We had a lot of trouble with western mental health workers who came here immediately after the genocide and we had to ask some of them to leave. They came and their practice did not involve being outside in the sun where you begin to feel better, there was no music or drumming to get your blood flowing again, there was no sense that everyone had taken the day off so that the entire community could come together to try to lift you up and bring you back to joy, there was no acknowledgement of the depression as something invasive and external that could actually be cast out again. Instead they would take people one at a time into these dingy little rooms and have them sit around for an hour or so and talk about bad things that had happened to them. We had to ask them to leave.
A Rwandan talking to a western writer, Andrew Solomon, about his experience with western mental health and depression. I regret losing the URL, but offer the following in complement:
Serenity in leisure
There is a certain serenity in leisure. That serenity springs precisely from our inability to understand, from a recognition of the mysterious nature of the universe; it springs from the courage of deep confidence, so that we are content to let things take their course; and there is something about it which Konrad Weiss, the poet, called “confidence in the fragmentariness of life and history.”
Visit a graveyard; you will search in vain for a tombstone inscribed with the words “steam-fitter,” “executive vice president,” “park ranger,” or “clerk.” In death, the essence of a soul’s being on earth is seen as marked by the love they felt for, and received from, their husbands, wives, and children, or sometimes also by what military unit they served with in time of war. These are all things which involve both intense emotional commitment, and the giving and taking of life. While alive, in contrast, the first question anyone was likely to have asked on meeting any of those people was, “What do you do for a living?”
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs
… but liars can figure
I saw an item in the Wall Street Journal very recently:
Here’s a statistic to remember next year, as Congress debates extending President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts: The top 1% of income-tax filers provided 40.4% of the revenue in 2022, according to recently released IRS data. The top 10% of filers carried 72% of the tax burden. Self-styled progressives will never admit it, but U.S. income taxes are already highly progressive ….
Then I saw a Politico item lamenting how little income tax the super-wealth pay on their increase wealth.
So, is someone lying?
Yeah, pretty much. Increased wealth doesn’t imply taxable income. I’m confident that the increased wealth figures Politico cited were mostly unrealized capital gains, which we don’t tax for a number of very good (if not ironclad) reasons.
Infrastructure century
Because the highways were gold-plated with our national wealth, all other forms of public building were impoverished. This is the reason why every town hall built after 1950 is a concrete-block shed full of cheap paneling and plastic furniture, why public schools look like overgrown gas stations, why courthouses, firehouses, halls of records, libraries, museums, post offices, and other civic monuments are indistinguishable from bottling plants and cold-storage warehouses. The dogmas of Modernism only helped rationalize what the car economy demanded: bare bones buildings that served their basic functions without symbolically expressing any aspirations or civic virtues.
One of the things I worry about is unaccountable local officials now that the internet has killed smaller local media. The Lafayette Journal & Courier is a wraith, all but invisible were it not for stories fed from other Gannett papers. WLFI has been gutted with departures as its owner, Allen Media Group, bids billions for new acquisitions but doesn’t pay its bills. Only national politics is really covered any more, and that in only a selective way:
Trans teen health
In oral arguments at the Supreme Court Wednesday, ACLU lawyer and transgender ideologue Chase Strangio was forced to admit that gender realignment surgery for children does not prevent suicide—a core claim of many trans activists, notoriously communicated to parents by doctors as “do you want a live girl or a dead boy?” (Source: The Free Press)
What’s left of the trans argument against Tennessee law, in my view, boils down to “it’s sex discrimination to allow estrogen for girls, testosterone for boys, but not vice versa” — an argument that begs the question of whether the brute fact of sexual binary has any implications for law and medicine.
Wordplay
as man became disenchanted with regards to God and the cosmos, he became enchanted instead with himself and his own potential
The Free Press has its people weigh in on what they’re thankful for at Thanksgiving. Martin Gurri responds:
This year, the petty little man in me is thankful that I won’t have to listen to Joe Biden’s double-dribbling sentences or Kamala Harris’s sitcom canned laughter ever again. The greedy analyst in me is thankful that Donald Trump is coming to burn Washington, D.C., to the ground, so Bari Weiss can keep telling people that I’m the only human on Earth who understands this dread pirate. The lonesome immigrant in me is thankful for my wife, and children, and grandchildren, my country and my street, my plans and my memories—because they make high politics feel like a trivial dream that I wake up from, when I step away from my laptop.
Pete Hegseth
I don’t trust Trump, and it seems to me as if he’s deliberately staffing up with sexual predators — as if that was proof of a decisive “get-things-done” manliness.
Moreover, I distrust pretty boys like Pete Heseth, Gavin Newsom, etc. (Yeah. Maybe there’s a little envy there.)
Nevertheless, I’m withholding my final judgment on Hegseth’s suitability for DoD because his accusers are hiding behind anonymity.
Pardon power
[T]he President is only accountable to the electorate so long as he or his party are up for election. Once the election is over, there’s no one for voters to punish. That’s why Biden waited until after the election to pardon Hunter; why Trump did the same for Steve Bannon and Roger Stone; why Obama did the same when commuting the sentences of Chelsea Manning and the terrorist Oscar López Rivera. And, most notoriously, that’s why Bill Clinton waited until his last full day in office to pardon the fugitive Marc Rich, who had fled to Switzerland to avoid prosecution and whose ex-wife donated $450,000 to the Clinton Library.
It is true that in some matters, including a considerable swath of policy issues that he neither understands nor cares about, Trump can be like Lord Derby, who, “like the feather pillow, bears the marks of the last person who has sat on him”—which is no small thing given the assortment of asses we are talking about. But Trump makes a big impression of his own on the feather pillows he encounters.
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.
In The Washington Post, Catherine Rampell evaluated the naming of Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as heads of a new government agency: “How can you tell Donald Trump’s plan to improve ‘government efficiency’ is off to a promising start? Because his first step was appointing two people to do the same job.” (Gerard Farrell, Summit, N.J., and Bruno Momont, Manhattan)
Also in The Post, Ruth Marcus took in Trump’s galling choice for attorney general: “No mother says to her son, ‘Why can’t you be more like Matt Gaetz.’” (David Sherman, Arlington, Va.) Her Post colleague George F. Will called Gaetz “an arrested-development adolescent with the swagger of a sequined guitarist in a low-rent casino.” (Korleen Kraft, Portland, Ore., and Bill Tanski, Stratford, Conn., among many others)
And so, Lesson No 1: Not all allegations against Republicans are partisan shams. That’s surely hard for Republicans to swallow …
The Trump transition team might have also read the insider room. Republicans are well versed in defending their brethren against nonsense attacks—even their unpopular brethren. There was a reason few if any Republican members rushed to Mr. Gaetz’s defense: They know him. Congress is a close space, and most all members had seen or heard something unpleasant enough to make them suspect fire accompanied the smoke. Ergo, Lesson No. 2: Take your lead from people who know, not MAGA Twitter insurgents.
The name of the Trump nominations game is clearly “shakeup”—and that’s to be applauded. Few doubt that Washington is in desperate need of some rattling. But note Lesson No. 3: The Gaetz fiasco is a reminder that there remains a bright line between a candidate who is aggressive, committed and professional and one who is unthinking, partisan and a liability … Mr. Gaetz was always clearly the latter—big on bravado, short on ideas and temperament. While not as discussed as the ethics question, it’s also an important reason his nomination was destined to fail.
(Bold added)
Essential workers
Another vulnerability that the novel coronavirus has exposed is the paradoxical notion of “essential” workers who are grossly underpaid and whose lives are treated as disposable.
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.
While many people voted against Trump because they felt that liberalism or democracy was under threat, many other people moved rightward for the same reason — because they felt that was the way to defend liberal norms against the speech police, or democratic power against control by technocratic elites.
Ross Douthat (unlocked). This is the sort of thing that finally became clear to me in the weeks before the election. I still voted for my third party, but with greater sympathy for Trump voters.
More Douthat:
[T]he first way that we are not going back: We are not returning to the narrowing of political debate that characterized the world after 1989, the converging worldviews of the Reaganite center-right and the Clinton-Blairite center-left, the ruling-out of radical and reactionary possibilities.
Yes, my blog category of “Zombie Reaganism” seems well and truly dead. I haven’t used it in year — probably at least nine — because there isn’t any Zombie Reaganism around any more.
[W]e are also not going back to a world where there is a set of trusted truth-mediating institutions, core sources of news and information that everyone recognizes and trusts, a “mainstream” of argument and opinion-shaping that sets the parameters of debate … the internet remains an acid for trust in institutions and an enabler of rebellions in a way that makes consensus and conformism extremely difficult to sustain.
…
Then there is the global backdrop: After the past four years, it’s clear that we are not going back to a world of unchallenged American primacy or a liberal international order expanding to encompass more and more regions of the globe … The “global” alliance in support of Ukraine is functionally mostly an American and European coalition, with much of the non-Western world distinctly not on our side.
…
The dynamics of the 21st century will favor belief over secularism, Orthodox Jews over their modernized coreligionists, the Amish over their modern neighbors, “trads” of all kinds over more lukewarm kinds of spirituality.
It took a lot of links to this article to make me realize that there was something worthwhile in it — even though it felt much different than most Douthat columns. Again: Ross Douthat (unlocked).
Still defining deviancy down
It’s been a little more than three decades since Daniel Patrick Moynihan published his famous essay on “Defining Deviancy Down.”
…
If Moynihan were writing his essay today, he might have added a section about politics. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan won the presidency, it was still considered something of a political liability that he had been divorced 32 years earlier. In 1987, one of Reagan’s nominees for the Supreme Court, Douglas Ginsburg, had to withdraw his name after NPR’s Nina Totenberg revealed that, years earlier, the judge had smoked pot. A few years later, two of Bill Clinton’s early candidates for attorney general, Zoë Baird and Kimba Wood, were felled by revelations of hiring illegal immigrants as nannies (and, in Baird’s case, of not paying Social Security taxes).
How quaint.
On Monday, a lawyer for two women told several news outlets that former Representative Matt Gaetz used Venmo to pay for sex with multiple women, one of whom says she saw him having sex with a 17-year-old girl at a drug-fueled house party in 2017. Donald Trump is doubling down on Gaetz’s nomination as attorney general, even as the president-elect privately acknowledges that the chances of confirmation are not great.
…
Still, all this misses the meaning of the Gaetz nomination, the point of which has nothing to do with his suitability for the job. His virtue, in Trump’s eyes, is his unsuitability. He is the proverbial tip of the spear in a larger effort to define deviancy down …
There’s a guiding logic here — and it isn’t to “own the libs,” in the sense of driving Trump’s opponents to fits of moralistic rage (even if, from the president-elect’s perspective, that’s an ancillary benefit). It’s to perpetuate the spirit of cynicism, which is the core of Trumpism. If truth has no currency, you cannot use it. If power is the only coin of the realm, you’d better be on the side of it. If the government is run by cads and lackeys, you’ll need to make your peace with them.
