A big, beautiful opener from MAGA 2.0

A big beautiful opener from MAGA 2.0

Yes, it’s been a big beautiful opener from MAGA 2.0., hasn’t it?

In all fairness, let’s start with a real, substantive achievement. The Southern border is more secure than it has been in decades. Biden helped a lot with his belated executive orders, but reinstating Remain in Mexico and ending largely fraudulent asylum claims have been even more effective. In February 2024, Border Patrol picked up some 140,641 migrants between legal ports of entry; this February, it was 8,347. Huge success. And proof that previous administrations actively chose to keep the border open.

But the rest is chaos, malice, revenge, and failure, tinged with levels of indecency never before seen from the Oval Office.

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The disaster this week with Mike Waltz’s astonishingly reckless Signal messaging brings it all together. This is a crew of bigots, sycophants, Fox News drunks and bimbos, Hollywood loonies, Claremont nutters, and uber-online edge-lords cosplaying as statesmen. But they aren’t even faintly serious — as Russia and China now fully understand. And their response to being found out was classic Trump: lie, lie, lie and call journalists scum. By any objective standard, this is a clown car.

Andrew Sullivan

“If I’m such a nefarious character, why am I in Mike Waltz’s phone?” – Jeff Goldberg.
“So President Trump is ‘using war authorities’ in the absence of a declared war when he deports Venezuelans, but it’s not ‘war plans’ (just ‘attack plans’) to bomb the Houthis because there is no declared war,” – Ed Whelan.
“This is dystopian. The government does not even allege this woman played a major role in the pro-Palestine protests, like Khalil did. And yet they’re trying to expel her to South Korea, where she hasn’t lived since she was 7. I don’t see how anyone can defend this. It’s un-American,” – Billy Binion on a 21-year-old college senior who’s had a green card since age 7.

Via Andrew Sullivan

Already, a Cabinet portrait

Via Frank Bruni:

“Global Law Firms”

Why are these firms being targeted, and what does Trump hope to get out of this campaign? In the Paul Weiss EO, the government alleges that “global law firms,” as Trump pejoratively calls them, have been involved in “the destruction of bedrock American principles.” They have played a large role in “undermining the judicial process” and engaging in “activities that make our communities less safe, increase burdens on local businesses, limit constitutional freedoms, and degrade the quality of American elections.”

But what’s really going on here, quite obviously, is that these firms have attempted to fight Trump and have represented clients Trump and his voters disapprove of. That is hardly a sin; representing an unpopular client is essential to any fair system. But Trump and his allies don’t want a fair system; they want a system reminiscent of China’s or Russia’s, that scares lawyers away from these clients and disables their opponents from bringing legal challenges against their efforts to rule by executive fiat. Already, some firms are receding from the fight against Trump, declining to represent those who oppose him.

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Taken as a whole, this attack on law firms is nothing short of an assault on the very idea of an independent legal profession. For years, the profession has had a set of overarching principles that are thought to guide its members’ conduct. Among them: Clients should be able to hire whom they wish without worrying about government retribution, and lawyers should be free to zealously represent their clients without the threat of government retaliation. To say otherwise is to betray the fundamental value of fairness that undergirds our justice system. Trump’s actions are an attempt, bluntly speaking, to tilt the scales of justice by using the raw power of government coercion.

Paul Rosenzweig

If you can’t get a lawyer to take a case against the administration, it doesn’t matter that the courts would have ruled for you.

DARVO

Standard protocol for the president and his minions when doing damage control is DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender. That’s the playbook Hegseth used on Monday (see for yourself) when reporters confronted him about Goldberg’s story, and no wonder. He learned during his confirmation ordeal that the trick to getting Trump and Trumpists firmly on your side is to start throwing roundhouses at their enemies, irrespective of the facts.

Hegseth sensed that the best way to shore up his political support was to turn this story into a test of credibility between himself and The Atlantic …

…

If you elect a criminal who values loyalty above competence; if you confirm an unqualified nominee to lead the military because you’re too cowardly to oppose him; if you incentivize ruthlessness in your leaders by refusing to hold them accountable for failures, you’re handing public policy over to clowns.

And policy run by clowns is destined to become a circus.

The most interesting thing about the behavior here of Mike Waltz and Pete Hegseth is that they’re both smart, capable men. Waltz was a colonel in the special forces; Hegseth is an Ivy League grad who served honorably in the military. Removed from the circus culture in which they now operate, I suspect both would recognize instantly how reckless it is to conduct sensitive national security business in an insecure forum.

In fact, I don’t suspect it, I know it.

This failure isn’t a matter of stupidity, in other words, it’s a matter of corruption. Waltz and Hegseth knew that Trump wouldn’t care how securely or insecurely they behaved (I mean, really) and in a pseudo-autocratic operation like this one that’s the only relevant political consideration. Obviously, they would have thought differently if they knew Jeffrey Goldberg would end up on the thread, but that’s a question of getting caught, not a question of behaving responsibly. They assumed they had the president’s approval; that’s all that mattered.

That logic will bite us in worse ways than this before this presidency is done.

Nick Catoggio

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

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

First weekend of Spring

Give it back!

Raphael Glucksmann, a member of the European Parliament, feels that America has reneged on the values that led to the statue being gifted. “We’re going to say to the Americans who have chosen to side with the tyrants, to the Americans who fired researchers for demanding scientific freedom: “Give us back the Statue of Liberty,” he said at a convention of his center-left party, Place Publique, Sunday. “We gave it to you as a gift, but apparently you despise it. So it will be just fine here at home,” Glucksmann added.

Daily Beast via The Morning Dispatch

Incel Integralists

The Harvard Law School chapter of the Federalist Society was taken over last week by “Common Good Constitutionalism” disciples of Professor Adrian Vermeule (i.e., wokesters of the Right). The chapter’s former president, Sarah Isgur, has some thoughts about the incel Integralists and their pyrrhic victory:

Freedom is turned on its head. Individual freedom does not exist if it does not enhance the general welfare (again, defined by them). To break it down: Speech that is good is protected. Speech that is bad is not. And the government gets to define what is good.

But they misunderstand Fed Soc’s strength. So let me explain: It came from its size and its diversity of thought. When you shrink it down to only those people who agree with you on outcomes, you have stripped it of its source of power.

The Vikings can be resentful that we didn’t let them into our club. They can even burn down the club. But they still won’t be in the club. They’ll just be standing over its ashes, still sad, and confused, and angry, and without clerkships, and without girlfriends.

History is littered with the stories of young men who are frustrated and can’t get chicks. They’re called “Jacobins.”

(A combination of Twitter, and the Advisory Opinions podcast.)

Regrets

Trigger warning: Do not read the following with your mouth full of scrambled eggs or hot coffee. I speak from experience.

In Oedipus Tex, the mathematician-composer P.D.Q. Bach’s 1990 comedic answer to Stravinsky’s tragic oratorio, the titular hero discovers the truth of his situation—that he has married his mother, Billy-Jo Costa, Queen of the Rodeo—and, fulfilling the requirements of tragedy, he takes the rhinestone-covered barrettes out of her hair and gouges out his eyes. At which point the chorus sings:

“And immediately after he’d put out both his eyes, he … kind of wished he hadn’t.”

