Thursday roundup

The Justice Department has dropped its prosecution of Michael Flynn.

David French at The Dispatch has a comprehensive and well-thought-out-on-the-legal-and-moral-levels piece about the Ahmaud Arbery shooting in Georgia.

Great piece at the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission website by Andrew T. Walker entitled "How Religious Liberty Made Me a Baptist, Part 1."

Erick Erickson at The Resurgent has a balanced and carefully considered take on Shelly Luther, the Dallas hair salon owner who was sentenced to a week in jail.

Great piece by Rod Dreher at The American Conservative entitled "Mask Truthers." A taste:

Note well, though, that the mask truthers aren’t refusing to wear masks because they don’t believe they help. That might or might not be true, but it’s a defensible position. They’re refusing to wear masks because they see them as a symbol of social control.

This is not the kind of conservatism I signed up for. In fact, one reason I consider myself a conservative is because, according to Russell Kirk, conservatism proper rejects ideological thinking. He wrote:

Ideology, in short, is a political formula that promises mankind an earthly paradise; but in cruel fact what ideology has created is a series of terrestrial hells. I set down below some of the vices of ideology.

1. Ideology is inverted religion, denying the Christian doctrine of salvation through grace in death, and substituting collective salvation here on earth through violent revolution. Ideology inherits the fanaticism that sometimes has afflicted religious faith, and applies that intolerant belief to concerns secular.
2. Ideology makes political compromise impossible: the ideologue will accept no deviation from the Absolute Truth of his secular revelation. This narrow vision brings about civil war, extirpation of “reactionaries”, and the destruction of beneficial functioning social institutions. …

Now I contrast with those three failings certain principles of the politics of prudence.

1. As I put it earlier, ideology is inverted religion. But the prudential politician knows that “Utopia” means “Nowhere”; that we cannot march to an earthly Zion; that human nature and human institutions are imperfectible; that aggressive “righteousness” in politics ends in slaughter. True religion is a discipline for the soul, not for the state.

2. Ideology makes political compromise impossible, I pointed out. The prudential politician, au contraire, is well aware that the primary purpose of the state is to keep the peace. This can be achieved only by maintaining a tolerable balance among great interests in society. Parties, interests, and social classes and groups must arrive at compromises, if bowie-knives are to be kept from throats.

Hannah Arendt, talking about the kinds of men that brought totalitarianism to Russia and Germany (here she speaks of writers and intellectuals):

To them, violence, power, cruelty, were the supreme capacities of men who had definitely lost their place in the universe and were much too proud to long for a power theory that would safely bring them back and reintegrate them into the world. They were satisfied with blind partisanship in anything that respectable society had banned, regardless of theory or content…

Arendt goes on:

The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered up with corruption.

If there's a benign explanation for this, it had better come out quickly: the Trump administration has shelved the detailed CDC guidelines for faith leaders, business owners, educators and state and local officials re: reopening society. It basically fleshes out the federal-level three-phase plan that Doctors Birx and Fauci set forth a few weeks ago. For reasons that presently elude us, the White House has shelved this document. Indeed, it told agency scientists it "would never see the light of day." 

The president of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners was in the Oval Office - to be recognized for her role in addressing the pandemic - and she happened to mention that PPE availability had been sporadic in some areas of the country. The VSG immediately shot back, saying, "Maybe sporadically for you, but not sporadic for a number of other people, because I've heard the opposite." He then reinforced his attitude with a bit of body language, folding his arms as he bragged about how his administration had rebuilt the government's PPE supply after the previous administration had let it dwindle. The video is here. 

Great S.E. Cupp piece entitled "The President Is Not Well."

My latest at Precipice is entitled "An Absolutist Grapples With Ambiguity."