Category: Empire

Potpourri, 11/15/18

1

I never really kissed dating goodbye as a teenager in the mid-2000s — to be honest, I was pretty late in kissing it hello. But like many who were brought up in contact with evangelical culture, I absorbed its tenets almost by osmosis even though I never even read the whole book. Falling in love means sharing a piece of your heart that you’ll never get back. Sex is a slippery slope, generally with disaster at the bottom. Hard decisions could be boiled down to one rule: Keep it chaste. Do things right, though, and you’ll get the reward you deserve. Follow the instructions: results guaranteed.

Christine Emba.

It’s the promise of a fairy tale ending that offends me. Evangelicals lack any tragic sense of life. (Just “pray away the gay,” for instance.)

Or maybe that absence of tragic sense is a besetting American sin. More Emba:

In essence, “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” and its (inevitable, if you think about it) fall represent a mind-set prominent in evangelical culture, but also in American society more broadly.

We insist that meritocracy works and combine it with a valorization of hard work (which itself stems from our country’s majority-Protestant roots). To maintain the story that success is accessible to all, we’ve developed a tendency to seek out and elevate simplistic formulas that we hope come with guarantees. Stay pure until marriage, and your marriage will flourish. Follow the “success sequence,” and you’ll never be poor. Go to the right school, and all career doors will open. Elect the right candidate, and America will be great once more.

But the dark side of all this is that when the formulas fail — as they so often do — it’s you who must have done something wrong. And then it’s up to you to fix it on your own. Bad marriage? You must have screwed around as a teen. Still in public housing? Should have gotten a better job. The if/then mind-set doesn’t take into account how much is actually out of our personal control, or the systemic forces — race, class, family history — that might hold someone back.

It is difficult to counter such an ingrained — and easy — habit of thought. But give him credit: In reevaluating “I Kissed Dating Goodbye,” Harris is modeling one way of doing so — he’s admitting to complexity and engaging directly with others, rather than sending down recommendations from above. Alas, even this admirable attempt won’t undo the harms that his formula caused in the first place.

But let the implosion of a cultural touchstone like “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” serve as a lesson, or at least a warning. The next time we’re tempted toward too-formulaic thinking, we’ll know to take it with a grain of salt. After all, life is rarely so pure.

2

Once upon a time, Protestant congregations had pulpits. This was a form of church furniture, a glorified lectern as it where, behind which pastors read the text for their sermon and preached it to boot. Today, contemporary design of church buildings makes little of fixed places for anyone participating in worship, except for the drummer who may be quarantined in a drum shield.

… as ministers of God’s word, pastors’ actions, including their feet, while communicating a message of such great moment should encourage the idea of permanence. That is one reason for having a pulpit with serious heft. It symbolizes that what goes on in this space is of great significance and enduring value (though some look so permanent that even the coming of the New Heavens and the New Earth will not unsettle them).

The permanence of the word preached is also a reason for ministers to stay in the pocket behind the pulpit and not move around. At best, happy feet is a distraction that calls more attention to the man than his message. At worst, they invite liturgical dance. So if the argument from permanence does not help, maybe the thought of overweight men and women in leotards will assist pastors (some on the rotund side themselves) keep both feet firmly planted behind their congregation’s ample pulpit.

D.G. Hart

3

[S]cientists are … making declarations ex cathedra — as a direct result of intellectual movements that began in humanities scholarship twenty-five years ago.

So for those of you who think that the humanities are marginal and irrelevant, put that in your mental pipe and contemplatively smoke it for a while.

Many years ago the great American poet Richard Wilbur wrote a poem called “Shame,” in which he imagined “a cramped little state with no foreign policy, / Save to be thought inoffensive.”

Sheep are the national product. The faint inscription
Over the city gates may perhaps be rendered,
“I’m afraid you won’t find much of interest here.”

The people of this nation could not be more overt in their humility, their irrelevance, their powerlessness. But …

Their complete negligence is reserved, however,
For the hoped-for invasion, at which time the happy people
(Sniggering, ruddily naked, and shamelessly drunk)
Will stun the foe by their overwhelming submission,
Corrupt the generals, infiltrate the staff,
Usurp the throne, proclaim themselves to be sun-gods,
And bring about the collapse of the whole empire.

Alan Jacobs, the imminent collapse of an empire

4

[W]hen you are told endlessly that there is no meaning to existence, then guess what? You actually start to think that way. And then everything loses its flavor. Everything starts to taste like rice cakes.

