Category: Political Matters

Notebook dump 7/18/24

Politics prescinding the Convention

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

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

Ross on a Roll

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

The latest (as I write):

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

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

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

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

Philosophical Anthropology in Politics

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

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

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

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

Will Butler, PA chasten The Donald?

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

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

Democracy’s relevance to Election 2024

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

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

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

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

Fundamentals

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

Peter Wehner, A Moment to Seek Our Better Angels

The Trump revolution, version 2024

Rooting for laundry

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

The Dispatch

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

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

…

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

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

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

JD Vance

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

Which is to say: He is nobody.

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

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

Bret Stephens

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

America’s Hitler?

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

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

Also from Jilani:

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

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

Alex Jones a truth-teller?

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

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

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

You got a problem with that comparison? Really?

Political converts

Vance the “convert”

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

…

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

…

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

Damon Linker, The Convert

J Budziszewski changes his mind

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

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

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

Excerpt:

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

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

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

Changing his mind about Trump — with a twist

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

Justin Smith-Ruiu, World Spirit on Feedback

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

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

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

Miscellany

A different kind of conservative

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

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

Non-stochastic violence

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

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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.

Public Affairs 7/15/24

Assassination attempt aside …

Republicans Will Regret a Second Trump Term

I have excluded from this essay some of the parade of horribles that Trump’s critics on the left expect from a second term, from anxieties about the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025” scheme (which Trump has distanced himself from) to terror about the end of democracy itself. Those are fears I don’t share because, like many conservatives, I don’t think Trump is strong or smart enough to blow down the pillars of American institutional life. On the contrary, it’s precisely because I think those pillars will hold that I expect that a second Trump term will mainly be shambolic, angry, divisive, not catastrophic but profoundly corrosive.

If this is considered a conservative win, I wonder what a loss looks like.

Bret Stephens, Republicans Will Regret a Second Trump Term

(Published before Saturday’s assassination attempt)

Is Project 2025 the spawn of demons?

Project 2025 [is] a populist-inflected restatement of movement-conservative priorities that the right has been trying and failing to implement for decades — plus a long list of résumés of potential footsoldiers for a guerrilla war inside the administrative state.

Ross Douthat

Ross is right and brilliantly succinct. I appreciate his swimming against the stream of Chicken Littleism.

At the same time, “movement-conservative priorities” include disrupting if not destroying the “deep state,” which includes Civil Service employees who might slow-walk an administration’s initiatives, and for that reason if no other I’m no fan of Project 2025 and it’s detailed plan for replacing civil servants with political cronies.

High floor, low ceiling

Just as there is an immense amount of rage against Trump’s enemies, Trump’s base also tends to have fun. They’re very angry at their enemies and very happy with each other. They’re not just energized by Trump, they’re entertained by him. Everything in the Republican Party — from the anger to the joy — is just more intense now. That intensity is a source of Trump’s strength — he has an incredibly high floor of support — and a source of his weakness. He has a low ceiling, in part because the entire culture of MAGA can be off-putting and even repulsive to those who don’t share its passion.

David French, in a New York Times panel discussion about this week’s GOP convention and related matters.

Assassination attempt aftermath

Genius

Mr. Trump had heard at least one shot, maybe a few. One grazed his ear. He hit the deck, was lifted up in shock, pale. He should have been swiftly rushed from the stage. But no, this is the great genius of American political theater and the reflex kicked in, the same reflex that kicked in after he had Covid and was returned to the White House from the hospital, and wanted to pose on the White House balcony in a Superman shirt with a big S, and somebody talked him out of it. So too at the rally Saturday—he got to his feet, he didn’t wipe the blood from his face, he wanted you to see and understand the whole picture. He got his look of tough-guy fury, the one he showed for weeks walking into court in New York, the one on the mug shot. He raised that fist, pumped it, shouted “Fight,” as part of the crowd began to chant “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”

It was epic. Whatever you feel about him, whatever your stand, grant him one of the great gangsta moves of American political history.

Peggy Noonan

This, too:

The Compact editor Sohrab Ahmari tweeted that Trump’s instinct—to reflexively gesture in rebellion after being shot at—is “evidence of a truly extraordinary man.” He is more than a little right. Extraordinary, after all, is not so much a moral descriptor as an aesthetic one.

Tyler Austin Harper, A Legendary American Photograph

Trump went down as a fatmouthing politician, and rose as a pagan demigod. If Jesus Christ and George Washington came down from heaven to replace Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on the Democratic ticket, Trump would still likely win in a landslide.

Rod Dreher

Trump survived and followed his instincts as a showman and a democratic politician of uncommon instincts to transform it into an indelible image of courage and defiance that will help to shape the remainder of the presidential campaign and Trump’s long-term political legacy and reputation.

Damon Linker

I fear Trump will get a sympathy boost from this event. It may be only a couple percentage points in the upcoming election. But that could be decisive in a close contest. If so, it is even more imperative than before that the Democrats replace Biden with a stronger candidate.

Ilya Somin . Not sympathy, dummy; adulation for his “gangsta move” after standing back up.

Stochastic violence

Thinking about the attempted assassination, I appreciate that someone suggested that it was an instance of stochastic terrorism or stochastic violence. I appreciate it because it’s the Right that’s usually accused of fomenting such violence .

But I can’t see how that “stochastic” theory is falsifiable, nor can I imagine it providing a convincing explanation of any discrete act of violence. We have clever people who think that non-falsifiable propositions are gibberish, but that’s not the end of the subject for me.

Stochastic violence is almost self-evidently real, something one can know tacitly or intuitively, despite inability to falsify it. It is a reason for decent people freely to refrain from incendiary speech, but I reject legal restrictions on free speech based on it.

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, 7/13/24

Democrats’ “revealed preference”

[I]t’s always been clear that the Democratic Party in the age of Trump isn’t as NeverTrump as the truest NeverTrump believers, that it usually chooses “mundane imperatives” and self-interest over emergency measures geared to existential stakes.
…
Time and again, from 2016 to the present, the Democratic Party has treated Trumpism not as a “civic emergency” but as a political opportunity, a golden chance to win over moderate and right-leaning voters with the language of anti-authoritarianism while avoiding substantive concessions to these voters and actually moving farther to the left.
…
I’m not saying that you can’t find moments here and there where Democrats moderated on some issue or made a patriotic concession for the anti-Trump cause. But the overarching pattern is better represented by the various times when Democrats deliberately boosted MAGA candidates in Republican primaries on the theory that they’d be easier to beat — or for that matter by the fact that right now, as Biden teeters on the brink, his vice president and natural successor is a figure chosen entirely for the “mundane imperatives” of Democratic interest groups, rather for a scenario where she might be called upon to face Trump with democracy supposedly at stake.
…
The idea of an anti-Trump “coalition of all democratic forces” has been prominent in the media and the commentariat, and there you have seen big shifts and concessions. But these have mostly been made by anti-Trump conservatives and ex-conservatives moving leftward, not by the political coalition that they’re joining.

Ross Douthat

Douthat goes on to concede some ways in which the Democrats’ approach may not be cynical and deceptive, but I’ve quoted enough. For the rest, my link gets you past the paywall.

Smart people swapping stupid barbs?

It seems that for Roberts, the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump is so transgressive as to demand the immediate intervention of the Supreme Court.

Jamelle Bouie, proving that smart people with blind spots can write stupid things.

If only Bouie had written

It seems that for Roberts, the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump, combined with Trump’s pledge to prosecute Joe Biden and lower court rulings that President’s have no immunity from criminal prosecution, are so transgressive as to demand intervention of the Supreme Court

I wouldn’t have bothered writing my own stupid things.

Lies in service of “higher truths”

This past week, a Pennsylvania man was arrested for the murder and dismemberment of a 14-year-old boy. The man allegedly lured the boy to his death through Grindr, a gay hookup app. The boy’s last Snapchat image was posted at 2:30 in the morning, on a dark road, with the comment that he was just out for a late-night walk. Nobody ever heard from him again.

Several grim and (one would think) obvious lessons should immediately present themselves to all concerned adults here. However, it appears that the adults are determined not to learn them, because this particular boy believed he was a girl. Consequently, all their energy has been spent on making sure nobody “misgenders” him in death, using him as a mascot of “anti-trans” violence, and taking the opportunity to lobby for new “hate-crime” legislation.

…

[The Free Press sent Ben Kawaller to Laramie, Wyoming, to talk to people about Matthew Shepard, murdered there in 1998 and lionized ever since.]

One resistant young gay man asks Ben what’s to be gained by reassessing the crime. Ben asks whether he would agree that it’s worthwhile simply because the reassessment might be true. The young man pauses for a moment, then stutters a bit, casting about. “There’s a point when you as a person should look around and see, like…read the room. And what has happened, this is really important, the, the…understanding of what happened to Matthew means a lot to a lot of people. So just leave it alone.”

Notice that this young man isn’t even bothering to debate the history or discredit Jimenez. He is saying that even if Jimenez were right, it wouldn’t matter. The truth wouldn’t matter.

Bethel McGrew, What is Truth?

After careful consideration, I decided last fall not to sit out a performance of Considering Matthew Shepard by a chorus I’ve been in for more than two decades now.

Considering Matthew Shepard is a sort of cantata on the murder of young Shepard. I carefully scrutinized the libretto for any explicit perpetuation of the Matthew Shepard myth (i.e., that it was the quintessential anti-gay hate crime) and found none. I considered the feelings of my fellow-choristers and the Artistic Director who programmed it. I also considered the “meta” point that the piece never would have been composed (and nobody would attend if it had been composed) were it not for the prevalence of the myth, and that performing it probably perpetuates the myth tacitly. My decision to go ahead and sing may have been sub-optimal. I’m still not sure.

But I want people to know that there’s almost zero truth to the myth — the standard Matthew Shepard narrative that gave us the federal “Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes” law — and almost no poetry to the truth. If you want to know the grimier and better-substantiated counter-narrative, it’s readily available.

