The pleasure of error

"Every prophet is a comedian, and every comedian a prophet."

After a week, I think it’s clear that Donald Trump was not engaging in hyperbole when he told the libs: “we will do things to you that have never been done before.” What an incredible line! What a comedian! What a prophet! Many such cases.

Poetry is just a line that sticks in your head—and while bad politics is bad poetry, good politics is good poetry. Politics and religion are brothers; and comedy is the cousin of both. Every prophet is a comedian. Every comedian is a prophet. This is Hallmark stuff—everyone should know it.

I was talking to a very worried lib a couple of months before the election. I was like: dude, remember that full-page huge-point headline in the Times? “WHEN DONALD TRUMP SAYS… [long list of hyperbolic threats to libs and libbery] BELIEVE HIM.”

I was like: Trump University? Trump Steaks? And, let’s not forget, for the intellectual right of 2017—the great Ann Coulter’s epic literary fumble, “In Trump We Trust”?

As a writer, after 2020, the idea of trusting Trump to execute (as opposed to his talents as a comedian, prophet, etc) was like… it was like putting your savings in TrumpCoin. Has the man changed? Do men change? And yet—

All the Bayesian logic went one way. A bullet went another. So did history. So much for Hari Seldon. Somehow, as too often happens, I was wrong, but not exactly surprised.

As a pessimist by temperament, I find it important to be a pessimist by trade. Also, everyone has to be a pessimist by logic: pessimism optimizes tail-risk optionality, since you are either wrong or disappointed—never both.

However, being wrong is being wrong. For one thing, I owe some people, like Chris Rufo, an apology. Was my tongue in my cheek? Maybe. I am not sure if I bet him a bottle of Scotch. But I owe him a bottle of Scotch.

For another thing, if I’m wrong, it means there’s something wrong with my model. There isn’t anything structurally wrong with my model, I don’t think—it’s just that I kind of underestimated one of the forces that’s been operating in it. That force is the voltage differential of progressive ideology.

When 2020 happened and 1970s New Left dogma planted its flag in every American kindergarten, not to mention on every American wine aunt’s lawn, it appeared to be the final victory of this century-old aristocratic/oligarchic movement. But most things are cyclical. Victory has a map of its own defeat—and defeat of its own victory. (No one is telling me I was wrong about the 2020 election.)

The differential is the ideological difference between social classes. “Luxury beliefs” are indelible status markers. Once the luxury belief goes mainstream, the final station on Foucault’s long march from the French literature department, it is useless as a marker. Unless something still more radical—voluntary human extinction, maybe—comes down this pipeline—after the victory of the marker, there is no marker at all. Energy has to flow from high to low voltage. Once everything is high voltage—

“Antiracism,” for instance, is no longer a marker. Hick preachers in Arkabama are “antiracist.” Your baby is “antiracist.” So is mine. It’s all good, man. We may move on from “antiracism”—we can never move past it. It happened. Now it’s done. There are no cool teenage parties of the only nine “antiracist” skater kids in Oxford, Arkabama.

Live by fashion, die by fashion! When there is no differential, there is no energy. The structures created by the energy remain, but there is no force that maintains them. Rather than being highly resilient under attack, they are highly friable under attack. They are husks without the power to defend or restore themselves.

I was wrong because I imagined Trump 47 taking, like Trump 45, small, performative steps to untangle the obvious Gordian knot standing between the chief executive and his actual Constitutional control of the executive branch—long since hacked by the Congress through a bizarrely micromanaged appropriations process, which certainly does not resemble any 18th-century idea of the “power of the purse”—itself a dubious innovation dating back to Puritan lawfare in the early 17th century. And if Puritans in the early 17th century found it useful, that definitely means we need to reverence it!

The Constitution was made for men, not men for the Constitution. And in fact, it was made well—because it is starting to seem that what Article I can hack, Article II can hack right back. As FDR tweeted:

Action in this image and to this end is feasible under the form of government which we have inherited from our ancestors.

Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form.

That is why our constitutional system has proved itself the most superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has produced.

Ultimately, what killed the USSR—our weird eastern cousin—in the second half of the 20th century, was its loss of the moral energy that Communism inspired in the first half. Not that Communism was ever “moral” in the sense of being good—but “moral” as in morale. As Napoleon put it: “in war, the moral is to the physical as ten to one.” Moral energy is the good old “will to power.”

The USG will outlast the USSR, because at the top level our Constitution deliberately fails to specify the precedence of its three branches. (Okay—I don’t have historical evidence that this design was intentional—but maybe we could just take it on faith?)

The effect of these unspecified political semantics—and even perhaps the purpose—is that of the dying Alexander’s decision to hand down his empire “to the strongest.” Control peacefully oscillates between the branches with the strongest will to power. Therefore, the government stays strong and keeps the country healthy and great. Is this really that counterintuitive?