… [Y]ou cannot have it both ways. You cannot bleach divinity and Transcendence out of the cosmos and tell everyone that the whole affair is just an aimless and pointless accident, and then turn around and talk to us about the “moral necessity” of this or that urgent social cause.

Larry Chapp via Rod Dreher.

5

From before the election, but when I was otherwise occupied:

Trumpism … is the new normal. It is not going away. And there is no going back. The challenge for the center-right and center-left across the West is to accommodate this new normal in ways that do not empower authoritarianism, provoke constitutional unraveling, or incite civil unrest. And it seems to me that the lesson of the last two years is that the Republican Party is unable and unwilling to perform that function. It has turned itself into a cult behind a figure hostile to liberal democratic norms, responsible government, and any notion of moderation. It is less a political party than a mass movement sustained by shame-free, mendacious propaganda around a man whose articulated values place him more in the company of Putin and Duterte than Merkel and Macron.

The GOP cannot be talked out of their surrender to this strongman. With each rhetorical or policy atrocity, they have attached themselves more firmly to him. The dissenters are leaving; the new members of Congress will be even Trumpier than the old. They have abandoned any serious oversight role. Their singular achievement has been supplying judicial ranks who will not stand in the way of executive power. That was the real issue in the Kavanaugh nomination, as Newt Gingrich blurted out last week. A subpoena for the president from the special counsel would be fought, he promised, all the way to the Supreme Court, which is when we would see “whether or not the Kavanaugh fight was worth it.” This is a party bent on enabling authoritarianism, not restraining it.

That’s why I will vote Democrat next Tuesday. I have many issues with the Democrats, as regular readers well know. None of that matters compared with this emergency. I don’t care, in this instance, what their policies are. I am going to vote for them. I can’t stand most of their leaders and fear their radical fringe. I am going to vote for them anyway. Because it is the only responsible thing there is to do.

…

The Italian leftist, Antonio Gramsci, famously wrote, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” We live in such a time, and we have in front of us one of those morbid symptoms: the current Republican Party. You know what to do.

Andrew Sullivan.

Or as William Blake put it:

what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I’m not at all certain that “judicial ranks … will not stand in the way of executive power” or that such was the aim of confirming them, but Sullivan otherwise is right about the abasement of the GOP, and the House has indeed flipped to the Democrats.

I wrote last week that the midterms would finally tell us what this country now is. And with a remarkable turnout — a 50-year high for a non- presidential election, no less — we did indeed learn something solid and eye-opening. We learned that the American public as a whole has reacted to the first two years of an unfit, delusional, mendacious, malevolent, incompetent authoritarian as president … with relative equanimity. The net backlash is milder than it was against Clinton or Obama (and both of them went on to win reelection).

…

What I take from this is that Trump really does have a cultlike grip on a whole new population of voters, as well as the reliable Republican voters of the past. That’s not just 42 percent of the country (to use Trump’s approval rating); it’s a motivated 42 percent. And what Trump has successfully done, by corralling right-wing media, tweeting incessantly, dominating the discourse, tending so diligently to his base, and holding rally after rally, is keep that engagement going. Most presidents are interested in governing and sometimes take their eye off the ball politically. Trump is all politics and all salesmanship all the time. And it works. If he can demonstrate this in the midterms, imagine what his reelection campaign will be like.

…

I’ve been razzed a little for using the term “existential threat” to describe Trump two and a half years ago. But I used it in a specific context: He was and remains such a threat to liberal democracy. Not democracy as a whole. Strongmen can win election after election with big majorities without rigging the vote. A single political party can co-opt the judiciary, or capture the Senate, by democratic means, for illiberal ends. I mean by liberal democracy one in which pluralism is celebrated, power is widely distributed, justice is dispensed without regard to politics, the press is free and respected, minorities protected, and where an opposition has a chance to win real, governing power. The space for this in America has significantly shrunk these past two years and this election has only consolidated that new status quo.

Andrew Sullivan

I’ve detested the Republican party long enough now that my reflex to cringe at Democrat victories passes very quickly, replaced by a resigned feeling of “we are soooooo screwed!” — no matter which major party wins.

6

When you obsess about a problem, you have less energy and passion to pursue solutions. When you fret over every outrage, you elevate those outrages. Stories trend because consumers engage with them, clicking and sharing them, not because the news media dictates that they trend.