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.

Friday, 7/12/2

Culture

Anti-Christian, anti-religion, anti-tradition

The modern West is said to be Christian, but this is untrue: the modern outlook is anti-Christian, because it is essentially anti-religious; and it is anti-religious because, still more generally, it is anti-traditional; this is its distinguishing characteristic and this is what makes it what it is.

René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World.

Creepier than frank laxity

Just don’t do it again, promise? Remember those kids who got suspended from Harvard after setting up encampments on the lawn and then harassing other students? Well, the Harvard College Administrative Board has reversed the decision, a win for the “student intifada,” which I thought was slanderous but is actually just what they call themselves. And then over at Columbia, the administrators who texted each other vomit emojis during a panel discussing a rabbi’s op-ed about his fears for Jews on campus—they were fired, right? Well, actually they were just put on leave and will be assigned to different jobs later. And remember the Columbia students who were arrested after they occupied a campus building? Most of their charges were dropped. There’s something way creepier about punishing people in the moment only to reverse it as soon as the zeitgeist moves on to the next thing versus not punishing them at all.

Suzy Weiss

Prescient

This was not written of Team Biden, but it sure seems to fit:

The elites who manage the system no longer believe in a way forward. Stuck in the muck, they strive simply to endure: après moi le deluge.

Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

Not a flattering juxtaposition

  • In The Guardian, Marina Hyde: “It’s incredible to think that only a short while ago we thought we’d eradicated measles and Nigel Farage. Both have now been brought back, largely by the same people.”

Via Frank Bruni. (I didn’t call this “Politics” because it’s foreign politics.)

Enemies of Article III

Federal Court critics

Never forget, most commentary about the Supreme Court is performative. Critics have a vested interest in making the decisions seem so much worse than they really are.

Josh Blackman, Everyone Needs To Take A Deep Breath About Trump v. United States

AOC, ever-performative, is “trying” to impeach Justices Alito and Thomas — a kind of performative commentary uniquely available to congress-critters.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, supported by left-wing interest groups, demanded that Judge Don Willett of the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals recuse himself from a case challenging the CFPB’s rule on credit-card late fees. One of Judge Willett’s child college savings accounts held around $2,000 of stock in Citigroup, which wasn’t a party to the case.

…

Normally, parties to a lawsuit have a strong incentive not to provoke judges with baseless recusal demands. That makes it surprising the CFPB would join in such an unwarranted demand. But the bureau seems to be more an extension of certain Democratic politicians these days than a federal agency respectful of the rule of law. Several members of Congress, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, responded to the committee’s opinion with a hyperbolic letter declaring that the opinion and Judge Willett’s decision not to recuse himself “represent ongoing threats to the integrity of the judicial system.”

…

Recusal tactics have become more outrageous. Normally, only parties directly involved in the litigation can file a motion to recuse a judge for an alleged conflict of interest. But we now see coordinated campaigns to pressure recusals. Left-wing interest groups are submitting demands for recusal, coupled with press releases and press conferences. This practice should stop. There is no formal mechanism for outsiders to file such recusal demands, and for good reason. They clog courts with additional briefings and hearings, causing delays and distorting outcomes. Courts should refuse to entertain these ill-intended requests, and the lawyers and litigants responsible should be subjected to sanctions.

Theodore B. Olson, Proliferating Recusal Demands Threaten the Judiciary

Politics, more or less

What liberal democracy sounds like

In America, it can be easy to forget what liberal democracy sounds like. But it used to sound something like this:

Whilst he has been my political opponent, Sir Keir Starmer will shortly become our prime minister. In this job, his successes will be all of our successes and I wish him and his family well. Whatever our disagreements in this campaign, he is a decent public-spirited man who I respect. He and his family deserve the very best of our understanding as they make the huge transition to their new lives behind this door, and as he grapples with this most demanding of jobs in this increasingly unstable world.

Those are the words of former British prime minister Rishi Sunak in his farewell speech last week outside Number 10, Downing Street. This is how Keir Starmer responded:

I want to thank the outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, his achievement as the first British-Asian prime minister of our country. The extra effort that that will have required should not be underestimated by anyone, and we pay tribute to that today. And we also recognize the dedication and hard work he brought to his leadership.

He went on:

If you voted Labour yesterday, we will carry the responsibility of your trust as we rebuild our country. But whether you voted Labour or not, in fact, especially if you did not, I say to you directly, my government will serve you.

And, if you listen to them say these words, they even seemed to mean it. That’s what it takes to put a toxically divided country back on track toward liberal democracy, after a woundingly divisive period centered on Brexit.

No one claimed fraud. No one derided the lopsided unfairness of the parliamentary results, where Labour got 34 percent of the vote and a whopping 63 percent of the seats, and where the new rightist Reform Party won 14 percent of the vote and got only 5 seats. Those were the rules ahead of the game, and they were the rules everyone had agreed to.

There is one reason and one reason only why this kind of conciliatory exchange cannot happen any time soon in America, and that is Donald J. Trump ….

Andrew Sullivan, pitch-perfect.

I wish it were true that Trump is the whole problem, but he tapped into something that won’t go away just because he sheds this mortal coil.

Art of the Deal

  • “That the sheep are still on the air, dispensing undiminished certitudes, is evidence of two things. That — outside of a few bastions of meritocracy and accountability, such as professional sports — there is no penalty for failure in contemporary America. And that many prominent people have the scary strength that comes from being incapable of embarrassment.” (George Will on the Dem/MSM bunker)
  • “If Trump is elected again, Dems should get over it and try to do more deals with him like they did on the USMCA and First Step Act. Trump isn’t an ideologue and just has an enormous ego anyone can exploit,” – Zaid Jilani.
  • “Some will say now that I am calling America a Christian Nation. So I am. And some will say that I am advocating Christian Nationalism. And so I do,” – Josh Hawley.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Comments:

  • Zaid Jilani’s advice is brilliant! We need more like that!
  • There is all kinds of play in the joints of “Christian Nationalism,” but any politician of Josh Hawley’s intelligence who demagogues the term is playing with fire and is going to find me unmoved when he tries to disambiguate it into something benign. Once a bright hope for the GOP, he’s gone shamelessly whoring after Trump.

You can have my delegates when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers

In his selfish desperation to retain control of his party, the president has resorted to political hostage-taking. His pitch to Democrats for sticking with him has nothing to do with sketching out a compelling plan to win or demonstrating his mental agility by holding numerous live events or even outlining a policy program for a second term. It’s simply this: The delegates he earned by winning this year’s primary (under false pretenses about his fitness) are pledged to him and he’s not giving them up.

Nick Catoggio, The Return of the Smoke-Filled Room

The window into Trump’s id

The best window into Trump’s ignorant and destructive id is often his Truth Social account. While normal Americans were making plans for Independence Day, an obsessive on Truth Social was declaring, “Elizabeth Lynne Cheney is guilty of treason. Retruth if you want televised military tribunals.” “Retruth,” in the idiom of Truth Social, means “to repost.” Trump of course retruthed. The former president also took time to retruth a post calling for Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, Cheney, and a dozen prominent Democrats to be jailed because they saw fit to tell the American people the truth that the 2020 “elections were fair.” Republicans would be wise to remember that character is destiny and that Trump has never had any.

National Review, The Week

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.

Mostly political (sigh)

After the July 4 British election:

Conservatism has died, not from an assassin’s bullet, or even from old age or because it was run over by a bus. It has died because there is no call for it anymore. This isn’t to say that nobody wants it, but that nobody cares that we want it. The same thing has happened to most of the things I like, from the forgotten Aztec chocolate bar to railway restaurant cars, from woodland peace to proper funerals.

In fact, conservatism — not to be mistaken for its loud, overdressed cousin, the Conservative Party, which somehow lives on — will probably not even get a proper funeral. Its passing will not be marked by sonorous gloom and penitence, and stern dark poetry borne away on the wind at the muddy edge of a deep, sad grave. Nobody can stand that sort of thing now. It will get a cheerful informal send-off with jokes and applause …

… The other day I was asked to define the word, on Twitter, and came up with something like “Love of God, love of country, love of family, love of beauty, love of liberty and the rule of law, suspicion of needless change”. Given more room I’d have added all kinds of preferences for poetry and sylvan beauty over noise and concrete, for twilight over noonday, for autumn over summer and wind over calm, for the deep gleam of iron polished in use over the flashy sparkle of precious metal.

But you probably know what I mean. And all my life these things have been slipping away from me. I am using them as metaphors for conservatism in politics, in education, literature and music as well.

Peter Hitchens

US Politics

Trump’s first-term SCOTUS picks

[SCOTUS Justices] Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are not cut from the same block of wood as Barrett. Barrett was a piece of unfinished wood, and Justice Kagan is coating her with one layer of glossy lacquer after another.

I am also curious about this part: “[Barrett] spoke favorably of the work of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.” A common swipe at Judge Ho and others is that they are “auditioning” for the Supreme Court with their opinions. I think that criticism is quite unfair for a host of reasons, but at least their so-called “auditions” are public and transparent. They are taking actions for all to see. I did a quick search of Judge Barrett’s 7th Circuit decisions, and the names “Kavanaugh” and “Gorsuch” appear nowhere. Barrett did not even cite any Kavanaugh’s decisions on the Second Amendment in Kanter. If she thought so favorably of their work, surely she could have found a chance to cite them. But she didn’t. She played it safe. But in private, she quietly praised those judges–a convenient thing to do when a Supreme Court seat is on the horizon. We need to retire this “auditioning” barb–it is what judicial nominees say in private that is auditioning. When they say things in public, they are doing their job.

Josh Blackman, The Goal Of The “Architects of the Supreme Court” Was Always Overruling Chevron, and not Overruling Roe

I’ve mentioned before, I’m pretty sure, that in 2002, I was given a red-pill I really didn’t want to swallow: that the GOP was playing pro-life voters for fools. I nevertheless left the GOP fewer than three years later and now think that my “doctor” was right in his diagnosis (although he had decided that the cranky “Constitution Party” was the cure).

