Mark Leibovich, in something of a “hall of faith cowardice” for the Grand Old Party:

He welcomed their contempt, he told me, because that would make his turning them into supplicants all the more humiliating.

“They might speak badly about me now, but they won’t later,” Trump said. They like to say they are “public servants,” he added, his voice dripping with derision at the word servant. But they would eventually submit to him and fear him. They would “evolve,” as they say in politics. “It will be very easy; I can make them evolve,” Trump told me. “They will evolve.”

Like most people who’d been around politics for a while, I was dubious. And wrong. They evolved.

[…]

After Trump won the nomination in 2016, “The party defines the party” became a familiar feckless refrain among the GOP’s putative leaders. House Speaker Paul Ryan vowed to me that he would “protect conservatism from being disfigured.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told the radio host Hugh Hewitt that “Trump is not going to change the institution,” referring to the GOP. “He’s not going to change the basic philosophy of the party.”

In retrospect, this was hilarious.

Hilarious, of course, because it was pure bullshit. As I’ve been learning, over and over and over again for the last decade-plus, it’s all been steeped in bullshit from the beginning. They were just better at controlling it and hiding it (even from themselves) before someone truly shameless came along and showed them — or showed the rest of the world, anyway — just how little control, and even less integrity, they really have.

One of the reasons I like reading Kevin Williamson is that he gives a breath of, uh… not fresh air, but very honest air, anyway. (I’ll save “fresh air” for Wendell Berry, or stuff like this.) He’s as solid an avenue as you’ll find for vicariously venting frustration at the general lack of integrity in politics. And his humor lacks for nothing.

Another reason I like reading him is that I find a lot of chances to see where I part ways with him, and perhaps with “conservatism” — not only as it has become but how it has always been, at least during my lifetime. And that’s been important in finding my feet, and my voice, in the current era.

For example, here is Bill Kristoll, saying it the way I really try to say it:

Trumpism is a horror show, and the Trumpists who strut upon its stage, full of sound and fury, are pretty horrifying. So one’s inclined to praise those normal Republicans who avoid joining in the most ghastly performances of the horror show.

Not that these respectable “normie” types have had the nerve to actually oppose Trump. That would apparently be a bridge of courage and principle too far. Some may privately disdain him. But they are almost uniformly supporting him for a second term as president.

These normie Republicans, their admirers point out, have tried to minimize their participation in some of the worst features of Trumpism, even as they back Trump. They aren’t personally crazy, and often aren’t personally cruel. Those who want to believe in a constructive future for the GOP place great hope on them.

But they don’t deserve much praise, and they aren’t worthy of much hope. Because they refuse to be honest about the craziness and cruelty in the candidate and movement they support, they end up legitimizing and strengthening the craziness and the cruelty.

These fellow travelers provide false comfort that you can retain a modicum of dignity and decency as you go along with Trump and get along with Trumpism. In doing so, they strengthen Trumpism. […]

In the context of Trump’s Big Lie, smaller lies from more apparently reasonable actors matter. They help legitimize Trumpist lies about massive election fraud. They help lay the groundwork for another Big Lie this November.

… [N]ormie Republicans shouldn’t be let off the hook. The normie Republicans are not upholding democratic norms in the face of Trump. Instead, they’re normalizing Trumpist lies and demagoguery. And so they’ve chosen to be part of the problem, not part of the solution.

And here is Williamson yesterday, saying how I really feel (emphasis mine):

One of the dumbest complaints I hear 1,838 times a day goes roughly like this: “You say Trump is a would-be tyrant, a moron, a monster of moral depravity—which means that you’re saying that the people who support him, half the country, are idiots and moral miscreants and fools.” 

Yes, that’s right. That’s exactly what I am saying. 

I don’t know if the difference here has anything to do with “parting ways.” It may be a subtle difference at times, but I try really, really hard (with notable and frequent failures) to stick with Bill Kristol’s somewhat softer approach. (In this case, at least; I don’t read much from Kristol, so I don’t know how representative this is. I read Williamson enough to know that it is very representative.)

Like I said above, I enjoy this. And I laughed out loud in the middle of a breakroom filled with people when I read it. When you see craziness, it really helps to just call it craziness.

But I’m also torn.

