Waiting on Waterloo
Fine, we'll talk about politics for a minute
At some point, it becomes bloody-minded to avoid talking about the elephant in the room—so, fine, I’ll do a bit of what Jonah Goldberg would call “rank punditry.” And then we’ll talk about Apple and the iMac anniversary as a palate-cleanser.
On Wednesday, candidates for the Republican Party’s Presidential nomination took to a debate stage to field softballs from the editors of Pravda, while the frontrunner for said nomination was elsewhere, to wit, surrendering to law enforcement in Georgia. Even by the standards of modern “debates,” which have more in common with Barnum & Bailey than Lincoln & Douglas, this was a desultory exercise.
Donald Trump, the disgraced former President who’s presently fighting four indictments, one apiece from New York and Georgia, and two federal, is the presumptive nominee. It would be understatement to say less—that he merely “leads” the polls. No, in national polls, he dwarfs his closest competitor, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), 55.4%-14.6%, and in Iowa—location of the first caucus of primary season, only four months hence—43.2%-17.2%. Behind DeSantis in those polls are, respectively, Vivek Rama-smarmy at 7.2% (yes, I know how to spell his name; shut up) and Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) at 10.2%. So commanding is Trump’s lead that he didn’t even bother to show up for this debate, which rendering the whole thing surreally otiose.
Early summer, I was apt to say that the race was looking like 2016 all over again, and I was grumpy about that. In 2016, Trump, with a consistent and consolidated plurality, sailed past a splintered multiplicity of opponents. Until forced out by factors beyond their control, those opponents refused to yield, convinced by either of two theories: a) since Trump would eventually but inevitably fold, they could harvest his voters if they could just hold out until the collapse, or b) since Trump was winning by pluralities, they could win if they could just outlast everyone else. Just three months ago, I assessed the state of the 2024 race this way:
You have an unacceptable candidate with a death-grip on 30% of the primary electorate, and you have a baker's dozen go-nowhere delusional [candidates] with just enough hubris and resources to stay in the race but no capacity to do anything beyond preventing any other single candidate getting above 31%. Gee, what's 70% divided between thirteen, or twelve, or ten, or eight?
That was too optimistic. I was thinking that the primary could have become a three-person race and would still have needed winnowed to a two-person race. But that 30% figure was a relic of 2016; when Trump secured the nomination, he had only plurality support, but in the time since, the pressures of practical politics in an era of intense polarization have forced more and more Republicans to either fall down the gravity-well into the Trump singularity, or else be flung our and away at high velocities. Few have defied gravity to hold their place à la the USS Cygnus. Today, then, that death-grip holds more like 40% and it may be 50% in many states.
So, this is not a re-run of 2016. Even if every other candidate were to exit immediately, allowing not-Trump votes to pool behind one alternative candidate, so what when Trump is already north of 50%? Say that every candidate except Trump and DeSantis ejects. Say (against all sense) that all the non-Trump-candidate votes go to non-Trump candidates when their preferred candidate gets out, landing eventually with DeSantis. Swell; DeSantis has acquired only 29.5%, which takes him all the way up to 44.1%, still a humiliatingly distant second place.
In practice, it’s even worse than that. Add up the support for Trump, DeSantis (Trump lite), and Rama-smarmy (brazenly Trump’s mini-me, running to be his veep) and at least 77.2% of the GOP is voting directly for Trumpism. And as Sarah Isgur likes to note, as other candidates depart, even candidates who are relatively hostile to Trump, their voters will not all go one way. Some will go to Trump, as they did in 2016, either because he is their second choice (hard to believe, but evident) or because they are exhausted and feel like they’re bowing to the inevitable. Voters can be a strange, unpredictable animal. So, unless the fundamentals of the race shift, it’s over.
Long-time readers will recall from Motu Proprio that I left the GOP when Trump won the Indiana primary in 2016. (“There is nothing in the desert,” I said later, “and sometimes, everyone needs nothing.”) Although I assumed that Trump would go on to lose, I thought it obvious that a substantial new force had entered the party that would direct it for years to come, a direction antithetical to what I had thought we were about. Time has not confounded that analysis. If anything, it’s worse; I disagree with Nick Cattogio that the modern GOP is “part political party, part criminal syndicate” in that I think it’s part cult, part grift, and part tribe. No part of it is recognizable as a “political party”—an association formed for the achievement of political goals among people with compatible views and directionally similar goals.
