St. John Climacus, 2025

Denying our ancestry

Just as the Bishop of Oxford refused to consider that he might be descended from an ape, so now are many in the West reluctant to contemplate that their values, and even their very lack of belief, might be traceable back to Christian origins.

Tom Holland, Dominion

The virtue of essays

I write here not as a teacher to students but rather as a reader to other readers, a citizen to other citizens. I write because I think I have learned a few things in my teaching life that are relevant to our common life. You will see what those are if you read on.

My approach here is anything but systematic. Of all the literary genres, I am fondest of the essay, with its meandering course that (we hope) faithfully represents the meanderings of the human mind … certain images in advance and people will recur throughout this book, returning perhaps when you think we’re done with them. I write this way because none of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead. That last sentence is a gem.

Notional Evangelical Bibicism

As a public relations stunt, Trump’s Bible photo might seem unserious, but the president certainly understood the importance of Christian scripture to a significant voting bloc. Evangelicals are biblicists, and the extent to which American religiosity has been dominated by evangelical Protestantism correlates to the degree to which American culture has been shaped by the Bible.

Paul J. Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation

I would be remiss were I not to recommend Brad East’s ‌Biblicist churches that don’t read the Bible — Brad East. Historian Gutaker may be missing something contemporary.

The one, true meaning of the text

When I try to explain to people why we need to recover patristic interpretation, the biggest obstacle I face is the desire of my interlocutors to establish the one, true meaning of the text. When I assert that there is no such thing, I provoke raised eyebrows: I must be playing fast and loose with the biblical text, making it echo my preconceptions. My insistence that biblical texts have multiple, even innumerable meanings contradicts our modern objectivism. My defense of patristic allegorizing likewise elicits fears of arbitrariness and subjectivism.

Hans Boersma, No Method but Christ

Whither the magisterial Reformation?

Nearly two decades ago, Bruce McCormack, professor of systematic theology at Princeton Seminary, wrote: “The situation in which Christian theology is done in the United States today is shaped most dramatically by the slow death of the Protestant churches.” He went on:

if current rates of decline in membership continue, all that will be left by mid-century will be Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and non-denominational evangelical churches. . . . The churches of the Reformation will have passed from the scene—and with their demise, there will be no obvious institutional bearers of the message of the Reformation. What all of this means in practice is that it will become more and more necessary, for the sake of the future of Christianity, to establish stronger ecumenical relations with the Catholics and the Orthodox.

This is a grave prediction, but its sobriety makes it not just prescient but practical. Non-catholic varieties of Christendom are here for good, but Goldilocks Protestantism was always doomed to fail. It presumed too much, relying on a common inheritance—patristic, medieval, and cultural—that was bound to be called into question by future reformers in search of their own style of biblical renewal.

In any case, McCormack is right: Whether, in the coming decades, magisterial Christians look “up” or “down” for friendship and cooperation, they will be living in a world without Protestantism. In truth, they already are.

Brad East, Goldilocks Protestantism

Martyrdom

Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion.

John Henry Newman

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.

Saturday. 3/29/25

Our third-leading export

Much of what Illich had to say to those bright-eyed students preparing to spend their summer volunteering in Mexico are summed up in these early lines:

“I do have deep faith in the enormous good will of the U.S. volunteer. However, his good faith can usually be explained only by an abysmal lack of intuitive delicacy. By definition, you cannot help being ultimately vacationing salesmen for the middle-class ‘American Way of Life,’ since that is really the only life you know.”

Illich recognized that “development” work, as it was happening in the 1960s, was, in fact, a vehicle by which a whole complex nexus of values and systems was being exported to and imposed upon the “under-developed” world, and ultimately in such a way that the recipients of this aid would be subjected to new forms of poverty and dependence—“modernized poverty,” as Illich called it elsewhere.

…

Illich tells his audience that “next to money and guns, the third largest North American export is the U.S. idealist, who turns up in every theater of the world: the teacher, the volunteer, the missionary, the community organizer, the economic developer, and the vacationing do-gooders”—to which list, of course, we can add the tech evangelist. It is then that he drops this devastating line:

Perhaps this is the moment to instead bring home to the people of the U.S. the knowledge that the way of life they have chosen simply is not alive enough to be shared.

L. M. Sacasas, To Hell With Good Intentions, Silicon Valley Edition

On “going home again”

‘Young man,’ he said, ‘don’t you know you can’t go home again?’ And he went on to speak of the advantages, for a young writer, of living in New York among the writers and the editors and the publishers.

The conversation that followed was a persistence of politeness in the face of impossibility. I knew as well as Wolfe that there is a certain metaphorical sense in which you can’t go home again – that is, the past is lost to the extent that it cannot be lived in again. I knew perfectly well that I could not return home and be a child, or recover the secure pleasures of childhood.

But I knew also that as the sentence was spoken to me it bore a self-dramatizing sentimentality that was absurd. Home – the place, the countryside – was still there, still pretty much as I left it, and there was no reason I could not go back to it if I wanted to.

Wendell Berry, The World-Ending Fire

Extremisms

Knee-jerk whataboutism—citing left-wing extremism to brush away concerns of right-wing extremism—is a way of saying, effectively, “I don’t actually care about right-wing extremism. Left-wing extremism is so overwhelmingly bad it’s okay to turn a blind eye to the conspiracy theorists, thugs, and terrorists on my side.”

Paul D. Miller, The Deer, the Lion, the Beast, and the Serpent

Capital rights, human rights

Slavery was never less than a statement about the sovereignty of capital, and its rights, in relation to human rights. In the South, economic restrictions on religious organization by black Christians was part and parcel of the racial system undergirding slavery and the marginalization of free African Americans.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

Terribly prophetic

When you have attention, you have power, and some people will try and succeed in getting huge amounts of attention, and they would not use it in equal or positive ways.

Daniel Goldhaber, “the Cassandra of the Internet Age.”

The big tech platform debates about online censorship and content moderation? Those are ultimately debates about amplification and attention. Same with the crisis of disinformation. It’s impossible to understand the rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA wing of the far right or, really, modern American politics without understanding attention hijacking and how it is used to wield power … the attempted Capitol insurrection in January [2021] was the result of thousands of influencers and news outlets that, in an attempt to gain fortune and fame and attention, trotted out increasingly dangerous conspiracy theories on platforms optimized to amplify outrage.

