July 10, 2026

Trump

Election tampering

It seems to me that the most sinister and calculated thing Trump is doing this time around is trying to override the constitutional control of elections by the states. I have little doubt that he’s trying to wring out more wins for MAGA candidates, starting this Fall and continuing to 2028.

But I hadn’t seen much evidence that there were court challenges or any other opposition to such dubious efforts.

Now I’ve see that there is opposition and it’s largely successful.

Because he’s a stupid and impetuous man 99% of the time, Trump is getting some pushback from Republicans, especially in the Senate, at least partly on grounds that Trump’s shenanigans might actually suppress Republican voters as much or more than Democrats. The SAVE Act just may not make it across the finish line (the “prediction markets” say it won’t) despite Trump flogging Congress to get it there.
I don’t know where the FBI got authority to impound anyone’s voting records, but the federal courts are (now?) virtually unanimous in knocking down such efforts — including federal courts presided over by Trump appointees.

I’m troubled by legal whores in the administration (e.g., John Eastman), but the larger story has been one of the legal profession’s steadfastness:

Heavy downpours, not just scattered showers, of principled resignations from the Department of Justice and U.S. Attorneys’ offices, whenever Trump demanded something unethical. Trump has has to staff up with unprincipled Chuds who make fools of themselves — and of him — in court.
Judges insisting on being impartial and following the law despite appointment by Trump.

It makes me proud of my former profession and delighted that we have a judiciary, unlike Congress, that’s still functioning.

“Sports Diplomacy”

The American government is giving its imprimatur — perhaps I should say lending its muscle — to the international expansion of human cockfighting. An earlier generation had the Marshall Plan. Ours has mixed martial arts.

The administration is calling the arrangement “sports diplomacy,” and there are images of Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Dana White, U.F.C.’s chief executive officer, holding up a memorandum of understanding at the State Department on June 11. They’re smiling, as if they accomplished something important. As if there were a global barbarism deficit and the United States is nobly stepping up to fill the void. As if an important emblem of human civilization and expression of human culture will finally get the recognition it deserves. As if the torch of liberty can now shine brighter than ever, because it will be carried by warriors of such vision and valor that one of them, upon winning his South Lawn brawl, used his moment at the mic to crow a cuckoo credo: “Michelle Obama is a man!”

…

I cringe at our government’s advancement of such savagery while we’re retreating from the kinds of engagements that lessen hardship and relieve misery.

Frank Bruni. I cringe, too.

The Crypto President

Our Crypto President is fighting for the right of Americans to piss their retirement accounts away on stuff like, well, crypto:

Most Americans don’t look to their 401(k) plans for excitement or experimentation, instead relying on the promise that steady saving and sober planning will guarantee security in their golden years. The Trump administration wants to transform the well-worn patterns of retirement investing. To do so, it is moving to weaken the main protection workers have over their retirement money. The man in charge of the regulatory rollback is an industry insider whose former clients are among the large companies likely to benefit from his plan. Since taking office last year, President Donald Trump has loudly called for plans to include less-regulated — and often risky — investments like private equity and cryptocurrency. To achieve that goal, the administration is softening one of the strongest legal protections American workers have: the right to hold an employer accountable when retirement savings are mishandled. The change is designed to give employers cover if their workers’ 401(k)s are deflated by expensive, opaque or unproven investments. Backing this push are Wall Street firms, which want a bigger piece of the $10 trillion in America’s 401(k) plans, and America’s largest employers, who want to avoid class-action lawsuits from their employees. They have a powerful ally in Trump’s pick to lead the effort at the Department of Labor: Daniel Aronowitz, who previously ran a firm that helped large companies protect themselves against worker lawsuits. Now Aronowitz is the one driving changes to the rules those same companies play by. (Source: propublica.org)

John Ellis News Items. I’m glad to see this mentioned, but I wish that it was more prominent than ProPublica and the world’s greatest newsletter. This is the risk I immediately saw when Trump touted allowing private equity and cryptocurrency in retirement plans, though it gets a little further into the weeds than I did since I’m no expert on retirement plan law.

Mustafa Mond knew the score

I’m a little bit surprised that I haven’t heard people talking about how artificial intelligence will give us a four day work week. That’s the kind of prattle that usually accompanies labor-saving innovations.

But it’s just as well that people haven’t been saying that, because it isn’t going to happen this time just like it hasn’t happened the other times. Not in the USA anyway. Maybe in Europe, where they tend to see living as worthier than ever-rising “standard of living.”

