“Fascist” slightly misses the mark. M. Gessen hits a bulls-eye:
Unmarked Vans. Secret Lists. Public Denunciations. Our Police State Has Arrived.
The 4chan White House Communications Office
Beyond the fact that this kind of shitposting is so obviously beneath the office, the posts are genuinely sinister. By adding a photo of an ICE arrest to a light-hearted viral trend, for instance, the White House account manages to perfectly capture the sociopathic, fascistic tone of ironic detachment and glee of the internet’s darkest corners and most malignant trolls. The official X account of the White House isn’t just full of low-rent 4chan musings, it’s an alarming signal of an administration that’s fluent in internet extremism and seemingly dedicated to pursuing its casual cruelty as a chief political export.
…
And the posters have goals. The first is to engage and supply their loyal audiences with constant memes and content. The second is perhaps more strategic. The account’s blatant humiliation of immigrants who it alleges have heinous criminal records is intentional. The goal is to goad their opponents into defending people accused of indefensible crimes. The primary accusation from the MAGA faithful toward people who are outraged about the White House’s Studio Ghibli post or the ASMR video is that the left is more concerned with defending fentanyl dealers and immigrants accused of rape and robbery than they are about the safety of the country. “Disappointing that folks are more upset about this meme than they are about the fentanyl crisis,” Dorr said in the same post that the White House pointed me to. But this is a false binary; in all cases, the chief objections are to the dehumanization and glee on display and the worrying lack of due process.
Aspiring Dominatrix-in-Chief Kristi Noem added a $50,000 Rolex to the dehumanization.
Feeling like Abraham
The America I’ve known for all my life is gone. I don’t think it will be back in my lifetime.
I’m not going to complain about God allowing this to happen; I suspect that something like it needed to happen and I trust that my morning prayer for the nation, “Let your judgment be merciful,” is somehow being answered.
But it may be that the merciful thing in the long-term feels very harsh in the moment (and that’s the perception of a citizen who’s relatively safe; imagine the immigrants among us!).
And part of the background thrum that makes the moment unnerving is my concern that the Democrats might do no better.
It feels like an Abraham moment: “Get thee up into a land I will show thee.” No map.
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
[I’ve already quoted a very pungent Nick Catoggio distillation, but I keep returning to it.]
Insofar as I thought Trump marked mostly a populist realignment of partisan political boundaries, I think I was wrong — or at least that Trump 2.0 is a bigger deal than Trump 1.0. I think he’s now leading us into a post-liberal/illiberal world (that may be inevitable).
2015 me would have gazed around at the first nine days of Trump’s term, taking each policy in isolation, and concluded that the individual trees look pretty good. 2025 me stares around at the forest Trump is planting and shudders.
Many are freaking out about this.
The post-liberal/illiberal world is ominous for a lot of reasons:
Liberal democracy has been very good materially to me, and mine, and most of the U.S. (But some have been left behind relatively because they didn’t register as Important People.)
There’s a decent case to be made that liberal democracy represents our best chance to live together peacefully despite deep differences. Trump’s zero-sum mentality requires winners, losers and chaos, not co-existence.
Postliberalism/Illiberalism in America feels alien, and how tolerably it’s implemented will depend on those implementing it. Trump, a toxic narcissist with authoritarian impulses and a taste for lethal retribution, is a terrible person to implement it. I’d be more comfortable with an Orbán than with Trump, but I cannot identify any American Orbán.
Donald Trump has millions or tens of millions of supporters for who lethal retribution is a feature, not a bug, and they’ll turn on anyone he turns on. He’s an antichrist heading a new toxic religious cult, and since the failed assassination attempt, he may actually believe that he’s anointed (in contrast to his former cynicism toward his Christian enthusiasts).
Bottom line: it’s probably the end of a world, but not the end of the world. And I can’t do much about it except, possibly, take personal and familial protective measures. Some of those are in place; others we’ve ruled out as a matter of principle.
Good People
[I]t is impossible to overstate the conformist power among elites of being seen as a Good Person. This is why no Republican leader ever pushed back against this stuff prior to Trump. They were terrified of being seen as a Bad Person by the media and other elites. Trump is the Honey Badger of politics: he doesn’t care. (That’s a link to the megaviral Randall video from some years back; he drops some profanity in it, so be aware.)
Niall Ferguson on the bipartisan assault on the rule of law
Let me add two more big drops of rain on the Promenade parade. Since Adam Smith, economists have mostly seen free trade and the rule of law as beneficial for growth. Not only have we now entered a period of extreme uncertainty about the future path of U.S. trade policy (does Trump really mean to jack up tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China on February 1, or are the threats just a negotiating tactic?), but we also appear to have jettisoned the rule of law in the euphoria of the monarchical moment.
It is not just Trump’s executive order suspending a law to ban TikTok that was passed by Congress, signed by his predecessor, and upheld by the Supreme Court. Trump has also issued a blanket pardon to all those convicted of crimes—including assaults on police officers—committed on January 6, 2021. And he has issued an executive order overturning the birthright citizenship most people had long assumed was enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment.
But the truly disturbing thing to my eyes is that the assault on the rule of law has been bipartisan. And it is at least arguable that the Democrats began the process. It all started with their hounding of Trump in the courts, at least some of which was politically motivated, and continued in the final days of Biden’s presidency with his preemptive pardons of family members and political figures (they’re all here, including the one for his son Hunter), and a wild attempt to declare a constitutional amendment ratified (the Equal Rights Amendment) that hadn’t been.
“I believe in the rule of law, and I am optimistic that the strength of our legal institutions will ultimately prevail over politics,” Biden said in a statement justifying his actions. “But . . . ” You can stop reading right there. Because if you believe in the rule of law, “but,” then you don’t believe in the rule of law at all. It’s the same as those people who say they believe in free speech, but . . .
To be clear, I begin to fear we may be living through the death of the republic—the transition to empire that historical experience has led us to expect—but it’s not all Trump. It’s a truly bipartisan effort.
I am just fine with a vibe shift that gets us away from ESG, DEI, and the strangling regulation and ideologically motivated incompetence that lies behind the Los Angeles inferno, not to mention Chicago’s less spectacular descent into insolvency and criminality. If Davos Man needed Trump’s reelection to point out that if Europe went woke, it would go broke, then fine.
But trashing the rule of law is another matter.
And note how perfectly the phenomena coincide: the erosion of the laws and the imperial aspirations—Greenland; the Panama Canal; Canada (just kidding); the “Gulf of America;” and Mount McKinley ….
Take the word fascism, properly applied to Franco’s Spain or Mussolini’s Italy, and to some extent beyond. The fasces were the bundles of rods carried by Roman lictors: symbols of punishment and magisterial authority, but in modern times also of a tightly unified society controlled from above, and organized in corporate form. The desire of totalitarians everywhere is to achieve harmonization, with all of society marching in military cadence under the guidance of an omnipresent government.
But the Trump administration is more interested in blowing up the state than in extending its power. Its ideologues, such as they are, are reacting to what they think of as government overreach. They will abuse executive power to do it, but they want to eliminate bureaucracy, not grow it.
Trump himself is not Mussolini, or Hitler, or Orbán—two of them soldiers with creditable war records, the third an activist against a dying Communist regime. Trump was a draft dodger by choice and a grifter by trade, and more important, he does not read. Unlike others in his orbit, he does not have ideas so much as impulses, whims, and resentments. He is, to be sure, cruel and malicious, but unlike the others, has no real governing vision.
My simple thought: that in our politics now we consistently go too far and ask too much. It has become a major dynamic in the past 20 years or so. It manifests in a kind of ideological maximalism. You must get everything you want and grant your foe nothing. In terms of the issue above, you don’t ask society to give you something you deserve—good and just treatment of all transgender folk. Instead you insist that others see reality exactly as you do—that if a man experiences himself as a woman, then you must agree that he is a woman, and this new insight must be incorporated into all human activity, such as sports.
Reaction to the Trump executive order from those who disagree with it has been curiously absent. The reason is that they know they went too far.
The biggest and most politically consequential example of going too far, in the past generation, has been the Democratic Party and illegal immigration. Everyone knows this so I’ll say it quickly. If you deliberately allow many millions to cross the southern border illegally, thus deliberately provoking those who came here legally or were born here, Americans will become a people comfortable with—supportive of—their forced removal, certainly of those who are criminals.
…
Jump to what has been going on the past few weeks in Washington, with the unelected Elon Musk reorganizing, if that’s the word, the federal agencies. Here I pick on him, in part to show fairness. He is surely a genius, a visionary, a titan, but there is something childish and primitive about him. He has wild confidence in his ability to engineer desired outcomes, but unstable elements have a way of exploding in the beaker, and like everyone else from Silicon Valley he lacks a sense of the tragic. They think human life can be rationally shaped and perfected, that every problem just needs the right wrench, and in any case they all think they’re God.
My fear, here we switch metaphors, is that Mr. Musk and his young staffers and acolytes are mad doctors who’ll put 30 chemo ports in the sick body. They’ll not only kill the cancer, they’ll kill the patient.
But they are up against, or trying to reform, a government whose agencies themselves were often maximalist and went too far.
Of all the agencies being batted about the one we will remember first when we recall this period in history is the U.S. Agency for International Development, so much of whose line-item spending was devoted to cultural imperialism. You have seen the lists. USAID produced a DEI musical in Ireland, funded LGBT activism in Guatemala. It spent $426,000 to help Indonesian coffee companies become more climate- and gender-friendly, $447,000 to promote the expansion of atheism in Nepal, and on and on.
When you look at what they were pushing on the world you think: They’re not fighting anti-American feeling, they are causing anti-American feeling.