Charlie Warzel

Laying waste to cynicism

Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism.

Nick Cave via Annie Mueller via Dense Discovery 331

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.

A big, beautiful opener from MAGA 2.0

A big beautiful opener from MAGA 2.0

Yes, it’s been a big beautiful opener from MAGA 2.0., hasn’t it?

In all fairness, let’s start with a real, substantive achievement. The Southern border is more secure than it has been in decades. Biden helped a lot with his belated executive orders, but reinstating Remain in Mexico and ending largely fraudulent asylum claims have been even more effective. In February 2024, Border Patrol picked up some 140,641 migrants between legal ports of entry; this February, it was 8,347. Huge success. And proof that previous administrations actively chose to keep the border open.

But the rest is chaos, malice, revenge, and failure, tinged with levels of indecency never before seen from the Oval Office.

…

The disaster this week with Mike Waltz’s astonishingly reckless Signal messaging brings it all together. This is a crew of bigots, sycophants, Fox News drunks and bimbos, Hollywood loonies, Claremont nutters, and uber-online edge-lords cosplaying as statesmen. But they aren’t even faintly serious — as Russia and China now fully understand. And their response to being found out was classic Trump: lie, lie, lie and call journalists scum. By any objective standard, this is a clown car.

Andrew Sullivan

“If I’m such a nefarious character, why am I in Mike Waltz’s phone?” – Jeff Goldberg.
“So President Trump is ‘using war authorities’ in the absence of a declared war when he deports Venezuelans, but it’s not ‘war plans’ (just ‘attack plans’) to bomb the Houthis because there is no declared war,” – Ed Whelan.
“This is dystopian. The government does not even allege this woman played a major role in the pro-Palestine protests, like Khalil did. And yet they’re trying to expel her to South Korea, where she hasn’t lived since she was 7. I don’t see how anyone can defend this. It’s un-American,” – Billy Binion on a 21-year-old college senior who’s had a green card since age 7.

Via Andrew Sullivan

Already, a Cabinet portrait

Via Frank Bruni:

“Global Law Firms”

Why are these firms being targeted, and what does Trump hope to get out of this campaign? In the Paul Weiss EO, the government alleges that “global law firms,” as Trump pejoratively calls them, have been involved in “the destruction of bedrock American principles.” They have played a large role in “undermining the judicial process” and engaging in “activities that make our communities less safe, increase burdens on local businesses, limit constitutional freedoms, and degrade the quality of American elections.”

But what’s really going on here, quite obviously, is that these firms have attempted to fight Trump and have represented clients Trump and his voters disapprove of. That is hardly a sin; representing an unpopular client is essential to any fair system. But Trump and his allies don’t want a fair system; they want a system reminiscent of China’s or Russia’s, that scares lawyers away from these clients and disables their opponents from bringing legal challenges against their efforts to rule by executive fiat. Already, some firms are receding from the fight against Trump, declining to represent those who oppose him.

…

Taken as a whole, this attack on law firms is nothing short of an assault on the very idea of an independent legal profession. For years, the profession has had a set of overarching principles that are thought to guide its members’ conduct. Among them: Clients should be able to hire whom they wish without worrying about government retribution, and lawyers should be free to zealously represent their clients without the threat of government retaliation. To say otherwise is to betray the fundamental value of fairness that undergirds our justice system. Trump’s actions are an attempt, bluntly speaking, to tilt the scales of justice by using the raw power of government coercion.

Paul Rosenzweig

If you can’t get a lawyer to take a case against the administration, it doesn’t matter that the courts would have ruled for you.

DARVO

Standard protocol for the president and his minions when doing damage control is DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. That’s the playbook Hegseth used on Monday (see for yourself) when reporters confronted him about Goldberg’s story, and no wonder. He learned during his confirmation ordeal that the trick to getting Trump and Trumpists firmly on your side is to start throwing roundhouses at their enemies, irrespective of the facts.

Hegseth sensed that the best way to shore up his political support was to turn this story into a test of credibility between himself and The Atlantic …

…

If you elect a criminal who values loyalty above competence; if you confirm an unqualified nominee to lead the military because you’re too cowardly to oppose him; if you incentivize ruthlessness in your leaders by refusing to hold them accountable for failures, you’re handing public policy over to clowns.

And policy run by clowns is destined to become a circus.

The most interesting thing about the behavior here of Mike Waltz and Pete Hegseth is that they’re both smart, capable men. Waltz was a colonel in the special forces; Hegseth is an Ivy League grad who served honorably in the military. Removed from the circus culture in which they now operate, I suspect both would recognize instantly how reckless it is to conduct sensitive national security business in an insecure forum.

In fact, I don’t suspect it, I know it.

This failure isn’t a matter of stupidity, in other words, it’s a matter of corruption. Waltz and Hegseth knew that Trump wouldn’t care how securely or insecurely they behaved (I mean, really) and in a pseudo-autocratic operation like this one that’s the only relevant political consideration. Obviously, they would have thought differently if they knew Jeffrey Goldberg would end up on the thread, but that’s a question of getting caught, not a question of behaving responsibly. They assumed they had the president’s approval; that’s all that mattered.

That logic will bite us in worse ways than this before this presidency is done.

Nick Catoggio

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

March 26, first year of the Trumposcene

I won’t waste my time or yours weighing in on what has predictably been labeled “Signalgate” except to note that Trump, Gabbard and Hegseth are all trying to brazen it out with transparent lies.

Most chilling of all

The ochre emperor, having figured out that he cannot control life-tenured federal judges, has taken to kidnapping law firms, negotiating ransoms that include not taking any cases he doesn’t like.

Courts decide cases. They don’t inject themselves unbidden into the affairs of the Executive and Legislative branches. If Trump’s kidnappings work (and so far they have worked pretty well), don’t trust the courts to keep him in line because people won’t be able to get law firms to represent them against the Administration’s already-lawless behaviors.

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump delivered a speech in the Great Hall of the Justice Department. But he did not laud the impartial application of the law, as past presidents have done in the staid space. Instead, he took the opportunity to signal some score-settling against the lawyers involved in legal challenges against him.

