Having dated other blogs according to the Christian calendar, it seems only fair to date one according to the Consumerist calendar. I’m debating whether next June I should date things Pride 1, Pride 2, etc.
Okay, the debate’s over: I’ll do that only if I can figure out how to make it clear that I’m being a sarcastic dissenter.
Public affairs
Toward a better understanding of MAGA America
I’ve been trying to understand Trumpworld since Trump started winning GOP primaries in 2016. Really I have. I don’t want to think that almost 50% of this country just raised a middle finger in November 2016 and said “Just watch us blow up your precious nation!”
It has been slow going, but I have made some progress. First was remembering that the alternative was HRC, and that most Americans can’t bear the thought of voting other than for a major party. Second, was appreciating the legitimacy of some of Trumpworld’s grievances, which appreciation began in the run-up to the 2016 election as I left the main highway in eastern Ohio and found Trump signs everywhere in the sorry little town where I re-fueled.
But why Donald Trump felt like the solution to those grievances has eluded me — at least until late last week.
I won’t even try to capture the essence of David French’s The Rage and Joy of MAGA America, published Thursday. It’s David French at his best, as he writes from his home county, just 15% Democrat.
If you want to go deeper into the mindset of what 7 years ago proved to be an electoral majority of your countrymen, I urge you to read it, carefully and sympathetically, bearing in mind the categorical contempt felt toward “flyover country” by our national elites. The link I’ve provided should get you to it even if you’re not a New York Times subscriber.
But Paul A. Djupe in We Should Probably Stop Thinking Religion is a Solution to MAGA specifically faults any implication that MAGA evangelicals would be less MAGA if they attended church more regularly.
Parenthetical
Nick Cattogio feels his own kind of “joy” less by understanding Trump sellouts — the public-figure Never Trumpers who folded for a bit of power — than by something more primal:
The dirty little secret about being an anti-Trump conservative is that it too is often joyous.
In this case the joy derives not from belonging but from not belonging. Many times I’ve heard Jonah Goldberg say on The Remnant how his position on Trump has cost him friendships on the right, and I always sympathize—but cannot empathize. My contempt for those who traded their commitment to classical liberalism to protect their status within a Trumpifying right is so boundless that I’ve never stopped feeling grateful to be rid of them. If ever I should return to their good graces somehow, they’ll discover that they haven’t returned to mine.
It’s an almost spiritual pleasure to find yourself surrounded by people without dignity and to know that you don’t belong.
The other joy of opposing Trump from the right is the satisfaction one gets from speaking one’s mind when others fear speaking their own. The happiest character in literature must be the boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes who shouted the truth about the sovereign’s attire as the adults around him bit their tongues and kept up a silly pretense so as not to cause themselves trouble.
The emperor wasn’t wearing any clothes. Trump is a criminal reprobate who’s morally and intellectually unfit to wield any sort of power. These are simple truths, acknowledged privately by all but the most devout loyalists. But to say them aloud, in public, when others don’t dare is liberating in a way that’s difficult to describe. If you know, you know. Dispatch readers know.
Chris Christie, very much a latecomer to the practice, knows too.
About saying the truth out loud, see Orange Man Bad in my July 7 post. Want to wager whether Cattogio read that?
Now, though the writing is entertaining, I am conscience-bound to note that the “almost spiritual pleasure” of “find[ing] yourself surrounded by people without dignity and [knowing] that you don’t belong” has a name, Pharisaism, and a “spiritual” pedigree of the diabolical sort. I can only hope Cattagio is exercising artistic license.
Deep-state BlackOps
In The Bourne Supremacy all a journalist had to do is say “Blackbriar” into a cell phone and minutes later, vans full of hyper-efficient assassins scrambled to snatch him up. Jack Bauer could not only direct phone taps and hack security cameras with a few keystrokes on his Blackberry, he could weave through miles of LA traffic in a few minutes. When he calls various government agencies, including after hours, he always gets them on the phone and not some, “Our offices are currently closed. Press 1 for English” message.
That’s all fine for escapist fare. But if you think real life works remotely like that, your assumptions about a lot of politics are going to be really stupid and maybe dangerous.
Jonah Goldberg, who 13 years ago imprudently asked “Why isn’t Julian Assange dead?” — his point being that our BlackOps aren’t as omnipotent as the Left thought.
Now he’s asking a different question, and asking it of a different delusional demographic:
No, the reason I’m going down memory lane is I want to ask a similar question: Why hasn’t the deep state gotten rid of Donald Trump yet? … If the deep state were remotely as powerful, wicked, and skilled as many claim, why let Trump live?
