Something in the wind, part 3 of 3. The rise of the radical populist right. Getting what you wish for.

Part Three of this series is brought to you by Giogia Meloni and Clarence Thomas.

Meloni and Thomas.¹

Thomas?

Yes, we'll explain down below, sooner or later.

In the first two parts of this three part series, I've looked at the election of Giorgia Meloni and the reasons for her rise. In the last episode, we tried to sum up the source of her popularity, and how that relates to a now, semi-fawning, American far right.  Italy has now gone down this path.  Others, now more than ever, are urging the United States to do the same.

Which bring up the dread Law of Unintended Consequences.

All of us probably heard our mothers, or somebody, give us the warning "Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true!"  Probably, few stop to realize that this warning was delivered by non-other than Aesop as far back as 260BC.  His sage advice has hung around for a good reason.  The danger of getting something more than you asked for, in terms of secondary effects, is always pretty high.  Nobody tends to think much about that, however.

Far right admirers of Meloni, or Orban for that matter, are disgusted with the "woke" drift of American progressivism and goals that it has, some of which have been quite successful, which seem to offer promise to countering that.  These folks, in many instances, are horrified by progressive efforts that seek to remodel every institution of society and even our basic natures, if they can, and they likely really cannot, which doesn't mean that they can't do a lot of damage in the effort.

But others, and indeed most, of the Americans who are on the Trump train are on it only for one or two reasons.  Some are there for economic reasons, upset by the export of American jobs overseas for decades and a rising tide of immigrants.  Others are horrified by the seeming triumph of the woke and the redefinition of marriage.  Probably most have a vague sense that this ain't the way things ought to be.²

And I agree.

This ain't the way things ought to be.

But, I'm a dreaded intellectual Catholic, the very sort of people that the founders of this Great Nation abhorred and dreaded, and which many in the culture still do. 

Some feel that this era has passed, and such distinctions no longer matter, but I wonder, and I'm not the only one.  Ross Douthat, regarding current American Conservatism, has posted the following on his Twitter account within the last few days.

Current American conservatism: a low-church nondenominational Protestant mass movement trying to exert influence via intellectual Catholics strategically placed inside hollowed-out/secularized institutions of high-church denominational Protestantism.

If you dig deeper into this, you'll find that folks like Douthat, and Catholic intellectual circles, are concerned that ultimately they are there to be used, but when the time comes, they'll be dumped.

Now this may be surprising in an era when the real intellectuals on the Supreme Court, for example, are all Catholics.  All of them.  And its no surprise that this is the case.  By their training, both in their Catechism, and in their profession, they have to be, and were probably always inclined in that direction.  It used to be, however, that this was also true of others of different backgrounds, and while saying it is definitely dangerous, as it can be so easily misunderstood, it's still true of observant Jewish individuals, such as the recently departed Justice Ginsberg, which is part of the reason she was so widely, and justifiably, admired.  

It's getting pretty hard, however, to find serious intellects of the same type who are coming out of what's become of mainstream American conservatism.  Yes, they are there, to be sure.  Mitch McConnell is one, no matter what you think of him.  He's a Baptist. John Hickenlooper is a Quaker. Ben Sasse is a Presbyterian who was once a Lutheran.  And I don't mean to suggest a person has to be Catholic, or even religious, to be a heavyweight intellect by any means.

Rather, what I'm suggesting is this.

A lot of those in the Trump populist right are basically adherents to a sort of intellectualism lite, and often participants in the American Civil Religion, which claims Protestant Christianity as its foundation, but which advances it in a very lenient fashion, omitting, in its current form, darned near all of the New Testament list of behaviors between male and female, and indeed between male and male, and female and female, of a certain category, that were listed as sinful.³

So again, if we're turning the clock back, as Chesterton says we can, who will be comfortable with that and who won't?

Let's get back to voting and what you get, in the end.

In the German elections of the early 1930s, some people really did want to elect a radical racist party into power that would kill the Jews and hopefully, in their line of thinking, punish the French and wipe out the Bosheveks whereever they could be found.

But most voters who went to the polls probably didn't really have sending their sons to freeze to death at Stalingrad or being asked to put a bullet into a rabbi's head, or crush the skull of a Jewish infant in with a rifle butt, in mind at the time.

