Category: Education

May 9, 2025

Trump, Trumpism

Two Americas in a nutshell

America continues divided into two groups. One thinks, “He is something that happened to us.” The tone is shocked, still, and bewildered: Did I live in this country all this time and not understand it? The other thinks, “He is something we did.” The tone is pride and, still, surprise: I didn’t know we could seize things back.

Peggy Noonan

Ends and means

How can it be wrong when it feels so right?

I’ve now listened to two podcasts in which journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon defends Trump.

I don’t think she really believes it. Some verbal tics when challenged suggest she doesn’t really believe it (notably, her repeated retreats into “I’m just a journalist explaining why people like him” when that’s plainly false). I suspect she has just found a niche (Center-Left Journalist Becomes Ardent Trump Defender!) that gets attention.

But whether or not she believes it, most of it is gibberish, nonsense-on-stilts — and it ignores Trump’s norm-breaking, due process and other constitutional violations, focusing on the (supposed) policy goals which (refrain) 80% of voters want, so they’re entitled to it immediately.

Well no, they’re not necessarily entitled to it at all, let alone immediately. The Constitution of the United States is deliberately counter-majoritarian in several of its structural provisions (e.g., the Electoral College and the Senate) and even more of the Bill of Rights.

Even the “right” policy, if executed unconstitutionally, is wrong.

I’m resolved not to inflict Batya Ungar-Sargon on myself again. She’s a vexation to my soul. But I’m still waiting for a coherent defense of Trump. Surely I’m missing something.

Conservative critics of Trumpism

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about being a conservative critic of Trumpism is that you often start by agreeing with Trumpworld about ends while disagreeing about means.

This pleases nobody. The left, broadly speaking, considers the ends as illegitimate as the means, and the pro-Trump right thinks that if you’re against the means you really don’t desire the ends. I’m against the abuse of power, even for my own “side.”

Jonah Goldberg, Right Ends, Wrong Means

Gangster government

When Amazon reportedly considered displaying the added cost of tariffs on the price of items, Trump was furious. Here’s what an official anonymously told CNN: “Of course he was pissed. Why should a multibillion-dollar company pass off costs to consumers?” Fascinating. This is like when socialists, during the pandemic inflation, were talking about how greedy grocery store owners were to let prices go up. This is so phenomenally economically illiterate. Their argument is that Amazon should absorb the cost of the tariffs? What they really want is for Amazon not to point the tariffs out.

So Trump called Jeff Bezos, perhaps threatening to use the full weight of the U.S. government to make his life miserable (though Trump later described him as a “good guy” and said that Bezos “solved the problem very quickly.”). Amazon then told CNN “this was never approved and [was] not going to happen.” Right. . . so we’re in a gangster government now. The White House will personally target you if you don’t comply with their harebrained schemes. That’s a nice logistics and web services company you got there, Jeff, would be a real shame if the U.S. government went after it. Even Jeff Bezos—a man who is flying ladies to space for fun—caved. Our gangster government means conservative values are whatever Trumpo says they are, capisce? And Trumpo says it’s tariffs—or your other option is to buy $MELANIA coin, do you hear me? [Knee digs deeper into neck.] Am I not being clear, Jeff? Do I gotta enunciate more, Jeff?

Speaking of gangsters, a new private club for MAGA has launched in D.C. It’s called Executive Branch, and the membership fee is $500,000. Well, do you want your corporate merger approved or not?

Nellie Bowles

The great film menace

Of Trump’s Tweeted Truthed declaration Sunday, declaring that foreign flicks are a National Security threat and authorizing institution of “a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.” (Since when do we tariff national security threats, by the way!?)

Hollywood and its foreign counterparts are “reeling” today from Sunday’s post, with studio executives reportedly convening emergency calls to plot a way forward financially. Billions of dollars and countless jobs here and abroad will turn on a random thought that the president had, one which he may or may not lift a finger to follow through on … We’re all living in a demented baby boomer’s endless nostalgia trip.

Nick Catoggio (emphasis added).

It never was about antisemitism

What you will not find in the [Secretary of Education Linda] McMahon letter [to Harvard] is any mention of the original justification for the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on elite universities: anti-Semitism. As a legal pretext for trying to financially hobble the Ivy League, anti-Semitism had some strategic merit. Many students and faculty justifiably feel that these schools failed to take harassment of Jews seriously enough during the protests that erupted after the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas. By centering its critique on that issue, the administration was cannily appropriating for its own ends one of the progressive left’s highest priorities: protecting a minority from hostile acts.

Now, however, the mask is off. Aside from one oblique reference to congressional hearings about anti-Semitism (“the great work of Congresswoman Elise Stefanik”), the letter is silent on the subject. The administration is no longer pretending that it is standing up for Jewish students. The project has been revealed for what it is: an effort to punish liberal institutions for the crime of being liberal.

Rose Horowitch, Trump Finally Drops the Anti-Semitism Pretext

Crypto

Were I not already leery of cryptocurrency as a scam, Trump’s creation of a même-coin on the cusp of his second term, and the way it’s being openly used to buy access to him (putting untold millions of actual U.S. dollars into his pockets), would have made me leery.

Another impeachable offense (foreign emoluments clause, for instance), but I’m pissing into the wind to note that.

Congress’ default

Congress is not doing its job, and the vacuum that its dereliction has created is encouraging presidential and judicial overreach. Congress’s weakness is our deepest constitutional problem, because it is not a function of one man’s whims and won’t pass with one administration’s term. It is an institutional dynamic that has disordered our politics for a generation. It results from choices that members of Congress have made, and only those members can improve the situation. It is hard to imagine any meaningful constitutional renewal in America unless they do.

…

[Newt] Gingrich advanced an almost-parliamentary model of the House of Representatives. He empowered the speaker and majority leader at the expense of the policy-focused committees, and set in motion a process that robbed most members of the opportunity for meaningful legislative work. His moves dramatically accelerated what was by then a 20-year trend toward the centralization of authority in the hands of congressional leaders. House leaders of both parties have pushed further in that direction in this century, and the Senate has largely followed suit. These efforts were intended to make Congress more effective, but in practice, they rendered most legislators almost irrelevant.

As a result, many ambitious members of Congress have concluded that their path to prominence must run not through policy expertise and bargaining in committees but through political performance art on social media and punditry on cable news. Our broader political culture has pushed in the same direction, encouraging performative partisanship. And the narrowing of congressional majorities has put a premium on party loyalty, further empowering leaders, and leaving many members wary of the cross-partisan bargaining that is the essence of legislative work.

…

In his first 100 days, Donald Trump signed only five bills into law—fewer than any other modern president. In a period rife with constitutional conflict in Washington, the first branch has done essentially nothing.

Yuval Levin

Since Levin wrote this, Congress has gotten on the stick by passing the vital bill to rename the Gulf of Mexico. Marjorie Taylor Greene led the charge. And if that’s not serious enough for you, you’re probably out of luck.

Excerpts from Sully

  • “The Trump admin was about to send a former POLICE OFFICER to be imprisoned in El Salvador without trial because an ICE officer looked at his social media and said his ‘hand gestures’ meant he was a gang member,” – Aaron Reichlin-Melnick.
  • Bonus track (Not Suitable For Work) about the decor of the Trump Oval Office.

Andrew Sullivan

Without Comment

Other stuff

Transing the gay away isn’t entirely new

“It is of interest to note that [the patient’s family] were all reassured to discover that George was not a homosexual. The diagnosis of ‘transexual’ provided an explanation for his feminine behavior and was, especially for the parents, psychologically relieving,” – a 1970 report on teen transition..

Andrew Sullivan

Sports stadiums, data servers, and other boondoggles

Writing in Reason, Marc Oestreich explores what data server farms and new sports stadiums have in common. “The recent announcement that Microsoft is investing over a billion dollars into a vast new data center campus in La Porte, [ Indiana], is expected to be transformational for the town of 22,000 people. Microsoft was given a 40-year tax abatement on equipment, a renewable state sales tax exemption through 2068, and just $2.5 million of payments in lieu of taxes (PILOT) over four years—roughly 30 percent of what it would normally owe. After that? Nothing. Local utilities would cover the infrastructure.” For Oestreich, this sounds familiar. “Just 60 miles up the toll road sits Soldier Field, home of the Chicago Bears. The stadium’s 2002 post-modern renovation cost $587 million, $387 million of which was shouldered by taxpayers. Two decades and two dozen quarterbacks later, Chicago only has $640 million (thanks to $256 million in interest) left to pay,” Oestreich writes. “Today’s stadium boondoggle is a server farm … The sales pitch is nearly identical to the stadium era: ‘It’ll create jobs. It’ll put us on the map. It’s worth the investment.’”

The Dispatch

NYT stylesheet

A friend drew my attention to a January 21, 2025 article in the New York Times. The topic was the Trump administration’s effort to limit the scope of birthright citizenship, the constitutional provision that accords citizenship to anyone born in the United States. The article’s title: “Undocumented Women Ask: Will My Unborn Child be a Citizen?” When the issue is abortion, the New York Times would never dream of referring to an “unborn child.” Apparently, that editorial discretion falls away when illegal immigration is under discussion.

