'Collapsing into incoherence'

 

We drift into yahooism

By Patrick Lawrence

Of all the things J.D. Vance said at the Munich Security Conference as he sent the Europeans present into paroxysms of distress, it was one of the American vice-president’s first thoughts that seemed to me his worthiest. Here is the passage I have considered many times since Vance shocked his audience—and the rest of the Western world, I will add—at the mid–February gathering in the Bavarian capital:

    … The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with the United States of America….

It is a piercingly true assertion, notable not least for its author. The last thing those leading the Western post-democracies wish to face as they purport to govern is the internal rot—political, economic, social—for which they bear considerable, if not primary responsibility. Always, the problems facing the West must be some other nation’s fault. Vance, in a few sentences, devastated this fiction. Here was a Western leader saying what has long been considered part of “the great unsayable,” as I call the many, many things neoliberal elites carefully exclude from public discourse.

There is only one feature of J.D. Vance’s reasoning that has given me pause. He was quite correct about the failings and lapses of the Europeans—their descent into all manner of antidemocratic measures in defense of the orthodoxies common to all neoliberal centrists. Could Vance not have seen, I have asked myself, that the government of which he is part is well, well into making the same mistakes, falling into the same decadence? My question has gained considerable urgency since Vance appeared in Munich, and for one simple reason. The Trump administration lately proves worse, at this point far worse by the day, I would say, than the Europeans he rightly castigated.

One thought for a time—during Donald Trump’s first term, during the early days of his second—that those few ideas he cultivated that one could count worthy—a new détente with Russia, the end to America’s wars of adventure, a national turn toward America’s working majority—would redeem him, would compensate for all his errors, his stupidities, the miscalculations deriving from his political inexperience.

It is no longer possible to defend this reasoning.

Joe Biden’s four years in the White House marked a significant escalation in the rate of America’s decline. Two months into his second term, it is already clear that Trump will hasten the nation’s collapse into incoherence yet more swiftly. And if one feature of Trump’s programs this time around stands out above all others, it is his administration’s evident intent: Destruction seems its very objective...