There are still good people in the GOP, committed to Liberal policy. Why won’t they leave? They retain, I think, a misplaced idea that “if we can just get through this we can get back to normal.” That idea looked tenuous on January 20, 2020; it seems delusional today, and clearly driven by the same kind of sunk-cost fallacy that holds people fast in Trump’s orbit. For one thing, it assumes that Trump will eventually meet his Waterloo (preferably at the hands of someone else, anyone else, who will absorb the blowback from the Trump cult), finally and mercifully slinking from the stage. This makes the mistake of treating him as a politician rather than a cult leader. For another, it assumes that after this hypothetical Waterloo, the fever will break, and significant parts of the Trump cult will exit the GOP (which they continued to hate even after staging a hostile takeover), depriving the Buchananite and Paulist factions of their majority. This from people who, knowing in a context of tax that systems are dynamic and evolving, should know better. If you change tax rates, taxed individuals know it and change their behavior. If you change humans under external pressure, they don’t just snap back when the form and pressure are removed.
In short, he isn’t going away and neither are they. The Trumpet faction, engorged by the gravitational political pressures mentioned above, rounds to three quarters of the party. Even if Trump loses in 2024—I think he will, but I said that in 2016, I was wrong, and having been wrong then, I will be circumspect now—his campaign for the 2028 nomination will begin immediately. Any notion that defeat or conviction will break his cult’s loyalty seems fantastical. And even if he dies in 2024, It should by now be apparent that the Trumpet-Buchananite-Paulist cult now controlling the GOP will remain in control, even if it splinters for want of one obvious heir going into 2028. Do Trump-skeptical Republicans intend to just write off the next five years, hoping against all evidence that they will thereafter seize the party back in the same way they lost it?
My question remains, then: Just how clear does just how large a fraction of the GOP need to make it (that there’s no going back) before the folks who are still in thrall to The Party That Once Was see what has happened and leave? What does it take? How much clearer could the new owners possibly make it? I get that it will be hard to create a new party. I get that, it’s not fair!, and, why should I have to leave when they're the ones who suck? But—it’s dead, Jim. It won’t be resuscitated in 2028 any more than it was in 2024, or in 2020, and all you’re accomplishing by not recognizing that and acting accordingly is maximizing the damage that can be done by its zombified corpse. The best time to leave was May 2016; the next best time is right now. The way forward now is the same way forward I have advocated since then: Out of the GOP and on to something new.
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Oh, I nearly forgot! Back to the debate. It (and the current state of the GOP) was perfectly encapsulated by one moment: The candidates were asked, “raise your hand1 if you'd support Trump even if he is by the time of the election a convicted felon (I’m paraphrasing), most of them did, and the crowd went wild for it. This is bonkers. I strongly suspect that if Trump were hit by lightning, his supporters would demand that Congress learn Hunter Biden's connection to “big cloud”; FOLLOW THE CHARGE, SHEEPLE!
The only candidate who makes what strikes me as the minimum necessary showing of hostility toward Trump to be taken seriously is former Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.). Naturally, then, his support rounds to zero. I’m a small-dollar donor, if only for the chance of seeing him flay Trump and his sycophants and surrogates. But I was mystified by his criticism of Rama-smarmy. Christie said, “The last person in one of these debate who stood in the middle of the stage and said, ‘What is a skinny guy with an odd last name doing up here?’ was Barack Obama. And I am afraid we are dealing with the same type of amateur standing on the stage tonight.” That’s a weird thing to say about one’s opponent. Yeah: Obama said that. And then he went on to win not only the nomination but the general. Soooo…?
Meanwhile, Rama-smarmy, after saying in as many words that the other candidates are “bought and paid for” (by who? The Sierra Slub? It’s unclear) insisted that “the climate change agenda is a hoax.” This is a clever bit of bullspit from Rama-smarmy. Regardless of what words actually came out of his gob (going all the way back to President Obama and the Stubborn Facts days, I have insisted that politicians be cut some slack when they speak extemporaneously) or actually believes (not much), what everyone heard was, “climate change is a hoax.”
