Your absolute must-read for today

At City Journal, Harvey Mansfield offers an essay spurred by this circumstance and this thought:

A conference that I attended recently at the Chateau of Alexis de Tocqueville in Normandy brought me to confront Tocqueville with Donald Trump. I did not see how I as an American, just now, could come to Europe and say nothing about America’s latest choice as president.

He explores a couple of dichotomies that we find particularly pressing in the present moment, but that have always been with us in some form:

• the particularities that make for a distinct culture in a particular land and the diminishing of those by the advent of global supply chains and international trade in general, or, as Mansfield puts it, "the tension between nation and commerce," and
• equality and hierarchy

It's one of those pieces the contours of which find their convergence at the end, but it's also full of great money lines. In fact, those money lines, presented in sequence, can give one some idea of those contours and their convergence:

"Tocqueville was a great thinker, a philosopher greater even than his admirers believe, and Trump is great mainly in the amazing extent of his pettiness and willingness to level insults at his rivals. Occasionally, he reaches upward, as in his recent speech at the World War II invasion beaches of Normandy, not far from the Tocqueville Chateau, though he frequently spoils his moments of elevation with a cheap remark."

"In two well-separated passages in The Spirit of the Laws (1748), [Montesquieu, one of Tocqueville's favorite authors] says, first, that 'movable wealth . . . belongs to the whole world, which in this regard comprises but a single state of which all societies are members,' but later, in the context of political laws for a nation, says it is among the right of nations that a “great state” can exclude one 'imbued with foreign maxims' in the royal succession under the principle (set in capital letters) that “the well-being of the people is the supreme law.' Montesquieu adds that 'men care prodigiously for their laws and their customs; these make the felicity of every nation; it is rare for them to be changed without great upsets and great shedding of blood.'"

"A demagogue in the classical sense is one who seeks to be loved indiscriminately, not caring by whom, one eager to move the people as he or they wish, thus an evil endemic to democracy. Trump’s success in gaining the presidency without experience in diplomacy or government reminds us of the essential vulgarity of democracy, for he is not above or against democracy, as is said by his opponents."

"there are many others who never read books, and in a democracy they have votes. And there are, too, plenty of book-reading intellectuals who are disgusted with the display of easy moral superiority that impels political correctness and has come to be called 'virtue-signaling,' one vice Trump manages to avoid."

"Democracy, with its demand for ever-more equality, robs all inequalities, whether of family, piety, race, sex, birth, or especially intelligence, of any pretense of authority to rule. The result is an anarchy of equals, none having authority over anyone else. Yet democracy has need of precisely the expertise that is the source of inequality in authority."

Ironically, says Mansfield, democracy spawns its own aristocracy, and thus breeds an inherent resentment:

"Democracy, with its demand for ever-more equality, robs all inequalities, whether of family, piety, race, sex, birth, or especially intelligence, of any pretense of authority to rule. The result is an anarchy of equals, none having authority over anyone else. Yet democracy has need of precisely the expertise that is the source of inequality in authority."

He points out that the way Trump rolls is rich in irony:

"[Trump's] policy of 'America First' is ambivalent between hawkish bristling and dovish isolation, as if a nation could warn possible enemies without ever having to punish them in case the warning is ignored. He warns enemies so as not to join the company of the Democrats, but refrains from attacking them in order to distinguish his policy from neoconservatism. This potential for inconsistency can easily upset sound policy, but again, it is a failing more democratic than anti-democratic." 

"Trump is accused of authoritarianism, but this is because he is as impulsive, abrupt, and inconsistent as a democratic majority. Like an untaught, unshackled majority, he seeks the advantage of immediacy against time-consuming, obstructive intermediaries, procedures, and legalities that hinder his, or the popular, will."

And soon afterward Mansfield delivers a money line that brings us to the summation of his position:

"The founders of the American nation would not have admired Donald Trump. "

I'll tease you by leaving it to you to read his concluding paragraph, which expands his subject matter to the level of general principle, principle that we would do well to consider deeply.

The Independence Day post

It comes along just days after what, from a number-of-months standpoint, is the midpoint of the year. It insists on being celebrated outdoors, with grill food, near water, if possible. Fireworks and patriotic music ought to be part of the mix as well.

It's still worth celebrating, even though the sociocultural landscape, as well as the political scene, is bleak. Immutable principles, as is stressed repeatedly at LITD, remain so by definition even if their application is hard to find.

It's interesting that the country from which the colonies had to do their breaking was Britain, given that Britain had more to do with the development of the idea that a society could be established on the principle of maximized freedom than any other nation-state in history. The big leaps forward, such as the Magna Carta, the 1689 Bill of Rights drafted upon the collapse of James II's rule, and the works of John Locke, came from there.

And British society at the time separation fervor was spiking in the colonies was incredibly culturally and intellectually rich. Adam Smith published Wealth of Nations in 1776. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, David Hume, Samuel Johnson, George Whitefield and John Wesley were all active then.

And George III was in a lot of ways an unlikely tyrant. He was devout in his faith life, a patron of the arts, and interested in the sciences. He really didn't focus on the American colonies a great deal until he was made aware of resistance to the various newly imposed forms of taxation and British disregard for colonial legislative bodies.

But by the 1770s, a few generations had come along in which lots of people had never been "back" to the mother country. The crown and Parliament were something of an abstraction for them.

But what they did have were those British intellectual roots. Collective memory of the milestones in the advance of freedom ran deep.

Tax policy was a top-tier issue for the Founders, as it is again in this age when Bill deBlasio speaks of plenty of money in the wrong hands.

