The Infernal Triangle: My Political Depression Problem

I don’t want to make this about me, because it really isn’t about me. I don’t want make it about them, because it really isn’t about them.

I’m talking about an anguish I felt this past week, a weight heaving down somewhere around my sternum, grinding away at my ability to proceed through daily life. Such feelings are not unfamiliar to me; just ask my pharmacist. But I’ve never had them before over politics.

So, yes, OK: Maybe this is a little bit about me.

I’ve spent half my life now, starting in 1997 when I was 27, trying to make sense of the right. It was a fortunate career choice. With each passing year, the right became more and more the star of the American political show. More and more, people began telling me, with aching earnestness, that what I did was profoundly valuable to them. I helped them understand their childhoods; I helped them fear the future less, because they saw what we had overcome before. They still feared the future, but they were grateful, because I inspired them to launch their own careers as activists or politicians to fight for it.

This has been a fortunate thing for my soul. Writing that last sentence, in fact, I misted up a little bit—which is a good thing, because for the last several days, I’ve felt so dead inside that I’ve hardly had any emotions at all.

What does my work on American conservatism come down to? One of my readers once put it best: “There’s always more, and it’s always worse. But it’s never new.”

The most important part of that formulation is the “always worse” part. Right now, that means three things. First, there is no going back to some more innocent conservatism of the past. Second, if Donald Trump wins the majority of electoral votes and accedes again to the White House, this will obviously be very bad. But third, if he does not win the majority of electoral votes—well, it might be worse. I’ve heard that the secret to politics is repetition. Can you stand for me to repeat it one more time? The question is not just how many votes Donald Trump gets, but how many are willing to take up arms for him if he loses.

Always worse. In the book I’m working on now, I’ve developed a theory to explain why that is, and how it works. I call it the “authoritarian ratchet.” Its axioms are that the basic thing conservatism promises to its adherents, a return of society to a prelapsarian state, is impossible; but that this impossible thing, in the logic of conservatism, is also imperative to achieve, lest civilization collapse, and good people suffer a kind of living death.

To understand the “imperative” part, note how conservatives talk in every generation about whatever it is they identify as the latest existential threat to civilization.

“The demand is for the abolition of all distinctions … It attacks the integrity of the family; it attacks the eternal decrees of God Almighty; it denies and repudiates the obligations of motherhood.” (That was a delegate to the California constitutional convention of 1879, speaking on a motion to give women the vote.)

“Never in the history of the world has any measure [been] so insidiously designed … to enslave workers … The lash of the dictator will be felt … [It will] pull the pillars of the temple down upon the heads of our descendants.” (That was Republican congressmen in the debate over Social Security in 1935.)

“You and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.” (That was Ronald Reagan in 1961, talking about what would happen if Congress enacted Medicare.)

“We won’t have a country anymore.” (Donald Trump, 2015–present, usually about “open borders,” but more recently, about what will happen if he loses in November.)

When conservatives lose fights like these, and civilizations stand nonetheless, conservatives just move on to the next existential threat: people using the “wrong” bathrooms, lab-grown meat, or whatever else is invented by some clever ideological entrepreneur.

Which is strange. Imagine living, as your basic orientation toward the world, under the imperative/impossible dyad. No wonder conservatives, as a basic psychological proposition, tend to feel so angry and unhinged.

What is even stranger is when conservatives win. When this, that, or the other liberal horror they’ve been working decades to repeal is finally repealed (think, most recently, of the right to abortion). When after decades of struggle, they take command of a marquee institution like the Supreme Court. When they control the White House, House, and Senate, like they did between 2017 and 2019. And yet that never makes them less agitated. The promised return to a prelapsarian peace doesn’t feel any closer—because retuning to that fictional state is impossible.

Of course, a conservative could respond by moderating their expectations of what politics could achieve—but then other conservatives say they are no longer conservatives. They are “squishes,” “RINOs,” or “cucks.” No wonder there are fewer moderate Republicans to point to all the time.

