Friday roundup

 I'm heading out later this morning to be part of a jail-ministry team for the weekend, so I'm putting together your reading recommendations nice and early. Have a safe, fun and edifying couple of days.

Kirstin Anderson Birkhaug, writing at Law & Liberty, invites us to consider that there are better things than happiness. A remark from a college mentor sparked her personal thinking about the matter:

I was twenty-one when I learned this lesson, a senior in college and hopelessly undecided about my future. My worried dithering with regards to this fact often fell upon the ears of a long-suffering political science professor. One fall afternoon, I sat in his office, perched on the edge of the well-worn chair across from his desk, one foot tapping, expressing for the hundredth time that semester my anxiety about the future. My professor often just listened, knowing as only teachers and parents do that young people sometimes just need to be heard. “I don’t know what I want to be,” I sighed. “I just want to be happy!”

My professor tilted his head and squinted at me in a familiar way that told me I’d gotten something wrong. He was silent for a moment, measuring his words in his mind. I had known this professor long enough to value his careful consideration. His next words would mean something. I waited. He leaned forward and said plainly, “you can be so many better things than happy.”

You can be so many better things than happy, he said. I remember feeling confused and disappointed. It was unfathomable to me what he could have meant by that, and moreover, to the extent that I could understand him at all, I thought he must be wrong. I had grown up in an age of self-help, in which happiness was considered the ultimate good. Happiness was the end that could justify any means. It was a viable reason to quit your job, move cross country, leave your marriage. It meant eating, praying, and loving. It meant safety from doubt and regret.

Alternatively, an unhappy life could be no life at all. And so, I wanted to be happy. How or why, or at what cost, I could not say. But it was surely the best and most important thing I could imagine being. Everything else, I presumed, must be secondary. But my professor was a worldly, faithful, intelligent, and very dear friend. I could not ignore his words, even if accepting them would mean challenging the organizational principle with which I had been attempting to build my future. It was the first time anyone had ever given me reason to reconsider the central role that the pursuit of happiness had held in my heart. That day, my professor set in motion a shift in my perception of the world, one that I could not understand at that instant, but I would come to know in time.

About a year after my professor told me I could be better things than happy, I read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. As I did, I could not help but remember his words. Aristotle writes of happiness as eudaimonia, but “happiness” is a poor substitute for the richness described by this term. Eudaimonia refers to a sense of wholeness, of completeness, and of peace. It refers to a flawless harmony between the person and the world outside the person, and of ultimate achievement for the individual. It is happiness, yes, but something bigger and better too—it is perfection; perfect happiness.

At Bari Weiss's Common Sense Substack,  Walter Kirn looks at the nature of fun:

But what do I mean by “fun”? I’m not quite sure. I don’t mean “pleasure” in the old sense, which usually is associated with eroticism or sensuality, and I don’t mean “play,” which tends to refer to structured games. But fun, as such, is not competitive. No one wins at it. Nor is fun the ‘leisure” of the ancients, which one is supposed to spend in contemplation or civic engagement or other worthy pursuits. I mean something bouncier, simpler, more mundane, a feeling of antic stimulation, the opposite of seriousness. Often there is risk involved in fun. Manageable, perhaps simulated risk. You round a tight curve in a sports car that can handle it. You careen down a snowy hill in a red saucer sled. Sometimes you take a tumble or scrape a knee. Sometimes you scream—a laughing sort of scream.

On a more somber note, at Modern War Institute, Andrew Milburn's on-the-ground analysis of the Russian invasion of Ukraine leads him to conclude that "Time Is Not On Kyiv's Side." Milburn had a 31-year career in the Marine Corps and is currently equipping and training Ukrainian frontline units.

The term "ideology" gets bandied about in such a variety of ways that its core meaning can get lost in the shuffle. Jacob Howland has a piece at UnHerd entitled "Ideology Has Poisoned The West" in which he has us get clear on the word's definition and then how it's having its pernicious effect:

ideology is incapable of treating human beings as participants in a shared life, much less as individuals made in the image of God. Like the party hack whose spectacles struck Orwell as “blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them”, it sees them only as groups to be acted upon. The term idéologie was coined during the French Revolution by Antoine Destutt de Tracy, an anti-clerical materialist philosopher who believed that reason offered a way of uncovering general laws of social relations. Tracy conceived of idéologie as a social science of “ideas” that would inform the construction of a rational progressive society governed by an enlightened elite, whose  context technical expertise would justify their claim to rule. The illiberalism of this progressive-technocratic ideal became fully apparent in the West only with the onset of Covid. It is now widely understood that the subordination of public life to ostensibly scientific guidance and the effective transfer of sovereignty from the body of citizens to an unelected overclass are fundamentally inconsistent with liberty and individual dignity.

Finally, there's my latest at Ordinary Times, "Five Quintessentially American Recordings for Cranking Up on Independence Day." It was obviously written specifically for the recently-transpired holiday, but they're worth considering in the context of their quintessential American-ness. Plus, they're all great party tunes, and summer's here and the time is right. It won't be too much of a spoiler to name them here, since the point of each, if I do say so myself, is my commentary on them. I also provide the links, so you can listen right away. They are "Johnny B. Goode" by Chuck Berry, "Hey Good Lookin'' by Hank Williams, "One O'Clock Jump" by the Count Basie Orchestra, "Mystery Train" boy Elvis Presley, and "Dancing in the Street" by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas.

Easter weekend Saturday roundup

 

It would be interesting to see a comment thread get going here about a piece by Julie Mastrine at Evie entitled "Did Millenials Kill Flirting?"

In a piece at Quillette, Ron Radosh looks at what an unwieldy and unlikely project the founders of a new magazine called Compact are trying to get off the ground. The initial group of contributors includes writers ranging from "Against David Frenchism" author Sohrab Ahmari to David Reiff, a contributor to The Guardian and The Nation, and a board member of the arms division of Human Rights Watch. The founders have this idea that there is a Venn diagram overlap in the views of participants:

Compact [was] established as a rallying point for writers and thinkers from Left and Right fed up with the prevailing liberal consensus. “Our editorial choices,” explain the founders, “are shaped by our desire for a strong social-democratic state that defends community—local and national, familial and religious—against a libertine left and a libertarian right.”