Who is defending these USAID programs? Nobody. Obviously not Republicans, but not Democrats either. Everyone knows the agency went too far.
[O]n Wednesday afternoon, when I visited the essential Live Updates feed at The New York Times to check in on the latest barrage of Trump administration hyperactivity, I found literally the entire feed devoted to Trump’s bullshit “plan” for the U.S. takeover of Gaza. Breaking news stories. Reactions from around the world. Chin-scratching analysis from experts. All taking the suggestion, which Trump’s own senior staff hadn’t been expecting prior to its announcement during his press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with utmost seriousness. As if it was a real proposal that could conceivably become a reality.
I admit, this made me want to throw my laptop at the wall. Can’t you see he just fucking with us? But that’s unfair to the hardworking journalists at the Times. The American president’s words matter. They have to cover it as if it’s real. Which, of course, takes attention away from the things happening that are real. That illustrates quite vividly the horrible bind in which journalists, reporters, and news organizations find themselves at this maximally harrowing moment.
Thank god for James Carville: While the entire Dem establishment seems committed to losing at every opportunity they have, one James Carville is screaming into the void. “We ran a presidential election. If we were playing the Super Bowl, we started our seventh-string quarterback. . . . You can’t address a problem unless you’re honest about a problem.”
When the glowing orb of Carville pops up on the TV, you know you’re about to be yelled at. You know there’ll be spit on that table. Carville said people would be shocked to know that there are Dem candidates that “can actually complete a sentence, that actually know how to frame a message, that actually have a sense of accomplishment, of doing something.” Where are they hiding? Maybe in Governor Phil Murphy’s attic. Maybe somewhere in South Bend. But it’s time, guys: We need a complete-your-sentence–level politician, and we need one ba (sic)
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
For most of my professional career, I’ve been a skeptic of the American meritocracy. Not a skeptic of the basic idea that competent and intelligent people should fill positions requiring competence and intelligence, but a skeptic of the idea that a system of frantic adolescent hoop-jumping and résumé-building, designed to skim the smartest kids from every region and segregate them from the rest of society for college and beyond, has actually created an elite that’s more responsible, effective, morally grounded and genuinely cosmopolitan than the more quasi-aristocratic upper class that it displaced.
I’ve spent most of my life thinking that I was well-informed on the American religious scene — especially Evangelicalism. For a long time, that self-regard may have been warranted.
No more. I recently passed the 27th anniversary of my reception into the Orthodox Christian faith. And it may be time to admit that I’ve lost track of what’s going on in the American Evangelical world.
Stephanie McCrummen of the Atlantic has recently published twoarticles on the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and those who share its outlook with or without conscious acknowledgement of NAR.
I’ve had my eyes on NAR for a few years, but here’s where McCrummen floored me:
What was happening in the barn in Lancaster County did not represent some fringe of American Christianity, but rather what much of the faith is becoming. A shift is under way, one that scholars have been tracking for years and that has become startlingly visible with the rise of Trumpism. At this point, tens of millions of believers—about 40 percent of American Christians, including Catholics, according to a recent Denison University survey—are embracing an alluring, charismatic movement that has little use for religious pluralism, individual rights, or constitutional democracy.
What she’s describing in NAR That 40% figure got my back up as absurd until I realized that I was basing it on the typical doctrinal commitments of Evangelicalism more than 27 years ago. In fact, it’s been 45 years since I unequivocally identified as Evangelical, being for 18 subsequent years (before my Orthodox reception) only Evangelical-adjacent.
So I can’t say she’s wrong. I also can’t say she’s right, but if she’s right, it would go fairly far in explaining the great Evangelical murmuration from “character matters” (Bill Clinton) to, in effect, “he may be a rapist sonofabitch but he’s our rapist sonofabitch.” So the NAR “prophets” have spoken.
Metaphors: Choose Wisely
Metaphors matter. They can elucidate, but they can also elide and confuse. For a long time, the conservative metaphor for the Left’s tactics has been “slippery slope.” It’s a bad metaphor. It suggests that radical efforts to harm American families are all just the result of the gravitational pull of the earth, or the inevitability of logical progression. That isn’t the case. The tactics used against American families are far more clever. And they invariably involve a “Bait and Switch.” Sell the American people on a principle we can all agree on: “inclusivity,” “tolerance” and “anti-bullying.” Then, smuggle in an entirely different program under its name. That is how gender ideology ended up part of the mandatory “anti-bullying” curriculum, as opposed to the “sex education curriculum,” which is subject to parental opt out.
When an authoritarian-minded leader poised to control the world’s most powerful military begins overt saber-rattling against neighbors, the most obvious and important question to ask is whether he intends to follow through. That question, unfortunately, is difficult to answer. On the one hand, Trump almost certainly has no plan, or even concepts of a plan, to launch a hemispheric war. Seizing the uncontrolled edges of the North American continent makes sense in the board game Risk, but it has very little logic in any real-world scenario.
On the other hand, Trump constantly generated wild ideas during his first term, only for the traditional Republicans in his orbit to distract or foil him, with the result that the world never found out how serious he was about them. This time around, one of his highest priorities has been to make sure his incoming administration is free of officials whose professionalism or loyalty to the Constitution would put them at risk of violating their loyalty to Trump. We cannot simply assume that Trump’s most harebrained schemes will fizzle.
An easier question to answer is why Trump keeps uttering these threats. One reason is that he seems to sincerely believe that strong countries have the right to bully weaker ones. Trump has longinsisted that the United States should seize smaller countries’ natural resources, and that American allies should be paying us protection money, as if they were shopkeepers and America were a mob boss.
So let’s run the race marked out for us. Let’s fix our eyes on Old Glory and all she represents. Let’s fix our eyes on this land of heroes and let their courage inspire. And let’s fix our eyes on the author and perfecter of our faith and our freedom and never forget that where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. That means freedom always wins.
Mike Pence, at the 2020 Republican National Convention, via William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry. Compare this the Hebrews 12:1-2 and ask yourself “just how low is the bar for being considered a devout Christian Republican?”
Cui bono?
Cui bono? Whom did this new story serve? Who benefits from a world of consequence-free sex, weak ties, the putting off of childbearing and family? Today, the pharmaceutical and medical industries benefit, by selling decades-long prescriptions for contraceptives, and then various attempts at ART [Assisted Reproductive Technology] later on. Corporations and employers benefit: they gain a new labor force unsaddled by commitments to family, place, or other less-than-profitable concerns.
On Wednesday America’s Supreme Court examined a Texas law mandating age verification for websites where a third or more of the material is “sexual” and “harmful to minors”. A district judge blocked the law, which is similar to measures recently passed by 18 other states, but an appeals court reinstated it last year.
A trade association of adult entertainers, known as the Free Speech Coalition, is arguing that the law restricts adult Texans’ access to protected speech and violates the First Amendment. The Supreme Court struck down a similar law (the federal Child Online Protection Act) in 2004, the plaintiffs point out. Texas’s defence relies on a high-court ruling from 1968 that upheld a law banning erotic bookstores from selling their wares to children. But online commerce, the plaintiffs retort, is a world apart: adults may be reluctant to reveal their identities to porn sites because they worry about “identity thieves and extortionists”.
Economist World News in Brief for 1/15/25.
That last sentence should be a real eye-opener. Paraphrasing: “We’re such pathetic wankers that we do business with identity thieves and extortionists. We have a right to be pathetic wankers, so to hell with the kids who get exposed.”
That’s not the whole case the “Free Speech Coalition” could make against the Texas law (and about the logic of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals) but it’s got to be among the most risible.
Glimmers
Woke retreat
Recently, [Mark] Zuckerberg ordered tampon machines to be taken out of men’s bathrooms in all of Meta’s offices. Commenter Richard Hanania said,
This is like pulling down the statue of Saddam. Now you know wokeness is dead.
… Nobody could have imagined that a vulgar, orange billionaire from New York and an anti-woke South African immigrant in Silicon Valley might be the champions Europe needs to find its own courage and Make Europe Great Again. But then again, despite the false faith of the left-wing ideologues and their bureaucracies, the march of history follows no predictable path.
[F]or those of us who have run afoul of the Left’s dogma, particularly in public, it’s harder to worry over the Trump cabinet’s failure to harmonize with the views of credentialed bureaucrats.
Look no further than MAGA mega-toady Steve Bannon declaring war on MAGA mega-toady Elon Musk.
Bannon has had a bee in his bonnet about Musk for the better part of a month, ever since Elon went to the mat in support of H-1B visas for highly skilled immigrants. “He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down,” he told an Italian newspaper recently, vowing to have Musk “run out of here by Inauguration Day.” Turning to Silicon Valley’s habit of hiring migrants instead of Americans, Bannon took the gloves off—and sounded a little, well, woke in the process:
“No blacks or Hispanics have any of these jobs or any access to these jobs,” Bannon said.
“Peter Thiel, David Sachs, Elon Musk, are all white South Africans,” Bannon observed. “He should go back to South Africa. Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, white South Africans, we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?”
Well then.
Pity poor Elon, who spent Christmas week defending Indian engineers from Groypers calling them sewage-drinking subhumans only to have Groyper-adjacent nationalist Steve Bannon turn around and accuse him of being racist. The rift over immigration policy developing between red-pilled tech bros, color-blind nativist ideologues, and gutter white supremacists will be a fun one to follow over the next four years.
But it won’t be the only one. There are numerous rifts opening on the right as Donald Trump prepares to take office. The GOP caught the proverbial car on Election Day and now each of its factions wants to drive; watching them tear each other apart will be one of the small silver linings of a second Trump presidency.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
Three days in a row! When did I last blog three days in a row?!
