With our off-year election so close, everyone seems to be waxing political. But there’s politics and then there elevated politics, like maybe at the 20,000-foot level if not 30,000 feet. I’m shooting for elevated politics or clever writing.
Politics
The politics of candor
Mr. Carter’s words were easy political pickings.
Mr. Reagan used Mr. Carter’s call for moderation as a kind of anvil to define the sitting president. “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Mr. Reagan asked. “Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago?”
As Jonathan Alter wrote in “His Very Best,” his excellent biography of Mr. Carter, “The politics of candor were terrible.”
Mr. Carter’s wise counsel made him an easy mark for anyone inclined to criticize him as a finger-wagging scold.
“If you have concerns about consumption in society, it’s very difficult not to sound moralizing and patronizing,” said Alison Hulme, associate professor of social and cultural change at the University of Northampton in England and the author of “A Brief History of Thrift.”
And so we got the opposite of what Mr. Carter wished for. Yuppies arrived in the 1980s, and the 1990s brought us Hummers to guzzle the gas that people had waited in line for 15 years earlier. In 2001, President George W. Bush wanted us to get back to our daily routines and fly to Disney World after the Sept. 11 attacks. And the Obama administration couldn’t bear to slice away at a whopping tax break that makes it much easier for affluent families to spend $400,000 per child on college.
Ron Lieber, Jimmy Carter Was Right About Materialism but, Alas, Wrong About Us
On the future of third parties in America
I haven’t voted R or D for President since 2012, but for the American Solidarity Party candidate. If we don’t stop eating the shit sandwiches, they’ll keep serving them.
Coke versus Pepsi once seemed permanent. Today, Dr Pepper is second. In 1965, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler together had 92 percent of domestic auto sales. Then Toyota, Volkswagen and others arrived. By 2024, the “big three” had 38 percent. But foreign competition had improved their products.
George Will, calling the “Lincoln Party” candidacy of Greg Ballard for Indiana Secretary of State a promising debut.
George Will again:
A two-party system is best for producing broad, temperate coalitions. And when one of the parties fragments over an issue, or becomes strange by internal dynamics, it can be replaced in the duopoly. The Republican Party was born as a third party in 1854, as the slavery issue shattered the Whig Party, and six years later a Republican was elected president.
Today’s Republican Party has become weird, and most of its congressional members are embarrassingly incapable of embarrassment. A small Indiana event, unnoticed elsewhere, might someday be remembered as portentous.
Samuel Sey, chudbait
Here’s a thumbnail about Samuel Sey, in case you hadn’t heard of him and his situation.
His deportation by team Trump has been something of an apocalypse, in the historic sense.
“If you know Samuel, you know what a good man of character he is,” former Babylon Bee editor Joel Berry tweeted last week while setting up a crowdfunding page for the Seys to help pay for their legal battle with the administration. Last year the same Joel Berry sniffed that “the only due process owed to an illegal alien is deportation.”
…
Sey is a Christian, and that’s what matters to some right-wingers. Berry explicitly used the language of tribalism to defend his friend on those grounds, in fact. “I do have a tribe. I am tribal. It’s a tribe Jesus described,” he wrote on Monday, going on to quote several passages from the gospels. “I just don’t classify my tribe by melanin count. Samuel Sey is in my tribe, and he is my brother. And he would make an excellent American.”
For other MAGA devotees, Sey’s faith isn’t enough to earn tribal membership. Race trumps religion in this case: He’s black, African-born, married to a white woman, and “spent much of the past year feuding with a set of conservative pastors who promote antisemitic and pro-segregation theology,” per Salon. To a chud obsessed with the consequences of “importing the third world,” that’s all one needs to know to believe ICE did the right thing in moving to remove Sey from the United States. If the Somalis don’t belong here, surely the Ghanaians don’t either.
Berry sounded earnestly shocked this week to discover how many of those chuds are inside his tent. “This has been probably the darkest 24 hours I’ve ever experienced on social media in my life,” he remarked about the vicious backlash to his agitation on Sey’s behalf. “The things being said about Samuel, his wife, and his small children are unthinkably evil. There is a segment of the so-called ‘Christian’ nationalist crowd that has given itself completely over to Satan. I’ve never had more resolve to defeat these subversive demons invading the Right and invading Christianity.”
A political movement that openly celebrates ruthlessness toward undesirables has given itself over to Satan? The things you learn in the year of our lord 2026.
I wish Sey’s supporters luck in exorcising the demons 10 years too late, but two points shouldn’t be lost here. One is that their plea for mercy on his behalf seems conditioned on tribal membership. If Sey were merely a “good man of character” who would “make an excellent American,” presumably that wouldn’t suffice for immigration restrictionists like Berry to justify allowing him to remain legally in the U.S. After all, many illegal immigrants meet those criteria. Sey is worthy of mercy, it seems, because he’s a member of the “tribe Jesus described.” Berry doesn’t appear to disagree with the chuds that laws should apply differently to one’s “friends,” that is, only about who qualifies and who doesn’t.
Nick Catoggio (bold added)
Shorts
- Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty charged right-wing activist James O’Keefe and content creator Cam Higby with felony unlawful voting and identity theft over a video filmed at a Minneapolis polling place during Minnesota’s August 11 primary.
- Utah’s attorney general charged the prediction market Kalshi with 14 criminal counts, accusing it of illegally promoting online gambling, and named its co-founders, Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara, as defendants.
- Any discussion of power is now, ultimately, a conversation about attention and how we extract it, wield it, waste it, abuse it, sell it, lose it and profit from it. (Charlie Warzel, Michael Goldhaber, the Cassandra of the Internet Age)
- I think that if you put guns to their heads and told them to spell Machiavelli, you’d have to shoot a whole bunch of top campaign managers, many of whom are people who peaked in high school debate but don’t know it. (Kevin D. Williamson, on the dirty Democrat trickery in the Alaska Senate race.)
- Americans do not have a great deal of republican self-respect, and some of them seem to enjoy being manipulated (it never seems to occur to anybody that Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” remark and Donald Trump’s “Fifth Avenue” remark amounted to the two of them saying the same thing about the same pigheaded rubes) …. (Kevin D. Williamson, ibid.)
Elsewhere in Tipsyworld
- Unheard-of until Trump II
- If not a third impeachment, then what?
- This lawless administration
- Buttinsky told to butt out
- The Case for a Historic Wave
- Postliberalism’s Omnicause
- You know what to do
- Obama out-trolled the Troll-in-Chief
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 my favorite no-algorithm social medium.
