Category: Patriotic Correctness

Never say Never

I never imagined that I would recommend listening to an accordion player. But the YouTube channel Sergei Teleshev Accordion is astonishing. I’ve never (that I can recall) seen accordions like that (they’re called button accordions, I guess) or heard them making serious, even thrilling, music, like this father and daughter do. (The daughter is 16, by the way.)

Trigger warning: The remainder of this post is (more or less) political

The Calvinball Presidency

I like arguments about ideas. The only way to have a good argument about ideas is if the person or people you’re arguing with have some degree of sincerity about what they are arguing for—or against. Being a political commentator in the Trump era is like being a sportscaster covering a game of Calvinball. The rules change all the time, so arguing about them is an exhausting waste of time.

Jonah Goldberg, The Boredom of Writing in the Trump Era – The Dispatch

Inspectors General

When hoodlums start disabling security cameras, you can bet they’ve got nothing good in mind.

The Trump administration on Wednesday withdrew funding for the Council of Inspectors General, a federal watchdog group, and the entity’s website was disabled. The group oversaw a network of 72 inspectors general. According to the Washington Post, the Trump administration had decided last week to pull the group’s funding.

The Morning Dispatch

Algorithms

[W]e are a nation divided by algorithms. If your algorithm knows you as conservative and interested in military matters, you got a lot of videos of young soldiers and sailors acting out the past few years, and of service branches tweeting out showy political sentiments. You felt understandable alarm. If your algorithm knows you as liberal and not interested in military affairs, you haven’t seen that content, and will have been surprised by Mr. Hegseth’s reference to “dudes in dresses.” We are all getting different versions of reality every time we look at a screen, and it’s hurting us.

Peggy Noonan, The Embarrassing Pete Hegseth.

As if on cue, some folks known to the algorithm as conservative and interested in military matters let it be known that they thought Hegseth’s show was just fine:

Much depends on the details and execution, but if implemented with both verve and prudence, Hegseth’s commonsense reforms will profit the American profession of arms.

As noted in my standard footer for blog posts, I am a participant on something called micro.blog: I follow people I’ve found interesting and some of them follow me. Yet I sensed it wasn’t like Facebook or Twitter/X. It was pleasant. It was sane.

I think Noonan has put her finger on why it is so: it has no algorithms.

In fact, I don’t think I frequent any websites that use algorithms to target my inferred vulnerabilities.

Grooming codes and Flag Codes

Speaking of The Embarrassing Pete Hegseth, Kevin D. Williamson has a few choice words:

I will believe that Hegseth is serious about this stuff when Hegseth starts acting like he is serious about it. As a few observers have pointed out, Hegseth’s Beverly Hills, 90210-style sideburns often extend to a length that would be prohibited under military grooming standards. But there is another area of dress convention that Hegseth violates in practically every public appearance, one that is in fact relevant to his current position: the Flag Code.

The Flag Code is written into federal law, though there is no penalty for violating it. It forbids wearing the flag as an article of clothing, a rule Hegseth routinely flouts with his dopey flag-lined suits. It specifically forbids using the flag as a handkerchief, which Hegseth does habitually, tucking it into his chest pocket as a decorative pocket square—and surely, surely not because doing so makes it look like he is wearing some kind of military decoration. Hegseth, Donald Trump, and the members of the movement they represent are habitual violators of the Flag Code, which is not merely an aesthetic concern. 

Part of the point of the Flag Code is the notion that the flag is not to be treated as though it were merely an item of personal property. It is not to be used for tawdry, tacky, or self-interested purposes such as advertising. Hegseth has obvious contempt for rules of this kind, and Trump has equally obvious contempt for any kind of rule that would put any kind of limitation on his self-aggrandizement and vanity. You can be sure that if Hegseth or Trump preferred to wear a beard, then beards would be mandatory in the military, possibly even for women.

…

The allure of delusional self-adoration can be powerful. When a junior high vice principal made me cut my hair (picture your obedient correspondent at 15 with a blond Robert Smith-circa-Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me rats’ nest), I was much offended. I believed, in the sincerest possible way, that I was a unique, very special, possibly heroic 15-year-old, one destined for great things, and, above all, one whose autonomy and personal sense of self had to be respected at all times, damn the rules. It all seemed incontrovertible at the time. But I am not in junior high school anymore. Pete Hegseth somehow is. Princeton owes him a refund. 

Mau-mauing the NFL

I’d bet a modest amount that our Censor-in-Chief will figure out some threat to the NFL sufficient to motivate a change of the Superbowl Halftime Show from Bad Bunny to someone markedly more WASPish.

In any event, I’ll miss the game and the show. I’m expecting an emergency call then.

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

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 my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Thursday, 1/16/25

American Meritocracy

For most of my professional career, I’ve been a skeptic of the American meritocracy. Not a skeptic of the basic idea that competent and intelligent people should fill positions requiring competence and intelligence, but a skeptic of the idea that a system of frantic adolescent hoop-jumping and résumé-building, designed to skim the smartest kids from every region and segregate them from the rest of society for college and beyond, has actually created an elite that’s more responsible, effective, morally grounded and genuinely cosmopolitan than the more quasi-aristocratic upper class that it displaced.

Ross Douthat

NAR

I’ve spent most of my life thinking that I was well-informed on the American religious scene — especially Evangelicalism. For a long time, that self-regard may have been warranted.

No more. I recently passed the 27th anniversary of my reception into the Orthodox Christian faith. And it may be time to admit that I’ve lost track of what’s going on in the American Evangelical world.

Stephanie McCrummen of the Atlantic has recently published two articles on the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and those who share its outlook with or without conscious acknowledgement of NAR.

I’ve had my eyes on NAR for a few years, but here’s where McCrummen floored me:

What was happening in the barn in Lancaster County did not represent some fringe of American Christianity, but rather what much of the faith is becoming. A shift is under way, one that scholars have been tracking for years and that has become startlingly visible with the rise of Trumpism. At this point, tens of millions of believers—about 40 percent of American Christians, including Catholics, according to a recent Denison University survey—are embracing an alluring, charismatic movement that has little use for religious pluralism, individual rights, or constitutional democracy.

