Emergencies seem to be all the rage these days, so I’m following suit by abandoning all my usual blogging practices and rushing this out with no second thoughts.
On Thursday, former FBI Director James Comey posted a picture on Instagram with the caption: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.” The shells were arranged to spell out “8647.” This became an outrage on social media because, obviously, Comey was calling for Donald Trump (the 47th president) to be murdered.
Murdered? Yes. Murdered.
Donald Trump Jr. responded, “Just James Comey casually calling for my dad to be murdered.” Department of Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem leaped into action, tweeting, “Disgraced former FBI Director James Comey just called for the assassination of @POTUS Trump. DHS and Secret Service is investigating this threat and will respond appropriately.” Current FBI Director Kash Patel, no doubt poolside in Vegas, said he was monitoring the situation closely, but the Secret Service was taking the lead.
Not to be out done, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard scrambled to deal with this emergency the way leaders in national security and intelligence have since the old OSS days: She ran to a camera to talk to Fox News’ Jesse Watters and told him, “The danger of this [Instagram photo of some shell-numbers] cannot be underestimated.”
Watters got to the real crux of the issue quickly. “Do you believe Comey should be in jail?”
“I do,” Gabbard replied …
I don’t want to belabor this, because you’re either embarrassed for the country by this unconstrained idiocy and asininity or you should probably be reading Gateway Pundit’s coverage of this very serious assassination plot. I don’t think Comey was calling for Trump’s assassination. Nor do I think there’s a person out there who would be motivated to assassinate the president by the numbers 8647, whether spelled in seashells, Cheetos, or the decapitated heads of Barbie dolls. But just for the record, even if the shells spelled out “Trump should be fed face first to bears,” Comey would be in no legal jeopardy.
I do love that the same crowd that bragged about restoring the First Amendment and vowed to end the era of weaponizing the justice system went straight to the claim that Comey’s obvious incitement of violence demands that he be put behind bars.
The past 24 hours have been something of a Rorschach Test for the Supreme Court. In the birthright citizenship case, the Court made clear that in emergencies, the judiciary must retain the power to enter universal injunctions, even if Article III does not otherwise permit such injunctions. And in A.A.R.P. v. Trump, the Court made clear that in emergencies, the court should certify a class without going through Rule 23, and grant an ex parte tro without considering any of the usual TRO factors.
What lesson should lower court judges take away? In cases of perceived emergencies, forget all the rules and make stuff up. When the executive branch takes such actions we call it an autocracy. When the courts do it, they call it the “rule of law.”
I will have much more to say about this order in due course.
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
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.
Liberal education, which consists in the constant intercourse with the greatest minds, is a training in the highest form of modesty, not to say of humility. It is at the same time a training in boldness: it demands from us a complete break with the noise, the rush, the thoughtlessness, the cheapness of the Vanity Fair of the intellectuals as well as of their enemies. It demands from us the boldness implied in the resolve to regard the accepted views as mere opinions, or to regard the average opinions as extreme opinions which are at least as likely to be wrong as the most strange or the least popular opinions.
…
Liberal education is liberation from vulgarity. The Greeks had a beautiful word for “vulgarity”; they called it apeirokalia, lack of experience in things beautiful. Liberal education supplies us with experience in things beautiful.
Leo Strauss, Liberalism Ancient and Modern, via Damon Linker
Passport to privilege or sacred obligation?
I think it was the Chinese, before World War II, who calculated that it took the work of thirty peasants to keep one man or woman at a university. If that person at the university took a five-year course, by the time he had finished he would have consumed 150 peasant-work-years. How can this be justified? Who has the right to appropriate 150 years of peasant work to keep one person at university for five years, and what do the peasants get back for it? These questions lead us to the parting of the ways: is education to be a “passport to privilege” or is it something which people take upon themselves almost like a monastic vow, a sacred obligation to serve the people? The first road takes the educated young person into a fashionable district of Bombay, where a lot of other highly educated people have already gone and where he can join a mutual admiration society, a “trade union of the privileged,” to see to it that his privileges are not eroded by the great masses of his contemporaries who have not been educated. This is one way. The other way would be embarked upon in a different spirit and would lead to a different destination. It would take him back to the people who, after all, directly or indirectly, had paid for his education by 150 peasant-work-years; having consumed the fruits of their work, he would feel in honour bound to return something to them.
Don’t think for one moment that this is only an issue for India.
Stultification
I do wonder whether we spend too much time worrying about whether this moment is one characterized by creativity or stagnation. It is not as though the New is all that matters …
The proper worry, I think, is this: What if we’re making generations of people who can’t genuinely discover the Beatles or Dante? If they can’t read anything longer than a tweet, if they can’t grok music that doesn’t start with its chorus and last 90 seconds max? If we can form young people in such a way that they’re capable of apprehending the non-algorithmic, non-digital world of art and culture, then the problem of stagnation will eventually resolve itself. But if we can’t … well, then, we can focus on helping those adults who come to doubt the wisdom and good will of their algorithmic overlords. There will be plenty such; never a majority, of course, but plenty. As Larkin says, “someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to be more serious.”
“I sit on a man’s back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by any means possible, except getting off his back.”
David French and Sarah Isgur of the Advisory Opinions podcast very recently went to Gettysburg with a group from the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals. They viewed and got lectures on battlegrounds. But the following really caught my attention.
Confederate apologists continue to claim that the Civil War was not about slavery, but about States’ Rights. But one of the presenters gave us a scholarly paper, comparing the US Constitution to the Confederate Constitution, and found that the federalism provisions of the Confederate Constitution — that is, the balance of powers between the national government and the seceding states — was identical to the United States constitution.
I think we should put a QED after that.
The culture generally
Well, duh!
Yasha Mounk, who I no longer confuse with Yuval Levin, brings a boatload of data that proves that “The average American,” having single-mindedly pursued financial wealth, “is now vastly more affluent than the average European.”
My breast does not swell with pride, especially since I just yesterday paid some virtual visits to Europe with Chris Arnade and some YouTube videos. Your mileage may vary, especially if you’re American. “What the hell is water?,” after all.
This is why:
I love to travel in European cities.
I seldom bother reading Yasha Mounk.
Mostly peaceful in Portlandia
In law, it’s long been established that the defense of property is not worth a human life. This notion has been twisted over the past year from valuing the sanctity of human life to justifying the destruction of property. It’s not big deal. It’s not “violence.” It’s just stuff. So what? The “so what” is that its destruction is being used to coerce political decision making.
Commissioner Dan Ryan said Wednesday that his home has been vandalized seven times since late October, when the North Portland dwelling he shares with his fiance was first targeted by protesters who wanted him to support cutting millions of dollars from the city’s police budget.
No, it’s not as bad as the insurrection of storming the Capitol, and it’s nearly impossible to avert one’s eyes from the most outrageous and significant car wreck in modern political history. And no, it’s not as if terrorists kidnapped a loved one and held him hostage, only to be released minus the cut-off ear for emphasis, upon a vote as the terrorists demand. It’s just vandalism, which is a nice way of saying that “mostly peaceful” protesters have gone to an elected Portland public officials home and committed acts of destruction. Seven times. Because they want to influence his official decision-making.
Should we be parsing the vandalism for the extent of destruction? The cost of repairs? Should we contrast it with the passion of that group of “reformers” who believe their cause so just, so important, that they get to engage in acts of destruction to force an elected official to bend to their will?
Anywhere else in the universe, these criminal acts of destruction might be seen as terrorism, the use of violence to influence politics. But this is Portlandia, and while Dan Ryan’s recalcitrance to sufficiently defund police is seen as right-wing heresy. Elsewhere, Ryan would likely be deemed far too radically progressive to be elected dog catcher.