“They spied on my campaign; launched one hoax and disinformation operation after another; broke the law on a colossal scale; persecuted my family, staff, and supporters; raided my home, Mar-a-Lago; and did everything within their power to prevent me from becoming the president of the United States,” Trump said, referencing his past campaigns and some of the criminal and civil cases brought against him. He went on to single out several lawyers allegedly involved in the scheme by name, including “radicals like Marc Elias, Mark Pomerantz” and “scum” like “Andrew Weissmann, deranged Jack Smith.”

As of Tuesday, each of those attorneys has something else in common: They all have current or former ties to law firms now in Trump’s crosshairs. Over the last month, Trump has threatened four law firms in what appears to be a broader campaign of intimidation directed at the legal profession. Coinciding with the administration’s recent attacks on judges, legal scholars fear the moves could represent a serious threat to the independence of the bar and the ability of individuals to effectively challenge the government in court.

The Morning Dispatch

You’d think that BigLaw could stand up and fight, but it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and Paul Weiss found the other dogs trying to poach their top lawyers and clients rather than offering help. That’s why they felt they had to pay Trump’s ransom demand.

Let me get this straight …

Donald Trump is, as he will tell you, the world’s greatest negotiator, and he feels the need to renegotiate the existing U.S.-Canada trade deal, which was negotiated by an utter incompetent: Donald Trump, whose administration oversaw the replacement of NAFTA by the (rather lightly modified) USMCA the last time he was president. And now Canadians have learned what banks, investors, vendors, small business partners, wives, ex-wives, and pornographic performers rapidly approaching their expiration dates have all learned over the years: If you think you have a deal with Donald Trump, you are a fool.

Kevin D. Williamson

The Roy Cohn theory of university perfidity

[T]he tone was a diatribe, the kind of ill-informed, red-meat rant Tucker Carlson honed throughout the first Trump administration every weeknight in prime time on Fox News: Come out of gate with guns blazing and never relent. Concede nothing to any less severe view of the topic. Reject any form of nuance. Illustrate the absolute truth of one’s position by giving a handful of outrageous-sounding anecdotes cherry-picked to demonstrate the absurdity of holding any other position.

On that day three years ago, it took Vance exactly 40 seconds to declare how important it was for conservatives like himself to “honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country”—just as it took just a few weeks for the second Trump administration to follow through on precisely this agenda.

Damon Linker. I quote it because the bolded part is the Trump style, which he learned from the infamous Roy Cohn. That’s why you dare not rely on anything anyone in this administration says.

I know enough about what goes on in the country’s universities to recognize that the right-wing thugs currently running the executive branch and taking a baseball bat to higher education are utterly full of shit. They are poised to do an immense amount of damage to something valuable and good. And much of the broader public appears not to care—in no small part because of the incendiary lies the ideological propagandists behind the MAGA movement have been propagating for years. I won’t say they must be stopped, because I don’t know if they can be stopped. Still, it’s important we recognize exactly what they’re doing and the price our country and our world are going to end up paying for their destructive zealotry.

Of course a narcissist would feel this way

I believe that CNN and MS-DNC, who literally write 97.6 percent bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party and in my opinion, they’re really corrupt and they’re illegal, what they do is illegal, … And it has to stop, it has to be illegal, it’s influencing judges and it’s really changing law, and it just cannot be legal. I don’t believe it’s legal, and they do it in total coordination with each other.

Nellie Bowles quoting Trump’s speech to the DOJ.

Change “I” to “we,” format it, sign it, and file it with the District Court. That’s how Trump’s new toadies at DOJ operate.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Third Sunday of Lent

Same data, different conclusions

Graham takes comfort in Trump’s election. “He did everything wrong, politically,” Graham told me. “He offended gays. He offended women. He offended the military. He offended black people. He offended the Hispanic people. He offended everybody! And he became president of the United States. Only God could do that.”

Emma Green, Franklin Graham Is the Evangelical ID

It seems to me that Franklin Graham thinks this proves Trump is okay. I thought then (2017) and think now (March 2025) that it proves God’s judgment is falling on us. And in the end, I’m okay with that. When I pray for America, as I do every morning, my first petition is “Let your judgment be merciful.”

Baptism in the fundagelical world

Brad East, writing in Christianity Today, on baptism, and how his nondenominational students marginalize it:

First, my students see baptism as purely symbolic. It does not do anything. Nothing “happens.” In terms of God’s action or presence, it is no different from any other spiritual practice ….

Bearing in mind that I’ve been out of this world for more than 45 years now, I suggest that they believe that because they’ve been taught it. It’s my second- or third-hand understanding that many nondenominational pastors take a few moments before baptism to explain that it’s purely symbolic and does nothing.

With the same caveat, I do not understand how anyone who purports to have the Bible as their final authority on matters of faith can teach that with so few of them being struck down by lightning as they do. But then I do not understand how scripture-twisting fundagelicals can so reliably make scripture teach something they want to believe — perhaps because it is a repudiation of that the Catholic Church believes.

I’m not going to say (or deny) that Brad East gets to the orthodox understanding in his item, but he gets a whole lot closer than his students have heard.

Porn

Caitlin Flanagan:

The internet’s biggest by-product is loneliness; porn isn’t special in that regard. You and I weren’t made to live this way; we barely are living this way. Many of the traits that make us human—our compassion, our ability to devote sustained thought to a problem, our capacity to fall in love and to sacrifice for the people we love—are meaningless to the algorithms that rule us. They’ve deformed us. Every time I hear a middle-class young woman make the utilitarian argument for why she makes sexual videos on OnlyFans—because she can make in two hours of work what would take her 40 hours to earn waitressing—I think, Here it is at last: end-stage capitalism. The phase in which nothing has any value or meaning other than its sale price. (Source: theatlantic.com/Read the rest)

via News Items

That’s quite a quote, but to my way of thinking it can’t top this one, which carries a weighty moral challenge:

As far as the moral equations of watching porn go, the one that matters is: Are you excited by the obvious abuse of women, or have you learned to countenance that abuse as a necessary cost of your own pleasure? And which of those is worse?

Caitlin Flanagan

If C.S. Lewis were to write The Great Divorce today, I think one of the vignettes would be of a male wraith from the hell-bus, met in heaven by his beautiful wife, made more beautiful by her heavenly transformation. They would discuss how they had drifted apart in life. He’d try to abuse her again (and fail — of course he would fail in The Great Divorce setting).

He ultimately would decide that he wouldn’t remain in heaven if the price were giving up porn.

And I think that may just be the price.

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

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

First weekend of Spring

Give it back!

Raphael Glucksmann, a member of the European Parliament, feels that America has reneged on the values that led to the statue being gifted. “We’re going to say to the Americans who have chosen to side with the tyrants, to the Americans who fired researchers for demanding scientific freedom: “Give us back the Statue of Liberty,” he said at a convention of his center-left party, Place Publique, Sunday. “We gave it to you as a gift, but apparently you despise it. So it will be just fine here at home,” Glucksmann added.

Daily Beast via The Morning Dispatch

Incel Integralists

The Harvard Law School chapter of the Federalist Society was taken over last week by “Common Good Constitutionalism” disciples of Professor Adrian Vermeule (i.e., wokesters of the Right). The chapter’s former president, Sarah Isgur, has some thoughts about the incel Integralists and their pyrrhic victory:

Freedom is turned on its head. Individual freedom does not exist if it does not enhance the general welfare (again, defined by them). To break it down: Speech that is good is protected. Speech that is bad is not. And the government gets to define what is good.

But they misunderstand Fed Soc’s strength. So let me explain: It came from its size and its diversity of thought. When you shrink it down to only those people who agree with you on outcomes, you have stripped it of its source of power.

The Vikings can be resentful that we didn’t let them into our club. They can even burn down the club. But they still won’t be in the club. They’ll just be standing over its ashes, still sad, and confused, and angry, and without clerkships, and without girlfriends.

History is littered with the stories of young men who are frustrated and can’t get chicks. They’re called “Jacobins.”

(A combination of Twitter, and the Advisory Opinions podcast.)

Regrets

Trigger warning: Do not read the following with your mouth full of scrambled eggs or hot coffee. I speak from experience.

In Oedipus Tex, the mathematician-composer P.D.Q. Bach’s 1990 comedic answer to Stravinsky’s tragic oratorio, the titular hero discovers the truth of his situation—that he has married his mother, Billy-Jo Costa, Queen of the Rodeo—and, fulfilling the requirements of tragedy, he takes the rhinestone-covered barrettes out of her hair and gouges out his eyes. At which point the chorus sings:

“And immediately after he’d put out both his eyes, he … kind of wished he hadn’t.”

Everybody has regrets. Nations and their governments do, too. When things are upside down in the state, you end up with Oedipus Rex, Macbeth, or the Trump administration.

Mahmoud Khalil is a Palestinian activist involved in the Columbia protests who was arrested in a Keystone Kops-level caper launched by Marco Rubio’s incompetent State Department, which proposed to revoke a student visa that Khalil doesn’t have. Khalil is, in fact, the holder of a green card, meaning that he has been given permanent resident status in the United States by the U.S. government. Which is to say, Khalil is in this country as a permanent resident thanks to a decision of the U.S. government, which, after looking back on what it had done, kind of wished it hadn’t.

Kevin D. Williamson

My regret is that I cannot read Kevin D. Williamson or Nick Catoggio more regularly without breaking my promise to myself not to wallow in politics during the Trumposcene, but rather to enjoy the inumerable things that humans can enjoy even under the governance of jackasses or jackboots.

The corrupting effect of corrupt rulers

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville, in a section on corruption and the vices of rulers in a democracy, warned:

In a democracy private citizens see a man of their own rank in life who rises from that obscure position in a few years to riches and power; the spectacle excites their surprise and their envy, and they are led to inquire how the person who was yesterday their equal is today their ruler. To attribute his rise to his talents or his virtues is unpleasant, for it is tacitly to acknowledge that they are themselves less virtuous or less talented than he was. They are therefore led, and often rightly, to impute his success mainly to some of his vices; and an odious connection is thus formed between the ideas of turpitude and power, unworthiness and success, utility and dishonor.

Tocqueville’s concern was that if citizens in a democracy saw that unethical and corrupt behavior led to “riches and power,” this would not only normalize such behavior; it would validate and even valorize it. The “odious connection” between immoral behavior and worldly success would be first made by the public, which would then emulate that behavior.

That is the great civic danger posed by Donald Trump, that the habits of his heart become the habits of our hearts; that his code of conduct becomes ours. That we delight in mistreating others almost as much as he does. That vengeance becomes nearly as important to us as it is to him. That dehumanization becomes de rigueur.

Peter Wehner, Trump’s Revenge Campaign

Thumbnail history of the GOP since 2008

David French, reflecting on his (supportive) relationship to the Tea Party movement and cautioning Democrats against trying to reproduce it in the Democrat party:

But it all turned bad, and the reasons it turned bad are directly relevant to Democrats today.

Republicans built a movement around both anger and ideology. My mistake was in believing that the ideology was more important than the anger, but it was the anger that gave the Tea Party its political momentum, and that anger eventually swallowed the ideology. Rage is now the defining characteristic of Trump’s Republican Party.

…

My first interpretation of Tea Party anger was precisely that it was in service of higher values, specifically a return to founding constitutional principles and an embrace of free markets and fiscal responsibility. But that was wrong. The ideology mattered only if it could serve the anger.

Another way of putting it is that Tea Party members embraced constitutional conservatism and libertarianism as a tactic, not as a principle, and the instant that a different, Trumpist ideology emerged — a better vehicle for the party’s raw rage — they welcomed it with open arms.

What’s your hurry?

Could this be the meta-explanation of what the ochre emperor is doing?:

DOGE is in a race with the courts. From the first days of the administration it was all shock and awe. Take an agency everyone knows is a problem, such as USAID, and kill it. Tell employees to go home, put a guard outside and lock the door, cover the agency’s name in gaffer’s tape, have a functionary send an email terminating employment, then disable email accounts. Staffers can’t reach each other, can’t find the reporter’s address—confusion kills the will to resist. Other agencies watch, and it puts the fear of God into them.

It’s all a race to get as much accomplished now as possible. Once something goes to the Supreme Court, there will be clear limits. Until then, maybe months, maybe a year, get it done.

Peggy Noonan. More:

Here I confess my conservative lizard brain likes seeing unhelpful and destructive parts of any organism, very much including government, cut and sometimes obliterated, and for the usual reasons. But the non-lizard parts—those that are analytical, involve experience, and have observed human nature and seen who’s doing the cutting, and at what size and speed—recoil, and see great danger ahead.

Judiciary 101

“The good news here is, we did put 235 judges, progressive judges, judges not under the control of Trump, last year on the bench, and they are ruling against Trump time after time after time,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said a few days ago.

You do the judiciary no favors talking like that, Sen. Schumer.

“[C]onservative judges, judges (supposedly) under the control of Trump,” are ruling against him, too — just as they did with his b*llsh*t 2020-21 election challenges.
No federal judge is “under the control” of the President who appointed him or her. That’s kinda the point of life tenure on good behavior.

Miscellany

“If you weren’t outraged that the law and due process weren’t followed when Biden let 10+ million people into the country, don’t expect voters to be outraged by accusations Trump isn’t following due process when he deports them,” – Mark Hemingway.
“I still can’t get over the power of negative polarization where liberals genuinely convinced themselves that the lab leak was the racist theory of Covid origins, but the ‘it’s just the disgusting hygiene and superstition of Chinese wet market customers’ was the non-racist theory,” – Michael Brendan Dougherty.
Colin Wright: “‘Christ Is King’ Is the Woke Right’s ‘Black Lives Matter.’”

All via Andrew Sullivan

Sullivan’s main essay is on how Anthony Fauci intentionally misled us about the origins of Covid.

Why on earth would panicked scientists believe that Covid was probably a lab leak and then write a landmark paper “trying to disprove” it? It’s the essential question. One obvious answer is that Fauci realized that if his beloved gain-of-function research had led to the death of millions in a plague, he might not go down in history as a medical saint.

I have no need of any other hypothesis.

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

Trump rants 3/19/25

The stripping away of illusions

President Trump does not seem to notice or care that if you betray people, or jerk them around, they will revile you. Over the last few weeks, the Europeans have gone from shock to bewilderment to revulsion. This period was for them what 9/11 was for us — the stripping away of illusions, the exposure of an existential threat. The Europeans have realized that America, the nation they thought was their friend, is actually a rogue superpower.

In Canada and Mexico you now win popularity by treating America as your foe. Over the next few years, I predict, Trump will cut a deal with China, doing to Taiwan some version of what he has already done to Ukraine — betray the little guy to suck up to the big guy. Nations across Asia will come to the same conclusion the Europeans have already reached: America is a Judas.

This is not just a Trump problem; America’s whole reputation is shot. I don’t care if Abraham Lincoln himself walked into the White House in 2029, no foreign leader can responsibly trust a nation that is perpetually four years away from electing another authoritarian nihilist.

David Brooks

Anti-Constitutional

An anti-constitutional act is one that rejects the basic premises of constitutionalism. It rejects the premise that sovereignty lies with the people, that ours is a government of limited and enumerated powers and that the officers of that government are bound by law.

The new president has, in just the first two months of his second term, performed a number of illegal and unconstitutional acts. But the defining attribute of his administration thus far is its anti-constitutional orientation. Both of its most aggressive and far-reaching efforts — the impoundment of billions of dollars in congressionally authorized spending and the attempt to realize the president’s promise of mass deportation — rest on fundamentally anti-constitutional assertions of executive authority.

…

There is much to say about the administration’s decision to seemingly ignore a court order to halt or reroute deportation flights for these people and return them to United States. For now, let’s focus on the Justice Department’s initial defense of the president’s order, in which government lawyers argued the following: “Beyond the statute, the President’s inherent Article II authority is plainly violated by the district court’s order. As a function of his inherent Article II authority to protect the nation, the President may determine that [Tren de Aragua, a criminal gang] represents a significant risk to the United States … and that its members should be summarily removed from this country as part of that threat.”

In other words, according to the Justice Department, the president of the United States has an “inherent” power to summarily deport any accused member of Tren de Aragua (and presumably, any foreign national accused of membership in any gang) without so much as a hearing. What’s more, under this logic, the president can then direct his administration to send that person, without due process, to prison in a foreign country.

This is a claim of sovereign authority. This is a claim that the president has the power to declare a state of exception around a group of people and expel them from the nation — no questions asked. It is anti-constitutional — a negation of the right to be free, in Locke’s words, of “the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man.”

There is nothing in this vision of presidential power that limits it to foreign nationals. Who is to say, under the logic of the Department of Justice, that the president could not do the same to a citizen?

Jamelle Bouie, Trump Has Gone From Unconstitutional to Anti-Constitutional (shared article).

If Congressional Republicans took their oaths of office seriously, they’d be impeaching Trump and removing him from office. He has already destroyed many of our most important international relationships (see David Brooks, above), and by “destroyed,” I mean that we face a long period of repair even if he were removed this afternoon.

Dems and Damon in the same headspace?

[M]y assumptions and style of analysis bring me back again and again to a feeling of fatalism rooted in the conviction that the time to stop Trump was in November 2016, in the immediate aftermath of the January 6 insurrection (via conviction in his second impeachment trial), or in November 2024. I don’t want to succumb to the feeling that it’s already too late to stop him. It’s just that I’m still trying to figure out how to break out of that cul-de-sac.

Damon Linker

How to create a legal banana republic

To collapse the structure of American justice and replace it with a proper banana republic, each pillar holding it up needs to be weakened.

The president spent most of his first two months in office focused on a single pillar: law enforcement. He purged officials at the Justice Department and FBI and replaced them with clownish toadies like Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Dan Bongino. That was a sensible way for an authoritarian to prioritize: Of the institutional players I’ve mentioned, corrupt cops and prosecutors can do the most damage. As long as the DOJ is willing to behave like a secret police force, Donald Trump doesn’t need to send Liz Cheney or Mark Milley to prison to make their lives miserable. Investigations are punishment enough.

His Castro-esque speech on Friday to Justice Department officials reflected his priorities. The president labeled political enemies like former special counsel Jack Smith “scum,” claimed that CNN and MSNBC are behaving “illegally” somehow, babbled about the supposedly rigged 2020 election, and insisted that the January 6 defendants he pardoned were “grossly mistreated.” The speech ended with the song “YMCA,” as you might hear at one of his political rallies.

