Putting this here for the future reference. And I need to read more W.H. Auden.
Auden is an antidote to Trump and to our times. He despised celebrity; he ran from fame and money; he never “signaled” his many virtues to anyone; in fact, he went to great lengths to hide them from view. “Once at a party I met a woman who belonged to the same Episcopal church that Auden attended in the 1950s, St. Mark’s in-the-Bowery in New York,” Mendelson recalls. “She told me that Auden heard that an old woman in the congregation was suffering night terrors, so he took a blanket and slept in the hallway outside her apartment until she felt safe again.”
Most important of all, he never succumbed to the belief that evil was always on the other side, that those fighting for the good weren’t also capable of great wickedness, and self-deception. He was not one of those, in Mendelson’s words, “who can say of themselves without irony, ‘I am a good person,’ who perceive great evils only in other, evil people whose motives and actions are entirely different from their own … He observed to friends how common it was to find a dedicated anti-fascist who conducted his erotic life as if he were invading Poland.” I love that line. But what he saw most potently was that victims are also capable of becoming victimizers, that the best intentions come wrapped in the crumpled tissue of human fallibility, that “I and the public know / What all schoolchildren learn, / Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return.” He was, like Orwell, a patron saint of anti-tribalism.
There is a political answer to Trump: Vote against him and his GOP backers wherever and whenever you can. But if this is not merely to replace one fever with another, there must also be an intellectual struggle to recover moderation and toleration, and a spiritual effort to find the peace no politics will ever provide. Yes, one side — the red — has a more urgent need for self-doubt and self-criticism than the other. But the moment we decide that our side has no need of uncertainty or perspective or moderation at all is the moment liberal democracy dies.
tinfoilparachute 