I did not expect much from President Trump’s April 1 address about his war of choice against the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Trump’s presidential addresses are, from a basic aesthetic standpoint, uniformly terrible. His delivery is labored. He sounds like someone who fears reading in public and resents any situation that makes this especially conspicuous. He makes the presidency seem like a small and piddling thing.

But what made me double-plus sure the remarks would amount to less than zero was the topic itself: his world-historically stupid decision to launch a legally dubious and strategically ruinous war he reportedly finds “boring” and that has already spun far beyond his understanding or control.

It’s not just that he’s losing; it’s that he sounds like he knows it.

“Never before…”

If you’re an unusually mundane masochist, you can watch the whole thing above. (I’ll only moderately kink-shame you, I promise.) But the part of the speech I want to focus on, the part where I believe he reveals, despite himself, his awareness of his escalating failure, came early.

From Trump (emphasis mine):

As we speak this evening, it’s been just one month since the United States military began Operation Epic Fury, targeting the world’s number one state sponsor of terror, Iran. In these past four weeks, our armed forces have delivered swift, decisive, overwhelming victories on the battlefield. Victories like few people have ever seen before.

[…]

Never in the history of warfare has an enemy suffered such clear and devastating large-scale losses in a matter of weeks. Our enemies are losing, and America, as it has been for five years, under my presidency, is winning, and now winning bigger than ever before.

[…]

We are systematically dismantling the regime’s ability to threaten America or project power outside of their borders. That means eliminating Iran’s navy, which is now absolutely destroyed. Hurting their air force and their missile program at levels never seen before. And annihilating their defense industrial base.

[…]

Our armed forces have been extraordinary. There’s never been anything like it militarily. Everyone is talking about it.

[…]

The whole world is watching, and they can’t believe the power, strength and brilliance. They just can’t believe what they’re seeing. They leave it to your imagination, but they can’t believe what they’re seeing, the brilliance of the United States military.

[…]

Because of the actions we have taken, we are on the cusp of ending Iran’s sinister threat to America and the world. And I’ll tell you, the world is watching.

As you might imagine, I’ve cut out a lot — the lies, of which there were many, and the statements that contradict each other in almost sequential order — but even without my excisions the basic propaganda is, as always, punishingly obvious:

Like few have ever seen before. Never in the history of warfare. Winning bigger than ever before. Hurting their air force and their missile program at levels never seen before. There’s never been anything like it militarily. Everyone is talking about. They just can’t believe what they’re seeing … they can’t believe what they’re seeing.

10 years into the experience of President Trump — first as candidate, then reality, then specter, then reality once again — I think even the most news-avoidant Americans understand that this is what Trump sounds like when he knows things aren’t going well.

As we saw in his response to his defeat in 2020, it’s not enough to say that a loss was actually a win. It’s necessary to say that the loss was not only a win but the greatest victory of all time. It’s not enough to say that down is up; it’s necessary to say that down is the most up that up has ever been, and that up is down to a degree the world has never seen before.

It’s all so tedious — and, yes, pathological. But there’s a method to it, too.

That method is best summarized by two of the more famous quotes from Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism which, taken together, offer a useful guide to how Trump and his acolytes approach “messaging” (a flattering euphemism Americans use to talk about our own propaganda).

The first:

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is … people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

And the second:

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

What Arendt is describing, and what Trump so often embodies — though I am absolutely fucking positive that he has never read a single word Arendt wrote — is the basic conviction that the people, the masses, are both stupid and desperate to be lied to.

That this kind of lying, baldfaced and almost performative as it is, provides those who accept it a means of escaping a reality they find disempowering and overwhelming. That to savvily recognize how you’re being manipulated is, somehow, a sign of your own power.

“The greatest victory in the history of mankind”

Dispiriting as Trump’s address was, it did at least remind me of one of my favorite movies of recent years, Alexander Garland’s Civil War.

In the opening of that film, we see a character simply known as The President (Nick Offerman) preparing to deliver a speech to what remains of the failing rump-state once known as the United States of America. The movie begins with the President practicing his lines (he’s got that much on Trump, I guess!) for a public address.

And while, at this point, the viewer doesn’t know whether the President is winning his war or not, once they hear what he actually says, it’s abundantly clear that he is absolutely not.

Here’s what he says to himself as he readies to go live:

Some are already calling it the greatest victory in the history of mankind…

Some are calling it already…

We are closer than we have ever been to victory…

Some are already calling it the greatest victory in the history of military campaigns…

And then here is what he ultimately says once the cameras are rolling:

Today, I can announce that the so-called Western Forces of Texas and California have suffered a great loss. A very great defeat at the hands of the fighting men and women of the United States military.

The people of Texas and California should know that they will be welcomed back to these United States as soon as their illegal secessionist government is deposed.

I can also confirm that the Florida alliance has failed in its attempt to force the brave people of the Carolinas into joining the insurrection.

Citizens of America, we are now closer than ever to a historic victory. As we eliminate the final pockets of resistance, God bless you all and God Bless America.

As the movie unspools, we soon find out that the United States is not winning — that, in fact, the rebel forces that were supposedly handed “a very great defeat” are preparing for a final siege of DC and that this president’s days are numbered.

But this doesn’t come as a surprise. We knew, from the moment we first heard the President mumbling to himself about “the greatest victory in the history of mankind,” that we were listening to a failure.

“The hard part”

So where does this likely lead?

In Civil War — spoiler alert — it leads to the President (Offerman) getting executed on the floor of the Oval Office. It’s a pyrrhic victory of sorts — the point of Civil War, among other things, is that most modern civil wars don’t really have winners so much as one side that loses less — but it’s a victory all the same.

The same logic applies to Trump’s war, and it’s inseparable from the idiocy that has defined his “excursion” from the jump.

Zero-sum-minded as he is, Trump cannot understand that war is one of the most obvious arenas in life where it is possible for both sides to lose. Yes, one side can lose more than the other — Iran’s military is definitely losing much more than is the US — but losing less is not the same as winning.

And while I doubt Trump is capable of understanding this in a deep sense, I do think we can see, not only in his administration’s actions but in his address to the nation, that he understands that Iran’s decision to close the Strait of Hormuz has placed him in a kind of strategic checkmate.

From Trump (emphasis mine):

We’ve beaten and completely decimated Iran. They are decimated both militarily and economically and in every other way. And the countries of the world that do receive oil through the Hormuz Strait must take care of that passage. They must cherish it. They must grab it and cherish it. They can do it easily. We will be helpful, but they should take the lead in protecting the oil that they so desperately depend on.

So to those countries that can’t get fuel, many of which refuse to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, we had to do it ourselves. I have a suggestion. No. 1, buy oil from the United States of America. We have plenty. We have so much. And No. 2, build up some delayed courage — should have done it before, should have done it with us, as we asked. Go to the strait and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves. Iran has been essentially decimated. The hard part is done, so it should be easy.

If the United States were insulated from global markets — if the closing of the Strait of Hormuz did not effect prices everywhere, including at gas stations across the country — then Trump might maybe kinda-sorta have a point. But it isn’t; so he doesn’t.

But whether or not the US “needs” oil from the Strait, American consumers definitely need cheap gas. And the US economy definitely needs to avoid another oil-shock-induced recession like the ones in the 1970s. Those are fixed facts. They will not change, no matter how many times Trump claims he’s done something the likes of which the world has never seen before.

The question, then, isn’t so much what Trump will do. (For all the propaganda about his mercurial and unpredictable nature, he is actually incredibly easy to anticipate.) The question is whether the American people have reached the stage of epistemic degradation that Arendt warned us about.

When gas prices keep going up, and when the already rickety economy starts to show major strains, will voters “protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and … admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness”? Or will they do what they so often do: Get mad as hell, insist they’re not going to take it any more, and vote for whichever party happens to be the opposition?

I don’t know the future. But I can tell you something about the present. As of this writing, Trump’s approval rating on the economy, according to CNN, is 31 percent.

Last week, during the Pentagon’s monthly prayer service, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth delivered an address that would have made a bloodthirsty crusader like Pope Innocent III proud.

From the Military Times:

Hegseth then prayed what he said was the same prayer that a military chaplain gave troops during the Maduro operation, calling on God to behold the “wicked who rise against your justice and the peace of the righteous” and to “break the teeth of the ungodly.”

“Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation. Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy,” Hegseth prayed.

Like so much of the second Trump administration, Hegseth’s remarks were shocking but not surprising. (Granted, he’s amping up his Christian Nationalism; the absolutely unhinged and odious extremist Doug Wilson is his mentor for a reason.)

But, as Greg Sargent recently documented, Hegseth’s rhetoric about Operation Epic Fury has always been, by any previous standards, almost cartoonishly berserk.

From Greg Sargent in The New Republic:

By now it’s become unmistakable that Hegseth’s tenure has been marked by open and unrestrained sadism and bloodlust. He enthuses about raining “death and destruction from the sky all day long” and about “punching” the enemy “while they’re down.” He speaks of liberating the military from “stupid” rules of engagement. He delights in unleashing its “maximum lethality.” He rhapsodizes about killing “without hesitation”—with no moral qualms whatsoever.

It’s all more than a little performative. But that isn’t the same thing as being insincere or easily dismissed.

As Kurt Vonnegut wrote, we are what we pretend to be. And Hegseth pretends to be — and therefore is — the kind of person who issues orders like kill them all.

From the Washington Post:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.

[…]

A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.

The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.

Now, according to a report in Zeteo, some folks within the Pentagon have started referring to Hegseth as “Dumb McNamara.”

Just like his Vietnam War-era predecessor, the joke goes, Hegseth is so obsessed with metrics that “prove” the US is winning that he cannot appreciate (or refuses to see) the larger strategic failure. But unlike McNamara, who was objectively brilliant, Hegseth is… patently not.

It’s a funny line, and the contempt for Hegseth is certainly deserved.

But to understand who Hegseth thinks he is — and why he’s actually even worse than that — we need to look to another figure from the Vietnam War.

Who Hegseth thinks he is

The figure Hegseth seems to have in mind — the template he’s working from, consciously or not — is Apocalypse Now’s Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore.

Played by Robert Duvall, Kilgore, famous for declaring, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” is an instantly iconic representation of US imperialism and a militarist will-to-power.

Kilgore is a Vietnam War commander who leads helicopter assaults to the blare of Wagner. He’s like something out of The Iliad — intentionally, self-consciously so.

He’s not just an aesthete. He’s also a performer: whether it’s professional surfing or rolling thunder, he loves the sublime combination of beauty and violence as both a practitioner and a connoisseur.

From the script:

KILGORE (pointing to trees): Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed for twelve hours... and when it was all over, I walked up. We didn’t find one of them, not one stinking [—] body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell? The whole hill — smelled like… victory.

He looks off nostalgically. A shell comes in and hits in the background… Kilgore ignores it.

KILGORE: Someday this war’s gonna end.

A tremendous sadness enveloping him. Then he stands up and walks off.

Kilgore doesn’t justify what he does. He is too busy reveling in it.

When Hegseth practically vibrates with excitement while rattling off statistics about enemy targets obliterated, his eyes gleaming with satisfaction, this is who he thinks he is.

“Any man who’s brave enough to fight”

Yet Hegseth’s performance is a pale imitation.

As evidenced by his frequent invocation of “no quarter,” Hegseth recognizes no code, not even that of the warrior. That’s not true of Kilgore, who, for his manifest flaws, operates according to a standard.

From the script:

Kilgore turns and continues down the burning street with his group. He comes upon a wounded VC, groaning. The man has tied a wash bowl over his belly — and is groaning for water. Kilgore turns to a soldier.

KILGORE: What’s this?

SOLDIER (OVER P.A.): This man’s hurt pretty bad, sir. About the only thing holding his guts in, sir, is that pot lid.

KILGORE (to ARVN soldier): Yeah? What does he have to say?

ARVN SOLDIER: This soldier is dirty VC. He wants water. He can drink paddy water.

KILGORE: Get out of here! Give me that canteen.

He pushes the ARVN soldier away, turns, and then gets a canteen full of water from the lieutenant.

KILGORE: Any man who’s brave enough to fight —(to ARVN soldier) Get outta here! I’ll kick your fucking ass! Any man brave enough to fight with his guts strapped on him can drink from my canteen any day.

The difference

Of course, we shouldn’t romanticize a character who is depicted as monstrous — charismatically so, yes, but still.

Although that scene showcases Kilgore’s code, and its allowance for a limited form of mercy, it’s also evidence of his arrogance. (Remember: the US is supposedly there to support the South Vietnamese, not threaten to kick their fucking asses.)

Kilgore is no hero. But what he does have is a fundamental respect for war — and for warriors, even the enemy.

Unlike Hegseth, who is desperate to advertise his contempt for limits, Kilgore treats his code as no less an integral part of his embodiment of American machismo than his shirtlessness or his coolness under pressure.

For Kilgore, war is a force that gives life grandeur and, as Chris Hedges put it, meaning. For Hegseth — and for his boss — the war on Iran is propaganda and content.

Kilgore loved war. Hegseth, as Sargent reminds us, seems to love killing. That distinction might have once sounded abstract. No longer.