The Inventions Office is stuffed with plans for labour-saving processes. Thousands of them.” Mustapha Mond made a lavish gesture. “And why don’t we put them into execution? For the sake of the labourers; it would be sheer cruelty to afflict them with excessive leisure.

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World.

Cicero Society

The occasion was the monthly meeting of the Cicero Society, a parliamentary debating club committed, according to its terse website, to “developing excellence, preserving the Western intellectual tradition, and forming young leaders” — which in Washington is usually code for conservative job placement.

…

The evening’s debate was “Is Christianity Conservative?” I assumed the answer would be “Of course it is.” Conservatism is the political instinct that guards “permanent things” against the progressive urge to remake the world from scratch, to paraphrase one debater. But after several hours, the opposition carried the night with a different argument: Until Christian beliefs are fully enshrined in public policy, Christians will need to be radicals. One of the speakers on the winning side put the matter pithily: “Christian ends sometimes require progressive means.” If the existing order is decadent, corrupt, or hostile to Christian life, then conserving it is no virtue.

…

According to the Catholic writer and Vance-whisperer Sohrab Ahmari, Evangelical Protestantism may be more powerful as a mass political force, but Catholicism has “a deep theory of the world.”

Nate Weisberg, The Young Catholic Elite Poised to Take Over MAGA

I have never heard of the Cicero Society before. Although I care for the irreligious right even less, I’ll pass on Catholic Integralism’s right as well. I’m not yet to the point of choosing lesser evils with enthusiasm.

Genealogy by Bill of Sale

Carolyn Haliburton Carter, a descendant of slaves and a professional genealogist, tells of meeting with descendants of the people who had owned her ancestors, still living on the plantation where her family was enslaved:

What was clear is that absence exists on both sides of enslavement. My family inherited silence where records should have been. Their family inherited stories shaped by omission. Neither lineage was whole.

Scripture tells us that truth sets people free – but it does not promise comfort in the telling. Witness, too, is costly. But it remains the only ground on which reconciliation can stand.

I wanted them to know that I had no animosity towards them. I was grateful for the opportunity, and felt compelled to say aloud what seemed necessary: “We cannot change the past, and neither you nor I were there, but we can tell the truth about it – for the future.”

Carolyn Haliburton Carter,The Price of a Name. That’s the kind of article I really value at Plough.

Shorts

Sonofagun! It’s true. I configured a 16” MacBook Pro with everything, and everything super-sized, and it priced out at $10,149.00! AI farms are buying so many processors and memory chips (terminology may be outdated) that the price is soaring and Apple has raised prices accordingly.
[A] nation united in pabulum is better than one divided into two tribal camps waging an “uncivil war” against each other about everything. (Andrew Sullivan, Biden’s Culture War Aggression)
A rule of good manners, perhaps good morals: those with options should not criticize those without them. (@jabel on micro.blog)
In 1534, papal authority was formally repudiated by act of parliament. Henry was declared ‘the only supreme head on Earth of the Church of England’. Anyone who disputed his right to this title was guilty of capital treason. (Tom Holland, Dominion)
In a policy analysis on the Brookings Institution’s website, Fiona Hill contrasted two world leaders: “Putin believes that things will go wrong in military and other operations — based on his own experience in the security services — but he also believes he will always find a way to fix them. Trump believes nothing will go wrong, and if it does, someone else is to blame.” (Via Frank Bruni)
[I]n The Atlantic, Alexandra Petri sought a final word on those iconically foul waters, which may bear some blame for a fowl fatality: “The Reflecting Pool is a metaphor so perfect, it feels almost valedictory, as though symbolism as a whole gave up and decided to sign off. On its way out, it killed a duck.” (Via Frank Bruni)
Block that metaphor! Of Graham Platner: “The red flag that led to his implosion was hiding in plain sight.” (Emma Tucker at the Wall Street Journal)
“Synergies is Latin for layoffs.” (Scott Galloway H/T John Ellis)
Communism is a system of government in which the ruling party controls major investment decisions while hoarding wealth for itself and suppressing all opposition. / Nevertheless, Donald Trump professes to dislike it. (Jonathan Chait)

Elsewhere in Tipsyworld

Thursday Potpourri

We continue murdering furriners

Acting on orders from President Donald Trump, the U.S. military has murdered Héctor Rusthenford Guerrero Flores, popularly known as Niño Guerrero, a Venezuelan drug trafficker and leader of the Tren de Aragua crime syndicate.

