Douthat: Q Is Right!

Ding dong, the Bilderberg is dead!

And here's Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, at his weirdest, with an agenda I want to try unpacking ("The End of the New World Order"): it starts off with a mysterious warning that some rightwing conspiracy theories, while false, may be sort of true in a way that overrides their particular falsehood:

This is as true in the Trump era as in any other. Extraterrestrials are probably not among us, but we keep being handed new evidence that the U.F.O. phenomenon is real. QAnon is a landscape of fantasy, but the fact that powerful sexual predators have ties to presidents, popes and princes is a hard post-Jeffrey Epstein truth....

The phrase “New World Order” was lifted by the conspiracy-minded from the optimistic rhetoric of George H.W. Bush, and since then the paranoia and the facts have always existed symbiotically. The fantasy is looming totalitarian control, black helicopters descending, secret Bilderberg plots. But it’s been encouraged by various undeniable realities — the growth of transnational institutions, the manifest power of a global overclass, the often undemocratic expansion of the European Union and the rise of digital surveillance and the ties binding China and the U.S. into “Chimerica.”

I'm not so sure about this whole perspective. It's like if you read about the myths of Zeus or Thor and came away with the idea you'd found proof that thunder goes back at least 3000 years. That's not the point! We have independent reasons for believing that thunder is millions of years older than that because that's how Earth weather works! They made up stories about it 3000 years ago because they didn't know that, but we do; the myths tell us more about the people than about the natural phenomenon.

Dishonesty on Diversity

Apropos of nothing in particular... Via SpydersDen.

Shorter Ross Douthat, "Diversity and Dishonesty", New York Times, 13 April 2014:

University faculty should be encouraged to engage in research promoting or justifying oppression or tainted by racism, sexism, or heterosexism, because freedom.

Hahaha, just kidding. The Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street merely argued that tenured faculty should be permitted to engage in such research, against the threat represented by Sandra Korn, a Harvard senior and twice-a-month columnist at the influential Crimson newspaper, who wrote a piece in February expressing a certain nostalgia for the Harvard of [jump]

How much of a liar is Ross Douthat?

Sitting Bull's tobacco bag and ceremonial war club, Native American Collection, Peabody Museum. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

A quirky little thing disturbed me in Susan's elegant takedown of Douthat's 2005 article about the failure of Harvard to educate him properly, "The Truth [!] about Harvard", in a passage from the article about how easy it was for him to fake his way through a difficult-sounding assignment:

One of the last papers I wrote in college was assigned in "The American West, 1780—1930." The professor handed out two journal articles on the theory and practice of "material history"—essentially, historical research based on the careful analysis of objects. We were told to go to the Peabody, Harvard's museum of archaeology and ethnology, where the professor had set out three pairs of objects from the frontier era. One object in each pair had been made by Indians, one by Europeans, and we were to write a ten-page paper that compared the objects in a given pair. Aside from the articles on material history and a general text, North American Indian Jewelry and Adornment, we were to use no sources.

Poser

First issue, 1857, via Wikipedia.

OK, so one last moment of engagement with the saga of Kevin D. Williamson, because as it turns out the whole thing really was about one tweet, apparently, or Williamson's inability to give a satisfactory explanation of it to the Atlantic's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg:

Specifically, the subject of one of Kevin’s most controversial tweets was also a centerpiece of a [2014] podcast discussion in which Kevin explained his views on the subject of the death penalty and abortion. The language he used in this podcast—and in my conversations with him in recent days—made it clear that the original tweet did, in fact, represent his carefully considered views. The tweet was not merely an impulsive, decontextualized, heat-of-the-moment post, as Kevin had explained it. Furthermore, the language used in the podcast was callous and violent. This runs contrary to The Atlantic’s tradition of respectful, well-reasoned debate, and to the values of our workplace.

Kevin is a gifted writer, and he has been nothing but professional in all of our interactions. But I have come to the conclusion that The Atlantic is not the best fit for his talents, and so we are parting ways.

