Elections and consequences

The Election Generally

Finally grokking Trump — as a repudiation of Democrat attitudes and positions

I don’t recall how much, or even whether, I have written about my little epiphany in the last two weeks or so before November election.

I was “never Trump” since I first realized that his candidacy was serious in 2015 or 2016. I confess that I could not imagine anything other than a “tear it all down!” mentality motivating Trump voters. The way I avoided contemning them was to assume that there was some nobler reason that was invisible to me for some mysterious reason.

My little epiphany in the weeks before the election was that the evils of the Democrat party could make it plausible to vote against them, even if doing so meant voting for Trump.

I considered writing about this in last Thursday’s post, but I thought it would be tedious to try to name all the Democrat evils that could repel a voter. After I posted on Thursday, though, Mary Eberstadt kindly posted an item at First Things that listed many of them for me. As does this:

Although Eberstadt specifically refers to Democrat antipathy toward Roman Catholics and Catholic teaching, I’m in the same target zone, just as when I was a conservative Protestant in my beforetimes.

Were my vote determined solely by which party is likelier to persecute me and mine over the next four years, I could imagine voting for Trump, pretty darned confident that he’ll leave me and mine alone. (Even though this little blog has dissed him for 8 years, I don’t flatter myself that he’s noticed.) But my vote tends less toward short-term self-protection and more toward fiat justitia ruat caelum.

Still: the people have spoken, and what they said means I’m likely to be left alone at least until 2029. There’s some small comfort in that.

Is identitarianism a dying delusion?

David Brooks looks at many of the ways the pre-election expectations (of how groups would vote) were dashed.

Why were so many of our expectations wrong? Well, we all walk around with mental models of reality in our heads. Our mental models help us make sense of the buzzing, blooming confusion of the world. Our mental models help us anticipate what’s about to happen. Our mental models guide us as we make decisions about how to get the results we want.

Many of us are walking around with broken mental models. Many of us go through life with false assumptions about how the world works.

Where did we get our current models? Well, we get models from our experience, our peers, the educational system, the media and popular culture. Over the past few generations, a certain worldview that emphasizes racial, gender and ethnic identity has been prevalent in the circles where highly educated people congregate …

The crucial assertion of the identitarian mind-set is that all politics and all history can be seen through the lens of liberation movements. Society is divided between the privileged (straight white males) and the marginalized (pretty much everyone else). History and politics are the struggle between oppressors and oppressed groups.

In this model, people are seen as members of a group before they are seen as individuals …

In this model, society is seen as an agglomeration of different communities. Democrats thus produce separate agendas designed to mobilize Black men, women and so on. The goal of Democratic politics is to link all the oppressed and marginalized groups into one majority coalition.

…

But this mind-set has just crashed against the rocks of reality. This model assumes that people are primarily motivated by identity group solidarity. This model assumes that the struggle against oppressive systems and groups is the central subject of politics. This model has no room for what just happened.

It turns out a lot of people don’t behave like ambassadors from this or that group. They think for themselves in unexpected ways.

Why We Got It So Wrong (unlocked article)

Liberal democracy vs. populism

For those bewildered by why so many Americans apparently voted against the values of liberal democracy, Balint Magyar has a useful formulation. “Liberal democracy,” he says, “offers moral constraints without problem-solving” — a lot of rules, not a lot of change — while “populism offers problem-solving without moral constraints.” Magyar, a scholar of autocracy, isn’t interested in calling Donald Trump a fascist. He sees the president-elect’s appeal in terms of something more primal: “Trump promises that you don’t have to think about other people.”

Around the world, populist autocrats have leveraged the thrilling power of that promise to transform their countries into vehicles for their own singular will … What they delivered was permission to abandon societal inhibitions, to amplify the grievances of one’s own group and heap hate on assorted others, particularly on groups that cannot speak up for themselves. Magyar calls this “morally unconstrained collective egoism.”

M. Gessen in the New York Times

Go stick your head in a cold Bulwark

A reader did not like Andrew Sullivan’s first post-election post:

When I opened your Dish email last Friday, I fully expected a big serving of both-sides-y handwringing — as in, “Trump is bad, but Harris is also bad, because wokeness/inflation/illegal immigrants … poor voters, what were they to do?” But I was also hoping for an acknowledgement of how terribly painful it is that the lawless kakistocrat has been reelected, more resoundingly than the first time.

Instead, I got a celebration of the multiracial, multiethnic coalition that brought us Clown Car Horror Show 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Not a single solitary goddamn word about all the reasons why Agent Orange deserved to lose. Attempting to overturn a free election in 2020? Inciting a mob to attack the Capitol? Running on “retribution” and promising to deploy the justice system against his political opponents? Routine use of crass, ugly insults and normalizing his surrogates’ use of same? Musing about how he wants to be “dictator for a day”? Wanting to fire government workers and replace them with incompetent sycophants? Never heard of it.

Sullivan responded:

In the immediate wake of the Trump victory, did we really need another account of why I didn’t vote for him? Especially when those arguments failed to work in the campaign yet again? Go read The Bulwark.

The Clown-Car Nominations

A sober lament

On Trump’s choice of Matt Gaetz as Attorney General:

The choice obviously isn’t meant to reassure anyone outside the MAGA base—or even those within it who are intelligent. It is an insolent appointment, guaranteed to cause trouble and meant to cause friction.

We are back to the Island of Misfit Toys. What a mistake. Mr. Trump often confuses his own antic malice for daring, his own unseriousness for boldness. How amazing that in the rosy glow of election, he will spend so much political capital and goodwill on confirmation fights he may well, and certainly deserves to, lose.

Peggy Noonan

Shambolic Kakistocracy

[H]ere is a glimmer of hope: Team Trump’s most human failings may thwart some of their most evil plans.

Take, for instance, appointing Representative Matt Gaetz to be the Attorney General of the United States. If this is a sincere appointment — in other words, if it isn’t a head-fake to get the Senate to accept another candidate later, or a ruse to let Gaetz resign from Congress and avoid a damaging ethics report — it’s an example of self-indulgence thwarting malign intent. Gaetz is a buffoon. He has absolutely no qualifications to run the Department of Justice. Can he wander around firing everyone? Yes. Does he understand how the Department of Justice works in a way that would allow him to maximize its potential for abuse? No. Is he smart enough to figure it out? Also no. Is he charismatic enough to persuade insiders to help him use it effectively? Very much no. Gaetz as Attorney General will do petty, flamboyant, stupid things in clumsy ways. Some of those things will be very bad. But clown shoes are preferable to jackboots. We’d be in much more trouble if someone evil in a smart and competent way who understands how the machine works — say, Jeff Clark or Ken Paxton — took over. That would be terrifying.

Trump’s decision shows his tendency to vent his spleen. Appointing Gaetz owns the libs, humiliates the hated Justice Department, elevates someone who is a vulgar elbow-thrower like him, and is a thumb in the eye to the Republicans who hate Gaetz. It’s not a decision reflecting self-control; it’s a decision reflecting unconstrained anger and resentment. It’s like making your horse a Senator. The point isn’t that the horse will vote the way you want it to. The point is to humiliate the senate and show them you can do what you want. It’s bad, but it’s not smart bad.

…

[P]erhaps they will not be as bad as they could be because God, in His wisdom, has chosen to make these people weird freaks along the way to letting them run the place. This is a time to cherish every hope and embrace every ally. Trump and Trumpists are dysfunctional weirdos and that fact is our ally. Cold comfort is still comfort.

Popehat, Refuge in Kakistocracy

A vital pardon

Pardon Trump’s Critics Now
President Biden has a moral obligation to do what he can for patriotic Americans who have risked it all.

Paul Rosenzweig

[H]istory is well and truly back. Even Francis Fukuyama agrees.

Mary Harrington at UnHerd

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.

Halloween 2024

I’ve been relentlessly venting my spleen against one of the two candidates for President of the United States. Today, I will completely spare you vitriol except to offer this link.

There are, however, a few political comments today, along with much else.

The Machine

That’s not a very imaginative title I came up with. R.S. Thomas is a poet whose Collected Later Poems I bought for some reason, though Thomas was not acclaimed like, say, Dylan Thomas, his fellow Welchman. But I’m very fond of many of his poems.

‘The body is mine and the soul is mine’
says the machine. ‘I am at the dark source
where the good is indistinguishable
from evil. I fill my tanks up
and there is war. I empty them and there is not peace.
I am the sound,
not of the world breathing, but
of the catch rather in the world’s breath.’

Is there a contraceptive
for the machine, that we may enjoy
intercourse with it without being overrun
by vocabulary? We go up
into the temple of ourselves
and give thanks that we are not
as the machine is. But it waits
for us outside, knowing that when
we emerge it is into the noise
of its hand beating on the breast’s
iron as Pharisaically as ourselves.

R.S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems 1988-2000. Bloodaxe Books. Kindle Edition.

Excising personhood

Every attempt to implement machine learning will come at the cost of removing features of personhood from the world. Already, the cost of housing in person-scale environments like the neighborhood where Jacobs herself lived—Manhattan’s Greenwich Village—has soared beyond the reach of almost everyone, leaving those with more modest means to move to places dominated by highways.

Andy Crouch, The Life We’re Looking For

Trusting obliging liars

When I tell people here in Tennessee that I work for The New York Times, I often get a visible negative reaction. Sometimes, the negative reaction is verbal and I’m condemned to my face as “fake news.”

I try to respond with a spirit of curiosity. I know that we make mistakes and I’m curious as to what specifically made them angry. Rarely do I get a precise answer. There is simply a sense that we can’t be trusted, that we’re on the other side.

When I ask which news outlets they follow, invariably they give me a list of channels and sites that were so comprehensively dishonest and irresponsible in 2020 and 2021 that many of them have been forced into settlements, have retracted stories and have issued apologies under pressure.

Yet all these outlets are all still popular on the right. Long after their dishonesty was exposed, the MAGA faithful continue to believe their reports and share their stories. It turns out that people will in fact trust liars — so long as the liars keep telling them what they want to hear.

David French, Four Lessons From Nine Years of Being ‘Never Trump’ (unlocked)

Here are French’s four lessons in summary:

Community is more powerful than ideology
We don’t know our true values until they’re tested
Hatred is the prime motivating force in our politics
Trust is tribal

Problematizing Geography

How Many Continents Are There? You May Not Like the Answers.
Recent earth science developments suggest that how we count our planet’s largest land masses is less clear than we learned in school.

NYT

Sweeties, everything is less clear than you learned in school.

A Moral Choice

Valerie Pavilonis gives a shout-out to the American Solidarity Party in the pages of the New York Times (Is There a Moral Choice for Catholic Voters?) (unlocked).

The imperfection she cites — questioning no-fault divorce — is just fine with me, by the way. I know the arguments that sold no-fault to America, but I also know the reality, and I don’t like it. No-fault deserves to be questioned.

Frivolous pursuits

“Talking? But what about?” Walking and talking—that seemed a very odd way of spending an afternoon. In the end she persuaded him, much against his will, to fly over to Amsterdam to see the Semi-Demi-Finals of the Women’s Heavyweight Wrestling Championship.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World. I read 1984 long before I read Brave New World. Who in their right mind thinks Orwell saw the future more clearly than Huxley?

