Liz's decision

 I'd been wondering if she'd go the binary-choice route:

Republican former Rep. Liz Cheney will vote for Vice President Kamala Harris in November, she said during remarks at Duke University, according to audio obtained by CNN.

The former Wyoming congresswoman noted the importance of voting for Harris in states like North Carolina, where she appeared on Wednesday.

“I think it is crucially important for people to recognize, not only is what I just said about the danger that Trump poses something that should prevent people from voting for him, but I don’t believe that we have the luxury of writing in candidates’ names, particularly in swing states,” Cheney said.

She made the announcement in North Carolina specifically because it is a battleground state, according to a source close to Cheney.

“And as a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this, and because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris,” she continued.

She joins her fellow Republican member of the J6 committee Adam Kinzinger in opting for this means of opposing the Very Stable Genius. They have considerable company. Over 200 staffers for George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney have endorsed Harris.

I 've been rethinking my harsh view of at least some of the people who have decided thusly. Cheney and Kinzinger are serious people with solid conservative bona fides, and I have no disagreement with their assessment of Trump and Trumpism. Cheney has chosen the word "danger" wisely.

But as I said recently over at Precipice, I have to conclude differently:

I’m not sure that stressing which is worse, which requires establishing some kind of criteria for how to line the two candidates up side by side to determine that, is a productive use of our time as summer turns to fall in 2024. The Very Stable Genius is a solipsistic man-child driven solely by self-glorification, but Kamala Harris has no redeeming qualities, as a politician, statesperson, or an example of character.

I mean that. John Kelly was exactly right last October when he said that Trump has no idea what America stands for. That goes for Harris as well.  From her abysmal economic policy stances (increase in corporate and capital gains taxes, price controls, minimum wage increase) to her zeal for having government impose play-like energy forms on the post-American people to her horrible choice of a running mate to her apparent inability to see that for a ceasefire to be agreed to in Gaza, Hamas would have to come to the table and negotiate, she is a nightmare.

The likelihood that Republicans could take the Senate could mitigate her ability to do damage. But consider the symbolism-level power a US president has. No one else serves as a national emblem the way a president does. 

Presidents have cultural influence. Her people are big on talking about vibes, so consider what kinds of vibes she'd emit from the White House.

It's pretty apparent that one of our most dire cultural dilemmas is the diminishing centrality of the nuclear family headed by a mother and father. Such a family unit is where we first learn about loyalty, trust, teamwork, humor, balance, encouragement, boundaries, and a host of other human essentials. Growing up in such an environment, we get to see a model of a man and woman relating to each other with affection and respect.

Kamala Harris thinks this is at best a boutique arrangement, one of many in which people can thrive. Why wouldn't she? Her leftist parents met at Berkeley in the 1960s, stayed together long enough to have two daughters and then split up. Her mother then emphasized the primacy of the "strong, black woman" role in approaching life while raising her daughters, setting the path for Harris's identity politics focus - and defense of abortion. Alas, at age 29, she had an affair with the married Willie Brown, and that's how she began her political career. Her husband, Doug Emhoff, lost his first wife because he impregnated the couple's nanny. 

In short, she doesn't have a lot of personal experience with stable two-parent (as in father and mother) families. She would no doubt advocate on the world stage for inclusion of all manner of exotic arrangements by which children are raised. 

I am not alone in my insistence that not voting for either Trump or Harris is the best choice for conservatives. Meghan McCain pretty much speaks for me on the matter:

“I greatly respect the wide variety of political opinions of all of my family members and love them all very much,” Meghan McCain wrote Tuesday on the social platform X. “I, however, remain a proud member of the Republican Party and hope for brighter days ahead. (Not voting for Harris or Trump, hope that clears things up).”

She did not touch upon who else, if anyone, she might support for the White House.

Responding to calls last month to endorse Harris’s ticket, McCain said, “Please stop trying to turn me into a progressive.”

“It’s a fever dream,” she added “I’m a life long, generational conservative.”

