Dr. Douthat and Mr. Ross

Illustration via Wikipedia.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, has come up with the perfect allegorical representation ("The Last Temptation of NeverTrump") of his shtik: as an interior dialogue between his divided selves, the weary preppy of the surface, in roman type, and the alt-right maniac of the depths, urging a vote for Trump, in italics. 

Ah, sure — you’re my right-wing id. And let me guess — you want to make the case that I should vote for Trump? I figured the coronavirus experience had shamed you into silence.

Shame is what you should feel, sellout. Look, I get that you’re a lost cause. But someone needs to tell you that you’re going to miss Trump when he’s gone.

Douthat, you see, doesn't endorse Trump—he's just saying. But the endorsement's in there and has to come out. He's far too proper to do anything as disgraceful as voting for Trump himself—

He’s a bigot and an aggressive liar, he winks at violence, and he’s exacerbated one of his party’s worst tendencies, its obsession with the minor threat of voter fraud and its eagerness to throw up impediments to voting. What he’s given to cultural conservatives with the courts, he’s taken by making us seem like hypocrites and making embarrassments like Jerry Falwell Jr. the face of conservative Christendom. He’s radicalized young people and empowered some truly terrible tendencies on the left that will reshape American institutions deep into Amy Coney Barrett’s old age. And I haven’t even gotten to the coronavirus.

—but he hopes people won't agree with him too much:

Thinking Bigger

 

Dumpling truck, via New York Street Food.

Cheered and even kind of pumped by a radio appearance from Matty Glesias (as I like to think of him—it's how it looks on his Twitter handle) promoting a book, One Billion Americans: The Case For Thinking Bigger, offering some pretty big thinking indeed: that if you really wanted to make America great again, you'd want to do it with a greater population, say tripling it to a billion by the year 2100, through a combination of policies: not just making immigration much easier rather than much harder as the Trump administration has done, but also making it much easier for existing Americans to raise kids, and generally working the infrastructure to support a bigger population, because

the United States is not “full.” Many of its iconic cities—including not just famous cases of collapse like Detroit but also Philadelphia and Chicago and dozens of smaller cities like Rochester and Erie—actually have fewer residents than they had decades ago. And virtually all of our thriving cities easily have room to grow and accommodate more people.

Forget it, Jesse, it's New York City. And you're not, you bumpkin.

Ronny Chieng and the Daily Show response to the ghastly Orientalism of Fox "News" correspondent Jesse Watters and his journey into the Heart of Darkness in Lower Manhattan that aired on the O'Reilly show on Monday, which was some of the most insulting, ignorant, and all-round shamefully terrible TV I've ever seen.

I wanted to write something about it as I was becoming aware of it yesterday, but this piece really says everything I'd want to say much better and more. It's just really well done.

Also I know a couple of the featured interviewees (the Alfred E. Neuman voter and the guy who says "fuck" a lot) somewhat—both are among many other things notably involved in community arts support—and the helpmeet knows them well, along with some of the others, and recognizes more or less everybody. (Also turns out that Chieng was raised in Singapore and born just across the Causeway in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, so sentimental about that.)

So I'm posting it even if you already saw it. Sue me.

The era of arguing about big government

Update 7/4: Happy Glorious Fourth and Welcome Mike's Round Up Fans—Thanks, Batocchio!

Charles Chaplin in The Gold Rush (1925). Via somebody's Tumblr.

David Brooks ("The Coming Political Realignment", July 1 2016) gives us yet more hints on his reporting techniques during his voyage into the heart of whiteness last spring, after his sudden realization that he didn't know how to do his job and decision to leap across the chasms of segmentation and get socially intermingled with the white working-class voters, telling us what he did on his investigative visit to Pittsburgh, in addition to interviewing factory owners and school principals:

I recently got a tour of it from the mayor, Bill Peduto. We visited a beautiful, tight Italian community with family-owned businesses stretching back generations. We visited a resurging African-American community where local activists were building a cultural center in the home of the great playwright August Wilson. Mostly we just saw acres and acres of new development: new restaurants, new museums, new loft-style office spaces and several gleaming new hospitals.

This reconnaissance was evidently over by 11:00 or so, leaving him the afternoon for a more explicit hunt for white working-class voters, which he conducted by driving around looking for a steelworkers' lunch spot where he would be able to get socially intermingled with some of the chaps, but unfortunately he failed to locate one: