Charlie Sykes and the mirror opposite of the Flight-93-election argument

 You may recall the article that instilled a sense of urgency in a number of right-leaners two presidential election cycles ago:

In September 2016, Michael Anton wrote an essay for the right-wing Claremont Institute, “The Flight 93 Election,” making the case for Donald Trump’s election as a necessary gamble to stave off the destruction of conservatism. Anton then did a stint in Trump’s National Security Council, and last night was rewarded by the president with a posting to the National Board for Education Sciences. It was a fitting coda for Trump to single out the figure who most perfectly captured the spirit that right-wing intellectuals brought to the era.

Anton’s case was notable, first, for its novelty. Before Trump won, “Never Trumpers” constituted the dominant strain of right-wing intellectual sentiment. Here was a prestigious organ of the intellectual right making a positive case for a nominee that the movement had dismissed as a clown and a surefire loser. Anton memorably seized the imagination of his audience by likening the choice to that faced by the passengers of Flight 93, who wrested control of the plane from Al Qaeda hijackers on 9/11. Allowing Hillary Clinton to win would mean certain death for conservatism, whereas electing Trump was risky — “you may die anyway” — but clearly preferable to certain death.

Anton’s argument was filled with dramatic rhetorical flourishes like this, and what little of it that was not non-falsifiable was demonstrably false. (According to Anton, “liberals took over criminal justice in the mid-’60s,” Democrats “treat open borders as the ‘absolute value,’” and Barack Obama engaged in “flagrant use of the IRS to torment political opponents.”)

Despite (or perhaps because of) these flaws, Anton articulated the bedrock principle that has driven the right the last [eight] years: The Democratic Party is so terrifying and all-powerful that literally any measures, however unwise, are justifiable to block them from winning an election. That is the power of Anton’s chosen analogy, which urges his audience to overlook all of Trump’s complete unfitness to handle the job (“You — or the leader of your party — may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane,” he concedes) on the grounds that the alternative means imminent national death. 

Now, in summer 2024, former radio host and Bulwark cofounder Charlie Sykes has employed the same quickening-of-the-senses tactic, but from the opposite end of the spectrum:

 My latest in The Atlantic:

When the Never Trump movement emerged, in 2016, it wasn’t always clear what never meant. For some anti-Trump Republicans, it simply meant a short, shameful interval before falling back in line with their party. Others couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton and sat out the election. But a notable remnant meant never as in “absolutely never.” As the threat of a second Donald Trump presidency grows more imminent, that remnant seems to have hardened its resolve to do whatever it needs to do to keep him out of office—including planning to support the presumptive Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris.

For some observers, the idea of conservative-leaning Americans voting for Harris is unthinkable. “For Never Trump or Trump reluctant conservatives the Harris nomination is a catastrophic development,” the American Enterprise Institute fellow and Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen declared in a post on X. “At least Biden pretended to be a moderate,” he wrote. But now, he argued, Never Trump Republicans have to choose between Trump and Harris, whom Thiessen described as the “most left wing Democratic presidential nominee in modern times,” adding, bizarrely, that she was “a Democratic Socialist who is to the left of Bernie Sanders.”

There's nothing bizarre about that characterization, Charlie. She's on the record as, prior to this week's flip-flops, supporting the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, a path to citizenship for pretty much anybody coming over the border, pretty much unrestricted abortion, creating of a federal Office of Paid Family Leave, and the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which conferred legitimacy on Iran's toxic regime.

He enlists the help of fellow Atlantic writer Tom Nichols in his disingenuous attempt to paint Never-Trumpers as looking for an excuse to vote for the Very Stable Genius:

It’s important to understand what’s going on here. Theissen leans on this sort of crude caricature because it’s useful for anti-anti-Trump Republicans who have been scrabbling desperately for an excuse — almost any excuse — to vote for Trump. For the anti-anti-Trump pundit, whatever the allegation against Trump, whatever his crimes or his frauds, the other side is always worse. As Damon Linker once wrote, anti-anti-Trumpism “allows the right to indulge its hatred of liberals and liberalism while sidestepping the need for a reckoning with the disaster of the Trump administration itself.”