Who are the founders?

Compact is the political project of two religious traditionalists and a left-wing populist. Matthew Schmitz is a Catholic convert who was, until recently, senior editor at the conservative religious magazine, First Things. Edwin Aponte was previously the founder and editor of the Bellows, a Marxist webzine that stands for “working-class populism for the future.” Sohrab Ahmari is perhaps the most prominent of the three, having worked as an editorial writer at the Wall Street Journal, then senior writer at Commentary, and finally as opinion editor at the New York Post from 2018.

Just who do they think they're going to attract as faithful readers of issue after issue, with positions like this?

The Nation’s editors and readers, after all, are overwhelmingly feminist, and are unlikely to be overjoyed by articles like Nina Power’s essay, “Why We Need the Patriarchy.”

There are some very kinky stakings-out of terrain out there. 

I've seen some pieces that critique certain perceived shortcomings of "Why The Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid" by Jonathan Haidt, published in The Atlantic, but I think it stands as an important analysis of the effects of social media, and a great starting point for a general conversation about the stupidity topic:

The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.

It’s been clear for quite a while now that red America and blue America are becoming like two different countries claiming the same territory, with two different versions of the Constitution, economics, and American history. But Babel is not a story about tribalism; it’s a story about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.

Park MacDougald's UnHerd piece "Joe Biden's Gender Agenda" is about how the president has gotten over his skis in terms of where the nation is regarding transgenderism.

If I may toot my own horn a bit, I cover similar territory in my Precipice piece, "Disney." 

While we're on this subject, there was an interesting story at the New York Post today about a - well, let's say person - who "transitioned" from one sex to the other and also practices psychology and who thinks our society's zeal for letting people with the slightest inclination to resent their DNA carve their crotches up and pump themselves full of hormones and puberty blockers may have gotten out of hand:

A transgender psychologist who has helped hundreds of teens transition has warned that it has “gone too far” — and fears many are making life-changing decisions because it’s “trendy” and pushed on social media.

Erica Anderson, 71 — who is transgender herself — told the Los Angeles Times that she is horrified that even 13-year-old kids are now getting hormone treatment without even meeting with psychologists.

“I think it’s gone too far,” said Anderson, who until recently led the US professional society at the forefront of transgender care.

Susan Bagwell, who wrote for RedState back when it was an important conservative organ and then got kicked out when a new editorial team took it in a Trumpist direction, has one of those man-I-wish-I'd-written-that pieces at The Racket News called "What Have We Become?" A taste:

While I walked away from the Republican Party because of Trump, I never abandoned my conservatism. I never abandoned my values. I’m no “blue waver.” I think it’s just as idiotic to make a hard swing from the right, to the left. You think it makes you “virtuous” and more anti-Trump than the rest of us, just because you wear a Beto hat in Texas, or suddenly start using cuss words and touting your newly found appreciation for socialism.

What are you trying to prove? Either those values you once claimed were always with you, or they never were.

My point – and I do have one – is that tribalism and personality cults have damaged this nation beyond measure. We need to reassess and find ground that will strengthen us, not tear us further apart.

Richard M. Reinsch II, writing at Law & Liberty in a piece entitled "Finding The Constitution's Common Good," clarifies what that phrase does and does not mean.  

 

 

 

The likeliest scenario is probably the best one given the times we live in

 As of now (mid-afternoon on Wednesday, November 4), it appears that all this will shake out thusly: Joe Biden will hobble over the finish line with the thinnest of margins, the Senate will remain in Republican hands, and a newly energized GOP minority in the House will be a force the hard left, as represented in that body, has to reckon with.

One or more elements of this scenario could change, even yet today. That doesn't seem likely, though. 

Both Trumpists and hard leftists are trying hard to buck this picture. Of course they are. It disempowers each phenomenon. Each wants to see the other resolutely and permanently vanquished, relegated to historical-footnote status, so that an era in which a grand vision for our land can prevail and the messiness of disparate ambitions coming together in some form of self-governance is resolved once and for all. 

Trumpists see nothing wrong with Trump's nakedly authoritarian 2:30 AM unsubstantiated "in-fact-I-did-win / this-is-a-fraud" outburst in the White House East Room. They have responded with a hell-yeah concurrence, claiming that there's something nefarious about seeing that every ballot is counted. They are, as has been increasingly the case with Trumpist battle cries, persuading no one outside their ranks, however. Not only did anchors for CNN, ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC immediately denounce his remarks, they came in for rebuke from the likes of Ben Shapiro and Chris Christie and Rick Santorum, who have for some time found aspects of Trump's presidency appealing. 

Leftists immediately went into identity-politics mode, even as voter data showed that minorities did not neatly fit their expectations:

Pro-Democrat (or anti-Republican) partisans are already convincing themselves that the party’s stumbles on Tuesday are attributable to “whiteness”—even when the voters they lost weren’t white. Architect of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “1619 Project,” Nikole Hannah-Jones immediately went about explaining away Donald Trump’s surprisingly strong showing in places like Miami-Dade County by attributing the victory to “white Cubans,” who are “Hispanic” only insofar as that is a “contrived ethnic category.” Influential former ESPN host Jemele Hillinsisted that it is “on white people” and “no one else” if Trump had won. “I don’t trust the White vote,” former RNC Chair Michael Steele told Washington Post columnist Jonathan Capehart. “And I don’t trust it because, at the end of the day, it is very self-serving.”

No matter that weighted exit polling data found that Donald Trump increased his margins among minorities, drawing the support of 32 percent of Hispanics and double-digits among black voters, and Democrats improved their showing among whites. This isn’t analysis; it’s the avoidance of analysis.

So there are neither enough Trumpists within Republican ranks nor Squad-types among the Democrats for the kind of final vanquishing of the other each dreams of. No Big Vision is going to get imposed on the country by next spring:

Progressives can say goodbye to their already tenuous hopes for dramatic reforms to the institutions that govern American political life. There will be no filibuster nuking, no punitive expansion of the federal judiciary, no sweeping institutional reforms to “restructure things to fit our vision.” Nor will there be transformative legislative reforms without a Republican buy-in. Say goodbye to the Green New Deal, a Universal Basic Income, “debt-free” college, single-payer health care, the dissolution of the Department of Homeland Security’s border enforcement agencies, or half a dozen other big ideas that loomed ominously over American heads for the better part of two years.

