Category: SCOTUS

Monday, 7/25/22

Trump, Trump, Trump

If you’ve already heard enough, I’ll take no offense if you skip this section. But the first three of these Trump-related items all involve a bit of my own thinking and analogizing, not just quotes without comment.

Flight 93 Indictments

People continue to make the case that what Donald Trump did — here, there, everywhere — was criminal and that he should be charged. I’ll stipulate for sake of argument that every one of those arguments, even the weakest of them, is correct.

Some convictions, I believe (don’t bet anything you can’t afford to lose), would disqualify him from running in 2024.

But can we get convictions? When did Trump’s lawyers ever allow any case against him to go forward expeditiously? When did they not throw up every conceivable preliminary motion to put a spanner in the works?

And with his astonishing continued levels of support (at least as reported to pollsters; I can’t rule out mischievous responses), can we really expect unanimous jury verdicts of "guilty" anywhere in this country?

An acquittal, even if the jury voted 11-1 for conviction, might well strengthen him and his narrative of "all the poopy-heads hate me."

Michael Anton infamously argued in the 2016 Election cycle that it was either Donald Trump or the end of America as we know it. It was like flight 93: storm the cockpit and we just might live.

Let’s not repeat Anton’s mistake in reverse: "if we indict him, we just might get a conviction that will disqualify him from running again; whereas if we don’t, he’ll run again, win, and it will be the end of America as we know it."

I do think that Trump 2024 could be the end of America as we know it, and the January 6 Committee hearings have put at least slightly reinforced that in my mind (I was very anti-Trump before January 6 and before the hearings). They may even have had a net-positive effect on the electorate, swaying more against Trump than toward him in false sympathy for him as victim. But I think that beating him at the polls with a reformed Electoral Count Act to thwart shenanigans is a sounder strategy than trying to disqualify him with a felony conviction.

(David French’s argument in Friday’s Atlantic tends toward indictment despite unnamed risks — because (as I interpret it) we must show that nobody is above the law.)

I confess to TDS

I laughed at Democrats suffering Bush Derangement Syndrome. I laughed at Republicans suffering Obama Derangement Syndrome, but also shook my head at their frequent racist dog-whistles. I was above all that.

Then Donald Trump actually got the Republican nomination, and if someone wanted to call my reaction Trump Derangement Syndrome, I’d understand. My main defense is that I was right: his narcissism eventually so distorted his reality field that he put the nation at grave and unnecessary risk beginning Election Day 2020.

Conspiracy or Tragedy?

It is a sign of the committee Democrats’ love of country that they have allowed the hearings to proceed this way. They are crafting a story about Jan. 6 as a battle between Republican heroism and Republican villainy. It seems intended to create a permission structure for Trump supporters to move on without having to disavow everything they loved about his presidency, or to admit that Jan. 6 was the logical culmination of his sadistic politics.

If you believe, as I do, that Trump’s sociopathy makes him a unique threat to this country’s future, it makes sense to try to lure Republicans away from him rather than damn them for their complicity. There is a difference, however, between a smart narrative and an accurate one. In truth, you can’t cleave Trump and his most shameless antidemocratic enablers off from the rest of the Republican Party, because the party has been remade in his image. Plenty of ex-Trump officials have come off well in the hearings, including the former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger, the former acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and, in video testimony, the former White House counsel Pat Cipollone. That shouldn’t erase the ignominy of having served Trump in the first place.

Michelle Goldberg, The Myth of the Good Trump Official.

Goldberg had me in the first paragraph but substantially lost me in the second. My TDS doesn’t make me condemn everyone who served in the Trump administration. For many of them, their service was a sign of their love of country, for which they willingly put their reputations and political futures permanently at risk to be among the adults in the room.

I know, I know: Many of them ended up as infantilized sycophants, but I don’t think that’s how they, or at least most of them, went in.

The difference between Goldberg and me on this topic is that she seemingly views the Trump years mostly as a conspiracy of bad actors against the country whereas I see it more as a tragedy, whereby a malign leader seduced a lot of benign-to-neutral followers — my paradigm being Mark Studdock in C.S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength.

If you insist on Mephistopheles and a bunch of Fausts, I’d insist back at you that they didn’t think they were Fausts when they initially said "yes." They thought of themselves as the alternative to cronies and crazies who ended up being named Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, Roger Stone, Sydney Powell, Michael Eastman, Mike Lindell and such.

And although I recognized grave danger in Trump’s narcissism, I did not foresee his seductiveness — though his ability to seduce an electoral majority of voters should have warned me.

Why I still read the New York Times

By insisting that he was cheated out of victory, Trump fashioned himself into a king-in-exile rather than a loser — an Arthur betrayed by the Mordreds of his own party, waiting in the Avalon of Mar-a-Lago to make his prophesied return.

As with many forms of dark Trumpian brilliance, though, the former president is not exactly in conscious control of this strategy. He intuited rather than calculated his way to its effectiveness, and he seems too invested in its central conceit — the absolute righteousness of his “Stop the Steal” campaign — to modulate when it begins to reap diminishing returns.

…

While Ron DeSantis, his strongest potential rival, has been throwing himself in front of almost every issue that Republican primary voters care about, Trump has marinated in grievance, narrowed his inner circle, and continued to badger Republican officials about undoing the last election. While DeSantis has been selling himself as the scourge of liberalism, the former president has been selling himself mostly as the scourge of Brian Kemp, Liz Cheney and Mike Pence.

…

A counterargument, raised on Friday by New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait, is that so long as those lukewarm supporters still believe the 2020 election was unfair, Trump will have a trump card over any rival — because if you believe a steal happened, “you are perfectly rational to select a candidate who will acknowledge the crime and do everything to prevent it from reoccurring.”

But it seems just as possible for the lukewarm supporter to decide that if Trump’s response to being robbed was to first just let it happen and then ask his vice president to wave a magic wand on his behalf, then maybe he’s not the right guy to take on the Democratic machine next time.

There is more than one way, in other words, for Republican voters to decide that the former president is a loser ….

Ross Douthat in the New York Times.

Once again, it’s Trump’s narcissism: it’s all about him and to hell with everything else.

Not Trump

The Great EV Scam

Regulators everywhere are structuring their electric-vehicle industries on the Norway model, based on subsidies from less-affluent people who continue to buy gas-powered cars. A zombie business or industry, in today’s parlance, is one sustained less by creative destruction than by a combination of government bailout, regulation and hidden subsidies. This is what the global auto sector is becoming. Germany, having saddled its domestic makers with mandates for diesel and then electric vehicles, has repeatedly had to scarf together hidden rescues when the mandated investments didn’t pay off. Don’t think it can’t happen here. In fact, the history of the U.S. auto sector since the Chrysler bailout of 1980 has been of more or less continuous open and crypto-bailouts.

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., The Upside-Down Logic of Electric SUVs

America, Abortionmonger to the World

A foreign policy pushing for abortion abroad is also a strategic blunder with long-term consequences. Many countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America have strict limits on abortion, and even most of the free world is closer to Dobbs than to Roe.

Some Western politicians, such as French President Emmanuel Macron, and the European Parliament have joined Mr. Biden in denouncing Dobbs. But their statements reflect more the global solidarity of pro-abortion politicians than diplomatic prudence or even their own nations’ laws and practices.

Jakub Grygiel and Rebeccah Heinrichs, Biden’s Abortion Politics Will Undermine America’s World Standing.

Note that the characterization of the free world in the first paragraph is true only in the sense that Western Europe largely leaves abortion to political processes, as does Dobbs not constitutionalizing it s did Roe. It’s false insofar as it implies that Dobbs sets a national policy of, say, legal abortion in the first trimester, which is roughly where Western Europe tends to be, as compared to Roe‘s much more radically permissive regime.

SCOTUS legitimacy: two views

For three decades, Casey was precedent on precedent. But that is not the only conception of legitimacy.

On Thursday, Justice Kagan spoke to the Ninth Circuit Judicial Conference. She was careful to avoid talking about Dobbs directly, but she clearly alluded to the case. And, according to the Washington Post–I’ve not yet found video of the event–she invoked the concept of "legitimacy" as defined by Casey. That is, the Court’s "legitimacy" is linked to public perception …

The Dobbs Court emphatically repealed and replaced that notion of legitimacy. Now, legitimacy is defined by following written law, without regard to public perception. Linda Greenhouse’s column laments that shift:

. . .  Justice Alito actually had the gall to write that "we do not pretend to know how our political system or society will respond to today’s decision." Polls conducted before the opinion’s release showing that upward of two-thirds of Americans wanted to retain a right to abortion offered a hint and were perhaps what led to Justice Alito’s self-righteous declaration: "We cannot allow our decisions to be affected by any extraneous influences such as concern about the public’s reaction to our work."

Dobbs overruled Casey‘s undue burden framework, but also overruled the precedent on precedent. Justice Scalia would often joke that the Constitution is dead, dead, dead. We should say the same for Casey‘s precedent on precedent. It’s dead, dead, dead.

Josh Blackman at the Volokh Conspiracy.

Medical miracles

What they’re doing with vagus nerve stimulation is fascinating. I got tipped off by the Wall Street Journal, but here’s a solid link sans paywall

The other book-banners

We hear constantly about conservative efforts to "ban books," which accusation sometimes amounts to nothing more than taking a book out of a curriculum while leaving it readily available in the school library. But that’s not the whole story:

Last year, when the American Booksellers Association included Abigail Shrier’s book, “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters,” in a mailing to member booksellers, a number of booksellers publicly castigated the group for promoting a book they considered transphobic. The association issued a lengthy apology and subsequently promised to revise its practices. The group’s board then backed away from its traditional support of free expression, emphasizing the importance of avoiding “harmful speech.”

A recent overview in Publishers Weekly about the state of free expression in the industry noted, “Many longtime book people have said what makes the present unprecedented is a new impetus to censor — and self-censor — coming from the left.” When the reporter asked a half dozen influential figures at the largest publishing houses to comment, only one would talk — and only on condition of anonymity. “This is the censorship that, as the phrase goes, dare not speak its name,” the reporter wrote.

Pamela Paul, There’s More Than One Way to Ban a Book

It’s a long way to Heaven dear Lord,
it’s a hard row to hoe
And I don’t know if I’ll make it dear Lord
but I sure won’t make it alone.

SmallTown Heroes, Long Road, from their one-and-so-far-only "byzantine bluegrass" album Lo, the Hard Times.

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

Thursday, 7/21/22

Newsie

Good guys with guns

[A] common argument in favor of "high capacity" magazine bans is that defensive gun use never needs more than a few bullets. Here, the good samaritan used ten bullets, and he could have needed even more. In California, for example, magazines are limited to ten rounds. Had the good samaritan needed one more bullet to drop the assailant, he would have been out of luck in California.

…

Update 2: The Greenwood Police now report that the Good Samaritan acted quickly. In the span of 15 seconds (not 2 minutes), he fired 10 rounds, eight of which hit the assailant. And his first shot hit the assailant from 40 yards!

That is some top-level accuracy.

Josh Blackmun

I wasn’t going to say much about this until I saw that second update. That was the first time I heard that 8 of 10 shots hit the terrorist, one from 40 yards. It kind of boggles the mind.

