Tag: Politics

Elevation of the Holy Cross 2024

I’m on vacation, so I’m not going to take the time to sort these into topics.

Also, it’s a major Feast day in the Eastern Church. The Orthodox Church at my vacation destination appears to be postponing observance to tomorrow — an Orthodox oddity in my limited experience.

Selling hoi polloi a delusion

Those with a material interest in doing so have learned to speak autonomy talk, and to tap into the deep psychology of autonomy in ways that lead to its opposite.

Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head

Purposeful to a fault

Himmler quite aptly defined the SS member as the new type of man who under no circumstances will ever do “a thing for its own sake.”

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Sit quietly with that one for a minute. Then consider Josef Pieper, Leisure, The Basis of Culture.

“Televangelists”

Fugitive Televangelist Wanted by F.B.I. Is Caught in the Philippines
Weeks of tense standoff in the Philippines have ended in the capture of a pastor accused of leading an international ring of sex abuse and trafficking of young women and girls.

New York Times

I don’t believe it would be fair to saddle any Christian tradition or denomination with this guy. From what the Times says about the idolatrous adulation he cultivated, he was plainly some kind of one-off cultist.

But I have no idea how many one-off cultists are abroad in the world, when this admonition currently being featured at the end of my Sunday blog posts:

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

Huge (if true)

Donald Trump runs no risk of going to prison in the middle of his campaign, thanks to Judge Juan Merchan’s decision Friday to postpone sentencing until Nov. 26. The delay gives his lawyers more time to prepare an appeal. Fortunately for Mr. Trump, his trial was overwhelmingly flawed, and a well-constructed appeal would ensure its ultimate reversal.

A central problem for the prosecution and Judge Merchan lies in Article VI of the U.S. Constitution, which makes federal law the “supreme law of the land.” That pre-empts state law when it conflicts with federal law, including by asserting jurisdiction over areas in which the federal government has exclusive authority.

Mr. Trump’s conviction violates this principle because it hinges on alleged violations of state election law governing campaign spending and contributions. The Federal Election Campaign Act pre-empts these laws as applied to federal campaigns. If it didn’t, there would be chaos. Partisan state and local prosecutors could interfere in federal elections by entangling candidates in litigation, devouring precious time and resources.

That hasn’t happened except in the Trump case, because the Justice Department has always guarded its exclusive jurisdiction even when states have pushed back, as has happened in recent decades over immigration enforcement.

The normal approach would have been for the Justice Department to inform District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who was contemplating charges against Mr. Trump, of the FECA pre-emption issue. If Mr. Bragg didn’t follow the department’s guidance, it would have intervened at the start of the case to have it dismissed. Instead the department allowed a state prosecutor to interfere with the electoral prospects of the chief political rival of President Biden, the attorney general’s boss.

David B. Rivkin Jr. and Elizabeth Price Foley, Why Trump’s Conviction Can’t Stand

They evolved

In the summer of 2015, back when he was still talking to traitorous reporters like me, I spent extended stretches with Donald Trump. He was in the early phase of his first campaign for president, though he had quickly made himself the inescapable figure of that race—as he would in pretty much every Republican contest since. We would hop around his various clubs, buildings, holding rooms, limos, planes, golf carts, and mob scenes, Trump disgorging his usual bluster, slander, flattery, and obvious lies. The diatribes were exhausting and disjointed.

But I was struck by one theme that Trump kept pounding on over and over: that he was used to dealing with “brutal, vicious killers”—by which he meant his fellow ruthless operators in showbiz, real estate, casinos, and other big-boy industries. In contrast, he told me, politicians are saps and weaklings.

“I will roll over them,” he boasted, referring to the flaccid field of Republican challengers he was about to debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library that September. They were “puppets,” “not strong people.” He welcomed their contempt, he told me, because that would make his turning them into supplicants all the more humiliating.

“They might speak badly about me now, but they won’t later,” Trump said. They like to say they are “public servants,” he added, his voice dripping with derision at the word servant. But they would eventually submit to him and fear him. They would “evolve,” as they say in politics. “It will be very easy; I can make them evolve,” Trump told me. “They will evolve.”

Like most people who’d been around politics for a while, I was dubious. And wrong. They evolved.

Mark Leibovich, Hypocrisy, Spinelessness, and the Triumph of Donald Trump

Change of perspective or sign of deline?

The eighteenth-century Humean slave of the passions is thus indistinguishable from the liberated, twentieth-century Sartrean individual living authentically.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

All that matters is strength

Part of the reason Trump is less constrained on [the abortion] issue than his predecessors is that he’s transformed the Christian right just as he has the broader conservative movement, dethroning serious-seeming figures while promoting those once regarded as flamboyant cranks. In Republican politics, Steve Bannon and Alex Jones now have far more influence than erstwhile conservative stalwarts like Paul Ryan and Dick Cheney. Similarly, in the religious realm, the ex-president has elevated a class of faith healers, prosperity gospel preachers and roadshow revivalists over the kind of respectable evangelicals who clustered around George W. Bush. “Independent charismatic leaders, who 20 years ago would have been mocked by mainstream religious right leaders, are now frontline captains in the American culture wars,” writes the scholar Matthew D. Taylor in his fascinating new book, “The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy.”

The churches Taylor is writing about exist outside the structures and doctrines of denominations like the Southern Baptists. They’re led by flashy spiritual entrepreneurs who fashion themselves as modern apostles and prophets with supernatural spiritual gifts, and they represent one of the fastest-growing movements in American Christianity. Among many of these churches, Trump remains the anointed one, chosen by God to restore Christian rule to the United States. These Christians care a great deal about abortion, but they appear to care at least as much about Trump. Many of them see him as a modern-day version of the Persian emperor Cyrus, a heathen who, in the sixth century B.C.E., rescued God’s chosen people from Babylonian captivity. In this framework, Trump’s piety is irrelevant; all that matters is his strength.

Michelle Goldberg

I think Goldberg, no Christian, is right. And that means that it’s hard to say that MAGA and I share the Christian tradition; their religion seems from a darker source.

Ted Cruz is no dummie

Liz Cheney famously endorsed Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, and less famously endorsed Democratic U.S. Representative Colin Allred over Ted Cruz for Cruz’s Texas Senate seat.

So has she abandoned the GOP?

I can’t speak for Cheney, but I can tell you why I’m voting for Allred over Cruz—and it has nothing to do with policy or burning anything down.

Since January 6, the threshold question I ask when considering whether to vote for a Republican is how that candidate responded to Trump’s coup attempt. There’s a spectrum of behavior on that point, with Cheney and Kinzinger on one end, Trump himself on the other, and the mass of congressional Republicans somewhere in between.

At the two extremes of the spectrum, policy doesn’t matter to me. Policy debates are things you get to have when everyone agrees on the rules of the game. Rewarding those who defended democratic norms and punishing those who undermined them is more important.

I would vote for Cheney and every other Republican who voted to impeach or convict Trump following the insurrection in hopes that their victories would embolden others in the party to resist his power grabs in a second term. And I would vote against Trump and all of his co-conspirators for the opposite reason, in hopes that their defeats would convince others that civic crime, like trying to overturn an election on false pretenses, doesn’t pay.

Ted Cruz was Trump’s chief co-conspirator in the Senate after the 2020 election, initially agreeing to argue before the Supreme Court that the electoral votes of swing states won by Joe Biden should be thrown out. When the court declined to hear that case, Cruz switched to Plan B and ring-led a scheme on January 6 to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s victory by objecting to those swing-state electoral votes. Had he gotten his way, some sort of chaotic ad hoc election “commission” would have been thrown together before Inauguration Day to decide who the next president should be.

He did all of this knowing full well that Trump was and is a loon and that egging on Americans to doubt the fairness of their own elections will destabilize the country long-term. But he was willing to pay that price because he thought making himself useful to the coup would give him a leg up with Trump’s base when he runs for president again someday.

You don’t need to agree with Colin Allred on a single policy issue to grasp that a person like Ted Cruz cannot be trusted to defend the constitutional order. He was tested and failed grievously. If you believe that a second Trump presidency would create a “unique threat” to American government, as Liz Cheney and I do, it’s urgent that Trump’s most unethical enablers in Congress be replaced by people who won’t rubber-stamp anything he does.

Republicans in Texas had their chance to replace Cruz with a candidate like that in this year’s primary, just as Republicans nationally had their chance to replace Trump. They made their choice. Cheney and I have made ours.

It’s frankly amazing to me that so many conservatives have been left struggling to understand Cheney’s endorsement of Allred. To a certain sort of partisan, it seems, Trump is the only elected Republican who bears meaningful responsibility for the attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, the scores of House GOPers who voted to object on January 6—they’re all off the hook because, well, there are just too many of them to punish. Beating them at the polls would wipe out the party, and partisans won’t tolerate that. Even for just one election cycle, to teach their representatives a hard lesson about authoritarian bootlicking.

If you feel obliged to excuse Ted Cruz for his role in a coup plot because that’s what hating Democrats requires of you, you do you. But let’s please stop memory-holing his part in it by feigning confusion as to why Liz Cheney might want to drive him from politics. It’s pathetic.

Nick Catoggio

Ted Cruz is no dummie. He’s whip-smart and cunning. He also is a contemptible human being with no core. His mentor, Princeton’s Robert P. George, must be deeply grieved.

Shanghaied

  • Few cities in Asia match Shanghai’s level of economic development. In the fanciest shopping streets in the city center you can go miles without leaving the realm of luxury stores, with a Hermes outlet abutting a Louis Vuitton outlet, which in turn abuts a Rolex outlet. At times, the city reminded me of an acquaintance’s semi-humorous observation that, in a hundred years, luxury brands may be all that remains of Europe’s once enormous influence on the world.
  • In Postwar, Tony Judt argues that in the 1960s, the restive mood of Europe’s young was in part fueled by the ugliness of the homes in which they had been raised and the new universities in which they were being educated. Comparisons between Europe sixty years ago and China today are certain to be wrong for any number of reasons, but my mind kept going back to Judt’s observation every time I drove past another island of identical, unadorned housing blocks.
  • Preferences about the next American president seem to be nearly as divided among Chinese intellectuals as they are among the American electorate. A senior scholar of international relations told me that Donald Trump would likely be more willing to cut deals with China but that he preferred Kamala Harris because of her greater predictability on the international stage. A senior economist told me that Kamala Harris might prove softer on tariffs but that she would prefer Donald Trump because of his greater predictability on economic policy. The only consistent refrain was the preference for perceived predictability: Chinese elites seem as discombobulated by the sense that it’s impossible to predict what Washington might do as they are by any specific action the next president might take.

Yasha Mounk, 3 of 21 Observations About China

The All-Volunteer Navy at Play

The chief petty officers aboard the USS Manchester (LCS-14) were caught illicitly placing and using a Starlink satellite-internet antenna while the ship was under way. The conspiracy, involving all senior enlisted sailors attached to the littoral combat ship, came to light after months of use, when a civilian contractor came aboard and stumbled upon the bootleg setup. The ship’s command senior chief and ringleader of the operation was convicted at court-martial and reduced in rank from E-8 to E-7: an outrageously light penalty considering her repeated lies to her commanding officer, her background in Navy IT that ensures she was absolutely aware of her transgression, and the cover-up campaign that involved the intimidation and silencing of those below her. This betrayal of the ship’s whereabouts in service to movie-streaming, texting, and other forms of personal entertainment is especially egregious because of the role that chiefs have in preserving good order and discipline among the ranks while upholding Navy traditions. A bad chief is the ruin of a ship and its crew, and the legal equivalent of keelhauling the only correct recourse.

National Review’s The Week Friday email. See also the Navy Times.

Donald Trump after the debate

The Hill: Trump Floats Punishment For ABC After Debate

I mean, to be honest, they’re a news organization. They have to be licensed to do it. They ought to take away their license for the way they did that.

Via The Dispatch

This response is fractally wrong. ABC doesn’t need a license to be a news organization (thank God and the First Amendment).

If they did have a license, it would be dictatorial to revoke it for displeasing the President or anyone else.

Trump once again exhibits his anti-democratic impulses, though once again it probably will deter no fans.

Lesser evils

“Sending migrants away, not allowing them to grow, not letting them have life is something wrong; it is cruelty,” Francis said in a news conference on the plane as he returned to Rome after his long trip to Southeast Asia and Oceania. “Sending a child away from the womb of the mother is murder because there is life. And we must speak clearly about these things.”

