Goodbye Principled What?

Illustration by Alex Cai via Streak Club.

Say, what's in this barrel ("Goodbye Principled Conservatism" by Bret Stephens)? It appears to be full of fish!

How did the conservative movement reach this pass? Hemingway’s great line about how one goes bankrupt — “gradually, then suddenly” — seems apt. But the tipping point arrived on a precise date: July 20, 2015. That was the day Rush Limbaugh came to Trump’s political rescue after the developer nearly self-immolated with his remark that John McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war, refusing early release at the price of gruesome torture, should not be considered a war hero.

I don't know, I'd go for 1957 myself:

In 1957, Buckley wrote National Review’s most infamous editorial, entitled “Why the South Must Prevail.” Is the white community in the South, he asked, “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically?” His answer was crystal clear: “The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because for the time being, it is the advanced race.” Buckley cited unfounded statistics demonstrating the superiority of white over black, and concluded that, “it is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority.” He added definitively: “the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.”

Why don't conservatives care about manners any more?

Swiss Miss

Via CEFA Aviation.

This is a couple of weeks old already, but I just heard about it on the radio, a Covid piece by Dr. Jonathan Schiffer ("Against Covid-19, Imperfect Measures Do the Most Good"), and it's a bit cheering: 

Schiffer, an associate professor in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, discusses the benefits of some effective, although far from flawless, tools in the battle against COVID-19. It’s an approach that reminds him of swiss cheese, he says, because “each of these strategies has holes but, if you apply all of them, fewer infections break through.”

The Swiss cheese is a reference to a kind of biz school model of risk assessment, envisaging safeguards against harm as an array of cheese slices, each of which blocks the oncoming threat except where it has holes; if each slice comes from a different part of the cheese, its holes are in different places, so if you have enough of them you can block just about everything (see illustration).

So if all our tools are flawed, all of them—the washing of hands and wiping down of surfaces, the masks, the distancing, the testing and tracing, the quarantine, the temperature check, eventually the vaccine that may be as little as 50% effective—have flaws in different places. I was inclined to feel despair at the thought of a vaccine that's only 50% effective, and I still see 70% would be a lot better, but the point is that trying to get where you need to go with the perfect method, the one that doesn't have any flaws at all, is a mistake—it's really better to have imperfect techniques, if you have a bunch of them.

Post-Trump Conservatism: A Marxist Approach. By David F. Brooks

Pablo Picasso, Girl With Mandolin (1910), via PabloPicasso.org.

David Brooks has a column predicting that the post-Trump GOP will be thoughtful and compassionate. Alongside that, there's an op-ed arguing that the GOP is getting serious about the climate.

In other words, the Failed Biden Presidency has already begun at @nytopinion.

— Steve M. (@nomoremister) August 7, 2020

Today's Brooks ("Where Do Republicans Go From Here?") is fooling everybody like that, because it starts out looking like a column he's written 15 or 16 times in the last couple of years and you think you know how it ends, but you're wrong. Actually he ends up with the Bernie Sanders theory of how to fix the post-Trump Republican Party—"deracialize", and move on to class struggle!

working-class emphasis is the only way out of the demographic doom loop. If the party sticks with its old white high school-educated base, it will die. They just aren’t making enough old white men. To have any shot of surviving as a major party, the G.O.P. has to build a cross-racial alliance among working-class whites [non-old high school–educated?], working-class Hispanics and some working-class Blacks.

None of this works unless Republicans can deracialize their appeal — by which I mean they must stop pandering to the racists in the party and stop presenting themselves and seeing themselves as the party of white people — and wage a class struggle between diverse workers in their coalition and the highly educated coastal manager and professional class in the Democratic coalition.

Pile those coastals into the tumbrils! It's the political revolution! All you need is "some working-class Blacks!"—not all of them, just some as-yet-undefined critical mass—and that sniveling manager and professional class won't know what hit it.

That is, I mean, there may be a flaw in this plan, but you can't say it lacks boldness.

The rest of the column gets a little more interesting when you try to reconstruct how his usual point of departure, the History of Conservative Thought, led him through a Hegelian dialectical model of thesis/antithesis/synthesis to this radical conclusion.

Wrongthink

Siri, show me a stupid person's idea of a smart person.

It's the Intellectual Dark Singularity! Where on the same strange Tuesday, Andrew Sullivan gets the sack from New York Magazine

The underlying reasons for the split are pretty self-evident, and I’ll be discussing the broader questions involved in my last column this Friday.

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) July 14, 2020

the young throwback artist Bari Weiss, representing the liberalism of the good old days of Woodrow Wilson and Alan Dershowitz, takes her departure from the New York Times editorial board, to an extremely gloomy response from National Review's Rich Lowry

They warned Trump would bring fascism to America even as they implemented their own exquisite system of thought control https://t.co/D6HITsn7bp

— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) July 14, 2020

and Squeaky Ben Shapiro the Straw Man King has emeritated hinself from the helm of the alleged publication he's been associated with, "The Daily Wire" (I have to admit while I haven't seen any proof it exists, I haven't looked very hard)