I’ve been relentlessly venting my spleen against one of the two candidates for President of the United States. Today, I will completely spare you vitriol except to offer this link.
There are, however, a few political comments today, along with much else.
The Machine
That’s not a very imaginative title I came up with. R.S. Thomas is a poet whose Collected Later Poems I bought for some reason, though Thomas was not acclaimed like, say, Dylan Thomas, his fellow Welchman. But I’m very fond of many of his poems.
‘The body is mine and the soul is mine’ says the machine. ‘I am at the dark source where the good is indistinguishable from evil. I fill my tanks up and there is war. I empty them and there is not peace. I am the sound, not of the world breathing, but of the catch rather in the world’s breath.’
Is there a contraceptive for the machine, that we may enjoy intercourse with it without being overrun by vocabulary? We go up into the temple of ourselves and give thanks that we are not as the machine is. But it waits for us outside, knowing that when we emerge it is into the noise of its hand beating on the breast’s iron as Pharisaically as ourselves.
R.S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems 1988-2000. Bloodaxe Books. Kindle Edition.
Excising personhood
Every attempt to implement machine learning will come at the cost of removing features of personhood from the world. Already, the cost of housing in person-scale environments like the neighborhood where Jacobs herself lived—Manhattan’s Greenwich Village—has soared beyond the reach of almost everyone, leaving those with more modest means to move to places dominated by highways.
When I tell people here in Tennessee that I work for The New York Times, I often get a visible negative reaction. Sometimes, the negative reaction is verbal and I’m condemned to my face as “fake news.”
I try to respond with a spirit of curiosity. I know that we make mistakes and I’m curious as to what specifically made them angry. Rarely do I get a precise answer. There is simply a sense that we can’t be trusted, that we’re on the other side.
When I ask which news outlets they follow, invariably they give me a list of channels and sites that were so comprehensively dishonest and irresponsible in 2020 and 2021 that many of them have been forced into settlements, have retracted stories and have issued apologies under pressure.
Yet all these outlets are all still popular on the right. Long after their dishonesty was exposed, the MAGA faithful continue to believe their reports and share their stories. It turns out that people will in fact trust liars — so long as the liars keep telling them what they want to hear.
We don’t know our true values until they’re tested
Hatred is the prime motivating force in our politics
Trust is tribal
Problematizing Geography
How Many Continents Are There? You May Not Like the Answers. Recent earth science developments suggest that how we count our planet’s largest land masses is less clear than we learned in school.
The imperfection she cites — questioning no-fault divorce — is just fine with me, by the way. I know the arguments that sold no-fault to America, but I also know the reality, and I don’t like it. No-fault deserves to be questioned.
Frivolous pursuits
“Talking? But what about?” Walking and talking—that seemed a very odd way of spending an afternoon. In the end she persuaded him, much against his will, to fly over to Amsterdam to see the Semi-Demi-Finals of the Women’s Heavyweight Wrestling Championship.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World. I read 1984 long before I read Brave New World. Who in their right mind thinks Orwell saw the future more clearly than Huxley?
Brides of the State
Fifty percent of married women vote Republican, and 45% vote Democratic, which mirrors the GOP advantage in other demographic groups. But, according to Pew, “Women who have never been married are three times as likely to associate with the Democratic Party as with the Republican Party (72% vs. 24%).” In 1980, the number of women over 40 who had never married was around 6%. Now it is 22%, and this has become a crucial bloc for the Democrats.
Bret Stephens makes A Conservative Case Against Trump (unlocked). It’s not his best anti-Trump case, in my opinion, but you can judge its persuasiveness for yourself if you like, since the end of the month is nigh and I have unlocked articles to give away still.
An Academic’s Case for Trump
The ideology that believes that humans can change sex; treats children’s and young people’s fantasies as truth; and is willing to put children on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and even butcher them with surgery, is barbaric. There is no other word for it. Men who give themselves female names and pronouns, and put on lipstick and a dress, do not magically become women. Pretending that such men are women puts actual women directly at risk. Men, no matter how they dress or what they call themselves, have no place in women’s bathrooms, in women’s domestic crisis centers, in women’s prisons, or—less critically but somehow more obvious to everyone—in women’s sports.
Heather Heying, discussing one of the reasons she is, surprisingly, voting for Trump.
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
The startling reversal in which America’s religious leaders took up the language of republicanism was the most important ideological development for the future of theology in the United States.
Mark A. Noll, America’s God from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln.
[I wish I had a better handle on this very central thesis of Noll’s dense book. All I really can say is that American Christians were essentially alone in embracing republicanism; European Christians rejected it fairly vehemently.]
Although identifiably evangelical churches by 1860 made up the vast majority of American congregations (at least 85%), these churches did not present a homogeneous faith. In fact, evangelicals fought each other over a host of Streitpunkte—over how to interpret the Scriptures; over the definition of many Christian doctrines, including human free will, the atonement, eschatology, the meaning of the sacraments, and the nature of the church; over slavery and other social issues; over the ecclesiastical roles of women and laymen; over whether to sing hymns or psalms only; over whether churches should use creeds; over principles and practices of the market economy; and over every imaginable kind of personality conflict. … Evangelicals called people to acknowledge their sin before God, to look upon Jesus Christ (crucified—dead—resurrected) as God’s means of redemption, and to exercise faith in this Redeemer as the way of reconciliation with God and orientation for life in the world.
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The most important conclusion that can be drawn from a survey of writings about money, markets, and the economy in this period is that Protestants regularly, consistently, and without sense of contradiction both enunciated traditional Christian exhortations about careful financial stewardship and simply took for granted the workings of the United States’ expanding commercial society.
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Finney’s Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835), which is discussed at greater length below in chapter 15, was important for summarizing a new approach toward reaching the lost. Since God had established reliable laws in the natural world and since humans were created with the ability to discern those laws, it was obvious that the spiritual world worked on the same basis. Thus, to activate the proper causes for revivals was to produce the proper effects: “The connection between the right use of means for a revival and a revival is as philosophically [i.e., scientifically] sure as between the right use of means to raise grain and a crop of wheat. I believe, in fact, it is more certain, and there are fewer instances of failure.” Because the world spiritual was analogous to the world natural, observable cause and effect must work in religion as well as in physics. The wine of revival—confidence in God’s supernatural ability to convert the sinner—may have looked the same in antebellum America as it had in earlier centuries, but the wineskin was of recent manufacture.
[Finney’s “scientific” revivalism strikes me as a terrible error, but a persistent one. However, this mechanistic approach has been instantiated in evangelistic crusades during my adolescence, and I assume since then as well. The rising and falling of the preaching voice; the shouting followed by the whisper; these are the rhetorical tricks (science) to get people to “make decisions for Jesus” – or Amway or Tupperware or just about anything else.]
On that score there was for Smith not a dime’s worth of difference between Samuel Miller and John Henry Hobart. Through a life of energetic peripateticism (from Lyme, Connecticut, to Vermont and then Portsmouth, New Hampshire, later to Boston, Philadelphia, Providence, and Portland, Maine), as well as frequent redirection of career (as minister—successively Baptist, “Christian,” Universalist, and “Christian” again—physician, dentist, publisher, and merchant), and in the midst of incessant polemical creativity, one thing remained constant for Elias Smith. His anchor was unshakable belief in a radically egalitarian biblicism. If the religion of formalist Presbyterians and Episcopalians was tinctured with American values, Smith’s religion represented a more complete assimilation. That religion was, in the words of a solid recent biography, “a specifically Christian republicanism growing out of a New Light evangelical heritage, conjoined with a rapidly evolving national political culture in a climate of strident partisan conflict.”46 Smith was especially important as a founder of New England’s “Christian” movement, a radically antielitist drive that sought a harmonious, unified church for all who wished to live according to the New Testament’s “perfect law of liberty.” To build such a church, however, it was necessary to clear away traditional biblical interpretations, traditional denominations, and traditional clerical authority.
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“The Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science. It is his store-house of facts; and his method of ascertaining what the Bible teaches, is the same as that which the natural philosopher adopts to ascertain what nature teaches…. The duty of the Christian theologian is to ascertain, collect, and combine all the facts which God has revealed concerning himself and our relation to Him. These facts are all in the Bible.” On the basis of these assertions, Hodge then went on to suggest that “the Theologian [is] to be guided by the same rules as the Man of Science.”