I have nothing to say about Israel, Hamas, Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, hostages and any piece I’ve left out, but I’m not oblivious to this anniversary.
Not politics
Tradition
Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.
G.K. Chesteron, Orthodoxy
Here is a quick and generally reliable rule to follow. If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment.
Anthony M. Esolen, Out of the Ashes
Sportsball
Gladwell, like many of us, seems to have unwittingly internalized the idea that when professional athletes do the thing they’re paid to do, they’re not acting according to the workaday necessity (like the rest of us) but rather are expressing with grace and energy their inmost competitive instincts, and doing so in a way that gives them delight. We need to believe that because much of our delight in watching them derives from our belief in their delight.
Alan Jacobs, How to Think
Dreaming is just about our only break from rationalism
The whole evolution of music as an academic discipline tends to destroy the most important reason to care about music in the first place.
Here’s one of my charts on the subject:
That’s why I started to write about sleeping.
No music writer talks about sleep more than me. And that’s because dreams happen when we sleep—and this is the one type of visionary experience everybody can still access.
We all become a little unhinged and crazy in those dreams. Even the most rationalistic STEM advocate.
…
Could something like this—dream therapy for creatives— exist in the current day?
I wondered about this for a long time. I finally decided to ask musicians about whether they had learned songs from their dreams.
Nothing prepared me for the response I got. I heard from hundreds of musicians—and learned that the gift of a song during a dream is quite common. And it’s usually a powerful song.
…
I note that many musicians have told me that they are reluctant to discuss their dream songs. The subject is just too strange and antithetical to our dominant rationalist paradigm.
And that reluctance is even greater if the artist has a hallucination or out-of-body experience or something else that ‘medical experts’ might want to treat.
My hunch is that these happen frequently to intensely creative people—even in an age of rationalism.
The world isn’t as neat and rigorously logical as you’ve been told. And the world of artistic inspiration is the least logical of all. There’s a good reason why the ancients believed that creative works were a gift from the muse.
…
I continue to research this subject, and I think about it all the time. Even more important, I try to open up my mind to realms of experience beyond the empirical. That’s where creativity comes from, and I don’t want to shut myself off from the source because of close-mindedness.
Above all, I don’t mock or dismiss artists who have these visions, or assume that in every instance they are suffering from mental illness. Some of them might be a lot wiser or healthier than the rest of us.
I can’t think of a solo-effort Substack that delivers more bang for the buck that Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker. And the guy is really smart about some things that interest me.
From the Department of Free-Association: Has Rod Dreher, once again, seized the moment to shape a coming conversation, as he did in Crunchy Cons, Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies?
Politics
Serious people earnestly disagreeing
Back in August I was watching the DNC with my old mom in California. Kamala and Tim and Michelle and Barack and all the others kept talking about our reasons for aiding Ukraine in its fight against the Russian occupation of its eastern territories. They consistently appealed to the apparently essentialized fact that the Ukrainians, like the Americans, “love freedom”, and that it is only natural and right to help other peoples who share this love with us. There was zero acknowledgment of the complexities of geopolitics and historical legacies, or of the situated perspective a Russian might non-crazily come to have, according to which parts of what is now Ukraine seem naturally and justly to fall more into the sphere of influence of the Russian Empire than of the North Atlantic one.
I know a lovely man in his 60s, an outstanding member of the vanishing breed of the Homo Sovieticus, whose father is Ukrainian and whose mother is Russian, and who grew up in Kazakhstan. He tells me his parents waited to get married so that the celebration would take place on the 300th anniversary of the 1654 Pereyaslav Agreement, in which the Cossack Hetmanate in control of much of Ukraine made a ceremonial pledge of loyalty to Moscow. This friend of mine is in exile, and is no admirer of Putin. He greatly regrets the 2022 invasion. But he could never make any sense of any claim to the effect that Ukraine rightly belongs to NATO and not to Russia in virtue of some mysterious essential trait of the Ukrainian people, that they “love freedom” while the Russians do not.
…
And here we arrive at what really gets me about the Democrats. If we are going to risk direct conflict with another nuclear-armed superpower, let us not be lulled into it by bullshit and platitudes. Why do the Democrats have to talk that way? It’s as if the Republican tactic of portraying “the libs” as effeminate hyper-woke safe-spacers has really only caused the Democrats themselves to double down with absurd displays of hawkish masculinity. We’re supposed to love Kamala because she’s a tough-on-crime prosecutor, and that therefore corrects for the slip-ups of the past years when some in the progressive wing of the party have suggested, on the contrary, that all cops are bastards. Tim Walz, meanwhile, seems to have been chosen primarily because he wears flannel shirts, and has been put on display in the most implausibly kayfabe campaign ads purportedly fixing his own pick-up truck. One almost expects them next to come out with an ad depicting Walz in the act of dressing a deer, looking every bit the caricature of the Minneapolis goy neighbor in the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man (2009). He’s a hunter and a football coach, but he’s also a faculty advisor for the LGBTQIA+ club! What a model of enlightened masculinity! She’s a prosecutor and a foreign-policy hawk, but she’s a she and she brings “joy”! The problem is that none of the rest of the world cares about any of that childish stuff. They all know that for all the equally kayfabe retrograde masculinity of Trump, that man is an absolute pussy, and it is in fact the Democrats who represent the greatest threat to any hot-spot of resistance to the US’s arch-imperial ambitions throughout the world.
What are the odds that a world in which the American Empire is beaten into desperate retreat would be any sort of world our children and grandchildren might want to live in? … Trump, in a second term as president, is practically guaranteed to assume the role of overseer of American imperial retreat, in favor not of a global community of equals such as some naïve progressives might have hoped for in the early years of the League of Nations, but of nationalist isolation and at most pragmatic cooperation with other self-sequestering nation-states, somewhat along the lines of what Marine Le Pen envisions for Europe in the phrase “association des nations libres”. That phrase might sound innocent enough, but nations that are free to dispense with any idea of reciprocal obligations are unlikely to remain in a stable “association” for long, and Trump, at least, hardly gives any indications of knowing how to guide the ship of state as it weathers the inevitable storms that will whip up unstable waters in our years of decline. Far better, far surer, we believe, to have a party in power that understands and accepts the nature of the that power: imperial power, namely, which might aspire in the years ahead not only to face off with steely resolve in our current global showdown, but, eventually, to emerge as its undisputed champion. … Most of us on the Editorial Board, even the Americans among us, do not live in the United States, and from our respective vantages it is pretty hard to concentrate on any aspect of American political life that does not have to do with its role as a globe-spanning empire. Just manage your domestic affairs however you see fit, we are tempted to say; our overwhelming concern is with what you get up to beyond your borders. We therefore have rather little patience for that current of Democratic partisan discourse that would like for American politics to sound more or less like, say, Danish politics. Denmark, if we may be blunt, and all of the Scandinavian countries with such high marks on all the usual tests, is able to focus on maintaining its robust welfare state primarily because its defense is entirely outsourced to the American Empire. The American Democrats who fawn over European national health systems seldom realize that by seeing to the defense of other NATO members, the United States is at the same time freeing up European national budgets for other more humane uses. Americans pay for European defense rather than paying for their own welfare; Europeans get health care in turn, but only through de-facto vassalization.
We would like to see this arrangement continue, at least for now, at least until NATO can be expanded to include all of those states that currently set themselves up in opposition to it, a prospect even Russia’s own leaders in the early post-Soviet years were able to entertain with some seriousness.
You might think our reasons for voting for the Democrats are not good ones, or that we are merely “joking” when we give them. We can only reply that your reasons really do not matter. You might well imagine your are voting, for your part, for “decency”, or “joy”, or sane gun-control laws or a woman’s right to choose. But the only way to vote for any of these things is to cast a vote for American empire. That’s the bargain. We here at The Hinternet, minus our Founding Editor, believe this is a bargain worth accepting, but that is only because we believe it is the United States under Democratic leadership that offers us the single best shot at subduing all the planet’s lingering zones of discontent, and delivering us into a future of perpetual peace. This is what we at The Hinternet want. Do you?
These seem to be serious people having a serious disagreement, not just swapping bullshit and platitudes. It’s a habit most of us, myself included, could benefit by emulating.
Agreement on norms trumps disagreement on policy
Cheney’s argument for Harris is a classical liberal version of the GOP’s “Flight 93 election” reasoning from 2016. It’s a basic matter of proper prioritizing: Agreement on norms trumps disagreement on policy. If you hand power back to Trump, he’ll crash the constitutional order. The conservative thing to do under the circumstances is to storm the cockpit by backing Harris, who’ll at least keep the plane in the air.
(I wonder how Lisa Beamer feels about Flight 93 as a recurring political trope?)
Those conservative Democrats!
The truth, I think, is that the Democratic Party is drifting. Coasting. Dems are buoyed at the national level by Trump’s personal unpopularity but lacking in any kind of compelling vision for the future of the country. For the third cycle in a row, the Democrats have been freed up to run a mostly substanceless campaign that boils down to “Vote for us so Trump will lose.” But what besides that promise of negation does the party stand for? What does it hope to accomplish? Or does it just want to be empowered to manage for a little longer the well-functioning system of domestic and international institutions that already exists?
The answer, it would seem, is the latter. From what I can tell, the Democrats are proposing little beyond a defense of the status quo (or, in the case of abortion rights, a return to the status quo as of a few years ago) against all the unorthodox things their opponents aim to accomplish (including mass deportations, a revolution in how the executive branch is staffed, and the imposition of sweeping tariffs).
