Why Do Good Things Happen to Bad People?

As I watch the Trump/Musk plutocracy conduct a cruel and chaotic mass firing of government employees and threaten and blackmail other nations, I feel heartsick and horribly disappointed at how life often seems to reward the worst people with power, wealth and fame.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk are both profoundly impaired human beings.  They lack empathy, they are emotionally immature, they are grotesquely vain and narcissistic, and they are frighteningly vindictive. Both Musk and Trump seem to be trapped in an endless adolescence.

 

Their business success is probably at least partially due to these pathological traits, which is a very sad and depressing fact.  The history of human endeavor is replete with examples of people with horrific flaws wielding tremendous power and causing mayhem and tragedy.  

 

Both Trump and Musk achieved wealth through audacious, risk-taking ventures.  Trump was never seen as a great genius, but his massive accumulation of wealth made him a celebrity in a nation that worships the rich.  His unscrupulous character and hardball business ethics were well known from the start, but he, like so many of the rich, was never called to account for the way he did business.  The only thing that mattered was that it succeeded.

 

Musk, on the other hand, was idolized early on for his technical acumen and his apparently visionary commitment to a world of electric vehicles and space adventure.  He cast himself as the planet’s savior from climate change and the world swooned in admiration.  A closer look at his business trajectory poses many questions as to how much of this hero myth was self-generated after clever appropriation of other businesses and their already well-developed strategies. 

 

But now the true character of both men has come into stark relief.  With the unbridled glee of a spoiled eight-year-old torturing a cat, Musk revels in wreaking havoc in real people’s lives.  He seems to experience a diabolical joy in the fear and heartbreak that his DOGE goons have inflicted on tens of thousands of dedicated government employees.  And Trump stands behind him, sneering proudly – “this is my son, with him I am well pleased”.

 

Yes, it is a sad truth that bad people will often have their way in this world.  I find it highly dispiriting, but I know from history that their success is not the end of the story.  Justice will not necessarily be served directly to Trump or Musk.  Trump may keel over from a fast food induced heart attack before he experiences any sort of consequences for his actions.  But good people will rise and the pendulum will eventually swing away from the red zone of the Trump/Musk villainy.  I just wish it were more like the movies and the bad guys got their punishment quickly and we got to see it happen.  Sigh.

 

The Liberal Bias in Academia is No Conspiracy!

Conservatives have complained bitterly about liberal bias in academia since the 60’s.  The hysteria became particularly shrill in the last 10 years or so, appending the pejorative ‘woke’ as a further term of disdain.  The right believes that college and universities specifically hire and encourage liberal professors and administrators, and reject or ostracize conservatives.  They consider this part of a liberal conspiracy to corrupt impressionable students and bolster ‘woke’ culture and America-hating.

But the simple fact is that across America (and, for that matter, the rest of the developed world) higher education is associated with more liberal political views.  The Pew Charitable Trust conducted a survey on political views with people of various levels of education (https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/04/26/a-wider-ideological-gap-between-more-and-less-educated-adults/).  People with postgraduate education and degrees were much more likely to hold liberal views, and people with high school and some college education were very likely to hold conservative views.  The liberal bias in the well-educated is not simply a college professor phenomenon, but extends across the US population.

 

Every professor has a postgraduate degree, so it is no surprise that the majority of them hold liberal political views.  And when a majority of people hold similar views, then there is always the potential for some level of bias in that population and it is certainly possible that students and professors who hold conservative views may feel unwelcome or in some way demeaned.  My own experience in college was that professors did not hide their political inclinations, but they also welcomed other opinions and were never dismissive of them.

 

One might argue that people with postgraduate education have generally been corrupted by the liberal universities, but I find that to be a specious argument.  Once people leave the university there are multiple factors influencing their thinking and it is unlikely that they would cling to views formed at the university unless they continue to make sense to them in the marketplace of ideas that they confront throughout their lives.  And indeed, the tendency, as one grows older, is to become more conservative and less idealistic, as taxes and self-interest curb one’s zeal for liberal causes and ideology.

 

There is a better explanation for why postgraduate education leads to liberal political views.  Better educated people recognize the contradictions and injustices in society and they tend to read widely and dig deeply into history, science, economics and other concepts.  They have developed the skills and habits necessary for deep thinking and processing of more complex data.  They have the same self-interest that less educated conservatives have, but they recognize the contradictions and the paradoxes and choose to err on the side of social justice and the social contract.  In the balancing of liberty and equality, they are willing to push the scale a bit toward equality because otherwise it will steadily slip further away from it.

 

Yes, colleges generally tend to be liberal.  But quite frankly, it is typically the only time in one’s life that the surrounding culture will tilt that direction.  There is no broad conspiracy to indoctrinate our youth in Marxism, atheism or socialism or any other specific ideology. It is simply a great time to explore different ways of thinking and be challenged in one’s point of view.  We should all have faith in the intellectual strength and the ethical and moral code that we have nurtured in our children.  They will find their own way.  

 

But if they get well educated, and don’t simply go to frat parties and football games, then there is a high probability they will lean left. 

Leadership versus Autocracy

What is the difference between a leader and a dictator?  A leader identifies goals and objectives, explains them to the people and to the legislators that must enact laws to support those goals, then works to build consensus to legitimize those laws and objectives.  If compromises are necessary to build broad support, then a leader will make those compromises and negotiate a course that may not be exactly what he or she originally desired.

This is the process that has more or less been the method of presidential leadership and congressional lawgiving over the course of our nation’s history.  Change has generally been incremental, sometimes frustratingly so.  But given the nature of a divided populace and the underlying passions of the people, incremental change is the safest and most effective method of governance.

 

A dictator, on the other hand, does not seek consensus.  He does not attempt to reconcile the wide diversity of opinions and positions.  He does not respect or acknowledge the opposition’s point of view.  He is convinced that his objectives must be achieved at any cost. He is neither willing to compromise nor engage in negotiations or even discussion.  He will go to the extremes of his power to suppress dissent or steamroll over opposition.  

 

If a leader has to make difficult choices and cut back programs or let people go, he does it delicately and with empathy.  A dictator does it gleefully, without a trace of respect or compassion.  

 

The lack of leadership and the cruel, vindictive approach that Trump and Musk have demonstrated in their first weeks of power are not only horribly divisive, but they are completely out of step with the long history of progress and improvement by negotiation and consensus in the United States.  They are especially egregious considering that Trump won by a tiny margin and both the house and senate have tiny Trumpian majorities.

Changes that are made at the point of a gun are not likely to stand the test of time.  Trump and Musk will lose their luster even among their most ardent supporters.  They have already earned the enduring enmity of at least half of the country.

This Is the Way the US Empire Ends; Not with a Bang but with a Whimper

It was a good ride, I guess.  Depending on when you start the clock, Empire USA has been either on top or heading rapidly towards the top for about 150 years.  I put the start at the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia.  That was when the world got a great glimpse into the industrial and technological might that the USA was developing.  Not long after, our imperial ambitions came into stark view with the Spanish American war and Teddy Roosevelt.  

It took a while for us to edge out Great Britain, but their descent was clearly evident in the Boer War and then amplified by their fragility in WWI, the unraveling of their colonial empire, and the decay of their industrial economy after WWII

 

Our empire has been teetering for some time.  We had what appeared to be rather glorious years in the 50’s and 60’s, though our original sin of slavery and our inability to address major social issues sowed the seeds for future distress even during those supposedly halcyon years.

 

The wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated both our hubris and our growing vulnerability.  The almost gleeful outsourcing of our manufacturing capabilities by management consultants and the resultant middle-class malaise accelerated the process.   Our dominance in computer and Internet technology shielded us from a more rapid decline, but the benefits accrued more and more to a fairly small part of our population.

 

So here we are today, with a deeply divided people, a sly but completely amoral and unhinged president, and a cabal of plutocrats, one of whom has been given carte blanche to wreak whatever havoc he chooses on our government and institutions.

 

Trump may believe he is a master negotiator, and perhaps he was in real estate, where a no-holds-barred approach and lack of ethics can apparently bring great success.  But his style on the world stage can ultimately only bring isolation and pariah status to our country.  Other countries will find new allies, new ways to conduct business.  Even his cohort of MAGA crazies will eventually tire of his posturing.  In the meantime, Musk’s incoherent ravaging of our government will cause a steady exodus of talent and a rapid degradation of services and sanity.

 

The US empire will fade away, but the Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple and Tesla empires will continue to expand and control the world.  They will gobble up potential competitors and dictate how whatever remaining governments interact with them by buying political influence and controlling information.  Yes, China will become the dominant nation, but it may soon find itself controlled more and more by its own technology companies.

 

There was a movie back in the mid-70s called Rollerball, where corporations were the most powerful entities on earth and made all the decisions.  The individual corporations sponsored teams in a brutal sport called Rollerball, meant to pacify the masses.  It wasn’t the best movie in the world, but I think it is very prescient in terms of where we are headed.  Most of us sit in front of screens watching series and interminably scrolling already.  We don’t have far to go.

 

It may be that the corporations are already powerful enough to stop the idiot Trump from starting a world war, though all bets are off on that question.  The next couple of years will see Trump careen from one outrageous demand to another, and there is no telling what kind of mayhem will ensue.  

