Tag: civil service

Wednesday, 7/31/24

Weird candidates, glass houses

“Weird” is the new “deplorables”

For a few days this last week I started to believe that Kamala Harris and the Democrats could come from behind and beat Donald Trump. But then I started to hear Democrats patting themselves on the back for coming up with a great new label for Trump Republicans. They are “weird.”

I cannot think of a sillier, more playground, more foolish and more counterproductive political taunt for Democrats to seize on than calling Trump and his supporters “weird.”

But weird seems to be the word of the week. As this newspaper reported, in a potential audition to be Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said over the weekend of Trump and his vice-presidential pick, Senator JD Vance of Ohio: “The fascists depend on us going back, but we’re not afraid of weird people. We’re a little bit creeped out, but we’re not afraid.” Just to make sure he got the point across, Walz added: “The nation found out what we’ve all known in Minnesota: These guys are just weird.”

As The Times reported, Harris, speaking at a weekend campaign event at a theater in the Berkshires, “leaned into a new Democratic attack on the former president and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, saying that some of the swipes the men had taken against her were ‘just plain weird.’” The Times added: “Pete Buttigieg, the secretary of transportation, said Mr. Trump was getting ‘older and stranger’ while Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, called Mr. Vance ‘weird’ and ‘erratic.’”

It is now a truism that if Democrats have any hope of carrying key swing states and overcoming Trump’s advantages in the Electoral College, they have to break through to white, working-class, non-college-educated men and women, who, if they have one thing in common, feel denigrated and humiliated by Democratic, liberal, college-educated elites. They hate the people who hate Trump more than they care about any Trump policies. Therefore, the dumbest message Democrats could seize on right now is to further humiliate them as “weird.”

“It is not only a flight from substance,” noted Prof. Michael J. Sandel of Harvard, author of “The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?” “It allows Trump to tell his supporters that establishment elites look down on them, marginalize them and view them as ‘outsiders’ — people who are ‘weird.’ It plays right into Trump’s appeal to his followers that he is taking the slings and arrows of elites for them. It is a distraction from the big argument that Democrats should be running on: How we can renew the dignity of work and the dignity of working men and women.”

I don’t know what is sufficient for Harris to win, but I sure know what is necessary: a message that is dignity-affirming for working-class Americans, not dignity-destroying. If this campaign is descending into name-calling, no one beats Trump in that arena.

Thomas L. Friedman

Too busy to look in a mirror?

I’m not sure that calling Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance “weird” when you’re the party of gender fluidity will connect with voters.

Oliver Wiseman at the Free Press (cartoon from a separate source)

(N.B. Be it remembered that everyone reading this is probably WEIRD)

Self-sabotage

Decades ago, the lesbian cultural critic Camille Paglia warned her fellow homosexuals against reckless attacks on religion. Homosexuality only flourishes under conditions of advanced culture, she said—and like it or not, the church is a pillar of culture. Therefore, said Paglia, when gays “attack the institutions of culture (including religion), they are sabotaging their own future.”

In 2016, Paglia spoke at an ideas festival in Britain, saying that the West’s obsession with androgyny and transgenderism is a sign that “civilization is starting to unravel. You find it again and again and again in history.” 

“People who live in such times feel that they’re very sophisticated, they’re very cosmopolitan,” Paglia said. In truth, she goes on, they give evidence of a culture that no longer believes in itself. This, in turn, calls forth “people who are convinced of the power of heroic masculinity”—in other words, barbarians.

Nobody will resist contemporary “barbarians” to defend a civilizational order that places the sexually disordered at its symbolic pinnacle. Ordinary Frenchmen might fight for the Blessed Virgin Mary, or for Marianne, the symbol of the Republic, or at least for Brigitte Bardot. But for Barbara Butch? Please.

Rod Dreher, A Civilizational Suicide Note on the Seine. Apropos of the barbarians called forth by our queered culture, see ‌Toxic Masculinity rightly so called in Monday’s blog.