What she’s describing in NAR That 40% figure got my back up as absurd until I realized that I was basing it on the typical doctrinal commitments of Evangelicalism more than 27 years ago. In fact, it’s been 45 years since I unequivocally identified as Evangelical, being for 18 subsequent years (before my Orthodox reception) only Evangelical-adjacent.

So I can’t say she’s wrong. I also can’t say she’s right, but if she’s right, it would go fairly far in explaining the great Evangelical murmuration from “character matters” (Bill Clinton) to, in effect, “he may be a rapist sonofabitch but he’s our rapist sonofabitch.” So the NAR “prophets” have spoken.

Metaphors: Choose Wisely

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

Abigail Shrier

Greenland, Canada and the Canal

When an authoritarian-minded leader poised to control the world’s most powerful military begins overt saber-rattling against neighbors, the most obvious and important question to ask is whether he intends to follow through. That question, unfortunately, is difficult to answer. On the one hand, Trump almost certainly has no plan, or even concepts of a plan, to launch a hemispheric war. Seizing the uncontrolled edges of the North American continent makes sense in the board game Risk, but it has very little logic in any real-world scenario.

On the other hand, Trump constantly generated wild ideas during his first term, only for the traditional Republicans in his orbit to distract or foil him, with the result that the world never found out how serious he was about them. This time around, one of his highest priorities has been to make sure his incoming administration is free of officials whose professionalism or loyalty to the Constitution would put them at risk of violating their loyalty to Trump. We cannot simply assume that Trump’s most harebrained schemes will fizzle.

An easier question to answer is why Trump keeps uttering these threats. One reason is that he seems to sincerely believe that strong countries have the right to bully weaker ones. Trump has long insisted that the United States should seize smaller countries’ natural resources, and that American allies should be paying us protection money, as if they were shopkeepers and America were a mob boss.

Jonathan Chait, Donald Trump’s Performative Imperialism

We’ll know he’s a Christian by his blasphemy

So let’s run the race marked out for us. Let’s fix our eyes on Old Glory and all she represents. Let’s fix our eyes on this land of heroes and let their courage inspire. And let’s fix our eyes on the author and perfecter of our faith and our freedom and never forget that where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. That means freedom always wins.

Mike Pence, at the 2020 Republican National Convention, via William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry. Compare this the Hebrews 12:1-2 and ask yourself “just how low is the bar for being considered a devout Christian Republican?”

Cui bono?

Cui bono? Whom did this new story serve? Who benefits from a world of consequence-free sex, weak ties, the putting off of childbearing and family? Today, the pharmaceutical and medical industries benefit, by selling decades-long prescriptions for contraceptives, and then various attempts at ART [Assisted Reproductive Technology] later on. Corporations and employers benefit: they gain a new labor force unsaddled by commitments to family, place, or other less-than-profitable concerns.

Christine Emba quoted by Alan Jacobs

Pathetic wankers get their day at SCOTUS

On Wednesday America’s Supreme Court examined a Texas law mandating age verification for websites where a third or more of the material is “sexual” and “harmful to minors”. A district judge blocked the law, which is similar to measures recently passed by 18 other states, but an appeals court reinstated it last year.

A trade association of adult entertainers, known as the Free Speech Coalition, is arguing that the law restricts adult Texans’ access to protected speech and violates the First Amendment. The Supreme Court struck down a similar law (the federal Child Online Protection Act) in 2004, the plaintiffs point out. Texas’s defence relies on a high-court ruling from 1968 that upheld a law banning erotic bookstores from selling their wares to children. But online commerce, the plaintiffs retort, is a world apart: adults may be reluctant to reveal their identities to porn sites because they worry about “identity thieves and extortionists”.

Economist World News in Brief for 1/15/25.

That last sentence should be a real eye-opener. Paraphrasing: “We’re such pathetic wankers that we do business with identity thieves and extortionists. We have a right to be pathetic wankers, so to hell with the kids who get exposed.”

That’s not the whole case the “Free Speech Coalition” could make against the Texas law (and about the logic of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals) but it’s got to be among the most risible.

Glimmers

Woke retreat

Recently, [Mark] Zuckerberg ordered tampon machines to be taken out of men’s bathrooms in all of Meta’s offices. Commenter Richard Hanania said,

This is like pulling down the statue of Saddam. Now you know wokeness is dead.

… Nobody could have imagined that a vulgar, orange billionaire from New York and an anti-woke South African immigrant in Silicon Valley might be the champions Europe needs to find its own courage and Make Europe Great Again. But then again, despite the false faith of the left-wing ideologues and their bureaucracies, the march of history follows no predictable path.

Rod Dreher

Cabinet of the Cancelled

[F]or those of us who have run afoul of the Left’s dogma, particularly in public, it’s harder to worry over the Trump cabinet’s failure to harmonize with the views of credentialed bureaucrats.

Abigail Shrier, Trump’s ‘Cabinet of the Cancelled’

Devouring one another

Look no further than MAGA mega-toady Steve Bannon declaring war on MAGA mega-toady Elon Musk.

Bannon has had a bee in his bonnet about Musk for the better part of a month, ever since Elon went to the mat in support of H-1B visas for highly skilled immigrants. “He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down,” he told an Italian newspaper recently, vowing to have Musk “run out of here by Inauguration Day.” Turning to Silicon Valley’s habit of hiring migrants instead of Americans, Bannon took the gloves off—and sounded a little, well, woke in the process:

“No blacks or Hispanics have any of these jobs or any access to these jobs,” Bannon said.

“Peter Thiel, David Sachs, Elon Musk, are all white South Africans,” Bannon observed. “He should go back to South Africa. Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, white South Africans, we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?”

Well then.

Pity poor Elon, who spent Christmas week defending Indian engineers from Groypers calling them sewage-drinking subhumans only to have Groyper-adjacent nationalist Steve Bannon turn around and accuse him of being racist. The rift over immigration policy developing between red-pilled tech bros, color-blind nativist ideologues, and gutter white supremacists will be a fun one to follow over the next four years.