Williamson provides both the temptation to give in to the harsher condemnation…

My case is that these people should be ashamed of themselves, that a self-respecting society wouldn’t allow such a specimen as Lindsey Graham to vote, much less to serve in the Senate. I understand that hurts some feelings out there in the dank, wooly wilds of the “real America.”

So what?

And also a decent reason to refrain from it…

There is a great paradox at the heart of American life: Americans are, in many capacities, amazing people. … Visit an American community in crisis, and you’ll see remarkable neighborliness, cooperation, and good citizenship. Philosophy, religion, medicine, military affairs, science, music—Americans excel in an astonishing number of fields.  The American scientist, the American artist, the American businessman—impressive figures, all.

The American voter? A howling moonbat. I’d lend Ozzy Osbourne my truck on a Saturday night before I trusted one of those lunatics with any measure of real power beyond what is absolutely necessary.

Williamson’s point is to argue that we have a citizenship problem more than we have a leadership problem. (Echoing his colleague Nick Catoggio’s infinitely repeated point: “We don’t have a Trump problem; we have a Trump voter problem.”) And I don’t for a second deny my desire to simply nod and agree. But he also does a pretty good job convincing me of the opposite of his point. Namely, that we do in fact have, more than anything else, a leadership problem. Williamson does, after all, end his piece with an example not from Wendell Berry or even Virgil but from Cato — you know, the prominent Roman statesman and leader.

On the whole, and as usual, I can’t deny much of what Williamson says. But there is — I think, I wonder — a case to be made, and in fact is being made by Williamson (pace Williamson), that humans, not just Americans, have always been “politically stupid cretins and moonbats.” (And this can be as much a grand comedy as a grand tragedy. Just think of philosophizing cavemen and revolutionaries in slippers.)

If so, should this make us despise our neighbors and ourselves more? Or should we be particularly pissed at the “public servants” who aspired to leadership who have proved even more cretinous and selfish and opportunistic and vile than any of us or our neighbors — even the ones who stupidly support those “public servants?”

In other words, is our citizenship problem really much different than it has ever been?

Damned if I know.

---

But speaking of parting ways. It’s funny that Williamson mentions Obama’s “You didn’t build that” speech, since that is exactly what I had in mind last week with the kinds of absurdity that drove me toward the door. Right after Obama said it, I remember spending a baffling three hours on the way to Boston listening to a van full of self-professing Christians condemn the “Marxist, communist, community organizer (who probably wasn’t even born here — wink, wink, giggle, nod)” for reminding the country that most of us do in fact drive on roads and bridges that we didn’t build ourselves. That phrase got a lot of mileage in the Republican Party, and with every single Christian I knew. I have never understood why it got even an inch, especially with the proud spiritual descendants of a people who were given “a land on which you had not labored, and towns that you had not built, and you live in them; you eat the fruit of vineyards and oliveyards that you did not plant.” To Williamson’s point, these are often very good people, and often very thoughtful people, but you’re up against some cosmic principalities and powers if you expect them to extend that thoughtfulness to politics.

And also to Williamson’s own point, Williamson himself, I think, wants to have his cake here and eat it too. He tells us that we should all be grateful for the Republic that we were lucky enough to born into because we didn’t build it — and he’s right, we should, because we didn’t. But for some reason if a Democrat dares to remind the cretonous wombats driving south over the Piscataqua River Bridge “By the way, you didn’t build this” — well, that’s clearly just “collectivist” nonsense and we don’t need to stand for it.

Whether it’s bridges or “the republic,” it is good to be reminded of the things we enjoy which we did not build. The fact that we so irrationally and stubbornly reject this when the Other Team says it is part of The Problem. And the amount of dopamine that gets released doing exactly that is largely why I left. Or in this case, why I kindly part ways.

