A busy few days, no?

American Caesar

Once we face the low level of Caesarism and how unchoiceworthy it is, we can begin to understand the danger that follows from normalizing public discussion of it as a possibility and option. Doing so “means encouraging dangerous men to confuse the issue by bringing about a state of affairs in which the common good requires the establishment of their absolute rule” (emphasis added). In other words, ambitious political actors will seek to create by their actions the very chaotic conditions that justify their own seizure of postconstitutional rule. This is a form of right-wing accelerationism.

Damon Linker, Leo Strauss, Harry Jaffa, and the “Red Caesar” Concept.

I’m always looking for explanations for why 77 million Americans voted for Donald Trump even after January 6. (Sometimes, I hallucinate a reason, but when the fever breaks it goes away and the bafflement returns.)

I don’t think that the desirability of a “red Caesar” motivated voters consciously. I see it more as a way for MAGA intellectuals (e.g., Michael Anton, John Eastman and other Claremonsters), to try, try again to justify their support. It reminds me of how progressive intellectuals kept trying (and invariably failing), for almost five decades, to re-write Roe v. Wade so as to make it coherent.

As a disciple of Leo Strauss, the muse of Claremont, Damon Linker takes personal offense.

History Rhymes

They didn’t actively collaborate, but by declining to resist and going along with the government, they enabled the occupation. I have seen many examples, in the past decade, of journalists and historians using historical encounters with fascism and authoritarianism to comment on the present moment in the United States. Often, these parallels are forced; the situation in the U.S. is a far cry from Nazi-occupied Europe. But Ophuls’s film is illuminating precisely because its lessons about complicity apply to evil and corruption of all kinds.

…

Restoring democracy required opponents of fascism—nationalists, republicans, and Communists—to work together despite serious misgivings about one another’s views. Purity tests had to wait until the war was over.

David A. Graham, The Film That Explains Contemporary America.

I’ve certainly made my opposition to Trump obvious in my writings, but I think it’s time to drop my purity tests and attend the next “No Kings” event in town.

Piling up hoards of money

I see no special heroism in accumulating money, particularly if, in addition, the person is foolish enough to not even try to derive any tangible benefit from the wealth (aside from the pleasure of regularly counting the beans). I have no large desire to sacrifice much of my personal habits, intellectual pleasures, and personal standards in order to become a billionaire like Warren Buffett, and I certainly do not see the point of becoming one if I were to adopt Spartan (even miserly) habits and live in my starter house. Something about the praise lavished upon him for living in austerity while being so rich escapes me; if austerity is the end, he should become a monk or a social worker—we should remember that becoming rich is a purely selfish act, not a social one.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness

A backstory

No longer was it uncommon, as in the time of James Fenimore Cooper, to see a husband and wife come aboard with three or four young children, as well as a servant or two. Among the earliest of such couples were Robert and Katherine Cassatt of Pennsylvania, who in the summer of 1851 embarked on an extended sojourn abroad, stopping first in London before moving on to Paris with their three young children, Alexander, Lydia, and Mary. In Paris they settled in for an extended stay at the Hôtel Continental, and seven-year-old Mary was to remember the day of Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état the rest of her life. It would also be said that her interest in painting began then, which would appear to make her the youngest American thus far to have come under the spell of the arts in Paris.

David McCullough, The Greater Journey

Pizzagate Redux?

Pizzagate lost relevance over time, usurped by marginally less insane conspiracy theories about rigged elections and the “deep state.” So it felt newsy when J.D. Vance told a Turning Point USA crowd last Tuesday that mentions of pizza and grape soda in some of the Jeffrey Epstein files had piqued his interest. “I remember it sounding like the Pizzagate conspiracy theory,” he marveled at the language. “We should absolutely investigate.”

That was interesting for two reasons.

First, at a moment when swing voters and even certain “America First” postliberals are experiencing buyer’s remorse, it was useful of the VP to remind the country that Donald Trump’s movement has always been powered by febrile cranks and grifting sociopaths keen to monetize their paranoia.

Nick Catoggio, The Hidden Hand

Second, Turning Point USA is becoming the Zelig of febrile crankery and grifting sociopathy in the 2020s. (And no, that was not Catoggio’s second reason.)

He has put down the mighty and exalted the humble

10. The veneer of Wall Street’s longstanding assertion — that A.I. will enhance human work not replace it — is rapidly peeling away, as evidenced by the current quarterly earnings season. JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo racked up $47 billion in collective profits, up 18 percent, while shedding 15,000 employees. All of them credited A.I. to some degree with helping cut jobs and automate work in areas ranging from the so-called back office, where tens of thousands of employees fill out paperwork to comply with various laws and regulations, to the front office, where seven-figure salaried professionals put together complicated financial transactions for corporate clients. (Source: nytimes.com)

11. Bhaskar Chakravorti:

Digital Planet, my research center at Tufts University, recently released the American AI Jobs Risk Index, assessing vulnerabilities across 784 occupations. The economics are striking: 9.3 million jobs and $757 billion in annual income are at risk within five years, rising to 19.5 million jobs and $1.5 trillion if AI adoption accelerates. But the more consequential finding is the geography of the displacement. The occupations most at risk are concentrated in the “wired belts”: regions that have thrived on data, content and cognitive work. These areas may well become the new rust belts, stretching from the familiar tech hubs of Silicon Valley, Boston and New York to Philadelphia, Atlanta and Phoenix. Suburban knowledge corridors surrounding major US swing-state cities rank among America’s most vulnerable. (Sources: ft.com, digitalplanet.tufts.edu, fletcher.tufts.edu)

Both items from John Ellis News Items

My latest AI adventure

Tuesday, I groped for a half-remembered poem, and finally consulted the oracle, Claude AI:

I’m trying to recall a poem, with a woman author, that counsels against the party of certainty and for the party of awe. Can you help.

Claude went through iterative searches, fixated on my “party of certainty” and “party of awe” phrasings.

It came up dry but offered this:

…

A few other possibilities worth considering:

Mary Oliver, who consistently urges readers toward wonder over certainty in the natural world
Lisel Mueller, whose poem “Alive Together” meditates on contingency and astonishment
Naomi Shihab Nye, who writes about wonder and humility

Mary Oliver rang a bell for me, and I told Claude so.

” Mysteries, Yes” seems like a very strong candidate — it’s directly about marveling at mystery rather than demanding answers. Let me fetch the full text.

(Me:) I believe this is the one

(Claude) — “Mysteries, Yes” by Mary Oliver. It maps perfectly onto what you described. The poem opens by declaring that we live with mysteries too marvelous to be understood, and closes with this counsel:

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

Those were exactly the lines I half-remembered. I told Claude so.

Okay. This is why I don’t shun AI. But then Claude gave me strokes:

[Y]our summary of it — “the party of certainty versus the party of awe” — is honestly a more memorable distillation of its argument than most critical descriptions I’ve seen. It captures exactly what Oliver is doing in those final two stanzas.

I think Claude likes me! Is it any wonder that people anthropomorphize, and some even have AI girlfriends or boyfriends?

And, by the way, those lines I half remembered come at the end of a poem I don’t think I’d ever read in full.

Beware “the colon movies”

I liked “Project Hail Mary” until I didn’t, couldn’t, wanted to get on with my life, wanted to hit the men’s room, wanted to hit whoever had edited (or, rather, failed to edit) this needlessly epic adventure …

It’s as if Hollywood is punking us. How else to explain stretching a Tom Cruise stunt-a-thon to two hours and 43 minutes and then calling it “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One”? The italics are mine; read them as a primal scream. “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” lasts two hours and 49 minutes. It’s supposedly the end of impossible missions, but nothing ends anymore. By the current illogic of interminable narratives, there will surely be a “Mission: Impossible — One More Reckoning for the Road,” and it will be longer than the audiobook of “Middlemarch.” Cruise’s first “Mission: Impossible,” from 1996, is one hour and 50 minutes.

…

Explanations vary. Many Hollywood executives and moviemakers apparently believe that if you’re going to lure people out of their homes and away from their smaller screens to the communal experience of the multiplex — and if you’re also going to ask them to fork over roughly $30 for a ticket, popcorn and a soft drink — you better promise them a real event, even a spectacle, something with a sense of amplitude. That means three hours and one minute of “Avengers: Endgame,” three hours and 12 minutes of “Avatar: The Way of Water” and three hours and 17 minutes of “Avatar: Fire and Ash.” (Beware the colon movies — or at least make sure you haven’t planned anything else that day.)

Frank Bruni

Having just finished reading Middlemarch a few weeks ago, that line about Middlemarch busted me up.

Prequel

From today’s by Judge George C. Hanks, Jr. (S.D. Tex.) in Patel v. Figliuzzi, which stemmed from his exchange on MSNC’s Morning Joe with defendant Cesare Frank Figliuzzi, Jr., “the former assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI”:

Host: “So, Frank, let’s turn to FBI Director Kash Patel, who has sort of taken a surprisingly backseat role—at least to this point, in the first 102 or 103 days, wherever we are right now. What do you make of that, that he’s just been a little less visible than I think a lot of people and Trump observers expected him to be?”