Everybody has regrets. Nations and their governments do, too. When things are upside down in the state, you end up with Oedipus Rex, Macbeth, or the Trump administration.

Mahmoud Khalil is a Palestinian activist involved in the Columbia protests who was arrested in a Keystone Kops-level caper launched by Marco Rubio’s incompetent State Department, which proposed to revoke a student visa that Khalil doesn’t have. Khalil is, in fact, the holder of a green card, meaning that he has been given permanent resident status in the United States by the U.S. government. Which is to say, Khalil is in this country as a permanent resident thanks to a decision of the U.S. government, which, after looking back on what it had done, kind of wished it hadn’t.

Kevin D. Williamson

My regret is that I cannot read Kevin D. Williamson or Nick Catoggio more regularly without breaking my promise to myself not to wallow in politics during the Trumposcene, but rather to enjoy the inumerable things that humans can enjoy even under the governance of jackasses or jackboots.

The corrupting effect of corrupt rulers

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville, in a section on corruption and the vices of rulers in a democracy, warned:

In a democracy private citizens see a man of their own rank in life who rises from that obscure position in a few years to riches and power; the spectacle excites their surprise and their envy, and they are led to inquire how the person who was yesterday their equal is today their ruler. To attribute his rise to his talents or his virtues is unpleasant, for it is tacitly to acknowledge that they are themselves less virtuous or less talented than he was. They are therefore led, and often rightly, to impute his success mainly to some of his vices; and an odious connection is thus formed between the ideas of turpitude and power, unworthiness and success, utility and dishonor.

Tocqueville’s concern was that if citizens in a democracy saw that unethical and corrupt behavior led to “riches and power,” this would not only normalize such behavior; it would validate and even valorize it. The “odious connection” between immoral behavior and worldly success would be first made by the public, which would then emulate that behavior.

That is the great civic danger posed by Donald Trump, that the habits of his heart become the habits of our hearts; that his code of conduct becomes ours. That we delight in mistreating others almost as much as he does. That vengeance becomes nearly as important to us as it is to him. That dehumanization becomes de rigueur.

Peter Wehner, Trump’s Revenge Campaign

Thumbnail history of the GOP since 2008

David French, reflecting on his (supportive) relationship to the Tea Party movement and cautioning Democrats against trying to reproduce it in the Democrat party:

But it all turned bad, and the reasons it turned bad are directly relevant to Democrats today.

Republicans built a movement around both anger and ideology. My mistake was in believing that the ideology was more important than the anger, but it was the anger that gave the Tea Party its political momentum, and that anger eventually swallowed the ideology. Rage is now the defining characteristic of Trump’s Republican Party.

…

My first interpretation of Tea Party anger was precisely that it was in service of higher values, specifically a return to founding constitutional principles and an embrace of free markets and fiscal responsibility. But that was wrong. The ideology mattered only if it could serve the anger.

Another way of putting it is that Tea Party members embraced constitutional conservatism and libertarianism as a tactic, not as a principle, and the instant that a different, Trumpist ideology emerged — a better vehicle for the party’s raw rage — they welcomed it with open arms.

What’s your hurry?

Could this be the meta-explanation of what the ochre emperor is doing?:

DOGE is in a race with the courts. From the first days of the administration it was all shock and awe. Take an agency everyone knows is a problem, such as USAID, and kill it. Tell employees to go home, put a guard outside and lock the door, cover the agency’s name in gaffer’s tape, have a functionary send an email terminating employment, then disable email accounts. Staffers can’t reach each other, can’t find the reporter’s address—confusion kills the will to resist. Other agencies watch, and it puts the fear of God into them.

It’s all a race to get as much accomplished now as possible. Once something goes to the Supreme Court, there will be clear limits. Until then, maybe months, maybe a year, get it done.

Peggy Noonan. More:

Here I confess my conservative lizard brain likes seeing unhelpful and destructive parts of any organism, very much including government, cut and sometimes obliterated, and for the usual reasons. But the non-lizard parts—those that are analytical, involve experience, and have observed human nature and seen who’s doing the cutting, and at what size and speed—recoil, and see great danger ahead.

Judiciary 101

“The good news here is, we did put 235 judges, progressive judges, judges not under the control of Trump, last year on the bench, and they are ruling against Trump time after time after time,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said a few days ago.

You do the judiciary no favors talking like that, Sen. Schumer.

“[C]onservative judges, judges (supposedly) under the control of Trump,” are ruling against him, too — just as they did with his b*llsh*t 2020-21 election challenges.
No federal judge is “under the control” of the President who appointed him or her. That’s kinda the point of life tenure on good behavior.

Miscellany

“If you weren’t outraged that the law and due process weren’t followed when Biden let 10+ million people into the country, don’t expect voters to be outraged by accusations Trump isn’t following due process when he deports them,” – Mark Hemingway.
“I still can’t get over the power of negative polarization where liberals genuinely convinced themselves that the lab leak was the racist theory of Covid origins, but the ‘it’s just the disgusting hygiene and superstition of Chinese wet market customers’ was the non-racist theory,” – Michael Brendan Dougherty.
Colin Wright: “‘Christ Is King’ Is the Woke Right’s ‘Black Lives Matter.’”

All via Andrew Sullivan

Sullivan’s main essay is on how Anthony Fauci intentionally misled us about the origins of Covid.

Why on earth would panicked scientists believe that Covid was probably a lab leak and then write a landmark paper “trying to disprove” it? It’s the essential question. One obvious answer is that Fauci realized that if his beloved gain-of-function research had led to the death of millions in a plague, he might not go down in history as a medical saint.

I have no need of any other hypothesis.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

Trump rants 3/19/25

The stripping away of illusions

President Trump does not seem to notice or care that if you betray people, or jerk them around, they will revile you. Over the last few weeks, the Europeans have gone from shock to bewilderment to revulsion. This period was for them what 9/11 was for us — the stripping away of illusions, the exposure of an existential threat. The Europeans have realized that America, the nation they thought was their friend, is actually a rogue superpower.

In Canada and Mexico you now win popularity by treating America as your foe. Over the next few years, I predict, Trump will cut a deal with China, doing to Taiwan some version of what he has already done to Ukraine — betray the little guy to suck up to the big guy. Nations across Asia will come to the same conclusion the Europeans have already reached: America is a Judas.

This is not just a Trump problem; America’s whole reputation is shot. I don’t care if Abraham Lincoln himself walked into the White House in 2029, no foreign leader can responsibly trust a nation that is perpetually four years away from electing another authoritarian nihilist.

David Brooks

Anti-Constitutional

An anti-constitutional act is one that rejects the basic premises of constitutionalism. It rejects the premise that sovereignty lies with the people, that ours is a government of limited and enumerated powers and that the officers of that government are bound by law.

The new president has, in just the first two months of his second term, performed a number of illegal and unconstitutional acts. But the defining attribute of his administration thus far is its anti-constitutional orientation. Both of its most aggressive and far-reaching efforts — the impoundment of billions of dollars in congressionally authorized spending and the attempt to realize the president’s promise of mass deportation — rest on fundamentally anti-constitutional assertions of executive authority.