However, the leftist vision won't have died, and neither will the Trumpist impulse on the Right: 

Final results that fall short of a massive rejection of Trump, as seems likely, would fail to trigger the repudiation of Trumpism in the Republican Party that many Democrats — and a minority of Republicans — had hoped for. As John Harris argues, whatever the final numbers, Trump’s appeal to half the country has proven to be durable. Even a narrow Biden victory would generate a larger debate about Trump’s harm to Republicans, but the full-scale de-Trumpification of the GOP required a landslide.

And the fact that Trumpism isn't even going to fade away, much less be stomped out of existence, doesn't speak well about what we as a nation have become:

This—the authoritarian strongman—is what the American people want. Not all of the people. Not quite a majority of the people. But a large enough percentage to put our country at risk of Orbánism.

Nearly half of America chose this. Not once, but twice.

But if the scenario of a Democrat president without a mandate and a Republican Senate plays out, we have at least two years in which actual conservatives, those who never quit understanding that free-market economics is the natural way human beings interact (and has been responsible for the advancement of our species over the last 300 years),  that Western civilization has been a unique blessing to humankind, and that it's imperative for our nation to form strong alliances with other countries that share at least a preponderance of our values and interests (and for such alliances to serve notice to hostile forces that they'd best not pose threats), to convince ever more of their fellow citizens of the clarity and elegance of what would work if we ever cared to try it.

 

The Lincoln Project, as a formal organization and a mindset, is proving to be as problematic as Trumpism and leftism

 It's a joy to watch conservative groups that vehemently oppose Donald Trump spring up throughout the land. They, and the publications taking that position as their editorial stance, are solid proof that Trumpism  has not marginalized the insistence on consistent principles, clarity, and decorum and character. We have not gone anywhere and our voice is strong. 

Many of these groups take the laudable position that the "Never Trump" tent (and I dislike that term as much as I ever have) should be big, that a considerable range of ideas is healthy as long as there is a shared commitment to some kind of agreed-upon definition of conservatism.

Some, though, stretch the fabric of this tent to the tearing point by adopting the mirror opposite of the binary-choice argument that the Trumpists make - that is, by an insistence on the necessity of supporting Joe Biden. 

Some take it that far and no farther, arguing that maintaining a Republican Senate majority assures the country a foil against the implementation of the kinds of identity-politics-and-redistribution-on-steroids policy moves that modern-day Democrats advocate. This seems to me to have a herding-cats implausibility to it. Who is clever enough to devise a strategy for exhorting voters to split the ticket in various far-flung states across this big country?

Some go all the way, arguing for a burn-it-all-down strategy that seems largely emotion-fueled. Proponents of this approach let their disgust with most, if not all, Senators and House members for not explicitly repudiating Trump override their considerations of hard politics realities, as well as those legislators' track records of support for real conservatism.

The Exhibit-A organization representing this position is The Lincoln Project. 

Wariness about its passing muster as an actually conservative group starts with a look at its four founders. Steve Schmidt and John Weaver boast a number of political-consultant bona fides between them, but they seem to be generally in the service of Republicans who are decidedly not conservatives, such as John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Between Weaver's stints on the 2000 and 2000 McCain campaigns, he worked for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. George Conway's vocal aversion to Trump is laudable and seems sincere, given that it's been a strain on his marriage. Rick Wilson seems to fit the description of a conservative on the level of abstract principles, but his demeanor, particularly his foul mouth, does nothing to help lift our national discourse out of the gutter. 

Then there's the matter of The Lincoln Project's funding:

By far the biggest donor has been Stephen Mandel, who gave the Lincoln Project — which, as far as I can tell, produces cheap b-roll-laden ads and takes nearly 90 percent of its budget in “operating expenditures” — a million dollars. Employees at his company Lone Pine Capital, it seems, have given the Democratic Party Senate committee $497,000 this year, $248,500 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign committee, and a bunch of money to other left-wing candidates. During the 2018 cycle, employees at Lone Pine Capital doled out $5,893,300 to Democrats and $1,333,333 to Planned Parenthood.

I’m confused somewhat by one of the other top names: Arturas Kerelis, who news reports say is actually an Internet grifter named Arturas Rosenbacher. Maybe the donor is a different person. Then again, it would fit. (It looks like his donation was refunded.) Amos Hostetter, who droppedover a million dollars on the Obama Foundation, and David Geffen have been giving money to Democrats decades before Donald Trump ever ran for president or “Trumpism” existed. As has another top Lincoln Project donor, Joshua Bekenstein, director of Bain Capital, who gaveDemocrats $3.5 million in 2018.

David Geffen! 

But I think we can also refer to Lincoln-Project-ism as a mindset. You will notice that those mentioned above who now take the gotta-vote-Biden position reserve their remaining modicum of respect for Republicans based on what we might call their RINO identities, also known as squishiness, or, to use a term coined here at Late in the Day long ago, Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome. 

Another such Reasonable Gentleman is Mitt Romney. I'm sorry, but I don't have much use for this new-found admiration for Mitt as some kind of statesman the likes of which we need more of in this country. It was clear in 2012 that he didn't speak conservative as his first language, and, like McCain, went out of his way to avoid speaking plainly about Barack Obama's radical background.

And now comes a book by Stuart Stevens, who was Romney's chief strategist in 2012, which, as far as I'm concerned, sheds a lot of light on the pretty-much-leftist turn he takes in It Was All A Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump. 

His assessment of what conservatism has been about since its modern iteration's formative years sounds like it could have been cooked up by The Nation:

In the short version, Republican deceits began in 1964, when, writes Stevens, “Barry Goldwater ran on a carefully crafted platform of coded racism.” This was the era of “Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative, which became to conservatives what Mao’s Little Red Book was to the Red Guard.” William F. Buckley Jr. wasn’t any help in those days, on this account, advocating as he did limits on federal power along with the principle of a color-blind society that, says Stevens, we now know to be “perversely racist but reassuring to white people.” From which it follows that National Review’s founder was just “a more articulate version of the same deep ugliness and bigotry that is the hallmark of Trumpism.” He comes back to NR later on, pointing out that despite their own misgivings about Trump’s candidacy in 2016, some editors and writers have since been Trump’s well-wishers whenever he pursues conservative policies: “fanciful rationalizations.” The “racism” is gone but now NR’s problem is “moral collapse.”

