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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He says something similar seems to be presently afoot:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

Friday roundup

 The title of Dorian Linskey's recent essay at UnHerd, "Why We Love To Hate 'Imagine,'" certainly grabbed my attention since I've hated that song since it came out in 1971 and have had to strive not to let it ruin my perspective on the incredible body of work John Lennon, as a co-writer with Paul McCartney, created from 1958 to 1969. Linskey's essay concludes on a generous note, borne of his own yearning for a world at least somewhat less challenging to live in than this one. Still, one senses that he understands why the song is repugnant to the non-starry-eyed. 

The most valuable part of the piece is the context he provides for the song's creation:

It is annoying that Imagine has been used to caricature a painfully complicated man as a gentle saint, so it’s essential to understand where Lennon’s head was at when he recorded the song in his home studio in Tittenhurst Park, Berkshire in May 1971. His experience of Arthur Janov’s primal scream therapy had enabled him to let go of the “father-figure trip”, he said. “Facing up to reality instead of always looking for some kind of heaven.” At the same time, Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono were in the throes of political radicalisation.

In 1968, he had written the Beatles’ Revolution, which told the counterculture to steady on there and drop the pictures of Mao. By the end of 1970, he was telling Rolling Stone: “I really thought that love will save us all. But now I’m wearing a Chairman Mao badge, that’s where it’s at.” Shortly after an interview with Tariq Ali and Robin Blackburn for the Trotskyist magazine Red Mole in January 1971, he wrote a new song based on their conversation. Combining socialism and feminism with a Black Panther slogan, Power to the People flipped the ambivalent opening line of Revolution into a call to arms: “Say you want a revolution/ We better get on right away.” The US New Left magazine Ramparts republished the interview under the headline “The Working Class Hero Turns Red”.

Lennon saw Imagine as a different kind of revolution. The black comedian and activist Dick Gregory had given him a book of positive prayer, which Lennon explained to Playboy in 1980 like so: “If you can imagine a world at peace, with no denominations of religion — not without religion but without this my-God-is-bigger-than-your-God thing — then it can be true.” Imagine, therefore, is protest rewritten as a secular prayer. The idea chimed with Ono’s “instruction paintings”, collected in her 1964 book Grapefruit, each of which began “Imagine…” Lennon later said that Imagine should have been credited to Lennon/Ono because “it was right out of Grapefruit” and her name was finally added in 2017.

The Yoko factor turns a lot of people off. While a song like Working Class Hero draws its political power from Lennon’s distinctive flinty sarcasm, Imagine is driven by Ono’s utopian whimsicality. It’s of a piece with the couple’s subsequent billboard campaign, “War is over! If you want it.” The idea that you can simply will a better world into being can seem like impotent New Age guff but the New Left’s philosopher-in-chief Herbert Marcuse was then arguing that imagining radical change was the essential first step towards realising it. The critic Robert Christgau acutely observed that Imagine was “both a hymn for the Movement and a love song for his wife, celebrating a Yokoism and a Marcusianism simultaneously”.

David Hein, writing at The Imaginative Conservative, makes a compelling case for conferring the same status as an English-language impact maker upon the 1928 Book of Common Prayer as the Bible and the works of Shakespeare.

At Law & Liberty, Mark Pulliam offers "An Elegy for the Boy Scouts."

He invites the reader to appreciate the scope with which Scouting founder Baden-Powell was viewing the need for his movement:

Lord Baden-Powell did not write Scouting for Boys in 1908—the foundational text for the worldwide scouting movement—to increase social capital, but to improve the character of Britain’s male youth, which he found wanting.

Baden-Powell, a career military officer in imperial Britain and a hero of the Second Boer War (1899-1902), became concerned that British youth were succumbing to the vices of an industrial and urban society: passivity, sloth, smoking, drinking, poor hygiene, and a general decline in what he felt were essential masculine qualities. So, he began the scouting program to “save boys from the ills of modern life.”  A century later, Baden-Powell’s concerns are as vital as ever.

Baden-Powell felt that learning outdoor skills would make boys “strong and plucky,” and that self-reliance was essential to character building. Thus, his fascination for knot-tying, navigation, fire-building, camping, cooking, first aid, physical fitness, and surviving the wilderness—practical, quasi-military skills that are still a staple of the scouting program. All of this was in aid of improving boys’ character—making them productive citizens. Some of Baden-Powell’s concepts seem dated more than a century later, but many of them are timeless, including the motto he coined: Be prepared.

