Category: Political Matters

Saturday Truth in Advertising

Not really politics

Res ipsa loquitur

It is satisfying to manifest oneself concretely in the world, through manual competence; it has been known to make a person quiet and easy. It seems to relieve him of the need to offer chattering interpretations of himself, to vindicate his worth. He can remain quiet and simply point: The building stands, the lights are on, the car now runs.

Matthew Crawford, What School Didn’t Teach Us: Your Place in the World

I tend to forget how strange was the childhood of the brilliant and quirky Matthew Crawford. Read the item to see what I mean.

Bon mots

  • In The Washington Post, Amanda Katz noted that Kennedy had terminated his presidential campaign and endorsed Trump, “ending a dilemma for voters torn between their love of deportation camps and their love of measles.”
  • In The New Yorker, Helen Rosner sampled the classic fare at a nearly 90-year-old French restaurant in Manhattan that received a recent sprucing-up: “You can hardly go wrong, though it would be the height of tragedy if not one person at the table ordered the frogs’ legs persillade, a cancan line of amphibian gams in an audibly sizzling bath of butter and garlic that a server oomphs up, upon presentation, with a squeeze of lemon.”

Via Frank Bruni

  • “I don’t know if Democrats fully realize how damaging the image of the possible first woman president being incapable of giving an interview alone without the presence of a man to help her is,” – Meghan McCain.
  • “It’s disappointing to say — but perhaps he personally lacks principle on this issue,” – Lila Rose, anti-abortion activist, on Trump’s latest pivot. (D’ya think?)

Via Andrew Sullivan

Politics generally

A Thrill for Nerds

Political highlight of 2024: The Democrats selecting a successor to feeble President Joe Biden without panic about needing to re-do the primary elections.

I wasn’t politically sophisticated when the parties decided to turn over the selection of their Presidential candidates to whoever deigned to show up at a primary election (run at government expense, with government’s thumb on the scales to maintain the present two parties), but I was alive and aware. Because I was a snot-nosed kid, I probably thought it was a great idea.

It wasn’t. It took the selection from pros who wanted to win the election and turned it over to “the base”, which eventually would want maximalist trolling of the other duopoly party. Therein is a major source of our notorious “polarization,” at least among the noisier members of the parties.

If I haven’t said it before, I’m in favor of “smoke-filled rooms” or whatever other technique the parties choose to select candidates at their own expense. I heard one where they suggested non-binding primaries — a way to create a presumptive nominee, but giving the party a opportunity to bail out if the people’s choice is an idiot or semi-comatose.

(This rant inspired by Thursday’s Advisory Opinions podcast with the fabulous Yuval Levin.)

One picture, many words

…

Two things about the image stood out. One is the preposterous idea that “America” is accurately represented by five populist edgelords, all of whom live in close proximity at the ends of the proverbial horseshoe. But that’s in keeping with modern Republican mythology about Trump’s movement reflecting a supposed silent majority: If the only people who count as “real Americans” are those on Team MAGA, then sure, a coalition that runs the gamut from left-leaning Putin apologists to right-leaning Putin apologists is a fair portrait of America.

The other thing that struck me was that Republicans evidently believe this image benefits them politically. Somehow we’ve arrived at a place as a country where Donald Trump is no longer weird enough in his own right to lock down “the weird vote” this fall and needs cover on his weirdo flank from the likes of Kennedy and Gabbard. Worse, he and his party seem to think there are more votes to be had by appealing to that weirdo bloc than there are to be lost among normie voters by doing so.

Nick Cattogio

The Dumb Crank Party

The partisan shifts of both Trump and RFK Jr. are part of a long term cycle in which educated professionals have gravitated toward the Democratic Party coalition and a generic suspicion of institutions and the people who run them has come to be associated with conservative politics. … The problem is that this hasn’t actually changed the fact that lots of people are dumb cranks; it’s simply created a Dumb Crank Party. And on balance, I think that has eroded the epistemic quality of both coalitions.

Matt Yglesias via The Morning Dispatch

Snare

My worry is that liberals will get so caught up in countering his every move, essentially playing his game, that they will fail to seize—or even recognize—the opportunity he has given them. Now that he has destroyed conventional Republicanism and what was left of principled conservatism, the playing field is empty. For the first time in living memory, we liberals have no ideological adversary worthy of the name. So it is crucial that we look beyond Trump.

Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal

CPAC

CPAC was still a depressing place to be, a revival meeting for political fanatics. Only, instead of selling hope, the speakers were preaching anger and resentment.

Jon Ward, Testimony

Trump

Railing against the unpersuadables

A wise man once said that the business of punditry is persuasion. Assuming that’s true, we won’t be conducting any business today.

That’s because the subject of Donald Trump’s toothy thumbs-up photo op amid the fallen at Arlington National Cemetery is persuasion-proof. There are already a thousand reasons to despise him; either you came around to doing so long ago or you’ve managed to rationalize away each of them, in which case this latest one won’t pose any problem.

Years ago, it was possible to believe there might be something he could do to alienate his apologists. Callousness toward the military was an obvious one: The right prides itself on being patriotic, and patriots rightly celebrate service members for the sacrifices they’ve made to defend America. If Trump were to stoop to his usual boorishness in attacking an opponent’s military record, it was thought, he might at last discover a line he’s not allowed to cross.

How naive we were. The rest of this column could be spent revisiting his various affronts to military honor over the years: goofing on John McCain for being captured in Vietnam; “feuding” with a Muslim Gold Star family in 2016; confiding in aides that he didn’t want wounded veterans in a parade because it “doesn’t look good for me;” declining to visit an American military cemetery outside Paris in 2018 for fear, allegedly, that his hair would get wet in the rain; saying on the same trip, according to four separate sources cited by The Atlantic, that the cemetery was “filled with losers” and that the Marines at Belleau Wood were “suckers” for having sacrificed their lives.

John Kelly, a four-star Marine general who went on to become Trump’s chief of staff, confirmed all of it on the record to CNN last October. According to The Atlantic, when Trump accompanied Kelly in 2017 on a visit to the grave of the general’s son Robert, who was himself killed in Afghanistan years earlier, he turned to Kelly and said of the fallen, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

In a test of credibility between a man with a dubious record of draft deferments on the one hand and a highly decorated officer who lost his son in combat on the other, it’s no contest: The right chooses to believe that Kelly, not Trump, is the liar. That’s what being “persuasion-proof” means …

All of this feels familiar, no?

Not the setting, that is, but Trump’s M.O. It’s the classified documents fiasco all over again. He wanted something he couldn’t have; that something was minor enough that he calculated the relevant authorities wouldn’t go to war with him to block him from getting it; so he simply ignored the rules and dared them to do something about it.

He succeeded at Arlington and might yet succeed in the other matter. That’s what happens when a gangster by temperament leads a gang that includes millions of people: In nearly every dispute, the personal cost of litigating that dispute will be greater for his opponents than it will be for him. Not coincidentally, according to military sources who spoke to the New York Times, the reason the cemetery employee chose not to press charges over the alleged altercation is that “she feared Mr. Trump’s supporters pursuing retaliation,” an entirely reasonable concern.

…

Law simply shouldn’t matter here. The way you deter Trump and other sociopathic politicians from treating gravesites as stage sets is by shaming them and punishing them politically for their callousness. But … how you do that when the people in the best position to inflict that punishment, right-wing voters, refuse to do so?

Nick Catoggio, Mourning in America

Transactional Trump

Trump was never on the social conservatives’ side. He courted them and sought their approval as a function of his desire for status, power, and his own aggrandizement. If they had achieved political results that could benefit him, he would still be seeking their support, but now he sees them as an obstacle and an embarrassment. If you are seeking to manipulate, influence, or transact business with Trump by all means flatter him, but always understand that he was never your friend and will always turn on you the moment you pose an obstacle to his ambitions.

Analysis of an anonymous friend of Rod Dreher

No Pro-Life Case for Trump

When you announce that one can be pro-life and support a philandering womanizer and twice divorced serial adulterer who has been credibly accused of rape, you discredit the cause and tell people you aren’t really serious.

When you announce that one can be pro-life and support a man who was closely associated with Jeffrey Epstein and even joked about Epstein’s alleged pedophiliac assaults of children, you discredit the cause and tell people you aren’t really serious.

When you announce that one can be pro-life and support a man who refused to straightforwardly answer when asked if he has ever paid for an abortion, you discredit the cause and tell people you aren’t really serious.

Jake Meador, There Never Was a Pro-Life Case for Trump

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Wednesday, 8/28/24

All Presidential politics today.

Presented Without Comment

Former President Donald Trump, on Truth Social: “My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.”

(The Morning Dispatch)

Also Presented Without Comment

NBC News: Vance Says Trump Would Veto A National Abortion Ban

Ohio Sen. JD Vance, former President Donald Trump’s running mate, on Saturday said Trump would veto a federal abortion ban if a bill were to be passed by Congress.

…

“I mean, if you’re not supporting it, as the president of the United States, you fundamentally have to veto it,” Vance argued.

(The Morning Dispatch)

So: The Betrayer betrays again

This feels rather like a “dog bites man” story:

The GOP has jettisoned its pro-life plank after having it in place for nearly a half century. And Trump himself is now saying he’d be great for “reproductive rights,” a position that pro-lifers have long insisted is a moral abomination.

This is not a surprise. Betrayal is a core character trait of Trump’s. He’s betrayed his wives, his mistresses, his friends, his business associates, people who have worked for him, and his country. There is no person and no cause he will not double-cross. The pro-life movement is only the latest thing to which he has been unfaithful, and it won’t be the last.

The question to ask yourself is: Who in the pro-life movement—Al Mohler, Mike Huckabee, Franklin Graham, Eric Metaxas, Marjorie Dannenfelser, Ralph Reed, Tony Perkins, Robert Jeffress, and countless others—will speak out, publicly and forcefully and relentlessly, against Trump’s about-face? Will they tell the full truth, which is that abortions increased during the Trump presidency, that the pro-life movement is weaker than at almost any time in its history, and that, when it comes to making the Republican Party the home of the pro-life cause, Trump is doing unprecedented damage?

Will they now say of Trump what they say of liberal Democrats, that he supports the murder of innocent unborn children?

Now ask yourself this: How could an evangelical who claims to be passionately pro-life vote for a presidential candidate who now promises that his administration will “be great for women and their reproductive rights”? Especially when that person has cheated on his wives and on his taxes, paid hush money to porn stars, and been found liable of sexual assault?

