Lucy Pulls the Football Away Again
Why Americans keep falling for moral spectacle and economic betrayal
1.
Why do people keep falling for the oldest trick in the book?
Once again, Republicans won an election due, in large part, to the support of lower- and middle-income voters who are hurting economically. And once again — as in 1981, 2001, and 2017 — they have passed a budget plan that will extend tax cuts for the richest 1% of Americans, while slashing services for everyone else (including, probably, Medicaid).
Once again, Lucy has pulled the football away from the Charlie Brown voters who decided the 2024 election and hoped that Trump would help them economically. Surprise!
Now, the budget resolution passed by the House this week is only a broad contour, calling for $2 trillion in spending cuts and $4.5 trillion in tax cuts. (Doing the math, that means adding $2.5 trillion — that’s $2,500,000,000,000 — to the national debt. So much for deficit hawks!) But most of the tax cuts will come from extending Trump’s 2017 tax giveaways to the ultra-rich, leaving little room for anything else. So this is literally the same football-pulling trick that Lucy always plays.
How do they keep getting away with this? Let’s flash back 1,900 years.
In approximately the year 125, the Roman satirist Juvenal wrote that people can be hoodwinked as long as politicians give them pānis et circēnsēs — bread and circuses. Give them that, and politicians can get away with almost anything, including hurting the people who put them there.
Probably the word “circus” connotes mere entertainment, but in Juvenal’s time, it was often a particular kind of entertainment: moral entertainment. Christians, slaves, and foreigners battled one another (and various animals) to the death, as Rome asserted its dominance, degrading those it sought to subjugate. No doubt, it made the Roman mob feel better about themselves — after all, they’re not the ones being oppressed — even as their own lives were being degraded by their leaders.
It's not hard to find contemporary parallels: the “deportation porn” videos on right-wing media of migrants being rounded up and deported, the utter fabrications being spread about transgender people, the vulgarity of any Trump rally. Or, dialing back a few decades, Nixon’s “War on Drugs” which, aide John Erlichman later admitted, was designed to criminalize and vilify Black Americans and leftists. Or Reagan’s moralistic crusades against “welfare queens” and gay people.
Reagan didn’t even have to throw us to the lions; AIDS did the job for him.
Such moral spectacles don’t simply distract from Republicans’ assault on working people. They define what Republican politics are about. As J. Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood wrote during the first Trump administration, Republican populism is “intuitionist”: it appeals to gut feelings, instincts, and irrationality. Democratic liberalism is basically rationalist: it appeals to science, reason, and data.
But rationalism rarely prevails, at least in America. When liberalism has triumphed, it has usually appealed to the affective, emotional capacities of the human mind – think of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or Barack Obama, or even Bill Clinton, who made a tagline out of the phrase “I feel your pain.”
And so, decade after decade, Republicans have used social issues, religious appeals, populist rage, and, yes, racism (coded or overt) to appeal to the hearts of people whose economic livelihoods they proceed to undermine. There’s a library of books about this: Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas from the George W. Bush years (subtitle: “How conservatives won the heart of America”), Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman’s White Rural Rage from last year. But guess who reads these books, and who doesn’t?
Republicans are always going to give the rich a break at the expense of everyone else. Lucy is always going to pull that football away from Charlie Brown. On the level of facts, this is just how it is. But intuitionally, they trusted Trump. He wouldn’t pull the football away, would he?
2.
Now, Republican politics are not as simple as Lucy and Charlie Brown, because while Lucy consistently pulls away the economic football, she does deliver a lot other things.
Consider the multiple constituencies within the modern Republican party — and reflect on how each of them get what they want:
First there are the normal conservatives, neo-cons, and moderates. These are the rational, politically conservative folks who were mostly in charge of the party from the 1950s to the 2010s. They favor business over regulations, lower taxes, smaller government, a strong national defense and foreign policy, and are skeptical of any social engineering. Some are a little extreme, but others are moderate. When I was younger, I used to loathe these people, but now they seem almost quaint—a vestige of an earlier era.
