Rod Dreher's Blog, page 584

Donald The Brute?

A Southern reader who identifies himself as “Christian, Catholic, Republican, veteran (peacetime)” writes to say:

I am writing, briefly, about Trump, and Trump hatred. For instance, Dr [Russell] Moore, who I know is your buddy. He is so appalled and offended by Trump’s brutishness. I can see it. But it seems to me all out of proportion, versus Bush-Cheney — lies, torture, thousands of dead American soldiers, more maimed, not to mention hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis. Where was he (and Erick Erickson and the rest) back then? And not a one of them ever had the character to say, we were wrong, we screwed up. I have to say, it seems to me that many of these “conservatives” have malformed consciences. Did Bush get a free pass on this stuff because he was an evangelical and spoke a certain religious language? Or because he promised progress on the pro-life front (none of which was ever delivered by the way)?

I think the reader has a point, though I don’t know where Russell Moore stands on the Iraq War today, where he stood back when it started, or what he has said in the interim. For what it’s worth, he is (or once was) a Democrat who worked for a former Democratic US Congressman from Mississippi. If Dr. Moore has the time and the interest in responding to the reader’s remarks, I will publish it here. I want to caution you readers, though, not to impute things to him he may not believe.

To give a broader context for the reader’s observations, in a Pew survey taken back in 2009, 62 percent of white Evangelicals polled defended torture, and 52 percent of white Catholics, said that torture was either “often” or “sometimes” justified — in the Evangelical case, that’s significantly greater than the general US population. And the more often someone went to church, the more likely they were to support torture.

Leaving aside his criticism of specific people, I think the reader’s general point is worth pondering: that some of the things that Trump critics deplore about him amount to picking specks out of his eye while ignoring logs in their own. I won’t go into the GOP presidential candidates guilty of this, because they don’t matter anymore, but it’s worth thinking about how willing Trump’s conservative critics were to criticize his opponents for supporting the Iraq disaster, which turned the Middle East into a charnel house of instability. Remember when Trump brought this up in the South Carolina debate, how Jeb Bush complained that Trump was insulting his family — and none of the other candidates agreed with Trump, or ever did?

(By the way, Trump in March called for US ground troops in Syria and Iraq.  This is why I don’t trust what he says about being a non-interventionist.)

Note well, for example, that Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State, pushed the destruction of Libya, which destabilized the region, further empowered ISIS, and has contributed to the mass illegal migration into Europe, from Libya — and she’s still defending it!

Look, for all we know, Trump in power would have done the same thing, or the same sort of thing. And Trump has certainly endorsed torture, with a particularly disgusting relish. I think he deserves to be criticized for this and other things he says. But I appreciate the reader’s pointing out the double standard here. Is it plausible to say that the difference between George W. Bush and his team, versus Donald Trump, on the subject of torture is that the respectable Republicans denied and euphemized the horror of it away, while Trump is not a hypocrite or a dissembler about the matter?

That’s hardly an endorsement of Trump, mind you, but the reader’s comments make me think that a lot of us — me included — had better try to understand why people who are more sympathetic to Trump than we are find our objections to him less than compelling.

What do you think? I find myself in the position of believing that Trump is likely to get us into another war because of his crude recklessness … but that Hillary Clinton is likely to do the same because of her sophisticated, think-tanked-to-the-hilt, establishment-approved recklessness.

What The Media Don’t Let You See

Everybody’s talking about the Gizmodo piece quoting anonymous people who used to work for Facebook, who … well, this:

Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.

Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module.

In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing—but it is in stark contrast to the company’s claims that the trending module simply lists “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.”

So they suppressed news that people were actually talking about, and pretended that more people were talking about things like Black Lives Matter on Facebook than really were, because BLM is something the company’s leadership believes in.

Last week, Gizmodo talked to former journalists who worked on this project at Facebook. Excerpts:

Launched in January 2014, Facebook’s trending newssection occupies some of the most precious real estate in all of the internet, filling the top-right hand corner of the site with a list of topics people are talking about and links out to different news articles about them. The dozen or so journalists paid to run that section are contractors who work out of the basement of the company’s New York office.