My fellow contributors at The Freemen News-letter also generally inhabit the Narrow Sliver of Terrain. It's the subject of much discussion in social media threads.

I am well aware that either Trump or Harris will win the election in November. I can't, with my meager resources, persuade a critical mass of voters to stay home.

But I come back to this: I will not have the eternal record book show that I signed onto either form of national ruin.

The contemptibles are not going to quietly accept yesterday's defeat

         Last September, I wrote a post at Precipice titled "My Personal Struggle With Contempt."  It riffs off of 

an essay at Law & Liberty by John O. McGinnis entitled “Is Civic Decline an Existential Threat?” It really doesn’t cover any ground that hasn’t been covered before. It notes the three main components of our present crisis: decline of education, decline of civic associations, and the transmutation of the religious impulse. McGinnis even shares my inclination toward pessimism about our prospects for any kind of civic restoration.

McGinnis is properly aware of how tough it is to surmount ill will given the array of obsessions the Left has imposed on society as a whole:

As McGinnis points out, climate alarmism, which demands a halt to human advancement regarding such modern blessings as safety, comfort and convenience, is something that we ought not to abide by. He also notes the normalization of the Howard Zinn’s and Nicole Hannah-Jones’s view of America’s essence, and this likewise falls outside the parameters of “just one of many viewpoints we ought to consider in our nation’s classrooms.”

I would add to his enumerations the mainstreaming of historically unprecedented notions of human sexuality, such as the expansion of the definition of marriage to include unions of two people of the same sex, and the legitimization of self-identification with the sex opposite one’s DNA and genitals. Carl Trueman is exactly right in asserting that, of all the bizarre novelties we’re living with, this one takes us into realms devoid of reference points. In combination with artificial intelligence, it has the capacity to completely untether us from assumptions we as members of the species Homo sapiens have held since our arrival among the planet’s life forms.

And then there is the septic infection on the Right:

Conversely, the fact that well over half of those who identify with one of the nation’s two major political parties intend to vote for the most unfit, vulgar and infantile person to ever enter US politics, even after two impeachments, four indictments, and the increasingly unhinged nature of his social-media blurtings cannot be permitted to be seen as a new normal.

Along those lines, New Right abandonment of the free-market component of conventional conservatism’s vision erodes the overall centrality of human freedom on which that vision rests. Some very smart people have gone in for this. It seems they have lost sight of what Adam Smith, Frederic Bastiat and Henry Hazlitt had to say about how an individual’s freedom of choice about what to own, buy, sell, invent and market is a divinely granted gift. This one really does boil down to a binary choice. One is either free to come to an agreement with one’s fellow human being about the value of a good or service being considered for exchange, or we’re talking about central planning. Prattle about “settling for imperfect arrangements” that compromise this freedom of choice, this personal sovereignty, stinks of rudderlessness.

This is what I mean by inhabiting an ever-narrower sliver of terrain. There is no space in our public square for a healthy prescription for peaceable co-existence.

I then publicly forced myself to be real about my reaction to the lay of the land, and its spiritual implications:

That said, all the destructive devotions I’ve discussed here are embraced by my actual various fellow human beings, and I have to figure out how to hold them in some kind of basic regard. I pass them on the sidewalk. I host them for Thanksgiving dinner. They’re colleagues at the university where I teach. I have them as social-media friends. 

If I hold them in contempt, which Merriam-Webster defines as “the feeling that a person or a thing is beneath consideration, worthless, or deserving scorn,” I cage myself in a kind of isolation in which productive existence becomes impossible. 

More fundamentally, in so doing, I sin. No matter what they have proclaimed or done, they were created by the same God who fashioned me, and have the same right to breathe and pursue happiness that I have.

The struggle hasn't abated. That has been brought home to me as I encounter the Trumpist response to the excellent victory for the international rules-based order achieved yesterday in the House of Representatives.  