Watching it felt like watching a dog mark his territory.

Nick Catoggio

Trying not to try

I may not have said this before: Trump’s shock and awe assault on norms, perceived enemies, constitutional limitations and the independence of “independent agencies” are so comprehensive, and so blur together in news coverage, that I couldn’t keep up, and couldn’t cogently predict which actions will ultimately be found unlawful, even if I tried.

And I’m trying not to try.

Oh, I still listen to legal podcasts, and they typically cover some of the cases brewing. If you get an opinion from me on a case, I’ll probably be regurgitating some of them, lightly post-processed.

I don’t feel responsible for Trump. He’s something I’m suffering along with everyone else — and my situation means I’m not personally suffering all that much except anxiety for my living descendants.

I don’t think Trump is the eventuality of true conservatism, though he may be the eventuality of the Moral Majority and other Religious Right activism starting in the 70s. I was never on board with them; I’m even less on board with them since becoming an Orthodox Christian; and I’m pleased to contemplate a knife fight between the New, Improved Religious Right (The New Apostolic Reformation! All you loved about the Moral Majority, but now with added Charismatic flakery!) and the Catholic Integralist “Common Good Constitutionalism.”

(Thoughts prompted by my deciding not to read a Wall Street Journal article on a Federal District court ruling against the demolition of USAID.)

Inflicting trauma

Russell Vought, a graduate of Wheaton College, now describes himself as a “Christian nationalist.” He also says:

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

“We want to put them in trauma.”

He may be a nationalist, but he puts his Christianity open to serious question by such hateful intentions. (Mark 8:36.) He’s rather unpopular at Wheaton, too, which is much to its credit.

Free speech lies

The president brags about ‘ending censorship’ while describing negative coverage about him as ‘illegal.’

Jonah Goldberg’s subheadline to his recent The Trump Administration’s Free Speech Hypocrisy. The whole (relatively short) thing is worth reading.

Weaponizing government

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. And Donald Trump is “Ending the Weaponization of Government”

David Post, Paul, Weiss Next on the Chopping Block

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

Sunday, 3/16/25

God making the world

As Peter Geach puts it, for Aquinas the claim that God made the world “is more like ‘the minstrel made music’ than ‘the blacksmith made a shoe’”; that is to say, creation is an ongoing activity rather than a once-and-for-all event. While the shoe might continue to exist even if the blacksmith dies, the music necessarily stops when the minstrel stops playing, and the world would necessarily go out of existence if God stopped creating it.

Edward Feser, Aquinas

Sitting with the dead

Walking backwards into our own graves, so filled with denial because we lived not really once thinking that such a thing could one day happen to us. We miss the needed consciousness that sitting with a dead body will sober and sanctify us into. We haven’t been done a favour by having the end of life ushered out of sight.

Part of getting made into a human is the final part. Getting un-made. That preparing for death is not the same as what was before it. Denial is not just a river in Egypt. It’s not my time is not the appropriate mantra of a grown up. One day, any day, it will be my time, is better.

Martin Shaw, On Death

“American Christianity”

After playing whataboutism with the Manicheanism of the Seven Mountain Mandate and shrill progressives like Anne Applebaum, R.R. Reno sums up:

A friend recently argued that “evangelicalism” is a spent label. It gained currency during the postwar era, but cultural changes, not just in American society at large, but within conservative Protestant churches have made the term impossible to define. Better, he said, to speak of “American Christianity,” the free-wheeling, entrepreneurial, and populist form of Bible-only Christianity that has its roots in the Second Great Awakening and was supercharged by the Pentecostal revivals of the twentieth century.

American Christianity has always been deeply embedded in and responsive to the social realities that shape the lives of non-elite Americans. We’re in a populist moment in our politics, because these non-elite Americans have decided to use their votes to fight back. The same thing is happening in our home-grown American Christianity. I may dismiss the reasoning behind the New Apostolic Reformation (not least because it is anti-theological) and rue its blustering political biblicism. But I won’t criticize the activist spirit. Why should the great American tradition of reformist zeal be the sole possession of secular progressives?

R.R. Reno

I tend to agree with the uselessness of the “evangelical” label, though I’m not ready to cede “American Christianity” to the sectarians.

I think I’ve tacitly undertaken to undermine the the free-wheeling, entrepreneurial, populist and anti-intellectual aspects in which, for lack of a better term, American evangelicalism specializes — in hopes that evangelicals who love Christ more than political power will wise up and come take a look at Orthodoxy.

How to work up a crusade

The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of a good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with a good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your behavior “righteous indignation”—this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.

Aldous Huxley via R.R. Reno. Surely this concept is behind Mafia Don’s campaign promise “I am your retribution.”

I’ve known for decades that there’s something corrupt about an economy based on competitive acquisitiveness and the promise of endless growth. The politics of retribution is no less corrupt.

I’m using “corrupt” in the third adjectival sense.

God sees the heart

There was once a monk who lived on Mount Athos, in Karyes. He was drinking and getting drunk every day, scandalizing the pilgrims. After a while he died and this relieved some of the believers who went and told elder Paisios they were pleased that finally this huge problem was resolved.

Father Paisios replied that he knew about the monk’s death, because he saw a whole battalion of angels who came to pick up his soul.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

Relgio-Political wisdom

A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.

Rod Dreher, Something Demonic Is In The Air, 1/13/2021

There’s more than thinking to life

Contemporary western Christianity trained us how to think and what to think; whereas Christ himself, as did Lao Tzu before Him, taught us how not to need to think.

Christ the Eternal Tao

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

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

Ides of March

Simile of the week

[I] n The New Yorker, Ruth Marcus, who recently resigned from The Washington Post, explained that she and other columnists were confused by the Post owner Jeff Bezos’ new edict that the Opinions section write only in favor of “personal liberties and free markets”: “Without further clarification, we were like dogs that had been fitted with shock collars but had no clue where the invisible fence was.” (Susan Casey, Palm City, Fla.)

