The Unbearable Whiteness of Chicory

Belgian endive.

One of the conservative voices I know of who can write a truly decent paragraph and show some genuine human feeling, at the same time, is Anne Applebaum, an American journalist married to the Polish politician Radosław Sikorski, who had a beautiful, colossally sad essay ("A Warning From Europe") in last month's Atlantic about crazy nationalism as it's expressing itself in Central Europe at the moment, particularly in Poland and Hungary, which is in some ways scarier, if only because of its echoes of a familiar 1930s and 40s, than the comical goings-on in Trumpy America or the infuriating stupidity of Brexit Britain—if you think I'm crazy to keep associating conspiracy theories about George Soros with traditional Protocols-of-the-Elders anti-Semitism, you just need to be looking at the anti-Soros propaganda coming from Soros's native Hungary, where they make it very explicit (and where Trump adviser Dr. Sebastian Gorka, member of a "Historical Order of Vitéz" reviving the Nazi-run Order of Vitéz of the interbellum era, got his doctorate at the sadly decayed Corvinus University). In Poland especially, where the Velvet Revolutions of 1989 took a particularly legitimate conservative form,  Catholic, under the influence of John Paul II and union leader Lech Wałęsa, Applebaum describes a wrenching split between what I almost want to call leftist conservatives, the European-minded, artistically and philosophically sophisticated, conservative mainly in a kind of sweet upper-class cluelessness that really doesn't mean any harm, and the ruthlessly careerist nationalists of the Kaczyński faction, dividing families and marriages, and wrecking friendships she herself has had for decades, but worse than that is the damage that the nationalists are industriously making.

So here's David F. Brooks to supply the tl;dr on that ("The Rise of the Resentniks") by way of applying it to the Americans and, presumably, soak up some of that pity I can't help feeling for the Sikorski-Applebaums of the world:

What part of "deconstruction of the administrative state" don't you understand, Brooksy?

Age of Wonders 3, just right for Yale Professors of Grand Strategy, screenshot.

Former New York Times columnist David Brooks (his formerness may not be obvious as he continues to drool down the Times pages twice a week, but the evidence remains) has the hottest of hot takes on Emperor Trump's endorsement of the Ryan tax cut health care bill and the "skinny budget" proposal the White House released yesterday. He thinks he sees a pattern in the devastating cuts proposed in more or less everything constructive the government does, and it's that working-class hero Stephen Bannon has lost all his influence on the Emperor ("Let Bannon Be Bannon!"):

[Bannon's] governing philosophy is being completely gutted by the mice around him. He seems to have a big influence on Trump speeches but zero influence on recent Trump policies. I’m beginning to fear that he’s spending his days sitting along the wall in the Roosevelt Room morosely playing one of those Risk-style global empire video games on his smartphone.

Because instead of doing what Brooks heard the No True Conservative say he was going to do, sticking it to the "hedge-fund guys" taxwise, insuring everybody, and mounting that trillion-dollar infrastructure plan ("Many of us wouldn’t have liked that agenda—the trade and immigration parts—but at least it would have helped the people who are being pummeled by this economy"), Trump seems to have signed on to the most reactionary agenda you can imagine, as if—as if he were some kind of Republican!