Zaccheus Sunday 2026

History

Theology the authorities can work with

Predictably, secular authorities convinced by the reformers’ truth claims liked the distinction drawn between the necessity of obedience to them and of disobedience to Rome. They liked hearing “the Gospel” accompanied by such “good news”—it would allow them, for starters, to appropriate for themselves all ecclesiastical property, including the many buildings and lands that belonged to religious orders, and to use it or the money from its sale in whatever ways they saw fit. In two stages during the late 1530s, seizing for himself the vast holdings of all the hundreds of English monasteries and friaries, Henry VIII would demonstrate how thoroughly a ruler could learn this lesson without even having to accept Lutheran or Reformed Protestant doctrines about grace, faith, salvation, or worship.

Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

The long shadow of Puritanism

Long after Puritans had become Yankees, and Yankee Trinitarians had become New England Unitarians (whom Whitehead defined as believers in one God at most) the long shadow of Puritan belief still lingered over the folkways of an American region.

David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed

Human Rights

Most menacing of all was the United Nations. Established in the aftermath of the Second World War, its delegates had proclaimed a Universal Declaration of Human Rights. To be a Muslim, though, was to know that humans did not have rights. There was no natural law in Islam. There were only laws authored by God.

Tom Holland, Dominion.

That’s pretty terrifying if Holland is correct and if a lot of Muslims are still faithful to that command ethic.

Salvation (“Soteriology”)

Hacking Eternity

I’m glad the authors or editors at Dispatch Faith came up with that “Hacking Eternity” title for a little bit of musing on Scott Adams’ (creator of Dilbert) self-reported deathbed conversion. It’s perfect:

For whatever reason, Adams delayed his conversion … In that January 4 X post, only nine days before his death, Adams said, “So I still have time, but my understanding is you’re never too late.” His final message, read by his first wife after his death, confirmed his plans: “I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior … I have to admit, the risk-reward calculation for doing so looks so attractive to me. So here I go.”

I cannot categorically rule out the sincerity of Scott Adams’ “conversion,” but with all the Pascal’s wager trappings, and delaying claiming Christ as Lord until the very last minute (when the formulaic Lordship carried no practical meaning, no period of following Christ’s example or commandments) I can’t not put conversion in precatory quotes, either.

I recall one classmate in my Evangelical boarding school who declared his intent to become a Christian some day, but not before he’d whooped it up as much as possible. Last I knew, he was whooping it up at age 50+ with pneumatic wife #2. His declaration was so consistent with the logic of evangelical soteriology (study of salvation) pervasive in that time and place that the only refutations I can recall were:

That he might be murdered, or have a fatal car collision, or otherwise die too suddenly to effectuate his last minute “conversion.”
That refusing salvation for too long risked “hardening of the heart” to where could not repent.

Better would be this, I think, though it would probably be dismissed as “works righteousness”:

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption; but he that soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting.

Galatians 6:7-8.

Yeah, that’s a proof-text, taken without context. But I’d still say it fits.

The current milieu

The denominations

A new era of martyrdom

The Episcopal Church of New Hampshire is ready for frickin’ war. The Episcopalians are amped up. Bishop Rob’s reflection from earlier this month: “We are now, I believe, entering a time, a new era of martyrdom.” Of his priests: “And I’ve asked them to get their affairs in order—to make sure they have their wills written, because it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.” These guys are not kidding around anymore. They are ready to die. And there will be cookies after the sermon.

Nellie Bowles. Bishop Rob’s letter has to be seen to be disbelieved. It features an ecclesiology straight from the lowest-church fever swamps:

As soon as the Christian church became linked to the empire by Constantine in the year 325 or so, the church immediately became corrupt.

(Italics added)

Ummmm, that’s just not credible. I don’t even think that educated clergy of low-church persuasion would defend that if pressed. To hear it from a Bishop of a high church is shocking but evocative. After all, what authority does a corrupt church have to tell Bishop Rob,

a man of profound historical privilege, … one who has made statements that, [he has] to say, have been really good and eloquent,

that he can’t innovate like mad to drive out that millenia-long corruption?