But the gravamen of Thiessen’s argument was that Harris also posed an impossible dilemma for Never Trump conservatives. 

“Even the pretense of a benign alternative has been eliminated,” he claimed.

But, as it turns out, the choice of Trump vs. Harris is proving to be a remarkably easy choice for Never Trumpers, who have moved far beyond searching for a “benign alternative.”

The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols posted a quick answer to Thiessen: “Yes, I have to pick between a normal person who is going to have some policies I won’t like and an unhinged, deranged wannabe dictator sociopath surrounded by goons.”

In other words, not really that hard at all.

On paper, Thiessen might once have had a point. Before Trump, the ideological divide between Harris and conservative Republicans might have been too large to bridge. But this is not a normal campaign. For most Never Trump Republicans, the 2024 election is not primarily about the divide between the left and the right; it’s about preserving our liberal constitutional order. For years, Never Trumpers have been split between those who have remained conservative at the policy level and those who more or less transformed themselves into progressives. There were also differences of opinion within the movement about whether Joe Biden should step aside, but there was never any doubt about the existential threat Trump posed to the body politic.

Of course, many conservatives have their own issues with Harris’s policies—and, for that matter, have their issues with Biden’s. In an op-ed for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Geoff Duncan, the conservative Republican former lieutenant governor of Georgia, acknowledged that endorsing Harris “wasn’t easy. Through my conservative lens, I see very few policy areas where we agree.” But, he wrote, his “current north star is ridding” the GOP of Trump, and Harris is “the best vehicle toward preventing another stained Trump presidency.”

The trauma of the last month also made the choice somewhat easier. 

Trump’s July surge focused the mind of anti-Trump voters, perhaps usefully, on the very real prospect that he was about to return to power. 

Trump had been leading the polls for months, but the attempted assassination and the Republican National Convention boosted him into the most dominant political position of his lifetime. Meanwhile, the one candidate who stood between him and his future presidency of retribution was visibly floundering. 

For anti-Trump progressives, July felt like a near-death experience. Now the relief is staggering—for Never Trumpers too.

There are, however, still bumps ahead, and not every Never Trumper will be able to reconcile themselves to Harris’s style of progressivism.

That would be me.

But according to Sykes, this makes me a poseur, wishing to appear aloof:

Some Republicans may sit out the race in a cloud of above-it-all righteous irrelevance.

Irrelevance. Interesting framing. Just what sets the standard for relevance? A seat at the table for the food fight over which presidential candidate and political party will achieve the victory of clinging to power by its fingernails while being pelted with investigations, lawsuits and inevitably disillusioned purists of either stripe? Count me out. I'm interested in something with some lasting power, the immutable stuff.

I realize that identity and power are a lot sexier to the 2024 post-Westerner than the quest for truth, justice, beauty and wisdom. But that's what is. I'm interested in what should be. And I'm so damn interested in it that I can't abide by what Kamala Harris is about any more than I can what the VSG is about.

So, yeah, I still plan to stay home in November. For a reason I've laid out here before: I don't want to have the eternal record book show that I signed onto either form of American ruination. 

It is the right thing to do to stand on this narrow sliver of terrain. 

Charlie, why are you so eager to write us off? Do you maybe harbor occasional thoughts that ours is the honorable stance?

Don't look to either major US party for a friend of the free market

 The Republicans, as we know, have gone full-tilt populist, as confirmed by the choice of tariffs-and-industrial-policy fan J.D. Vance as their vice presidential nominee.

But how does freshly minted Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris stack up with regard to economic policy?

Ryan Bourne of the Cato Institute reminds us of some of Vice President Kamala Harris’s positions on economic policy.

• Pandemic checks of $2,000/month for most individuals until three months after the end of the declared emergency.
• Mandate that Federal Reserve banks interview at least one person of each gender and racial or ethnic diversity for the position of president.
• End of minimum work requirement during the preceding year before becoming eligible for family and medical leave.
• $15 minimum wage (I assume she will want more now).
• The federal Price Gouging Prevention Act that would guarantee bigger and more widespread shortages during emergencies.
• A climate “equity” bill that would create a new agency to assess legislation for DEI purposes: the Office of Climate and Environmental Justice Accountability. The name says it all.

