Peggy Noonan's column in the Wall Street Journal this morning encapsulates exactly where we are as a civilization. She launches her reflection with a comparison of the unity America experienced in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attack and the utter lack of it on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary:
It had to do with a sense that we are losing the thread, that America is losing the thread. We compared—we couldn’t help it, it is in the nature of memory—the America of now with the America of 20 years ago, and we see a deterioration. We feel disturbance at this because we don’t know if we can get our way back. The losing of the thread feels bigger than ideology, bigger certainly than parties. It feels like some more fundamental confusion, an inability to play the role of who we are, and to be comfortable in who we are.
The money line of the whole essay is this:
Just about every large business in America is now run by its human resources department because everyone appears to be harassing and assaulting each other, or accusing each other. Is this the sign of a healthy country?
COVID has served to worsen our fracturing. Concern about our price various financial state has faded to the point of being negligible. That there isn't unanimous alarm about what happened at the Capitol this past January says much about where we are:
And of course it all plays out in a million political and cultural issues. The pandemic came, a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence (we hope) and somehow that shared experience became another opportunity for division. Government had to be deft and persuasive and honest about what it didn’t know and didn’t have, and often failed. But government can always regulate, spend and tax. We’re no deficit hawks in this corner but doesn’t U.S. public debt going toward $30 trillion feel a little . . . high? And dangerous?
When a country has lost the thread it gets a mob breaking into the U.S. Capitol going for the ballots that will ensure and formalize a presidential election. When it’s lost the thread it can no longer maintain a rough consensus—it doesn’t even WANT a rough consensus—on how we vote.
Consider what the Met gala tells us about the flatlining of our culture:
The Met Gala the other night showed the elite of a major industry literally losing the thread. Google the pictures. It was a freak show. There was no feeling of a responsibility to present to the world a sense of coherence or elegance, to show a thing so beautiful it left the people who saw it aspiring to something they couldn’t even name. All this was presided over by a chic and cultivated woman who is cunning and practical. If freaky is in she’s going freaky deaky to the max. Follow the base, even if it’s sick. Do not lead. Leading is impossible now.
The argument is sometimes made that there's still a critical mass of Americans who are solid human beings, safeguarding the thread of which Noonan speaks. But their confidence in anything beyond their personal spheres has waned considerably:
What are regular people doing? My sense is they’re trying to hide from the national, figuring they’ll make strong what they can make strong—the family, the school, the local. They’re not trying to “maintain control” or “retreat,” they’re just trying to make things work. But what does it mean for a country when its most sober and thoughtful people are essentially trying to hide from it? To hide from the accusations and division and the growing air of freakishness, from the whole cultural revolution and the woke regime, trying to enforce boundaries between “that” and “us.” And knowing all the while that, as they say, you may be through with the culture but the culture isn’t through with you.
Strong stuff, but important to take in.
Danielle Pletka, writing at The Dispatch, says that the Taliban's re-ascension to rule in Afghanistan blows up the notion that Sunni and Shiite Muslims can't share goals and cooperate:
The era ushered in by 9/11 made theological terms like Sunni, Shiite, jihad, sharia, and Salafi household words, and birthed a nation of armchair experts on the intricacies of Islamic sectarianism and doctrine. Pretense to expertise is a privilege of living in a free country. Oddly, however, the U.S. government has adopted the same facile analysis of regional and religious dynamics in the Middle East and South Asia, viz. the trope that Shiite Iran is a natural enemy to the Sunni Taliban in Afghanistan. This is, in short, rubbish.
The Taliban victory in Afghanistan is a gift to Iran, nothing less.
How is this playing out?
