Ross, Brilliant but mistaken analysis. Trump is an egomaniac but not a nihilist. You can see this from how well his children are brought up. I am sure he loves this country and everyone in it. His ego is so large because it encompasses everyone and everything in America. His braggadocio and conceitedness is eminently American and worthy of its president. He is proud of being American. Nay, in some sense he is proud to be America, so grand is his conceit! He reminds me of that caricature of the American people from WWII government bond selling posters, Uncle Sam. He understands to the depths of his guts that America’s greatness comes from liberty. That’s what has made him a great businessman. That’s what has made his domestic policies largely successful so far. Now, he has been called upon to save his America, an America that had been so much like him. He is for many of us the last best hope. I hope you will reconsider your assessment.
58
@ett
A great businessman?
Six bankruptcies?
A great businessman?
300
@ett Oh, yes, such a successful guy:
Trump steaks = failed
Trump air = failed
Trump casinos = failed
Trump condos = failed
Trump wine = failed
Incidentally, the most truly successful people also tend to be modest (Buffett). Trump falls into the gigantic hat/no cattle category.
290
@, if he is your last best hope, then you’re country is in deep, deep trouble.
274
Let's just call a spade a spade: "I believe that what this president has done to our culture, to our civic discourse ... you cannot unring these bells and you cannot unsay what he has said, and you cannot change that he has now in a very short time made it seem normal for schoolboy taunts and obvious lies to be spun out in a constant stream. I think this will do more lasting damage than Richard Nixon's surreptitious burglaries did." (George Will, 15July2019)
54
Think have you ever once heard Donald Trump make a self deprecating joke? Ever? Even once? Obama, GWB, Clinton, GHWB, Reagan, Carter, etc. all had a sense of humor and would on occasion poke fun at themselves. GWB was not my pick for President, but I appreciated his self deprecation and sense of humor, like when he said Laura told him “it’s either Jim Beam or me” as what made him decide to give up drinking. GWB was at once owning up to a personal problem and at the same time humanizing in a somewhat joking way about his own battle with addiction. This is what the opposite of darkness (Trump) looks like, self effacing humor which confronts our own oddities and weaknesses where we are the butt of our own jokes for the pleasure or insight of others, an incredibly endearing and necessary trait to mental sanity and survival. And Trump posses not one iota of this trait, and that’s why he is a nihilist.
37
Ross, welcome to the club of all those who have been revolted by Trump, and even more so by his supporters and enablers. Yes, it has always been about the moral and ethical void that is Donald Trump.
His election has ceded enormous power to a dangerous force, and the supposed checks and balances have shown themselves to be sorely lacking. He can issue executive orders to destroy actual laws passed by Congress and he can stand before crowds of similarly damaged citizens, and call for populist lawlessness, and his party just goes silent.
While you’re at it, Ross, please send the memo to your friends in the evangelical community who are so in love with this Satanic figure because he has tempted them with a few political trinkets.
35
Bunch of mumbo jumbo. Just say that Trump is a racist and a bigot. Stop twisting yourself in some intellectual reasoning behind who he is or how he thinks.
30
Socialists advocate wealth taxes and income redistribution...
....not incarceration, banning of or hate of minority groups.
13
"...and declare war on “white nationalism” — a war the left wants because it has decided that all conservatism can be reduced to white supremacy..."
No one I know has ever alleged that "all conservatism can be reduced to white supremacy." However, it is clear to me that white supremacists have certainly found a home in conservatism.
42
Bottom Line: These current events are simply the latest in a long series of domestic terrorists and mass murderers are simply puppeteers and stooges of their master who, in turn, has continuously been manipulated by his own master, a puppeteer who, in his day job, controls our country's most formidable sworn enemy. Some toxic food chain, eh? Stop playing Minnesota Nice.' Demand radical change.
Vote.
4
Trump never seems to have a moment. Unlike other presidents, Obama, Bush, Clinton and Reagan included... there is never a pause on emotion. A bit choked up on what is before us. Trump is essentially a sociopathic con man who never wanted this position. He is vengeful and full of narcissism which equates to hate. My fear is his base just doesn't care. They want the American Reich and sadly, they may get it.
41
Marianne Williamson said it best...
Nuff said. Stop the column, I want to get off.
7
Anyone glancing at the headlines of the NYT Op-Ed section any given day lately would have to logically surmise that the Editorial Board is itself a prominent hate monger. Should one go further and read the pieces themselves they would find repetitive partisan vitriol and little in the way of thoughtful, constructive solutioning. Shame on you for stooping to the level of the President you so revile.
6
I thought this column was profound. Some of the commenters who read it as a sly defense of Trump seem to be caught up in the same vortex the columnist describes.
4
Carapace? Failson? Reductionism? Really?
5
Up until now your take on Trump has been that he is repugnant, an idiot, whatever, but the Republicans are keeping him in check. Now he's the face of the abyss. Did you not notice this earlier?
20
Labeling Trump a "nihilist" doesn't help much. It's an exotic word in a tissue of simplifications, and too many of them are applied to "the left." Ross says that "it has decided that all conservatism can be reduced to white supremacy." Far from it! That has been one theme, but not a dominant one in the Democrats' presidential campaign. I wish Ross would apply his good mind to retooling a conservative credo. For some time now, it has seemed to me that in the U S, liberals are the only true conservatives.
7
Okay, Okay.. We have to see if the voters listen you arguments before the 2020 elections.
WRONG
Trump is not a nihilist.
He is an active white nationalist.
He has a cause. He finds meaning in whiteness in America.
People with a cause are not nihilists.
10
Sly, but reprehensible Douthat. The Dayton killer's supposed anti-Trump, atheist-socialist politics don't seem to have anything to do with the crime. Nor does he appear to be someone who craved publicity. He appears to have been a garden variety sociopath who wanted to kill people. The El Paso killer posted a manifesto and was clearly inspired by the racist rhetoric of the president. Your creative counter-narratives and false equivalences might have seemed cute in 2016. But it's 2018, and it's time to take a stand against the racism and white supremacy coming from the right. This is terrorism.
25
Commentators love to pile on Ross, and have done. But this is a brilliantly written piece, a cris de coeur of a rational being dumbstruck in an irrational world.
10
It’s not a worldwide phenomenon?
Putin, Xi, Erdogan, Netanyahu, Orban, Salvini, Boris Johnson...
17
Thank you Ross. You and Maureen Dowd supported the gangster-in-chief wholeheartedly. This column is laughable. I can't wait until November 2020 and you're explaining to us why the only choice you have is to vote for Trump. Again.
22
And you can't have it both ways Ross. You either condemn Trump and put your words and energy towards ending his rein, or you tacitly support him. Same goes for all the "Christians" who support Trump, and anyone else who still does. What has unfolded i a direct result of Trump's words an actions. Whatever good his version of "populist" words might provide is eradicated by the evil of his actual deeds. To support any of his agenda is to reinforce all of it Ross. You're intelligent enough to see this, The only question is: do you have enough moral backbone left to oppose it?
15
How long will Mr. Douthat keep barking up this tree? There are no “dark psychic forces” here. Donald Trump is a loser. He might have more money in the bank than most people, but against his reference group of rich people, business leaders, senior politicians or anyone of genuine accomplishment in life, he’s second or third rate at best.
He knows this. His sorry list of appointees makes it evident to any thinking person. Given the choice of the best that America can offer, he goes instinctively for people even less capable than himself, drawn from the absolute dregs of American public life.
Trump appeals naturally to more people than we might like to think. We can dissect this in many ways, but one thing should be clear. This isn’t nihilism. It’s deeply-felt resentment, leading to a desire to hurt. And in hurting, even very deeply, the loser strikes back but cannot actually “win”. The continued presence of his victims is essential to the coherence of his internal beliefs.
This isn’t much encouragement for the victims, obviously, but neither is trying to cast these horrible events as some deep intellectual process, with dark forces and good and evil and godliness and video games and whatnot. It’s about shallow and stupid people acting out their shallow and stupid ideas - and we can prevail against them more readily if we see them for what they really are.
22
Spot on
How did the German people allow such a monster to take over their country and start a world war and kill 6 million Jews as the enemy of the people. Trump is a demagogue and wanna be dictator like the ones he fawns over today including his benefactor and holder of dirt on him Putin. Trump has shown us who he is and folks murdered as an indirect result of his deliberate hateful rhetoric he hopes will give him a second term. Trump's narcissism may force him to ignore the results of the 2020 election if he loses would the republicans stand by him.
4
There are some wise thoughts in here, but overall there is enough idiocy and falsehoods as to discredit the wisdom. Trump certainly has not championed a populist economic path. Quite the opposite. I would agree that we do have a moral and ethical vacuum in America. but it is most deeply entrenched in the Right. We should not be sympathetic to those who equate bigotry and hate with "being moral." Or to those who espouse morals re unborn fetuses while shielding a population of pedophiles, sexual assault criminals, adulterers, liars, thieves and misogynists. The Right is a sinkhole of hypocrisy and Douthat seems to have been contaminated a bit himself.
13
Nihilism and narcissism aren’t the same thing as immorality and evil. You’re attacking a “bad people on both sides” argument that isn’t in this column
2
Ah, says Father Douthat, at root cause we have but a “moral and spiritual problem”. The follow-up column to this one will undoubtedly be a rallying cry for the necessary, required reemergence of the “one and true religion”...Catholicism! Prepare thyself, dear readership, for some serious proselytizing by the Times resident pastor.
6
Wow. When he announced his candidacy, I thought he was simply a buffoon. By the time of the election, I thought he was so mean, and still a buffoon. I had no idea how mean. This is a bad person.
14
@Ross Shame on you for giving into political correctness.
2
The "Miasma" thesis and the supposed massive differences between the El Paso and the Dayton Killers is now rebutted.
The FBI just stated that the investigation into the mass shooting in Dayton on Sunday had "uncovered evidence that the shooter was exploring violent ideologies." Further, Adelia Johnson, a woman who dated Connor Betts, the Dayton gunman, gave a statement that on their first date, Betts showed her a video of a synagogue shooting, and stated to her he wanted to also "hurt a lot of people." There's also evidence Betts belong to groups of violent online misogynists.
Maggie Koerth-Baker just wrote on fivethirtyeight: "No Terrorist Is A ‘Lone Wolf’; Even apparent loners are connected to extremist communities."
Looking at three things: Trump's rhetoric, radical online sites, and then a lone-wolf shootings, the questions was: "Did the first two things directly lead to the third?"
While it's impossible to state with absolute certainty, social scientists say without question evidence shows "that they’re all linked."
"So-called lone wolves...participate in spaces where violent rhetoric is supported and welcome fosters a sense of community. And that community can be critical to what comes next." Through public rhetoric future terrorists seek and find "support and validation for their ideas."
Finally, researchers now say there are no "'lone wolf' killers. Violent dehumanizing rhetoric and communal ties "are too strong to ever say someone was truly acting alone."
12
"populist and worker-friendly conservative economics"...
... is a contradiction in terms.
8
Trump represents the inevitable, logical conclusion, the point of convergence, of all the mealy mouthed conservatism of people like Douthat, Brooks, Will and the rest of that ilk. Couching their ideology in faux intellectual wrapping, they are nothing less than enablers. I guess there are some who are impressed by these glorified columnists, passing themselves off as some sort of intellectual vanguard for way to long at this point. When Mr. Douthat laments the decay or death of some imaginary "spiritual" and "moral" tenets we might have once had, I can only laugh. Trump offers himself up, to his Evangelical followers in particular, as both a moral and spiritual paragon, and they lap it up. Keep your retrograde spirituality, and your fake morality (see the recent piece on Saint Reagan and his enlightened morality regarding African diplomats at the United Nations). Hey, pointy headed conservatives: you own Trump, he's your ideological offspring. Accountability, that's a conservative virtue, yes?
15
To put it bluntly Trump is sadistic, evil and demented. That’s what connects him to terrorists be they homegrown or foreign.
One has to be mentally ill to massacre people but one has to also be mentally ill to take children from their parents and put them in cages..
Professional ethics prevent psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, counselors and therapists from coming forward to give us a thorough analysis of Trump’s psyche. Suffice it to say we have a mentally ill man somewhere in the early stage of dementia running this country.
If you have time, watch the four seasons of The Tudors on Netflix. The likeness of Trump to Henry VIII is chilling!
10
You had me until you said " declare war on “white nationalism” — a war the left wants because it has decided that all conservatism can be reduced to white supremacy".
7
Conservatives, especially Republicans are most responsible for maliciously reductive tropes of their political opponents - the Clintons and the Obamas have been targeted with the most and the worst.
Many on the moderate humane left are tired of being reduced not just to an insulting and perverse form of socialism that only exists in the GOP’s perverse minds when better examples of moderate socialism exist in Scandinavia that has resulted in the happiest nations on earth. Conservatives shouldn’t be reduced to fascism either even if they repeatedly support elements of it and actively destroy the pursuit of happiness of hard working Americans who they think are not entitled or rich enough for happiness.
Trump is not a star. He’s the blackest of black holes sucking wealth and all that is good from this country and into the dark abyss nourishing his soul.
What trump championed, Mr. Douthat, was and is a con. He could care less about the worker, better cheaper healthcare for all including preconditions. Spouting all those socialistic ideas was merely a con! And it still is! He wants to transfer all the wealth from society and it’s social programs - that society has paid to care for itself with the taxes society has paid - and put it in his own pocket a la Putin and other kleptocrats throughout history.
“worker-friendly conservative economics” and “common good”!!! are you trying to appropriate socialistic ideas as conservative?
11
spot on..trump is a con man. period.
6
I only ALL photos of trump were darkened like this.
Just as we do not now showcase photos of terrorists, we should do the same with trump - foster father of terrorists.
5
Mr. Douthat I agree that "Trump participates in the general cultural miasma that generates mass shooters." That said, I also, believe what is missing from your opinion is the 40 yrs. of racist, white-nationalist trope off-gassing from the Republican Party to incite/inspire our country's right-wing extremists.
A cursory review of G.O.P. election history finds examples of how the G.O.P. used hate filled rhetoric to arouse latent racism and white nationalism in many of our nation's voters. For example, Nixon's southern strategy, Reagan's welfare queens, H. Bush's Willie Horton adds all employed hate filled rhetoric.
Then the 90s brought the country the toxic verbal discharged by the right-wing conservatives Pat Buchanan and Newt Gingrich. The verbal flatulence from those two included "Make America Great Again" and "we need to take our country back."
During the W. years white nationalism gave way to fear of Islamic extremism which was fed by large doses of toxic hot air from Fox News personalities. After W. the fear and loathing of the "other," stirred up by Fox New, returned during the Obama years and led to the country's right-wing extremists and white nationalists being re-energized.
Trump's participation in the general cultural miasma that generates mass shooters is a big problem; however, the bigger problem is a G.O.P. that has grown and nurtured the political environment that produces today's mass shooters.
18
I am afraid the largest problem with trump is that he is just plain dumb. Coasting along on Dads money he salvaged enough to think he was a success and enraged by Obama's dis he tossed himself in the ring. Impetuously. He is an incurious ignoramus who can barely form a thought. Thus the short sentences and he only fraternises with close friends. Never seen in public except for pep rallies in selected areas. I would never trust anyone who doesn't read.
12
...or perhaps cannot read.
2
Without trying to be trivial ... Doc Holliday's description of Johnny Ringo from the movie "Tombstone" fits Trump eerily well:
"He has a hole right through the middle of him. He can never kill enough, or steal enough, or inflict enough pain, to fill it."
What does he want? "Revenge."
For what? "For being born."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaoK_CIAr0k
6
Doc Holliday's description of Johnny Ringo from the movie "Tombstone" fits Trump eerily well:
"... has a hole right through the middle of him. He can never kill enough, or steal enough, or inflict enough pain, to fill it."
What does he want? "Revenge."
For what? "For being born."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaoK_CIAr0k
3
When Mr. Douthat lumps white racist terrorists in the US with jihadist terrorists elsewhere in the world, they do seem like large numbers of adherents motivated by hatred and a desire for an apocalyptic battle between them and the other. However, in the US we seem to have lots of rightwing white terrorists but a tiny bunch of non-white, jihadist and leftist terrorists. If the shooter in Dayton was anti-Trump as you say I would be surprised if that political viewpoint had anything to do with his murderous behavior towards a group of black and white people outside a nightclub.
3
Conservatism is survival of the richest and survival of the one with the biggest gun. Is that what Americans really want for themselves and their children? Nihilists indeed.
7
Hey, can we ban assault weapons first and discuss ideology second? I doubt any victim cares exactly what the shooter’s ideology is.
11
Trump is the symptom, not the cause. The conservative Republican movement (in whatever form, from Reaganomics to Tea-Party to Freedom Caucus) is dead. Its members are deserting the ship like the rats they are, and they are leaving Trumpism behind, squatting like a fat toad in Congress and spitting bullets out into the streets. This can't be explained by a very broad interpretation of nihilism (and I think the causation argument is actually quite strong.) It's sad but oddly hopeful to watch (some) conservative writers struggle to justify choices and beliefs that are proving rotten to the core. I wish you luck in escaping the black void you've helped create.
8
"Here I would dissent, mildly, from the desire to tell a mostly ideological story in the aftermath of El Paso, and declare war on “white nationalism” — a war the left wants because it has decided that all conservatism can be reduced to white supremacy, and the right wants as a way of rebutting and rejecting that reductionism"
The fact that conservatism's collective reaction to a so-called "war on white nationalism" is to immediately "rebut and reject" it is pretty telling. It is not "the left" that is consciously of unconsciously equating conservatism and white supremacy (although Trump has shown there is overlap); it's conservatives that are doing it. Conservatives like Douthat believe white supremacy=conservatism, thus attacks on white supremacy=attacks on conservatism, so they must defend against attacks on white supremacy. And regardless of how you arrive there (its the liberals fault!!!), I think it's pretty clear that defending white nationalism is an objectively awful thing to do.
"Like them he plainly believes in nothing but his ego, his vanity, his sense of spite and grievance, and the self he sees reflected in the mirror of television, mass media, online."
That's not nihilism, Ross, that's narcissism. For a guy that can't seem to resist slipping in obscure references and esoteric vocabulary, you'd think Ross would take the time to look up the word "nihilism" before publishing this piece.
2
American Magazine, a Jesuit publication, addressed Trump as nihilist last January. Excellent article.
https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2018/10/31/donald-trump-president-expressive-individualism
3
This issue of the NY Times is filled with articles in which Trump excoriated for "bigotry" the telling of lies, and "dark psychic forces."
Unwittingly these articles play into Trump's hands. He characterizes the NY Times articles as "fake news," its opinion columnists influenced by "political correctness."
Democrats are vulnerable. They also lie, in spite of their efforts not to.
During the latest Democratic debate, the candidates were all asked whether they would support providing universal health care to illegal immigrants and all said yes.
But this is an untenable position. It ignores the resource constraints on providing health care to the 44 million Americans who still don't have health care and the 38 million whose health insurance is inadequate.
You can't just mandate universal health care and have it magically happen. Somebody has to furnish the education of additional physicians to provide the health care.
Many Americans are just inches away from losing their jobs and with it their health care. And they look around and see what might be their future fate.
I live in a Western state. A few miles from my comfortable home are homeless encampments which the local Democratic politicians try to hide. They don't know how to deal with it!
Yes, Trump does indeed lie when he says that "trade wars are good and easy to win." Or maybe he is stupid enough to actually believe that.
But Democrats lie when they claim that resources are unlimited. Which is worse?
4
My wife remarked in church a few weeks ago asking if Trump was the devil (or of the devil). I kind of shrugged it off as a bit over the top. Upon reflection, can it really be ruled out? If the devil (if you believe in him) is here to prey on our worst natures and to appeal to our worst instincts, isn't that exactly what Trump has been doing. All in a semi-slick marketing/snake oil salesman way that many see through but many buy as well.
Whether he is the devil, an agent of the devil or just the most recent in a line of demagogues, we need to realize the lasting damage he is doing to the American soul and address it as the danger he truly is.
6
Nihilistic only to they exclusion of himself as the center of the universe ... The evil, abysmal craving for attention that is his core.
DT is the head cheerleader for the malaise of our time.
3
Interesting analysis, Mr. Douhat. Don't forget however, that you yourself, as a highly educated, successful journalist are very much part of the "meritocratic, faux-cosmopolitan elite" that you denigrate.
4
Is it hate for others, or is it love of the gun that powers mass killers?
Decades ago, I read the words of a mass murderer in South Africa's apartheid conflict . After killing a crowd waiting for a bus, he felt as if he were killing animals, like chickens.
3
Ross, I would generally agree. You are right about Trump. That said, I do think you should avoid the temptation to tell people on the Left what they think and why it is wrong - even if it is just a minor point. There are a lot of us on the Left and we are all different and we mostly think a lot about these issues. We don't all fit into your simple analysis. What you SHOULD be doing is telling us how conservatives should be responding in these troubled times. And not just by listing vague ideas like "worker-friendly conservative economics" and "decelerating low-skilled immigration". What is that anyway? Work on some details and enlighten not only those on the Left but your buddies on the Right as well. Go on - I know you can do it.
4
Trump has always been a moral black hole. Why do you think he's been involved in over 3500 lawsuits? Many of those are cases where contracting work was done and approved, but Donald refused to pay them. Some of them had put out big money in materials to do the work.
His strategy was get them to reduce their fees after the work was completed. If they didn't knuckle under he wouldn't pay them at all and said "sue me." Many of them were tied up in court for years and forced to go out of business. That isn't exactly nihilism, just moral bankruptcy and, one might argue, larceny.
10
Mr. Douthat is right that Trump is a connection but that connectiin that ties all e, and millions of his,supporters is toxic masculinity. I hesitate to use such a liberal buzz term but I see no other explanation. Just like many women often dress more for the acceptance and approval of other women more than for men,many men believe and/act in ways that get them the approval of the alpha male. Trump is not the only guy with daddy issues and we are all suffering from it.
2
What good can come out of Trumpism, or from ideas Trump championed in 2016?
In answering to this question none of your points makes much sense. You were just fooled, that’s it. Every liberal knew his populism is as empty as any republican economic policy for the middle class. His promises were nothing more than empty words that Trump used to attract some poor folks who, in addition to facing economic struggle, also had racial issues.
5
I'm a moderate liberal and I have never thought that conservatism could be reduced to white supremacism - even at this point in time. Trump has let that dark force out of the closet because his election depends upon it. He cannot win without his rallies and tweets that stoke hatred and division.
But you are right to say that there is another darkness beneath the hate-mongering, the white supremacy, the xenophobia.
And that is the the void of our culture, which Trump actually IS. What seems so shocking to me is that Evangelicals have signed onto this because Trump is giving them some of what they want. So they elected a man without principles to protect their principles, and the emptier and darker that Trump is revealed to be, the more they compartmentalize their principles. The Christians backing Trump have truly become the scandal or scandalon - stumbling block - to others that St. Paul warned all Christians against.
8
It seems obvious, to me at least, that Trump is a threat to this country and any hopes for stability in the world beyond our borders. He is an instigator who relishes starting fires and worse and then playing the innocent, even the wronged party.
That he became president should be a lesson we never forget. It's a lesson we may not survive.
6
I was a lad in the early to mid 70’s when there was a spat of far left bombings and shootings carried out by a lunatic fringe. In 1971 alone there were a few hundred, roughly one per day. I even went through a few bomb scares in my suburban schools.
As awful as they were at least they weren’t carried or aided and abetted by rhetoric from the White House or congress. Even the most liberal congress member decried what went on. George McGovern wasn’t on the television or the senate floor excusing these domestic terrorists.
They weren’t inspired by a group of the presidents followers and certain factions of the media. Eric Sevareid wasn’t on the television doing his evening commentary riling up these groups or making excuses for them. I think we all know where our current problem stems from.
5
The left does not want to conflate all conservatism with white supremacy. You want the left to want that, so you can dismiss them (as you acknowledge).
What the left wants is for the GOP to acknowledge the racist elements that are and have been deeply embedded in their party, from the Southern Strategy through to Trumpism, address the racism and end it. But the GOP continues to ignore it, because it brings reliable conservative votes. Do you want to know the crux of the left's frustration? Conservatives aren't all white supremacists, but “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” That's been the GOP of the last 60 years, not just the last 2 and a half.
7
I'm sorry, but I as I read through your column, your first paragraph kept nagging at me:
"Note that I said both men: the one with the white-nationalist manifesto and the one with some kind of atheist-socialist politics; the one whose ranting about a “Hispanic invasion” echoed Trump’s own rhetoric and the one who was anti-Trump and also apparently the lead singer in a “pornogrind” band."
By all news accounts your analysis of their political beliefs may be broadly accurate, but you are conflating apples and oranges. The El Paso assailant cited our president and his party's message and beliefs. The Dayton assailant was deeply, horrifically troubled, but appears not to have cited his own left-wing politics in the commission of his atrocities.
I understand the writer's desire to keep a certain parallelism in discussing the two men, but in this case, doing so obscures the fact that the rhetoric that only one man held dear seems to have driven him to unspeakable and tragic acts of domestic terrorism.
4
It's just chemistry. Don't leave oily rags in a pile or they will spontaneously combust. Don't light a match where there is extra oxygen in the air. When the level of oxygen is higher than 21%, spontaneous combustion will happen more often.
The US has a high level of "weaponization" in its cultural atmosphere, so the psychological equivalent of random sparks and piles of oily rags will inevitably result in the spontaneous combustion of mass shootings. Reduce, somehow, the level of weaponization and the problem will subside. Until this happens, the statistical probability is that El Paso and Dayton and (fill in the blanks) will occur with predictable regularity.
4
Take the constantly shape-shifting creature from “The Thing” and insert it as the invisible creature from the id in “Forbidden Planet” which is visible only as an outline when blasted with light beam weapons. So it is with Trump who tests the limits of all he encounters to find the boundaries or limits which then define him for at least a moment until he repeats the process and changes shape again. None of this has anything to do with any positive virtues or characteristics for while he wants the accolades & fame, he long ago eschewed the honest labor that would earn true respect and, more importantly, provide a sense of character & identity. He is thus defined negatively without which what would he be? Nothing. His constant dour countenance says he is quite aware of his existential dilemma that neither his wealth nor empty soul can remedy.
1
The guns are definitely part of it. The white supremacy is definitely part of it. But at the bottom of it is the question of what people are for. The overwhelming majority of the time, what men are for. And more often than not, what young men are for.
