Thursday, 4/11/24

Permanence

“How has it come about,” C. S. Lewis once asked, “that we use the highly emotive word ‘stagnation,’ with all its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called ‘permanence’?” It is, Lewis suggests, because the dominance of the machine in our culture altered our imagination. It gave us a “new archetypal image.”

Ken Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes

Considering how excellent an interviewer Ken Myers is, I’m surprised I don’t have more highlights from this oldish book by him. But this one surfaces just often enough to seem ever green. It’s especially dear to me because one of the common lazy criticisms of Orthodox Christianity is that it’s “stagnant.”

Feckless Diktator

Tens of thousands of people marched in Budapest, Hungary, on Saturday to protest Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government. Péter Magyar, a former diplomat who was once a senior member of Orbán’s Fidesz party, organized the demonstration and has presented himself as a changemaker with plans to challenge Orbán in upcoming European parliament elections this summer. The rising opposition figure has promised to root out corruption and repair ties with the European Union—of which Hungary is a member—if elected.

The Morning Dispatch

What kind of authoritarian would allow such a thing? Could it be that our press has giving him a bum rap? Surely not!

NCAA wrap-up: Defense always travels

“We’ve played against athletes, played against some really good defensive guys this year in the tournament,” Painter said. “But not the collection of defensive players like UConn has. We play against somebody, they would have a lock-down defender. These guys are bringing lock-down defenders off the bench. Defense always travels. Tip of the hat to them. They were great.”

Kyle Neddenriep

I’ve said without embarrassment that I’m a “fair weather fan.” I think I’ve learned enough about basketball, and about Purdue Coach Matt Painter’s approach to coaching, to change that to “Purdue Men’s basketball fan.”

Caitlin Clark helped the generalized fandom, too.

Where’s a pro-lifer to go in 2024?

I am conflicted. It is tempting to join the pro-life chorus proclaiming that Donald Trump is not a pro-life candidate (because it’s true). But I don’t agree that his not-so-new abortion federalism is the proof that he’s not pro-life.

Abortion federalism is what the law should be. It’s what I said for darn near 50 years that the law would be after the reversal of Roe, and I’m not going to do a bait-and-switch.

So I guess I’m stuck with my fundamental objection that Donald Trump is a toxic narcissist, incapable of reckoning with facts that are inconvenient to him (like “You lost the election, sir”), yet capable of poisoning the culture.

For maybe a decade, from the earlyish eighties forward, I really was a single-issue anti-abortion voter (anti-abortion and pro-life aren’t the same thing, but seamless-garment-of-life candidates were rare). I became disenthralled of single-issue voting when NRLC and its affiliates endorsed nasty people who unconvincingly claimed they were pro-life — like maybe Trump in 2016 (I don’t recall whether they endorsed him; I wouldn’t have paid attention if they had.)

Trump’s pledge to appoint Supreme Court Justices from Leonard Leo’s list, which I only half believed, was not enough to gain my vote in 2016, and nothing he could say about “life issues” in 2024 would outweigh his baneful influence on everything he touches.

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

Rod Dreher, Something Demonic Is in the Air (2021)

Other disaffected seamless-garment pro-lifers should join me in voting for this party.

Gaining Perspective

A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Can we afford the rich?

While we talk a lot about the private jet emissions of the rich, the biggest environmental impacts of inequality are actually ‘psychosocial’:

“The well-publicized lifestyles of the rich promote standards and ways of living that others seek to emulate, triggering cascades of expenditure for holiday homes, swimming pools, travel, clothes and expensive cars. Studies show that people who live in more-unequal societies spend more on status goods. … Inequality also makes it harder to implement environmental policies. Changes are resisted if people feel that the burden is not being shared fairly.”

Fierce competition for social status not only turbocharges consumerism, it also reduces social cohesion, worsens mental health and increases crime:

“By accentuating differences in status and social class – for example, through the type of car someone drives, their clothing or where they live – inequality increases feelings of superiority and of inferiority. … Even affluent people would enjoy a better quality of life if they lived in a country with a more equal distribution of wealth, similar to a Scandinavian nation. They might see improvements in their mental health and have a reduced chance of becoming victims of violence; their children might do better at school and be less likely to take dangerous drugs.”

Dense Discovery, quoting Why the world cannot afford the rich

Trump aims at the FBI, kills FISA; gee, thanks Mr. Revenge!

Donald Trump has a special talent for creating chaos that benefits no one except Donald Trump, and doesn’t even do that in the end. That’s the only way to understand his destructive intervention Wednesday on the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in Congress. “Kill FISA,” he wrote on Truth Social, and the House Republican dunce caucus obliged.

On Tuesday evening the House Rules Committee voted out a rule that would have allowed lawmakers to vote on renewing FISA along with substantive reforms. The proposed bill, a consensus project between the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees, was written to improve safeguards for Americans in Section 702’s surveillance database, which lets intelligence agencies eavesdrop on the communications of foreigners overseas.

…

Mr. Trump instructed Republicans to kill FISA because “IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!!” Nice to know that the man who wants to become Commander in Chief again has his eye on his own revenge, rather than public safety.

Trump Blows Up Anti-Terror Surveillance – WSJ

Modernists losing copyright protection

For those of a certain age — who hear the word “modernist” as modern — it’s an astonishment that a good portion of William Carlos Williams’s poetry is out of copyright. After noticing how often the Internet routinely violates poetry copyrights (currently protecting works after 1928), we decided early on here at Poems Ancient and Modern that we would try to be vigilant about copyright, which prevents us (in our current poverty) from running anything from W.H. Auden, Silvia Plath, Delmore Schwartz, Philip Larkin, and many others. But not only is the first modernist generation, with the likes of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, coming into the public domain, but so increasingly is the second generation of such modernists as William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. It’s been a hundred years since the high modernists were the cutting edge of the modern.

Poems Ancient and Modern

Back home in Indiana

The Indiana Court of Appeals rejects a demand that a third “gender” designation be available on drivers licenses:

BMV asserts its binary-only policy for state credentials is designed to accurately, consistently, and efficiently identify licensees. The agency indicates that recording an individual’s objective characteristic of sex better advances the state interest in accurate identification than would recording a person’s subjective non-binary identity. Additionally, identifying an individual’s sex on their state credentials promotes consistency within the system as other statutes require the licensee’s sex to be identified and recorded. Finally, BMV suggests that issuing credentials identifying an individual’s sex better serves to further administrative efficiency than reporting a subjective status with innumerable designations.

Indiana Court Rejects Claim That Driver’s Licenses Must Include Third Gender Option

I appreciate living in a state that isn’t “way out there” to either extreme.

Wordplay

1

… umbraphilia — the love of eclipses …

Where You Can See the Next Total Solar Eclipse, in 2026 – The New York Times

2

You cannot make a competitive selection process a tool for equality, as the entire point of competitive selection is to identify inequality.

Freddie deBoer

3

Quango: a Quasi-NGO; an organisation to which a government has devolved power, but which is still partly controlled and/or financed by government bodies.

4

Sodcasting: a term coined in Britain for playing music on your phone in public — after “sod” for “sodomite”, i.e. something that only a total ASSHOLE would do. H/T Andrew Sullivan, who adds:

It’s not as if there isn’t an obvious win-win solution for both those who want to listen to music and those who don’t. Let me explain something that seems completely unimaginable to the Bluetoothers: If you can afford an iPhone, you can afford AirPods, or a headset, or the like. Put them in your ears, and you will hear music of far, far higher quality than from a distant Bluetooth, and no one else will be forced to hear anything at all! What’s not to like? It follows, it seems to me, that those who continue to refuse to do so, who insist that they are still going to make you listen as well, just because fuck-you they can, are waging a meretricious assault on their fellow humans.

5

fundamentalist, n. Anyone who is more serious about religion than I am, especially if he owns a gun.

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick], Una Sancta: Fundamentalism, Ecumenism and the One True Church

6

… the Netherlands, a country so flat it feels it’s been ironed into submission.

Chris Arnade

7

I look up from my book,
from the unreality of language,
and stare at the sea’s surface
that says nothing and means it.

R.S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems 1988-2000

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

March 5, 2024

Art

Popular “unpopular art”

[A]art is in a peculiar and dangerous position these days. This week, over 17,000 artists and activists signed an open letter demanding that Israeli artists be excluded from the Venice Biennale festival in Italy, simply because they are Israelis. And even while that attempt at censorship is launched, other artists proclaim how brave they are for art on certain pet causes, violating taboos that no one has enforced for decades and everyone they know already mocks. There is no real cost to such stands.

Joseph Bottum

Popular art

Meet Frankey, the Street Artist Delighting Amsterdam – The New York Times (shared link, no paywall). I was afraid this story would be about another Banksy type graffiti artist (I viscerally hate graffiti). Not at all. It’s sheer whimsical delight.

IVF

The ephemeral threat to IVF

In June 2022, the court ended federal access to abortion, kicking abortion policy back to the states.

Since then, nine states—Alabama, Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Tennessee—have outlawed abortion outright, not even allowing the procedure when women become pregnant through rape or incest. (Alabama’s IVF ruling is the most extreme pro-life ruling yet.) …

How Abortion Became ‘the Defund the Police of the GOP’ | The Free Press

Alabama Supreme Court’s decision might ramify unpopularly, bearing in mind the conservative adage that there are popular “unpopular opinions” (i.e., “popular among our leftcoastal readers, less so in flyover country”) and unpopular “unpopular opinions (i.e., “popular among the fundamentalist deplorables in flyover country but vilified by leftcoastal types).

But I digress. The Alabama decision was a ruling in favor of IVF-availing parents whose frozen embryos were negligently destroyed by another patient for lack of safeguards at the IVF clinic. There were no sinister designs on IVF in the opinion at all.* So constantly throwing the decision into the abortion mix strikes me as shit-stirring clickbait.

And “they” must stir the shit, and bait the clicks, vigorously and now, because IVF is in fact popular and the Alabama legislature is hastening to protect it from unintended consequences of the Court’s decision. (I’d say “nobody would dare try to outlaw IVF” except that people are daring some pretty bizarre things these days.)

* Alabama’s Supreme Court had earlier ruled that wrongful death action was allowed to parents for loss of descendants en ventre sa mere; the recent case clarified that intrauterine or extrauterine descendants were within contemplation of the parental wrongful death law.

The case against IVF

While we’re on the subject, I think it’s important for people in secure positions occasionally to voice unpopular unpopular opinions — opinions that others may be too cancelable to voice.

For the record, I have serious moral qualms about IVF, based on a combination of (a) knowing that in the U.S., IVF practice knowingly creates large numbers of embryos that will eventually be destroyed and (b) some Roman Catholic influence that tells me babies should be made in marital beds, not laboratories.

J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know briefly sketches the Roman Catholic case against IVF (thought his immediate target is cloning).

So you would say that aspirin, surgery to remove a tumor, and cloning “respect” nature, too.
Not cloning.
Why not? Doesn’t it assist the natural function of having babies?
Once more: our nature is our design. We are designed to have babies, but we are not designed to have them in that way. To put it another way, our design includes not only certain ends but certain means. There is a difference between repairing the reproductive system and bypassing it.
Well, it doesn’t seem to be a big deal anyway.
I think it is a very big deal. When you try to turn yourself into a different kind of being, you are not only doing wrong but asking for trouble. He who ignores the witness of his design will have to face the witness of natural consequences.

