Why Trump, lamentably, wins
There aren’t many original insights or approaches to political topics, but there are a few. I commend to you David Brooks, Trump’s Single Stroke of Brilliance. (Shared link)
I’ll single out what most grabbed my attention.
Of Trump:
He is not a learned man, but he is a spirited man, an assertive man. The ancient Greeks would say he possesses a torrential thumos, a burning core of anger, a lust for recognition. All his life, he has moved forward with new projects and attempted new conquests, despite repeated failures and bankruptcies that would have humbled a nonnarcissist.
Of his adversaries:
The people who succeeded in the current meritocracy tend not to be spirited in the way Trump is spirited. The system weeds such people out and rewards those who can compliantly jump through the hoops their elders have put in front of them.
Members of the educated elite (guilty!) tend to operate by analysis, not instinct, which renders them slow-footed in comparison with the Trumps of the world …
Fatally, America now has an establishment that is ambivalent about being an establishment. Back in the day, those WASP blue bloods like Roosevelt were utterly confident in their right to rule, utterly confident they could handle whatever the future might throw at them. But since the 1960s, successive generations, raised on everything from Woodstock to hip-hop, have been taught that the establishment is bad. They have been taught, in the words of those famous Apple commercials, to celebrate “the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels.”
When those people grew up and became the establishment — holding senior posts in law, government, universities, media, nonprofits and boardrooms — they became the kind of ambivalent souls who are unwilling to take their own side in a fight. They refuse to accept the fact that every society has a leadership class and that if you find yourself in it, your primary job is to defend its institutions, like the Constitution, objective journalism and scientific research centers, when the big bad wolf comes to blow it all down.
Lots of food for thought. I fear the contrast between Trump and the meritocracy is accurate and that it bodes ill for us.
Man of Destiny
There’s a tendency, sometimes very explicit, to see Donald Trump as a world-historical figure, especially after last summer’s failed assassination attempt. Trump even alludes to his own changed self-perception.
But why should that man-of-destiny sense assume that the destiny is good, not merely consequential?
If you see the hand of Providence operating through George Washington and John Adams in the founding of America, you could see the hand of Providence operating through Donald Trump in the chastisement of America – that Trump is a great man of history whose role is to chastise the liberal intelligentsia, and the never-Trumpers, and all these groups that failed to govern America, but it doesn’t mean at the end of the day that he’s actually saving America. Sometimes it’s just a chastisement.
I feel like that possibility deserves more consideration from the people that have this kind of mystical reaction to the drama of the Trump era.
Ross Douthat, interviewing rightwing figure Jonathan Keeperman. (It was a very lively conversation; Keeperman’s no fool.)
I have felt, and said, that two of the past three Presidential elections “had the judgment of God” written all over it,” so it should come as no surprise that I felt more than a little kinship with Ross over his observation.
Americans Don’t Do This
I have a pretty high tolerance for student protests, even as the outrageous cost of college has turned many of them into exercises in bourgeois decadence. But the Columbia protests have been different from past campus uprisings in several stark ways. They have exposed the whole “belonging” and “inclusion” system of handling offensive speech as fraudulent. The amount of intimidation and harassment experienced by Jewish students over the past year and a half should have been more than enough to alert that particular cavalry, but Jewish students turn out to belong to the only religious minority unprotected by it. (A regular talking point to emerge from last year’s encampment was that no Jewish students at the university had reason to feel harassed or intimidated by the protests, an assertion that was at best ignorant and at worst sinister.)
And yet despite my strongly held feelings about these matters, when I learned that Mahmoud Khalil had been arrested in the lobby of his New York apartment building, handcuffed, folded into an unmarked vehicle by men who would not give their names, and transported first to a facility in New York, then to a detention center in New Jersey, and then to one in Louisiana, every siren in my body screamed.
Down to the marrow of my bones, I am an American. And we don’t do this.
Everything that has failed in American universities has failed because of the opposition to freedom of expression.
Caitlin Flanagan, Americans Don’t Do This
Caution on transitioning
On January 28, Donald Trump issued one of his innumerable executive orders, provocatively Titled Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation, providing among other things that “within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) shall publish a review of the existing literature on best practices for promoting the health of children who assert gender dysphoria, rapid-onset gender dysphoria, or other identity-based confusion.”
I heartily approve of this mandate for a review of existing literature on best practices. I disapprove of the President announcing his conclusions (with which i substantially agree, but I’m just some guy, not POTUS) before the reviews. That’s not the way it should be done and it provides instant fodder for undermining the report that arrived on Thursday.
I trust nobody on the transing-of-teens issue more than I trust Jesse Singal, who got an advance copy of the report and summarized his admiration, including of the high-caliber authors (officially undisclosed for now). Singal is, or at least was very recently, a man of the fairly hard left, but intellectually honest. That he’s broken with his tribe on this issue, and has published extensively on it, is reassuring, as I’m not so keen about topic this to read 409 pages myself.
Be careful what you wish for
I think I keep wallowing in the news because I’m still trying to get my head around what it means that my frequently expressed wish has been fulfilled.
That frequently expressed wish was that America could become just a regular country again and stop trying to be a crypto-imperial power. Like the jokes about genies who fulfill wishes painfully literally, too little did I appreciate what a tawdry and corrupt thing a regular country could be.
I guess I somehow thought we could be “regular” and “exceptional” at the same time. So very American of me.
How could anything possibly go wrong?
DOGE Put a College Student in Charge of Using AI to Rewrite Regulations | WIRED
If you think this is a plausible idea, you have a different experience with federal regulations or Artificial Intelligence than I do.
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?”
Regarding said “lot of stupid and terrible things,” my failure to call out anything about the current regime does not mean I approve. There’s just too much, and on some of the apparent illegalities I don’t want to abuse my credentials without thinking it through.
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.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 