After Goldwater came Richard Nixon, with appeals to “forgotten Americans” — “code words” for “white.” And then our 40th president with his stories of the “welfare queen,” an unkind term often attributed to him but which he never used, although for Stevens enough to prove “a direct line from the more genteel prejudice of Ronald Reagan to the white nationalism of Donald Trump.” And then George Bush with the Willie Horton ad . . . and so on all the way up to the nightmarish present, in a chronology every freshman in poli sci has heard chillingly recited to explain why, in national contests, Democrats don’t always win but always deserve to.

Apparently the assigned reading these days is Dog Whistle Politics by a University of California at Berkeley expert in “critical race theory” and “white and Latinx racial identity.” With special attention to the chapter “The White Man’s Party,” this book rates citation by Stevens as some authoritative treatment of Republican politics, along with some obscure study explaining “the Republican decision to exploit the race issue” in 1964. But to see what Goldwater’s “carefully crafted platform of coded racism” actually looked like, you have to go fetch it yourself. Republicans in 1964 pledged “full implementation and faithful execution of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and all other civil rights statutes; . . . such additional administrative or legislative actions as may be required to end the denial, for whatever unlawful reason, of the right to vote; . . . continued opposition to discrimination based on race, creed, national origin or sex. We recognize that the elimination of any such discrimination is a matter of heart, conscience, and education, as well as of equal rights under law.”

Across the South, we’re to believe, ears went up at the dog whistle in this language, so subtle that even now no one else can pick it up. Even if Stevens’s point is that 1964 marked a sharp decline in African-American votes for Republicans, that proves only that the sum of Goldwater’s platform and convictions held less appeal to black citizens than did Lyndon Johnson’s activist government and Great Society agenda. As NR’s Kevin Williamson has skillfully explained, African-American support for Democrats began to rise long before the 1960s with the programs of the New Deal. Everything isn’t about race; presumably black voters acted in the belief that these economic policies best served their own and their country’s interests. And this despite the fact that many prominent Democrats themselves in that era, including LBJ, had disgraceful records on civil rights.

On that score it would have been relevant for Stevens to mention that Barry Goldwater — the most upright of men, whose reputation was good enough for the proud one-time “Goldwater Girl” nominated for president in 2016 — was a champion of and fundraiser for efforts to end segregation in Phoenix schools, in 1946 led the desegregation of the Arizona National Guard, and was a founding member of the Arizona NAACP. Easy to fault the senator now for overthinking constitutional objections to elements of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, despite his consistent votes for civil-rights bills before that, and to note adverse electoral consequences for his party. But to accuse Republicans of stirring up racial hatred with that man and that platform is a gross misstatement of fact.

As a rule of thumb, moreover, anyone so glib and presumptuous as to brush off as “ugliness and bigotry” the enduring political and moral legacy of William F. Buckley Jr. has, for that reason alone, no business involving himself in Republican affairs. And then there’s the “genteel prejudice” of Ronald Reagan: Here Stevens is referring to a man who one morning in 1982 read a Washington Post item about a persecuted black family in a white neighborhood in Maryland —  their home had been vandalized, a burning cross left on their lawn — and then ordered Marine One fired up and that very afternoon paid the family a presidential visit, just to show what he thought about racists: an act entirely consistent with everything else in his character and life.

This is all undeniably tricky. As I say, narrowly constructed litmus tests are probably just a recipe for further fracturing of our political landscape.

Still I would caution Principles First, a group with a truly admirable mission, to reconsider the hand of solidarity it has extended to the Lincoln Project and LP types. It appears that it's still firming up its list of speakers for its upcoming Convention on Founding Principles. I'd be encouraged to see more of the likes of Mona Charen and Amanda Carpenter, and less of the likes of Jennifer Horn.

How about booking Justin Stapley?

This must all be handled deftly. First and foremost, we must remember that we embrace something that needs and deserves defending - against Trumpists and against Democrats. 

 

Masks

It appears we have to learn anew the truism that reality unfolds more by unanticipated twists and turns than in a linear fashion fairly routinely. "The best-laid plans of mice and men" and all that.

We're having a big-time relearning experience right now. Who, a year ago, could have predicted that the wearing of surgical masks would be an ideologically charged behavior and a symbol for a broad set of practices undertaken - or not - in response to an epidemiological phenomenon that has come to define daily American life?

It was the stuff of rumors and speculation for most of America until mid-March. It gradually insinuated itself into society until it did so abruptly. Unless someone gets a whopping case of it that really lays him or her low - perhaps killing them - it's a silent aggressor. We all knew there would be an inflection point after which life would change, but about all we could do was carry on and wait. 

From that moment on, there have been scoffers. There has also been a "well-okay-it's-serious-but-people-still-have-their-constitutional-rights" crowd, for which the implementation of various states' phased plans for reopening was still a draconian violations of personal choice and freedom of association.

We've all seen the YouTube videos of violent confrontations at store entrances. Dr. Fauci has received serious threats to himself and his family.  Liz Cheney's expression of admiration for Dr. Fauci has become a political football among Congressional Republicans. 

I live in a reliably red state, but it does have its blue outposts. Probably Exhibit A for that is a city that is home to the largest campus of our largest state university. It's been a Mecca of hipness for decades - excellent music scene, a pioneer food co-op that got going in the mid-1970s, expressions of solidarity with everything one would expect, persnickety ordinances about all manner of aspects of lifestyle. A few years ago, some folks in the area who saw things in a diametrically opposite way to much of the city's overall culture formed a grassroots conservative organization. I was greatly encouraged and went to several of its monthly meetings for a while. I was particularly encouraged by the fact that in its late 2015-early 2016 monthly straw polls, other Republican presidential candidates far outdid Donald Trump. In fact, he was usually dead last. These people are the real deal, I thought.

Alas, they have now made masks their hill to die on. Rallies, exhortations to call the offices of the governor and state representatives, bullet-point lists of reasons not to wear a mask.

