Tag: third parties

Almost all Politics, but not too nasty

With our off-year election so close, everyone seems to be waxing political. But there’s politics and then there elevated politics, like maybe at the 20,000-foot level if not 30,000 feet. I’m shooting for elevated politics or clever writing.

Politics

The politics of candor

Mr. Carter’s words were easy political pickings.

Mr. Reagan used Mr. Carter’s call for moderation as a kind of anvil to define the sitting president. “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Mr. Reagan asked. “Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was four years ago?”

As Jonathan Alter wrote in “His Very Best,” his excellent biography of Mr. Carter, “The politics of candor were terrible.”

Mr. Carter’s wise counsel made him an easy mark for anyone inclined to criticize him as a finger-wagging scold.

“If you have concerns about consumption in society, it’s very difficult not to sound moralizing and patronizing,” said Alison Hulme, associate professor of social and cultural change at the University of Northampton in England and the author of “A Brief History of Thrift.”

And so we got the opposite of what Mr. Carter wished for. Yuppies arrived in the 1980s, and the 1990s brought us Hummers to guzzle the gas that people had waited in line for 15 years earlier. In 2001, President George W. Bush wanted us to get back to our daily routines and fly to Disney World after the Sept. 11 attacks. And the Obama administration couldn’t bear to slice away at a whopping tax break that makes it much easier for affluent families to spend $400,000 per child on college.

Ron Lieber, Jimmy Carter Was Right About Materialism but, Alas, Wrong About Us

On the future of third parties in America

I haven’t voted R or D for President since 2012, but for the American Solidarity Party candidate. If we don’t stop eating the shit sandwiches, they’ll keep serving them.

Coke versus Pepsi once seemed permanent. Today, Dr Pepper is second. In 1965, General Motors, Ford and Chrysler together had 92 percent of domestic auto sales. Then Toyota, Volkswagen and others arrived. By 2024, the “big three” had 38 percent. But foreign competition had improved their products.

George Will, calling the “Lincoln Party” candidacy of Greg Ballard for Indiana Secretary of State a promising debut.

George Will again:

A two-party system is best for producing broad, temperate coalitions. And when one of the parties fragments over an issue, or becomes strange by internal dynamics, it can be replaced in the duopoly. The Republican Party was born as a third party in 1854, as the slavery issue shattered the Whig Party, and six years later a Republican was elected president.

Today’s Republican Party has become weird, and most of its congressional members are embarrassingly incapable of embarrassment. A small Indiana event, unnoticed elsewhere, might someday be remembered as portentous.

Samuel Sey, chudbait

Here’s a thumbnail about Samuel Sey, in case you hadn’t heard of him and his situation.

His deportation by team Trump has been something of an apocalypse, in the historic sense.

“If you know Samuel, you know what a good man of character he is,” former Babylon Bee editor Joel Berry tweeted last week while setting up a crowdfunding page for the Seys to help pay for their legal battle with the administration. Last year the same Joel Berry sniffed that “the only due process owed to an illegal alien is deportation.”

…

Sey is a Christian, and that’s what matters to some right-wingers. Berry explicitly used the language of tribalism to defend his friend on those grounds, in fact. “I do have a tribe. I am tribal. It’s a tribe Jesus described,” he wrote on Monday, going on to quote several passages from the gospels. “I just don’t classify my tribe by melanin count. Samuel Sey is in my tribe, and he is my brother. And he would make an excellent American.”

⁠⁠For other MAGA devotees, Sey’s faith isn’t enough to earn tribal membership. Race trumps religion in this case: He’s black, African-born, married to a white woman, and “spent much of the past year feuding with a set of conservative pastors who promote antisemitic and pro-segregation theology,” per Salon. To a chud obsessed with the consequences of “importing the third world,” that’s all one needs to know to believe ICE did the right thing in moving to remove Sey from the United States. If the Somalis don’t belong here, surely the Ghanaians don’t either.

Berry sounded earnestly shocked this week to discover how many of those chuds are inside his tent. “This has been probably the darkest 24 hours I’ve ever experienced on social media in my life,” he remarked about the vicious backlash to his agitation on Sey’s behalf. “The things being said about Samuel, his wife, and his small children are unthinkably evil. There is a segment of the so-called ‘Christian’ nationalist crowd that has given itself completely over to Satan. I’ve never had more resolve to defeat these subversive demons invading the Right and invading Christianity.”⁠⁠

A political movement that openly celebrates ruthlessness toward undesirables has given itself over to Satan? The things you learn in the year of our lord 2026.

⁠⁠I wish Sey’s supporters luck in exorcising the demons 10 years too late, but two points shouldn’t be lost here. One is that their plea for mercy on his behalf seems conditioned on tribal membership. If Sey were merely a “good man of character” who would “make an excellent American,” presumably that wouldn’t suffice for immigration restrictionists like Berry to justify allowing him to remain legally in the U.S. After all, many illegal immigrants meet those criteria. Sey is worthy of mercy, it seems, because he’s a member of the “tribe Jesus described.” Berry doesn’t appear to disagree with the chuds that laws should apply differently to one’s “friends,” that is, only about who qualifies and who doesn’t.⁠⁠

Nick Catoggio (bold added)

Shorts

  • Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty charged right-wing activist James O’Keefe and content creator Cam Higby with felony unlawful voting and identity theft over a video filmed at a Minneapolis polling place during Minnesota’s August 11 primary.
  • Utah’s attorney general charged the prediction market Kalshi with 14 criminal counts, accusing it of illegally promoting online gambling, and named its co-founders, Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara, as defendants.
  • Any discussion of power is now, ultimately, a conversation about attention and how we extract it, wield it, waste it, abuse it, sell it, lose it and profit from it. (Charlie Warzel, Michael Goldhaber, the Cassandra of the Internet Age)
  • I think that if you put guns to their heads and told them to spell Machiavelli, you’d have to shoot a whole bunch of top campaign managers, many of whom are people who peaked in high school debate but don’t know it. (Kevin D. Williamson, on the dirty Democrat trickery in the Alaska Senate race.)
  • Americans do not have a great deal of republican self-respect, and some of them seem to enjoy being manipulated (it never seems to occur to anybody that Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” remark and Donald Trump’s “Fifth Avenue” remark amounted to the two of them saying the same thing about the same pigheaded rubes) …. (Kevin D. Williamson, ibid.)