Seldom do I read a sympathetic defense of illiberalism. I suspect you seldom see one, either. So let’s cure that, if only to give the devil his due.
No man or woman is an island, and no one should aspire to be one, either. That, at the core, is the claim of illiberalism, post-liberalism, or any of the other names given to the movement that pushes back against individualism as an ideal. The liberalism of Locke, deeply woven into American culture and political philosophy, takes the individual as the basic unit of society, while an illiberal view looks to traditions, family, and other institutions whose demands define who we are.
It always confuses me that illiberalism is taken as a belligerent ideology – both by its detractors and some of its proponents – as though it were rooted in strength and prepared to wield that power against others. It is contemporary liberalism that begins from an anthropology of independence, and presumes a strength and self-ownership we do not in fact possess.
There’s a reason why the billionaires running X, Alphabet, and Meta all changed the names of their companies recently. That always happens when you’re ashamed of what you’re doing—you hope that a new name will wipe away the stain.
Musk came in claiming his people could cut $2 trillion out of the budget, or nearly a quarter of federal spending. He brushed off questions about just how that could be achieved with vague intimations of immense secret pots of corrupt and wasteful spending. At first, he could sustain this by pointing to various ridiculous uses of public dollars in assorted agencies, but none of it added up to anything like the savings he had promised.
By March 27, when Musk and several DOGE leaders sat down with Fox News’ Bret Baier to talk about their work, his ambition had been cut in half. “Our goal is to reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars,” he told Baier,
So from a nominal deficit of $2 trillion to try to cut the deficit in half to $1 trillion, or looked at in total federal spending, to drop federal spending from $7 trillion to $6 trillion. We want to reduce the spending, by eliminating waste and fraud, to reduce spending by 15 percent, which seems really quite achievable. The government is not efficient, and there is a lot of waste and fraud, so we feel confident that a 15 percent reduction can be done without affecting any of the critical government services.
Just two weeks later, Musk had scaled down his expectations dramatically, announcing at a Cabinet meeting that he expected DOGE to reduce federal spending by $150 billion this year.
But even having reduced his projection of potential savings by more than 90 percent, Musk still appears to be exaggerating what DOGE has achieved. As of early May, about $70 billion in cuts have been itemized on DOGE’s website, and even some of those will not actually reduce federal spending unless Congress rescinds them from this year’s appropriations statutes. That figure also does not account for the costs involved in firing and rehiring workers, providing severance and paid leave, lost productivity, diminished tax enforcement, and other implications of DOGE’s personnel moves.
On CNN.com, Allison Morrow processed Trump’s announcement last week about progress in trade talks with Britain: “OK, so it’s more of a concept of a deal. If a trade deal is, like, Michelangelo’s David, this is more like a block of marble. Or really it’s like a receipt from the marble guy that says we’ve placed an order for a block of marble.” (Thanks to Daniel Levinson of Montreal for nominating this.)
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
Regarding said “lot of stupid and terrible things,” my failure to call out anything about the current regime does not mean I approve. There’s just too much, and on some of the apparent illegalities I don’t want to abuse my credentials without thinking it through.
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.
Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson, who had been Falwell’s chief lieutenants in the Moral Majority, published a book questioning not just the efficacy of political action but the righteousness of the enterprise. In Blinded by Might they argued that in the process of trying to win elections conservative Christians had been seduced by the lure of power. What had begun as an effort to restore Christian values to the nation had degenerated into an unbridled partisan struggle, creating an atmosphere in which it was assumed that Democrats could not be Christians and that Bill and Hillary Clinton were the Antichrist.
Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals
So far as I can tell, this continues in full force except that the “Christian” bona fides of the Christian right are becoming ever more dubious.
The need for limits
Localism is modest … and in its modesty it is largely indifferent to the divisions that animate citizens who may hate each other but otherwise share the first premise of the modern age, which is that limits are there to be broken. When the success of the economy depends on perpetual growth fueled by boundless consumption, and the legitimacy of the state depends on a receding horizon of social progress fueled by an ever-expanding list of rights, “modest hopes” are obscene. Simply living as you should, without lending your energies to the machinery of progress, can be a mortal threat to the way things are.
… [I]f there is any such thing as an “ideal regime” it is the peasant village, “a gathering of human families for the sake of endurance across the harsh terrain of mortal life”. But many kinds of actually existing regimes have room for such gatherings, and our proper aim as citizens is not to transform the empires of progress into the Shire. Our business is not with ideals. We have a basic interest in existing institutions that support material life and in their competent management; beyond this realm of “normal politics,” we need not concern ourselves.
… Radner mentions the book of Ecclesiastes as the “scriptural ballast” for his political theory, and calls it “that most political book of the Bible.”
Adam Smith, reviewing Ephraim Radner, Mortal Goods. My copy of Mortal Goods was delivered yesterday and is near the top of the stack to read.
American Christianity
False binary
Christianity as we see it in eighteenth-century Britain or twenty-first-century America is not Christianity as it has always been, and the more fundamental changes may not be those that the received history of religion narrates. The cultural formations of western Christianity, growing as they do in good part from binary, Protestant-Catholic debates, can be thrown into stark relief, for instance, when studied in comparison to that much neglected third term in Christendom: the Eastern Orthodox churches from which Rome severed itself nearly half a millennium before the Reformation, charting a course for Western Christianity wed to rationalism and enamored of individual authority, whether papal or personal.
Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity.
I don’t recall any other non-Orthodox (so far as I know) writer who doesn’t reflexively fall into the trap of treating the Eastern Orthodox as the schismatics, Rome as the orthodox continuation.
Cooties
“There never was a time when it was so much abused, when its simple narrations were so much perverted, and when its true and more important uses were so completely overlooked in following fanciful theories and false deductions; and such as seriously threaten the interests of Protestant Christianity.” [Professor David R. Kerr of the United Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Monmouth, Illinois] warned students to beware of two “fanciful theories”: the “Mercersburg theology” taught by Philip Schaff and John Williamson Nevin, which appeared to depart from traditional Reformed views of the sacraments and of church history, and the Oxford Movement, a group of High Church Anglicans whose writings in the 1830s and 1840s gave birth to Anglo-Catholicism. These errors could not be countered merely with scripture, Kerr argued, but required careful attention to church history, which alone could “correct the gross perversions and false glosses.”
Paul J. Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation
As a Protestant Calvinist, I loved the Mercerburg theologians, who translated the Church Fathers, and was fascinated by the Oxford Movement. Considering where I’ve ended up, I guess it is no surprise that my favorite 19th century protestants, those of catholic leanings, had cooties in the eyes of evangelical sectarians.
Secularizations
After he had twice visited the United States in the 1930s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a perceptive essay contrasting Christian development in America with parallel developments in the parts of Europe most directly shaped by the Protestant Reformation. His assessment included an observation that was as shrewd in its comparative wisdom as it is relevant for the themes of this book: “The secularization of the church on the continent of Europe arises from the misinterpretation of the reformers’ distinction of the two realms [of church and society]; American secularization derives precisely from the imperfect distinction of the kingdoms and offices of church and state, from the enthusiastic claim of the church to universal influence in the world.” What Bonhoeffer saw has been described with other terms here: The key moves in the creation of evangelical America were also the key moves that created secular America.
Why smart atheists admit they’re cultural Christians
At the same time, you hold all sorts of Christian assumptions about the world, even if you do not believe in God. It is clear to you that there are such things as human rights, such that a certain level of dignity belongs to all people simply because they are members of the human race, and laws and customs should reflect this in practice. You reject polygamy. You believe in limitations on the power of the state and that the rule of law is essential to a healthy society, whereby the rex (king) is always subject to the lex (law). You think those with much should provide for those with little, whether this is expressed through a redistributive state, charitable giving, or both. You affirm the fundamental equality of all people before the law. You abhor slavery. You do not seek to justify inequalities in wealth or status seek to reduce them.
