How Steve Bannon captured America's spirit of revolt

Thomas Frank in The Guardian

 

Illustration by Matt Kenyon



So our billionaire president hangs a portrait of Andrew Jackson on his wall, spits on his hands, and takes a sledgehammer to the Dodd–Frank Act. The portrait is of the banks’ all-time arch-enemy; the reality is that the banks are going to be deregulated yet again. And in that insane juxtaposition we can grasp rightwing populism almost in its entirety: fiery verbal hostility to elites, combined with generous government favours for those same elites.

Donald Trump’s adviser Stephen Bannon presents an even more striking combination. A former executive at Goldman Sachs, Bannon is also the product of what the Hollywood Reporter calls a “blue-collar, union and Democratic family” who feels “an unreconstructed sense of class awareness, or bitterness – or betrayal”. Bannon is a founding member of the objectionable far-right website Breitbart and an architect of Trump’s unlikely victory, the man at the right hand of power. And yet almost no one in Washington seems to understand how he pulled this off.

Let me propose a partial explanation: that one of the reasons Bannon succeeded is because he has been able to unite the two unconnected halves of American populist outrage – the cultural and the economic.

Start with the latter. In a 2014 interview on the recent financial crisis, Bannon proclaimed: “The way that the people who ran the banks and ran the hedge funds have never really been held accountable for what they did has fuelled much of the anger in the Tea Party movement in the United States.”

Fair enough. I myself am outraged that financiers were not held responsible for the many obvious mistakes and even acts of fraud they appeared to commit.

But when we turn to the specifics of Bannon’s indictment, accountability gets a little blurry. In 2010 Bannon wrote, directed and produced a documentary film about the 2008 financial crisis called Generation Zero – a documentary that explicitly tries to get laissez-faire capitalism off the hook for this colossal capitalist disaster. Remember the roll-back of banking rules under Bill Clinton and George W Bush, or the hapless regulatory agencies filled with former bank officers and lobbyists? Evidently none of that really mattered. As one of the movie’s many experts intones, “Deregulation is not the problem.” The first sentence in the promotional copy on the back of the DVD case is just as blunt: “The current economic crisis is not a failure of capitalism, but a failure of culture.” 

What culture do you think Bannon means? The buccaneering culture of the Wall Street traders? The corrupt culture of the real estate appraisers or the bond rating agencies? The get-rich-quick culture of the mortgage originators?

No, no and no. He means … the counterculture of the 1960s. Bell bottoms. Drum solos. Dope. That’s the thing to blame for the financial crisis and the bailouts. Not the deregulation of derivatives in 2000. It was those kids having fun at Woodstock in 1969.

I am not joking. This really is Bannon’s argument, illustrated again and again in Generation Zero with 40-year-old footage of hippies dancing and fooling around, which is thrown together with stock footage of dollar bills being counted, or funny old cartoons, or vacant houses, or really mean-looking sharks, and then back to those happy hippies again.

One way of assessing this is that Generation Zero is the transition from the culture wars to Trumpism. What Bannon is doing is bringing the strands of outrage together. He’s saying that the culture wars and the financial crisis both share the same villain: the bad values that supposedly infected our society in the 1960s. The same forces that made the movies and pop music so vulgar also crashed the economy and ruined your livelihood. Here is how Roger Kimball of the New Criterion makes the case in Generation Zero:

“A lot of what we have just seen is a kind of a real-world dramatisation of those ideas that became popular in the 60s and 70s, and that had a dry run then. And that, I think, has been a prescription for disaster in some very concrete ways. Take, for example, the financial crisis. What we have just seen in the irresponsible lending by banks and the irresponsible leveraging by many hedge funds is an abdication of responsibility.”

