Category: Political Matters

Feast of Prophet Elijah

Culture

“Mixed heritage” versus “mixed race”

I have an extraordinary acquaintance on social media whose skin is dark, whereas his wife’s is light. It’s the things he does, and his unusual heritage, that makes him extraordinary. But he also thinks a lot about “race” because of how he and his daughter get categorized.

His daughter is also light-skinned, and was categorized as “white” a few days ago in a class where basically everyone else was a POC (as they say) and they “decided to lean hard into race being about physical characteristics, basically how people look, rather than even addressing the even slightly less dicey definition of shared ancestry.” The story has started a little social media discussion.

In the course, my acquaintance drew a distinction that I’d not heard before:

The main thing to understand is that race is a completely made up construct with no basis in scientific method (with the many, many, outliers like my daughter as proof of that). [So far, so familiar.]

Heritage is scientifically inescapable as it is based on who your direct ancestors are.

This is why I’m careful to say [my daughter] is of “mixed heritage” and not “mixed race”. Because, no one is of “mixed race” because race is based solely on looks and looks are a matter of individual perception.

If I ruled the world, “race” would be banished in favor of “heritage.” It seems like a helpful mind-hack.

Viva la difference!

Japan is very Japanese, intentionally so. You rarely see foreigners here beyond a few Filipinos and Bangladeshis. This annoys the economist technocrat types, sometimes for moral reasons, but mostly for pragmatic reasons. They see immigration, and open borders, as necessary for economic growth, which they view as the only goal for a country. A place must grow, change, and evolve, or else it’s a failure. Or to put it in the words of the economic development IMF types, every country should adopt the US western model of open borders, labor and pension reform, global treaties, and free markets, etc etc etc.

Japan, of all the G7 members, has stubbornly refused to do much of this, from the smaller things like eating whale to the larger things like increasing immigration, especially when it comes to any policy that could corrupt or dilute its culture.

So the technocrat/policy types look at Japan’s last few decades of relative economic stagnation as a failure, while the Japanese just shrug it off and chalk it up to one of the costs of maintaining their cultural identity. Something I intellectually respect, even if it’s not for me. A national identity, through a shared and specialized culture, is one of the easiest webs of meaning to construct, that works for the largest number of citizens, and in a largely secular place like Japan, certainly helps add to its functionality. To it being a high trust society.

That model of “maintaining Japan for the Japanese” might work for Japan, but that doesn’t mean I’m suggesting it would be good for the US. Immigration is central to the US’s last remaining shared web of meaning, which is what we generally call the American Dream. The idea that anybody, with enough hard work, can be successful, without having to break the rules. That someone can come to the US from literally anywhere, with nothing, and build a life for their kids that’s better than their own.

In contrast to Japan, cultural change rather than preservation is our national model, and entrepreneurialism is our national identity. So much so that we have made it a transcendent and spiritual ethos, even though it’s grounded in the material. A nationalism built around a kind of prosperity theology — which is inclusive of different peoples and cultures, as long as they buy into the concept of aspirational wealth.

Chris Arnade, Walking across Japan, part 2: A retreat to Niigata.

I could do with a bit more Japan in my life, figuratively speaking. I’ll never move, and it would not be to the far east if I did. I’m not opposed to (controlled) immigration even at a fairly expansive rate. But the dynamism, the churn, of American modernity I find pretty uncongenial much of the time.

Self-induced flatness?

Most consumers don’t know that by using internet-based (or -generated) platforms—by buying from Amazon, by staying in an Airbnb, by ordering on Grubhub, by friending people on Facebook—that they are subscribing to a life of flatness, one that can lead directly into certain politics. But they are. Seduced by convenience, we end up paying for the flattening of our own lives. It is not an accident that progressive ideas spread faster on the internet. The internet is a car that runs on flatness; progressive politics—unlike either conservatism or liberalism—are flatness.

Alana Newhouse, Everything is Broken

Happy places

In a previous life, Jamie was a MacBook-using, flat white-sipping hipster photographer from east London, growing slowly disillusioned with the pressure and precarity of the city’s gentrification. Then, one day, while hungover at a music festival, she stumbled upon a sauna. “I came out of the sauna into nature and plunged into a cold lake and was reborn,” she says.

Months later, Jamie left London, moved to Sussex and set up her first sauna venture. After just five years, she’s flourishing: “I’ve created a really beautiful life for myself. I live on the beach, I work in a forest, I run my own business. I’m doing work that feels purposeful and impactful.”

Louis Elton, The dawn of the Bohemian Peasants

Tech

Technological downsides

[T]he tendency to disorder [is] greatest when social arrangements are both increasingly complicated, and increasingly unnatural. Hackers couldn’t have kept our ancestors from building cooking fires, but it is very difficult to keep them from knocking out the electrical grid.

J Budziszewski

ChatGPT scholarship

I’ve written before about the ways that ChatGPT and the like are revealing the unimaginative, mechanical nature of so many assignments we college teachers create and administer. In that post I wrote, “If an AI can write it, and an AI can read it and respond to it, then does it need to be done at all?“ Might we not ask the same question about our research, so much of which is produced simply because publish-or-perish demands it, not because of any value it has either to its authors or its readers (if it has any readers)?

Countless times in my career I have heard people talk about their need to publish research — to get tenure or promotion — in an AI-like pattern-matching mode: What sort of thing is getting published these days? What terms and concepts are predominantly featured? What previous scholarship is most often cited? And once they answer those questions, they generate the appropriate “content” and then fit it into one of the very few predetermined structures of academic writing. And isn’t all this a perfect illustration of a bullshit job?

Yes, I’m worried about what AI will do to academic life — but I also see the possibility of our having to face the ways in which our work, as students, teachers, and researchers, has become mechanistic and dehumanizing. And if we can honestly acknowledge the conditions, then maybe we can do something better.

Alan Jacobs, noting another facet to Dan Cohen’s concerns about AI in scholarship.

Jacobs’ path requires reflection and painful course-correction, so I reckon we’ll use AI to fight AI — the usual layering of a technical solution on top of a technology-induced problem.

Until it all breaks.

Legalia

The Lawless GOP Law-Enforcers

I had forgotten that the Republican Attorneys General Association sent robocalls asking people to join a certain rally on January 6, 2021. Hindsight shows this to have been a bad idea.

But foresight would have done the same: what legitimate interest did Republican Attorneys General have in turning out throngs of deluded populists for a rally in support of the idea that Donald Trump had won the election he’d lost two months earlier? Much worse came of it than expected, but no sane person would have expected any good of it.

They should have been supporting the rule of law, not becoming violence-enabling political hacks.

Aim at fat-cats, hit do-gooders

My colleagues at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (where I am a writer in residence) are taking the lead in what will be, almost certainly, the most significant case the Supreme Court hears in its next term: Moore v. United States. (Do not confuse it with the surveillance case of the same name.) Like many such cases, this one really involves, at heart, very little more than the question of whether the Constitution says what it actually says or whether the government can, citing needful exigencies, simply pretend that the Constitution says whatever the powers that be in Washington decide it needs to say on any given day.

Charles and Kathleen Moore invested in a social enterprise in India, KisanKraft Machine Tools Private Limited, which helps Indian farmers in poor and underdeveloped areas improve their businesses—and their lives—by acquiring more modern equipment. KisanKraft now employs hundreds of people in India and has helped a great many marginal farmers—and their families and communities—improve their economic situations by means of their own work and enterprise, not as clients of some political patron or as dependents on some charitable program. (The next time someone tells you free-market economics is for people who care only about themselves … ) KisanKraft is one of those businesses that exists to make a difference rather than a profit, and, for that reason, it reinvests all of its earnings into the business itself. The Moores have never received a penny of income from their investment in the firm, never expected to, and, barring some unforeseeable development, never will. 

But, thanks to the special kind of imbecility that can be produced only by the intellectual fusion of Donald Trump with Elizabeth Warren, the Moores have been given a tax bill not for any income they have realized from their investment—of which there is $0.00—but for imaginary income. KisanKraft could have paid out dividends to its investors, who would then have investment income to pay taxes on. But KisanKraft did not do that. Donald Trump, who has the resume of a villain from an unpublished Ayn Rand novel—second-rater, inherited money, serial business failure, corrupt, seething with hatred for people who succeed in the businesses he failed at—has spent years railing at American investors and businesses with the unpatriotic gall to invest in overseas businesses (that are not golf courses), and in 2017 congressional Republicans, caught up in that unsavory nationalist-populist moment, produced the grievously misnamed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which imposed a “one time” (“It’s only this once, we promise!”) tax on unrealized overseas investment income, simply “deeming” profits to have been realized and repatriated for tax purposes. It was one of the dumbest policy ideas of a remarkably dumb era. Of course, it was supposed to wring money out of the scheming shifty corporate “fat cats” who populate the fever dreams of well-heeled Washington populists. 

Of course, it landed on people like the Moores.

Kevin D. Williamson

Early precedent for 303 Creative

Creative artists refusing to create works that violate their conscience is nothing new. Consider, for instance, the Roman Emperor Diocletian:

… the last glimpse that we have of his personal life is his irritation at the refusal of his Christian stone-masons to make him a statue of Æsculapius.

Rebecca West, Black Lamb & Grey Falcon, (Kindle Location 3520).

Sex and gender

Sanity or a ban?

I don’t want to ban any medical procedure. It may be that in a few cases, transition will help at such a young age. But recommending them as a general rule, the minute a child says they’re the opposite sex, without exploration of other possible mental health issues? Reckless beyond belief. That has got to stop. Someone has to protect the children, especially the gay ones, who cannot protect themselves.

Andrew Sullivan. This is the concluding paragraph of a too-long-to-fully-quote item on the continuing scandal of the American medical establishment using junk science or made-up science to support mutilating gender dysphoric children as the first treatment option.

Shmocial Shmontagion

[N]early forty percent of Brown’s student body identifies as “not straight,” which is five times the national average. To be fair, the definition of “not straight” ranges these days from being in a same-sex relationship—which somehow rings very traditional now, very problematic, very “there’s only one sex allowed in this relationship”—to having an edgy haircut. There are two options for what’s going on here. The first is that Alex Jones was right, that our drinking water is screwing with our hormones, and that indeed everyone is becoming gay from it. The second rhymes with Shmocial Shmontagion.

Suzy Weiss, The Free Press

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

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

Sunday, 7/16/23

Imagine there’s no Rapture …

Orthodox Holy Tradition says clearly that the Second Coming, the General Resurrection, and the Last Judgment are three facets of one single, overwhelming event. There is no divide (which is the meaning of the heresy of chiliasm, which was rejected in the Second Ecumenical Council, and the reason why we say “and His Kingdom shall have no end” in the Creed). There is no Rapture. There is no Seven Year Tribulation. There is no single human individual who is the Antichrist or the Beast — the Antichrist is not a Jew, not a Muslim, not a Communist, nor is he the Pope or any one of the many theories that have been published over the centuries.

There is no literal thousand-year-long Millennium. There is no reappearance of Satan setting off the last Armageddon.

There will indeed come the Great Universal Transfiguration that overwhelms time and space and all Creation.

This is the Kingdom if its infinite, almost terrifying fullness and glory.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias, the last judgment and the problem of goathood

This I believe.