Covid vaccination breakthrough?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday recommended Novavax’s COVID-19 vaccine for use in people age 18 and older, clearing the last regulatory hurdle before the shot’s widespread distribution in the U.S. Novavax’s two-dose vaccine relies on well-established vaccine technology, providing an alternative for people reluctant to take the newer mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer and Moderna. The U.S. has purchased 3.2 million doses of the Novavax shot.

The Morning Dispatch makes a good point about the likely nexus between new mRNA technology and vaccine resistance. I thought mRNA, which I didn’t really understand, was a lesser evil than Covid, but some other opinions varied.

News you can abuse, ignore

In the parts of the world where monkeypox is newly spreading, like the United States and Europe, the people currently most at risk of getting the disease are gay and bisexual men. A recent update from the World Health Organization noted that cases in newly afflicted countries have mainly been among “men who have had recent sexual contact with a new or multiple male partners.” In Europe, just 0.2 percent of the men who have gotten the disease identify as heterosexual. Reports from the center of the U.S. outbreak—New York City—show that “the number of monkeypox cases has nearly tripled in the last week, nearly all of them among men who have sex with men.” The infectious-disease and LGBTQ-health journalist Benjamin Ryan notes that though the U.S. is, frustratingly, not collecting demographic details on monkeypox patients, Britain is, and the numbers there are clear: “Half of men screened for monkeypox tested positive; women, by contrast, tested positive only 0.6 percent of the time.”

Opening paragraph of U.S. Messaging on Monkeypox Is Deeply Flawed.

If AIDS was the first politically-protected disease, Monkeypox is the second. Most of our media and government simply cannot find the integrity to speak plain, helpful English about diseases that are sexually transmitted among gay men. They’re probably trying to protect them; as so often, they may accomplish the opposite of their intention.

Politics and Legal Wrangling

Contraception, Sodomy, Same-sex marriage

I agree that “[n]othing in [the Court’s] opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.”

For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Because any substantive due process decision is “demonstrably erroneous,” … we have a duty to “correct the error” established in those precedents. After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated. For example, we could consider whether any of the rights announced in this Court’s substantive due process cases are “privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Clarence Thomas’s concurrence in the Dobbs case (which overruled Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey).

I looked this up because I doubted news stories that said Thomas had "called for" re-examination of these other "substantive due process" decisions. I publish what I found to acknowledge that he did call for that, and to provide context:

  • Justice Thomas’s dictum tacitly invites challenges to these other "substantive due process" decisions, but I’m not sure he’ll get any challenges unless some government in the U.S. tries to undermine the court-decreed rights to contraception, consensual adult sodomy or same-sex marriage. Unlike the situation with abortion, I’m just not sure there’s anywhere left in the U.S. where a legislative majority could mistake opposition to these for a winning political position. In other words, how would SCOTUS get a case challenging contraception, consensual adult sodomy or same-sex marriage? Am I missing something?
  • You can certainly accuse Thomas of pedantry in his criticism of "substantive due process" while explicitly leaving open a door to recognizing the selfsame rights as "privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States," but that strikes many as a better legal foundation. Liberal Yale Law School Professor Akhil Amar heartily respects, perhaps even embraces, that approach.

Where should America go legislatively on abortion?

I’ve said that any legislative resolution will have greater constitutional legitimacy than did Roe‘s bogus constitutional pretexts, and I meant and mean that.

But I now should add the qualifier that I’m not sure this is a fit subject for national legislation on the circumstances where abortion should or shouldn’t be lawful. Maybe there’s room for some Congressional legislation, like maybe protecting the right to travel (which already is judicially recognized, be it noted), but historically, abortion is a matter for the states. (I’d say the same, by the way, if Congress was weighing restriction rather than liberalization.)

I’ve always assumed that once Roe was out of the way, we’d eventually reach some ideologically-unsatisfying legislative compromise, as have western European nations. I don’t think my opinionating could change that.

A Bill with exceptions exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother was introduced in Indiana’s Special Session Wednesday (a Session called to rebate some of our budget surplus, but expanded after Dobbs). Legislators who are fighting against those compassionate exceptions (and there are some) are likely to pay a political price.

Democracy and distrust

The Secret Service reportedly told the January 6 select committee on Tuesday that it cannot recover deleted text messages from the days surrounding the Capitol attack after all, and has no new messages to provide. The agency says the messages were lost as part of a technology upgrade. The National Archives has asked the Secret Service to report within 30 days on the “potential unauthorized deletion” of agency records, including what was lost and how.

The Morning Dispatch.

This story has me as frustrated as any recent story. I would have thought the Secret Service above such stuff. Everything Orange Man/Reverse Midas touches turns to merde.

Norms

We no longer honor norms; we weaponize them.

Jonah Goldberg on Bari Weiss’ Honestly podcast Election Denial: A Roundtable. Jonah had Bari laughing out loud so many times (e.g., Trump "Tweeting like a monkey escaped from a cocaine study") that I see one of two futures:

  1. Jonah becomes a frequent flyer with Bari; or
  2. Bari, fearing loss of gravitas, never invites him again.

For what it’s worth, I found her laughter delightful.

Why we need philosophers

Over forty years, Kant taught this lecture series forty-eight times. In his Physische Geographie, as the series was called, Kant insisted that knowledge was a systematic construct in which individual facts needed to fit into a larger framework in order to make sense. He used the image of a house to explain this: before constructing it brick by brick and piece by piece, it was necessary to have an idea of how the entire building would look. It was this concept of a system that became the linchpin of Humboldt’s later thinking.

Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt’s New World.

Note that Kant was referring to knowledge, not just scientific knowledge.

Why we don’t need end-times opinions

“We may have another year, maybe two years, to work for Jesus Christ, and [then] . . . it’s all going to be over,” he said in 1951. Two years later he said, “I sincerely believe, if I can study the Scriptures aright and read current events and keep with my current reading, that we are living in the latter days. I sincerely believe that the coming of the Lord draweth nigh.”

Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America

I admired Billy Graham. Now, I’d call him "consequential" rather than "great." Maybe that’s hair-splitting.

Self-sabotage

Many years ago I had a student who took several classes from me and never got anything better than a C. At the beginning of his senior year he came to my office and asked me why. I reminded him that I had always made detailed comments on his paper; he said, yeah, he knew that, but he had never read the comments and always just threw the papers away. So I explained what his problem was. He nodded, thanked me, went away, and in the two classes he had from me that year he got the highest grades in the class.

improving – Snakes and Ladders

Organic towns, functional cities

Town and city are no longer the organic growths they once were. They have begun to operate on a purely functional level that has little to do with what actually brings grace into our lives. You eviscerate a habitat of its culture and the species it supports will find it increasingly difficult to survive or else they’ll mutate into something else.

Marius Kociejowski, A Factotum in the Book Trade, via Prufrock

Why do we so mythologize the sixties?

So why do those that would lead us treat the sixties as though they were our Heroic Age?

My theory is very simple: it is the last time that any of them mattered.

Those on the left pretend that society can be guided with the right policies from powerful institutional centres. They flatter themselves otherwise, but so do those on the right, even if their versions of ‘right policies’ often involves slimming down some institutional centres. The seventies taught us a harsher lesson. They ended one of modernity’s founding political myths, the idea that the vast bureaucratic engines the modern state uses to intimately order the lives of millions could be understood as a variation on the Greek city-states. They cannot: a modern state is a different order of being. It cannot be controlled by institutional centres, and even those centres can no longer be controlled. Any attempt to limit them only renders them more powerful. Nowadays, even the Machine’s smaller cogs are too big for human hands. This is the truth that our ‘leaders’ cannot even whisper. For if social institutions have become invulnerable to meaningful control, then their entire caste – politicians, journalists, civil service managers, researchers, and all – serve no purpose. To admit their pointlessness would end them. So, liberal and conservative alike, they retreat to the sixties and pretend that it matters as they launch into another round of culture war. It doesn’t matter and they don’t matter. They cannot prevent the end that is coming.

FFatalism, The culture wars were irrelevant by 1976

If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes

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

Wednesday, 7/20/22

You didn’t miss anything. I didn’t publish yesterday because I just didn’t have enough material. That’s likely to recur, as I’m gradually correcting my incorrigible habit of poring over news that seems especially shareable.

Polling

The survey also found that 32% of Latino Catholics said their religious faith dictates their views on abortion, compared to 73% of white evangelical Protestants.

A new survey found Latino Catholics overwhelmingly support abortion rights. Here’s why.

I would be a pollster’s nightmare, as I find so many polling questions unanswerable if not unintelligible.

Orthodox Christianity is opposed to abortion, but I was anti-abortion before I became Orthodox, and (heaven help me, for this may mean that I’m an American individualist) I would affirm that at no time in my life has my religious faith "dictated my views" on abortion.

I have difficulty getting into the mind of anyone who would listen to that polling question, note the import of "dictate," and then answer in the affirmative. Thus the question is a — what? litmus test? ink blot test? I certainly don’t see useful information coming from it.

I don’t consider myself a rebel against my Church. I don’t think it has ever said what an Orthodox political position on abortion should be, though in my parish we especially pray regularly for an end to abortion through changed hearts.

My religious faith does "dictate" some things — say, my rejection of monothelitism and monoenergism and suchlike — important Christological questions of import on which the Church’s position is longstanding and plausibly reasoned (e.g., those teachings effectively denied the full humanity of Christ by saying that He had no human will or energy). Countermanding what the Church says about such theological nuances is above my pay grade and, unlike David Bentley Hart, I’m not arrogant enough to "go there." (I was a Protestant for two-thirds of my life and don’t care to try it again.)

But abortion? Capital punishment? Euthanasia? Eugenics? I can’t help but form my own opinions on those, informed by the Church but not dictated to.

Notes from a roving raconteur

I beat myself up because I’m an old fundamentalist and self-mortification is our specialty. And I’ve been having too much fun lately, which confuses me, doing shows in red states to crowds that include a good many Republicans who voted for the landslide winner in 2020 but nonetheless were warm and receptive to me who voted for the thief. In blue states, audiences are listening to make sure you check the boxes of Inclusivity, Diversity, Equity, and Antiracism. These are people who don’t mind that many theaters refuse to do “Our Town” because the “Our” does not acknowledge that Grover’s Corners was stolen from indigenous people. I use the possessive pronoun in singing “My country, ’tis of thee,” which audiences in red states enjoy singing with me, and also our national anthem, ignoring the fact that Francis Scott Key did own slaves.

Back in the Sixties, when I was in my twenties, we sang “We Shall Overcome” and clearly we did not overcome, we only created new hairstyles. So we pass the torch to the young, some of whom feel the word “person” shows gender bias and want to change it to perself. To which I say, “Good luck with dat.”

Garrison Keillor, national treasure.

