For the Record: Moldbuggery

Saw something yesterday that tempted me to go have a look at something written by enemy of democracy Curtis Yarvin, the artist formerly known as "Mencius Moldbug" (and I really should register a protest against at the use of the Latinized name of the philosopher known as Mengzi (孟子, 372-289 B.C.E.), the most humane and liberal of the early Confucians, a man who sincerely and deeply believed in the innate goodness of the human being and the saving value of education for all, a man as remote intellectually from the Moldbug as it is possible for anyone to be, it actually gets me kind of angry). 

It's pretty interesting, though of course perverted, what Yarvin is doing there, which is spelled out at his own substack graymirror.substack.com/p/a-conversa.... He claims FDR exercised an "informal dictatorship-for-life" that was so immensely powerful that he retained power after he died. Or at any rate left behind a zombie presence that governs us still, 80 years later, presumably forcing us against our will to accept Social Security payments and workers' comp and unemployment benefits and the like:

Read FDR’s First Inaugural, specifically the part where he demands the powers of a general resisting an enemy invasion. In 1933! These were the powers FDR needed to create what, during his informal dictatorship-for-life, was more or less his personal executive monarchy, then after his death became the formalized administrative state.

That is to say, no, Roosevelt did not rule from beyond the grave, but the institutions of the New Deal persisted after he died, and, with the advent of civil rights laws and no doubt Obamacare, even got worse, from Yarvin's point of view...

War on Reality

6th-grade journalist Sarfaraz, of Jharkhand state, via TribuneIndia. 

A goodhearted little story on NPR the other morning, reported by Pien Huang, about an elementary school in Tampa Bay with a substantial number of unhoused students, and a mindfulness program:

HUANG: Sullivan Elementary School is a public school. It partners with a local nonprofit called Metropolitan Ministries which supports poor and homeless families in Tampa Bay. Principal McMeen says many of the students come from the homeless shelter across the street, and they're dealing with serious stressors outside of school.

[PRINCIPAL] MCMEEN: Students experience these traumas of which sometimes they don't have control over. While we have them, what do we have control over? It's those few moments to say, OK, take that hurt, take that pain, let's figure out how we can release it.

HUANG: Research shows that chronic stress can shrink the brain, especially the parts that play a role in learning and memory, and that mindfulness helps reduce that stress. It's now 8:50 in the morning. Principal McMeen takes us to the second and third-grade classroom, where a mindfulness session plays over the loudspeaker.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Breathing in and out. Placing the hands on my heart. Repeating to yourself, I have the power to make wise choices.

UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: I have the power to make wise choices.

HUANG: The transformation is amazing. Seventeen rambunctious kids are now settled at their desks. Their eyes are closed, and today's session is about forgiveness.

I was enchanted with it until an unwelcome thought showed up: that there are people who would want to destroy it, for one reason or another, maybe for the same reason they've objected to school yoga, because mindfulness is the property of a religion that's not "Judeo-Christian" and it might endanger the children's souls; it might be some kind of Satanic plot.

Point of Personal Privilege

 

"Photo op raid"—I can't tell whether they've really forgotten that the FBI's seizure of the stolen materials at Mar-a-Lago was carried out with the usual FBI discretion, and the reason we learned about it was Trump's immediate howls of preemptive rage; it was his publicity, not theirs. Or that they released the photo (documenting the proceedings with photos is part of their standard procedure) in self-defense, against the Republican insistence that Trump's theft of presidential documents was nothing but eccentric billionaire souvenir collecting, showing that, no, some of these documents were definitely not souvenirs, through media like TMZ.

Heirs of Joseph de Maistre

Mockery for Edmund Burke's support for Catholic emancipation, by James Gillray - Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division.

The historian Thomas Zimmer is doing some interesting (and scary!) analysis on his SubStack of what's been happening in the livelier precincts of the American right, at The Federalist and the Claremont Institute and the like, where they've decided to stop calling themselves "conservatives" because they're really revolutionaries, and they're ready to throw out the whole apparatus of representative government:

In a more recent piece entitled “Hard Truths and Radical Possibilities,” which came out in American Greatness in November, [Claremont thinker Glen] Ellmers reacted to the midterm results – by rejecting the legitimacy of elections altogether: “Elections – and therefore consent and popular sovereignty – are no longer meaningful.” Once again, his issue is not that the midterms were fraudulently stolen; it is actually much worse: “even if conducted legitimately, elections no longer reflect the will of the people.” There certainly isn’t much of a conserving spirit to be found here. Ellmers rails against the “woke oligarchy” which, based on a massive state bureaucracy that is entirely dominated by “the Left” and unresponsive to the will of the real people, has already completely destroyed the constitutional republic. There is, in this view, very little time to stand up to the “left-wing masters.”