There is so much data out there, tailored to every conceivable confirmation bias, that eventually you have to bring your gut into it. I'm comfortable doing so. I have a pretty reliable sense of intuition. It's served me well over the years. It tells me this: The United States is either in a second wave of the pandemic, or the first has come out of dormancy. Inquiry into how coronavirus spreads has led to a consensus among credible people and organizations that wearing masks and social distancing are two simple practices that, if studiously followed, could tame this fearsome threat. 

To be sure, there is an element on the Left that is also making ideological hay with this. Mask-shaming does not have anything to recommend it. It invites resentment, backlash and further societal brittleness. 

But this is another one of those contemporary situations in which there is a way to proceed that's right because it's so obviously sensible. 

Vote for whoever yanks your chain, but wear the damn mask. 

Just because we find Trump unfit doesn't mean that we can forget that the Left wants to eat us for lunch

I have not had much use for The Federalist of late, but there is an important piece up at that site right now. It raises the need for consideration of several levels of the present societal dynamics before us.

It's by Glenn T. Stanton, and is a response to a New York Times piece by Peter Wehner and Jonathan Rauch, two public intellectuals who are friends despite coming at many issues from decidedly different perspectives.

Wehner is one of those figures who has irritated me many times over the years, but not enough for me to write him off. He has some solid conservative credential. he served in the Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43 administrations. He wrote a book with Arthur C. Brooks on why the free market makes us more moral. He's pro-life and advocates a resolute foreign policy He's currently with the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He's concerned about seeing that Christian faith is able to thrive in our undoubtedly increasingly secular society, which is a good thing. He understands that Trump has been horrible for conservatism.

Still, he has exhibited more than a touch of what I call Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome - a condition similar to being a RINO, I suppose - over the years.

Rauch has characterized himself as an "unrepentantly atheistic Jewish homosexual." He's an interesting mix of traits. Edmund Burke and James Madison are among his first-tier objects of admiration. He firmly believes that two people of the same gender can be married. On the other hand, he opposes hate-crimes laws, or at least did in a 1991 New Republic article.

Anyway, Stanton takes on the argument the two of them make in the NYT:

Rest easy, orthodox Christians, Jews, and Muslims. The New York Times wants you to know there is no reason to fear your conscience protections being steamrolled by the juggernaut that is the queer politics machine.

In a hopeful op-ed titled “We Can Find Common Ground on Gay Rights and Religious Liberty,” with the rest-assured subtitle “It does not have to be all or nothing,” Jonathan Rauch, whom I value as a long and deeply respected friend, and Peter Wehner say the Supreme Court’s recent Bostock decision provides a golden opportunity for religious conservatives and gay activists to “make a deal.” They speak hopefully of mutually beneficial compromise, with both sides attaining their desired freedoms and protections.

While I trust their talk of compromise is well-intentioned, it is profoundly naïve. Both men are intimately aware of the way the queer movement’s leadership has framed the issue and how dutifully their media and elite partisans have carried their water for decades. Their message? Gay rights are civil rights. Full stop.

This truth claim is not a statement of fact. It is one of faith, ideological conviction, and rhetorical strategy. It is aspirational. The mission is for all to adopt this belief and condemn anyone who doesn’t as a hateful bigot. There is no middle ground.

The call of the day used to be “live and let live,” but no more. Now the call is, “You will respect and affirm everything about my new understanding of sexuality and gender, or else.”

This script has been most effective. But if gay and trans rights really are civil rights, their proponents know the first rule of civil rights is that you don’t negotiate them. True justice dictates you demand them, and don’t quiet down until you’ve attained the fullness of every last one. 

About the enthusiasm that Wehner and Rauch share for the Fairness for All Act, Stanton says this:

When a bill’s rosy title signals that if it is passed, all will be right with the world, it’s a good sign someone’s putting rouge on a pig. First, when you negotiate carveouts for religious protections — a first freedom — you give up, not gain, ground.

The Fairness for All Act provides protections for religious schools, colleges, and charities, but these are tremendously narrow and few given the breadth of possible encroachments that will occur as sexual and gender options continue to expand. This will leave not only religious organizations seriously vulnerable, but also medical and social-service professionals whose work is informed by religious convictions. 

What is unsettling about the terrain that Rauch and Wehner share is that it provides fodder to the Trumpists who say, "You pointy-headed think tank dweebs really have no clue how rabid the Left is, do you? How late the hour is, the kind of fight we must mount in the culture war at this stage."

It's a little tricky, because, yes, a fight must be mounted, but Trump's juvenile insults are supremely ineffective weapons.

Two things must be kept in view at all times: the Left's ferocity, and Trumpism's inadequacy as a countervailing force.

Real damage

Distinguishing Trumpism from other phenomena that have appeared on the right over the last 70 years is not just an exercise in abstraction. When National Review showed the door to the John Birch Society and Ayn Rand's Objectivists in the 1950s, those movements had not wreaked palpable destruction on the nation's cultural foundation and social fabric, nor were they in a position to do so. The paleoconservative impetus of the 1990s likewise had nowhere near enough appeal to be a source of real danger.

Trumpism is different. It was a cluster bomb placed in the house of conservatism and detonated. It blew the walls out and cast its damage over a much wider swath of the American landscape.

The record of thought that had been the architectural drawings for that house was buried beneath the rubble of the blast.

And if that's too abstract for you, more visceral examples abound.

It's shattered hearts of good human beings, such as Timothy J. Klausutis, who has had the wound of his wife's untimely death nineteen years ago ripped open afresh by Donald Trump's maniacal and  vicious conspiracy-theory tweets about that incident, and by the sycophantic defense of those tweets by the icy-hearted White House press secretary this afternoon. 

Trumpism bent backwards the knuckles, in quintessential playground-bully fashion, of previously principled conservative leaders, watching with bared-teeth glee as they dropped to their knees. Mind you, those former movement leaders are not bystanders to the obliteration of their self-respect, but the hey-get-a-clue-this-is-the-only-game-in-town-now-for-Republicans message is hard to resist when a frenzied mob is screaming it:

He didn’t just burn the village, he sowed salt in the ground, too. He emasculated and destroyed the reputations of a rising generation of Republican leaders, who, depending on their story, will now be viewed as weaklings, co-conspirators, appeasers, racists, phonies, losers, or apostates.