“We were housed in a conference room for two-and-a-half months,” said one former curator (all former curators insisted on anonymity out of concerns over violating their non-disclosure agreements with Facebook). “It was clear that Zuckerberg could squash the project at any moment.”

Just so you know, an estimated 600 million people worldwide see a news story on FB in a given week. That’s one-sixth of the entire planet. Facebook wants to cultivate an image of being totally bias-free, and allowing its users to determine what’s trending and what’s not. But that’s not how it works.

Who were the people choosing these stories?:

The trending news section is run by people in their 20s and early 30s, most of whom graduated from Ivy League and private East Coast schools like Columbia University and NYU. They’ve previously worked at outlets like the New York Daily News, Bloomberg, MSNBC, and the Guardian. Some former curators have left Facebook for jobs at organizations including the New Yorker, Mashable, and Sky Sports.

According to former team members interviewed by Gizmodo, this small group has the power to choose what stories make it onto the trending bar and, more importantly, what news sites each topic links out to. “We choose what’s trending,” said one. “There was no real standard for measuring what qualified as news and what didn’t. It was up to the news curator to decide.”

So East Coast elites were making invisible, unaccountable editorial decisions, while Facebook led its members to believe that they were unbiased, that “trending” was only a thing to do with what its users were actually reading.

It was a lie. Mark Zuckerberg is a fraud.

I’m going to cancel my Facebook account. I don’t really use it much, certainly not as a news source. But if Facebook will lie about that, what other lies is it telling its users?

This is a classic example of how media bias works. Many people believe that media bias is when the media tell people what to believe. Sometimes that happens, but more often than not, media bias occurs when reporters, editors, and producers decide what counts as news, and therefore what the boundaries of public discussion should be.

I saw it happen in my industry over gay marriage. Reporters routinely went out of their way to create positive coverage, and to ignore any objection to it. As one editor I argued with at a newspaper conference said to me, “Do you think we should give fair and balanced coverage to the KKK?” I heard that kind of thing often. Same too with radical Islam in America. It is not news that journalists are overwhelmingly liberal (see here and here and here, for example; the Indiana University study also shows that over 90 percent of journalists are college-educated, which inculcates a massive cultural bias), and that that liberalism causes them to promote causes that are important to them — and, to be fair, I think many of them genuinely don’t understand how skewed their perceptions are. What is most interesting to me, though, is how their biases prevent them from seeing what is right in front of their faces.

Terry Mattingly brings up a good example from The New York Times over the weekend.  Manny Hernandez, a Houston-based Times reporter, wrote a piece explaining Texas. It begins this way:

I was born and raised in Central California, and I moved to Houston from Brooklyn in June 2011 to cover Texas for The New York Times. I live here with my wife, my 7-year-old son and my 3-year-old daughter, who keeps a pair of pink cowboy boots outside on the porch or inside by the front door. I have covered stories in the South, the Midwest and other parts of the country. People in those places identified with their political party, their job, their cause, their sexual orientation, their city, their race. Almost no one identified with their state the way Texans do.

Who are these people, these Texans?

Anybody who lives in Texas, or who has lived in Texas, will immediately spot what’s wrong with that paragraph. For the rest, TMatt explains it for you:

Look at that list of life-shaping forces: That would be “political party,” “job,” “cause,” “sexual orientation,” “city,” “race” and “state.” OK, Texans, can I get a witness? What is missing from that list?

“Religion,” of course. Maybe that’s what the Times guy means when he says “cause”?

You have to really work at it to miss the enormous role religion plays in the lives of Texans. I come from next-door Louisiana, but when I moved to Texas in 2003, I was not prepared for the overwhelming presence of religion in Texas life. Hey, for me, that’s a feature! Like it or not, Texans take their religion seriously. In Dallas, I was surprised to discover that many liberals go to church. Heck, the world’s largest gay church is in Dallas!

But in an otherwise colorful piece describing the unusual character of Texas, the Times correspondent didn’t even mention religion. Funnily enough, this reminded me of the only thing that the best TV show ever, Friday Night Lights, got wrong about Texas: religion. Every now and then an episode would show the characters in church on Sunday, but my wife (a native Texan) said that in small-town Texas, there is simply no way that church would be at the periphery of life, even for teenagers. I think the show’s creators simply did not know how to handle religion, so they all but erased it.

