No Way Back
Living in the age of the Oedipus Trap
“One sin leads to a deeper sin.”
—Judah Rosenthal1
Why Doesn’t Somebody Just Stop Him?
With the final nails being driven into NATO’s coffin this week by a personified Id enabled by a Republican majority of self-castrating eunuchs prepared to make themselves the co-authors of America’s national self-immolation in a gesture of ultimate fealty far beyond that of Jonestown’s single most indoctrinated participant; and with said id having imposed a deadline of 8:00 pm this evening on the Iranian regime, at which point a failure to strike a deal to open the Strait of Hormuz will, according to him, result in the “destruction of the entire Iranian civilization” —there’s one question that seems to be on everyone’s lips: Why doesn’t somebody just stop him? The most immediate answer is also the question: Because somebody hasn’t stopped him.
In recent months, as we’ve watched Republicans struggle to defend the Trump administration as it’s undermined NATO, aligned itself with some of the world’s worst dictators, engaged in unprecedented open corruption, and made a complete mockery of the rule of law—numerous commentators have offered their own variants of the same basic observation:👇
(click on the bottom two to read them in full). I even made my own contribution to the genre in my January article The Force Threshold, in which I argued the following:
In January of 2017, I’m quite certain most Senate Republicans did not expect that they would eventually be handing all of their power over to Donald Trump. Nor that they would vote to acquit him for dispatching a mob to kill them as part of an effort to steal the 2020 election. Nor that they would be acquiescing to the destruction of NATO and the realignment of the United States with fascist Russia. Nor that they would eventually be voting almost unanimously to confirm people to top cabinet positions who at the time they rightly regarded as leftist crackpots. Nor that they would be prepared to go along with his effort to take over the Fed and destroy the currency. How did it all happen? One day at a time. One concession at a time. As he grew more brazen in his lawlessness, many likely assured themselves (and each other) that these scenarios represented red lines that they were prepared to enforce. What they failed to take into consideration (beyond their own cowardice) is how much all of the insanity that they accommodated and excused in the interim would change them. So when it came time to enforce their red lines, they confronted the prospect as diminished, defeated shells of their former selves: untethered from any past principles, having long since lost their self-respect, in addition to that of almost everybody outside the cult—thus leaving them without a world to go back to and ever more dependent on Trump’s favor.
There are many phrases that have been used to try to capture the sort of psychological dynamic being described here. Examples include—"the sunk cost fallacy,” “pot committed,” “on tilt,” and Jay Nordlinger’s personal favorite “In too deep.” But there’s another somewhat more obscure term that I think fits our current circumstances even better:👇
The Oedipus Trap
For many years the term Oedipus Trap was used to refer to a scenario in which a person’s efforts to prevent a catastrophic event result in the very catastrophe they were attempting to avoid. The expression was largely self-explanatory, as this sequence of events describes the plot line from the famous Greek tragedy penned by Sophocles during the 5th century B.C. In recent years, however, the definition has evolved—or rather, splintered. In addition to the old definition, the expression is now sometimes used to describe a situation in which a person makes a catastrophic mistake that’s so disastrous and devastating that they’re psychologically incapable of digesting it. In response, they instead choose to double down in the face of incontrovertible evidence, thus compounding the error and making them prisoners of their own evasive compulsions.
This new definition was given a big shot in the arm in 2023 when Washington Post columnist Meghan McArdle wrote an article about this phenomenon. The article largely focused on the life and career of physician Walter Freeman, who achieved notoriety (and later infamy) by promoting the use of lobotomies to treat mental illness—including long after the practice had been discredited.
Since McArdle’s article originally appeared, the term Oedipus Trap has been used to describe various contemporary phenomena of a similar nature. In this video, for instance, it’s applied to the ongoing controversy over gender affirming care for children and the reluctance of left-wing politicians and activists (as well as scientific journals and medical associations) to cease their unequivocal support for the practice despite growing evidence of both long-term complications and a lack of medical effectiveness (not to mention overwhelming political opposition). The term could also (arguably) be applied to other high-profile recent controversies such as the scuttling of any systematic review of gain of function research in the wake of the Covid pandemic, and the doubling down on promoting of off-label substitutes for the Covid vaccine by figures like Brett Weinstein long after they’d been proven useless. One could even argue, in fact, that we inhabit an age of Oedipus traps—perhaps a subject for a future article. In this article, however, the primary focus is on its relevance to our immediate Trump-related crisis.
