Immensity cloistered in thy dear womb,
Now leaves his welbelov’d imprisonment,
There he hath made himself to his intent
Weak enough, now into our world to come;
But Oh, for thee, for him, hath th’Inne no roome?
Yet lay him in this stall, and from the Orient,
Stars, and wisemen will travel to prevent
Th’effect of Herod’s jealous general doom;
Seest thou, my Soul, with thy faith’s eyes, how he
Which fills all place, yet none holds him, doth lie?
Was not his pity towards thee wondrous high,
That would have need to be pitied by thee?
Kiss him, and with him into Egypt goe,
With his kind mother, who partakes thy woe.

(John Donne, Nativity)

Steven Bannon, of Breitbart News and now the presumptive Trump Administration, has been covered by media like a “cloven-hoofed devil,” as he puts it. I know almost nothing about him, but it seems fair to let him speak for himself, which he does at length in a Saturday Wall Street Journal profile. (There’s a pay wall, I assume, but since it magically disappears for me I’m not positive.)

Why does he think that leftists are so fixated on him? “They were ready to coronate Hillary Clinton. That didn’t happen, and I’m one of the reasons why. So, by the way, I wear these attacks as an emblem of pride.”

…

He acknowledges that the site is “edgy” but insists it is “vibrant.” He offers his own definition of the alt-right movement and explains how he sees it fitting into Breitbart. “Our definition of the alt-right is younger people who are anti-globalists, very nationalist, terribly anti-establishment.”

But he says Breitbart is also a platform for “libertarians,” Zionists, “the conservative gay community,” “proponents of restrictions on gay marriage,” “economic nationalism” and “populism” and “the anti-establishment.” In other words, the site hosts many views. “We provide an outlet for 10 or 12 or 15 lines of thought—we set it up that way” and the alt-right is “a tiny part of that.” Yes, he concedes, the alt-right has “some racial and anti-Semitic overtones.” He makes clear he has zero tolerance for such views.

It seems to me that he pretty well puts to rest the anti-semitism charge for one (his corroboration carries a lot more weight than an unsupported allegation by an ex-wife, it seems to me), but judge for yourself.

* * * * *

“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Tertiary Things

Today, Tipsy’s all tertiary and too lazy to label items.

1

To this point, note this story from 2014, about John Podesta’s outfit:

A top liberal group has temporarily abandoned plans for a new project designed to court white working class voters after it could not marshal the necessary financial support for the project, according to documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The Center for American Progress planned to roll out a new effort last year called the Bobby Kennedy Project. However, insufficient funding for the project forced the group to postpone its launch until 2016.

The stated need for the project suggests potential pitfalls for Democrats in its eventual delay: In a midterm election year expected to heavily favor Republicans, CAP has apparently abandoned, for the time being, an effort to reach out to a constituency that it acknowledges could determine the viability of the Democrats’ voting coalition going forward.

Of course. Because the kind of people who fund the Democratic Party care more about gay marriage than they do about the Rust Belt. And now they know what that means.

(Rod Dreher)

2

Liberals focused on backlash to civil rights, and not at all on the Democratic Party’s decades-long retreat from the politics of organized labor and working people, and its concurrent embrace of metropolitan social liberalism and neoliberal financial capitalism. Seven million American men have dropped out of the workforce, and the liberal candidate was offering a few wonky tweaks to health care and paid maternity leave. Trump was right to call his supporters the forgotten men. The leading exponents of liberalism perform their politics as a self-admiring monologue about their moral superiority. If liberals noticed working-class people in rural Indiana, it’s only because they might have said something wrong on their “egg account” on Twitter or gave the wrong answer to a local news crew. Time to get the outrage mob to make them a national spectacle and possibly deprive them of their livelihood. Why is this form of liberalism surprised that people doubt the beneficence of its ministrations?

(Michael Brendan Dougherty)

3

On Tuesday, America rejected a patrician and elected a tribune. Let us hope we see some genuinely Gracchian reforms, and let us hope they work this time. Because if not, I fear that, though I might not, my children will one day see a Caesar cross the Potomac.

(Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, concluding America now looks like Rome before the fall of the Republic)

4

Too bad for Democrats there are zero electoral votes in the State of Denial.

(Marc Thiessen)

5

I have disagreed with President Obama on most things, while avoiding, by my lights at least, Obama Derangement Syndrome. The election of an African-American President was historic in a good sense, for reasons I’ll not attempt to enumerate.

My biggest regret about his presidency is its worst-ever records on religious freedom in the United States — bigger even than the Affordable Care Act, though the ACA might give a real run for the money if I weren’t on Medicare.

