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

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.

More taking stock

I don’t claim to understand what’s going on with Trump 2.0, but these are among the things that seem to contain glimmers of insight.

Vance’s “true self”

Normal people puzzling over which version of Vance is his “true self” should consider the possibility that, for politicians of extreme ambition, there is no “true self” as the concept is commonly understood. They are what they need to be to get ahead, period, irrespective of moral or civic considerations. They’re less “converts” than reptiles, a distinct species.

Jonah Goldberg

This was written last July and has aged very well.

Flag worship

President Trump responded with horror: “There are other things you can protest, but not our Great American Flag—NO KNEELING!” For Trump, kneeling before the flag was enough potentially to disqualify one from membership in the nation: “You have to stand proudly for the national anthem or you shouldn’t be playing, you shouldn’t be there. Maybe you shouldn’t be in the country.”

William T. Cavanaugh, Nationalism as Religion, in The Uses of Idolatry

USAID

The role of the president is merely to enforce the laws made by Congress in institutions created and funded by the legislature. If Congress has funded a government agency for certain reasons, for example, only the Congress can defund it. So a huge amount of Elon Musk’s manic destruction of the administrative state is thereby illegal on its face. Which means it almost certainly cannot last.

This is not to say that Musk hasn’t exposed predictable waste. Why are we surprised that our enlightened elites would use USAID for their pet ideological projects: $3.9 million to promote critical gender and queer theory in — checks notes — the western Balkans; $2.1 million to help the BBC “value the diversity of Libyan society” (is the British government funding insufficient?); $8.3 million for “USAID Education: Equity and Inclusion,” and $7.9 million to teach Sri Lankan journalists how to avoid “binary-gendered language.” Exposing this is fantastic — and could lead to real reform; but instantly shutting down whole agencies, freezing funding for others, laying off thousands and thousands, without any congressional approval, is the path to nowhere.

Andrew Sullivan

Rod Flunks the Marshmallow Test

[I]t feels so, so good that we don’t have to pretend anymore that all the crazy-ass nonsense imposed on us all over the past decade is good or normal. That makes me happier than if the Tigers had shut out the Crimson Tide. I know I’m dumb about this, but it feels like the first day of spring after a long and miserable winter, and that feels great.

…

I was having pints with a fellow American expatriate conservative at a pub near Paddington on Saturday, and we were both on a big high about how Trump and his team are wrecking wokeness and all its pomps and works. Yet my friend said that he has this nagging feeling that this might not end well. “It feels like the way I felt leading up to the Iraq War,” he said, and I got what he meant. Conservatives like him and me, we felt this surge of heroic destiny for America. It was clear who we were as a country, and what we had to do. It felt great! And it ended in disaster.

Rod Dreher

Zero-sum

I don’t believe there’s anything more morally corrupting than an utterly single-minded focus on defeating your political enemies, even when those political enemies really deserve to be defeated. To think only in terms of Winning and Losing is dehumanizing, both to your enemies and to yourself. It’s virtually animalistic, and it makes you forget a lot of things you need to remember.

Alan Jacobs

Don’t hold your breath

A lot of conservatives, myself included, appreciate some of Trump’s Executive Orders on Culture War issues, but we need to get a grip.

If you are waiting for the media to stop calling surgical mutilation of young people “gender-affirming care,” don’t hold your breath.

The reasons why these lunacies persist have to do less with politics than with profound shifts in how we think about right and wrong, life and death, truth and falsehood — about God and man, men and women, adults and children – and about the nature of our bonds with each other.

These shifts have been going on for a long, long time, and the dirty secret is this: Milder versions of the lunacies of which progressives are so fond are widely accepted among conservatives too. They want to embrace lunatic premises, without coming to lunatic conclusions. They want the poison apple, without the worm.

J Budziszewski

This was written last July and has aged very well.

Government’s chief adversary

Donald Trump’s election has created real opportunities for advancing needed change. But the new administration seems intent on squandering those opportunities because it does not see itself as responsible for the federal government. Eager to demonstrate how corrupt our institutions have become rather than to facilitate their improvement, it is opting for lawless and performative iconoclasm over the more mundane but potentially transformative work of governance.

Yuval Levin

Kennedy Center

The VSG (Very Stable Genius) has indicated that he is planning on (and may perhaps have already begun?) firing the members of the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees (including chairman David Rubinstein), replacing them with his own appointees, and naming himself as Chairman of the Board.

… This is a guy who, as far as we know, has never, with all his millions and billions of dollars tucked away in some hedge fund somewhere, given $25.00 to any cultural or artistic institution of any kind. Not a nickel, as far as I can tell (and I’ve looked).

He’s not, of course, much given to philanthropy in support of anything; it’s as though he’s taken the “Reverse Giving Pledge” in which he promises to keep most of his money rather than giving it away to try to make the world a better place.

It is, I candidly admit, one of the things I dislike most about him.

David Post, The Kennedy Center? Really?

Government’s chief adversary

Donald Trump’s election has created real opportunities for advancing needed change. But the new administration seems intent on squandering those opportunities because it does not see itself as responsible for the federal government. Eager to demonstrate how corrupt our institutions have become rather than to facilitate their improvement, it is opting for lawless and performative iconoclasm over the more mundane but potentially transformative work of governance.

Yuval Levin

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

Forest and Tree

Forest and trees revisited

[I’ve already quoted a very pungent Nick Catoggio distillation, but I keep returning to it.]

Insofar as I thought Trump marked mostly a populist realignment of partisan political boundaries, I think I was wrong — or at least that Trump 2.0 is a bigger deal than Trump 1.0. I think he’s now leading us into a post-liberal/illiberal world (that may be inevitable).

Nick Catoggio nails my feelings:

2015 me would have gazed around at the first nine days of Trump’s term, taking each policy in isolation, and concluded that the individual trees look pretty good. 2025 me stares around at the forest Trump is planting and shudders.

Many are freaking out about this.

The post-liberal/illiberal world is ominous for a lot of reasons:

Liberal democracy has been very good materially to me, and mine, and most of the U.S. (But some have been left behind relatively because they didn’t register as Important People.)
There’s a decent case to be made that liberal democracy represents our best chance to live together peacefully despite deep differences. Trump’s zero-sum mentality requires winners, losers and chaos, not co-existence.
Postliberalism/Illiberalism in America feels alien, and how tolerably it’s implemented will depend on those implementing it. Trump, a toxic narcissist with authoritarian impulses and a taste for lethal retribution, is a terrible person to implement it. I’d be more comfortable with an Orbán than with Trump, but I cannot identify any American Orbán.
Donald Trump has millions or tens of millions of supporters for who lethal retribution is a feature, not a bug, and they’ll turn on anyone he turns on. He’s an antichrist heading a new toxic religious cult, and since the failed assassination attempt, he may actually believe that he’s anointed (in contrast to his former cynicism toward his Christian enthusiasts).