That gives you a taste of how Bannon’s logic unfolds. The decade of the 60s supposedly introduced Americans to the idea of irresponsibility and self-indulgence, and now that we are suffering from an epidemic of irresponsibility and self-indulgence a mere 50 years later, it’s obviously the fault of people from that decade long ago. Blame is thus offloaded from, say, the captured regulators of the Bush administration to the pot-smoking college students of the Vietnam era. Unfortunately, just because something makes moral sense doesn’t mean it’s true. Take the phenomenon of “stated income” or liar’s loans, the fraud that came to symbolise so much of what went wrong in the last decade. One of the movie’s experts, Peter Schweizer (later the author of Clinton Cash), seems to blame this dirty business on … Saul Alinsky, an author and community organiser who died in 1972. Alinsky, he maintains, “applauded activists who used lying effectively. You end up where applicants lie on their applications, mortgage lenders lie when they pass that to the underwriters, and then these mortgages are sold as mortgage-backed securities on Wall Street ... It’s a chain of lie after lie after lie, which eventually undermines even the most effective system.”

Schweizer is right that loans based on lies undermined the system. By 2005 they had become an enormous part of the mortgage market, and the story of how that happened is a really fascinating one. Many books have been written on the subject. But filmmaker Bannon shows no interest in any of that. He makes little effort to find out who was issuing such loans, what kind of houses they were used to purchase (McMansions?), who packaged them up into securities, or why regulators didn’t do anything to stop it. Instead, the movie just implies that the diabolical Alinsky had some vague something to do with it and then walks away. This is not history, it’s naked blame-shifting.

In fairness, Bannon’s movie also makes plenty of valid points and has some fine moments. The director obviously cares about the working-class people who were ruined by the recession. He correctly portrays the Democratic party’s love affair with Wall Street in the 90s (although he downplays the amorous deeds of Republicans). He understands the cronyism between government and high finance, and one of his sources aptly describes the bailed-out system as “socialism for the wealthy but capitalism for everybody else”. Which kind of sounds like something that old 60s radical Bernie Sanders might say.

The putative moral of Generation Zero is that we all need to grow up and take responsibility for our actions; and yet as I watched it I was bowled over by how profoundly irresponsible this documentary is. Other than a single quote from Time magazine circa 1969 and the old TV footage of hippies doing their dance, Bannon doesn’t really try to nail down what “the 60s” stood for or meant. None of the leading participants in that decade’s bacchanals are interviewed. Skipping ahead to the financial crisis, we never learn whether it’s the dishonest home-buyers who were hippies, or the fly-by-night mortgage lenders or the Wall Street traders who were hippies. Which set of hippies are we supposed to crack down on? We never find out.

All we know, really, is that there was once a dreadful thing called the 60s, and then there was a terrible financial crisis four decades later, and because the one came before the other, it somehow caused it. The effort to bridge that evidence gap is almost nonexistent. In a typical moment, Bannon shows us Republican treasury secretary Hank Paulson desperately trying to stop the money haemorrhage in September 2008, and then cuts immediately to footage of the Black Panthers, holding a rally many decades ago. Why? What is the connection? Does Paulson, the devout Christian Scientist, the teetotalling college football star, have some secret affiliation with 60s radicalism?

Worst of all is the former presidential adviser Dick Morris (Bill Clinton’s Steve Bannon, come to think of it), who appears throughout Generation Zero blowing hard about this outrage and that. Here is what Morris tells the camera about the threat of hyperinflation, which loomed so large in the rightwing mind back in 2010: “The real catastrophe is going to come in about a year, a year and a half, or two years, when all of this money that the Fed has been printing comes out of hiding all at once and causes explosive inflation.”

The movie’s most far-fetched proposition is also its most revealing. Generation Zero asserts that history unfolds in a cyclical pattern, endlessly repeating itself. Historical crises (such as the Depression and second world war) are said to give rise to triumphant and ambitious generations (think Levittown circa 1952), who make the mistake of spoiling their children, who then tear society apart through their decadence and narcissism, triggering the cycle over again. Or as the movie’s trailer puts it: “In history, there are four turnings. The crisis. The high. The awakening. The unravelling. History repeats itself. The untold story about the financial meltdown.”

In a word, the theory is ridiculous. It is so vague and squishy and easily contradicted that the viewer wonders why Bannon included it at all.

