Journalist Sebastian Junger was embedded with soldiers in the Korengal Valley during the war in Afghanistan. One of the reasons some veterans miss war, he says, is because it fulfills a deep human need to belong to a trusted group.
Many soldiers experience intense connections, without fully understanding what they experienced.
How does this experience of a common enemy compare to Rene Girard’s ideas about the first scapegoating process.
Why the Center-Left Became Immoderate
In polarized times, those without a clear guiding ideology become the most vicious partisans.
Democracy dies when one side loses respect for electoral outcomes and comes to consider the other illegitimate. Recent U.S. presidents, at least since Bill Clinton, have faced a degree of implacable opposition from the further reaches of the opposing party. But of late the problem seems to have intensified—and disrespect for democratic outcomes has become particularly acute on the center-left.
.. But although centrists are by definition skeptical of ideology, that does not make them any less prone to partisanship.
.. In polarized times, political competition comes to resemble tribal warfare. Everyone is under pressure to close ranks and boost morale.
.. Before being appointed to succeed Mrs. Clinton in the Senate, Kirsten Gillibrand was an upstate New York representative who belonged to the Blue Dog Coalition.
.. Many Democrats are unwilling to accept that Mrs. Clinton actually lost to Donald Trump. Those who find her standard center-left technocratic worldview congenial are disinclined to accept ideological explanations, so they look for scapegoats: Russia, James Comey, even the voters who supported Donald Trump.
.. Contrast the centrists with leftist standard-bearers like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. They’re no fans of Mr. Trump, but they haven’t been at the forefront of calls for impeachment or intensifying the Russia investigation. Instead, they have focused their efforts on broadening the Democratic Party’s base with a more inclusive populism that takes seriously the systemic causes of inequality
.. Both have resisted the urge to write off Mr. Trump’s supporters, and Mr. Sanders in particular has made outreach to Republicans a major part of his postelection message. Mr. Sanders seems instinctively uncomfortable with identity politics,
.. People want something to believe in, but in the absence of a strong ideological sensibility among Democrats, partisanship and alarmism offer ready recourse. Having an enemy is a powerful motivator, and hating Mr. Trump is entertaining to boot.
.. Yesterday’s centrists have become some of today’s most intense partisans.
Donald Trump: The Anti-Hero
Donald J. Trump, with his golden towers, his perennial tanned face and his 7th grade vocabulary, is the anti-hero of the elites. He’s the negation of countless hours spent on complicated books, of travelling around the world to attend sophistic conferences, of being proud of their PhDs, of writing hunger-solving children-savings essays. He is the negation of everything that they are.
.. They knew that if Trump won, their rent-free business models would come to an end. They were not concerned with the fate of the country, they were concerned with the fate of their careers. After all, how could they keep distributing their unbounded expertise to the masses when the guy who, according to them didn’t have any, was rewarded with the highest office in the land? How could they sell complicated books and charge high fees to go speak around the country when the guy who was proud of not reading books was made President?
.. This catastrophe, of course, caused pain and disbelief in the heart of the experts. How could they be this wrong? They couldn’t, obviously. Something else must have happened. Something else that was outside of their control. Something nefarious which couldn’t possibly be foreseen nor accounted for in their torrential editorials plastered on the front pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post.
Something, something. Something that could, somehow, incorporate President Trump in their “I’m a very educated and smart person” worldview.
What if Trump actually lost the election? What if there was a glitch in the system, an error, a mistake. That would explain everything.
And so it came. A few days after the election, the exit door from their nightmare materialized, like the sun after a tempest, under the form of an old enemy. An enemy that was operating below the surface, away from the impervious sight of the experts, an enemy sabotaging our democracy from the cold basements of a foreign land. And, just like that, Russia became the scapegoat for all of their shortcomings. As they furiously typed away their new editorials explaining in phantasmagorical details how Russia stole the election for Trump, they realized that hope was still there. Not everything was lost.
Do You Think Donald Trump Is Ready for a Real Financial Crisis?
The tax law and a push by the Trump administration to increase military spending will reduce federal revenue and force the Treasury to borrow more money when the economy is close to full employment. This could stoke inflation and prompt the Federal Reserve to tighten monetary policy. That, in turn, would slow the economy.
.. The prospect of a recession or financial crisis on Mr. Trump’s watch is unnerving, because he is as confident in his own abilities as he is lacking in knowledge and sound judgment. When confronted with criticism, he lashes out like an intemperate child.
On Monday, he said Democrats who did not applaud during his State of the Union address were un-American and treasonous.
.. If the stock market falls further, will the president try to reassure the public, or will he launch a Twitter fusillade blaming the drop on, say, a conspiracy hatched by the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, and Tom Steyer, the billionaire hedge fund manager who wants Mr. Trump impeached?
.. Instead, he has stacked his administration with incompetent yes men, right-wing ideologues and Washington swamp dwellers. Consider the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, a former investment banker, who unnerved the currency market last month by suggesting that the United States was trying to weaken the dollar. His statement broke with the longstanding practice followed by Treasury secretaries from both parties to avoid making careless public pronouncements about American currency.
Mr. Mnuchin and Gary Cohn, the White House’s chief economic adviser, also debased their credibility last year by arguing with no evidence whatsoever that the Republican tax cut would pay for itself.
.. Paul Ryan, tried to pass off as good economic news that a public school secretary would take home an extra $1.50 a week as a result of the tax law.
.. Mr. Ryan, for one, is citing the deficit to make the case that the government needs to slash Medicaid, Medicare and other important government programs. Other members of his party are using the deficits to argue that the government cannot afford to repair and upgrade the country’s dilapidated infrastructure.