Bottom line: it’s probably the end of a world, but not the end of the world. And I can’t do much about it except, possibly, take personal and familial protective measures. Some of those are in place; others we’ve ruled out as a matter of principle.

Good People

[I]t is impossible to overstate the conformist power among elites of being seen as a Good Person. This is why no Republican leader ever pushed back against this stuff prior to Trump. They were terrified of being seen as a Bad Person by the media and other elites. Trump is the Honey Badger of politics: he doesn’t care. (That’s a link to the megaviral Randall video from some years back; he drops some profanity in it, so be aware.)

Rod Dreher

Niall Ferguson on the bipartisan assault on the rule of law

Let me add two more big drops of rain on the Promenade parade. Since Adam Smith, economists have mostly seen free trade and the rule of law as beneficial for growth. Not only have we now entered a period of extreme uncertainty about the future path of U.S. trade policy (does Trump really mean to jack up tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China on February 1, or are the threats just a negotiating tactic?), but we also appear to have jettisoned the rule of law in the euphoria of the monarchical moment.

It is not just Trump’s executive order suspending a law to ban TikTok that was passed by Congress, signed by his predecessor, and upheld by the Supreme Court. Trump has also issued a blanket pardon to all those convicted of crimes—including assaults on police officers—committed on January 6, 2021. And he has issued an executive order overturning the birthright citizenship most people had long assumed was enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment.

But the truly disturbing thing to my eyes is that the assault on the rule of law has been bipartisan. And it is at least arguable that the Democrats began the process. It all started with their hounding of Trump in the courts, at least some of which was politically motivated, and continued in the final days of Biden’s presidency with his preemptive pardons of family members and political figures (they’re all here, including the one for his son Hunter), and a wild attempt to declare a constitutional amendment ratified (the Equal Rights Amendment) that hadn’t been.

“I believe in the rule of law, and I am optimistic that the strength of our legal institutions will ultimately prevail over politics,” Biden said in a statement justifying his actions. “But . . . ” You can stop reading right there. Because if you believe in the rule of law, “but,” then you don’t believe in the rule of law at all. It’s the same as those people who say they believe in free speech, but . . .

To be clear, I begin to fear we may be living through the death of the republic—the transition to empire that historical experience has led us to expect—but it’s not all Trump. It’s a truly bipartisan effort.

I am just fine with a vibe shift that gets us away from ESG, DEI, and the strangling regulation and ideologically motivated incompetence that lies behind the Los Angeles inferno, not to mention Chicago’s less spectacular descent into insolvency and criminality. If Davos Man needed Trump’s reelection to point out that if Europe went woke, it would go broke, then fine.

But trashing the rule of law is another matter.

And note how perfectly the phenomena coincide: the erosion of the laws and the imperial aspirations—Greenland; the Panama Canal; Canada (just kidding); the “Gulf of America;” and Mount McKinley ….

Niall Ferguson, Always Bet Against the Davos Man

Fascism?

Take the word fascism, properly applied to Franco’s Spain or Mussolini’s Italy, and to some extent beyond. The fasces were the bundles of rods carried by Roman lictors: symbols of punishment and magisterial authority, but in modern times also of a tightly unified society controlled from above, and organized in corporate form. The desire of totalitarians everywhere is to achieve harmonization, with all of society marching in military cadence under the guidance of an omnipresent government.

But the Trump administration is more interested in blowing up the state than in extending its power. Its ideologues, such as they are, are reacting to what they think of as government overreach. They will abuse executive power to do it, but they want to eliminate bureaucracy, not grow it.

Trump himself is not Mussolini, or Hitler, or Orbán—two of them soldiers with creditable war records, the third an activist against a dying Communist regime. Trump was a draft dodger by choice and a grifter by trade, and more important, he does not read. Unlike others in his orbit, he does not have ideas so much as impulses, whims, and resentments. He is, to be sure, cruel and malicious, but unlike the others, has no real governing vision.

Eliot A. Cohen, America Needs a Mirror, Not a Window

Too much

My simple thought: that in our politics now we consistently go too far and ask too much. It has become a major dynamic in the past 20 years or so. It manifests in a kind of ideological maximalism. You must get everything you want and grant your foe nothing. In terms of the issue above, you don’t ask society to give you something you deserve—good and just treatment of all transgender folk. Instead you insist that others see reality exactly as you do—that if a man experiences himself as a woman, then you must agree that he is a woman, and this new insight must be incorporated into all human activity, such as sports.

Reaction to the Trump executive order from those who disagree with it has been curiously absent. The reason is that they know they went too far.

The biggest and most politically consequential example of going too far, in the past generation, has been the Democratic Party and illegal immigration. Everyone knows this so I’ll say it quickly. If you deliberately allow many millions to cross the southern border illegally, thus deliberately provoking those who came here legally or were born here, Americans will become a people comfortable with—supportive of—their forced removal, certainly of those who are criminals.

…

Jump to what has been going on the past few weeks in Washington, with the unelected Elon Musk reorganizing, if that’s the word, the federal agencies. Here I pick on him, in part to show fairness. He is surely a genius, a visionary, a titan, but there is something childish and primitive about him. He has wild confidence in his ability to engineer desired outcomes, but unstable elements have a way of exploding in the beaker, and like everyone else from Silicon Valley he lacks a sense of the tragic. They think human life can be rationally shaped and perfected, that every problem just needs the right wrench, and in any case they all think they’re God.

My fear, here we switch metaphors, is that Mr. Musk and his young staffers and acolytes are mad doctors who’ll put 30 chemo ports in the sick body. They’ll not only kill the cancer, they’ll kill the patient.

But they are up against, or trying to reform, a government whose agencies themselves were often maximalist and went too far.

Of all the agencies being batted about the one we will remember first when we recall this period in history is the U.S. Agency for International Development, so much of whose line-item spending was devoted to cultural imperialism. You have seen the lists. USAID produced a DEI musical in Ireland, funded LGBT activism in Guatemala. It spent $426,000 to help Indonesian coffee companies become more climate- and gender-friendly, $447,000 to promote the expansion of atheism in Nepal, and on and on.

When you look at what they were pushing on the world you think: They’re not fighting anti-American feeling, they are causing anti-American feeling.

Who is defending these USAID programs? Nobody. Obviously not Republicans, but not Democrats either. Everyone knows the agency went too far.

Peggy Noonan

Journalism’s horrible bind

[O]n Wednesday afternoon, when I visited the essential Live Updates feed at The New York Times to check in on the latest barrage of Trump administration hyperactivity, I found literally the entire feed devoted to Trump’s bullshit “plan” for the U.S. takeover of Gaza. Breaking news stories. Reactions from around the world. Chin-scratching analysis from experts. All taking the suggestion, which Trump’s own senior staff hadn’t been expecting prior to its announcement during his press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with utmost seriousness. As if it was a real proposal that could conceivably become a reality.