Donald Trump’s deviancy doesn’t start with nominees. His entire scorched-earth speaking style is nothing any decent person would want to emulate or have his child emulate. (And I’m biting my tongue on at least one other topic.)
Louche is the new Cabinet Qualification
The press is obsessed with whether Fox talking head and Secretary of Defense nominee Pete Hegseth sexually assaulted a woman in 2017. I guess none of the proven stuff even matters any more because, hey!, no fault divorce:
The point of my tweet was to mock the efforts of the Trump-supporting right to use photographs like the one I was commenting on to portray the president-elect’s nomination of Fox & Friends co-host Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense as some kind of triumph of wholesome masculinity and family-focused fertility.
Hegseth is 44 years old. He’s been married three times. He was unfaithful to his first two wives. Three of his seven children were born from his second wife. Another of the children was born of his third wife, whom he impregnated while he was still married to his second wife. The other three children come from his third wife’s previous marriage.
…
Then there’s the story about the late wife of Trump’s nominee to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Kennedy’s wife killed herself after finding and reading his diary, which recorded details of 37 extramarital affairs, coded by sexual act.
…
It’s not good that John F. Kennedy got away with appalling behavior with women, just as it’s unfortunate that the Democratic Party circled the wagons around Bill Clinton after his Oval Office liaisons with a 22-year-old White House intern were revealed. Yet it’s healthier for a culture when such behavior is concealed, as Kennedy’s was—and even when partisans defend a perpetrator who already holds high office and will be reaching the end of his final term before long—than it is for a culture seemingly to reward such actions when they are already publicly known.
The old line about hypocrisy—that it’s the tribute that vice pays to virtue—is correct: Hypocritical responses from past Democrats were compatible with continuing to uphold the old standards. Actively elevating, and thereby rewarding, men who are known to treat women like playthings to be used, abused, and discarded at will is, quite obviously, not.
Yet that is precisely where we find ourselves today—confronting the predation unleashed by the rise of a thoroughly post-conservative right.
Consider the ways in which both the Right and the Left now routinely avail themselves of what might be called “the appeal to the calendar.” The Left, including former president Barack Obama, have long spoken of the possibility of being “on the wrong side of history,” as if history itself is a moral force that calls us to certain choices and will judge us should we choose wrongly. Yet the Right makes its own appeal to the calendar. Any number of moral horrors are tolerated and justified through the claim that the offending party “knows what time it is,” and therefore must be allowed or even encouraged. Here the claim is that we live in a unique apocalyptic moment in human history and, given the threats facing us, certain actions and words that might have once been beyond the pale are now admissible.
I think it is likely that Matt Gaetz is guilty of everything of which he is accused and more. But I do not know what to do with that opinion.
The accusations against Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings seemed to me absurd—out of character for the man, based on supposed wrongdoing when he was a teenager, and obviously timed for a specific political purpose, i.e., to prevent his confirmation to the Supreme Court. The accusations against Gaetz are perfectly in character for the man, they preceded his nomination but are based on relatively recent events, they are attested to by more than one person, etc. But they are only accusations.
There is a kind of no-man’s-land between the sort of proof that will suffice to send somebody to prison and the kind of proof that will suffice to convince us that a man should not be attorney general or hold some other high office and the kind of proof that just makes us recoil from a man on grounds of general ick. The legal and ethical accusations Gaetz faces are both tawdry and serious–the most serious of them involve an underage prostitute–and, if they are substantiated, losing the AG spot would be the least of his worries. In the case of Gaetz, senators—and the public—are spared the necessity of diving too deeply into that to resolve this issue, inasmuch as there are perfectly adequate reasons to reject the Gaetz nomination that do not require any further proof at all: Gaetz is a cretin and a flunky, his low character is attested to publicly by members of his own party in Congress, he lacks any relevant preparation for the job at hand, etc.
Despite parents’ clear desire for alternatives to public schools, progressives remain concerned about homeschooling. Besides concerns rooted in individual children’s welfare, progressives will sometimes hint that too many homeschoolers might lead to disruption in the civil sphere. (See, for instance, the recent Amazon documentary Shiny Happy People.) These latter fears are overblown. Homeschoolers are nowhere near replacing the American liberal regime with a Christian commonwealth (and even if they were, the evangelicals and the Catholic integralists would never be able to agree on a constitution).
Tricksters
I can’t call The Donald a Trickster in the folkloric sense of the word, mythically, because the Trickster in folklore is a regenerative, taboo-busting energy that is still – in the end in service, somehow – to a sacred outcome. I wouldn’t dream of bestowing that kind of generativity on The Donald. His Tourette level fabrications are mesmerically troubling, and yet his story won. A sizeable amount of the American public is not-yet-done with his tale. Sure, here he comes to ‘fix’ Gaza and the Ukraine, he just needs even more power than last time.
… As my old friend Lewis Hyde states:
Most of the travellers, liars, thieves and shameless personalities of the twentieth century (now 21st) are not tricksters at all, then. Their disruptions are not subtle enough, or pitched at a high enough level… when he lies and steals, it isn’t so much to get away with something or get rich as to disturb the established categories of truth and property and, by doing so, open the road to possible new worlds. When Pablo Picasso says that “art is a lie that tells the truth,” we are closer to the old Trickster spirit.
Lewis Hyde and myself on the Trickster, back in 2017
…
So here we go, another four years on the merry-go-round of what will he do next? I turn to the Teacher and ask:
What shall we do Yeshua?
Don’t freak out, says Jesus. He said this two thousand years ago for just this kind of moment.
And Auden pipes up:
Don’t die in your dread.
It’s a liminal moment, as the anthropologists liked to call it. It’s not business as usual. That’s got to make us curious at the very least.
As a reminder of the official Dem line, here is a real-life sentence inScientific American on the topic: “Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.” Right. Biases. Nothing inherent going on here. I don’t dominate in football because of biases.
Employees at the Federal Emergency Management Agency were told not to help people after Hurricane Milton if those people displayed Trump signage around their homes … So we have the taxpayer-funded federal relief agency explicitly denying certain Americans lifesaving service because of their politics. Basically, you get a lifeboat only if you’re also wearing a pride flag pin. But. . . but I was reliably told by The New York Times that this was a conspiracy theory?! … My worldview is shattered! NYT says something is categorically false but it is, in fact, completely true and simply politically inconvenient. Who can I ever trust?
Republicans latched on to the left’s strangest political beliefs and exploited them, spending $143 million on ads that highlighted Kamala’s policies around gender, which most Dems can barely defend. Because she really did support federally funded gender transition surgeries for illegal immigrants in jail. The idea sounds like something a dad would say after taking too much cough syrup. It’s like “Okay, Dad, I’m sure she said that, now let’s get you to bed.” But she really did.
It occurred to me recently that Nellie Bowles reminds me of the late Molly Ivins, she who said of Dubya that he couldn’t help himself verbally because “he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” Treasure Nellie while we’ve got her.
Gaining Independence
[R]eal independence of mind can be won only by a sustained process of submission to authority.
As a Colombia-born friend often reminds me, most of today’s American left has no experience of real poverty or hunger, real political repression, or real civil violence—the kind that leaves a river of blood in the streets. We Americans live in a cocoon of comfort and security compared to most of the rest of the world. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow earns $30 million a year for her progressive views. In effect, American radicalism on the left, especially in our cultural elite, is a performative faith, a kind of ongoing, immanent religious liturgy. It’s bad First World theater produced by the pampered, the privileged, the intellectually extreme, and hangers-on unaware of the uglier ironies of recent history.
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.
Finally grokking Trump — as a repudiation of Democrat attitudes and positions
I don’t recall how much, or even whether, I have written about my little epiphany in the last two weeks or so before November election.
I was “never Trump” since I first realized that his candidacy was serious in 2015 or 2016. I confess that I could not imagine anything other than a “tear it all down!” mentality motivating Trump voters. The way I avoided contemning them was to assume that there was some nobler reason that was invisible to me for some mysterious reason.
My little epiphany in the weeks before the election was that the evils of the Democrat party could make it plausible to vote against them, even if doing so meant voting for Trump.
I considered writing about this in last Thursday’s post, but I thought it would be tedious to try to name all the Democrat evils that could repel a voter. After I posted on Thursday, though, Mary Eberstadt kindly posted an item at First Things that listed many of them for me. As does this:
Although Eberstadt specifically refers to Democrat antipathy toward Roman Catholics and Catholic teaching, I’m in the same target zone, just as when I was a conservative Protestant in my beforetimes.
Were my vote determined solely by which party is likelier to persecute me and mine over the next four years, I could imagine voting for Trump, pretty darned confident that he’ll leave me and mine alone. (Even though this little blog has dissed him for 8 years, I don’t flatter myself that he’s noticed.) But my vote tends less toward short-term self-protection and more toward fiat justitia ruat caelum.
Still: the people have spoken, and what they said means I’m likely to be left alone at least until 2029. There’s some small comfort in that.
Is identitarianism a dying delusion?
David Brooks looks at many of the ways the pre-election expectations (of how groups would vote) were dashed.
Why were so many of our expectations wrong? Well, we all walk around with mental models of reality in our heads. Our mental models help us make sense of the buzzing, blooming confusion of the world. Our mental models help us anticipate what’s about to happen. Our mental models guide us as we make decisions about how to get the results we want.
Many of us are walking around with broken mental models. Many of us go through life with false assumptions about how the world works.
Where did we get our current models? Well, we get models from our experience, our peers, the educational system, the media and popular culture. Over the past few generations, a certain worldview that emphasizes racial, gender and ethnic identity has been prevalent in the circles where highly educated people congregate …
The crucial assertion of the identitarian mind-set is that all politics and all history can be seen through the lens of liberation movements. Society is divided between the privileged (straight white males) and the marginalized (pretty much everyone else). History and politics are the struggle between oppressors and oppressed groups.
In this model, people are seen as members of a group before they are seen as individuals …
In this model, society is seen as an agglomeration of different communities. Democrats thus produce separate agendas designed to mobilize Black men, women and so on. The goal of Democratic politics is to link all the oppressed and marginalized groups into one majority coalition.
…
But this mind-set has just crashed against the rocks of reality. This model assumes that people are primarily motivated by identity group solidarity. This model assumes that the struggle against oppressive systems and groups is the central subject of politics. This model has no room for what just happened.
It turns out a lot of people don’t behave like ambassadors from this or that group. They think for themselves in unexpected ways.
For those bewildered by why so many Americans apparently voted against the values of liberal democracy, Balint Magyar has a useful formulation. “Liberal democracy,” he says, “offers moral constraints without problem-solving” — a lot of rules, not a lot of change — while “populism offers problem-solving without moral constraints.” Magyar, a scholar of autocracy, isn’t interested in calling Donald Trump a fascist. He sees the president-elect’s appeal in terms of something more primal: “Trump promises that you don’t have to think about other people.”