America’s unacknowledged social credit system

“Vague and subjective policies pervade the financial industry,” Jeremy Tedesco told the Federalist Society group. He is the general counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, which has itself been labeled an “extremist group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. (ADF once was the institutional home of famously intolerant extremist David French.) “They’ll never tell the customer the real reason they are being debanked. Companies hide behind vague standards, just like government would do if it were regulating speech.”

Tedesco sees the issue as being essentially one of collusion: heavily regulated industries doing the dirty work of government officials who cannot engage in censorship themselves but who can lean on banks and insurance companies and make their lives miserable if they choose.

Kevin D. Williamson, Debanking is Just a Tax on Dissent

Schedule F

How many civil servants could a future President Trump try to fire using a reimplemented Schedule F? Estimates run to somewhere around 50,000. Fukuyama is worth quoting at length on the implications:

It is hard to describe the damage that will be done to American government if these plans are carried out. While there is a good case to be made for great flexibility in the hiring and firing of federal officials, the wholesale replacement of thousands of public servants with political cronies would take the nation back to the spoils system of the 19th century. Republicans think that they will be undermining the deep state, but they will simply be politicizing functions that should be carried out in an impartial way, and will destroy the ethic of neutral public service that animates much of the government. When they lose power, as they necessarily will, the other party will simply get rid of their partisans and replace them with Democratic loyalists in a way that undermines any continuity in government. Who will want a career in public service under these conditions? Only political hacks, opportunists, and those who see openings for personal enrichment in the bureaucracy.

Damon Linker, The Part of “Project 2025” We’re Sure to See

The low stakes in Election 2024

I figure whoever walks away with Pennsylvania wins the deal; so come first Tuesday in November, I plan on staying up no later than the calling of that state. Either way, it will be a new regime, sending rats like Sullivan and Blinken and Kirby scurrying off to think tanks to plot their return to power. Meanwhile, nothing much will change, despite the label at the top; for weapons of death and destruction have to be shipped, genocide has to be upheld, and money has to be printed, no matter the administration.

Terry Cowan

Lame-Duck Quackery

Biden’s three-pronged proposal to reform the Supreme Court isn’t serious.

  • He didn’t consult with Congress before announcing it, as he would have if he were serious.
  • He proposed no language for the constitutional amendments that would be required were he serious.
  • A constitutional amendment to the effect that Presidents have no (little?) immunity isn’t a matter of Supreme Court reform at all — and will prove deucedly difficult to write if someone tries.

Biden probably is past the point of being able to achieve seriousness; all he’s got left is petulance.

(BTW: Term limits and a binding ethics code are not crazy ideas, but the devil’s in the details on how to “bind” SCOTUS.)

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

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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.

Wednesday, 4/26/23

Cognitive dissonance in Texas

[T]he gun rights movement is changing. In many quarters of America, respect for firearms has turned into a form of reverence. As I wrote in 2022, there is now widespread gun idolatry. “Guns” have joined “God” and “Trump” in the hierarchy of right-wing values.

David French

Texas has one of the strongest ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive District Attorney.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Tweeting in effect that he knows better than the jury who heard the evidence, and that he knows that this white man was merely “standing his ground,” not looking for trouble and finding it.

It took an Atlantic Ocean of distance to let the Economist spot this juicy bit of weirdness:

The convergence of broad “stand your ground” laws and more permissive gun laws is a toxic combination, says Kami Chavis, a professor at William and Mary Law School. Messrs Perry and Foster were both armed when they encountered each other, thanks to Texas’s lax gun laws. But there is an inconsistency in the logic of Mr Perry’s supporters, who say that he justifiably felt threatened and needed to act in self-defence because his victim was carrying an assault rifle.

If openly carrying a gun constitutes such a threat that someone can shoot you dead for it, why in the hell is it legal to openly carry?

I’m sick of the culture of vigilanteism created by these damned “stand your ground” laws, and open carry only makes it worse. Open carry and stand your ground are perversely lethal laws in the performative name of “safety.”

