Rod Dreher's Blog, page 491

Good Church Diversity, Bad Church Diversity

So if your church is now spending more energy seeking #immigrants than it (ever) did lower class whites, now you know why Trump is POTUS.

— Anthony Bradley (@drantbradley) February 1, 2017

Discuss.

(P.S. Anthony Bradley is an African-American theologian who teaches at The King’s College in New York.)

View From Your Table

Bari, Italy

The reader (you know who) writes:

Bari sea urchins. Raw. Briny as all hell—I mean heaven…

I WANT TO EAT THEM RIGHT NOW!

Walker Percy Weekend 2017 Tickets Available

Photo courtesy Christopher R. Harris, copyright Christopher Harris, all rights reserved

It’s that time of the year again: Walker Percy Weekend 2017 tickets are now on sale. 

Here’s the line-up of this year’s speakers.  Of particular note to readers of this blog, Baylor’s Ralph Wood is going to give a lecture on Walker Percy and the Benedict Option. Lost Cove, Tenn., we’re looking at you!

From Lost In The Cosmos, this proposal from Abbot Leibowitz, concerning a post-apocalyptic settlement. For all he knows, the Pope did not survive the nuclear holocaust, nor did any bishops; he might be the pope:

We can’t promise you Lost Cove, but we can promise you the bounty of early-summer West Feliciana Parish, with its bourbon stroll, literary talk, boiled crawfish, and Southern companionability. Won’t you join us this year? It’ll be the first weekend in June. We hope this year we can avoid breaking Franklin Evans’s leg.

If you’ve not yet met and had a drink with Mary Pratt Percy Lobdell, one of Walker and Bunt’s two daughters, you have missed out on something special. Mary Pratt always comes to the festival, and she is always a blast. Come see her. Come see us.

UPDATE: I should add that tickets are limited. When they’re gone, they’re gone. We sell about 450 each year, but no more than that.

Gorsuch And The Evangelium Mortis

A law-professor reader writes:

Did you see today’s NYT editorial on Gorsuch (Neil Gorsuch, the Nominee for a Stolen Seat)? Setting aside the silliness of the claim that the Senate had a constitutional obligation to give Garland an up-or-down vote (the overwhelming consensus of Con Law scholars is that the Senate can exercise the advise and consent power however it chooses, as that’s kind of the point.  You know, separation of powers and all that), but did you catch the Times’ choice of quote?

Not that it should surprise anyone by now, but in yet another example of the utter tone-deaf, morally bankrupt nature of the left (and the NYT editorial board),  the only quote they pull from all of Gorsuch’s writing and judicial opinions — and presumably the most shocking and worrisome quote they could find to make the case that he is dangerous to our “rights” — is the following:

While Judge Gorsuch’s views on abortion are not known, he has written extensively about assisted suicide and euthanasia. In his book on the topic, he wrote that “human life is fundamentally and inherently valuable, and that the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong.”

Alas—let us all clutch our pearls!  This man rejects “the intentional taking of human life by private persons.” Paging Peter Singer.

In all seriousness, I am still trying to get my head around the fact that, to the NYT Editorial Board, the view that “human life is fundamentally and inherently valuable, and the intentional taking of human life by private persons is always wrong” is prima facie evidence of a dangerous moral worldview.  And yes, I get that it would foreclose euthanasia, a pet of the left, but still, is this really the fat, ripe target that the NYT thinks it is?

Seems to me it shows all one needs to know about the utter bankruptcy of the left’s moral vision at this stage in Western politics that this is the quotation they chose to persuade the reader of Gorsuch’s extreme conservatism.

The reader is correct. For the Times editorial board and the people for whom it speaks, not even life itself has precedence over individual autonomy. Notice that the editorial doesn’t even attempt to argue the point; its authors simply assume that Gorsuch’s statement is obviously beyond the pale. Utterly chilling — and also clarifying.

Consider these words of Pope Saint John Paul II, from his encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life):

All this explains, at least in part, how the value of life can today undergo a kind of “eclipse”, even though conscience does not cease to point to it as a sacred and inviolable value, as is evident in the tendency to disguise certain crimes against life in its early or final stages by using innocuous medical terms which distract attention from the fact that what is involved is the right to life of an actual human person.

In fact, while the climate of widespread moral uncertainty can in some way be explained by the multiplicity and gravity of today’s social problems, and these can sometimes mitigate the subjective responsibility of individuals, it is no less true that we are confronted by an even larger reality, which can be described as a veritable structure of sin. This reality is characterized by the emergence of a culture which denies solidarity and in many cases takes the form of a veritable “culture of death”. This culture is actively fostered by powerful cultural, economic and political currents which encourage an idea of society excessively concerned with efficiency. Looking at the situation from this point of view, it is possible to speak in a certain sense of a war of the powerful against the weak: a life which would require greater acceptance, love and care is considered useless, or held to be an intolerable burden, and is therefore rejected in one way or another. A person who, because of illness, handicap or, more simply, just by existing, compromises the well-being or life-style of those who are more favoured tends to be looked upon as an enemy to be resisted or eliminated. In this way a kind of “conspiracy against life” is unleashed. This conspiracy involves not only individuals in their personal, family or group relationships, but goes far beyond, to the point of damaging and distorting, at the international level, relations between peoples and States.

More:

On a more general level, there exists in contemporary culture a certain Promethean attitude which leads people to think that they can control life and death by taking the decisions about them into their own hands. What really happens in this case is that the individual is overcome and crushed by a death deprived of any prospect of meaning or hope. We see a tragic expression of all this in the spread of euthanasia-disguised and surreptitious, or practised openly and even legally. As well as for reasons of a misguided pity at the sight of the patient’s suffering, euthanasia is sometimes justified by the utilitarian motive of avoiding costs which bring no return and which weigh heavily on society. Thus it is proposed to eliminate malformed babies, the severely handicapped, the disabled, the elderly, especially when they are not self-sufficient, and the terminally ill. Nor can we remain silent in the face of other more furtive, but no less serious and real, forms of euthanasia. These could occur for example when, in order to increase the availability of organs for transplants, organs are removed without respecting objective and adequate criteria which verify the death of the donor.

The New York Times editorial board brings to its readers the evangelium mortem — the gospel of death. Said God to the Hebrews, “This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.” These are the stakes. As I said, this editorial is clarifying.

UPDATE: I’m informed by Latin-speaking readers that it should be “mortis” not “mortem”. I have made the change. Live by Google Translate, die by Google Translate…

A Benedict Of The Protestants?

I went back this morning to read political scientist James Kurth’s brilliant 2001 speech delivered to the Philadelphia Society, on the subject of what he calls “the Protestant Deformation”  and how it affects US foreign policy. Kurth, a Swarthmore professor, is a conservative Presbyterian layman active in his church (see here for biographical information). He delivered this speech before the 9/11 attacks. Later, Kurtz openly opposed the Iraq War from the right.

The gist of the speech is that American foreign policy is an expression of desacralized Protestantism. From the beginning:

We will argue that American foreign policy has been, and continues to be, shaped by the Protestant origins of the United States. But the Protestantism that has shaped American foreign policy over two centuries has not been the original religion but a series of successive departures from it down the scale of what might be called the Protestant declension. We are now at the end point of this declension, and the Protestantism that shapes American foreign policy today is a peculiar heresy of the original religion, not the Protestant Reformation but what might be called the Protestant Deformation. With the United States left as the sole superpower, this Protestant Deformation is at its greatest, even global influence. But because it is such a peculiar religion, and indeed is correctly seen as a fundamental and fatal threat by all the other religions, its pervasive sway is generating intense resistance and international conflict.

The very nature of the Protestant Deformation conceals its religious essence from its adherents, such that they don’t readily grasp that it is parasitic on Christianity, despite its pretensions to be wholly secular. Kurth focuses on how liberal democracy and free markets developed out of the Protestant worldview, and demonstrates how the “American creed” (= the natural and obvious superiority of liberal democracy and free markets) taken for granted by most Americans is only something that could have emerged from a Protestant society.

Here’s Kurth:

In the 1970s, American political and intellectual elites began to promote the notion of universal human rights as a fundamental goal of American foreign policy. This conception took the central elements of the American Creed and carried them to a logical conclusion and to a universal extent.

It was a conjunction of factors that caused American elites to embrace universal human rights at that time. First, those elites

James Kurth (photo via Swarthmore College)

who had condemned the U.S. intervention in the Vietnam War needed to develop a new doctrine for American foreign policy to replace the doctrine of containment, which in their eyes was now discredited. Secondly, the surge in U.S. trade and investment in newly-industrializing countries beyond Europe and Japan caused some elites to see a need to develop a new doctrine for American foreign policy that could be applied to a wide variety of different (and often difficult) countries and cultures. Most importantly, however, were changes within the American people themselves. America was changing from an industrial to a post-industrial economy and thus from a producer to a consumer mentality. It was also changing from a modern to a post-modern society and thus from an ideology of “possessive individualism” to an ideology of “expressive individualism.” The new post-industrial, consumer, post-modern, expressive-individualist America was embodied in the “me generation,” i.e., the baby-boomer generation. For them, the rights (and definitely not the responsibilities) of the individual (and definitely not of the community) were the highest, indeed the only, good.

In the new ideology, human rights are thus seen as the rights of individuals. The individual’s rights are independent of any hierarchy or community, traditions or customs, in which that individual might be situated. This means that human rights are applicable to any individual, anywhere in the world, i.e., they are universal, and not merely communal or national. There is thus a close logical connection between the rights of the individual and the universality of those rights. Individual rights are universal rights, and universal rights are individual rights.

Numerous social analysts have noted that the United States has become in the past two decades a new kind of political society, what has been called “the republic of choice.”2 It is characterized by the “rights revolution” in law, “freedom of choice” in politics, “consumer sovereignty” in economics, “question authority” in attitudes, and “expressive individualism” in ideology. In regard to spiritual life, one manifestation of this new mentality is “New Age.”

The ideology of expressive individualism thus reaches into all aspects of society; it is a total philosophy. The result appears to be totally opposite from the totalitarianism of the state, but it is a sort of totalitarianism of the self. Both totalitarianisms are relentless in breaking down intermediate bodies and mediating institutions that stand between the individual and the highest powers or the widest forces. With the totalitarianism of the state, the highest powers are the authorities of the nation state; with the totalitarianism of the self, the widest forces are the agencies of the global economy.

Expressive individualism — with its contempt for and protest against all hierarchies, communities, traditions, and customs — represents the logical conclusion and the ultimate extreme of the secularization of the Protestant religion. The Holy Trinity of original Protestantism, the Supreme Being of unitarianism, the American nation of the American Creed have all been dethroned and replaced by the imperial self. The long declension of the Protestant Reformation has reached its end point in the Protestant Deformation. The Protestant Deformation is a Protestantism without God, a reformation against all forms.

I would dearly love to read a Kurth essay on the Protestant Deformation in the Age of Trump — fourteen years after the Iraq War, and amid the emerging political crisis across the West. The conclusion of his Protestant Deformation speech made me think of the Benedict Option:

The Protestant Reformation was a prime movement in the making of the modern era. Five hundred years later, the Protestant deformation is a prime movement in the making of the post-modern era. The Protestant Reformation was the most unique of all religions. The Protestant deformation seeks the end of all religions, or rather it seeks to replace the worship of God with the expression of the self.

The Protestant Reformation brought into being the first nation states and the first great powers of the modern era. The most Reformed Protestant of all nations was the United States, and it became the greatest of all great powers as well. Much of the power of the United States can be traced to the energy, efficacy, and organization that was a legacy of its Reformed Protestantism. However, the Protestant deformation, because of its universalist and individualist creed, seeks the end of all nation states and to replace loyalty to America with gratification of oneself. It relentlessly undermines the authority of the United States, the superpower which promotes that creed throughout the world.

In his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon once wrote that the Roman Empire spread the Christian religion throughout the ancient world, but that the Christian religion then undermined the Roman Empire. Now, the American empire is spreading the Protestant deformation throughout the modern world, but the Protestant deformation is beginning to undermine the American empire.

Perhaps one day, on the open and hostile terrain that has become the global economy and amid the empty formalisms of what was once liberal democracy, there will be found an individual. Once so intoxicated with his boisterous self-expression but now so exhausted from stress and strain, he at last recognizes how lonely and isolated he has become. Then perhaps he will turn and seek his refuge and his safety in the protection of a hierarchy, the support of a community, and the comfort of traditions and customs. And then perhaps too he will turn and seek his salvation by becoming open to receive the grace of God.

In other words, the Protestant man comes to realize that the grace of God can in fact be mediated to him through hierarchy, community, traditions, and customs. This doesn’t mean he becomes a Catholic (or an Orthodox), necessarily, but it does mean that he turns away from the dead end of radical individualism.

Next week, I’m going to Louisville to give four lectures on the Benedict Option at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Boyce College (they’re the same place; SBTS is on the grounds of Boyce). Since I began this Ben Op project, I have been amazed and delighted by the enthusiasm that younger Evangelical Protestants have shown for it. I don’t know the Evangelical world, though I have been getting to know it much better over the past two years. I sense a real creative ferment there for grounding in tradition, and a pushback against Americanist individualism. Again, I don’t see a desire to leave Protestantism, but rather a curiosity about what resources there are within the Protestant tradition to reclaim a greater rootedness.

I cannot presume to tell Protestant Christians how they should live out the Benedict Option within their tradition. That will be up to them to work out. All I can do is present the Benedict Option as I understand it, and hope that within their circles, they come up with ways to adapt it to an authentic Evangelicalism. This is my hope for the Ben Op book: that it seeds these conversations among all kinds of Christians — conversations that lead to action.

So, to you readers today, especially Protestant readers: take a look at Kurth’s final paragraph. What do the social and political problems of our own current moment make you think about Protestantism as a historical and social phenomenon. What are the resources within the Protestant tradition that could provide a basis for resistance and recovery to the disintegrating forces ravaging our society?

UPDATE: Sorry that I inadvertently called him “Kurtz” on several occasions in this essay. Thanks to a reader for catching the error.

