go on to actual productive work. I first want to highlight Harry Cheadle's post in Persuasion last week, "Progressive asceticism will never win electoins," in which he highlights some of my own frustrations with my side of the political spectrum:

What this movement is gesturing toward is a conception that the lifestyles enjoyed by citizens of wealthy nations are, if not outright unsustainable, then at least deeply unfair. For at least a decade, left-of-center, educated, middle-class-and-above Westerners have become inflamed with guilt for the way we live. In a roundabout way, the left has reinvented the idea of sin.

This negativity manifested, for instance, in the since-deleted tweets of Darializa Avila Chevalier, who recently won a primary for a New York City congressional seat even though she wrote in 2020 that “this country [the U.S.] is a fucking disgrace” and in 2019 that “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me.” What Chevalier was expressing is not a political critique, but a view of the country as being irredeemably fallen—and that’s of course catnip to conservatives who attempt to paint all liberals and progressives with the same brush.

The last decade has convinced a lot of people that progressives are nothing but humorless scolds. Who wants to join a club like that? Until the left can convince everyone that it’s fun to be a member of the movement, that movement will struggle. But first, maybe some leftists need to convince themselves it’s okay to have fun.

Hear, hear! Progress is fun.

I also want to highlight an essay by Tim Kreider, "The Argobast Fallacy," which neatly explains why journalists have so much trouble addressing the OAFPOTUS's behavior:

In Psycho ... the characters all act as though they think they’re in a film noir (and Psycho is considered the end of the noir cycle by some film scholars)—trying to suss out one another’s motives, unravel their schemes, solve the mystery. When Janet Leigh’s character, Marion Crane, disappears, her sister hires a detective named Arbogast (Martin Balsam), who assumes she’s absconded with the cash she embezzled to elope with her fiancee; later he starts to suspect that this squirrelly kid Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) is in cahoots with her, or maybe even offed her to take the money himself; after Arbogast goes missing, too, the sister figures he must’ve found her and blackmailed her for a cut of the loot.

None of them can comprehend or begin to imagine what’s actually happening, because they have no way of knowing that they’re not in a noir at all; they’re in the first modern horror film, whose villain kills for no rational reason at all. A psychologist gives a convoluted and dodgy psychosexual explanation in the movie’s denouement that’s belied by the film’s last shot, of the murderer’s grinning face dissolving into the rictus of a death’s head. He wasn’t some venal schemer, or tortured by repressed Oedipal urges; he’s what horror fans now call a slasher—a monster, an incarnation of Death.

And this, essentially, is the fallacy that so many editorialists, pundits, and talking heads fall prey to in discussing the monster who’s now President. I’m always interested to read or hear political commentators discussing Trump’s contradictory statements and erratic behavior; there’s always something left conspicuously unsaid in their analyses.

There’s nothing there for a smart person to figure out; they’re writing think pieces about a guy who doesn’t. His operating principles, the only rules you need to remember to understand absolutely everything he does, are simple:

1. He is a very stupid person who has never read or learned or ever been really interested in anything that didn’t directly benefit him, and (not unrelated)
2. He genuinely doesn’t give a shit about anything other than himself—not his voters or his party or his allies in congress or his “friends”/business associates or his own family. I have no doubt he would sell his daughter to a Saudi prince if he could negotiate a good price.

He also does not have what you could call a hidden agenda. His goals are as crude and basic as a flatworm’s. He wants:

a.) to make as much money as possible in any way he can

b.) have everyone pay attention to him all the time

and—increasingly a priority the last few years—

c.) stay out of prison.

Yes, that is really all there is. And I have been saying these things for about 10 years now. And now, class, for extra credit I invite you to read the TV Tropes explanation of "Wrong Genre Savvy."

In other news:

• Margaret Sullivan says the media got it right with Graham Platner, even though it took a while and was kind of messy.
• How should we eulogize dead fascists and their enablers?
• Anthropic has extended the Claude Fable 5 preview yet again, and I swear I'll get to it this week.
• This visualization of where locals and tourists take photos is absolutely fascinating.
• And that visualization is made possible by the super-compact GPS chips in every phone in the world now.

Finally, New Zealand actor Sam Neill has died at 78. His career included The Hunt for Red October, Jurassic Park, and a whole bunch of other movies that he made better just by being in them. He will be missed.