But it won’t be the only one. There are numerous rifts opening on the right as Donald Trump prepares to take office. The GOP caught the proverbial car on Election Day and now each of its factions wants to drive; watching them tear each other apart will be one of the small silver linings of a second Trump presidency.

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.

May 30, 2024

Just yesterday …

Pick at random any other graduate from Steinert High School in Trenton, Class of 1968, and call their wife the c-word. See what would happen. Judicial restraint would not be the order of the day. (By chance, the District Court judge I clerked for graduated from Steinert a few years before Justice Alito.)

Josh Blackman

I have no intention of entering into the dispute about Mrs. Justice Alito flying her flag funny or how she was or wasn’t provoked by neighbors.

Rather, I’m tattling on myself: when I read “Steinert High School in Trenton, Class of 1968,” I thought “Who is he talking about? That’s just yesterday. Supreme Court Justices in 2024 graduated earlier than that!”

In point of fact, they did not. Most of the current court graduated later than that. Most of them are, in other words, young whippersnappers.

And I’m old enough to be that actress’s grandfather. And, no, I’m not up for a game of touch football this afternoon, thank you. And so on and so forth.

The mind rebels at the thought that I really am this old.

Nonpolitics

Chatbot “biographies”

Bruni recently published another book, The Age of Grievance, after which there appeared on Amazon’s pages a “biography” of him — actually, several — that apparently were generated by chatbots hoovering up random biographical bits from the web:

I guess that … I should be flattered? I am, sort of. I never imagined I’d be the subject of any biography, so a pamphlet of pablum exceeds my dreams! But I’m also unsettled, and not by the realization that my life, or at least life story, doesn’t belong to me, but by the idea that we are masses of bytes at the mercy of bots. In this scenario, emblematic of our digital age, I’m neither “he” nor “she.” I’m really more “it.”

Frank Bruni

The Humanities

I won’t deny that the downward trend in majors is troubling to people (like me) who love the humanities.

But I disagree with the notion that success is based on convincing 18 year olds to declare an English major. That makes a mockery of the whole subject. Youngsters may eventually decide that the humanities are worth studying, but that will only happen after humanistic thinking starts to pervade our society.

Ted Gioia, The Real Crisis in Humanities Isn’t Happening at College

Extraction economy still

Extracting eyeball minutes, the key resource for companies like Google and Facebook, has become significantly more lucrative than extracting oil.

Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism

Sustainability

During some “foreign” travel a few years ago (Vancouver, BC), we got a carryout rotisserie chicken we tried to carve up in our hotel room with wooden knives and then eat with wooden sporks. I longed for plastic.

Plastic utensils set for immediate disposal after use truly is not sustainable though, and the Vancouver way (sigh!) is better.

Speaking of which:

David Mamet via Nellie Bowles (This is satire. With California, though, it’s sometimes hard to tell.)

The Algorithms Are Broken

The Google algorithm deliberately makes it difficult to find reliable information. That’s because there’s more money made from promoting garbage, and forcing users to scroll through oceans of crap.

…

I ought to share more examples. But there are so many. Where do I even start?

For example, Amazon’s algorithm suggests books I might enjoy. But the recommendations have gotten worse over time—much worse!—just like everything else coming out of the technocracy.

…

I became am a conscientious objector in the world of algorithms. They give more unwanted advice than any person in history, even your mom.

At least mom has your best interests at heart. Can we say the same for Silicon Valley?

Ted Gioia, Let’s Just Admit it: The Algorithms Are Broken

Irrational fear and animus

From my own experience, it seems the reverse is true: very few who hold a strong position on this issue, whether for or against SSM, are driven by irrational fear or animus. They seem to be driven by beliefs they hold to be properly basic in terms of justice, whether it is the rightly ordered ends of our sexual powers (including their relation to marriage’s nature) or the rightly ordered ends of our public institutions. Both sides answer these concerns differently and thus come to contrary conclusions on whether the legal recognition of SSM is just.

Francis J. Beckwith, Taking Rites Seriously

Success

Years ago at a Stanford conference, Girard faced a tough question about his unconventional methods. His research had involved a close reading of archaic texts—which is to say, stories. In them, he discerned hidden patterns of rivalry and the sacralization of violence to end strife, an unending sequence throughout the long night of humanity. His writing was seasoned with characteristic humor and insight—he had learned something about himself along his journey, and so did not offer himself as a hero or an answer.

After the talk, one man asked a provocative question: “Given that we can’t entirely trust the veracity of ancient writings, how would you measure the success of your theory?”

Girard’s answer was a thunderbolt in its directness and simplicity: “You will see the success of my theories when you recognize yourself as a persecutor.”

Cynthia L. Haven, We Do Not Come in Peace

NCAA

Nowhere else in America can businesses get away with agreeing not to pay their workers a fair-market rate on the theory that their product is defined by not paying their workers a fair-market rate.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, concurring, in N.C.A.A. v. Alston, that student athletes should be able to profit from their names, images or likenesses. Via Jane Coaston

Advanced or underdeveloped?

The Stalinist interpretation of socialism has made it possible for socialists and capitalists alike to agree on how to measure the level of development a society has achieved. Societies in which most people depend for most of their goods and services on the personal whim, kindness, or skill of another are called “underdeveloped,” while those in which living has been transformed into a process of ordering from an all-encompassing store catalogue are called “advanced.”

Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality

Ouch!

The New York Times this week frames a shibboleth combined with a vague appeal to authority, writing: “President Biden placed electric vehicles at the heart of his climate agenda because scientists say that a rapid switch from gasoline-powered cars to electric versions is one of the most effective ways to slow the carbon dioxide emissions that are dangerously heating the planet.”

Economists might be better to consult than scientists, but, in all likelihood, no one was consulted by the Times on the question of whether the policy will be effective.

This sentence, we can safely assume, arose entirely as a backward-reasoned justification of the Biden program, concocted on the spot by a Times editor to fill the place where a reader expects to be assured that the policy has been vetted and found to be sensible.