Around the world, populist autocrats have leveraged the thrilling power of that promise to transform their countries into vehicles for their own singular will … What they delivered was permission to abandon societal inhibitions, to amplify the grievances of one’s own group and heap hate on assorted others, particularly on groups that cannot speak up for themselves. Magyar calls this “morally unconstrained collective egoism.”
When I opened your Dish email last Friday, I fully expected a big serving of both-sides-y handwringing — as in, “Trump is bad, but Harris is also bad, because wokeness/inflation/illegal immigrants … poor voters, what were they to do?” But I was also hoping for an acknowledgement of how terribly painful it is that the lawless kakistocrat has been reelected, more resoundingly than the first time.
Instead, I got a celebration of the multiracial, multiethnic coalition that brought us Clown Car Horror Show 2: Electric Boogaloo.
Not a single solitary goddamn word about all the reasons why Agent Orange deserved to lose. Attempting to overturn a free election in 2020? Inciting a mob to attack the Capitol? Running on “retribution” and promising to deploy the justice system against his political opponents? Routine use of crass, ugly insults and normalizing his surrogates’ use of same? Musing about how he wants to be “dictator for a day”? Wanting to fire government workers and replace them with incompetent sycophants? Never heard of it.
Sullivan responded:
In the immediate wake of the Trump victory, did we really need another account of why I didn’t vote for him? Especially when those arguments failed to work in the campaign yet again? Go read The Bulwark.
The Clown-Car Nominations
A sober lament
On Trump’s choice of Matt Gaetz as Attorney General:
The choice obviously isn’t meant to reassure anyone outside the MAGA base—or even those within it who are intelligent. It is an insolent appointment, guaranteed to cause trouble and meant to cause friction.
We are back to the Island of Misfit Toys. What a mistake. Mr. Trump often confuses his own antic malice for daring, his own unseriousness for boldness. How amazing that in the rosy glow of election, he will spend so much political capital and goodwill on confirmation fights he may well, and certainly deserves to, lose.
[H]ere is a glimmer of hope: Team Trump’s most human failings may thwart some of their most evil plans.
Take, for instance, appointing Representative Matt Gaetz to be the Attorney General of the United States. If this is a sincere appointment — in other words, if it isn’t a head-fake to get the Senate to accept another candidate later, or a ruse to let Gaetz resign from Congress and avoid a damaging ethics report — it’s an example of self-indulgence thwarting malign intent. Gaetz is a buffoon. He has absolutely no qualifications to run the Department of Justice. Can he wander around firing everyone? Yes. Does he understand how the Department of Justice works in a way that would allow him to maximize its potential for abuse? No. Is he smart enough to figure it out? Also no. Is he charismatic enough to persuade insiders to help him use it effectively? Very much no. Gaetz as Attorney General will do petty, flamboyant, stupid things in clumsy ways. Some of those things will be very bad. But clown shoes are preferable to jackboots. We’d be in much more trouble if someone evil in a smart and competent way who understands how the machine works — say, Jeff Clark or Ken Paxton — took over. That would be terrifying.
Trump’s decision shows his tendency to vent his spleen. Appointing Gaetz owns the libs, humiliates the hated Justice Department, elevates someone who is a vulgar elbow-thrower like him, and is a thumb in the eye to the Republicans who hate Gaetz. It’s not a decision reflecting self-control; it’s a decision reflecting unconstrained anger and resentment. It’s like making your horse a Senator. The point isn’t that the horse will vote the way you want it to. The point is to humiliate the senate and show them you can do what you want. It’s bad, but it’s not smart bad.
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[P]erhaps they will not be as bad as they could be because God, in His wisdom, has chosen to make these people weird freaks along the way to letting them run the place. This is a time to cherish every hope and embrace every ally. Trump and Trumpists are dysfunctional weirdos and that fact is our ally. Cold comfort is still comfort.
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.
As it turned out, Yeltsin probably did not need to conduct a political campaign in the usual sense. As the Party’s hostility became more evident, Yeltsin’s popularity rose. The public attitude was that anybody the Communist apparatchiks detested must be a hero. The campaign the Party waged against Yeltsin was not merely futile; it was Yeltsin’s strongest political asset.
Jack F. Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire
Hostage situations
Republicans can’t unequivocally say that Joe Biden won the 2020 Presidential election.
But Democrats can’t say that a human being with a penis is not a woman.
Both major parties are hostage to crazies.
Hearsay High Dudgeon
Of Ta-Nahesi Coates
“Part of me would have done anything to go home,” he writes in his new book The Message, about his 10-day trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories in the summer of 2023. “The part that always grouses about the rigors of reporting, the awkwardness of asking strangers intimate questions, the discipline of listening intently.” Readers, if listening to other people is a chore, then journalism might not be the career for you.
It could also be that Coates hates reporting because he is bad at it. Every reporter knows the a-ha moment of living through the anecdote that will make the perfect lead or kicker. No such perfect anecdotes have ever happened to Coates or, if they did, he was oblivious to them. His previous book, Between the World and Me, was an indictment of America as a racist hellscape, yet the worst act of racism he recounted from his own life—not something he read about in a newspaper or a history book—was a white lady on an escalator who shouted at his dawdling son, who was blocking her way, “Come on!”
I have no personal opinion of Mr. Coates. One of my then-favorites, Rod Dreher, was in awe of him as a writer, but before I read anything of his (save possibly a magazine article or such), he turned dour (that much I knew) and pretty much dropped off my radar.
But Andrews’ description of the worst active racism he personally experienced reminds me of a pattern I’ll call “hearsay high dudgeon.”
One notices such things, first, in one’s adversaries. 30+ years ago, my fair city, followed by the sister city across the river and my fair county, decided that we desperately needed to add sexual orientation to our human relations codes. There was no precipitating hate crime. The precipitant was merely that a liberal city councilman’s son came out, and the ordinance amendment felt like a father’s homage to his son.
As I listened to the heated public comments, I waited for evidence that we had unjust discrimination in our collective hearts. In three sets of public comments (one in each of the three jurisdictions in question), I heard one first-hand complaint from a lesbian whose military career was somehow deflected (I do not remember the details) before the military began liberalizing on such matters under the Clinton administration. (Of course, our local ordinance wasn’t going to change how the United States military treated such matters.)
But then there was one other first-hand account of local adverse effects: a male college student’s two male roommates no longer wanted to live with him after they found his stash of gay porn. Arguably, the Ordinances would have made that actionable as “discrimination in housing.” But was that discrimination “unjust”? Do we really want government intruding on roommate preferences?
Yes, we do in my community. Or maybe the testimony was irrelevant because our representatives just know, without evidence, what homophobic blackguards their constituents are.
Only later did I begin noticing similar things said by my allies. Various Christians also live in hearsay high dudgeon, collecting and cherishing accounts of “persecution” against other Christians.
Isn’t it pretty debilitating to present yourself or your tribe as victims to gain sympathy?
* * * * * * *
I have a sequel to the preceding. Some readers might wonder why I opposed extending anti-discrimination measures to the attribute of sexual orientation. They might even be indignant that I did that.
In large part, it was because I don’t think all “discrimination” is invidious (or unjust, if you prefer). “Discrimination” can be the epithet version of “discernment,” a very good and important word.
Let me illustrate. Suppose you run a government institution for troubled adolescent girls. Suppose you need staff and are determined not to “discriminate.” Suppose a 24-year-old man applies for a position that will allow him unsupervised access to those troubled adolescent girls.
Of course you have rules as safeguards against sexual predation, but rules can be broken.
Should you be discerning and recognize that hiring a man likely to be sexually attracted to some of his charges, in a position that allows unsupervised access to the objects of his desire, is a formula for disaster and scandal? Or should you follow your nondiscrimination ideology and hire him if he is otherwise the best candidate, perhaps giving yourself a pat on the back for open-mindedness?
Now flip that script. Suppose one runs a government institution for troubled adolescent boys. Suppose one needs staff and is determined not to “discriminate.” Suppose a 24-year-old “out” gay man applies for a position that will allow him unsupervised access to those troubled adolescent boys.
Ledbetter was hired by a home for troubled boys after he was “out” to anyone in town who paid any attention. A few years later, two of those troubled boys came forward to say he preyed on them sexually. The local press declared editorially that they were put up to the accusations by fundamentalist homophobes and that the episode was an illustration of blackguard homophobia. Somehow, Ledbetter’s defense attorneys got a signed retraction from one of the boys and the charges went away.
But the accusations were true. Ledbetter had even videotaped the encounters, as Wisconsin police discovered when they investigated him for similar sexual predation up there more than a decade later.
He’s in custody for the rest of his years. His journalistic enablers are complicit in the abuse of dozens of boys — and they didn’t do Ledbetter any favors either.
I didn’t know at the time whether the 1990s accusations were true or false (I had spoken to the boys, but did not undertake to represent them legally) nor do I expect that the journalists would have known. What I expected from the journalists was something better than damnable conspiracy theories about fundamentalist Christians, a fundamentalist being anyone more conservative than the journalist. The journalistic reaction was tribal, not rational; gay is good, conservative Christian bad.
I did not think that a gay man inevitably would bugger boys in his charge if given the chance any more than a straight man would copulate willy-nilly with nubile girls. But I was good and damn sure, from personal experience of male adolescence and young adulthood (from which vantage point some adolescent girls remained alluring), that the chances were way too high for his hiring to have been defensible.
Saying “no” to his application would have been “discernment,” not “discrimination.” But the Ordinance we passed categorically forbids any “difference in treatment in the areas of employment, housing and public accommodations” based on sex or sexual orientation (or other attributed). No discernment is allowed.
Democrat conspiracy kooks
The claims had a powerful effect on public opinion among Democrats, just as Trump’s ranting and raving is doing now among Republicans. In March 2018, a YouGov poll revealed that an astonishingly high 66 percent of Democrats believed that in 2016 Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected president — a claim with no more evidence behind it than Trump’s current assertions about being deprived of victory by voter fraud.
Remember that, dear Christian, next time you’re tempted to paint us as uniquely victims of the Zeitgeist. The Zeitgeist varies from place-to-place.
Empty pantsuit
The closest Harris has gotten to articulating her agenda is the following, from the 60 Minutes interview:
In the last four years, I have been vice president of the United States. And I have been traveling our country. And I have been listening to folks and seeking what is possible in terms of common ground. I believe in building consensus. We are a diverse people. Geographically, regionally, in terms of where we are in our backgrounds. And what the American people do want is that we have leaders who can build consensus. Where we can figure out compromise and understand it’s not a bad thing, as long as you don’t compromise your values, to find common-sense solutions. And that has been my approach.
This is a classic Harris quote. It’s impossible to disagree with, but it’s also so empty that it’s hard even to agree with it either. It doesn’t tell us what she personally would push for before she’d compromise, what she really has conviction about, what she really believes in. In fact, the more I listened to her in these interviews, the more worried I became that she doesn’t actually believe in anything.
