Why I read Damon Linker
But several of the comments said much the same thing—and others left similar remarks in response some statements I (and others) made about Biden on to the “Beg to Differ” podcast last week (which was recorded before the SOTU). I’m going to quote one of those comments, anonymously, because it so nicely distills the criticism I keep hearing in both places.
Damon [and others on the podcast] are so completely negative and pessimistic that they are contributing to the downfall of our Democracy. … It is past time to put aside your trepidation about Biden’s candidacy and policies and do everything you can to get him elected. Hopelessness and apathy are friends to authoritarians. They lead to people staying home. You can offer suggestions for changes in policy without gloom and doom and trashing Biden.
The message here is admirably clear: The critic wants me to write and say things that will contribute to Biden winning and stop saying things that will supposedly demoralize voters, leading them to give up hope for victory and so possibly skip voting on Election Day. Which means the critic wants me to suppress my critical intellect or otherwise bring it into alignment with the kind of talking points that might be released by the Biden campaign’s communications office.
…
I very much want Trump to lose—and by the widest possible margin. But nothing I write can make that happen. So instead of writing things with an eye to contributing to Biden’s campaign, I devote my time and talents (such as they are) to trying to understand what is happening—above all: Why has Trump succeeded in taking over the Republican Party? And how does this manifestly unfit, seditious, and corrupt bullshit artist manage to command enough support in the electorate that he will be seriously competitive for the presidency for the third election in a row?
…
Democracy is being threatened democratically, in other words, which means, as the old horror-movie tag line has it, the call is coming from inside the house. It’s important to remember that. Trump isn’t some foreign agent. He’s as American as can be, and so are those who have voted for him in the past and will vote for him in November. They are our fellow citizens. This is their country, too—as much theirs as it is ours. If we outnumber them, we will win and America will remain a liberal democracy for another four years. If they outnumber us, they will prevail and our liberalism will be tested, again—and, I fear, more severely than the last time.
But that won’t be the end of the story, because the story never ends ….
This is why I expect to continue reading Damon Linker even as I cut away political reading that tends merely to inflame the reader.
As for that last paragraph, remember that neither party’s win in November is “the end of the world.” It is at worst “the end of a world.”
There is no “labor shortage”
I’m a libertarian, let-markets-work kind of guy, and some of my lefty or populist friends sometimes act like they’ve pulled a dispositive rabbit out of the rhetorical hat when they point out that there exist—angels and ministers of grace, defend us!—badly run businesses, dysfunctional markets, dishonest businessmen, etc. They don’t seem to understand that the choice is between stupid, greedy men and stupid, greedy men with an army and a police force. One of these groups of stupid, greedy men has to compete for your business, and you can say “no” to them; the other kind doesn’t have to take “no” for an answer. That’s the whole enchilada, really: I want more decisions affecting my life made in the context of negotiations I can walk away from and fewer of them made at the point of a bayonet.
… when it comes to immigration, I keep coming back to one thing: We have enough poor people in our country, and we don’t need to import more of them. There’s a lot more to citizenship than economic calculation, but if it’s just green cards or the equivalent we’re talking about, then I’m all for opening the national door to people who have offers for jobs at, say, $200,000 a year, or people with seven-to-10-figure sums to invest in businesses and projects. But unskilled and low-wage workers? We have plenty. And if I have to pay more for an avocado to get control of our runaway illegal (literally illegal, Mr. President—literally) immigration problem—fine.
Not a strong draw
We’ve reached the stage of American decline in which smashing the constitutional order is just another issue in the upcoming election, something to be weighed alongside the candidates’ respective positions on taxes, say.
…
It’s not clear anymore that Trump even has a firm position on most policy issues.
He fights! his fans insist. But what, at this point, is he fighting for?
Trump’s policy preferences can usually be explained straightforwardly by ignorance, selfishness, or, in rarer cases, ideological nationalism.
None of which is a strong draw for conservative voters, I hope you’ll agree.