A conservative could also respond by questioning the original premise. But if they do that, they are no longer “conservative” either.

Those who do affect this apostasy are often the most clear-eyed explicators of what happens next, as the imperative/impossible dyad continues to fail to deliver. Constituents demand, and conservative politicians offer, even more radical panaceas, the problem always being that the previous ones were not conservative enough. Ever-more-elaborate conspiracy theories as the only explanation for the disappointment. Ever-more-fierce hunts for quislings to purge. Ever-more-metastasizing scapegoating. Anger at the designated Others who must have made it happen—for conservatism itself can never be the problem. Conservatism, as I once wrote, never fails. It is only failed.

This is why I now describe the history of conservatism as a ratchet. It must always move in an invariably more authoritarian direction, with no possible end point but an apocalyptic one.

Just listen to any recent Donald Trump speech: The redemptive promises he makes are more insanely fantastical with each passing day. Imagine the disappointment their serial failures will bring in their wake, which can never redound on him. (Conservatism never fails …) They must instead be blamed on the Enemy.

Which is us.

That is why another Trump term—or the potential insurgency after a Trump defeat—may be traumatic beyond our poor powers to imagine it. People seem to think there’s some modern American exception to the ease with which human beings can turn to violence on a mass scale, and the pleasure they will take in it, once they receive sanction from on high to do so. It can happen here. It might.

But believe it or not, contemplating that is not what is making me so depressed.

LOOK AT THE FIRST PARAGRAPH OF THIS ESSAY: its reference to “them.” I’m not talking about right-wingers.

There have always been right-wingers. They’ve always harbored the potential to do the most terrible things imaginable. After all my years dwelling intellectually among them, I’ve devised ways to retain equanimity while staring down that particular abyss, and become adept at taking in their harshest assaults. I’m talking about the kind of person who tracks down your email to let you know they hope someday to flay all the skin off your body (I got that one for calling the Vietnam POW/MIA flag “racist”); or the kind of Fox News host who spits out “that Perlstein,” as a picture of me with my nose photoshopped to be 15 percent more Jew-y flashes on the screen; or a top-drawer right-wing publicist, one of the people at the vanguard in driving Bill Clinton’s impeachment, trying to smear my career out of existence for writing a book critical of Ronald Reagan.

No, the injury grinding me down is built of much smaller differences. It comes from encounters with colleagues and comrades on the left. What we disagree on, as you might have guessed, is endorsing a Democratic president who shares responsibility for the massacre of tens of thousands of innocents, in a criminal war that another country’s quite fascist leader seems to be pursuing, not merely out of fanatical bloodlust and racism but in order to stay in power and perhaps to avoid prison.

It’s happening, no surprise, on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, where I’ve been drafted as an apologist for “Genocide Joe” for arguing why the alternative is so much worse.

People who read me here won’t be particularly surprised to learn that I agree with these interlocutors that the best word the English language gives us to describe what the IDF is doing to the population trapped within Gaza is, indeed, “genocide.” And while I think the version of the argument that holds that Joe Biden himself is committing genocide is a grievous violation of reason, I still believe that, considering the tools at his disposal to stop it, Biden’s moral culpability for the slaughter is only a few notches below that.

So, saying you should vote for him anyway is a hard argument to make. Maybe I should be gentler on myself that I’ve not managed to persuade the literally thousands of people on the left raining abuse down upon me for making it. All the same, my failure is gutting me worse than anything that has happened to me before in my career.

What it comes down to, I guess, is this. If I of all people can’t convince people on the left to fight right-wing authoritarians who consider them veritable Untermenschen, then what the hell have I been wasting half my life on this work for?

FORMERLY-KNOWN-AS-TWITTER IS NOT REAL LIFE, they say, and you can dismiss a lot of the nastiness, especially when it’s attached to a pseudonym, as the product of minds not mature enough to know better.

