On the cusp of 2024, a snapshot of a desperately sick post-America

 I guess the task before me in this post is to prove that the title is not just sensationalistic clickbait. I know that New Year's Eve is particularly an occasion when we want to be in it's-going-to-be-fine mode. There's reflecting and partying and personal goal-setting to tend to.

But events confirm, in ever-more undeniable form, that the erosion of guardrails and foundations has reached a critical state:

I offer for your consideration two graphs from an article at The Conversation about an Allegheny College poll on how we - post-Americans - view the value of those guardrails and foundations:

and

 

There is no more important undertaking for the people of this country than to look into how we came to this state of affairs.

That's actually been the impetus behind LITD since 2012, and is baked into the mission statement at my Substack, Precipice:  

[The name] Precipice indicates that America, Western civilization and the world generally are close enough to a yawning abyss to see its terrifying vastness. It’s an abyss with cultural, political, economic and spiritual dimensions.

I so named it knowing the risk that it would come across like yet another Debbie Downer outlet in a world in which happiness is at a premium. But pointing out evidence of my premise is not the aim. The question before us is, on what grounds might we hope?

You won’t find pat answers. I consider myself a Christian - albeit a rather crummy one - but I don’t serve up platitudes, cliches about how since all is well in the eternal realm we needn’t fret about our current juncture, or attempts to recruit the uncommitted.

Rather, I invite you to join me on a journey, a search for genuinely solid ground, on which we can plant our feet and not feel perilously close to free fall. 

If our toes are truly gripping the edge of the precipice, is there time for such a search? 

I’d argue that there is no other sensible use of our time.

Peruse the archives and you'll see that I've zeroed in on various inflection points: the impact of Rouseau's state-of-nature framework, the Enlightenment veneration of rationality, the Romantic poets' turn the other way to the point of immersion in personal feelings, the thinkers behind the fin de siecle wave of Progressivism. I even did a post about turning 13 in the year 1968, titled "On Entering Adolescence During the Tectonic Shift."

I keep thinking about the money line from Kevin Williamson's December 16 Wall Street Journal column titled "You Asked For It, America."  He says, "Sometimes a country is doing so well it can afford a silly season. This is not that time and the US is not that country."

The devaluing of seriousness has serious consequences. In this instance, the consequence appears to be the completion of the squandering of our birthright. 

And here's a way to tell how badly infected you might be with this dismissing of seriousness: If you finish reading this and say, "That's exactly why we need to elect a majority of [pick one of the two major political parties]," you urgently need an antibiotic intervention. 

What we really need isn't remotely on the minds of most of us.

The Colorado Supreme Court decision - initial thoughts

 Let's start with the November ruling by Denver District Court judge Sarah B. Wallace that the Very Stable Genius could indeed appear on the ballot when Colorado has its primary.

She based her reasoning on something that, with my limited knowledge of constitutional law, looks pretty damn iffy:

In a 102-page ruling, Wallace accepted many of the plaintiffs’ core claims about Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, and rejected arguments from Trump’s legal team that his messages to his supporters, including incendiary social media posts and a speech at the White House Ellipse just prior to the violence at the Capitol, were protected speech under the First Amendment.

“The Court concludes … that Trump incited an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021 and therefore ‘engaged’ in insurrection within the meaning of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment,” Wallace wrote.

But because of this, she came to the conclusion she did:

But Wallace ultimately sided with a legal theory, put forward by several conservative scholars and cited by Trump’s attorneys, holding that Section 3’s reference to individuals who have “taken an oath … as an officer of the United States” does not include the presidency.

“After considering the arguments on both sides, the Court is persuaded that ‘officers of the United States’ did not include the President of the United States,” Wallace wrote. “It appears to the Court that for whatever reason the drafters of Section 3 did not intend to include a person who had only taken the Presidential Oath.”

The Colorado Supreme Court's opposing reasoning seems pretty straightforward to me: 

“President Trump asks us to hold that Section 3 disqualifies every oathbreaking insurrectionist except the most powerful one and that it bars oath-breakers from virtually every office, both state and federal, except the highest one in the land,” the court’s majority opinion said. “Both results are inconsistent with the plain language and history of Section 3.”

That said, it's worthy of note that the four justices in the majority were all appointed by Democratic governors. Also that the case was initiated by the decidedly left-leaning Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington. 

You can be sure that the drool-besotted leg-humpers are going to make sure those facts are front and center in the public's understanding. More generally, the Republican Party, as exemplified by Ronna McDaniel and Elise Stefaniak, as well as many of the also-ran presidential candidates, has already started beating that drum.