But I have always appreciated his gracious and irenic tone, and the absence of personal scandal. No known mistresses. No profiteering. Just an occasional glimpse of a cigarette, and not even that for a long time now.

The video in this story is a good example of his tone.

6

The blogosphere is teeming with post-election reflections. I’ve had to toss some out as I found others still better.

I see little point, for instance,  in repeating Glenn Greenwald’s litany of what was wrong with Hillary as a candidate. She’s dead politically. It’s gone. Nothing to see here. Move along now.

I have several friends made disconsolate by Trump’s victory.

All I can think is they must have talked themselves into thinking Hillary would be at least okay, which was more than I could do. I went into the election assuming I would awaken November 9 to news of which unacceptable major party candidate was elected. Only because I believed the polls that Hillary would win did Trump’s strong showing lure me into hour-after-hour after incredulous results-monitoring.

To my disconsolate friends, without singling anyone out, I say “take heart!” America didn’t elect Donald Trump because he was a pussy-grabbing, naked-beauty-pageant-contestant-ogling misogynist and serial adulterer.

They elected him for some other reason, such as to avoid the candidate who considered their type “deplorable.” I haven’t quite sorted that out yet.

The dangers of which I warned remain, but there are silver linings for anyone with values like mine. I feel like a target has been removed from my back (I was going to say “yellow star from my sleeve,” but I’m not going to melodramatically go that far) and I’m now just in the mass of people who face the Trumpesque dangers together, without feeling singled out.

At least temporarily, I’m not going back to remind myself of all the potential downside because it’s totally out of my hands now. I didn’t expect to be happy after the election.

And with credit to President Obama for nominating someone as moderate as Judge Garland, I look forward to a new, more conservative, Supreme Court nominee from Trump’s list of 21.

* * * * *

“In learning as in traveling and, of course, in lovemaking, all the charm lies in not coming too quickly to the point, but in meandering around for a while.” (Eva Brann)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

1. Frenzy, knavery
2. Not the better place we hoped for
3. Putting lipstick on bloodlust
4. The perils of the election
5. Not as clever as we think
6. NYT 2000, 2016
7. An argument for Trump

Continue reading “Monday 10/24/16” →

1. Maturen-Muñoz
2. Beyond narcissism
3. Not really a “chronic liar”
4. Sadly clueless

Continue reading “Political overflow, segregated for your viewing discretion” →

1

I missed this when it was fresh:

Welcome to a world without rules. (I want you to read this paragraph in your super-scary movie trailer voice.) Welcome to a world in which families are mowed down by illegal immigrants, in which cops die in the streets, in which Muslims rampage the innocents and threaten our very way of life, in which the fear of violent death lurks in every human heart.

Sometimes in that blood-drenched world a dark knight arises. You don’t have to admire or like this knight. But you need this knight. He is your muscle and your voice in a dark, corrupt and malevolent world.

Such has been the argument of nearly every demagogue since the dawn of time. Aaron Burr claimed Spain threatened the U.S in 1806. A. Mitchell Palmer exaggerated the Red Scare in 1919 and Joe McCarthy did it in 1950.

And such was Donald Trump’s law-and-order argument in Cleveland on Thursday night. This was a compelling text that turned into more than an hour of humorless shouting. It was a dystopian message that found an audience and then pummeled them to exhaustion.

(David Brooks, 7/22/16) But I caught this one fresh:

Donald Trump has found an ingenious way to save the Democratic Party. Basically, he’s abandoned the great patriotic themes that used to fire up the G.O.P. and he’s allowed the Democrats to seize that ground. If you visited the two conventions this year you would have come away thinking that the Democrats are the more patriotic of the two parties — and the more culturally conservative.

Trump has abandoned the Judeo-Christian aspirations that have always represented America’s highest moral ideals: toward love, charity, humility, goodness, faith, temperance and gentleness.

He left the ground open for Joe Biden to remind us that decent people don’t enjoy firing other human beings.

Trump has abandoned the basic modesty code that has always ennobled the American middle class: Don’t brag, don’t let your life be defined by gilded luxuries ….

(7/28/16) That’s just the warm-up. I mustn’t quote the full thing, but you can go read it.

2

It seems to me that the press bias against all things Republican has been unusually stark this year. But is it really “bias” if it’s reasoned, and not both preconceived and unreasoning? In a quadrennium when the GOP nominee is so execrable that many traditional Republican leaders stayed away from the national convention, there’s a rare, nearly unanimous consensus against Trump among the people whose opinions make it into print or into thoughtful TV interviews.