Like so many cultural institutions, the BSA felt the need to become market-driven in order to reach generations that followed in the wake of the 1960s upheaval:

The Boy Scout Law—with its embrace of religious faith (“reverence”) and heterosexuality (“morally straight”)—faced hostile headwinds in an increasingly secular and “tolerant” society. And, to be honest, in a youth culture increasingly sensitive to what is fashionable—a norm rigidly and relentlessly enforced by social media through the omnipresent smartphone—the Boy Scouts in recent decades was regarded as unacceptably “uncool.” In the 1950s and 1960s, peer pressure went in the opposite direction, reinforcing the attractiveness of scouting. Norman Rockwell’s cover illustration for the February 1965 issue of Boys’ Life depicts two parents proudly watching as their clean-cut son—standing at attention in a crisply-pressed uniform—receives his Eagle medal. Alas, times change. As the BSA’s membership began to decline, the national organization tried to remain “relevant,” adapting to America’s abrupt cultural and demographic shifts with responses that were sometimes clumsy and even counter-productive.

After decades of litigation brought by atheists and homosexuals regarding the BSA’s exclusionary membership requirements—which were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark case Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000) as the exercise of the BSA’s First Amendment rights—the BSA reversed itself by allowing gay youths full participation in 2014 and allowing openly gay adults as leaders in 2015. Instead of stemming BSA’s membership decline, the national leadership’s acquiescence to atheists and homosexuals—some believe due to pressure from major corporations whose financial patronage had become indispensable to the organization’s operation—only accelerated it.

He discusses the ill will between the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts stemming from the BSA's opening its membership to girls, as well as the BSA hiring a diversity officer.

How does the BSA come back from a decline from a 1972 peak membership of 6.5 million to  present figure of 762,000?

Jonathan Kay, writing at Quilette, says that belief that there is systemic racism in 2021 America amounts to a faith that looks in many ways like religious faith. Toward the end, he coins a great term, "plurality of the unwell," to examine how this spread has so permeated national life:

But then there is the Plurality of the Unwell. Those who are the loudest and most desperate and dangerous. Those behind the new discourse. Those who corner or lobby the people who make the decisions—the CEOs, university presidents, studio chiefs and so on—to pretend that there is a ghost in the machine. That we are being orchestrated by an unverifiable hate. That it is their role, their mandate, to overthrow the veil of false consciousness and lead us to the light. These people, one suspects, are true believers. Their faith is real, but they do not realize it is faith. They would deny vehemently that it is anything of the kind. They believe that they simply know what the old, the dumb, the wicked cannot know. That we cannot make any meaningful distinction between Jim Crow America and America right now. That all of the so-called progress of the past half-century is a distraction and a farce. That we are trapped inside a vast web of manipulations that must be decimated, loudly and with an unbelievable fervor.

At American Purpose, Frank J. DiStefano says that history can be a great guide regarding how those truly motivated could start a new political party with the viability that the Republicans and Democrats once had. 

For a read that will scare the pants off ya, check out Damon Linker's essay in The Week entitled"The Intellectual Right Contemplates an 'American Caesar.'" Actual conservatives who have succeeded in staying away from what is depicted here will get a fresh sense of the wilderness they inhabit. People with nutty, dangerous, and unConstitutional ideas have vastly more influence at the moment.

Rod Dreher is not the first observer to ask "'What Is Happening To America?'" but his contribution to the conversation is important. 

Nicole Russell at the Washington Examiner lays out just what's in the infrastructure bill:

Some of us have been reading the bill. It’s a shining example of government spending gone wrong. A friend who tweets anonymously — and who isn’t in politics or journalism but has made a habit of poring over these bills — has been raising the alarm. Turns out, the bill is chock-full of pork, “equity” oriented grants, and millions of dollars of “hard” infrastructure that seems neither necessary nor similar to infrastructure.

Here are a few more examples of things in the infrastructure bill:

• $50 million for Central Utah Project Completion
• $5 billion for low/zero emissions school buses
• $2.5 billion for a carbon storage commercialization program
• $21.5 billion for clean energy demonstrations
• $75 million for the Denali commission
• $14.2 billion for the Federal Communications Commission
• $3.4 billion for the Federal Buildings Fund
• $3.5 billion for Indian Health Service

The descriptions of these payouts — I mean, grants — are ludicrous: $250 million for reducing truck emissions at ports. A $500 million grant for the Healthy Streets Program allows cities to "provide funding to deploy cool and porous pavements and expand tree cover to mitigate urban heat islands, improve air quality, and reduce flood risks.”

The bill includes $75 million for the Open Challenge and Research Proposal pilot program, which provides grants for proposals to “research needs or challenges identified or determined as important by the Secretary.” And it proposes a “federal system funding alternative advisory board” that must appoint “advocacy groups focused on equity,” among other things.

Quinnipiac poll has some really ugly stats for Andrew Cuomo.  

 

  

 

Woke-ism makes it damn hard for free-market champions to defend corporations against regulation and taxation

 I'm not huge on litmus tests, but I do consider it as essential to substantiation of someone's claim to be a conservative that they be on board with free-market economics. That he or she have the principles laid out by Adam Smith, Frederic Bastiat, Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt and Frederich Hayek ingrained in his or her bones. Economic freedom is essential to the viability of any other kind of freedom.