I read the news the other day — oh, boy — and came across something that’s been nagging at me ever since. It was a piece from Jake Traylor at MS NOW (née MSNBC). Trump, it seems, is bored with his war of choice:

Trump calling the war already won is “mostly hyperbole,” said a senior White House official granted anonymity to speak candidly about the administration’s thinking. “It’s part [of Trump] just wanting to declare victory and move on.”

That impulse, the official said, has become more pronounced in recent days.

“[Trump] is getting a little bored with Iran,” the official said. “Not that he regrets it or something — he’s just bored and wants to move on.”

A second White House official who was granted anonymity for the same reason said that Trump has begun to “move on” from the conflict and has started shifting conversations and personal focus toward the economy, domestic issues and the upcoming midterm elections.

The White House’s public communications have suggested a similar detachment, presenting the conflict less as an ongoing war with human lives at stake and more as a cultural moment that generates online content.

This is decadence beyond all comprehension. The president launched an unnecessary and legally dubious war on a whim, without seriously considering its likely consequences.

And now that this colossally stupid gambit is going as poorly as anyone with even a superficial understanding of the issue would predict, he’s decided the whole thing is just, like, y’know, so boring. So whatever. 1

Tawdry, and — given the stakes — grotesque. Equal parts evil and banal.

But the reason this stuck with me isn’t because I was shocked to discover that the president is a profoundly unserious person. It’s because it reminded me of one of my favorite scenes from my favorite show.

And the more I thought about the parallel between the scene and our present crisis, the more I started to wonder whether focusing on Trump’s depravity isn’t wrong, per se, but rather a way of letting us — by which I mean American society — off the hook.

The boredom of Tony Soprano

“House Arrest” is the 11th episode of season two of The Sopranos. It’s not one of the series’s most celebrated chapters, but it’s always been one of my favorites. It's an episode about boredom, and about whether "boredom" is a concept we use to mask something deeper and darker about ourselves.

The setup: Tony has narrowly escaped arrest for a murder he committed impulsively, against his own interests, because he couldn’t stop himself. His lawyer tells him, not for the first time, that he needs to insulate himself from the nuts-and-bolts of his criminal empire.

So for one whole episode, Tony tries. He avoids the Bada Bing. He goes to his straight job. He stops immersing himself in the lifestyle of the mob.

And he cannot stand it.

When he goes to see his therapist, Dr. Melfi, he is overcome with resentment: “Trying to keep a low profile, what’s the fucking point? I’m still a miserable prick, and I’m still passing out.”

At this point in the show, Melfi’s ambivalence about having Tony as a patient is near its peak.

Rather than validate his self-pity — which, in truth, is all Tony ever really wants from therapy — she is reserved, even somewhat withholding. Tony senses this and it makes him mad.

He sneers, “You seem very mellow today.” And she responds:

MELFI: Let’s talk about you.

TONY: You seem like you’re on drugs, and I’m boring myself to death. I’m ready for the George Sanders long walk here.2

MELFI: Do you know why a shark keeps moving?

TONY: They gotta keep moving or they’ll die, they can’t breathe or something.

MELFI: There’s a psychological condition known as Alexithymia, common in certain personalities. The individual craves almost ceaseless action, which enables them to avoid acknowledging the abhorrent things they do.

TONY: Abhorrent? What certain personalities?

MELFI: Antisocial personalities.

TONY: My future brother-in-law ... Ran over a guy, no reason. Guy’s paralyzed, has to piss into a catho-tube … What happens when these antisocial personalities aren’t distracted from the horrible shit they do?

MELFI: They have time to think about their behavior. How what they do affects other people. About feelings of emptiness and self-loathing, haunting them since childhood. And they crash.

A nation of sharks

The easy thing would be to compare Trump to Tony and leave it at that — to end this with some high dudgeon about how Trump’s boredom reflects the same antisocial personality traits, albeit on an impossibly grander scale.

And there would be truth to that. Trump is clearly someone who needs constant action, constant attention, to avoid any opportunity to stare at the abyss within himself.

But the point of The Sopranos was never that Tony was bad and the rest of us are good. The point was always that we are Tony. It’s why the finale is titled “Made in America.”

Tony is not something alien or other. He’s a (slightly) exaggerated version of the modal American — his materialism, his narcissism, his boredom. Just taken to the nth degree.

If that’s true of Tony Soprano, a fictional character, then how much more true is it of Donald Trump — a man the American people elected, nearly reelected, and then chose to elect again? Can we honestly say we’re so different?

The better question is what it is about our lives — our politics, our society, our culture — that has us all so bored. What makes Donald Trump the president we may not want but that, on some deep level, we seem to think we deserve?

Yes, Donald Trump is bored. His boredom is obscene. But what is our excuse?

The allegations of insider trading tied to the Iran war had a familiar shape: people close enough to power to know what was coming using their knowledge of a pending catastrophe to profit before it became public.

For millennials, elite impunity and financial markets intersecting tends to summon 2008. And then I found myself thinking about how much worse this is. The villainy of the people responsible for the greatest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression looks, from today’s vantage, almost quaint.

It’s one thing to knowingly spread toxic assets across the market in the hope that your employer won’t be left holding the bag; it’s another to see the death and destruction of a war of choice as a chance to get that bag.

So I decided to rewatch Margin Call and see if I could understand, on a characterological level, this process of moral degradation.

“I’m here for one reason and one reason alone.”

The film, which was written and directed by J.C. Chandor, takes place over a single night at a large investment bank.

The people running “the firm,” as they call it, have just discovered they are holding investments that are so bad that they threaten to overwhelm the company’s entire market capitalization — so bad that, if they don’t spread the poison throughout the market before anyone else knows, the whole company will go under.

The film’s most powerful figure is John Tuld (Jeremy Irons), the CEO who arrives by helicopter in the small hours and decides, before dawn, to dump the firm’s entire toxic position onto an unsuspecting market. As he puts it:

Do you care to know why … I earn the big bucks? I’m here for one reason and one reason alone. I’m here to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That’s it. Nothing more. And standing here tonight, I’m afraid that I don’t hear a thing. Just silence.

When pushed, he continues:

What have I told you since the first day you stepped into my office? There are three ways to make a living in this business: be first, be smarter, or cheat. Now, I don’t cheat. And although I like to think we have some pretty smart people in this building, it sure is a hell of a lot easier to just be first. Sell it all. Today.

Cynical as he may sound, nothing Tuld says here is untrue.

When Sam Rogers (Kevin Spacey), his head of sales, warns him that they’ll be selling assets they know have no value, Tuld cuts him off: “We are selling to willing buyers of the current fair-market price. So that we may survive.”

Tuld is not a deep thinker. He jokes at one point that a junior colleague should explain the situation by speaking to him “as you might to a young child. Or a golden retriever.”

But he isn’t full of shit. He knows who he is. He knows the business he’s chosen.

“The fear that they might jump”

The more interesting characters are the ones who haven’t made that peace, the ones who are living in what Sartre would call bad faith.

Rogers is one example. His sudden bouts of conscience, despite working at the firm for more than 30 years, are both sympathetic and, in context, risible. He bridles when Tuld accuses him of “going soft” — but after Tuld hands him a piece of paper with a “very generous” number on it, he follows orders.

Rogers’ guilt is real. It is also, entirely, beside the point.

Will Emerson (Paul Bettany) is the film’s most volatile figure, and its most revealing one. Whereas Rogers pretends to have less agency than he does, Emerson imagines he has more.

He is 10 years into a career he regards with sardonic detachment. He spent $76,520 last year on, as he puts it, “hookers, booze, and dancers. But mainly hookers.” He jokes that if he doesn’t get nicorette soon, he’ll be forced to kill somebody.

Early in the film, before Tuld arrives, Emerson climbs onto the ledge of the firm’s skyscraper roof and looks down over the city. His younger colleagues tell him to get down. Before he does, he offers this:

The feeling people experience when they stand on the edge like this isn’t a fear of falling. It’s the fear that they might jump.

“That’s very deep and depressing,” one of his underlings shoots back. “Yeah, well, I’m a little dark sometimes,” Emerson says.

Then, after another bitter joke — “Not today!” — he gets down and says: “It looks like they’re going to make us dump this shit. You watch.”

Later, driving back to Manhattan from Brooklyn, Emerson explains himself to one of the men he spoke with on the roof:

Listen, if you really want to do this with your life, you have to believe you're necessary. And you are. People want to live like this, in their cars and the big fucking houses they can't even pay for, then you're necessary. The only reason that they all get to continue living like kings is because we've got our fingers on the scales in their favor.

I take my hand off, then the whole world gets really fucking fair really fucking quickly, and nobody actually wants that. They say they do, but they don't. They want what we have to give them, but they also want to play innocent and pretend they have no idea where it came from. That's more hypocrisy than I'm willing to swallow.

“So,” he concludes, “fuck normal people.”

The difference between Emerson and Tuld

Emerson’s real foil is not Rogers but Tuld. The difference between them isn't conscience versus cold rationalism; it’s bitter disillusion vs. unbothered fatalism.

But where Emerson's cynicism is performed, Tuld's fatalism is almost terrifyingly sincere. Confronted at the end of the film by Rogers, who demands to be let go as a kind of penance for what they’ve done, Tuld responds:

When did you start feeling so sorry for yourself? It’s unbearable.

So you think we might have put a few people out of business today. That’s all for naught. But you’ve been doing that every day for almost 40 years, Sam. And if this is all for naught, then so is everything out there. It’s just money. It’s made up, pieces of paper with pictures on it so that we don’t have to kill each other just to get something to eat. It’s not wrong. And it’s certainly no different today than it’s ever been…

We can’t help ourselves. And you and I can’t control it or stop it or even slow it down. Or even ever so slightly alter it. We just react. And we make a lot of money if we get it right. And we get left by the side of the road if we get it wrong.

Emerson's argument is organized around contempt for "people" — their hypocrisy, their appetites, their need to play innocent. He hates that they render someone like himself “necessary” — and that without him, “the whole world gets really fucking fair really fucking quickly,” something that “nobody actually wants.”

The difference between Emerson and Tuld can be seen in their points of emphasis. Unlike Emerson, Tuld doesn’t talk about “people” — he talks about “we.” He doesn’t say people can’t help themselves; he says “We can’t help ourselves.” And he doesn’t say that he and Rogers have their fingers “on the scales,” but rather that, “you and I can’t control it or stop it or even slow it down … We just react.”

Tuld does not imagine himself as a moral or civic leader. As he says earlier in the film, his job is “to guess what the music might do a week, a month, a year from now. That’s it. Nothing more.” But by absolving himself he absolves everyone else.

He does not say “fuck normal people.” He says: “It’s not wrong. And it’s certainly no different today than it’s ever been.”

From the Great Recession to Operation Epic Fury

Nearly 20 years have passed since the events depicted in Margin Call. I don’t know where Will has ended up. Maybe he’s in early retirement, living in New Zealand, meditating and getting into woodworking.

But I do know where the US has ended up. And the road from there to here has been paved by people like Emerson — angry, bitter, and disillusioned elites who have opted to give the “normal people” what they supposedly both deserve and want.

In early March, the US and Israel launched a sweeping attack on the nation of Iran that the US has called Operation Epic Fury (OEF).

As American and Israeli missiles have continued to fall on Iran, killing more than a thousand civilians so far, the White House has posted a series of videos on social media splicing together actual war footage and clips from video games and action movies.

The videos are willfully transgressive, likely designed to send a different message to two distinct audiences. For the primary audience — the kind of people who post all day on X about how international law is for “simps” who suffer from “suicidal empathy” — the message is clear: It is “based” when the US military kills people.

For the second audience, however, the message is even more unvarnished: You want to be innocent? You want to imagine you can live your lives as Americans without having to sully your consciences by supporting violence against its “enemies”? Fuck you. That is more hypocrisy than we’re willing to swallow.

Unlike Tuld, who celebrates the market, even at its most heartless, because it allows humans to avoid “kill[ing] each other just to get something to eat,” the heirs of Emerson in the Trump Administration celebrate “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.” They talk about their kitschy videos of mechanized death as “banger memes.”

The world Tuld presides over accepts unjust outcomes as a necessary price for a great harmony; the one Emerson’s heirs have built celebrates cruelty as a kind of meaning in itself.

Watching Margin Call again, I kept thinking about the difference between the Olympian remove of a man like Tuld and the barely suppressed hatred of a man like Emerson. They may be two evils, but one is clearly the lesser.

Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord — remembered, simply, as Talleyrand — was one of the “great” diplomats and statesmen of his era.

He spent years helping Napoleon Bonaparte build his empire, only to eventually betray the Emperor when it became clear to him that the latter’s time was running out. He was cynical to the point of nihilism, a shameless womanizer, and corrupt as hell.

He was also the author of more than a few sterling bon mots. If he had been born a few centuries later, it is likely he would have also been a top-tier, Hall of Fame-level poster.

There are two quotes attributed to him that I particularly enjoy.

The first, which I think about whenever I’m reminded that there’s a whole generation of people who never knew what it was like to live in a world before Instagram, is this:

He who has not lived in the eighteenth century before the [French] Revolution does not know the sweetness of life and cannot imagine that there can be happiness in life.