Trump’s Not Putin; He’s Mohamed Morsi

A reader writes, starting by quoting me:

“It wasn’t enough to justify a vote for Trump on my part, but it did cause me to abstain, as I saw them both as poisonous.”

I have been thinking about this particular stance of yours in the context of the very same passage from Dante’s Inferno for months now.

When I was a kid, my friends and I would often roam the dilapidated streets of the small (Bohemian) town where I was growing up. Sometimes the adults would yell at us for being a pain, and sometimes we would yell back: “what were you doing in ’48?!?” What we were saying to them (without really understanding it) was: “where is your moral high ground now, eh? You have none!” Many of those quite decent people chose not to participate in the political circus of 1947 and 1948. That helped the communists win fairly democratic elections and forced the president to name a communist prime minister.

There still was a chance. A Czech version of gen. Pinochet was on offer. Instead, the non-communist members of the government found it morally unacceptable and decided to resign. A few months later the president was dead, and the very same people found themselves occupying much lower grounds scraping uranium ore from mineshaft walls with teaspoons.

The Benedict Option did not work out well either. Religious orders were rounded up and sent to the same mines or gulags. Faith-based groups were dispersed and punished severely. Would I have preferred a Pinochet to the total social and economic, generations-long devastation? Absolutely.

I guess what I am trying to say here is that perhaps making a pact with the devil is sometimes the moral thing to do.

Well, I would have too, and had the choice been between communism or Trump (or an American Pinochet), I would have had no qualms about voting Trump. That wasn’t the case, not remotely. I mean, I agree with the reader’s point that in politics, sometimes you do have to make a pact with the devil. I’m not convinced that 2016 was one of those times. Besides, as I’ve said here, my withholding my vote was ultimately an act of vanity; Trump won my home state easily, meaning my anti-Trump vote, had I cast one, would have been meaningless. Had I lived in a swing state, I am pretty sure I would have been compelled by conscience to have voted one way or another.

Still, let me say again: the reader is right about politics sometimes putting you in a position in which you have to choose one evil to avoid a worse evil (though I think to call Trump or H. Clinton “evil” is to devalue the term). What bothers we about the way establishment Washington (of both parties) is resisting Trump is what looks to me like failure on its part to understand why the electorate had lost so much faith in it that it voted for a man like Donald Trump as the lesser evil.

On the other side, it is becoming clear that Trump’s administrative and political incompetence is going to cost us all. Ross Douthat has a good column today talking about how populism in power often fails to deliver, because the things that made it work on the campaign trail puts it at a disadvantage at governing. Excerpt:

Second, having campaigned against elites and experts and all their pomps and works, populists imagine that their zeal can carry all before it, that proceduralism and institutional knowledge are for losers and toadies and men with soft hands, and that a few guys in the White House can execute a major overhaul of a delicate system without bureaucratic patience or rhetorical finesse.

This assumption is deeply mistaken, for reasons evident this weekend — in the chaotic scenes at airports, the spectacle of people already in transit being turned away, the crazy attempt to apply the ban to permanent residents, the absence of obvious carve-outs and exceptions, the failure to get adequate buy-in or advice from cabinet officials, and the blowback from Trump’s political allies as well as his opponents.

Then, finally, because populism thrives on its willingness to shatter norms, it tends to treat this chaos and blowback as a kind of vindication — a sign that it’s on the right track, that its boldness is meeting inevitable resistance from the failed orthodoxies of the past, and so on through a self-comforting litany. That makes it hard for populists to course correct, because they get stuck in a “the worse the better” loop, reassuring themselves that they’re making progress when actually they’re cratering.

Read the whole thing.  Douthat says that Trump has not shown either the popularity or the political skill to be an American Putin. Rather, he looks more like the hapless Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who was elected president of Egypt, but who was so administratively incompetent and politically maladroit that he provoked a coup. Douthat does not predict a coup for the US, but he does predict that Trump’s tenure will be ineffective, in part because he will have alienated the people in both Congress and in the bureaucracy who are needed to make the trains run on time.

Nobody knows yet what’s going to happen. We are in uncharted territory. One danger that conservatives face is that Trump’s blunders will call forth a massive reaction from the left — remember, Trump really did lose the popular vote — and bring to power Democrats who are ideologically fired up and eager to punish. In other words, we wouldn’t be looking at a restoration of establishment governance in terms of restoring the status quo, but a relative radicalization of the establishment. If I were a liberal Democrat, I would want nothing to do with anything Clintonian; I would be demanding stronger stuff.

The danger the Democrats face is that their party will rally behind a Jeremy Corbyn figure. The danger the rest of us face is that their party will rally behind an American Hugo Chavez. To be sure, I don’t think American political culture can produce a Hugo Chavez, or a right-wing counterpart. But a year ago, I didn’t think Donald Trump would be our president, so what do I know?