You think the central unit in human relations is the self, the sovereign individual, rather than the group to which the self belongs. You think all people are equally endowed with free will, reason, and moral agency. Humility in others is more attractive to you than pride. Love is more appealing to you than honor. You think colonialism is morally problematic, and that those who have benefited from it have obligations (however defined) to those who did not. You think of time as an arrow rather than a wheel: you believe that we are gradually making progress toward a better world rather than declining from a previous Golden Age or recurring in an endless series of cycles, and as such you would think “behind the times” is an insult and “ahead of her time” is a compliment. You admire people who forgive their enemies. You long for transcendence and are likely to describe yourself as spiritual, open to the supernatural, and even as praying sometimes. Even if the God of Abraham is dead to you, your language, legal framework, moral imagination, and sense of self are all haunted by his ghost.
The prayer of penitence leads us to reflect critically on our own lives. If it is uttered sincerely, it leads us to repent in humility, not just of particular wrongs we have done, but of our whole shameful and degraded state of being. The paradox is that, far from leading to lethargy or despair, such penitence brings a new kind of strength. Sexual sin is never merely sexual, but always has motives that are rooted in the passions—whether the need to be loved, or the lust for domination, or the desire to prove oneself attractive, or any of a dozen other motives that come readily to mind.
I’ve quoted this before, probably multiple times, but it’s so very perceptive:
Both the fundamentalist and the higher critic assume that it is possible to understand the biblical text without training, without moral transformation, without the confession and forgiveness that come about within the church. Unconsciously, both means of interpretation try to make everyone religious (that is, able to understand and appropriate scripture) without everyone’s being a member of the community for which the Bible is Scripture.
I’ve also echoed it when I’ve noted that people who don’t like Christianity cherry-pick hard passages, read them like fundamentalist literalists, and then object at how absurd the Scriptures are.
Cosmologies
The Copernican/Galilean worldview, that is the heliocentric worldview and its further development into our modern cosmology of galaxies and nebulas and black holes has two important aspects. It is an artificial vision and it is an alienating vision. It is artificial in the strictest sense of “art” or “techne”. It is a technical vision because we cannot experience this vision without technology, without telescopes and other apparatuses …
[T]he telescope and microscope are self-effacing artifices, they attempt to replace the eye, to convince us that they are not artificial but are more real than the eye. It is not only the physical gesture of looking at the world through a machine that demonstrates the radical change, though this is symbolic enough, but it is the very fact that people would do that and come to the conclusion that what they saw through these machines was truer than how they experienced the world without them. Yet the great revolution is not simply a technical rectification as it is presented by some today, it is not only that technically speaking we used to believe the earth to be a flat disk at the centre of the cosmos, and now we know the earth to be a big ball of water and dirt swirling around a giant nuclear reactor at the centre of our planetary system. The change happens in the very core of what Truth is, it is a change in the priority of knowledge, a change in what is important to us as human beings. That is the change. In a traditional world, all of reality is understood and expressed in an integrated manner. We describe phenomena in the manner we experience it because what is important is not so much the making of big mechanically precise machines that will increase our physical power, but rather the forming of human beings that have wisdom and virtue. The resistance to the heliocentric model was a desire to “save the phenomena”, the desire to express the world as we experience it because this expression must remain connected to how human beings live their lives and interact with God and their fellow men. So by projecting ourselves out through our machines into an physically augmented world, we “fall” into that materiality, we inevitably live in a more material and materialist world. And this is modern history itself.
What proceeds from this is my second point, which is that modern cosmology is not only artificial, but it is alienating, it moves Man away from himself. Once Man accepted that what he saw through his telescopes and microscopes is more real than his natural experience, he made inevitable the artificial world, he made inevitable as its end the plastic, synthetic, genetically modified, photoshopped, pornographic, social-networked reality we live in.
I enjoyed re-reading this after eleven years and am enjoying (not quite as much) the three other articles Pageau wrote defending ancient cosmology (over “scientific” cosmology).
More:
In 1922 fr. Pavel Florensky wrote an article in his “Imaginary Values in Geometry” in which he attempted to use the general theory of relativity to show that considering the relativity of motion, one could develop a perfectly coherent mathematical model in which the Earth is the reference of motion. This model would in fact correspond to Ptolemy’s cosmological descriptions. This article was one of the reasons the Communist State gave for his trial and execution, a dark irony considering the usual “violent religion” vs. “enlightening science” rhetoric we are taught in primary school regarding Galileo’s censorship.
Ah! A kindred spirit! I long thought that Copernicus had the scientific advantage over Ptolemy because his scheme was more parsimonious, but that Ptolemy was coherent, too. The way it gets taught, though, is that Ptolemy was wrong and we know better now.
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
I didn’t anticipate blogging much about the new American Pope, but I’ve come across several surprisingly good and insightful (i.e., they fit my biases) commentaries.
Nick Catoggio
Nick Catoggio doesn’t entirely fall into the fallacy of reducing religion to crypto-politics (see Ross Douthat, below), but he does write for a politically-oriented Dispatch. So it’s no surprise to see him muse about political implications among other things:
The last thing Leo wants for his papacy, I’m sure, is to see it sucked into the sleazy reality show that is Trump-era American politics, a black hole of shame and nihilism from which no dignity can escape.
In fact, my guess is that he’s less likely to comment on policy in the United States than the other candidates to succeed Francis would have been. Doing so might tempt Catholics here to choose between their loyalty to an American-led church and their loyalty to Trumpism, and not all would choose the church. It would also demean the pontificate, as surely the Holy Father has more exalted business to attend to than serving as the president’s latest foil in America’s degenerate “politics as pro wrestling” populist spectacle.
Most of all, it would show a world that’s been dominated by the United States for 80 years that even the papacy can’t prevent an American from parochially and narcissistically prioritizing his own country’s affairs. In an age of “America First,” where Uncle Sam unapologetically cares only about himself, the so-called Ugly American has never looked uglier. If Leo really does mean to prove that he “cares about the entire world,” the easiest way to do it is to reject that narcissism by ignoring the United States as completely as possible.
Jonathan Last
Catoggio pointed me to another article that’s spicier than his summary:
I expected to see an African pope in my lifetime. I never expected to see an American pope.
Why?
Because the Vatican is dominated by Europeans and they are deeply suspicious of America and American Catholics. To them, we are toddlers with shotguns.
Cardinal George of Chicago, of happy memory, was one of my great mentors, and he said: ‘Look, until America goes into political decline, there won’t be an American pope.’ And his point was, if America is kind of running the world politically, culturally, economically, they don’t want America running the world religiously. So, I think there’s some truth to that, that we’re such a superpower and so dominant, they don’t wanna give us, also, control over the church.
Barron is one of America’s MAGA priests, so naturally he could not imagine that anyone else in the world might view America as being in decline.
But we are and it’s obvious.
It’s obvious to the people of Canada, who just elected a prime minister exclusively on the grounds that the American century was over.
It’s obvious to the Chinese, who are planning to step into the vacuum and establish their own world order.
It’s obvious to our European allies, who are now making plans for a future in which America is toothless, lazy, and impotent.
And maybe—just maybe—this reality was obvious the College of Cardinals, too.
Maybe they looked at America and realized that it was no longer a colossus bestriding the globe. No longer exceptional. Not just in decline, but deluded about its reality.
Maybe Robert Prevost was elected pope because the Church realized they no longer needed to be concerned about America power.
I hoped that someone who doesn’t focus on the crypto-politics of religions would write about Pope Leo.
