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23-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
A Blinding ‘Realism'
From the G-File on The Dispatch Dear Reader (especially those of you who know who the real monster is), Longtime readers know that I don't have a lot of use for 'realism' as widely practiced in foreign policy debates. The best working definition of a realist, I often say, is an ideologue who lost an argument. What I mean by that is so-called realists tend to claim that their political opponents—particularly those in power—are letting their ideological commitments blind them to what really needs to be done. 'Those guys are ideologues, I'm just a realist' is to foreign policy what 'Those guys are ideologues, I'm just a pragmatist' is to domestic policy. One of my favorite illustrations of this comes from Pat Buchanan. Perhaps more than any other mainstream figure, Pat pushed the idea that America was too close to Israel. Some of his arguments were standard fair realpolitik and rehashed 'beware entangling alliances' boilerplate. Israel is tiny, the Arab world is huge, why side with a hated minority in a region we relied on for oil? But Pat would press the argument further, suggesting—or asserting—that Jews in America were responsible for our unwise alliance with Israel because they're a 'fifth column' in America with dual loyalties. Here are a few of many, many examples, as pointed out by the Anti-Defamation League: 'There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in The Middle East—the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.' (The McLaughlin Group, Aug 26, 1990) 'Capitol Hill is Israeli occupied territory.' (The McLaughlin Group, June 15, 1990) 'I know the power of the Israeli lobby and the other lobbies, but we need a foreign policy that puts our own country first.' (Meet the Press, September 12, 1999) 'Whose War? The Loudest Clique Behind the President's Policy' (The American Conservative, March 24, 2003) Anyway, you get the point. But in 1991, Buchanan urged the U.S. government to send the 6th Fleet to protect Croatia from Serbian aggression because, as David Frum wrote for National Review: 'Croatia is not some faraway desert emirate,' he noted. 'It is a 'piece of the continent, a part of the main,' a Western republic that belonged to the Habsburg empire and was for centuries the first line of defense of Christian Europe. For their ceaseless resistance to the Ottoman Turks, Croatia was proclaimed by Pope Leo X to be the 'Antemurale Christianitatis,' the bulwark of Christianity.' Now, I'm okay with a policy of protecting Croatia, but spare me the Jew scapegoating about letting religious and ethnic loyalties trump realism. As John Lukacs once put it, describing Buchanan's virulent hatred for Winston Churchill but tolerance for Hitler, 'Buchanan is as much of an internationalist as he is an isolationist—dependent on his choice of who the enemy is.' If you want a pithier and more timely illustration of the point, consider Donald Trump's defense of white South Africans. Trump and his folks have invested a ton of time and energy into the idea that we should not be offering asylum to persecuted peoples, including Afghan translators who worked with American troops. Whatever you think of that idea, or how the administration has acted on it, it's an intellectually defensible position. But it goes out the window when it comes to white farmers in South Africa. I'm fine with offering asylum to qualified white South Africans, but it's telling that Afrikaners are the exception to the realist rule the way Croatians were for Buchanan. There is no national security argument for coming to their rescue. It just feels right to Trump. And that gets me to my point. Not to sound too much like German political theorist Carl Schmitt, but the friend-enemy distinction is unavoidable in foreign policy. The trick is to have a worldview, an ideological construct or frame of reference, about how you distinguish friend from enemy. A second order question is what you're willing to do—or not do—in the name of friendship or, nemesis. Enmity? That is almost entirely a prudential question. In other words, idealism is unavoidable about ends, but realism about means is essential. Isolationism is a form of idealism—believing in a shining city on a hill unmuddied by the affairs of the world. Liberal internationalism is a form of idealism. Even classical realism is a kind of idealism, insofar as it posits a theory of how the world works and, as a result, how the state should operate within that reality. But every form of realism still conceives of friends and enemies. Realists want allies. They may be more cynical about how deep or enduring any given alliance will be in the unsupervised prison yard that is the global arena, but they still see alliances as useful tools of statecraft. As the 19th century British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston famously said, 'We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual.' But back to that prudential question. I have few major objections to the realist's description of how the world works. Countries act on their interests, they say, and I nod along. Where I think realists go wrong is in their quasi-Marxist definition of national interests as narrow economic, geo-strategic, essentially materialist, considerations. Political leaders—democratic and authoritarian alike—make decisions based on things other than economic or pure national security considerations all the time. Notions of national honor, cultural ties, shared values, religious imperatives, and national 'glory' move countries to action all the time. Starting in earnest in the 19th century, Russia convinced itself that it was the 'Protector of the Slavs' everywhere. I think this is a stupid belief. But it is, and has been, sincerely held by Russians for a long time. I don't think it's been in their interest, if we define interest in realist terms, but that's the point. The Russians don't define their interest in purely realist terms. If they did, they might not be slaughtering so many Ukrainians right now. Iran is run by a bunch of theocratic nutters. Their definition of national interest stems from their messianic mess of an ideology. If the regime were toppled tomorrow—fingers crossed!—the new regime would have a different definition of national interest. I could do the same thing with China, North Korea, Cuba, et al. The assumption that rulers act only on fundamental national interest is question-begging on stilts. And the idea that the conception of national interest doesn't change with a new regime is as ideological and unrealistic as any other school of foreign policy. Which gets us back to the friend-enemy distinction. The question isn't whether America should have friends, but what kind of friends we should have. President Trump doesn't have a lot of use for our traditional friends or our traditional criteria for deciding who our friends are. But that doesn't mean he doesn't want friends. He obviously wants to be Vladimir Putin's friend, which is why he treats him with such deference while treating Volodymyr Zelensky with such contempt. He clearly likes being friends with the president of El Salvador. He loves to show people the love letters he got from Kim Jong Un. And, of course, he really digs his new besties in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. I think some of this can be explained by the fact that he likes to be friends with tough guys because that's how he likes to be seen. But some of it can also be explained by the fact he loves to make deals with the sorts of people who don't have to go to voters or legislatures for approval. He likes dealing with 'deciders' who can close a deal with a handshake. That's harder to do with democratic leaders. In other words, he likes strong men aesthetically but he also likes the way strong men can get things done. This is partly why he's so hellbent on convincing people he should be granted war powers, because in our system it's only through the invocation of war or some other crisis that an American president can behave like a strong man. Until recently, Americans in both parties broadly defined our national interest as being bound-up with being the 'leader of the free world.' There's a lot of room within that consensus for profound disagreements, but they were disagreements within that broad framework. I think that framework is correct. Full stop. I can give you another 500 or 5,000 words for why I think this is so—on realist terms. As an economic matter, it's better to be friends with rich countries than poor ones. It's better to have allies that share our values, because that makes collective action in our interest easier. But I don't want to make the realist case, because I think the moral case is more compelling. We should be on the side of freedom, because we believe freedom is morally superior. Even the isolationist hero John Quincy Adams agreed with that. Isolationists love to quote his line about how America 'goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.' They're less fond of sentences that came before and after it: Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. In other words, JQA would be, at least rhetorically, on the side of Ukraine, Tibet, and Taiwan. Not to live down to Pat's expectations, but I think the Trump administration's view is bad news for Israel. I'll spare you all of the punditry about Steve Witkoff's toadying to Qatar (and Putin), the administration's leaks undermining Israel, or the fact Trump skipped visiting Israel on his recent trip to the Middle East. The bigger point is that if the new definition of the national interest is one that accepts a policy of blindness or contempt for democracies that share our values, that's bad news for Israel (and Taiwan) in the long run. A world in which America values friends who can make handshake deals, regardless of how much blood they have on their hands; a world in which trade between free economies is deemed to be theft; a world in which mutual defense over shared values is for suckers; a world in which nations can buy good will with fawning lightshows and free luxury jets: This is not a good world for Israel. But more importantly, it's not a good world for America. Canine update: So the Fair Jessica and Lil Lucy are on a Gavora family adventure in Spain. That means I am home alone with the quadrupeds. That, in turn, means I sleep with a lot of animals every night. It's a tense situation with strict protocols about turf that often leave me perpetually on the cusp of falling out of bed. Also, the amount of psychological space they take up has expanded enormously, because they are constantly following me around, worried that I might grab some luggage and abandon them as well. They're also being pretty weird. Yesterday, I found Pippa in the mud room looking extremely guilty. But I have no idea why. Whatever it was, it didn't get in the way of the waggling. And of course, they still have Kirsten for the midday walks, where Zoë really has come to love her little troupe of ankle-biters. And, yes, the treats still flow. I do need to find out if Chester is okay, because he hasn't been by for a while. But Fafoon would like you to get to the point. Owner's Name: Trent Bohacz Why I'm a Dispatch Member: I enjoy reading things that challenge me, make me think, and help me learn. I'm a lifelong conservative, with a libertarian bent. I've changed a lot as I've grown, raised kids, and traveled, but my core beliefs about life and politics remain, which means I disagree with both parties immensely! Personal Details: I've voted in seven presidential elections. I've voted for the winner in three. Pet's Name: Remi (short for Remington) Pet's Breed: Brittany Spaniel Pet's Age: 5 Gotcha Story: It was the beginning of Covid, spring of 2020, and we knew our 12-year-old German Shorthaired Pointer was getting long in the tooth, so we decided to get another puppy to avoid a gap when he eventually left us. With the kids home from school, it was the perfect time to train and housebreak a puppy. We made the drive from Chicago to near Louisville and brought her home on July 5 at only 8 weeks old. Pet's Likes: To hunt anything! She is a pointing bird dog by nature, but will chase any living thing in our suburban backyard. She has caught squirrels, rabbits, birds, and mice. It's really remarkable that she has the speed and agility to run these critters down. I guess that's her favorite thing … to run! Pet's Dislikes: Thunder. It's odd that I can shoot over her while we are pheasant hunting without a problem, but one rumble of thunder when we're in the house and she's on my lap! Pet's Proudest Moment: Pointing her first pheasant that I bagged. She's not a retriever, and a little prissy, so she wouldn't pick it up, but she stood over that bird like a queen looking down at her adoring subjects. Bad Pet: She's been accused of 'running away' on a few occasions, and the rest of my family is very anal about making sure the gate is closed on our backyard fence. But, when she's got out, as everyone else panics, I simply walk to the front door where she's sitting and waiting for me. ICYMI —Seashells by the seashore —Tsars at the bar —Remnant Love Line —Take me to my McDonald's trailer! —Dirty hippies —Keeping secrets —Learning our lesson —Junior ragers —Yard waste —The trains are Stalin —One big beautiful nap —The sharpest Googler in the East —Graduation over the rainbow —How was I supposed to know? —Speedy wienies —Hey, I know that guy!