Figliuzzi: “Yeah, well, reportedly, he’s been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building. And there are reports that daily briefings to him have been changed from every day to maybe twice weekly. So this is both a blessing and a curse, because if he’s really trying to run things without any experience level, things could be bad. If he’s not plugged in, things could be bad, but he’s allowing agents to run things. So we don’t know where this is going.”

Patel claimed the “been visible at nightclubs far more than he has been on the seventh floor of the Hoover building” was actionable defamation, but the court found that it was nonactionable rhetorical hyperbole instead:

“Rhetorical hyperbole” is a subset of opinion, which Texas courts have “defined as extravagant exaggeration that is employed for rhetorical effect.” “Statements that would be perceived by the audience as ‘rhetorical hyperbole’ do not constitute defamation.” In this way, Texas law protects “statements that cannot reasonably be interpreted as stating actual facts about an individual.” “Whether an utterance is … rhetorical hyperbole turns not on what the speaker intended but what a reasonable person would believe and presents as a question of law for the court to decide.”

Eugene Volokh, FBI Director Kash Patel Loses Defamation Lawsuit Over Morning Joe Statements

This decision came down Tuesday, the day after Patel sued the Atlantic for reporting that he’s a lush.

N.B.

Some words about the arc of my writing over the past ten years or so.

I didn’t take Donald Trump seriously when he came down the (golden?) escalator in 2015.

He never held any fascination for me.
I didn’t buy his (ghost-written?) book.
I didn’t watch any of the beauty pageants he bought so he could talk to cute girls and they’d have to listen (and could walk through dressing rooms when they were half-naked).
I didn’t watch any of his reality TV or gladiator spectacles.

Because I hadn’t followed him at all, I didn’t know he was a sexual predator (serial adulterer, yes) or a chronic liar (I’m not going to soften it by calling it “bullshitting”). I was sort of aware that he was incompetent enough to have bankrupted a casino (!) and other businesses.

I was alarmed when my former major party gave him the nomination. (I wish we could go back to smoke-filled rooms instead of rage-filled primary voters.) I opposed him as soon as he started dehumanizing people on the campaign trail. I was incredulous when he won the 2016 general election. I was not reassured when he assumed office by forcing his press secretary, Sean Spicer, to begin the gaslighting immediately. I was mildly reassured when he surrounded himself with pros who became the grownups in his room. I was pleasantly surprised when he honored his pledge about SCOTUS nominees.

This narrative is getting tedious, so I’ll cut to the chase: I ream out Trump and the GOP because I once was a Republican, and I feel their betrayal even though I repudiated the party in 2005. I wish I could ignore Trump, a toxic narcissist, but he very deliberately commits daily outrages to keep attention on himself, and fool though he be, as POTUS he is a very consequential fool.

I rarely ream out the Democrats because I have no stake in them, present or historic.

I have never even been able to consider Trump the lesser evil candidate because the Democrats aren’t actually demons and with them I’d at least be confident that there would still be elections in four years. Nevertheless, I haven’t voted for a Democrat for President since 1972.

My state is very red, and my half-hearted blue vote won’t change that. So I vote for the Christian Democrats.

Trump’s damage to the nation (and to the GOP) will not be repaired in my lifetime, nor (probably) in my son’s lifetime. Maybe during my grandchildren’s lives.

I was a conscientious objector and I’m close to pacifist. I won’t take up arms. But I will protest in the ways my conscience allows, and this blog has been one of those ways.

Shorts

[T]he nuclear question had been resolved peacefully by the JCPOA before Trump tore it up, and any remaining serious nuclear threat had been “obliterated” last year …. (Andrew Sullivan)
We see the victims of bad drug approvals, but victims of incorrect FDA delays or denials are practically invisible. (The Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Sam Kazman)
President Trump has been rampaging around the globe like Grendel at dinner time, a rapacious, feral creature. Who could stand up to him? (Maureen Dowd. The answer is “Pope Bob.”)
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)
For a variety of reasons, in recent decades the rate of profit to be made by producing goods has fallen below the rate of profit to be made through finance. (William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry)
Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else. (Mark Twain)

Elsewhere in Tipsyland

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 March 2

A keeper

Damon Linker discusses (shared link) the debates among Right illiberals, not nut-picking but citing scholars and a Notre Dame Republican student group.

Then he puts his finger on the key question they disagree about:

The question is whether the country today is actually facing a threat dire enough to justify or excuse otherwise unjustifiable or inexcusable acts. Are we facing a genuine threat to our continued existence as a country? Determining the answer boils down to judgment.

