If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
-Cormac McCarthy, No Country For Old Men
Of course this is the week that we’re all supposed to give thanks for what good fortune we had this year and to specify what exactly we are thankful for. Off the top of my head, I can give thanks to at least two people this year.
The first, perhaps not surprisingly, is Donald Trump. The Republican Party has failed to gain more than ten seats in a Congressional midterm where a Democrat was president, and Trumpnik Republican candidates have largely failed to win key races for state government. This historic failure to perform is almost entirely because the Party felt the need to stay in Trump’s good graces and so agreed to nominate election-liar candidates like Adam Laxalt for US Senator in Nevada, Doug Mastriano as Governor in Pennsylvania, and pretty much every Republican in Arizona. All of whom lost.
Now, of course Trump was already planning to announce his wonderful re-election campaign to be Vladimir Putin’s Viceroy for Russian North America, and he was hoping he would get a huge boost from supporting all these candidates who were supposed to sweep against an unpopular Democratic Party and Biden Administration. It turns out, there’s one thing more unpopular than the Biden Democratic Party, and that’s the Trump Republican Party. So that meant Liddle Donnie Clown Boy didn’t get the big push he was hoping for in his campaign announcement. Worse than that, the truly amazing performance of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and some other Republicans (like Georgia Governor Brian Kemp) who are just as authoritarian as Trump but not as erratic mean that for the first time since 2016, some Republicans are actually advocating for someone else to be President. Of course Trump has to run anyway, basically to stay out of prison, but it’s getting that much harder. In a further act of disloyalty, “his” Supreme Court ordered that he must hand over his tax returns to a House investigative committee. The fact that Democrats won’t have charge of the House after December doesn’t matter, because they can share those documents with Senate committees, and the Senate hasn’t changed over to the Republicans. Again, largely because of the Party going along with Trump’s incompetence.
None of all the establishment Republican huffing and puffing against Trump is going to make much difference, because the professionals haven’t been in charge for a while. I plan to write in much greater detail about this subject, but I am thankful for Donald Trump because he always wants to make everything about him, even when he isn’t on the ballot. And by forcing his party to go along with his Big Lie, he did indeed make the election all about him, because everyone knew that all of those Church of Trump candidates for Governor and Secretary of State were going to change the rules to protect their party, and Trump in particular, from competition in 2024. So he made this election matter about as much as 2024, and a whole bunch of people, probably including some conservatives, realized we had to put a stop to that campaign this year. And we did. And in the process we made it a little less likely that Trump’s scheme to grab power again will work.
Again, none of this is going to stop “the base” from goosestepping in line to elect Trump so that they’ll never have to vote again, but that’s the other reason to be thankful. If Trump’s lies and schemes forced the non-Republican part of the country to move actively against him – which required acting against his Party – he’s forcing Republican and conservative influencers to consider if their slavish loyalty was worth it in the long run. A party that literally is only a Party of Trump, that is only about catering to his whims and delusions, cannot survive. And yet it has taken over precisely because celebrity worship and irrationality are more prized in the public sphere than professionalism and intellect. To really address the broader problem we need to address a culture that would make somebody like Trump president, which is where I get to the other person I want to thank:
Elon Musk.
I have already gone over how much Musk is fucking over Twitter, but apparently he’s not done. In his continuing tilt to squeeze a profit out of a medium that has never been profitable, Musk decided to fire a whole bunch of technical employees only to ask them to come back because they were fired “by mistake” or because he needed them to handle software issues that he didn’t realize needed to be dealt with. It turns out two of these people never worked there in the first place and were just trolling the company. I had said that the Occam’s Razor explanation for Musk’s erratic behavior is that he made a deal without knowing what he was doing or how to run this particular company, and he is hardly disabusing me of that notion.
I now put Elon Musk on a list with Rudy Guiliani and Vladimir Putin – men whom I used to think were intelligent. It turns out they’re just latter-day cases of the Peter Principle. The Peter Principle, for those who didn’t grow up in the ’70s, states that “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” Consequently, “In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties.” Like, maybe Vladimir Putin’s skill set at destroying opposition on a political level led him to believe he could invade the largest country in Europe other than Russia, with draftees and trainees and inadequate air support and logistics for the operation, and get the capital to fall in three days. Almost a year after the fact, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Of course Trump is an even bigger example of the Peter Principle, but the difference is that Musk used to be considered competent. As in, even the people who didn’t like his management of Tesla or Space X didn’t think he was running them into the ground. But now the Tesla stock he was using to back up his takeover has gone down $700 billion in value from a year ago.
I can’t remember where, but someone recently said that Musk’s Twitter purchase was like a gambling addict buying the race track. This is about what you would expect. But I am thankful because not only is Musk wrecking Twitter, he is wrecking its credibility as an information source in the event that someone else takes charge. Liberals have been complaining for some time that Twitter is a monopoly, as if it were the only company providing a posting medium and as if that were the same thing as a public information service. But Musk’s utter disregard for information security really is a problem for anybody who wants to post on Twitter, and illustrates the problem we face when such a large and influential company is suddenly taken over by a capricious nitwit. But the difference between the Twitter base and the Republican Party is that social media users really do have other options. The one currently getting a lot of the buzz is Mastodon. The difference between that service and Twitter is that Mastodon is open-source. A Reason Magazine article explains it this way: “Essentially, Mastodon is a federation of independent but interconnected servers. It’s common to see Mastodon users refer to it as the “fediverse.” For the most part, folks in one part of the Mastodon fediverse can see and interact with folks in all other parts of the Mastodon fediverse.” One poster said, “This really isn’t a place of influencers – at least in its current iteration. If you don’t want to reply to comments on your posts you probably shouldn’t post. This (is) engagement and community not hot takes and “influence” that can be monetarized by advertisers.”
Of course that last bit may illustrate why Twitter got as toxic as it did and why all the people complaining about it didn’t leave until it became more liability than it was worth.
As Adam Conover said recently regarding Musk in particular, “(Sam Bankman-Fried), Elon and (Mark Zuckerberg) haven’t been hurt by their apocalyptic failures, but their image has. Everyone from the media to the government can finally see the truth. And that’s a good thing, because if we remember that these guys are actually dumbasses, then we can beat them.”
Of course that’s the bright-side way to look at it. The other way to look at it is that these con men got as far as they did because the majority who gave them power are that much bigger dumbasses.