Ross Douthat stepped up: What the World Needs From Pope Leo (shared link). If I could put it in a nutshell, I wouldn’t share the link, but this jumped out at me:
This is a much weirder landscape than the one in which liberal and conservative Catholics clashed over contraception or gay marriage, and it’s likely to get weirder still as we move deeper into a digital and virtual and artificial-intelligence-mediated existence.
Catholicism has had little of note to say thus far about what it means to be Christian and human under these conditions or how Catholics should think morally and spiritually about their relationships to these technologies. But if Leo XIV reigns as long as Leo XIII did, no issue may be more important to the faithful — or the world.
Why should I care?
My fascination with the Pope (and his precedessors since John Paul II) has a couple of sources:
He is seen as the very Vicar of Christ by 1.4 billion of my separated brethren.
He is one of a handful of distilled symbols of Christianity for my countrymen. (The MAGA response confirms that MAGA hates any remotely authentic Christianity because there’s too little hate in it. “Men loved darkness rather than light” and all that.)
UPDATE: Therefore, the only way to be an inconsequential Pope is to die quickly after elevation.
What he cannot yet undo are barriers to healing the Great Schism, but Popes can undermine (and have undermined) those barriers so that they may someday collapse.
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
America continues divided into two groups. One thinks, “He is something that happened to us.” The tone is shocked, still, and bewildered: Did I live in this country all this time and not understand it? The other thinks, “He is something we did.” The tone is pride and, still, surprise: I didn’t know we could seize things back.
I’ve now listened to twopodcasts in which journalist Batya Ungar-Sargon defends Trump.
I don’t think she really believes it. Some verbal tics when challenged suggest she doesn’t really believe it (notably, her repeated retreats into “I’m just a journalist explaining why people like him” when that’s plainly false). I suspect she has just found a niche (Center-Left Journalist Becomes Ardent Trump Defender!) that gets attention.
But whether or not she believes it, most of it is gibberish, nonsense-on-stilts — and it ignores Trump’s norm-breaking, due process and other constitutional violations, focusing on the (supposed) policy goals which (refrain) 80% of voters want, so they’re entitled to it immediately.
Well no, they’re not necessarily entitled to it at all, let alone immediately. The Constitution of the United States is deliberately counter-majoritarian in several of its structural provisions (e.g., the Electoral College and the Senate) and even more of the Bill of Rights.
Even the “right” policy, if executed unconstitutionally, is wrong.
I’m resolved not to inflict Batya Ungar-Sargon on myself again. She’s a vexation to my soul. But I’m still waiting for a coherent defense of Trump. Surely I’m missing something.
Conservative critics of Trumpism
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about being a conservative critic of Trumpism is that you often start by agreeing with Trumpworld about ends while disagreeing about means.
This pleases nobody. The left, broadly speaking, considers the ends as illegitimate as the means, and the pro-Trump right thinks that if you’re against the means you really don’t desire the ends. I’m against the abuse of power, even for my own “side.”
When Amazon reportedly considered displaying the added cost of tariffs on the price of items, Trump was furious. Here’s what an official anonymously told CNN: “Of course he was pissed. Why should a multibillion-dollar company pass off costs to consumers?” Fascinating. This is like when socialists, during the pandemic inflation, were talking about how greedy grocery store owners were to let prices go up. This is so phenomenally economically illiterate. Their argument is that Amazon should absorb the cost of the tariffs? What they really want is for Amazon not to point the tariffs out.
So Trump called Jeff Bezos, perhaps threatening to use the full weight of the U.S. government to make his life miserable (though Trump later described him as a “good guy” and said that Bezos “solved the problem very quickly.”). Amazon then told CNN “this was never approved and [was] not going to happen.” Right. . . so we’re in a gangster government now. The White House will personally target you if you don’t comply with their harebrained schemes. That’s a nice logistics and web services company you got there, Jeff, would be a real shame if the U.S. government went after it. Even Jeff Bezos—a man who is flying ladies to space for fun—caved. Our gangster government means conservative values are whatever Trumpo says they are, capisce? And Trumpo says it’s tariffs—or your other option is to buy $MELANIA coin, do you hear me? [Knee digs deeper into neck.] Am I not being clear, Jeff? Do I gotta enunciate more, Jeff?
Speaking of gangsters, a new private club for MAGA has launched in D.C. It’s called Executive Branch, and the membership fee is $500,000. Well, do you want your corporate merger approved or not?
Of Trump’s TweetedTruthed declaration Sunday, declaring that foreign flicks are a National Security threat and authorizing institution of “a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.” (Since when do we tariff national security threats, by the way!?)
Hollywood and its foreign counterparts are “reeling” today from Sunday’s post, with studio executives reportedly convening emergency calls to plot a way forward financially. Billions of dollars and countless jobs here and abroad will turn on a random thought that the president had, one which he may or may not lift a finger to follow through on … We’re all living in a demented baby boomer’s endless nostalgia trip.
What you will not find in the [Secretary of Education Linda] McMahon letter [to Harvard] is any mention of the original justification for the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on elite universities: anti-Semitism. As a legal pretext for trying to financially hobble the Ivy League, anti-Semitism had some strategic merit. Many students and faculty justifiably feel that these schools failed to take harassment of Jews seriously enough during the protests that erupted after the October 7, 2023, terrorist attack on Israel by Hamas. By centering its critique on that issue, the administration was cannily appropriating for its own ends one of the progressive left’s highest priorities: protecting a minority from hostile acts.
Now, however, the mask is off. Aside from one oblique reference to congressional hearings about anti-Semitism (“the great work of Congresswoman Elise Stefanik”), the letter is silent on the subject. The administration is no longer pretending that it is standing up for Jewish students. The project has been revealed for what it is: an effort to punish liberal institutions for the crime of being liberal.
Were I not already leery of cryptocurrency as a scam, Trump’s creation of a même-coin on the cusp of his second term, and the way it’s being openly used to buy access to him (putting untold millions of actual U.S. dollars into his pockets), would have made me leery.
Another impeachable offense (foreign emoluments clause, for instance), but I’m pissing into the wind to note that.
Congress’ default
Congress is not doing its job, and the vacuum that its dereliction has created is encouraging presidential and judicial overreach. Congress’s weakness is our deepest constitutional problem, because it is not a function of one man’s whims and won’t pass with one administration’s term. It is an institutional dynamic that has disordered our politics for a generation. It results from choices that members of Congress have made, and only those members can improve the situation. It is hard to imagine any meaningful constitutional renewal in America unless they do.
…
[Newt] Gingrich advanced an almost-parliamentary model of the House of Representatives. He empowered the speaker and majority leader at the expense of the policy-focused committees, and set in motion a process that robbed most members of the opportunity for meaningful legislative work. His moves dramatically accelerated what was by then a 20-year trend toward the centralization of authority in the hands of congressional leaders. House leaders of both parties have pushed further in that direction in this century, and the Senate has largely followed suit. These efforts were intended to make Congress more effective, but in practice, they rendered most legislators almost irrelevant.
As a result, many ambitious members of Congress have concluded that their path to prominence must run not through policy expertise and bargaining in committees but through political performance art on social media and punditry on cable news. Our broader political culture has pushed in the same direction, encouraging performative partisanship. And the narrowing of congressional majorities has put a premium on party loyalty, further empowering leaders, and leaving many members wary of the cross-partisan bargaining that is the essence of legislative work.
…
In his first 100 days, Donald Trump signed only five bills into law—fewer than any other modern president. In a period rife with constitutional conflict in Washington, the first branch has done essentially nothing.
Since Levin wrote this, Congress has gotten on the stick by passing the vital bill to rename the Gulf of Mexico. Marjorie Taylor Greene led the charge. And if that’s not serious enough for you, you’re probably out of luck.