That's a pretty weird turn. Elections are bad because they install a "woke oligarchy" in power. What kind of political process implements the "will of the people" instead? What is the will of "the" people as opposed to the will of most people?

To understand that, you should understand that most Americans aren't "authentic" Americans:

For the Record: Working the Ruffs

Republican reaction to the January 6 committee hearings continue to develop along not unpredictable lines, like this scumbag's bragging about how he hasn't read any of the indictments:

It didn't. Their move was planned well before. The Trump speech was intended to incite the more-or-less innocent mob of deplorables to follow the Proud Boyz as the latter broke into the building, providing the insurrection with cannon fodder, and it worked extremely well.

— Woke Mob For Taxing Billionaires (@Yastreblyansky) June 11, 2022

Mulvaney has no suspicion, I guess, that Trump forces could plan anything without his help, like the way he set up Trump's extortion call to President Zelenskyy with the long months of denying Ukraine the congressionally mandated funding for the Javelins. He expected them to be paralyzed without him.

Then there's the. straight-out McCarthyism from our pal Senator Rubio:

For the Record: Double Standard

"The Affair", 1875, via The Lighthouse.

Oh, for heaven's sake, in the first place it's not about "corporate speech" as such. They're not telling BP what to say, or Morgan Chase. It's about mediated speech, and media corporations, and censoring them (typically on behalf of children) is always on the conservative menu.

— НЕТ ВОЙНЕ (@Yastreblyansky) April 13, 2022

corporations, like Disney, PRODUCING or at least trying to produce antiracist or sex-positive speech. Conservatives are reacting (as usual, that's what "reactionary" means) to a threat that wasn't there before, and trying to suppress it, as usual.

— НЕТ ВОЙНЕ (@Yastreblyansky) April 13, 2022

>

Conservatism begins with the division of the population into good people, "us," and bad people, "them", and libertarianism is for the former and values enforcement for the latter. MY speech must not be suppressed, but THEIRS has to be, for the children's sake.

— НЕТ ВОЙНЕ (@Yastreblyansky) April 13, 2022

And of course "good" people are variously proprietors as opposed to renters, or investors as opposed to laborers, or married folks as opposed to disorderly cohabitors, or "Judeo-Christians" as opposed to scandalous unbelievers, or supporters vs. opponents of patriarchal social organization, or more often than not white people as opposed to dark, depending on what part of the coalition you're trying to rile up. That's pretty much the whole story.

On Propaganda

"Want It? Join up" Poster by Vladimir Mayakovsky. The text reads, "1. Want to overcome cold? 2. Want to overcome hunger? 3. Want to eat? 4. Want to drink? Then hurry up and join the shock brigades of exemplary labor!" Via Wikipedia.

Got into a big debate—not hostile, I think, but more properly exploratory—in which I was trying to explain some ideas about the press, and how it works, that I think are really kind of important in our post-truth environment. That you can understand how bad the proper prestige press is, in the first place, without concluding that nothing is knowable and everything you read or hear might be a lie. The very real problems of the news media are systemic, like racism. They are not the result of an elaborate conspiracy, as if Dean Baquet was taking marching orders from Charles Koch in some undisclosed location; they are a feature, as our old friend Thornton (who will show up in the thread, under the name "Henry Porter"), would say, not of an ideology but of a business plan. It starts out at what seems like a modest point (the specific question was whether the Senate deal on US Postal Service reform was going to protect Louis DeJoy from getting fired, and whether an old Politico article got the question right):

It's not so hard to get a feel for it and read it critically. They're not interested in telling lies, they're interested in dealing exciting gossip, and they might occasionally thank sources by making them look good in return.

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) March 9, 2022

Brooksy New Year

Happy New Year!

Updated 1 January.

Death of Mimì. English National Opera, don't know the date or cast.