Observant German Lutherans, over half the county's religious community, didn't imagine that they'd have to fight off an attempt to consolidate them into a state approved variant of their faith.  German Catholics didn't imagine they'd be hiding impaired children from thinly disguised euthanasia programs.

Italians, in the 1920s, didn't imagine, for that matter, that some twenty years later they'd be sending their sons to fight one of the best armies in the world in North Africa, and others to fight the Red Army in the East.

Benito Mussolini.  He was the authority.  All you would have to do to verify this would have been to ask him. . .

Oh, I know, some will read this (among the few who do) and dismiss it as wild hyperbole.  And, for that matter, I'm not saying that anyone is going to be freezing in a few years on the Volga.

What I am saying is that a lot of right wing populist truly talk the talk, but don't really walk the walk, and probably don't want to either.

I'm also saying it's hard, when you go shopping for really radical political movements, to buy just part of the pie.  I.e, it's hard to say "I'll have a think slice of immigration reform please" and not get "here's your populist pie, including a complete set of family values you aren't following. . . "

Which takes us back to Clarence Thomas and more particularly his dissent in Dobbs.

Now, the Dobbs decision is 213 pages long in the original reporter, and we can't expect everyone to have read it.  I haven't read it all, either. But Dobbs, we know, got the abortion topic right.  Roe v. Wade, as most constitutional scholars long ago admitted, just made stuff up that wasn't in the Constitution, and it had long prior become completely unworkable.  Dobbs just sent things back to the states, where they belonged in the first place.

The Dobbs majority was quick to point out, in the text, that it was in no way shape or form seeking to expand the holding in Dobbs beyond the opinion itself, and it in particular it was no threat to Obergefell.

Well, baloney.

That's the same thing Justice Kennedy said in Obergefell. At the time that decision was handed down, the Court indicated it wouldn't expand into anything else, and those advancing the cause that prevailed in Obergefell likewise promised they had nothing else on the agenda.  Obergefell was, as noted, in our opinion on it at the time, a judicial coup, one preceding the attempted January 6, 2021, coup, and one basically fed into the other.

Kennedy was wrong in his declaration, and those 

I write separately to emphasize a second, more fundamental reason why there is no abortion guarantee lurking in the Due Process Clause. Considerable historical evidence indicates that “due process of law” merely required executive and judicial actors to comply with legislative enactments and the common law when depriving a person of life, liberty, or property. See, e.g., Johnson v. United States, 576 U. S. 591, 623 (2015) (THOMAS, J., concurring in judgment). Other sources, by contrast, suggest that “due process of law” prohibited legislatures “from authorizing the deprivation of a person’s life, liberty, or property without providing him the customary procedures to which freemen were entitled by the old law of England.” United States v. Vaello Madero, 596 U. S. ___, ____ (2022) (THOMAS, J., concurring) (slip op., at 3) (internal quotation marks omitted). Either way, the Due Process Clause at most guarantees process. It does not, as the Court’s substantive due process cases suppose, “forbi[d] the government to infringe certain ‘fundamental’ liberty interests at all, no matter what process is provided.” Reno v. Flores, 507 U. S. 292, 302 (1993); see also, e.g., Collins v. Harker Heights, 503 U. S. 115, 125 (1992).

As I have previously explained, “substantive due process” is an oxymoron that “lack[s] any basis in the Constitution.” Johnson, 576 U. S., at 607–608 (opinion of THOMAS, J.); see also, e.g., Vaello Madero, 596 U. S., at ___ (THOMAS, J., concurring) (slip op., at 3) (“[T]ext and history provide little support for modern substantive due process doctrine”). “The notion that a constitutional provision that guarantees only ‘process’ before a person is deprived of life, liberty, or property could define the substance of those rights strains credulity for even the most casual user of words.” McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U. S. 742, 811 (2010) (THOMAS, J., concurring in part and concurring in judgment); see also United States v. Carlton, 512 U. S. 26, 40 (1994) (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment). The resolution of this case is thus straightforward. Because the Due Process Clause does not secure any substantive rights, it does not secure a right to abortion. 