Vignettes

There’s no apparent common theme to this two vignettes, but I thought each of them was interesting in different ways:

  • A young Hungarian academic I dined with last evening told me how jarring it was to get his master’s degree at a western European university, and to be congratulated by fellow grad students on how lucky he was to have grown up in a country that had been blessed by Marxist government. His own family had had everything taken from them by the Communists, yet these privileged nitwits could only imagine that life had been glorious under Communism. This has something to do with the fact that he’s living back in Hungary now, though he could make a lot more money working in the West. He can’t bear to deal with such ignorant people.
  • [A correspondent was one of] a bunch of very conservative Catholics who wanted to live rurally, and went out and bought land in the same area. This reader said he has been mostly grateful for having had the chance to live there and raise his kids there, but he’s not sure he would do it again if he had the chance. The reason, he said, is that he was too optimistic about how life would be there. He says he had not counted on the fact that the kind of Catholics who would make such a radical choice — strong-willed Catholics like himself, as he conceded — would find it unusually hard to get along. The reader told me that there were frequent disputes within the community over purity — not strictly sexual purity, but over whether or not it was licit to do things like let your daughters wear pants, or keep them in skirts and dresses. He said it got to be exhausting, dealing with these communal neuroses.

Rod Dreher’s Diary, Sisi, Queen Of The Magyars

Indestructible lies

… There in Boston is a monument to the man who discovered anesthesia; many people are aware, in these latter days, that that man didn’t discover it at all, but stole the discovery from another man. Is this truth mighty, and will it prevail? Ah, no, my hearers, the monument is made of hardy material, but the lie it tells will outlast it a million years ….

Mark Twain via Alan Jacobs

When Wystan met Hannah

“I met Auden late in his life and mine—at an age when the easy, knowledgeable intimacy of friendships formed in one’s youth can no longer be attained, because not enough life is left, or expected to be left, to share with another. Thus, we were very good friends but not intimate friends.”

Hannah Arendt, explaining (it seems) her refusal of a marriage proposal by the poet and friend W. H. Auden (via L. M. Sacasas). I was unaware of that episode, which rather complicates my recollection that Auden eventually gave up trying to resist his homosexuality.

Sacasas continues on other topics:

The examples I have in mind of this receding of materiality arise, not surprisingly, from the most prosaic quarters of daily life. As a bookish person, for example, I think about how the distinct material shape of the book not only encodes a text but also becomes a reservoir of my personal history. I remember where I was when I read it. Or I recall who gave it to me or to whom I have lent it. In other words, the presence of the book on a shelf recalls its contents to mind at a glance and also intertwines an assortment of memories into the backdrop of my day-to-day life. At the very least, it becomes an always available potential portal into my past. I don’t mean to be romantic about any of this. In fact, I think this is all decidedly unromantic, having to do chiefly with the meaning and significance of the stuff that daily surrounds us.

The digitized book by contrast may have its own advantages, but by being the single undifferentiated interface for every book it loses its function as a mooring for the self. It’s not that the e-reader has no materiality of its own—of course it does. Perhaps the best way of conceptualizing this is to say that the device over-consolidates the materiality of reading in a way that smooths out the texture of our experience. Consider how this pattern of over-consolidation and subsequent smoothing of the texture of material culture recurs throughout digital society. The smartphone is a good example. An array of distinct physical objects—cash, maps, analog music players, cameras, calendars, etc.—become one thing. The texture of our experience is flattened out as a result.

He’s not wrong about this (insider joke to one of my readers). Yet, because of the Readwise service, I’m developing a preferential option for eBooks. That and my shelves having filled to overflowing with regular books several times.

It’s helpful to be reminded of what’s lost, though. I hope Warren Farha of the world’s greatest brick and mortar bookstore, Eighth Day Books in Wichita, will forgive my my opinion if he’s reading this.

Awkward

Barton and WallBuilders argue that Jefferson and the Founders, outside of some exceptions, meant for the “wall of protection” to operate in one direction. It also, the group and its founder suggested, applies mostly to the federal government, not the states.

Jack Jenkins, The activist behind opposition to the separation of church and state

Well! This is awkward! I have a bad impression of David Barton, who I’ve understood as a grifter, dining out on "America is a Christian Nation."

But Barton is almost completely correct in what I first quoted. What Thomas Jefferson called a "wall of separation" was meant to protect the churches (I’d prefer "religion," though both terms have shortcomings in this context) from the state; and it was, at the time the First Amendment was ratified, intended to apply only to the federal government ("Congress shall make no law …"). Heck, Massachusetts had an established Congregational Church for 30 more years after Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists, and that letter was well after the Bill of Rights!

Where Barton may be wrong is in in the report that he thinks that amendment "applies" rather than "applied" mostly to the Federal Government. The First Amendment has been incorporated in the post-Civil War Fourteenth Amendment and thereby made applicable to the states. Thus Saith the Courts.

Thus, it seems to me, Barton may be telling half-truths to embolden crypto-theocrats by whose concepts of Christianity I have no desire to be governed — unless the alternative is the Wokeworld religion. I would almost certainly pick the Bartonites in that contest.

Like I said: awkward.

Is the tide turning?

… there is something undeniably more powerful about reading critiques of contemporary sexual morality that arise not from traditional religious spaces, but from within secular feminism and and from elite media. That’s when you know the tide might be turning.

…

I bring this up because in every single argument and controversy under the sun, reality gets a vote. Culture wars are ultimately won or lost not by online arguments but through their real-world consequences, and the position that leads to greater human misery tends to lose.

To connect with the issues at the start of this piece, when speaking about the wave of intolerance that’s swept the academy, philanthropy, Hollywood, and much of mainstream media, I’ve told conservative friends that they have no idea how miserable it was making most of the people in those organizations. Something had to give, and the immiserated majority is going to be intimidated by the motivated minority for only so long.

When speaking of the reality of porn-influenced consent culture, there’s a similar dynamic in play. It’s immiserating people by the millions.

David French, in an encouraging column: we seem to have hit bottom and started back up in several ways. At least that’s what French thinks.

Imagine my arse

Comments such as these convince me that John Lennon captured a common liberal dream in his haunting song “Imagine.” Imagine if there were no countries, and no religion too. If we could just erase the borders and boundaries that divide us, then the world would “be as one.” It’s a vision of heaven for liberals, but conservatives believe it would quickly descend into hell. I think conservatives are on to something.

Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind.

I absolutely hate that song, and I was glad to learn I’m not alone.

If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes

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

Saturday, 7/16/22

Bankrupt

[Herschel] Walker’s personal flaws have made him an outlier: The Daily Beast last week reported that the former football great fathered several secret children and lied to his campaign staff about it — with the story quoting Walker’s own aides calling the candidate a "serious liability."

Axios (emphasis added).

Pardon me, but when the candidate himself is a "serious liability," what possible assets would suffice to make the campaign solvent?

Proof, I guess, that Campaign Aide is not a job requiring high levels of introspection or even basic love of country.

Axios lists four more states (Pennsylvania, Missouri, Ohio, Arizona) where the GOP nominated such bozos or scandal-magnets that regaining the Senate looks iffy. Imagine that: 5 very winnable Senate seats imperiled by extremist primary voters.

To win today, you should look relatively sane, and in a lot of races, only the Democrats are passing that test. That’s a real shame, because the Democrats are going to do some ugly things if they’re in control of Congress and the White House, and if SCOTUS rules even one of them ultra vires, let alone substantively unconstitutional, the slanders will intensify.

From Friday’s Morning Dispatch

Hate crime

The Department of Justice announced Thursday that a federal grand jury has indicted the man accused of murdering 10 black people in a Buffalo grocery store in May on hate crimes and firearms violations. If convicted, he could face life in prison or the death penalty. “The Justice Department fully recognizes the threat that white supremacist violence poses to the safety of the American people and American democracy,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. The supermarket is set to reopen today.

If ever a crime was a "hate crime," it was this one. But after 30 or more years of intermittent reflection, I’m still not convinced that hate crime laws are an improvement in criminal justice.

A pox on both houses

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Thursday sued to block enforcement of the Biden administration’s recent guidance telling health providers that life- or health-saving abortions are protected by the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, regardless of state abortion restrictions. The lawsuit alleges the guidance “flagrantly disregard[s] the legislative and democratic process,” and seeks to “transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic.”

Ken Paxton is a cowboy, with very plausible allegations of corruption against him (See Timeline: 6 times Texas AG Ken Paxton faced allegations of malfeasance and pending criminal charges.

On abortion, Joe Biden has become a cowboy, who cares less about constitutional limits than about virtue-signaling. (He’s also more corrupt than I realized in the 2020 election, though I still didn’t vote for him — I threw my vote away for principles I care about, not for the lesser evil who inevitably was going to lose to the greater evil in my state).

So I’m glad Paxton is challenging some of Biden’s moves. I wish his Solicitor General well, while wishing total disgrace for him personally. (And I don’t predict 100% success for Texas.)

Internet delight

The internet can be a pretty mean and nasty place, but it still has the ability to delight you every once in a while. Enter the Northwoods Baseball Radio Network, a podcast feed produced by a mysterious “Mr. King” that features nothing other than two-hour-long fictional baseball broadcasts designed to help insomniacs get to sleep. “No yelling, no loud commercials, no weird volume spikes,” the tagline reads. “Fans call it ‘baseball radio ASMR.’” Katy Waldman was entranced. “Time—how it’s apportioned, and the inner experience of it—seems to be the show’s main character. The series could be a sendup of Americana, the aesthetic’s essential boringness, or a love note to memory, with the hazy, preserved glow of a scene unburied from childhood,” she writes in The New Yorker. “The show’s best feature remains the pure sonic contentment it delivers. Real or fantastical, baseball commentary unfolds as metered poetry: ‘IN there for a called STRIKE,’ goes the rising question. ‘It’s OH and ONE,’ goes the falling answer.”

Lost, Not Stolen

Eight prominent conservatives released a report on Thursday examining “every claim of fraud and miscount put forward by former President Trump and his advocates” following the 2020 presidential election and reached an “unequivocal” conclusion: “Joe Biden was the choice of a majority of the Electors, who themselves were the choice of the majority of voters in their states.”

…

“The idea is that it’s written by conservatives, for conservatives,” Griffith said. “We recognize the people who are watching [Morning Joe and CNN] are probably not the people we’re primarily interested in. I mean, we’re happy to tell our message to anyone, but it’s really the folks who are conservatives who think the election was stolen.”

In the report’s executive summary, the eight men take pains to emphasize their conservative bona fides. “Every member of this informal group has worked in Republican politics, been appointed to office by Republicans, or is otherwise associated with the Party,” they write. “None have shifted loyalties to the Democratic Party, and none bear any ill will toward Trump and especially not toward his sincere supporters.”

Price St. Clair, A 2020 Election Report ‘By Conservatives, For Conservatives’.

My only concern about these high-level investigators is why they don’t "none bear any ill will toward Trump" after he lied, denied his own Justice Department’s conclusions, and precipitated a constitutional crisis to try to steal the election.

Temporary truce

I’m declaring a 15-minute pause in my bitter Jihad against Sen. Josh Hawley (who seemed like the real deal until he decided the future was populist, not conservative):

Meanwhile, high profile pro-choice advocates remain unconvincing. If you haven’t seen it, here’s the viral video of UC Berkeley School of Law professor Khiara Bridges sparring with Senator Josh Hawley. She insisted on using the phrase “people with the capacity for pregnancy,” rather than the verboten word women. When Hawley said, well then, “this isn’t really a women’s rights issue,” the Berkeley professor balked.