Josh Blackman confirms in this article that we were being played (our votes were wanted, but Roe-reversal wasn’t) and that it was a miracle that Roe got reversed by Dobbs.

Leashing populism

Ross Douthat said in 2016 that both parties were like fully fueled jets sitting on the tarmac just waiting to be hijacked. Bernie Sanders almost succeeded. Trump pulled it off. I would argue, somewhat counter-intuitively, that Sanders failed where Trump succeeded in part because historically the Democratic Party is the more populist party. … [P]opulist economics has always been at the center of Democratic rhetoric (if not always policy). As a result, the Democrats developed mechanisms—political, psychological, and institutional—to channel populism effectively and, when necessary, to check it. It’s not a coincidence Democrats invented “super-delegates.” The GOP, for all of its efforts at tapping into the “silent majority,” never built safeguards like that. So when actual rightwing populism surged, it had no arguments or tools to check it. It is no coincidence, as the Marxists like to say, that as the GOP has gone populist it has moved leftward on economics. JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, and all sorts of nominally “conservative” institutions are bending to the cruel logic of audience capture.

Jonah Golberg, in part 2 of an email dialog with Damon Linker.

This observation haunts me, a former Republican.

Nonsequiturs

The narrative the left appears to want is that EVERYTHING IS FINE with Biden and how dare we ask if everything is ok because, um, Trump.

Chris Cillizza

Biden must be fine “because, um, Trump”? It’s not possible that we’ve polarized ourselves into a no-win situation?

But there’s also something else going on: Since the evening of June 27, the Biden administration, many leading Democrats, and a swarm of the party’s online advocates have responded in the way you described, by attacking those rightly treating this as a massive story — and in terms that sound as cynical and contemptuous of truth as anything you’ll hear from a Trumpist Republican. We’re “bedwetters.” We’re indulging in “bad politics.” We don’t realize that the right way to respond to something like the June 27 debate is to admit Biden did poorly, wave away any broader concerns, and change the subject, moving on like nothing important happened. 

Pretend it was no big deal, and it will be no big deal.

Damon Linker replying to Cillizza

[T]ime and again I was told — by the White House, by Democratic readers etc. — that I was part of the problem: That Biden was old, sure, but that he was vigorous as hell and outworked even his youngest and spryest of aides.  Hell, do you remember the outrage by the White House and the online left when the Wall Street Journal published a story a month or two ago about Biden’s mental slippage behind the scenes? Lots and lots of people — including, I am sorry to say, plenty of “mainstream” reporters — insisted that the story was total bullshit and that it was deeply irresponsible that the Journal published it. They said it was Rupert Murdoch pushing his agenda!

Cillizza again

Checking the ruling class

In a democratic republic such as the United States, where the people elect leaders to govern on their behalf, the ballot box is the primary check on an unresponsive, incompetent or corrupt ruling class — or, as Democrats may be learning, a ruling class that insists on a candidate who voters no longer believe can lead. If those in power come to believe they are the only logical options, the people can always prove them wrong. For a frustrated populace, an anti-establishment outsider’s ability to wreak havoc is a feature rather than a bug. The elevation of such a candidate to high office should provoke immediate soul-searching and radical reform among the highly credentialed leaders across government, law, media, business, academia and so on — collectively, the elites.

The response to Mr. Trump’s success, unfortunately, has been the opposite. Seeing him elected once, faced with the reality that he may well win again, most elites have doubled down. We have not failed, the thinking goes; we have been failed, by the American people. In some tellings, grievance-filled Americans simply do not appreciate their prosperity. In others they are incapable of informed judgments, leaving them susceptible to demagoguery and foreign manipulation. Or perhaps they are just too racist to care — never mind that polling consistently suggests that most of Mr. Trump’s supporters are women and minorities, or that polling shows he is attracting far greater Black and Hispanic support than prior Republican leaders.

Mr. Trump is by no means an ideal tribune of the popular will, especially considering his own efforts to defy it after the 2020 presidential election. But the nation, given full opportunity to assess that conduct, seems to have decided it likes him more than ever, at least compared with the alternatives on offer. Somehow the response of elites to that humiliating indictment of their leadership is a redoubled obstinance: Democracy itself is at stake if the election does not go their way, they lecture, even as they pursue plainly anti-democratic strategies. How’s that going? One recent poll of swing-state voters found that most see “threats to democracy” as an extremely important issue in the coming election, and that they are more likely to believe Mr. Trump can handle the issue well.

Oren Cass

How to pick Zombie Joe’s replacement

Jonathan Chait … argues that “a small group of party leaders—say, Biden, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and Jen O’Malley Dillon—should decide on a new candidate over the next week.” Is it democratic? No. But hey, sometimes a smoke-filled room is just what you need. (New York)

The Free Press

I concur. Compared with what primary elections has given us (at taxpayer expense, and with high barriers to third parties), the old smoke-filled rooms of my youth look pretty good.

Unless the GOP abandons the primary system or comes up with an equivalent of the Democrats’ “Super Delegates” (the Democrats’ prescient protection against left-populism run amok), we’re in for a long run of right-populist GOP nominees.

Miscellany

On not liking the immunity decision

I don’t like the Supreme Court’s recent decision on presidential immunity. I don’t think it’s the disaster or outrage some people claim it is, but I also think … it was flawed …. But I mostly blame Donald Trump for putting us in this situation. I also blame Merrick Garland and Jack Smith to a lesser extent …. I think Chief Justice John Roberts believes Trump is a one-off, … and he doesn’t want to mess up the constitutional order by deciding a case based on the one guy … .

… 

This week’s immunity ruling sheds light on something that would have been better kept in the shadows: There’s nothing in our system that outright prevents a terrible man from doing terrible things if he gets in power and enough people want him in power. If you think every job applicant is going to be respectful of the unwritten rules, and if you think voters will only support such people, the need to write out rules against selling pardons or trying to steal an election by force and intimidation seems like a waste of time.

The people angriest at the Supreme Court think that the judicial system should do the job the voters are unwilling to do—stop Trump. Given that I think he’s guilty of many disqualifying crimes, that idea doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is the idea that the courts should deviate from the rules to do it. Charges should have been brought against Trump the day after impeachment (as Mitch McConnell suggested). It is not Chief Justice Roberts’ fault the Department of Justice waited too long and brought needlessly unconventional charges. It’s also not his fault that the Republican Party—elected officials and voters alike—failed in their moral and civic obligation to vomit him out like the poison he is.

I don’t particularly like Roberts’ answer to this dilemma, but he is not the real author of it. We are increasingly living in the worst-case scenario envisioned by John Adams: a society so unburdened by conventional morality or the willingness to demand it from our leaders that the system cannot function as designed.

The only reliable remedy to our political problems is a citizenry willing to do the right thing—and demand that their leaders follow their example.

Jonah Goldberg

Social Darwinism

One of Darwin’s most influential German publicists was Ernst Haeckel (Darwin actually endorsed him personally). He claimed the world was divided into multiple races that functioned almost as distinct species. One of these, the Caucasians, was superior to all others. This radical division of humanity by race led the German evolutionist to declare that science should assign to members of inferior races—“psychologically nearer to the mammals (apes and dogs) than civilized Europeans”—a “totally different value to their lives.”

John Strickland, The Age of Nihilism

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go? Well, first, I resolved to stop harping on it. But then, I just moved it off to my reflexive blog, trying to keep this one relatively reflective.

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.

Independence Day

Public Affairs

The Immunity Ruling

The mark of an iconic Supreme Court decision is timelessness. With every read, the opinion teaches new insights and provides new lessons on our Constitution. Each semester when I prepare a case like Marbury or McCulloch, I learn something new.

Opinions from Chief Justice Roberts, however, are just the opposite. They are best read once. After the first read, you will come away entirely persuaded that Roberts’s analysis was not only the best answer (to use the Loper Bright framing), but the only conceivable answer, as any contrary positions are unfounded. That’s the first read.

But when you read a Roberts decision a a second, a third, and a fourth time, all of the fancy veneers and window dressing start to come off ….

Josh Blackman.

On Trump v. United States, people I trust who’ve taken the time to work through the case (I was never a prosecutor, rarely a criminal defense attorney) say it’s going to be very hard to prosecute a President for anything. That is not the impression Justice Roberts created on first reading of his opinion.

That means, in essence, that “the President is not above the law” is substantially false now.

And that means that Trump may soon no longer be a convicted felon (because Judge Merchan admitted testimony of a sort that Justice Roberts dubiously says may not be admitted).

I guess we’ll just have to elect someone else. What crueler punishment for Trump than an emphatic electoral drubbing? (But what crueler punishment for the USA than to re-elect the zombie currently in the Oval Office?)

Some thoughts, though:

  1. I just about freaked out when, in law school, I learned that “immunity” was a thing. Lots of people are “above the law” in various circumstances, including crooked prosecutors, judges, policemen (“qualified immunity” in too many circumstances), trash-talking Congressmenpersons. I’ve even figured out why that’s often the lesser evil compared to no immunity. So get it out of your head that keening about “they made him above the law” communicates anything salient.
  2. This isn’t just about Trump. It’s about all Presidents. Good luck prosecuting Joe Biden, Cheeto Benito — or Mike Pence, or Barack Obama, for that matter.
  3. Do you really think that none of the Presidents in your lifetime until Trump has crimed — if only to protect the country from, for instance, terrorists whose location we knew?
  4. That we have an ex-President who is almost certainly guilty of vile, self-serving, delusional crimes is a very, very, very sorry commentary. That his crimes commend him to so many voters is even worse.
  5. Just about everyone agreed that the court would extend, and should extend, some measure of immunity from criminal prosecution to our Presidents. The decisions of the lower courts that Presidents have zero immunity were surprising (likelier, shocking) and unlikely to stand. But few expected the court to give Presidents the extensive practical immunity that emerges from the weeds when you get deeply enough into them.
  6. The lack of constitutional language making the President immune to criminal prosecution is barely interesting, let alone dispositive. There’s no “separation of powers” clause, either and for instance, but it’s fundamental to our system and implied by what is specified.
  7. If and when Trump issues a lawless order, the people he orders should consider refusing to carry it out because I don’t believe they’ll ride his immunity coat-tails. I can only hope that Project 2025 hasn’t vetted a full slate of Trumpist sociopaths who’ll never threaten mass walkouts.
  8. We need to get it through our heads that our Presidents are, pretty much, above the law and that we should try to elect people who aren’t, for instance, promising a retributive crime spree against their adversaries.
  9. When Trump crimes in his second term, I hope we’ll have a Congress willing to impeach, because the Senate will no longer have the excuse that the criminal justice system can deal with it.