Consider 2016 conservative runner-up Ted Cruz, who briefly stood up to Trump, only to be tamed by him. Or Marco Rubio, who said he didn’t trust Trump with the nuclear codes, but now warns it would be “catastrophic” for the cause of freedom if Trump loses.

The most promising young-ish conservatives have been, to some degree, compromised by Trump. If you embrace him, you look weak and intellectually dishonest. If you stand up to him (see Jeff Flake and Justin Amash), you’re toast. And if you try to have it both ways (see Nikki Haley and Ben Sasse), you look calculating, ambitious, and wishy-washy. This might be the worst strategy of all, because you'll never be Trumpy enough for the Trumpists, but you’ll also end up alienating the rest of us. 

Do I respect the above-mentioned people less than I did in 2015? Absolutely. But none of them could have foreseen a character test like Trumpism before July of that year. And one - Ted Cruz - held out until May of the following year. In fact, so did Mike Pence, who, as Indiana governor, hosted Cruz at the governor's mansion for breakfast the morning of the dark day that culminated in Cruz's bowing out of the race.

There's political damage right now as well. Support is eroding in two demographics that Trump is absolutely dependent on  - older Americans and evangelicals . The leftism that conservatism emerged to engage in a twilight struggle with is poised to fill the vacuum.

America is a much different place than it was fifty, certainly sixty years ago. Our civic bonds have eroded. Family formation and church attendance are at historic lows. Education has been thoroughly infected by identity politics. We make no art worth speaking of. Still, the people who inhabit this country want to believe that a sense of community can be shored up on some level. And they see that Donald Trump and his grotesque movement are the antithesis of that possibility.

This is not to offer an etched-in-stone prognostication. The economy could recover quickly, quickening the heartbeats of the materialist masses, convincing them that we'd "transitioned to greatness." It's entirely possible that Trumpism could hold sway for another few years, maybe morph into something even more foul.

That's what a savage, cold place 2020 post-America is.

Barney & Clyde Season 2, Episode 10

It's been a long two weeks, but your wait is over! Season 2, Episode 10 of the Barney & Clyde podcast is here!

Pull up a virtual barstool and join us at the digital libation station for your fortnightly installment of your favorite Libertarian and Conservative perspectives on the weighty matters of the day. In this episode: 

THE FINE LINE BETWEEN CARING AND GRANDSTANDING: Does Trump have the Authority to make Governors open churches? Do Governors have the authority to keep them closed? 

PURITY OF VISION AND FACTS ON THE GROUND: Is it possible to put together a non-leftist party with a discernible set of principles?

THE STATE AND THE INDIVIDUAL IN A TIME OF PANDEMIC: New Zealand warrantless searches and Rand Paul's fight against no-knock warrants in the US?

MEANWHILE, IN THE CIRCLE CITY: Indianapolis kicks restaurants while they're down, City plans to close Mass Ave to foot traffic despite protests from business owners they've already hurt.

You can support us at Patreon.com/barneyandclyde

Follow us on Facebook @ facebook.com/barneyandclydeshow

or twitter @barneyandclyde1

Something you think we should discuss? Send us your suggestions to barneyandclydeshow@gmail.com. Send us a video clip and we'll show it!

The Amash factor

Well, then.

As I expected, my Twitter feed this morning is bursting with people accusing each other of consigning the nation to doom depending on how his entry into the race is likely to affect the decision they'll make the first Tuesday in November.

I'm in an interesting position these days. Well, at least I find it interesting. As with the whole national debate shouting match over when, how and how fast to reopen the economy, as well as a few other issues, with regard to Amash joining the presidential fray, I feel no need to commit myself to a hard and fast take at this throbbingly inflamed moment. I reserve the right to chill and rub my chin a bit.

This is odd, because I am on record as declaring myself to be an absolutist. I adhere to certain immutable principles, which I've largely distilled into my personal articulation of the three pillars of conservatism:

1.) Free market economics: A good or a service is worth what buyer and seller agree that it is worth.  Period.  No other entity - certainly not government - has any business being involved in reaching that agreement.  Therefore, public-policy inquiries that concern themselves with macro-level phenomenon such as wealth inequality or “fair” wages are not only pointless but tyrannical by definition.

2.) The understanding that Western civilization is a unique blessing to the world: Both the Greco-Roman tradition from which the West has distilled the political structure of a representative democracy and the above-mentioned free-market economy, and the Judeo-Christian tradition from which it acquired an accurate understanding of the Creator’s nature and humankind’s proper relationship to the creator are the two most significant avenues of advancement our species has ever discovered.  (And much falls under this point that needs serious discussion at this time, such as the fact that there are only two genders, male and female, and that their is no fluidity between them, and that the family structure of a husband, wife and children thereof is the overwhelmingly normal one and the one most conducive to a happy and prosperous society.)

3.) A foreign policy based on what history tells us about human nature:  Evil is real and always with us.  A nation-state seeking a righteous world(such as the United States of America) should only form close alliances with other nations that have demonstrated a track record of common values.  Regimes that are clearly tyrannical and / or expansionist should never be appeased.  Indeed, foreign policy should be guided by thinking on how to at least eventually remove such regimes as problems on the world stage.

Now, these are hard and fast positions. There's nothing situational about them.

The fact that Amash is driven by principles and they align with mine to a considerable degree is impressive. Phoniness of varying degrees and types is so pervasive in the political world that his steadfastness in itself is refreshing. (Actually, even though the principles to which, say, AOC adheres are completely loony and would destroy human freedom and civilizational advancement, I have to commend her for having a body of principles and sticking to it.)

My co-host for the Barney & Clyde, Clyde Myers, podcast hates the Amash development. On our last episode, we had the so-far-leading Libertarian Party candidate, Jacob Hornberger as our guest for the full hour, and I know Clyde was electrified. Heck, I was mightily impressed. And as Hornberger said early on, their party's dilemma for several election cycles has been the dilution of their own set of principles. Amash strays from those just enough that the dilemma seems likely to beset them again.