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Deals and Duds, All the Way Down
From the G-File on The Dispatch Dear Reader (including those of you suffering from imposter syndrome), Greetings from 30,000 feet. I'm on my way to California. So we'll see how far we get—in this 'news'letter, not in the plane. I will be pretty ticked off if we don't get all the way to California, if you know what I mean. But I'm gonna keep this a bit breezy. On Thursday, former FBI Director James Comey posted a picture on Instagram with the caption: 'Cool shell formation on my beach walk.' The shells were arranged to spell out '8647.' This became an outrage on social media because, obviously, Comey was calling for Donald Trump (the 47th president) to be murdered. Murdered? Yes. Murdered. Donald Trump Jr. responded, 'Just James Comey casually calling for my dad to be murdered.' Department of Homeland Secretary Kristi Noem leaped into action, tweeting, 'Disgraced former FBI Director James Comey just called for the assassination of @POTUS Trump. DHS and Secret Service is investigating this threat and will respond appropriately.' Current FBI Director Kash Patel, no doubt poolside in Vegas, said he was monitoring the situation closely, but the Secret Service was taking the lead. Not to be out done, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard scrambled to deal with this emergency the way leaders in national security and intelligence have since the old OSS days: She ran to a camera to talk to Fox News' Jesse Watters and told him, 'The danger of this [Instagram photo of some shell-numbers] cannot be underestimated.' Watters got to the real crux of the issue quickly. 'Do you believe Comey should be in jail?' 'I do,' Gabbard replied. Lest you think I'm unfairly leaving out the full context of her answer, here's the run-on sentence fragment in all its glory: 'I do. Any other person with the position of influence that he has, people who take very seriously what a guy of his stature, his experience, and what the propaganda media has built him up to be—I'm very concerned for the president's life.' Any other person … what? I don't know. I gather she's saying people who otherwise would not be inclined to risk their lives in an attempt to assassinate the president of the United States would of course do so when a person of (checks notes) James Comey's stature and influence posts the number '8647' in shells. No undue disrespect to Comey, but come on. Stature is in the eye of the beholder, I guess. But influence? What influence? James Comey is disliked by a remarkably diverse and large share of the U.S. population. At least the share that remembers who he is—or was. Don't get me wrong. I don't think Comey should have posted that (and he did take the post down), but mostly because it was lame. However good he was as a lawyer or FBI director, he's not good at politics and should just stick to writing novels. I don't want to belabor this, because you're either embarrassed for the country by this unconstrained idiocy and asininity or you should probably be reading Gateway Pundit's coverage of this very serious assassination plot. I don't think Comey was calling for Trump's assassination. Nor do I think there's a person out there who would be motivated to assassinate the president by the numbers 8647, whether spelled in seashells, Cheetos, or the decapitated heads of Barbie dolls. But just for the record, even if the shells spelled out 'Trump should be fed face first to bears,' Comey would be in no legal jeopardy. I do love that the same crowd that bragged about restoring the First Amendment and vowed to end the era of weaponizing the justice system went straight to the claim that Comey's obvious incitement of violence demands that he be put behind bars. There's no rule saying you have to be this dumb. In what has been called by a number of people—some of whom I respect—the most important speech of Trump's second term, on Tuesday at an event in Saudi Arabia, the president lavished praise on his hosts and marveled at the economic progress they have made. Then he added: And it's crucial for the wider world to note this great transformation has not come from Western interventionalists [sic] or flying people in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs. No, the gleaming marvels of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation-builders, neocons or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities. Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves, the people that are right here, the people that have lived here all their lives developing your own sovereign countries, pursuing your own unique visions, and charting your own destinies in your own way. It's really incredible what you've done. This is wrong. Oh, I don't mean it's wrong for presidents to crap on the foreign policy of previous administrations (though thinking so used to be a thing). When Barack Obama gave his first foreign speech in Egypt and dunked on his predecessors, conservatives carped that it was unpresidential or something really quaint. And I agree with Trump that 'flying people in beautiful planes' lecturing Arabs on how to live had little to do with the affluence of the Gulf states. I don't even mean it was wrong for Trump to indulge some MAGA fan service by taking a swipe at 'neocons.' I just mean that, factually, he is wrong. Incorrect. The Gulf states exist because of the United States of America. No, we didn't create them, the British and French did more of the heavy lifting on that front. But if not for American assistance and 'interventionalism,' the hereditary monarchies and dynasties that pass for nation-states would have almost surely been toppled either by actual nationalists, socialists, national-socialists, or Islamic radicals of one stripe or another (as happened in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Egypt, et al). Or, they would have been conquered by some of those nationalist or Islamist countries in the neighborhood, or by the Soviet Union. We might as well start with President Franklin Roosevelt. World War II underscored the importance of oil. Beginning in 1940, Italy bombed Saudi and Bahraini oil facilities. The Saudis realized they needed protection, and Roosevelt realized protecting the oil supply from the Persian Gulf was in America's interest. So he issued an executive order declaring that 'the defense of Saudi Arabia is vital to the defense of the United States' and made Saudi Arabia eligible for Lend-Lease. In 1945, near the end of the war, FDR and Saudi King Ibn Saud met on the aircraft carrier USS Quincy and formalized the relationship between the countries (FDR declined to smoke or drink at dinner so as to not offend the king). America was granted permission to build military airfields and America offered protection of Saudi Arabia, its oil facilities, and, well, the regime. There were lots of highs and lows during the Cold War. For instance, I can say without fear of arousing accusations of undue exaggeration that Israel was a bone of contention. But FDR's basic idea—which we extended to the other Gulf states—of trading security for oil held fairly constant. Other factors came into play. Preventing the Soviets from setting up shop became another priority. President Jimmy Carter introduced the 'Carter Doctrine' in 1980, which was just an update of FDR's project: We would use military force to protect our interests in the Persian Gulf. This had less to do with protecting oil supply lines than putting the Soviets on notice, after their invasion of Afghanistan, that they shouldn't get any ideas about moving further West. In 1987 the Reagan administration reflagged Kuwaiti oil tankers—and naval escorts—to fend off Iranian attacks. And then of course there was the first Iraq war, when we sent hundreds of thousands of American and allied troops to the region to roll back Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and to protect Saudi Arabia. Whether Saddam Hussein intended to press on into Saudi Arabia is debated, but the Saudis definitely thought it was possible, which is one reason they allowed American troops on their soil. I could go on, with all of the arms shipments,intelligence sharing , naval bases, etc., but you get the point. I could also add, by the way that lots of this glorious city-building was done by foreign workers, foreign construction firms, foreign architects, etc. Heck, some financial districts even use English law for contracts and disputes because indigenous law and custom won't attract capital. But I don't want to be too ungracious about all of this self-sufficiency. These countries have lived—thrived—with the aid and protection of the United States. I have plenty of criticisms of this arrangement, but I also think it's been defensible for the most part (albeit punctuated with many indefensible moments). But who cares what I think? What's weird is that Trump—the 'restrainer,' 'non-interventionist,' enemy of forever wars and foreign entanglements—has pretty much promised to keep that arrangement going during his presidency. As Jim Geraghty beat me to pointing out, Trump said in Qatar: We are going to protect this country. And it's [a] very special place, with a special royal family. The head of the royal family is two heads of the royal family, really, if you think. Great. It's great people, and they're going to be protected by the United States of America. And: Our relationship now is very strong with Saudi Arabia. Nobody's coming, nobody's going to be bothering that relationship. Nobody would be able to break that relationship, because of my relationship with the Crown Prince and the family. So just to put a fine point on it: These countries did all this awesome stuff without our help, but now that Trump's on the scene we'll protect these little guys, because … why? I gather the answer to that question is we're doing 'deals.' I'm fine with deals. But I have some questions, both for Trump and his various fans: Why the double standard? Which double standard? you ask. Well, all the double standards. Let's start with the obvious: Why is our military alliance with Europe or our security guarantees for Japan, Australia, etc., proof that we're getting 'ripped off,' but our security guarantees for Saudi Arabia and Qatar (or at least for their royal families) are awesome? Why is a military alliance that has never compelled us to fight for Europe but that did compel Europe to fight for us (after 9/11) considered an entangling alliance we don't need, but an entangling alliance in the Middle East is suddenly such a good thing? I mean, I could have sworn J.D. Vance and that crowd wanted us to be less involved in the Middle East. I mean Vance says, 'It's not good for Europe to be the permanent security vassal of the United States.' Okay, but why is it good for the Saudis? Or us? Here's a question for the various ethno-nationalist types. You know, the ones who really like to lean into the fact that America is a white, Christian, or European nation with a distinct white, Christian, or European culture—particularly the dudes who loved Trump's first foray into banning Muslims and his newfound sympathies for refugees if they're white people from South Africa. Why are you okay with this? Seriously. What good is it having a nativist nationalist superhero as president if he can be bought with a plane and some ass-kissing? I'm sure you can come up with more questions along these lines. But let's try to bring this thing—again, not my plane—in for a landing. One answer to these and related questions is the same as it was for FDR: oil. The Gulf states sell oil, a lot of it. But they don't sell that much to us. You know who does? Canada—you know that Western, mostly Christian, mostly European, mostly English-speaking, entirely democratic, peaceful neighbor to the north? You know the one that is so much like us that the president wants to make it part of America? Right. That