The Federalist, a perfect example of a once-actually-conservative site that has been wholly given over to MAGA-ism, has among the daily sewage it's inflicting on the world this morning Shawn Fleetwood's piece in which he trots out the by-now-disgustingly-familiar look-Ukraine-can't-possibly-decisively-defeat-Russia-so-instead-of-shoveling-more-money-at-the-Ukrainian-resistance-to-being-invaded-we-ought-to-be-moving-toward-a-'realistic'-end-game angle. Not a word about the fierce determination of the Ukrainian people and leadership to reassert the country's sovereignty. Oh, and also that disingenuous zero-sum horseshit about the US southern border.

At the similarly septic American Conservative, Bradley Devin, in a piece titled "What's Next After the Ukrainian Mistake?" the author makes the help Johnson got on the House floor yesterday his focus, with a strong implication that Johnson was driven by a cynical foremost motivation of keeping his Speaker job.

Utah Senator Mike Lee, who is a prime example of this sepsis consuming a once-honorable-Constitutional originalist with a mainstream Rightist set of principles, decided to post on Twitter (X, if you must), a hey-look-we-got-'em-now reaction to the package's passing that lists objections of varying degrees of speciousness, such as - well, he starts out with that always-handy red herring, the US southern border - and including funding for gender advisors to the Ukrainian army and humanitarian aid to Gaza.

From his choices of objections and the way he words his screed, it's obvious he's reaching, while the sane majority - well, maybe it's just a plurality - of Westerners are celebrating the assertion of national sovereignty for three important West-inclined nations.

The Washington Examiner has a roundup of explanations from House Republicans who voted against the aid package. They strike a similar tone to the foregoing:

“I stand with the Ukrainian people in their fight against Russia, but not at the continued expense of hardworking American taxpayer,” Rep. James Comer (R-KY) wrote on X. “The United States cannot continue to spend blindly when those funds could be better utilitzed right here at home. As Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, I made a commitment to safeguard taxpayer funds from waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement.”

“For the Swamp, it’s Ukraine First and America Last,” Rep. Dan Bishop (R-NC) wrote. “Gleefully waving Ukrainian flags as the American people suffer under Biden’s border invasion.”

“We must be thoughtful and strategic with our dollars and put Americans first, which is why I voted to send funds to our borders, Israel, and Taiwan, and not send dollars to Ukraine until we have a strategic exit plan with quantifiable metrics,” Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI) wrote in a statement.

Last month at Precipice, I wrote a post looking at a number of laudable, indeed noble, efforts of people who to some degree hang onto a self-identification as Republicans to plan for a time when the Trumpist infection passes out of the party. (In the process, I date myself as Boomer.) 

 

 

Some are more effective than others. I’ve written before about how Heath Mayo, founder of Principles First, badly dented his movement’s raison d’être by chiding Republicans for not signing on to legislation codifying same-sex marriage, calling such legislation a “no-brainer” that would strengthen the family unit. Such a position is a de facto resignation to secularization. Acknowledgement of a transcendent order becomes a quaint notion our society has outgrown if we listen to such an argument. 

Most self-identified conservatives can’t accept that.

Among publications that have sought to clearly repudiate the MAGA impulse, some have admirably continued to hew to a recognizable conservative vision (think The Dispatch) and some have bought into the binary-choice framing, which has made them Democrats for all intents and purposes (think The Bulwark; I was particularly dismayed to learn that Mona Charen had deemed the stay-home and consideration of a third party options as “the coward’s way out”).

The publication that has conferred Senior Freelance Contributor status on me, The Freemen Newsletter, has spawned an interesting undertaking. I’m not exactly clear on whether it’s going to be called the Reagan Caucus or the New Reagan Caucus, but a number of younger folks who appear on the masthead are having lively discussions on Twitter (X, if you must) and Slack regarding mission, tactics and standards for alliances.