We have no good answers anymore. I mean, we don't have them for women either, but women seem less likely to shoot up Walmart over it, or to venture into the murkier parts of the internet where radicalization occurs.
2
The following patterns of numerous Republican Party "wrongdoings" always adversely affect workers and actual small businesses:
o Lincoln was subverted by his assassination;
o Rs subverted The Civil War by the abrupt end of Reconstruction 11 years later;
o Rs removed Federal troops from the South, who then conquered the Native Americans;
o Rs complicitly allowed States' anti-Constitutional laws to terrorize the freed slaves / Jim Crow;
o Harding had the corrupt Teapot Dome Scandal;
o Coolidge with the R's usual flawed financial policies caused the Great Depression in 1929;
o Hoover failed to help 99% of American citizens hurt by the Great Depression;
o DDE overthrew the elected president of Iran for corporate oil and re-installed the Shah in 1953;
(Truman would not support it.)
o Nixon colluded with the Vietnamese before the 1968 election;
o Nixon welcomed George Wallace voters to kickoff the Southern Strategy (SS);
o Nixon weakened the anti-Poverty laws from LBJ;
o Nixon overthrew South American leaders with a preferred replacement;
o Nixon's costly and failed War on Drugs effectively separated poor families;
o Ford pardoned Nixon for his Watergate crimes;
o` Rs falsely blamed Carter for their recession and mocked his futuristic energy policies;
Continued with a second comment.
4
Republicans passed and had ratified the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. They were too "radical" for the majority of white Americans who abandoned the cause of racial equality. This situation continued by law and custom until 1965 and is being revived today.
"Cultural conservatives get a lot of grief when they respond to these massacres by citing moral and spiritual issues, rather than leaping straight to gun policy (or in this case, racist ideology)." That's because their "moral and spiritual issues" tend to be hypocritical, nonsensical, ineffective, exclusive, narrow-minded, and based on absurdist magical ideologies that most people do not share of even accept. Cultural conservatives need to shut up about their sky daddies and focus on real solutions for real people in the real world.
7
"the one with some kind of atheist-socialist politics"
But the "real Christians" such as Mike Pence, and the other 75% of White Evangelical "Christians," who support Trump, somehow don't merit your opprobrium, Douthat.
It's the "atheists." It's the "socialists." Right. Those are the philosophies fueling White Nationalist Terrorism.
Mr. Douthat: You are the quintessence of intellectual dishonesty. Which means, Mr. Douthat, that you take it upon yourself to decide what "Thou shall not bear false witness." Just as White Evangelical "Christians" went from 75% prioritizing politicians' personal character per-Trump, to 25% prioritizing it post-Trump.
You have as little shame as Trump, Douthat.
7
The GOP, gun companies and the NRA have been preparing Americans for civil war for decades. Do we really expect them to cry when the shooting starts?
6
I think the media of the world - and by media I mean real media such as the NTY, the Guardian, and so on, need to take a decision to boycott Trump's ego-hunger.
By all means, let us hear about actual policy - what foment and division he is committing on the world stage, on the environmental stage, on the stage of equality and fraternity.
His toilet tweets will never stop. Whether they are as has been suggested, coldly calculated attempts to awaken the darkest forces of the psyche of certain groups of the US electorate, or a distraction, or ego-hunger or all of the above, as journalists and commentators, thought leaders and analysts, can't you all pull the plug? I mean on his social media barbarism. We know that there are dangerous and powerful climate deniers and holocaust deniers. Thinking people choose to not give them airtime. Perhaps in time google, twitter, youtube, facebook will be regulated and we will find the line between freedom of expression and decency again. That is out of the hands of the press. But something else lies in your power.
After the Christchurch massacre in NZ, the most sane and sensible response was the request that we all turn our backs to the dark manifesto of the killer, and deny him airtime. I am sick to death of seeing Trumps inane and damaging tweets dominate the international online press. There are real issues out there. Please. Gag him. Let's turn our backs on Trump and send him to coventry where he belongs.
5
Brilliant piece of analysis. But he is not exactly a nihilist. Trump does have two values—power and money. He admires and even envies those with more power and /or money than him, namely Putin and Kim. He admires their power to do away with their critics by a simple command.
You’re right that Trump has no soul; that there is a dark void where some semblance of humanity should reside. He can’t even mouth empathy unless his staff writes down the exact words and gets them on the teleprompter.
But Trump is cunning. He has the singular talent to make certain people believe that, no matter how many others
-he has cheated (his tradesmen, his Trump Univ. subscribers),
-defaulted on (his Atlantic City investors),
- raped or harrassed (many women),
-lied to (everyone hearing his Trump Tower Moscow denials, and 10,000 other documented lies)
that he will not do the same to them. Those certain people are his base—35% of Americans.
He is cunning enough to make his own weather. He has created and participates actively every day in the climate that produces Charlottesville, Tree of Life, Gilroy, El Paso, Dayton...
He is cunning enough to have enlisted 90% of Republicans as partners in his project. Including now the destruction of global supply chains in his personal war on carefully selected targets.
Trump is cunning in his pursuit of power and money. He does evil and destructive things. He acts as party leader, not President. But his party—90% of them—is with him.
7
Douthat is wrong about guns. Addressing the social emptiness that generates white mail terrorism could take generations. But cutting down the number of innocent people sacrificed to that emptiness can be done much more quickly. TAKE THE GUNS OUT OF THEIR HANDS AND LIMIT THE NUMBER OF SHOTS ANY PUBLICLY AVAILABLE GUN CAN FIRE. It's that simple.
6
Whatever happened to William Bennett and the self righteous virtue signalers from the Clinton years? Character is apparently small potatoes when compared with tax cuts.
6
Speaking of which Bill Clinton chastised a marginal rapper/author who had a record that was 100 something on the Billboard chart for her offensive stupid comments.
Trump can barely even lift a bone spur limb to criticize White nationalists and neo-Nazis that the FBI and most law enforcement call a threat to the nations well-being.
Just to better understand each other, let’s try to put ourselves in their shoes.
I have never own a gun in my life, but let’s imagine if somebody tried to take away you artistic freedoms or anything else you love.
Would it be reasonable to claim that the car racing in the movies incites the youth to imitate the famous actors and excessively speed on the streets causing the deadly crushes?
Imagine if somebody claimed that portrayal of the fist fights in the flicks encourages the children to fight.
What if they forbid any presentation of the alcoholic drinks, smoking or drugs in the movies in order to prevent creation of the deadly habits?
What about banning the time-outs in the NBA and NFL because those are used for the harmful advertisement leading to the binge drinking and eating, thus causing generational obesity and alcoholism…
Of course, the drunk driving, speeding, smoking and obesity have created many, many time more deaths than the white nationalism.
Do you like to be personally criticized and lectured?
Can you hear me now in spite of your aura of moral superiority and elitist indignation?
2
If writing romance novels resulted in the death of 20 children, I’d quit writing romance novels. I’m not so spoiled that I think my pleasure is more important than the lives of other people. But I’m not convinced that’s even the issue. I think all these guys who insist on owning AR-15 are fantasizing about killing a large number of people. Black folk, or Latinos, or some women who told them no. Insecure little men with a lot to be insecure about. Which is why I have no patience for their trash.
2
@JLW
How many novels did you write about misuse of the endless commercials by the corporations to make our kids addicted to the sodas, sugary sweets, compulsive eating and craving, drinking, smoking?
Actually, not writing the novels about those topics has killed the millions.
Sometimes the inaction is much worse that anything...
What is more important, romance or saving the millions of human lives?
Every time a shooting like this happens, from certain writers we get this kind of over analysis that makes my head hurt.
Put simply, we are a country where it’s not possible to presume you are safe from annihilation in public places, or even semi public, like schools, places or worship, work, and even hospitals.
It doesn’t really matter much to trace dark psychic forces. We have extremely lax gun laws that allow powerful military style weapons into the hands of dangerous people. Our government is beholden to the powerful gun lobby and refuses to take measures to protect us.
Let me go out on a limb and say the vast majority of people, including non citizens who want to visit here, would like that to change. It doesn’t because we passively accept this madness.
3
Kenan Porobic - to respond point by point (on the assumption that your comment is not poorly rendered irony):
1. I think loving a gun is weirder than loving one’s artistic freedom, and the things I love are mostly non-lethal. The few dangerous things I do love are tightly controlled, I understand why, and I support those restrictions.
2. Yes. It’s reasonable to at least consider that any risky behavior (car racing, fist fights) dramatized or romanticized in the media may affect behavior.
3. You do realize that we already regulate advertising of alcohol, smoking and drugs, don’t you?
4. Your NBA/NFL example is poorly chosen. We regulate the ads that occur during time-outs, not the time-outs.
5. No, I don’t like being personally criticized or lectured, but I do admit that I’ve sometimes needed someone to straighten me out when I’ve been stubbornly doing destructive or foolish things, and it’s definitely hard to listen when I suspect I might be wrong.
6. Forgive me if I gave the impression of being morally superior, elitist, or indignant. I just think we should temper our weird fetish about guns. I do think gun ownership is sometimes reasonable, but guns do also kill and injure a lot of people.
2
I wonder why so many "Movement Conservatives" are now such fervent supporters of Trump.
2
It will be interesting to witness how conservatives handle the future.
Deny? Minimize? Rationalize? Or, their favorite, attack anyone who challenges them. This party's "values" -- power for the few at the expense of the many, is not new.
Trump exposed it.
4
I sometimes wonder what goes through the minds of the many Republican leaders who, in their silent acquiescence, continually aid and abet this toxic narcissist? Is their plan to bide their time until we reach a post-Trump world where they will be able to reconstruct the American conservative movement? Do they consider whether by that point the GOP brand will be so badly tarnished that the party will be incapable of regaining the center? More to the point has their survivalist mentality and fear of being "primaried" obscured any thought of such things?
3
Yes there is a moral and spiritual problem, but that is not why it is becoming too dangerous to go to the Mall. To fix that you will have to address the guns.
4
I think it is hard to separate Trump from the circumstances that begat him. The uneven distribution of wealth which has destroyed any possibility of a solid, middle class life for too many, especially young people. The kow-towing to the NRA which seems to be on the wane but its evil work is done. A very rigid world view of the religious right which excludes more than it includes. The dark influence of Fox news on people who watch and listen in good faith.
People are right to say that they have had something taken from them. Trump was wily enough to present himself as the solution when, in fact, he was on the side of those who have been stealing opportunity and optimism about the future. He alone is not solely responsible for the desperate acts of unhinged young men but he does represent all the forces that drive their mayhem and he should be held accountable. Certainly he should not be allowed to deflect his responsibility.
8
I didn't get the connection to nihilism? Nihilism is a defensible viewpoint given the nature of existence. Trump's myopia, materialism, traditionalism and lack of depth would seem to make it unlikely he could exhibit nihilism.
Ah-ah, I think I smell the idiosyncratic loner argument here.
President Trump has no connection to us real conservatives. Nothing we Republicans have been doing over the last four or five decades could have led to this cruelty and racism. And even when it seemed as if we were loudly blowing all those dog whistles (or failing to call them out), we didn't really mean it.
What a shock it is to discover a massive Donald Trump contingent in our righteous and patriotic party--shocking I say! He's not the result of what we've been doing or letting go on. He's a crazed loner.
4
Mr. Ross-this is a pretty amazing analysis. One important aspect of Trump's moving forward, that is missing, however, came from Steve Bannon's own horrible mouth. I believe it was in his 60 Minutes interview that he said if the Democrats want to make the battle for the White House in 2020 about race he said that the Trump camp would decidedly win that war and to bring it on.
I profoundly paraphrased that but he said it. I remember but no one else seems to. The Trumpist strategy was put forward months ago. We should be more prepared to call him out and curse and call our liar in chief-Depraved Donny who's a 'rapist' and not our best people. Mr. Louhat you said it less concisely but said it.
Donald Trump is the effect, not the cause. He is America. Perfectly.
Do you really believe Trump is a champion for workers over “the elite”? You’ve got to be kidding me and yourself if you ever bought this line of rhetoric. Trump is about one thing and one thing only: himself.
10
This essay points to so many character defects and flaws in this one man that to fix them, to analyze them, to hope they will somehow improve is but a fools errand.
Do we, therefore, all agree that Donald Trump is a deeply damaged man? Damaged to the point that he is so badly broken as to be irreparable. That he is president of the US is deeply unfortunate, that a majority of the popular vote did not vote for and something that historians will not look upon kindly. It is only with extreme good fortune that nothing serious [e.g., 9/11] has occurred on his watch.
So pick up this mantra:
I will vote for ANY Democrat. I will never vote for trump.
9
I'm an extremely lefty liberal possessed of a borderline pathological need to constantly question and challenge my own beliefs to ensure they're solid (probably from years of relationships with strong personalities that specialized in gaslighting). Because of this, I like to hear the conservative point of view on the issues of the day.
But when I read David Brooks or Ross Douthat, I usually find myself disappointed by sweeping laments about philosophical generalities like the "degradation" of our culture that often feel like the polished side of the "back to the 50s" coin that has Trump's face on its obverse. Calls to reverse religion's decline, to create private institutions that fill the needs that we liberals want "big government" to fill, to rely on interpersonal relationships to maintain civic cohesion and protect our most vulnerable citizens are fundamentally flawed in myriad ways that I won't bother to rehash.
That is why I was surprised when I found myself drawn in by the argument Ross made in this article. I believe he has a stronger point than most commenters are allowing him. As he said, we should absolutely confront right wing extremism and white nationalism. But people don't gravitate to extremist ideology if there isn't a deeper rot present in their lives, in their psyches. We have to address the damage these people are suffering that makes them vulnerable. I believe that liberal ideas are the best way to do this, but we need to argue for them in this frame.
3
"I keep returning to this issue because unlike many conservatives who opposed him in 2016, I actually agree with, or am sympathetic toward, versions of ideas that Trump has championed — the idea of a more populist and worker-friendly conservative economics, the idea of a foreign policy with a more realpolitik and anti-interventionist spirit, the idea that decelerating low-skilled immigration would benefit the common good, the idea that our meritocratic, faux-cosmopolitan elite has badly misgoverned the republic."
Trump NEVER "championed" these ideas. Trump LIED about these ideas. Trump USED these ideas to con people.
And frankly, Mr. Douthat, so has every "conservative" Republican done the same, for the past 40 years, since the rise of Reagan.
You've been part of that group. Mr. Douthat. You've been fine with paying lip service to these ideas your entire career. You're as honest as is Trump.
11
And don't forget Mc Connell's and the GOP's political and economic agenda, which is of course also directly linked to #45 and to the dark forces.
3
Every GOP Senator who refuses to act on the anti Gun legislation brought by the house, most Especially McConnell and Trump, are Henceforth Monsters. No excuses and in the same category to Never Forget comparable to the criminal act of stealing children from their parents.This current situation has no equal in our History.
2
The thing we call "Trump" is an image, a persona, a fantasy. Even the public figure himself refers to "Trump" in the third person. The phenomenon he embodies is equal parts nihilism and narcissism, a cynical attitude that no lives matter beyond his own Hobbesian existence: "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
Indeed, look at the nasty, brutish things he's said in public about his own children, all of whom had been estranged from him at some time until he ran for President. To him, they -- and all Others -- are just tools to be employed and discarded when they are no longer of use.
Trumpublicanism (the Republican Party no longer exists apart from him) is an inside-out manifestation of the right's favorite Straw Man piñata, "Political Correctness," which they claim stifles their Constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of expression. The underlying assumption is that we're all bigots at heart, and that only restrictive social pressures prevent us from speaking the "truth" and venting our spleens. Otherwise, we'd all "tell it like it is" and throw in with those who see immigration as an invasion, code for "white genocide."
Trump is an expression, both petty and grandiose, of a Nietzschean amorality that puts self-regard über alles. He's beyond good and evil, because he disregards distinctions between right and wrong. For him, all life is reduced to one base consideration: "Is it good for Trump?"
5
If the devil offers to vanquish your enemies, you should say no.
The high-minded reason is you should not engage with the devil. The low-minded reason is the devil will betray you.
It sounds like you're trying to hold on to some of the initial infatuation you had with Trump. Give it up. He's not interested in populist, conservative, and worker-friendly policies. If this column is your thought process for reaching that conclusion, so be it. But anything more than that is just wishful thinking.
4
Why are so many positive opinions of Trump on this board? Why all these justifications? Since when is a spade not a spade? Many of us know the answer because this type of reasoning has a long history of deception and self deceptions. Get ready philosophers,. In all likelihood there will be mass killings in the USA the day Trump loses the election and you'll need your philosophical acuity to find other reasons for the event.
1
Let’s make a short digression to better understand the core problem.
What is the most popular sport in the USA?
The American football…
What is the essence of that sport? Breed and train the athletes willing to collide full-speed, head-first into each other. It gets as close to the ancient gladiator games as possible.
Did it really take the decades to conclude that such repetitive behavior would result in the serious brain damage?
How come that nobody had courage to protest and warn that popularity of such a sport in our middle schools, high schools and the universities could damage the health of our younger generations?
Nobody has ever raised a voice because everybody was profiting from that – the corporate world, the universities, the restaurants, the breweries…
Who cares that the entire generations of the students were exposed to the binge drinking and alcoholism.
However, this is not a gun-control issue so our free press didn’t pay any attention to it nor ridiculed the endless number of time-outs designed to brainwash the viewers into the addictive habits.
Are we going to blame Trump for those tragic consequences too?
Even better question, who is responsible for those deadly conditions that killed far more people than the white-nationalism-related terrorism.
Just check the national statistics for the drunk-driving-caused deaths…
1
Still not sure I've heard you walkback "Trump won fair and square...", Ross. It will be 5 months since the release of the Mueller Report and Congress has yet to see a full copy of the report with supporting exhibits. Is that another example of what 'fair and square' means? It disregards the concept of 'checks and balances' entirely.
Accepting 'help' from foreign agents and intelligence service, paying hush money to former sex partners and accepting 'help' by the GOP to release the FBI director's private communication to his congressional oversight chairs? That feels a lot more like disregarding the free and fair elections element of the fundamental principles of democracy than 'fair and square' to me.
Trump's a corrupt poser wannabe...The only example he provides the nation is his bad example.
2
Has anyone ever heard a less impassioned, more pro forma denunciation of bigotry than Trump's? Seriously, what kind of a man--much less a politician--denounces hate in a soulless monotone? Chilling.
1
We pledge allegiance to the United States of America. We need a president
who believes that. Instead we have one who specializes in a dividing us.
He offers our country nothing but heartbreak. Thoughts and prayers for the
United States of America.
3
Ross, has it occurred to you that "the left" wants "a war on "white nationalism because it believes white nationalism is morally wrong and exceedingly dangerous? Whether or not conservationism, or any fringe brand of conservatism, can be blamed is almost beside the point.
5
Thank you, Mr. Douthat, for such a thoughtful and (mostly) balanced column that really does strike at the heart of the many dilemmas faced by both conservatives and liberals during the Trump administration. I do wish he could restrain himself from taking cheap shots at Democrats -- in today's piece, for one, the dishonest, rather puerile swipe at "the left," asserting that their criticism of conservatism is to reduce its ideas to white supremacy. Otherwise, it does truly help, I think, to frame the problem of The Current Occupant in terms of his moral vacuity and how its deployment encourages degeneracy. Well done.
Mr. Douthat is thorough thinker. This column does an atypically better job of describing Trump than most. However, Mr. Douthat always tries to somehow blame Democrats or other not-Trump voters for some of it, somewhere. Sorry, those who didn't vote for Trump are not to blame. Trump voter own him. Trump is an adult (legally, anyway), we are not responsible for his actions. He should have enough self-control in his current (or any) position to not react rashly and dangerously.
Ross, if you voted for Trump, own it. And now that you recognize the malignancy that he is, do what you can to jettison him from office. Otherwise, you are part of the problem. I do believe Mr. Weld is running for office.
11
Please show me the evidence that Ross Douthat might have voted for or ever supported Donald Trump’s Presidential bid. That certainly wasn’t how I remembered it, so I turned to Google. This is what I found.
In his NYT column for May 7 2016, titled the Conservative Case Against Trump, Douthat wrote “Even if you find things to appreciate in Trumpism — as I have, and still do, the man is still unfit for an office as awesomely powerful as the presidency of the United States.”
The column ends with this statement “But to Trump himself, there is no patriotic answer except “No.””
But what if he wavered later?
On November 6, 2016 NBC News listed Republicans not voting for Trump. Ross Douthat is #59.
That satisfies me. Ross Douthat opposed Donald Trump’s candidacy for the Presidency.
A clever conservative redirection, long on armchair philosophy and short on any evidence. Instead of the typically lazy "video games" or "mental illness" diagnoses, this article posits that these shootings are a symptom of some sort of cult of fame epidemic. Any excuse to avoid the obvious. We are awash in guns and ammo. Violent right-wing extremism has been on the rise for a while and is well documented. The Dayton shooting isn't some counter example to be used to for "both sides do it" shoulder-shrugging. We all know what needs to be done. Gun control and policing of right-wing white supremacist groups.
11
I’d rather ask what Marianne Williamson has in common with Donald Trump. The main connection I see is that they are both entertainers. They can say things “serious” people can’t say – we don’t take it quite so literally and give them the benefit of the doubt – yet what they say leaks into the wider world where serious people start to say the same thing and they obviously mean it. Williamson talks about a “dark, psychic force” and the part that shouldn’t be taken seriously in any way is the reduction of complex problems to a single source, whether tangible and mundane (gun accessibility) or ineffable and spiritual (“lonely egomania and alienated narcissism”).
We need a comprehensive approach to the problem of gun violence, and we can’t leave it purely to the government. However, I will say that I don’t think automatic weapons should be considered “arms” – those things we have a right to bear. We don’t have the right to bear nuclear weapons, and the line has to be drawn somewhere. There are no magic bullets (pun intended, I guess) but some factors are obviously more important when considering the literal problem of "gun violence" than others.
4
A must read: An extraordinary scientific take on psychic forces. Be sure to check out Douthat’s upcoming expose on ‘The Symbiosis of Unicorns and Astrology.’
7
For once I agree with Ross, but conservative calls for return to a set of values based on male entitlement and needs is not the answer. To paraphrase: "It is the patriarchy stupid!"
The answer is to recognize that human persons are created after birth by other persons and nobody has been specially created in the womb by some god or could have been raised by apes.
Our existence is a product of other people's care, including the care and institutions of government. This needs to be emphasized to children from birth.
We become individuals with individual experiences and thoughts and needs. But we never should think of others as things to be used for our own benefit. Others benefit us because they value society as well as us as individuals.
We should be grateful and resolve to act in the same way: to do what is good for others as well as ourselves.
3
“Because he is rich and famous and powerful, he can get that attention with a tweet about his enemies, and then experience the rush of a cable-news segment about him”
Wrong!
He gets attention because our media outlets and free press are in the business of directing the people’s attention to their own content and stupid ads.
The free press never ridiculed the brainwashing commercials stupefying the younger generations from the earliest age and developing their addiction to the corporate set of values.
In that distorted world, the value of individuals is measure by the amount of the money they make, the price of clothing, the type of watch they use, the designer of their shoes, et cetera.
Our free press destroyed the morality and the values of the young generations. It delivers them as the adults on the silver plate to the corporate America and their servant political parties.
That’s why the dozens millions of Americans are following and reacting to Trumps tweets.
If they were trained from the early age to ignore stupidity and extravaganza, they would ignore Trump tweets, but all the stupid ads too. Our media outlets would be deprived of the advertisement income and forced to survive by selling the subscriptions directly to the people.
Trump’s exaggeration is the direct consequence of the morally corrupt free press.
Everybody is trained to follow...
1
@Kenan Porobic
Yes. Advertising and media executives love the controversy Trump daily (hourly) generates — it keeps viewers attention — and media makes a fortune off Trump. Advertising has its audience. That’s why media follows Trumps inane tweets — and not the far more important hurtful policies he pushes.
1
No, Ross, the left doesn't think that all conservatism can be reduced to White Nationalism. But what passes for the conservative party in the United States today is led by a White Nationalist. Overall, though, you are correct about the nihilism of Trump.
10
@Mark the "conservatives" used to stand for low deficits and low debt too but what happened to that? The TEA Party used to say that's what they stood for but now it is revealed that it was really what the democrats were saying the minute Barack Obama became the nominee "it's about him being black". Remember the pushback from the GOP as they fell on the fainting couch saying "well I never!". They didn't seem to care when the massive tax cut was put through and now with Trump taking his voters into a trade war that will see a 1980's style farm collapse I guess we will see if farmers care about other farmers or just that we don't have a person of color or a woman in the white house.
4
Let's just ignore Douthat's mandatory anti-liberal rhetoric and blame. Instead, let's take him seriously when he argues that Trump magnifies a dark maleficent force in a large number of people. Let's remember that racism and its sickening child White Supremacy are the dark sins of our nation.
Let's ask this: why is this fever suddenly so catching? What is it about our society that makes people susceeptible to this force at this moment, unlike some earlier periods?
There have been breakdowns in fundamental parts of our society, and we should look for them.
Perhaps we can agree on one. In the 50s and 60s, there was a social practice that the rich didn't take all the money. This chart from the St. Louis Fed shows the share of national economic output going to workers as compensation. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRS85006173 It shows that the rich have been taking more and more of the money.
For far too many people, life, work, homes and families are constantly in danger. That was always true for minorities, and it led to some of the problems in their communities. Now it is beating the white majority too.
The nihilism that Douthat sees has causes. Let's look for them.
6
"And the possibility that Trump’s zest for demonization can feed a demonic element in the wider culture is something the many religious people who voted for the president should be especially willing to consider."
Who's the anti-Christ now? Obama deserves an apology, on so many fronts.
7
So you actually believed what Trump s said as a candidate?
4
Please, fellow citizens, vote — not just for president, but for all who represent you.
Trump and those who are enabling him are complicit in a Faustian bargain. We are trading the soul of our nation for what is, at best, short-term gain. It’s a bad deal, and one that the devil is sure to win.
We cannot ever again make the mistake of assuming that sound character is not an essential part of leading. Our elected officials are called to uphold our constitution and our laws, but they also influence the tenor of our society. We need people who will faithfully execute all aspects of these duties.
3
Yes the problem is a deeply moral one. trump's success proves that immorality, crime, and every kind of ruthless ethical violation can lead to ultimate power - "winning."