And then it hits you. He included it because this rainy-day Marxism is pretty much the only way you can do what Bannon set out to do in this movie: get deregulated capitalism out of the shadow for the financial crisis and blame instead the same forces that the family-values crowd has been complaining about for years. Blame the hippies for what arch-deregulator Phil Gramm did 40 years later and call it a high-flown theory of history: the “fourth turning”, or some such nonsense. Of course Bannon’s fans believe it. It makes perfect sense to them.

A funny thing about Bannon’s stinky pudding of exaggerations and hallucinations: in the broadest terms, it’s also true. The counterculture really did have something to do with both our accelerated modern capitalism and the Democratic party’s shift to the right – it’s a subject I have written about from The Conquest of Cool to Listen, Liberal.

The Clinton administration really did strike up an alliance with Wall Street, and this really did represent a new and catastrophic direction for the Democratic party. Trade deals really did help to deindustrialise the US, and that deindustrialisation really was a terrible thing. The bankers really did get bailed out by their friends the politicians in 2008 and 2009, and it really was the greatest outrage of our stupid century. And there really is a lot of narcissism mixed up in modern capitalism. Just look at the man for whom Bannon presently works.

Generation Zero acknowledges these visible facts but connects the dots by means of a vast looping diagram of confusion and blame evasion. It is a fantasy of accountability that actually serves to get the guilty off the hook.

Then again, another way to judge this alternative theory, with its alternative facts, is to set it off against what the Democratic establishment was saying at the time. Which was pretty much nothing.

Centrist Democrats simply don’t talk about their alliance with Wall Street – it’s like the party’s guilty secret, never to be discussed in a straightforward way. Try asking former President Obama or former treasury secretary Geithner or former attorney general Holder why they were so generous with the bankers and why they never held them responsible, and see what kind of answer you get.

And that, in short, is the story of how the right captured the spirit of revolt in this most flagrantly populist period in modern times. Want to take it away from them, liberal? Start by understanding your history.

The case for sledging

Sam Perry in Cricinfo

Around a decade ago a 20-year-old man walked to a suburban wicket with his team in a precarious position. The previous week they had conceded a glut of runs to a rampaging opposition that included a recently discarded international player. In a message to selectors and anyone else who wanted to listen, the deposed veteran made a score that dropped jaws.

And so the 20-year-old strode to the crease, his team 40 for 4 in reply. Two overs remained before lunch. Slightly shaking but presenting the bravest face possible, he asked for centre. In an attempt at familiarity, he addressed the umpire by name. It was a disastrous overcompensation, seized upon gleefully.

"Do you know him, mate?" offered the point fieldsman. Chuckles ensued from those in earshot. The batsman glanced behind him to see four slips waiting. Each stared, stony-faced, directly back. Two had arms folded, two had hands behind their backs, like policemen strolling their beat. Robocop wraparound sunglasses were the day's fashion, as was the gnashing of chewing gum. The batsman probably shouldn't have addressed the umpire by name. It played on his mind.

"Rod, do you know this bloke?" came the follow-up from first slip. It was the veteran record-breaker, speaking to the umpire, capitalising on the moment. All heads turned to the man in white, now a central character in the contrived pantomime. Rod chuckled. "Nope!" he replied, followed by more laughter. A ball hadn't yet been bowled.

The veteran continued, "Mate, what's going on with your socks?" Now we had a problem. Unbeknown to the batsman, he had tucked his socks into his pants before affixing his pads. "Is this Under-12s? Rod, am I playing Under-12s?" Guffaws followed from all but the already humiliated batsman. He was out for 5, caught at gully off the last ball before lunch.

Sledging has utility and that's primarily why it exists. While few of us ever will, were we to step into the private confines of a professional dressing room, we would likely find believers. You won't hear this publicly, though, as the word itself has become villainous to cricketing morality. Very few are willing to openly defend sledging, though many privately believe in its value. Pragmatism often trumps principle.

