Inauguration Day

Inauguration Day thoughts

A favorite poem, revised and reprised

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Washington to be born?”

Andrew Sullivan

Farewell, you fools!

I was confident that Biden’s farewell address would be a sufficient for several days’ minimum requirement of laughs, and I was right:

Biden says goodbye: President Joe Biden gave his farewell address Wednesday night, leaving with ominous warnings about dark forces (billionaires) exerting too much influence on American politics. “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

I agree there is a new oligarchy of rich people who manipulate our political landscape, and I, for one, am glad that our president finally sees the danger of MacKenzie Scott and George Soros, billionaire political donors propping up untold numbers of causes. He’s never criticized MacKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos), but I’m sure he was thinking of her, the woman who has thrown $19 billion at activist nonprofits to sway American politics. I’m sure when he just recently gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Soros, he was thinking this is the dangerous oligarch I will speak of soon.

No, I’m being silly. Obviously he means the other side’s dangerous oligarchs! When a billionaire oligarch is throwing money at your own team, they’re just a concerned citizen doing what they can with what they have. Me, I’m balanced, moderate: I love all our oligarchs, on both sides. I want more oligarchs and less democracy. I want our political battles to be fought on warring yachts off the coast of Croatia. See, California lets voters vote on everything, and I’ve seen what too much democracy looks like, and I think that Penny Pritzker and Peter Thiel could sit with each other and come up with something better for us.

Nellie Bowles

Joe Biden bade farewell Wednesday night to a nation that is already done with him. The final CNN poll of his presidency shows that nearly two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the job he did. He drearily recited fictitious accomplishments such as an expansion of broadband access that never actually happened. He took credit for Israel striking a peace deal that it obtained by resolutely ignoring his advice for over a year. He called for tax hikes on the rich, a mantra he has been repeating since the mid-1970s regardless of tax rates or economic conditions. He praised “our system of separation of powers” as if he hadn’t spent four years assaulting it. He could have offered some self-reflection or hard-earned wisdom, but instead—less than two weeks after giving the Presidential Medal of Freedom to billionaire megadonor George Soros—he whined about “an oligarchy” supposedly taking over the country. Where Eisenhower once warned against an unholy alliance of industry and government, what irks Biden is that social-media giants stopped taking marching orders from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on what speech may be heard. At least we’ll hear no more of Biden’s.

National Review, The Week, 1/17/25

They didn’t really vote for Trump

As Inauguration Day approaches, President-elect Trump receives his highest favorable rating and half of registered voters approve of his handling of the presidential transition. Still, a majority does not view his election win as a mandate, and more think it was a rejection of the outgoing administration rather than an endorsement of Trump. The latest Fox News Poll, released Wednesday, finds that by a 13-point margin, more voters view Trump’s victory as a referendum on President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ policies and performance (54%) than a validation of Trump’s (41%). That includes 71% of Democrats, 64% of independents and 34% of Republicans saying it was more of a rejection. Overall, 52% approve of Trump’s handling of the transition, while 46% disapprove, a reversal from 2017 when just 37% approved and 54% disapproved. (Source: foxnews.com)

John Ellis News Items

Part of what the voters rejected

Here’s the simplest definition: “Individuals, civil society and companies shape interactions in society, and their actions can harm or foster integrity in their communities. A whole-of-society approach asserts that as these actors interact with public officials and play a critical role in setting the public agenda and influencing public decisions, they also have a responsibility to promote public integrity.”

In other words, the government enacts policies and then “enlists” corporations, NGOs and even individual citizens to enforce them—creating a 360-degree police force made up of the companies you do business with, the civic organizations that you think make up your communal safety net, even your neighbors.

Jacob Siegel, Learn This Term: ‘Whole of Society’

Silicon Valley switcheroo

It’s not just ordinary voters who were queasy about the Democrats’ proclivities. Our tech overloads had a bellyfull, too.

My first shared New York Times link of 2025: Ross Douthat, How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms: Marc Andreessen explains the newest faction of conservatism.

I thought all the oligarchs were being hypocrites chipping in their milion-per-oligarch contributions to the inauguration, but I now suspect they’re actually pro-Trump because of the alternative. The strong-arm censorship tactics of the Biden administration were really awful (as now has been his lawless final days — declaring the ERA ratified, refusing to shut down TikTok though he signed that law that requires it, a farewell address that’s comedy gold, etc.)

I don’t know that these Techies are now conservatives, but they’ve had their fill of how senescent Joe’s controllers have run things.

What could possibly go wrong?

My biggest fear [for Trump 47] is that another four years with Mr. Trump will lead the Democrats to embrace even more self-destructively the policies that lost them the 2024 election. So come 2029, Mr. Trump will leave a GOP rudderless without its cultic leader and a Democratic Party more awful than ever.

Tunku Varadarajan in Journal Writers Look Ahead to Trump 47

Other stuff

Whataboutism is nothing new

In the view of the Virginian George Fitzhugh, one of the more influential of the proslavery apologists in the 1850s, the paternalism of slavery was far preferable to the “wage slavery” of northern industrial society, in which greedy, profit-oriented capitalists took no responsibility for the comprehensive well-being of their workers but instead exploited them freely and then cast them aside like used tissues when their labor was no longer useful.

Wilfred M. McClay, Land of Hope

The thing about whataboutism is that it generally points to a real problem. Literal slavery has gone away now in the US; wage slavery, not so much.

Government failure elicits self-help

If your first thoughts during a catastrophe are political then maybe something in you has gotten too tight and reflexive, but if your thoughts don’t come to include the political then maybe something in you has gotten too unreflective and rote. All disasters have political reverberations. I suspect for California this will in a general way involve a new shift, a reorientation toward reality.

…

The current facts of California were memorably reported this week by Sean McLain, Dan Frosch and Joe Flint of this newspaper. In Altadena, where the lemons hanging from trees look like lumps of coal, where almost 3,000 structures were lost, scores of residents “have defied orders to evacuate, staying behind to protect what is left of their properties from looters and more fires after losing faith in authorities.”

They have lost faith because they are realists: State and local government have proved unequal to the crisis. Residents patrol the streets and question strangers while living in “a Hobbesian world without electricity or clean drinking water.” Some are armed. The authorities may not let them return if they leave, so they arranged for friends to bring them food at checkpoints. Authorities then ordered supplies not be let through.

Nothing speaks of a failure of government like this: that citizens are forced to function as police, and when officials find out someone is doing what they’ve failed to do, they shut it down. It is an unbelievable breakdown in the right order of things.

Peggy Noonan

Perspective

JPMorgan Chase, a bank, estimates that the bill for the damage will exceed $50bn, making these fires the costliest in American history .

The Economist.

Oddly, that number struck me as kind of low, so I did a little search and here’s what AI offered as an answer to my query:

As of January 2025, the wealth of the top billionaires is as follows:

Elon Musk: $439 billion
Jeff Bezos: $240 billion
Mark Zuckerberg: $216 billion
Bernard Arnault: $190 billion
Larry Ellison: $187 billion

The combined net worth of these five individuals is approximately $1.272 trillion.

Media

It’s interesting that “mainstream media” are now called “legacy media,” which implies that significant parts of new media are already “mainstream.”

Online nihilism

Cal Newport—the anti-social media computer science professor and author of books like Deep Work and Digital Minimalism—detailed his experience of joining TikTok in an essay for the New Yorker. “A decade ago, I viewed social media as Manichaean: these platforms could distract and mislead their users, but they could also topple dictators and enable free expression,” he wrote. “But much of the content on TikTok, and on comparable services like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, borders on nihilism. It seems to revel in meaninglessness, sometimes even poking fun at the idea that a video should be useful. The most popular platforms are saying the quiet part out loud—that there is no deeply meaningful justification for their digital wares—and their users seem to understand and accept this new agreement.”

The Morning Dispatch

ADD

I open a book of Aristotle and try to read a page of his choppy, gnomic Greek. After a few lines I start to shift my weight in the chair and drum my fingers on the table. It is Tuesday night, after all. I turn on Sons of Anarchy, and share the experience with 4.6 million of my closest friends. The next day, I have some basis for chitchat with others. I am not a freak. If I had gotten absorbed in the Nicomachean Ethics, my head would still be turning in a spiral of untimely meditations that could only sound strange to my acquaintances.

Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head. (I’ve sounded strange to my acquaintances many times, but I can’t blame Aristotle.)