This was—and ought to be treated as—a straightforwardly criminal act on the part of the American president and those who have carried out his illegal orders … Guerrero Flores may very well be everything the Trump administration says he is and more—though under the Trump administration the word of the White House is no more reliable than the word of a South American drug dealer—but, even if that were the case, there is no legal authorization for the preemptive extrajudicial killing of crime suspects. …

Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus was known by his childhood nickname, “Caligula,” meaning “little boot,” because as a child he liked to play dress-up and pretend to be a soldier. Trump has a similar puerile fondness for military pomp and martial posturing—and, more to the point, his pretensions include both the divine and the monarchical. And, deepening the unfortunate trend originating with earlier presidents, he has leaned into the constitutionally undefined notion of the president as “commander in chief,” or, as the Romans would have put it, imperator.

Which is to say: This is not really about Niño Guerrero. This is about the United States of America, what kind of government we mean to have, and what kind of nation we mean to be. The question is not: “What would we do if faced with a lawless president who is willing to carry out crimes up to and including murder and who attempts to stay in office when voted out?” The question is: “Now that we have a lawless president who is willing to carry out crimes up to and including murder and who already has once attempted to stay in office when voted out, what are we going to do?”

I suppose we could sit around and wait for the great patriots and constitutionalists such as Sen. Ted Cruz to rediscover their manhood, but that is a long wait for a train that ain’t coming.

Kevin D. Williamson, We Should Probably Stop Murdering People (bold added)

Behind the scenes of the Iran deal

Kushner and Witkoff have worked through an extraordinary mediator, Ali Al Thawadi, minister of strategic affairs in the office of Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, the widely respected prime minister of Qatar. Al Thawadi has brought a rare understanding of the Middle East and its culture. He has traveled to Tehran, by one count, four times in the past 10 days to nail down the peace framework. Al Thawadi, though almost unknown to the general public, was a key emissary in the Gaza peace talks, on Venezuela, and a half-dozen other projects of the Trump White House. He also worked on mediation efforts with the Biden administration.

“The main message we need to keep in mind is that we have a country that has been isolated from the world for the past 47 years, and individuals that literally don’t have any communication outside of their circle,” a source close to the mediation team explained. “We need to show them that there is a much bigger world, and they could be accepted in it.”

David Ignatius, Inside the Iran deal: Zigzag bargaining and a final framework.

This makes me more hopeful that there’s a real, meaningful deal, though I still say Trump left us weaker, Iran stronger, in the long run. I should always read Ignatius.

“Demotic spirit”?

The conservative writer Marc Thiessen tried to depict Trump’s lurid festival [the UFC fights for his birthday] as a sign of his demotic spirit, opening the White House to the sort of people who go to motocross rallies and monster truck shows. “If you’re offended by that, you may be an elitist snob,” he wrote. Put aside, for a moment, the fact that Thiessen once clucked that Barack Obama was failing to maintain “presidential dignity.” By this standard — that U.F.C. brawls, which John McCain once called “human cockfighting,” belong in the White House because lots of Americans like them — there can be no standards. Like Ultimate Fighting, porn is extremely popular, but I somehow doubt Thiessen would defend a Democratic president who invited a bunch of OnlyFans creators to the Oval Office while he was losing a war.

Michelle Goldberg

Today’s Tocqueville

Quotidian American life has suddenly been made fresh when seen through a visitor’s eyes.

Sometimes it takes a foreign observer to remind Americans of the bounties and blessings they too often take for granted. The gold standard for such observations came nearly two centuries ago, in the 1830s, when the French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville toured the young republic and located its genius in ordinary institutions: township meetings, jury duty and local newspapers.

As the nation’s semiquincentennial approaches, Tocqueville’s reflections on America’s frontier spirit are particularly resonant: “America is a land of wonders, in which everything is in constant motion and every change seems an improvement … No natural boundary seems to be set to the efforts of man; and in his eyes what is not yet done is only what he has not yet attempted to do.”

Now America has Freddy from Germany [a visitor drawn by the World Cup], and while his prose can’t keep up with Alexis’s, his marveling at what he finds is no less heartening. For the better part of a decade, Americans have been instructed by their politics and their social media feeds that their country is something to apologize for, that it is a nation in decline. It doesn’t feel like decline when you readily encounter free refills and ice at fast-food restaurants, travel on a 46,876-mile interstate highway system with no border checks, visit the birthplaces of the blues, jazz, country and hip-hop, and patronize a diner chain so reliable that the federal government monitors natural disasters by whether its restaurants are still open (yes, Freddy does love a Waffle House).