I will not say that the Orthodox Church is the only church that rejects all the rapture crap, because I don’t believe it is. But it’s also true that not every church that rejects all the rapture crap still believes in the Second Coming, the General Resurrection, and the Last Judgment. That kind of narrows things down a lot.

A periodic reminder

I’ve no doubt posted this quote before:

The shift from church power to state power is not the victory of peaceable reason over irrational religious violence. The more we tell ourselves it is, the more we are capable of ignoring the violence we do in the name of reason and freedom.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence

Liturgy

In a culture that values spontaneity, liturgy grounds us in something enduring. In a culture that assumes truth is a product of the mind, liturgy helps us experience truth in mind, body, and spirit.

Book blurb for Mark Galli’s Beyond Smells and Bells: The Wonder and Power of Christian Liturgy

Modern worship

On a related note:

[A]ny attempt to “modernise” liturgy in terms of making it more acceptable to modern society (i.e. “pastoral respectability”) should be undertaken with extreme caution; the warning of Charles Davis is paramount here:

My thesis is that there is no modern form of worship, because worship itself is outdated in the modern world and Christian Faith a state of deviancy from contemporary culture.

Bryan D. Spinks, “Christian Worship or Cultural Incantations?”, Studia Liturgical, vol. 12 (1977), 1, 12-13 (quoting Charles Davis, “Ghetto or Desert: Liturgy in a Cultural Dilemma” in Worship and Secularization (1970), pp. 10-27, p. 12).

Thanks to @letters on micro.blog who appears to read such things voraciously.

The teleological void

My college students have worked hard getting impressive credentials since at least middle school and will continue to do so long after college. When I ask them where this is all going, they are befuddled. “This is just what you do,” they often answer. Anything else is impractical, unrealistic, and useless. They have been going their whole lives without asking or being asked “where to?” Asking such a question means stopping, thinking, and perhaps changing direction, all things that religion and humanities have us do. But our society has no interest in silence or pausing.

Terence Sweeney, Why Religion and the Humanities Are in Decline

The evangelical soul

This baffling essay proves that although Mere Orthodoxy is consistently good, it’s not unvaryingly good. The author lost me at the construct “the evangelical soul.”

(Mere Orthodoxy, by the way and once again, is not a Orthodox website; it is a Reformed-leaning Protestant website that considers itself orthodox and “leans young.” It’s usually pretty good; I don’t subscribe to anything for the sole purpose of dissing it.)

What if?

Our professor asked a hypothetical question: “If the bones of Jesus were discovered, and if there were some way to absolutely confirm that they were the bones of Jesus, would you still be a Christian?”
Every other member of the class confirmed that he or she would remain a Christian, making statements such as “I would not lose my faith,” or “Jesus was a great teacher and philosopher.”

I was dumbfounded and utterly dismayed. How was it possible that such intelligent, committed, and educated Catholics could give such responses? Did they not realize the fundamental importance of the Resurrection of Christ? If not, why not? My response was, “If the bones of Jesus were discovered, I would be outta here! I would no longer be a Christian!” I explained that the Resurrection is an absolute necessity to the Christian faith. The class listened politely, but no one seemed at all impressed or influenced by my answer.

Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

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

Saturday, 7/15/23

I forewent a provocative headline and lead paragraph.

You’re welcome.

Culture

Peter Coy brings the receipts

I haven’t harped about this because I didn’t have facts and figures. But the New York Times’ Peter Coy has now provided them (and it’s important enough that I’m giving you a link that pierces the paywall):

  • The amount of lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel, graphite and other lithium-ion battery materials needed for one long-range electric vehicle would be enough for either six plug-in hybrids or 90 of the type of hybrid that recharges from deceleration and braking.
  • The overall carbon reduction of those 90 hybrids over their lifetimes is 37 times as much as a single battery electric vehicle.
  • The production of electric vehicles produces more greenhouse gases than the production of cars with combustion engines. So E.V.s have to travel between 28,000 and 68,000 miles before they have an emissions advantage over similarly sized and equipped internal-combustion mobiles.

All-electric vehicles are presently a gigantic flim-flam, and considering that third point, they’re going to remain a flim-flam for quite a long time. (Does an EV even get 68,000+ miles before those big honkin’ batteries need replaced?)

The plug-in hybrids have appealed to me, but I’ve got to get over that and to stop feeling like a criminal for (currently) not even driving a conventional hybrid, but a full-blown internal-combustion vehicle. (I’d have bought my second hybrid if they offered one on this model.)

EVs are a kind of social contagion, heavily subsidized by the federal government, which really needs to cut it out.

This is one reason I have almost as little respect for Elon Musk as I do for He Who Shall Not Be Named (another guy who got more-or-less rich dishonorably).

From the July 15 Economist

Pangloss makes the case for AI

Mark Andreesen, giving the Panglossian version of AI, lost me early on at the patently bullshitty “infinitely patient, infinitely compassionate, infinitely knowledgeable, and infinitely helpful.” He reminds me of George Burns: “Sincerity – if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” Because all those AI virtues are fakes.

I was hoping for something better, because I think there’s a better case available. In fact, I know there’s a better case to be made because I heard it made on a podcast Tuesday on the Ezra Klein show.

Freedom

Aunt Concetta told me that she didn’t like life in America because we had no freedom. That comment baffled me because, like everyone else my age, I believed that America was the land of the free and the home of the brave. But she pulled me up short. “Your grandmother,” she said, “is afraid to walk down the main street at night.”

…

… That little conversation, more than anything I have read about political life, has put an indelible mark on my thinking about freedom. I have long rejected any view that reduces liberty to the results of a constitutional mechanism, or that identifies liberty with suffrage, or that defines liberty as a negative, as what the government may not tell you that you may not do.

… I think I can venture a suggestion as to gauging the degree of real freedom that a nation, or perhaps your town or your street, enjoys. It is the degree and the character of spontaneous, unencumbered, and undirected action on the street.

Anthony Esolen

I kinda sorta feel for Tommy Tuberville

Terms like “white nationalist” mean something: White nationalism is a form of white supremacy that advocates white dominance and white control. You don’t have to take my word for it, you can look it up. (On Tuesday, Tuberville admitted that white nationalists are racists.)

I don’t normally read Charles Blow, but this time, I read a little bit, including the block-quote, because The Morning Dispatch had called out Tuberville teasingly the day before:

It took him about two months and several botched attempts, but a hearty congratulations to GOP Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama for finally saying these words in this order: “White nationalists are racists.”

I remember in law school insisting that I was a creationist. I said that because I believed that this stuff all around us, out to the furthest reaches of our telescopes, were the result of a divine creation, not an accident or the outworking of eternally-existent matter and energy. Someone pointed out that what I meant, though, was not what creationism had come to mean as a term of art. Creationism had come to mean divine creation roughly 6000 to 10,000 years ago, fixed species, etc.

“White Nationalist” has never been a term I’d apply to myself; first, because race is truly (if not exclusively, in our vexed history) a pigment of the imagination; second, because nationalism holds little to no appeal for me. But it appeared to me to mean “nationalism professed by a pale person,” and its journalistic use to be more epithet than description.

Maybe Tommy Tuberville thought as I did, and that’s why he pushed back so. But Blow cites Merriam-Webster for a term-of-art meaning that implies racist white supremacy.

I still stand by the epithet point, and believe that the term is not yet univocally racist. But sensible people, aware of its equivocal meaning, will steer clear of it.

Paris

Many people who love Paris love it because the first time they came they ate something better than they had ever eaten before, and kept coming back to eat it again.

Adam Gopnik, [The Table Comes First(https://www.amazon.com/Table-Comes-First-Family-Meaning-ebook/dp/B004KPM1EY/ref=sr_1_1)

I find that very plausible.

Legalia

FINALLY someone else says it (and better than I)

The nature of expressive, creative work is also such that consumers would not ordinarily wish to risk the quality of the product or service by conscripting a reluctant vendor to create messages that contradict the vendor’s sincere personal beliefs.

Abram Pafford, “You Couldn’t Pay Me to Say That”: 303 Creative and Compelled Commercial Speech.

303 Creative was a well-warranted pre-enforcement challenge based on the proposition that Colorado’s public accommodations law was unconstitutional as applied to plaintiff’s refusal of website design for same-sex weddings. Colorado never challenged the owner’s standing, and even stipulated the facts that eventually blew a little hole in the hull of its law (which remains resolutely afloat).

Even today, pre-enforcement challenges are pending to, notably, some of the new restrictive abortion laws some states have passed, and to state bans on transgender care for minors. The Left is happy as can be with decades of pre-enforcement challenges like these — of which the Left has been the primary beneficiary. I don’t recall Right-leaning pre-enforcement challenges, other than against college speech codes, until the Obama years.

Not until after Colorado had lost did its Attorney General start joining the ignorant “fake case” chorus.

But in a sense, 303 Creative was a “fake case” — or at least an “engineered case”: the sense that in the real world, untainted by polarization and the insatiable desire of LGBTetc folks for universal affirmation, as if their sexuality were constitutional high trump, such cases would not be brought because — well, see the block quote. That’s why I put it there.

What should happen now is clear enough to me: states should disavow application of their public accommodation laws to creative professionals’ rare refusals to aid in expressing an objectionable message — with the creative professional being the sole judge of “objectionable.”

And I’ll reiterate that the key here is the right of the service provider to be free of compulsion to express sentiments they in fact disapprove. It would apply as much to, say, a Jewish graphic designer declining to work on BDS advocacy as to conservative Christians (and others) declining work on same-sex weddings. I sincerely doubt that Colorado would punish that Jewish graphic designer; this is about forcing Christians to bend the knee to the new sexual orthodoxies.

(It’s surprising how easy it is to mis-state what’s at stake here. This little item took far more time than I expected. I probably should cut some slack to those who make a living minting hot takes on complex topics for siloed readerships and who get sloppy in the process.)

Non-partisan politics

Smoke-filled rooms

I miss smoke-filled rooms.

Not the literal ones, but the ones that brought forth sane and competitive candidates back in the day.

Today, primary voters — often the most extreme members of a party — deliver us unpalatable candidates, with the only gesture toward electability being “will he be perceived as less bad than the other party’s guy?”

Yes, I’m thinking specifically of the likely nomination of Donald Trump by the GOP. But I’m not thinking exclusively of that. Hillary in 2016 is also an example.

Our Unaccountable TechLords

At almost every gathering artificial intelligence came up. I’d say people are approaching AI with a free floating dread leavened by a pragmatic commitment to make the best of it, see what it can do to make life better. It can’t be stopped any more than you can stop the tide. There’s a sense of, “It may break cancer’s deepest codes,” combined with, “It may turn on us and get us nuked.”

My offered thought: AI’s founders, funders and promoters made a big recent show of asking Congress to help them fashion moral guardrails, but to my mind there was little comfort in it. I think they had three motives. First, to be seen as humble and morally serious—aware of the complexities of this awesome new power and asking for help in thinking them through. Second, they are certain government is too incompetent and stupid to slow them down or impede them in any meaningful way, so why not. Third, when something goes wrong they can say, “But we pleaded for your help!”