My second-favorite, however, requires a pinch of context.

For one thing, it turns out that the quote, while often attributed to Talleyrand, was actually said by someone else, although it’s not clear who.

More importantly for my purposes here, though, is that the quote was a response to Napoleon Bonaparte’s decision to have a rival kidnapped and executed.

The move had short-term gains (and Napoleon would go to his death insisting he was right to do it) but many people, then and now, believed the benefits were more than outweighed by long-term costs.

Eventually, somebody described the affair as:

Worse than a crime — a mistake.

And that is what came to my mind during my recent re-watch of Unforgiven (1992), Clint Eastwood’s masterful revisionist Western.

Like any truly great film, Unforgiven is about a lot of things, and like any great Western, those things include: capitalism, progress, self-mythology, and US history.

What makes Unforgiven especially compelling, however, is that it is interested — on a deep and almost spiritual level — in what philosophers call the question of “desert”, and what normal people call the basic question of whether we get what we deserve.

But as I watched Unforgiven this past weekend, I was struck by how much the film is also about something much simpler: the importance of having a government staffed with serious people who take their jobs seriously. The absolute necessity of basic competence. The value of good bureaucrats.

Because what really sets the plot of Unforgiven into motion is not a crime; it’s a mistake.

Despite being the closest thing the film has to a defender of the rule of law, the man who makes this mistake — Sheriff Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman) — is domineering and sadistic. But the source of his error is neither his authoritarianism nor his brutality.

It’s his utter incompetence.

The two Williams

William Munny was once the kind of man other killers invoked like a curse. A drunk, “a killer of women and children,” infamous for savagery that even by the standards of the frontier was considered extreme.

Then he met a woman who seemed to see something in him nobody else did. Married her, got sober, spent eleven years trying to become the pig farmer she apparently believed he could be.

By the time the film begins, she’s dead from smallpox. He’s failing at the farm, face-down in the mud more often than not, but still sober, still trying.

Little Bill Daggett has also reinvented himself. He’s the sheriff of Big Whiskey now, which means he still gets to hit people, but with a badge.

He is building a house, too — literally, with his own hands, and badly. As one of his deputies says: “He don’t have a straight angle in that whole god-damned porch, or the whole house for that matter.”

Little Bill can dominate a room, humiliate a man in the street, run a protection racket with the confidence of someone who has never once questioned his own judgment. What he cannot do is build anything that lasts.

Whatever order he maintains rests entirely on the threat of violence. He doesn’t cite a law when he demands new arrivals disarm. He cites a hand-painted sign.

Little Bill’s big blunder

There is no such thing as equality under Little Bill’s corrupt facsimile of “the law.” He does not judge people according to what they’ve done. He judges them according to who they are.

After two cowboys are detained in a brothel for viciously assaulting a sex-worker — slashing her repeatedly across the face because she involuntarily laughed at how small one of their penises were — Little Bill is initially inclined to punish via bullwhip.

The plan is hardly a model of restorative justice, but it’s at least consonant with an idea of justice: namely, “an eye for an eye.”

But then Skinny, the brothel’s owner and resident pimp, complains that Little Bill’s plan would leave him at a financial loss:

SKINNY: Little Bill, a whipping ain’t going to settle this. This here is a lawful contract between me and Delilah Fitzgerald, the cut whore. I brought her clear from Boston, I paid her expenses and all, and I’ve got a contract here that represents an investment of capital.

LITTLE BILL: Property.

SKINNY: Damaged property. Like if I was to hamstring one of their cow ponies.

LITTLE BILL: So you figure nobody will want to fuck her now, right?

SKINNY: Hell no, least ways they won’t pay to do it. Maybe she can clean up the place or something, but nobody’s going to pay good money for a cut up

“I guess you’d just as soon not have a trial. No fuss, huh?” Little Bill asks the cowboys.

They agree, and a deal is struck: instead of being whipped, they will give Skinny some of their finest ponies — seven of them, which is almost certainly worth more than Delilah’s contract — or else.

The brothel’s madam, Alice, dissents:

ALICE: You ain’t even going to whip them?

LITTLE BILL: Well, fined them instead, Alice.

ALICE: For what they done? Skinny gets some ponies, and that’s it? That ain’t fair, Little Bill. That ain’t fair!

He could have stopped here. The deal was already done, the cowboys spared.

Instead he turns to Alice and explains that they were just “boys” who were being “foolish” — not like, he doesn’t quite say, the women in this room:

LITTLE BILL: Haven’t you seen enough blood for one night, Huh? Hell, Alice, it ain’t like they were tramps, or loafers or bad men, you know there were just hard working boys who were foolish. If they was given over to wickedness in a regular way then I could see…

ALICE: Like whores?

Alice doesn’t miss it. Neither does the audience.

The quip — which makes a mockery of his “system” of order — does not enhance but rather diminishes Little Bill’s authority. It exposes the fortress of his power as rickety and jerry-rigged, representing nothing more than his arbitrary will.

Now it is clear to Alice, if it weren’t already, that Little Bill’s sovereignty over Big Whiskey stands — solely — on his use of brute force. And in the Wild West of 1880, there are plenty of other men who are happy to exchange their violence for someone else’s money.

“What I’m doing is talking.”

Little Bill knows immediately what he’s done. The bounty Alice and the other women put out — pooling their savings, for which Alice is beaten by Skinny — is a direct challenge to his authority. And because that authority rests entirely on force, the only answer he can think of is more force.

English Bob (Richard Harris) comes to Big Whiskey with hopes of an easy score. Like Little Bill, he too has had a late-career shift, becoming muscle for railroad companies trying to keep their Chinese laborers as weak, unorganized, and exploited as possible. Unlike Little Bill, however, he cannot claim that his actions carry with them the imprimatur of the law.

So when Little Bill catches English Bob walking around Big Whiskey with multiple firearms on his person, he decides the best way to shore-up his dwindling authority is to make an example of the man. He disarms him, then sucker-punches him, and then proceeds to brutally beat him in the middle of his little fiefdom’s one main street.

And as he literally — and repeatedly — kicks English Bob while he’s down, Little Bill proclaims:

I guess you think I’m kicking you, Bob. It ain’t so. What I’m doing is talking. You hear? I’m talking to all those villains down there in Kansas! I’m talking to those villains in Missouri! And all those villains down there in Cheyenne! And I’m telling them, there ain’t no whores’ gold! And even if there was, well, they wouldn’t want to come looking for it anyhow!

As far as English Bob goes, the tactic works. Bob is thoroughly defeated and, after suffering through a night in Big Whiskey’s jailhouse, subject to Little Bill’s mockery and derision, the would-be assassin is sent packing.

But those “villains” in Kansas and Missouri and Cheyenne that Little Bill is so worried about aren’t in Big Whiskey to witness English Bob’s humbling. They don’t see a thing. Neither do Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) nor his partner, William Munny.

The final mistakes

Repeatedly throughout Unforgiven, we are shown that although Little Bill is an adequate destroyer of other men’s pride and bodies, he has no capacity for building. He can break things — the social contract, his own rules, people’s bones — but he cannot make anything. He is “the worst carpenter.”

Little Bill fails at his chief goal: to keep the cowboys from getting killed. The first one is shot by Munny in a surprise attack. The second one, despite being “guarded” by one of Little Bill’s deputies, is similarly dispatched by a young assassin — the Schofield Kid (Jaimz Woolvett) — who is sharing the reward with Logan and Munny.

At this point in the narrative, however, Logan is no longer riding with the Kid or Munny. After finding that he’s lost his stomach for murder during the first assassination, he decides to ride back to his wife and home. But, inevitably, he is captured and dropped into Little Bill’s clutches.

After Little Bill hears that both of the cowboys under his protection have been murdered, he tortures Logan so badly that he kills him. Logan’s death is an accident — another example of Little Bill’s incompetence.

Here’s how Kate, one of the sex-workers, shares the news with Munny:

KATE: A cowboy come in saying you killed Quick Mike in a shithouse at the Bar-T.

MUNNY: So Little Bill killed him for what we done.

KATE: Not on purpose, but he started hurting him worse, making him tell stuff. First Ned wouldn’t say nothing, and then Little Bill hurt him so bad that he said who you was. He said how you was really William Munny out of Missouri and Little Bill said, “The same William Munny that dynamited the Rock Island and Pacific in ’69 killing women and children and all?” and Ned said you done worse than that. Said you was more cold-blooded than [Billy the Kid] and how, if he hurt Ned again, you was going to come kill him like you killed a U.S. Marshall in ’70.

This is what finally that breaks Munny’s wavering resolve and causes him to once again embody the angel of death that he once was and still sees in his dreams.

And it doesn’t happen because Little Bill makes a considered decision to kill Logan and risk Munny’s vengeance; it happens because Little Bill is too weak, too stupid, and too fundamentally incompetent to realize what he is doing.

After Munny has killed the pimp Skinny, as well as five or so of Little Bill’s deputies, but before he delivers the coup de grace to Little Bill, the latter whines:

I don’t deserve this. To die like this. I was building a house.

Munny’s response is the film’s most famous line, and one of the greatest send-offs in film history: “Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.”

Part of what makes the line so indelible is its ambiguity.

Is it a statement about might-makes-right? A refutation of the idea that it was the forces of “good” and “progress” that “won” the West? An expression of an even deeper nihilism? Or evidence that Munny has truly lost whatever it was that inspired his late-wife to marry and rehabilitate him?

Given these choices, my answer is: Yes.

But I’d also suggest that, on one level, Munny’s answer is quite simply incorrect. Little Bill does deserve this. Not because the world is fair and good triumphs over evil, but because he had a job — a job with life-or-death consequences — and he was absolutely, abysmally terrible at it.

He “deserves” it not because of his crimes, but because of his mistakes.​​​​​​​​

There is a story that Max Brod, Franz Kafka’s friend and literary executor, once told about a conversation he had with the novelist in 1920:

I remember a conversation with Kafka which began with present-day Europe and the decline of the human race.

“We are nihilistic thoughts, suicidal thoughts that come into God’s head,” Kafka said.

This reminded me at first of the Gnostic view of life: God as the evil demiurge, the world as his Fall.

“Oh no,” said Kafka, “our world is only a bad mood of God, a bad day of his.”

“Then there is hope outside this manifestation of the world that we know.”

He smiled. “Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope — but not for us.”’

When, against my better judgment, I find myself ruminating and feeling rather doomy about the direction of things, I often think about this exchange.

It makes me smile. The combination of humor and despair; the seemingly glib, yet sneakily profound, irony of saying there is hope “— but not for us”; it’s Kafka’s whole style in miniature. Finding comedy, and therefore a kind of humanity, while staring into the abyss. Gallows humor as art.

This story is always wandering somewhere in the recesses of my mind. But it came to the forefront most recently as I was re-watching Network — recently released as part of the Criterion Collection1 — for the umpteenth time. It’s still masterful. It’s still hilarious. It’s still prophetic.

But, goddamn, is it hopeless too.

Paddy Chayefsky's bad day

Network was directed by Sidney Lumet. But if the film has an auteur, it's Paddy Chayefsky, the screenwriter who was so closely involved with every aspect of the film, even holding "final cut" rights, that he’s better understood as its co-director.

And if Chayefsky is Network's demiurge, then it's fair to say — to paraphrase Kafka — that he's having a very bad day indeed.

As the film begins, the network in question, Union Broadcasting System (UBS), is a failing enterprise, behind in the ratings and bleeding cash. Its longtime anchor is Howard Beale (Peter Finch), an old lion in the vein of Edward R. Murrow or Walter Cronkite, and he’s getting sacked.

There is also every indication that things are about to get worse.

Lurking in the background is Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall), a banal corporate enforcer dispatched by the conglomerate that has just acquired UBS — the Communications Corporation of America (CCA) — to seize control of the network and jack up its profits, first and foremost by gutting the money-losing news division.

The national zeitgeist, meanwhile, is increasingly grim.

We are decisively in the post-’60s fugue state: the dream is over, stagflation is king, and Gerald Ford is a caretaker president who nobody voted for. As the film’s chief antagonist, a striving and amoral executive named Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), puts it when summarizing “a concept analysis report”:

The American people are turning sullen. They’ve been clobbered by Vietnam, Watergate, inflation, the Depression. They’ve turned off, shot up and fucked themselves limp. And nothing helps.

It’s not quite 2026-level bad. But, to quote another Jewish poet, it’s getting there.

The hope outside

Yet the awful truth is that the world of Network is even worse than it seems.

I don’t just mean that the film gets darker, and yet also funnier; I mean that as the film accumulates, the despairing thoughts of its demiurge, Chayefsky, become increasingly nihilistic and suicidal — to the point that, by the end, the world of Network is nothing less than a totalitarian nightmare.

That is a common interpretation of the movie, and I’ll admit that there were times during my latest watch when I felt suffocated by Chayefsky’s methodical construction of a kind of existential prison that its characters are not only unable to escape but unable to even imagine escaping.

After some more of that damn rumination, however, I decided that reading of the movie was wrong. Not because it’s too bleak — this is a movie where suicide is repeatedly played for laughs — but because it’s too pat.