Civil Service mischief mayhem

While there is a good case to be made for great flexibility in the hiring and firing of federal officials, the wholesale replacement of thousands of public servants with political cronies would take the nation back to the spoils system of the 19th century. Republicans think that they will be undermining the deep state, but they will simply be politicizing functions that should be carried out in an impartial way, and will destroy the ethic of neutral public service that animates much of the government. When they lose power, as they necessarily will, the other party will simply get rid of their partisans and replace them with Democratic loyalists in a way that undermines any continuity in government. Who will want a career in public service under these conditions?  Only political hacks, opportunists, and those who see openings for personal enrichment in the bureaucracy.

Damon Linker, on the virtual abolition of merit-based civil service positions in the Federal Government that Trump began shortly before the 2020 Election.

Was Tucker a money-maker?

I can’t help but notice that commentators on Tucker Carlson’s firing from Fox News can’t agree on whether his show was (1) hugely profitable or whether instead (2) boycotts of his advertisers had “intimidated woke capitalists, who declined to advertise on his show” (Rod Dreher) and thus made it marginal or even a money-loser.

I have no idea which, if either, is true.

I do know that my long Dreher fandom has greatly cooled. I suspect it’s because he and I have both changed during the Trump era: he increasingly supportive of illiberal democracy; I, after flirtation with illiberal democracy, returning uneasily to center-right classical liberalism. “Better the devil you know,” y’know.

Constraints on Single-Payer healthcare

“Health” is an extraordinarily difficult concept to pin down, and if unchecked, it will expand to encompass anything and everything as Leviathan’s vanguard and advance scout.

…

A conservative “healthcare system” is one that protects life and prevents disability. Modern medicine is good at resuscitation, reducing the risk of severe yet preventable incidents such as heart attacks and strokes, catching cancers when they can still be treated, and managing chronic illnesses such as asthma and depression. Caring for illnesses both catastrophic and chronic is what a healthcare system is for, and only when there is a strong focus on applying the technical power of medicine to prevent or treat disease, rather than an all-encompassing quest for health, can we speak coherently of a healthcare system worth funding.

Matthew Loftus, The Conservative Christian Case for Single-Payer Healthcare

Bobo power and powerlessness

As the bobos achieved a sort of stranglehold on the economy, the culture, and even our understanding of what a good life is, no wonder society has begun to array itself against them, with the old three-part class structure breaking apart into a confusing welter of micro-groups competing for status and standing in any way they can. So, for instance, the bobos have abundant cultural, political, and economic power; the red one-percenters have economic power, but scant cultural power; the young, educated elites have tons of cultural power and growing political power, but still not much economic power; and the caring class and rural working class, unheard and unseen, have almost no power of any kind at all. Our politics, meanwhile, has become sharper-edged, more identity-based, and more reactionary, in part because politics is the one arena in which the bobos cannot dominate—there aren’t enough of us.

David Brooks, How the Bobos Broke America

The last straw

[M]ost right-wing institutions that depend on a large customer or donor base have embraced a strategy of monetizing the constant stoking of crisis and paranoia as the new True Faith. If the real-world facts prove inconvenient to the narrative, invent new facts to fit. 

And Tucker [Carlson] was the high priest of that faith.  

I quit Fox after more than a decade as a contributor when Carlson released a “documentary” for Fox Nation, a streaming service for Fox-addicts who can’t get sufficiently high off the basic cable junk anymore. His Patriot Purge, a farrago of deceptions, fearmongering and “just asking questions” conspiracy theories, was put together to leave the viewer with the distinct impression that the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol was some kind of false flag operation or Deep State operation. It was the last straw for me.

Jonah Goldberg at the Dispatch

Vikings and Ninjas

The right wing are censorship vikings and the left wing are censorship ninjas.

Sherman Alexie. (H/T Alan Jacobs)

For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.

Ross Douthat, Bad Religion

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