But it's clear that the Trump phenomenon brought us a "populist" take on economics that depends less on immutable principles than it does on appeals to Little Guys and Average Joes. It's going to be hard to wrest that terrain back from them in the struggle to reclaim the mantle of actual conservatism.

And conservatives are sure not getting any help from post-America's big corporations, That's been true for some time, but the momentum has been increasing in 2021. It's given the populists the perfect excuse to thumb their nose at that whole sector:

Republicans and corporate America are on the outs.

In the past week alone, American Airlines and computer company Dell came out strongly against GOP-led bills that place restrictions on voting in their home base of Texas. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a rising star in Republican Party, continued to take heat for nixing a bill that would have imposed a ban on transgender athletes in sports, citing the potential impact on her state's bottom line. And conservatives spent days bashing "vaccine passports" some businesses think are needed to return to normal.

And then there was Georgia, where the Republican-controlled state House narrowly voted to end a tax break worth millions that Delta enjoys on jet fuel after the airline's CEO — along with the CEO of Coca-Cola, another major Atlanta-based business — condemned new voting restrictions in the state. (The GOP-led state Senate did not take up the measure.) On Friday, Major League Baseball pulled this year's All-Star Game out of Atlanta in protest of that same law.

Republicans were outraged.

"Boycott baseball and all of the woke companies that are interfering with Free and Fair Elections," former President Donald Trump said in a statement. "Are you listening Coke, Delta, and all!"

"Why are we still listening to these woke corporate hypocrites on taxes, regulations & anti-trust?" Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., tweeted.

Such public dust-ups between businesses and members of the GOP are becoming more frequent, though the divide — possibly one of the most consequential in U.S. politics and society — is years in the making. The shift is the product of a Republican Party increasingly driven by "culture war" issues that animate a base invigorated by Trump and corporate powerhouses that are under more pressure than ever to align themselves with the left on voting rights, LGBTQ rights and anti-racist efforts.

The result is a fraying in relations between a GOP that has for years advocated for the kinds of libertarian economic policies that have widely benefited these businesses and companies that are using their might to help advance racial and social justice causes.

"We have long thought and still think of the big institutional drivers of this culture war as more in academia, the arts, the media, and corporate America has mostly sat it out until recently," retiring Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., told NBC News in an interview. He added that while he does not think of corporate America "as the biggest player yet," companies coming off the sidelines "can change the dynamic."

It's to the point at which some are ready to quit speaking of people's - and that's what we're talking about, even in the case of big corporations, since they're owned by investors - right to keep government's hands off their money:

"Talking about corporate tax cuts and reducing burdensome regulations doesn't do it for our new voters," this person said. "I guess it's not that exciting. It might be exciting for those country club Republicans we lost, but we're losing them."

What it means for policy is less clear, however, even as some Republicans embrace some leftward policies like an increase in the minimum wage. Under Trump, Republicans implemented a tax cut that saw much of its benefits go toward some of these same corporations conservatives now decry for their social activism. Few Republicans are turning away from the traditional agenda of lower taxes and deregulation — though some prominent Republicans like Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Rubio have sought to position themselves as corporate antagonists.

Toomey said he's seen the "rise in economic populism among some Republicans," with the possibility of more "anti-corporate momentum" should corporations decide "to become part of the left-wing social movement."

Toomey makes this observation objectively, but it's not his own viewpoint, to be sure:

Toomey, a former president of the Club for Growth, is not on board with such moves.

"I'm still going to fight for the right economic policy, right? I'm not going to say, 'Well, let's punish them for their bad behavior,' because unfortunately punishment is inflicted on the American people and our economy," he said. "So I'm not going to be part of that."

There's plenty of cluelessness here to go around. The populists have lost sight of the principles of freedom  and limited government, and the corporate sector has signed on to all this "stakeholder theory" and social-justice nonsense, probably at the expense of the maximum profitability it owes its actual owners. 

It's so hard for clarity to get an airing in post-America. 

 

 

 

 

Making sense: at more of a premium in this world than ever

Honest, it's still possible to find people who are neither foolish nor rotten. It's not easy, but it's possible.

You can't find any of them on the Left, obviously. It's been rather amusing to take in the tales of rancorous meetings between "establishment" Democrats and the new breed of radicals in Congress. I'm quite sure there have been tense moments and shouting matches. But it amounts to a present-day playing out of the old adage that radicals are merely liberals in a hurry. The young turks are merely making plain what the end game for the whole lot of them has always been.

And, if it's possible, the foolishness and rottenness permeating such societal sectors as education, journalism, arts and entertainment, the corporate world and even a lamentably large swath of institutional Christianity are even more egregious than what we see in the national and state capitols of our land.

So, how are things to the right of center?

Dismaying in the extreme, I must report.

