Archives for July 2018

The dog days of summer haven’t yet reared their heads, but need we await their arrival for things to go wrong? Modelling our forecast upon the past antics of President Trump tells us no—we needn’t wait for the heatwaves to find us; they’re already here. Throw away your mystic aeromancy, once useful in divining the season’s inevitable, annual strife. Toss out your almanacs, those antiquated books through which farmers read gales and controversy. We know, based on all of the previous and tempestuous piques of Trump, one year unto the next, that summertime is the time for meltdowns.

As it did in 2016, so too in 2017, and in much the same way it continues until today, the summertime for President Trump invites problems: problems for him at the polls (his favorability ratings, when gauged during the summer months, have a tendency to slip); problems for his communications department (which is tasked with a Sisyphean battle of walking back—rather than up—heaps of controversies and prevaricating on his behalf); and problems for his Republican Party (which has recently finished not only its prostration—that that kind of groveling, admittedly, has been going on for a while—but its castration as well. The Republican Party is now little more than a sterile group of eunuchs kissing a sultan’s ring).

But to call them problems might be to put the matter more charitably than one should. In each successive year, between the months of June and September, President Trump has been at the center and has been the main cause of things considerably worse than mere controversies. Less hiccups they’ve been than unmitigated maelstroms. Far from harmless snafus, they’ve been national embarrassments, and each summer, we tolerate a new one.

To begin, perforce, we’re brought back to the summer of 2016—a summer indelibly etched into the American soul. It was a halcyon time when still Hillary Clinton’s name was on the tongue (bitter though to the taste it was becoming), James Comey’s reputation was on the line, and Donald Trump’s ascent was merely beginning its rise. At least it very much appeared to be, until he responded to Khizr Khan.

Better and more widely known as the father of Humayun Khan, a marine of Pakistani extraction who was slain while fighting on the American side in the Middle East, the elder Khan memorably berated Trump for having no knowledge of the Constitution and its sanctity. He vigorously picked up his pocket-sized Constitution and waved it in the air. Indiscriminately irascible then as now, Trump take such reproach sitting down. He responded by insulting not only Khizr Khan, but his family as well. He intimated that Khan’s wife, Ghazala Khan (at whose side he spoke at the DNC convention in Philadelphia where the world listened to this unassuming man excoriate Trump) wasn’t “allowed to speak” because of some kind of misogynistic Islamic prohibition. The idea was that Ghazala Khan, a proud American citizen and mother of a veteran, was religiously subdued by her umma and her man. Adding to this, it was at this time that Trump’s “Muslim Ban”—still an infant of an idea and a vaunted figment of the nationalist imagination—was being debated. Needless to say, the fallout from his remark about Mrs. Khan was severe.

It was one thing to ascribe to an apparently secular Muslim-American family a sort of religious fanaticism that would put at a distance a woman from her inalienable right to speak, quite another to disrespect a Gold Star family. Knowing it as I do, the American right will usually countenance the former, but I’ve not yet stumbled upon a Republican who’d suffer the latter. (Khan’s wife later wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post, in which she attributed her silence not to some Medieval moratorium on her right to be heard, but to the crippling emotions by which she was overcome at the revisited thought of her son’s untimely death). The exchange and its aftermath was, in Trumpian terms, a total disaster. It also inaugurated Trump’s trend of summertime meltdowns to come.

The next came in 2017. Seeking and finding a moral nadir—really an ethical bedrock to which no previous statesman had yet plunged—the now president Trump responded to the ghastly events of Charlottesville in his own abhorrent and idiosyncratic way.

It was in that quaint and sleepy university town where the “Unite the Right” rally was held. There was nothing innocuous about it from the start; what good can come, after all, from a gathering of a bunch of aggrieved, racist, white, ennui-imbued, middle-aged, tiki-torch brandishing louts? Not surprisingly, the event quickly spiraled out of control. It devolved from an odious demonstration of the “blood-and-soil” right to a direct confrontation in the streets. The radical leftist “Antifa” members—armed with identity politics and pepper spray—and the white nationalists—favoring clubs, shields, and an assortment of slapdash accoutrements to clad their ranks—converged on the university green before mid-day. Thereafter, for the better part of the morning, the two sides proceeded to beat each other with home-made matériels. It wasn’t until the police arrived on scene that things settled down—albeit only slightly.