The Court today declines to disturb substantive due process jurisprudence generally or the doctrine’s application in other, specific contexts. Cases like Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U. S. 479 (1965) (right of married persons to obtain contraceptives)*; Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U. S. 558 (2003) (right to engage in private, consensual sexual acts); and Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U. S. 644 (2015) (right to same-sex marriage), are not at issue. The Court’s abortion cases are unique, see ante, at 31–32, 66, 71–72, and no party has asked us to decide “whether our entire Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence must be preserved or revised,” McDonald, 561 U. S., at 813 (opinion of THOMAS, J.). Thus, I agree that “[n]othing in [the Court’s] opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.” Ante, at 66.

For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell. Because any substantive due process decision is “demonstrably erroneous,” Ramos v. Louisiana, 590 U. S. ___, ___ (2020) (THOMAS, J., concurring in judgment) (slip op., at 7), we have a duty to “correct the error” established in those precedents, Gamble v. United States, 587 U. S. ___, ___ (2019) (THOMAS, J., concurring) (slip op., at 9). After overruling these demonstrably erroneous decisions, the question would remain whether other constitutional provisions guarantee the myriad rights that our substantive due process cases have generated. For example, we could consider whether any of the rights announced in this Court’s substantive due process cases are “privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Amdt.  14, §1; see McDonald, 561 U. S., at 806 (opinion of THOMAS, J.). To answer that question, we would need to decide important antecedent questions, including whether the Privileges or Immunities Clause protects any rights that are not enumerated in the Constitution and, if so, how to identify those rights. See id., at 854. That said, even if the Clause does protect unenumerated rights, the Court conclusively demonstrates that abortion is not one of them under any plausible interpretive approach. See ante, at 15, n. 22. 

You get the point.⁴ 

So here's the deal.  Thomas would strike down an entire series of substantive due process cases.  And indeed, his logic on this is infallible.  He's correct.⁵

And that's why I wonder, quite frankly, if rank and file populists have thought this out.

Once you board the logic train, you have to go where it goes.  It's like going on a transcontinental railroad trip. 

Once you board the logic train, you have to go where it takes you and you can't get off early.  It's like going on a transcontinental railroad trip.  You buy your ticket, and you can't pretend the train doesn't run all the way across the country and just stops, and turns around, in Denver.  You'll go through Denver. . . but the train will keep going.

The string of cases that Thomas mentions are in fact in peril now, and they likely also ought to be.  But Thomas didn't mention Loving v. Virginia.  Now, I think Loving v. Virginia can still be defended, and it undoubtedly can be on Natural Law grounds.

Loving v. Virginia was, you will recall, the case that determined that states couldn't ban interracial marriages.

Now most people, and certainly any decent people, would find that concept horrific.  Of course states can't ban interracial marriages. But they did, in some instances, up until that time.  It was Loving v. Virginia that struck that down.  Not too many people want to go back to that.

As critics of Dobbs have mentioned, as the state's can and have litigated in all of the areas that Thomas mentions, it's odd, sort of, that he omitted this one.  Well maybe not.  There's another way to address this case too, but it's still worth noting that this is the one area that would personally impact Thomas in a very direct way, and which is contrary to his personal worldview.

At the Wyoming State Bar convention, this came up during a speech by a constitutional scholar who also publishes in the Tribune. At some point during the speech, I don't know where, Harriet Hageman left the room, and she was apparently pretty disgruntled with what the speaker was saying, although I don't know that it was this. An email that circulated among Wyoming State Bar members later claimed that Hageman "heckled" the speaker, and the speaker perceived it that way, although many people disagreed with that characterization.  If nothing else, this all goes to show how uncomfortable people on the far populist right are with where this all leads.

The backdoor out of this is, as noted, Natural Law, but most populist really don't want to go there either.  

Natural Law has come up in American law repeatedly over the centuries, although now it is official eschewed. At one time it was not.  We've dealt with both of those themes here before, with the most interesting example of it being the case The Antelope, which we've written about at least twice.  That was the case in which the United States Supreme Court decided that slavery was contrary to the natural law, but allowable under the law of the United States as countries could legislate contrary to the natural law, to wit:

That it is contrary to the law of nature will scarcely be denied. That every man has a natural right to the fruits of his own labor is generally admitted, and that no other person can rightfully deprive him of those fruits and appropriate them against his will seems to be the necessary result of this admission. But from the earliest times, war has existed, and war confers rights in which all have acquiesced. Among the most enlightened nations of antiquity, one of these was that the victor might enslave the vanquished. This, which was the usage of all, could not be pronounced repugnant to the law of nations, which is certainly to be tried by the test of general usage. That which has received the assent of all must be the law of all. 