… Trump knows how to sell — in fourth grade language. Harris only knows how to charm elite liberals — in language only elite liberals use. It’s the only political skill she’s ever needed to have. And it’s not going to be enough.
…
Look: I’m voting for her. Or rather, I’m voting against Trump. (The most striking aspect of the various endorsements of Harris — from The New Yorker to The Atlantic — is that they were almost entirely about Trump.) But I’ll tell you this: catching Trump’s various podcast and radio spots gives a very different impression. He is as reckless as she is careful; as conversational and natural as she is stilted and scripted. He is much more comfortable in the new media universe than she is.
Check out his interview with Theo Von, and watch him and Theo talk about cocaine addiction; or see Trump’s appearance on comic Andrew Shulz’s show. Here’s Schulz bursting out laughing when Trump says he’s “a basically truthful person” — and Trump carries on.
In his newsletter, Political Wire, Taegan Goddard surveyed that fabulist’s unfabulous merch: “The constant stream of Trump infomercials — hawking watches, silver coins, sneakers, bibles, coffee table books, NFTs — is beginning to feel like a going-out-of-business sale.” (Nancy Jones, Iowa City)
At Defector, David Roth recapped The Washington Post’s interviews with Trump rallygoers who weren’t staying for the whole show: “Some of the people The Post spoke to left because they were sick of ‘the insults,’ which feels a bit like storming out of a steakhouse dinner just before dessert because you don’t eat meat.” (Matt Keenan, Sharon, Mass.)
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.
Three days in a row! When did I last blog three days in a row?!
I have nothing to say about Israel, Hamas, Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, hostages and any piece I’ve left out, but I’m not oblivious to this anniversary.
Not politics
Tradition
Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.
G.K. Chesteron, Orthodoxy
Here is a quick and generally reliable rule to follow. If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.
Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes
Sportsball
Gladwell, like many of us, seems to have unwittingly internalized the idea that when professional athletes do the thing they’re paid to do, they’re not acting according to the workaday necessity (like the rest of us) but rather are expressing with grace and energy their inmost competitive instincts, and doing so in a way that gives them delight. We need to believe that because much of our delight in watching them derives from our belief in their delight.
Alan Jacobs, How to Think
Dreaming is just about our only break from rationalism
The whole evolution of music as an academic discipline tends to destroy the most important reason to care about music in the first place.
Here’s one of my charts on the subject:
That’s why I started to write about sleeping.
No music writer talks about sleep more than me. And that’s because dreams happen when we sleep—and this is the one type of visionary experience everybody can still access.
We all become a little unhinged and crazy in those dreams. Even the most rationalistic STEM advocate.
…
Could something like this—dream therapy for creatives— exist in the current day?
I wondered about this for a long time. I finally decided to ask musicians about whether they had learned songs from their dreams.
Nothing prepared me for the response I got. I heard from hundreds of musicians—and learned that the gift of a song during a dream is quite common. And it’s usually a powerful song.
…
I note that many musicians have told me that they are reluctant to discuss their dream songs. The subject is just too strange and antithetical to our dominant rationalist paradigm.
And that reluctance is even greater if the artist has a hallucination or out-of-body experience or something else that ‘medical experts’ might want to treat.
My hunch is that these happen frequently to intensely creative people—even in an age of rationalism.
The world isn’t as neat and rigorously logical as you’ve been told. And the world of artistic inspiration is the least logical of all. There’s a good reason why the ancients believed that creative works were a gift from the muse.
…
I continue to research this subject, and I think about it all the time. Even more important, I try to open up my mind to realms of experience beyond the empirical. That’s where creativity comes from, and I don’t want to shut myself off from the source because of close-mindedness.
Above all, I don’t mock or dismiss artists who have these visions, or assume that in every instance they are suffering from mental illness. Some of them might be a lot wiser or healthier than the rest of us.
I can’t think of a solo-effort Substack that delivers more bang for the buck that Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker. And the guy is really smart about some things that interest me.
From the Department of Free-Association: Has Rod Dreher, once again, seized the moment to shape a coming conversation, as he did in Crunchy Cons, Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies?
Politics
Serious people earnestly disagreeing
Back in August I was watching the DNC with my old mom in California. Kamala and Tim and Michelle and Barack and all the others kept talking about our reasons for aiding Ukraine in its fight against the Russian occupation of its eastern territories. They consistently appealed to the apparently essentialized fact that the Ukrainians, like the Americans, “love freedom”, and that it is only natural and right to help other peoples who share this love with us. There was zero acknowledgment of the complexities of geopolitics and historical legacies, or of the situated perspective a Russian might non-crazily come to have, according to which parts of what is now Ukraine seem naturally and justly to fall more into the sphere of influence of the Russian Empire than of the North Atlantic one.
I know a lovely man in his 60s, an outstanding member of the vanishing breed of the Homo Sovieticus, whose father is Ukrainian and whose mother is Russian, and who grew up in Kazakhstan. He tells me his parents waited to get married so that the celebration would take place on the 300th anniversary of the 1654 Pereyaslav Agreement, in which the Cossack Hetmanate in control of much of Ukraine made a ceremonial pledge of loyalty to Moscow. This friend of mine is in exile, and is no admirer of Putin. He greatly regrets the 2022 invasion. But he could never make any sense of any claim to the effect that Ukraine rightly belongs to NATO and not to Russia in virtue of some mysterious essential trait of the Ukrainian people, that they “love freedom” while the Russians do not.
…
And here we arrive at what really gets me about the Democrats. If we are going to risk direct conflict with another nuclear-armed superpower, let us not be lulled into it by bullshit and platitudes. Why do the Democrats have to talk that way? It’s as if the Republican tactic of portraying “the libs” as effeminate hyper-woke safe-spacers has really only caused the Democrats themselves to double down with absurd displays of hawkish masculinity. We’re supposed to love Kamala because she’s a tough-on-crime prosecutor, and that therefore corrects for the slip-ups of the past years when some in the progressive wing of the party have suggested, on the contrary, that all cops are bastards. Tim Walz, meanwhile, seems to have been chosen primarily because he wears flannel shirts, and has been put on display in the most implausibly kayfabe campaign ads purportedly fixing his own pick-up truck. One almost expects them next to come out with an ad depicting Walz in the act of dressing a deer, looking every bit the caricature of the Minneapolis goy neighbor in the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man (2009). He’s a hunter and a football coach, but he’s also a faculty advisor for the LGBTQIA+ club! What a model of enlightened masculinity! She’s a prosecutor and a foreign-policy hawk, but she’s a she and she brings “joy”! The problem is that none of the rest of the world cares about any of that childish stuff. They all know that for all the equally kayfabe retrograde masculinity of Trump, that man is an absolute pussy, and it is in fact the Democrats who represent the greatest threat to any hot-spot of resistance to the US’s arch-imperial ambitions throughout the world.
What are the odds that a world in which the American Empire is beaten into desperate retreat would be any sort of world our children and grandchildren might want to live in? … Trump, in a second term as president, is practically guaranteed to assume the role of overseer of American imperial retreat, in favor not of a global community of equals such as some naïve progressives might have hoped for in the early years of the League of Nations, but of nationalist isolation and at most pragmatic cooperation with other self-sequestering nation-states, somewhat along the lines of what Marine Le Pen envisions for Europe in the phrase “association des nations libres”. That phrase might sound innocent enough, but nations that are free to dispense with any idea of reciprocal obligations are unlikely to remain in a stable “association” for long, and Trump, at least, hardly gives any indications of knowing how to guide the ship of state as it weathers the inevitable storms that will whip up unstable waters in our years of decline. Far better, far surer, we believe, to have a party in power that understands and accepts the nature of the that power: imperial power, namely, which might aspire in the years ahead not only to face off with steely resolve in our current global showdown, but, eventually, to emerge as its undisputed champion. … Most of us on the Editorial Board, even the Americans among us, do not live in the United States, and from our respective vantages it is pretty hard to concentrate on any aspect of American political life that does not have to do with its role as a globe-spanning empire. Just manage your domestic affairs however you see fit, we are tempted to say; our overwhelming concern is with what you get up to beyond your borders. We therefore have rather little patience for that current of Democratic partisan discourse that would like for American politics to sound more or less like, say, Danish politics. Denmark, if we may be blunt, and all of the Scandinavian countries with such high marks on all the usual tests, is able to focus on maintaining its robust welfare state primarily because its defense is entirely outsourced to the American Empire. The American Democrats who fawn over European national health systems seldom realize that by seeing to the defense of other NATO members, the United States is at the same time freeing up European national budgets for other more humane uses. Americans pay for European defense rather than paying for their own welfare; Europeans get health care in turn, but only through de-facto vassalization.
We would like to see this arrangement continue, at least for now, at least until NATO can be expanded to include all of those states that currently set themselves up in opposition to it, a prospect even Russia’s own leaders in the early post-Soviet years were able to entertain with some seriousness.
You might think our reasons for voting for the Democrats are not good ones, or that we are merely “joking” when we give them. We can only reply that your reasons really do not matter. You might well imagine your are voting, for your part, for “decency”, or “joy”, or sane gun-control laws or a woman’s right to choose. But the only way to vote for any of these things is to cast a vote for American empire. That’s the bargain. We here at The Hinternet, minus our Founding Editor, believe this is a bargain worth accepting, but that is only because we believe it is the United States under Democratic leadership that offers us the single best shot at subduing all the planet’s lingering zones of discontent, and delivering us into a future of perpetual peace. This is what we at The Hinternet want. Do you?
These seem to be serious people having a serious disagreement, not just swapping bullshit and platitudes. It’s a habit most of us, myself included, could benefit by emulating.
Agreement on norms trumps disagreement on policy
Cheney’s argument for Harris is a classical liberal version of the GOP’s “Flight 93 election” reasoning from 2016. It’s a basic matter of proper prioritizing: Agreement on norms trumps disagreement on policy. If you hand power back to Trump, he’ll crash the constitutional order. The conservative thing to do under the circumstances is to storm the cockpit by backing Harris, who’ll at least keep the plane in the air.
(I wonder how Lisa Beamer feels about Flight 93 as a recurring political trope?)
Those conservative Democrats!
The truth, I think, is that the Democratic Party is drifting. Coasting. Dems are buoyed at the national level by Trump’s personal unpopularity but lacking in any kind of compelling vision for the future of the country. For the third cycle in a row, the Democrats have been freed up to run a mostly substanceless campaign that boils down to “Vote for us so Trump will lose.” But what besides that promise of negation does the party stand for? What does it hope to accomplish? Or does it just want to be empowered to manage for a little longer the well-functioning system of domestic and international institutions that already exists?
The answer, it would seem, is the latter. From what I can tell, the Democrats are proposing little beyond a defense of the status quo (or, in the case of abortion rights, a return to the status quo as of a few years ago) against all the unorthodox things their opponents aim to accomplish (including mass deportations, a revolution in how the executive branch is staffed, and the imposition of sweeping tariffs).