Peter Wehner, Trump’s Evangelical Supporters Just Lost Their Best Excuse

Ukraine in Election 2024

As my friend David French points out, there is at least one important policy priority with regard to which Kamala Harris clearly offers conservatives an approach preferable to that of Donald Trump: U.S. policy vis-à-vis U.S. interests in Ukraine, whose people are valiantly fighting off an invasion undertaken by a tyrant whose junta is entirely hostile to U.S. interests and who is in bed with every important U.S. enemy and adversary from Tehran to Beijing. Donald Trump is essentially pro-Moscow in his stance; Deputy Troll J.D. Vance is as close to explicitly pro-Moscow in his stance as it is permissible to be and still hope to have a political future after the crash and burn that his ticket seems to be headed toward. (Seems, as of this writing. I don’t do predictions.)

Kevin D. Williamson

I don’t care for either party’s Ukraine position, but I’m closer to the Democrats.

I don’t care for the parties’ positions because Ukraine, with the help of the US, NATO, and the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch, poked the bear and Ukraine now is paying the price.

I’m doing this mostly from memory so don’t hold me to the details too strictly: As the Soviet Union was dying, we were helping it along, giving Gorbachev advice on how best to move from an command economy to a market economy and from authoritarianism to democracy. We essentially promised Russia (predictably the most prominent of the states after breakup of the union) a zone of influence (can you say “Monroe Doctrine”?) and that NATO would not push to Russian borders. We broke that promise in many ways, both explicit and implicit (e.g., fomenting rebellions in the former Soviet Republics after the Union broke up, trumpeting that Ukraine was under consideration for NATO membership) — and then the Ecumenical Patriarch added fuel to the fire (pushed by our State Department?) by declaring the autonomy (technically, autocephaly) of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, a group which was in schism from the Russian-Orthodox-controlled Ukrainian Orthodox Church. That the latter was controlled by the Russian Orthodox Church does not mean, however, that Patriarch Kirill actually cared for it pastorally — his spiritual neglect was part of the reason for the tomos of autocephaly.

That said, I don’t see that allowing the conquest of Ukraine by Russia rectifies past mistakes. We broke it, we bought it.

Of course, Williamson has a zinger or two, like

  • this description of Trump as “the serial bankrupt gameshow host and quondam pornographer who is so bad with money that he somehow lost his ass owning casinos.”
  • if Democratic hypocrisy means that the Democrats are at least paying attention to reality, that they have some understanding of what it is, then that’s to the good. If Democratic hypocrisy regarding a shift to the center means that they at least understand where the center is, then, as Jonah says, two cheers for that hypocrisy.

Observers versus Activists

[A]fter the shocking events of January 6, 2021, The Bulwark’s Never Trump stance began to evolve in the direction of defending liberal democracy against Trumpian authoritarianism. This was a goal that required working for the electoral victory and governing success of Democrats.

… As [Sarah Longwell] puts it at one point,

This isn’t a ‘lesser of two evils’ situation. One candidate is evil. The other is someone with whom I have some policy disagreements and some policy agreements. An easy choice.

That’s where we come, I think, to the core of the disagreement between Longwell and Hayes. It’s not primarily about whether Harris has sufficiently or sincerely moderated her views. It’s about what the present situation requires. For Longwell, Trump poses “the worst threat to American ideals in our lifetimes,” and that threat calls for refusing to “stand on the sidelines.” It demands “taking a stand” because we are living through a “moment when moral clarity and corresponding action is required,” rendering efforts to maintain a kind of ideological purity a morally inadequate and politically impotent “intellectual exercise.”

…

That issue—how intellectuals are supposed to comport themselves in their political engagements—is one that matters a lot to me. On top of the policy disagreements, what drove me away from the intellectual right two decades ago was the expectation, as an editor for First Things magazine, that I defend a political line in public. I wasn’t allowed to write a conservative case for not invading Iraq, for example, because that would risk making myself and the magazine appear “unreliable.” There was simply too much at stake, my boss told me, to risk a dissent from the conservative movement and its presidential champion. The War on Terror had to be won—and even more fundamentally, George W. Bush needed to have a successful presidency. We couldn’t risk contributing to its failure by directing criticisms its way.

Damon Linker, Never-Trump Smackdown

I’ve been neglecting the Bulwark since shortly after its founding. I’ve now subscribed again — for one month, with a reminder set to cancel if I don’t like it, as I suspect will happen, judging from this hectoring bit:

As for most everyone else marked absent on my attendance sheet, they are nearing—or already in—retirement. They have no GOP future to speak of.

So what’s the holdup?

I have been told that one answer to this is concerns about personal safety. And I hear that. But lots of people have put their personal safety at risk. I’ve gotten threats. So have Kinzinger and Duncan and my colleague Sarah Longwell. We all have young kids and none of us has either Secret Service or the scratch for private security. Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman had to move out of their damn home. That didn’t stop them.

Here is the truth: Every person who agrees to be a poll watcher this fall is putting themselves at a risk that is equal or greater to what John Kelly would face if he were to cut an ad for Kamala Harris.

So what it comes down to is something more mundane than safety. These people aren’t endorsing Harris because they don’t want to deal with the hassle.

The bleats from Trump. The media requests. The chastising emails from their MAGA friends (or spouses, in a few cases). Getting an earful at the club every time Kamala does something that conservatives don’t like. Maybe they have a board position or another influence-peddling gig that’s dependent on their status as a Republican in Good Standing.

Dealing with all that is a pain in the ass. Doing nothing is easy.

And maybe this would be a fair excuse in normal times. They’ve done their bit; they should be able to retire in peace.

But these are not normal times. Donald Trump engineered the first non-peaceful transfer of power in our country since the Civil War. In a second term, he would be unleashed to act on his worst impulses, having cast off all of those who dared try to check him.

Tim Miller (at the Bulwark). I can’t say he’s wrong about any basic facts, but who didn’t know those facts already? Who doesn’t know that Trump is an existential threat to Democracy (“you’ll never have to vote again”)? But who says we must allow that threat to occupy our every waking hour, that opposition to Trump must be our deepest identity?

I really appreciate being kept abreast of what’s going on through the Dispatch, which doesn’t presume to dictate my response.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Saturday, 8/24/24

Politics

Truly weird

Y’know what’s weird in a hopeful sort of way? Nostaligia across ideological lines, that’s what.

… programming on Thursday night, which seemed to aim at appealing to Nikki Haley voters from the GOP primaries. There were a lot of respectful references to Ronald Reagan. From Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly. From old-time national security hand Leon Panetta, who talked about killing Osama bin Laden.

Damon Linker, Well done, Dems

[L]et’s face it, even some European conservatives find Trump so distasteful that they are eager to believe the best about Harris—especially the idea that she really might be Obama in a pants suit.

Rod Dreher, Kamala Harris and her ‘Good Vibes’ Campaign

Almost she maketh me straight

I’m reluctant to write about Kamala Harris’s smile because I’m going to get all gushy and mushy about it, and the Harris lovefest is a jammed jamboree without need of another journalist. She’s enjoying more than a routine political honeymoon; she’s in the priciest suite on the poshest cruise ship sailing through a tropical paradise where coconuts tumble juicily from their trees into her aloe-moistened hands.

But I can’t stop noticing and basking in her happy face. Actually, happy doesn’t do it justice — it’s exuberant. Sometimes even ecstatic. When she made her surprise appearance onstage in Chicago during the prime-time portion of the Democratic National Convention on Monday night, she beamed so brightly I reached for my sunglasses. When she high-fived her running mate’s wife, Gwen Walz, during a campaign rally in Rochester, Pa., the day before, she sparkled like a gemstone. Even when she talked about the economy — the economy! — in Raleigh, N.C., two days before that, she found places and pauses for her mouth to widen and her eyes to light up. Those smiles of hers communicate an elation that I immediately want to share, an optimism that I instantly want to embrace.

Frank Bruni, who may be confusing Kamala with Judy Garland.

Kamala’s hostile work environment

And now for the anti-Bruni:

The Harris-Walz messaging indeed projects a pair of lovable scamps out to defend old-fashioned American decency against two mean, corrupt weirdos, Trump and J.D. Vance. Harris’s bubbly likability is a façade. In fact, Harris has a behind-the-scenes reputation as a high-maintenance diva. As vice president, she has had an unusually high staff turnover, with burned-out aides leaving feeling chewed up and spit out.

“People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it’s an abusive environment,” a person with direct knowledge of how Harris’ office is run told Politico, in a 2021 report. “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s—.”

To be sure, Donald Trump is famously a difficult boss. And yes, the presidency is not a therapy session. Still, when Kamala Harris gasses on, as she did in her convention speech, about the need for charity, and about the mandate to treat others as you want to be treated, it is all an act to create, well, a trippy California vibe that contrasts with Trump’s meanness.

Rod Dreher, Kamala Harris and her ‘Good Vibes’ Campaign

Noonan’s take

The Democratic Party has more substantial characters of recent American history to parade around on stage. The Clintons, the Obamas, Jesse Jackson, who, whatever your view of him, was there, on the balcony at the Lorraine Motel, when Martin Luther King was shot. This conveyed a party with a storied past, and if you join it you’re joining something real. The Republican Party, in its great toppling, has rejected its past. You lose something when you cast your history aside, and all you’ve got for prime time is Trump sons.

…

Donald Trump is famously off his game. He knows his old insult shtick isn’t working. Some of his supporters say, “All he has to do is read from the teleprompter!” but they’re wrong. He’s no good when he reads from the prompter, he doesn’t respect what’s on it. It bores him, and he talks like a tranquilized robot. He knows what he does well—shock, entertain, mention two or three big issues. He’s having trouble making a stinging critique of Democratic policy because he’s insulted everything over the years, and when he says something’s bad now it just seems part of his act and doesn’t land.

Peggy Noonan

Normal people

The Obamas managed to strike a tone that was at once a little bit angry and a little bit hopeful. Barack spoke about how most Americans don’t want to go to war with our neighbors over politics. He’s right: In fact, most of us normal people don’t actually care how our neighbors vote, just as long as the guy next door isn’t blasting Mexican polka after 8 p.m. He also nicely articulated what’s so grating about Trump: Trump is the guy who has everything and still whines about not having enough. He’s always talking about himself: his problems, his successes, his goddamn golf score.

…

Meanwhile, Trump focuses on what really matters—cocaine: Trump took a brief moment away from listing his grievances to educate himself on America’s drug problem during an appearance on comedian Theo Von’s podcast. You’d think a rich man who lived in New York in the 1980s would know a little something about the white stuff, but listening to Trump ask Von about coke is like hearing a five-year-old ask where babies come from. “And is that a good feeling? Why would you do it?”

Honestly, the whole thing is sort of endearing, and as Helen Lewis said, it’s the first time Trump has shown an interest in someone other than himself.

Katie Herzog

Conspiracy theory of the Left

If you think, as Kamala Harris thinks, or says she thinks—(“thinks”)—that inflation in grocery prices is the result of “price gouging,” then I don’t want to hear you ever complaining about conspiracy theories. Because that is a big, dumb conspiracy theory, the sort of thing that can be taken seriously only by asses of exceptional asininity.