David F. Brooks, winding up the year in his traditional way with the annual presentation of the "Sidney Awards", not a red carpet ceremony by a list of magazine article recommendations, oddly dominated this year by human interest stories, tales of personal obsession productive and unproductive (a man loses his son on 9/11 and becomes a 9/11 truther; a man who was sexually exploited as a young teenager now studies "rooms occupied by Ghislaine Maxwell"; a novelist receives a fan letter from a convicted murderer and, convinced he's innocent, puts her own life on pause in a crazed crusade to get him out of prison), but among the more typically Brooksian choices is a piece by a former research assistant of his at The Times, April Lawson, in a magazine, Comment ("Public Theology for the Common Good"), edited by another former research assistant of his at The Times, Anne Snyder. 

Snyder, of course, is also Mrs. Brooks, as well as

Director of The Philanthropy Roundtable‘s Character Initiative, a Fellow at the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism [now known as the Urban Reform Institute, with our and Brooks's old friend Joel Kotkin serving as executive director, wouldn't you just know it], and a Senior Fellow at The Trinity Forum. She holds a Master’s degree in journalism from Georgetown University and a B.A. in philosophy and international relations from Wheaton College (IL).

while Lawson was a co-founder and Associate Director of Weave: The Social Fabric Project, which Brooks founded for the Aspen Institute in early 2019 only to be forced to abscond from it when BuzzFeed revealed that Aspen was paying him six figures for it even as he puffed it up in his Times column, as well as puffing up Facebook's participation in it in remarks for which Facebook seemed to have paid him as well (see my report on this from last March, apparently at the same time as Snyder's book, The Fabric of Character: A Wise Giver's Guide to Supporting Social and Moral Renewal was issued by The Philanthropy Roundtable, $14.95 in paperback, sorry I didn't get to this when we were all planning our end-of-year donations, as I'm sure the suggestions from this incestuous web of do-gooding are completely sensible and not at all self-serving).

And Lawson is now Director of Debates at Braver Angels, a Weavy nonprofit (not connected to the Aspen Institute as far as I know; but praised in print by David Brooks as early as Feburary 2018), devoted to bridging the distance between Red and Blue, and her essay, "Building Trust Across the Political Divide", retails what she's learned in a couple of years conducting debates on Braver Angels principles: everybody must be sincere, everybody gets to speak, and everybody always addresses the chair, as a way of avoiding the pitfalls that generally afflict such efforts, largely, as Lawson says, because they are generally run by liberals:

The Great Awokening: Can They Be Trusted?

  Update: Text a good deal more edited than it was when first posted.  

In the Forest of Illusion.

My tentative answer (and I very much look forward to reading this piece by @nytdavidbrooks):
1. Conservatism isn't what it once was.
2. Conservatism was never quite what we thought it was. https://t.co/gH6pQm8daS

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) December 8, 2021

Yes he does. Basically calls US conservatism a moral crime.

— Nathan Newman 🧭 (@nathansnewman) December 9, 2021

Newman, the sociologist and labor-left Substacker who's been influencing my own thinking an awful lot lately, posted a response to Brooks's big Atlantic article on his great awokening, or final departure from the conservative fold, around the same time I was writing my own. 

My post was mostly about Brooks's outline of the history of conservatism, in which Burkean "modesty" was invented decades before Burke was born, in reaction to the terrible religious wars in 16th- and 17th-century Europe, when they all decided to abjure fanaticism and have governments that did less, which would have come as a big surprise to intolerant Catholic Louis XIV and equally intolerant Protestants William and Mary, who all probably would have thought they were pretty conservative if anybody had been using the term at the time.

Ho de ho

At one point, [Stephanie] Grisham says Graham kicked a White House staffer out of Bedminster "so he could take her room."

"Senator Freeloader was sitting at a table by the pool, a big grin on his face, lapping up the goodies he was getting like some potentate," Grisham writes. "He said to me with a creepy little smile, 'Isn't this great? Man, this is the life.'" (David Edwards/Raw Story)

Conservatives Against Capitalism

Casting a vote for Chancellor Hitler's party, which took pretty good care of you if you were a member of the right group. Photo via Quartz, 2017.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, has a pretty oddly structured argument ("Is Capitalism Killing Conservatism?"), starting, in the first place, with the "grim" news of the falling birthrate in the US.

paragraph 1:

The report on Wednesday that U.S. birthrates fell to a record low in 2020 was expected but still grim. On Twitter the news was greeted, characteristically, by conservative laments and liberal comments implying that it’s mostly conservatism’s fault — because American capitalism allegedly makes parenthood unaffordable, work-life balance impossible and atomization inevitable.