I’m still trying to figure out if “Rob” is his last name or if it’s an aw-shucks affectation. (Googles the question) Of course: it’s affectation.

Ostensibly Protestant; functionally, what?

There is another obvious fact that few denominational Protestants in the SBC or PCA seem willing to admit: The growth in these ostensibly traditional denominations stems almost entirely from the work of the Non-Denom churches. As already mentioned, pan- or pseudo-denominational organizations now own the church planting space. All church plants, to a great extent, utilize the methods and mores of Non-Denom Church. Most no longer even have their host denomination in their names. Therefore, I wager that whatever growth exists in the SBC and PCA is almost entirely the result of the Non-Denom churches growing within the husk of the world of traditional Protestantism.

Casey Spinks, Does Traditional Protestantism Have a Future?

Christianity and nationalism

Christianity does not simply fade away with the rise of nationalism; the process is more one of the reconfiguration of Christian elements to fit within a nationalist framework. When the holy migrates from the church to the nation-state, the church does not disappear but generally takes a supporting role to the creation of national identities.

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry

The nondenominations

Nondenominational Protestantism

Douthat: Right. But I’m going to ask you to generalize. … For people who aren’t familiar with that world, what is nondenominational Protestantism right now?

Burge: They’re evangelical. Not all of them, but the vast, vast majority are evangelical in their orientation and theology and practice and all the things that we would call evangelical.

One thing is, they’re anti-institutional. They’re anti-authority in a lot of ways. Where does your money go when you put it on the plate? Well, it goes right here. It stays right here in these four walls. So what we’re going to have is a very fragmented Protestant Christianity, where you’ve got a little fiefdom here of 15,000 people in this church, and 20,000 people in this church.

I think the problem is, it’s going to be harder to conceptualize, to measure, to really understand what these groups look like, because now you’ve got these little pockets. You’ve got Joel Osteen in Houston, Texas. He’s an evangelical, but he doesn’t interface with most other evangelicals. You got Paula White down in Florida, whom Trump loves, but she’s Pentecostal and believes in the gifts of the spirit. And other evangelicals, like Franklin Graham, would never talk to Paula White.

You’ve got all these little pockets, and they don’t add up to a cohesive “What is evangelicalism?” In 30 years, that question is going to be almost impossible to answer. Not that it’s easy now, but it’s going to be 10 times harder because of this amorphous nature of nondenominationalism.

Ross Douthat and Ryan Burge (shared link). Ryan Burge is the most interesting social scientist focused on religion that I know. The transcript of his podcast is worth reading in full; I both listened and then read, highlighting heavily.

For my money, “amorphous” and “fiefdom” are the keys to nondenominational evangelicalism, and the two are related. The substantive religious content of the nondenominational religious landscape is amorphous, despite the shared term “evangelical,” because they are individual fiefdoms. The pastors may well be untutored and unorthodox, and they certainly are unaccountable to any higher authority.

But be careful: Burge leaves the impression, inadvertently I think, that these nondenominational churches typically number in the thousands. I’d be surprised if the median number of members or attenders was as high as 200. Burge no doubt would know the numbers on that if asked directly.

Orthopathos

Because of the divorce from the historic Church, Evangelicalism has sought for a new way to satisfy the need for materiality. This is why such believers have welcomed pop music and rock-n-roll into their churches. It is why emotion is mistaken for spirituality. It is why sentiment is substituted for holiness. Sincere feeling is the authenticator. Instead of icons of Christ, whose piercing stare calls you to repentance, the Evangelical can go to a Christian bookstore and buy a soft-focus, long-haired picture of Jesus. He’s a “nice” Jesus, but it is hard to believe that He is God.

Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy

I bang on a lot about Evangelicalism, my former affiliation, and specifically about the difficulty of defining it so as to be able to say “no, that’s not evangelical.” Ken Myer, founder of Mars Hill Audio Journal, once offered the possibility that while evangelicals don’t really share a coherent common doctrine, an orthodoxy, that they do share a common feeling or sentiment, an “orthopathos.”

Christianity Today

Sometime within the past year, I subscribed to Christianity Today. It is a magazine whose founding described it as “A fortnightly journal of evangelical persuasion” or something very like that.