R.R. Reno (hyperlink added)

Datapoint

College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point.

Quoted in the Dispatch from a New York Magazine article.

A lighter note

We have seen some of the most grotesque costumes, along the line of the railroad, that can be imagined. I am glad that no possible combination of words could describe them, for I might then be foolish enough to attempt it.

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

Regarding said “lot of stupid and terrible things,” my failure to call out anything about the current regime does not mean I approve. There’s just too much, and on some of the apparent illegalities I don’t want to abuse my credentials without thinking it through.

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.

Bright Monday (with clouds)

Cultural

Learning

The normative approach to learning draws the analytical after it, whereas the analytical approach repels the normative. The fragmentation of arts and letters into academic disciplines (literature, history, philosophy, religion, social studies, and so forth) answers an analytical need that pushes normative inquiry into the interstices between disciplines. This is the strongest argument for reuniting the arts and letters.

David Hicks, Norms and Nobility

What capitalist society requires

A capitalist society required not just capitalist practices among urban elites, but a demographically widespread social acceptance among Christians of the counter-biblical notion that the good life was the goods life.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Empty gestures

Playing the “The Star-Spangled Banner” at sporting events has become an empty gesture of patriotism—so empty that, when the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks quietly began skipping the ritual, 13 preseason and regular-season games passed before anyone noticed. On Tuesday, The Athletic reported that the Mavericks had abandoned the national anthem, making them the first team in the recent history of major professional sports to take such a stance. The next day, the National Basketball Association issued a statement declaring that every team must play the song, in accordance with league rules. Inevitably, the Mavericks reversed course.

Why Pro Sports Should Skip the National Anthem

A new, and very revealing, locution

Over the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our universities into the media mainstream: Speaking as an X . . . This is not an anodyne phrase. It tells the listener that I am speaking from a privileged position on this matter. (One never says, Speaking as a gay Asian, I feel incompetent to judge this matter.) It sets up a wall against questions, which by definition come from a non-X perspective. And it turns the encounter into a power relation: the winner of the argument will be whoever has invoked the morally superior identity and expressed the most outrage at being questioned.

Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal

MAGA-lite

“Sad to agree [that] the Free Press (for which I had high hopes) has ‘descended into MAGA-lite.’ Yes, PC-SJW-Critical-Woke-Intersectionality is bad, but some perspective, please: Blowing up the international order, sucking up to autocrats, wrecking the world economy, sowing doubt about vaccines, spreading medical quackery, strangling lifesaving foreign aid, pardoning violent rioters, preventing data collection, spewing nonstop lies, & extorting the press, law firms, and universities is worse,” – Steven Pinker.

I haven’t cancelled yet, but it’s getting close. Part of it is the MAGA-lite vibe, but another part is that it’s trying to be too much like a full-blown newspaper, right down to the culture vultures fluff.

On the other hand, it’s not terribly expensive — if one excludes the “cost” of wading through some of it.

My visit to the Xitter

I wanted to communicate something positive to a restaurant chain, and couldn’t find a way to do it other than @ing them on X.com:

@Wendys Your Panko fish sandwich is easily the best in the fast food biz. Could you find in your hearts to have it all year, not just in Lent?

Then I made the mistake of looking around, finding tons of tacit confirmation of Fr. Stephen Freeman’s advice:

Quit arguing about politics as though the political realm were the answer to the world’s problems. It gives it power that is not legitimate and enables a project that is anti-God.

I’m not going to get more specific than that advice because that would be like the kid at the table who says “Mom! Joey had his eyes open while Dad was praying!”: You can’t fault someone for anti-God politics without arguing about politics.

Political

To see ourselves as others see us

4. The US needs to “stop whining” about being a victim after “taking a free ride on the globalization train”, China’s official state media said, as the trade war between the two countries continued to spiral. Last week’s tit-for-tat tariff rises appear to have paused, but the conflict between the two biggest economies is showing no signs of letting up. On Tuesday evening, China Daily, the ruling Chinese Communist party’s (CCP) English-language mouthpiece, published an editorial saying Donald Trump’s frequent claims of the US being “ripped off” were “hoodwinking the US public”. “The US is not getting ripped off by anybody,” it said. “The problem is the US has been living beyond its means for decades. It consumes more than it produces. It has outsourced its manufacturing and borrowed money in order to have a higher standard of living than it’s entitled to based on its productivity. Rather than being ‘cheated’, the US has been taking a free ride on the globalization train.” (Source: theguardian.com)

News Items

Deep American Impulse

Religious populism, reflecting the passions of ordinary people and the charisma of democratic movement-builders, remains among the oldest and deepest impulses in American life.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (1991)

To see ourselves as others see us

4. The US needs to “stop whining” about being a victim after “taking a free ride on the globalization train”, China’s official state media said, as the trade war between the two countries continued to spiral. Last week’s tit-for-tat tariff rises appear to have paused, but the conflict between the two biggest economies is showing no signs of letting up. On Tuesday evening, China Daily, the ruling Chinese Communist party’s (CCP) English-language mouthpiece, published an editorial saying Donald Trump’s frequent claims of the US being “ripped off” were “hoodwinking the US public”. “The US is not getting ripped off by anybody,” it said. “The problem is the US has been living beyond its means for decades. It consumes more than it produces. It has outsourced its manufacturing and borrowed money in order to have a higher standard of living than it’s entitled to based on its productivity. Rather than being ‘cheated’, the US has been taking a free ride on the globalization train.” (Source: theguardian.com)

News Items

Judicial

Payback Lawfare

Political persecution this, political persecution that: The Trump administration is seeking criminal charges against New York attorney general Letitia James, Trump’s public enemy number one. Federal Housing Finance Agency head William Pulte accused James of mortgage fraud, saying she misrepresented her building to get a better loan deal. He also accused James of claiming a Virginia property as her primary residence while she was New York’s AG in order to secure a lower interest rate on a loan.

You’ll recall that Letitia James literally campaigned for attorney general on a platform of prosecuting Trump on anything she could. Here she was back in 2018: “We will use every area of the law to investigate President Trump and his business transactions, and that of his family as well.” But now, with the shoe on the other foot, James is accusing Trump of politically persecuting her. Her team said that Trump was weaponizing “the federal government against the rule of law and the Constitution.” Such are the consequences of lawfare: always in litigation, always filing briefs, never settling, never quite winning.

Nellie Bowles

Not mincing words

It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order. Further, it claims in essence that because it has rid itself of custody that there is nothing that can be done.

This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from courthouses still hold dear.

…

The Executive possesses enormous powers to prosecute and to deport, but with powers come restraints. If today the Executive claims the right to deport without due process and in disregard of court orders, what assurance will there be tomorrow that it will not deport American citizens and then disclaim responsibility to bring them home? {See, e.g., Michelle Stoddart, ‘Homegrowns are Next’: Trump Doubles Down on Sending American ‘Criminals’ to Foreign Prisons, ABC News (Apr. 14, 2025); David Rutz, Trump Open to Sending Violent American Criminals to El Salvador Prisons, Fox News (Apr. 15, 2025).}

And what assurance shall there be that the Executive will not train its broad discretionary powers upon its political enemies? The threat, even if not the actuality, would always be present, and the Executive’s obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” would lose its meaning.

…

The basic differences between the branches mandate a serious effort at mutual respect. The respect that courts must accord the Executive must be reciprocated by the Executive’s respect for the courts. Too often today this has not been the case, as calls for impeachment of judges for decisions the Executive disfavors and exhortations to disregard court orders sadly illustrate.

It is in this atmosphere that we are reminded of President Eisenhower’s sage example. Putting his “personal opinions” aside, President Eisenhower honored his “inescapable” duty to enforce the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education II to desegregate schools “with all deliberate speed.” Address by the President of the United States (Sept. 24, 1957). This great man expressed his unflagging belief that “[t]he very basis of our individual rights and freedoms is the certainty that the President and the Executive Branch of Government will support and [e]nsure the carrying out of the decisions of the Federal Courts.” Indeed, in our late Executive’s own words, “[u]nless the President did so, anarchy would result.”

Now the branches come too close to grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that promises to diminish both.

Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, conservative icon Reagan appointee, mincing no words. Via Eugene Volokh.

Article III

Remember, courts cannot solve all of society’s ills. Some problems can only be resolved through the political process.

Josh Blackman.

This is true. Blackman’s Trump-era meta-theme seems to be that federal courts are getting out of their proper constitutional lane trying to solve ills wrought by Velveeta Voldemort.

The reality that the Bill of Rights is deliberately counter-majoritarian doesn’t always mean that the courts can beat back “populist” majoritarian idiocies. In the political process, it has pleased the sovereign will of the American people to well and truly screw the pooch.