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr., Anatomy of an EV Policy Error

Politics

Nonsequitur of the week

(The Economist) A governor‘s pardon implies nothing about the trustworthiness of the courts that convicted the now-pardoned person.

Please: make sure brain is working before engaging mouth.

Not actual news, but cuts pretty close to the bone

TALLAHASSEE, FL—Touting the legislation as a common-sense victory for family values, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a new law Thursday requiring all Florida women to produce three healthy, white sons by the date of their 22nd birthday. “The production of white daughters will not be penalized, but they will be seized by the state for the production of white sons,” said DeSantis, who clarified that regardless of the race, ethnicity, or religious background of the mother, all sons would be required to be both white and raised in a Catholic household. “Three is the bare minimum. Despite what the virtue-signaling, left-wing fanatics are espousing on CNN, this requirement is actually quite fair and attainable. Whether Florida women and girls choose to get started at age 15 or 19, they will have plenty of time to comply.” At press time, DeSantis added that a miscarriage counted as negative one white sons.

The Onion

Political bons mots

  • [I]n The Post, Matt Bai sought to trace J.D. Vance’s boundless sycophancy, including his appearance last week at Donald Trump’s trial: “I can’t say from experience how you’re supposed to know when you’ve officially become part of an organized crime family, but if you feel it necessary for your professional advancement to show up at a courthouse and pay respect to a patriarch charged with fraudulent payments to a porn star, chances are you check all the boxes.”
  • In USA Today, Rex Huppke examined the folly and failure of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s unsuccessful attempt to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson: “Like a dull-witted Icarus, she has now flown too close to the dumb.”
  • In The Times, Bret Stephens previewed the first planned presidential debate next month: “If President Biden gets through the debate without committing a gaffe, he’ll surpass expectations. If Donald Trump gets through it without committing a felony, he’ll surpass expectations.”

Frank Bruni

I would be remiss were I not to give a shout-out to Kevin D. Williamson as well:

… Mike Johnson, a coup-backing knee-walking MAGA grotesque and Trump enabler who is somehow not depraved and sycophantic enough for [Marjorie Taylor] Greene.

Just links

I’ve posted some political things elsewhere that you might (or might not) want to see.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

March 5, 2024

Art

Popular “unpopular art”

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

Joseph Bottum

Popular art

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

IVF

The ephemeral threat to IVF

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The case against IVF

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

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

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

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

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

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

Law

Witless Ape returns to ballot

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

Damon Linker

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

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

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

David French

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

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

The exceedingly long arm of Russian law

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

Dora Chomiak in the Wall Street Journal

Trump’s immunity claims

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

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

Qualified Immunity

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

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

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

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

Miscellany

[Expletive deleted] AI

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

Google’s Gemini AI via Nellie Bowles

Pride before the Fall

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

Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope

Psychological Man

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

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

Where paranoia is the mark of sophistication

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

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


So: where did all my mockery of Trump go?

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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

On proper love of country

Love of country or “nationalism”?

Most of what is written about Christian nationalism is silly. Critics and analysts sweepingly deride conventional Christian conservatives as Christian nationalists. By some counts, there are, by this definition, tens of millions of Christian nationalists. Sometimes even civil religion, with its homage to a vague deity, is labeled Christian nationalism. If so, all presidents from George Washington to Joe Biden are Christian nationalists. Sometimes the target is folk religionists who conflate God and country. They sometimes sport paraphernalia with American flags draped around the cross. These folk religionists typically aren’t aware they are Christian nationalists. They don’t publish articles, much less books. And they typically don’t have policy agendas, just an attitude that God and country should be interchangeably honored.

…

Christian nationalism is distinct from conventional Christian conservatism. The former are typically post-liberals who want some level of explicit state established Christianity. The latter have been and largely still are classical liberals who affirm traditional American concepts of full religious liberty for all. Both groups want a “Christian America.”  But the former want it by statute. The latter see it as mainly a demographic, historical and cultural reality.

Mark Tooley, Christian Conservatism vs Christian Nationalism

This looks like a solid and helpful piece from a more religiously-sophisticated source than the Politico piece it’s responding to. But it seems to me superficial insofar as it’s credulous about “nations.”

Not this:

The patriotic mythologies that came into existence together with modernity’s nationalisms are siren songs that seek to create loyalties that are essentially religious in nature. World War I, in the early 20th century, was deeply revealing of the 19th century’s false ideologies. There, in the fields of France, European Christians killed one another by the millions in the name of entities that, in some cases, had existed for less than 50 years (Germany was born, more or less, in 1871). The end of that war did nothing, apparently, to awaken Christians to the madness that had been born in their midst.

…

These passions are worth careful examination, particularly as they have long been married to America’s many denominational Christianities. I think it is noteworthy that one of the most prominent 19th century American inventions was Mormonism. There, we have the case of a religious inventor (Joseph Smith) literally writing America into the Scriptures and creating an alternative, specifically American, account of Christ and salvation. It was not an accident. He was, in fact, drawing on the spirit of the Age, only more blatantly and heretically. But there are many Christians whose Christianity is no less suffused with the same sentiments.

Asking questions of these things quickly sends some heads spinning. They wonder, “Are we not supposed to love our country?” As an abstraction, no. We love people; we love the land. We owe honor to honorable things and persons. The Church prays for persons: the President, civil authorities, the armed forces. We are commanded to pray and to obey the laws as we are able in good conscience. Nothing more.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

The conveniently unknown God

For fifty years I worshipped at the shrine of an Unknown God. It’s better than nothing. This tells us something of the intrinsic nature of humans. That we are wired to adore. It’s been a deception that we can get along without bending our heads, or ‘think’ our way out of our essential religiosity …

I lit candles for the Unknown God, coaxed exotic incense, sought out quiet places, wrapped myself in antelope skins and read ancient texts, hundreds of them. I got myself out into the bush, I abandoned work without real substance, I became a scholar and a seeker. I lived in a circle for four years, no screens anywhere near me. I blew my lantern out early and woke to birdsong. I was devoted, and I was led.

