Tag: monarchy

Impeach Trump

As I reviewed my latest draft weekday blog, I found it full of politics and war. So I decided to hold back everything else for another post and to put a trigger warning on this one: I give Donald J. Trump and his minions no quarter.

Missing a functioning democracy

[I]n those tense, polarized months of 2002 and 2003, we had hashed out the case for war thoroughly beforehand, as democracies do. A thousand op-eds bloomed; critical votes were taken in the Congress; political careers were weighed in the balance; and Colin Powell went to the UN to present the “evidence.”

Seems like a wholly different world, doesn’t it?

Come with me a little further back in time to the Persian Gulf War of 1991. That was a war started by Saddam Hussein, not us. How did we go about a new war in the Middle East back then? Well, we had another big public debate, another trip to the UN, and then another vote in the Congress. It was closer than we remember: just 52-47 in the Senate (with one abstention). We then went to war with a very precise aim — ending the occupation of Kuwait — after amassing a coalition of 35 countries, and did so to cement the status of international law in the post-Cold War world.

Seems like another planet, doesn’t it?

And there’s a reason for that. We had a functioning liberal democracy then, a constitutional system that was imperfectly but actually followed, a responsible president, and international law on our side.

Today, we have precisely none of the above.

We’ve had no debate; we’ve had no search for international support or allies; we’ve ignored the UN entirely; the Congress didn’t debate, let alone vote, in advance; and the American people were told about the war after it had already begun. All of this renders this war illegal and unconstitutional and outrageous, and the fact that most people have just accepted it is proof, if we still needed it, that the extinction-level event I predicted in 2016 is now well in the rearview mirror.

In plain English, this is what is in front of our nose: a corrupt, deranged monarch pursuing an illegal and immoral war primarily to benefit a foreign country. This war makes us a textbook case of how democracies stagger into tyranny and endless war.

Andrew Sullivan

Not reassuring

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation, an advocacy organization dedicated to assuring church-state separation in the armed forces, reported yesterday that it has received numerous complaints from military personnel that, in briefings, their commanders are describing the military operations against Iran in Christian eschatological terms. According to a report on Substack by journalist Jonathan Larsen:

A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer.

From Saturday morning through Monday night, more than 110 similar complaints about commanders in every branch of the military had been logged by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).

The complaints came from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, the MRFF told me Monday night.

Religion Clause: Advocacy Group Says Military Commanders Are Describing Iran Operations in Christian Biblical Terms.

I thought dispensationalist bullcrap was dying, but I guess the self-styled Secretary of War didn’t get the message.

Politics as Ritual Humiliation

Republicans … continue to practice politics as a form of ritual humiliation for the remains of the old guard, compelling Sen. John Cornyn to stand as an equal to Ken Paxton, the morally depraved and intellectually vacant grotesque who currently serves as attorney general of Texas. Sen. Cornyn barely topped Paxton in the three-man primary and now must face him again in a runoff.

Some Democrats have in mind the success Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer and his allies had—and continue to have—meddling in Republican primary elections to elevate extremists and kooks (more extreme and kookier than the Republican average, I mean) on the grounds that such nut-cutlets are easier to beat in general elections, and quietly are talking up the idea of working to help secure the GOP nomination for Paxton.

Kevin D. Williamson

The bellicose through-line from neocons to Trump

The best essay for understanding right-wing support for Donald Trump’s war against Iran was published in National Review in 2023, at the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion. Written by Tanner Greer, a conservative writer and China analyst, it argued that the official populist repudiation of George W. Bush and neoconservatism masked a deep continuity between the Iraq-era conservative mainstream and the Trump-era new right.

…

The famous quote from a Bush official about how “when we act, we create our own reality” directly anticipated the Trump-era belief that “you can just do things.”

…

[T]he idea that America can go into a rough neighborhood, hit our enemies hard, kill some of their leaders and force them to RESPECT OUR HEGEMONY is not some brilliant innovation of the based Trump era. It was the dominant right-wing perspective on the Iraq war (and, indeed, sometimes a centrist perspective as well), especially in the run-up to the invasion, with democracy promotion very much a minor theme.

Ross Douthat

Barbarism nukes nihilism

In liberating Western Europe and Asia, the United States military for its part firebombed German cities into virtual nonexistence. Then, on the feast of Christ’s Holy Transfiguration (August 6) in 1945, it annihilated a hundred thousand unarmed Japanese civilians at Hiroshima with the dropping of a single atom bomb. Unperturbed by the unprecedented carnage, America dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki three days later. Defeating the most nihilistic powers to threaten Christendom since the Mongol invasions provoked, in turn, acts of barbarity.