I admit, this made me want to throw my laptop at the wall. Can’t you see he just fucking with us? But that’s unfair to the hardworking journalists at the Times. The American president’s words matter. They have to cover it as if it’s real. Which, of course, takes attention away from the things happening that are real. That illustrates quite vividly the horrible bind in which journalists, reporters, and news organizations find themselves at this maximally harrowing moment.

Damon Linker, Three Observations from the Midst of the Maelstrom

Starting your seventh-string QB

Thank god for James Carville: While the entire Dem establishment seems committed to losing at every opportunity they have, one James Carville is screaming into the void. “We ran a presidential election. If we were playing the Super Bowl, we started our seventh-string quarterback. . . . You can’t address a problem unless you’re honest about a problem.”

When the glowing orb of Carville pops up on the TV, you know you’re about to be yelled at. You know there’ll be spit on that table. Carville said people would be shocked to know that there are Dem candidates that “can actually complete a sentence, that actually know how to frame a message, that actually have a sense of accomplishment, of doing something.” Where are they hiding? Maybe in Governor Phil Murphy’s attic. Maybe somewhere in South Bend. But it’s time, guys: We need a complete-your-sentence–level politician, and we need one ba (sic)

Nellie Bowles

Born Against

Source, which is very worth reading.

Offshore politics

Obviously, there’s a lot going on, but I have limited my political comments in this post. Here are still more from my least-filtered blog:

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

Not yet eleven days

Political

Trump

Top-line summary

David Post, One-Man Rule. And that one man is a honey badger.

Not leadership

In The Rutland Herald, of Vermont, an unsigned editorial summarized our new president’s fusillade of executive orders: “Donald Trump just decided to slam the nation up against the locker and demand that we all play his game — or else. That’s not leadership. That’s a shakedown.”

Via Frank Bruni

Forest and Trees

2015 me would have gazed around at the first nine days of Trump’s term, taking each policy in isolation, and concluded that the individual trees look pretty good. 2025 me stares around at the forest Trump is planting and shudders.

“What we are witnessing is nothing short of a revolution inside the U.S. government,” Politico announced on Tuesday in response to Trump’s latest personnel purges. That’s the right word.

Only two presidents in my lifetime have been truly visionary, I wrote a few weeks before the election. One is Ronald Reagan, the other is Trump. But while both treated the federal government as a beast to be broken, their goals in subduing it were all but directly opposed. Reagan believed that a weaker government would mean greater individual liberty for Americans. Trump believes that a weaker government will be less able to prevent him from consolidating power and dominating American life.

Policy by policy, he’s trying to bring about a postliberal revolution in which all meaningful federal authority ultimately rests with him. If you’re judging his daily executive actions in isolation, without regard to that fact, you’re missing the forest for the trees.

Nick Catoggio.

I usually read Catoggio for laughs. This time, he’s spot-on about a matter of vital national interest. Like Catoggio, I see a lot of nice trees; my list of them is up to seven so far. But the forest is “Mafia Don.”

Of all the links in this post, this one is the one I most hope you’ll follow, devour, and digest.

The Softest of Targets

One of the problems with Donald Trump is that he doesn’t … know stuff.

My own theory of the case, following Sherlock Holmes’ advice—“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”—is that Trump is exactly what he appears to be: an ignorant buffoon who has been carried to the presidency twice on the winds of resentment, romanticism, and nihilism. Trump is a weird combination of Chauncey Gardiner and the Bizarro World version of Pope Celestine V, the naïve hermit who was dragged out of his hole in the ground and plunked down in the Chair of St. Peter when exasperated cardinals decided that what the sclerotic papacy needed was a political outsider … who could be easily manipulated by insiders.

…

[T]hreatening to take away Putin’s access to U.S. markets is like threatening to take away Donald Trump’s library card—it’s not like he’s using it a whole heck of a lot.

… I’ve been to Ukraine and seen some of the damage done. On July 8 of last year, Putin’s forces bombed a children’s hospital in Kyiv. Putin knows a soft target when he sees it, and there are few targets in the geopolitical theater right now softer than Donald Trump.

Kevin D. Williamson

Male and Female he Executive Ordered them

Trump 47 signed an Executive Order on sex that I appreciated for its refusal to pussy-foot around. There has been some pushback (maybe a lot of pushback) that much prefers pussy-footing. Jesse Singal is on it:

What’s going on here, as usual, is that left-of-center thinkers are trying to squeeze a scientific argument into the clothes of a moral one. They have foolishly accepted the framing that we should only treat trans people with dignity and grant them certain rights if they are really the sex they say they are.

(Bold added) Isn’t that really what’s going on with the pushback?

If I only treated people with dignity and as rights-bearers when I agreed with all their delusional ideas, I’d have suffered a lot more broken bones and black eyes in my life.

Abusing the Courts

Donald Trump has sued election pollster J. Ann Selzer for “consumer fraud” and “election interference” for incorrectly projecting Kamala Harris to win Iowa by 3 points:

Efforts to prohibit purportedly false statements in politics are as old as the republic. Indeed, our First Amendment tradition originated from colonial officials’ early attempts to use libel laws against the press.

America rejected this censorship after officials used the Sedition Act of 1798 to jail newspaper editors for publishing “false” and “malicious” criticisms of President John Adams. After Thomas Jefferson defeated Adams in the election of 1800, he pardoned and remitted the fines of those convicted, writing that he considered the act “to be a nullity, as absolute and as palpable as if Congress had ordered us to fall down and worship a golden image.”

Trump’s allegations against Selzer are so baseless that you’d be forgiven for wondering why he even bothered. That is, until you realize that these claims are filed not because they have any merit or stand any chance of success, but in order to impose punishing litigation costs on his perceived opponents. The lawsuit is the punishment.

In fact, Trump has a habit of doing this. He once sued an architecture columnist for calling a proposed Trump building “one of the silliest things anyone could inflict on New York or any other city.” The suit was dismissed. He also sued author Timothy L. O’Brien, business reporter at the New York Times and author of TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald, for writing that Trump’s net worth was much lower than he had publicly claimed. The suit was also dismissed.

But winning those lawsuits wasn’t the point, and Trump himself said so. “I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more,” he said. “I did it to make his life miserable, which I’m happy about.” Back in 2015, he even threatened to sue John Kasich, then-governor of Ohio and a fellow Republican candidate for president, “just for fun” because of his attack ads.

This tactic is called a “strategic lawsuit against public participation,” or SLAPP for short, and it’s a tried-and-true way for wealthy and powerful people to punish their perceived enemies for their protected speech. It’s also a serious threat to open discourse and a violation of our First Amendment freedoms.