Danielle Shapiro, Freddy the viral German soccer fan is bringing what America needed (gift link)

America’s Industrial Might

By the end of the first year of American involvement in the war, American arms production had risen to the same level as that of Germany, Italy, and Japan put together. By 1944, it was double that amount. By the end of the war, the United States had turned out two-thirds of all the military equipment used by the Allies combined: a staggering 280,000 warplanes, 100,000 armored cars, 86,000 tanks, 8,800 naval ships, 2.6 million machine guns, 650,000 artillery pieces, millions of tons of ordnance, and 41 billion rounds of ammunition. Accomplishing all this, while putting into uniform 11 million soldiers, 4 million sailors, 700,000 marines, and 240,000 coast guardsmen, meant drawing into the industrial workforce a great many women and minorities, on an even greater scale than occurred in World War I. Depression-era unemployment rates were now a distant memory, as the factories of the nation whirred with activity.

Wilfred McClay, Land of Hope.

All of this may well be true, but I can’t let pass any hint that the U.S. uniquely defeated the Nazis — not after reading Anthony Beever, Stalingrad, I can’t.

Shorts

In The Times, Nitsuh Abebe marveled at the marketing behind “PepsiCo’s denuded ‘Simply NKD’ Cheetos and Doritos, ‘now reimagined without any colors or artificial flavors’ — as if freshly picked from the Dorito bush and crisped in an elderly doritero’s brick oven.” (Via Frank Bruni)
It makes me ill that the Mavs had Jalen Brunson AND Luke. (An anonymous Dallas-area resident, to whom I’m related by blood and a shared bedroom with for much of our childhood.)
Andrew Jackson’s tyrannical instincts threatened the wholesome freedom of the American experiment. (Mark A. Noll, America’s God). (And to which former President is Trump oftenest linked?)
Only the hackiest screenwriter imaginable would script America’s decline this way.(Michelle Goldberg on the White House’s human cockfight in celebration of Trump’s 80th birthday.)
Ortega was right when he said that in the old societies people had customs, proverbs, stories, and sayings; today they have opinions, which they quite sincerely believe to be their own. What they do not know, however, is that they owe these opinions to the ideology that surrounds them, not to their independent intellectual efforts. (Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy)
[T]he outcome of war rarely rests on a tally of relative strength. War is a contest of wills. And in that contest, the hard men of Tehran appear to have scored a decisive victory over the vain man of Washington … Tehran took the measure of Trump’s courage. What it found was a bone spur. (Bret Stephens)
Anthropic sees itself as the A.I. company that’s most attuned to safety issues and eager for democratic oversight, but each move from the Trump administration has prompted the company to shout, “No, not like that!” (Ross Douthat)
If you insist on working with the poor, if this is your vocation, then at least work among the poor who can tell you to go to hell. (L.M. Sacasas)

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.

Morose thoughts at the Semiquincentennial

A note from the curator

I’m not feeling much joy as America’s semiquincentennial approaches, and that’s written all over this post (after this little apologetic). If you’re sick of politics or already feeling deeply depressed, skip it.

I’m on a social medium (I refuse to abuse the plural “media”) with an astonishing number of people, many of them decades younger than me, who manage, without coming across as idiots (au contraire: I’m struck by how many there make me feel unobservant and thick-skulled about what I do observe), to focus on positive, and personal, and local things. Kudos to its designer, who consciously designed it that way (I’m not sure how, except that one never knows how many people follow him or her, and there are no buttons to simply “like” a post).

I am blessed to be tolerated by that community because I seem to share a temperamental makeup with my most beloved uncle, who was denied ordination by the Presbyterian Church in America because he was “contentious.”

I really don’t think politics is the most important thing in the world, though I may be in this post revealing a preference to the contrary. I suspect that what’s bugging me, especially for the next few months, is the state of the American nation especially at 250. I came of age in the 60s, opposed the Vietnam War, and have never since been a jingoist.

But I apparently thought we were better than this. It’s rough learning how wrong I can be (along with unobservant and thick-skulled). I guess the aphorism “we get the leadership we deserve” was, all along, far truer than I gave it credit for.

Tomorrow’s post will be, as has become my Sunday custom, as politics-free as possible.