6
Yes Ross this may be a moral and spiritual problem, but we will have those discussions until the end of humanity. In the meantime can we get the guns off the street and out of the hands of people other than the military? Why is that so hard for conservatives and Republicans to understand.
7
@Steve Thank you Steve!
2
"...a war the left wants because it has decided all conservatism can be reduced to white supremacy." Come on, Ross. This is paranoid and loose terminology bound up and conflated. What 'left'? Extreme? Liberal left, which brand? Just stop it and apologize.
But you're right- look down that hole and it is Trump staring back in front of legions of angry an d blind Americans.
7
It is an expense of spirit in a waste of words to attempt an excavation of the "dark psychic forces" that lead to mass shootings. Neither killer appears to be or was insane. Trumps and Republican pleas for better mental health checks or resources may help a smidgen but won't prevent mass killings any more than unearthing the roots of pedophilia will prevent people like Epstein from raping girls and young woman. The reason that America, by far, leads the civilized world in mass killings is hiding in plain sight. It is the ready availability of guns and assault weapons. Republicans will do all they can to deflect or obscure or obfuscate. But until we control guns in the manner that Europeans have nothing will change and the slaughter will continue unabated.
6
Trump embodies all of Gandhi's 'Seven Deadly Sins:'
1- Wealth without Work
2- Pleasure without Conscience
3 - Science without Humanity
4 - Knowledge without Character
5 - Politics without Principal
6 - Commerce without Morality
7 - Worship without Sacrifice
8
Trump is an abomination, but until the guns are GONE this will continue to happen. These murders are on the heads of the Court that chooses to misread the 2nd Amendment and Federal and State Legislatures that fail to regulate magazines, bump stocks, ammunition, require licenses and real background check. In other words to take the common-sense action undertaken by civilized nations.
6
I an so sick of eloquent caperings around the truth. This is eloquent, and it is capering. What are we going to do to end mass shootings in America?
5
@Owen Douthat appears to be competing with his "eloquent" colleague Brooks. So many words. So little said.
3
If Trump hadn't been born wealthy, he'd be one of the weasely weak losers who keep grabbing guns and killing other people. These losers want to die because they are so filled with hate, anger and rage, but they don't have the guts to just kill themselves, they have to take other people out too.
I taught elementary school many years ago and one day the six year old who was totally disruptive each day and it always ended with him harming another student in some manner. One day he jumped up on his desk and pretended he was machine gunning all of his classmates and the other kids were literally dumbstruck by his action. As a result he was removed from the classroom and his parents were advised by the school psychologist to get him the help that he needed.
Trump is that kid in adult form -- he damages and breaks things and people and now he's damaged our country with his hate, anger, and rage.
5
We need to abandon the delusion that Republicans and Trump supporters are bothered in the slightest by massacres of people they feel are their ideological opposites, ie. Latinos, Jews, African Americans, LGBT etc. They do not care. All you will ever get from the right when one of their comrades slaughters dozens of people in a church or a synagogue or a store or a school is deflection, attempted justification, or claiming it’s all the Dems’ fault. Thinking of Trump supporters as good people is a potentially fatal mistake.
6
Modern conservatism has been reduced to white supremacy, but not by the left.
11
Anyone who looks at Donald Trump and sees a cultural exemplar of manhood is probably beyond help.
11
Thanks for this article, Ross. Could you please clarify your phrase: “more populist and worker-friendly conservative economics,” which to me seems like an oxymoron.
When has conservative economics ever been populist or worker-friendly?
Thanks
12
Pete Hammill wrote the following about Doanld Trump in 1989. It was a response to Trump's ad calling for the execution of the Central Park 5.
"Snarling and heartless and fraudulently tough, insisting on the virtue of stupidity, it was the epitome of blind negation.
Hate was just another luxury. And Trump stood naked revealed as the spokesman for that tiny minority of Americans who live well-defended lives. Forget poverty and its causes. Forget the degradation and squalor of millions. Fry them into passivity.”
8
Donald Trump has become the face of the moral bankruptcy that is today's Republican Party -- he defines it.........
The big unanswered question is - Is he what America has become?......Pray NO !!!.....
Are we, is America destroying itself through a Donald Trump styled unfettered greed, an unrestrained capitalism?.......
Most economic systems are good - until they aren't.......Have we in America reached that "aren't" point?.......It's sure starting to look that way......Restrain today's rampant, untethered economic imperialism before it devours the country.....
2
There's nothing intrinsically bad about being a nihilist. A nihilist simply believes the universe came into being with no objective meaning or purpose and therefore an individual's life has no meaning or purpose. But it doesn't automatically follow that a cretinous, immoral, buffoonish, charlatan like the current White House occupant is a nihilist. Trump is more of an existentialist. He does consciously or subconsciously believe there is no objective meaning or purpose to existence, but absolutely believes his life has meaning and purpose and feels unconstrained in attaining both. That's what an existentialist does. Absent an objective meaning or purpose of existence, they create their own, and this philosophy can produce someone like Camus but ,unfortunately, also someone like Trump.
4
Brilliant analysis of the president's spiritual sickness, which is driven by ego and insecurity.
In Chinese Buddhist terms, Trump is a hungry ghost. A hungry ghost has a huge belly that things like endless money, publicity, power, women, and mocking other humans can never fill, and a pencil-thin neck so he can't get enough "stuff" down there to satiate himself, even for a day.
Pity him. Pray for him, and for America.
6
Compare Trump's public utterances and his supporters' with those of Rwandan leaders reported in the media around the time of the mass slaughter of Tutsi people--scarily similar, crude, impassioned hatred and public anger. The mass killings have started, but instead of using machetes, they are using military rifles and pistols. The Republicans need to dial back the hate speech and calm their supporters while they still can.
4
Another thing Marianne said (not at the debates): “A smug, self-righteous, intolerant left-winger is no less dangerous to the emotional fabric of this nation than a smug, self-righteous, intolerant right-winger.”
Really made me think, sometimes I have definitely been guilty of being a “smug, self-righteous, intolerant left-winger,” especially online. When we approach conservatives, with smug, self-righteousness it does nothing but further entrench and enrage them and see left leaning people as the enemy. It doesn’t win battles, it coddles our ego.
6
You can't have it both ways, Mr. Douthat. You can't separate conservatism from Trumpism, because Trumpism is the logical conclusion of conservatism--angry, old, rich white guys who cannot stand seeing people of color usurping their "white privilege." The Republican Party is overwhelmingly white. Over the last 40 years (since the Reagan era), it has moved inexorably further and further to the right, to the point that now, under Trump, racism/white nationalism is considered a legitimate political philosophy.
Your "worker-friendly conservative economics" is a contradiction in terms. Big business wants unions crushed into dust. Big business opposes public education, because it does not want an educated electorate capable of critical thinking. It wants obedient workers. "Realpolitik" was Henry Kissinger's code word for "Let's dump our allies when it's in our short-term interests." Your "decelerating low-skilled immigration" is Trump-speak for "Let's get rid of all these BROWN people." And your "meritocratic, faux-cosmopolitan elite" are well-educated REPUBLICANS who thought the answer to all our country's problems was to wipe out the middle class and turn 99% of the population into eternally in-debt peasants.
If you are a Republican, then YOU created Trump. You are responsible for him. You own him. You, Mitch McConnell, and all the GOP in Congress thought you could control his worst impulses while profiting from his hateful rhetoric. The bill has come due. Pay up.
9
Nietzsche explored nihilism and its implications for civilization. As he predicted, nihilism's impact on the culture and values by the end of the 20th century has been pervasive, its apocalyptic tenor spawning a mood of gloom and a good deal of anxiety, anger, and terror.
Since he took office not only is president Trump creating more radicals, but his attacks on the free press and knowledge itself are encouraging people to seek information that has no basis in fact.
People are using social media to stay in their own bubbles and Trump encourages such behaviour.
I don't know if Trump knows even about Nietzsche and the concept of nihilism. He is just a self-serving compromised nincompoop helping domestic and foreign grey eminences who are powerful decision-makers or advisers who operate "behind the scenes". He is their puppet.
If the United States of America survive the process of destroying all interpretations of the world, it could then perhaps discover the correct course for their fellow Americans and allies from all over the world.
The American people have the power of the ballot.
It's up to them to vote out this Nihilist-in-Chief in 2020.
It seems fallacious now, to use the colloquial language "Leader of the Free World" for 45th - which was first used during the Cold War - because really Trump is not even a leader. He comes across as a malicious man borderline insane.
4
Trump is the ultimate expression of capitalist values. He is about winning, and his way of winning is to create himself as myth. The fact that he has so many devoted followers shows how good he is.
Anything that helps him win is good. Anything that gets in his way is bad and unfair and out to get him. Shareholder value is the ultimate good, and he is the only shareholder in his company.
He is the supreme argument for why capitalism can be tolerated only within a noncapitalist framework, which we call the rule of law and the general welfare. The idea that the general welfare is best promoted by letting business do what it wants has been tried and proved false -- business freedom promotes the welfare of the very affluent at everyone else's expense.
Trump is the best argument for what business people call socialism, things like Social Security and antitrust laws and minimum wages and forcing corporations not to play games with their financial information.
Personal needs and deprivations fuel the appetites and drives of a violent extremists. Extremisms--the you-name-it ideologies, religions, theories of history, systems of belief--are what extremists cling to dignify their appetites. Political debate tends to dwell on direct causation. So, naturally, we dwell on the link between murder and white nationalism. Do doubt, there is a link, and, no doubt, Trump has spurred growth of various safe-space communities of far-right extremists, each community clotting around its preferred agenda of intolerance. Yes, beneath these communities of hate are places of "dark psychic forces", which the language we rely on to talk about politics, policy, history, race, immigration, gender, poverty and wealth can't explain. But isn't this the ultimate truth of all forms of extremism? Isn't extremism more about how people behave rather than what they believe? Hasn't demagoguery - the political exploitation of social grievances - been around for a long time? While Trump may be a "creature of our late-modern anti-culture", he is not unique to history, nor is the psychic darkness that surrounds and inhabits him.
Does Douthat call himself a Republican?
2
What the "dark psychic force" really is is something like or really "the mass psychology of fascism". The commonality extant among Trumpers, conservatives and the like is rooted in a militaristic world view, where individualism is the supreme value, other than mechanized warfare. The fact that most of these people have these value ideals, much or all of which is frustrated by their inability to really participate (as in the actual military) gives them no choice but to support the "nothingness", and some, regrettably, develop the need to take action in order to build self-esteem, and perhaps, in their warped minds, leave a legacy...through suicide, which is the very opposite of the all-consuming ego of the "dark psychic force"-in-chief. That is not irony. It is stupidity which is borne of the hatred which has been inculcated in them in this orgy of inequitable economic status and unfair income distribution, coupled with an unfavorable balance of trade, and a basic disrespect for anything foreign, which translates as intolerance and xenophobia. That's what pulls the trigger(s). Recall heel-clicking and the extended arm salute. Recall the murderous "Sieg Heil!"
3
this is the smartest column Douthat has ever written.
It's the guns, Ross.
8
"Mentally ill people must be involuntarily committed to protect against gun violence," the president spouts. Is he projecting again? Go ahead, man, do your country a favor and please commit yourself. But leave the rest of us alone.
2
Most insightful column I have read all year.
By the way nihilism and narcissism go hand in hand. If it is all about you, what do you care about the future. Since you will be dead, I guess everyone else is on their own. Why would you care about anyone else and anything else other than the gratification of you ego.
You are the only thing that exists.
Your needs are the only reality. And when you die everything might as well die, because without you there is nothing real.
2
Wow!!! You nailed it!
There are narcissistic nihilists in other countries.
The difference is the guns.
5
Did you see the CNN headline:
Dayton Shooter TweetED Extreme Left Views
source: CNN
https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/05/us/connor-betts-dayton-shooting-profile/index.html
(still Trump's fault though, right?)
2
Country club republicans, to gain a small tax cut, support the white racism of their party. They forget that once in power, white nationalists take what they want treasure, freedom and life.
1
Charlie Manson didn't plunge the knife into Tate & friends, either. But he had a lot to do with it.
5
In response, Ross, to your statement:
“Cultural conservatives get a lot of grief when they respond to these massacres by citing moral and spiritual issues, rather than leaping straight to gun policy...”
Wikipedia has gun ownership vastly higher in the United States than in any other country on the globe (perhaps sole exception of Yemen)...a minimum of at least 2 1/2 times more guns than our nearest rival.
That is “gun policy“ Ross. Every other country has the same problems with the Internet, with disgruntled male youth , with mental illness, with video games… And no other country has this proliferation of gun deaths. None. Face it: guns are the only variable.
3
You write, " a war the left wants because it has decided that all conservatism can be reduced to white supremacy"
No -- but individuals left of your position have noticed that *Trumpism* can be reduced to white supremacy, and that for the most part, conservatives have not objected.
you get around to some excellent observations in this column, but the above is both a cheap shot and inaccurate.
2
"Like them he is a creature of our late-modern anti-culture, our internet-accelerated dissolution of normal human bonds. Like them he plainly believes in nothing but his ego, his vanity, his sense of spite and grievance, and the self he sees reflected in the mirror of television, mass media, online."
This IS our culture, not an anti-culture. Trump and these folks are a product of our highly individualized, winner-take-all, underlying philosophy of our culture. Ego has never been stronger than in modern America.
1
Mr. Douthat you lost me when you linked to the article , "Trump Summons Demons", in which the author writes,
"... I believe that putting Democrats in power would be worse, solely because of what it would mean for laws and policies that are important to me. But this degrading demagogic behavior is exactly the kind of thing that would flip me to the other side. There are things worse than a president who is radically pro-abortion, opposed to religious liberty, and favoring open borders. It’s having a president who recklessly endangers the lives of people for the sake of winding up a mob."
Kudos to the writer for seeing the danger that is Trump. What I take issue with are his misleading claims that Democrats are, "radically pro-abortion, opposed to religious liberty, and favoring open borders."
So let me understand some things from a conservative's point of view: A woman's right to choose is "radically pro abortion"? Believing everyone should be treated fairly and equally and with decency and respect when they go into a bakery to buy a wedding cake, is being opposed to religious liberty? And calling for a humane border policy where asylum seekers are not dehumanized and separated from their children, is favoring open borders? Okay, got it.
It's exactly this kind of distortion of facts and divisive language that inflames people rather than educates them. And if this is your bedtime reading then let me say that you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.
7
Ross, you can either give up your ideology and admit that Trump is its natural product, or you might as well be quiet. You can't ride both horses through life. "Conservative" ideology is inextricably linked to the American history of white nationalism. It's been obvious since way before Strom Thurmond. You can't be on the right side of history whilst in the same picture as dudes like that. Do what this country is so afraid of: CHANGE.
1
You recognized him? He is the Chancelor Palpatine, ploting a coup to become America's emperor and pull your country into the dark side of the force...
Watch this next year how he will threaten US of civil war if he looses. I would not be surprised if he does not recognise his defeat and have to be dragged out of White House by secret services. It will be a nice revenge for them if it happen lol
The question is by which (witch?) of those devils Trump is controlled.
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150316-ten-parasites-that-control-minds
I remember a long ago Douthat op-ed that talked about his inability to deal with "a tale told by an idiot, filled with sound and fury signifying nothing."
I am not an American but I am more American than Ross Douthat. The Deists that gave birth to America understood sound and fury signifying nothing and gave us America to give the sound and fury meaning.
There is no Satan and there is no Demigod locked in perpetual combat. Cromwell secretary, John Milton, called himself a "liberal Puritan" and America was the first country of the Age of Reason where liberal meant "free will". No longer were men subject to the whims of a deity who determined destiny but the Creator created and then moved on. Good and evil are two sides of the same coin and what I am seeing is a country out of balance.
For those of us steeped in English and East India Company tea the Tea Party is extreme liberalism. I remember the libertarian William F. Buckley Jr and his hatred of Ayn Rand.
Nihilism isn't choosing the dark side it is denying that we have a choice to make and choosing ideology over pragmatism.
America's "conservatives" have what they wanted and now must deal with the fact that they got what they wished for.
Conservatism demands authority one need only ask Samuel Johnson.
https://www.samueljohnson.com/tnt.html
1
I am ashamed to be a middle aged white man!
Bravo!
Whatever carnage is exhibited by those in the far-right will, I predict, come to an end in about 25 years from now. How? That will be the time, like it or not, when a majority of these politicians- those who've consistently opposed gun legislation over the years-will be people of color, either in the House of Representative or in the Senate.
2
Two shootings in 24 hours show us two different sides of Trump.
One side is the racist. The other side is the misogynist.
Trump is both, as evidenced by both his words and his deeds.
Any conservative, any Republican, any Christian who defends Trump is just as evil as he is.
Progressives and liberals are the groups with strong values these days, humanistic values. We are pro-life and anti-hate, anti-murder, anti-rape.
It is one party that promotes hate, rape, and murder. Go to a Trump rally, as I did, and you will feel Germany 1932 in the air.
3
Whether you like it or not Conservatives may not all be white supremacists but the silence of many of them about Trump just because they are getting what they want makes them just as culpable for the carnage. Not to mention the failure of many of them to support sensible gun laws. Though I may disagree with the viewpoint of many conservatives, such as yourself, but I am angered by those Conservatives with a viewpoint on Trump which appears to say "the end justifies the means."
1
There is no conservatism apart from white supremacy. They are joined at the hip.
2
LOL. In addition to all else, the guy is a transparent swindler.
4
The moment after the shootings extreme right wing posts showed up on the news feeds tying the shooters to Antifa. Be aware right wing extremism is throwing mud against the wall and making excuses to see what sticks.
The first one is a true political motivated individual who wanted the races not to mix in society. This is a common theme in conservatism that a diverse society is a failure. See Tucker Carlson and many others on Fox for reference.
The second shooter is the strangest I’ve read about. He ended up killing his own sister. He had to know. Yet the extremists on the right are acting like this kid promoted some sort of political manifesto supporting Antifa. They name socialism, antifa and progressive leaders and that somehow liberals radicalized this kid but the far rights hatred didn’t. And that party I agree with in this article. The far right wants bloodshed in the streets. Look at Trumps base and his rallies. They think it’s funny! Just shoot them they say! Guess what someone did and likely will in the future.
Trolls And Far-Right Figures Kept Spreading Their Same Old Hoaxes Even During The El Paso And Dayton Shootings
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/janelytvynenko/el-paso-dayton-disinformation-hoax
Fake News Proliferates Following Two Mass Shootings – Rolling Stone
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/el-paso-dayton-shooting-fake-news-antifa-charlottesville-867499/
The real problem is easy access to firearms without regulation.
1
Claims such as "these views pre-date Trump" or that the Ohio gun murderer was a "socialist-atheist" ring COMPLETELY HOLLOW, as was Donald's reading of the teleprompter in the wake of the murders.
The chants in NC of "Send Them Back!" and Donald's 'response' to them came off as sincere, however.
Enough said.
1
Every sentence of this is filled with Ross's typical hedging and refusal to take full responsibility for the face that it is his bankrupt movement that directly caused this. There is no shared responsibility, no matter how many times he pointlessly drops "socialism" in to these embarrassing, transparent attempts at dodging. Ross is certainly responsible and part of all of this. Even now, he tries to bring "complications" in to a straight forward indictment of a movement that has used overt bigotry and (the now Russian front group) the NRA for many decades. Shame on him.
2
A worthwhile piece, but don't expect Douthat to utter the words "Southern strategy," "monkey," "Lee Atwater," "Willie Horton," "Philadelphia, Mississippi" - all words that many think indicate a long history of racism in the Republican Party - any time soon.
1
What has happened to Ross? He isn’t listening to his conservative brethren who believe that the root of these mass slayings started with the Atari video game “Pong.”
2
When inciting mass murder becomes an acceptable partisan strategy for re-election, we are on the road to Rwanda, to Croatia, and populist genocide.
God have mercy on the United States of America.
1
So you are saying that Trump is an insane monster that, due to the dark aspects of the American electorate, gained the presidency and leadership of the Republican Party.
I definitely have to agree with the insane monster part of the argument.
1
All of this aside, doesn't anyone see one glaring fact -- these mass murderers are all men. This is a guy thing. Men with high-powered rifles. It isn't all of you; it's the men.
2
"The only thing to discover is the void"
Like Crabby Appleton, he's rotten to the core.
2
I scarcely know where to begin. Trump is a fascist and repubs who continue to support him should never be forgiven. The entire repub establishment has since 1965 existed to maintain white supremacy pure and simple and to maintain the Rich elites hold on,our culture. To even mention liberals in his column is pure nonsense. The big words aside dems stand for progress and decency and that is what gave us social security and Medicare. The repubs would still let older folk live out their lives in desperate poverty a
Nd would likely permit legalized segregation. Which brings us to trump supporters. Like their forbears they can’t stand the diversity the immigration brings but will at least to,erase it ifThey remain top banana in the social pecking order Now that they are losing that dominance they simply can’t abide it. The economy is going reasonably well and still they are yelling fascist things at trump rallies. They don’t even understand the constitution under which they have thrived for two centuries
1
Ross: I most certainly agree with your analysis that Trump is a pathetic, needy, anomic, narcissistic void. I also agree that our nation is progressively losing a moral civilizing interconnectedness. We are becoming free floating bubbles with no concern outside of ourselves. But I felt that your discussion would ultimately meander to an accusation that the cause is our collective lack of your (Catholic) religiosity, promoting the falsity that nonbelievers in the almighty god of western religion lack spiritual or moral sensibilities. I want to remind you that cracked vessels are not always empty. They are often brimming with outraged righteousness, unshakable certainty and murderous vindictiveness, all in the name of some irrefutable creed and it’s angry god.
Ross,
Can we once and for all STOP referring to the rightwing who attend churches to further their hopeful utopia of Christian sharia law as “ religious?”
If they are truly religious then I’m the Queen of England.
A great column ! Now get your colleagues to stop pandering to him; stop treating him respect; mock him at every opportunity; aggressively challenge him and his minions.
When he speaks about mental illness...they should through it back right in his face..clearly he is mentally ill and is psychologically broken as are all of these violent men.
This column, which I mostly agree with, points to a man--Donald Trump-who is codependent with those white supremacists. They feed on one another in a number of twisted ways.
1
I think that, by ascribing dark psychic forces to Adipose Rex, Brother Ross invests him with far more depth and elan than he deserves. He is a clown, but hardly Pennywise. He's a carnival barker, a snake oil salesman, a bargain basement Elmer Gantry who has found a sure fire way to fleece the hicks and the rubes. He is no ideologue with anything like a coherent agenda. He's just a con artist.
That said, he's selling something far more dangerous than snake oil. He's selling crude oil, and coal, and every other environmentally destructive poison there is. He's not an evil genius plotting our destruction. But he and his ilk make a lot of money off of selling the things that can bring it, be it directly, or indirectly, by selling arms to those with even more oil money. The Russian tundra is burning due to one, the Gulf of Oman threatens to burn due to the other.
He can be stopped only by someone with the grit to out Elmer Gantry him. It won't be by some quavery school marm lecturing about arcana in the bankruptcy code. It will take a full bore, by God, fire and brimstone, economic fear monger, thundering about the Republican plan to end Social Security. Want to fight fire with a scented candle? No thanks. Hand me a flamethrower. I want to win this time.
I used to laugh that the evangelicals had it backwards. Trump is the Antichrist. I was right. We Facebook yellers, at least my little crowd, spend as much time despairing over his crudeness, his lack of human decency, his abuse of the weak, and his narcissism as we do over any specific policy. And you’re right. All that is circling around the central issue, the hollow where a soul should be, and the fact he’s able to broadcast that vacuum to the country.
If these shootings cause a radical shift in law enforcement, it will just further his desire for a police state. Once that framework is in place, I guarantee white supremacy will be a footnote. Trump’s enemies list is endless.
1
it must be difficult to hold your nose with one hand, and type all that Buckley-esque sea of words with the other. "carapace", indeed. Will you also hold your nose on November 3rd, 2020 as you enter the voting booth and fill out Row B?
2
Sad to say, with Trump as hatemonger in chief, I'm hearing people say that they would not be saddened if Trump died by the gun violence he promotes. I do not want that to happen but I do want him to be impeached and removed. When he was elected I thought, well, another buffoon in the oval office. I wish that would have been the worst of it, but he has turned the presidency into a national disgrace.
Trump’s utter lack of morality had nothing to do with previous mass shootings. Yes, he is despicable and bears responsibility for El Paso, but a country awash in guns is the real issue. Gun control now!
2
This is ridiculous Trump-hating rhetoric. I seem to recall that some of the worst domestic terrorist incidents in the US predated the Trump presidency.
1
Ross,
Save your breath and a lot of virtual ink ...
Too many guns ... that's it.
Yes Trump is a moral black hole.
But you know, Sandy Hook happened when we had Obama in office.
Too many guns. Too many guns.
Wait--did Trump really just call mass shooting victims 'Martyrs to the 2nd amendment?'
1
Our actions in Central America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East have exemplified both realpolitik and intervention -- against socialist social experiments and for our business interests. Banana republics did not just happen to be called that. The CIA messed in Iran's internal affairs to safeguard the investments of our oil companies.
When conservatives talk of realpolitik, they mean alliances where our businessmen can make money and gain control of resources essential to us. Protecting these things is not interventionism; pushing for democracy or political and cultural freedom is.
No mention of the Bernie Sanders inspired AR shooter of the GOP ball players. Note the similarity with Dayton, where there are armed police the shooter is stopped sooner.
1
Ross, you must be reading a different kind of news. Here is what Pompeo said about Trump being sent by God himself.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47670717
"Pompeo says God may have sent Trump to save Israel from Iran".
Don't even mention Mark Pence (cringeworthy): "President Donald Trump began a recent National Day of Prayer event recognizing the “big, big help” he’s received from his vice president. Although not specified, that help has included Mike Pence's full-throated defense of Trump's faith credentials as a liaison to Christian conservatives – a bedrock constituency for the Republican president....Despite the unlikely partnership between Christian conservatives and Trump, 81% of white evangelicals voted for him. That’s a greater share than supported George W. Bush in 2004, John McCain in 2008 or Mitt Romney in 2012."
Ross, please answer yes or no...are you a white evangelical who voted fro Trump?
2
What do all the shooters have in common?
Come on, I know you can do this! Think! THINK!
What do they all have in common?
Hint: It involves exchange of money.
