But For Constant Intervention Abroad, Richard?

Can political parties have souls in the way political romantics like to think?

"We're fighting for the soul of the [Republican/Democratic/Libertarian/Very Silly] Party" is the sort of thing a certain group of people -- namely, people who don't know what souls are and who think politics is anything other than war by other means -- tend to say. It rallies their fellow believers, it inspires people who couldn't even cut it as English majors and so became communications/journalism/philosophy majors instead, and by golly, it makes one feel important as one sets about mustering votes to control the selection of the humans who will at most perform a fraction of the tasks they promised getting there.

But it's nonsense on stilts, because parties don't have souls; humans have souls, immortal ones, and Neo-Platonic nonsense notwithstanding, humans don't contribute to any kind of oversoul, nor do their partisan allegiances somehow forge their souls together like Superion forming from the Aerialbots.

Not pictured: The soul of any political party.

This does not mean that the phrase is ineffective, even if it's stupid; a great many stupid things are very effective. As I say, it's a very good way to rally the ideological troops and to try to convince leaners that one is in the right in a fight over who gets what committee chairs and whether some future mildew-gathering upright ape will have to retire to a different profitable sinecure.

But it's still stupid, precisely because parties don't have souls; they don't even, in our system, have fixed ideological positions or tendencies. They necessarily move and shift as the humans who compose them do; and as they add or subtract humans, those things change in different ways, as well.

So if one says I'm fighting for the soul of the Republican party, it might not be a bad idea to be sure one knows what that means in practice.

I'm going to drop, very briefly, my smug jackass routine to put some cards on the table. I totally called it wrong in 2016. I was pretty sure JEB! (who was a great governor, and I mean that) was gonna run the table for the GOP nod; and when he faltered, I was sure everyone else would start dropping to keep Trump out of the nominee spot; and when that didn't happen, I assumed primary voters would wise up and get ahead of the Dorito Lord; and when that didn't happen, I was pretty damned sure Hillary would win -- not by a lot, but by enough, popularly and electorally, to be dispositive.

I made all of these mistakes because I totally misjudged the "soul of the Republican party" (and because I read stories about problems pollsters were having identifying where voters were and assumed that this represented statistical noise that campaign machines would cancel). I completely missed it. I thought partisan and ideological realignment were so complete that outside of a populist rump that swung between the parties, and that rump was enough for 1-2 percent of the vote in a handful of states, at most -- and that the margins weren't close enough for that to matter.

I was so, so wrong.

Part of adulthood is identifying one's mistakes and learning from them. So the lessons here, or two of them, are that insofar as the "soul of the Republican party" means anything, it's only a situational thing, variable over time and even instantaneously, which really means "nothing"; and insofar as that "soul" was post-World War II fusionist-conservative, that isn't and hasn't been the case in a while. I made this mistake because Republican presidential candidate after Republican presidential candidate had to at least pretend some level of conservatism in the primaries and the general election; because I was so immersed in conservative commentary that I forgot my own rules about identifying selection bias; and because of my own experience, in which the populist members of my exceedingly large family have by and large remained Democrats over time, meaning their votes were already accounted-for.

These were mistakes, the last particularly stupid, and I've corrected them.

The Republican party, as currently constituted, is -- ideologically -- a fusion of true-blue conservatives, libertines-masquerading-as-libertarians-who-care-slightly-more-about-economics-than-sodomy, social conservatives who don't care about the rest, legacy Republicans, populists, foreign policy hawks, foreign policy isolationists, some racists who prefer the kind they think they sniff in dedicated arguments for vouchers more than the Democrat anti-Semitism variety, and single-issue voters of various stripes. Conservatives are not a majority. Populists, who tend to have at least some overlap with every one of those groups except the libertines and a handful of single-issue voters, are essentially in the catbird seat.

You may (quite fairly) blame Nixon, Reagan, and Gingrich for this state of affairs; you may blame Trump. You're blaming the people who won, which suggests the exact connotation of the word "blame" here. Each of these men intuited -- for different reasons at different times -- that there was and is a strong populist element in our country, and harnessing it is the key to electoral victory.

Populism is a corrosive force, destructive of institutions and republican governance (though whether that matters appreciably in a system with low institutional trust and devastated small-r republican governance is another matter altogether). It even eats away at civil society. It inevitably gives rise to clannishness and worse, anti-Semitism and other species of racism being prime examples. It is one of the things our system was designed to combat.

But it is very real, and it's been a very vital force in our system since the Democrats realized they could encourage and harness it two centuries ago. It is abetted by universal suffrage and by a thousand less noble things, none of which are going back in the bottle any time soon. And it's a driving force in both parties, where as recently as 2000, we thought it only Al Gore's latest firmware update. You can try to tame or redirect it, you can grab it by the tail and hold on for dear life, or you can get swallowed by it. Ignoring it is exactly as stupid as thinking that you can tell a great deal about millions of Americans based on the people you personally know.