The Virginia Declaration of Rights, drafted weeks before the US Declaration became law, speaks of life, liberty and property as fundamental rights. It's a notion that comes from Locke's Two Treatises of Government. While Jefferson decided to go with the pursuit of happiness as a specifically mentioned right, the conviction that being able to own something was core to all kinds of other freedoms was deeply ingrained in the American character.

Independence Day is a secular holiday, but it rather insists on our refecting upon our blessedness. The thought leaders among the Founders were a diverse lot in many ways. Each brought a particular facet of overall understanding of the nature of freedom and its relationship to order to the table. It led to some sharp disagreements among them. But to consider even cursorily that minds such as those of Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, Richard Henry Lee, Alexander Hamiton, John Jay, James Madison, and George Washington found each other and found sufficient common cause to draft the second and third most thunderously powerful documents (after the Holy Bible) in human history is to be awestruck in the most intense degree.

We, of course, have nothing like that today. There may be a handful of minds of the Founders' caliber in various pockets of the current post-American government - even in Congress - but none are in position of real leadership. Those posts have gone to mediocrities, charlatans, lunatics and lovers of tyranny.

And much of the 2019 post-American populace is in the position of bread-and-circuses late-period  Roman Empire citizens. If it can be bothered to contemplate such matters as what is and what cannot by definition be a right, or the relationship between the individual and the state at all, it thinks in terms of  the "right" to be"gender fluid" or the "right" to health care.  And those who may have an ever-so-slightly-deeper understanding of the matter have come to think in terms of measuring national health in terms of gross domestic product, wage growth, and stock-market averages. The yearnings of the human spirit are absent from the discussion.

It's against this backdrop that celebrating Independence Day gains its significance at this time. The principles remain, they are still practiced to some degree in some places in post-America, and we still observe some tradition.

Let's think of it as a day of possibility. It's very Late in the Day, but not completely dark. The best tribute we can pay to those who birthed this unprecedented experiment is to refuse to squander our birthright, no matter how many around us are doing exactly that.

Leftists hate America - today's edition

Get ready to need a shower and a change of clothes, because the following is sure to induce a good puke:

The upcoming Neil Armstrong biopic "First Man," from "Whiplash" and "La La Land" director Damien Chazelle, premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday to rave reviews and early Oscar buzz. But the movie doesn't include a key scene in Armstrong's mission to the moon and an integral moment in American history. 

The movie omits the American flag being planted on the moon, and the movie's star Ryan Gosling, who plays Armstrong, defended the decision when asked about it at Venice (via The Telegraph). 

Gosling, who is Canadian, argued that the first voyage to the moon was a "human achievement" that didn't just represent an American accomplishment, and that's how Armstrong viewed it. 

"I think this was widely regarded in the end as a human achievement [and] that's how we chose to view it," Gosling. "I also think Neil was extremely humble, as were many of these astronauts, and time and time again he deferred the focus from himself to the 400,000 people who made the mission possible."

Gosling added, "He was reminding everyone that he was just the tip of the iceberg — and that's not just to be humble, that's also true. So I don't think that Neil viewed himself as an American hero. From my interviews with his family and people that knew him, it was quite the opposite. And we wanted the film to reflect Neil." 

Gosling also joked that he's Canadian, so he "might have cognitive bias." 

"First Man" arrives in theaters October 12 and also stars "The Crown" star Claire Foy as Armstrong's wife, Janet. It currently has a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes. 

"I don't think that Neil viewed himself as an American hero. " Are you getting this dog vomit from something he said that would leave no other possible conclusion to be drawn? Some quote from an interview, or memoirs? If not, you're being damn presumptive, you vomit-inducing little punk.

The historical fact is that Armstrong planted the flag of the United States of America.

Man, I hope this gets a lot of discussion, at opinion sites, on social media, on radio and television.

Don't see this movie, people. It was made by morally crippled weirdos.

UPDATE: Gotta include Ben Shapiro's spot-on take on this:

 it’s telling that the Left seems to attribute every universal sin to America, and every specific victory to humanity as a whole. Slavery: uniquely American. Racism: uniquely American. Sexism: uniquely American. Homophobia: uniquely American. Putting a man on the moon: an achievement of humanity.

All of this is in keeping with a general perspective that sees America as a nefarious force in the world. This is Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States view: that America’s birth represented the creation of a terrible totalitarian regime, but that Maoist China is the “closest thing, in the long history of that ancient country, to a people’s government, independent of outside control”; that Castro’s Cuba had “no bloody record of suppression,” but that the US responded to the “horrors perpetrated by the terrorists against innocent people in New York by killing other innocent people in Afghanistan.”

In reality, however, America remains the single greatest force for human freedom and progress in the history of the world. And landing a man on the moon was part of that uniquely American legacy.  

Don't go see this movie, and get your kids out of government schools, where they use Zinn's book as a history textbook.

This is what we mean by the Left wing war on Western civilization.

Recklessly squandering the source of our greatness

This is going to be another of those posts that largely consists of generous excerpts from something I link to. It's that important.

The linked piece is by Heidi Munson and it's at The Resurgent. It is about something that is one of the main themes here at LITD: the question of how much more societal brittleness our nation can withstand.

The statistics would indicate that the continuity of our essential identity is unlikely. Consider this:

We are the anomaly. Except for the state of Massachusetts, America has the longest lasting constitution in the history of the world. In contrast, France has had 16 constitutions since ours has been ratified. Venezuela has had 25, Haiti 23, Ecuador 20. In the last century alone, Russia has had four, and Poland has had seven. Since we haven’t lived through the tumult of revolutions, we take our stability for granted and assume it will last in perpetuity. We are fools if we think that.

Which, of course, begs the question "why."

