The abused and abusive nation led by Old Boys

Many of us have spent 2018 trying to wrap our heads around how, exactly, the country whose slightly priggish brand was once meritocracy, competence, and moral authority has turned out to have instead nourished and enriched an elaborate network of overripe, decadent, and not particularly clever criminals. What’s confusing about that isn’t that the myth of our virtue was greatly exaggerated—that much was clear to anyone with a passing knowledge of American history. No, what’s confusing is the extent to which the fiction of decency (whether political, financial, or sexual) seems to have been unnecessary all along.

  Slate

We've all known who we are for a very long time. We just refused to acknowledge it publicly. Like a family thinking they're covering up the fact that they're not really dysfunctional and led by alcoholics.

2018 has ended euphemisms and pretenses and politesse, and however much some claim to miss the country’s more decorous days, there’s something to be said for having the outsides match the insides. The myth of the great male American leader has been as robust as it’s been ruinously incomplete. It needed to be exposed, and Trump did so with a beautiful absence of care. He’s not going to behave at a funeral. He won’t sing the opening hymn or the national anthem or participate in a communal gesture unless it centers him. He’ll wander off the stage he’s sharing with the Argentine president, insult a dying senator, forget to sign things once he’s gotten his applause, publicly praise men for not snitching on him. He’ll use his Twitter account as a burn book, and what he’s most grateful for at Thanksgiving is himself. The definition of American “greatness” he has embodied is as precise as any we’ve had.

I thought it was being exposed when George W Bush was president and Dick Cheney was Vice. Apparently that wasn't bad enough.

Trump is valued, by his supporters, for much of the above. That’s not entirely new. In overvaluing a certain kind of masculine ethos, the United States has always glorified impoliteness; there have long been people who confuse boorishness with power and find courtesy effeminate. But [Trump's moves are] puffy and decadent—the qualities associated with the kind of bratty, spoiled boy we met when the term affluenza was first used as a legal defense on the grounds that someone so ruined by financial privilege can’t understand ethics or consequences. Trump isn’t too busy for etiquette; he has nothing but time. He spent Barbara Bush’s funeral on Twitter denying that he called Jeff Sessions “Mr. Magoo” and Rod Rosenstein “Mr. Peepers.” There’s a crusty entitlement to this species of maleness that makes it feel at least as geriatric as it is juvenile. Though Trump’s petty malice puts him in (roughly) seventh grade, it has a doddering petulance, too. He is, in effect, an old boy. And when you step back and think about it, you realize America is full of them.

Thanks for catching up.

The Old Boy needs attention as well as power, and with this presidency, the former has finally trumped the latter. [...] From Trump to Brett Kavanaugh, from Les Moonves to Jeffrey Epstein: This year we saw with startling clarity that what many of the nation’s powerful men share is less talent and vision than arbitrary cruelty, pleasure in retribution, bullying, shouting, sneering, a sense that they’re above consequences, and an unusual dependence on golf—the traits of aging manchildren.

The Old Boy is immensely fortunate, but his core drive is greed. He has power and wealth, but it’s always less than he thinks he deserves. He’s bratty and cross and past his prime. He doesn’t feel good. He’s distant from conventional masculine markers in ways a suit usually helps to mask. His defining features are a puffy softness and a basic, uncultured greed that’s fed by status symbols. The Old Boy has a vile temper and makes others responsible for his moods.

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The only thing the Old Boy hates more than being told no is being questioned. He is both fussy and smug—think of Paul Manafort seething, arms crossed, as he stared at underling Rick Gates in court, or Sen. Lindsey Graham theatrically yelling “This is hell” about a hearing process his own party devised.

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An Old Boy lies fluently and to your face, and he will explode in rage if you point this out to him not because you’re wrong (this is key) but because you don’t matter and neither does the truth; an Old Boy gets to say and do what he likes. The Old Boy recognizes some authorities. He smiles at those he considers fellow Boys—there’s a faintly embarrassing abjection to this performance when it happens. (See Kavanaugh bowing and scraping to Trump when Trump introduced him as his nominee, or how solicitously Trump acts around Vladimir Putin.)

The flip side is that the Old Boy considers his mere presence a gift to those he sees as his inferiors. As a result, any honor conferred upon him is no more than his due. So yes, he lies, but only because that’s what a blinkered world requires in order for him to get what he is owed. To bring about the correct outcome, he gets to lie, and you get to believe it. That’s your privilege.

