Month: February 2024

Nikki Haley wants the Reagan vision for America–the current condition, but with a larger military and a smaller welfare state. DeSantis supported the status quo, with wokeness ripped from our institutions. What is Trump’s vision?

Trump has the entire reactionary dream. In his America, industry and resource extraction drive the economy, not tech and services. Big burly men do jobs requiring lots of physical strength and make lots of money; women stay at home and take care of the children. White Christians have a monopoly on political power. Questions of sex, gender, and race go underground. Environmentalists and members of the woke left simply don’t exist.

The problem with the dream, of course, is that Trump has to uninvent the wheel. The social and economic changes of the last 50 years have to disappear. He can’t accomplish that even with huge tariffs and autocratic rule.

He’s King Lear for the 21st century.

Ross Douthat has argued for years that America is a decadent society; his Exhibit A is our, to him, unacceptably low birthrate. More recently, however, he has finally looked around the world and ascertained that other, more socially conservative countries have even lower birthrates than we do. His new conclusion is that only America can save the world from the declining population bomb. What is going on here?

The reasons for, and solutions to, a declining birth rate are perfectly obvious. If you have a society that gives women lots of opportunities for economic advancement–in all likelihood, requires them to work–but also puts virtually all of the demands of bearing and raising children on them, you’re not going to have many children. There aren’t enough hours in a day.

The reactionary “solution” to this is to envision a country in which men do all of the paying work and women can afford to stay at home and have children–America in the 1950s, in other words. Of course, the reactionaries have no idea how to get there from here except through tariffs. The more plausible approach is to encourage men to play a much bigger role in taking care of children. If you’ve seen the new Amazon commercial that uses the Chicago song “25 or 6 to 4” as a background, you have seen the ideal type for this more feminist society; the stay-at-home dad does a great job with the baby and is rewarded with sex by the mother for his hard work.

A representative of the Heritage Foundation made the claim in a recent NYT interview that the violence associated with the demonstrations following the George Floyd murder was worse than January 6. This is a claim frequently made by members of the right. What does it tell us about their priorities?

January 6 was about subverting the Constitution and the will of the voters; the BLM actions resulted in property damage. Heritage–and it is not alone–attaches more value to torched convenience stores than to liberal democracy.

Years ago, I did a post about how Taylor Swift had successfully transitioned from country to pop music without offending much of anyone. I concluded that the Democratic Party had much to learn from her. Today, reactionary activists view her as the enemy. Does that mean she has lost red America for good?

No, because in America, celebrity and narrative usually trump ideology. Swift is an attractive white pop princess with a jock boyfriend–how perfectly American is that? It sounds like something from a Disney movie. Do you really think teenage girls from red states are going to give up on that just because someone on Fox News says they should?

No, and they haven’t stopped going to Disney parks, either.

Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift

Exposed a deep and ugly rift

Between the far right and the NFL.

They think pro football’s gone to hell.

_________

They could be right, for all I know.

But if they are, where will they go?

They have lots of alternatives, fortunately.

They can still watch NASCAR and the SEC.

To the American right, a “conservative” is someone who believes in traditional values: Christianity; the political, social, and economic supremacy of white men; gender rigidity; and sexual practices as regulated by scripture. Any American institution, including our political system, which no longer promotes this agenda should be taken over and either reformed or destroyed.

To the left and center, a “conservative” is someone who believes in slowing the pace of change to a crawl in order to avoid collateral damage and unexpected consequences. We can only absorb so much at a time. The political system and our institutions are based on the collective experience of millions of people over hundreds of years and should be protected to the maximum extent possible.

Which definition makes more sense? Which of the two party nominees is a genuine “conservative?” You decide.

An article in Politico tells us that Erdogan took a decade to establish illiberal rule in Turkey, so we shouldn’t be concerned that Trump can do it in four years. Should we feel reassured?

No, because it didn’t take Hitler and Mussolini that long. If you follow the processes of liberal democracy to rot it out from the inside, it might take a decade, but if you are determined to win absolute power from the minute you take office, all you need is control over the military and something you can call an emergency. Do we know for certain that Trump won’t try that? No, we don’t.

Hezbollah isn’t a terrorist organization; it’s a state within a state. It has obligations to its constituents in Lebanon. It has plenty of power in Beirut, too. In other words, it has a lot to lose in a war with Israel. As a result, it has been relatively responsible over the last few months; it has lobbed a few missiles at the Israelis, and made life at the border impossible, but it shows no interest in starting a full-scale war. I don’t expect that to change any time soon.

The Houthis are a different story, even though they are also a state within a state. Having beaten the Saudis, they are suffering from delusions of grandeur; they probably think if they suck us into a war on their terms, they can beat us, too. It won’t happen. American military action against them will be solely focused on maintaining freedom of navigation in the Red Sea.

The pro-Iranian militias in Iraq are even worse. What are they trying to accomplish by attacking American bases outside of the country? Do they think they have the power to drive us out of the Middle East? Do they think weakening the international effort against IS, which just killed hundreds of people in a despicable terrorist bombing in Iran, is a good idea?

What they are actually doing is creating a threat to Iran. The Iranian government needs to get a grip on these guys as soon as possible.

Reactionaries turn everything into cultural wars and conspiracies, so it is no surprise that they have concocted a ridiculous narrative about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. But the opposition in the Super Bowl represents San Francisco, one of the cities the right really loves to hate. And Colin Kaepernick played for the 49ers, for God’s sake! It doesn’t get any worse than that.

The right loves the violence of football, but it has a completely unpalatable choice here. Don’t you feel sorry for them?