Primary Eve

I’m publishing today because some states have primary elections tomorrow and I’ve got some thoughts on elections.

Making modernity

One of the key moments in the creation of modernity occurs when production moves outside the household. So long as productive work occurs within the structure of households, it is easy and right to understand that work as part of the sustaining of the community of the household and of those wider forms of community which the household in turn sustains. As, and to the extent that, work moves outside the household and is put to the service of impersonal capital, the realm of work tends to become separated from everything but the service of biological survival and the reproduction of the labor force, on the one hand, and that of institutionalized acquisitiveness, on the other. Pleonexia, a vice in the Aristotelian scheme, is now the driving force of modern productive work.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue. (That requires a bit more chewing that we may be accustomed to doing.)

Insatiable

The question with which to start my investigation is obviously this: Is there enough to go round? Immediately we encounter a serious difficulty: What is “enough”? Who can tell us? Certainly not the economist who pursues “economic growth” as the highest of all values, and therefore has no concept of “enough.” There are poor societies which have too little; but where is the rich society that says: “Halt! We have enough”? There is none.

E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful. We’re going to need to update Proverbs 30:15–16.

Book Criticism on the decline

Dwight Garner counted the surviving full-time American book critics — and they fit on one hand. “The thin crust of American intellectual life, long flaking, has begun to show bald patches,” he wrote. He expressed envy of England, which has many more newspapers that routinely publish book reviews: “The literary debate over there is more like a boisterous dinner party and less like a Morse code dispatch between distant frigates passing in the night.” Still, America has its scrappy freelancers and part-timers. “I’m cheered by the young critics out there, swimming in this sea without drowning in it, trying not to be cast into gaol by their creditors, and working to make certain that the last snatch of book criticism isn’t three fire emojis, two jazz-hands, a crying face and a facepalm.”

Via Frank Bruni

Flat-out politics

What Democratic elites would prefer to do

The continuing appeal of Harris is a useful indicator of … stasis. Yes, she is unlikely to be the 2028 nominee, and part of her support is name recognition; … many Democrats who find her renomination unthinkable are nonetheless incapable of acknowledging the real reasons that she lost.

I’ll list some of those reasons. First, her party was seen as too beholden to progressive activists on a range of issues, including immigration, crime, education, energy and the transgender debate. Second, Harris’s vice presidency was itself a creation of the 2020 identity politics moment, without which Joe Biden never would have picked her, and she succeeded him without a fight in part because no one wanted to acknowledge her painful limits as a politician. Finally, she tried to solve both the policy problem and the identity politics problem through evasion and distraction and yet more identity politics, with empty rhetoric of “joy” and circumlocution about her past positions and a mediocre Midwestern white guy running mate.

Despite being on the record taking radical positions, Harris was never a radical politician. Rather, she was a perfectly hapless embodiment of a Democratic establishment that aspired to manage its base without ever strongly resisting its demands and that aspired to win moderate voters not by moderating on the issues but through a change of affect or a change of subject.

That’s still clearly what Democratic elites would prefer to do ….

Ross Douthat, Slouching Toward Kamala Harris

America needs a better Democrat party than that!

Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered

Graham Platner isn’t my ideal Senate candidate. Not even close. I’m deeply troubled by the thinness of his political experience, by the primacy of raw anger in his appeal to voters and by the oddities and ugliness, from a Nazi tattoo to a fondness for “gay” and “gayest” as put-downs, in his not-so-distant past. It’s a lot to overlook.

But if I lived in Maine, I’d vote for him in November. I’d do it without any joy and without any hesitation, because he’s a Democrat running against a Republican and I haven’t been kidding around when I’ve said that President Trump has no respect for democracy, no regard for the truth, no patience for Americans who don’t bow to him and no limits to his desire to exploit the presidency for his and his minions’ glorification and enrichment. I can’t recognize the profound moral offense and extreme danger of Trump and then sit out the election or cast a vote that potentially helps his party, which has abetted or ignored his authoritarian designs, win either chamber of Congress. That would be irresponsible, nonsensical and perilous.

But do other voters think the same way? Is their frequently articulated disdain for Trump just a bunch of colorful and cathartic words or a genuine cause for action, for uncomfortable choices ….

Frank Bruni, Are Democrats Scared Enough of Trump to Defeat Him? (my first NYT gift link this month).

I hope that 2026 will be such a wave election — nay, a Tsunami election — that the Republicans’ norm-shattering mid-decade gerrymanders will backfire. The press keeps reporting as if the gerrymanders will, if not stricken down by courts, accomplish exactly what the Republicans want, and I can’t rule that out.

But it ain’t necessarily so: if you take your pool of usually-Republican voters and spread them over more (redrawn) congressional districts, maintaining a theoretical but slimmer Republican majority in more districts, an election fueled by revulsion toward the GOP could see usually-Republican voters staying home or (horrors!) voting for Democrats, and with thinner margins more seats could flip.