Brides of the State

Fifty percent of married women vote Republican, and 45% vote Democratic, which mirrors the GOP advantage in other demographic groups. But, according to Pew, “Women who have never been married are three times as likely to associate with the Democratic Party as with the Republican Party (72% vs. 24%).” In 1980, the number of women over 40 who had never married was around 6%. Now it is 22%, and this has become a crucial bloc for the Democrats.

Matthew Crawford, Brides of the State

A Conservative Case Against Trump

Bret Stephens makes A Conservative Case Against Trump (unlocked). It’s not his best anti-Trump case, in my opinion, but you can judge its persuasiveness for yourself if you like, since the end of the month is nigh and I have unlocked articles to give away still.

An Academic’s Case for Trump

The ideology that believes that humans can change sex; treats children’s and young people’s fantasies as truth; and is willing to put children on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and even butcher them with surgery, is barbaric. There is no other word for it. Men who give themselves female names and pronouns, and put on lipstick and a dress, do not magically become women. Pretending that such men are women puts actual women directly at risk. Men, no matter how they dress or what they call themselves, have no place in women’s bathrooms, in women’s domestic crisis centers, in women’s prisons, or—less critically but somehow more obvious to everyone—in women’s sports.

Heather Heying, discussing one of the reasons she is, surprisingly, voting for Trump.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Sunday, October 27

Booknotes

From Mark A. Noll, America’s God from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln.

The startling reversal in which America’s religious leaders took up the language of republicanism was the most important ideological development for the future of theology in the United States.

Mark A. Noll, America’s God from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln.

[I wish I had a better handle on this very central thesis of Noll’s dense book. All I really can say is that American Christians were essentially alone in embracing republicanism; European Christians rejected it fairly vehemently.]

Although identifiably evangelical churches by 1860 made up the vast majority of American congregations (at least 85%), these churches did not present a homogeneous faith. In fact, evangelicals fought each other over a host of Streitpunkte—over how to interpret the Scriptures; over the definition of many Christian doctrines, including human free will, the atonement, eschatology, the meaning of the sacraments, and the nature of the church; over slavery and other social issues; over the ecclesiastical roles of women and laymen; over whether to sing hymns or psalms only; over whether churches should use creeds; over principles and practices of the market economy; and over every imaginable kind of personality conflict. … Evangelicals called people to acknowledge their sin before God, to look upon Jesus Christ (crucified—dead—resurrected) as God’s means of redemption, and to exercise faith in this Redeemer as the way of reconciliation with God and orientation for life in the world.

…

The most important conclusion that can be drawn from a survey of writings about money, markets, and the economy in this period is that Protestants regularly, consistently, and without sense of contradiction both enunciated traditional Christian exhortations about careful financial stewardship and simply took for granted the workings of the United States’ expanding commercial society.

…

Finney’s Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835), which is discussed at greater length below in chapter 15, was important for summarizing a new approach toward reaching the lost. Since God had established reliable laws in the natural world and since humans were created with the ability to discern those laws, it was obvious that the spiritual world worked on the same basis. Thus, to activate the proper causes for revivals was to produce the proper effects: “The connection between the right use of means for a revival and a revival is as philosophically [i.e., scientifically] sure as between the right use of means to raise grain and a crop of wheat. I believe, in fact, it is more certain, and there are fewer instances of failure.” Because the world spiritual was analogous to the world natural, observable cause and effect must work in religion as well as in physics. The wine of revival—confidence in God’s supernatural ability to convert the sinner—may have looked the same in antebellum America as it had in earlier centuries, but the wineskin was of recent manufacture.

[Finney’s “scientific” revivalism strikes me as a terrible error, but a persistent one. However, this mechanistic approach has been instantiated in evangelistic crusades during my adolescence, and I assume since then as well. The rising and falling of the preaching voice; the shouting followed by the whisper; these are the rhetorical tricks (science) to get people to “make decisions for Jesus” – or Amway or Tupperware or just about anything else.]

On that score there was for Smith not a dime’s worth of difference between Samuel Miller and John Henry Hobart. Through a life of energetic peripateticism (from Lyme, Connecticut, to Vermont and then Portsmouth, New Hampshire, later to Boston, Philadelphia, Providence, and Portland, Maine), as well as frequent redirection of career (as minister—successively Baptist, “Christian,” Universalist, and “Christian” again—physician, dentist, publisher, and merchant), and in the midst of incessant polemical creativity, one thing remained constant for Elias Smith. His anchor was unshakable belief in a radically egalitarian biblicism. If the religion of formalist Presbyterians and Episcopalians was tinctured with American values, Smith’s religion represented a more complete assimilation. That religion was, in the words of a solid recent biography, “a specifically Christian republicanism growing out of a New Light evangelical heritage, conjoined with a rapidly evolving national political culture in a climate of strident partisan conflict.”46 Smith was especially important as a founder of New England’s “Christian” movement, a radically antielitist drive that sought a harmonious, unified church for all who wished to live according to the New Testament’s “perfect law of liberty.” To build such a church, however, it was necessary to clear away traditional biblical interpretations, traditional denominations, and traditional clerical authority.

…

“The Bible is to the theologian what nature is to the man of science. It is his store-house of facts; and his method of ascertaining what the Bible teaches, is the same as that which the natural philosopher adopts to ascertain what nature teaches…. The duty of the Christian theologian is to ascertain, collect, and combine all the facts which God has revealed concerning himself and our relation to Him. These facts are all in the Bible.” On the basis of these assertions, Hodge then went on to suggest that “the Theologian [is] to be guided by the same rules as the Man of Science.”

[I once admired Hodge, and would have been pleased, if not thrilled, by this declaration.]

[No longer. But this sort of approach was part of how “America’s God” became so unlike the true God.]

Selective resistance to secularity

In his book Fault Lines, Voddie Baucham argues that

The social sciences may be useful tools, but they are far from necessary. ‘All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work’ (2 Timothy 3:16–17). In no area does God require me to walk in a level of righteousness for which the Scriptures do not equip me — including any and all aspects of justice.

The logic of Baucham’s argument, which permeates his book, is that the Bible is enough. It is enough to parse the complexity of race in the United States, and enough to provide a roadmap for justice. Let’s be clear: Baucham agrees that the gospel has social implications. He is also clear that the social sciences are simply unnecessary to illuminate what those social implications are, and how the gospel compels us to act.

This is, in fact, explicitly outlined in the Dallas Statement:

We deny that Christian belief, character, or conduct can be dictated by any other authority, and we deny that the postmodern ideologies derived from intersectionality, radical feminism, and critical race theory are consistent with biblical teaching. We further deny that competency to teach on any biblical issue comes from any qualification for spiritual people other than clear understanding and simple communication of what is revealed in Scripture.

According to Baucham and the signers of the Dallas Statement, the claim that secular scholarship is necessary to understand and address the contemporary racial landscape are violating the doctrine of sufficiency, and compromising their fidelity to Scripture. Despite passing affirmations that Christians ought to read broadly, insofar as it pertains to matters of race and justice, Baucham, et al., clearly view secular scholarship as suspect, and inessential to comprehending and shaping responses to the social problems we face.

Of course, in their view, not all secular sources are suspect. Many of the signers of the Dallas Statement happily employ the work of James Lindsay or Thomas Sowell in their analysis of our social realities. The real concern lies in a particular set of sources: “postmodern ideologies derived from intersectionality, radical feminism, and critical race theory.” It is these sources which consume massive amounts of energy expended by Owen Strachan, Voddie Baucham, Tom Ascol, and many others. Summarized by many under the slushy appellation “wokeness,” these writers are convinced that reliance on anything that smacks of woke is deleterious to the faith given once for all to the saints.

Josh Fenska, Thin Discipleship‌

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.

Monday, 10/21/24

The second section of this post, “Unapologetic TDS,” is venting, pure and simple. If you’re tired of hearing what’s wrong with Trump, I sort of understand. Trump Derangement Syndrome is that first case of presidential derangement I’ve ever had. And though I’m not ashamed to completely oppose Trump, I understand why someone without TDS might find it unedifying.

Public affairs with the TDS turned off

Aphorism

Don’t run on boutique issues in a Walmart nation.

I was at the wheel of the car when some podcast or other delivered this up as an old saw. I’d never heard it before but found it delightful — even though I’m more boutique than WalMart.

In the same vein, more or less:

Much of what has come to be called “wokeness” consists of highly educated white people who went to fantastically expensive colleges trying to show the world, and themselves, that they are victims, or at least allied with the victims. Watching Ivy League students complain about how poorly society treats them is not good for my digestion.

David Brooks, Confessions of a Republican Exile

(I first went to a WalMart in the south in 1968, not far from Bentonville, AR, WalMart’s home. I had no idea what the future held.)

Marcus Welby, VC

If you let private equity buy a health care business, you run the risk that profits are going to come before patients. That’s the nature of private equity. And right now, private equity firms are buying health care companies in record numbers.

Investments in health care have grown from less than $5 billion in 2000 to more than $120 billion in 2019, according to work done by the Eileen Appelbaum, co-director of the Center for Economic Policy and Research, and Cornell professor Rosemary Batt; private equity owned hospitals now account for approximately one in five for-profit hospitals in the United States. (Sources: penguinrandomhouse.com, washingtonpost.com)

Via John Ellis

Law of Group Polarization

It’s a fact of human nature that when like-minded people gather, they tend to become more extreme. This concept — called the law of group polarization — applies across ideological and institutional lines. The term was most clearly defined and popularized in a 1999 paper by Cass Sunstein. The law of group polarization, according to Sunstein, “helps to explain extremism, ‘radicalization,’ cultural shifts and the behavior of political parties and religious organizations.”

David French, I Don’t Want to Live in a Monoculture, and Neither Do You.

That’s a pretty boring title, but the Law of Group Polarization is a real thing. Whence the put-down “you need to get out more.”

Unapologetic TDS

In what hellscape do vigilantes attack FEMA workers?

To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.

…

Other influencers, such as the Trump sycophant Laura Loomer, have urged their followers to disrupt the disaster agency’s efforts to help hurricane victims. “Do not comply with FEMA,” she posted on X. “This is a matter of survival.”

Charlie Warzel

(I consider this political because the vigilantes strike me as crazed in a generally MAGAfied direction.)

The meta-lesson of Election 2024

An disconcerting old thought: we get the government we deserve.

No election prior to the Trump era, regardless of the outcome, ever caused me to question the fundamental decency of America.

Peter Wehner

Late Weimar America

Rhetoric has a history. The words democracy and tyranny were debated in ancient Greece; the phrase separation of powers became important in the 17th and 18th centuries. The word vermin, as a political term, dates from the 1930s and ’40s, when both fascists and communists liked to describe their political enemies as vermin, parasites, and blood infections, as well as insects, weeds, dirt, and animals. The term has been revived and reanimated, in an American presidential campaign, with Donald Trump’s description of his opponents as “radical-left thugs” who “live like vermin.”

…

If you connect your opponents with disease, illness, and poisoned blood, if you dehumanize them as insects or animals, if you speak of squashing them or cleansing them as if they were pests or bacteria, then you can much more easily arrest them, deprive them of rights, exclude them, or even kill them. If they are parasites, they aren’t human. If they are vermin, they don’t get to enjoy freedom of speech, or freedoms of any kind. And if you squash them, you won’t be held accountable.