Kevin D. Williamson

Populists versus the credentialed experts

Populist politics defies experts in favor of deferring to the people (the voters).

The reason why such a politics still seems disorienting to so many of us is that we just lived through several decades when highly credentialized experts enjoyed uncommon levels of deference. This was the highwater mark of technocratic-managerial neoliberalism. What should the president do about an economic problem? Talk to economists and follow their advice. What about a foreign policy crisis unfolding abroad? Talk to experts ensconced in Washington’s many think tanks devoted to international affairs. The same holds for any area of policy. Whatever the problem, solving it involves finding the experts, listening to what they say, and then going along with their recommendations.

But not anymore. Or at least not consistently. The experts are still around, and they are still shown respect by journalists who focus on national politics. But they don’t have the political clout and don’t exercise the overwhelming influence they once did. This is true in both parties. And taking note of it is crucial for understanding where we are and where we’re going.

Damon Linker

How to get the press to blurt out inconvenient truth

Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while, and so it goes with journalistic “fact checkers.” Sen. J.D. Vance made a slip of the tongue last week, which prompted CBS News to reveal the truth unwittingly.

In an Aug. 11 “Face the Nation” interview with Margaret Brennan, Mr. Vance said that Donald Trump is “trying to find some common ground” on abortion. Meanwhile, “you have Democrats who supported abortion right up to the moment—and sometimes even beyond the moment—of birth, which is just sick stuff.”

“That’s not accurate,” Ms. Brennan admonished him.

“It is accurate,” he replied. “In fact, the Born Alive Act, multiple members of the current Democratic administration, including our vice president, supported that legislation—they have supported taxpayer-funded abortions up to the moment of birth.”

The screen, moments later, cuts to the studio, where Ms. Brennan reads from a script: “We want to clarify what Sen. Vance said about the Born Alive [Abortion] Survivors Protection Act and his claim that Vice President Harris supported the legislation. A CBS News fact-check finds that Harris voted against advancing the bill twice when she was a senator, and has previously called it extreme and a setback to reproductive rights in America. We found no evidence that anyone who currently serves in the Biden administration voted for it either.” Then the interview continues.

Sierra Dawn McClain and Nicholas Tomaino, Vance Flips the ‘Fact Check’ Script

Culture, education

Myth

Myths are basic truths twisted into mnemonics, instructions posted from the past, memories waiting to become predictions.

Richard Powers, The Overstory

Breaking political taboos

Getting inside the heads of these kinds of voters became an obsession for Mr. Schoen. As a doctoral student at Oxford, he wrote a dissertation on Enoch Powell, a Conservative legislator, who stunned Britain in 1968 with a speech predicting that if current levels of immigration continued, soon “the Black man will have the whip hand over the white man.” After sifting through polls and election returns, Mr. Schoen convincingly argued that Powell drew millions of these voters to the right in the first election after his incendiary speech, shaking the foundations of British politics and setting the template for a new kind of right-wing populism.

Mr. Schoen came to believe that people were drawn to firebrands like Powell not just because they agreed with him on the issues, but also because he was saying something political elites had tried to keep out of public debate. It proved that he was in touch with a constituency that wasn’t being heard — and it gave his movement a frisson of excitement. You didn’t need a grass-roots campaign or a lavish advertising blitz to win over the public, just the right words and voters ready to hear them.

… Ignoring a problem on the electorate’s mind doesn’t make it go away; it only sends voters searching for a candidate who will listen. Views can shift over time, but probably not over the course of a campaign. Elections aren’t a battle for hearts and minds. They’re a fight to give voters what they already want.

Timothy Shenk, 30 Years Ago, Two Young Strategists Cracked How to Beat a Guy Like Trump. Are Democrats Ready to Listen?

Learning to desire the right things

We normally pay attention to what we desire without thinking about whether our desires are good for us. But that is a dangerous trap in a culture where there are myriad powerful forces competing for our attention, trying to lure us into desiring the ideas, merchandise, or experiences they want to sell us.

Besides, late modern culture is one that has located the core of one’s identity in the desiring self—a self whose wants are thought to be beyond judgment. What you want to be, we are told, is who you are—and anybody who denies that is somehow attacking your identity, or so the world says. The old ideal that you should learn—through study, practice, and submission to authoritative tradition—to desire the right things has been cast aside. Who’s to say what the right things are, anyway? Only you, the autonomous choosing self, have the right to make those determinations. Anybody who says otherwise is a threat.

Excerpt from Rod Dreher’s forthcoming book Living in Wonder (emphasis added). The highlight describes a an “old ideal” that is a major thrust of classical education.

Bearing (false?) witness

Some more Kevin D. Williamson. This time, it’s a book review:

As a Catholic, I suppose I should try harder not to enjoy Protestant factional infighting as much as I do. But every time I read something as bog-bottom dumb as Megan Basham’s excruciatingly imbecilic new book, Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda, I am reminded of the poetic justice arising from American-style choose-your-own-adventure theology and exegesis: There never was a better advertisement for the benefits of maintaining a Magisterium.

…

Reviewing a book like this is like trying to argue with an avalanche—an avalanche of stupidity and error, to be sure, but an avalanche all the same. I have the same problem with this book I had reviewing Alissa Quart’s similarly idiotic Bootstrapped: The author can make enough errors in a dozen words that the critic needs 400 words to correct them. And so one ends up writing an annotated companion to a work that was not worth reading in the first place, much less annotating. (If you would like a more conventional review of the book, please do check out Warren Cole Smith’s excellent contribution.) And while readers have often suspected otherwise, I do not generally get paid by the word.

…

This is a book about, and for, Christians, which means there is something on the table more important than journalistic incompetence. There is the matter of bearing false witness. Megan Basham has some apologies to make and a public record to correct. Judgment, I am reliably informed, comes like a thief in the night.

Kevin D. Williamson, Bearing False Witness

I appreciate Williamson’s assessment of George Soros, which is one I reached independently:

There isn’t any question that Soros and his Open Society project hope to influence prominent institutions, including conservative-leaning churches and religious associations. Soros is engaged in a social change project, and that is what social change projects do. His ends are not generally ends that I share, but that doesn’t make it nefarious.

Considering Soros’ ongoing status as whipping-boy for the American Right, it’s nice to see someone else with conservative bona fides who doesn’t think Soros is nefarious.

(Noted that Bethel McGrew thinks Basham’s book is just fine. I trust Williamson more, and don’t care enough to buy and read the book. Not my circus, not my monkeys.)

Karma Update

The Italian Coast Guard on Wednesday recovered the body of British tech mogul Mike Lynch from the wreckage of the Bayesian superyacht that sunk on Monday. The 56-meter yacht owned by Lynch’s wife, Angela Bachares, had been described by its builders as “unsinkable.” Italian investigators believe the yacht sank quickly on Monday morning after being hit by a waterspout, essentially an oceangoing tornado. Fifteen people who were on the yacht have survived, with six confirmed dead and one unaccounted for. Lynch, considered “Britain’s Bill Gates,” was acquitted in June by a San Francisco jury of fraud charges related to the sale of his company, Autonomy, to Hewlett Packard in 2011. His co-defendant in the trial, Stephen Chamberlain, also died Monday after being struck by a car while jogging in Cambridgeshire on Saturday.

The Morning Dispatch

I don’t know anything about Lynch or Chamberlain, and I have no actual opinion on their guilt of things for which they were acquitted in court. But if others can cite divine intervention in the failed attempt to assassinate Trump with a gunshot, and others can say “miraculous” of the meteoric rise of the Democrats’ prospects for November, I can hint at divine justice in two related deaths of acquitted co-defendants — especially since one sank on an unsinkable yacht.

Just six weeks ago, as a bullet whizzed past Donald Trump’s ear and he popped back up onstage with one fist raised and the other clutching a bald eagle, it appeared the Democrats were doomed. No more. Against all odds, the party that until recently had the pallor of a 80-year-old on day sixteen of a Covid infection has regained its mojo, and that was abundantly clear at the DNC this week.

Katie Herzog

(FWIW, I’m still not voting for either major party for POTUS.)

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Saturday, 8/17/24

A hectic week in which I forgot things, including blogging (though not clipping blog fodder). Enjoy.

Culture

America the unadorned ugly

While I was driving through some of America’s most majestic natural beauty, almost everything in it built by humans was unadorned ugliness. Pre-fab bland buildings that look like they were airlifted in and plopped down in plots of land bulldozed flat, with zero shade or attempt to integrate them into the surrounding nature.

It didn’t help that I was also feeling physically gross, unable to walk, and eating trash, since that’s what’s almost exclusively available on the road in the US, because that’s what most Americans eat — prepackaged globs of fat and sugar.

America’s diet, outside of a minority of successful neighborhoods, has gotten worse since my last American Dream trip, with everything now somehow bigger, sweeter, and fattier: Mass produced, highly processed gunk, that has as much connection to what the rest of the world considers food as pornography does to intimacy.

… [M]y last three years of trips to countries as different as Vietnam, France, Uganda, and Istanbul, has highlighted and strengthened my view that while the US certainly provides our citizens with the most opportunity, and the most stuff, we don’t provide them with the most fulfilling, beautiful, and elevating life.

Chris Arnade

Changing from Häftlinge to men again

When the broken window was repaired and the stove began to spread its heat, something seemed to relax in everyone, and at that moment Towarowski (a Franco-Pole of twenty-three, typhus) proposed to the others that each of them offer a slice of bread to us three who had been working. And so it was agreed. Only a day before a similar event would have been inconceivable. The law of the Lager said: “eat your own bread, and if you can, that of your neighbor,” and left no room for gratitude. It really meant that the Lager was dead. It was the first human gesture that occurred among us. I believe that that moment can be dated as the beginning of the change by which we who had not died slowly changed from Häftlinge to men again.

Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

My pet peeve

When Sarah Kate Ellis was named president of GLAAD more than a decade ago, the LGBTQ advocacy organization was in dire financial straits. “I was given a scary mandate,” she told The New York Times in 2019: “Fix it or shut it down.”

She should have done the latter.

Founded in 1985 as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, the nonprofit originally had the mission of promoting more empathetic media coverage of people with AIDS. Over the years, its remit expanded to countering negative portrayals of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people in advertising and entertainment. Today, the proliferation of LGBTQ characters on our screens, largely sympathetic coverage in mainstream media, and the ubiquity of same-sex couples in advertisements and commercials all suggest that GLAAD achieved its mission. The group should have long ago taken the win and dissolved—just as the organization Freedom to Marry announced it would do shortly after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in the summer of 2015.

Accepting victory, however, can be difficult for people who devote their lives to a cause, and not only for emotional reasons. The impulse among activists, once successful, to keep raising money necessitates that they find things to spend it on ….

