Anomie and Airsickness

We are buffeted by the turbulence of crazy. Buckle up.

Quick note: I’m sending this out early today because (1) I’m headed off to spend the long weekend with the grandkids out east, (2) Had some thoughts on the unbearable lightness of Nikki and (3) Wanted to share my latest offering in The Atlantic — which is a reminder that you are not the crazy ones.

Happy Friday.

But, first, the obligatory dog pictures.

Auggie says hi.

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A montage of Pete!

Not numbness. More like airsickness.

There’s a reason you feel like you’ve been taking crazy pills every day — we live in vertiginous times where nothing seems to make sense anymore. Buckle up, because it’s going to be a bumpy year.

Here’s my latest offering in The Atlantic:

“At what other moment in American history,” Anne Applebaum recently asked, “could a presidential candidate praise a fictional serial killer, and inspire almost no reaction at all?”

Even by the standards of the times, what she was referring to did seem a vertigo-inducing moment. Amid an anti-migrant tirade at a rally earlier this month in New Jersey, Donald Trump gave a shout-out to the “late, great” Hannibal Lecter, referring to the fava bean–loving cannibal played by Anthony Hopkins in the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs as a “wonderful man.”

And the nation shrugged, because this was simply the latest in a long list of 2024’s bizarre and disorienting moments (including an earlier recent reference to cannibalism from the president himself). “The scale of the abnormality is so staggering,” ABC’s George Stephanopoulos argued recently, “that it can actually become numbing.”

But Americans’ reaction is less like numbness and more a response to something like airsickness, which results when we experience a disconnect between our senses—a nausea-inducing conflict between what we know and what we see. Motion sickness is caused by a discrepancy between what the inner ear detects and what the eye sees. The effect can be vertiginous—so the way people avoid being nauseated is by trying to ignore the dissonance.

We’ve been led to believe that things work in a certain way, that there are mores and norms. We thought our world was right side up, but it now feels as if it’s been turned upside down. Words don’t mean what we think they do. Outrage is followed not by accountability, but by adulation. Standards shift, flicker, vanish. Nothing is stable.

More than a century ago, Émile Durkheim, the father of modern sociology, described what he called “anomie,” a condition of instability “resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals.” Anomie could result from a conflict of belief systems, leading to a breakdown of social ties and a “shared moral order.”

Call it anomie or call it airsickness—we find ourselves in a land of confusion. Trump pays off a porn star and yet is hailed as a champion of Christian values. He mocks prisoners of war and calls dead soldiers “suckers,” and his MAGA base is thrilled by his patriotism. And, as Tom Nichols notes in The Atlantic today, Trump brags about his tight relationship with America’s implacable adversary, Vladimir Putin, claiming that the Russian president will release detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich “for me, but not for anyone else.”

To hear conservative Christians argue that personal character doesn’t matter, or to witness self-described constitutional conservatives defend a relentless attack on the rule of law, is disorienting. To see advocates of law and order embrace rioters who attacked the Capitol and beat police officers is baffling. To watch the party of Ronald Reagan embracing isolationism and following Trump in truckling to the Butcher of Ukraine, Putin, is bewildering. Mind-bending, also, is that, despite Trump’s fire hose of lies, 71 percent of Republicans describe him as “honest and trustworthy.” Recent polls suggest that Trump is leading President Joe Biden in the swing states that will decide the November election.

Maybe that’s why following the news these days feels like swallowing crazy pills. You don’t have to be a particularly cynical observer of American politics to recognize that, past a certain point, no norms endure that cannot be abandoned, and that any position can be flipped if doing so is expedient.

Trump has been found liable for sexual abuse and defaming his victim. He incited a violent attack on the Capitol, called for terminating rules in the Constitution, dined with a neo-Nazi, and floated the idea of executing the nation’s most senior general. He has been fined for fraud on a massive scale, faces more than 80 felony charges, and is accused of withholding and sharing top-secret national-security documents.

Faced with all of this, the Republican Party says, Yeah, we want four more years of that. GOP leaders wearing red ties make lockstep pilgrimages to his felony trial in New York to show their fealty, while wannabe running mates mimic his rhetoric and echo his lies about the 2020 election. And now there’s Nikki Haley, who has called Trump “unhinged,” “toxic,” “diminished,” and unqualified. Yesterday, she said that she would vote for him anyway. The alleged frauds, adultery, sexual assault, threats, and possible felony convictions don’t matter. Close to half the electorate seems to agree.