But I would tell by the camp fire every story but the story. The vast, glorious, uneasy elephant in the room.

I loved the Unknown God because it seemed beautiful, ancient, intensely mysterious, but didn’t infringe on how I actually lived. Not if I didn’t want it to. Had no bearing on my ethics or morality – what there was left of them. I dwelt in a world of strong emotion, intuitions and elaborate ceremonies. I learnt an awful lot about being human. I learnt an awful lot about the value of beauty.

And yet, I remained absolutely unaccountable. At the flick of a switch I could be the same old degenerate I’d always been …

Those fifty years got me an awfully long way. They’ve enabled me languages and experiences that gird me well in middle age. They haven’t required abandoning, or disowning, or shamefully chucking on a bonfire. I was a Romantic, that was what I was. But if you’ve really committed to a quest, a day will come when everything you think you know gets rocked, challenged, shaken. That happened to me four years ago up in the forest at the end of a 101-day vigil. When the unthinkable happened.

My unknown God decided to make himself visible to me.

Known to me.

Martin Shaw.

A bit of lay history

Clause not yet adopted at Rome … omitted from manuscripts of the Creed … inclusion perhaps a copyist’s mistake! H’m … Upheld by Paulinus of Aquileia at the Synod of Friuli, 800, yes, yes, yes … but only adopted among the Franks … Here we are! Frankish monks intoning the Filioque clause at Jerusalem! Outrage and uproar of Eastern monks!’ He paused and rubbed his hands. ‘I wish I’d been there!’ He pushed back his spectacles for a moment and then resumed. ‘Pope Leo III tries to suppress the addition, in spite of the insistence of Charlemagne – a Frank, of course! – but approves of the doctrine.

Patrick Leigh Fermor, Between the Woods and the Water. Patrick Leigh Fermor is not where I expected to find a saucy account of where the filioque came from.

Untenable but appealing

To read [Elaine] Pagels and [Bart]Ehrman, the Jesus Seminarians, and many others, the reader would think that orthodox interpretation of the Christian story has no claim to greater antiquity, and no stronger connection to the first followers of Christ, than the many and various heretical interpretations. In their view, the New Testament reflects only the theological-ideological biases of the “proto-orthodox” party, and the canon as we know it was imposed retrospectively, rather than developing organically in the early Church. These claims are enormously appealing to the modern religious mind, but they aren’t particularly tenable.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

Iconodules

A key turning point in my life, during my thesis (“The Icon as Theology”) defense, came with the question, “Do you believe the veneration of icons to be necessary to salvation?” I hesitated (I was an Anglican priest at the time), and responded, “I believe that their veneration is necessary to its fullness.” I have lived with that answer for many years and pondered it and the question as well. Christ, according to the Scriptures, is the “icon of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15). I cannot imagine a salvation that is somehow separate from the veneration, indeed, the worship of that Icon.

Fr. Stephen Freeman

On “calling”

Florida’s most notorious abortion clinic is located at 1103 Lucerne Terrace in downtown Orlando. On the sidewalk directly in front of this clinic, the Orlando Women’s Center, there are two prominent marks in the concrete. They are signs of an extraordinary story.

The concrete was worn away by the feet of John Barros, who for nearly two decades stood outside this clinic as a sidewalk counselor …

I asked him, once, how he’d felt called to the pro-life movement. “I wasn’t called to the pro-life movement,” he replied. “God called me to forty feet of sidewalk.”

Farewell to a Pro-Life Hero

The new Christendom’s penitential system was often experienced as external to the needs of the penitent. It was based on new patterns of canon law that codified sin and the penances that negated it. The system could be overwhelmingly legalistic and for some authorities was centered not on the penitent but on his clerical confessor. It was concerned more with divine satisfaction than with human transformation.

John Strickland, The Age of Utopia. The “new Christendom” Strickland is referring to is Western Christendom after the Great Schism of roughly 1,000 years ago. Human transformation remains the focus of confession, absolution and penance in the Christian East (and in American Orthodoxy).

Anecdote contra data

Writing on X, a priest reports: “A bit of good news . . . I’ve had more confessions of the ‘Bless me Father, for I have sinned, it’s been 20, 25, 30, 40, 50 years since my last confession . . .’ sort this year than I ever remember. I’m seeing more people at Mass than I ever remember.”

R.R. Reno

… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)

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

Raging against the Machine

Raging against the Machine

  • Jyoti [the writer’s wife] was a psychiatrist who earned actual money. But psychiatry was killing her, her role was not to cure people but to medicate them, to stick plasters on the wounds the Machine had gouged into the people at the bottom of the pile. There was nothing she could do about the wounds, and they kept coming.
  • My culture comes, most recently, from the southeastern suburbs of England. It’s a culture of hard work, of ‘getting on,’ of English Protestantism channeled into secular ambition. It’s about settling down and having a family, contributing, progressing, climbing up; not bad things, necessarily, not for a lot of people. But it’s also about selling up, moving on, about property ladders and career ladders, about staking your place on the consumer travelator that represents progress in a burning world. It’s about feeding the Machine that rips up the people and rips up the places and turns them all against each other while the money funnels upwards to the people who are paying attention. This is the crap our children are learning. There is not much sign at all that the tide is turning.
  • The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of ‘legitimate’ thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world’s ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people. … Newton, for example, ‘revolutionized’ physics and the so-called natural sciences by reducing the physical universe to a linear mathematical equation. Descartes did the same thing with culture. John Locke did it with politics, and Adam Smith did it with economics. Each one of these ‘thinkers’ took a piece of the spirituality of human existence and converted it into a code, an abstraction … Each of these intellectual revolutions served to abstract the European mentality even further, to remove the wonderful complexity and spirituality from the universe and replace it with a logical sequence: one, two, three. Answer! (Quoting Russell Means)
  • ‘In Western Civilization,’ says the poet Gary Snyder, ‘our elders are books.’ Books pass on our stories. Books carry the forbidden knowledge and the true. Books are weird things, inhuman things, abstract things, but they are gateways, at their best, to the world to which the drum and the fire and the sweat lodge used to take us. The Otherworld. At her best, the writer is a shaman, a priestess, a summoner.