FWIW: SeamlessM4T

1. Meta has released a new AI model that can translate speech from 101 different languages. It represents a step toward real-time, simultaneous interpretation, where words are translated as soon as they come out of someone’s mouth. Typically, translation models for speech use a multistep approach. First they translate speech into text. Then they translate that text into text in another language. Finally, that translated text is turned into speech in the new language. This method can be inefficient, and at each step, errors and mistranslations can creep in. But Meta’s new model, called SeamlessM4T, enables more direct translation from speech in one language to speech in another. The model is described in a paper published today in Nature. Seamless can translate text with 23% more accuracy than the top existing models. (Source: technologyreview.com, nature.com)

John Ellis News Item. This is impressive, but I’ve got a bone to pick, probably petty, over “words are translated as soon as they come out of someone’s mouth.” Language doesn’t work word-by-word. If SeamlessM4T really achieves higher levels of accuracy, it surely must wait for the context of words, at least for full phrases.

I’d love to hear John McWhorter weigh in on this, though I suspect that he’d need to get deep into the linguistic weeds to define how much context an AI translator needs around a word before translating.

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.

Friday, January 10, 2025

Trump 47

I’m leading with Trump because his coronation is imminent and I’ve encountered a few unfamiliar worthy “takes” on him.

The Solzhenitsyn test

In his 1970 Nobel lecture, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, “You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” The problem presently before the United States is that the Trump administration will be staffed in its upper reaches by political appointees who, without exception, have failed this test.

To get their positions, these men and women have to be willing to declare, publicly if necessary, that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and that the insurrectionary riot of January 6, 2021, was not instigated by a president seeking to overturn that election. These are not merely matters that might be disputed, or on which reasonable people can disagree, or of which citizens in the public square can claim ignorance. They are lies, big, consequential lies that strike at the heart of the American system of government, that deny the history through which we have all lived, that reject the unambiguous facts that are in front of our noses. They are lies that require exceptional brazenness, or exceptional cowardice, or a break with reality to assert.

…

Whatever the defenses they come up with, however, the senior appointees of the Trump administration will have to enter public service having affirmed an ugly lie, or several. No matter what other qualities they have to their credit, that will remain with them. That, in turns, means that we can never really trust them: We must always suppose that, having told an egregious lie to get their positions, they will be willing to tell others to hold on to them. They can have no presumption of truthfulness in their government service.

That in turn will change them fundamentally. In Robert Bolt’s marvelous A Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More explains to his daughter why he cannot yield to Henry VIII’s demand that he declare the king’s first marriage invalid, allowing Henry to marry Anne Boleyn, and hopefully get the male heir the kingdom desperately needs. More knows that that declaration is in the public interest. He also knows that his refusal will sooner or later lead him to the execution block.

When a man takes an oath, Meg, he’s holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. And if he opens his fingers then—he needn’t hope to find himself again.

To land a top job with Donald Trump, you have to open your fingers. It is, as Solzhenitsyn suggested, the end of your integrity.

Eliot A. Cohen, The Solzhenitsyn Test

The imbecilic clown show 1/6/21 was the least of it

We use “January 6” as a shorthand to talk about what Trump did after losing the 2020 election, but it is important to understand—and I think historians will agree about this—that the imbecilic clown show at the Capitol was the least important and least dangerous part of that episode. Trump’s attempt to suborn election fraud—which is what he was up to on that telephone call with the Georgia secretary of state on January 2, 2021—was the more serious part of the attempted coup d’état. Some coup-plotters are generalissimos who just march their troops into the capital and seize power, but many of them—many of the worst of them—take pains to come up with some legal or constitutional pretext for their actions. Often, the pretext is an emergency, as it was with Indira Gandhi, Augusto Pinochet, the coup that brought Francisco Franco to power, etc. You’ll remember that Donald Trump called for the termination of the Constitution as an emergency measure: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump wrote in his trademark kindergartner’s prose. “Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”

John Adams knew the secret in the heart of democracy: a death wish. “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide,” he wrote. And so the American people, in their belligerent stupidity, have again given the awesome power of the presidency to the man who attempted to overthrow the government the last time he was entrusted with that power. Trump has, of course, promised to pardon those who carried out the violence and chaos of January 6, which is no surprise: The riot was conducted on his behalf, and that is the kind of riot he likes. His contempt for the law is utter and complete, and the only law that he honors is the one inscribed on his heart: “I should get whatever I want.”

Kevin D. Williamson

Cheap date

Trump is the CCP’s cheapest date: Trump is scrambling to save TikTok. He’s filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court asking them to treat him like he’s already president and to stop this terrible ban of his favorite piece of Chinese spyware. As The Wall Street Journal editorial board puts it: “The brief is extraordinary in several ways, none of them good.”

As background, Trump was against TikTok until. . . TikTok investor Jeff Yass and his wife Janine dropped about $100 million into Republicans in recent years. And then, what do you know, he’s all in for TikTok! Trump asked the Supreme Court not to act all sus on TikTok’s rizz.

Shadow president Elon Musk has deep business entanglements with China, so it’s a given he’s going to be compromised on this. But Trumpo—Mr. CHYNA—made nationalism his whole thing. And all it took was one Republican donor with cash, but not even that much for China, to continue the colonization of teenage American minds through the infectious disease known as TikTok. Democrats at least genuinely believe in the CCP. Like, they prefer it on an intellectual level. Republicans don’t; they’re just for sale, and cheap.

Meanwhile, the White House confirmed this week that a ninth American telecommunications firm has been hacked by China. Per the AP: “Though the FBI has not publicly identified any of the victims, officials believe senior U.S. government officials and prominent political figures are among those whose communications were accessed.” China just reads all our texts and no one even cares. To explain this in a way you TikTok-addled people might understand: America is the unconscious patient in surgery, and our lawmakers are the surgeons and nurses doing a viral dance around our slack-jawed body.

Nellie Bowles. Remember: This is part of Bowles’ weekly sardonic news wrap-up. Take it seriously, not literally.

Simon won his bet with Ehrlich

Be it remembered that Julian (“The Ultimate Resource Simon, in my younger lifetime, made a wager with Paul (“The Population Bomb”) Ehrlich about what would happen to five key commodity prices over the period of the wager. Ehrich predicted that the prices would rise, Simon that they would fall.

As I read The Ultimate Resource, I thought “surely this is some very clever sophistry.” But Simon won the wager. All five commodities fell in real price.

Infinite growth in a finite world still seems impossible (though Simon probably would say the world isn’t finite in any economically significant way because of human ingenuity). There’s also the matter of externalities, about which “human ingenuity” seems kind of cavalier.

But Simon won the wager. That’s not nothing, and it doesn’t fit the left narrative.

Northstar

Dreher proposed the best way forward for the Republican Party when he wrote Crunchy Cons. In case anyone has forgotten the manifesto, here it is again in brief:

* Conservatism should focus more on the character of society than on the material conditions of life found in consumerism.
* Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
* Culture is more important than politics and economics.
* A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.
* Small, local, old, and particular are almost always better than big, global, new, and abstract.
* Beauty is more important than efficiency.
* The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.
* The institution most essential to conserve is the traditional family.

Live Not by Lies From Neither the Left Nor Right (Front Porch Republic)

This is the version of Rod Dreher that first caught my so favorable attention. I’m keeping a wary eye on the current version.

UBI

→ UBI really doesn’t work: It pains me to write this. But yet another study was published that shows universal basic income (UBI) doesn’t work.

Researchers gave $500 a month to a group of California households and compared them to a control group who received no money—quite the short straw to draw. The households that received the stipend ended up only $100 richer and actually purchased more cigarettes. So basically, UBI makes people French. They found that UBI had no positive effect on psychological or financial well-being. It didn’t even improve food security. Except that cigarettes make it so you don’t need lunch, so I guess food security is relative.

I was hoping universal basic income would become a reality nationwide. Then I could pursue my true passions: horseback riding, debutante balls, and cyberbullying.

Nellie Bowles, TGIF

Title IX

The entire point of Title IX is to prevent discrimination based on sex. Throwing gender identity into the mix eviscerates the statute and renders it largely meaningless.

Chief Judge Danny C. Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky, rejecting the Biden administration’s novel interpretation of Title IX through federal rule-making.

First-world problems

The FBI has issued a formal warning to sports leagues about organized robberies of professional athletes. Since September, nine pro athletes have had their homes broken into, including Kansas City Chiefs stars Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce, Dallas Mavericks guard Luka Dončić, and Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow. According to the FBI, organized crime groups from South America have used high-tech surveillance and hacking methods to spy on athletes and disable their security systems. (It also helps to know when a team is playing an away game.)

Madeleine Kearns, The Free Press

Terrifying Parenting advice

What answer did writer Fyodor Dostoevsky give a concerned mother about how to teach her son the difference between good and evil? “His answer both eased my anxiety and terrified me,” Vika Pechersky wrote for Christianity Today. “On the one hand, Dostoevsky gives simple advice to a set of very complex questions. There is no need to master elaborate philosophical systems and social theories to teach my children the meaning of good and evil. According to Dostoevsky, people have a natural yearning for truth, and this yearning comes to our aid in the work of parenting. Herein lies the terrifying part, for the work of parenting starts with my own self—my love of truth, rectitude, goodness of heart, freedom from false shame, and constant reluctance to deceive. I have to embody the love of truth and goodness and live them out in my daily life if I want to teach my children to love what is good.”