It is this complete misunderstanding that drives so much commentary in the, sigh, Never Trump universe. (I refuse to use a hashtag because screw you, I'm older than 16.) I was one of that group (no hashtag, even then older than 16), and the point was very clear: Stop the orange clown from getting the GOP nod and making the conservative and Republican labels even stinkier to impressionable children, ages 16-35. We failed. Anyone who cheered on the 2012 postmortem should have been enthusiastic about doing a 2016 one on conservative efforts to take down Trump, and the response has largely been ... being angry that Donald J. Trump is a conniving, lying, scheming, adultering, cheating, malicious, petty, vaguely racist, misogynistic boor who somehow grasped the brass ring despite himself, and carrying on as if nothing happened.

2016 happened. The ground shifted under us and we didn't notice until very late in the game. Pretending that excising the Trump Cancer will somehow both restore the GOP to c. 2003 A.D. forms and ideology, and also win elections, is madness, and yet here we are. You like Paul Ryan? Heck, I like Paul Ryan a lot. I like Marco Rubio, too. You know who doesn't? GOP voters and swing voters. You know who wins this debate? Let me give you a hint: Ryan is retired and Rubio is going to be a Senator, at most, for four more years; President Dorito Lord is currently reminding the Never Trump holdouts that a primary against him is a waste of time and money. And Bill Weld won't save you.

(Contemplate the absurdity of anyone imagining he would, even if he could.)

Populism's ascendance to parity or better with fusionist conservatism in the GOP is a problem if you believe in and want the old coalition back. Instead of dealing with this problem head-on, far too many of those wounded by it spend too much time in echo chambers on social media, participants or observers, reassured in their righteousness and shrinking farther from relevance not only today, but from the people who will be there post-Trump and are not going to put aside human nature to say, Your program that got clobbered by Obama twice and Trump once or twice sounds like a winner to us, sign us up. They're locked in the floor fight of the 1976 Republican National Convention, certain that Goldwater's pitchman is about to vindicate the doddering libertine.

Of course, that was 43 years ago. Someone, please let them know.

Identifying the problem does not mean surrendering in its face. Trump shamelessly employed populism to win and has precious little intention of using it as more than a prolonged marketing campaign. Nixon, Reagan, and Gingrich harnessed it to leverage their way to increasingly-conservative governing majorities and outcomes. Fox News uses it for ratings and very little else. Populism by definition isn't an intellectual exercise, it's a roar of righteous outrage, and emotions are much easier to channel than cold thoughts, for good and for ill. You might even say this isn't a new insight.

Pretending it away, however, won't merely fail to work, it will blow up in your face, and likely take your awesome magazine with it.

Stop. Be the grown-ups you've been before. Join us in the here and now; learn from the mistakes that made Trump's rise possible and your own, and Trump's and his thronesniffers'. We have a party to take back, even if it's different than the one we were sure we had.

This won't work if the past and the present are the undiscovered country.

___

Image of Superion is: Superion, by Atsuhiko Sugita of Studio OX. Scanned from Transformers Visualworks. Copyright TakaraTomy and Studio OX 1986, via tfwiki.net. Low-res image used for non-commercial educational/commentary purposes only. No advertising revenue is taken on this blog. Heck, virtually no one reads it. For takedown requests, please leave a comment below with contact information.

They All Fall Down, Part Some Large Exponent of Ten

If you gaze too long into The Donald, The Donald gazes back into you.

And everyone is dumber for it.

The problem of Donald Trump hit the conservative movement like a problem-shaped figurative landmine hitting a foot, which is to say reactively, with explosive force, and with a great deal of collateral damage. (That metaphor sounded much cooler and smoother when I started than when I finished, but blogging is great for indulging rhetorical flights of fancy.) The vaguely brutal reinforcement of the fact that conservatives are at best a plurality in their own party hit the movement hard, fracturing old alliances; altering priorities; and realigning the entire thing around an orange, blustering lodestar, in opposition, alliance, avoidance, or some combination.

I'd thought the fallout more or less reduced to rival camps of people with way too much time on their hands putting cured meat products on the table of Twitter when the Weekly Standard up-and-died.

I'm hesitant to say too much about the Standard for fear I'll reduce this to a blubbering series of nostalgia-painted trips down my incredibly hum-drum memory lane, but I'll say that from when I was in law school through late last year, the one conservative publication I consistently read was the Weekly Standard. Cheeky, insightful, funny, smart, never self-reverent, witty, and never afraid to be introspective, it was everything a 22-40 year-old guy who thinks too much of himself wants to imagine he'd write.

Three of my favorite writers -- Andrew Ferguson, Matt Labash, and Jonathan Last -- could be found there, and I devoured their articles the way Rosie O'Donnell devours inhabited planets. Last will always have a special place in my heart, for his cheerily-doom-ridden obsession with (declining) demographics on a par with mine; my one major point of disagreement with him was in his identification of Labash and Ferguson as top-shelf writers without including his own name. He never had their flair; he always had the boards nailed down and the carpet perfectly placed. As anyone who's ever written and edited knows, this is a non-trivial accomplishment, even for nominally accomplished writers.