Back to America’s news media: see, this is why I think it’s a crock of s–t when I hear news executives talk about how important diversity is to newsrooms, because (they say) we have to cover America as it is. They do not mean it. If they did, they would make at least a fraction of the effort to recruit conservatives and Evangelicals as they do recruiting ethnic minorities. I am not kidding when I tell you a US media executive will lie awake at night in bed, trying to figure out how to hire a transgendered reporter, but the thought that maybe, just maybe, he ought to be reaching out to find an Evangelical reporter never, ever crosses his mind.

Earlier today, I was talking about badly led institutions that were digging their own graves because they were blind to the changing world around them, and clung bitterly to confirmation bias? Same deal with so much of our news media. Not all of them. I know good, honest, fair reporters and editors, mostly liberals, but some conservatives, who try hard to be fair (even at the Times!). But mostly, in my experience, the culture is pretty much what we are told is the case at Facebook. And most of us have very little idea of how we are manipulated. In fact, I would say that most of the manipulators don’t really know how they’re manipulating things, because everywhere they look around them they see people of both sexes and all races, who think like they do.

This is why so many of the media (myself included, I must concede) missed the rise of Trump. But that’s another story.

Benedict Option For Libertarians

Here’s a link to an interview I did with Jason Sorens, founder of the Free State Project, a kind of Benedict Option for libertarians he leads in New Hampshire. Excerpt:

RD: You Free Staters already have people on the ground. I’m trying now to identify people around the country who are already living out a version of the Benedict Option. I’m meeting young Christian agrarians, classical educators, and others who not only have an argument but more importantly have a story to tell. They’re incarnating this ideal now. They’re happy, hopeful people, not miserable Bible-thumpers holed up in a bunker waiting for the end.

The thing is, so many of us today are being terribly damaged by growing up without roots of any sort, or any sense that life has a transcendent purpose, meaning, and direction. We have to get outside of our heads, and relearn that the narrative modernity hands us is not the last word, nor even the most persuasive word.

JS: That sense of ultimate, perhaps even transcendent, purpose has been vital to the success of the Free State Project as well. Those who have moved so far generally have a keen sense of justice and of the potentially historic significance of what they’re doing. People aren’t giving tens of thousands of volunteer hours a year just to better their own condition. They want to see everyone enjoy more freedom.

My guess is that, like the FSP, Ben Op communities will work best when they are not strongly hierarchical and are at least somewhat polycentric. Most people fear the commune lifestyle, and for some good reasons. Again, you can bring together a generous “salting” of committed Christians into a particular neighborhood in order to live a life more fully dedicated to God without cutting off from the modern economy or evangelism.

Mormons have done this in Utah. And while Christians will disagree with many Mormon doctrines, the evidence suggests that Mormons have done an excellent job of building communities, educating their own, sustaining their own numbers, and helping the poor. Utah is a really nice place to live. Real poverty is low, crime is low, and social isolation is low, especially if you are Mormon. But the vast majority of them don’t live in separatist communes. If anything, I wish Utahns would do more to assert their political autonomy and cultural distinctiveness.

Read the whole thing — and leave your comments there. I’m closing comments on this particular entry, just to direct discussion to the original, which is on the front page of TAC’s website today. I just wanted to flag readers who only check this blog feed.

How Bad Leadership Destroys Institutions

I liked Peter Lawler’s direct, hard-hitting explanation of how Trump has taken over the GOP. He cannot stand Trump, considering him “not fit to be president,” and is beyond depressed at what he foresees will be “a Democratic rout” this fall. The last lines were especially on point:

I’m far less angry at Trump or Trump supporters than I am at those who created the vacuum he so readily filled. His was a hostile takeover of a decadent party. More power to him, as they say.

This is exactly right, I think. The Republican Party’s leadership class is getting what it brought on itself.

I was thinking about the GOP’s self-inflicted wounds this weekend when I read this story in the Philadelphia Inquirer about how the most recent Catholic sex abuse scandals in Pennsylvania have tipped the legislature, in a way that portends financial catastrophe for the Catholic Church. Excerpt:

Rep. Thomas Caltagirone was disgusted. The veteran Democrat from Reading had been one of the Catholic Church’s staunchest political allies for years, but by March he had hit a breaking point.