[I once admired Hodge, and would have been pleased, if not thrilled, by this declaration.]
[No longer. But this sort of approach was part of how “America’s God” became so unlike the true God.]
Selective resistance to secularity
In his book Fault Lines, Voddie Baucham argues that
The social sciences may be useful tools, but they are far from necessary. ‘All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work’ (2 Timothy 3:16–17). In no area does God require me to walk in a level of righteousness for which the Scriptures do not equip me — including any and all aspects of justice.
The logic of Baucham’s argument, which permeates his book, is that the Bible is enough. It is enough to parse the complexity of race in the United States, and enough to provide a roadmap for justice. Let’s be clear: Baucham agrees that the gospel has social implications. He is also clear that the social sciences are simply unnecessary to illuminate what those social implications are, and how the gospel compels us to act.
We deny that Christian belief, character, or conduct can be dictated by any other authority, and we deny that the postmodern ideologies derived from intersectionality, radical feminism, and critical race theory are consistent with biblical teaching. We further deny that competency to teach on any biblical issue comes from any qualification for spiritual people other than clear understanding and simple communication of what is revealed in Scripture.
According to Baucham and the signers of the Dallas Statement, the claim that secular scholarship is necessary to understand and address the contemporary racial landscape are violating the doctrine of sufficiency, and compromising their fidelity to Scripture. Despite passing affirmations that Christians ought to read broadly, insofar as it pertains to matters of race and justice, Baucham, et al., clearly view secular scholarship as suspect, and inessential to comprehending and shaping responses to the social problems we face.
Of course, in their view, not all secular sources are suspect. Many of the signers of the Dallas Statement happily employ the work of James Lindsay or Thomas Sowell in their analysis of our social realities. The real concern lies in a particular set of sources: “postmodern ideologies derived from intersectionality, radical feminism, and critical race theory.” It is these sources which consume massive amounts of energy expended by Owen Strachan, Voddie Baucham, Tom Ascol, and many others. Summarized by many under the slushy appellation “wokeness,” these writers are convinced that reliance on anything that smacks of woke is deleterious to the faith given once for all to the saints.
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
More than three decades ago, Nathan Hatch published The Democratization of American Christianity, a history of the Second Great Awakening, arguably the most important religious episode in American history. At the recent Intercollegiate Studies Institute annual homecoming, I served on a panel that discussed the award-winning book. It was a pleasure to do so. Hatch gives a magisterial account of the upsurge of religious populism that shaped the new American republic in decisive ways. Anyone who wants to understand the last ten years of American politics should read The Democratization of American Christianity.
Denunciations of the “swamp” echo the Second Great Awakening’s polemics against the clerical establishment of its day, which itinerate preachers derided as complacent, more interested in high salaries and comfortable parsonages than in gospel preaching. Trump rallies follow in the tradition of raucous, call-and-response camp meetings. Commentators wonder at the fact that respectable people support Trump, not knowing that some of the most important leaders of the religious populism of the early 1800s were elites such as Barton Stone, who embraced the new, raw, and uncouth style of religious revival.
Elias Smith was a renegade preacher and journalist who, in 1808, launched America’s first religious newspaper, Herald of Gospel Liberty. He mocked and abused the Calvinist grandees, the “clerical hierarchy” that dominated Protestantism at that time. Establishment clergy like Lyman Beecher raged against preachers like Smith who were disturbing the religious landscape. It does not take much imagination to cast Tucker Carlson in the role of a latter-day Elias Smith. He thrills his populist devotees and outrages the guardians of political respectability such as George Will, a Lyman Beecher of our time.
Hatch raises larger themes. The Second Great Awakening took place during a time of rapid social change. The new republic gave rise to radicalisms of many sorts. People were on the move, as territories west of the Appalachian Mountains were settled. Old institutions and authorities lost their power. As I note above, recent decades have seen similar changes. Globalization, demographic change, the sexual revolution, social media, and other factors have precipitated a quite different but equally significant crisis of authority. We should not be surprised, therefore, that populism has returned, as it did in the late 1800s, when America was transformed by industrialization, urbanization, and swelling waves of immigrants.
Hatch documents that revivalist preachers were confident that their individualist, evangelical Christianity would fulfill the sacred mission of America. In their sermons and broadsides, populist religion mixed freely with populist politics, as was the case for William Jennings Bryan and subsequent American populists. Today’s Trumpian populism is different. To be sure, many pious people support Trump and other populist politicians. Avatars of popular religion like Paula White lurk on the peripheries. But the movement lacks an explicitly religious dimension, which is striking when we compare it to the administration of George W. Bush, an establishment figure who was not shy about his evangelical convictions.
Which makes me wonder: In spite of fascinating parallels to the outpouring of Christian enthusiasm and political radicalism in the Second Great Awakening, does today’s populism ironically contribute to an important elite ambition, the establishment of a post-Christian, entirely secular political culture in America? I hope not.
After several readings, I’m not sure what Reno is trying to say here. My impression until that penultimate paragraph was that he though our last decade’s populism just fine and dandy, as was the ferment of the 19th century; then he raises the possibility that the lack of a “religious dimension” is at least a bit worrisome.
But what an odd thing for a Catholic (or Orthodox) to believe. In case after case, the wake of the Great Awakenings was destructive of the Christian institutions that evidenced stability and left us, in the characterization of Ross Douthat, A Nation of Heretics.
That’s mostly because I don’t think changing gender is possible. How can an impossible thing be immoral?
It’s also partly because I hold open the possibility that presenting as the opposite sex, with or without surgery and hormonal interventions, may for some individuals be the optimal way to quiet intractable gender dysphoria. (Who am I to condemn cosplaying in the cause of lessening psychic pain?)
But I’ll tell you something that is immoral. This kind of un-empathetic poor-mouthing about people disapproving (or denying the reality of) “trans lives”:
Is it morally acceptable to change your gender?
Just over half the country doesn’t think so — a proportion that has stayed fairly stable since 2021, the year after I disclosed my gender transition. It’s disheartening to reflect on the fact that every other person you meet, statistically speaking, disapproves of your existence.
Gina Chua. Nothing in the Gallup poll in question suggests that anyone disapproves the existence of people who’ve carried through on the putatively immoral decision to transition.
We are a low-down, debased people who have made ourselves indisposed toward intelligent discussion of issues. We sling slurs and pitch pity parties.
Journalistic murmurations
World Ends in Nuclear conflagration. Women and children most affected.
Something like this was an old jab at the New York Times’s stylistic preoccupations.
Inside the U.S. Government-Bought Tool That Can Track Phones at Abortion Clinics
H/T Nellie Bowles, who didn’t seem to think it the least bit odd that 404 Media’s fears turned immediately to red states tracking their handmaidens to blue state abortuaries.
With insanity supporters like this, sanity may stand a chance
Tucker Carlson spoke at the Turning Point USA Trump rally this week and gave the absolute best anti-Trump speech I’ve ever heard. Tucker’s speech is here and excerpted below, somehow kinky and alarming and rousing at the same time:
“There has to be a point at which Dad comes home [crowd cheers]. Yeah, that’s right. Dad comes home, and he’s pissed. Dad is pissed. He’s not vengeful. He loves his children, disobedient as they may be. He loves them because they’re his children,” said Tucker Carlson, a grown man and a major respected figure on the right. “And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not gonna hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not gonna lie. It’s gonna hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl. And it has to be this way.’ ”
If someone spoke like this to me on the street, I would pepper spray them. If I heard someone speak like this to someone else, I would pepper spray them and myself. Tucker Carlson’s endorsement of Trump makes me want to mainline MSNBC. Tucker’s endorsement makes me think Democracy Is On the Line, and Christopher Steele is a respected member of the intelligence community, and I heard there was a box of White House stationery at Mar-a-Lago illegally. Tucker’s endorsement just made me start knitting a pussy hat. Trump is not daddy. America is not his little girl. I believe in free speech except when a grown man is saying the words bad little girl. And Tucker Carlson needs to keep his kinks private and shameful like the rest of us.
Democrats have continued to liken Trump to Adolf Hitler and assert he poses a grave “danger” to the planet if he is reelected, even after two recent assassination attempts against him.