Until recently, this kind of language was not a normal part of American presidential politics. Even George Wallace’s notorious, racist, neo-Confederate 1963 speech, his inaugural speech as Alabama governor and the prelude to his first presidential campaign, avoided such language. Wallace called for “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” But he did not speak of his political opponents as “vermin” or talk about them poisoning the nation’s blood. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, which ordered Japanese Americans into internment camps following the outbreak of World War II, spoke of “alien enemies” but not parasites.

In the 2024 campaign, that line has been crossed. Trump blurs the distinction between illegal immigrants and legal immigrants—the latter including his wife, his late ex-wife, the in-laws of his running mate, and many others. He has said of immigrants, “They’re poisoning the blood of our country” and “They’re destroying the blood of our country.” He has claimed that many have “bad genes.” He has also been more explicit: “They’re not humans; they’re animals”; they are “cold-blooded killers.” He refers more broadly to his opponents—American citizens, some of whom are elected officials—as “the enemy from within … sick people, radical-left lunatics.” Not only do they have no rights; they should be “handled by,” he has said, “if necessary, National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.”

In using this language, Trump knows exactly what he is doing. He understands which era and what kind of politics this language evokes. “I haven’t read Mein Kampf,” he declared, unprovoked, during one rally—an admission that he knows what Hitler’s manifesto contains, whether or not he has actually read it. “If you don’t use certain rhetoric,” he told an interviewer, “if you don’t use certain words, and maybe they’re not very nice words, nothing will happen.”

Anne Applebaum

Wordplay

David Rothkopf, the host of the podcast Deep State Radio, beheld Trump’s descent this week from “being periodically adrift” to something stranger and more savage: “He’s one cloudless night away from baying at the moon.” (Mary Azoy, Chapel Hill, N.C., and Steven Rauch, Claremont, Calif., among many others)

Frank Bruni

Appeal to the distaff

Have you ever looked after toddlers who insist on showing you everything they have done—terrible stick-figure drawings, what they’ve left in the potty—and demand that you admire it? If you have, then you’ve experienced something very similar to Donald Trump’s performance at a Fox News town hall yesterday in Cumming, Georgia, with an all-female audience.

Helen Lewis

“Donald Trump” is “a substantial exaggeration”

U.S. News and World Report: We Created a Monster: Trump Was a TV Fantasy Invented for ‘The Apprentice’

I want to apologize to America. I helped create a monster.

For nearly 25 years, I led marketing at NBC and NBCUniversal. I led the team that marketed “The Apprentice,” the reality show that made Donald Trump a household name outside of New York City, where he was better known for overextending his empire and appearing in celebrity gossip columns.

To sell the show, we created the narrative that Trump was a super-successful businessman who lived like royalty. That was the conceit of the show. At the very least, it was a substantial exaggeration; at worst, it created a false narrative by making him seem more successful than he was.

Via The Dispatch

Kabuki Normality

The point is not that Trump is too bilious to be funny; the point is that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, and many others who should know better sat there and pretended that Trump was just a regular political candidate soft-shoeing his way through an Al Smith dinner. All of these people should have refused to share a stage with Trump, but the dinner was another example of what Jonathan Last acidly—and rightly—calls “Kabuki Normality,” the careful pretense that all is well, and that appearing with a convicted felon, a man found liable for sexual abuse, a racist and a misogynist and a “fascist to the core,” is just another day at the office for the leader of New York’s Catholics and the senior Democratic senator from New York.

Tom Nichols, Trump’s ‘Day of Love’ Caps a Bizarre Week

Make your case

Donald Trump is an ailing, dim, mentally unstable moral grotesque who attempted to stage a coup d’état the last time he lost an election. If your case for Trump is “Yes, but,” then you are going to have to tell me something about Kamala Harris that I do not already know. Maybe there is a persuasive case to be made. But I haven’t heard it.

Kevin D. Williamson

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Sunday, 10/20/24

Good news for Kings and Princes

Predictably, secular authorities convinced by the reformers’ truth claims liked the distinction drawn between the necessity of obedience to them and of disobedience to Rome. They liked hearing “the Gospel” accompanied by such “good news”—it would allow them, for starters, to appropriate for themselves all ecclesiastical property, including the many buildings and lands that belonged to religious orders, and to use it or the money from its sale in whatever ways they saw fit. In two stages during the late 1530s, seizing for himself the vast holdings of all the hundreds of English monasteries and friaries, Henry VIII would demonstrate how thoroughly a ruler could learn this lesson without even having to accept Lutheran or Reformed Protestant doctrines about grace, faith, salvation, or worship.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Repentance in a nutshell

Repentance is everything you do to get sin, those inborn passions, out of you. It’s reading, thinking, praying, weeding out disruptive influences in your life, sharing time with fellow Christians, following the guidance of the saints. Repentance is the renunciation of what harms us and the acquisition of what is beneficial to us, writes a holy counselor.

Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity

Prayer of Penitence

The prayer of penitence leads us to reflect critically on our own lives. If it is uttered sincerely, it leads us to repent in humility, not just of particular wrongs we have done, but of our whole shameful and degraded state of being. The paradox is that, far from leading to lethargy or despair, such penitence brings a new kind of strength. Sexual sin is never merely sexual, but always has motives that are rooted in the passions—whether the need to be loved, or the lust for domination, or the desire to prove oneself attractive, or any of a dozen other motives that come readily to mind.

Frederica Mathewes-Green & Rod Dreher, Healing Humanity

The worth of a man

… to believe that wealth is the only significant measure of the worth of an individual, a family, or a community is to reject the teaching of nearly every religion and wisdom tradition that ever was.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

Option preclusion

[T]he move from taking God for granted to disputing God’s existence is a move from naïve to reflective, from a position where one set of options is precluded to a position where that set of options is fully available. Underlying that move, however, is the move from porous to buffered selves, and that is a move from naïve to naïve. It is, in other words, a move from a position where one set of options is precluded to a position where another set of options is precluded.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

Perdition

Miles Smith, Perdition. Potent.

Caveat: This touches on American electoral politics.

Historical views of the Rapture

Do you want to be like Tim?

If you are a writer or pastor who wants to preach like [the late Tim] Keller, you won’t get there if your strategy is “listen to Keller and copy him.” Keller himself would tell you that that’s a terrible idea.

Instead, do what Tim did: Go to seminary. After seminary, read everything George Whitefield wrote. Read Calvin’s Institutes and his sermons. Read The Lord of the Rings over and over and over. Read everything C. S. Lewis ever wrote. Read every Puritan paperback from Banner of Truth. Read sociology. Read social theory. Read Bavinck. Read current events books and a steady line up of journalists. Do all of that within the context of a family alongside your spouse and while talking to people facing ordinary life problems who are in need of counsel and aid and think about how to explain what you’re learning to them in ways that are sensible to them. Lewis had a rule that if he couldn’t say something in a way an ordinary British person could understand it meant that he wasn’t ready to say that thing yet. Follow that rule.

That is how you become a good missionary.

Jake Meador.

Heh, heh, heh! You had me going there for a minute, Jake. What’s the quick way to preaching like Tim Keller? I don’t want to be faithful for decades and decades with no assurance that I’ll ever become famous; I want a surefire to fame by next year.

East versus West

The thing is the cultural habit of rationalizing and abstracting has also made serious inroads into Catholic life and practice in the West. The crisis, Kingsnorth concluded, is not so much one of Catholic versus Protestant as it is of Eastern Christianity versus Western Christianity. It is a conclusion I arrived at not long after I left Catholicism for Orthodoxy in 2006, the result of a great spiritual trauma. I had thought of Catholicism as a mystic-friendly form of Christianity—which it is, but only by comparison to Protestantism. When seen from the East, both Catholicism and Protestantism—in the West, at least—are marooned primarily in the head and are futilely trying to think their way out of the civilizational shipwreck of the modern West.

Though Orthodoxy shares with Catholicism a fundamentally sacramental metaphysics, in practice Orthodoxy is far more mystical, emphasizing that the conversion of the heart must precede the conversion of the intellect. It does not deny the intellect, only orders it within an anthropological hierarchy.

One aspect of Orthodoxy that particularly appealed to Kingsnorth is its panentheism—the principle that God is, as the Orthodox prayer says, “everywhere present and filling all things.” It’s not the same as pantheism, which says that the material universe is God. Orthodoxy teaches that God is separate from his creation but also interpenetrates it with his energies, or his force. Consider how the warmth and pleasant glow of an English hillside on an August afternoon occur because the faraway sun penetrates the grass, the flowers, and the earth with its energies. The hillside is not the sun, but it testifies to the presence of the sun in its material being.

“The earth is not God, but God is there, present in nature, not in some far-off heaven,” Kingsnorth says. He goes on: “He’s deeply entwined in everything. Creation is the book of God, as Augustine said, I think. That is explicitly recognized in Orthodoxy. So what I was finding, weirdly enough, was a sort of ancestral Christianity that my ancestors in England would have had access to, and that the early Celtic saints certainly had access to. When I became Orthodox, a lot of people said to me, ‘Welcome home,’ and, strangely, it did feel like I was coming home. It felt like there’s something here that we had, that we lost.”

Rod Dreher.

I’ve been a fan of most of Rod Dreher’s books since Crunchy Cons. I want to distinguish his books from his columns, which I have frequently disagreed with. I also concede that one of his books was too raw, too transparent, too kiss-and-tell for my tastes.

Rod has been through a lot — openly for the last two years or so, quietly for a decade before that. Oh, heck: he’s been through a lot his whole life, much at the hands of family who lived in Louisiana at an extreme end of insularity. It’s hard to imagine a family that felt no pride in a member making it fairly big in New York City publishing because he dared to leave home, a family that affirmatively poisoned the minds of the next generation with refrains that Uncle Rod was uppity and no damn good.

I think he’s coming out of it, but he thought he had come out of it when he wrote How Dante Can Save Your Life. He’s voting for Donald Trump because Trump is the enemy of his enemies.. I cannot. I’m more with Miles Smith: “don’t tell me it is anything other than tragic that either of the two leading candidates for the presidency will eventually govern the American republic.”

Rod has a new book coming out tomorrow. It may be his most important; I’ve had it on pre-order for months.

This rave review struck me as capturing what’s special about Rod:

Dreher has an uncanny ability to articulate how religious conservatives feel, even to pre-empt it. Previous books gave us the Crunchy Cons (2006), whose eponymous conservatives want to turn the clock back; The Benedict Option (2017), which meant opting out of liberal culture; and Live Not By Lies (2020), which drew a line between “Marxist” and “woke”.

I can attest, spending much time among devout Christians, that Dreher has done it again, capturing our present mood: we’re trapped between wanting to throw ourselves into movement politics to defeat The Beast, or looking inwards in the hopes of becoming the change one wants to see in the world. Many of us are asking whether the best service we could do to Christianity is simply to become better Christians.

(Boldface added.) If you doubt that he has pre-empted conversations, ask yourself how often you’ve encountered the term “the Benedict Option,” which is literally his coinage.

These are a few of my favorite things

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

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead

Christian fruits

“My people have been oppressed for nearly 2000 years. For 1200 years they endured Dhimmitude, a system of oppression made for the sole purpose of humiliating & breaking them. Today they face persecution in their homeland. And yet I don’t know of a single Coptic terrorist. Do you?”

Samuel Tadros.