That means the Democrats have inadvertently become America’s conservative party, championing the views and interests of those Americans who are content with the country’s present and recent past. When that stance is combined with opposition to the widely loathed Trump, it can (just barely) deliver victory …
The term “conservative” has many meanings, but the most elementary one—the one associated with the man generally considered to be the first conservative writer and thinker, Edmund Burke—grows out of the name itself: To be conservative is to seek to conserve the present’s inheritance from the past: the accomplishments, authoritative institutions, norms, habits, policies, and traditions that have been handed down to us by previous generations.
That’s the meaning of Liz Cheney’s enthusiastic endorsement of the Harris/Walz ticket late last week. It’s not a signal that Harris will govern as a Republican from the era when Cheney’s father (who has also endorsed Harris) served as George W. Bush’s vice president. It’s an expression of Burkean conservatism against the disruptive-revolutionary impulses of the MAGA movement.
The American multiculturalists similarly reject their country’s cultural heritage. Instead of attempting to identify the United States with another civilization, however, they wish to create a country of many civilizations, which is to say a country not belonging to any civilization and lacking a cultural core. History shows that no country so constituted can long endure as a coherent society. A multicivilizational United States will not be the United States; it will be the United Nations.
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
I was not a very good student of history, but I wonder what historic precedents Huntington has in mind when he says “History shows …”. Sincere question. Surely it’s not just that nobody has tried a multicivilizational nation before; that would not yield a verdict of history.
Please comment if you know. (Comments are moderated but not censored for viewpoint.)
We knew damn well he was a snake …
before we took him in.
I love editorial cartoons, and am fond of comic strips as well. As newspapers are dying, I mainline mine from here.
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
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.
We’re home at last from a vacation overshadowed by car damage from road debris encountered on the way north to vacation. Every fix revealed yet another problem. Every new problem required a wait for Allstate to approve the added work. We finally just drove our rental car home yesterday and are currently planning how most easily to retrieve our car when they finally fix the final problem.
I have nothing more to say on that, lest I add myself to the luckiest victims in the world (see below).
Not very political
The huge history of a little bit of geography
The word Palestine always brought to my mind a vague suggestion of a country as large as the United States. I do not know why, but such was the case. I suppose it was because I could not conceive of a small country having so large a history. I think I was a little surprised to find that the grand Sultan of Turkey was a man of only ordinary size. I must try to reduce my ideas of Palestine to a more reasonable shape. One gets large impressions in boyhood, sometimes, which he has to fight against all his life.
Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
Epistemic idiocy
A man who murdered dozens of Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand was “steeped in the culture of the extreme-right internet,” … His manifesto explained that he had done research and developed his racist worldview on “the internet, of course. . . . You will not find the truth anywhere else.”6 The latter assertion involves, alas, a rather serious mistake about epistemic authority.
This is a flawed but important article I personally will revisit on the subject of legitimate epistemic authority. We’re not as adrift and it sometimes seems — or as the New Zealander fancied himself.
ProPublica
Having apparently run out of Supreme Court justices to attempt to drive from public life, the left-wing nonprofit journalistic outfit ProPublica has directed its attention to sullying one of their most notable achievements: the Dobbs decision, which returned the power to regulate abortion to the people and to the states. Georgia now has a heartbeat law, which outlaws abortion once a fetus has a detectable heartbeat (with exceptions for rape, incest, and maternal health). A recent ProPublica article blamed the law for the deaths of two women who had taken chemical-abortion drugs (whose riskiness goes unremarked upon). The drugs killed the children but failed to expel all of their remains. One woman unsuccessfully sought treatment in a hospital, and the other feared it—both, supposedly, results of the law. But as our former colleague Isaac Schorr pointed out at Mediaite, the law does not forbid the surgical removal of an already dead child. No reasonable person who read the plain text of the law would think otherwise, which may be why ProPublica did not include the relevant portion. Even the argument that the doctors’ uncertainty about the law prevented treatment is unsubstantiated. The ProPublica article eventually admits that “it is not clear” why doctors waited to perform the necessary procedure. Laws against abortion haven’t caused any deaths, but ProPublica is doing its part to raise the death toll.
National Review email newsletter
The luckiest victims on earth
[E]ven as you push back against ideological bias and discrimination, remember that as a university student you are one of the luckiest — most privileged — people on the planet. So do not think of yourself as a victim. You can assert and defend your rights without building an identity around grievances, however justified those grievances may be.
…
Remember that the criticism of a belief (or a practice, faith or lifestyle) is not a personal attack, though the natural human tendency to wrap our emotions tightly around our convictions can make it feel as if it is.
I don’t pin dreams on the rack of endless above-ground interpretation, but I do give them space and attention.
In myth, when you are facing a monster, look at its reflection on your shield, not the abyss of its face. That will quickly burn you to cinders. What is your shield? Well it’s something that shows you the general shape of your adversary but not to the degree it paralyses you.
The yearslong elevation of figures like [North Carolina Gubernatorial Candidate] Mark Robinson and the many other outrageous MAGA personalities, along with the devolution of people in MAGA’s inner orbit — JD Vance, Elon Musk, Lindsey Graham and so very many others — has established beyond doubt that Trump has changed the Republican Party and Republican Christians far more than they have changed him.
In nine years, countless Republican primary voters have moved from voting for Trump in spite of his transgressions to rejecting anyone who doesn’t transgress. If you’re not transgressive, you’re suspicious. Decency is countercultural in the Republican Party. It’s seen as a rebuke of Trump.
… I’ve compared the cultural power of a leader to setting the course of a river. Defying or contradicting the leader’s ethos is like swimming against the current — yes, you can do that for a time, but eventually you get exhausted and either have to swim to the bank and leave, or you’re swept downstream, just like everyone else.
In a similar vein, albeit from someone who hasn’t been Republican:
There is no place for dissenters in the contemporary Republican Party. That is going to remain true whether or not Donald Trump prevails in November. It’s long past time those who reject the right-populist takeover of the party to cut themselves loose and stop pretending they will have a meaningful say in building its future. They will not. It would be far better for them, and for the Democrats, if they joined the Donkey Party outright and began fortifying the Harris-Walz campaign’s move toward the ideological center-left.
In a strong post late last week, The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last took the occasion of the latest mind-boggling revelations about Mark Robinson, the Republican Party’s nominee for governor of North Carolina, to make the point that the GOP is a “failed state.” The image comes from a 2016 Slatecolumn by his Bulwark colleague Will Saletan. As Last explains, functional institutions “have power centers and interests. In a healthy institution, these power centers can unite to achieve shared interests, even in difficult moments which require sacrifice.” Over the last two decades, for example, Democratic Party has given us the following examples:
In 2008 Hillary Clinton was supposed to be the Democratic presidential nominee. But various Democratic power centers coordinated to elevate Barack Obama, who they believed was a better candidate.
In 2016, a democratic socialist tried to win the Democratic presidential nomination. The party coordinated to prevent him from doing so.
In 2020, the same democratic socialist made another attempt. The party coalesced around Joe Biden and got him elected president.
In 2023, as Republicans went through four nominees to find a speaker of the House, Democrats voted, unanimously, time after time, for Hakeem Jeffries.
And in 2024, when the Democratic Party realized that Joe Biden was compromised as a candidate by his health, they convinced him to step aside.
I want to underscore this: The Democratic Party was able to convince a sitting president to abandon his reelection attempt four months before November.
That’s a portrait of a party as an effective, functional institution.
The Republican Party, by way of sharpest contrast, cannot even get a man to step aside in a crucial statewide race when he’s caught (among other things) describing himself as a “Black Nazi” on a porn-focused chat forum. The party is being held hostage—by the candidate, yes, but his power is itself a function of his popularity among Republican voters in the state. They want him as their nominee, and the voters get whatever they want in the contemporary GOP. Which means the institution is a hollow shell—or the domestic equivalent of a failed state.
Sorry, Damon, but I’m not going to be in the vanguard of any GOP migration, partly because I’m not exactly in the GOP, partly because of a few deal-killer Democrat policies.
The Bennet Inversion
Our best hope is to hasten a change in culture that reverses this effect. Call it the Bennet Inversion, for Senator Michael Bennet, who campaigned for president promising to govern so boringly that voters would go weeks without thinking about him. He was so successful that no one remembers his campaign at all. Biden accomplished a miniature version of this, by executing a Fabian strategy and defeating Trump without ever facing him directly on the field of meme battle.
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.
I’m on vacation, so I’m not going to take the time to sort these into topics.
Also, it’s a major Feast day in the Eastern Church. The Orthodox Church at my vacation destination appears to be postponing observance to tomorrow — an Orthodox oddity in my limited experience.
Selling hoi polloi a delusion
Those with a material interest in doing so have learned to speak autonomy talk, and to tap into the deep psychology of autonomy in ways that lead to its opposite.
Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head
Purposeful to a fault
Himmler quite aptly defined the SS member as the new type of man who under no circumstances will ever do “a thing for its own sake.”
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Sit quietly with that one for a minute. Then consider Josef Pieper, Leisure, The Basis of Culture.
“Televangelists”
Fugitive Televangelist Wanted by F.B.I. Is Caught in the Philippines Weeks of tense standoff in the Philippines have ended in the capture of a pastor accused of leading an international ring of sex abuse and trafficking of young women and girls.
I don’t believe it would be fair to saddle any Christian tradition or denomination with this guy. From what the Times says about the idolatrous adulation he cultivated, he was plainly some kind of one-off cultist.
But I have no idea how many one-off cultists are abroad in the world, when this admonition currently being featured at the end of my Sunday blog posts:
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
Huge (if true)
Donald Trump runs no risk of going to prison in the middle of his campaign, thanks to Judge Juan Merchan’s decision Friday to postpone sentencing until Nov. 26. The delay gives his lawyers more time to prepare an appeal. Fortunately for Mr. Trump, his trial was overwhelmingly flawed, and a well-constructed appeal would ensure its ultimate reversal.
A central problem for the prosecution and Judge Merchan lies in Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, which makes federal law the “supreme law of the land.” That pre-empts state law when it conflicts with federal law, including by asserting jurisdiction over areas in which the federal government has exclusive authority.
Mr. Trump’s conviction violates this principle because it hinges on alleged violations of state election law governing campaign spending and contributions. The Federal Election Campaign Act pre-empts these laws as applied to federal campaigns. If it didn’t, there would be chaos. Partisan state and local prosecutors could interfere in federal elections by entangling candidates in litigation, devouring precious time and resources.
That hasn’t happened except in the Trump case, because the Justice Department has always guarded its exclusive jurisdiction even when states have pushed back, as has happened in recent decades over immigration enforcement.