But it has also come from grown-ups with considerable cultural capital, including people I deeply admire. When I reposted a picture of an IDF soldier proudly sitting and reading in the library of Gaza City’s Aqsa University, in front of a set of shelves he and his unit had set on fire, a response shredded my insides more than anything I had ever fielded about my writing (including the guy who wanted to flay me alive). It came from someone who is a major intellectual influence on me. It amounted to: Rick Perlstein thinks you should vote for Biden, because under Trump, the books will burn faster.

Not bad, by Algonquin Round Table standards: That’s genuine wit. You’ll have a hard time finding the post, though, if you care to search, because by the time this essay is posted I plan to have closed down my formerly-known-as-Twitter account, at least until people can be counted on to have moved on. It’s hardly an original insight to point out that the incentives on social media are set up to award the hit-and-run over respectful mutual engagement. So I’ll take a break—not least because I am very guilty of that sin, too.

My worst offense was an over-the-top claim that we can expect second-term Trump to urge Israel to use nuclear weapons, that they just might, and that this would lead to World War III and global Armageddon—and, well, isn’t that worse than what is happening now?

The thing is, I don’t really believe it. Still, I convinced myself I did, doubling down, patronizing people by claiming they just didn’t know the literature, etc. My temptation to histrionic speculation was born of the logic of fka Twitter: to score points. It helped nothing. It opened me up to a mocking that was probably deserved.

I’ve certainly made arguments there that I stand behind, ones that don’t demand speculation about what Trump would do, but point to what he has done. Trump doesn’t care about causing mass death when those dying are red-blooded Americans. In my column on sociologist Eric Klinenberg’s book on COVID, I cited a study demonstrating that if the United States had the same COVID death rate as Australia, 900,000 more people would be alive today. This is largely Trump’s fault, for refusing to do things Australia did like establish federal task forces, publicly subsidize necessary equipment, establish uniform lockdown policies and contact-tracing protocols, respect and empower the relevant public-health experts, etc. The reason he did not was his infantile magic thinking that if he pretended there was not a crisis, there would not be one, and he would not be blamed. Imagine how much less he’d care about corpses in a “shithole” like Gaza.

Another argument I stand by is a hoary cliché of the “lesser evil” sweepstakes: quoting Frederick Douglass’s famous advice to recently enfranchised Black voters that “the Republican Party is the ship, all else the sea.” I pointed out that, in 1872, white Republicans’ willingness to sell out multiracial democracy in the South was already in evidence, and the sharecropping system that forced Blacks into conditions almost as bad as slavery already in formation. So was Frederick Douglass pro-sharecropping? No, he was just saying that the leaky, rusting pile they were stuck with beat the hell out of drowning. It was a 19th-century version of imploring people once to hold their noses and support another oft-pathetic political party, our own benighted Democrats.

Be that as it may. For making arguments like these, I learned I was “a genocidal racist and it defines your politics, your character, and your scholarship.” And maybe I’ll keep pushing arguments like these, somewhere. But not chez Elon Musk.

I don’t trust my own infantile temptation to answer back snark for snark, to dream up cleverer cheap shots, to fantasize about spurring my own troops to a pile-on. So no more. De-escalation, or nothing.

Blame Joe Biden for this present mess, sure—this guy without the character to grasp how vulnerable any campaign would be for a second term that ends at age 86. This guy without the wisdom or foresight to conspicuously groom a successor. This guy who, in some unreachable recess of his brain, seems to have convinced himself he’s somehow saving another six million Jews from death by letting Benjamin Netanyahu indiscriminately massacre Palestinians.

Or, hell, blame Adolf Hitler, for making what was once the ideology of only a tiny minority of Jews—state-based Zionism—seem suddenly the only viable solution to the worst refugee crisis the world had ever seen.

Blame whoever you want, because either way, no one’s getting anywhere on fka Twitter.

One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot instead: calling the guys (the debaters seem to be all male, for what it’s worth) who’ve been slamming me. On the telephone, like in the olden days. Ask where they are coming from. Establish a common ground of understanding. Then, maybe, have the arguments.

