We have all been watching Trump’s disruptive political urges and his crazed socio-cultural ideas for over a decade now (starting with his campaign of denying President Obama’s birthright citizenship). It should be very clear that while Trump sells a false image of “greatness” in America’s past, his strong personal preference is AGAINST any kind of “normalcy” in American life (a “normalcy” first voiced by Warren Harding in 1920 and visually represented by Norman Rockwell’s artistic skill in projecting positive stereotypes for American democracy and community, images which did a lot of work in past decades in establishing the idea, mythologized by the media, that there was some real type of “normal” American life which the vast majority of Americans shared, or at least aspired to share).
It has also become quite clear that Trump has very little idea of the concept of “ Competence” as a public virtue; he cannot seem to recognize the daily competence that hundreds of millions of Americans strive for in their daily jobs, he does not recognize competence (or any other virtue) in people or institutions he has come to hate, and he does not actively seek or value general competence in the individuals he appoints to government positions or the people he hires for his own projects.
In November 2024, the amazingly terrible Trump appointments for major Cabinet positions have been interpreted in many ways.
I see them as the culmination of a long campaign of lies and disinformation that has been successfully waged, specifically to disrupt and degrade American society and politics, to poison our national conversation with the idea that “there is no objective truth, scientists are corrupt liars just like we are.”
It is not clear what the motives of the shadowy voices, the obnoxious bots, and the conspiratorial whisperers have been in this campaign that has taken over the internet and minds of 30-40% of Americans. To the extent that the military-intelligence units of the Russian state have joined in this campaign, it has been specifically meant to destroy American social, business and governmental power and reduce American influence in the world, and our ability to support the victims of Russian aggression – which now includes nearly all of the states bordering Russia in addition to their unjustified, war-crime-ridden invasion of Ukraine.
Get very ready, lace up your boots, gather your supplies and prepare for hard times, as this new Trump administration gets going there is never again going to be any appearances of “normality” in our daily lives, nor any demonstration of competent government administration in any part of America’s former democracy.
The appointment of Matt Gaetz as Attorney General, who has subsequently withdrawn his name, should be seen in my opinion as a direct attack on the concept of “The Rule of Law,” as opposed to the “Rule of Man” that dictators and monarchs so much prefer. His replacement is a Trump-loyalist Florida Republican politician (i.e. capable of any sort of vote or statement necessary to advance the Republican party’s needs of that moment). She at least has the formal qualification of having served as a state Attorney General, and since I am arguing in favor of competence here, I’ll say that’s a step in the direction of recognizing the importance of the appearance of competence that deserves a bit of mild applause – even if we shouldn’t expect her to resist any orders from her President.
The appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Welfare is a direct attack on the concept of “public health” as something that competent government should be concerned about. The concept of “public health” was built and established in America by Americans trying to do better for other Americans, in the first half of the 20th Century, and was established deeply into state and local governments with the firm support of Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower, who clearly saw the benefit of a population that received and was urged to follow the best health advisories.
Even further, the Kennedy appointment is a direct attack on the concept that doctors (and other experts in any field) do have a knowledge and a competence, (required by their training and their institutional cultures), that should by respected by people trying to create rules and systems to serve a complex society.
As a student of world history, I’ve read lots of books that were concerned about the geopolitical clash of empires. It’s serious stuff, depressing to most people, the world would be better if a global popular movement could find a less violent, less dominating, less wasteful and more cooperative path than the current nation-state system.
Nevertheless, global geopolitics is serious stuff that affects the lives and experiences of just about everyone on the globe.
Thus, I am even more shocked and concerned by the nominations of Gabbard for the Director of Central Intelligence and Hegseth for Defense Secretary, since the pro-Russian and anti-NATO sentiments expressed by these nominees do seem to indicate that Trump is indeed intending to fulfill Vladimir Putin’s greatest desire: the end of the NATO military alliance that has indeed kept us safe and prosperous for the 80 years since World Wat II.