1
From your point of view it is Democrats and those on the left who are reducing all Republicans and conservatives down to 'white nationalist' and that is the major problem. You don't accept that you and yours have been demonizing Democrats, liberals and progressives for 50 years as the 'destroyers of America' as your party got progressively whiter and moved further and further to the right. And now you don't like the label you have earned. Shame.
Oh, and the 'I hate Trump but love his policies' is getting old as this is the excuse of every conservative, Republican, RWinger, etc who supports Trump at a 93% approval rate.
2
You can't have it both ways, Mr. Douthat. You claim to care about viewing crises in all of their complexity, denouncing binaries and other reductive ways of parsing a problem. But you erect simplistic binaries in discussing the "liberal" view, as if it were monolithic, KNOWING FULL WELL that "liberals" and the Democratic party are, at this point, as diverse and un-unified as they've visibly been--at least in my long life-time. I like to read a diversity of Op-Ed opinions, but your columns ALWAYS upset me: you hate Trump--what's new? That's been your theme for years now. It seems to me that someone who writes a regular column for the NYT should be . . . 1.) Able to generate thoughtful, nuanced ideas about current issues, without repeating him/her/theirself; 2.) Prohibited from hiding behind big vocabulary words to conceal the fact you have nothing new to say; C.) Able to unpack a miasmal situation and offer new insights without resorting to dyads like "liberals" as your ideological whipping boys vs. "conservatives," a group you claim to be part of but one you see yourself rising above, in most cases. If you care about the immigration problem, offer possible solutions. Instead, you love to provoke, to wink at those you hope to enrage by saying you half agree with Trump on immigration. Your rhetorical and ideological toolkit is ridiculously small.
2
Ah, Mr Douthat, how you do prattle on. What you want is a more polite Trump - but keep his cabinet and their destructive ways and, of course, the tax cut. Plato would have been, and Theologians of all stripes, I'm sure, are proud of you.
2
“Trump has also referred to Latin American refugees and asylum seekers as ‘rapists,’ ‘criminals,’ ‘drug dealers’ and ‘terrorists,’” the piece read. “It’s worth remembering that when a Rwandan politician described Rwanda’s Tutsi minority as ‘cockroaches’ it started a genocide that resulted in the deaths of upwards of one million people in that country.”
2
Look at Trump’s business career — as reported extensively by the NYT. He borrows millions, wastes the money indulging himself, then when the bills come due, he says to the lenders: “that building is worth more with my name on it, so you’re stuck with me” — and the lenders give in, bailing him out! Trump’s doing the same to American society, trashing it and expecting to get bailed out. He doesn’t seem to realize politics is not like business. He’ll get voted out, not indulged like a rich brat, for his selfish nihilism.
1
This is the best explanation of Donald Trump I’ve ever read.
1
Sometimes I feel that Mr Douthat and all the other very talented journalists and thinkers, though their essays and thoughts are full of wisdom and analytical compassion, are wasting their time. I was at a playground one time and a little boy was bullying, hitting and kicking other children. His mother, when confronted by other parents and asked to take control of her son, sat next to him on the sandbox and proceeded to talk thusly: ' I know why you did that, sweetheart, I know that you're frustrated, jealous and lonely, I understand your pain, your anger, your fear and your nihilist tendencies..." well, not that last but you get the jist. Instead of taking his guns away and, if he persists, sending him to military school.
2
Are Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and Mitch McConnell, to name just a few, members of the "meritocratic, faux-cosmopolitan elite" who have "badly misgoverned the republic"?
3
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Trump's is not just 'spiritual' nihilism: everything he does -- from deleting climate science from policy papers, the annihilation of the scientific arm of the USDA, to handing out public lands and natural resource extraction permits to private companies for peanuts so that they can wreck fragile ecoystems, to say nothing of accelerating the already horrific rate of global warming -- is planet -killing. He does not love his children, he does not love his grandchildren. He does not even love the white nationalists who worship him. His hatred is boundlessly deep and his voracious appetite for destruction is unlike any that has existed before. He is the first world leader who has both the perverted will and the geopolitical power to take the entire planet with him in his ecstasy of self-destruction. Mitch McC is the cowboy pilot riding the nuclear bomb beside him. All those people at the rallies, and all his friends who gather at Mar-a-Lago as well as all the rest of us are going to go with him. I cannot fathom how anyone can still think this is just about the next election.
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Trump represents the inevitable, logical conclusion, the point of convergence, of all the mealy mouthed conservatism of people like Douthat, Brooks, Will and the rest of that ilk. Couching their ideology in faux intellectual wrapping, they are nothing less than enablers. I guess there are some who are impressed by these glorified columnists, passing themselves off as some sort of intellectual vanguard for way to long at this point. When Mr. Douthat laments the decay or death of some imaginary "spiritual" and "moral" tenets we might have once had, I can only laugh. Trump offers himself up, to his Evangelical followers in particular, as both a moral and spiritual paragon, and they lap it up. Keep your retrograde spirituality, and your fake morality (see the recent piece on Saint Reagan and his enlightened morality regarding African diplomats at the United Nations). Hey, pointy headed conservatives: you own Trump, he's your ideological offspring. Accountability, that's a conservative virtue, yes?
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Can you please give examples as a why to explain what this ridiculous statement means; “the idea of a more populist and worker-friendly conservative economics.”
God I love the Times. The next time someone reduces this newspaper to the simplistic left-right paradigm, I'll send them this column. What an interesting perspective. Thanks!
If it’s bad for our country, no matter what it is, Donald Trump has his fingers in it: racism, bigotry, white supremacy, Russia’s interference, North Korean relationship, buddying with the murderous Saudis, demise of public education, decimation of natural resources, tax cuts for the wealthiest, healthcare gutting for millions......the list goes on.
And he says all this is Making America Great Again.
If I may dumb down Douthat's message, imagine a high school class making the biggest bully the class president. What would that do to the rest of the student body?
Sometimes my fellow Americans seem like young toddlers, don’t take away my guns, my rights, my free speech, I can do and say whatever I like, while wading in the dark narcissistic pool of self glorification, and the denomination of others unlike me, the roots of violent rebukes.
It is my observation that with few exceptions the GOP is heading right on down the rat hole it desires. Trump is such a flawed human, if we can even use that word, that to support him is to fail the humanity test. Yet, history illustrates how the GOP has been lurching in this direction for some time now and all the racist Democrats I grew up with in the south some years ago are now all committed Republicans.
The president and the mass shooters are not connected. You have flipped your lid.
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"a war the left wants because it has decided that all conservatism can be reduced to white supremacy"
That's simplistic hogwash. Do better.
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This opinion lacks any analytical skills and is definitely amnesiac. Obama should have the derogatory and slanderous headlines. Shooting under his administration was more prevalent. Was he responsible?
So running for President is the same thing for Trump as it is for another nihilistic-narcissistic Joe to run amok?
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Trump and that part of Republcanism he represents are very needy souls, with huge psychological dilemmas adrift in daily making sense of a world perceived in light of all the folly a personal demented psyche must travel.
Trump does not have a "moral vacuum." He has festering, viral hatred for people of color, the poor, the sick, and not-white-privileged men. That morass is far more sinister than a vacuum.
But go ahead and vote for them anyway.
Because... buttery males. etc.
Right to the heart of the matter, Ross.
"the possibility that Trump’s zest for demonization can feed a demonic element in the wider culture is something the many religious people who voted for the president should be especially willing to consider."
One would have thought they could have considered that in 2016. Republicans continue to revel in hate daily around the country.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/8/6/1877114/-At-Kentucky-event-young-men-from-Team-Mitch-posed-chocking-and-groping-an-AOC-cut-out
What nonsense to say that the left equate all conservatism with white supremacy. This is completely ridiculous. I am an active liberal Democrat and I don’t know a single person with that point of view.
Well, Mr Douthat, I believe that you do really believe in: " the idea of a more populist and worker-friendly conservative economics, the idea of a foreign policy with a more realpolitik and anti-interventionist spirit, the idea that decelerating low-skilled immigration would benefit the common good, the idea that our meritocratic, faux-cosmopolitan elite has badly misgoverned the republic" -- so you should be supporting Bernie Sanders because that he represents the socially connected and humane version of your goals.
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Mr. Douthat, I marvel at the endless ways in which you struggle to justify being a conservative in an era when conservatism has been hijacked by plutocratic wealth, Christian fascism cum nihilism, and the ruthless pursuit of power.
Your continual efforts to parse and compartmentalize the sins of today's Republican Party are wearing just as thin as your increasingly tenuous efforts to minimize their import. The entire subtext of your commentary in the Trump Era is to say, "Not MUCH to see here, liberals, so stop being drama queens!"
Trump's transgressions are never as bad, impactful, or serious as they seem, according to you. The world as we know it isn't coming to an end. The Republican Party and Republicans in Congress, are not at risk of corrupting themselves into imposing fascism on America. We should all calm down and not lose our heads to the hysteria promoted by the Democratic Party.
The president is terrible, you say, but not so much that one man could destroy our exceptional country. Besides, as you say, you actually agree with aspects of the president's agenda. (And you're supposed to be a Catholic Christian. Ugh!)
It doesn't take one man, but an entire political party to stand by and enable its leader to run to destroy our democratic institutions.
Which begs a question: How as a Christian can your sympathies lie with a political party that cares only about money and power? The ruthless might of money makes right?
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Mr. Ross, I don't usually agree with your columns but in this case I most definitely do. Trump is a narcissist who only cares about his ego, his sense of vanity, and is consumed by grievances against so many around him. But as you point out, beneath all this is a profound spiritual void, a dark emptiness which is quite frightening. If he is re-elected, I shudder to think what will happen to this country.
Couple of things Ross:
'...the idea of a more populist and worker-friendly conservative economics,' You have to be kidding us right? Listen to the Party and they have accomplished this. The working folk might have another view.
'...idea that decelerating low-skilled immigration would benefit the common good,' Hey Ross, you have any problem with the people working farms (not enough because white folk won't do the work), cutting your lawn, taking care of your old mother, raking hot asphalt, finishing concrete, etc, etc? White people are too busy gaping into their phones, believe they are above this work, and have observed the execution of '...worker-friendly conservative economics...', and say no thanks.
I kind of like this column but try to reign in the more obvious hypocrisies.
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Nothing makes me more nauseous than tRump saying "God Bless" or Evangelicals claiming that Trump was chosen by "God".
Perhaps the real culprit here is "God". Why is "God" silent in the wake of all this human evil? Why did the Cosmic Force create a species that is capable of destroying "all things bright and beautiful" and not send a little more frequent assistance from above to straighten things out? Tends to make one question the existence of "God", doesn't it? Seems to me that we are truly abandoned.
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Anyone that hates people that do not know to the extent that they commit murder, or mass murder, is mentally ill. There are those saying that hate killed those victims, hatred does not kill. They may just as well say race killed them, rather than saying the racist killed them. People saying that hate and guns kill are excusing the actions of the murderer. Its like saying the person that killed those innocent victims was innocent because of hatred and gun culture. That is like saying we will fix the issue with racism by eliminating one of the races. You can not fix mass murder by taking one of a million ways to murder away. These people will just as easily use cars or fertilizer bombs to commit mass murder. Soon we will have an all Nerf society. Nothing hard or sharp because it can be used to harm people. Fix the mental illness issues. If everyone can have free access to mental health and free medication for mental health issues, we may see change. Its cheaper and easier than trying to change the constitution and take peoples guns away..
Douthat like other Republicans twists himself into a pretzel trying to come up without blaming the obvious: Trump and GOP intransigence for this evil. Vote out Trump and all Republicans. This country needs empathy, truth and democracy.
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Agree, the whole country is falling into a sink hole. Trump is not just a GOP problem, he is our problem. While the GOP is refusing to face the problem, the DEM only throws mud at him without offering a positive alternative to his twisted, ego-driven populism. Pessimistically, I see no way out of the path towards doom for the country.
I am no profound thinker, like Mr. Douthat here. I don't pretend to be anything other than just another American who votes and pays attention to what goes on in his country.
Trump, as far as this writer is concerned, is about as scary a human being as I've seen in my lifetime. He is a sick man who cannot relate to his fellow human beings, including, apparently, his spouses. He might as well just stay in his bedroom and govern my Tweet because every time he opens his mouth in front of a camera butterflies come out of it. In other words, nothing!
There is something deeply, deeply wrong with this guy on one hand, yet on the other he has obviously caught lightning in a bottle to become the most powerful man on the planet.
We Americans got it terribly wrong in 2016. This accident of a chief executive, along with his conniving and cynical supporters in the Senate must be shown the door.
To re-elect Trump will be ruinous to this nation in every imaginable way. We must excise this cancer, and quickly.
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Conservatives get grief because they mouth empty platitudes not because they discuss moral or spiritual issues. If they were, they might ask themselves precisely what narcissism and nihilism, what apocalyptic vision of the world requires them to be armed to the teeth. They might even discover their own hypocrisy in decrying a culture of death whilst owning tools created solely to kill other human beings. They might consider why after every mass shooting, the response of supposed good Christians is to buy even more implements of death. They might even consider papering the freedom tree with a few bureaucratic forms so that it does not have to be watered with the blood of children.
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I flatly reject this column in its entirety. In particular, I reject Douthat's rather dumb claim that the left "wants" a war on white nationalism. That phrase alone conveniently ignores the fact that 99 percent of mass shootings, and - let's not forget - lawbreakers like the Hammonds and the Bundys - are white men. They're basically fighting a one-sided war with acquittals, impunity and pardons that beggar belief in this ridiculous claim.
I suppose it's easy, Mr. Douthat, to be a monk (albeit a deluded one) when you're sitting on a mountain top.
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Anyone who still supports this twitter-typing, attention-seeking, uninformed, barely evolved so-called president is as damaged as trump is. All the rest is just background noise.
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Ross,
I struggle with you and your ilk. You disavowed Donald Trump during the 2015/16 election cycle. Conservatives and spiritual types struggled with who he was, and what he stood for. You all trusted your internal moral compass. Then he won. The was an evolution of your thought, your words, you writings. I would call it exceptance followed by embracing the dys-regulation of social and environmental regulations with the thought that "the end justified the means".
Several times during this presidency you have walked back your support of who he is, and what he stands for when his behavior became to egregious - but like a moth to a flame you fluttered back to dip and swirl around his light - he and his administration were simply to hypnotizing.
Well, here you are again, realizing just how terrible he is. Vacuous, amoral, and all the excuses that men of the scripture and conservatives have used to defend him seem hollow and contrived.
PLEASE FOR THE SAKE OF THE COUNTRY, and for this beautiful blue ball we all live on, stand for what is right and good about all people and all of gods creatures. Help in your own way to disavow this man, and help elect anyone that has a more clear, moral, and compassionate view of how to govern.
Indeed Trump has a black hole at the center of his constant efforts at self promotion. The news media gets paid to list his endless offensive baloney. They know he helps their bottom line. He was a Dem now he is the leader of the GOP. Reagan managed the same transformation. But Reagan actually put together a gov't and listened to his advisors and corrected some bad mistakes. With Trump the country has reached the rock bottom of news media cesspool. The world has changed radically. The future that people contemplated for the US never included a clueless demagogue like Trump. Until 2016. Trump v. Clinton. A social media festival of hate. The GOP collapses and wins the election. All the judges rolling down the GOP assembly line. Tax cuts and deregulation to make all of Wall Street salivate. Trump was embraced.
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Hurrah! Three cheers!
Yup. Agreed. The problem is your preaching is only being heard by the choir.
In an attempt to stake out a nuanced and object view, you tread very treacherous waters. The thought that you are sympathetic to ideas that Trump has championed may come back one day to bite you. All Trump ideas are tainted by his motives and you would do well to seek another champion. Even scientific discoveries unearthed by unethical and many times inhuman means have been rejected or embargoed till the right ethic methods are employed. Beware of whom you sympathetize with.
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Mr. Douthat, you make many good points in this op-ed. Unfortunately, even your gifted prose cannot hide your bias. When you say the left “has decided that all conservatism can be reduced to white supremacy“ you give yourself away as another person who has accepted what Fox News has been preaching for some twenty years—that all democrats/liberals are unworthy. Your suggestion is nonsense. But, it is also Trump-like in the sense of reducing the better points of the piece and lacking a full measure of courage/conviction.
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Nihilist...more name calling. That's all the Times are good for (talk about bigoted rhetoric).
When you resort to name calling, you make yourself as small as your intended target.
If President Trump were actually a nihilist, why did he bother to run for President? (It being so meaningless.)
According to the Times, it's absurd to think that playing violent video games for thousands of hours could desensitize a person to the point that they no longer value human life.
But if TRUMP says something, that's a different matter! "The president’s bigoted rhetoric is obviously part of this."
I think the writers of the Times need to take a good, long, hard look in the mirror.
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One can be a gentle soul who loves others and spreads kindness wide and far, and one can be a close-minded bigot who spreads hate and fear. But feed either of them poison and they will sicken and die.
Sit behind the Oval Office desk and "the buck stops here" because of the enormous power of the U.S. presidency. Does anyone -- anyone -- think that Donald Trump can grasp that simple notion of accountability?
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and so, by this measure rep omar's anti-semitic statements connect her to (history says) the even darker "psychic forces"
of the mid 20th century...
Read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to understand Trump’s moral vacuum.
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Trump. Hate. Guns. Murder. Murderer.
No Trump did not pull the trigger. The worst offenders never do. Rather abusing their platform to propagate hatred, insecurity, fear. Formulaic.
What do all of these incidents have in common? ....many things it turns out...
-American legacy of racial hatred, xenophobia, scapegoating
-Male (often white) perpetrators
-Political, racial inspiration
-Hate groups
-Legally obtained (semi-automatic) guns
-GoP/NRA/Trump resistance to gun control
-Preponderantly (but not exclusively) red states
-Stoked by hate speech
-Trump's dog whistle
-GoP refusal to speak out against Trump, perpetrators
-Nation-wide mourning, prayers, nothing changes.
Video games and mental problems? --are you joking? Research proves these are virtually irrelevant. And the Constitution would never sanction what is required to address these marginal issues.
We know what to do. Look around. What is done elsewhere in the world...
And while we debate ad infinitum gun control it distracts from the real underlying issue. It diverts attention from the widening income distribution gap. From the class issues that stoke middle and lower middle and the poor frustrations with declining incomes and opportunities. From the tax deform and attack on health care and social safety nets.
What a mess we are...
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"atheist-socialist"
As an atheist socialist myself, let me just say that the sick person in Ohio doesn't represent either of those ideals in his mass murder.
I'd also argue that contrasting white nationalism against either atheism or socialism is lazy and wrong headed. Neither atheism nor socialism are philosophies born directly from discrimination and hate. White nationalism, on the other hand, is an ideal that has left tens of millions dead.
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Just so I’m clear: the video games with their glorification of violence didn’t do it (as per another piece in the NYT today), but Trump who, divisive and insensitivevrhetoric aside, never actually called for violence — did.
Got it.
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Let’s just get a lot of these military style guns off the streets and worry about the philosophy later.
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@Theo Baker
Why get them off?...It's not a solution.
There are millions of semi-automatic weapons in the hands of citizens, and how many are used for terrorism?
You don't punish 330 million citizens for the actions of a very few.
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Mr. Douthat's analysis is spot-on correct, but only as far as it goes. He points to but does not adequately explore another important angle: mental illness, including personality disorders. Most of these mass shooters, whether from the right or left, are simply delusional sociopaths. Trump's hateful, bigoted rhetoric is certainly a catalyst, stirring up their paranoid fantasies and pushing them over the edge. But as much as I despise Trump, he did make a good point about focusing on mental illness as a major factor behind these heinous crimes.
"...ideas that Trump has championed — the idea of a more populist and worker-friendly conservative economics, the idea of a foreign policy with a more realpolitik and anti-interventionist spirit, the idea that decelerating low-skilled immigration would benefit the common good..."
Mr. Douthat, Trump did not champion these ideas during his campaign. These are ideas you projected on to Trump. Trump's economic ideas mirror the failed trickle-down policies of more tax cuts and deregulation. His foreign policy proposals offered nothing but genuflection to the Russians and his opposition to immigration was always rooted in racism. The notion that something good might come out of the Trump era is just a false hope that Republicans and conservatives might be able to redeem themselves after having enabled Trump's rise.
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Populism used to mean agrarian rebels and Wobblies. It meant Southern politicians like Tom Watson who preached black-white unity against the South's ruling class, until they were defeated and some of them went over to the enemy.
Populism used to be concerned with class, not race. It reflected the standard experience of working for an individual or organization that wanted to get the most out of you and give the least, and tell you what to do and not do rather than having to negotiate.
Populism was a direct challenge to conservatism. What we call populism today is perfectly compatible with conservatism; conservatives of principle will be allowed to talk among themselves and be ignored unless they want to be propagandists.
There is a book out there, that I’ve bought but not yet started that links the loss of traction in this world to evil. It is a theological/Psychological work by Marguerite Shuster called “Power, Pathology, Paradox.”
My general understanding of the thesis is that humility & humbleness is next to godliness. However the human condition of being fragile creatures in anotherwise hostile universe creates a desire for traction against the force of entropy and the universe. When we lose power it can create a crisis. It is at that point that one is most vulnerable to the allure of raw power. However raw power is cast as being a characteristic of evil.
Trump is a narcississist. That means he has an overwhelming wound at his core. That makes money and power attractive to him. The working class white person whose father or grandfather had good paying working class jobs back in the 1960s, 70s, & 80s now is suffering from a loss of power. So many of them grab a hold of the easiest way to traction against that loss: anger, hate, and so on.
So I think that thesis will probably hold up, so in a sense, I agree with this column at least in concept if not in execution.
Ross, I’m tired of your smarter-than-thou approach to Trump and Conservatism. So you’re a conservative populist. Trump did not hijack this movement, he’s a product of it. If he’s steering us all off a cliff perhaps you could offer a bit more in the way of insight into the failure of conservative populists over the decades to account for the potential - the possibility, the *probability* - of a Trump. Or do you see no connection between the Pete Wilsons, Willie Hortons, Timothy McVeighs, David Dukes, and Tea Parties of the past decades and the 2019 GOP? Easier to just blame The Black Hole In Chief I suppose. Conservatives have a tendency to focus on the moral and spiritual or ‘technocratic’ and legal? Please. Save it. The conservatives of the moment and the last several decades have played every legal and technocratic card in their hand, dined the cost to democracy or the sustainability of the planet or women’s rights. Or immigrants. What does the Bible say about strangers Ross?, I forget.
So what are you suggesting Ro
DJT is absolutely no surprise to many Americans and many New Yorkers. I’ve spent 50 years scratching my head and ignoring the guy. If I were to care, I’d tell my kids “just act exactly the opposite as this guy and you’ll do fine in life”. Obviously the big surprise is that half of America buys into a loud mouth with very little to say.
The United States was built on so called dark psychic forces. Although they should be correctly labeled white psychic forces generated through the belief in racial superiority, genocide and slavery.
Williams is the only democratic candidate who has stated that America can never fully heal until it deals with the blood, cruelty and racism on which it was built and still stands.
The problem is America is still in denial. People are in shock because they immigrated here and thought they had membership in white America and were accepted.
They ignored racism because they thought it was mainly for black Americans. Now they are only upset when they get a taste of it. They should thank black Americans for fighting to pass laws protecting them from worse treatment.
I doubt that will happen because all I see and hear is a push to go back to pre Trump times. In other words jus better times for some while others still face racism.
Who's behind the triggers of these mass shootings? Fox News, the NRA, most Republicans and Donald Trump. None of them are going away any time soon. When you have a white nationalist as a President and you have a large news organization that supports him, and you have a powerful gun organization that wants to arm the populace with assault rifles made for war and you have Republicans whose silence is deadly black, it is a formula for disaster and violence. America has been heading in this direction since Nixon's southern strategy and we have yet to reach its apex. There's no doubt more violence is coming.
I don't get it. This is clearly Ross' clearest condemnation of Trump. But if it is this bad, probably worse, how can Ross simply intellectualize the dilemma and along with the sane Republicans (there must be some) not be the loudest voices calling the removal of this clear and present danger. They should be the angriest because what might be considered conservative principles have been hijacked by a con man who's behavior, words and actions are diametrically opposed to any quaint notion of the conservatism that Ross and others pretend to represent.
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Translation, in a nutshell :
The problem IS Trump
Add a conveniently overlooked aspect Mr Douthat: the craving to retain power by a shrinking minority of white men for whom trump represents savior hood.
And that sir is what inevitably will sink the same white men and their vehicle to immorally attempt minority rule: the Republican Party
That party is in its’ death throes and the final push towards death is best represented by Trump’s self immolation.
The end will not be pretty for them , no sir, not at all.
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Mr Douthat's last few columns have been outstanding. As a died-in-the-wool liberal I always appreciate his clarity of thought, and I even agree with his list of ideas of worker-friendly economics, etc. If those were what the GOP was really about, I might even support them. But where Mr Douthat loses me, where he always loses me, is when he finds it impossible not to snipe at liberalism with one of his sweeping generalizations, as “the liberal claim that any adaptation to populism only does the devil’s work” or “the left… has decided that all conservatism can be reduced to white supremacy.” It is as if Mr Douthat simply cannot resist some liberal-bashing, no matter what the topic, and this both weakens his argument, and repels many a liberal who might otherwise profit from hearing his views. It’s like the right-wing uncle we dread having to dinner, because no matter what we talk about, he will put on that red hat and start raving.
Most of my friends are liberals, many devout Christians. None of them believe the nonsense Mr Douthat ascribes to them.
You have much of value to say Mr Douthat. But please put away your cheap generalizations realize that often our views are not so far apart. Blessed are the uniters.
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@Nathaniel Brown
Exactly, as I was reading, I was really thinking about what he was saying until I came to those two lines in particular. I just cringed. It just seemed that all that coherent, logical thought was just the run-up to a few low blows at us liberals and progressives. Then I think he’s just another meanie pretending to listen.
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This breathtakingly erudite analysis of Trump merely rediscovers that which is well known to the practitioners on the floor.
For decades, if not centuries, tens of thousands of similar individuals have been encountered, interrogated, analysed, and categorised; their peculiar traits collated and arranged. The practitioners have labelled this recurring collection of traits the Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
Understanding Mr Trump is straightforward when seen in light of this disorder.