James Kirchick, How the Gay-Rights Movement Lost Its Way

I may be particularly sensitive to this sort of thing because my father once joined “Ad hoc Committee [to Accomplish Somethingorother].” They accomplished it, but soon Dad got a letter, on the Committee’s letterhead, supporting some other cause, and listing him as a committee members. I don’t recall if he didn’t support the new cause at all of if he merely had not enlisted to go on record on that cause, but some co-belligerent failed to grok “ad hoc.”

I’m confident there are conservative groups that should have declared victory and gone home (some have crossed my mind in the past but I don’t now recall them. Right to Life is not an example because it wanted to outlaw abortion, not just reverse Roe.). Human Rights Campaign is another example on the sexual-liberation Left:

Flailing about for relevance since the legalization of same-sex marriage, many gay-rights groups pivoted to a related but fundamentally different cause: transgender rights. Rather than emulate the movement’s past approach—seeking allies across the political spectrum and accepting compromise as a precondition for legal and social progress—they have taken hard-line left-wing positions. LGBTQ groups repeat the mantra “the science is settled” on the extremely complex and fraught subject of youth gender medicine and insist that anyone who questions the provision of puberty blockers to gender-dysphoric children is transphobic. They continue to spread this message even as many European countries have backed away from such treatments after concluding that the evidence supporting them is weak. The reflexive promotion of major medical interventions for minors should be a red flag for gay men and lesbians, considering the research indicating that many gender-distressed and gender-nonconforming children grow up to be gay.

Whence the phrase “transing away the gay” as the newest iteration of “praying away the gay” (and checking some of the same emotional boxes). The whole Kirchick article is quote-worthy, and I commend it to you.

Politics generally

BOTS

Blunt talk:

[T]he key to a Harris win in November won’t be the support of black Americans or Indian Americans or even “brown Americans” — though she has identified at various points in her political life as all three. Rather, Harris is a flesh-and-blood avatar of a much more numerous, powerful, and radically dissatisfied demographic: never-married and childless American women between the ages of 20 and 45.

Aside from mass immigration, the most striking demographic development of the past decade is the large cohort of American women who have embraced the helping hand of the state in place of the increasingly suspect protections of fathers, brothers, boyfriends and husbands. In doing so, they have become the Democratic Party’s most enthusiastic and decisive constituency. According to a recent Pew survey, these Brides Of The State (BOTS) support Democrats over Republicans by a whopping 72-24%, providing the Party with its entire advantage in both national and most state elections. Married American women, by contrast, support Republicans by 50-45, which more or less matches the pro-Republican margin in every other age and gender demographic. Without the overwhelming support of BOTS for the Democrats, in other words, America would be a solid-majority Republican country in which Trump would win a likely electoral landslide.

The Democratic Party’s political engineers first sensed the centrality of BOTS to the Party’s power base during Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012. The Obama campaign then duly rolled out a storybook ad called “the Life of Julia”, which explained how Obama’s policies, from Head Start to Obamacare to contraception coverage to Medicare reform, would care for Julia from graduation through motherhood and finally to the grave without her needing to form a human relationship with anyone outside the government.

David Samuels, The march of Kamala’s brides

Fundamentalist America at Defcon 2

What you’re seeing throughout American Christianity now is the fundamentalist wing is really exerting itself. And so what that means is when you encounter somebody who’s a fundamentalist and you say, “I’m not voting for Trump,” they often don’t look at that as a debatable point for which Christians in good will can disagree. They will look at this and say, “It is the natural and inevitable consequence of applying Christian principles that you will support Donald Trump.”

David French

As long-time readers know, I spent most of my first three decades as a Wheaton College/IVCF-flavored Evangelical. What I’ve mentioned less often is that schools of that flavor had some taboos that, although mostly sensible, did not merit the label “biblical.” How often Christians who purport to base everything on the Bible come up with extrabiblical Shibboleths is telling.

Political violence and threats of violence

Political violence and threats of violence have no place in the American democratic process. Yet threats and intimidation follow the MAGA movement like night follows day. One of the saddest stories of our time is the way in which even local election officials and local school board members fear for their safety. The level of threat against public officials has escalated in the MAGA era, MAGA Republicans often wield threats as a weapon against Republican dissenters, and every American should remember Jan. 6, when a mob of insurrectionists ransacked the Capitol.

David French, To Save Conservatism From Itself, I Am Voting for Harris

I appreciate French reminding me about the violence and intimidation that follows MAGA, even quite apart from January 6. He will suffer attempts at intimidation as a result of this piece.

(For the record, though, some Trump supporters allegedly fear the consequence of letting it be known that they support Trump)

French also points out some legitimate complexifiers even on abortion, which so many millions consider a categorical reason to vote Republican: (1) the 2024 GOP platform plank on abortion is effectively pro-choice; (2) abortion rates and ratios have been lower under pro-abortion democrats.

“Caring” politicians

About 4 in 10 say Harris is someone who “cares about people like you” while about 3 in 10 say that about Trump.

Via John Ellis news items. It’s gratifying that a majority is directionally correct about politicians caring about people like them. But nobody, not even 1 in 10, should be so stupid as to think that Trump cares about anybody but Trump.

Trump in particular

On message?

The silliest spectacle in politics this month has been Republicans pleading with Trump to get back on message, as if he’s somehow forgotten that inflation and immigration are his strongest lines of attack against Harris.

He didn’t forget. And he assuredly does want to win. He’s off-message because he can’t help himself. There’s something wrong with him.

The New York Times reported this weekend on a dinner he held with wealthy donors in New York on August 2. “Some guests hoped Mr. Trump would signal that he was recalibrating after a series of damaging mistakes,” the paper noted. Instead he babbled about stolen elections, repeated his “black or Indian?” critique of Harris, and assured the crowd that he’s “not nicer” following the attempt on his life last month that had supposedly left him a changed man.

One attendee told the New York Post’s Charles Gasparino that when a donor advised him to tone down some of his attacks, Trump replied, “They tried to put me in jail; they tried to ruin my reputation and then they tried to assassinate me. At some point, you have [to] be truthful to yourself.”

Being true to himself is the whole problem. His advisers are “deeply rattled by his meandering, mean and often middling public performances since the failed assassination attempt,” per Axios. One source claimed that Trump “is struggling to get past his anger,” the sort of thing one might say about a temperamental child (no wonder), not the nominee of a major party fewer than 100 days out from an election.

Trump being undisciplined and self-indulgent isn’t news, though, any more than him resorting to childish cruelty toward his enemies is. What’s newsy is how his anxiety about Harris’ surging popularity has led him into outright fantasy to try to explain it.

Nick Catoggio

Ominous words, especially from this quarter

“It’s not over until he puts his hand on the Bible and takes the oath,” LaCivita said in a recent interview with Politico at the Republican National Convention. “It’s not over on Election Day, it’s over on Inauguration Day.” An investigation by Rolling Stone last month found that nearly 70 pro-Trump election deniers serve as election officials in key battleground counties.

In Georgia, Trump supporters on the state election board have adopted rules requiring “reasonable inquiry” before election results are certified, a move that could give GOP county-election-board members the ability to reject the 2024 election’s outcome. And as The Guardian reports, the lawyer and Trump ally Cleta Mitchell “has spent the last few years building up a network of activists focused on local boards of elections.” At the national level, the Republican National Committee says that it hopes to mobilize 100,000 volunteers, including thousands of poll watchers, to focus on “Democrat attempts to circumvent the rules.” Meanwhile, one RNC senior counsel for election integrity, Christina Bobb, was criminally indicted earlier this year for her role in trying to overturn the 2020 election (she pleaded not guilty).

Then there is the mood of the MAGA base. Trump’s lies about the 2020 election have become a litmus test in the GOP, and a recent Pew Research Center poll found that although 77 percent of Democratic voters believe that the election will be conducted “fairly and accurately,” less than half of Republican voters have faith in the system. Despite Harris’s recent surge, the majority of Trump supporters are confident that he will be victorious. (A recent YouGov poll found that nearly eight in 10 Trump supporters think he would win if pitted against Harris.) Trump fully intends to stoke his supporters’ disbelief and anger at the possibility that he could lose. As Wehner warned recently: “If you have friends who are Trump worshippers, a word of counsel: They’re heading to a very dark place psychologically … They felt this race was won; now it’s slipping away. Expect even greater self-delusion and more toxic rants.”

Charles Sykes, Trump Is Setting the Stage to Challenge the Election. The only steal of the 2024 Election is the one Trump and his minions are planning — and strategically placed to advance.

Not the unity they craved

Never has the GOP been more unified, and Donald Trump deserves all the credit. The issue uniting pundits, editorial boards, virtually all Republican politicians, GOP consultants, MAGA warriors, and rallygoers: the need for Trump to lay aside personal gripes and grievances and to stick to the issues and attack Vice President Kamala Harris and Gov. Tim Walz on their records.

Jonah Goldberg

A Political Fat Elvis

The whole landscape of the campaign has been transformed. The rise of Harris instantly cast Trump in a new light. He formerly seemed more ominous and threatening, which, whatever its political drawbacks, signaled strength; now he seems not just old but low-energy, stale, even pathetic. He has become the political version of Fat Elvis.

Trump is much better equipped psychologically to withstand ferocious criticisms than he is equipped to withstand mockery. Malignant narcissists go to great lengths to hide their fears and display a false or idealized self. Criticism targets the persona. Mockery, by contrast, can tap very deep fears of being exposed as flawed or weak. When the mask is the target, people with Trump’s psychological profile know how to fight back. Mockery, though, can cause them to unravel.

Peter Wehner, Trump Can’t Deal With Harris’s Success

Lazy, stupid, childish

Trump’s three big problems as a candidate are precisely the same qualities that mitigated the worst of what might have been a much worse Trump presidency the last time around: He is lazy, he is stupid, and he is childish. 

I can hear you objecting: “Hey, we came here for serious analysis, not name-calling!” But, in this case, the analysis and the name-calling end up in the same place: finding that the most politically relevant traits of Donald Trump are that he is lazy, stupid, and childish.

… Anyone who has heard Trump speak or read his unedited writing knows that he is not an especially intelligent man. But his native stupidity is compounded by his ignorance—which is to say, by the fact that he is too lazy to do his homework and acquire the kind of grasp of the issues that would make him a more effective candidate.

… There is a reason he wanders all over the place in his speeches—it isn’t only arrogance and self-centeredness. He’s dumber than nine chickens. That’s why he was an incompetent real-estate investor even though he was a successful reality-television grotesque. He isn’t the first dumb person to find success in the celebrity business, where stupidity seems to be an asset.

…

His penchant for using demeaning nicknames as a substitute for political argument might be thought of as an aspect of his laziness or his stupidity, but it is, at heart, part of his childishness. The same childishness is what has him insisting that he doesn’t need to run a conventional campaign, because he is a very special little boy. Never mind that after his fluke win in 2016, he has led his party from one electoral defeat to another—often in close succession, as when he pissed away Republicans’ chances in Georgia in a snit after his humiliating loss to the human eggplant in 2020.