The question we ought to pause and consider is: what has been the cause of our stability? Americans are no different than any other humans around the globe, so it’s not us. We could credit the Constitution, but that didn’t magically appear out of a vacuum. The creators of that document did so from the perspective of a particular worldview, and we would not have gotten that document from any other. 

Those involved in framing our Constitution had a specifically Judeo-Christian worldview. No, not all of them were Christians, nor were they attempting to form a theocracy (in fact, it was because of their worldview that they didn’tform a theocracy). Their worldview provided them with an accurate understanding of human nature: humans are terribly flawed and require laws. However, did we mention that humans are terribly flawed? Therefore, those with power are also terribly flawed, and thus, checks must be placed on that power. As James Madison said, “But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature. If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” 

Because they knew the destructive nature of humans with ultimate power (aka, “government”), they placed “the chains of the Constitution,” on them. They did so, however, with the understanding that the citizens of the republic would be self-governing. This is a necessary component for freedom. As Benjamin Franklin said, “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious (stemming from the word “vice”), they have more need of masters.”

Yeah. Those “old, dead white guys,” as they are so often described, weren’t so dumb, huh? 

What we see going on today is the structure of our Judeo-Christian worldview—which no one notices any more because “it’s always been this way”—being used (or, rather, abused). At the same time, we are violently ripping out the foundation upon which we’ve been standing these 200+ years. We want the benefits of the Judeo-Christian worldview (e.g., liberty, peace, prosperity, etc.), but we want to be rid of the worldview itself (which is what our entire nation rests on). We don’t realize that thousands of years of history and philosophy went into the crafting of the two most profound and momentous political documents in the history of mankind: the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, before removing a fence, wisdom would suggest you look into why it was put there in the first place. Likewise, we foolishly think we can destroy our foundation and no harm will come to us as a result. Before you go back to hating people on Twitter today, perhaps we could take a moment to ponder what America will be like after we have torn her down brick by brick. Unless you’re a fan of less freedom, you may not like what you see. 

There is no substitute for what we have to do to rescue America. 

 

The 2018 LITD Independence Day post

In recent years, when preparing to write this post, the question before me has been whether or not my rhetorical device of referring to this country as "post-America" is still applicable.

Believe me, I understand that there's no arguing with the perspective that, in myriad undeniably significant ways, no human beings have ever had it better than Americans have it on July 4, 2018. Cell phones, laser surgery, economic opportunity, declining crime rates and all that.

But there's also no denying the extremely poor state of the nation's spiritual health. Pick your arena for citing examples: entertainment, education, law, "journalism." A nation in good shape would not have elected either its current president nor his immediate predecessor.

The polarization gets worse by the day. Any attempt to construct a chart of the fracturing is nearly impossibly complex. The days when the Right consisted merely of an Establishment and a conservative movement seem like a quaint and distant memory. We now have the intrusion of the Trump phenomenon, which has, along with itself, splintered the conservative movement into numerous shards. On the Left, the New York House-seat Democrat primary victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over incumbent Joe Crowley crystallizes an even further leftward shift in a party that was already unrecognizably leftist when it catapulted an Alinskyite community organizer to its top rung in the previous decade.

Still, the forces of fealty to the Three Pillars of conservatism are not extinguished.

New to this site? Alright, Independence Day is as good a time as any for us to revisit the Three Pillars, so we're all on the same page. I'm not the first pundit to articulate them. In fact, the towering giant of our worldview, Ronald Reagan,  spoke of them.

But I've come up with my own formulation. I wanted to keep them devoid of shorthand. I was looking for ways to express them that would encompass any and all specific questions about the way human beings ought to organize themselves into livable societies, and I think I have.

They are as follows:

1.) Free-market economics, which begins with the premise that a good or service is worth what buyer and seller agree that it is worth - period. No other party has any business being involved in that agreement - certainly not government.

2.) An understanding that Western civilization has been a unique blessing to humankind. (Judeo-Christian morality, Greco-Roman model of representative democracy, the great scientific and artistic achievements.)

3.) A foreign policy based on what history tells us about human nature. This plays itself out as our allies knowing we have their backs, our adversaries respecting us, and our enemies fearing us.

Anyway, as I say, there is a swath of America that understands them and remains committed to seeing them upheld and implemented on the culture and policy levels. Despite the best efforts of the two other main groupings in post-America, that swath has not been extinguished.

In a post yesterday, I put that thusly:

It's interesting, isn't it? Trump lives rent-free inside the heads of enraged hard leftists, and those of us who, while applauding the good moves, particularly judicial appointments and deregulation, find him ideologically unmoored and loathsome on a character level, live rent-free inside the heads of the [Emerald] Robinson and [Kurt] Schlichter types.

Meanwhile, we just proceed according to our principles. To the two groups above - progressives and populists, for shorthand - our continued existence is something they dare not acknowledge.

This is encouraging particularly with regard to the understanding that the guidance provided by God's mighty hand is, as always, vital to this country continuing to exist in some recognizable form. Not many people do understand that anymore. But some do, and we're not going to be silenced or brainwashed.

Speaking of shorthand, here's a tidy way of putting that. There are still people in this country who will, upon reading aloud the Declaration of Independence, listening to the United States Marine Band rendition of the National Anthem, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's version of the Battle Hymn of the Republic today, be unable to refrain from openly weeping and trembling. The love of human freedom and gratitude to God for giving it to us burns hot within them.

That's how we know all is not lost.

All is not lost. Even if only as an idea, tattered from battle, like the flag Francis Scott Key saw from his jail-cell window, the United States of America lives.

God, as always, is up to something great in human history.

Happy Independence Day.