To return to the Brod-Kafka conversation I mentioned in the beginning: I don’t think Chayefsky’s point is simply that there’s no hope for the men and women of Network, but rather that there is “an infinite amount of hope.”

But it’s not for them. It’s for us.

How Network negates itself

There are four scenes, all of which involve Beale, that, taken together, show how Chayefsky manages to find hope in hopelessness.

The scenes trace a temptation narrative — a fall. In the person of Howard Beale, the soul defends itself. Incoherently, “madly,” and almost by accident; but still. There is a wild holiness to Beale urging his audience to proclaim, “I’m a human being, goddammit!”

And then, corrupted by pride, and overwhelmed by the awesome power of a false god, Beale embraces his own annihilation.

Scene one: “And I’m not God!”

In the first scene, Beale goes on the air and recounts a visitation he experienced the night before after awaking from “a fitful sleep”.2 He says that the Voice — which he describes as “shrill, sibilant, faceless” — tells him: “I want you to tell the people the truth” even though “the people don’t want to know the truth.”

Beale says he initially refused, telling the Voice, “How the hell would I know what the truth is?” But the Voice, he says, had no patience for this. “Don’t worry about the truth,” he says it told him, “I’ll put the words in your mouth.”

At this point in the film, Beale is lucid enough to recognize that the story he is telling is more or less the same as the one recounted in Exodus, and he says he tells the Voice, with incredulousness, “What is this, the burning bush?! For God’s sake, I’m not Moses!”

But the Voice — crucially — does not respond by saying, as God did to Moses, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob,” nor does it declare “I AM WHO I AM.”

Rather, the Voice responds: “And I’m not God! What’s that got to do with it?!”

Then, according to Beale, the Voice offers a fuller explanation of itself and its mission to him (emphasis mine):

“We’re not talking about eternal truth or absolute truth or ultimate truth! We’re talking about impermanent, transient, human truth! I don’t expect you people to be capable of truth — but, goddammit, you’re at least capable of self-preservation! That’s good enough! I want you to go out and tell the people to preserve themselves!”

Again, the Voice affirmatively disclaims godhood. It explicitly says it is not offering some kind of all-encompassing, permanent, eternal truth. It repeats, in fact, that “I don’t expect you people to be capable of truth.”

All it is asking for Beale to articulate is what it sees as the bare minimum — “self-preservation” — which, it insists, is “good enough!”

Like Moses, Beale asks, “Why me?” But unlike God, the Voice does not tell Beale, as God does Moses: “I will be with you.” It gives, instead, a far more prosaic — but practical — answer:

“Because you’re on television, dummy! You have forty million Americans listening to you, man!”

It’s all terribly compelling, but it’s also still — clearly — the ravings of someone losing his mind.

Scene two: “I am imbued, Max.”

Immediately after Beale shares his story of the Voice, he meets with his boss, Max Schumacher (William Holden), who at this point in the story is still under the (mistaken) impression that he’s running his own news division.

Schumacher is Beale’s best friend, and although he knows Christensen and Hackett are thrilled with Beale’s ratings, he does not want to continue putting someone he loves on the air to humiliate himself for CCA’s benefit.

But Beale — exhilarated by the effects of a psychotic breakdown and the unexpected revival of his career — refuses to relinquish his pulpit. When Schumacher tells him he plans to take him off the air, Beale responds (emphasis mine):

What’s happening to me, Max, isn’t mensurate in psychiatric terms. This is not a psychotic episode. It is a cleansing moment of clarity. I am imbued, Max. I am imbued with some special spirit. It’s not a religious feeling at all. It is a shocking eruption of great electrical energy … It is not a breakdown. I have never felt so orderly in my life! It is a shattering and beautiful sensation! It is the exalted flow of the space-time continuum, save that it is spaceless and timeless and of such loveliness! I feel on the verge of some great ultimate truth.

At the crescendo of this rant, Beale faints — but not before bellowing: “You will not take me off the air for now or for any other spaceless time!”

I want you to notice two things here.

Beale is already forgetting what the Voice told him. It did not promise him “some great ultimate truth”; it explicitly said the truth it offered was not “eternal truth or absolute truth or ultimate truth.”

And the Voice said something else: “I’m not God!”

Christensen and the other opportunists at CCA are branding Beale “the mad prophet of the airwaves” — but the Voice flatly contradicted that. If the Voice is not God, then Beale is no prophet.

But it’s unclear whether he cares anymore. He is back on TV. He is imbued.

Scene three: “My life has value!”

The third scene, Beale’s “mad as hell” diatribe, is the most famous moment in Network and one of the most iconic scenes in American cinema. It is also much hollower — and much darker — than the endorphin-rush of catharsis it provides may lead you to believe.

This is intentional, and it has a lot to do with the way Chayefsky structures the monologue. The worst parts — the warning signs that we’re listening to the ravings of an increasingly unwell and megalomaniacal demagogue — are all in the front.

Here, for example, is how Beale begins. You’d only need to tweak a few words here and there and it could be a run-of-the-mill Facebook post from a MAGA3 supporter (emphasis mine):

I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth. Banks are going bust. Shop-keepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street, and there’s nobody anywhere who seem to know what to do about it. There’s no end to it.

Although Beale has already forgotten that he is not “imbued” and that the Voice that spoke to him was not God, he still has the self-awareness to admit that he has no solutions: “I don’t want you to riot or write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write.”

Despite his increasing mania and rising messianism, Beale is sticking to the script the Voice has given him. He is not offering some kind of “truth.” He is simply urging — demanding — that his audience assert its right to “self-preservation”:

All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad! You’ve got to say, “I’m a human being, God damn it! My life has value!”

Next is the culmination:

So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs! I want you to get up right now, go to the window, open it, stick your head out and yell, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

That’s usually where the clip stops.

But I want you to watch the rest of the scene, because a closer look reveals that as stirring as what Beale is saying feels, and as noble as the basic impulse that all human lives “have value” is, what we’re actually watching — and what he’s inspiring — is not something to celebrate:

Yes, people are screaming the phrase from their fire-escapes and out their windows. It seems like a thrilling display of collective self-assertion.

But notice what else is happening: ominous thunderclaps, flashing lightning. These are not signs God gives us when he is happy. And as you examine the scene more closely, it’s clear that the “God” of Network, Chayefsky, is not happy either.

Do all those people in their little apartments, indistinguishable from one another, chanting the same phrase — a phrase they’re repeating from someone else — strike you as true individuals? Is this what liberation looks like? Or is it meaningless, commodified catharsis?

As Schumacher listens to the crowd with a look of weary barrenness, Diana Christensen — who has supplanted Schumacher and now controls the broadcast — is effervescent.

He turns his face from the empty spectacle; she calls various regional stations to hear the chants and revel in her triumph.

Scene four: “They say I can sell anything.”

I want to now focus on the second-most famous scene in Network, in which Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty), the chairman of CCA, and the film’s true villain, explains that Beale has “meddled with the primal forces of nature” by urging his audience to flood the White House with telegrams to stop a Saudi-backed front company from buying the conglomerate — and, with it, UBS.

But before we get into Jensen’s nightmarish and towering rant about “a holistic system of systems” and the “primal forces of nature” that represent “the atomic, subatomic, and galactic structure of things today,” it’s worth taking a beat to appreciate how the scene begins.

Because it doesn’t start with the rant. It begins with Jensen, in a rather unpretentious and down-to-earth manner, introducing himself to Beale and saying — with no less explicitness than that of the Voice — exactly what he is, as well as his intentions (emphasis mine):

I started as a salesman, Mr. Beale. I sold sewing machines and automobile parts, hair brushes and electronic equipment. They say I can sell anything. I’d like to try to sell something to you.

After walking him into the conference room — or “Valhalla,” as Jensen calls it — Jensen sits Beale down on one end of the long table and stands before him at the other end. And then he thunders:

You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it, is that clear?! You think you have merely stopped a business deal — that is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back. It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity, it is ecological balance!

Jensen, knowing his mark, understands that the best way to get through to the “mad prophet of the airwaves” is to speak far more like the “burning bush” that confronted Moses than the Voice that confronted Beale ever did. He doesn’t quite scream “I AM THAT I AM,” but he may as well have.

Still, he’s not content to simply demand Beale let the deal go through.

Appreciating the power of Beale’s hold over his audience, Jensen wants to turn Beale — this advocate of the “human being” and its right to “self-preservation” — into an apostle of a corporate cosmology that is nothing less than the absolute annihilation of the very idea of the individual human.

And so he makes a hard-sell (emphasis mine):

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians. There are no Arabs! There are no third worlds! There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars! Petro-dollar, electro-dollars, multi-dollars; reichmarks, rubles, rin, pounds and shekels! It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet! That is the natural order of things today! That is the atomic, subatomic, and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and you will atone!

Then, almost as if breaking character, Jensen lowers his arms and, back in the mode of the kindly salesman who walked Beale into “Valhalla,” asks: “Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?”

Beale is mute with wonder. So Jensen continues — and in absolute contrast with the Voice, which insisted it was not God and that the truth it offered was “not eternal truth or absolute truth or ultimate truth,” Jensen insists that Beale bow down to a truth that, although horrifying, is fixed, immutable, and beyond even a scintilla of hope of resistance (emphasis mine):

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen, and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today … We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale! It has been since man crawled out of the slime.

Jensen’s peroration is so powerful — and Beale’s capacity to resist, which was never strong, is so corrupted by his own messianism and deteriorating mental health — that Beale never notices what we, watching from outside, can plainly see: this corporate Lucifer has tipped his hand.

Is this “corporate cosmology” the “natural order of things today,” or is it how the world has always been “since man crawled out of the slime”? It cannot be both. If it’s new, it’s contingent — something that happened, and could therefore unhappen. If it’s eternal, then Jensen’s rage at Beale makes no sense; you don’t thunder at a man for “meddling” with the inevitable.

The speech is a sales pitch; it is designed not to tell the truth but to manipulate its recipient into giving the speaker what he wants. Jensen told Beale he was a salesman. Beale should have believed him.

But Beale is too far gone. And as he asks the same question of Jensen that he asked of the Voice — and accepts the exact opposite answer — we see how fully he has fallen:

Howard Beale: Why me?

Arthur Jensen: Because you’re on television, dummy.

Howard Beale: I have seen the face of God.

Arthur Jensen: You just might be right, Mr. Beale.

Jensen has closed his deal. Beale will soon go on the airwaves and insist, to his audience’s chagrin (and despite rapidly declining ratings) that, “It’s the individual that’s finished. It’s the single, solitary human being who’s finished.”

“Is dehumanization,” he later asks, “such a bad word?”

A flicker in the dark

What happens next to Beale doesn’t really matter.

In keeping with Beale’s new philosophy, the movie begins to move forward with a kind of pitiless determinism. And why not? Through the serpent of Jensen, Chayefsky-the-demiurge has seemingly snuffed out the last flicker of humanity left in Network’s nightmare-world.

Yet I still don’t think that’s Chayefsky’s ultimate point, nor is it the conclusion we should take from the film.

Because that contradiction I noted earlier from Jensen — his mutually exclusive claim that his “corporate cosmology” was a new order and how the world has always been — is not the only example of the film’s plot undermining its characters’ explanations.

If there truly were no America, Jensen wouldn’t need the SEC to cooperate. Yet Hackett, in an earlier scene, warns: “The SEC could hold this deal up for twenty years if they wanted to!”

If there were truly a kind of sublime wisdom to what Beale said once he became Jensen’s mouthpiece, why would audiences turn against it so viscerally? I suppose one could say, echoing the Voice, that people don’t want to hear the truth. But in the film, the reason we are given is that the audience finds Beale’s new schtick “very tedious and depressing” and quickly stops watching.

I think that’s a perfectly Chayefskyian phrasing.

Because while it’s not optimistic — it would be better if the audience rejected it as blasphemy, rather than simply for being dull! — it’s also not fully nihilistic. To stick with the Gnostic frame: it would suggest that somewhere in Network there remains a flicker of the spirit trapped in the otherwise evil physical world around it.

And if there’s a flicker of that in Network, which Chayefsky has almost designed as a perfect trap, imagine how much more there is in our world? I don’t think that’s an excessively sunny gloss on this, either; Chayefsky put everything he had into this screenplay, and whatever else he was, he was a brilliant writer.

That’s not quite Kafka’s “infinite amount of hope,” but maybe it’s just enough.

In my writings here so far, I have focused on visual media — television, movies, and political reporting. But I contain multitudes, and storytelling comes in a nearly endless variety of forms.

The first form was aural. When hunter-gatherers sat around a fire sharing the myths and fables that structured their worldview, they weren’t reading. They were listening.

So, before you read any further — and in the interest of minimizing the contradiction of writing about how not all stories can be understood through the written word, I’ll keep my comments brief — I want you to stop and listen to a new song by Cameron Winter, the lead singer and chief songwriter of Geese (your hipster dad’s favorite new band).

The song is called “Warning,” and it’s part of a new compilation, HELP(2), from War Child Records, to support children in conflict zones.

This is a worthy cause at all times, of course, but one that is especially vital at a time when the government of Israel is perpetrating, at the very least, a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and when USAID, which was once one of the chief vehicles for delivering aid to those most in need, has been fed “into the wood chipper.”

