On November 8, 2016, in the wake of Donald Trump’s first triumph, I wrote “It is, appropriately enough, gray and wet in Washington, DC this morning. Brilliant sunshine would be almost more irony than one could bear.” Today, we are not so lucky.
What I had to say in my earlier post, which bore the title “Finger-Pointing in the Dark: The Rout of Neo-Liberalism”, holds up distressingly well in the wake of the Biden Interlude, poor Joe doing his best but unwittingly leading us into disaster on many occasions, most particularly on immigration, though it’s doubtful that any Democratic president could have done much better, because you can only lead a party where it wants to go.
I have always felt that politicians only learn from failure. However calculating they are, politicians are, in the end, driven by passion—passion for office, if nothing else—and are immune to argument unless they experience the consequences of argument’s failure. Neoliberalism “failed” under Obama, even though I very much remain a neoliberal myself. Elizabeth Warren/Bernie Sanders paleoliberalism failed under Joe Biden—and I say, good riddance!—though, sadly, Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy—far saner than Obama’s or Biden’s—was never tried. Instead, the Wilsonian self-righteousness of Hillary Clinton et al. prevailed—prevailed and failed. Whether we will ever learn the “right” lessons—thanks to the continuing dominance of my bête noire of bêtes noires, the military intellectual complex, aka “the Blob”—remains to be seen.
In my 2016 post, I wrote that I considered changing the name of this blog to “A Journal of the Plague Years”. Well, I stuck with “Literature R Us”, but for the substack iteration I added the tag as subtext. How right I was to do so. The erstwhile “greatest nation in the world” has a consciously selected as its leader its greatest criminal. As I’ve been predicting, when all this is “through”, as I insist on believing it will be, we will be a very different nation from the one we have been.
