Good news for Hoosiers who appreciate good governance: our smarmy, showboating Attorney General, Todd Rokita, is today publicly reprimanded by the Indiana Supreme Court for disreputable extrajudicial comments.
Two dissenters thought it should be stronger than reprimand.
Downside: He’ll be deemed a martyr now and may never again lose an election in this red state.
A fundamental reality of human existence is that vice often leaves virtue with few good options. Evil men can attach catastrophic risks to virtually any course of action, however admirable.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
As for the home-schooling pioneers who left government schools to avoid assaults on their values, they’re looking less like an ideological fringe these days and more like people who were just paying attention.
Alan Jacobs and I share a longing: Back to My Books. (It’s a short piece.)
Indeed, given a common distinction between introversion and extraversion (drained versus energized by significant time socially interacting with non-intimates), I can’t even imagine being an extravert.
Antisemite mightily resents being labeled antisemite
Suit was filed earlier this month in a New York federal district court by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan against the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center seeking $4.8 billion in damages. The suit alleges that defendants are interfering with Farrakhan’s activities through labeling him as an antisemite.
ProTip for Farrakhan: If you want to file a lawsuit objecting to getting the antisemite label, it might be wise not to lard your complaint with accusations that Jews control the government.
Free to be me, a hobbyist
It’s my growing conviction that America is on a trajectory toward crack-up, but unlike my longtime muse, Rod Dreher, I’m kind of philosophical about it, believing that what follows the crack-up may be quite bearable. (I wouldn’t cheer for the crackup because I could be wrong: revolutions generally do make things worse.)
In this vein, consider Chris Arnade’s observation about the somewhat parallel calcified cultures of England and Japan:
Because of England’s calcified class structure, they know they can never be anything else, which ironically frees them up to be themselves. Which means, given they aren’t always, like Americans, trying to be more than what they currently are, they have the interest and time to pursue hobbies.
…
What about the Japanese? In Japan, while class exists (the most obvious difference is home size), it’s not nearly as stratified, or explicit as in England. The wealthy are not as, well, wealthy, or nearly as ostentatious, as they are in the rest of the developed world. At least not outwardly.
That general lack of class division—there really being nothing you can move up to that is much different from where you are now—allows the Japanese the space and time to make the best of the life they have, rather than constantly striving to be something different.
In both cases, the working and middle class Japanese and English are forced by a lack of options, to develop their own sense of self. Which includes lots of hobbies.
…
Because I respect and enjoy being around people with a well-developed sense of the self, more than I enjoy being around people with lots of stuff.
That’s also why, as much as I love the US, I find it frustrating to come back home, where we are so free to be anything, that so many of us end up being nothing.
English courses in college are a little over a hundred years old, its having been taken for granted before then that you did not need special instruction to read poetry and novels written in your native language.
None of this is how the future was supposed to feel. In 1930, in a speech titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes made a famous prediction: Within a century, thanks to the growth of wealth and the advance of technology, no one would have to work more than about fifteen hours a week.
Last week, nine Democrats voted against a House resolution condemning Hamas and backing Israel—a gauge of the extent of hard-line anti-Israel sentiment in Washington.
“I represent the mainstream of the Democratic Party,” Torres told me, “whereas members like Ilhan Omar represent the fringe. I would hardly call that a divide. A divide would seem to suggest that the Democratic Party is split between the two of us. Quite the contrary. With the exception of a visible, vocal minority, just about every congressional Democrat supports Israel’s right to defend itself in the face of unprecedented terrorism.”
“What that means is that he kind of takes conservative, white evangelical ideals from our current moment, and says that those were all baked into the Constitution, and that God has elected America to be a special nation, and that the nation will be blessed if we respond in obedience and maintain that, and not if we go astray,” she continued. “It really fuels evangelical politics and the idea that evangelicalism has a special role to play to get the country back on track.”
“David Barton is a political propagandist, he’s a Christian-right activist who cherry picks from the past to promote political agendas in the present, to paint a picture of America’s history as evangelicals would like it to be,” John Fea, the chair of the history department at the evangelical Messiah University, told NBC News. “Mike Johnson comes straight out of that Christian-right world, where Barton’s ideas are highly influential. It’s the air they breathe.”
In 2012, Barton wrote The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas Jefferson. Among other things, he argued that Jefferson was a “conventional Christian” despite the fact that Jefferson questioned many of the core tenets of Christianity. Martin Marty, a historian of religion, said it would have been better titled “Barton’s Lies about Jefferson.” “As a piece of historical scholarship, the book is awful,” the Wheaton historian Tracy McKenzie wrote, deeming it “relentlessly anti-intellectual.” The book was so riddled with historical inaccuracies that it was recalled by its Christian publisher, Thomas Nelson, because “basic truths just were not there.”
…
So in Speaker Johnson we have a man whose Christian worldview has led him into a hall of mirrors—historically, scientifically, legally, and constitutionally. A “rule-of-law guy” who laments a lack of “absolute standards of right and wrong” was a key participant in undermining the rule of law and has been a steadfast defender of Donald Trump, who has done so much to shatter absolute standards of right and wrong.
From what I can tell, Mike Johnson—unlike, say, Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, or J. D. Vance and Lindsey Graham—is not cynical; he seems to be a true believer, and a zealot. A polite and mild-mannered zealot, to be sure, especially by MAGA standards, but a zealot nonetheless. And what makes this doubly painful for many of us is that he uses his Christian faith to sacralize his fanaticism and assault on truth. I can’t help thinking this isn’t quite what Jesus had in mind.
Mike Johnson is the first person to become speaker of the House who can be fairly described as a Christian nationalist, a major development in American history in and of itself. Equally important, however, his ascension reflects the strength of white evangelical voters’ influence in the House Republican caucus, voters who are determined to use the power of government to roll back the civil rights, women’s rights and sexual revolutions.
“Johnson is a clear rebuttal to the overall liberal societal drift that’s happening in the United States,” Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University, wrote by email in response to my query. “His views are far out of step with the average American and even with a significant number of Republicans.”
“Yet, he was chosen as speaker,” continued Burge, who is also a pastor in the American Baptist Church. “If anything, it shows us that white evangelicals still have a very strong hold on the modern Republican Party. They are losing overall market share in the larger culture, but they are certainly taking on an outsized role in Republican politics.”
Republican Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado confirmed on Wednesday that he would not run for reelection.“Too many Republican leaders are lying to America, claiming that the 2020 election was stolen,” the five-term congressman said in a resignation video released yesterday. “These insidious narratives breed widespread cynicism and erode Americans’ confidence in the rule of law.” Longtime GOP Rep. Kay Granger of Texas, who currently chairs the Appropriations Committee, also announced yesterday she would retire at the end of her term.
Mike Pence has ceased his campaign for the Republican nomination to the Presidency.
That’s a shame if only because he maintained at least a shred of integrity to the end:
(I’m sorry I don’t remember the source of that. I got it in July of 2022. Might the “Johnson” referenced be the new Speaker?)
Why I remain a liberal
Liberalism has always had two faces. From one side, toleration is the pursuit of an ideal form of life. From the other, it is the search for terms of peace among different ways of life. In the former view, liberal institutions are seen as applications of universal principles. In the latter, they are a means to peaceful coexistence. In the first, liberalism is a prescription for a universal regime. In the second, it is a project of coexistence that can be pursued in many regimes.
I’m a liberal of the latter kind. I cannot be a Christian Nationalist because the “Christianity” that would hold power in the USA in 2023 and for the foreseeable future would be heretical and oppressive; the very best case would be schismatic Catholic Integralists.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 