On the other hand …

Perhaps the federal courts are incited to action by the pugilistic stance this Administration takes in the lower courts, its demands for impeachment of judges who rule against it, and its murmurs about maybe defying the courts:

Yesterday Justice Alito published a fiery statement explaining his dissent from the Supreme Court’s early Saturday morning order directing the U.S. government “not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees [subject to Alien Enemy Act removal] from the United States until further order.”

Alito’s statement highlighted the rushed and unusual nature of the Court’s order. What it neglected to mention was that the Court probably acted so quickly because the U.S. government cannot be trusted to comply in good faith with the Court’s April 7 order that the “AEA detainees must receive notice . . . within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.”

Jack Goldsmith (bold added)

Bearing witness against Mafia Don

I’m trying to keep our contemptible President out of this blog. If you want to see what I’m reading (and thinking) about him, I’m keeping them here.)

But I’ve got to call attention to his Easter Greeting. (Trigger warning: blasphemy) “Christian” Trumpists take note.

NEW!

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

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.

Wednesday, 3/12/25

Trump-related

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

As the twig is bent …

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

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

Andrew Sullivan

Tripping over a very low bar

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

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

Jason Dempsey at the Atlantic.

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

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

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

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

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

David French, who has the receipts.

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

The Plight of the Never-Trump Pundit

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

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

Nick Catoggio

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

And I mostly borrow.

Not Trump-related

Resurrecting de Gaulle

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

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

…

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

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

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

Ross Douthat

ACB

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

Kevin D. Williamson is having none of it:

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

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

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

Kevin D. Williamson

Debasing education

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

Troy Jollimore via Alan Jacobs

Moral clarity

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

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

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

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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.

Belated thoughts on the Olympic opening ceremony kerfuffle

Since I finally decided that the content of the Lord of Spirits podcast outweighed the obscure pop-culture references and other drollery, I’ve been binge-listening, and I’m now within seven months of being current.

Seven months ago, the Summer Olympics were airing, and you may recall the calculated provocation of one Opening Ceremony tableau, reminiscent of Leonardo’s Last Supper:

So those people freaking out about this whole Olympics thing. It is if they’ve suddenly discovered that the Olympics are pagan. And if you’re one of those folks who just discovered this I have bad news for you because the Olympics have always been pagan. They started out pagan.

… Like the first one a guy sacrificed a baby. [He] committed an act of cannibalism to get demonic power to win the Olympics, okay? The Olympics are pagan.

Why am I pointing this out? Not just to say like, “yeah duh, why do you think the opening ceremonies look like that?” But I think this is emblematic of a larger thing, a larger cultural thing, that while it’s not germane to tonight’s topic, it’s very germane to the theme of our show, as a whole.

And that’s that we’ve been sold this bill of goods. since we were kids in our education. We’ve been taught about this thing that isn’t real, and it’s called Western civilization where they try to draw a historical throughline starting in like ancient Sumer and ending — depending on your vintage — either in like 19th century Germany, or 19th century British Empire, or if you’re more my age, ending in late 20th century United States of America. And this is the March of Civilization. This is all one thing, one stream.

And uh, religiously, what this does, is it tries to draw through line from Sumerian religion, a development line from there to 19th century German Lutheranism, the 19th century Church of England, or 20th century, late 20th century American evangelicalism, as the culmination not just of Christianity but is of human religion as a whole. Finally got it right, but everything along the way is part of this tapestry part of this one tradition, right? We all grew up thinking that cupids were cherubs; they’re not.

When this whole idea was concocted through the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when the basically European pagan tradition was fusing itself to the Western Christian tradition, it was sort of a devil’s bargain from both sides, right? There were people who, didn’t much like the Western Christian tradition and were chafing at it, because they wanted to live their lives or exercise their intellects in other ways, and so they wanted the freedom that a revised and hollowed-out version of the Western pagan tradition offered them. And then on the other side, there were people who were still loyal to the Western Christian tradition, but who wanted to claim credit for the glories of Greece and Rome and all the pagan stuff and pagan art and culture. And so they came to this agreement we’ll just fuse all this together and call it Western culture and Western civilization.

And now very timely you can go all over YouTube — you know it’s in some of our own circles, so shall we say — people talking about the demise of the West, and the demise of Western civilization and Western culture — this thing that was phony and never existed, that we were all pretending to exist it.

It’s not that this thing was real and now it’s going away. It’s that those two things which are fundamentally incompatible, Christianity and paganism, are pulling themselves apart again. And guess what: The paganism side is rediscovering its antipathy toward Christianity faster than the opposite is happening.

Because the folks who are still on the Western Christian side still want to keep things like the Olympics. still want to keep a bunch of these things that ultimately are not germane to the Christian tradition that come out of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the pagan alt recovery they’re in — they want to cling to those they want to keep those right and just keep pretending that they’re Christian. But… the pagan side won’t accept that bargain anymore. They’re feeling their oats now right and they want to take the back (sic) and just be pagan, as pagan as they could be.

Now that’s going to lead to them to very dark places; hopefully some of them will yo-yo back to Christianity and realize what they’ve lost. But that’s what’s happening in our culture right now. That’s what everybody could observe in the opening ceremony of the Olympics was, oh, the Olympics are now just being openly pagan again. They’re not pretending anymore.

…

The nations worshiped demons, not God. Both the Torah and St. Paul say so, and we need to stop trying to fuse the city of God and the city of man and trying to hold those things together and pretend that they’re the same city.

Fr. Stephen De Young, August 1, 2024 (emphasis added)

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Tuesday, 9/24/24

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.

Brian Leiter, Free Speech on the Internet: The Crisis of 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.

Robert P. George, A Princeton Professor’s Advice to Young Conservatives

Two bits of advice from a mensch

  • 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.

Martin Shaw, We Need The Ancient Good

Hitchens’s Razor

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

Christopher Hitchens. If you make a claim, it’s up to you to prove it, not to me to disprove it.

Via 17 useful concepts to survive the election

Political

Countercultural decency is exhausting

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.

David French

Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?

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 Slate column 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.

Damon Linker

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.

Graeme Wood, Trumpism Is Harder to Fight Than Terrorism

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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.

Indiction 2024

This is the Eastern Church’s Indiction, the beginning of the liturgical year.

[I]n the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship . . . is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

David Foster Wallace, quoted as the epigraph to the Introduction of William T. Cavanaugh’s new The Uses of Idolatry. It seemed a fitting epigraph for this post as well.

From incarnate God to Baby Jesus

Historian John Strickland rues

that moment in history when the incarnate God gives way to “Baby Jesus,” a departure from tradition so great that it represents the transition between a paradisiacal art and a utopian one. To a member of the old Christendom, it bordered on blasphemy. In an effort to celebrate human life in a spiritually untransformed world, the artist of the new Christendom now emasculates the image of the Godman and by doing so diminishes His divinity. … the only clue that the painting represented the Madonna was that it conformed in content to the standard iconography of the Theotokos inherited from and still normative in the East. … Jesus Christ had become an adorable baby whose passivity incites a desire to pinch him on the cheek and poke him in the belly like some fourteenth-century Pillsbury Doughboy.

From the chapter The End of Iconography in The Age of Utopia.

Christian schools as an effective alternatives to secular schools

Christian schools will be effective alternatives to secular schools only to the extent that students at those schools are formed in a sacramental imagination that sees the cosmos as “charged with the grandeur of God.” Too often, Christian educators formed by the secular academy have unwittingly adopted modes of teaching and attention that impart a reductive, materialist understanding of reality.

Their materialist assumptions are often disguised by a veneer of prayer that is equal parts domesticated, distant, and safe. It’s easy to see why. While a handful of faithful families might reject a school that adopts the lens of the world, many more—hungry for their children to fit into mainstream American culture—will line up, especially if the school has a proven track record of finding places for their graduates at elite colleges and universities, which are still seen by far too many parents as the only path to a good life.

As families begin to see the dangers that secular and secular-adjacent institutions of higher education pose to their children over the next decade, and as alternative career paths in the trades become increasingly commonplace, it’s essential for educators at Christian schools to begin discerning a new path forward. Is there a different way to educate young men and women that avoids the college prep vortex?

Randy Aust, Sacramental Ontology in a Christian School

What follows this quote are four suggested steps to inculcate a sacramental ontology.

As a Board Member of two different Christian schools in my lifetime, these opening paragraphs really ring true — especially the tacit point that it’s hard to maintain a school with just “a handful of faithful families” who set their sites higher than hunger for their children to fit into mainstream American culture with a little Baby Jesus thrown in for good measure.

Not my circus, not my monkeys inquisitors

It is noteworthy that no institutional form of religious persecution was ever introduced in the Christian East. Because of Western historiographical ignorance of the Orthodox Church, however, the inquisition would come to represent, for secular intellectuals in modern times, the illegitimacy of any civilization grounded in Christianity, whether Western or Eastern.