That unfriendly read is based on 30 years of observing our tech leaders. They have a sense of responsibility to their vision and to their own genius, but not to people at large or the American people in particular. They always claim they’re looking for better communication and greater joy between peoples when in the end it turns out they’re looking for money and power. And they only see the sunny side of their inventions because they were raised in a sunny age, and can’t imagine what darkness looks like, or that it comes.

Peggy Noonan

My skewed perspective

There are too many sensible people writing critically and even bitterly about the government’s Covid pandemic (or is “epidemic” sufficient?) response for me to assume it just partisan politics. But I confess that something about having retired before Covidtide seems to make me largely insensible to the outrage many feel about the government response.

I even joked that “I’m an introvert; social distancing is almost my default.”

So pardon me for not joining the chorus. If I’m consistent, though, I won’t join government’s defenders, either.

But I will make this observation: during the putative lockdowns, our lowest-paid, lowest-status workers had to go ahead and work in “meatspace,” risking infection. They are our truly indispensable workers, and many of them should be paid far better than they are.

Gaming the fat-cat system

The Republican National Committee has set a threshold of 40,000 individual donors, including 200 each in 20 states or territories, to qualify for primary debates. This is supposed to assure broad support and (they say) block candidates with mostly fat-cat donors.

So, how long did it take for candidates to game that system?

So how about using fat-cat donations to buy $20 gift cards for anyone who gives $1? You can buy a lot of $1 gifts if you’re offering an instant 1900% ROI.

(David A. Graham, We’re Entering a New Era of Shady Campaign Finance)

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

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

Amazon Prime Day 1

Having dated other blogs according to the Christian calendar, it seems only fair to date one according to the Consumerist calendar. I’m debating whether next June I should date things Pride 1, Pride 2, etc.

Okay, the debate’s over: I’ll do that only if I can figure out how to make it clear that I’m being a sarcastic dissenter.

Public affairs

Toward a better understanding of MAGA America

I’ve been trying to understand Trumpworld since Trump started winning GOP primaries in 2016. Really I have. I don’t want to think that almost 50% of this country just raised a middle finger in November 2016 and said “Just watch us blow up your precious nation!”

It has been slow going, but I have made some progress. First was remembering that the alternative was HRC, and that most Americans can’t bear the thought of voting other than for a major party. Second, was appreciating the legitimacy of some of Trumpworld’s grievances, which appreciation began in the run-up to the 2016 election as I left the main highway in eastern Ohio and found Trump signs everywhere in the sorry little town where I re-fueled.

But why Donald Trump felt like the solution to those grievances has eluded me — at least until late last week.

I won’t even try to capture the essence of David French’s The Rage and Joy of MAGA America, published Thursday. It’s David French at his best, as he writes from his home county, just 15% Democrat.

If you want to go deeper into the mindset of what 7 years ago proved to be an electoral majority of your countrymen, I urge you to read it, carefully and sympathetically, bearing in mind the categorical contempt felt toward “flyover country” by our national elites. The link I’ve provided should get you to it even if you’re not a New York Times subscriber.

But Paul A. Djupe in We Should Probably Stop Thinking Religion is a Solution to MAGA specifically faults any implication that MAGA evangelicals would be less MAGA if they attended church more regularly.

Parenthetical

Nick Cattogio feels his own kind of “joy” less by understanding Trump sellouts — the public-figure Never Trumpers who folded for a bit of power — than by something more primal:

The dirty little secret about being an anti-Trump conservative is that it too is often joyous.

In this case the joy derives not from belonging but from not belonging. Many times I’ve heard Jonah Goldberg say on The Remnant how his position on Trump has cost him friendships on the right, and I always sympathize—but cannot empathize. My contempt for those who traded their commitment to classical liberalism to protect their status within a Trumpifying right is so boundless that I’ve never stopped feeling grateful to be rid of them. If ever I should return to their good graces somehow, they’ll discover that they haven’t returned to mine.

It’s an almost spiritual pleasure to find yourself surrounded by people without dignity and to know that you don’t belong. 

The other joy of opposing Trump from the right is the satisfaction one gets from speaking one’s mind when others fear speaking their own. The happiest character in literature must be the boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes who shouted the truth about the sovereign’s attire as the adults around him bit their tongues and kept up a silly pretense so as not to cause themselves trouble.

The emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes. Trump is a criminal reprobate who’s morally and intellectually unfit to wield any sort of power. These are simple truths, acknowledged privately by all but the most devout loyalists. But to say them aloud, in public, when others don’t dare is liberating in a way that’s difficult to describe. If you know, you know. Dispatch readers know.

Chris Christie, very much a latecomer to the practice, knows too.

About saying the truth out loud, see Orange Man Bad in my July 7 post. Want to wager whether Cattogio read that?

Now, though the writing is entertaining, I am conscience-bound to note that the “almost spiritual pleasure” of “find[ing] yourself surrounded by people without dignity and [knowing] that you don’t belong” has a name, Pharisaism, and a “spiritual” pedigree of the diabolical sort. I can only hope Cattagio is exercising artistic license.

Deep-state BlackOps

In The Bourne Supremacy all a journalist had to do is say “Blackbriar” into a cell phone and minutes later, vans full of hyper-efficient assassins scrambled to snatch him up. Jack Bauer could not only direct phone taps and hack security cameras with a few keystrokes on his Blackberry, he could weave through miles of LA traffic in a few minutes. When he calls various government agencies, including after hours, he always gets them on the phone and not some, “Our offices are currently closed. Press 1 for English” message.

That’s all fine for escapist fare. But if you think real life works remotely like that, your assumptions about a lot of politics are going to be really stupid and maybe dangerous.

Jonah Goldberg, who 13 years ago imprudently asked “Why isn’t Julian Assange dead?” — his point being that our BlackOps aren’t as omnipotent as the Left thought.

Now he’s asking a different question, and asking it of a different delusional demographic:

No, the reason I’m going down memory lane is I want to ask a similar question: Why hasn’t the deep state gotten rid of Donald Trump yet? … If the deep state were remotely as powerful, wicked, and skilled as many claim, why let Trump live?

It’s a fair question, with a lot more colorful detail than I’m quoting.

Which brings me to the second problem: A lot of idiots and unwell people don’t realize that a lot of the deep state stuff is a grift. Devin Nunes used to sell deep state collectibles. There are no end of books claiming to expose the deep state and the cabal running our country. Here’s the description of The Deep State Encyclopedia: Exposing the Cabal’s Playbook:

Our country is being attacked from within. The past several years showed us that the shadow government seeks to assert absolute control over the human cattle, but what if we could stop them? What if we could take away the cabal’s power by exposing their entire playbook?

If this was their playbook, it wouldn’t be on Amazon.

And the pseudonymous author, “Grace Reallygraceful,” would be dead, too.

Tribal identity, fluid identity

In Hungarian, the word for their country is “Magyarország” — Land of the Magyars. Russia, in the Hungarian language, is “Oroszország” — Land of the Russians. Unlike the USA, where identity is fluid and contractual, these nations are tribes with flags. In Hungary, for example, they were occupied for 150 years by the Ottoman Empire, which, as you know, was Islamic. These things matter to them — and who are we Americans to say it shouldn’t? … I feel at home here in Hungary, in most respects, as I would in any other country of Europe. But whatever my migration status, I will never allow myself to think of myself as European, because that’s just not how it works. We Americans tend to assume that our openness and fluidity of identity is a natural stance. In fact, we are far outliers on national experience around the world.

Rod Dreher, who has some other worthwhile comments on immigration as well. I am encouraged. Rod has been far too often unreadable for a long time now.

NATO

Oh, my! The Nato mindset leads to war pulls a lot of threads together, and it doesn’t make me like post-cold war NATO any better than I did before. That it is purely defensive and that Russia therefore had nothing to fear from its expansion is a tale told by liars and believed by amnesiacs.

Conservatives today

If conservatism is support of the status quo, then the Democrat Party is today’s conservative party. So argues David Graham.

Homefront

We’ve had a run of cool days, and particularly of cool mornings. I’ve enjoyed sitting in my east-facing sunroom with windows open, sun streaming in, and I have been surprised how quiet my neighborhood is in the morning.

Not today, though. The sound of heavy equipment engines has begun. They are swarming my neighborhood for the next few days (or weeks) with those mechanical monsters that eat up the top few inches of pavement to permit new pavement to be laid without raising the street too high. Then we’ll get some shiny new asphalt. It will, no doubt, look very spiffy.

I have said, and probably have written, before, that I have the good fortune of living in a place that can still afford to repair its infrastructure. But I question why they are repairing in my neighborhood, and I’m not questioning just because I don’t like the noise.

I’m questioning because our streets have no potholes, cracks, irregularities, or other compelling reasons for repair. What they do have is a lot of fading and some tar strips running like spider veins where small cracks have been repaired over the years.

I’ve driven in enough neighborhoods to know that ours are not the city’s worst streets. But we are a wealthy neighborhood, and I suppose that explains much more than I wish it did.

(If I were king of the world, they’d be narrowing the streets by half and repairing the sidewalks. It would still be about as unpleasant to walk as Tokyo, but it would be a step in the right direction.)

Legalia

Consequentialism in jurisprudence

One of the really knotty problems with our public debates is that we often are having two or three debates at the same time, and it is easy to get confused about which question is actually in dispute at any given moment. 

Take, for example, the recent debate about racial preferences in college admissions: The question before the Supreme Court was only a legal one—not that you’d know it from the campaign-style rhetoric of Ketanji Brown Jackson or Sonia Sotomayor!—to wit, whether the law permits what Harvard and the University of North Carolina were doing, or whether that amounted to unlawful racial discrimination. The majority of the Supreme Court rightly found that this racial discrimination was unlawful. A second question—an unrelated question from the point of view of a Supreme Court justice who is actually doing his or her job instead of trying to act as an unelected legislator—is whether racial-preference policies such as those that had been implemented at Harvard are good policies. A third question—never quite explicitly discussed—has to do with “legal consequentialism,” the notion (which has official legal standing in some countries, such as Brazil) that legal questions per se should be made subordinate to utilitarian calculation. As the Brazilian statute puts it, “a decision shall not be made based on abstract legal values without considering the practical consequences of the decision.”

Kevin D. Williamson

Qualified Immunity hits a wall — finally

Seventeen-year-old student is required to participate in police ride-along for a class, and the Hammond, Ind. officer she shadows spends the day groping her, making lewd remarks, and even taking her to a remote location where he offers her to another officer for sex. Officer: This mere “boorish flirtation” was just “making for an exciting ride along.” District court: Qualified immunity. Seventh Circuit: Reversed. “Sexual assault is an intentional act that never serves a legitimate governmental purpose.”

Short Circuit: A Roundup of Recent Federal Court Decisions.

It’s actually a bit surprising, not to mention heartening, that the 7th Circuit reversed this. “Qualified immunity” has become the monster that devoured 42 USC §1983 (the post-Civil War law that gives a remedy for deprivation of rights under color of law).

More:

It is obviously unreasonable for an off-duty, out-of-uniform police officer to lose his temper on the road, follow another motorist home, box him in his driveway, scream profanities, and point a gun at him when the other motorist is nonthreatening. So says the Tenth Circuit, reversing a grant of qualified immunity to a (now-former) Chaves County, N.M. sheriff’s deputy. Claims against the county, which hired him in spite of his history of volatile behavior, are on the table, too.