Because what happens on fka Twitter, and I hope my interlocutors there don’t find this too patronizing, aren’t even actually arguments. They can be, certainly. But according to a koan issued by a long-forgotten social critic named Marshall McLuhan: The medium is the message. How a conduit for information structures that information determines how that information comes across. In Elon’s house, collecting endorphin hits from piling up points—follows, retweets, pile-ons, etc.—is just too easy. And in the world we live in, in 2024, all of us need some kind of narcotic just to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

It’s a symptom. A symptom of a time when oceans are rising and fires are burning and trust is evaporating and guns are proliferating, when AI is embraced headlong even as proof piles up that it just makes everything worse. A symptom of what happens when one broken society, the United States, smashes up against another broken society, Israel. A symptom of institutionalized stupidity, like Jews getting regularly called antisemites for not holding the same opinions as the most powerful people in society. People gulp the available pixel-pills to keep from feeling too much pain—which only makes us all more insane, and thus adds to the diseases causing the pain.

We need the drug. He’s got the drug. That makes this particular opium den, whatever the stakes of the arguments, just one more manifestation of an entire society in unceasing fight-or-flight mode, looking for an enemy to blame or a bunker to hide in. Our highbrow version of the thoroughgoing trashiness of MAGA culture. If it wasn’t, people agreeing on 95 percent of everything else wouldn’t be acting like such assholes to one another.

For me, it’s a symptom most of all of my helplessness, as the authoritarian ratchet grinds ceaselessly on, with anti-authoritarians helpless to stop it whether we “win” in Washington or not, with the way one group of anti-authoritarians accuses another group of anti-authoritarians of being complicit “shitlibs,” and with that group accusing the first group of sole responsibility for every loss to the Republicans since the time when convention power brokers smoked backroom cigars. It was my New Year’s resolution two years ago to do whatever I could to keep an operational peace between “liberals” and the “left”; and how’s that working out for me?

As I like to point out in another of those arguments I kept futilely making on fka Twitter, the bad guys want to put us all in stretchers, not recognizing any distinction we’d care to make. It’s like an old joke from the 1960s. A cop bops a liberal on the head with a billy club at an anti-war protest, calling him a “Commie” as he slaps the bracelets on him.

“But officer, I’m an anti-Communist!”

“I don’t care what kind of Communist you are, you’re coming with me.”

No wonder I’ve been depressed.

LAST NOVEMBER, ON FRESH AIR, at the end of an interview with the outstanding and prolific writer Garrett Graff, who had written a new book on the possibility of life on other planets, Terry Gross asked him to reflect back on an interview they’d done two years earlier about a prescient article he’d published about the damage Trump might still do to democracy in his remaining weeks in the White House. “So I’m wondering what you’re thinking now about Trump … if he does manage, in spite of all the indictments, to get re-elected.”

I deeply appreciated Graff’s response. He said it better than I could.

“Let me give you an answer,” he began, “that, unexpectedly, is going to connect to UFOs.”

Gross laughed. I didn’t. I had some idea where he was going.

The scientists who work on SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—have this thing called the “Drake Equation.” It’s an equation that is supposed to predict the number of intelligent civilizations out there, and how many there are at any given time. The main variable scientists call “L,” which stands for the length of time an advanced civilization lasts. To me, the challenge is, L could turn out to be, based on where humanity is heading, a pretty short number. And when you look around our world right now … there’s no guarantee that human civilization is around for that much longer … So to me, when I look at Donald Trump’s possible return to power, what I’m thinking about right now is what it does to the L of American democracy and human civilization and how it could, and almost certainly would, accelerate the unwinding of modern American life.

Me, too. I can’t be the only one whose unconscious figures out ways to keep them in bed until noon, even on sunny spring days where everything else in life is full of safety, sweetness, rewarding work. Read Auden, he said it even better than anyone: We must love each other, or die.

But there I go again, being histrionic. I can’t help it. It’s simply how I understand the stakes.

Extra! Extra! Got Infernally Triangular questions you’d like to see answered in a future column? Send them to infernaltriangle@prospect.org.