If you think this argument has (not “should have”) any appreciable political valence in the USA, you need to get a grip. I’m just saying it should have some valence.

I don’t know where I ultimately would come out on IVF it were there an opportunity to discuss it, not just Roman Catholic voices crying in the wilderness versus reflexive dismissal of those voices.

Law

Witless Ape returns to ballot

[I]t was a perfectly defensible position to hold that Trump should be disqualified. What was indefensible was the air of swaggering certainty that permeated so many of those takes. … self-evident. Common sense. Obvious. Indisputable. Automatic.

Damon Linker

David French was in the “Common sense. Obvious. Indisputable. Automatic.” camp, and he’s not going down without a final howl of protest:

It’s extremely difficult to square this ruling with the text of Section 3. The language is clearly mandatory. The first words are “No person shall be” a member of Congress or a state or federal officer if that person has engaged in insurrection or rebellion or provided aid or comfort to the enemies of the Constitution. The Section then says, “But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each house, remove such disability.”

In other words, the Constitution imposes the disability, and only a supermajority of Congress can remove it. But under the Supreme Court’s reasoning, the meaning is inverted: The Constitution merely allows Congress to impose the disability, and if Congress chooses not to enact legislation enforcing the section, then the disability does not exist. The Supreme Court has effectively replaced a very high bar for allowing insurrectionists into federal office — a supermajority vote by Congress — with the lowest bar imaginable: congressional inaction.

David French

I guess the Supreme Court considers whether it’s best to shade the law when following it fearlessly could unleash chaos. It’s days like yesterday that make that obvious, indisputable.

(H/T Kevin D. Williamson for the “Witless Ape” image; he minted it, and the linked item is a classic.)

The exceedingly long arm of Russian law

The media reported last week that Russian authorities had arrested Ksenia Karelina, a U.S.-Russian dual citizen, and charged her with treason for donating a nominal sum to an organization that aids Ukraine … The charges against Ms. Karelina are an assault on what it means to be American. The Russian state contends that for a U.S. citizen to make a donation to a U.S. charity and to attend a peaceful protest on U.S. soil is a punishable offense on arrival in Russia.

Dora Chomiak in the Wall Street Journal

Trump’s immunity claims

People who want Donald Trump tried, convicted and jailed before November, for acts while he was in office, have my sympathy, but as we head ever deeper into a tit-for-tat polarized political world, I must substantially agree with Lee Kovarsky instead: Trump Should Lose. But the Supreme Court Should Still Clarify Immunity. – The New York Times.

Trump’s immunity claims are far too broad, but ex-Presidents need at least narrow immunity. Running for high office is already so fraught that I question the sanity of anyone who runs. Add to the existing ugliness the prospect of criminal prosecution, with no possible immunity if the other party wins next time, and we’ll have nobody but saints and sociopaths willing to risk it.

Qualified Immunity

In Indiana, we have a political novice candidate for governor whose first major media buy was an ad with him sitting in a rustic church, slightly misquoting the Bible and earnestly telling us he’s a “man of faith.” It kind of turned my stomach.

The second major media buy was an ad with a well-spoken Rwandan refugee, who became his foster daughter, telling us he’s a “man of faith.” It was much more believable.

His third major media buy simplistically says that qualified immunity (over which governors have little or no control) protects police and so protects us and brillig, and slithey toves, gyring and gimbling in the wabe, and “as governor, your safety will always come first” (sic).

Eric Doden has now lost me for sure. Qualified Immunity, a court-created line-item veto, effectively turns “every person” in 42 USC §1983 into “precious few people.”

Miscellany

[Expletive deleted] AI

It is not possible to say definitively who negatively impacted society more, Elon Musk tweeting memes or Hitler. Both have had a significant impact on society, but in different ways.

Google’s Gemini AI via Nellie Bowles

Pride before the Fall

No, you dare not make war on cotton. No power on earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is king.” Such words smacked of hubris, the excessive pride that goes before a fall. And so they would turn out to be, expressing a mistaken vision that would lead to cruel and tragic consequences for the South. Lulled into a false sense of economic security by the illusion that cotton was invincible and its prices would never fall, the South would become fatally committed to a brutal social and economic system that was designed for the lucrative production of cotton on a massive scale but that achieved such productivity at an incalculable cost in human and moral terms. It placed the region on a collision course with changing moral sensibilities in the world, and with fundamental American ideals.

Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope

Psychological Man

My grandfather left school at fifteen and spent the rest of his working life as a sheet metal worker in a factory in Birmingham, the industrial heartland of England. If he had been asked if he found satisfaction in his work, there is a distinct possibility he would not even have understood the question, given that it really reflects the concerns of psychological man’s world, to which he did not belong.

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

Where paranoia is the mark of sophistication

In the offline world, paranoia is a liability. It inhibits you from seeing the world clearly. In parts of the online world, you’re considered a rube if you’re not paranoid, if you’re not seeing a leftist plot around every corner, if you’re not believing that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s romance is a Biden administration psy-op that culminated with rigging the Super Bowl.

David French, Why Elon Musk Is the Second Most Important Person in MAGA

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Tuesday, 11/14/23

Middle East

Evidence is what confirms your priors

It’s not just the activists. Congresswoman Tlaib has accused Biden of “funding Netanyahu’s genocide,” and said “We are literally watching people commit genocide” — referring to the blast next to a Gaza hospital caused by a Hamas rocket. Congresswoman Omar retweeted a photo of dead kids with the caption “CHILD GENOCIDE IN PALESTINE” — but the photo was from a 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria.

Andrew Sullivan

Culpably loose translation

At the pro-Palestine/anti-Israel protests and in various “We Will Not Condemn Hamas” letters from academia, there are a lot of Arabic phrases bandied about. A lot of Arabic words showing up on posters. And those words are a translation, of a sort. So: when it says Free Palestine in English, in Arabic it often says Palestine Is Arab. The phrase Free Palestine sounds nebulous and nice. And sure! Free Everyone, I say! In Arabic, it’s a little less subtle: Palestine Is Arab. Palestine is not Jewish. It’s a call for the end of Jews in the area. (H/t Matt Yglesias for pointing this out.) You see, the same translation in the big “Academics and Intellectuals for a Free Palestine” letter. There, in English, it says Free Palestine. In Arabic: Palestine Is Arab.

Nellie Bowles

One picture’s worth …

Via Nellie Bowles

Anti-Zionist, antisemitic

Anti-Zionists claim the moral high-ground and often take great offense at any suggestion they are antisemitic.

But that’s the amazing thing.

We spend so much time on that debate, everyone thinks it’s just normal to say, “I don’t think Israel should exist.” Because that’s what anti-Zionism means. Zionism is the idea that Israel should exist as a Jewish homeland. It’s not more complicated than that. Anti-Zionism is the idea that Israel shouldn’t exist as a Jewish homeland.

Jonah Goldberg, How Anti-Zionism Shrugs Off Antisemitism

Moral clarity on Gaza

Barack Obama returns to the arena: Former president Obama jetted in from Martha’s Vineyard to say one quick thing, guys: the war’s kinda Israel’s fault! Or at least, we’re all guilty here, man. Hamas is the same as you and me. I’m reactive and need to learn how to take a deep breath before writing emails; Hamas tortured children and livestreamed it. Point is, we’ve all got issues. Here’s Obama: “If you want to solve the problem, then you have to take in the whole truth. And you then have to admit nobody’s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree.” It takes two to tango. Hamas killed infants point-blank; I never replace the toilet paper roll.

You know who’s not talking like that? My woman, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who went on The View to deliver a shot of moral clarity straight into Stay-at-Home America’s veins. Here’s Mrs. Clinton: “Remember, there was a cease-fire on October 6 that Hamas broke by their barbaric assault on peaceful civilians and their kidnapping, their killing, their beheading, their terrible, inhumane savagery. It did not hold because Hamas chose to break it.” Moms around the country heard that call and are gathering arms. Hillary’s been through everything, so tarnished in battle she actually became clean again. I’m. With. Her, we all bellowed.

Trendy cultural relativists like 2023-era Obama can never really believe there’s a good guy. Nothing is ever better or worse than anything else. To the cultural relativists, Hamas is just another modern dance—a wild and beautiful expression of the human condition. The old-school feminists like Hilz are not so easily taken. They cut their teeth on brass tacks. They spend Saturday night preparing for the Model UN Conference, where they will crush. It does not take two to tango in the mind of Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Nellie Bowles

Abortion

Abortion in perspective: politique and mystique

The string of political losses since Dobbs overturned Roe has some thoughtful Christian conservatives reconsidering — and a few suggesting that their past writings have been vindicated:

Several years ago Matthew Lee Anderson wrote in these pages that there is no pro-life case for Donald Trump …:

If abortions happen because of the breakdown of marriage, then there is nothing ‘pro-life’ about electing someone who is at best a serial monogamist. If the abortion culture has anything to do with the wider degradation of our society’s sex and morals — as pro-lifers have argued it does for as long as I have been alive — then there is nothing pro-life in endorsing a candidate who has bragged about the number of his sexual partners. It matters that Trump is unwilling to answer whether he personally has funded abortions. It matters a great deal.

Let me be as explicit as possible about what pro-lifers supporting Trump means: It means lending their aid to someone who (with Bill Clinton) was friends with Jeffrey Epstein who was eventually convicted of pedophilia. And Trump knew of it and commended Epstein. I mean, look at this glowing endorsement: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

Think about that for a second: Conservative evangelicals and other pro-lifers have rushed to find any justification they can think of to vote for a fellow who almost certainly knew of pedophilia occurring, and, for all we do know of him, did nothing to prevent it. At the very least, he was not the one who went to the police about it. That pro-lifers have been reduced to this beguiles the mind, to put it gently.

…

As long as our laws allow for the killing of the unborn we cannot claim to be such a society. But the erasure of such laws will not, in itself, absolve us of the charge of being a society that is deeply inhumane and hostile to life.

…

[T]his is what makes the embrace of Trump as a pro-life champion so damaging to the movement: It … diminishes the goals of the pro-life movement, reducing them from the lofty and inspiring ideal of creating a society hospitable to life down [mystique]to simply overturning a badly argued Supreme Court ruling [politique]. And by reducing the ideal in this way it actually drains the life from the pro-life movement, rendering it equivalent to any other political advocacy group whose sole objective is narrowly political in nature.

…

To secure an admittedly significant political victory the pro-life movement has had to give up this broader vision, for how can you credibly claim to resist the culture of death when your champion is Donald Trump?

Of course, that may be precisely the point. There may be no eulogy more fitting for American Christian conservatism than this: That we secured our continued relevance in American society by giving up the things that might have made us a distinctive society ourselves. We have gained a political victory but even if we triumph, what will we have to say? And can we say any of it with even a modicum of credibility?

Jake Meador, The Mystique of the Pro-Life Movement: On Trump & the March for Life, a reprint from January 24, 2020.

Why Abortion is a losing issue for the GOP

In the eight years since the so-called New Right emerged on the scene and Trump began to dominate the Republican landscape, the Republican Party has become less libertarian but more libertine, and libertinism is ultimately incompatible with a holistic pro-life worldview … Libertarianism says that your rights are more important than my desires. Libertinism says my desires are more important than your rights, and this means that libertines are terrible ambassadors for any cause that requires self-sacrifice.

