It was Jemima Kelly at the FT who succinctly called Trump the anti-hero. I am not going to delve into the merits of the charges against him (yes, yes, 91 of them! NINETY ONE CHARGES! Real or not, partisan or not, they are still charges).
But the term anti-hero did make me pause.
I wrote Quest for Justice with what I thought was an anti-hero in mind, a person who didn’t set out to be a hero on a quest rescuing damsels (and dudes) in distress. But perhaps it’s more apt to now think of Jude Royer as a reluctant hero, for he does embrace the high expectations of his quest, even if not without resentment. But he does so because he has a moral code to which he adheres, and considers an elemental essence of his being. Qualifications that cannot be said to apply to Donald Trump.
But I did spend some time thinking about that phrase, anti-hero. Trump is no golden boy symbol of hopes and dreams, an imagery that was foisted upon a bemused Barack Obama by a liberal establishment desperate for its new gods. So what does it mean? Kelly defined it as someone battling against the oppressions of the establishment.
Kelly wrote, Trump “has convinced many ordinary Americans that the system is rigged against him just as they feel it is rigged against them.”
It’s hard not to see why.
Even if I am relatively fortunate, someone who would qualify, albeit just barely, as one of what Scott Rasmussen referred to as the elite (and what I call the modern gentry), the a first-of-its-kind look at the views of the American Elite – defined as people having at least one post-graduate degree, earning at least $150,000 annually, and living in high-population density areas (more than 10,000 people per square mile in their zip code) – and compares them to what the average American thinks, I have a distinctly different outlook in part because life has thrown a few struggles at my way, some minor, some permanent.
There are many writers exploring the frustrations everyday Americans feel from economic matters (inflation outpacing any wage gains for multiple years) to culture war topics over America’s identities (America the structurally racist versus America the land of hope and glory), and how the Democratic Party and the elite stubbornly not only ignore these frustrations but often pretend they don’t exist, or if they do, it’s due to misinformation (and the need for deprogramming - a side note, can you imagine Bill Clinton ever saying such a thing? Bill Clinton of the “I feel your pain” fame? Which tells you how far the Democratic Party has come (fallen?) since the 1990s).
I don’t need to repeat these excellent articles as I suspect many of you have already read them (if you haven’t, here’s a a fabulous article courtesy of Martin Gurri at the Free Press) or anything by one of my favorite writers, Ruy Teixeira at the Liberal Patriot. And, of course, Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn at the Racket.
Regardless of the topic of the day among all these articles about frustrations and venting and anger at a tone-deaf Democratic establishment eager to have kale salad with Marie Antoinette, hidden in plain sight in just about everything is the larger pervading sense that things aren’t working well in America.
The world feels like a struggle in which you have little control and in so many ways and places. Go to a podiatrist for a simple office visit and recommendation for a prescription for a plantar’s wart and walk away with a whopping bill that is three times what a similar appointment was two years ago, followed with two weeks on the phone with the insurance company to try to understand the charges and the constant merry-go-round of being handed over from medical offices to billing offices, without anyone being able to tell you anything, before the officious final-decision letters from insurance bureaucrats all signed by an “Ella R. or Parisa C.” with no real explanation, no guidance, no clarity, nothing but the firm declaration, in spite of all the obsequious phrasing they exist to help you, there is nothing you can do and no further protests or questions will be tolerated. In short, you are now muted.
Or dealing with trying to get accurate estimations for upcoming specialist visits only to be repeatedly told that it’s impossible because “we don’t know what will happen at the visit.” And billing estimates for lab tests are multiple weeks pending and you still have no idea how much they will cost. Yet shouldn’t it be straightforward with the aid of a computer algorithm and your insurance plan data? Why is it so complicated? Or expensive?
Thankfully I am healthy and don’t have to deal with the healthcare system regularly!
But’s not just healthcare. I took a long trip overseas last summer and every single flight involved was canceled, often at the last minute (thank you, British Airways). Try to deal with reimbursement from the airline and after multiple months have passed with polite weekly calls and emails to follow up with your claim, you are consistently and repeatedly told, no, there is no supervisor you can speak to, there is nothing you can do to try to see why nothing is happening. A pattern strangely similar to how insurance companies operate.
The system is against you because the system is designed to protect itself. Not help you. A bureaucracy meant to serve the people does the opposite by deliberately keeping the people in the dark, keeping its processes opaque, its managers inaccessible, and information virtually impossible to find. And at every turn, you run into yet another firewalls whose sole function is to protect the institution from the people it’s supposed to serve.
One sees the same in the Federal government. It’s hard to take seriously the notion that the Federal government exists by the consent of the governed when so many of the behaviors of the Federal bureaucracy is distinctly distrustful of the people it’s supposed to serve. The extensive censorship attempts in the name of misinformation as extensively reported by both the Free Press and the Racket and Public. The border crisis is also a perfect example of a government not serving its people. The Federal government for the last three years has done nil - nothing - nada - zip to do anything to curb the tide of illegal migration. If anything, Federal leadership has done everything to oppose any meaningful control of migration, its behaviors more deferential to its bureaucracy than its voters.
One questions whether we live in a democracy or a bureaucracy. One suspects it is one political party that is happy to live in a bureaucracy. One suspects the other party resists being ruled by a bureaucracy.
Neither is surprising when you consider that two very different types of freedoms are involved. And two very different types of justices. One freedom-justice makes perfect sense to the Democrats. Another different kind of freedom-justice makes perfect sense to the Republicans.
Isaiah Berlin, one of the greatest philosophers of the 21st century liberal era explored this theme in a series of lectures at Oxford in 1958. In 2024 we easily forget that the mid 21st century was a brave new era with the world turning its back firmly to kings and autocratic rule, and split between two opposing forms of acceptable governing: democracy and communism.
Few remember how powerful the Soviets were after WWII and how influential the communist ideology was worldwide. The Democratic West was prone to caricature the Soviets and communism, and with valid reasons, but the political argument of the era was liberalism versus communism, with both arguing they offered the best freedoms and both attracted their fervent ideologues.
Isaiah Berlin reduced the opposing ideologies to their core fundamental beliefs, the very atom at the heart of their raison d’etre, and identified the split as due to two kinds of liberties, negative and positive:1
Negative liberty: freedom from external factors, such as regulation or state control, with the emphasis on the greatest autonomy for man’s free will. Proponents of negative liberty would support strong restrictions on a government activities, seeing it an obstacle to expressing one’s free will. This is just.
Positive liberty: freedom to do things as self-mastery or perfection of the individual. Respecting free will is less a priority than social well-being. Removing obstacles such as poverty or oppression of a minority, factors that prevent one’s self-mastery, is priority. As such, government intervention needs to be proactive and substantial, even if often requires curbing free-will actions. This is just.
And that’s it. To understand Democratic versus Republican justice, or Trump versus Biden, this is pretty much all you need to know.
But the real world does not operate on a strict binary. And both types of liberty, the freedoms they offer, and their justices, have their own paradoxes. Come read Quest for Justice and how my hero explores all these liberties and paradoxes. And to understand the 2024 presidential election.
Nor is this understanding of the dual and conflicting liberties restricted to the modern era. It goes as far back as Ancient Greece. "As for Otanes, he wished neither to rule nor to be ruled—the exact opposite of Aristotle's notion of true civic liberty....".
"Isaiah Berlin". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University. 2022.
Isaiah Berlin, Liberty, Oxford 2002, pp. 33–4