Things are happening in Washington because the moral energy of the new executive branch is suddenly much greater than the moral energy of the administrative branch, and even the judicial branch. (Once the “vibe shift” reaches a certain threshold frequency, I predict, even the supple “swing justices” will start vibrating to its tune.) As for the legislative branch, it (a) is elected and (b) has a popularity rating of 13%, none of which is on TikTok. We may ask of any political structure: who would miss it?

The Republicans of the second half of the 20th century acknowledged that FDR’s regime, or the headless bureaucracy it became after FDR’s death (the power of even Democratic presidents declined in the second half of the 20th century; no successor, even LBJ, had a fraction of FDR’s discretion in guiding the state and the nation), had generally more morale than any President it could elect. The personal qualities of the man did not matter. The system could tame him. Even the ‘60s firebrand, Reagan, became a pussycat in the White House. Nixon fought hard; he was totally defeated.

But the power held by FDR’s regime was a consequence of two things: competence and moral energy. Its competence was startup-tier. Its energy was off the charts. That was then—this is now.

Trump 47 is not cutting the Gordian knot. Not yet, anyway! But rather than untangling it gingerly, like a ‘90s Republican, as though it was electrified (it was electrified), he is grabbing it with both hands and ripping out big hunks.

It turns out that the knot, with oxcart attached, has been hanging in Gordius’s palace courtyard for 80 years. Not exactly a climate-controlled environment. The fibers, once springy, seem to have deteriorated and become brittle. Fungus may even be indicated.

Now, it is unclear that ripping out hunks of the knot will work. For instance: “RAGE” wasn’t supposed to be a voluntary program! I still think a substantial percentage of Federal employees will take Trump’s early retirement proposal, more than expected—and I don’t see why it has to be so stingy.

Why just nine months’ severance? After a lifetime of service? Why not all four years? Just go. Your silver will still be delivered, without fail, to your mailbox. With four years to make yourself useful in some other way, to some other human being or beings—plus of course your existing retirement package—who can feel mistreated?

As for the money, it’s not silver. We can print it. This is its own problem—and has its own solution. But as Cromwell said:

You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. In the name of God, go.

The reality of government is that there are three things: (A) things the government is doing, that it shouldn’t be doing; (B) things the government isn’t doing, but should be doing; and (C) things the government is doing, and should be doing.

Anyone with the slightest experience of both Silicon Valley and Washington, DC knows that even when it comes to (C), the actual problems, by far the most efficient way to make an efficient organization to solve an actual problem is to make a new one, not to fix the old one.

In fact, Washington already knows this: the government proper doesn’t do anything anymore. It puts out a contract or makes a grant. The contractors and grantees work on the same principle as Silicon Valley companies, more or less—top-down command, not process-based bureaucracy. But if (to paraphrase the Bhagwan), the contracts and grants are retarded, the problem is only made worse.

There are many situations in which keeping the assets and personnel (looking at you, air traffic controllers) of the old organization would make sense. But the whole system? Why would anyone who wanted to govern America efficiently want to reuse it? On the contrary—the first job of any new system is shutting the old system down.

Another analogy: true top-down White House control of the executive branch is like a bicycle that’s been sitting outside in the rain for 80 years. Previous Republican presidents, including Trump himself, had picked it up, posed with it, pretended to sit on it, actually sat on it, etc. But no one has actually tried to ride FDR’s rusty old bicycle.

What happens when you try? Do the pedals move? Does the chain break? The post? It’s fascinating to see Trump—plus a small army of revved-up nerdy zoomers—try to actually ride the bike. For all the reasons I said, it works much better than I expected. But—couldn’t we afford a new bike? Wouldn’t it be worth it? For the paper route?

What is the real story of the knot? Wikipedia is helpful:

An oracle had declared that any man who could unravel its elaborate knots was destined to become ruler of all of Asia. Alexander the Great wanted to untie the knot but struggled to do so before reasoning that it would make no difference how the knot was loosed. Sources from antiquity disagree on his solution. In one version of the story, he drew his sword and sliced it in half with a single stroke.

However, Plutarch and Arrian relate that, according to Aristobulus, Alexander pulled the linchpin from the pole to which the yoke was fastened, exposing the two ends of the cord and allowing him to untie the knot without having to cut through it. Some classical scholars regard this as more plausible than the popular account.

So in real life, Alexander did not cut the knot. He hacked it.

To hack our Gordian knot, it’s important to observe that while our disastrous financial system (someone just noticed that if you could hold a McChicken sandwich without any asset depreciation, McChicken would have beaten the SPX over the last five years) itself needs comprehensive restructuring, it has a silver lining.

The silver lining is that the Fed, an “independent” agency (lol) which in fact is part of the executive branch, can buy any assets it wants—including Treasury bonds, gold, foreign currencies, Beanie Babies, fine art, wine, single-malt Scotch, and bonds or other obligations issued by a new agency set up to shut down the old administrative branch, and start up a new executive branch run on genuinely executive principles.

When he gets tired of the Deep State, Trump can print money to build a New State. Legally, according to the Constitution. Of course, he still needs to win politically…