The Monkey's Paw

If you know the story, this will really creep you out. Illustration by David Lupton.

Donald Trump’s administration has been way worse than even I expected. I thought we would slowly abandon Ukraine. I didn’t realize we would be forging an alliance with Colonel Putin of the KGB.

But it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good, and there have been a few things the current administration is doing that I would normally approve of. So as I ask in a new piece at Discourse: Why am I not happier about these things?

I came up with the perfect metaphor to explain it. Maybe this will resonate with you, too.

There’s a classic short story in the horror genre about a talisman brought back from India by a traveler, a shriveled monkey’s paw that is cursed to grant its owner three wishes. I say “cursed” because when the monkey’s paw twitches, you get exactly what you wished for—but in a form so horrible that you immediately regret it.

That’s exactly how I feel about the second Trump administration.

I go on to catalog “the work of the monkey’s paw.” My greatest disappointment is that I have been advocating and working toward a backlash against “wokeness.” But the monkey’s paw twitched, and what I got was a backlash against wokeness—in favor of racism.

To give an example of how a supposed campaign against DEI has simply became a campaign against any governmental expression of opposition to racism, the Department of Defense required the Maryland National Guard to withdraw from a parade to celebrate the abolitionist firebrand Frederick Douglass, because the event was “part of a Black History Month celebration.”

DEI was often a poorly executed and ideologically dogmatic expression of opposition to racism—but the administration is reacting by, in effect, eliminating any official expression of opposition to racism. We now have a federal government in which you can be fired just for attending DEI training but rehired if you boasted, “I was a racist before it was cool.”

By the way, this is not just about government policy. The Trump administration has declared its intention to target private companies, not just for DEI training, but potentially for any effort to increase minority hiring, such as recruiting at historically black colleges.

And within this administration, it’s even worse than I had space to describe. In the response to the Trump administration’s hiring of yet another racist—in this case, an antisemite—Cathy Young just published a good overview of the deep penetration of racist ideas into the American right, to the extent that the old racist “alt-right” doesn’t really exist anymore, because it is no longer the alternative. It is the right.

While the alt-right as a separate movement has largely faded from view, white nationalist and/or antisemitic views have infiltrated the right-wing mainstream—and with it, the government—to a degree unthinkable eight years ago. Tucker Carlson, who has coyly flirted with such views for a while, is now brazen about it…. Carlson aired a long, fawning interview with “popular historian” Darryl Cooper, a Hitler apologist who finds continued Nazi rule in France vastly preferable to drag queens at the Paris Olympics opening ceremony. Unscathed by the outrage among many conservatives, Carlson continued to play a prominent role in the Trump campaign.

The “vibe shift” is not necessarily that more people on the right are antisemites compared to eight years ago; it’s that much of the right now appears to reject the basic notion that there should be any stigma against even the vilest bigotry.

Read that piece. It’s eye-opening, and even then, there are probably a dozen more examples Cathy could have given.

On government spending, I describe Elon Musk’s policy as what you would do if you set out to “discredit budget cuts and the cause of small government.” I end up having to defend, among other things, spending on USAID, a tiny little portion of the federal budget that is not just welfare for the world but also does some important things that help the US achieve its foreign policy goals.

The dismantling of USAID has included blocking funding that is crucial for big national security goals such as keeping ISIS terrorists in jail or supporting a peace deal that ended a narco-terrorist insurgency in Colombia.

At the same time, DOGE fired hundreds of workers who keep our nuclear arsenal safe, then scrambled to unfire them, but will still probably lose many of them anyway. As one specialist told NBC News, “I will be honest, I intend to keep looking for work. I will go back, but as soon as I find another role, I’ll be leaving.”

There is a much worse aspect to DOGE, which is that it has already transferred the power of the purse from Congress to an unelected and unaccountable private citizen. I’ll be writing more about that very soon. But even on its own terms, as an alleged attempt to reduce government spending, it is cutting legitimate and illegitimate things, valuable and wasteful spending, indiscriminately. And it’s not even achieving any significant reductions in spending.