Even with the police’s arrival, the situation remained a mess. Its response was desultory and slow and the fighting continued, but the situation hadn’t yet become one of a sanguinary kind. That would of course change when a crazed allegiant of the right, too proud of skin and soil and all things Aryan, drove his vehicle down a pedestrian-filled street. By the time he reversed his car and ventured toward a getaway, one innocent victim’s heart stopped its beat. A peaceful protestor lay dead, and—thanks to President Trump’s response to it all—a new source of national embarrassment was born.

Flanked by Gary Cohen and Steve Mnuchin in his gilded Trump Tower atrium in New York, the president gave a most unforgettable press conference. Ostensibly, the three were gathered to talk about America’s financial path forward and the inchoate tax reforms that tickled the businessmen’s mind. But the horrors of Charlottesville were fresher and deeper than any tax cut could be. Casting a wink and a sympathetic nod to the furthest reaches of the right, Trump infamously exclaimed that “both sides” were to blame for the death of the young woman on that Charlottesville street.

It seemed as if Trump couldn’t have sunk much lower. After making the remark—and subsequently refusing to amend it in the face of mounting pressure—the idea of his presidency became tinged with the sour taste of ignominy. Henceforth, these loose and undercooked morals were to become a common course, nauseating yet familiar to the American palate.

They were served up again, only this time on the world rather than the national stage. Following a divisive visit to Brussels (where he met and bumped heads with NATO members) and thence to England (where he insulted Theresa May and the Queen), Trump flew to Helsinki for the last stop of his European tour. It was there, in that capital city just beyond Stalin’s reach, that Trump met with our modern-day, neo-authoritarian Russian man of steel—Vladimir Putin. This second of two tête-à- têtes (the first having taken place last year in the German city of Hamburg) gave time enough for Trump and Putin to discuss many a thing. So far as we’re led to believe, the topics about which they spoke included entanglements in Syria, unlawful annexations in Crimea, issues in Iran, oil shipments in Germany, and meddling in the U.S. election. Ever the obscurantists, no readout of the meeting has been made available from either side. Buoyed by the breadth of their conversation, though, one might’ve expected Trump’s posture toward Putin to be one of dominance rather than subservience—of command rather than equivocation (Trump, after all, had recently lambasted Angela Merkel for her dealings with Russian petro-companies and had come out on the side of the pro-western Ukrainians). This was his chance to give Putin a piece of his mind.

But it became immediately clear, as the two began fielding questions from the gathered press corps, that Trump would assume no such manly stance. Instead, he chose to kowtow to President Putin—taking to a knee and kissing the despot’s boot in a most emasculating way. Agreeing with all Putin had to say, Trump made the worse arguments the better and America’s pride the lesser. As if attempting to re-capture the momentary idiocy of President George W. Bush (who you’ll recall was convinced of Putin’s sincerity and bonhomie, after having seen his soul through his mother’s cross), Trump was likewise smitten with the ex-KGB Machiavel of a leader in whose image he sees himself.

Days before the summit, President Trump’s own Department of Justice—a department, mind you, whose execution he oversees—released a damning indictment of twelve Russian state agents. After more than two years of quiet and indefatigable research, the DOJ came to the conclusion that the dozen was doubtless involved in the attempt to meddle in the 2016 election. What’s more, President Putin almost certainly had a hand in orchestrating the coup. It seemed as though even the staunchest Trump apologist and the most imaginative Republican revisionist could no longer deny the intelligence community’s findings: the Russians meddled in our election process, and they were sanctioned to do so from on high. And likely, if given the chance, they’d do so again.

Yet of all of the apologists, Trump continued to be the most obstinate, and of all the revisionists, the most acrobatic. Instead of explicitly siding with his own Department of Justice when he had the chance, Trump appeared to toss American intel under the bus. He opted instead to swallow the Russian pill, having been taken in hook, bait, and sinker by the line the Kremlin had cast. “(President Putin) just said it’s not Russia”, said Trump when pressed by journalists to expound on his position. “I do not see any reason why it would be”, he continued, before ending by saying that “I have great confidence in my intelligence people…but (Putin) was extremely strong and confident in his denial today”. As always they are, the “buts” are the most worth noting; they’re the pivot points over which real feelings turn.

We’d hoped that Trump had long since forsaken this position—that of Putin’s denial being more creditable than the intelligence community’s avowal that the Russians interfered in our election process. We’d hoped that he might’ve evolved his thinking on this matter for the good of the country—that he’d maybe sobered his infatuation with the autocrat, and humbled himself to the unprepossessing truth. But one knows too well the adage of old dogs and new tricks.

And so, like old mutts, the dog days trickle in. So as before, and now again, the president limps through another summertime meltdown. As he does, America suffers its annual bout of embarrassment. But, amazingly, come autumn, neither seems much worse for the wear.

“One for all”, said Athos to Porthos, and Porthos to Aramis, and Aramis in synchrony as they solemnized their vow “and all for one!” Thus spoke those unnamed musketeers (whose individual identities have until now been lost). Or, for the Francophones amongst us, whose ears must shrivel at our harsh consonants and yearn to hear the phrase in its original and melodious form, “Un pour tous, tous pour un”. Still, even today, after having written that famous rallying cry nearly two centuries ago, Alexandre Dumas’ logic persists. It still reads like a chivalrous ode—like a selfless attestation to our fellow man. It leaps before our eyes and into our fraternal souls like a declaration of interdependence of the most enlightened and latitudinous kind. It’s a basic and yet timeless corollary to which we owe a thousand shared victories and a hundred defeats. And, being as such—a corollary, that is—its second half necessarily follows its first and is all the more important: All for one.

 It’s in Dumas’ terms, and specifically in that second part, that I come to think of NATO and its vaunted “Article Five”. This most demanding of articles, of course, requires that every allegiant to the post-WWII organization (in whose grasp we count ourselves and twenty-eight other nations—a figure that has steadily grown since NATO’s inception in 1948. It’s a growth in membership, one might add as an aside, that’s caused in Moscow no small amount of geopolitical unease) responds to an assault on one constituent member as though it were an assault on its own being. Just as the one nation would hasten to its colleague’s defense, so too would that once-badgered nation return the favor in kind. Thus established, Article Five functions like a virtuous circle. It creates a double effect by simultaneously deterring attacks by non-NATO states (why would Russia, to use a feasible example, attack a nation whom it considered vulnerable and teetering on the edge of sovereignty if it knew that twenty-eight other countries would unanimously respond and intervene) and buttressing military responses if the deterrence is ignored.

Article Five, then, becomes the same type of noble, mutual, and above all, reliable assurance upon which the western world and those doughty musketeers relied. It’s the knowledge that next to you stands a saber in its sheath and a bullet in its barrel, both of which are ready—on your behalf and for your preservation—to explode.

It’s a sacred and a far-sighted bond, even though it’s been implemented but once. Since the Treaty was established, NATO hasn’t had too many military entanglements—as the world, in the broader view of modern history, hasn’t itself had all that many military events (at least none comparable to those that punctuated the twentieth century) of which to speak. Its first involvement was in Kuwait in 1991, when Saddam Hussein’s Baathist thugs attempted to overrun their small oil-rich neighbors to the south. Though not a proper NATO member per se, Kuwait was gladly relieved of Hussein’s imperialist endeavors by the organization and by the urgings of President Bush. It was a NATO coalition that stopped in his tracks that sadist Hussein, although looking back, it might’ve done well to finish the deal.

Not long after the crisis in Kuwait, the war in Bosnia erupted. Again, though not a NATO member state, the situation required of the organization its action. But, sadly, far too long after the crisis began did NATO finally choose to act. Insensate to the sufferings of the Bosnian Muslims on the ground, it would take nearly two years before NATO responded to the developing genocide in a meaningful way. A same story could be told of Kosovo, a Balkan nation not far from Bosnia and Herzegovina were ultimately thousands of Bosniaks died. Kosovo told of a similarly gruesome and sanguinary tale. Where Bush moved with relative alacrity in the Middle East, Clinton dithered with timidity along the Adriatic Sea. Even as the evidence of Mladic’s, and Milosevic’s crimes mounted, NATO was slow to respond. Finally, it did, but much of the damage was done.

But hitherto, there hadn’t been a direct attack on a NATO-member state from the outside. The inauguration of such an event, a sad distinction, no doubt, came on September 11, 2001. Seeing those eviscerated towers (from whose crags hundreds leapt and in whose hallways thousands burned) crumble, NATO remembered its commitment and perhaps redeemed its prior hesitations in the prior Slavic wars. All for one, the bells did toll again, and NATO intrepidly joined its American comrades for a decades’ long Central Asian travail.

Amongst those many and gallant nations who came to our support in those years was the tiny state of Montenegro. No state better encapsulates Mark Twain’s ode to the underdog (it was he who said that it’s not the size of the dog in the fight that counts, rather that of the fight in the dog. He spoke, of course, at a time before America would become the Goliath we know her to be). Not yet a member of NATO in any official capacity, Montenegro cared for titles not; it believed in America’s cause and in its own future as a part of the west. Strained of manpower (its population sits just above 620,000—commensurate with our own sparsely inhabited Vermont) and limited in matériels and clout, Montenegro nevertheless committed itself to our end. All for one, it said, and Montenegro hasn’t yet reneged on this loyal decree; it’s maintained since the mid-2000’s an indefatigable (albeit small) military presence in Afghanistan (its army numbers just over 2000, of whom every fifth has served for some amount of time in Afghanistan for the American cause).

That sort of dogged commitment, however infinitesimal it may seem, is enough to make a man blush. Yet just the opposite was the response of President Trump when he grew red in the face when thinking about doughty Montenegro and what our allegiance to that state means. It wasn’t out of a humble appreciation for that little Balkan nation’s resolve that he turned his face a crimson hue, but out of anger at the sheer thought of having to return the favor by coming to Montenegro’s aid, should it require that of us.

Asked by Fox News’ Tucker Carlson why his or for that matter any blue-blooded American son should die for that insignificantly small Montenegro (who is, after all, a mere stripling of a NATO member, having been admitted only last year), President Trump responded that they shouldn’t. In words reminiscent of Twain, though forgivably less eloquent than he, Trump called Montenegro a “tiny country with very strong people”, but like a dog desperate for its life, they are a “very aggressive people” all the same. The line of reasoning here being that, as a people with an inclination toward aggression (having not visited Montenegro myself, I can’t speak to its people’s manners; we’ll simply have to accept the president’s characterization as true), Montenegro could incite World War III. And alas, because of its people’s foolhardy aggressive ways, America would be made to defend Montenegro’s sovereignty at great—and by extension—unnecessary loss.

Dumas would be downcast and NATO, crestfallen. It appears as though President Trump, in understanding his calculation, thinks that All for one works in only one way. Tous pour un, so long as everyone is there for the U.S. As for Montenegro? Much obliged for the help, but henceforth, you can go it alone.

Uncomfortable though it may seem, two things at once can be true: on the one hand, the Russian government could have meddled in the 2016 election that saw the defeat of Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump. However distressing the thought of such a brazen intrusion into our democratic process might still be, this is the consensus on which nearly every U.S. intelligence agency has converged. Of the reality of Moscow’s meddling and its attempt to influence America’s political sentiments from within, there can be no doubt. Under Vladimir Putin’s supervision, Russian state actors—of whom twelve have as of Friday been indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice—succeeded in hacking into the Democratic Party’s servers and propagandizing their scurrilous messages across the web.

That’s the first of two things that can be true. Simultaneously, the second is that there could’ve been no discernible collusion between the Kremlin and Donald Trump. It could be that the former had its tenebrous paws on the scale for the latter, and that it was pushing ever so imperceptibly on platforms like Facebook, and Twitter, and Reddit to see him win, but that Trump’s campaign knew not of its presence and felt not its touch. In the absence of more compelling evidence, this is the conclusion to which we must be resigned. Anti-climactic though it may seem, sometimes that’s all that there is to it in these stories of statecraft; the drama of politics seldom moves us to loftier heights. Rather prone is it to over-promise and under-deliver in that regard. To service our catharsis, we thus spurn politics and turn toward the likes of a Shakespeare or a Real Housewives.

Yet all of the political parties—be they of the left, of the right, or of the diminishing in-between—seem to have become immune to this idea—this idea that two things can be at once true. There seems to have fallen atop everyone’s eyes a veil. It’s a veil through whose fibers the two co-existing sides of the coin can’t be seen. And with that obfuscating veil have come fetters, and with the fetters a paralyzing adherence to mutual exclusivity. We’re now stuck in a binary way of thinking that demands we choose either “0’s” or “1’s”, without acknowledging the existence of decimals or gradations in between. Only one number is real—only one has validity.

On the left, they choose a “1”. There must be something “there”. A there there, to put it more redundantly. Or more eloquently, there must be something positive, affirmative, and actual. More than mere meddling, there must be something scandalous, something heinous, something boiling beneath the surface wanting to be seen and, once seen, wanting to explode. Amongst these Democrats, of whom many have invested endless hours and tireless diatribes and their 2018 re-election campaigns to this end, there’s a tendency to consider only this one side of the two possibilities. They accept fully and with a rapacious gulp the conclusions drawn by the U.S. intelligence agencies—as well they should. Yet one taste isn’t enough to slake the thirst, and still they want more. Insatiate and desperate, they’ve shown themselves willing to stop at nothing until the president is impeached. Only this will fulfill them. And in their desperation, they’ve jumped heedlessly toward their own conclusions. They’ve fixed an illusory path from meddling to collusion; from unilateral mischief on the part of Putin, to reciprocal misbehavior between the ex-KGB henchman and Trump.

The reality is that this path from unwitting beneficiary (which, as far as we know and not an inch farther, is the extent of Trump’s role) to treasonous co-conspirator hasn’t yet been forged. Nor are there very many signs pointing in the direction that soon it shall be. But the left wants more than anything to make this leap and to bury into Trump’s presidency its final blow. This leap, mind you, is contingent on the stubbornly unforthcoming evidence that he and Putin engaged in a collusive act. This simply isn’t the case, and the Democrats are salivating over an inconclusive conclusion; such evidence simply hasn’t materialized to date. They are thus stuck accepting only one truth as true—that meddling was real and collusion much the same. Yet by accepting the latter, they get dangerously ahead of their skis. They fail to affirm the former and negate the latter.

On the obverse paces and frets President Trump. Continuing in our binary world, where all is mutually exclusive, he chooses “0”. He chooses negation. Against the advice of no fewer than seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies (of whose collective organization, he’s the ultimate head), he’s decided there simply was no meddling on the part of Russia. It’s all a falsity, a mendacity, a political witch-hunt, and a ruse. And, the more he says that the Russians didn’t meddle, the more likely is the idea in his mind to disappear. Even after the passage of an entire year, during which investigations have been plenary and all-encompassing, the idea is no more salient, let alone feasible to him. It’s a negatively re-enforcing message, from whose cycle he refuses to escape, even when given every rope and ladder to climb out of his own ego and find the light. So, he continues to cloak our intelligence agencies’ findings in a mantle of doubt and suspicion, while he intimately denies their conclusions wholesale (and often does so publicly as well).

In his mind, it’s because he and Putin didn’t collude that Putin didn’t meddle. The former necessarily negates the latter. President Trump has proven himself frankly incapable of dissociating the two. Meddling, so far as his mental faculties can extend, has become a synonym for collusion. As such, any scintilla of the notion that Russia meddled in the election on his behalf is a direct assault on his presidential legitimacy—an insult for which he won’t stand. Never mind the fact that the efficacy of the Kremlin’s meddling efforts remains unknown, though probably once known, will prove exiguous. To admit as much would be to discredit or to diminish his incredible victory, his glory, and his legacy. This leaves him thinking in terms of a “0” as it pertains to our choice between one and nil. There was no collusion, and thus no meddling.

But, indeed, there was meddling—of this, we can be unequivocally sure. And there was no Trump-Putin collusion—of this, at least for the nonce, we must accept. Contrary to popular belief, we can have in our equation both a “0” and a “1”. Both things can at once be true. It’s from this very basic math we must begin again if we’re to improve the political discussion.

Facing a growing crowd of surly protestors in the city streets of London, Voltaire was made to use his wit as though his life—and not just his livelihood—depended on it. “Englishmen!”, cried that inveterate exile (he’d already been by that point imprisoned in the Bastille twice, from whose confines he sprang forth expectedly unrepentant. He was then sent to the Netherlands, and then to England, and then finally, should all else have failed, he was to be sent off to the New World and Quebec) “You want to kill me because I am a Frenchman?” Quite right. Need there be a more grievous offense? One shouldn’t think so; after all, anything Gallic runs anathema to the doughty Angle’s soul. Those hostile Brits were all too eager to move from prosecution to guillotine right then and there, when Voltaire turned to his cause their Francophobic hearts. “Am I not punished enough”, said he in a flourish of desperation and genius, “in not having been born an Englishman?”

With the hypnotic charm of a sorcerer, and the necessary flattery of a foreigner caught in a bind, Voltaire thus won to his side that day’s English rabble. The once angry, sanguinary mob began to cheer his words as it escorted the now laughing philosopher off to safety and thence to history. Voltaire, a stripling in his twenties at the time, would go on to illuminate the continent, to humiliate lesser minds, and to aggravate nearly every ecclesiastical stripe for the next six decades of his life.

No such genially capricious hosts were to be found in England three centuries nearer our own day, when President Trump stopped on that same island and in that same city for his first official diplomatic visit with Prime Minister Theresa May. In fact, equally chipper would these present-day Londoners have been to have seen Trump’s head on a platter, as their ancestors would’ve been to have seen that of Voltaire’s. Filling the streets by the thousands, the anti-Trump Britons held signs, chanted mantras, and navigated through Trafalgar Square a “baby Trump balloon”, a ponderous and Pamper-wearing blimp measuring some six meters in height. This, aside from the sheer number of protestors (which approximated a staggering 250,000) was the most memorable of the afternoon’s spectacles. The multitude gathered there was vast and there’s no doubt that it sent a message, but it was the verisimilitude of the blimp that won’t soon be forgotten.

Except, perhaps, for the fact that the balloon’s head might not have been sufficiently inflated. The “real” Donald Trump’s head—that repository for his prodigious self-esteem—is significantly bigger, his insides airier. With an unpopularity in England almost as boundless as said ego, it’s no surprise then that he bruised onlookers and caused a stir even before sitting down with Prime Minister May for tea.

Having just recently concluded a rather tense conference with the members of NATO (the post-war organization of Western powers that he’s repeatedly disparaged as “obsolete” and “weak”), President Trump travelled to London to hopefully ease animosities and strengthen America’s “special relationship” with her majesty. Before doing so, he sat down with The Sun newspaper (a daily British tabloid) for a wide-ranging and candid interview. In so many words, President Trump inveighed against London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, for the latter’s milquetoast response to the recent surge in terrorist activity that his city has witnessed. He flaunted that “millions” of Brits support his policies, of whom the 250,000 were clearly not representative. Also on that vein, he expressed his sadness at having been so uncongenially received by those same boisterous Brits clamoring in the streets.

More germane to the imminent meeting with May, however, were his comments about Brexit and the government overseeing its implementation. While he didn’t explicitly attack the beleaguered Prime Minister May (who’s seen in the disastrous span of just one week the joint resignations of her Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and her Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union David Davis. Their leaving puts an already shaky administration on ever more tremulous ground), he did hint at the fact that she was handling her business poorly. As a consolation, he did deny having once called the oft-seemingly punctilious May a “bossy schoolteacher”, but he said that she had essentially wrecked Brexit. What’s worse, Trump then went on to imply that the since-departed Boris Johnson—a “hard” Brexit stalwart and Eurosceptic—would make a “great” Prime Minister. The intimation here being, of course, that Johnson would be a Prime Minister superior to May. It was at once a jarring credit to him and a demerit to her—an apparent vote of no confidence from an American cousin.

At least, this was the going thought. Liberals the world-over lamented the fact that Trump could’ve been so rude as to have said something so unsupportive of May. With her station in British politics being as it is (and growing ever-more precarious by the day) many pundits thought that Trump’s ill-timed comment would be the final nail in her political coffin—a heap of dirt on her grave. As Trump uttered his first breath in London, May would breathe her last.

All that said, I don’t see that at all as being the case. On the contrary, I think that Trump inadvertently provided May with a public resuscitation. Like the Lazarus of 10 Downing Street, she might yet be raised, and it’ll be upon Trump’s face she looks when first she re-opens her eyes. It’ll be his hand (regardless of its disputed size) by which she’s brought back to life. By saying what he did about May, President Trump served rather to help than hurt Theresa May.

Simply in light of their general disdain for President Trump, Brits may come to the side of their own leader, of Prime Minister May, in a kind of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” situation. Granted, it’s not the best way to rally support for a person nor cause, but anything is preferable to the slow drowning death that May is experiencing at the moment. They’ll probably look upon her with greater sympathy, or at the very least, with a bit less hostility, knowing that in a leader, they as British citizens could have worse. In her reception of Trump and his untoward remarks, May looked to be the paragon of stolidity and poise. She was dignified and disinterested, receiving him as any sober businesswoman would. In the eyes of many otherwise uninspired Brits, sitting opposite the analphabetic American president was May—the lettered and polished Oxonian who for once looked and felt as if one of their own. Trump looked as if a bull in a china shop, she as if a statuary model unperturbed. Simply put, the British people’s loathing for President Trump might bring them to liking their own head of state slightly more.

And although patience on all sides has worn thin as Brexit negotiations have become increasingly fraught, this might be all that May needs to salvage what’s left of her government—that is, to be liked just slightly more and to be given just a bit more time.

But will the British people grant her either of these things? With an ingratiating wink and a clever word, Voltaire’s life was saved. He was to become not only a beloved denizen of England, but the chief exporter of the island’s best ideas. He was to return to Paris to make Newton’s physics intelligible and Bolingbroke’s deism ecumenical (and himself tolerable, so long as from Paris, he stayed away). But today’s English mob seems not so ready to forgive. It certainly didn’t change its opinion of Trump as it did of Voltaire. The former garnered no plaudits nor found at Whitehall many friends. So much the worse for him. But with Trump’s unintended help, that same English mob might just change its opinion of May. Far from a Voltaire, she, like he, might be given life anew and a chance at another day.

Ask of your elder the difference between a millennial and a socialist, and ready yourself for his response. Having broached the question to many a senior whose days more than treble my own, I can almost tell you verbatim what candid, albeit spittle-encrusted answer will come. It will be at once refreshing and gratuitously wet; hopefully, if not drenched, you’ll be edified after hearing it. You might even go so far as to take what I have to say on good authority. So good an authority, in fact, that you might as well go ahead and generalize it to our nation of geriatrics as a whole (a nation, it might be added, of whose composition 15% live presently and happily over the age of 65—a remarkable number that’s certain to double in nearly as many years as longevity becomes a synonym for society).

But back to his response. Candid it shall be, as frankness is commensurate with age, but at the same time, in giving his answer he might be given pause. If this is the case, as I’ve experienced it to be, expect his response to be somewhat quizzical, slower than usual, perhaps even completely bemused. He’ll think that you—attempting to be clever with your envious and impish youth—have pressed upon him a mischievous riddle. Are not the terms “Millennial” and “socialist”, after all, really just one in the same? Is not the first little more than a synonym for the latter—the second an equivalent of the first? In what infinitesimal cranny does the difference lie?

Seeing through your sophistry, he’ll finally settle on this response: the difference between Millennial and socialist is non-existent! With one thrust and with the sagacity of his years, he’s slain your tempting koan. There is no discernable line where the Millennial stops and the in-dwelling socialist begins. Their distinction is one without a difference; they’re but emanations of the same essence, branches of the same tree. Through his trusty window into the greater world outside—be it of glass, of memory, or of an ever-thumping television screen—our elder knows so much to be true.

His generation would never dare associate itself with socialism. At least in hindsight, it wouldn’t make that leap to the furthest reaches of the left. He, more than the callow undergraduate with whom he speaks, recognizes what socialism really means. It means mass starvations and Siberian “vacations”; the former being something from which you can’t escape, the latter from which you seldom return. It means gulags in the Arctic permafrost and work camps in Cambodian jungles. It means a Stalinist Eastern Bloc and a Maoist far East. It means Marx and Engels, of whom a besotted cult of acolytes remains enamored. An opium of the masses, if ever there was such a drug. It means grain quotas, matériels, fiats, and five-year plans. It means social immobility, paralyzing brutality, and intermittent purging. It means obfuscation, prestidigitation, and a Potemkin façade carried around for outsiders to see. It means no blue jeans, no rock music, no kulaks, and no culture. It means totalitarianism, repression, exploitation, and—more often than is natural—countless unnatural deaths.

Yet it means none of these things to the Millennial, for the Millennial sees socialism not for what it is, but as something trendy and chic. Detached from its history and its underlying philosophy, socialism looks like an innocuous and useful thing. It looks like an enticing remedy to our society’s present ills. To each according to his need, after all, sounds like a laudable and desirable creed. But it’s completely illusory, and your elder knows this well.

And he knows that, in this day and age, over half of all Millennials self-identify as “socialists”. He’s long suspected that which the polls only now confirm. Based on the findings of last year’s Reason-Rupe Survey, 58% of those aged 18-24 look favorably upon socialism and endorse it as a practicable means to our country’s end. As the case of our interlocutor proves, though, with age comes wisdom. At least it should. Belying this truth is the recent finding of Michelle Goldberg, a trenchant reporter who leans to the left on the left-leaning staff of the New York Times. She’s found in her research that indeed 61% of those aged 18-34 view socialism positively. One’s drawn to the depressing conclusion that we Millennials are becoming less enlightened as we age.

And more confused. As an appendage to that Reason-Rupe Survey cited above, when asked if they favored free or centralized market economies, 64% of the same Millennial respondents between the aforementioned ages threw their hats behind the first. Thus arises the rather embarrassing contradiction; Millennials simultaneously support socialism as their preferred form of government, while supporting capitalism as the most choice-worthy economic model. The fundamental tension, if not the sheer incompatibility between the two (in their purest, most ideologically coherent forms) is woefully lost on them. Of course, in application, there is a necessary confluence between the two, but I don’t think that either poll was trying to evoke in its respondents quite that much nuance.

With scornful reproach, your elder’s eyes narrow at such ignorance. Doubtless, he himself knows the philosophy and its effects well, but he knows the Millennial well too. He knows the quixotic and delusional look in the youthful eye. It’s an eye that’s too willing and eager. And he knows the shining and tempting lights of socialism by which so many earlier intellectuals had been made blind. Intellectuals like Whittaker Chambers, sociologists like Beatrice and Sydney Webb, satirists like George Bernard Shaw, journalists like Walter Duranty, muralists like Diego Rivera, artists like Frida Kahlo, and essayists like Lincoln Steffens. It was the last of these soviet apologists who less than presciently exclaimed that he’d seen the future (in what was an inchoate Red Russia), and that it worked. It’s the same type chimerical future, nearly a century later, for which our Millennials still grasp.

This group of Millennials, of whose generation I’m an unwitting member, ought to turn toward its elders or its books. We’ve clearly been failed by our teachers or made dumb by our own incurious natures. Either way, we should work toward proving wrong our elder’s perception of us. Millennials and socialists ought not be synonyms and we certainly shouldn’t allow ourselves to become one in the same.