David French

(Note the congruence of these two perspectives.)

Culture

Liberal democracy’s tacit orthodoxy

Liberal democracy has created its own orthodoxy, which causes it to become less of a forum for articulating positions and agreeing on actions than—to a much higher extent—a political mechanism for the selection of people, organizations, and ideas in line with the orthodoxy. This phenomenon can be seen especially in Europe, where in the past few decades there has been a major ideological rapprochement of the right-and left-wing parties. This resulted in the formation of what is called “the political mainstream,” which includes Socialists, Christian Democrats, the Greens, Social Democrats, Liberals, and even Conservatives. The mainstream that runs in Europe today is tilted far more to the left than to the right. Within it, the left has made a slight shift to the right in some matters (mostly economic) and made a further move to the left in other matters (mainly moral), while the right-wing movement’s shift to the left was huge.

Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy

Bittersweet resolution of nostalgia

(James Matthew Wilson ached for Michigan during his long exile:)

We had chosen a difficult time to return. Michigan had legalized recreational marijuana use in 2018, and cannabis shops had sprung up all over the place, with their ridiculous names and vulgar slogans appearing on billboards along the highways. The whole state has been defaced with bad puns on words like “high” and “stoned.” And in 2022, the citizens of the state voted to lock abortion rights into the state constitution. It also elected its first Democratic legislature in forty years, and in the short time that coalition has been in power, it has pushed through a slew of left-leaning programs that will further erode the moral and educational standards of the place—all done, ironically, in hopes of luring new residents to the state. Michigan risks becoming a state where the slaughter of the innocent and the drugging of citizens into inertia and schizophrenia are celebrated as pastimes. Its governor proudly speaks of these things as part of a golden vision of the future, alongside the construction of a new Chinese-owned plant for electric vehicle batteries.

These changes have given my family occasion to see why the love of country, the piety of Virgil, is so essential. When one feels betrayed or disappointed—or wounded by the legal establishment of grave evil—the loving reaction is not to withdraw but to abide, to recommit oneself to the saving of what risks being lost. “It is good that you exist!” Love sees through the faults and perversions of the hour. It stands firm, when other kinds of commitment or affection would crumble. This kind of love has to be wound about the bone and deep within the sinew, just as its vision of the object loved is not subject to present appearances. Our truest loves are not universalizing, free, and deliberate, but stubborn, unaccountable, and particular. We do not love immutability, eternity, or omniscience. We yearn to see God’s face, which we find in the human countenance of Jesus. The same holds for natural pieties, especially love of one’s home.

I have a favorite Michigan vacation destination, Traverse City, and agree with him on the “ridiculous names and vulgar [marijuana] slogans.”

What happened to the ACLU

The ACLU really did stand for sincere liberalism during the middle decades of its existence, and perhaps for even longer than that. In the 1990s, when New York City’s Ancient Order of Hibernians wanted to keep a gay pride float out of its century-old St. Patrick’s Day Parade, the local affiliate of the ACLU took the parade organizers’ side. From the 1980s until recently, ACLU lawyers filed numerous amicus briefs against ordinances that banned protest and prayer outside abortion clinics, even though the organization was institutionally pro-choice and had its own “reproductive rights” division. For ACLU lawyers, it was a point of pride that they defended the free speech rights of pro-lifers with whom they disagreed.

Recently, something changed. Impartial liberalism is no longer the ruling ideology at the ACLU. The organization’s social media accounts now regularly weigh in on matters in which civil liberties either are not at issue or seem to lie on the other side. When Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted on grounds of self-defense after shooting three assailants at a protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the ACLU Twitter account lamented that Rittenhouse “was not held responsible for his actions.” In a departure from longstanding practice, the organization began making political ads on behalf of candidates, $25 million worth in the 2018 midterm cycle. A million dollars were spent on an ad opposing Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation, not because of his legal views but because he had been accused, on flimsy evidence, of sexual assault.

In 2018, a memo titled “ACLU Case Selection Guidelines: Conflicts Between Competing Values or Priorities” formalized the end of the old era. Due to “limited resources” and the ACLU’s need “to recruit and retain a diverse staff,” its lawyers would now avoid taking clients whose “views are contrary to our values.” Among the criteria its lawyers would use when choosing cases were “the potential effect on marginalized communities” and the “harmful impact on the equality and justice work to which we are also committed.”

The ACLU had come full circle. The new generation of left-wing “woke” lawyers is trying to impose on the American justice system the attitude to the law that prevails in Communist countries, where the most important question in any trial is whether a person belongs to a favored class, and where rights such as free speech and the presumption of innocence are derided as bourgeois proceduralism. And they are well on their way to succeeding.

Helen Andrews, What Happened to the ACLU

Things at hand

Now if it is my inclination to tune out the national news, or if I claim that being obsessed with it is a sign not of engagement in the world but of a pathological boredom with it, I do so because I believe that, by comparison, what’s “at hand” is far more important. And I leave aside asking whether there are no Shakespeare plays or sonnets or Melville novels we haven’t read yet that we could go and read instead of glutting our boredom on Fox and CNN. Are we really going to surrender our attention to what the precious twenty-somethings on NPR believe we should care about when we ourselves can take charge of our own attention and attending?

…

I am not suggesting that anyone abstain from voting in presidential elections, though I confess to having abstained on grounds that seem perfectly reasonable to me: I didn’t want to be implicated in the shenanigans of either of the clowns on offer. But what I am saying is that there are duties of citizenship confronting us not once every four years but every day. And those who account themselves citizens because they vote in abstract elections but cannot be bothered by the “things at hand” are, in my view, not citizens in any sense of the word. They are people sitting on their couches watching the Super Bowl or the Election News, elbow deep in Cheeze Doodles, too busy being consumers of far-away news or sports to be citizens of the near-at-hand—citizens performing, at scale, the offices of neighbor.

Jason Peters, in an essay well worth a few minutes, Citizens of the Things at Hand.

Why is such advice so hard to follow?

Politics

Long-term consquences of Trumpism

One of the many tragedies of this era for the American right is how Trump and Trumpism have consumed young Republican political talent.

The most promising young governor in the party is being steamrolled in this year’s presidential primary, a casualty of Trump’s hubris and ambition. He may never recover from the ridicule he’s endured for his “disloyalty.”

Successful young(-ish) governors like Chris Sununu and Doug Ducey are either out of politics or soon will be, despite how formidable they’d be as Senate candidates. They ran afoul of Trump and therefore would struggle to get through a primary, so they’ve decided not to bother.

Smart young conservatives like Elise Stefanik converted to Trumpism for the same reason, to not run afoul of him or his voters. There’s little left to distinguish phony, opportunistic populists like Stefanik from true believers like Marjorie Taylor Greene. They’re rubber stamps for Trump in equal measure; the only difference is that one mutters sotto voce while doing the stamping.

Right-wing political stars now tend to be made from charismatic charlatans who are good on television, in the image of the party’s leader, not from policy mavens. Kari Lake and Vivek Ramaswamy are better known than most Republican officeholders despite never having won an election.

The closest thing Trumpism has to a next-gen political success story is J.D. Vance in Ohio. In unguarded moments, Vance sounds like a fascist.

That’s a lot of political capital that Republicans have spoiled or squandered.

Nick Cataggio

Our libertarian land

Ross Douthat

I don’t find this surprising at all. I think America is a pro-choice, pro-pot, and pro-gun society. I think the legalization of marijuana in Ohio is going to be a total disaster. But I think social conservatism is largely correct, and unfortunately, fairly unpopular, and that’s bad for the country. But such is life.

Michelle Cottle

Such is a democracy. So you’re saying you believe in thermostatic voting, more or less.

Ross Douthat

I think that America has shifted meaningfully to the individualist left on a range of, quote unquote, “social issues” over the last 20 years, including not just issues about sex and reproduction, but also issues like marijuana.

And I think guns falls into this category. One reason I think the liberals lose on guns in certain ways for the same reason maybe pro-lifers lose on abortion, where if you poll people about specific gun control provisions, they might support them, but they don’t trust Democrats because they think Democrats want to take away their guns. And in the same way, I think it might be that people who would support a 12-week abortion ban in theory don’t trust Republicans to implement it because they think Republicans want to just ban all abortions. I think there may be similar dynamics in play there, in a very libertarian country.

New York Times

Don’t say he didn’t tell us

“If I happen to be President and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them.’ They’d be out of business. They’d be out of the election,” – likely future president Donald Trump, to Univision.

Via Andrew Sullivan

Humpty Elon

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, via Goodreads.

We tweeted a line from Louise Perry’s remarkable essay, “We Are Repaganizing” (October 2023): “Abortion is not just ‘healthcare’; it is not at all like getting a tooth or a tonsil removed.” When we turned to promote the tweet as part of an X Ads campaign, the Ministry of Truth at X (formerly known as Twitter) informed us that the ad would not run. Its communication specified a violation of a policy that prohibits the promotion of health and pharmaceutical products and services. But the thrust of Louise’s observation is analytical, not promotional. It concerns what abortion is. Welcome to the Free Society™, brought to you by Silicon Valley. (Via First Things)

When we apply a rule, it means just what we choose it to mean — neither more nor less. The question is who is to be master — that’s all.

Living your faith

For me, faith is about uniting all people. It says all children are children of God. And if you’re truly living out your faith, you’re not playing into these anger and hatred games.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear, who won re-election November 7, via E.J. Dionne and David Brooks.

If divine law and human reason condemn hatred of anyone who is “Other” simply because of who he or she is, then even more so do they condemn the irrational and too-often lethal hatred of the People to whom God first made his promises—promises, the Second Vatican Council taught, of which God has never repented (see Nostra Aetate 4). Jew-hatred that leads to cries of “Kill the Jews!” and “Gas the Jews!” is as clear an example of a deliberate choice that “destroys in us the charity without which eternal beatitude is impossible” as one can imagine. It is loathsome. It is a gangrenous wound eating away at everything from higher education to politics. It cannot be tolerated, and those who advocate such barbarities should not be tolerated either.

For Christians to engage in any form of anti-Semitism is to add further blows to the smitten back of Christ, tied to the Pillar of Flagellation. It is to press more thorns upon his bleeding brow. It is to pound more nails into his hands and feet. It is to thrust another spear into his side. For he was and is, eternally, the Son of David as well as the Son of God, and to scorn his kinsmen is to scorn him.

George Weigel

The human voice: That we can sing seems basis for conjecture that, despite our stupidities and our sinfulness, we might be the reason the universe exists.

Alexander Riley

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

Thursday, 12/15/22

Politics

A foundation of liberal democracy

Liberal democracy requires some core attempt at least to understand the arguments of your opponents in order to rebut them. It requires a minimal level of fairness. Fox News is therefore part of the problem. But so are [John] Oliver and [Jon] Stewart. All start from tribal loyalty and then skew all the facts that back them up and erase all those that don’t. But the Oliver-Stewart disinformation campaigns are in some ways worse because they pretend to be honest observers, backed by “research,” and are still respected by elites. They are, in fact, Fox-style tribal propagandists — telling lies of omission and commission. If we want to rescue liberal democracy, we have to defeat this mentality, from whichever tribe it comes.

Andrew Sullivan, on alleged (I say alleged because I’ve essentially never watched either Stewart of Oliver) lies of the two comics about gender dysphoria in teenagers.