I won't go over the basics about Donald Trump himself again here. He's a self-absorbed, shallow, blustery, inconsistent - indeed, ideologically rudderless - huckster who has, because he has proven he has a bit of instinct for listening to people who can help him really and truly look like a "winner," overseen implementation of a number of great policy moves. To restate the one point of agreement to be found on the fractured Right, on the policy level, his has, on balance, been a good presidency so far.

There are, of course, his shills. Cult followers. Throne-sniffers. The first wave of them, back circa 2015 and 2016, mainly consisted of those who communicated in all caps in comment threads, amply peppering their rhetorical fist-pumps with exclamation marks. As the campaign gave way to the election and the inauguration and the beginning of a Trump administration, one started to see a more "respectable" layer of enthusiasm for the man himself. The likes of Conrad Black, Victor Davis Hanson and Roger Kimball brought an erudition to the impetus that began to shake things up in circles where responsible consideration was essential for participation.

The emergence of The Center for American Greatness represents kind of a nexus of the yee-haw and the highbrow. Its journal publishes the aforementioned thinkers, but its resident opiners such as Karl Notturno and Chris Buskirk differ little in tone from the boneheaded cheerleading of a Sean Hannity.

This type of Trumpist also has a notable need to portray the entire swath of the Right that, to various degrees and in various ways, finds Trump objectionable as moribund, as teetering on the edge of oblivion. This crowd did much crowing over the demise of The Weekly Standard, for instance.

These people want the public to think there is no daylight between, say, Jonah Goldberg, Rich Lowry, Erick Erickson, Susan Wright and Kimberly Ross on the one hand, and Jennifer Rubin, George Will, Max Boot and Bill Kristol on the other. Obviously an observer as astute as yourself - evidenced by your taking the time to stop by LITD - doesn't fall for it.

The second crowd mentioned in the previous paragraph harms its own cause - whatever that is; getting Trump impeached, I guess? - as well as the greater cause of responsibly adhering to immutable principles when it pulls moves like sending Molly Jong-Fast to cover CPAC for The Bulwark.

The balancing act for actual conservatives has become trickier than ever. Bad blood between us and Trumpists makes finding common cause a daunting task. We will continue to applaud good policy moves. What we will not do is sign on to bad ones (tariffs, paid family leave, summits with dictators of rogue states) nor go into fanboy mode over the Very Stable Genius. He is no standard-bearer for what we hold dear.

The Trumpists find us contempt-worthy, but we are the ones equipped to offer consistency-based refutation of the grim Leftist program. We are, in fact, indispensable to the MAGA crowd, providing the heft when their lack of a coherent worldview becomes obvious to our common enemy.

We know who the enemy is; do we know who we are?

Obviously it hasn't merited the foremost position among my thoughts in the last few days - with the avalanche of developments, how could anything hold that status for more than a few hours, anyway? - but I have found my thoughts occasionally returning to George Will's piece that appeared at both The Washington Post  and National Review entitled "Amy Klobuchar Could Break Minnesota's Presidential Losing Streak."A lot of it is taken up with wonky diving into Minnesota voting patterns in recent decades. He juxtaposes her against the current radical fever gripping the Democrat party, noting that  the Almanac of American Politics deemed her the 27th most liberal Senator, "liberal enough to soothe other liberals without annoying everyone else."

A big thrust of the piece is his point that Minnesota Dem presidential candidates lose. Harold Stassen. Hubert Humphrey. Eugene McCarthy. Walter Mondale.

A few questions:

• Why would Will give a s--- about Minnesota breaking its Dem-prez-candidate losing streak?
• Why would Will, with all that is going on, and with Democrats currently on the ropes due to such moves as the open love of infanticide, give a s--- about Dem political prospects in general?
• What kind of conversation among members of NR's editorial board led to the decision to publish this weird screed?

The piece has resurfaced among my thoughts today, because he ends his piece with this paragraph:

Her special strength, however, is her temperament. Baseball, it has been said, is not a game you can play with your teeth clenched. That is also true of politics, another day-by-day game with a long season: It requires an emotional equipoise, a blend of relaxation and concentration, stamina leavened by cheerfulness. Klobuchar laughs easily and often. If the nation wants an angry president, it can pick from among the many seething Democratic aspirants, or can keep the one president it has. If, however, it would like someone to lead a fatigued nation in a long exhale, it can pick a Minnesotan, at last.

The essay ran on January 31, and it hasn't aged well. This is now out there for our consideration:

At least three people have withdrawn from consideration to lead Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s nascent 2020 presidential campaign — and done so in part because of the Minnesota Democrat’s history of mistreating her staff, HuffPost has learned.

Klobuchar, who plans to make an announcement about a potential presidential bid on Sunday in Minneapolis, has spent the past several months positioning herself to run for president. She’s beloved in her state as a smart, funny and personable lawmaker and has gained national attention for her lines of questioning at high-profile hearings.