It is the angriest and most devastating thing you’ll hear all day.

I am not going to describe the music or try to translate into text a work of art that is nontextual — that’s not even a xerox of a xerox, but something worse.

But I want you to read some of the lyrics. They’re deceptively simple but cumulatively devastating.

Good morning

This is your warning

This is your warning

You’re gonna appear before a stranger

I don’t know if you’ll be in any danger

For some are not pulled into moving cars

Some are not dragged down Fifth Avenue by the hairs in their ears

Some get away with it, some get away with it for many years

And are not punished, but some are

The stranger

Two lines are especially noteworthy here: “You’re gonna appear before a stranger” and “Some are not dragged down Fifth Avenue by the hairs in their ears.”

Initially, Winter’s reference to “a stranger” sounds like he’s talking about God — a suspicion confirmed later in the song when he refers to “a tall far-off thing with eyes / Whose existence I cannot prove or disprove / Looking at everybody all the time.”

But that phrase, “a stranger,” has special meaning and resonance within Judaism.1

Exodus 22:21 says: “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

And in Leviticus 19:34, we’re told: “The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

What Winter is suggesting, I believe, is that if God is real — “Whose existence I cannot prove or disprove” — then God is “a stranger.” In this respect, he’s echoing what Jesus says in Matthew 25:35-40 (emphasis mine):

For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.

Recall that this is a song for a compilation about children in “conflict zones.” If anyone is a stranger, it is them.

Remember, too, what Jesus said: “Suffer the little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.”

As to the second line — “Some are not dragged down Fifth Avenue by the hairs in their ears” — I think the allusion is clear enough that it doesn’t require further elaboration:

The reckoning

As rich and powerful as these lyrics are, it’s not until we reach the end of the song that “Warning” becomes something more than a jeremiad.

If you’re not wrong and there’s really nobody out there who can do the impossible

And who’s gonna forgive you?

Who is gonna forgive you?

This is a fascinating reversal of the idea that a Godless universe is one in which those who do evil — the people who “get away with it … for many years” — go unpunished.

What Winter sees here is the inverse: If there is no reckoning, there is also no forgiveness.

The “stranger” who is being hurt by this evildoer, and the people who love the “stranger” and identify with them, will not forget what has been done to them. And they won’t forgive it, either.

The work that must be done

Next come what I think are the most affecting lyrics in the whole song, a series of lines that I believe are coming from the strangers who will not forgive what has been done to them.

They are both cryptic and chilling, an eerie combination of sadistic reverie and ambient menace:

Now, there is work to be done on the sides of your body

And there are hot things that are unusually long and they burn very badly

There are things I hope one day to hook around the corners of your mouth

There are plans that I have in this house, written down

And there are plenty of people that I can very easily call who can come over here within an hour

And do the work that must be done on your heart

There is so, so, so, so much work to be done on your heart

There is so much work to be done on your heart

And it’s not the kind of work that you do around the house

“There is so much work to be done on your heart / And it’s not the kind of work that you do around the house.”

If that doesn’t put the fear of God — or, more to the point, the fear of there being no God — into one’s heart, I don’t know what could.

And this, in the end, is Winter’s “warning.” Woe to those who refuse to hear it.

Lately, when I try to explain to myself or to other people how US politics has reached its current state of decadent degradation, I find myself returning to a handful of aphorisms.1

Here’s one of my favorites: The media is structurally pro-Trump.

I know there are people who would push back on the structural emphasis. And in the era of Jeff Bezos, the Ellisons, and Patrick Soon-Shiong, I’d never entirely dismiss the argument that oligarchic ownership prefers a rightwing Republican — however insane — to even the most milquetoast Democrat.

But I’ve worked in media for a long time, and I can say with some confidence that most reporters aren’t ideologically liberal. They’re culturally cosmopolitan, which isn’t the same thing. They’re also not MAGA. Mostly, they’re just people with kids trying not to get laid off.

And not getting laid off means operating according to a set of incentives that increasingly determine the direction of political media — especially outlets that depend on advertisers rather than subscribers.

It’s the (stupid) incentives, stupid

What are these incentives? There are many, but for the purposes of my argument here, I’d simplify them as the following:

• Most people — and especially younger people — now get their “news” from social media.

• Therefore: create as much content as possible, as fast as possible, optimized for “engagement” and “traction.”

• That means inclining toward the unholy tetralogy of algorithmic virality: negativity, moral outrage, tribal resentment, and misinformation.

• Ideally, frame stories so they can be easily cut into vertical video for TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

Under these mandates, the ideal politician to cover is someone who gives you an endless supply of quick-hit content that checks all four boxes.

Someone exactly like Donald Trump.

An anti-Mamdani hit piece as a case in point

I don’t need to belabor the Trump examples.

It’s 2026. We’ve lived through the prospect, the reality, the second prospect, and the second reality of President Donald Trump for more than a decade. You get it.

What I want to draw your attention to instead is what happens to politicians who don’t make it easy for the media to follow these incentives and feed the content machine.

Specifically: a recent piece from the New York Times about New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

The piece is titled “Mamdani Chooses His Words Carefully After Alleged Terror Attack,” and it’s an unusually transparent example of what happens when a politician declines to help the elite press satisfy the Moloch of algorithmic social media.

The gist of the piece is that there’s something a little off about the way Mamdani handled a recent attempted terrorist attack on a group of protestors near Gracie Mansion, where the mayor lives with his wife:

In the days after a homemade bomb laced with metal was hurled into a highly charged protest near his official residence in Manhattan, Mayor Zohran Mamdani did not turn to his typical means of communication.

There were no short-form videos posted to social media about the attack in front of Gracie Mansion, where Mr. Mamdani lives with his wife, Rama Duwaji. There were no impassioned speeches.

Mr. Mamdani chose an alternative path: two deliberative written statements, and one 14-minute joint appearance with his police commissioner, Jessica S. Tisch, a political moderate, during which they took only four questions.

Before I get into what's really going on here, two stipulations:

• The New York Times has often covered politics under the assumption that if a politician doesn’t want to make news about something, that is in itself newsworthy.

• The basic insight — that Mamdani chose to downplay the incident — is correct. He did.

But here’s the next paragraph in the piece, and I think this is where the Times’s biases — against Mamdani, personally, as well as against Mamdani’s decision to forego this golden opportunity for content — become glaring (emphasis mine):

Mr. Mamdani may have risen to power on the strength of his strong communication skills, but in moments that cut close to some of the city’s deepest fault lines and his own religious identity as the city’s first Muslim mayor, he has come to favor a more cautious and stiffer approach.

I am not a Mamdani stan; but the idea that his “communication skills” only “may have” contributed to his success manages to be condescending on two somewhat contradictory levels. For one, there is no “may” when it comes to Mamdani’s “communication skills,” unless we’re also going to say the sun “may” come up tomorrow. I mean, come on.

And yet even this compliment, backhanded as it is, sells Mamdani — and, more importantly, Mamdani’s supporters — short.

Is he a good communicator? Yes. But he also ran on policies. And among the New York City electorate, those policies are rather popular.2 The implication that his supporters are little more than rubes, seduced by a good performer, reads like an opinion masquerading as reporting.

But that’s still just the warm-up.

The real tell here, the place where it becomes clear that the Times is mad at Mamdani for not creating content about the attack — content that the Times can use to make more content, and so on — is when the report says Mamdani has chosen “a more cautious and stiffer approach.”

“More cautious” is fine. But what the hell does “stiffer” mean? That his responses were boring? Formal? Restrained?

Another way to put it: responsible.

Instead of heightening the fear and animus, he communicated to the public what it needed to know without giving the would-be terrorists what they most wanted: outsized publicity.

Democracy vs. content

By any rational assessment, this is what we want our elected officials to do. We do not want them to act like influencers by seizing on the most incendiary items in the news and exploiting them for maximum attention. We do not want them to make engaging content; we want them to govern.

But “we” are not the elite political press. We want a functioning democracy. They want content.

And so, because Mamdani — despite “the strength of his strong communication skills” — refused to give it to them, he must be punished. If he won’t give the press the content that their incentives compel them to demand, then they will manufacture content out of his refusal to do so.

Ultimately, the problem isn’t simply that this incentive-structure rewards Trump. It’s that the media is methodically remaking the entire political landscape in his image. The media may not love Donald Trump. But its own fucked-up incentives are creating a world designed for someone like him.

In 1991, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard published three short essays arguing — with a born-poster’s combination of pique and irony — that the Gulf War “did not take place.”

The obvious, immediate response is ??? Hundreds of thousands were killed. Many more displaced. Oil fields, and people, burned. It’s featured in The Big Lebowski. The Gulf War definitely happened!

But Baudrillard wasn’t denying the killing. His argument was more specific:1

One of the two adversaries is a rug salesman, the other an arms salesman: they have neither the same logic nor the same strategy, even though they are both crooks. There is not enough communication between them to enable them to make war upon each other.

What happened in the Gulf, he argued, wasn’t war. It was a spectacle: Hussein was running a “hostage operation” while the US ran a one-sided air campaign.

When it ended, Saddam stayed in power. The US, meanwhile, didn’t just declare victory and leave. It also called on Iraq’s people to overthrow their dictator, then did nothing while Hussein massacred tens of thousands Kurds and Shiites for trying to do just that.

The essays are fun and maddening in roughly equal measure. There’s a stubborn cattiness to them that is refreshing in our era of AI slop and algorithmic homogenization.

And there are times, like when your country is marching into a quagmire for absolutely no coherent — much less good — reason, when it’s a relief to flee reality and hide in hyperreality instead.

So, because I am who I am, I had these essays on my mind lately.2 But as I re-read them, I found something more valuable than mere escapism. I think applying Baudrillard’s framework for analyzing the Gulf War to Trump’s war against Iran provides some real insight.

Because in his way, however self-consciously provocative it was, Baudrillard wasn’t wrong about the Gulf War. He suggested the war was colonial in nature, an attempt to punish a symbol of resistance to the New World Order, not because it was a threat, but because it represented the Other.

I don’t want to give that too much credit. Compared to Baudrillard, I’m more of a believer in individual agency; unlike W. in 2003, I don’t think Poppy in 1991 was desperate for a fight. I could imagine scenarios with less bloodshed.3

But for all the limits of his theory, revisiting Baudrillard still felt valuable — because, on that instinctual level that lurks beneath reason, I think Trump agrees. With his distinctly horrifying glibness, this is how Trump has understood military actions so far, and especially during his second term.

The Gulf War did not take place and Trump’s many second-term bombings have not taken place and his earlier war against Iran did not take place and his war against Venezuela did not take place, either.

The problem, of course, is that a regime-change war against the Islamic Republic of Iran doesn’t lend itself to Trump’s unconsciously postmodern approaches to statecraft.

Iran is not Iraq; the United States is not nearly as powerful as it was in 2003, much less 1991; and the current president is not George HW Bush.

It’s this guy:

This began in Caracas

The operation against Maduro was, in Baudrillard’s terms, almost perfectly unreal.

Maduro was removed from power but government was left intact. He had shown the Godfather disrespect, but his whole crew — that little… thing in Caracas, as Phil Leotardo might say — didn’t have to go. That’d be a whole thing. They just had to make a deal and call it a wash.

Cue the “surgical” strike. Rouse the commandos. Grab Maduro, bring him to a prison in the US, and see if you can still do business with what remains

After having some fun bombing fishermen, Trump got to post, with awe and delight, a picture of one of his enemies defeated and humiliated.

He wasn’t there, of course. But he got to watch it all. Even better, he got to post about what he was watching, too. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect simulacrum of a “war president.”

The experience was so exhilarating, according to The Atlantic, that it gave him some ideas:

The president’s past success with a limited strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities over the summer, as well as last month’s operation that removed Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela, may have convinced Trump that the U.S. military is ‘an almost biblical force that can accomplish anything,’ one Trump adviser told us.

Now, you may think, ah, that’s just one report; and it’s someone else’s read on Trump’s mindset, not something from Trump himself. And you’d have a point!

Unfortunately, this is what Trump recently said to Jonathan Karl of ABC News:

President Donald Trump told ABC News’ Jonathan Karl on Thursday that he isn’t concerned about what comes next after the war with Iran, praising what he described as the success of the U.S. military operation.

“Forget about next,” he replied to a question about the future of Iran, Karl reported on X. “They are decimated for a 10-year period before they could build it back.”

Karl also reported that Trump referred to the ongoing Middle East conflict as a “performance,” saying, “I hope you are impressed … How do you like the performance? I mean, Venezuela is obvious. This might be even better. How do you like the performance?”

For lack of a more coherent way to respond to such a stunning quote from the president of the United States about a war of choice he’s launched against a nation of over 90 million people, I’ll take a beat to remind you of this:

Trump has said in interviews and at rallies that two of his favorite movies are the black-and-white classics about stars collapsing in on themselves, “Citizen Kane” and “Sunset Boulevard.”

The problem for President Norma Desmond isn’t that his military got small. It’s that his ambition got too big.

An inconvenient truth: Iran is not Venezuela

There’s a dark irony in all of this that Baudrillard would have appreciated.

