An interesting reflection by The Economist’s US editor, John Prideaux, in a subscriber-only newsletter is worth quoting at some length (“How to Cover Trump 2.0,” Checks and Balances, January 10, 2025):
Perhaps the least important thing about the awful fires in and around Los Angeles is Donald Trump’s response to them. And yet he’s about to be the president again, so his hot take can’t be ignored either. “Gavin Newsom should resign. This is all his fault!!!” he wrote on Truth Social.
An underrated part of Mr Trump’s political method, and his appeal, is that he doesn’t say what he is supposed to. Any normal person, or any politician taking advice from a communications pro, would lead with sympathy for those who lost loved ones and whose houses have burned down and say something comforting about how, when he takes office, he will help LA to come back stronger. Mr Trump doesn’t bother with that. He knows his voters don’t like Mr Newsom. Blaming an appalling natural disaster on him is therefore a thrill. Henry Adams wrote that, “politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organisation of hatreds.” Mr Trump’s success makes me think he was right.
One may relate Henry Adam’s striking aphorism to Anthony de Jasay’s theory of the state. Since, for de Jasay, any action of the state amounts to discriminating against somebody to help somebody else (“maximizing aggregate utility” is a convenient rationalization), it can understandably generate hatred from the discriminated against. However, de Jasay’s theory (or part of his theory) is different: in a democratic state, the victims of discrimination will instead demand some discriminatory privilege in their own favor, which will in turn generate discontent from other individuals discriminated against, and so forth up to the “Plantation State” (see his 1985 book The State).
On this road, Donald Trump and Joe Biden, to take two recent examples, will just have been milestones among others.
Under the Plantation State, everybody would be more or less equal, except for the equalizers. Will all the equalized hate the state? Perhaps, but they would have to hide their hatred.
READER COMMENTS
David Seltzer
Jan 25 2025 at 5:52pm
Pierre: “the victims of discrimination will instead demand some discriminatory privilege in their own favor, which will in turn generate discontent from other individuals discriminated against, and so forth up to the “Plantation State”.” Alas, I suspect the exponential nature of this metastasis makes it difficult for civil discourse to obtain.
Thomas L Hutcheson
Jan 25 2025 at 7:30pm
But what do we substitute for politics in a post-Edenic society?
Pierre Lemieux
Jan 26 2025 at 11:00am
Thomas: Perhaps a close substitute: thuggery (with a cost-benefit-analysis cover)?
Jose Pablo
Jan 27 2025 at 1:02pm
Anarcho-capitalism—the advent of which is long overdue.
It’s hard to imagine what additional proof of the evils of governments (all kind of them) is needed to move us in that direction.
If we continue to delay the arrival of anarchism, it’s only a matter of time before some ego-driven maniac nukes the Earth out of existance—perhaps over a patch of land with a canal running through it, or an uninhabitable piece of territory in the middle of nowhere.
Mactoul
Jan 25 2025 at 9:44pm
If it needed 200 years from Henry Adam to reach the present alarming state of hatred even with the singular personality of Trump, then there must be counteracting tendencies that keep the Plantation State at bay.
The evil of Plantation State, which tries to please everyone, was already known to Kipling in the well-known poem The Gods of Copybook Headings — where the foolishness is ascribed to liberals as it were.
Pierre Lemieux
Jan 26 2025 at 11:50am
Mactoul: Henry Adams is closer to 100 years ago than 200. Moreover, note my penultimate paragraph.
Jose Pablo
Jan 27 2025 at 10:02am
that keep the Plantation State at bay.
It has never been kept at bay. It has always been growing—to the point where, in today’s Europe, it confiscates approximately 55% of all products and services produced by individuals.
From time to time, a “Leader” (a “Führer” in German or a “Duce” in Italian—both meaning the same) comes along and briefly inoculates us against the horrors of the State (all States, it is just a matter of time). But it never lasts. We are little more than a bunch of memoryless monkeys.
Jon Murphy
Jan 27 2025 at 7:34am
Agreed. Such building hatred is poison to a liberal society.
Laurentian
Jan 27 2025 at 2:47pm
Classical Liberalism was all about hatred of the aristocrats, Catholics and “barbarians”. Why did Bright and Spencer oppose Irish Home Rule?
Also going to bat for Gavin Newsom, really?
Jon Murphy
Jan 27 2025 at 8:46pm
Dude, please just leave me alone. If you’re not going to comment productively, then please just leave me alone.
Pierre Lemieux
Jan 29 2025 at 11:02am
Jon: I think Laurentian is a bit late in his readings.
Roger McKinney
Jan 27 2025 at 11:52am
Great points! What’s missing from the discussion is the role of state owned property. As far as I can tell, all the fires started in government owned forests. LA is locked in by vast state owned forests.
Roger McKinney
Jan 27 2025 at 11:53am
PS, https://rdmckinney.blogspot.com/2025/01/california-fires-show-danger-of.html?m=0
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