He can’t tell us exactly how he knows
Robert Reich did a public Facebook post yesterday that I find intensely annoying.
Friends,
I can’t tell you exactly how I know but after sixty years in and around politics I’ve developed a sixth sense, and my sixth sense tells me the tide is now turning on Trump.
This past week did it.
On Monday, he sued the Times in a lawsuit that, as CNN put it, read “like a pro-Trump op-ed, with page after page of gushing praise for the president.”
On Tuesday, he accused reporter Jonathan Karl and his employer, ABC News, of engaging in hate speech against him, and warned that Pam Bondi, the attorney general, might go after them.
And so on for each day of the week – Trump did bad damaging things.
On Sunday, at the memorial service for Charlie Kirk, he said that he disagreed with Kirk’s supposed leniency toward his ideological foes, adding: “I hate my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them.”
You could almost feel the great sleeping giant of America open an eye and frown, then blink both eyes and sit up and stretch, and then roar “what the hell is going on here?”
Oh give me a break. Maybe he could, but like hell the rest of us could. I couldn’t feel any such damn thing, and I’m pretty confident that no such damn thing happened. Metaphors are fun but this is serious business.
According to Strength in Numbers, the Disney boycott quickly became four times as large as any boycott over the last five years.
Disney’s stock dipped about 3.5 percent and continued to trade lower in subsequent days — a loss in market value amounting to some $4 billion.
Even Ted Cruz — Ted Cruz! — began issuing grave warnings about censorship.
By then the giant was roaring and stomping.
No it wasn’t! Much of the giant just loves what Trump is doing. Robert Reich’s magic intuition isn’t going to change that.
I’m old enough to have witnessed the great sleeping giant of America awaken before.
…
It roared again after tens of thousands of young Americans were killed in the jungles of Vietnam, finally bringing to an end one of the nation’s costliest, deadliest, and stupidest wars.
It roared again at Richard Nixon after Nixon was heard on tape plotting the coverup of Watergate — then being forced to exit the White House by helicopter on his way back to California.
It is starting to roar again now — at the sociopathic occupant of the Oval Office who won’t tolerate criticism, who in one wild week revealed his utter contempt for the freedom of Americans to criticize him, to write or speak negatively about him, even to joke about him.
Maybe I’m being too optimistic, but I’ve seen a lot. I know the signs. The sleeping giant always remains asleep until some venality becomes so noxious, some action so disrespectful of the common good, some brutality so noisy, that he has no choice but to awaken.
And when he does, the good sense of the American people causes him to put an end to whatever it was that awakened him.
What do you think?
I think it’s ridiculous.
Reich is stooping to yellow jounalism. I read this in the cadence of Cary Grant in His Girl Friday. It doesn’t sound like truth-telling; it sounds like gamesmanship, like hype.
He does have a kernel of a point about a convergence of bad press for Trump this week — and a lot of a specific kind of bad press: the special kind that actually strikes a chord with his MAGA base. But that’s nowhere close to a guarantee that any “sleeping giants” are awakening. Personally, I believe the behavioural psychology of the MAGA nuts is much more complex than that. The behavioural dynamics of the whole Euroamerican “West” right now is strange and complex — across the political spectrum, the citizenry’s broken down to a mob mentality, and the madness of crowds is like the weather. It’s the domain of chaos theory — a butterfly flaps its wings over here and eventually a tornado materializes over there. Much easier to piece the causation together after the fact than to make predictions beforehand.
I unfollowed Reich a couple years ago because of his “yellowing” tone (or “purpling” prose? There was a marked shift in hue, if you ask me). I did the same with many of my once-trusty old-school Lefty media sources. I still have some fondness for Nick Cohen, and I follow his Substack, but in these tumultuous power-polarity shifts of the Culture Wars, with liberals dominating in some spheres (like Silicon Valley and Hollywood) and conservatives staking their ground in others (Wall Street, Washington), it’s been quite surprising how poorly many commentators on the left have been able to hold the neutral ground and not succumb to massive bias. (It goes without saying the right never did this in the first place; no one expected them to!)
Thank goodness for you, OB, and for B&W! There are days where I don’t even know what I’d do if I didn’t get a dose of sanity, and this is the only place I can truly find it.
Aw, gee, Arty, that’s quite the compliment. Thank you.
Good one, Arty. I think Reich is overly optimistic to say the least.
Plus one. You have my gratitude as well, Ophelia.
Whenever this site is down for any reason, I feel incomplete, like I can’t get sustenance. It’s that important.
Aw you guize. I’m all verklempt.
The danger of pieces like this one is that they turn off the responsibility of those concerned about the situation at hand to actually ~do~ something. “Oh, don’t worry about temporary setbacks. The tide of history, the waking American giant, will come in and save us.” That we’ve overcome such things in the past does not mean that we don’t need to worry about it this time–rather, it means that we need to emulate those in the past who worked, and in some cases fought, to put down the rising tides of insanity. The GOP is, in many ways, hoping that the Bystander Paradox will prevent anyone from being willing to do anything. (Hell, this is how Trump got to where he is in the first place; during the 2016 primary, he was facing off against 12 other Republican wannabes, but none of them wanted to be the one who angered Trump’s base–then, only 25% of the party–in order to take him down. So one by one, they faltered, and by the time they’d been cleared down to one or two others, it was too late.)