Happy New Year From The Dispatch!

In my anecdotal experience, he’s right.

AI Update

I am, relatively speaking, a grouch about AI, so I’m happy to pass along the bad news.

AI is losing money faster than any technology in human history.

I was stunned when OpenAI said it would charge $200 per month for an AI subscription.

That adds up to $2,400 for a full year. Who pays that much for a chatbot?

But the story gets crazier. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman now admits that the company still loses money at that price—the cost of providing AI to premium subscribers is more than $200 per month.

Ted Gioia

Traffic congention

An online forum was getting slower and slower, and users were complaining. An investigation found that the traffic was not coming from users.

Dennis Schubert, who discovered this, shared his irritation in a testy post:

Looks like my server is doing 70% of all its work for these fucking LLM training bots that don’t to anything except for crawling the fucking internet over and over again.

Oh, and of course, they don’t just crawl a page once and then move on. Oh, no, they come back every 6 hours because lol why not. They also don’t give a single flying fuck… [about making] my database server very unhappy, causing load spikes, and effective downtime/slowness for the human users.

I guess this is the new role for human beings in the digital economy. We teach the bots how to replace us.

Those greedy bots will come back again in a few hours—they always do. So get busy and start posting.

Ted Gioia again.

Why would anyone want to read that?

AI F1 A -FRIEND of mine who sings the praises of AI has suggested that I might farm out Touchstone fundraising letters to Al or perhaps even have it write an article or two for the magazine. What could I say? I shook my head in silence. Failing to catch my meaning, he assured me that improvements to Al over the past year have it writing at a professional level.

“So what?” I said. “Why would anyone want to read it?”

“Because,” he said, “it writes well.”

Again I said, “So what?”

I have all but given up trying to explain my opposition to Al to those who seem to think that, if Al can be programmed to mimic the best writing of which men are capable, then why wouldn’t I want to use it? I tell them that I presume Al is now every bit as capable as they say and will be doubly so six months from now. And still I say, “So what?” And still they earnestly try to convince me that Al writes every bit as well as I just conceded it does.

My friend is a Formula 1 racing fan, so I tried a new angle: “I am certain that if they took the men out of the cars (and the pit crews out of the pits), Al drivers could churn out better lap times than their human counterparts every time.”

He found my suggestion ridiculous. “Who would want to watch that?”

-J. Douglas Johnson, Touchstone magazine, January/February 2025

Patience takes a lot out of you

His father said, “Kindness takes more strength than I have now. I didn’t realize how much effort I used to put into it. It’s like everything else that way, I guess.” … “Maybe I’m finding out I’m not such a good man as I thought I was. Now that I don’t have the strength—patience takes a lot out of you. Hope, too.”

Marilynne Robinson, The Gilead Novels (I can’t way which Gilead novel; I have a Kindle version including all three.)

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

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.

Election draweth near

Culture

Bad Religion

More than three decades ago, Nathan Hatch published The Democratization of American Christianity, a history of the Second Great Awakening, arguably the most important religious episode in American history. At the recent Intercollegiate Studies Institute annual homecoming, I served on a panel that discussed the award-winning book. It was a pleasure to do so. Hatch gives a magisterial account of the upsurge of religious populism that shaped the new American republic in decisive ways. Anyone who wants to understand the last ten years of American politics should read The Democratization of American Christianity.

Denunciations of the “swamp” echo the Second Great Awakening’s polemics against the clerical establishment of its day, which itinerate preachers derided as complacent, more interested in high salaries and comfortable parsonages than in gospel preaching. Trump rallies follow in the tradition of raucous, call-and-response camp meetings. Commentators wonder at the fact that respectable people support Trump, not knowing that some of the most important leaders of the religious populism of the early 1800s were elites such as Barton Stone, who embraced the new, raw, and uncouth style of religious revival.

Elias Smith was a renegade preacher and journalist who, in 1808, launched America’s first religious newspaper, Herald of Gospel Liberty. He mocked and abused the Calvinist grandees, the “clerical hierarchy” that dominated Protestantism at that time. Establishment clergy like Lyman Beecher raged against preachers like Smith who were disturbing the religious landscape. It does not take much imagination to cast Tucker Carlson in the role of a latter-day Elias Smith. He thrills his populist devotees and outrages the guardians of political respectability such as George Will, a Lyman Beecher of our time.

Hatch raises larger themes. The Second Great Awakening took place during a time of rapid social change. The new republic gave rise to radicalisms of many sorts. People were on the move, as territories west of the Appalachian Mountains were settled. Old institutions and authorities lost their power. As I note above, recent decades have seen similar changes. Globalization, demographic change, the sexual revolution, social media, and other factors have precipitated a quite different but equally significant crisis of authority. We should not be surprised, therefore, that populism has returned, as it did in the late 1800s, when America was transformed by industrialization, urbanization, and swelling waves of immigrants.

Hatch documents that revivalist preachers were confident that their individualist, evangelical Christianity would fulfill the sacred mission of America. In their sermons and broadsides, populist religion mixed freely with populist politics, as was the case for William Jennings Bryan and subsequent American populists. Today’s Trumpian populism is different. To be sure, many pious people support Trump and other populist politicians. Avatars of popular religion like Paula White lurk on the peripheries. But the movement lacks an explicitly religious dimension, which is striking when we compare it to the administration of George W. Bush, an establishment figure who was not shy about his evangelical convictions.

Which makes me wonder: In spite of fascinating parallels to the outpouring of Christian enthusiasm and political radicalism in the Second Great Awakening, does today’s populism ironically contribute to an important elite ambition, the establishment of a post-Christian, entirely secular political culture in America? I hope not.

R.R. Reno

After several readings, I’m not sure what Reno is trying to say here. My impression until that penultimate paragraph was that he though our last decade’s populism just fine and dandy, as was the ferment of the 19th century; then he raises the possibility that the lack of a “religious dimension” is at least a bit worrisome.

But what an odd thing for a Catholic (or Orthodox) to believe. In case after case, the wake of the Great Awakenings was destructive of the Christian institutions that evidenced stability and left us, in the characterization of Ross Douthat, A Nation of Heretics.

Slinging slurs, pitching pity parties

I have no idea how one is supposed to respond to polling questions about the morality of changing one’s gender.

That’s mostly because I don’t think changing gender is possible. How can an impossible thing be immoral?

It’s also partly because I hold open the possibility that presenting as the opposite sex, with or without surgery and hormonal interventions, may for some individuals be the optimal way to quiet intractable gender dysphoria. (Who am I to condemn cosplaying in the cause of lessening psychic pain?)

But I’ll tell you something that is immoral. This kind of un-empathetic poor-mouthing about people disapproving (or denying the reality of) “trans lives”:

Is it morally acceptable to change your gender?

Just over half the country doesn’t think so — a proportion that has stayed fairly stable since 2021, the year after I disclosed my gender transition. It’s disheartening to reflect on the fact that every other person you meet, statistically speaking, disapproves of your existence.

Gina Chua. Nothing in the Gallup poll in question suggests that anyone disapproves the existence of people who’ve carried through on the putatively immoral decision to transition.

We are a low-down, debased people who have made ourselves indisposed toward intelligent discussion of issues. We sling slurs and pitch pity parties.

Journalistic murmurations

World Ends in Nuclear conflagration. Women and children most affected.

Something like this was an old jab at the New York Times’s stylistic preoccupations.

New era, new media, new preoccupations:

Inside the U.S. Government-Bought Tool That Can Track Phones at Abortion Clinics

H/T Nellie Bowles, who didn’t seem to think it the least bit odd that 404 Media’s fears turned immediately to red states tracking their handmaidens to blue state abortuaries.

Politics

MVP of Election 2024?

Bret Stephens hits back-to-back homeruns.

With insanity supporters like this, sanity may stand a chance

Tucker Carlson spoke at the Turning Point USA Trump rally this week and gave the absolute best anti-Trump speech I’ve ever heard. Tucker’s speech is here and excerpted below, somehow kinky and alarming and rousing at the same time:

“There has to be a point at which Dad comes home [crowd cheers]. Yeah, that’s right. Dad comes home, and he’s pissed. Dad is pissed. He’s not vengeful. He loves his children, disobedient as they may be. He loves them because they’re his children,” said Tucker Carlson, a grown man and a major respected figure on the right. “And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? ‘You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking right now. And no, it’s not gonna hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not gonna lie. It’s gonna hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl. And it has to be this way.’ ”

If someone spoke like this to me on the street, I would pepper spray them. If I heard someone speak like this to someone else, I would pepper spray them and myself. Tucker Carlson’s endorsement of Trump makes me want to mainline MSNBC. Tucker’s endorsement makes me think Democracy Is On the Line, and Christopher Steele is a respected member of the intelligence community, and I heard there was a box of White House stationery at Mar-a-Lago illegally. Tucker’s endorsement just made me start knitting a pussy hat. Trump is not daddy. America is not his little girl. I believe in free speech except when a grown man is saying the words bad little girl. And Tucker Carlson needs to keep his kinks private and shameful like the rest of us.