Except for any changes that have occurred in him due to his rise to power, Trump is the same guy he was when he started his run. Occupying the Oval Office is a sleazy real estate huckster with not so humble beginnings from New York that had a reserved seat on the money train. His reasons for running were more about ego, free publicity, advancing his brand and profits then some egalitarian ideals. To his surprise and the Republican party's, he found an eager audience for his messages laced with fear and hatred. He has carried very high approval ratings to date among his core supporters. While he hasn't as yet shot anybody on Fifth Avenue, he has helped provide the energy behind greater carnage. The party's leadership sits by quietly, content with their tax cuts and court appointments.
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Trump is not a nihilist. His beliefs are strong and have been consistent over the decades. He is a narcissist and an authoritarian. He believes in power, money, and self-aggrandizement.
A nihilist believes nothing is ultimately important. Trump believes he alone is important.
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@vbering Dictionary.com defines nihilism not as the belief that nothing is important, but as total destructiveness. This, plus the hollowness at the center of Donald Trump's consciousness, makes him a nihilist. Trump does not want to build up anything; he wants to destroy because he loathes himself and the world in which he lives. And he is succeeding in destroying the fabric of this nation. He is every bit the utter catastrophe I thought when he was elected that he would be.
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@Joanne Davis That's not what nihilism means, though. It's the belief that life is meaningless, it has nothing to do with destructiveness.
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@Sara https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/nihilism "In philosophy, nihilism is the complete rejection of moral values and religious beliefs. It is such a negative outlook that it denies any meaning or purpose in life. In political theory, nihilism is carried to an even greater extreme, arguing for the destruction of all existing political and social institutions."
nihilism - Dictionary Definition : Vocabulary.com
https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/nihilism
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I disagree that the dark force is psychic. It is physical. It s an inherited trait that is magnified by the culture. It is so prevalent that it seems normal. It is so common that it is accepted and that is why it is so hard to deal with it. Men were born to rule over women. Women who don't know their place must be taught a lesson.
I don't doubt that something the sister of the Dayton killer said or did triggered his rage. Both are dead so we will never know what it was. I have seen that rage first hand. It doesn't take much to provoke such a response. Even a small disagreement will do it.
This 'born to rule' notion extends to the race and ethnicity issue as well but is less personal. It is still the same innate belief of how social relationships were meant to be. When they aren't, the killer/abuser has to fix them anyway he can. It is his role to maintain the order. "Rule or ruin." That's how my mother described it. Nothing says it more clearly than that.
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Without guns this would be much less compelling and you may be avoiding that fact. I'm pleased you acknowledge the dark 'shadow' side of conservatism. It would be a moving reflection on what lurks in and leaks out of men's souls, as is the case in Europe (being an expat American over there), were the prime cause not the gun carrying adolescent male psyches of America (no matter how virile they believe themselves out to be) supercharged a rabid/wealthy gun lobby and locked up politicians.
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Without guns this would be much less compelling. My impression is that you may be avoiding that fact. I'm pleased you acknowledge the dark 'shadow' side of your political stance. It would be a moving reflection on what lurks in and leaks out of men's souls on occasion, as is the case in Europe (being an expat American over there), were the prime cause not the adolescent male psyches of America (no matter how virile they believe themselves out to be) carrying all kinds of guns enhanced by with the rabid/wealthy gun lobby locking up politicians.
Why, Mr. Douthat, can you not write a wonderful op-ed without having to disparage the other party?
I like reading your thoughts but I am tired of having to withstand the disparaging remarks just because I think differently than you do or I believe the answers to our problems are different solutions than yours.
In a sense you are doing the very same thing which you accuse others of doing. It's just not elevated to rage.
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Let's be clear about one thing: it is the Republicans who destroyed the industrial base of this country with their anti-labor, radical free market ideas that gave carte blanche to our industrial titans to flee overseas with our manufacturing jobs. The Democrats certainly failed us by buying into the meritocratic "everyone can be trained to be an engineer on the information superhighway" twaddle starting with the Clinton Administration's Third Way. Then both parties turned their backs on the working class only to see the Republicans win them back with policies oriented to activate their social and religious bigotries. Which brings us to the Bigots vs. Progressives impasse that we find ourselves in today. Sadly we find that our political system in its elevation of the under-populated portions of our country favors the bigots.
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Every time a shooting like this happens, from certain writers we get this kind of over analysis that makes my head hurt.
Put simply, we are a country where it’s not possible to presume you are safe from annihilation in public places, or even semi public, like schools, places or worship, work, and even hospitals.
It doesn’t really matter much to trace dark psychic forces. We have extremely lax gun laws that allow powerful military style weapons into the hands of dangerous people. Our government is beholding to the powerful gun lobby and refuses to take measures to protect us.
Let me go out on a limb and say the vast majority of people, including non citizens who want to visit here, would like that to change. It doesn’t because we passively accept this madness.
2
Ross, Ross, Ross - it took another 30 or more people killed by conservative rhetoric, which you have expressed over the years and still reluctantly won't give up in this powerful coming-to-jesus Op-Ed. You and Brooks and Will and others deserve our anger and scorn with your new found understanding of the full effects of your movement since Reagan. But, you will still struggle to fully condemn your Party for how easy it was to have you all quietly accept the destruction done to this country due to the money and the disregard for the general citizen by you all. You better make good following this confession and do something to really help this nation.
Ross, Ross, Ross - it took another 30 or more people killed by conservative rhetoric, which you have expressed over the years and still reluctantly won't give up in this powerful coming-to-jesus Op-Ed. You and Brooks and Will and others deserve our anger and scorn with your new found understanding of the full effects of your movement since Reagan. But, you will still struggle to fully condemn your Party for how easy it was to have you all quietly accept the destruction done to this country due to the money and the disregard for the general citizen by you all. You better make good following this confession and do something to really help this nation.
All of a sudden Trump's hot hand turns cold.
North Korea blows off Trump by firing missiles.
China blows off Trump by playing the currency card and not budging on negotiations.
All sensible people are horrified by Trump in seeing his insincerity around our own mass killings.
His advisors and even most Republicans say awful things about his irrationality behind his back. George Conway channels publicly what they say privately.
His random appointments of absolutely unqualified appointees has been a disaster. Dozens of big jobs remain unfilled because he thinks he can do it all.
The market, which has kept him afloat, now heads down.
When he finally flames out, it will be precipitous and dramatic.
He can't cope with this compounding set of absolute failures.
Fasten your seat belt. It won't be pretty.
1
Trump is running a fraudulent protection racket. It doesn't protect but, rather, feeds off fear. Each time there is an "incident," notice how the market reacts. There's a downward turn when some are able to buy low. Then the market goes back up whereupon the same folks can sell high. This is Naomi Cline's Shock Doctrine engineered to capitalize off of chaos, whether that chaos is natural, as in flood, fire, tornado, or whether it is man made, a mass shooting. I believe there are people and corporations who want these awful things to keep happening; they are profitable. Human lives don't matter.
Ross, the title of your piece should be "How our president and republicans are connected to the same dark psychic forces."Let's not forget that Trump has consistently enjoyed at least an 80% approval rating from the republican party. I don't care how much you might like some of his policies, you are complicit in the darkness and the evil if you support this man. Period.
"But the dilemma that conservatives have to confront is that you can chase this cultural problem all the way down to its source in lonely egomania and alienated narcissism, and you’ll still find Donald Trump’s face staring back to you."
Thanks for the most penetrating and wise insight into the moral black hole that is trumpism - that i have ever read.
I would just add that the diemma all of us have face is that -at the source of this cultural darkness are some 40 million americans who share trump's ugly worldview.
A "populist and worker-friendly conservative economics"?
Conservative economics is all about the sanctity of corporate profits: CEOs are responsible only to their shareholders, whose sole concern is the stock price and their dividends. The less workers are paid, the better (labor unions are anathema), and Wall Street and the big banks can do no wrong so long as the money keeps coming in. And, of course, the undead corpse of supply-side economics.
How you plan to make this "worker friendly" is something your readers look forward to with great interest.
1
Reading through these comments, it seems as though many are focused on peripheral aspects of Ross’ piece. They are choosing to engage in a debate about populism or racism, not about the narcissism and nihilism Mr. Douthat places as the main cultural culprit.
I had the benefit of receiving a Catholic education, K through college. That education has made me comfortable in discussing such spiritual issues. Unfortunately, with a culture that feels almost completely secularized, many seem to be spiritually illiterate and thus cannot even grapes the main points Mr. Douthat is trying to communicate.
I wonder if Douthat has hit on something with the notion that media fame and the instant celebrity status that accompanies mass murder has become a new type of driving force? Could it be that the internet generation is prone to these sort of actions?
So Ross, you're saying that all we need to do is find a conservative with values and integrity to replace Trump with? Good luck with that. let us know when they turn up.
2
Are you kidding me when you describe Trump’s worker friendly conservatism? There is nothing worker friendly about conservatism. Ultimately, in a perfect conservative world, workers’ wages and conditions are left to the whims of markets and stockholders. Depressed salaries; no collective bargaining and the necessity of multiple jobs are the result of the top-down economic thinking that is the hallmark of conservatism. Finally, if Trump is worker friendly why did he nominate Federalist Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court?
My sister posted a definition of racism. Just that. She did not name any names, not even the President's, and yet at least two relatives, one I respect and love deeply and dearly, defended themselves, one saying he had voted twice for Obama and the other who claimed the grievance of those who believe that the government has somehow made it easy for brown people and hard for whites and did not understand why anyone would care who another voted for.
What is it about Trump that creates this allegiance and defensiveness? I voted for Mrs. Clinton but when people called her a crook, I did not think they called me one (though I do get tired--as I'm sure my relatives do--of never having to express an opinion because as soon as I express one, all my others must be an open book). What is it that he elicits that creates this cult of personality?
Not one thinking conservative I know (and I don't think we all have to be deep thinkers about everything in politics) including Ross Douthat, supports Mr. Trump. We disagree on so many issues, but not this one, that he is a sad, soul-less little man.
It makes me think perhaps the reason his supporters often react so defensively is that--deep down--they know there is no defense for supporting him and they know he is a racist and a fool. This is why they take such personal umbrage. Criticisms of Trump prick a conscience in conflict. And that gives me hope that next election, we will have a flawed human as President and not this disaster.
5
@History Guy
Name one candidate in contemporary times that hasn’t been morally and ethically bankrupt and/or engaged in a vicious campaign against his or her opponent. One.
I’m not “red state folks;” I now live in one because that’s where the economy drove me. I used to be an avowed Democrat but the party’s divisiveness-as-number-one-political-stance approach drove me away and I now vote as an Independent.
I don’t know whether my Republican friends, of whom I have many because of where I live now, would vote for anyone the party put up as a candidate irrespective of morality; would you do the same for a Democratic candidate? I only see that a huge percentage of potential candidates on both sides are craven, limelight-seeking features. Not all, of course, but then the ones whose humanity and sanity I would be satisfied with haven’t made it past the primaries in a long time. Let’s see what happens with Pete Buttigieg. He’s a decent guy: he’s smart, measured, and compassionate. In other words, he doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell in the cesspool that’s today’s Democratic Party machine.
3
When will the pundits learn that the only policy and driving force behind Trump is the advancement, enrichment and adoration of Trump.
Trump is a chameleon who will adopt any position, take any action, incite any rally, to achieve those goals. If Trump were to suddenly decide that a facade of decency and empathy were most likely to fulfill his requirements, he’d adopt those positions and facade immediately.
Trump does not run his administration like the government of the world’s most powerful nation; he runs it like a mafia chieftain. He sucks in as much revenue as he can, using the power of his position and he fires up his base with his racist, xenophobic, misogynist, homophobic commentary. He used to ostensibly be a pro-choice Democrat - until being a pro-life Republican better suited his needs. He is a pathological liar who will state any falsehood he believes will help him at the moment, and when confronted on it, he doubles down on it before later denying he ever said it. I cannot understand how this antithesis of everything that comprises a decent human being enjoys a 40% approval rating among all voters and a 80% approval rating among Republicans. We have truly become a very sick nation and I fear Trump will be re-elected for a second term.
1
In the aftermath of the horrors of just this past weekend, this is all that Ross Douthat could come up with? I know he has to write so and so many words a few times each week to collect a paycheck from the NYT, but this one is a peach.
While Trump didn't pull the triggers, he most certainly helped load the metaphorical magazine. But I will get to that in a moment.
As for these killers and the others before them, there is only one singular link between them and it is not their psychic state or lust for fame or even hate for a specific race or people. Break down the backgrounds of other mass murderers and you have motivations that come from all over the place. And yes, while one can claim mental as an issue linking all of them (because as the argument goes, a sane person would never kill like that), as of late, hate seems to be a unifying factor.
The one common factor that all have had is easy access to weapons capable of delivering a salvo of high-velocity rounds in rapid succession.
As for Trump, he is more than happy to help load the magazines with more bullets. He will be back to his old racist rhetoric before the last bodies are laid to rest.
Ross, perhaps it is time for you to focus on not Trump or the shooters, but rather the enablers - McConnell, the GOP Senate, and GOP House members who clearly have no spine - but just hopes and prayers.
It is high-time to turn up the heat on the GOP and dump Trump as the headline.
1
trump is the enemy of this country and of humanity. I wish people in this country could recognize their destroyer. Because that's what he is.
Blah! Blah! Blah! All the gun control won't fix the problem. It is, after all, the American way. Got a problem? Shoot someone. A Nation conceived in violence, expanded in violence that glorifies its violent history as entertainment. No, I'm afraid until there is a dramatic cultural shift things will not change. The baffling thing is, that America, having watched European nations bleed themselves white with continuous war and having inflicted a horrific Civil War on itself, has refused to learn the lessons of history.
1
Blah, blah, blah. Until we take common sense steps on gun control, nothing will change. And as long as the republican party exists, that won't happen. Trump is merely a symptom of a fatal disease. The republican party is the cancer.
2
Previously I had argued for the free speech protections of all organizations, including white nationalists, thinking it was as it was in 1978 when the ACLU protected the right of Nazis to march in Chicago. Then, the danger to the Constitution was greater than from a few fanatics.
But I was wrong. It is obvious we are at war, in the same way we found we were at war after 9/11. One plane hits a building, maybe an accident. Three...it is time to awake to the reality that we are under attack. This last terrible weekend showed me just how wrong I was.
I can admit my mistake, I wonder if Trump will ever.
Hugh Massengill, Eugene Oregon
This tortured analysis has one purpose, to insulate Republicans and Conservatives from Trump's racist rhetoric, and his praising white supremacists, which are connected to the El Paso massacre.
Douthat’s contention that the terrorist attack by a white supremacist in El Paso occurred because of a made up "general cultural miasma that generates mass shooters" is an insult to all who died at the hands of a white supremacist terrorist directly tied, as the Times established, to an international ISIS type movement.
The El Paso terrorist deliberately targeted Latinos because they were Latinos, just as the massacre in Pittsburg only 8 months ago, perpetuated by a white supremacist terrorist, targeted Jews because they were Jews.
Douthat's denial is that of Republicans and Conservatives. Horrified GOP state Sen. John McCollister wrote after the El Paso massacre: "The Republican Party is enabling white supremacy in our country. As a lifelong Republican, it pains me to say this, but it’s the truth."
The Nebraska Republican Party viciously attacked McCollister, demanding he register as a Democrat because "His latest false statement about Republicans should come as no surprise to anyone who is paying attention, and we’re happy he has finally shed all pretense of being a conservative.”
If you have morality you only have the "pretense of being a conservative”. If you say Trump's rhetoric was in any way connected to the El Paso killings, you can't be a Republican or Conservative.
2
Really...
So, these be the demons among us - and Antifa be the Angels???
Ross, stop trying so hard...
Progressives will give you about as much credit for crossing over to the other side as Bush41 got for his tax increase...
3
Nihilist yes, worse yet , a malignant narcissist who lives in an alternate reality, totally unaware of the irreversible damage he is doing to this country,.
1
Ross Douthat wrote: "I actually agree with, or am sympathetic toward, versions of ideas that Trump has championed."
^ Yes, your readers have noticed this fact.
We've also noticed how many other op-ed columnists are sympathetic towards Trump's ideas, including David Brooks, Bret Stephens, Thomas Friedman, Roger Cohen, David Leonhardt, Frank Bruni, etc.
Of course—when Trump dies of old age—will any of these people admit that they were sympathetic to his ideas? Doubtful. Instead, they will all claim to have been part of "the resistance."
2
I am at a point that I dont care what your political leanings are. People have been murdered every single day in this country by people who have one belief and a feeling of superiority over another group.
By reducing it to political parties you demean humanity and the people who are on their way to being six feet under. Yes you make your money by writing about cultural problems, and yes I speak for myself. Enough, we are born and we need to live our lives without looking over our shoulders for a white man with a gun who is going to kill us in Whole Foods, Macy's. Hilton Hotel etc.
How do you explain the deranged man who shot his own sister. who is going to pay for the injured medical care, since the GOP doesn't believe that Americans deserve medical care.
Write about economic realities that we face every single day because of white superiority. Write about taking away food stamps, write about brown children in cages.
Enough if your not contributing to positive solutions, no one cares about your so called conservative thoughts, William Buckley is dead and because he was very rich he could sit around and think with racial superiority.
People are dead and they had there lives in front of them, write something of meaning if you know how to do that.
1
NYT, thank you for all your investigative reporting on this sick, hate-filled administration. It feels like the best thing that could happen the country now is a story that totally breaks open the rotten egg that is our president. Waiting on him to show moral leadership is a waste. He has. has not ever, will not ever have morals.
What is particularly shameful is the politicization of these horrid tragedies by those who vehemently hate President Trump...
1
Hey Ross,
Your excellent points are obfuscated by your verbose linguistic gymnastics. Stick to simpler wording and maybe some of your detractors might realize what you are saying. I consider myself fairly literate but your wording had me scrambling across the internet and dictionary apps to keep up. Not my ideal for reading a news article, I'll say.
Trump is a phony and a poser. He knows better but choses to latch on to the dark side. He knows that many of his supporters believe in racial superiority. Trump knows its a myth that he can exploit. Trump is more connected to former Philadelphia Mayor Frank Rizzo and former talk radio host Bob Grant who also engaged in outrageous race baiting. They would tell you, as does Trump, that they have no problems with any non-white person 'so long as they are beneath me and my white skin'. So, if the voters don't throw him out in 2020, we will know what kind of a nation we really live in.
"Dark psychic forces"?
2000 years of christianity gave us Donald Trump.
The delusion, superstition, shame, and divisiveness of religion, ought to make us consider junking all of it.
3
The text is utterly insulting to Trump. Nothing new on the pages of NYT but stating that the president is driven by the dark lunatic forces just the same as the mass killers is simply disgusting and apparently untrue. Even for the El Paso massacre, whatever DT rhetoric is, it is an utterly mad and extremely dangerous individual who committed the crime. The government should do something, I do not care at which level, to stop such people, or at least stop them from getting armed for mass killings. Insulting DT and by implication his voters is not the way forward but it is good for NYT and its readership.
3
Interesting that Trump is the unquestioned champion of white evangelicals whose teachings warn them of a divisive world leader who spurns the teachings of Christ, an antichrist supported by false teachers and prophets.
*twiddles thumbs*
1
You do realize this radical left drivel falls on deaf ears? The radicalized statements after these shootings does NOTHING to end them. Why would anyone listen to these radical fact less opinions? The stupidity I've heard the past 48 hours is mind numbing. The first two years of the Obama administration the democrats had a lock on Congress and the White House...and yet NOTHING was done. And yet we pretend these politicians want to help.
2
Ross Douthat has told us exactly who Trump is.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
1
You're spinning hard. You're placing left and right on the same moral plane. And that's wrong. Regardless of how the "pornosinger' politically classifies himself, I've yet to hear anybody on the left calling for a "race war". To some extent you're intellectually dishonest. Trump is merely reaping the racism sown on American soil. Trump is not generating mysterious "dark psychic force"; his hate is generated, paradoxically, by the exploitation of class inequalities and existing racism.
Trump, you say lack a moral compass and lives "the profound spiritual black hole, that lies beneath his persona and career?" So, what happened? Could it be that being raised and living in a dog-eat-dog environment he doesn't know anything about morality? After all the very society we live in, centred as it is on the "free market" cannot function according to moral values.
The enabler of the link between Trump and white extremism is the GOP! GOP has become a rotten tribal affair now hailing and supplicating to a deranged chieftain who whips his supporters into a frenzy. Therefore it is the GOP that is destroying democracy, that is destroying America from within!
Another thing the killers and Trump share is a virulent mysoginy.
Sadly Ross's obsessive need to control women's sexual and reproductive lives seems fueled by a very comparable "dark psychic force".
1
Blame El Paso on AM Hate Radio
In 1995 I turned on the radio and came upon the Rush Limbaugh 'Show' on the AM dial.
I had never heard of him, but I was shocked from the first few seconds of his show and I am still today. I'm shocked at the blatant violence and hate he spews like a fire hydrant, 3 hours a day 5 days a week.
In Rush's universe, rich white guys make all the rules and everyone else is better off for it. And 'others' are sub human.
When I hear Rush talk I hear Trump's puppetmaster.
This terrible growth on our psyche has been expanding for 30 years! After Limbaugh came Hannity, Alex Jones, Savage, Levin etc. Now, President Hate has been created on this 'plantation medium'.
Today the companies that own the AM bandwidths that broadcast this white supremacist cheerleading Sinclair/Cox etc. they get to own the bandwidth licences FOREVER as long as they pay the light bill and since there is no longer any fairness doctrine type law they get to brainwash poor people in perpetuity as long as their audience can afford a $5 radio and $2 in batteries a year.
I talked on the phone to a Washington Post reporter in 1995 and I 'reported' that Rush Limbaugh was brainwashing rural America and he needed to be called out and fact checked. The reporter laughed in my face and said 'no one who listens to that is smart enough to figure out how to vote'.
Today Limbaugh and his progeny on hate radio have created and elected one of their disciples as President of the USA.
God help us
2
Yes, Ross, there is a needy, soulless monster at the helm of the ship of state. But, we knew that from the moment he rode down the escalator and began ranting that Mexicans are rapists and murderers.
The problem is, and to our shame, that we haven't done anything about it. We, the American people (and not just feckless Republican congressmen) are culpable for all the heinous acts that he's committed. He should have been gone long ago, exiled to Mar a Lago or some such awful place.
No truck with declaring Trump a hollow man, a dog chasing his own tail. But your agenda is showing: "some kind of atheist-socialist politics." Your understanding of atheism is telling.
Trite as it might sound, but bares repeating here: do you really think more violence is committed in the name of no god, or in the name of some god?
Trump lacked a moral compass long before he found a platform on Twitter/the internet. What the Trump experience shows is the need to vet a candidate's ability to put their own ego aside to lead the country. Trump's massive ego and his insatiable quest for constant attention was clear even before he ran for office. What wasn't clear was just how far he would go to put self over country. Now we know. Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, shame on us.
Trump tried to fob off this weekend’s gun violence on mental illness, when the most mentally ill force in American politics is Trump himself. Only the profoundly insecure and unstable preach hatred, as he does at every rally. And only the weak respond to it, like the chanting automatons who follow his sick lead.
So what are you going to do about it?
Trump did not turn the Republican Party into the party of hate, corruption, and fear mongering that it is today. He was just the first Republican leader stupid enough to bring the ideology out into the open for all to see. Now that the Republican Party is exposed for what it really is, it will implode. The only question is whether gerrymandering, the Electoral College, and the Russians will keep it afloat long enough to implode the republic along with the Republican Party.
The new mantra on the left, which we have seen building up recently and caught fire after the recent mass shootings a few days ago, is not only that all conservatives are white supremacists; there’s no more center at all. Either you are a Democratic Socialist or a White Nationalist-Supremacist. A great justification for a Holly War - this is not about policies anymore, it’s about annihilating the Antichrist.
2
@Gimme A. Break Coorect. People who think the way you do created this binary universe. The rest of us need to recognize that this is the reality we now live in - and we have to do something about it.
Trump has no credibility. Stay away from El Paso.
Not the Nihilist-in-Chief, Ross.
The REPUBLICAN-IN-CHIEF.
Your party. Your president. He just says out loud what all Republicans say after a few bourbons at the club, when the doors are shut and the help is out of earshot.
1
Nice to see you come around, Ross. Now just recognize that evangelicals are power-mad nihilists willing to tolerate the nihilist-in-chief as long as he keeps giving them what they want.
1
The efforts Americans undertake to deny the power of white supremacy is quite astounding. Ross actually dismisses it here while claiming to be on the side of truth. He argues that the dark forces in play here are a mysterious uprising based on our failed connections as human beings.
Well, there’s a simpler explanation that isn’t mysterious at all. It’s white supremacy, Ross.
Like most Americans, you’ve chosen to ignore US history because you clearly buy into the whitewashed version of it. America was a racial colonizer of nonwhite peoples starting in 1776, when Thomas Jefferson included interference with slaveowner rights in his complaints to the King of England (by vote it was decided to strike that complaint from the Declaration of Independence for political reasons). The genocidal and barbaric conduct of this country continued not through 1865, but 1965, when Congress finally decided that black voters should be allowed to properly vote and, you know, eat in restaurants or drink from water fountains.
America also maintained itself as a white-supremacist republic demographically, through pro-white immigration laws that endured from 1776 to 1965, and arguably still persist today. Meanwhile, Natives were slaughtered. Latinos were slaughtered. (See: Texas Rangers massacre 1915). Blacks were slaughtered.
El Paso is not the result of the Internet’s dark forces, Ross. El Paso is the natural continuation of a pattern of American white supremacy.
BOLTON says that "the president is watching things very carefully" with regard to NK's launch of two more ballistic missiles.
1. We have no president.
2. TRUMP is watching cartoons, planning his next unconstitutional move, picking lint out of his belly button and scheming how to get away with having cheated on his last golf outing. HE IS NOT PAYING ANY ATTENTION TO NK.
Trump is notorious for knowing nothing about world affairs - only why he is fed by his sycophant war mongers like Bolton, Miller and Pompeo. If asked to point out NK on the map, I would bet he could not find it.
Kim is prodding and Trump will over react as usual with rhetoric and more sanctions; Kim will REact and off we go again. No diplomacy, only "love letters" and lies. YOUR fake president.
1
He has well-earned his title, Fulminator in Chief. He excels at it.
Don’t forget the misogyny Trump has in common with these killers.
1
The late Osama bin Laden and Trump both preached hateful messages, one against Infidels, the other against people of color.