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The Old Boy doesn’t really answer a question because he denies that he can be questioned. And money and power have gotten plenty of people to play along and make this true.

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It may be that large adult sons like Don Jr. and David Huckabee grow up into Old Boys. But whereas both figures are spiteful, lumpy, appetitive, status-obsessed, entitled, ill-tempered, conniving, and at best semicompetent, the Old Boy—however absurd he first seems—has real power.

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Many of the traits of the large adult son are there—the random meanness, the fury at repercussions that feels like evidence of a coddled child gone to seed—but he has teeth. It’s possible that the Old Boy’s abuse stems from his resentment at having been a large adult son—drowned in luxury but thumbed down by constant filial humiliation. But whatever the psychological backdrop, the result is that the Old Boy is powerful in material terms and definitionally impossible to satisfy. [...] Result: Acts of childish cruelty.

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The Old Boy’s defining characteristic may just be that he wants. It’s not clear what he wants, and in the end, it doesn’t much matter. His drive lacks focus and can’t be satisfied, but it can’t be stopped by things like ethics or law or introspection. And he’s terribly scared of losing.

Trump’s mainstreaming of Old Boy behavior set the stage for the biggest Old Boy spectacle of the year. Having been accused of sexually assaulting Christine Blasey Ford while both were in high school—and laughing hysterically while his friend Mark Judge watched and she feared for her life—Kavanaugh, who had tried to maintain a choirboy veneer throughout his Supreme Court confirmation hearing, abruptly dropped the mask. He sputtered with rage in a paranoid and partisan diatribe that seemed to threaten dire consequences to the republic if he didn’t get his way. He wept. He turned bright red. He lied repeatedly under oath. If there was any doubt this man responded poorly to being told no, he dispelled it.

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The Old Boy regards all of life as a strategic contest to be won. [...] This is what “scoring” means, of course, and that logic seeps into how men like these think of everything, from business deals to electoral fraud to abuse to murder.

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Old Boys’ opinions don’t depend on demonstrated wrongdoing; that’s why Trump maintains that Mohammed bin Salman’s innocence is plausible. The Old Boy’s drives reduce, in a way that’s almost embarrassingly basic, to naked self-interest. When Trump was recently shown data about the consequences of his ballooning the national debt, he “referenced the first year [it would explode] and said, ‘Yeah, but I won’t be here.’ ”

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Trump’s self-involvement is extreme enough that the shock of it can sort of impair our cognitive reflexes in ways he’d interpret as victory. Take that quote above: He doesn’t care about the country or the debt he’s saddling it with; he cares about himself.

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One Old Boy, Roger Ailes, launched the juggernaut of propaganda that became Fox News, building a network of enablers who protected him as he assaulted and harassed women. Jeffrey Epstein’s network—which included Donald Trump and Bill Clinton—appears not to have objected to riding on Epstein’s private plane, known as the “Lolita Express.” Trump even joked about Epstein’s predilection for “very young” girls.

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The nexus these Old Boys form isn’t just class- or age- or power-based, and the alliances being revealed don’t reduce to simple profit seeking. Profit alone does not explain why Alexander Acosta, then the U.S. attorney in Miami, helped Epstein reach a nonprosecution agreement structured in a way that locked the victims out. He is now Trump’s labor secretary. [...] It wasn’t simply profit that inspired Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke to respond to the hurricane damage in Puerto Rico by awarding a $300 million contract to a two-person company from his hometown. It’s profit-plus. It’s what pushed Chris Christie into Bridgegate. It’s the timeworn social code of the Old Boys’ network, in part. But it’s also the thrill of feeding appetites that can’t actually be satisfied, of gloating, of winning the game.

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The Old Boy is in a double bind of his own devising. His loyalty to his own greed means he can never, by definition, be satiated. If you notice Old Boys getting more abusive, or flailing more desperately, this is why: The philosophical endpoint of a junkie’s increasing resistance is panic that satisfaction will never come. All the money and power in the world won’t get the Old Boy what he wants because what he wants isn’t a thing but the dopamine rush of victory (and nothing wears off more quickly). What he wants isn’t anything in particular; it’s just more.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

P.S.  This DPRK Twitter account is not really from the DPRK.