Tag: SCOTUS

Somehow waiting for Something

Somehow waiting for something.

I find right now it can be hard to speak about anything going on in the world: it’s all moving so fast, very little seems clear, and there is a strange indefinable sense that we are all somehow waiting for something.

Paul Kingsnorth

I suggest we’re waiting for two tangled somethings:

  1. See whether, and how, and how radically, AI shakes up the world as we’ve known it.
  2. See if the tech sector bubble (AI market valuation collectively has reached $27 trillion) bursts and worry #1 flees like a dream in the night.

With all the buzz and confidently-voiced narratives, it’s easy to forget that AI has not yet been profitable, and may never be profitable, but is up to its eyeballs in debt or in equity that likely never will generate enough free cash flow to justify it.

Running on steroids

It was on Wall Street that Luana Lopes Lara, the 30-year-old co-founder of Kalshi, was inspired to start a prediction-markets exchange. As an intern at hedge funds such as Five Rings Capital and Citadel Securities, she was baffled to find fund managers building elaborate portfolios to take positions on forthcoming elections and interest-rate decisions. Kalshi’s users bet directly on events instead. “What we are building is a financial exchange where anyone from a Robin Hood trader to Goldman Sachs to someone in an MIT dorm could trade directly in what their thesis was about the future,” Ms Lopes Lara says.

Among amateur traders, prediction markets have taken off. Everyone from students to delivery drivers seems to be having a flutter. Kalshi processed $33bn of trades in June, according to the Block, a data provider. Its main rival, Polymarket, did $10.7bn on its crypto-based international exchange, plus $3.3bn on its regulated American version. These are tiny sums next to those on big derivatives exchanges. But they are growing fast (see chart). Kalshi and Polymarket are reportedly fundraising at valuations of $40bn and $15bn.

The Economist. I’m pretty certain I’ve voiced by hatred of gambling, and gambling apps, and perhaps even Kalshi and Polymarket by name. But I confess to not having connected them to what was already going on at hedge funds.

Our “healthy” economy is running on steroids and crack even beyond what I thought. For “hedge funds” are available only to accredited and institutional investors (who can afford getting hosed) while Kalshi and Polymarket are available to any random chud. That democratic gesture bodes ill for just about everyone but the owners of Kalshi and Polymarket.

Barbarian art-destroyers

Many fresco paintings were whitewashed away in the so-called Enlightenment; it was that same Enlightenment, in its sanguinary French eruption, that smashed priceless stained glass windows in churches and cathedrals across the country. “Four fifths of [man’s] greatest art,” said Henry Adams, was created in those supposedly dark days, to the honor of Jesus and Mary. The Enlightenment destroyed more great art than it produced, and what the harbingers of the novus ordo saeclorum did not get around to destroying they slandered.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes

Mature enough for the humanities

I was having a blast. I started looking forward to my evening ‘community service’ with enthusiasm. This was what education was supposed to be like. But why was it happening here, instead of with the young geniuses I was teaching during the day?

Here’s the kicker. When I talked to other Stanford faculty members who were teaching community classes, they all had the same experience.

The adults were more impressive than the college students.

Maybe that wouldn’t have been true if I’d been teaching calculus or computer science or engineering. But anything related to the arts and the humanities needed—and deserved—a mature mind with some experience of the world before it could bear fruit.

Ted Gioia

The Odyssey

Christopher Nolan evidently has taken some artistic license in telling a story about men and women who never actually lived and the war they never actually fought as related by an ancient oral tradition attributed to Homer, a poet who (probably) did not exist. I am not at all sure that a military historian is the person I would consult to evaluate a story about sea monsters and one-eyed giants and witches who (3,000-year-old spoiler alert!) turn men into pigs. In a mythological milieu in which the Greeks’ chief lightning guy turns himself into a swan to rape an entirely different Spartan queen (queen of Sparta is one of the toughest jobs in mythology), you’re telling me that the actor formerly known as Ellen Page cannot play the role of a scrawny Greek redshirt who gets left behind on the beach to take one for the team? If you’re going to complain about Sinon, maybe start with the fact that the character does not appear in the original Odyssey at all—he is imported from the Aeneid.

Kevin D. Williamson, who I’ll read even when he’s writing about a movie I don’t plan to see.

Elena Kagan

I keep and regularly review a list of my truly unpopular opinions — not the edgy things one says or write in hopes of being thought courageous, but the things one dare not say or write in the current milieu.

This is not one of them, though it may be a bit edgy in “conservative” (whatever that term means after ten years in the Trumposcene) circles: Justice Elena Kagan is more than just one of three “liberal” justices on the Supreme Court. She is a diplomat, with stratospheric emotional intelligence, who managed to make conservative students feel welcome at Harvard Law and not infrequently attended Federalist Society meetings. When I hear discussions of SCOTUS decisions, I frequently wonder how Justice Kagan shaped them behind the scenes.

I’ll likely be gone before she is, but I suspect she will go down in history as one of the most consequential justices of the court — top decile at least.

UPDATE: On Tuesday the 28th, Josh Blackmun conveniently published this brief piece on Justice Kagan, which harmonizes well with my view of her.

Mission Creeps

Amnesty International, which once “enjoyed a reputation for defending prisoners of conscience and upholding human rights for all,” appears to be succumbing to succumbing to mission creep.

This has been most clearly demonstrated by Amnesty International UK’s publication on July 8 of a report called “A Growing Threat: The Anti-Rights Movement in the UK.”

The report branded more than 100 groups as “anti-rights,” including 51 that are dedicated to protecting the freedoms of women and gay people but are dismissed as “gender critical.” The common characteristic of these organizations is that they acknowledge the fact that human beings cannot change sex and that the rights of women and gay people are underpinned by a recognition of biological sex differences. This is apparently sufficient to see them condemned.

Andrew Doyle, Amnesty International UK vs. J.K. Rowling

I’m pleased to see that the push-back is strong.

Get over yourself, JD

The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel criticized Vice President JD Vance’s absenteeism from the Senate, where he is ex officio Senate president. His enforcers came down hard on her:

  • uniparty mouthpiece
  • billionaire lackey
  • corrupt
  • liberal
  • Marxist
  • deep state
  • captive tool
  • liar
  • establishment
  • RINO

She responds:

Can Mr. Vance possibly think this is smart? Successful politicians seek to find new allies, not to alienate longstanding ones, whether elected colleagues, interest groups, the entrepreneurial class or conservative media. Winning is hard enough without a right-on-right cage match. One answer is simply that Mr. Vance is a sensitive bunny. If he wants to be president, he’ll need to get over that.

But the other answer is that Mr. Vance knows his “national conservative” ambitions for the GOP aren’t landing. Republicans are increasingly up in arms over a Vance agenda that sounds like Bernie Sanders. Hence his Vance team’s need to invalidate anyone who disagrees as a “RINO” or a “tool” of special interests or an “elite”—the better to allow them to define what counts as a “real” Republican. A Vance Republican.

Here’s an idea: Make the argument instead. And maybe let others make theirs, too—free of the gaslighting.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, by JD Vance

I was reading Rod Dreher when he “catapulted JD Vance into fame.” Understandably, considering what followed, Dreher and Vance remain close. But even Rod, because he actually cares for Vance, with skin in the game, has written some critical things.

I once cared moderately for Vance, thinking he might reprise the role of Mike Pence. I care for him a little less every week.

Shorts

  • From Barcelona to Bruges by way of Florence, vast swathes of Europe’s once-idyllic cities are a procession of foreigners shopping for souvenirs. Some hilltop villages in Provence or Tuscany now seem to exist chiefly as backdrops for linen-clad types sipping spritzes. … In summer Europeans are not so much residents of their home cities as extras in someone else’s social-media feed. (The Economist)
  • It turns out that when you mix narcissism and nihilism, you create an acid that corrodes every belief system it touches. (David Brooks)
  • Build a techno-social system which demands that humans act like machines and it turns out that machines can eventually be made to displace humans with relative ease. (L.M. Sacasas. This is a periodic, pithy gut-check. It evokes a lot.)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Semiquicentennial (and other things)

Semiquicentennial

Burnt-Over America

I thought it would be nice to limit this post to observations on the Semiquicentennial but, alas, it was not to be. Only this item and the next are so timely.

I’ve read quite a lot of religious history, including (maybe even disproportionately) the religious history of this nation of heretics. Among the most important influences of American religion is the revivalism and religious ferment of the so-called burnt-over district in New York state, where revival followed revival and where many of our most marginal Christian-ish groups, like Mormons and Seventh-Day Adventists, were born amidst a seemingly unchallenged conviction that real Christianity had been lost and needed to be “restored.”

But my focus was on the ferment and spawning of group after group of restorationists. I sort of ignored that “burnt-over district” implies exhaustion of fuel with little left but ashes:

Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875) popularized the term: his posthumous 1876 book Autobiography of Charles G. Finney referred to a “burnt district” to denote an area in central and western New York State during the Second Awakening:

I found that region of country what, in the western phrase, would be called, a “burnt district.” There had been, a few years previously, a wild excitement passing through that region, which they called a revival of religion, but which turned out to be spurious. … It was reported as having been a very extravagant excitement; and resulted in a reaction so extensive and profound, as to leave the impression on many minds that religion was a mere delusion. A great many men seemed to be settled in that conviction. Taking what they had seen as a specimen of a revival of religion, they felt justified in opposing anything looking toward the promoting of a revival.

Wikipedia

And indeed, I understand that the former burnt-over district is uncommonly disinterested in religion still today.

Leave it to David French to see this as metaphor for America as a political burnt-over district. People are so much of the mind “I just can’t even” that Trump is getting away with corruption on a scale unprecedented in our history. Meanwhile, antisemitic crypto-communists are ascendent in the Democrat party.

