TPUSA
I paid no conscious attention to Turning Point USA (TPUSA) before Charlie Kirk’s murder 14 months ago and only a little (unfavorable) attention to Charlie Kirk, who I knew exclusively as somebody who’d teamed up with the (execrable) Jerry Falwell, Jr. to create a “FalKirk Center” at Liberty University. After Kirk’s murder, I paid a little attention for a little while and then drifted back into indifference.
Now TPUSA is back in the commentary. It seems that TPUSA started off as essentially Reaganite conservative, but fell in with a bad set, as foolish youth are wont to do, and hitched their star to MAGA, forsaking conservatism for the populist fad. There doubtless are non-Reaganite conservatisms, but I’m not sure there’s even one MAGA conservatism, so I cannot take TPUSA seriously a flavor of conservatism, even if I once might have done had I been paying attention.
Anyway, part of the TPUSA plan was to mobilize young voters. They did, but young voters turned blue last week. Oops!
Instead of vindicating a polarizing organization that has pitched itself as the future of the G.O.P., Tuesday’s results set off recriminations from establishment Republicans who have been exiled by Turning Point’s political machine.
“Turning Point is driving us to extinction,” said Gina Swoboda, the former Arizona Republican Party chairwoman who has feuded with the group. “They have become a destructive force in Republican politics.”
In the days since Republicans’ blowout loss, Turning Point leaders have been left to sift through the rubble of the “red wall” they had pledged to build in Arizona, Nevada and New Hampshire, states they view as critical battlegrounds. Despite the group’s significant investment, the only high-profile candidate in those three states who won with its backing was Kelly Ayotte, the incumbent governor of New Hampshire.
…
In a social media post, Erika Kirk, Mr. Kirk’s widow and Turning Point’s chief executive, said it was clear voters were “concerned about the state of the economy and the war in Iran.” The group’s leaders, she said, were poring over election results and would “spend the next two years making the case for how conservative, free market solutions, and a renewed focus on our country’s founding principles can address the problems the American people face.”
Turning Point Bet on the Midterms and Lost. Some Republicans Are Furious. (The New York Times)
I kinda like that last block-quoted paragraph. “Conservative, free market solutions, and a renewed focus on our country’s founding principles” is very un-MAGA. It could signal a course-correction, but it also could be just so much blather and boilerplate.
If you’re keenly interested in what TPUSA is up to, don’t watch this spot. I’m fairly certain I won’t be thinking about them for long.
Persuasion
We have stopped believing in reason’s power to persuade. The right thinks the critical social theories espoused by many on the left are both wrong and pernicious, but it doesn’t expect to be able to convince the left of this view. Hence the move to use raw political or legal power to suppress it. The left, meanwhile, thinks many of those who don’t share its premises are motivated by racism and other forms of bigotry that are in most cases untouchable by argument. Hence the move to use moral condemnation to get resisters excluded from social circles and cultural institutions in which they enjoy various forms of power and status.
These examples are themselves expressions of a broader trend we see all around us in our public life: the tendency to skip the work of attempting to change minds in favor of grabbing the power to control what’s permitted. The clearest, and oldest example, of this move is the appeal to judges to resolve disputes that resist resolution through democratic deliberation and consensus-building. Instead of the right trying (and likely failing) to convince the rest of the country that the New Deal is a bad idea, it seeks to get the Supreme Court to declare the New Deal unconstitutional. Instead of the left trying (and likely failing) to convince the rest of the country that abortion should be legal, it seeks to get the Supreme Court to declare abortion a constitutionally protected right.
Damon Linker (March 2021) via Alan Jacobs (who adds “I don’t think this is quite right”)
Frantic, tragic, sanguine
Please don’t come at me with “but you voted for him!” I did, in 2020, and would have done in 2024 had I been in the country. I did so not out of respect for him, but because I believed that he was the only thing standing between people like me and the woke fanatics who despise us so much they would stop at next to nothing to ruin us. Because he was the only thing! He really was.