Thomas Nagel (via Jesse Singal):

Whether we succeed or fail in what we try to do nearly always depends to some extent on factors beyond our control. This is true of murder, altruism, revolution, the sacrifice of certain interests for the sake of others — almost any morally important act. What has been done, and what is morally judged, is partly determined by external factors. However jewel-like the good will may be in its own right, there is a morally significant difference between rescuing someone from a burning building and dropping him from a twelfth-story window while trying to rescue him. Similarly, there is a morally significant difference between reckless driving and manslaughter. But whether a reckless driver hits a pedestrian depends on the presence of the pedestrian at the point where he recklessly passes a red light. What we do is also limited by the opportunities and choices with which we are faced, and these are largely determined by factors beyond our control. Someone who was an officer in a concentration camp might have led a quiet and harmless life if the Nazis had never come to power in Germany. And someone who led a quiet and harmless life in Argentina might have become an officer in a concentration camp if he had not left Germany for business reasons in 1930. 

W. G. Sebald:

The rain clouds had dispersed when, after dinner, I took my first walk around the streets and lanes of the town [Southwold]. Darkness was falling, and only the lighthouse with its shining glass cabin still caught the last luminous rays that came in from the western horizon. Footsore and weary as I was after my long walk from Lowestoft, I sat down on a bench on the green called Gunhill and looked out on the tranquil sea, from the depths of which the shadows were now rising. Everyone who had been out for an evening stroll was gone. I felt as if I were in a deserted theatre, and I should not have been surprised if a curtain had suddenly risen before me and on the proscenium I had beheld, say, the 28th of May 1672 — that memorable day when the Dutch fleet appeared offshore from out of the drifting mists, with the bright morning light behind it, and opened fire on the English ships in Sole Bay. In all likelihood the people of Southwold hurried out of the town as soon as the first cannonades were fired to watch the rare spectacle from the beach. Shading their eyes with their hands against the dazzling sun, they would have watched the ships moving hither and thither, apparently at random, their sails billowing in a light northeast wind and then, as they manoeuvred ponderously, flapping once again. They would not have been able to make out human figures at that distance, not even the gentlemen of the Dutch and English admiralties on the bridges. As the battle continued, the powder magazines exploded, and some of the tarred hulls burned down to the waterline; the scene would have been shrouded in an acrid, yellowish-black smoke creeping across the entire bay and masking the combat from view. While most of the accounts of the battles fought on the so-called fields of honour have from time immemorial been unreliable, the pictorial representations of great naval engagements are without exception figments of the imagination. Even celebrated painters such as Storck, van der Velde or de Loutherbourg, some of whose versions of the Battle of Sole Bay I studied closely in the Maritime Museum in Greenwich, fail to convey any true impression of how it must have been to be on board one of these ships, already overloaded with equipment and men, when burning masts and sails began to fall or cannonballs smashed into the appallingly overcrowded decks. On the Royal James alone, which was set aflame by a fireship, nearly half the thousand-strong crew perished. No details of the end of the three-master have come down to us. There were eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen the commander of the English feet, the Earl of Sandwich, who weighed almost twenty-four stone, gesticulating on the afterdeck as the flames encircled him. All we know for certain is that his bloated body was washed up on the beach near Harwich a few weeks later. The seams of his uniform had burst asunder, the buttonholes were torn open, yet the Order of the Garter still gleamed in undiminished splendour. At that date there can have been only a few cities on earth that numbered as many souls as were annihilated in sea-battles of this kind. The agony that was endured and the enormity of the havoc wrought defeat our powers of comprehension, just as we cannot conceive the vastness of the effort that must have been required — from felling and preparing the timber, mining and smelting the ore, and forging the iron, to weaving and sewing the sailcloth — to build and equip vessels that were almost all predestined for destruction. For a brief time only these curious creatures sailed the seas, moved by the winds that circle the earth, bearing names such as Stavoren, Resolution, Victory, Groot Hollandia and Olyfan, and then they were gone. It has never been determined, which of the two parties in the naval battle fought off Southwold to extort trading advantages emerged victorious. It is certain, however, that the decline of the Netherlands began here, with a shift in the balance of power so small that it was out of proportion to the human and material resources expended in the battle; while on the other hand the English government, almost bankrupt, diplomatically isolated, and humiliated by the Dutch raid on Chatham, was now able, despite a complete absence of strategic thinking and a naval administration on the verge of disintegration, and thanks only to the vagaries of the wind and the waves that day, to commence the sovereignty at sea that was to be unbroken for so long. — As I sat there that evening in Southwold overlooking the German Ocean, I sensed quite clearly the earth’s slow turning into the dark. The huntsmen are up in America, writes Thomas Browne in The Garden of Cyrus, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. The shadow of night is drawn like a black veil across the earth, and since almost all creatures, from one meridian to the next, lie down after the sun has set, so, he continues, one might, in following the setting sun, see on our globe nothing but prone bodies, row upon row, as if levelled by the scythe of Saturn — an endless graveyard for a humanity struck by falling sickness.