Conservatives, Reactionaries, Counter-revolutionaries

What makes someone a conservative? As the term implies, it describes a person who wants to conserve something about the present. It may not be the present as a whole but merely one embattled or enfeebled aspect of it that traces its roots back into the past. But whatever the case, the impulse is toward protecting something that exists so that it might persist and even thrive into the future. In that respect, conservatism isn’t a destructive impulse or even a reformist one. It wants to keep things in our world (or some specific things within that world) as they are.

In addition to differing from liberals, progressives, socialists, anarchists, communists, and others on the left, a conservative stands in sharp contrast to reactionaries situated further out on the right. A reactionary is someone who believes a specific and crucially important aspect of the world that traces its roots back into the past has already been corrupted or extinguished in our time through prior revolutionary change. The reactionary believes this precipitous decline requires a counter-revolutionary response.

…

I think it’s indisputably the case that there are far fewer conservatives on the American right today than there were 20 or 40 years ago, and far more reactionaries.

Damon Linker, Opening Our Eyes to the Right’s Rising Radicalism

This raised a question: what if one agrees with much or all of the reactionary diagnosis but by disposition, or pacifistic convictions, or raw distrust of the counter-revolution’s wannabe leaders, rejects the “counter-revolutionary response”? In other words, am I a conservative, a reactionary, or off that scale entirely?

Linker immediately takes a stab at an answer:

[R]eactionary impulses also come in a range of intensities. At the moderate end of the spectrum, there are aestheticized reactionaries who lament the loss of some element of culture and set about reviving it in how they dress or speak or in the habits they personally cultivate. This a lonely (and largely apolitical) kind of reactionary, fighting a mostly individual battle against the cultural tide.

That sounds like a good thesis for starting a discussion. But let’s continue it.

Tyler Cowan dissects the New Right — “from Curtis Yarvin to J.D. Vance to Adrian Vermeule to Sohrab Ahmari to Rod Dreher to Tucker Carlson” — very effectively.

Remembering that “dissects” is clinical, as opposed to “eviscerates,” you should read it carefully.

For me, the Amen! moments in Cowan’s piece were these:

I … do not see how the New Right stance avoids the risks from an extremely corrupt and self-seeking power elite. Let’s say the New Right description of the rottenness of elites were true – would we really solve that problem by electing more New Right-oriented individuals to government? Under a New Right worldview, there is all the more reason to be cynical about New Right leaders, no matter which ideological side they start on. If elites are so corrupt right now, the force corrupting elites are likely to be truly fundamental.

…

The point is that good or at least satisfactory elite performance is by no means entirely out of our reach. We then have to ask the question – which philosophy of governance is most likely to get us there next time around? I can see that some New Right ideas might contribute to useful reform, but it is not my number one wish to have New Right leaders firmly in charge or to have New Right ideology primary in our nation’s youth.

Finally, I worry about excess negativism in New Right thinking. Negative thoughts tend to breed further negative thoughts.

Think about the plausible New Right candidates for high office — Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and possibly J.D. Vance in the not-too-distant future. You can add your own.

Then ask, “aren’t they disproportionately weathervane grifters?” Or, if you prefer, barnacles. Darn right they are. I trust them less than I trust “establishment” figures.

This doesn’t mean I find their critiques of liberal democracy meritless. Far from it. For that matter, I find Marx’s critiques spot-on quite often — but I don’t trust Marxists to rule us well, either.

The political eschaton remains non-imminent. That’s why I can largely buy the reactionary diagnosis while rejecting its prescription.

Bret Stevens and I do a Mind-Meld

To me, the choice these days between Republicans and Democrats is about as appealing as a dinner invitation from Hannibal Lecter: either you get your heart cut out or your brain removed, and both get served with a side of fava beans and a nice Chianti.

… the Republican Party is pretty much irredeemable, while the Democrats are … just not the team I’m ever going to bat for.

Meet Kyrsten Sinema, Former Democrat of Arizona – The New York Times

A Defense of Christianish Trumpism

Given the existential threat to Christianity in the U.S., I cannot understand how men like Dreher can fail to fall behind Trump. These parlour-room Christians seem more concerned about social graces and etiquette which are accorded a greater weighting than any other quality a man can have. Combined with their Christian Buddhism, they would rather suffer under an urbane tyrant than fight with a righteous braggart.

The Social Pathologist.

I do not agree with this (for several reasons, starting with its “existential threat” premise) but found it, then and now, an unusually plausible defense of Christianish Trumpism.

Edge case – is it is or is it ain’t politics?

In Richmond, Virginia,

Metzger Bar and Butchery recently canceled a conservative Christian group’s event reservation after staff members raised concerns about the group’s opposition to same-sex marriage and abortion rights, according to Virginia Business.

“Many of our staff are women and/or members of the LGBTQ+ community. All of our staff are people with rights who deserve dignity and a safe work environment. We respect our staff’s established rights as humans and strive to create a work environment where they can do their jobs with dignity, comfort and safety,” the restaurant said in an Instagram post.

The Christian group, called the Family Foundation, later addressed the incident in a blog post titled, “We’ve been canceled! Again.”

“Welcome to the double standard of the left, where some believe (a Christian baker) must be forced to create a wedding cake as part of the celebration of a same-sex ceremony but any business should be able to deny basic goods and services to those who hold biblical values around marriage,” wrote Victoria Cobb, president of the Family Foundation, in the post.

In the blog post, Cobb also accused Metzger Bar and Butchery of engaging in the same type of discrimination that plagued Black communities around 70 years ago.

Can a restaurant refuse service to conservative customers? – Deseret News

The restaurant:

dignity, comfort and safety
rights as humans
a safe work environment

The Christian group:

the same type of discrimination that plagued Black communities around 70 years ago
biblical values
double standard of the left
canceled

The tired tropes of Selma Envy.

Not Politics

Onion readers react to Britney Griner’s release

Since they made her miss a whole season in the WNBA, Russia should really owe her $19 in lost wages as well.
Hopefully now she has learned her lesson about murdering people, or whatever crime of that magnitude she must have committed to be handed such a harsh sentence.

Americans React To Brittney Griner Returning Home From Russia

The entire earth is alive

When education only consists of what can be coded into written words and numbers, then we are at the apogee of left hemisphere processing and are indeed behaving somewhat like machines. But if a tool, let’s say a bass guitar, is used by the hands and heart until the point of becoming alive to us, has not real magic happened? Is not the inert reenchanted, and revivified? What happens to the musician which we overlook here in modernity, is a thing Dougald mentions regularly – that his Indigenous friends find so hard to tell him that we’re missing – because there are no words for it. It is how the water is for the fishes. The entire earth is alive, and everything in it.

Caroline Ross, The Now Time of the Hand

I’m unaware of any pernicious habit that shapes me more than dwelling in abstractions of things that “can be coded into words and numbers.”

Personality-driven hate-totem non-stories

Funny thing about the news: There is lots of it, which makes you wonder why so much so-called journalism in our time consists of tired political hacks trying to work up a good lather of outrage—I have seen 50-year-old men type "OMG" unironically—over whatever the personality-driven hate-totem non-story of the day is.

… There are basically two business models in modern digital journalism, those being 1.) the bigger-is-better mass-eyeball-commodification model, which works the magic of turning "You won’t believe!" clickbait headlines into erection-pill ad revenue, and 2.) subscriptions. We chose subscriptions here because the subscription-based model is a license to do good, interesting, honest, independent, original work. The nice thing about the subscription model is, we don’t need 40 million daily pageviews to make a buck. Our theory is that we can write smart stuff for smart people and make a decent profit doing so. I don’t expect Steve Hayes to end up in some future version of the Pandora Papers like that Pornhub guy, because there’s really only one business model that produces that kind of traffic, and it isn’t ours. But, as some of the media outlets that we do not wish to imitate have discovered, porn isn’t the only way to appeal to the baser instincts—there’s rage and hatred and titillation and mood-affiliation and bias-confirmation and a bunch of other stuff that may be good for something but that isn’t a part of good journalism.

Kevin D. Williamson, in an email promoting The Dispatch.

The Dispatch is definitely worth a try. It’s (mostly? I don’t know about their young hires) conservatives playing the news straight and commenting from the non-tribal center-right.

Some conservative corrolaries

… a certain skepticism is always appropriate when someone’s proposed system doesn’t have many existing models and the world as we know it tends the other way.

… a movement with utopian ambitions needs a recognition that it’s seeking a genuinely different society as well as a different set of laws.

Ross Douthat, Does American Society Need Abortion?

Today’s Chuckle

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

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

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

The Orthodox "phronema" [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

We’ve Been Lucky Day

What we are experiencing isn’t truly thankfulness, but only something like delight over good fortune. In this case, I wonder why we even call it thankfulness. Perhaps we should be celebrating a Gee We’ve Been Lucky Day, or, if times have been hard, maybe an It Could Have Been Worse Day. If a shorter name is needed, we could call it Okayness Day. I guess it would be something like Happy Hour.

J Budziszewski, wrested from context (i.e., this is not his position)

Eulogy — Mike Gerson

It’s nice to read Peter Wehner writing a eulogy instead of invective, however deserved.

Excerpts:

Mike [Gerson] was appalled at those who disfigured Jesus and used their faith for the purposes of dehumanization. It is one of the reasons why he was so thankful to publish an extraordinary essay in the Post before his death, lamenting Christians whose view of politics “is closer to ‘Game of Thrones’ than to the Beatitudes.”

…

Very few people knew the full scope of the health challenges Mike faced. He suffered a heart attack in 2004, when he was 40. Kidney cancer in 2013. Debilitating leg pain, probably the result of surgical nerve damage. The kidney cancer spread to his lungs. Then Parkinson’s disease and metastatic adrenal cancer. And finally, metastatic bone cancer in multiple locations, intensely painful. At one point he told me he was on 20 different medications. Mike and I joked that of all the figures in the Bible he could model himself after, he chose Job.

I am among those who had no idea of Gerson’s health problems. I admired his opinion pieces, but not quite enough to keep my Washington Post digital subscription.

Buying off the bloodhounds

[Y]ou don’t have to have a granular understanding of blockchain to understand [Sam Bankman-Fried] was a fraud. I think there are a lot of reasons he got away with it for as long as he did. Buying political cover from politicians with donations (Bankman-Fried was the Dems’ second biggest donor in the last cycle) and purchasing political cover from the media with woke gobbledygook about philanthropy is not a bad strategy. Also, hiding your malfeasance in the squid ink of technical jargon few people understand is pretty savvy as well.

But I think he had something else going for him. Democrats and the left love having billionaires in their corner. It’s a great way to blunt charges of “Marxism” and whatnot, and it’s also a fun way to advance the argument that there’s no real tension between progressive policies and profit. Having token billionaires is even better when those billionaires seem like they’ve broken the old paradigms of heavy industry and are on the cutting edge of innovation. Having dinosaurs who made their money the old-fashioned way—especially the ones who made their money from liquified dinosaurs—can trigger psychological or ideological second thoughts. Peddling ones-and-zeros just sounds so cutting edge.

One lesson from this is that new ideas and new technologies—not to mention getting rich off them—can blind you to the importance of due diligence. Say what you will about old-fashioned accountants and lawyers from prestigious firms—they at least have a vested interest in protecting their reputations and brands. Thinking that the rules of the past don’t apply to you is a great way to give yourself permission to break rules that definitely do apply to you.