Some of us Americans who may have regretted some of our military adventures in more recent decades may have a lot of conflicted thoughts about the fact that America has been the most capable military superpower in the world in the 80 years since the end of World War II. Yet this is a primary fact of modern world history, and it has indeed contributed greatly to our prosperity and our privileges here in America.
This fact, and the fact that this military (and economic and cultural) power has been achieved in association with a capable and prosperous Europe, an association that has contributed greatly to American military and political power, contributed significantly to our economic prosperity, and enriches us with a wide variety of socio-cultural avenues of “soft power” in which Americans and Europeans continually stimulate each other’s creativity. is exactly what Vladimir Putin has been determined to destroy.
And to be very clear, it does appear that Donald Trump and his nominations of Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard to the top of the American military pyramid represents a very serious attempt to help Vladimir Putin destroy/degrade the NATO alliance and help his campaign to conquer Ukraine and other former Soviet territories.
So yeah, that’s pretty concerning. I happen to be someone who studies the science on climate and has become much more concerned (than most of the rest of the world seems to be) about the potential disasters of future climate change … which are already killing people and disrupting economies all over the world, yet perhaps the worst disasters of food crops failing and/or hundreds of millions of desperate migrants overwhelming borders may not occur for another 15 years or more. If Putin is successful in installing a President who actively helps in degrading and destroying NATO, the bad effects of negative geopolitical and economic changes will be very apparent much sooner … as we watch our inspiring, courageous Ukrainian brothers and sisters die and suffer at Russian hands.
Perhaps European politicians and citizens can succeed in convincing any Republican Senators who still have sense, morals and courage, to reject these nominees to the top of the American military, and to fight Trump’s dictatorial demand to be allowed recess appointments, and keep some check of rationality over Trump’s moods and meanderings. Republican Senators sure don’t seem to be listening to Americans.
I’m not going to get into Dr. Oz or wrestling businesswoman McMahon and all the others, releasing all these names before November ends is another example of the media strategy of “flooding the zone with crap” that the right wing propogandists have been successful with in recent years, neither the old established media nor the emerging voices of a more intelligent media have been able to stem the flood of crap by trying to deal with each lie one by one.
What I did want to get into with this essay was to stress the importance of Expectations of Normal Behavior and Expectations of Visible Managerial Competence in Government Officials. You or I or your weird uncle may not agree on every aspect of what constitutes Normal Behavior, yet in we should be able to expect that public officials will follow laws and not tell lies about not following laws. A democratic society cannot survive without this expectation, which is a basic element in the legitimacy of a government in the popular mind.
For some corroboration on the idea that we need some feelings of “normalcy” to exjst to have democratic values work in an increasingly complex society, let me cite excellent journalist Josh Marshall, who writes (behind a paywall, sorry) about a party and an electorate that wants our govermment to work well in an “era of distrust.” He writes in terms of party politics and what voters want, I’m looking more from a psychological-social point of view, it benefits us personally, socially, and eventually politically to have some common expectations for what democratic government should look like, even as we see that a lot of parts of our government should receive great improvements. In terms of historical irony, it is against all the “laws of karma” that in 2024, the lying Republican party should receive a victory from a general sense of disappointment in government, since it is largely the Republican Party’s insistence, a consistent insistence on cutting government budgets over many decades and having lots of rules to ensure no government benefits go to the “wrong” people, that ensures that government is very often slow, without the resources to do the basic jobs that citizens want and need, and works clunkily at best and leaves us all in some degree of dissatisfaction.
So here’s what we’ve come to in America. Basically the media of lies and disinformation have won, Fox news’s decades of selling fear and lies about Democratic politicians and social activists merged into the global wave of lies and disinformation and profit-motivated hype of all kinds that has taken over the modern internet , and of which Trump and his MAGA cult are a part. They cannot allow that any government besides Trump’s MAGA cult can ever be legitimate.
For the rest of us, the majority who did not vote for Trump and did not give him an actual majority of the popular vote in 2024, nearly all of us STILL WANT AMERICA TO SUCCEED yet are revolted by Trump’s personal grossness and his symptoms of mental illness, and of course by the destructive, unconstitutional policies he is likely to pursue with the shoddy cast of characters he associates with.