As a Christian, I will never buy the idea of Trump as God’s appointed man to right the American ship. (Most people I know don’t buy this either, or have thus far resisted it, publicly anyway.) Nor will I buy into the need to make less obtuse but no less dishonest excuses in that direction. (Most people I know do this a lot.) But for all I know, God could be using Trump to show us all just how fuckin’ stupid we are.

You guys thought you were rational, civilized, above the fray? Tee hee. Hold mine beer.

We’ll know have a better idea soon enough, I suppose.

Nick Catoggio:

The Times is biased. But there’s a difference between bias and propaganda.

Bias is having a rooting interest in a dispute. Propaganda is allowing your rooting interest to define your understanding of reality.

If Trump wins, the Times will overflow with thoughtful analysis about how he did it—turning out low-propensity voters, winning over union members, mobilizing young men, making inroads with working-class blacks and Latinos. There’ll be endless doomsaying about the outcome in the paper’s opinion section and many ominous (and justified) “news” pieces wondering how dark the next four years might get, but the reality of what happened won’t be challenged.

If Harris wins, right-wing media will overflow with conspiracy theories about how she did it—ballot stuffing, vote-machine tinkering, turning out illegal immigrants by the millions to vote fraudulently and, somehow, undetectably. The daytime hosts at Fox will engage seriously with the exit polls, as will legacy conservative publications like National Review. But across the broader industry, denying the reality of what happened will be treated as a supreme litmus test of tribal loyalty.

Most mainstream media is biased; most right-wing media is propaganda.

The Hinternet Editorial Board v. Justin Smith-Ruiu thing is quite interesting; it gets to the heart of what, in Normal Times, would be an important internal disagreement among conservatives. Now it feels more like a disagreement with nothing to be internal to except the remnant kerfuffle that makes up whatever conservatism still is. I mentioned to the person who shared it that my dad and I hashed out a more-or-less identical conversation while we were stacking firewood last night. I also mentioned that “In this tragicomedy, I play the part of the editorial board and my dad plays the part of JSR.” That is, I (the self-described 95% pacifist) am the one defending “American hegemony” and my dad, along with every other conservative Christian I know, is sounding more and more isolationist with each passing YouTube feed day.

For what it’s worth — and I really don’t know what it’s worth — the argument I find myself at least tacitly on the side of is not new, but it has changed hands. So part of what makes this all so tricky to navigate is not necessarily the argument itself but who I’m having it with and why.

In my experience, I have these political conversations almost entirely with Christians who have been longtime “conservative” Republicans, most of whom I have known for almost 40 years. They know perfectly well (as we all do) to say that their Christianity comes first. And, in their defense, I think that that fundamentally holds in their day-to-day interactions, and that it would continue to hold on pain of death. But for some reason when they are talking politics or walking into the voting booth, no line from Jesus is particularly effective. Whether on the Democrats, the border, or foreign policy, the political habitat to which they belong clearly has the first word. But I’m not writing this at the moment to talk about Jesus and politics per se but more generally about the truth. What makes conversion in recent years so exasperating is the lack of memory that everyone seems to be suffering from. Memory, that is, of their own not-so-distantly past selves. 

To wit, there is one person whom I can invoke to some sobering effect from time to time. (Again, I’m sorry, but it’s not Jesus.) The argument made by the editorial board above was given, less apologetically for American hubris but almost verbatim, by Charles Krauthammer in his 2009 “Decline Is a Choice” speech. (Right on down to the “you buy the health care, we’ll buy the bullets” bit.) And in the kind of average-Joe conversation I’m talking about, that speech will get you somewhere.

Mention Jesus’ name and we’ll dance all night with “yeah buts” and drag ourselves down endless rabbit holes explaining “the biblical context that contextualizes the difference from our context and what he really meant and what was I saying?”

Mention Krauthammer, however, and we’ll reminisce.