One of those big-picture looks at how America came to its current juncture - crammed into a Townhall column

Paul Dreissen isn't a columnist whose stuff I read every time I see it. He tends to have a circumscribed range of focus: environmental issues. These are important, as the ample number of LITD posts in that category will attest, but on any given day, I may or may not have time to check out the latest on that front.

But his column today is worth everybody's time. I will say the contour of it is a little weird. Using his attendance of a recent jazz performance to riff off (pun intended) into a look at the unprecedented blessing to humankind the was this nation's founding, and how collectivism, particularly in its environmentalist form, has sullied the founders' vision seems a bit forced.

But once he gets going, he has important things to say:

What indeed was our Creator thinking, when he gathered those brilliant, classically educated farmers, merchants and tradesmen from all over Colonial America, giving them Divine Guidance to debate ideas and craft documents that declared independence from the then-most powerful nation on Earth, launched a novel, untested form of government – and birthed the bold notion that all men (and women) are created equal … at least as an ideal, at least eventually, at least after the long, bitter struggles of the Civil War and Abolition, Suffrage and Civil Rights Movements?

They didn’t stop there. The 1787 Constitution also launched the concept of federalism: the idea that a national government should legislate and rule only on national issues, but otherwise should leave individual states to innovate and test their own governing principles, for better or worse. They might devise brilliant solutions that are copied by all, or provide glaring examples of what not to do elsewhere.

Concerned about pure democracies and a tyranny of majorities, our Founding Fathers also established a separation of powers via three co-equal branches of government – and an Electoral College to prevent big urban areas from overwhelming sparsely populated rural and small town areas during presidential races. Five candidates have since received a majority of votes, but not electoral districts, and so lost their bids.

When was the last time you saw the essence of the United States of America so clearly articulated?

Then he - necessarily - gives us a case of the sads:

[We've been saddled with] government agencies and activist groups that ignored the enormous environmental progress America has made over the past four decades, and were demanding that we spend trillions of dollars on imaginary problems and for barely detectable (or even fabricated) benefits from further reductions in pollution – even substances that clearly are not pollutants: plant-fertilizing, crop-enhancing, planet-greening, life-giving carbon dioxide, for instance. 

And he reminds us that all the ways the jackboots would have us drastically alter our way of life would amount to a drop in the bucket in changing the numbers they profess to want to change:

 . . .the Energy Information Administration says fossil fuels will still provide 79% of US energy in 2050–globally too. Wind and solar remain too expensive, unreliable and land-intensive to power economies or give impoverished nations the living standards they dream of.

Meanwhile, the Obama EPA’s MAGGICC climate analysis model determined that even shutting down all US coal-fired power plants and drastically limiting the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions – at a cost of up to $39 billion per year – would prevent just 0.03 degrees F of manmade global warming by 2100, even assuming CO2 drives climate change, because the world will still be burning fossil fuels. In fact, all the damage and dire threats supposedly caused by greenhouse gases exist only in computer climate models.

And those models haven’t worked in the past, don’t work now and are unlikely to work in the foreseeable future, say scientists like William Happer and Anthony Sadar. That’s because they focus on CO2, ignore the most important atmospheric gas (water vapor) and can’t solve enough equations needed to accurately describe Earth’s climate. Relying on them to decide energy and economic policies is folly and fakery. 

He ends by not-altogether-gracefully tying it all back to the jazz concert. I guess it does work, in the sense that jazz is another one of those blessings to humankind that is originally and distinctly American.

And American things are good things.

Tuesday roundup

 Ted Cruz calls for the Senate to forego an August recess and work on the repeal plan for the "A"CA.

Very thoughtful piece at NRO by Nicholas Gallagher on the tension between the two key notions of what America is: an idea (namely, that liberty is an essential condition for human well-being) and a blood-and-soil geographically identifiable location populated by particular demographics.

North Korea has been supplying everything from arms to construction labor to a number of African nations for decades, and they are quite pleased with the partnership.

Identity politics madness in San Francisco prevents BART from releasing videos of criminals beating people up and robbing them on public transit:

The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) authority is refusing to release surveillance videos involving a recent spate of robberies committed at BART stations in the last three months. Their reasoning?

They don’t want to perpetuate negative stereotypes of minorities.

 The CBS affiliate in San Francisco says in the last three months “there have been at least three robberies on BART involving groups of teenagers.”

April 22: Forty to sixty kids boarded a train at the Coliseum stop and robbed seven passengers, beating up two;

June 28: A group of four kids assaulted a passenger and made off with a cell phone at Dublin; and

June 30: A woman on a train with about a dozen teenagers had her phone snatched by one them before the group got off at the Coliseum stop. Thankfully, a good Samaritan was on hand to retrieve the phone.

Despite the heightened threat to the public, BART authorities continue to withhold video of the attacks from the press, citing concerns that they would be aiding negativity towards minorities, although they failed to identify which minorities are in question.

You knew this was coming: transgendered dolls.

There's been a lot of hype in recent times about China being poised to become a genuine world-stage leader. Don't buy it, says Rich Lowry.

Count me surprised and impressed by our president's performance last night

And it wasn't just me. Philip Rucker and Robert Costa at the Washington Post called it "uncharacteristically disciplined."

But if you want to really grasp the speech's impact, consider Van Jones's response at CNN and on Twitter: "He became president." "For people hoping that maybe he would remain a divisive cartoon . . . they should begin to become a little bit worried tonight."

I hope we find out some specifics about the team that wrote it, because it had just the right flourishes in just the right places:

“We are one people, with one destiny,” Trump said quietly near the end. “The time for small thinking is over. The time for trivial fights is behind us. We just need the courage to share the dreams that fill our hearts.”