So in this Trumpian world, perhaps it's time to air the views of a silent majority. Maybe sledging is effective. Maybe sledging makes a difference. Maybe sledging helps teams win.

We accept that cricket is a mental game, and let's face it, the majority of us cannot control ourselves very well mentally

Contrary to popular conception, sledging is rarely a series of witty one-liners of the sort found in internet listicles. Nor is it often outright verbal abuse. In large part it's merely a stream of hushed expletives, passive-aggressive body language, conversations between team-mates, and assorted noises, the worst of which is laughter.

We accept that cricket is a mental game, and let's face it, the majority of us cannot control ourselves very well mentally. We are not purveyors of unadulterated Zen and focused positivity. We are mostly flawed individuals, who carry our nerves, insecurities and awareness of weakness into most of life's important moments. We all learned at an early age that humiliation, embarrassment, and feelings of not belonging compromise our confidence. Ergo, if you accept that confidence is critical to cricketing success, then isn't it the opposition's imperative to weaken it?

Which brings us to sledging's ethical considerations. Among the many and overlapping guiding principles for a player's behaviour, particularly at the professional level, standing as tall as any is this: "What will help us win?" It's here that we confront sledging's mythical line. For most, the line is simply about what you can get away with. Or as Nathan Lyon described it, "We try to head-butt the line." If there is an upside or edge to be exploited in pursuit of victory, aren't players arguably justified in doing so? When it comes to sledging, for many the question is less "Is this right?", more "Will this work?"

Of course, it doesn't always work. Some personalities thrive under sledging, while others are immune. But these are rare birds. It's more likely than not that sledging hurts us. If we succeed, we do so in spite of it and not because of it. And so in our new, Trump-led world, where the prevailing doctrines seem to be less about honour and more about winning, it is fitting to view sledging as a viable tool in the arsenals of fielding sides. No one will say so, mind.
Beyond its capacity to mentally disrupt the opposition, in some countries sledging seemingly has a cultural allure too. You don't have to travel far on YouTube to witness the bipartisan adoration for former Australian prime minister Paul Keating, whose ability to deliver withering verbal takedowns and comebacks is arguably without peer. He is adored for his capacity to verbally undermine his opposition, and it's understandable that many may seek to emulate that when it comes to facing opponents of their own.

This potent yet fragile tool for psychological disruption remains as alive as ever. Ask any batsman whether they'd prefer to be sledged when they bat or not, and the honest answer will be no. And it is for this reason that they will engage in sledging themselves when fielding. While many might express a glib, deep-voiced indifference to "chat", we would all much prefer friendly, welcoming, encouraging environs when out in the middle. The reality, however sad or unethical, is that sledging usually makes one's innings more difficult. So long as professional pragmatism and the doctrine of winning prevails, so will sledging, whether publicly acknowledged or not.

The 100-year-old couple – still married, still going strong

Paul Laity in The Guardian

We don’t know anyone else over 100. We are really oddities: two people married for 78 years, one 103, the other 100. We’ve outlived everybody. And it’s rare, I recognise that. We’re very lucky. The best I can wish you is our luck.”




Morrie Markoff is sitting on the sofa in his downtown Los Angeles apartment next to his wife, Betty. They are delighted that someone from the “Manchester Guardian” has come to talk to them, though these days they are used to a degree of attention. When Morrie was 100, a gallery in the city put on his first art show, exhibiting his scrap-metal sculptures, photographs and paintings. “Ease up on the 100 business,” he remarked at the time. “I’m trying to pass as 90.” Now the Markoffs are to appear in Aging Gracefully, a book of photos of centenarians by Karsten Thormaehlen; they are the only married couple in its pages. 

“We’ve been together for nearly eight decades, and we still haven’t killed each other!” Morrie says.

“Though we’ve tried a few times,” chimes in Betty. “We’ve had plenty of run-ins, oh my God … but he never hit me, and I never hit him. Though I think I pushed him once.”