one. Trump treats that country like crap. He fawns on Arab Muslim despots—some with a long track record of funding terrorists—but heaps ridicule and scorn on our northern neighbors. (Note: I'm not trying to sound racist, anti-Arab, or anti-Islamic by harping on this stuff. I'm just trying to get the attention of those looking the other way.) Well, we buy 10 times more oil from Canada than from Saudi Arabia. Canada has been selling us more oil than the Saudis since 2004. Even better, it sells us oil at a discount because of our integrated infrastructure. As I first learned from Dominic Pino in National Review, if you took our oil imports out of the equation, we'd have a trade surplus with Canada. Then again, we had a trade surplus with the U.K. and Trump still thought they were playing us for suckers. It's kind of funny. Canada is one of our oldest and most reliable allies. It's literally a neighbor. The geopolitical and national security risks and costs of importing oil from Canada are as close to zero as possible. No need to worry about Iranians or Iranian proxies bombing the supply lines. The need to protect Canada hasn't pulled us into any 'forever wars.' Our petrodollars haven't funded any Canadian madrasas or provided slush funds for Canuck terrorists. And yet Trump says of Canada, 'We don't need their oil and gas.' Heck, he says over and over that we don't need anything from Canada—except all of Canada as a state. But when it comes to Saudi Arabia, everything is on the table because we're making deals, man. Which brings me to the new oil: Deals! Trump loves deals. Again, that's fine. He exaggerates the topline numbers and ridiculously takes press releases as firm commitments. But whatevs, man, he's making it rain Benjamins on America. It's the direct investment in America from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, etc., that justifies our anti-forever war president giving his personal assurance we'll protect our friends in Quagmire Land, right? Okay, except you know who invests far, far, far more in America than the Saudis and all their neighbors combined? Canada and Europe. And that's the sticky wicket. That investment is the product of what came before Trump. He likes deals he can take credit for. Deals that were made before he showed up have to be stupid because everyone in charge before him was stupid. And that's at least one of the real reasons he prefers undemocratic, authoritarian countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. He can make deals with a handshake and take all the credit. Deals between democracies take time, involve legislators and lawyers, and even voters. Who's got time for all of that noise? Not Donald Trump and not just when it comes to trade deals. Hey for those interested, Erica Schoder of the R Street Institute recently interviewed me at their big fancy summit thing. We covered a lot of territory in a short amount of time. They're good people. For starters, Fafoon and Paddington have finally moved out of my mom's house (where they were visited and fed daily) and into new accommodations they deem acceptable. Dru, my mom's beloved friend and majordomo, wanted to wait until her own (very old) cat passed away before bringing them to her house. They could not possibly be in better hands (though Sarah Isgur did lobby hard to be their caretaker). Fafoon is still Fafoon, and could be no other. Okay, now for the homefront: Zoe and Pippa are pissed. There was no hiding the packing of the luggage, and the atmosphere of moping this morning was intense. But they will be fine. We have a house-sitter and walker whom they love. Beyond that, the girls have not loved the rain, and today was the first turn toward Washington's equatorial summers, which bums out all of us. But most of the week they had nice times with their friends. But morning negotiations with Pippa can still be complicated. And Gracie is doing her own thing. Owner's Name: John Gabrielson Why I'm a Member: A friend from seminary recommended The Dispatch when I needed a replacement publication for National Review in my news pool as a counterpoint to The Atlantic. Understanding the different positions people hold, and why, well enough to pass the Turing test is vital to my vocation and avocation. Personal Details: I serve as pastor of a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and on public policy teams for my church and Ducks Unlimited. News and social media might not show it, but our congregations are mostly very purple, particularly where I live in central Minnesota, and conservation is an everyone issue. Pet's Name: Mousse Pet's Breed: Labrador Retriever Pet's Age: 4 Gotcha Story: My wife got edged in the last seconds of a bidding war for a pointing lab puppy at a Pheasants Forever online auction and got kinda salty about it. She birddogged the organizer for the breeder's contact info, called him the next day, and put down a deposit for the choice of males from the next litter. A few months later, we collected this guy. Pet's Likes: Cuddles, fetch, fruit that isn't citrus, people, most other dogs … but most of all he likes it when I dress or trim birds or deer, because he gets the hearts and livers and trimmed bits. Pet's Dislikes: The closest he comes to not liking something is when my wife or I stay up past what he considers bed time. He'll stand in the hall, huffing, then lay down and sigh; if we wait a really inappropriate time, he will then get up and whine or even bark, before going to bed alone. Pet's Proudest Moment: When he finally started water retrieving. I'd never met a lab that didn't take to water like an otter. I couldn't get him to do it, nor could a trainer I hired. In the end, it was my wife playing fetch with my dad's dog (Nell is the love of Mousse's life) in the lake at my grandma's home. He couldn't bear to be apart from smelly Nellie, so he took the plunge and now he loves it. Bad Pet: Mousse is a notorious and unrepentant food stealer. —Jonah's opus —Da Pope —Everyone say thank you, capitalism —Tinfoil haberdashery —Trump of Arabia —Name calling —Fallen media —Whole or snail? —Dark irony —Holy grail —Watch yourself —Reading the fine print —Prized possessions —Dude, where's my car? —Gone girl
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Stickin' It to The (Strong)Man
From the G-File on The Dispatch Dear Reader (especially those of you who don't take yourselves too seriously), I'm back from California. It was a great trip. Saw my daughter. Enjoyed the weather. And I got to stick it to The Man by smoking a cigar within 500,000 feet of a carbon-based lifeform. 'The Man' is an interesting phrase. I don't think many people use it unironically anymore—at least I haven't heard people say 'stick it to The Man' much. You can still find descriptive uses. A while back the Guardian ran a piece on the ''stick it to the man passion' pervading the Oscars. In 2023, Ms. magazine (which still exists!), ran an essay from a woman titled ''Stick It' To the Man!' in which the author boasted of her heroic act of defiance plastering pro-abortion stickers around Florida. I don't think this usage counts as unironic though. It's funny—if you have never heard the phrase, you'd think it might be a feminist rallying cry because of the pretty obvious patriarchal connotation. It almost begs for a Handmaid's Tale scene in which the vengeful ladies literally poke a trussed-up dude with a stick (in the porn movie adaptation, The Handmaid's Tail, that scene would be different). Anyway, while I'm sure feminists used 'Stick it to the Man' from time to time in the '60s or '70s, the whole idea of 'The Man' doesn't have much of a feminist pedigree. The Man apparently started as slang for the boss, particularly in the South and especially among blacks. By the 1960s it became the term of art for Jim Crow but also the white establishment and whatnot among black activists. But white dudes co-opted it to decry, well, other white dudes and by extension the whole capitalist system. The Man keeps 'us' down—the 'us' in question being radicals, free-thinkers, non-conformists, artists, and pretty much anyone with a gripe about 'the system.' As Peter Fonda says in The Wild Angels, 'We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by The Man.' John Lennon accused The Man of trying to kick him out of New York City. The singer in 'Proud Mary' equates 'The Man' with the stultifying oppression of having to work for a living, or something. The Yippies were determined to bring down that Man. And, as with nearly all radical concepts in America, they eventually become commodified and co-opted by—guess who?—The Man. Columbia Records launched an ad campaign in 1968 with the slogan 'But the man can't bust our music.' The print ads showed seven mostly white guys in a jail cell. 'The Establishment's against adventure,' read the ad copy. 'And the arousing experience that comes with today's music. So What? Let them slam doors. And keep it out of the concert halls.' Decades later, The Man is a joke in movies like Undercover Brother and School of Rock and 'news'letters like this one. Why am I talking about this? Honestly, I set out to write about an interesting lesson of the Canadian election (though Nick Catoggio selfishly beat me to some of the points I wanted to make). So while I was thinking about how to do it, I got carried away with that throwaway line about 'sticking it to The Man' (And don't walk past the wordplay. In the tobacco trade, cigars are routinely called 'sticks.') It's okay with me, though. When it comes to this 'news'letter, I get to spelunk in any lagomorphic cavern I want, because I am The Man here (and, alas, only here). William Faulkner (and others) may have advised writers to 'kill your darlings' but here they are a protected species. Besides, I sometimes like to challenge myself to make my strange self-indulgent digressions relevant to a larger, seemingly, unrelated point. (Question: Can you call the opening of a discussion a digression from the discussion if you haven't started the actual discussion yet? Discuss among yourselves.) So let's give it a whirl. This idea that The Man, the system, or the Powers That Be are keeping us down is as old as politics itself. After all, every empire oppressed some group to one extent or another. No doubt countless Celts, Jews, Greeks, et al. said something like 'Stick it to the Romans.' Plenty of people wanted to stick it to the Russians, English, Han Chinese, Mongols, Aztecs, Persians, Mali, Lizardmen, Thetans, etc. But in the modern era, by which I mean the last couple centuries, this idea that the 'establishment,' 'the system,' or some other euphemism for the ruling power structure, is keeping 'us' down and not letting 'us' be our authentic selves is closely associated with Romanticism. One of the funny things about the Romantic temper is that it tends to be fixated on metaphorical oppression more than the real thing. The Maccabees, the Jewish rabble rousers who rose up against Roman occupation in the second century, weren't Romantic rebels. They were just, you know, rebels. The Romantic obsession with oppression tends to increase and intensify as actual oppression declines. That's why the most spoiled and catered-to humans in Western civilization—elite college students—are constantly rebelling against abstractions, imagined oppressions, and other whirlwinds in the thorn tree. Romanticism manifests itself with resentment toward the system and modernity itself. According to the French poet Charles Baudelaire—who coined the term 'modernity'—'Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a mode of feeling.' Romanticism was born as a rebellion against the established order of, variously, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, capitalism, bourgeois culture, even reason itself. The Romantics celebrated personal authenticity, emotion, instincts, and heroic defiance of norms and rules. Conventional morality, grubby