 

Everyone fears that AI will cause wars, loss of jobs and that we will end up with AI conquering and perhaps obliterating humanity.  But I think the AI juggernaut will simply provide corporations with the tools necessary to completely control the world.  No more nationalism, no more wars, no more populism, no more immigration, no more democracy, no more compassion, no more visible dissension.

 

And then the plutocrats will build a lovely colony on Mars and flee there with their retinues while the earth dies from climate disasters, plastic pollution and the inevitable revolt of a few billion very disgruntled Amazon customers.

 

 

They Warmed to Hitler Too

Megalomaniacs and narcissists who attain positions of power can be very charming and compelling, even charismatic, before things go south.  Whether their appeal is warranted or simply an illusion due to their aura of power and a human predilection to be awed by celebrity, is an interesting question.  I strongly suspect it is the latter.

Before Hitler came to power, he was generally ridiculed and dismissed as a laughable character by those in power and those unlikely to embrace his ideology, which at the time were the majority of Germans.  Once he was declared Chancellor and began to wield power things started to change.  Serious people took a second look.  His early successes in stabilizing the German economy and establishing order were heralded as great accomplishments.  Yes, he was a bit rough in his speech, and clearly a narcissist, but damned if he didn’t have a big effect on his country!

 

Credible newspapers, radio broadcasters, diplomats and cultural icons all begin to come around to Hitler due to his apparently dramatic impact on Germany.  People who met him in person often came away enchanted by his personality and charisma.  Perhaps he was what Germany really needed, they opined.

 

Donald Trump was a laughable character too, all through the 80’s, 90’s and 2000’s.  His wealth was prodigious, but few people had any respect for him as a person.  He was viewed as a pompous blowhard and self-promoter – the worst example of rogue capitalism writ large.  In the elections of 2016 and 2020, few of the elites and powerful were in any way impressed by him.  

 

He won the nomination in 2016 because there were enough MAGA crazies (there always are) to give him a slight majority over the 10 other more reasonable candidates.  In the general election, large numbers voted for him (though not enough to win the popular vote!) simply because they couldn’t bear to have a democrat (or a woman) in the White House.

 

But time and familiarity do strange things.  Despite the insurrection of January 6^th and his ignominious behavior post-election and throughout the pandemic, or perhaps even because of it, Trump retained the loyalty of 15-20% of the population (again, more or less the crazies), and their activism was enough to doom any republican who didn’t profess allegiance to Trump and his catechism (climate change denial, stolen election, weaponized justice department, deep state radical left, etc.)

 

A weak attempt by less extreme republicans to sideline him in the 2024 primaries amounted to nothing, and the wealthy and powerful began to acknowledge that Trump was likely to be the next president.  Years of exposure to his lying, his thin skin, his preposterous boasting, his vendettas and his messianic complex had made these characteristics seem almost quaint or eccentric rather than dangerous to people whose lives are already filled with vanity and excess.

 

We now have the elites, the tech bros, the financial tycoons all cozying up to Trump, seeking his favor.  And Trump, who more than anything else has always craved the approval and respect of these people, is feeling empowered to go to any extreme to make his mark and create his legacy.  What could go wrong?  Ask the Germans.

The Triumph of Spite

Cue the Nuremberg Rallies!  Gather the MAGA faithful from all across the land and let us worship at the feet of our glorious leader.  Let us revel in our spite, our ill will, our grudges, our self-righteousness, our imagined grievances.  Trump has returned with his colossal mandate of 1% of the popular vote, and his vengeance is ours.

Oh, this time it will be different.  No half measures, no attempts to assuage the full half of the country that is completely opposed to our agenda.  This time the cabinet and all of the government leadership will be inhabited by true believers.  There will be no room for RINOs or half-hearted conservatives.  And certainly, no traitorous America-haters from the left.

 

The purge will start on day one.  The Musk-led oligarchy will use its master-of-the-universe brain power to whittle down the government with dramatic eliminations of services and social net infrastructure.  The first to go will be any suspected ‘deep-state’ elements.  Let’s piss them all off on day one by forbidding remote work and expressing our utter contempt for them.

 

Then let’s pardon all the violent rioters from January 6^th and pretend that it was just a love fest for our glorious leader and a justified outrage at the stolen election that not a single lawsuit or investigation could ever legitimize even under Trump-appointed judges.  Vengeance is mine, sayeth Trump. Sadly, rewriting history is not quite so easy, as Stalin and Hitler and Mao and Pinochet and others have discovered.