Ross, regarding your conclusion, I'd point out that egomania and narcissism are required to adopt a white nationalist philosophy.
In fewer words, choose your enemies well, for it is they whom you will come to resemble.
I am struck by the fact that it is white young men who commit these horrendous shootings now and many times they are killed themselves! Similar to when states loosen up gun regulations and it is largely white men who commit most suicides by guns and when states rejected Affordable Care Act for their people, its mostly the poor, white that sided with the GOP and willingly sacrificed their lives to keep ACA out of their states. Republican policies are killing their own white conservative supporters! I don't feel sorry for them.
"One recurring question taken up in this column is whether something good might come out of the Trump era." The clear and unarguable answer to that question is an absolute "No."
"...the idea of a more populist and worker-friendly conservative economics." Talk about an oxymoron, sweet Jesus. "Worker friendly" economics include higher pay, universal access to affordable healthcare and safe working conditions. Conservatives believe in none of these things.
"One recurring question taken up in this column is whether something good might come out of the Trump era." The clear and unarguable answer to that question is an absolute "No."
"...the idea of a more populist and worker-friendly conservative economics." Talk about an oxymoron, sweet Jesus. "Worker friendly" economics include higher pay, universal access to affordable healthcare and safe working conditions. Conservatives believe in none of these things.
One question, Ross; what is it about the modern conservative mindset that has allowed itself to attach to this human black hole?
I have two friends with sons living in their basements. One in his 30's and one in his 20's. One stays in all day and works nights and one is too agoraphobic to venture outside except occasionally to mow the lawn. These guys roam the internet for their social lives. No friends, no future. Guns are available in their homes. What could possibly go wrong? There are ZERO mental health services for them. No one in their families wants to admit the seriousness of these situations. They don't have access to mental health even if these services were consistent and effective. They cannot be committed or arrested because the have not done anything and they may not ever do anything against society. The amount of money and personnel needed for the tens of thousands of men in these situations is staggering. The GOP won't even fund rebuilding the infrastructure or veteran services let alone help for the basement dwelling future gunmen of the country.
2
Ross D, David B, George W et al condeming DJT for his senseless behavior and leaving the Republican Congressional caucus alone simply does not wash. Each time DJT steps to the microphone and taps his tweets the Republican Party continues to play the silent and active supporter. Your words reflect that same silent support for DJT when they do not include calling for the Republican caucus to be rebuilt from scratch in 2020 for their complicity during the DJT presidency.
Ross, I disagree with you on many things, but I do appreciate your wisdom.
It is everyone's responsibility to put love into the world. It is the responsibility of those who ushered this disaster into the White House to usher it out. You break it, you buy it. Otherwise you are complicit.
I really wish I could vote for Marianne. But I will cast my vote and my voice, 110%, with the Democratic nominee.
Then, people, we need to move toward facing the real (and very deep) issues of injustice and spiritual bankruptcy in our country and our culture.
Put down your phone. Help someone who needs help. Extend a hand to your sisters and brothers who need one. Take care of your loved ones.
I wish Trump would grow up and keep his mouth shut more and quit tweeting about every little thing, but he isn't the only politician fanning the flames.
@Lee Irvine This false equivalency is the disrupter of any intelligent discussion. It's simply 'you're another', elevated from a 5th grade playground taunt to the automatic response to any challenge to Trump. Please give me one instance where Left rhetoric can be as closely linked to these multiple massacres - Pittsburgh, El Paso, Gilroy - as Alt Right rhetoric is. Find a way to disavow them unconditionally, and work with good faith efforts to address the problem, so we can all go back to a traditional discussion of politics.
G.W.Bush is still the worst president of my lifetime because, with all his ugliness, trump hasn’t started any wars (yet).
While somewhat simplistic, i have always found Trump to be stupid, cruel and utterly self absorbed. Unfortunately, it seems the same characteristics apply to much of humankind. If there is a cure, we have neither discovered nor bottled it. Trump appeals to the worst of out inner selves. Voters see themselves in his vile rants. We must continue to call him out, but I fear people will continue to be stupid, cruel and self absorbed.
Ross,
Though perhaps noble in intention, you are trying to have it both ways. There is absolutely no way you can respect the message and hate the messenger. Okay, you agree with T’s policies. But the man is exactly what you call him, a sinkhole. Do you and your conservative brethren wish to fall into that abyss or make a real stand and try and stand up to this despicable narcissist? Sure, you’ll have your nice NYT job even if T gets another four years. But what about the nation? Where will we be?
Yes, exactly.
I think less egg-heady, and truer, and since he doesn't know what a Nihilist is, would be to call him the terrorist in chief.
If an American born Muslim drove 600 miles from home to a primarily white Christian community and killed 22 people with an assault rifle would the President and his minions invoke the claim of "mental health" as the underlying cause ?
Please NYT, it’s enough writing about trump and his evil workings. Your writers and the entire media scape is telling us every day how awful he is and what’s going on...
It is time to tell the people of America to start demonstrating to get rid of him and his evil Senate entourage.
We, your readers and also the audience of MCNBC know, but the nation is still not wholly awakened.
Please NYT and the news media uncover the whole truth for the country and every day tell the nation who trump really is and the destruction he is doing to our planet and humanity.
These criminal acts that are coming out of the White House regularly, need to be stopped. Most of us reading the NYT don’t consider him our president, and it’s time for him to go. Show us the way.
Thank you
1
Vacuous. Conservatism is not the problem. Liberalism is not the problem. Trump is the problem, except you support his policies. You have abandoned the moral high ground and have taken refuge behind flowing and obfuscating prose. The problem is clear. The right has accepted race-baiting white supremacy. Trump is merely the avatar of a seething cancer. Having done nothing with your pulpit to excise it, you have demonstrated that you have chosen to be part of the problem rather than the solution. Shame on you.
He cheats at golf too. Nihilist is a good description.
1
Agree re the black hole. But:
“the shared bravado and nihilism driving shooters of many different ideological persuasions...”. Many???
There’s a word for a world-view which is, at its core, a nihilistic void: fascism.
1
No mention the dark psychic forces in the NRA or the dark psychic forces in Congress who bought by the NRA?
If a KKK meeting had a group of people chanting "send them back", while their Imperial Wizard looked on approvingly would that be racist?
Knowing the answer to that is everything you need to know about Trump and the rallies he's leading.
This needs to be stopped.
The silence of Republicans (not just their leadership) is a stain on our country.
1
Shut up, Ross.
If, as you say, Trump is the "Nihilist in Chief," then you and your fellow Republicans are his "Enablers in Chief."
1
I guess Trump is to blame for the Dayton shooter who embraces Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Socialism and Satan.
2
Dark psychic forces: Greed, racism, sexism, religious bigotry, climate crisis denial. Trump has harnessed them and the Republican Party has adopted them as its de facto platform. He gives the worst of us permission to flaunt our basest impulses. " Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. " John 8:44
Donald Trump is a twisted evil person. We were warned!! Can he sent packing next year? or maybe he will be removed by natural causes.
1
Sounds like the conservative case for impeachment and removal. Too bad Mitch McConnell is home nursing an injured shoulder.
As the Church Lady would say, "How conveeeeeenient!"
Ross:
The dilemma for conservatives is you created this monster. You are the ones embracing a criminal who conspired with Russia to sway elections. You are the ones who sanction the underlying threat of violence by dredging up racial tensions long ago settled and fought for. You are the ones protecting gun rights at any cost, regardless of the body count. You are the ones who look the other way as your Frankenstein runs amok. It’s not us. So stop equivocating, unless you really do crave the violent race war your white nationalist supporters seek. You can’t blame us. You have to stop it.
2
There is no there there.
1
Oh puhhhh-leaaaaaaaaze. It's so easy to be a Liberal these days--say any ridiculous thing and your fellow travelers will just nod in acceptance.
You used the word 'ideas' in the same sentence as the name 'Trump'! Naughty! Shame on you! Go stand in the corner until you've thought this through.
Dan Kravitz
Evil: profoundly immoral and wicked. Trump is evil, racist, incites violence, and a pathological liar. Evidence? Read the news. You may disagree if you derive some benefit from Trump’s actions and speech. Is Trump good?
Trump is a terrible president and a horrible human being and the world can't stop watching him. I feel that his going to El Paso is not generated by concern or empathy but rather by a strange, malicious desire to cause yet more pain to the community.
Wow, you really lost me at "a war the left wants because it has decided that all conservatism can be reduced to white supremacy." I expected a higher standard of thinking.
2
This is all well and good but in about 10 minutes he'll wake up, latch onto the fact that the lunatic from Ohio tweeted about Antifa and we're right back to "Send Them Back" at the next rally. Within 2 weeks the go-to line of every ardent & reluctant Trump supporter will be "What about the Antifa guy in Ohio!" and then we're in a worse place than where we started. Way worse. Because the buck never stops with him. Because there will always be a 'What about' point to score to avoid the blame & keep the hate moving to the next news cycle.
1
I wish that everyone (media, GOP) would stop pretending that Trump is sane. He is out of his mind, obviously mentally compromised and the whole world pretends it is normal to have a dangerous, mentally deranged "president". He is getting worse every day, what is it gong to take before he is taken out in a strait jacket?
2
Spiritual and culture issues are the problem here, Mr. Douthat? Why doesn't the rest of the world have weekly mass gun killings? Get real. There are way too many guns in the US that any moron can easily obtain. Mix that with white nationalism and an immoral president who stokes hate and division and you get the amount of mass killings we have in the US. Not rocket science. Ban the military weapons. Vote out Trump and the Republicans who enable him.
1
The dark twisted relationship is between America and firearms. From your perch in Midtown you don’t get to observe it like we do in flyover country. Giant pickups with assault weapon stickers in the window. American flag hats with the Stars and Stripes portrayed by bullets, random idiots with holstered pistols at outdoor community events like corn mazes and free concerts. People proudly sporting gun manufacturers logo wear.
Douthat characterizes the Dayton shooter as "the one with some kind of atheist-socialist politics... who was anti-Trump" – but then links to an article with this quote from someone who actually knew him: "another dime a dozen Ohio grind dude who caped progressive politics while treating women like (bleep).""
Douthat somehow fails to characterize the shooter as "misogynistic" even when his behavior towards and feelings about women have been testified to -- not by columnists but by people who knew him. Instead Douthat rushes to use political terms in order to establish a conservative "what-about" equivalency between the two shooters.
Even worse, he assigns the label "socialist" to the Dayton shooter, Douthat is carrying Trump's water while simultaneously claiming to repudiate him -- given Trump's strategy to use that label negatively about all Democrats. You can't use that word in the careless way Douthat does without consequences. Hasn't Douthat learned that yet?
The real bottom line is this: It's hatred that kills. Hatred of people based on their race, religion, gender, political beliefs or sexual preference. Nothing more, nothing less.
Dear New York Times,
Due to the fact that I can't stand looking at Trump, thank you for covering his face in dark shadow.
3
What Trump and the shooters have in common is easy access to guns and bullets and the invocation of a hyper-masculinity. Take the guns and bullets away and all you have are schoolyard bullies. Arm them and you have massacres. All of this blood is on the hands of the Republicans for they are the ones who have been most willing to give the gun lobby all it wants.
So, Russ, if you could do it all over again, support Trump so that you could have your anti-abortion judges and vile tax cuts and lock her up chants, would you?
Of course you would. As the saying goes, this column is just virtue signalling.
Anomie, dislocation, internet-accelerated erosion of communities are amorphous problems, Mr. Douthat, hard to identify with particular enabling publications or groups. (Exception: “incels,” who have little to do with atheism or socialism, both of which you feel compelled to name as bugbears here.)
White nationalists in this country have web and organizational presence, highly visible ideological messaging—the Daily Stormer is just Dabiq with a swastika tattoo. Hate groups and their members are identifiable. They should be classified as terrorists and crushed underfoot, with less mercy than we have shown ISIS or Al Qaeda.
Why less? Because these cretins call themselves Americans. If political will can’t do it, the demographics will; the white supremacists will vanish with whiteness, leaving us a chance to be Americans pure and simple—it a burning, dying world desiccated by climate change left unchecked by the politicians my fellow Caucasians saw fit to keep in office while the crisis reached apocalyptic proportions.
It’s time to call these groups what they are. If David Koresh deserved what he got all those years ago, can anyone reasonably argue that Klan shouldn’t get the same, finally, given its history?
Socialists aren’t the problem, Ross. Nazis are the problem—or at least, the clearly identifiable one.
Guns are the how, not the why. If you pull your dog's teeth, he may still hate you, but he can't bite you.
1
Thank you for acknowledging the role that nihilism played in Trump's rise to power. There were many different contributing factors to Trump's election, but one I rarely see mentioned is the nihilistic appeal he had to people who don't care much for religion or ideology, but rather are looking for a venue to channel their rage for mankind itself. For people like this, supporting Trump wasn't about Trump himself, but rather sticking the proverbial middle finger up at everything that modern day society represents.
Its not just Donald, but his sick and dysfunctional family as well.
Cruel people.
1
"a war the left wants because it has decided that all conservatism can be reduced to white supremacy"
is a preposterous statement.
3
Gee, Ross, an inveterate conservative coopting Marianne Williamson's language.
I guess that is progress.
This whole article could have been abridged to this: Trump is a bad and cruel person, who attracts other like-minded people, some of whom are in politics, religion, and others who are killers of innocents.
Douthat doesn't mention that Trump is a criminal as well.
This is one of Douthat's better columns, but he is ignoring GOP complicity. The GOP has been pursuing a strategy of divide and conquer since the '60s. Trump is merely the logical outcome. Also, many in the GO may have found Trump odious in 2016, but they did nothing about it. Douthat and his ilk were willing to have Trump as their useful idiot to obtain deregulation, pack the courts with conservatives, and give big donors a tax cut. They felt they could control a man who was only interested in building a brand.
Of course, actions have consequences. Douthat's GOP owns Trump--his policies of hate, his misogyny, his ignorance, his soullessness--because they were greedy and, in many ways, share his views, just in a shadowed manner.
Complain all you want, Douthat, about nihilism because of buyer's remorse. When you look into the mirror that is Trump, you see the face of the GOP looking back at you.
This column makes me feel conflicted. I can't really disagree with what you've written, Mr. Douthat. I was horrified when Trump was elected. I didn't read or watch much news at all for 6 months. But my mindset has changed a lot since then. I have a better sense of why so many people voted for Trump now. They're tired of snobbish coastal elites sneering at them and their values. Their tired of the neverending flood of insistence on tolerance, especially when liberal "tolerance" imperiously demands tolerance for every increasingly-unusual sexual expression and simultaneously excludes (as a rule) tolerance for a diversity of views. Think homosexual acts are wrong yet still love and have relationships with many gay people? Homophobe! Think we should have fewer immigrants or should regulate our borders? Disgusting xenophobe! Think babies should be protected in utero? Misogynist!
Oppressive liberal elitism and radical liberalism had a big part in provoking the era of Trump. For myself, nowadays, as much as I wish he could censor himself or just hold ideas quietly in his mind, I can appreciate Trump's straightforwardness. I can appreciate his willingness to lambast mouthy millennial congresspersons and other forms of snobbish liberalism. I certainly don't want a Democrat to be president any time soon (though I was a Dem until recently). The current bunch is a clown car.
3
Amen to that!
Vote Blue.
No Matter Who.
2020
2
Was Obama responsible for the 32 mass shootings during the Obama administration?
1
Just a few words that are synonymous with nihilist: anarchist, insurgent, radical, fanatic, destroyer. Racism is a sickness and needs to be treated as a disease.
Trump is Gollum staring into the pool of water--seeing only himself and his "precious" -- the gilded trappings of his office. Every day, he fades more and more, and loses more of the small amount of humanity he ever had. He is soon nothing but a malevolent shell, consumed by his own ego, his love of gold and the adulation of his supporters.
Let us all recognize what we have before us -- a racist, narcissistic sociopath, with the attention span of a gnat -- who would destroy our country on the altar of his ego and his hatred.
His crimes have been laid bare, and every day he remains in office is a smear on our body politic. Impeach now.
3
Wow. Today's conservativism suffers from cognitive dissonance, more personal freedom unless you are a women and then your womb is owned by the state. Freedom of religion of course you must accept Jesus... Don't vet our Republican judges, but deny and Democratic appointments. So the leader of the Republicans, the Don, is a perfect representation of the party..calling for unity and love while dehumanizing the other and spewing hate.
Everyday unhinged Trump destroys anything he wants to destroy because he can & undermines the USA on every level. Democracy no longer exists.
Stop analysing Trumps insanity and get rid of him. Dragging Trump, his family & cronies kicking and screaming out of the White House is preferable.....
People without machine guns cannot kill people as fast.
1
Dowd wasn't fooling around when she told her book-signing audience in Miami just after the election (C-SPAN) that NYT had plans to attack Trump by any and all measures.
It seems no president in modern history has so offended the New York City and Washington Mandarin elite like this fellow. Now Douthat is telling us "Trump participates in the general cultural miasma that generates mass shooters".
When it comes to "general cultural miasma" and causing mass death, I'd put Johnson first by many orders of magnitude, Bush II a close second, but Trump, nada.
Tying Trump to El Paso and Dayton is like tying Obama and his self-indulgent "Trayvon could have been my son" to the St. Louis riots.
But cultural "nihilism"? What's next with 2020 reelection in sight, Beelzebub uber alles, the cause of solar flares, plastic in the oceans?
No question NYT Opinion Kingdom is on fire and smoking hot with elite Mandarin rage, but no one who matters seems to be paying attention, save their fellow comrades in our hate-Trump Sovietized mass-media.
If only they could convince all those "deplorables" who voted for Trump to see it their way. So sad.
Dark forces? Sounds like Darth Vader.
Best I've ever read under your byline..
Psychic forces. Marianne Williamson!!
The state of the nation is bad cause the ‘cosmopolitan’ elites, liberal of course, have abandoned conservative principals ....
I give up Ross: let me get this straight: you buy into Trumps ideas like helping the working people of America. Do you actually think Trump cares one iota.? Huh?
And what about the birther thing? Did you speak up? No.
This boar of a president* speaks your language, you agree with the strategy just not the tactics.
This column reads like, I agree with the purpose of the inquisition. It’s just they went a little overboard!
Sounds like world history 1914 plus or minus to 1945 plus or minus. Control weapons and beware of sociopaths, for there are whole armies of them.
True. Republicans accept lies to get what get what and the religious rights alliance with Trump is dark indeed. Not my opinion:”You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44).
“...the shared bravado and nihilism driving shooters of many different ideological persuasions,...”
Both-sidism again!! Give us a break! Do not throw this neatly hidden in an op-ed to distract from the elephant in the room.
Southaven’s May be right about nihilism and seeking acknowledgement, but it’s NOT a both sides issue, as all statistics flying around will show.
Source Eurasia Group:
Murders committed by domestic extremists in the US (2007 to 2016)
74% right wing extremism
24% Islamist extremism
2% left wing extremism
Acknowledge the above first, than tell me which side is missing a “heart”.
1
I think you meant “psychotic” forces.
2
Read The Mueller Report.
This thing in our white house isn't a "reality star turned president."
The Trump-GRU connections exist long before 2016. To pretend this thing in our White House is not a money laundering, sex trafficking, racist, grifting thug is enabling treason.
2
``But the dilemma that conservatives have to confront is that you can chase this cultural problem all the way down to its source in lonely egomania and alienated narcissism, and you’ll still find Donald Trump’s face staring back to you.''
You're naive, dude. History tells us that the end-logic of right-wing positions, no matter how polite they are in defending accumulated wealth and status, is always the ugly face of a Trump or Mussolini or Hitler or other such creature.
Thank God! We commenters were not published for saying this a year ago.
By all means impeach. By all means VOTE.
“the idea that our meritocratic, faux-cosmopolitan elite has badly misgoverned the republic.”
Change that to read “our wealthy Republican elite” and you might be on the edge of an actually useful idea, Douthat.
1
Russ, if you think Christian Evangelicals are part of the solution, think again. They are as guilty of demonization as Trump. They demonize the LGBTQ community. They demonize science and scientists. I recall a Christian Fundamentalist claiming evolution and the Big Bang theory were "lies from the pit of hell". And as far as dealing with guns, it's no secret that fundamentalist churches have gun sales. Evangelicals point to Luke for their pro-gun position. Luke's position was "sell your cloak and buy a sword." An article in the New Yorker cited a bumper sticker that stated “Jesus would still be alive if he’d had an AR-15.” Too many fundamentalists share the same culture as the shooters. So much for following the Prince of Peace.
The “birther beginnings “ started with Hillary’s campaign, remember?
I have no idea what you nean by "nihilism." However, the reduction to nothing, unfortunately, does not just spring from THE DONALD: it is the true expression of late capital that both Dems and Repubes subscribe to: everything is money and money has no intrinsuc value. So, nothing has any value, We are dead. All dreams of progess are just that.
The worst mistake in our history has been encouraging and electing this dysfunctional hateful man.
1
Ross Douthat states his belief, "that our meritocratic, faux-cosmopolitan elite has badly misgoverned the republic."
I keep hearing conservatives make that claim about "cosmopolitan elites." That word- "cosmopolitan"- has for decades been used by the Far Right, back to Nazi Europe, as code for Jews. Given Trump's anti-Semitism, calling the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville chanting "Jews will not replace us," and "Into the ovens," "very fine people, it appears clear that that "cosmopolitan elite" to which the conservative Ross Douthat refers, also refers to Jews.
Otherwise, who are these "cosmopolitan elites"? They're never named.
Name them, Mr Douthat. And make it clear, if you're not referring to Jews, just whom are you referring to?
1
Even though he says his IQ is high, nihilist is not a word he would know.
The dark psychic forces will re-elect him president again in 2020. Unfortunately, the educated white people will not vote for him. White Nationalism is Trump's best strategy to win. He knows that his base and voters are blind and stupid. In Trump's word he boasted that he would not loose one vote even he shoots somebody on main street in New York. After Access Hollywood video and so many accusation of sexual predatory, Russian collusion and tax evasion, he won the election ( not by popular vote). Who voted for him and why?
Shorter Douthat: too many thoughts, not enough prayers is the problem.
I'm going to have to take a shower after reading this screed. How anyone can expect to be taken seriously after writing the following is beyond me (but apparently not the NY Times):
"I actually agree with, or am sympathetic toward, versions of ideas that Trump has championed — the idea of a more populist and worker-friendly conservative economics, the idea of a foreign policy with a more realpolitik and anti-interventionist spirit, the idea that decelerating low-skilled immigration would benefit the common good, the idea that our meritocratic, faux-cosmopolitan elite has badly misgoverned the republic."
And Hitler did some good things for Germany too.
1
Just reading in the Daily Mail that the Dayton murderer was a fan of both Elisabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, I guess that Mr. Douhat now will include these two Democrats in the circle of dark psychic forces.
I keep waiting for the Doc Graham walking off the Field of Dreams moment, when the pro-Trump voters, say, "Where did all these racists/mysogynists/xenophobes come from?"
Mr. Douthat’s oft stated desire to champion a “new conservatism” is, in addition to representing an oxymoron, a patently futile enterprise. The ends of the political spectrum, and not necessarily the extreme ends, represent, by definition, minority views. That’s why they are the ends. This reality seems to cause him to constantly apologize for the very ideas he takes such pains to put forth.
Civic discourse regularly finds the left calling for dismantling the old regimes and creating new ones, while the right insists on preserving or even resurrecting old versions. While as a mental exercise, such imaginings are perhaps useful, in practice they are merely gestures utilized by the group currently manipulating the levers of power to bolster their hold on that power.
Maybe it’s time to rethink.
We ought always to remind ourselves that the history of human existence has been, as MLK famously pointed out, an arc of progress, albeit slow. Perhaps the tendency toward gradualness is a feature, not a flaw. Seen this way, the conservative impulse can function as a useful brake on recklessly imposed innovation, but is not a practical philosophical ideal. Conversely, it also means that change which happens too quickly has equally limited usefulness.
The center isn’t sexy, baby, but that’s where the truly meaningful action is.
2
Finally a Douthat column that puts it out there.
Well done Ross!
But it may already be too late.
Its right in front of our faces.
The building is already falling into the void.
Can this country save itself?
2
Mr Douthat, it may not be Trump’s face staring at you after all once you get to the bottom of things, but your own.
Trump is the allergic reaction symptom to the “elites” consensus on governance. Other way to look at him is as a weapon chosen by those seeing no other choices in their quest to be heard, listened to and just considered by the powers to be.
These tragic events aftermath is already proving their suspicions and fueling their anger. These crimes have already been weaponized and monetized by the political class to its benefits. In your case your fight against Trump, for others raising money, for others trying to silence critics of the fiasco of our immigration policies, for others to get, Beto like, in front of a camera, or Legend like to get some woke revolutionary visibility.
Your and your colleagues selective choices of which social media post by the shooters to feature and which to suppress make things infinitely worse.
Trump has huge deficits, granted, and the alternative is what?
1
Guns are much easier to control than are “dark psychic forces.”
After every shooting, there is a chorus listing the “real” reasons for the carnage, vast and abstract reasons, reasons that would require research, enormous investment, and decades to implement. Reasons that point away from guns.
Control guns and shooting deaths decrease. Period. Then work on the reasons for the dark psychic forces.
5
When the 2nd amendment was written the weapons referred to were muskets that could only kill 1 person (in a El Paso mall) before law enforcement arrived.
Rifles and Shotguns are and should be 2nd amendment protected weapons in every state. They are good for hunting, target practice and home protection.
Pistols need more control because of their concealable nature .
But with assault weapons, we need to subtract them from the list of 2nd amendment protected weapons or the carnage in America will Never Stop. Ever!
There's a reason machine guns, grenades and bazookas are not 2nd amendment protected weapons. Because they have no place in a civil society. So too, assault weapons have no place in civil society. None!
Two simple laws are needed. Background Checks and Banning of Assault Weapons. If we cannot get these laws passed every single citizen will have to walk around with an loaded assault weapon. And that is not civil society by any stretch of the imagination.
And sensible gun laws can Only Be All or None Laws as in the whole nation or none of it. Ask Chicago. They have strict gun control laws but the state next door serves as a de facto undocumented gun dispensary.
Expecting law enforcement to react our out guess where the next shooting will occur is a fools errand. Only legislation can end this.
I’m far more concerned about the hate this president and republicans support increasing death all over the world. I don’t fear poor immigrants coming here to live and work as they are no threat to me or my family. Conservatives and their hostility to liberals as well as directly assaulting diversity is a direct threat on my life. That is the problem.