commerce, and private property were what later thinkers would call 'tools of oppression.' Indeed, this is one reason I'm so unimpressed by a lot of modern radical thinkers. The Foucaults, Derridas, Marcuses, and Saids were simply updating the Romantic critique of 'the system' and how it keeps 'us' or, really, 'me' down. Even Karl Marx, for all his bogus talk of 'science,' was an anti-scientific Romantic poet at heart. In the words of the 'ecosocialist' scholar Michael Lowy, 'Romantic anti-capitalism is the forgotten source of Marx.' Any movement based on feelings has to be solipsistic because every adherent starts with their own feelings. Marx summed it up well when he called for, 'The revolutionary daring which hurls at its adversaries the defiant words: 'I am nothing and I must be everything!'' But I'm jumping ahead. Before there was Marx, there was Jean Jacques Rousseau, the 'father of Romanticism.' More than anyone else, he laid the foundation for the modern version of the idea that the 'system' is rigged against not just the downtrodden, but the true authentic souls who are kept down by, well, The Man. One of Rousseau's most famous lines captures the idea. 'Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.' I have no problem with the idea that man is born free, allowing for poetic license. But for Rousseau and his imitators, the chains are any rules, customs, laws, or morals that place limitations on personal freedom. And they are all corrupt. Indeed, Rousseau turned Christianity on its head by rewriting the story of Adam and Eve: He believed we were perfect and perfectly happy in a state of nature and became corrupted only by leaving it (not that the leaving was a result of corruption and original sin). In many respects, this a profoundly Nietzschean sentiment, but Friedrich Nietzsche hated Rousseau even though he agreed with many of his critiques of modernity. Nietzsche detested Rousseau because he saw him (rightly) as a decadent moralist who preached the glories of 'equality,' and Nietzsche thought equality was garbage because it bred mediocrity (among other things). Rousseau was one of the first practitioners of the 'disparate impact' technique, arguing that inequality was prima facie proof of injustice. Nietzsche thought 'justice' was just another form of oppression. But I would argue that in many ways Nietzsche stood on Rousseau's shoulders. When you claim that a rules-based order is illegitimate if it results in some form of inequality, you're opening the door to Nietzschean (im)morality. Capitalism creates inequality. Some people will be more successful than other people, ideally because they deserve to be. But socialism and every other 'ism' creates inequality, too. Communist countries are shot through with political inequality—members of the party benefit from the system more than non-members do. Aristocracy and monarchy are obviously inegalitarian. Theocracy, no matter how benign and well-intentioned, will still create winners and losers from someone's perspective. In short, every system is going to reward some people over others according to some standard. In a society that rewards work, the hard-working will do better than the lazy. In a society that rewards cruelty, the cruel will thrive. In a society that rewards piety, the pious or, more likely, the judges of piousness will be the winners. This is not an argument for getting rid of rules, it's an argument for just, universal, and fair rules—i.e. classically liberal rules. Nietzsche's approach was to adopt much of Rousseau's indictment of Christian and Enlightenment-based rules, while rejecting Rousseau's utopian idea that a morally perfect society could exist. Instead, Nietzsche privileged only one rule: power. Let the strong, the supermen, make their own rules and enforce them without apology. Rousseau wanted to stick it to The Man, wherever he found him. Nietzsche celebrated The Man, and wanted him to use his own stick as he pleased. As I said on that long drive to Vancouver, it doesn't seem like we're getting any closer to Canada. But I'm getting there. Rousseau was also in many respects the father of nationalism. Indeed, for a long time, when people spoke of nationalism they referred to 'Romantic nationalism.' I won't get too deep into the weeds on this. But the gist of Rousseau's nationalism was that the nation should come first and that every citizen's primary allegiance was to the nation. Nations are 'organic' beings and the people are mere organs of the whole. 'Each of us puts his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction of the general will,' Rousseau writes in The Social Contract, 'and, in our corporate capacity, we receive each member as an indivisible part of the whole.' 'True community for Rousseau is not anything arising out of kinship, religion, ethnicity, or language,' sociologist Robert Nisbet writes in The Present Age. 'True community lies only within the purview of the state, the state consecrated to the virtue of its citizens, to be sure, but the state, once and for all. The general will, to which Rousseau gives absolute sovereignty, is the collective will purged of all marks of purely individual wills—with their egoisms, avarices, and selfishnesses.' Rousseau's Social Contract reinvents theocracy as statolatry—worship of the state. This was the heart of the Jacobin project, which was the first modern nationalist project. One of the most annoying things about Rousseau is that for all his brilliance and insight, he was a horrible person and a staggering hypocrite. He spoke of virtue but had little to speak of. He wrote brilliantly about how best to raise children but forced his mistresses to put his own babies in an orphanage. One of his mistresses, Sophie d'Houdetot, was, according to Rousseau, the only woman he truly loved. Near the end of her long life, she said of him, 'He was ugly enough to frighten me and love did not make him more attractive. But he was a pathetic figure and I treated him with gentleness and kindness. He was an interesting madman.' But the relevant hypocrisy here is not personal. Perhaps inconsistency is the better word. Regardless, the point is that one of the foremost champions of non-conformity, personal autonomy, and defiance of external rules was also one of the foremost champions of a totalitarian system of government that would, if he had his way, punish non-conformity with the General Will by death or exile. Not all of the nationalisms that flowed from Rousseau's ideas of the General Will became totalitarian, but many did. This is the danger that comes with building a political project that rests on the righteous power of feelings. Nationalism is a feeling, not a philosophy. Emotions don't have limiting principles because emotions aren't about principles. All attempts to make nationalism something more than the organization of sentiment, an empire of feeling, requires ransacking the intellectual supply depot for barbed wire or steel bars that can be constructed to contain it. Some look to the church and say that the national will must be constrained by God's will. Nationalists barrel through these arguments all the time. They proclaim Jesus was a nationalist. They incant blasphemously stupid Latin phrases like Vox populi, vox dei! They claim, as Rousseau did, that the church leaders are worldly and corrupt practitioners of priestcraft. Some nationalists invoke the rule of law, the Constitution, and other features of classical liberalism. And so long as people recognize the power of these principles, nationalism is indeed kept at bay. But the nationalists bristle at these constraints. They test the bars of the cage, they denounce and mock the guards. Why? Because liberal principles are external to nationalism. They can transcend borders, and sharing across borders is icky to people who invest everything in the nation's supremacy. The Bill of Rights protects individuals against the deprivations of the General Will, and that makes the champions of the national will whine that the system is rigged against them—and it is! Because the Bill of Rights says that you get to say, worship, defend yourself, etc. in ways that might run counter to the national will. If the national will is supreme, then whatever the nation wants it gets. If the authentic desires of the nation define justice, then there is no higher justice to appeal to when the rights of the individual or of minorities are trampled. This is why statism is simply applied nationalism. The state is the mechanism for serving the will of the nation. If the nation is an organic being, then the rulers become its head, the army and the police its hands. The pronouncements of its leaders are the voice of the nation. Limits on the state in this vision become unnatural, artificial, inauthentic impediments to the advance of the national will. It shouldn't surprise anyone that nationalism leads to authoritarianism, because as both a practical and psychological matter, the national will needs to be personified in a figure. It's the only way to settle competing arguments about what needs to be done for the glory of the nation. The duce, the führer, the leader of men, becomes the avatar of the national will, the father of the organic family that is the nation. This is why nationalism so often adopts moral-equivalent-of-war arguments. The leader is a general and the people—all the people—his army. It's no accident that Donald Trump is constantly trying to invoke war powers and declare various crises: In times of war, we get to suspend the rules for a Cincinnatus or Caesar. This is the spirit of thought and emotion that Trump draws on when he says America is just a 'department store' that he runs. It's why he thinks he should set interest rates and run the Kennedy Center's programming. When he says the states 'are just an agent of the federal government,' he's not merely expressing his ignorance of the constitutional order, he's expressing his conviction that the constitutional order should not be an impediment to his agency. And here we find the way of reconciling the two strands of Rousseau's seemingly contradictory views. Romantic nationalism is romantic individualism on a geopolitical scale. The Rousseauian individual rejects the idea that anyone or anything is the boss of him. No rules, no norms, no external constraints should be allowed to hinder the individual's self-expression. The Rousseauian nation is the plural of the Rousseauian individuals. Rousseau believed that humans in their natural state were perfect. But he also believed that humans could be perfected. Once perfected—through education, coercion, whatever—they would all see their collective interests as indistinguishable from their personal interests. Sticking it to The Man is great, until you become The Man. Then everybody needs to fall in line. It's complete nonsense. But that's the idea. And that idea is at the heart of nationalism and its various brands, like fascism, Nazism, communism, Juche, Maoism, etc. The soul of a true patriot in the nationalist vision mirrors the soul of the nation itself. Non-conformity with the national soul is definitionally disordered. Those who do not comply are traitors, parasites, disease-spreaders. So let's bring this in for a landing. I'll leave it to others to do the punditry. But I am fascinated by all the bleating about how Trump has screwed Canadian conservatives and is making life miserable for both conservatives and right-wing nationalists in other countries. Unsurprisingly, Trump's America First agenda is arousing a backlash nearly everywhere, and that backlash is helping incumbent parties and delegitimizing nationalist movements. 'There is a rallying around the flag effect, the flag in question being the Progress Pride banner of global progressivism,' writes Ed West. 