Money and attitude

The famous Hollywood agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar once gave a protege the following advice: In this life you must acquire either fuck you money or fuck you attitude.

An autocratic plutocracy, which is what America is on the verge of becoming with breathtaking speed, is made up of people with the former. Its opponents need to very quickly develop much larger reserves of the latter.

Bill Kristol continues to be very clear-eyed on every aspect of Trumpism:

The autocratic project extends beyond the government. Autocracy seeks to undermine not just a free government but a free society. Autocracy isn’t just about personal power, or the power of a political movement over the institutions of government. It’s about extending that power to institutions outside of government—to businesses, to the media, to civic associations.

The individual steps towards autocracy can seem petty and personal. But their significance goes beyond that. Retaliation or retribution against one individual or institution is a way to intimidate many others. It’s a way to induce much broader compliance. It’s a way to encourage what Tim Snyder calls “anticipatory obedience.”

So, for example, excluding the Associated Press from the White House press pool wasn’t just about punishing the Associated Press for its editorial choices. It was about sending a chilling message to other news organizations who might choose to defy Trump in some way or other. And indeed last night a Trump aide posted that the New York Times’sPeter Baker would be excluded from the pool too, for the temerity of raising concerns about the White House’s media restrictions.

It’s easy to multiply such examples of attempted autocratic advances.

We saw another yesterday afternoon, when President Trump signed an executive order suspending security clearances for any attorneys at Covington and Burling who were involved in representing Special Counsel Jack Smith. The order also directs federal agencies to limit interactions with lawyers from Covington and Burling, and to assess any government contracts with the firm to align “funding decisions with the interests of the citizens of the United States.”

Covington and Burling has been accused of no illegality or even impropriety. The firm simply has a client the president doesn’t like. In a free society, this should not be a ground for targeting by the federal government. But that’s the point: to collapse the boundaries that limit arbitrary government action or help preserve the overall rule of law.

Kristol points out that we’re now in the early stages of what happened in Orban’s Hungary, quoting David Pressman, who was the most recent US ambassador to that country:

“The first tool was essentially constructing a system where institutions are captured and then creating an architecture of rewarding and punishing,” he said. “It’s a clear message to anyone that the costs of disagreeing, the cost of engaging is so high. And as a result of that, a lot of people choose just not to.”

The intimidation goes hand-in-hand with corruption. Orbán transferred public assets to friendly oligarchs. His closest childhood friend has become the country’s single wealthiest individual. As Pressman says, “It became very lucrative and attractive to be a Fidesz loyalist. And simultaneously it became existentially challenging to exist if you were somehow outside the Fidesz, or the Orbán party system.”

Pressman goes on to describe the cost paid by those who seek to challenge this system. He spotlighted the case of a conservative, but independent newspaper in the country called Magyar Hang. It’s often critical of Orbán. It has to print the paper in neighboring Slovakia, because no firm in Hungary will risk doing so.

This is personalist autocracy, run on explicitly plutocratic principles, which is exactly what is happening right here right now, as Trump and Musk destroy the autonomy of both public and private institutions via bureaucratic banditry and extortion.

This is the negative analysis: now what is to be done?

I believe that opposition to Trumpism, which is now exactly identical to the Republican party, requires, at the social and psychological level, an opposition mentality of total war. Fuck you money must be met, always and everywhere for the duration, with fuck you attitude. A Republican — any Republican anywhere — needs to be treated by any and all defenders of liberal democracy, from Bill Kristol to AOC, as an enemy combatant in a cold (to this point) civil war.

Let me give a small personal example of what I’m talking about.

A former colleague and friendly acquaintance of mine, Allison Eid, is now a 10th circuit appellate court judge. Earlier this month Eid issued a concurrence in a case in which she stated that the question of whether Donald Trump could run for president again was “novel and complex.” She did this, I believe, because she is a corrupt person who is willing to prostitute her intellect in pursuit of a SCOTUS appointment (she was shortlisted by the Leonard Leo Experience for at least one of the openings during the first Trump presidency, so this isn’t as delusional as such ambitions typically are).

The more charitable explanation I suppose is that she’s dim enough to reason herself into a sincere belief that it’s not clear that the 22nd amendment bars Trump from re-election. Corruption and stupidity are often intertwined, so it’s hard to say for sure, but for practical purposes it makes no difference. (Eid was an Articles Editor on the University of Chicago Law Review so how dumb could she be? Denverite you are on the clock). The practical purpose here is that Allison Eid has, since she left the law school faculty to join the Colorado supreme court and then the 10th circuit, taught several classes as a distinguished visiting adjunct professor. And that’s no longer tolerable. I happen to be on the law school’s adjunct committee this year, so I’m going to be introducing a motion, to be, I hope, forwarded to the faculty as a whole, to make the official position of the law school that Eid is no longer eligible to teach at the law school, because she’s either too corrupt or too stupid to perform that role, especially under present circumstances.

I have no idea — OK I have some idea — whether enough of my colleagues are going to join me in this tiny but real act of protest and resistance. There are, after all, an infinite number of excuses, always and everywhere, not to do so — we can just not assign her any classes in the future without saying why, this will infuriate the central administration, at a time when the new chancellor and provost are already squinting hard at our profligate spending, etc etc etc.

Fuck you money or fuck you attitude.