(I’m not simply criticizing here. Krauthammer is second only to Christopher Hitchens in recently deceased journalists I very selfishly wish we could still hear from.)

I suspect one of the reasons that Krauthammer seems, at least momentarily, to break through in these conversations is that he reminds “conservatives” of the (political) selves they seem to have very quickly forgotten: the tear-down-this-wall Reaganites who were proud of their country and its presence in the world. I’m sure that it is also something of an irksome wake-up to be shown that their present (i.e. latest) policy/American-historical positions align not with Krauthammer but with then-president Obama, a man they despised, and continue to despise, to no end. (Trump may have lit the fuse, but it was the absurdly irrational hatred of Obama that prepared me for my rocket launch out of the Republican Party.)

It’s worth noting here that I have no problem with criticisms of America or criticisms of its military actions in the world. (Au contraire!) What I am frustrated by is a group of people claiming to have the capital-T Truth of the world guiding their hearts and minds but who have recently rediscovered Eisenhower’s “military industrial complex” speech not through Stanley Hauerwas or George Hunsinger but through RFK Jr. and Tim Pool. Call me crazy — and I do feel crazy — but the truth, if it can even be present here at all, feels a little less than safe in a group of people whose politics is by all appearances more enlightened by Jordan Peterson and Russel Brand than by Jesus and St. Paul.

And all this is to say nothing about the immigrant-slandering hatred that seems to be such ready, low-hanging fruit for the New Isolationists and self-appointed (oh yes, the ironic shoe fits) Border Czars.

In any case, while I am aware that my vote for Harris could be framed as a “Flight 93,” do-or-die approach to the upcoming election, I am disinclined to appeal to too much doom-predicting, simply because I have no secret knowledge about what will happen if either candidate is elected. (The utter doom of Republican integrity, though… that’s straight-up prophecy, continuously fulfilled.)

I phrase my choice more like this: I would rather have my political (i.e. policy) opponents in charge than have my own group maintain political power by dishonest and harsh means. In a way, it’s simply a political party version of what Simone Weil said about her country: I suffer more from the humiliations and lies inflicted by those on my own side — be they Christians or conservatives — than from those inflicted by anyone else. I prefer giving power to someone who I believe loves her country and, however imperfectly and misguidedly (or sometimes stupidly), wants the best for it and for the world over embarrassingly clinging to it ourselves through a lifelong con artist who suddenly “shares our values and concerns” and whose presence requires the maintenance of, and acquiescence to, historic levels of propaganda and bullshit. 

And, in this case at least, I would rather state it in these terms than to take the heavenly high road of a protest vote.

(For the record, I do not believe in a “wasted vote” and absolutely support the very legitimate third party or protest vote. I am, however, skeptical of the idea that George Will & Co. can wash their moral hands of the binary choice as easily as a lone farmer or logger in Maine might. But that’s an incomplete thought and another subject.)

As for the argument itself, I belive that national borders, while not unimportant, are ultimately artificial, temporary, blurry lines in a world shared by all. Far from being an excuse for bullshit revanchism or irredentism, this means that, just as no man is an island, no nation lives in isolation. And as such, I believe that America’s presence on the world stage, while horrifyingly imperfect, is still ultimately that of, to use Krauthammer’s phrase, the most benign hegemon the world has ever known. (If you follow the previous link, I hope you’ll see that I am extremely sensitive to the fact that “benign” by itself is hardly a good word here. That qualifying “most” is doing a lot of work.)

That said, I deeply admire Stanley Hauerwas and George Hunsinger, both of whose work has affected me greatly. (Hauerwas is a remarkably consistent Christian pacifist. I don’t recall if Hunsinger describes himself as a pacifist, but his criticizing of American foreign policy is also consistent and very much predates the current trendiness to do so. And it predates it because it is a Christian criticism, not an antagonistic fad.) I have no desire to make excuses for the American nation. I hate guns, I hate bombs, and I hate violence of any kind — especially our own violence. Something you’ll find if you follow that Simone Weil link above is a quote from Vaclav Havel alongside it, which offers what I think is an indispensable ingredient to national self-confidence and which I find not only missing but disturbingly criticized in Krauthammer’s speech. Namely, the public shame and sorrow for the suffering we have caused, the regular admittance of which is not antithetical to self-confidence but is in fact its characteristic sine qua non.