His essays were a provocation: if a war is pure spectacle, does it “take place” at all? But he couldn’t quite imagine the inverse problem: a president who actually believed him. Who went looking for a war that would not take place and found one that would.

Because here is what “taking place” means, in practice.

It means oil prices that working people feel at the pump, in a country where inflation was already the issue that cost the previous president his job.

It means US partners in the region who no longer know what American commitments are worth, and who are making their own calculations accordingly.

It means soldiers and sailors in harm’s way, in a war that was started without a public case being made for it, without Congress being consulted, and without anyone in the administration, it appears, knowing what the hell would happen next.

It means Iranians dying. Which includes the regime’s brutal and unlamented leaders, yes; but also the millions of Iranians who did not choose this and cannot stop it.

It also means — and this is the part they actually care about —that gas prices are going (do your best David Byrne here) up-up-up-up, up-up-up-up!

From Politico:

President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, is telling his advisers to bring ideas to the Oval Office to lower gasoline prices in the wake of the U.S. attack on Iran, according to two energy industry executives familiar with the conversations.

The White House is “looking under every rock for ideas on improving energy prices, especially gasoline prices,” said one of the executives, who was granted anonymity to describe internal administration discussions.

The attack and Iran’s subsequent targeting of the Persian Gulf’s energy sector has sent crude oil up more than $10 a barrel, lifting gasoline prices to their highest levels since Trump took office last year.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright and other advisers focused on energy policy, including a council led by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, “are getting screamed at to find some good news” on bringing down prices, the same executive said. “Folks are scrambling for announcements and messaging to counter the narrative” of rising prices, this person said.

None of that fits in a victory video, no matter how many totally badass clips from movies and video games you include. And none of it can be resolved by having your press secretary announce that you’ve decided you’ve won:

Trump has launched a war of choice against a government that has been preparing for exactly this confrontation for nearly half a century.

Also inconvenient: the Ayatollahs ≠ Saddam Hussein

Whatever you think of the regime in Iran — and there is not much to recommend it — the violent men running the Islamic Republic of Iran are not confused about what is happening to them or what they’re going to do about it.

Here’s their plan, according to a report in the New Yorker:

A war of attrition that exhausts missile defense inventories is the most beneficial outcome for Tehran. Iran knows this is a war it cannot ‘win’ militarily, but the regime in Tehran may believe they can survive it.

And here it is again from the regime itself:

We had no choice but to escalate and start a big fire so everyone would see. When our red lines were crossed in violation of all international laws, we could no longer adhere to the rules of the game.

Trump, apparently, expected to find an Iranian equivalent of Delcy Rodriguez; or for the Iranian people to “respond” to the “moment” to “seize control of [their] destiny”; or he’s waiting for some based Kurdish militiamen to save him like he’s Charlie Wilson; or he’s about to bring “certain death” to “groups of people that were not considered for targeting until this moment in time.”

Instead, it seems, he’s traded one Khamenei for another.

And the unlike the version of Saddam Hussein in Baudrillard’s story, the regime in Iran has no intention of trading “[a] perfect semblance of victory” for a “perfect semblance of defeat[.]”

That gives Iran agency — the very agency Baudrillard, and apparently Trump, believed was impossible in an era of hyperreality; or, as others call it, God help us, “performance.”

Every few years, when I feel as if the state of the world necessitates “a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off,” I try to calm myself by rewatching Deadwood, the David Milch-helmed HBO show that ran from 2004 to 2006.

I never regret it. The experience always leaves me with a sense of awe.

How did something so sophisticated, so ambitious, so weird, and so expensive manage to survive the entertainment industrial complex death-march from pre-production to public release? How did it manage to hold on for 3 whole seasons before HBO pulled the plug? Was the demiurge who seems to be in control of the world today on some kind of sabbatical? Can we send him back?

But during my most recent rewatch of the show, I found myself fixating on something else — something more particular — that the state of the world today doubtless primed me to notice in a way I would not have 10 years ago.

That something was George Hearst (Gerald McRaney) — a fictionalized version of the father of William Randolph Hearst, aka Charles Foster Kane — who is the closest thing the show has to a Big Bad and, in ways I’ll try to explain below, an embodiment of what Milch (via Deadwood) argues are the human forces in this world who drive us, with terrifying certainty and utter remorselessness, towards a future characterized by alienation, domination, and exploitation.

But before I fully turn towards examining Hearst — both as a symbol and as an archetype of the kind of people, with all their self-justifications and pride and self-pity, who are the chief proponents of tyranny — it’s worth explaining in fuller detail what Deadwood is about and why Hearst’s arrival in the camp is both dramatically and thematically necessary.

Deadwood’s triune truth

So what is Deadwood about? First, it’s worth recognizing the deceptive simplicity of this question. Deadwood is an audaciously ambitious project. It is trying to be about what it means to be a human being in the modern world; it is, therefore, in a sense, about everything.

That said, it is reasonable to argue that, from the most elevated vantage, Deadwood, despite its capaciousness, is making a specific argument about human nature and human society. And you must understand that argument to understand why Hearst is so important — and so disturbing.

Now, I do not here claim any special powers of divination. Among its many seemingly impossible feats, Deadwood is at once unusually entertaining and exceptionally didactic. If the show were a politician, we’d call it “on message.”

Moreover, Milch, through interviews and his own writings about the show, has been more than happy to explain — with a kind of intellectual rigor that reminds us that he was a star pupil at Yale and spent time as a professor — what he was trying to say in Deadwood, and why.1

The show is an explanation for why human beings, despite their often selfish and anarchic nature, manage so consistently, and of their own volition, to form together into something we call “society” or “civilization,” something better — something nobler — than the sum of its parts.

Or, as the late scholar and media critic Paul Cantor put it (emphasis mine):2

[W]hat intrigued Milch about Deadwood is the way a motley group of human beings, pursuing—sometimes viciously—their own self-interest could—in the absence of any legal institutions or established government—nevertheless manage to organize themselves into a community and pursue some form of common good.

In short, Milch’s “big idea” about society is a combination of three ideas that are, by themselves, plenty big already. Those three ideas are as follows:

1. Society is based on “operating fiction[s]”

2. Society is an “organism”

3. This “organism” is how God (or “the body of God,” as Milch has called it) is made manifest in our world

Put these three together, and you have Deadwood’s big idea.

The operating fiction(s)

Let’s start with the first idea — that society relies on multiple and overlapping “operating fictions.” (Each one being, to quote the title of the two-part episode that opens Deadwood’s second season, “a lie agreed upon.”)

In a 2005 interview with Salon, Milch spoke of that greatest operating fiction of them all, the law (emphasis mine):

You know, the cop series I had done [NYPD Blue] tried to engage the theme that in order to administer the law, you have to break the law. That is, that the idea of equality before the law is an operating fiction of democracy. Any cop will tell you. If a cop is forced to watch a cop show, and he hears the suspect given his Miranda warning, he just turns away, because no suspect is ever given his Miranda warning until after the cop has gotten the information he needs. If he’s given his Miranda warning, the cop can’t do his job, because then the cop has to turn him over to a lawyer. What cops are hired to do is to control people who will not abide by the social contract.

Milch takes this idea of the foundation of human coexistence being “operating fictions” a step further, though, and connects it to the foundational “operating fiction” of the Declaration of Independence (emphasis mine):

What we say in our treasured documents is not, “These truths are self-evident, that all men are created equal.” What we say is, “We hold these truths to be self-evident” — in other words, we’re going to act as if these truths are self-evident, but in practice, those truths have never been self-evident. And the reason that cops only trust other cops is because they know that they’ve been hired to lie, they’ve been hired to beat the balls off people, and get them to confess so they can be excluded from society. That’s the first part of their job. The second part of their job is to lie about what they did. And the third part of their job is to know that if they’re caught, they’re going to be put in jail.

But rather than wax philosophical about how Deadwood is really about America (though it quite obviously is), Milch returns to the idea of the law and notes two paradoxes. The first paradox is cops acting lawlessly in the name of upholding the law. The second paradox is violently lawless people nevertheless creating a society based on restricting violence and lawlessness (emphasis mine):

I wanted to push that situation further, to the point where it was acknowledged by everyone that there was no law, and then to try and figure out how we govern ourselves, how we improvise the structures of governance in an environment which acknowledges that it is the abrogation of everything but brute force.

What Milch means by that “abrogation” comment, I’m pretty sure (it’s a little confusing) is: At the beginning of the show, the environment in which the town of Deadwood is built is one in which no law beyond brute force holds any real power.

And this is not just a descriptive thing; it’s not just acknowledging that, in Deadwood — especially during its first season, the camp’s early days — a man can kill another man and, provided the victim didn’t have any creditors upset about losing their investment, likely go about his day without further consequence.

It’s also a factual thing; Deadwood is an illegal settlement on what is, at the time of its founding, land that belongs to the Lakota people, not the United States. Deadwood is, quite literally, operating entirely outside the law. It is not in America; it is, in fact, a flagrant violation of the sovereignty of the people who nominally control the land on which it stands.

And yet, by the time we reach season three, it is on the verge of being annexed to a US territory — governed out of Yankton, even though the state of South Dakota does not yet formally exist — and it has (at least nominally) a mayor and a sheriff and health inspector. As Milch put it, the residents of Deadwood, seeing that outside forces are keen to claim the town — and most especially its gold — begin to “act governmental.”3

Crucially, they do not do this because they have any fondness (or desire) for government in the abstract. Quite the opposite; most of the people who have come to Deadwood have done so, at least in part, to escape government.

But what Milch suggests in the show (and has said explicitly elsewhere) is that the leaders of Deadwood believe that in order to protect their own interests from Yankton — and, behind it, the US government — it is essential that they cooperate to form some semi-official countervailing institutions of their own.

In other words, if government is a means of taking people’s wealth from them, then, the leaders of Deadwood conclude, the best chances they have of stopping that from happening is to form a (minimal) government of their own to combat that larger government’s purposes.

Here, too, then, we see another “operating fiction.”

According to Milch, government is not formed by “the people” to pursue some high-minded vision of the greater good. Government is something made, ad hoc, by one group of self-interested individuals to protect themselves against another group of self-interested individuals.

That’s the inoperable truth; “of, by, and for the people” is the operating fiction.

It is worth emphasizing, though, that it would be wrong to see this as Milch saying this is all bullshit. As I hope the sections below on the more spiritual aspects of Deadwood will make clear, Milch is what John F. Kennedy called an “idealist without illusions.” He is not a nihilist.

Rather, he is an adult who — like every adult must — holds two contradictory ideas in his head at the same time. The “lies” we “agree upon” are “fictions,” yes; but they’re necessary fictions, and it is through an accretion of these fictions that an anarchic rabble of self-interested individuals is transformed into a community.

Or, as Milch often refers to it, “an organism.”

Society as an “organism”

To understand what Milch means when he refers to society as an “organism,” I want to ask you to indulge me and read a long quote from episode three of Deadwood’s first season.

It’s a funeral oration given by Deadwood’s preacher, Reverend Smith (Ray McKinnon), at the funeral of Wild Bill Hickock (Keith Carradine), a celebrity gunslinger who is depicted in the show as a kind, decent, and profoundly self-loathing depressive with a death-wish that is eventually consummated by an alcoholic gambler.

Hickock and the gambler have been playing poker against one another for days. The tension between them is palpable. (At one point Hickock, who is usually near-stoical in his reserve and performative dignity, tells his adversary, in a rage, that the latter’s mouth reminds him of female genitalia.)

But after a game during which Hickock takes his sparring partner for all he’s got, Wild Bill goes one step too far — he tosses the man a poker chip and urges him to buy himself a meal. The moment speaks well of Hickock’s basic humanity, but one can tell that his foe takes it as a serious affront.

He wants to take Hickock down. He does not want to be reminded, via Hickock’s act of pity, that he is the lesser man.

And so, inevitably and not long thereafter, the man sneaks up behind Hickock and shoots him in the back of the head, killing him instantly. Everything about the scene implies that Hickock is aware of what is coming and simply chooses to let it happen. (Indeed, in an earlier scene, we see Hickock shoot a man he rightly suspects intends to kill him, even before the latter has had the chance to draw his weapon.)

It is difficult, therefore, to interpret Hickock’s demise as anything less than a kind of suicide by proxy. This is certainly the interpretation that those at the camp who knew Hickock best draw, and we can see how it haunts them for the remainder of the series.

Throughout the show, Milch suggests that one of the solvents that turns a collection of individuals into a community is shared trauma. And, in the world of Deadwood, Hickock’s murder is a shocking and tragic event — so much so that this town’s otherwise brutally unsentimental residents form a long, long line to pay their respects to Hickock’s corpse before its burial.

The tragedy elicits, even in Deadwood’s hardest hearts, “pity” — something that, Milch suggests, is no less essentially human than “lower” qualities like selfishness and aggression.