Nellie Bowles

Actually, Hawley’s point was cute, but deflected without hesitation, so it wasn’t any kind of mike-drop moment. Speaking presumptuously for the normie community, I’d say Hawley won handily. The whole relevant exchange, via Conor Friedersdorf:

Senator Hawley: Professor Bridges, you said several times––you’ve used a phrase, I want to make sure I understand what you mean by it. You’ve referred to “people with a capacity for pregnancy.” Would that be women?

Professor Bridges: Many women, cis women, have the capacity for pregnancy. Many cis women do not have the capacity for pregnancy. There are also trans men who are capable of pregnancy, as well as nonbinary people who are capable of pregnancy.

Hawley: So this isn’t really a women’s-rights issue, it’s a––

Bridges: We can recognize that this impacts women while also recognizing that it impacts other groups. Those things are not mutually exclusive, Senator Hawley.

Hawley: Alright, so your view is that the core of this right, then, is about what?

Bridges: So, um, I want to recognize that your line of questioning is transphobic and it opens up trans people to violence by not recognizing them.

Hawley: Wow, you’re saying that I’m opening up people to violence by asking whether or not women are the folks who can have pregnancies?

Bridges: So I want to note that one out of five transgender persons have attempted sucide, so I think it’s important––

Hawley: Because of my line of questioning? So we can’t talk about it?

Bridges: Because denying that trans people exist and pretending not to know that they exist––

Hawley: I’m denying that trans people exist by asking you––

Bridges: Are you? Are you?

Hawley: ––if you’re talking about women having pregnancies?

Bridges: Do you believe that men can get pregnant?

Hawley: No, I don’t think men can get pregnant.

Bridges: So you’re denying that trans people exist!

Hawley: And that leads to violence? Is this how you run your classroom? Are students allowed to question you or are they also treated like this, where they’re told that they’re opening up people to violence––

Bridges: We have a good time in my class. You should join. You might learn a lot.

Hawley: I would learn a lot. I’ve learned a lot just in this exchange. Extraordinary.

(Pro-tip to the "men can get pregnant" set: if only you would phrase it as "trans men," I might play along. Lose the "trans men are men and trans women are women" dogma if you want any normie support whatever.)

Against aspiration

Wow!:

Let me try to illustrate what I mean. At one point, I was a commuter. It didn’t last, but I did find watching other rush-hour drivers fascinating. Like a rubbish modern version of a nineteenth century naturalist, I used to classify them based on observable features. One particular type of driver usually drove a German luxury car. They would drive fast and close, exhibit visible frustration if the car in front of them had a large gap in front of it; and would shift lanes frequently, jostling for position among the other commuters. …

I came to see their behaviour as reflecting a deep[] confusion. My theory is that they were not emotionally differentiating between getting to work faster and going faster than the people around them. In other words, they failed to distinguish between their longer-term goals and interpersonal competition, even when the interpersonal competition was more or less fruitless. In this, they helped me to understand another group that had puzzled me: the British upper-middle classes, who seemed to me to be similarly focused on markers of interpersonal status that were completely divorced from their own overall flourishing, even in contexts where they had a negligible degree of control over the outcome.

… Its measures are intrapersonal: how well the person is doing on a scale against the rest of society, not how well they are flourishing as an organic being.

… I am not arguing for better aspirations here. I am arguing against aspiration.

This might seem harsh, but that is because the language of aspiration has debased our political language. I am not arguing against individual success. I am arguing that a society whose only measure of success is doing better than other people has no true concept of success at all. …

I have no aspiration for Yorkshire because Yorkshire is older, bigger, and better than the language of aspiration and than our entire degenerate post-war political class. I have no aspiration for Yorkshire because I have hope for it, and hope is a different kind of thing. I do not want Yorkshire to do well in the race to the bottom that now passes for civilisation. I want Yorkshire to survive it.

Leaving behind aspiration – by FFatalism

The Machine speaks

‘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

If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes

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


	


	



			
				


			

			
Wednesday, 7/13/22
		
	
	

		

Independent State Legislatures?




Members of the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority just last week took the next step in a little-noticed, but extremely dangerous, project: attempting to jam into law a radical misinterpretation of the Constitution’s elections and electors clauses, which, if successful, would create electoral chaos across the country.




Thomas Wolf and Ethan Herenstein, How the Supreme Court Could Upend the Integrity of Our Elections.


It is very obnoxious to attribute a "project" to the Supreme Court or to individual justices. But if you can filter out such tendentious crap, this is a more accessible explanation of the "Independent State Legislature" idea than the law journal article from the brothers Amar.


I can only hope that this pernicious novelty got such favorable mention as it did from three justices because the issue was barely briefed and superficially plausible. That won’t happen again in the North Carolina case: the issue will have the hell briefed out of it and no superficial plausibility will be left.


For my tastes, the key is one of those things you might overlook, but once you’ve seen it, you cannot unsee it.


Why liberal democracy gets no purchase in Islamdom




The general failure of liberal democracy to take hold in Muslim societies is a continuing and repeated phenomenon for an entire century beginning in the late 1800s. This failure has its source at least in part in the inhospitable nature of Islamic culture and society to Western liberal concepts.




Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. This inhospitality is shared by what Huntington labels "Orthodox civilization," centered in Russia, where it goes back at least 150 years.


Rationality and Taboo




In this context, the words of Leszek Kołakowski are sobering and akin to Philip Rieff’s own melancholy judgment on our third-world culture: “To the extent that rationality and rationalization threaten the very presence of taboos of our civilization, they corrode its ability to survive. But it is quite improbable that taboos, which are barriers erected by instinct and not by conscious planning, could be saved, or selectively saved, by rational technique; in this area we can only rely on the uncertain hope that the social self-preservation drive will prove strong enough to react to their evaporation, and that this reaction will not come in barbarous form.”




Rod Dreher and Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, quoting Modernity on Endless Trial (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 13.


Steve Bannon




[Steve] Bannon’s “offer” to testify seemed clearly to be an attempt to muddy the increasingly clear waters of the committee’s hearings. In the first impeachment hearings, Representatives Jim Jordan (R-OH) and John Ratcliffe (R-TX) used their positions to shout and badger witnesses and to create sound bites for right-wing media that put forward a completely misleading narrative of what the hearings were actually showing. As Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo pointed out today, Trump has complained bitterly that his people are unable to get their own narrative out, even as evidence against the president and his allies coming from his own inner circle is painting a damning picture of an attempt to overturn our democracy.


Public “testimony” would enable loyalists like Bannon to “flood the zone with sh*t,” as he has called his method of disinformation. Not only Bannon, but also the leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, has offered to “testify.” So, too, has Representative Mo Brooks (R-AL). In each case, though, the men have tried to put limits on what they will talk about and the conditions under which they will talk, revealing both an attempt to demonstrate that they still have power to make demands (they don’t) and that they are not making good faith offers. Rhodes’s lawyer told Politico: “He wants to confront them.”




Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American, July 11, 2022


Anyone who’s trying to put limits on what they will talk about and the conditions under which they will talk isn’t acting in good faith. It’s theater or even sabotage.


The crossroads of forest and village




The breakdown of initiation and the diminishment of mythic understanding are actually defences against encountering our own beauty. On a societal level, we appear to be working day and night at that defense. But the Great Self is hard-wired in us, and though the ritual mechanisms to approach it are wiped out, it won’t disappear but instead becomes mired in shadow. Therefore a King can only be seen as a tyrant, a Hag only as a bringer of misfortune. We tiptoe away from these beings, far too informed to take them seriously, and then we wonder why we don’t have the energy to vote. Myth proposes the paradoxical view that we are to dwell in the tension of a “crossroads” of Village and Forest, and that this very complexity provides the grounding of an authentic human life—a strange accord with ego and soul, rationality and vision. Ego gives a shape to these energies for living in the world that benefits others, but with no inner connection they lose their divine inflections and corrupt.




Fatuity of the Month, June 2022




Your freedom of expression of yourselves in drag is what America is all about.




Nancy Pelosi, pandering on Ru Paul’s Drag Race.


Martin Shaw, quoted by Rod Dreher (without a link)






If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.




Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes


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



	


	



			
				


			

			
Saturday, 7/9/22
		
	
	

		

Dobbs


Digesting Dobbs‘ legal fallout


Most of my favorite podcasters have annoying mannerisms, but substance too good to get hung up on it. For a ConLaw geek, Akhil Amar’s Amarica’s Constitution fits that to a "T".


Amar glories in saying "I told you so" (not in those words) over and over and over, but as they say, "it ain’t bragging if you can do it." He definitely is one of our nation’s top Constitutional Law scholars.


Amar is a "pro-choice" liberal who recognized that Roe was a real dog’s breakfast. So I took seriously his July 6 ruminations on the rationale of Dobbs, which he considers justified if flawed (for context, note that finding little flaws in justified opinions is roughly half of what legal teaching is about).


If the court takes the Dobbs reasoning elsewhere, it portends more reversals of precedent, though not necessarily contraception, miscegenation, sodomy or same-sex marriage. (For instance, in what state in 2022 would laws against them pass to create a test case? And if such a law were passed, there’s more to stare decisis analysis than "was this wrong when decided?" or even "was this egregiously wrong when decided?")


But the originalist approaches of the conservative majority are going to be less deferential to precedent than to the original meaning of the constitutional provision in question. And that’s as it should be because the constitution, not precedent, is the supreme law of the land, and to it Justices take an oath. (It’s understood, though, that lower courts are bound by precedent from higher courts.)


I’m not sure what precedents will be at most risk, but I think we’re going to find out.


Dobbs cultural fallout




“Men, it’s on us now,” someone said on Twitter just hours after Roe v. Wade was overturned on June 24. “Either start wearing contraceptives or get a vasectomy.” In the two weeks since, the suggestion that men can or should express solidarity with women by getting vasectomies to prevent unwanted pregnancies has proliferated online. The tone varies from flirty (“getting a vasectomy is the new 6-foot-4”) to pointed (“i don’t want to hear a peep out of anyone with a dick until the vasectomy appointment is scheduled”), but the overarching message is the same: “If you create sperm and can get someone pregnant, go get a vasectomy,” one viral tweet read. “We are tired.”


… Google Trends shows a small increase in vasectomy searches during the first week of May, when the draft decision first leaked, followed by a second, larger one starting in late June. Doctors have also reported higher interest in the procedure. “We have never seen a vasectomy spike like this in response to a single political or social event,” the Florida-based urologist Doug Stein told me.


Doctors like Stein, who has been dubbed “The Vasectomy King” by local press, have spent years evangelizing for the procedure. Now their cause is suddenly ascendant. The nation’s vasectomy influencers are in the spotlight.




The Vasectomy Influencers.


Well, I certainly didn’t see that coming, though I suppose it was unrealistic to expect an outbreak of chastity.


Remember, young Lothario: vasectomy is forever. Maybe you should just keep it in your pants until you’re ready to start adulting. Not that adulting is always easy.


Adulting in America




If you’re an adult in America today, you’ve learned how to speak furtively of what is happening, how to deploy discretion in repeating what you’ve heard, this secret grammar of mass murder. Time was that a horror like the 2006 slaying of five Amish schoolgirls by a deranged gunman would hold up daily affairs for at least a few moments; even little ones could detect a disruption in the normal order of things. By now we know that if the kids are young enough to miss the news, you might as well let them, because there will—not might, but will—come a day when the reality of their situation finds them.