Jonah Goldberg

I’d rather drink muddy water

My least-favorite series in the New York Times travel section is “36 Hours in [major city].” I would not enjoy dashing around and bar-hopping at night as they invariably describe.

Let me settle into a city for a bit, and give me time to catch my breath without liquor.

Is Orbán a Cosplayer?

There has always been a whiff of the fake about Mr. Orbán’s war on Brussels. That he never proposed the obvious solution to this impasse—Hungary’s exit from the European Union—exposed the limit of his gamesmanship. More fool the American conservatives who didn’t notice this sooner.

Joseph C. Sternberg, Orbán and the Collapse of the Trump Intellectuals

I don’t fully agree with Sternberg, but I welcome his pushback against Orbán if only because it doesn’t follow the usual script of name-calling and “everybody knows.”

Epistemic humility

Appealing to a higher, theological standard of judgment above politics can, in theory, act as a moderating influence that inspires humility, restraint, and even wisdom. But it often does the opposite—inspiring imprudent acts and judgments …

Of course, the religiously devout aren’t the only people who are prone to act in a way that fails to exemplify the spirit of liberality or civic generosity …

Liberalism is better off when these tendencies are tamed. The best way to accomplish that goal is to rely on civic education that instills lessons in epistemic humility and mutual respect for fellow citizens. But of course, such education will only receive political support if our fellow Americans already want to produce humble and respectful citizens in the first place.

Damon Linker, The Endless Skirmish Between Liberalism and Religion

I have a nit-picky disagreement with Linker. I doubt that we can maintain liberalism at all without the epistemic humility he commends, not just that “liberalism is better off when these tendencies are tamed.” Indeed, liberalism almost seems definitionally a polity of epistemic humility, a recognition that the other guy just might be right, and therefore can be worth close attention.

Florida Man and the Pro-life cause

The ethos of the Trumpist-dominated G.O.P. is fundamentally incompatible with the ethos of a healthy pro-life movement. The reason is simple: Trumpism is centered around animosity. The pro-life movement has to be centered around love, including love for its most bitter political opponents.

David French, The Pro-Life Movement Has to Break With Trumpism

An honest, full-cost accounting

[W]e need to replace fanciful dreams of endless energy from renewables with full-cost accounting, which an increasing number of experts are taking seriously. There are destructive environmental and social consequences to constructing the infrastructure for that energy production.

Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen, No Easy Answers: Facing Ecological Crises Honestly

I often post controversial or negative things with no comment. Not this time. I believe that Jackson and Jensen are right.

If wishes were horses …

[M]y friends at National Review plead[] with Republican hopefuls to clear the field for a Trump-DeSantis showdown.

That’s the right strategy if you’re a conservative whose goal is to maximize the GOP’s chances of nominating a superior candidate, but it’s eye-roll material if you’re an ambitious Republican politician who looks in the mirror and sees a president staring back.

…

That’s a great irony of the next cycle, incidentally. As selfish as Trump is in routinely placing his own interests above the GOP’s, the Chris Christies and Nikki Haleys who’ll end up piling into the 2024 field and splintering the anti-Trump vote will be guilty of having done the same.

Nick Cattogio, Trump Is About to Wreck His Legacy

Respect for Marriage Act

Yet the gains here are not negligible, either, and what is lost is—well, the answer to that depends on how realistic it is to think that Obergefell will be overturned within the next 10 years.

Matthew Lee Anderson, regarding the Respect for Marriage Act, quoted at The Dispatch (italics added)

I don’t think there’s a significant chance that Obergefell gets overruled for a long time. (Eventually, it probably will be overruled because it’s contrary to the nature of marriage and came about through an ideological mania. We’ll come to our senses eventually.) So, we (those concerned to preserve religious liberty) are getting something for essentially nothing.

Sounds like a presumptively good deal. Tell me how I’m wrong.

David French endorses RFMA, and has caught a lot of crap for it. Even Kristen Waggoner has misrepresented RFMA, but she’s now head of ADF, which may explain her factual flexibility.

Have I mentioned lately that my pen always totally dries up if I think of writing a check to ADF, but always works just fine for checks to Becket Fund?

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

The Orthodox "phronema" [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

Thursday, 11/17/22

Embodied Perception

To emphasize the role that our bodies play in determining how we inhabit and therefore perceive the world, and to entertain the notion of cognitive extension, is to put oneself on a collision course with the central tenets of the official anthropology of the West. As we have already noted, embodied perception poses a direct challenge to the idea that representation is the fundamental mental process by which we apprehend the world.

Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head

I think Crawford calls this “the official anthropology of the West” because of our fetish that everyone must go to college to encounter more representations of the world, less actual world.

Long-term readers may justly suspect that, in my behavior, I am slave to this official anthropology. I tend to prefer reading to getting up and going for a walk or making something with my hands.

An opportunity, not a death knell

Let’s start with what the pro-life pessimists get right. Tuesday’s results confirm the anti-abortion movement’s fundamental disadvantages: While Americans are conflicted about abortion, a majority is more pro-choice than pro-life, the pro-choice side owns almost all the important cultural megaphones, and voters generally dislike sudden unsettlements of social issues.

You can strategize around these problems to some extent, contrasting incremental protections for the unborn with the left’s pro-choice absolutism. But when you’re the side seeking a change in settled arrangements, voters may still choose the absolutism they know over the uncertainty of where pro-life zeal might take them.

However, when abortion wasn’t directly on the ballot, many of those same voters showed no inclination to punish politicians who backed abortion restrictions. Any pro-choice swing to the Democrats was probably a matter of a couple of points in the overall vote for the House of Representatives; meanwhile, Republican governors who signed “heartbeat” legislation in Texas, Georgia and Ohio easily won re-election, and there was no dramatic backlash in red states that now restrict abortion.

In other words, Republicans in 2022 traded a larger margin in the House and maybe a Senate seat or two for a generational goal, the end of Roe v. Wade. And more than that, they demonstrated that many voters who might vote pro-choice on an up-down ballot will also accept, for the time being, pro-life legislation in their states.

For a movement that’s clearly a moral minority, that’s an opportunity, not a death knell ….

Ross Douthat

FTX

I have generally avoided getting into discussions about cryptocurrencies, because I am a perennial late-adopter who never understands how the big new thing is supposed to work or why anyone would even be interested in it. Aware of that bias, the fact that crypto always struck me as an elaborate Ponzi scheme wasn’t quite enough for me to be sure that it was an elaborate Ponzi scheme. Besides, even if I was sure, that wouldn’t be reason enough to confidently predict collapse; flim-flam operations sometimes get bought by companies with real businesses—or may even monetize their hype into real currency that they use to buy real companies—and thereby achieve something like an enduring presence in the business landscape that they might not have been able to achieve on their own merits.

…

So what interests me primarily about the collapse of FTX is this business could ever have been idealized. The premise behind FTX is that, even though nobody is totally sure what crypto is ultimately good for, people love to trade it, and to concoct ever more elaborate schemes for leveraging waves of investor enthusiasm.

Noah Millman

Priorities

My wife and I had a conversation one day with a pleasant couple who were much younger, and much more prosperous, than we were. Husband and wife were both high-dollar attorneys. She expressed strong frustration because the kids were in day care, but she wanted to stay with them herself. “Why don’t you?” we asked. They answered that they had expenses. “Like what?” we asked. Well, they had to keep up the payments on their big, expensive boat and their big, expensive house on the lake.

The difference between her facial expression and his were intriguing. She became nervous. He became alarmed. There was some history here, and he didn’t want his wife going down this road. She didn’t want to displease him. We changed the subject.

To one degree or another, almost all husbands and wives divide labor, and they are generally happier doing so. Obviously, not all women desire an exclusively domestic life, and there is nothing wrong with that. But there is a great deal wrong with the fact that we force women to act against their domestic inclinations for reasons that have nothing to do with their fulfillment. We call it being liberated, but it is really about serving the interests of men — and economic managers.

J Budziszewski I have seen another variation on this: high-earners who “can’t afford” to pay the tuition they agreed for private Christian education.

Letting the cat out of the bag

It is important that we start on time. We are training our children for the work force.

Remark from the school on a first-grader’s report card, via Jonathan Malesic, When Work and Meaning Part Ways

There’s another cat in the bag, too. We’re training our children in a second role of consumers. A hyperbolic account:

[S]trange to think that even in Our Ford’s day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It’s madness. Nowadays the Controllers won’t approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.

This is one of the reasons I think Huxley far surpasses Orwell as a prophet of dystopia (although I’m pretty sure I had no opinion either way before the year 1984.)

Things they told you that weren’t, now that you think about it, true.

On a note related to the preceding item, this:

The transformation of work into a spiritual enterprise, the site of our highest aspirations—to transcend ourselves, to encounter a higher reality, to serve others—is the work ethic’s cruelest unfulfilled promise.

Jonathan Malesic, When Work and Meaning Part Ways

Speaking of truth, the Wall Street Journal’s Pepper & Salt cartoon is one of few cartoons I view regularly. Wednesday’s gave me a rueful chuckle:

Guilty and unashamed

Caffeine is so widely used and normalised that we don’t think of it as a drug or notice how it alters our minds. Research into its effects is often hampered by the difficulty of finding people who aren’t already dependent on it.

Sophie McBain, The psychoactive plants that change our consciousness, reviewing Michael Pollan, This is Your Mind on Plants.

A Hoosier teetotaler on the Isle of Islay

I opened my first-ever bottle of Laphroaig, “the most richly flavoured of all Scotch whiskies,” Monday night, as nightcap and to usher in the Nativity Fast that began Tuesday (a sort of personal “fat Monday”).

Wow! Now I think I know what Cutty Sark was trying to do when it produced a liquor that tasted like Listerine. In fact, that’s what the smell of Laphroaig reminded me of. Mercifully, the taste is not Cutty Sark.

Laphroaig is to every other scotch I’ve had as Dogfish Head 120 minute IPA is to Bud Light. It’s more — much more — but not just more. It’s different, too. From the label, that difference may be peat and smoke, but I’m forever hearing scotch afficianados talk about “peatiness,” so maybe I’m way off base. My palate and liquor vocabulary reflect my teetotaler roots.

Truth be told, I’m not sure how well I really like it. I’m not exactly alone. It was a shock. But I’ll know by the end of the bottle in a few months.

My last two items are about someone I hate even to name. Skip them if you like.

Trumpism without Trump?

Trumpism can survive without Mr. Trump.

Peter Wehner, Never-Trumper from the early days.

Isolating this phrase, I could hope that we get “Trumpism without Trump,” but that totally depends what one means by that phrase.

I could, and probably would, endorse the GOP continuing toward making itself the party of working-class middle-Americans of all races. Highlighting their plight is one of the (few, but consequential) good things Trump did.

Wehner, though, means by “Trumpism without Trump” a GOP that is malicious, dishonest and destructive. No thanks.

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

The Orthodox "phronema" [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

It’s about time

Jonathan H. Adler, Trump Lawyers Sanctioned for Frivolous Lawsuit Against Political Opponents

There’s apparently no deterring Trump, but maybe his legal prostitutes (that’s what I consider lawyers who file frivolous lawsuits just because a client is willing to pay them to do so) can be deterred.