Slavery, then, has its origin in force; but as the world has agreed that it is a legitimate result of force, the state of things which is thus produced by general consent cannot be pronounced unlawful. 

Throughout Christendom, this harsh rule has been exploded, and war is no longer considered as giving a right to enslave captives. But this triumph of humanity has not been universal. The parties to the modern law of nations do not propagate their principles by force, and Africa has not yet adopted them. Throughout the whole extent of that immense continent, so far as we know its history, it is still the law of nations that prisoners are slaves. Can those who have themselves renounced this law be permitted to participate in its effects by purchasing the beings who are its victims? 

Now, if somebody is wondering how this gets us out of this mess, it doesn't.  Under the holding in The Antelope, outlawing anything not mentioned in the Constitution, no matter how shocking, would be okay.

But following this, on more than one occasion, the Court referenced Natural Law in order to support a decision. At least as recently as the 1980s, the Court found that laws addressing homosexual conduction were allowable, as homosexuality was contrary to the Natural Law.  A Wyoming jurist found that laws banning adoption by homosexual couples were allowable for the same reason, and more recently than that.

Now, some are going to find that really shocking as well, but once again, if we're on the populist train, this is where that goes, and frankly most of those on the hard populist right, are okay with this.  I.e., that would cure the Loving v. Virginia problem, as banning marriage between heterosexual couples based on race is contrary to the Natural Law.

But the ancient law of humanity also tried to make sure that the same impulses that gave rise to marriage assured them.  Hence, the creation of the Common Law's common law marriage.  How many on the Trump train want to return to the days of the Heart Balm Statutes?

My guess is not many, and certainly not Trump himself, who is a serial polygamist.  

Now, I'm not here to judge people's morals by any means.  But this is a topic worth considering.  In the current political world we live in, we have a Senator who is divorced and remarried and at least one extremely right wing politician entering the legislature has a wife who was married before as well.  You can be guaranteed that some of those now running have openly lived lives involving cohabitation outside of marriage, as it is so common.  Are people really comfortable with a return to the old law on all of this?

Well, sincere Catholics, like me, might be. But this is a Protestant nation.  Here in town, there's a huge Protestant church that I think is "non-denominational" (I'm not completely certain).  Somebody I know who attends it is on their third marriage.  In the American Civil Religion, that seemingly doesn't cause problems, and I don't doubt that person's sincerity in attending.  But in American law, prior to the post World War Two Supreme Court trip that Justice Thomas complained, of, it would have.

Do people have this in mind?

Looking around, I really doubt it.  People seem to believe that the Constitution applies only to other people, not to themselves, or worse yet, they have a false belief about what the history of our laws and the Constitutional law really is.  In reality, at one time marriage was solely the province of the states, and they could allow or ban whatever they chose.  Restricting firearm carrying was pretty common, and the concept of "open carry" around town nonexistent.  Prohibiting members of certain races from certain neighborhoods through restrictive covenants completely allowable and in fact the norm.  The only way around that is the Natural Law, but the Natural Law brings in concerns that most Americans aren't really prepared to deal with, even remotely.

And if you are dabbling with concepts of Natural Law, you sooner or later are going to stray into concepts of Subsidiarity and the like.  Those concepts make most Americans squirm in their seats, at least if they aren't of the left.  Vest the economy entirely downwards, accept a lower standard of living for the middle class and the wealthy in favor of vesting the economy in families and elevating the poor.  Nobody too rich, and nobody too wealthy.  An economy that favors sustainability forever over one that does not.

Chesterton would have been comfortable with all of that.

Jefferson might have been.

Giorgia Meloni is probably comfortable with all of that.

Most Americans now. . . definately not.