That means the Democrats have inadvertently become America’s conservative party, championing the views and interests of those Americans who are content with the country’s present and recent past. When that stance is combined with opposition to the widely loathed Trump, it can (just barely) deliver victory …
The term “conservative” has many meanings, but the most elementary one—the one associated with the man generally considered to be the first conservative writer and thinker, Edmund Burke—grows out of the name itself: To be conservative is to seek to conserve the present’s inheritance from the past: the accomplishments, authoritative institutions, norms, habits, policies, and traditions that have been handed down to us by previous generations.
That’s the meaning of Liz Cheney’s enthusiastic endorsement of the Harris/Walz ticket late last week. It’s not a signal that Harris will govern as a Republican from the era when Cheney’s father (who has also endorsed Harris) served as George W. Bush’s vice president. It’s an expression of Burkean conservatism against the disruptive-revolutionary impulses of the MAGA movement.
The American multiculturalists similarly reject their country’s cultural heritage. Instead of attempting to identify the United States with another civilization, however, they wish to create a country of many civilizations, which is to say a country not belonging to any civilization and lacking a cultural core. History shows that no country so constituted can long endure as a coherent society. A multicivilizational United States will not be the United States; it will be the United Nations.
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
I was not a very good student of history, but I wonder what historic precedents Huntington has in mind when he says “History shows …”. Sincere question. Surely it’s not just that nobody has tried a multicivilizational nation before; that would not yield a verdict of history.
Please comment if you know. (Comments are moderated but not censored for viewpoint.)
We knew damn well he was a snake …
before we took him in.
I love editorial cartoons, and am fond of comic strips as well. As newspapers are dying, I mainline mine from here.
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
A hectic week in which I forgot things, including blogging (though not clipping blog fodder). Enjoy.
Culture
America the unadorned ugly
While I was driving through some of America’s most majestic natural beauty, almost everything in it built by humans was unadorned ugliness. Pre-fab bland buildings that look like they were airlifted in and plopped down in plots of land bulldozed flat, with zero shade or attempt to integrate them into the surrounding nature.
It didn’t help that I was also feeling physically gross, unable to walk, and eating trash, since that’s what’s almost exclusively available on the road in the US, because that’s what most Americans eat — prepackaged globs of fat and sugar.
America’s diet, outside of a minority of successful neighborhoods, has gotten worse since my last American Dream trip, with everything now somehow bigger, sweeter, and fattier: Mass produced, highly processed gunk, that has as much connection to what the rest of the world considers food as pornography does to intimacy.
… [M]y last three years of trips to countries as different as Vietnam, France, Uganda, and Istanbul, has highlighted and strengthened my view that while the US certainly provides our citizens with the most opportunity, and the most stuff, we don’t provide them with the most fulfilling, beautiful, and elevating life.
When the broken window was repaired and the stove began to spread its heat, something seemed to relax in everyone, and at that moment Towarowski (a Franco-Pole of twenty-three, typhus) proposed to the others that each of them offer a slice of bread to us three who had been working. And so it was agreed. Only a day before a similar event would have been inconceivable. The law of the Lager said: “eat your own bread, and if you can, that of your neighbor,” and left no room for gratitude. It really meant that the Lager was dead. It was the first human gesture that occurred among us. I believe that that moment can be dated as the beginning of the change by which we who had not died slowly changed from Häftlinge to men again.
Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz
My pet peeve
When Sarah Kate Ellis was named president of GLAAD more than a decade ago, the LGBTQ advocacy organization was in dire financial straits. “I was given a scary mandate,” she toldThe New York Times in 2019: “Fix it or shut it down.”
She should have done the latter.
Founded in 1985 as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, the nonprofit originally had the mission of promoting more empathetic media coverage of people with AIDS. Over the years, its remit expanded to countering negative portrayals of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in advertising and entertainment. Today, the proliferation of LGBTQ characters on our screens, largely sympathetic coverage in mainstream media, and the ubiquity of same-sex couples in advertisements and commercials all suggest that GLAAD achieved its mission. The group should have long ago taken the win and dissolved—just as the organization Freedom to Marry announced it would do shortly after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in the summer of 2015.
Accepting victory, however, can be difficult for people who devote their lives to a cause, and not only for emotional reasons. The impulse among activists, once successful, to keep raising money necessitates that they find things to spend it on ….
I may be particularly sensitive to this sort of thing because my father once joined “Ad hoc Committee [to Accomplish Somethingorother].” They accomplished it, but soon Dad got a letter, on the Committee’s letterhead, supporting some other cause, and listing him as a committee members. I don’t recall if he didn’t support the new cause at all of if he merely had not enlisted to go on record on that cause, but some co-belligerent failed to grok “ad hoc.”
I’m confident there are conservative groups that should have declared victory and gone home (some have crossed my mind in the past but I don’t now recall them. Right to Life is not an example because it wanted to outlaw abortion, not just reverse Roe.). Human Rights Campaign is another example on the sexual-liberation Left:
Flailing about for relevance since the legalization of same-sex marriage, many gay-rights groups pivoted to a related but fundamentally different cause: transgender rights. Rather than emulate the movement’s past approach—seeking allies across the political spectrum and accepting compromise as a precondition for legal and social progress—they have taken hard-line left-wing positions. LGBTQ groups repeat the mantra “the science is settled” on the extremely complex and fraught subject of youth gender medicine and insist that anyone who questions the provision of puberty blockers to gender-dysphoric children is transphobic. They continue to spread this message even as many European countries have backed away from such treatments after concluding that the evidence supporting them is weak. The reflexive promotion of major medical interventions for minors should be a red flag for gay men and lesbians, considering the research indicating that manygender-distressed and gender-nonconformingchildren grow up to be gay.
Whence the phrase “transing away the gay” as the newest iteration of “praying away the gay” (and checking some of the same emotional boxes). The whole Kirchick article is quote-worthy, and I commend it to you.
Politics generally
BOTS
Blunt talk:
[T]he key to a Harris win in November won’t be the support of black Americans or Indian Americans or even “brown Americans” — though she has identified at various points in her political life as all three. Rather, Harris is a flesh-and-blood avatar of a much more numerous, powerful, and radically dissatisfied demographic: never-married and childless American women between the ages of 20 and 45.
Aside from mass immigration, the most striking demographic development of the past decade is the large cohort of American women who have embraced the helping hand of the state in place of the increasingly suspect protections of fathers, brothers, boyfriends and husbands. In doing so, they have become the Democratic Party’s most enthusiastic and decisive constituency. According to a recent Pew survey, these Brides Of The State (BOTS) support Democrats over Republicans by a whopping 72-24%, providing the Party with its entire advantage in both national and most state elections. Married American women, by contrast, support Republicans by 50-45, which more or less matches the pro-Republican margin in every other age and gender demographic. Without the overwhelming support of BOTS for the Democrats, in other words, America would be a solid-majority Republican country in which Trump would win a likely electoral landslide.
The Democratic Party’s political engineers first sensed the centrality of BOTS to the Party’s power base during Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012. The Obama campaign then duly rolled out a storybook ad called “the Life of Julia”, which explained how Obama’s policies, from Head Start to Obamacare to contraception coverage to Medicare reform, would care for Julia from graduation through motherhood and finally to the grave without her needing to form a human relationship with anyone outside the government.
What you’re seeing throughout American Christianity now is the fundamentalist wing is really exerting itself. And so what that means is when you encounter somebody who’s a fundamentalist and you say, “I’m not voting for Trump,” they often don’t look at that as a debatable point for which Christians in good will can disagree. They will look at this and say, “It is the natural and inevitable consequence of applying Christian principles that you will support Donald Trump.”
As long-time readers know, I spent most of my first three decades as a Wheaton College/IVCF-flavored Evangelical. What I’ve mentioned less often is that schools of that flavor had some taboos that, although mostly sensible, did not merit the label “biblical.” How often Christians who purport to base everything on the Bible come up with extrabiblical Shibboleths is telling.
Political violence and threats of violence
Political violence and threats of violence have no place in the American democratic process. Yet threats and intimidation follow the MAGA movement like night follows day. One of the saddest stories of our time is the way in which even local election officials and local school board members fear for their safety. The level of threat against public officialshas escalated in the MAGA era, MAGA Republicans often wield threats as a weapon against Republican dissenters, and every American should remember Jan. 6, when a mob of insurrectionists ransacked the Capitol.
I appreciate French reminding me about the violence and intimidation that follows MAGA, even quite apart from January 6. He will suffer attempts at intimidation as a result of this piece.
French also points out some legitimate complexifiers even on abortion, which so many millions consider a categorical reason to vote Republican: (1) the 2024 GOP platform plank on abortion is effectively pro-choice; (2) abortion rates and ratios have been lower under pro-abortion democrats.
Via John Ellis news items. It’s gratifying that a majority is directionally correct about politicians caring about people like them. But nobody, not even 1 in 10, should be so stupid as to think that Trump cares about anybody but Trump.
Trump in particular
On message?
The silliest spectacle in politics this month has been Republicans pleading with Trump to get back on message, as if he’s somehow forgotten that inflation and immigration are his strongest lines of attack against Harris.
He didn’t forget. And he assuredly does want to win. He’s off-message because he can’t help himself. There’s something wrong with him.
The New York Times reported this weekend on a dinner he held with wealthy donors in New York on August 2. “Some guests hoped Mr. Trump would signal that he was recalibrating after a series of damaging mistakes,” the paper noted. Instead he babbled about stolen elections, repeated his “black or Indian?” critique of Harris, and assured the crowd that he’s “not nicer” following the attempt on his life last month that had supposedly left him a changed man.