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.

Friday, 7/29/22

R.I.P. William Jon Gray

William Jon Gray, undoubtedly the best Choral Conductor I ever sang under, has died at his home in New York state at age 66. I have the impression (from someone saying “You sung under him?!”) that he was widely known in American choral music circles.

That’s all I know about his death at this point, the news having just come to me Thursday through the (reliable) grapevine.

Bill was Artistic Director of the Bach Chorale Singers from 1994 to 2010. I re-joined the Chorale, after a very brief prior experience in the 1980s, in 1997. In addition to his formal education, Bill learned from the Master, Robert Shaw, having sung with him for some period of time. He forever followed what I understand was “Mr. Shaw’s” practice of meticulously marking scores before distributing them to his singers and, heaven help us, count-singing. His other accomplishments can be seen at the first link, above.

The pinnacles of my experience with Bill were, in no particular order:

  • performance of Rachmaninoff’s Vespers,
  • a professional recording of the Latin Organ and Choral Music of Zoltan Kodaly, with Organist Marilyn Keiser, on the Pro Organo label. One track unfailingly brings tears to my eyes, and
  • in retrospect, sitting a couple of feet from our Guest Tenor Soloist, Lawrence Brownlee, days after he had won the Metropolitan Opera Auditions. (Bill said “Enjoy him. We’ll never be able to afford him again.”)

Signs of the Times

  • A handful of former Democratic and Republican officials announced Wednesday they are forming a new national political party—Forward—that they believe will appeal to voters frustrated with the United States’ current two-party system. The centrist party will be chaired by former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang and former Republican New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, and plans to gain ballot access in all 50 states in time for the 2024 presidential and congressional elections.
  • A new FBI search warrant claims the man who allegedly attempted to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh last month was also planning to kill two other Supreme Court justices. The FBI alleges the man searched “assassin skills,” “most effective place to stab someone,” and “quietest semi auto rifle” online before he was arrested, and that he messaged unnamed users on Discord that he was going to “stop Roe v. Wade from being overturned” and that he would “remove some people from the Supreme Court.”

The Morning Dispatch, July 28.

Turning Point, USA?

I conducted dozens of focus groups of Trump 2020 voters in the 17 months between the storming of the Capitol on January 6 and when the hearings began in June. One measure was consistent: At least half of the respondents in each group wanted Trump to run again in 2024. The prevailing belief was that the 2020 election was stolen—or at least unfair in some way—and Trump should get another shot.

But since June, I’ve observed a shift. I’ve conducted nine focus groups during this period, and found that only 14 percent of Trump 2020 voters wanted him to run in 2024, with a few others on the fence. In four of the groups, zero people wanted Trump to run again. Their reasoning is clear: They’re now uncertain that Trump can win again.

…

[U]nlike the impeachment hearings, which in some ways made GOP voters more defensive of Trump, the accumulating drama of the January 6 hearings—which they can’t avoid in social-media feeds—seems to be facilitating not a wholesale collapse of support, but a soft permission to move on.

Sarah Longwell, The January 6 Hearings Are Changing Republicans’ Minds

In [Peter Thiel’s] view, much of what passes for “progress” is in truth more like “distraction”. As he puts it, “the iPhone that distracts us from our environment also distracts us from the ways our environment is unchanging and static.” And in this culture, economy and politics of chronic self-deception, as Thiel sees it, we tell ourselves that we’re advancing because “grandma gets an iPhone with a smooth surface,” but meanwhile she “gets to eat cat food because food prices have gone up.”

Mary Harrington, Peter Thiel on the dangers of progress.

One of many provocative observations in this long piece.

And yes, I’ve read accusations that he’s a fascist. I’m just saying he’s smart, not that he’s good.

Nothing pointless

Speaking of fascists …

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

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Church/State

Lifeway research suggests that as many as 2/3 of American churches incorporate patriotic music into their liturgy for public worship during the time around the 4th of July holiday.

So this is one piece of the problem: For many of our nation’s white evangelicals, their patriotic commitments as Americans are so intertwined with their Christian faith that it is very hard for them to imagine a scenario where Christian fidelity actually requires them to reject standard American ideas about identity, wealth, success, and so on.

Jake Meador, Defining “White Evangelical Crap”.

Was MLK antiracist? Barack Obama?

Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speech would not meet Kendi’s definition of anti-racism, nor would the one Barack Obama made about there being too many fatherless Black families. Indeed, nearly everything that Americans have been taught about how to be anti-racist for the past several decades is, according to Kendi’s explicit definition, racist.

Bari Weiss, Stop Being Shocked

Flash!

This just in: With Russia at war in Ukraine, and Putin’s stench in American nostrils increasing, our 45th POTUS has declared himself an acolyte of Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr now. al-Sadr’s followers are very special people.

(Pass it on.)

Note to Readers

I will be traveling for more than a week. I may or may not get a post scheduled for tomorrow or intermittently during travel, but I should be back sometime the week of August 7.

And I just realized that today is the 57th anniversary of my most serious accident, on a motorcycle at age 16.

“The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness ….” (G.K. Chesterton)

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.