Via Frank Bruni

Justice Barrett

After a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s effort to stop $2 billion in foreign-aid spending, Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined with Chief Justice John Roberts and all three Democratic-appointed justices to leave that order in place. The decision provoked a fiery and warranted dissent from Justice Samuel Alito, as well as some bitter complaints about Barrett from the right-leaning commentariat. It is understandable that conservatives might be nervous about the Supreme Court. For good reason, the names “Stevens,” “Souter,” “Kennedy,” and “O’Connor” echo eerily in the originalist mind. But while she was wrong in this particular case, there is no evidence that Barrett is at risk of joining their ranks. She concurred in Dobbs, the case that overturned Roe; in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., the case that barred affirmative action; and in Bruen, the case that expanded the protections of the Second Amendment. More important than those outcomes is how she did so. Unlike the judicial nomads of the past, Barrett has a transparent and well-considered approach to the law that explains her actions even when she disappoints. In the case that prompted the criticisms, she was likely motivated by her mistrust of the shadow docket and her dislike of big cases built atop disputed facts. To conclude from this that Barrett was “a mistake”—or, worse, “a DEI hire”—is absurd. Judges are not supposed to play for a team.

National Review email for 3/14/25

Meritocracy is the death of noblesse oblige

In some ways, we’ve just reestablished the old hierarchy rooted in wealth and social status—only the new elites possess greater hubris, because they believe that their status has been won by hard work and talent rather than by birth. The sense that they “deserve” their success for having earned it can make them feel more entitled to the fruits of it, and less called to the spirit of noblesse oblige.

David Brooks, How the Ivy League Broke America

Gold and Bitcoin

I’ve shunned Bitcoin as an investment because it’s useless other than for criming and speculation.

I’ve always shunned gold for similar reasons. Its industrial and jewelry uses are not the reason for it rising to more than $3,000 per troy ounce.

Regarding this Presidency

Trump censorship worse than cancel culture

I’ve been relegating most of my bile toward Trump and his goons to another blog, referenced in the footer below, but this is so patently un-American that it needs the widest exposure I can give it:

[T]his is not about protection from woke professors or ideologically captured deans. It’s protection from direct surveillance by the federal government. The Trump administration has launched a massive, all-of-government, AI-assisted program called “Catch and Revoke,” which will scan every social media comment and anything online they can use to flush out any noncitizen who might be seen as anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist or anti-Israel or indeed just getting on Marco Rubio’s wrong side.

Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder, has not been accused of a crime. And that is the point. …

…

JD Vance — who lectured Europeans on free speech online, while his own administration was using AI to police the web for dissent! — said on Fox that a green card holder “doesn’t have an indefinite right to stay in America.”

Andrew Sullivan

In a Feb. 6 editorial, [Purdue] Exponent editors wrote: “And don’t get it twisted: When letters of visa revocation arrive in these students’ mailboxes and federal agents come to Purdue’s campus, no distinction will be made between ‘pro-jihadist’ and pro-Palestinian. Pro-ceasefire will continue to be conflated with ‘antisemitic.’ Anti-war can only now mean ‘pro-Hamas.’ Such twisting of language to be used as a weapon is contrary to the First Amendment, which gives the Exponent its right to exist just as much as it gives the right to students to protest as they see fit. It is the opinion of the Exponent that standing back while our website is potentially used to identify the state’s enemies would be directly against those principles.”

Based in Lafayette, Indiana

The statute cited by the Trump administration for expelling Khalil is very broad — and vague. I don’t think it will be struck down in its entirety, but surely permanent residents are entitled to know with some clarity what behaviors could get them kicked out of the country.

So I think the likeliest outcome is “unconstitutional as applied” to Khalil.

Living in fear

I spoke on Thursday to a university president who told me he was just advised to hire a bodyguard. He said he’d never seen so much fear in the world of higher education — that many college presidents are “scared to death” about the Trump administration cutting their funding, Elon Musk unleashing Twitter mobs on them, ICE agents coming on campus, angry email flooding their inboxes, student protests over Gaza and Israel, and worries about being targeted for violence. I was a higher education reporter two decades ago, when universities were widely admired in America, and so I asked this president — what went wrong?

He said presidents and professors had taken too many things for granted — they thought they’d always be seen as a “public good” benefiting society, but came to be seen as elitist and condescending toward regular Americans. And Americans hate a lot of things, but they really hate elites condescending to them. Now we are seeing a big reckoning for higher education — ideological, cultural, financial — driven by Donald Trump and the right.

Patrick Healy, introducing a conversation with M. Gessen, Tressie McMillan Cottom and Bret Stephens.

Just sayin’

Narcissism has a very high correlation with conspicuous consumption in an effort to boost social status and self-esteem. Narcissists are focused on the symbolic, rather than functional, importance of commodities, and the symbolism of the products they purchase is often used to compensate for fragile egos and fluctuating self-esteem.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

Re-assessing

As I have said any number of times, I have voted for the American Solidarity Party in each of the last three election cycles. But in the 2024 election, I was beginning to feel some sympathy for the people who thought Trump was less bad than Kamala Harris in the forced binary choice too many voters feel.

I no longer have any sympathy for that position, although I’m obviously working with the benefit of hindsight: Ready, Fire, Aim — over and over again ad infinitum. This is no way to run anything, quite apart from the autocracy.

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

Wednesday, 3/12/25

Trump-related

As is my wavering intent, I have moved my more vitriolic criticisms of Trump 2.0 to another blog. What remains is relatively temperate.

As the twig is bent …

“Dennis Burnham, who lived next door, was a toddler when his mother briefly put him in a playpen in their garden. She returned a few minutes later to find the current U.S. president, then aged five or six, standing at his fence throwing rocks at the little boy. Another neighbor, Steven Nachtigall, now a 66-year-old doctor, said he never forgot Trump … once jumping off his bike and beating up another boy: ‘It was so unusual and terrifying at that age,’” – Trump Revealed.

“When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same,” – Donald J Trump.

Andrew Sullivan

Tripping over a very low bar

It doesn’t take much to persuade me that some new development in this Administration is really bad. But it takes more than this:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s appointment today of his personal lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, as a Navy commander in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps reflects not just the norm-breaking approach that Hegseth is bringing to the job, but an odious philosophy of warfare. Like his new boss at the Pentagon, Parlatore has a pattern of providing support to soldiers accused of grave misconduct, even war crimes. He notably represented Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL court-martialed on charges including the murder of a captured fighter (though he was found guilty only of one, lesser charge), along with a second SEAL accused of serious sexual offenses. Elevating a lawyer with this record does not bode well for the armed services Hegseth hopes to build.