That, in turn, will join the Peter Strzok - Lisa Page saga, the pee tape, James Comey's inscrutability and undeniable mainstream media bias as MAGA-land substantiation that the long knives are out everywhere you look, and the figure at the center of it all will play it up to the hilt at his rallies and in his Truth Social posts.

It's going to be very interesting indeed to see how the federal Supreme Court handles this. It may be driven by the urgency of the deadline for Colorado printing its ballots. But it's important to remember that the Court, in its current makeup, is comprised mostly of serious originalists and textualists. They're not driven, the assertions of Acela Corridor pundits to the contrary, by an ideological agenda. For instance, Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization was not decided on the basis of an opportunity for a gotch, but rather on the fact that Roe v Wade had been decided on so-flimsy-as-to-be-extra-consitutional grounds. Legal scholars, such as John Hart Ely and Edward Lazarus at the time Roe was decided even said so. 

Then again, if SCOTUS upholds the Colorado Supreme Court ruling, look for other states to toss Trump off their primary ballots. 

What we can say about this situation is that it ought to brace us for a 2024 so raw, so ugly, so chaotic, that we may well look back on this year as a downright stable time.

 

Well, now; an interesting pickle Ohio Republicans have created for themselves

 The more popular of the two primary contenders for a US House seat is the pone the drool-besotted leg-humpers find problematic:

House Republicans are scrambling to fix a potential nightmare that’s unfolding in a must-win race in northwestern Ohio.

The GOP is eager to block J.R. Majewski from winning its nomination to challenge veteran Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur. Majewski lost his previous bid for Congress last year, after a news report on his military records indicated he lied about combat duty in Afghanistan.

Republicans turned to former state legislator Craig Riedel to beat Majewski in this cycle’s primary. But last week, an audio tape surfaced of Riedel calling Donald Trump “arrogant” and vowing not to endorse the former president. Now the primary looks poised to become a referendum on which is worse in today’s GOP: criticizing Trump or allegedly lying about one’s military valor.

Republican strategists don’t believe Majewski can win a general election against Kaptur, given his record and how purple the district is. Yet the audio of Riedel may have tanked his chances of defeating Majewski.

So Republicans in Ohio and Washington are in damage control mode, holding high-level discussions about trying to find a new candidate before the state’s Dec. 20 filing deadline, according to three people familiar with the effort who were granted anonymity to speak candidly.

Delicious.

Principle has not just taken a back seat to political "reality." It's been bound, gagged and stuffed in the trunk. 

This is now the party that daily fellates the runaway best-polling presidential candidate who sells trading cards and pieces of his mug shot suit.

Not exactly what the ex-Whigs in Ripon, Wisconsin in 1854 had in mind. But Scoop Jackson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan wouldn't recognize their party, either. 

 

 

The House hearing, the three university presidents, and the rot of post-American higher education on full display

 I've waited to weigh in on this, because there was assuredly going to be a first wave of reaction to the disgusting way presidents Claudine Gay of Harvard, Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, and Sally Kornbluth of MIT conducted themselves as they appeared before the House Education and Workforce Committee last Tuesday. And there was, from columnists, radio talk show hosts, cable-TV personalities and ordinary post-Americans conversing among themselves.

I probably don't have anything startlingly original to add to the discussion, but I know where on the landscape I want to position myself.

Let's start with the after-the-fact apology phenomenon. We see this a lot these days. The social climate in our country is such that there's not much regard for internal filters that might make someone think twice about taking a stance that allows one to indulge in self-congratulation, but that has a lot of opposition among people of influence. If President Gay's cocksure depends-on-the-context response to Representative Stefaniak's questioning about exhortations of Jewish genocide was one hundred percent sincere, then her walk-back has to be seen as full of ka-ka, does it not? 

Or is the reverse the case? There's at least a theoretical case to be made for that. After all, she was still dealing with the mid-November letter she received from 100 faculty members who did not at all care for the "Combating  Antisemitism" statement she issued in response to donors and alums speaking up about campus Jew-hatred. 

Either way, the only conclusion to be reached is that she's a phony.

And if these university presidents want to talk about context, we can gladly revisit the whole leftward drift of higher education over the past umpteen decades. We can trace the role of the Gramscian long march through the institutions by which 1960s radicals became tenured professors. We can point out the fact that William F. Buckley launched his career as an author with the 1952 tome God and Man at Yale, which examined his alma mater's complete secularization. Timothy Dwight, call your office.

I am also not the first to note that Gay, Magill and Kornbluth would have come down on similar calls for extermination of just about any demographic group other than Jews.

The "just about" qualifier was not thrown into the previous sentence idly. We all know which group would not incur their ire. 

And that's what this really comes down to, isn't it? A key component of the above-mentioned leftward drift is the assumption that there is something fundamentally problematic about being white. 