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There is much to say about the administration’s decision to seemingly ignore a court order to halt or reroute deportation flights for these people and return them to United States. For now, let’s focus on the Justice Department’s initial defense of the president’s order, in which government lawyers argued the following: “Beyond the statute, the President’s inherent Article II authority is plainly violated by the district court’s order. As a function of his inherent Article II authority to protect the nation, the President may determine that [Tren de Aragua, a criminal gang] represents a significant risk to the United States … and that its members should be summarily removed from this country as part of that threat.”

In other words, according to the Justice Department, the president of the United States has an “inherent” power to summarily deport any accused member of Tren de Aragua (and presumably, any foreign national accused of membership in any gang) without so much as a hearing. What’s more, under this logic, the president can then direct his administration to send that person, without due process, to prison in a foreign country.

This is a claim of sovereign authority. This is a claim that the president has the power to declare a state of exception around a group of people and expel them from the nation — no questions asked. It is anti-constitutional — a negation of the right to be free, in Locke’s words, of “the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man.”

There is nothing in this vision of presidential power that limits it to foreign nationals. Who is to say, under the logic of the Department of Justice, that the president could not do the same to a citizen?

Jamelle Bouie, Trump Has Gone From Unconstitutional to Anti-Constitutional (shared article).

If Congressional Republicans took their oaths of office seriously, they’d be impeaching Trump and removing him from office. He has already destroyed many of our most important international relationships (see David Brooks, above), and by “destroyed,” I mean that we face a long period of repair even if he were removed this afternoon.

Dems and Damon in the same headspace?

[M]y assumptions and style of analysis bring me back again and again to a feeling of fatalism rooted in the conviction that the time to stop Trump was in November 2016, in the immediate aftermath of the January 6 insurrection (via conviction in his second impeachment trial), or in November 2024. I don’t want to succumb to the feeling that it’s already too late to stop him. It’s just that I’m still trying to figure out how to break out of that cul-de-sac.

Damon Linker

How to create a legal banana republic

To collapse the structure of American justice and replace it with a proper banana republic, each pillar holding it up needs to be weakened.

The president spent most of his first two months in office focused on a single pillar: law enforcement. He purged officials at the Justice Department and FBI and replaced them with clownish toadies like Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Dan Bongino. That was a sensible way for an authoritarian to prioritize: Of the institutional players I’ve mentioned, corrupt cops and prosecutors can do the most damage. As long as the DOJ is willing to behave like a secret police force, Donald Trump doesn’t need to send Liz Cheney or Mark Milley to prison to make their lives miserable. Investigations are punishment enough.

His Castro-esque speech on Friday to Justice Department officials reflected his priorities. The president labeled political enemies like former special counsel Jack Smith “scum,” claimed that CNN and MSNBC are behaving “illegally” somehow, babbled about the supposedly rigged 2020 election, and insisted that the January 6 defendants he pardoned were “grossly mistreated.” The speech ended with the song “YMCA,” as you might hear at one of his political rallies.

Watching it felt like watching a dog mark his territory.

Nick Catoggio

Trying not to try

I may not have said this before: Trump’s shock and awe assault on norms, perceived enemies, constitutional limitations and the independence of “independent agencies” are so comprehensive, and so blur together in news coverage, that I couldn’t keep up, and couldn’t cogently predict which actions will ultimately be found unlawful, even if I tried.

And I’m trying not to try.

Oh, I still listen to legal podcasts, and they typically cover some of the cases brewing. If you get an opinion from me on a case, I’ll probably be regurgitating some of them, lightly post-processed.

I don’t feel responsible for Trump. He’s something I’m suffering along with everyone else — and my situation means I’m not personally suffering all that much except anxiety for my living descendants.

I don’t think Trump is the eventuality of true conservatism, though he may be the eventuality of the Moral Majority and other Religious Right activism starting in the 70s. I was never on board with them; I’m even less on board with them since becoming an Orthodox Christian; and I’m pleased to contemplate a knife fight between the New, Improved Religious Right (The New Apostolic Reformation! All you loved about the Moral Majority, but now with added Charismatic flakery!) and the Catholic Integralist “Common Good Constitutionalism.”

(Thoughts prompted by my deciding not to read a Wall Street Journal article on a Federal District court ruling against the demolition of USAID.)

Inflicting trauma

Russell Vought, a graduate of Wheaton College, now describes himself as a “Christian nationalist.” He also says:

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” he said. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.

“We want to put them in trauma.”

He may be a nationalist, but he puts his Christianity open to serious question by such hateful intentions. (Mark 8:36.) He’s rather unpopular at Wheaton, too, which is much to its credit.

Free speech lies

The president brags about ‘ending censorship’ while describing negative coverage about him as ‘illegal.’

Jonah Goldberg’s subheadline to his recent The Trump Administration’s Free Speech Hypocrisy. The whole (relatively short) thing is worth reading.

Weaponizing government

War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. And Donald Trump is “Ending the Weaponization of Government”

David Post, Paul, Weiss Next on the Chopping Block

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

Wednesday, 3/12/25

Trump-related

As is my wavering intent, I have moved my more vitriolic criticisms of Trump 2.0 to another blog. What remains is relatively temperate.

As the twig is bent …

“Dennis Burnham, who lived next door, was a toddler when his mother briefly put him in a playpen in their garden. She returned a few minutes later to find the current U.S. president, then aged five or six, standing at his fence throwing rocks at the little boy. Another neighbor, Steven Nachtigall, now a 66-year-old doctor, said he never forgot Trump … once jumping off his bike and beating up another boy: ‘It was so unusual and terrifying at that age,’” – Trump Revealed.

“When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same,” – Donald J Trump.

Andrew Sullivan

Tripping over a very low bar

It doesn’t take much to persuade me that some new development in this Administration is really bad. But it takes more than this:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s appointment today of his personal lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, as a Navy commander in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps reflects not just the norm-breaking approach that Hegseth is bringing to the job, but an odious philosophy of warfare. Like his new boss at the Pentagon, Parlatore has a pattern of providing support to soldiers accused of grave misconduct, even war crimes. He notably represented Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL court-martialed on charges including the murder of a captured fighter (though he was found guilty only of one, lesser charge), along with a second SEAL accused of serious sexual offenses. Elevating a lawyer with this record does not bode well for the armed services Hegseth hopes to build.

Jason Dempsey at the Atlantic.

If we really believe that every criminal defendant deserves competent legal counsel, we must stop insinuating that lawyers who have represented criminals are complicit in their crime and therefore evil. But we’ve done so (albeit selectively, sorted by tribe) all my adult life, and it has always bugged me — even before I was a lawyer.

Dare I think this nasty habit reflects what we really believe:

We should have kangaroo courts or even summary executions without trial — except for members of our respective tribes.
Anyone who facilitates real courts and frustrates summary executions is a money-grubbing lowlife.

For my friends, anything; for my enemies, the law

For all of Trump’s talk about rooting out “anti-Christian bias” from the United States, one of his administration’s first executive actions violated the free speech and religious freedom rights of several Christian congregations. It turns out that Trump wants to protect only his Christian allies from government reprisals. Dissenting believers will face his wrath, and the wrath of the state.

David French, who has the receipts.

This is one of the reasons I don’t buy Aaron Renn’s positive world/neutral world/negative world chronology of Christianity’s status in the US. True and consistent Christianity has never been viewed positively, and the negativity has come from the right as well as the left, albeit for different reasons.

