We go to ancient Japan, Star Trek and our two current presidential leads for 2024 to explore the concept of form without substance.
We go to ancient Japan, Star Trek and our two current presidential leads for 2024 to explore the concept of form without substance.
Form without Substance: Tojo, Trump, Biden, and the Squire of Gothos
January 2024
So I wanted to begin by thanking all you for downloading my podcast, hope you have a great 2024, and check out all of the podcasts produced as I am approaching nearly 200 podcasts. And on with the show.
“Worthiness is what gives meaning and fulfillment. Success without fulfillment is empty. That’s like good looks without goodness. In life, we need substance over form, not form over substance.”
Shiv Khera
“Form and Substance are opposite ends of the same coin.”
Ronald Reagan
In the article “Shogun and The Japanese Emperor,” written in 2021 by Emi Noguchi, a blogger and freelance writing instructor, the author writes of the first official Japanese Shogunate:
The beginning of the Kamakura Shogunate in 1192 marked the waning of the Emperor’s once-real power to a purely symbolic status. In its place rose the warrior class. The transition was the fallout of a years-long war between two clans. Their respective colors, red and white, would take on a national significance for centuries to come.
Despite the rise of subsequent warlords and several prominent Japanese families vying for power, the form of Japan as an empire overseen by a divine Emperor continued for nearly a thousand years up to the end of World War II. Even when the powerful Tokugawa clan took power over the whole of Japan in the early 1600s, they still styled themselves Shoguns, but never Emperors. The concept of the Emperor overseeing Japan was a form without substance.
Even the Meiji Restoration of 1868 was supposedly about the Tokugawa Shogunate losing its power and the Emperor being restored to the supreme governing position. In reality, the restoration moved political power from the feudal bureaucracy of the Tokugawas to an oligarchy of disaffected samurai who wished to bring modernization to the Empire. In the view of the new rulers, the Emperor of Japan continued to serve solely as the spiritual authority of the nation, but his ministers governed the nation in his name.
Emperors previous to the Meiji period were housed in Kyoto and were rarely, if ever, seen by the general population. Yet during the 20th century, Emperor Hirohito’s portrait was distributed among the people of Japan, and he would visit troops and be seen in public. These appearances still had two key aspects: he was considered divine and did not make the decisions. For example, the declaration of war of Japan against the United States, delivered immediately after the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, was delivered in Hirohito’s name, but the man who actually ordered the declaration was Prime Minister Hideki Tojo.
Sometimes, the form of power or ideas can be slightly more subtle. The official name of China is the People’s Republic of China. This brings to mind Voltaire’s quip about a 1,000-year-old state located in central Europe, “The Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” The people do not rule China; it is not a true Republic, but at least China is China.
Cuba does not even contain the fiction of the people as it is known as the Republic of Cuba. It may have the form of a Republic, but the substance is a dictatorship.
Why do people like me like Star Trek? There are space battles and cool aliens, but what made the original show so lasting was the personalities and the ideas. For differentiated temperaments, we have the leader Kirk, part diplomat, part warrior, part lover, and fully the Captain, McCoy, the emotional idealogue, and Spock, the logician. The show only lasted for three years, but back in the 1960s, a season was, in fact, a season. Sorry, Netflix and all you streamers, but ten shows, much less six, is not a season.
Star Trek has 29 shows just in its first year, and the 17th among them, the Squire of Gothos, played with the idea of form and substance. In this episode, the crew of the Starship Enterprise is taken prisoner by a being so powerful that he makes planets move at his whim and can create matter from energy by simply thinking things into existence. But Trelane, the super alien, is very interested in humanity’s violent past. He styles himself a general and loves Napoleon to the point where he creates an 18th-century parlor for the crew. But Trelane has a weakness.
Consider this exchange between the Captain, McCoy, and Spock.
McCoy: You should taste his food. Straw would taste better than his meat and water a hundred times better than his brandy - nothing has any taste at all.
Spock: It may be unappetizing, doctor, but it is logical.
McCoy: Ah, there’s that magic word again. Does your logic find this fascinating, Mr. Spock?
Spock: No, ‘fascinating’ is a word I use for the unexpected. In this case, I should think ‘interesting’ would suffice.
Kirk: You don’t find this unexpected, Mister Spock?
SPOCK: That his food has no taste, his wine no flavor? No. It simply means that Trelane knows all of the Earth forms but none of the substance.
Sadly, the recent Star Trek movies by JJ Abrams do not understand the unique nature of the show. His Star Trek is Star Wars, with the ship-to-ship battles and daring dos of the crew members. Yet, lacking ideas and because his movies were one action set piece to another, he never gave his characters time to breathe.
The recent Star Trek movies were the form of Star Trek but not the substance.
And our politics in 2024 are form without substance, in which the dominant factions claim to be one thing but are actually quite something else.