MAGA

White Trash Nation

But, in that moment, in the weird little interstice between the front yards of Eisenhower-era brick ranch houses built close enough together that you’d get a weird echo if you raised your voice while standing between them, something seems to have occurred to her. And she stopped, and turned, and fought, and, to her own surprise, even more than anybody else’s, beat the crap out of her second husband, there in the front yard as the neighbors popped their heads up out of their holes, prairie dog–style, to see what it was that family was up to now. Roy was on the ground by the end. I was pleased by the outcome, though I cannot say I was exactly proud of the scene.

Of course we had fights in the front yard—some of them incidents of domestic violence, some of them merely recreational. In almost exactly the same spot, our neighbor’s older son, who was younger than me and who had finally had enough of being bullied by my older brother, Darrell, gave him a richly deserved beating, taking a fence picket full of rusty nails to his ribs, which necessitated a tetanus shot and earned me a stern lecture for having advised the little boy on how best to deal with a remorseless bully. (It was excellent advice: Darrell never bothered him again. But I have spent a fair bit of my career getting in trouble for offering good advice.) In sixth grade, I fought another kid in the front yard of a different house on the same street (we had moved two doors down) for no other reason than that we were the two biggest kids in the class and somebody (I don’t know who) thought it was a good idea, maybe even necessary, that we should have a fight.

…

When the Trump administration announced that it was staging a UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House, I knew what I was seeing. It is as familiar to me as the taste of canned Ranch Style Beans on cornbread or the smell of cigarette smoke soaking into Dacron-upholstered office furniture and slick tallowy well-yellowed linoleum in the grim waiting rooms outside those weepy Al-Anon meetings my mother dragged me to for a while because she couldn’t afford a babysitter. I know my people. My people know what they like. And they will have what they like even if it harelips the pope—especially if it harelips the pope.

It took 250 years, but you got here. All the way down here. From Greatest Generation to White Trash Nation in the space of one lifetime.

Welcome to my world, America.

Kevin D. Williamson, Of Course We’re Fighting on the Lawn.

Sailing the ship of Theseus to Jonestown

Some might find John Cornyn’s affirmation of partisan devotion amid intense humiliation by his party affecting. I find it pitiful.

He’s a voyager on a ship of Theseus. The modern Republican Party bears the same name as the vessel Cornyn boarded decades ago, but nearly all of its components—including the senator himself as of last night—have been replaced. Morally and ideologically, the ship must be unrecognizable to a crewman like him who enlisted to join the small-government “character counts” Reaganite armada.

Now that he’s been fired, why doesn’t he disembark already, for cripes’ sake?

…

Regular readers know my theory about why Republican voters are suddenly hellbent on purging incumbents in primaries: They’re in their Jonestown phase. Disappointed in Trump’s economic failures yet psychologically unable to hold him (or themselves) accountable, they’re coping by turning more radically cultish and flogging heretics like Cornyn, Thomas Massie, and Bill Cassidy instead.

Surely things in America will improve if the president faces even less resistance inside the GOP.

Nick Catoggio

I quote Catoggio a lot, because he writes colorfully and almost always is directionally correct.

This “ship of Theseus” metaphor is intriguing, but probably doesn’t go far enough: might we all, Democrats, Republicans, independents, and third-party cranks, be sailing on the ship of Theseus? The United States of America is a whole lot different, with a lot of replacement parts, than the America of my birth year.

Atheist Christmas

[Context: Trump’s Great American State Fair Is Running Out of Acts]

The engine of civic apathy is believing that America is still America and always will be, no matter how Americans or their government behave.

That just ain’t so, unless you also believe that Milli Vanilli is still Milli Vanilli as long as whoever’s on stage insists on calling themselves that.

This year of all years, it feels like a cosmic joke that Americans will mark a major anniversary of declaring their independence from monarchy. Many of us quite like having a monarch, we’ve discovered, provided that he’s on our side. But vestigial respect for the Founders will oblige us to trudge out to parades and whatnot on the Fourth of July and pretend that we’re celebrating what America is, not what it was.

We’re on a ship of Theseus whose most essential components we chose, needlessly, to replace. The most dignified thing we could do at this point is acknowledge that instead of retreating into patriotic delusions. And in fairness, many of us have: It’s not a coincidence that pride in being American hit a record low during year one of postliberalism’s return to power.

…

Trump-sanctioned “Freedom 250” events are the civic version of an atheist Christmas.

Nick Catoggio, in a separate column.

The Opposition

It’s not just MAGA that contributes to my Jeremiad.