And then the Weekly Standard just died. Poof. Its increasingly strident tone against the Trump Administration -- of which it had not been fond since before there was one -- was cited as one explanation. Another was the consolidation of conservative opinion mags. From my perspective, its constant ownership shifts made it look perilously like The New Republic, but without billionaires in love with eugenics and sodomy to bail it out.

When Last teased a successor, and then it launched, I was relieved. There was hope! A great publication had been saved!

Not so much.

The Bulwark is something of a case study in what happens when one is (1) convinced one is the last righteous man standing (2) obsessed with the demon that laid low or corrupted one's former allies and (3) unmoored from any need to hide either of those things. Publishing the creepy stalker-of-women-on-Twitter guy (whose primary oeuvre is screenshotting conservatives sympathetic to The Weekly Standard and also conservative women, but especially the latter, to hold them up for mockery) and giving Molly Jong-Fast a byline to discuss, inter alia, the pro-life movement as part of the conservative movement can only make sense if your priority is not preserving 1990s-2000s era conservatism so much as it is the absolute destruction of Donald Trump and anyone saying anything that could possibly so much as help someone who helps someone who might help him.

Worse than bad writer selection, however, is the content. To call The Bulwark obsessed is to engage in understatement so profound the very language might collapse on itself; a fate that, philosophically, has struck the Bulwark as well.

I'll offer an example, drawn from using the site's search engine to search for two terms: "the" and "Trump."

A search for "the," which should theoretically yield every article posted on the site, yielded 537 results. A search for "Trump," unsurprisingly, yielded pretty close to every article posted on the site: 445, or 82.87%, of the "the" results. (The Bulwark's search function appears to be default-Boolean, so articles like "The Age of Trumpshevism" did show in these results.)

Perhaps I'm being unfair; as I said, I tend to put Last on the top shelf of editorial and analytical thinkers of my generation, and his hand is, according to the masthead, the last or one of the last to open the bomb-bay doors. Let us therefore look at the stories on the first page of the "Trump" search:

(My mad Photoshop skills are neither mad nor usable when I don't have any tools other than the ones Microsoft hands out for free, so I've reproduced the links below.)

How to Impeach Donald Trump
It’s a Terrible Idea for Trump to Cozy Up to Nigel Farage
Only the Best Deals: How Trump Got Pantsed By Mexico
The Definitive Explanation of Why Donald Trump Is Bane from The Dark Knight Rises
The Trump Kids Go Royal
Sohrab Ahmari’s ‘Culture War’ Is Really Just About Donald Trump
Trump’s Poverty-Line Proposal Is Wonkier Than It Seems
Trump Wants Our Allies to Spend More on Defense. Is That a Good Idea?
Trump’s Mexico Tariffs Are Forever
America’s Trade Laws Were Not Designed for a President Like Trump

Of these, I think it's safe to say that an instruction manual on impeaching someone is disfavorable to the impeachment target. Similarly, describing someone as "pantsed," even the great Wade Boggs, is not a kindness. Making an explicit equation between someone and a completely uninteresting villain from a completely uninteresting movie from a badly overhyped superhero movie sub-franchise does not rate high on the compliment scale.

Any piece by the odious Jong-Fast is, by definition, going to be harsh to Donald Trump and the conservative movement of which the Bulwark claims to be one of the last standing parts. The Bulwark's decision to briefly be the Paper of Sohrab Ahmari Record was apparently incomplete until it topped off with an explanation of how the intra-right contratemps Mr. Ahmari set off, and against whom the Bulwark set itself, was really all about Trump.

That leaves five pieces that, from the headline alone, cannot be sussed out. (In the interest of full disclosure, I read each of the pieces here, because few things are as obnoxious as headline-sniffing, with the possible exception of headline-baiting, which we're all supposed to pretend is basically fine because clicks.) Let's look at those.

The Nigel Farage piece is really an explanation that Nigel Farage sucks, and Donald Trump does as well, for treating him seriously. (The Tories are currently treating Mr. Farage quite seriously for the same reasons Mr. Trump does, which is quite beside anything mentioned in the piece; the analysis of how playing nice with Farage undercuts the Tories (and Labour? the 9/11 discussion makes this mixed) would be much more compelling if the Conservatives weren't doing a fine job of undercutting themselves.)

The poverty-line analysis piece is a relatively even-handed look at a policy proposal that conservatives have favored for years, with a conclusion that ... it likely won't matter all that much, and either should or shouldn't be enacted, who knows.