The normal approach would have been for the Justice Department to inform District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who was contemplating charges against Mr. Trump, of the FECA pre-emption issue. If Mr. Bragg didn’t follow the department’s guidance, it would have intervened at the start of the case to have it dismissed. Instead the department allowed a state prosecutor to interfere with the electoral prospects of the chief political rival of President Biden, the attorney general’s boss.
In the summer of 2015, back when he was still talking to traitorous reporters like me, I spent extended stretches with Donald Trump. He was in the early phase of his first campaign for president, though he had quickly made himself the inescapable figure of that race—as he would in pretty much every Republican contest since. We would hop around his various clubs, buildings, holding rooms, limos, planes, golf carts, and mob scenes, Trump disgorging his usual bluster, slander, flattery, and obvious lies. The diatribes were exhausting and disjointed.
But I was struck by one theme that Trump kept pounding on over and over: that he was used to dealing with “brutal, vicious killers”—by which he meant his fellow ruthless operators in showbiz, real estate, casinos, and other big-boy industries. In contrast, he told me, politicians are saps and weaklings.
“I will roll over them,” he boasted, referring to the flaccid field of Republican challengers he was about to debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library that September. They were “puppets,” “not strong people.” He welcomed their contempt, he told me, because that would make his turning them into supplicants all the more humiliating.
“They might speak badly about me now, but they won’t later,” Trump said. They like to say they are “public servants,” he added, his voice dripping with derision at the word servant. But they would eventually submit to him and fear him. They would “evolve,” as they say in politics. “It will be very easy; I can make them evolve,” Trump told me. “They will evolve.”
Like most people who’d been around politics for a while, I was dubious. And wrong. They evolved.
The eighteenth-century Humean slave of the passions is thus indistinguishable from the liberated, twentieth-century Sartrean individual living authentically.
Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation
All that matters is strength
Part of the reason Trump is less constrained on [the abortion] issue than his predecessors is that he’s transformed the Christian right just as he has the broader conservative movement, dethroning serious-seeming figures while promoting those once regarded as flamboyant cranks. In Republican politics, Steve Bannon and Alex Jones now have far more influence than erstwhile conservative stalwarts like Paul Ryan and Dick Cheney. Similarly, in the religious realm, the ex-president has elevated a class of faith healers, prosperity gospel preachers and roadshow revivalists over the kind of respectable evangelicals who clustered around George W. Bush. “Independent charismatic leaders, who 20 years ago would have been mocked by mainstream religious right leaders, are now frontline captains in the American culture wars,” writes the scholar Matthew D. Taylor in his fascinating new book, “The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy.”
The churches Taylor is writing about exist outside the structures and doctrines of denominations like the Southern Baptists. They’re led by flashy spiritual entrepreneurs who fashion themselves as modern apostles and prophets with supernatural spiritual gifts, and they represent one of the fastest-growing movements in American Christianity. Among many of these churches, Trump remains the anointed one, chosen by God to restore Christian rule to the United States. These Christians care a great deal about abortion, but they appear to care at least as much about Trump. Many of them see him as a modern-day version of the Persian emperor Cyrus, a heathen who, in the sixth century B.C.E., rescued God’s chosen people from Babylonian captivity. In this framework, Trump’s piety is irrelevant; all that matters is his strength.
I think Goldberg, no Christian, is right. And that means that it’s hard to say that MAGA and I share the Christian tradition; their religion seems from a darker source.
Ted Cruz is no dummie
Liz Cheney famously endorsed Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, and less famously endorsed Democratic U.S. Representative Colin Allred over Ted Cruz for Cruz’s Texas Senate seat.
So has she abandoned the GOP?
I can’t speak for Cheney, but I can tell you why I’m voting for Allred over Cruz—and it has nothing to do with policy or burning anything down.
Since January 6, the threshold question I ask when considering whether to vote for a Republican is how that candidate responded to Trump’s coup attempt. There’s a spectrum of behavior on that point, with Cheney and Kinzinger on one end, Trump himself on the other, and the mass of congressional Republicans somewhere in between.
At the two extremes of the spectrum, policy doesn’t matter to me. Policy debates are things you get to have when everyone agrees on the rules of the game. Rewarding those who defended democratic norms and punishing those who undermined them is more important.
I would vote for Cheney and every other Republican who voted to impeach or convict Trump following the insurrection in hopes that their victories would embolden others in the party to resist his power grabs in a second term. And I would vote against Trump and all of his co-conspirators for the opposite reason, in hopes that their defeats would convince others that civic crime, like trying to overturn an election on false pretenses, doesn’t pay.
Ted Cruz was Trump’s chief co-conspirator in the Senate after the 2020 election, initially agreeing to argue before the Supreme Court that the electoral votes of swing states won by Joe Biden should be thrown out. When the court declined to hear that case, Cruz switched to Plan B and ring-led a scheme on January 6 to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s victory by objecting to those swing-state electoral votes. Had he gotten his way, some sort of chaotic ad hoc election “commission” would have been thrown together before Inauguration Day to decide who the next president should be.
He did all of this knowing full well that Trump was and is a loon and that egging on Americans to doubt the fairness of their own elections will destabilize the country long-term. But he was willing to pay that price because he thought making himself useful to the coup would give him a leg up with Trump’s base when he runs for president again someday.
You don’t need to agree with Colin Allred on a single policy issue to grasp that a person like Ted Cruz cannot be trusted to defend the constitutional order. He was tested and failed grievously. If you believe that a second Trump presidency would create a “unique threat” to American government, as Liz Cheney and I do, it’s urgent that Trump’s most unethical enablers in Congress be replaced by people who won’t rubber-stamp anything he does.
Republicans in Texas had their chance to replace Cruz with a candidate like that in this year’s primary, just as Republicans nationally had their chance to replace Trump. They made their choice. Cheney and I have made ours.
It’s frankly amazing to me that so many conservatives have been left struggling to understand Cheney’s endorsement of Allred. To a certain sort of partisan, it seems, Trump is the only elected Republican who bears meaningful responsibility for the attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, the scores of House GOPers who voted to object on January 6—they’re all off the hook because, well, there are just too many of them to punish. Beating them at the polls would wipe out the party, and partisans won’t tolerate that. Even for just one election cycle, to teach their representatives a hard lesson about authoritarian bootlicking.
If you feel obliged to excuse Ted Cruz for his role in a coup plot because that’s what hating Democrats requires of you, you do you. But let’s please stop memory-holing his part in it by feigning confusion as to why Liz Cheney might want to drive him from politics. It’s pathetic.
Ted Cruz is no dummie. He’s whip-smart and cunning. He also is a contemptible human being with no core. His mentor, Princeton’s Robert P. George, must be deeply grieved.
Shanghaied
Few cities in Asia match Shanghai’s level of economic development. In the fanciest shopping streets in the city center you can go miles without leaving the realm of luxury stores, with a Hermes outlet abutting a Louis Vuitton outlet, which in turn abuts a Rolex outlet. At times, the city reminded me of an acquaintance’s semi-humorous observation that, in a hundred years, luxury brands may be all that remains of Europe’s once enormous influence on the world.
In Postwar, Tony Judt argues that in the 1960s, the restive mood of Europe’s young was in part fueled by the ugliness of the homes in which they had been raised and the new universities in which they were being educated. Comparisons between Europe sixty years ago and China today are certain to be wrong for any number of reasons, but my mind kept going back to Judt’s observation every time I drove past another island of identical, unadorned housing blocks.
Preferences about the next American president seem to be nearly as divided among Chinese intellectuals as they are among the American electorate. A senior scholar of international relations told me that Donald Trump would likely be more willing to cut deals with China but that he preferred Kamala Harris because of her greater predictability on the international stage. A senior economist told me that Kamala Harris might prove softer on tariffs but that she would prefer Donald Trump because of his greater predictability on economic policy. The only consistent refrain was the preference for perceived predictability: Chinese elites seem as discombobulated by the sense that it’s impossible to predict what Washington might do as they are by any specific action the next president might take.
The chief petty officers aboard the USS Manchester (LCS-14) were caught illicitly placing and using a Starlink satellite-internet antenna while the ship was under way. The conspiracy, involving all senior enlisted sailors attached to the littoral combat ship, came to light after months of use, when a civilian contractor came aboard and stumbled upon the bootleg setup. The ship’s command senior chief and ringleader of the operation was convicted at court-martial and reduced in rank from E-8 to E-7: an outrageously light penalty considering her repeated lies to her commanding officer, her background in Navy IT that ensures she was absolutely aware of her transgression, and the cover-up campaign that involved the intimidation and silencing of those below her. This betrayal of the ship’s whereabouts in service to movie-streaming, texting, and other forms of personal entertainment is especially egregious because of the role that chiefs have in preserving good order and discipline among the ranks while upholding Navy traditions. A bad chief is the ruin of a ship and its crew, and the legal equivalent of keelhauling the only correct recourse.
National Review’s The Week Friday email. See also the Navy Times.
Donald Trump after the debate
The Hill: Trump Floats Punishment For ABC After Debate
I mean, to be honest, they’re a news organization. They have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license for the way they did that.
This response is fractally wrong. ABC doesn’t need a license to be a news organization (thank God and the First Amendment).
If they did have a license, it would be dictatorial to revoke it for displeasing the President or anyone else.
Trump once again exhibits his anti-democratic impulses, though once again it probably will deter no fans.
Lesser evils
“Sending migrants away, not allowing them to grow, not letting them have life is something wrong; it is cruelty,” Francis said in a news conference on the plane as he returned to Rome after his long trip to Southeast Asia and Oceania. “Sending a child away from the womb of the mother is murder because there is life. And we must speak clearly about these things.”
…
But when asked whether it would be morally admissible to vote for someone who favored the right to abortion, he responded: “One must vote. And one must choose the lesser evil. Which is the lesser evil? That lady or that gentleman? I don’t know. Each person must think and decide according to his or her own conscience.”
Donald Trump seemingly is Teflon-coated, but explicit Papal permission to vote for the (more) pro-abortion candidate could logically be a factor in this election.
Even WSJ is appalled
Ms. Loomer is usually described in the press as “far right,” but that’s unfair to the fever swamps. On Sunday she posted on X that if Ms. Harris wins the election, “the White House will smell like curry,” a gibe against Ms. Harris’s Indian heritage.
She added that Ms. Harris’s speeches “will be facilitated via a call center.” U.S. companies often farm out their information lines to Indian firms, get it? We wonder if JD Vance’s Indian-American wife thinks that’s funny.
In 2018 Ms. Loomer chained herself to Twitter’s New York headquarters after the platform banned her. She suggested that Casey DeSantis, the wife of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, might have lied about having breast cancer: “I’ve never seen the medical records.” This week she smeared Sen. Lindsey Graham after he criticized her association with Mr. Trump.
All of this would be ignorable, except that others close to Mr. Trump say he is listening to Ms. Loomer’s advice. People in the Trump campaign are trying to get her out of the former President’s entourage, to no avail. Even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks Ms. Loomer is damaging the former President’s election chances.