I can scarcely bear to bear to look any more, but through long habit (and a desire for topics readers might find interesting) it’s hard to look away, too.

I personally can’t imagine voting for the party of MAGA or the Democrats, who just when we need them most seem to be succumbing to extremely radical Democratic Socialists of America (i.e., they despise AOC, for instance, as too mainstream) that founder Michael Harrington wouldn’t recognize.

And I don’t even care that I don’t care. I’ve heard that I’m not alone in feeling that way.

In January the president was asked why members of his family had begun doing business overseas during his second term when they had sworn off doing so during his first. If perceptions of influence-peddling were enough to put them off the practice once before, why would he and they engage in it orgiastically now?

“I found out that nobody cared,” he replied, matter-of-factly.

That’s classic Trump. On the one hand, it’s a pristine vista onto a criminal mind. Moral misgivings about monetizing one’s public office are nowhere in sight, nor is there any interest in setting a good example or anxiety about the civic consequences of letting an appearance of impropriety go uncorrected. To him, the question is simply whether the crime, once committed, is likely to go unpunished. If so, proceed.

On the other hand, he’s right. For all intents and purposes, nobody cares.

Nick Catoggio, who first turned my mind to this morose thought. Then French added the metaphor and cemented it.

I’m burnt over on politics. Maybe you are, too.

Pray for America. I do so daily — not that God would Make America Great Again, but more along the lines that we’d repent, and become good for the long run.

Vive la France!

This is a time for thinking about the things we like and love best about these United States but there is a national shortcoming weighing on me that I feel compelled to mention: Of all the many regrettable political developments of the past dozen years, the most regrettable is the fact that the United States has become such a poor friend and a shabby ally, and not only to the French. Americans sneer at NATO, an alliance organized around a collective-defense provision that has been invoked precisely once in its history: rallying to the defense of the United States after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Americans lament—not without reason—the expense of what seems to many to have been a pointless war in Afghanistan, and we mourn the loss of American lives there. We are less likely to mention the 457 British soldiers who gave their lives in that conflict, the 159 Canadians, the 90 French, the 62 Germans, the 53 Italians, the 44 Poles, the 44 Danes, and the Australians, Spanish, Georgians, Romanians, Dutch, Turks, Czechs, New Zealanders, and Norwegians. When the United States under Joe Biden decided to suddenly quit Afghanistan, our government did so with hardly any consultation with the allies who had fought and died beside us there. It was a blunder and an insult. The same administration blindsided the French with the AUKUS agreement that, among other things, torpedoed a French-Australian submarine project–another blunder, another insult. The succeeding administration, it goes without saying, has done everything within its considerable power to make things worse with its childish displays of incompetence, ingratitude, and resentment. There is a certain horrifying symmetry at work: Donald Trump, a man without friends, presides over a nation without allies–or one that will be without allies if we continue on our current course.

…

We didn’t get to 250 by ourselves. There have been times when the United States has carried the world on its back—and times when the United States has been borne up by our friends and allies. We never forget when it’s been us doing the heavy lifting—but we are, at times, shamefully forgetful of what others have done for us.

…

God bless America, yes. We will need His blessing. 

But, also: God bless the friends and allies who have invested their own blood and treasure in the extraordinary project of liberty that we took up 250 years ago. Vive la France!

Kevin D. Williamson

The Other Stuff

SCOTUS

Right outcome, wrong rationale

It was a grievous disappointment to the sort of person whose interest in Republican politics is coextensive with their interest in “the Great Replacement,” which describes a lot of Trump voters. And it’s no answer to tell them that the decision did nothing more than uphold the law as it’s stood for ages. The point of the revolution is to overturn the law as it’s stood for ages. What do you think the word “postliberal” means, exactly?

…

Jonah Goldberg is correct that the new right’s difficulty with that language resembles the left’s difficulty with the Second Amendment more so than conservatives’ difficulty with abortion: “It can’t mean what it says because I really don’t want it to!”

…

Liberalism cares about process, postliberalism cares only about results … Conservatives wouldn’t want a court full of hacks and chuds but postliberals would welcome it.

Nick Catoggio

Because I’m a conservative (i.e., a “right-liberal”) who cares about process, I’m going to eat my words about a result I liked. I wrote: “I’m glad SCOTUS decided the birthright citizenship case as it did because I think the language of the citizenship clause is clear” (italics added). I now, reluctantly, retract that.

I’m reluctant because I think that the Citizenship clause of the 14th amendment is clear enough that we don’t need to look at its “legislative history.”

But there’s a canon besides that “textualist” one: avoid constitutional decisions if there’s a narrower basis. In this case, one or two twentieth-century statutes recognizing birthright citizenship would have trumped Trump’s Executive Order and disposed of the case, leaving the constitutional question for another day should our MAGA Congress repeal those statutes. This narrower statutory basis was what Justice Kavanaugh advocated in his concurrence.

My only excuses for this error are: (1) all the buzz was about the 14th amendment; (2) my perception of the clarity of that amendment’s citizenship clause riveted my attention.

I’m pretty happy with Justice Kavanaugh. I deplore his underage binge-drinking, but he’s not underage any more, and as another underappreciated public figure (not to mention sundry songsters) once said when asked to explain a blemish on his youthful record, “when I was young and foolish, I was young and foolish.”

(David Post at the Volokh Conspiracy blog also commends Kavanaugh’s approach. Some Thoughts on the Court’s Opinion(s) in the Birthright Citizenship Case. I got there before he did, but I’ve been aggregating thing for another multi-topic blogpost.)

The timing couldn’t be worse

Speaking of SCOTUS decisions, I’ve lamented that the “Unitary Executive” theory is being so vigorously exercised by this particularly corrupt and personalist administration, but I sort of assumed the theory simpliciter was correct, probably because it’s pretty easy to understand and apply, partly because it has been supported even by my (non-MAGA) conservative tribe.

Now that it’s 11:59 on the Unitary Executive doomsday clock, I’m reconsidering my position.

[T]here is no question that the federal government needs to delegate authority to officials with the knowledge, skills, and expertise needed to run a complex modern state, and that Congress ought to be able to play a role in protecting that delegated authority.

Francis Fukuyama. See also George Will, Lawrence Lessig & Cass R. Sunstein, and Federalist Papers 51 (James Madison) (not all of which I’ve read as I write)

Donald Trump has demonstrated that he doesn’t really care about running our complex modern state so long as he’s serviced by Cabinet members and agency heads who will tongue-shine his shoes and he can line his pockets with impunity. Even if SCOTUS is right about this, the timing could hardly be worse.

Why the carve-out for the Fed?

For my money, one of the worst decisions of the term came (fittingly) on the same day as Slaughter, and it nicely illustrates the difference between ad hoc, bad-faith reasoning and its opposite. That was Trump v. Cook, the 5-4 decision in which Roberts, along with Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberals, held that Lisa Cook of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors could remain in her position while she fights Trump’s attempt to fire her. This, in effect, creates a carve out for the Federal Reserve from the presidential firing power enhanced by Slaughter. Why does the Fed alone receive such special protection? Because, Roberts argued, “the appearance of independence is key to the Federal Reserve’s design.” That’s true. But then how is an independent Fed compatible with the Constitution when the ostensible independence of other agencies is supposedly incompatible with the Constitution?

The argument appears to be that the consequences of undermining the appearance of Fed independence would be bad for American monetary policy and stability. No doubt it would be. But if it’s legitimate to think in terms of the consequences in the case of denying Fed independence, why not when it comes to denying the independence of other federal agencies? The distinction sounds arbitrary to me—unless one grants the Marxist premise that it’s perfectly “normal” for capital to warp the rules of the capitalist system around itself. (I hate granting Marxist premises, but when reality vindicates them, what else am I supposed to do?)

Damon Linker, Two Cheers for the SCOTUS Term.

It’s hard to argue with Linker on this. “Just an eensy-weensy fourth branch to protect money” has a foul odor to it.

Wooden Ships

(Song of my youth that I love)

If you smile at me, I will understand  
'Cause that is something everybody everywhere does  
In the same language  
   
I can see by your coat, my friend  
You're from the other side  
There's just one thing I got to know  
Can you tell me please, who won?  
   
Say, can I have some of your purple berries?  
Yes, I've been eating them for six or seven weeks now  
Haven't got sick once  
Probably keep us both alive  
  
Wooden ships on the water, very free and easy  
Easy, you know the way it's supposed to be  
Silver people on the shoreline, let us be  
Talkin' 'bout very free and easy  
   
Horror grips us as we watch you die  
All we can do is echo your anguished cries  
Stare as all human feelings die  
We are leaving, you don't need us  
  
Go, take your sister then, by the hand  
Lead her away from this foreign land  
Far away, where we might laugh again  
We are leaving, you don't need us  
  
And it's a fair wind blowin' warm  
Out of the south over my shoulder  
Guess I'll set a course and go

Crosby, Stills & Nash, or one of its reshufflings, Wooden Ships. Sorry that my stylesheet renders the lyrics monospaced, like a typewriter.

Buy Me a Coffee or Substack? Well, it depends.

I have never quite brought myself to the point of saying I will never move to Substack. The reason? Because I know I could make a lot more money on Substack than I make by using Buy Me a Coffee. Indeed, people remind me of this! My friend Freddie deBoer wrote to me recently to say that a post of mine would have done gangbusters on Substack — which would have meant a lot of people impulse-buying subscriptions. That’s the thing about being in that platform ecosystem: thanks to network effects, you get the impulse buyers. That does not happen on Buy Me a Coffee. You all have had to be really intentional about supporting me, which is a great thing. 