The Freemen founding editor, Justin Stapley, laid out his druthers about the enterprise in a recent piece entitled “DeTrumpification of the GOP.” He sets the table by resolutely proclaiming what I assert above - namely, that despair is not an option, that our conservatism obliges us to see this as a universe of possibility. (He does so by taking issue with a 2021 Dispatch piece by Jonah Goldberg, someone high in Justin’s pantheon of good guys - and mine) in which Goldberg looks seriously at the third party option.)

Justin sees a Reagan Caucus thusly:

Taking Reagan as a symbol of an old-school approach to Republican politics and a commitment to conservative principles unstained by the reactionary nature of Trump’s brand of nationalist populism, this Reagan Caucus is declaring an intention to engage in the GOP's primaries and processes to push back against MAGA’s control of the party, and pledges to withhold their support of Republican candidates who embody or acquiesce to the toxic nature of the MAGA movement.   

If non-Trump conservatives take this path, it can solve several of the problems with the third-party route:   

• We could still participate in the Republican Party and wouldn't further abandon the party to the very forces we wish to curtail.  

• We would be encouraging more participation in the party processes instead of further enabling control of the processes by those we oppose. 

• We wouldn't be seen as a rival or spoiler political party.  

• We wouldn't be operating from the get-go as a spoiler effort.  

• We would have clear organizing principles and, especially, could demonstrate a contrast to the party's current direction given that the actual “agenda” of Trump and MAGA changes at his whim (TikTok).

• We could both endorse acceptable Republican primary candidates and actively work to get them through the process.   

• There would be nothing keeping us from endorsing acceptable Republican candidates who lost in the primaries as independent candidates should the eventual nominee prove to be wholly unacceptable, or throwing our support behind other independents or even third-party candidates.  

• The caucus's declared values would hopefully keep members from being less inclined to support Democrats unless the Democratic candidate moved to accommodate us as a more moderate alternative in the mold of Manchin or Sinema.  

I think this approach has a good shot at accomplishing what Jonah proposed in 2021 while answering the concerns many had with his proposal, including myself. There have long been various caucuses within both political parties and many other organizations and lobbying entities that support or withhold their support of party nominees based on declared principles.

So, the Reagan Caucus is not going to be doing anything new or threatening, and it could engage in ways that would still accomplish the goals that Jonah put forward, arguably in more effective ways given that we'd still be engaging in the GOP itself without other Republicans easily dismissing us as a rival or spoiler party. We could force a genuine debate on principles and vision that could transcend Trump and Trumpism instead of becoming a reflexive opposition that loses its intellectual grounding in the struggle of the general election. 

And besides, even most Trump voters still love Reagan, and this effort could be an effective way to provide a better contrast between an actual conservative vision and the angry, unprincipled direction that Trump has taken the party.

His optimism is enviable. Maybe he has an ear closer to the ground than I do, although I know a lot of local Republicans. Maybe that ground is more arable in Utah, where he lives, than it is here in Indiana.I think of my state’s gubernatorial race. There are four Republican candidates. The television ads of three of them try to outdo each other in boasting of the Trump connection. The fourth candidate has chosen a noteworthy departure, framing himself as being in the lineage of Reagan and Mitch Daniels, a universally admired Indiana native who served as everything from governor to president of Purdue University to president of the Hudson Institute to head of Eli Lily’s North America operations to Reagan’s OMB director. I don’t know much more about that candidate, but I’d still want an answer to the question of who he intends to vote for for president come November.

As I say, the folks who are fired up about this project are, from this Boomer’s perspective, young pups, and they are already setting about taking concrete actions - becoming Precinct Committeemen, running for office, deciding how to structure the project organizationally.

In their back-and-forths, they demonstrate a grounding in that which they ought to be grounded in. They know who Russell Kirk, Fredrich Hayek and Frank S. Meyer are. 

Two things: I hope they understand the ferocity with which the Trumpists will attempt to stomp them into the dust, and the challenge they’ll face maintaining their standards for forming alliances. I’m already seeing arguments along the-tent-must-be-big-enough-to-bring-in the-less-ate-up-Trumpists lines. That could muddy the mission from the get-go.