Which brings us back to our chronic airsickness. Most of us took it for granted that Americans by and large shared certain ethical assumptions. Despite our differences, we imagined, we all used roughly the same moral compass to judge right and wrong.

But what if that’s not true anymore?

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Peak Nikki

As someone who once wrote a piece entitled, “The Unbearable Lightness of Nikki,” I wasn’t surprised by her announcement that she would be voting for Donald Trump, a man she has variously described as ‘toxic,” “a disaster,” and “unhinged.”

Her flip-flop-flip-flop-flip (etc.) was very much on brand. But because this is Nikki Haley, she executed her latest act of performative genuflection in the most cynical possible manner.

During her campaign she called Trump out: “He said that he would stand with Putin and encourage him to invade our allies. . . . Trump would side with a dictator who kills his political opponents. . . . Trump is going to side with a madman who’s made no bones about the fact he wants to destroy America.”

This week she explained that she wanted a president who would have the “backs of our allies and hold our enemies to account.”

And then endorsed a man she absolutely knows will do neither. In other words:

At another point in her campaign, she declared: “If you mock the service of a combat veteran, you don’t deserve a driver’s license, let alone being president of the United States.”

In the end, though, she decided that even though Trump couldn’t be trusted to drive a car, we should, by all means, give him back the nuclear codes.

Such is the bottomless ambition and opportunism of the former U.N. Ambassador.

To state the obvious: Nikki Haley will never be confused with Ronald Reagan, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Chris Christie, or even Mike Pence.

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What now for her supporters? Trump seems uninterested in wooing them, and Nikki’s endorsement is unlikely to carry much weight from voters who were more anti-Trump than pro-Haley.

David Frum writes:

From the point of view of Trump-skeptical Republicans, this election is no more about Joe Biden than a fire in a children’s hospital is about the fire extinguisher. They don’t think, Gee, I wish this extinguisher were newer, so I’ll let the children burn to death.

They think, I hope there’s still an ounce or two of flame-retardant foam left in this old thing—and if there is, I’ll be damn grateful for it.

Those who cast their votes for Haley in the Republican primaries are sometimes denigrated as out-of-date and out of touch. There is much truth to those jibes. Very clearly, the party is trending in a new direction. Those who object—but who for one reason or another have not yet quit the party altogether—are clearly a waning force.

But they’re not quite an extinct force.

They are motivated by what they cherish: the country, its democracy, its place in the world, its Constitution. Nobody will change their mind about those things. Haley was their instrument, not their leader. When the instrument ceases to serve its purpose, it can be thrown away without a pang of regret.

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But, as Andrew Egger noted yesterday, the whole “Haley Republican” thing is no more.

For a minute this year, she won those people over anyway. Because for a minute, when she got into that one-on-one with Trump, she actually seemed to be saying: Forget the consequences, I’m going to tell you how I really feel about the guy.

That’s what those people—that quarter or so of the party—were pulling the lever for. That’s what they kept pulling the lever for, in state after state, even after it was obvious it was a hopeless endeavor. Even after she dropped out! The “Haley Republicans” coalition wasn’t forged by stupid canned lines about how kicks hurt worse when you’re wearing heels. It wasn’t even forged by appreciation for Haley’s serious foreign policy views. “Haley Republicans” became a thing because, for a few months this year, Haley, uniquely among the top brass of the Republican party, was willing to step forward and tell the truth about Donald Trump.

That energy is still there—those voters are still there—but the coalition is gone now. “Haley Republicans” as a bloc ceased to exist when Nikki Haley took to the Hudson Institute stage to bend the knee.

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Exit take: Amanda Carpenter has a damn good question:

Nota Bene

Via Politico: “The White House to the left: We told you so on crime.”

The defeat of a liberal Portland prosecutor at the hands of a tough-on-crime challenger has hardened a view among top White House officials that Democrats need to further distance themselves from their left flank on law-and-order issues.

In the wake of the voter backlash over public safety in Oregon, Joe Biden’s aides this week argued the results served as validation of their long-running concerns that crime and an immigration crisis at the southern border risk overwhelming the president’s case for reelection — especially if the broader party is seen as soft on both fronts.

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And finally: