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Amid the parade of outrages, what we’re feeling isn’t numbness. It’s more like airsickness.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
The Nation Shrugs
“At what other moment in American history,” Anne Applebaum , “could a presidential candidate praise a fictional serial killer, and inspire almost no reaction at all?”
Even by the standards of the times, what she was referring to did seem a vertigo-inducing moment. Amid an at a rally earlier this month in New Jersey, Donald Trump to the “late, great” Hannibal Lecter, referring to the played by Anthony Hopkins in the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs as a “wonderful man.”
And the nation shrugged, because this was simply the latest in a long list of 2024’s bizarre and disorienting moments (including from the president himself). “The scale of the abnormality is so staggering,” ABC’s George Stephanopoulos , “that it can actually become numbing.”
But Americans’ reaction is less like numbness and more a response to something like airsickness, which results when we experience a disconnect between our senses—a nausea-inducing conflict between what we know and what we see. Motion sickness is caused by a discrepancy between what the inner ear detects and what the eye sees. The effect can be vertiginous—so the way people avoid being nauseated is by trying to ignore the dissonance.
We’ve been led to believe that things work in a certain way, that there are mores and norms. We thought our world was right side up, but it now feels as if it’s been turned upside down. Words don’t mean what we think they do. Outrage is followed not by accountability, but by adulation. Standards shift, flicker, vanish. Nothing is stable.
More than a century ago, , the father of modern sociology, described what he called “,” a condition of instability “resulting from a breakdown of standards and values or from a lack of purpose or ideals.” Anomie could result from a conflict of belief systems, leading to a breakdown of social ties ”
Call it anomie or call it airsickness—we find ourselves in a land of confusion. Trump and yet is hailed as a champion of Christian values. He mocks prisoners of war and calls dead soldiers “,” and his MAGA base is thrilled by his patriotism. And, as Tom Nichols today, Trump brags about his tight relationship with America’s implacable adversary, Vladimir Putin, claiming that the Russian president will release detained Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich “for me, but not for anyone else.”
To hear conservative Christians argue that personal character doesn’t matter, or to witness self-described constitutional conservatives defend a relentless attack on the rule of law, is disorienting. To see advocates of law and order embrace rioters who attacked the Capitol and beat police officers is baffling. To watch the party of Ronald Reagan embracing isolationism and following Trump in truckling to the Butcher of Ukraine, Putin, is bewildering. Mind-bending, also, is that, despite Trump’s fire hose of lies, describe him as “honest and trustworthy.” Recent polls suggest that Trump is leading President Joe Biden in the swing states that will decide the November election.
Maybe that’s why following the news these days feels like swallowing crazy pills. You don’t have to be a particularly cynical observer of American politics to recognize that, past a certain point, no norms endure that cannot be abandoned, and that any position can be flipped if doing so is expedient.
Trump has been found liable for sexual abuse and defaming his victim. He incited a violent attack on the Capitol, rules in the Constitution, , and the nation’s most senior general. He has on a massive scale, faces more than 80 felony charges, and is accused of withholding and sharing top-secret national-security documents.
Faced with all of this, the Republican Party says, Yeah, we want four more years of that. GOP leaders wearing red ties make lockstep pilgrimages to his felony trial in New York to show their fealty, while wannabe running mates mimic his rhetoric and echo his lies about the 2020 election. And now there’s Nikki Haley, who has called Trump “,” “,” “diminished,” and unqualified. Yesterday, she said that . The alleged frauds, adultery, sexual assault, threats, and possible felony convictions don’t matter. Close to half the electorate seems to agree.
Which brings us back to our chronic airsickness. Most of us took it for granted that Americans by and large shared certain ethical assumptions. Despite our differences, we imagined, we all used roughly the same moral compass to judge right and wrong.
But what if that’s not true anymore?
What if the guardrails of the U.S. legal system turn out to be illusory or broken beyond repair? What if we have exhausted our reservoirs of democratic values and shared norms? And what if the constant turbulence buffeting our sense of reality is a sign that we are in a different world, one whose values we don’t understand?
I suspect that the great thinker Hannah Arendt would recognize some of the aspects of that world. In , she described the annihilation of truth and the collapse of moral reasoning:
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true.
Or, to paraphrase the of Bette Davis’s character, Margo Channing, in All About Eve: Fasten your seat belts; it’s going to be a bumpy year.
Related:
Today’s News
- The Louisiana legislature passed a bill that would classify . The legislation would make it a crime to possess the drugs without a prescription, punishable with jail time and fines.
- The Justice Department and 29 states against Ticketmaster’s parent corporation, Live Nation, in an attempt to break up the company over its alleged monopoly in the live-entertainment industry.
- The Supreme Court that Republicans in South Carolina did not engage in racial gerrymandering when they moved thousands of Black voters out of a congressional district that Republicans currently control. The decision allows the state to continue using its current congressional map.
Dispatches
- : Who was Michael Field? The pseudonym was an , used by two women who composed subversive and arresting poems together, Walt Hunter writes.
- : Joe Biden’s on Chinese goods mark the decisive rejection of an economic orthodoxy that dominated American policy making for nearly half a century, Rogé Karma writes.
Evening Read
Scientists Are Very Worried About NASA’s Mars Plan
By Marina Koren
For three years, a robot from Earth has been collecting samples of rock and soil into six-inch-long tubes, on the otherwise quiet planet. The robot, a rover named Perseverance, has deposited some of the samples on the Martian surface in sealed tubes. The others, about two dozen so far, remain stored inside the rover’s belly.
Perseverance will stay on Mars forever, but the majority of its carefully packaged samples are meant to return to Earth … Some scientists hope the dusty fragments will contain tiny fossilized microbes that would prove life once existed on Mars. Those tiny life forms will have been dead for who knows how long—but still would be evidence of a second genesis in our own backyard.
If, that is, the samples ever make it back to Earth.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Watch. Furiosa (out now in theaters), a Max Mad prequel, is not Fury Road, Shirley Li writes. And that’s a .
Read. , the Irish writer Colm Tóibín’s new novel and the sequel to his popular 2009 book, , asks the most about immigration, Rhian Sasseen writes.
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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