'Rather than aiding a western vibe shift, Trump's form of American nationalism is weakening the European right – and they know it. Eric Kaufman has a useful essay on all of this. He notes that most nationalist conservatives outside of America support Ukraine. They're appalled by Trump's unilateral declaration of a trade war with the planet (except for Russia) on the merits, but they're especially aggrieved by the fact that Trump's 'egocentric nationalism' is undermining their movements at home. But this passage caught my eye: As my doctoral supervisor Anthony Smith once summarized it, the philosophy of nationalism holds that each nation has its own particularity which it should protect and develop, and that a peaceful world order is based on free nations. Those who support principled nationalism oppose imperialist actions such as laying claim to another country, erasing its culture or invading it. Only an egocentric nationalist concerned solely with their own national status would do so. I get it, but this is what happens when nationalist arguments are allowed to trump all other considerations because, again, nationalism itself has no limiting principle. Nationalism was born of the Age of Reason, but in rebellion to it. So long as it is constrained by things like respect for national sovereignty, respect for the rule of law, the rights of the individual, adherence to free market principles, and open to reason itself nationalism can be a source of civic health and social solidarity. But that's the point. Those ideas and commitments exist outside of nationalism. They cannot be derived from it. This is why efforts in the past to create a 'Nationalist Internationale' or 'Universal Fascism' failed. A doctrine of national uniqueness and supremacy is a poor organizing principle for an alliance of equals. It's like trying to set up a radical anarchist bowling league with strict rules of attendance. Our allies in the free world are our allies in large part because member nations of the free world believe in freedom. Not the Rousseauian freedom to do whatever you like, but the freedom of Burke, Locke, Montesquieu, Smith, and the Founders. John Adams famously argued that the American Constitution could work only for a moral people who, by definition, complied with virtuous norms, just laws, and civic restraints. In short, there's a difference between pure freedom from all constraints and ordered liberty. As 'America The Beautiful' says, 'Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law.' The Rousseauian individual is the jackass in the office who nukes his stinky tuna casserole in the microwave and refuses to clean up afterward because he's a maverick who plays by his own rules. He's the guy who curses loudly around kids or refuses to wear headphones when watching a loud and offensive movie on a plane. Or someone who rejects the rules of the HOA for herself, but demands compliance for her neighbors. They are the kind of people who cut in line at the movies or grocery store, drink your last beer without permission or apology, and steal petty cash when they can get away with it. The Rousseauian nation is the same sort of person on a global scale. That's how Trump is conducting foreign policy, albeit with a little of Nietzsche's love of strength and hatred of equality thrown in. Just as the Rousseauian individual has contempt for the rules of society because he thinks those rules are rigged against him, Trump's Rousseauian nationalism has contempt for the international order of security and trade because he thinks it's rigged against America. That system has never been perfect, but it is in our interest. Indeed, to a certain extent, we created it out of our own self-interest. I believe that there are plenty of decent, liberal-minded nationalists in other countries. But their commitment to decency and the liberal order is derived from ideals outside of nationalism. Scholars of fascism often divide fascists seeking power from fascists in power because once in power, they no longer respect any constraints. A similar dynamic applies to various nationalists, socialists, and other illiberal movements. I'm sure many believe that if they did have power, they'd still play by the rules. But they should keep in mind, that's what people said Trump would do if he was reelected in 2024. They were wrong. Some of that error has to do with failing to appreciate Trump's character. But another part of that error is failing to appreciate the character of nationalism itself. Nationalists out of power bide their time by following the rules. Nationalists in power write the rules for their own benefit. Canine Update: Because I am a servant of my people, I am writing this update on set at CNN on my phone. So please forgive the brevity. Zoë is becoming weirdly clingy with me these days. So my departure for California left her in a funk for about 24 hours, then she just made peace with the fact I was gone forever. Pippa held things down okay in my absence and in my return she is finding a good work-waggle balance. She is also determined to continue the belly rub tariff regime. The mid day crew is thriving and I'm particularly excited to announce the addition of Watson to the crew. Gracie, meanwhile, is fine. And in important news, Fafoon and Paddington have moved to new accommodations. This is good news because it will make daily pampering requirements easier to fulfill. Owner's Name: Mike Tyworth Why I'm a Dispatch Member: There can only be one reason: I want to be where I can read Kevin D. Williamson. Personal Details: Like Jonah, I have an affinity for scotch and Star Trek. Pet's Name: Dug Pet's Breed: Golden Retriever Pet's Age: 4 months Gotcha Story: Dug joined our home in early February. When my daughter and I went to pick our puppy out of the litter, he made the choice easy by crawling into my daughter's lap and never leaving. Pet's Likes: Retrieving (natch), hassling the cat, tug of war, shredding paper, and, well, peeing on the floor. Pet's Dislikes: Being separated from the pack, crate time, not being able to galumph all over every person that comes within range. Pet's Proudest Moment: Fetching like a boss. Bad Pet: Those people will never be found. Not this week!
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Hogg Wild
From the G-File on The Dispatch Dear Reader (including the superstitious), I can't stand David Hogg, the elvish progressive activist who was recently elected as a vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. From his introduction to the public during the heinous 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting (where his anti-gun outrage was entirely understandable), he has always struck me as the kind of precocious kid who knows exactly how to impress a certain kind of middle-aged lefty. He's exactly what young people are supposed to be like in the eyes of a certain kind of affluent blue-bubble oldster. Full of invincible righteous arrogance and supreme confidence that the way you 'effect change' is through performative protest, Hogg seems like he was bioengineered in a vat to impress Ivy League admissions officers and intern coordinators at Greenpeace. I am confessing my dislike for the guy as a Dispatchian service to readers who might be tempted to accuse me of being unduly biased. 'Unduly' is in the eye of the beholder—or reader—but I admit my bias freely. In my ideal world, I wouldn't feel compelled to write about him because he wouldn't matter. He'd be just another minion in Elizabeth Warren's Senate office annoying the chief of staff with memos about how he's being underutilized (or maybe he'd be a Botox salesman making a fortune by telling metrosexual men he's 15 years older than he really is). But precisely because he's the kind of oleaginous creature designed to slide up the greasy pole of progressive politics, he's landed a 'leadership' position in the Democratic Party. Normally, a vice chair (they don't use 'chairman' or even 'chairperson') of the Democratic Party isn't a particularly newsworthy position. I mean, there are four of them. Can you name the other three? Forgive me if I don't wait for you to Google their names. Hogg is newsworthy because he's vowed to spend $20 million from his 'Leaders We Deserve' PAC to challenge Democratic incumbents. As Karl Rove suggests, this might be more of a publicity stunt (of course) than a plausible threat. In the last cycle, the Leaders We Deserve PAC raised $11.9 million while spending a mere $266,000 on the leaders we allegedly deserve, Rove writes. That's 2.2 percent. The other 97.8 percent went to operating costs, including Hogg's salary. If those ratios stayed constant, they'd have to raise $909 million. Of course, the need to find leaders we deserve might induce them to up the percentage from 2.2 percent, even if that meant skimping on media bookers and hair product. Before I continue with the rank punditry, let me return once again to a regular theme here about weak parties, but also about weakening institutions. With the possible exception of Yuval Levin himself, I think I might be the foremost promoter of his analysis of institutional decay in A Time To Build. The problem, as Remnant listeners and loyal G-File readers will recall, is that people use institutions as stages to perform on. Institutions are supposed to mold character toward the interests of the institution. Instead, people use institutions as platforms to get attention. You can think former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick was a hero or a jerk for kneeling during the national anthem, but it's indisputable that he used his membership in the NFL to promote his agenda at the expense of the institution that employed him. Meghan Markle used the institution of the British royal family to promote her own celebrity and cult of personality. Sometimes, the people who do this are careful to limit the harm to the institution they are exploiting for their own purposes. Sometimes, harming the institution is the point, because it is that very disloyalty that attracts attention. The examples of this kind of thing are legion. And Hogg is just the latest example. He is using his position within the Democratic Party to garner attention and money for his own agenda. Political parties are not mystical entities. They only exist for a few interrelated reasons. But the primary one is to simply get members of their party elected. You can gussy it up with some gauzy aspirational secondary rationalizations about ideology and principle. But those things apply to politicians, not apparatchiks of the party itself. If Hogg wants to support politicians more to his liking, that's fine. But doing it while an official of the party is indefensible. There is nothing wrong with Lutherans trying to convert Catholics to Lutheranism. But a Catholic priest trying to dragoon Lutherans into the Catholic Church—not to make them Catholics but to make the church more Lutheran—is not, shall we say, consistent with the job description. Okay, back to the rank punditry. You might not think this is a big deal, in part because it might not end up being a big deal. Also, he's getting most of what he wants from this stunt by announcing it. And I don't just mean attention. Older—by which I mean just plain old—Democrats are getting the message. Like when the Denny's manager signals that the Early Bird Special window has closed by stacking the chairs on the table, old Democrats are getting the hint that it's time to start working on their memoirs. We've entered the Logan's Run phase of Democratic internal politics. No, they're not putting their elders in weird bodysuits and blowing them up as the kids shout 'Renew!' But the young'ns are making themselves heard. Illinois Sen. Dick Durban, 80, announced this week that he's retiring. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, also 80, is expected to announce her retirement soon. San Francisco's Democratic Party is considering mandatory retirement ages. Rumors that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is taking Steve Buscemi's 'Hello Fellow Kids' online courses, and has hired food tasters in furtherance of his desire to become the Deng Xiaoping of Democratic politics, could not be confirmed. Of course, one of the reasons the young'ns have the wind at their back is the debacle of Joe Biden. It's not just that he was too old or infirm to run again—or really stay president. The whole Weekend at Bernie's subterfuge understandably pissed off a lot of Democrats. The other reason is the generally hapless and feckless state of the Democratic Party. The theory seems to be that the reason the Democrats aren't fighting back against Donald Trump more effectively is that it's hard to march for justice while using a walker. Or something like that. It should be noted that if the Democratic Caucus in the House or Senate looked more like the cast of the Gilmore Girls than the Golden Girls, they still wouldn't have the votes to thwart Trump. Now, despite my biases against Hogg and youth politics generally, I think the progressive Red Guard have a point. (That doesn't excuse what Hogg is doing. You can simultaneously think Kaepernick had a good point about police abuse and think it was inappropriate for him to behave the way he did.) There are too many oldsters in both parties. It's not as dramatic as you might think. The median age of the House is 57.5. In the Senate, it's 64.7. But as is always the case with youth movements, youth serves as cover for the real priorities—a desire for power and an ideological agenda. The desire for power part is not hard to explain. Politicians desire power. Young politicians always exaggerate the importance of youth because it's their comparative advantage. Older politicians emphasize experience because that's their comparative advantage. As for the ideology part, well, it's worth noting that Bernie Sanders, who is 83 years old, recently filed paperwork to run for his Senate seat again … in 2030. And the Youth Brigades haven't said boo about it. In other words, age is being weaponized against the Democrats the base doesn't like, which is another way of saying age isn't really the issue at all. I am torn. Yesterday, I listened to Jamie Weinstein's interview of Larry Diamond, an esteemed student of democracy and authoritarianism. I'm only exaggerating a little so I can use this clip from Monsters Inc., but Diamond's position might be boiled down to, 'It is my professional opinion that now is the time to panic!' Diamond, a very serious scholar, believes that Trump is moving in the direction of authoritarianism. He laid out his argument in an essay for Persuasion last February, 'The Crisis of Democracy is Here.' No, he's not Hitler. But Diamond sees Trump and his minions as moving in the direction of Hungary's Viktor Orbán or Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. I find much of his argument sober and compelling. But I also read Bret Stephens' New York Times column, 'The Face-Plant President,' and heard him discuss it on the Commentary podcast. While he doesn't put it in exactly these terms, he makes a convincing case that Trump is effectively destroying his presidency—and the GOP—on his own. He opens with that famous quote from former British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan that what statesmen fear most is 'events, dear boy, events,' and, rather remarkably, Donald Trump is being undone by events of his own making. I agree with that, though I will annoyingly note that it's not confirmed that MacMillan uttered that quote. The two views are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Diamond allows for Trump's incompetence, and Stephens concedes Trump's authoritarian tendencies. But there is more than a little tension all the same. If the strongest version of Diamond's argument is right, finding reassurance in Trump's determination to undermine his own presidency seems like a risk not worth taking. If the strongest version of Stephens' case is right, then Trump will continue to step on garden rakes and his presidency will unravel on its own accord. Stephens nods to this in his concluding paragraph: Democrats wondering how to oppose Trump most effectively might consider the following. Drop the dictator comparisons. Rehearse the above facts. Promise normality and offer plans to regain it. And remember that no matter how malignant he may be, there's no better opponent than a face-plant president stumbling over his untied laces. Take the advice to Democrats out of it for a moment. The most obvious problem with this sentiment is that Trump's incompetence could very well be the reason he doubles down on authoritarianism. Indeed, this is often how it works. Authoritarians screw up the economy, which invites criticism, and because the authoritarian cannot fix the economy (for the same reasons they screwed up in the first place) they decide to silence the critics. Outrage over the crackdown and dissatisfaction with the economy threaten the authoritarian's hold on power, so the authoritarian uses even more extra-legal mechanisms to stay in power. For every 'successful' authoritarian like former Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew, there are a dozen unsuccessful ones who follow something like this pattern. Even discounting for non-authoritarian motivations—Trump doesn't want to seem like a lame duck, Trumpists love trolling, Trump loves to monetize trolling—it's not a great sign that Trump world is rolling out the Trump 2028 merch. It's going to be a gas watching Republican senators explain why they are for Trump pursuing all legal options to run again rather than take their spines out of cold storage and explain that there are no legal options for him to run again. Indeed, that's always been the pattern with Trump. It is his unfitness and incompetence that drives the effort to shore him up rather than discard him. His obvious ignorance has to be spun as a greater genius that we cannot see. Rather than marshal the moral courage to defend the rules and the institutions elected Republicans have quite literally sworn to defend, they pretend that some deus ex machina will kick in and solve the problem for them. This was true of the Republican Party in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Like Steve Gutenberg in Diner, they simply say, 'It's out of my hands.' Diamond rightly says this is the crux of the problem. So long as civic-minded Republicans, particularly in Congress, act as if they have no duty or obligation to say 'Enough!' Trump and his willing accomplices will keep testing the system in pursuit of staying in power. Politically, I agree with Stephens—and James Carville—that the smartest thing for Democrats to do is let Trump continue to face-plant. But I can't help but think that in 10 or 20 years, this might look like part of the democratic decay Diamond frets over. I don't have a lot of confidence that a party being taken over by the Hoggses of the world will suddenly embark on rebuilding the guardrails Trump has torn down. Biden didn't, and he was elected to restore 'normalcy.' Biden's lawless attempt to forgive student loans and his bullying of social media companies are part of the apocalyptic narrative the Trumpists use to justify Trump's lawlessness. This sort of 'you did it, so can we' logic has been the defining spirit of our politics for a decade now. When you point out that Trump's targeting of political opponents is outrageous, the response from MAGA world is, 'They tried to put Trump in jail!' I think some of the cases against Trump were wholly justified. But that's not the point. Each side follows a version of the Chicago Way of politics. They bring a knife, you bring a gun. It doesn't matter if the reality is not what the opposing side claims—what they imagine is all the permission they need. Biden didn't pack the Supreme Court, but the belief that he might cave to the Hogg types partly fueled the panic on the right and further justified rallying around Trump. I've complained a lot about how Trump has taught a generation of young Republicans that politics is all about 'cry more, lib' tactics. But he's also taught a whole generation of Democrats that they should fight fire with fire. I mean, Hogg launched a pillow company to compete with Mike Lindell. You know, because that'll show the MAGAs. It's all so stupid. But it's also dangerous. Canine Update: So the other morning, I put Zoë in the car for the morning walk. But I left Pippa out of the car while I put the trash cans out for pickup. While I was doing that, a man came by with a pit-bully dog. Zoë went ballistic inside the car, like some action movie hero trapped outside the airlock while the alien threatened the crew. Pippa rose to the occasion. She had her ball in her mouth, as per procedure, but knew she had to defend our turf. So she got on our front lawn and barked at the bemused intruder, all while upholding her fiduciary obligation to keep her ball in her mouth. You try to shout, 'Get out of here mean dog!' with a ball in your mouth. It's not easy. Meanwhile, this morning, I found Pippa watching what we call the Dog TV (an open window in the guest room). She was contemplative. But when I approached her, she agreed to come on the walk if I paid the spaniel geld an extended belly rub. Zoë eventually came upstairs and yelled at us for allowing such decadence to take precedence over the morning mission. Speaking of quadruped extortion, we are still willing victims of Chester's extortion racket. In other news, out of respect for Easter, Zoë suspended rabbit-chasing for 24 hours. And Kirsten captured a rare smile from Dark Pippa. Owner's Name: Michael Green Why I'm a Dispatch Member: I appreciate The Dispatch because its politics match closely with my beliefs, but it is much more than that. The articles have a sophistication and depth that is difficult to find these days. I was a Republican for a long time, but I am ideologically homeless now. If The Dispatch started a political party, I would be one of the first to join. Personal Details: We live in Bermuda because that is where my wife is from. I grew up in Texas and lived in D.C. for 15 years before coming here. Bermuda is a great place to raise children because it is basically a small town with beautiful scenery, mild weather, and an international airport. One difference with the U.S. is that new 16-year-old drivers can only drive motorbikes. My son is about to turn 16, and it makes me nervous to know that the worst drivers are forced to use the most dangerous vehicles. Pet's Name: Indy, short for Indiana. Pet's Breed: Bernedoodle Pet's Age: 1 Gotcha Story: Bermuda has no rabies. In order to get a new puppy, one must get it directly from somewhere that also does not have rabies, which generally means the U.K. Our pup came from Scotland after overnighting at the airport in Heathrow. He still loves to be outside when the weather is gray, drizzly, and windy. We named him Indy because we already had backyard chickens with state names, and it seemed like a good trend to continue. There also is the line from the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: 'We named the dog Indiana.' Pet's Likes: His favorite game is to be chased, which is very annoying after he has grabbed the TV remote or something off the counter. He also loves socks. If you leave a sock on the ground for even a moment, he will pounce on it and joyfully run around the house. He also likes to be cradled in my arms on his back like a baby, which is really weird when you consider that he weighs 60 pounds. Pet's Dislikes: Our backyard chickens. He can't understand why we let them live. He also dislikes the heat because he has a lot of fur, which we shave in the summer. Pet's Proudest Moment: He is very fast and seems to mock me when I can't catch him. When he was younger, he proudly showed off his collection of sticks, rocks, and leaves at the backdoor. Bad Pet: Property boundaries in Bermuda often are marked with thick hedges. Indy figured out how to climb through the hedge into the neighbor's yard and proceeded to poop by their pool. After he did it for the third time, our patient neighbor had some stern words and we had to install an electronic fence system. Do you have a quadruped you'd like to nominate for Dispawtcher of the Week and catapult to stardom? Let us know about your pet by clicking here. Reminder: You must be a Dispatch member to participate. —If x then why?? —Juicy gossip —USD CPR —But why haven't we gone back?? —Bad plan —Not in Trump's back yard! —What's really going on here? —Former Freudian slip —Streamlining? —Life imitates art —The Monkees go girl group —Naughty knowledge —No need for manners —Spicy verdict