Set aside that “hoax” is an odd choice of word no matter what he meant. Calling anything a “hoax” plays well with the conspiratorial, populist disposition of the Trump cult. And since most of them are (to say the least) climate-change skeptics, putting the phrase “climate change” in a sentence with any word belonging to the general category “words expressing skepticism and hostility” will signal “I’m one of you,” which is all Rama-smarmy really intends. Better yet: Indicating that one has anything short of fervent fealty to all things climate change will get you condemned and contemned by people hated by the Trump base. The blowback from that crowd (they can’t help themselves; they can’t resist) will bolster Rama-smarmy’s clout with the people he’s courting.
(I have to pause for a sidebar. I saw not a few people—victims of consuming their own propaganda, I think—insisting that obviously, the racist Trump cult won’t support an Indian, even for veep. Nonsense. Most of the Trump base is “not racist,”2 hates being called racist, and loves supporting candidates of color just to prove how not-actually-racist they are. For recent examples, see former Gov. Nikki Haley (R-S.C.) (for Governor, anyway), Sen. Rick Scott (R-S.C.) (for Senate, anyway), Herman Cain, Michael Steele, and if Donald Trump died tomorrow, no one would have a better chance of acceptance by the cult as its new leader than, if he wanted it, Justice Clarence Thomas.)
Anyway: What Rama-smary actually faulted as a “hoax” was not “climate change” but “the climate change agenda.” I still think “hoax” is a strange word choice, but I think we can extract the outline of a fair point from what he’s saying. If I had to translate it into a coherent, sincere, Reaganesque formulation, it would be this: “What the Democrats call their ‘agenda for climate change’ is simply a new excuse for the same agenda they always have for everything. No matter the question, the Democrats' answer is always more government and more control for them, and less freedom, less choice, and fewer and more expensive goods for you.” I can subscribe to that. It doesn’t say that there is no climate change problem (there is), nor that policy can’t be brought to bear against such (it can), it just expresses appropriate skepticism as to the left’s habit of finding in each new “crisis” a new pretext to do what the left always wants to do.
(A newsletter on what “left” and “right” mean these days is coming soon, I promise.)
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The iMac turns 25. It’s hard to overstate how much of a difference the iMac made. At a minimum, it saved Apple’s bacon, bending the curve of computing: No iMac, no iPod, and no iPod, no iPhone. But we shouldn’t damn the iMac by relegating it to a supporting player in its own story. (That’s a job for The Mandalorian’s show runners.)
The iMac was at once a continuation of the by-then-venerable all-in-one Macintosh concept and also something new. It simplified, ditching complicated legacy ports and bringing to the masses one port to rule them all, USB. It stood out from the ugly beige boxes of the time, gorgeous and colorful. It was transparent, as if to say, “there are no cards hidden up my sleeve, I have nothing to hide.” It was fun, friendly, approachable, and for that reason, coinciding with the Internet’s arrival in the mass market and forming a virtuous circle with such, it was a smash hit.
OSX didn’t ship with the original iMac, but it came soon thereafter. The iMac’s friendly design shaped OSX’s Aqua interface, a legacy that continued long after Apple moved the iMac into first its “white period” and then its “brushed aluminum period.” These choices also fed the virtuous cycle, teaching normal humans how to do familiar things using the unfamiliar computer, favoring app design that aped the look of real-world cognates. This is called skeumorphism. Like the bright colors of the iMac, it has fallen out of fashion. Unlike bright colors (already kinda-sorta back on the iMac), I don’t anticipate a return. I think Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall liked skeumorphism because they liked the look, not because of its utility in debarricading computers for the masses, and while Jony Ive hated it because he hated the look, he was right that skeuomorphism’s job was largely done by 2013. Blessed with a public now primed for computers, designers have found other, more visually-efficient ways to accomplish the same goals.
Then and now, IT people tended to see the iMac rather as the 16th Century clergy saw the vernacular Bible: Contempt masking fear. The iMac, especially after OSX arrived, allowed normal people access to mysteries hitherto reserved to the clerics. Why, with this, someone could get on the internet without knowing why they shouldn’t type sudo rm -r /! But that was always the point. Steve Jobs said it in as many words: “Most people have no concept of how an automatic transmission works, yet they know how to drive a car. You don't have to study physics to understand the laws of motion to drive a car. You don't have to understand any of this stuff to use Macintosh.”
To this day, ask IT people and they are likely to offer grudging acknowledgement of Apple’s accomplishments before swiftly moving on to their real point: “Macs are overpriced.” (And, let’s be real, because they’re kind of distaff and because they don’t come in black with fancy LED lights.) This is puzzling, because IT people, of all people, I expect to have seen Firefly:
BRIE:
It’s parts! A lot of cheap parts we’ll never unload.