Paul Kingsnorth, in Savage Gods.

Hungary

Tucker in Hungary

Of Tucker Carlson in Hungary, Bill Kristol says out loud what others have been insinuating:

The New American Right is now explicitly embracing the Old European Right. Not to put to fine a point on it, the New American Right is…anti-American.

Rod Dreher is having none of it — from Kristol the rest of the Sacred Confraternity of Circle-Jerking Pundits:

Is anybody really moved by an older man calling a younger man “anti-American” because he goes to a NATO country and American ally, and speaks well of it? Isn’t that, you know, nuts?

…

The idea that an American conservative who admires some of what Viktor Orban does, and believes, is somehow “anti-American” is not only insulting, but is a smear designed to make people believe that to be a real American, you have to endorse selling your country, its institutions, and its traditions out to globalist liberals and American hegemons willing to start wars to turn the whole world into America. Forget it. I love my country, though I don’t love what it’s becoming. If I can learn from the Hungarians how to better resist what the people who are ruining America are doing, then that’s pro-American to me.

Rod Dreher

Which is less bad?

I would rather have honest government over dishonest government, but if I had to choose between a corrupt president who rewarded his cronies, and a president who was morally fastidious, but whose administration stopped using the word “mother” in federal documents, substituting instead “birthing people” — well, that’s not a hard choice to make. A society can survive Huey P. Long; it cannot survive losing the meaning of “mother”.

Rod Dreher, ‌Why Conservatives Should Care About Hungary

The last word on Andrew Cuomo

Are you getting tired of news about Andrew Cuomo? Me too.

Peggy Noonan has the mike-drop line:

No one in New York is walking around saying “I don’t believe it” or “That’s not the Andrew I know.” It’s apparently the Andrew Cuomo a lot of people knew.

You may now resume your regularly-scheduled activities.

Another inversion, realignment

I’ve said since Election 2016 that a major political realignment was under way (though I said it much more in the early days, before the daily assaults from Trump became too dominant in my thoughts). Here’s an emergent example:

We’ve come to an odd pass in American politics. The people who have the deepest suspicions about the way government works are increasingly enthusiastic about the use of government power.

Somehow, many of the same folks who say that government authorities shouldn’t be trusted to make sure vaccines are safe or that elections are fairly conducted also say that we should have the government set industrial policy, regulate speech on the internet, or even engineer the size and shape of American families. How can institutions so corrupt as the ones described by right-wing nationalists be trusted with the power to administer matters far more complicated than testing vaccines or counting ballots?

Chris Stirewalt, ‌The Contradictions of Paranoid Nationalism.

This is perhaps hyperbolic, but it is at least directionally right as to some of Rod Dreher’s recent utterances, for instance:

Hungary is an important example for American conservatives in part because it compels us to recognize that the state is the only means we have left to defend ourselves from those who despise us and our institutions, and want to force us to bow to soft totalitarianism. This is a hell of a thing for an American conservative raised in the Reagan era to grasp, but that’s where we are. Just as the king’s role was in part to protect the people from the depredations of the nobility, in this current era of leftist capture of US institutions (including the military!), the state is the only means by which we conservatives can exercise power in our own self-defense.

Sullivan the Prophet

[Andrew Sullivan’s] term “Christianist” felt like a mild slap in the face, right until the afternoon of Jan. 6, when a mob of believers stormed the Capitol on a “righteous” mission to overturn an election — with crosses in the crowd and prayers on their lips.

David French, reviewing Out on a Limb

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

When politics becomes a religion

Religionized politics bodes to kill us:

I’m convinced that 2020 is going to be the most spiritually challenging year for politically engaged Christians of my adult lifetime. In an increasingly de-Christianized America, politics itself is emerging as a competing religious force, and it’s a religion that’s increasingly based on hate and fear, rather than love and grace.

…

[T]he idea that a person is “good, but wrong” or even “decent, but wrong” is vanishing. Instead, the conventional wisdom is that our political opponents are “terrible and wrong.” Our opponents not only have bad policies, they are bad people.

Now, let’s thrown in an additional complicator for people of faith. Perhaps a religious partisan could attempt to justify the animosity if they could map out a nice, neat religious divide. “Of course they’re terrible people—they’re all heretics.” After all, “reasoning” like that has launched countless wars of religion. And indeed, Republican partisans do make the claim that the GOP stands as a bulwark against increasingly godless Democrats.

But here’s the very different truth. The bases of both parties are disproportionately composed of the most God-fearing, church-going cohort of Americans—black Democrats and white Evangelicals. So, no, while there are serious differences regading abortion, religious liberty, immigration, and a host of other vital moral issues (and blue states tend to be more secular than red states), American politics cannot be neatly defined as a battle between the godly and the godless.

Thus, while the stakes of our modern political conflicts are thankfully lower than the awful carnage of the Civil War, the political division between black Democrats and white Evangelicals reminds me of Lincoln’s famous words in his second inaugural: “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.” And we face a similar reality: “The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully.”

David French (emphasis added).

* * * * *

Sailing on the sea of this present life, I think of the ocean of my many offenses; and not having a pilot for my thoughts, I call to Thee with the cry of Peter, save me, O Christ! Save me, O God! For Thou art the lover of mankind.

(From A Psalter for Prayer)

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff at here. It should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly, should you want to make a habit of it.

1

Holy Smokes! Tucker Carlson lit a long fuse and Michael Brendan Dougherty just ignited!

Carlson pointed to the real molten fissure that is burbling sulfur on the American right. By doing so without ever mentioning the name, the character, or the political fortunes of Donald Trump, he allowed everyone to be more frank than usual. Carlson’s case is that elite-driven economic and social policy has destroyed the material basis for the family life, that our technocratic elite has the wrong measures of national health. Further, he argues, if the American Right doesn’t give up on its absentminded idolatry of “the market,” the country will quickly move toward socialism.