John Strickland, The Age of Division

Lazarus

IT IS WELL KNOWN AMONG Cypriots, not to mention a matter of national pride, that St. Lazarus lived on the island of Cyprus after the Lord’s Resurrection. Saint John’s Gospel tells us that the Jewish leaders had resolved to kill both Jesus and Lazarus. They considered it necessary to kill Lazarus because belief in Jesus as the Messiah increased after he raised Lazarus to life when he had been dead for four days (John 12:9–11). Lazarus was literally living proof of this extraordinary miracle. The New Testament itself does not tell us that Lazarus went to Cyprus later, but this was known in the tradition of the Church of Cyprus. The gospel message came to Cyprus very early, and the Church was established there even before St. Paul became a missionary (Acts 11:19–21).

My husband, Fr. Costas, was born and lived on the island of Cyprus when it was still a British colony. He related to me that the Cypriots would boast about St. Lazarus to the British there. But the British would often scoff at this claim, saying there was no proof that Lazarus had ever come to Cyprus.

A very old church dedicated to St. Lazarus, dating back to the 800s, is located in Larnaca, Cyprus. In 1972 a fire caused serious damage to the church building. The subsequent renovation required digging beneath the church to support the structure during reconstruction. In the process of digging, workers uncovered the relics of St. Lazarus located directly below the altar in a marble sarcophagus engraved with the words “Lazarus, the four-day dead and friend of Christ.”

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

Rubes

The Presbyterian David Rice described these impulses at work among people in Kentucky: “They were then prepared to imbibe every new notion, advanced by a popular warm preacher, which he said was agreeable to Scripture. They were like a parcel of boys suddenly tumbled out of a boat, who had been unaccustomed to swim, and knew not the way to shore. Some fixed upon one error, and some upon another.”

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Religion

Something in common

As a historical and empirical reality between the early Reformation and the present, “Protestantism” is an umbrella designation of groups, churches, movements, and individuals whose only common feature is a rejection of the authority of the Roman Catholic Church.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

How we got critical theory

Convinced that capitalism must be abolished before the promises of humanism could be realized, they considered liberal democracy a functional dystopia. Contrary to the promises of Marx, the proletariat did not choose to overthrow the bourgeoisie when given the opportunity. In fact, it came to embrace the values of the oppressors. This was astonishing to Marxist intellectuals. The Frankfurt School developed an entirely new method of understanding the calamity, something they called “critical theory.”

John Strickland, The Age of Nihilism

Authentic embrace of the struggle

One of the first things most young men do who authentically embrace the struggle is get rid of their video games. The same with drugs. If the young man is to succeed, the marijuana has got to go as well.

From the chapter An Approach to Healing in Frederica Mathewes-Green & Rod Dreher, Healing Humanity

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Saturday, 8/24/24

Politics

Truly weird

Y’know what’s weird in a hopeful sort of way? Nostaligia across ideological lines, that’s what.

… programming on Thursday night, which seemed to aim at appealing to Nikki Haley voters from the GOP primaries. There were a lot of respectful references to Ronald Reagan. From Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly. From old-time national security hand Leon Panetta, who talked about killing Osama bin Laden.

Damon Linker, Well done, Dems

[L]et’s face it, even some European conservatives find Trump so distasteful that they are eager to believe the best about Harris—especially the idea that she really might be Obama in a pants suit.

Rod Dreher, Kamala Harris and her ‘Good Vibes’ Campaign

Almost she maketh me straight

I’m reluctant to write about Kamala Harris’s smile because I’m going to get all gushy and mushy about it, and the Harris lovefest is a jammed jamboree without need of another journalist. She’s enjoying more than a routine political honeymoon; she’s in the priciest suite on the poshest cruise ship sailing through a tropical paradise where coconuts tumble juicily from their trees into her aloe-moistened hands.

But I can’t stop noticing and basking in her happy face. Actually, happy doesn’t do it justice — it’s exuberant. Sometimes even ecstatic. When she made her surprise appearance onstage in Chicago during the prime-time portion of the Democratic National Convention on Monday night, she beamed so brightly I reached for my sunglasses. When she high-fived her running mate’s wife, Gwen Walz, during a campaign rally in Rochester, Pa., the day before, she sparkled like a gemstone. Even when she talked about the economy — the economy! — in Raleigh, N.C., two days before that, she found places and pauses for her mouth to widen and her eyes to light up. Those smiles of hers communicate an elation that I immediately want to share, an optimism that I instantly want to embrace.

Frank Bruni, who may be confusing Kamala with Judy Garland.

Kamala’s hostile work environment

And now for the anti-Bruni:

The Harris-Walz messaging indeed projects a pair of lovable scamps out to defend old-fashioned American decency against two mean, corrupt weirdos, Trump and J.D. Vance. Harris’s bubbly likability is a façade. In fact, Harris has a behind-the-scenes reputation as a high-maintenance diva. As vice president, she has had an unusually high staff turnover, with burned-out aides leaving feeling chewed up and spit out.

“People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it’s an abusive environment,” a person with direct knowledge of how Harris’ office is run told Politico, in a 2021 report. “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s—.”

To be sure, Donald Trump is famously a difficult boss. And yes, the presidency is not a therapy session. Still, when Kamala Harris gasses on, as she did in her convention speech, about the need for charity, and about the mandate to treat others as you want to be treated, it is all an act to create, well, a trippy California vibe that contrasts with Trump’s meanness.

Rod Dreher, Kamala Harris and her ‘Good Vibes’ Campaign

Noonan’s take

The Democratic Party has more substantial characters of recent American history to parade around on stage. The Clintons, the Obamas, Jesse Jackson, who, whatever your view of him, was there, on the balcony at the Lorraine Motel, when Martin Luther King was shot. This conveyed a party with a storied past, and if you join it you’re joining something real. The Republican Party, in its great toppling, has rejected its past. You lose something when you cast your history aside, and all you’ve got for prime time is Trump sons.

…

Donald Trump is famously off his game. He knows his old insult shtick isn’t working. Some of his supporters say, “All he has to do is read from the teleprompter!” but they’re wrong. He’s no good when he reads from the prompter, he doesn’t respect what’s on it. It bores him, and he talks like a tranquilized robot. He knows what he does well—shock, entertain, mention two or three big issues. He’s having trouble making a stinging critique of Democratic policy because he’s insulted everything over the years, and when he says something’s bad now it just seems part of his act and doesn’t land.

Peggy Noonan

Normal people

The Obamas managed to strike a tone that was at once a little bit angry and a little bit hopeful. Barack spoke about how most Americans don’t want to go to war with our neighbors over politics. He’s right: In fact, most of us normal people don’t actually care how our neighbors vote, just as long as the guy next door isn’t blasting Mexican polka after 8 p.m. He also nicely articulated what’s so grating about Trump: Trump is the guy who has everything and still whines about not having enough. He’s always talking about himself: his problems, his successes, his goddamn golf score.

…

Meanwhile, Trump focuses on what really matters—cocaine: Trump took a brief moment away from listing his grievances to educate himself on America’s drug problem during an appearance on comedian Theo Von’s podcast. You’d think a rich man who lived in New York in the 1980s would know a little something about the white stuff, but listening to Trump ask Von about coke is like hearing a five-year-old ask where babies come from. “And is that a good feeling? Why would you do it?”

Honestly, the whole thing is sort of endearing, and as Helen Lewis said, it’s the first time Trump has shown an interest in someone other than himself.

Katie Herzog

Conspiracy theory of the Left

If you think, as Kamala Harris thinks, or says she thinks—(“thinks”)—that inflation in grocery prices is the result of “price gouging,” then I don’t want to hear you ever complaining about conspiracy theories. Because that is a big, dumb conspiracy theory, the sort of thing that can be taken seriously only by asses of exceptional asininity.

Kevin D. Williamson

Populists versus the credentialed experts

Populist politics defies experts in favor of deferring to the people (the voters).

The reason why such a politics still seems disorienting to so many of us is that we just lived through several decades when highly credentialized experts enjoyed uncommon levels of deference. This was the highwater mark of technocratic-managerial neoliberalism. What should the president do about an economic problem? Talk to economists and follow their advice. What about a foreign policy crisis unfolding abroad? Talk to experts ensconced in Washington’s many think tanks devoted to international affairs. The same holds for any area of policy. Whatever the problem, solving it involves finding the experts, listening to what they say, and then going along with their recommendations.

But not anymore. Or at least not consistently. The experts are still around, and they are still shown respect by journalists who focus on national politics. But they don’t have the political clout and don’t exercise the overwhelming influence they once did. This is true in both parties. And taking note of it is crucial for understanding where we are and where we’re going.

Damon Linker

How to get the press to blurt out inconvenient truth

Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while, and so it goes with journalistic “fact checkers.” Sen. J.D. Vance made a slip of the tongue last week, which prompted CBS News to reveal the truth unwittingly.

In an Aug. 11 “Face the Nation” interview with Margaret Brennan, Mr. Vance said that Donald Trump is “trying to find some common ground” on abortion. Meanwhile, “you have Democrats who supported abortion right up to the moment—and sometimes even beyond the moment—of birth, which is just sick stuff.”