I thought very highly of it. Just as I was an Intervarsity Christian Fellowship guy instead of a Campus Crusade for Christ guy, so I was a CT guy instead of a Moody Monthly guy. I even wrote a very cringe item they published. (I’ll give you no further hints whereby to unearth it.)

By and large, CT today has been a big disappointment, and I do not intend to renew.

The main part of the disappointment has been less the content of their articles (which certainly need a critical filter for evangelical bias), but the banality (it seems to me) of the topics of their articles. We’re just not remotely on the same wavelength any more. This “dumbing down” began nearly 50 years ago, and even then I took that as a sign that the evangelical appetite for chewing on meaty topics was waning.

But Thursday past, they finally floated on their RSS feed a story the topic and timeliness of which got my attention: How to Know If You’re Growing in Patience—or Just Giving Up.

Yes, it should be “whether” instead of “if,” but I’ll not dwell on that. It just seems to me as we, to whatever degree, watch the ICE terrorism and murders in Minneapolis, powerless to do anything, the spiritual line between patience (with prayer and trust in God’s providence) and giving up is an important one.

Jaw-dropping nadir

Majorities of white evangelicals favor deporting undocumented immigrants to foreign prisons in El Salvador, Rwanda, or Libya without allowing them to challenge their deportation in court (57 percent), and approve of placing immigrants who have entered the country illegally in internment camps (53 percent).

“It has become virtually impossible to write a survey question about immigration policy that is too harsh for white evangelicals to support,” Robert P. Jones, the president of the Public Religion Research Institute, recently wrote.

Tobias Cremer is a member of the European Parliament. His book The Godless Crusade argues that the rise of right-wing populism in the West and its references to religion are driven less by a resurgence of religious fervor than by the emergence of a new secular identity politics. Right-wing populists don’t view Christianity as a faith; rather, Cremer suggests, they use Christianity as a cultural identity marker of the “pure people” against external “others,” while in many cases remaining disconnected from Christian values, beliefs, and institutions.

…

The Trump administration has gone one step further, inverting authentic Christian faith by selling in a dozen different ways cruelty and the will to power in the name of Jesus. It has welcomed Christians into a theological twilight zone, where the beatitudes are invoked on behalf of a political movement with authoritarian tendencies. This isn’t the first time in history such things have happened.

…

Huge numbers of American fundamentalists and evangelicals—not just cultural Christians, but also those who faithfully attend church and Bible-study sessions and prayer gatherings—prefer the MAGA Jesus to the real Jesus. Few of them would say so explicitly, though, because the cognitive dissonance would be too unsettling. And so they have worked hard to construct rationalizations. It’s rather remarkable, really, to see tens of millions of Christians validate, to themselves and to one another, a political movement led by a malignant narcissist—who is driven by hate and bent on revenge, who mocks the dead, and who delights in inflicting pain on the powerless. The wreckage to the Christian faith is incalculable, yet most evangelicals will never break with him. They have invested too much of themselves and their identity in Trump and what he stands for.

Peter Wehner

Sacraments or notions?

Christianity that has purged the Church of the sacraments, and of the sacramental, has only ideas to substitute in their place. The result is the eradication of God from the world in all ways other than the theoretical.

Fr. Stephen Freeman, Everywhere Present

Orthodoxy

Rescue

He is Jesus, the name chosen before his birth. The angel spoke separately to Mary and Joseph, and told them that the baby’s name would be Jesus, “because he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). The name Jesus means, in Hebrew, “God will save.” When Gabriel says “he will save his people” the Greek verb sozo means “save” as in rescue, like “saved you from drowning.” That kind of “saved,” not “intervened and paid your debt.”

I had been a Christian decades before it occurred to me that this means Jesus can rescue us from our sins, not merely from the penalty for our sins. He can free us from the sins themselves. We will still fail over and over to take his outstretched hand and be lifted from the mire. We like mire. But he can do it, and make us not merely debt-free in his Father’s sight, but transformed and filled with his light.