But some former Klobuchar staffers, all of whom spoke to HuffPost on condition of anonymity, describe Klobuchar as habitually demeaning and prone to bursts of cruelty that make it difficult to work in her office for long. 

It is common for staff to wake up to multiple emails from Klobuchar characterizing one’s work as “the worst” briefing or press release she’d seen in her decades of public service, according to two former aides and emails seen by HuffPost.

Although some staffers grew inured to her constant put-downs (“It’s always ‘the worst,’” one said sarcastically, “‘It was ‘the worst’ one two weeks ago”), others found it grinding and demoralizing. Adding to the humiliation, Klobuchar often cc’d large groups of staffers who weren’t working on the topic at hand, giving the emails the effect of a public flogging.

There's more:

Three former staffers said Klobuchar has tasked them or their co-workers with performing personal errands, such as making her personal appointments, washing dishes at her home or picking up her dry cleaning.

Senate staff are generally prohibited by Senate ethics rules from performing personal duties for members. 

Let's get back to Will for a minute. He has made it very easy for the once-actually-conservative-usually-all-the-way-through-the-primaries-but-now-full-throatedly-supportive-of-Trump crowd (think Kurt Schlichter) to lambaste and lampoon him. Will has been weird for some time. Maybe he's about to turn Dem. Who knows?

But the biggest disservice Will does to his former ideological soulmates - actual conservatives - is open the door to the band with the hyphen-rich characterization to lump conservatives who haven't gone weird one way or another in with those who have gone weird in an anti-Trump way.

This all came to mind for me yet again as I read strieff's latest piece at Red State. He takes Rich Lowry and Joe Walsh to task for their tweets asserting that 30-plus-year-old photos of politicians in blackface should not be career-enders. The gist of where strieff is coming from: In isolated consideration, none of this would be worth giving a diddly about, but Leftists hate conservatism in an all-consuming way, and would indeed take kindness for weakness. Regardless of whether we cut Herring or Northam a break, Dems will go to lengths even beyond those employed against Kavanaugh in the next SCOTUS nomination.

Again, a few thoughts:

• All conservatives really have to do is stand back and let these Freedom-Haters eat their own.
• The above-mentioned Rich Lowry makes pretty much that point in today's Politico piece, to which I linked in a post earlier today. Intersectionality inevitably entails throwing somebody overboard, since no one's past is not without lapses in judgement.
• Standing back on the identity-politics angle allows us to focus with requisite ferocity on the infanticide angle.

Strieff, for the second time in the last few days, approvingly quoting the above-mentioned Kurt Schlichter, reprinting a tweet in which  Schlichter uses his pet term of disparagement "Conservatism Inc." to talk about its "sissy reaction to what's happening in Virginia."

I think strieff must be the head editorial honcho at Red State these days. Diary posts that get promoted to the front page have to have his imprimatur. And he's becoming more of a fan of Schlichter all the time.

The Erick Erickson era at RS is obviously long over.

You may recall my linking to the Bulwark piece by Kimberly Ross and Andrea Ruth about why they quit RS. The decision to shift editorial tone seems to go all the way to the top at Salem Communications.

All this can be tied together.

A few points:

• Leftists are indeed as much of an enemy of Western civilization and America in particular as North Korea, Iran or the Sunni jihadist network. They have to be defeated. 
• The Democrat party has gone full leftist. The only way to constructively converse with the last few decent, normal, truly civic-minded people affiliated with it - and they are only to be found at the local level anymore (and I know a few like that; two on the local city council and one vying for a seat on it) - is to say to them, "Why would you be willing to associate yourself with such an evil organization?"
• Even with a few good recent moves, such as Tuesday's SOTU address, Trump remains unqualified to serve as a standard-bearer for conservatism.
• George Will and Bill Kristol have indeed become weirdos, and maybe even (though it pains me to even hint at any alignment with Kurt Schlichter) useless sissies.
• Jennifer Rubin and Max Boot are even worse and deserve complete banishment.

So, yes, this is war. The Democrats have served notice in unmistakable terms. The question is how most effectively to fight this enemy.

I think where the actual conservatives are coming from is making sure there are no gaps in our integrity, no loopholes that leave us open to charges of inconsistency. This in turn leads to the larger question of just what conservatism is, a conversation dating back at least to the days of William Buckley forbidding the Ayn Rand or the John Birch types from coming anywhere near the aforementioned National Review. 

In turn, what the Schlichter and strieff types (by the way, I just have to weigh in on the convention of using enigmatic nom de plumes in Internet-opining work. Is it just me, or does it strike anyone else as having a hint of scaredy-cat-edness to it?) seem to be proposing is "Use anything that can be used to your advantage that comes along. We're storming the beaches at Normandy here."

I'll take a moment to give this position, with which I strongly disagree, the benefit of the doubt. We're in mortal combat with an enemy that hates our guts. Chances for us to defeat that enemy non-violently are not increasing. Ferocity is definitely called for.