…

But when asked whether it would be morally admissible to vote for someone who favored the right to abortion, he responded: “One must vote. And one must choose the lesser evil. Which is the lesser evil? That lady or that gentleman? I don’t know. Each person must think and decide according to his or her own conscience.”

Pope Says Both Trump and Harris Are ‘Against Life’.

Donald Trump seemingly is Teflon-coated, but explicit Papal permission to vote for the (more) pro-abortion candidate could logically be a factor in this election.

Even WSJ is appalled

Ms. Loomer is usually described in the press as “far right,” but that’s unfair to the fever swamps. On Sunday she posted on X that if Ms. Harris wins the election, “the White House will smell like curry,” a gibe against Ms. Harris’s Indian heritage.

She added that Ms. Harris’s speeches “will be facilitated via a call center.” U.S. companies often farm out their information lines to Indian firms, get it? We wonder if JD Vance’s Indian-American wife thinks that’s funny.

In 2018 Ms. Loomer chained herself to Twitter’s New York headquarters after the platform banned her. She suggested that Casey DeSantis, the wife of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, might have lied about having breast cancer: “I’ve never seen the medical records.” This week she smeared Sen. Lindsey Graham after he criticized her association with Mr. Trump.

All of this would be ignorable, except that others close to Mr. Trump say he is listening to Ms. Loomer’s advice. People in the Trump campaign are trying to get her out of the former President’s entourage, to no avail. Even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene thinks Ms. Loomer is damaging the former President’s election chances.

As North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis put it on Friday: “Laura Loomer is a crazy conspiracy theorist who regularly utters disgusting garbage intended to divide Republicans. A DNC plant couldn’t do a better job than she is doing to hurt President Trump’s chances of winning re-election. Enough.”

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board

On the other hand …

If anyone is looking for facts to support a vote for Trump despite loony Loomer (and everything else), these two graphs may be just the ticket. The Biden administration has not covered itself in glory on illegal immigration.

The yellow bar is illegal immigrants and those awaiting adjudication of asylum claims or other claims to remain.

See the Wall Street Journal story.

Where customer service and stalking overlap

Delta wants to know what I thought of my flight. Honda wants to know what I thought of my oil change. The company that inspects my HVAC system twice yearly wants to know what I thought of … the air filter replacements? The technician’s demeanor? I’m not sure because I’ve read only the subject lines of the emails, which keep coming, imploring me to reflect on the experience and charting some strange new territory where customer service and stalking overlap. It may be time for a restraining order. Or, minimally, a different kind of filter, the one that consigns certain senders’ electronic missives to the Spam or Trash folders.

Frank Bruni

Life goes on

O when the world’s at peace and every man is free
then will I go down unto my love.
O and I may go down several times before that.

Wendell Berry

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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.

Just the Debate

No, I didn’t watch. I thought I might. Then I thought I wouldn’t because it wouldn’t change my vote for “neither of the above.” Then I just plain forgot it was going to broadcast, picked up a book to make me smarter, and was asleep before the conclusion of the debate that would have made me dumber.

Harris-Trump presidential debate transcript

It can be said that Ms. Harris was well prepared in leading him astray. After blaming Mr. Trump for helping to tank a congressional border bill, Ms. Harris unboxed an attack line that seemed handcrafted by a team of Trumpologists to enrage him, distracting him with his own vanity.

“I’m going to actually do something really unusual,” she said, addressing the audience at home. “I’m going to invite you to attend one of Donald Trump’s rallies. Because it’s a really interesting thing to watch.”

Smirking, provoking, Ms. Harris ticked through some common Trump digressions, like windmills and the fictional killer Hannibal Lecter. Mr. Trump’s eyes narrowed, and his head cocked to the left.

“And what you will also notice,” she said, as Mr. Trump bobbed a bit, pendulum-like, “is that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.”

On those two nouns, Mr. Trump’s eyes shot up. Ms. Harris completed her thought: “The one thing you will not hear him talk about is you.”

And then, Mr. Trump talked about Mr. Trump.

Matt Flegenheimer

Mr. Trump went on to say that the FBI’s crime statistics are “a fraud,” and the Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs numbers are “a fraud,” and the 2020 election was, yes, still a fraud, and “they should have sent it back to the legislatures.” About the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, he regrets nothing. Then World War III again. What of this is supposed to reassure suburbanites who worry that Mr. Trump is too erratic to put back in the Oval Office?

Kyle Peterson

She turned to him with an arched brow. A quiet sigh. A hand on her chin. A laugh. A pitiful glance. A dismissive shake of her head.

From the opening moments of her first debate against Donald J. Trump, Kamala Harris craftily exploited her opponent’s biggest weakness.

Not his record. Not his divisive policies. Not his history of inflammatory statements.

Instead, she took aim at a far more primal part of him: his ego.

Lisa Lerer, Reid J. Epstein

In Kamala Harris’s big general-election debate four years ago, she faced off against an opponent with a fly on his head.

In her immeasurably bigger debate on Tuesday night, she confronted an opponent with bats inside his.

And out they came, flapping and screeching, when he brought up cats and dogs.

He was talking about what he couldn’t stop talking about — the millions of migrants who, he insisted, were depraved criminals being dumped on us by cackling foreign leaders — and in his indiscriminate zest to describe an American hellscape, he repeated debunked stories that in Springfield, Ohio, these desperate newcomers were noshing on Fido and Whiskers.

“They’re eating the dogs. The people that came in — they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” he sputtered, red-faced …

…

And all that predebate chatter about his being a foot taller than she is and how that might visually diminish her? Most of the televised debate was a split screen of their two faces, and it was Trump who ended up looking small.

…

But while she was brilliant when discussing the damage done by what she shrewdly termed the “Trump abortion bans,” she was evasive when asked whether she supported any abortion restrictions. She was evasive, period, routinely answering questions by not answering them and pivoting to statements of principle, pitches for her policy proposals or indictments of Trump.

…

And Trump can be beaten. That was the clearest takeaway on Tuesday night.

Insufficiently prepared and demonstrably perturbed, he was reduced to insults and catcalls: Biden was a beach bum. Harris shirked important matters of state for a sorority reunion. And she had no real plan for the economy.

“It’s, like, four sentences,” Trump groused. “Run, Spot, run.”

Um, that’s three words. And isn’t Spot running so he doesn’t end up as charcuterie?

Frank Bruni

Trump cited his friendly relations with Putin and the praise he has gotten from Viktor Orban, both autocrats. Harris explained that they wanted him in power because they know “they can flatter you and manipulate you.” In one swoop, he showed how naïve, ignorant and dangerous he would be for American foreign policy.

Pamela Paul

Trump kept describing the United States as a failing nation. His candidacy remains the best evidence for that claim. The Republican candidate for president of the United States baldly asserted on national television that doctors are executing babies after birth. He said that immigrants are stealing and eating Americans’ pet dogs and cats. He defended the rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6. Even if he loses the election, this debate was a reminder — though, frankly, one we didn’t need — that our democracy has big problems.

Binyamin Appelbaum

Trump’s recapitulation of his running mate’s smears against Haitian immigrants in Ohio is a sign that the former president is marinating in a right-wing media ecosystem that, along with his own incapacities, renders him unable to perceive reality.

Jamelle Bouie.

Trump’s inability to perceive reality is, in my estimation, an epiphenomenon of his narcissism, rather than the “right-wing media ecosystem” he marinates in. (But I’m quibbling; he so marinates because his narcissism can’t bear the criticism he’d see if he ventured outside his bubble.)

Even when Trump had the facts on his side, his answers were delivered in such disjointed staccato that his message was lost on the listener. Consider his response on Afghanistan. This should have been a layup, given the fact the Biden-Harris administration presided over a humiliating withdrawal that left our Afghan allies behind and culminated in a suicide bombing attack that killed 13 U.S. service personnel. But Trump, instead, rambled about the detailed sequence of the withdrawal in the agreement that his administration had originally negotiated, and then pivoted to complain about the $85 billion worth of “beautiful military equipment” left on the battlefield.

Eli Lake

Vice President Kamala Harris walked onto the ABC News debate stage with a mission: trigger a Trump meltdown.

She succeeded.

Former President Donald Trump had a mission too: control yourself.

He failed.

Trump lost his cool over and over. Goaded by predictable provocations, he succumbed again and again.

Trump was pushed into broken-sentence monologues—and even an all-out attack on the 2020 election outcome. He repeated crazy stories about immigrants eating cats and dogs, and was backwards-looking, personal, emotional, defensive, and frequently incomprehensible.

Harris hit pain point after pain point: Trump’s bankruptcies, the disdain of generals who had served with him, the boredom and early exits of crowds at his shrinking rallies. Every hit was followed by an ouch. Trump’s counterpunches flailed and missed. Harris met them with smiling mockery and cool amusement. The debate was often a battle of eyelids: Harris’s opened wide, Trump’s squinting and tightening.

Harris’s debate prep seemed to have concentrated on psychology as much as on policy. She drove Trump and trapped him and baited him—and it worked every time.

David Frum

Trump’s nondefense of his behavior on Jan. 6 was so ridiculous — he tried to change the subject to illegal immigration at one point, as if disgruntled Mexicans had invaded the Capitol at his behest — that even if Harris had stumbled out drunk and dribbled down her blouse, Trump still might have lost the debate for himself.

Matt Labash

P.S.

ABC News lost the presidential debate

Moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis of ABC News made the controversial decision to perform fact checks of the candidates in real time. Not once did they check a claim from Harris. All four of the moderators’ live corrections were made against Trump, some of which were highly subjective.

Of course, that’s why many moderators — including Jake Tapper and Dana Bash in June — choose to trust that voters can check facts on their own. Campaigns are built on exaggerations. Nobody is happy about it, but it’s true of both Republicans and Democrats. While Trump is uniquely freewheeling, to say the very least, Harris provided plenty of openings for the moderators to offer just one easy correction.

Emily Jashinsky at UnHerd

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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.

Wednesday, 7/31/24

Weird candidates, glass houses

“Weird” is the new “deplorables”

For a few days this last week I started to believe that Kamala Harris and the Democrats could come from behind and beat Donald Trump. But then I started to hear Democrats patting themselves on the back for coming up with a great new label for Trump Republicans. They are “weird.”

I cannot think of a sillier, more playground, more foolish and more counterproductive political taunt for Democrats to seize on than calling Trump and his supporters “weird.”

But weird seems to be the word of the week. As this newspaper reported, in a potential audition to be Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota said over the weekend of Trump and his vice-presidential pick, Senator JD Vance of Ohio: “The fascists depend on us going back, but we’re not afraid of weird people. We’re a little bit creeped out, but we’re not afraid.” Just to make sure he got the point across, Walz added: “The nation found out what we’ve all known in Minnesota: These guys are just weird.”

As The Times reported, Harris, speaking at a weekend campaign event at a theater in the Berkshires, “leaned into a new Democratic attack on the former president and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, saying that some of the swipes the men had taken against her were ‘just plain weird.’” The Times added: “Pete Buttigieg, the secretary of transportation, said Mr. Trump was getting ‘older and stranger’ while Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, called Mr. Vance ‘weird’ and ‘erratic.’”

It is now a truism that if Democrats have any hope of carrying key swing states and overcoming Trump’s advantages in the Electoral College, they have to break through to white, working-class, non-college-educated men and women, who, if they have one thing in common, feel denigrated and humiliated by Democratic, liberal, college-educated elites. They hate the people who hate Trump more than they care about any Trump policies. Therefore, the dumbest message Democrats could seize on right now is to further humiliate them as “weird.”

“It is not only a flight from substance,” noted Prof. Michael J. Sandel of Harvard, author of “The Tyranny of Merit: Can We Find the Common Good?” “It allows Trump to tell his supporters that establishment elites look down on them, marginalize them and view them as ‘outsiders’ — people who are ‘weird.’ It plays right into Trump’s appeal to his followers that he is taking the slings and arrows of elites for them. It is a distraction from the big argument that Democrats should be running on: How we can renew the dignity of work and the dignity of working men and women.”

I don’t know what is sufficient for Harris to win, but I sure know what is necessary: a message that is dignity-affirming for working-class Americans, not dignity-destroying. If this campaign is descending into name-calling, no one beats Trump in that arena.

Thomas L. Friedman

Too busy to look in a mirror?

