Friday, May 8

Trump’s secret sauce (and where it falls flat)

I don’t plan anything else pointedly about Trump today, but David French’s latest (gift link) struck me as surprising and unusually powerful. And actually, it’s as much or more about the Republican politicians who now dance to Trump’s pipe and the 77 million voters who put him back in the Oval Office even after January 6.

Trump’s central political insight (and perhaps his key political advantage) is that he understood that Americans weren’t quite cynical enough about many of our politicians. As much as we already thought they placed power over principle, we didn’t know the half of it. He could see our politicians more clearly than we could — perhaps because he’d spent a lifetime in their presence, writing them large checks while hearing their empty promises.

And he showed it by placing a big carrot and a giant stick in front of the Republican political class, and then we watched as virtually everyone fell in line.

…

Trump is not a man who values dissent, to put it mildly. The idea of a “team of rivals” is completely alien to him. Talk to virtually any prominent person who breaks with Trump, and they can tell you stories of terrifying days and sleepless nights as MAGA’s minions made their lives a living hell.

At the core of Trump’s worldview is a belief that the world is a fundamentally transactional place, and that everyone has a price.

The Republican Party has done nothing to disabuse him of the notion. Even the religious leaders around him are fundamentally transactional. As they’ve demonstrated, they’ll put up with virtually any behavior from Trump so long as he delivers on a few, simple promises. And now — especially when it comes to abortion — he doesn’t even have to deliver on those. For some it seems as if access to power alone is compensation enough.

The key to Trump’s power isn’t just that he accurately sensed that much of the Republican establishment paid lip service to principle but really cared about power — it’s that he knew millions upon millions of voters possessed similar values. Their commitments to character or ideology took a back seat to the simple desire to defeat their opponents. The most important thing was to win. Anything else was a luxury.

…

Like calls out to like, and over time Trump has built one of the most purely transactional coalitions in politics. It should surprise no one that prosperity gospel pastors were among the first Christians to answer Trump’s call. Their entire religion is transactional — with God dispensing health and wealth in direct response to the financial donations of the faithful.

…

But [n]ot everyone is transactional. Some people — for better and for worse — actually have beliefs that they’re willing to die for, and Trump is painfully, obviously baffled when he encounters belief like that.

It’s embarrassing, for example, to watch him flail his way through the Iran war …

…

Trump plays the only cards he knows how to play — alternating between threatening death and destruction and proposing business deals. Remember when he considered a “joint venture” to control the Strait of Hormuz with Iran?

It turns out that there is an immense difference between your median South American autocracy and Twelver Shi’ism, the dominant religion of the Iranian regime. Threatening death to people who are willing to die for their cause doesn’t have the same effect as threatening people who seek mainly wealth and power. They are also quite willing to make other people die for their cause as well — and that means the Iranian regime (like Putin’s Russia) will endure catastrophic casualties without shaking its commitment or tempting it to yield.

Why hasn’t Trump been able to force an end to the Ukraine war? There are true believers on both sides. The Ukrainians won’t willingly yield an inch to the man who wants to destroy them, and Vladimir Putin is infused with his own sense of religious purpose and historic destiny.

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At home, Trump has obviously been flummoxed by judges who stubbornly stick to principle and seem immune to his bluster. Constitutional fidelity is alien to him. He cannot understand why the justices he appointed will not do exactly what he wants.

At the same time, it’s no coincidence that the members of the MAGA coalition who are most apt to break with him are the cranks and conspiracists — people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, and even Tucker Carlson. They came into the MAGA coalition as true believers, and they’re the ones who seem genuinely outraged when Trump breaks his promises and betrays their trust.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the last 10 years of American political life has been the way that Trump has exposed layers of differences in American life beyond right versus left. In fact, in many ways right versus left has been the least consequential aspect of the American divide. The Republican Party bears little ideological resemblance to the G.O.P. of even the very recent past.

Instead, it’s been between decent and indecent. Honest and dishonest. Transactional and principled.

(Bold added)

Read the whole thing: True Believers Blow Trump’s Mind (gift link).

I cannot think of a more elegant solution to the mystery of how putative conservatives and professing Christians turned into, well, whatever the hell it is that they’ve become: they were just waiting to be bought.