Excerpts from Sully
“The Trump admin was about to send a former POLICE OFFICER to be imprisoned in El Salvador without trial because an ICE officer looked at his social media and said his ‘hand gestures’ meant he was a gang member,” – Aaron Reichlin-Melnick.
“It is of interest to note that [the patient’s family] were all reassured to discover that George was not a homosexual. The diagnosis of ‘transexual’ provided an explanation for his feminine behavior and was, especially for the parents, psychologically relieving,” – a 1970 report on teen transition..
Sports stadiums, data servers, and other boondoggles
Writing in Reason, Marc Oestreich explores what data server farms and new sports stadiums have in common. “The recent announcement that Microsoft is investing over a billion dollars into a vast new data center campus in La Porte, [ Indiana], is expected to be transformational for the town of 22,000 people. Microsoft was given a 40-year tax abatement on equipment, a renewable state sales tax exemption through 2068, and just $2.5 million of payments in lieu of taxes (PILOT) over four years—roughly 30 percent of what it would normally owe. After that? Nothing. Local utilities would cover the infrastructure.” For Oestreich, this sounds familiar. “Just 60 miles up the toll road sits Soldier Field, home of the Chicago Bears. The stadium’s 2002 post-modern renovation cost $587 million, $387 million of which was shouldered by taxpayers. Two decades and two dozen quarterbacks later, Chicago only has $640 million (thanks to $256 million in interest) left to pay,” Oestreich writes. “Today’s stadium boondoggle is a server farm … The sales pitch is nearly identical to the stadium era: ‘It’ll create jobs. It’ll put us on the map. It’s worth the investment.’”
A friend drew my attention to a January 21, 2025 article in the New York Times. The topic was the Trump administration’s effort to limit the scope of birthright citizenship, the constitutional provision that accords citizenship to anyone born in the United States. The article’s title: “Undocumented Women Ask: Will My Unborn Child be a Citizen?” When the issue is abortion, the New York Times would never dream of referring to an “unborn child.” Apparently, that editorial discretion falls away when illegal immigration is under discussion.
We have seen some of the most grotesque costumes, along the line of the railroad, that can be imagined. I am glad that no possible combination of words could describe them, for I might then be foolish enough to attempt it.
Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
Regarding said “lot of stupid and terrible things,” my failure to call out anything about the current regime does not mean I approve. There’s just too much, and on some of the apparent illegalities I don’t want to abuse my credentials without thinking it through.
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.
But in this case, to understand is not to be reassured. There is a dictatorial theory behind Trump’s assertion that “He who saves his country breaks no law,” and it is limited only if he gets tired of declaring bogus emergencies (from which to “save America”) or declines to defy the courts.
[Leo] Strauss sets out a timeless moral standard of what is “intrinsically good or right” in normal situations as the just allocation of benefits and burdens in a society. But there are also “extreme situations” — those in which “the very existence or independence of a society is at stake.” In such situations, the normally valid rules of “natural right” are revealed to be changeable, permitting officeholders to do whatever is required to defend citizens against “possibly an absolutely unscrupulous and savage enemy.”
Who gets to determine “extreme situations?” Strauss answers that it is “the most competent and most conscientious statesman” who decides. The statesman must also identify foreign enemies as well as “subversive elements” at home.
In recent decades, presidents of both parties have used emergency declarations to enhance their freedom of action. Barack Obama declared a dozen emergencies during his eight years in office. Mr. Trump declared 13 in his first presidency, while Joe Biden declared 11.
In only the first few months of his second term, Mr. Trump has declared eight ….
Coincidentally, Paul Dans, muse of Project 2025 (and a misogynist abuser and demeaner), defends Trump’s actions as absolutely necessary to “save America” in the Economist a few days ago. His argument eerily reflects what Linker has identified, but as ipse dixit rather than as the realization of intellectual theories that have been floating around a while.
The fit between Dans’ propaganda and Linker’s explanation adds to my assurance that Linker has nailed it.
One brief thing I want to add here that I don’t explicitly spell out in the op-ed: What’s typically called unitary executive theory is primarily about the president asserting power over the executive branch in a vertical way. Trump’s claim to possess the power to hire and fire executive branch employees as he sees fit, like his denial of their independence from presidential will, can be described as applications of that theory, which has been around since (at least) the Reagan administration.
But Trump has also been seeking to elevate the executive branch over the legislative and judicial branches of the federal government. He’s done this by refusing to enforce the law banning TikTok (which was passed by Congress, signed into law by Joe Biden, and deemed constitutional by a 9-0 Supreme Court decision), by claiming the power to impound congressionally appropriated funds, by defying judicial rules and expressing contempt for federal judges and courts, including when it comes to permitting due process to noncitizens marked for deportation. All of that can be described as a horizontal assertion of power that denies the doctrine of separate co-equal branches of government in favor of executive supremacy. (I’m relying here on a distinction drawn by Jack Goldsmith in his interview with Ross Douthat. I wrote about that interview in a post I published a couple of weeks ago.)
It’s primarily in the latter assertions of power that the tradition I’m writing about in today’s op-ed comes into play. The people I highlight genuinely believe that politics at its peak involves great statesmen looking out at the world, sizing up the situation (often deemed an emergency requiring decisive action), and making singular, unimpeded life-and-death decisions about what it will take to preserve the polity against an existential threat. That’s a justification for absolute executive governance.
I’ve been quoting Jonah Goldberg in my footer for a few months now, but never has it been more apt:
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
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.
JD Vance, it seems, is responsible for the death of Pope Francis. In this case, I believe that to the victor should go the spoils, and Vance should be the next Roman pontiff. The circumstantial evidence is beyond doubt: Vance and Pope Francis had a public disagreement over the concept of ordo amoris, and then the pope died shortly after they met for the first time. There are no coincidences. This isn’t even without precedent: Pope Sergius III (allegedly) killed his two predecessors Pope Leo V and Antipope Christopher. Don’t we want a return to tradition? The tradcath convert Vance could take the name Sergius, and then even have one of his sons installed after him, just like his namesake. Besides, there’s nothing in the Constitution that says the vice president can’t also be the pope. Maybe in a few years Pope JD can also be President JD. This would also be very traditional and return secular power to the papacy, and I look forward to a return of Renaissance-era political intrigue in the Vatican. (Virginia Aabram)
…
David Bentley Hart’s election as pope would give the Church a leader who is sure of his own infallibility. As a dogmatic Catholic, I would welcome such a development. I would also be glad to have a pope with a first-class theological mind, a due appreciation for Robert Louis Stevenson, and a desire to heal the schism between East and West. There is of course a risk that Hart would seek to suppress people with my conservative theological views. But I believe that his doctrinal chief, Roland, would help to ensure a just and liberal policy. If Hart concludes that he must refuse the burdens of the papal office, I could reconcile myself to the election of Cardinal Sarah. (Matthew Schmitz)
I was doing some computer housekeeping Thursday and came across this. It reminded me of one of the weirdest things I ever heard a fringe Christian say: “It would have been perverted if Mary and Joseph didn’t have sex after Jesus was born!”
For those who think it’s obvious that Joseph and Mary had normal marital relations, and younger brothers and sisters of Jesus, because the scriptures refer to his “brothers”:
When you say that they were his brothers, do you mean that they had the same parents?
If so, are you saying that Joseph was Jesus’ father?
If Joseph was not Jesus father, then wouldn’t any brothers spoken of in scripture be half-brothers?
Have you ever considered the possibility that Joseph and Mary were not teenagers in love, but that Joseph was an older man, a widower, with children by a prior marriage?