The Plight of the Never-Trump Pundit

I woke up excited to write about the day’s most important political news—before remembering that I said most of what I wanted to say on the subject a few weeks ago.

Never Trumpers who work in media will face that problem every day for the next four years. Good luck finding something new and interesting to say as the president vindicates your arguments against him again and again and again.

Nick Catoggio

The Trumposcene is a great time not to be a professional pundit. Yes, I opine, but I don’t have to do it on a schedule, whether or not I’m feelin’ it.

And I mostly borrow.

Not Trump-related

Resurrecting de Gaulle

[T]he American right should consciously support a stronger France. It should encourage a special relationship between the two republics, support French primacy on the continent, treat Paris rather than Brussels as the European capital and the French military as the keystone of Europe’s security.

In effect, we should revisit Charles de Gaulle’s bid to maintain more French independence within the Western alliance, which made him a thorn in the American side during the Cold War, and recognize that he was right. It was not actually in America’s long-term interests to make Europe our full dependent, because vassaldom encourages weakness, and weakness reduces the value of the alliance in a world that America can no longer simply bestride alone.

…

The French military is limited but still “indisputably the most capable in Western Europe,” as Michael Shurkin noted in a 2023 analysis for War on the Rocks, with a resilient capacity for expeditionary action. Its nuclear-energy strategy has granted it a degree of energy independence that contrasts sharply with the reckless folly of German “green” de-industralization. Its pro-natal policies have given it a sustained demographic advantage; it is aging, but its fertility isn’t collapsing in the style of Italy, Spain or now Poland.

Then, psychologically, France lacks the crippling sense of historical guilt that still pervades Germany, and the junior-partner complex that has made Britain an unsuccessful adjunct of recent American foreign policy mistakes. It embodies two distinct forms of universalism, Roman Catholic and republican, that have more historical appeal across Europe than the Anglo-American style of empire. And the rapid renovation of Notre-Dame de Paris joined to the recent “gentle revival” of Catholic practice amid secularized conditions suggest stronger possibilities for spiritual renewal as well.

This last point is crucial for American conservatives. The current European establishment, secular and socially liberal even in its “conservative” forms, often feels like a natural ally not of the United States in full but of American progressivism alone. So the American right should wish to see a more substantial European conservatism re-emerge — more ambitious than today’s populist factions, and capable, as the right-wing Frenchman Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry put it this week, of affirming Europe’s “Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian” roots in contrast to Anglo-American progressivism.

Ross Douthat

ACB

After Justice Amy Coney Barrett voted against the Administration on one of the many Trump 2.0 “Emergency Docket” cases, she has been attacked I’m told, by the kinds of trolls who trot out canards like “DEI hire” in place of “treacherous bitch.” (I’m not referring to Prof. Josh Blackman, who criticizes the decision on more defensible grounds.)

Kevin D. Williamson is having none of it:

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who joined with the chief justice to rule against Trump in the matter of his attempt to unilaterally freeze certain federal spending, is a great loyalist—but not the kind of loyalist Donald Trump’s ghastly little sycophants demand that she be. Justice Barrett is loyal to her oath of office, to the law, to the Constitution, to certain principles governing her view of the judge’s role in American life—all of which amounts to approximately squat in the Trumpist mind, which demands only—exclusively—that she be loyal to Trump, and that she practice that loyalty by giving him what he wants in court, the statute books—and the Constitution—be damned.

The usual dopes demand that she give Trump what he wants because he is “the man who put her on the Supreme Court.” Mike Davis of the Article III Project (not the author of Late Victorian Holocausts; his organization works to recruit Trump-friendly judges) sneers that the justice is “weak and timid” and, because he is a right-wing public intellectual in 2025, that “she is a rattled law professor with her head up her ass.” Davis, a former clerk for Justice Neil Gorsuch, presumably is not as titanically stupid as he sounds, but there is a reason Justice Barrett is on the Supreme Court and he is a right-wing media gadfly who describes his job as “punching back at the left’s attacks.”

There is a word for men such as Davis et al.: subjects.

Kevin D. Williamson

Debasing education

Even though I am certainly angry at those students who choose to cheat, the fact is that I also care about them and feel a certain degree of compassion for them. I don’t want them to miss out on the opportunity to become educated, not even as the result of their own poor choices. It’s a bit of a Catch-22. How can we expect them to make good choices, about their studies or anything else, if they have not yet been given the tools to think critically? How can we expect them to grasp what education means when we, as educators, haven’t begun to undo the years of cognitive and spiritual damage inflicted by a society that treats schooling as a means to a high-paying job, maybe some social status, but nothing more? Or, worse, to see it as bearing no value at all, as if it were a kind of confidence trick, an elaborate sham?

Troy Jollimore via Alan Jacobs

Moral clarity

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

Rod Dreher, Something Demonic Is In The Air, 1/13/2021

I don’t think Rod’s vision is as clear now as it was then.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

Sledgehammers and Death Threats

I think these go beyond saying, explicitly or implicitly, that someone on the internet really, really don’t like Donald Trump. The common theme may be “retribution,” the campaign promise Trump and his goons are most zestfully fulfilling, and so they seem worth sharing.

It’s happening

When you see important societal actors — be it university presidents, media outlets, C.E.O.s, mayors, governors — changing their behavior in order to avoid the wrath of the government, that’s a sign that we’ve crossed the line into some form of authoritarianism.

Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard and the co-author of the influential 2018 book “How Democracies Die,” via the New York Times.

One prominent first-term critic of Mr. Trump said in a recent interview that not only would he not comment on the record, he did not want to be mentioned in this article at all. Every time his name appears in public, he said, the threats against him from the far right increase.
University presidents are largely silent because they are protecting their institutions, said Ted Mitchell, the president of the American Council on Education. “Don’t wrestle with a pig,” he said. “You’ll just get muddy and annoy the pig.”
[T]hat business leader thinks that chief executives see the way that Mr. Musk is going about slashing the federal work force as “totally crazy” — but would say so only on the condition of anonymity, fearing retribution.
Representative Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat and a frequent critic of Mr. Trump, said the real fear among Republicans in the House who might otherwise voice criticism of the administration on some issues was violence against their families.
Senator Todd Young, Republican of Indiana, was called a “deep state puppet” by Elon Musk after he asked tough questions about Mr. Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence.

(I must note the Folksy Failure by Ted Mitchell. The canonical folk form is “Never wrestle with a pig. You get all muddy and the pig loves it.”)

The SOTU that wasn’t

I’m told that Tuesday’s speech by the Chaos Monkey In Chief was not a State of the Union address, but it came across as one from what I’ve seen of the reporting.

David Brooks has thoughts:

Healy: David, it’s so important to underscore that with speeches like this, a lot of Americans aren’t sitting there with a scorecard, rating and fact-checking and assessing policies. It is about how these speeches make people feel.

That moment that you touched on about the young boy who wanted to be a cop. That is the moment when my phone blew up from both Republicans and Democrats. People who I hear from in politics. Trump made people feel something with moments like that. And again, it’s not that people in America are sitting around doing a fact-check on these speeches. They’re looking to feel the impact of them.

