To Each his Own Illusion

Brief thoughts on what the Hegseth hearing has to do with the climate debate.

The autopsy of the Pete Hegseth hearing by the non-Trump commentators (it’s not the left only) was immediate and accompanied by lots of wishful thinking. According to them, Hegseth was destroyed, crushed, ruined, shown for what he is, finished, out, kaputt, and the Democrats were triumphant. For the Democratic choir, yes.

Here’s the bad news:

Hegseth got away with a lot and as far as I can tell, not a single Republican mind wavered. Murkowski might vote against him. Collins will be concerned, but confident that he will change when he becomes top dog at the DoD.Because Collins wants to continue pretending she is “independent.”

And the Dems on the committee? Many showed that they are not really on the ball, they seem to lack the ability to throw a punch without apologizing before hand. The recurring exchange to exemplify the KO-punch to Hegseth shown on several channels (like BTC, who is often very astute) was that between Tim Kaine and Hegseth. I saw it. It was cringey at best, to use a popular word. Kaine went on and on about Heg’s sexual deviance. Yes, that is really bad. But reality check: the Maga GOP doesn’t care about it, as long as they can own the libs, and that is precisely what they feel they are doing when they support sexual predators. It’s sort of weird, but that is a fact.

Core issues

It’s about norms. Normalcy. Doing political business according to Hoyle, in which a minimum of exaggeration and lying is acceptable in debate but ad hominem attacks are not. Norms that stipulate that racism, vulgarity, four-letter words, talking genitalia, and off-road sexual behavior are career terminators. In the Democrats’ mental construct, the country must stick to the rules of engagement (note Hegseth’s cavalier attitude towards the Geneva Convention, it says a lot).

Let me ask frankly: Who set these norms? Where is the consensus about their criteria? And what happens when a party wins while shattering every single one of them? Let’s look back briefly:

The GOP, which was so eager to nail Bill Clinton for a blow job, dropped the pretense of any moral high ground at the latest in 2016, but the signs were already there much earlier. When the party, having taken a deep breath, decided to follow their Pied Piper after the Hollywood Access tape revelation, they did so realizing, perhaps, that their ur-base, the evangelicals, were not going to let go of their new spokesman, a crazy city slicker, who expressed all their hatred for progress, for intellectuals, for government, yes, even for democracy and all its dickering. They found more excuses for him than an army of high-schoolers would for late homework. Trump had taken over the hard base of the GOP, and the party couldn’t afford to lose them. The bubble on the Right became a Kevlar enclosure, permeable from the outside, but without an easy exit.

Still smelling the latte

The next eight years saw a whittling down of those unwritten norms as the GOP slowly became drunk on the power, the money, and the adulation from the base, while Trump became an amazing attack dog and distractor-in-chief. Like all con men, he has a feral instinct for human weakness, he spoke to venality, to paranoia, to willful ignorance, to the hatred of intellectuals, who manage to julienne every little detail. He spotted genuine despair, too, just like the Evangelical pastors who dish out fear, division, and provide the solution if you pay. Trump demanded and received his racketeering rights from them.

But above all, it’s about the American way of sex, and the obsession with old puritanical values. Someone has to write a book about this obsession that occupies the American psyche. In the 19th century, you couldn’t even say “legs” or “arms.” We call toilets “rest rooms.” Dating is spoken of in terms of baseball, and it has all the spontaneity of a corporate business plan. The free love liberalism of the 1960s, which really did objectify women, suddenly became anathema with the AIDS epidemic… and soon, Janet Jackson’s nipple appearing for about 1/4 of a second on national TV causes an uproar and threats of closing down a channel?! But mass killings on screens? No problem. These are norms: “You can do this, you can’t do that.” "(Forgive me for being amazed, but I grew up in Europe.”

These are also the norms that lost the Democrats Al Franken. WSe could have used him at these hearings, because he was fearless and bright. Tim Kaine seemed like another dad joke trying to pin down Hegseth, who, honestly, has the intellectual capacity of a turnstile.

As an aside, but its important: Franken was lost to the eternal sourpuss Puritan crouching in American DNA, which had to pounce on a former comedian who had a really sophomoric moment. With that, they lost one of the sharper minds in the Senate.

The Democrats have to get this message if they ever want to get the upper hand:

1. Stop being outraged. The more they get outraged, the more they satisfy the longing of a very juvenile crowd of voters.

2. Understand the fundamental difference between ethics and moralism.

Why did people vote for Trump and give an accolade to his lecherous, lying, scamming surrogates and hangers-on? For many reasons, but by and large there was the fact that the moralistic streak that hamstrings the Democratic Party is felt as a judgmental gaze by others (I myself have been subjected to such a gaze, and it is unpleasant). When I hear or read Democrats saying: Gee, but we are the ones for the working class, but they voted for him… This is what many hear: “We support the working class [or some ethnic group, or even women], and if you don’t support us, you are morally inferior.”

This is not about policy differences. Trump has no real policy to speak of, other than attracting attention. It’s the judgmental attitude of the left, which has alienated even many on the left, the old-fashioned Democratic voters. This is why — I’ve said this as early as 2016 and was yelled at for it— Clinton’s “deplorables” comment, hardly astonishing for a Methodist, was so wrong, and Biden’s “garbage” comment without qualifications was equally wrong. The Democrats hate the “fuck your feelings” attitude of the Maga crowd, but in fact it’s an iteration of “Fuck your moral pronunciamentoes.”

Two worlds

The Hegseth hearing was a perfect illustration of how deep the GOP is immersed in the new non-norm system, and apparently a lot of Americans feel the same way. They are not all “morally deviant.” They are expressing something that is profound. And they are not one block, which, alas, the moralizers turn them into, because moralizing means that all those not following their rules are bad, or sinful.

The hearing was also a demonstration of how deeply the Democrats are immersed in the old finger-waving that has eroded the party’s base. A few of the Democratic senators were good. King spoke of international humanitarian law and the Geneva conventions. Duckworth was credible, of course, she is a vet who left her legs in Iraq, and her nailing him on ASEAN was terrific. It was factual, not moral. But Kaine sounded like a cranky schoolteacher, and that gave the opening to Mullin to slam the whole Senate with the “tu quoque” argument, which is a fallacy, by the way, just sayin’.

What they missed: More questions about the army using force on Americans needed to be asked, they made Hegseth really uncomfortable in my view. Someone could have pressed further on the Geneva Conventions, or on Hegseth’s foreign experience, other than going to Afghanistan and killing villagers. And what about Hegseth’s frequent reference to Democrats some kind of enemy. Did he think that there were no Democrats in the army? Does he think that the 1/3rd of the country that voted for Trump is a mandate? In our two-party system, the winner is never take all.

These would have been vital areas, some were touched on, but otherwise, believing that there are old “norms,” many of the Democratic Senators chose to waltz around on the philandering and the boozing and all that ridiculous macho stuff, that seems to come from a Marvel comic book with yellowed pages…

Is the GOP a party of corrupt opportunists, of liars and bullshitters? Tragically, way more than the Democrats, who really struggle to do good, for sure, but are also desperately hampered by that vague, moralistic attitude that turns their message into some kind of smoldering homily… (By the way: the televangelists do the same… but they do it with verve, with yelling, and whooping, and screaming and fire and brimstone, lots of entertainment that gets the pill down and the people to reach for their wallets to pay for another private jet).

My optimism is dwindling… Let’s see what the next hearing brings.