Purging an evil

A District of Columbia-based disciplinary panel has recommended Rudy Giuliani be disbarred for his “frivolous” efforts on behalf of then-President Donald Trump to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The committee, an arm of the District of Columbia Bar, found in a report released on Friday that Giuliani had undermined trust in federal elections by directing Trump’s legal challenge to the presidential vote count in Pennsylvania and promoting unfounded theories of fraud in court.

“He claimed massive election fraud but had no evidence of it,” the committee wrote. “By prosecuting that destructive case Mr. Giuliani, a sworn officer of the Court, forfeited his right to practice law.”

Wall Street Journal

Culture

AI wins where people have been deskilled

My present thesis is something like this: The claim or fear that AI will displace human beings becomes plausible to the degree that we have already been complicit in a deep deskilling that has unfolded over the last few generations. Or, to put it another way, it is easier to imagine that we are replaceable when we have already outsourced many of our core human competencies.

L.M. Sacasas, Render Unto the Machine. This is an idea I keep running into. It was a thread through Matthew B. Crawford’s Why We Drive

Wordplay

1

trying to ride a bicycle in zero gravity

Sven R. Larson This seems to be a more refined version of “nailing jello to the wall” or even my father’s favorite, “goosing butterflies.” I assume the metaphor hitch-hikes on the further metaphor of “getting no traction” (in an argument, in this case).

2

As ever more laity, especially young people, seek out the ancient liturgy of the Church, the Eye of Sauron in Rome has turned towards these congregations …

Sebastian Morello, The Tragedy of the Sarum Rite (The European Conservative)

3

[T]he difference between being gay and being black is that if you’re black you don’t have to tell your mother.

Simon Fanshawe

4

[Great Britain’s National Health Service] looms so large in our politics as to wholly justify the sardonic description of Britain as “a health service with a country attached”.

Mary Harrington

5

Mountebank: A hawker of quack medicines who attracts customers with stories, jokes, or tricks; A flamboyant charlatan. (Wordnik)

I’m shocked that his was not already in my vocabulary. Maybe I couldn’t decide on pronunciation, since it was fairly obviously of foreign (Italian, apparently) origin.

6

Insufficient nihilism: David Graham’s characterization of the real reason for Marjorie Taylor Greene’s expulsion from the House Freedom Caucus. (That she had called fellow HFC member Lauren Boebert “a little bitch” was just a plausible excuse.)

7

“Tact” is insulting a man without his knowing it

John “Jackie” Fisher via the Economist

8

… he’s 22, and like many intelligent and loquacious 22-year-olds, quickly got out far over his skis.

Rod Dreher, on a recent conversation

9

Alethic commitment: Committing and belonging because of considered belief that a thing is true. (J Budziszewski)

I no longer believe that the essence, the sina qua non, of authentic Christian life is alethic commitment. I don’t even believe that it’s the proper goal of a Christian life.

Those possibilities seems too left-brain for me, and too culture-bound. Fr. Stephen DeYoung describes it as “checkbox religion.” “Jesus is God?” Check. “Bible miracles were miraculous?” Check. Etc

Experience or immersion might count for as much as considered belief.

By some combination of nature and nurture, I’m an alethic commitment kind of guy, but on entering Orthodoxy, I had a few stumbling blocks — boxes I couldn’t check yet. Because I’d seen enough of the Church to trust it, and to even assume that where I demurred I was wrong, I immersed.

10

All men profess honesty as long as they can. To believe all men honest would be folly. To believe none so is something worse.

John Quincy Adams via the Economist

11

Suddenly life became more like it used to be than it ever was before.

Garrison Keillor on the social effects of Covid.

12

My theory of economics is called Gratitudemy, as found in Psalm 23: “My cup runneth over.”

Garrison Keillor

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

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

Friday July 7, 2023

Culture

Frog and Toad Christendom

I wanted to suggest a few ideas that could anchor what we might jokingly refer to as “Frog and Toad Christendom.”

The idea is best summarized, as one friend helpfully put it, as resetting society’s defaults to favor people’s long-term interests rather than short-term pleasures. At present, we make it easy for people to indulge in in short-term pleasures that will, stretched out over time, leave them poorer, more lonely, and less able to contribute to their communities. We also make it harder to pursue things that will be in our best interests long-term. This is precisely the opposite of how it should be. We want to make it easier to choose virtue and harder to choose vices on a broad, societal level.

Here are six ideas that I think could fit under this overall principle:

First, ban online gambling …

Second, ban porn …

Third, place higher taxes on vices, such as marijuana and alcohol …

Fourth, redesign cities to discourage speeding and to make roads more pedestrian friendly. Third places thrive in walkable neighborhoods and because so much of our social connectedness comes via third places, we should want our cities to be walkable …

Fifth, birth should be free …

Sixth, to make it easier for workers, particularly workers with only high-school degrees, to form and support families, we should repeal right to work laws where they exist …

Jake Meador.

I agree with the spirit of all these, particularly when Jake fleshes them out (my ellipses). But they’re the work of a generation, and David Samuels’ “glittering oligarchy” (see The problem, and the un-solution below) will fight them as the existential threat they are.

What if …?

What if Arthur, eldest son of Henry VII, had not died in his mid-teens?:

There would have been no Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the subsequent upheaval to the rhythm of rural English life. 90% of English art would not have been destroyed in an iconoclastic orgasm of ideological fervor, and English churches and shrines would have remained awash in color, rather than the stone or whitewashed sepulchers of today. There would have been no new aristocracy to steal the land of the peasants, and there would have been no Enclosures Act … There was no New England because there were no Puritans—no “City on a Hill,” no Protestant work ethic … The empire would have been English rather than British. The Industrial Revolution would have been muted, not being able to feed upon rural dispossession and poverty, and would consequently been less convulsive to English society.

Terry Cowan.

Since Terry’s an actual historian, he plays out a lot more detail than this. I, not a historian but made heartsick by Bradford Wicox’s Unintended Reformation, was reminded again that destroying culture and smashing artifacts was a Protestant thing before it was an ISIS thing.

Well played

(H/T Todd Grotenuis on micro.blog)

Must reading

When doctors fundamentally misunderstand the cause of a condition and treat the symptoms instead, and fail to properly monitor outcomes, and modify their practice in response to known adverse outcomes, our patients suffer — often greatly and for the rest of their lives — if indeed they survive. These fundamental errors underpin the depressingly regular scandals that punctuate the history of medicine. (The stakes are particularly high if surgery is involved.)

It is naïve to think that all these scandals are in the past … So where might the next medical scandal be brewing?

The increasing visibility of detransitioners suggests it may lie in wait in gender-affirming medicine. Many detransitioners are young women who underwent treatment for psychological distress that has left them with irreversible, life-long changes to their bodies: a deep voice, a beard, and compromised sexual function. Some have had their breasts surgically removed; some may be infertile. Others are young men who have been castrated.

…

For many detransitioners, the cause of their distress as a teenager was misattributed by their clinicians to the notion that they had been born in the wrong body, and that they would be helped by the surgical creation of the “correct” body ….

Sallie Baxendale

Mutilating bodies ought to be the very, very last resort for a problem that starts in the mind.

Ardently seeking catharsis

[I]ntroducing no-fault divorce was a travesty, and in many ways redefined marriage more drastically than Obergefell vs. Hodges. 

None of this is even on the radar of many of today’s conservative elites. As often as not, they have been through a divorce themselves, and the compromise that marks their personal lives renders them reticent about standing up for traditional marriage. The consequence has been that most conservative influencers seek to move on from same-sex marriage as quickly as possible. Battle lines have been redrawn, the tent broadened, and now—they loudly proclaim—we can get back to promoting the free market and taking on the really crazy leftist proposals. Sure, the institution of marriage might be an unfortunate piece of collateral damage in the fight, but at least we won’t give an inch on this transgender nonsense.

Clement J. Harrold

I, too, had never heard of Mr. Harrold. And I disagree with his vitriol toward the Respect for Marriage Act. But I’m glad someone had the balls to write something so contrary to the Zeitgeist that for a moment, I felt positively moderate.

The right kind of facts, mediated by our betters

In an important article titled “Google.gov,” the law professor Adam J. White writes that Google views “society’s challenges today as social-engineering problems” and aspires to “reshape Americans’ informational context, ensuring that we make choices based only upon what they consider the right kind of facts—while denying that there could be any values or politics embedded in the effort.”

Matthew B. Crawford, Why We Drive

Making ourselves stupid

A society which wants to preserve a fund of personal knowledge must submit to tradition.

Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge. But we won’t submit because we’re Mur’cans.

Legalia

Protecting freedom of religion — through the speech clause

In case you hadn’t noticed, or had forgotten, the free speech clause of the First Amendment has been more effective in protecting religiously-informed conscience than have free exercise or non-establishment clauses, directly concerned with religion though they be.

I cannot imagine a factual scenario where that would not continue to hold true, though that may be a failure of imagination (from too many years between me and a Socratic law school classroom).

Simple question, botched answer

The reliance of religious dissenters on the free speech clause should have come up here, too:

Another dissenter has “a simple question regarding 303 Creative”:

If the website designer’s action is expressive, and if her closely held religious belief was to believe that God was against interracial or inter-religious wedding, is it okay for her to refuse service? If not, why not? If so, it would seem to open a Pandora’s Box of truly held religious beliefs (with no way to prove/disprove) overriding any and all anti-discrimination protections if the business’s product is viewed as expressive — which is just as nebulous as knowing if a belief is truly held.

One answer is that all the major religions bar homosexual sex. A better case would be where a religion forbids divorce. Would someone refuse to design a site for a second wedding? Possibly, I suppose. I don’t doubt that some of this is driven by homophobia and very selective enforcement of Biblical strictures. As a Christian, I think it’s immoral to single out gays — and only gays — in this way. But a fundamentalist may differ, and they have rights too.

Andrew Sullivan.

Sullivan is a very smart fellow but he blew this one.

The simple answer to the dissenter’s simple question is “Yes, she may deny her expressive services to create custom websites for interracial or inter-religious weddings” in this fairly wild hypothetical, because this was a free speech case; all references to religious beliefs are beside the point because it’s not a free exercise of religion case.

Although I would find opposition to interracial weddings atavistic, offensive and anti-Christian, and opposition to inter-religious weddings surprising in this day and age, I believe that freedom from compelled expression is “high trump” and will be so held if challenges continue. The only viable question will be in edge cases: “is this really compelled expression”?

As I was writing the preceding, I remembered the days when I thought otherwise, thought that the gay tsunami would crush all before it — as its legal theorists intended:

In her symposium paper Moral Conflict: (Some) Religions and Marriage Equality, [Georgetown law prof and later Obama recess appointment to the EEOC Chai] Feldblum asked what effect “marriage equality” – i.e., marriage between members of the same sex – will have on the rights of those employers, landlords and others whose religion teaches them that same-sex sexual conduct is sinful (and perhaps harmful to society):

Let me be very clear … [I]n almost all the situations (not perhaps in every one, but in almost every one), I believe the burden on religious people that will be caused by granting gay people full equality will be justified …. That is because I believe granting liberty to gay people advances a compelling government interest, that such an interest cannot be adequately advanced if “pockets of resistance” to a societal statement of equality are permitted to flourish, and hence that a law that permits no individual exceptions based on religious beliefs will be the least restrictive means of achieving the goal of liberty for gay people.