We haven’t lost faith in the legitimacy of American government, so far, although the Supreme Court majority (and the normalcy-breaking tactics used to build it, arising out of a decades-long campaign by Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society to create a class of political judges to be appointed by Republican presidents) has become openly corrupt politically, and is in danger of making the whole Federal Judiciary quite illegitimate in the eyes of many good American citizens.
So it’s going to be a long hard ride for a few years, and almost all the worst people in the world are likely to be doing well with it for a year or three. Anything like normalcy is going to go far away from our lives, expect another huge wave of “flooding the zone with crap” after Jan. 20th, it’s very likely some sort of cooked-up “national emergency” will be invented. Certainly all the trends pointing to terrible, civilization-ending catastrophes arising from climate change are more likely to get more severe for humanity; fossil fuels will likely be burned in ever greater quantities, pumping up the heat.
Populist politics will make it easy to vote for the convenience of the fossil fuels that will kill our children, while refusing the sacrifices of the drastic plans that may be necessary to keep our complex systems of food supply, infrastructure, government, and the everyday life of millions of people being able to work (versus being consumed by crises) continuing to keep everything going with a bit of “normalcy.”
And the deeper point of today’s essay is that expectations of Normal Behavior, expectations of Competence in one’s job, while they may arise from the more traditional elements of our social heritage, are nevertheless still good tools of good citizenship that helps to keep governments legitimate in the eyes of their peoples.
And to finish, I’d like to refer to my recent, work, trying to make sense out of Human History. The three big trends that I see in modern times, that are probably not good for us in the long run, are what I call the 3 Great Inequalities. All of these Great Inequalities are going to become significantly more unbalanced with a Donald Trump administration in the USA.
There is the inequality of political and governmental power between governments and citizens, which poisons all elements of just about all societies, a very few people get to make the decisions that billions must live by. This got a lot worse for America in just one day a few weeks ago, dictators all over the world are making their plans to grab more power and wealth.
The second Great Inequality is the inequality of economic resources among the world’s 8 billion people. Literally a small class of a few thousand people controls more wealth than all the rest of humanity. Their wealth (and their ability to manipulate governments directly and by court cases) has given them an unprecedented ability to keep their themselves and their families apart from all normal environments, and to keep their business and personal financial dealings untransparent and untouchable by mere mortals.
The third Great Inequality is the one brought on by our success, our success in creating this wonderful new modern economy of ever-more amazing devices and systems – it’s the inequality between our never-ending desires to have and use it all, and the our ability to even think about dealing with all the damage we’re doing to our lands, our waters and oceans, and the air we breathe and the weather and climate we’re living in.
It’s our invisible, odorless damage to the air we breathe from burning huge quantities of fossil fuels, for transportation and warm homes and for manufacturing and distributing all of our economic goodies that make our current lives seem so different and exciting, that is going to be a severe threat to the happiness, prosperity and perhaps even the lives of all our children and grandchildren
None of these 3 Great Inequalities look to be stable in the next few years, or sustainable for many decades to come
So it’s all likely to get worse under Trump and his cabinet and administration, some of whom are just yes-persons or grifters or TV personalities, yet a lot of them are righteous ideologue’s against the very idea of the department or agency they are meant to lead. All normalcy, all expectation of competence in management will be long gone from the Trump crew (and most of the media), yet it is important for those of us in “the reality-based community” to not lose hope, to not stifle our own actions of positivity, and to privately and publicly maintain the expectations of a certain normalcy – even though it may be defined by each different individual – and a level of proven competence in government officials, if only to shame and contrast the abnormality and incompetence of what we are like to see in the next few years.
This hasn’t been a fun essay to write, there’s too much pessimism to report on. Yet we will keep living day-to-day, we will keep putting one foot in front of another as we deal with our personal struggles, we need to stay hopeful, and we really, really need to keep working for a better world in a better future.