Rod Dreher (bold added).
I can think of no deeper gulf between Rod and me than this. I think his fear of progressives is wildly disproportionate; I think his willingness to trust in a profoundly wicked and un-Christian man for his protection from them is perversely short-sighted and unscriptural. (Ps. 146:3).
I’ve “wasted” my vote on a third-party candidate in every Presidential election involving Trump, and if I die at the hands of lefties, I die proud that I did not vote for a wicked man who with the advice of Stephen Wormtongue Miller may still do irreparable damage to our Republic.
It’s called “tragedy,” Rod, and I suspect that it, not “Weimar America,” is the ur-narrative we’re living. So I don’t plan on buying your forthcoming Weimar America.
Oh: Rod also hopes his buddy J.D. Vance (who owes his good fortune, at least in part, to Rod’s glowing review of Hillbilly Elegy) becomes President — a prospect that increasingly fills me with dread (and also seems decreasingly likely).
That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it. Rod can stick to his Flight 93 Election — ummmm — stuff if he likes.
But if he’d like to break out of catastrophism, he can start here:
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
Atmosphere of Menace
I lament the atmosphere of menace in the US that deters wise and good people from seeking office and acting of voting as they think best. The image I generally have in mind when so lamenting is anonymous MAGA-sounding death threats against anyone who bucks the wishes of Donald Trump.
But the news that our Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, has moved to a military base because of Iranian threats on his life reminded me that the menace comes not only from MAGA to non-MAGA (I won’t say “Right to Left” because MAGA isn’t conservative) but is more generalized. More than a half-dozen Trump Administration officials have moved onto military bases for personal security according to a search I made on Veterans Day. See somewhat stale details here. And I recently learned that Judges, from trial courts to state supreme courts, get death threats when executions are immanent.
Line-drawing
A few months ago, I purchased an online course on automating stuff with AI from a source I’ve been pleased with on other topics. I took the first lesson and then — decided I really didn’t want to have AI Agents (“Robot Assistants” in the terms of the course) doing a bunch of stuff for me.
It’s partly because my life isn’t all that repetitive unless you count “read the news, follow interesting trails, write about what you found on those interesting trails, etc.” as “repetitive.” Second, were there some way to automate that, I’d lose the personal benefit of the encounters. Third, there’s something kind of ineffable about it, but I feel fondness for humans and their abilities.
Were I still working for money, the calculus probably would be different — indeed, market pressures would compel using AI for greater efficiency. I’ve been an early-adopter; the competitive advantage of the cutting edge is invariably short-lived.
Shorts
- Unfortunately, I do not believe that Congress can impeach a White House Chief of Staff.
- This week I learned that State Supreme Court justices get death threats and require additional security when executions are immanent.
- In a letter to the editor of The Boston Globe, Mary Skorczeski linked voters’ Democratic turn to Trump’s insatiable need for attention: “What happens when you suck the oxygen out of the room for 10 years? People turn blue.” Via Frank Bruni
- In The Toronto Star, Justin Ling characterized the midterm results as a “productive cough for democracy in the United States.” Via Frank Bruni
- For the Republican Party, it might seem a little premature to talk about “rebuilding”—if rebuilding is even possible. That’s because Donald Trump still has two years left in his presidency to make the rubble bounce. In the wake of Godzilla visits and natural disasters alike, rebuilding efforts usually wait for the “all clear” because it makes no sense to start putting up drywall if another tornado or giant lizard is around the corner. (Jonah Goldberg in an email)
Elsewhere in Tipsyworld
- Trump has found his new Roy Cohn
- Telltale
- Noble lies without the nobility
- Juxtapose these images and the column almost writes iteself
- Imputation, implication, derivation and association
- Dog returns to his vomit
- Andrew McCarthy on the Hegseth Impeachment
Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” remark and Donald Trump’s “Fifth Avenue” remark amounted to the two of them saying the same thing about the same pigheaded rubes ….
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.