This is the context in which Reverend Smith — a character who immediately differentiates himself from the rest of Deadwood’s population by his capacity for kindness and pity — delivers an oration that, in many ways, also functions as not only Deadwood’s mission-statement but Milch’s philosophy.4

Smith says (emphasis mine):

St. Paul tells us, “By one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jew or Gentile, bond or free, and have all been made to drink into one Spirit. For the body is not one member but many.” He tells us, “The eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee; nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of thee. Nay, much more those members of the body which seem to be more feeble, and those members of the body which we think of as less honorable, all are necessary.” He says that “there should be no schism in the body, but that the members should have the same care, one to another, and whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it.” I believe in God’s purpose, not knowing it. I ask Him, moving in me, to allow me to see His will. I ask Him, moving in others, to allow them to see it.

As Kristen Martin wrote for NPR, this is nothing less than a declaration “that solipsism is a lie, that we must remember that we are as humans all interconnected.”

But here, through Reverend Smith-channeling-Saint-Paul, we hear what Milch believes is true. We are “not one … but many.” None of us has a right to say, “I have no need of thee” to another, because “all are necessary.”

In the Salon interview I quoted above, Milch had this to say about Smith’s remarks (emphasis mine):

In other words, because we misunderstand our natures, does that exclude us from the community of spirits? And the answer is no, it just means we misunderstand our natures. So many of these characters misunderstand their natures, but that does not prevent us from recognizing that they’re of the body of Christ. My feeling about “Deadwood” is it’s a single organism, and I think human society is the body of God...

Our belief that we are separate from each other — that we are distinct, atomized individuals; that we are not part of some larger “body” — is the “solipsism,” as Martin puts it, that causes us to “misunderstand our own natures.”

But even though we are all afflicted with this pernicious misunderstanding, Milch does not believe we are doomed to remain in perpetual ignorance. We are capable, he believes, of recognizing — even just dimly — that we are part of a community, part of the “body.” He explains (emphasis mine):

If you go to any small town, you’ll see in the center of town signs that advertise the weekly meeting of the Lion’s Club and the Optimists and the Kiwanis. You know, a bowling team, a bridge club? All of those things express our impulse to recognize that our most confident and satisfied sense of our individuality is found in relating to something outside of us.

Here, then, is another paradox: In order to most fully and confidently embody “our own individuality,” we must “relat[e] to something outside of us.”

And within the world of Deadwood, populated though it is by self-seeking murderers and pimps and alcoholic gold-diggers, no one misunderstands themselves more profoundly — and more destructively — than George Hearst.

Enter Hearst

In Deadwood, George Hearst, a mining tycoon who would go on to become a U.S. Senator, is the rejection and negation of every aspect of Milch’s philosophy.

He considers himself to be the prophet of a higher truth and has no time for society’s “operating fictions.” He does not recognize himself as part of a larger organism; he is an open misanthrope who insists he’s only happy when he’s with the earth and she is “telling me where to dig into her.”5

When he observes Deadwood, the town, its people, their tangled lives, he does not see the “body of God.” Speaking to a Pinkerton he has enlisted to help him bring Deadwood under his heel — or destroy it, if it refuses — he sneers, with wolfish contempt: “The camp is galvanized. People scurry about. They’ve tasks to perform. They feel important.”

It’s hard to imagine Hearst believes in God; but if he does, his God is “progress.” His version of progress is not of the humanistic kind, however. It’s the progress of the brutal industrialist, the ruthless hyper-capitalist, the imperious tech baron — progress as a boot stamping on a human face, forever.

How Hearst willfully misunderstands his nature

Unlike some of the most sympathetic characters in Deadwood, Hearst isn’t entirely ignorant of his nature. For example, in an exchange with his deputy, Francis Wolcott (Garret Dillahunt), with whom he is “severing” his connection on account of the latter’s compulsive need to murder sex workers, we see Hearst’s signature combination of self-awareness and willful self-ignorance:

Wolcott: As when the earth talks to you particularly, you never ask its reasons.

Hearst: I don’t need to know why I’m lucky!

Wolcott: What if the earth talks to us to get us to arrange its amusements?

Hearst: That sounds like goddamned nonsense to me.

Wolcott: Suppose, to you, it whispers, “You are king over me. I exist to flesh your will.”

Hearst: Nonsense.

Wolcott: And to me... “There is no sin.”

And then, as they part:

Hearst: Does some spirit overtake you? Is that what you mean by the “talk”?

Wolcott: No.

Hearst: It tells me where the color [gold] is. That’s all it tells me.

Despite his egoism, Hearst even shows hints of self-loathing.

In the scene with the Pinkerton I mentioned earlier, Hearst, after mocking Deadwood’s residents for “feel[ing] important,” pauses. Then, as if he is disgusted by his own disgust, he adds, “I oughtn’t to work in these places. I was not born to crush my own kind.” In a similar moment later in the series, he growls to another underling: “My proper traffic is with the earth. In my dealings with people, I ought solely have to do with [—s] and whites who obey me like dogs.”

And yet, in another scene, he cries tears of self-pity over, in so many words, his position as an outsider — as separate from the “body” of the camp (and, more generally, it seems, the “body” of human society itself):

I hate these places … because the truth that I know, the promise that I bring, the necessities I’m prepared to accept, make me outcast. Isn’t that foolish? Isn’t that foolishness? An old man, disabused long ago of certain yearnings and hopes as to how he would be held by his fellows; and yet I weep.

Then, having composed himself, he once again adopts his self-appointed role as a prophet — if not God Himself — and vows to “take [Deadwood] down like Gomorrah.”

Hearst as “the best in us, as well as the worst”

Due to a combination of Milch’s writing and Gerald McRaney’s performance, however, we recognize something human in Hearst. His will-to-power, his impatience, his disdain for the irrationalities and hypocrisies — the operating fictions — that stand in the way of the “truths” he believes he understands and represents; these are all, in at least some ways, relatable character traits.

He is unquestionably Deadwood’s villain; but there is also something correct, if not quite “right,” about George Hearst. His desire to impose order on this motley rabble is not attractive. But it is understandable.

For example, the kind of “progress” on whose behalf he claims to speak — “amalgamation and capital” as Charlie Utter (Dayton Callie) calls it, only half-comprehendingly — is indeed coming. We know that, of course; but most of the characters in Deadwood also take it for granted, regardless of whether they welcome it.

And, most interestingly, especially from today’s vantage, Hearst’s indifference to the on-the-ground messy realities of human civilization — his preference for what Cantor describes in his essay as “abstraction” — leads him to be, by the extremely low standards prevalent within the camp, one of the show’s least-racist characters.

To be clear, this is not because he is a humanist. As Cantor explains, it is, ironically, because Hearst so insistently places himself apart from and above the rest of society that he is — again, relatively speaking — indifferent to white supremacy, one of the most noxious “operating fictions” of the time.

This is made explicit during a scene in which Hearst converses with his Odell Marchbanks (Omar Gooding), the son of his cook, both of whom are Black, about the latter’s claim that he has found gold in Liberia and would like to sell the rights to Hearst.

First, that Hearst is having a sit-down meal — in public, no less — with a Black man is, in the Deadwood of the time, a transgressive act. There are precious few Black people in Deadwood, and those that we do see live under the constant threat of being lynched. We are still decades away from Jim Crow being fully institutionalized; but the direction of things is clear. This is not a time of racial progress.

Still, because Hearst cares much more about gold than he cares about the “small-mindedness and self-interested behavior that’s so pervasive in this shithole,” he has dinner with Odell. At one point during their conversation — which is much more like a duel, given Odell’s falsity and Hearst’s narcissistic paranoia — ⁠Odell stands up, offended by Hearst’s suggestion that he (Odell) may be trying to fleece him.

Hearst is impressed, in a patronizing way, by Odell’s pride, and urges him to calm himself and sit back down. He then explains why, to him, gold is the only “color” that matters (emphasis mine):

Hearst: But for that gold, you’d never have sat at my table. And for the effrontery in your rising-up, except that you’d showed me the gold, I’d’ve shot, or seen you hanged, without a second thought. The value I gave the gold restrained me, you see, your utility in connection with it … Gold confers power, and that power is transferable. Power comes to any man who has the color.

Odell: Even if he is black.

Hearst. ⁠⁠That is our species’ hope—that, uniformly agreeing on its value, we organize to seek the color⁠⁠.

In Deadwood: Stories of the Black Hills, Milch writes about this with characteristic directness (emphasis mine):

Yet the process of abstraction that Hearst embodies, which is symbolized in gold, is also at the very heart of what makes us human. It’s the best in us, as well as the worst, and it is often both at the same time … Hearst sees the power of gold … in the way [it] can eliminate the stickier aspects of our human particularity. That’s why Hearst can befriend Odell, the son of his black chef, Aunt Lou. Odell has discovered gold in Liberia. For Hearst, the agreed-upon value of gold is the root of all civilized behavior. It mandates a calculus of utility that trumps even the most deep-seated prejudice.

As noxious as he is, I will confess that, here in 2026, I wouldn’t mind if more of our world-destroying oligarchs were similarly uninterested in the kind of racist determinism that Hearst regards as contemptibly “small-minded.”

Hearst, Deadwood, and the “community of spirits”

At this point, I hope, I’ve persuaded you that Hearst is the antithesis of the first two of Milch’s three big ideas. He refuses to accept the necessity of “operating fictions,” and he refuses to recognize that human society is “an organism,” rather than a thing onto which he can impose — through a combination of his wealth, his willpower, and “the truth” he “know[s]” — a kind of top-down direction.

To close, then, I’d like to turn to the final of Milch’s three big ideas: that the organism of society represents the “body of God.”

What I want to suggest here is that as we witness Deadwood’s people organize in opposition to Hearst, we see how that “organism” — somewhat despite itself, and with only a vague awareness of its own purposes — responds to threats by making manifest those higher ideals and aspirations we associate with Godliness.

There is a key moment in Deadwood that illustrates this dynamic — and represents a realization of Milch’s argument that although we “misunderstand our natures,” that doesn’t “exclude us from the community of spirits.”

A law beyond law

First, some context: At this point in the narrative, Hearst, frustrated and humiliated by his inability to bend the town to his will, is engaging in wild escalations that seem driven more by his sense of lèse-majesté than pragmatism.

He is bringing in Pinkertons by the dozens — these are the agents through which he hopes to turn Deadwood into another “Gomorrah” — while also openly flaunting the authority of the town’s nascent system of law and order by having multiple Cornish laborers who work at his mines murdered for attempting to form a union.

The town’s de facto leader, Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) can see no recourse other than to call in “guns” of his own and launch a preemptive strike against the Pinkertons and even Hearst himself. Yet Swearengen also believes that this will be, at most, a pyrrhic victory; the conflagration will likely destroy the town, and Hearst, being the representative of corporate interests, will simply be replaced by his shareholders with some other titan of industry. Swearengen has no intention of being Hearst’s slave; but even if for no other reason than self-interest, he also does not want to destroy the town he has worked so hard to build.

Out of desperation, Swearengen convenes Deadwood’s leading figures, such as they are, and shares his thinking. He nearly begs, however, for anyone with ideas for a less apocalyptic resolution to share them. None are forthcoming. But then, Deadwood’s Sheriff, Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant), shares with the group a letter he has written for the family of one of the Cornish laborers Hearst has had killed.

He hands the letter to A.W. Merrick (Jeffrey Jones), who runs Deadwood’s lone newspaper; and he does this wordlessly, almost as if he himself does not understand what he is doing or why. The letter, which ostensibly has nothing to do with the immediate question Swearengen is trying to answer, is read aloud by Merrick, and is as follows (emphasis mine):

It becomes my painful duty to inform you that Pasco Carwen was killed earlier this week. His body was found in the road. It was not mutilated in any way. His death seems to have been instantaneous as he was stabbed through the heart. Pasco’s funeral occurred today and was attended by coworkers and friends who all shared the same high opinion of him. Everything was done by kind hands that was possible under the circumstances, and a Christian burial was given him. I was not personally acquainted with Mr. Carwen, save for one encounter where he demonstrated grief and deep compassion at the passing of a friend. I knew him by reputation as an earnest worker and a diligent believer in right and wrong. His memory I am sure will always be with those who knew and loved him, among whose number I imagine you as first. A letter from you which I found in his tent causes me to convey this sad intelligence to you. Sincerely yours, Seth Bullock.

It is a remarkable piece of writing (and, according to Reddit, quite similar to a letter the real-life Seth Bullock wrote) and everyone at the meeting is clearly affected by it. Yet Bullock’s purpose remains obscure. Merrick asks him, “What shall I do with this, Mr. Bullock?” In response, Swearengen says, “What’s your fucking paper for? You fucking publish as witness, for Hearst and others to read.”

And thus ends the meeting. Instead of agreeing to organize a preemptive strike that would amount to a kind of murder-suicide, the leaders of Deadwood decide to publish a letter about the murder of an immigrant worker that none of them knew, nor especially cared to know. It feels right to them — or at least most of them — and yet it would be wrong to say that any of them entirely understand why that is or what they think its publication will do.

But this is an essential, pivotal moment. This is when, to go back to one of Milch’s earlier quotes, we see how a collection of individuals who “misunderstand [their] nature” can nevertheless, when embodied in the “organism” of society, find themselves in communion with a “community of spirits.”

