The most revealing line in Donald Trump's convention speech

[View in browser]( [Mother Jones Daily Newsletter]( August 28, 2020 Last night, the GOP wrapped up its convention with a blowout violation of the Hatch Act. President Trump and his daughter Ivanka headlined a maskless scene of dystopian proportions. My colleagues have written some wonderful things about this convention, which I link to below, but I want to make a point that I didn’t put in a post on our site. Here is how Trump [concluded his speech](: On November 3, we will make America safer. We will make America stronger. We will make America prouder. And we will make America greater than ever before. I am very proud to be the nominee of the Republican Party. Donald Trump is the president of the United States today. At this moment. If he were serious about making America safer or stronger or prouder or taller or shorter or greener or bluer or wider or longer, there is no reason why he would need to wait until November 3 to begin! But of course he obviously has no interest in doing that—and is completely indifferent to the entire idea because he spends every day in bed live-tweeting talk shows—and everyone knows it, including his speechwriters, so they lazily reached into the cupboard and pulled out this stock nonsense language, not noticing that it is the stock nonsense language used by candidates who are not incumbents. It makes no sense to say it as an incumbent. Just like it makes no sense to say, as Ivanka did, that her father ran for president to “make America great again” and that he made good on that promise, and also will do it if reelected. There is no internal logic to this campaign. And everyone knows it. It’s maddening! Sometimes I wonder how someone could watch the spectacle of incompetence, narcissism, self-interest, and depravity that has come to define the Trump administration and think, "Yes. Okay. Yes. I like this. This is what I like." Then I worry I'm crazy because obviously there are millions of people who do have that reaction, but the truth is Trump is not a very good politician. As far as I can tell, though some people have that reaction, it isn't many! He's been unpopular his entire presidency and he remains unpopular today. "He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad," begins Rafael Sabatini's novel Scaramouche. I love the line and have always thought that it's something to aspire to. An ability to recognize the absurdities of life, but not get lost in despair because of them. It does indeed, and not by accident, describe me. But it also describes Donald Trump. And it wasn't until very recently that I realized that it's not just the sense that life is mad that's important, and it's not just the gift of laughter that's important. It's the kind of laughter that matters and what one does with the recognition that things are irrational that matters. Donald Trump cackles. He knows the world to be unfair and he exploits it for his gain. And he cackles. Have a nice weekend, —Ben Dreyfuss [House Donations Ad]( [Top Story] [Top Story]( [How Badly Did Trump Want to Say the N-Word?]( His speech at the RNC was incoherent about everything but its promise to preserve the racial order. BY NATHALIE BAPTISTE [Trending] [Do Republicans know "Hallelujah" is about sex?]( BY ABIGAIL WEINBERG [Ivanka Trump’s RNC speech was a preview of the future]( BY TIM MURPHY [Festive protesters dance and shout behind the White House while Donald Trump speaks]( BY ABIGAIL WEINBERG [Black lives don't matter to Black Lives Matter, says Rudy Giuliani]( BY TIM MURPHY [House Subscriptions Ad]( [Weekend Reads] [Special Feature]( [Without Journalists, My Mom Often Said, "We Just Would Not Know."]( I wanted to become a reporter because I want to tell truth to power. JAHNA BERRY [Fiercely Independent] Support from readers allows Mother Jones to do journalism that doesn't just follow the pack. [Donate]( [Recharge] SOME GOOD NEWS, FOR ONCE [From Our Archives, a Visit to the Culture Wars (of the 1990s)]( Do you remember the hysteria of the “culture wars”? In the 1990s—across magazine pages and college campuses and in books ([Arthur Schlesinger Jr.](, hello!)—there was a growing concern about the culture. Ah, that vague noun. Much like today, discussions of the problem with the discourse or the culture fit the eye of the beholder. In grasping for facts that fit a feeling of anxiety, thinkers lumped in anything they could find. This led to one of my favorite sentences I’ve read in our archives—as I pull from it each week to give you a boost into the weekend: The opening line in Louis Menand’s 1995 piece “[Mixed Paint](.” The “culture wars”—the metaphor into which campus hate-speech codes, school prayer, Afrocentric school curricula, abortion, politically correct language, family values, affirmative action, the racial distribution of intelligence, deconstructionist literary criticism, sexual harassment policy, the Great Books, hardcore pornography, publicly funded art, and many other fractious things, are currently stuffed—are misfigured. I found comfort, and maybe you will too, in realizing how “stuffed” terms can be when they mean, in fact, whatever you want them to. The rest of Menand’s piece might not be worth the read. I don’t agree with much of it. Its best parts point out that these discussions over “culture” have occurred for a long time. He quibbles that the misconfiguring fear for liberalism in the “culture war,” much like the fear of “cancel culture” ruining free speech today, is actually a series of attacks (from every angle, all across the political spectrum) over who has power. Gripes about the end of the melting pot, and the end of liberalism, are misplaced. That’s all interesting, and worth remembering. But Menand, who now writes at the New Yorker and published the fantastic history of American pragmatism The Metaphysical Club, spins that out as a grand vision of liberalism as saving America. He believes that all this friction of ideas means America is actually finally doing some mixing, as real integration occurs. (I disagree!) He says liberalism is to thank for that. (I disagree, again!) And it drones on from there, with more than a vague hint of condescension. His most fascinating (and wrong) point, to me, is that the problem is that “liberalism has nothing substantive to say about culture.” While “liberals, like anyone else, have views about culture,” he writes, “liberalism doesn’t.” Think of the “cultural vacuum” of the SAT, as an example, he writes. Liberalism’s faith is that groups are fundamentally equal in capacity, so that bracketing race and gender to eliminate bias will produce demographically proportional results. There is no reason to believe that, in the cultural vacuum tests like the SATs are supposed to provide, people will score lower or higher just because they have breasts or darker skin. Holding cultural background constant, liberals believe we can measure, and reward, excellence and excellence alone. I think many would find the SAT example laughable. The test’s false neutrality is the problem. In a racist society, you cannot, as liberalism would hope, just keep “cultural background constant.” Menand holds out hope for the triumph of a neutral meritocracy that liberalism will create. Well, it hasn’t happened. But, at the same time, I think Menand is aware of how capitalist democracies are prone to complain about “culture” as a code for battles over inequality. The obsession with “culture” (as opposed to, say, economics) as the key to our national problems draws on an intellectual tradition which points to culture (high culture, indigenous culture, or folk culture, depending on the theorist) as the element of continuity and moral coherence in a world characterized precisely by its lack of respect for continuity and moral coherence. The trouble with this faith is that in addition to being socially and economically mobile and unstable, modern liberal societies are culturally mobile and unstable, as well. Capitalist democracies are not just permissive about cultural change; they actually thrive on it. A new taste means a new market. A free-for-all is exactly the sort of “culture war” capitalist societies produce. Even if you hate all of this Menand article, take comfort—hate-reading a long article can be a lovely weekend activity too. Plus, his recent one on affirmative action in the New Yorker has a markedly different series of conclusions. Check that out [here](. —Jacob Rosenberg Did you enjoy this newsletter? Help us out by [forwarding]( it to a friend or sharing it on [Facebook]( and [Twitter](. [Mother Jones]( [Donate]( [Subscribe]( This message was sent to {EMAIL}. To change the messages you receive from us, you can [edit your email preferences]( or [unsubscribe from all mailings.]( For advertising opportunities see our online [media kit.]( Were you forwarded this email? [Sign up for Mother Jones' newsletters today.]( [www.MotherJones.com]( PO Box 8539, Big Sandy, TX 75755