Thursday, 11/10/22

Election 2022

With a little help from their foes

[M]uch of the conversation about the modern Republican Party assumes … that Republican politicians are impossibly bound to the needs and desires of their coalition and unable to resist its demands. Many — too many — political observers speak as if Republican leaders and officials had no choice but to accept Donald Trump into the fold, no choice but to apologize for his every transgression, no choice but to humor his attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election and now no choice but to embrace election-denying candidates around the country.

But that’s nonsense. For all the pressures of the base, for all the fear of Trump and his gift for ridicule, for all the demands of the donor class, it is also true that at every turn, Republicans in Washington and elsewhere have made an active and affirmative choice to embrace the worst elements of their party — and jettison the norms and values that make democracy work.

Jamelle Bouie, No One Forced Republicans to Do Any of These Things

Nobody forced them, but a sleazy and dangerous Democrat tactic worked:

Democrats’ cynical decisions to boost more extreme Republican primary candidates seem to have paid off last night, as Price reports, with all six of the boosted primary winners losing to Democratic candidates. That’s likely to encourage future Democratic meddling—but operatives say it should also be a wake up call for Republicans supporting extreme candidates.

The Morning Dispatch

Some of these MAGA candidates were so thinly-funded — apart from the boost the Dems cynically gave them — that they were unlikely to win. And in the end (the general election), they didn’t.

For more, see Price St. Clair, Primary Meddling Pays Off for Democrats. Excerpt:

The Democrats meddling in Michigan’s 3rd District generated the most controversy. Incumbent Peter Meijer was one of only 10 Republican House members to vote to impeach Trump in the aftermath of January 6—but he lost his primary to Trump-aligned candidate John Gibbs after the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent $425,000 boosting Gibbs. Pre-election forecasts suggested that the race was likely to end up being the closest of the six “MAGA meddling” races. On Tuesday, Gibbs lost by 8 points to his Democratic opponent Hillary Scholten, who had run an explicitly moderate campaign.

Lashed to the Orange mast as the ship overturns

Mastriano and Lake, meanwhile, successfully navigated their respective primaries by lashing themselves to the former president in essentially every respect. That meant throwing themselves behind stolen-election conspiracy theories, but it also meant disdaining the notion that they had to care about uniting the party. It was their job to wave the MAGA flag, and everyone else’s job to get in line.

This produced bizarre spectacles, like when Lake went out of her way to attack, not just the late Sen. John McCain, but any of her own potential voters who might have liked him. “We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here, do we?” Lake said at a campaign event. “Get the hell out!”

In a wave election, that sort of behavior might pay off as a triumphal assertion of who is in charge around here. With a loss, it ends up as a remarkable display of political hubris.

Andrew Egger, The End of ‘Stop the Steal’?

Voldemorting 45

“What every Republican leader knows, but few dare say out loud, is that 2022 would mark the third consecutive year that Republicans not named or tainted by Trump had a good election,” Jonathan Martin writes for Politico. “For all the affection Trump enjoys from his base, there’s a reason why it’s Democrats who are the most eager to make him the face of the GOP.”

The Morning Dispatch

Dissent

While others suggest this election was a defeat for Trump, Trumpism, and the Big Steal bullshit, the New York Times narrative makes it about America’s love of abortion together with a defense of democracy against its enemies.

I know I’m nowhere near the mainstream in many ways, and I was sufficiently inattentive to the campaign that I unwittingly early-voted for an Indiana candidate who, I learned on Election Day, is under a dark cloud. But despite the success of a few abortion-permissive post-Dobbs referenda, I’m not buying the Times narrative. It’s not absurd, but I don’t find it persuasive, either.

Politics more broadly

The GOP’s Urban failures

Young, educated urbanites in Texas are a lot like their counterparts anywhere else in the country. Imagine yourself as a high-achieving young Texan who wants to attend an elite university, graduate, move to Austin, and work at Apple. What does the Republican Party stand for that makes you feel that you belong there? Parker, the Fort Worth mayor, looks like precisely the kind of voter Republicans have an increasingly hard time reaching: a millennial woman with an elite university education, a graduate degree, and an address in a major city in what will soon be the nation’s third-largest metropolitan area.

…

There is good evidence that conservatives can get good things done in big cities. But, for the most part, big-city voters are not interested in Republicans.

“We’re the old man saying, ‘Get off my lawn!’” says Kevin Robnett of Fort Worth, a businessman, veteran, and longtime Republican activist. “We as a party have become anti-intellectual, and we have become anti-institution,” he continues. This has made it more difficult to connect with college-educated professionals in the cities and suburbs. “Our message is: ‘Something has been broken and you have been robbed, and things were better in the past.’ That’s our mantra now, and it is a losing vision for the entire millennial generation. They want to suck the marrow out of life. That’s why you don’t see them in offices, and they’re hard to employ. But one of the things about that generation that I really like—that we are not appealing to—is the sense that we can fix our problems, that our best days are ahead. I have an optimistic view of that generation, but our party does not.”

Worse than merely failing to sympathize with the values and aspirations of these voters, Republicans often sneer at them, denouncing the cities and the mode of life lived there as corrupt, dismissing the colleges and universities that prepare students for professional life as dens of inequity, and, increasingly, treating those at the commanding heights of business as cultural traitors. “You don’t tell a woman she’s ugly and should have made better choices and then try to get her to go out with you,” Robnett says.

Kevin D. Williamson

It can’t happen here

I didn’t read past this, but I’m inclined to agree with the top-level summary:

A MAGA America Would Be Ugly
Forget Orban’s Hungary. We’d be worse. By Paul Krugman

I’m still on the fence about whether Viktor Orban’s “illiberal democracy” is per se anathema (currently reading Karl Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies), but I don’t think that today’s dramatis personnae on the American Right could pull it off here — with the possible exception of Ron DeSantis, who is far smarter and more thoughtful than his street-brawler looks suggest.

Culture

Good science not (necessarily) welcome here

Students are often happy to hear that there are genes for sexual orientation, but if you teach that most human personality traits, and even school achievement, have a heritable component, they start to squirm …

[I]t has become taboo in the classroom to note any disparities between groups that are not explained as the result of systemic bias.

…

Some grants focus almost exclusively on identity, as federal agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, now offer a surplus of grants with the purpose of “broadening the participation of members of groups that are . . . currently underrepresented”—instead of funding research to answer scientific questions.

But the field that is most directly affected is research related to humans, especially those dealing with evolution of populations.

As an example: The NIH now puts barriers to access to the important database of “Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP).” The database is an amazing tool that combines genomes (the unique genetic makeup of each individual) and phenotypes (the observable characteristics of each individual) of millions of people. These phenotypes include education, occupation, health and income and, because the dataset connects genetics with phenotype at an individual level, it is essential for scientists who want to understand genes and genetic pathways that are behind those phenotypes.

The NIH now denies scientists access to this data and other related datasets. Researchers report getting permits denied on the grounds that studying their genetic basis is “stigmatizing.” According to one researcher, this happens even if the research has nothing to do with race or sex, but focuses on genetics and education.

Luana Maroja, An Existential Threat to Doing Good Science

Not with a bang but a whimper

Jeffrey Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre, her lawyer David Boies and the disgraced financier’s former attorney Alan Dershowitz said Tuesday that they have dropped their defamation lawsuits against one another, ending a yearslong feud involving two of the nation’s best-known attorneys.

…

In announcing the resolution of the lawsuits, Ms. Giuffre said in a statement that she now recognizes that she might have made a mistake in identifying Mr. Dershowitz as one of her alleged abusers.

…

Mr. Dershowitz said in a statement Tuesday that he never had sex with Ms. Giuffre.

“I have nevertheless come to believe that at the time she accused me she believed what she said,” Mr. Dershowitz said. He added that he now believed that he was mistaken in accusing Mr. Boies of engaging in misconduct and extortion.

Defamation Lawsuits Dropped in Jeffrey Epstein Saga

Well, I’m glad that’s all — well, “cleared up” seems a bit strong.

Pro tip from someone who practiced law for 37 years and heard many jury verdicts announced: very seldom does either side feel fully vindicated and satisfied after the jury comes back.

Too typical

This is a humiliating moment. Or at least it should have been. The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and asserted that “millions” of kids have been on hormone blockers. That’s laughably absurd. There has been a spike in students identifying as genderqueer or non-binary, but millions of kids on puberty blockers?

Rogan’s team fact-checked Walsh in real time, and found that the true number of children placed on puberty blockers was less than 1,000 kids per year, out of the more than 70 million children in the United States.

[Embedded Tweet omitted]

I want to be crystal clear on where I stand. I don’t believe minor children should receive “gender-affirming” surgery or be placed on puberty blockers. States have the constitutional authority to block such treatments, and they should.

At the same time, one of the reasons why our politics has become so hysterical is constant exaggeration. Critical race theory is everywhere! Drag queens are overrunning our schools! Millions of kids are on puberty blockers!

Take something that’s bad (there are, in fact, harmful anti-racist training modules, drag shows for children are absurd, and no child should be given life-altering “gender-affirming” medical treatment) and then hype the threat. Make it pervasive. Frighten people. It’s a formula for ratings and clicks, but it’s also a formula for reactionary politics and constitutional violations. It’s a formula that heightens American polarization and contributes to pervasive anger and despair.

Walsh has cast himself as an expert on these matters. He created a documentary attacking radical gender ideology. He should know better.

David French

I am sick to death of implausible, if not outright innumerate, hyperbole from people I basically agree with.

(For what it’s worth, contra French, I’m uneasy with outright bans on “gender-affirming care” of adolescents because, even if “trans” is a social contagion, and there has been profiteering and ideological blinders at gender clinics, I’m not prepared to say that no adolescent needs such a band-aid, if only to cover the deep wound of genuine, persistent and extreme gender dysphoria.)

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

The Orthodox "phronema" [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

Tuesday, 10/11/22

Come out from among them and be ye separate

Between two worlds

The people here were heart-broken over the shelling going on in the Donbass. I saw a video posted by an American in Ukraine showing a march of parents in Donetsk carrying photos of their children who had been killed as a result of the shelling. I had tears in my eyes watching. We all knew it was the U.S. that blocked efforts to implement the Minsk Accords set forth by France and Germany which called for the cessation of the shelling. The people in the Donbass are essentially Russians living in Ukraine. I’ve stated several times that Ukraine refused them independence after the coup removing the democratically elected president of Ukraine. The residents were not allowed to speak Russian, their native language, or, in some cases, even to worship in the Russian Orthodox church. Yet it is still a practical requirement that journalists refer to Russian troops going into Ukraine as an “unprovoked invasion.”

Hal Freeman, an Orthodox American expatriate living in Russia. He is probably too credulous about Russian news of the war, as are most Americans about the American-flavored version, but I consider his blog that of an honest Christian living between two worlds. He’s especially valuable for things like reminding Americans that the U.S., through proxies, subverted and overthrew a democratically-elected Ukrainian government we considered too pro-Russia — things our press will rarely remember.

His final paragraph, as he updates his personal status (his younger Russian wife died leaving him an aging widower with young children) is worth chewing on:

I have had some family members in America encourage me to come back there. But I still think it would be too disruptive to the children. And, furthermore, the U.S. does not look like an attractive place to live anymore. It continues on a trajectory that I do not want to move my children back to. I wish it were not so. I would love to see my family there and have not given up the dream that my toes will be in the South Carolina sand when we hopefully can visit next summer.