Elizabeth Bruenig, Living in an Age of Mass Shootings


Too much more about Orange Man and Kindred Spirits


Trumpian "coincidences"




Among tax lawyers, the most invasive type of random audit carried out by the I.R.S. is known, only partly jokingly, as “an autopsy without the benefit of death.”


The odds of being selected for that audit in any given year are tiny — out of nearly 153 million individual returns filed for 2017, for example, the I.R.S. targeted about 5,000, or roughly one out of 30,600.


One of the few who received a bureaucratic letter with the news that his 2017 return would be under intensive scrutiny was James B. Comey, who had been fired as F.B.I. director that year by President Donald J. Trump. …


Among those who were chosen to have their 2019 returns scrutinized was the man who had been Mr. Comey’s deputy at the bureau: Andrew G. McCabe, who served several months as acting F.B.I. director after Mr. Comey’s firing.


Mr. McCabe was later dismissed by the Trump Justice Department after its watchdog accused him of misleading internal F.B.I. investigators ….




Michael S. Schmidt, Comey and McCabe, Who Infuriated Trump, Both Faced Intensive I.R.S. Audits


Weaponizing the IRS is neither unprecedented nor the exlusive mark of one of the two corrupt and feckless major parties. But this is unusually blatant.


The IRS Commissioner appointed by Trump has ordered an Inspector General investigation, but it’s a stretch for me to believe that a hit-job like this didn’t come through his own office.


Roped, broke and branded




Mr Trump prizes no supporters more than those who once rejected him but then roped, broke and branded themselves. He has endorsed [Harriet] Hageman and appeared last month at a rally in Casper with her. Ms Hageman, a lawyer, stoked the crowd by itemising things to revile, from illegal immigration to Anthony Fauci. But one bit of elaboration popped out when she said Mr Trump knew she would represent “your fallacies”, quickly amending that to “families”.




High noon for Liz Cheney | The Economist


Shambolic boyo




I see nothing sad in his leaving but that he was very entertaining and had one of the best political acts—shambolic upper-class boyo, utterly lost in his personal sphere, just like you and no better than you—in modern British history.




Peggy Noonan on the downfall of Boris Johnson


Boris and Donald




The actual law-breaking and lies about law-breaking were cast in even worse light by the news today that the opposition leader, Keir Starmer, has been cleared by the police from the charge that he too had violated the lockdown rules. Starmer, to heighten the contrast, had publicly stated that he’d resign his position if he were found guilty. The difference between Keir and Boris (and I’ve known both for decades) is pretty obvious: Keir is a somewhat dull, decent bloke and Boris is an entitled, colorful charlatan.


But the glee of the elites and the mainstream media at this likable rogue’s political demise obscures something important. They were wrong to conflate him with Trump. Boris is a liar the way Bill Clinton was a liar: he lied to get himself out of trouble he’d gotten himself into. And, like Clinton, Boris had some relationship to reality — even as he tried to bluff and bluster his way through it.


Trump’s lies were far, far graver and bolder: that he’d won an election in a landslide (when he lost), and that our entire electoral system is rigged. And Trump, unlike Boris, is truly pathological and psychologically broken — incapable of distinguishing his own egomaniac fantasies from the real world.




Andrew Sullivan (emphasis added)


Not that the emphasized sentence is not how Oxford-educated pundits say "poopy-head" or "full of cooties." It’s an actual opinion — which I fully share — of psychological incapacity, which if true leads inexorably to the conclusion that Trump’s unfit to occupy the White House. That was essentially my objection to Trump from the beginning (probably 2016, when it became harder to write him off as a joke), though through a combination of luck and some adults in the room, we didn’t see the lunacy on full display until after he lost in 2020.


I thought in 2016 that his nomination, and then his election, were raised middle-fingers to America’s competent governing class. I slowly came to appreciate why a lot of American’s left-behind might want to do that, and I hope that both parties will pay attention to their legitimate grievances (i.e., the economic ones, not any racial resentments).


But God deliver us from any more Trump!


Anyway, Sullivan’s Substack this week is far more about Boris Johnson than about Trump, and gives Johnson credit for his many accomplishments. Then he pivots back:




Which brings me, of course, to the obvious analogy to the American right. The Tories were thrilled to ride Boris’ coat-tails into office — he did deliver Brexit and a smashing election victory — but they did not turn into a cult. He had to face a feisty press and weekly grillings in parliament, in which his relationship to reality was constantly tested. His own Conservative MPs — many of whom owed him their seats and careers — enabled him to a point, but they never lost their minds or, ultimately, their consciences.


Trump and the GOP? A sadder, darker, weirder story. Trump’s lies are far, far worse. Boris never questioned the results of a referendum or an election — and neither did his opponents. He didn’t marshal an armed mob to ransack parliament when his own MPs turned on him. The final straw for Boris was when he lied that he hadn’t been briefed about a minor Tory sex scandal, and apologized.


Trump, meanwhile, has unrelentingly sustained the biggest, most dangerous lie of all: that our entire democracy is rigged, that he won in a landslide in 2020, and that the GOP should seek to win the next election by any means, fair or foul. His lies are proactive and corrosive to democracy for the future. They have to be huge to work. And they are.




Why We Did It


I don’t know if this is David French’s original thought or Tim Miller’s original thought or the result of French reflecting on Miller, but darn, it’s good!




Ask any person to describe themselves, and they’ll likely respond with a mix of characteristics and virtues. They’ll describe their profession (lawyer, banker, plumber), their relationships (husband, father, grandfather), and their politics (Republican, Democrat), and if asked they might even describe their perceived virtues (honesty, fidelity, fortitude).


But what if the virtues conflict with other core parts of a person’s identity? …


[D]uring the Trump years, honesty and independence directly and starkly clashed with status. Time and again, men and women in America’s political class found that they couldn’t possess both virtue and power. They had to make a choice.


…


During the Trump years, the collision between status and virtue was constant and relentless. Trump never gave anyone a breather. He was never chagrined or mollified by scandal. He never apologized. He never turned over a new leaf. He just charged from one lie to another, and his demands for absolute loyalty left his defenders and followers with little ability to separate themselves from his worst moments while still remaining in the Republican tent.


As we’ve seen from days of courageous testimony before the January 6 House Select Committee, it is quite possible to say “I’m a Republican, and I’m honest.” But with each passing week—and with each new revelation—it grows more difficult to say “I’m a Trump Republican, and I’m honest.” Status conflicts with virtue, and status wins.




David French at his best, reviewing (and highly recommending) Tim Miller’s Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell.


Thriving on toxicity


Somehow this seems to fit here, with the preceding two as preface:




There are species of bacteria that actually thrive in the toxic emissions from hydrothermal vents deep below the ocean. What would be killing sulphuric acid to most animals is food for them. We have created a similarly hostile climate in media and politics: high pressure, extreme temperature swings, and a toxic atmosphere. We should not be surprised, then, that unlovely creatures are the only ones who can thrive in this space.


Decent people with dignity are easy marks for outrage mobs, cancel culture, and the clickbait press. But fools with no shame are impervious to such a climate. Men and women of character tend to stay away, and if they don’t, are much more subject to the extortionate pressures of the political world. If your reputation is already poor, you can chase celebrity, frolicking among the deep-sea plumes, while your more delicate competitors are floating on the surface, poisoned.




Chris Stirewalt, H/T Alan Jacobs, commenting specifically on the improbable political victories of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson.


Miscellany


    

  • Public health officials in Oregon announced they would be delaying a meeting because to rush and get everything done for it was a white trait. Here’s what a high ranking Oregon Health Authority official wrote to postpone the upcoming confab: "We recognize that urgency is a white supremacy value that can get in the way of more intentional and thoughtful work, and we want to attend to this dynamic. Therefore, we will reach out at a later date to reschedule." The KKK would unironically love this explanation.
    • 

  • Tucker and conservative media have a hammer and keep looking for nails … Carlson is right that there is social breakdown that contributed to this shooting: After police took away the boy’s knives amid his various threats of violence, the Highland Park shooter’s dad helped buy him a gun.
    • 

  • “Joy too can be an act of resistance. I want to talk about personal acts of reclamation because sometimes people will say, ‘There’s nothing I can do. I feel so powerless.’ There is no act too small that you can engage in. Even today, I have a personal errand, I need to redo my nails. And I’ve decided that I’m going to use my new manicure as almost like a personal act of reclamation for me and my story.” — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
    • 



Nellie Bowles


Nellie had many more (including side-eyes at Elon Musk’s non-marital fertility), but I started feeling guilty about sharing so much paid content.




Penultimately, just a bit more, now from Andrew Sullivan’s miscellany:


    

  • “From an empirical, non-woke perspective, the ‘Kill TERFs’ movement is pretty astonishing. It’s a bunch of biological males, threatening to brutalize biological females, for saying that female sex is real,” – Wilfred Reilly.
    • 

  • “There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists,” a Yosemite Park ranger when asked why it was so tough to design a bear-proof trash bin.
    • 



Happy




Happy as something unimportant

and free as a thing unimportant.

As something no one prizes

and which does not prize itself.

As something mocked by all

and which mocks at their mockery.

As laughter without serious reason.

As a yell able to outyell itself.

Happy as no matter what,

as any no matter what.


Happy

as a dog’s tail.




Anna Swir via Poetry Foundation






If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.




Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes


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



	


	



			
				


			

			
Wednesday, 7/6/22
		
	
	

		

Eye of newt, toe of frog: what’s cooking in Nashville?




“The greatest danger to America is not our enemies from the outside, as powerful as they may be,” said former President Donald Trump, who delivered the keynote address at the event. “The greatest danger to America is the destruction of our nation from the people from within. And you know the people I’m talking about.”




Katherine Stewart, Christian Nationalists Are Excited About What Comes Next


Because Trump’s words are in quotation-marks, I trust Stewart on the quote. (Otherwise, she’s prone to reckless hyperbole.) Can we agree that "you know the people I’m talking about," coming from the mouth of the man who’d have been glad of the lynching of Mike Pence on 1/6/21 for frustrating his coup attempt, is legitimately chilling?


But, ironically, he almost spoke the truth for once: the greatest danger is within, and a big part of it was listening to him with rapt attention.


The "theology of dominionism — that is, the belief that “right-thinking” Christians have a biblically derived mandate to take control of all aspects of government and society" (Stewart’s pretty accurate summary) is deeply unchristian, and I don’t mean that it isn’t nice enough or sweet enough. I’m using Christian in a, well, Christian sense, not as a synonym for "mensch." (There are nasty Christians in this world and admirable non-Christians.)


I mean that grasping for political power through threat of violence is demonic, not Christian. I don’t care what kind of half-assed "Seven Mountains Dominionism" you can brew up from eye of newt, toe of frog, tongues of glossolalia and Calvin’s sting to justify it.




No, the problem isn’t wanting to win. The problem is the unwillingness to lose. That is, the problem is the impossibility of imagining that certain forms of losing might be preferable to certain forms of winning – that some things might not be worth doing even if not doing them would entail losing.