Lawsuits are costly, time-consuming, and often disastrous to people’s personal lives and reputations. If you have the threat of legal action hanging over you for what you’re about to say, you will think twice before saying it—and that’s the point.

Greg Lukianoff of FIRE, which is doing the free speech work that no longer interests the pathetic ACLU since it discovered LGBTetc. issues. (Bold added)

I’m going to say what is said too rarely: the lawyers who file these suits for Trump are acting unethically and should be personally sanctioned.

Other

America now hates Democrats

10. Aaron Blake:

A Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday had this stunning finding: While Americans were about evenly split in their views of the Republican Party (43 percent favorable to 45 percent unfavorable), negative views of the Democratic Party outpaced positive ones by 26 points — 31 percent favorable to 57 percent unfavorable.

That’s not only a huge imbalance but also an unprecedented one.

In fact, Democrats’ 57 percent unfavorable rating is their highest ever in Quinnipiac’s polling, dating back to 2008, while the GOP’s 43 percent favorable rating is its highest ever. (Sources: washingtonpost.com, poll.qu.edu)

From John Ellis’ News Items

And why does America hate Democrats?

[A]s the teens drew to close, punctuated by the COVID pandemic and the George Floyd summer of 2020, the left was both larger than it had been in a long time and very different from earlier iterations. This was a left that believed America was a white supremacist society, fully bought into climate catastrophism, prized “equity” above social order, good governance and equal opportunity and thought “no human being is illegal” was a good approach to immigration policy. And they were perfectly willing to shout you down if you didn’t believe all this stuff or even if you didn’t use the right language when referring to these issues. Not coincidentally this was also a left with almost no connection to the working class, in stark contrast to the 20^th century left’s origin story.

Ruy Teixera, The Liberal Patriot

Elon schools the AfD on guilt

I generally read Nick Catoggio for a few chuckles, but this seems deadly serious:

[O]n the eve of the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation, [Elon] Musk beamed into a meeting of Germany’s right-wing, populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party to urge them to stop feeling guilty about the Holocaust, I wondered if building a “doomsday machine” might not be in his future after all.

“There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that. Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents,” Musk said, seeming to reference the country’s history when the Nazis rose to power.

“You should be optimistic and excited about a future for Germany,” said Musk, as the crowd applauded.

Elon Musk is correct, of course, that one generation should not be deemed guilty of the sins of another. No one should want to see German Chancellor Olaf Scholz hauled off to the Hague to answer for the crimes of the S.S.

But no one does want to see that, as far as I know. It’s a red herring. In his address to the German far right, Musk conflated personal responsibility with cultural responsibility.

Personal responsibility says “you, personally, committed this sin and should pay for it.” Cultural responsibility says “you are capable of committing this sin, as you belong to a culture in which it was once widely and flagrantly committed, and that fact should inform your understanding of your culture and yourself.”

German children should not be made to feel responsible for the Holocaust. But they should be keenly aware of the fact that their culture, within living memory, barfed up a government of degenerates so depraved that it literally industrialized murder.

We all know the Santayana quote about remembering the past and being condemned to repeat it. Musk would do well to think on it a while. If your condition for feeling “optimistic and excited” about Germany’s future is everyone “moving beyond” Auschwitz, you’re not ready to move beyond Auschwitz.

I am not prepared to wave away Musk’s alleged Nazi salute. I don’t really do social media, and I don’t follow Musk on X (pronounced “shitter”), but I have reliable reports of him repeatedly boosting truly extreme and racist tweets of others. That’s some of the context for what Catoggio calls “spaz.”

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

Tuesday, 1/21/25

Does 47 have what greatness takes?

[T]he heroic presidency runs the persistent danger of becoming craven or abusive, as Vietnam and Watergate taught. This is what so many critics worry about with Mr. Trump — that his transformations will be more resonant of Richard Nixon than of our most esteemed presidents.

Yet there is a complementary question that should concern supporters of Mr. Trump: Can he succeed? He has amassed enormous power in his party and is building an intensely devoted administration. Those factors will bring him wins in the short run.

But it takes extraordinary skill to wield executive power successfully throughout an administration. If past is prologue, Mr. Trump lacks the acumen to carry out his ambitious agenda.

The first problem is management style. In his first term, Mr. Trump was a poor administrator because of his mercurial, polarizing style and a general indifference to facts and the hard work of governance. …

Second is the question of whether Mr. Trump knows where he wants to go. … Mr. Trump has a powerful slogan, “America first,” a robust agenda, and many discrete and often insightful political instincts. But he lacks a coherent sense of the public ends for which he exercises power. …

Third, personal gain was neither a priority of the great presidents nor a guide to their exercise of power. …

Fourth, Mr. Trump is unlike any previous president, even Jackson, in broadly delegitimating American institutions — the courts, the military and intelligence communities, the Justice Department, the press, the electoral system and both political parties. This will do him no favors when he needs their support, as he will.

…

Fifth, Mr. Trump’s obsession with hard executive power and an extreme version of the unitary executive theory will be self-defeating. If his stalwart subordinates carry out his every whim, as he hopes, bad policies will result. If the loyalists Mr. Trump is putting at the top of the Justice Department do not give him candid independent advice that he follows, he will violate the law and often lose in court, as happened in his first term.

The great presidents … understood that hard power could go only so far and that persuasion and consent were surer tools to achieving lasting presidential goals in our democracy. This idea is lost on Mr. Trump.

Finally, as Mr. Schlesinger noted, the great presidents all “took risks in pursuit of their ideals” and “provoked intense controversy.” And, except for Washington, they all “divided the nation before reuniting it on a new level of national understanding.”

Mr. Trump is a risk taker and a divider. But it is hard to see how his approach to the presidency ends in national reunion.

Jack Goldsmith (unlocked article)

Offshore politics

Velocior, superior, stupidior

What runners they were,
round and round the arena
in their expensive armour

like that other runner
from Marathon, his time
unsurpassed until the arrival
of steroids. We cover the ground
faster, but what news do we bring?

Excerpt from Postcard, in R.S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems 1988-2000

The neutering welcome

Merkel, when she insisted that Islam belonged in Germany just as much as Christianity, was only appearing to be even-handed. To hail a religion for its compatibility with a secular society was decidedly not a neutral gesture. Secularism was no less bred of the sweep of Christian history than were Orbán’s barbed-wire fences. Naturally, for it to function as its exponents wished it to function, this could never be admitted.

Tom Holland, Dominion

If this makes no sense to you, read it again. And again. If it still makes no sense, you need to read some history, and Dominion wouldn’t be a bad place to start.

What is truly “self-evident”?

So yes, the equality of all humans seemed staringly obvious (at least in theory) to Franklin and Jefferson. But that was because their culture was saturated with Christian assumptions―so much so that the concepts and phrases they used were taken from Locke, who had got them from Hooker, who had got them from Scripture.”