One attendee told the New York Post’s Charles Gasparino that when a donor advised him to tone down some of his attacks, Trump replied, “They tried to put me in jail; they tried to ruin my reputation and then they tried to assassinate me. At some point, you have [to] be truthful to yourself.”
Being true to himself is the whole problem. His advisers are “deeply rattled by his meandering, mean and often middling public performances since the failed assassination attempt,” per Axios. One source claimed that Trump “is struggling to get past his anger,” the sort of thing one might say about a temperamental child (no wonder), not the nominee of a major party fewer than 100 days out from an election.
Trump being undisciplined and self-indulgent isn’t news, though, any more than him resorting to childish cruelty toward his enemies is. What’s newsy is how his anxiety about Harris’ surging popularity has led him into outright fantasy to try to explain it.
“It’s not over until he puts his hand on the Bible and takes the oath,” LaCivita said in a recent interview with Politico at the Republican National Convention. “It’s not over on Election Day, it’s over on Inauguration Day.” An investigation by Rolling Stone last month found that nearly 70 pro-Trump election deniers serve as election officials in key battleground counties.
In Georgia, Trump supporters on the state election board have adopted rules requiring “reasonable inquiry” before election results are certified, a move that could give GOP county-election-board members the ability to reject the 2024 election’s outcome. And as The Guardianreports, the lawyer and Trump ally Cleta Mitchell “has spent the last few years building up a network of activists focused on local boards of elections.” At the national level, the Republican National Committee says that it hopes to mobilize 100,000 volunteers, including thousands of poll watchers, to focus on “Democrat attempts to circumvent the rules.” Meanwhile, one RNC senior counsel for election integrity, Christina Bobb, was criminally indicted earlier this year for her role in trying to overturn the 2020 election (she pleaded not guilty).
Then there is the mood of the MAGA base. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election have become a litmus test in the GOP, and a recent Pew Research Center poll found that although 77 percent of Democratic voters believe that the election will be conducted “fairly and accurately,” less than half of Republican voters have faith in the system. Despite Harris’s recent surge, the majority of Trump supporters are confident that he will be victorious. (A recent YouGov poll found that nearly eight in 10 Trump supporters think he would win if pitted against Harris.) Trump fully intends to stoke his supporters’ disbelief and anger at the possibility that he could lose. As Wehner warned recently: “If you have friends who are Trump worshippers, a word of counsel: They’re heading to a very dark place psychologically … They felt this race was won; now it’s slipping away. Expect even greater self-delusion and more toxic rants.”
Never has the GOP been more unified, and Donald Trump deserves all the credit. The issueunitingpundits, editorial boards, virtually allRepublicanpoliticians, GOP consultants, MAGA warriors, and rallygoers: the need for Trump to lay aside personal gripes and grievances and to stick to theissues and attack Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz on their records.
The whole landscape of the campaign has been transformed. The rise of Harris instantly cast Trump in a new light. He formerly seemed more ominous and threatening, which, whatever its political drawbacks, signaled strength; now he seems not just old but low-energy, stale, even pathetic. He has become the political version of Fat Elvis.
Trump is much better equipped psychologically to withstand ferocious criticisms than he is equipped to withstand mockery. Malignant narcissists go to great lengths to hide their fears and display a false or idealized self. Criticism targets the persona. Mockery, by contrast, can tap very deep fears of being exposed as flawed or weak. When the mask is the target, people with Trump’s psychological profile know how to fight back. Mockery, though, can cause them to unravel.
Trump’s three big problems as a candidate are precisely the same qualities that mitigated the worst of what might have been a much worse Trump presidency the last time around: He is lazy, he is stupid, and he is childish.
I can hear you objecting: “Hey, we came here for serious analysis, not name-calling!” But, in this case, the analysis and the name-calling end up in the same place: finding that the most politically relevant traits of Donald Trump are that he is lazy, stupid, and childish.
… Anyone who has heard Trump speak or read his unedited writing knows that he is not an especially intelligent man. But his native stupidity is compounded by his ignorance—which is to say, by the fact that he is too lazy to do his homework and acquire the kind of grasp of the issues that would make him a more effective candidate.
… There is a reason he wanders all over the place in his speeches—it isn’t only arrogance and self-centeredness. He’s dumber than nine chickens. That’s why he was an incompetent real-estate investor even though he was a successful reality-television grotesque. He isn’t the first dumb person to find success in the celebrity business, where stupidity seems to be an asset.
…
His penchant for using demeaning nicknames as a substitute for political argument might be thought of as an aspect of his laziness or his stupidity, but it is, at heart, part of his childishness. The same childishness is what has him insisting that he doesn’t need to run a conventional campaign, because he is a very special little boy. Never mind that after his fluke win in 2016, he has led his party from one electoral defeat to another—often in close succession, as when he pissed away Republicans’ chances in Georgia in a snit after his humiliating loss to the human eggplant in 2020.
Trump’s personality defects were, perversely enough, this country’s saving grace while he was president. He wanted to be a caudillo but ended up being very little more than a poisonous buffoon thanks to the laziness, stupidity, and childishness that kept him from realizing the worst of his ambitions as president. That very well may keep him from realizing any of his political ambitions in 2024.
I am not quite sure that I believe the maxim that “character is destiny.” Stupidity, on the other hand …
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
All political conventions are cringe-worthy idolatry fests. But even by those low standards, there was so much abject Trump flattery going on among his cultish speakers that if this had been Kim Jong-un’s convention, he’d have told his propagandists, “Hey, fellas, dial it back a little.”
Trump made many false claims about immigration throughout his remarks, but the most absurd was: “You know who’s taking the jobs, the jobs that are created? One hundred and seven percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens.”
How does one take that “seriously but not literally”?
Compared with Trump’s acceptance speeches in 2016 and 2020, which were unusual enough, this one was unrestrained, self-indulgent and undisciplined, radiating a sense of grievance. It was Trump untethered, which is the right way to understand what his second term would be. We can’t say we haven’t been warned.
Oh give him a break. He’s an old man who has a limited playlist.
60 seconds of unified tone
It was then that Trump struck the tone of national unity that he had teased in interviews leading up to the convention, promising to be a president for all Americans. “I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America,” he said. “I’m here tonight to lay out a vision for the whole nation, to every citizen. Whether you’re young or old, man or woman, Democrat, Republican, or independent, black or white, Asian or Hispanic—I extend to you a hand of loyalty and of friendship. Together, we will lead America to new heights of greatness like the world has never seen before.”
That unified tone last for about … a full 60 seconds. No, Trump went on to spend most of the more than 90-minute speech—the longest nomination acceptance speech in modern history—riffing on old motifs like, as Drucker put it on Dispatch Live late last night, the Grateful Dead at a jam: Same song, different flavor. Far from revealing a changed man, reformed by a near-death experience, Trump’s speech showed a man unchained and more-or-less as he’s ever been.
We saw something epochal: the finalization and ratification of a change in the essential nature of one of the two major political parties of the world’s most powerful nation. It is now a populist, working-class, nationalist party. That is where its sympathies, identification and affiliation lie. There will be shifts, stops and accommodations in the future, no party ever has a clear line, history intervenes, but it is changed, and there will be no going back.
…
It should be added that it was creepy to see members of the Trump family dominating prime speaking slots all week. This was carelessly cultish, and in its carelessness insolent. Mr. Trump’s speech was surprisingly muted, scattered and low-energy. It lacked drama even though he was narrating what it is like to be shot.
…
A final point. We have, many of us, for some time—months, certainly the past few weeks—felt various degrees and kinds of horror. But oh these are exciting times. Things are moving, shifting. Again, this is big history. Hold on to your hat.
Vance had a grandmother who encouraged him—and, perhaps equally important, discouraged him—in the right ways. And Vance did what poor white trash types who do not wish to remain poor white trash do: He got out, in his case by joining the Marine Corps, one of the great exemplars of American meritocracy. He went to a good state college and an Ivy League law school, he married a woman from an immigrant family with values superior to the ones exhibited by the Real Americans™ who brought him into the world, took a job that paid a lot of money, and made the kind of social and economic connections that give a man options in life. He rails against multinational corporations and “woke” colleges and then goes home to his wife, a lawyer whose clients have included the Walt Disney Co. and the University of California; he himself is a former Silicon Valley venture capitalist, not a small-town hardware-shop owner. He rails against self-interested billionaires while Peter Thiel scratches him behind the ear.
One must respect the hustle. Even if one retches, just a little.
But Kevin: Isn’t this pretty low-hanging fruit? Won’t any Presidential or Vice-Presidential nominee be, ipso facto, “privileged”? Does every up-from-poverty success per se disprove a populist “they’re screwing you” pitch to those still in poverty? Isn’t Biden screwing “the working man” by forgiving elites’ student loans? Have I left out any Latin shorthand?
Let’s try another language then. ¿Porque no los dos? Why can’t oppression be real yet surmountable for a few?
Absolution and a call for revenge
Vance talked about working-class white people the way liberal Democrats used to talk about Black communities in the early 1970s. At 39, he is too young to remember those days, but Republicans back then charged liberals with abetting the misery of Black communities by making excuses for their challenges. And they had a point: Half a century ago, some liberals did indulge in a kind of cringey, paternalistic excuse-making that depicted Black people as mindless victims, unable to control themselves when faced with the relentless forces of capitalism and consumerism.
Conservatives countered that the narrative of victimhood never serves anyone except the political leaders who reap votes from convincing people that they are merely hapless targets who need to be protected from a world full of sinister conspirators. Those who genuinely cared about the collapse of the cities (and there were more than a few who didn’t, to be sure) stressed the importance of personal choices and the power of individual responsibility. They refused to accept policies that led, in their view, to permanent dependence on the state. Perhaps most important, they sharply criticized the language of victimhood. And Vance, until recently, seemed to embrace those old-school, center-right views.