Please note the phrase about ferocity in the last paragraph of the above excerpt. And note how quickly the Trumpists went to work upon the passage of yesterday's aid package.

I have real trouble forgiving them for what they've done to conservatism's prospects. They're proud of their incoherence and their vaunting of stubbornness as a primary admirable basis for political engagement.

I'm trying really hard not to let this post become a venomous rant, but I can say that actual conservatives remain mired in a two-pronged existential battle: against a Left working overtime to impose climate alarmism, militant identity politics, and wealth redistribution, and a Right wholly given over to worship of the least savory traits human beings are capable of exhibiting. 

At this point, I still intend to stay home the first Tuesday in November. 

 

 

 

The election of Johnson as House speaker crystallizes the danger facing conservatism since 2015

 It's expressed as succinctly as I've seen in these paragraphs from this CNN opinion piece:

On almost every issue, Johnson is hard right. He has been a staunch opponent of same-sex marriage. He has been at the forefront of opposing reproductive rights. He opposed funding for Ukraine. He wants to deregulate the economy, cut taxes and deny the very real problems facing our climate. He supported “expunging” former President Donald Trump’s second impeachment and has questioned the Justice Department for how it has handled investigations into Hunter Biden.

Most importantly, Johnson was at the center of the effort to overturn the 2020 election, something that in other times would have been immediately disqualifying for holding office let alone being speaker. Within the House itself, he was one of the point persons working with the Trump administration to subvert the decision of American voters by standing against certifying the 2020 results and helping create the legal strategy that was the basis for Trump’s attempted overthrow. In particular, he helped to round up support for a legal brief behind a lawsuit in Texas that would have thrown out the election results in four battle ground states where Biden was victorious.

The author, Julian Zeliker, a Princeton history professor, focuses on American political unfolding over the past 60 years. He's written books on Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and Newt Gingrich's role in transforming the Republican Party. 

So he's done some serious looking into the forces that have brought us to where we are. But it doesn't take a surfeit of astuteness to see that he has done so with a conviction that the good guys of the story have been located left of center. 

Johnson's assumption of the speakership makes easy pickins for the likes of Zeliker. 

Since so many on the right have willingly let their core set of principles be muddied in the name of "the times" calling for the core's situational tweaking, we've seen such developments as "national conservatism," which is basically gussied up protectionism, and, more recently, a clouded understanding of the stakes involved in Ukraine. 

The Zelikers of the world will happily conflate these positions - and, more importantly, the election denialism that has poisoned the stances of all Republican Speaker aspirants in the past several months, to one degree or another - with solidly conservative positions that Never Trump conservatives get behind: unnborn Americans' right to life, the understanding of what marriage is common to all cultures throughout all human history until five minutes ago, the understanding that cheap, dense and readily available energy sources has made for the quantum boost in human advancement over the last two centuries, and the principle that government ought to have to puke all over itself to take the first red cent of any citizen's money.

But since the Very Stable Genius came down the elevator, these get tangled together in ways that make reversing the tangle increasingly difficult. 

There might be some kind of reader who would here be inclined to respond, "Don't you think this presents you with an opportunity to reassess this whole conservative enterprise you've been so solidly behind most of your adult life?"

And I can't deny that it does raise interesting questions. I've been fascinated, in a horrified kind of way, at the wholesale signing on to Trumpism by towering intellectual figures I'd once greatly respected: Victor Davis Hanson, Roger Kimball, Bill Bennett, to name a few. I do ask myself, is there something flawed about the basic vision that would lead to their kind of excitement about an obvious charlatan?

What makes me doubt the validity of such doubt about conservatism is that there are still so many voices, found at journals such as National Review and The Dispatch (and LITD and Precipice) that did not swallow the Kool-Aid and are still capable of extracting Trumpist sludge from immutable verities.