That would be a lovely result in 2026 because:

It might frustrate and slow Trump in his last two years.
It would rebuke Trump for his obnoxious effort to steal 2026 by shattering democratic norms. (His 2020 meddling in Georgia, in the form of complaining of vote fraud so persistently that it depressed Republican turnout, got Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock elected to the Senate. Nice job, Mr. Genius!)
It would be a rebuke to those who kiss Trump’s … ummmm, ring … for going along with his obnoxious attempted theft.

In Tuesday’s Indiana primary May 5, I plan to take a Republican ballot (nothing new there) and vote against every candidate endorse by Trump — even the one running against a guy with a non-trivial but remote criminal record who had hoped for Trump’s endorsement over the RINO incumbent. I wish I could vote for Spencer Deery, who put a target on his back by putting Hoosier interests over Washington’s interests when Trump called for redistricting, but he’s in the next Senate district to my west.

War crimes

It has now become routine for U.S. Southern Command to post grainy videos online of boats being blown up, along with claims that “male narco-terrorists were killed,” even though the administration has not offered any evidence that even one of the people incinerated by U.S. firepower was engaged in drug trafficking, much less in terrorism. The administration is so averse to trying to prove wrongdoing in court that, when suspects survive a strike, they are released rather than arrested. Apparently, there is a secret Justice Department opinion justifying the strikes based on the fanciful premise that drug cartels are waging war on the United States.

Max Boot.

In a Wall Street Journal editorial today, James Freeman beclowns himself by pointing out that Barack Obama did sorta kinda the same thing. Now I would have no problem accusing Obama of war crimes if he did the same thing, but even Freeman’s account notes that Obama attacked those “believed to be terrorists,” whereas the Trump administration is labeling narcotics traffickers ipso facto “terrorists” without so much as making a plausible case that they really are narcotics traffickers in the first place.

The fallacy of Boromir

When people justify their voting choice by its outcome, I always think of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien emphasizes repeatedly that we cannot make decisions based on the hoped-for result. We can only control the means. If we validate our choice of voting for someone that may not be a good person in the hopes that he or she will use his power to our advantage, we succumb to the fallacy of Boromir, who assumed he too would use the Ring of Power for good. Power cannot be controlled; it enslaves you. To act freely is to acknowledge your limits, to see the journey as a long road that includes dozens of future elections, and to fight against the temptation for power.

Jessica Hooten Wilson, What ‘The Lord of the Rings’ can teach us about U.S. politics, Christianity and power.

I’m not voting against all things Trumpy to seize power, by the way; it’s to destroy Sauron’s power.

Shorts

It was lovely to hear the King’s English, devoid of the vengeance, blasphemy and vulgarity common in our leader’s language. (Maureen Dowd on King Charles’ address to a state dinner during his recent trip to America)
We need stories – sometimes subtle, gentle things – that restore in us a sense of goodness. Not just jagged bitterness frothing at the mouth or bonkers political hijacking of deep religious themes. (Marin Shaw)
Our economically RINO administration is tariffing globalization to death. Democrats are writing the eulogy. (Andy Kessler, Wall Street Journal)

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

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.

November 16

Not political

Amish demurrals

My apologies if I’ve quoted this before:

These observations dismiss the popular belief that the Amish reject all new technologies. So what’s really going on here? The Amish, it turns out, do something that’s both shockingly radical and simple in our age of impulsive and complicated consumerism: they start with the things they value most, then work backward to ask whether a given new technology performs more harm than good with respect to these values.

Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism

Quantitative metrics – meh!

Please don’t email me about my position on the Substack leaderboards. 100% of such emails have been in the way of encouragement and congratulations, so of course I’m not mad about it. But I saw those when I first set up this newsletter and said “nope nope nope.” I’ve never intentionally checked the leaderboard since, though I’ve blundered into it a couple times. It’s just exactly the kind of quantitative metric I don’t want to care about. I want to pay the bills and write for a passionate audience, not climb some status ladder. You can reference it in comments if it’s germane to your conversation, but in general please let me stay in the dark.

Freddie deBoer. By "writ[ing] for a passionate audience, not climb[ing] some status ladder," deBoer has created a Substack some very smart people are calling names like "indispensible" — and I welcome them to Freddie fandom.

Godless Middle Earth?

Musing about the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and its lack of religion, priests, and such:

For the Extremely Online Discourse Police, the sole purpose of language is to declare allegiances and repudiations, and you can’t do that effectively if you “tell the truth but tell it slant.” The good news is that this moment will not last, and (again) in the long run Dickinson is exactly right to say that “Success in Circuit lies.”

Alan Jacobs

Valorizing a loser

I’ll have to take David French’s word that Kyle Rittenhouse is not just defended, but valorized in significant parts of the Right, because I don’t watch or read them even for purposes of vigilance.

But I agree with French that valorizing Rittenhouse will produce copy-cats. He should be left to live with his folly and shame, but bad actors will try to put him in the limelight for their own profit or dubious ends.