I don’t mean to say it will all work out okay. We’re in unchartered territory with Zombie Joe v. Cheeto Benito and his merry band of Project 2025 vandals. I’ve been bearish on the USA for quite a while now, heaven help me — the cultural equivalent of “the financial doomsayers who has correctly predicted 10 of the last three recessions” (see below).

The Unitary Executive

Not unrelated to the matter of Presidential immunity is the “unitary executive” theory.

I thought I was fairly sophisticated on matters of Constitutional Law, but an article in the New York Times lays out with unusual clarity a sort of meta-battle going on in the legal ether above some recent SCOTUS decisions: Charlie Savage, Conservative Legal Movement’s Agenda Unites Court’s Rulings on Executive Power. That’s freebie “shared link,” by the way.

It leaves me feeling freshly conflicted about the independent regulatory agencies we have. They’re “a headless fourth branch of the U.S. government” as Justice Kavanaugh once put it in his pre-SCOTUS days. But the Project 2025 vandals are not at all conflicted; they want to domesticate all regulatory agencies. That would mean that we would have even wider swings in policy from Administration-to-Administration, as far fewer career civil servants would carry over, and far fewer good people would be willing to go into low-profile career governmental service.

I highly recommend the article, and plan to re-read it at least once in a few weeks.

UPDATE: A recommended companion read for Savage is from Josh Blackman again, The Goal Of The “Architects of the Supreme Court” Was Always Overruling Chevron, and not Overruling Roe.

Bare-faced lies

Earlier this year, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman was boasting of the personal time he spent with Biden, who he proclaimed to be “completely lucid and with excellent grasp of detail”. After the debate, Krugman called on Biden to step down. Senile dementia is a clever disease. Or maybe Krugman didn’t like the face he saw in the mirror the morning after Biden’s debate performance.

What astounded Krugman and his fellow bold-faced journalist types about Biden’s rotten debate performance wasn’t the obviousness of Biden’s mental decline, but the fear that they were now publicly shown to have been lying. Krugman’s fellow in-house NYT author of Soviet state propaganda, Thomas Friedman, who fancies himself an “old friend” of Biden’s, was writing fibs about Biden as late as last month while boasting of his long off-the-record conversations with the President about the future of the Middle East. It took Friedman less than 24 hours to proclaim that Biden’s debate performance had made him “weep”. Poor man — no doubt it did. David Remnick of The New Yorker, who authored a door-stopper-sized hagiography of Barack Obama during the President’s first year in office, was equally quick to go public with his discovery that Joe Biden was maybe not exactly up to sorting marbles by size or colour, just in time to become a virgin for the next election.

It’s hard to be revealed as a fibber — especially when your job is ostensibly to tell the truth. But the sight of journalistic worthies suddenly grabbing hand towels to cover their proximity to power was not by itself enough to explain the Night of the Journalistic Long Knives.

David Samuels

Whataboutism comes home

On the center-left, Mark Leibovich isn’t pulling his punches in a piece on the Democrats sticking with Biden: “Since President Joe Biden’s debate debacle on Thursday, I’ve learned two things for sure: first, that Republicans are not the only party being led by a geriatric egotist who puts himself before the country. And second, that Republicans are not the only party whose putative leaders have a toxic lemming mindset and are willing to lead American democracy off a cliff.” (The Atlantic)

The Free Press

History will, if necessary, judge between the harm wrought by the two geriatric egotists.

Without comment

Lighter fare

One movie is worth how many words?

The shocking decline of the city—driven by any number of factors, but most certainly liberal policies high among them—drove massive white flight and deindustrialization of the city. Vast numbers of New Yorkers moved to the suburbs in Long Island, New Jersey, or in enclaves in the outer boroughs.

(An interesting exercise is to look at the movies set in the Big Apple in the early sixties compared to those in the early 70s and you can see the suddenness of the decline. From Breakfast at Tiffanys, That Touch of Mink, and Barefoot in the Park_to _Death Wish, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, and Serpico in about a decade.).

Jonah Goldberg

Past its sell-by date

MoveOn is the textbook example of an organization that has outlived its purpose. Founded more than a quarter-century ago to argue that the country needed to “move on” from Bill Clinton’s intern-diddling impeachment drama, it had two things that confer a very long life in American politics: office space and a good fundraising list. And so, while the country has moved on, MoveOn hasn’t. Which is weird, but this is America.

Kevin D. Williamson.

Frank Bruni’s beloved sentences this week

  • In The New Yorker, Susan B. Glasser reflected on a micro-tussle toward the end of last Thursday night’s presidential debate: “Is this how democracy dies, in a shouting match between two seniors about their golf game?” (Thanks to Mike Greenwald of Melville, N.Y., for nominating this.)
  • In The Connecticut Post, Colin McEnroe pondered the president’s proper course: “I’m guardedly a ‘replace him’ guy. Some of you may recall that in 2019, I compared Biden to a Subaru with 310,000 miles on the odometer … But Thursday night was 90 minutes of the ‘check engine’ light flashing desperately in the darkness.” (Holly Franquet, Fairfield, Conn.)
  • In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan evaluated Americans’ attitudes toward NATO … NATO is the rotary phone of geopolitical alliances.” (Richard Reams, San Antonio)

Frank Bruni

Quickies

a matryoshka doll of mendacity

George Conway’s description of Trump, apropos of the New York records falsification case.

one of those financial doomsayers who has correctly predicted 10 of the last three recessions.

The Free Press

… Slate, which, as we all know, employs lab monkeys escaped from federal cocaine experiments as fact-checkers

Kevin D. Williamson

An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half-truth or a truth-and-a-half

Karl Kraus

(Economist World in Brief)

Plaintiff Accused of Being “Litigious” Sues for Slander

Eugene Volokh

Male and female

This view would understand the division of man into male and female as, of course, a biological actuality; i.e., this is the way it is. It seems to be a necessity; it is at least a convenience; and it is certainly a delight.

Thomas Howard, Chance or the Dance?, written before gender ideology was a thing.

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.

Election 2024 (and beyond)

A soulless man does not care

Nobody actually admires Trump … The Republicans sucking up to him now will go down in history as suck-ups, whether they think so or not. It will be a blot on the record. Their biographers will have to work their way around it, like a conviction for embezzlement or marriage to a cousin.

…

In Minnesota we’ve come to the sad realization that corporations don’t have souls. Our beloved 3M has done wretched things and poisoned its own people and lied about it, which no human being you respect would do. Trump is a corporation, he is not a genuine human being. He is not vermin, he is apparently sensate and responds to commands, but he has conquered his own soul and a soulless man does not care. That is not a quality one seeks in a leader. A Shakespearean tale is unwinding and it does not appear to me to be a comedy.

Garrison Keillor

Presidential Immunity

Former President Trump over the weekend escalated his vows to prosecute his political opponents, circulating posts on his social media website invoking “televised military tribunals” and calling for the jailing of President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Senators Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer and former Vice President Mike Pence, among other high-profile politicians. Mr. Trump, using his account on Truth Social on Sunday, promoted two posts from other users of the site that called for the jailing of his perceived political enemies. One post that he circulated on Sunday singled out Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming congresswoman who is a Republican critic of Mr. Trump’s, and called for her to be prosecuted by a type of military court reserved for enemy combatants and war criminals. “Elizabeth Lynne Cheney is guilty of treason,” the post said. “Retruth if you want televised military tribunals.” (Source: dnyuz.com)

John Ellis News Items. The Soviet Union had its Pravda; Trump has his Truth Social; the former probably had a higher proportion of truth.

Silver lining report: Donald Trump will find that yesterday’s Presidential immunity case will make it tough for him, if elected, to honor these vows.

Gotta look for that silver lining because what that soulless man in the Presidency likely will do with this decision come January 21 is pretty grim.

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go? Well, first, I resolved to stop harping on it. But then, I just moved it off to my reflexive blog, trying to keep this one relatively reflective.

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.

Another notebook dump

Wisdom Generally

Willie Mays

The Say Hey Kid was that rarity who played a boy’s game with a boy’s joy and a man’s discipline and shrewdness.

National Review, The Week. That’s got to be the best “in a nutshell” on Mays. One consolation of being 75 most of this year is the memory of Willie Mays playing live, not just on highlight reels. You kids have no idea ….

Even the secularists have rituals

The “acme” of religious secularism in the West—Masonry—is made up almost entirely of highly elaborated ceremonies saturated with “symbolism.”

Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World

Apple acquiesces in reality

I became an “Apple guy” at home before retirement, though I still had to use Windows at work. Now our house is all Apple (or nearly so). (I confess to brief side-eyed looks at Linux, but it’s never stuck; I’ve just got my Apple gear set up to do what I want, quickly, so why change?)