Footnotes:

1.  Okay, Meloni's photo here, taken from a Reel, is unfair.  She's an effective speaker and clearly highly intelligent, as is Thomas.  This illustrates, however, how Italian politics isn't American politics, gushing from Ted Cruz and Marjorie Taylor Greene aside.  Meloni is an intellectual, if perhaps a somewhat scary one, compared to Cruz and Greene, and Thomas is definately an intellectual.  Greene and Cruz certainly dont' seem to be, and frankly some or perhaps a lot of their positions wouldn't square with either Meloni's or Thomas'

Added to that, Meloni is a politician in a  unique Italian environment where things are done, said, or portrayed that definately would never be here.

2.  This is the source, I think, of the lot of election discontent.

It's also the source of a lot of election denialism. The thought is that "people can't have really voted for Biden, as people can't really be for. . . ".  In another form, which isn't the same, its "votes for Biden can't count, as what he stands for is vile, and therefore. . . "

Almost lost in all of this is the fact that Trump lost the popular vote twice.  His first election was only legitimate, and it was legitimate, due to the artifact of the electoral college.  Of course, this causes people to unthinkingly babble "we aren't a democracy" (we are) "but a republic".  I've addressed that elsewhere, but using that as an argument shows that the person advancing a point is largley ignorant of what they're trying to advance.

3.  It might be worth noting here that fully 1/3d of American Evangelical Protestants believe the United States Constitution, which never mentions God, was inspired by God.  The newly appointed interim Wyoming Secretary of State has publicly taken this position in his campaign material.

For reasons that are partially addresssed in this essay, that's a fairly startling and scary proposition.  Traditional Christianity holds that inspired texts cease with the end of the Apostolic Age, at which point there were no more general revalations.

4. It should be noted, and will be later in the text, that even if Thomas' logic is correct on the cases he mentions, he's only commenting in regard to procedural due process. For that reason, his comments have been read to probably mean more than they should be.

I'll address Loving v. Virginia below, but Griswald v. Connecticut is another such example.  Even if Thomas' criticism of the case in a procedural due process context are correct, it doesn't address Federal Supremacy might mean that the Federal Government has completlely dominated the field here to the detriment of indivdual states through the laws pertaining to pharmacueticals.

5.  But see footnote 4.

Prior Related Threads:

Something in the wind, part 1 of 3. The rise of the radical populist right. A second look at the Italian election. . . and a bunch of other stuff.

Something in the wind, part 2 of 3. The rise of the radical populist right. A second look at the Italian election. . . and a bunch of other stuff.

Duty to vote?

Veritas

By No machine-readable author provided. Javier Carro assumed (based on copyright claims). - No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=674551

We often hear this time of year that everyone has a duty to vote.  This is regarded as a patriotic duty, but beyond that some hold it to be a moral obligation.

Indeed, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

It is the duty of citizens to contribute along with the civil authorities to the good of society in a spirit of truth, justice, solidarity, and freedom. The love and service of one’s country follow from the duty of gratitude and belong to the order of charity. Submission to legitimate authorities and service of the common good require citizens to fulfill their roles in the life of the political community. . . [s]ubmission to authority and co-responsibility for the common good make it morally obligatory to pay taxes, to exercise the right to vote, and to defend one’s country 

No. 2239 and 2240

I have an old friend that once told me that he never bothered to inform himself on the lesser candidates in an election, and barely did on the major ones.  He just went in and guess on most of them.

Whatever else our duty may be, that breaches it.

I don't disagree that we have a duty to vote.  But that's an informed duty.  That duty includes weighing what a person declares themselves to be for on every level, including an existential level.  It also includes weighting the candidate's honesty.

It requires the voter to embrace reality and the truth as well, no matter how uncomfortable that may be.  If it seems that everyone in your pack thinks just like you, and some candidate rabidly supports that, you might want to rethink things.

A Corrective Warning.

We started off to comment on a couple of newsworthy items from the Catholic news sphere the other day but like a lot of things here, we only got to one, the recent Prime Minister of the United Kingdom's wedding.  We posted on that, we'd note, on a companion blog, which is where we intended and still more or less intend to comment on another thing, which was a recent change in Canon Law regarding punishments under the law for certain things.

The latter item created quite an odd stir on the Internet for reasons that are really unclear.  That was what the second post was going to more or less deal with.