Finally, there is one thing I was really hoping to see, which is reform of the National Environmental Protection Act, a 1970 law that is the source of huge delays and impenetrable bureaucracy that bogs down big infrastructure projects. But I fear that even these good things will eventually get swept away in the backlash against Trump—or that they simply won’t matter in the full context.

I end by describing what’s wrong with the devil’s bargain we are being asked to make.

For many of us, the specific, concrete policy objectives we have always wanted—regulatory reform, constitutional originalism, deficit reduction and so on—were just aspects of a larger vision: our desire to live in the vibrant and dynamic environment made possible by a free society secured by the rule of law. None of those specifics mean very much—and none of them are possible, in the long run—outside that vision.

Read the whole thing.

The Monkey’s Paw Administration

Ayn Rand, Donald Trump, and the Will to Power

Speaking of the appeal of that devil’s bargain, one of the big disappointments of the Trump era, and especially the second Trump administration, is seeing a contingent of Objectivists flock to defend and applaud Trump. (The internecine Objectivist battles over Trump are especially intense on Facebook.)

Stewart Margolis raised some interesting questions about this in a Substack post, and I posted a somewhat off-the-cuff response, which I thought I should share with you here, as well.

1) Objectivism is a philosophical movement, but it was introduced to the world in a way that was highly politically salient. Ayn Rand’s works originally came out in the context of the Cold War and a global battle between capitalism and socialism. So even though Ayn Rand occasionally went hammer and tongs against the conservatives, her works still reached many people who were “on the right,” who came to the philosophy politics-first and kept viewing it that way.

This is definitely an ingredient for the pro-Trump Objectivists, who don’t seem to be able to disentangle the philosophy from a mental model in which “the right” are the good guys, maybe just a little misguided, while the “the left” is pure evil.

2) Closely related is the fact that Objectivism is still a small movement within a much larger culture, so it tends to get drawn into the currents of that larger culture. If someone reads Atlas Shrugged every once in a while but watches Fox News Channel every day or stews constantly in online misinformation and conspiracy theories, which is going to end up being the stronger influence?

3) Our philosophical enemy adapts. In Ayn Rand’s novels, Jim Taggart borrowed the language of the left. But what if he borrowed the language of the right? What if he denounced “Marxism” and “wokeness”? What if, instead of embracing conformism, Peter Keating tried to cosplay as Howard Roark and present himself as a bold individualist? (And yes, I am referring to Elon Musk.)

I think that right now we’re in a world that’s more like The Fountainhead than Atlas Shrugged. In Atlas Shrugged, the genuine producers tend to also be first-hand thinkers in other ways. In The Fountainhead, there are more characters like Gail Wynand—brilliantly independent in his work but fatally flawed in his thinking. (Or some mixture of those things.) That’s the world we’re in right now.

4) The main thing I’ve been harping on is that you can have a philosophy that advocates reason, but this is not the same thing as understanding the daily practice and discipline of using reason. That’s the biggest thing I think has been left unexplored in Objectivism: the ability to translate the philosophy into a practical spiritual discipline of rationality. And so I see a lot of people who think or claim they’re being rational but are actually just rationalizing their emotions—which is what makes my first point above possible. “The left must be worse than the right, now here let me search for reasons.”

I hold Leonard Piekoff partly responsible for this because he has a long history of drawing wrong conclusions and making bad recommendations in politics. I think it’s because he never thought seriously about what methods and habits would be required to be properly informed and reach rational conclusions in this area. Instead, it seemed that he just assumed that as the most prominent Objectivist philosopher, whatever conclusions he drew must be the most rational ones.

5) Finally, to get to a relatively narrow but important weakness in Objectivism as a philosophy: Objectivists haven’t spent enough time talking about our form of government. I’ve been planning to write an article about how Ayn Rand was a “liberal democrat”—not in the partisan 20th-Century sense but in the sense of advocating “liberal democracy.” But because of that 20th Century meaning of “liberal Democrat,” she was highly reluctant to embrace “democracy” either as a term or as a system, and she wrote relatively little about it.