Did you know that this is the tradition of the orthodox church? (I believe it is the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church that the brothers and sisters were more like cousins.)
If the Orthodox church is right, then the brothers referred to are older stepbrothers, right?
Is it any stranger calling stepbrothers “brothers” then it is calling half-brothers “brothers”?
If not, and since Christians believe that Joseph was not Jesus father, but rather that Jesus was conceived of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, why not just accept that they were stepbrothers?
Considering the times when Jesus brothers tried to stage a sort of intervention, wouldn’t it make sense that they were older stepbrothers, rather than younger siblings?
Does it bother you at all that all of the protestant reformers believe that Mary remain a virgin, the rest of her life, after giving birth to Jesus as a virgin?
Transhumanism: Christianity without all those God parts
The Silicon Valley agenda, the transhumanist agenda, is extremely utopian, and actually very religious. I think it’s like if you took the Christian religion — which they’re all sort of steeped in because they’re in America — and you take out the actual bits about God and Jesus and things, you’re left with a desire for transcendence and utopia and life after death, living forever and universal justice — all of which are sort of Christian notions — and so they’ve decided they’re going to build those themselves.
We seem to be entering a pagan century. It’s not only Trump. It’s the whole phalanx of authoritarians, all those greatness-obsessed macho men like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. It’s the tech bros. It’s Christian nationalism, which is paganism with worship music. (If you ever doubt the seductive power of paganism, remember it has conquered many of the churches that were explicitly founded to reject it.)
… Christianity is built on a series of inversions that make paganism look pompous and soulless: Blessed are the meek. Blessed are the poor in spirit. The last shall be first. The poor are closer to God than the rich. Jesus was perpetually performing outrageous acts of radical generosity, without calculating the cost.
Brooks’ impression will be hard to vindicate if we continue with our “religious revival,” so very much of which is crypto-pagan.
Ordinary
You have permission to be ordinary. To live a quiet life. To go for a walk without turning it into content. To do good work without chasing viral. To be present with your people instead of always ‘building something.’ Your life doesn’t have to be optimized to be meaningful. The Ordinary creates space for what truly matters.
Weep If you can, Weep, But do not complain. The way chose you – And you must be thankful.
(Dag Hammarskjold)
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
There aren’t many original insights or approaches to political topics, but there are a few. I commend to you David Brooks, Trump’s Single Stroke of Brilliance. (Shared link)
I’ll single out what most grabbed my attention.
Of Trump:
He is not a learned man, but he is a spirited man, an assertive man. The ancient Greeks would say he possesses a torrential thumos, a burning core of anger, a lust for recognition. All his life, he has moved forward with new projects and attempted new conquests, despite repeated failures and bankruptcies that would have humbled a nonnarcissist.
Of his adversaries:
The people who succeeded in the current meritocracy tend not to be spirited in the way Trump is spirited. The system weeds such people out and rewards those who can compliantly jump through the hoops their elders have put in front of them.
Members of the educated elite (guilty!) tend to operate by analysis, not instinct, which renders them slow-footed in comparison with the Trumps of the world …
Fatally, America now has an establishment that is ambivalent about being an establishment. Back in the day, those WASP blue bloods like Roosevelt were utterly confident in their right to rule, utterly confident they could handle whatever the future might throw at them. But since the 1960s, successive generations, raised on everything from Woodstock to hip-hop, have been taught that the establishment is bad. They have been taught, in the words of those famous Apple commercials, to celebrate “the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels.”
When those people grew up and became the establishment — holding senior posts in law, government, universities, media, nonprofits and boardrooms — they became the kind of ambivalent souls who are unwilling to take their own side in a fight. They refuse to accept the fact that every society has a leadership class and that if you find yourself in it, your primary job is to defend its institutions, like the Constitution, objective journalism and scientific research centers, when the big bad wolf comes to blow it all down.
Lots of food for thought. I fear the contrast between Trump and the meritocracy is accurate and that it bodes ill for us.
Man of Destiny
There’s a tendency, sometimes very explicit, to see Donald Trump as a world-historical figure, especially after last summer’s failed assassination attempt. Trump even alludes to his own changed self-perception.
But why should that man-of-destiny sense assume that the destiny is good, not merely consequential?
If you see the hand of Providence operating through George Washington and John Adams in the founding of America, you could see the hand of Providence operating through Donald Trump in the chastisement of America – that Trump is a great man of history whose role is to chastise the liberal intelligentsia, and the never-Trumpers, and all these groups that failed to govern America, but it doesn’t mean at the end of the day that he’s actually saving America. Sometimes it’s just a chastisement.
I feel like that possibility deserves more consideration from the people that have this kind of mystical reaction to the drama of the Trump era.
Ross Douthat, interviewing rightwing figure Jonathan Keeperman. (It was a very lively conversation; Keeperman’s no fool.)
I have felt, and said, that two of the past three Presidential elections “had the judgment of God” written all over it,” so it should come as no surprise that I felt more than a little kinship with Ross over his observation.
Americans Don’t Do This
I have a pretty high tolerance for student protests, even as the outrageous cost of college has turned many of them into exercises in bourgeois decadence. But the Columbia protests have been different from past campus uprisings in several stark ways. They have exposed the whole “belonging” and “inclusion” system of handling offensive speech as fraudulent. The amount of intimidation and harassment experienced by Jewish students over the past year and a half should have been more than enough to alert that particular cavalry, but Jewish students turn out to belong to the only religious minority unprotected by it. (A regular talking point to emerge from last year’s encampment was that no Jewish students at the university had reason to feel harassed or intimidated by the protests, an assertion that was at best ignorant and at worst sinister.)
And yet despite my strongly held feelings about these matters, when I learned that Mahmoud Khalil had been arrested in the lobby of his New York apartment building, handcuffed, folded into an unmarked vehicle by men who would not give their names, and transported first to a facility in New York, then to a detention center in New Jersey, and then to one in Louisiana, every siren in my body screamed.
Down to the marrow of my bones, I am an American. And we don’t do this.
Everything that has failed in American universities has failed because of the opposition to freedom of expression.
On January 28, Donald Trump issued one of his innumerable executive orders, provocatively Titled Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation, providing among other things that “within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) shall publish a review of the existing literature on best practices for promoting the health of children who assert gender dysphoria, rapid-onset gender dysphoria, or other identity-based confusion.”
I heartily approve of this mandate for a review of existing literature on best practices. I disapprove of the President announcing his conclusions (with which i substantially agree, but I’m just some guy, not POTUS) before the reviews. That’s not the way it should be done and it provides instant fodder for undermining the report that arrived on Thursday.
I trust nobody on the transing-of-teens issue more than I trust Jesse Singal, who got an advance copy of the report and summarized his admiration, including of the high-caliber authors (officially undisclosed for now). Singal is, or at least was very recently, a man of the fairly hard left, but intellectually honest. That he’s broken with his tribe on this issue, and has published extensively on it, is reassuring, as I’m not so keen about topic this to read 409 pages myself.
Be careful what you wish for
I think I keep wallowing in the news because I’m still trying to get my head around what it means that my frequently expressed wish has been fulfilled.
That frequently expressed wish was that America could become just a regular country again and stop trying to be a crypto-imperial power. Like the jokes about genies who fulfill wishes painfully literally, too little did I appreciate what a tawdry and corrupt thing a regular country could be.
I guess I somehow thought we could be “regular” and “exceptional” at the same time. So very American of me.
If you think this is a plausible idea, you have a different experience with federal regulations or Artificial Intelligence than I do.
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
Regarding said “lot of stupid and terrible things,” my failure to call out anything about the current regime does not mean I approve. There’s just too much, and on some of the apparent illegalities I don’t want to abuse my credentials without thinking it through.