 

Then on to America First!  Scrap the Paris Accords; abandon all efforts to fight climate change; exit the World Health Organization; persecute the International Criminal Court members that dared to call out Israel and Netanyahu for crimes against humanity; ignore anything from the UN that doesn’t align with our interests; threaten Panama, Greenland and any other country that is bold enough to question the might and the manifest destiny of the greatest country that ever existed.  International cooperation be damned!

 

Declare emergencies right and left!  An energy emergency, a border emergency, a law-and-order emergency.  Maybe we’ll need to set a Reichstag fire or two to get things moving!  Fortunately, the first steps of a massive manhunt for undocumented people will set the stage for future crackdowns.  Getting rid of the liberal press will require some finesse, but all in due time.

 

Am I being melodramatic?  Perhaps, but given Trump’s increasingly messianic lunacy (‘I was saved by God to make America great again’), his aggrieved desires for vengeance, his absurd narcissism, his dark inclinations toward violence and his absurdly simplistic appraisals of world events, it seems prudent to expect and prepare for the very worst.

 

There may be many aspects of Trump’s agenda that appear to be highly desirable and reasonable to the run-of-the-mill conservative or the Christian fretting over cultural issues.  I want to believe that we can find ways to achieve some of what the Trump voters desire without making a frightening lurch toward autocracy.

But it is an incredibly dangerous Faustian bargain to give so much power to a man with such obvious psychological flaws.  Let us all pray that the remaining legal, bureaucratic, and legislative barriers will be enough to prevent a full authoritarian transformation in our country, or worse yet, a major war.

 

 

The Sadly Predictable Decline

In 1945 the United States was the sole nation to emerge from the devastation of World War Two with its economy and population intact.  Indeed, the USA was master of the world – a booming industrial economy, a dominating military capability and a population eager to take advantage of both.

As the world slowly recovered, it became a captive market for the USA.  America produced everything and no other economy even came close.  No longer allowed to engage in direct colonization, we mastered economic imperialism, manipulating developing nations to use their resources and manpower to benefit our economic domination, all the while rationalizing our role in the spirit of free market capitalism and a rising tide that lifts all boats.

 

We grew comfortable in our exalted position.  Even though we failed to lift up our own bottom 15-20% out of poverty and despair, the 50’s and 60’s were times of heady economic optimism for most of the country.

 

By the time the 70’s and 80’ came along, Europe had begun to compete effectively with us in many markets, and the Japanese industrial juggernaut caught us by surprise.  An economic malaise took hold in the late 70’s due to multiple factors, so we tightened our belts, reduced taxes for the wealthy and began to look for ways to maintain the high earnings that wall street had come to expect.

 

Globalization took hold in the 80’s, as other nations began to cultivate industrial capabilities and provide less expensive labor.  A legion of freshly minted MBAs spread out across industrial America with the gospel of offshore factories and production, and corporate profits began to soar again as American manufacturing fled overseas.

 

American dominance in the technology revolution masked the insidious changes afoot throughout the 90’s. So-called knowledge jobs became the mantra and we convinced ourselves that the disappearing industrial base would be easily transformed into an even more lucrative knowledge economy. 

 

Economics is perhaps not truly a zero-sum game, but as other nations developed and began to claim their share of the world’s riches, it was not hard to predict that average wages and employment opportunities would be affected in previously dominant economies as the global economy became ever more inter-connected.  Even knowledge jobs can be outsourced with the Internet and gigabit networks.

 

Slowing population growth in established economies resulted in increased immigration to augment the labor market.  In good times and at a measured pace, immigration can be tolerated and even embraced by a native population.  But as economies began to stagnate and the middle class to languish, the immigration waves of the 2000’s and 2010’s created a tsunami of resentment that foretold a rise in populism.

 

Sharing the world’s resources was never going to be easy.  When you have a part of the world that was accustomed to being in the catbird seat and is now struggling to find its equilibrium in a changing world, there was bound to be a very difficult transition.

 

But now, with increasingly rampant populism and the rise to power of authoritarian figures like Trump, Putin, Xi, Modi, Orban and Netanyahu, the prospects for global cooperation on the thorny issues facing this world seem increasingly dim.  Unilateralism, clownishly personified in Trump, appears to be the watchword for the superpowers.  

 

There was a period in the 90’s when we all felt optimistic about the future.  Democracy seemed to be flourishing, economies were growing, global conflict was minimal, hundreds of millions across the globe were rising into the middle class.  But the seeds of discontent were already there.  Did we squander the momentum we had at that time?  Could we have changed the arc of history to a more harmonious path by making some adjustments?  Who knows?  Human nature does not easily tolerate decreased expectations, and sharing is not easy.  

 

I see hard times ahead, but I have faith in our basic humanity.  Unfortunately, we may have to endure some very difficult moments before that really kicks in.