Joseph Goebbels, published in Der Angriff, 30 April 1928:

We are an anti-parliamentarian party that for good reasons rejects the Weimar constitution and its republican institutions. We oppose a fake democracy that treats the intelligent and the foolish, the industrious and the lazy, in the same way. We see in the present system of majorities and organized irresponsibility the main cause of our steadily increasing miseries. So why do we want to be in the Reichstag?

We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with democracy’s weapons. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem. It does not concern us. Any way of bringing about the revolution is fine by us.

If we succeed in getting sixty or seventy of our party’s agitators and organizers elected to the various parliaments, the state itself will pay for our fighting organization. That is amusing and entertaining enough to be worth trying.[…

…When democracy is near its end it will resort openly to the terror of capitalistic dictatorship that it ordinarily uses covertly. But that will not happen for some time, and in the meanwhile the fighters for our faith will enjoy parliamentary immunity long enough to broaden our fighting front such that shutting them up will not be as easy as democracy would like it to be.[…]

We are coming neither as friends or neutrals. We come as enemies! As the wolf attacks the sheep, so come we.

You are not among your friends any longer! You will not enjoy having us among you!

Justin Smith-Ruiu:

I hear echoing in my head that great line from Chateaubriand, which I have selected as my epigraph: “I can’t stand the pride of victory”. Anyone who does not share this same sentiment, I contend, shares in no real spirit of conservatism. They might support particular policies that are conservative-coded in a particular place and time, policies I myself generally do not support. But the conservative character, the likely innate disposition to the world and to history that hates to see venerable forms of life subducted under new strata hastily composed from the passions of know-nothing youth — that is almost nowhere in evidence among any of the factions of our current regime. […]

Old men returning to childhood: this is a fairly good characterization of the species of conservatism I am attempting here to draw into relief — not the later childhood we call “adolescence”, where the passions grow focused on acquisition of power and status, but the first childhood, of kinship with trees, when one still has a choice of standing outside the narrowly human conflicts that serves as the motor of history and that also keeps most of us busy, with our own minuscule struggles, for the greater part of our lives. Chateaubriand spent that greater part of his life bemused, perplexed, disappointed, in love with a past of which he was never really sure whether it was his own, or humanity’s own. He was certain, anyhow, that no human effort was ever going to deliver us into a happier earthly condition — for the only real happiness is blessedness, which, in any composition with the modifier “earthly”, really does produce an oxymoron.

… But I do wish there were still some proper conservatives out there, with the learning and wisdom to recognize Chateaubriand’s outlook as a significant part of their venerable lineage, to acknowledge and to embrace the melancholy and the tragedy, to be able to regret all that is lost even as one faces up honestly to the inevitability of loss. […]

And this new arrangement is certainly not going to be a victory for conservatism either, no matter how messily that term continues to be employed. Any conservatism that is worth the name is a conservatism of spirit and of temperament. Wistful, melancholic, and utterly resistant to interpretation by anyone who is a zealot for anything, it is fundamentally incompatible with the aims of any reign of terror, today no less than in 1792.

Jonah Goldberg:

Donald Trump lashed out at the democratically elected Ukrainian president today, calling him “a dictator.” 

Forget that this is a lie, just like Trump’s insinuation that Ukraine “started” the war with Russia—a claim that is the geopolitical equivalent of saying a rape victim started it by, well, being rapable. 

But I don’t want to talk about the lie. You can defend Trump by telling me that it’s sort of true because elections are overdue in Ukraine. They are! You know why? Because the entire country is mobilized for a war it didn’t start and about a fifth of it is occupied by a country led by an actual dictator who targets children’s hospitals and sanctions rape, child abductions, and mass slaughter by its troops. But if you don’t have something better than that, don’t even bother trying.

Elizabeth Bruenig:

Vance, speaking with the Fox News host Sean Hannity, provided further Catholic reasoning for his administration’s approach to migrants and refugees, arguing that he thinks it’s “a very Christian concept that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world”—a statement to which the bishops have not responded. If they did, however, I imagine they would point out that Jesus addresses this matter in his Sermon on the Mount, saying, “If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The Christian mandate is more arduous than Vance’s account seems to allow.