And this abrupt reversal of the Most  Equal Comrade's style of being president:

“My job is not to represent the world,” Trump said. “My job is to represent the United States of America.”

And his reasoning behind his call for increased military spending:

“America is willing to find new friends, and to forge new partnerships, where share interests align,” Trump said. “We want harmony and stability, not war and conflict.”

The bring-the-house-down moment was the nod to, and standing ovation for, Carryn Owens, widow of Ryan Owens, the Navy SEAL killed in the January Yemen raid. Van Jones called it "one of the most extraordinary moments you've ever seen in American politics."

As I say, consider me surprised and impressed, but also well aware that DJT is no consistent conservative. He forthrightly called for a big infrastructure program, as well as paid family leave. (We are going to have to keep our eye on Ivanka; she has the scent of trouble about her.)

But, to sum up, the president served notice that last fall's seismic shift was real, and that American greatness has not been permanently extinguished. Indeed, a rekindled flame grows among the embers of collectivist ruin.

 

The difference between patriotism and nationalism

Mona Charen has an important Townhall column today that makes a clear distinction between these two concepts, and in the process reiterates one of the most important things for us to keep in mind concerning Donald Trump: He has no developed understanding of real American greatness, of the philosophical underpinnings of its founding documents.

Demagogues of the right -- or nationalists -- argue that our troubles are the result of immigrants taking our jobs or foreigners stealing our factories. This is not natural love of home and hearth or reverence for America's founding ideals. It is scapegoating.

Which brings us to the proximate cause of this debate [on whether nationalism is a laudable sentiment]: President Trump. Far from deepening our appreciation of our history or institutions, he embodies the reasons to be wary of demagoguery in the name of country. In him we see strutting nationalism ("America first!") but little true patriotism. He claims to pursue America's interests, yet has shockingly little respect for the nation he heads. He doesn't love the country enough to have familiarized himself with the basics of our system. In one debate, he said judges "sign bills," and in a Capitol Hill meeting with congressmen, he praised Article XII of the Constitution. What patriot can claim that we lack the moral authority to criticize Turkey's crackdown on independent journalists, or impugn this country as no better than Russia when it comes to political assassination? As Trump demonstrates, nationalism is not patriotism in a hurry; it is resentment draped in the flag. 

This is why the dichotomy held up by his devotees - the man of action vs. the pointy-headed theorists - makes my teeth grind.

There are immutable principles that a Republican president ought to be guided by.

Presidential leadership ought not to be situational. That leads to chaos, as we are seeing in real time.

This argument comes closer to convincing me than any so far, but still comes up ever-so-short

Georgetown political theory professor Joshua Mitchell sure puts forth a compelling case for Squirrel-Hair as an overall positive historical figure. Before I get into my problems with it, let's give him the floor and you'll see what I mean:

if he had been just a one-off, surely the Republican Party would have been able to contain him, even co-opt him for its own purposes. After all, doesn’t the party decide? The Republican Party is not a one, however, it is a many. William F. Buckley Jr. and others invented the cultural conservatism portion of the party in the 1950s, with the turn to the traditionalism of Edmund Burke; the other big portion of the party adheres to the free-market conservatism of Friedrich Hayek. The third leg of the Republican Party stool, added during the Reagan years, includes evangelical Christians and Roman Catholics of the sort who were still unsure of the implications of Vatican II. To Burke and Hayek, then, add the names John Calvin and Aristotle/Thomas Aquinas. Anyone who really reads these figures knows that the tension between them is palpable. For a time, the three GOP factions were able to form an alliance against Communism abroad and against Progressivism at home. But after the Cold War ended, Communism withered and the culture wars were lost, there has been very little to keep the partnership together. And if it hadn’t been Trump, sooner or later someone else was going to come along and reveal the Republican Party’s inner fault lines. Trump alone might have been the catalyst, but the different factions of the GOP who quickly split over him were more than happy to oblige.

There is another reason why the Republican Party could not contain Trump, a perhaps deeper reason. Michael Oakeshott, an under-read political thinker in the mid-20th century, remarked in his exquisite essay, “Rationalism in Politics,” that one of the more pathological notions of our age is that political life can be understood in terms of “principles” that must be applied to circumstances. Politics-as-engineering, if you will. Republicans themselves succumbed to this notion, and members of the rank and file have noticed. Republicans stood for “the principles of the constitution,” for “the principles of the free market,” etc. The problem with standing for principles is that it allows you to remain unsullied by the political fray, to stand back and wait until yet another presidential election cycle when “our principles” can perhaps be applied. And if we lose, it’s OK, because we still have “our principles.” What Trump has been able to seize upon is growing dissatisfaction with this endless deferral, the sociological arrangement for which looks like comfortable Inside-the-Beltway Republicans defending “principles” and rank-and-file Republicans far from Washington-Babylon watching in horror and disgust.

Any number of commentators (and prominent Republican Party members) have said that Trump is an anti-ideas candidate. If we are serious about understanding our political moment, we have to be very clear about what this can mean. It can mean Trump’s administration will involve the-politics-of-will, so to speak; that the only thing that will matter in government will be what Trump demands. Or, it can mean that Trump is not a candidate who believes in “principles” at all. This is probably the more accurate usage. This doesn’t necessarily mean that he is unprincipled; it means rather that he doesn’t believe that yet another policy paper based on conservative “principles” is going to save either America or the Republican Party. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville was clear that the spirit of democracy is not made possible by great ideas (and certainly not by policy papers), but rather by practical, hands-on experience with self-governance. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s mystical musings in his essay, “Experience,” corroborate this. American democracy will not be rejuvenated by yet another policy paper from the Inside-the-Beltway gang. What I am not saying here is that Trump has the wisdom of an Oakeshott, a Tocqueville or an Emerson. What I am saying is that Trump is that quintessentially American figure, hated by intellectuals on both sides of the aisle and on the other side of the Atlantic, who doesn’t start with a “plan,” but rather gets himself in the thick of things and then moves outward to a workable idea—not a “principled” one—that can address the problem at hand, but which goes no further. That’s what American businessmen and women do. (And, if popular culture is a reliable guide to America, it is what Han Solo always does in Star Wars movies.) We would do well not to forget that the only school of philosophy developed in America has been Pragmatism. This second meaning of being an anti-ideas candidate is consonant with it.