Why is it a great thing? Because by writing on the open web and merely asking for support, I have wholly escaped the pressures that come when people have paid money to see your writing and therefore have certain expectations for what you say and how you say it. Also escaped: that other kind of pressure that comes when people really like one particular post and show their liking with money — which plants the idea in the back of your head that you need to write more posts like that … whether you really want to or not. By contrast, y’all have supported me because you see what the whole package is, and know what you’re getting and are likely to continue to get. That’s really wonderful. So I have every reason to keep writing for the open web and merely requesting/hoping for your contributions.

Well, every reason but one, anyway. Why haven’t I forsworn Substack? Simple: I’m afraid that when I retire next year and take a big financial hit, I’ll be poor, or significantly poorer anyway, unless I hawk my wares on that platform. Which is pathetic. That attitude is unworthy of a mature Christian man.

So — taking a deep breath here — I solemnly affirm before God and my fellow humans that I will never write on Substack. There, I said it. If no one supports my writing I’ll work as a greeter at Walmart — but as for my personal online writing, I pledge my troth to the open web! You heard it here first.

Alan Jacobs. I’m glad I can write as I wish, not as readers might wish, and not for money.

Secularization ——> Anxious Religiosity

Whatever you heard in the early 2000s, reports of the death of transcendence have been greatly exaggerated. Secularization seems instead to provoke anxious religiosity, like a bird with no place to land. The hallowing of the sacred flame at Gettysburg is matched by an equally intense desacralizing instinct, yet even that zealous iconoclasm has a mystic quality of its own.

When I visited the Hudson Valley School painter Thomas Cole’s house in upstate New York, I noticed a tag informing me that an object had been “owned by an enslaver” (or words to that effect). I was struck by the implication that the object was stained somehow. We might not use the word “sin” anymore, but the concept is still there. The extreme scrupulosity, combined – naturally – with an Indigenous land acknowledgment, wasn’t even for Thomas Cole, but for the people who had owned the house before him. My goodness, I thought, how stressful it must be to live in a constant state of confession of an ancestor’s sins. The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

Hannah Long, Hallowed and Haunted

Shorts

  • The Republican Party worshiped the god of political expediency. Once political power became their idol, they lost control. (Nancy French, Ghosted)
  • I got a head start because my ancestors started practicing miscegenation before it was fashionable … In my symbolic family tree there’s a place for Mahatma Gandhi, Anna Akhmatova, Duke Ellington, Mister Rogers, Sappho, Anthony Bourdain, Julian of Norwich, Virginia Woolf, Miguel de Unamuno, Rainer Maria Rilke, Audrey Hepburn, Willa Cather, Cary Grant, Søren Kierkegaard, Frederick Douglass, Hannah Arendt, and many others. (Ted Gioia, reflecting on his identity as an American both in terms of physical inheritance and of chosen influences.)
  • Was Jeannie Gates right about America?
  • “If you invested $10,000 in Trump coin on January 20th, 2025, it would be worth $415 today. You lost everything. He made half a billion,” – Chris Mowrey via Andrew Sullivan.
  • “[Trump has] made more money in one year than his entire life combined. That’s not business, it’s corruption,” – Fred Wellman via Andrew Sullivan.
  • “Intel came in. They had a problem. I said, ‘I can solve your problem, but I want 10% of the company,’” – Donald Trump via Andrew Sullivan.
  • Facebook, Fox and MSNBC have done to our parents what they warned computer gaming would do to us. (Jonah Goldberg)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

UPDATE: Boy, that’s kind of embarrassing. I thought I had finally figured out what this big birthday was called, and I published this using the term “semisesquicentennial.” That was so wrong that I couldn’t bear leaving it – or pretending it never happened.

D Day’s 82nd Anniversary

Douthat

Is secular critique of AI adequate?

Writing in The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper argues that some secular A.I. skeptics have been drawn to religious thinkers like the pope for exactly this reason — because a secular language of harm seems inadequate to the perils A.I. creates for human beings, which are better identified by the language of sin.>

If that’s the case, though, the goal of the critic should be to identify the sin directly, not merely to lament the general advance of the technology nor to make excuses for individuals caught up in disruption.

Do not offer vague laments for the fate of higher education; say that students who use A.I. to cheat are doing something gravely wrong.

Do not merely bemoan the proliferation of Claude-inflected prose; say that the novelist or essayist who outsources a chapter to A.I. has committed what should be a career-ending literary crime.

Do not merely fret, as the pope’s encyclical does, that receiving “words of advice, empathy, friendship and even love” from a chatbot can be “misleading” for “less discerning users.” Tell Catholics and other Christians that treating an A.I. bot like your girlfriend or your boyfriend is a sin.

Ross Douthat’s (further?) thoughts on the Pope’s AI encyclical.

Douthat is onto something, I think

We’re very complicated critters cognitively. Douthat’s discomfort is a surprise, but seems to capture our dilemma.

Why would anyone prefer sleaze to morality? Because early-21st-century Americans are profoundly divided about what being moral means.

[O]nce you get beyond the theft-murder-adultery basics, we’re in a world of factional moralities and profound metaphysical divides, which separate Republicans from Democrats but also create deep fissures inside the two coalitions.

…

In this environment, the upright moralist becomes an inherently untrustworthy figure — not because he might be secretly a hypocrite but because he might be entirely sincere, and in his sincerity end up imposing a stringent morality that’s alien to to your own …

I feel a version of this impulse myself with Talarico and Platner. The Texas Democrat seems sincerely religious, even zealous, and having written frequently about the value of religion to liberalism, I should be very happy to have a Democratic politician making biblical arguments for his positions, even if they aren’t necessarily positions that I share.

But then I encounter Talarico’s concrete religious persona, the specific blend of piety and Peak Woke moralism … And my reaction is allergic, in a way that’s similar, I’m sure, to the reaction that a liberal Christian might have to a traditionalist Christian speaking the language of Trumpian populism. It’s a vision of political morality that I don’t share, and the piety makes it more threatening, not more congenial.

…

if you’re a swing voter who isn’t on board with either side’s zeal, someone like Platner, with his checkered past and dubious tattoo and Reddit indecency, might actually seem preferable to someone like Talarico. Imagine that you want to punish Trump Republicans but you don’t want the oppressive ideological climate of 2020 and 2021 to suddenly return. There’s a case that you’re better off with the guy who nobody would mistake for a moral exemplar than with the guy who might think that God is on the side of whatever mania progressivism thinks up next.

This is not a happy state of cultural affairs. But it’s hard to get back to a place where public virtue is rewarded and egregious vice is punished without forms of public morality that are more unifying than what’s on offer at the moment. This is why the quest for a religious center matters: Piety and probity will be rewarded only if they’re linked to a moral vision that seems reasonably unifying, a sacred canopy beneath which a majority of Americans can feel secure.

Ross Douthat, Graham Platner and the Amoral Center, 6/3/26

Two things Douthat said that sounded a bit off (but don’t undermine his argument):

  • “… having written frequently about the value of religion to liberalism ….” “Religion,” insofar as it is a coherent construct at all (see Brent Nongbri, Before Religion), is too varied to affirm its value to liberalism. One might think that that author of a book titled Bad Religion would get that.
  • “… a traditionalist Christian speaking the language of Trumpian populism ….” The thought boggles the mind. The Evangelical Trumpistas, Trump’s most notorious “Christian” supporters, are “traditionalist” or “traditional” only from the perspective of historic amnesiacs. The tradition in anything like its present form is maybe — if you hold your head just right and squint a bit — 300-ish years old, and by my lights is dated more accurately to the Second Great Awakening. I can only imagine a truly traditional Christian supporting Trump as a lesser evil, not as a good choice.

“Finishing the job” in Iran

I usually quote Nick Catoggio for sharp, biting invective, but Wednesday, he got serious about the undeclared Iran War from which Trump is trying to withdraw (would that he hadn’t started it!) while Israel continues to fight a serious threat:

We’ve arrived at the stage of this conflict where American and Israeli definitions of “the job” have plainly diverged.

And I do mean plainly. “You’re f—ing crazy,” an Axios source paraphrased the president as telling Netanyahu on Monday. “You’d be in prison if it weren’t for me. I’m saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this.” If you aren’t worried about Trump eventually scapegoating the Jewish state for the war, you should be.

The conflict began with the two nations’ interests aligned. Both sought nothing less than regime change in Iran, assessing correctly that Khomeinists will seek ways to threaten American and Israeli interests as long as they’re in power. Mossad believed they could be toppled; Trump agreed, letting his fantasies about another Venezuela-like capitulation override the skepticism of his own CIA director.

Yet, for obvious reasons of size, capabilities, and geography, the threat that the two countries face from Iran isn’t symmetrical.

Israel needs to worry about all forms of power projection by its regional neighbor, very much including conventional attacks like the ones being staged from Lebanon by Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah. Nothing will solve that problem short of cutting off the head of the snake. The United States, however, worries mainly about unconventional power projection, i.e. nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles. And that problem can be solved—or managed, for some period of time—without decapitation by degrading Iran’s nuclear program and missile arsenal.

That gives you an idea of how Israel and the U.S. diverge on what “the job” is. Catoggio also evaluates what “finishing” would mean.

Catoggio seems to me to give too much credit to Trump for trying to withdraw, since Trump and Netanyahu started the open hostilities, but his analysis of the falling out of Israel and the U.S. over Iran seemed notable.

Grotesque and terrifying and juvenile

“They walk among us.” The glowing green letters emerge ominously against a dark backdrop. Above them hover the words “aliens” and “declassified,” suggesting the release — long awaited in some corners of the internet — of secret government files concerning extraterrestrials. Slowly, tantalizingly, more text appears: “For 60 years, the U.S. government has kept a closely guarded secret.” Then the big reveal: It’s not the trailer for a horror film; it’s a White House web page, posted last Thursday. And scary creatures in question aren’t extraterrestrials; they’re the other kind of aliens — the immigrant kind, the kind hunted by ICE.