So it was particularly jarring to hear Vance talking down to Appalachians and working-class households in ways that he himself likely would have found insulting before ambition snuffed out his ability to feel shame. All his previous talk of responsibility and initiative was gone, replaced by images of a heartland full of victims, a Norman Rockwell world now inundated with fentanyl and cheap Chinese electronics by Washington’s scheming elites.
Through it all, you could almost hear the issuance of absolution and the call for revenge: It’s not your fault that your unemployed son lives at home, staring at screens and getting high all day. Biden and Beijing and Wall Street did that. We’ll settle the score somehow. It was a night of messages every bit as infantilizing and degrading as any Vance and the old GOP would have once castigated had they been offered by the old left.
What jumped out at me here wasn’t “JD Vance is a phony” but “Republicans are now treating dysfunctional white people as Democrats once treated black people” (and unlike Vance, I’m old enough personally to remember those days).
In this, Tom Nichols is running on a track perfectly parallel to Kevin D. Williamson:
Watching his descent into … whatever it is he has become … has been dispiriting. Have you ever had an acquaintance, someone you see only infrequently, who had a terrible problem with addiction or some sickness, and every time you saw them they were noticeably worse? I see Vance only in the news, but that is kind of what it is like. Or like visiting your hometown every few years and seeing it decline.
Declining hometowns are a theme of Vance’s. It’s mostly bulls—t, of course. What’s true of much of Appalachia is true of much of the Rust Belt: Nothing happened to those communities. Eastern Kentucky isn’t poor because of NAFTA or the WTO—it was poor when Andrew Jackson was president, and it has been poor since.
(See more of this Williamson column above)
Second-hand synthesis
Synthesizing what I read of it, the GOP Convention was a big, cheerful, sexy, vulgar, idolatrous pagan bacchanalia.
Of course, when the line between enthusiasm and idolatry is crossed at a political convention can be subtle, but I’m in a Christian tradition oft-accused of idolatry for saying of the Theotokos and the Saints things less hyperbolic than were repeatedly said of Trump this week.
One silver lining: Zombie Reaganism is as good and truly dead as conservatism in GOP version 2024.
Twixt now and November
Still beatable?
After beginning his speech with calls for unity — “There is no victory in winning for half of America” — the former president turned the convention into a Trump rally, attacking “crazy Nancy Pelosi” and slamming Biden by name after Republicans said that he would rise above the insults and not mention the president.
He ripped into Democrats on Social Security, Medicare, the border and energy policy, saying America was “stupid” under Biden while ad-libbing about Hannibal Lecter and having the next Republican convention in Venezuela.
Trump was suddenly thin on the unity and heavy on the unhinged, as his speech became tiresome and stretched past midnight on the East Coast. Biden may have messed up the June debate, but Trump’s own cognitive functioning was messing up the July convention.
[T]he problem with MAGA — and here is where the Democratic opportunity lies — is that it emerges from a mode of consciousness that is very different from the traditional American consciousness.
The American consciousness has traditionally been an abundance consciousness …
Many foreign observers saw us, and we saw ourselves, as the dynamic nation par excellence. We didn’t have a common past, but we dreamed of a common future. Our sense of home was not rooted in blood-and-soil nationalism; our home was something we were building together. Through most of our history, we were not known for our profundity or culture but for living at full throttle.
MAGA, on the other hand, emerges from a scarcity consciousness, a zero-sum mentality: If we let in tons of immigrants they will take all our jobs; if America gets browner, “they” will replace “us.” MAGA is based on a series of victim stories: The elites are out to screw us. Our allies are freeloading off us. Secular America is oppressing Christian America.
Viewed from the traditional American abundance mind-set, MAGA looks less like an American brand of conservatism and more like a European brand of conservatism. It resembles all those generations of Russian chauvinists who argued that the Russian masses embody all that is good but they are threatened by aliens from the outside. MAGA looks like a kind of right-wing Marxism, which assumes that class struggle is the permanent defining feature of politics. MAGA is a fortress mentality, but America has traditionally been defined by a pioneering mentality. MAGA offers a strong shell, but not much in the way of wings needed to soar.
If Democrats are to thrive, they need to tap into America’s dynamic cultural roots and show how they can be applied to the 21st century ….
[C]anceling student loan debt would be a massive unforced error for the newly minted Biden administration. It would show that one of the new Democratic president’s highest priorities during a pandemic and a destabilizing economic shock is to provide a bailout to people who are overwhelmingly likely to end up as members of the upper-middle class. It would amount to a transfer payment from contractors and service workers to high-earning knowledge workers and other white-collar employees. As such, it would also accelerate trends in the Democratic Party that would leave it vulnerable to a Republican Party increasingly trying to rebrand itself as a champion of the working class.
…
As economist Thomas Piketty and others have pointed out in recent years, center-left political parties suffer at the ballot-box when they come to represent the interests of the upper-middle class at the expense of the working class, allowing the nationalist-populist right to make inroads with the latter. This has happened in a series of European countries in recent years, and it’s happening in the U.S. as well, with the Democrats enjoying surging support in inner-ring suburbs but losing ground in working-class, exurban, and rural areas. In the 2020 election, Democrats were able to defeat Donald Trump with this coalition, but they got tripped up down ballot, most likely falling short of a Senate majority, losing seats in the House, and failing to flip even a single state legislature.
…
Sixty-five percent of Americans haven’t graduated from a four-year college. Will that large majority really favor a multi-billion-dollar bailout for people who hold those degrees when their indebtedness was freely taken on and has granted them a credential that gives them a ticket to lifetime higher earnings?
I don’t know that Trump or Vance has spoken about this, but if I judge persuadable undecideds accurately, they should, because despite warnings from people like Linker, Biden pandered to the wealthy in this way and others.
Whence conspiracism?
When you don’t know how things work, everything looks like a conspiracy.
Jonah Goldberg
I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.
I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.
Every once in a while, David Brooks writes something that makes me want to say “I’m a David Brooks kind of conservative.” This was one of those times:
How do you stay mentally healthy and spiritually whole in brutalizing times? How do you prevent yourself from becoming embittered, hate-filled, calloused over, suspicious and desensitized?
Ancient wisdom has a formula to help us, which you might call skepticism of the head and audacity of the heart.
The ancient Greeks knew about violent times. They lived with frequent wars between city-states, with massacres and mass rape. In response, they adopted a tragic sensibility. This sensibility begins with the awareness that the crust of civilization is thin. Breakdowns into barbarism are the historic norm. Don’t fool yourself into believing that you’re living in some modern age, too enlightened for hatred to take over.
In these circumstances, everybody has a choice. You can try to avoid thinking about the dark realities of life and naïvely wish that bad things won’t happen. Or you can confront these realities and develop a tragic mentality to help you thrive among them. As Ralph Waldo Emerson would write centuries later, “Great men, great nations have not been boasters and buffoons, but perceivers of the terror of life, and have manned themselves to face it.” And that goes for great women, too.
This tragic sensibility prepares you for the rigors of life in concrete ways. First, it teaches a sense of humility …
Second, the tragic sensibility nurtures a prudent approach to life. It encourages people to focus on the downsides of their actions and work to head them off …
Third, this tragic mentality encourages caution. …
Fourth, the tragic mentality teaches people to be suspicious of their own rage. …
Fifth, tragedies thrust the harsh realities of individual suffering in our faces, and in them we find our common humanity. …
So far, I’ve been describing the cool, prudent and humble mentality we learn from the Athenians. Now I turn to a different mentality, a mentality that emerged among the great Abrahamic faiths, and in their sacred city, Jerusalem. This mentality celebrates an audacious act: the act of leading with love in harsh times.
… During a recent Zoom call, someone asked me: Isn’t it dangerous to be vulnerable toward others when there is so much bitterness, betrayal and pain all around? My answer to that good question is: Yes, it is dangerous. But it is also dangerous to be hardened and calloused over by hard times. It is also dangerous, as C.S. Lewis put it, to guard your heart so thoroughly that you make it “unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”
I believe I have given a fair representation of the plight of rural America, a land of worsening problems that it did not cause and cannot solve, from which urban America derives its food, clothing, and shelter, plus “raw materials.” For these necessary things rural America receives prices set in urban America. For the manufactured goods returned to it, rural America pays prices set in urban America.
This rural America Mr. Burns treats as an enemy country, “rural and white,” inhabited by voters for Trump who are “animated most intensely by feelings of racial resentment or male self-pity,” and by “working-class voters who feel victimized by a distant and dysfunctional government, by wealthy elites, by nefarious foreign regimes, and all-powerful multinational corporations.” Mr. Burns is a political expert, who writes from a posture of authority, but his authority comes from no close acquaintance with rural places or with Trump voters or with people of the working class. He identifies only two reasons rural people might have had for voting for Trump, without asking, for instance, why they might have voted against Clinton or Biden. And he says that working-class voters “feel” victimized, apparently without considering that they may “feel” so because they know so. He might have added that many of them know also that they are disregarded or disdained by another set of elites who think them ignorant because they have not been to college. This is a prejudice, resting upon a cruel and extremely destructive falsehood of the same kind as white supremacy. To be fair, or at least more complete, Mr. Burns might have added to his collection of deplorables the rural voters who vote for Democrats only because the Democrats are not Republicans.