Brooks: Well, take a couple other examples. He talked about all the people allegedly getting Social Security benefits, even though they’re 160 years old. Now, people like us, we’re media obsessed, so we know that was all disproved, that there really are no 320-year-old people getting Social Security benefits. There are no 160-year-olds getting those benefits. That has been shot down by Trump’s own Social Security administrator. But when you’re sitting there reading and you’re just a normal person who pays normal attention to politics, you think: “Wow, that’s ridiculous. I’m glad he’s getting rid of this stuff.”

Healy: Yep.

…

Brooks: I would advise Democrats to take some time off. They’re not in control. They don’t have power. But mostly a lot of the categories Democrats have used to understand reality don’t describe actual reality.

I don’t think Democrats have coped with the fact that they’re more the party of the elites now than the party of the working class. I don’t think they expected so many Black and brown voters to go for Donald Trump, and it just takes an intellectual revolution to adjust.

And they have to make some fundamental decisions. Do they want to work really hard to once again become the party of the working class? Is that even possible? Joe Biden tried with good economic policies — a large percentage of his policies helped working-class voters. It did him no political good because you can’t solve with economics a problem that’s fundamentally about culture and respect.

Or, maybe they should accept the fact that they’re the party of the college educated and urban classes, and that’s who they are, and they’re going to represent those people and hopefully build some majorities around those people.

Going back to the 19th century, Andrew Jackson — who’s the closest politician we’ve ever had to Donald Trump. He was a narcissist, he was power hungry, and didn’t fundamentally know what he was doing to screw up. And lo and behold, Andrew Jackson made a terrible decision to close the Second Bank of the United States and the end result was, basically, a decadelong depression.

So Democrats right now have to wait for Donald Trump to screw up. I think the tariffs may be that screw-up. The policy toward Ukraine may be that screw-up. I’m assuming that a guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing will make some major errors and then the Democrats will see some opportunities.

…

As for the faux populism, I’ve been around these people all my life. I graduated from college in 1983, I worked in National Review in 1984, and my first encounter with Trumpians was way back then, though we didn’t know it at the time. There was a group at Dartmouth, called the Dartmouth Review. Famous people have emerged from there — Laura Ingraham, Dinesh D’Souza — but they were very different from us. We were earnest. We read Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. They were like, “Let’s take on the left.”

And the classic Dartmouth Review action took place in 1986. A group of progressive students had erected a shanty on the quad at Dartmouth to protest apartheid, a thing very much worth opposing. And the Dartmouth Review guys, in the middle of the night, used sledgehammers and broke it all down. And I remember thinking that’s appalling. First, apartheid really is terrible. We should not be defending it. But also, coming in with sledgehammers, that’s more Gestapo than Edmund Burke.

And yet, that kind of person who’s in the elite universities, but who is a dissenter in the elite universities, who’s fed up with the progressive orthodoxy that dominates those universities — you get Elon Musk who went to Penn, Vivek Ramaswamy who went to Harvard and Yale, Stephen Miller went to Duke — these are elite dissenters from the university culture. They are not populists.

As a result, when they come to power, they don’t really do all that much to help the working class. I would love it if the Trump administration would take on the health disparities, the education disparities, the family disparities that make it hard to be working class right now. But they don’t do that. They go after N.I.H. They go after the Department of Education. They go after U.S.A.I.D. They go after the places where they think elite liberals live.

David Brooks with Patrick Healy (shared link)

The only thing I have to add is that some recent personal reading in history stunned me with the parallels between Trump and Andrew Jackson.

A third rate, schoolboy version of magnanimity

It seems this is a David Brooks day, as Brooks dissects Trump’s “third rate, schoolboy version of magnanimity.” (shared link)

Why there will be no recession despite Trump’s antics

If critics point out that Canada and Mexico have done nothing to warrant the imposition of these punishing penalties, this will be irrelevant. Trump will simply lie about his reasons, accusing these rival nations of some imaginary transgression, which many Republican voters will believe is true. Along the way, as Trump lowers and raises these penalties at will, domestic companies will seek exemptions in return for favors (financial and otherwise), which Trump will gladly grant and accept. Meanwhile, senior members of his administration will be free to enrich themselves by shorting the stock market just before the announcement of an increase in tariffs (which often produces a drop in prices). If these trading partners retaliate in a way that harms the United States, Trump will use this retroactively to justify his protectionist moves. See? It’s us against them, as I always said.

But what about economic reality? Won’t the data show that Trump’s policies are hurting the economy? The answer is: Only if the government continues to put out trustworthy and accurate economic data. Earlier this week, The Bulwark’s Jonathan Last suggested that the Trump administration could well be planning to stop doing that.

[Trump] doesn’t care about the numbers because he’s planning to have his government monkey with the economic data. There won’t be a recession because Trump’s government is never going to release data showing a recession. He’s planning on doing to economic data what he tried to do with COVID case numbers and testing. And he thinks that he’ll be able to sell the “data” his government produces to voters.

Later the same day Last published these words, a member of the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee (FESAC) announced that the committee was “terminated abruptly,” with “all upcoming meetings … also canceled.” The committee has existed for 25 years and met twice a year to advise the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Census Bureau, and the Department of Commerce “on matters related to federal economic statistics.” The very next day, the Secretary of Commerce likewise disbanded the 2030 Census Advisory Committee, claiming its purpose had been fulfilled.

Damon Linker (emphasis added)

I’m starting to think that Trumps crazy careening around is his way of soliciting bribes to leave the briber alone.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

Can this be happening here?

Denial at its most alluring

My Experience of Trump 2.0 so far

Some Zen Buddhists hold that the entirety of human suffering can be boiled down to this effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are going, because we wish they were going differently (“This shouldn’t be happening!”), or because we wish we felt more in control of the process.

Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

Phase-shift

I realized suddenly on Wednesday morning that I could not bear listening to Trump — not even short sound clips from his address to Congress as part of a critical story.

Every other word Trump utters is a lie, and the words come in Tsunami waves. Some people apparently don’t care about the lies because letting those waves roll over them feels good.

They don’t make me feel good, and I don’t have the bandwidth or patience to filter out the lies. Hate-listening is spiritually sick even outside of Lent, so better not to listen at all.

It can’t be happening here

The extent to which the United States is embroiled in a major political crisis would be obvious and apparent if these events were unfolding in another country. Unfortunately, the sheer depth of American exceptionalism is such that this country’s political, media and economic elites have a difficult time believing that anything can fundamentally change for the worse. But that, in fact, is what’s happening right now.

Jamelle Bouie, There Is No Going Back

Antichrist

It’s typical political rhetoric to say you “stand with Israel” or that you “stand with Jewish Americans against antisemitism.” Trump offers a different claim: If you fail to support him, you hate your own religion. Trump wants to judge religion in light of his political interest, but detests a religious judgment on him or his politics. Politicians have long appealed to religious voters, but Trump wants religious voters to appeal to and accommodate him.

