Patrick Lawrence - A collapse into incoherence
By Patrick Lawrence for l'AntiDiplomatico
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 because 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 ban 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 vulnerable to the same mistakes, 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 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.
Trump’s foreign policies, it can perhaps go without saying, are already a shambles. The man who proposed to end Zionist Israel’s campaign of terror against the Palestinian people now licenses “the Jewish state” to breach the ceasefire accord one of Trump’s envoys brokered but a month ago. The man who promised to end the Ukraine war and restore relations with Russia has just decided—a gross betrayal of Moscow, this—to continue providing the Kiev regime with weapons and essential battlefield intelligence.
One can mark the mess on the national-security side to incompetence. Or as Yves Smith, the nom de plume of an American commentator who has made a study of Trump, put it the other day in Naked Capitalism, “It is becoming more and more apparent that his [Trump’s] top priority is dominating any interaction, no matter whether that advances any long-term aim.” There is no expecting coherence when mere displays of control are all that matter.
I do not know what the Trump administration’s domestic project looks like from the other side of the Atlantic, but it is at home where incompetence—this on a grand scale—meets a desire to demolish institutions and governing structures that is unmistakably pathological in character.
Elon Musk, the crypto-fascist Trump has set loose on the federal government, is ripping through departments and agencies with wanton carelessness. The stated intent of Musk’s bogus “Department of Government Efficiency” is to cut costs, and no one can argue there is not a considerable measure of bloat throughout Washington’s sprawling bureaucracies. But to strip government agencies to the point they will no longer be able to function? This is what I mean by a pathological drive. There is a compulsion at work that warrants—and I argue this with conviction—psychiatric investigation. Some neurotic complexes resulting in irrational conduct—unconscious hatreds, resentments?—appear to be sublimated in this program of bureaucratic smashing and wrecking, childish in character as it is.
It is by now evident that Trump—the president himself, not an adjutant such as Musk—has mounted a comprehensive campaign against America’s institutions of higher learning. There are those close to the White House who advocate destroying the Education Department altogether. More directly to the point, the Trump White House just begun to attack leading universities on the fraudulent argument that anti–Semitism is rampant on American campuses.
This malevolent undertaking got fully under way last weekend, when Immigration and Customs agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of last year’s protests at Columbian University against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, while he was in his Manhattan apartment. Khalil is of Palestinian decent and a legal resident in the U.S. He has committed no crime. In explaining his arrest, his detention, and the Trump administration’s intent to deport him, a government spokesperson said Kahlil’s views “align with Hamas.”
No one has yet explained this phrase: It has, indeed, no meaning. Many have pointed out that to “align” with anyone or any entity is a constitutional right. Khalil’s arrest amounts not only to an assault on America’s First Amendment, the free-speech article in the Constitution; on the explanation given, it is also not more or less than an official assertion of thought control.
These matters are variants of what J.D. Vance complained off in his Munich speech. We have heard nothing from Vance since Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest.
Here is a brief passage from the speech Donald Trump delivered at his inauguration on 20 January:
After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I also will sign an Executive Order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.
Trump was right to single out the disgraceful censorship operations conducted during the Biden years. And he indeed passed an executive order—one of scores he signed during his first days in office—guaranteeing the restoration of First Amendment Rights in America. This was surely among the things Vance had in mind when he spoke in Munich. And now Mahmoud Khalil, charged with no crime, awaits deportation in an Immigration and Customs jail in the godforsaken backwoods of Louisiana.
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I could go on indefinitely about the objectionable doings of Trump and his people. The list of misdeeds is long and will grow longer. But I leave this to the reporters. My concern is to identify the fundamental meaning of the decadence evident among America’s governing elites for some years now. It is present in Europe, too, just as J.D. Vance asserted last month, but permit me, please, to be just another self-centered American for a moment. Something has happened in recent years among those purporting to lead America. What is it?
My mind goes to Arnold Toynbee, the once-celebrated and now out-of-fashion English historian as I contemplate this question.
Toynbee was a student of civilizations—specifically in their rises and declines. In 12 volumes published from 1934 to 1961 as A Study of History, he considered 26 of them and drew certain conclusions.
One of these was that great civilizations, the kind we read about in our university texts, arose when elites endowed with imagination, creativity, and a measure of courage responded to one or another circumstance requiring address for the sake of a people’s survival. Among Toynbee’s often-cited examples were the Sumerians, whose elites organized those under them to develop vast, civilization-saving systems of irrigation. Challenge-and-response: This was Toynbee’s term for the phenomenon he identified as common to the civilizations he studied. “Man achieves civilization, not as a result of superior biological endowment or geographical environment,” he wrote, “but as a response to a challenge in a situation of special difficulty which rouses him to make a hitherto unprecedented effort.” The rise of civilizations, then, is a question of spirit: This was his thesis.
O.K., how do civilizations fall? To answer this Toynbee applied another of what he considered the laws of history. And it comes to the same question, turned upside-down.
Rarely if ever, Toynbee found in his extended explorations of the past, do societies collapse in consequence of external factors—aggressions, altered environments, and so on. The end almost invariably begins, maybe a little surprisingly, with a spiritual lapse. Ruling elites, in plain language, lose their dynamism. The civilizations they inherited from distant ancestors no longer inspire them, or they take them for granted as eternal and do not tend them properly. It is at this point they decline into greed, decadence of all kinds, self-absorption, aggressive nationalism, pointless military adventures, one or another form of despotism.
Somewhere in A Study of History, (and my edition is in a storage vault with the rest of my life), Toynbee puts it this way: Failing societies fail almost always because their elites murdered them or they committed suicide. Maybe there are exceptions to this as a scientific law: What about the ancient civilizations of the American Southwest that swiftly disintegrated when the arable land gave out? But this seems to me an elegantly simple summation of Toynbee’s findings.
It was J.D. Vance’s Munich speech that prompted me to think of Toynbee. Had the American populist read the famously erudite Englishman? Maybe, I thought at first, but I then concluded it did not matter. If Vance has read A Study of History, he seems to have missed its lessons.
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