Master of Puppets
Much like Walter Freeman, who spent his final years desperately clinging to a lie because he couldn’t accept that his life’s work had ruined thousands of lives, Republican elites—be they members of Congress, public intellectuals, or media personalities—now find themselves inhabiting their very own Oedipus Trap; or as Anthony Scaramucci called it—a loyalty trap (see his tweet above). To break with Trump at this point doesn’t merely mean drawing his ire, losing access, hemorrhaging followers, or drawing a primary challenger. For those most culpable in enabling him, it represents a far more profound recognition of personal failure. For many Republicans in public life, it means acknowledging that they’ve spent the last ten years in an abusive relationship with a malignant clown in bed with America’s worst enemies for whom they’ve relinquished every ounce of self-respect, jettisoned everything they ever claimed to believe in, and assented to the destruction of the American-led postwar global order. It means, in other words, accepting that they passed the point of no return long ago. That their mistakes are far too big to ever be forgiven or redeemed. And that they’ve ensured that they will forever be regarded as cautionary tales—history’s greatest monuments to cowardice.
I doubt that Anthony Scaramucci is a reader of this substack. But his description of the Trump loyalty trap does a pretty good job summarizing my own argument from January (see passage above). One idea that we both touched on which I think is an underappreciated feature of this entire perverse dynamic is incrementalism. As I alluded to at the top of the passage, had Congressional Republicans faced a simple ultimatum in 2017 to either torpedo their political careers or sign on to the destruction of NATO and the transformation of the United States into a kleptocratic autocracy, I suspect more than just Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and a couple of others would have opted for political martyrdom. But when the road to submission is broken up into 10,000 incremental steps, the calculus changes. For the venal and short-sighted, no single incremental step seems like it’s worth throwing it all away. Yet in their totality, they amount to signing on to a level of submission and self-abasement that goes far beyond anything they could ever imagine having stomached ten years ago.
The human psyche works in strange and mysterious ways. Goals that are initially instrumental, when pursued in endless repetition, can become ends unto themselves. Men like Lindsey Graham and Mike Lee, who saw Trump for what he was ten years ago, began their descent likely thinking they were merely pursuing a working relationship. But over time winning Trump’s favor gradually went from political pragmatism to psychological necessity. And as they continued to compromise themselves and advance further along a path of submission and self-erosion, demands for ever more ludicrous concessions only strengthened their attachment, as summoning the resolve to push back would require recognizing just how pitiful and broken they have become. Until finally they can no longer even remember the person who they were and live only to serve their master.
The Abyss
One thing I’ve noticed recently is that when Trump does something especially outrageous and indefensible, something that’s unprecedented even for him, there tends to be a lull of about a day or so during which many of his defenders become pretty quiet on social media. Though the massive and far-reaching right wing media ecosystem certainly isn’t known to slow itself down worrying about things like intellectual standards, some of Trump’s offenses are so outside the pale that it still takes about 24 hours or so for his enablers to crowd source an immune response.
In the wake of Trump’s threats to commit massive war crimes and obliterate an entire civilization at 8:00 pm this evening, if his demands aren’t met, this same network of enablers has once again been reduced to (relative) temporary silence. After having spent recent days in a collective effort to selectively redact recent history so as to refashion it in a way that excuses Trump (and themselves) of all responsibility for his ostentatious and deliberate destruction of NATO 👇, this rogues gallery of cowards, traitors, and frauds faces their greatest test of fealty yet:
Having shrugged at the needless destruction of the world’s greatest military alliance, they now face a crossroads with even higher stakes. And this time the clock is ticking. Is Jay Nordlinger right? Will there never be a “too far”? Are GOP elites prepared to cosign mass murder, war crimes, and global catastrophe to avoid facing the music and accepting the hideous role they’ve played in selling out the Republic to its enemies to cover their asses and preserve their seats at the table? Is there a way back? Or is there only the abyss? Time may soon tell.
Judah Rosenthal was the character played by Martin Landau in Woody Allen’s 1989 comedy-drama Crimes and Misdemeanors. He delivers this line during a moment of personal moral crisis after having arranged for the murder of an unstable woman (Anjelica Houston) with whom he’d had an affair after she threatened to tell his wife.