(Jason Cohen)
How pray tell, Mr. Cohen, do two assassination attempts disprove Trump being a grave danger (or require suppression of the truth)? Do you tacitly call on Trump to cool it when his rhetoric generates death threats to election officials?
(Note that all the hyperlinks in my quote are to other Daily Caller stories; that’s why I thought “echo chamber” was apt.)
Would it help if it were done by image rather than words?
(If you don’t get the allusion, search for “distracted boyfriend même.)
Kamala F.B. Harris
In The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last thanked the vice president for taking on Trump: “I believe that for all her political ambition, Kamala Harris is carrying this burden for us. She’s not Barack Obama, basking in the warmth of a cultural moment en route to becoming a cultural icon. She’s more like Frodo Baggins, walking toward Mordor while carrying a millstone around her neck, in an attempt to save all of Middle-earth from a dark fate.” (Sally McDonald, Cairns, Australia)
I find his immodesty not only a serious character flaw but a danger to his governing ability. I don’t believe he wishes to abolish the Constitution, undermine our democracy, set himself up as dictator. But such full-court immodesty has to work against one’s perspective, make impossible anything resembling a sense of history, allow for necessary accommodations with reality. A man who sees no other picture but those with himself in the center is not a man you want to run your nation.
I quote this not to beat a dead horse, but because it is almost identical in its insight to one of the points I made long ago: Trump’a narcissism distorts his vision of the world, and that kind of distortion is intolerable in a POTUS. It’s so disqualifying that I don’t care what his “positions” are on “the issues.”
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
The second section of this post, “Unapologetic TDS,” is venting, pure and simple. If you’re tired of hearing what’s wrong with Trump, I sort of understand. Trump Derangement Syndrome is that first case of presidential derangement I’ve ever had. And though I’m not ashamed to completely oppose Trump, I understand why someone without TDS might find it unedifying.
Public affairs with the TDS turned off
Aphorism
Don’t run on boutique issues in a Walmart nation.
I was at the wheel of the car when some podcast or other delivered this up as an old saw. I’d never heard it before but found it delightful — even though I’m more boutique than WalMart.
In the same vein, more or less:
Much of what has come to be called “wokeness” consists of highly educated white people who went to fantastically expensive colleges trying to show the world, and themselves, that they are victims, or at least allied with the victims. Watching Ivy League students complain about how poorly society treats them is not good for my digestion.
Investments in health care have grown from less than $5 billion in 2000 to more than $120 billion in 2019, according to work done by the Eileen Appelbaum, co-director of the Center for Economic Policy and Research, and Cornell professor Rosemary Batt; private equity owned hospitals now account for approximately one in five for-profit hospitals in the United States. (Sources: penguinrandomhouse.com, washingtonpost.com)
It’s a fact of human nature that when like-minded people gather, they tend to become more extreme. This concept — called the law of group polarization — applies across ideological and institutional lines. The term was most clearly defined and popularized in a 1999 paper by Cass Sunstein. The law of group polarization, according to Sunstein, “helps to explain extremism, ‘radicalization,’ cultural shifts and the behavior of political parties and religious organizations.”
That’s a pretty boring title, but the Law of Group Polarization is a real thing. Whence the put-down “you need to get out more.”
Unapologetic TDS
In what hellscape do vigilantes attack FEMA workers?
To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.
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Other influencers, such as the Trump sycophant Laura Loomer, have urged their followers to disrupt the disaster agency’s efforts to help hurricane victims. “Do not comply with FEMA,” she posted on X. “This is a matter of survival.”
Rhetoric has a history. The words democracy and tyranny were debated in ancient Greece; the phrase separation of powers became important in the 17th and 18th centuries. The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.”
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If you connect your opponents with disease, illness, and poisoned blood, if you dehumanize them as insects or animals, if you speak of squashing them or cleansing them as if they were pests or bacteria, then you can much more easily arrest them, deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them. If they are parasites, they aren’t human. If they are vermin, they don’t get to enjoy freedom of speech, or freedoms of any kind. And if you squash them, you won’t be held accountable.
Until recently, this kind of language was not a normal part of American presidential politics. Even George Wallace’s notorious, racist, neo-Confederate 1963 speech, his inaugural speech as Alabama governor and the prelude to his first presidential campaign, avoided such language. Wallace called for “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” But he did not speak of his political opponents as “vermin” or talk about them poisoning the nation’s blood. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps following the outbreak of World War II, spoke of “alien enemies” but not parasites.
In the 2024 campaign, that line has been crossed. Trump blurs the distinction between illegal immigrants and legal immigrants—the latter including his wife, his late ex-wife, the in-laws of his running mate, and many others. He has said of immigrants, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country” and “They’re destroying the blood of our country.” He has claimed that many have “bad genes.” He has also been more explicit: “They’re not humans; they’re animals”; they are “cold-blooded killers.” He refers more broadly to his opponents—American citizens, some of whom are elected officials—as “the enemy from within … sick people, radical-left lunatics.” Not only do they have no rights; they should be “handled by,” he has said, “if necessary, National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”
In using this language, Trump knows exactly what he is doing. He understands which era and what kind of politics this language evokes. “I haven’t read Mein Kampf,” he declared, unprovoked, during one rally—an admission that he knows what Hitler’s manifesto contains, whether or not he has actually read it. “If you don’t use certain rhetoric,” he told an interviewer, “if you don’t use certain words, and maybe they’re not very nice words, nothing will happen.”
David Rothkopf, the host of the podcast Deep State Radio, beheld Trump’s descent this week from “being periodically adrift” to something stranger and more savage: “He’s one cloudless night away from baying at the moon.” (Mary Azoy, Chapel Hill, N.C., and Steven Rauch, Claremont, Calif., among many others)
Have you ever looked after toddlers who insist on showing you everything they have done—terrible stick-figure drawings, what they’ve left in the potty—and demand that you admire it? If you have, then you’ve experienced something very similar to Donald Trump’s performance at a Fox News town hall yesterday in Cumming, Georgia, with an all-female audience.
I want to apologize to America. I helped create a monster.
For nearly 25 years, I led marketing at NBC and NBCUniversal. I led the team that marketed “The Apprentice,” the reality show that made Donald Trump a household name outside of New York City, where he was better known for overextending his empire and appearing in celebrity gossip columns.
To sell the show, we created the narrative that Trump was a super-successful businessman who lived like royalty. That was the conceit of the show. At the very least, it was a substantial exaggeration; at worst, it created a false narrative by making him seem more successful than he was.
The point is not that Trump is too bilious to be funny; the point is that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, and many others who should know better sat there and pretended that Trump was just a regular political candidate soft-shoeing his way through an Al Smith dinner. All of these people should have refused to share a stage with Trump, but the dinner was another example of what Jonathan Last acidly—and rightly—calls “Kabuki Normality,” the careful pretense that all is well, and that appearing with a convicted felon, a man found liable for sexual abuse, a racist and a misogynist and a “fascist to the core,” is just another day at the office for the leader of New York’s Catholics and the senior Democratic senator from New York.
Donald Trump is an ailing, dim, mentally unstable moral grotesque who attempted to stage a coup d’état the last time he lost an election. If your case for Trump is “Yes, but,” then you are going to have to tell me something about Kamala Harris that I do not already know. Maybe there is a persuasive case to be made. But I haven’t heard it.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
Predictably, secular authorities convinced by the reformers’ truth claims liked the distinction drawn between the necessity of obedience to them and of disobedience to Rome. They liked hearing “the Gospel” accompanied by such “good news”—it would allow them, for starters, to appropriate for themselves all ecclesiastical property, including the many buildings and lands that belonged to religious orders, and to use it or the money from its sale in whatever ways they saw fit. In two stages during the late 1530s, seizing for himself the vast holdings of all the hundreds of English monasteries and friaries, Henry VIII would demonstrate how thoroughly a ruler could learn this lesson without even having to accept Lutheran or Reformed Protestant doctrines about grace, faith, salvation, or worship.
Repentance is everything you do to get sin, those inborn passions, out of you. It’s reading, thinking, praying, weeding out disruptive influences in your life, sharing time with fellow Christians, following the guidance of the saints. Repentance is the renunciation of what harms us and the acquisition of what is beneficial to us, writes a holy counselor.