Nellie Bowles

Nonsequiturland

Also from the echo chamber of Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller:

Democrats have continued to liken Trump to Adolf Hitler and assert he poses a grave “danger” to the planet if he is reelected, even after two recent assassination attempts against him.

(Jason Cohen)

How pray tell, Mr. Cohen, do two assassination attempts disprove Trump being a grave danger (or require suppression of the truth)? Do you tacitly call on Trump to cool it when his rhetoric generates death threats to election officials?

(Note that all the hyperlinks in my quote are to other Daily Caller stories; that’s why I thought “echo chamber” was apt.)

Would it help if it were done by image rather than words?

(If you don’t get the allusion, search for “distracted boyfriend même.)

Kamala F.B. Harris

In The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last thanked the vice president for taking on Trump: “I believe that for all her political ambition, Kamala Harris is carrying this burden for us. She’s not Barack Obama, basking in the warmth of a cultural moment en route to becoming a cultural icon. She’s more like Frodo Baggins, walking toward Mordor while carrying a millstone around her neck, in an attempt to save all of Middle-earth from a dark fate.” (Sally McDonald, Cairns, Australia)

Frank Bruni‌

Narcissism from a slightly different angle

I find his immodesty not only a serious character flaw but a danger to his governing ability. I don’t believe he wishes to abolish the Constitution, undermine our democracy, set himself up as dictator. But such full-court immodesty has to work against one’s perspective, make impossible anything resembling a sense of history, allow for necessary accommodations with reality. A man who sees no other picture but those with himself in the center is not a man you want to run your nation.

Joseph Epstein

I quote this not to beat a dead horse, but because it is almost identical in its insight to one of the points I made long ago: Trump’a narcissism distorts his vision of the world, and that kind of distortion is intolerable in a POTUS. It’s so disqualifying that I don’t care what his “positions” are on “the issues.”

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Wednesday, 10/16/24

Not Politics

Iatrogenic Customer Dissatisfaction

I took my Lincoln into the dealer last week because wiper fluid wouldn’t spray. They fixed it and suggested wiper blades, too.

I of course got a Customer Satisfaction Survey afterword because — well, this is Weimar America 2024.

In my value system, a 3 out of 5 means this was a perfectly okay experience, no problem. I don’t expect bliss or epiphanies from a car repair.

But to Ford-Lincoln, anything less that straight 5s triggers a message to the dealer that it desperately needs to call me to fix things. So the dealer called, and I told him his corporate overlords are idiots.

And then, incredibly, another survey came to ask whether the dealer called me, and now what are my answers to the other questions (how likely are you to recommend, etc.)? I couldn’t just say the dealer called me; the other questions were mandatory so I couldn’t submit the form without answering them.

But, aha!, they had a field for free-form comments, which I filled and submitted thus:

I am never going to answer another customer satisfaction survey. You won’t be satisfied until I’ve lied and given you all fives, so I’m going to lie like a dog and give them to you. But the truth is that Ford-Lincoln has burnt some goodwill by the refusal to accept “this was a satisfactory service call.” You won’t even let me say the dealer followed up and leave it at that, because I can’t say that (which is true) without answering all the other questions and risking another round of fawning attention if the answers are less than 5.
I DON’T WANT FAWNING ATTENTION. I WANTED MY CAR FIXED. I GOT MY CAR FIXED. NOW LEAVE ME ALONE! WHAT KIND OF IDIOTS ARE TELLING YOU THAT THIS HARASSMENT IS A WAY TO BUILD CUSTOMER SATISFACTION?!

(That felt good, but I’m not sure my pulse and blood pressure are back down yet. I claim no copyright on this, and you can substitute another “f-word” for “fawning.”)

Gratitude Grievance

I beam with pride when I see companies like Shopify, GitHub, Gusto, Zendesk, Instacart, Procore, Doximity, Coinbase, and others claim billion-dollar valuations from work done with Rails. It’s beyond satisfying to see this much value created with a web framework I’ve spent the last two decades evolving and maintaining. A beautiful prize from a life’s work realized.

But it’s also possible to look at this through another lens, and see a huge missed opportunity! If hundreds of billions of dollars in valuations came to be from tools that I originated, why am I not at least a pétit billionaire?! …

This line of thinking is lethal to the open source spirit.

The moment you go down the path of gratitude grievances, you’ll see ungrateful ghosts everywhere. People who owe you something, if they succeed. A ratio that’s never quite right between what you’ve helped create and what you’ve managed to capture. If you let it, it’ll haunt you forever.

…

Thou shall not lust after thy open source’s users and their success.

David Heinemeier Hansson

The Meaning of Existence

Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
moment by moment as the universe.

Even this fool of a body
lives it in part,
and would have full dignity within it
but for the ignorant freedom
of my talking mind.

Les Murray, New Selected Poems

Religion (whatever that is)

Papering over an abyss of waste and horror

[T]he 2024 presidential campaign is a type of tragedy. For many Evangelicals, choosing between the two is a near-existential psycho-intellectual crisis. Because we lack an understanding of the tragic, we tend to think that everything we do must somehow be “redemptive.” …

…

Evangelical treatment of politics as nearly sacramental, rather than a part of temporal or natural life, has left them unable to conceive of political tragedy. Greg Wolfe in Image sees this as an essentially American failing, and he’s probably right. “My youthful, earnest religiosity” Wolfe writes, papered over “an abyss of waste and horror with innocuous pieties.”

…

Evangelicals seem convinced that they could never be a part of a national political tragedy, and their refusal to concede the essentially tragic nature of American politics is to their peril. Every succeeding generation of evangelicals, left right and center, seem convinced that salvation lies in their own political exertions, seemingly unaware that they too could be a part of a national political tragedy, wherein God’s judgment comes on the moral and immoral, on the pious and impious. There are cases, I am sure, to be made for voting for Trump, and that is who most of my tribe will tend towards. Maybe it is necessary. Maybe it is prudent. But don’t tell me it is anything other than tragic that either of the two leading candidates for the presidency will eventually govern the American republic.

Miles Smith at Mere Orthodoxy.

“Charismatics” didn’t used to be “Evangelicals”

There was in fact a strange mix of Evangelicalism clericalism and charismatic political action that Trump effectively harnessed in unique ways.

It is not coincidental that many, if not most, exvangelical memoirs are written by people who have had some background with charismatic influence, and why the specific Cold War confluence of legacy Evangelicals and charismatics created the conditions for the exvangelical movement. In their Washington Post piece Erica Ramirez and Leah Payne rightly note that while the “Pentecostal-Charismatic movement overlaps with evangelical traditions in many ways, especially in their conservative ideas about political issues such as abortion, marriage and prayer in schools,” evangelicals and Pentecostals are “historically distinct — until the mid-20th century, Pentecostals and their Charismatic descendants weren’t routinely grouped with their evangelical counterparts.”

There was in fact a strange mix of Evangelicalism clericalism and charismatic political action that Trump effectively harnessed in unique ways.

Miles Smith, Reading the Exvangelicals

It’s tempting to muse about why both “sides” consented to the conflation of pentecostal/charismatic and evangelical.

Perhaps another day. If I tried it today, I’d be neglecting other things and my take would probably be too cynical.

Politics

New Nadir

The Rutherford County, North Carolina, Sheriff’s Office said on Monday that police officers arrested a 44-year-old man on Saturday suspected of threatening violence against Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) disaster workers. The Washington Post reported over the weekend that FEMA ordered its employees to temporarily evacuate the county after National Guard service members reported seeing a truck of armed militants who were “out hunting FEMA,” though law enforcement said the suspect acted alone. The man—carrying a handgun and rifle at the time of his arrest—was charged with “going armed to the terror of the public” and released later that day on $10,000 bail.

Via The Dispatch.

Militants hunting for FEMA workers in hurricane devastation because — why, in God’s name!? Can we sink any lower?

Kamala’s best case?

Bret Stephens, Harris Needs a Closing Argument. Here’s One. is very appealing.

With Harris I’m pretty sure there will be another Election in four years; I’m not at all sure with Trump. But with Trump at +16 in my state, I have the luxury of voting for neither of them.