My colleagues David French and David Bahnsen, along with Ben Shapiro, argued forcefully against him. The themes are remarkably similar. Carlson says true things about the state of family life, they admit. But he is encouraging a victim mentality …

While French, Bahnsen, and Shapiro all variously object to Carlson’s jeremiads about elites, and his iconoclasm when it comes to the “free market,” nobody disputed that, as Carlson said, sometimes private-equity outfits do take advantage of our laws to extract value from existing companies for shareholders, charging fees while passing on pension burdens to the public. Also, nobody argued against Carlson’s contention that, absent a dramatic effort to change the conditions for America’s middle and working class, the country will turn to socialism. I found these omissions curious.

…

Bahnsen writes: “Carlson wrongly chooses to assign blame for the decisions people make to macroeconomic forces, instead of focusing on the decisions people make and the microeconomic consequences people absorb.”

To those who object to Carlson along these lines I would ask: At what point can we actually move on from the subject of personal responsibility and onto governance? Or, to put it another way, are there any political conditions in which the advice to be virtuous and responsible aren’t the best counsel you could give an individual?

It seems that it would be just as true to say these things in Russia during the post-Communist period, which saw soaring substance-abuse problems and plunging life expectancies. Then as now, the best advice you could give an individual Russian man was not to drink until his liver failed and he died. You could advise Russian women not to abort so many of their children. You could advise people to go back to church. All that would be salutary and more practically useful than having them wallow in elite failure. But none of that advice is inconsistent with political reflection and action for building a more flourishing society.

And our jobs at National Review and the Daily Wire include writing about and reflecting on political conditions. We are, all of us in this debate, dedicated to causes in which political effort and coordination is difficult. Would any of us really conclude that because the Russian state wasn’t forcing men at gunpoint to drink, Russia’s mortality rate had nothing to do with the corruption, venality, and misgovernance of the era? I doubt it.

*     *     *

I agree that a victim mentality isn’t helpful. A victim mentality doesn’t even help most actual victims. It wouldn’t help most political prisoners held unjustly. They, too, benefit spiritually from self-control (and religion)! My fear is that we are now so self-conscious about legitimizing a victim mentality that we have decided that justice is hardly worth pursuing. We trust an invisible hand so thoroughly that we don’t ask whether the laws and policies that govern trade, employment, and markets are prudent. We are becoming as glib as those who say “Don’t like abortion? Then don’t have one.”

(Bold added)

Kudos to Carlson for starting this intra-conservative fight. Kudos to Dougherty for the cojones to point out that his colleagues, most or all of them senior to him, are selling buck-naked, Emperor’s-New-Clothes nostrums that few are still buying. And Kudos to National Review for allowing Dougherty to deviate from the conservative party line.

2

I do think Trump will declare a bogus national emergency because it provides a similacrum of accomplishing something.

So: Which is the worse precedent?

  1. A President declaring a bogus national emergency to gesture at fulfilling a key campaign promise?
  2. Federal Courts ruling that a declaration of national emergency is bogus?

Note that I’ve kept personalities out of it because the question is precedent.

The President claims that his lawyers have given a legal green light to the proposed declaration of national emergency. His oath to uphold the laws and constitution oblige him to satisfy himself of that.

  1. Has the Department of Justice really vetted this proposal for conformity with what the law has in mind by “national emergency” (rather than just “can I get away with it”) and said “Yes. This is a classic national emergency”? Or …
  2. Will there be principled resignations of lawyers whose opinions are being misrepresented?

3

Are there enough millstones left in the world to appropriately bedeck the necks of Fordham faculty, staff and counselors?

4

… I no longer recognize my country and I don’t feel welcome here anymore. That is why I’m leaving America, for the same reason my ancestors came here, to find home.

…

… Last month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo phoned the new breakaway Ukrainian patriarch to offer the US Government’s support. I can’t expect the US Government to have a theological care about the destruction of the Russian Orthodox Church, but I hate that my government is exploiting this rift to gain advantage against Russia.

…

It gets worse. In 2016, the Trump State Department put out a $300,000 bid to hire culture-war mercenaries to go into Macedonia with the express purpose of fighting Orthodox Christian teaching on homosexuality. The American taxpayer paid money to export the destruction of Macedonia’s Christian culture.

… Personally, I don’t know what it would mean to “give up” on America. That said, I find our country to be an increasingly hostile, alien place, in terms of the direction of the culture, and the lack of a sense that there’s anything left to restrain its descent.

Rod Dreher, An Expatriate Of The Heart, initially quoting a reader from Atlanta.

I’m thinking of “the … closing lines in Alasdair MacIntyre’s … After Virtue, in which MacIntyre concludes:

A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead . . . was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.

Patrick J. Deneen

Unlike Rod’s reader in Atlanta, my wife has not left me for another woman. I have a son, his wife, and two grandchildren. I serve my parish as Cantor.

These loyalties, not any attachment to the nation writ large (let alone to the government, a true force for evil in the world), keep me here (along with frank recognition that my language skills aren’t supple enough to make emigration to any Orthodox land feasible).

I’m of a generation and personal temperament that come to such conclusions relatively easily, I suspect. But I was a bit surprised to find myself agreeing so thoroughly with Rod’s reader.

I strongly suspect we’re at such the kind of “crucial turning point” MacIntyre described in the U.S., too. The comments to Dreher’s blog confirm that I’m not alone.

* * * * *

Follow me on Micro.blog Follow me on Micro.blog, too, where I blog tweet-like shorter items and … well, it’s evolving. Or, if you prefer, those micro.blog items also appear now at microblog.intellectualoid.com.

Trimmer callout

Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journal accurately describes the Donald Trump foreign policy modus operandi:

The controversy overflowing the banks of the press conference between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is a moment to step back and assess the nonstop maelstrom called the Trump presidency.

Mr. Trump’s famous modus operandi is the art of the deal. Keep everyone guessing and off balance. Decision first, details later. Drive events, stay on offense, force everyone to react. In this, Mr. Trump has succeeded.

No one—from the individuals who work daily in the White House to friends and enemies in foreign capitals—knows what he may do next. A high-ranking official from an Asian ally who visited the Journal’s offices recently was asked if his government has a clear idea of what Mr. Trump wants them to do on trade. “No,” he said, “we do not.”