It’s a fair question, with a lot more colorful detail than I’m quoting.
Which brings me to the second problem: A lot of idiots and unwell people don’t realize that a lot of the deep state stuff is a grift. Devin Nunes used to sell deep state collectibles. There are no end of books claiming to expose the deep state and the cabal running our country. Here’s the description of The Deep State Encyclopedia: Exposing the Cabal’s Playbook:
Our country is being attacked from within. The past several years showed us that the shadow government seeks to assert absolute control over the human cattle, but what if we could stop them? What if we could take away the cabal’s power by exposing their entire playbook?
If this was their playbook, it wouldn’t be on Amazon.
And the pseudonymous author, “Grace Reallygraceful,” would be dead, too.
Tribal identity, fluid identity
In Hungarian, the word for their country is “Magyarország” — Land of the Magyars. Russia, in the Hungarian language, is “Oroszország” — Land of the Russians. Unlike the USA, where identity is fluid and contractual, these nations are tribes with flags. In Hungary, for example, they were occupied for 150 years by the Ottoman Empire, which, as you know, was Islamic. These things matter to them — and who are we Americans to say it shouldn’t? … I feel at home here in Hungary, in most respects, as I would in any other country of Europe. But whatever my migration status, I will never allow myself to think of myself as European, because that’s just not how it works. We Americans tend to assume that our openness and fluidity of identity is a natural stance. In fact, we are far outliers on national experience around the world.
Rod Dreher, who has some other worthwhile comments on immigration as well. I am encouraged. Rod has been far too often unreadable for a long time now.
NATO
Oh, my! The Nato mindset leads to war pulls a lot of threads together, and it doesn’t make me like post-cold war NATO any better than I did before. That it is purely defensive and that Russia therefore had nothing to fear from its expansion is a tale told by liars and believed by amnesiacs.
Conservatives today
If conservatism is support of the status quo, then the Democrat Party is today’s conservative party. So argues David Graham.
Homefront
We’ve had a run of cool days, and particularly of cool mornings. I’ve enjoyed sitting in my east-facing sunroom with windows open, sun streaming in, and I have been surprised how quiet my neighborhood is in the morning.
Not today, though. The sound of heavy equipment engines has begun. They are swarming my neighborhood for the next few days (or weeks) with those mechanical monsters that eat up the top few inches of pavement to permit new pavement to be laid without raising the street too high. Then we’ll get some shiny new asphalt. It will, no doubt, look very spiffy.
I have said, and probably have written, before, that I have the good fortune of living in a place that can still afford to repair its infrastructure. But I question why they are repairing in my neighborhood, and I’m not questioning just because I don’t like the noise.
I’m questioning because our streets have no potholes, cracks, irregularities, or other compelling reasons for repair. What they do have is a lot of fading and some tar strips running like spider veins where small cracks have been repaired over the years.
I’ve driven in enough neighborhoods to know that ours are not the city’s worst streets. But we are a wealthy neighborhood, and I suppose that explains much more than I wish it did.
(If I were king of the world, they’d be narrowing the streets by half and repairing the sidewalks. It would still be about as unpleasant to walk as Tokyo, but it would be a step in the right direction.)
Legalia
Consequentialism in jurisprudence
One of the really knotty problems with our public debates is that we often are having two or three debates at the same time, and it is easy to get confused about which question is actually in dispute at any given moment.
Take, for example, the recent debate about racial preferences in college admissions: The question before the Supreme Court was only a legal one—not that you’d know it from the campaign-style rhetoric of Ketanji Brown Jackson or Sonia Sotomayor!—to wit, whether the law permits what Harvard and the University of North Carolina were doing, or whether that amounted to unlawful racial discrimination. The majority of the Supreme Court rightly found that this racial discrimination was unlawful. A second question—an unrelated question from the point of view of a Supreme Court justice who is actually doing his or her job instead of trying to act as an unelected legislator—is whether racial-preference policies such as those that had been implemented at Harvard are good policies. A third question—never quite explicitly discussed—has to do with “legal consequentialism,” the notion (which has official legal standing in some countries, such as Brazil) that legal questions per se should be made subordinate to utilitarian calculation. As the Brazilian statute puts it, “a decision shall not be made based on abstract legal values without considering the practical consequences of the decision.”
Kevin D. Williamson
Qualified Immunity hits a wall — finally
Seventeen-year-old student is required to participate in police ride-along for a class, and the Hammond, Ind. officer she shadows spends the day groping her, making lewd remarks, and even taking her to a remote location where he offers her to another officer for sex. Officer: This mere “boorish flirtation” was just “making for an exciting ride along.” District court: Qualified immunity. Seventh Circuit: Reversed. “Sexual assault is an intentional act that never serves a legitimate governmental purpose.”