Poetic justice

Less than four weeks from the election, Michigan’s Democratic governor made an in-kind contribution to Donald Trump’s campaign. Gretchen Whitmer appeared last week in a video featuring her placing a Dorito chip on the tongue of a kneeling social-media influencer. After Michigan’s bishops denounced the clip as “specifically imitating the posture and gestures of Catholics receiving the Holy Eucharist,” Ms. Whitmer apologized.

The kicker: She was wearing a Harris-Walz campaign hat in the video.

The swing-state governor says she had no idea people might find the post offensive, which speaks to how out of touch Democratic elites are ….

William McGurn

This may qualify as poetic justice. Kamala Harris deserves to be outed as anti-Catholic (see this as well as the McGurn column) quite apart from Gretchen Whitmer’s mockery of the eucharist.

But I’m kind of waiting for the rest of the Whitmer story. What’s above is suspiciously weird; I just don’t know how Whitmer could have blundered her way into that highly-scripted gaff unless it was some kind of Borat or Project Veritas entrapment. Maybe that kneeling social-media influencer was a conservative provocateur, in which case I’d fault her (him?) equally with Whitmer in staging the mockery.

Russian 1988, China 2024

So: Why didn’t Gorbachev’s reforms succeed and save an empire?

Regarding the key figure, opinion was split at least five ways: some said it had been Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk; others, Russian President Boris Yeltsin; still others, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev or KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov. Finally, one or two passed the credit (or guilt) back to Leonid Brezhnev.

Each had a cogent reason for his answer. Moscow’s Mayor Gavriil Popov and Alexander Yakovlev fingered Kravchuk because his action in leading Ukraine to complete independence had removed an essential component of any possible union. Without Ukraine, their argument went, a union would be unworkable, since the discrepancy in size between Russia and each of the other republics was so great. At least one unit of intermediate size was needed to create the sort of balance a federation, or even confederation, would require.nov Others, such as Anatoly Sobchak and Konstantin Lubenchenko, the last speaker of the USSR Supreme Soviet, did not agree with this logic.

Russia, Belarus, the countries of Central Asia, and perhaps one or two from the Transcaucasus could have formed a viable union even without Ukraine, they argued. Only one republic was irreplaceable, and that was Russia. Ergo, Yeltsin had been the key figure. If he had not conspired with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus to form the Commonwealth of Independent States, some form of confederation could have been cobbled together to the benefit of all.

“No,” said others, including Vladislav Starkov and Sergei Stankevich, who felt that Gorbachev’s stubbornness, his failure to understand the force of nationalism, his devotion to a discredited socialism, and the authoritarian streak in his personality had prevented him from voluntarily transferring the sort of power to the republics that their leaders demanded. His failures in leadership, in short, had determined the collapse of the state he headed, and no other political figure could have saved it.

Anatoly Chernyayev, ever loyal to his boss, would have none of that. He felt that a union treaty would have been signed if the attempted coup had not occurred in August. This implied that Vladimir Kryuchkov had been the key figure. He, after all, had organized the coup, and nobody else could have done it without his cooperation.

Starkov, who named Gorbachev as the principal culprit, also pointed out that Leonid Brezhnev had shared much of the responsibility, for he was the Soviet leader who had set the stage for collapse by neglecting the country’s economic, social, and ethnic problems and by permitting local “mafias” under the guise of the Communist Party to obtain a hammerlock on power in many of the union republics.

Jack Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire

This stuff’s complicated and most of us Americans haven’t got a clue what Russia is about. Gobachev tried major reform, but there were too many moving pieces and personalities — so he got collapse in the end.

China seems to be in similar bind as Gorbachev: economic dysfunction, the cure of which might bring down the CCP.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Saturday 9/28/24

This is Purdue’s Homecoming weekend. They’re playing football — or pretending to. I’m looking forward to basketball season.

Miscellany

An odd job title, if you think about it

“Content Creator” is a title that inadvertently tells on itself. It’s a tacit admission that the nature of the “content“ is meaningless and it exists to fill space. Might as well call yourself “Stuff Maker” or “Thing Doer.”

Dominic Armato via Alan Jacobs

As wrong as possible

“Poverty just doesn’t happen,” Rep. [Barbara] Lee, a California Democrat, declared at the launch of the “Children’s Budget,” a kind of progressive wish list, last week. “It’s a policy choice.” Rep. Lee has run up against a kind of metaphysical limit there: She is as wrong as it is possible for a human being to be.

As practically every serious thinker about the issue has understood for a few thousand years at least, poverty does just happen—it is, in fact, one of the few things that does just happen. Poverty is the natural state of the human animal. Do nothing, and you will have poverty. Thomas Hobbes knew it. Aristotle knew it 2,000 years before Hobbes. Hesiod knew it centuries before Aristotle. The authors of the Upanishads knew it centuries before Hesiod. “Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man,” the American sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein observed. Or, as Thomas Sowell spent a lifetime explaining to an apparently impenetrable public, poverty has no causes—the absence of poverty has causes. Rep. Lee’s error is not novel. Her mistake repeats—nearly verbatim—the error of Rep. Ayanna Pressley: “Poverty is not naturally occurring; it is a policy choice.”

Kevin D. Williamson

Nothing more freeing

Of The Bulwark’s Mona Charen:

In 2018, she appeared on a panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference. When asked about feminism, she attacked her own tribe, saying, “I’m disappointed in people on our side for being hypocrites on sexual harassers and abusers of women who are in our party, who are in the White House, who brag about their extramarital affairs, who brag about mistreating women. And because he happens to have an R after his name, we look the other way; we don’t complain.”

The crowd erupted in jeers and shouts of “Not true!” Charen had been a speechwriter for Nancy Reagan! This was CPAC, Republican prom! Security guards escorted her out for her own protection.

The incident didn’t seem to shake her. “There is nothing more freeing than telling the truth,” Charen later wrote in a New York Times op-ed.

Olga Khazan, Never Trump, Forever

Decades ago, Mona Charen was one of my favorite conservative columnists. I rarely read her these days because, in the anti-Trump cosmos, I’m on planet Dispatch and find planet Bulwark a bit ~~weird~~ tedious. Thus has the black hole of Donald Trump disrupted the cosmos.

What unites us

Americans are less divided politically than the media likes to pretend.

Yes, it’s a big, diverse electorate, but there are certain opinions we all share. Like this one: I can’t believe the party I hate isn’t getting clobbered in the polls.

From the Liz Cheney left to the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. right, ask any voter at random whether they’re surprised at how close this race is, and my guess is they’ll talk your ear off in exasperation.

Nick Catoggio

Banned Books Week

The Orwellian Evolution of Banned Books Week

Vice and Virtue

Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

T.S. Eliot, Gerontion, via J. Bottum

The gay guy pundits agree

Harris’ Context

I can’t say what Vice President Kamala Harris’s favorite word is — the one time I met with her, I didn’t ask — but I’d put a big stack of chips on “context.” She said it not once, not twice, but three times in her signature May 2023 “coconut tree” riff, and I’ve heard it tumble from her lips on other occasions as well. It’s like some oratorical caftan, warming and comforting her.

That turns out to be apt. Her bid for the presidency is all about context.

Any realistic response to it hinges not on the policy details that she has or hasn’t provided, not on the fine points of her record over time, not on her interview with Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC on Wednesday, not on her previous sit-down with CNN’s Dana Bash. It hinges on context. She cannot be sized up outside of or apart from the alternative, a man of such reprehensible character, limitless rage, disregard for truth, contempt for democracy, monumental selfishness and incoherent thinking that even discussing Harris’s virtues and vices feels ever so slightly beside the point. She’s not Donald Trump.

Frank Bruni

The words are different but the melody’s the same

In the culture war, we know exactly what she is: an equity leftist, a strong believer in race and sex discrimination today to make up for past race and sex discrimination yesterday, and a politician who favors redefining womanhood to include biological men, and conducting medical experiments on gay, autistic and trans children, based entirely on self-diagnosis. These are her values, they are the values of every Dem special interest group, and she assures us they have not changed. I believe her.

…

I have yet to hear her say a single interesting or memorable thing in her entire career. Have you?

…

If a serious Republican candidate were up against her — even Nikki Haley — this election would not be even faintly close.

But we do not have a serious Republican candidate.

We have the most shameless charlatan in American political history — and there are plenty of competitors. He is unfit in every respect to be president of the United States …

Trump does not merely break norms. He has broken the norm, the indispensable norm for the continuation of the republic, the norm first set by George Washington when he retired from office, the norm that changed the entire world for the better: accepting the results of an election … I do not think this is even within his personal control. He is so genuinely psychologically warped that he has never and will never agree to the most basic requirement of public office: that you quit when you lose; and that the system is more important than any individual in it.