A state grand jury had exposed clergy sex abuse in the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese and a bishop who used an internal payment chart to dole out money, correlating to the degree of the victim’s abuse. This, after Jerry Sandusky and two damning grand jury reports in a decade about predator priests in Philadelphia.

Then came another grand jury bombshell from Attorney General Kathleen G. Kane: Leaders in the Franciscan order had allegedly enabled a friar to abuse scores of children at a Catholic high school in Johnstown and remain free to roam as recently as January 2013.

“Enough is enough,” Caltagirone told his colleagues the day Kane announced charges. “We need to enact new laws that will send the strongest message possible: If you commit heinous crimes against children, if you cover up for pedophiles, if you lurk in the shadows waiting for time to run out, we are coming for you.”

His proclamation marked an unexpected shift from a key legislator long resistant to changing the law. It helped persuade others to pass a House bill that for the first time would let victims abused decades ago sue their attackers and institutions that supervised them.

The Catholic Church’s lobbyists in the state legislature have been working hard for a long time to tamp down any legislative attempts to loosen the statute of limitations on such suits, fearing that it would open the floodgates of abuse claims from middle-aged victims. And the lobbyists have been successful — until now:

Insiders said the church’s efforts in the House were drowned out by the revelations of abuse in Johnstown-Altoona. Horrified by the disclosures, Christopher Winters, chief of staff to Caltagirone, said some longtime defenders of the church felt betrayed.

“The grand jury report portrayed something completely different than what we were told sitting at the table with lobbyists for the Catholic Conference,” he said. “That they were handling things.”

Whole thing here. Fourteen years after the Boston revelations ripped open the Church’s dark underbelly, Catholic legislators and others sympathetic to the Church had been able to protect it. But now, it appears, they believe they were lied to by the Church’s own representatives. And, of course, there is little to no accountability within the Church for bishops who have so badly served their people and their God.

You might remember the stormy exit former Oklahoma governor Frank Keating made from the National Review Board the US Catholic bishops set up in the wake of Boston. He had been tapped to lead the board, and was happy to serve, to help clean up his own church. But what he saw in the year he served before quitting (here is his own account, from 2003) caused him to publicly denounce the institutional Church’s leaders for behaving like the mafia, not men of God.

In my own personal case, it was betrayal after betrayal — including one that came very close to my own family — caused my wife and me to conclude that we could not trust the Church on these matters, ever, nor would we ever feel at ease with our three children there. Not after all these lies. It was not long after that that we began looking for the way out. We couldn’t take it anymore.

I don’t want to discuss the merits or lack thereof of events that happened in my own life a decade ago (and if you want to start that discussion, I won’t post your comments). But here’s the thing: that was a decade ago. It beggars belief that there are still grotesque abuse stories and cover-ups to be uncovered in the Catholic Church. If the Church in Pennsylvania loses this fight in the legislature, the resulting lawsuits will likely devastate the Church financially — and that means parishes, schools, and other institutions that are a big part of the lives of real people, people who had nothing at all to do with the abuse and the cover-up, but who have been paying a steep price, and will continue to do so, through no fault of their own.

Because they were badly led, and because their leaders cannot seem to understand what they (or their predecessors) did, and what it means.

Now, a church, to me, is an incomparably more important institution to human flourishing than a political party. Souls aren’t lost because the GOP leadership class piloted the party into an iceberg by thinking itself invulnerable. Still, the characteristic failures of the leadership classes in both the Roman Catholic and Republican institutions are the same.

Adding to Pennsylvania’s woes are allegations contained in court papers that Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, and his staff, knew about Jerry Sandusky’s child molestation much earlier than had been previously revealed — as far back as the 1970s! Penn State today conceded that its massive payout to Sandusky’s victims included a settlement with a victim who was abused in 1971. For at least forty years, Sandusky was raping kids while on Penn State’s coaching staff. The university says that the claim by the university’s insurer, that Paterno had been told as early as 1976 about Sandusky’s behavior, is not established fact, and that people shouldn’t be so quick to believe allegations.