Trump’s personality defects were, perversely enough, this country’s saving grace while he was president. He wanted to be a caudillo but ended up being very little more than a poisonous buffoon thanks to the laziness, stupidity, and childishness that kept him from realizing the worst of his ambitions as president. That very well may keep him from realizing any of his political ambitions in 2024.

I am not quite sure that I believe the maxim that “character is destiny.” Stupidity, on the other hand …

Kevin D. Williamson

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Saturday, 8/10/24

Not much today, but some of it will be pretty stale later.

“Ultraconservative”

He bucks convention in more ways than one: He holds ultraconservative views that are farther to the right than most Americans …

Kayla Dwyer, Indianapolis Star, profiling Pastor Micah Beckwith, Indiana’s surprise GOP candidate for Lieutenant Governor.

What does the phrase “ultraconservative” mean except “further to the right” than most?

I don’t like the Beckwith candidacy, which instantiates a populist Christianist strategy (by sectarian kooks, to boot) to take over my former party. But the press bias still bothers me.

The Olympic Women’s Boxing Controversy

Jesse Singal, If Your Brain Doesn’t Hurt Sometimes, You’re Doing It Wrong

Singal’s title is just about perfect:

[T]here will be a loser. Either Khelif and Lin would be barred from competing as women, or the women who face them will be forced to face down what is, in effect, male competition.

In favor of Khelif and Lin:

  • Disorder of Sexual Development
  • internal testes
  • assigned female at birth
  • raised as girls

Against Khelif and Lin: they have experienced male puberty.

Is your brain hurting yet? There’s no obvious answer, is there?

The Iconic Lunacy quote

Presented Without Comment

Former President Donald Trump, on Truth Social:

What are the chances that Crooked Joe Biden, the WORST President in the history of the U.S., whose Presidency was Unconstitutionally STOLEN from him by Kamabla, Barrack HUSSEIN Obama, Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Shifty Adam Schiff, Cryin’ Chuck Schumer, and others on the Lunatic Left, CRASHES the Democrat National Convention and tries to take back the Nomination, beginning with challenging me to another DEBATE. He feels that he made a historically tragic mistake by handing over the U.S. Presidency, a COUP, to the people in the World he most hates, and he wants it back, NOW!!!

Via The Morning Dispatch

For what it’s worth, I clipped this before everybody else was citing it as the clearest proof yet that Trump is a lunatic.

The case for Harris/Walz

I think the case for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz can be summed up in a line. When one candidate on the ballot has tried to stage a coup and the other hasn’t, you choose the latter. Period.

But if that’s not enough to persuade you, there’s a second reason that David didn’t mention. After eight exhausting years, it would be wonderful not to have to worry day-to-day about the president’s mental health.

…

As we sit here in 2024, the last time Americans didn’t need to worry whether the commander in chief might suffer a breakdown of one sort or another was the last year of Barack Obama’s second term.

Nick Catoggio

I still won’t vote for either major-party Presidential slate, but Nick’s not wrong.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Tuesday, 8/6/24

The Left

Cynics

Two years ago, Democratic outfits spent money in GOP primaries on ads designed to help crank populist candidates prevail over more formidable mainstream opponents. “Cynical” doesn’t begin to describe the mindset of liberals who routinely warn voters that MAGA Republicans are a threat to democracy and then quietly spend millions of dollars to help those same Republicans advance to the general election.

Nick Cattogion, The Nuclear Option – The Dispatch

Bait and switch, not “slippery slope”

Recall that gender ideology was never sold to the American people. Parents were sold on “inclusivity.” Gender ideology itself was sold to their grade-school kids. This was another of the Left’s “bait-and-switch” maneuvers, and it succeeded so well, the gender ideologues had essentially a decade’s head start on American parents.

Metaphors matter. They can elucidate, but they can also elide and confuse. For a long time, the conservative metaphor for the Left’s tactics has been “slippery slope.” It’s a bad metaphor. It suggests that radical efforts to harm American families are all just the result of the gravitational pull of the earth, or the inevitability of logical progression. That isn’t the case. The tactics used against American families are far more clever. And they invariably involve a “Bait and Switch.” Sell the American people on a principle we can all agree on: “inclusivity,” “tolerance” and “anti-bullying.” Then, smuggle in an entirely different program under its name. That is how gender ideology ended up part of the mandatory “anti-bullying” curriculum, as opposed to the “sex education curriculum,” which is subject to parental opt out.

Abigail Shrier, California’s New Law Lets Schools Keep Secrets from Parents

I like the bait-and-switch framing, which I think reflects the intentions of the core gender ideologues.

Grifters gonna grift

GLAAD Paid For CEO’s Lavish Spending, Documents Reveal – The New York Times

Kamala’s Lawfare against conservatives

We keep looking for an issue, any issue, on which Kamala Harris differs with the Democratic left, but we keep coming up empty. That includes her party’s use of lawfare against political opponents, as an episode while she was California Attorney General reminds us.

Ms. Harris made headlines a decade ago by threatening to punish nonprofit groups that refused to turn over unredacted donor information. She demanded they hand to the state their federal IRS Form 990 Schedule B in the name of discovering “self dealing” or “improper loans.” The real purpose was to learn the names of conservative donors and chill future political giving—that is, political speech.

…

Free-market nonprofits challenged the Harris dragnet, suing the AG’s office in a case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court. In Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta in 2021, the High Court ruled 6-3 that the AG’s disclosure demand broke the law. The Court pointed out that a lower court had found not “a single, concrete instance in which pre-investigation collection of a Schedule B did anything to advance the Attorney General’s investigative, regulatory or enforcement efforts.”

The Court said California’s claim that it would protect donor information lacked credibility, since during the litigation plaintiffs discovered nearly 2,000 Schedule B forms “inadvertently posted to the Attorney General’s website.” It noted that the petitioners and donors faced “threats” and “retaliation.”

The Supreme Court said Ms. Harris’s policy posed a risk of chilling free-speech rights, and it cited its 1958 NAACP v. Alabama precedent, which protected First Amendment “associational” rights. Ms. Harris is citing her experience as state AG as a political asset, but the Bonta case is a warning to voters that she’s willing to use the law as a weapon against political opponents.

WSJ, Harris and the First Amendment

The Donald

The Low Road

The outrageousness of Trump’s remarks at the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual convention on Wednesday afternoon reminded everyone that Trump will always choose the low road of bigotry and smarmy insinuation over any kind of debate about ideas or policy. This is a man who launched his political career by suggesting, without evidence, that the country’s first black president held the office illegitimately because he was born abroad and therefore not a true American.

Damon Linker

Trump’s Shtick

Can Mr. Trump shift gears? He grew up, as I did, watching “The Ed Sullivan Show.” I’m sure it was on every Sunday night at 8 at the Trump house in Queens. On that show you saw every week the great Borscht Belt comics of 1950-70. Their timing—“Take my wife—please!”—is ingrained in him. What he does now is shtick, because he likes to entertain and is a performer. The boat’s sinking, the battery’s spitting, the shark’s coming! As Hannibal Lecter said, “I’d love to have you for dinner!”

This works so perfectly for those who support him. For everyone else it’s just more evidence of psychopathology. He has to freshen up his act. Can he?

Peggy Noonan, who is taking Kamala Harris very seriously.

It had never in the last nine years occurred to me that what Trump is doing is shtick. That’s just perfect!

If Trump continues his bizarre race-baiting instead of beating up the Border Czar on her failures and her past radical positions, he deserves to lose. (He deserves to lose categorically, but that’s another matter; I’m writing about political stupidity here.)

“But wait!”, you say. “Kamala has repudiated all her past radical positions!”

Yeah, right. And Barack Obama was against same-sex marriage, too. On that, too, Noonan is pitch-perfect:

On policy she is bold to the point of shameless. This week she essentially said: You know those policies I stood for that you don’t like? I changed my mind! Her campaign began blithely disavowing previous stands, with no explanation. From the New York Times’s Reid Epstein: “The Harris campaign announced on Friday that the vice president no longer wanted to ban fracking, a significant shift from where she stood four years ago.” Campaign officials said she also now supports “increased funding for border enforcement; no longer supported a single-payer health insurance program; and echoed Mr. Biden’s call for banning assault weapons but not a requirement to sell them to the federal government.” It’s remarkable, she’s getting away with it, and it’s no doubt just the beginning. It will make it harder for the Trump campaign with its devastating videos.

Will the left of her party let her tack toward moderation? Yes. She’s what they’ve got, and in any case people on the wings of both parties have a way of recognizing their own. Progressives aren’t protesting her new stands: That’s the dog that didn’t bark.

(Emphasis added)

The Culture

LOTR goes New Right?

I was dumbstruck to read that

Critical factions of the new right at home and the far right in Europe have latched on to Tolkien’s work. By “new right” I mean the post-Reagan right, a movement that embraces state power as a means of fighting and winning the culture war.

I still can’t quite believe it. It’s just so utterly tone-deaf.

Tolkien, in fact, was concerned with the way that good can become evil. He understood that even the best of people are vulnerable to the temptations of evil, and that that temptation is perhaps most powerful when we believe we are engaged in a fight against darkness.

That’s the brilliance of the conceit of the One Ring, the ring of ultimate power, in Tolkien’s trilogy. Throughout the story the ring calls out to the heroes, speaking to their hearts, telling them that only by claiming power can they defeat power. In a very real way, the will to power is the true enemy in Tolkien’s work. The identity of the villain, whether it’s Morgoth and Sauron in “The Silmarillion” or Sauron and Saruman in “The Lord of the Rings,” is less relevant than grasping after power.

Anyone over the age of 14 or so (where’s Jean Piaget when I need him?) who reads LOTR and doesn’t get a glimmering of what the One Ring is about is not very ight-bray.

Thanks, I think, to David French for so heavily taxing my credulity.

Childless Cat Ladies

I’ll concede that it’s super-smelly to the tone-sniffing police dogs to quip, during a campaign for U.S. Senate (as I recall), about “childless cat ladies” being a problem. But J.D. Vance was at fault for being too colorful, not for being entirely wrong:

I have seen in the political discourse around J.D. and children a sense of resentment over the idea that having children gives one greater wisdom.

I’m sorry, but it does. Not in every case — it is possible to be a bad mother or bad father, and to learn nothing from the experience of parenthood (J.D.’s own troubled childhood testifies to this — but generally, yes, of course it does. This doesn’t make the childless morally less worthy, or the childbearing morally greater. But for most people, having kids gives you more wisdom about life — wisdom to which the young and childless ought to defer.

…

having a baby changed the way I thought about politics and a lot of things, and it did so for a predictable reason: when you have kids, you have a stake in the future in a way you could not have had as a childless person. I moved away from liberalism toward conservatism dramatically after 1989, when I graduated from college and moved off campus. Suddenly having to pay taxes, and having to deal with the reality of crime, made me start thinking hard about what the world would be like if most people held the liberal views I did. I saw — and I felt — that my liberal ideals were incommensurate with lived reality. So I changed.