Are gay rights in conflict with religious freedom? – Tipsy Teetotaler ن. I don’t know what Feldblum would have said about those “others” whose (religious) convictions might motivate a free-speech refusal of expressive services, and I won’t speculate about that. But with that sole carve-out, Feldblum has been vindicated so far.

Racial gerrymandering in a SCOTUS dissent on affirmative action

I got a kick out of David Bernstein’s demolition of Justice Sotomayor’s judicial gerrymandering of “race” in last week’s Harvard and University of North Carolina affirmative action cases. Nobody is better qualified to dissect American bullshitting on the legalities of race than he is, and he has a book to prove it.

I may have enjoyed Freddie DeBoer’s Socratic dialog, putatively on affirmative action, even better: The Point of College, My Dear Glaucon

Saying the quiet part out loud

Leftists who love racial discrimination when they control it have responded widely and loudly. This tweet from Erica Marsh, a Democrat operative, provides an excellent summary of them all:

Today’s Supreme Court decision is a direct attack on Black people. No Black person will be able to succeed in a merit-based system which is exactly why affirmative-action based programs were needed. Today’s decision is a TRAVESTY!!!

— Erica Marsh (@ericareport) June 29, 2023

Sven R. Larson, The America Report: Three Cheers for Conservatism (The European Conservative)

Twitter being Twitter, there was a nice pile-on, back-tracking, blacksplaining, etc.

(Do not rely on Mr. Larson for analysis of the Supreme Court cases he’s celebrating. He’s conservative, but he’s just as sloppy about the details as most liberals who are lamenting the same cases.)

SCOTUS

Be it noted that I disapprove the feeding frenzy of attacks on conservative Supreme Court justices, notably Thomas and Alito. I won’t go into the reasons why, which have been well-addressed by their defenders or, in Alito’s case, by himself.

But I can still appreciate the wordcraft of these bits via Frank Bruni:

  • In Slate, Dahlia Lithwick parsed the generosity from billionaires that Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas have so richly enjoyed: “A #protip that will no doubt make those justices who have been lured away to elaborate bear hunts and deer hunts and rabbit hunts and salmon hunts by wealthy oligarchs feel a bit sad: If your close personal friends who only just met you after you came onto the courts are memorializing your time together for posterity, there’s a decent chance you are, in fact, the thing being hunted.”
  • In The Washington Post, Alexandra Petri mined that material by mimicking the famous opening line of “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that an American billionaire, in possession of sufficient fortune, must be in want of a Supreme Court justice.”

Politics

$35 million per quarter

Trump raking it in: The Prince of Mar-a-Lago pulled in $35 million in the second quarter of the year, double what he raised the quarter before. It looks like Republican donors not only weren’t put off by the classified document scandal. . . or the New York indictment. . . or the Georgia case, but are, in fact, rallying behind him, perhaps hoping to get a better seat at the document viewing table. If you had to guess, how much would you need to donate to see the aliens? Just images of aliens, printed and spread out next to a Diet Coke and onion rings, preferably. Asking for a friend.

Nellie Bowles

Orange Man bad

I was taken by surprised at least twice by this quote from Peggy Noonan:

Chris Christie could easily defeat Joe Biden. So could several of the GOP candidates now in the field. Donald Trump wouldn’t, for one big reason: His special superpower is that he is the only Republican who will unite and rally the Democratic base and drive independents away. He keeps the Biden coalition together.

A sad thing is that many bright Trump supporters sense this, and the case against him, but can’t concede it and break from him, in some cases because they fear him and his friends. They don’t want to be a target, they don’t want to be outside the in-group, they want to be safely inside. They curry favor.

This weekend at a party, one of Mr. Trump’s New York supporters, a former officeholder, quickly made his way to me to speak of his hero. He referred to the Abraham Accords and the economy and said: “Surely you can admit he was a good president.”

He was all wound up, so I spoke slowly. “I will tell you what he is: He is a bad man. I know it, and if I were a less courteous person I would say that you know it, too.”

He was startled, didn’t reply, and literally took a step back. Because, I think, he does know it. But doesn’t ever expect it to be said.

A journalist in our cluster said, musingly, “That was an excellent example of apophasis,” the rhetorical device of saying something by saying you’re not going to say it.

Imagine that! Knowingly forfeiting the Presidency for this evil man. But I think Noonan’s right, as she so often is.

The problem, and the un-solution

The country once defined by its powerful middle class is now a flagship of inequality that looks more like a high-end version of Brazil or Nigeria than the mid-20th century bastion of strong unions, churches, civic associations and inclusive political parties … A glittering oligarchy … presides over a simmering landscape of uncontrolled low-skill immigration, drug addiction and dead-end service jobs.

… Propelled by the rise of identity politics, the fragmenting logic of market capitalism or the force of new technologies that reconfigure space and time — or all three forces working hand-in-hand — America has become the prize for a set of tribes engaged in a zero-sum contest for power and spoils.

…

Where the idea of an American nation or community is increasingly rejected as a remnant of a hegemonic and oppressive past, the celebration of particularity reigns. There is the mandatory replacement of the American flag by sectarian banners — the Black Lives Matter flag for Black History Month; the ever-changing LGBTQA+ symbols for Pride Month — along with elaborate ceremonies of printing new postage stamps, and rewriting history books to focus on the laudable achievements of tribal heroes …

The paradoxical nature of the current American predicament is therefore hard to miss. On the one hand, Silicon Valley has cemented America’s place as the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth, the unchallenged global leader in fields like AI and biotech — capable of disintegrating any would-be rival by pushing a button and detaching them from the global banking system and the internet. On the other, the digital revolution propelled by American technology and finance is visibly disintegrating America itself. The meritocratic universities and other institutions that once made America the envy of the world are hostages of a new political system in which rote repetition of Democratic Party catechisms about race, class, gender and identity has replaced institutional values such as intellectual independence and critical inquiry. Such ambitions, along with the pursuit of beauty and other forms of excellence, are now signs of Right-wing heresy, to be stamped out by party administrators who administer, well, pretty much everything.

The Democratic Party plays a central role in the new American order, serving as a kind of shadow state, or state-within-a-state — the supremacy of the former being characteristic of so-called revolutionary regimes overseas. Once a vehicle for working Americans to achieve tangible goals such as home ownership, decent healthcare, national parks and a dignified old age, the Democrats under the presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama found a new place in the sun as the address to which the oligarchs pay protection money and do deals with the security agencies in Washington — after endorsing a global trade regime that cost millions of Americans their jobs and flooded their towns with fentanyl.

The Republican Party, meanwhile, once the party of America’s richest moneymen and biggest industrialists, now poses as the party of small business and the dispossessed, under the leadership of an oft-indicted figure who surrounds himself with the dregs of American political life. Whatever threat Donald Trump once posed to the robber barons and the bureaucracies they have allied themselves with, he long ago revealed himself to be a clownish figure, alternating populist rhetoric with self-pitying conspiracy theories while repeatedly failing to protect himself or his followers from forces that mean them harm. The result has been political suicide for Republicans who support him, as well as those who oppose them.

David Samuels, The Puritan spirit of America’s civil war

See? I think I understand discontent with the way things have developed under the major parties. But nominating that evil man is not a solution.

247 and counting

Politics

Trump

Lies and lies

All politicians lie, I dutifully concede, but there are lies and there are lies. [Speaker Kevin] McCarthy’s claim that the second impeachment was rash and ill-considered after Trump had spent two months trying to orchestrate a coup in plain sight, hour by hour on TV and Twitter, is a lie. Granted, it’s a common lie among Republicans who lacked the courage to vote for impeachment and then hid behind a flimsy procedural excuse, the same way Senate Republicans did in declining to convict Trump because his term as president had already run out. But it’s a lie nonetheless.

Nick Cattogio

Grifts

The other grift that’s really bothering me right now is Trump taking money from middle-class Americans who think they’re supporting his campaign for president and then he’s using it, as a billionaire, to pay his own lawyers. It’s disgusting. But this is Donald. As I said, he’s the cheapest SOB I’ve ever met in my life. He’s just better at spending other people’s money than he is at spending his own. Frankly, this is why he went bankrupt three different times in New Jersey in the casino business. He would borrow other people’s money, run through it, and then not pay it back. In this instance, he’s taking money from middle-class people who are working hard and sending him $25, $50, $100 multiple times a year through his website. And then he has the audacity, while he’s sitting on billions of dollars of his own personal wealth, to not use that personal wealth to pay his personal legal fees. Instead, he uses the money of middle-class Americans to pay it off. That’s a grift.

Chris Christie

Some countries work differently

Brazil’s top electoral court banned Jair Bolsonaro, a former president, from holding public office until 2030. The court found that Mr Bolsonaro abused his powers by casting doubt over the trustworthiness of Brazil’s electronic voting machines and implying that the 2022 election was rigged . He lost his bid for re-election to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a left-wing rival.

The Economist World in Brief for July 1. No doubt many wish the U.S. had an equivalent procedure.

Oafs

I suggested in 2020 that “it’s a class thing.” A certain kind of oafishness is considered lovable by the political classes, and not even recognized as oafish because it is their sort of oafishness. Another kind of oafishness 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 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.

J Budziszewski, Elites, Deplorables, and Political Style

I find Budziszewski worth reading even when I disagree, as I did with most of this column. This excerpt may be onto something. It’s hard for me to judge because I bear many marks of being among the elites but also countersigns that I’m closer to the common people.

Cultural

Renaissance men (and women)

Excited to read this: Beauty Makes a Comeback. You see, I’ve got this 15-year-old grandson, and neither he nor anyone else has quite figured out who he is yet. American College of the Building Arts seems like a via media; I’d feel pretty good about it.

Dietary dogma

Not a single one of those promoting the “three meals a day,” “eat in moderation” idea has tested it empirically to see whether it is healthier than intermittent fasts followed by large feasts.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan

Unseemly Modesty

“Kyle from Chicago,” visiting Nashville for the NHL Draft last night, was stopped on the street this week by the crew from The Penalty Box podcast for a man-on-the-street interview about hockey and the Chicago Blackhawks’ pick of once-in-a-generation talent, Connor Bedard, as the number one overall selection. “On a scale of one to ten, how much would you say you know about hockey?” He responded: “I didn’t play professionally or anything, so probably like a four?” He was being…modest. Unbeknownst to the interviewer, “Kyle from Chicago” was Blackhawks General Manager, Kyle Davidson. Well played.

TMD

Bracing:

Affirmative Action Thoughts in an Inelegant List Format. It’s Freddie, and defies summary.

Feminisms

[The] women’s movement, from the outset, was marked by a tension between what Harrington calls a “feminism of care,” which resisted the logic of the market, emphasizing interdependence and the domestic realm, and a “feminism of freedom,” which “embraced the individualist market logic, and sought women’s entry into that market on the same terms as men.” The movement, Harrington contends, was more or less balanced in an “ambivalent tension” until the mid-twentieth century, when feminism’s embrace of contraception and abortion tipped the movement decidedly toward the market. From this point on, “feminism largely abandoned the question of how men and women can best live together, and instead embraced a tech-enabled drive to liberate humans altogether from the confines of biology.”