Christians. Until the 1960s, most conservative protestants stayed out of politics, but that changed with the civil rights movement and feminism, and 1980 was the first time their chosen candidate won the election. When asked, they legitimately prioritize social issues over economic ones, though in recent years, with the advent of prosperity gospel and the capitalism-ization of Christ, there’s been less and less of a conflict between the two. But they really do care more about abortion and prayer and “religious liberty” and so on. This population is at least half the Republican base today, though secular media usually does a terrible job of understanding it (let alone communicating with it).
Plutocrats/Oligarchs. In a way, this segment used to overlap with ‘normal conservatives’ but as we’ve now seen, they are a distinct segment that will support any candidate as long as they can get more money, power, and “freedom.” They are doing really, really well right now.
Nationalists. The MAGA base, overlapping somewhat with Christians. They are patriotic, nostalgic, resentful of their loss of status, and above all angry as hell. Some are racist, others less so. This segment is newly ascendant; Reagan and Bush Jr. were apparently true believers, yet the policies they enacted were mostly plutocratic. Until Trump, the party seemed most interested in harnessing nationalist grievance just enough, throwing them red meat but also keeping them on a leash. But not anymore. Some are now overtly anti-democratic, or at least instrumentally anti-democratic, so that the volk can regain their rightful power. Some flirt with violence or white nationalism. Yet nationalists have always been this way: think Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater (“In your heart, you know he’s right” – the ultimate Intuitionist slogan), the John Birch Society. For these people, America is the greatest country on earth – but it’s always been five minutes to midnight.
And finally, the Weirdos. This is a new part of the coalition, comprising Ayn Randian libertarians, transhumanists like Elon Musk, anti-democratic eugenicists like Peter Thiel, diagonalists like the RFK-MAHA crowd, and tech-fash types who think that Curtis Yarvin is brilliant. They are for ‘freedom’ defined as the freedom of the ultra-rich and ultra-powerful to do whatever they want, free from regulation. Some seem to really believe that they, and only they, can save humanity, or at least keep us around long enough to upload our consciousnesses to the AI Matrix. They are into psychedelics, crypto, and AI; they hate wokeness, the Cathedral, and looking hard at the causes of economic or social inequality. They usually don’t see themselves as conservatives, and are often believers in enlightened despotism (as long as they are the ones doing the despotism) apparently unaware of how unenlightened their own ideas are. Memo: success in one industry does not create expertise in everything else.
In Republican politics, whether under a conservative, moderate, or nationalist administration, all these groups get some of what they want. Sometimes there are contradictions: for example, the Christian parts of Project 2025 call for a theocratic authoritarianism, which is quite different from small-government conservatism or libertarianism. We’ll see which prevails. But in every Republican administration, these groups find ways to carve up power, just as different Democratic constituencies do as well.
And of course, there’s Trump, who mostly just cares about Trump, and is happy to cater to all of these constituencies (except RINO moderates, anyway) if it aggrandizes his power. Which it certainly has done.
So, some Charlies get their footballs. But you know the one who doesn’t? The one who actually put Trump in office. Remember, this election wasn’t decided by anti-wokeness or governmental reform — it was decided by the price of eggs, i.e., economic insecurity. And what is being done about that? Nada.
To really help working people’s economic well-being would require things that Republican coalitions are loathe to do: addressing things like education, healthcare, labor law, the minimum wage, transportation, and infrastructure. You’d need higher taxes, not lower ones. Sixty years ago, the top income tax bracket was reduced from 91 percent to 70 percent. Under the 2017-and-2025 tax cut, it’s just 37%. The corporate tax rate went down from 52% to 48%. Now it’s 21%. That’s how the postwar American boom happened — that’s how Boomers got rich and could afford houses. As
put it:
But all that is anathema to the Republican party, its donors, and supporters. So instead of substance, they offer empty promises: Open the plant back up! Fight China! Or they offer rhetoric like Hoover’s “rugged individualism” or talk of personal responsibility, job creators, free markets, and “trickle-down economics” (which doesn’t work). And they cast blame: on immigrants, on “globalists,” on coastal elites.
But of course, words don’t work; policies do. So once they have the votes of middle-class and working-class people, Republicans just pull away the football.
3.
Arguably, at this moment in American history, the threats to constitutional democracy are more salient than issues of economic inequality. The House budget is outrageous, but it won’t destroy America; it will just make tens of millions of people suffer, and further enrich some ultra-rich ones.