As North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis put it on Friday: “Laura Loomer is a crazy conspiracy theorist who regularly utters disgusting garbage intended to divide Republicans. A DNC plant couldn’t do a better job than she is doing to hurt President Trump’s chances of winning re-election. Enough.”
If anyone is looking for facts to support a vote for Trump despite loony Loomer (and everything else), these two graphs may be just the ticket. The Biden administration has not covered itself in glory on illegal immigration.
The yellow bar is illegal immigrants and those awaiting adjudication of asylum claims or other claims to remain.
Delta wants to know what I thought of my flight. Honda wants to know what I thought of my oil change. The company that inspects my HVAC system twice yearly wants to know what I thought of … the air filter replacements? The technician’s demeanor? I’m not sure because I’ve read only the subject lines of the emails, which keep coming, imploring me to reflect on the experience and charting some strange new territory where customer service and stalking overlap. It may be time for a restraining order. Or, minimally, a different kind of filter, the one that consigns certain senders’ electronic missives to the Spam or Trash folders.
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.
It is satisfying to manifest oneself concretely in the world, through manual competence; it has been known to make a person quiet and easy. It seems to relieve him of the need to offer chattering interpretations of himself, to vindicate his worth. He can remain quiet and simply point: The building stands, the lights are on, the car now runs.
I tend to forget how strange was the childhood of the brilliant and quirky Matthew Crawford. Read the item to see what I mean.
Bon mots
In The Washington Post, Amanda Katz noted that Kennedy had terminated his presidential campaign and endorsed Trump, “ending a dilemma for voters torn between their love of deportation camps and their love of measles.”
In The New Yorker, Helen Rosner sampled the classic fare at a nearly 90-year-old French restaurant in Manhattan that received a recent sprucing-up: “You can hardly go wrong, though it would be the height of tragedy if not one person at the table ordered the frogs’ legs persillade, a cancan line of amphibian gams in an audibly sizzling bath of butter and garlic that a server oomphs up, upon presentation, with a squeeze of lemon.”
“I don’t know if Democrats fully realize how damaging the image of the possible first woman president being incapable of giving an interview alone without the presence of a man to help her is,” – Meghan McCain.
“It’s disappointing to say — but perhaps he personally lacks principle on this issue,” – Lila Rose, anti-abortion activist, on Trump’s latest pivot. (D’ya think?)
Political highlight of 2024: The Democrats selecting a successor to feeble President Joe Biden without panic about needing to re-do the primary elections.
I wasn’t politically sophisticated when the parties decided to turn over the selection of their Presidential candidates to whoever deigned to show up at a primary election (run at government expense, with government’s thumb on the scales to maintain the present two parties), but I was alive and aware. Because I was a snot-nosed kid, I probably thought it was a great idea.
It wasn’t. It took the selection from pros who wanted to win the election and turned it over to “the base”, which eventually would want maximalist trolling of the other duopoly party. Therein is a major source of our notorious “polarization,” at least among the noisier members of the parties.
If I haven’t said it before, I’m in favor of “smoke-filled rooms” or whatever other technique the parties choose to select candidates at their own expense. I heard one where they suggested non-binding primaries — a way to create a presumptive nominee, but giving the party a opportunity to bail out if the people’s choice is an idiot or semi-comatose.
Two things about the image stood out. One is the preposterous idea that “America” is accurately represented by five populist edgelords, all of whom live in close proximity at the ends of the proverbial horseshoe. But that’s in keeping with modern Republican mythology about Trump’s movement reflecting a supposed silent majority: If the only people who count as “real Americans” are those on Team MAGA, then sure, a coalition that runs the gamut from left-leaning Putin apologists to right-leaning Putin apologists is a fair portrait of America.
The other thing that struck me was that Republicans evidently believe this image benefits them politically. Somehow we’ve arrived at a place as a country where Donald Trump is no longer weird enough in his own right to lock down “the weird vote” this fall and needs cover on his weirdo flank from the likes of Kennedy and Gabbard. Worse, he and his party seem to think there are more votes to be had by appealing to that weirdo bloc than there are to be lost among normie voters by doing so.
The partisan shifts of both Trump and RFK Jr. are part of a long term cycle in which educated professionals have gravitated toward the Democratic Party coalition and a generic suspicion of institutions and the people who run them has come to be associated with conservative politics. … The problem is that this hasn’t actually changed the fact that lots of people are dumb cranks; it’s simply created a Dumb Crank Party. And on balance, I think that has eroded the epistemic quality of both coalitions.
My worry is that liberals will get so caught up in countering his every move, essentially playing his game, that they will fail to seize—or even recognize—the opportunity he has given them. Now that he has destroyed conventional Republicanism and what was left of principled conservatism, the playing field is empty. For the first time in living memory, we liberals have no ideological adversary worthy of the name. So it is crucial that we look beyond Trump.
Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal
CPAC
CPAC was still a depressing place to be, a revival meeting for political fanatics. Only, instead of selling hope, the speakers were preaching anger and resentment.
That’s because the subject of Donald Trump’s toothy thumbs-up photo op amid the fallen at Arlington National Cemetery is persuasion-proof. There are already a thousand reasons to despise him; either you came around to doing so long ago or you’ve managed to rationalize away each of them, in which case this latest one won’t pose any problem.
Years ago, it was possible to believe there might be something he could do to alienate his apologists. Callousness toward the military was an obvious one: The right prides itself on being patriotic, and patriots rightly celebrate service members for the sacrifices they’ve made to defend America. If Trump were to stoop to his usual boorishness in attacking an opponent’s military record, it was thought, he might at last discover a line he’s not allowed to cross.
How naive we were. The rest of this column could be spent revisiting his various affronts to military honor over the years: goofing on John McCain for being captured in Vietnam; “feuding” with a Muslim Gold Star family in 2016; confiding in aides that he didn’t want wounded veterans in a parade because it “doesn’t look good for me;” declining to visit an American military cemetery outside Paris in 2018 for fear, allegedly, that his hair would get wet in the rain; saying on the same trip, according to four separate sources cited by TheAtlantic, that the cemetery was “filled with losers” and that the Marines at Belleau Wood were “suckers” for having sacrificed their lives.
John Kelly, a four-star Marine general who went on to become Trump’s chief of staff, confirmed all of it on the record to CNN last October. According to The Atlantic, when Trump accompanied Kelly in 2017 on a visit to the grave of the general’s son Robert, who was himself killed in Afghanistan years earlier, he turned to Kelly and said of the fallen, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”
In a test of credibility between a man with a dubious record of draft deferments on the one hand and a highly decorated officer who lost his son in combat on the other, it’s no contest: The right chooses to believe that Kelly, not Trump, is the liar. That’s what being “persuasion-proof” means …
All of this feels familiar, no?
Not the setting, that is, but Trump’s M.O. It’s the classified documents fiasco all over again. He wanted something he couldn’t have; that something was minor enough that he calculated the relevant authorities wouldn’t go to war with him to block him from getting it; so he simply ignored the rules and dared them to do something about it.
He succeeded at Arlington and might yet succeed in the other matter. That’s what happens when a gangster by temperament leads a gang that includes millions of people: In nearly every dispute, the personal cost of litigating that dispute will be greater for his opponents than it will be for him. Not coincidentally, according to military sources who spoke to the New YorkTimes, the reason the cemetery employee chose not to press charges over the alleged altercation is that “she feared Mr. Trump’s supporters pursuing retaliation,” an entirely reasonable concern.
…
Law simply shouldn’t matter here. The way you deter Trump and other sociopathic politicians from treating gravesites as stage sets is by shaming them and punishing them politically for their callousness. But … how you do that when the people in the best position to inflict that punishment, right-wing voters, refuse to do so?
Trump was never on the social conservatives’ side. He courted them and sought their approval as a function of his desire for status, power, and his own aggrandizement. If they had achieved political results that could benefit him, he would still be seeking their support, but now he sees them as an obstacle and an embarrassment. If you are seeking to manipulate, influence, or transact business with Trump by all means flatter him, but always understand that he was never your friend and will always turn on you the moment you pose an obstacle to his ambitions.
When you announce that one can be pro-life and support a philandering womanizer and twice divorced serial adulterer who has been credibly accused of rape, you discredit the cause and tell people you aren’t really serious.
When you announce that one can be pro-life and support a man who was closely associated with Jeffrey Epstein and even joked about Epstein’s alleged pedophiliac assaults of children, you discredit the cause and tell people you aren’t really serious.
When you announce that one can be pro-life and support a man who refused to straightforwardly answer when asked if he has ever paid for an abortion, you discredit the cause and tell people you aren’t really serious.
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 hectic week in which I forgot things, including blogging (though not clipping blog fodder). Enjoy.
Culture
America the unadorned ugly
While I was driving through some of America’s most majestic natural beauty, almost everything in it built by humans was unadorned ugliness. Pre-fab bland buildings that look like they were airlifted in and plopped down in plots of land bulldozed flat, with zero shade or attempt to integrate them into the surrounding nature.
It didn’t help that I was also feeling physically gross, unable to walk, and eating trash, since that’s what’s almost exclusively available on the road in the US, because that’s what most Americans eat — prepackaged globs of fat and sugar.
America’s diet, outside of a minority of successful neighborhoods, has gotten worse since my last American Dream trip, with everything now somehow bigger, sweeter, and fattier: Mass produced, highly processed gunk, that has as much connection to what the rest of the world considers food as pornography does to intimacy.
… [M]y last three years of trips to countries as different as Vietnam, France, Uganda, and Istanbul, has highlighted and strengthened my view that while the US certainly provides our citizens with the most opportunity, and the most stuff, we don’t provide them with the most fulfilling, beautiful, and elevating life.
When the broken window was repaired and the stove began to spread its heat, something seemed to relax in everyone, and at that moment Towarowski (a Franco-Pole of twenty-three, typhus) proposed to the others that each of them offer a slice of bread to us three who had been working. And so it was agreed. Only a day before a similar event would have been inconceivable. The law of the Lager said: “eat your own bread, and if you can, that of your neighbor,” and left no room for gratitude. It really meant that the Lager was dead. It was the first human gesture that occurred among us. I believe that that moment can be dated as the beginning of the change by which we who had not died slowly changed from Häftlinge to men again.
Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz
My pet peeve
When Sarah Kate Ellis was named president of GLAAD more than a decade ago, the LGBTQ advocacy organization was in dire financial straits. “I was given a scary mandate,” she toldThe New York Times in 2019: “Fix it or shut it down.”
She should have done the latter.
Founded in 1985 as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, the nonprofit originally had the mission of promoting more empathetic media coverage of people with AIDS. Over the years, its remit expanded to countering negative portrayals of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in advertising and entertainment. Today, the proliferation of LGBTQ characters on our screens, largely sympathetic coverage in mainstream media, and the ubiquity of same-sex couples in advertisements and commercials all suggest that GLAAD achieved its mission. The group should have long ago taken the win and dissolved—just as the organization Freedom to Marry announced it would do shortly after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in the summer of 2015.