Preaching the Gospel

“How do I get saved?” is not the gospel. And “So, would you like to get saved?” is not preaching the gospel.

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, Arise, O God

Pride

If you hide the gifts you have been given in order to appear humble, then you are very proud indeed. Wishing to appear humble is the worst form of pride.

Vassilios Papavassiliou, Thirty Steps to Heaven

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

Wednesday, 10/16/24

Not Politics

Iatrogenic Customer Dissatisfaction

I took my Lincoln into the dealer last week because wiper fluid wouldn’t spray. They fixed it and suggested wiper blades, too.

I of course got a Customer Satisfaction Survey afterword because — well, this is Weimar America 2024.

In my value system, a 3 out of 5 means this was a perfectly okay experience, no problem. I don’t expect bliss or epiphanies from a car repair.

But to Ford-Lincoln, anything less that straight 5s triggers a message to the dealer that it desperately needs to call me to fix things. So the dealer called, and I told him his corporate overlords are idiots.

And then, incredibly, another survey came to ask whether the dealer called me, and now what are my answers to the other questions (how likely are you to recommend, etc.)? I couldn’t just say the dealer called me; the other questions were mandatory so I couldn’t submit the form without answering them.

But, aha!, they had a field for free-form comments, which I filled and submitted thus:

I am never going to answer another customer satisfaction survey. You won’t be satisfied until I’ve lied and given you all fives, so I’m going to lie like a dog and give them to you. But the truth is that Ford-Lincoln has burnt some goodwill by the refusal to accept “this was a satisfactory service call.” You won’t even let me say the dealer followed up and leave it at that, because I can’t say that (which is true) without answering all the other questions and risking another round of fawning attention if the answers are less than 5.
I DON’T WANT FAWNING ATTENTION. I WANTED MY CAR FIXED. I GOT MY CAR FIXED. NOW LEAVE ME ALONE! WHAT KIND OF IDIOTS ARE TELLING YOU THAT THIS HARASSMENT IS A WAY TO BUILD CUSTOMER SATISFACTION?!

(That felt good, but I’m not sure my pulse and blood pressure are back down yet. I claim no copyright on this, and you can substitute another “f-word” for “fawning.”)

Gratitude Grievance

I beam with pride when I see companies like Shopify, GitHub, Gusto, Zendesk, Instacart, Procore, Doximity, Coinbase, and others claim billion-dollar valuations from work done with Rails. It’s beyond satisfying to see this much value created with a web framework I’ve spent the last two decades evolving and maintaining. A beautiful prize from a life’s work realized.

But it’s also possible to look at this through another lens, and see a huge missed opportunity! If hundreds of billions of dollars in valuations came to be from tools that I originated, why am I not at least a pétit billionaire?! …

This line of thinking is lethal to the open source spirit.

The moment you go down the path of gratitude grievances, you’ll see ungrateful ghosts everywhere. People who owe you something, if they succeed. A ratio that’s never quite right between what you’ve helped create and what you’ve managed to capture. If you let it, it’ll haunt you forever.

…

Thou shall not lust after thy open source’s users and their success.

David Heinemeier Hansson

The Meaning of Existence

Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
moment by moment as the universe.

Even this fool of a body
lives it in part,
and would have full dignity within it
but for the ignorant freedom
of my talking mind.

Les Murray, New Selected Poems

Religion (whatever that is)

Papering over an abyss of waste and horror

[T]he 2024 presidential campaign is a type of tragedy. For many Evangelicals, choosing between the two is a near-existential psycho-intellectual crisis. Because we lack an understanding of the tragic, we tend to think that everything we do must somehow be “redemptive.” …

…

Evangelical treatment of politics as nearly sacramental, rather than a part of temporal or natural life, has left them unable to conceive of political tragedy. Greg Wolfe in Image sees this as an essentially American failing, and he’s probably right. “My youthful, earnest religiosity” Wolfe writes, papered over “an abyss of waste and horror with innocuous pieties.”

…

Evangelicals seem convinced that they could never be a part of a national political tragedy, and their refusal to concede the essentially tragic nature of American politics is to their peril. Every succeeding generation of evangelicals, left right and center, seem convinced that salvation lies in their own political exertions, seemingly unaware that they too could be a part of a national political tragedy, wherein God’s judgment comes on the moral and immoral, on the pious and impious. There are cases, I am sure, to be made for voting for Trump, and that is who most of my tribe will tend towards. Maybe it is necessary. Maybe it is prudent. But don’t tell me it is anything other than tragic that either of the two leading candidates for the presidency will eventually govern the American republic.

Miles Smith at Mere Orthodoxy.

“Charismatics” didn’t used to be “Evangelicals”

There was in fact a strange mix of Evangelicalism clericalism and charismatic political action that Trump effectively harnessed in unique ways.

It is not coincidental that many, if not most, exvangelical memoirs are written by people who have had some background with charismatic influence, and why the specific Cold War confluence of legacy Evangelicals and charismatics created the conditions for the exvangelical movement. In their Washington Post piece Erica Ramirez and Leah Payne rightly note that while the “Pentecostal-Charismatic movement overlaps with evangelical traditions in many ways, especially in their conservative ideas about political issues such as abortion, marriage and prayer in schools,” evangelicals and Pentecostals are “historically distinct — until the mid-20th century, Pentecostals and their Charismatic descendants weren’t routinely grouped with their evangelical counterparts.”

There was in fact a strange mix of Evangelicalism clericalism and charismatic political action that Trump effectively harnessed in unique ways.

Miles Smith, Reading the Exvangelicals

It’s tempting to muse about why both “sides” consented to the conflation of pentecostal/charismatic and evangelical.

Perhaps another day. If I tried it today, I’d be neglecting other things and my take would probably be too cynical.

Politics

New Nadir

The Rutherford County, North Carolina, Sheriff’s Office said on Monday that police officers arrested a 44-year-old man on Saturday suspected of threatening violence against Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster workers. The Washington Post reported over the weekend that FEMA ordered its employees to temporarily evacuate the county after National Guard service members reported seeing a truck of armed militants who were “out hunting FEMA,” though law enforcement said the suspect acted alone. The man—carrying a handgun and rifle at the time of his arrest—was charged with “going armed to the terror of the public” and released later that day on $10,000 bail.

Via The Dispatch.

Militants hunting for FEMA workers in hurricane devastation because — why, in God’s name!? Can we sink any lower?

Kamala’s best case?

Bret Stephens, Harris Needs a Closing Argument. Here’s One. is very appealing.

With Harris I’m pretty sure there will be another Election in four years; I’m not at all sure with Trump. But with Trump at +16 in my state, I have the luxury of voting for neither of them.

Poetic justice

Less than four weeks from the election, Michigan’s Democratic governor made an in-kind contribution to Donald Trump’s campaign. Gretchen Whitmer appeared last week in a video featuring her placing a Dorito chip on the tongue of a kneeling social-media influencer. After Michigan’s bishops denounced the clip as “specifically imitating the posture and gestures of Catholics receiving the Holy Eucharist,” Ms. Whitmer apologized.

The kicker: She was wearing a Harris-Walz campaign hat in the video.

The swing-state governor says she had no idea people might find the post offensive, which speaks to how out of touch Democratic elites are ….

William McGurn

This may qualify as poetic justice. Kamala Harris deserves to be outed as anti-Catholic (see this as well as the McGurn column) quite apart from Gretchen Whitmer’s mockery of the eucharist.

But I’m kind of waiting for the rest of the Whitmer story. What’s above is suspiciously weird; I just don’t know how Whitmer could have blundered her way into that highly-scripted gaff unless it was some kind of Borat or Project Veritas entrapment. Maybe that kneeling social-media influencer was a conservative provocateur, in which case I’d fault her (him?) equally with Whitmer in staging the mockery.

Russian 1988, China 2024

So: Why didn’t Gorbachev’s reforms succeed and save an empire?

Regarding the key figure, opinion was split at least five ways: some said it had been Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk; others, Russian President Boris Yeltsin; still others, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev or KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov. Finally, one or two passed the credit (or guilt) back to Leonid Brezhnev.

Each had a cogent reason for his answer. Moscow’s Mayor Gavriil Popov and Alexander Yakovlev fingered Kravchuk because his action in leading Ukraine to complete independence had removed an essential component of any possible union. Without Ukraine, their argument went, a union would be unworkable, since the discrepancy in size between Russia and each of the other republics was so great. At least one unit of intermediate size was needed to create the sort of balance a federation, or even confederation, would require.nov Others, such as Anatoly Sobchak and Konstantin Lubenchenko, the last speaker of the USSR Supreme Soviet, did not agree with this logic.

Russia, Belarus, the countries of Central Asia, and perhaps one or two from the Transcaucasus could have formed a viable union even without Ukraine, they argued. Only one republic was irreplaceable, and that was Russia. Ergo, Yeltsin had been the key figure. If he had not conspired with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus to form the Commonwealth of Independent States, some form of confederation could have been cobbled together to the benefit of all.

“No,” said others, including Vladislav Starkov and Sergei Stankevich, who felt that Gorbachev’s stubbornness, his failure to understand the force of nationalism, his devotion to a discredited socialism, and the authoritarian streak in his personality had prevented him from voluntarily transferring the sort of power to the republics that their leaders demanded. His failures in leadership, in short, had determined the collapse of the state he headed, and no other political figure could have saved it.

Anatoly Chernyayev, ever loyal to his boss, would have none of that. He felt that a union treaty would have been signed if the attempted coup had not occurred in August. This implied that Vladimir Kryuchkov had been the key figure. He, after all, had organized the coup, and nobody else could have done it without his cooperation.

Starkov, who named Gorbachev as the principal culprit, also pointed out that Leonid Brezhnev had shared much of the responsibility, for he was the Soviet leader who had set the stage for collapse by neglecting the country’s economic, social, and ethnic problems and by permitting local “mafias” under the guise of the Communist Party to obtain a hammerlock on power in many of the union republics.

Jack Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire

This stuff’s complicated and most of us Americans haven’t got a clue what Russia is about. Gobachev tried major reform, but there were too many moving pieces and personalities — so he got collapse in the end.

China seems to be in similar bind as Gorbachev: economic dysfunction, the cure of which might bring down the CCP.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Columbus Day (observed)

History Rhymes

As it turned out, Yeltsin probably did not need to conduct a political campaign in the usual sense. As the Party’s hostility became more evident, Yeltsin’s popularity rose. The public attitude was that anybody the Communist apparatchiks detested must be a hero. The campaign the Party waged against Yeltsin was not merely futile; it was Yeltsin’s strongest political asset.

Jack F. Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire

Hostage situations

Republicans can’t unequivocally say that Joe Biden won the 2020 Presidential election.

But Democrats can’t say that a human being with a penis is not a woman.

Both major parties are hostage to crazies.

Hearsay High Dudgeon

Of Ta-Nahesi Coates

“Part of me would have done anything to go home,” he writes in his new book The Message, about his 10-day trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories in the summer of 2023. “The part that always grouses about the rigors of reporting, the awkwardness of asking strangers intimate questions, the discipline of listening intently.” Readers, if listening to other people is a chore, then journalism might not be the career for you.