I’m not sure that calling Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance “weird” when you’re the party of gender fluidity will connect with voters.

Oliver Wiseman at the Free Press (cartoon from a separate source)

(N.B. Be it remembered that everyone reading this is probably WEIRD)

Self-sabotage

Decades ago, the lesbian cultural critic Camille Paglia warned her fellow homosexuals against reckless attacks on religion. Homosexuality only flourishes under conditions of advanced culture, she said—and like it or not, the church is a pillar of culture. Therefore, said Paglia, when gays “attack the institutions of culture (including religion), they are sabotaging their own future.”

In 2016, Paglia spoke at an ideas festival in Britain, saying that the West’s obsession with androgyny and transgenderism is a sign that “civilization is starting to unravel. You find it again and again and again in history.” 

“People who live in such times feel that they’re very sophisticated, they’re very cosmopolitan,” Paglia said. In truth, she goes on, they give evidence of a culture that no longer believes in itself. This, in turn, calls forth “people who are convinced of the power of heroic masculinity”—in other words, barbarians.

Nobody will resist contemporary “barbarians” to defend a civilizational order that places the sexually disordered at its symbolic pinnacle. Ordinary Frenchmen might fight for the Blessed Virgin Mary, or for Marianne, the symbol of the Republic, or at least for Brigitte Bardot. But for Barbara Butch? Please.

Rod Dreher, A Civilizational Suicide Note on the Seine. Apropos of the barbarians called forth by our queered culture, see ‌Toxic Masculinity rightly so called in Monday’s blog.

America’s unacknowledged social credit system

“Vague and subjective policies pervade the financial industry,” Jeremy Tedesco told the Federalist Society group. He is the general counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, which has itself been labeled an “extremist group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. (ADF once was the institutional home of famously intolerant extremist David French.) “They’ll never tell the customer the real reason they are being debanked. Companies hide behind vague standards, just like government would do if it were regulating speech.”

Tedesco sees the issue as being essentially one of collusion: heavily regulated industries doing the dirty work of government officials who cannot engage in censorship themselves but who can lean on banks and insurance companies and make their lives miserable if they choose.

Kevin D. Williamson, Debanking is Just a Tax on Dissent

Schedule F

How many civil servants could a future President Trump try to fire using a reimplemented Schedule F? Estimates run to somewhere around 50,000. Fukuyama is worth quoting at length on the implications:

It is hard to describe the damage that will be done to American government if these plans are carried out. While there is a good case to be made for great flexibility in the hiring and firing of federal officials, the wholesale replacement of thousands of public servants with political cronies would take the nation back to the spoils system of the 19th century. Republicans think that they will be undermining the deep state, but they will simply be politicizing functions that should be carried out in an impartial way, and will destroy the ethic of neutral public service that animates much of the government. When they lose power, as they necessarily will, the other party will simply get rid of their partisans and replace them with Democratic loyalists in a way that undermines any continuity in government. Who will want a career in public service under these conditions? Only political hacks, opportunists, and those who see openings for personal enrichment in the bureaucracy.

Damon Linker, The Part of “Project 2025” We’re Sure to See

The low stakes in Election 2024

I figure whoever walks away with Pennsylvania wins the deal; so come first Tuesday in November, I plan on staying up no later than the calling of that state. Either way, it will be a new regime, sending rats like Sullivan and Blinken and Kirby scurrying off to think tanks to plot their return to power. Meanwhile, nothing much will change, despite the label at the top; for weapons of death and destruction have to be shipped, genocide has to be upheld, and money has to be printed, no matter the administration.

Terry Cowan

Lame-Duck Quackery

Biden’s three-pronged proposal to reform the Supreme Court isn’t serious.

  • He didn’t consult with Congress before announcing it, as he would have if he were serious.
  • He proposed no language for the constitutional amendments that would be required were he serious.
  • A constitutional amendment to the effect that Presidents have no (little?) immunity isn’t a matter of Supreme Court reform at all — and will prove deucedly difficult to write if someone tries.

Biden probably is past the point of being able to achieve seriousness; all he’s got left is petulance.

(BTW: Term limits and a binding ethics code are not crazy ideas, but the devil’s in the details on how to “bind” SCOTUS.)

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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.

Monday, 7/29/24

From nobody’s Synaxarion except mine: On this, the 29th day of July, we commemorate the chastening of Tipsy the not-yet-Orthodox, who was wounded in a stupid motorcycle accident in Lafayette in the year 1965.

Politics

Be it remembered

The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the president. The president could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.

Liz Cheney via Peggy Noonan, Liz Cheney Shows What Leadership Looks Like, January 14, 2021.

If only the GOP had more persons with balls like Liz Cheney’s! Speaking of which …

Toxic Masculinity rightly so called

The Democratic Party must join the battle for the hearts and minds of young men … Trumpist masculinity is rooted in grievance and anger. [Admiral William] McRaven’s message centers on honor and courage.

There’s a seductive quality to Trump’s masculinity. Grievance is a form of counterfeit purpose, and anger is a form of counterfeit courage. For a time, your grievance can give you a mission — fighting the hated foe. And when you’re in the midst of an online temper tantrum, taking on all comers in your social media feed, you can feel a little bit brave, even if all you’re doing is tapping out vitriolic posts from the safety and comfort of your couch.

When you center masculinity on grievance and anger rather than honor and courage, you attract men like Hogan and Kid Rock and White. Worse, that is how you mold the men in your movement, including men like [VP Candidate JD] Vance.

Many conservatives rightly decry the way in which parts of the far left tend to use the words “straight white male” as a virtual epithet, as if there were something inherently suspect in the identities of tens of millions of men and boys. And if men feel that Democrats are hostile to them, they’ll go where they feel wanted, the gender gap will become a gender canyon, and more men will embrace Trumpism because that’s just what men do.

David French, Hulk Hogan Is Not the Only Way to Be a Man

So what?

It will take a victorious Trump all of 30 seconds to begin discussing the “many, many people saying we should probably change the Constitution” to allow presidents to serve more than two terms. Sorry to be gloomy, but it seems unrealistic to think that the extreme polarization, the massive proliferation of disinformation and conspiracy theories, and the erosion of faith in elections will retreat or dissipate. If anything, they seem to be strengthening and accelerating.

A “dissent” to something Andrew Sullivan said.

Hyperbole aside, I don’t much care if Trump does say that. There’s no way a constitutional amendment to that effect would pass within 3 years or so (i.e., in time for him to run again) — if ever.

Kamala

I think it’s very important, as you have heard from so many incredible leaders, for us at every moment in time, and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past but the future.

Kamala Harris (via Andrew Sullivan)

What the fuck does any of that mean? And what does she actually believe in? From locking up criminals as California’s AG to pushing bail for BLM rioters, from imprisoning cannabis users to favoring national weed legalization — is quite a journey.

…

Harris is one of the weakest and wokest Democratic candidates there is. She cannot credibly appeal to the center after such extreme-left posturing; she cannot run a campaign; she cannot run an executive office; she has never been able to win elections outside the left-liberal, one-party state of California; and she has nothing to offer to those of us who really, really don’t want to vote for Trump but don’t want to unburden ourselves of every moderate or conservative principle we ever had. Apart from that, she’s perfect.

Andrew Sullivan

JD Vance has said some things he needs to explain or walk back. But so has Kamala Harris — at least when she’s not utterly vacuous in a pseudo-smart sort of way.

Public Affairs

Beacon of hope

Matthew Crawford is a guy with a PhD who still, compulsively, does things with his hands. Thus, he sometimes needs tools — like an “indicator base.”

The one from Harbor Freight was a real POS, as apparently are most things from there, their “thing” being selling really cheap Chinese stuff. He went to Grainger for a replacement:

The lady behind the counter had never heard of an indicator base, but I expected this. It is a common enough tool, but in a big, publicly-traded company, people who know things don’t sit behind counters or answer phones. The less someone knows, the cheaper they are. So she got on her computer and looked it up. The one that came up had a price of $465. I told her that can’t be right; a decent one costs about $50 and a good one about $100 (the HFT one I am replacing currently sells for $13). There must have been a misplaced decimal point. Trying again, she hit a few key strokes that brought her to a screen with a series of search filters. The first filter asked me to choose the holding strength of the magnet, from a list of options. These were listed in a hodgepodge of different units. One such unit was Newtons, which is a legitimate unit for specifying force, but one that most people in the US (certainly machinists) don’t use, unless they are the type who also get into Esperanto.

…

My point is that the desk lady and I were dealing with a bunch of random shit on a screen that had little connection to reality as I understood it, and we couldn’t get past this screen without pretending otherwise. The inventory system was surely built by a web designer, someone who has probably never used any of the tools listed in the vast Grainger catalogue. Or rather, it was likely built by a whole team of such people, unknown to one another, speaking several different languages and dispersed across the globe.

And so forth and so on. But there’s a better alternative, with some trade-offs:

I could end on this gloomy note. But let me tell you about another industrial supply house, McMaster-Carr, because the difference is remarkable. (They are my go-to source, but they have no storefronts as Grainger does, and I wanted my indicator base immediately.)

…

My point is that the catalogue [“3,592 pages of dense type”] is written as though it matters, by people involved with material things. They want to sell stuff that enables people to do things. How is this allowed in 2024?!

The answer is surely connected to the fact that this family business, with 1,000 employees, which opened in the Chicago Loop in 1901, remains private, while Grainger is publicly traded. McMaster is said to be “secretive”, but a business intelligence site says the company “has historically raised $0 in funding,” meaning it has no debt. Meaning, it isn’t subject to the imperatives of what I like to call “systematized irrationality.”  Global capital isn’t just impatient for returns, it is invested in models of reality that offer portability and scalability, allowing metrics to be applied across sectors and industries and communicated to people sitting in high-rise office buildings. Legibility-from-afar always means partial and hence fake legibility. It can be achieved by substituting representations for reality, but representations of a particular kind: they must be emptied of rich layers of content derived from the situated knowledge of particular practices – the very practices in which you might use the tool or material in question. This entails the destruction of knowledge, for the sake of uniformity and financial abstraction.

By contrast, the McMaster-Carr catalogue is like a modern-day version of Diderot’s Encyclopedie. If the final cataclysm were to happen, but you somehow had access to the catalogue and everything in it, you would be able to reconstruct the modern world. They have kept finance and IT in their proper place.

I decidedly do not work with my hands (unless you count typing). I used to be pretty handy in a general sort of way, but it’s gone away from decades of disuse. (My son must have picked up his dual mind-hand propensities from his maternal grandfather. His musical keyboard abilities are a total mystery. Milkman?)

But I can appreciate Crawford, and his story, and a privately-held company that does things right.

No storefronts? No problem!

Irish microcosm

Ardnacrusha was a revolutionary piece of technology in its time, enabling the newly-independent Irish state to provide huge amounts of electricity for a nation for which it was still a rarity (you can see fascinating photos and accounts of its construction here and here.) But the march of the Machine has consequences. In this case, those consequences included a 90% collapse in the salmon population of the Shannon, which previously had been world-famous for its salmon runs, along with the mass death of trout and eels, the silting up of parts of the waterway, an increase in flooding and the raising of the water level of Lough Derg.

Still at least Ireland now has a carbon-free electricity supply, right? Well, no. When it was built, Ardnacrusha was the biggest hydroelectric scheme in the world, until it was beaten to that title by America’s Hoover Dam. On completion, it produced enough power to meet the electricity demand of the whole of Ireland. Today it produces just 2% of it. That’s how much the thirst for electricity has increased in one short century. An astonishing seventy per cent of all that electricity will be swallowed by Internet server farms by the end of this decade.

Behold! Sustainability!

…

The giant wind turbines – subject to similar local protests across the land – are the latest Big Tech solution to the power ‘needs’ of the country: ‘needs’ which have accelerated a thousandfold in a century, and will continue to do so. Everybody wants insta-access to the shiny flicky pictures on the little Satanic Rectangle in their back pockets, but nobody wants to live in the middle of the power station needed to supply it. Well, get used to it, people, because the whole landscape will be a power station soon. Then there’ll be nowhere to hide except inside your VR headsets. Got a problem with that? Then take a hammer to your phone!

Paul Kingsnorth

Music today

We have two camps, and you really need to pick a side:

(1) The dominant view in the economy treats music as something of little consequence or value. You shouldn’t even have to pay a penny to hear it. And if it can be replaced by an AI track—or even a podcast or twerking video or some other form of ‘content’—that’s perfectly fine. That’s because musicians don’t create sufficient value to deserve better treatment.

