- Ben Rhodes at NYT on the perils of short-term thinking;
- A Facebook comment about intellectual loneliness;
- And how Trump is lying about crime in DC in order to, what? distract from the Epstein crisis? Or show random totalitarian power?
Another big substantial piece, like yesterday’s about stagnation, that speaks to one of my recurring themes.
NY Times, guest essay by Ben Rhodes, 11 August 2025: How Short-Term Thinking Is Destroying America [gift link]
(Title at homepage link: “We’re Trapped in Trump’s Reality. This Is How We Escape it.”)
The writer begins by discussing the new film “Eddington,” and how it “captures the American tendency to live obsessively in the present.” I haven’t seen the film, so I’ll skip his discussion of it, and cut to the chase.
Unsurprisingly, the second Trump administration has binged on short-term “wins” at the expense of the future. It has created trillions of dollars in prospective debt, bullied every country on earth, deregulated the spread of A.I. and denied the scientific reality of global warming. It has ignored the math that doesn’t add up, the wars that don’t end on Trump deadlines, the C.E.O.s forecasting what could amount to huge job losses if A.I. transforms our economy and the catastrophic floods, which are harbingers of a changing climate. Mr. Trump declares victory. The camera focuses on the next shiny object. Negative consequences can be obfuscated today, blamed on others tomorrow.
And Democrats are forced to respond.
Democrats are also trapped in this short-termism. Opposition to each action Mr. Trump takes may be morally and practically necessary, but it also reinforces his dominance over events. Every day brings a new battle, generating outrage that overwhelms their capacity to present a coherent alternative. The party spends more time defending what is being lost than imagining what will take its place. The public stares down at phones instead of looking to any horizon.
Then with history since World War II. The Cold War compelled both parties to support
initiatives as diverse as the national security state, basic research, higher education, international development and civil rights. Despite partisan differences, there was a long-term consensus around the nation’s purpose.
But the Cold War ended.
With the end of the Cold War, politics descended into partisan political combat over seemingly small things — from manufactured scandals to culture wars. This spiral was suspended, briefly, to launch the war on terror — the last major bipartisan effort to remake government to serve a long-term objective, in this case a dubious one: waging a forever war abroad while making much of American life at home more secure.
By the time Barack Obama took office, a destabilizing asymmetry had taken hold. …
This reminds me of a familiar theme: it takes a common enemy to bring conflicting sides together. That’s a running theme in alien invasion novels and movies.
Then:
The second Trump administration has fully normalized the ethos of short-termism. Mr. Trump does have an overarching promise about the future. But it is rooted in what he is destroying, not what he is building. By dismantling the administrative state, starving the government of funds, deregulating the economy, unraveling the international order, punishing countries with arbitrary tariffs and whitening the nation through mass deportations, he will reverse the globalization that has shaped our lives and the government that was built during the Cold War. On the other side of this destruction, he says, a new “golden age” awaits.
Ending,
Mr. Trump is a 79-year-old strongman nostalgic for the past. His domination of the present is not permanent, but it is leading many Americans to live in the status quo he commands while ignoring where we are going. To overcome that reality, Democrats must mobilize people to believe in the future.
Now, from the perspective of science fiction with its visions of far futures, and of nonfiction sages like Yuval Noah Harari and Brian Greene who specialize in long-term points of view, all current politics is about only short-term thinking. Still, there are degrees. Politicians, especially, think out only until the next election. Conservatives, in general, dismiss long-term threats like climate change that seem fantastic compared to anything they’ve experience in their own lives. And capitalism, in general prioritizes immediate profits only and never mind long-term conservancy of resources.
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Here’s an unattributed comment that I’ve seen half a dozen times from my Facebook friends today.
Read carefully.
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The big news today is how Trump is lying about crime in Washington DC and wants to show strength — and/or distract yet again from the Epstein scandal — by pretending to respond to an “emergency” that doesn’t exist.
NY Times, live updates, today: Live Updates: Trump Orders National Guard to Washington and Takeover of Capital’s Police, subtitled “D.C.’s mayor acknowledged local officials could do little to block what was expected to be a 30-day takeover of the capital’s policing. President Trump suggested his action might be expanded to other cities.”
President Trump said that he was temporarily taking control of the Washington, D.C., police department and deploying 800 National Guard troops to the city, painting a dystopian picture of the nation’s capital that stood in sharp contrast to official figures showing violent crime in the city is at a 30-year low.
After Mr. Trump’s claims that the city was overrun by “bloodthirsty criminals” and “roving mobs of wild youth,” Mayor Muriel Bowser struck a diplomatic tone that acknowledged the president’s authority to enact a 30-day takeover of the city’s police. But she disputed his rationale and his depictions of life in the city, calling his actions “unsettling and unprecedented.”
And,
CNN, 11 Aug 2025: Trump announces federal takeover of DC police and mobilization of National Guard
And,
Trump wants us to forget his Epstein files cover-up so badly that he’s invading Washington D.C.
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I’ll catch up with those music items tomorrow.