Have you noticed that the term “values voters” is essentially absent from national political discourse since Trump solidified his hold on the GOP? It’s not because the media is more progressive or antagonistic toward social conservatives now than they were pre-Trump. It’s because Trump’s case was not based on shared values. George W. Bush said at a presidential debate that his favorite philosopher was Jesus Christ. Donald Trump told a crowd of Christian conservatives that he does not need God’s forgiveness. He rejected Jesus’ teaching to love your enemies at the National Prayer Breakfast. He does and says these things all while insisting on his audience’s religious obligation to support him. In so doing, Trump fundamentally disrupted the typical understanding of what large, influential swaths of religious voters were looking for in a politician, and how a politician must approach them. It’s hard to sustain the moniker “values voters” when the candidate receiving the support of those voters regularly disregards, or even flagrantly undermines, those values.

… It took an extra four years, but with Trump’s second administration underway, the leader of GOP—the party that has been viewed as more “friendly to religion”—is casting aspersions on the very idea of religious organizations receiving federal money, and openly attacking the credibility and sincerity of the Catholic Church regarding work it has done for centuries.

…

Not even the pope provokes magnanimity or respect from Trump and his White House. When asked about Pope Francis’ letter to American bishops regarding God’s care for migrants and the dignity of the human person, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, responded: “I got harsh words for the pope: the pope ought to fix the Catholic Church … and focus on his work, and leave border enforcement to us.”

…

Trump’s new paradigm doesn’t have to be what replaces the old one. The paradigm Trump offers requires a set of circumstances, real and perceived, that make it plausible. To seek a protector, you must feel you need—and therefore prioritize—protection. To cut a deal, you must feel sufficient anxiety about the future without one. To seek refuge with someone who will make light of what you believe, you must feel that discomfort to be more desirable than the alternatives on offer.

What Trump promises is a future for Christianity, while claiming that the future he is promising is the only one on offer. Eric Trump claimed his father “literally saved Christianity.” During the last presidential campaign, Donald Trump told a gathering of Christians that “in four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.”

Michael Reneau and Michael Wear, The New Era of Religion and Politics

To borrow from Josh Barro (about the Democrat base, below), “These people don’t have good intentions; they have a worldview that is wrong, and they need to be stopped.” I’m feeling very affirmed in rejecting both major parties in the last three election cycles. And I’m blessed not to be in a cult that cheerfully votes en masse for an Antichrist.

TDS is dead (because it’s now totally rational)

Trump 2.0 is what you get when you take Trump 1.0 and subtract nearly every element of accountability. Since his first term in office, the president has gained a considerable degree of legal impunity from the Supreme Court, almost limitless political impunity from his supporters and the cowards in Congress who represent them, absolute administrative impunity from the slavish cronies with whom he’s staffed his government, and electoral impunity from the fact that, one way or another, he’ll never face voters again.

…

If there ever were such a thing as irrational “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” it died in the Oval Office on Friday.

Nick Catoggio

Sometimes Buttegieg is spot-on

At the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics last week, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was nearly apoplectic about the diversity spectacles at the recent Democratic National Committee meeting

…

Yet Buttigieg pulled his punches, emphasizing the good “intentions” of the people who have led Democrats down this road of being off-putting and unpopular.

These people don’t have good intentions; they have a worldview that is wrong, and they need to be stopped.

Josh Barro, Democrats Need to Clean House

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

Keeping up with the chaos

I excelled in the study of Constitutional Law, which excellence helped little if any in my subsequent practice of law, but helped a lot in my blogging.

The current firehose of constitutional indignities, though, defies my analysis. It’s too much, too fast — just as they intended.

I have thoughts on a few, but we’re into the structural parts of the Constitution now, the reconciliation of Articles I through III, and there are norms as well as laws. I suspect that the Trump team’s legal justifications will be rejected by the Courts as crackpottery, but even if I’m right, that’s not the end of it. Trump is no fan of norms.

Inversion in the Anglicansphere

These days, I tend very strongly to find “Anglicans” more simpatico than “Episcopalians.” But not this time, between Calvin Robinson and John Taylor:

Intemperate and Imprudent

Sorry trolls, it’s a Nazi salute: After Father Calvin Robinson threw out a “Roman salute,” also known as a Nazi salute, the Anglican Catholic Church ousted him. They wrote beautifully about why, and it’s a great articulation of the values that seem so distant, just a few weeks later.

Priests are certainly called to support the Church’s teaching on the sanctity of life and on a range of other doctrinal issues; but they are not called to provoke, to troll, or to behave uncharitably toward their opponents. They are called to minister to, to persuade, to forgive, to be gentle, and to be kind even to their foes. Robinson demonstrated repeatedly that he lacks the temperament and prudence needed in a parish priest.

After Steve Bannon threw up a Nazi salute last Friday, French far-right leader Jordan Bardella canceled his CPAC speech, calling it “a provocation. . . a gesture referring to Nazi ideology.” So lame, Jordan, you’re totally misunderstanding this. Nothing says light-hearted youthful hijinks like a Nazi salute, Jordan. It’s a meme thing, Jordan!

It’s always in jest, they say, always a reference, never the one you’re thinking of. I’m showing my cards too much, but these salutes make me nauseous, and you better believe I’m in therapy like: I just don’t get why Nazis are back and Do I need to listen to Martyr Made’s new revisionist WWII podcast and Is there lots of evidence that Brigitte Macron is a man and I’m just totally missing it? So weird that my therapist keeps canceling our sessions when I am simply emailing photos of Brigitte’s shoulders and asking if they look wide.

Nellie Bowles

Art anticipates life

Seeing Putin’s boys bully a besieged freedom fighter in the Oval Office was humiliating for every American. Since there is no presidential precedent for the public brutalizing of an ally, we reach for fiction and Mayor Carmine DePasto, from the comedy “Animal House,” and his summit with the dean of Faber College. “If you want this year’s homecoming parade in my town,” he says, “you have to pay.” When the dean accuses him of extortion, the mayor replies, “Look, these parades are very expensive. You’re using my police, my sanitation people, my three Oldsmobiles. So if you mention extortion again, I’ll have your legs broken.”

…

Making our way through the shadow of disgrace Trump casts requires us to think carefully and humbly. Notwithstanding the heretical teachings of Christian nationalists and apostolic reformists, God doesn’t love us more than other people. We’re not chosen or anointed. We’ve had moments of glory and deep disgrace.

…

If the U.S. ever needs its friends again, no one will answer the phone. We’ll be as lonely as Trump when he turns out the lights.

John Taylor, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, via David Post at the Volokh Conspiracy.

I don’t want to reflexively both-sides things, but Ross Douthat steel-mans Trump’s foreign policy (shared link). Even if he’s 100% right, it’s very sobering.

ElonAI refutes Elon

I asked @grok (Elon Musk’s AI company) to analyze the last 1,000 posts from Elon Musk for truth and veracity. More than half of what Elon posts on X is false or misleading, while most of the “true” posts are simply updates about his companies. (Source: x.com)

Isaac Saul via John Ellis

Oscars

[I]he Oscars have become less about the movies and more about politics. Winners feel the need to turn their acceptance speeches into sermons about feminism, or immigration, or Donald Trump. But the average American doesn’t want political advice from jesters in $10,000 evening gowns. In fact, there was a time when actors would be booed for using the podium as a pulpit. … [I]t was a better time.