“Aliens have been walking among us, living in our neighborhoods, and interacting with us in our daily lives,” the page announces. “They’ve shopped in the same stores, attended the same classes as our children, and lived seemingly normal human existences.” That’s the joke: Human beings are described as nonhuman invaders. Fascism, but make it a troll.

…

With phrases like, “They do not belong here” and, “Deport them all,” the page struck me as an incitement for Americans to commit acts of violence against immigrants. But Benjamin Valentino, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, thinks that the purpose of the page is not to get Americans to do anything: It’s to get them to do nothing, while the government commits its campaign of cruelty against millions of people just trying to live in peace. “They want a majority of the population to turn their backs,” he said. “That’s all that’s necessary.”

… [T]he dehumanizing language of the sort used by the Trump administration is, he said, “a pretty standard indicator” of risk, a necessary if insufficient condition of mass violence directed at a particular group.

“It’s not that it turns normal people into murderers,” Valentino said. “It’s that it turns them into bystanders.”

M. Gessen, New York Times.

Again, this merde is on a White House webpage.

Who is the real radical?

I had the opportunity a few months ago to hear Dean Erwin Chemerinsky speak at Wabash College, not far from me. He’s quite an influential figure in the legal world.

Wednesday, he wrote about the “radical” Justice Clarence Thomas, opening with this salvo:

Thomas is the only justice that I can identify who has openly said that precedent deserves little weight in constitutional law. In a concurring opinion in 2019’s Gamble v. United States, Thomas said that the court should follow the text and the original meaning of the Constitution and not precedents that are inconsistent with them. He wrote: “In my view, the Court’s typical formulation of the stare decisis standard does not comport with our judicial duty under Article III because it elevates demonstrably erroneous decisions—meaning decisions outside the realm of permissible interpretation—over the text of the Constitution and other duly enacted federal law.” In a speech in Dallas, Thomas once remarked: “I always say that when someone uses stare decisis, that means they’re out of arguments. Now they’re just waving the white flag. And I just keep going.” He also said at another event: “We use stare decisis as a mantra when we don’t want to think.”

Call it radical, Professor, but the Oath the Justices take is to the Constitution, not to stare decisis. In my book, Justice Thomas is spot-on and the Dean is radical.

Now a decent human being will approach precedent with the attitude “they may be right, and I may be wrong.” But after wrestling with that, and giving the party of precedent a chance to persuade you, if you’re still convinced the precedent contradicts the Constitution, you should say so — likely in a dissent and, one hopes, with genuine respect for the predecessors who got it wrong and the contemporaries who are following them.

How much of what will focus your attention?

The character of a republic, like the character of an individual, is a matter of habit, of what we do, day by day, what we expect, what we tolerate, and what causes us to say, “No, no more of this.” What was done to E. Jean Carroll—what is being done—could be done to you. What was done to Renee Good or Alex Pretti could be done to you—or to someone you love. 

But do you know what the average Republican with any power is thinking? I know. It is this: “What was done to John Cornyn could be done to me.”

(Kevin D. Williamson)

Shorts

  • I have no desire to tell girls that they should not be playing softball. I do desire to tell parents that they should not be pushing softball upon them. (Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes)
  • School … is a perfect system of regressive taxation, where the privileged graduates ride on the back of the entire paying public. (Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society)
  • … LinkedIn, the irritating social-media site for puffed-up “consultants” pretending not to be unemployed. (Kevin D. Williamson)
  • E. Jean Carroll is an 82-year-old woman who worked as a journalist and who was, for a time, pretty famous across a swath of about 60 blocks in Manhattan. (Kevin D. Williamson)
  • My grandparents were like most other Americans. They were Protestants, but you could never find out precisely what kind of Protestants they were. (Thomas Merton, The Seven-Story Mountain)
  • In the final moments of Aaron Bushnell’s life, officers rush to the site of his burning. One asks for a fire extinguisher, another points his gun at the flames. (Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Hyperlink added.)
  • I eagerly anticipated the coming years, when we could get on with the important business of being friends with the Russians. That day never came, and I believe that to be largely our fault. (Terry Cowan)
  • He had, he said, never asked God for forgiveness, but that he felt “cleansed” when “I drink my little wine” . . . and “have my little cracker.” (Frances Fitzgerald, Epilogue to The Evangelicals)
  • Graham Platner is running to be a U.S. Senator from Maine. He has zipper issues. But why is the press shoving the story into the national news every day? And why have a felt compelled to read so many of those stories? And why does Ken Paxton feel different? And can I stop, exercising a little electoral federalism (i.e., it’s not my job to stop Maine or Texas from electing crooks and grifters with zipper problems)?

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Monday, June 1

I recently used AI to generate a title for a blog post. Today, none of its proffers seemed any better than my anodyne offering.

Sportsball

The greatest threat to ethical hooping, if the discourse is any indication, are the Oklahoma City Thunder. On the weaponized shoulders of their star and two-time MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the defending NBA champions have mastered a maximally efficient and spiritually corrosive style of basketball predicated, at least in part, on baiting credulous referees into calling fouls on the opposing team. One way they do this is by flopping, the umbrella term for the parade of pratfalls and head-jerks intended to exaggerate the appearance of defensive contact when shooting. The floppers of yore had the luxury of degrading the sport in an era of less intense scrutiny. Not so with SGA, whose antics have become the cause célèbre of basketball fans everywhere, from the court-side seats in San Antonio, where one Spurs fan was seen brandishing a miniature Academy Award, to the pick-up courts of China, where TikTokers are going viral with videos demonstrating their best SGA imitations.

Why the Oklahoma City Thunder Are a Deserving Villain

I don’t watch the NBA much, but playoffs tend to get my attention. I watched the Thunder win the title last year and didn’t like them. I didn’t like SGA in particular, despite respecting his skills.

So when I saw that San Antonio and OKC were tied at three games each, I watched the end of game seven. I’d say Victor Wembanyama is an upgrade from SGA. Next, I’m keen to see how San Antonio stacks up against the Knicks.

And speaking of the Knicks, Brian Rivel has, over 35 years of his team’s struggles, upgraded his nose-bleed-section Knicks tickets into really choice seats, center-court. Now, he’s got some tough choices to make:

Due to a prior commitment, Rivel will sell his tickets to the Knicks’ first home Finals game. Tickets in his section for that game are going for more than $40,000 on resale markets. Although he plans to attend at least one game in the series with his wife — two, if the series goes to six games — Rivel conceded that the staggering prices might change his calculus. “I could list them at a very high number and get life-changing money, where I could send one of my daughters to college,” he said. “It just all depends on how much somebody is willing to offer for those tickets.”

For a potential game six, which may present a title-clinching scenario for the Knicks, some tickets in Rivel’s section have already been listed in the low six-figures. “I gotta go if there’s a game six, right?” he said, before considering some of the more lucrative scenarios. “Unless somebody offers me $100,000 a ticket. Then I have to make a serious decision.”

Tim Kludt, Knicks Die-hards Wrestle With Attending Finals or Cashing In.

Of course, I would sell those tickets, but then again I never would have bought them in the first place, right?

En masse

The law of group polarization at work

In 2024, I taught an undergraduate class with a catchy title, “Why American Politics Went Insane.” At the risk of shortening a semester to a sentence, the devolution proceeded in three stages, from victory to separation to radicalization.

When the Cold War ended, the United States, for the first time since the wars against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, faced no external challenges to its prosperity and power. We were, in the words of the former French foreign minister Hubert Védrine, the “hyperpower.”

I began with “The End of History,” to borrow a term from Francis Fukuyama’s misunderstood book, but I began with his prescient warning near the end:

If men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.

That is exactly what we are doing. We are struggling against each other. Some of us are struggling against democracy itself. America is the only nation out of 25 comparable countries in which a majority of people believe that their fellow citizens are morally bad. It should be no surprise, then, that negative partisanship (when you support your party primarily because of your disdain for its opponents) is a central factor in American politics.

This drives us apart. Ever increasing numbers of American citizens live in one-party states or so-called blowout counties, where one side or the other wins presidential elections by 50 points or more.

And what happens when people of like mind gather together? The law of group polarization, first applied to political decision making by the law professor and author Cass Sunstein in 1999, teaches us that when like-minded people deliberate, they become more extreme.

Create a monoculture, and red becomes deep red. Blue becomes deep blue. And as the two sides move farther apart, both geographically and ideologically, we lose even the capacity to understand each other’s lives and thoughts.

If I taught the class over again, though, I’d add a fourth stage: amnesia. The problem isn’t just that we’re at each other’s throats; it’s that we’re turning to the worst of recent history’s alternative ideas in response.

It’s no coincidence that this is happening at a time when a generation of world leaders has no experience with world wars and rising millions of young people have no experience with real fascism and actual communism.

…

We have to know that the world as it is, with all its inefficiencies and injustices, is better than the world that was.

David French. I quoted so much I felt obliged to use one of June’s ten gift links for this one.

Plausible deniability

He knew how to dabble in race-baiting without quite ever going full George Wallace. He had the great skill of propounding absurd or evil things and adding “It’s what I’ve heard” or “People are saying,” so that there was always enough room for The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page to sigh wearily rather than face up to what his words meant.

Eliot A. Cohen, Trump the Genius, Trump the Incompetent, Trump the Bogeyman, writing Trump’s premature epitaph after the 2020 election (which, be it noted, Trump lost).

Gender

How the Gender Fever Finally Broke

Disagreeable contrarians who resisted gender fever are the real oddballs. Some combination of personality quirk and conviction that occasionally makes us obnoxious employees and intolerable cocktail-party guests also inoculated us against gender madness. There is no reforming us.