If, as some have said, Trump’s only idea is, “I can solve it,” then we are in real trouble. The difficulty, of course, is that in this new, Trumpean moment when politics is unabashed rhetoric, it is very difficult to discern the direction a Trump administration will take us. Will he be the tyrant some fear, or the pragmatist that is needed?

It’s not unreasonable to think the latter. This is because, against the backdrop of post-1989 ideas, the Trump campaign does indeed have a nascent coherence. “Globalization” and “identity politics” are a remarkable configuration of ideas, which have sustained America, and much of the rest of the world, since 1989. With a historical eye—dating back to the formal acceptance of the state-system with the treaty of Westphalia in 1648—we see what is so remarkable about this configuration: It presumes that sovereignty rests not with the state, but with supra-national organizations—NAFTA, WTO, the U.N., the EU, the IMF, etc.—and with subnational sovereign sites that we name with the term “identity.” So inscribed in our post-1989 vernacular is the idea of “identity” that we can scarcely imagine ourselves without reference to our racial, gender, ethnic, national, religious and/or tribal “identity.” Once, we aspired to be citizens who abided by the rule of law prescribed within a territory; now we have sovereign “identities,” and wander aimlessly in a world without borders, with our gadgets in hand to distract us, and our polemics in mind to repudiate the disbelievers.

Actually, we've seen aspects of this case argued before. Roger L. Simon at PJ Media has been putting forth the Trump-is-a-man-of-action-and-that-appeals-to-the-go-getterism-intrinsic-to-the-American-character argument for the better part of a year. A number of people - some savory, some not (think the despicable Laura Ingraham) - have focused on the undeniably real global elite and its erosion of the concept of the nation-state. Of course, the seething antipathy toward political correctness and identity politics that excites Trump fans (and perhaps most notably his black fans, such as Sheriff Clarke, Lloyd Marcus, Herman Cain, and Dr. Carson) has been front and center in his rise.

But, damn it, I've just about had my fill of this denigration of principles that have informed the conservative movement for over 60 years, whether such denigration is presented with attempted subtlety and objectivity, as it is here and in the monologues of Rush Limbaugh, or with flecks of spittle, as it is in the rantings of the aforementioned Ingraham or the all-caps exhortations of the comment threads around the Internet.

And, as Jonah Goldberg has pointed out, foremost among those principles is the cultivation of character and its evidence in a public figure's demeanor.

Every one of the "objective analysts," outright apologists, and slavish devotees has to look squarely, and publicly address, Trump's narcissism, as evidenced by the way he put on a show of reluctance about deciding to run because his "businesses were doing so fantastically," his pettiness as evidenced by his constant Twitter wars, his shallow understanding of matters of the spirit, as evidenced by the what he had to say about Easter when asked this spring, or his inherent hedonism, as evidenced by his  remark about Jeffrey Epstein, or his remark about how everything's okay "as long as you have a beautiful piece of ass beside you."

How have we fallen so far that those of obviously impeccable erudition are willing to overlook the matters enumerated in the previous paragraph?

No, Mitchell gets about a 93, but if 100 is the score necessary to get me to say I will definitely vote for Squirrel-Hair, he has come up short.

The day the USA's independence was confirmed

It was declared on July 4, 1776, but it was sealed as a fait accompli on October 19, 1781:

By mid-October, Cornwallis was watching Alexander Hamilton taunting him, by parading his troops in full view, just out of range of the British guns, so he couldn’t do a thing about it.  Washington had sent the upstart wunderkind from St. Croix to command one force, and the French nobleman Lafayette to command the other, making the most of his best people on what was sure to be an overwhelming and long-awaited defeat of their persistant enemy.

The battle was over almost as soon as it was begun; Cornwallis was forced to admit defeat on the 17^th.  All that remained was for them to work out the details of the surrender… and for Cornwallis to present his sword to the dominant Gentleman from Mt. Vernon.

But it was not to be.  Charles Cornwallis, who had been courageous on the battlefield throughout his career, was afraid of the ignominy he was to face on October 19.  This was no Roman triumph, when the victorious general parades his defeated enemy through the city in a cage, closing with his ritual decapitation.  It wasn’t even a televised event, with the defeated general having his shame captured on video for the ages.  In those simpler times, it was just a somber meeting, in which General Cornwallis would ride up on his horse, his retinue behind him, sign the terms of surrender, and present his sword to General Washington.  But he couldn’t bring himself to do it.  When the time came, he turned chicken.

And on the morning of October 19, 1781, little Charles Cornwallis called in sick.

No amount of encouragement or pleading from his staff would do.  He refused to budge from his stateroom.  The most powerful general in the British army handed his sword to his second-in-command, General Charles O’Hara, and sent him out in his place to bear the shame of England on his shoulders.