Starting at least with Michael Anton’s 2016 “Flight 93 Election” essay, there are plenty on the right excusing unjustifiable or inexcusable acts on the premise that the Democrats are an “existential threat.” I don’t believe them, and if I did it’s no longer clear to me that I would take the illiberal Right’s side in the fight. There’s a lot of evidence that they’re a bigger threat than the Democrats.

I plan to revisit Linker’s essay at least once; I’m not sure I’ve sucked all the juice from it yet.

The first thing the communists do when they take over is to systematize snitching

When I was living, fairly briefly, in Oklahoma 50 years ago, we heard not only the usual “first thing the communists do when they take over is,” but an interesting variant.

The usual, of course, was “outlaw guns.” The variant was “outlaw cock-fighting.” I’m not kidding. I do not claim that the variant was common or held by a substantial number of Okies, but it was there.

The marks of authoritarianism and totalitarianism are debated, but I suggest that one of them is recruiting people to snitch on each other even about trivial deviations from the government’s line. Kids reporting to teachers naughty things their parents or siblings said, for instance.

Making due allowance for his youth at the time and signs of subsequent growth, it nevertheless is an authoritarian blot on the late Charlie Kirk’s legacy that one of his early Turning Point USA initiatives was Professor Watch, a website for student to snitch on their professors.

If I were more obsessive about the dangers from MAGAworld, I would keep a list of the dubious stuff TPUSA has done since Kirk’s death, like the All-American Halftime Show in 2026. (That, at least, was not clearly authoritarian, but it was petty as hell.)

For now, suffice that one of TPUSA’s earliest initiatives was a tool of authoritarian wannabes.

Beating a dead(ish) horse

Wokeness is often thought to be a form of virtue signalling. This is subtly wrong, for it is more often a kind of status signalling. The wokist wants to be seen as belonging to “the right kind of people.” He drapes himself with wokeness the same way that in another day and age people paraded their memberships in prestigious clubs, or that today they flaunt the brands and styles of shoes and clothing that they wear. If ethics comes into the matter at all, it comes in not via the thought “I would never do that,” but via the thought “I’m not the kind of person who would do that.” You know, the deplorables.

I am not suggesting that such a person is aware of his craving for status. Very few people are fully aware of their own motives. In a society which professes to believe in equality, and pretends to despise snobbery, it is hard for a snob who knows he is a snob to think well of himself; therefore he has to convince himself that he isn’t a snob. With its faux concern for The People (most of whom have no interest whatsoever in the cause of woke), wokeness is a convenient way to do that. My very expensive jeans must have holes in them.

J Budziszewski

Budziszewski’s not wrong, but a parallel takedown of MAGA vice-signallers couldn’t be all that hard. I’m not a pas d’ennemis á droite kind of guy, but I’m not going to take the time to write it — only to point out that the Right has unclean hands of its own. Do you have eyes to see that or are you blinkered?

We need to “get out” more

A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

C.S. Lewis, Learning in War-Time, from Weight of Glory

Incommensurable

[O]ne is compelled to admire a man of such verbal agility as not only to conceal from his readers and audiences the shallowness of his own thought, but to persuade them that in admiring his work they were giving evidence of their own intelligence as well. I do not say that Shaw could have succeeded alone, without the more plodding and laborious minds with which he associated himself; but by persuading lowbrows that they were high-brows and that high-brows must be Socialist, he contributed greatly to the prestige of Socialism. But between the influence of a Bernard Shaw or an H.G. Wells, and the influence of a Coleridge or a Newman, I can conceive no common scale of measurement.

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 on George Bernard Shaw, inter alia.

Manipulation in a good cause

Ten years in, and Democrats still don’t know how to handle Donald Trump. He used them as foils and they allowed it, sitting there snarling, at points screaming. Part of how to handle him is if he tries to manipulate you into doing the right thing—if, for instance, he challenges you to stand in respect for a mother mourning the murder of her daughter—you put aside that you’re being manipulated and stand. Because it is right to show human sympathy and regard. The thing to do is look better than Mr. Trump, not worse. You say: My base demands coldness. Then get a new base. If you can’t, leave before you are reduced to a soulless husk of the eager, happy person who walked into that chamber a decade ago.

Peggy Noonan, The Oprah State of the Union.

The same advice could and should be given to Republicans when their one-man “base” in the White House demands dishonor of them.