Or as Reverend Smith put it, channeling Paul during his eulogy for Hickock, they recognize that “all are necessary” — even the immigrant — and therefore can experience “Him, moving in me, to allow me to see His will” and “ask Him, moving in others, to allow them to see it.”

Later in the episode, when recounting the meeting to his friend, the theater troupe leader Jack Langrishe (Brian Cox), Swearengen reveals that, in retrospect, he is “mystified” by his own behavior. He went into the meeting expecting to be told to organize his forces for an orgy of violence; he left it having commissioned the publication of a letter that, he confesses, “Never once mention[s] Hearst,” and certainly doesn’t call him to account for his crimes against both the law and Deadwood’s social contract.

Whether out of friendship, sycophancy, or true wisdom, however — and I think Milch would say the reason is not so important as the result; because, again, we so often “misunderstand” our own nature — Langrishe argues that Swearengen should not be mystified.

The decision to publish the letter, he says, makes perfect sense (emphasis mine):

Mystified, Al, at proclaiming a law beyond law to a man who’s beyond law himself? It’s publication invoking a decency whose scrutiny applies to him as to all his fellows. I call that strategy cunningly sophisticated, befitting and becoming the man who sits before me.

Similarly, when Swearengen’s two most loyal henchmen are discussing what transpired during the meeting, clearly trying to understand it themselves, one of them, Swearengen’s chief deputy, Dan Dority (W. Earl Brown), says, with halting but increasing confidence (emphasis mine):

[T]he letter’s contents is witness that... Bullock wrote a nice fucking letter. And it proves... that that’s the sort we are here, the caring sort that would write a letter of that ilk. Furthermore, we don’t give a fuck who knows it, George fucking Hearst included.

While it is hard to draw a direct line from its publication to the series’ resolution, it’s clear that the letter’s publication does indeed have an effect. When Hearst confronts Merrick about its publication, it is obvious that this reminder of, as Langrishe puts it, “a law beyond law,” both shames and offends him (emphasis mine):

Hearst: Thanks, too, for publishing Sheriff Bullock’s letter of condolence to the family of that murdered worker of mine.

Merrick: Oh, you’re welcome.

Hearst: I suppose I should have written them myself.

Merrick: I’d not presumed to suppose in that regard, Mr. Hearst, one way or another.

Hearst: Was the Sheriff’s making his letter part of the public record meant to embarrass or reproach me?

Under Hearst’s orders, a Pinkerton will later savagely beat Merrick for this affront.

Why Hearst is necessary

Ultimately, and to return to the point I made at the beginning of this essay, this is why Hearst is necessary.

It is not until the “organism” of Deadwood is faced by its antithesis that it is able, however fitfully and ignorantly, to connect with that “community of spirits” that helps a group of self-interested individuals, who “misunderstand their nature,” reveal themselves more fully as members of “the body of God,” capable of evoking the “law beyond law” that allows us to recognize that, as Paul says, “there should be no schism in the body … and whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it.”

To recognize that “all are necessary” — even, in his way, someone like George Hearst.

If you spend enough time on Bluesky1 it won’t take long before you’re confronted with someone making some version of the following statement about the Second Trump Administration:

These are not the actions of people who expect to relinquish power — ever.

And then you’ll probably see a bunch of despondent and fatalistic replies to this portentous warning, usually along the lines of:

There won’t be free and fair elections in 2026 or 2028 or ever again!

And then you’ll feel tired, and irritable, and powerless; and you’ll wonder why the hell you ever use social media in the first place. And then, if you’re truly gifted with wisdom and self-control, you’ll put your phone down and take a little nap.

And after you wake up — but before you impulsively grab your phone to look at Bluesky once again — you may also wonder: Are they right?

Is that MAGA’s private rejoinder to every person who cries out against the President’s acts of hubris and corruption? That it doesn’t matter what popular opinion says, because we’ll never “have” to vote again?

Why else would the Trump Administration — very much including Trump’s over-mighty subject, Elon Musk — behave as if it were not susceptible to the normal rules of political gravity? Why else would they try to so hard to assert that Trump has powers that would make King George III blush?

It’s MAGA canon that Trump has never really lost an election; that his defeat in 2020 was a world-historic fraud. So I’m not going to say that anyone unsettled by these foreboding possibilities needs to calm down or touch grass.

I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump tried to remain in office after 2028.

At the same time, though, I don’t think we need to spend so much time trying to mind-meld with the current administration and its MAGA allies in order to understand why they act and talk as if their hold on power is permanent.

I think it’s enough to simply recognize that these people are hardcore populists, and that this kind of hubris is an inevitable consequence of the fundamental assumptions that undergird every truly populist movement.

Seeing like a populist

What are some of those fundamental assumptions?

Well, there’s the idea that the existing society’s elite are fundamentally self-interested, and that their claims to work for the common good are therefore inherently disingenuous.

And there’s the idea that some larger but politically weaker force — the People, the Working-Class, the Forgotten Man, etc. — are ignorant of their own latent power and consequently allow themselves to be exploited by this nefarious, cynical elite.

There’s also usually some version of the idea of “false consciousness” in this mix, some bedrock assumption that these people would be ready and willing to rise-up and overthrow their oppressors if only someone could activate them by yelling like Howard Beale.

You’ve probably noticed that little to none of this has anything to do with policy, per se.

That’s because populism isn’t defined by a commitment to any specific ideological or policy program; it can manifest across the ideological spectrum, as indeed it has throughout history. Huey Long was no more or less a populist than was Joe McCarthy, and Benjamin Netanyahu is no more or less a populist than is Recep Erdoğan.

On one level, this is part of what can make populist movements successful.

Public policy is often, at heart, a dispute about resources — who gets what. Almost axiomatically, therefore, any public policy question that is significant enough to gain widespread attention is going to involve a large number of people who feel they may lose something they consider important if they don’t engage in politics to stop it.

Populism, however, tries to avoid these potential sources of internal division by ignoring policy details altogether. That’s not to say that populists don’t campaign for or against specific policies; they do.

But rather than focusing their fire on the policies, populists tend to depict the policies they oppose as symptoms of a bigger problem: the wrong people — often, the wrong kind of people — have too much power.

Even by the standards of a populist leader and his movement, Trump and MAGA make this point with unusual bluntness. (Subtext is for cowards.)

On the “highbrow” side, you’ve got MAGA intellectuals waxing lyrical about the need for a “new elite”; on the Trump side, you’ve got countless declarations that the people who governed the country before he entered politics were “stupid people.”

As Trump’s career shows, this gambit can work. But the impulse to ignore or dismiss public policy brings risks as well as rewards. If the absolutely essential ingredient holding your political movement together is shared animosity, rather than mutual affection or a deeper sense of mutual interests, you have to keep those fires of antipathy burning.

Meanwhile, if you’re actually in power — and therefore, inevitably, in charge of making those “who gets what” policy decisions — you’ll eventually have to increase that negative solidarity in order to compensate for the loss of internal cohesion that is an inescapable consequence of policymaking.

Here’s how Jeremy Shapiro, Research Director at the European Council of Foreign Relations, described the dynamic on a recent episode of Pod Save the World when talking about Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s populist prime minister (emphasis mine):

I think she is more or less a traditional populist, certainly in when it comes to her immigration stance and when it comes to her anti-elite message and when it comes to her basic nationalism. But I think what she is above all is a very, very impressive politician.

And I think when you're Prime Minister of Italy, you have to balance a whole bunch of different considerations. And I think what we're seeing in Giorgia Meloni is not that someone who seemed to be a populist wasn't, but that power socializes you.

[…]

 If you're an Italian politician, you have to have a good relationship with the European Union. You have to have a good relationship with the United States. So she has, I think, been quite deft in being able to stay true in a basic way to her populist roots, but also govern the country in a way that can conceivably deliver the goods.

And that's, that's moderated her from the standpoint of liberals in Europe and in the United States. I don't think she's exactly any different than she ever was, but I think she is finding that it's very easy to run [for office] as a populist; it's a lot harder to govern as a populist…

 Populists don't really have governing programs, they have opposition programs. What she has done is demonstrate how you can change from an oppositional populist to a governing populist.

As Shapiro notes, Meloni has responded to the shift in incentives that comes with holding power by moderating, triangulating, balancing; by acting like a “normal” politician.

But as Shapiro also notes, that’s no doubt a consequence of her relative lack of power, as Prime Minister of Italy, when compared against the level of power of, say, a President Trump or President Putin:

Middle-sized European countries can't do anything everything they want. They have to deal with the European Union, they have to deal with the United States. They have to deal with a population that … once you're in power, isn't just interested in whether you like Russia or not; they're interested in you delivering the goods. And liking Russia is not a way of delivering the goods, economically.

These constraints have “socialize[d]” Meloni, as Shapiro puts it. But to state the obvious, there’s been no evidence — really ever, but especially during Trump’s second term — that Trump and MAGA are similarly willing to recognize reality’s constraints.

“Other people don’t mean anything”

And that brings us back to our original question about MAGA’s tendency to behave as if the large swathes of the US population that oppose it simply do not exist.

Again, it could be because they have no intention of a peaceful transfer of power.2 But I think there’s something more fundamental going on here, something that has more to do with the essence of populism than with the specific individuals working in the Second Trump Administration.

It’s something that the professor and theorist of populism, Jan-Werner Müller, wrote about in 2019 in a London Review of Books essay that has mostly3 aged well (my emphasis):

Right-wing populists claim that they, and only they, represent what they tend to call ‘the real people’, or the ‘silent majority’. Rival contenders for power are dismissed as irredeemably corrupt: ‘Crooked Hillary’. Those among the people who do not fall in with the populists are said never to have truly belonged to the people in the first place – witness Trump’s condemnation of his critics as ‘un-American’, [Poland’s] Kaczyński railing against Poles with treason in their genes, or BJP politicians’ insistence that ‘division ... is just in the mind of certain politicians, but, as a society, India is one and India is harmonious.’ Populists talk incessantly about unifying the people, but their political strategy involves dividing societies and waging culture wars: whoever doesn’t want to be unified on their terms is cast out. As Trump put it in a campaign speech in May 2016, ‘the only important thing is the unification of the people, because the other people don’t mean anything.’

In other words, populism’s refusal to accept the legitimacy of its opponents is not simply a tendency or a rhetorical bent. It is the scaffolding that holds the rest of the populist project together. If you remove it, if you allow politics to be about something more than never-ending argument over who counts as “us” and “them,” the whole edifice collapses.

Without a target on which they can focus their animosity, the various factions within the populist movement — who often hate each other only slightly less than they hate their shared enemies — begin to fight.4

You can try to paper-over this inherent instability with patrimonial corruption; but eventually the bill comes due, and normal people — not just those with a privileged position within your populist party-state — notice their standard-of-living is deteriorating and demand, as Shapiro put, that you “deliver the goods.”

Someone less inclined towards magical thinking than Trump, or a version of Trump less surrounded by lickspittles who see their primary job as working towards the Donald, might well recognize complications that arise when the populist movement ascends to power.

But when party doctrine holds that “the other people don’t mean anything,” anyone making this argument risks being branded as a sell-out or a squish. It is not your job, as a loyal adherent of The Leader, to save him from himself. Your job is to let Trump be Trump.

So where does that leave you? With only one real choice: to double-down on the idea that, in a sense, you have no legitimate opposition — and that, as Steven Bannon once put it, “The Democrats don’t matter” because “the real opposition is the media.” And you can see how this plays out in the real-world by looking to places like Russia.

From the same 2019 Müller essay quoted above:

Opposition​ from within civil society presents a difficulty for populists: it potentially undermines their claim to be the sole representatives of the people. Their method of dealing with this problem is to follow a playbook perfected by Vladimir Putin (in many ways a role model for today’s right-wing populists): set out to ‘prove’ that civil society isn’t civil society at all, and that what appears to be popular opposition on the streets has nothing to do with the real people. Thus right-wing populist regimes have gone out of their way to discredit NGOs, representing them as the tools of external powers, and even (in Russia) insisting they declare themselves as ‘foreign agents’. Trump described as ‘paid-up activists’ the millions who came out against his proposed Muslim travel ban, and used the term again about critics of Brett Kavanaugh (for good measure, he also declared them to be ‘evil’).

I think this is the best way to understand MAGA’s increasing habit of describing anyone who doesn’t subscribe to its worldview as an “NPC.” And I believe it’s the reason why both Elon Musk and Trump insist that anyone who protests against them is likely a paid agent — or, as pro-segregationist politicians used to call them, “outside agitators.”

If they’re paid, then they’re basically actors. And if they’re actors, then they’re not “real.” They don’t represent a “real” constituency, or a “real” bloc of “real” voters. They’re a nuisance, a distraction, maybe even a psyop.

Whatever you want to call them, the one thing they’re not — within this warped mindset — is a potential future electoral majority. So there’s no reason for anyone who wants to remain in good standing within the MAGA world to behave as if the movement losing power is anything but a remote possibility.

And that, ultimately, is why the Second Trump Administration does so many things that make reasonable people — who are making the cardinal mistake of assuming that MAGA is also populated by reasonable people — think that this current administration must have some secret plans to hold onto power indefinitely.

It’s not because they do.5 It’s because they’re populists.

And, as populists, they can do no other.