Brad East, Another Option for Christian Politics.


The Rise and Fall of Nondenominationalism


Christianity Today had an excellent podcast series, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, with Mars Hill being a Seattle-area megachurch led by its founder named Mark Driscoll. Driscoll was autocratic, toxic, and had some weird obsessions. The Church finally exploded, for reasons you can learn by listening to the podcast series.


Or, in my opinion, you could listen to one of the follow-on episodes, specifically a new interview with Tim Keller. Keller has tremendous insight, but you need to listen closely because he doesn’t say narrowly and judgmentally "this what went wrong with Mars Hill and Mark Driscoll." What he does say has to do with the weaknesses of nondenominational Evangelicalism.


It’s not that hard to connect the dots from there. And in the end, that’s far more important than the weaknesses of Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill.


Stories




Stanley is convinced that at least part of a theologian’s job is to tell stories, and stories should be entertaining. Though some might take this as a sign of unsophistication, Stanley would argue that Wittgenstein and others have cured him of theology’s self-defeating post-Enlightenment attempt to ground itself on anything but the biblical narrative.




Stanley Hauerwas, John Berkman, Michael G. Cartwright, The Hauerwas Reader. Or, as Fr. Hans Jacobse said,
"We are not in a post-Christian age, but in a post-Enlightenment age. The reason why these Christianities are collapsing is that they were rationalized."


Blinking in shock at a different kind of midlife crisis




Like me, Martin recently found himself blinking in shock as he was dragged unexpectedly towards Christianity in midlife, after a career as a storyteller, mythologist and wilderness rites-of-passage guide. Wondering what we can do about our mutual weird journey, we’ve put our heads together to organise a day-long event of stories, talks, workshops and other bits and pieces, aimed at reviving the wild, ancient Christian legacy of the West.


It’s quite a legacy, too. Once upon a time these islands were sprinkled with cave-dwelling monks, forest Christians, old stone monasteries, wandering fools-for-Christ and stories of faith wound deep in the woods and the wild. It’s a deep liturgical, mythological and wild legacy that most of us have forgotten, and we’re going to spend a day and a night talking about it.




Paul Kingsnorth. The "Martin" is Martin Shaw (The House of Beasts & Vines and Amazon).


These aren’t, I think, kinds of stories Stanley Hauerwas was referring to (above), because they’re not exactly biblical. But they’re very good.


I’d give a lot to hear these two together, but not as much as transatlantic air fare.


Humility Today




Ever notice how the people who mention humility the most tend to have it in the shortest supply? Citing a tweet from European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde—that she was “humbled to be awarded an honorary degree by the London School of Economics”—David Brooks dives into the false modesty phenomenon, and why it’s found such a natural home online. “If you’ve spent any time on social media, and especially if you’re around the high-status world of the achievatrons, you are probably familiar with the basic rules of the form,” he writes. “The first rule is that you must never tweet about any event that could actually lead to humility. Never tweet: ‘I’m humbled that I went to a party, and nobody noticed me.’ Never tweet: ‘I’m humbled that I got fired for incompetence.’ The whole point of humility display is to signal that you are humbled by your own magnificent accomplishments. We can all be humbled by an awesome mountain or the infinitude of the night sky, but to be humbled by being in the presence of yourself—that is a sign of truly great humility.”




The Morning Dispatch


Pride is generally thought a, if not the, cardinal sin. Humility is its opposite. When people turn "humbled" into the equivalent of "proud", we’re in a world of hurt — worse by far than when they turned "literally" into another word for "figuratively."


David Brooks is one of a handful of reasons I renewed my New York Times subscription after they offered another year at 75%+ discount. Ask and ye shall receive, I guess.


School Shootings (and likely more, but tacitly)




The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It’s worse. It’s that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts.




Malcolm Gladwell via David French, on school shootings as slow-motion riots (among other things).


French:




[T]he “ideology of masculinity” is more dysfunctional than I’ve ever seen. It’s trapped between two competing extremes, a far-left version that casts common male characteristics as inherently toxic or unhealthy and a right-wing masculine counterculture that often revels in aggression and intimidation. One extreme says, “Traditional masculinity is toxic,” and the other extreme responds, “I’ll show you toxic masculinity.” In the meantime, all too many ordinary young men lack any kind of common vision for a moral, meaningful life.




The Supreme Court’s War on Life, the Universe and Everything




From the first full term of a high court whose majority is committed to interpreting the law rather than making it, we know definitively it is for many Americans a revolutionary concept tantamount to an act of aggression. The left and its standard bearers in the media have become so inured to the idea of the judicial branch as an additional arm of the legislature that they regard any departure as an act of hostility.


For that half-century, judges have been allies in the progressive struggle to remake America—either as friendly facilitators of the aims of Democratic presidents and lawmakers or as useful bulwarks against the efforts of Republicans.


The left has surely been encouraged in this belief by the apparently bipartisan nature of the progressive, activist interpretation of the judiciary’s role. Justices appointed by presidents of both parties, have affirmed it. If Anthony Kennedy could reaffirm Roe and John Roberts could uphold ObamaCare, then this is surely the settled and universally agreed-on function of the court: to align itself efficiently with the dominant ideology of the times.


This ideology requires the judiciary to view its role not as the independent interpreter of law in the light of what the Constitution as written permits, but as supplier of a spurious legal authority for explicitly political goals that have no constitutional justification.




Gerard Baker, The Supreme Court’s War on Life, the Universe and Everything






If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.




Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes


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



	


	



			
				


			

			
Tuesday, 6/28/22
		
	
	

		

Still more on Dobbs


As I know the lay of the land uncommonly well, I am trying to say some genuinely useful things, that are not being said very commonly, on the reversal of Roe and Casey. I’m also trying to avoid worsening tensions. I even exited social media for a few days (maybe more than necessary — I’ve been peeking) when a discussion started getting unproductively heated.


Face-saving failure


Confirmation hearing vignettes:




Here’s Justice Gorsuch: “Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, is a precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court. It has been reaffirmed. . . . So a good judge will consider it as precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court worthy as treatment of precedent like any other.”


He added that “If I were to start telling you which are my favorite precedents or which are my least favorite precedents, or if I viewed precedent in that fashion, I would be tipping my hand and suggesting to litigants that I have already made up my mind about their cases.”


And here’s Justice Kavanaugh: “Roe v. Wade is an important precedent of the Supreme Court. It has been reaffirmed many times. It was reaffirmed in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992. . . . So that precedent on precedent is quite important as you think about stare decisis in this context.” He made no specific pledge about either case that we have seen. Justice Amy Coney Barrett expressly rejected the idea that Roe was a super precedent.




Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, which also explains why a nominee cannot pledge to uphold a precedent or to strike it down:




Sens. Susan Collins and Joe Manchin said Friday they feel Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch deceived them on the precedent point in testimony and in their private meetings with the Justices. We weren’t in those meetings, but we’d be stunned if either Justice came close to making a pledge about Roe.


The reason is that the first rule of judging is that you can’t pre-judge a case. Judges are limited under Article III of the Constitution to hearing cases and controversies, and that means ruling on facts and law that are specific to those cases.


No judge can know what those facts might be in advance of a case, and judges owe it to the parties to consider those facts impartially. A judge who can’t be impartial, or who has already reached a conclusion or has a bias about a case, is obliged to recuse himself. This is judicial ethics 101.


An authority on this point is no less than the late progressive Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as she explained in 1993. “It would be wrong for me to say or preview in this legislative chamber how I would cast my vote on questions the Supreme Court may be called upon to decide,” she said. “A judge sworn to decide impartially can offer no forecasts, no hints, for that would show not only disregard for the specifics of the particular case, it would display disdain for the entire judicial process.”




Frankly, no nominee should ever pledge their vote on any issue at confirmation hearings. That alone would be a disqualifier. Any Senator worth his or her seat should understand that, and since I respect them as senateworthy, I suggest that both Collins and Manchin do understand it. Their face-saving isn’t convincing.


Now flooding the zone shamelessly


As I scan the New York Times Opinion page since Friday morning, it’s apparent that "flooding the zone with sh*t" is not a MAGAworld exclusive.


Do not trust the Grey Lady for reliable interpretation of Dobbs overruling Roe or for prognostications about what a supposedly agenda-driven court is going to do next. (Exception: Ross Douthat wrote one of the wisest things I’ve read in the aftermath, and they did publish it.)


Is the court going to ban contraception? Ban sodomy? Ban same-sex marriage? Overrule the precedents that dogmatized rights to each into existence?


Just remember: courts decide cases. They don’t go out and make mischief on their own. So how would SCOTUS even get a chance to rescind these other "unenumerated rights"?


Damon Linker (After Roe: The Reversals to Come), who I respect enough to read when it’s obvious we disagree, imputes a nefarious agenda to the court but skips any suggestion of how it would get the opportunity to realize that agenda.


I can think of no obvious way other than some jurisdiction banning contraception, sodomy or same-sex marriage, resulting in a fresh round of litigation.


What do you think of the life expectancy of a legislator, even in Texas, who proposed to outlaw contraception? Outlawing sodomy would be a hard sell in 2021 even in red states. I could imagine a performative bill to define marriage as sexually binary, but have trouble imagining it getting very far.


If it did, the lower Federal courts would almost certainly strike such a law down under Griswold, Lawrence or Obergefell. Then SCOTUS could just decline to grant certiorari.


If it granted "cert," the stare decisis analysis on those precedents would include factoring in some very, very concrete reliance on Obergefell in the SSM context.


I’m no prophet, and I’m not close enough to the political poles to be incapably of suffering rude surprises, but I just don’t see those other precedents falling until there’s I’m long in the grave and there have been some major wake-up calls from realities we’ve had on call-blocking for a while.


Heartening




After weeks of incendiary rhetoric, attacks on crisis pregnancy centers, and a foiled attempt on Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s life, Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion groups formally disavowed violence in the name of their cause. Those who use “destruction and violence” do not speak for them or the movement, the groups said in a statement.




TMD


On a related note, one of my favorite Substackers, Freddie deBoer, scared me by opening that it’s time for the Left to engage in extralegal resistance. Fortunately, it turned out that he meant things like helping abortion-minded women get to states where abortion is legal, or even to help them find clandestine abortions in their own states.


I don’t even think the former could be criminalized; the latter, perhaps.


Victor Rosenblum


As I was writing yesterday that I wish Nat Henthoff had lived to see Friday’s Dobbs decision, I was wracking my brain for the name of his "country cousin" (also a prolife liberal Jewish Democrat) at Northwestern University Law School. I finally gave up. Of course, it finally came to me this morning. So: I also wish Victor Rosenblum had lived to see this day.


Advice for the despondent


After stylishly signaling his pro-choice virtue, Garrison Keillor shows some sympathy for the 6 justices who are now pariahs, and then turns to some good advice for his own tribe:




Meanwhile, remind yourself that other people have thrived under wretched governors so don’t be discouraged. The Duke of Saxe-Weimar threw Bach in jail for daring to think he had individual rights. Dante was sent into exile and he wrote the Inferno so he could put the politician Argenti into the Fifth Circle of Hell. Dostoevsky joined a liberal study group for which, in 1849, he was thrown into prison and sentenced to death by firing squad, and was third in line to be executed when a pardon arrived. He lit out for Paris, London, Berlin, and figured out how to survive, writing Crime and Punishment in serial installments for magazines, avoiding politics. While cruelty is in power, do what Mozart did. Exercise your gifts. Create beautiful things. Wolfgang stayed clear of emperors and did his work and he lives on today and the emperors are just moldy names on marble slabs covered with pigeon droppings. If you can’t write The Marriage of Figaro, write your own marriage and make it a work of art.