Since that time, however, something we've dealt with here before has come up as a major news story, that being the almost certain move of Catholic Bishops to deny politicians the reception of the Eucharist if they publicly support abortion. This is in the news as it will impact the President, Joe Biden.

For sincere Catholics this news is both way overdue and the reaction to it incredibly surprising.  It's also had the impact of smoking out liberal cafeteria Catholics whose attachment to their faith is tempered by their politics and world view.  

To start off with, the Catholic faithful have long wondered why Catholic Bishops allow politicians to take the wishy washy "I'm personally opposed to abortion but. . ." cop out.  

The entire matter, as Canon Lawyer Edward Peters noted on, of course, Twitter seems pretty canonically clear.  Hence the surprise on the Captain Renault like "shocked shocked" reaction some liberal Catholics have been all atwitter with.

Here's the basics of it.

Catholics believe that every human being, no matter their condition or state in life, have a right to lift and that killing a human is homicide. This is the case whether or not a person is young or old, health or ill, intelligent or unintelligent, physically fit or dramatically impaired.

And it applies whether a person is born, or not. Catholics believe that a person's right to life is absolute, tempered only by the right of self defense.

Indeed, the last time the Church made news on this was when the Church modified the Catechism to provide that penal institutions and measurements had improved so much over the years that the death penalty was no longer morally justified.  This caused Catholic trads to be all atwitter in some instances.

That, however, was a mere development in a direction that Pope St. John Paul II had started decades ago.

The current controversy isn't even a new development in anything.  Catholics have held that abortion is infanticide since ancient times.  The sin has been regarded as so serious in more modern times that technically Canon Law precludes a confessor from forgiving it, requiring a Bishop to do that.  However, in many places, including the United States, the Church also has recognized that the sin is so common that this was unworkable and Bishops have extended permission to all confessors to forgive it.  A few years ago the Pope did that for the entire church worldwide, although I'm not up to speed on the current status that.

The Church has also always had a doctrine regarding "cooperation with evil".  Generally, "remote cooperation with evil" is regarded as inevitable. But direct open cooperation with evil can be a mortal sin.  For example, the driver of a getaway car in a robbery can't take the position that he's only a driver.  He's assisting in a great sin.  

Perhaps more illustratively, selling a handgun over the counter to somebody who intends to commit murder with it isn't a sin at all, if you have no knowledge of what he intends to do with it. But if a person specifically asks for somebody to provide a gun for a murder, a person can't morally do it.

This gets us to our current topic. The Church's concepts in this area, many of which tend not to be fully fleshed out, have long held that where politicians directly cooperate in an evil, just like where anyone else does, they bear moral responsibility for it and can be denied Communion.

For example, during the 1960s when desegregation was taking place, the Bishop of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, Bishop Joseph Rummel, took the position that segregation was a great evil and, in 1962, excommunicated three Catholics in the diocese for organizing protests against desegregation in the diocese.  More correctly the excommunications were for defying Church authority. Two of the three recanted and were then reinstated to communion with the Church.

All of that is instructive as actions of this type are designed to be corrective, not punitive.  The thought is that a person is committing a great sin and the action is necessary to instruct them in that fact in a way that can't be ignored.

That's the thought here.

It's openly and obviously the case that Catholic politicians who have openly allowed for advanced positions that the Church has regarded as gravely evil should have correction long ago.  Conservative Catholics have long argued for this, but many rank and file Catholics have been baffled by it as well.  Now its going to happen.

Liberal Catholics, in many instances, are having a fit, but they ought to stop and pause for a moment.  It's always been accepted by the Catholic Church that to be a Catholic wasn't going to win you any friends.  On the contrary, Christ warned and the Church still holds that it would instead draw to you abuse.  It's expected that to be a Catholic, and holding the tenants of the Faith seriously, means you'll lose friends, family and even up to your life in some circumstances.  No "health and wealth" gospel here.  Not by a long shot.

The Church, in may people's views, should have taken this step long ago.  However, the thought seems to have been that there was a fear that taking it would drive people in this category further away.  The risk, on the other hand, was what the title of one of the linked in items below notes, that being scandal.

Now it seems that the Church has finally reached the point where its decided to do what many faithful Catholics in the pews have urged be done for many years, that being to deny Communion, which is not the same we'd note as Excommunication, to public figures who are openly and obviously assisting an evil.  