I just don't want to see anything arise to bite us in the backside at the moment when victory is in sight.

Is there a big protectionist groundswell in post-America? We might want to rethink that

Michael Strain at the American Enterprise Institute has a column today at Bloomberg entitled "Republicans Rejected Free Trade for No Reason."

LITD highly recommends it:

Donald Trump's election in 2016 was taken as clear evidence that Americans were fed up with globalization. Though elites and economists supported free trade, the silent majority of Americans, left to live with its effects, did not. Protectionist sentiment was resurgent. Economic nationalism and “America First” have since become the order of the day, the consequences of a bottom-up reaction from the people. 

 The problem with this new conventional wisdom about trade is that it may be wrong, according to a new study based on polling data from a variety of organizations.

The author, Scott Lincicome, an international trade lawyer and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, found that the solid majority of Americans support trade and globalization. A March 2018 Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, for example, finds that “Americans overwhelmingly think trade is more of an opportunity to boost the economy than it is a threat to it”; the margin was 66 percent to 20 percent.

In the same month, Gallup found that 70 percent of U.S. adults “see foreign trade as an opportunity for U.S. economic growth through increased exports,” while only 25 percent see trade as a “threat to the economy” due to foreign imports. 

Lincicome contrasts the central role trade played in the 2016 campaign with evidence that the issue simply wasn't a priority even then for most Americans. He highlights a poll taken after the Republican National Convention in July 2016 nominated Trump for president. This poll found that half of respondents had no opinion on “rolling back free-trade agreements” like the North American Free Trade Agreement. (Out of the 12 issues polled, the second-highest “no opinion” score, on Medicare vouchers, was 29 percent.) 

Overall, two-thirds of respondents were largely disinterested — either indifferent, weakly supportive or weakly opposed to curtailing free-trade agreements. 

These results jibe with more recent surveys. Lincicome highlights a January 2018 Pew poll in which respondents ranked global trade last among issues that should be a top priority for the federal government. Pew noted that, historically, “dealing with global trade issues has been among the lowest-ranked priorities over the past two decades.” In June 2018, a Gallup poll found that only 1 percent of Americans think “foreign trade/trade deficit” is “the most important problem facing the country today.”

Importantly, Lincicome’s paper documents shifts in attitudes that correlate with the state of the economy and with politics. Support for trade fell during the Great Recession and rebounded during the recovery. 

I remember the 2015 - 16 era and how Laura Ingraham, on her radio show, kept harping away about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, as if it was a front-burner issue, when no one else was nearly as preoccupied with it.

There seems to be little doubt that there is indeed a very large swath of post-Americans who feel that their everyday concerns are not understood or addressed by elected officials or policy wonks, but Trumpists may have read too much in terms of specific trade policy into that.

Strain offers a way to address those concerns that can actually lead to something other than a closing off of organic economic exchange:

It could be a focal point for frustration with economic and cultural change. In this sense, the conventional wisdom about trade might be evidence that public policy needs to create more real on-ramps to economic opportunity for lower-income and working-class Americans. 

But even that way of framing it makes me wary. We're awfully quick, it seems to me, to assume that "public policy" can "create" things that benefit sovereign individuals. I'm more inclined to think that truly organic economic opportunity happens on the level of particular needs and particular ideas for profitably meeting those needs.

Maybe Strain would say we're talking about the same thing, which is probably true, at least to a large extent. I just get wary of accepting the terms of discussion about economics as being what some big entity - generally government, or the administrative apparatus more broadly - can "do" for some amorphous "people."

In any event, his main point is spot-on. Protectionism is a road to nowhere.

A narrow path indeed

To employ the image of walking a tightrope to connote the need for steadiness in a perilously tricky environment doesn't require a great deal in the way of originality, but it is effective for conjuring the stakes involved. A false move midway between two high-rises at a quarter-mile altitude has immediate and irreversible consequences.

So that's what I'm going with as a metaphor for what's required of conservatives in the summer of 2018.

Nothing short of bringing to bear everything we know, with no slop in formulation, is going to ensure our survival.

Here at LITD, we've recently devoted a lot of posts to two concurrent threats - think of them as gusts of wind, or sudden noises - to the Grand Theme, the body of immutable principles, that hasn't changed and doesn't change in the face of historical comings and goings.

There's the recent exponential ratcheting up of the Left's frenzied bitterness. Since the Progressive era of a hundred years ago, and through its "achievements" such as the New Deal, the Great Society and the Obama era, it has insisted that the primary lens through which history and public policy should be viewed is struggle between classes - first, between economic classes (muckety-mucks versus working stiffs), then between races, then between genders, and then between those who understand that the universe self-evidently exhibit an a priori design and those who maintain that the human being can define and invent himself,  herself or itself.