That’s kind of what I’ve been trying to do, in my very limited way, for more than a decade. I like to think of myself as that proverbial butterfly in the Amazon, very subtly changing the weather in Indiana.


Not Dobbs


Still flooding the zone


The Donald reads conservatives out of MAGAworld




Bozos on the bus




What we need as a nation, more than anything else I can think of, is a recommitment to basic competence, and, especially, a refusal to accept ideological justifications for plain old ineptitude. Too often Americans give a free pass to bunglers and bozos who belong to their tribe.




Alan Jacobs, I think we’re all bozos on this bus – Snakes and Ladders


Inauguration Day 2017 in a Nutshell


Speaking of clowns:




When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. The palace becomes a circus.




Turkish Proverb (reportedly)


A little levity


I probably have given too short shrift to the January 6 Committee hearings because … well, I didn’t think anything they said would change my life or my vote. But I sure got a chuckle out of this:




H/T Yassine Meskhout






If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.




Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes


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



	


	



			
				


			

			
Mostly abortion-related
		
	
	

		

David French, Cassandra


I follow David French in podcasts and blogs because:


    

  • He’s a seasoned litigator aligned with me on abortion, free speech, and religious freedom; and
    • 

  • I have to put up with hearing him to hear the amazing Sarah Isgur.
    • 



But Sunday, I think his reflexive religious provincialism got the better of him in Roe Is Reversed, and the Right Isn’t Ready.


He starts off well enough:




I’ve been a pro-life advocate and activist for more than 30 years …


…


Through it all, I was guided by two burning convictions—that Roe represented a grave moral and constitutional wrong and that I belonged to a national Christian community that loved its fellow citizens, believed in a holistic ethic of life, and was ready, willing, and able to rise to the challenge of creating a truly pro-life culture.


I believe only one of those things today.


My feelings about Roe are unchanged. …




But then he paints a very bleak picture of the right generally and more specifically his corner of the religious right, which he reflexively equates with "the Church" (it’s one of his most annoying verbal tics, another is hyperbolicic use of "tremendous, tremendous"):




The two sides of the great American divide are now staring at each other and asking, “Now what?” The answer from pro-life America should be clear and resounding—the commitment to life carries with it a commitment to love, to care for the most vulnerable members of society, both mother and child.


But life and love are countercultural on too many parts of the right. In a time of hate and death, too many members of pro-life America are contributing to both phenomena. Is that too much to say? Is that too strong? I don’t think so.


In deep-red America, a wave of performative and punitive legislation is sweeping the land. …


… The vicissitudes of politics haven’t just linked the anti-abortion cause to various toxic forces on the right, they’ve transformed parts of the anti-abortion movement, making many of its members as toxic as their “libertine and hyperindividualist” allies.


…


In the meantime, the Republican branch of the American church is adopting the political culture of the secular right. With a few notable exceptions, it not only didn’t resist the hatred and fury of the MAGA movement, it was the MAGA movement.




(Emphasis added)


Now I suppose there are at least three possibilities here:


    

  1. He’s right about pro-life America, period, full stop.
    2. 

  2. He’s right about Evangelicalism.
    3. 

  3. He’s engaged in hyperbole to get Evangelicals to to better than settling for liberal tears.
    4. 



I reject the first possibility. I’ve been pro-life a decade longer than French (mostly because I’m two decades older). I broke markedly, if not completely, with Evangelicism shortly before I became actively pro-life, and left Protestantism entirely a about a decade-and-a-half later.


I do not believe that lib-trolling and vindictiveness is any significant part of Orthodox Christianity, though Orthodoxy is anti-abortion (as the historic church always has been — i.e., before American Evangelicals got recruited to the cause by C. Everett Koop, Francis Schaeffer, and less principled actors).


I also don’t believe that it is a significant factor among observant Roman Catholics, "observant" being measured by adherence to Catholic Social Teaching as well as participation in their Church’s sacramental life. Indeed, Catholic Social Teaching (Christian Democracy) is the North Star of the American Solidarity Party, which party alone I support these days.


Bottom line: I believe French is wrong about the Church because his provincialism blinds him to the bigger picture. I certainly hope he’s wrong.


And French’s turn to anti-vaxx sentiment a red prolife America seems like totally gratuitous grievance-airing.


I suggest to David French that if he’s all that down on Calvinist-tinged Evangelicalism, he step out for a breath of incense-tinged air at one of the Anglophone Orthodox Churches in his area.


Come and see, David. Give it a month or two of Sundays.


Douthat on the risk of toxic response


Observant Catholic (see above) Ross Douthat puts French’s point less apocalyptically (I’m being very selective; read the whole column if you can):




While the pro-life movement has won the right to legislate against abortion, it has not yet proven that it can do so in a way that can command durable majority support … [T]he vicissitudes of politics and its own compromises have linked the anti-abortion cause to various toxic forces on the right — some libertine and hyperindividualist, others simply hostile to synthesis, conciliation and majoritarian politics.


… But among its own writers and activists, the movement has understood itself to also be carrying on the best of America’s tradition of social reform, including causes associated with liberalism and progressivism.


…


To win the long-term battle, to persuade the country’s vast disquieted middle, abortion opponents … need to show how abortion restrictions are compatible with … the health of the poorest women, the flourishing of their children, the dignity of motherhood even when it comes unexpectedly or amid great difficulty.


These issues … are essential to the holistic aspects of political and ideological debate. In any great controversy, people are swayed to one side or another not just by the rightness of a particular position, but by whether that position is embedded in a social vision that seems generally attractive, desirable, worth siding with and fighting for.


Here some of the pathologies of right-wing governance could pave a path to failure for the pro-life movement. You can imagine a future in which anti-abortion laws are permanently linked to a punitive and stingy politics, in which women in difficulties can face police scrutiny for a suspicious miscarriage but receive little in the way of prenatal guidance or postnatal support. In that world, serious abortion restrictions would be sustainable in the most conservative parts of the country, but probably nowhere else, and the long-term prospects for national abortion rights legislation would be bright.




In a part of French’s column, he quoted this Douthat column but said it didn’t go far enough. I think it does — because Douthat’s vision is more Catholic (and more catholic).


Making abortion unthinkable


Even in the Evangelical world, there are sane people wanting actually to make things better:




Roe was an unjust ruling. I have always believed it would be overturned, as other unjust decisions by the court were, although I thought it would take longer. I rejoice that it did not. But of course it will take longer for abortion to become unthinkable, which is the real goal of the pro-life movement.




Karen Swallow Prior


Prior continues:




Still, I was, like my fellow evangelicals, a Johnny-come-lately in a long line of people who have opposed abortion and infanticide and tried to defend vulnerable life.


Members of the early Christian church within the ancient Roman world rescued abandoned infants (often those who were female or otherwise deemed inferior) from certain death ….




I always appreciate it when Evangelicals admit, even if tacitly, that Evangelicalism is so unlike the earliest church that it cannot claim vicarious credit for what the earliest church did.


Orthodoxy (and even Catholicism) can.


Still more:




The judicial fiat of Roe v. Wade jump-started the culture wars that have poisoned our political process and brought us to a place of polarization and unbridgeable division. Indeed, this division has been capitalized on by far too many pundits and politicians, for whom a position on abortion does not appear to be a sincerely held belief, but merely an issue they can (and do) leverage for votes or monetize for financial gain. Such betrayal casts a shadow on the overturning of Roe, which has been for me and many others a long-awaited event.


Even so, making abortion unthinkable might start with the law, but it won’t end there. For it is not only the supply of abortion that matters but also the demand. I lament the impoverishment of a social imagination that cannot conceive of a world in which women can flourish without abortion.




Nat Henthoff




On this day, I remember with fondness the late Nat Hentoff, a Jewish atheist who nevertheless believed in the right to life of the unborn, and said so in a time and place where that cost him something. Here is a column Hentoff wrote after he hosted pro-life liberal Pennsylvania Democratic Gov. Bob Casey at Cooper Union in downtown Manhattan.




Rod Dreher.


Henthoff was a fierce member of the ACLU back when the ACLU was actually about civil liberties, and was one of the preeminent jazz critics of his age.


I wish he had lived to see last Friday.


He really didn’t need the Committee’s help …




This just seems to make Donald Trump look awful, just awful."




Neil Cavuto, Fox News, on the latest revelations from the January 6 Committee.


You’re surprised that Trump is awful, Neil?


Terrorist wishcasting




I note, with raised eyebrow, the terrorist plans underway to set about attacking Catholic churches and pregnancy resource centers. As someone put it in a dark joke-tweet, this is the state of the discourse in 2022: “You don’t care about pregnant women!” “Well no, we have numerous buildings and institutions expressly set up for that purpose actually, how can we help you?” “Oh really, where? Let’s go firebomb them!”




Bethel McGrew






If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.




Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes


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



	


	



			
				


			

			
At last, after 49 years …
		
	
	

		

Dobbs


The case and my feelings


After some 40 years as consciously pro-life, most of those years being actively pro-life as well, I feel a strange let-down and foreboding:


    

  • Dobbs means pro-abortion terrorism for a while;
    • 

  • Dobbs means prolonged political debate in many of the 50 states, some of which will swerve performatively too far left or right;
    • 

  • Dobbs is messier procedurally than I remembered; and
    • 

  • I have friends who are beside themselves with grief and rage (I hope they appreciate that I was constitutionally outraged by Roe for 40 years).
    • 

  • UPDATE: Of course! Duh! The leak made this anticlimactic all by itself! (H/T Advisory Opinions podcast)
    • 



Yes, I’m satisfied with the outcome: Roe was wrongly decided, and Casey may have been even worse. It’s important for the structural integrity of our constitutional system that political issues not be hijacked by the courts under constitutional pretexts.


On what becomes of birth control, inter-racial marriage, same-sex marriage, anti-sodomy laws, and any remaining liberal groin pieties, I suggest that the most important observation in Alito’s opinion is this:




… even putting aside that these cases are distinguishable, there is a further point that the dissent ignores: Each precedent is subject to its own stare decisis analysis, and the factors that our doctrine instructs us to consider like reliance and workability are different for these cases than for our abortion jurisprudence.




(Opinion at 71-72)


Homework: using the factors for upholding or overruling precedent outlined by Alito, do your own stare decisis analysis on each. I’ll get you started: not one of the four is deeply rooted in our history and traditions, but that’s only the beginning of the analysis. From there, it gets more interesting.


Night of Rage




In a recent video essay, my friend James Wood has suggested that in this day and age, thinking Christians should work to recover a theology of the demonic. I don’t assume this suggestion will be equally meaningful to all my readers. But I submit that you can’t contemplate what drives men to organize a “Night of Rage” against Christian charities whose sole purpose is aiding pregnant women, and not wonder if there is a dark something or other lurking back of it all.