At the end of the day, what underpins the Iranian relationship with the Taliban (as with al-Qaeda) is the central tenet of Iranian strategic policy overall: instability. While Tehran may have been pleased to aid the U.S. in ousting the Taliban in Afghanistan, it had no interest in seeing a stable, pro-American government to its east. And so, led by the IRGC, it returned to what Iranian strategists perceive as their sweet spot: playing both sides. The Taliban was licensed to open a political office in Iran. Senior Taliban leaders began occasional visits to Tehran to kiss the ring of the supreme leader. Meanwhile, the IRGC continued to support disgruntled Shiites inside Afghanistan. (Indeed, Iran’s support for those Shiites was such that by the time the Arab Spring erupted in 2011, Iran was well-placed enough in Afghanistan to reportedly recruit tens of thousands of Afghan Shiites to fight on behalf of their Syrian puppet Bashar al Assad.)
Nor was Iran’s support for the Taliban purely political. Tehran permitted Taliban training camps inside its borders and provided “light arms, rifled-propelled grenades (RPGs), and even military training for Taliban forces on Iranian soil.” Later stories made clear that the Iranian government was also paying Taliban salaries. And reporting last year revealed that Iran was paying the Taliban bounties to kill American troops in Afghanistan.
At the Washington Examiner, Quin Hillyer says we'd all damn well better get real about COVID:
The United States should revise its response to COVID-19. This is going to be a long explanation of both why and how. This first column will explain why a better response is crucial. A companion column will outline the better strategy.
The tragedy of the U.S. pandemic response is that conservatives tend not to take it seriously enough while liberals overreact with counterproductive solutions. Both responses make matters worse, meaning either more culturally and economically devastating or more deadly. Or both.
For more than six months, many conservatives have been saying the pandemic is effectively finished, especially for the vaccinated. Both the numbers and the nature of viruses show they are dangerously wrong. This contagion is a major ongoing threat .
On Aug. 7, when the rolling seven-day average of U.S. coronavirus daily deaths again rose above 500, alarm bells should have gone off: At that rate, the annual deaths would have been three times worse than even a bad year of ordinary influenza. Since then, the bad numbers have nearly quadrupled yet again. As I write today, the seven-day average of deaths-per-day is at 1,827, the highest since March 2 and still rising. If this keeps up for a whole year, 666,855 more Americans would die in 12 months from COVID-19, on top of the 662,000 who already succumbed in the past 18 months.
The nation's supply-chain woes are due in large part to the pandemic.
Russell Moore, writing at Plough, examines the loss of faith among the country's young.
Generally speaking, The Atlantic's Adam Serwer is not my cup of tea, but he does make a compelling case that Robert E. Lee is not worthy of admiration.
Here's a compare-and-contrast for you. Both Andrew Doran, writing at The National Interest, and Janan Ganesh, writing at the Financial Times, posit that there is a pointy-headed class of elites that has made a mess of US foreign policy, but Doran thinks the time may be ripe for putting that class out on its ear, while Ganesh thinks they are permanently ensconced.
Ed Morrissey at Hot Air on how three Supreme Court Justices are pushing back on the notion that the federal judiciary is a political spoils system:
There’s no doubt, though, that the Supreme Court has become one of the main institutions caught in that crossfire. Furthermore, it can’t compete in that polarized-partisan atmosphere. The Supreme Court doesn’t have an electorate, let alone a base to fire up on its own. Decades of judicial activism that preceded recent courts has made it into a political spoil for elections, and the judiciary wars in the Senate over the last two decades are the result.
This year, however, the justices appear to have had enough. One could chalk up Breyer’s public tour as the need to promote his book, but he wrote his new book in large part to fight back against charges of polarization and politicization on the Supreme Court. Barrett and Thomas have now come out on the same theme, putting three of the court’s more controversial members on the campaign trail too, so to speak.
The period between terms has always offered justices the time to engage publicly, and often talk about the collegiality of the court, but this time it feels different. The political environment has changed, and perhaps the justices have decided that it requires a more robust defense of their own institution before it gets gutted by the nihilists, and with it the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law to boot. If so, then Thomas and his colleagues have accurately diagnosed the tenor of our times — and hopefully will continue to push back against it.
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