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18-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Eternal Badness of Bad Ideas
From the G-File on The Dispatch Dear Reader (including those of you with pastel potatoes), When you've been doing this (gestures toward millions of words under my byline on the internet and bookshelf) for so long, you don't just acquire opinions, you acquire whole intellectual set pieces. This is not unique to me—it's true of pretty much everyone I know in my line of work. Think of the rhetorical invention of the Remnant podcast 'bingo card.' I've collected certain arguments—riffs, you might say—that are like building blocks of my worldview. For example, when someone refers to the 'coequal branches of government,' longtime listeners know I'm going to give a few minutes—at least—to how this is Nixonian propaganda (TLDR: Tricky Dick didn't want to be henpecked by Congress or the courts, so he argued that as a 'coequal branch' the executive got to do what it wanted (sound familiar?). The problem, as Jay Cost lays out, is that the branches may have coequal 'status,' but they don't have coequal power. Congress is the boss of our system). The point is that the longer you do this … stuff (gestures again) the more of these set pieces you acquire, like old, comfortable tools you've used so long they feel like an extension of your hands. Again, this isn't just true of me or my profession, it's true of pretty much everybody. How many baseball junkies do you know who will leap at the opportunity to explain—again!—that Ted Williams was better than Babe Ruth? 'His stats would be better but he enlisted in the Navy!' The trick is to keep accumulating new set pieces. But there's a hitch: You have to be prepared to retire old ones when some new argument or new evidence causes you to change your mind (I don't want to dunk on anybody by name, but there are folks who just can't let go of old arguments because the task of retooling is too onerous, and the old arguments are so central to their identity.). I've had to change my mind a few times. For instance, thanks to the work of Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge, I've changed my mind about the validity of generational stereotyping. In short, the idea of 'event-driven' generational change (9/11, the Kennedy assassination, etc.) is still garbage, but changes in technology really do change cultures, and those changes manifest differently depending on your age. People who grew up after the advent of the automobile or the radio were different from those who grew up before. Kids who grow up with social media are different from people who grew up before Instagram or TikTok. There is another hitch, one that works the other way. There are times when the zeitgeist zigs so suddenly, and large numbers of people zig with it, that staying on course looks like you're the one zagging. In my line of work, partisanship is the chief cause of this kind of thing. When people think it's your job to defend a party, in their eyes, refusing to go along makes you the outlier, the traitor, the zagger. That wouldn't be so annoying except for the fact that a lot of people conflate ideology with party affiliation. I get called left-wing every day by people who think the definition of right-wing is determined by what's good for the GOP, the president, or what they say is good for them. But if I think, say, free trade is better than protectionism, absent some new evidence or new argument, changing my view just because the GOP is now a protectionist party seems like an intellectually, even morally, cowardly thing to do. The intellectually cowardly part should be pretty obvious. But the charge of moral cowardice deserves some explication. I don't make the charge as an insult. But if you believe that freer trade is better for—pick your beneficiary—American citizens, the poor (American or otherwise), the country, or the world, because it makes people richer (and reduces military conflict), reversing your position for the political benefit of a party means, as a matter of logic, that you want to make people poorer for the sake of partisanship. A lot of—but sadly not all—pro-lifers understand this point. If you believe that abortion is akin to murder, changing your position for partisan advantage is—on your own terms—immoral. This is why I have such contempt for right-wing industrial complex—the Heritage Foundation, CPAC, various MAGAified media personalities, et al. They leave me feeling like Thomas More muttering 'but for Wales?' This message has been brought to you by the Remnant podcast. I'll get back to the above point in a minute. But first let's briefly discuss the latest fad on the intellectual new right. In yesterday's Wall Street Journal, Kevin T. Dugan had an interesting piece titled 'Meet MAGA's Favorite Communist.' The communist in question is Antonio Gramsci. The most famous slogan associated with Gramsci —the 'long march through the institutions'—wasn't coined by Gramsci, but much later, in 1967, by a German socialist named Rudi Dutschke. The idea behind the long march referred to the idea that radicals should join the establishment—government, universities, etc.—in order to capture them and impose radical change from within. Amusingly, there's not much evidence that Dutschke knew anything about Gramsci. He was using the phrase 'the long march' as a nod to Mao's Long March. But the idea is similar to Gramsci's 'war of position,' and in the 1970s Gramsci became a kind of star of the European communist left, and ultimately, the American left. Eventually, conservatives noticed that the left liked the term and the idea—and seemed to be putting it into practice—and started calling it out. Like 'the Frankfurt School' or 'cultural Marxism,' Gramscian ideas became fun ideas for right-wingers—most emphatically including yours truly—to deplore, debate, and condemn. So, who was Antonio Gramsci? He was a Sardinian by birth who became a young leader of the Italian Communist Party. Initially Gramsci was a big fan of Mussolini—back when Mussolini was a revered leader of the Italian left (Mussolini first earned the title 'Il Duce,' 'the leader,' not as a Fascist but as the foremost Italian socialist). Gramsci was a heterodox Communist and Marxist. He became a pain in the ass to Mussolini after Mussolini broke with the Communists, first by supporting entry into the war, and ultimately by becoming a Fascist dictator. A loyal servant of Moscow, Gramsci led the Italian Communist opposition to Mussolini. In 1926, Mussolini got fed up with his criticisms and threw him in jail. At Gramsci's show trial, the prosecutor declared, 'For twenty years, we must stop this brain from functioning.' They failed. In prison he became an impressive intellectual, more impressive than he would have been on the outside, because he could get away with writing stuff that would have gotten him thrown in jail by Stalin, if he'd written it in Russia. He developed all sorts of interesting ideas about how the Fascists consolidated power with the aid and consent of the bourgeois and capitalists. His various theories of Fascism—they changed over time—are all very Marxist and therefore, in my mind, analytically suspect. But they were interesting and they were compelling for a bunch of reasons. Marxists always like a self-serving explanation for why their b.s. isn't more popular and successful. More relevant, Gramsci put a lot of emphasis on the importance of intellectuals and their power to shape ideas, and as a result wield power. Gramsci's ideas were a very intellectualized version of Saturday Night Live's Stuart Smalley character, played by Al Franken. Smalley's mantra was, 'You're good enough, you're smart enough, and doggone it, people like you'—or they should. As Thomas Meaney writes, 'The belief that Gramsci somehow privileged the cultural domain over the political and economic helped justify the materialist allergies of at least two generations of professors, while keeping their nominal radicalism intact.' Anyway, today's new right, or at least the faction led by Christopher Rufo, loves Gramsci. They find in his writings an explanation for how the new left of the 1960s took over the commanding heights of the culture and how the new right can retake them. Yesterday, Ruffo tweeted out the Wall Street Journal article declaring, 'The Right is learning new political tactics. We are not going to indulge the fantasies of the 'classical liberals' who forfeited all of the institutions. We're going to fight tooth and nail to recapture the regime and entrench our ideas in the public sphere. Get ready.' I responded, 'Um. A *lot* of the idea of the right are classically liberal. Or at least they were considered to be for a century or so. Could you explicate which classically liberal ideas you think are 'fantasies'? Because I could swear a lot of your @ManhattanInst colleagues don't think they're fantastical.' Ruffo responded here, and I responded to that here. You can read the whole exchange, but my most basic concern is that embracing a fundamentally and devoutly illiberal thinker as your political sherpa raises the possibility that you will also embrace the illiberalism central to his thought. I've watched—and written about—this exact dynamic playing out with the right's previous, and very similar, obsession with Saul Alinsky. Over the course of a decade, many on the right went from denouncing Alinsky to making him a kind of dashboard saint. Convinced that the left always wins—because they are Alinksyites—folks like Dinesh D'Souza and Steve Bannon decided the right needed to become right-wing Alinskyites in the spirit of fighting fire with fire. At the end of this process, D'Souza has become a conspiracy theorist and troll and Bannon has become an avowed Leninist. Podcast April 18, 2025 Jonah Goldberg Responding to Chris Rufo. I am more open to a conservative 'long counter-march through the institutions' than some might think. But count me out of any effort that thinks the solution to left-wing illiberalism is right-wing illiberalism. Attacking the left's 'living constitution' garbage is good and useful. But replacing the left's version with a right-wing version of it is perverse. Denouncing left-wing cancel culture is necessary and right. Celebrating right-wing cancel culture in the spirit of 'retribution' or a Gramscian fearlessness or MAGA manliness, is grotesque, and not just because of the hypocrisy of it. I've written a lot about that stuff and will undoubtedly again. But I want to make a different point. It is absolutely true that the left took over universities and other institutions and used their positions of power to push crappy ideas. It is also true that Gramsci (and Foucault) were inspirations for some of these efforts in the 1970s and 1980s. I think all of this can—and often is—wildly overstated, but there's truth here if you look for it. But it doesn't seem to have occurred to many people that Gramsci was just wrong. He believed that liberalism was a spent force, a dying and discardable carapace to be shed by society as it evolves into mature Communism. As Gramsci put it in his 1924 essay, 'Neither Fascism Nor Liberalism: Sovietism!': 'Liberalism, even if inoculated with the glands of the