But we served a vital function: Together, a ragtag crew of truculent journalists and outcast researchers stopped the entire herd from running off the cliff. None of us ever expected to be welcomed back into the same elite circles that, only recently, had cheered or looked away as a generation of tormented girls took themselves apart.

Abigail Shrier, How the Gender Fever Finally Broke.

Gender identity is meaningless

Sex therapist Jackie Golob put it the way one most often hears it described: “Gender identity is how you feel about yourself and the ways you express your gender and biological sex. … Biological sex is physical, while gender is feeling.” That is a common view, and it seems to me that it gets it about right. But if gender is a feeling, then there are as many genders as there are people—human beings are unique, individualistic, and idiosyncratic in how they understand themselves as members of sexes—and, hence, meaningless: Words that describe everything describe nothing.

Kevin D. Williamson, The Forgotten Word: Sex Why the Discourse on Sex and Gender Is So Toxic

We know so much better now

“[F]or longtime ultra conservative activists, CRT is the opportunity of a lifetime.” CRT, she explains, is not a threat at all, and there is no proof that it is even being taught. It’s “just a catch-all term repurposed as a conservative boogeyman.”

Andrew Sullivan, Don’t Ban CRT. Expose It. (2021).

CRT is sooooo 2021! Don’t they know that DEI is the real threat to God, Mom, apple pie, the flag and the 4th of July? (Well, maybe Freedom 250 is the real threat to the 4th of July, but that’s a whole nuther kettle of fish.)

Yeah! That’s the ticket! Opposing DEI!

The real “corruption” of SCOTUS

Democrats are free to dislike the Court’s decisions, yet they aren’t helpless. If Democrats abhor gerrymandering, they can argue for a bill to limit how, or how often, states draw House maps. But what really angers Democrats is that the Supreme Court is no longer a second progressive legislature that can impose policies they can’t get through Congress.

Wall Street Journal Editorial Board, Application error: a client-side exception has occurred.

Sorry, guys, but nothing is more important this Fall than breaking this corrupt — no, not Supreme Court — this corrupt MAGAfied Republican Party. I’m not going to let even the threat of court-packing deter me.

Where there is no vision, the people perish

What makes our culture modern is that despite the explicit beliefs by many citizens, our public institutions—education, government, the arts, entertainment, journalism, science and technology, commerce—all function without any necessary direction from any teleological vision. They operate without working toward any purpose beyond material benefit and the maximizing of choices for individuals.

Ken Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes

Shorts

  • I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. (Stephen Jay Gould via Maria Popova)
  • In rural Texas pretty much everyone has a gun cabinet. Unless they’re gay. Then they have gun armoires. (Jenny Lawson, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Saturday, 4/25/26

The Right Way to Talk About War

What are we doing here? We’re reminding how it’s done. We’re putting forward what it should look like when a president brings his nation to armed military action. He explains the history, offers the evidence, interprets its meaning, outlines the plan.

You can’t take a nation to war without this rhetorical predicate.

Mr. Trump has failed to provide it. Now and then he announces things behind a podium, and there are regular responses to questions in press gaggles, where he reacts off the cuff. But nothing thought-through, no serious document making the case. And the public is never reassured.

We don’t even know, a month into Iran, why now. Iran has been the world’s fanatic irritant for almost 50 years. What is the plan?

This absence of formal seriousness is part of why the president’s popularity is falling.

If Donald Trump can’t do this, and his vice president can’t do it sincerely, maybe the secretary of state should step in?

While we’re giving advice, one imagines the Vatican has many excitable monsignors running the pontiff’s social-media accounts, and one suspects they are hyped to show the pope is giving rizz. But homilies, speeches, papers and encyclicals are better suited to great statements at great moments than buzzy posts on X.

Don’t do it the cheap way. You are the throne of Peter. Do it the serious way.

Peggy Noonan (shared link).

Why left-hemisphere dominance?

With apologies to Emerson, why is the left hemisphere in the saddle, riding mankind?

I think [the left hemisphere’s] success can be attributed to several things. First, it makes you powerful, and power is very seductive. Second, it offers very simple explanations, that are in their own terms convincing, because what doesn’t fit the plan is simply declared to be meaningless. … Third, the left hemisphere is also … the Berlusconi of the brain – the political heavyweight that controls the media. It does the speaking, constructs the arguments in its own favour. And finally, since the Industrial Revolution, we have constructed a world around us externally that is the image of the world the left hemisphere has made internally.

Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning.

Every of those four points distills hundreds of pages from McGilchrist’s very much larger works. But because of some other things I read recently that haunt me, the final one has created one of my exciting moments where I (silently) exult “Oh! That meshes with these other points! I’ve almost got it now: the grand unified theory of how everything works!”

Here’s one of the other thing I read:

We are discovering, for example, that AI is especially adept at displacing or, from the techno-optimist’s perspective, liberating us from human labour in contexts wherein humans had already conformed, willfully or otherwise, to the pattern of a machine. Build a techno-social system which demands that humans act like machines and it turns out that machines can eventually be made to displace humans with relative ease.

L.M. Sacasas.

I read this less than a week ago, but it haunts me and keeps popping up in my head as I read things like, say, McGilchrist’s final point about “the image of the world the left hemisphere has made internally,”

The other thing I read (actually, heard and transcribed) was this:

Unfortunately, reason on its own will lead you astray very, very quickly …

People detect from what I wrote in The Master and His Emissary that I am not a huge admirer of the [left-hemisphere inspired] Reformation … Unfortunately, it brought with it a kind of headstrong view that ‘now we’re in the clear. Everything must be made explicit. The word triumphs over the image’ and so on. …

The trouble with the left hemisphere is … it tends to be headstrong. It tends to think it knows far more than it does.

Iain McGilchrist.

My frustration with headstrong Protestants briefly led me off into thinking that, the Reformation having been midwifed by the left hemisphere, Protestants today remain too left-hemispheric.

I still think so, but then I realized that Protestantism never sits still — that the charismatic renewal of the 60s and 70s, and the happy-clappy guitar-and-drum assemblies of today, just might be human beings wittingly or unwittingly trying to counter-balance their left hemispheres.

I have learned to prefer icons, incense, fasting, feasting, eucharist and apophaticism generally to such ersatz, but à chacûn son gout.

More reasons to discipline yourself to spend more time attending to your world in a right-hemispheric way.

Learning to attend in an LLM world

Rules produce compliance. Distinctions produce discernment. Digital platforms are engineered to collapse that discernment. They optimize for engagement, for seamlessness, and for frictionless fulfillment. The tech arrives dressed as toys.

In an operating room, no one bans scalpels. Nor does a surgeon treat them casually. Instead, there’s a ritual: scrubbing in. The scrub-in isn’t merely about hygiene. It’s a cognitive threshold. It marks a passage from ordinary space to consequential space by establishing the sterile field: a bounded space of deliberate intervention where carelessness is as much the enemy as contamination. It means recognizing that environments carry risks and risks require care ….

…

[S]tudents don’t need prohibitions enforced by administrations, but disciplined practices modeled by adults; they need to learn to “scrub in” for the classroom. That means leaving things behind as well as bringing things in, not only in terms of the materials students bring to class but also the attitudes and sense of purpose as well.

In my own classes, this can be as simple as examining the threshold. At the start of a session, I might pull a trick from my meditation or yoga practice and say, as we’re opening our computers, that I know how tempting it is to check our carts, our socials, our text messages. I feel the pull, too. But for the next ninety minutes, we’re scrubbing in. Laptops are for notes and the text. Phones are face down. If your attention drifts, notice it. Bring yourself back. The drift isn’t failure. Noticing it is the lesson, and it’s what experts do. 

My opening comments matter because they reframe distraction not as transgression but as training. Students begin to understand that governing their own attention is part of their education, not a prerequisite for it.

Justin Neuman, Scrubbing In.

Neuman’s students are lucky to have such a thoughtful teacher, and he’s lucky to have students with the seriousness not to take governing their attention as a total joke.

If that’s actually happening, that is. Alan Jacobs doubts that it is, and focuses on pen-and-paper instruction.

Trump

Hereditary power

Nick Catoggio suspects that Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance will both get straight-armed in 2028:

From monarchies to the mafia, outfits that follow preliberal norms place special value on familial relationships. For one thing, family members are (somewhat) less likely to betray each other than non-relations are, a valuable trait for those operating in cutthroat kill-or-be-killed cultures. And because preliberalism is all about leveraging power for one’s personal advantage, it stands to reason that those who rise to the top would want that power to be hereditary. If you can’t rule forever, the next best thing is ensuring that your gene pool does.

…

You don’t need a complicated triple-bank-shot theory to explain why the president’s son has the inside track. It’s this simple: Because the Republican Party is a moronic personality cult, Donald Trump effectively has the power to pick his own successor. Whomever he endorses will be a prohibitive favorite among his slavishly loyal supporters.

Such is the power of the Trump name on the right, as Last notes, that Junior is already polling in second place in early 2028 primary polls, slightly ahead of Secretary of State Marco Rubio. It’s a distant second behind Vance, sure, but so what? The vice president is coasting on his high profile and the widespread assumption that he’s Donald Trump’s choice for heir apparent. If that were to change—if Junior were to take a more visible political role after the midterms and his father were to begin sounding iffy on Vance—the polling would change as well. Dramatically.

Nick Catoggio, The Son Also Rises, speculating about Donald Jr. in 2028.

Why would a smart young conservative work for Trump?

After January 6, after Trump’s endless threats of “retribution” during the campaign, after multiple federal indictments, there are only two reasons a smart young conservative should want to work for him.