Yes, well, in any case, the university is hoping to be reimbursed by its insurer for the over $60 million it has paid out in settlements to Sandusky’s victims. The insurance company claims in the court case that it shouldn’t have to pay, because the university knew about Sandusky, and said nothing. The new revelation emerged out of that dispute, which has yet to be settled.

Sixty million dollars is a lot of faculty salaries and scholarships. But the credibility of the university’s leadership, including the moral status of the legendary Coach Paterno, is priceless. And it’s gone.

No wonder people are so skeptical of institutions these days. We cannot live without institutions, but in some of our major ones, there has been very damn little accountability for spectacular wrongdoing. Nobody at senior levels of the Republican Party has ever owned up to the massive failure that was Iraq (only Donald Trump dared to tell that truth on the debate stage). Wall Street bigs got away with what they did that led up to the crash of 2008 — and the politicians that enabled them don’t seem to have suffered much. In fact, the presumptive Democratic nominee, the wife of one of them, remains today one of Wall Street’s best friends. The Church — well, what else needs to be said? The media? Let Ben Rhodes brag about how he and others in the White House manipulate reporters, who know very little about what they’re covering.

Trump and the “burn it all down” right-wing Jacobinism didn’t come from nowhere. Nor did the eagerness of a shocking number of Democratic primary voters to pull the lever for an elderly socialist (!) instead of one of their party establishment’s most enduring standard-bearers.

I often wonder if  Trump is only the beginning of the unraveling.

Ben Rhodes, True-Believing Cynic

I’m late to the much-discussed New York Times Magazine profile of Ben Rhodes, the 38-year-old White House staffer who is President Obama’s “foreign policy guru.” This paragraph early in the piece lets you know (you might think) what an arrogant piece of work is Ben Rhodes. Emphasis mine:

Part of what accounts for Rhodes’s influence is his “mind meld” with the president. Nearly everyone I spoke to about Rhodes used the phrase “mind meld” verbatim, some with casual assurance and others in the hushed tones that are usually reserved for special insights. He doesn’t think for the president, but he knows what the president is thinking, which is a source of tremendous power. One day, when Rhodes and I were sitting in his boiler-room office, he confessed, with a touch of bafflement, “I don’t know anymore where I begin and Obama ends.”

Ben! Ben Rhodes! You’re a literary guy. You must at once read about the life and fate of Pietro della Vigna, immortalized by Dante in the Inferno‘s Circle Of The Suicides.

But it turns out that quote is deceptive. Ben Rhodes does not put himself out in front of the president. He lives modestly, and has a modest office in the White House. Then again, there is nothing modest — nothing remotely modest — about telling a New York Times reporter that you have mind-melded with POTUS.

From the sound of things, he is utterly devoted to serving Obama — a good quality to have in a senior adviser. And he has the number of a lot of powerful people, based on his work as a Democratic staffer on the bipartisan Congressional Iraq Study Group, which analyzed the debacle of the Bush Administration’s war. From the article:

One result of this experience was that when Rhodes joined the Obama campaign in 2007, he arguably knew more about the Iraq war than the candidate himself, or any of his advisers. He had also developed a healthy contempt for the American foreign-policy establishment, including editors and reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker and elsewhere, who at first applauded the Iraq war and then sought to pin all the blame on Bush and his merry band of neocons when it quickly turned sour. If anything, that anger has grown fiercer during Rhodes’s time in the White House. He referred to the American foreign-policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.

Hard to blame him for that. Former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau quickly took to his White House colleague:

“He truly gives zero [expletive] about what most people in Washington think,” Favreau says admiringly of Rhodes. “I think he’s always seen his time there as temporary and won’t care if he’s never again invited to a cocktail party, or asked to appear on ‘Morning Joe,’ or inducted into the Council on Foreign Relations hall of fame or whatever the hell they do there.”