Dr. Biden’s Book

Two things revealed this week how still hopelessly out-of-touch many Dems still are. Dr Jill Biden — you know she’s a doctor, right? — Dr Jill Biden decided that it was time to bring out a memoir. That fathomless Biden vanity strikes again. In a sane world, both Joe and Dr Jill Biden would never show themselves in public again. They did more to re-elect Donald Trump than anyone else — by their utter selfishness, power-lust, and Trump-level gaslighting about Joe’s health.

No one will buy that book, or should. We know it’s a pack of self-serving lies even before we open it up. Dr Jill actually thought she could get away with saying that on that fateful debate night, she thought her husband was “having a stroke.” Seriously. And yet everything we saw with our own eyes that night instantly disproves it. FFS.

She was, of course, also lying in a different way that evening as well. Of course she knew her husband was incapable of being president for another four years. Of course she knew he had had a predictable shambles of a performance. But she wanted to stay in power, with all its privileges, and so lied her ass off, excoriated honest people, and dug in, verging on senior abuse, ensuring the Dems had no time or space to find a successor who didn’t suck as bad as Harris. Hence Trump. And now Jill’s the victim?

Andrew Sullivan

Tit-for-Tat

[L]ess than six months out from the 2026 midterm elections, I think you’d need to be blind not to have noticed that Democratic voters (far more so than Democratic officeholders) have been undergoing their own shifts. They’re frustrated, angry, and appalled—about pretty much everything the second Trump administration is doing, and about how little the Democratic establishment can do to stop it. And that frustration, anger, and disgust is translating into a willingness, and even an eagerness, to go toe-to-toe with the Trumpified GOP on political tactics.

…

I don’t care if it “works,” in the sense of getting the angry Democratic base revved up so its members go vote en masse and thereby kick the Republicans from power. That would be good, in the short term. But allow me to make a rather blunt prediction: A political system in which disputes are adjudicated at the level of “the Democratic Senate candidate (who is clearly not trans) is trans” and “shut up you ugly fuck” will not remain a free and democratic system for long.

…

It may feel good to scream vulgar insults in the face of your opponent. But it will not feel good to live in a country in which people regularly scream insults into the faces of their opponents. It will feel like what it will be—and already to a considerable extent it is—which is living in a country slouching toward some unstable blend of dysfunction and dictatorship.

Damon Linker, The Bottomless Pit Beneath Our Feet

Miscellany

I am not (entirely) immune

I was furious at the Texas GOP Thursday night for starting in on James Talarico as a “gay vegan pagan.” Then Friday morning I started smirkily devouring this.

(I give myself partial credit for pulling myself up short when I saw the parallel.)

Shorts

[Utterly corrupt Texas Senate primary winner Ken] Paxton’s unfortunate ascent in state politics is a good reminder of why parties tend to become dangerous to themselves when they go for years without facing meaningful political opposition from the other party. (Bret Stephens)
[Name omitted (because it’s a distraction from my point) is] one of these internet-era candidates surfing big swells of rancor. Big swells of rancor are not serving America well. You could even say they’re capsizing it. (Frank Bruni)
You’re free to belong to a ruthlessly tribal movement that aims to dominate and punish rival tribes, but in that case don’t demand that everyone “come together” for a party hosted by the tribal chieftain so that he isn’t embarrassed by poor turnout. That invitation will be treated with precisely the amount of respect it deserves. (Nick Catoggio)

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

Our (mumble-mumble) anniversary

Ode to Miller Lite

Let’s start on two Lite notes.

First, it has been an impossibly long time since the missus and I tied the knot, and it shows no signs of slipping. Though I did discover this morning that poetry I consider brilliantly realistic about our human foibles can strike her as depressing.

Second:

Miller Lite is not a great beer. It’s not even an okay beer. Miller Lite is a bad beer but an incredible beverage. It is neither complicated nor offensive, and it derives its magic from this bland alchemy, this delicate equipoise of fizzy nothingness. Miller Lite does not demand your attention. It does not slap you in the face with flavor; in fact, you’d be hard-pressed to identify any flavor at all. Gun to my head, I’d say it vaguely recalls … sandwich bread? Frozen corn? Off-brand Cheerios, maybe? The tasting notes provided by the Miller Brewing Company include such descriptors as “light to medium body,” “clean,” and “crisp,” all of which are not tastes but textures, as if the most flattering thing the manufacturer has to say about its own beer is that “you will notice it in your mouth.” A review on the brew-rating website Beeradvocate notes that Miller “is a beer best observed in bunches”—a beverage whose most favorable quality is quantity.

