More Notes From The Rubble

Answers to a few of the near-universal talking points apropos the deliberate Vance-Trump ambush of Volodymyr Zelensky:

1. This was not, not for one second, “a shouting match.” A shouting match is an argument in which both sides are shouting. Zelensky never shouted, never lost his cool, but merely expressed his points with a certain amount of exasperation and animation which were clearly and very understandably brought on by (a) the fact that his tag-teaming assailants were intentionally refusing to leave him space to complete his sentences, and (b) the awareness he had obviously reached, by the time things “got out of control,” that Vance and Trump were not in the least bit interested in what he was saying, i.e., in engaging in rational argument based on facts, historical precedents, and simple logic. 
2. Things never “got out of control.” Vance deliberately inserted himself into the discussion to accuse Zelensky of not having shown sufficient “gratitude” to Trump — not to America, but to Trump himself. This was off-topic and had no purpose in this context but to personalize the argument in a way that would light up Trump’s vanity and vindictiveness, which it did.
3. This catastrophic event was not “terrible for everyone.” It was terrible for Zelensky and Ukraine. It was terrible for Americans who still remember that their country used to be an honorable friend and fully invested in the ideas of global liberty and the restraining of global tyranny. It was terrible for Europe, which now realizes it has to deal with the most serious threat to its security since WWII without the relatively stalwart ally it has counted on since WWII, but can trust no more. It was, on the other hand, excellent, almost unimaginably, giddily wonderful, for Putin and his overt and covert allies around the world, including, of course, Trump, who used to be a semi-covert ally but came out of the closet on Friday as an overt supporter of the position and cause of his greatest personal hero and political benefactor.

There are millions, both among Trump’s cult members (only a cult member or a Russian oligarch could support Trump now) and among his ostensible opponents, who will continue to refuse to accept the notion that he is actually trying to help Putin save face and avoid political defeat until and unless they hear Trump directly declare that he wants Putin to devour Ukraine, subjugate Europe, and be a determining force in U.S. domestic politics for a generation. Trump will make no such declaration — but the reason is not because these are not the very outcomes he prefers. On the contrary, he and his acolytes are making it as clear as possible every day now that they are prepared to take all the steps necessary to bring those goals into reality without having to state the goals directly: withdrawing security guarantees from Ukraine, withdrawing from the NATO alliance, pulling troops out of Europe, and reducing former restrictions on Russian-sponsored internet subversion aimed at American interests.

As for the question of why, if Trump and his thugs are so hellbent on helping Putin get his way, they do not just say so — God knows almost as well as Trump himself does that he wouldn’t lose a single supporter if he shot a civilization on Fifth Avenue — the answer is actually quite obvious: It is in Putin’s best interests to maintain at least the formal appearances of America, and specifically its president, being an adversary. Trump, in other words, is more useful to Putin, at least under the current global dynamics, if he can sustain the illusion that America represents a threat and limitation to Russia’s actions, so that, for example, the geopolitical gifts Trump gives him can be portrayed as hard-won negotiating concessions, suggesting Putin’s willingness to settle for “reasonable compromises,” rather than drawing attention to the extent to which he, Putin, has subverted the American government and taken control of American foreign policy for his own purposes. That is, the jig would be up if Putin’s ownership of Trump became official and explicit; the world could no longer hide its head in the comforting and convenient delusion that America was doing its best to restrain Putin’s power if portraits of Putin started appearing on the wall of the Oval Office. That comforting and convenient delusion, as Russia’s KGB dictator obviously knows very well, is exactly the dreamy mirage he needs to uphold as well as possible in order to continue getting his way without the world fully waking up to the reality of what they are now almost but not quite seeing with their own eyes.

For years, thanks in large part to Russia-sponsored propaganda, the transformation of anti-progressive, limited-government conservative factions into populist authoritarian factions prone to the lowest forms of demagoguery — a transformation in which Donald Trump has been a remarkably effective Trojan horse — has greatly deepened the divides of tribal emotionalism and unreason that are tearing the democratic countries asunder as we speak. And one of the worst political effects of such irrational tribalism is that it creates, in those who succumb to its de-civilizing charms, a natural tendency to regard “the other side” as so fundamentally and comprehensively despicable that absolutely nothing they do or say can be regarded with respect or appreciation. Or rather, to state the point more pointedly, this tribalism leads to the conspiratorial suspicion, or even the categorical assumption, that anything “the other side” supports must be evil, for the simple reason that “the other side” consists of nothing but evil — this assumption, after all, being the condition that confirms our belief that we are right to hate them, and to hate everything about them, as we do.

But once you have given yourself over to that assumption — “Everything they are and do is evil, and therefore everything they support, however reasonable it might appear on the surface, just must be a part of their evil schemes” — the ability to look at real life situations with clear perception and a logical mind dissolves. It thus becomes possible for people who, in 2015, knew and would have openly said that Vladimir Putin was a conscienceless thug, and that the invasion of Crimea was part of an obvious ploy to regain territory lost with the demise of the Soviet Union, to turn around and hate the leader of Ukraine who is resisting Putin’s full-blown invasion of that country, to call him a grifter, a dictator, a profiteering actor, and an ungrateful warmonger, to mock and ridicule him, to sneer at his cause, and to extort resources from him, mafia-style, as “payment” for the enormous benefits his country has provided to the Western world at such great cost to herself and such relatively low cost to everyone else. After all, Zelensky was supported by the Democrats for three years (along with most Republicans at one time, but of course those were “deep state” Republicans!), and that in itself, so the tribal reasoning goes, proves that he is a fraud, his cause unjust, and this ongoing war just a propaganda ploy to diminish and smear the legitimate Russian president, to thwart Russia’s legimate national security concerns, and to promote “forever wars” that fill the coffers of Ukrainian oligarchs and the deep state Jewish cabal that has secretly run the Western world since WWII, all at the expense of Donald Trump, Champion of Peace and Freedom.

There is another angle on this, of course, which is that if Trump and his cronies had not been so overtly pro-Putin all these years, and Putin himself not so obviously pro-Trump, the Democrats would have been less likely to support Ukraine’s cause even as half-heartedly as they have done. The effects of this irrationally tribalized era on American politics go both ways.