“That’s not accurate,” Ms. Brennan admonished him.

“It is accurate,” he replied. “In fact, the Born Alive Act, multiple members of the current Democratic administration, including our vice president, supported that legislation—they have supported taxpayer-funded abortions up to the moment of birth.”

The screen, moments later, cuts to the studio, where Ms. Brennan reads from a script: “We want to clarify what Sen. Vance said about the Born Alive [Abortion] Survivors Protection Act and his claim that Vice President Harris supported the legislation. A CBS News fact-check finds that Harris voted against advancing the bill twice when she was a senator, and has previously called it extreme and a setback to reproductive rights in America. We found no evidence that anyone who currently serves in the Biden administration voted for it either.” Then the interview continues.

Sierra Dawn McClain and Nicholas Tomaino, Vance Flips the ‘Fact Check’ Script

Culture, education

Myth

Myths are basic truths twisted into mnemonics, instructions posted from the past, memories waiting to become predictions.

Richard Powers, The Overstory

Breaking political taboos

Getting inside the heads of these kinds of voters became an obsession for Mr. Schoen. As a doctoral student at Oxford, he wrote a dissertation on Enoch Powell, a Conservative legislator, who stunned Britain in 1968 with a speech predicting that if current levels of immigration continued, soon “the Black man will have the whip hand over the white man.” After sifting through polls and election returns, Mr. Schoen convincingly argued that Powell drew millions of these voters to the right in the first election after his incendiary speech, shaking the foundations of British politics and setting the template for a new kind of right-wing populism.

Mr. Schoen came to believe that people were drawn to firebrands like Powell not just because they agreed with him on the issues, but also because he was saying something political elites had tried to keep out of public debate. It proved that he was in touch with a constituency that wasn’t being heard — and it gave his movement a frisson of excitement. You didn’t need a grass-roots campaign or a lavish advertising blitz to win over the public, just the right words and voters ready to hear them.

… Ignoring a problem on the electorate’s mind doesn’t make it go away; it only sends voters searching for a candidate who will listen. Views can shift over time, but probably not over the course of a campaign. Elections aren’t a battle for hearts and minds. They’re a fight to give voters what they already want.

Timothy Shenk, 30 Years Ago, Two Young Strategists Cracked How to Beat a Guy Like Trump. Are Democrats Ready to Listen?

Learning to desire the right things

We normally pay attention to what we desire without thinking about whether our desires are good for us. But that is a dangerous trap in a culture where there are myriad powerful forces competing for our attention, trying to lure us into desiring the ideas, merchandise, or experiences they want to sell us.

Besides, late modern culture is one that has located the core of one’s identity in the desiring self—a self whose wants are thought to be beyond judgment. What you want to be, we are told, is who you are—and anybody who denies that is somehow attacking your identity, or so the world says. The old ideal that you should learn—through study, practice, and submission to authoritative tradition—to desire the right things has been cast aside. Who’s to say what the right things are, anyway? Only you, the autonomous choosing self, have the right to make those determinations. Anybody who says otherwise is a threat.

Excerpt from Rod Dreher’s forthcoming book Living in Wonder (emphasis added). The highlight describes a an “old ideal” that is a major thrust of classical education.

Bearing (false?) witness

Some more Kevin D. Williamson. This time, it’s a book review:

As a Catholic, I suppose I should try harder not to enjoy Protestant factional infighting as much as I do. But every time I read something as bog-bottom dumb as Megan Basham’s excruciatingly imbecilic new book, Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda, I am reminded of the poetic justice arising from American-style choose-your-own-adventure theology and exegesis: There never was a better advertisement for the benefits of maintaining a Magisterium.

…

Reviewing a book like this is like trying to argue with an avalanche—an avalanche of stupidity and error, to be sure, but an avalanche all the same. I have the same problem with this book I had reviewing Alissa Quart’s similarly idiotic Bootstrapped: The author can make enough errors in a dozen words that the critic needs 400 words to correct them. And so one ends up writing an annotated companion to a work that was not worth reading in the first place, much less annotating. (If you would like a more conventional review of the book, please do check out Warren Cole Smith’s excellent contribution.) And while readers have often suspected otherwise, I do not generally get paid by the word.

…

This is a book about, and for, Christians, which means there is something on the table more important than journalistic incompetence. There is the matter of bearing false witness. Megan Basham has some apologies to make and a public record to correct. Judgment, I am reliably informed, comes like a thief in the night.

Kevin D. Williamson, Bearing False Witness

I appreciate Williamson’s assessment of George Soros, which is one I reached independently:

There isn’t any question that Soros and his Open Society project hope to influence prominent institutions, including conservative-leaning churches and religious associations. Soros is engaged in a social change project, and that is what social change projects do. His ends are not generally ends that I share, but that doesn’t make it nefarious.

Considering Soros’ ongoing status as whipping-boy for the American Right, it’s nice to see someone else with conservative bona fides who doesn’t think Soros is nefarious.

(Noted that Bethel McGrew thinks Basham’s book is just fine. I trust Williamson more, and don’t care enough to buy and read the book. Not my circus, not my monkeys.)

Karma Update

The Italian Coast Guard on Wednesday recovered the body of British tech mogul Mike Lynch from the wreckage of the Bayesian superyacht that sunk on Monday. The 56-meter yacht owned by Lynch’s wife, Angela Bachares, had been described by its builders as “unsinkable.” Italian investigators believe the yacht sank quickly on Monday morning after being hit by a waterspout, essentially an oceangoing tornado. Fifteen people who were on the yacht have survived, with six confirmed dead and one unaccounted for. Lynch, considered “Britain’s Bill Gates,” was acquitted in June by a San Francisco jury of fraud charges related to the sale of his company, Autonomy, to Hewlett Packard in 2011. His co-defendant in the trial, Stephen Chamberlain, also died Monday after being struck by a car while jogging in Cambridgeshire on Saturday.

The Morning Dispatch

I don’t know anything about Lynch or Chamberlain, and I have no actual opinion on their guilt of things for which they were acquitted in court. But if others can cite divine intervention in the failed attempt to assassinate Trump with a gunshot, and others can say “miraculous” of the meteoric rise of the Democrats’ prospects for November, I can hint at divine justice in two related deaths of acquitted co-defendants — especially since one sank on an unsinkable yacht.

Just six weeks ago, as a bullet whizzed past Donald Trump’s ear and he popped back up onstage with one fist raised and the other clutching a bald eagle, it appeared the Democrats were doomed. No more. Against all odds, the party that until recently had the pallor of a 80-year-old on day sixteen of a Covid infection has regained its mojo, and that was abundantly clear at the DNC this week.

Katie Herzog

(FWIW, I’m still not voting for either major party for POTUS.)

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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.

Independence Day

Public Affairs

The Immunity Ruling

The mark of an iconic Supreme Court decision is timelessness. With every read, the opinion teaches new insights and provides new lessons on our Constitution. Each semester when I prepare a case like Marbury or McCulloch, I learn something new.

Opinions from Chief Justice Roberts, however, are just the opposite. They are best read once. After the first read, you will come away entirely persuaded that Roberts’s analysis was not only the best answer (to use the Loper Bright framing), but the only conceivable answer, as any contrary positions are unfounded. That’s the first read.

But when you read a Roberts decision a a second, a third, and a fourth time, all of the fancy veneers and window dressing start to come off ….

Josh Blackman.

On Trump v. United States, people I trust who’ve taken the time to work through the case (I was never a prosecutor, rarely a criminal defense attorney) say it’s going to be very hard to prosecute a President for anything. That is not the impression Justice Roberts created on first reading of his opinion.

That means, in essence, that “the President is not above the law” is substantially false now.

And that means that Trump may soon no longer be a convicted felon (because Judge Merchan admitted testimony of a sort that Justice Roberts dubiously says may not be admitted).

I guess we’ll just have to elect someone else. What crueler punishment for Trump than an emphatic electoral drubbing? (But what crueler punishment for the USA than to re-elect the zombie currently in the Oval Office?)

Some thoughts, though:

  1. I just about freaked out when, in law school, I learned that “immunity” was a thing. Lots of people are “above the law” in various circumstances, including crooked prosecutors, judges, policemen (“qualified immunity” in too many circumstances), trash-talking Congressmenpersons. I’ve even figured out why that’s often the lesser evil compared to no immunity. So get it out of your head that keening about “they made him above the law” communicates anything salient.
  2. This isn’t just about Trump. It’s about all Presidents. Good luck prosecuting Joe Biden, Cheeto Benito — or Mike Pence, or Barack Obama, for that matter.
  3. Do you really think that none of the Presidents in your lifetime until Trump has crimed — if only to protect the country from, for instance, terrorists whose location we knew?
  4. That we have an ex-President who is almost certainly guilty of vile, self-serving, delusional crimes is a very, very, very sorry commentary. That his crimes commend him to so many voters is even worse.
  5. Just about everyone agreed that the court would extend, and should extend, some measure of immunity from criminal prosecution to our Presidents. The decisions of the lower courts that Presidents have zero immunity were surprising (likelier, shocking) and unlikely to stand. But few expected the court to give Presidents the extensive practical immunity that emerges from the weeds when you get deeply enough into them.
  6. The lack of constitutional language making the President immune to criminal prosecution is barely interesting, let alone dispositive. There’s no “separation of powers” clause, either and for instance, but it’s fundamental to our system and implied by what is specified.
  7. If and when Trump issues a lawless order, the people he orders should consider refusing to carry it out because I don’t believe they’ll ride his immunity coat-tails. I can only hope that Project 2025 hasn’t vetted a full slate of Trumpist sociopaths who’ll never threaten mass walkouts.
  8. We need to get it through our heads that our Presidents are, pretty much, above the law and that we should try to elect people who aren’t, for instance, promising a retributive crime spree against their adversaries.
  9. When Trump crimes in his second term, I hope we’ll have a Congress willing to impeach, because the Senate will no longer have the excuse that the criminal justice system can deal with it.

