The Widening Gyre: Jill Lepore Unleashes Her Inner Joan Didion

 

Jill Lepore has harbored an inner streak of Joan Didion for some years, but in this week's New Yorker (5/5/25) she goes full "Slouching Toward Bethlehem."

Reading the New Yorker in New Hampshire Obadiah Youngblood

She starts off with a litany of complaints about his highness, the Trump, which would make Jefferson blush in envy for its conciseness, its scope and its sheer power.

King George III was doped slapped compared to what Lepore does to Trump.

But then she goes beyond Thomas of Monticello and sails into a truly courageous analysis of why Trump has been able to chop down the structures of government and liberal democracy so easily: the wood had been allowed to rot:

"They refused to denounce the illiberalism of speech codes, the lack of due process in the #MeToo movement and Title IX cases, mandatory D.E.I. affirmations as condition of employment and the remorseless political intolerance of much of the left."

In her famous account of the fragmentation and degeneration of San Francisco in 1967, Didion showed where liberal, liberated thought had brought us. Her essays collected as "Slouching Toward Bethlehem," took the title from W.H. Auden's poem, "The Second Coming," which contained the lines:

"Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity."

Which pretty well describes how writers at the New Yorker--Lepore, David Rankin, the whole lot feel right now, in a year which many have compared to 1968. 

Lepore's summation of Trump's offense is spot on, of course:

From his first day in office, he set about dismantling much of both the federal government and the Constitution’s system of checks and balances. By declarations of national emergency, by executive order, and by executive action—and frequently in plain violation of the Constitution— Trump gutted entire departments of the federal government. He defied the federal judiciary. He rescinded funds lawfully appropriated by Congress. He lifted regulations across industries. He fired, forced the resignations of, or eliminated the jobs of tens of thousands of federal employees. He hobbled scientific research. He all but criminalized immigration. He denounced the arts. He abandoned the federal government’s commitment to public education. He revoked civil rights and shuttered civil-rights programs, deriding the goals of racial equality, gender equality, and L.G.B.T.Q. equality. He made enemies of American allies, and prostituted the United States to the passions of tyrants. He punished his adversaries and delighted in their suffering. He tried to bring universities to heel. He bent law firms to his will. He instituted tariffs and toppled markets; he lifted tariffs and toppled markets. He debased the very idea of America. He created chaos, emergency after emergency.

But it is her analysis of why he has been so successful which is telling: 

Trump felled so much timber not because of the mightiness of his axe but because of the rot within the trees and the weakness of the wood. Many of the institutions Trump attacked, from the immigration system to higher education, were those whose leaders and votaries knew them to be broken and yet whose problems they had failed to fix, or even, publicly, to acknowledge.

She has seen the problem and she knows a big part of it has been the failure of liberals to police their own house.