The most obvious example is Donald Trump. Back in 2015, he used the example of Reagan, who was once a Democrat, to note that though Trump had voted Democrat, he was, in reality, a conservative, “When you get down to it, I am a conservative person. I am by nature a somewhat conservative person.”
After getting elected president, many agreed with Trump’s assessment, “I think he has conservative instincts, and I think he is starting to govern as a conservative. But up until he started making those decisions as president, it was hard to know,” said Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Political Action Committee.
Trump’s record, in many regards, proved that. One example was the effort to curb government regulation. According to Trump’s official white house statement,
President Trump’s actions to roll back regulations are lifting American families and businesses. Between FY 2017 and FY 2019, the Trump Administration has cut nearly eight regulations for every new, significant regulation—more than fulfilling the promise of Executive Order 13771 to cut two regulations for every new regulation imposed.
There was the appointment of conservative justices, a tax cut, and progress on Israeli relations with the Arab Gulf States.
Yet, there were aspects of Trump’s presidency that were not conservative. He is pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Trade Deal, or TPP, to name one. The protectionist Trump nixed a deal whose ultimate goal would have been to marginalize China. Then, he ejected NAFTA for the USMCA, a move beloved by progressives. In a 2019 Washington Post article, the Democrats crowed about the bill.
The revised trade agreement with Canada and Mexico won the enthusiastic support of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka on Tuesday, with the union’s backing signaling to many Republicans that the trade deal was perhaps not in their favor. Pelosi told other House Democrats during a closed-door meeting Tuesday that “we ate their lunch,” referring to multiple changes White House officials made to the trade deal in recent weeks to win the support from labor groups.
But lately, in his 2023 remarks, Trump has moved away from conservativism. I will define conservatism here in the Burke, Kirk, Sowell, and Will vein. One of the tenets of conservatism is a belief in institutions. Even those rife with liberalism, ranging from the ACLU to the FBI, need to be reformed, but not abolished. Trump would fire legions of civil servants to be replaced by loyalists. But playing some chess here, another precedent would enable the next Democrat to do the same.
And of the institutions themselves, writing in the Conversation, Karyn Amira notes,
Trump’s rhetoric persistently attacked the free press, the Department of Justice, the FBI – often considered a conservative organization – military leadership, and the integrity of the electoral system. Some of these organizations enforce justice and hold government accountable through free speech, ideals embedded in the conservative principles laid out by Republican Rep. Mike Johnson for the Republican Study Committee in 2018.
Before you know it, we have the odious spoils system of the mid-19th century.
I mentioned the tax cut. Trump did very little to cut the government commiserate with that cut, so the deficit ballooned to $8 trillion on his watch. A Democrat would be so proud. And as Reagan once said, “There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.” Adds Amira,
Using the bully pulpit and his presidential powers, Trump threatened retaliation against companies that moved jobs overseas, increased the national debt, instigated trade wars by raising tariffs, and gave subsidies to farmers who were harmed in the trade war process. These behaviors and policies also fly in the face of conservative principles.
Trump also carries the form of a tough guy, a fighter. Yet, under his watch, our adversaries were either unaffected by his actions or experienced prosperity. Ranging from China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea, none were inhibited nor intimidated by the Trump presidency.
And in all of these cases, he would double down on his first term. And those conservative victories, particularly the tax cut and SCOTUS justices? They were enabled by the likes of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, who have been subject to the most whithering of commentary from Trump up to making fun of McConnell’s wife’s Chinese ethnicity. It should be noted that Elaine Chao served as transportation secretary during the Trump administration.
As recently as November 29, 2023, Trump stated that he would use “the government to “come down hard” on MSNBC and “make them pay” for its critical coverage of Republicans after previously vowing to investigate parent company Comcast if elected.” This media intervention, seemingly a positive given the nature of left-wing media, creates an alarming precedent as any future Democratic president would feel entitled to such interventions not just on Fox or National Review but on Truth Social and perhaps X as well. In the Obama administration, I understand that using Officials who conducted electronic surveillance of both New York Times reporter James Risen and Fox News correspondent James Rosen in an effort to identify their sources was just such an act. But the right becoming the left is not the answer.
And increasingly, right-wing media has only the form of conservatism. Here is a quote from Elizabeth Warren, “libertarian economics is a scam perpetrated by the beneficiaries of the economic system.” And that William F. Buckley was a “villain.” Ok, I am indulging a ruse valued listener, and let me apologize in advance. Warren did not say these things; Tucker Carlson did, but can you tell the difference? In fact, Carlson has supported many of Warren’s economic positions in the past.
Earlier, I quoted Matt Schlapp of CPAC. I am old enough to remember when George Will and Jonah Goldberg were CPAC speakers. In today’s CPAC, they would not make it to the stage without being spit upon. Putting Schlapp’s personal conduct aside (which admittedly is difficult), that Ron DeSantis chose not to attend this year’s event, and little doubt that if there was a fall version, no Nikki Haley, shows the state of the “conservative” political action committee. Given the new populist nature, perhaps the right substance to form might be the Populist Political Action Committee, or even more precisely, TPAC.