Of course, the main point of departure - the area outside our Venn diagram overlap, as Clyde and I like to say - between Ron Paul / Lew Rockwell / Jacob Hornberger libertarianism and conservatism as I delineate it above is that pesky Pillar Number Three. I feel that the libertarian view of foreign policy and national security ignores the glaring fact about human history: war is a given at any time and in every place. The determination of boundaries of geographical / political entities, such as tribal lands, kingdoms, empires and nation-states has generally involved some armed conflict. More specifically, Pax Americana, the 75-year-old US-led world order that has by and large prevented the world stage's bad guys from achieving ultimate victory, has been a blessing to humankind. The US and its network of allies represents the pinnacle of civilization. Our national interest, and that of our closest allies, is not based on mere amassing of power but a striving after righteousness. 

Now, to the question of whether pressing the button for Amash is a throwaway vote, a gratuitous and pointless gesture, let's consider the three choices we can assume we'd have before us when it's just each of us and God standing there looking at the ballot. 

Clearly, being a conservative and not a Trumpist, it's hard for me to swallow the prospect of the eternal record book showing I cast my vote for someone so glaringly unfit for the presidency. Take a scroll through LITD's posts, going back to mid-2015, under the label "Donald Trump" and you'll see that I've had that position since he came down the escalator and announced his decision to run. His handling of this coronavirus crisis has amplified all that I'd concluded. 

Then there is Joe Biden. The fact that he holds the positions that modern Democrats have to hold - that the extermination of fetal Americans is acceptable, that the global climate is in some kind of trouble that requires us to abandon human advancement, that two people of the same sex can be married, as that term had been commonly understood by the entire human species until about ten years ago, that government should be involved in health care - makes him an instant non-starter. But that is going to be a given no matter who the Democrats would select as their nominee. It's those traits that are peculiar to him (and some of which are quite peculiar) and make him particularly objectionable.

He's an empty suit. He was a crummy student in high school, college and law school (and ran into some plagiarism trouble in that last stop), getting by on being a charismatic glad-hand and a good athlete. 

He can be quite nasty. The driver of truck that killed his first wife and infant daughter went to his grave never getting an apology from Biden for the false accusation that he'd been drunk at the time of the collision. More recently, the remark about how Republicans would like to "put y'all back in chains" to a black audience was sadly characteristic of his bared-teeth style.

Now there's this business of the sexual-assault allegation. I touched this one. Such accusations have to be handled very carefully. It's way too easy to ruin a man's life, or at least put a cloud over it, in cases in which the story is not true. Just ask the Duke lacrosse team, the fraternity at the University of Virginia about which a lurid Rolling Stone article was written, or Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. But now footage of Tara Reade's mother calling in to the Larry King Live television program in 1993 has surfaced, and Business Insider has reported that a former neighbor of Reade's "recalls a conversation with her in 1995 or 1996 in which Reade tearfully describe being sexually assaulted by Biden." And then this:

Finally, on Tuesday, a 2008 essay by the late Alexander Cockburn surfacedin which the journalist reported that Biden had made "unwelcome and unwanted" sexual advances against a woman in 1972 or 1973 — and that he was well known on Capitol Hill for making "loutish sexual advances to staffers, interns, and the like." That establishes a possible longstanding pattern of Biden's behavior that further validates Reade's accusation (and potentially opens the door to others).

Again, let me say that I'm not coming to a conclusive position about this. It's entirely possible that Joe Biden is innocent of all allegations. But it's possible he's not. This must be looked into further.

Then there's Justin Amash. And I say, the fact that he's principled is mainly what commends him. Even in instances in which he voted in ways I might, at first glance, question, further consideration makes clear why he behaved as he did. For instance, when he voted present in the matter of defunding Planned Parenthood, he did so because of his discomfort with setting the precedent of naming a specific organization in a piece of legislation. He takes the position that marriage means the union of one man and one woman, but feels that the matter ought not to be decided by government. With regard to the US forcefully inserting itself into world-stage situations, he feels that Congress ought to vote on every instance in which that's being considered.

He's opposed to tax increases and subsidies. He's a Christian.

There's a lot to like.

So I will take my sweet time to weigh all the considerations.

The grim backdrop to this is that no matter what I decide, he's not going to be president. It's going to be one of the unacceptable choices.

It's very late in the day.

A bonus-content video for the LITD Patreon community

It's here.

It's about how that post from last Tuesday about not tolerating Trumpist mischaracterization of who we are clearly struck a nerve.

A short video for the LITD Patreon community

 . . . in which I sort out the gradations within opposition to the Very Stable Genius and within support for him.

"Never Trump" is a useless term for two reasons: one, that horse is out of the barn. He's the president. Two, there are gradations of anti-Trumpism, ranging from leftist opposition, which is because they're mad he beat a Democrat (admittedly exacerbated by his repellant personality) to formerly principled conservatives tempted to support a Democrat because they've put the binary-choice angle front and center to responsible conservative opposition. 

Then there are gradations within Trumpism, ranging from those similarly motivated by the binary-choice scenario through the his-good-moves-outweigh-his-bombast viewpoint, to to slavish cult worship.

You'll find it here. 

A look back at the November prez-candidate choices we've had over the last 50 years

I've come across two pieces today - one by Erick Erickson at The Resurgent, and one by S.E. Cupp at The New York Daily News -  that examine the same basic theme: the parallels between where the Democrats seem to be headed in 2020 and how things unfolded for the Republicans in 2016. In each case, an overcrowded field of presidential contenders would not winnow itself down due to the stubbornness of candidates who surely realize(d) they don't / didn't have a chance, so that the party was left with a candidate that much of the country found completely unpalatable. Erickson's focus is on how the looming specter of Bloomberg keeps the prevailing of Sanders from being a certainty, but leaves Dems with the possibility that the former New York mayor, who greatly alarms most kinds of contemporary Democrats, may shake out to be their man. Cupp doesn't seem to think the Bloomberg factor is that significant, but points to Trump's ascendancy going from a remote possibility to a reality, suggesting that Sanders may have a similar successful trajectory.

It got me to thinking about the way primary season has shaken out to give the country the choices it has had in all the elections since 1972.

That year, Richard Nixon's popularity was proven by his landslide victory. Yes, the Watergate scandal had broken that summer, but the Dem choice, McGovern, was the first candidate to represent the faction within that party that spoke plainly about its view that US involvement in Vietnam was dishonorable. The radicals who had come off the streets to commence a Gramscian long march through the institutions threw their support behind him. The voting public had no appetite for a pivot in that direction.