Jason Dempsey at the Atlantic.

If we really believe that every criminal defendant deserves competent legal counsel, we must stop insinuating that lawyers who have represented criminals are complicit in their crime and therefore evil. But we’ve done so (albeit selectively, sorted by tribe) all my adult life, and it has always bugged me — even before I was a lawyer.

Dare I think this nasty habit reflects what we really believe:

We should have kangaroo courts or even summary executions without trial — except for members of our respective tribes.
Anyone who facilitates real courts and frustrates summary executions is a money-grubbing lowlife.

For my friends, anything; for my enemies, the law

For all of Trump’s talk about rooting out “anti-Christian bias” from the United States, one of his administration’s first executive actions violated the free speech and religious freedom rights of several Christian congregations. It turns out that Trump wants to protect only his Christian allies from government reprisals. Dissenting believers will face his wrath, and the wrath of the state.

David French, who has the receipts.

This is one of the reasons I don’t buy Aaron Renn’s positive world/neutral world/negative world chronology of Christianity’s status in the US. True and consistent Christianity has never been viewed positively, and the negativity has come from the right as well as the left, albeit for different reasons.

The Plight of the Never-Trump Pundit

I woke up excited to write about the day’s most important political news—before remembering that I said most of what I wanted to say on the subject a few weeks ago.

Never Trumpers who work in media will face that problem every day for the next four years. Good luck finding something new and interesting to say as the president vindicates your arguments against him again and again and again.

Nick Catoggio

The Trumposcene is a great time not to be a professional pundit. Yes, I opine, but I don’t have to do it on a schedule, whether or not I’m feelin’ it.

And I mostly borrow.

Not Trump-related

Resurrecting de Gaulle

[T]he American right should consciously support a stronger France. It should encourage a special relationship between the two republics, support French primacy on the continent, treat Paris rather than Brussels as the European capital and the French military as the keystone of Europe’s security.

In effect, we should revisit Charles de Gaulle’s bid to maintain more French independence within the Western alliance, which made him a thorn in the American side during the Cold War, and recognize that he was right. It was not actually in America’s long-term interests to make Europe our full dependent, because vassaldom encourages weakness, and weakness reduces the value of the alliance in a world that America can no longer simply bestride alone.

…

The French military is limited but still “indisputably the most capable in Western Europe,” as Michael Shurkin noted in a 2023 analysis for War on the Rocks, with a resilient capacity for expeditionary action. Its nuclear-energy strategy has granted it a degree of energy independence that contrasts sharply with the reckless folly of German “green” de-industralization. Its pro-natal policies have given it a sustained demographic advantage; it is aging, but its fertility isn’t collapsing in the style of Italy, Spain or now Poland.

Then, psychologically, France lacks the crippling sense of historical guilt that still pervades Germany, and the junior-partner complex that has made Britain an unsuccessful adjunct of recent American foreign policy mistakes. It embodies two distinct forms of universalism, Roman Catholic and republican, that have more historical appeal across Europe than the Anglo-American style of empire. And the rapid renovation of Notre-Dame de Paris joined to the recent “gentle revival” of Catholic practice amid secularized conditions suggest stronger possibilities for spiritual renewal as well.

This last point is crucial for American conservatives. The current European establishment, secular and socially liberal even in its “conservative” forms, often feels like a natural ally not of the United States in full but of American progressivism alone. So the American right should wish to see a more substantial European conservatism re-emerge — more ambitious than today’s populist factions, and capable, as the right-wing Frenchman Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry put it this week, of affirming Europe’s “Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian” roots in contrast to Anglo-American progressivism.

Ross Douthat

ACB

After Justice Amy Coney Barrett voted against the Administration on one of the many Trump 2.0 “Emergency Docket” cases, she has been attacked I’m told, by the kinds of trolls who trot out canards like “DEI hire” in place of “treacherous bitch.” (I’m not referring to Prof. Josh Blackman, who criticizes the decision on more defensible grounds.)

Kevin D. Williamson is having none of it:

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who joined with the chief justice to rule against Trump in the matter of his attempt to unilaterally freeze certain federal spending, is a great loyalist—but not the kind of loyalist Donald Trump’s ghastly little sycophants demand that she be. Justice Barrett is loyal to her oath of office, to the law, to the Constitution, to certain principles governing her view of the judge’s role in American life—all of which amounts to approximately squat in the Trumpist mind, which demands only—exclusively—that she be loyal to Trump, and that she practice that loyalty by giving him what he wants in court, the statute books—and the Constitution—be damned.

The usual dopes demand that she give Trump what he wants because he is “the man who put her on the Supreme Court.” Mike Davis of the Article III Project (not the author of Late Victorian Holocausts; his organization works to recruit Trump-friendly judges) sneers that the justice is “weak and timid” and, because he is a right-wing public intellectual in 2025, that “she is a rattled law professor with her head up her ass.” Davis, a former clerk for Justice Neil Gorsuch, presumably is not as titanically stupid as he sounds, but there is a reason Justice Barrett is on the Supreme Court and he is a right-wing media gadfly who describes his job as “punching back at the left’s attacks.”

There is a word for men such as Davis et al.: subjects.

Kevin D. Williamson

Debasing education

Even though I am certainly angry at those students who choose to cheat, the fact is that I also care about them and feel a certain degree of compassion for them. I don’t want them to miss out on the opportunity to become educated, not even as the result of their own poor choices. It’s a bit of a Catch-22. How can we expect them to make good choices, about their studies or anything else, if they have not yet been given the tools to think critically? How can we expect them to grasp what education means when we, as educators, haven’t begun to undo the years of cognitive and spiritual damage inflicted by a society that treats schooling as a means to a high-paying job, maybe some social status, but nothing more? Or, worse, to see it as bearing no value at all, as if it were a kind of confidence trick, an elaborate sham?

Troy Jollimore via Alan Jacobs

Moral clarity

A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power.

Rod Dreher, Something Demonic Is In The Air, 1/13/2021

I don’t think Rod’s vision is as clear now as it was then.

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