I think it would be a solid and beneficial step for us all to simply come to the realizations: Trump is going to Trump. He’s going to lie. He’s going to wink at the racists and Nazis. He’s going to demean women. He’s going to embarrass this country. It’s all going to happen.

Nevertheless, we can take this stand unequivocally: It is all unacceptable and we stand in opposition to it. It is not normal and must never be met as such.

But we must also focus on the future.

Charles Blow

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Troll farming

“Have we ever tried to meddle in other countries’ elections?” Laura Ingraham asked former CIA Director James Woolsey this weekend.

With a grin, Woolsey replied, “Oh, probably.”

“We don’t do that anymore though?” Ingraham interrupted. “We don’t mess around in other people’s elections, Jim?”

“Well,” Woolsey said with a smile, “only for a very good cause.”

(Pat Buchanan, who, for the record, I’m aware has gotten “pretty far out there”)

[I]f Putin’s mischief-making constituted an act of war against the United States, then the U.S. has committed acts of war against an astonishingly long list of countries since the end of World War II. One study estimates that we interfered with no fewer than 81 elections in 45 nations from 1946 to 2000. Such efforts have been so brazen and uncontroversial that former CIA Director James Woolsey recently felt comfortable laughing about them with Laura Ingraham on Fox News.

This doesn’t mean that we should respond to Putin’s program of manipulation with indifference. Far from it. But it does mean that a response of self-righteous indignation is risible. To treat such meddling as an act of war on the part of Russia is either to invoke a blatant double standard that permits the U.S. to do things we stridently denounce in others — or it’s to admit that our own actions have been far more pernicious than we like to think. We definitely need to protect the integrity of our elections, but we should do so without placing ourselves unconvincingly on the moral high ground.

(Damon Linker)

If our meddling in other nations’ elections comes as a surprise to you, you really need to get out more.

The indignation and exaggeration about Russian election meddling disgusts me for reasons too numerous to list (well, some of them are at the sub-articulate level, too), but hypocrisy tops the list. Damon Linker is exactly right that we need to respond, but we make ourselves absurd by feigning clean hands. STFU and do what must be done.

Much as I detest 45, trying to portray him as a Manchurian Candidate is absurd. He serves no master save his own massive ego. Even mammon and mistresses are just means to stoke that fire.

UPDATE:

The astonishing thing about Donald Trump’s response to Robert Mueller’s recent indictments is his inability to recognize that Russia’s interference in the 2016 election is about something bigger than him. Look closely at Trump’s tweets.

February 16: “Russia started their anti-US campaign in 2014, long before I announced that I would run for President. The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong – no collusion!”

February 17: “General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems. Remember the Dirty Dossier, Uranium, Speeches, Emails and the Podesta Company!”

February 18: “I never said Russia did not meddle in the election, I said “it may be Russia, or China or another country or group, or it may be a 400 pound genius sitting in bed and playing with his computer.” The Russian “hoax” was that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia – it never did!”

Each tweet makes basically the same point: “Sure, Russia may have tried to undermine American democracy. But what really matters is that I never colluded with Putin and won the presidency fair and square.” Even if you believe that Trump is right—that his campaign never assisted Russia’s efforts to swing the election in his favor and that Russia’s efforts had no material effect on its outcome—the narcissism is breathtaking.

(Peter Beinart, The Atlantic, who then goes off the rails by implying that what Russia did was the equivalent of Pearl Harbor or 9/11)

Also, don’t forget the Time magazine story alluded to here.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.

Trump, Russia, Poland and The West

I’ve figured all along that Team Trump was guilty of something in this regard. You don’t get so cozy with a Russian made man like Paul Manafort, not if you have the ethics of Donald Trump, and not get your hands dirty in some way. The problem so far is that much of the Trump-Russia speculation in the media has gotten out ahead of the known facts. That problem is rapidly going away, and may have just done so.

Here’s the thing that dogs me, and that’s a measure of my own cynicism about Trump: I’m struggling to care about this story at this point. Me, I’ve priced this corruption into my estimation of the man. He is morally unfit to be president. By the time his presidency is over, he will have made Richard Nixon and Warren G. Harding, previously thought to be considered the two most corrupt American presidents, look like Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Green Jeans (sorry, Millennials; you have to be of a certain age to get the reference).