Here’s a prediction, based on my early reading of René Girard’s work. If Trump continues on this path of antagonism and incompetence, social divisions will intensify. We will either come apart, or we will unite around scapegoating Trump. We will agree that he is responsible for our problems, and that only by ridding ourselves of him and those associated with him can we restore the peace. Whether or not this is true, this will be the story most of us agree on, because the alternative is communal disintegration. And Evangelical Christians, for whom the left has particular contempt (and who are unbeloved by elite Republicans), will be scapegoated along with Trump, whom they embraced as their champion.

With Gorsuch, Trump Delivers

So it’s Neil Gorsuch for SCOTUS: a jurist who is conservative, but not mad about it.

With this pick, the president has come through in a big way for socially conservative voters who chose him over Hillary Clinton because of the Supreme Court’s future. On Gorsuch’s views regarding religious liberty, Andrew T. Walker says:

In addition to his defense of Hobby Lobby’s religious liberty claim, Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion in a little-known but significant religious liberty case. In Yellowbear v. Lampert (2014), Gorsuch sided with the plaintiff, Andrew Yellowbear, a prisoner of native American descent who sued the Wyoming Department of Corrections for preventing him access to a sweat lodge which he argued was part of his faith. Gorsuch ruled that the Department of Correction violated Yellowbear’s religious rights.

In his ruling, Gorsuch noted that applicable law regarding sincerely held religious belief protects considerably more than the right to hold religious belief in private. Rather, the law protects religious exercise. He explained, “Even if others of the same faith may consider the exercise at issue unnecessary or less valuable than the claimant, even if some may find it illogical, that doesn’t take it outside the law’s protection. Instead, RLUIPA protects any exercise of a sincerely held religious belief. When a sincere religious claimant draws a line ruling in or out a particular religious exercise, “it is not for us to say that the line he drew was an unreasonable one.” He also cited the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (1993) in his opinion, noting that it “passed nearly unanimously” and that “RFRA was (and remains) something of a ‘super-statute.’”

Gorsuch has not ruled on abortion case, but he has come out against euthanasia.

SCOTUS Blog has a thorough description and analysis of Gorsuch as nominee. Excerpt:

In fact, one study has identified him as the most natural successor to Justice Antonin Scalia on the Trump shortlist, both in terms of his judicial style and his substantive approach.

With perhaps one notable area of disagreement, Judge Gorsuch’s prominent decisions bear the comparison out. For one thing, the great compliment that Gorsuch’s legal writing is in a class with Scalia’s is deserved: Gorsuch’s opinions are exceptionally clear and routinely entertaining; he is an unusual pleasure to read, and it is always plain exactly what he thinks and why. Like Scalia, Gorsuch also seems to have a set of judicial/ideological commitments apart from his personal policy preferences that drive his decision-making. He is an ardent textualist (like Scalia); he believes criminal laws should be clear and interpreted in favor of defendants even if that hurts government prosecutions (like Scalia); he is skeptical of efforts to purge religious expression from public spaces (like Scalia); he is highly dubious of legislative history (like Scalia); and he is less than enamored of the dormant commerce clause (like Scalia). In fact, some of the parallels can be downright eerie. For example, the reasoning in Gorsuch’s 2008 concurrence in United States v. Hinckley, in which he argues that one possible reading of the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act would probably violate the rarely invoked non-delegation principle, is exactly the same as that of Scalia’s 2012 dissent in Reynolds v. United States. The notable exception is one prominent concurrence last August, in Gutierrez-Brizuela v. Lynch, in which Gorsuch criticized a doctrine of administrative law (called Chevron deference) that Scalia had long defended. Even here, however, there may be more in common than meets the eye.

Of course I’m thrilled with Gorsuch and very pleased that Trump vindicated the decision of many social and religious conservatives to vote for him over the Court. But look at this: Here’s an interesting piece in the NYT by Neal Katyal, who was acting solicitor general under President Obama, making the case that liberals should back Gorsuch. Excerpts:

I am hard-pressed to think of one thing President Trump has done right in the last 11 days since his inauguration. Until Tuesday, when he nominated an extraordinary judge and man, Neil Gorsuch, to be a justice on the Supreme Court.

The nomination comes at a fraught moment. The new administration’s executive actions on immigration have led to chaos everywhere from the nation’s airports to the Department of Justice. They have raised justified concern about whether the new administration will follow the law. More than ever, public confidence in our system of government depends on the impartiality and independence of the courts.

There is a very difficult question about whether there should be a vote on President Trump’s nominee at all, given the Republican Senate’s history-breaking record of obstruction on Judge Merrick B. Garland — perhaps the most qualified nominee ever for the high court. But if the Senate is to confirm anyone, Judge Gorsuch, who sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in Denver, should be at the top of the list.

More:

I, for one, wish it were a Democrat choosing the next justice. But since that is not to be, one basic criterion should be paramount: Is the nominee someone who will stand up for the rule of law and say no to a president or Congress that strays beyond the Constitution and laws?