In short, it keeps refining this notion of "systemic oppression" that has always fueled it:

Democrats have been grappling with key questions about coalition building since the 2016 election: Should they prioritize winning back the voters they lost to Trump? Should they attempt to woo the white voters gradually fleeingthe party? Progressives this weekend said, emphatically, no. It’s a genuine attempt to remake the Democratic Party at a time when racial and class tensions are the highest they’ve been since the 1960s—and it’s also put them on a collision course with party leaders and other Democrats.

“I think Trump’s win scared the shit out of everybody,” said Anoa Changa, a progressive activist and host of the podcast The Way with Anoa. “I think it’s been a wakeup call for a lot of people that we have to invest. We can’t just do the traditional model where we only talk to super-voters.”

That doesn’t mean ignoring whites and Trump voters, she says. Instead, “it’s rejecting the notion that our way to victory is having a centrist, moderate right-leaning strategy that feels like we could peel off Romney Republicans, versus investing in communities of color, marginalized groups and progressive white people,” Changa said. “There is this notion that...we can’t address the issues of race, systemic oppression because we don’t want to piss these voters off. We have to find a way to do both.”

It does lead to some odd delusions, such as the notion that nobody has been talking about race:

progressives are adamant that the only way to win in November and beyond has to be about more than economics, and that the right message—the one that will appeal to progressive whites, as well as turning out more people of color to the polls—invokes both race and class equally. Two Netroots trainings on developing a “Race-Class Narrative” were completely filled this weekend, with activists and organizers participating in mock-canvassing sessions in which they practiced delivering lines that contained both racial and economic messages. “The status quo has been not to talk about race, and there’s a myth out there is that if you talk about race you’ll lose,” said Causten Rodriguez-Wollerman, one of the leaders of the training, and a strategist with the public-policy organization Demos. “You cannot build a multiracial coalition by being silent on race.”

But for some, no amount of puking all over oneself about supposed demographic disadvantage is ever enough:

On Saturday, the final night of this year’s Netroots conference, a small group of young protesters from the “Black-Ass Caucus” took to the stage. “We will no longer be tokenized by so-called white allies,” one man shouted to the audience. Another protester, a young woman, criticized progressives who speak about economics and class, without mentioning race. “Everything—including class issues—are built on race issues!” she yelled into the microphone.

“I’m a woman of color and people do not pay attention to us, even in the littlest things. but we are always the ones saving the Democratic Party,” 27-year-old Ianthe Metzger, a staffer for the Human Rights Campaign and a Netroots attendee, told me earlier in the weekend. “Finally it feels like we have a say...it’s like finally, this is our moment.” 

The demands get ever more exacting. In a HuffPost piece by Jessica Prois,  we see an attempt to make Asians, an awfully broad categorization, but a demographic that routinely beats the pants off both blacks and whites in college-admissions scores, representation in well-paying occupations, and a number of other metrics, into a beleaguered group entitled to frenzied bitterness:

That The New York Times stood behind [Sarah Jeong's] anger means something to Asians. There are, of course, other outlets for Asian anger, but they aren’t mainstream. There is the original online purveyor, Angry Asian Man. Founder Phil Yu’s motto is “stay angry,” and one of his canonical questions when he features readers is “What makes you angry?”

Emma Sulkowicz, an Asian-American artist known for carrying a mattress across Columbia University’s campus as a visual reminder of her alleged rape, talked to HuffPost about where Asian anger comes from.

“There’s a lot of racism we have to deal with. Why are we angry Asians? It comes from a place of being stepped on. There is a level of invisibility we have.”

As we can see, leftists are not in a very good position for seeing any aspects of reality that don't fit into this oppressor - oppressed configuration. They are, for instance, utterly oblivious to the undercurrents in hinterland America that led to the populism that in turn gave rise to Trumpism. Laid-off blue-collar workers in Ohio? To the Left, there's no significant difference between them and seven-figure corporate titans. Privileged mostly-male white people, that's all.

Then there's the risk of not taking into account everything about the various types of Trump voters - that is, glossing over any traits that don't fit with a sympathetic portrayal. Yes, there are the above-mentioned small-town work-with-their-hands types, as well as a certain kind of suburban mom, those with pretty much single-issue focus on such issues as guns or immigration, and a certain kind of evangelical voter who has resolved to overlook Trump's sybaritic track record and his obvious lack of acquaintance with real faith or tradition because he advocates some policies (and appoints some judges) favorable to a Judeo-Christian worldview.

But for those looking at that collection of Trump types rather than from their perspective, there's a cult-of-personality component that binds them in a common enthusiasm that at least equals and may even exceed that with which the Left showered Barack Obama.

This is the crowd from which we hear a forthright admission that Trump's ways are crude and that he has no ideological consistency - is not even capable of it - and immediately afterward that anything less than our full-throated, unreserved fealty to whatever he's deciding to do at any moment is somehow a betrayal of actual conservatism on our part.