Political

"The Progressives made us do it"

Of J.D. Vance’s transformation as an Ohio Senate Candidate:

Progressives who lament the loss of another “genteel” conservative ought to ask themselves whether their own uncompromising politics have played a role.

Sean Speer, ‌What elite commentary gets wrong about J.D. Vance

This is sort of interesting, because it makes explicit the sort of "the other guys are an existential threat and must be defeated by any means necessary" that is tearing our country apart.

David French is the bane of the new right for good reasons. One reason is he’s not having any of the macho bullshit that passes for masculinity today, and neither did wise voice of an earlier era, like Rudyard Kipling:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise …

It may indeed be impossible to reconcile the hard, progressive left and the allegedly white nationalist right, but even in the aggregate they’re not a majority in the country. The problem is, the extremes are riled up, active, colorful and "newsworthy." The majority is none of those.

Not mutually exclusive

In Friday’s G-File, Jonah uses the latest developments regarding the Steele dossier to make a point about both-sides-ism. “Going by what we know, the Steele dossier was a travesty. It was an outrageous, indefensible, dirty trick,” he writes. But on “the other side of the ledger,” Donald Trump openly called on the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election, his campaign held a meeting with a Russian woman promising to deliver dirt on Hillary Clinton, and his campaign manager, Paul Manafort, gave internal polling data to Russian intelligence officer Konstantin Kilimnik. “Now you can make as much or as little about all of this as you want—and many people have, in both pro- and anti-Trump tribes,” Jonah concludes. “My only point is that just because Team A misbehaved, that doesn’t mean Team B’s misbehavior didn’t exist.”

The Morning Dispatch, 11/15/21

And they did both misbehave, which reinforces my unwillingness to pledge myself to either of them.

It’s 1968 again

Of Steve Bannon’s Contempt of Congress indictment, David Frum says Bannon knows exactly what he’s doing:

It’s a political strategy, intended, like the Chicago Seven’s strategy in Judge Julius Hoffman’s courtroom all those years ago, to discredit a legal and constitutional system that the pro-Trump partisans despise.

The Trump partisans start with huge advantages that the Chicago Seven lacked: They have a large and growing segment of the voting public in their corner, and they are backed by this country’s most powerful media institutions, including the para-media of Facebook and other social platforms.

Thanks to that advantage, the Trump partisans don’t need to convince much of anybody of much of anything. It won’t bother the Trump partisans that their excuses are a mess of contradictions. They say that nothing happened, and that it was totally justified; that Trump did nothing, and that Trump was totally entitled to do it. Their argument doesn’t have to make sense, because their constituency doesn’t care about it making sense. Their constituency cares about being given permission to disregard and despise the legal rules that once bound U.S. society. That’s the game, and that’s how Bannon & Co. will play the game.

Gerrymandering

When I was young and ignorant, I had the same dumb opinion about gerrymandering as almost everybody else does: I was shocked by it. The process was politicized, and I was scandalized. As a veteran state legislator in Texas explained it to me, redistricting isn’t politicized — it is political per se, “the most political thing a legislature does,” as he put it. It does not have to be politicized because it is political by nature, and to “depoliticize” it, as some self-serving Democrats and a few callow idealists suggest, would be to change its nature and its character. The Democrats who lecture us about the will of the people would, in this matter, deprive the people’s elected representatives of one of their natural powers.

The gerrymander — like the filibuster, the earmark, the debt ceiling, and other procedural instruments of power — is something that people complain about only when it is being used against them. The Democrats were perfectly happy with gerrymandering for the better part of 200 years, understanding it to be an utterly normal part of the political process. They began to object to it when Republicans got good at it. And, in a refreshing bit of candor, their argument against partisan redistricting is that Republicans are too good at it.

Seriously — that is the Democrats’ argument: that gerrymandering was all good and fine until Republicans figured out how to make the most of it. Republicans, in clear violation of the ancient Republican Party tradition, embraced cutting-edge technology and availed themselves of the best experts’ help in order to methodically and intelligently conduct a long-term program of serious and profitable political action. “Never before have party strategists been armed with sophisticated computer software that can help them carve districts down to the individual street and home,” Hedrick Smith wailed in a 2015 essay.

Detail-oriented Republicans with an attention span exceeding that of a meth-addicted goldfish — angels and ministers of grace, defend us!

…

Go look at an old district map of Texas during that state’s 130 years of Democratic legislative control, and what you will see is not exactly a hard-edged display of Euclidean regularity. Democrats made the most of their redistricting power in the Texas legislature and — bear this in mind, Republicans — it wasn’t enough to save them. Not nearly enough. Once Texans decided they were no longer buying what Democrats were selling, there was no procedural shenanigan that was going to save the[m].

… in spite of Republican manipulation of House districts, the Democrats quickly rebuilt their congressional majorities with the assistance of Donald Trump.

Kevin D. Williamson

Sometimes I just post stuff, but I substantially agree with this. "Agree with" does not mean "exult in"; I haven’t considered myself a Republican since January 2005.