I have no doubt that if confirmed, Judge Gorsuch would help to restore confidence in the rule of law. His years on the bench reveal a commitment to judicial independence — a record that should give the American people confidence that he will not compromise principle to favor the president who appointed him.

Katyal’s argument is that while it is tempting for Senate Democrats to exact payback for the GOP-controlled Senate’s sandbagging Merrick Garland’s SCOTUS nomination, if they are ultimately going to confirm somebody sent up by Trump, they would do well to confirm Gorsuch, who is not going to be a rubber stamp for Trump.

I know nothing about Gorsuch’s jurisprudence or temperament, but I suspect Katyal is right about that. Thinking like a Democrat here, I would be sorely tempted to pay the GOP back for what they did to Garland. But the Republicans were in a different political situation when Justice Scalia died last February. Everybody knew an election was coming up, and that the Court’s future would be a major issue. I think they owed Garland a hearing and a vote as a matter of fair play, but it was certainly plausible to hold off until the election decided matters.

The Democrats will not be able to stall for the next four years, especially given the advanced ages of Justices Breyer, Kennedy, and Ginsburg. If they scapegoat Gorsuch for the sins of Mitch McConnell et alia, they will probably not like the next nominee sent to the Senate by President Trump as much. Besides, the Gorsuch nomination is not the hill for Democrats to die on, as it only restores the status quo to the Court it had when Scalia was alive. The nominee to follow Gorsuch is the one that matters more.

UPDATE: Damon Root writes at Reason:

Gorsuch has also rejected pro-government deference in the Fourth Amendment context. For instance, in his 2016 dissent in United States v. Carloss, Gorsuch strongly objected to the majority’s view that police officers had the “implied consent” to enter private property for a warrantless “knock and talk” on a homeowner’s front porch even though the homeowner had placed multiple “No Trespassing” signs around the property and even on the front door. Under the government’s flawed theory of the Fourth Amendment, Gorsuch complained, “a homeowner may post as many No Trespassing signs as she wishes. She might add a wall or a medieval-style moat, too. Maybe razor wire and battlements and mantraps besides. Even that isn’t enough to revoke the state’s right to enter.” As Gorsuch dryly observed, “this line of reasoning seems to me difficult to reconcile with the Constitution of the founders’ design.”

Gorsuch demonstrated admirable and reassuring judgment in these cases. Not only did he cast a principled vote against overreaching law enforcement, he cast a principled vote against the overreaching executive branch. It’s not difficult to imagine Gorsuch imposing the same severe judicial scrutiny against the misdeeds of the Trump administration.

Amen to that.

Those Stung By Wasps

In Dante’s Inferno, the pilgrim begins his journey at the borders of Hell. He encounters a mass of people running this way and that. He describes them like this:

These wretches, who never were alive,

were naked and beset

by stinging flies and wasps

These are those who in life lacked passion. They never committed one way or the other, but rather drifted with the wind. They went with the crowd, hoping to avoid trouble, but ended up being caught and tortured for eternity by the stings they wanted to avoid in the mortal life. In death, neither heaven nor hell wants them, because they believed in nothing other than their own safety or comfort.

David Brooks’s column today brought those damned souls to mind.  In it, he talks about what we have learned these past 10 days or so about the kind of president Donald Trump is and will be. Excerpts:

Many Republican members of Congress have made a Faustian bargain with Donald Trump. They don’t particularly admire him as a man, they don’t trust him as an administrator, they don’t agree with him on major issues, but they respect the grip he has on their voters, they hope he’ll sign their legislation and they certainly don’t want to be seen siding with the inflamed progressives or the hyperventilating media.

Their position was at least comprehensible: How many times in a lifetime does your party control all levers of power? When that happens you’re willing to tolerate a little Trumpian circus behavior in order to get things done.

But if the last 10 days have made anything clear, it’s this: The Republican Fausts are in an untenable position. The deal they’ve struck with the devil comes at too high a price. It really will cost them their soul.

More:

None of these traits will improve with time. As former Bush administration official Eliot Cohen wrote in The Atlantic, “Precisely because the problem is one of temperament and character, it will not get better. It will get worse, as power intoxicates Trump and those around him. It will probably end in calamity — substantial domestic protest and violence, a breakdown of international economic relationships, the collapse of major alliances, or perhaps one or more new wars (even with China) on top of the ones we already have. It will not be surprising in the slightest if his term ends not in four or in eight years, but sooner, with impeachment or removal under the 25th Amendment.”

The danger signs are there in profusion. Sooner or later, the Republican Fausts will face a binary choice. As they did under Nixon, Republican leaders will have to either oppose Trump and risk his tweets, or sidle along with him and live with his stain.