Objectivists have largely followed that lead, and at best it leaves them unprepared for an era in which democracy versus authoritarianism is the central global and domestic conflict. At worst, it has led some Objectivists into a dark and foolish fascination with the idea of authoritarian capitalism, even though such a combination does not really exist.

In thinking about this a little bit more, I would add one more thing. A huge part of the appeal of authoritarianism or fascism is that it is a fantasy of power. I’ve been meaning to write something about the odd phenomenon of the “black Nazi,” and I think this is the root. People are drawn to an ideology, despite the fact that it is hostile to their very existence, because it offers them an esthetic of power, a fantasy of crushing one’s enemies.

Ayn Rand’s ideas have been spread through her esthetics, through her novels, and I think some of her readers also experienced this as a fantasy of power. But of course, Ayn Rand did not celebrate power in that sense at all.¹ She advocated man’s power over nature, not power over other men. But people will confuse these issues.

I figured out a long time ago that Ayn Rand’s ideas are deeply misunderstood by her critics—but are sometimes equally misunderstood by her supporters. Her critics file her away as a Nietzschean, ignoring the fundamental differences between her philosophy and his. But then some of her fans make the exact same mistake and are drawn to her by a Nietzschean vision of the assertion of power over others.

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At any rate, I wanted to end by pointing to an interesting piece by an Ayn Rand critic, of sorts, who actually gets this issue right. Paul Crider just published an article in The Bulwark arguing that Trump and his minions resemble Ayn Rand’s villains more than her heroes.

I’ve know Paul for a while. He’s a modern liberal or probably even a “progressive” who writes for Liberal Currents. He’s also probably the wokest Ayn Rand fan you’ll ever meet, and he has a genuine appreciation for her work. I think he gets the basic story here right. I do not agree with everything, of course, but this passage is the most insightful.

As a radical promoter of laissez-faire capitalism, Rand likely would have favored abolishing the Department of Education, USAID, and other agencies now in the crosshairs. But the means do not justify the ends in Rand’s philosophy, and Rand believed in America’s constitutional republican form of representative government, not monarchy or personalist rule à la Trump.

Rand is best known—fairly—for defending the rich, but it may surprise casual readers to realize that in her novels money and wealth are never prized for their own sake. Rand’s heroes are creative geniuses who follow their own passions. Her protagonists suffer extended periods of avoidable poverty. The Fountainhead’s Howard Roark wouldn’t compromise his artistic integrity and so labored in a quarry until he could find a client who respected his work. The heroes of Atlas Shrugged go on strike: They leave their various industrial empires to decay as an act of political dissidence against an oppressive regime. The money never mattered. Can you imagine Musk, Thiel, or Andreessen sacrificing their fortunes for a higher principle? Can you imagine them voluntarily enduring any hardship at all?

Rand instilled in her followers a need for hero worship, and she gave them the impression these heroes were plentiful at the commanding heights of the economy, despite slotting many of her villains in these same lofty positions. She thus left her disciples unprepared for a world in which so many of the world’s wealthiest capitalists used the “aristocracy of pull” to amass their wealth, and sought that wealth not as a byproduct of their creative energies but as a means to dominate others. Being seen as dominant is just as important—that whooshing sound you hear is the black hole of Elon Musk’s self-esteem, sucking in its surroundings. And Rand failed to equip her followers to grapple with racism not from the underbelly of society but from its highest echelons.

Read the whole thing. It is nice to see someone from outside the usual Objectivist circles grasp this, and do so better than some people within those circles.

1. I once came across a blog post on Ayn Rand from a neo-Nazi, who wanted to like her novels because her heroes are strong-willed and (in his imagination) all have blond hair and blue eyes. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it because Ayn Rand was a Jew. It just goes to show how superficially some people can read her books.