I start here because I really think the author had distilled a major temperamental difference between MAGA populists and wokesters on the one hand, traditional conservatives (and classical liberals generally) on the other. I plan to revisit this to see how well it stands up to repeated critical engagement.
Populism thrives on a zero-sum mind-set. The central story that populists tell is: They are out to destroy us. Populist leaders invariably inflame ethnic bigotry to mobilize their own supporters.
America’s populist in chief, Donald Trump, exemplifies this mentality. Trump grew up in a zero-sum world. In the world of New York real estate, there’s a fixed amount of land. Trump didn’t have to invent a new concept, just screw the other side. In 2017, the Vox writer Dylan Matthews and his colleagues read all of Trump’s books on business and politics, and concluded that zero-sum thinking is the core of his mind-set. “You hear lots of people say that a great deal is when both sides win,” Trump and his co-author wrote in “Think Big and Kick Ass.” “That is a bunch of crap. In a great deal you win — not the other side. You crush the opponent and come away with something better for yourself.”
MAGA is the zero-sum concept in political form. What’s good for immigrants is bad for the American-born. What’s good for Black people is bad for whites. Trade deals are exploitation. Our NATO allies are out to screw us. Every day for Trump is an Us/Them dominance game.
Zero-sum thinking is surging on the left as well. A generation of college students has been raised on the dogma that life is a contest between groups — oppressor versus oppressed, colonizers versus colonized.
This thinking is rising across the globe …
We all have complaints about the age of go-go globalization, but what’s followed is far worse — global economic competition being replaced by political and military confrontation. And the thugs are winning. Russia now has the momentum in Ukraine. China is growing increasingly aggressive in the waters around Taiwan. Trump is leading in many polls.
Many of us greet 2024 with a sense of foreboding. We need Joe Biden to be as big as this year demands. We need a leader who shows that he grasps the scope of global crisis and has a vision for how to return to a positive-sum world of growth, innovation and peace.
“Plagiarism” is just another weapon for the deplorables
→ Who came up with this plagiarism idea?The Associated Press set the tone for how this would be covered. Plagiarism being bad is a monstrous and deceitful new concept, developed in a lab by right-wing activists and unleashed on unsuspecting academics.
As my favorite, Nate Silver, put it: “Pretty worried about this new chronoweapon that can force you to go back as many as 27 years in time and commit plagiarism.”
If you are black and in the fourth lowest decile of SATs and GPAs among Harvard applicants, you have a higher chance of getting into Harvard (12.8 percent admitted) than an Asian-American in the very top decile (12.7 admitted). It’s rigged, which is why it was shut down by SCOTUS. When you look at these cold, hard stats — which Harvard, of course, did all it could to conceal — there is no debate. There’s a trade-off. But once you make identity a core qualification, you’re opening up a whole world of racist anti-racism.
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The response to all this from the CRT crowd has been to insist — ever more strongly — that Gay is simply and only a victim of racism, or, in woke terminology, a victim of misogynoir. The fact that a white female university president at those same hearings lost her job before Gay did — and without any plagiarism questions — doesn’t count. The fact that a male, white university president also recently stepped down for academic misconduct, also doesn’t count. The fact that the president of Harvard violated rules that a Harvard undergraduate would be disciplined for doesn’t count. Nothing counts, in the end, except her race and sex and ideology. The defenses of her make this explicit. Which is why they have been salutary.
Significantly, the Court has not limited the questions presented. That means the justices could potentially consider the full range of issues raised by the case, including whether the January 6 attack on the Capitol qualifies as an “insurrection,” whether Trump’s actions amount to “engaging” in insurrection, whether the president is an “officer of the United States” covered by Section 3, whether Section 3 is “self-executing,” whether it is a “political question,” and whether Trump got adequate due process in the state court.
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I think many are underrating the likelihood that the justices will affirm the Colorado ruling. The latter is based on strong reasoning, including from an originalist point of view. And to the extent the justices may be motivated by reputational considerations, disqualifying Trump is the perfect opportunity for them to show once and for all that they are not adjuncts of the GOP and especially not the “MAGA Court.” In my view, much of the left-wing criticism of the Court is wrong or over overblown; but my opinion is not what’s decisive for the Court’s public and elite standing.
French’s flawed but evocative case against Trump ballot access
This is where we are, and have now been for years: The Trump movement commits threats, violence and lies. And then it tries to escape accountability for those acts through more threats, more violence and more lies. At the heart of the “but the consequences” argument against disqualification is a confession that if we hold Trump accountable for his fomenting violence on Jan. 6, he might foment additional violence now.
The counterpart to “but the consequences” is “we’ll show them we can’t be intimidated.” Both reactive approaches can color our interpretation of the law.
It’s dangerous to read minds, but I think David is so fed up with “but the consequences” that he’s fallen into the opposite error.
I’m convinced by the history of the 14th Amendment’s drafting that the framers didn’t intend for the President to be covered. Given that history, the Supreme Court can easily and legitimately reverse the Colorado decision.
But there has been a tendency on the court to follow the “plain meaning” of legislative texts without worrying about what legislators intended. That’s how, for example, homosexuals and transgendered people gained coverage, under a broad reading of “on account of sex” in some of our 20th century civil rights laws, even though everyone was thinking “male and female” at the time.
If SCOTUS looks to legislative history, it will be abandoning its recent more textualist approach. I think there are enough conundrums presented by the textualist approach — above all, why would the 14th Amendment’s framers hide the presidential elephant in the “any office” mouse-hole, after enumerating Senators, Representatives and electors — that looking beyond the text, all the way back to legislative history, is well warranted.
Damon Linker spends more time eviscerating French’s uncharacteristically flawed argument just from a logic standpoint.
Other legalia
Unlawful discrimination
Some civil libertarians have attempted to finesse the issue by redefining civil liberties to include protection from the discriminatory behavior of private parties. Under this view, conflicts between freedom of expression and antidiscrimination laws could be construed as clashes between competing civil liberties. For purposes of this book, however, civil liberties retains its traditional definition, referring to constitutional rights protected by the First Amendment and related constitutional provisions.”
David Bernstein, You Can’t Say That!
Asylum
Western Europe and the U.S. are still largely governed by a 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which was expanded in 1967 to cover anyone living in what can be considered a “dangerous” place. That definition allows potentially hundreds of millions of people worldwide to qualify as refugees. The U.N, High Commission on Refugees estimates that there were 26 million likely candidates for resettlement at the end of 2019. All that is needed is to arrive in a hospitable country and claim asylum.
… Hybris comes to an ugly finish, Irreverence is a greater oaf than Superstition.
Our apparatniks will continue making the usual squalid mess called History: all we can pray for is that artists, chefs and saints may still appear to blithe it.
When men landed on the moon, I was too young and too techy to have developed full-blown case of faux Ludditism, but I don’t recall being swept up in elation at the accomplishment, either.
These days, I love the whole poem (a few obscure words or allusions aside).
… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
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 