John Strickland, The Age of Nihilism

His own morality

When asked in January by the New York Times “if there were any limits on his global powers,” President Trump responded: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

I’m afraid those are the only constraints on Trump’s use of nuclear weapons in Iran.

Jack Goldsmith, Trump, Iran, Nuclear Weapons.

Would it be rude to say I’ve been unimpressed with Trump’s personal morality?

Funnies

The “targeted strike” in Iran

When I hear people saying that the U.S. is not fighting a war against Iran I find myself remembering Rex Mottram and the priest charged with catechizing him: 

“Yesterday I asked him whether Our Lord had more than one nature. He said: ‘Just as many as you say, Father.’ Then again I asked him: ‘Supposing the Pope looked up and saw a cloud and said ‘It’s going to rain’, would that be bound to happen?’ ‘Oh, yes, Father.’ ‘But supposing it didn’t?’ He thought a moment and said, “I suppose it would be sort of raining spiritually, only we were too sinful to see it.’” 

I suppose what’s happening now in Iran is merely a targeted strike, only we’re too sinful to see it.

(Alan Jacobs, political Mottramism)

Obituaries

Every day, a shabbily dressed man pauses at the same newsstand to scan the front pages. He then moves on without buying anything. At last the news seller confronts him.

“I know times are tough, but you must be able to afford at least one single newspaper.”

“I don’t need to buy the whole paper. I only care about the obituaries.”

“You do need to buy the paper, because the obituaries are in the back pages.”

“Not the one I’m looking for. That one will be right up front.”

David Frum

Shorts

  • Pete Hegseth is “something between an excitable morning TV anchor and the rooster who thought he brought the dawn. ‘We’re playing for keeps.’ ‘We’re punching them while they’re down.’ He brags about our ‘lethality.’ Stop talking like that! Don’t feed the stereotypes, don’t tempt the gods.” (Peggy Noonan)
  • Trump’s Department of Justice tacitly admits that it is too corrupted to withstand ethical inquiry.
  • Cheering for epistemic humility gets you no television interviews, no requests for op-eds, and no invitations to conferences. … But in the early phase of a war, above all, it should be the prudent observer’s battle cry. (Eliot Abrams)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

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.

Saturday, 9/10/22

Elizabeth Regina

There is not much use for me to try to explain my sense of loss at the death of Queen Elizabeth. Others have described reasons for such a sense better than I could.

I’ve been something of an Anglophile (is Britophile a word?) since discovering Lewis, and Tolkien, and the mystique of OxBridge. That was intensified when I arrived in London, for three weeks in the British Isles, in June 1968, after 3 weeks on the continent with languages I didn’t really speak (despite formal study of French and Spanish). It just felt like home to be among English-speakers again.

So these items probably won’t be my last on the topic.

Also: long live the King, two days my Junior, who nobody thought would wait 74 years for his coronation.

Sully plays my trump card, C.S. Lewis

You can make all sorts of solid arguments against a constitutional monarchy — but the point of monarchy is precisely that it is not the fruit of an argument. It is emphatically not an Enlightenment institution. It’s a primordial institution smuggled into a democratic system. It has nothing to do with merit and logic and everything to do with authority and mystery — two deeply human needs our modern world has trouble satisfying without danger.

The Crown satisfies those needs, which keeps other more malign alternatives at bay. No one has expressed this better than C.S. Lewis:

Where men are forbidden to honor a king, they honor millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead; even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

The Crown represents something from the ancient past, a logically indefensible but emotionally salient symbol of something called a nation, something that gives its members meaning and happiness. However shitty the economy, or awful the prime minister, or ugly the discourse, the monarch is able to represent the nation all the time. In a living, breathing, mortal person.

The importance of this in a deeply polarized and ideological world, where fellow citizens have come to despise their opponents as enemies, is hard to measure.

Andrew Sullivan, An Icon, Not An Idol. The whole eulogistic first part of his blog this week is worth reading if it’s not paywalled. I’d rank it as the best I’ve seen so far.

Yet another perspective on Elizabeth Regina’s longevity

Born in 1926—the year A.A. Milne’s “Winnie-the-Pooh” was published, and two years before the invention of sliced bread—Elizabeth ascended to the throne in 1952 at age 25. Winston Churchill was then Prime Minister, and Britain controlled over 70 territories around the globe from Tonga to Uganda, the Bahamas to Brunei. But as early as 1953, the Queen foresaw a changing world. “The Commonwealth bears no resemblance to the empires of the past,” she said. Her successor, King Charles III, will control only 14 realms plus the U.K. The Queen oversaw historic transformation, even as she was the embodiment of tradition.