Franklin’s brief, scribbled correction is a marvelous metaphor for the ex-Christian West. His replacement of the words “sacred and undeniable” with “self-evident” echoes what was happening across European society as a whole in 1776, at least among elites. It was an attempt to retain Christianity’s moral conclusions while scrubbing out its theological foundations: keeping the fruits while severing the roots, if you will. And it resulted in the insistence that JudeoChristian convictions on anthropology and ethics were now to be regarded as universal norms on which all reasonable people would agree.

Andrew Wilson, Remaking the World

See my remark in the prior item.

Oblivious

On this bitter-cold January morning in the American midwest, my thoughts turned to hot, hearty soup, and this quickly led to a reflection.

There is a catering service in my fair city that used to be open to the public for sit-down lunch. Its kitchen included a soup genius.

I’d go there on a wintery day, and once I learned of it, I would invariably check their freezer before leaving, buying as many as four quarts of frozen, leftover soup.

Then one day the proprietress approached me: “Did you realize that a lot of people on fixed incomes come here to buy soup?” Crestfallen, I answered “No, I didn’t. I’m sorry. Thank you for telling me. I’ll leave the soup for them.”

My obliviousness fit my recent description of non-rebellious sin.

God never said “Thou shalt not buy leftover soup.” He didn’t say “Thou shalt think twice or thrice about the indirect consequences of buying leftover soup.” And, since this was a rather upscale eatery (albeit in a downscale neighborhood), I’m not sure that the proverbial “moment’s reflection” would have revealed the indirect consequences to me; I just saw it as “I get good soup and this caterer gets more money.”

But I was, quite obliviously, snatching food from the mouths of poor pensioners. Greater awareness might have prevented that, and the proprietress’ consciousness-raising was welcome.

Proof

Woozle Effect

When a source makes an unproven claim and it’s then cited as proof by another, which is cited by another, and so on, until the chain of citations looks like evidence. This is common because, while many writers check their sources, few check their sources’ sources.

A recent example: evidence that puberty blockers are safe and effective was overestimated because institutions were circularly citing each other.

…

Hitchens’s Razor

“What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” ― Christopher Hitchens. If you make a claim, it’s up to you to prove it, not to me to disprove it.

Gurwinder Bhogal

Time to pull this out (again?)

I don’t recall if I’ve shared this favorite here:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” from The Country of Marriage, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1973. Also published by Counterpoint Press in The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1999; The Mad Farmer Poems_, 2008;_ New Collected Poems, 2012.

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

Eleventh Day of Christmas

Liberal democracy versus Populism

For those bewildered by why so many Americans apparently voted against the values of liberal democracy, Balint Magyar has a useful formulation. “Liberal democracy,” he says, “offers moral constraints without problem-solving” — a lot of rules, not a lot of change — while “populism offers problem-solving without moral constraints.” Magyar, a scholar of autocracy, isn’t interested in calling Donald Trump a fascist. He sees the president-elect’s appeal in terms of something more primal: “Trump promises that you don’t have to think about other people.”

M. Gessen, New York Times

Limited supply, infinite demand

What a lot of people who are celebrating Thompson’s death and demonizing UnitedHealthcare don’t seem to understand—or don’t seem to want to understand—is that in every modern health-care system, some institution is charged with rationing care. In some, it’s a government bureaucracy. In others, it’s a private for-profit or nonprofit insurer. In America, it’s a mix of all three. Many insurers, such as Blue Cross Blue Shield and Kaiser Permanente, are nonprofits. The biggest insurers are Medicare and Medicaid, which are single-payer public programs. So is the Veterans Affairs Department. Other insurers are for-profit companies, like UnitedHealthcare.

You don’t have to be a fan of the way that UnitedHealthcare makes its decisions to acknowledge the difficulty of mediating between providers and patients. Private insurers make their rationing decisions in ways that are relatively transparent but always far from perfectly simple or fair. But if they didn’t do it, someone else would need to, Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute told me. The reality of scarcity is not their fault, nor is it “social murder.”

Peter Wehner (emphasis added)

“Scarcity” doesn’t mean we should educate more doctors, build more hospitals, etc. (nor that we shouldn’t). It means that aggregate demand for healthcare services will always exceed the funds available to pay for them all, in every imaginable system of funding healthcare.

Everybody knows the Emperor is naked

[I]f you want to understand what happened in politics this year, you can get by with two sentences from the Washington Post: “[Joe] Biden and some of his aides still believe he should have stayed in the race, despite the rocky debate performance and low poll numbers that prompted Democrats to pressure him to drop out. Biden and these aides have told people in recent days that he could have defeated [Donald] Trump, according to people familiar with their comments, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.”

…

Never Trump is heavy on moralizing, and how could it not be? Trump hasn’t just upended the conservative agenda, he’s cultivated an anti-morality in the American right that’s turned scumminess into a leadership credential. For Reaganites of a certain age, watching traditional “values” voters grant moral carte blanche to a seedy authoritarian is so baffling that it leaves one thinking there must be a conscientious impulse still buried in them somewhere that might be roused if only the right appeal can be made.

And so we Never Trumpers often end up behaving like the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes. If only we say out loud that the emperor is wearing nothing at all—and say it and say it and say it—the spell will eventually be broken and the crowd will come to its senses. By all means, run Liz Cheney out on the campaign trail with Kamala Harris and have her recite the thousandth iteration of her civic indictment of Trumpism. Maybe the thousandth time will be the charm.

… Most Americans understand very well, after all, that Emperor Trump is sleazy, oafish, and dangerous. But they concluded that there would still be more upside to his presidency, warts and all, than to Harris’.

They know the emperor is naked. They watched the news on January 6. They either like it that way, as Trump’s base does, or they don’t care overly much, as swing voters ultimately did not. Never Trumpers reminding them of it incessantly anyway—surely you’re not going to reelect the coup-plotter—resembles the so-called definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Nick Catoggio

Nick has given a good description of me for the last eight-or-so years. I finally grokked why voters might reject the Democrats in favor of Trump (for instance), but I’d cast a protest vote for Angela Davis first, I think.

And that’s quite apart from the absurd journalistic murmurations to protect Joe Biden.

A wan Audie Murphy

I am an admirer of Audie Murphy, the celebrated yet troubled hero who was the most decorated U.S. soldier of World War II but struggled with mental illness and addiction for the rest of his relatively short life before dying at the age of 45 …

He was a hell of a soldier, by all accounts.

Nobody ever thought he should be secretary of defense.