In 1976, the Republican candidate was the first in a line of what I call afflictees of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome. That's a term I used to use a lot here at LITD and still occasionally find useful. A Reasonable Gentleman is the kind of Republican politician / officeholder who cannot or will not speak of the stark difference between the collectivist ideology of the Democratic Party and the worldview that at least ought to inform Republican politics. Gerald Ford just wasn't up to the task. The Reasonable Gentleman is basically what a lot of people call RINOs or squishes. The Dem candidate, Jimmy Carter, intrigued the public with his mix of Baptist faith, grits-and-gravy Southern sensibility, concern about the energy situation, and support from the rock stars of the day.

By 1980, Carter had proven such a miserable failure, with inflation and economic indicators generally out of hand, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the spread of Marxism-Leninism in Central America, that the contrast between him and the towering Ronald Reagan was the clearest contrast any of us now alive have ever see. Ronald Reagan's three-pillar conservative bona fides were in impeccable order. He'd been recruited into politics by none other than Bill Buckley.

By 1984, Reagan had proven that tax cuts can turn around a troubled economy. He didn't do detente with the Soviet empire, much less impeachment. He spoke of that empire's demise as a reality within the world's grasp. He forthrightly supported the right to life movement. And he did it all with a cheerfulness, an optimism, and a dignified bearing that  mightily impressed the nation. Mondale? He was basically cobbling together a platform of elements from both the ever-more-radical left wing of the Democratic Party and its "establishment," for want of a better term (and there surely is one).  He proclaimed that he was a feminist and that he would raise taxes. He didn't stand a chance against Dutch.

By 1988 the Soviet Union was so plainly on its last legs, and the economy so good, and Michael Dukakis exuding doofusness at every turn, that Vice President George Bush's run was a walk in the park.

Bush deftly managed the US role in the actual collapse of the Soviet empire, and commanded Desert Storm superbly. But he made the fatal mistake of trusting Democrats, and it cost him Republican support. He'd come across so resolute when he said "Read my lips: No new taxes!" and then he sent Richard Darman up to Cpitol Hill to negotiate spending cuts in return for - you guessed it - tax increases.

That was Bill Clinton's opening. He had a heaping helping of that Southern charm - even a thicker accent than Carter's - a bit of a wonky air about him (he'd given a stemwinder of a speech at the 1988 DNC convention), and spoke of a Third Way effectively enough that it looked like something other than a mushy middle. There were hints that he was a rascal, but his machine was able to sufficiently tamp down those who tried to make it a full-blown issue.

By 1996, however, much more about that rascal streak had come to light, as had various scandals dating back to his time as governor of Arkansas. His wife's utter unlikability and power-hunger was becoming obvious. Congress had gone to the Republicans in the 1994 midterms. It was becoming clear that the whole reason he'd gotten into politics was Still, his opponent was a Reasonable Gentleman of the first order. I mean, Bob Dole? Really?

2000 was a hot mess. The final decision extended considerably past early November, and the nation was subjected to the grind of magnifying-glass examinations of hanging chads and David Boies appealing every court decision that didn't go the Dems' way. Al Gore finally exited the stage, to the relief of an exhausted nation. George W. Bush seemed like a healthy mixture of humanity ("compassionate conservatism") and firmness. He was of east-coast pedigree, but, due to his father's oil-business career prior to getting into politics, had grown up in Texas, and had that charming folksy drawl.

In 2004, even though no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq - a concern not only of the Bush administration at the time, but of Democrats such as Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd, Bob Graham and Sandy Berger as far back as 1998 - the US had achieved the mission of removing Saddam Hussein from power in that country, thereby bringing relief to a terrified Iraqi populace. US domestic life was stable. John Kerry, whose persona was another mixture of radical-wing and Dem-establishment, seemed out of tune, and he lost to George W. Bush.

In 2008, a totally new political creature appeared on the scene: Barack Obama. The racial angle allowed a lot of Dems to support him so as to indulge in that classic Dem emotion, self-congratulation. That angle's unprecedentedness went far in obscuring Obama's radicalism. Here was the first true candidate who came out of that hard-left wing. He'd been mentored as a kid in Hawaii by Communist Frank Marshall Davis. John Drew recalls how, at Occidental College circa 1980, Obama had advocated revolution. He wandered into a socialist convention in New York City while at Columbia University and became a fan of the thought of Saul Alinsky and Cloward and Piven. As a community organizer in Chicago, he was under the tutelage of such radicals-who-came-in-off-the-street-to-subvert-the-system-from-within as Heather Booth, Greg Galluzzo, Robert Creamer, and Bill Ayers. He attended Trinity Church, the pastor of which was liberation-theology proponent Jeremiah "God damn America" Wright. He gave a talk, oozing with lavish praise,  at the farewell dinner for Rashid Khalidi, who was leaving Chicago for the east coast. Khalidi was fiercely anti-Israel. Obama said he'd learned a lot sitting at Khalidi's kitchen table.  He was on record supporting single-payer health care. In his autobiography The Audacity of Hope, he wrote of feeling like a sellout for going to work for a private-sector law firm.

But he was undeniably charming and glib. He knew how to play all the cards he'd been given. And, again, the Pubs put up a ridiculously squishy Reasonable Gentleman, John McCain.

21012 was a repeat, with Mitt Romney standing in in the Reasonable Gentleman role.

So that's the series of choices we've had over the last half-century.

What stands out to me is that Dems have fairly consistently offered solidly leftist candidates. Sometimes they won, sometimes they didn't. Only once in that time span did Republicans put forth an actual conservative. He won handily twice.

And now we're going to get a Dem candidate even further to the left than Obama (there are no moderates in their field; people need to stop applying that term to any of them) and the Republican candidate is going to be - well, you know.

I think it's pretty clear that retrospective such as I'm putting forth here a half-century hence will deem this the age of cacophony and incoherence. That is, if there's still a United States of America at that point, if the infantilism that has beset both parties has not so thoroughly degraded our political life that we've morphed into something having nothing to do with freedom, dignity, prosperity, strength and reverence.