Politics
A key question for the quadrennium
What is the honorable way to oppose while hoping for the best, to oppose while being as quick to recognize progress as to see failure, to oppose while appreciating any outcomes that are healthy for and helpful to the United States of America? And without forgetting why you oppose? We’ll find out. This is our goal. History is long and our moment within it short. Play it straight and say what you see.
…
He is going to utterly dominate our brainspace. He is a neurological imperialist, he storms in and stays. In his public self, Joe Biden asked nothing and gave nothing. Mr. Trump demands and dominates: Attention must be paid. It was said years ago that Fox News viewers were so loyal that they never changed the channel and the Fox logo burned itself into the screens. Donald Trump won’t be happy until he’s burned himself into the nation’s corneas.
… let me tell you what happens when you pardon virtually everyone who did Jan. 6: You get more Jan. 6ths. When people who commit crimes see that their punishment will be minimal they are encouraged. It was a wicked act. Conservatives are tough on crime because of the pain and disorder it causes. In that case it pained an entire nation. Jan. 6 too shamed us in the eyes of the world. This pardon was not a patriotic act.
Peggy Noonan on Trump 2.0.
Our building-on-precedent President
The effect — and I believe purpose — of these pardons is to encourage vigilantes and militias loyal to the president, but unaccountable to the government. Illiberal democracies and outright dictatorships often rely on such militia groups, whose organization and seriousness can range widely, from the vigilantes who enforce Iran’s hijab dress code to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia that have killed government opponents.
Here in America, lynch mobs and the Ku Klux Klan bolstered a racial caste system with violence that state governments, for the most part, were unwilling to commit themselves. But for decades, we had little reason to fear that vigilantes or militias would enforce the will of the state.
Former Federal Prosecutor Brendan Ballou
The Biden administration enlisted the “whole of society” to suppress supposed misinformation on social media. In practice, that meant screaming, cussing and threatening social media owners to do what the government itself is not allowed to do.
Mafia Don, by pardoning or commuting the sentences of violent felons who support him, says “hold my beer.”
I fear we’re in for vigilante justice.
Moral equivalency? Not if you think threats of violence and death are worse than threats of regulatory harassment. But it’s not unprecedented.
The day I became politically homeless
Monday, inauguration day, was the 20th Anniversary of my declaring an end of my loyalty to the GOP.
George W. Bush, for whom I’d voted in 2000 because of his promise of a humbler foreign policy, announced a 180-degree reversal:
So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
(Italics added) He immediately added “This is not primarily the task of arms,” but I knew that the policy was delusional and that arms would be required in the folly.
I was right.
I wish I could say I quit because I foresaw something like Donald Trump as the eventuality of, say, the GOP’s “southern strategy,” but that would be a big ole lie.
MAGA Granny repents
One of the January 6 rioters doesn’t want a pardon:
Ms. Hemphill, 71, who was called “MAGA Granny” in some news headlines, has said that she no longer supports Mr. Trump or believes his lie that the 2020 election was stolen. She said that a therapist had helped change her view of the attack by telling her she was “not a victim of Jan. 6; I was a volunteer.”
“I lost my critical thinking,” she said on Wednesday, reflecting on her involvement in the riot and the “Stop the Steal” movement. “Now I know it was a cult, and I was in a cult.”
Would that this were not a man-bites-dog story! Would that most of the rioters had come to their senses!
Over-interpreting
Episcopal Bishop Mariann E. Budde pointedly challenged President Trump from the pulpit this week:
So, she took a breath, and spoke.
President Trump, seated seven feet below and some 40 feet to her right, made eye contact. One representation of American Christianity began speaking to another, and the most powerful man in the world was arrested by the words of a silver-haired female bishop in the pulpit. Until he turned away.
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“Let me make one final plea, Mr. President: Millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families, some who fear for their lives. And the people, the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals, they — they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. I ask you to have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away, and that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here, Mr. President.” …
For everyone watching, the vastness of Washington National Cathedral compressed, in one stunning moment, into a sudden intimacy. And with it, all the existential fights not simply of politics, but of morality itself. In a flash, the war over spiritual authority in America burst into a rare public showdown.
The Canterbury Pulpit confronted the bully pulpit on the greatest possible stage.
For nearly a decade, American Christianity has been torn apart in every possible way. Christians have fought over whether women should be allowed to preach. Over the place of gay people. The definition of marriage. The separation of church and state. Black Lives Matter. And at the heart of much of it has been Mr. Trump’s rise as the de facto head of the modern American church, and the rise of right-wing Christian power declaring itself the one true voice of God.
Elizabeth Dias, New York Times (Emphasis added)
I deny that Donald Trump is any representative of American Christianity; I don’t even think his Christianish supporters any longer claim that he is a Christian of any sort. I deny that he is “the de facto head of the modern American church.” This is highly tendentious reporting, notwithstanding the author’s credentials.
I remain scandalized that Trump gets so much enthusiastic Christianish support, but I have come to understand, at least a little bit, why voters, Christianish or not, preferred him to the senile, corrupt, manipulative, gaslighting and extremist alternative.
Honey Badger
A fairly short paragraph that packs a big claim. Speaking of a panel at Davos:
[O]ne of the panelists said she has been talking to CEOs there, and they all promise that they are not going to roll back DEI, despite the criticism. I believe she’s telling the truth. Whether those CEOs were just telling her that to calm her down, or whether they really believe it — only time will tell. I would bet that most of them really believe it, because DEI is held to with religious fervor by that elite class. As I’ve written here before, it is impossible to overstate the conformist power among elites of being seen as a Good Person. This is why no Republican leader ever pushed back against this stuff prior to Trump. They were terrified of being seen as a Bad Person by the media and other elites. Trump is the Honey Badger of politics: he doesn’t care. (That’s a link to the megaviral Randall video from some years back; he drops some profanity in it, so be aware.)
Greatness
Literary greatness
Of life in the Soviet Union for writers:
the lesson I have learned from the writers of my father’s generation is that those who resisted the life of doublethink then are the one who keep influencing us now.
Natan Sharansky, The Doublethinkers
Musical greatness
Garth Hudson, the last surviving member of The Band, has died at age 87. Alan Jacobs mourns, and in doing so points out what was so special about The Band:
Robbie Robertson once said that — when they were all living in and around the house in West Saugerties, New York they called Big Pink — Dylan would play them songs he was working on and they couldn’t tell whether he had just written them or found them under a rock. The Band’s best music is like that: it feels old, time-worn and seasoned, and yet is also a brand new thing.
Yeah, that’s how it felt.
Healthy Society, Sickly Society
The quality that sets the true elites apart—that bestows authority on their actions and expressions—isn’t power, or wealth, or education, or even persuasiveness. It’s integrity in life and work. A healthy society is one in which such exemplary types draw the public toward them purely by the force of their example. Without compulsion, ordinary persons aspire to resemble the extraordinary, not superficially but fundamentally, because they wish to partake of superior models of being or doing. The good society, Ortega concluded, was an “engine of perfection.”
In a sickly society, the force of exemplarity is reversed. Elites seek to flatter and imitate the public. They make a display of popular tastes and attitudes, even as they retreat behind barricades of bodyguards and metal-detecting machines. This, of course, is what I meant by distance: a moral alienation felt even more keenly than the structural divide.
Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.
[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 