Longtime readers of this newsletter know that I seldom speak about the horse race aspect of politics. I mostly talk about myself, and my life, and my profession (if one might call it that), which is postwar American satire. I wish to stay in my lane. It’s a good lane, and nobody needs another opinion.
When I veer into history, or its loudmouth younger brother, politics, it’s because nobody smarter than me seems to be saying something I find staggeringly obvious. My frustration builds up and I am faced with a stark choice: 1) blurt it out, or 2) go hysterically blind.
For example: American history since 1865 only makes sense after you recognize that there is a permanent Fascist subgroup in the US. Well-funded, paranoid, endlessly calling themselves “the real Americans,” this cohort erupts into violence whenever it feels threatened, but is never punished as any other group of citizens might be. These American Fascists—from Preston Brooks to Kyle Rittenhouse—are a privileged, protected group, and sow violence and chaos and hate over and over, in every generation.
This is not natural or necessary. This is a privilege the rest of America grants its Fascists, out of a weird political immaturity.
John Brown was hanged, but Robert E. Lee was not. Reconstruction lasted 11 years, Jim Crow over a hundred (in some places, it’s still going on). The organizers of the 1933 Business Plot were not rooted out, tried for treason and executed. The assassinations of the Sixties, which decapitated liberalism and cleared the way for Nixon and Reagan, were all instantly depoliticized. Nixon was allowed to sabotage the peace process in 1968—and did more anti-democratic criming as President. Reagan was allowed to ratfck Carter in 1980, skate on Iran-Contra, and drool through a second term. And so we sally, right up to the present day, where the right-wing candidate for President is a mush-brained shuffling farting felon without any discernible political platform save “retribution.” He is a secrets-stealing conman numbskull who constantly predicts, and often threatens, the death of many American citizens—and yet our country seems unable to restrain him in any way.
The question is: why?
It’s not, as some have said, the media’s lust for profits, though it’s never wrong to suspect money as the root of an evil. The entire budget of The Washington Post is a rounding error to Jeff Bezos, and if the Sulzbergers’ ever decide to sell the Times, some other super-rich chud will happily snap it up, profitable or not.
It is simply because every modern American has been trained, from birth, to treat right-wing violence and insanity as normal. How could it happen here? It happens here all the fucking time. It’s never stopped happening here! If you’re interested in how the Jim Crow South was Fascism before Fascism, I’m happy to write about that, but it’s pretty obvious. And what’s the Southern Strategy but chucking Civil Rights and making nice with Jim Crow?
For at least 175 years, America has been forged in the big secular cities powered by immigration and technology. Yet this rural, religious, nativist, backward-looking Fascist class has convinced the rest of us that it is the home of real Americans. So we naively indulge it, and hope its takeover can be avoided, and its anti-social behavior ameliorated. They react to this mollycoddling by becoming ever-more radical. We let the 1933 coup go unpunished; they despise FDR all the more, and pass an Amendment making sure he never happens again (think Barack Obama would be running for Term #4? I do). We don’t try Nixon, and ten years later, his partisans insist he did nothing wrong. We draw a polite veil over Reagan’s doddering, and ten years later, we get Clinton’s impeachment, followed by Bush v. Gore. We forget how with disaster relief, or during COVID, Trump actually treated half the country as if it was enemy territory. We even allow January 6th to be memory-holed…when we all watched it live on TV.
We have a real problem here, and it’s not Joe Biden’s age. The good news is that ripping out this horrible Fascist subculture—by which I mean simply applying the law to its members whenever they crime—would not topple America. It would actually strengthen us, immeasurably so, by removing the contradiction at our core. When the United States, by far the richest, most powerful country in the history of humanity, loses its way, it’s always and forever this contradiction rearing its ugly head.
Maybe someday I’ll write that book. Today there’s another obvious thing I’d like to talk about, ever so briefly.
• • •
People tell me that Joe Biden had a lousy debate. I couldn’t tell you, I didn’t watch. I didn’t watch because I knew there was no possible way it would be good for President Biden, whom I will vote for in November. If for some reason he is not on the ballot, I will vote for whichever candidate the Democrats run. I will vote for a turnip, and happily so, as long as it is not Donald Trump.
The debate, what a terrible idea. Because the media still refuses to treat Trump like it would’ve any other candidate before 2016—sir, that’s incorrect, please stop lying or we’ll cut your mic—either Biden would be competent, and thus seem totally boring next to the “dynamic” lunatic, or he would seem old and frail because—let’s be honest—81-year-olds are like that.