She is also a protectionist and voted against president Trump’s free-trade USMCA (U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement). During her first campaign (she got fewer votes than the Democrat who won the primary in Samoa this year, as I learned from Matt Continetti), she supported Medicare for All (though she later modified her stance. That means she may shift again), the Green New Deal, federal paid family leave, and free college tuition for most Americans. These are only a few things she is for, in addition to all the things that happened during the last few years.

The Dems are reliable, at lest, unlike the Pubs, who seem to relish mercuriality. Still driven by their Big Three: identity politics, climate alarmism and wealth redistribution.  

Unifier, my tail end

 The blather about how, now that the Very Stable Genius had locked up complete control of the Republican Party, he'd pivot toward some kind of at least minimal magnanimity and extend a welcoming hand to Americans broadly gained momentum after he got his ear nicked in Pennsylvania. He even participated in the revising of his RNC acceptance speech, which had observers anticipating the new version with bated breath.

Alas, his feeble attempt to deliver on that last night lasted three minutes max. And then we were into this:

Despite the call for unity, Trump soon referred to “crazy Nancy Pelosi,” repeatedly cited false allegations of stolen elections, called for the firing of the head of the United Auto Workers, cited the “China virus” and the “invasion” at the Southern border. He called a Democratic senator a “total lightweight.” He even repeated a puzzling allusion to “the late, great Hannibal Lecter,” from “The Silence of the Lambs,” which he’s used before. 

Of course, the hall full of drool-besotted leg-humpers, dutifully wearing their solidarity ear bandages, ate it up. Their "fighter" is still that. 

And because the Democrats are facing the nightmare of a candidate (and current president) who is increasingly under pressure to step down due to his obvious feebleness, with the alternatives being the specter of either a Harris candidacy or a free-for-all at their convention, Trump has a pretty good chance of re-election. 

I agree with the likes of Jonah Goldberg and Yuval Levin who say that unity is not only too much to hope for in our present moment, but has never been a realistic aspiration in a country whose citizens have widely diverse viewpoints and are free to express them.  I concur that our magnificent Constitution provides the framework for Americans to disagree well. 

As Levin puts it,

Our political system allows citizens to share a common life even when they differ fiercely on important public questions. Their disputes aren’t always settled civilly, but they are settled politically, through competition and negotiation rooted in the premise that partisan victories and defeats are both inevitably temporary, and that the people we disagree with aren’t going away. Politics within this framework can be so intense, its stakes can be so high, precisely because we are arguing about what our common future looks like. 

Constitutionalism defines the boundaries of this political realm. It offers the rules for setting priorities, deploying power, resolving disputes, and making demands of each other. Its purpose is not so much to help us agree as to help us disagree constructively and safely.

But the first step toward that aim is to get a critical mass of Americans to give a diddly about the Constitution. Our public education system has seen to it that up-and-coming citizens aren't even acquainted with it. The yay-hoos assembled in Milwaukee have no regard for it. Democrats have likewise demonstrated that they don't either, with their fierce defense of the cabal of "experts" ensconced in the various executive-branch agencies as being more qualified than elected legislators to shape policy, and their presumption that the executive branch has the authority to affect the character, and independence of, the judicial branch. 

So, no Squirrel Hair isn't unifying anybody. We're still stuck with the pugnacious populists and the current disarray of the identity politics / climate alarmism / wealth redistribution bunch.

Or somebody is. I have no truck with either of them.

Leftist pundits continue to bamboozle post-Americans about how the current Supreme Court comes to decisions

 This. is another one of those generous-excerpt posts, because Romesh Ponnuru of the American Enterprise Institute has offered up a prime example of how pundits committed to a secular future for the West get readers who have lost the capability to make necessary distinctions all riled up about the current makeup of the Supreme Court:

Pamela Paul’s recent op-ed in the New York Times was notable for two things. The first is an incendiary title (“Your Religious Values Are Not American Values”) that fortunately does not convey a tone sustained throughout the piece. Paul ends with a conclusion so tepid that nearly all the religious conservatives she means to denounce could agree with it: “This Fourth of July, let’s bear in mind that what many Americans value in this country is its inclusion and protection of all, regardless of their beliefs.”