Without saying exactly what's grim about it, though you can assume he's one of the characteristically lamenting conservatives. And reading into the comments of liberals something more than they (actually, she—there's only one of them) actually said:

I’m a solo working parent of a 16 month old. I struggle without many of the things I outlined in the first tweet. This country does not support parents.

— Tanzina Vega (@tanzinavega) May 5, 2021

What makes him think Vega is decrying "conservatism"?  Other than his own tacit assumption, you know, that that is where American capitalism comes from? And what does he mean by "atomization"? 

Brooks Is Getting Even Worse

No particular reason. Photo by Evan Vucci/AP, June 2019.

Getting rid of Trump not only hasn't helped, according to David Brooks ("The G.O.P. Is Getting Even Worse"), it's actually hurt, and Republicans (who no longer include Brooks, it's hinted in the third sentence, but he still has friends in the party), wouldn't you know it, are the real victims:

Those of us who had hoped America would calm down when we no longer had Donald Trump spewing poison from the Oval Office have been sadly disabused. There are increasing signs that the Trumpian base is radicalizing. My Republican friends report vicious divisions in their churches and families. Republican politicians who don’t toe the Trump line are speaking of death threats and menacing verbal attacks.

It’s as if the Trump base felt some security when their man was at the top, and that’s now gone. Maybe Trump was the restraining force.

It's fun to imagine how Trump was holding them back all this time. If he hadn't warned supporters on 6 January, "I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard," who knows what they might have gotten up to? They might have been distinctly unpeaceful, even unpatriotic, waving Confederate flags and the like.

Lift a Finger

 

Had an interesting kind of New Year's Eve colloquy, or maybe I should call it an obloquy (he was nice enough to respond to me on several points, but I was mostly just bouncing off him) with the writer Noah Berlatsky, who posted a fun list of 99 unpopular opinions on the Twitter, on all sorts of subjects, one of which was this:

agree on the whole, though I think it helped prevent certain horrors like bombing Iran or North Korea. On the other hand if he had been competent he wouldn't have wanted to do those things.

— Gluten4Punishment (@Yastreblyansky) January 1, 2021

Coincidentally, it turns out this morning that this is a less unpopular opinion than you might think, in part because of some terrific reporting by the New York Times White House gossip department on Trump's handling of the pandemic and his inability to understand that it involved the needs of anybody other than himself:

Throughout late summer and fall, in the heat of a re-election campaign that he would go on to lose, and in the face of mounting evidence of a surge in infections and deaths far worse than in the spring, Mr. Trump’s management of the crisis — unsteady, unscientific and colored by politics all year — was in effect reduced to a single question: What would it mean for him?

Cruz Channels Lenin

 

Eleanor Roosevelt and Dorothy Height, 1960. Tell them the Republicans are the "party of the working class". Via Wikipedia.

I've long found it fun to say that American conservatives are the most doctrinaire Marxist ideological faction, in the sense of believing in the reality of class struggle, except that they want the proletariat to lose the war and give way to the permanent dictatorship of the revolutionary bourgeoisie instead of the more conventional other way around.

But I always meant it as a joke line, insightful but not meant to be taken literally, until I saw this from Rafael Theodore Cruz channeling Vladimir Il'ich Lenin here:

Today’s Dems are the party of the rich.

GOP is and should be the party of the working class. https://t.co/WMTDtKTzwU

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) November 29, 2020

Really? 

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?

For the Record: Rage

Photo by Tyrone Siu/Reuters, via Trending A to Z.

Marco on Hong Kong

It enrages me beyond words that an ignorant hypocrite like Rubio should get away with capitalizing on the suffering of people in Hong Kong to build up his cred.

A people accustomed to liberty & democracy do not easily surrender it.

As tens of thousands protest #China’s plan to use #NationalSecurityLegislation to crush the autonomy of #HongKong we will #StandWithHongKong https://t.co/W11ecziWBd

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) May 24, 2020

You should think about your record of support for voter suppression measures in Florida--not that different in outcome from the way China maintains control of HK legislative council--and elsewhere and ask whether you're really a good spokesman for democracy.

