The place is our Tiananmen sq. ‘Tank Man’ who can stand as much as Trump? | Corey Robin

Everyone’s ready for that one particular person to face as much as Donald Trump. Not simply that one particular person. There are numerous such folks. You may examine them in each newspaper. However that one particular person with actual energy who’s prepared to threat one thing expensive in defiance. That one college president who’ll say, fuck you and your cash. That one Democrat who’ll say, fuck you and your risk to my re-election or that of my social gathering. Everybody’s on the lookout for our Tank Man, staring down a column of tanks, all by himself, in Tiananmen Sq..

Why don’t we see that particular person? The place is our Tank Man? (And, no, I don’t assume Cory Booker doing a marathon-length filibuster counts.)

The explanation we don’t see that particular person is that we’re asking the unsuitable query. There’s a motive there are so few lonely people prepared to face as much as the machine. It’s not simply easy cowardice or craven self-interest, although which may clarify a few of it. There’s one thing deeper at work.

It’s arduous to take a threat, nevertheless it’s particularly arduous whenever you really feel like there’s no level, that you just’ll fail, or worse, that you just’ll be the one one on the market doing it. Once you’re the one one doing it, you run a threat a lot worse than failure. You run the danger of doing one thing pointless. All the things in our nature cuts towards the grain of pointlessness. Sure, historical past would possibly keep in mind you, however what’s historical past? To threat pointlessness is to threat foolishness, frivolousness, fatuity, inanity. It could actually even really feel like ethical slovenliness.

Take Roy Huggins, one in all my favourite villain-heroes of the blacklist period. You’ve in all probability by no means heard of him. In his time, he was a screenwriter, producer and director of some observe. He was answerable for The Fugitive and The Rockford Information. He additionally named names, after initially refusing to cooperate with the federal government.

Why did he do it? He had numerous causes. However this one has at all times stayed with me:

Once you’re considering of changing into a hero, you are feeling like a slob. You are feeling, do you actually have a proper to do this?

It’s a perplexing query: do I’ve the correct to grow to be a hero? One doesn’t often consider heroism with no consideration. Why does Huggins body the query that manner? As a result of he thinks of heroism as some form of extravagance, some form of selfishness, a type of grandstanding that comes awfully near vainness.

The thinker Thomas Hobbes had some ideas on this matter, how simply the hunt for glory, which had historically been thought-about a advantage, might slide into vaingloriousness. And the thinker Max Weber had the same instinct: how simply the tragic hero turns into a type of narcissist, preening in entrance of the mirror.

I feel Huggins is getting at one thing like that slide, from glory to vainglory, from heroism to vainness and narcissism. It’s why he instantly follows up his query on the correct to heroism with the query: do I’ve the correct to be a slob?

That’s what made him afraid. He might think about taking over a heroic act if he thought it would obtain one thing, even in failure. However to assume that the act can be utterly extinguished by failure, by its pointlessness, that was an excessive amount of.

I discover myself occupied with this worry rather a lot. I’ve performed a good quantity of political stuff through the years, a few of it at some price and threat. But it surely was at all times collective and it was at all times meant to work, to achieve success, ultimately, to realize one thing, even in failure. That’s what made it definitely worth the threat.

I’ve at all times hated the romance of heroism, the futile gesture of protest and defiance, notably of the person. It reeks of what Lenin hated about intellectuals, who “undertake the whole lot beneath the solar with out ending something”. He referred to as {that a} type of “slovenliness”, by the way.

However I can see the underside of my dislike. It could actually make you leery of being that solely particular person on the market, and typically that could be what different folks desperately want: simply to see you, anybody, on the market.