In turn, Morrie jokes about trading her in for two 50-year-old women. But whatever arguments they had are a thing of the past. “Now it’s peaceful,” Betty says, her hand touching the back of Morrie’s neck. She dismisses any idea of there being a secret to making a marriage work so long. “Just don’t let every complaint turn to anger. Tolerance and respect. And you’ve got to like them. Morrie would never use the word love; I do, but the actions are the same on either part.”

Why not the word “love”? Morrie replies that “to me, love is possessive; it’s controlling and demanding. The word that I would rather use instead is ‘caring’. You care about people. ‘Care’, to me, has a much deeper meaning. Love is an esoteric word, but one that people also use to mean all sorts of off-hand things. ‘I love playing tennis,’ and such. I hug Betty constantly, I kiss her constantly, I care very much about her.” Morrie assures me that the day they got together was the most fortunate of his life.

They met in New York City in 1938, at the wedding of Betty’s cousin, who happened to be the brother of one of Morrie’s friends. Betty was sitting at the table on Morrie’s left. “On my right,” he picks up the story, “was Rose Lebovsky, a very pretty girl, sophisticated, with wealthy parents. Betty has asked: why did you pick me? And I say: it’s because you ate less.”

Betty’s friends were unsure about the charming machinist, who had grown up in a tenement in East Harlem. But she let him drive her back home to College Point, in Queens.

“He was so handsome, with curly black hair. And on one of our first dates, the car broke down and he fixed it quietly and uncomplainingly, just like that. No fuss, unlike other men. I was impressed. And,” she repeats, “he was so handsome.” What else appealed to you, I ask: his sense of humour? She looks doubtful. “Er, yes, well, I guess so!”

  Morrie and Betty with their children, Judith and Steven in the 1940s.

The dating didn’t last long; Morrie left the East Coast and returned to California, where he had lived for some time having taken a road trip there with friends and fallen in love with the sunshine and easy atmosphere. Was it a memorable marriage proposal? “Oh hell no,” Betty replies. “He never proposed. He just asked: would you like to live in California?”

Morrie sent her the fare for the bus, and picked her up in LA after the four-day journey. They “found a rabbi in our price range” and had a simple ceremony, during which the rabbi said: “May the marriage be as pure as the gold in the ring.” Betty and Morrie “looked at each other and almost burst into laughter” – they had a fake gold ring bought at Woolworths.

For Betty, LA is a fabulous city. “You’ve got the beach, the mountains, and the climate is so nice; I think it’s like paradise.” She shows off the one-room condo where they’ve lived for five years, since moving out of their much-loved modernist home a few miles away. The flat is decorated with Morrie’s artwork, most of it from the 1950s and 60s. There’s a view of blue skies and Bunker Hill skyscrapers; Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall, with its luminous swoops and curves, is almost next door.

Betty says that old age for her has meant a great loss of energy: “My walking isn’t good, and I get confused.” These days, Morrie uses a mobility scooter. “He can’t forgive them for taking his car away,” says Betty. But they still go out for breakfast, and declining vigour is in part made up for by a sharpened appreciation of the world around them. Betty enjoys sitting outside a local cafe to see the play of sunlight and shadow, and likes to watch young children splashing in a nearby fountain, wondering which ones will brave the water, and which, too cautious, will turn away.

“I’ve lived a long life and a full one,” Morrie reflects. “I’ve never known a minute of boredom. I’ve always been busy, with work, or making things, or photography or travel, or most recently writing [he’s finished a memoir]. And there’s always another book to read. I sometimes say: I have so much to do, I don’t have time to die.”

 Morrie Markoff. Photograph: Karsten Thormaehlen

The day before his 99th birthday, he did die, at least for a few moments. Having had a heart attack – “Betty acted quickly and dialled 911; she saved my life” – Morrie was undergoing an operation to put in a pacemaker when something went wrong and he flatlined. “The surgeons killed me – not a good idea as I have relations who are attorneys.” Apparently, his mouth fell open, his tongue dropped out and the grieving family retreated to the hospital’s meditation room – only to be called back a little later to find Morrie alive and joking.

