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“What to Fight For”: The Way Forward
On Election Day I flew up to New York City to celebrate with friends the Harris victory I had begun to think was certain. On the plane I explored what Kamala Harris’s campaign, win or lose, got right, how she addressed something that we desperately need, a rebirth of community.
Apparently, that idea wasn’t right enough for the electorate. But, however wrong I was about the election, I finished this piece mostly unchanged to put a pin in the idea. While the pundits explain what went wrong and the Democrats indulge in their traditional circular firing squad, it’s worthwhile to mark what Harris got right.
A Deeper Dive on Tribalism: On the Eve of the 2024 U.S. Election
Political discourse now echoes the darkest moments before the Civil War. If we haven’t seen an event on the Senate floor like the 1856 caning of Charles Sumner, when Representative Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery Democrat from South Carolina, used a walking cane to attack an abolitionist Republican from Massachusetts, the January 6th perpetrators did far worse in order to get into the Senate Chamber.
Call it Trump Derangement Syndrome if you must but count me among the less surprised at the caning of Mookie Betts in the Dodgers-Yankees World Series. Yankees fan Austin Capobianco grabbed Betts’s glove with both hands and pulled the ball out. Capobianco’s friend, John Peter, grabbed Betts’s non-glove hand.
Sign of the times? You bet.
James Hillman on Show Business Ethics
In “On Show-Business Ethics” (Philosophical Intimations, Uniform Edition), archetypal psychologist James Hillman offers a prophetic understanding of what drives Trump’s power with this base. Writing in 1988, the Reagan era, Hillman points out that, replacing morality as we know it—you know, right and wrong—show biz ethics has instead taken over the agora and the forum, the marketplace and the body politic. In show biz ethics, it is not the rightness or wrongness of action but strictly the question, does it work?