reformist monkey, is powerless. It belongs to the past.' (There are better quotes, but man, how can you not love 'glands of the reformist monkey'?) His theories about Communism, capitalism, and democracy were wrong because—wait for it—Marxism is wrong. Its metaphysics are wrong. Its economic theory is wrong. Marx's Labor Theory of Value is smoldering garbage. Gramsci's analysis of fascism was wrong (don't get me started). And, not least importantly, even if Gramsci was right about the politics and power dynamics of 1920s and 1930s Italy—again, he wasn't—America isn't very much like Italy, then or now. If Gramsci's theories of power were so successful and offered such a great blueprint for the new right today, why are so many new right bros pissing and moaning about 'neo-liberalism' and its hegemonic power? One can concede that the tweedy tenured Marxists succeeded in their long march to take over the English department. But if Gramsci was right, the next step would have been to seize control of the state and the means of production. Instead, they spend their time bleating about the same 'neo-liberalism' that the new right gripes about. Their 'hegemony' pretty much stops at the faculty lounge, if even there. Heck, if the lefties with all of this 'cultural hegemonic power' had remotely the power the new Gramscians of the right claim, Donald Trump wouldn't have won, sex assignment surgeries would be part of Medicare For All, and Chris Rufo would be writing his own manifesto from prison, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren read the latest wheat production quota reports from her dacha on Boston Harbor. This whole fad stems from a misreading of 'what time it is.' We are not at the precipice of a left-wing social transformation of society, we are not in a state of war with the forces of cultural Marxism. We're a liberal society full of people with bad ideas contending for power. It has always been thus, and hopefully always will be. I don't say 'hopefully' because I like bad ideas, I say that because so long as we have classically liberal guardrails and checks on power, the bad ideas will ultimately lose. When the people with bad ideas get power, the badness of their ideas becomes evident and people with better ideas start winning arguments and elections. As Edmund Burke tells us, 'Example is the school of mankind and will learn at no other.' This process can take way longer than I would like and I am all for making it easier for good ideas to prevail, but not if it comes at the expense of those classically liberal rules. That's one of those set pieces I referred to above. I've spent my career inveighing against left-wing illiberalism. But the arguments against illiberalism don't change much if the issue is right-wing illiberalism. I don't think Rufo is illiberal. Or at least I don't think he thinks he is. But at a time when the president is pushing illiberalism all over the place, celebrating Trumpism arouses skepticism about his commitment to classical liberalism. He says he favors small-r republicanism. I love me some small r-republicanism, but the American vision of republicanism was grounded in classical liberalism. And healthy republican institutions dedicate themselves to the strengthening of explication of that liberalism. If the new right wants to zig over there and wax tumescent over Communist intellectuals and their illiberal lust for power the way the new left did, I'm not going with them. If that makes me look like I'm the one zagging, so be it. Speaking of set pieces, this tweet thread from the vice president has me reaching for the toolbox. Vance was beating up on Jesse Singal (a Dispatch contributing writer), responding to a zesty post from Singal about the administration's deportation policies: I hate this smug, self-assured bullshit. 'I know I'm right, and people must be dumb or immoral to disagree with me.' It's an easy way to go through life, because then you never have to think seriously about why your worldview is a justification for the mass invasion of the country my ancestors built with their bare hands. Vance then followed up with: None of these people can articulate a deportation standard that: 1) would satisfy left-wing critics of the administration's immigration policy; 2) would satisfy their intuitions about what 'due process' is required; 3) would be workable given resource constraints; and 4) would permit deportation of most of the illegal immigrants allowed under Joe Biden's administration. They want to nullify the results of a democratic election. It's that simple. Now, I don't feel compelled to respond to all of this. But just so people don't think I'm dodging anything here. I find it laughable that Donald Trump's foremost fulltime defender is outraged by smug, self-assured b.s. or the belittling of political opponents. Redact the smug and self-assured b.s. out of his boss's public statements, and you'd be left with a few sentence fragments and proper names. Also, whether or not Singal or anyone else can or cannot articulate a deportation or immigration standard that satisfies left-wing critics and their intuitions about due process is a red herring. The question is whether the administration can articulate a policy that comports with the law, the Constitution, and the courts. As Richard Reinsch replied to Vance, 'You are being asked to observe the US Constitution's provision for habeas corpus. It is not a relative question as you present it. Upholding one of the oldest grounds for limiting state power in our constitutional tradition is not a woke plot to undermine the Trump admin.' Indeed, the fact that Vance—Yale Law School '13—puts 'due process' in scare quotes speaks volumes. With that out of the way, let me address the two things he said that really set me off. I'll take the second one first: Vance says that people who object to the way the administration is handling deportation 'want to nullify the results of a democratic election. It's that simple.' What Vance is saying here is that Trump ran on mass deportation (true!) and he won (also true!) and therefore he has a right to deport people anyway he chooses. And if you object, you're trying to 'nullify the results of a democratic election.' Never mind that Vance's fastidiousness about the righteousness of democracy is awfully precious, given his defense of Trump's effort to steal (i.e. nullify) the 2020 election and his refusal to condemn it. And ignore his super–sophisticated aversion to condemning undemocratic nations as 'bad guys.' If you want to say that the 2024 election was a referendum on mass deportation, I can live with it in a colloquial sense. But I don't agree with it in any rigorous sense. I personally know a lot of people who voted for Trump who assured themselves he wouldn't be able to do full-fledged mass deportation and all that would require. Nor do I think it was a more important issue for the majority-making voters, including many Hispanics, for whom the economy was front-of-mind. Lots of people voted for Trump despite his grotesque rhetoric about immigrants 'poisoning the blood' of America. Obviously, some people loved that talk. Though odds are good that they'd have voted for him anyway. But that's beside the point. I think the concept of 'mandates' is anti-constitutional garbage. Again, I think I have to live with it as a colloquial thing. If by mandate you mean, 'He ran on this, so he should try to achieve it,' that's fine. But that's not how Trump and Vance conceive of it. They believe the democratic will of the people (i.e. the slight majority of people who voted for him or against Harris) gives them license to simply have their way. That's the anti-C\constitutional garbage. Going by the Constitution and nothing else, Trump has a single mandate: to be president for four years. That's it. The Constitution doesn't say jack about the popular will giving him extra authority to do anything. If it were otherwise, then you would have to believe that Trump could unilaterally declare war on Denmark and seize Greenland. If he can't accomplish what he campaigned on, that's not nullifying the results of an election. That's just a president failing to fulfill a campaign promise. If Trump fails to get his 'no tax on tips' idea through Congress, that doesn't mean the election results will have been 'nullified.' He'll still be president. He'll just have failed to do something he promised to do. Elections are not referendums on everything a candidate campaigns on. And alleged electoral mandates are not a license to defy the Constitution. Finally, there's Vance's invocation of his ancestors. Screw that noise. I have ancestors on my mom's side that go back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. They had calloused hands from building this country before the Vances set foot here. For all I know, they shook their heads as his people got off the boat, thinking, 'there goes the neighborhood.' Boom, do I win all of my arguments now? This is right-wing identity politics and nothing more. By all means, deport illegal immigrants if you can figure out how to do it within the confines of the rule of law and the Constitution and basic human decency. But spare me this 'I know I'm right because my people were here first' b.s. Canine Update: I gotta do this fast. The Dingo continues to rule the shotgun seat, but does on occasion make allowances for the Spaniel. We continue to pay the Chestergeld. Also, rare footage of Pippa demanding bellygeld. Mother Jones recently insisted that dogs were bad for Gaia. Pippa was unamused. I had to head up to that trade school in New Haven for a panel. When I returned, the Welcoming Committee was … welcoming. Pippa would like you to say hello to her little friend. Gracie is the best napper (though Pippa is no slouch). I was recently surveilled by a basset. And, while technically, only Dispatch subscribers can submit entries for Dispawtcher of the Week, I think we all should take a moment to appreciate the heroism of Buford! Owner's Name: John Warburton Why I'm a Dispatch Member: I had followed Steve and Jonah for years at National Review so joining The Dispatch right in the beginning was an easy decision. I love the balanced, no b.s. reporting and depend on The Dispatch for the truth. Personal Details: I love sharing stories from The Dispatch with my three Friday breakfast friends: a hospice physician, a pediatrician, and an engineer. I'm the group meteorologist. We're all retired and call ourselves The Paleo Conservative Coalition of Lakewood Ranch, Florida. Pet's Name: Henry Pet's Breed: Cavalier King Charles Spaniel Pet's Age: 1.5 Gotcha Story: We have always had beagles and lost our Mack three years ago to cancer. We knew we wanted another dog but put it off. We were searching the web one day and found Henry on a breeder's website. We instantly fell in love with his cute face and big eyes. Pet's Likes: Henry loves mulch and has become an expert at grabbing a piece of it seemingly out of nowhere. He is very happy to be on someone's lap and loves to play ball. He also knows which neighbors always have treats in their pocket. Pet's Dislikes: Henry is always on duty monitoring 'the perimeter' and quickly begins barking when neighborhood dogs walk by. Pet's Proudest Moment: When he sneaks in with a prize hunk of mulch and we don't catch it. Bad Pet: When he was joyfully running through a puddle after it rained and someone said he shouldn't get wet nor splash water on other dogs. Do you have a quadruped you'd like to nominate for Dispawtcher of the Week and catapult to stardom? Let us know about your pet by clicking here. Reminder: You must be a Dispatch member to participate. ICYMI —On tyranny and Alien —Settling down —Marmot malarkey —Exorcizing —Be careful what you wish for —The ostrich maneuver —Popular opinion —Aptronymic olympics —Walter White Sr. —Ants in your pants —Ding dong! —Conquerors —Missing the point —Here we go again —Old School 2