The second is this passing smear, the most specific criticism she offers: “Unfortunately, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court has demonstrated that, like many Republican politicians, when it comes to freedom of religion — and yes, that must include freedom from religion — those justices are willing to put their own faith above all else.”

The link, where she supposedly demonstrates the accuracy of this accusation, goes to her own op-ed from two years ago furiously attacking the 6–3 decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District:

This court’s right-wing majority is following the dictum of our Trumpian age: Objective truth doesn’t matter. Subjective belief — specifically the beliefs of the court’s religious-right majority — does. The Kennedy decision wasn’t based on the facts but on belief in the face of facts. Moreover, those six justices are determined to foist their beliefs on the rest of the country.

Paul believes that the assistant football coach who brought the case, Joseph Kennedy, had coerced players to submit to his proselytizing: “Students who walked off the field rather than take part in Kennedy’s prayers may have risked losing playing time and perhaps a path to a football scholarship. No athlete on a public-school team should have to pray to play.”

Sorry, but none of this is what the case was about — although Justice Sotomayor’s dissent artfully misdirects its readers into thinking as Paul does.

The truth can be found in Justice Gorsuch’s opinion (and also in Ed Whelan’s coverage of the case for NRO). Here’s Gorsuch:

The contested exercise before us does not involve leading prayers with the team or before any other captive audience. . . . At the District’s request, he voluntarily discontinued the school tradition of locker-room prayers and his postgame religious talks to students. The District disciplined him only for his decision to persist in praying quietly without his players after three games in October 2015. [Emphasis in original.]

Maybe Paul would have had a point if Kennedy had continued his previous practice, been disciplined by the district for it, and then gotten the Supreme Court to rule that he had a First Amendment right to flout its directive. But that’s not what happened. The real scandal in the case is that three justices were willing to okay the district’s indefensible behavior — and that for two years running, many in the press, including Pamela Paul, keep distorting the facts of the case. “Objective truth doesn’t matter,” indeed.

Now, an interesting question arises, namely, whether Paul knew what the real gist of the case was, or whether she lazily didn't dig deep enough to find that out. I'm betting on the former. I'd say it bugs her so much that the coach still had the right to pray privately after games that she framed her column the way she did on purpose.

                

SCOTUS overturning Chevron really brought up the Left's stuff, didn't it?

 The actual case that was before the court:

Atlantic herring fishermen sued over federal rules requiring them to pay for independent observers to monitor their catch. The fishermen argued that the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act did not authorize officials to create industry-funded monitoring requirements and that the National Marine Fisheries Service failed to follow proper rulemaking procedure.

In two related cases, the fishermen asked the court to overturn the 40-year-old Chevron doctrine, which stems from a unanimous Supreme Court case involving the energy giant in a dispute over the Clean Air Act. That ruling said judges should defer to the executive branch when laws passed by Congress are ambiguous.

Okay, now for some play-by-play commentary. The reason the Chevron case, and subsequent doctrine, needed to be overturned is that the onus for ambiguity need to be on Congress. Write laws with more clarity. That's what we hire you to do. 

Consider the wording that AP has chosen to frame the impact:

With a closely divided Congress, presidential administrations have increasingly turned to federal regulation to implement policy changes. Federal rules impact virtually every aspect of everyday life, from the food we eat and the cars we drive to the air we breathe and homes we live in.

I did the boldfacing. The damn sentence is just presented as something that ought to be taken as a given in "modern life." And that's horrifying.

Look, I'm no Lew Rockwell, but one doesn't have to be to be incensed at this framing. Us actual conservatives are Frank Meyer fusionists. Freedom to chose the cars we drive, the homes we live in, and the food we eat is of a seamless piece with a fealty to tradition and an insistence on a morality-driven policy orientation informed by a transcendent order. When such choices are taken out of our hands by the entity with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, our ability to value our agency as individuals withers and we become cattle.