Or you can align yourself with the other view:

(2) Music is our most trusted pathway into a world of beauty and enchantment. It transforms our lives in a way that everyday products of consumption can’t replicate. And even though it is intangible, it endures longer than these consumer goods. At the end of your life, you will still turn to your beloved songs for comforts, long after other products have worn out and lost their value.

Make no mistake, this is a huge issue. The wealthiest people in the world—namely, the owners of the dominant web platforms—are trying to subjugate all cultural endeavors (or as they call it, content) in their digital domains. But this can only happen if they are allowed to manipulate the economy value of creativity, and force it into subservience to their centralized technologies.

We can’t afford to let that happen. So, as you might guess, I have an easy time picking (2) above as my chosen pathway.

And it’s not just my opinion. Plato and Socrates finally came to the same conclusion at the end of their lives. Is it too much to hope that the people who control our music economy will eventually make that same discovery?

Ted Gioia

“Private” matters

Remembering Crunchy Rod

Dreher proposed the best way forward for the Republican Party when he wrote Crunchy Cons. In case anyone has forgotten the manifesto, here it is again in brief: 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

Crunchy Cons was my introduction to Rod Dreher, and I liked it very much. “Beauty is more important than efficiency”? now that is counter-cultural!

I rather miss that sunnier, more optimistic version of him — which I did not read as a way forward for the GOP so much as a way forward for the culture. Speaking of which …

Living decently

What I hold out for is the possibility that a man can live decently without knowing all the answers, or believing that he does—can live decently even in the understanding that life is unspeakably complex and unspeakably subtle in its complexity. The decency, I think, would be in acting out of the awareness that personal acts of compassion, love, humility, and honesty are better and more adequate responses to that complexity than any public abstraction or theory or organization.

— Wendell Berry, “Notes from an Absence and a Return,” in A Continuous Harmony (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2012), page 51, via Gracy Olmstead

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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.

Pre-Olympic notebook dump

Public Affairs

Everybody wants everything

Quite recently, I quoted Zaid Jilani:

In our political duopoly, you have to endorse one set of leaders or another in order to do anything constructive.

I responded that perhaps my rejection of the duopoly is because I’m not really trying “to do anything constructive” politically.

I stand by that, and I’m now reinforced by Isaiah Berlin via Alan Jacobs. Berlin:

[I]t is in fact impossible to combine Christian virtues, for example meekness or the search for spiritual salvation, with a satisfactory, stable, vigorous, strong society on earth. Consequently a man must choose. To choose to lead a Christian life is to condemn oneself to political impotence: to being used and crushed by powerful, ambitious, clever, unscrupulous men; if one wishes to build a glorious community like those of Athens or Rome at their best, then one must abandon Christian education and substitute one better suited to the purpose.

Jacobs adds:

I think Berlin is right about Machiavelli, and I think Machiavelli is right about Christianity too. The whole argument illustrates Berlin’s one great theme: the incompatibility of certain “Great Goods” with one another. The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the inability to grasp this point is one of the greatest causes of personal unhappiness and social unrest. Millions of American Christians don’t see how it might be impossible to reconcile (a) being a disciple of Jesus Christ with (b) ruling over their fellow citizens and seeking retribution against them. Many students at Columbia University would be furious if you told them that they can’t simultaneously (a) participate in what they call protest and (b) fulfill the obligations they’ve taken on as students. They want both! They demand both! 

Everybody wants everything, that’s all. They’re willing to settle for everything.

If you are fearful about condemning yourself “to political impotence: to being used and crushed by powerful, ambitious, clever, unscrupulous men,” David Brooks has some help to offer: Love in Harsh Times and Other Coping Mechanisms

America’s world mission

After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration imposed “super sanctions,” promising that such measures would bring the Russian economy to its knees. These measures, and the confidence with which they were imposed, reflected the old consensus, which presupposed the end-of-history dream world. But the outcomes contradict that fantasy. Countries commanding nearly half of global GDP refused to join our sanctions regime, exposing the obvious fact that the “rules-based international order” is not international and never has been. It has always been an instrument of American power.

I’m reluctant to use the word “empire.” After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States did not establish colonies. But the term has become unavoidable. The international order was made in our image, an ersatz empire, as recent events have revealed. Faced with the prospect of Russian aggression, the demilitarized nations of Europe are forced to operate as American vassal states.

…

I’m not a foreign policy expert, but I venture to guess that the combined military firepower of Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran (and its proxies) is substantial, perhaps equal to any force that the United States and its allies can bring to bear on short notice. How is it that we have allowed such a coalition to emerge? The Journal reports this expert opinion: “Russia and the other nations have set aside historic frictions to collectively counter what they regard as a U.S.-dominated global system.” I marvel at the formulation, “what they regard.” In effect, our policymakers suggest that the Russia-China-Iran-North Korea alliance rests on a misconception. Putin and Xi need to wake up to the truth. The “global system” is not U.S. dominated but U.S. sponsored—for the sake of world peace, prosperity, and the triumph of abortion and gay rights . . . er, human rights. It is nothing so narrow and parochial as the imposition of America’s national interests or our activist ideologies.

Maybe the Great and the Good in Washington recognize reality, and they mouth the old pieties out of habit; or perhaps they sense (accurately) the political danger of being the first to break with established orthodoxies. Can you imagine the domestic furor that would be visited upon a Secretary of State who suggested (again, accurately) that a foreign policy promoting gay rights and other progressive causes is a virtue-signaling luxury we can’t afford in an era of great-power competition? But I worry that we are led by true believers. Some imagine that the United States has been ordained by God to defend “democracy.” Others think that we have a secular mission to promote “reproductive freedom” and LGBTQ rights around the world (the arc of history, and so on).

R.R. Reno

Blaming the messenger

In 2023 Christopher Rufo exposed the fact that Texas Children’s Hospital was maiming minors in the service of transgender ideology. The Texas Legislature passed a bill prohibiting transgender medical procedures for minors. Now Rufo reports that the Texas Children’s Hospital has persisted in practicing “gender-affirming care,” committing Medicaid fraud in order to fund the prohibited procedures (“The Murky Business of Transgender Medicine,” City Journal). Federal officials have not stood idle. As the controversy became public in 2023, they were “busy assembling information.” The target? The whistleblowers! “A federal prosecutor, Tina Ansari, threatened the original whistleblower [Eithan] Haim with prosecution.” Then, in early June, “the stakes intensified. Three heavily armed federal agents knocked on Haim’s door and gave him a summons. According to the documents, he had been indicted on four felony counts of violating medical privacy laws. If convicted, Haim faces the possibility of ten years in federal prison.” A sadly familiar story. The rule of law turned into an ideological weapon.

R.R. Reno

Trade-offs

Writing for the Washington Post, Megan McArdle explored the questions posed by the CrowdStrike IT meltdown. “It’s quite efficient for one firm to serve a large number of important customers, as CrowdStrike does,” she wrote. “In some ways, these concentrated players might provide greater reliability, because they develop a lot of expertise by serving many users, and they can invest more in R&D and security than Bob’s Friendly Local Software Co. can. But when outages happen, they happen to seemingly everyone, everywhere, all at once, leaving users no alternatives. How best to try to manage the trade-off between efficiency and redundancy is a hard question for another day. For the moment, the important thing is to recognize that it exists, and that there’s no easy way around it. We probably should have thought more about such trade-offs when the Great Efficiency Drive was underway. We’ll have to think even harder about them now.”

The Morning Dispatch

Model collapse

Training artificial intelligence (AI) models on AI-generated text quickly leads to the models churning out nonsense, a study has found. This cannibalistic phenomenon, termed model collapse, could halt the improvement of large language models (LLMs) as they run out of human-derived training data and as increasing amounts of AI-generated text pervade the Internet. “The message is, we have to be very careful about what ends up in our training data,” says co-author Zakhar Shumaylov, an AI researcher at the University of Cambridge, UK. Otherwise, “things will always, provably, go wrong”. he says.” The team used a mathematical analysis to show that the problem of model collapse is likely to be universal, affecting all sizes of language model that use uncurated data, as well as simple image generators and other types of AI. (Source: nature.com)

John Ellis News Items

Luxury Beliefs

Young Rob Henderson has been deservedly dining out on his memoir Troubled and his coinage of “luxury beliefs.” But once you enter public debates, you not only attract crazies and trolls, but solid critics as well.

Yasha Mounk finds Henderson’s definition of luxury beliefs wanting:

Ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. And a core feature of a luxury belief is that the believer is sheltered from the consequences of his or her belief. There is this kind of element of duplicity, whether conscious or not.

He offers a substitute:

Luxury beliefs are ideas professed by people who would be much less likely to hold them if they were not insulated from, and had therefore failed seriously to consider, their negative effects.

The differences aren’t just semantic, and between the two of them, I agree with Mounk.

Now I await Mounk’s critics to further refine the definition.

Partisan politics

The Populist id weighs in on Harris

I’m not at all sure I agree with him on this, but Nick Catoggio has some pointed thoughts on GOP reactions to de facto Democrat nominee Kamala Harris:

I don’t believe the jabs about her being a “DEI hire” are part of a strategic calculus. I think they’re a matter of the populist id flaring at the thought of being governed by a black woman who’s not part of the ideological tribe.

It’s a preview of the next four years if Kamala Harris figures out a way to beat Trump this fall, I suspect. Unlike any presidency in my lifetime, her term would be wracked by obstruction, paralysis, and public disillusionment.

If you thought congressional Republicans were reluctant to compromise with Barack Obama, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Gaslighted about the border

Remember when Joe Biden made Kamala Harris his border czar? Well, bunky, that’s no longer operative. All the cool kids agree that it never happened. Do you want to be know for cooties? C’mon, man!

At this stage of things, perhaps it’s not surprising that reporters aren’t scrutinizing Harris’s record with the same zeal with which they dove into “Russiagate,” but this marks a new low. We told you she was this thing that we’re now telling you she never was. What’s the word for that again? Right. Gaslighting.

…

We can be sure of this much: If the border was not a mess, if this was not a winning GOP issue, Kamala Harris would be running on it right now. And her media sock-puppet friends—who seem to believe in nothing except making sure she wins—would be celebrating “The Greatest Border Czar Who Ever Was.”

Peter Savodnik, Gaslighting the Public on Kamala Harris as ‘Border Czar’

I understood — indeed, sympathized with — the desperation to keep Trump from the Presidency in 2016. But a lie is a lie, and they’re lying to us again.

It’s not that “they must think we’re stupid.” They do think that we’re stupid, and we give them grounds to think that day after day.

Is this half-apology better than none?

I am writing to offer an apology. The short version is this: I severely underestimated the threat posed by a Donald Trump presidency. The never-Trumpers—who never seemed to stop issuing their warnings and critiques—struck me as psychologically and emotionally weak people with porcelain-fragile sensibilities. It turns out their instincts were significantly better attuned than my own.

…

My judgment of colleagues and of various conservatives who opposed Trump was privately severe. On the surface, I fully granted the strength of their concerns. But in the confines of my mind, I concluded that they were moral free riders. They wouldn’t sully themselves by voting for Donald Trump, but they would benefit from many of his policies. I have been asked why I voted for him when I live in Tennessee where my vote was not necessary. I voted for him exactly because of my determination not to be a free rider. I would bear the weight of the decision.

…

I knew I was wrong as January 6 approached and the president started calling for Vice President Mike Pence to reject certification of the electoral college results. This, of course, was on top of his disturbing phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State urging him to “find” additional votes. At the same time, he encouraged Americans to mass at the Capitol to support his cause.

I do not suggest that the Americans who went to the Capitol, the great majority of them peaceful, bore ill intent, but I do think that the president intended to create a spectacle that would put pressure on Mike Pence to take a dramatic and extra-legal step that would fundamentally betray the American political order and its traditions.

Hunter Baker, When Pragmatic Politics Goes Bad: An Apology to the Never Trumpers

This column is ever-so-timely again. I say that not to praise the de facto Democrat nominee, nor even to imply that she’s a “lesser evil.” I say it, first, as a call to repentance from the behavior that got us into this awful mess. Insanity, by one pop-definition, is doing what you’ve always done and expecting a different result.