Help me out here. Atheist - Socialist and White Supremacist are two sides of the same coin? By what measure? Try and distance yourself from Trump as much as you like but I, for one, am not buying it. You accuse liberals of reductionism, but if you don't believe race defines this country, and is at the very core of this debate, then you haven't been paying attention. Your carefully reasoned, well articulated argument comes right back to the opening paragraph and your choice of pejorative. It's very similar to Mr Trump's statement about Charlottesville, except that instead of there being some very good people on both sides, there are some very bad people on both sides!
1
"It’s not as if you could carve away his race-baiting and discover a healthier populism instead, or analyze him the way you might analyze his more complex antecedents, a Richard Nixon or a Ross Perot."
"Conservatives" still don't dare go near their central artifice: By not including Ronald Reagan in your analysis, you leave out the proto-Trump. Yes, smoother and slicker and more polite than Trump, with far better handlers and PR, Reagan was still a very effective race-baiting demagogue conning America with right-wing populism while selling out America to his pluto-kleptocratic patrons in the background. Trump with a happy face, and "the best cue card reader they could find," as Gore Vidal put it.
4
Trump's inflammatory rhetoric is reprehensible. Equally reprehensible is the Republican party's refusal to challenge him or agree to any gun control measures. I expect that from the party of Trump. But what is totally confounding is the slow walk Democrats are making toward impeachment. This is a toxic president who has committed more high crimes in office than the three impeached presidents (Johnson, Nixon, Clinton) ten times over. Democrats in Congress: Do your constitutional duty. Forget about expecting the McConnell controlled Senate to cover his behind. Impeach, and let the chips fall where they may. Not impeaching is just as unforgivable as the Republicans in Congress not enacting gun control legislation.
Mr. Douthat has hit on many truths. However, his statement that meritocrat liberals have “badly” run the Republic is both an overstatement, they’ve run it quite well when actually in charge, and a confirmation that at least they maintained it AS a republic. Under Nationalist/conservative leadership by any Trump successor, the policy preferences Douthat maintains, such as economic and strategic isolationism, are just as likely to weaken America as they are now with Trump swinging the axe. The domestic policies Douthat enshrines are equally destructive. The bottom line is, conservatism is bankrupt and ready for the ash-bin of history. Trump is an inevitable symptom of it, not an internet inspired perverter of it. Its just going out with an ugly violent death throe.
What Marianne Williamson grasps is what Jung described as archetypal. What is important in this observation is that this force is non-personal. Of course, President Trump is accountable for his actions, but he is, as you describe, sickly succumbed to a narcissism that is beyond his control. This is why the congress republican in their abetting and democratic in their wage equal war must find a way of meeting and transforming these dark energies.
My observation. There is great anger and frustration in the United States today. A vast spiritual emptiness dug by expectations created party by social media and advertising. Ultimately the creation of unattainable social and financial expectations is filled with hate. The hate filled spiritual hole, combined with the easy accessibly of obtaining weapons with nearly unlimited magazine capacity, result in increasing massacres. The hatred and violence spun by Trump further ignites the problem.
As a liberal who happens to believe in some form of god and afterlife, and who sees that all which exists is essentially ENERGY, what POTUS does is engage the lowest, darkest forms of it.
Have you noticed that fear breeds fear, and hate breeds hate? That such feelings actually attract and cause more of what they embody? It's not accident energetically.
The President is indeed a dark psychic operative, knowingly or not. He does not appeal to our sense of duty, self-sacrifice, patriotism, kindness, the general welfare, shared community responsibility, caring for the planet we live, caring for each other (all politics aside), operating from generosity and love, all essentially the biblical qualities as highlighted by jesus, who was either a prophet or an extremely wise man who challenged entrenched POWER.
And POWER is what Potus craves and understands. But power is only worth something when you give it away. When you use it to help others.
The road to American redemption can only begin when he is no longer in the land's highest office. Until then, we exist under his dark cloud. But believe that the sun will return. It always does when people agree on what must be done for the future of the world's children.
and as such he will be remembered
a dark force of hate, self-absorption and division
a cautionary tale for future generations
Time-and-again it is the conservative flank of the NYT opinion columnists that have the most acute analysis of president Trump. I only wish there was a tad more poignant, self reflection on their part.
I wish, when Ross Douthat, David Brooks and Bret Stevens point out Trump's moral vacuum, that they would acknowledge the fact that a vast majority of Christians support him, unequivocally... so maybe "lack of spirituality" isn't the simple answer.
I wish, when Ross Douthat, David Brooks and Bret Stevens point out Trump's unfettered, unapologetic avarice and greed, that they might think twice when it comes to their conservative stance against government regulations that try to curb unfettered, unapologetic, corporate avarice and greed.
I wish, when Ross Douthat, David Brooks and Bret Stevens point out Trump's Hate-filled rhetoric against immigrants and brown skinned Americans, that they rethink some of their own xenophobia.
As a liberal, one of the key things I do is to put myself in someone else's shoes, not to consider their "feelings" but to consider what they have to deal with, on a daily basis, that I don't... and how our culture impacts them, not me. I'm doing fine.
Since when have Republicans espoused "worker-friendly conservative economics?" Douthat, go back to the Gilded Age that spawned J.P. Morgan, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller etc. with their anti-labor, wealth-is-everything, and their original trick-me-down economic views. Even a crash course in US history will do you good.
2
I truly loath Donald Trump, but I believe he was inevitable. In many ways his narcissism, cynicism, hypocrisy, greed are the products of post-modern American culture. He is Holden Caufield all grown up and in charge of the nation.
His politics are not ideological or partisan - they are personal and self-glorifying. He may have risen to power using the Republican Party, but it's a mere marriage of convenience. He lavishes his "bride" when she pleases him and smacks her around when she gets out of line. He doesn't care for her anymore than he cares for the actual women he uses, abuses, and throws away.
Trump embodies the worst of both American conservatism and liberalism: capitalism without compassion; power without principal; freedom without responsibility; sex without consequences; passion without reason.
I think America invited Donald Trump to run for president when it fell in love with politics as entertainment. Notice how little difference there is today between CNN's election night coverage and ESPN's sports broadcasts. They never ask which competitor is Good or Just or Right, but only cheer the winners and ridicule the losers, and then they tease tomorrow's broadcast with a preview of the next fight.
Trump was made for this.
The narrative of this article is quite problematic. First came the reference to a cultural miasma... There is something inherently biased and negative about the word ‘miasma’ that doesn’t feel right in the discussion and fails to add any value to the article. It’s either trying too hard not to be judged or sending the wrong message. Then the rest of the article reads like someone opened a box full of spiders and ordered them to weave tons of cobwebs over Trump to insulate him from at least one of the tragedies. More disturbingly, the narrative then has the unforgiving effect of dismissing the devastating consequences of hate speech. Hate towards X is hate and hate towards Y is hate, two heads: one trunk. And Yes hate speech is the problem and Yes guns are the problem. One last point: ‘dark psychic forces?’ It just doesn’t feel right to read a sentence like that in an article of two heartbreaking tragedies for the whole nation. Perhaps ok in a trivial movie review but not here.
"the idea that decelerating low-skilled immigration would benefit the common good"
The problem with this is that it is probably the 551st biggest problem facing the U.S., but number 3 on Mr. Douthat's list. Peel away the layers and it's just Trump's "invasion" in prettier lingo.
Adding “nihilism” to any sentence certainly does make it suddenly sound very deep, ironically, for it’s that nothingness that can never be exhausted.
As long as 30% Trump's white base is numb to his rhetoric which incites hate towards immigrants in general and Mexicans in particular along with deafening silence or blind support by Republican law makers out of fear of annoying Trump's base, these events are the making by Trump. There is blood on their hands from these 32 victims.
So very well said. Thank you, Mr. Douthat. And congratulations to the editor who chose the accompanying photograph.
1
This nihilist Trump has managed to avoid a lot of the sort of international nihilistic violence that was a hallmark of the last several administrations, including Nobel peace prize winner Obama (who said of himself that he turned out to be good at killing people.) Sadly, the nihilist Trump has not avoided all violence, what with neocon agitators around every corner demanding war, or at least abandonment of any and all peace initiatives, at every opportunity, on pain even of impeachment, while sanctimoniously expressing ritualistic, self serving, virtue signaling dismay at his failure to sufficiently embrace diversity cant.
Oh no you don't Mr. Douthat. I have great respect for your writings, but: Isolating trump as the deep dark problem afflicting us ignores years of republican and conservative demonizing of the other to the point of obstruction, violence and more.
Republicans and conservatives have led the fight against gays, women, immigration, health care, fair elections, climate change and gun control for so long, a human wreck like trump seems like the perfect gollum.
You made him, you own him. With his clay feet and lumbering destruction, trump does the bidding of conservative and republican think tanks and political operatives much better than a Tim Ryan, a Boehner, Gingrich, McConnell, McCarthy and all the rest of the amoral warriors who did so much to bring this country to this low point.
trump is a feature, not a bug. That he blows an air horn instead of a dog whistle doesn't change your collective message.
1
Dear Ross,
For me this is the best article that you have ever written. I think you are seeing the issues facing our country with a new clarity that gives me hope.
The Nihilist in Chief is also the Commander-in-Chief. As President he can, and is, doing much more damage to the country than the El Paso or Dayton killers, not just by being, in effect, the leader of the White Supremacists, but by all his other actions -- his attacks on the Justice Department, the intelligence agencies, the EPA, etc, etc. Perhaps Trump will turn out to be a Russian asset. Will anyone other than his most devoted followers be surprised?
Well, at least I learned about the world of Pornogrind by clicking on the link. I wonder if those heavy metal 4.0 youth who disavow their Dayton band partner's actions will vote? Who will try to convert their indignation at mass murder to indignation at the man who Douthat says is their role-model? I want to see a youth-wave vote in 2020, but it sure is complicated - there are only so many woke youth activists.
Other than that, it's the same Douthat/Brooks intellectual reframing with new categories that take no political responsibility, drivel.
I usually don't agree with Ross on many issues, because he often parks his thoughts within well-demarcated conservative boundaries. Within such boundaries, he has sometimes rationalized untenable and un-American actions. But this commentary differs, for he has really felt the pain and shame and has taken the courage to finger Trump, the cult leader, and the cultists, the shooters as conjoint culprits in the recent mass shooting. Both the inciter-in-chief and the executioner must share the guilt. I hope Ross will continue to step across the sacrosanct phantom lines of conservative beliefs and help Americans grapple with a sinister "moral vacuum" that has grown. True, demonizing "White Nationalism" just finger-wags. Understanding and addressing "White Nationalism", however, will help Americans find a way forward and also find a way backward to their laudable tradition, a truly conservative position.
It would be great if we could truly stop the rot in government that’s the result of corporate campaign contributions. The Republicans are blatant in their low bar strategies - appealing to bigotry, evangelical narrow mindedness, and so on. Unfortunately the Democrats are also far from blameless, as they act in reaction as well as to please corporate interests. The rest of us seem to be mere bit players in a dark play.
1
That you're consistently opposed to Trump is not at issue. That you correctly, and eloquently, point to the spiritual and moral void that is Trump is laudable. That you seem to suggest that gun control AND a commitment to moral and spiritual healing are equally important is also good to hear, for all sides (I would quibble that government is suited to the former and not the latter, which undercuts much of the Republican party's "thoughts and prayers and video games bad" mantra in the face of total silence on even modest gun control measures).
All this said, I can't help but think that your words are too, well, sophisticated. I understand them clearly, and most here do as well. Bravo. You know who most surely doesn't? Trump.
If this were a proper autocracy — and despite all our troubles, we remain very far from that — like Oceana, or the Third Reich, or Gilead, intellectuals like you and me and half of the readers here would still get the iron rat mask, the chamber, or the wall. Some sooner than others, but does it matter?
I'm not calling for any of this. What I'm saying is stop using your reason and intellect as a shield. The president respects neither, and he must be ousted. Write about plain solutions to rid of us Trump in plain language. Please.
1
Dark psychic forces indeed.
Lincoln appealed to the better angels in our nature.
Trump appeals to our worst, to our demons.
That's why Lincoln is one of our greatest Presidents. And why Trump will go down in history as our worst.
You are correct in pointing out that our country/culture has a moral, spiritual void. And that because of this, the two men in question, have something in common, not necessarily their ideology. That void has been filled by a narcissistic, materialistic view of life spread like wildfire by the internet and the entertainment industry with plenty of drugs, alcohol and an incendiary, hateful president igniting the blaze.
The “dark side” has always been around; we have all caught a glimpse of it in our own lives. But with no spiritual, ethical and moral guide or practice, it grows larger and darker in many. You’ve brought up the subject but need to go further in exploring this important subject.
Douthat is a gifted writer. I find his diagnosis of the "moral and spiritual problem" persuasive but, unfortunately, beside the point. The world is filled with impoverished souls. The difference in America is the guns.
It appears that Mr. Douthat just can't link Trump to white nationalism to to white supremacy to domestic terrorism.
He writes, for example, "life and radicalism and violence are all more complicated than that." Hey, Ross, I'll bet that if the El Paso terrorist were a Muslim, you would find it pretty darned easy to find that life and radicalism and violence are not at all complicated. Why can't you come to the same conclusion for white supremacist domestic terrorists?
Sorry, but the conservatism of the 1950s through the 1970s bears no resemblance to the conservatism today. Today's conservatism is rooted in guns, bigotry, racism, misogyny, fear, and an abiding hatred for "The Other" that is terrifying. To parse and nitpick and say it ain't so is well beyond disingenuous.
For once, Douthat has written a MOSTLY intelligent piece. But his assertion that the "meritocratic, faux-cosmopolitan elite has badly misgoverned the republic" is either delusional or in bad faith. His beloved GOP's incessant tax cuts have eaten away at the working class since Reagan. They have controlled the levers of power and set policy vastly more than the 'faux-cosmopolitan elite'.
"a war the left wants because it has decided that all conservatism can be reduced to white supremacy, and the right wants as a way of rebutting and rejecting that reductionism."
I don't say all conservatism is reduced to white supremacy, and that is a distortion of the left's position. I do say, however, that conservatives who continue to support and enable Trump are, to varying degrees, white supremacists. The GOP today under Trump's leadership is a white supremacist organization.
And I do say that even anti-Trump conservatives who for decades have ignored the demagoguery, lies, hatred, and dog-whistle racism which has made up the foundation of GOP support are complicit in Trump's rise to power and the state of the party and conservatism today. Trump isn't an aberration, but an accurate expression of who the GOP is today.
Trump is the symptom of a disease conservatives have been carefully nurturing for a long, long time.
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you”
“There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.”
F. Nietzsche
Rood D.: You just can't bring yourself to admit that Trump's continual anti-immigrant, anti-people of colour, anti women anti-gays, anti-liberal hate speech that supports "solutions" based on extreme violence is the problem. Nor can you bring yourself to admit that it is the Conservatives' opposition to sane gun laws that are part of the problem. You last paragraph give me some hope that you are beginning to admit the reality of American Conservatism.
In the aftermath of the 2016, a New York Times columnist said that the media messed up by overusing the term 'racist.'
He argued that scribblers had called every GOP candidate from Goldwater to Romney racist, and as a result, people tuned them out when a real racist emerged.
So, while Trump's bombast is indeed vile and destructive, other than tone, is it different than warning that Mitt Romney is a racist or George W. Bush is a Facist?
Trump did not suddenly make our society and politics coarse. Media has coarsened society and politics has followed. Trump is simply the intersection of the two.
1
I have often thought of Trump as a reflection of America’s negative traits all wrapped up in one person. Amazing really. Unfortunately he missed out on internalizing the country’s amazing qualities.
The question is are people willing to look at what he is reflecting back to them? Are they willing to acknowledge then examine what they see? And more importantly, are they willing to do something about their cultural slide into narcissism, egotism, greed, rage, to name a few?
Trump unfortunately is a personification of the stereotype, ‘ugly American’.
1
It's a function of living in a Post-industrialized society where the traditional roles of men have evaporated. On the one hand, this is awesome. On the other, it leaves the males who can't adapt in a tough place.
"Dark psychic forces"? Shall I run and get my light saber? The more we project our problems onto unknowable others or "dark forces," the more we refuse to look in the mirror and take responsibility for our world. We're in a difficult and challenging time. Economic inequality, climate change, rising authoritarianism worldwide--these are human-made problems. We have met the enemy and he is us.
2
It's so frightening and disillusioning that this bigot continues to enjoy so much support among Republicans. We're not the country I once thought we were. There ARE dark forces at work.
It's so disappointing that a prominent Republican (either a moderate or a conservative, other than William Weld) doesn't step up to challenge Trump in the primaries. James Comey, Governor Larry Hogan, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, for example. A candidate could raise $, as many Republicans and independents don't approve of Trump and want to return to decency. The candidate probably wouldn't get the nomination, but would be revered by many voters as having the courage to take him on. The candidate would set the stage for a future run. (And the Democrats would greatly benefit from having a Republican, from inside the tent, tamping down enthusiasm for Trump.)
Achieving such a paradigm is like whistling in the wind in today’s Republican Autocracy .
Self imposed by the way
An excellent piece, and a rare example of non-reactionary conservative thoughtfulness. This is almost absent from the Republican party now, and has been on the decline, at least since the rise of Reagan and the worship accorded to him.
Mr. Douthat says Trump 'participates in the cultural miasma that generates mass shooters.'.. He greatly downplays Trump's true role... Trump is a leader, not some mere participant.
..--However, Mr. Douthat generally equivocates, and dances around the edges..rather than say something directly.
-- You get the feeling he would like to say 'there are fine people on both sides', but he's afraid to hear himself say it..
3
"Cultural conservatives get a lot of grief when they respond to these massacres by citing moral and spiritual issues, rather than leaping straight to gun policy..."
As a liberal Democrat, I rarely find agreement with much in Mr. Douthat's columns. But I agree there are moral, spiritual, cultural roots to many of the issues inherent in these mass slaughters that just keep coming. Mr Douthat, like many other cultural conservatives, however, fails to acknowledge that the 'grief' they get comes precisely because these cultural conservatives seem to able to respond to these horrific events ONLY on the basis of moral or spiritual issues. Do they have any grasp of the time it will take to substantively change the moral or spiritual character of this nation sufficiently to curtail gun massacres? It would seem not.
I, for one, am not willing to wait. Gun controls present a sensible, feasible short-term starting point to begin concretely and substantively addressing the problem of angry young men murdering innocent people in large numbers. Once such laws are in place, I, and I'm sure many other liberals, would be happy to meet Mr. Douthat and his ilk to soul-search and solve the moral and spiritual ills of the nation. But to pretend we must address these existential issues before doing anything else to reduce the likelihood of these tragedies in the future is simply false.
4
In 2018, Small Arms Survey reported that there are over one billion small arms distributed globally, of which 857 million (about 85 percent) are in civilian hands.The Small Arms Survey stated that U.S. civilians alone account for 393 million (about 46 percent) of the worldwide total of civilian held firearms.
Even if we had a very fine President ( we do not ) and an effective Congress, years of inaction, leave us with 121 firearms for every 100 residents. And many angry young men fired up by Trump.
1
@kat perkins
Think about what you have said.
393 million guns in private hands, and how many have been used for terrorist acts?
This is something to be proud of. You don't punish 330 million good people for the acts of a very few.
And stop blaming this on Trump, it's lame. This sort of thing has been happening for decades.
3
Sending middle-class jobs out of the country and growth of gig economy.
Increasing wealthy inequality accompanied by mass media glorification of wealth.
Loss of affordable health care and social services.
Increasing mechanization in all aspects of American life.
Glorified violence and dehumanized sexuality in entertainment.
Together these trends have created a mass mental illness, a mass psychosis. Not surprising that the availability of firearms and President Trump have put the match to our flammable psychic material. It was inevitable, only a matter of time.
Gun control is only part of the remedy needed to cope with the madness we now confront. There may be no way back.
2
What do totalitarian leaders do but assert their influence and authority by masterfully manipulating human psychology. And Trump has shown himself to be expert at one thing. Messing with and inflaming a vulnerability that all people share. Their emotional life. There's nothing dark and macabre about this. It's a display of a utilitarian calculated process as mundane as those used by medicine wagon con men to sell a product in days of old. What we got today going on is demonstration of what's old is new again. Brought to America daily by the reality show master of ceremonies, aka The President The United States. What's dark and sinister isn't the method but the agenda Trump and crew are working on to bring about. Maneuvering America back into primitive times.
Thank you for having the guts to endorse Marianne Williamson's phrase, and concept, of psychic forces. We all know it's true; it's invisible and ineffable, and therefore disconcerting. Usually this promotes nervous giggles and mockery from the pundit class, terrified of appearing "weird". Yet every person alive has felt the wonderful and warm psychic energy of a person with the character of an angel, and also the unsettling discomfort and fear that follows a person with the character of a demon.
Both are highly contagious.
There's a reason that Star Wars is the most successful movie franchise in history, and arguably the epic story of our entire age. Hint: it ain't the lightsabers.
2
When Trump got unbelievably elected and the nightmare we can't seem to wake from began to play out, I opined that if I were still Catholic, I'd have to consider he was in league with the devil. But, I'm not, so I had to settle for Putin etal. Well Ross is still Catholic, and he's nibbling at the edges of that theory. I heartily sympathize.
I also heartily recommend watching the still ongoing series on Roger Ailles, The Loudest Voice. There's no shortage of demons in the 21st century conservative entertainment establishment.
1
As a Canadian, I see only one QUOTE general cultural miasma UNQUOTE, and I agree with the article writer Douthat that such miasma is extremely unhealthy. But the perpetrators are the Douthats... Forever ranting against an elected President, without any regard for facts. From my decades of following USA politics, I can only conclude the USA Left wants to be in power, and does NOT tolerate -- not even remotely -- any opposite thought or position. Whatever opposes the Douthats is demonized.
Mr. Douthat raises interesting points, even though he downplays Trump's direct connection to the ideologies driving the white supremacist terrorists responsible for the bulk of domestic terror incidents over the last 25 years.
His statement "the personal commonalities between the shooters are clearly more important than the political ones" is an unsubstantiated assertion.
And to agree with "ideas that Trump has championed — the idea of a more populist and worker-friendly conservative economics, the idea of a foreign policy with a more realpolitik and anti-interventionist spirit, the idea that decelerating low-skilled immigration would benefit the common good, the idea that our meritocratic, faux-cosmopolitan elite has badly misgoverned the republic" is to ignore that to Trump these were only words and his governing principle has been, simply, "what's in it for me?"
7
I had a problem with this statement: "Here I would dissent, mildly, from the desire to tell a mostly ideological story in the aftermath of El Paso, and declare war on “white nationalism” — a war the left wants because it has decided that all conservatism can be reduced to white supremacy" What I at least have a problem with is how conservatism has been so tolerant of white supremacy for so long. Every conservative president in my lifetime has at least given some nod to white supremacy, Trump is just more blatent about it.
5
Well said, Mr Douthat. Come at the problem from all sides: moral, spiritual, regulatory, psychological, social. Then and only then do we make progress.
Conservatism is terrorizing the US
Conservatives don’t want to pay any taxes, don’t want to maintain infrastructure, don’t want workers to have any rights and don’t want any entity to interfere with their ability to exploit the public to earn higher profits.
To attain these goals they have used Fox News, talk radio and Sinclair to divide the nation, sow fears and promote violence. Remember when Trump said there could be a second amendment solution to Hillary Clinton and Republicans were silent? How is that conservative?
14
Douthat here lays claim to some things that in truth are his opposition:
"the idea of a more populist and worker-friendly conservative economics, the idea of a foreign policy with a more realpolitik and anti-interventionist spirit, . . . the idea that our meritocratic, faux-cosmopolitan elite has badly misgoverned the republic."
Those are things that Trump lied about, promised but has done the opposite of. Conservatives overall have played at that long before Trump.
It was conservatives, both Republican and triangulating Democrats, who gave us this extreme need for "a more populist and worker-friendly conservative economics," who started and supported the wars from which we need "a more realpolitik and anti-interventionist spirit," who gave us the elite-serving misgovernment that has led to such wide dissatisfaction.
Now they can't just blame it on Trump, while they mean to go on doing the same things under the banner "we are not Trump."
That includes both Republicans and self-proclaimed "moderates" who only want to do the same things with a D instead of an R after the name of the person elected -- just let the in-group be their own.
4
What evidence is there that “decelerating” low-skilled immigration fosters the common good?
Prioritizing wealthy immigrants, or those who have already benefitted from higher education, does not expand the gifts of prosperity and security to greater numbers of people.
And when we refer to measure as “merit-based,” we are giving moral weight characteristics that are, at best, ethically neutral—and missing out on the gifts brought by people who arrive—as many of our ancestors did—with nothing but a willingness to work in rough and menial jobs,often for length of their lives, so their children thrive
3
I have no problem with immigration but the so called meritocracy of workers is for one goal only and that is to depress wages and have nearly slave like labor.
A person in the US working IT on sponsorship is dependent on the employers good will to remain. This yields the result of them being unable to fight for higher wages for fear of receiving deportation papers.
This is also true of undocumented workers. The irony is the one way to help undocumented is to legalize their work and give them a voice. They live next door and wages would rise if we protected them which would yield greater access to more groups of people.
America also failed to raise democratic institutions in countries that we trade with. We claimed capitalism as being democracy when they are not the same. Capitalism doesn’t promote a democratic republic and actually undermines it if left unrestrained. When our corporations went to China they kept unions out of China. They undermined workers rights. They enabled China of today.
Now the America rust belt has massive grievance of all these deaths by a thousand cuts and has moved towards extremism and demonization of all things outside their in group. They won’t list to our data and won’t use social policy to blunt the effects of globalization.
Republicans could have embraced these things to maintain our society. They could have embraced the Hispanic population. They could have embraced diversity. They could have socialized job loses.
I see a lot of literary and archetypal comparisons in the comments. Another to consider: Mr. Dark, of Ray Bradbury's "Something Wicked This Way Comes," who seems have the power to grant citizens' secret desires but in reality lives off the life force of those he enslaves.
1
In addition to what Ross is saying, I also fear fanaticism of all types and political stripes. Historically we know about right wing, left wing, nationalistic, religious, terrorism of all types and kinds.
Apparently the Dayton shooter admired Bernie and Liz Warren.