He is not lying when he insists that he won in 2016 and 2020 by massive landslides in the popular vote. He believes it. He believes he will win by a landslide in November, and there is no empirical evidence that could convince him otherwise. If he loses the election, he will call it a massive fraud one more time, and foment violence to protest it. We know this more certainly than we know anything about Kamala Harris. He tried to leverage mob violence to disrupt our democracy once. If that was not disqualifying, nothing is …

…

So I will vote for Harris, despite my profound reservations about her. Because I have no profound reservations about him. I know who he is and what he is. I know what forces he is conjuring and the extremes to which he will gladly take his own personal crusade. To abstain, though temptingly pure, is a cop-out. I vote not for Harris as such, but for a conservatism that can emerge once the demon is exorcized.

And exorcize it we must. Now, while we still can.

Andrew Sullivan

Other thoughts on POTUS Election 2024

Uninteresting and unmemorable

We have to guard that spirit. Let it always inspire us. Let it always be the source of our optimism, which is that spirit that is uniquely American. Let that then inspire us by helping us to be inspired to solve the problems.

Kamala Harris. I hate to belittle her, because her context is him, and he is everything that Bruni and Sullivan said. If Indiana is in play, I’ll vote for the sane-but-empty suit who’ll leave office in 2028 if defeated, leaving our political system intact.

Suttons Bay, MI, last week

Donald Trump According to Those Who Know Him

My last NYT “gift article” for September, and one of the most important. Donald Trump According to Those Who Know Him

Even when he’s right, he’s wrong

Somebody apparently told Trump about, say, ProPublica attacking the Dobbs decision (substantially reversing Roe v. Wade). His over-the-top response, directionally right, was this:

When speaking to supporters from the swing state, where both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have doubled efforts to capture the election count in November, Trump lamented the criticism aimed at the Supreme Court‘s conservative supermajority and said it should be “illegal.”

“They were very brave, the Supreme Court. Very brave. And they take a lot of hits because of it,” said the former president. “It should be illegal, what happens. You know, you have these guys like playing the ref, like the great Bobby Knight. These people should be put in jail the way they talk about our judges and our justices, trying to … sway their vote, sway their decision”

Trump Says People Criticizing Supreme Court Justices Should Be Jailed

So he also is profoundly ignorant of our most fundamental rights, including the right to say stupid things about any branch of government we care to kvetch about.

Some Nationalist, this

Donald Trump is a funny kind of patriot.

He loves America—except for the cities, the people who live in the cities, about half of the states, the universities, professional sports leagues, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the legal system, immigrants, the culture. He thinks the Capitol Police are murderers and that the FBI is a gestapo, that the government is an illegitimate junta maintained through election fraud, that the January 6 rioters are political prisoners, that the nation is a ruin, that it is “failed.” And when it fell to him to explain to [a] debate audience why he should be president, he spent most of his time repeating the praise of Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán.

Trump’s enemies are all Americans, his friends are all foreign dictators, and his money lives in Dubai and Indonesia. Some nationalist.

Trump lives in a very strange little bubble: His world is Palm Beach, a handful of golf courses and hotels, and Fox News. The smallness of his frame of reference is a problem for him ….

Kevin D. Williamson

Trump’s victims

Depending on how you count them, 19 or 26 or 67 women have accused Mr. Trump of sexual misconduct. Women who have said he “squeezed my butt,” “eyed me like a piece of meat,” “stuck his hand up my skirt,” “thrust his genitals,” “forced his tongue in my mouth,” was “rummaging around my vagina,” and so on.

Mr. Trump has denied any misconduct. He, in turn, has accused the women of being “political operatives,” plotting a “conspiracy against you, the American people,” looking for their “10 minutes of fame” and not being his “type.”

“It couldn’t have happened, it didn’t happen,” Mr. Trump sneered during a recent news conference, referring to Ms. Leeds, the one who accused him of assaulting her on an airplane. “And she would not have been the chosen one.”

Jessica Bennett, Trump’s Female Accusers Are Begging You Not to Forget Them

He can’t even deny his sexual assaults without:

Sneering at how homely his accuser is and
Tacitly admitting that he assaults women lucky enough to be “chosen.”

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Wednesday, 8/28/24

All Presidential politics today.

Presented Without Comment

Former President Donald Trump, on Truth Social: “My Administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.”

(The Morning Dispatch)

Also Presented Without Comment

NBC News: Vance Says Trump Would Veto A National Abortion Ban

Ohio Sen. JD Vance, former President Donald Trump’s running mate, on Saturday said Trump would veto a federal abortion ban if a bill were to be passed by Congress.

…

“I mean, if you’re not supporting it, as the president of the United States, you fundamentally have to veto it,” Vance argued.

(The Morning Dispatch)

So: The Betrayer betrays again

This feels rather like a “dog bites man” story:

The GOP has jettisoned its pro-life plank after having it in place for nearly a half century. And Trump himself is now saying he’d be great for “reproductive rights,” a position that pro-lifers have long insisted is a moral abomination.

This is not a surprise. Betrayal is a core character trait of Trump’s. He’s betrayed his wives, his mistresses, his friends, his business associates, people who have worked for him, and his country. There is no person and no cause he will not double-cross. The pro-life movement is only the latest thing to which he has been unfaithful, and it won’t be the last.

The question to ask yourself is: Who in the pro-life movement—Al Mohler, Mike Huckabee, Franklin Graham, Eric Metaxas, Marjorie Dannenfelser, Ralph Reed, Tony Perkins, Robert Jeffress, and countless others—will speak out, publicly and forcefully and relentlessly, against Trump’s about-face? Will they tell the full truth, which is that abortions increased during the Trump presidency, that the pro-life movement is weaker than at almost any time in its history, and that, when it comes to making the Republican Party the home of the pro-life cause, Trump is doing unprecedented damage?

Will they now say of Trump what they say of liberal Democrats, that he supports the murder of innocent unborn children?

Now ask yourself this: How could an evangelical who claims to be passionately pro-life vote for a presidential candidate who now promises that his administration will “be great for women and their reproductive rights”? Especially when that person has cheated on his wives and on his taxes, paid hush money to porn stars, and been found liable of sexual assault?

Peter Wehner, Trump’s Evangelical Supporters Just Lost Their Best Excuse

Ukraine in Election 2024

As my friend David French points out, there is at least one important policy priority with regard to which Kamala Harris clearly offers conservatives an approach preferable to that of Donald Trump: U.S. policy vis-à-vis U.S. interests in Ukraine, whose people are valiantly fighting off an invasion undertaken by a tyrant whose junta is entirely hostile to U.S. interests and who is in bed with every important U.S. enemy and adversary from Tehran to Beijing. Donald Trump is essentially pro-Moscow in his stance; Deputy Troll J.D. Vance is as close to explicitly pro-Moscow in his stance as it is permissible to be and still hope to have a political future after the crash and burn that his ticket seems to be headed toward. (Seems, as of this writing. I don’t do predictions.)

Kevin D. Williamson

I don’t care for either party’s Ukraine position, but I’m closer to the Democrats.

I don’t care for the parties’ positions because Ukraine, with the help of the US, NATO, and the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch, poked the bear and Ukraine now is paying the price.

I’m doing this mostly from memory so don’t hold me to the details too strictly: As the Soviet Union was dying, we were helping it along, giving Gorbachev advice on how best to move from an command economy to a market economy and from authoritarianism to democracy. We essentially promised Russia (predictably the most prominent of the states after breakup of the union) a zone of influence (can you say “Monroe Doctrine”?) and that NATO would not push to Russian borders. We broke that promise in many ways, both explicit and implicit (e.g., fomenting rebellions in the former Soviet Republics after the Union broke up, trumpeting that Ukraine was under consideration for NATO membership) — and then the Ecumenical Patriarch added fuel to the fire (pushed by our State Department?) by declaring the autonomy (technically, autocephaly) of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, a group which was in schism from the Russian-Orthodox-controlled Ukrainian Orthodox Church. That the latter was controlled by the Russian Orthodox Church does not mean, however, that Patriarch Kirill actually cared for it pastorally — his spiritual neglect was part of the reason for the tomos of autocephaly.

That said, I don’t see that allowing the conquest of Ukraine by Russia rectifies past mistakes. We broke it, we bought it.

Of course, Williamson has a zinger or two, like

this description of Trump as “the serial bankrupt gameshow host and quondam pornographer who is so bad with money that he somehow lost his ass owning casinos.”
if Democratic hypocrisy means that the Democrats are at least paying attention to reality, that they have some understanding of what it is, then that’s to the good. If Democratic hypocrisy regarding a shift to the center means that they at least understand where the center is, then, as Jonah says, two cheers for that hypocrisy.

Observers versus Activists

[A]fter the shocking events of January 6, 2021, The Bulwark’s Never Trump stance began to evolve in the direction of defending liberal democracy against Trumpian authoritarianism. This was a goal that required working for the electoral victory and governing success of Democrats.