Pete Hegseth is something of a soft echo of Audie Murphy—an Ivy League version for our wan times. Like Murphy, Hegseth served honorably in combat (you will have heard that he was awarded two Bronze Stars), went into the entertainment business (his last job was as one of the hosts of Fox & Friends Weekend), took up drinking, wrecked some marriages (he is on his third), etc. He is today one year younger than Murphy was when he died.

Hegseth has an excellent general education, having done his undergraduate degree at Princeton and his master’s in public policy at Harvard. Harvard’s MPP program will graduate almost 700 students in its next class, and those are the only 700 people in the world who think any of them ought to be the next secretary of defense.

Kevin D. Williamson

Scientific realism

European scientists have started work on a project to create simple forms of life from scratch in the lab, capitalizing on theoretical and experimental advances in the fast-growing field of synthetic biology … “Success would constitute a landmark achievement in basic science,” said Eörs Szathmáry, director of the Centre for the Conceptual Foundations of Science at the Parmenides Foundation in Germany, who is a principal investigator on the ERC grant. “De-novo creation of living systems is a long-standing dream of humanity.”

John Ellis (hyperlink relocated from omitted text)

For the records, de-novo creation of living systems is not a dream of mine. Rather, I think of C.S. Lewis when I read things like this: “Man’s ‘power over nature’ is the power of some men over other men with nature as their instrument.”

Wonder not

Wonder not that Evangelicals are ga-ga over Donald Trump. “Evangelicalism is Protestant populism.” (Brad East, Conversions, Protestantism, and a new mainline)

God, Human Rights and other woo-woo

[T]he existence of human rights [is] no more provable than the existence of God.

Tom Holland, Dominion

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Nominees, Essential Workers and Half-Truths

Trump’s nominees

In The Washington Post, Catherine Rampell evaluated the naming of Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as heads of a new government agency: “How can you tell Donald Trump’s plan to improve ‘government efficiency’ is off to a promising start? Because his first step was appointing two people to do the same job.” (Gerard Farrell, Summit, N.J., and Bruno Momont, Manhattan)

Also in The Post, Ruth Marcus took in Trump’s galling choice for attorney general: “No mother says to her son, ‘Why can’t you be more like Matt Gaetz.’” (David Sherman, Arlington, Va.) Her Post colleague George F. Will called Gaetz “an arrested-development adolescent with the swagger of a sequined guitarist in a low-rent casino.” (Korleen Kraft, Portland, Ore., and Bill Tanski, Stratford, Conn., among many others)

Via Frank Bruni

Manly men

What’s with all the sociopaths, serial adulterers and accused rapists Trump wants in high office?

Is RFK Jr. a manly man while Mitt Romney is a soy boy?

Noah Millman has an hypothesis about what’s up, and I think it’s a good start on figuring out yet another division in how Americans view the world.

By the way: Trump is throwing out a lot of names that haven’t been vetted by the FBI. Is the Senate going to let him get away with that?

Three lessons from the Gaetz débâcle

Kimberly Strassel draws three lessons from the Matt Gaetz débâcle:

And so, Lesson No 1: Not all allegations against Republicans are partisan shams. That’s surely hard for Republicans to swallow …

The Trump transition team might have also read the insider room. Republicans are well versed in defending their brethren against nonsense attacks—even their unpopular brethren. There was a reason few if any Republican members rushed to Mr. Gaetz’s defense: They know him. Congress is a close space, and most all members had seen or heard something unpleasant enough to make them suspect fire accompanied the smoke. Ergo, Lesson No. 2: Take your lead from people who know, not MAGA Twitter insurgents.

The name of the Trump nominations game is clearly “shakeup”—and that’s to be applauded. Few doubt that Washington is in desperate need of some rattling. But note Lesson No. 3: The Gaetz fiasco is a reminder that there remains a bright line between a candidate who is aggressive, committed and professional and one who is unthinking, partisan and a liability … Mr. Gaetz was always clearly the latter—big on bravado, short on ideas and temperament. While not as discussed as the ethics question, it’s also an important reason his nomination was destined to fail.

(Bold added)

Essential workers

Another vulnerability that the novel coronavirus has exposed is the paradoxical notion of “essential” workers who are grossly underpaid and whose lives are treated as disposable.

Michael Pollan, The Sickness in Our Food Supply

Too good not to be true

Sometimes they lie to you because a story’s too good not to be true. (I hope I’m not doing that.)

[H]istory is well and truly back. Even Francis Fukuyama agrees.

Mary Harrington at UnHerd

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Elections and consequences

The Election Generally

Finally grokking Trump — as a repudiation of Democrat attitudes and positions

I don’t recall how much, or even whether, I have written about my little epiphany in the last two weeks or so before November election.

I was “never Trump” since I first realized that his candidacy was serious in 2015 or 2016. I confess that I could not imagine anything other than a “tear it all down!” mentality motivating Trump voters. The way I avoided contemning them was to assume that there was some nobler reason that was invisible to me for some mysterious reason.

My little epiphany in the weeks before the election was that the evils of the Democrat party could make it plausible to vote against them, even if doing so meant voting for Trump.

I considered writing about this in last Thursday’s post, but I thought it would be tedious to try to name all the Democrat evils that could repel a voter. After I posted on Thursday, though, Mary Eberstadt kindly posted an item at First Things that listed many of them for me. As does this:

Although Eberstadt specifically refers to Democrat antipathy toward Roman Catholics and Catholic teaching, I’m in the same target zone, just as when I was a conservative Protestant in my beforetimes.

Were my vote determined solely by which party is likelier to persecute me and mine over the next four years, I could imagine voting for Trump, pretty darned confident that he’ll leave me and mine alone. (Even though this little blog has dissed him for 8 years, I don’t flatter myself that he’s noticed.) But my vote tends less toward short-term self-protection and more toward fiat justitia ruat caelum.

Still: the people have spoken, and what they said means I’m likely to be left alone at least until 2029. There’s some small comfort in that.

Is identitarianism a dying delusion?

David Brooks looks at many of the ways the pre-election expectations (of how groups would vote) were dashed.

Why were so many of our expectations wrong? Well, we all walk around with mental models of reality in our heads. Our mental models help us make sense of the buzzing, blooming confusion of the world. Our mental models help us anticipate what’s about to happen. Our mental models guide us as we make decisions about how to get the results we want.

Many of us are walking around with broken mental models. Many of us go through life with false assumptions about how the world works.

Where did we get our current models? Well, we get models from our experience, our peers, the educational system, the media and popular culture. Over the past few generations, a certain worldview that emphasizes racial, gender and ethnic identity has been prevalent in the circles where highly educated people congregate …

The crucial assertion of the identitarian mind-set is that all politics and all history can be seen through the lens of liberation movements. Society is divided between the privileged (straight white males) and the marginalized (pretty much everyone else). History and politics are the struggle between oppressors and oppressed groups.