The prayer of penitence leads us to reflect critically on our own lives. If it is uttered sincerely, it leads us to repent in humility, not just of particular wrongs we have done, but of our whole shameful and degraded state of being. The paradox is that, far from leading to lethargy or despair, such penitence brings a new kind of strength. Sexual sin is never merely sexual, but always has motives that are rooted in the passions—whether the need to be loved, or the lust for domination, or the desire to prove oneself attractive, or any of a dozen other motives that come readily to mind.
… to believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.
[T]he move from taking God for granted to disputing God’s existence is a move from naïve to reflective, from a position where one set of options is precluded to a position where that set of options is fully available. Underlying that move, however, is the move from porous to buffered selves, and that is a move from naïve to naïve. It is, in other words, a move from a position where one set of options is precluded to a position where another set of options is precluded.
Caveat: This touches on American electoral politics.
Historical views of the Rapture
Do you want to be like Tim?
If you are a writer or pastor who wants to preach like [the late Tim] Keller, you won’t get there if your strategy is “listen to Keller and copy him.” Keller himself would tell you that that’s a terrible idea.
Instead, do what Tim did: Go to seminary. After seminary, read everything George Whitefield wrote. Read Calvin’s Institutes and his sermons. Read The Lord of the Rings over and over and over. Read everything C. S. Lewis ever wrote. Read every Puritan paperback from Banner of Truth. Read sociology. Read social theory. Read Bavinck. Read current events books and a steady line up of journalists. Do all of that within the context of a family alongside your spouse and while talking to people facing ordinary life problems who are in need of counsel and aid and think about how to explain what you’re learning to them in ways that are sensible to them. Lewis had a rule that if he couldn’t say something in a way an ordinary British person could understand it meant that he wasn’t ready to say that thing yet. Follow that rule.
Heh, heh, heh! You had me going there for a minute, Jake. What’s the quick way to preaching like Tim Keller? I don’t want to be faithful for decades and decades with no assurance that I’ll ever become famous; I want a surefire to fame by next year.
East versus West
The thing is the cultural habit of rationalizing and abstracting has also made serious inroads into Catholic life and practice in the West. The crisis, Kingsnorth concluded, is not so much one of Catholic versus Protestant as it is of Eastern Christianity versus Western Christianity. It is a conclusion I arrived at not long after I left Catholicism for Orthodoxy in 2006, the result of a great spiritual trauma. I had thought of Catholicism as a mystic-friendly form of Christianity—which it is, but only by comparison to Protestantism. When seen from the East, both Catholicism and Protestantism—in the West, at least—are marooned primarily in the head and are futilely trying to think their way out of the civilizational shipwreck of the modern West.
Though Orthodoxy shares with Catholicism a fundamentally sacramental metaphysics, in practice Orthodoxy is far more mystical, emphasizing that the conversion of the heart must precede the conversion of the intellect. It does not deny the intellect, only orders it within an anthropological hierarchy.
One aspect of Orthodoxy that particularly appealed to Kingsnorth is its panentheism—the principle that God is, as the Orthodox prayer says, “everywhere present and filling all things.” It’s not the same as pantheism, which says that the material universe is God. Orthodoxy teaches that God is separate from his creation but also interpenetrates it with his energies, or his force. Consider how the warmth and pleasant glow of an English hillside on an August afternoon occur because the faraway sun penetrates the grass, the flowers, and the earth with its energies. The hillside is not the sun, but it testifies to the presence of the sun in its material being.
“The earth is not God, but God is there, present in nature, not in some far-off heaven,” Kingsnorth says. He goes on: “He’s deeply entwined in everything. Creation is the book of God, as Augustine said, I think. That is explicitly recognized in Orthodoxy. So what I was finding, weirdly enough, was a sort of ancestral Christianity that my ancestors in England would have had access to, and that the early Celtic saints certainly had access to. When I became Orthodox, a lot of people said to me, ‘Welcome home,’ and, strangely, it did feel like I was coming home. It felt like there’s something here that we had, that we lost.”
I’ve been a fan of most of Rod Dreher’s books since Crunchy Cons. I want to distinguish his books from his columns, which I have frequently disagreed with. I also concede that one of his books was too raw, too transparent, too kiss-and-tell for my tastes.
Rod has been through a lot — openly for the last two years or so, quietly for a decade before that. Oh, heck: he’s been through a lot his whole life, much at the hands of family who lived in Louisiana at an extreme end of insularity. It’s hard to imagine a family that felt no pride in a member making it fairly big in New York City publishing because he dared to leave home, a family that affirmatively poisoned the minds of the next generation with refrains that Uncle Rod was uppity and no damn good.
I think he’s coming out of it, but he thought he had come out of it when he wrote How Dante Can Save Your Life.He’s voting for Donald Trump because Trump is the enemy of his enemies.. I cannot. I’m more with Miles Smith: “don’t tell me it is anything other than tragic that either of the two leading candidates for the presidency will eventually govern the American republic.”
Rod has a new book coming out tomorrow. It may be his most important; I’ve had it on pre-order for months.
This rave review struck me as capturing what’s special about Rod:
Dreher has an uncanny ability to articulate how religious conservatives feel, even to pre-empt it. Previous books gave us the Crunchy Cons (2006), whose eponymous conservatives want to turn the clock back; The Benedict Option (2017), which meant opting out of liberal culture; and Live Not By Lies (2020), which drew a line between “Marxist” and “woke”.
I can attest, spending much time among devout Christians, that Dreher has done it again, capturing our present mood: we’re trapped between wanting to throw ourselves into movement politics to defeat The Beast, or looking inwards in the hopes of becoming the change one wants to see in the world. Many of us are asking whether the best service we could do to Christianity is simply to become better Christians.
(Boldface added.) If you doubt that he has pre-empted conversations, ask yourself how often you’ve encountered the term “the Benedict Option,” which is literally his coinage.
These are a few of my favorite things
[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
“My people have been oppressed for nearly 2000 years. For 1200 years they endured Dhimmitude, a system of oppression made for the sole purpose of humiliating & breaking them. Today they face persecution in their homeland. And yet I don’t know of a single Coptic terrorist. Do you?”
If you hide the gifts you have been given in order to appear humble, then you are very proud indeed. Wishing to appear humble is the worst form of pride.
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
I took my Lincoln into the dealer last week because wiper fluid wouldn’t spray. They fixed it and suggested wiper blades, too.
I of course got a Customer Satisfaction Survey afterword because — well, this is Weimar America 2024.
In my value system, a 3 out of 5 means this was a perfectly okay experience, no problem. I don’t expect bliss or epiphanies from a car repair.
But to Ford-Lincoln, anything less that straight 5s triggers a message to the dealer that it desperately needs to call me to fix things. So the dealer called, and I told him his corporate overlords are idiots.
And then, incredibly, another survey came to ask whether the dealer called me, and now what are my answers to the other questions (how likely are you to recommend, etc.)? I couldn’t just say the dealer called me; the other questions were mandatory so I couldn’t submit the form without answering them.
But, aha!, they had a field for free-form comments, which I filled and submitted thus:
I am never going to answer another customer satisfaction survey. You won’t be satisfied until I’ve lied and given you all fives, so I’m going to lie like a dog and give them to you. But the truth is that Ford-Lincoln has burnt some goodwill by the refusal to accept “this was a satisfactory service call.” You won’t even let me say the dealer followed up and leave it at that, because I can’t say that (which is true) without answering all the other questions and risking another round of fawning attention if the answers are less than 5. I DON’T WANT FAWNING ATTENTION. I WANTED MY CAR FIXED. I GOT MY CAR FIXED. NOW LEAVE ME ALONE! WHAT KIND OF IDIOTS ARE TELLING YOU THAT THIS HARASSMENT IS A WAY TO BUILD CUSTOMER SATISFACTION?!
(That felt good, but I’m not sure my pulse and blood pressure are back down yet. I claim no copyright on this, and you can substitute another “f-word” for “fawning.”)
Gratitude Grievance
I beam with pride when I see companies like Shopify, GitHub, Gusto, Zendesk, Instacart, Procore, Doximity, Coinbase, and others claim billion-dollar valuations from work done with Rails. It’s beyond satisfying to see this much value created with a web framework I’ve spent the last two decades evolving and maintaining. A beautiful prize from a life’s work realized.