Regime Change

As Americans, we do not need regime change abroad; we need it at home. We must escape the ghastly bloodlust and other demonic impulses of the Democratic and Republican parties. Men and women of goodwill must unite in solidarity to build an alternative to evil.

Jack Ternan, Chair of the National Committee of the American Solidarity Party

Shorts

Two tongue-in-cheek descriptions of The Bulwark: “Pro market, anti-polio”; “The capitalist wing of Antifa.”
“…preposterously self-satisfied, preternaturally nasty and profoundly delusional …” (Frank Bruni’s top-line characterization of Trump’s 2026 SOTU)
I don’t know who coined the expression “Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining,” but it fits the overall tone of the speech. (Bret Stephens’ top-line characterization of Trump’s 2026 SOTU)
That’s what’s nice about politics, Yevgeny: anything that makes people believe in power actually increases that power. (Giuliano da Empoli and Willard Wood, The Wizard of the Kremlin.)
No, it’s not a conspiracy. It’s much worse—it’s a consensus. (R.R. Reno on “the progressive takeover of higher education … or DEI’s reign over corporate America”)

I had another few items, but after the USA and Israel attached Iran, they could have been too easily misunderstood.

Barbarian versus conservative

TPUSA

I spent time Thursday listening to Ross Douthat interview Andrew Kolvet, Turning Point USA spokesperson, filling in for Charlie Kirk who was scheduled for the Douthat interview before he was murdered. I registered nothing truly outrageous from Kolvet, but there was inordinate reverence toward Kirk, who literally was styled by Kolvet a “Christian martyr.”

My errands finished, I settled into my chair to finish up my print media reading. Of the Indiana Senate, less than fully enthusiastic about norm-shattering mid-decade redistricting:

Brett Galaszewski, national enterprise director at Turning Point Action, said during a rally at the Statehouse on Dec. 5. “Complacency has set in in this state and has allowed this sequence of events to take place.” … [Lieutenant Governor Micah] Beckwith said then: “I’m on a mission now. … I’m going after senators. I’m going to help anyone who wants to primary these weak senators. (Turning Point) USA is on board.

Based in Lafayette.

I am old and out of touch. I am, for long enough that it has notably remade my mind, an Orthodox Christian; the tropes of Evangelical piety now leave me cold. That, too, puts me out of touch with much in America. And I’m conservative — not Libertarian or populist or MAGA or “religious right” or even, since 2005, Republican.

But be it noted that resistance to rapid, radical change is part of the meaning of conservatism as traditionally understood and as I understand it. By that criterion, Turning Point and MAGA are more barbarian than conservative.

At posting, we’re awaiting the Indiana Senate’s vote. Those who stand fast for conservatism may make me break my record of not giving to major-party candidates.

Not in America, no

It is unconscionable that in a free society, those with the power to arrest and detain are not clearly identifiable as such, with their full faces and names and identity visible. Protestors who wear masks are just as anathema to a liberal democracy, and wearing a mask in such a context should be grounds for arrest. But for the state to be anonymous and lethal is a mark of totalitarian societies, not democracies.

Andrew Sullivan, The American Caudillo

Indeterminate negation

Early on in the Trump era, I treated the Orange Man as an anomaly. Sure, I recognized some prefigurements of the MAGA movement—in George Wallace’s populist presidential campaign in 1968, in Pat Buchanan’s potent paleoconservative challenge to George H.W. Bush’s bid for re-election in 1992. Yet I still tended to view the form of conservatism that dominated the scene from Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 to Donald Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016 as setting some kind of American standard from which Trump and his supporters diverged.

I no longer look at it that way. As I argued in a New York Times op-ed published last month, taking a longer view enables us to see that Trump marks a return to an older form of conservatism with deep roots in the American past from which Reaganite conservatism can be viewed as an anomaly—one inspired and made possible by the contingencies of the Cold War.

Damon Linker (public post – not paywalled). More:

I’ve had several occasions down through the years to make reference to a little book I brought out at Penn Press in 2014 by the brilliant Bulgarian writer and intellectual Ivan Krastev. The book was called Democracy Disrupted: The Politics of Global Protest. It’s important for several reasons, but in retrospect mostly because it shows that Krastev noticed a distinctive trend very early, more than two years before the Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s first successful presidential campaign—namely, that democratic publics in a wide range of countries around the world had become deeply discontented with those running the show but had little sense of what they wanted as an alternative. To invoke Hegel, this was an expression of an indeterminate negation.