Frederica Matthewes-Green

Repentance

Repentance is everything you do to get sin, those inborn passions, out of you. It’s reading, thinking, praying, weeding out disruptive influences in your life, sharing time with fellow Christians, following the guidance of the saints. Repentance is the renunciation of what harms us and the acquisition of what is beneficial to us, writes a holy counselor.

Dee Pennock, God’s Path to Sanity

A glimpse into an Orthodox mind

The Protoevangelium of James is not a text that itself holds a position of authority in the life of the Church. Indeed, the West formally rejected it well before the Great Schism. Nevertheless, the Church preserved the text through centuries of copying and recopying. It stands as the earliest written witness to the antiquity of a number of important traditions related to the New Testament Scriptures regarding the lives of the Theotokos, St. James, and their family. The Protoevangelium of James did not originate these traditions, nor does it provide their authority. Their authoritative form exists in the liturgical life of the Church, in hymnography and iconography.

Fr. Stephen DeYoung, Apocrypha (bold added).

All the well-educated Orthodox teachers agree on this. If you hear an Orthodox layman answer “How do you know that?” with “We get it from the Protoevangelium of James,” know that s/he’s got that backwards.

Darkness and Light

As Stephen Wormtongue Miller pronounces from the White House that the way the world works is by force, I’m very glad to be in a church where every Sunday we sing the Beatitudes, which tell us the way blessedness works.

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

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Thursday, 3/2/23

Culture

The Wandering Minstrels

In London on [February 25,] 1871 an audience gathered in the newly-finished Royal Albert Hall to attend the first-ever concert to be performed there. This occurred a month before the official opening of this famous Victorian edifice as a special thank-you for the workers who constructed the building.

The orchestra that played that concert was famous in its day – though now totally forgotten. It was called The Wandering Minstrels and its players were all British aristocrats – Lords, Right Honourables, and senior military – who from 1861 to 1896 played exclusively for charity events. One strict rule of membership was that only amateur musicians were allowed. If you earned even one penny as a professional, you were out.

That happened to one member, the composer Frederick Clay, who had to leave The Wandering Minstrels when music he wrote for the stage started to pull in a few pennies. Clay even collaborated with W.S. Gilbert, the famous librettist for Sir Arthur Sullivan, who himself occasionally performed as a guest with The Wandering Minstrels.

And yes, it’s likely that the Gilbert & Sullivan song A Wandering Minstrel I from The Mikado was an in-joke reference to the aristocratic orchestra, especially since Nanki-Poo, who sings it, was (after all) a nobleman in disguise.

Opening of Royal Albert Hall

Is Fred Phelps the father of cancel culture?

“Part of the reason you don’t hear as much about Westboro [Baptist Church]anymore, is that the tactics that made us infamous are now used by so many people on all sides,” – Megan Phelps-Roper, former cult member of Westboro Baptist Church.

(Quoted by Andrew Sullivan)

Conspiracy theories

Mary Harrington reports from her hairdresser conversation that “Joe Biden being a deepfake (you have to look at his ears, apparently).” I hadn’t heard that one, but it reminds me of the flake who insisted that Michelle Obama was a guy (“just look how wide her shoulders are” or something like that).

Of modern conspiracy theories she has much to say, but I’d distill it to “stereotype accuracy” or (my words) “true enough.”

Why, despite so much, I still read him

To understand the Fox News phenomenon, one has to understand the place it occupies in Red America. It’s no mere source of news. It’s the place where Red America goes to feel seen and heard.

David French

Harry Potter orders a black coffee

Alex Wicker is used to odd looks from baristas when he stops by his local coffee shop. His order is unusual: black coffee.

“Asking for just ‘coffee’ with no added context, without going through a round of 20 questions with the server, has become impossible at this point,” said Mr. Wicker, a 23-year-old student from Shelbyville, Ind.

In a nation awash in Pistachio Cream Cold Brew and Iced Chocolate Almondmilk Shaken Espresso with Chestnut Praline Syrup, black-coffee drinkers like Mr. Wicker are becoming a rare breed.

Hold the extras. Yes, really.

What lovers of straight black consider simple, easy-to-pour orders can wind up stuck behind a jam of customized, multipump concoctions, they said. Sometimes their pristine black joe is lightened with sugar or cream anyway. Some baristas seem bewildered by the concept of coffee taken plain.