It could also be that Coates hates reporting because he is bad at it. Every reporter knows the a-ha moment of living through the anecdote that will make the perfect lead or kicker. No such perfect anecdotes have ever happened to Coates or, if they did, he was oblivious to them. His previous book, Between the World and Me, was an indictment of America as a racist hellscape, yet the worst act of racism he recounted from his own life—not something he read about in a newspaper or a history book—was a white lady on an escalator who shouted at his dawdling son, who was blocking her way, “Come on!”

Helen Andrews.

I have no personal opinion of Mr. Coates. One of my then-favorites, Rod Dreher, was in awe of him as a writer, but before I read anything of his (save possibly a magazine article or such), he turned dour (that much I knew) and pretty much dropped off my radar.

But Andrews’ description of the worst active racism he personally experienced reminds me of a pattern I’ll call “hearsay high dudgeon.”

One notices such things, first, in one’s adversaries. 30+ years ago, my fair city, followed by the sister city across the river and my fair county, decided that we desperately needed to add sexual orientation to our human relations codes. There was no precipitating hate crime. The precipitant was merely that a liberal city councilman’s son came out, and the ordinance amendment felt like a father’s homage to his son.

As I listened to the heated public comments, I waited for evidence that we had unjust discrimination in our collective hearts. In three sets of public comments (one in each of the three jurisdictions in question), I heard one first-hand complaint from a lesbian whose military career was somehow deflected (I do not remember the details) before the military began liberalizing on such matters under the Clinton administration. (Of course, our local ordinance wasn’t going to change how the United States military treated such matters.)

But then there was one other first-hand account of local adverse effects: a male college student’s two male roommates no longer wanted to live with him after they found his stash of gay porn. Arguably, the Ordinances would have made that actionable as “discrimination in housing.” But was that discrimination “unjust”? Do we really want government intruding on roommate preferences?

Yes, we do in my community. Or maybe the testimony was irrelevant because our representatives just know, without evidence, what homophobic blackguards their constituents are.

Only later did I begin noticing similar things said by my allies. Various Christians also live in hearsay high dudgeon, collecting and cherishing accounts of “persecution” against other Christians.

Isn’t it pretty debilitating to present yourself or your tribe as victims to gain sympathy?

* * * * * * *

I have a sequel to the preceding. Some readers might wonder why I opposed extending anti-discrimination measures to the attribute of sexual orientation. They might even be indignant that I did that.

In large part, it was because I don’t think all “discrimination” is invidious (or unjust, if you prefer). “Discrimination” can be the epithet version of “discernment,” a very good and important word.

Let me illustrate. Suppose you run a government institution for troubled adolescent girls. Suppose you need staff and are determined not to “discriminate.” Suppose a 24-year-old man applies for a position that will allow him unsupervised access to those troubled adolescent girls.

Of course you have rules as safeguards against sexual predation, but rules can be broken.

Should you be discerning and recognize that hiring a man likely to be sexually attracted to some of his charges, in a position that allows unsupervised access to the objects of his desire, is a formula for disaster and scandal? Or should you follow your nondiscrimination ideology and hire him if he is otherwise the best candidate, perhaps giving yourself a pat on the back for open-mindedness?

Now flip that script. Suppose one runs a government institution for troubled adolescent boys. Suppose one needs staff and is determined not to “discriminate.” Suppose a 24-year-old “out” gay man applies for a position that will allow him unsupervised access to those troubled adolescent boys.

Same questions.

If you said you’d hire the gay man, consider the story of Greg Ledbetter (and Angela Kalscheur, too – she illustrates the first hypothetical). Greg Ledbetter was the recipient of the legislative homage, the son who came out to his father the City Councilman who started the gay-rights ordinance balls rolling.

Ledbetter was hired by a home for troubled boys after he was “out” to anyone in town who paid any attention. A few years later, two of those troubled boys came forward to say he preyed on them sexually. The local press declared editorially that they were put up to the accusations by fundamentalist homophobes and that the episode was an illustration of blackguard homophobia. Somehow, Ledbetter’s defense attorneys got a signed retraction from one of the boys and the charges went away.

But the accusations were true. Ledbetter had even videotaped the encounters, as Wisconsin police discovered when they investigated him for similar sexual predation up there more than a decade later.

He’s in custody for the rest of his years. His journalistic enablers are complicit in the abuse of dozens of boys — and they didn’t do Ledbetter any favors either.

I didn’t know at the time whether the 1990s accusations were true or false (I had spoken to the boys, but did not undertake to represent them legally) nor do I expect that the journalists would have known. What I expected from the journalists was something better than damnable conspiracy theories about fundamentalist Christians, a fundamentalist being anyone more conservative than the journalist. The journalistic reaction was tribal, not rational; gay is good, conservative Christian bad.

I did not think that a gay man inevitably would bugger boys in his charge if given the chance any more than a straight man would copulate willy-nilly with nubile girls. But I was good and damn sure, from personal experience of male adolescence and young adulthood (from which vantage point some adolescent girls remained alluring), that the chances were way too high for his hiring to have been defensible.

Saying “no” to his application would have been “discernment,” not “discrimination.” But the Ordinance we passed categorically forbids any “difference in treatment in the areas of employment, housing and public accommodations” based on sex or sexual orientation (or other attributed). No discernment is allowed.

Democrat conspiracy kooks

The claims had a powerful effect on public opinion among Democrats, just as Trump’s ranting and raving is doing now among Republicans. In March 2018, a YouGov poll revealed that an astonishingly high 66 percent of Democrats believed that in 2016 Russia tampered with vote tallies in order to get Donald Trump elected president — a claim with no more evidence behind it than Trump’s current assertions about being deprived of victory by voter fraud.

Damon Linker at The Week

Victimhood

In all seriousness, I am offended by the “typical” public school turning Orgasms for All After You Buy Consumer Crap You Don’t Need into our tacit national religion. But I’m roughly as offended by “Christian” clergy and school officials deceptively indoctrinating kids in sectarian Christianity*.

Remember that, dear Christian, next time you’re tempted to paint us as uniquely victims of the Zeitgeist. The Zeitgeist varies from place-to-place.

Empty pantsuit

The closest Harris has gotten to articulating her agenda is the following, from the 60 Minutes interview:

In the last four years, I have been vice president of the United States. And I have been traveling our country. And I have been listening to folks and seeking what is possible in terms of common ground. I believe in building consensus. We are a diverse people. Geographically, regionally, in terms of where we are in our backgrounds. And what the American people do want is that we have leaders who can build consensus. Where we can figure out compromise and understand it’s not a bad thing, as long as you don’t compromise your values, to find common-sense solutions. And that has been my approach.

This is a classic Harris quote. It’s impossible to disagree with, but it’s also so empty that it’s hard even to agree with it either. It doesn’t tell us what she personally would push for before she’d compromise, what she really has conviction about, what she really believes in. In fact, the more I listened to her in these interviews, the more worried I became that she doesn’t actually believe in anything.

… Trump knows how to sell — in fourth grade language. Harris only knows how to charm elite liberals — in language only elite liberals use. It’s the only political skill she’s ever needed to have. And it’s not going to be enough.

…

Look: I’m voting for her. Or rather, I’m voting against Trump. (The most striking aspect of the various endorsements of Harris — from The New Yorker to The Atlantic — is that they were almost entirely about Trump.) But I’ll tell you this: catching Trump’s various podcast and radio spots gives a very different impression. He is as reckless as she is careful; as conversational and natural as she is stilted and scripted. He is much more comfortable in the new media universe than she is.

Check out his interview with Theo Von, and watch him and Theo talk about cocaine addiction; or see Trump’s appearance on comic Andrew Shulz’s show. Here’s Schulz bursting out laughing when Trump says he’s “a basically truthful person” — and Trump carries on.

Andrew Sullivan, who thinks Harris is losing.

Miscellany

In his newsletter, Political Wire, Taegan Goddard surveyed that fabulist’s unfabulous merch: “The constant stream of Trump infomercials — hawking watches, silver coins, sneakers, bibles, coffee table books, NFTs — is beginning to feel like a going-out-of-business sale.” (Nancy Jones, Iowa City)
At Defector, David Roth recapped The Washington Post’s interviews with Trump rallygoers who weren’t staying for the whole show: “Some of the people The Post spoke to left because they were sick of ‘the insults,’ which feels a bit like storming out of a steakhouse dinner just before dessert because you don’t eat meat.” (Matt Keenan, Sharon, Mass.)

Frank Bruni

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Thursday, 9/5/24

Culture

A key moment in modernity

One of the key moments in the creation of modernity occurs when production moves outside the household. So long as productive work occurs within the structure of households, it is easy and right to understand that work as part of the sustaining of the community of the household and of those wider forms of community which the household in turn sustains. As, and to the extent that, work moves outside the household and is put to the service of impersonal capital, the realm of work tends to become separated from everything but the service of biological survival and the reproduction of the labor force, on the one hand, and that of institutionalized acquisitiveness, on the other. Pleonexia, a vice in the Aristotelian scheme, is now the driving force of modern productive work.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Why essays?

Of all the literary genres, I am fondest of the essay, with its meandering course that (we hope) faithfully represents the meanderings of the human mind … certain images in advance and people will recur throughout this book, returning perhaps when you think we’re done with them. I write this way because none of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead (emphasis added)

Interrogating “Self-expression”

[A]lthough everything we do is self-expression, we normally describe an action as self-expression only to say “this is good.” Used that way, the term is powerful. For example, foul pictures and language weren’t formerly counted as free speech because they didn’t communicate ideas and arguments. Today, though, they are counted as free speech, just because we say they “express” the “self.” And of course, logically, they do. If I spout a stream of profanities, I may be expressing nothing more of myself than an urge to blow off steam. But I may also be divulging my desire for attention, my craving to sound tough, my enjoyment of filthiness, or even my inability to express a cogent argument.

But why should the term “self-expression” have such power to connect itself with our approval? Probably for at least two reasons. The first is that the idea of expressing ourselves validates our narcissism. The second is that it shields us from criticism.

J Budziszewski

Modern finance is a shell-game

John Lanchester:

Lending money where it’s needed is what the modern form of finance, for the most part, does not do. What modern finance does, for the most part, is gamble. It speculates on the movements of prices and makes bets on their direction. Here’s a way to think about it: you live in a community that is entirely self-sufficient but produces one cash crop a year, consisting of a hundred crates of mangoes. In advance of the harvest, because it’s helpful for you to get the money now and not later, you sell the future ownership of the mango crop to a broker, for a dollar a crate. The broker immediately sells the rights to the crop to a dealer who’s heard a rumour that thanks to bad weather mangoes are going to be scarce and therefore extra valuable, so he pays $1.10 a crate. A speculator on international commodity markets hears about the rumour and buys the future crop from him for $1.20. A specialist ‘momentum trader’, who picks up trends in markets and bets on their continuation (yes, they do exist), comes in and buys the mangoes for $1.30. A specialist contrarian trader (they exist too) picks up on the trend in prices, concludes that it’s unsustainable and short-sells the mangoes for $1.20. Other market participants pick up on the short-selling and bid the prices back down to $1.10 and then to $1. A further speculator hears that the weather this growing season is now predicted to be very favourable for mangoes, so the crop will be particularly abundant, and further shorts the price to 90 cents, at which point the original broker re-enters the market and buys back the mangoes, which causes their price to return to $1. At which point the mangoes are harvested and shipped off the island and sold on the retail market, where an actual customer buys the mangoes, say for $1.10 a crate.

