Month: October 2021

John McWhorter thinks it is counterproductive for black people to try to impose feelings of guilt on whites with no visible racist leanings. I agree, because these campaigns don’t merely fail; they create backlash. But the conceptual problem goes deeper than that.

In order to make white people feel guilty, you must initially persuade them to identify with the historic forces of oppression. Is that really a good idea? Wouldn’t it be wiser to encourage whites to identify with the black victims of racism, and to be outraged by it? Wouldn’t you actually accomplish far more that way, because it would bring an element of self-interest into the picture?

He was an old man in a hurry. Having come to power unexpectedly, and late in life, he was determined to make a difference by reaching out to believers and nonbelievers alike. Unlike his predecessor, he offered compassion instead of rules and law enforcement. He built bridges, not walls.

But he ran into plenty of resistance. From the left, there was a general consensus that he wasn’t forceful enough, and that he showed too much respect for the enemies of change and existing institutions. From the right, he received nothing but scorn. Maybe he meant well, they said, but he underestimated the power of evil, and he was just a puppet for the woke left. The point was to protect the shrinking flock from the wolves, not to try and convert the wolves.

Is it Pope Francis or President Biden? You decide.

The mountain town in which we spend the summer only has one radio station. It plays nothing but songs that were hits in my adolescence and early adult years. Some of them are classics; some of them were always lame, and haven’t improved with age; but all of them are familiar, and many of them have intense emotional connections.

I call my new home town “Boomerville.” I love Boomerville. It isn’t just the cool mountain air and the stunning natural beauty; I feel like I belong here, far away from the madding younger crowd, with people and a culture that I understand.

But autumn leaves, and so must we. It is getting uncomfortably cold. And so, tomorrow we will follow the birds (except our faithful resident blue jays) and head back to Florida.

It will be good to be warm again. I have a bigger footprint in Florida than I ever will here. It will be nice to post using an actual keyboard instead of an iPad, and I have access to books and media equipment that I don’t have here. Nevertheless, I will miss Boomerville, and I will spend the winter looking at mountain webcams and dreaming about our return in the spring.

My wife and I recently became aware of a recurrent theme on the internet: the white Christian woman who wallows in a variety of pastimes related to fall, including picking apples and drinking pumpkin spice coffee. The archetype is generally viewed as a pathetically out of touch female who wants to experience some spurious relationship with rural America and whitewash both American history and the realities of contemporary life. My wife concurrently embraces some of the fall rituals and the critiques of them. I, on the other hand, am indifferent.

Anyone who has seen my art collection knows that I am, and always have been, a fall person. To me, fall isn’t pumpkin spice baked goods; it is a moment of bittersweet beauty, to be savored before winter comes. It is a sort of Easter in reverse.

Carpe diem, everyone.

FIGHT THE MANDATES

Now, Trump told the Fauci man

“You’ve got to let those mandates drop.

Looking strong is who I am.

It’s how I made it to the top.”

But the election went the other way,

And the left is now in power.

Reactionaries fighting back;

And here’s the cause of the hour!

——

The base doesn’t like them.

Fight the mandates! Fight the mandates!

The base doesn’t like them.

Fight the mandates! Fight the mandates!

——

By order of DeSantis

We ban those mandates now!

We’ll fire up the faithful

We know they won’t be cowed!

So the freedom-loving people

Are voting with their feet.

Parents, cops, and nurses

Demonstrating in the street.

As soon as the doctors were out of their hair,

The Reactionaries wailed:

——

The base doesn’t like them.

Fight the mandates! Fight the mandates!

The base doesn’t like them.

Fight the mandates! Fight the mandates!

The base doesn’t like them.

They think they’re too kosher.

Fight the mandates! Fight the mandates!

The base doesn’t like them.

Fundamentalists can’t take them.

Fight the mandates! Fight the mandates!

You know they really hate them!

—-

Parody of “Rock the Casbah” by The Clash.

Biden won a fairly decisive victory last November, but the Democrats only won control of Congress by a microscopic margin. What lessons should we draw from that? What did the voters try to tell us?

The most plausible answer to that is that the electorate was sick of Trump’s antics, particularly with regard to the pandemic, but it had no stomach for any major policy shifts. It wanted quiet competence, and some incremental improvement, but nothing more.

I suspect that is Manchin’s understanding of the situation. It is likely to be the place we wind up when the story of the human capital bill has finally been written. And it is terrible news for the planet. The public simply hasn’t been prepared properly for the changes that are necessary to minimize the catastrophic impacts of climate change, so they are going to happen, no matter how vigorously we wring our hands about it.

Pay me now, or pay me a lot more later.

As I’ve noted many times before, the GOP pretends to be a pro-worker party, but actually fights for the dollar store economy, because low wages, high profits, and low prices benefit its two core constituencies—retirees and business owners. A collateral impact of the pandemic, however, is worker shortages, higher wages, and inflation. What could the party do to resolve this problem?

Encourage more immigrant workers, of course. But that would lead to a major conflict with the base, which views immigration as an existential issue. So what happens next? The GOP ramps up its criticism of the president without offering any productive alternatives.