Abigail Favale, A Feminism Embedded in Human Nature, discussing Mary Harrington’s Feminism against Progress.

Legal

Freedom from compelled speech

I assume my readers all know at least vaguely about the Supreme Court’s decision in 303 Creative, but here’s something about it that’s under-reported and even mis-reported:

This case was not, as it has been widely described, about whether a website designer could refuse gay customers. … Indeed, the parties stipulated that the web designer, Lorie Smith, was “‘willing to work with all people regardless of classifications such as race, creed, sexual orientation and gender,’ and she ‘will gladly create custom graphics and websites’ for clients of any sexual orientation.” She was simply not willing to design websites that contained messages that violated her religious beliefs.

The case was not about whether a business could refuse to provide goods or services but whether it could refuse to generate specific expressions with which it disagreed …

The 303 Creative case was … about compelled speech. When could the government require a commercial provider of expressive services to say things she found objectionable? Could the government compel a portrait artist to paint a heroic picture of a white supremacist? Could the government compel a speechwriter to pen an anti-gay screed on behalf of a right-wing politician?

Under traditional First Amendment doctrine, the answer was a clear and emphatic no. The First Amendment doesn’t just protect my right to say things I believe, it also protects my right not to say things I don’t believe.

David French, How Christians and Drag Queens Are Defending the First Amendment.

In a very important sense, this was not even a case about homosexuality or same-sex marriage. A retired lawyer and longtime advocate for religious freedom and free speech, I downloaded and highlighted the court’s decision. But when it came to tagging it for ease of subsequent retrieval, my tags were #discrimination, #free_speech, #compelled_expression, #websites, #weddings, and #public_accommodations — and I only tagged “weddings” in case I was lazily focusing on peripheral issues. I did not tag “free_exercise” because this was a free speech case. Elizabeth Sepper, a law professor at the University of Texas, Austin, seems to get this part right:

[W]hile Smith asserted religion as her motivation, this is a speech case, so it won’t matter whether business owners are motivated to discriminate by sincere religious values, secular bigotry or no reason at all.

(italics added)

The core was freedom from compelled expression (speech in constitutional terms), whether that expression be celebration of a faux wedding (from the website designer’s perspective) or biting atheist advocacy or anything else she did not want to express.

As Dale Carpenter, a constitutional scholar at SMU put it:

I read [the majority in 303 Creative] to say we’re not stripping any protection from classes of people or people based on status. We are protecting expressive activity, regardless of protected and class status.”

“The court here was talking about basically a commission-based service that is customized and expressive,” Carpenter adds. “That’s a really narrow range.”

Quoted in TMD

Student Loan forgiveness

As we’ve previously reported, research suggests blanket partial forgiveness would disproportionately benefit wealthy and upwardly mobile graduates over low-income, debt-burdened borrowers. An analysis published by the left-leaning Brookings Institution found the richest 20 percent of households hold about a third of all student debt, compared to 8 percent held by the poorest 20 percent. Meanwhile, it’s possible a debt forgiveness precedent would incentivize students to take on more debt, allowing colleges to raise prices further. According to a DataStream analysis of Labor Department data, the cost of a college education has increased by 1,200 percent since 1980, compared to overall inflation of 236 percent.

TMD

These facts are probably what ticked off red states: student loan forgiveness was a payoff to a demographic already inclined to vote blue.

But they are not sufficient to warrant striking down the loan forgiveness. I don’t disagree with the Supreme Court majority that Biden lacked the power to forgive student loans en masse under the HEROES Act based on the “emergency” of Covid. Biden has promised to try again under other law.

Here’s what does trouble me about the Supreme Court decision: Did Missouri really have standing to bring the challenge? I do not like lawless government actions that try to evade court review, as the loan forgiveness was immediately understood to do because of standing issues. Similarly, I include the now-mostly-forgotten Texas abortion law of a very few year ago that defied pre-enforcement challenge by creating uncertainty about who to sue in such a challenge.

There ought be a law

Fake reviews might soon be illegal: “The Federal Trade Commission on Friday proposed new rules to take aim at businesses that buy, sell and manipulate online reviews. If the rules are approved, they’ll carry a big stick: a fine of up to $50,000 for each fake review, for each time a consumer sees it.”

Prufrock

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

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

Political, but not partisan

Reiterating, I had collected so much material that I’m breaking it up topically. I can’t certify zero partisanship, express or implied, in what follows. Just remember that I’ve never been a Democrat and I’m almost over all my Republican reflexes.

Gobsmacked?

Who is the most pro-life president in modern American history?

Many of Donald Trump’s defenders say that it’s him. The proof, they say, is the Supreme Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization …

But if we change the metric from abortion law to actual, legal abortions, the picture is considerably different, and begins to challenge our assumptions about what it means to build a true pro-life culture in the United States. If the most important metric in determining a president’s pro-life credentials is the prevalence of abortions performed in the United States during his term, then the title of the most pro-life president in modern American history belongs, remarkably, to Barack Obama. It’s not close. And, Trump’s judicial nominations notwithstanding, a very long pro-life trend reversed itself during his presidency.

…

No president saw sharper decreases in the abortion rate and ratio from the first to the last year of his presidency than Barack Obama. In 2016, at the end of a presidency dominated by pro-choice policies and judicial nominations, there were a total of 874,080 abortions — 338,270 fewer than there were in 2008, the last year of the George W. Bush presidency.

…

[E]ven before Roe was overturned, I was under no illusions about the challenge facing the pro-life movement. That challenge is now proving worse even than I feared, and it’s worse in part because of the very compromises made to secure the Dobbs victory. The pro-life movement was Donald Trump’s mighty political vehicle. Without its support, his cruelty, malice and corruption would be a footnote to history.

Instead, his towering presence has warped almost a full decade of American life, turned Americans against Americans and transformed the culture of the Republican Party, the political home of pro-life America. It remains to be seen how long his malign influence will last. But much of America has experienced Trump’s presence on the public stage as a form of assault, and that assault is ultimately antithetical to the cause of life.

…

A pro-life movement that has long affixed its eyes on power must now remember hope. Otherwise, it may remember this period of American history as the time when it won the law and lost the nation, when the means of its legal triumph also sowed the seeds of its cultural defeat. If there is one thing that we know, it is that the culture in which we live decisively influences whether men and women possess the hope sufficient to have a child.

David French. In fairness to French, I realize that my excerpts may be slightly more negative toward Trump than his essay was.

In any event, for a 43-year pro-life veteran like me, the raw facts are challenging, and they’ve earned this French essay a flag to remind me to read it again.

The emigration of the Left

Leftists used to see themselves as champions of the poor and working classes. They viewed government as a means to protect and provide for the economically vulnerable. They wanted to rein in the power of the rich, and to ensure a decent life for the ordinary working man and his family.

This was a winning political message for the Democratic Party of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his successors, even though the reality fell short of the promises. As those on the right pointed out, big government has inefficiencies, injustices, oppression, and corruption of its own. Nonetheless, conservatives are not opposed to all government welfare and regulation, and we can recognize some virtues in the left’s old economic vision, even if we remain skeptical of big government’s ability to achieve it.

The left used to dream of economic and social solidarity. Then sex broke the left. The sexual revolution suddenly had the left talking like the most radical individualists imaginable; solidarity, commitment, and obligations were abandoned if they got in the way of pursuing a good time in bed or pursuing the next romantic relationship.

…

The heart of today’s Democratic Party isn’t the union hall, but white-collar professionals with pride flags in their Twitter profiles. This class is eager to pressure everyone else into accepting their social views, especially as regards the rainbow agenda. Hence the order to take food from poor children to force schools to adhere to the whims of LGBT activists.

Nathanael Blake, The Left Prioritizes Sex Over Solidarity, With Tragic Consequences

I do not ordinarily visit The Federalist, which I hasten to say is unrelated to The Federalist Society. Thursday’s “front page above the fold” gives you a sampling of the unsavory flavor:

But this article was linked within another I was reading — and the description of “leftists” and Democrats seems fundamentally accurate. Further, there’s at least smoke if not fire behind that last sentence.

I feel bad that I had to learn of this story by coincidence, but I’m too likely to end up utterly frantic and unhinged if I regularly dumpster-dive for the odd bit of edible news. (I could name names, but I won’t. Let’s just say I’m glad I’m not expected to publish every day in order to keep myself and my wife fed.) Isn’t it enough to know that our general national trajectory is very bad without obsessing over every scrap of supporting evidence, Left and Right?

The prime directive of any bureaucracy

Title Nine of the 1972 Education Act was straightforward, and answered perfectly well to a democratic consensus of the time: educational institutions should not discriminate based on sex. As in “you’re a woman, you can’t attend this school.” The object of its control was institutions. But the powers said to emanate from Title Nine not only expanded, they became different in kind. Its object of control is now students: universities, as franchisees of the federal government, must now manage student’ sexual relations with one another. This transformation has taken place outside the legislative process, where it would be subject to democratic pressures (and hence common opinion), and has instead been internal to the federal rule-making apparatus.

Universities, in turn, tend to interpret the rules according to the timeless institutional principle of maximum ass-covering, which lines up nicely with the prime directive of any bureaucracy: it must expand, like a shark that must keep moving or die.

Matthew B. Crawford, The illegitimacy of the male

Don’t let a lucrative cause end just because you won

The goal of any civil rights movement should be to shut itself down one day. And once we get marriage equality and military service, those of us in the gay rights movement should throw a party, end the movement, and get on with our lives.

Andrew Sullivan, at a Human Rights Campaign Fundraiser before Obergefell decreed same-sex marriage throughout the land. But the HRC continued, shifting its attention to grifting for every plausible and some implausible demands of sexual minorities — er, excuse me, gender minorities, or something.

The craziest thing is that these grifters still have the respectful ears of our adult “influencers.”

In Vibetown, it always made sense

One of the three researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who came down with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019 was Ben Hu, who worked on the project that received U.S. funding. This was first reported by our friends at Public, then confirmed in The Wall Street Journal. 

Yes, a U.S. taxpayer-funded project. So the U.S. intelligence communities knew what was happening and why from the start. If Public and The WSJ are right, the scandal now is the cover-up. Here’s Alina Chan, who works with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and wrote a book on Covid’s origins: “When I first heard the names of the sick WIV researchers, I was in disbelief that people in the US [government] knew about this and yet allowed the public to listen to media stories about pangolins and raccoon dogs for literally years. . . . The most shocking part of this story is that it took 3.5 years for this intel to be shared with the public.”

In retrospect, there were early signs that it was a U.S. government cover-up, not a Chinese one. Only an American would know that our media is so malleable that indeed we can be told Chinese-people-eating-crazy-shit-again is the anti-racist origin story. Yes, the classic not racist explanation: the Chinese love of diseased pangolin flesh is what killed your grandma. A research lab with sloppy security? That’s called racism. Chinese officials would never concoct this PR scheme on their own because it’s insane. But you see: it’s insane in a world of logic. Not in vibes, where we live. In Vibetown, it always made sense. 

Nellie Bowles at the Free Press. I almost let my subscription lapse last Monday, because I’m only reading a third to a half of their daily articles, but then thought better of it. That their interests are broader than mine doesn’t mean they’re not interesting when the stars are in alignment.