Which was the one issue I hadn't really given a lot of attention to, interested as I was in Williamson's general tendency to dehumanize whoever he doesn't like, from African American children in East St. Louis, Illinois to the Trump voters of Hardscrabble, New York and Childwhelp, Kentucky, and the success with which he masquerades (like William F. Buckley, Jr., or Mr. Bret Stephens) as the kind of writer somebody like Jeffrey Goldberg might refer to as "gifted".

In which I agree with Ross Douthat...

Wassily Kandinsky, Composition IV, 1911.

...when the Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street makes fun of the administration's insistence that there's anything "medieval" about the self-denominated "Islamic state":

The idea that America’s foes and rivals are not merely morally but chronologically deficient, confused time travelers who need to turn their DeLorean around, has long been a staple of this administration’s rhetoric. Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad and tyrants in general have been condemned, in varying contexts, for being on the dreaded “wrong side of history.”

Obviously if the would-be Caliph were to be transported back to the actual medieval Caliphate of Baghdad with its alcohol and sexual adventurousness, freedom of thought and easy acceptance of Jews, Christians, Chinese, and even Shiites (Sunnis, however, often had to bend to the theological whims of the ruler),  and art, music, fragrance, he'd want to behead them all or run away.

But I have a little difficulty with the warmed-over Fukuyamism with which he goes onto explain,

Lincoln Lincoln I've Been Thinkin

 

Southern Punch 1863, via Sher Watts Spooner/Daily Kos, 2016.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, asks ("The Revolt of the Republican Strategists") a kind of interesting question about the Lincoln Project Republicans, former party functionaries who have abandoned the GOP over Trump, and the new book from another one, Romney strategist Stuart Stevens, It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump, who takes it full Driftglass, as you might say, acknowledging Trump as symptom, not cause, of the terrible thing that has happened to the GOP, and that it started happening quite a while back. In the first place, whether the movement wants to move into the Democrats or remain Republican—what does it have in mind? And then why, if the Republicans are so depraved, were they ever Republicans anyhow? What was the Republican thing that held them, until Trump wrecked it, or wrecked their perception that it had ever existed?

But Stevens is so determined to emphasize his party’s total depravity that his only answer to the hard question of why Republicans swung from Romney’s technocratic decency to Trump’s know-nothing flamboyance is that Trumpism was the beating heart of conservatism all along....

There is another way of reading this history, though, that’s suggested by a passage where Stevens is emphasizing the fundamental emptiness of G.O.P. rhetoric on deficits and taxes. “But still the Republican Party continues to push tax cuts the same way the Roman Catholic Church uses incense for High Mass,” he writes, “as a comforting symbolism for believers that reminds them of their identity.” And then, pushing the analogy further: “Being against ‘out-of-control federal spending,’ a phrase I must have used in a hundred ads, is a catechism of the Republican faith. But no one really believes in it any more than communicants believe they are actually eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ.”

Except that in point of fact, many communicants at a Catholic Mass do believe that they are actually eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ. And this is particularly true among the conservative Catholics whose votes were essential to the Republican politicians Stuart Stevens tried to get elected president.

I guess Stevens just doesn't understand that conservative conservatives, as opposed to this cynical breed of party operatives, truly believe in the sacramental character of tax cuts and the Real Presence of out-of-control spending. These hypocritical strategists mistake the depth of faith in the party faithful and suppose that just because massive federal tax cuts and control over federal spending sound as if they contradict each other only the foolish would demand them both, simultaneously. The sacrosanct certainty of our fathers from Reagan through Bush to Trump that cutting taxes will reduce the federal deficit is why we're all worshiping together, isn't it?

Monsignor Worries About Answered Prayers

Sad Republican senators at the White House, 7 August 1974, via Medium.