The NATO defense target piece carefully notes that (1) it has been a policy of multiple Administrations to urge or require Europe, and especially NATO, to spend more on defense; (2) they have not (but they're starting to! sort of!); (3) if they do hit their defense spending targets, it will likely be on soldier welfare (as opposed to the civilian welfare systems most of their armed services already use, one supposes); (4) even if they spend money, it would "only" be worth a few aircraft carriers, ships we all know aren't terribly useful for combat; and (5) if we do, we're begging for European regional hegemons and possibly another Reich or World War. (The implicit answer to the headline, then, is "no.") Unmentioned is that conservatives have been pushing for greater NATO defense spending by constituent powers for decades, an omission that makes perfect sense because reasons. There is a complicated dispute bound up in this question, involving America's sway over NATO, member-states' publics' support of military spending and American military measures, American support for military actions abroad, the decline of Russia from world power to regional hegemon-basket-case, military focus on the Far East, and a dozen other concerns, of which "maybe Germany will re-arm and grab Eastern France and Poland" isn't even remotely one.

Days before Mexico made (possible) concessions and the tariffs at issue in the penultimate piece were called off (for now), the Bulwark announced they'd never be called off because, and I do not believe I'm being unfair here, Donald Trump is an idiot who painted himself into a corner on tariffs and is too stupid to realize it and will never end them. That he did is best explained as ... being too stupid to realize that he'd been pantsed by ending the things we were all confidently told he wouldn't end.

Finally, there's an analysis by the ever-demure Andrew Egger explaining that a late-1990s Congress was too stupid to realize that handing off unilateral authority to the President can be dangerous. While repeatedly emphasizing the stupid, blundering nature of the current occupant of 1600, the piece does close by noting that this is an instance in which Congress was too generous with its powers, and that maybe reconsideration, post-Trump (or intra-Trump!) is needed.

Thus, there are eight highly-unfavorable-to-merely-unfavorable results in that latest ten hits (as of June 18, 2019) for Donald Trump, one of which hammers Donald Trump for pushing a policy endorsed by numerous Presidents and years of American conservatives. There are two analysis pieces, one of which skips right past the fact that the Trump administration is enacting a conservative policy choice in order to suggest it may be a bad idea (or not!) and another to say Donald Trump is so singlehandedly bad, Congress has to have learned a lesson or two by now. Reading deeper does not change this: From only the coverage on The Bulwark, one might reasonably infer that Donald Trump's administration has quite literally done nothing right, from a conservative or even competence perspective.

This is demonstrably silly. One does not have to think the Trump Administration, or its head, has always been right to note that a lot of things have gone well precisely because a lot of traditional conservatives and Republicans swallowed their bile and stayed the course. Judges, Middle East policy (sorry, Rand Paul), life issues(!), heck, even arguably immigration, depending on which part of the screaming parts of the conservative movement one surveys on that front on any given day -- all have had at least reasonably good outcomes.

Let us get something out of the way, many, many paragraphs later than the Bulwark would like or would believe appropriate: Donald Trump is a clown, a crass man who in any reasonable time would not be President unless he first served in the Senate and happened to be Vice President when the squalid, raping, aborting, philandering, vicious, nasty, casually-racist President under whom he served was assassinated. (Thus, a Democrat, in party registration as well as fact; but a proto-neocon, so perhaps occupying a warm spot in the Bulwark crowd's heart.) His presidency has had its share of errors-to-disasters and then some, most notably, on immigration (again, depending on one's perspective; in this case, I think it the one grounded in reality), tariffs (not since George H.W. Bush has any Republican tried so hard to raise tariffs on Americans while pretending it away), and let's just say "communications" has been a byword for "hash." Additionally, there is no need to play carrot-and-stick; The Bulwark acts as essentially Breitbart's mirror image, the back of the hand to the soft, loving palm, and this is a perfectly reasonable position to take.

Someone has to be the guy telling the town drunk to go home, he's making an ass of himself, even when the bartender is slipping him another whiskey. That's an honorable role to fill, although it's a bit much when you follow the guy home, yelling at him the whole way and rousing the whole town in the process.

The essential problem is not even that the Bulwark is obsessed with Trump. He's the President, and that staff has loved an imperial presidency right up until someone they hate with the hate of Rosie O'Donnell facing a diet plan sat in the Oval Office. They're within their rights to focus on the man they basically see as an illegitimate usurper of the throne.

The problem is that they've lost all touch with perspective. It's not just the ridiculous byline pieces -- authors chosen for their open, seething hatred of Trump over the wit, pinache, and learning that used to occupy the Weekly Standard. It's not just the sudden policy shifts -- the Alabama abortion law is not merely a tactical error, but is actually a world-historical betrayal of a movement dedicated to ... ending legalized abortion. It's not the skewed policy perspective -- quite aside from now wanting NATO to bear less of NATO's burden, it appears that making a government-mandated exemption from civil liability dependent on actually complying with the original conditions for that exemption is a form of statism. It's not just treating Bill Weld(!) as a serious candidate for the presidency, something even his exhumed mother would not be able to bring herself to do.

It's all these and more. Altogether, it suggests an unmooring from decades of principles for the sole purpose of screaming at and about Donald Trump, and destroying anything aiding him, even to good outcomes. It is a derangement. It is stupid, precisely because it is unthinking, or worse, surface-level thought in defense of a lack of it.