… The Church is called to be a sign of contradiction—a bulwark of Christian priorities against the demands of the political and cultural eras that the faithful pass through. Comporting with political and cultural demands is what politicians do; the degree to which Catholic politicians do the same is the degree to which they ought to suspect themselves spiritually compromised. Perhaps they all are, and perhaps so are we.

In fact, the tendency of humankind to be self-serving and deceitful is part of what makes me believe that Christianity is at its purest and most beautiful when it is counterintuitive and unwieldy—that is, when it is least amenable to human convenience. The command to love even those who aren’t your kith and kin is an excellent example of just that. The command to serve the weakest and most outcast members of society is another. Thus, the decision to love and serve the stranger, the refugee, and the foreigner with charity is a hallmark of the Christian faith, such that a government crackdown on this work seems to be a threat to Christian practice itself, or an attempt to reshape it into something else altogether.

One terrible thing about that “reshaping” is that it really doesn’t require much actual reshaping among those who cheer and champion this. The church that supports Trump and Musk — and it is a real segment of the church, at least as we here experience it — has long since shaped itself into this very mold, primed itself to despise the foreigner and love those who love us.

Vance’s priorities may not be Jesus’s priorities, but they are spot-on; he has astutely read the room nave.

Makes me all the more grateful for writers like Bruenig.

Jeremy Eichler (emphasis mine):

But whatever tensions ran through his philosophy and his life, it may be said that in a century of averting eyes, [Theodor] Adorno refused to look away. After the Second World War and the Shoah, like a structural engineer inspecting the wreckage of a collapsed building in order to account for its fall, he scanned the histories of art and artworks themselves—and even the central premises of the Enlightenment—for cracks in the foundation, premonitions of future failure. “Auschwitz demonstrated irrefutably that culture has failed,” he wrote. “That this could happen in the midst of the traditions of philosophy, of art, and of the enlightening sciences says more than that these traditions and their spirit lacked the power to take hold of men and work a change in them. There is untruth in those fields themselves.” … It might also be said that, for Adorno, this is the task of art. Certain works could reveal the “rifts and crevices” of a fallen world. They could carry forward the memory of loss, and with it perhaps the seeds of a melancholy hope.

Forced out of Nazi Germany just after earning his first professorship, Adorno eventually met [Thomas] Mann at an exile party [in Los Angelas] in the summer of 1943. Not long afterward, Adorno gave the novelist a copy of his own Philosophy of New Music, an audacious manifesto then unpublished yet later to become one of Adorno’s signature works. In it Mann discovered reflections that bore, he later claimed, a striking resemblance to his own, ideas he would weave into the intellectual fabric of his novel [Doctor Faustus, published in 1947]. Chief among these may have been the notion that works of art are, in Adorno’s words, “the hidden essence of society, summoned into appearance.” But that was just the beginning. As the scholar Rose Subotnik has described, Adorno was approaching music “not merely as an organization of sounds but as an embodiment of the truths perceived by human consciousness; and the purpose of his musical writings [was] to criticize not merely the technical workings of music but, above all, the human condition of the societies that give music life.“

Beethoven was a key figure for Adorno, a composer whose work both crystallized and anticipated dramatic shifts in European society. As he saw it, at some point in Beethoven’s middle period (roughly the first decade of the nineteenth century), a work of music could sound well rounded and affirmative even triumphant—in tone while still remaining “true,” because the progress of Western society had itself reached a moment of great possibility, a time when a forward-thinking artist like Beethoven could imagine the interests of the individual (freedom) as potentially reconcilable with those of society (form). This moment of promise, however, would be short-lived. The music of Beethoven’s final years, his late period, already anticipated that the eras lofty visions, its noble humanism, was a pledge society would not keep. This is why Beethoven’s late music, in Adorno’s terms, became more “negative,” its once-smooth surfaces now fracturing, the music’s levels of dissonance allowed to grow at times to the point where, as in Beethoven’s “Grosse Fuge,” the dissonance claims the music’s expressive core.