Another word for it is honesty. If people want to embrace an isolationist policy, that’s fine. As Krauthammer points out, there is plenty of it in U.S. history to fall back to. But I’m not convinced that that’s actually what’s happening. As Jonah Goldberg recently pointed out, “At a certain level of abstraction, there’s a lot to defend in the [non-interventionist position]. The problem … is that the facts supplied by the most passionate and ardent proponents of that position are lies, and falsehoods, and distortions, or just based on ignorance. And if you had a really good case to make along those lines, you would’t need to make stuff up. And yet, when you look at the things that people say about Ukraine, when you look at the things they say about NATO, before you get into the whether or not they come from a legitimate position, you have to start [by] asking the question ‘Are they true?’”

I have lost all confidence in most conservatives’ ability to ask let alone answer that question.

One of the simplest ways to describe the conservative mentality is (as I think David Brooks put it) that it believes in “making our mistakes slowly.” It believes that bad memory and big moves can cause a lot of damage, especially when combined. And I have sensed deep and terrifying levels of this combination in The Group Formerly Known as Reaganite Conservatives for some time. Any group this belligerently incapable of recognizing the truth needs as little power as possible in this relatively benign hegemon of a country.

While we attempt to stiff-arm the bullshitters and the propagandists — and the millions who freely buy and sell from them — maybe we can find a way to less violently and unapologetically … to more graciously and sorrowfully preside over our messed up beautiful world.

Or, to extend another Krauthammer phrase, one which has also been quite effective in the last 8 years of conversation: It’s a tough choice, and of course I could be wrong, but I am trying not to make others — other people and other countries — pay a potentially heavy price just so an increasingly nefarious looking bunch of propagandists, supported by an army of amnesiacs, can enjoy the catharsis of kicking over a table.

Josef Pieper:

The figure of youth is the eternal symbol of hope, just as it is the symbol of magnanimity.

Natural hope blossoms with the strength of youth and withers when youth withers. “Youth is a cause of hope. For youth, the future is long and the past is short.” On the other hand, it is above all when life grows short that hope grows weary; the “not yet” is turned into the has-been, and old age turns, not to the “not yet”, but to memories of what is “no more”.

For supernatural hope, the opposite is true: not only is it not bound to natural youth; it is actually rooted in a much more substantial youthfulness. It bestows on mankind a “not yet” that is entirely superior to and distinct from the failing strength of man’s natural hope. Hence it gives man such a “long” future that the past seems “short” however long and rich his life. The theological virtue of hope is the power to wait patiently for a “not yet” that is the more immeasurably distant from us the more closely we approach it.

The supernatural vitality of hope overflows, moreover, and sheds its light also upon the rejuvenated powers of natural hope. The lives of countless saints attest to this truly astonishing fact. It seems surprising, however, how seldom the enchanting youthfulness of our great saints is noticed; especially of those saints who were active in the world as builders and founders. There is hardly anything comparable to just this youthfulness of the saint that testifies so challengingly to the fact that is surely most relevant for contemporary man: that, in the most literal sense of these words, nothing more eminently preserves and founds “eternal youth” than the theological virtue of hope. It alone can bestow on man the certain possession of that aspiration that is at once relaxed and disciplined, that adaptability and readiness, that strong-hearted freshness, that resilient joy, that steady preseverance in trust that so distinguish the young and make them lovable.

We must not regard this as a fatal concession to the Zeitgeist. As Saint Augustine so aptly says: “God is younger than all else.”

William T. Cavanaugh, on the “freedom” of the free market:

The point is this: the absence of external force is not sufficient to determine the freedom of any particular exchange. In order to judge whether or not an exchange is free, one must know whether or not the will is moved toward a good end. This requires some kind of substantive – not merely formal — account of the true end, or telos, of the human person. Where there are no objectively desirable ends, and the individual is told to choose his or her own ends, then choice itself becomes the only thing that is inherently good. When there is a recession, we are told to buy things to get the economy moving; what we buy makes no difference. All desires, good and bad, melt into the one overriding imperative to consume, and we all stand under the one sacred canopy of consumption for its own sake.