The problem with an indeterminate negation is that it undermines the possibility of dialectical progress. Rather than identifying a problem or mistake committed by the people in positions of authority, kicking them out, and elevating an alternative set of elites to course correct, we end up with, instead, one spasm of disgusted rejectionism followed by another, and then another, as if the very fact of being ruled by anyone at all who must make choices and trade-offs under conditions of constraint is itself a fatal flaw or defect demanding punishment.

If that ‘indeterminate negation” stuff had been a sermon, I’d have thought I was being targeted by the preacher.

I’m very unhappy with the GOP, my political home for most of my life, but not for the last twenty years. I cannot support the Democrat party if only because of its long and deeply-ingrained support for permissive abortion, but its other liberal groin pieties put me off, too. I cling without real hope of rescue to the loosely Christian Democrat ideas of the American Solidarity Party, aware that they’ve been no panacea in Europe when tried.

Maybe the Psalmist was right. I cling to that, too.

Seven (more) Deadly Sins

Here are the seven deadly sins according to Gandhi (often called the Seven Social Sins):
1. Wealth without work — gaining riches without contributing or earning them.
2. Pleasure without conscience — seeking enjoyment without moral awareness or concern for others.
3. Knowledge without character (or education without character) — learning or information unaccompanied by ethical strength.
4. Commerce (business) without morality — doing business without ethical principles.
5. Science without humanity — scientific progress that ignores compassion or human welfare.
6. Religion (or worship) without sacrifice — religious practice that lacks self-sacrifice or genuine commitment.
7. Politics without principle — political action divorced from ethical standards.

These aren’t sins in the theological sense but rather social and ethical pitfalls Gandhi warned could undermine individuals and society if not addressed with conscience, character, and principle.

(ChatGPT on a prompt from my brother, who couldn’t remember Ghandi’s list.)

“Christian Nationalism”

Of the concept of Christian Nationalism as it plays out these days:

This is a term that can be understood in two ways. The first understanding emphasizes the “Christian” part and imagines nationalism as the vehicle through which conservative believers impose their doctrines on a pluralist society. This is the vision that inspires the strongest liberal paranoia, with images of inquisitions, witch trials, the Republic of Gilead.

But there’s a second understanding, in which “nationalism” is the controlling word and the religious modifier is the pinch of incense that makes believers comfortable with worldly deeds and choices.

Ross Douthat

The first understanding of the term, I think, has fewer adherents than the second, but it’s not just liberals who fear it.

Douthat himself has described us as “a nation of heretics”:

America has indeed become less traditionally Christian across the last half century, just as religious conservatives insist, with unhappy consequences for our national life. But certain kinds of religious faith are as influential as ever, just as secular critics and the new atheists contend—and they’re right, as well, that to the extent that there’s an ongoing crisis in American culture, the excesses of the faithful probably matter more than the sins of unbelievers.

In heretic America, any semi-plausible future Christian Nationalism is going to be the Christianity of heretics or secularist pseudo-Christians. Though their current thought is vexing liberals and progressives, they would soon enough turn their attention to traditional Christians.

Attention

Attention is not neutral … It is the act by which we confer meaning on things and by which we discover that they are meaningful, the act through which we bind facts into cares.

Antón Barba-Kay, a philosopher at University of California, San Diego, in A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation (via Ezra Klein). Klein continues:

When we cede control of our attention, we cede more than what we are looking at now. We cede, to some degree, control over what we will care about tomorrow.

He closes with another quote from Barba-Kay:

If the present technological age has a lasting gift for us, it is to urge as decisive the question of what human beings are for.

I will be flagging this to be read again in a few months (which I’ve never done for an Ezra Klein piece before), and so I’ve used my first NYT share like this month so you can wrestle with it, too.

Hate-watch of the week

In The Washington Post, Monica Hesse provided context for her analysis of Meghan Markle’s holiday special on Netflix: “I did not review the first two seasons of ‘With Love, Meghan,’ and to start now seems unsporting, like showing up to a deer hunt after the animal is already dead and butchered just so you can point to the plates of venison and say, LOL, Bambi, sucks to be you.” (Karen J Andrade, Merchantville, N.J., and Virginia Matish, Chesapeake, Va.)