Read the whole thing.  It’s an important column, even if you are more favorably disposed to Trump than Brooks is. I’d say that’s me, though for different reasons than the GOP legislator of Brooks’s column. I don’t trust Trump, I don’t like Trump, and I don’t agree with everything he stands for, but I am not wholeheartedly opposed to him — not in the way #NeverTrump Republicans were and are — because I believe the system we had needed change, and because I was (and remain) certain that under a Hillary Clinton presidency, the religious liberty of believers who do not share her social progressivism would have been more strongly curtailed. It wasn’t enough to justify a vote for Trump on my part, but it did cause me to abstain, as I saw them both as poisonous.

That said, even we who are more willing to give Trump a chance have to think clearly about what we can tolerate, and what we cannot, because it is very clear that Trump is going to test our limits. David Brooks draws his personal line in a different place than many of us do, but he’s right about this: Trump is going to push right up to everybody’s line, because he is unmoored by conviction and unrestrained by prudence. Congressional Republicans — and conservatives in general — have a moral responsibility to act as a brake on him. But they (we) can’t do that unless we have in our minds clear principles on which we cannot allow ourselves to compromise, or rather, to be compromised. We have to be prepared to lose with honor than win with dishonor, because we fear a judge greater than the voters.

The astonishing audacity and recklessness with which Trump has begun his presidency is a bad sign. For me, it is not so much what he has done (though I do object to some of it) as it is the reckless manner in which he has done it. As every well-raised Southern child knows, manners express morality. Yes, manners are artificial, but they embody a social code that governs the conduct of people who live under it. True, it is always better to do the right thing than to work unrighteousness under the cover of minding one’s manners. But as Brooks points out, there’s something crude and vicious about the way Trump goes out of his way to provoke, to rub the noses of his opponents in the exercise of his power. In Trump’s case, manners express the man.

In other words, we know what kind of president Trump is going to be by the way he has carried out his executive actions so far. He does not consider himself bound by law or custom. He is a law unto himself. That doesn’t make him wrong about everything, but it does serve as fair warning to Republicans and conservatives, both on Capitol Hill and out in the country: sooner or later, he’s going to make us take sides. In the moment of testing, you will only be able to make the right call then if you have prepared your conscience, and exercised it by being more faithful to the Truth than to your president.

What Came Before ‘Autocracy’

David Frum’s cover story in the current Atlantic is worth reading. It’s titled How To Build An Autocracy, and of course it’s about Trump. Frum says:

By all early indications, the Trump presidency will corrode public integrity and the rule of law—and also do untold damage to American global leadership, the Western alliance, and democratic norms around the world. The damage has already begun, and it will not be soon or easily undone. Yet exactly how much damage is allowed to be done is an open question—the most important near-term question in American politics. It is also an intensely personal one, for its answer will be determined by the answer to another question: What will you do? And you? And you?

Of course we want to believe that everything will turn out all right. In this instance, however, that lovely and customary American assumption itself qualifies as one of the most serious impediments to everything turning out all right. If the story ends without too much harm to the republic, it won’t be because the dangers were imagined, but because citizens resisted.

The duty to resist should weigh most heavily upon those of us who—because of ideology or partisan affiliation or some other reason—are most predisposed to favor President Trump and his agenda. The years ahead will be years of temptation as well as danger: temptation to seize a rare political opportunity to cram through an agenda that the American majority would normally reject. Who knows when that chance will recur?

A constitutional regime is founded upon the shared belief that the most fundamental commitment of the political system is to the rules. The rules matter more than the outcomes. It’s because the rules matter most that Hillary Clinton conceded the presidency to Trump despite winning millions more votes. It’s because the rules matter most that the giant state of California will accept the supremacy of a federal government that its people rejected by an almost two-to-one margin.

I think he’s right about all of this, but there’s something about it that rubs me the wrong way. No doubt all of this is so clear-cut to Frum because he has long been a member of the Washington establishment. (I don’t say that as a slur, only as a description of his position.) Among the reasons America voted for Donald Trump:

The Iraq War, a war of choice that was unjust, foolish, expensive, and catastrophic. None of the architects of that war, or any of the prominent conservatives who supported it (like David Frum, and a minor National Review writer named Rod Dreher) suffered any loss of power, income, or status because of it. In the Republican Party, no major presidential candidate (Ron Paul was not major) denounced the war as folly until Donald J. Trump spoke those words at the South Carolina GOP presidential debate a year ago. Why did it take 13 years after the launching of that war for a leading Republican presidential candidate to say what most people now recognize is true? The fact that the GOP establishment incompetently got us into that war, and could not own up to its mistake, undermined its credibility.
The 2008 financial crisis wreaked havoc on millions of households. Official Washington — Republicans, Democrats, the Almighty Greenspan — created the policies that brought about the crisis. Wall Street got its money’s worth from all its political contributions: no bigshots were held liable for crashing the US economy and very nearly getting us into a new Great Depression.
Out-of-control immigration. Take a look at this chart from the US Census Bureau:

Since Ronald Reagan took office, America has undergone by far the greatest period of mass immigration in its history. Both Republican and Democratic presidents have overseen this. They remained deaf to the complaints from the grassroots saying it was too much, too fast, and that they wanted the borders defended. So now the US has a president who actually intends to pay attention to these voters. A well-known Washington writer wrote earlier this week to criticize Trump’s Executive Order on immigration, but to say it was inevitable:

When liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals won’t do. This weekend’s shameful chapter in the history of the United States is a reproach not only to Trump, although it is that too, but to the political culture that enabled him. Angela Merkel and Donald Trump may be temperamental opposites. They are also functional allies.

That writer, by the way, was David Frum.

4. Insider corruption and indifference. I refer you once again to the great and perceptive essay Tucker Carlson wrote for Politico a year ago, explaining Trump’s appeal at a time when very few conservative elites could make sense of it. Excerpt:

Everyone beats up on Washington, but most of the people I know who live here love it. Of course they do. It’s beautiful, the people are friendly, we’ve got good restaurants, not to mention full employment and construction cranes on virtually every corner. If you work on Capitol Hill or downtown, it’s hard to walk back from lunch without seeing someone you know. It’s a warm bath. Nobody wants to leave.

But let’s pretend for a second this isn’t Washington. Let’s imagine it’s the capital of an African country, say Burkina Faso, and we are doing a study on corruption. Probably the first question we’d ask: How many government officials have close relatives who make a living by influencing government spending? A huge percentage of them? OK. Case closed. Ouagadougou is obviously a very corrupt city.

That’s how the rest of the country views D.C. Washington is probably the richest city in America because the people who live there have the closest proximity to power. That seems obvious to most voters. It’s less obvious to us, because everyone here is so cheerful and familiar, and we’re too close to it. Chairman so-and-so’s son-in-law lobbies the committee? That doesn’t seem corrupt. He’s such a good guy.

All of which explains why almost nobody in Washington caught the significance of Trump’s finest moment in the first debate. One of the moderators asked, in effect: if you’re so opposed to Hillary Clinton, why did she come to your last wedding? It seemed like a revealing, even devastating question.

Trump’s response, delivered without pause or embarrassment: Because I paid her to be there. As if she was the wedding singer, or in charge of the catering.

You see where I’m going with this. Again, I think a lot of what Frum says in his new piece — which you should read — is true and worth taking seriously. But Trump didn’t come from nowhere. It’s a bit rich to complain about the sanctity of the “rules” when those rules too often didn’t seem to apply to people who weren’t connected, and when the “rules” were too often written to advantage those with money and influence.

To use a more extreme example, Putin emerged from the corruption of the Yeltsin years — and remains popular today. That does not make Putin a good man or a wise leader, but it does tell us why a man of his qualities was chosen by the people of Russia — and why his autocratic behavior doesn’t bother them as much as it ought to. Likewise with Trump.

Boi Scouts Of America

a katz/Shutterstock

Well, you knew this was bound to happen:

The Boy Scouts of America said on Monday the group would begin accepting transgender boys, bucking its more than a century-old practice of using the gender stated on a birth certificate to determine eligibility.

“Starting today, we will accept and register youth in the Cub and Boy Scout programs based on the gender identity indicated on the application,” Boy Scouts of America communications director Effie Delimarkos said in an emailed statement.

Think of it: children with vaginas who present themselves as males will be accepted as males by the Boy (Boi?) Scouts of America. Is it possible for transgenderism to be more establishment than that?

This move came in part from a single case in Secaucus, NJ. Excerpt:

The organization’s leadership had considered a recent case in Secaucus, New Jersey, where an 8-year-old transgender child had been asked to leave his Scout troop after parents and leaders found out he is transgender. But the statement issued Monday said the change was made because of the larger conversation about gender identity going on around the country.

“For more than 100 years, the Boy Scouts of America, along with schools, youth sports and other youth organizations, have ultimately deferred to the information on an individual’s birth certificate to determine eligibility for our single-gender programs,” the statement said. “However, that approach is no longer sufficient as communities and state laws are interpreting gender identity differently, and these laws vary widely from state to state.”

Kristie Maldonado said she had mixed emotions Monday night when a representative of Boy Scouts of America called to tell her the organization would allow her son, Joe, to re-enroll in his troop after he was asked to leave last fall. Maldonado said she would like her son to rejoin the Secaucus troop, but only if the scout leader who made the previous decision leaves.

Says the reader who sent that piece: “It’s the tyranny of the unflinching and uncompromising minority.”

Question to conservative Christians (and other religious conservatives) still involved with the Boy Scouts: Is there a line the organization would cross that would cause you to withdraw? If so, why? And if you’re staying, how come?