“If I were a religious man, I’d put my longevity down to divine intervention,” Morrie says. “As I’m not, I simply say it’s luck.” Though the fact that his father, a very heavy smoker, died aged 94 suggests his genes aren’t bad.

Morrie’s early life was far from pampered. He remembers the tenement he grew up in as rat-ridden, with a kitchen filled with cockroaches and mattresses alive with bedbugs. Six people lived in three rooms; he slept on two chairs his mother put together, piled with cushions, in front of the stove. But he was never hungry, he insists, even in the Depression years, and was given complete freedom.

He remembers swimming naked as a boy in an East River that was full of floating rubbish, condoms, faeces and flotsam; he loved to dive off the flour barges tied to the dock. Perhaps he built up a great immune system, he wonders. And diet? He relishes the memory of hot dogs on Coney Island, with mustard and sauerkraut, washed down with Dr Brown’s celery tonic. Until he got tongue cancer, Morrie also smoked cigarettes, cigars and a pipe. When working as a machinist, he’d leave the cigarettes in his mouth because his hands were so oily; the smoke would fill his eyes, and in the morning he couldn’t open them.

Betty, on the other hand, puts her long life down to her “seventh grade nutrition class”. She was always aware of preparing a meal with protein and vegetables. Plus every morning for decades they’d walk the three miles or so around the local lake, before breakfast.

They always had energy, they insist, and boredom is not in the family. One of their early drives was politics. Morrie was a member of the Communist Party USA and would often go on protests; Betty was once put in prison for an hour for handing out its leaflets. But the aim was never an overthrow of government, just a fairer society. They were devotees of Roosevelt and even more enthusiastic about Barack Obama. As for Trump: “In my lifetime, he’s the oddest person to be elected president … he’s an egomaniac, a wildcard, a casino-owner: how much tax does he pay?”

“He’s so prejudiced,” Betty adds.

Betty Markoff. Photograph: Karsten Thormaehlen

Politics spawned friendships, and they had a close circle when bringing up their two kids, Judith and Steven. (One odd thing about getting to a very advanced age, Betty has said, is seeing your children becoming senior citizens.) The LA house they lived in for decades was part of a progressive housing co-operative; it was designed as a community, and its residents were in and out of each other’s houses all the time. “The friends are not there any more … they are long since gone,” Betty says. I ask her how that feels. She’s quiet but brisk in reply: “Oh, I’m very adaptable.”

After the war, during which he was deferred from the army to make detonators and contour rockets, Morrie ended up owning his own appliance shop. He used the scrap metal from air-conditioner repairs to make the small, dynamic sculptures that were exhibited decades later. But then a passion for travel and photography took over, and Morrie and Betty shine a bit more brightly when remembering their camping trips and tourist escapades. The photos they show me of their trips around the world, from Mexico to Macau, are of an astonishing quality. What camera did you use, I ask? Morrie begins to enthuse about his Rolleiflex and Leica, before Betty groans and changes the subject.

She is clearly proud of him, however. “He’s very talented in lots of directions,” she says in a moment when he’s not around. “If he had grown up differently, who knows what he might have achieved?”

Morrie still feels his days are not long enough, and insists you don’t need much money to live an active and involved life. Their daughter lives in the next building, so even the death of one of the couple won’t spell utter loneliness. Yet again, he mentions their luck.

As I prepare to leave, he chides me mischievously: “You haven’t asked us about our sex life!” Then he laughs: “that’s just a memory”. With his hand on Betty’s knee, Morrie looks at the woman whom he has never told he loves, and says: “After 78 years, I can say I didn’t make a mistake. We’ve had our ups and downs, but we’re still here.”

Despite his lies, Donald Trump is a potent truth-teller

James S Gordon in The Guardian


Donald Trump evokes a wily and resilient mythic figure: the joker, the trickster, the fool, the one the Lakota people call the Heyoka, the contrary. Had his opponents – like Hillary Clinton – understood this quality in him, the electoral outcome might have been different. The sooner the rest of us understand this side of him, the better.