But it’s also possible to look at this through another lens, and see a huge missed opportunity! If hundreds of billions of dollars in valuations came to be from tools that I originated, why am I not at least a pétit billionaire?! …
This line of thinking is lethal to the open source spirit.
The moment you go down the path of gratitude grievances, you’ll see ungrateful ghosts everywhere. People who owe you something, if they succeed. A ratio that’s never quite right between what you’ve helped create and what you’ve managed to capture. If you let it, it’ll haunt you forever.
…
Thou shall not lust after thy open source’s users and their success.
Everything except language knows the meaning of existence. Trees, planets, rivers, time know nothing else. They express it moment by moment as the universe.
Even this fool of a body lives it in part, and would have full dignity within it but for the ignorant freedom of my talking mind.
Les Murray, New Selected Poems
Religion (whatever that is)
Papering over an abyss of waste and horror
[T]he 2024 presidential campaign is a type of tragedy. For many Evangelicals, choosing between the two is a near-existential psycho-intellectual crisis. Because we lack an understanding of the tragic, we tend to think that everything we do must somehow be “redemptive.” …
…
Evangelical treatment of politics as nearly sacramental, rather than a part of temporal or natural life, has left them unable to conceive of political tragedy. Greg Wolfe in Image sees this as an essentially American failing, and he’s probably right. “My youthful, earnest religiosity” Wolfe writes, papered over “an abyss of waste and horror with innocuous pieties.”
…
Evangelicals seem convinced that they could never be a part of a national political tragedy, and their refusal to concede the essentially tragic nature of American politics is to their peril. Every succeeding generation of evangelicals, left right and center, seem convinced that salvation lies in their own political exertions, seemingly unaware that they too could be a part of a national political tragedy, wherein God’s judgment comes on the moral and immoral, on the pious and impious. There are cases, I am sure, to be made for voting for Trump, and that is who most of my tribe will tend towards. Maybe it is necessary. Maybe it is prudent. But don’t tell me it is anything other than tragic that either of the two leading candidates for the presidency will eventually govern the American republic.
There was in fact a strange mix of Evangelicalism clericalism and charismatic political action that Trump effectively harnessed in unique ways.
It is not coincidental that many, if not most, exvangelical memoirs are written by people who have had some background with charismatic influence, and why the specific Cold War confluence of legacy Evangelicals and charismatics created the conditions for the exvangelical movement. In their Washington Post piece Erica Ramirez and Leah Paynerightly note that while the “Pentecostal-Charismatic movement overlaps with evangelical traditions in many ways, especially in their conservative ideas about political issues such as abortion, marriage and prayer in schools,” evangelicals and Pentecostals are “historically distinct — until the mid-20th century, Pentecostals and their Charismatic descendants weren’t routinely grouped with their evangelical counterparts.”
There was in fact a strange mix of Evangelicalism clericalism and charismatic political action that Trump effectively harnessed in unique ways.
It’s tempting to muse about why both “sides” consented to the conflation of pentecostal/charismatic and evangelical.
Perhaps another day. If I tried it today, I’d be neglecting other things and my take would probably be too cynical.
Politics
New Nadir
The Rutherford County, North Carolina, Sheriff’s Office said on Monday that police officers arrested a 44-year-old man on Saturday suspected of threatening violence against Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster workers. The Washington Post reported over the weekend that FEMA ordered its employees to temporarily evacuate the county after National Guard service members reported seeing a truck of armed militants who were “out hunting FEMA,” though law enforcement said the suspect acted alone. The man—carrying a handgun and rifle at the time of his arrest—was charged with “going armed to the terror of the public” and released later that day on $10,000 bail.
With Harris I’m pretty sure there will be another Election in four years; I’m not at all sure with Trump. But with Trump at +16 in my state, I have the luxury of voting for neither of them.
Poetic justice
Less than four weeks from the election, Michigan’s Democratic governor made an in-kind contribution to Donald Trump’s campaign. Gretchen Whitmer appeared last week in a video featuring her placing a Dorito chip on the tongue of a kneeling social-media influencer. After Michigan’s bishops denounced the clip as “specifically imitating the posture and gestures of Catholics receiving the Holy Eucharist,” Ms. Whitmer apologized.
The kicker: She was wearing a Harris-Walz campaign hat in the video.
The swing-state governor says she had no idea people might find the post offensive, which speaks to how out of touch Democratic elites are ….
This may qualify as poetic justice. Kamala Harris deserves to be outed as anti-Catholic (see this as well as the McGurn column) quite apart from Gretchen Whitmer’s mockery of the eucharist.
But I’m kind of waiting for the rest of the Whitmer story. What’s above is suspiciously weird; I just don’t know how Whitmer could have blundered her way into that highly-scripted gaff unless it was some kind of Borat or Project Veritas entrapment. Maybe that kneeling social-media influencer was a conservative provocateur, in which case I’d fault her (him?) equally with Whitmer in staging the mockery.
Russian 1988, China 2024
So: Why didn’t Gorbachev’s reforms succeed and save an empire?
Regarding the key figure, opinion was split at least five ways: some said it had been Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk; others, Russian President Boris Yeltsin; still others, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev or KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov. Finally, one or two passed the credit (or guilt) back to Leonid Brezhnev.
Each had a cogent reason for his answer. Moscow’s Mayor Gavriil Popov and Alexander Yakovlev fingered Kravchuk because his action in leading Ukraine to complete independence had removed an essential component of any possible union. Without Ukraine, their argument went, a union would be unworkable, since the discrepancy in size between Russia and each of the other republics was so great. At least one unit of intermediate size was needed to create the sort of balance a federation, or even confederation, would require.nov Others, such as Anatoly Sobchak and Konstantin Lubenchenko, the last speaker of the USSR Supreme Soviet, did not agree with this logic.
Russia, Belarus, the countries of Central Asia, and perhaps one or two from the Transcaucasus could have formed a viable union even without Ukraine, they argued. Only one republic was irreplaceable, and that was Russia. Ergo, Yeltsin had been the key figure. If he had not conspired with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus to form the Commonwealth of Independent States, some form of confederation could have been cobbled together to the benefit of all.
“No,” said others, including Vladislav Starkov and Sergei Stankevich, who felt that Gorbachev’s stubbornness, his failure to understand the force of nationalism, his devotion to a discredited socialism, and the authoritarian streak in his personality had prevented him from voluntarily transferring the sort of power to the republics that their leaders demanded. His failures in leadership, in short, had determined the collapse of the state he headed, and no other political figure could have saved it.
Anatoly Chernyayev, ever loyal to his boss, would have none of that. He felt that a union treaty would have been signed if the attempted coup had not occurred in August. This implied that Vladimir Kryuchkov had been the key figure. He, after all, had organized the coup, and nobody else could have done it without his cooperation.
Starkov, who named Gorbachev as the principal culprit, also pointed out that Leonid Brezhnev had shared much of the responsibility, for he was the Soviet leader who had set the stage for collapse by neglecting the country’s economic, social, and ethnic problems and by permitting local “mafias” under the guise of the Communist Party to obtain a hammerlock on power in many of the union republics.
This stuff’s complicated and most of us Americans haven’t got a clue what Russia is about. Gobachev tried major reform, but there were too many moving pieces and personalities — so he got collapse in the end.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
As it turned out, Yeltsin probably did not need to conduct a political campaign in the usual sense. As the Party’s hostility became more evident, Yeltsin’s popularity rose. The public attitude was that anybody the Communist apparatchiks detested must be a hero. The campaign the Party waged against Yeltsin was not merely futile; it was Yeltsin’s strongest political asset.
Jack F. Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire
Hostage situations
Republicans can’t unequivocally say that Joe Biden won the 2020 Presidential election.
But Democrats can’t say that a human being with a penis is not a woman.
Both major parties are hostage to crazies.
Hearsay High Dudgeon
Of Ta-Nahesi Coates
“Part of me would have done anything to go home,” he writes in his new book The Message, about his 10-day trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories in the summer of 2023. “The part that always grouses about the rigors of reporting, the awkwardness of asking strangers intimate questions, the discipline of listening intently.” Readers, if listening to other people is a chore, then journalism might not be the career for you.