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.
In the Orthodox Churches they preserve that pristine liturgy. So beautiful. We have lost a bit the sense of adoration. They preserve it. They praise God, they adore God, singing. Time stops. The center is God. . . . Once, speaking about the western Church, of western Europe, above all the grown-up Church, they told me this phrase: Lux ex oriente, ex occidente luxus. [“Light comes from the East, luxury from the West.”] Consumerism, well-being, have done much harm. Instead, you preserve this beauty of God at the center, the point of reference. When reading Dostoyevsky, I believe that for all of us he must be an author to read and reread, because he has wisdom. One perceives the Russian soul, the Eastern soul. It is something that will do us all good. We need this renewal, this fresh air from the East, of this light from the Orient. . . . Too often, the luxus of the West causes us to lose the horizon. I don’t know. This is what I’m moved to say.
During the first millennium, the universal communion of the Churches in the ordinary course of events was maintained through fraternal relations between the bishops.
The bishop of Rome did not exercise canonical authority over the churches of the East.
These are important concessions by a Pope. Much more remains to be done to heal the Great Schism. Meanwhile, against my initial gut reaction, I now pray for the soul of God’s servant, Francis.
The worst of all possible Christian worlds
Not everyone feels as kindly toward Francis as does Michael Warren Davis:
Francis was thus my own worst Protestant nightmare: an authoritarian Roman pope driving a liberal Protestant agenda, a leader who embodied the worst of all possible Christian worlds.
Time will tell whether the next pope will follow in Francis’s footstep and permit the continuation of liberal Protestant policies. It’s up to the men who will be gathering in the Sistine Chapel in the coming weeks. As a Catholic friend once said to me about the last papal election, the Holy Spirit never errs. But, he added, the same cannot be said for the College of Cardinals.
I’m not claiming to be a good Catholic. I’m far from it. I’m a terrible one in many ways. I honestly, sincerely believe the church is wrong in some — but by no means all — of its teachings on sexuality. Lust has undoubtedly mastered me at times the way it has many men, and always will. But I also know my soul has far deeper problems than my love for other men, however muddied with desire; and that the world has lost its way so much more profoundly in other parts of life: in our materialism, our selfishness, our wealth and comfort, our smugness and distraction, and our abuse of our sacred planet.
The italicized portion of the block-quote bespeaks a genuine Christian faith, and I don’t have to agree with the rest to view it so.
A bitter pill
for every advance, there was an asterisk, and for every proclamation of love, a delineation of limits, so that Francis — who died on Monday at the age of 88 — personified the indelible tension in the church’s official teaching about homosexuality, which he never squarely renounced. That teaching holds that being gay isn’t a sin but that acting on those feelings is “intrinsically disordered.”
That’s tough to get your head around in the abstract. It’s even more difficult if you’ve spent much time in the church and with its clergy ….
I’ve never seen how Rome’s position is all that tough to get your head around. “A bitter pill to swallow” is what I think Bruni may intend.
Be it remembered
What’s church good for?
[O]ur religious institutions are most important not for reasons of civic utility, such as running soup kitchens or cleaning up after natural disasters. No, their highest function is offering us access to the fullest truth about our world.
Yuval Levin via Joshua T. Katz. I encountered this quote for the first time this week, and I love it because it defies every effort to instrumentalize Church (or Synagogue, as in Levin’s case, or Mosque).
God does not have an anger problem
It is sinful to ascribe to God the characteristic features of fallen man by alleging, for example, that God is angry and vengeful, and therefore He must be propitiated and appeased. Such an attitude wants to make it appear that it is God Who needs curing, and not man. But this is sacrilegious. The sinful man, who is characterized by egoism and arrogance, is offended. We cannot say that God is offended. . . . Consequently, sin is not an insult to God, Who must be cured, but our own illness, and therefore we need to be cured
Dr. Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox
That’s not necessarily a mike-drop observation. We have an overabundance of Gramscians trying to march through our institutions these days, but few who are Gramscian as part of an explicitly “religious” movement.
Orthodox hagiographies are full of Saints who had to be dragged kicking and screaming (as it were) to accept ordination to the Priesthood, or elevation to a Bishopric. I’ll drive my stake in the ground here: A Christian may legitimatly be led to office, but hunger for power over others is anti-Christian.
An old truth that we keep forgetting
Reason is an absolute—all is in ruins. Yet those who ask me to believe this world picture also ask me to believe that Reason is simply the unforeseen and unintended by-product of mindless matter at one stage of its endless and aimless becoming. Here is flat contradiction. They ask me at the same moment to accept a conclusion and to discredit the only testimony on which that conclusion can be based. The difficulty is to me a fatal one; and the fact that when you put it to many scientists, far from having an answer, they seem not even to understand what the difficulty is, assures me that I have not found a mare’s nest but detected a radical disease in their whole mode of thought from the very beginning.
C.S. Lewis, Weight of Glory
A surprising possibility
What’s driving young people to Christianity? In UnHerd, Niall Gooch argued the answer may lie in the strict moral demands of modern secularism. “At its best, Christianity is not a moralistic religion — in other words, it does not place the expectation of perfect behaviour at its core. It is repentance and reconciliation, not respectability, that are central to the internal logic of the faith. The Christian moral system is also coherent and predictable,” he wrote. “Modern secular morality, by contrast, is extremely censorious and has a strongly arbitrary element, as we have seen in the last decade or so of ‘cancel culture.’ People have been subjected to storms of anonymous criticism, resulting in lost jobs and lost livelihoods, with no clear limiting principle and no real interest in proportionality. To make matters worse, this is all highly impersonal and offers no clear pathway for restoration and forgiveness.”
To call the unknown “random” is to plant the flag by which to colonize and exploit the known. . . . To call the unknown by its right name, “mystery,” is to suggest that we had better respect the possibility of a larger, unseen pattern that can be damaged or destroyed and, with it, the smaller patterns. . . . But if we are up against mystery, then knowledge is relatively small, and the ancient program is the right one: Act on the basis of ignorance.
Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter , The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
I don’t know about your Inbox, but mine tends to fill up especially on Friday. So I’m posting this now rather than in the wee hours tomorrow.
Trump 2.0
I haven’t been able to eliminate sharp criticism of Trump from today’s post because there are too many issues and I’ve read too much that isn’t just “same old same old.” As has become my habit, I’ve posted most of my anti-Trump stuff here.
United States law allows for a quite expedited process to remove people from the country, to deport them. You don’t get a big trial. You don’t get a jury trial. You are moved rapidly because the theory of the case is: First, you don’t have a right to immigrate to the United States, so you have not been deprived of your rights. And secondly, once you’re removed from the United States, you remain a free person. You are sent back to the place you came from or some other place to which you have some connection, and then you’re free to go about your business. You’re not sent to a prison—not sent to a prison for life.
But as I talk about this, the thing that has most gripped my mind with worry and anxiety is not only the effect on the individuals themselves, some of whom may be genuinely innocent, but the effect on those who are sending human beings to a prison without a hearing.
You know, the United States government is now building an apparatus of lawyers, of officials of all kinds, who plan and think every day, How can we apprehend people on American soil and bundle them to a prison without giving them any show of a hearing? They’re building skills and competencies at non-due-process forms of arrest and incarceration that are going to be very hard to limit.
… I remember when I was a Canadian citizen in the United States on a student visa, we were warned if you got into a bar fight, you could theoretically lose your student visa. Now, in those days, that meant that you’d have to go back to Canada and go to school in Canada, which is not the end of the world. In today’s America, that could mean you could lose your student visa and be accused of terrorism, and a bag put over your head and be put into a car and sent to a prison in El Salvador for the rest of your life.