The whole world is back on its heels, which is where, according to theory, the art-of-the-deal master wants them.

As I read, I thought “This is true, and it describes an autocracy because nobody, including his White House staff, knows what he will do next and nobody is stopping him.”

Frank Bruni of the New York Times observes that “when it comes to babysitting this president, the Republican Party is a lost cause.” Bruni’s remark would have come across as a fairly anodyne liberal New York Times talking point had I not been mulling over Trump as autocrat (setting aside all other attributes).

That observation ramifies. Stay tuned.

Although one might make the case that this level of autocracy is impeachable, it would be a mere academic exercise at this point. If his own party won’t buck him, this sad, embarrassing wreck of a man, in control of the imperial Presidency we’ve built, has it in his tiny hands, guided by his cribbed mind, to cause untold damage in the world — that is, in foreign policy.

Henninger gives Trump much credit for the booming economy and for his judicial nominees.

When Mr. Trump entered office amid a generalized panic among political elites, the first thing some of us noticed was that he was filling his government with first-rate people. To revive the economy, they included economic advisers Gary Cohn and Kevin Hassett, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and OMB Director Mick Mulvaney. On taxes, Paul Ryan and Kevin Brady provided a detailed template. The economy raced to full employment. The stock market boomed.

On the Supreme Court, the most astute minds in the conservative legal movement gave Mr. Trump a list of stellar options. He picked Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. More wins.

Mr. Trump has said that in Mike Pompeo, Jim Mattis and John Bolton he has the foreign-policy team he always wanted. He also said he wanted to do one-on-ones with Messrs. Xi, Kim and Putin. He has done that. The moment has arrived to start listening less to America’s adversaries and more to his own good people. That, in his first year, was the art of the win.

On foreign policy, his competent people are themselves in the dark, and our Narcissist-in-Chief doesn’t know what he doesn’t know.

Mr. Trump’s supporters say he deserves more time to negotiate wins on these big foreign-policy bets. It’s not going to get better.

(Henninger) Thus, it’s time for “show us the money.”

Trump’s ascendancy has highlighted the warranted discontent of those who’ve been left behind economically. Average is Not Over, and average America does not intend to go off to its Bantustan while the new plutocrats grow ever wealthier.

I think that message has been received. I hope it has been received, anyway, and I’m certainly trying to digest it. Our future is more populist. Restoration of the status quo ante will do average America few favors. This generally fits at least a few of my long-lived notions about course correction for America.

Moreover, the time probably has come (I’m ready at least, and have been ready since the anomalies came to my attention from reading smarter people) to re-examine NATO and our other trans-Atlantic alliances in light of nearly 30 years since the end of the Cold War. But I don’t want Trump-as-autocrat doing it by humiliating our historic allies and engaging in secretive tête-a-tête meetings with Vladimir Putin — and I say that as a Russophile. Rearranging treaties in light of changed facts on the ground needs to be an orderly process.

In 2016, Trump out-performed the polls. People lied or hid their true leanings (because supporting Trump would get you added to The Deplorables by the bien pensants). Having elected their secret favorite, a new tribe has tacitly enacted it own set of smelly tribal orthodoxies, starting with, in effect, “touch not God’s annointed autocrat.”

I’m hoping the current polls’ insane levels of support for Trump among Republicans are again off-base — that people are giving the approved tribal answers while secretly harboring doubts, deep doubts.

I see no reason to believe this except a disorderly and ever-weakening reflex that, under their tribal bluster, my countrymen are sane.

Bruni is calling for a blue wave in November if only to show quisling Republicans that not bucking Trump when appropriate is as dangerous as bucking him. I’m receptive to the idea that having rushed the cockpit of Flight 93 in 2016, wresting the controls from the establishment and putting them in Trump’s tiny hands, it’s time to rush it again and reverse our course.

No, make that “correct our course.” I don’t think there’s any simple going back. But I’m hoping for the emergence of tens of millions of Trimmers.

The ‘trimmer’ is one who disposes his weight so as to keep the ship upon an even keel. And our inspection of his conduct reveals certain general ideas at work … Being concerned to prevent politics from running to extremes, he believes that there is a time for everything and that everything has its time — not providentially, but empirically. He will be found facing in whatever direction the occasion seems to require if the boat is to go even.

May this tribe increase.

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Shelby Steele on NFL & BLM

Stanford Historian and Hoover Institute Fellow Shelby Steele has a powerful essay in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, behind a pay wall, about the feckless NFL “take the knee” protests. He also touches on Black Lives Matter. You probably can get a copy of the Journal at Barnes & Noble or another news stand if you move quickly. Or there’s always your local library.

I’m going to quote his core claim and, what I find a most powerful illustration, and his reasoning on why protests continue:

The oppression of black people is over with. This is politically incorrect news, but it is true nonetheless. We blacks are, today, a free people. It is as if freedom sneaked up and caught us by surprise.

Of course this does not mean there is no racism left in American life. Racism is endemic to the human condition, just as stupidity is. We will always have to be on guard against it. But now it is recognized as a scourge, as the crowning immorality of our age and our history.

Protest always tries to make a point. But what happens when that point already has been made—when, in this case, racism has become anathema and freedom has expanded?

…

To hear … that more than 4,000 people were shot in Chicago in 2016 embarrasses us because this level of largely black-on-black crime cannot be blamed simply on white racism.

We can say that past oppression left us unprepared for freedom. This is certainly true. But it is no consolation. Freedom is just freedom. It is a condition, not an agent of change. It does not develop or uplift those who win it. Freedom holds us accountable no matter the disadvantages we inherit from the past. The tragedy in Chicago—rightly or wrongly—reflects on black America.

That’s why, in the face of freedom’s unsparing judgmentalism, we reflexively claim that freedom is a lie. We conjure elaborate narratives that give white racism new life in the present ….

I tried to comment on this, but that only made it weaker.

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“No man hath a velvet cross.” (Samuel Rutherford, 17th century Scotland)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Where I glean stuff.