Mr. Wicker said his purist take on coffee makes him feel like an outcast. “I don’t know a single person within my age range that enjoys drinking black coffee,” he said.

Ticket for Coffee Shop Frustration: Ordering Black Coffee – WSJ

A tip for Mr. Wicker. I have finally watched a Harry Potter movie and I can report that the proper Starbucks incantation is and long has been “Venti bold, no room.” If they’re out of “bold” (dark roast – which they tend not to brew in the afternoon), they’ll tell you and you can get a Pike Place — or you can wait for a “pourover.”

I know no further incantation for getting your coffee quickly, ahead of all the frou-frou drinks of people who don’t really love coffee and who drink it only for fashion. But there’s no reason why the person who takes your order can’t fulfill it on the spot.

Or just order this and make it at home.

Cuts both ways

“No, I can’t believe this. No. My ancestors did not come here on the Mayflower,” – Angela Davis, being told exactly that by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

I suspect my readers are old enough to remember Angela Davis, but in case I’m wrong, see here.

Scott Adams

I’ve seen people “cancelled” over respectable conservative opinions or fairly anodyne statements. Scott Adams, Dilbert creator, is not one of them.

Scott Adams somehow foresaw that Donald Trump would win the Presidency and went on record with that prediction — at first, noncommittally (I had no idea that word had so many double-letters). He went on to become a Trumpist in his activities outside of Dilbert, so I’ve been leery of him personally. And now he seems to have gone into racially divisive advice.

But if my local rag drops Dilbert, I’ll continue reading it on the web here until the strip itself becomes toxic.

Nevertheless, this breaking commentary, directed at those complaining that Adams is a victim of cancel cultue:

[T]he writer Thomas Chatterton Williams dealt with that complaint elegantly. When we think of “cancel culture,” he said, we think of people being ostracized for violating social norms that haven’t been broadly agreed upon. That’s not what Adams did. Advising white people to “get the hell away from black people” has been pretty well settled as Bad for, oh, 50 to 60 years.

Covid origins

For the record, I presume (and have presumed since the earliest days of the pandemic) that Covid resulted from a Wuhan lab leak.

That implies or is adjacent to a lot of other things, such as our government lying to us about the likely source, and more specifically, Anthony Fauci lying about U.S. involvement in gain-of-function research.

One reason I haven’t taken up arms against the liars is the paucity of honest replacements.

Legalia

It’s not inconsistency, it’s hierarchy

In response to those who complain that different treatment is meted out to those on the Left or the Right for what is essentially the same behaviour, legal scholar Adrian Vermeule is fond of saying ‘It’s not inconsistency, it’s hierarchy’. Some groups, that is, receive more favourable treatment than others because they rank higher. The always perspicacious NS Lyons sums this view up here.

So some groups are preferred over others. What about ideas, though? Why should we be encouraged to deconstruct one generalisation on the basis of a few outliers, but castigated for employing the same critical attitude toward a different generalisation on the basis of outliers? It’s either faulty logic, or there’s an implicit hierarchy that isn’t being spelled out.

I think it’s the latter. And the governing principle isn’t logic but constraint. For the new faithful, ideas aren’t evaluated on the basis of being true, or even reasonable, but on how much they constrain desire. This explains why sex dimorphism is considered ‘outdated’, despite its features being consistent across a great many species, including humans, and (among humans) all but a very small number of outliers. Nonetheless, it must be deconstructed, because the reality of living in a sexed body constrains the things any given individual can desire. We see this in Marsh’s ‘no such thing as boys or girls’ video, which suggests that a few outliers render sex dimorphism meaningless, and concludes triumphantly: “Where does this leave you? Free!”

Mary Harrington

I hate it when Adrian Vermeule makes an observation that’s so powerful and so undeniable. Especially since it pushes me toward Harrington’s conclusion, in which “howling fury” may be more than verbal:

There is, in fact, no resolution, save insisting that human life cannot proceed without some constraints, and insisting on their imposition, and weathering the howling fury this will inevitably cause.