(emphasis added)

Why Conservatism failed

The modern conservative project failed because it didn’t take into account the revolutionary principle of technology, and its intrinsic connection to the telos of sheer profit. Decrying left-wing revolutionary politics and postmodern anarchy, conservatives missed that the real moral relativism was to believe that one could change the material form of society without directly affecting its substance or its ends.

In between great-books seminars, conservatives have decried any interference in what technologies the all-knowing market chooses to build, while taking no stance on what technologies we ought to build and accepting with equanimity massive research investment from the private economy and military-industrial complex, at most wringing their hands about the speed and direction of social change (while accepting its inevitability). Not for nothing did the Canadian philosopher George Grant, in an essay on “the impossibility of conservatism as a theoretical stance in the technological society,” describe them as “those who accept the orientation to the future in the modern but who want to stop the movement of modernity at points which touch their special interests.”

Geoff Shullenberger, Why Conservatism Failed.

Shullenberger adds more weight to the argument that to live conservatively is deeply counter-cultural and might even require substantial withdrawal from society — maybe as Hal Freeman has. But even Hal has American Social Security.

We’re all complicit even when we’re not guilty.

Anaxios!

Of the Georgia Senate race:

We don’t know if Reverend Warnock himself has ever personally facilitated an abortion, but we do know he will do everything in his power to keep facilitating them for countless women he will never know. And this is supposed to give him the moral high ground? An old Norm Macdonald line comes to mind, from the scene in Comedians With Cars Getting Coffee where he’s discussing Bill Cosby with Jerry Seinfeld. “The worst part is the hypocrisy,” Seinfeld says earnestly. “Huh,” Norm goes, poker-faced. “I kinda thought it was the rape.”

So, in the end, neither candidate can hide behind a veneer of moral respectability here. This is a choice between two evils. And yet, many voters who share my convictions remain convinced that they must choose …

… My concern is those earnest voters who have still constructed such a consequentialist frame around their vote that there truly seems to be nothing that would cause them to withhold it from a Republican, provided the Democrat was always worse.

I hate to bring him up, but Trump obviously hovers behind all this. Cards on the table, I didn’t vote for him in 2016 or 2020. Many people didn’t vote for him in 2016 but decided to do so in 2020. Now, in the wake of Dobbs, they feel vindicated …

I have seen this presented as a “conundrum” for the conservative voter, something that has to be reckoned and wrestled with. This might have an effect on some people, but I’ve always been singularly immune to this sort of challenge once my mind is firmly made up. I cheered the fall of Roe as loudly as any Trump voter. Yet, in my own mind, I remain quite happy not to have cast a vote for Trump in either year. Because a vote, to me, is more than a utilitarian ticking of a box. It’s more than getting the right warm body in the right seat so that he can vote the right way. To me, a vote is a statement: This candidate is worthy.

… When the game is this cynical, we are under no obligation to keep playing. What happens next, whatever happens, is not on us. It is on the people who forgot what it means to be worthy.

Bethel McGrew, Notes from a Christian Humanist (emphasis added)

The mystic among us

Community life loves to flog mystic.

Martin Shaw, commenting on the Inuit story The Moon Palace.

This is my favorite Martin Shaw podcast yet.

Working with What We’ve Got

In stark contrast to the impulse to withdraw for Christian or conservative integrity is the impulse to seize control. There are Christian people who aren’t stupid or notably power-hungry who advocate that option.

Return of the Strong Gods

The way we do education in America results in the “overproduction of elites,” [Patrick] Deneen declared. “There need to be fewer people like me, with jobs like mine.” When I laughed at this, he smiled and said: “I mean, gosh! Just try getting someone to do brick work on your house.”

…

“So instead of stripping society down to atomized individuals in a ‘state of nature’ and then building up Lockean rights,” I asked Deneen clumsily, “you’re starting with the family, and then society grows out of that?”

“That’s exactly right,” Deneen told me. “It’s conceptually and anthropologically different from liberal assumptions. If you begin by building from that point and you think about the ways that those institutions are under threat from a variety of sources in modern society… to the extent that you can strengthen those institutions, you do the things that someone like David French wants, which is to track a lot of the attention away from the role of central government. One of the reasons liberalism has failed in the thing it claims to do—which is limiting central government—is precisely because it is so fundamentally individualistic that radically individuated selves end up needing and turning to central governments for support and assistance.”

…

[C]itizens, [R.R.] Reno argues, will not tolerate a society of “pure negation” for long. The strong gods always return. Public life requires a shared mythos and a higher vision of the common good—what Richard Weaver called a “metaphysical dream.” Human beings long to coalesce around shared loves and loyalties.

Jordan Alexander Hill, Return of the Strong Gods: Understanding the New Right. I apparently read this before it was paywalled.

We must pass a law — many laws!

J Budziszewski replies to an anguished postliberal, who’s ready to take some real action against the perceived existential threat of secularism and bad religion. This strikes me, with my long interest in religious freedom law, as a key part of the reply:

It is one thing to say that moralistic monotheism should enjoy some special recognition or privilege over and above the protections that all systems of belief receive through the Free Speech and Assembly Clauses. It is quite another to say that systems of belief outside of it should be denied freedom of speech and assembly, or that we should round up their adherents and put them in jail.

I would add that I always thought “we must pass a law!” was an anti-conservative impulse.

Five proposed Constitutional Amendments

National Constitution Center Project Offers Constitutional Amendment Proposals with Broad Cross-Ideological Support

Miscellany

NYC

Anarchy is in the water here, like fluoride, and toilet alligators.

Jason Gay, ‘Anarchy’ Is Not a New York City Crisis. It’s a Lifestyle.

Pandemic apocalypse

The pandemic has illustrated all too vividly the meaning of terms like systemic racism and structural inequality in a way anyone can grasp: “Oh, you mean black people are at greater risk from Covid-19 because they’re more likely to be working in supermarkets or other essential jobs, and to use public transportation, and to live in housing that doesn’t allow for social distancing? And their mortality rate is higher because they’re more likely to have pre-existing health conditions?”

Black Lives Matter and the Church: An Interview with Eugene F. Rivers III and Jacqueline Rivers

Wordplay

It isn’t only Hart’s view of the world that has been consistent. It’s also his style. Clause follows clause like the folds in a voluminous garment, every noun set off by beguiling and unusual modifiers (plus some of his old favorites, like “beguiling”). In one way, at least, he is the least American of writers, in that adjectives and adverbs do not give him that twinge of guilt that so many of us have picked up from Hemingway and Twain, the suspicion that we are using them to distract the reader from our failure to describe some particular action or detail—some verb or noun—precisely enough.

Written of David Bentley Hart by Phil Christman, via Front Porch Republic.

I feel that twinge of guilt, but so far as I know, I picked it up by precept from Strunk & White, not by example from Twain and Hemingway.

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

The Orthodox "phronema" [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced to shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

Elevation of the Holy Cross (a/k/a 9/14/22)

Culture

Building on vice

As Augustine of Hippo noticed, what the Romans called virtue was really a vicious craving for glory, for the approval of others who think well of one. This vice helped prop up the Roman republic, because the political class could win glory by performing deeds of conspicuous benefit to the commonwealth. In this way, the vice of glory protected against other vices that were even worse. The problem was twofold. First, this strategy worked only because some little bit of real virtue remained; otherwise, one might pursue glory by foul means rather than fair. Second, indulging the itch for glory gradually undermined that little bit of real virtue, so that one did use foul means, for example buying votes. At that point the entire motivational structure begins to collapse, as the political class comes to lust not after simple glory, but after wealth and power. The curtain fell on the republic.

… Our society has a version of the Roman strategy too, but in our case the vice that protects against still worse vices is the lust for wealth itself. As Adam Smith noticed, the sheer desire for acquisition, as though by an invisible hand, can motivate people to benefit others, not because they love them but because that is how they earn a profit. Just as in the Roman case, this strategy works only if there a little bit of virtue remains; otherwise, one might pursue wealth by fraud and by governmental favors rather instead of by making a better and cheaper product. Just as in the Roman case, indulging the itch for wealth eventually undermines that little bit of virtue; today our corporations compete by gaming the system of regulations and subsidies. And just as in the Roman case, at this point the whole motivational structure begins to collapse, and the elite classes begin to scratch far baser itches than simple desire for honest profit.

J Budziszewski, Why Do We Always Hit a Wall?

This has haunted me since I read it, in part because it haunted me maybe 55 years before I read it.

No, I wasn’t conscious that Roman “virtue” was built on vice, but I did know that our system was built on the desire for wealth, and that a system like that seemed unlikely to come to a good end.

The longer I live, the closer I come to internalizing a key truth: there are no “good ends.” That’s what it means to live in a “fallen world.” But another part of what a “fallen world” means is that we are drawn, (almost?) irresistibly, to shuffle the deck chairs as it all goes down.

See also Jack Leahy, Cloud-Hidden.

The demand to be political first

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before! A piece of pop culture has been announced, one with a diverse cast of characters and themes of female empowerment. Some conservative idiots lose their minds because they’re conservative idiots. Liberals respond by taking to the ramparts to defend the honor of the piece of pop culture against MAGA or whatever. Meanwhile, the actual artistic value of the pop culture in question is completely lost. Aesthetic concerns are buried beneath the demand to be political first. If you aren’t actively singing the praises of worthless shlock that’s vaguely associated with progressive politics, you’re one of them. My god, that She-Hulk show is f***ing dreadful, and its feminist politics are warmed-over Sheryl Sandberg tripe, but people are like “actually the CGI is supposed to look like dogshit, it’s artistic” because they think defending Disney’s latest blast of entertainment Soylent Green is the same as storming the Bastille. Conservatives freak about diversity, liberals defend art without any reference to artist, rinse and repeat. I could be talking about 2016’s Ghostbusters, or I could be talking about the upcoming Little Mermaid remake. Nothing ever changes, and it is all so, so tiresome.

Freddie deBoer, Why Are Identitarians Such Cheap Dates? (bowdlerization gently added). That opening paragraph was terrific, and the title of the posting makes it even better.

The special costs of being poor

Early in Nickel and Dimed, the great Barbara Ehrenreich offered up a blunt observation. “There are no secret economies that nourish the poor; on the contrary, there are a host of special costs,” she wrote. “If you can’t put up the two months’ rent you need to secure an apartment, you end up paying through the nose for a room by the week,” she explained. “If you have only a room, with a hot plate at best, you can’t save by cooking up huge lentil stews that can be frozen for the week ahead. You eat fast food or the hot dogs and Styrofoam cups of soup that can be microwaved in a convenience store.” For the poor this is no revelation, merely a description of daily life. For many others, though, it was something else, a glimpse into a world that could feel distant. Yet it was not so far away, as she understood: The poor were all around. They worked, they loved, they tried to make do. The poor carried America on their backs and debunked its self-mythologies. So, too, did Ehrenreich, who showed no patience for pretense. She always looked for the truth of a thing, and for decades, she shared her search with all of us.