It could also be that Coates hates reporting because he is bad at it. Every reporter knows the a-ha moment of living through the anecdote that will make the perfect lead or kicker. No such perfect anecdotes have ever happened to Coates or, if they did, he was oblivious to them. His previous book, Between the World and Me, was an indictment of America as a racist hellscape, yet the worst act of racism he recounted from his own life—not something he read about in a newspaper or a history book—was a white lady on an escalator who shouted at his dawdling son, who was blocking her way, “Come on!”
I have no personal opinion of Mr. Coates. One of my then-favorites, Rod Dreher, was in awe of him as a writer, but before I read anything of his (save possibly a magazine article or such), he turned dour (that much I knew) and pretty much dropped off my radar.
But Andrews’ description of the worst active racism he personally experienced reminds me of a pattern I’ll call “hearsay high dudgeon.”
One notices such things, first, in one’s adversaries. 30+ years ago, my fair city, followed by the sister city across the river and my fair county, decided that we desperately needed to add sexual orientation to our human relations codes. There was no precipitating hate crime. The precipitant was merely that a liberal city councilman’s son came out, and the ordinance amendment felt like a father’s homage to his son.
As I listened to the heated public comments, I waited for evidence that we had unjust discrimination in our collective hearts. In three sets of public comments (one in each of the three jurisdictions in question), I heard one first-hand complaint from a lesbian whose military career was somehow deflected (I do not remember the details) before the military began liberalizing on such matters under the Clinton administration. (Of course, our local ordinance wasn’t going to change how the United States military treated such matters.)
But then there was one other first-hand account of local adverse effects: a male college student’s two male roommates no longer wanted to live with him after they found his stash of gay porn. Arguably, the Ordinances would have made that actionable as “discrimination in housing.” But was that discrimination “unjust”? Do we really want government intruding on roommate preferences?
Yes, we do in my community. Or maybe the testimony was irrelevant because our representatives just know, without evidence, what homophobic blackguards their constituents are.
Only later did I begin noticing similar things said by my allies. Various Christians also live in hearsay high dudgeon, collecting and cherishing accounts of “persecution” against other Christians.
Isn’t it pretty debilitating to present yourself or your tribe as victims to gain sympathy?
* * * * * * *
I have a sequel to the preceding. Some readers might wonder why I opposed extending anti-discrimination measures to the attribute of sexual orientation. They might even be indignant that I did that.
In large part, it was because I don’t think all “discrimination” is invidious (or unjust, if you prefer). “Discrimination” can be the epithet version of “discernment,” a very good and important word.
Let me illustrate. Suppose you run a government institution for troubled adolescent girls. Suppose you need staff and are determined not to “discriminate.” Suppose a 24-year-old man applies for a position that will allow him unsupervised access to those troubled adolescent girls.
Of course you have rules as safeguards against sexual predation, but rules can be broken.
Should you be discerning and recognize that hiring a man likely to be sexually attracted to some of his charges, in a position that allows unsupervised access to the objects of his desire, is a formula for disaster and scandal? Or should you follow your nondiscrimination ideology and hire him if he is otherwise the best candidate, perhaps giving yourself a pat on the back for open-mindedness?
Now flip that script. Suppose one runs a government institution for troubled adolescent boys. Suppose one needs staff and is determined not to “discriminate.” Suppose a 24-year-old “out” gay man applies for a position that will allow him unsupervised access to those troubled adolescent boys.
Ledbetter was hired by a home for troubled boys after he was “out” to anyone in town who paid any attention. A few years later, two of those troubled boys came forward to say he preyed on them sexually. The local press declared editorially that they were put up to the accusations by fundamentalist homophobes and that the episode was an illustration of blackguard homophobia. Somehow, Ledbetter’s defense attorneys got a signed retraction from one of the boys and the charges went away.
But the accusations were true. Ledbetter had even videotaped the encounters, as Wisconsin police discovered when they investigated him for similar sexual predation up there more than a decade later.
He’s in custody for the rest of his years. His journalistic enablers are complicit in the abuse of dozens of boys — and they didn’t do Ledbetter any favors either.
I didn’t know at the time whether the 1990s accusations were true or false (I had spoken to the boys, but did not undertake to represent them legally) nor do I expect that the journalists would have known. What I expected from the journalists was something better than damnable conspiracy theories about fundamentalist Christians, a fundamentalist being anyone more conservative than the journalist. The journalistic reaction was tribal, not rational; gay is good, conservative Christian bad.
I did not think that a gay man inevitably would bugger boys in his charge if given the chance any more than a straight man would copulate willy-nilly with nubile girls. But I was good and damn sure, from personal experience of male adolescence and young adulthood (from which vantage point some adolescent girls remained alluring), that the chances were way too high for his hiring to have been defensible.
Saying “no” to his application would have been “discernment,” not “discrimination.” But the Ordinance we passed categorically forbids any “difference in treatment in the areas of employment, housing and public accommodations” based on sex or sexual orientation (or other attributed). No discernment is allowed.
Democrat conspiracy kooks
The claims had a powerful effect on public opinion among Democrats, just as Trump’s ranting and raving is doing now among Republicans. In March 2018, a YouGov poll revealed that an astonishingly high 66 percent of Democrats believed that in 2016 Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected president — a claim with no more evidence behind it than Trump’s current assertions about being deprived of victory by voter fraud.
Remember that, dear Christian, next time you’re tempted to paint us as uniquely victims of the Zeitgeist. The Zeitgeist varies from place-to-place.
Empty pantsuit
The closest Harris has gotten to articulating her agenda is the following, from the 60 Minutes interview:
In the last four years, I have been vice president of the United States. And I have been traveling our country. And I have been listening to folks and seeking what is possible in terms of common ground. I believe in building consensus. We are a diverse people. Geographically, regionally, in terms of where we are in our backgrounds. And what the American people do want is that we have leaders who can build consensus. Where we can figure out compromise and understand it’s not a bad thing, as long as you don’t compromise your values, to find common-sense solutions. And that has been my approach.
This is a classic Harris quote. It’s impossible to disagree with, but it’s also so empty that it’s hard even to agree with it either. It doesn’t tell us what she personally would push for before she’d compromise, what she really has conviction about, what she really believes in. In fact, the more I listened to her in these interviews, the more worried I became that she doesn’t actually believe in anything.
… Trump knows how to sell — in fourth grade language. Harris only knows how to charm elite liberals — in language only elite liberals use. It’s the only political skill she’s ever needed to have. And it’s not going to be enough.
…
Look: I’m voting for her. Or rather, I’m voting against Trump. (The most striking aspect of the various endorsements of Harris — from The New Yorker to The Atlantic — is that they were almost entirely about Trump.) But I’ll tell you this: catching Trump’s various podcast and radio spots gives a very different impression. He is as reckless as she is careful; as conversational and natural as she is stilted and scripted. He is much more comfortable in the new media universe than she is.
Check out his interview with Theo Von, and watch him and Theo talk about cocaine addiction; or see Trump’s appearance on comic Andrew Shulz’s show. Here’s Schulz bursting out laughing when Trump says he’s “a basically truthful person” — and Trump carries on.
In his newsletter, Political Wire, Taegan Goddard surveyed that fabulist’s unfabulous merch: “The constant stream of Trump infomercials — hawking watches, silver coins, sneakers, bibles, coffee table books, NFTs — is beginning to feel like a going-out-of-business sale.” (Nancy Jones, Iowa City)
At Defector, David Roth recapped The Washington Post’s interviews with Trump rallygoers who weren’t staying for the whole show: “Some of the people The Post spoke to left because they were sick of ‘the insults,’ which feels a bit like storming out of a steakhouse dinner just before dessert because you don’t eat meat.” (Matt Keenan, Sharon, Mass.)
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
Tomorrow, we will bury my youngest brother, who died Tuesday. So it has been a busy and stressful week.
Jonathan’s life on earth was, by upper-middle class, first world standards, unusually afflicted, and he was not afraid of death. We, his surviving brothers, all practicing Christians of varying traditions (our parents did well), see God’s gracious hand in this in many ways.
If you do such things, pray for God’s servant, Jonathan, who has “fallen asleep” in hope of resurrection, though in his tradition he would have called it something else.
Here’s what I have for you today.
Christians did not worry that absence of the pagans from their services constituted a lost opportunity. Their worship was not evangelistic; it was not “seeker sensitive.” Their intent in worshiping was to glorify God rather than to attract outsiders. And since they believed that authentic worship formed the worshipers, they believed that in the course of time the behavior of those so formed would attract outsiders.