Short Circuit: A Roundup of Recent Federal Court Decisions.
It’s actually a bit surprising, not to mention heartening, that the 7th Circuit reversed this. “Qualified immunity” has become the monster that devoured 42 USC §1983 (the post-Civil War law that gives a remedy for deprivation of rights under color of law).
More:
It is obviously unreasonable for an off-duty, out-of-uniform police officer to lose his temper on the road, follow another motorist home, box him in his driveway, scream profanities, and point a gun at him when the other motorist is nonthreatening. So says the Tenth Circuit, reversing a grant of qualified immunity to a (now-former) Chaves County, N.M. sheriff’s deputy. Claims against the county, which hired him in spite of his history of volatile behavior, are on the table, too.
Purging an evil
A District of Columbia-based disciplinary panel has recommended Rudy Giuliani be disbarred for his “frivolous” efforts on behalf of then-President Donald Trump to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
The committee, an arm of the District of Columbia Bar, found in a report released on Friday that Giuliani had undermined trust in federal elections by directing Trump’s legal challenge to the presidential vote count in Pennsylvania and promoting unfounded theories of fraud in court.
“He claimed massive election fraud but had no evidence of it,” the committee wrote. “By prosecuting that destructive case Mr. Giuliani, a sworn officer of the Court, forfeited his right to practice law.”
Wall Street Journal
Culture
AI wins where people have been deskilled
My present thesis is something like this: The claim or fear that AI will displace human beings becomes plausible to the degree that we have already been complicit in a deep deskilling that has unfolded over the last few generations. Or, to put it another way, it is easier to imagine that we are replaceable when we have already outsourced many of our core human competencies.
L.M. Sacasas, Render Unto the Machine. This is an idea I keep running into. It was a thread through Matthew B. Crawford’s Why We Drive
Wordplay
1
trying to ride a bicycle in zero gravity
Sven R. Larson This seems to be a more refined version of “nailing jello to the wall” or even my father’s favorite, “goosing butterflies.” I assume the metaphor hitch-hikes on the further metaphor of “getting no traction” (in an argument, in this case).
2
As ever more laity, especially young people, seek out the ancient liturgy of the Church, the Eye of Sauron in Rome has turned towards these congregations …
Sebastian Morello, The Tragedy of the Sarum Rite (The European Conservative)
3
[T]he difference between being gay and being black is that if you’re black you don’t have to tell your mother.
Simon Fanshawe
4
[Great Britain’s National Health Service] looms so large in our politics as to wholly justify the sardonic description of Britain as “a health service with a country attached”.
Mary Harrington
5
Mountebank: A hawker of quack medicines who attracts customers with stories, jokes, or tricks; A flamboyant charlatan. (Wordnik)
I’m shocked that his was not already in my vocabulary. Maybe I couldn’t decide on pronunciation, since it was fairly obviously of foreign (Italian, apparently) origin.
6
Insufficient nihilism: David Graham’s characterization of the real reason for Marjorie Taylor Greene’s expulsion from the House Freedom Caucus. (That she had called fellow HFC member Lauren Boebert “a little bitch” was just a plausible excuse.)
7
“Tact” is insulting a man without his knowing it
John “Jackie” Fisher via the Economist
8
… he’s 22, and like many intelligent and loquacious 22-year-olds, quickly got out far over his skis.
Rod Dreher, on a recent conversation
9
Alethic commitment: Committing and belonging because of considered belief that a thing is true. (J Budziszewski)
I no longer believe that the essence, the sina qua non, of authentic Christian life is alethic commitment. I don’t even believe that it’s the proper goal of a Christian life.
Those possibilities seems too left-brain for me, and too culture-bound. Fr. Stephen DeYoung describes it as “checkbox religion.” “Jesus is God?” Check. “Bible miracles were miraculous?” Check. Etc
Experience or immersion might count for as much as considered belief.
By some combination of nature and nurture, I’m an alethic commitment kind of guy, but on entering Orthodoxy, I had a few stumbling blocks — boxes I couldn’t check yet. Because I’d seen enough of the Church to trust it, and to even assume that where I demurred I was wrong, I immersed.
10
All men profess honesty as long as they can. To believe all men honest would be folly. To believe none so is something worse.
John Quincy Adams via the Economist
11
Suddenly life became more like it used to be than it ever was before.
Garrison Keillor on the social effects of Covid.
12
My theory of economics is called Gratitudemy, as found in Psalm 23: “My cup runneth over.”
Garrison Keillor
We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.
R.R. Reno
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.