By this point, I’m liking this guy more than I expected to. He has what sounds like a healthy contempt for the Establishment. And he understands communications. Which leads us to the most infamous passage from the story:

It is hard for many to absorb the true magnitude of the change in the news business — 40 percent of newspaper-industry professionals have lost their jobs over the past decade — in part because readers can absorb all the news they want from social-media platforms like Facebook, which are valued in the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars and pay nothing for the “content” they provide to their readers. You have to have skin in the game — to be in the news business, or depend in a life-or-death way on its products — to understand the radical and qualitative ways in which words that appear in familiar typefaces have changed. Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

They literally know nothing. This is what the Internet has wrought: vastly more amounts of information, but much less knowledge.

I won’t spoil for you the description of how Rhodes and his White House colleagues describe manipulating a willing media for the sake of selling Obama policies. David Samuels, the piece’s writer, says that this is something “very different from old-fashioned spin.” It’s about how a smart storyteller learned how to get media figures to tell the story he wants told by having mastered the art of social media.

It is almost breathtaking to read Rhodes describing how his White House war room orchestrated media coverage of the Iran deal to sell a story that was not true. He and his team deceived people for what he believes is the higher good. They just flat-out lied. From Samuels’ piece:

Rather, it derived from his own sense of the urgency of radically reorienting American policy in the Middle East in order to make the prospect of American involvement in the region’s future wars a lot less likely. When I asked whether the prospect of this same kind of far-reaching spin campaign being run by a different administration is something that scares him, he admitted that it does. “I mean, I’d prefer a sober, reasoned public debate, after which members of Congress reflect and take a vote,” he said, shrugging. “But that’s impossible.”

And that made an opening for a very cynical young man like Ben Rhodes, who is very good at shaping narratives. He’s proud of lying successfully for his boss, and proud that he, a writer in his 30s with no training in foreign policy, is one of the main figures directing America’s foreign policy. Now, I no like him so much.

Read the whole thing, especially the details about how the White House spin machine advances its preferred narrative through the media, and think about what the fact of social media, and the gullibility and inexperience of today’s reporters, says about the future of our democracy.

UPDATE: You really must read Jeffrey Goldberg’s powerful response to the story.  The piece slimes him as a shill for the administration. Turns out that the reporter, David Samuels, is a personal enemy of Goldberg’s, and never called him to get him to respond to the allegation. More insight into how the sausage gets made in DC…

Sex & The Modern Mother

Happy Mother’s Day from Cosmopolitan and author Kitty Stryker, who offers a touching tale of how her career brought her and her feminist mom closer:

Still, I tried to hide my work in the porn industry from my mother. She’s a second-wave feminist, so I grew up marching next to her at NOW rallies. By the time I was dabbling in the adult industry, I had read enough about the history of feminism to feel pretty confident that she would not welcome my “alternative lifestyle.” I didn’t feel very close to her at the time, and I certainly did not feel prepared to talk to her about this career choice. As I worked and blogged under a different name, I didn’t think she would ever find out.

She did.

Oh no! She talked you out of it, right? Right, Kitty?

My mother didn’t yell at me, or talk over me, or dictate to me what I should or shouldn’t be doing.

She listened.

She listened when I had great days and felt like porn was the most empowering thing I could do for myself, how I was claiming sexuality in a way that felt safe and fun for me. She listened when I felt insecure about my body, loving my fatness and my curves but also aware that being this way would mean fewer jobs and less respect. She listened when I had a tough day, and felt anxious about the weird power dynamics in the industry.

My mother never told me to quit. She never told me I had made a bad decision. She never asked me how I could be a feminist and a sex worker. She made space for me and my experiences, and she gave me advice or sympathy when I asked. So I found myself reaching out to her more often, grateful for her analysis and her wit. Now, I consider her one of my closest friends.

She’s educated herself on various industry issues, becoming a solid and outspoken ally. Knowing she’s proud of me — as an entrepreneur, as a writer, and yes, as a sex worker — has made me feel accepted and loved…

Read the whole thing. Ah, progress. Actually, this account first appeared in, get this, Good Housekeeping. I guess they don’t make housekeeping like they used to.

Trump The Destabilizer

Ross Douthat lays out what he calls “the conservative case against Trump.” He says that electing Trump would mean the end of Reaganism, but concedes that for some conservatives, that would not be a bug, but a feature.

Here is the heart of the argument:

Trump would not be an American Mussolini; even our sclerotic institutions would resist him more effectively than that. But he could test them as no modern president has tested them before — and with them, the health of our economy, the civil peace of our society and the stability of an increasingly perilous world.