I have never met an 81-year-old who did not show every goddamn one of those years in some way or another. I hang out with a lot of extremely fit old people who exercise, eat right, and meet me in the park every Saturday morning to harness the power of the Universe to make their bowels function better. But even Golden Ball qigong would not have made Joe Biden seem younger than he is, or sharper, or stronger of voice. He is 81.
So now there are calls for him to drop out, and endless back-and-forth about whether that’s possible, practical, desirable, or absolutely necessary. I have no idea what the Democrats should do, but I do know that the Republicans would be responding to similar questions with, “Fuck you, you better vote for Donald Trump or we’ll kill you.”
But since we oh-so-reasonable Dems insist on having this discussion, there are two things to keep in mind.
The first is: we are only talking about this because of the other thing I started this letter with. The non-insane 75% of our culture cannot acknowledge the obviously unfit, preposterously dangerous Republican candidate. Until we do that, every other conversation is nonsense. Donald Trump shouldn’t be elected to an HOA board, much less President, but since he’s a Fascist, and we’ve all decided that they can do whatever the fuck they please, we have to find other things to talk about. Today it is Biden’s age; tomorrow it will be something else equally inane in comparison to the full-spectrum society-in-decline Nero-level calamity that is Donald Trump.
Which brings me to my second thought. If we must parse the normal-range failings of the non-insane candidate, let us at least agree to start from this point: we are hiring a team, not a man. TR started the myth of the super-President, and while it’s potentially possible that he really did dominate the office in 1901, by the time JFK came along, the schtick had become “the Best and the Brightest”—a group effort, and wisely so.
The American Presidency is the world’s biggest job, and we should be realistic about what we are choosing when we tick that little box. We’re not hiring a guy to shovel the walk, we’re hiring a whole infrastructure, an outlook, a hundreds-strong mass of experience and competency. If Biden is sick for a day—or a week—or a month—I’m confident that whoever’s minding the store will be competent and sane. Nobody can say that about Donald Trump or his cohort, which is why they couch their vandalism in jargon like “deconstructing the administrative state.” Call it what it is: Putinizing America.
We’ve had smart Presidents and dumb ones, energetic ones and ones who prided themselves on doing nothing. But as long as there was a basic respect for the importance of the job—as long as the idea of competence was honored—bad things (mostly) didn’t happen. That’s the real job of the President, and if that person is working 16-hour days, something is very, very wrong. The White House is no place for grind culture.
Would I prefer a younger candidate? Oh Jesus, would I. But the accomplishments of the Biden administration are reasonably impressive, and that’s not because Joe’s still spry enough to ride a bike. It’s because he sees how the job should be done—he’s got a good team, the right priorities, and clearly knows how to President at least as well as Clinton or Obama, manifestly better than Carter, and probably as good as Johnson. He might be the most effective Democrat since FDR.
Who, by the way, might not have seemed so Presidential if you saw him debating in his wheelchair.
So maybe it’s time for us to start thinking of elections not as a referendum on a person—“is this guy spry enough to clean my pool?”—and more of hiring a group of people—“this pool cleaning company is 40 years old, and has 257 five-star reviews on Yelp.” This seems completely obvious to me, and as a person trained not in political punditry but in dick jokes, I am appalled that it falls to me to say it. But weird things happen when you train people to ignore what’s right in their faces. They don’t think super-clearly. They can appear distracted, or lose their train of thought, or stutter.
Would it really be such a bad thing if Biden stopped insisting that he is up to the job, but instead told people what the job really is? Eighty-one isn’t too old to have meetings, attend state dinners, make phone calls, and give the occasional speech. Every Presidency is a team effort—as is something like NATO—and far from being a detriment, Biden’s age is forcing him to fill every position with good, competent reliable people. Pivot away from this media-driven Caesarism, and replace it with the truth. The Presidency simply cannot be that taxing, if Donald Trump still wants to do it.
And once we get used to hearing the truth about the Presidency, maybe we’ll get better at acknowledging the other thing, too. Because sooner or later—and it seems like sooner—we’re going to have to recognize our Fascist friends and neighbors for who they really are, and resolve to apply the law to them when they crime, just as if they were normal Americans. Normal prison for rich people, what a concept! I think we’d be amazed at what happened next—not Civil War, but an American Renaissance. Fascism appeals to adolescents, and America needs to quit being a kid. I don’t know if Joe Biden is too old, but I think it’s time for the country—finally—to grow the fuck up. ◊
Every so often, Editor & Publisher MICHAEL GERBER opines about politics, but mostly it’s dick jokes. Caesarism appeals to him as much as the next guy, but it’s not really viable when you’re even shorter than Napoleon.