In a similar way, some of my untested conservative views began to change after my son was born. Without realizing what was happening to me at first, I suddenly became aware of how thin some of my libertarian views were when I thought about the kind of world that libertarianism would create for my son to grow up in.

…

Being a parent doesn’t immunize you against stupidity, but it really is an apprenticeship for life beyond the confines of the home. Future historians, I suspect, will look back on our culture and civilization and see a people who had an insane disregard for the future. This is not a point I’m making against liberals. It’s almost as true of conservatives. We are not a civilization that makes proper provision for our descendants.

…

A people that ceases having children will cease to exist. It is not the case that everyone who can have children should have children, but a culture in which childbearing isn’t seen as the norm, and indeed a good and noble thing that all members of society should support, is a culture that is already dead and doesn’t know it.

Rod Dreher, The Secret Life of Parents

Be it remembered that Dreher is thick with JD Vance, and indeed did an interview with him that launched Hillbilly Elegy, theretofore languishing, to the Best Seller list. But don’t you dare dismiss his argument on that basis.

Seduced and abandoned

The postliberal Right, heavily Christian, went almost overnight from Benedict Option to MAGA:

The outcome is that the postliberal right, which began in conversations around The Benedict Option about how to better catechize young people and create thick communities of Christian belief has, in just under 10 years, shifted into something primarily partisan and quite often linked to white nationalism.

The irony in all this is that just as the postliberal right has become maximally partisan in its outlook and sensibilities, it has been abandoned by the very party and leader it looked to for security. Last month’s Republican National Convention included the GOP abandoning its commitment to the cause for life, leaving behind what little remained of its support for natural marriage, and platforming Amber Rose, a social media star who routinely posts pornographic images on her social media handles and only a few months ago praised Satanist groups for helping women secure abortions. Five years after Ahmari sold many on the notion that the authoritarian leadership of Trump was necessary to advance the good life, the party of Trump now resembles a more sexually progressive version of the 1990s-era Democratic Party.

… The false human story told by many progressives and conservatives alike in the years since Reagan, a story built around individual identity creation and the limitless pursuit of wealth through “free” (but to what end?) markets, often at the cost of transcendent truth, had left many people and places adrift. 

The signs are not hard to identify even now: soaring rates of reported loneliness, an increased openness to euthanasia, shattered trust within communities, a strong anti-natal turn among many young Americans which has correlated unsurprisingly with freefalling birth rates, and all of that with a rising generation coming that is racked by anxiety and depression. These realities were present in 2015 and still are a decade later. If anything, the GOP’s capitulation on life and marriage suggests it will become even more entrenched on the American right as the GOP comes to be ever more dominated by what Matthew Walther has called the barstool conservatives. Yet the devouring need for truth, for genuine life together, and for higher goods than a purely individualistic freedom remain.

Jake Meador, normally of Mere Orthodoxy but writing this time for The Dispatch

Institutional arsonist new media grifters

Given this inclination toward mistrust it is not surprising that media producers, often working in fairly desperate financial positions themselves, are finding ways to profit off that mistrust and sell it to others.

Viewed sympathetically, media projects working in this space are good and legitimate journalistic endeavors meant to shine a light on corruption or injustice and to aid those who wish to correct that problem. Corruption should be exposed, of course. But also presumptions of corruption should not be normalized or encouraged. In practice what these works can do is provide ordinary people with scripts that teach them how to interpret the behavior of institutional leaders: That pastor said something that made me uncomfortable (maybe it was the Holy Spirit convicting you?), therefore he must be abusive. That pastor quoted Tim Keller favorably, therefore he must be a shepherd for sale. In short, these projects of institutional arson encourage community members in habits and practices that corrode common life because they encourage them to assume the worst of their own leaders and ascribe motivations to them which may or may not even be true. The problem, at bottom, is simply this: Common life is not safe, nor does it necessarily tend toward each individual becoming exactly who they wish to be defined purely by themselves. To live in community is to be obstructed and offended and frustrated and then learning that oftentimes in those offenses and obstructions and frustrations that you were the one at fault. It is, in short, to be confronted by the truth that Eliot spoke of here:

You are not the same people who left that station …
Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark.
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.

The common life we experienced through RUF and the church and the university and through many other places besides was a life that forced us to recognize that we needed to change, that we could not be the people who had once left that station, nor were we now the people who would one day disembark.

What is troubling about institutional arsonist media is that in its attempt to spotlight genuine abuses it often overreaches and consumes many good people and good places that unfortunately found themselves in the blast radius. And when those good institutions and good leaders are gone, how will the next generation have that experience that we did? Who will tell them the things we needed to hear? Who will walk with them as they learn and grow?

I cannot speak to the motives of the people who produce these works, of course. But I can see the ramifications by simply looking around and observing: Sometimes the sin of one institutional leader becomes a template that is then retroactively applied to anyone unfortunate enough to slightly resemble that failed leader. In other cases, the habits of suspicion and cynicism have caused us to leap to conclusions, ascribing the least charitable motives and not even pausing to consider if we might be wrong.

Healthy institutions, above all else, require trust. I am grateful that in my formative years that trust still held. I hope that by the time my kids are the age I was in those vital years that they will be as fortunate as I was. But that hope now hangs from rather slender threads.

Jake Meador again, back on his home turf (emphasis added).

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Slithery slimy things

Donald Trump and Project 2025

Remember how Donald Trump recited a rhyme about a snake, likening immigrants to the snake?

But of course, he’s the snake. We knew it when we “took him in.” January 6 confirmed it. And he’s still a snake, because he’s a narcissist:

In the heart of D.C., where ambitions brew,
The Heritage Foundation found a snake,
He promised to make America new,
They thought, “What a promising take.”

“Oh, naive wonks,” the snake did cry,
“Won’t you give me shelter and care?
I’m Donald Trump, give me a try,
I’ll make the nation fair.”

The Foundation, seeing dollars bright,
Brought him in from the storm,
“With our wisdom, you’ll lead the right,
And we’ll keep each other warm.”

They showered him with strategy,
Plans to make the country strong.
He nodded and smiled, seemingly with glee,
As they helped him along.

But once he’d gained a foothold, sure,
The snake began to twist.
His love of self remained so pure,
The Foundation’s dreams dismissed.

He reveled in the spotlight’s glare,
His ego paved the way.
His positions showed that he didn’t care,
About anything they’d say.

“Oh, snake!” they cried, “Why did you feign?
We trusted you with care!
You’ve left us out in the rain,
Your selfishness laid bare.” 

The snake just laughed, a selfish grin,
“You knew my nature well,
You forgot I must win,
Now you can go to Hell.”

He left them there, ambitions crushed,
As he pursued his own acclaim.
The Foundation, feeling foolish, hushed,
Had only themselves to blame.

Jonah Goldberg, Donald Trump is the Snake

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Monday, 7/29/24

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

Politics

Be it remembered

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

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

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

Toxic Masculinity rightly so called

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

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

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

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

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

So what?

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

A “dissent” to something Andrew Sullivan said.

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

Kamala

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

Kamala Harris (via Andrew Sullivan)

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

…

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

Andrew Sullivan

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

Public Affairs

Beacon of hope

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

No storefronts? No problem!

Irish microcosm

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

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

Behold! Sustainability!

…

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

Paul Kingsnorth

Music today

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

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

Or you can align yourself with the other view:

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

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

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

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

Ted Gioia

“Private” matters

Remembering Crunchy Rod

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

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

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

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

Living decently

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

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

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Pre-Olympic notebook dump

Public Affairs

Everybody wants everything

Quite recently, I quoted Zaid Jilani:

In our political duopoly, you have to endorse one set of leaders or another in order to do anything constructive.

I responded that perhaps my rejection of the duopoly is because I’m not really trying “to do anything constructive” politically.

I stand by that, and I’m now reinforced by Isaiah Berlin via Alan Jacobs. Berlin:

[I]t is in fact impossible to combine Christian virtues, for example meekness or the search for spiritual salvation, with a satisfactory, stable, vigorous, strong society on earth. Consequently a man must choose. To choose to lead a Christian life is to condemn oneself to political impotence: to being used and crushed by powerful, ambitious, clever, unscrupulous men; if one wishes to build a glorious community like those of Athens or Rome at their best, then one must abandon Christian education and substitute one better suited to the purpose.

Jacobs adds:

I think Berlin is right about Machiavelli, and I think Machiavelli is right about Christianity too. The whole argument illustrates Berlin’s one great theme: the incompatibility of certain “Great Goods” with one another. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the inability to grasp this point is one of the greatest causes of personal unhappiness and social unrest. Millions of American Christians don’t see how it might be impossible to reconcile (a) being a disciple of Jesus Christ with (b) ruling over their fellow citizens and seeking retribution against them. Many students at Columbia University would be furious if you told them that they can’t simultaneously (a) participate in what they call protest and (b) fulfill the obligations they’ve taken on as students. They want both! They demand both! 

Everybody wants everything, that’s all. They’re willing to settle for everything.

If you are fearful about condemning yourself “to political impotence: to being used and crushed by powerful, ambitious, clever, unscrupulous men,” David Brooks has some help to offer: Love in Harsh Times and Other Coping Mechanisms

America’s world mission

After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration imposed “super sanctions,” promising that such measures would bring the Russian economy to its knees. These measures, and the confidence with which they were imposed, reflected the old consensus, which presupposed the end-of-history dream world. But the outcomes contradict that fantasy. Countries commanding nearly half of global GDP refused to join our sanctions regime, exposing the obvious fact that the “rules-based international order” is not international and never has been. It has always been an instrument of American power.

I’m reluctant to use the word “empire.” After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States did not establish colonies. But the term has become unavoidable. The international order was made in our image, an ersatz empire, as recent events have revealed. Faced with the prospect of Russian aggression, the demilitarized nations of Europe are forced to operate as American vassal states.

…

I’m not a foreign policy expert, but I venture to guess that the combined military firepower of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran (and its proxies) is substantial, perhaps equal to any force that the United States and its allies can bring to bear on short notice. How is it that we have allowed such a coalition to emerge? The Journal reports this expert opinion: “Russia and the other nations have set aside historic frictions to collectively counter what they regard as a U.S.-dominated global system.” I marvel at the formulation, “what they regard.” In effect, our policymakers suggest that the Russia-China-Iran-North Korea alliance rests on a misconception. Putin and Xi need to wake up to the truth. The “global system” is not U.S. dominated but U.S. sponsored—for the sake of world peace, prosperity, and the triumph of abortion and gay rights . . . er, human rights. It is nothing so narrow and parochial as the imposition of America’s national interests or our activist ideologies.