Anyway, I don’t actually remember whether “I told you so,” about Fauci, but I never believed his denial of U.S. funding for gain-of-function research. I’m pretty sure that the proof he was lying (not just equivocating with weasel-words) was revealed almost immediately.

If you live where the government regularly lies to you but isn’t consistently good at suppressing refutations of its lies, are you living in a “free country” or a “democracy”?

The new education rhetoric

Here’s a great example of the new education rhetoric: “The far right’s effort to take over schools is not limited to battlegrounds or red states—they just won 40% of the elected education roles in NYC,” writes Amanda Litman, a prominent education activist, literally just describing parents who are pro–standardized testing. 

It turns out that closing schools for years was really bad. And schools deciding that math and reading are right-wing didn’t help. And weirdly, teachers becoming quasi-religious figures primarily tasked with gender-discovery journeys also did not improve scores. You know why? Those are my jobs. Yes, all of these tasks used to be the role of the lesbian aunt. It was my job to say math class is trash; Howard Zinn does it better; and Doc Martens are a good shoe that will last you years. It was me who was meant to paint your son’s nails. ME.

Nellie Bowles

How and in what sense has the Right become authoritarian?

I don’t think our most fundamental problem is that one of our two parties wants to establish one-party authoritarian rule. Our most fundamental problem is that we disagree very deeply about what kind of country we should be, and that disagreement is also very narrow, meaning that which direction we will go is maximally unsettled …

As far as I’m concerned, the primary thing that has made the right more dangerous than the left through this period is that, thanks to Donald Trump and voters most devoted to him, the right now actively indulges in fantasies, delusions, and conspiratorial thinking that convince it that it’s more popular than it really is, that the left has rigged the system in its favor, and that these acts of cheating by the left require truth-defying acts of rule-bending and rule-breaking in order for the right to prevail.

That is how the right gets to nascent authoritarianism ….

Damon Linker

What some American conservatives see in Putin

How were the large animals initially domesticated? I really like the theory that ancient people used the same trick modern hunters use—salt traps. They would give animals salt (which they need badly), so they have to come. Even husbandry has an element of bribe and negotiation. … You need to give people what they want. Now what do they want? That’s usually very simple to understand, they won’t shut up about it. They may express it indirectly through projections though. … Western right wings desire a great Christian conservative power which will save them from the wokes. They dream about it day and night. …  they project their need to the nearest available candidate—Vladimir Putin, viewing him as a parental figure.

John Lamont, Russian Philosopher Aleksandr Dugin: Defender of Traditional Values or Dangerous Occultist?.

Considering how flawed and dishonest virtually all politicians are, I once flirted with the possibility that Putin was a flawed, dishonest and sometimes murderous Christian conservative, so I know that Lamont is at least in the ballpark on this.

The real problem with corporate tax cuts

One way of talking about tax cuts, for example, is that they’re a bad economic policy solution to the real problems that we face. But another is that they’re a way of giving money to our enemies as conservatives. Do we really want to keep on fueling the people who are funding institutions, organizations, and ideas that we find abhorrent?

My answer to that is, obviously, no. So despite the fact that I don’t think tax cuts are great economic policy, I think they’re most stupid because they’re empowering our political enemies and we should stop doing that.

J.D. Vance via American Compass

In 20 seconds or less: why Ramaswamy?

He can make 16 arguments in the time it takes Joe Biden to wander through a sentence and Kamala Harris to butcher a paragraph.

Ross Douthat’s hypothetical elevator pitch for Vivek Ramaswamy

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

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

All Politics (6/28/23)

I had collected such an insane amount of material since my last general-interest post that I had the luxury of separating out the most sharply anti-Trump stuff and posting it here.

When a liar meets a skilled, prepared journalist

When Trump went on, for example, about how he’d give the death penalty to drug dealers, [Fox News’ Bret] Baier interrupted to note that Trump had pardoned a drug dealer named Alice Johnson, who, under his new plan, would have been executed. “Huh?” Trump responded, with evident confusion. “No, no. No. Under my, oh, under that? Uh, it would depend on the severity.” But Baier pressed on: Johnson had run a major cocaine ring. Trump groped around until he conjured up an assertion that if his notional death penalty for drug dealers had existed, Johnson would never have dealt drugs. Problem solved.

Tom Nichols, *Donald Trump Seems to Be Afraid, Very Afraid *

Another take:

Trump kind of says what you’d expect him to say (various things that are probably crimes to declare, Biden has more secret documents than I do, the economy, etc.). 

A Trump-trained artificial intelligence could do it all at this point.

Nellie Bowles.

Vote for the Decent Man

The Atlantic has endorsed only three candidates in its 163-year history: Abraham Lincoln, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Hillary Clinton. The latter two endorsements had more to do with the qualities of Barry Goldwater and Donald Trump than with those of Johnson and Clinton. The same holds true in the case of Joe Biden. Biden is a man of experience, maturity, and obvious humanity, but had the Republican Party put forward a credible candidate for president, we would have felt no compulsion to state a preference. Donald Trump, however, is a clear and continuing danger to the United States, and it does not seem likely that our country would be able to emerge whole from four more years of his misrule. Two men are running for president. One is a terrible man; the other is a decent man. Vote for the decent man.

The Atlantic’s Endorsement: Against Donald Trump – The Atlantic, October 22, 2020.

If my home state, Indiana, polls ambiguously on a 2024 Trump v. Biden election, I just might vote, with heavy heart, for Biden. But not since 2008 has Indiana really been “in play” in the POTUS race, so my vote likely will be for Peter Sonski. Heck, maybe even Cornel West.

Bad Theodicy

No one predicted evangelicals would go from piously denouncing Bill Clinton’s moral failings to swooning for a thrice-divorced, porn-star-screwing real-estate mogul from Manhattan …

But evangelicals being evangelicals, they couldn’t just leave it as a Machiavellian maneuver. They had to concoct a whole theodicy to make it sound theologically admirable, with Trump serving as God’s vessel in the world to achieve his own ends ….

Damon Linker.

Could I have been dogmatically wrong about Florida Man?

I have a different take on Trump’s behavior: Oppositional Defiant Disorder, which begins in childhood, explains most of his deviancy. The distinct feature of this disorder is the refusal to follow any directions requested by anyone. Those with ODD see an order or request as someone trying to control them, and it feels like life or death.

I have a nephew who manifested this condition as a child — and now, at 55 years old, he hasn’t changed a whit. If you ask him a simple thing like to pick a piece of paper off the floor, he would refuse. He would not outright refuse, but he would avoid doing it and just ignore the request. God forbid you asked him why; he would say you were a controlling person and sulk off. He has been divorced twice because his behavior drove the women crazy.

Trump could not draw his sword at military school, and he cannot return the boxes, because to be controlled feels like life or death in his psyche. It really is a mental disorder — but that excuses nothing, especially in a president.

A reader responding to Andrew Sullivan.

UPDATE: I realized after posting this that I hadn’t explained the headline. I have insisted until now that Trump’s fundamental flaw, his fundamental disqualification for office, is narcissism. ODD may very well be a better explanation.

The GOP endorsement pledge

Readers too young to remember the Before Times may find the following hard to believe, but I swear it’s true.

Back in the day, Republican presidential candidates weren’t asked to formally pledge their support for the party’s nominee in advance.

There was no need. It went without saying that contenders who disliked each other would set aside their differences in the end for the good of the country and support the winner of the primary. Any Republican president would govern more conservatively than any Democrat would, therefore any Republican nominee was worth endorsing in the general election.

In the After Times, what’s best for the country in the general election is … less clear-cut.

And so, not coincidentally, the After Times are when the RNC began pushing loyalty pledges on primary candidates.

In the past week three different Republican contenders have chafed at having to commit to endorsing the GOP nominee, keenly aware of who that nominee is likely to be. Their reasons for doing so differ, as does their thinking on whether to sign the pledge anyway knowing that the RNC intends to bar those who refuse from the GOP primary debates.

But the fact that so many are struggling with the prospect of supporting Trump again highlights an ominous evolution in the nature of the process since 2016. During that cycle, the pledge aimed to bind a plainly unfit demagogue to support the Republican Party in the general election.

In this cycle, it aims to do the opposite.

…

The idea of Donald Trump keeping a promise because he signed a piece of paper pledging to do so must have seemed very funny at the time to building contractors in the tri-state area. True to form, he abandoned the pledge in early 2016.

Nick Cattogio

Wishcasting?

There is no path to the White House for Republicans with Mr. Trump. He would need every single Republican and independent vote, and there are untold numbers of Republicans and independents who will never vote for him, if for no other perfectly legitimate reason than that he has corrupted America’s democracy and is now attempting to corrupt the country’s rule of law. No sane Democrat will vote for Mr. Trump — even over the aging Mr. Biden — when there are so many sane Republicans who will refuse to vote for Mr. Trump. This is all plain to see, which makes it all the more mystifying why more Republicans don’t see it.

J. Michael Luttig, It’s Not Too Late for the Republican Party

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

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

Theme, restatement, and variation

We’re Electing Idiots

Liz Cheney On What’s Wrong With Politics via TMD.

There will always be people whose ambition is greater than their pride and they will always curry favour with anyone closer to power than they are.

Jacob T Levy via DenseDiscovery.

Last week two of Trump’s most slavish cronies in the caucus introduced resolutions that aim to undo his two impeachments. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s legislation, targeting the first one, is short and sweet; Elise Stefanik’s counterpart, targeting the second, is more elaborate. The resolutions don’t purport to “repeal” or “overturn” the House impeachment votes held in 2019 and 2021, notably, but to banish them from official existence entirely. If enacted, each would have the effect of expunging the record “as if such … Articles had never passed the full House of Representatives.”

In theory, at least. Per Charlie Sykes, legal experts find the idea of the House retroactively disappearing an impeachment to be cockamamie, including the normally Trump-friendly Jonathan Turley. “It is not like a constitutional DUI. Once you are impeached, you are impeached,” he told one news outlet. Even if the resolutions pass, there’s nothing stopping a future Democratic House majority from expunging the GOP’s expungement—an un-un-impeachment, as it were.

Of course, a subsequent Republican House majority could expunge that expungement, amounting to an un-un-un-impeachment. And then a later Democratic House majority could—you get the idea.

Perhaps, centuries from now, it’ll be a House tradition whenever the out-party wins control of the chamber that they undertake to un-impeach or re-impeach Donald Trump, as the case may be, on their first day in power.

Nick Cattogio

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

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

Summer Solstice 2023

Culture

Commencement Wisdom

I’ve always liked the story with the punchline “What the hell is water?” But I don’t think I’d ever read the full commencement address from which I got it.

Quite good, with anticipations of Iain McGillchrist and of “pay attention to what you’re paying attention to;” but David Foster Wallace’s way may be better.

Is SCOTUS out of step?

About the Supreme Court, the New York Times wants to know “whether the court’s decisions are out of step with public opinion.” Here is the answer to that question:

It does not matter.

