Dominic Green

Nietzsche would have been great at Twitter. He excelled at epigrams, which are to philosophy as the fortune-cookie motto is to Chinese takeout, and he loved to hate. Scholars divide as to whether his epigrammatic excellence came from using a typewriter — he was the earliest philosophical adopter of this technology — or because he was no good at joined-up thinking but very good at vituperating about the news. It was Nietzsche who spotted that the emerging theme of democratic society was not the reign of reason and universal brotherhood, but the ‘stupidification of the world’ and resentment. He called it ressentiment. Philosophy goes better in French, and Nietzsche had lately turned against Wagner, anti-Semitism and German nationalism.

The Biden administration intends to notify Facebook about ‘problematic’ postings, such as questioning the COVID-19 vaccine. Jen Psaki, the White House spokesperson, suggests that if you’re problematic on one social-media site, you should be banned from them all. Big Tech, meet Big Sister. I suppose this is still America. If Donald Trump had said he’d use extra-legal leverage over Big Tech, most of the media would be crying ‘fascism’. Brian Stelter would decry an unprecedented assault on the First Amendment. Jeffrey Toobin would bang one out about bypassing Congress and the law. Minor academics would op-ed in the New York Times about the classically fascist ‘collusion’ between government and big business.

The Republicans need to separate the MAGA from the message. The Democrats are already doing this. While congressional Republicans pander to MAGA, which is now a racket for conspiracy theorists and the con artists who exploit them, the Biden administration is lifting Trump’s policies and stealing the Republicans’ thunder. Trump’s ‘America First’ has become Biden’s ‘Made in America’. The Democrats now offer almost everything that Trump promised — and sometimes more. At home, infrastructure spending, rebuilding the industrial base and reshoring essential supply chains; plus subsidies for the wallet-sapping disaster that is Obamacare.

They’ve finally found a way to make Joe Biden look young and vigorous: put him next to a Jimmy Carter doll. It’s elder abuse, though I’m not sure who’s being abused here. I had thought that the most alarming image of this year would be the one of the QAnon shaman at the Speaker’s desk in the Capitol Building. But the photo of Joe and Dr Jill with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter really is a riot. The Bidens look like ventriloquists, dropping by a seniors’ center to cheer up the inmates. The Carters look like dolls, awaiting the insertion of their owners’ hands so that they can jump into jerky life. This is the official photo, selected by the Carter Center. We have to wonder what obscenities are contained in the outtakes.