Shorter Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street ("How Trump Survives"):

Looking through the lenses of their own partisanship at the total history (all two cases) of 20th-century presidential impeachment for clues as to what is to come, liberals tend to think that Nixon ended up out of office because, unlike Clinton, he was guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, while conservatives believe it is because the senators of the Republican minority in 1974 were more high-minded than the senators of the Democratic minority in 1998. But my hot empirical take, drawing on Twitter commentary by the political scientist Jacob Levy is that it was the oil shocks and stagflation that brought Nixon down. Meaning not "the economy, stupid," but a cascade toward economic debacle, foreign-policy catastrophe or late-1960s civil strife, as the case may be, which convinced Senator Goldwater and the others that Nixon was going to have to go.

The moral being that you won't get rid of Trump just because he's a criminal, but only if you're cascading toward economic debacle, foreign-policy catastrophe, or late-1960s civil strife, and if you want that to happen you're a bad person. I'm not saying you shouldn't impeach him, because he's an extremely bad person, but you should hope that you fail.

You think I'm kidding?

Tout le monde est Charlie, ça finira par ne plus être chic!

On March 8, Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury strip paid an eloquent tribute to the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists murdered on January 7, making a loving use of some of their own best images (Christ I love that Benedict XVI) and showing, incidentally, one way of taunting the murderers without strictly violating the Salafist rules against the visual depiction of the Prophet:

Smash-Mouth Liberalism

Apparently Smash Mouth was the name of the first band to give Trump permission to use their music at his rallies. Not sure how that relates to the way Douthat's using the expression, but it must be relevant.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, does not love the kids; he is deeply distressed by them, in particular their chillingly violent calls for the destruction of Senator Rubio ("Marco Rubio Must Be Destroyed"):

Since the Parkland shootings in Florida, Senator Marco Rubio has done many of the things liberals say they are desperate, desperate for decent Republicans to do. He has changed his position on gun control, expressing support for new restrictions: age limits on gun purchases, new background check rules, possibly magazine restrictions. He has co-sponsored legislation encouraging states to issue restraining orders that temporarily would strip people deemed dangerous of their guns. Some of these measures have conservative support, but in other cases the Florida Republican has effectively bucked the N.R.A.

When he showed up for the CNN town hall he met boos and heckles; one of the shooting survivors told him that just looking at him was like staring down the barrel of an assault rifle. Notwithstanding his subsequent policy concessions, at the March for Our Lives the students wore price tags around their neck, $1.05 each — the amount of money Rubio’s campaigns have received from the N.R.A. divided by the number of students in Florida schools. David Hogg, one of their leaders, began his speech with the price tag line, and told a CNN interviewer that if anything he feels that their attacks on the Florida senator haven’t been provocative enough.

I'm not having any luck finding cases of liberals saying "I am desperate, desperate for decent Republicans to" do anything. It's certainly not something I would say. I suspect Ross is making this up.

Poor little rich populist

Monsignor Ross Douthat, the Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, has always seemed to me to be smarter than David Brooks, but he may be equally challenged when it comes to simple mathematics.

In Sunday's Times, he writes:

Debate blogging

Lord Chatham (Pitt the elder) collapsing during a debate on American independence in the House of Lords, 1778, via NewEgg. 

Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, says Klobuchar and Buttigieg won the debate by giving people who like Biden a reason not to necessarily vote for Biden, I think:

they’re problem-solving Midwesterners with realistic policy blueprints who can win swing states, and (less explicitly) that they’re like Biden in their practicality and electability but unlike him in their relative youth and lack of baggage.

I hardly noticed either one of them. My notes praise Klobuchar for explaining that anti-trust law is about encouraging competition—

Start talking about this as a pro-competition issue. This used to be a Republican and Democratic issue, because America, our founding fathers, actually wanted to have less consolidation. We were a place of entrepreneurship. We are seeing a startup slump in this country. (WaPo running transcript)

and laugh at Buttigieg for "a plan for 'depoliticizing' Supreme Court that's so Baroque the National Review might like it"