But impressionable ordinary Americans, particularly the younger ones coming out of an "educational" system that has left them woefully ungrounded in a comprehension of the West's unique blessings for humankind, are vulnerable to a low-taxes-and-traditional-marriage-equals-election-denialism formulation as they prepare for the coming election cycle.

And postmodern Republicans will dig in their heels, flaunting a damn-right-it's-all-part-of-the-same-worldview / we-must-get-down-in-the-mud-for-this-fight attitude that makes any kind of healing or yearning after that which actually makes sense and is noble even more remote than it has been for eight years. 

Two divergent - but both intelligently arrived at - views of populism

 Consider this a preliminary working-out of a notion I want to explore in an essay for a new publication to which I've been invited to contribute.

Populism is obviously a force to be contended with, but its contours are not distinct beyond a basic juxtaposition against an elite.

I think Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center does a commendable job framing it as a reaction to the limited choices posed to the Western public, much as social democracy was a century ago:

By 1929, labor-backed parties were powerful everywhere they existed. Five Western nations had labor-led governments by then, and many more would join them by 1940. The nineteenth-century debates between liberals seeking constitutional democracies and conservatives resisting their rise had been utterly transformed into the battle between capital and labor that typified twentieth-century politics.

It’s easy in hindsight to see why this happened. Industrialization upset centuries of tradition as millions of people left farms and towns to work in city-based factories. These people came to see themselves as united by class interest, one that sought to limit the private power held by factory owners and traditional moral authorities such as priests and aristocrats. Armed with the vote, they forced their views to the political forefront and set the terms of debate.

Their rise was fueled by the failure of their foes. Non-socialist parties promised peace and prosperity. Instead, the world experienced war and woe. After the World Wars and the Great Depression, voters everywhere wanted calm. They largely granted social democrats the policies that had driven their ancestors to mad opposition in exchange for continued liberal political freedoms and some semblance of private property and markets. The post-1945 social democratic victory was so thorough that even leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan could only claw back some of the ground their ancestors had conceded.

He says something similar seems to be presently afoot:

Populist ideas and themes have also infiltrated major parties in the United States, Great Britain and Canada. Donald Trump is a populist par excellence with his overt nationalism and call to smash elites. Britain’s Tories won their 2019 majority under the leadership of the brash Boris Johnson, who promised to deliver the Brexit voters had opted for three years earlier, as well as significant government spending to “level up” left-behind parts of the country. Canada’s new Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, also opts for “us versus them” themes and targets working-class voters with his policies and rhetoric.

This dramatic surge has already left its mark just as the early twentieth-century social democratic jump did. Back then, existing parties began to create rudimentary welfare states in the hope they would prevent “socialism.” Today, existing leaders rush to limit immigration and subsidize domestic manufacturing, two main demands of the populist right. Fiscal consolidation or austerity seems off the table as traditional center-left and center-right parties compete for the support of economically struggling voters and parties who otherwise might back populists.

This alone would mark populism as an important phenomenon. Social democracy’s prior rise from nonentity to dominant force, however, suggests a more fundamental shift is underway. Populists have already imitated their predecessors’ early achievements. Can they go further and become the paradigmatic twenty-first century political force?

He's candid about how populism is being demographically fueled:

Populist parties tend to draw from less educated, poorer men. These are not society’s dregs: they work rather than draw benefits. But the same trend persists regardless of nation. Populist support drops as income and education rise, and it is almost always higher among men than among women. Populism also tends to draw support from those who identify as Christians but do not regularly attend services. This tendency is less often measured, in part because many western nations are so thoroughly secular that pollsters tend not to ask about religious belief and observance. A statistical study I commissioned, however, found that 2017 support for Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland rose in Bavaria in direct relationship to Catholic church membership, even after controlling for other factors. This would explain why many populist parties and leaders extol Christian values even as they do not pursue explicitly theological policies.