For me, part of repentance is rejecting “lesser-of-two-evils” voting calculus. Two parties of some sort were (inadvertently?) in our national DNA from the start; if one must win a majority (not plurality) of electors to gain the Presidency, then third parties are overwhelmingly “spoilers” (though not quite inevitably). I nevertheless will spoil my heart out again this quadrennium — taking care not to despise those who make the “binary” choice.

For any Christian Trump voter in 2024 (I suspect Baker will be in that camp in a few months unless he’s changed a lot since 1/21/21, when his apology was dated) whose head or heart is not dead must extend a bit of grace to those who can’t bring themselves to vote for him.

Trump as media favorite

Be at remembered that the media gave Donald Trump so much Free Press in 2016 that they virtually elected him. And while they clearly wanted to be coded as anti-Trump (their “stated preference”), the attention they gave him smells like revealed preference to me. A lot of people do like to watch him — a preference I never understood from the day a friend of mine went gaga over The Art of the Deal.

Adiaphora

Dinosaur

I like technology. I was, for my generation, an early adopter of computers and I spend (too) many hours per day on my MacBook.

But after a few years on Facebook, I dropped it. I got on it to communicate among my high school classmates, but most of them weren’t on it. And it got kind of overwhelmed with commercialism. Maybe there were plugins or something to suppress all that, but I dropped it anyway.

I dropped my Twitter account, too, unable to bear a 1/100 signal-to-noise ratio. I eventually signed up again, for some incomprehensible reason, only to find that the ratio is now 1/10000. I haven’t logged on in months. Is there any more enervating activity in the world than doom-scrolling?

I thought those were two pretty solid decisions. But now I constantly hear things on podcasts like “You can find it on our Facebook page.” (Oof! No I cannot! Why don’t you have a page on the open web?) And yesterday, the President of the United States announced on Twitter/X that he’s ending his campaign for re-election. (Mercifully, professional doomscrollers quickly surface major news like this.)

I still think those were solid decisions, but they seem pretty tame compared friends flirting with stuff like this and repeating mêmes like “be the friction you want to see in the world.”

A blast from the Covid past

I am radically testing the limits of what it fundamentally means to be outdoors by erecting walls, putting a roof on top of those walls, and then insisting that it is still outdoors. This bold subversion of commonly accepted norms challenges and deconstructs “outdoorsness” as we know it. Moreover, by performing this act of deconstruction through a literal act of construction, I am illuminating the contradictory double nature of the mere act of existing. To this end, I search for the strange within the familiar, the indoors within the outdoors, the technically compliant within the clearly unsafe.

Simon Henriques, I Am the Designer of This Restaurant’s Outdoor Seating Space, and This Is My Artist’s Statement

Why resign on August 20?

After half a century in politics, Senator Bob Menendez, found guilty of all 16 counts in his corruption trial, will resign, effective August 20. Why then? Well, as Katherine Tully-McManus notes, senators get paid on the 5th and 20th of each month. Trust old “Gold Bar Bob” to check out after payday. (Politico)

The Free Press

Technology will never end work (at least until we re-jigger our mimesis)

Futurists and their ilk keep predicting the elimination of work by technology, but it never arrives. By some reckonings, we’re working more than ever; we’re certainly not approaching zero work, not even asymptotically.

What gives? We give. We keep working because we want more. We want everything. (See Alan Jacobs, above)

Disciples of René Girard make careers out of analyzing such things, so I’ll dabbling lest I make a fool of myself.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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.

Saturday politics

Convention and its dramatis personae

Convention tidbits

All political conventions are cringe-worthy idolatry fests. But even by those low standards, there was so much abject Trump flattery going on among his cultish speakers that if this had been Kim Jong-un’s convention, he’d have told his propagandists, “Hey, fellas, dial it back a little.”

Matt Labash

I do not take idolatry as a harmless pecadillo.

Trump made many false claims about immigration throughout his remarks, but the most absurd was: “You know who’s taking the jobs, the jobs that are created? One hundred and seven percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens.”

Katherine Mangu-Ward

How does one take that “seriously but not literally”?

Compared with Trump’s acceptance speeches in 2016 and 2020, which were unusual enough, this one was unrestrained, self-indulgent and undisciplined, radiating a sense of grievance. It was Trump untethered, which is the right way to understand what his second term would be. We can’t say we haven’t been warned.

Peter Wehner

Oh give him a break. He’s an old man who has a limited playlist.

60 seconds of unified tone

It was then that Trump struck the tone of national unity that he had teased in interviews leading up to the convention, promising to be a president for all Americans. “I am running to be president for all of America, not half of America, because there is no victory in winning for half of America,” he said. “I’m here tonight to lay out a vision for the whole nation, to every citizen. Whether you’re young or old, man or woman, Democrat, Republican, or independent, black or white, Asian or Hispanic—I extend to you a hand of loyalty and of friendship. Together, we will lead America to new heights of greatness like the world has never seen before.”

That unified tone last for about … a full 60 seconds. No, Trump went on to spend most of the more than 90-minute speech—the longest nomination acceptance speech in modern history—riffing on old motifs like, as Drucker put it on Dispatch Live late last night, the Grateful Dead at a jam: Same song, different flavor. Far from revealing a changed man, reformed by a near-death experience, Trump’s speech showed a man unchained and more-or-less as he’s ever been.

The Morning Dispatch

Hold onto your hat

We saw something epochal: the finalization and ratification of a change in the essential nature of one of the two major political parties of the world’s most powerful nation. It is now a populist, working-class, nationalist party. That is where its sympathies, identification and affiliation lie. There will be shifts, stops and accommodations in the future, no party ever has a clear line, history intervenes, but it is changed, and there will be no going back.

…

It should be added that it was creepy to see members of the Trump family dominating prime speaking slots all week. This was carelessly cultish, and in its carelessness insolent. Mr. Trump’s speech was surprisingly muted, scattered and low-energy. It lacked drama even though he was narrating what it is like to be shot.

…

A final point. We have, many of us, for some time—months, certainly the past few weeks—felt various degrees and kinds of horror. But oh these are exciting times. Things are moving, shifting. Again, this is big history. Hold on to your hat.

Peggy Noonan

Bootstrapping

Vance had a grandmother who encouraged him—and, perhaps equally important, discouraged him—in the right ways. And Vance did what poor white trash types who do not wish to remain poor white trash do: He got out, in his case by joining the Marine Corps, one of the great exemplars of American meritocracy. He went to a good state college and an Ivy League law school, he married a woman from an immigrant family with values superior to the ones exhibited by the Real Americans™ who brought him into the world, took a job that paid a lot of money, and made the kind of social and economic connections that give a man options in life. He rails against multinational corporations and “woke” colleges and then goes home to his wife, a lawyer whose clients have included the Walt Disney Co. and the University of California; he himself is a former Silicon Valley venture capitalist, not a small-town hardware-shop owner. He rails against self-interested billionaires while Peter Thiel scratches him behind the ear. 

One must respect the hustle. Even if one retches, just a little.

Kevin D. Williamson

But Kevin: Isn’t this pretty low-hanging fruit? Won’t any Presidential or Vice-Presidential nominee be, ipso facto, “privileged”? Does every up-from-poverty success per se disprove a populist “they’re screwing you” pitch to those still in poverty? Isn’t Biden screwing “the working man” by forgiving elites’ student loans? Have I left out any Latin shorthand?

Let’s try another language then. ¿Porque no los dos? Why can’t oppression be real yet surmountable for a few?

Absolution and a call for revenge

Vance talked about working-class white people the way liberal Democrats used to talk about Black communities in the early 1970s. At 39, he is too young to remember those days, but Republicans back then charged liberals with abetting the misery of Black communities by making excuses for their challenges. And they had a point: Half a century ago, some liberals did indulge in a kind of cringey, paternalistic excuse-making that depicted Black people as mindless victims, unable to control themselves when faced with the relentless forces of capitalism and consumerism.

Conservatives countered that the narrative of victimhood never serves anyone except the political leaders who reap votes from convincing people that they are merely hapless targets who need to be protected from a world full of sinister conspirators. Those who genuinely cared about the collapse of the cities (and there were more than a few who didn’t, to be sure) stressed the importance of personal choices and the power of individual responsibility. They refused to accept policies that led, in their view, to permanent dependence on the state. Perhaps most important, they sharply criticized the language of victimhood. And Vance, until recently, seemed to embrace those old-school, center-right views.

So it was particularly jarring to hear Vance talking down to Appalachians and working-class households in ways that he himself likely would have found insulting before ambition snuffed out his ability to feel shame. All his previous talk of responsibility and initiative was gone, replaced by images of a heartland full of victims, a Norman Rockwell world now inundated with fentanyl and cheap Chinese electronics by Washington’s scheming elites.

Through it all, you could almost hear the issuance of absolution and the call for revenge: It’s not your fault that your unemployed son lives at home, staring at screens and getting high all day. Biden and Beijing and Wall Street did that. We’ll settle the score somehow. It was a night of messages every bit as infantilizing and degrading as any Vance and the old GOP would have once castigated had they been offered by the old left.

Tom Nichols, Hillbilly Excuses

What jumped out at me here wasn’t “JD Vance is a phony” but “Republicans are now treating dysfunctional white people as Democrats once treated black people” (and unlike Vance, I’m old enough personally to remember those days).

In this, Tom Nichols is running on a track perfectly parallel to Kevin D. Williamson:

I’d been writing about lower-class, mainly white dysfunction for a few years at that point, and Vance had just published his famous book, which I had reviewed in Commentary. I admired his work tremendously—and, naturally, envied him some, too. We had a good conversation. 

Watching his descent into … whatever it is he has become … has been dispiriting. Have you ever had an acquaintance, someone you see only infrequently, who had a terrible problem with addiction or some sickness, and every time you saw them they were noticeably worse? I see Vance only in the news, but that is kind of what it is like. Or like visiting your hometown every few years and seeing it decline. 

Declining hometowns are a theme of Vance’s. It’s mostly bulls—t, of course. What’s true of much of Appalachia is true of much of the Rust Belt: Nothing happened to those communities. Eastern Kentucky isn’t poor because of NAFTA or the WTO—it was poor when Andrew Jackson was president, and it has been poor since.

(See more of this Williamson column above)

Second-hand synthesis

Synthesizing what I read of it, the GOP Convention was a big, cheerful, sexy, vulgar, idolatrous pagan bacchanalia.

Of course, when the line between enthusiasm and idolatry is crossed at a political convention can be subtle, but I’m in a Christian tradition oft-accused of idolatry for saying of the Theotokos and the Saints things less hyperbolic than were repeatedly said of Trump this week.

One silver lining: Zombie Reaganism is as good and truly dead as conservatism in GOP version 2024.

Twixt now and November

Still beatable?

After beginning his speech with calls for unity — “There is no victory in winning for half of America” — the former president turned the convention into a Trump rally, attacking “crazy Nancy Pelosi” and slamming Biden by name after Republicans said that he would rise above the insults and not mention the president.

He ripped into Democrats on Social Security, Medicare, the border and energy policy, saying America was “stupid” under Biden while ad-libbing about Hannibal Lecter and having the next Republican convention in Venezuela.

Trump was suddenly thin on the unity and heavy on the unhinged, as his speech became tiresome and stretched past midnight on the East Coast. Biden may have messed up the June debate, but Trump’s own cognitive functioning was messing up the July convention.

Patrick Healy, Trump Goes Off the Rails. This Guy Is Still Beatable

Where the Democratic opportunity lies

[T]he problem with MAGA — and here is where the Democratic opportunity lies — is that it emerges from a mode of consciousness that is very different from the traditional American consciousness.

The American consciousness has traditionally been an abundance consciousness …

Many foreign observers saw us, and we saw ourselves, as the dynamic nation par excellence. We didn’t have a common past, but we dreamed of a common future. Our sense of home was not rooted in blood-and-soil nationalism; our home was something we were building together. Through most of our history, we were not known for our profundity or culture but for living at full throttle.

MAGA, on the other hand, emerges from a scarcity consciousness, a zero-sum mentality: If we let in tons of immigrants they will take all our jobs; if America gets browner, “they” will replace “us.” MAGA is based on a series of victim stories: The elites are out to screw us. Our allies are freeloading off us. Secular America is oppressing Christian America.