In an article entitled “Trump and the Conservative Movement” Author Andrzej Bryk is correct about one thing: “United under Regan by anti-communism, the US Conservative movement is now deeply divided. This division was already visible in the so-called Sarah Palin’s conservative populism and the Tea Party movement.” But then Byrk gets something very wrong, “Trump’s candidacy referred to the tradition of American conservatism, appealing to the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and national pride and supporting the idea of metaphysical freedom, ontologically rooted in being greater than the autonomous will of the individual.”
One of the core tenets of the Founding Fathers, and conservatism in itself, is the reduction of the state’s power. Trump has repeatedly said this year that he would use the state’s power to exact, in his own words, “retribution.”
The Democrats also favor a specific form of which there is little substance. They are the party of the downtrodden, the Forgotten Man as their patron Saint of progressivism, Franklin D Roosevelt noted in the 1930s. The substance is something else. During COVID, we saw those who could work from home, the professional class, continue with their work while those who had to travel were penalized. The Democrats are big supporters of the Teacher’s Unions, and again, during COVID, this support was at the expense of student education. The democrats would reorder parts of society for the .01% of the population who are trans. I can argue all the trans issues in another podcast, but allowing males to compete in female sports is not for the betterment of the girls.
The left claims the mantle of professing advancement for African Americans. Yet in two key areas, defunding the police and support for public teacher’s unions are detrimental to the very group they purportedly are trying to help. In one case, it exposes African American communities to greater crime, and in the second, it keeps African Americans in poorly performing schools.
And their current leader needs the substance of his form. The latter is that of a kindly, grandfatherly figure who gets the working man and is moderate in his politics. Uh, no.
Let’s talk about the image of Grandpa Joe. In a piece entitled “Joe Biden’s brand is being tested like never before” by NBC News, a conservative outlet, Jonathan Allen and Natasha Korecki
Some of the president’s Democratic allies are worried about potential fallout from a confluence of family drama spilled into public view and Republican attacks that cut at the bedrock of Biden’s longtime political appeal.
Republicans also say Biden’s Justice Department tried to give Hunter Biden a “sweetheart” plea deal on federal tax and firearm possession charges — a deal that fell apart last month after a judge questioned its terms. At the same time, a federal special counsel is investigating Biden’s handling of classified documents following his two terms as vice president.
In a matter of a much more personal nature, Biden recently acknowledged for the first time that he has a seventh grandchild — Navy Joan Roberts, the 4-year-old daughter of Hunter Biden, who wrote in a memoir that he doesn’t remember his “encounter” with her mother.
The recent revelations with Hunter Biden really are in conflict with the current perception of his image of being squeaky clean,” Mike Noble, the CEO of the nonpartisan Noble Predictive Insights and a pre-eminent pollster in the Southwest, said of the president.
Regarding the form of moderate Joe, his support for a $6 trillion infrastructure bill, Lina Kahn at the FTC, or the continued presence of Julie Su at Labor and a host of other policies shows that Joe is in lockstep with the progressives on every issue save support for Israel. And even in that essential conflict, his support wavers at the time of this recording.
Yet I have been opposing progressivism for years since my first presidential vote cast decades ago, marching in solidarity with those supporting Scott Walker against the WI Teachers Unions in 2010 until today. Yet after 2020, I find myself in this cleft stick between progressivism, no choice for me, and the populists now running the GOP.
Many Trump supporters feel I will fall in line in November this year. And I recognize that of the roughly 30 elections in which I have cast a vote, I am still waiting to see the ideal candidate, nor will I. But when the form of something is so different from the substance I hold dear, I have little choice but not to support that form, which is false. Another quote from the Squire of Gothos encapsulates my feelings about Trump and why, after voting for him in 2016 and 2020, I will not in 2024. When the character of Trelane senses disapproval from Spock, the latter explains, “I object to you. I object to intellect without discipline and power without constructive purpose.”
The Squire of Gothos ends in a reveal that Trelane was both a super being and a child of super beings. His behaviors were not borne out of great power but childishness, pique, and brattiness. As his super parents explain to Kirk:
TRELANE: You always stop me when I’m having fun.
FATHER: You’re disobedient and cruel. We’ve told you before.
MOTHER: Time to come in now, Trelane.
TRELANE: But I don’t want to come in, and I won’t. I’m a general, and I won’t listen to you.
FATHER: Enough, Trelane. Come along.
FATHER: Captain, we regret that the life paths of yourself and your companions have been disturbed.
Kirk: Who are you? Who is Trelane?
MOTHER: You must forgive our child. The fault is ours for indulging him too much. He will be punished.
This 1967 production feels just a bit too prophetic for my well-being. Unfortunately, though they have been indulged to the extreme, no one has given much discipline to the likes of Trump or Carlson. Trelane was a bratty child. The form of Trump as an effective, manly, competent figure is as much a fiction as Trelane himself.