The demographic solidarity among populists means they have a shared identity that fuels their political activity. They are not, as elites have commonly assumed, motivated solely by transitory anger focused on discrete — hence ameliorable — concerns. They have a worldview based on their experience and framework that encompasses the whole of society. This means they can weather the periodic storms that always beset politics and remain firmly on course.

It's a worldview markedly at odds with what Olsen (and a great many other analysts) call the "elite":

. . . populists want a very different type of society than do the educated, affluent elites whom they battle. Elites benefit from the individualistic society they have created, both economically and socially. Globalization and mass immigration mean they can contract with cheaper foreigners for labor at home and abroad, dramatically increasing their purchasing power. Their education also has trained them to value the novel experience over the traditional one, whether it is searching for exciting new foods or engaging with different cultures. The fact that the rapid adoption of these views has unsettled and disadvantaged large numbers of their fellow citizens does not bother them, so sure are they of their merit and virtue.

Where I think Olsen steps onto shaky ground is when he concludes that populism is so inexorably on the rise that elites had better reconsider their presumptions lest they get run over. Let us remember that the "elites" have the technology and the thrall of upcoming generations to their "novel" ideas. Shiny objects and human nature are a volatile mix.

Olsen's view, in more concentrated form, is what motivated a formerly actual conservative, well-respected for his erudition and measured takes, such as Victor Davis Hanson to burn bridges and go all-in for the Very Stable Genius, arguing in a book called The Case for Trump that a hollowed-out national core was fed up with not being listened to, and that a period of upheaval was just the ticket for serving notice to the muckety-mucks.

Daren Jonescu is having none of it. He sees a different kind of dichotomy, and illustrates it using the issue of Ukraine:

The American government’s old guard establishment in both parties wants Ukraine to lose the war, but slowly. The establishment’s upstart wing, comprised mainly of populists of the right, including the farcically-named House Freedom Caucus, wants Russia to win, and quickly. Neither side is quite willing to state its genuine position directly, at least so far, although the loonier puppets of the populist faction, led by Marjorie Taylor Greene, are almost there. But the two groups’ respective positions become increasingly obvious and inescapable over time, being the only reasonable explanations for their respective actions and rhetoric. 

Let it be noted, however, that for all the apparent conflict between them on the subject of the war, in the final analysis they are aiming at the same thing, namely the appeasement of Vladimir Putin and the maintenance of the pre-war status quo, with thousands of dead or enslaved victims of tyranny “over there” being regarded by both sides as an insignificant price to pay for the restoration of “stability.” That is, for all the noisy vitriol between the two factions, they are, in the final analysis, basically arguing about optics, not outcomes — such internal conflict over mere methods and rhetoric being a defining mark of establishmentarianism. The “two party system” operating as always, and, as always, dragging a hundred and fifty million lost souls through the crucible of its ignoble lie, the never-ending “binary choice” election cycle.

The same dynamic, with regional variations, may easily be observed in Western Europe, as the traditional democratic allies maintain, at the leadership level, the same ambiguous voice of “supporting Ukraine, but not too much,” while an undercurrent made up of undersecretaries and rival parties speaks more openly of Putin having been “unjustly provoked” by NATO, and of Ukraine having to accept the sacrifice of its territorial sovereignty in the name of peace. 

Is it any wonder the former free world is so unfree today, and so rapidly accelerating into the gutter of self-annihilation? Its establishments are rotting corpses, decaying in the muck of lustful indulgence and hubristic illogic, and increasingly infested with Marxist flies and populist worms, all seeking, in their superficially alternative ways, to cast off all the institutions, principles, and apolitical wonders that were once the wellsprings of civilization and the guardrails of rational coexistence, in the name of their own avarice, perpetual power, and sense of entitlement.

Allow me to here let the cat out of the bag and say that I find Jonescu's assessment more resonant. He takes the longer view, speaking of "wellsprings of civilization and the guardrails of rational coexistence."

That is what gets short shrift in most of these exchanges. What I'm after is a worldview impervious to compartmentalization. 