…
Because I have watched for half a century and more the decline of my own community and others like it everywhere in rural America, along with the increasing ecological and cultural damages of industrial agriculture, I have made a practice of reading newspaper and magazine articles by Democratic or leftward experts of politics and economics, hoping that I would see an acknowledgement, first of the economic importance of the natural world, and then of the importance of the land-use economies of agriculture, forestry, and mining, by which the goods of the natural world are made available for human use. I have not made a “survey,” but I have read enough to know that Alexander Burns’s article is conventional. Like his fellow experts, he appears to assume the inexhaustibility of the non-human world, and likewise the forever availability of the rural and working-class humans who do, well or poorly, the fundamental work of every economy. Like most of his fellow experts, he consents to and takes for granted the corporate destruction of the land and the human communities of rural America.
…
My impression is that the writers of the articles I have read have never ventured into rural America to ask in good faith what the problems are and what might be the remedies. And so I have made a sort of practice also of inviting writers and editors to come here where I live to allow me (and some younger people) to show them what we are up against. So far, nobody has showed up.
The fact of the matter is he is a consummate narcissist and he constantly engages in reckless conduct that puts his political followers at risk and the conservative and Republican agenda at risk. … He will always put his own interest and gratifying his own ego ahead of everything else, including the country’s interest. There’s no question about it. … He’s like a 9-year-old, a defiant 9-year-old kid, who’s always pushing the glass toward the edge of the table defying his parents to stop him from doing it.
William Barr, who together with a few other former high officials in Trump’s administration have ruled out voting for him in 2024:
Nikki Haley
Mike Pence
Mike Pompeo
John Bolton
William Barr
Mick Mulvaney
Betsy DeVos
Dan Coats
Rex Tillerson
Alex Azar
Elaine Chao
John Kelly
Mark Esper
James Mattis
H.R. McMaster
Richard Spencer
Mark Milley
The ubiquitous machine
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.”
I had mixed, but mostly negative, feelings about it at the time. (The positive feelings boiled down to “anyone who doesn’t know you can’t vote by text message is someone I’d prefer not vote anyway.”)
Reading in silence is the source of half the misconceptions that have caused the public to distrust poetry. Without the sound, the reader looks at the lines as he looks at prose, seeking a meaning. Prose exists to convey meaning, and no meaning such as prose conveys can be expressed as well in poetry. That is not poetry’s business.
Basil Bunting, “The Poet’s Point of View” via Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone
The attention economy rewards shamelessness
In subsequent obscure journal articles, Mr. Goldhaber warned of the attention economy’s destabilizing effects, including how it has disproportionate benefits for the most shameless among us. “Our abilities to pay attention are limited. Not so our abilities to receive it,” he wrote in the journal First Monday. “The value of true modesty or humility is hard to sustain in an attention economy.”
“A PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES MUST HAVE FULL IMMUNITY, WITHOUT WHICH IT WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE FOR HIM/HER TO PROPERLY FUNCTION. ANY MISTAKE, EVEN IF WELL INTENDED, WOULD BE MET WITH ALMOST CERTAIN INDICTMENT BY THE OPPOSING PARTY AT TERM END. EVEN EVENTS THAT ‘CROSS THE LINE’ MUST FALL UNDER TOTAL IMMUNITY, OR IT WILL BE YEARS OF TRAUMA TRYING TO DETERMINE GOOD FROM BAD. THERE MUST BE CERTAINTY. EXAMPLE: YOU CAN’T STOP POLICE FROM DOING THE JOB OF STRONG & EFFECTIVE CRIME PREVENTION BECAUSE YOU WANT TO GUARD AGAINST THE OCCASIONAL ‘ROGUE COP’ OR ‘BAD APPLE.’ SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO LIVE WITH ‘GREAT BUT SLIGHTLY IMPERFECT.’ ALL PRESIDENTS MUST HAVE COMPLETE & TOTAL PRESIDENTIAL IMMUNITY, OR THE AUTHORITY & DECISIVENESS OF A PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES WILL BE STRIPPED & GONE FOREVER. HOPEFULLY THIS WILL BE AN EASY DECISION. GOD BLESS THE SUPREME COURT!”
“People do these elaborate takes about Trump’s authoritarian aspirations and then he just comes out and says the president should be allowed to do infinite crimes,” Matt Yglesias marveled.
When carmakers test gasoline-powered vehicles for compliance with the Transportation Department’s fuel-efficiency rules, they must use real values measured in a laboratory. By contrast, under an Energy Department rule, carmakers can arbitrarily multiply the efficiency of electric cars by 6.67. This means that although a 2022 Tesla Model Y tests at the equivalent of about 65 miles per gallon in a laboratory (roughly the same as a hybrid), it is counted as having an absurdly high compliance value of 430 mpg. That number has no basis in reality or law.
For exaggerating electric-car efficiency, the government rewards carmakers with compliance credits they can trade for cash. Economists estimate these credits could be worth billions: a vast cross-subsidy invented by bureaucrats and paid for by every person who buys a new gasoline-powered car.
Until recently, this subsidy was a Washington secret. Carmakers and regulators liked it that way. Regulators could announce what sounded like stringent targets, and carmakers would nod along, knowing they could comply by making electric cars with arbitrarily boosted compliance values. Consumers would unknowingly foot the bill.
The secret is out. After environmental groups pointed out the illegality of this charade, the Energy Department proposed eliminating the 6.67 multiplier for electric cars, recognizing that the number “lacks legal support” and has “no basis.”
Carmakers have panicked and asked the Biden administration to delay any return to legal or engineering reality. That is understandable. Without the multiplier, the Transportation Department’s proposed rules are completely unattainable. But workable rules don’t require government-created cheat codes. Carmakers should confront that problem head on.
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.
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.
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.
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 ….
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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
“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.
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.
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.
Capitalists are not friends of the Good, True and Beautiful
Paul Kingsnorth, a British writer who (to his own surprise) became an Orthodox Christian a year or so ago, has continued writing on what he calls "The Machine."
Why would transnational capital be parrotting slogans drawn from a leftist framework which claims to be anti-capitalist? Why would the middle classes be further to the ‘left’ than the workers? If the left was what it claims to be – a bottom-up movement for popular justice – this would not be the case. If capitalism was what it is assumed to be – a rapacious, non-ideological engine of profit-maximisation – then this would not be the case either.
But what if both of them were something else? What if the ideology of the corporate world and the ideology of the ‘progressive’ left had not forged an inexplicable marriage of convenience, but had grown all along from the same rootstock? What if the left and global capitalism are, at base, the same thing: engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the new world of the Machine?
… Who doesn’t want to be free?
The question that quickly arises, of course, is ‘free from what?’ A key term, found everywhere in current leftist discourse, is ‘emancipatory.’ To be ‘progressive’ is to emancipate. What is it that is to be emancipated? The individual. What are they to be emancipated from? All societal structures. And what is the best instrument for achieving this emancipation? Uncomfortably for both Rousseauvian primitivists and old-school leftists, who have seen large-scale experiments in socialist economics go up in flames time and time again, the answer appears to be: global capitalism. No other system in history has ever been as effective in breaking the chains of time, place and culture as the global empire of corporate power.
…
Those of us who remember the halcyon era in which ‘right’ and ‘left’ seemed to mean something might find all this confusing, but if we step back for a broader view we can see that the economics of capitalism and the politics of progressivism are both manifestations of what Jacques Ellul called technique: the technocratic essence of Machine modernity. Today’s left is no threat to technique: on the contrary, it is its vanguard. If you have ever asked yourself what kind of ‘revolution’ would be sponsored by Nike, promoted by BP, propagandised for by Hollywood and Netflix and policed by Facebook and Youtube, then the answer is here.
[T]here was no “tight spot” for Orbán—and if Western observers cannot understand why, they will continue to waste money and effort on changing the political culture of central Europe. The leader of the combined opposition, Péter Márki-Zay, closed his campaign with the slogan “Let’s bring Europe here, to Hungary.” An implausible slogan even in marginally liberal Budapest—but an insane slogan for a small-town mayor to carry into the Hungarian countryside. The results show how it was received: outside of Budapest, the entire country was bathed in the deep orange of Fidesz. The opposition’s rhetoric was designed to play well on anglophone Twitter, but the Western commentariat are not voters in this election.
It’s long past time for sensible people to stop giving to this organization. (The right time was as soon as BLM posted their broader radical agenda on their website — since toned down) Black lives do matter, but gullibly giving to a bunch of scammers doesn’t make them matter any more.
Yes, political and charitable organizations of all stripes can fall prey to the iron law of institutions (if they’re not conscious scams from the start), and if you have a "whatabout" about conservative scammers, you’re welcome to bring it on.
BLM may be the biggest nonprofit scam of our generation: For a while, the Black Lives Matter organization and its allies were very good at getting people to do their bidding. They could bully journalists into ignoring the organization’s issues (being called racist is terrifying and not worth the scoop). They could convince social media companies to happily block critical commentary and reporting on the organization’s financial improprieties.
Part Two, broken by the New York Post: They bought it from a friend who paid $3.1 million for it six days earlier. So they got themselves a party house with donated funds and kicked nearly $3 million of donor funds to a buddy. Who knows how the fat thereafter was split up.
From the house, they posted a video of the leadership crew having fancy outdoor brunches. One founder, Patrisse Cullors, began a YouTube cooking show in the expansive kitchen. (After the story on their property came out, they took both videos down.) They called the holding company used to buy the house 3726 Laurel Canyon LLC, an address that can be shared since it was bought with tax-deductible charitable dollars.
Patrisse Cullors took to Instagram to slam Sean Kevin Campbell, who is black, and to slam the outlet that published his reporting, New York Magazine, calling the piece a “despicable abuse of a platform.” She added: “Journalism is supposed to mitigate harm and inform our communities.” She said the house, which has a pool and a sound stage, “was purchased to be a safe space for Black people in the community.”