The law says what the law says. The job of the Supreme Court is to apply the law, not to make up the law, not to reform the law, not to ensure that the law accords with public opinion. If public opinion is opposed to the law, then the public can elect new lawmakers and write new laws. It is not up to the Supreme Court to do that for them. If representative democracy means anything, it is that the law is made by lawmakers who are elected by the people and democratically accountable to them.

…

Even Nina Totenberg has noticed that the progressives on the Supreme Court are more inclined toward bloc voting while the so-called conservatives are more inclined toward intellectual disagreement. If your bookie took bets on how individual justices were going to vote in any given hot-button case, you’d make more money betting on the progressives, who are predictable. When it comes to their most important political commitments, they sometimes have reached their decision before the first arguments are made.

Kevin D. Williamson, When Public Opinion Is Irrelevant.

I’m not sure how Williamson supports that last sentence, but otherwise it’s solid.

Damon Linker’s sober assessment

I’m not really interested in debating the substance of the issue. I’m fully vaccinated, so is my wife, and so are my kids. That includes several rounds of Pfizer’s mRNA COVID vaccine. But I’m not anything close to being a medical doctor or an expert on immunology or epidemiology. I’m not even an especially informed amateur observer of issues in public health. What I am is a broadly well-educated writer and citizen who trusts doctors, public-health professionals, government agencies, and the media’s myriad mechanisms of publicity to provide me with accurate information about the world. I trust that since tens of millions of Americans (and hundreds of millions more all over the world) have taken these vaccines, I would have heard about it in the form of a blockbuster news story if they actually did more harm than good.

But note: I don’t know that vaccines are safe in the same way that I know it’s a cloudy day in the Philadelphia suburbs, where I live and am writing this post. And this is true about an enormous number of things. Anytime anyone says “I know X” about a matter that goes beyond direct personal experience—I can see the clouds outside my window with my own eyes—it implicitly involves an act of trust: “I know X because Y says X, and I trust that Y knows what s/he is talking about and wouldn’t deceive me.”

Do you distrust the pronouncements of Anthony Fauci? Fine. But why would that lead you to trust RFK or Joe Rogan more? Just because they’re not employed by the government?

Why indeed? I know full well that governments lie to me constantly — but nowhere near so constantly that I can say “government said it so it must be a lie.” But what I also know believe is that crackpots and grifters are even less reliable than the government (do I really need to cite examples?), and that I lack the time and the knowledge to personally check out every contrarian claim.

Especially at age 74, I am very aware of my mortality, and of the much higher priorities for spending the time until that day.

Maslow’s Hierarchy, level 1

For all I complain about the empty materialism of the West, there is a certain level of wealth essential to human happiness, below which family, faith, and work as a craft, isn’t solace enough. We need a certain amount of stuff to escape the drudgery and toil of existence. That level is probably somewhere above Senegal ($1,800 per capita GDP) and below Vietnam ($4,000).

Chris Arnade

Vote your vice

The policies implementing the Sexual Revolution now have the priority that peace and prosperity used to occupy in political loyalties and discourse. The revolutionary ideology now holds the place of esteem once held by the Judeo-Christian religions.

Jennifer Roback Morse, The Sexual State.

In general, I did not care for this book, but this particular point is powerful. The Biden administration has proven the truth of it vividly in its enthusiastic celebrations of Pride Month. (If you missed the details, Rod Dreher is ever ready to fill you in.)

The late Joseph Sobran said decades ago that the Democrats had become the “vote your vice” party. It has only gotten worse (with an admixture of perverse obsequiousness toward transgender ideology).

(I grant that there are vices other than sexual, and that when Republicans are in power they either leave the declining status quo untouched or else pass performative and draconian bans that the courts strike down on various grounds, some of those grounds being solid.)

Scotomas

Speaking of vice, the current issue of The American Conservative devotes its current issue to the topic.

Yup. They’ve got the biggies:

  • Porn
  • Gambling
  • Marijuana
  • Witchcraft
  • Social Media

But I almost laughed out loud at the absence of binge drinking and at the article titled and subtitled The No Smoking Garden: The crusade against tobacco has depended on shameless propaganda.

I’m thinking the common thread here is “calls to legalize newer vices are bad; traditional legal vices are fine.”

This is typical of why I keep waiting for The American Conservative to realize that my subscription has lapsed.

Don’t worry; science has it all figured out

(An archaeologist finds a motel centuries hence:)

Surrounding almost the entire complex was a vast flat area, marked with parallel white lines. In several of the spaces stood freely interpreted metal sculptures of animals. To avoid the misunderstanding that often arises with free interpretation, each sculpture was clearly labeled. They were inscribed with such names as Cougar, Skylark, and Thunderbird, to name but a few. The importance of animal worship in Yank burial customs has never been more clearly illustrated.

David Macaulay, Motel of the Mysteries

Politics

Donald Trump as an occasion of sin

It was easy for my generation of baby boomer liberals to be humble, because we had much to be humble about.

Many on the left had erred on what was perhaps the most important issue of the 20th century, global totalitarianism: Too many had been soft on Soviet Communism or Chinese Maoism. When you see well-meaning people on your side who were catastrophically wrong about profound moral and political issues, humility comes more easily.

These days, however, many conservatives are so ridiculous that I fear they are robbing us liberals of that well-earned humility.

Nicholas Kristof, In the Age of Trump, It’s Hard to Be Humble

Florida Man is one-of-a-kind

Peter Wehner can always be counted on to oppose Florida Man, but sometimes he hits the nail on the head more squarely than other times:

  • Trump doesn’t just cross moral lines; he doesn’t appear capable of understanding moral categories. Morality is for Trump what colors are to a person who is color-blind.
  • Trump’s moral depravity, which touches every area of his life, private and public, has long been in public view, undisguised and impossible to miss.
  • Other shady and unethical individuals have served in the White House—Richard Nixon and Warren Harding among them—but Trump’s full-spectrum corruption puts him in a category all his own. His degeneracy is unmatched in American presidential history and unsurpassed in American political history.
  • Donald Trump, rather than using the presidency to elevate human sensibilities, did the opposite, and he did it relentlessly. Among the most damaging legacies of the Trump years is his barbarization of America’s civic and political life. He called the spirits from the vasty deep, and they came when summoned.

Mind you, I’m among those who succumbed to Trump Derangement Syndrome (the first Presidency so to afflict me), so I can’t fault Wehner for a bit of obsessiveness.

What is the reason for Mike Pence?

Pence recently did an interview with right-wing radio hosts Clay Travis and Buck Sexton, in which he refused to say whether he’d pardon Trump once in office. The hosts wanted Trump pardoned, and Pence basically had three answers. First, he riffed on the fact that he believes these are “serious charges” and he “can’t defend what’s been alleged.” Second, he says it’s “premature” to discuss a pardon because we don’t know what “the president’s defense is” or “what are the facts.” And then third, he says “we either believe in our judicial process in this country or we don’t; we either stand by the rule of law or we don’t.”

…

Normally, I’m not impressed with candidates who refuse to answer questions because they look like they’re being evasive for political reasons. The lack of authenticity is like nails on a chalkboard. But here, it actually is a real answer. He thinks the charges are real, but he’s open to hearing Trump’s side of the story.

Sarah Isgur. She analyzes the other GOP candidates, too.

Pence is right, but being right often requires nuance for which voters have no patience.

I was aware of, but did not share, a Pence Derangement Syndrome when he was Governor of Indiana. I have nothing in particular against him now. But on 1/6/21, he assuredly was aware that by honoring our electoral college system over the shenannigans of Florida Man, he was ending his political career.

In 2023, Pence is a stone-cold loser, lacking even the “what the hell, why not tell the truth?” rationale of Chris Christie.

Wordplay

1

Filiation and affiliation

The late Edward Said was known for his distinction between filiation and affiliation. Filiative relations are those that come to us naturally, those that are givens of our birth and into which we are born. Affiliative relations are those we purposefully forge.

James Matthew Wilson

2

Mr. Robertson ran for president in 1988, hoping to channel evangelistic popularity from his growing television empire, the Christian Broadcasting Network, into Republican political might. Ultimately he failed — even devout Christians worried about the intensity with which the celebrity minister blended church and state.

And yet, by the time of his death on Thursday, the vision he championed had gained more power than he could have ever thought possible. The alliance between evangelical Christianity and Republican politics has fused, even as America has grown increasingly secular. The polarizing rhetoric of his often inflammatory views has become a defining feature of American politics.

Elizabeth Dias at the New York Times, writing about the political side of Pat Robertson, who died June 8. (Emphasis added)

“Evangelistic popularity” is pretty clumsy. It skips over primary and secondary meanings of evangelism and evangelistic to mash up a tertiary meaning (a meaning which I suggest arose from journalistic misusage, which eventually “makes proper” I guess, as “literal” now is a hyperbolic form of “metaphorical.”)

I have no idea, apart from context, what happens when an alliance fuses, and I’m not persuaded by it.

3

hysteria

Boy! I had never stopped to think how loaded that word is!

“Mass hysteria” is out; “psychogenic illness” is in.

4

If demography is destiny, population movements are the motor of history.

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

5

Getting offended by something on the internet is like choosing to to step in dog crap instead of walking around it.

Found by my wife on Pinterest

6

ESPN is now a gambling-promotion network that finds sports useful.

Alan Jacobs

7

holobionts: a united meta-organism whose components evolve in concert with each other. (The idea of “holobionts” represents a paradigm shift in biology). See also, of course, Wikipedia.

8

Word of the Era: Religion

I recently read Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept 📚 The idea of religion as a sphere of life distinct from politics, economics, or science is a recent development in European history. That’s not a complete surprise to me, but I’d never before read so much on how that came about. Spoiler alert: there’s a bit of cultural imperialism in the sense of “imposing” on other cultures how the secularized West parses things.

9

Baksheesh, a word meaning bribes in Arabic, which police frequently ask for in Egypt. Read the full story.

10

Happiness writes white ink on a white page.

Henry de Montherlant via Things Worth Remembering: The Joy of Requited Love

This probably is in the same thought constellation as how notoriously hard it is to create compelling good fictional characters.

11

“Random” vs. “Mystery”

To call the unknown “random” is to plant the flag by which to colonize and exploit the known … To call the unknown by its right name, “mystery,” is to suggest that we had better respect the possibility of a larger, unseen pattern that can be damaged or destroyed and, with it, the smaller patterns … But if we are up against mystery, then knowledge is relatively small, and the ancient program is the right one: Act on the basis of ignorance.

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

12

From Frank Bruni’s “For Love of Sentences” segment:

A

We can’t shuffle off the mortal coil of Trump. He has burrowed, tick-like, into the national bloodstream, causing all kinds of septic responses.

Maureen Dowd

B

So we come to the present pass, with the world’s most powerful nation, with all of its magnificent history and intricate constitutional architecture, at the mercy of a pathological narcissist, trembling at the thought of bringing him to justice — as if it were the act of applying the law to him, and not his brazen defiance of it, that were the anomaly

Andrew Coyne

C

What he once wore as electoral camouflage is now tattooed all over him, in yet another fulfillment of the late Kurt Vonnegut’s warning that, eventually, “we are what we pretend to be.”

Tom Nichols on the transmogrification of J.D. Vance into a Trumpist.

D

Teenagers suffer for many reasons. One is being fragile and in formation — a human construction site.

Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell

We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.

R.R. Reno

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.

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