Personality profiles
“We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers…and there is good reason for this. We have never looked for ourselves—so how are we ever supposed to find ourselves?” Much has changed since the late nineteenth century, when Nietzsche wrote those words. We now look obsessively for ourselves, and we find ourselves in myriad ways. Then we find more ways of finding ourselves. One involves a tool, around which grew a science, from which bloomed a faith, and from which fell the fruits of dogma. That tool is the questionnaire. The science is psychometrics. And the faith is a devotion to self-codification, of which the revelation of personality is the fruit.
…
[T]he self has never been more securely an object of classification than it is today, thanks to the century-long ascendence of behavioral analysis and scientific psychology, sociometry, taxonomic personology, and personality theory. Add to these the assorted psychodiagnostic instruments drawing on refinements of multiple regression analysis, and multivariate and circumplex modeling, trait determination and battery-based assessments, and the ebbs and flows of psychoanalytic theory. Not to be overlooked, of course, is the popularizing power of evidence-based objective and predictive personality profiling inside and outside the laboratory and therapy chambers since Katherine Briggs began envisioning what would become the fabled person-sorting Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) in 1919. A handful of phone calls, psychological referrals, job applications, and free or modestly priced hyperlinked platforms will place before you (and the eighty million or more other Americans who take these tests annually) more than two thousand personality assessments promising to crack your code. Their efficacy has become an object of our collective speculation. And by many accounts, their revelations make us not only known but also more empowered to live healthy and fulfilling lives. Nietzsche had many things, but he did not have PersonalityMax.com or PersonalityAssessor.com.
Christopher Yates, Sorting the Self
I must confess that I read no further. Spritely writing just could not overcome my indifference to the topic (relative to other topics). Your mileage may vary.
A picture worth how many words
This map has kind of bothered me since I first saw it:
Look at tiny Ukraine, 1654, the orange mass in the middle, before Russia expanded it.
I can’t put it in words, but this somehow seems relevant to current travails. The heart of it, I suspect, is the question “just what is a nation-state?”
I’m sure smart people have pondered that a lot, though I don’t hear it spoken of very often. I have no illusions that I have anything to add.
Wordplay
Sexual creationism
The narrow progressive stance on gender ideology. (Pamela Paul, discussing John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s Where Have All the Democrats Gone?)
Thermostatic voting
Used by a New York Times pundit to describe voters’ preference for moderate candidates.
Bafflegab
A good alternative to gobbledygook if you fear you’ve overused it.
Dirigiste
relating to a system in which a government has a lot of control over a country’s economy
Egregious
The etymology is the fun part here, via Merriam-Webster:
Some words originally used for animals that gather in flocks have been herded into use for people, too. The Latin word grex means “flock,” “herd,” or “group,” and is the root of several English words. Gregarious originally meant “tending to live in a flock, herd, or community rather than alone” but has become a synonym for “sociable.” Egregious literally meant “out of the herd” in Latin — something that stands apart. Its first meaning in English was consequently “outstanding” or “remarkable for good quality,” but over time that changed to become “very bad and easily noticed” or “flagrant.”
Interpellate/Interpolate
- Interpellate. (I’d be very impressed by a middle-schooler who got that in a spelling bee!)
- Interpolate.
Stolpersteine
Literally stumbling-stones: brass plates, embedded in concrete, in the streets where victims of the Nazi Holocaust lived. 100,000 Stopersteines have now been laid.
Fluffers
Tech bros like Thiel, Musk and Andreesen are the fluffers in the global authoritarian circle jerk.
Maria, Silicon Valley’s worldview is not just an ideology; it’s a personality disorder (Crooked Timber) (hyperlink added)
Bon mots
Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.
Not Mark Twain
… a strangulated piety which was little more than a mask ….
Martin Shaw, The Problem With Peace
Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them.
A.A. Milne
Imagine a double-masked bureaucrat running a white-privilege workshop, forever.
You can make a throne of bayonets, but you can’t sit on it for long.
Boris Yeltsin
Paranoia is the opiate of those who fear they may be insignificant.
[T]o be human is to long for constancy, to crave the touchingly impossible assurance that what we have and cherish will be ours to hold forever, just as it is now. We build homes — fragile haikus of concrete and glass to be unwritten by the first earthquake or flood. We make vows — fragile promises to be upheld by selves we haven’t met in a future we can’t predict.
Ill fares the land, to hast’ning ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay.
Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1770)
So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.
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.