So it was that Charles O’Hara approached Washington’s staff on the 19^th of October, proffered the implausible excuse that his superior was just feeling under the weather that day, and tried to present his commander’s sword to the supreme commander of the Continental Army.  General Washington, ever the master of protocol, refused it, sending forward one of his own key aides, General Benjamin Lincoln, to accept the sword instead.   So it was finally done. 

Now, the task before us is to restore post-America to its previous status as the United States of America, thus ensuring that General Lincoln didn't accept that sword in vain.

Rockin' the anthems

Oh, hell yeah!  Gene Simmons brings a little rock and roll to the patriotic classics for a receptive and rowdy audience.



If this doesn't get ya teared up, you need to get your head on straight.

No one else is bringing this kind of comprehensive package to the table

Everyone, from disinterested observers to foaming-at-the-mouth Freedom-Haters to oh-so-savvy number-crunching wonks on "our side" will react to this with the expected "It's impossible to put a figure like that into the final arena of modern presidential politics" assessment.



Here's what's wrong with their assessment: They assume that post-modern post-American society is so far gone with its relativism, its prioritization of "fairness" over liberty, its utter lack of understanding of the role history has handed America, that it will immediately dismiss this great man as cartoonish and marginal.



They are wrong.  We on the Right venerate our beloved spokespeople a little differently from the way it's done on the Left.  On the Left, they lionize the likes of the Most Equal Comrade or the H-Word Creature based on identity politics and the basic leftist affinity for anybody who talks a good game about wealth redistribution or a new "enlightened" arrangement of the world stage.  And inevitably the bloom comes off the rose of someone adored on such a basis.



We scream and pump our fists over our heroes based on their adherence to time-honored truths about human nature and the human creature's relationship to almighty God.  We receive as nectar from the fountain of common sense and wisdom clearly thought-out and courageously expressed words of our spokespeople, because we truly love human freedom.  It's our own sovereignty, and everybody's that gets us fired up.



Ted Cruz is my first choice for a 2016 presidential candidate for the same reason Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Allen West, Michelle Malkin and John Bolton occupy my pantheon of heroes.  Yes, all these figures are ridiculed with a regularity and viciousness that would sear the senses of self-worth of beings of any less stoutness.  But these people understand what's really important in this universe.  Their cause is mine, and there's not a poll or opinion piece or Facebook exchange that could ever change that.

Defending conservative principles on Facebook

Just had an interesting exchange - in fact, I doubt if it's done yet - on Facebook.  A "friend" who is of the pretty darn hard left variety (Unitarian, feminist, climate change Kool Aid swallower, zealot for caricaturing the Tea Party as a bunch of inbred illiterates) thought it would be clever to taunt me with a "news item" about a Tennessee Tea Party activist named Hal Rounds and his group's efforts to get the state's history textbooks to place the Founding Fathers' vision and courage front and center, rather than the fact that some of them were slave owners.

In these situations, the first step  is to do some digging.  I Googled Hal Rounds.  I swear, I'm convinced that someone at Google manipulates the ranking for links in searches to put the lefty ones first.  I had to scroll to halfway through the second page to find one non-lefty link about him.  It was from black conservative Kira Davis, and it was just what I needed to fire a return salvo.

But the kind of sense Davis makes is buried among a plethora of accusatory, nuance-lacking diatribes.

Here is what the Tennessee Tea Party wants to see as the criterion for dealing with the fact that some Founders owned slaves:

“No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.”

No assertion that textbooks shouldn't mention the slavery issue.  Just that it shouldn't be so front-and-center as to obscure the main point about the Founders:

 Where is the demand for the Tea Party seeking to remove the teaching of slavery from textbooks?  It becomes obvious that the TP is leveling the charge that public schools are purposely playing down or omitting the Founding Father’s great contributions to American history.  Such great contributions include the importance of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.  Never in the history of mankind has a country founded its government on the premise that the right to life and liberty derive from our Creator and that these rights are unalienable.  Additionally, it has never been truly established that government’s primary function is to merely protect those rights as the Constitution is like no other founding document in the world.  Countries such as Rome, Sweden, France, Germany etc. have had several forms of government (i.e. monarchy, oligarchy, democracy, etc.) – not America though.  The United States, on the other hand, is the only nation in the world that has had a Constitutional Republic that has lasted for over 220 years.

The liberties and opportunities of the United States have attracted many immigrants to come here.  Even illegal aliens recognize that America is like no other country in the world as many risk their lives to come here for job opportunities.  I have never heard of an American floating on an inner tube while fighting off sharks of the ocean to escape America; but I have certainly heard of a Cuban doing such a thing to flee the socialist whelms of Fidel Castro in search of freedom.
Then there’s also the charge from the Tea Party affiliate that information is being purposely omitted; which adds negative light to some our great revolutionaries.  For example, modern textbooks hardly ever acknowledge the fact that some founders never owned slaves.  John Adams, Signer of the Declaration of Independence, immediately comes to mind as he stated, “My opinion about it has always been known…never in my life did I own a slave.” (Letter to George Churchman and Jacob Lindley on January 24, 1801)
Some simply changed their position and later denounced slavery.

Stay tuned.  I doubt if my "friend" will let this be the end of it.  If it gets juicier, I'll fill you in here.

UPDATE:  My "friend" wants to expand the argument to include the Texas textbook dust-up.  This time I had to wade through six and a half pages of Google search to find Rick Moran's American Thinker piece, the first really substantive refutation of claims such as, for instance, that Texas conservatives wanted to impart a stature equal to Lincoln's to Jefferson Davis.

Here's my latest comment in our thread:

Anyway, on to the Texas component. Lefty accounts of what went down try to make it sound as if the point was to establish some kind of moral equivalency between Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. What actually was implemented was the inclusion of Davis's inaugural address, so that students might have the opportunity to compare and contrast it to Lincoln's. Davis did, after all, se himself as president of a sovereign nation. I might have a criticism that this is not the highest priority element of the Civil War years for eighth graders to focus on, but it hardly rises to an advocacy of a view of black inferiority.