Noah Blum

A proper old growth sovereign

I was just preparing for [an] interview … when I got the news. I’m not expecting you to be a monarchist or even interested in the English royals, but you will understand the tremors when a proper old growth sovereign dies. In an already hugely uncertain moment, England shakes yet again.

Martin Shaw

Culture

How bad was the pandemic?

The coronavirus pandemic killed so many people that U.S. life expectancy fell from roughly 79 in 2019 to 76 in 2021—the largest two-year decline in nearly a century.

America Is a Rich Death Trap – The Atlantic

Where is the grass really greener?

Whatever the shortcomings are of a liberal democracy, you have to live with the shortcomings and not use them as a reason to grab the steering wheel and just go somewhere else. Because there is nowhere else which is as good. Nowhere else which is as humane ….

Tom Stoppard via Andrew Sullivan.

These are the kinds of words I need to hear sometimes, but it’s generally enough that I would not trust any of the postliberal/illiberal figures I know to hold the reins of power. And when schismatics or heretics propose a “Christian America,” I throw up in my mouth a little.

But we still have a lot of people who’ve been given a very bad deal in this globalized world, and we need to heed their complaints even if they propose intolerable solutions.

When they call you “racist,” they may just mean they’re clearly better than you

Oberlin College’s character assassination of a local bakery is a perfect analogy for how the new upper middle class language of social justice is deployed as class warfare.

Leighton Woodhouse via Noah Blum.

I literally heard a progressive clergyperson, a mere hours ago, say that a scheduled November 5 program celebrating (now posthumously) Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee would be offensive “to BIPOC people” because … empire, colonialism, whatever.

I got the message: she’s better than the rest of us for noting that.

Politics

Writing as politics

Nearly everyone today writes from a distinct partisan position. Some commentators write as allies of the Democratic Party, others as allies of the Republicans. Still others outflank the Democrats on the left or the Republicans on the right with an eye to dragging the parties further in those respective directions.

As a consequence, what we end up with is less writing about politics than writing as politics. Many pundits and columnists seem to be primarily concerned with advancing the prospects of one party, set of policies, or ideological agenda. Or put in properly contrary terms for our era of negative partisanship: They are primarily concerned with thwarting one party, set of policies, or ideological agenda.

Whichever way you put it, this makes these writers pro bono PR flacks for one or the other of the country’s primary political factions and its ancillary branches throughout the culture.

Damon Linker, who is not a PR flack.

Pat Buchanan as proto-Trump

Buchananism was never truly popular. Neither was Trumpism: With Trump, Republicans won power but not popularity — at least not a popularity they could translate into clear electoral majorities. The simple solution would be to return to Reaganism, to reconstruct that big, if still exclusionary, tent and win huge majorities. But recent efforts to recreate Reaganism and establish a more inclusive Republican Party, like George W. Bush’s appeals to compassionate conservatism and Mr. McCain’s insistence on immigration reform, met fierce opposition from the party’s base.

Nicole Hemmer, The Man Who Won the Republican Party Before Trump Did, an argument that the swing of the GOP to populism (which Hemmer considers as being to the right of Reaganism) can be traced to Patrick J. Buchanan. It’s pretty good, if occasionally off-key.

So much venom and no fangs

The Former, who has been trying for years to master the Churchillian scowl, is seriously humor-impaired. There are unemployed joke writers around but he never thought to hire one. He was a name-caller on a fourth-grade level (Lyin’ Ted, Crooked Hillary) or he slapped a LOSER sticker on someone’s back and let it go at that. So much venom and no fangs to make it work for him.

The Brits do insult so much better. So we should steal from them. “A shiver looking for a spine to run up” could be applied to Mitch McConnell just as well as to Edward Heath, the original target. “A sheep in sheep’s clothing” fits any number of people. “He eats used toilet tissue in the hope that he will someday get used to the taste” fits Kevin McCarthy perfectly. And “He is the only man I know who immatures as he ages” is the Former in twelve words. It’s a poke in the snoot that disarms even as it raises a welt.

Never been such times as these before, I swear | Garrison Keillor

[S]ubordinating truth to politics is a game which tyrants and bullies always win.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

The Orthodox “phronema” [roughly, mind-set] cannot be programmitized or reduced into shibboleths.

Fr. Jonathan Tobias

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