The previous post shows that the GOP, which purports to be a family-friendly party, is actually split on issues pertaining to the family. One faction, which is in what may be terminal decline, is willing to spend public money to strengthen families; two others, however, feel far more strongly about work, liberty, and self-reliance than child protection. To them, poverty is a good thing, because it is a powerful motivator to be industrious and get ahead. And if children, who cannot be expected to be hard working, rugged individuals, get caught in the crossfire, they are just acceptable collateral damage.

In other words, the Victorian ethos is alive and well in America, even in a pandemic. It makes the very notion of a UBI, regardless of its merits, a distant dream.

Here is where the factions stand on tax credits for small children and child care:

1. CDs: Subsidies for children strengthen families and reduce child poverty. That’s what we’re all about. Count us in!
2. CLs: Government spending programs reduce liberty and economic growth and create a culture of dependency. Whatever happened to good old fashioned grit and self-reliance? A definite no from us.
3. PBPs: Child care subsidies would increase our pool of workers and thus reduce wages. They would also increase demand for our goods and services by giving families with children more disposable income. Just don’t ask us to pay for them.
4. Reactionaries: Sounds like a welfare program for lazy minorities to us. Don’t just give poor people money out our pockets—make them work for it!

The bottom line is that the Reactionaries rule the roost, so suffer the little children . . .

Joe Manchin is frequently accused of being an elephant in donkey’s clothing. Is that accurate?

Consider the following:

1. Manchin clearly rejects the Trump rigged election theme, which is the orthodox GOP position on the issue.
2. He takes mostly unhelpful stances on climate change, but, unlike the average Republican, he does not deny it exists.
3. He supports the dollar store economy, but he will vote for programs which mitigate some of its worst features for workers. The GOP considers any such mitigation to be socialism.
4. He is closer to the GOP than to progressives on some social issues, but his voting record on judges is unremarkable, and social issues rarely figure in Congress in other contexts.

In short, if the GOP were a sane, moderate, constructive party, Manchin would probably be among them, but they aren’t, so he isn’t. And rightly so.

Yesterday’s NYT Magazine contained a lengthy article about American conservatives and Hungary which focuses largely on our old friend Rod Dreher. The article was interesting and somewhat revealing, but the author really didn’t ask Dreher the essential, bottom line questions about the relationship between his ideology and liberal democracy. I will do it for him, and provide what I think Dreher’s responses would be:

C: Is any government that consistently violates scripture, at least as you understand it, legitimate?

D: No.

C: Even if it enjoys the support of a clear majority of the population?

D: Correct. Government comes from God, not the people, and exists to enforce his will.

C: What is the remedy for dealing with an illegitimate government?

D: It must be checked and replaced by any means necessary.

C: There are a variety of religions, and innumerable different interpretations of scripture. What gives you the right to stand in for God?

D: It isn’t me as an individual; I stand for two thousand years of Western civilization and religious thought. What do you have to beat that?

Two things to note in this. First, I have Dreher using the Thomas More argument to support his position, which was a lot more compelling in the 1530s than it is today. More didn’t have to deal with the Enlightenment and its impact on the American political system, which has been the status quo here for centuries. Dreher is not a conservative in the literal sense of the word; he is a reactionary who longs to recreate a bygone age. Second, the dialogue shows that most fundamental political questions are really religious questions in disguise.

Trump and Orban have very different backgrounds and personalities. They are both illiberal democrats, however. Are they ideological twins?

No, because Trump actually believes in the orthodox GOP position regarding tax cuts and deregulation for business. He also supports the faux libertarianism of his most dedicated supporters. Orban, on the other hand, has no use for libertarianism of any sort, and wants to be at the apex of a neo-feudal economy, like Putin. Trump can barely dream about the level of arbitrary interference with business and centralized power that have become Orban’s calling card.

Not that the reactionary right objects to it.

It occurred to me this morning that if you believe that there is no such thing as objective truth, and that “truth” is consequently dictated solely by power, then power itself creates a kind of legitimacy. There is every reason to believe that Trump accepted this view in 2016, and he may believe it today.

His supporters do not, however. The power theory only works if your rule is a series of unbroken successes. Any regime built on it is consequently unstable, and succession is a problem without a good solution. It is far more likely , therefore, that the reactionary right will base its claims on a divine mandate than on the awesomeness of one man.

By what right does the government rule? In the end, there are only two answers to that question. In a liberal system, legitimate power flows upward from the people, as expressed in open and fair elections. The other possibility is God, as expressed through conquest, revelation, miracles, or by genetic inheritance from someone who received one of the above-listed signs of God’s favor. The Taliban, who (in their eyes) won power by following God’s will, and who openly reject democracy, are an excellent example of the latter group.

If you’re Viktor Orban, or some other supporter of illiberal democracy, you have a problem, because you are stuck in between. You may well believe that your power comes from God, and that any government that does not reflect God’s will (as you interpret it) is illegitimate, but you probably don’t have the nerve to say that in public in 2021. The “solution” is to throw red meat to the faithful and rig the system, while pretending to adhere to the concept of popular sovereignty. That is what Orban does, and that is why Donald Trump is such a danger to our system, in spite of his innumerable personal shortcomings.

On the 46th President Joe.

His big plan has a long way to go.

Some parts have been dropped.

Will it end as a flop?

At this point, I don’t honestly know.