It’s a shame that the issues Trump exploited — I’m basically thinking of concerns of the economic losers in America, who may be wrong about why they’re losing, but know darned well that they’re mostly forgotten — will carry stigma for a while because of the association with him as their champion.

3

In one ironic sense, the Democrat convention was the insane one: Hillary promises to keep on doing the same things but with a different and better result. At least Trump was offering something different — really, really different.

I refused to wallow in the television coverage of either convention, but in retrospect, I wish I’d known to watch Khizr Khan, father of a Muslim soldier killed serving the U.S., telling Trump “You have sacrificed nothing.”

4

The big thing we found out in the convention is exactly how Democrats will attempt to dismantle Mr. Trump piece by piece. He’s not just reckless, he’s ridiculous—a fraud in business, a screwball, unserious and uninformed about policy. They’ll try to drive him crazy, too, quite deliberately. They’ll do this not by quoting him accurately and denouncing his views, but by misquoting him, putting a twist on what he said, and then denouncing him. They’ll try to get him to whine, whinge, blow his top. They’re doing it already, to their profit. They’ll play the picador tormenting the bull, goading him, weakened, into an unfortunate charge.

(Peggy Noonan) Does anyone doubt that Donald “my hands may be small but there’s no trouble down there” Trump will take the bait?

The real question is whether Hillary will querulously take the bait when he fires back. He is masterful at that petty art.

5

Of Catholic Tim Kaine and ex-Catholic Mike Pence:

Has the U.S. accepted Catholics, or has it merely accepted Catholics who, when their progressive politics conflict with church doctrine, simply subordinate their religious beliefs? This is the key question for modern Catholic engagement in civic life. Unfortunately, it seems that many Catholics have abandoned the distinctive contributions they bring, in favor of blending in with modern progressivism.

Consider Gov. Mike Pence and Sen. Tim Kaine. The two vice-presidential candidates are white men born in the 1950s, with deep Catholic and Democratic roots. They’ve been described by colleagues as kind and thoughtful, but they still diverge in significant ways.

…

Surely Mr. Kaine can’t claim to be a “Pope Francis Catholic” on abortion. The notion that a Catholic can be “personally” opposed to abortion while supporting laws that legalize the procedure is simply inconsistent with Catholic teaching. It conflicts not only with Pope Francis but with 2,000 years of tradition. The Virginia senator’s recent decision to reverse his longstanding support for the Hyde Amendment, which limits public funding for abortion, puts even greater distance between him and the pontiff.

Key doctrinal and moral rules apply to all Catholics in all contexts—in business, at home, or in elective office. One cannot “personally” oppose something while making a living advocating it.

By contrast, Mr. Pence made a more dramatic decision to leave the Catholic Church during his college years. While painful for me to hear as a priest, it represents a certain honesty. Having found himself in disagreement with some of the church’s fundamental teaching, Mr. Pence accepted that he was no longer in communion with it. He didn’t pretend that he was, nor did he twist the church’s rules to conform to his own worldview.

There was an old joke that made the rounds in seminaries some years ago: What’s the difference between a dissenting Catholic and a Protestant? The Protestant has integrity.

(Robert A. Sirico)

6

He’s a racist! He’s a demagogue! He’s authoritarian! His presidency could deliver a fatal blow to the Constitution!

This is all true of Donald Trump. The problem is, Democrats have been saying it’s true of nearly every prominent Republican for the past 30 years …

Don’t get me wrong. Of course, in politics, all sides are guilty of exaggerated claims and unfair attacks. But there’s a particular tendency on the left to portray opponents as not just wrong but evil, and in a unique way. It’s an offshoot of Krauthammer’s Second Law that “conservatives think liberals are misguided; liberals think conservatives are evil.”

(Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, The Democrats have a ‘crying wolf’ problem)

Krauthammer presumably postulated his Second Law before Obama’s inauguration. I’ve been complaining of Obama Derangement Syndrome, a reverse mirror-image of Bush Derangement Syndrome, for as long as I’ve been blogging.

7

In Cleveland vs. Philadelphia, Pat Buchanan steps away from his Trump puffery (it’s weird how varied the voices are at the American Conservative) for a pretty balanced assessment.

8

After liveblogging Hillary’s acceptance speech, Rod Dreher concludes “I need a drink. Of hemlock.”

* * * * *

“In learning as in traveling and, of course, in lovemaking, all the charm lies in not coming too quickly to the point, but in meandering around for a while.” (Eva Brann)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.