They frighten me also. The irrational flailing of the arms, the physicality of it. The preaching of hatred of the 1%, the insurance company employees, the pharmaceutical employees.
Some of the things said by Omar, Tlaib, the Squad, are sometimes fanatical, over the wall.
1
Thanks for pointing that out. I never realized how threatening the “flailing of the arms” and discussion of extreme wealth inequality really is. Far more dangerous than a demented Trump supporter with an AR15 massacring people a synagogue or a church or a Walmart. Let’s focus on the real threat: Elizabeth Warren flailing her arms.
Mr Douthat,
Your article does not mention the Vice President anywhere, but I think that your thesis would also apply to the individual who holds that office.
Behind the VP's espoused beliefs of "family values" exists a much darker belief in a divinely-prophesied apocalypse.
It is the same ideology that the MAGA hat-wearing Rev. Jim Baker uses to sell five gallon buckets of ravioli to doomsday preppers.
It is the same ideology twisted up in the "Prosperity gospel" of Joel Osteen.
It is the same ideology of Franklin Graham (who states that God has already done a universal background check on humanity, so why would our government need one?).
Perhaps this is how the Religious Right can ignore such un-Christian behavior displayed by the Commander in Chief - he serves as an ends to their means.
7
Most of what Mr. Douthat writes in this op-ed makes sense and resonates with the crisis in which we are enmeshed. I wonder whether his reference to a "more worker-friendly conservative economics" includes recognizing the importance unions have had in the growth of the US.
5
Thank you, Ross. Your column begins to uncover the root cause for many of the systemic problems that plague our country and, I suspect, the world we live in. The question now is how do we as a community of human beings overcome the darkness of nihilism? For me its a matter of taking it one step at a time and performing my day-in and day-out activities with kindness. Maybe.
3
This column focuses only on the motive for violence, not the means. There is nothing here about weapons becoming more powerful, and that plays into the right-wing mantra that "guns don't kill people." They have and they will, until we restrict access to them.
15
I noticed a few "What you talkin' bout Ross?" comments here.
Being a progressive, I don't really understand what being a conservative means and reading Ross's article doesn't help a bit. If it means letting the rich run roughshod over We The People and the planet I don't see the point.
We are at a dangerous point in our time on earth. We are really screwing it up.
14
Mr. Douthat praises President Trump’s pre-election rhetoric about standing up for the common person, despite the evidence that he meant none of it. While Candidate Trump may have pretended to champion the working class, his every action has contradicted that position. What good may come of his Presidency? None for the environment, none for education, none for National Parks, none for healthcare, and probably none for the Stock Market. What was said in 2016 has been proven to be situational veneer.
8
Please give an example of work-friendly policies Trump has proposed, much less sent to Congress?
15
Many of the jobs that we’ve added are lower paid’ and many firms have found ways to cut the the benefits of being a productive employee. For the average worker pay scales are stagnant.
2
America, you and your guns . . . From the perspective of a citizen of a country where gun ownership is considered weird, or needless, or usually restricted to hunters and rural residents, I look south of the border and can help but think that Americans arming themselves to the teeth is not so much a result of historical forces -- all that infantile blather about the right to bear arms, etc. -- but the underlying fear and dread Americans feel of living in the society they have created.
22
Taiwan (The Republic of China) prohibits private possession of guns and ammo. Homicide by a firearm is a rare and odd event. Homicides are also minuscule, however tragic.
5
Believe me...Gun ownership seems weird to this middle-aged American male...I’ve never seen a privately-owned firearm nor have I heard ANYONE articulate a desire to purchase a gun...I don’t know who these folks are that want these dangerous items in their homes...
1
I disagree that conservatism can be reduced to white supremacy. Rather, I think that there is not enough support for the rest of the Conservative agenda without the support of the white supremecists. If Republicans were to reject that faction, they would find themselves perpetually a minority party.
9
We live in an immediate-gratification narcissistic society personified by endless selfies on Instagram or Facebook. The tried and true conservative virtues- hard work, moral rectitude, community, don’t sell anymore in our fast food, shallow-thinking society. There has to be a government solution for all our problems because we allow all our problems to reach crisis proportions. For Republicans, there has to be a new phase beyond the bankrupted trickle-down economics cloaked in cultural resentment issues. This is what gave us Trump. As a Democrat, I am eager, even desperate, to see the Republican Party evolve past this nihilistic vacuum it finds itself in now.
10
I'd welcome Mr. Douthat's thoughts on what American conservatism since 1968 has ever been else than a mixture of (sometimes paternalist, sometimes feral) racism, anti-feminism and 100% pro-business/anti-labor politics, shoddily stitched together with patches of faux patriotism and moralistic homilies about God and healthy families (the ones destroyed by rampant global capitalism's corrosive force). Trump isn't the anti-thesis of American conservatism, he is its nihilistic, self-serving fulfillment.
14
@T. Clark
Excellently said.
The mass shootings actually help the republican party and the political dominance by hiding the endemic structural violence inherent to the US society.
The highest violent crime rate in the industrialized world and the highest incarceration rate by 8 times the European average. Almost 1 % of all US citizens are in jail.
The mass shooting make the public think that violence is a crazy exceptional occurence ,even may be related to the individual mental health problem, when the state of violence in the USA is caused by the constant economic and social pressure on the masses resulting in uncivil behaviors.
It is at this price that the capitalist system thrives.
The mass shootings are actually good at hiding the situation of normal excessive violence and repression .
6
When people say they need a gun to *protect* themselves what are they really saying?
We live in a media and political culture where fear is promoted and stoked. When I reflect on my life I’ve never been in a situation where the solution was to kill another person. Have I felt bodily fear, yes, usually having to do with cars. Have I felt fortunate at times to have a largish dog with me while out walking? Yes. Does the culture sometimes break through my vulnerabilities and I feel very inadequate? Yes. Can we please reflect on what are actual lives are comprised of not what the binary media is telling us our lives are like. Can we please identify what is really going on?
Isn’t white nationalism not that very different from extreme Islamic jihadism? Don’t they basically stem from the same source? Lack of opportunity for a fulfilling life, a lack of personal agency, isolation, and fear.
The fact that in THIS country, with all its wealth, people feel a primordial need to lethally *protect* themselves seems crazy! CRAZY! The fact that some media-caught segment of the population feels so viscerally threatened by the “Other” speaks to a deep depravity that needs some deep healing if we want to get on with the good stuff of life.
We live in a culture of fear. Let’s identify it and then let’s change it. And let’s stop supporting politicians, organizations, and other cultural institutions and leaders who promote a doctrine of fear, entitlement, and dominance.
10
It's good to see Ross Douthat quoting Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson's assessment of the current feel of America as one swirling with a "dark psychic force." True enough, but the problem is that Douthat ascribes it to Trump, as if Trump is the source of it, which is false.
Every single human being, every one of us, has within us the capacity to be taken captive by this dark, psychic force. It is part of our instinctual human nature to want to respond to threats, real or imagined, with sneers, jeers, spears, stones, fists and clubs. Trump's success at channeling and unleashing this dark psychic force has been made possible by our ignorance of this psychic phenomenon.
When Clinton called Trump supporters "deplorables," she was manifesting this dark, psychic force. When Obama laughed about sending drones to kill his daughters potential suitors, he was manifesting this dark psychic force. When Bush 45 made his humorous little video skit in the Oval Office showing "no weapons of mass destruction here," he was channeling this force. When Reagan spoke of an "Evil Empire," he was channeling this dark, force.
Whenever people believe that 'evil' is outside themselves, they are corrupted. Evil is not "out there," it is potentially everywhere, even inside us. Knowledge of this truth is what keeps us humble and helps us reach out to people in pain. Pain, unattended and uncared for, is what ultimately produces the "dark psychic force."
1
You're right that this is a moral and spiritual crisis. Putting aside the obvious fact that we shouldn't allow anyone to own military weapons, we should raise child abuse to the level of national crisis. Why are so many of our boys growing up hopeless and direction-less? It's not just popular culture and narcissism. Many of these boys are neglected or abused. They are just a few years from being little kids. We should ask what is going wrong in WHITE families, since that is where these boys are being raised. Is religion the answer, as Ross seems to suggest? Certainly not evangelical Christianity, since most of these people support Trump, a man with no soul and no goodness.
4
Gun rights advocates never fail to point out the necessity of individual firearms ownership as a bulwark against a tyrannical government. This neatly ties in with the heroic narrative of the American Revolution but makes little sense because a tyrannical government couldn't be stopped in its tracks with small arms. In reality, we have been tolerating a monumental waste of human life because we want to remain true to the spirit of the Revolution.
Deranged, angry, and violent people are everywhere in the world, but their means to destroy their fellow humans is more limited because they are not entitled to possess guns. Only here do we celebrate our collective right to destroy ourselves.
5
Perhaps.
But one aspect of modern culture that hasn’t been talked about enough is the sub-text of violent solutions to seemingly intractable problems.
Trump often he either overtly supports or gives winking acceptance to such solutions - starting from his campaign where he mentioned “2nd Amendment” solutions to a Clinton victory, to chants of “Lock her up” to “Only in the Panhandle...” and “Send them back.”.
What was unthinkable now has the informal stamp of approval from Trump.
3
There may be a lot of factors of mass shootings, some of which we may not even know. But whatever they are they all have one thing in common, high powered guns.
3
Out of curiosity I followed the "zest for demonization" link which, it turns out, goes to a conservative web site. In the article that author states: "There are things worse than a president who is radically pro-abortion, opposed to religious liberty, and favoring open borders. " .... WHAT?! What Democratic candidate, exactly, does this describe? This neatly sums up what is wrong with our system. ONE side - the right - has created a ridiculous, over-the-top, completely false representation of the other. It is literally impossible to have any kind of discussion with these people because they start from an absurd and disconnected from reality perspective. How about some truth and facts, righties, just for something different?
6
Interesting that everyone is overlooking the fact that the Dayton shooter was an avowed socialist and supporter of Elizabeth Warren. His social media threatened acts of violence against both Republicans and moderate Democrats. Evil and hate are not defined by ideology, but by the individual who holds such views.
3
Look carefully. Ross acknowledges those connections on both sides, then refutes them.
That Trump rally where a comment was shouted from the audience to Trump pretty much sums up what rhetoric means. I'm not going to say what was said, but if your interested it's on any major network.
What's even more interesting is in that clip there's a Hispanic woman behind him who looks dismayed and shocked by the situation. The other part of the clip is that contrasted to the Hispanic woman's dismay there was a white woman grinning ear to ear and clapping her hands in delight. It was like a movie. But real life. I wonder what that white woman was thinking, perhaps she didn't hear the comment and was just cheering for the sake of it. Or perhaps she did and she agreed that was a plausible way to solve our immigration problem. Which is profound, because standing a few people over was the Hispanic woman. I mean you can't make this up. Both are Americans at the same rally; one is dismayed that she too has brown skin and she is the target of that comment and a overjoyed white woman who is participant in the comment. That is the problem we have in this country. The white woman probably would say she isn't a racist if confronted. But she cheered for violence against a brown skinned immigrants. Right next to a Hispanic lady at the same rally! I'm at a loss..
Russ, I think it's the end times. Dogs and cats falling from the sky type stuff. I know your a ardent Catholic so you know what that means. Lock the doors, hide the children, turn off youtube.
The GOP has allowed Trump to spill toxic sticky tar on everything. And now we have to try to clean it up and get it back in the bottle. This will not be an easy task. I find the GOP loathsome for allowing Trump to do whatever he wants with zero accountability. The lack of basic integrity is astounding.
6
I disagree that inside Trump is a void. A void is empty, neutral. What Michael D'Antonio called Trump's "bottomless pit of need" is hardly neutral. It's a breeding ground for all manner of inhumane ideas.
EVERYone should have noticed Trump's violent impulses when he said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and wouldn't lose any voters, okay?” EVERYone should have feared the motivations of a man who encourages police officers to be rough with arrestees.
Trump's perverted use of his office, his promotion of violent speech, the fact that his own words have appeared in at least two web-posted screeds of mass-murderers (Christchurch, El Paso), and (not counting the bumpstock ban) his complete inaction on gun restrictions suggest that certain misguided individuals see themselves as the foot-soldiers carrying out the wishes of people like him.
7
You can agonize about the moral and spiritual voids of mass shooters ad infinitum in your columns, but let's get technocratic and make it harder for them to get assault weapons. You're just placing one more obstacle in the way of doing something effective to address this blight.
6
"White supremacists, like their Islamist counterparts, explicitly seek to use violence to create a climate of fear and chaos that can then be exploited to reshape society in their own image."
This is a quote from a recent Times op-ed column by Ali Soufan, a former FBI counterterrorism agent for 25 years, who compares the methods of domestic terrorists in America today to those of Al Qaeda jihadis in the 1990s. You should read his column. It is a stark warning. Although the moral and spiritual emptiness of President Trump is apparent, it does not explain or justify the muted or downright ridiculous responses of "conservatives" regarding the continued violent assaults by domestic terrorists against American citizens. Why do they continue to ignore such pre-meditated acts of mass murder, while throwing up obstacles to any attempts by Congress or law-enforcement agencies to address the problem? Do conservatives actually welcome the resulting climate of fear and chaos as a useful prelude to their right-wing political agenda? Why evade the issues by trying to ascribe the continuing violence to some vague "cultural miasma," or mental illness, or video games?
2
Unspoken here is that anyone who cared to look could see the narcissism, the nihilism, all of the "isms" that make up the creature that is Trump could see it well before the first votes were cast in '16. Bragging of sexually assaulting women, suggesting to his base that a "2nd Amendment person" could contain the damage of a Hillary victory by a year or two , presumably with a bullet, left no doubt whatsoever what he was. The real villains are not the damaged "failsons" or presumptive 2nd Amendment shooters but the clergy and big-moneyed manipulators, kings of their own over-blown universes, who took so many of the damaged by the hand and led them into the voting booths. Then the real damage was done.
Brilliant column. In one of his poems, Wallace Stevens refers, memorably, to the “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Trump is the “nothing that is.” He represents a profound and terrifying emptiness, a black hole into which America is being drawn.
1
Ross, Brilliant but mistaken analysis. Trump is an egomaniac but not a nihilist. You can see this from how well his children are brought up. I am sure he loves this country and everyone in it. His ego is so large because it encompasses everyone and everything in America. His braggadocio and conceitedness is eminently American and worthy of its president. He is proud of being American. Nay, in some sense he is proud to be America, so grand is his conceit! He reminds me of that caricature of the American people from WWII government bond selling posters, Uncle Sam. He understands to the depths of his guts that America’s greatness comes from liberty. That’s what has made him a great businessman. That’s what has made his domestic policies largely successful so far. Now, he has been called upon to save his America, an America that had been so much like him. He is for many of us the last best hope. I hope you will reconsider your assessment.
2
Douthat's comments are all well & good, but to begin to do something about these awful shootings we must absolutely begin to take ban and confiscate assault weapons and all of the accoutrements of death (large capacity clips, bump stocks etc) that a nihilist can use to kill many people quickly. This is at at least a beginning. We can philosophize about nihilism later.
3
Mr. Douthat, you state that "To analyze Trump is to discover only bottomless appetite and need, and to carve at him is like carving at an online troll: The only thing to discover is the void." Tony Schwartz, the author of the the "Art of the Deal" has been saying that all along for years. Why don't people wake up? This is no new revelation. We are now stuck with this president. If he is reelected, it's because people refuse to see what Trump really is: a worthless excuse for a human being who does not deserve the most powerful position in the world.
2
Ross complains that “[c]ultural conservatives get a lot of grief when they respond to these massacres by citing moral and spiritual issues, rather than leaping straight to gun policy.” Two problems.
First, it violates Occam’s razor (when there exist multiple explanations for something, the one that requires the least speculation is usually correct). All explanations for mass killings in the U.S. --violent society, racial divisions, no mental health care -- have been debunked. Except one; the “astronomical number of guns.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/world/americas/mass-shootings-us-international.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
Second, spare us the lecture that violence results from of the dismal state of our spirituality. For Ross that would mean a lack of religious spirituality. There is nothing in the cultural history of our species more responsible for hatred, violence and intolerance than the “absolutist refusal of monotheistic religions to tolerate different viewpoints about the cosmos.” “The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, Jeremy Lent, at 243.
Indeed, when Ross points to the “late-modern anti-culture . . . internet accelerated dissolution of normal human bonds” just maybe much of that anti-culture sentiment is driven by our need to rid ourselves of the 2000 years of dehumanizing religious intolerance – particularly towards women -- and rid ourselves of the false (i.e. not normal) human bonds religion has created.
1
Don’t blame Trump only. Both Democrat and Republican are responsible for the current situation.
1
There are many people who share Trump's views. We do not go out and demonstrate in the streets or shoot up Malls. but we will be showing up at election time to vote for him.
Not sure about the 'dark psychic forces' but in listening to Trump read off the teleprompter yesterday, he came off as a child robotically attempting to address a class of fourth grade students. He did not invest in anything he was saying, there was no emphasis on empathy, no moral guidelines espoused. He was just giving lip service to tragedy. It's obvious he didn't believe what he was ordered to say yesterday, you can tell he wasn't up to it. He would have wanted to Twitter his way out of it. He is incapable of showing genuine sympathy. He has a vacuum where his heart should be. The advent of Artificial Intelligence? Just look in the White House - it's already arrived.
Good description of that woeful performance. I thought he looked like a POW forced to read a confession of his atrocities. Reminded me of the Pueblo - but he just needed to make the white power symbol.
Ronald Reagan spoke in code. Donald Trump doesn't. Which is worse? I prefer the bigotry to be out in the open so that the entire nation knows with what it is dealing. Conservative code permitted the Republicans to pretend that they were part of a nice, moral, "spiritual" political movement. Donald Trump ripped the mask off that. Code is for sissies. By the way, the pornogrinder is no more nihilistic than a conservative who cuts food stamps when the unemployment rate is 7.5%.
1
At this point it's just not important whether there are some aspects of Trump's ideas that you agree with. When leadership is evil, terrible things ensue. Germany had many genuine problems before the Nazis took power, and some of their objections and efforts to counter those problems could be reasonably supported. And on the ashes of WWII, modern Germany has built a country and an ethos that have many positives. The fact that something positive could finally by constructed doesn't change that fact that the whole era was a catastrophe for Germany and the world. I suppose we can take comfort in not heading right now toward our Battle of Berlin, but there is no mistaking that we are led by evil, we are on a destructive path that damages us and others around the world every day, and no amount of talk about the genuine problems that Trump has objected to will ever make his rule a net positive.
1
Donald showed the kind of man he would be in his later life when he was in his early 20s and pretended to have a problem with his foot in order to get out of service in the war in Vietnam.
It didn't bother him that he was lying to our government; he was afraid that he might be hurt. He was (and still is) a coward.
No one can claim that Donald hasn't lied his way through life, as we know from so many, many untruthful things he has said which have been reported in the NYT, or which he has claimed on television. He's a man who isn't afraid to lie because he knows that he has learned to tell his lies so that most people are hoodwinked.
We need an honest president, one who cares for all Americans and isn't out to turn our government into his own personal piggy bank. We also need a president whom we can believe, someone like our former president.
1
Douthat, you are correct in voicing the evil that Donald is. He doesn’t care one iota about working class folks. I ask you, Ross, what have the Republicans/Conservatives done for working class Americans?! Zilch!
Republicans/Conservatives have long championed racism, in a veiled way and not so veiled: gerrymandering and voter suppression. Ross, where have YOU been?!
Repare not inclusive, and as a fellow Catholic, Republicans do not and have never cared about Social Justice issues! Once, again you criticized Liberals but it’s Liberals that most closely adhere to the Social Justice teachings of the RCC!
1
Which is why our next President should be Pence. With a strong religious and moral foundation. Faithful to his one and only wife.
Or Rubio, with the same merits.
In 2016 neither you nor David Brooks embraced Donald Trump. You both knew he was amoral. You both knew he was racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, and was toxically narcissistic. Yet both of you failed to endorse Hillary Clinton for President. There were no other choices in November of that year. By failing to endorse Clinton, it was a tantamount endorsement of Trump. It was Party over conscience. Since that night, that has been the mantra of the Republican Party which has failed in every instance to rebuke this vile man we have as President. Not at Charlottesville, not when immigrant families were and are still being torn apart at the border, and not when Trump spewed repugnant racist remarks about Black members of Congress just this past week. Trump stating that "bigotry has to stop in this country" was revolting in its hypocrisy. There were no calls for new gun control measures courtesy of the NRA yet again.
Why would we not "leap straight to gun policy"? Citizens in every country which has enacted sensible gun control measures are subject to the same input from video games, TV shows, and the internet. It is gun control laws which have absolutely made a difference in mass killings, spiritual problems aside.
Even after the mass killings spurred on by Trump's racist rants, his amoral behavior, and his lack of ability to effectively govern, the Republican Party will support Trump in 2020. Party over conscience. Votes over morality. Power over decency.
1
Ross can't face the reality that the ultimate cause of these slaughters is conservatism itself.
A conservatism that at its core has fought back against change, fought to "win" the culture (although the culture can never be "won"). A conservatism that has fought against changes in modern popular music introduced by people of color. A conservatism that has fought against the acceptance of equal rights for gay people. A conservatism that has fought against interracial marriage. A conservatism that has fought against the country turning more racially brown due to immigration.
And now thanks to the Republican party controlling our governments across the states, and with its leader in Trump inspiring violence, the struggle for conservatives has turned violent. What they cannot win democratically they now will try to win by force.
Ross has the nerve to write a column like this and never mention the impact of having millions of guns freely floating around the society. Or the nerve to ignore the fact tat Republicans have resisted all attempts at passing meaningful gun regulation.
In the end, Ross reveals himself as part of the problem with his attempt at equating the gun slaughters as coming from both liberals and conservatives. That is absurd, just ask the FBI. The slaughters will continue and get worse until the Democrats take complete control of our governments and once and for all discredit the conservative movement for what it has become, violently un-American.
2
This is the first time that one if the shooters is labeled as kind of “atheist-socialist”. The problem with facile labeling is that it obscures and conflates the issue. Both are white nationalists, period.
Mr. Douthat,
I agree with what you wrote and would add that when you look at the hole you also find republican/conservative obstructionism and “just say no” unwillingness to pass any legislation that doesn’t conform to their radical agenda.
Why does Ross Douthat want to argue away the obvious point that the "dark psychic force" is heavily composed of racism? Trump doesn't get a "rush" of cable-news coverage of his tweets because he's rich and famous. He gets it because he's a rich and famous white man who is an aggressive and unapologetic racist, and who says, as his supporters say over and over and over, "what we're thinking."
Douthat's denialism, alas, is one feature of the dark psychic force.
A new, kinder, gentler conservatism? Please... Let’s look at what the Republican Party actually does: passes tax cuts for their plutocrat overlords, shreds the social safety net, destroys the EPA, refuses to raise the minimum wage, denies climate change as the planet cooks itself, packs the federal courts with pro-business judges, defends the sale of any and all weaponry, denies women the right to control their own bodies, and aids and abets the most monstrous president in our history. Trump is the symptom, the Republican Party is the disease.
3
Not just Trump! Take a close look Ross and you will see the nihilistic, amoral Republican party and their fellow travelers staring back at you. Nothing changes until Republicans are decimated, driven from office and forced to re build a decent, humane and honest conservative party.
3
I see many eloquent phrases here that say the president's sick character (that is, his mental illness), which features his need for glory, is a sort of role model for other "empty" souls. That's true as a peripheral factor. Sick and hate- and revenge-consumed youngsters -- cultivated in families -- have learned that you can shoot lots of people at a time, not just one or two. But these shooters were already disturbed and being "emptied" in their homes long before they took to the malls, nightclubs and festivals. They were already consumed with a sense of emotional injustice before they watched or attended a Trump rally. Intangible as it will seem, there needs to be as much a focus on fathers of sons, on domestic violence, as on guns and the immoral ether that surrounds us.
"...a war the left wants because it has decided that all conservatism can be reduced to white supremacy."
As an anti-Trump Progressive Democrat, I now understand that that we cannot reduce things to that level of simplicity. For decades, I frequently declared in arguments that "all Republicans are Nazis." However, after a newspaper survey found that a small percentage of House and Senate Republicans rebuked Trump for his post-Charlottesville comments, while most people were appropriately upset at the anemic reaction from the GOP, I was awakened that not "all" Republicans are Nazis. While most Republican lawmakers were clearly fearful of alienated the pro-Nazis in their base, it was not party-universal.
Still, an overwhelming majority complicity with Nazi-praising is pretty pathetic, and why the small percentage that rebuked Trump would want to be part of a majority hate party is inexplicable to me. It appears that today, the percentage of Republican complicity and silence is now even higher.
The seeds of this hatefest escalation in the GOP are decades old. I see no sign or scenario where decency will take hold of that party. I hate to be reductionist, but perhaps Mr Douthat should examine if there is anything basic in the conservative GOP agenda that has led them here.
1
Poor Ross, he can't just come out and condemn trump for his racism. He always as to include criticism of the left even though they haven't added to the problem. Come on Ross, stand up and be a man.
1
There’s nothing more scary to me than a person with little emotional intelligence who is bombarded by endless “end of the world” nonsense from the always complaining right wing.
What enables Trump is the continued complicity of the Republican Party which truly has become a death cult and will surely be judged harshly by history.
Mr Douthat:
If you want to find a cause for what's going on, simply find the nearest mirror and take a good look. What you will see is an example of what we call the media, and let's include Facebook and Twitter in this conversation.
Start with the miasma of the President, he has said "there's no such think as bad publicity", and it's been repeated by his adult children.
The President craves attention, he doesn't care what he says as long as it gets media coverage. It's not his fault if a bunch of losers see the world as a place where they have been deprived of their God given rights to wealth, fame, etc.
If the Times really believed its motto "All the news that's fit to print." the current President would get about 4 inches in two columns on the upper left corner. Most of it would be a list of the time he spends watching "Fox and Friends". Some would be about golf and the majority would be a list of his bloviating rants of hatred for various people.
The people who do these mass killings have the same mental image as does the President - always right, suppressed by the minorities, ignored by women (unless you pay them - and even then once in a while), and targeted by society as failures.
Take away the big headlines, talk about the victims without naming or mentioning the perpetrator. Start testing for anti social tendencies at the high school level and incarcerate those leaning toward violence.
Reagan closed the insane asylums, it's time to reopen them!