… As [Sarah Longwell] puts it at one point,

This isn’t a ‘lesser of two evils’ situation. One candidate is evil. The other is someone with whom I have some policy disagreements and some policy agreements. An easy choice.

That’s where we come, I think, to the core of the disagreement between Longwell and Hayes. It’s not primarily about whether Harris has sufficiently or sincerely moderated her views. It’s about what the present situation requires. For Longwell, Trump poses “the worst threat to American ideals in our lifetimes,” and that threat calls for refusing to “stand on the sidelines.” It demands “taking a stand” because we are living through a “moment when moral clarity and corresponding action is required,” rendering efforts to maintain a kind of ideological purity a morally inadequate and politically impotent “intellectual exercise.”

…

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

Damon Linker, Never-Trump Smackdown

I’ve been neglecting the Bulwark since shortly after its founding. I’ve now subscribed again — for one month, with a reminder set to cancel if I don’t like it, as I suspect will happen, judging from this hectoring bit:

As for most everyone else marked absent on my attendance sheet, they are nearing—or already in—retirement. They have no GOP future to speak of.

So what’s the holdup?

I have been told that one answer to this is concerns about personal safety. And I hear that. But lots of people have put their personal safety at risk. I’ve gotten threats. So have Kinzinger and Duncan and my colleague Sarah Longwell. We all have young kids and none of us has either Secret Service or the scratch for private security. Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman had to move out of their damn home. That didn’t stop them.

Here is the truth: Every person who agrees to be a poll watcher this fall is putting themselves at a risk that is equal or greater to what John Kelly would face if he were to cut an ad for Kamala Harris.

So what it comes down to is something more mundane than safety. These people aren’t endorsing Harris because they don’t want to deal with the hassle.

The bleats from Trump. The media requests. The chastising emails from their MAGA friends (or spouses, in a few cases). Getting an earful at the club every time Kamala does something that conservatives don’t like. Maybe they have a board position or another influence-peddling gig that’s dependent on their status as a Republican in Good Standing.

Dealing with all that is a pain in the ass. Doing nothing is easy.

And maybe this would be a fair excuse in normal times. They’ve done their bit; they should be able to retire in peace.

But these are not normal times. Donald Trump engineered the first non-peaceful transfer of power in our country since the Civil War. In a second term, he would be unleashed to act on his worst impulses, having cast off all of those who dared try to check him.

Tim Miller (at the Bulwark). I can’t say he’s wrong about any basic facts, but who didn’t know those facts already? Who doesn’t know that Trump is an existential threat to Democracy (“you’ll never have to vote again”)? But who says we must allow that threat to occupy our every waking hour, that opposition to Trump must be our deepest identity?

I really appreciate being kept abreast of what’s going on through the Dispatch, which doesn’t presume to dictate my response.

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Saturday, 8/24/24

Politics

Truly weird

Y’know what’s weird in a hopeful sort of way? Nostaligia across ideological lines, that’s what.

… programming on Thursday night, which seemed to aim at appealing to Nikki Haley voters from the GOP primaries. There were a lot of respectful references to Ronald Reagan. From Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly. From old-time national security hand Leon Panetta, who talked about killing Osama bin Laden.

Damon Linker, Well done, Dems

[L]et’s face it, even some European conservatives find Trump so distasteful that they are eager to believe the best about Harris—especially the idea that she really might be Obama in a pants suit.

Rod Dreher, Kamala Harris and her ‘Good Vibes’ Campaign

Almost she maketh me straight

I’m reluctant to write about Kamala Harris’s smile because I’m going to get all gushy and mushy about it, and the Harris lovefest is a jammed jamboree without need of another journalist. She’s enjoying more than a routine political honeymoon; she’s in the priciest suite on the poshest cruise ship sailing through a tropical paradise where coconuts tumble juicily from their trees into her aloe-moistened hands.

But I can’t stop noticing and basking in her happy face. Actually, happy doesn’t do it justice — it’s exuberant. Sometimes even ecstatic. When she made her surprise appearance onstage in Chicago during the prime-time portion of the Democratic National Convention on Monday night, she beamed so brightly I reached for my sunglasses. When she high-fived her running mate’s wife, Gwen Walz, during a campaign rally in Rochester, Pa., the day before, she sparkled like a gemstone. Even when she talked about the economy — the economy! — in Raleigh, N.C., two days before that, she found places and pauses for her mouth to widen and her eyes to light up. Those smiles of hers communicate an elation that I immediately want to share, an optimism that I instantly want to embrace.

Frank Bruni, who may be confusing Kamala with Judy Garland.

Kamala’s hostile work environment

And now for the anti-Bruni:

The Harris-Walz messaging indeed projects a pair of lovable scamps out to defend old-fashioned American decency against two mean, corrupt weirdos, Trump and J.D. Vance. Harris’s bubbly likability is a façade. In fact, Harris has a behind-the-scenes reputation as a high-maintenance diva. As vice president, she has had an unusually high staff turnover, with burned-out aides leaving feeling chewed up and spit out.

“People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it’s an abusive environment,” a person with direct knowledge of how Harris’ office is run told Politico, in a 2021 report. “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like s—.”

To be sure, Donald Trump is famously a difficult boss. And yes, the presidency is not a therapy session. Still, when Kamala Harris gasses on, as she did in her convention speech, about the need for charity, and about the mandate to treat others as you want to be treated, it is all an act to create, well, a trippy California vibe that contrasts with Trump’s meanness.

Rod Dreher, Kamala Harris and her ‘Good Vibes’ Campaign

Noonan’s take

The Democratic Party has more substantial characters of recent American history to parade around on stage. The Clintons, the Obamas, Jesse Jackson, who, whatever your view of him, was there, on the balcony at the Lorraine Motel, when Martin Luther King was shot. This conveyed a party with a storied past, and if you join it you’re joining something real. The Republican Party, in its great toppling, has rejected its past. You lose something when you cast your history aside, and all you’ve got for prime time is Trump sons.

…

Donald Trump is famously off his game. He knows his old insult shtick isn’t working. Some of his supporters say, “All he has to do is read from the teleprompter!” but they’re wrong. He’s no good when he reads from the prompter, he doesn’t respect what’s on it. It bores him, and he talks like a tranquilized robot. He knows what he does well—shock, entertain, mention two or three big issues. He’s having trouble making a stinging critique of Democratic policy because he’s insulted everything over the years, and when he says something’s bad now it just seems part of his act and doesn’t land.

Peggy Noonan

Normal people

The Obamas managed to strike a tone that was at once a little bit angry and a little bit hopeful. Barack spoke about how most Americans don’t want to go to war with our neighbors over politics. He’s right: In fact, most of us normal people don’t actually care how our neighbors vote, just as long as the guy next door isn’t blasting Mexican polka after 8 p.m. He also nicely articulated what’s so grating about Trump: Trump is the guy who has everything and still whines about not having enough. He’s always talking about himself: his problems, his successes, his goddamn golf score.

…

Meanwhile, Trump focuses on what really matters—cocaine: Trump took a brief moment away from listing his grievances to educate himself on America’s drug problem during an appearance on comedian Theo Von’s podcast. You’d think a rich man who lived in New York in the 1980s would know a little something about the white stuff, but listening to Trump ask Von about coke is like hearing a five-year-old ask where babies come from. “And is that a good feeling? Why would you do it?”

Honestly, the whole thing is sort of endearing, and as Helen Lewis said, it’s the first time Trump has shown an interest in someone other than himself.

Katie Herzog

Conspiracy theory of the Left

If you think, as Kamala Harris thinks, or says she thinks—(“thinks”)—that inflation in grocery prices is the result of “price gouging,” then I don’t want to hear you ever complaining about conspiracy theories. Because that is a big, dumb conspiracy theory, the sort of thing that can be taken seriously only by asses of exceptional asininity.

Kevin D. Williamson

Populists versus the credentialed experts

Populist politics defies experts in favor of deferring to the people (the voters).

The reason why such a politics still seems disorienting to so many of us is that we just lived through several decades when highly credentialized experts enjoyed uncommon levels of deference. This was the highwater mark of technocratic-managerial neoliberalism. What should the president do about an economic problem? Talk to economists and follow their advice. What about a foreign policy crisis unfolding abroad? Talk to experts ensconced in Washington’s many think tanks devoted to international affairs. The same holds for any area of policy. Whatever the problem, solving it involves finding the experts, listening to what they say, and then going along with their recommendations.

But not anymore. Or at least not consistently. The experts are still around, and they are still shown respect by journalists who focus on national politics. But they don’t have the political clout and don’t exercise the overwhelming influence they once did. This is true in both parties. And taking note of it is crucial for understanding where we are and where we’re going.