The Free Press

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

Friday, 2/28/25

Welcome to the post-Christian right

The Trump administration is pushing Romania to lift travel restrictions on Andrew Tate, who is a pimp being prosecuted for human trafficking, sexual misconduct, money laundering, and starting an organized crime group. But he’s also a hero of the new right and has a huge online following despite efforts to censor the hell out of him, and obviously someone in the Trump administration is a Tate fanboy and wants to help him out. There is a guy who works in the State Department who is on his eighth Jake Paul energy drink and taking a victory lap through Discord right now.

But wait, how did a European pimp become a conservative hero? Welcome to the post-Christian right. The Moral Majority is out. Ned Flanders is out. In, instead, is paganism. In is strength, sun, and harems. Basically that movie The Northman is the new vibe of all your favorite conservatives.

Nellie Bowles, 2/21/25.

So much “winning”

Andrew and Tristan Tate left Romania for America on a private jet after prosecutors lifted a travel ban. Andrew, a social influencer, is popular in alt-right online spaces. The pair are under investigation for human trafficking and money laundering, charges they deny. Romanian prosecutors say the case remains open. They also face sexual misconduct allegations in Britain, which they deny.

Economist World in Brief, 2/27/25. See also WSJ and NYT.

Tribalismⁿ

I can’t think of a single institution in which I really believe — that is, that I consider to have the common good and the best interests of the American people in mind. The System is collapsing? Good. It’s about time. David Brooks, at ARC, said that conservatives are supposed to conserve, not destroy. He’s right — which is why Shadi Hamid is correct to say the Democratic Party has become the conservative party, the party of the System.

Maybe it’s better to think of myself and people like me not as conservatives — I sure as hell don’t want to conserve most of what the ruling class and its conquered institutions have done to America — but as right-wing antagonists to the System. Donald Trump is very far from my ideal president, but you know what? He’s not One Of Them. More power to him. I say that with great trepidation, because history shows that revolution against a corrupt ancien régime can produce worse. Still.

…

The future is not fated. We can change. Maybe that’s what’s happening in Washington now. I hope so. But I know this: it could not go on as it had been doing. The old paradigm is over, because at least half the country has lost faith in it. Maybe what’s being born now will be worse, I dunno. We’ll see. But bring it on. I’ve had it.

Thus (emphasis added to show that he is without excuse) does my longtime fellow-traveler, Rod Dreher, take a nihilistic fork in the road that I refuse to take.

Let me quote Rod to Rod:

A second major factor present in pre-totalitarian societies is loss of faith in institutions.

Living in Wonder, October 2024.

The kind of trolling yard sign I’d consider

Mike drop

To a certain kind of guy, Donald Trump epitomizes masculine cool. He’s ostentatiously wealthy. He’s married to his third model wife. He gets prime seats at UFC fights, goes on popular podcasts, and does more or less whatever he wants without consequences.

That certain kind of guy who sees Trump as a masculine ideal? That guy is a teenage boy.

Jill Filipovic, The Adolescent Style in American Politics

The problem with those two paragraphs is that they’re too perfect. I didn’t want to risk spoiling them by reading the rest of the article.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

An auspicious birthday

Today is my son’s 49th birthday. Such a thing is impossible. I can’t have a son that old.

I recall watching M.A.S.H. in my wife’s room as she labored into the evening. The next day, I ran into my ex-fianceés husband at a Pizza Hut, I being 70 miles from home (a town of 4,000 with no OB/GYNs, and it was a tricky pregnancy) and he being several hundred miles from home leading a high school band in something-or-other.

The rest of it’s kind of a blur.

The rest of this post is pretty political. Summary: I’m unhappy with our course, but I’d have been unhappy with the alternative, too.

We need friends in the world

After the Cold War Ukraine agreed to relinquish the nuclear weapons housed there for a promise the U.S. would always have its back. They trusted us. Must American presidents honor the honestly made vows of their predecessors? In this case surely yes, at pain of announcing to every friend we have, “You’re on your own, Uncle Sam has left the building.” Trump supporters think they want that message sent. It is a careless and destructive one.

…

The future will be a hard place. All the unfortunate aspects of man’s nature will be sped up and made more fateful by technology such as artificial intelligence. In that world we will need old friends. There is a speech by St. Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons”: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you—where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country’s planted thick with laws . . . and if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it—d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?” Replace “law” with “friend.”

Peggy Noonan

Less uncomprehending

The book’s emotional climax is Mr. Rauch’s endorsement of Joe Biden’s characterization of Mr. Trump as “semifascist.” Mr. Rauch generously concedes that MAGA partisans aren’t sending their opponents to death camps, but he insists there are similarities between Mr. Trump and Hitler. “Rejection of elections? Check. Contempt for law? Check. Corrupt use of government power? Check.” And so on for two pages. The possibility that these criticisms might apply as much to Mr. Trump’s opponents, or more so, doesn’t occur to Mr. Rauch.

Barton Swaim, Wall Street Journal (emphasis added), reviewing Jonathan Rauch’s latest book.

I haven’t voted for a Democrat for President since 1972, and I haven’t voted for a Republican for President since 2012.

Swaim’s last sentence alludes, though, to the bipartisan rot that made me less uncomprehending of Trump voters late in the 2024 election season than I had been in 2016 and 2020.

So we elected Trump and Babylon USA is now falling in a Trumpian manner than a Democrat manner.

History rhyming again

The politics of the backcountry consisted mainly of charismatic leaders and personal followings, cemented by strong and forceful acts such as Jackson’s behavior at Jonesboro. The rhetoric that these leaders used sometimes sounded democratic, but it was easily misunderstood by those who were not part of this folk culture. The Jacksonian movement was a case in point. To easterners, Andrew Jackson looked and sounded like a Democrat. But in his own culture, his rhetoric had a very different function. Historian Thomas Abernethy observes that Andrew Jackson never championed the cause of the people; he merely invited the people to champion him. This was a style of politics which placed a heavy premium upon personal loyalty. In the American backcountry, as on the British borders, loyalty was the most powerful cement of political relationships. Disloyalty was the primary political sin.

David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed

I really have been astonished at the Jackson/Trump parallels Fischer brings out implicitly (because the book came out in 1989 — long before Mafia Don descended the golden escalator).

Liberation — for satyrs

…men have created the social structures that determine how our culture dispenses money and creates fame. For women, this is almost always tied to the sexual exploitation of their bodies — most often to make corporations lots and lots of money.

Charles C. Camosy, Beyond the Abortion Wars

Ubiquitous terms that tell us almost nothing

Far right [is]one of those labels around whose use we could do with having some hygiene. I’ve only ever been called ‘far-right’ by Islamists and far-leftists who want to try to stigmatize me like I’m a totally unreasonable head-banger. It is a smear, designed to shut down debate.

Douglas Murray

Pudwhacking throne-sniffers

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency is not a department, it is really only quasi-government at most, and its aim is not efficiency. It is the right-wing mirror image of those “diversity” offices whose aim is the enforcement of homogeneity and conformity. George Orwell (I hope he is pleasantly surprised by his position in the afterlife) is somewhere laughing his immortal ass off.

…

It is obvious that Musk and his disreputable little gaggle of pudwhacking throne-sniffers simply do not know what they are doing: For example, they ordered the dismissal of a bunch of federal employees who were “on probation” because they seem to have thought that this probationary condition was disciplinary rather than a formality related to those employees being new hires. Employees with stellar evaluations were fired in emails that cited their supposed performance problems.