It is neither too late nor too hard to end this experiment in madness; the writers are smart enough, Egger being the possible exception, and decent enough, the stalker guy and Jong-Fast being the obvious exceptions to that, to at the very least remain solid on principles while opposing the man they hate. The alternative is to be a revanchist holdout of a world that never existed outside of their own imagination, so determined to slay the blundering ogre that they force their own allies away in the process; or, worse, a laughingstock.

The conservative movement has fractured; that doesn't mean that some of its leading lights must lose their mind. I would submit that they should not, for their sake and ours.

Nevertheless, my bet is that they remain what they've become: The Mirror Universe Breitbart (or worse, to their mind: Federalist). My further bet is that they scoff at this even as the world drifts away from them, reassuring themselves that at least they don't champion hopeless or despicable causes.

And yet: Bill Weld.

Probably could have left it at this, to be honest.

People are losing their ever loving minds.

— Casey Mattox (@CaseyMattox_) June 5, 2019

I need to do this more often.

I forget how much fun I have writing something that doesn't need jump cites until I do it, and then I get addicted again.

The Beatings Will Continue Until the Stupidity Ends

The most attractive part of the human body, based on centuries of human experience, is not the face, or the legs, or the midsection, or the chest, or the hips, or any genital; but, rather, the navel. This has come into starker relief now that we as a society have discovered that our ability to share our most trivial insights with a waiting world is quite literally at our fingertips. It is made worse in the face of absolute futility of action, something to which American conservatives would be absolutely conditioned but for the historical success of a former Democrat who launched one of those epochal political revolutions that happen in our system from time to time.

I have very little to add to the Sohrab Ahmari-David French affair that has consumed the attention of people who write about ideas, politics, and political grunting for a living, because this entire contretemps is not even a disagreement over tactics, or strategy, or even temperament or attitude. It's a disagreement that cannot even agree on the field of battle. 

On the one hand, the one side correctly notes that we have entered the stage of the culture wars in which evil may safely shed its love of tolerance because it has the upper hand. On the other hand, the other side correctly says that political liberalism has delivered on the promise of peaceful coexistence and prosperity. Many pixels have died to make exactly these points, changing no one's mind in the process.

Each may find fault, I would suggest with great accuracy, with the other. But they're not even talking to each other. They're simply staking out stances, because neither really grasps the import of why they're yelling past each other; or, worse, simply doesn't have a solution except to keep doing what it has done so far. 

The real problem here is simple to identify, but hard to solve. It is actually a combination of both positions: We are part of a liberal political order. (Here, I mean the word "liberal" in its classical sense, which refers to sometimes-muted popular sovereignty over and against the authority of a monarch, buttressed by norms and rules and laws both substantive and procedural; so the American system, for example, is liberal, while the Saudi system, by contrast, is conservative. This does not map perfectly onto how we perceive conservatism, which is a spectrum of rightist attitudes including some species of political liberalism, or progressivism, which historically includes others.)

Within the liberal order is the underlying presumption that whichever side wins a debate, absent a structural violation, wins. The other side must briefly yield, even if promising to reverse the effect through liberal means -- debate, persuasion, and votes taking in representative bodies. But as ours has recently evolved, it is one in which one combatant is slowly but surely and successfully using illiberal tactics and strategies not merely to deny the other victory, nor even to deny it legitimacy, but to deny it access to the tools of liberalism and therefore the system; and the real battlefield, for now at least, is the governed, who cannot fathom a world outside that liberal order but who are constantly bombarded with cultural messages about the rightness of the side abandoning liberalism. 

Indulge me in an example near and dear to my heart. Assume Republicans retake the House and expand their majority in the Senate. They also grow spines. They send up a budget not merely stripped of Planned Parenthood funding, but that instructs that no Medicaid funds may go to any abortion provider. States may use their own funds as they will, but Federal funding is right out. Trump, because he's not smart but he knows marketing, signs this. 

Raise your hand if you honestly believe a venue-shopped District Judge won't void that part of the budget because reasons. Keep it up if you think the Ninth or Fourth or Second Circuits, where venue will probably be, won't affirm. If the Trump years have taught us anything -- an open question -- it is that the total absence of a Constitutional basis for this behavior is irrelevant.

Now strain your shoulder to the tearing point if you believe (1) SCOTUS will take cert and (2) there won't be a non-stop media, every medium, war on the GOP for denying funds to people who provide mammograms even though their leadership has testified under oath that they do not, in fact, provide mammograms. 

As the great Justice Antonin Scalia noted, the Court is designed to be illiberal but limited, and is instead illiberal and expansive, and we have tacitly accepted this; and where the Court has not ruled or has ruled in our favor, we face a multi-pronged assault from tiny but disproportional elements of what's left of civil society that serves to deny us legitimacy even in the eyes of our own representatives. If you doubt that, look at subdued reaction by every, single major Republican candidate in 2016 to Obergefell -- or more precisely, to the demands by their constituents that they rein in the Supreme Court's ad hoc lawmaking. One hundred and fifty years ago, a future President railed against unjust Supreme Court adventurism. Today, we shrug and accept the destruction of our system by men and women sworn to uphold it because their social milieu demands it. As the late Justice Scalia also noted, "when the Court takes sides in the culture wars, it tends to be with the knights rather than the villains -- and more specifically with the Templars."

