The Calvinball Effect
How liberal elites ushered in a world of chaos
Calvin from "Calvin and Hobbes" was an entitled little shit. At least, that was my opinion at 12 years old. Most of the time, he wasn't so bad, but my evidence of his rottenness derived from the occasional "Calvinball" strips. In them, Calvin plays a ball game with rules made up on the fly, adjusted to benefit their inventor. Each rule is countered by another invented specifically to thwart it, such as “opposite zones” and “invisible sectors.” Points are often not represented by numbers. In one panel, the score is "oogy to boogy." The only constant is that no two games of Calvinball can repeat rules. As a grown-up, I now find these strips endearing, but as a kid, Calvin reminded me of other children I played with who liked to bend the mores of childhood socialization to advantage themselves and disadvantage others.
As Donald Trump, our great national embarrassment of a once and future leader, strolls back into power with ambitions to reshape America in his fascist and bediapered image, I've been considering the roll of referees in society. In one particularly memorable "Calvin and Hobbes" Sunday edition, the two titular characters are playing a game of football that quickly devolves into chaos, with Calvin remarking, "Sooner or later, all our games turn into Calvinball." Of course, the devolution from organized sport into disordered childishness is only possible because no one is supervising Calvin to ensure he follows the rules of football. As he bends those rules to suit him, Hobbes responds in kind, and, before long, rules become unrecognizable, then cease to exist.
Trump, whether conscious of it or not, recognized a decade ago that America had long been playing a game of football with no referees. Our centuries-old republic was a patchwork of norms that only remained unbroken because no one had realized they were (to stay on theme) paper tigers. Possessed of extreme brazenness and no conscience, Trump was uniquely positioned to exploit that vulnerability. He violated norms with all the glee of a dog who pees on the rug because it does not fear discipline, and then progressed to breaking laws, just as he had for the duration of his career in real estate. Yet, even as he and the Republican party he quickly brought under his thumb proved time and again that Calvinball was the order of the day, Democratic politicians and the liberal elite doggedly refused to step outside the rules of football. With each hallowed norm shattered, they clutched their pearls and wrote op-eds about how you can't just do whatever it is Trump and the GOP were dauntlessly doing.
It is not a coincidence that Trump's rise came at a time when trust in American institutions was plummeting among average citizens. Much like a game of football, the delicate ecosystem of society only functions when everyone agrees to be bound by a set of rules and to settle debates by deferring to referees.
The immediate counter is that our referees deserved to lose our trust. Be they the courts or the police on one side or legacy mainstream media on the other, they were (and are) untrustworthy, having degraded themselves from the inside. That decline has long been evident to anyone paying attention. But it appears to have blindsided the institutional elites themselves, who still seem unable to reckon with the fact that they proved completely insufficient as a bulwark against fascism.
A decade after Donald Trump made his infamous descent on a Trump Tower escalator to smash open a Pandora’s box and unleash the worst devils of our American subconscious upon a nation primed for precisely his brand of chaos, liberal elites continue to write articles that attempt to explain why they were unprepared for him. These always come off like that one friend of yours who is shocked they got played by a man whose scumminess was visible from outer space, and they are undone by one simple fact: Trump is a fucking moron. His lawbreaking and norm-shattering has been done in the manner of a cat knocking a glass off a countertop. He does these things because they are instinctual for him, and because no one has pulled the glass out of his reach. He does it for the same reason Calvin makes up rules in Calvinball.
Now, as Trump chooses his incoming administration, we are living in a Calvinball world. There is nobody too scandal-ridden, no one too odious or moronic to work in a Trump White House. If anything, those qualities are qualifications, proof that the appointee knows there are no inviolable shibboleths and will act as a ruthless emissary of Trump's fascist agenda. The rules have ceased to matter, new ones are being written on the fly, and the score is Trump: oogy, democracy: boogy.
There is no question that the next who-knows-how-many years will be filled with the destruction of so much progress made over the past century. It will be filled with sycophancy and lies from those Trump installs in power, and they will act with unimaginable cruelty in service of his agenda—and their own. We must, of course, resist at all costs, but we must also look to what comes after, because there is always an after.
The liberal order we lived under until now was created in the wake of WWII, after humanity had reached an unthinkable place. Millions lay dead from war and genocide, and weapons now had the power to destroy nearly all life on our pale blue dot. What rose from the ashes was orders of magnitude better than the chaos it emerged from, but it was a half-measure driven by craven plutocracy, designed to allow the illegitimately powerful to remain so. Its stated principles—democracy, universal human rights—were enlightened, but hollow. People saw through them within a century, and once their trust had lapsed, a vacuum emerged that perfectly catered to the tendencies of a figure like Trump. Now, here we are, facing the potential end of the American experiment.
Perhaps the most evident seed of the postwar order's destruction was its full-throated embrace of neoliberal capitalism. Economist Thomas Friedman, a favorite of the 1990s Clinton crowd, crowed over a concept he dubbed the "Golden Arches theory of conflict prevention," which stated that two countries with McDonald's restaurants would never enter an armed conflict with one another. Obviously, a Big Mac doesn't turn someone into a pacifist, and the truth was that McDonald's simply doesn't open restaurants in unstable countries. But liberal elites were so desperate to believe that capitalism itself was the magic cure to global conflict, they never stopped to consider whether they were being driven delusional by power and greed. This, despite the fact that World War II had emerged under the conditions of capitalism.
After society emerges from the fascistic fever currently gripping it, we will once again need to build a system that acts as a bulwark against the worst excesses of human nature. By that point, my hope is that the failure of neoliberalism and the postwar order will be undeniable to the vast majority of people, no matter how loudly elites beg for a return to it. In its place, we can build something truly equitable for all, with trustworthy referees who themselves have checks and balances placed against them. If we do not, this cycle will repeat again.
In the meantime, remember: the rules are made up, and the points don’t matter.
—M