Olsen says populists claim a Christian foundation but are not inclined to attend church. That indicates to me that they're also not inclined to do a deep dive into the very kind of thing we all need to dive into. 

I know that the notion of immutable verities shows up in a lot of the bullet-point-ish summarizations of what conservatism (remember that concept?), but we're always tempted to settle for an uneasy peace at which competing social movements or economic paradigms arrive. 

The real quest human beings are on is that for a slop-proof universal ought. 

And I don't think we can embark on a sound analysis on any level short of acknowledging a transcendent order. Anything less ends in a relativity that ultimately resolves nothing.

 

 

 

New Right nastiness and a young woman's innocuous video

 Am pleased to see Zack Kessel at National Review come to the defense of Julia Mazur:

Julia Mazur, an ex-Tinder employee . . .  hosts the Pretty Much Done podcast, which addresses relationships with a focus on “the most important one we’ll ever have: our relationship with ourself.” On her show, according to a self-described friend of hers from college, Mazur “talks about breakups, relationships, and trying to love yourself at any stage you are in.”

Mazur became X’s main character after a video she posted on TikTok — in which she describes her Saturday as a single, childless woman in her late 20s as consisting of such activities as sleeping in, binge-watching television shows on Netflix, and teaching herself how to make shakshuka — went viral. She closed out the video with a paean to freedom, saying her ability to do essentially whatever she wants makes up for however upset she might be by her not having a husband and children:

I say all this to say, whenever I’m hard on myself about why I’m not married and I don’t have kids and I should be further along at 29 (almost 30), I wouldn’t wanna do anything else this Saturday. I know that you can do all these things when you have kids and you’re married, and I understand, but the effortlessness and ease of my life — just kind of focusing on myself and the shakshuka I wanna make or the Beyoncé concert I wanna go to — really pays off when I’m hard on myself for not being where society tells me I should be in life.

Everything Mazur talks about should seem relatively mundane. She does not have a husband or children, so she doesn’t have the responsibilities that would come with them. It’s a silver lining in a situation she seems to understand might not be ideal. You might think such a video describes pretty basic stuff that is not worth getting worked up about. You’d be wrong. 

The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh posted the TikTok on X on Sunday, writing that Mazur’s “life doesn’t revolve around her family and kids so instead it revolves around TV shows and pop stars. Worst of all she’s too stupid to realize how depressing this is.”

There’s plenty that could be said about the experience of a single, childless woman in her late 20s. I obviously have very little practice being one, so I’ll address something else: the sheer nastiness in Walsh’s post. His attack on a woman who’s simply trying to appreciate what she has in life is emblematic of a broader problem on the right: the conflation of “conservative” with “jerk.” Walsh is by no means the only offender, with many other right-wing influencers solely focusing on “owning the libs.” The “owning” often stoops to bullying.

Look, Mazur could indeed be held up as a poster child for the vacuousness of the lives of millennials. She is indeed a number in the collapsing-marriage rate, and her choices of ways to aesthetically nourish herself, and her seeming lack of community and connectedness are the opposite of heartening. 

But Neo-Trumpists just have to slather a dollop of attitude on any observation they make. As Kessel says, there's no higher priority for them than "owning the libs."

Kessel commendably then steps back and takes a more aerial view of the ways in which the New Right is decidedly not what we'd known as conservatism prior to 2015:

This is a real problem for conservatism. Over the past decade or so, many elements of what once constituted the movement have crumbled, especially within much of the right-wing media ecosystem. Small government? That’s old-fashioned. Clear, universal ideas of morality? So archaic. A globally engaged United States? That’s “not where the voters are,” and even if it was, America isn’t necessarily the good guy. 

The difference between actual conservatives and the New Right is that conservatism has a vision for a society in which everyone would be truly happier. The other bunch just wants to stomp the bad guys into the dust. Problem is, the bad guys will rise again at some point, demonstrating the cyclical nature of this level of political activity. That is, unless the yay-hoos institute such an authoritarian system that they can't.

No, thanks.