One: Said conservative is a sociopath who will, in the name of getting ahead, light the Constitution on fire if Donald Trump tells him or her to. Two: Said conservative is a patriot who fears that others will light the Constitution on fire if Trump tells him or her to and they want to be in the room to stop it when it happens. Ethical Republicans must fill vacant positions if only to block unethical ones from filling them instead.

Nick Catoggio, However Much You Admire Danielle Sassoon, It’s Not Enough (February 14, 2025)

Why I’d like for the GOP to lose the Senate this Fall

In my first draft of this sub-post, I indulged in some political wool-gathering about my current personal political proclivities. I decided to spare the world from slop that doubtless is more fascinating to me than it’s likely to be to anyone else.

But one thing stood out as worthy of publication:

Of course, the Supreme Court poses the highest stakes of all. The two oldest justices are Trump’s most reliable stalwarts, Clarence Thomas, 77, and Samuel Alito, 76. CBS News reports that neither plans to retire in 2026, but that hasn’t stopped Trump from cajoling them to step aside.

Elie Honig, Trump Seems to Be Planning Ahead for Losing the Senate. I don’t necessarily agree that the Court is “the highest stakes of all,” but it’s pretty important.

I hope neither Alito nor Thomas succumbs to Trump’s cajoling. Next, I don’t want either justice to die between this Fall’s election and Inauguration Day 2028, but if that should happen, I’d want Democrats in control of the Senate to force Trump into nominating someone well-enough qualified to gain a few Democrat votes for confirmation.

I don’t think we have any political hacks on the Court currently — neither Republican nor Democrat — but with Republicans in control of the Senate, Trump could nominate Emil Bove or John Eastman or the winner of the Kentucky Derby (the equine, not the jockey) and the Senate would confirm him (the filibuster for SCOTUS justices having been abolished). Having already trashed the Department of Justice with political hacks, putting political hacks on SCOTUS would set us back years further in the steps to post-Trump recovery.

Will Trump shoot himself in the foot again?

[I]t was strange to watch a man of Musk’s capacities burn political capital and the energy of his apprentices just to discover that the real money is in big popular entitlements that can’t be cut by presidential fiat.

Then, in a different key, Musk decided to do it again with the SAVE America Act, embracing (and hyping, with a strong dose of paranoia) the conceit that elections are rigged against Republicans because some vast number of noncitizens are casting illegal votes.

We have years of investigations by Republican administrations and years of evidence from voter ID laws to indicate that this is not the case. There are sound reasons to think that ID requirements don’t have the dramatic vote-suppressing effects alleged by left-wing critics. But neither do they have the election-protecting effects promised by their conservative champions. Voter fraud is just not an important reason that Republicans lose elections. (Moreover, now that the Republican coalition includes more low-propensity and downscale voters, any effect of ID requirements might actually cut against conservative turnout.)

Ross Douthat (emphasis added)

Breaking the trolling cycle

Be honest. Do not say anything about yourself or others that you know is false. Absolutely refuse to let your mind be colonized. The first crazy thing someone asks you to believe or to profess, refuse. If you can, do so out loud. There is a good chance it will inspire others to speak up, too.

Bari Weiss

Shorts

  • We’re totally trying to call the bluff on the great divorce between the head and the hands. (Jacob Imam, founder of the College of St. Joseph the Worker in Steubenville, OH, where students get a liberal arts degree and trade training, graduating debt-free.)
  • Jonathan Dupiton, host of the Rich and Unemployed podcast, was sentenced to seven years in federal prison for a $3.8 million unemployment fraud scheme. Turns out the secret to being rich and unemployed is crime. (TMD)
  • All material culture is an instantiation of ideas. But it’s easier to see ideas-in-things with a knowing, irony-laden look at the past. Putting babies on display in incubators, especially because they were ones unlikely to survive, now strikes us as abhorrent. We feel confident in seeing its errors and therefore reassured by our good judgment. It’s much harder to see what’s unfolding right in front of us. (Sara Hendren, Pattern Recognition)
  • Be it noted, please!, that NATO nations pledge to help defend countries attacked from outside NATO. It does not oblige anyone to help Donald Trump prosecute an offensive war against Iran.
  • No need to spend any money on a hot water heater, as hot water doesn’t need heating. Now, if we’re talking a water heater, different story (yes, I’m THAT GUY). (Social media poster, name withheld by me.)
  • A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. (Edward Murrow)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

I confess, however, that I am not myself very much concerned with the question of influence, or with those publicists who have impressed their names upon the public by catching the morning tide and rowing very fast in the direction in which the current was flowing; but rather that there should always be a few writers preoccupied in penetrating to the core of the matter, in trying to arrive at the truth and to set it forth, without too much hope, without ambition to alter the immediate course of affairs, and without being downcast or defeated when nothing appears to ensue.

T.S. Eliot

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here; (b). I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

Immigration

The firehose of commentary on last Thursday’s birthright citizenship/nationwide injunction Supreme Court argument is now more a squirt gun. But I’ve had two very smart takes clipped for days now, and I think it’s time to get them out to readers:

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson put it well in [last Thursday’s] argument:

[T]he real concern, I think, is that your argument [meaning that of the federal government] seems to turn our justice system, in my view at least, into a “catch me if you can” kind of regime from the standpoint of the executive, where everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights.

Justice Kagan says let’s assume for the purpose of this that you’re wrong about the merits, that the government is not allowed to do this under the Constitution. And yet it seems to me that your argument says we get to keep on doing it until everyone who is potentially harmed by it figures out how to… file a lawsuit, hire a lawyer, et cetera. And I don’t understand how that is remotely consistent with the rule of law

This is especially true when, as in the birthright citizenship case, there are hundreds of thousands of victims of the government’s illegal policies, and many of them are poor or otherwise unable to readily file a lawsuit.

Ilya Somin, A Simple Defense of Nationwide Injunctions

Only the Supreme Court, the Administration asserts, can declare the policy unconstitutional as to persons who are not party to any lawsuit, and only the Supreme Court can enjoin the government from revoking the citizenship of persons similarly-situated to Able, Baker, and Charlie but located in other judicial districts.

It’s not a totally unreasonable position: only the Supreme Court has truly nationwide jurisdiction, and it alone should be permitted to decide “the law of the land,” not some district court in Texas or Massachusetts or Colorado.

But Justice Kagan identified the fatal flaw in the argument:

If [the government] wins this challenge and we say that there is no nationwide injunction and it all has to be through individual cases, then I can’t see how an individual who is not being treated equivalently to the individual who brought the case would have any ability to bring the substantive question to us…. In a case like this, the government has no incentive to bring this case to the Supreme Court because it’s not really losing anything. It’s losing a lot of individual cases, which still allow it to enforce its EO against the vast majority of people to whom it applies. . . . I’m suggesting that in a case in which the government is losing constantly, there’s nobody else who’s going to appeal; they’re all winning! It’s up to you, [the government], to decide whether to take this case to us. If I were in your shoes, there is no way I’d approach the Supreme Court with this case.

Which is exactly what happened here! …

… paradoxically enough, the more egregious the executive’s conduct – the more obviously and incontrovertibly unconstitutional it is – the more likely it is that it will lose every case, which will mean that the question of its constitutionality never gets to the Supreme Court for a conclusive ruling.

Clever, no? Another seam, or fault-line, in the web of constitutional protections and the separation of powers has been exposed.

I regard this as a fatal objection to a rule prohibiting non-party injunctions in all cases because it fails what we might call the Hitler Test: if we are ever so unfortunate as to have a president who wanted to do Hitler-ian things, would this rule help to prevent that from happening or not? It’s not a terribly high bar, but a rule prohibiting non-party injunctions in all cases doesn’t make it over.

David Post, Nationwide Injunctions and the Rule of Law

I have almost no doubt that the Trump administration will never bring the merits of its absurd birthright citizenship theories to the Supreme Court so long as it can continue acting on them against everyone who lacks the moxie or the wherewithal to file a lawsuit and get an injunction preventing enforcement against them personally. It will feel just fine if 10,000 successful plaintiffs can’t be deported so long as hundreds of thousands or millions can be plausibly threatened because they haven’t sued.

By the way: there are almost no honest politicians in the immigration fights. Everyone knows how to reduce illegal immigration to almost nothing: Congress must make e-Verify mandatory. They won’t do it because the economy relies on the mostly-menial labor of illegal immigrants, but they will bluff and bluster. And I’d give you pretty good odds that Donald J. Trump won’t deport them all for that reason, too. There will be just enough performative cruelty to keep MAGA happy.

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

Regarding said “lot of stupid and terrible things,” my failure to call out anything about the current regime does not mean I approve. There’s just too much, and on some of the apparent illegalities I don’t want to abuse my credentials without thinking it through.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Musings, 2/21/25

Can there be a lawful order to act unethically?

I’m struggling with the agreement between Sarah Isgur and David French on the Advisory Opinions podcast that the orders from the Trump Department of Justice to dismiss the charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams was a lawful order, even if compliance by federal prosecutors would have been unethical. I’d like to think that an order to a professional to do something unethical is ipso facto not a lawful order.

If nothing else, this confirms the wisdom of not allowing non-lawyers to own a law firm (e.g., Model Rules of Professional Conduct 1.17(b)) lest this kind of thing pervade the legal profession rather than remaining an application of the unitary executive theory to the Department of Justice.

This is why we can’t have nice things

Speaking of unitary executive theory, I have more or less been persuaded to become a “soft unitarian.” But the test case that Donald Trump has set up by firing the head of the Special Counsel’s office is straining my recently-acquired conviction.

Mafia Don has fired Hampton Dellinger, current head of the Office of Special Counsel, without invoking “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office” as required by statute. A federal District Court has ordered that he be reinstated. A federal Court of Appeals has rejected Trump’s appeal on technical grounds (the District Court decision is only preliminary, not final). He now seeks review by the US Supreme Court.

