The GOP rejects Scotsmen

Via TrulyFallacious.

Shorter David Brooks, "The G.O.P. Rejects Conservatism", New York Times, June 27 2017:

No true conservative would contemplate eliminating the Affordable Care Act without providing some alternative way of getting people health care, because many conservative intellectuals are now kind-hearted folk and believers in income redistribution, just not liberal income redistribution but a more modest and gentle type that doesn't actually redistribute the income, like allowing tax-free health savings accounts, surely people who can't afford decent health insurance would be able to put together a couple of hundred thousand for an emergency if they didn't have to pay all those bloody taxes amirite? And reducing regulations and using market incentives [ed.: Market incentives without regulations?]. Etc. Therefore, Republican Senators are no true conservatives but beastly individualists, as Prophet Tocqueville spake it in the ancient sacred book.

The No True Scotsman fallacy is when you make your point by quietly changing the definition of a primary term to exclude the case you don't like. "No true conservative would support a health plan condemning tens of millions to sickness and impoverishment, because that's what Yuval Levin and I decided the other day."

Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the "Brighton Sex Maniac Strikes Again". Hamish is shocked and declares that "No Scotsman would do such a thing." The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again; and, this time, finds an article about an Aberdeen man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion, but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says: "No true Scotsman would do such a thing." (Antony Flew, 1975, via Wikipedia)

"Conservative" is, in the perfectly adequate American Heritage definition,

disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.

It doesn't say anything about a tendency "to have accepted the fact that American society is coming apart and that measures need to be taken to assist the working class" or "a vision for how they want American society to be in the 21st century". These are neither conservative nor non-conservative (you could use them to call for a socialist revolution, if you wanted to do that in such a dreary tone), they are simply thoughts that make Brooks feel good about himself.

Brooks nails it again: There's too much politics in this joint!

Bioluminescence in Vadhoo, Maldives, which won't exist if we don't move faster on global warming, speaking of galaxies of warm places, politics, and both sides not doing it, from msn via Beth Smith at Pinterest.

David Brooks wants to know

How to Fix Politics

I thought it was already fixed, har har har. Isn't that the problem?

No, seriously:

It’s possible to imagine an elite solution. The next president could get together with the leaders of both parties in Congress and say: “We’re going to change the way we do business in Washington..."

But you don't really have to imagine it, because every president does that. It's not even meant as a solution, if it ever was, it's a ritual cleansing. It is startling to realize that David Brooks doesn't know this. Anyway he he's not so dumb as to imagine such a procedure would have a really good chance of fixing things. Though not for the obvious reason that it's never worked yet; rather, because

Happy Birthday Alexis de Tocqueville!

Jacques-Louis David showing his lack of painterly imagination in the 1824 Mars being Disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces. Tocqueville really didn't know much about art. Image via Wikipedia.

A new superlatively bad writer, Arthur Milikh, assistant director of the B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics at The Heritage Foundation, celebrating the 210th birthday of Alexis de Tocqueville on July 29 (or 225th in the original version, as you can see from the URL) in the Daily Dogwhistle Signal:

We often boast about having attained some unimaginable redefinition of ourselves and our nation.

Do you now? What gets you in the mood? Asking for a friend.

Imma let you finish, Obama...

The "21" Club on 52nd Street. Photo by Holly Northrop.

He's like the Kanye West of rightwing politics:

A person close to John Catsimatidis, the grocery store magnate who sponsored the event, said Mr. Giuliani was not originally part of the speaking program or expected to attend.

Mr. Catsimatidis, who is prominent in New York political circles, saw the former mayor at an earlier event in the city Wednesday night, and invited him to come by the Walker dinner.

Navel-gazing mush

I swear I'll stop writing Piketty posts soon, or at least try to pause to read Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century myself, somehow, but it's going to be really hard if these conservatives don't give it a rest. There are just so many of them, just sufficiently stupider than me as to be not worth the attention of any actual economists (though Krugman couldn't resist a brief shout-out to Brooks this morning), and it gives you such a rush to realize you really do in a simple and straightforward sense know more about economics than Ross Douthat or Megan McArdle or—what's this? James Poulos?

Do any of you all recall James Poulos, an Edroso candidate for the title of worst writer working in the English language, whom I had the opportunity to cast as the logorrhoeic slave Lucky in an imaginary production of Waiting for Godot? Yeah, that James Poulos.

He's still around, it seems, still a colossally bad writer, and getting gigs with the Daily Beast, so you don't have to feel sorry for him, and apparently he too has been driven to write a [jump]