Notice that the final transaction is the only one in which a real exchange takes place. You grew the mangoes and the customer bought them. Everything else was finance – speculation on the movement of prices. In between the time when they were your mangoes and the time when they became the customer’s mangoes, there were nine transactions. All of them amounted to a zero-sum activity. Some people made money and some lost it, and all of that cancelled out. No value was created in the process.

That’s finance. The total value of all the economic activity in the world is estimated at $105 trillion. That’s the mangoes. The value of the financial derivatives which arise from this activity – that’s the subsequent trading – is $667 trillion. That makes it the biggest business in the world. And in terms of the things it produces, that business is useless. (Source: lrb.co.uk)

John Ellis News Items

Word-of-the-day

Word of the day: coprophagia

Definition: gobbling up Tucker Carlson other than for a detailed exposé. (Note that there are three hyperlinks in the preceding sentence.)

I don’t think Carlson has lost his mind, or at least no more so than anyone who’s been politically radicalized has. He’s been engaged in a coherent, if despicable, ideological project for years. As far back as 2017, he was airing segments in Fox News prime time on the gypsy infiltration of America. He surrounded himself at the network with white-nationalist chuds. He’s become a committed postliberal. It was inevitable that he’d start pulling his chin one day about the supposed moral complexity of World War II.

There’s nothing unusual about populists Nazi-pilling themselves with historical revisionism in search of their next contrarian high. What’s unusual about Tucker is that he’s maintained a degree of national popularity and even mainstream acceptance as he goes about trying to make the world unsafe for democracy.

How? He’s taking advantage of a leadership vacuum on the right.

…

Creeping fascism on the right has been a-creepin’ since at least 2016. If you’re shocked, shocked to find that there’s gambling going on in here in 2024, it can only be because you went out of your way for tribal reasons not to notice.

Nick Catoggio

Covering what others don’t

If there is a criticism I’ve gotten over the past several years it’s that I pay too much attention—and apply too much scrutiny—to the excesses of the illiberal left at the expense of the illiberal right. Wasn’t I ignoring the elephant and allowing myself to get distracted by the gnat?

My response to that is twofold.

The first is that there is no shortage of writers, reporters, and outlets focusing on the dangers of the far right. I saw the far left as conspicuously overlooked by people who otherwise take a great interest in political extremism. And I understand why they were averting their gaze: The social cost of noticing this subject is very high. Given that the job description of a journalist is to observe the world, uncover things in the public interest, and then tell the plain truth about it, choosing topics where others fall silent seems wise to me. It still does.

The second is that I have been concerned for years now that the illiberal ideology that has become increasingly mainstream on the political left—one that makes war on our common history, our common identity as Americans, and fundamentally, on the goodness of the American project—would inspire the mirror ideology on the right.

And that is exactly where we find ourselves, with an illiberal left that defaces Churchill statues—and an illiberal right that defaces Churchill’s legacy. With a left that insists 1619 was the year of the true founding of America—and a right that suggests the Greatest Generation was something closer to genociders. With a left that sympathizes with modern-day Nazis in the form of Hamas—and a right that sympathizes with the original ones.

Bari Weiss

Public affairs

Military valor

[Adam] Kinzinger’s political stance—his willingness to criticize the most popular and feared figure in his party, when the overwhelming majority of his colleagues have either gone silent or defended the ex-president’s indefensible actions—can’t be understood apart from his military service.

“Because we ask [service members] to die for the country, we have to be willing to do the same thing. But”—here he turned incredulous—“we’re too scared to vote for impeachment, because we’re going to lose our job? Like, seriously?”

For most of Kinzinger’s colleagues, the answer is: Yes, seriously. When I asked Kinzinger how many Republican votes there would have been in favor of impeachment if it had been a secret ballot, he told me 150. Instead, there were only 10.

The Man Who Refused to Bow

Richard Lugar

Tuesday, a bronze statue of Richard Lugar was unveiled in Indianapolis, with considerable ceremony including a speech by, appropriately, Condoleeza Rice.

I recall when I first was awed by Lugar. At our County’s Lincoln Day dinner (the closest I ever got to being a partisan activist) around 1982 or 1983, he was the featured speaker. He spoke for a very long time, without notes, mostly about his trip to the Phillipines, which had just ended. He shot straight, eschewing the B.S. about Ferdinand Marcos. One of the “conservative” talking points of the day was that Marcos’ only opponents were communists. “Don’t you believe it,” Lugar essentially said. “His only supporters are the oligarchs of the country. Small business, the Chamber of Commerce types, oppose him strongly.”

It all seemed to cohere. I couldn’t give such a speech even with notes. That he’d been a Rhodes Scholar showed.

Lugar was the kind of statesman who’d have voted to convict Trump on the Articles of Impeachment. If more Republicans had his balls, Trump would be behind us by now.

Understudy to Russia’s role as whipping boy

Yesterday Politico dropped a story about how “former GOP officials are sounding the alarm over Trump’s Orban embrace.” Gosh, where would we be without Former GOP Officials, eh? The story attempts to demonize anyone who has anything to do with the Hungarian prime minister. Excerpt:

The Conservative Partnership Institute, a nerve center for incubating policies for a second Trump administration, co-sponsored a discussion in October 2022 about how to bring “peace in Ukraine” featuring Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs Peter Szijjarto.

Audience members included conservative policy and national security officials and GOP strategists, according to a person familiar with the meeting. Once seated, they were given pamphlets pushing unabashedly pro-Russia talking points.

“Russia has the will, strength, and patience to continue war,” warned the document, which was given to POLITICO by a participant. “U.S aid to Ukraine must be severely constricted and Ukrainian President Zelensky should be encouraged by U.S. leadership to seek armistice and concede Ukraine as a neutral country.”

“If the U.S. continues to enable war, it will result in the destruction of Ukraine and provoke further Russian aggression toward the West, with the potential for nuclear conflict,” it said.

You see what Politico is doing here? We are not supposed to evaluate these claims; we are supposed to reject them out of hand as “pro-Russian talking points.”

This is the same kind of manipulation the Blob used to manufacture consent of the American people to support the Iraq War. What, you think Arabs don’t deserve democracy? You want Iraq to create a mushroom cloud over an American city? You want the terrorists to win?!

The Orban government might be wrong in its analysis of the Ukraine war, but characterizing it as nothing more than “pro-Russian talking points” does a profound disservice to democratic publics in the US and Europe, who are financing NATO’s participation in this war. If Orban’s government is wrong, then explain how they’re wrong. Don’t talk to people like we’re morons.

Rod Dreher (who you can safely ignore because he just channels pro-Russian talking points).

The Best fall outcome, in the long-term, for the GOP

For the GOP, might the ingredient for long-term success be its defeat in the 2024 election? “The best possible outcome in November for the future of the Republican Party is for former President Donald Trump to lose and lose soundly,” Jonathan Martin wrote for Politico. “Trump will never concede defeat, no matter how thorough his loss. Yet the more decisively Vice President Kamala Harris wins the popular vote and electoral college the less political oxygen he’ll have to reprise his 2020 antics; and, importantly, the faster Republicans can begin building a post-Trump party,” Martin continued. “For most Republicans who’ve not converted to the Church of MAGA, this scenario is barely even provocative. In fact, asking around with Republicans last week, the most fervent private debate I came across in the party was how best to accelerate Trump’s exit to the 19th Hole. … Yes, moving past Trump in the aftermath of another defeat will hardly be easy. But it’s essential if Republicans want to become a viable national party once more.”

The Morning Dispatch

Politics more narrowly

Kamala Harris is an enemy of free speech

In 2019, well before the January 6 riot that ultimately led to President Trump’s Twitter ban, then–Senator Harris publicly and repeatedly called on Twitter to ban him. On October 1, 2019, in a letter to Dorsey, Senator Harris called Trump’s tweets “blatant threats,” and claimed that other users “have had their accounts suspended for less offensive behavior.” She tweeted at Twitter’s then-CEO Jack Dorsey, pleading with him “to do something about this.”

Apparently surprised by Harris’s casual use of her pulpit to call for Twitter to ban a sitting president, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Harris in an interview: “How is that not a violation of free speech? The president has the same rights that you have, that I have. How would that not be a slippery slope to ban half the people on Twitter?”

Harris doubled down: “I’ve heard that argument, but here’s the thing, Jake. A corporation—which is what Twitter is—has obligations and in this case, they have terms of use policy. Their terms of use dictate who receives the privilege of speaking on that platform and who does not. And Donald Trump has clearly violated the terms of use, and there should be a consequence for that,” she said [emphasis mine]. “Not to mention the fact that he has used his platform, being the president of the United States, in a way that has been about inciting fear and potentially inciting harm against a witness to what might be a crime against our country and our democracy.”

In case Twitter had somehow failed to notice the directive, then–Senator Harris said: “And I am asking that Twitter does what it has done on previous occasions, which is revoke someone’s privilege because they have not lived up to the advantages of the privilege.”

Two weeks after the Tapper interview, at the Democratic primary debate on October 15, 2019, Harris repeated her call for Twitter to ban President Donald Trump from its platform. Harris claimed that the mass shooter at an El Paso Walmart had been “informed by how Donald Trump uses that platform.” She several times urged Elizabeth Warren, “Join me in saying his Twitter account should be shut down.” Even

Even Elizabeth Warren seemed appalled. She refused with a simple “No.” She is a law professor, after all.

After that debate, Harris told Tapper flatly: “The bottom line is you can’t say you have one rule for Facebook and another rule for Twitter. The same rule has to apply which is that there has to be a responsibility placed on social media sites to understand their power. They are directly speaking to millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation and that has to stop.” [empahsis mine]

Did you get that? It’s worth watching: Harris said social media sites should not be able to communicate information directly with the public without government oversight.

Abigail Shrier, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Our Government Censors

This item via Bari Weiss’s Free Press, as she does indeed cover what others don’t. (See above.)

Swing states

I don’t believe we have the luxury of writing in candidates’ names, particularly in swing states … As a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this and because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris.

Liz Cheney

I have just one question: Is Wyoming really a swing state?

Trump’s off his game

I get the sense that the assassination attempt spooked him more than he’s willing to admit and also slowed him down. And yes, there are those niggling details about him being a nut, a narcissist, a boor, a bigot, a blowhard, a tornado of baloney — a man who, to borrow from an old joke, could commit suicide by leaping from his ego to his I.Q.

Bret Stephens

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, my primal screams, here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Monday, 7/29/24

From nobody’s Synaxarion except mine: On this, the 29th day of July, we commemorate the chastening of Tipsy the not-yet-Orthodox, who was wounded in a stupid motorcycle accident in Lafayette in the year 1965.

Politics

Be it remembered

The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the president. The president could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.

Liz Cheney via Peggy Noonan, Liz Cheney Shows What Leadership Looks Like, January 14, 2021.

If only the GOP had more persons with balls like Liz Cheney’s! Speaking of which …

Toxic Masculinity rightly so called

The Democratic Party must join the battle for the hearts and minds of young men … Trumpist masculinity is rooted in grievance and anger. [Admiral William] McRaven’s message centers on honor and courage.