Here's a lady who's absolutely aghast about the matter:

“This case was never just about fish,’' said Meredith Moore of the environmental group Ocean Conservancy. Instead, businesses and other interest groups used the herring fishery “to attack the foundations of the public agencies that serve the American public and conserve our natural resources,’' she said.

 "Serve the American public." Get the paternalistic tone there? The pointy-heads know how we need to be "served," and they don't need your input.

But if you want to see some really apoplectic reaction to the recent decision, there's this post at Public Notice, a Substack that has a palpable aversion to freedom. It's titled "The Destruction of the Regulatory State Is Already Happening." 

Check out the opening paragraph. The boldface is once again mine:

It’s been barely a week since conservatives on the US Supreme Court radically upended the balance of power between the branches of government, giving the federal courts the exclusive power to interpret statutes rather than deferring to agency experts. And we’re already seeing impacts on the ground.

Rexford Tugwell and Frances Perkins, call your offices! 

There's a section of the post that author Lisa Needham calls "Bigotry From the Bench" that gets to the heart of what has her howling like a coyote with its leg caught in a trap:

Unsurprisingly, much of the assault on administration rules relates to any regulation that would protect transgender people. 

Four days after Loper Bright was handed down, another Trump appointee, Judge John W. Broomes in Kansas, enjoined the Department of Education from enforcing its Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Sex in Education Programs rule in Kansas, Alaska, Utah, and Wyoming. The Department of Education spent two years finalizing the rule, which would have prohibited discrimination based on gender identity under Title IX. 

The unofficial text of the rule, which runs 1,577 pages with supporting material, is jam-packed with legal analysis. Hundreds of pages are spent explaining how the DOE considered and addressed public comments and the document details the mental health impact of discrimination against LGBTQ students. 

 Broomes’s expertise is in natural resource law, a background that does not lend itself to a detailed understanding of Title IX, sex discrimination, or gender identity. But none of that matters. 

His opinion sneers about “self-professed and potentially ever-changing gender identity” and insists that things like using correct pronouns for students and allowing them to use the bathroom that conforms with their gender identity is an issue of “vast economic” significance. Given that the only costs of the rule are things like updated administrative guidance and perhaps hiring additional Title IX staff, the idea it is a vast economic question is, to put it politely, a reach. Instead, Broomes sided with the conservative plaintiffs, including Moms for Liberty and an Oklahoma student who asserted that using the correct pronouns for other students violated her religious beliefs.  

Because of this mix of conservative state litigants, private anti-trans groups, and an Oklahoma student, the extent of Broomes’s injunction is even weirder than the patchwork blocking of the HHS rule. 

Besides blocking the rule entirely in four states, the rule is also blocked for the schools attended by the members of two private plaintiffs, Young America’s Foundation and Female Athletes United, and all schools attended by the children of members of Moms for Liberty. So now, if you are a transgender student unlucky enough to attend school anywhere in the country where a child of a Moms for Liberty student also attends, you’re out of luck. If your school is free of children of book-banners, you get the protection of the federal rule — unless you live in Kansas, Alaska, Utah, and Wyoming, in which case it doesn’t matter what school you go to. 

On full display here is the Left's refusal to address the fact that, until ten years ago at the outside, no culture in human history had ever codified a demographic called "transgender," as well as an assumption that human beings can invent themselves with no acknowledgement of a divine architecture to the universe.   

The Left is demonstrating (once again) that its core principle is a hatred of human liberty.

That's nothing new, but the problem is exacerbated by the fact that the Trumpist Right can't even remember what the term "core principles" means. 

Wiser this time: the international community is working to Very-Stable-Genius-proof its goals and strategies

 The world stage, after having gotten a taste of Donald Trump's special brand of chaos, is taking precautions in the event the VSG is once again at the helm in post-America:

In Brussels, NATO officials have devised a plan to lock in long-term military support for Ukraine so that a possible Trump administration can’t get in the way.