Via Frank Bruni

Shorts

[I]f the most fundamental social institution (marriage) is one that has nothing to do with the sex of those taking part in it, it’s difficult to maintain that male-female distinctions matter anywhere else. (Rod Dreher)
“I write plays because dialogue is the most respectable way of contradicting myself.” (Tom Stoppard, RIP, via Andrew Sullivan).
When scholars in Europe sought to justify the Spanish conquest of the New World, they reached not for the Church Fathers, but for Aristotle. ‘As the Philosopher says, it is clear that some men are slaves by nature and others free by nature.’ (Tom Holland, Dominion)
Amid the hyperpluralism of divergent truth claims, metaphysical beliefs, moral values, and life priorities, ubiquitous practices of consumerism are more than anything else the cultural glue that holds Western societies together. (Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation)
If every society has a spiritual substructure, then every society will need its priests. Scientists have taken holy orders in the age of the Machine. (Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan

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.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio

Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk and his memorial service

I don’t want to keep banging on about this, because two weeks ago all I consciously knew about Charlie Kirk was that he was affiliated with Jerry Falwell Jr. around the time Falwell made spiritual shipwreck. My impression of him is more favorable now (mama was right: you’re known by the company you keep).

I suspect that Charlie will stop occupying our mind-space relatively soon. Meanwhile, here are some observations I think trenchant.

False note

Some “Evangelicals” are reportedly are starting to style Charlie Kirk as a Christian martyr. Rachel Roth Aldhizer gives examples and cautions that they’re playing with fire.

I have a more fundamental objection: the hagiography should stop not because of dangerous eventualities, but because it’s false.

Not every Christian who is murdered is a Christian martyr, and a Christian martyr is not a murdered Christian who is liked by lot of people, even a lot a people who are good at wordcraft.

Rather, a martyr must be murdered because of his Christian faith. The “tell” in this “Christian martyr” tale is the pronoun “they.” “They killed Charlie because ….“

No, “they” did not, and so far as we know at this point, based on very sketchy information, “he” didn’t either. What little we know points toward the lone shooter perceiving Kirk’s politics as hate-filled.

Plus ça change …

In most secular colleges and universities the largest evangelical organization was Campus Crusade for Christ, founded in 1951 by Bill Bright, a conventionally right-wing Presbyterian, to evangelize students and instruct them in conservative religion and politics.

Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals. Is Turning Point USA the new Campus Crusade?

Erika Kirk

Erika Kirk set a stellar moral example yesterday despite immense emotional and political temptation to be vindictive. All but uniquely for a MAGA Republican, her country is better today for her public influence.

Then the president spoke.

“He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them,” Donald Trump said of Charlie Kirk, seemingly praising the dead. Then he veered off-script: “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry. I am sorry, Erika.”

He joked that maybe she could convince him that hating one’s enemies isn’t right, which turned her moving statement of Christian witness into a set-up for a punch line. The crowd laughed. When it was over, Mrs. Kirk embraced him.

I’ve heard of political “big tents,” but I’ve never heard of one big enough to accommodate two moral systems that aren’t just contradictory but irreconcilable. “Christ’s message, followed by its very antithesis,” philosophy professor Edward Feser wrote of the contrast between Kirk’s and Trump’s remarks. “It’s almost as if the audience is being put to a test.”

Almost, yeah.

It’s been many years since I read the gospels, but I do remember Matthew 6:24: “No one can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other.” That’s the test. Many American Christians, possibly including Erika Kirk, seem to reject the premise.

Nick Catoggio

The audience failed the test. They cheered Erika Kirk, but also cheered Trump, who logically they should have booed.

MAGA theology laid bare

Many people who saw or read about the rally were puzzled by what they perceived as a contradiction. How can you cheer love and hate at the same time? How can you worship Jesus and cheer such a base and gross description of other human beings, people who are created in the image of God?

My reaction was different. Finally, I thought, curious Americans who tuned in got to see MAGA theology more completely — and what they witnessed was the best and worst of MAGA Christianity.

…

The objection to Trump isn’t so much that he’s aggressive — Abraham Lincoln was aggressive against the Confederacy, just as Franklin D. Roosevelt was aggressive against the Axis powers — but that he’s malicious and unjust. And when Trump says that he hates his political enemies, it’s a confession that he’s governing through his basest desires.

David French

The attack on free speech

Our fundamental bargain

Every generation of Americans must come to terms with the fundamental bargain of free speech: we agree that we won’t use the mechanism of the state to punish speech we don’t like and will talk back instead … Every generation has to accept the deal that they’re going to refrain from censorship to protect their own right to speak. Plenty of us still don’t accept that bargain, but if a critical mass of people don’t accept it, then it stops working. Free speech is Tinker Bell; if enough kids don’t clap, she dies. Or as Learned Hand put it more poetically: “liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it.”

Popehat

That was then, this is then plus a few months and an opening to act more fashy

Then there’s the Big Guy. In his inauguration speech this year: “I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America. Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents.” Trump now: “The [networks] give me only bad publicity, press. I mean, they’re getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away.” And this: “That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!!”

Andrew Sullivan.