Sarah Jones, Barbara Ehrenreich Knew There Was a Fight

The platonic ideal of an NYT opinion piece

Maya Jasanoff’s idea that “The new king now has an opportunity to make a real historical impact by scaling back royal pomp and updating Britain’s monarchy to be more like those of Scandinavia” — because Colonialism! — is (a) the platonic ideal of an NYT opinion piece and (b) a perfect illustration of Clement Atlee’s comment that “the intelligentsia … can be trusted to take the wrong view on any subject.” The pomp of the British monarchy is the point; the ceremony is the substance — for good reasons and bad. When the ceremony is discarded the monarchy will be too. And rightly so.

Alan Jacobs

Sheer drudgery, with a dose of despair

Teaching has its own rewards, to be sure. But you’re a lot more likely to wax eloquent about the privilege of shaping the minds, hearts, and souls of our youth when you aren’t grading their papers.

Peter C. Meilaender, I Don’t Care If My Students Get Jobs

Not a promising review

[T]o their credit, the characters managed to exchange an endless series of ponderous aphorisms without giggling. So it was that we learned how ‘the wine is sweetest for those in whose bitter trials it has fermented’; how ‘the same wind that seeks to blow out a fire may also cause it to spread’; and, more pithily, how ‘there can be no trust between hammer and rock’.

Will you be able to get through the ponderous aphorisms without giggling? The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power reviewed | The Spectator

Political (after a fashion)

The difference between Russian and Ukrainian soldiers

The fundamental difference between Ukrainian soldiers, who are fighting for their country’s existence, and Russian soldiers, who are fighting for their salary, has finally begun to matter.

Anne Applebaum

Dance with the one what brung ya

In the post-Roe era, Ramesh Ponnuru argues, the pro-life movement should remember the approach that got them to to where they are today: incrementalism. “Passionate pro-lifers, in their impatience at what they recognize to be a grave injustice, are forgetting the need for patient persuasion of the public,” he writes for Bloomberg. “Some pro-lifers have made a point of claiming that abortion is never medically necessary. That’s because they don’t consider ending an ectopic pregnancy, for example, as a ‘direct abortion’—an intentional taking of human life. That’s needlessly confusing, and pro-lifers should simply say they’re for an exception in such cases. They should also broaden their agenda to include measures to aid parents of small children—such as the proposals of various Republican senators to expand the child tax credit and to finance paid leave. Promoting a culture of life includes fostering the economic conditions that help it thrive.”

The Morning Dispatch

Wordplay

Taking leave of senses

[I]f you have paid much attention to the conservative movement and conservative media, you’ve seen a few formerly sober-minded men take off the bow tie, put on the red cap, and bark at the moon.

Kevin F. Williamson, Steve Bannon Charges: Gravy Train Derailed

Truth Social

Truth Social: The media penal colony to which Twitter and Facebook sentenced Donald Trump.

Frank Bruni

Words failed them

The families and former FBI agent William Aldenberg say they have been confronted and harassed in person by [Alex] Jones’ followers because of the hoax conspiracy.

Associated Press story on a second civil trial against Jones arising from his claim that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax. (Emphasis added)

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

The Orthodox “phronema” [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced into shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

Thursday, 8/11/22

Everything here today is political in a fairly direct sense. Politics isn’t all I think about, but I tend to save up the more important things (i.e., what we conventionally call “religion”) for Sunday posts.

Politics Generally

Orbán and Soros

Let’s be honest: the most evil things in modern history were carried out by people who hated Christianity. Don’t be afraid to call your enemies by their name. You can play it safe, but they will never show mercy. Consider for example George Soros, as you call him here. In Hungary, we call him: Gyuri bácsi, which means Uncle Georgie. The wealthiest and one of the most talented Hungarians on Earth! Just a hint: Be careful with talented Hungarians! I know George Soros very well. He is my opponent. He believes in none of the things that we do. And he has an army at his service: money, NGOs, universities, research institutions and half the bureaucracy in Brussels. He uses this army to force his will on his opponents, like us Hungarians. He thinks that values dear to all of us led to the horrors of the twentieth century. But the case is exactly the opposite. Our values save us from repeating history’s mistakes. The horrors of Nazism and Communism happened because some Western States in continental Europe abandoned their Christian values. And today’s progressives are planning to do the same. They want to give up on western values, and create a New World, a Post Western World. Who is going to stop them if we don’t?

Viktor Orbán

I’m a fence-straddler on Viktor Orbán. I’d like to think that illiberal democracy (which is how Orbán described Hungary a few years ago) could exist and persist as democratic. Among all his fanboys in the U.S., though, I see none who I’d trust with my vote, if only because they come across as empty suits whereas Orbán seems to have some depth. For the U.S., liberal democracy seems like the only alternative, and I can only hope that it’s still viable.

I made it a point to dig into George Soros a few years back, and I reject the idea that he is consciously malign. He is ~~simply~~ fundamentally an adherent of a respectable “open society” philosophy that rose to prominence as a response to the horrors of WW II; heck, he even named his foundation after that philosophy. That doesn’t mean, though, that I agree with him or with such expenditures as those for electing permissive, progressive prosecutors.

After I wrote the preceding, I ran across two articles on Soros that I haven’t read, and may never read, that appear pretty thorough. (I should note, should you think the first title antisemitic, that the Tablet is a Jewish publication):

(Of course, there’s always Psalm 146:3, too).

The Dead Consensus vs Ahmarism in Three Sentences

The Dead Consensus has no theory of power.

The Ahmarists have no theory of martyrdom.

A Christian political philosophy has to have both if it is going to be actually Christian.

Jake Meador, The Dead Consensus vs Ahmarism in Three Sentences

Fond hopes

Could it come about that with Dobbs’ reversal of Roe v. Wade, the parties could become normal again, the “abortion distortion factor” in politics having been laid to rest?

I would like that very much, because while I’ve had an extremely strong presumption against voting for Democrats since they became the party homogenously in favor of every imaginable or unimaginable abortion, I haven’t found the Republicans very palatable, either.

IRS

The raid of MAL is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents, while people like Hunter Biden get treated with kid gloves. Now the Regime is getting another 87k IRS agents to wield against its adversaries? Banana Republic.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

This is one of the more perverse bits of paranoid pandering by Governor DeSantis. The IRS has been abused politically and bizarrely (why did they think that 69% of families who adopted children one year needed auditing?), but their daily functioning at their basic job has been wretched for years and years.

I dealt with their incompetence through much of my legal practice. I literally delayed my retirement by months waiting for IRS tax clearances for a deceased couple, as the agency repeatedly lost the income tax returns we filed. (When we finally closed the estate, 37 years to the day after my last law school examination, I strolled down the hall, signed an affidavit relinquishing my law license, and left the office for good.)

I deal with it still. A nonprofit I’m currently involved with keeps getting letters falsely claiming that it failed to file its informational returns nearly a half-decade ago.

The IRS needs enough funding to do its job properly, which I hope it prioritizes that over political shenanigans.

An effective heuristic

I stumbled onto Ann Coulter’s Substack a week or so ago, and I’ve now had my decadesworth of her.

Coulter, whip-smart and sexy (according to other guys’ tastes), snapped on 9/11, when her friend Barbara Olsen fell victim to the terrorist attack. There are certainly worse causes for turning from whip-smart and sexy into unhinged and repellent, but that doesn’t mean I need to support her efforts. I’ll not only not be upgrading to a paid subscription, but dropping my free one.

A year ago I wrote: “Wondering how to decide what to read? Here’s a simple but effective heuristic to cut down the choices significantly. Ask yourself one question: Does this writer make bank when we hate one another? And if the answer is yes, don’t read that writer.” The same rule applies to TV, radio, podcasts. If their clicks and ratings and ad revenues go up when we hate one another, flee them like the plague they are.

Alan Jacobs

(I dropped a half-dozen or so other free Substacks while I was there, but none besides Coulter failed the Jacobs heuristic.)

All things Trumpy

Witch Hunt?

It is true that the FBI departed from standard protocols when it investigated Hillary Clinton. The famous James Comey press conference detailing both Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information and the FBI’s decision not to recommend charges and the Comey letter announcing the re-opening of the investigation weeks before the election were well outside the norm …

The DOJ should stick to protocol. But it’s worth noting that protocol includes handing the Trump team a copy of the search warrant itself. It doesn’t contain as much information as the warrant application, but it does identify the key criminal statutes at issue and the items sought to be searched or seized. Trump can choose to release that document at any time.

David French.

Until Trump stops the generalized grousing and releases the search warrant, I’m assuming that the DOJ is not out of bounds.

But that doesn’t mean we can be smug when the raid has “civil war” trending on Twitter:

David Ashwell (@RedFury21) replying to @DamonLinker on Twitter on August 9 about the Mar a Lago raid:

We have an old saying in the law: fiat justitia ruat caelum. Let justice be done, though the heavens fall. The question before us is whether, indeed, we are the nation of laws and not men that our founders envisioned. Trump is not above the law.

Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) fires back:

Enjoy living through the experience of the heavens falling on your noble head.

The Rule of Law is for Chumps

Unusually strong Damon Linker Substack Wednesday, including the Twitter exchange quoted elsewhere in this posting:

Confidence or trust in American institutions is at historic lows. Trump’s political rise was a manifestation of that lack of trust—and, as a master demagogue, his very presence on the political scene continually drives those numbers lower.

He accomplishes this by refusing to play along with the atmospherics of high-minded politics. No one is given the benefit of the doubt unless they personally ingratiate themselves to him. No Democrat (like Attorney General Merrick Garland) could possibly be trying to do the right thing. There’s always a baser motive to point to, always an interpretation of events that suggests an effort to cloak a power-grab in exalted language. Law (and its enforcement) is indistinguishable from politics. The effort to pretend otherwise is just another (more deceptive) act of self-aggrandizement.

All of which means that for the better part of a decade now, Trump has been teaching his party that “the rule of law” is for saps, suckers, and chumps—and its voters have learned their lessons well.

America is Already Failing the Trump Test

Literally Nazis

[W]e have always been able to count on the armed forces of the United States as the apolitical and steady defenders of the American nation.

Trump wanted to change that and turn the military into his own praetorian guard. In an except from a forthcoming book, the journalists Susan Glasser and Peter Baker reveal an exchange between Trump and his then-chief of staff, John Kelly:

“You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”

“Which generals?” Kelly asked.

“The German generals in World War II,” Trump responded.

“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly said.

Trump refused to believe Kelly: “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” he replied. “In his version of history,” Glasser and Baker write, “the generals of the Third Reich had been completely subservient to Hitler; this was the model he wanted for his military.”

Let us leave aside the problem that Donald Trump might be the most intellectually limited and willfully ignorant man ever to sit in the Oval Office. Still, we must ask: Nazis?

Tom Nichols, The President Who Wanted Nazi Generals

Fight for what another day?

“I’m not sure that Dick (Cheney) ever taught Liz about the aphorism ‘live to fight another day.” This insightful comment perfectly encapsulates the best-case argument against Cheney.

It’s also dead wrong.

The recommendation “live to fight another day,” raises the question: Fight … for what? She could serve in Congress for decades longer and never do as much to preserve our constitutional order as she has serving as the key Republican on the January 6 committee.

Cliff Smith, Cheney’s Choice. The perfect subtitle of this story is “She has opted to do her job, rather than just have her job. That matters.”

A lot of what’s wrong in Washington arises from elevating retention of office over upholding the laws and constitution.

“The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness ….” (G.K. Chesterton)