Maybe the Great and the Good in Washington recognize reality, and they mouth the old pieties out of habit; or perhaps they sense (accurately) the political danger of being the first to break with established orthodoxies. Can you imagine the domestic furor that would be visited upon a Secretary of State who suggested (again, accurately) that a foreign policy promoting gay rights and other progressive causes is a virtue-signaling luxury we can’t afford in an era of great-power competition? But I worry that we are led by true believers. Some imagine that the United States has been ordained by God to defend “democracy.” Others think that we have a secular mission to promote “reproductive freedom” and LGBTQ rights around the world (the arc of history, and so on).

R.R. Reno

Blaming the messenger

In 2023 Christopher Rufo exposed the fact that Texas Children’s Hospital was maiming minors in the service of transgender ideology. The Texas Legislature passed a bill prohibiting transgender medical procedures for minors. Now Rufo reports that the Texas Children’s Hospital has persisted in practicing “gender-affirming care,” committing Medicaid fraud in order to fund the prohibited procedures (“The Murky Business of Transgender Medicine,” City Journal). Federal officials have not stood idle. As the controversy became public in 2023, they were “busy assembling information.” The target? The whistleblowers! “A federal prosecutor, Tina Ansari, threatened the original whistleblower [Eithan] Haim with prosecution.” Then, in early June, “the stakes intensified. Three heavily armed federal agents knocked on Haim’s door and gave him a summons. According to the documents, he had been indicted on four felony counts of violating medical privacy laws. If convicted, Haim faces the possibility of ten years in federal prison.” A sadly familiar story. The rule of law turned into an ideological weapon.

R.R. Reno

Trade-offs

Writing for the Washington Post, Megan McArdle explored the questions posed by the CrowdStrike IT meltdown. “It’s quite efficient for one firm to serve a large number of important customers, as CrowdStrike does,” she wrote. “In some ways, these concentrated players might provide greater reliability, because they develop a lot of expertise by serving many users, and they can invest more in R&D and security than Bob’s Friendly Local Software Co. can. But when outages happen, they happen to seemingly everyone, everywhere, all at once, leaving users no alternatives. How best to try to manage the trade-off between efficiency and redundancy is a hard question for another day. For the moment, the important thing is to recognize that it exists, and that there’s no easy way around it. We probably should have thought more about such trade-offs when the Great Efficiency Drive was underway. We’ll have to think even harder about them now.”

The Morning Dispatch

Model collapse

Training artificial intelligence (AI) models on AI-generated text quickly leads to the models churning out nonsense, a study has found. This cannibalistic phenomenon, termed model collapse, could halt the improvement of large language models (LLMs) as they run out of human-derived training data and as increasing amounts of AI-generated text pervade the Internet. “The message is, we have to be very careful about what ends up in our training data,” says co-author Zakhar Shumaylov, an AI researcher at the University of Cambridge, UK. Otherwise, “things will always, provably, go wrong”. he says.” The team used a mathematical analysis to show that the problem of model collapse is likely to be universal, affecting all sizes of language model that use uncurated data, as well as simple image generators and other types of AI. (Source: nature.com)

John Ellis News Items

Luxury Beliefs

Young Rob Henderson has been deservedly dining out on his memoir Troubled and his coinage of “luxury beliefs.” But once you enter public debates, you not only attract crazies and trolls, but solid critics as well.

Yasha Mounk finds Henderson’s definition of luxury beliefs wanting:

Ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. And a core feature of a luxury belief is that the believer is sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief. There is this kind of element of duplicity, whether conscious or not.

He offers a substitute:

Luxury beliefs are ideas professed by people who would be much less likely to hold them if they were not insulated from, and had therefore failed seriously to consider, their negative effects.

The differences aren’t just semantic, and between the two of them, I agree with Mounk.

Now I await Mounk’s critics to further refine the definition.

Partisan politics

The Populist id weighs in on Harris

I’m not at all sure I agree with him on this, but Nick Catoggio has some pointed thoughts on GOP reactions to de facto Democrat nominee Kamala Harris:

I don’t believe the jabs about her being a “DEI hire” are part of a strategic calculus. I think they’re a matter of the populist id flaring at the thought of being governed by a black woman who’s not part of the ideological tribe.

It’s a preview of the next four years if Kamala Harris figures out a way to beat Trump this fall, I suspect. Unlike any presidency in my lifetime, her term would be wracked by obstruction, paralysis, and public disillusionment.

If you thought congressional Republicans were reluctant to compromise with Barack Obama, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Gaslighted about the border

Remember when Joe Biden made Kamala Harris his border czar? Well, bunky, that’s no longer operative. All the cool kids agree that it never happened. Do you want to be know for cooties? C’mon, man!

At this stage of things, perhaps it’s not surprising that reporters aren’t scrutinizing Harris’s record with the same zeal with which they dove into “Russiagate,” but this marks a new low. We told you she was this thing that we’re now telling you she never was. What’s the word for that again? Right. Gaslighting.

…

We can be sure of this much: If the border was not a mess, if this was not a winning GOP issue, Kamala Harris would be running on it right now. And her media sock-puppet friends—who seem to believe in nothing except making sure she wins—would be celebrating “The Greatest Border Czar Who Ever Was.”

Peter Savodnik, Gaslighting the Public on Kamala Harris as ‘Border Czar’

I understood — indeed, sympathized with — the desperation to keep Trump from the Presidency in 2016. But a lie is a lie, and they’re lying to us again.

It’s not that “they must think we’re stupid.” They do think that we’re stupid, and we give them grounds to think that day after day.

Is this half-apology better than none?

I am writing to offer an apology. The short version is this: I severely underestimated the threat posed by a Donald Trump presidency. The never-Trumpers—who never seemed to stop issuing their warnings and critiques—struck me as psychologically and emotionally weak people with porcelain-fragile sensibilities. It turns out their instincts were significantly better attuned than my own.

…

My judgment of colleagues and of various conservatives who opposed Trump was privately severe. On the surface, I fully granted the strength of their concerns. But in the confines of my mind, I concluded that they were moral free riders. They wouldn’t sully themselves by voting for Donald Trump, but they would benefit from many of his policies. I have been asked why I voted for him when I live in Tennessee where my vote was not necessary. I voted for him exactly because of my determination not to be a free rider. I would bear the weight of the decision.

…

I knew I was wrong as January 6 approached and the president started calling for Vice President Mike Pence to reject certification of the electoral college results. This, of course, was on top of his disturbing phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State urging him to “find” additional votes. At the same time, he encouraged Americans to mass at the Capitol to support his cause.

I do not suggest that the Americans who went to the Capitol, the great majority of them peaceful, bore ill intent, but I do think that the president intended to create a spectacle that would put pressure on Mike Pence to take a dramatic and extra-legal step that would fundamentally betray the American political order and its traditions.

Hunter Baker, When Pragmatic Politics Goes Bad: An Apology to the Never Trumpers

This column is ever-so-timely again. I say that not to praise the de facto Democrat nominee, nor even to imply that she’s a “lesser evil.” I say it, first, as a call to repentance from the behavior that got us into this awful mess. Insanity, by one pop-definition, is doing what you’ve always done and expecting a different result.

For me, part of repentance is rejecting “lesser-of-two-evils” voting calculus. Two parties of some sort were (inadvertently?) in our national DNA from the start; if one must win a majority (not plurality) of electors to gain the Presidency, then third parties are overwhelmingly “spoilers” (though not quite inevitably). I nevertheless will spoil my heart out again this quadrennium — taking care not to despise those who make the “binary” choice.

For any Christian Trump voter in 2024 (I suspect Baker will be in that camp in a few months unless he’s changed a lot since 1/21/21, when his apology was dated) whose head or heart is not dead must extend a bit of grace to those who can’t bring themselves to vote for him.

Trump as media favorite

Be at remembered that the media gave Donald Trump so much Free Press in 2016 that they virtually elected him. And while they clearly wanted to be coded as anti-Trump (their “stated preference”), the attention they gave him smells like revealed preference to me. A lot of people do like to watch him — a preference I never understood from the day a friend of mine went gaga over The Art of the Deal.

Adiaphora

Dinosaur

I like technology. I was, for my generation, an early adopter of computers and I spend (too) many hours per day on my MacBook.

But after a few years on Facebook, I dropped it. I got on it to communicate among my high school classmates, but most of them weren’t on it. And it got kind of overwhelmed with commercialism. Maybe there were plugins or something to suppress all that, but I dropped it anyway.

I dropped my Twitter account, too, unable to bear a 1/100 signal-to-noise ratio. I eventually signed up again, for some incomprehensible reason, only to find that the ratio is now 1/10000. I haven’t logged on in months. Is there any more enervating activity in the world than doom-scrolling?

I thought those were two pretty solid decisions. But now I constantly hear things on podcasts like “You can find it on our Facebook page.” (Oof! No I cannot! Why don’t you have a page on the open web?) And yesterday, the President of the United States announced on Twitter/X that he’s ending his campaign for re-election. (Mercifully, professional doomscrollers quickly surface major news like this.)

I still think those were solid decisions, but they seem pretty tame compared friends flirting with stuff like this and repeating mêmes like “be the friction you want to see in the world.”

A blast from the Covid past

I am radically testing the limits of what it fundamentally means to be outdoors by erecting walls, putting a roof on top of those walls, and then insisting that it is still outdoors. This bold subversion of commonly accepted norms challenges and deconstructs “outdoorsness” as we know it. Moreover, by performing this act of deconstruction through a literal act of construction, I am illuminating the contradictory double nature of the mere act of existing. To this end, I search for the strange within the familiar, the indoors within the outdoors, the technically compliant within the clearly unsafe.

Simon Henriques, I Am the Designer of This Restaurant’s Outdoor Seating Space, and This Is My Artist’s Statement

Why resign on August 20?

After half a century in politics, Senator Bob Menendez, found guilty of all 16 counts in his corruption trial, will resign, effective August 20. Why then? Well, as Katherine Tully-McManus notes, senators get paid on the 5th and 20th of each month. Trust old “Gold Bar Bob” to check out after payday. (Politico)

The Free Press

Technology will never end work (at least until we re-jigger our mimesis)

Futurists and their ilk keep predicting the elimination of work by technology, but it never arrives. By some reckonings, we’re working more than ever; we’re certainly not approaching zero work, not even asymptotically.

What gives? We give. We keep working because we want more. We want everything. (See Alan Jacobs, above)

Disciples of René Girard make careers out of analyzing such things, so I’ll dabbling lest I make a fool of myself.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Saturday politics

Convention and its dramatis personae

Convention tidbits

All political conventions are cringe-worthy idolatry fests. But even by those low standards, there was so much abject Trump flattery going on among his cultish speakers that if this had been Kim Jong-un’s convention, he’d have told his propagandists, “Hey, fellas, dial it back a little.”

Matt Labash

I do not take idolatry as a harmless pecadillo.