Damon Linker

How to get the press to blurt out inconvenient truth

Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while, and so it goes with journalistic “fact checkers.” Sen. J.D. Vance made a slip of the tongue last week, which prompted CBS News to reveal the truth unwittingly.

In an Aug. 11 “Face the Nation” interview with Margaret Brennan, Mr. Vance said that Donald Trump is “trying to find some common ground” on abortion. Meanwhile, “you have Democrats who supported abortion right up to the moment—and sometimes even beyond the moment—of birth, which is just sick stuff.”

“That’s not accurate,” Ms. Brennan admonished him.

“It is accurate,” he replied. “In fact, the Born Alive Act, multiple members of the current Democratic administration, including our vice president, supported that legislation—they have supported taxpayer-funded abortions up to the moment of birth.”

The screen, moments later, cuts to the studio, where Ms. Brennan reads from a script: “We want to clarify what Sen. Vance said about the Born Alive [Abortion] Survivors Protection Act and his claim that Vice President Harris supported the legislation. A CBS News fact-check finds that Harris voted against advancing the bill twice when she was a senator, and has previously called it extreme and a setback to reproductive rights in America. We found no evidence that anyone who currently serves in the Biden administration voted for it either.” Then the interview continues.

Sierra Dawn McClain and Nicholas Tomaino, Vance Flips the ‘Fact Check’ Script

Culture, education

Myth

Myths are basic truths twisted into mnemonics, instructions posted from the past, memories waiting to become predictions.

Richard Powers, The Overstory

Breaking political taboos

Getting inside the heads of these kinds of voters became an obsession for Mr. Schoen. As a doctoral student at Oxford, he wrote a dissertation on Enoch Powell, a Conservative legislator, who stunned Britain in 1968 with a speech predicting that if current levels of immigration continued, soon “the Black man will have the whip hand over the white man.” After sifting through polls and election returns, Mr. Schoen convincingly argued that Powell drew millions of these voters to the right in the first election after his incendiary speech, shaking the foundations of British politics and setting the template for a new kind of right-wing populism.

Mr. Schoen came to believe that people were drawn to firebrands like Powell not just because they agreed with him on the issues, but also because he was saying something political elites had tried to keep out of public debate. It proved that he was in touch with a constituency that wasn’t being heard — and it gave his movement a frisson of excitement. You didn’t need a grass-roots campaign or a lavish advertising blitz to win over the public, just the right words and voters ready to hear them.

… Ignoring a problem on the electorate’s mind doesn’t make it go away; it only sends voters searching for a candidate who will listen. Views can shift over time, but probably not over the course of a campaign. Elections aren’t a battle for hearts and minds. They’re a fight to give voters what they already want.

Timothy Shenk, 30 Years Ago, Two Young Strategists Cracked How to Beat a Guy Like Trump. Are Democrats Ready to Listen?

Learning to desire the right things

We normally pay attention to what we desire without thinking about whether our desires are good for us. But that is a dangerous trap in a culture where there are myriad powerful forces competing for our attention, trying to lure us into desiring the ideas, merchandise, or experiences they want to sell us.

Besides, late modern culture is one that has located the core of one’s identity in the desiring self—a self whose wants are thought to be beyond judgment. What you want to be, we are told, is who you are—and anybody who denies that is somehow attacking your identity, or so the world says. The old ideal that you should learn—through study, practice, and submission to authoritative tradition—to desire the right things has been cast aside. Who’s to say what the right things are, anyway? Only you, the autonomous choosing self, have the right to make those determinations. Anybody who says otherwise is a threat.

Excerpt from Rod Dreher’s forthcoming book Living in Wonder (emphasis added). The highlight describes a an “old ideal” that is a major thrust of classical education.

Bearing (false?) witness

Some more Kevin D. Williamson. This time, it’s a book review:

As a Catholic, I suppose I should try harder not to enjoy Protestant factional infighting as much as I do. But every time I read something as bog-bottom dumb as Megan Basham’s excruciatingly imbecilic new book, Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda, I am reminded of the poetic justice arising from American-style choose-your-own-adventure theology and exegesis: There never was a better advertisement for the benefits of maintaining a Magisterium.

…

Reviewing a book like this is like trying to argue with an avalanche—an avalanche of stupidity and error, to be sure, but an avalanche all the same. I have the same problem with this book I had reviewing Alissa Quart’s similarly idiotic Bootstrapped: The author can make enough errors in a dozen words that the critic needs 400 words to correct them. And so one ends up writing an annotated companion to a work that was not worth reading in the first place, much less annotating. (If you would like a more conventional review of the book, please do check out Warren Cole Smith’s excellent contribution.) And while readers have often suspected otherwise, I do not generally get paid by the word.

…

This is a book about, and for, Christians, which means there is something on the table more important than journalistic incompetence. There is the matter of bearing false witness. Megan Basham has some apologies to make and a public record to correct. Judgment, I am reliably informed, comes like a thief in the night.

Kevin D. Williamson, Bearing False Witness

I appreciate Williamson’s assessment of George Soros, which is one I reached independently:

There isn’t any question that Soros and his Open Society project hope to influence prominent institutions, including conservative-leaning churches and religious associations. Soros is engaged in a social change project, and that is what social change projects do. His ends are not generally ends that I share, but that doesn’t make it nefarious.

Considering Soros’ ongoing status as whipping-boy for the American Right, it’s nice to see someone else with conservative bona fides who doesn’t think Soros is nefarious.

(Noted that Bethel McGrew thinks Basham’s book is just fine. I trust Williamson more, and don’t care enough to buy and read the book. Not my circus, not my monkeys.)

Karma Update

The Italian Coast Guard on Wednesday recovered the body of British tech mogul Mike Lynch from the wreckage of the Bayesian superyacht that sunk on Monday. The 56-meter yacht owned by Lynch’s wife, Angela Bachares, had been described by its builders as “unsinkable.” Italian investigators believe the yacht sank quickly on Monday morning after being hit by a waterspout, essentially an oceangoing tornado. Fifteen people who were on the yacht have survived, with six confirmed dead and one unaccounted for. Lynch, considered “Britain’s Bill Gates,” was acquitted in June by a San Francisco jury of fraud charges related to the sale of his company, Autonomy, to Hewlett Packard in 2011. His co-defendant in the trial, Stephen Chamberlain, also died Monday after being struck by a car while jogging in Cambridgeshire on Saturday.

The Morning Dispatch

I don’t know anything about Lynch or Chamberlain, and I have no actual opinion on their guilt of things for which they were acquitted in court. But if others can cite divine intervention in the failed attempt to assassinate Trump with a gunshot, and others can say “miraculous” of the meteoric rise of the Democrats’ prospects for November, I can hint at divine justice in two related deaths of acquitted co-defendants — especially since one sank on an unsinkable yacht.

Just six weeks ago, as a bullet whizzed past Donald Trump’s ear and he popped back up onstage with one fist raised and the other clutching a bald eagle, it appeared the Democrats were doomed. No more. Against all odds, the party that until recently had the pallor of a 80-year-old on day sixteen of a Covid infection has regained its mojo, and that was abundantly clear at the DNC this week.

Katie Herzog

(FWIW, I’m still not voting for either major party for POTUS.)

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

Slithery slimy things

Donald Trump and Project 2025

Remember how Donald Trump recited a rhyme about a snake, likening immigrants to the snake?

But of course, he’s the snake. We knew it when we “took him in.” January 6 confirmed it. And he’s still a snake, because he’s a narcissist:

In the heart of D.C., where ambitions brew,
The Heritage Foundation found a snake,
He promised to make America new,
They thought, “What a promising take.”

“Oh, naive wonks,” the snake did cry,
“Won’t you give me shelter and care?
I’m Donald Trump, give me a try,
I’ll make the nation fair.”

The Foundation, seeing dollars bright,
Brought him in from the storm,
“With our wisdom, you’ll lead the right,
And we’ll keep each other warm.”

They showered him with strategy,
Plans to make the country strong.
He nodded and smiled, seemingly with glee,
As they helped him along.

But once he’d gained a foothold, sure,
The snake began to twist.
His love of self remained so pure,
The Foundation’s dreams dismissed.

He reveled in the spotlight’s glare,
His ego paved the way.
His positions showed that he didn’t care,
About anything they’d say.

“Oh, snake!” they cried, “Why did you feign?
We trusted you with care!
You’ve left us out in the rain,
Your selfishness laid bare.”

The snake just laughed, a selfish grin,
“You knew my nature well,
You forgot I must win,
Now you can go to Hell.”

He left them there, ambitions crushed,
As he pursued his own acclaim.
The Foundation, feeling foolish, hushed,
Had only themselves to blame.

Jonah Goldberg, Donald Trump is the Snake

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.