In this model, people are seen as members of a group before they are seen as individuals …

In this model, society is seen as an agglomeration of different communities. Democrats thus produce separate agendas designed to mobilize Black men, women and so on. The goal of Democratic politics is to link all the oppressed and marginalized groups into one majority coalition.

…

But this mind-set has just crashed against the rocks of reality. This model assumes that people are primarily motivated by identity group solidarity. This model assumes that the struggle against oppressive systems and groups is the central subject of politics. This model has no room for what just happened.

It turns out a lot of people don’t behave like ambassadors from this or that group. They think for themselves in unexpected ways.

Why We Got It So Wrong (unlocked article)

Liberal democracy vs. populism

For those bewildered by why so many Americans apparently voted against the values of liberal democracy, Balint Magyar has a useful formulation. “Liberal democracy,” he says, “offers moral constraints without problem-solving” — a lot of rules, not a lot of change — while “populism offers problem-solving without moral constraints.” Magyar, a scholar of autocracy, isn’t interested in calling Donald Trump a fascist. He sees the president-elect’s appeal in terms of something more primal: “Trump promises that you don’t have to think about other people.”

Around the world, populist autocrats have leveraged the thrilling power of that promise to transform their countries into vehicles for their own singular will … What they delivered was permission to abandon societal inhibitions, to amplify the grievances of one’s own group and heap hate on assorted others, particularly on groups that cannot speak up for themselves. Magyar calls this “morally unconstrained collective egoism.”

M. Gessen in the New York Times

Go stick your head in a cold Bulwark

A reader did not like Andrew Sullivan’s first post-election post:

When I opened your Dish email last Friday, I fully expected a big serving of both-sides-y handwringing — as in, “Trump is bad, but Harris is also bad, because wokeness/inflation/illegal immigrants … poor voters, what were they to do?” But I was also hoping for an acknowledgement of how terribly painful it is that the lawless kakistocrat has been reelected, more resoundingly than the first time.

Instead, I got a celebration of the multiracial, multiethnic coalition that brought us Clown Car Horror Show 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Not a single solitary goddamn word about all the reasons why Agent Orange deserved to lose. Attempting to overturn a free election in 2020? Inciting a mob to attack the Capitol? Running on “retribution” and promising to deploy the justice system against his political opponents? Routine use of crass, ugly insults and normalizing his surrogates’ use of same? Musing about how he wants to be “dictator for a day”? Wanting to fire government workers and replace them with incompetent sycophants? Never heard of it.

Sullivan responded:

In the immediate wake of the Trump victory, did we really need another account of why I didn’t vote for him? Especially when those arguments failed to work in the campaign yet again? Go read The Bulwark.

The Clown-Car Nominations

A sober lament

On Trump’s choice of Matt Gaetz as Attorney General:

The choice obviously isn’t meant to reassure anyone outside the MAGA base—or even those within it who are intelligent. It is an insolent appointment, guaranteed to cause trouble and meant to cause friction.

We are back to the Island of Misfit Toys. What a mistake. Mr. Trump often confuses his own antic malice for daring, his own unseriousness for boldness. How amazing that in the rosy glow of election, he will spend so much political capital and goodwill on confirmation fights he may well, and certainly deserves to, lose.

Peggy Noonan

Shambolic Kakistocracy

[H]ere is a glimmer of hope: Team Trump’s most human failings may thwart some of their most evil plans.

Take, for instance, appointing Representative Matt Gaetz to be the Attorney General of the United States. If this is a sincere appointment — in other words, if it isn’t a head-fake to get the Senate to accept another candidate later, or a ruse to let Gaetz resign from Congress and avoid a damaging ethics report — it’s an example of self-indulgence thwarting malign intent. Gaetz is a buffoon. He has absolutely no qualifications to run the Department of Justice. Can he wander around firing everyone? Yes. Does he understand how the Department of Justice works in a way that would allow him to maximize its potential for abuse? No. Is he smart enough to figure it out? Also no. Is he charismatic enough to persuade insiders to help him use it effectively? Very much no. Gaetz as Attorney General will do petty, flamboyant, stupid things in clumsy ways. Some of those things will be very bad. But clown shoes are preferable to jackboots. We’d be in much more trouble if someone evil in a smart and competent way who understands how the machine works — say, Jeff Clark or Ken Paxton — took over. That would be terrifying.

Trump’s decision shows his tendency to vent his spleen. Appointing Gaetz owns the libs, humiliates the hated Justice Department, elevates someone who is a vulgar elbow-thrower like him, and is a thumb in the eye to the Republicans who hate Gaetz. It’s not a decision reflecting self-control; it’s a decision reflecting unconstrained anger and resentment. It’s like making your horse a Senator. The point isn’t that the horse will vote the way you want it to. The point is to humiliate the senate and show them you can do what you want. It’s bad, but it’s not smart bad.

…

[P]erhaps they will not be as bad as they could be because God, in His wisdom, has chosen to make these people weird freaks along the way to letting them run the place. This is a time to cherish every hope and embrace every ally. Trump and Trumpists are dysfunctional weirdos and that fact is our ally. Cold comfort is still comfort.

Popehat, Refuge in Kakistocracy

A vital pardon

Pardon Trump’s Critics Now
President Biden has a moral obligation to do what he can for patriotic Americans who have risked it all.

Paul Rosenzweig

[H]istory is well and truly back. Even Francis Fukuyama agrees.

Mary Harrington at UnHerd

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Thursday, 11/14/24

On seeing Trump differently

I’ve already acknowledged that I see Trump differently now than I did in 2016, and I’ll now acknowledge that that change in perception has only been further solidified in the wake of his shooting. Part of this change means that I no longer think it’s useful or meaningful to call him a charlatan, to insist that he’s “faking it”, that he’s actually a really bad businessman who only pretends to be a successful one on TV, that he’s a common low-end huckster of bad steaks and worthless paraphernalia. All of this implies that there are other actors on the world stage who, by contrast, are the real deal, and unlike in 2016 I just don’t believe that’s the case anymore.

Justin Smith-Ruiu, World Spirit on Feedback

Think at least a little bit about the math

One of the problems with being a grievance party for minority interests is that minorities are a minority. If your vision of politics is that what is most important about us is our demographic characteristics—race, sex, education level, etc.—and you understand political life as, essentially, a zero-sum competition between rival groups, then you should probably think at least a little bit about the math, just in case people start to take you seriously. … Doubling down on minority positions is how you become a minority party—and stay one.

This is Ruy Teixeira’s revenge.

Teixeira was the co-author (with John Judis) of a very famous book called The Emerging Democratic Majority. The thesis of the book was that as the U.S. electorate became younger, less white, and more immigrant-heavy, Democrats would be able to assemble a durable electoral majority—provided they held on to the working-class voters who had been the keystone of the New Deal coalition.