A recent piece by Daren Jonescu at his blog entitled "The Dangerous Idealization of Material Success" is pertinent here. It reminds me of Richard M. Weaver's warnings, in his 1948 book Ideas Have Consequences, that the West's losing sight of the role of transcendence in Western flourishing is proving to be its undoing.

He says that when safety, comfort and status became the most focused-upon fruits of human ingenuity and enterprise, we became less capable of exalting or even recognizing character and depth as the most admirable of human traits.

This, in turn, led to a veneration of the person who "gets things done."

The absolute reversal of Plato’s unrealizable ideal is the view, which has become disturbingly common among the last substantial faction on Earth still clinging to a semblance of the essentially modern project of individual practical liberty — i.e., American conservatives — that the only man fit to govern is precisely the man who has devoted his life to material gain. Hence these conservatives’ ill-conceived dream of the “CEO president” or “management skills president,” who, because he supposedly “knows how to run a business” or “knows how to manage people and budgets,” will, it is presumed, know how to “run” a nation and “manage” an economy. (As though a free republic and free economy were designed to be “run” or “managed” by a powerful central figure in the first place.) For an example of this perspective, one need look no further than the Republican Party’s mainstream voting block, which has selected its presidential candidates on this basis as often as not for many years — and that includes, most obviously, the current figurehead, who was alleged to be an anti-establishment muckraker, but who, when criticized for his leadership skills, knowledge, or economic policy, is invariably defended by his idolaters with the cliché that “He knows how to run a business,” or, as he laughably boasts of himself, he “only hires the best people.”

And what is the result of this absolute reversal of Plato’s governing ideal, and of the ethico-political devolution that precipitated the reversal? A once-free society that has come to identify wealth with wisdom, aggressive self-seeking with strong leadership, “winning” with principled statesmanship, and pragmatic opportunism with American individualism. 

We're then left with a grotesquely distorted notion of what it means to lead, or have vision:

Until modernity recognizes the error of confusing the real but secondary benefits of wealth-getting with ultimate human goods — in other words, until we stop reducing human nature to its physical necessities, and human fulfillment to material comfort and security — our only realistic hope of saving the continuity of civilization against the progressive tide, namely a free republic grounded in enlightened individualism, is doomed to self-destruction. For when, through popular distortions and exaggerations of early modernity’s paean to practical efficacy and its criticism of ancient and medieval notions of a hierarchy of human ends, the various possibilities of human life are placed on equal footing, morally and rationally, material gain is thereby implicitly legitimized as not merely a necessary but also a sufficient condition of wellbeing. Hence, the morally neutral activity of wealth-getting (which derives moral worth only from the ends it serves) assumes the mantle of a standard of excellence in its own right, as though there were no such thing as human nature at all — or as though human nature were purely physical and appetitive.

And then we're left with the irony that the leftists and the Trumpists have something very disturbing in common: the belief that to be comfortably situated in this material realm is the ultimate aim of human endeavor.

I doubt that the Jessica Prois / Sarah Jeong / Ta-Nehisi Coates / Linda Sarsour / Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez types have a clear view of just what happens when the dog actually catches up to the car - that is, when the white, straight, Christian male is resolutely quashed and transgendered amputees of color hold a majority in Congress - but we can safely say that it has nothing to do with God being glorified.

We're getting close to coming full circle with the tightrope metaphor with which this post was launched, aren't we?

See the various types of agents of cacophony besetting post-America from all sides?

Or perhaps another not-particularly-original metaphor - that of Michaelangelo's answer when asked how he carved David (he said he carved away all the stone that wasn't David) - applies here.

For that admittedly minority audience that at least hopefully grows some every day due to the curiosity of those sensing that something's amiss in ways that most observations don't take into account, the basic message - sort of like a tightrope walker somehow being able to get a high-altitude conveyance to supporters and curiosity-seekers on the ground - is along the lines of "For the moment I'm doing fine, but do what you can to support me in remaining true to  my understanding that

• this isn't about an improved GDP
• this isn't about NATO being equally funded by its members
• this isn't about any particular demographic group's advantage or disadvantage relative to any other particular demographic group
• this isn't about some scientific or technological advancement that makes human life more convenient, safe or enjoyable
• this isn't about getting a reasonably reliable assurance from any of the menacing nation-states or jihadist groups currently threatening us that they will reverse course

It's about understanding the human birthright, and responsibly exercising it. 

As I've said a few times in recent posts, those of us who continue to adhere steadfastly to the core principles are ultimately in the safest position of anyone at this crazy juncture at which post-America and the post-West generally finds himself or herself. The alternatives are all built on self-invented aspirations. "Making America great again" or "smashing the white Christian patriarchy" do not offer a prescription for what makes the human soul bleed and scream and finally either die or find its redemption.

It's noisy, cold and windy up here. The crowds clamoring on the street below - some for our success and some for our tragic end - are quite distracting.

Steady, now. Much rests upon the completion of our very careful walk.