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) May 24, 2020

It seems Americans are really not familiar with this: Hong Kong doesn't have democracy, though it has had economic freedom and a good deal of freedom of speech and assembly which are nowadays under very serious threat. The Hong Kong Legco has never been a representative body, though when Hong Kong was a British colony it represented the (originally all-white) business community. But even after elections were introduced there were always enough appointed seats to ensure the governor general (then) or Beijing-appointed executive (now) would command a majority, as the Republican governor of Florida does, through various techniques of disenfranchisement. Rubio doesn't see anything wrong with that. Coincidentally, it keeps him in a position of power.

The British had a chance to institute real democracy in Hong Kong in the years leading up to 1997 but they chose not to. Rubio has a chance to back democracy in Florida but don't hold your breath.

People Against Populism

The "populist" Maximilien Robespierre, in a contemporary cartoon, via The New Statesman, July 2017.

What accounts for the following"?

Crowds are chanting “Death to Khamenei” in Iran while the regime kills them en masse and shuts down the internet. Throngs are marching to preserve democratic rights in Hong Kong, Warsaw, Budapest, Istanbul and Moscow. The masses are angry in Pakistan, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia and toppling leaders in Lebanon and Bolivia.

David Brooks has an important idea, naturally ("The Revolt Against Populism"):

The Whole Science of Conservatism

Perkins + Will design for the Suzhou Science and Technology Museum, via ArchDaily.

Not sure I can let go of that Douthat column, in spite of wonderful takes from Steve and Roy (subscribe to his newsletter) and my own fool parody, because I really believe there's much much more, starting with the introductory words:

Why We Miss the WASPs

Their more meritocratic, diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well.

"We"!!!

And the idea that the United States was once ruled by an ethnic group, a hereditary aristocracy,  the Anglo-Saxon Protestant, presumably lording it over the Scotch-Irish Protestant peasantry. And all the other Protestant tribes of northern Europe and mercurial Papists, some pink and others swarthy, saturnine Hebrews, the sullen American natives and cheerful Africans, with their banjos on their knees.

Opinion

Why We Miss the TWITs

Their more scientifically educated, multi-hued and poly-gendered, atheistical successors rule us too wisely and not well, or will if we ever let them.

By Bertram Wooster

Opinion Columnist

• Dec. 5, 2018
•  

The nostalgia roused by the passing of Poppy Bush-Nottle grows from a multiplicity of roots, interrelated like those of an aspen grove: our memories of a simpler, better time, during what I am told is often known as the Second World War, with which Poppy himself, though mentally spry as a stripling, was always irrefragably associated, owing to his actually having been there, for some reason that escapes me at the moment; the yearning of our Marxist press for the kind of Republicans who would cheerfully sign a tax hike or a bill forcing us all to throw away our funds on ramps and elevators so our homes can be invaded by noxious people in wheelchairs; and the selfishness of Jeeves, who has suddenly deserted me over a matter that should have been too trivial to separate us, a little tastefully trimmed chin-and-lip hair that seems to me entirely appropriate and has been praised by sophisticated judges including the Honorable Roberta “Bobbie” Wickham, and which I shall never give up. Do your worst, Jeeves!

RIP GHWB

Also, as he receded in very old age into inoffensiveness, whether jumping out of airplanes in his 80s or wearing Bill Clinton socks in his 90s, he became truly cute in spite of everything. Photo via Associated Press.

I don't usually stop to commemorate the deaths of old people about whom I don't have a lot of positive things to say, but the contemplation of George H.W. Bush could lead somewhere interesting:

Anyway, he was conservative in the real sense, which is something I think people are just now realizing they miss. He fought bravely and knew a great deal about baseball. Played it well too, they say.

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) December 1, 2018

Dick's getting his Hemingway on here, isn't he? It's that, though, the "real sense" of being a conservative, which I think for the real Nixon might be what this anonymous Redditor suggested a couple of years ago:

I've always thought of Nixon as a Gaullist or Disraeli type of conservative with a small-town American strain in him rather than a Reaganite conservative or a "closet liberal". He was conservative in the real sense of the word--his major domestic and foreign goals revolved around order and structure, not ideals or justice--but a different kind of conservative. Makes a lot more sense, and that's what Nixon himself thought.

I don't know if he thought it or not, but I think he might have been pleased by having the description applied to him alongside the patrician George Herbert Walker Bush, emphasizing the calm "realism" of his views once he achieved the presidency, and papering over the noise and squalor of the dirty fighting and deceit that got him there up from early poverty and rage.