I shudder because unitary executive theory makes the substance of his appeal plausible.

So here’s the deal on the Constitutional issues.

The Constitution establishes three branches of the federal government: Congress (Article I), the Executive (Article II), and the Judiciary (Article III). The opening words of Article II are “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.“

So what is the status of supposedly “independent” agencies, created by Congress, like the Office of Special Council? Are they a fourth branch of government, hiding in the shadows of the constitution, or are they simply unconstitutional because all executive power is vested in the presidency? If the latter (which is substantially the position of President after President since the Office was created, but nobody before The Don cared so little about chaos to provoke a fight over it), then what checks the power of the Presidency? Are we doomed to live under a kakistocracy if the President goes haywire?

The conventional answer is that Congress’s impeachment power checks the power of the presidency. If you are satisfied that this Congress has the cojones to impeach this president, you are living in a different reality than I am.

As I sit here in my easy chair, six years retired and 43 years out of law school, the best response I can come up with for SCOTUS is (1) refuse to hear the case because the District Court decision is only preliminary or (2) take the case and rule that independent agencies are not exercising executive power, but rather are serving as a check on executive power, and thus really are “hiding in the shadows” of the Constitution.

I think this would be a satisfactory ground to uphold the District Court. But I remember how conservatives derided Justice Harry Blackmun’s finding a right to abortion in the “emanations of the penumbrae” of the constitution?

The electorate having decided that Mafia Don was the lesser evil (a perception I gradually came to find defensible within the 5 or 6 months preceding January 20) has thrust us into the Constitutional crisis of an utterly corrupt President who will never be impeached because not only can he suborn and fund primary candidates against those who would impeach him, but he can with winks, nods, and stochastically violent rhetoric unleash fanatics that make Congressmen literally fear for their families if they cross him.

A decision either way from the Supreme Court will deepen the crisis.

First, they came for the radical liberal communists …

Pundit tribalism

That issue—how intellectuals are supposed to comport themselves in their political engagements—is one that matters a lot to me. On top of the policy disagreements, what drove me away from the intellectual right two decades ago was the expectation, as an editor for First Things magazine, that I defend a political line in public. I wasn’t allowed to write a conservative case for not invading Iraq, for example, because that would risk making myself and the magazine appear “unreliable.” There was simply too much at stake, my boss told me, to risk a dissent from the conservative movement and its presidential champion. The War on Terror had to be won—and even more fundamentally, George W. Bush needed to have a successful presidency. We couldn’t risk contributing to its failure by directing criticisms its way.

Damon Linker

I’m very sympathetic to Linker about this kind of tribalism.

Our local rag used to have a very lively letters to the editor section (they don’t even have an opinion page anymore). When my religious Right co-belligerents expressed particularly idiotic opinions or called for perverse boycotts (example omitted because it was so idiotic you wouldn’t believe me), I tended to refute them vigorously, and at least once received an anonymous phone call implying that I was a Judas (no threat, just bile).

Why can’t the world be unanimously sane and moderate, just like Damon Linker and me?

Our four-party system

I enjoyed Ezra Klein’s little essay the other day as a partial explanation of how polarization got worse:

The two-party system of the 20th century was really a four-party system. The Democrats were split between the liberals we know today and the Dixiecrats, whose primary goal was upholding segregation. The Republicans were split between conservatives and Northern liberals. It is astonishing from our vantage point, but it was true for much of the 20th century: To say you were a Republican or a Democrat didn’t reveal whether you were a liberal or a conservative. As a senator, Joe Biden opposed the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. President Richard Nixon proposed a universal health care bill and created the Environmental Protection Agency. George Wallace started out as a Democrat. Politics was different then.

Parties that contained so many different places and ideologies could not act in lock step, and so bipartisanship was common. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was pushed by a Democratic president, but congressional Republicans were crucial to its passage. When Watergate began coming to light, Congress acted as a collective. Only four House Republicans voted against opening the impeachment inquiry into Nixon, and a delegation of congressional Republicans ultimately persuaded him to resign.

And it wasn’t just impeachment. When Nixon refused to spend the money Congress had appropriated — a policy known as impoundment — Congress acted to protect its power: The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 passed the House with only six “no” votes; it passed the Senate without a single vote in opposition.

(Emphasis added) I remember guys like Scoop Jackson, Dick Gephart, Mark Hatfield, Nelson Rockefeller, John Lindsey. Joe Manchin proves there’s no room for that kind any more. There’s just two tribes, each controlled from the wings, not the center.

Clamoring aboard the ARC

A Jordan Peterson-adjacent, Christian-coded “Alliance for Responsible Citizenship” recently convened. Two Orthodox Christian friends have diverging thoughts:

As I wrote yesterday, it is strange that it has taken a non-believing clown like Donald Trump to be the Great Disrupter. We do not have to agree with everything he does …, but I believe people like me can work with people like him in ways we simply could not do with those who were in power before.

Rod Dreher, whose “responsible citizen” culture-warring is a bone of contention between him and his friend Kingsnorth:

Jesus didn’t come to Earth to teach us how to be ‘responsible citizens’, of any political stripe. Responsible citizens don’t leave their own fathers unburied. They don’t hate their own mother and father, or give away all of their wealth, or compare the religious authorities to whitewashed tombs full of rotting flesh. And they don’t usually end up being crucified.

Paul Kingsnorth commenting in advance.

My sympathies lie almost completely with Kingsnorth, but I understand Dreher’s point — though I would rephrase it as “Unlike the Democrats, Trump is not actively and operationally hostile toward America’s motley array of ‘conservative’ Christians.”

Back in the days when I blogged longer-form original material more than curating other folks’ stuff, I declared myself a “Conscientious Objector to the Culture Wars” (a status that’s hard to maintain consistently) in a long-form blog that holds up well as a description of why I disengaged. This was about 80% Kingsnorthian a decade before I’d heard of the guy. It’s a posture that has spared me the ignominy of ever hallucinating that “we can work with” Trump 2.0 toward any truly edifying end.

(By the way: my shift from longer-form original material toward curation is, I think, a recognition that I’ve blogged most of my idées fixes in long-form and to my personal satisfaction; there’s no need to inflict them on others constantly, though I’m toying with a blogroll of my landmark posts.)

Just because …

… I thought this image was beautiful.

Jozef Pankiewicz, Market Square of Warsaw by Night, 1892 (Wikimedia Commons)

O Lord of hosts be with us, for we have none other help in times of sorrow but Thee. O Lord of hosts, have mercy on us.

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 9/28/24

This is Purdue’s Homecoming weekend. They’re playing football — or pretending to. I’m looking forward to basketball season.

Miscellany

An odd job title, if you think about it

“Content Creator” is a title that inadvertently tells on itself. It’s a tacit admission that the nature of the “content“ is meaningless and it exists to fill space. Might as well call yourself “Stuff Maker” or “Thing Doer.”

Dominic Armato via Alan Jacobs

As wrong as possible

“Poverty just doesn’t happen,” Rep. [Barbara] Lee, a California Democrat, declared at the launch of the “Children’s Budget,” a kind of progressive wish list, last week. “It’s a policy choice.” Rep. Lee has run up against a kind of metaphysical limit there: She is as wrong as it is possible for a human being to be. 

As practically every serious thinker about the issue has understood for a few thousand years at least, poverty does just happen—it is, in fact, one of the few things that does just happen. Poverty is the natural state of the human animal. Do nothing, and you will have poverty. Thomas Hobbes knew it. Aristotle knew it 2,000 years before Hobbes. Hesiod knew it centuries before Aristotle. The authors of the Upanishads knew it centuries before Hesiod. “Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man,” the American sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein observed. Or, as Thomas Sowell spent a lifetime explaining to an apparently impenetrable public, poverty has no causes—the absence of poverty has causes. Rep. Lee’s error is not novel. Her mistake repeats—nearly verbatim—the error of Rep. Ayanna Pressley: “Poverty is not naturally occurring; it is a policy choice.”

Kevin D. Williamson

Nothing more freeing

Of The Bulwark’s Mona Charen:

In 2018, she appeared on a panel at the Conservative Political Action Conference. When asked about feminism, she attacked her own tribe, saying, “I’m disappointed in people on our side for being hypocrites on sexual harassers and abusers of women who are in our party, who are in the White House, who brag about their extramarital affairs, who brag about mistreating women. And because he happens to have an R after his name, we look the other way; we don’t complain.”

The crowd erupted in jeers and shouts of “Not true!” Charen had been a speechwriter for Nancy Reagan! This was CPAC, Republican prom! Security guards escorted her out for her own protection.

The incident didn’t seem to shake her. “There is nothing more freeing than telling the truth,” Charen later wrote in a New York Times op-ed.

Olga Khazan, Never Trump, Forever

Decades ago, Mona Charen was one of my favorite conservative columnists. I rarely read her these days because, in the anti-Trump cosmos, I’m on planet Dispatch and find planet Bulwark a bit weird tedious. Thus has the black hole of Donald Trump disrupted the cosmos.

What unites us

Americans are less divided politically than the media likes to pretend.

Yes, it’s a big, diverse electorate, but there are certain opinions we all share. Like this one: I can’t believe the party I hate isn’t getting clobbered in the polls.

From the Liz Cheney left to the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. right, ask any voter at random whether they’re surprised at how close this race is, and my guess is they’ll talk your ear off in exasperation.

Nick Catoggio

Banned Books Week

The Orwellian Evolution of Banned Books Week

Vice and Virtue

Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices
Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues
Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.
These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.