In sum: It would be possible to justify support for Trump if he merely promised a period of chaos for conservatism. But to support Trump for the presidency is to invite chaos upon the republic and the world. No policy goal, no court appointment, can justify such recklessness.

This is something I’ve been thinking about lately. I told a friend the other day, “If Trump is elected, I don’t know how he’s going to govern the country.” If it’s only about ticking off the Social Justice Warriors, I would be sorely tempted to say, “Bring it.”

But it wouldn’t be. Trump is a chaos candidate by nature. There’s no telling what he would say on any given day — or who he would insult. It’s a gross understatement to say that a very great deal depends on the stability of the US presidency. One of the defining characteristics of conservatism is an appreciation for stability and continuity in our institutions. Trump, purely from a temperamental point of view, would likely be the most radical president we’ve ever had, because the most unpredictable, and the one most driven not by principle, but by ego.

And, what kind of scenario would we be looking at if whole regions of the country were to regard the US president as somehow illegitimate? I’m not talking about merely hating him; I’m talking about refusing to have any part of him and his administration. If Trump wins the election fair and square, he will be the lawful president. But let’s not kid ourselves about the ability of such a polarizing and intemperate figure to lead the country, especially in a time of crisis.

Let’s say China makes a provocative military move in the South China Sea. How confident would you feel with Trump in the White House? Or if Russia invades western Ukraine — do you really think a wider war is more likely or less likely with Trump as Commander in Chief?

I don’t have confidence in Hillary Clinton’s leadership, but compared to Trump, she at least has the virtue of being predictable, and not likely to shoot her mouth off.

Douthat’s column shines light on an aspect of conservatism that has not been appreciated much in our ideological age: its bias toward stability. In the same way many liberals today have forgotten the liberal virtue of tolerance, so have many conservatives forgotten the conservative virtue of prudence.

It must be said that the Republican Party has earned the Trump curse, both because it has cultivated rashness, and because the status quo it has stood on for so long caused it to ignore fundamental changes in the country, and to respond creatively to them. To paraphrase Edmund Burke, a political party without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation. Trump-As-GOP-Nominee is the walking, talking, combed-over embodiment of this principle.

It is a withering indictment of the GOP Establishment that not one of its candidates could persuade a plurality of Republican primary voters that More Of The Same would be better than whatever Donald Trump is selling. At some point, though, you have to put away the Schadenfreude and think about the future of the country. That point is going to come in early November.

I never imagined that I would face an election choice worse than the Louisiana governor’s runoff in 1991, in which Edwin W. Edwards faced off against David Duke. I voted for Edwards, without apology, but felt sick inside over it. This one is worse, because the stakes are immeasurably higher. #NeverTrump folks may want to resurrect that old bumper sticker seen all over Louisiana during the 1991 race: VOTE FOR THE CROOK: IT’S IMPORTANT

View From Your Table

Starhill, Louisiana

In the neighbors’ backyard clinging bitterly to our guns, our religion, and our crawfish.

Speaking of, have you bought your tickets for Walker Percy Weekend yet? Time is running out! Where else are you gonna talk about Percy, Catholicism, the South, Dostoevsky, Donald Trump in the Ruins, and so forth, while sipping bourbon or beer, and eating crawfish? It’s all happening here, the first weekend of June.

View From Your Table

Oxford, England

James C., on the banks of the River Isis, with croissant, strudel, and coffee.

Leninist Liberalism On The Bench

“To be successful, insurrection must rely not upon conspiracy and not upon a party, but upon the advanced class.” — Lenin.

You really have to read this post by Harvard Law professor Mark Tushnet, in which he advises his fellow legal liberals to take the gloves off and hit conservatives with bare-knuckle force. Excerpts:

Several generations of law students and their teachers grew up with federal courts dominated by conservatives. Not surprisingly, they found themselves wandering in the wilderness, looking for any sign of hope. The result: Defensive-crouch constitutionalism, with every liberal position asserted nervously, its proponents looking over their shoulders for retaliation by conservatives (in its elevated forms, fear of a backlash against aggressively liberal positions).