I don’t mean to say it will all work out okay. We’re in unchartered territory with Zombie Joe v. Cheeto Benito and his merry band of Project 2025 vandals. I’ve been bearish on the USA for quite a while now, heaven help me — the cultural equivalent of “the financial doomsayers who has correctly predicted 10 of the last three recessions” (see below).

The Unitary Executive

Not unrelated to the matter of Presidential immunity is the “unitary executive” theory.

I thought I was fairly sophisticated on matters of Constitutional Law, but an article in the New York Times lays out with unusual clarity a sort of meta-battle going on in the legal ether above some recent SCOTUS decisions: Charlie Savage, Conservative Legal Movement’s Agenda Unites Court’s Rulings on Executive Power. That’s freebie “shared link,” by the way.

It leaves me feeling freshly conflicted about the independent regulatory agencies we have. They’re “a headless fourth branch of the U.S. government” as Justice Kavanaugh once put it in his pre-SCOTUS days. But the Project 2025 vandals are not at all conflicted; they want to domesticate all regulatory agencies. That would mean that we would have even wider swings in policy from Administration-to-Administration, as far fewer career civil servants would carry over, and far fewer good people would be willing to go into low-profile career governmental service.

I highly recommend the article, and plan to re-read it at least once in a few weeks.

UPDATE: A recommended companion read for Savage is from Josh Blackman again, The Goal Of The “Architects of the Supreme Court” Was Always Overruling Chevron, and not Overruling Roe.

Bare-faced lies

Earlier this year, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was boasting of the personal time he spent with Biden, who he proclaimed to be “completely lucid and with excellent grasp of detail”. After the debate, Krugman called on Biden to step down. Senile dementia is a clever disease. Or maybe Krugman didn’t like the face he saw in the mirror the morning after Biden’s debate performance.

What astounded Krugman and his fellow bold-faced journalist types about Biden’s rotten debate performance wasn’t the obviousness of Biden’s mental decline, but the fear that they were now publicly shown to have been lying. Krugman’s fellow in-house NYT author of Soviet state propaganda, Thomas Friedman, who fancies himself an “old friend” of Biden’s, was writing fibs about Biden as late as last month while boasting of his long off-the-record conversations with the President about the future of the Middle East. It took Friedman less than 24 hours to proclaim that Biden’s debate performance had made him “weep”. Poor man — no doubt it did. David Remnick of The New Yorker, who authored a door-stopper-sized hagiography of Barack Obama during the President’s first year in office, was equally quick to go public with his discovery that Joe Biden was maybe not exactly up to sorting marbles by size or colour, just in time to become a virgin for the next election.

It’s hard to be revealed as a fibber — especially when your job is ostensibly to tell the truth. But the sight of journalistic worthies suddenly grabbing hand towels to cover their proximity to power was not by itself enough to explain the Night of the Journalistic Long Knives.

David Samuels

Whataboutism comes home

On the center-left, Mark Leibovich isn’t pulling his punches in a piece on the Democrats sticking with Biden: “Since President Joe Biden’s debate debacle on Thursday, I’ve learned two things for sure: first, that Republicans are not the only party being led by a geriatric egotist who puts himself before the country. And second, that Republicans are not the only party whose putative leaders have a toxic lemming mindset and are willing to lead American democracy off a cliff.” (The Atlantic)

The Free Press

History will, if necessary, judge between the harm wrought by the two geriatric egotists.

Without comment

Lighter fare

One movie is worth how many words?

The shocking decline of the city—driven by any number of factors, but most certainly liberal policies high among them—drove massive white flight and deindustrialization of the city. Vast numbers of New Yorkers moved to the suburbs in Long Island, New Jersey, or in enclaves in the outer boroughs.

(An interesting exercise is to look at the movies set in the Big Apple in the early sixties compared to those in the early 70s and you can see the suddenness of the decline. From Breakfast at Tiffanys, That Touch of Mink, and Barefoot in the Park_to _Death Wish, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, and Serpico in about a decade.).

Jonah Goldberg

Past its sell-by date

MoveOn is the textbook example of an organization that has outlived its purpose. Founded more than a quarter-century ago to argue that the country needed to “move on” from Bill Clinton’s intern-diddling impeachment drama, it had two things that confer a very long life in American politics: office space and a good fundraising list. And so, while the country has moved on, MoveOn hasn’t. Which is weird, but this is America.

Kevin D. Williamson.

Frank Bruni’s beloved sentences this week

  • In The New Yorker, Susan B. Glasser reflected on a micro-tussle toward the end of last Thursday night’s presidential debate: “Is this how democracy dies, in a shouting match between two seniors about their golf game?” (Thanks to Mike Greenwald of Melville, N.Y., for nominating this.)
  • In The Connecticut Post, Colin McEnroe pondered the president’s proper course: “I’m guardedly a ‘replace him’ guy. Some of you may recall that in 2019, I compared Biden to a Subaru with 310,000 miles on the odometer … But Thursday night was 90 minutes of the ‘check engine’ light flashing desperately in the darkness.” (Holly Franquet, Fairfield, Conn.)
  • In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan evaluated Americans’ attitudes toward NATO … NATO is the rotary phone of geopolitical alliances.” (Richard Reams, San Antonio)

Frank Bruni

Quickies

a matryoshka doll of mendacity

George Conway’s description of Trump, apropos of the New York records falsification case.

one of those financial doomsayers who has correctly predicted 10 of the last three recessions.

The Free Press

… Slate, which, as we all know, employs lab monkeys escaped from federal cocaine experiments as fact-checkers

Kevin D. Williamson

An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half

Karl Kraus

(Economist World in Brief)

Plaintiff Accused of Being “Litigious” Sues for Slander

Eugene Volokh

Male and female

This view would understand the division of man into male and female as, of course, a biological actuality; i.e., this is the way it is. It seems to be a necessity; it is at least a convenience; and it is certainly a delight.

Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance?, written before gender ideology was a thing.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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.

Friday, 6/7/24

Legalia

Musical rackets

Copyright law is just a big steaming mess. Whenever you think it can’t get crazier, it always does.

YouTube is the ultimate battlefield for copyright claims gone wild. Even when I do a short YouTube video about music, I can never play examples from actual recordings. (That’s why I’ve never given an online course on music history. Corporate lawyers would shut me down in a New York minute.)

Consider the case of the YouTuber whose video got demonetized because his “Samsung washing machine randomly chimed to signal a laundry cycle had finished while he was streaming.”

How is that even possible? But it gets even stranger.

Ashley Belanger reports in Ars Technica:

Apparently, YouTube had automatically scanned Albino’s video and detected the washing machine chime as a song called “Done”…[but it] actually comes from the song “Die Forelle” (“The Trout”) from Austrian composer Franz Schubert.

The song was composed in 1817 and is in the public domain. Samsung has used it to signal the end of a wash cycle for years.

I’m not sure what Schubert would make of all this. But I can assure you that none of his heirs will get a penny from this. That’s not the purpose of song copyrights anymore.

Ted Gioia, in a thoroughly disheartening chronicle of where AI appears to be taking us.

See also James O’Malley, Music Just Changed Forever

One crime with 34 cooties

I have added a P.S. to my recent post “34 Counts!”:

I don’t think I’ll dwell on the 34 counts any more, and regret having done so. The 34 counts were 34 bookkeeping entries. In most courts — and in best practice — this would have been charged as one crime, or so I’m told.

Politics

Sheep

Most Church leaders—conscious that to condemn Nazis for blasphemous kitsch might prove risky—opted to bite their tongues. Some, though, actively lent it their imprimatur. In 1933, the year that Hitler was appointed chancellor, Protestant churches across Germany marked the annual celebration of the Reformation by singing Wessel’s battle hymn. In Berlin Cathedral, a pastor shamelessly aped Goebbels. Wessel, he preached, had died just as Jesus had died. Then, just for good measure, he added that Hitler was ‘a man sent by God’.