CORBIN:
This is why you'll never be in charge, Brie. You don't see the whole. The parts are crap, but you put it together and you’ve got a Firefly. Thing’ll run forever they got a mechanic that's even half awake.
A working Firefly is worth more than the sum of its parts because the value proposition of the Firefly-class midbulk transport is not the parts, its value-proposition is that it’s a Firefly, a good boat, a spacegoing schooner, versatile, reliable, and rugged. IT people tend to look at computers and they see a pile of parts. The value proposition of that pile of parts is the sum total of its costs rather than what the parts create as an integrated whole. While iMacs, unlike Fireflies, are not built with cheap, readily-available captain-tightpants-replaceable parts, they are more than just a pile of parts. The value proposition of Apple products has always been that they are tools that demystify computers and allow normal people to accomplish things, just as (pace Steve) capitalism has furnished me with a car that I can drive without knowing much about what goes on under the hood.
Last words go to Steve. Two quotes that I think really get after it:
Look at the design of a lot of consumer products — they're really complicated surfaces. We tried to make something much more holistic and simple. [If you] . . . peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don't put in the time or energy to get there. We believe that customers are smart, and want objects which are well thought through.
And:
One of the things I've always found is that you've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and try to figure out [what it can do, so] . . . [a]s we have tried to come up with a strategy and a vision for Apple, it started with "What incredible benefits can we give to the customer? Where can we take the customer?" not starting with, "Let's sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and then how are we going to market that. And I think that's the right path to take.
Notes & queries.
Last week’s newsletter did not “stick the landing.” I think the discussion in the post was good and the meandering style reads as playful, but it built toward a point that was somewhere short of a spectacular finish. I write pretty fast when I know what I think, but often I’m writing precisely in order to figure out what I think, and last week was an instance of the latter.
Also, now I’ve said my piece on “woke,” I’m adding it to my personal Index of Banned Words. If I never hear “woke” or “cancel” or “DESTROY” (and similar words, always in caps) it’ll be too soon.
Critics of the Holy See’s China policy continue to spit fire over the story I discussed two weeks ago in Rome Alone. I remain unclear as to what exactly they propose as an alternative.
In July, I marked five years of sobriety. I did not have any fixed endpoint in mind, but I also didn’t intend for it to be forever. Five years seems like a nice, round number. I intend to climb down (not fall) off the wagon at some appropriate point in the next few months, though I anticipate that looking like an occasional glass of red with dinner rather than absinthe parties with Dua Lipa.
Cornucopia.
This makes me want to burn my basses. I was already a fan of Julia, but this is next-level. The fluidity, precision, sure-footedness, and lightness of touch with which Julia dances through this line is beyond me, and it so perfectly encapsulates my Guy Pratt-influenced preferences that I thought of Neil Tennant, who, lore holds, wept when he heard Blue Monday, so completely did it anticipate the ideas that he and Chris Lowe had been developing.
The story behind Babylon-on-Thames: How and why Britain’s secret service moved into a building that made even the Lubyanka look subtle. I confess a touch of disappointment. I had always assumed that the ostentatious building was a deliberate flex.
Cardinal Burke has penned a foreword to a forthcoming book on the parlous state of the Catholic Church as the latest Synod looms. The book will have my attention, but I’m skeptical that it can have any more impact than Burke’s previous effort, The Four Cardinals Dubia, which to this day remains ignored and unanswered by the Holy See and forgotten and not-acted-upon by those of the four Cardinals who have not since died. (Yevgeny Prigozhin could not be reached for comment.)
I seem to recall that Republicans savaged a past MSM attempt to force candidates into a show of hands. As it transpires, it would seem that the format is less important than is what their hands showed.
This is not the context in which to get into this, but the scare-quotes are not intended to imply that they are, in a meaningful sense, racists. Democrats hindered the cause of antiracism (and helped Trump) by treating every criticism of President Obama as racism, and subsequently by treating everything athwart their preferences as a result of racism. To put it glibly, “racism,” it seems to me, is bigotry or prejudice as to skin color; with obvious exceptions, the right, broadly speaking, is no longer afflicted by racial bigotry, though racial prejudice is a stickier wicket, and “structural racism” and what to do about it remains a separate and attenuated class of concerns.