It’s important not to forget how BLM leaders like Cullors raised these tens of millions: It was by chanting the names and showing the photos of dead black children. The donated money came from kind, well-intentioned people who desperately wanted to help.
Prerequisites for argument
This isn’t new, but it resurfaced this morning:
The split we are seeing is not theological or philosophical. It’s a division between those who have become detached from reality and those who, however right wing, are still in the real world.
Hence, it’s not an argument. You can’t argue with people who have their own separate made-up set of facts. You can’t have an argument with people who are deranged by the euphoric rage of what Erich Fromm called group narcissism — the thoughtless roar of those who believe their superior group is being polluted by alien groups.
It’s a pure power struggle. The weapons in this struggle are intimidation, verbal assault, death threats and violence, real and rhetorical. The fantasyland mobbists have an advantage because they relish using these weapons, while their fellow Christians just want to lead their lives.
The problem is, how do you go about reattaching people to reality?
Is this not a sign that something is amiss in Todd Rokita’s stewardship of the Indiana Attorney General’s office? Might it be that he’s not a steward, but rather treats the AG’s office as a platform for his ego?
I repeat: I have never voted for Todd Rokita. He told a whopper of a lie in his very first campaign (don’t ask me the details; I don’t remember), and has a nonstop smirk on his face that tells me he has no respect for those who do vote for him.
Presidential Pandering, Biden agenda
President Joe Biden announced Wednesday his administration would extend the pause on federal student loan repayments—first put in place by the Trump administration in March 2020—until August 31. Biden had already prolonged the moratorium in August 2021 (which he claimed at the time would be the final extension) and in December 2021. The Department of Education said yesterday it would also allow those with paused loans to receive a “fresh start” on repayment by “eliminating the impact of delinquency and default and allowing them to reenter repayment in good standing.”
The Morning Dispatch. I would bet a modest amount that "the pause" will be extended beyond August 31 to beyond the November elections.
This is on a continuum with Student Loan forgiveness, a policy so regressive as to put its proponents in the elitist category and further accelerating the re-alignment of party boundaries, with Democrats the party of the laptop class, Republicans the party of the working class.
Who’s to blame for KBJ?
To be clear, I’m not upset by the Senate confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson. Elections have consequences, and America elected a Democrat as President in 2020.
The Wall Street Journal wants us to remember that Georgia improbably elected two Democrats to the Senate in a 2021 runoff, too:
Republicans shouldn’t forget who is to blame for their predicament. If President Trump hadn’t been preoccupied with imagined fraud conspiracies after the 2020 election, Republicans probably would have retained two Senate seats in the January 2021 Georgia runoff elections. Without Democratic Senate control, President Biden might have been forced to choose a more moderate nominee than Judge Jackson, or possibly a jurist older than age 51, with a shorter prospective Supreme Court career.
Conservatives could spend the next 30 years ruing Justice Jackson’s decisions. Spare a thought for how Mr. Trump helped it happen.
We’re not going to return to civility in SCOTUS confirmation hearings if the soberest, greyest conservatish newspaper in the land accepts it as good that a narrowly Republican-controlled Senate would reject a qualified Democrat nominee, but that’s where we are.
France rhymes America
Mr Macron also faces a problem that responsible politicians always face when running against populists. He offers policies boringly grounded in reality. They say whatever will stir up voters, whether or not it is true.
Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Law has tons of popularity with ordinary folks despite being dishonestly labeled by both the Left ("Don’t Say Gay law") and the Right (anti-Grooming law):
And now the darker turn: The right, which won this round definitively, can’t seem to take the win. They are using the opportunity to give the left a taste of their own medicine. ‘You’ve spent years calling us racists and transphobes. Fine. No problem. If you even criticize the law we’ll call you groomers.’
For days now, that ugly word with a dark history has been everywhere I’ve looked. And it’s being used to refer not just to opponents of the law but increasingly as short-hand for gay people. Gurgling up to join in the fun are QAnon fans, who argue that the American left is hiding a massive pedophilia ring. I suspect this backlash is just beginning.
Over the years, various people I know in my real life have gotten mad at me as I’ve argued generally for moderation and for the practical over the radical. I’m wary of sudden movements. The BLM protests and the urban burnings were cathartic and thrilling—it probably felt good yelling “abolish!”—but in the end it was pretty useless if the goal was majorly improving policing and prisons.
So too with the kids and trans issues. Right now, the progressive movement has made it an all-or-nothing conversation. Anyone who might urge caution when it comes to transitioning children, for example, is smeared as a transphobe and has been for years now. It’s 0-60, and you better get on. Women are menstruators, biological males are in the pool crushing your daughter’s race, teenagers know best if they should be sterilized, story hour better as hell be a drag show, fraysexual is part of the rainbow, and if you screw up a they/them conjugation, well, sir, you’re fired.
You would be foolish not to see that once you’ve gutted terms like racist and transphobic of any meaning, you might see horrible racism and horrible transphobia and be left with no words to describe it ….
What we’re witnessing is the continued moral devolution of a movement. Where once it was “vile” or “evil” to make frivolous claims of grotesque sexual misconduct, it is now considered “weakness” or “surrender” in some quarters not to “fight” with the most inflammatory language and the most inflammatory charges.
On Fox News over the weekend, Sen. Ted Cruz criticized Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for her work as a public defender, arguing people go into that line of work because “their heart is with the murderers, the criminals, and that’s who they’re rooting for.” Cruz—an Ivy League-educated lawyer who clerked on the Supreme Court—should know that charge is ridiculous. “If we are to have a legal system that allows people, institutions, and governments to defend themselves against charges of illegal conduct—and we should have that system—then we are going to have lawyers who defend their clients to the best of their ability,” Charlie Cooke writes forNational Review. “It doesn’t matter whether the defendant is popular, whether the institution is sympathetic, or whether the law is a good one—none of that is the point. The point is that an adversarial legal system requires advocates who will relentlessly press their case, and, in so doing, force the other side to prove its brief to a high standard. There is nothing wrong with … people who are willing to become public defenders and defend clients they suspect are guilty, and to suggest otherwise betrays an unthinking and opportunistic illiberalism.”
Charlie Cooke is wrong about "unthinking and opportunistic illiberalism." It is calculatedly opportunistic illiberalism, of the sort that is becoming far too common among ambitious younger Republicans.
One man’s eschaton is another’s apocalypse
As I write, CBS it running a big, free advertisement for Joe Biden, who is celebrating Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation as if it were the inauguration of the eschaton. "She’s historic! She’s black! She’s a woman! She’s a black woman! She’s a historic black woman! Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace!"
The Right seems to see her as the inauguration of the apocalypse, though they’ve had to lie like dogs to make the case. "Soft on pedophiles! You know: like the pervs at Comet Ping-Pong! She’d defend Eichman! We don’t want the kind of person who defended accused criminals! Dies irae! Dies illa! Solvet saeclum in favilla! Teste David cum Sybilla!"
Piss in omnibus illis!
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The loss of Christendom gives us a joyous opportunity to reclaim the freedom to proclaim the gospel in a way in which we cannot when the main social task of the church is to serve as one among many helpful props for the state.
I don’t have many coinages to my name, but I call this kind of truth doxological (versus merely logical), and if others have used it before me, I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen it.
(The insight was not an easy acquisition for a recovering Calvinist intellectualoid.)
Christian hope entropy
In short, highly devoted Christian teenagers operationalized Christian hope as a generalized trust that God has the future under control, without showing much familiarity with (or interest in) traditional teachings associated with Christian eschatology …
Tuesday, I felt unusual kinship with Damon Linker:
There is no Big Idea for which I feel greater contempt than the suggestion that we’re all living in a simulation. The runner up is the claim that we should seek fun and fulfillment in a technologically simulated reality — the so-called metaverse or virtual reality.
…
Though I can’t prove our experiences of the world, ourselves, and those around us are in fact real, I can explain why we shouldn’t waste our time imagining it’s all fake; why our happiness is wrapped up with the presumption that the world around us is, in fact, reality; and how much we lose by spending ever more of our lives interacting with manifestly false, digitally constructed virtual worlds.
Moreover, Linker (who abandoned Catholicism, then Christianity) puts his finger on why I consider the metaverse stuff evil. It’s the latest manifestation of what seems to be the hardiest of perennial heresies, gnosticism.
Apropos of his own past as an Episcopalian:
"Doctrine changes, but the Episcopal Church’s social role remained constant: to be the chaplaincy for white upper-middle-class culture.
Today, the German Catholic Church is doing something similar, serving as a chaplaincy for the Rainbow Reich—the empire of diversity, equity, and inclusion that flies the rainbow flag."
Is it just me?
It’s probably none of my business, but from where I sit "Innovation Church" is the worst Church name I think I’ve ever seen. It’s either brazen or misleading.
Orthodox Christianity detests little or nothing more than it detests religious "innovation," and I seem to have internalized that pretty completely.
Damning (if you’ll just use your noggin’)
It is not an exaggeration to claim that this nineteenth-century Protestant evangelicalism differed from the religion of the Protestant Reformation as much as the sixteenth-century Reformation Protestantism differed from the Roman Catholic theology from which it emerged.
[Satan] always sends errors into the world in pairs — pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worst. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors ….
That’s how I feel about America’s two major political parties.
Modern poets versus old epics
Modern minor poets are naturalists, and talk about the bush or the brook; but the singers of the old epics and fables were supernaturalists, and talked about the gods of brook and bush.
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
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.