And there's a global dimension to this. Russia's Putin and China's Xi  are licking their chops at the prospect of a BRICS expansion that would bring its role as a voice for the "global south" into sharper focus. What an exquisitely effective way to nudge the West, and the United States in particular, out of their role as guarantor of the rules-based post-World War II international order.

So the ramifications of the way these three ladies conducted themselves last Tuesday are numerous.

It was one more confirmation that we've moved past the peak of human advancement and are descending back into the grim way human beings have treated each other for most of our species' history. 

The breathtaking uselessness of Antony Blinken

 Your tax dollars went for a whole lotta jet fuel in the service of an ill-conceived mission:

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken returned to the Mideast this week pressing for agreements to extend the Gaza cease-fire, step up the release of hostages held by Hamas and limit Palestinian civilian casualties if fighting with Israel resumed. He left Friday with his goals largely unfulfilled. 

Blinken wrapped up his third Middle East tour since the Israel-Hamas war started in October with decidedly mixed results. He watched as the seven-day cease-fire agreement collapsed under new Hamas attacks and Israeli airstrikes. 

And, it remained uncertain if Israel would follow through on commitments to protect Palestinian civilians from military operations in the southern Gaza Strip, as he warned they should, or whether Hamas would engage in future hostage negotiations. 

Blinken arrived in Israel on Thursday with hopes to see a further extension of the cease-fire agreement under which Israel had halted most military operations in exchange for the release of hostages held by Hamas.

Blinken said Friday that Hamas bore the blame for the failure while the U.S. would continue to push for extensions to release hostages and boost the flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza. Yet, he also warned Israel that it must adhere to international laws of war as it prosecutes its campaign to eradicate Hamas.

And he's still, after Palestinians have given the thumbs-down to the 1937 Peel Commission proposal and the 1947 UN partition plan, and after the 2000 failure of the Ehud Barak-Yasir Arafat-Bill Clinton summit,  to name the three most noteworthy offers, prattling about an end goal of a Palestinian state:

“It is important for us to be talking about and thinking about every aspect of this challenge – not only today but also what happens the day after the conflict in Gaza is over,” Blinken said. “How are we thinking about what happens in Gaza itself? How is it governed? Where does the security come from? How do we begin to rebuild? And critically, how we get on a path to invest in lasting peace. And for us, of course, that has to result in a state for the Palestinians.”

Broaching that subject weeks after the Hamas assault of October 7 demonstrates that Blinken is considerably over his skis.

Don't we need to focus on more immediate concerns such as this? 

Four people were killed and five were wounded Thursday, one of them seriously, in a terror shooting attack claimed by Hamas at the entrance to Jerusalem, police and medics said.

One of those killed was a civilian who fired at the terrorists and was mistaken by other responders for one of the shooters.

The victims were named later as Livia Dikman, 24, Ashdod rabbinical judge Elimelech Wasserman, 73, and Hannah Ifergan, who was in her 60s. The civilian hit by friendly fire was named as Yuval Doron Castleman, 38.

According to police, at around 7:40 a.m., two Palestinian gunmen got out of a vehicle on Weizmann Boulevard at the main entrance to the capital and opened fire at people at a bus stop.

We can take some heart that voices of moral clarity can be found in some corners. To wit, this response to the Blinken-ist approach from Representative Mike Gallagher R-WI:

“In his press conference in Israel today, Secretary Blinken repeatedly emphasized that Hamas cannot retain governance of Gaza. He is wrong. Hamas cannot remain at all. This is an irrefutable point that was avoided throughout his entire speech. 

“It has been nearly two months since Hamas launched a barbaric attack against Israel, but rather than hold Hamas accountable for killing innocent Palestinians and Israelis, the Biden administration seems to spend more time publicly shaming the Israeli government for civilian casualties than punishing a murderous organization. This weakness will not only benefit Hamas but also do something I never believed was possible after the President’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan: worsen our reputation in the Middle East. 

“If this administration wants to 'create conditions for durable and lasting peace' for both Palestinians and Israelis, they must fully support the destruction of Hamas. Hamas's existence is incompatible with the 'two-state solution' they seek because Hamas believes any Jew's existence is incompatible with life. Rather than lay the groundwork for what appears to be the strategic withdrawal of or heavy conditioning of American support for Israeli military efforts, the Biden administration should be doing everything possible to ensure the swift and complete elimination of a terrorist organization that is happily murdering children and putting their citizens in harm's way to achieve more mass murder.”

Exactly so. 

Wobbliness in support of the obvious goal further erodes the US role as guarantor of a rules-based international order, which has been in worsening shape for some time.