There’s a seductive quality to Trump’s masculinity. Grievance is a form of counterfeit purpose, and anger is a form of counterfeit courage. For a time, your grievance can give you a mission — fighting the hated foe. And when you’re in the midst of an online temper tantrum, taking on all comers in your social media feed, you can feel a little bit brave, even if all you’re doing is tapping out vitriolic posts from the safety and comfort of your couch.

When you center masculinity on grievance and anger rather than honor and courage, you attract men like Hogan and Kid Rock and White. Worse, that is how you mold the men in your movement, including men like [VP Candidate JD] Vance.

Many conservatives rightly decry the way in which parts of the far left tend to use the words “straight white male” as a virtual epithet, as if there were something inherently suspect in the identities of tens of millions of men and boys. And if men feel that Democrats are hostile to them, they’ll go where they feel wanted, the gender gap will become a gender canyon, and more men will embrace Trumpism because that’s just what men do.

David French, Hulk Hogan Is Not the Only Way to Be a Man

So what?

It will take a victorious Trump all of 30 seconds to begin discussing the “many, many people saying we should probably change the Constitution” to allow presidents to serve more than two terms. Sorry to be gloomy, but it seems unrealistic to think that the extreme polarization, the massive proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy theories, and the erosion of faith in elections will retreat or dissipate. If anything, they seem to be strengthening and accelerating.

A “dissent” to something Andrew Sullivan said.

Hyperbole aside, I don’t much care if Trump does say that. There’s no way a constitutional amendment to that effect would pass within 3 years or so (i.e., in time for him to run again) — if ever.

Kamala

I think it’s very important, as you have heard from so many incredible leaders, for us at every moment in time, and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past but the future.

Kamala Harris (via Andrew Sullivan)

What the fuck does any of that mean? And what does she actually believe in? From locking up criminals as California’s AG to pushing bail for BLM rioters, from imprisoning cannabis users to favoring national weed legalization — is quite a journey.

…

Harris is one of the weakest and wokest Democratic candidates there is. She cannot credibly appeal to the center after such extreme-left posturing; she cannot run a campaign; she cannot run an executive office; she has never been able to win elections outside the left-liberal, one-party state of California; and she has nothing to offer to those of us who really, really don’t want to vote for Trump but don’t want to unburden ourselves of every moderate or conservative principle we ever had. Apart from that, she’s perfect.

Andrew Sullivan

JD Vance has said some things he needs to explain or walk back. But so has Kamala Harris — at least when she’s not utterly vacuous in a pseudo-smart sort of way.

Public Affairs

Beacon of hope

Matthew Crawford is a guy with a PhD who still, compulsively, does things with his hands. Thus, he sometimes needs tools — like an “indicator base.”

The one from Harbor Freight was a real POS, as apparently are most things from there, their “thing” being selling really cheap Chinese stuff. He went to Grainger for a replacement:

The lady behind the counter had never heard of an indicator base, but I expected this. It is a common enough tool, but in a big, publicly-traded company, people who know things don’t sit behind counters or answer phones. The less someone knows, the cheaper they are. So she got on her computer and looked it up. The one that came up had a price of $465. I told her that can’t be right; a decent one costs about $50 and a good one about $100 (the HFT one I am replacing currently sells for $13). There must have been a misplaced decimal point. Trying again, she hit a few key strokes that brought her to a screen with a series of search filters. The first filter asked me to choose the holding strength of the magnet, from a list of options. These were listed in a hodgepodge of different units. One such unit was Newtons, which is a legitimate unit for specifying force, but one that most people in the US (certainly machinists) don’t use, unless they are the type who also get into Esperanto.

…

My point is that the desk lady and I were dealing with a bunch of random shit on a screen that had little connection to reality as I understood it, and we couldn’t get past this screen without pretending otherwise. The inventory system was surely built by a web designer, someone who has probably never used any of the tools listed in the vast Grainger catalogue. Or rather, it was likely built by a whole team of such people, unknown to one another, speaking several different languages and dispersed across the globe.

And so forth and so on. But there’s a better alternative, with some trade-offs:

I could end on this gloomy note. But let me tell you about another industrial supply house, McMaster-Carr, because the difference is remarkable. (They are my go-to source, but they have no storefronts as Grainger does, and I wanted my indicator base immediately.)

…

My point is that the catalogue [“3,592 pages of dense type”] is written as though it matters, by people involved with material things. They want to sell stuff that enables people to do things. How is this allowed in 2024?!

The answer is surely connected to the fact that this family business, with 1,000 employees, which opened in the Chicago Loop in 1901, remains private, while Grainger is publicly traded. McMaster is said to be “secretive”, but a business intelligence site says the company “has historically raised $0 in funding,” meaning it has no debt. Meaning, it isn’t subject to the imperatives of what I like to call “systematized irrationality.” Global capital isn’t just impatient for returns, it is invested in models of reality that offer portability and scalability, allowing metrics to be applied across sectors and industries and communicated to people sitting in high-rise office buildings. Legibility-from-afar always means partial and hence fake legibility. It can be achieved by substituting representations for reality, but representations of a particular kind: they must be emptied of rich layers of content derived from the situated knowledge of particular practices – the very practices in which you might use the tool or material in question. This entails the destruction of knowledge, for the sake of uniformity and financial abstraction.

By contrast, the McMaster-Carr catalogue is like a modern-day version of Diderot’s Encyclopedie. If the final cataclysm were to happen, but you somehow had access to the catalogue and everything in it, you would be able to reconstruct the modern world. They have kept finance and IT in their proper place.

I decidedly do not work with my hands (unless you count typing). I used to be pretty handy in a general sort of way, but it’s gone away from decades of disuse. (My son must have picked up his dual mind-hand propensities from his maternal grandfather. His musical keyboard abilities are a total mystery. Milkman?)

But I can appreciate Crawford, and his story, and a privately-held company that does things right.

No storefronts? No problem!

Irish microcosm

Ardnacrusha was a revolutionary piece of technology in its time, enabling the newly-independent Irish state to provide huge amounts of electricity for a nation for which it was still a rarity (you can see fascinating photos and accounts of its construction here and here.) But the march of the Machine has consequences. In this case, those consequences included a 90% collapse in the salmon population of the Shannon, which previously had been world-famous for its salmon runs, along with the mass death of trout and eels, the silting up of parts of the waterway, an increase in flooding and the raising of the water level of Lough Derg.

Still at least Ireland now has a carbon-free electricity supply, right? Well, no. When it was built, Ardnacrusha was the biggest hydroelectric scheme in the world, until it was beaten to that title by America’s Hoover Dam. On completion, it produced enough power to meet the electricity demand of the whole of Ireland. Today it produces just 2% of it. That’s how much the thirst for electricity has increased in one short century. An astonishing seventy per cent of all that electricity will be swallowed by Internet server farms by the end of this decade.

Behold! Sustainability!

…

The giant wind turbines – subject to similar local protests across the land – are the latest Big Tech solution to the power ‘needs’ of the country: ‘needs’ which have accelerated a thousandfold in a century, and will continue to do so. Everybody wants insta-access to the shiny flicky pictures on the little Satanic Rectangle in their back pockets, but nobody wants to live in the middle of the power station needed to supply it. Well, get used to it, people, because the whole landscape will be a power station soon. Then there’ll be nowhere to hide except inside your VR headsets. Got a problem with that? Then take a hammer to your phone!

Paul Kingsnorth

Music today

We have two camps, and you really need to pick a side:

(1) The dominant view in the economy treats music as something of little consequence or value. You shouldn’t even have to pay a penny to hear it. And if it can be replaced by an AI track—or even a podcast or twerking video or some other form of ‘content’—that’s perfectly fine. That’s because musicians don’t create sufficient value to deserve better treatment.

Or you can align yourself with the other view:

(2) Music is our most trusted pathway into a world of beauty and enchantment. It transforms our lives in a way that everyday products of consumption can’t replicate. And even though it is intangible, it endures longer than these consumer goods. At the end of your life, you will still turn to your beloved songs for comforts, long after other products have worn out and lost their value.

Make no mistake, this is a huge issue. The wealthiest people in the world—namely, the owners of the dominant web platforms—are trying to subjugate all cultural endeavors (or as they call it, content) in their digital domains. But this can only happen if they are allowed to manipulate the economy value of creativity, and force it into subservience to their centralized technologies.

We can’t afford to let that happen. So, as you might guess, I have an easy time picking (2) above as my chosen pathway.

And it’s not just my opinion. Plato and Socrates finally came to the same conclusion at the end of their lives. Is it too much to hope that the people who control our music economy will eventually make that same discovery?

Ted Gioia

“Private” matters

Remembering Crunchy Rod

Dreher proposed the best way forward for the Republican Party when he wrote Crunchy Cons. In case anyone has forgotten the manifesto, here it is again in brief: Conservatism should focus more on the character of society than on the material conditions of life found in consumerism. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government. Culture is more important than politics and economics. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative. Small, local, old, and particular are almost always better than big, global, new, and abstract. Beauty is more important than efficiency. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom. The institution most essential to conserve is the traditional family.

Arthur Hunt III, Live Not by Lies from Neither the Left nor Right

Crunchy Cons was my introduction to Rod Dreher, and I liked it very much. “Beauty is more important than efficiency”? now that is counter-cultural!

I rather miss that sunnier, more optimistic version of him — which I did not read as a way forward for the GOP so much as a way forward for the culture. Speaking of which …

Living decently

What I hold out for is the possibility that a man can live decently without knowing all the answers, or believing that he does—can live decently even in the understanding that life is unspeakably complex and unspeakably subtle in its complexity. The decency, I think, would be in acting out of the awareness that personal acts of compassion, love, humility, and honesty are better and more adequate responses to that complexity than any public abstraction or theory or organization.

— Wendell Berry, “Notes from an Absence and a Return,” in A Continuous Harmony (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012), page 51, via Gracy Olmstead

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Notebook dump 7/18/24

Politics prescinding the Convention

I have not watched one minute of the GOP convention, nor do I intend to. I have better things to do with multiple evening hours per day this week. But I do read analysis. Lots of analysis.

And there’s a lot more, over the same period, in my private Common Place Book than in this blog post, believe it or not.

Ross on a Roll

It feels as if Ross Douthat is publishing something new every day (as well as being on every NYT political panel), and every one of them captures something that keeps eluding my capture.

The latest (as I write):

He is a man of negligible intellectual curiosity who dominates all of his epoch’s popular media forms: gossip columns, cable news, reality television, social media. He’s a man who represents the shadow side of the American character — not the Lincolnian statesman but the hustler, the mountebank, the self-promoter, the tabloid celebrity — at a time when American power and American corruption are intermingled. And he’s a man graced, this past weekend especially but always, with incredible, preternatural good luck.

That last quality is understood by some of Trump’s religious supporters as proof of divine favor and a reason to support him absolutely. But this is a presumptuous interpretation. (Some notably sinister historical figures have enjoyed miraculous-seeming escapes from assassination.) The man of destiny might represent a test for his society, a form of chastisement, an exposure of weakness and decay — in which case your obligation is not to support him without question, but to try to recognize the historical role he’s playing and match your response to what’s being unsettled or unveiled.

Yeah. Ross is a big reason I continue a digital NYT subscription. David Brooks, David French, Bret Stephens and Frank Bruni are four others, but Ross has risen to the top.

Frankly, I don’t even look at the “news pages” most days; I go straight to opinion.