Bethel McGrew, Morning in America. I quote it because I was thinking exactly the same thing. There is no logic to vandalizing or even firebombing pro-life pregnancy centers unless the motivation is consciously pro-abortion, not pro-choice, or else one is demonically confused.


Other Legalia


Principled




We could not abandon ongoing representations just because a client’s position is unpopular in some circles.




Former Solicitor General Paul Clement on leaving Chicago’s Kirkland & Ellis when they decided to abandon second amendment litigation. He is forming his own firm with another Kirkland partner.


Best wishes. Even though I’m at best lukewarm about guns, this stand is principled, and nobody’s going to have to pass the hat so Paul Clement can pay for his lunch.


Correct facts, dubious conclusion


One of the reasons I think the Supreme Court got it right in Carson v. Makin is the poor quality of the dissents. Justice Sotomayor actually invoked the "wall of separation," an extraconstitutional metaphor that probably has never actually fit our nation’s polity (starting with the little-known fact that we had state-established churches into the 1830s).


But an odder one is Justice Breyer’s:




This potential for religious strife is still with us. We are today a Nation with well over 100 different religious groups, from Free Will Baptist to African Methodist, Buddhist to Humanist. See Pew Research Center, America’s Changing Religious Landscape 21 (May 12, 2015). People in our country adhere to a vast array of beliefs, ideals, and philosophies. And with greater religious diversity comes greater risk of religiously based strife, conflict, and social division. The Religion Clauses were written in part to help avoid that disunion. As Thomas Jefferson, one of the leading drafters and proponents of those Clauses, wrote, “ ‘to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical.’ ” Everson, 330 U. S., at 13. And as James Madison, another drafter and proponent, said, compelled taxpayer sponsorship of religion “is itself a signal of persecution,” which “will destroy that moderation and harmony which the forbearance of our laws to intermeddle with Religion, has produced amongst its several sects.” Id., at 68–69 (appendix to dissenting opinion of Rutledge, J.). To interpret the Clauses with these concerns in mind may help to further their original purpose of avoiding religious-based division.




Is there any evidence whatever that increased religious diversity leads to greater strife? Doesn’t Western history’s putatively religious strife generally involve Protestants versus Catholics in a society where almost everyone was one or the other? Doesn’t our present reality belie Breyer’s logic, i.e., doesn’t our lack of strife despite "well over 100 different religious groups" tend all by itself to disprove Breyer’s prophecy?


Let’s end the end-runs now




Anticipating this week’s school funding decision, Maine lawmakers enacted a crucial amendment to the state’s anti-discrimination law last year in order to counteract the expected ruling. The revised law forbids discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation, and it applies to every private school that chooses to accept public funds, without regard to religious affiliation.




Aaron Tang in the New York Times


It would be interesting to learn whether the debate over S.P. 544 (the Bill in question) included any invidiously discriminatory snark about religion.


But the legislature avoided one other potential infirmity.


Previously, Maine law allowed sexual discrimination in education (some of the private schools receiving aid while religious schools did not were either all-male or all-female) while forbidding sexual orientation discrimination (with an exception for religious schools). That seems exceedingly odd, as bans on sexual discrimination are generally older than those based on sexual orientation.


The revision adds a prohibition on sex discrimination as well as sexual orientation discrimination, and thus will put those other private schools to the choice of going co-ed or forfeiting aid.


I can’t think of a legal theory I’d want to see recognized by courts that would allow Maine private schools to do an end-run around the legislature’s end-run. It’s always been the case that state money comes with strings attached.


The challenge for private schools now is the get parents to care enough about their children’s longterm wellbeing to reject the economic values society promotes, notably including consumerism, and to redirect some dollars to tuition in schools that won’t perpetuate those ultimately-immiserating values. Sad to say, most "Christian" schools are consumerist with a religious veneer.


January 6


Liz Cheney, kamikaze pilot




[Florida Governor Ron] DeSantis … is capturing the Republican imagination as tough and committed but not unstable or criminal.




Peggy Noonan.


"Not unstable or criminal" is an improvement for the post-2015 GOP.


But I, a former Republican and still reflexively concerned about that party, am not enthusiastic about DeSantis for more than maybe 30 seconds at a time. His appearance, unfortunately, is kind of Mafia. He is quite smart but too often "politically savvy" in crudely manipulative way.


More Noonan:




Mr. Trump’s national polling numbers continue underwater, but the real test will be to see those numbers after the Jan. 6 hearings are over. I believe we’ll see Rep. Liz Cheney’s kamikaze mission hit its target, and the SS Trump will list.


…


This is one of the great stories. Mr. Trump won’t recover from it.


I think Republicans, including plenty of Trump people, are slowly but surely solving their party’s Trump problem.




Liz Cheney, or Providence through her, has turned the January 6 Committee into a nothingburger for the Democrats and a boost for sane, non-criminal Republicans. Some day, maybe, a renewed GOP will issue her a posthumous pardon and even lionize her as a self-sacrificial heroine in our nation’s hour of need — no less than Mike Pence’s steadfastness on January 6 itself, and equally "kamikaze."


Still, I’ll be voting American Solidarity Party again in 2024, I think, and don’t expect ever to declare myself Republican again. And I don’t expect politics from any perspective, to really accomplish much of lasting importance.


The January 6 Committee, a liberal view




The decision by the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, to keep pro-Trump Republicans off the Jan. 6 committee has eliminated the back-and-forth bloviating that typically plague congressional inquiries, allowing investigators to present their findings with the narrative cohesion of a good true-crime series. Trump, who understands television, appears to be aware of how bad the hearings are for him; The Washington Post reported that he’s watching all of them and is furious at McCarthy for not putting anyone on the dais to defend him.


…


Dustin Stockton helped organize the pro-Trump bus tour that culminated in the Jan. 6 rally at the Ellipse in front of the White House. Politico once called him and his fiancée, Jennifer Lawrence, the “Bonnie and Clyde of MAGA world.” On Tuesday, after a hearing that included testimony by Rusty Bowers, the speaker of the Arizona House, and the Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, Stockton tweeted, “This has been the most impactful of the January 6th Committee hearings. Embarrassed that I was fooled by the Fulton County ‘suitcases of ballots’ hoax.”


He was referring to the conspiracy theory, pushed by Trump and his allies, that election workers smuggled fraudulent ballots into the State Farm Arena in Atlanta and ran them through the voting machines multiple times. Tuesday, he said, was the first time he realized the tale was a complete fabrication.


… The hearing on Tuesday … got to him, especially the testimony from Freeman and Moss about how their lives were upended by the lie Stockton helped spread.


“To see the just absolute turmoil it caused in her life, and the human impact of that accusation, especially, was incredibly jarring,” Stockton said of Freeman.


… Elite conservatives mostly understood that Trump’s stories about a stolen election were absurd; as one senior Republican official asked The Washington Post, “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time?” But his rank-and-file devotees weren’t all in on the con. Instead, they were the marks.




Michelle Goldberg.


I think we know now what the downside was of humoring Trump.


Politics Generally


Biden’s incoherence on LGBT


In no area has the Biden administration been more appallingly misled by extremists than in "LGBT" issues. His ignorance of what constitutes "conversion therapy" has led to a particularly perverse result — as shown in the last sentence below:




Some therapists who work with children with gender dysphoria worry that [a June 15 Biden executive order “advancing equality for lgbtqi+ Individuals”] could be interpreted to mean therapists should not investigate why someone feels distressed about their biological sex. … It has long been held that people with gender dysphoria should have therapy before drugs.


Increasingly, however, such talking therapy has clashed with “gender-affirmative” care, which accepts patients’ self-diagnosis that they are trans. That is now considered best practice in America’s booming trans health-care field. Therapy has been dismissed as “gatekeeping”, even when applied to trans-identifying minors for whom gender-affirming drugs can be particularly harmful. … Finland and Sweden have mostly stopped prescribing blockers to under-18s in favour of talking therapy, because the evidence base for them is thin. Mr Biden’s order, by contrast, asks federal departments to expand access to “gender-affirming care”.


The order does not impose an outright ban on therapy for gender-dysphoric youth. But it will have a “chilling effect”, says Lisa Marchiano, a Jungian therapist and a co-founder of the Gender Exploratory Therapy Association. Most decent therapists should be able to help people with gender dysphoria, she says. Yet America’s focus on affirmation means many are wary of doing so. Instead, they refer children to gender therapists, who are likely to affirm a trans identity and suggest drugs. Some gay adults who struggled with gender nonconformity in adolescence say they believe that encouraging children with gender dysphoria to consider themselves trans is in effect conversion therapy.




The Economist (emphasis added)


If there is any grain of truth in the conservative charge of "grooming" or "recruitment," it’s that foreclosing or chilling pre-transition psychological assessment delivers gender-dysphoric kids to the tender mercies of people who don’t make real money unless the kid transitions.


What liberals can learn from conservatives


By and large, I’ve been underwhelmed by Damon Linker’s new Substack. It’s a big commitment to write and some length many times per week, and Linker seems, ummmm, out of the habit.


But Friday he hit a home run, especially for anyone who has read and pondered Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind..


    

  • He tacitly challenges Haidt to "do better" on measuring the moral values of liberals;
    • 

  • He explains why he thinks liberals profess disinterest in the values of sanctity, authority and loyalty;
    • 

  • He suggests that liberals are missing out on a full appreciation of moral pluralism by discounting sanctity, authority and loyalty; and
    • 

  • Bonus for me who wasn’t familiar at all with Isaiah Berlin (beyond knowing that he was an important intellectual of some sort), he summarizes Isaiah Berlin’s thoughts on moral pluralism along the way.
    • 



I have reason to think that this link will get you Linker’s full piece even if you’re not a subscriber.


Face-plant


Lauren Boebert apparently thinks that if Jesus and da boyz had them some AR-15s, He wouldn’t have had to die that yucky ole death.


She made this remark to a gathering at some "Christian Center."


To be fair, the response to her was tepid at best.


They never should have invited her, but it’s weird what some "Christians" will do to raise money.


I attended a Christian college once (not Wheaton) that honored archaeologist and oil multi-millionaire Wendell Phillips (back when "millionaire" meant something) with an honorary doctorate. After he used his acceptance speech to contradict things the university considered part of the faith, they barred faculty from later rebutting him from that same pulpit.


I do not name it because I have some reason to think it’s doing better now.


Unclassifiable (unless the class is "Bless Their Hearts")


This NYT item would have me tearing my hair out if I had any hair.


In short, it’s about some Christianish or Christianist business that are hawking guns for Jesus, and they wear their faith (such as it is) on their sleeves, or gunstocks, or anywhere else they can put it to be noticed.


I’m a fallible interpreter of scripture, but doesn’t "put not your trust in princes, in sons of men in whom there is no salvation" include putting trust in the arms you keep and bear, as in declarations like the "Second Amendment to our Constitution is the cornerstone of the freedom we enjoy as American citizens"?


(Reminds me, by the way, of an actual quote from an Oklahoma legislator in the mid-70s: "The first thing the communists do when they take over is outlaw cockfighting." Bet you thought it was going to be "take away all the guns," didn’t you.)






If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.




Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes


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