The CrunchyCon Manifesto
- Conservatism should focus more on the character of society than on the material conditions of life found in consumerism.
- Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
- Culture is more important than politics and economics.
- A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.
- Small, local, old, and particular are almost always better than big, global, new, and abstract.
- Beauty is more important than efficiency.
- The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.
- The institution most essential to conserve is the traditional family.
Arthur Hunt III, Live Not by Lies from Neither the Left nor Right (Front Porch Republic)
Blame them both
In case after case after case, the Department of Justice is targeting Trump opponents, making frivolous arguments and engaging in vindictive, meritless prosecutions.
I blame Trump, but I also blame [Attorney General Todd] Blanche. He doesn’t understand his own job.
We all know that Trump has an extreme view of executive power that renders him a virtual elected monarch. His administration’s actions extend well beyond conventional “unitary executive theory,” which puts a premium on presidential control over the executive branch. He treats the law as his plaything, deciding on his own whim which laws will be enforced and which ones will not.
It is true that the president is the boss of every cabinet official. He can fire them at will. But it is also true that the attorney general is different from every other member of the cabinet.
Unlike, say, Pete Hegseth, Blanche has three masters, not one. The attorney general and all the lawyers working for him also answer to the judiciary, which not only decides the cases he brings; it also governs the conduct of D.O.J. officials in court. And he also answers to the bar — rules of ethics are binding on every attorney, including government attorneys.
In addition, Trump may be Blanche’s boss, but he is not Blanche’s client. Blanche’s client is the government of the United States, including its various agencies. Blanche owes his fiduciary duty to the government (and, ultimately, the Constitution), not to the president.
In the criminal context, these additional obligations have profound meaning. In a 1935 case, Berger v. United States, the Supreme Court said, “The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all, and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.”
Read those words, and then ask yourself — does that sound like Todd Blanche to you?
One “first draft of history”
Lindsey Graham, taken by a heart condition at 71 just after returning to Washington from Ukraine, was one of the most effective Republican politicians of the Trump era. What that description means, and what kind of moral assessment it should yield, is something that historians will be arguing about for as long as our strange era is remembered.
Calling Graham effective may itself sound strange. Doesn’t a man who denounced Donald Trump in 2015 only to serve him and flatter him for a decade thereafter merit an adjective like “pathetic” or “supine” instead? … the reason to call Graham effective is that his long accommodation to Trump succeeded, sometimes modestly but often to a remarkable degree, in making Trump himself — the would-be isolationist, the scourge of neoconservatism, Mr. America First — into a hawk after Graham’s own heart.
I greatly admired the leadership of Mitch McConnell in his prime (Pelosi, too, in her party). If Douthat’s right, Lindsey Graham exercised a very focused version of that, the focus being Trump, but I cannot admire hawkishness.
New York Times
Until recently, a New York Times subscriber could share 10 items per month with non-subscribers. Now it’s unlimited. I think the Times is bidding to become that national newspaper for a broad swath of — oh, let’s call them college-educated — readers.
Your subjective sense of fairness has no effect on the underlying economic reality
Because I have a very strong preference for boring government, let’s consider the case of taxes.
At the moment, the Democrats talk about taxes in almost exclusively moralistic—and punitive—terms. This is an exercise in pure magical thinking: “If we do the thing that makes us feel morally satisfied, then the math will take care of itself.” But the math never takes care of itself. The purpose of a tax policy is not to pursue fairness, morality, social justice, or anything like that: The purpose of tax policy is to raise sufficient revenue while minimizing the inevitable damage and distortion that all taxes impose on an economy. The discussion can be maddening, as I know, having been through it so many times. It goes like this:
Some nice progressive: “If only billionaires would pay their fair share, then we could have all the spending we want and balance the budget, too.”
Pointed-headed right-wing ideologue: “Nope. Here are the numbers.”
SNP: “But that isn’t how I want it to be!”
P-HR-WI: “Your subjective sense of fairness has no effect on the underlying economic reality.”
SNP: “Jeff Bezos paid you to say that.”
It does not matter how many times you repeat the relevant facts—that we actually had slightly lower taxes (revenue as share of GDP) during the supposedly high-tax Eisenhower years than we have recently, that high-income people already pay a wildly disproportionate share of federal income tax, that the low notional rate on dividends is offset by the fact that these are paid out of business profits that already have been taxed at the much higher corporate rate, etc.—and people will cling to their superstitions and fictions and clichés as though their lives depended on it. Anything other than think.
Shorts
- Every American knows what it’s like to be governed by a regime whose agenda is foolish and whose ambitions are hubristic. What’s new is being governed by a regime whose intentions are, transparently, malign. (Nick Catoggio)
- At this particular moment (and at some others in the past), the thing that bugs me most about Elon Musk is the insouciance with which he envisions an escape from earthly hellscape to some other planet. Oops! I just remembered him unilaterally throttling Sklink/Skynet for the Ukrainian forces. As a conservative, I distrust hugely-concentrated private power, too.
- If the Democrats do have a big night, they will have a mandate, but only the most obvious one: The Democrats will have a mandate to not be Donald Trump. That is it. (Kevin D. Williamson)
- [T]he vaunted Republican billionaire advantage gave them a huge pile of nothing. It turns out that it’s harder than one might think to purchase a win in races where name ID is very high and the public is already extremely energized. Elon Musk in particular wasted an enormous amount of money. / That’s quite encouraging for American democracy. The people are not so easily bought. (David French)
Elsewhere in Tipsyworld
- I’m calling it dementia
- Dear Democrats
- Fascists at the Gates
- Grrrrrr!!!
- Y’know those iconic stickers on election day?
- The Dummymander came true
- The most gratifying thing about Tuesday’s election?
- Incorrigible
- How the Dems should proceed
- Too early to say
- Thick-headed but useful
- A hasty partisan promise that will be broken
- An Angel sowing confusion in the camp
- Down on the Wall Street Journal
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 my favorite no-algorithm social medium.
