Philip Gibbs:

These studies of mine, of what happened on both sides of the shifting lines in the Somme, must be as horrible to read as they were to write. But they are less than the actual truth, for no pen will ever in one book, or in hundreds, give the full record of the individual agony, the broken heart-springs, the soul-shock as well as the shell-shock, of that frightful struggle in which, on one side and the other, two million men were engulfed. Modern civilization was wrecked on those fire-blasted fields, though they led to what we called “Victory.” More died there than the flower of our youth and German manhood. The Old Order of the world died there, because many men who came alive out of that conflict were changed, and vowed not to tolerate a system of thought which had led up to such a monstrous massacre of human beings who prayed to the same God, loved the same joys of life, and had no hatred of one another except as it had been lighted and inflamed by their governors, their philosophers, and their newspapers. The German soldier cursed the militarism which had plunged him into that horror. The British soldier cursed the German as the direct cause of all his trouble, but looked back on his side of the lines and saw an evil there which was also his enemy—the evil of a secret diplomacy which juggled with the lives of humble men so that war might be sprung upon them without their knowledge or consent, and the evil of rulers who hated German militarism not because of its wickedness, but because of its strength in rivalry and the evil of a folly in the minds of men which had taught them to regard war as a glorious adventure, and patriotism as the right to dominate other peoples, and liberty as a catch—word of politicians in search of power. After the Somme battles there were many other battles as bloody and terrible, but they only confirmed greater numbers of men in the faith that the old world had been wrong in its “make-up” and wrong in its religion of life. Lip service to Christian ethics was not good enough as an argument for this. Either the heart of the world must be changed by a real obedience to the gospel of Christ or Christianity must be abandoned for a new creed which would give better results between men and nations. There could be no reconciling of bayonet-drill and high explosives with the words “Love one another.” Or if bayonet-drill and high-explosive force were to be the rule of life in preparation for another struggle such as this, then at least let men put hypocrisy away and return to the primitive law of the survival of the fittest in a jungle world subservient to the king of beasts. The devotion of military chaplains to the wounded, their valor, their decorations for gallantry under fire, their human comradeship and spiritual sincerity, would not bridge the gulf in the minds of many soldiers between a gospel of love and this argument by bayonet and bomb, gas-shell and high velocity, blunderbuss, club, and trench-shovel. Some time or other, when German militarism acknowledged defeat by the break of its machine or by the revolt of its people—not until then—there must be a new order of things, which would prevent such another massacre in the fair fields of life, and that could come only by a faith in the hearts of many peoples breaking down old barriers of hatred and reaching out to one another in a fellowship of common sense based on common interests, and inspired by an ideal higher than this beast-like rivalry of nations. So thinking men thought and talked. So said the soldier—poets who wrote from the trenches. So said many onlookers. The simple soldier did not talk like that unless he were a Frenchman. Our men only began to talk like that after the war—as many of them are now talking—and the revolt of the spirit, vague but passionate, against the evil that had produced this devil’s trap of war, and the German challenge, was subconscious as they sat in their dugouts and crowded in their ditches in the battles of the Somme.

Bret Stephens:

The vice president’s speech last week at the Munich Security Conference — in which the man who refuses to say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election lectured his audience about Europe’s retreat from democratic values — combined with his meeting with the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party, has caused a scandal because it is a scandal, a monument of arrogance based on a foundation of hypocrisy. […]

…the important point is this: Much like a certain British prime minister long ago, an American vice president went to Munich to carry on about his idealism while breaking bread with those who would obliterate democratic ideals. A disgrace.

Francis Fukuyama:

The United States under Donald Trump is not retreating into isolationism. It is actively joining the authoritarian camp, supporting right-wing authoritarians around the world from Vladimir Putin to Viktor Orbán to Nayib Bukele to Narendra Modi.… How can we tell Russia and China not to continue their conquests when we are busy trying to absorb Panama and Greenland? These foreign policy moves are completely consistent with the Trump administration’s assault on the rule of law domestically, its strengthening of executive power and its weakening of checks and balances at every point.

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.