Trump made many false claims about immigration throughout his remarks, but the most absurd was: “You know who’s taking the jobs, the jobs that are created? One hundred and seven percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens.”

Katherine Mangu-Ward

How does one take that “seriously but not literally”?

Compared with Trump’s acceptance speeches in 2016 and 2020, which were unusual enough, this one was unrestrained, self-indulgent and undisciplined, radiating a sense of grievance. It was Trump untethered, which is the right way to understand what his second term would be. We can’t say we haven’t been warned.

Peter Wehner

Oh give him a break. He’s an old man who has a limited playlist.

60 seconds of unified tone

It was then that Trump struck the tone of national unity that he had teased in interviews leading up to the convention, promising to be a president for all Americans. “I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America,” he said. “I’m here tonight to lay out a vision for the whole nation, to every citizen. Whether you’re young or old, man or woman, Democrat, Republican, or independent, black or white, Asian or Hispanic—I extend to you a hand of loyalty and of friendship. Together, we will lead America to new heights of greatness like the world has never seen before.”

That unified tone last for about … a full 60 seconds. No, Trump went on to spend most of the more than 90-minute speech—the longest nomination acceptance speech in modern history—riffing on old motifs like, as Drucker put it on Dispatch Live late last night, the Grateful Dead at a jam: Same song, different flavor. Far from revealing a changed man, reformed by a near-death experience, Trump’s speech showed a man unchained and more-or-less as he’s ever been.

The Morning Dispatch

Hold onto your hat

We saw something epochal: the finalization and ratification of a change in the essential nature of one of the two major political parties of the world’s most powerful nation. It is now a populist, working-class, nationalist party. That is where its sympathies, identification and affiliation lie. There will be shifts, stops and accommodations in the future, no party ever has a clear line, history intervenes, but it is changed, and there will be no going back.

…

It should be added that it was creepy to see members of the Trump family dominating prime speaking slots all week. This was carelessly cultish, and in its carelessness insolent. Mr. Trump’s speech was surprisingly muted, scattered and low-energy. It lacked drama even though he was narrating what it is like to be shot.

…

A final point. We have, many of us, for some time—months, certainly the past few weeks—felt various degrees and kinds of horror. But oh these are exciting times. Things are moving, shifting. Again, this is big history. Hold on to your hat.

Peggy Noonan

Bootstrapping

Vance had a grandmother who encouraged him—and, perhaps equally important, discouraged him—in the right ways. And Vance did what poor white trash types who do not wish to remain poor white trash do: He got out, in his case by joining the Marine Corps, one of the great exemplars of American meritocracy. He went to a good state college and an Ivy League law school, he married a woman from an immigrant family with values superior to the ones exhibited by the Real Americans™ who brought him into the world, took a job that paid a lot of money, and made the kind of social and economic connections that give a man options in life. He rails against multinational corporations and “woke” colleges and then goes home to his wife, a lawyer whose clients have included the Walt Disney Co. and the University of California; he himself is a former Silicon Valley venture capitalist, not a small-town hardware-shop owner. He rails against self-interested billionaires while Peter Thiel scratches him behind the ear. 

One must respect the hustle. Even if one retches, just a little.

Kevin D. Williamson

But Kevin: Isn’t this pretty low-hanging fruit? Won’t any Presidential or Vice-Presidential nominee be, ipso facto, “privileged”? Does every up-from-poverty success per se disprove a populist “they’re screwing you” pitch to those still in poverty? Isn’t Biden screwing “the working man” by forgiving elites’ student loans? Have I left out any Latin shorthand?

Let’s try another language then. ¿Porque no los dos? Why can’t oppression be real yet surmountable for a few?

Absolution and a call for revenge

Vance talked about working-class white people the way liberal Democrats used to talk about Black communities in the early 1970s. At 39, he is too young to remember those days, but Republicans back then charged liberals with abetting the misery of Black communities by making excuses for their challenges. And they had a point: Half a century ago, some liberals did indulge in a kind of cringey, paternalistic excuse-making that depicted Black people as mindless victims, unable to control themselves when faced with the relentless forces of capitalism and consumerism.

Conservatives countered that the narrative of victimhood never serves anyone except the political leaders who reap votes from convincing people that they are merely hapless targets who need to be protected from a world full of sinister conspirators. Those who genuinely cared about the collapse of the cities (and there were more than a few who didn’t, to be sure) stressed the importance of personal choices and the power of individual responsibility. They refused to accept policies that led, in their view, to permanent dependence on the state. Perhaps most important, they sharply criticized the language of victimhood. And Vance, until recently, seemed to embrace those old-school, center-right views.

So it was particularly jarring to hear Vance talking down to Appalachians and working-class households in ways that he himself likely would have found insulting before ambition snuffed out his ability to feel shame. All his previous talk of responsibility and initiative was gone, replaced by images of a heartland full of victims, a Norman Rockwell world now inundated with fentanyl and cheap Chinese electronics by Washington’s scheming elites.

Through it all, you could almost hear the issuance of absolution and the call for revenge: It’s not your fault that your unemployed son lives at home, staring at screens and getting high all day. Biden and Beijing and Wall Street did that. We’ll settle the score somehow. It was a night of messages every bit as infantilizing and degrading as any Vance and the old GOP would have once castigated had they been offered by the old left.

Tom Nichols, Hillbilly Excuses

What jumped out at me here wasn’t “JD Vance is a phony” but “Republicans are now treating dysfunctional white people as Democrats once treated black people” (and unlike Vance, I’m old enough personally to remember those days).

In this, Tom Nichols is running on a track perfectly parallel to Kevin D. Williamson:

I’d been writing about lower-class, mainly white dysfunction for a few years at that point, and Vance had just published his famous book, which I had reviewed in Commentary. I admired his work tremendously—and, naturally, envied him some, too. We had a good conversation. 

Watching his descent into … whatever it is he has become … has been dispiriting. Have you ever had an acquaintance, someone you see only infrequently, who had a terrible problem with addiction or some sickness, and every time you saw them they were noticeably worse? I see Vance only in the news, but that is kind of what it is like. Or like visiting your hometown every few years and seeing it decline. 

Declining hometowns are a theme of Vance’s. It’s mostly bulls—t, of course. What’s true of much of Appalachia is true of much of the Rust Belt: Nothing happened to those communities. Eastern Kentucky isn’t poor because of NAFTA or the WTO—it was poor when Andrew Jackson was president, and it has been poor since.

(See more of this Williamson column above)

Second-hand synthesis

Synthesizing what I read of it, the GOP Convention was a big, cheerful, sexy, vulgar, idolatrous pagan bacchanalia.

Of course, when the line between enthusiasm and idolatry is crossed at a political convention can be subtle, but I’m in a Christian tradition oft-accused of idolatry for saying of the Theotokos and the Saints things less hyperbolic than were repeatedly said of Trump this week.

One silver lining: Zombie Reaganism is as good and truly dead as conservatism in GOP version 2024.

Twixt now and November

Still beatable?

After beginning his speech with calls for unity — “There is no victory in winning for half of America” — the former president turned the convention into a Trump rally, attacking “crazy Nancy Pelosi” and slamming Biden by name after Republicans said that he would rise above the insults and not mention the president.

He ripped into Democrats on Social Security, Medicare, the border and energy policy, saying America was “stupid” under Biden while ad-libbing about Hannibal Lecter and having the next Republican convention in Venezuela.

Trump was suddenly thin on the unity and heavy on the unhinged, as his speech became tiresome and stretched past midnight on the East Coast. Biden may have messed up the June debate, but Trump’s own cognitive functioning was messing up the July convention.

Patrick Healy, Trump Goes Off the Rails. This Guy Is Still Beatable

Where the Democratic opportunity lies

[T]he problem with MAGA — and here is where the Democratic opportunity lies — is that it emerges from a mode of consciousness that is very different from the traditional American consciousness.

The American consciousness has traditionally been an abundance consciousness …

Many foreign observers saw us, and we saw ourselves, as the dynamic nation par excellence. We didn’t have a common past, but we dreamed of a common future. Our sense of home was not rooted in blood-and-soil nationalism; our home was something we were building together. Through most of our history, we were not known for our profundity or culture but for living at full throttle.

MAGA, on the other hand, emerges from a scarcity consciousness, a zero-sum mentality: If we let in tons of immigrants they will take all our jobs; if America gets browner, “they” will replace “us.” MAGA is based on a series of victim stories: The elites are out to screw us. Our allies are freeloading off us. Secular America is oppressing Christian America.

Viewed from the traditional American abundance mind-set, MAGA looks less like an American brand of conservatism and more like a European brand of conservatism. It resembles all those generations of Russian chauvinists who argued that the Russian masses embody all that is good but they are threatened by aliens from the outside. MAGA looks like a kind of right-wing Marxism, which assumes that class struggle is the permanent defining feature of politics. MAGA is a fortress mentality, but America has traditionally been defined by a pioneering mentality. MAGA offers a strong shell, but not much in the way of wings needed to soar.

If Democrats are to thrive, they need to tap into America’s dynamic cultural roots and show how they can be applied to the 21st century ….

David Brooks, What Democrats Need to Do Now

On the other hand …

[C]anceling student loan debt would be a massive unforced error for the newly minted Biden administration. It would show that one of the new Democratic president’s highest priorities during a pandemic and a destabilizing economic shock is to provide a bailout to people who are overwhelmingly likely to end up as members of the upper-middle class. It would amount to a transfer payment from contractors and service workers to high-earning knowledge workers and other white-collar employees. As such, it would also accelerate trends in the Democratic Party that would leave it vulnerable to a Republican Party increasingly trying to rebrand itself as a champion of the working class.

…

As economist Thomas Piketty and others have pointed out in recent years, center-left political parties suffer at the ballot-box when they come to represent the interests of the upper-middle class at the expense of the working class, allowing the nationalist-populist right to make inroads with the latter. This has happened in a series of European countries in recent years, and it’s happening in the U.S. as well, with the Democrats enjoying surging support in inner-ring suburbs but losing ground in working-class, exurban, and rural areas. In the 2020 election, Democrats were able to defeat Donald Trump with this coalition, but they got tripped up down ballot, most likely falling short of a Senate majority, losing seats in the House, and failing to flip even a single state legislature.

…

Sixty-five percent of Americans haven’t graduated from a four-year college. Will that large majority really favor a multi-billion-dollar bailout for people who hold those degrees when their indebtedness was freely taken on and has granted them a credential that gives them a ticket to lifetime higher earnings?

Damon Linker, The Class Folly of Canceling Student Loans (11/18/2020)

I don’t know that Trump or Vance has spoken about this, but if I judge persuadable undecideds accurately, they should, because despite warnings from people like Linker, Biden pandered to the wealthy in this way and others.

Whence conspiracism?

When you don’t know how things work, everything looks like a conspiracy.

Jonah Goldberg

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.