Viewed from the traditional American abundance mind-set, MAGA looks less like an American brand of conservatism and more like a European brand of conservatism. It resembles all those generations of Russian chauvinists who argued that the Russian masses embody all that is good but they are threatened by aliens from the outside. MAGA looks like a kind of right-wing Marxism, which assumes that class struggle is the permanent defining feature of politics. MAGA is a fortress mentality, but America has traditionally been defined by a pioneering mentality. MAGA offers a strong shell, but not much in the way of wings needed to soar.

If Democrats are to thrive, they need to tap into America’s dynamic cultural roots and show how they can be applied to the 21st century ….

David Brooks, What Democrats Need to Do Now

On the other hand …

[C]anceling student loan debt would be a massive unforced error for the newly minted Biden administration. It would show that one of the new Democratic president’s highest priorities during a pandemic and a destabilizing economic shock is to provide a bailout to people who are overwhelmingly likely to end up as members of the upper-middle class. It would amount to a transfer payment from contractors and service workers to high-earning knowledge workers and other white-collar employees. As such, it would also accelerate trends in the Democratic Party that would leave it vulnerable to a Republican Party increasingly trying to rebrand itself as a champion of the working class.

…

As economist Thomas Piketty and others have pointed out in recent years, center-left political parties suffer at the ballot-box when they come to represent the interests of the upper-middle class at the expense of the working class, allowing the nationalist-populist right to make inroads with the latter. This has happened in a series of European countries in recent years, and it’s happening in the U.S. as well, with the Democrats enjoying surging support in inner-ring suburbs but losing ground in working-class, exurban, and rural areas. In the 2020 election, Democrats were able to defeat Donald Trump with this coalition, but they got tripped up down ballot, most likely falling short of a Senate majority, losing seats in the House, and failing to flip even a single state legislature.

…

Sixty-five percent of Americans haven’t graduated from a four-year college. Will that large majority really favor a multi-billion-dollar bailout for people who hold those degrees when their indebtedness was freely taken on and has granted them a credential that gives them a ticket to lifetime higher earnings?

Damon Linker, The Class Folly of Canceling Student Loans (11/18/2020)

I don’t know that Trump or Vance has spoken about this, but if I judge persuadable undecideds accurately, they should, because despite warnings from people like Linker, Biden pandered to the wealthy in this way and others.

Whence conspiracism?

When you don’t know how things work, everything looks like a conspiracy.

Jonah Goldberg

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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.

Notebook dump 7/18/24

Politics prescinding the Convention

I have not watched one minute of the GOP convention, nor do I intend to. I have better things to do with multiple evening hours per day this week. But I do read analysis. Lots of analysis.

And there’s a lot more, over the same period, in my private Common Place Book than in this blog post, believe it or not.

Ross on a Roll

It feels as if Ross Douthat is publishing something new every day (as well as being on every NYT political panel), and every one of them captures something that keeps eluding my capture.

The latest (as I write):

He is a man of negligible intellectual curiosity who dominates all of his epoch’s popular media forms: gossip columns, cable news, reality television, social media. He’s a man who represents the shadow side of the American character — not the Lincolnian statesman but the hustler, the mountebank, the self-promoter, the tabloid celebrity — at a time when American power and American corruption are intermingled. And he’s a man graced, this past weekend especially but always, with incredible, preternatural good luck.

That last quality is understood by some of Trump’s religious supporters as proof of divine favor and a reason to support him absolutely. But this is a presumptuous interpretation. (Some notably sinister historical figures have enjoyed miraculous-seeming escapes from assassination.) The man of destiny might represent a test for his society, a form of chastisement, an exposure of weakness and decay — in which case your obligation is not to support him without question, but to try to recognize the historical role he’s playing and match your response to what’s being unsettled or unveiled.

Yeah. Ross is a big reason I continue a digital NYT subscription. David Brooks, David French, Bret Stephens and Frank Bruni are four others, but Ross has risen to the top.

Frankly, I don’t even look at the “news pages” most days; I go straight to opinion.

Philosophical Anthropology in Politics

The underlying irrationality of human nature, founded on such eternal verities as our longing for eternal life, … and by our flight from the certainty of death, presents political leaders with a mixed bag of tools that can be used to inspire, frighten, or cajole their fellow humans to come together and make decisions that might hopefully benefit the group, and perhaps actuate some greater idea of the good. Some version or another of the preceding vision has animated accounts of politics by philosophers, historians, poets, and novelists since the days of the Greeks.

There is another view of politics, of course. In that view, men are not irrational by nature. They are, by nature, calculating machinelike beings. In this view, which has been evolving steadily since the middle of the 19th century, politics is less of an art than a science, the rightful province not of storytellers and backslapping phonies and carnival barkers but of sober scientific experts whose job is to engineer outcomes that produce the greatest good for the greatest number of people, with special attention being paid by the enlightened men and women of our age to the historically disadvantaged and oppressed, in whose favor the arc of history inevitably bends.

The ideal of democratic governance for rationalist believers is as obvious to them as it seems false and repellent to followers of the Greeks. Presented with expert calculations about the necessary outcomes of certain decisions, properly functioning citizen-calculators use their software to calculate the likely benefit of desired outcomes to themselves as well as to others. Lesser calculators will put the benefits to themselves first, while more evolved beings will be moved more often by the greater good. Errors in the calculations that are presented to the public can be identified by well-credentialed experts, using agreed-upon rules and methods. While some believers in the above process may identify themselves as small-d democrats, others define themselves as socialists or communists, or as apolitical technocrats.

David Samuels, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the Portal Into American History

Will Butler, PA chasten The Donald?

After her dispatch for The Free Press on the attempt on Donald Trump’s life, Salena Zito snagged the first interview with the former president, who told her he is completely rewriting his convention speech. “This is a chance to bring the whole country, even the whole world, together. The speech will be a lot different, a lot different than it would’ve been two days ago,” he said. (Washington Examiner)

Oliver Wiseman, If You Love America, Turn Down the Temperature

Democracy’s relevance to Election 2024

The word “democracy” has been terribly abused. (H/T Yuval Levin).

We’re told, for instance, that Donald Trump “threatens democracy.” I’ll leave it to others to explain how that is true (without a bunch of slogans and hand-waving, I hope), but from my perspective, his threat is to American liberal democracy (constitutional democracy if you prefer), and the manner in which he threatens it is his intent to tear down the civil service and revive the spoils system. That, in my mind, would be an excess of raw democracy, constrained by one less counter-majoritarian guardrail.

Counter-majoritarian guardrails, starting with the Bill of Rights, have been a key part of our system, designed to be molasses in the gears of impetuous democratic majorities. The Civil Service system was added relatively recently, but it strikes me as particularly important because America has become a world super-power, if not hegemon, and violent swings of policy, empowered by cronies and unconstrained by careerists, would put the world on perpetual pins and needles — and ultimately undermine our power (for better and worse).

I’m aware of unitary executive theory, and of the likelihood of Presidential frustration with careerists (theoretically part of the executive branch, not a constitutionally independent fourth branch) slow-walking things. But precisely because I’m temperamentally conservative when it comes to rapid change, I’m against any ideology that would make us more purely democratic in this area.

Fundamentals

The democratic order rests on treating those with whom we disagree as opponents rather than enemies, on the belief that we share not just a continent but a country.

Peter Wehner, A Moment to Seek Our Better Angels

The Trump revolution, version 2024

Rooting for laundry

Conservatives in the party of Reagan often spoke of a three-legged stool of social conservatism, fiscal conservatism, and a hawkish foreign policy. But on Monday night, social conservatives in Trump’s party were expected to stomach a prime-time speaking appearance of internet personality Amber Rose, who has publicly praised “satanists” because they help women “get abortions in southern states” and publicly explained she tells her young children that her OnlyFans page is a positive thing. Fiscal conservatives were treated to a prime-time speech by Teamsters union President Sean O’Brien, who demagogically denounced big business: “Elites have no party, elites have no nation. Their loyalty is to the balance sheet and the stock price at the expense of the American worker.” And hawks were told by billionaire David Sacks that Vladimir Putin was “provoked, yes provoked” to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine by President Biden’s talk of expanding NATO.

The Dispatch

Along the same lines, from the Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio:

Everything you need to know about the new prince can be reduced to two sentences, elegantly stated by the Wall Street Journal’s Kyle Smith. “The pillars of conservatism are limited government, economic freedom, and the rule of law. J.D. Vance seems to have contempt for all three,” he wrote. Liz Cheney elaborated in a separate post: “J.D. Vance has pledged he would do what Mike Pence wouldn’t—overturn an election and illegally seize power. He says the president can ignore the rulings of our courts. He would capitulate to Russia and sacrifice the freedom of our allies in Ukraine.”

…

Jerry Seinfeld has a famous joke about how being a fan of a sports team is tantamount to “rooting for laundry.” Because your loyalty is to the franchise and not its personnel, you might cheer wildly for a player one season and give him the McConnell treatment the next, after he’s traded away. Ultimately you’re rooting for whoever wears the team’s uniform—for “laundry.”

Silly tribal allegiances are fine for silly diversions like sports, but rooting for laundry in politics is idiotic. If a party continues to command your loyalty by dint of the color of its jersey, it has no incentive to meet your policy demands. By stumping for a movement now led by Trump and J.D. Vance, Haley is telling conservatives that laundry is more important than the principles she and they purported to hold for the last 40 years.

I have not worn the Republican laundry since 2005, but these times are unsettling nonetheless.

JD Vance

Vance is whomever Trump needs him to be—the perfect would-be vice president, a quite green second banana. Vance can be anybody the day calls for.

Which is to say: He is nobody.

Kevin D. Williamson, The Infinitely Plastic J.D. Vance

In November 2022, after the Republicans’ lackluster showing in the midterms, I wrote a column titled “Donald Trump Is Finally Finished.” I keep a printed copy on my desk as a humbling reminder of how wrong I can be.

Bret Stephens

I pair these two with a suggestion that Williamson print out a copy of his piece for future desktop use.

America’s Hitler?

I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical asshole like Nixon who wouldn’t be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he’s America’s Hitler.

A fuller context for JD Vance’s former musing about Trump as “America’s Hitler,” via Zaid Jilani. Granted, neither alternative flatters Trump.

Also from Jilani:

For much of the left, analyzing Vance is simple: He once denounced Trump and now embraces him. Therefore, he is a cynic and a con man willing to do anything for power. But making compromises for power isn’t always malicious. In our political duopoly, you have to endorse one set of leaders or another in order to do anything constructive.

That paragraph forces me to think about my repudiation of both parties and my quixotic (and mostly notional) embrace of the American Solidarity Party. Maybe I’m not really trying “to do anything constructive,” although I do consider it constructive to remind people “Put not your trust in princes, in sons of men in whom there is no salvation.” (Psalm 145/146)

Alex Jones a truth-teller?

There seems to be an attack on JD Vance for his having said that Alex Jones was a teller of inconvenient truths. In one version I saw, a hyperlink led me to the context:

“If you listen to Rachel Maddow every night, the basic worldview that you have is that MAGA grandmas who have family dinners on Sunday and bake apple pies for their family are about to start a violent insurrection against this country,” Vance said. “But if you listen to Alex Jones every day, you would believe that a transnational financial elite controls things in our country, that they hate our society, and oh, by the way, a lot of them are probably sex perverts too.”

Vance went on, “Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, that’s actually a hell of a lot more true than Rachel Maddow’s view of society.”

You got a problem with that comparison? Really?

Political converts

Vance the “convert”

Vance set about building something—an ideological palace in which he could find a new home on the far side of the Rubicon his opportunism prompted him to cross. The Vance that emerged after 2021 is an aspirational right-populist who blends together staunch and unapologetic social conservatism, support for the kinds of economic regulations more often associated with progressives like Elizabeth Warren, and a desire for retrenchment in foreign policy, including the withdrawal of support for Ukraine in its conflict with Russia.

…

[H]is way of talking about right-populist ideas and ideology is more cogent and coherent than what one hears from other officeholders. Vance cares about ideas, and he has a mind capable of synthesizing them in a compelling way. There’s a reason Trump tapped him instead of Rubio, Hawley, or Utah Senator Mike Lee—because Vance thinks and talks like a true believer eager to preach a gospel and quote from a catechism he’s writing in real time.

…

Trumpism now has an ideological heir, leaving the Reaganism that’s been shunted to the side for the past eight years well and truly dead.