This is a beer that provides you with absolutely nothing to think about. It offers a break from the quest to find novel gustatory experience that has come to substitute for culture among much of the American professional class. To drink Miller Lite is to declare that you are a well-adjusted adult—that you do not require excitement at every juncture, that you are capable of sitting with your thoughts, that you have the patience and strength of character to build a buzz slowly.

Tyler Austin Harper, The Bad Beer That’s an Incredible Beverage. I just liked Harper’s deft touch. The negligible amount of beer I drink is invariably the kind that demands your attention.

Digital sackcloth and ashes

I well remember the magnificent tall ships sailing into New York Harbor for America’s bicentennial, which the wife and I watched on a little black & white TV in our apartment in Watonga, OK, with a four-month-old baby nearby.

For the 250th, we’re getting UFC on the White House lawn. I expect to avert my eyes, or blog about it again (based on news reports, not firsthand observation) — digital sackcloth and ashes.

I heard this week about a mature American couple that is expatriating without expectation of return — to the People’s Republic of China, which they have visited often. (Full disclosure: the wife is Chinese, and from a wealthy family, so there’s that.)

I daydream of expatriating (today’s post reflects the dream at several points), but for a number of reasons I know it won’t happen unless I literally must flee as a refugee. I’m having a very hard time internalizing the new American reality, so diminished from what appeared to be true for most of my life.

Would that The Donald had forced himself on us, as he has forced himself on women in the past. But no, 77 million of my countrymen voted for him. By the rules of the game, he owns us fair and square.

Still timely

From the time before Il Duce returned to the Oval Office:

I worry about my country. I wish my fellow Democrats were not so abysmally naïve about the world as so many of us are. I wish the country were united behind our founding principles, but I don’t know that we are. I have a feeling that if Putin launched missiles that wiped out the blue states, Fox America would be happy to cut a deal with him.

Garrison Keillor, Sitting Scared in Church, Thinking About Evil

You could see it coming from 15 months away

No politician in the primary era has been as aggressive as Trump has in boosting electoral challenges to members of his party who buck him. Until 2016, it would have been regarded as somewhere between a faux pas and downright reckless for a sitting president to weaken a congressional incumbent by calling for his or her ouster in a primary. Trump does it regularly now, sometimes out of petty revenge.

That’s why Bill Cassidy went wobbly on Gabbard, Kennedy, and (soon) Patel, of course. He’s up for reelection next year, has drawn a serious primary challenger, and has two strikes against him already by dint of having voted to convict Trump in 2021. Had he opposed one of the president’s Cabinet nominees, any slim chance of him receiving Trump’s endorsement—and salvaging his career—would have evaporated. Cassidy will spend the rest of his life receiving sporadic death threats from populist Republicans either as a sitting senator or as a private citizen; when you frame the choice before him on Trump’s nominees that way, is it any is it any wonder that he chose the way he did?

Nick Catoggio, The Culture of Fear, February, 2025.

So now Cassidy, defeated in his primary by Trump’s toady, gets to endure death threats as a private citizen, because MAGA doesn’t forget.

I’m troubled at the outbursts of violence ~~from the left~~ toward Trump and the Right, but (perhaps it’s the way news gets covered) I fear more the menace of MAGA, from whose hands guns, and from whose lips death threats, are never far.

Speaking of retribution

So Trump has knocked off two, and in a few days probably will have bagged a third, Republican Senators in retributive primary challenges.

So now that they’re lame ducks, just how compliant will they be with his will? This much, I hope.

[N.B.: Trump did indeed bag his third. May they team up and bedevil him through the rest of their terms.]

Farewell, Party; Hello Tribe

Something I hadn’t really noticed is the death of political parties.

Oh, we still have “Republicans” and “Democrats,” but those are names of opposing tribes now, not actual parties.

Principal proof: Any sleazy real estate developer from Queens can run for President as a Republican in primary elections, regardless of his past positions, his [how many?] cameos in porn flicks, his divorces, his misogyny. Heck, the Republicans didn’t even bother with a platform one quadrennium: Whatever The Donald wants today is what we want.

It hasn’t happened on the D side yet, unless you count Fetterman or Platner — neither one a clear R, but sure a poor fit as Deez.

Must we always overshoot?