Alan Kreider, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church
In 1184, bishops who previously might have been content to let sleeping heretics lie had been instructed actively to sniff them out. Then, in 1215, at the great Lateran Council presided over by Innocent III, sanctions explicitly targeting heresy had provided the Church with an entire machinery of persecution.
Tom Holland, Dominion
For what it’s worth, I seem to recall a trustworthy source affirm that there was never any sort of inquisition in the Eastern (Orthodox) Church, and I know I have heard of none.
Those who, like him, had dared to repudiate the Roman Church but had then been guilty of what Luther condemned as a failure properly to understand the Spirit, had also been the objects of his ire. Theologians in Swiss or German cities who presumed to dispute his views on the eucharist; Anabaptists, with their wild contempt for infant baptism and secular authority; Henry VIII, who seemed to think he was God. Luther, fretting where it all might lead, had not shrunk from contemplating a nightmarish prospect: a world in which the very concept of truth might end up dissolving, and everything appear relative. ‘For whoever has gone astray in the faith may thereafter believe whatever he wants.’
Tom Holland, Dominion
Protestants made the sixteenth century an era of unprecedented emphasis on doctrine. In their divergent ways, all Protestants thought that the most fundamental problem with the Roman church was its mistaken truth claims, that is, its false doctrines. As we saw in the previous chapter, they offered their respective corrections based on scripture, variously supplemented by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and the exercise of reason. Because Lutherans and Reformed Protestants were supported rather than suppressed by political authorities, theirs were the particular Protestant truth claims institutionalized in cities, territories, and countries whose leaders rejected Rome.
Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
(1) this is all political, but not full of vitriol toward DJT;
(2) I am in a “family situation” and may be silent for a while. Or I may not; I’ve not been through something like this before.
Bias versus propaganda
Trying to convince Fox watchers that they’re being misled is like trying to convince fish that they’re wet … Tell them that they’re more likely to find the truth about the election in the New York Times than on Fox and they’ll look at you cockeyed and say, “But the New York Times is biased!”
And they’re right …
The Times is biased. But there’s a difference between bias and propaganda.
Bias is having a rooting interest in a dispute. Propaganda is allowing your rooting interest to define your understanding of reality.
If Trump wins, the Times will overflow with thoughtful analysis about how he did it—turning out low-propensity voters, winning over union members, mobilizing young men, making inroads with working-class blacks and Latinos. There’ll be endless doomsaying about the outcome in the paper’s opinion section and many ominous (and justified) “news” pieces wondering how dark the next four years might get, but the reality of what happened won’t be challenged.
If Harris wins, right-wing media will overflow with conspiracy theories about how she did it—ballot stuffing, vote-machine tinkering, turning out illegal immigrants by the millions to vote fraudulently and, somehow, undetectably. The daytime hosts at Fox will engage seriously with the exit polls, as will legacy conservative publications like National Review. But across the broader industry, denying the reality of what happened will be treated as a supreme litmus test of tribal loyalty.
Most mainstream media is biased; most right-wing media is propaganda.
Conservative media began as a check on left-wing bias in mainstream outlets …
[L]et’s go back to 2015, the year Trump announced his run for the presidency. At that time, traditional evangelical elites were steadfastly against Trump. For example, the Christian newsmagazine World polled 103 evangelical leaders and influencers throughout the 2016 primary season (I was one of the people polled), and we resolutely and consistently rejected Trump. Marco Rubio won the poll month after month.
And yet, grass-roots evangelical voters preferred Trump. Even as early as August 2015, when a dozen other Republican challengers were still in the race, he enjoyed plurality support from evangelicals, and there was one category of Christian leaders that seemed more drawn to him than others: Pentecostals and charismatics.
…
Trump’s victory created an “entirely new incentive structure.” Hundreds of prophets and hundreds of prophecies began to flood Christian media outlets, not just the Victory Channel but also networks like Daystar, Trinity Broadcasting Network, and the Christian Broadcasting Network.
“The chorus of prophets,” Taylor said, “create a sense of certainty and irrefutability.” In other words, as the 2020 election approached, countless Christians were not only certain that Trump would win, they were certain that Trump was divinely appointed to save the United States of America, either as King Cyrus figure (a pagan ruler who helped save the people of Israel) or as a King David figure (a flawed king, but still God’s anointed ruler).
Any dissent from that idea was met with ruthless opposition. While there is relatively little theological policing within Pentecostal America, political policing has become rampant. Taylor compared it to a “mafia dynamic.” If you “get out of line on politics,” Taylor said, “you’ll feel it.”
Part of JD Vance’s assignment is to suck up to the followers of Lance Wallnau and his fellow theocrat wannabes. Mercifully, he has not been required to profess their twisted faith.
Exhaustion
Before Trump took his golden escalator ride, life was different. Then, even if I thought a candidate would make a terrible office holder, I rarely thought he or she was objectively a bad person. Even LBJ, and he was pretty bad on a personal level, or Nixon, who was pretty bad as a leader. One consequence was that was, while I might have considered the folks who supported “the other guy” naive or misguided, I didn’t think of them as bad. But Trump by any measure is actually a bad, bad man. And he’s bad in many, many ways. So, that makes my response to his supporters quite a problem. In my life, there are folks I love who definitely will vote for that bad, bad man. I know those folks are not themselves irredeemably bad. But I cannot help but wonder, “What is wrong with them?”
And that is one important reason this is all so exhausting.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
Three days in a row! When did I last blog three days in a row?!
I have nothing to say about Israel, Hamas, Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, hostages and any piece I’ve left out, but I’m not oblivious to this anniversary.
Not politics
Tradition
Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.
G.K. Chesteron, Orthodoxy
Here is a quick and generally reliable rule to follow. If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.
Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes
Sportsball
Gladwell, like many of us, seems to have unwittingly internalized the idea that when professional athletes do the thing they’re paid to do, they’re not acting according to the workaday necessity (like the rest of us) but rather are expressing with grace and energy their inmost competitive instincts, and doing so in a way that gives them delight. We need to believe that because much of our delight in watching them derives from our belief in their delight.
Alan Jacobs, How to Think
Dreaming is just about our only break from rationalism
The whole evolution of music as an academic discipline tends to destroy the most important reason to care about music in the first place.
Here’s one of my charts on the subject:
That’s why I started to write about sleeping.
No music writer talks about sleep more than me. And that’s because dreams happen when we sleep—and this is the one type of visionary experience everybody can still access.
We all become a little unhinged and crazy in those dreams. Even the most rationalistic STEM advocate.
…
Could something like this—dream therapy for creatives— exist in the current day?
I wondered about this for a long time. I finally decided to ask musicians about whether they had learned songs from their dreams.
Nothing prepared me for the response I got. I heard from hundreds of musicians—and learned that the gift of a song during a dream is quite common. And it’s usually a powerful song.
…
I note that many musicians have told me that they are reluctant to discuss their dream songs. The subject is just too strange and antithetical to our dominant rationalist paradigm.
And that reluctance is even greater if the artist has a hallucination or out-of-body experience or something else that ‘medical experts’ might want to treat.
My hunch is that these happen frequently to intensely creative people—even in an age of rationalism.
The world isn’t as neat and rigorously logical as you’ve been told. And the world of artistic inspiration is the least logical of all. There’s a good reason why the ancients believed that creative works were a gift from the muse.
…
I continue to research this subject, and I think about it all the time. Even more important, I try to open up my mind to realms of experience beyond the empirical. That’s where creativity comes from, and I don’t want to shut myself off from the source because of close-mindedness.
Above all, I don’t mock or dismiss artists who have these visions, or assume that in every instance they are suffering from mental illness. Some of them might be a lot wiser or healthier than the rest of us.
I can’t think of a solo-effort Substack that delivers more bang for the buck that Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker. And the guy is really smart about some things that interest me.
From the Department of Free-Association: Has Rod Dreher, once again, seized the moment to shape a coming conversation, as he did in Crunchy Cons, Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies?