And here is where it gets really interesting… and more challenging.

Schoenberg’s art, in this story, essentially picks up where Beethoven’s late music left off. At the end of the nineteenth century, plenty of Schoenberg’s contemporaries were still writing conventionally beautiful music, but that art’s relationship to society was now increasingly “false.” History had called its bluff, in ways we do not need Adorno to illuminate. Under the nose of enlightened humanism, Napoleon had declared himself emperor. Slavery had persisted in America. Belgian colonial rule had ravaged the Congo. Germany had committed genocide against the Herero and Nama in present-day Namibia. Beautiful art, in such a world, was like its own kind of opium for the masses, its charms serving to mask uglier truths about corruption, domination, repression, and moral rot. In this telling, then, Schoenberg’s own atonal revolution, as well as music’s turn toward harsh modern dissonance, was a kind of course correction, from an art that manufactured deceptive beauty to an art that conveyed existential truths—about life, about the suffering of humanity, about history, and about the possibility of a still-darker future. “Dissonance,” Adorno wrote, “is the truth about harmony.”

I want to add a thought to this, something from a pianist and survivor of the Theresienstadt Nazi propaganda camp. But I’ll come back to that another day.

Nick Catoggio:

Implicit in the Madisonian scheme is the assumption that Americans would never knowingly trust the Constitution to a full-spectrum miscreant like Trump who would aggressively test separation of powers. We’re about to find out if there’s anything left to Madison’s contraption once that assumption proves false.

We chose to become an unapologetically predatory nation on November 5, believing that we might suffer “a little pain” in the process. Instead we’re going to suffer a lot, and we’ll deserve it.

Just highlighting this line from Jonathan Chait

the wish masquerading as calculation that Democrats can gain vote share without compromising with the electorate.

Revisiting Rowan Williams:

No one is sure what Blake meant by mentioning “dark, Satanic mills” as part of what Jesus would have seen and moved among, but the candidates include early industrial sites, Druidic temples and (I’m afraid) Anglican parish churches. The point, though, is that we are being asked to imagine that the incarnate God moved and worked even in the middle of the cruelty, hypocrisy and exploitation that are an inseparable part of every human community’s history. “Jerusalem” is being built, even while all the signs in society around us seem to negate the vision. 

What we need is the rekindling of desire – the sheer passionate longing to see a social order at which the Holy Lamb of God might look without heartbreak. Arrows of desire; the courage and endurance of mental fight; the struggle to keep this imagination alive and burning – this is what we pray for. The poem looks back to an imaginary past and forward to an imagined future, but at its heart is the question: “do you truly want to live in Jerusalem? Because if you do, you need to remember that it is always already here and now; because even where justice and love seem to be defeated, the Holy Lamb of God is present.”

Nick Catoggio:

It seems chaotic, little more than haphazard fan service for his populist base, but there’s a common thread to many of the actions he’s taken. The impoundment nonsense is the latest example of Trump striving to make all federal policy subject to executive discretion and all exercises of that discretion subject to compliance with his wishes. We’re a government of “friends and enemies” now, and the more power he wields in his discretion, the more friends he’s going to have.

Also:

It is insane that a 25 percent tax on imports from America’s two closest trading partners could be imposed on the whim of one man rather than by a vote of Congress, but our feckless legislature spent many years gradually ceding authority to the president in this area and lacks the nerve to dare claw it back. And so, for Trump, tariffs have become a form of unilateral sanctionshe can impose to apply pressure internationally on weaker powers whenever there’s something he wants. […]

Is it any surprise, then, that he would look for ways to gain similar financial influence over adversaries here at home?

Impoundment is the way. If it’s within the president’s discretion to release or not release the enormous gobs of cash Congress sends out the door every year to domestic entities, practically every stakeholder in American society will need to kneel before him to stay afloat. Some people’s “loyalty” is compelled with a stick but others’ is purchased with a carrot. Trump, the man who insisted on putting his name on stimulus checks issued during the pandemic, wants the power to dole out the carrots. You want your appropriation from Congress? Then ask nicely, and explain what you’re prepared to do for him as a “favor” in return.