A nice symbol of this difficulty in the policy of even “just” nations is the ironic embarrassment in which the victorious democracies became involved in their program of “demilitarizing” the vanquished “militaristic” nations. In Japan they encouraged a ridiculous article in the new constitution which committed the nation to a perpetual pacifist defenselessness. In less than half a decade they were forced to ask their “demilitarized” former foes to rearm, and become allies in a common defense against a new foe, who had recently been their victorious ally.

Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History.

And as long as we’re on Niebuhr:

The fact that the European nations, more accustomed to the tragic vicissitudes of history, still have a measure of misgiving about our leadership in the world community is due to their fear that our “technocratic” tendency to equate the mastery of nature with the mastery of history could tempt us to lose patience with the tortuous course of history.

Id.

Institutions versus platforms

By 2020, people had stopped seeing institutions as places they entered to be morally formed, Levin argued. Instead, they see institutions as stages on which they can perform, can display their splendid selves. People run for Congress not so they can legislate, but so they can get on TV. People work in companies so they can build their personal brand. The result is a world in which institutions not only fail to serve their social function and keep us safe, they also fail to form trustworthy people. The rot in our structures spreads to a rot in ourselves.

David Brooks, America Is Having a Moral Convulsion

The French Table

A dinner here does not oppress one. The wine neither intoxicates nor heats, and the frame of mind and body, in which one is left, is precisely that best suited to intellectual and social pleasures. I make no doubt that one of the chief causes of the French being so agreeable as companions is, in a considerable degree, owing to the admirable qualities of their table. A national character may emanate from a kitchen. Roast beef, bacon, pudding, and beer and port, will make a different man in time from Château Margaux, côtelettes, consommés and soufflés. The very name vol-au-vent is enough to make one walk on air!

David McCullough, The Greater Journey, quoting James Fenimore Cooper.

Here’s Putin’s mindset: We’re the Third Rome

I debated whether this should be in Sunday’s faith-focused post, but I think it belongs here as a glimpse into how the Russian state got so thick with the Russian Orthodox Patriarch (leading to things like the Patriarch scandalously backing the war on Ukraine):

After the fall of Constantinople, an obscure monk named Filofey wrote a treatise arguing that the Greeks had been conquered because they were apostate. Three Romes now marked the history of Christendom, he claimed: the first had fallen away in 1054 [i.e., the Great Schism – Tipsy]; the second had done so in 1439 [i.e., the Council of Ferrara-Florence]; and the third, Moscow, would and could never fall until the end of time. This Third Rome doctrine, as it came to be known, was never officially endorsed. But it did illustrate the isolated mentality of Russia as she entered the sixteenth century.

John Strickland, The Age of Division

CCAI

Remember CCM? Well now we have CCAI, Contemporary Christian Artificial Intelligence, or as they seem to prefer, Gloo.

It’s “Values-Aligned AI for Faith & Ministry.”

Ummmm … Whatever.

Shorts

Evangelicals have not promoted a faith of word and sacrament, but one of word preached, word studied, and word shared. (Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind)
By economic standards the country gets richer and richer. By death-accounting standards the nation goes on winning its war forever. And by school standards the population becomes increasingly educated. (Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society)
Evil does not want to be tolerated. It needs to be vindicated. It demands to be seen as right. (Charles J. Chaput, Strangers in a Strange Land)
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)
States, particularly liberal democracies, are heavily dependent on wars for moral coherence. (Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens)
J.D. Vance is more than content to be in harness, happier than a dung beetle at Trump’s all-you-can-eat raw-sewage buffet. (Kevin D. Williamson, who called Vance “coprophagic” in his preceding column. Is there a theme emerging?)
Trump is, indeed, dedicated to running the government like a business—la Cosa Nostra. (Kevin D. Williamson)
In order to avoid believing in just one God we are now asked to believe in an infinite number of universes, all of them unobservable just because they are not part of ours. The principle of inference seems to be not Occam’s Razor but Occam’s Beard: “Multiply entities unnecessarily.” (J Budziszewski, What We Can’t Not Know)
I love my country, but I fit [in Europe]. In part it’s because I love history so much, and Europe has history like Idaho has potatoes. (Rod Dreher)
This takes us to what I think is the most important lesson my time in Europe taught me. It deepened my tragic sense of life, which is a deeply un-American thing, but an important thing to know. (Rod Dreher)
Mr. Paxton represents the serrated edge of the Texas GOP, for which “owning the libs” is the highest political value. (WSJ)