Tom Holland, Dominion

I heard David French tell a story about masculinity today that was very David Frenchy in that it was based on a movie, American Assassin:

This is the story of Chris Kyle. And it was — I remember seeing it here in Tennessee. And you couldn’t find a parking spot in our theater. That movie was an absolute sensation.

And one of the most memorable parts of that movie is when Chris Kyle is involved in a playground fight, and his father goes through this sheepdog, sheep, wolf analogy. And that is there’s three kinds of people in this world. There’s the sheep, there are the wolves who prey on the sheep, and the sheepdogs who protect the sheep from the wolf.

And he says, I’m not raising any sheep in this household. So what are you? And at that point, Chris Kyle identifies himself as a sheep dog, as somebody who protects the weak against the wolf. OK? And so it’s a very anti-bullying sort of vision of male courage.

And then here comes Donald Trump, who fits to a T the definition of a wolf, of a bully. The story the right told about itself was that they would be inoculated against the wolf, against the bully, because they have this ethos of the sheepdog.

But then when the wolf arose and the bully arose, they went with the bully, the very person that a generation of young right-wing men were warned about. And so that’s what makes this, in many ways, so much more deeply disturbing even than it otherwise been (sic), because it called into question kind of the cultural enterprise that was happening before Trump.

On that same podcast, Jamelle Bouie, riffing on Trump’s first post-conviction public appearance being UFC (Universal Fight Club), quipped that “Professional wrestling is camp for straight men..”

Not a referendum on Trump?!

I believe I recently passed on an opinion that both Trump and Biden want this election to be a referendum on Trump. Now I pass along the opinion that it’s a referendum on Biden:

[Y]ou can just look at the polls in the US: 51 percent of Americans now support mass deportations of the kind Trump is proposing; including 42 percent of Democrats, and 45 percent of Hispanics. That was unthinkable four years ago — and it’s entirely on Biden. The revolt against this basic failure of governance is now strong even in big cities, run by Democrats, and among non-whites, who are moving toward Trump.

Joe Biden’s main campaign theme seems to be that he alone can defend liberal democracy from Donald Trump. What Biden has never understood is that restricting immigration is absolutely critical to defending liberal democracy. Everything else is just words, condescending words. If Trump triumphs in November, Biden will be responsible for simply ignoring basic political reality, alienating the very people he needs.

…

One person was responsible for Trump’s first term: Hillary Clinton. And one will be responsible for his second: Joe Biden.

I guess it’s worth reiterating at this point that I’m not anti-immigration. It remains the lifeblood of America, and immigration is vital for our future fiscal balance. I’m a proud immigrant myself — and America will always be able to integrate newcomers in ways European countries simply cannot. But, like a huge majority of Americans, I’m in favor of legal, orderly, controlled immigration — and not the chaos we now see everywhere in the West. This is not racism or xenophobia; it’s a recognition that borders and the rule of law matter; and that without secure borders, we risk losing the core reality of a nation-state; and without a better-paced influx, we risk delegitimizing immigration altogether, and balkanizing our societies.

Andrew Sullivan

Loser Trump

Trump’s base does not win elections outside of party primaries. It did not win the midterms for the Republican Party in 2018, it did not win re-election for the Trump in 2020, and it did not win a red wave for Republicans in 2022. The signature Republican victory of the last four years, the election of Glenn Youngkin over Terry McAuliffe in the 2021 Virginia race for governor, rested on an effort to marginalize the Trump base so that party leaders could engineer a nominee with the ability to distance himself from the former president and his movement.

Jamelle Bouie.

And true to form, the RNC’s Lara Trump has issued a fatwa against Larry Hogan, Republican candidate from U.S. Senate from Maryland, for saying the public should respect the process and the verdict in the Trump felony trial. Kiss that seat goodbye, GOP.

Chicken Littles of the Left

Some people reportedly (I haven’t met one outside of click-bait stories) are worked up that some Trump supporters want to ban IVF, contraception, and recreational sex. Though I know some arguments against each of those sacred cows, this strikes me as a reverse mirror-image of QAnon.

I would welcome more careful thought about IVF, but I’m an outlier. Anyone who thinks that a lame duck Donald Trump is going to pander to a very small group of ideologues who are seriously out of step with 90%+ of their countrymen needs to take a deep breath. Anyone who thinks that Donald Trump (who probably has frequent sperm donor perks at the fertility clinics of Manhattan) is personally opposed to IVF, contraception and recreational sex (“I never did anything that needed forgiveness” or something like that, he said) needs inpatient psych care.

Culture

Defining deviancy down … and up

When and why did American life become so coarse, amoral and ungovernable? In his classic 1993 essay, “Defining Deviancy Down”, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan offered a semantic explanation. He concluded that, as the amount of deviant behaviour increased beyond the levels the community can “afford to recognise”, we have been redefining deviancy so as to exempt conduct we used to stigmatise, while also quietly raising the “normal” level in categories where behaviour is now abnormal by any earlier standard. The reasons behind this, he said, were altruism, opportunism and denial — but the result was the same: an acceptance of mental pathology, broken families and crime as a fact of life.

In that same summer, Charles Krauthammer responded to Senator Moynihan with a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. He acknowledged Senator Moynihan’s point but said it was only one side of the story. Deviancy was defined down for one category of society: the lower classes and black communities. For the middle classes, who are overwhelmingly white and Christian, the opposite was true. Deviancy was in fact defined up, stigmatising and criminalising behaviour that was previously regarded as normal. In other words, there was a double standard at work.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Presented without express comment

A new poll from Ipsos has found that support for same-sex marriage among Americans has fallen to just 51% approval.

…

Following a years-long rise in support for gay marriage, a groundswell of anti-woke sentiment emerged around 2021, much of it directed at LGBT activism as parents gained a new window into their children’s curriculum when schooling went remote during the Covid-19 pandemic …

Gay rights have since been lumped in with trans rights in the popular imagination, which may have chipped away some public support for gay marriage at the margins. …

Bev Jackson, co-founder of the LGB Alliance, said the decline in support for same-sex marriage had causes on both the Left and the Right. “Blame for the fall in US support for gay marriage lies partly with the homophobic religious Right. But equally to blame are treacherous organisations like GLAAD and the ACLU which promote insane, deeply unpopular concepts such as gender self-ID and child ‘transition’,” she said. “Gender identity ideologues have been riding on LGB’s coattails for too long, and they’re helping to destroy support for the rights we fought for decades to win.”

Laurel Duggan

Junk info

Junk info is often false info, but it isn’t junk because it’s false. It’s junk because it has no practical use; it doesn’t make your life better, and it doesn’t improve your understanding. Even lies can be nourishing; the works of Dostoevsky are fiction, yet can teach you more about humans than any psychology textbook. Meanwhile, most verified facts do nothing to improve your life or understanding, and are, to paraphrase Nietzsche, as useful as knowledge of the chemical composition of water to someone who is drowning.

Gurwinder

Privileging victims, real and imagined

The intuitive moral structure of our modern social imaginary prioritizes victimhood, sees selfhood in psychological terms, regards traditional sexual codes as oppressive and life denying, and places a premium on the individual’s right to define his or her own existence.

Carl R. Trueman and Rod Dreher, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

Safetyism today

They want revolutionary ends, but they want to hide behind establishment credibility.

Jonah Goldberg, describing the successor ideology, which has famously “march[ed] through the institutions.”

Tipsy the squish

I finally had to replace the color toner cartridges on my laser printer. I opened the red-and-white Canon box I’d ordered months ago. I found unfamiliar packaging of the cartridges and unfamiliar cartridge configuration. I figured out how to install them and then looked for the instructions on recycling them (back to Canon). It was nowhere to be found.

Having seen the word “compatible” a few times, I looked more closely at the box. Where the word Canon should have been, the word “Cartridge” appeared.

I remembered when I purchased them my shock at the low price, but I double- and triple-checked. I thought I was getting an inexplicable price on Canon goods. They still conned me with the Canon-looking box.

Now I’ve got three laser cartridges I can’t recycle, and it bothers me more than such a thing is supposed to bother a conservative.

Which reminds me again of how close “conservative” today is to “barbarian.” My gut-identification today remains “conservative,” but my considered identification is center-right.

Progress

Progress should be about improving the quality of life and human flourishing. We make a grave error when we assume this is the same as new tech and economic cost-squeezing.

Ted Gioia, I Ask Seven Heretical Questions About Progress

GD Misinformation

Mainstream coverage of this issue is a buffet of sanctimonious overclaiming. It says authoritatively that kids in the US can’t go on blockers or hormones prior to lengthy, in-depth assessment (false). That no one under 18 is getting surgery (false). That the worldwide rise in referrals to youth GD clinics is almost entirely the result of reduced stigmatization (no one knows). That GD, or the perception that one has GD, can’t spread through adolescent social networks (almost certainly false on the basis of anecdotal evidence and any familiarity with developmental psychology). That it’s a ‘myth’ that significant number of kids who believe themselves to be trans will later feel differently (false, according to all the existing data). That only a tiny percentage of people detransition (we have no data at all on this in the context of youth gender care in the States).