I guess it’s Trump fatigue. He has so lowered the bar on presidential behavior that this latest revelation comes across as just one more damn thing.

(Rod Dreher) I can’t say I’m with Rod on this one. I have not assumed “that Team Trump was guilty of something” with regard to Russia, nor do I think that the meeting of Manafort, Junior and Natasha Fatale is a smoking gun.

Analogy: 30+ years ago, we suffered a very disappointing loss in a Federal civil jury trial. As was then routine, the Judge ordered parties and counsel not to contact jurors. We didn’t. But a friend of our client, who had sat through the trial and was not subject to the Order, did somehow make contact, not at our instigation, and brought us information we couldn’t ignore. We filed a motion, were smacked down for trying to impeach the jury’s verdict, and even were rebuked by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of appeals for having made the contact ourselves — a falsehood unsupported by any evidence — in violation of the trial court Order.

If I had it to do over again, I could not do it otherwise, even if I knew I’d be falsely accused and “convicted” by a judicial rebuke.

So I’m sympathetic, in bare-knuckled context of politics, with willingness to listen to any source that bodes to help. If Team Hillary had been approached by the same lawyer, promising to dish dirt on The Donald, I suspect they’d have sent Leon Panetta to Natasha with flowers and chocolates.

I have changed my views on another political-ish topic within the last week, though.

I had assumed that we’re still demonizing Russia through a failure of imagination, particularly on the part of Republicans (who were more hawkish during the cold war) — that we, or the GOP at least, needed someone to demonize, and that Russian would fit the bill admirably.

I’m now inclined — after Trump’s Warsaw speech, the reactions it provoked, and my idiosyncratic processing of that all — to think that we’re still demonizing Russia for the more specific reason that it represents the major more-or-less Western, more-or-less modern, power center that doesn’t buy our “universalist” dream that love of liberal democracy burns intensely, if secretly, in every human breast. Cynically or not, Putin “is positioning himself as the world’s leading defender of traditional values,” and notwithstanding domestic political prattle from what passes for The Right in America, genuinely traditional values are antithetical to our vaunted capitalist economic dynamism.

For that reason at least, demonizing Russia is a bipartisan consensus. Call that a “measure of my own cynicism” if you like.

We could talk at length about how both Republicans and Democrats in Washington have over the last 20 years or so supported policies that have benefited Wall Street interests at the expense of the common good. I’m not sure if you can still watch it on the PBS website, but in 2009, Frontline aired an episode called “The Warning”, about how a relatively minor government regulator, back during the late 1990s, warned Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, Clinton economic adviser Larry Summers, and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, that the derivatives market threatened to crash the entire economy. They all shut her down. Didn’t want to hear it. Wall Street was making too much money (and note well, the GOP Congressional leadership was fully on board with Team Clinton in this respect). We all remember what eventually happened in 2007-08. How many bankers went to jail over it, or paid any kind of professional price? How many Washington politicians?

I don’t think many, if any, laws were broken. But that doesn’t mean the corruption did not go deep.

(Dreher, whose whole column is worth reading. Don’t miss his comments about Obama’s personal rectitude combined with his willingness to impose damnable lies as destructive public policy).

As long as we’re on Trump, more or less, let’s go back to Warsaw and the reactions.

Not all reactions were shrill. John Mark N. Reynolds was generally admiring of the speech, and caught gentle heck from two Christian friends on roughly opposite political poles.

Reynolds opened with Mr. Trump goes to Poland, the very title of which offended a historian friend:

And it irks me because it exhibits the exact inversion of power dynamics that I’m going to describe in this response, as well as those which convinced otherwise good-hearted people to vote for a predatory man who proposed policies of oppression, scapegoating, and physical violence. Mr. Smith went to Washington to serve his constituents and build a camp for underprivileged boys he mentored. Mr. Trump called for the illegal execution of five wrongly accused boys as the first act of his political career. The comparison, even in mere syntax, feeds the narrative Trump tries to spin of his own victimization.

…

It seems to me that you are encouraged by this speech because (1) it elevates Poland and (2) it affirms our commitment to defending “western values.” These are both, perhaps, good things. But both the text of the speech and the character of the administration that produced it immediately require a much more critical eye than your piece gives it.