Well, you slimy bastard, you can always move to North Korea or Cuba

Michael Shulan, the creative director for the 9/11 memorial museum, wanted to nix the photo of firemen raising an American  flag at Ground Zero.  He opposed it for being too "kitschy" and "rah-rah American."

Blues for Detroit

I don't suppose it's really novel to look at a city as a metaphor, but Detroit, Michigan seems to have served as a few different kinds of metaphors over the last century.

The most obvious sense in which this is so is its role as the symbol of American industrial might from about 1905 to about 1970.  The various car manufacturers in the area, and various types of companies in their supply chains, consolidated into the Big Three auto makers.  It was one of those cities that drew huge waves of immigrants, from the American South and Europe, primarily.  They provided the muscle that shaped the sheet metal and gave twentieth-century America another shot at mobility in the aftermath of the end of the frontier.

With the rise of the Motown recording empire, Detroit became a metaphor for a couple of things: black entrepreneurship done right, and the gathering of various elements of black American music into a streamlined form of pop that made crossover an unprecedented possibility for black American cultural contributions.  Who didn't love the Supremes and the Four Tops, with the possible exception of the architects of Southern soul, Motown's down-home main competitor?

As the 1970s progressed, it became a metaphor for something else: unchecked union power.  Lots of people knew the benefits packages negotiated by the UAW were unsustainable.  There were rumblings that Japan had taken the quality-assurance concepts of Americans such as J.M. Juran and W. Edwards Deming and run with them, and were about to strike a serious blow at Detroit's status as the world's car capital.  Chrysler was where the first concrete evidence of that appeared in 1979.

Then it came to serve as a metaphor for how human frailty got the better of the civil-rights movement.  The city has for all intents and purposes had a black government for four-plus decades, and antics such as those of Kwame Kilpatrick and Monica Conyers came to characterize the way things were done.

All these metaphors really wind up folding together.  There's no denying that soot and noise and blazing foundries and the mindless repetition of the assembly line were characteristics of Detroit's rise to automotive greatness.  Like a lot of northern cities, it was loud, sweaty and cramped.  Let's not forget that, along with its black-music legacy (certainly Motown, but also black gospel, as embodied by C.L. Franklin's New Bethel Baptist Church, and jazz, from the days of McKinney's Cotton Pickers through the postwar wave of hard boppers such as Kenny Burrell, Tommy Flanagan and Yusef Lateef), it had a  white rock and roll tradition distinguished by a harder edge than, say the rock of New York or Southern California or Britain.  Witness the MC5 and The Stooges.  This tradition continued through the rap-era emergence  of Eminem.  The sense of a barely-tamed urban landscape goes way back in Detroit's history.

The city's black population saw Detroit's musical prominence and saw political predominance as a logical next step.  There was one small problem.  Berry Gordy built Motown the free-market way.  He started it with an $800 loan from his parents.  (His sister had, at that time, just accepted a much larger loan from Leonard Chess of the Chicago-based r&b Chess powerhouse, but Berry was too proud to jump on her bandwagon.)  Public administration in Detroit became predicated on the notion that there would never be any end to the flow of public gravy.  Welfare became easy to obtain, and the well-documented crumbling of traditional family life followed in short order.

Now Detroit, in 1950 the fifth largest city in the US, and 10th largest as recently as 1990, is smaller than Columbus, Ohio.    And, as we know, it is bankrupt.

A couple of years ago, the city was celebrating the fact that its high school graduation rate had clawed its way back to the point where only one-third of students were dropping out, but its student-achievement gap vis-a-vis the country at large, and the gimme mentality of the teachers' union tell the real story.

Ultimately, and most scarily. Detroit serves as a metaphor for where post-America is headed: a power structure made possible by the foment of societal division and the exalting of dependency, a retreat from  basic literacy and decency, and a once-rich popular culture turned to junk.

These things happen because of the conscious choices of multitudes of individual human beings.  People take some huckster's notion of what is valuable, or righteous, or hip, and completely turn their backs on their own inner moral filters.  The buying-in gains momentum, and civilizational death is well under way.

An idea worth dying for

Mr. Jefferson's document is a bit like the Bible: it loses none of its thunder with the passing of years.

George Jones RIP

The greatest voice in the history of country music.

He came from hardscrabble beginnings in Beaumont, Texas.  Served a little time in the US Marines.  Cut his first records for the Starday label in the mid-1950s.

There was country music before him, of course, going back to "The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane" by Fiddlin' John Carson in 1924, and there has been country music, of a sort, albeit with a veneer of overwrought glitz and cynical marketing designed to self-congratulate and reinforce a demographic's attitude, since Possum's heyday.

But no one, save maybe Hank Williams or Webb Pierce, has brought to musical life the actual swath of American humanity that understood every note the likes of these artists ever sang.  It's a type of American whose engagement with life is raw, whose missteps and fits-and-starts growth of character are on full display, but who endure with humor, simple faith, and the loyalty of friends who can take the ornery with the sublime.

The best speech I've ever heard Mitt Romney give

Today, in Irwin, Pennsylvania.  It had everything it needed to have: a savage attack on the Most Equal Comrade, a celebration of success and achievement, a clear delineation of the role of government, an explanation of what makes America exceptional, and a proclamation of the divine origin of our rights.

Damn right, I'm an absolutist

That's why I adore the clarity of Calvin Coolidge's July 4, 1926 speech on the eternal verities enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.