What the Media Gets Wrong on Gender Reassignment. This is from 2021 when the elites were uniformly purveying lies about Covid, gender dysphoria and who knows what all else. Things have gotten markedly better in recent months on adolescent gender dysphoria.

Capitalistic algorithmic ideological hairball

For many of our applicants—and this, of course, is what the program is about, what the humanities are about—learning has, or ought to have, an existential weight. Beneath their talk of education, of unplugging from technology, of having time for creativity and solitude, I detected a desire to be free of forces and agendas: the university’s agenda of ‘relevance,’ the professoriate’s agenda of political mobilization, the market’s agenda of productivity, the internet’s agenda of surveillance and addiction. In short, the whole capitalistic algorithmic ideological hairball of coerced homogeneity. The desire is to not be recruited, to not be instrumentalized, to remain (or become) an individual, to resist regression toward the mean, or meme.

William Deresiewicz, Deep Reading Will Save Your Soul H/T Frank Bruni (who led me to actually read a piece I’d only skimmed). Ted Gioia, My Lifetime Reading Plan, practiced it before Deresiewicz preached it.

Losers

The characteristic feature of the loser is to bemoan, in general terms, mankind’s flaws, biases, contradictions, and irrationality-without exploiting them for fun and profit.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go? Well, first, I resolved to stop harping on it. But then, I just moved it off to my reflexive blog, trying to keep this one relatively reflective.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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.

June!

Culture

Summertime wordplay

[I]n The Star Tribune of Minneapolis, James Lileks described the “glorious boredom” of a child’s summer with its “endlessly attenuated twilight, as the sun slides down like a hot coin and starts up the jukebox of crickets and frogs.” (Rudy Brynolfson, Minneapolis)

(Via Frank Bruni)

The fate of the humanities

There’s no shortage of voices lamenting the state of the humanities, or at least of humanities departments. I was going to compile some samples, but if you’re interested, you’re already aware of them.

Are they wrong? Are the humanities actually at a new dawn?

The math nerds built our world, from the apps we use to get to work to the way we order our toilet paper. But with the rise of AI, are the coders set to become victims of their own success? Peter Thiel thinks so. In a recent conversation with Tyler Cowen, the PayPal co-founder predicted that the new technology would be “worse for the math people than for the word people.” What use is spending four years learning how to code when AI can do it all for you? 

The author Luke Burgis, echoing Thiel, predicts a “bull market in the humanities.” As he put it in a recent post on his Substack, “the humanities, rightly understood, are things that technology cannot take away or substitute for.” By the humanities, Burgis doesn’t mean the “ideological programs of cultural change” at elite universities. He means the humanities broadly understood as the study of history, philosophy, religion, language, and arts that explores “what it truly means to be human.” 

We may be in the middle of a technological revolution, but paradoxically, what’s timeless and ancient might be more valuable than what’s timely and modern.

The Free Press

From a somewhat different perspective:

The best books about technology are about humanity—about what it means to be human and about life well lived and urgent threats to the good life. Because technology is essentially a human thing, good writing about technology is good writing about human things. A doctrine of technology is only as good as its doctrine of man; indeed, not only depends upon but is a doctrine of man. The technologist is an anthropologist, from first to last.

…

What, then, are the best books (not) about technology that I have read? A short list would include Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath; Walker Percy’s Lost in the Cosmos; François Mauriac’s The Eucharist; Wendell Berry’s A Timbered Choir; Josef Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture; Jonathan Lear’s Radical Hope; Stephen King’s On Writing; Albert Murray’s The Omni-Americans; Pascal’s Pensées; and many more.

Brad East

Sportsball

[M]uch of the modern sports world has lost its luster for me.

The era is long gone when the lineups of professional teams had enough year-to-year continuity that one knew all the players’ names and stats. But the rotation in and out of teams, including now in college sports, has become such a blur that only TV commentators afflicted with hyperfocus can keep track.

Sure, money-ball’s metrics rule, but the reality remains that now you’re mostly rooting for mercenaries. And as cable TV fades, pro and college sports teams are disappearing into the permanent fog called streaming. Looking for the airtime of your favorite team can turn into a constant and costly snipe hunt. Is it worth it?

Daniel Henninger

Tap-dancing around the “W” word

Whether and when someone with a uterus gets their period — for the first time, and throughout their life — can reflect not only their reproductive health, but their risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, miscarriage, and premature death ….

STAT, H/T John Ellis

Let’s see now. Slightly more than half the human race comes equipped with a uterus. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a word for them less kludgy than “persons with uteruses” or the equivalent?

I wish they’d stop doing this

To journalists, this is a lazy visual for “this is a story about something-or-other related to Russia.”

To this American Orthodox Christian, it insinuates “Russian Orthodoxy is up to something sinister again.”

I object!

MAGA flag

Nobody knew the flag was MAGA until Justice Alito flew it. Justice Alito, however, should have known it was evil, so the argument goes, since by flying it he made it evil. Okay, well. Commenters, please add what else Justice Alito needs to endorse so that it can become shameful, and if you agree that he should start with the term fur baby. As for the other Alito flag controversy, the upside-down American flag, turns out The Washington Post saw that when it was briefly flying in 2021 and decided not to report on it since it wasn’t really a story, but now that the election’s coming up, everyone’s going through their diaries.

Nellie Bowles

Unplanned unparenthood

The obvious reasons for postponing or forgoing parenthood, such as lack of money or building a career, no doubt play a part. But another, more welcome, trend is also evident. Breaking the data down by age shows that fertility is in serious decline only among America’s youngest women. Since the 1990s the fertility rate for those aged between 15 and 19 has fallen by 77%; that for 20- to 24-year olds is down by 48%. Meanwhile, it is slowly increasing for women aged 30 and over (see charts). In 1990 teenage pregnancies accounted for one in eight births. By 2022 this had fallen to one in 25.

The Economist

Politics

Vice-signaling

“Vice-signaling.” Surely I’ve heard it before, but Michelle Goldberg brought it back as the overall branding of today’s GOP. (Killing Dogs. Taunting the Homeless. Praising Al Capone. This Is Trump’s Party.) To that list we can ad “voting for convicted felons if they’re really brazen about it.”

Speaking of which:

The blasphemy of the radical left is to deny human depravity; the radical right’s blasphemy is to enshrine this depravity as noble.

Matthew Beringer

Choosing

Eight years ago, I published an essay for Public Discourse about why I could not vote for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. “Vote as if your ballot determines nothing whatsoever—except the shape of your own character,” the piece concluded. “Vote as if the public consequences of your action weigh nothing next to the private consequences. The country will go whither it will go, when all the votes are counted. What should matter the most to you is whither you will go, on and after this November’s election day.”

There is nothing in what I said then that I would now retract. I rejected the idea that I, as one individual, must treat my choice as confined to the binary of Clinton versus Trump, as though the weight of the outcome were on me alone. It is frequently the case that we vote for one major-party presidential candidate principally because we are against the other one—usually because we find “our guy” a less than optimal choice but “the other guy” strongly repellent. But when we conclude that both of them are wholly unfit for office, our habitual partisan commitments, and our fond hope that the one representing “our side” will be normal, or guided by normal people, do not compel us to cast a vote in that direction. What we must consider, I argued, is not our role in the outcome of the election (which is negligible, and unknown to us when voting), but the effect on our conscience and character of joining our will to a bad cause.

The last eight years have made me more certain I was right.

Matthew J. Franck, Choosing Not to Choose

“Choosing Not to Choose” is the title of a new piece by Matthew Franck published today on the site. Trump is wholly unfit for office, Franck allows, but so is Biden for different reasons. And it’s important that Americans not vote for a political candidate they believe is unfit, as one’s vote inevitably influences one’s character. Invest in a corrupt political cause on lesser-of-two-evils grounds and eventually, by feeling obliged to defend it and perhaps embrace it, you too will be corrupted.

…

My dispute with Franck is simple. I disagree with how he’s framed the choice before voters.

The question isn’t “Biden or Trump?” so much as it’s “Should we continue with the constitutional order as we’ve known it or try something radically different?”

I’ll guarantee here and now that if Trump becomes president again and remains in good health he’ll try to extend his term in office past 2029. I won’t guarantee that he’ll succeed, but the attempt will be made as surely as you’re reading this. Trump is less a person than a personality type and his type is compelled to pursue its own interests remorselessly above all things. I think he’d honestly find it hard to comprehend why someone in his position shouldn’t try to extend their time in power.

Biden won’t do that if reelected. (And not just because he might be catatonic by 2029.) He won’t defy court orders. He won’t stock the leadership of the Justice Department with fanatics who have sworn an oath of allegiance to him personally. He won’t call the military out into the streets to confront people protesting him. And, contra Franck, I don’t believe he’ll claim a “mandate” if he wins, since he’s all but certain to do so with fewer electoral votes than he received in 2020 and with a Republican takeover of the Senate.

Nick Cattogio, Choosing to Choose

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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 cathartic venting, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.