This does not bode well for post-Trump America; the problem is pandemic, not confined to the White House.

The new calendar of Saints

I don’t think this readily reads as rage-bait, but just in case: I intend it as a light change of pace from the real rage-bait all around us. I don’t even intend to “own the libs” by posting it.

[C]onsider a recent Substack post by Ed West, a British conservative writer I enjoy reading. West is the kind of conservative who treats social-justice progressivism as a form of religion. I’ve done the same at times, agreeing with those who treat the trend as a post-Protestant moral crusade. But West goes much further in his post, pointing out just how many special days and months every year are now set aside in the UK for celebrating this or that protected or privileged group—and likening these celebrations to the feast days that comprised the liturgical calendar back during eras of Christian cultural dominance. Hence the tongue-in-cheek title of West’s post: “The New Calendar of Saints: Do you know your World Mental Health Day from your International Pronouns Day?”

In addition to those two, West highlights:

International Women’s Day

Zero Discrimination Day

Equal Pay Day

The International Day to Combat Islamophobia

The International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination

The International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

And the International Transgender Day of Visibility

If you’d like to see more, West provides a link to an organization based in Washington DC that compiles these and many more progressive feast days, including the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia on May 17, the International Nonbinary People’s Day on July 17, and many others.

It’s certainly possible to go about your life without giving such culturally mandated celebrations much thought. But in public schools and many workplaces in the United States, they will be announced, sometimes with programming added to ensure everyone within earshot learns proper moral lessons about each group and its mistreatment at the hands of … those who aren’t members of the group.

The question, once again, is who devised these occasions, proclaiming them into existence? And why did others in positions of authority and influence decide to go along with it, expecting that the rest of us would welcome the conjuring of a novel series of public celebrations of various multicultural-intersectional victim groups? Did I miss the election in which we cast ballots for this? Was even an opinion poll taken beforehand to gauge support for it? Or did someone simply decide for us, for our own good? And what about the “international” aspect to so many of these special days and months? That raises a slew of additional questions, including: Is there a committee at the United Nations or the Hague where such things are decided and imposed upon the nations, and through them the citizens, of the world?

Damon Linker, Mar 15, 2024

Abortion politics

There was a time when I was very much in the abortion fray on the pro-life side. I even was paid some legal fees to help. How I came to disengage is not worth telling, even assuming that I could tell the story with fly-on-the-wall accuracy, but it wasn’t because I switched to the pro-choice/abortion side.

I continued to watch developments, though, and the current kerfuffle over interstate distribution of mifepristone is a nice chance for me to say “I told you so.” I knew that the overruling of Roe v. Wade would not remotely lay the abortion issue to rest, and not just because 50 years of readily available abortion would not be relinquished without a fierce fight. What too many people didn’t seem to understand was that reversal of Roe would merely return abortion law to the political realm, where “chemical (pharmaceutical) abortions” via interstate mails was most definitely foreseen as a battle field.

We’re on that battle field now, even if other public affairs overshadow it for most of us.

Insatiable

What makes this sin so strange, counterproductive, and perhaps unforgivable, is that popular views on basic issues of tolerance and equality have become much more liberal over the years. The very things the Left was originally fighting for have become less controversial and more accepted—from gay marriage to women’s and racial equality to opposition to discrimination. The Left won.

Ruy Teixera, The Five Deadly Sins of the Left

This reminds me of a quip, from William F. Buckley, I think, about a liberal being the kind of person who cannot say what social improvements would be enough to turn him into a conservative.

Shorts

St Seraphim of Sarov, who lived at the turn of the 19th century, observed, “We condemn others only because we shun knowing ourselves.” (Peter Bouteneff, How to Be a Sinner)
Spoken of a post-op patient in Waco, TX, by her nurse — a grizzled Jerry Garcia with a thick Texas accent — “You’ve probably had a good many more drugs today than you have in a typical day. I don’t want to rush to judgment, but your tooth-to-tattoo ratio suggests that you’re not a heavy drug user.” (Alan Jacobs)
In the late 1970s, I was a teenager in Winona, Minnesota, a sleepy Mississippi River town defibrillated by three colleges and a few residual hippies. (Kevin Fenton)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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 my favorite no-algorithm social medium.