There is no liberal solution to this. The tools of liberalism are thwarted, capriciously or at least without much reflection to their nominal sources of authority, by the illiberal part of the system to which we agreed, and from which we cannot extricate ourselves without armed rebellion or exile; and by a culture that has the ear of that illiberal block. So even when we win liberally, not only do we lose, but we have agreed to the means of our defeat and exile from future competition. 

How do you fight this? French says he's won using the tools of liberalism and he's right, but he then points to victories we all know are etched in sand -- every win to which he proudly (and rightfully!) points was made in court and is therefore subject to a later court pulling a Lawrence to his Bowers, or was accomplished legislatively and is therefore even more fragile. Ahmari says that the tide is coming, and he's right, but he completely lacks any description or even general idea of how we get around this. 

Their various champions have not acquitted themselves appreciably better, even when arguing eloquently and movingly. (Most of their champions, at any rate: Over at the Bulwark and Reason, they smell from Ahmari a dangerous whiff of Trump-loving Popery, and their work sounds like it; those weirdo integralists, against whom Ahmari went to war just two years ago, and with whom he has not aligned himself, the Bulwark anti-Catholics' suspicions notwithstanding, are detached from reality.)

There are a thousand problems here that neither side even bothers to attack except fitfully and incompletely. Our system relies on an engaged populace who nevertheless draw their validation and morals from some place other than governance -- presumptively religion, but even a philosophy with fixed goals and morals could work in a pinch. It is designed around having States be not just outposts of the Federal government, but also independent stakeholders in it, and therefore prone to loudly and angrily reining it in or at least standing toe-to-toe and arguing with it. It assumes that most decisions of importance and triviality are made locally and at any rate by elected representatives. It assumes, let's be honest, a bunch of church going Protestants who believe in Hell and I guess Heaven are gonna be the bulk of the populace, with a small minority of Catholics willing to buck Rome on liberalism and some other people who don't make a big stink about themselves, all of whom accept the underlying premises of the system as something other than a springboard to the next. It relies on a Federal government of enumerated powers only. It relies on shared assumptions about governance and indeed the universe. And so on. 

None of this is true any more, and so we get two groups of people being swept away by the tide competing with each other to make ever-crappier allusions to (and accusations of watching!) a crappy TV show based on crappy books about the War of the Roses. Also Trump, because these days, even choices in pizza toppings involve Trump. 

I don't side with either because this is all stupid and they're not making it less so. 

Words Make the Man.

The language we choose tells others a great deal about us. For example, my wife jokes that I'm one of the few living speakers of American English who visibly suffers real pain when he accidentally dangles a preposition, or says, "To who?" or really, any of a litany of offenses against a perfectly-useful Latin-infected Germanic tongue. This suggests that, at best, I'm a pedant fighting a romantic rear-guard action to preserve a particular state of a living tongue; at worst, it suggests I'm a prig; and likely, it suggests something between the two. 

Similarly, people who refer to a single person as "they," or cannot bring themselves to accurately describe another person by sexual characteristics also broadcast important things about the durability of their connection to reality.

The importance of language in how we define and perceive reality is of inordinate importance to those in my profession, who have a bad tendency to see the world as a series of word-locks (often of our own creation) to which we fashion word-keys and word-lockpicks as needed. It is also singularly important to politicians, because except at war, their entire job is to [effect things/change things/spend money/take money/make pretend money/pretend the existence of money/create or destroy relationships] through words. This is why, to take an easy example, former Senator Tom Coburn would return to his obstetrics practice every weekend and eventually fled The World's Greatest Deliberative Body: Only truly awful people like lawyers and politicians would want to live in a bubble in which we pretend that our words make the world anew.

(One can also tell a great deal about a person from the length of his throat-clearing; taking, purely for example, 261 words, not including a parenthetical, to begin to get to a point suggests that the writer is perhaps too enamored of his own prose.)

The words our governing class of the moment uses to communicate with what it perceives as its subjects has long been one of my favorite bugaboos, precisely because it tells us a great deal about how our would-be rulers see us and them. As I said three years ago:

But what Islam and immigration have in common is not so much race (though they can both be proxies for race) or xenophobia (though again, this does influence at least some fraction of those concerned by these things), but rather a well-deserved reputation for being untouchable subjects by our political elites. The language we are allowed to use to describe these problems -- and the language we are not allowed to use -- is a both a symptom and a signal of the larger issues.