Damon Linker, The Convert

J Budziszewski changes his mind

I have much enjoyed J Budziszewski’s episodic blog (and a few of his books) over the years. He generally is a fairly rigorous thinker in the natural law tradition.

Over the last seven years or so, I’d say his rigor has slipped on the subject of politics — but then again I’m skeptical that syllogistic rigor is a sufficient guide to the decisions that voters must make.

So I think, rigorous or not, that his recent posting on the 2024 election warrants your attention. If nothing else, it may help you understand how a smart person can change his mind about Trump from unfavorable to favorable.

Excerpt:

I have written on several occasions that a certain kind of crudity and oafishness is considered lovable by the political classes, and not even recognized as oafish because it is their sort of oafishness. Another kind is considered lovable by those whom they disdain. Obama was a smooth rich fellow who flattered the elites. Biden is a coarse rich fellow who sneers at the common people in the same breath as he boasts of his humble origins. The elites think this kind of talk is merely telling it like it is.

Trump, though, is a coarse rich fellow who flatters the common people. Since he sneers at the elites and adopts a popular tone in doing so, it enrages them. Though all of these rulers claim to look out for the “little guy,” the difference is that Obama and Biden styled themselves as their patrons, and viewed the “little guys” as their clients. Trump styles himself as their benefactor, and views them as his constituents.

(I have not changed my mind, but I’ve experienced a dramatic increase in understanding Trump’s 2024 supporters.)

Changing his mind about Trump — with a twist

I’ve already acknowledged that I see Trump differently now than I do in 2016, and I’ll now acknowledge that that change in perception has only been further solidified in the wake of his shooting. Part of this change means that I no longer think it’s useful or meaningful to call him a charlatan, to insist that he’s “faking it”, that he’s actually a really bad businessman who only pretends to be a successful one on TV, that he’s a common low-end huckster of bad steaks and worthless paraphernalia. All of this implies that there are other actors on the world stage who, by contrast, are the real deal, and unlike in 2016 I just don’t believe that’s the case anymore. The only real grounds for such a distinction between the authentic statesman and the False Dmitri-like impostor is class habitus, and this is something of which, since 2016, I have learned to be very wary.

Justin Smith-Ruiu, World Spirit on Feedback

Apropos of the GOP anti-corporate shift (or is it mere rhetoric?)

A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. Unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive, as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular. It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.

Mark Mitchell and Nathan Schlueter, The Humane Vision of Wendell Berry

Miscellany

A different kind of conservative

I don’t care much about national flags and vehemently oppose them in churches. I don’t recite the pledge of allegiance. I despise the military flyovers at NFL games. I could go on.

Despite all that, it bugs me when people mangle the national anthem (that, as far as I’m concerned, need not be sung at all.) Go figure.

Non-stochastic violence

After seeing a Pakistani protest on television, Khomeini issued an edict declaring the novel to be against Islam. He called on Muslims everywhere to murder Rushdie and anyone who had assisted in the book’s publication. In the ensuing eruption, dozens of people were killed, including the book’s Japanese translator, and many more were threatened. With Iran’s multimillion-dollar bounty on his head, Rushdie was forced into hiding, under guard, for nine years.

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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.

Saturday, 7/13/24

Democrats’ “revealed preference”

[I]t’s always been clear that the Democratic Party in the age of Trump isn’t as NeverTrump as the truest NeverTrump believers, that it usually chooses “mundane imperatives” and self-interest over emergency measures geared to existential stakes.
…
Time and again, from 2016 to the present, the Democratic Party has treated Trumpism not as a “civic emergency” but as a political opportunity, a golden chance to win over moderate and right-leaning voters with the language of anti-authoritarianism while avoiding substantive concessions to these voters and actually moving farther to the left.
…
I’m not saying that you can’t find moments here and there where Democrats moderated on some issue or made a patriotic concession for the anti-Trump cause. But the overarching pattern is better represented by the various times when Democrats deliberately boosted MAGA candidates in Republican primaries on the theory that they’d be easier to beat — or for that matter by the fact that right now, as Biden teeters on the brink, his vice president and natural successor is a figure chosen entirely for the “mundane imperatives” of Democratic interest groups, rather for a scenario where she might be called upon to face Trump with democracy supposedly at stake.
…
The idea of an anti-Trump “coalition of all democratic forces” has been prominent in the media and the commentariat, and there you have seen big shifts and concessions. But these have mostly been made by anti-Trump conservatives and ex-conservatives moving leftward, not by the political coalition that they’re joining.

Ross Douthat

Douthat goes on to concede some ways in which the Democrats’ approach may not be cynical and deceptive, but I’ve quoted enough. For the rest, my link gets you past the paywall.

Smart people swapping stupid barbs?

It seems that for Roberts, the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump is so transgressive as to demand the immediate intervention of the Supreme Court.

Jamelle Bouie, proving that smart people with blind spots can write stupid things.

If only Bouie had written

It seems that for Roberts, the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump, combined with Trump’s pledge to prosecute Joe Biden and lower court rulings that President’s have no immunity from criminal prosecution, are so transgressive as to demand intervention of the Supreme Court

I wouldn’t have bothered writing my own stupid things.

Lies in service of “higher truths”

This past week, a Pennsylvania man was arrested for the murder and dismemberment of a 14-year-old boy. The man allegedly lured the boy to his death through Grindr, a gay hookup app. The boy’s last Snapchat image was posted at 2:30 in the morning, on a dark road, with the comment that he was just out for a late-night walk. Nobody ever heard from him again.

Several grim and (one would think) obvious lessons should immediately present themselves to all concerned adults here. However, it appears that the adults are determined not to learn them, because this particular boy believed he was a girl. Consequently, all their energy has been spent on making sure nobody “misgenders” him in death, using him as a mascot of “anti-trans” violence, and taking the opportunity to lobby for new “hate-crime” legislation.

…

[The Free Press sent Ben Kawaller to Laramie, Wyoming, to talk to people about Matthew Shepard, murdered there in 1998 and lionized ever since.]

One resistant young gay man asks Ben what’s to be gained by reassessing the crime. Ben asks whether he would agree that it’s worthwhile simply because the reassessment might be true. The young man pauses for a moment, then stutters a bit, casting about. “There’s a point when you as a person should look around and see, like…read the room. And what has happened, this is really important, the, the…understanding of what happened to Matthew means a lot to a lot of people. So just leave it alone.”

Notice that this young man isn’t even bothering to debate the history or discredit Jimenez. He is saying that even if Jimenez were right, it wouldn’t matter. The truth wouldn’t matter.

Bethel McGrew, What is Truth?

After careful consideration, I decided last fall not to sit out a performance of Considering Matthew Shepard by a chorus I’ve been in for more than two decades now.

Considering Matthew Shepard is a sort of cantata on the murder of young Shepard. I carefully scrutinized the libretto for any explicit perpetuation of the Matthew Shepard myth (i.e., that it was the quintessential anti-gay hate crime) and found none. I considered the feelings of my fellow-choristers and the Artistic Director who programmed it. I also considered the “meta” point that the piece never would have been composed (and nobody would attend if it had been composed) were it not for the prevalence of the myth, and that performing it probably perpetuates the myth tacitly. My decision to go ahead and sing may have been sub-optimal. I’m still not sure.

But I want people to know that there’s almost zero truth to the myth — the standard Matthew Shepard narrative that gave us the federal “Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes” law — and almost no poetry to the truth. If you want to know the grimier and better-substantiated counter-narrative, it’s readily available.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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.

Friday, 7/12/2

Culture

Anti-Christian, anti-religion, anti-tradition

The modern West is said to be Christian, but this is untrue: the modern outlook is anti-Christian, because it is essentially anti-religious; and it is anti-religious because, still more generally, it is anti-traditional; this is its distinguishing characteristic and this is what makes it what it is.

René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World.

Creepier than frank laxity

Just don’t do it again, promise? Remember those kids who got suspended from Harvard after setting up encampments on the lawn and then harassing other students? Well, the Harvard College Administrative Board has reversed the decision, a win for the “student intifada,” which I thought was slanderous but is actually just what they call themselves. And then over at Columbia, the administrators who texted each other vomit emojis during a panel discussing a rabbi’s op-ed about his fears for Jews on campus—they were fired, right? Well, actually they were just put on leave and will be assigned to different jobs later. And remember the Columbia students who were arrested after they occupied a campus building? Most of their charges were dropped. There’s something way creepier about punishing people in the moment only to reverse it as soon as the zeitgeist moves on to the next thing versus not punishing them at all.

Suzy Weiss

Prescient

This was not written of Team Biden, but it sure seems to fit:

The elites who manage the system no longer believe in a way forward. Stuck in the muck, they strive simply to endure: après moi le deluge.

Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium

Not a flattering juxtaposition

  • In The Guardian, Marina Hyde: “It’s incredible to think that only a short while ago we thought we’d eradicated measles and Nigel Farage. Both have now been brought back, largely by the same people.”

Via Frank Bruni. (I didn’t call this “Politics” because it’s foreign politics.)

Enemies of Article III

Federal Court critics

Never forget, most commentary about the Supreme Court is performative. Critics have a vested interest in making the decisions seem so much worse than they really are.

Josh Blackman, Everyone Needs To Take A Deep Breath About Trump v. United States

AOC, ever-performative, is “trying” to impeach Justices Alito and Thomas — a kind of performative commentary uniquely available to congress-critters.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, supported by left-wing interest groups, demanded that Judge Don Willett of the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals recuse himself from a case challenging the CFPB’s rule on credit-card late fees. One of Judge Willett’s child college savings accounts held around $2,000 of stock in Citigroup, which wasn’t a party to the case.

…

Normally, parties to a lawsuit have a strong incentive not to provoke judges with baseless recusal demands. That makes it surprising the CFPB would join in such an unwarranted demand. But the bureau seems to be more an extension of certain Democratic politicians these days than a federal agency respectful of the rule of law. Several members of Congress, led by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, responded to the committee’s opinion with a hyperbolic letter declaring that the opinion and Judge Willett’s decision not to recuse himself “represent ongoing threats to the integrity of the judicial system.”

…

Recusal tactics have become more outrageous. Normally, only parties directly involved in the litigation can file a motion to recuse a judge for an alleged conflict of interest. But we now see coordinated campaigns to pressure recusals. Left-wing interest groups are submitting demands for recusal, coupled with press releases and press conferences. This practice should stop. There is no formal mechanism for outsiders to file such recusal demands, and for good reason. They clog courts with additional briefings and hearings, causing delays and distorting outcomes. Courts should refuse to entertain these ill-intended requests, and the lawyers and litigants responsible should be subjected to sanctions.

Theodore B. Olson, Proliferating Recusal Demands Threaten the Judiciary

Politics, more or less

What liberal democracy sounds like

In America, it can be easy to forget what liberal democracy sounds like. But it used to sound something like this:

Whilst he has been my political opponent, Sir Keir Starmer will shortly become our prime minister. In this job, his successes will be all of our successes and I wish him and his family well. Whatever our disagreements in this campaign, he is a decent public-spirited man who I respect. He and his family deserve the very best of our understanding as they make the huge transition to their new lives behind this door, and as he grapples with this most demanding of jobs in this increasingly unstable world.

Those are the words of former British prime minister Rishi Sunak in his farewell speech last week outside Number 10, Downing Street. This is how Keir Starmer responded:

I want to thank the outgoing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, his achievement as the first British-Asian prime minister of our country. The extra effort that that will have required should not be underestimated by anyone, and we pay tribute to that today. And we also recognize the dedication and hard work he brought to his leadership.

He went on:

If you voted Labour yesterday, we will carry the responsibility of your trust as we rebuild our country. But whether you voted Labour or not, in fact, especially if you did not, I say to you directly, my government will serve you.

And, if you listen to them say these words, they even seemed to mean it. That’s what it takes to put a toxically divided country back on track toward liberal democracy, after a woundingly divisive period centered on Brexit.

No one claimed fraud. No one derided the lopsided unfairness of the parliamentary results, where Labour got 34 percent of the vote and a whopping 63 percent of the seats, and where the new rightist Reform Party won 14 percent of the vote and got only 5 seats. Those were the rules ahead of the game, and they were the rules everyone had agreed to.

There is one reason and one reason only why this kind of conciliatory exchange cannot happen any time soon in America, and that is Donald J. Trump ….

Andrew Sullivan, pitch-perfect.

I wish it were true that Trump is the whole problem, but he tapped into something that won’t go away just because he sheds this mortal coil.

