I don’t claim to understand what’s going on with Trump 2.0, but these are among the things that seem to contain glimmers of insight.
Vance’s “true self”
Normal people puzzling over which version of Vance is his “true self” should consider the possibility that, for politicians of extreme ambition, there is no “true self” as the concept is commonly understood. They are what they need to be to get ahead, period, irrespective of moral or civic considerations. They’re less “converts” than reptiles, a distinct species.
This was written last July and has aged very well.
Flag worship
President Trump responded with horror: “There are other things you can protest, but not our Great American Flag—NO KNEELING!” For Trump, kneeling before the flag was enough potentially to disqualify one from membership in the nation: “You have to stand proudly for the national anthem or you shouldn’t be playing, you shouldn’t be there. Maybe you shouldn’t be in the country.”
William T. Cavanaugh, Nationalism as Religion, in The Uses of Idolatry
USAID
The role of the president is merely to enforce the laws made by Congress in institutions created and funded by the legislature. If Congress has funded a government agency for certain reasons, for example, only the Congress can defund it. So a huge amount of Elon Musk’s manic destruction of the administrative state is thereby illegal on its face. Which means it almost certainly cannot last.
This is not to say that Musk hasn’t exposed predictable waste. Why are we surprised that our enlightened elites would use USAID for their pet ideological projects: $3.9 million to promote critical gender and queer theory in — checks notes — the western Balkans; $2.1 million to help the BBC “value the diversity of Libyan society” (is the British government funding insufficient?); $8.3 million for “USAID Education: Equity and Inclusion,” and $7.9 million to teach Sri Lankan journalists how to avoid “binary-gendered language.” Exposing this is fantastic — and could lead to real reform; but instantly shutting down whole agencies, freezing funding for others, laying off thousands and thousands, without any congressional approval, is the path to nowhere.
Rod Flunks the Marshmallow Test
[I]t feels so, so good that we don’t have to pretend anymore that all the crazy-ass nonsense imposed on us all over the past decade is good or normal. That makes me happier than if the Tigers had shut out the Crimson Tide. I know I’m dumb about this, but it feels like the first day of spring after a long and miserable winter, and that feels great.
…
I was having pints with a fellow American expatriate conservative at a pub near Paddington on Saturday, and we were both on a big high about how Trump and his team are wrecking wokeness and all its pomps and works. Yet my friend said that he has this nagging feeling that this might not end well. “It feels like the way I felt leading up to the Iraq War,” he said, and I got what he meant. Conservatives like him and me, we felt this surge of heroic destiny for America. It was clear who we were as a country, and what we had to do. It felt great! And it ended in disaster.
Zero-sum
I don’t believe there’s anything more morally corrupting than an utterly single-minded focus on defeating your political enemies, even when those political enemies really deserve to be defeated. To think only in terms of Winning and Losing is dehumanizing, both to your enemies and to yourself. It’s virtually animalistic, and it makes you forget a lot of things you need to remember.
Don’t hold your breath
A lot of conservatives, myself included, appreciate some of Trump’s Executive Orders on Culture War issues, but we need to get a grip.
If you are waiting for the media to stop calling surgical mutilation of young people “gender-affirming care,” don’t hold your breath.
The reasons why these lunacies persist have to do less with politics than with profound shifts in how we think about right and wrong, life and death, truth and falsehood — about God and man, men and women, adults and children – and about the nature of our bonds with each other.
These shifts have been going on for a long, long time, and the dirty secret is this: Milder versions of the lunacies of which progressives are so fond are widely accepted among conservatives too. They want to embrace lunatic premises, without coming to lunatic conclusions. They want the poison apple, without the worm.
This was written last July and has aged very well.
Government’s chief adversary
Donald Trump’s election has created real opportunities for advancing needed change. But the new administration seems intent on squandering those opportunities because it does not see itself as responsible for the federal government. Eager to demonstrate how corrupt our institutions have become rather than to facilitate their improvement, it is opting for lawless and performative iconoclasm over the more mundane but potentially transformative work of governance.
Kennedy Center
The VSG (Very Stable Genius) has indicated that he is planning on (and may perhaps have already begun?) firing the members of the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees (including chairman David Rubinstein), replacing them with his own appointees, and naming himself as Chairman of the Board.
… This is a guy who, as far as we know, has never, with all his millions and billions of dollars tucked away in some hedge fund somewhere, given $25.00 to any cultural or artistic institution of any kind. Not a nickel, as far as I can tell (and I’ve looked).
He’s not, of course, much given to philanthropy in support of anything; it’s as though he’s taken the “Reverse Giving Pledge” in which he promises to keep most of his money rather than giving it away to try to make the world a better place.
It is, I candidly admit, one of the things I dislike most about him.
David Post, The Kennedy Center? Really?
Government’s chief adversary
Donald Trump’s election has created real opportunities for advancing needed change. But the new administration seems intent on squandering those opportunities because it does not see itself as responsible for the federal government. Eager to demonstrate how corrupt our institutions have become rather than to facilitate their improvement, it is opting for lawless and performative iconoclasm over the more mundane but potentially transformative work of governance.
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
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 