But the two may be connected — if things get bad enough.
Generally speaking, when there are compelling stories of suffering, liberal-intuitionist appeals to fairness and compassion have a better chance of prevailing. Think of the Great Depression and the New Deal, or the civil rights movement again, or the fight for gay marriage. This is the logic of civil disobedience: that, for enough people, the conscience can be awakened if things get bad enough.
Could that happen now?
Maybe. Thus far, Bernie Sanders is the only progressive figure who has managed to articulate working-class rage — though even then, a lot of his support has been from educated young people, not the factory workers and farmers who would stand to benefit the most from his policies. But that may be changing. There is some impressive blowback against the Musk/DOGE shredding of government services. There are, just as I’d hoped there would be, compelling stories from park rangers and VA officials and thousands of other real federal workers. There are plenty of Trump supporters already regretting their votes as they realize that the Trump cuts are going to affect them personally, or that Trump’s nationalist policy might not be so good for Palestinians after all.
This does provide a modicum of hope. Trumpism is probably not going to do most of the things that got Trump elected. It will shrink the government, devastate higher education, realign global politics, cause trans kids to kill themselves, accelerate global climate disaster, deregulate, deport migrants, turn back the clock on racial justice, throw political dissidents in jail, cripple the free press, curtail women’s and LGBTQ rights, and rename the Gulf of Mexico. In other words, it will give most of the segments of the Republican coalition what they want.
But will it fix the economy? Highly unlikely. Will it somehow erase a half-century of erosion of America’s manufacturing base? Even less likely. Vibe shift notwithstanding, I’m not sure it can even shift culture in the way that the manosphere wants. In the most optimistic view, the failure of Trumpism to deliver on these fronts might finally get some of his supporters to realize that the age-old Republican bait-and-switch actually does not deliver where it counts.
But here’s why I’m not confident of that.
Why does Charlie Brown keep going for that football? Why doesn’t he understand, as we do, that Lucy’s going to pull it away again?
Commentators (and they are many) have offered many reasons: hope, trust, anger, naivete. Lucy, like a good politician, even rationalizes her cruelty to him, attributing it to tough love (“I’m not your mother, Charlie Brown”), a muscle spasm, revenge, fatalism, even symbolism. “Symbolism, Charlie Brown!” she said in 1996. “The ball! The desire! The triumph! It’s all there.”
I want to suggest another reason.
Remember, Lucy and Charlie are friends. They celebrate holidays together, they play music together, they have all their friends in common. The football kick is only one part of their overall relationship. True, she never lets him kick the ball, but she does give him other things: solace, advice, companionship. They are his pānis et circēnsēs.
And so he is seduced by her, in a way. He deludes himself, maybe even forgets how she has betrayed him so consistently, year after year. She is smiling at him, holding the ball.
And after all, he might say to himself, isn’t Lucy my friend?
Thanks to all of you for your support of this newsletter: this has been a period of significant growth for this project, and I look forward to repaying that support in the form of more features and content in the coming months.
Right now, I’m primarily focused on next week’s symposium on psychedelics in monotheistic traditions, which I’m co-presenting at Harvard on March 5-6. It will stream online — you can sign up here.
In the meantime, here’s a roundup of bad news:
The guys at DeSmog are doing a great job in the extremely depressing field of climate news. Here’s their latest, on Elon Musk’s climate denial crusade. They also did a great job of covering a far-right conference in Europe where the likes of Jordan Peterson and Bari Weiss rubbed shoulders with European fascists and fossil-fuel execs.
- wins headline of the week with “DOGE is the Theranos of Cost-Cutting.” He’s been doing a bang-up job covering Musk’s endless lies and misinformation.
And
has produced a thorough and heartbreaking account of the purge of trans people from the military.
Meanwhile, I’ve had a busy week in the podcast world. I was on 10% Happier with
this week talking about psychedelics and mental health. And I stopped by Judaism Unbound to talk about Israel/Palestine echo chambers.Remember, self-care is an act of spiritual warfare. Don’t give up that fight.
I'm listening to your latest interview on Judaism Unbound. I resonate with so much of your commentary. At the same time, it sure is depressing.