Let us take the word alien. Alien derives from the Latin alius, other; skipping the usual French transmission of Latin to English, it originally had nothing to do with extraterrestrials and simply meant strangers to one's land. Thus, early American laws on foreigners -- even ones who would become American -- referred to them as aliens. Over time, this usage persisted so that until very recently, we referred to legal aliens (strangers here legally) and illegal aliens (strangers here not-legally). To call someone or something alien is not to engage in racism or any actual sin; it is simply to describe a thing using slightly arcane language.

Starting a few decades ago, it became more fashionable to refer to these strangers as immigrants, a word that is technically both accurate and inaccurate.

An immigrant (Latin: migrare, to depart, which then became migrans, one who departs, combined with im which prefix means into as opposed to e, from) is one who departs his place to come into ours. The connotation of immigrant however, is somewhat more permanent than alien, which refers to one who is a stranger for any length of stay. Nevertheless, Americans are not all Latin buffs, so we ran with it.

In the last decade, someone decided that immigrant sounds racist and othering (a portmanteau that a just God will punish with the Fires of Hell), and that illegal immigrant is somehow worse; and all of a sudden, American politicians of both parties explicitly or implicitly declared that calling strangers who come into our land outside of our laws either of those words was racist thoughtcrime. 

Similarly, over the last decade and a half, American political leaders have been at great pains to pretend that Muslims who kill people in the name of Islam and subscribe to a system of Islamic belief that has roots at least in the 18th if not 8th century, and whose actions are supported by between ten and fifty percent of Muslims worldwide, are not, in fact, Muslim; and to call them Muslim is that great of American sins, racism. (Islam, like Christianity, perceives itself as a universal faith, which means one open to all races, but it is thoughtcrime to note that, as well.) 

Americans may not be amateur etymologists, but they are not actually fools; they understand that this is not an attempt to be polite -- something that even Yankees unconsciously do -- but rather an attempt to control conversation, thought, and action. It is nothing new to remark on how the left likes to control thought through the control of language; a clever fellow named Orwell remarked on it in a nearly eponymous essay decades ago. It is something new to see the nominal right engaged in it as well. It suggests that at some point, solving problems became less important than not making people upset that you recognized them. 

But not only does this convey a profound sense of unseriousness -- anyone of even minimal intelligence knows that it's hard to fight a thing if you won't call it by its right name -- it is also a subtle but profound announcement that We are not like (by which we mean, "are better") than you rabble. It says, We do not worry about the same things that you do, and to worry about those things, to call them by their right names and express concern, is racist and honestly isn't nearly as important as making sure politically-connected individuals and corporations get rich. It also says, Trust your betters, morons.

Despite (and arguably because of) the amazing swamp-clearing powers of Bad Orange Man and his surprisingly survival-adept band of competent people and situationally-competent nitwits, this condition has not merely not improved, it has worsened. 

Thus, let us speak of Christians, by way of speaking about English.

A good friend of mine has said one can tell a lot about a people based on how their language sounds when yelled out on a battlefield. A great language, whatever the virtues of its people and their martial prowess, is capable of eloquence and pithiness by turns, but by its own rhythm. Attempting an English version of Cicero or Leonidas only works insofar as one can abide by -- or even stretch -- English's rules of construction and formation. This is why children's insults, which are by turns elaborate and abrupt, often sound so amusing to adult ears, and why so many portmanteaux and neologisms die aborning every day in this great land.

This is no less true for politically-correct speech, a concept that regained currency in the 1980s and 1990s (and fueled the brief, too-short careers of Andrew "Dice" Clay, Morton Downey, Jr., and other leading lights), disappeared for a while, and made a roaring comeback in time for an orange buffoon and the antagonist of The Wizard of Oz to face off for the Presidency. "Gender non-confirming bi person of color," for example, is the sort of code to which college students (marked generally by immature brains and an excess of free time) might thrill, but the rest of us are basically fine with "woman." On the other side of that coin, "mozzarella head," might suggest "pasty person with soft if delicious brains and no real integrity," but it really just sounds like you're trying for insults and cannot create them.

"Christian" is an easy word with a well-defined meaning: It means "someone who worships [Jesus] Christ." It is succinct and carries a definition on which, broadly, everyone agrees, even if the particulars sometimes cripple that agreement quickly. 

It is not uncommon, especially in older texts, to see the archaism "Christ worshiper," which conveys the same meaning. This is because in English, a sufficiently specific noun may act as the direct object of a gerund or verb-based noun. Lotus eater, for example, means "one who eats lotuses." "Christ follower" means "one who follows [the teachings of] Christ." And so on.

It is very hard to change this structure, which while archaic, is well-rooted in our mother tongue. For example, referring to someone as a "flesh eater" does not mean "one who eats in the presence of or on top of flesh"; a "devil worshiper" does not pray to the God of Hosts while surrounded by the angels He evicted to darkness and emptiness for all eternity; and "Easter worshiper" does not mean "one who worships [something] on Easter." Were this otherwise, we would refer to the poor souls killed in New Zealand some weeks ago as "mosque worshipers" or "Friday worshipers," when the proper term is Muslims; this is because either of those terms would suggest they were worshiping a place or a day, rather than God as they perceive Him.