In Ankara, Turkish officials have reviewed the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy road map for clues into Donald Trump’s designs on Syria.

In Atlanta, Austin and Lincoln, Nebraska, top ministers from Germany and Canada have met with Republican governors to shore up relations on the American right.

And in Washington, Trump’s return is the dominant topic at monthly breakfast meetings of ambassadors from European countries. At one of those meetings, the top envoy from one country asked his colleagues whether they were engaged in a fool’s errand.

“Can we really prepare for Trump?” this person asked, according to another top diplomat. “Or do we rather have to wait and see what the new reality would look like?”

Folly or not, the preparations are underway.

There are three components to NATO's preparations:

First, there is extensive personal outreach to Trump and his advisers, in the hope of building relationships that will help minimize conflict.

Second, there are policy shifts aimed at pleasing Trump and his political coalition, chiefly by soothing Trump’s complaints about inadequate European defense spending.

Third, there are creative diplomatic and legal measures in the works to armor NATO priorities against tampering by a Trump administration.

Taken together, it starts to look like a plausible strategy for managing the turbulence of a Trump-led world. Still, even the NATO leaders driving this approach acknowledge that much of this project may ultimately be at the mercy of Trump’s individual whims.

“Of course, the biggest challenge is we don’t know — and I think nobody knows, exactly — what he will do,” said one diplomat from a NATO country.

A prudent way to proceed when dealing with Mr. Do-Whatever-The-Hell-They-Want.  

 

 

 

Post-America may be rethinking the mutilation of kids

 I'm basically just going to cede the floor here to Wesley J. Smith at National Review. In fact, there's a third layer, as he excerpts considerably from a New York Times story. 

(I've been asked what the principle difference is between LITD and Precipice.  Precipice is for essays, a canvas for working out thought processes about topics of permanent relevance. LITD allows me to address matters currently on the nation's and world's plate. There's a more generous degree of linking and excerpting here.)

Anyway, what Smith reports on is such encouraging news I have to see that it gets a dissemination boost:

The Biden administration has long insisted that “gender-affirming care” in minors is “safe” and “medically necessary” medical treatment. This, despite several European countries going in just the opposite direction.

Then, it was discovered that out that assistant secretary of Health and Human Services Admiral Rachel Levine — who is transgender and a radical on the issue — influenced WPATH, the ideological “medical association,” to do away with all age limitations in its GAC standard of care guidelines regarding puberty blockers, surgeries, and other interventions. What a scandal!

With that undue influence cigar exploding in the administration’s face, it has now backed away from its support for gender-affirming surgeries on minors. From the New York Times story:

The Biden administration said this week that it opposed gender-affirming surgery for minors, the most explicit statement to date on the subject from a president who has been a staunch supporter of transgender rights.

The White House announcement was sent to The New York Times on Wednesday in response to an article reporting that staff in the office of Adm. Rachel Levine, an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services, had urged an influential international transgender health organization to remove age minimums for surgery from its treatment guidelines for minors.

The draft guidelines would have lowered the age minimums to 14 for hormonal treatments, 15 for mastectomies, 16 for breast augmentation or facial surgeries, and 17 for genital surgeries or hysterectomies. The final guidelines, released in 2022, removed the age-based recommendations altogether.

“Adm. Levine shared her view with her staff that publishing the proposed lower ages for gender transition surgeries was not supported by science or research, and could lead to an onslaught of attacks on the transgender community,” an H.H.S. spokesman said in a statement on Friday evening . . .

The administration, which has been supportive of gender-affirming care for transgender youth, expressed opposition only to surgeries for minors, not other treatments. The procedures are usually irreversible, critics have said.

“Usually irreversible, critics have said“? Good grief, is there any questions that mastectomies — performed on hundreds of minors each year! — are irreversible? So are facial reconstructions and Adam’s apple shaving — all also performed on minors! So are genital-refashioning mutilations, done less frequently on people under 18, but still done.

One way or another the divinely crafted architecture of the universe will have the final say over human attempts at taking over the crafting function.