Still, VisionPro was a bridge or two too far — way too much money for a novelty. Now:

Apple has told at least one supplier that it has suspended work on its next high-end Vision headset, an employee at a manufacturer that makes key components for the Vision Pro said. The pullback comes as analysts and supply chain partners have flagged slowing sales of the $3,500 device. The company is still working on releasing a more affordable Vision product with fewer features before the end of 2025. (Source: theinformation.com)

Via John Ellis

Freud

In his fanciful narrative, religion and the civilization that springs from it are reducible to a primordial event of psychosexual violence. … For Freud, at the dawn of human civilization a group of brothers, desiring sexual gratification with their mother, spontaneously rise up against their father and commit parricide. They then devour his body in a ritual act, joining incest to cannibalism. Because of their guilt, however, they internalize their absent father’s authority, which takes the place of a collective superego. From that moment on, human civilization has worked to suppress the libidinal will to power in men by repressing desire and transferring it to more “sublimated” activities. All religions—but especially Christianity with its doctrine of God the Father—are compensations for this primordial act of parricide. They can all be traced back to this scientifically formulated (and completely theoretical) act of original sin.

John Strickland, The Age of Nihilism

Essentially, Professor Crews came to regard Freud as a charlatan. In a debate with the psychoanalyst and author Susie Orbach in 2017, published in The Guardian, he maintained that Freud had “contradicted, discomfited and harangued his patients in the hope of breaking their ‘resistance’ to ideas of his own — ideas that he presumptuously declared to be lurking within the patients’ own unconscious minds.” In the process, he said, Freud created a myth about himself and his findings that failed to live up to empirical scrutiny.

His polemical broadsides vaulted him to the forefront of a group of revisionist skeptics loosely known as the Freud bashers.

“Freud: The Making of an Illusion” was his most ambitious attempt to debunk the myth of Freud as a pioneering genius, drawing on decades of research in scrutinizing Freud’s early career. Writing in The New York Times Book Review in 2017, George Prochnik found the book to be provocative if exhaustingly relentless: “Here we have Freud the liar, cheat, incestuous child molester, woman hater, money-worshiper, chronic plagiarizer and all-around nasty nut job. This Freud doesn’t really develop, he just builds a rap sheet.”

Obituary for Frederick Crews: “A literary critic, essayist and author, he was a leading voice among revisionist skeptics who saw Freud as a charlatan and psychoanalysis as a pseudoscience.”

It does not matter that the strictly scientific status of Freud’s theories is now methodologically and materially discredited. The central notion—that human beings are at core sexual and that that shapes our thinking and our behavior in profound, often unconscious, ways—is now a basic part of the modern social imaginary.

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

Best and brightest besliming themselves

Cultural deregulation

Recent dustups over the supposedly racist implications of advocating marriage, thrift, and a good work ethic reveal the logic of cultural deregulation. The goal is to strip society of norms, leaving unsheltered those who cannot afford to live in well-appointed enclaves that covertly sustain modified bourgeois norms for the rich and their children. In the open culture, the lives of ordinary people become more disordered and less functional.

R. R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods

Scientific consensus

[I]t has become increasingly obvious that science functions as much as an ideology as it does as a method of inquiry. The “scientific consensus” is now frequently invoked to settle not just scientific questions, but public-policy ones as well. Call this scientism. One of its most striking features is just how vacuous it is. Contemporary scientism doesn’t necessarily entail anything beyond uncritical deference to experts. This became clear enough over the course of the Covid pandemic. Within a month in early 2020, all right-thinking people went from ridiculing the idea that masks could stop the spread of a respiratory virus to believing it was of paramount importance to wear a mask at all times. This reversal wasn’t due to people weighing new evidence, but the empty assurance of the “scientific consensus.”

…

[U]nlike the creationists Wright might have been confronting a generation ago, proponents of “gender-affirming care” don’t appeal to sources of authority other than science. On the contrary, they point to the fact that major US medical institutions have endorsed these practices. The “scientific consensus,” then, has proved capable of giving public legitimacy to even the most outré belief systems.

…

[I]t’s clear by now that those who purport to speak in the name of science aren’t as neutral and objective as I once assumed. Often, science’s would-be spokesmen are bent on imposing their own dogmas. In hindsight, I should have been more concerned about scientism becoming an official state ideology. Science has many impressive discoveries to its credit, but we shouldn’t let it think and make political decisions on our behalf. Nor ought we to uncritically adopt the metaphysical views of the majority of scientists as our own. The question of God’s existence, for instance, remains as open today as at any other time in human history.

David Moulton, Two Cheers for ‘Intelligent Design’

At war with the human race

So it is that the gendered nature of the body is under attack, from the Left and Right, as is the connection between sex and babies. Left and Right alike resent the limitations of the human body. There’s just one small problem: sex does make babies and men and women are different. An ideology that cannot make room for the basic facts of human reproduction and sex differences is an ideology that will end up at war with the human body, with nature itself, and ultimately with the entire human race. In that war, it will go looking for allies where it can find them. It finds its most powerful, its indispensable, ally in the State.

Jennifer Roback Morse, The Sexual State.

By quoting, I’m not endorsing this book. I read it in preparation for a Symposium where the author was to be one of three keynote speakers. Based partly on the book, which did make a few points in a temperate register, I decided not to register for the symposium.

Self-delegitimation

As Harvard Law school professor Adrian Vermeule has said, liberal institutions “will have to become systematically undemocratic in order to remain liberal and, even where they do so, that will be but a stopgap measure in light of their systematic self-delegitimation.”

Rod Dreher in the European Conservative

Ruso-Ukrainian war

So: Why did Russia invade Ukraine?

WordPress unfortunately has been “improving” things again, so I cannot figure out how to embed a YouTube video, but I recommend the video at this link.

Theory 1: Putin is a revanchist, with many screws loose, who wants to rebuild the USSR in toto.
Theory 2: Putin would not tolerate NATO being extended to its very border with Ukraine (which the US promised it would not allow), kinda like our Monroe Doctrine.

Expats

“I hate Russia, for forcing me to leave her.”

It was an apt summary of what waves of émigrés from Russia and the Soviet Union since the early 20th century have felt: a sorrowful sense of loss for a motherland — what Russians call “toska po rodine” — coupled with resentment at the autocratic powers that forced them out. My grandparents were among the “White” Russians who fled the Revolution and moved to Paris in the 1920s. A second wave of emigrants left in World War II. The third, Soviet Jews, started leaving in the 1970s. Vladimir Putin has now created another wave of people fleeing Russia, and many of them may still believe, as my forebears did, that they will one day return to the homeland.

Most probably will not.

…

That is the tragic irony of Mr. Putin’s war. His attempt to “restore Russian greatness” through violence and hatred has tainted Russia’s real greatness for years to come ….

Serge Schmemann

Front lines of the LGBTTTIQA+, etc. revolution

Another bridge too far

One thing I think we can rule out right away is that the drop in support for same-sex marriage and acceptance of homosexuality is a function of religion. I’m aware of no evidence that the United States is undergoing a religious Great Awakening, at least when it comes institutional forms of worship handed down from the past. As sociologist Samuel Perry recently put it in a useful summary for Time magazine:

According to data from Gallup, Pew, and PRRI, the percentage of Americans who identify with any religion is in steady decline, as are those who believe in God, the devil, Heaven, Hell, or angels; who say religion is a very important part of their life; maintain membership in a church or synagogue; or attend church regularly.

Why, then, might Republicans have begun turning against same-sex marriage and acceptance of homosexuality in the past two years?

This is just speculation, but I’d wager it has something to do with the way left-wing activists have taken up the cause of transgender rights as the next front in the now-decades-long cultural revolution. To be clear: I don’t think such a backlash, if there’s been one, has arisen over calls to protect the civil rights of the tiny number of transgender people in the country. Rather, the backlash would come from opposition to the ideology of transgenderism promulgated by the most militant activists on the left—and the extraordinary rapidity with which that ideology’s assumptions and assertions have come to be treated as conventional wisdom among many of those who run government bureaucracies, public and private schools and universities, medical institutions, and the business sector.

…

If I’m right that declining support for same-sex marriage and homosexual acceptance among Republicans derives (at least in part) from a backlash against transgender activism, that would likely mean that more conservative-minded Americans have concluded the gay-rights movement was a Trojan Horse for something far more extreme and destabilizing. It’s not inevitable that they would conclude this, since as Andrew Sullivan and other champions of gay rights have persuasively argued, the interests of homosexuals stand in considerable tension with those asserted by the most radical transgender activists. But the Activist and Donor Complex on the left has made it natural for the rest of the country to make the leap from one to the other by bundling the two movements together in an ever-expanding, alphabet-soup abbreviation: LGBTTTIQA+, etc.

Damon Linker

March of Dimes Syndrome

Why, last year, did the Human Rights Campaign declare a “national state of emergency” for LGBT people? Why was the election of the first black American president followed by the Black Lives Matter movement? Why have reports of “hate groups” risen during the same decades that racial prejudice has been plummeting? Why, during a long and steep decline in the incidence of sexual violence in America, did academics, federal officials, and the #MeToo movement discover a new “epidemic of sexual assault”?

These supposed crises are all examples of the March of Dimes syndrome, named after the organization founded in the 1930s to combat polio. The March helped fund the vaccines that eventually ended the polio epidemics—but not the organization, which, after polio’s eradication, changed its mission to preventing birth defects. Its leaders kept their group going by finding a new cause, just as antiwar activists did after achieving their goal of ending the Vietnam War. The Three Mile Island accident offered new fund-raising opportunities and a new platform for veterans of the antiwar movement such as Jane Fonda and her husband Tom Hayden, who both addressed the crowd at that first antinuke rally.

For career activists, success is a threat. They can never declare mission accomplished.

…

So activists have moved the goalposts once again. It is no longer enough for conservative Christians to tolerate same-sex marriage—now they must be legally required to bake cakes and design web pages for the weddings. It is no longer enough to protect gay students from harassment—now these students must have access in elementary school libraries to how-to manuals for anal sex. Public schools must encourage prepubescent students to explore the many possible gender identities without their parents’ knowledge. Biological males self-identifying as females must be allowed to compete against females in sports. These new causes have been wildly unpopular, arousing opposition from homosexuals as well as heterosexuals, and have led to a decline in public support for the gay rights movement. But however much the backlash has hurt the original cause, the controversies keep activists in business.