Kevin D. Williamson.

Loving “disreputable little gaggle of pudwhacking throne-sniffers” so much probably makes me a bad person. But it’s closer to the literal truth than mass firings of probationary employees for “performance problems.”

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

Musings, 2/21/25

Can there be a lawful order to act unethically?

I’m struggling with the agreement between Sarah Isgur and David French on the Advisory Opinions podcast that the orders from the Trump Department of Justice to dismiss the charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams was a lawful order, even if compliance by federal prosecutors would have been unethical. I’d like to think that an order to a professional to do something unethical is ipso facto not a lawful order.

If nothing else, this confirms the wisdom of not allowing non-lawyers to own a law firm (e.g., Model Rules of Professional Conduct 1.17(b)) lest this kind of thing pervade the legal profession rather than remaining an application of the unitary executive theory to the Department of Justice.

This is why we can’t have nice things

Speaking of unitary executive theory, I have more or less been persuaded to become a “soft unitarian.” But the test case that Donald Trump has set up by firing the head of the Special Counsel’s office is straining my recently-acquired conviction.

Mafia Don has fired Hampton Dellinger, current head of the Office of Special Counsel, without invoking “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office” as required by statute. A federal District Court has ordered that he be reinstated. A federal Court of Appeals has rejected Trump’s appeal on technical grounds (the District Court decision is only preliminary, not final). He now seeks review by the US Supreme Court.

I shudder because unitary executive theory makes the substance of his appeal plausible.

So here’s the deal on the Constitutional issues.

The Constitution establishes three branches of the federal government: Congress (Article I), the Executive (Article II), and the Judiciary (Article III). The opening words of Article II are “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.“

So what is the status of supposedly “independent” agencies, created by Congress, like the Office of Special Council? Are they a fourth branch of government, hiding in the shadows of the constitution, or are they simply unconstitutional because all executive power is vested in the presidency? If the latter (which is substantially the position of President after President since the Office was created, but nobody before The Don cared so little about chaos to provoke a fight over it), then what checks the power of the Presidency? Are we doomed to live under a kakistocracy if the President goes haywire?

The conventional answer is that Congress’s impeachment power checks the power of the presidency. If you are satisfied that this Congress has the cojones to impeach this president, you are living in a different reality than I am.

As I sit here in my easy chair, six years retired and 43 years out of law school, the best response I can come up with for SCOTUS is (1) refuse to hear the case because the District Court decision is only preliminary or (2) take the case and rule that independent agencies are not exercising executive power, but rather are serving as a check on executive power, and thus really are “hiding in the shadows” of the Constitution.

I think this would be a satisfactory ground to uphold the District Court. But I remember how conservatives derided Justice Harry Blackmun’s finding a right to abortion in the “emanations of the penumbrae” of the constitution?

The electorate having decided that Mafia Don was the lesser evil (a perception I gradually came to find defensible within the 5 or 6 months preceding January 20) has thrust us into the Constitutional crisis of an utterly corrupt President who will never be impeached because not only can he suborn and fund primary candidates against those who would impeach him, but he can with winks, nods, and stochastically violent rhetoric unleash fanatics that make Congressmen literally fear for their families if they cross him.

A decision either way from the Supreme Court will deepen the crisis.

First, they came for the radical liberal communists …

Pundit tribalism

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

Damon Linker

I’m very sympathetic to Linker about this kind of tribalism.

Our local rag used to have a very lively letters to the editor section (they don’t even have an opinion page anymore). When my religious Right co-belligerents expressed particularly idiotic opinions or called for perverse boycotts (example omitted because it was so idiotic you wouldn’t believe me), I tended to refute them vigorously, and at least once received an anonymous phone call implying that I was a Judas (no threat, just bile).

Why can’t the world be unanimously sane and moderate, just like Damon Linker and me?

Our four-party system

I enjoyed Ezra Klein’s little essay the other day as a partial explanation of how polarization got worse:

The two-party system of the 20th century was really a four-party system. The Democrats were split between the liberals we know today and the Dixiecrats, whose primary goal was upholding segregation. The Republicans were split between conservatives and Northern liberals. It is astonishing from our vantage point, but it was true for much of the 20th century: To say you were a Republican or a Democrat didn’t reveal whether you were a liberal or a conservative. As a senator, Joe Biden opposed the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. President Richard Nixon proposed a universal health care bill and created the Environmental Protection Agency. George Wallace started out as a Democrat. Politics was different then.

Parties that contained so many different places and ideologies could not act in lock step, and so bipartisanship was common. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was pushed by a Democratic president, but congressional Republicans were crucial to its passage. When Watergate began coming to light, Congress acted as a collective. Only four House Republicans voted against opening the impeachment inquiry into Nixon, and a delegation of congressional Republicans ultimately persuaded him to resign.

And it wasn’t just impeachment. When Nixon refused to spend the money Congress had appropriated — a policy known as impoundment — Congress acted to protect its power: The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 passed the House with only six “no” votes; it passed the Senate without a single vote in opposition.

(Emphasis added) I remember guys like Scoop Jackson, Dick Gephart, Mark Hatfield, Nelson Rockefeller, John Lindsey. Joe Manchin proves there’s no room for that kind any more. There’s just two tribes, each controlled from the wings, not the center.

Clamoring aboard the ARC

A Jordan Peterson-adjacent, Christian-coded “Alliance for Responsible Citizenship” recently convened. Two Orthodox Christian friends have diverging thoughts:

As I wrote yesterday, it is strange that it has taken a non-believing clown like Donald Trump to be the Great Disrupter. We do not have to agree with everything he does …, but I believe people like me can work with people like him in ways we simply could not do with those who were in power before.

Rod Dreher, whose “responsible citizen” culture-warring is a bone of contention between him and his friend Kingsnorth:

Jesus didn’t come to Earth to teach us how to be ‘responsible citizens’, of any political stripe. Responsible citizens don’t leave their own fathers unburied. They don’t hate their own mother and father, or give away all of their wealth, or compare the religious authorities to whitewashed tombs full of rotting flesh. And they don’t usually end up being crucified.

Paul Kingsnorth commenting in advance.

My sympathies lie almost completely with Kingsnorth, but I understand Dreher’s point — though I would rephrase it as “Unlike the Democrats, Trump is not actively and operationally hostile toward America’s motley array of ‘conservative’ Christians.”

Back in the days when I blogged longer-form original material more than curating other folks’ stuff, I declared myself a “Conscientious Objector to the Culture Wars” (a status that’s hard to maintain consistently) in a long-form blog that holds up well as a description of why I disengaged. This was about 80% Kingsnorthian a decade before I’d heard of the guy. It’s a posture that has spared me the ignominy of ever hallucinating that “we can work with” Trump 2.0 toward any truly edifying end.

(By the way: my shift from longer-form original material toward curation is, I think, a recognition that I’ve blogged most of my idées fixes in long-form and to my personal satisfaction; there’s no need to inflict them on others constantly, though I’m toying with a blogroll of my landmark posts.)

Just because …

… I thought this image was beautiful.

Jozef Pankiewicz, Market Square of Warsaw by Night, 1892 (Wikimedia Commons)

O Lord of hosts be with us, for we have none other help in times of sorrow but Thee. O Lord of hosts, have mercy on us.