Politics
Serious people earnestly disagreeing
Back in August I was watching the DNC with my old mom in California. Kamala and Tim and Michelle and Barack and all the others kept talking about our reasons for aiding Ukraine in its fight against the Russian occupation of its eastern territories. They consistently appealed to the apparently essentialized fact that the Ukrainians, like the Americans, “love freedom”, and that it is only natural and right to help other peoples who share this love with us. There was zero acknowledgment of the complexities of geopolitics and historical legacies, or of the situated perspective a Russian might non-crazily come to have, according to which parts of what is now Ukraine seem naturally and justly to fall more into the sphere of influence of the Russian Empire than of the North Atlantic one.
I know a lovely man in his 60s, an outstanding member of the vanishing breed of the Homo Sovieticus, whose father is Ukrainian and whose mother is Russian, and who grew up in Kazakhstan. He tells me his parents waited to get married so that the celebration would take place on the 300th anniversary of the 1654 Pereyaslav Agreement, in which the Cossack Hetmanate in control of much of Ukraine made a ceremonial pledge of loyalty to Moscow. This friend of mine is in exile, and is no admirer of Putin. He greatly regrets the 2022 invasion. But he could never make any sense of any claim to the effect that Ukraine rightly belongs to NATO and not to Russia in virtue of some mysterious essential trait of the Ukrainian people, that they “love freedom” while the Russians do not.
…
And here we arrive at what really gets me about the Democrats. If we are going to risk direct conflict with another nuclear-armed superpower, let us not be lulled into it by bullshit and platitudes. Why do the Democrats have to talk that way? It’s as if the Republican tactic of portraying “the libs” as effeminate hyper-woke safe-spacers has really only caused the Democrats themselves to double down with absurd displays of hawkish masculinity. We’re supposed to love Kamala because she’s a tough-on-crime prosecutor, and that therefore corrects for the slip-ups of the past years when some in the progressive wing of the party have suggested, on the contrary, that all cops are bastards. Tim Walz, meanwhile, seems to have been chosen primarily because he wears flannel shirts, and has been put on display in the most implausibly kayfabe campaign ads purportedly fixing his own pick-up truck. One almost expects them next to come out with an ad depicting Walz in the act of dressing a deer, looking every bit the caricature of the Minneapolis goy neighbor in the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man (2009). He’s a hunter and a football coach, but he’s also a faculty advisor for the LGBTQIA+ club! What a model of enlightened masculinity! She’s a prosecutor and a foreign-policy hawk, but she’s a she and she brings “joy”! The problem is that none of the rest of the world cares about any of that childish stuff. They all know that for all the equally kayfabe retrograde masculinity of Trump, that man is an absolute pussy, and it is in fact the Democrats who represent the greatest threat to any hot-spot of resistance to the US’s arch-imperial ambitions throughout the world.
What are the odds that a world in which the American Empire is beaten into desperate retreat would be any sort of world our children and grandchildren might want to live in? … Trump, in a second term as president, is practically guaranteed to assume the role of overseer of American imperial retreat, in favor not of a global community of equals such as some naïve progressives might have hoped for in the early years of the League of Nations, but of nationalist isolation and at most pragmatic cooperation with other self-sequestering nation-states, somewhat along the lines of what Marine Le Pen envisions for Europe in the phrase “association des nations libres”. That phrase might sound innocent enough, but nations that are free to dispense with any idea of reciprocal obligations are unlikely to remain in a stable “association” for long, and Trump, at least, hardly gives any indications of knowing how to guide the ship of state as it weathers the inevitable storms that will whip up unstable waters in our years of decline. Far better, far surer, we believe, to have a party in power that understands and accepts the nature of the that power: imperial power, namely, which might aspire in the years ahead not only to face off with steely resolve in our current global showdown, but, eventually, to emerge as its undisputed champion. … Most of us on the Editorial Board, even the Americans among us, do not live in the United States, and from our respective vantages it is pretty hard to concentrate on any aspect of American political life that does not have to do with its role as a globe-spanning empire. Just manage your domestic affairs however you see fit, we are tempted to say; our overwhelming concern is with what you get up to beyond your borders. We therefore have rather little patience for that current of Democratic partisan discourse that would like for American politics to sound more or less like, say, Danish politics. Denmark, if we may be blunt, and all of the Scandinavian countries with such high marks on all the usual tests, is able to focus on maintaining its robust welfare state primarily because its defense is entirely outsourced to the American Empire. The American Democrats who fawn over European national health systems seldom realize that by seeing to the defense of other NATO members, the United States is at the same time freeing up European national budgets for other more humane uses. Americans pay for European defense rather than paying for their own welfare; Europeans get health care in turn, but only through de-facto vassalization.
We would like to see this arrangement continue, at least for now, at least until NATO can be expanded to include all of those states that currently set themselves up in opposition to it, a prospect even Russia’s own leaders in the early post-Soviet years were able to entertain with some seriousness.
You might think our reasons for voting for the Democrats are not good ones, or that we are merely “joking” when we give them. We can only reply that your reasons really do not matter. You might well imagine your are voting, for your part, for “decency”, or “joy”, or sane gun-control laws or a woman’s right to choose. But the only way to vote for any of these things is to cast a vote for American empire. That’s the bargain. We here at The Hinternet, minus our Founding Editor, believe this is a bargain worth accepting, but that is only because we believe it is the United States under Democratic leadership that offers us the single best shot at subduing all the planet’s lingering zones of discontent, and delivering us into a future of perpetual peace. This is what we at The Hinternet want. Do you?
These seem to be serious people having a serious disagreement, not just swapping bullshit and platitudes. It’s a habit most of us, myself included, could benefit by emulating.
Agreement on norms trumps disagreement on policy
Cheney’s argument for Harris is a classical liberal version of the GOP’s “Flight 93 election” reasoning from 2016. It’s a basic matter of proper prioritizing: Agreement on norms trumps disagreement on policy. If you hand power back to Trump, he’ll crash the constitutional order. The conservative thing to do under the circumstances is to storm the cockpit by backing Harris, who’ll at least keep the plane in the air.
(I wonder how Lisa Beamer feels about Flight 93 as a recurring political trope?)
Those conservative Democrats!
The truth, I think, is that the Democratic Party is drifting. Coasting. Dems are buoyed at the national level by Trump’s personal unpopularity but lacking in any kind of compelling vision for the future of the country. For the third cycle in a row, the Democrats have been freed up to run a mostly substanceless campaign that boils down to “Vote for us so Trump will lose.” But what besides that promise of negation does the party stand for? What does it hope to accomplish? Or does it just want to be empowered to manage for a little longer the well-functioning system of domestic and international institutions that already exists?
The answer, it would seem, is the latter. From what I can tell, the Democrats are proposing little beyond a defense of the status quo (or, in the case of abortion rights, a return to the status quo as of a few years ago) against all the unorthodox things their opponents aim to accomplish (including mass deportations, a revolution in how the executive branch is staffed, and the imposition of sweeping tariffs).
That means the Democrats have inadvertently become America’s conservative party, championing the views and interests of those Americans who are content with the country’s present and recent past. When that stance is combined with opposition to the widely loathed Trump, it can (just barely) deliver victory …
The term “conservative” has many meanings, but the most elementary one—the one associated with the man generally considered to be the first conservative writer and thinker, Edmund Burke—grows out of the name itself: To be conservative is to seek to conserve the present’s inheritance from the past: the accomplishments, authoritative institutions, norms, habits, policies, and traditions that have been handed down to us by previous generations.
That’s the meaning of Liz Cheney’s enthusiastic endorsement of the Harris/Walz ticket late last week. It’s not a signal that Harris will govern as a Republican from the era when Cheney’s father (who has also endorsed Harris) served as George W. Bush’s vice president. It’s an expression of Burkean conservatism against the disruptive-revolutionary impulses of the MAGA movement.
The American multiculturalists similarly reject their country’s cultural heritage. Instead of attempting to identify the United States with another civilization, however, they wish to create a country of many civilizations, which is to say a country not belonging to any civilization and lacking a cultural core. History shows that no country so constituted can long endure as a coherent society. A multicivilizational United States will not be the United States; it will be the United Nations.
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
I was not a very good student of history, but I wonder what historic precedents Huntington has in mind when he says “History shows …”. Sincere question. Surely it’s not just that nobody has tried a multicivilizational nation before; that would not yield a verdict of history.
Please comment if you know. (Comments are moderated but not censored for viewpoint.)
We knew damn well he was a snake …
before we took him in.
I love editorial cartoons, and am fond of comic strips as well. As newspapers are dying, I mainline mine from here.
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 