Once again, I’m in turmoil about whether it’s time to forsake the center-right for the postliberal right.

Is it is or is it ain’t a hate crime?

Schroedinger’s Hate Crime – Mary Harrington’s coinage for the ritual of trumpeting accusations that some mass murder was the consequence of right-wing “stochastic terrorism,” followed by the sotto voce revelation that the murderer had no right-wing affiliations.

(I realized after writing this that Harrington only addressed one incident, the Colorado Springs gay club mass shooting, but I trust that she is aware of this repetitive pattern.)

Even more than I tend to forget that there’s a porn pandemic do I tend to forget that academic cheating is epidemic:

Professors describe feeling demoralized—“I didn’t get into academia to be a cop,” a CUNY professor in the English department told me. Faculty at other schools likewise describe feeling helpless when it comes to calling out cheating, or even catching it. There’s always another app, another workaround.

Plus, it’s not necessarily smart to report bad behavior.

“Nontenured faculty have no real choice but to compromise their professional standards and the quality of the students’ own education to take a customer’s-always-right approach,” Gabriel Rossman at UCLA told me.

That’s because lower level courses, where cheating is more rampant, tend to be taught by nontenured faculty with little job security—the kind of people who fear getting negative student evaluations. “Students can be tyrants,” the CUNY English professor said. “It’s like Yelp. The only four people who are going to review the restaurant are the people who are mad.”

Suzy Weiss And you’ve got to keep the customers happy when, as at several top universities, administrators are roughly as numerous as undergraduates.

Many now herald “lab-grown meat” – that is, animal protein unmoored from the living form and telos of an actual animal … But it felt stomach-churningly apt to discover recently that this product is produced in laboratory conditions thanks to the use of ‘immortal cells’: that is, cells that don’t stop growing when they’ve done their job, which is usually to grow some part of an animal body. And the other word for cells that don’t know when to stop proliferating is “cancer”. To put it another way: “lab-grown meat” is a polite way of saying “edible vat-grown tumours”.

Mary Harrington, Culture as Metastasis

Not at all sure I believe this …

Simply put, the FBI is full of people who would prefer not to investigate Donald Trump. He remains under federal investigation only because of his own inability to stop criming.

Adam Serwer

Politics

DeSantis or Trump?

Damon Linker wrote an NYT Op-Ed about Ron DeSantis and then referenced it on his Substack. Substack reactions include:

[H]e would bore enthusiastic visitors to the Nixon museum — and he wholly lacks Trump’s entertainment skills This is a big deal when you’re in the grievance-feeding business, and you’re looking to bring out the fringe element that was hiding before 2016. He has a bit of Trump’s shamelessness, but notwithstanding the Martha’s Vineyard stunt, it is blatantly imitative, and for the true believers, ultimately unsatisfying. I can’t imagine him inciting a riot in any capital, any more than I could see him selling out a medium size venue for an hour of spritzing insults and comedic asides. (J Dalessandro)
I’m surprised that you rarely mention something that bothers even a diehard fan like me about DeSantis. That is, he constantly sets traps for the left, and my side finds so much joy in it, because they usually do walk right into them. (Tony)

My current stance on DeSantis: very unlikely to vote for him in a primary or general election. 2024 might just be the first time I’ve ever sat out an election. But if there’s a Trump-DeSantis primary contest in Indiana and it appears close (and Indiana’s late primaries are not already irrelevant to the nomination), I’ll gladly vote for the lesser evil.

Power grabbing from the right is not fascism

Damon Linker got a lot of flak from extremely contentious progressives for the above-referenced NYT Op-Ed.

The flak included the customary drumbeat of the “f-word,” but Linker’s having none of it:

Ronald Reagan was not a fascist.

George H. W. Bush was not a fascist.

George W. Bush was not and is not a fascist.

John McCain was not a fascist.

Mitt Romney was not and is not a fascist.

But what about Ron DeSantis? To answer that question, we first have to ask if Hungarian president Viktor Orbán is a fascist.