It’s time to stop. Right now more than half of the judges sitting on the courts of appeals were appointed by Democratic presidents, and – though I wasn’t able to locate up-to-date numbers – the same appears to be true of the district courts. And, those judges no longer have to be worried about reversal by the Supreme Court if they take aggressively liberal positions. (They might be reversed, but now there’s no guarantee.) And, we shouldn’t focus on the Court’s docket this year, which was shaped by conservative justices thinking that they could count to five on a bunch of cases. The docket will look quite different if they can’t see that path to five votes when they decide which cases to review.

What would abandoning defensive-crouch liberalism mean? (I’ve blogged about some of these points before.)

Among his explanations:

1.     A jurisprudence of “wrong the day it was decided.” Liberals should be compiling lists of cases to be overruled at the first opportunity on the ground that they were wrong the day they were decided. My own list is Bakke (for rejecting all the rationales for affirmative action that really matter), Buckley v. Valeo (for ruling out the possibility that legislatures could develop reasonable campaign finance rules promoting small-r republicanism), Casey (for the “undue burden” test), and Shelby County. (I thought about including Washington v. Davis, but my third agenda item should be enough to deal with it.) Others will have their own candidates. What matters is that overruling key cases also means that a rather large body of doctrine will have to be built from the ground up. Thinking about what that doctrine should look like is important – more important than trying to maneuver to liberal goals through the narrow paths the bad precedents seem to leave open.

2.     The culture wars are over; they lost, we won. Remember, they were the ones who characterized constitutional disputes as culture wars (see Justice Scalia in Romer v. Evans, and the Wikipedia entry for culture wars, which describes conservative activists, not liberals, using the term.) And they had opportunities to reach a cease fire, but rejected them in favor of a scorched earth policy. The earth that was scorched, though, was their own. (No conservatives demonstrated any interest in trading off recognition of LGBT rights for “religious liberty” protections. Only now that they’ve lost the battle over LGBT rights, have they made those protections central – seeing them, I suppose, as a new front in the culture wars. But, again, they’ve already lost the war.). For liberals, the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars. That’s mostly a question of tactics. My own judgment is that taking a hard line (“You lost, live with it”) is better than trying to accommodate the losers, who – remember – defended, and are defending, positions that liberals regard as having no normative pull at all. Trying to be nice to the losers didn’t work well after the Civil War, nor after Brown. (And taking a hard line seemed to work reasonably well in Germany and Japan after 1945.) I should note that LGBT activists in particular seem to have settled on the hard-line approach, while some liberal academics defend more accommodating approaches. When specific battles in the culture wars were being fought, it might have made sense to try to be accommodating after a local victory, because other related fights were going on, and a hard line might have stiffened the opposition in those fights. But the war’s over, and we won.

 

 

Read the whole thing. It’s important. Note especially that Tushnet, a Harvard Law professor, says in his last item, “F**k Anthony Kennedy.”

Note too that he is comparing cultural conservatives to the defeated Nazis and Imperial Japanese, and advocating no mercy, just grinding us into the ground. Such is the magnanimity of some of our liberal elites.

And finally, observe that Tushnet believes that the only reason conservative judges and justices voted the way they did was for the sake of power relations, not because they happened to believe that the Constitution led to those conclusions. He apparently believes that the law is all about power relations, nothing more.

You need to be aware of what’s coming. This is what’s coming. And if a Tushnet dream court does what he wants it to do, it’s going to tear this country apart. This is the kind of thing many liberals applaud, even as they accuse conservatives of perpetuating the culture war. If you’re going to use the culture war metaphor, the Benedict Option assumes that we cultural conservatives have lost, and have to prepare for active resistance under occupation.

The only good reason I can think of to vote Trump this fall is that we can be certain that President Hillary Clinton, who will probably get to name three, maybe four, Supreme Court justices, will do her best to appoint justices that believe as Mark Tushnet does. If I were the Trump campaign, I would take Tushnet’s post and distribute it widely. It’s like a right-wing activist’s fever dream of what liberals in power would do — except it was written by a liberal who teaches at the most influential law schools in the nation, one that has produced four of the eight sitting Supreme Court justices (five if you count the late Antonin Scalia).