T.S. Eliot, Gerontion, via J. Bottum

The gay guy pundits agree

Harris’ Context

I can’t say what Vice President Kamala Harris’s favorite word is — the one time I met with her, I didn’t ask — but I’d put a big stack of chips on “context.” She said it not once, not twice, but three times in her signature May 2023 “coconut tree” riff, and I’ve heard it tumble from her lips on other occasions as well. It’s like some oratorical caftan, warming and comforting her.

That turns out to be apt. Her bid for the presidency is all about context.

Any realistic response to it hinges not on the policy details that she has or hasn’t provided, not on the fine points of her record over time, not on her interview with Stephanie Ruhle of MSNBC on Wednesday, not on her previous sit-down with CNN’s Dana Bash. It hinges on context. She cannot be sized up outside of or apart from the alternative, a man of such reprehensible character, limitless rage, disregard for truth, contempt for democracy, monumental selfishness and incoherent thinking that even discussing Harris’s virtues and vices feels ever so slightly beside the point. She’s not Donald Trump.

Frank Bruni

The words are different but the melody’s the same

In the culture war, we know exactly what she is: an equity leftist, a strong believer in race and sex discrimination today to make up for past race and sex discrimination yesterday, and a politician who favors redefining womanhood to include biological men, and conducting medical experiments on gay, autistic and trans children, based entirely on self-diagnosis. These are her values, they are the values of every Dem special interest group, and she assures us they have not changed. I believe her.

…

I have yet to hear her say a single interesting or memorable thing in her entire career. Have you?

…

If a serious Republican candidate were up against her — even Nikki Haley — this election would not be even faintly close.

But we do not have a serious Republican candidate.

We have the most shameless charlatan in American political history — and there are plenty of competitors. He is unfit in every respect to be president of the United States …

Trump does not merely break norms. He has broken the norm, the indispensable norm for the continuation of the republic, the norm first set by George Washington when he retired from office, the norm that changed the entire world for the better: accepting the results of an election … I do not think this is even within his personal control. He is so genuinely psychologically warped that he has never and will never agree to the most basic requirement of public office: that you quit when you lose; and that the system is more important than any individual in it.

He is not lying when he insists that he won in 2016 and 2020 by massive landslides in the popular vote. He believes it. He believes he will win by a landslide in November, and there is no empirical evidence that could convince him otherwise. If he loses the election, he will call it a massive fraud one more time, and foment violence to protest it. We know this more certainly than we know anything about Kamala Harris. He tried to leverage mob violence to disrupt our democracy once. If that was not disqualifying, nothing is …

…

So I will vote for Harris, despite my profound reservations about her. Because I have no profound reservations about him. I know who he is and what he is. I know what forces he is conjuring and the extremes to which he will gladly take his own personal crusade. To abstain, though temptingly pure, is a cop-out. I vote not for Harris as such, but for a conservatism that can emerge once the demon is exorcized.

And exorcize it we must. Now, while we still can.

Andrew Sullivan

Other thoughts on POTUS Election 2024

Uninteresting and unmemorable

We have to guard that spirit. Let it always inspire us. Let it always be the source of our optimism, which is that spirit that is uniquely American. Let that then inspire us by helping us to be inspired to solve the problems.

Kamala Harris. I hate to belittle her, because her context is him, and he is everything that Bruni and Sullivan said. If Indiana is in play, I’ll vote for the sane-but-empty suit who’ll leave office in 2028 if defeated, leaving our political system intact.

Suttons Bay, MI, last week

Donald Trump According to Those Who Know Him

My last NYT “gift article” for September, and one of the most important. Donald Trump According to Those Who Know Him

Even when he’s right, he’s wrong

Somebody apparently told Trump about, say, ProPublica attacking the Dobbs decision (substantially reversing Roe v. Wade). His over-the-top response, directionally right, was this:

When speaking to supporters from the swing state, where both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have doubled efforts to capture the election count in November, Trump lamented the criticism aimed at the Supreme Court‘s conservative supermajority and said it should be “illegal.”

“They were very brave, the Supreme Court. Very brave. And they take a lot of hits because of it,” said the former president. “It should be illegal, what happens. You know, you have these guys like playing the ref, like the great Bobby Knight. These people should be put in jail the way they talk about our judges and our justices, trying to … sway their vote, sway their decision”

Trump Says People Criticizing Supreme Court Justices Should Be Jailed

So he also is profoundly ignorant of our most fundamental rights, including the right to say stupid things about any branch of government we care to kvetch about.

Some Nationalist, this

Donald Trump is a funny kind of patriot. 

He loves America—except for the cities, the people who live in the cities, about half of the states, the universities, professional sports leagues, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the legal system, immigrants, the culture. He thinks the Capitol Police are murderers and that the FBI is a gestapo, that the government is an illegitimate junta maintained through election fraud, that the January 6 rioters are political prisoners, that the nation is a ruin, that it is “failed.” And when it fell to him to explain to [a] debate audience why he should be president, he spent most of his time repeating the praise of Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán.

Trump’s enemies are all Americans, his friends are all foreign dictators, and his money lives in Dubai and Indonesia. Some nationalist. 

Trump lives in a very strange little bubble: His world is Palm Beach, a handful of golf courses and hotels, and Fox News. The smallness of his frame of reference is a problem for him ….

Kevin D. Williamson

Trump’s victims

Depending on how you count them, 19 or 26 or 67 women have accused Mr. Trump of sexual misconduct. Women who have said he “squeezed my butt,” “eyed me like a piece of meat,” “stuck his hand up my skirt,” “thrust his genitals,” “forced his tongue in my mouth,” was “rummaging around my vagina,” and so on.

Mr. Trump has denied any misconduct. He, in turn, has accused the women of being “political operatives,” plotting a “conspiracy against you, the American people,” looking for their “10 minutes of fame” and not being his “type.”

“It couldn’t have happened, it didn’t happen,” Mr. Trump sneered during a recent news conference, referring to Ms. Leeds, the one who accused him of assaulting her on an airplane. “And she would not have been the chosen one.”

Jessica Bennett, Trump’s Female Accusers Are Begging You Not to Forget Them

He can’t even deny his sexual assaults without:

  1. Sneering at how homely his accuser is and
  2. Tacitly admitting that he assaults women lucky enough to be “chosen.”

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.

A change in blog direction

The pundits all agree that the Republican Presidential Primary is over and that Donald Trump is the winner.

There’s no sign that Joe Biden will step down.

So we’re headed for a General Election between two geriatric cases (one of whom feels non-geriatric because of his manic narcissism).

I probably didn’t start railing against Trump when first he descended the Golden escalator if only because I did not take him seriously. Unfortunately, he soon became somebody who needed to be taken seriously and I have been contemning him loudly ever since at least since June 2016. It’s getting pretty old.

I never intended any implied endorsement of Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden. But then I never was a Democrat, and I don’t think I’ve ever written anything that would cause a reasonable person to think I was a Democrat. Let them sort out their own problems.

Rather, I was a lifelong Republican until age 56 when a Republican president I had voted for twice used his second inaugural address to commit the United States to a foreign policy that, if taken seriously, meant that the United States would be at perpetual war. “Eradicate tyranny from the world” is how he put it, as I recall.

Despite my having at that moment repudiated the Republican party, my atavistic political impulses still tilted Republican, and that’s why I’ve cared to warn about Trump.

Today’s Republican party is not the one I repudiated. I’m not entirely sure what it is, other than Donald Trump’s party. And neither are you, because it hasn’t adopted a platform since 2016. It’s still metamorphizing.

I think, however, that it is more anti-war than the old party was and by all accounts is a better representation of middle America than the old Republican party or the Democrat party. However, it has chosen as its avatar, a man who is utterly unfit to hold high office, and who wouldn’t care about a party platform even if there were one. And I’m not completely sold on the values of “middle America,” though it’s important to hear its voices. So whatever I might someday like about the GOP when it has finished its makeover, it’s still my former party, not my current party.

“But the Supreme Court!” doesn’t even work any more. Trump II will nominate cronies and certified jackasses, having discovered as Trump I that Leonard Leo‘s favorites take their oaths to the Constitution seriously and are not Trump lackeys.

Within the past few days, my logorrheic buddy, Rod Dreher and Friend of Bari Martin Gurri both have both detailed how far toward the insane Left the Biden administration has drifted (or sprinted). Duly noted, guys. Thanks. I probably was paying insufficient attention.

Both parties think, for reasons that make sense within their respective echo chambers, that the victory of the other spells the end of America as they’ve known it.

I have consistently registered my opposition to Donald Trump. (I withhold judgment on notional “Trumpism without Trump.”)

I now register my opposition to Joe Biden for some of the reasons Dreher and Gurri spotlight but mostly because he seems to have lost most of whatever he once had as a leader and, assuming the best about his intentions, to be captive of the crazies in his party for lack of the chops to fight back.

America is in bad Presidential shape for the third Presidential cycle. Trump’s problems don’t mean Biden’s okay. Biden’s problems don’t mean Trump’s okay. A fortiori, neither’s problems make the other a prince among men. I’m not taking any comfort in any Presidential politics, let alone putting any trust in princes, in sons of men in whom there is no salvation.

I plan to write in the candidates of the American Solidarity Party for the third Presidential election in a row. I would do so even if my state was “in play,” which it almost certainly will not be.

If any of this changes, I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, I intend to stop harping on it. As they say of sermons, “nobody gets saved after the first 20 minutes,” and I’ve been going on much longer than that.

I’m trying not even to read about the election, but political clickbait is something of a weakness. I only regret that this means I can’t share things like the image of Trump as a cocaine-crazed squirrel with a stick of dynamite.

All this will probably lessen this blog’s frequency, as politics is convenient filler for lazy writing. I hope it will free up headspace for better things, and that my quality, if not my quantity, will improve.