That’s because DeSantis is clearly modeling some of his culture-war initiatives on things Orbán has done in office. Yet I don’t think it’s accurate to call Orbán a fascist. He’s some kind of soft authoritarian or illiberal democrat—both of which are very bad. I think, likewise, that much of what DeSantis is doing in Florida—for example, his moves to severely restrict academic freedom at public universities in the state—is atrocious. But using a landslide victory in his re-election bid as leverage to impose a conservative clampdown on publicly funded universities is not fascism. It’s a power grab from the right that liberals should be fighting hard. But reaching for the most hyperbolic epithet they can think of and hurling it at him and his supporters on social media isn’t fighting hard. It’s a panic attack.

I think Linker is spot-on about this. It has occurred to me that if I had given up on liberal democracy (I’ve only come close to giving up so far), DeSantis would probably be my man, because he’d be far likelier than Trump to realize a tolerable illiberal democracy.

Conservatism today

I think there should be a statute of limitations for calling a person a legal conservative. Show me what you’ve done lately.

Josh Blackman, reacting to J. Michael Luttig’s NYT Op-Ed Mike Pence Should Drop His Grand Jury Subpoena Gambit.

Luttig was considered conservative when he was a Federal Circuit Court judge, but then he left for a gig at Boeing, and his conservative credentials haven’t been renewed.

I’ll go Blackman one better, though: I think there should be a statute of limitations for calling a person any kind of conservative. I say that because the popular usage of “conservative” has shifted so much that I’m not sure I qualify any longer, whatever my reflexes may say about my place on the spectrum.

Good news from Congress?!

Kevin McCarthy has formed a decent working relationship with minority leader Hakeem Jeffries:

The parties have big differences on major issues, and each has its share of loudmouths who see taking cheap shots as the shortest route to a cable-news appearance. But the parties’ leaders are trying to find ways to mitigate dysfunction where they can.

Karl Rove

Populist losers

It seems that the Michigan GOP has some problems:

“There’s no way in hell you can look at the state party apparatus as a stock and say: ‘Gee, I want to invest more in that stock.’ Just the opposite,” Jimmy Greene, president and CEO of Associated Builders and Contractors of Michigan, told The Dispatch. “The party is a grievance driven party and not one to be taken seriously.”

…

[I]nterviews with several well-placed Michigan Republicans revealed widespread pessimism about the party’s prospects after grassroots delegates to the state GOP’s mid-February convention elected Karamo the new chairman. They say Karamo can’t raise money or manage a multimillion dollar organization, claim she is a poor communicator and repels swing voters by denying her loss to Benson, and argue she is hostile to traditional Republicans.

“It is a disaster and there’s no way to overstate what a disaster it is,” said Jason Roe (no relation to Jamie Roe), a Republican strategist in Michigan and former top aide at the state GOP. “It’s embarrassing. The media is going to love to turn to Karamo and hear her say things that make us look insane.”

“We’re going to lose elections,” a longtime Republican operative in the state said flatly, requesting anonymity to speak candidly.

Even Trump spurned Karamo in the chairman’s race, backing Matt DePerno, who lost the race for state attorney general last November. He too promoted Trump’s unfounded claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Republicans opposed to Karamo emphasize the biggest casualty of her reign will be the party’s ability to raise and maximize resources. Whatever windfall in small donations that might pour in from grassroots contributors enthusiastic about Karamo’s election, it’s unlikely to compensate for the millions of dollars from wealthy financiers her chairmanship costs the state party. There’s also the issue of discounted rates for bulk, direct-mail political advertising available to state parties but not individual candidates or the national party committees.

Michigan Republicans Fear a Split Ahead of 2024 – The Dispatch

I’m not closely familiar with the situation, but I’d wager that the populist “grassroots” who elected Karamo would defend the choice by noting that “traditional Republicans” never cared about them and would ignore them again if back in power.

It’s not clear when Team Trump, promised that they were going to win so much they’d cry for mercy, will get so tired of losing that they move on or learn that politics requires compromise. They don’t show much sign of letting up yet.

Tradition is a bulwark against the power of commerce and the dissolving acid of money, and by removing these, all revolutions in the modern period have ended up accelerating the commercial and technological shift towards the Machine.

Paul Kingsnorth

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