A Token of the Managerial Age Bewails Trump’s Surge
“…chatting with a politically mature friend today who, in the course of some delighted words about Attorney General Merrick Garland, reminded me that in his famous “evil empire” speech of 1983, Ronald Reagan quoted a few choice lines from the preface of C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters. “The greatest evil,” Lewis wrote, is not now done in any Dickensian “dens of iniquity” or even in “concentration camps and labor camps.” Such brutish moral cesspools, Lewis says, are rather “the final result” of the encompassing evil evoked in his awesome (in the old sense) satire.
On the contrary, the evil he has in mind is “conceived and ordered . . . in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.” Men, that is to say, like Merrick Garland, a lugubrious embodiment of the “Managerial Age,” the “world of ‘Admin’” that Lewis so abhorred. Here, he suggested, is the home office of Hell, “something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.”
The reason, by the way, my friend’s words about Merrick Garland were “delighted” was because of the huge, if inadvertent, boost the attorney general has just given to Donald Trump’s political prospects.
Monday’s FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Palm Beach residence, was probably the single biggest boon to his stature among voters since he left office in January 2021, bigger even than the partisan witch hunt over which future CNN hostess, Liz Cheney, has been presiding with such ostentatious zeal.
This is obviously a concern among the beautiful, well-pressed people with white collars and clean fingernails who hate Trump. Employing a ju-ju they recognize but do not understand, Trump has time and again demonstrated an uncanny ability to goad his would-be attackers into contortions of self-immolation.
Is that happening now? Maybe. My friend thinks so, hence his buoyant mood and affectionate feelings about the attorney general.
A lot of other people think so, too, though for many the apparently rising fortunes of Donald Trump are not something to celebrate but something to abominate. A good example of the latter was just provided by David Brooks, successfully housebroken faux-conservative columnist for our former paper of record, the New York Times.
In an extraordinary column called “Did the FBI just reelect Donald Trump?,” Brooks eloquently dramatizes the anxiety of those “quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails” C. S. Lewis wrote about.
There are two currents of sentiment running through Brooks’ column. One is a certain obtuse contempt. The other is an imperfectly concealed fear…”
Worth your time to click over for the whole thing.