Accepting victory, however, can be difficult for people who devote their lives to a cause, and not only for emotional reasons. The impulse among activists, once successful, to keep raising money necessitates that they find things to spend it on ….
I may be particularly sensitive to this sort of thing because my father once joined “Ad hoc Committee [to Accomplish Somethingorother].” They accomplished it, but soon Dad got a letter, on the Committee’s letterhead, supporting some other cause, and listing him as a committee members. I don’t recall if he didn’t support the new cause at all of if he merely had not enlisted to go on record on that cause, but some co-belligerent failed to grok “ad hoc.”
I’m confident there are conservative groups that should have declared victory and gone home (some have crossed my mind in the past but I don’t now recall them. Right to Life is not an example because it wanted to outlaw abortion, not just reverse Roe.). Human Rights Campaign is another example on the sexual-liberation Left:
Flailing about for relevance since the legalization of same-sex marriage, many gay-rights groups pivoted to a related but fundamentally different cause: transgender rights. Rather than emulate the movement’s past approach—seeking allies across the political spectrum and accepting compromise as a precondition for legal and social progress—they have taken hard-line left-wing positions. LGBTQ groups repeat the mantra “the science is settled” on the extremely complex and fraught subject of youth gender medicine and insist that anyone who questions the provision of puberty blockers to gender-dysphoric children is transphobic. They continue to spread this message even as many European countries have backed away from such treatments after concluding that the evidence supporting them is weak. The reflexive promotion of major medical interventions for minors should be a red flag for gay men and lesbians, considering the research indicating that manygender-distressed and gender-nonconformingchildren grow up to be gay.
Whence the phrase “transing away the gay” as the newest iteration of “praying away the gay” (and checking some of the same emotional boxes). The whole Kirchick article is quote-worthy, and I commend it to you.
Politics generally
BOTS
Blunt talk:
[T]he key to a Harris win in November won’t be the support of black Americans or Indian Americans or even “brown Americans” — though she has identified at various points in her political life as all three. Rather, Harris is a flesh-and-blood avatar of a much more numerous, powerful, and radically dissatisfied demographic: never-married and childless American women between the ages of 20 and 45.
Aside from mass immigration, the most striking demographic development of the past decade is the large cohort of American women who have embraced the helping hand of the state in place of the increasingly suspect protections of fathers, brothers, boyfriends and husbands. In doing so, they have become the Democratic Party’s most enthusiastic and decisive constituency. According to a recent Pew survey, these Brides Of The State (BOTS) support Democrats over Republicans by a whopping 72-24%, providing the Party with its entire advantage in both national and most state elections. Married American women, by contrast, support Republicans by 50-45, which more or less matches the pro-Republican margin in every other age and gender demographic. Without the overwhelming support of BOTS for the Democrats, in other words, America would be a solid-majority Republican country in which Trump would win a likely electoral landslide.
The Democratic Party’s political engineers first sensed the centrality of BOTS to the Party’s power base during Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012. The Obama campaign then duly rolled out a storybook ad called “the Life of Julia”, which explained how Obama’s policies, from Head Start to Obamacare to contraception coverage to Medicare reform, would care for Julia from graduation through motherhood and finally to the grave without her needing to form a human relationship with anyone outside the government.
What you’re seeing throughout American Christianity now is the fundamentalist wing is really exerting itself. And so what that means is when you encounter somebody who’s a fundamentalist and you say, “I’m not voting for Trump,” they often don’t look at that as a debatable point for which Christians in good will can disagree. They will look at this and say, “It is the natural and inevitable consequence of applying Christian principles that you will support Donald Trump.”
As long-time readers know, I spent most of my first three decades as a Wheaton College/IVCF-flavored Evangelical. What I’ve mentioned less often is that schools of that flavor had some taboos that, although mostly sensible, did not merit the label “biblical.” How often Christians who purport to base everything on the Bible come up with extrabiblical Shibboleths is telling.
Political violence and threats of violence
Political violence and threats of violence have no place in the American democratic process. Yet threats and intimidation follow the MAGA movement like night follows day. One of the saddest stories of our time is the way in which even local election officials and local school board members fear for their safety. The level of threat against public officialshas escalated in the MAGA era, MAGA Republicans often wield threats as a weapon against Republican dissenters, and every American should remember Jan. 6, when a mob of insurrectionists ransacked the Capitol.
I appreciate French reminding me about the violence and intimidation that follows MAGA, even quite apart from January 6. He will suffer attempts at intimidation as a result of this piece.
French also points out some legitimate complexifiers even on abortion, which so many millions consider a categorical reason to vote Republican: (1) the 2024 GOP platform plank on abortion is effectively pro-choice; (2) abortion rates and ratios have been lower under pro-abortion democrats.
Via John Ellis news items. It’s gratifying that a majority is directionally correct about politicians caring about people like them. But nobody, not even 1 in 10, should be so stupid as to think that Trump cares about anybody but Trump.
Trump in particular
On message?
The silliest spectacle in politics this month has been Republicans pleading with Trump to get back on message, as if he’s somehow forgotten that inflation and immigration are his strongest lines of attack against Harris.
He didn’t forget. And he assuredly does want to win. He’s off-message because he can’t help himself. There’s something wrong with him.
The New York Times reported this weekend on a dinner he held with wealthy donors in New York on August 2. “Some guests hoped Mr. Trump would signal that he was recalibrating after a series of damaging mistakes,” the paper noted. Instead he babbled about stolen elections, repeated his “black or Indian?” critique of Harris, and assured the crowd that he’s “not nicer” following the attempt on his life last month that had supposedly left him a changed man.
One attendee told the New York Post’s Charles Gasparino that when a donor advised him to tone down some of his attacks, Trump replied, “They tried to put me in jail; they tried to ruin my reputation and then they tried to assassinate me. At some point, you have [to] be truthful to yourself.”
Being true to himself is the whole problem. His advisers are “deeply rattled by his meandering, mean and often middling public performances since the failed assassination attempt,” per Axios. One source claimed that Trump “is struggling to get past his anger,” the sort of thing one might say about a temperamental child (no wonder), not the nominee of a major party fewer than 100 days out from an election.
Trump being undisciplined and self-indulgent isn’t news, though, any more than him resorting to childish cruelty toward his enemies is. What’s newsy is how his anxiety about Harris’ surging popularity has led him into outright fantasy to try to explain it.
“It’s not over until he puts his hand on the Bible and takes the oath,” LaCivita said in a recent interview with Politico at the Republican National Convention. “It’s not over on Election Day, it’s over on Inauguration Day.” An investigation by Rolling Stone last month found that nearly 70 pro-Trump election deniers serve as election officials in key battleground counties.
In Georgia, Trump supporters on the state election board have adopted rules requiring “reasonable inquiry” before election results are certified, a move that could give GOP county-election-board members the ability to reject the 2024 election’s outcome. And as The Guardianreports, the lawyer and Trump ally Cleta Mitchell “has spent the last few years building up a network of activists focused on local boards of elections.” At the national level, the Republican National Committee says that it hopes to mobilize 100,000 volunteers, including thousands of poll watchers, to focus on “Democrat attempts to circumvent the rules.” Meanwhile, one RNC senior counsel for election integrity, Christina Bobb, was criminally indicted earlier this year for her role in trying to overturn the 2020 election (she pleaded not guilty).
Then there is the mood of the MAGA base. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election have become a litmus test in the GOP, and a recent Pew Research Center poll found that although 77 percent of Democratic voters believe that the election will be conducted “fairly and accurately,” less than half of Republican voters have faith in the system. Despite Harris’s recent surge, the majority of Trump supporters are confident that he will be victorious. (A recent YouGov poll found that nearly eight in 10 Trump supporters think he would win if pitted against Harris.) Trump fully intends to stoke his supporters’ disbelief and anger at the possibility that he could lose. As Wehner warned recently: “If you have friends who are Trump worshippers, a word of counsel: They’re heading to a very dark place psychologically … They felt this race was won; now it’s slipping away. Expect even greater self-delusion and more toxic rants.”
Never has the GOP been more unified, and Donald Trump deserves all the credit. The issueunitingpundits, editorial boards, virtually allRepublicanpoliticians, GOP consultants, MAGA warriors, and rallygoers: the need for Trump to lay aside personal gripes and grievances and to stick to theissues and attack Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz on their records.
The whole landscape of the campaign has been transformed. The rise of Harris instantly cast Trump in a new light. He formerly seemed more ominous and threatening, which, whatever its political drawbacks, signaled strength; now he seems not just old but low-energy, stale, even pathetic. He has become the political version of Fat Elvis.
Trump is much better equipped psychologically to withstand ferocious criticisms than he is equipped to withstand mockery. Malignant narcissists go to great lengths to hide their fears and display a false or idealized self. Criticism targets the persona. Mockery, by contrast, can tap very deep fears of being exposed as flawed or weak. When the mask is the target, people with Trump’s psychological profile know how to fight back. Mockery, though, can cause them to unravel.
Trump’s three big problems as a candidate are precisely the same qualities that mitigated the worst of what might have been a much worse Trump presidency the last time around: He is lazy, he is stupid, and he is childish.
I can hear you objecting: “Hey, we came here for serious analysis, not name-calling!” But, in this case, the analysis and the name-calling end up in the same place: finding that the most politically relevant traits of Donald Trump are that he is lazy, stupid, and childish.
… Anyone who has heard Trump speak or read his unedited writing knows that he is not an especially intelligent man. But his native stupidity is compounded by his ignorance—which is to say, by the fact that he is too lazy to do his homework and acquire the kind of grasp of the issues that would make him a more effective candidate.
… There is a reason he wanders all over the place in his speeches—it isn’t only arrogance and self-centeredness. He’s dumber than nine chickens. That’s why he was an incompetent real-estate investor even though he was a successful reality-television grotesque. He isn’t the first dumb person to find success in the celebrity business, where stupidity seems to be an asset.
…
His penchant for using demeaning nicknames as a substitute for political argument might be thought of as an aspect of his laziness or his stupidity, but it is, at heart, part of his childishness. The same childishness is what has him insisting that he doesn’t need to run a conventional campaign, because he is a very special little boy. Never mind that after his fluke win in 2016, he has led his party from one electoral defeat to another—often in close succession, as when he pissed away Republicans’ chances in Georgia in a snit after his humiliating loss to the human eggplant in 2020.
Trump’s personality defects were, perversely enough, this country’s saving grace while he was president. He wanted to be a caudillo but ended up being very little more than a poisonous buffoon thanks to the laziness, stupidity, and childishness that kept him from realizing the worst of his ambitions as president. That very well may keep him from realizing any of his political ambitions in 2024.
I am not quite sure that I believe the maxim that “character is destiny.” Stupidity, on the other hand …
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 