…

As the civil rights movement searched for new causes, no group shifted as adroitly as the Southern Poverty Law Center. The group launched in the 1970s to offer legal representation to individual victims of discrimination but then switched to filing lawsuits against chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. In 1986, the SPLC’s entire legal team resigned in protest—they’d signed up to help poor people, not sue an organization whose national membership barely eclipsed 10,000. But the Klan made an ideal villain for fund-raising appeals to northern liberals, and the SPLC prospered from the publicity about lawsuits that bankrupted chapters of the Klan.

By the 1990s, virtually nothing was left of the Klan to sue, so the SPLC pivoted again. It changed the name of its “Klanwatch” project to “Hatewatch,” and began issuing reports listing a growing number of “hate groups” and “extremists” across America. Scholars, journalists, and nonprofits have repeatedly denounced SPLC’s blacklists, noting that its tallies include many “hate groups” that don’t exist, or are harmless (such as a Confederate memorabilia shop that made the list), or are mainstream conservative and Christian organizations that simply oppose progressive policies. The SPLC’s lists of dangerous “extremists” have included respected conservatives such as Charles Murray, Rand Paul, and Ben Carson … The SPLC’s appeals to combat a “rising tide of hate” have brought in so much donor money that its endowment has soared above $600 million.

John Tierney, The March of Dimes Syndrome

Politics

Tribal conformity

I personally know progressives who are absolutely furious that GOP figures don’t speak out against Trump, but those same individuals are petrified of the intolerant elements of their own political tribe. They wouldn’t dream of speaking against the most-woke elements of the radical left. After all, their jobs are at stake. Their reputations hang in the balance. Remember the now-famous Vox essay, “I’m a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me”? I’ve heard that sentiment many times.

David French, Let’s Talk About Fear

The Donilon strategy: All About ‘Dat Coup

If the sudden prospect of electing the first president who is a convicted felon hasn’t put Americans off Trump, why would Joe Biden, Mike Donilon, or anyone else think that reminding them of his coup plot and the insurrection it led to will do so?

On the other hand, how can one run against Donald Trump and not make his authoritarian ambitions the centerpiece of the campaign? He’s not shy about expressing those ambitions; should he win in November, the next four years will in fact be defined by his attempts to subvert the constitutional order. The right’s hostility to Western liberalism is the elephant in the room of this election. How can the president resist making a spectacle of it?

I think his and Donilon’s strategy of making the race about democracy is simultaneously weak and quite possibly the strongest one available to them.

…

There’s another case for the Donilon strategy. Namely, it’s worked before. And I don’t just mean in 2020.

Five days before the 2022 midterms Biden delivered a speech warning Americans that, with so many Trump-backed post-liberal populist Republicans running for major offices, “democracy is on the ballot.” He called on voters to ask themselves this question when considering a candidate: “Will that person accept the legitimate will of the American people and the people voting in his district or her district? Will that person accept the outcome of the election, win or lose?”

Some pundits called the address “head-scratching” in light of polling that showed the economy, not democracy, dominating when voters were asked what the most important issue in the election was. Yet five days later Republicans ended up underperforming badly in a midterm in which the out-party typically cleans up. One Trump-endorsed MAGA acolyte after another fell short in key races, holding the GOP to modest gains in the House and helping Democrats gain a seat in the Senate.

…

For me, the great virtue of the Donilon strategy is that it’ll leave America with no excuses if Trump wins. An election framed around the economy or immigration that ends in Republican victory will let denialists about the country’s decline insist that things would have been different if only Biden had taken a different approach. “He should have emphasized the coup attempt and January 6,” they’ll say. “Surely Americans wouldn’t have reelected Trump if the election had been about that.”

I’m not sure of that at all, personally. I’d like to test the proposition. And if Trump is returned to power, I’d find comfort in knowing that we maximized our collective shame by approaching the race as a referendum on the constitutional order—and chose the other option. If we do this, let’s be clear-eyed about it. No excuses. Trump 2024: Maximum Shame.

Nick Catoggio

The Machiavelli IQ test

The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him.

Niccolo Machiavelli

After Trump’s guilty verdicts, the popular sports talk radio host Colin Cowherd, who’s not a usual Trump critic, treated his listeners to an inventory of the criminals around Trump: “His campaign chairman was a felon. So is his deputy campaign manager, his personal lawyer, his chief strategist, his national security adviser, his trade adviser, his foreign policy adviser, his campaign fixer and his company C.F.O. They’re all felons. Judged by the company you keep. It’s a cabal of convicts.”

Frank Bruni

We knew damn well he was a snake before we took him in.

Populism anticipated

For the success of our restoration it cannot be too often said that society and mass are contradictory terms and that those who seek to do things in the name of mass are the destroyers in our midst. If society is something which can be understood, it must have structure; if it has structure, it must have hierarchy; against this metaphysical truth the declamations of the Jacobins break in vain.

Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences.

Past their “Sell By” Dates

Also Presented Without Comment

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asked by Anderson Cooper whether she has “confidence” in the Supreme Court: 

“No, I think they’ve gone rogue. It’s most unfortunate.”

Also Also Presented Without Comment

New York Post: Trump Camp Claims He Was ‘Tortured’ in Fulton County Jail—as It Peddles Coffee Cups With His Mugshot

Australia can have him

Julian Assange on his leaking of the names of hundreds of Afghan civilian informants into the hands of the Taliban: “Well, they’re informants. So, if they get killed, they’ve got it coming to them. They deserve it.”

Jim Ellis, News Items

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.

Juneteenth

I have nothing to say about Juneteenth except that emancipation was a legitimately huge landmark in our nation’s history and worthy of annual commemoration.

Public affairs

Indiana’s GOP Lieutenant Governor nominee

Indiana over last weekend nominated as its Lieutenant Governor candidate, Micah Beckwith, a pastor of some sort who:

  • Thinks that the “progressive left has taken over the Republican Party in Indiana,” and that some Republicans today are “champions of Communism.”
  • Said on a Christian(ish) podcast “We are in a season of war right now … People need to wake up, or else this mental and heart battle that we find ourselves in culturally, it will lead to bullets and bombs. It’s just a matter of time.”
  • Said God had told him, on January 7, 2021: “Micah, I sent those riots to Washington. What you saw yesterday was my hand at work.” (This is what every story on him seems to pick up.)

Those quotes are from Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times. Goldberg also says, sans quote, that he’s a “self-described Christian Nationalist.”

Beckwith was forced onto the ticket against the wishes of the Gubernatorial nominee, retiring U.S. Senator Mike Braun.

Yeah, I guess it’s national news.

I didn’t support Braun for Governor. I was unenthusiastic about him when he ran for Senate in a GOP primary whose theme was “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the Trumpiest of them all?” (but I preferred him to Todd Rokita, now our Attorney General and a truly loathsome person). I’m not certain I’ll vote for him in the General Election.

My decision will hinge to some degree on how effective he is at keeping a reassuring distance from Beckwith without, of course, repudiating him so firmly as to hand the election to Democrats. So far, his pointed message “I’m in charge” seems about right.

I’ve noted repeatedly that I repudiated any loyalty to the Republican Party on Inauguration Day 2005. But I still have a reflex to vote Republican over Democrat, and to mourn what already has become of the Republican party, and what one likely future holds.

On Christian Nationalism

Having noted Micah Beckwith’s purported Christian Nationalism, I’m reminded that I may not have staked out my own position openly.

First, I define it narrowly. There have been ridiculous accusations of Christian Nationalism based on undisclosed or untenable definitions. Real Christian Nationalists are still pretty rare, I think (but what do I, a contrarian, know?).

I’m not unaware that American pluralism is an experiment. I’m not sure whether it will succeed or fail. I’m familiar with and friendly toward the phrase “worst form of government except for all the others.” I’m not ready to abandon it.

At the risk of ad hominem, I don’t trust the “Christians” who expressly advocate for Christian Nationalism. One of my older blogs, on what we then called “culture wars,” remains relevant, but I’ll paraphrase excerpts rather than do direct quotes.

My distrust of Christian Nationalists stems fairly directly from my disagreements with their form of our putatively shared faith — disagreements that lead me to chronic use of scare-quotes around the word Christian or the use of “Christianish.”

The pious Protestants among them tend functionally believe that God’s only presence in the world is His rules, so they “honor” Him by keeping his rules. But the age of Trump has brought many to profess that they’re Evangelicals even if, in the extreme case, they’re Muslims or even atheists, because of something they like about the politics now associated with that label.

The most coherent, maybe the only, Protestant theorists of Christian Nationalism are theonomists, or more specifically Reconstructionists. If these Calvinist intellectuals had their way, there would be 18 Old Testament Capital Crimes in our law books – including sassing parents. They’d shut down my Church and desecrate its icons. They might, for all I know, execute me for idolatry for the icons in my home prayer corner.

Ummmm, no thanks.

The Catholic theorists of Christian Nationalism (Integralism, they call it) are much better — not okay, but less bad. But I don’t think their side would get the levers of power anyway.

There is no remotely viable Orthodox version of Christian Nationalism, Byzantium being long-gone. And we’d lack the numbers to staff government if there were.

So I think “Christian Nationalism” in America would be, in ascending order of likelihood:

  1. Catholic Integralism
  2. Calvinistic Reconstructionism
  3. A blasphemous mish-mash of right wingnuttery in the name of God. (Like Indiana’s GOP Lietenant Governor nominee or the yard sign “Make Faith Great Again: Trump 2020.”)

I reject them all. I think all of them would be hostile to Orthodox Christianity. I prefer to continue our flawed experiment with pluralism. But I suspect I’ll live to see one of them.

We Orthodox have survived similar or worse circumstances before.