Plutocrats in the C-Suite

One of the lesser-noted disturbing developments (because of all the higher-profile more “urgent” news) is the takeover of a vast swath of our media by family of billionaire Trump supporter Larry Ellison.

As Thomas Edsall notes in the linked article, this sort of thing is one of the ways Hungary’s Viktor Orbán built an illiberal democracy. They still have elections; they still have free speech; but anti-Orbán speech faces hurdles because Hungarian media are controlled by Orbán supporters.

Donald Trump is a much nastier man than Viktor Orbán. His instincts, unchecked by Congress as they are, are likely to take us to a place that makes Hungary look like paradise.

Chew on this

[T]he most trenchant point about the Kimmel saga was made by civil-rights lawyer Matthew Segal. “In my opinion, when companies or institutions cave to Trump despite the law being on their side, they are not misunderstanding the law,” he wrote. “They are making educated guesses that the U.S. is heading in a direction where, in practice, the law won’t matter.”

…

Go to court, one might say. Okay—but court is expensive, takes a long time, and risks winning the battle but losing the war. That’s Segal’s point: Even if Disney had prevailed in a legal battle with the FCC, our vindictive president would have looked for other levers of federal power to pull to damage the company. Keeping Jimmy Kimmel on the air and then turning around to find that the FCC has canceled your multibillion-dollar merger out of spite is the definition of a pyrrhic victory.

Nick Catoggio. I can’t say that’s entirely wrong, but this may be a better explanation. As to Jimmy Kimmel in particular, this too is relevant:

If CBS and ABC, two networks that have lately bowed to the president, gave half a hoot, they would easily have prevailed on First Amendment grounds if they put up a fight.

That is, if they prized their network TV businesses sufficiently as businesses, as opportunities to display stewardship, or even as instruments of influence. But they don’t.

Their network news and late-night talk shows are money-losing artifacts of an industry model their parent companies have no intention of investing in or taking risks for.

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Miscellany

A well/ill (choose one) founded fear of persecution

Hannah Kreager, a “trans woman,” fled Tucson for Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and promptly filed for asylum. Kreager had discerned which way the wind was blowing, and it was not propitious:

“If this had been just George Bush or some run-of-the-mill Republican president, I wouldn’t have left,” Kreager said. “I’d have stayed, written to my legislators, and protested because that’s what you do in a democracy. But this feels like an authoritarian regime.”

Rupa Subramanya, The Americans Seeking Refuge from Trump in Canada.

I don’t think Donald Trump feels any personal animus against transgender people, but he knows that quite a few in his base do feel such animus, and he panders to them periodically. Moreover, he is busily demolishing the rule of law in America, and one doesn’t know where he’ll turn next. I can’t say a fear of persecution is less than well-founded, although the Canadian government may, for diplomatic reasons, have trouble admitting that.

Trump lied, children died

The Trump administration has claimed that no one has died because of its cuts to humanitarian aid, and it is now trying to cancel an additional $4.9 billion in aid that Congress already approved. Yet what I find here in desperate villages in southwestern Uganda is that not only are aid cuts killing children every day, but that the death toll is accelerating.

Stockpiles of food and medicine are running out here. Village health workers who used to provide inexpensive preventive care have been laid off. Public health initiatives like deworming and vitamin A distribution have collapsed. Immunizations are being missed. Contraception is harder to get. Ordinary people are growing weaker, hungrier and more fragile. So as months pass, the crisis is not easing but growing increasingly lethal — and because children are particularly vulnerable, they are often the first to starve and the first to die.

It’s difficult to know how many children are dying worldwide as a result of the Trump aid cuts, but credible estimates by experts suggest that the child death toll may be in the hundreds of thousands this year alone — and likely an even higher number next year. In short, President Trump’s cuts appear to be by far the most lethal policy step he has taken.

…

Let me introduce Trump to the mothers of children that his cost-cutting has killed.

Nicholas Kristoff (Gift Link)

We are all gatekeepers now.

Comparing the top-down “gatekeeper” suppression of the full Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination to the easy access to videos of Charlie Kirk’s assassination:

The gatekeepers are long gone and will never return, but we can’t live as a healthy society without them. We prove this every day.

So you have to be the gatekeeper for your family. You have to be the gatekeeper for yourself. You have to hit delete as the stain tries constantly to creep in, you have to look away and guide others to look away. The school has to be a gatekeeper (removing smartphones from class is a gatekeeping action).

We are all gatekeepers now.

Peggy Noonan.

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.

[A] critical mass of the American people … no longer want[s] to govern themselves, … are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

Nick Catoggio