Now, maybe that doesn’t happen in every case. Maybe that doesn’t happen in many cases. But there are people in the employ of the United States government, paid by taxpayers to think about how can we daily broaden the category of people who can be arrested and detained and imprisoned without any showing to any authority at all, without any opportunity to make themselves heard, without any evaluation by an independent fact finder—by any of the things we call due process.
David Frum, introducing a terrific conversation about The Crisis of Due Process with Peter Keisler. (bold added)
Do we really believe in free speech?
Trump 2.0 has been deporting foreign students and others for constitutionally protected speech, using as its current go-to bad-faith excuse that the speech is antisemitic.
The late British-American journalist Christopher Hitchens is a more recent testament to the long tolerance of America toward foreign dissent. Before becoming a U.S. citizen in 2007, Hitchens spent decades as a legal resident—and as one of America’s most acerbic public intellectuals. He accused Ronald Reagan of being “a liar and trickster,” called Israel America’s “chosen surrogate” for “dirty work” and “terrorism,” lambasted Bill Clinton as “almost psychopathically deceitful,” and accused the George W. Bush administration of torture and illegal surveillance. If a student can be deported for writing a campus op-ed critical of Israel, any of Hitchens’ views could have been used to justify deporting him.
This isn’t how our system is supposed to work. When a president does the kinds of things Donald Trump is doing, his popularity should sink so low that Congress will feel empowered to stand up to him. Ideally, they would impeach and remove him from office for attempting to govern like an absolute monarch. Short of that, Congress and the courts would be working in tandem to impose and enforce constraints on the wayward executive until the next election strengthens their hand against him.
But none of this is happening—because our system has broken down. The parties are ideologically sorted, with almost no remaining overlap. And Trump has transformed the GOP into a cult of personality more loyal to him personally than to the Republican Party, the other institutions of American democracy, the law, or the Constitution.
In a situation like this, the only thing preventing the president from transforming himself into a tyrant is his own willingness to do it. The courts can tell him to stop. But will he? If he does, democracy survives, at least for the time being. If he doesn’t, democracy is over, at least until it can be reconstituted at some point in the future.
One should never hope to live through a moment of great political precarity like our own. But one tiny compensation is that such moments bring clarity about certain fundamental matters. How has the United States managed to survive for nearly 250 years without evolving into a dictatorship? The answer really may be this simple: By never electing a man willing to do what it takes to effectuate the change.
It’s not clear that the courts will suffice, but the courts — having already, and deservedly, come to treat the Administration as bad-faith, untrustworthy actors — will provide partial deterrence and may help sway public opinion by the cogency (and sometimes, the tartness) of their reasoning.
[I]f you want a really extraordinary example of that, you would look at the order that the Court issued at 1 a.m. on Saturday morning this last weekend, because even though they had held that everybody has to be given meaningful notice before they could be removed in this way, there was credible evidence that the administration was loading people onto buses without giving them anything like the notice that was required. And the ACLU went to the Supreme Court and said, you know, Please, as you listen to the rest of this case and get briefing, stop this from happening.
And if the administration were a normal administration and had compiled a record so far of being a normal administration, the Court would’ve said, Well, I can be confident they’re not going to do this while we are hearing your petition, so let’s give the government a chance to respond. Let’s see what they say, and then we’ll decide what to do. Because, of course, the government wouldn’t spirit these people away while we are actually in the process of deciding whether it can do so on this emergency application you filed. But they knew that the government had done exactly that with the first 200 or so people they had sent away.
The case was before a district judge, and they rushed to secretly get the people out before he could issue an order. And they didn’t quite succeed on that, which is why you have these issues of contempt floating around now. But at 1 a.m., the Court by a 7–2 vote said, Don’t remove anybody in the class represented by these lawyers until you hear otherwise from us.
And that shows that there is a cost to the administration of acting the way it’s acting towards the courts, because if you squander the reputation that governments of both parties have had for credibility and fair dealing and honest brokering with the Court, then they’re going to treat you different because they know they can’t quite trust you.
The barstool right, which is a genuinely new constituency made up of hedonistic anti-woke libertarians that has replaced the Christian conservatives
The neo-conservative foreign policy hawks, who are the weakest member of the coalition, but can still get what they want on certain issues, as seen with the attacks on the Houthis as well as the saber rattling regarding Greenland
In other words, the Christian influence on actual Republican policy items and their political vision is going to be exceedingly negligible going forward. Sure, Vice President Vance will make an appearance at the March for Life. President Trump will show up to the National Prayer Breakfast. But even when he does acknowledge a Christian event, it often will come loaded with hatred and vile self-aggrandizement, as seen yesterday:
And ultimately when push comes to shove on the policy level, Christian concerns will always be backgrounded or eliminated relative to the priorities of the three above groups, as we have already seen on abortion, marriage, and PEPFAR.
I originally thought to post this on a Sunday, when my focus is narrower, but it didn’t fit there because I don’t value “religion” for its instrumental partisan-political value.
It was a very few years ago when I warned (as had others) “If you don’t like the Religious Right, just wait ‘till you see the irreligious Right.” Well you’ve been seeing them in power for three months now.
Beta-testing tyranny in the Sunshine State
Ron DeSantis walked so that Donald Trump could run. When the time came to formulate a policy response to the woke left, no one mattered more than the governor of Florida.
And through it all, DeSantis declared that Florida was the place where “woke goes to die.”
In his second term, Trump is a scaled-up version of DeSantis. Every element of the DeSantis model has been deployed against Trump’s ideological enemies …
…
At first I was optimistic about the anti-woke right. Their free speech argument resonated with me. I’d spent decades litigating free speech cases, after all, and I’d never really seen anything like a mass movement for free expression.
But my optimism quickly faded. In 2021, the anti-woke right embraced a series of state laws that were designed to ban critical race theory. Rather than meet critical race theorists in the marketplace of ideas, the right chose to try to suppress their expression.
By this time I was familiar with the right’s authoritarian turn — and getting very worried about it. In 2019, parts of the intellectual right were consumed with a fight over liberalism itself, with the new right arguing that liberal values — freedom of speech and free trade, for example — were hollowing out American culture, creating a nation of atomized individuals who were consumed with self-actualization (and consumption itself) at the expense of family and community.
Ironically, the left, now alarmed by the federal government’s intrusive reach [into, say, Harvard], bears direct responsibility for crafting the very legal weapons wielded against the universities it dominates. Almost four decades ago, progressive legislators demanded sweeping amendments to civil rights law, expanding federal oversight over higher education. The sequence of events reveals a cautionary tale of political hubris: progressive confidence that state power would reliably serve their ends overlooked the reality that governmental authority, once unleashed, recognizes no ideological master. Today’s circumstances starkly illustrate how expansive federal control over civil society, originally celebrated by progressives, returns to haunt its architects. The left’s outrage ought to focus not on this particular administration but on its own reckless empowerment of the state.
Yet for all its courage, Harvard’s response stopped short of making the argument that would best protect the values for which it was fighting. It defended the university’s independence without explaining why that independence deserves protection. It invoked values like “pluralism” and “inquiry,” but it did not fully explain why those values are essential to a liberal democratic society. The letter therefore missed an opportunity to articulate what a university is for — not just to students or donors, but to the country. And this matters, because Trump’s attack against this and other universities is not only about the balance of power between universities and the government. It is, at bottom, about the legitimacy of higher education as a public good.
The danger of being a professional exposer of the bogus is that, encountering it so often, one may come in time to cease to believe in the reality it counterfeits.
Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”
Regarding said “lot of stupid and terrible things,” my failure to call out anything about the current regime does not mean I approve. There’s just too much, and on some of the apparent illegalities I don’t want to abuse my credentials without thinking it through.
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.