(Teixeira, who has won very little love for himself telling Democrats things they do not want to hear, now hangs his hat at the American Enterprise Institute, which is not famously full of Democrats but is absolutely packed to the rafters with people who know how to count.)

Democrats forgot to do the second part of the Teixeira two-step and keep those working-class voters ….

Kevin D. Williamson

Reactionary Biden

Mr Biden resharpened Mr Trump’s most effective political wedge by doing away with obstacles he had created to illegal immigration, providing no alternative. By the time he restored some of Mr Trump’s restrictions this spring, more than 4m migrants had crossed the southern border, compared with fewer than 1m under Mr Trump.

The Economist’s Lexington, Democrats need to understand: Americans think they’re worse

Little pitchers …

… have big ears.

Trump … is winning culturally in shaping America’s manners and mores.

Peter Wehner

It was such a cozy moment in the Oval Office on Wednesday morning, with the roaring fire and the warm handshake and the past presidents — including George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and F.D.R. — looking down benignly on the scene.

So why did it feel so nauseating?

It is hard to watch Donald Trump be gracious, because he is gracious only when he wins, and that’s not a good lesson for the children of America. When he loses, he tries to burn the democracy down.

Maureen Dowd

I will pray for America and its rulers, but I could not in good conscience tell a child to look up to 47 as an example of goodness or manliness.

They will do so anyway unless, perhaps, their parents tell them not to.

The Kakistocracy

When I first saw and article saying the new word to master was “kakistocracy,” I (incorrectly) confounded it with “kleptocracy.”

I reckon we’ll have both for four years. We’re certainly getting the kakistocracy. Matt Gaetz for Attorney General is banana republic stuff. Hegeth, or whatever his name is, may be a decent human being, but there is no reason to think he can run any large organization, let alone our huge and euphemistically misnamed Department of War.

On the other hand, remember the morass our Best and Brightest got us into.

[H]istory is well and truly back. Even Francis Fukuyama agrees.

Mary Harrington at UnHerd

Halloween 2024

I’ve been relentlessly venting my spleen against one of the two candidates for President of the United States. Today, I will completely spare you vitriol except to offer this link.

There are, however, a few political comments today, along with much else.

The Machine

That’s not a very imaginative title I came up with. R.S. Thomas is a poet whose Collected Later Poems I bought for some reason, though Thomas was not acclaimed like, say, Dylan Thomas, his fellow Welchman. But I’m very fond of many of his poems.

‘The body is mine and the soul is mine’
says the machine. ‘I am at the dark source
where the good is indistinguishable
from evil. I fill my tanks up
and there is war. I empty them and there is not peace.
I am the sound,
not of the world breathing, but
of the catch rather in the world’s breath.’

Is there a contraceptive
for the machine, that we may enjoy
intercourse with it without being overrun
by vocabulary? We go up
into the temple of ourselves
and give thanks that we are not
as the machine is. But it waits
for us outside, knowing that when
we emerge it is into the noise
of its hand beating on the breast’s
iron as Pharisaically as ourselves.

R.S. Thomas, Collected Later Poems 1988-2000. Bloodaxe Books. Kindle Edition.

Excising personhood

Every attempt to implement machine learning will come at the cost of removing features of personhood from the world. Already, the cost of housing in person-scale environments like the neighborhood where Jacobs herself lived—Manhattan’s Greenwich Village—has soared beyond the reach of almost everyone, leaving those with more modest means to move to places dominated by highways.

Andy Crouch, The Life We’re Looking For

Trusting obliging liars

When I tell people here in Tennessee that I work for The New York Times, I often get a visible negative reaction. Sometimes, the negative reaction is verbal and I’m condemned to my face as “fake news.”

I try to respond with a spirit of curiosity. I know that we make mistakes and I’m curious as to what specifically made them angry. Rarely do I get a precise answer. There is simply a sense that we can’t be trusted, that we’re on the other side.

When I ask which news outlets they follow, invariably they give me a list of channels and sites that were so comprehensively dishonest and irresponsible in 2020 and 2021 that many of them have been forced into settlements, have retracted stories and have issued apologies under pressure.

Yet all these outlets are all still popular on the right. Long after their dishonesty was exposed, the MAGA faithful continue to believe their reports and share their stories. It turns out that people will in fact trust liars — so long as the liars keep telling them what they want to hear.

David French, Four Lessons From Nine Years of Being ‘Never Trump’ (unlocked)

Here are French’s four lessons in summary:

Community is more powerful than ideology
We don’t know our true values until they’re tested
Hatred is the prime motivating force in our politics
Trust is tribal

Problematizing Geography

How Many Continents Are There? You May Not Like the Answers.
Recent earth science developments suggest that how we count our planet’s largest land masses is less clear than we learned in school.

NYT

Sweeties, everything is less clear than you learned in school.

A Moral Choice

Valerie Pavilonis gives a shout-out to the American Solidarity Party in the pages of the New York Times (Is There a Moral Choice for Catholic Voters?) (unlocked).

The imperfection she cites — questioning no-fault divorce — is just fine with me, by the way. I know the arguments that sold no-fault to America, but I also know the reality, and I don’t like it. No-fault deserves to be questioned.

Frivolous pursuits

“Talking? But what about?” Walking and talking—that seemed a very odd way of spending an afternoon. In the end she persuaded him, much against his will, to fly over to Amsterdam to see the Semi-Demi-Finals of the Women’s Heavyweight Wrestling Championship.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World. I read 1984 long before I read Brave New World. Who in their right mind thinks Orwell saw the future more clearly than Huxley?

Brides of the State

Fifty percent of married women vote Republican, and 45% vote Democratic, which mirrors the GOP advantage in other demographic groups. But, according to Pew, “Women who have never been married are three times as likely to associate with the Democratic Party as with the Republican Party (72% vs. 24%).” In 1980, the number of women over 40 who had never married was around 6%. Now it is 22%, and this has become a crucial bloc for the Democrats.

Matthew Crawford, Brides of the State

A Conservative Case Against Trump

Bret Stephens makes A Conservative Case Against Trump (unlocked). It’s not his best anti-Trump case, in my opinion, but you can judge its persuasiveness for yourself if you like, since the end of the month is nigh and I have unlocked articles to give away still.

An Academic’s Case for Trump

The ideology that believes that humans can change sex; treats children’s and young people’s fantasies as truth; and is willing to put children on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and even butcher them with surgery, is barbaric. There is no other word for it. Men who give themselves female names and pronouns, and put on lipstick and a dress, do not magically become women. Pretending that such men are women puts actual women directly at risk. Men, no matter how they dress or what they call themselves, have no place in women’s bathrooms, in women’s domestic crisis centers, in women’s prisons, or—less critically but somehow more obvious to everyone—in women’s sports.

Heather Heying, discussing one of the reasons she is, surprisingly, voting for Trump.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.