The massacre of Christians in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday was thus an opportunity to publicly emote for politicians who ordinarily couldn't give a rat's anus for anyone they cannot see in their own mirrors. Their response was not to mourn dead and wounded "Christians," but instead "Easter worshipers."

I do not care what convoluted newspeak a group of apostates, atheists, agnostics, and Obamaists use to describe Christianity, so long as they don't follow up that description with weaponry, and neither should you. The Church teaches that without Christ's freely-chosen Grace, Hell awaits, Jews being the only notable exception on the theory that God keeps His promises; the supermajority of this crowd has made their choice and they're in for one Hell of a surprise when the actuarial tables catch up with them. 

But given that the damned involved are former Presidents, incompetents who would have stepped over their own mothers to be President, and major media cretins, you should care what they think about you, because the consequences are coming soon to a policy decision near you.

After the September 11 attacks, then-President George W. Bush reassured the nation that true Muslims could not have perpetrated those mass killings, because Islam means "peace." Those of us who had paid attention in any of our world history classes from birth through college scratched our heads and more or less as one, said, "Wait, doesn't Islam mean submission?" Not to be outdone by a Republican executive, both parties began offering that Islam is a (possibly the) religion of peace, pace all those two Christians bombing abortion clinics and that one Jewish guy who killed a bunch of people at the Cave of the Patriarchs. Also the Crusades. This became a mantra to the point of mockery in conservative circles.

And rightfully so. I was (and am) a fan of the former President's, but this struck me as one of the most insulting possible things to say at that moment. It belittled Islam -- a faith that whatever its merits, quite logically postulates that if that conception of the Divine is accurate, face-to-the-ground submission is the only rational response -- and it belittled the American people, because it suggested that some large fraction of us were ticking time bombs, one bad translation of Arabic away from gunning down a mosque. 

There's a lot to unpack there, but let's start with the numbers.

As Pew put it in an accompanying blog post, assaults were only about a quarter of the 400 hate crimes perpetrated on Muslims in 2001, almost all of which were in the last quarter. Harm to an innocent, whatever the motivation, is by definition a terrible wrong, so there are 400 real wrongs on display in this data; but for perspective on the awfulness of the plague of violence with which our political class was faced, in January of 2001 alone, in Los Angeles only, there were 230 felony assaults. In the People's Republic of New Jersey in 2002, there were 433 carjackings -- that is, more carjackings in a single state (granted, the Capital of Carjacking and Superfund Sites) than there were anti-Muslim hate crimes of every kind in the heat of the post-9/11 trauma.

It is by definition impossible to prove a counterfactual, but even taking arguendo the highly questionable and still-mysteriously-unproven assertion that words inspire borderline and not-so-borderline people to go kill a lot of people, it appears that at least 400 times, someone overcame our ruling class's word choice and committed mortal sins on the basis of the (at times perceived) religious belief of their victims; and yet, it was only 400 times, a number roughly equal to the number of homicides in Detroit in 2001. The operational theory was therefore that the ordinary, non-violent humans and the borderline-violent humans are too stupid to understand circumlocution, but the marginal number of violent thugs can see right through it, and if we're not careful, the majority will join the margin.

There is and was a great deal to be said for neither antagonizing predominantly or exclusively Muslim allies whose territory we would need for staging grounds and whose intelligence operations, however unsavory, would make our own more effective; but there is even more to be said for not treating the people who put you in office as itchy-fingered psychopaths eager to burn their doctors and neighbors alive because Mooooooslim.

As much as has changed since 2001, this has not.

This leads to the crux of the problem with "Easter worshipers." Our governing class is composed of people of fading religiosity, increasingly tenuous connections with their Christian countrymen, and all of the noblesse oblige and class awareness of a stereotypical-if-historically-ridiculous movie medieval monarch and none of the fear that sent kings crawling across their islands on pilgrimage to save themselves and their subjects from excommunication. I use the phrases governing class and ruling class tongue-in-cheek; they do not use those terms at all, except to try to live them.

The term "Easter worshiper" is detached, analytical, jarring, silly, clumsy, and more likely to incite than calm; but it's the sort of thing a group of would-be technocrats would say while analyzing the subjects on whose dial settings they're working. Hm, careful, mustn't let Group A know that the mice who died in Group S are Christian mice, they might riot or refuse to eat the infused pellets. 

Put very simply, our representatives -- our public servants -- are increasingly our rulers, in their perception if not always in fact. Representatives or servants will feel a connection to those who put them in power, and will understand that acting in the governed's interest is acting in their own. Rulers will do what they feel right for their subjects, knowing that they themselves need never feel those policies or the consequences. A representative fears for his own skin, on the day he rejoins the governed; a ruler fears the mob.

Standing alone, "Easter worshipers" is jarring, weird, and a one-off. As part of a larger data set, it suggests that the people who govern and imagine they govern us increasingly believe they rule us.