America’s enemies

American leaders have a great need to identify an enemy or group of enemies that the U.S. can define itself against in order to justify the dominant position that they want the U.S. to have. It doesn’t occur to these leaders that the pursuit of dominance itself is what creates so many enemies or that the U.S. would be far more secure by renouncing the pursuit.

…

Losing the Soviets as an enemy created a hole in U.S. foreign policy that Washington desperately tried to fill with anything our leaders could find, but the substitute villains (Saddam Hussein, Milosevic, etc.) were so weak by comparison that the threats had to be massively inflated.

Daniel Larison (who had fallen off my radar)

We seem hellbent on creating intractible enemies in at least three corners of the world. Depending on their political stripe, American politicians speak as if Russia, China, and/or Iran pose existential threats to us. Yes, we do have substantive differences with all, but I can make a case for all three that they simply wish to live their lives in their own ways in their part of the world without our interference. Look at the flash points with each: Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan. All are American dependencies; all are projections of our hegemony into the very heart of their respective spheres. Regardless of your sentiments, the fate of none of those areas have any existential meaning to the U.S.; and yes, I am including Israel in that. They do, however, have existential meaning to our supposed adversaries.

Terry Cowan

J.D. Vance

I commented on June 13 about Ross Douthat’s interview with J.D. Vance.

There doubtless have been many commentators weighing in on the interview, but I’ve read only one so far: Andrew Sullivan. He made some excellent observations about places where Vance was tap-dancing around the unvarnished truth (to stay in Trump’s good graces?) or omitting crucial facts that eviscerate his argument.

Of the changes in voting rules to deal with Covid?:

The new pandemic rules, moreover, were endorsed by the Congress, which passed $400 million in the CARES Act for the election’s unique challenges, which Trump himself signed into law. If the rules were rigged, Trump helped rig them!

…

Vance’s case is completely undermined by Trump himself. Trump, after all, did not say after the election that the Covid rules were why he’d lost. He said he’d lost because votes were stolen, stuffed, and hidden, and the voting machines had been rigged. He’s saying the same things today. And the reason for all of it was not some genuine concern about easier mail-in and absentee voting (he endorsed absentee voting, after all), but Trump’s basic, characterological inability to function in a system that doesn’t guarantee him victory every single time.

That is not the system’s fault. It’s the fault of the party that nominated a malignant, delusional loon.

Putin

This week in Budapest, I met with an American academic active in the struggle for international religious freedom. We spoke about the Russia-Ukraine war, and established that we both believe Russia ought not to have invaded its neighbor. I added that as an Orthodox Christian, it grieves me how Putin has instrumentalized the Church to advance his war aims.

Then the American, a conservative Christian, posed a provocative question, that went something like this: For all his thuggishness, do you think that Vladimir Putin is on the right side of broad civilizational trends? My interlocutor brought up Putin’s harsh criticism of Western secularism and its emptiness, contrasting it to a Russia built on traditional values, including religion. Yes, Russia is in deep social and demographic trouble, and yes, Putin might be a colossal hypocrite, but, said the American, on the deep civilizational questions, isn’t Putin, you know … right?

I knew the answer, but as a man of the West, was too depressed by the question to admit it ….

Rod Dreher in the European Conservative

Degrowth

The case for degrowth is not about martyred self-denial or constraining human potential; it is about reorienting socioeconomies to support collaborative and creative construction of lives that are pleasurable, healthy, satisfying, and sustainable for more people and more places. End goals of degrowth – dignified work, less selfish competition, more equitable relationships, identities not ranked by individual achievement, solidary communities, humane rhythms of life, respect for natural environments – are also the means through which people exercise and embody, day by day, the lifestyles, institutions, and politics of degrowth worlds to come.

The Cauldron of Degrowth – Front Porch Republic

Euro-skepticism

The European Union began as a trading bloc, but by the early 1990s, it had evolved into a moral project fueled by elite distaste for (even revulsion against) the nationalistic sentiments these elites had become convinced were the source of all the crimes of the European past, including imperialism, racism, fascism, and genocide. What Europe needed was an inoculation against these sentiments, and the EU would be the vaccine, giving the continent a collective goal of striving to overcome particularistic attachments and the cruelty, suffering, and oppression they supposedly implant and encourage. Nationalistic sentiments would be sublimated into the transnational idea of the EU, with the EU itself eventually expanding without limit as the leading edge of a world without borders or walls impeding trade, the free movement of people, products, capital, and labor.

Damon Linker

I am enthusiastically European; no informed person could seriously wish to return to the embattled, mutually antagonistic circle of suspicious and introverted nations that was the European continent in the quite recent past. But it is one thing to think an outcome desirable, quite another to suppose it is possible. It is my contention that a truly united Europe is sufficiently unlikely for it to be unwise and self-defeating to insist upon it. I am thus, I suppose, a Euro-pessimist.

Tony Judt

Matters of Opinion

The continuing siege of Samuel Alito

I’m a journalist. We’re journalists. There are certain things we do. When we interview somebody, we make it clear that I work for the New York Times, the “NewsHour,” the Washington Post. Like, we make it clear who we are. We don’t lie. We don’t misrepresent ourselves. We don’t hide a tape recorder somewhere, and we don’t lead people on with a bunch of ideological rants. And this person did all that. It’s a complete breach of any—the basic form of journalistic ethics. And I was, frankly, stunned that all of us in our business just reported on it, just like straight up. And to me, this information is so doctored by her attitudes, the way she’s leading on Alito and his wife. It’s just—it’s unfair to them, frankly, to treat this as some major news story. We should be treating it as somebody, a prankster. And there’s a right-wing version of this called Project Veritas, where they lie too—as some prankster who’s creating distorted information.

David Brooks, on the Journalist who plied Justice Alito with a red-meat rant and got only a very anodyne response.

I found myself hoping that she will forever be known as the journalist who engaged in sleaze and then made it worse by publishing the nothingburger results. And then I remembered an incident in my past, when I may have been older than she is now, when I broke the rules to get the true story — not as a journalist, but as a lawyer. I, too, came up dry — and exposed for my wrongdoing.

I’m glad that did not follow me the rest of my life. I hope she has learned her lesson as I learned mine.

Worst Matter of Opinion podcast ever?

With Ross Douthat on vacation, Michelle Cottle, Carlos Lozada and Lydia Polgreen invited their hardcore colleague Jesse Wegman to join them.

Synopsis: Some justices blame the press for distrust of the U.S. Supreme Court. But that’s not it. It’s really Justice Alito’s [first exaggeration about Justice Alito] and [generalization built on exaggeration] and Clarence Thomas [Oh, hell, let’s just lump him with Alito] and dismissing Alito’s version of flag-gate and laughing out loud at Justice Alito saying [garbled version of he has a duty to deliberate if he’s not required to recuse, which is true] and Mitch McConnell, who played unprecedented political hardball to defeat Merrick Garland (by delay) and confirm Justice Barrett (by contrasting haste), so that Trump’s two appointees have cooties-by-association.

I will give Carlos Lozada credit for pushing back. The bias, dishonesty, and inexcusable ignorance of the other three make me want to cancel my Times subscription.

Intuition

“I have the feeling that I understand it.” But then he adds, “In fact, it is not ‘understanding,’ and it is not ‘knowledge.’ It is a direct awareness, or intuition. It’s not the kind of thing you ‘understand.’ It’s like I said before to you: one grain of rice, and the whole earth, they are the same. You can’t learn that from a book.”

Andy Couturier, The Abundance of Less

Mordant observation

The more people came to know gay people and understand the aims of the movement for gay marriage, the more accepting they became of it. The more people come to know trans people and understand the aims of the transgender moment, the more skeptical they become of its claims.

Wesley Yang on new polling. (Via Andrew Sullivan)

Books

There are 10,000 books in my library, and it will keep growing until I die. This has exasperated my daughters, amused my friends and baffled my accountant. If I had not picked up this habit in the library long ago, I would have more money in the bank today; I would not be richer.

Pete Hamill via Robert Breen on micro.blog.

I know what Hamill means.

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go? Well, first, I resolved to stop harping on it. But then, I just moved it off to my reflexive blog, trying to keep this one relatively reflective.

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.

Notebook Dump 6/13/24

Culture

Incentivizing misery (bad urbanism)

There is nothing economically or socially inevitable about either the decay of old cities or the fresh-minted decadence of the new unurban urbanization. On the contrary, no other aspect of our economy and society has been more purposefully manipulated … to achieve precisely what we are getting. Extraordinary governmental financial incentives have been required to achieve this degree of monotony, sterility and vulgarity. Decades of preaching, writing and exhorting by experts have gone into convincing us and our legislators that mush like this must be good for us, as long as it comes bedded with grass.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“Assignable Curiosity” — ouch!

As Jeff Schmidt writes in Disciplined Minds (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), academia and the other high-ranking professions are good at maintaining “ideological discipline” within their ranks, and people who do well in the academy tend to have “assignable curiosity,” which is to say, they are obediently interested in the things they’re told to be interested in.

Alan Jacobs, How to Think

By what authority?

The newest [Covid conspiracy theory] I’ve heard is that Covid is ravaging people’s immune systems on a mass scale comparable to that of H.I.V. On what authority can such a falsehood now be debunked?

As the expression goes, trust is built in drops and lost in buckets, and this bucket is going to take a very long time to refill.

Zeynep Tufekci, A Lesson From Covid on How to Destroy Public Trust (emphasis added)

And then there’s the National Security officials who prostituted themselves to declare Hunter Biden’s laptop a made-in-Russia hoax.

If I were on the Left, I hope I’d have the objectivity to reject most of what comes out of HRC and SPLC, both of them media-coddled bullshit factories, dependent on fear to stay in business. (By all rights, HRC should have declared victory and closed up shop after Obergefell; instead, it took up a version of transgender rights that many gays and lesbians reject.) But the Media lap up their stuff.

I don’t know who’s trustworthy any more. Whereas I formerly read stuff regularly from sources on the fairly far Left and Right, I now try to stick to sane-seeming, more-or-less-centrist sources, the fairly far Left and Right having become chronic liars. But I have no conclusive reason to think the center isn’t lying, too.

Any glimmers of absolute certainty I saw in the past were probably unwarranted, but these days it’s hard to find “beyond reasonable doubt.”

Elusive higher purposes

L.M. Sacacas attempts to disenthrall us from a subtle delusion:

Implicit in the promise of outsourcing and automation and time-saving devices is a freedom to be something other than what we ought to be. The liberation we are offered is a liberation from the very care-driven involvement in the world and in our communities that would render our lives meaningful and satisfying. In other words, the promise of liberation traps us within the tyranny of tiny tasks by convincing us to see the stuff of everyday life and ordinary relationships as obstacles in search of an elusive higher purpose—Creativity, Diversion, Wellness, Self-actualization, whatever. But in this way it turns out that we are only ever serving the demands of the system that wants nothing more than our ceaseless consumption and production.

…

Perhaps the best expression I know of the sentiment I’m trying to convey is from a poem by Marylin Chandler McEntyre, “Artists at Work,” from her collection inspired by Vermeer’s women:

The craftsman who made the rose window at Chartres
rose one morning in the dead of winter,
shivered into what layers of wool he owned,
and went to his bench to boil molten lead.
This was not the day to cut the glass or dye it,
lift it to the sun to see the colors dance
along the walls, or catch one’s breath
at peacock shades of blue: only, today,
to lay hot lead in careful lines, circles,
wiping and trimming, making
a perfect space for light.

When Wren designed St. Paul’s, he had to turn away
each day from the vision in his mind’s wide eye
to scraps of paper where columns of figures measured
tension and stress, heft and curve, angle and bearing point.
Whole days he spent considering the density
of granite, the weathering of hardwoods,
the thickness of perfect mortar; all
to the greater glory of God.

And Vermeer with his houseful of children
didn’t paint some days, didn’t even mix
powders or stretch canvasses, or clean palettes,
but hauled in firewood, cleaned out
a flue, repaired a broken cradle, remembering,
as he bent to his task, how light shone gold
on a woman’s flesh, and gathered
in drops on her pearls.

Teflon Sam

A liberal (maybe even left-wing) provocateur named Lauren Windsor attended a dinner of the Supreme Court Historical Society and, with hidden recording device and pretending to be a fervent Catholic conservative, tried to bait Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito into saying something inflammatory. She utterly struck out with Roberts but got an polite, anodyne response from Alito. The liberal media are now dishonestly engaged in trying to distill something sinister, even theocratic, from the weak tea of what he said.

But …

To start with the question of judicial ethics: Where was the justice’s error? He did not mention any pending case or litigation. He did not name any person or party. He did not discuss any specific political or moral matter. Most of the exchange consists of the filmmaker’s own goading remarks, followed by the justice’s vague and anodyne affirmations and replies. About what you might expect when cornered at a boring cocktail party.

Setting aside judicial ethics, I can think of two possible objections to what Justice Alito said: that he should not hold these views; or that he should not express them in public.

As to whether he should hold these views, I would suggest that they are not so extreme as to merit denunciation. On the contrary, they are reasonable, even commonplace.

Marc O. DeGirolami. And:

Alito wasn’t wrong. What’s wrong is what this Windsor woman did: misrepresented herself in an attempt to bait these Justices into saying something she could weaponize on social media.

To be fair, the right-wing activists of Project Veritas have famously done the same kind of thing. I’ve praised it before, but on reflection, I regret that. It is a bad thing to turn even private life into an ideological battleground. When activists of either Left or Right go picket outside a public figure’s house, they claim that their cause (pro-life, gay rights, whatever) is so morally urgent that it justifies violating the unwritten taboo that separates public from private. Both sides do it, and it’s wrong. They’re making life together impossible.

Project Veritas has landed some excellent scoops with its undercover activism, and has exposed some bad actors, for sure. Yet I have come to believe the price for doing so is too high. If we lose the ability to socialize with each other out of fear that the stranger we have just met might not be who he or she claims to be, and that they might be leading us into a trap, then we have lost something fundamental to civilized life, haven’t we?

Rod Dreher.

Errata

In March, I wrote:

IVF is in fact popular … (I’d say “nobody would dare try to outlaw IVF” except that people are daring some pretty bizarre things these days.)

I stand at least semi-corrected:

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest and most politically powerful Protestant denomination, voted Wednesday to oppose in vitro fertilization. The move may signal the beginning of a broad turn on the right against IVF, an issue that many evangelicals, anti-abortion advocates and other social conservatives see as the “pro-life” movement’s next frontier — one they hope will eventually lead to restrictions, or outright bans, on IVF at the state and federal levels. (Source: politico.com)

Via John Ellis, whose daily new curation I recently discovered.

I note that the SBC resolution does not call for legislation, but I’m placing no bets on this being the end of the subject.

If you have no idea why anyone might opposed IVF, you need to get out more. As an oblique reminder, I again dig into my archives:

When the industry makes promises to prospective parents about in vitro fertilization, it leans on images of cherub-cheeked babies. And when it pitches to egg donors, it speaks the language of altruism: You can help make a family. But when something goes wrong, the liability-shy industry is quick to retreat to the language of cells and property. IVF relies on treating the embryos it creates, freezes, and often discards as Schrödinger’s persons: we cannot make a moral pronouncement about what they are until we know whether they’re intended for life or death.

Leah Libresco Sargeant

Beginning with the paragraph “The media’s manipulations …”, Ryan Anderson critiques IVF more directly.

Politics

Trading Power for Liberty

So why are parts of the right so discontent? The answer lies in the difference between power and liberty. One of the most important stories of the last century — from the moment the Supreme Court applied the First Amendment to state power in 1925, until the present day — is the way in which white Protestants lost power but gained liberty. Many millions are unhappy with the exchange.

David French, MAGA Turns Against the Constitution

Western Hegemony has ended

Five hundred years of Western hegemony has ended, while the global majority’s aspiration for a world order based on multipolarity and sovereign equality is rising. This incisive book addresses the demise of liberal hegemony, though pointing out that a multipolar Westphalian world order has not yet taken shape, leaving the world in a period of interregnum. A legal vacuum has emerged, in which the conflicting sides are competing to define the future order.

NATO expansionism was an important component of liberal hegemony as it was intended to cement the collective hegemony of the West as the foundation for a liberal democratic peace. Instead, it dismantled the pan-European security architecture and set Europe on the path to war without the possibility of a course correction. Ukraine as a divided country in a divided Europe has been a crucial pawn in the great power competition between NATO and Russia for the past three decades.

The war in Ukraine is a symptom of the collapsing world order. The war revealed the dysfunction of liberal hegemony in terms of both power and legitimacy, and it sparked a proxy war between the West and Russia instead of ensuring peace, the source of its legitimacy.

The proxy war, unprecedented sanctions, and efforts to isolate Russia in the wider world contributed to the demise of liberal hegemony as opposed to its revival. Much of the world responded to the war by intensifying their transition to a Eurasian world order that rejects hegemony and liberal universalism. The economic architecture is being reorganised as the world diversifies away from excessive reliance on Western technologies, industries, transportation corridors, banks, payment systems, insurance systems, and currencies. Universalism based on Western values is replaced by civilisational distinctiveness, sovereign inequality is swapped with sovereign equality, socialising inferiors is replaced by negotiations, and the rules-based international order is discarded in favour of international law. A Westphalian world order is reasserting itself, although with Eurasian characteristics.

The West’s defeat of Russia would restore the unipolar world order while a Russian victory would cement a multipolar one. The international system is now at its most dangerous as the prospect of compromise is absent, meaning the winner will take all. Both NATO under US direction and Russia are therefore prepared to take great risks and escalate, making nuclear wan increasingly likely.

Summary blurb for Glenn Diesen, The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order, recommended by cyberfriend and blogger Terry Cowan.

Although Diesen, even Cowan, pay closer attention to such things than I do, this is very much my view as well. So do I buy the book to confirm my priors or move on to another topic? If the Russia-Ukraine war ends before I buy it, I’ll probably move on.

But first, a key quote, from 1987 and from an eminent source, to keep and ponder:

George Kennan:

Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to go on, substantially unchanged until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.

Via Diesen and Terry Cowan

Nothing has changed. It is literally true that we invent enemies to justify feeding what Dwight Eisenhower presciently called “the military-industrial complex.”

J.D. Vance (see below) also thinks the world is becoming multipolar.

J.D. Vance

Ross Douthat has an important interview: J.D. Vance on Where He’d Take the Republican Party. I’m sharing an unlocked version which, if you wonder, as I do, “What happened to the never-Trump author of Hillbilly Elegy?” is worth reading.

I’ll probably wrestle with it more if he becomes Trump’s running mate. For now, I’m slightly less cynical about his change(s) over eight years than I was before, and I find that I’m of one mind with him substantively on a few things.

Balancing Sociopathy against policy

I don’t apologize for the votes I cast after careful (indeed, searching) consideration. However, I do have to apologize for my view of the never Trumpers whom I found to be histrionic and unrealistic. They saw further that there were significant risks involved with Donald Trump that could very well outweigh the policy outcomes. They were right about that, and they deserve an apology from me (and perhaps others who saw it the way I did) for not perceiving that their concerns were grounded in reality, not merely some idealistic moral fragility. They perceived a legitimate threat, which did come to significant fruition.

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

This, published 9 days after the January 6 insurrection (or whatever you want to call it, except “patriot rally” or its cognates) remains worth reading — if only for his rationale for voting as he did. I consider his rationale incoherent; one need not vote for a menace who might do some good things in order avoid being a “free rider” if the menace actually does them. One can say “I think the menace outweighs the possible benefits.”

Reminder …

I’ve moved most political stuff to another blog, but if you’re curious, they’re just a click away.

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go? Well, first, I resolved to stop harping on it. But then, I just moved it off to my reflexive blog, trying to keep this one relatively reflective.

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.