Art of the Deal

  • “That the sheep are still on the air, dispensing undiminished certitudes, is evidence of two things. That — outside of a few bastions of meritocracy and accountability, such as professional sports — there is no penalty for failure in contemporary America. And that many prominent people have the scary strength that comes from being incapable of embarrassment.” (George Will on the Dem/MSM bunker)
  • “If Trump is elected again, Dems should get over it and try to do more deals with him like they did on the USMCA and First Step Act. Trump isn’t an ideologue and just has an enormous ego anyone can exploit,” – Zaid Jilani.
  • “Some will say now that I am calling America a Christian Nation. So I am. And some will say that I am advocating Christian Nationalism. And so I do,” – Josh Hawley.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

Comments:

  • Zaid Jilani’s advice is brilliant! We need more like that!
  • There is all kinds of play in the joints of “Christian Nationalism,” but any politician of Josh Hawley’s intelligence who demagogues the term is playing with fire and is going to find me unmoved when he tries to disambiguate it into something benign. Once a bright hope for the GOP, he’s gone shamelessly whoring after Trump.

You can have my delegates when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers

In his selfish desperation to retain control of his party, the president has resorted to political hostage-taking. His pitch to Democrats for sticking with him has nothing to do with sketching out a compelling plan to win or demonstrating his mental agility by holding numerous live events or even outlining a policy program for a second term. It’s simply this: The delegates he earned by winning this year’s primary (under false pretenses about his fitness) are pledged to him and he’s not giving them up.

Nick Catoggio, The Return of the Smoke-Filled Room

The window into Trump’s id

The best window into Trump’s ignorant and destructive id is often his Truth Social account. While normal Americans were making plans for Independence Day, an obsessive on Truth Social was declaring, “Elizabeth Lynne Cheney is guilty of treason. Retruth if you want televised military tribunals.” “Retruth,” in the idiom of Truth Social, means “to repost.” Trump of course retruthed. The former president also took time to retruth a post calling for Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, Cheney, and a dozen prominent Democrats to be jailed because they saw fit to tell the American people the truth that the 2020 “elections were fair.” Republicans would be wise to remember that character is destiny and that Trump has never had any.

National Review, The Week

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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.

Mostly political (sigh)

After the July 4 British election:

Conservatism has died, not from an assassin’s bullet, or even from old age or because it was run over by a bus. It has died because there is no call for it anymore. This isn’t to say that nobody wants it, but that nobody cares that we want it. The same thing has happened to most of the things I like, from the forgotten Aztec chocolate bar to railway restaurant cars, from woodland peace to proper funerals.

In fact, conservatism — not to be mistaken for its loud, overdressed cousin, the Conservative Party, which somehow lives on — will probably not even get a proper funeral. Its passing will not be marked by sonorous gloom and penitence, and stern dark poetry borne away on the wind at the muddy edge of a deep, sad grave. Nobody can stand that sort of thing now. It will get a cheerful informal send-off with jokes and applause …

… The other day I was asked to define the word, on Twitter, and came up with something like “Love of God, love of country, love of family, love of beauty, love of liberty and the rule of law, suspicion of needless change”. Given more room I’d have added all kinds of preferences for poetry and sylvan beauty over noise and concrete, for twilight over noonday, for autumn over summer and wind over calm, for the deep gleam of iron polished in use over the flashy sparkle of precious metal.

But you probably know what I mean. And all my life these things have been slipping away from me. I am using them as metaphors for conservatism in politics, in education, literature and music as well.

Peter Hitchens

US Politics

Trump’s first-term SCOTUS picks

[SCOTUS Justices] Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are not cut from the same block of wood as Barrett. Barrett was a piece of unfinished wood, and Justice Kagan is coating her with one layer of glossy lacquer after another.

I am also curious about this part: “[Barrett] spoke favorably of the work of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.” A common swipe at Judge Ho and others is that they are “auditioning” for the Supreme Court with their opinions. I think that criticism is quite unfair for a host of reasons, but at least their so-called “auditions” are public and transparent. They are taking actions for all to see. I did a quick search of Judge Barrett’s 7th Circuit decisions, and the names “Kavanaugh” and “Gorsuch” appear nowhere. Barrett did not even cite any Kavanaugh’s decisions on the Second Amendment in Kanter. If she thought so favorably of their work, surely she could have found a chance to cite them. But she didn’t. She played it safe. But in private, she quietly praised those judges–a convenient thing to do when a Supreme Court seat is on the horizon. We need to retire this “auditioning” barb–it is what judicial nominees say in private that is auditioning. When they say things in public, they are doing their job.

Josh Blackman, The Goal Of The “Architects of the Supreme Court” Was Always Overruling Chevron, and not Overruling Roe

I’ve mentioned before, I’m pretty sure, that in 2002, I was given a red-pill I really didn’t want to swallow: that the GOP was playing pro-life voters for fools. I nevertheless left the GOP fewer than three years later and now think that my “doctor” was right in his diagnosis (although he had decided that the cranky “Constitution Party” was the cure).

Josh Blackman confirms in this article that we were being played (our votes were wanted, but Roe-reversal wasn’t) and that it was a miracle that Roe got reversed by Dobbs.

Leashing populism

Ross Douthat said in 2016 that both parties were like fully fueled jets sitting on the tarmac just waiting to be hijacked. Bernie Sanders almost succeeded. Trump pulled it off. I would argue, somewhat counter-intuitively, that Sanders failed where Trump succeeded in part because historically the Democratic Party is the more populist party. … [P]opulist economics has always been at the center of Democratic rhetoric (if not always policy). As a result, the Democrats developed mechanisms—political, psychological, and institutional—to channel populism effectively and, when necessary, to check it. It’s not a coincidence Democrats invented “super-delegates.” The GOP, for all of its efforts at tapping into the “silent majority,” never built safeguards like that. So when actual rightwing populism surged, it had no arguments or tools to check it. It is no coincidence, as the Marxists like to say, that as the GOP has gone populist it has moved leftward on economics. JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Josh Hawley, and all sorts of nominally “conservative” institutions are bending to the cruel logic of audience capture.

Jonah Golberg, in part 2 of an email dialog with Damon Linker.

This observation haunts me, a former Republican.

Nonsequiturs

The narrative the left appears to want is that EVERYTHING IS FINE with Biden and how dare we ask if everything is ok because, um, Trump.

Chris Cillizza

Biden must be fine “because, um, Trump”? It’s not possible that we’ve polarized ourselves into a no-win situation?

But there’s also something else going on: Since the evening of June 27, the Biden administration, many leading Democrats, and a swarm of the party’s online advocates have responded in the way you described, by attacking those rightly treating this as a massive story — and in terms that sound as cynical and contemptuous of truth as anything you’ll hear from a Trumpist Republican. We’re “bedwetters.” We’re indulging in “bad politics.” We don’t realize that the right way to respond to something like the June 27 debate is to admit Biden did poorly, wave away any broader concerns, and change the subject, moving on like nothing important happened. 

Pretend it was no big deal, and it will be no big deal.

Damon Linker replying to Cillizza

[T]ime and again I was told — by the White House, by Democratic readers etc. — that I was part of the problem: That Biden was old, sure, but that he was vigorous as hell and outworked even his youngest and spryest of aides.  Hell, do you remember the outrage by the White House and the online left when the Wall Street Journal published a story a month or two ago about Biden’s mental slippage behind the scenes? Lots and lots of people — including, I am sorry to say, plenty of “mainstream” reporters — insisted that the story was total bullshit and that it was deeply irresponsible that the Journal published it. They said it was Rupert Murdoch pushing his agenda!

Cillizza again

Checking the ruling class

In a democratic republic such as the United States, where the people elect leaders to govern on their behalf, the ballot box is the primary check on an unresponsive, incompetent or corrupt ruling class — or, as Democrats may be learning, a ruling class that insists on a candidate who voters no longer believe can lead. If those in power come to believe they are the only logical options, the people can always prove them wrong. For a frustrated populace, an anti-establishment outsider’s ability to wreak havoc is a feature rather than a bug. The elevation of such a candidate to high office should provoke immediate soul-searching and radical reform among the highly credentialed leaders across government, law, media, business, academia and so on — collectively, the elites.

The response to Mr. Trump’s success, unfortunately, has been the opposite. Seeing him elected once, faced with the reality that he may well win again, most elites have doubled down. We have not failed, the thinking goes; we have been failed, by the American people. In some tellings, grievance-filled Americans simply do not appreciate their prosperity. In others they are incapable of informed judgments, leaving them susceptible to demagoguery and foreign manipulation. Or perhaps they are just too racist to care — never mind that polling consistently suggests that most of Mr. Trump’s supporters are women and minorities, or that polling shows he is attracting far greater Black and Hispanic support than prior Republican leaders.

Mr. Trump is by no means an ideal tribune of the popular will, especially considering his own efforts to defy it after the 2020 presidential election. But the nation, given full opportunity to assess that conduct, seems to have decided it likes him more than ever, at least compared with the alternatives on offer. Somehow the response of elites to that humiliating indictment of their leadership is a redoubled obstinance: Democracy itself is at stake if the election does not go their way, they lecture, even as they pursue plainly anti-democratic strategies. How’s that going? One recent poll of swing-state voters found that most see “threats to democracy” as an extremely important issue in the coming election, and that they are more likely to believe Mr. Trump can handle the issue well.

Oren Cass

How to pick Zombie Joe’s replacement

Jonathan Chait … argues that “a small group of party leaders—say, Biden, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and Jen O’Malley Dillon—should decide on a new candidate over the next week.” Is it democratic? No. But hey, sometimes a smoke-filled room is just what you need. (New York)

The Free Press

I concur. Compared with what primary elections has given us (at taxpayer expense, and with high barriers to third parties), the old smoke-filled rooms of my youth look pretty good.

Unless the GOP abandons the primary system or comes up with an equivalent of the Democrats’ “Super Delegates” (the Democrats’ prescient protection against left-populism run amok), we’re in for a long run of right-populist GOP nominees.

Miscellany

On not liking the immunity decision

I don’t like the Supreme Court’s recent decision on presidential immunity. I don’t think it’s the disaster or outrage some people claim it is, but I also think … it was flawed …. But I mostly blame Donald Trump for putting us in this situation. I also blame Merrick Garland and Jack Smith to a lesser extent …. I think Chief Justice John Roberts believes Trump is a one-off, … and he doesn’t want to mess up the constitutional order by deciding a case based on the one guy … .

… 

This week’s immunity ruling sheds light on something that would have been better kept in the shadows: There’s nothing in our system that outright prevents a terrible man from doing terrible things if he gets in power and enough people want him in power. If you think every job applicant is going to be respectful of the unwritten rules, and if you think voters will only support such people, the need to write out rules against selling pardons or trying to steal an election by force and intimidation seems like a waste of time.

The people angriest at the Supreme Court think that the judicial system should do the job the voters are unwilling to do—stop Trump. Given that I think he’s guilty of many disqualifying crimes, that idea doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is the idea that the courts should deviate from the rules to do it. Charges should have been brought against Trump the day after impeachment (as Mitch McConnell suggested). It is not Chief Justice Roberts’ fault the Department of Justice waited too long and brought needlessly unconventional charges. It’s also not his fault that the Republican Party—elected officials and voters alike—failed in their moral and civic obligation to vomit him out like the poison he is.

I don’t particularly like Roberts’ answer to this dilemma, but he is not the real author of it. We are increasingly living in the worst-case scenario envisioned by John Adams: a society so unburdened by conventional morality or the willingness to demand it from our leaders that the system cannot function as designed.

The only reliable remedy to our political problems is a citizenry willing to do the right thing—and demand that their leaders follow their example.

Jonah Goldberg

Social Darwinism

One of Darwin’s most influential German publicists was Ernst Haeckel (Darwin actually endorsed him personally). He claimed the world was divided into multiple races that functioned almost as distinct species. One of these, the Caucasians, was superior to all others. This radical division of humanity by race led the German evolutionist to declare that science should assign to members of inferior races—“psychologically nearer to the mammals (apes and dogs) than civilized Europeans”—a “totally different value to their lives.”

John Strickland, The Age of Nihilism

So: where did all my mockery of Trump go? Well, first, I resolved to stop harping on it. But then, I just moved it off to my reflexive blog, trying to keep this one relatively reflective.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

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.