Philosophical Anthropology in Politics

The underlying irrationality of human nature, founded on such eternal verities as our longing for eternal life, … and by our flight from the certainty of death, presents political leaders with a mixed bag of tools that can be used to inspire, frighten, or cajole their fellow humans to come together and make decisions that might hopefully benefit the group, and perhaps actuate some greater idea of the good. Some version or another of the preceding vision has animated accounts of politics by philosophers, historians, poets, and novelists since the days of the Greeks.

There is another view of politics, of course. In that view, men are not irrational by nature. They are, by nature, calculating machinelike beings. In this view, which has been evolving steadily since the middle of the 19th century, politics is less of an art than a science, the rightful province not of storytellers and backslapping phonies and carnival barkers but of sober scientific experts whose job is to engineer outcomes that produce the greatest good for the greatest number of people, with special attention being paid by the enlightened men and women of our age to the historically disadvantaged and oppressed, in whose favor the arc of history inevitably bends.

The ideal of democratic governance for rationalist believers is as obvious to them as it seems false and repellent to followers of the Greeks. Presented with expert calculations about the necessary outcomes of certain decisions, properly functioning citizen-calculators use their software to calculate the likely benefit of desired outcomes to themselves as well as to others. Lesser calculators will put the benefits to themselves first, while more evolved beings will be moved more often by the greater good. Errors in the calculations that are presented to the public can be identified by well-credentialed experts, using agreed-upon rules and methods. While some believers in the above process may identify themselves as small-d democrats, others define themselves as socialists or communists, or as apolitical technocrats.

David Samuels, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the Portal Into American History

Will Butler, PA chasten The Donald?

After her dispatch for The Free Press on the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, Salena Zito snagged the first interview with the former president, who told her he is completely rewriting his convention speech. “This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together. The speech will be a lot different, a lot different than it would’ve been two days ago,” he said. (Washington Examiner)

Oliver Wiseman, If You Love America, Turn Down the Temperature

Democracy’s relevance to Election 2024

The word “democracy” has been terribly abused. (H/T Yuval Levin).

We’re told, for instance, that Donald Trump “threatens democracy.” I’ll leave it to others to explain how that is true (without a bunch of slogans and hand-waving, I hope), but from my perspective, his threat is to American liberal democracy (constitutional democracy if you prefer), and the manner in which he threatens it is his intent to tear down the civil service and revive the spoils system. That, in my mind, would be an excess of raw democracy, constrained by one less counter-majoritarian guardrail.

Counter-majoritarian guardrails, starting with the Bill of Rights, have been a key part of our system, designed to be molasses in the gears of impetuous democratic majorities. The Civil Service system was added relatively recently, but it strikes me as particularly important because America has become a world super-power, if not hegemon, and violent swings of policy, empowered by cronies and unconstrained by careerists, would put the world on perpetual pins and needles — and ultimately undermine our power (for better and worse).

I’m aware of unitary executive theory, and of the likelihood of Presidential frustration with careerists (theoretically part of the executive branch, not a constitutionally independent fourth branch) slow-walking things. But precisely because I’m temperamentally conservative when it comes to rapid change, I’m against any ideology that would make us more purely democratic in this area.

Fundamentals

The democratic order rests on treating those with whom we disagree as opponents rather than enemies, on the belief that we share not just a continent but a country.

Peter Wehner, A Moment to Seek Our Better Angels

The Trump revolution, version 2024

Rooting for laundry

Conservatives in the party of Reagan often spoke of a three-legged stool of social conservatism, fiscal conservatism, and a hawkish foreign policy. But on Monday night, social conservatives in Trump’s party were expected to stomach a prime-time speaking appearance of internet personality Amber Rose, who has publicly praised “satanists” because they help women “get abortions in southern states” and publicly explained she tells her young children that her OnlyFans page is a positive thing. Fiscal conservatives were treated to a prime-time speech by Teamsters union President Sean O’Brien, who demagogically denounced big business: “Elites have no party, elites have no nation. Their loyalty is to the balance sheet and the stock price at the expense of the American worker.” And hawks were told by billionaire David Sacks that Vladimir Putin was “provoked, yes provoked” to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine by President Biden’s talk of expanding NATO.

The Dispatch

Along the same lines, from the Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio:

Everything you need to know about the new prince can be reduced to two sentences, elegantly stated by the Wall Street Journal’s Kyle Smith. “The pillars of conservatism are limited government, economic freedom, and the rule of law. J.D. Vance seems to have contempt for all three,” he wrote. Liz Cheney elaborated in a separate post: “J.D. Vance has pledged he would do what Mike Pence wouldn’t—overturn an election and illegally seize power. He says the president can ignore the rulings of our courts. He would capitulate to Russia and sacrifice the freedom of our allies in Ukraine.”

…

Jerry Seinfeld has a famous joke about how being a fan of a sports team is tantamount to “rooting for laundry.” Because your loyalty is to the franchise and not its personnel, you might cheer wildly for a player one season and give him the McConnell treatment the next, after he’s traded away. Ultimately you’re rooting for whoever wears the team’s uniform—for “laundry.”

Silly tribal allegiances are fine for silly diversions like sports, but rooting for laundry in politics is idiotic. If a party continues to command your loyalty by dint of the color of its jersey, it has no incentive to meet your policy demands. By stumping for a movement now led by Trump and J.D. Vance, Haley is telling conservatives that laundry is more important than the principles she and they purported to hold for the last 40 years.

I have not worn the Republican laundry since 2005, but these times are unsettling nonetheless.

JD Vance

Vance is whomever Trump needs him to be—the perfect would-be vice president, a quite green second banana. Vance can be anybody the day calls for.

Which is to say: He is nobody.

Kevin D. Williamson, The Infinitely Plastic J.D. Vance

In November 2022, after the Republicans’ lackluster showing in the midterms, I wrote a column titled “Donald Trump Is Finally Finished.” I keep a printed copy on my desk as a humbling reminder of how wrong I can be.

Bret Stephens

I pair these two with a suggestion that Williamson print out a copy of his piece for future desktop use.

America’s Hitler?

I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.

A fuller context for JD Vance’s former musing about Trump as “America’s Hitler,” via Zaid Jilani. Granted, neither alternative flatters Trump.

Also from Jilani:

For much of the left, analyzing Vance is simple: He once denounced Trump and now embraces him. Therefore, he is a cynic and a con man willing to do anything for power. But making compromises for power isn’t always malicious. In our political duopoly, you have to endorse one set of leaders or another in order to do anything constructive.

That paragraph forces me to think about my repudiation of both parties and my quixotic (and mostly notional) embrace of the American Solidarity Party. Maybe I’m not really trying “to do anything constructive,” although I do consider it constructive to remind people “Put not your trust in princes, in sons of men in whom there is no salvation.” (Psalm 145/146)

Alex Jones a truth-teller?

There seems to be an attack on JD Vance for his having said that Alex Jones was a teller of inconvenient truths. In one version I saw, a hyperlink led me to the context:

“If you listen to Rachel Maddow every night, the basic worldview that you have is that MAGA grandmas who have family dinners on Sunday and bake apple pies for their family are about to start a violent insurrection against this country,” Vance said. “But if you listen to Alex Jones every day, you would believe that a transnational financial elite controls things in our country, that they hate our society, and oh, by the way, a lot of them are probably sex perverts too.”

Vance went on, “Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, that’s actually a hell of a lot more true than Rachel Maddow’s view of society.”

You got a problem with that comparison? Really?

Political converts

Vance the “convert”

Vance set about building something—an ideological palace in which he could find a new home on the far side of the Rubicon his opportunism prompted him to cross. The Vance that emerged after 2021 is an aspirational right-populist who blends together staunch and unapologetic social conservatism, support for the kinds of economic regulations more often associated with progressives like Elizabeth Warren, and a desire for retrenchment in foreign policy, including the withdrawal of support for Ukraine in its conflict with Russia.

…

[H]is way of talking about right-populist ideas and ideology is more cogent and coherent than what one hears from other officeholders. Vance cares about ideas, and he has a mind capable of synthesizing them in a compelling way. There’s a reason Trump tapped him instead of Rubio, Hawley, or Utah Senator Mike Lee—because Vance thinks and talks like a true believer eager to preach a gospel and quote from a catechism he’s writing in real time.

…

Trumpism now has an ideological heir, leaving the Reaganism that’s been shunted to the side for the past eight years well and truly dead.

Damon Linker, The Convert

J Budziszewski changes his mind

I have much enjoyed J Budziszewski’s episodic blog (and a few of his books) over the years. He generally is a fairly rigorous thinker in the natural law tradition.

Over the last seven years or so, I’d say his rigor has slipped on the subject of politics — but then again I’m skeptical that syllogistic rigor is a sufficient guide to the decisions that voters must make.

So I think, rigorous or not, that his recent posting on the 2024 election warrants your attention. If nothing else, it may help you understand how a smart person can change his mind about Trump from unfavorable to favorable.

Excerpt:

I have written on several occasions that a certain kind of crudity and oafishness is considered lovable by the political classes, and not even recognized as oafish because it is their sort of oafishness. Another kind is considered lovable by those whom they disdain. Obama was a smooth rich fellow who flattered the elites. Biden is a coarse rich fellow who sneers at the common people in the same breath as he boasts of his humble origins. The elites think this kind of talk is merely telling it like it is.

Trump, though, is a coarse rich fellow who flatters the common people. Since he sneers at the elites and adopts a popular tone in doing so, it enrages them. Though all of these rulers claim to look out for the “little guy,” the difference is that Obama and Biden styled themselves as their patrons, and viewed the “little guys” as their clients. Trump styles himself as their benefactor, and views them as his constituents.

(I have not changed my mind, but I’ve experienced a dramatic increase in understanding Trump’s 2024 supporters.)

Changing his mind about Trump — with a twist

I’ve already acknowledged that I see Trump differently now than I do in 2016, and I’ll now acknowledge that that change in perception has only been further solidified in the wake of his shooting. Part of this change means that I no longer think it’s useful or meaningful to call him a charlatan, to insist that he’s “faking it”, that he’s actually a really bad businessman who only pretends to be a successful one on TV, that he’s a common low-end huckster of bad steaks and worthless paraphernalia. All of this implies that there are other actors on the world stage who, by contrast, are the real deal, and unlike in 2016 I just don’t believe that’s the case anymore. The only real grounds for such a distinction between the authentic statesman and the False Dmitri-like impostor is class habitus, and this is something of which, since 2016, I have learned to be very wary.

Justin Smith-Ruiu, World Spirit on Feedback

Apropos of the GOP anti-corporate shift (or is it mere rhetoric?)

A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. Unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular. It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

Miscellany

A different kind of conservative

I don’t care much about national flags and vehemently oppose them in churches. I don’t recite the pledge of allegiance. I despise the military flyovers at NFL games. I could go on.

Despite all that, it bugs me when people mangle the national anthem (that, as far as I’m concerned, need not be sung at all.) Go figure.

Non-stochastic violence

After seeing a Pakistani protest on television, Khomeini issued an edict declaring the novel to be against Islam. He called on Muslims everywhere to murder Rushdie and anyone who had assisted in the book’s publication. In the ensuing eruption, dozens of people were killed, including the book’s Japanese translator, and many more were threatened. With Iran’s multimillion-dollar bounty on his head, Rushdie was forced into hiding, under guard, for nine years.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.