In the European tradition, the fool holds up the mirror to the monarch and to all of us, mocking our faults and pretensions. He (the fool is almost always a man) is not constrained by deference or allegiance to truth. The Heyoka, one of the purest forms of fool, pretends to shiver when everyone else is sweating and takes off his clothes in winter.


The fool is a potent truth-teller and commands attention. Shakespeare knew this. Lear’s Fool, a gentle version of the species, skewered the arrogance and pride that were his master’s downfall, even as he comforted him. The “scabrous” Thersites in Troilus and Cressida speaks with relentless, scene-stealing venom. He paints Achilles, the Greeks’ greatest hero, as a petulant adolescent; King Agamemnon is a blowhard, Helen of Troy a hooker.

The fool is always addressing us, his audience, as well as his high-ranking targets. He performs a vital social function, forcing us to examine our own preconceptions, especially our inflated ideas about our own virtue. Trump was telling all of us – women and minorities, progressives, pillars of the establishment, as well as his supporters – that we were just like him.

The appropriate, time-honored response to the fool’s sallies is to take instruction from them. Only after we’ve acknowledged and accepted our own shortcomings, do we have the integrity that allows us to keep him in his place. Perhaps if Secretary Clinton had been a more skillful, poised and humble warrior, she could have done this.

Fools serve the collective order by challenging those whose ignorance and blindness threaten it. They are meant to be instruments of awareness, not rulers. Impossible to imagine Lear’s Fool succeeding him or Thersites commanding the Greek army. Trump will not address his own limitations, cannot tolerate criticism, and takes himself dangerously seriously. This makes him is a seriously flawed fool. He believes his own hyperbole and threatens democratic order.

In the weeks since his election, Trump has continued to act the fool. Now, however, the underdog’s challenges have become a bully’s beatdowns. His attack on the steelworkers’ union leader, Chuck Jones, exactly the kind of man whom he claimed to champion, was a vicious and painful lie. Unfunny, purely ugly. His more recent rants, including boasts about the crowds at his inaugural and the millions of imaginary illegal Clinton voters, illuminate his own troubled insecurity: the all-powerful winner acting the petulant, powerless loser.

Many of President Trump’s cabinet choices are like the punchlines of jokes, but punchlines with potentially devastating real-world consequences: an Education Secretary who disparages public education and badly botched her own effort at creating an alternative; men charged with responding to climate change who deny its existence and a National Security Advisor who purveys paranoid fantasies.

There are glimmers of hope that the jester might mature to majesty. General Mattis, the Defense Secretary, inspired a Trumpian epiphany that waterboarding might be counterproductive. Conversations with Al Gore or, more likely, ones with his daughter, Ivanka, could persuade him to open his eyes to the reality of climate change.

Or perhaps President Trump will implode, brought down by the damage done by perverse cabinet choices, or words and actions so intemperate and ill-advised that Congress and the courts call him to a terminal account. His challenged immigration order could be a harbinger.

Meanwhile, what are the rest of us to do? The fact that this question is even being asked is healthy, a residual benefit of his fool’s vocation. Trump’s grand and vulgar self-absorption is inviting all of us to examine our own selfishness. His ignorance calls us to attend to our own blind spots. The fears that he stokes and the isolation he promotes goad us to be braver, more generous. 

Already, people all over the United States – Republicans I know as well as Democrats – are beginning to link inner awareness to small and great political action.

The day after Trump’s inauguration, hundreds of thousands of women of all ages, ethnicities, and political affiliations affirmed their rights, celebrated their community and slyly poked at the joker: “if I incorporated my uterus,” read one demonstrator’s sign, “would you stop trying to regulate it.”

The joker who is now our president has served an important function, waking us up to what we’ve not yet admitted in ourselves or accomplished in our country. He is, without realizing it, challenging us to grow in self-awareness, to act in ways that respect and fulfill what is best in ourselves and our democracy.

It’s time for us citizens, who’ve watched the performance, to take the stage.