Good point. The waking giant is an excuse to let the giant deal with it.
You also have my gratitude, Ophelia, for your honesty & straight-talking.
I agree with you totally about Robert Reich’s piece, as does “Max” on Meidas Touch. What he is saying is utterly chilling, even though I do not know enough about economics and how finance works to understand everything he says. Here is the link if you can bear to watch it:
https://youtu.be/jCV2-qT9N5M?si=Iyn3Lo0E8LIhhwo8
Adding my vote to the list of people for whom this site is vital. First and last thing I read every day, and I frequently check for updates in-between.
As for sleeping giants, it would be actually realistic to look for brave lawyers and genuine journalists, for they are the ones who dealt with the corrupt politicians in the past. Not mythical giants. Unfortunately, Trump (and/or his advisors) know this, and that’s exactly why he and his supporters have been making life so difficult for both professions.
For some reason, I am reminded of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck (arguably the most psychologically interesting of his plays). The (anti-)hero Gregers Werle is on an “idealistic”* crusade to awaken the “giant” – his childhood friend Hjalmar Ekdal. Gregers is clearly idealizing this Hjalmar figure and sees him as someone who was destined for greatness but has been lulled into ”sleep” by the schemes of Gregers’ father. Gregers’ arch-nemesis Dr. Relling (the cynic of the story and clearly the voice of Ibsen himself), on the other hand, argues that Hjalmar is just a giant nobody and that the “greatness” Gregers sees in him simply isn’t there. Even after all his attempts to expose the truth and make the scales fall from Hjalmar’s eyes only succeed in making things worse, and ultimately end in total disaster, Gregers still refuses to get it, but keeps stubbornly clinging to the belief that the next shock is going to do the trick and release the imagined greatness in Hjalmar.
People like Reich remind me a lot of Gregers Werle. Even after all the supposedly career-ending scandals of Trump’s first term, his lifetime of crime and corruption, his obvious authoritarianism, his illiberalism, his constant flirtation with violence (the “2nd Amendment People”, anyone?), his pathological lying, his total lack of human decency, his use of the office to funnel money into his private businesses, his cronyism, his nepotism, his attempted coup d’état (!), his embrace of medical quackery, his bungling of the Covid 19 pandemic,his weaponization of the state to go after anyone who ever stood in his way, his censoriousness, his total disregard for human rights, due process, or the rule of law, his deployment of armed forces against civilians, the Epstein coverup etc. etc. have failed to awaken their imagined giant, they keep stubbornly clinging to the belief that that 5 foot 2 tall guy you’re looking at is really a giant, that what looks like active acquiescence is really just “sleep”, and if they can just persuade sweet little Hedvig here to shoot her beloved wild duck, the giant will finally awake and rise to greatness.
* Actually to a large degree motivated by revenge against his loathed father (the Trump figure of the story) whom Gregers (probably rightly) blames for the suicide of his mother as well as the downfall of the Ekdal family.
Oh, and I obviously agree with everything that’s been said about B&W. I like to think of this little virtual oasis as something like Wonko the Sane’s house from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. As anyone who has read the books will remember, the house is turned “inside out” with bookshelves, paintings etc. on the outside and the garden on the inside. The idea being that the “outside” of the house is really the “inside” of the insane asylum that is the rest of the world, and the “inside” of the house is the only place on the planet that’s outside the asylum.
And this place isn’t just a “hive” of sane opinions; it’s a genuinely healthy ecosystem, where well-thought-out and well-written ideas find an appreciative audience. And there’s healthy disagreement here, too — as there should be! That’s the secret sauce that I think some people forget: when “your side” (OUR side) feels threatened, that’s the time to double down on criticizing ideas that circulate in your (OUR!) ranks. Some people’s instincts are to rally and protect, and that’s understandable, but it’s ultimately a losing strategy if it’s not tempered with, and balanced by, enforcers of a stricter standard of truth. The left is losing elections because of this dynamic, and it’s kinda tragic. Nurturers, forgivers, apologists… they’re sweet. But the left also needs discipline. Punishment for underperformance and reward for accomplishment. Realism and a willingness to criticize our own friends. That’s healthy as fuck. And that’s the magic spice that keeps me coming back here to B&W. Y’all don’t pander!
My own experience commenting here has been like an extraordinary writing and thinking school. It’s an education better than college: I get roasted sometimes; I get kudos sometimes. I don’t want y’all to change your standards; I want to hone myself to live up to you! Keep on roasting me, my lovable B&W compatriots! xoxo
Now if only Robert Reich saw things that way…
I think his point in pushing optimism is exactly the opposite of letting people feel complacent that someone else will fix the problem. I think his point is to stop people from being paralyzed into inaction by feeling hopeless, thinking there is nothing that can be done. He’s trying to say each of us is not alone, there are many, go do something. He does frequently write lists of things that people can and should do.
He doesn’t say that though. What he does say is silly. “The sleeping giant always remains asleep until some venality becomes so noxious, some action so disrespectful of the common good, some brutality so noisy, that he has no choice but to awaken.” That’s silly in so many ways.