The core problem is context. The president stood in the square where thousands were murdered by Nazis, thousands who expected Allied aid that never came, and he did so as the first US president to play footsie with NATO’s Article 5. He praised a Poland of the past that overwhelmingly stood between tyrants and their victims, a nation in which the highest proportion of individuals chose to sacrifice themselves in order to personally hide Jewish people from Nazi death squads, and he called Poland’s current refusal to accept today’s refugees a continuation of that spirit instead of what it is: its betrayal.

The trick of white nationalism is to pretend the power dynamic is inverted. The conquerors, therefore, only conquer out of fear of conquest. The oppressor only oppresses to prevent greater oppression. Throughout our history as a nation, the United States has perfected this inversion and presented it for generations as fact ….

Next day, I was expecting Reynolds’ response to this friend, but, no, he’d caught heck from another friend, a pro-life Democrat who voted for Trump over Hillary:

The Left is the Boy who called Wolf. To accuse President Trump of racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia for a speech that was manifestly anti-racist, pro-Semitic, and xenophilic is to destroy what little remains of their credibility.

The critics’ argument is premised on the idea that any reference to “Western” civilization or “Western” values, or to any threat from the “East” or “South” is inherently racist and pro-Christian. This is, of course, nonsense. The idea of an opposition between East and West dates back to the war of the ancient Greeks against Xerxes’ invasion. It was also prominent at the time of the battle of Actium, when Octavius defeated Egyptian and Syrian troops commanded by Mark Antony. The idea of Western civilization predates Christianity by several centuries, and the invention of racism by Darwinian anthropologists by several millennia. Western civilization is essentially Roman civilization. Cicero and Virgil define its essential shape and tone, involving a way of life in which we find the rule of law, a sharp distinction of private and public, individual rights and private property, intermediate institutions, including schools and corporations, anthropomorphic gods, freedom of debate and philosophical inquiry, and a literature extolling civic virtue and romantic love.

…

My own problem with the speech is that Trump failed to recognize the distinction between the Communist Soviet Union and the authoritarian and nationalist Russia of today. The latter represents many orders of magnitude less danger to the world than did the former. We need to revive Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s useful distinction between authoritarian regimes and totalitarian ones. The world’s only totalitarian regimes are North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela, with Iran lying near the borderline. China and Russia have evolved into merely authoritarian regimes (as has Vietnam and former Soviet republics like Moldova and Uzbekistan) …

Let me close by addressing the larger question, the supposed “Bannonism” of the Trump administration. Ethnic, ethnicity, ethnos—these are not curse-words, some litany of Satanism. The creation and recognition of the status of nations (ethnos is simply Greek for nation) is one of the fruits of Christian civilization. I recommend the work of Roger Scruton, especially The West and the Rest, and T. S. Eliot’s classic Notes toward the Definition of Culture.

No nation is reducible to a set of ideas or a propositional creed. That includes the United States. Trump critics pose a false dichotomy: either abstract universalism or fascistic racism ….

Finally, Reynolds replies to both. I found his response on “Bannonism” especially notable:

I define Bannonism as being both an idea and an approach to politics. Let’s begin with the approach. Bannon has advocated a “by any means” conservatism, beating the left at her own game. Politics is not a Sunday School picnic and we can hit hard, but not use any means. We cannot (as Christians) hate, torture, or slander.

Christians are not too genteel to do those things, but too meek like Moses or Jesus.  Of course, you do not take issue with this, I assume you are not in favor of “by any means,” but that is central to my rejection of Bannonism. Christians are willing to be martyred rather than “win” in the short term!

You defend the nationalism of Bannon and here too we disagree. I think strong patriotism is compatible with Christianity, but not nationalism. I am an American and I love my nation, but I cannot think her special or unique. We are not “chosen” as Israel was chosen, though like any people group we have a work to do.

If you haven’t reached personal bedrock in your views of the Warsaw speech, or if you just want to see some civil and irenic comment among friends (well, Reynolds is the hub of the wheel; his two friends don’t interact directly), it’s worth 20 minutes or so to read the series.

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There is no epistemological Switzerland. (Via Mars Hill Audio Journal Volume 134)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Friday 12/2/16

  1. Dag Hammarskjöld and Post-Truth
  2. Rooting for the other side in Culture War 2.0
  3. The Big Rebuke
  4. Submerged Schism
  5. Trump is indecent, not Politically Incorrect
  6. Meaningless Statistics

Continue reading “Friday 12/2/16” →