Some Catholics who take a liberal view of theology are now busy making what amount to real misstatements about the Church's theology.  I saw, for example, somebody who represented themselves as a CCD teacher noting that to be a Catholic doesn't mean accepting Humane Vitae.  Oh, yes, it does.  What being a Catholic means is that your life will be more difficult than others, including other Christians.

The Church, in taking this step, is taking it, at a point in which in some parts of the globe, as is often noted, the Church has been in decline. It's rarely noted that its expanding at an exponential rate elsewhere.  Where its in decline are in those areas where it has sought to accommodate the world the most. The parts of the Church internally that have grown the most in recent years are those parts everywhere which are the most observant.  That's a lesson for every organization everywhere, but the irony of this act now, which really won't occur until at least the end of the year, is that the times actually give liberty for the Church to take the action.  If it doesn't win the Church secular friends, it doesn't have any, anyway.  And if it causes those who have light attachments to the Church's teachings to be upset, perhaps they should deeply consider the nature of a Pearl of Great Price, and if they expected to win Heaven easily.

And if it seems that the Church is now out of sink with the World, well, it's never been in sink with it ever. When its been most in sink with it, things have not gone well for the Church. . . or the world.

Will Biden recant?  Or Pelosi?  That's hard to say.  Decades of supporting grave evil will have built up a great pride that will be hard for them to overcome.  But that they need to overcome it is at least a warning they need to receive.  We can pray that they do.  We can pray that everyone does.

Related threads:

2020 Election Post Mortem VII. Joe Biden and the "Catholic vote".

Archbishop Chaput says what should have been said long ago. Scandal.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part 9. Democrats Leap Left, McConaughey for Governor?, Stats of the Wyoming Electorate, Carbon Engineering, Why not Nuclear?, Pop Tarts and Superficial Politicians, Time Travelers, Mopey Monarchy, Bed Bugs On Board.

No organized party

Will Rogers famously quipped that because he belonged to the Democratic Party, he didn't belong to an "organized party".

The entire staff of the Democratic Party in Nevada resigned.  All of them.

That's because the state organization in Nevada is the mirror image of the Republican GOP organization in Wyoming, if you recall that mirror images are right/left reversed.  That is, "Progressive" Democrats, and indeed candidates backed by the Democratic Socialist of America, took over the party.

Which is why, in spite of what we've been noting about the mess in the GOP, the Democrats will ultimately fail and are now well on their way to doing so.  

The Democratic Party tends to creep up on liberal positions and then, as soon as it has its toes in the water, it dives fully into the deep side of the pool, and drowns.

The American public really isn't liberal, or as the press and liberals now like to term it, "progressive".  It's really pretty conservative.  Indeed, something that the Democrats don't get, and the press very much doesn't get, is that a lot of the concerns that Trump gave voice to really do reflect the concerns of common Americans, and not in the way that the press imagines.

The press has repeatedly suggested since January 6 that Trump supporters are "racists".  Some probably are, and frankly the Democrats have some pretty racist members as well, with their racism just directed in a different direction.  But most aren't.  And they resent having their concerns framed in that fashion, which is actually hardening their opposition to the Democrats.

It isn't racist to be worried about the massive immigration rate into the country and to be concerned that its out of control.  Worrying about what seems to be an assault on traditional culture and even basic human nature in favor of newly defined and hyper evolving woke definitions doesn't make a person a bigot either.  A concern over traditional values and even traditional activities isn't an improper concern.

The left wing of the Democratic Party, looking at Donald Trump's loss in the last election, and the disarray in the party right now, is drawing the wrong conclusion.  The country hasn't leapt to the left.  Indeed, the overall vote would suggest its crept a bit to the right.  People just didn't like Donald Trump, who in more than one way seemed to be an assault on democracy and even an example of the personal opposite of what conservatives and populist stand for.  Lots of principled conservatives and populists have left the GOP. . . for now, but that doesn't mean that they're digging out their posters of Trotsky and Lenin. Far from it.

But the Democrats will think so. By 2024 they'll be running a Kamala Harris that they've pushed even further to the left of her natural left, which is pretty far left, and flame out.

Indeed, lots of people, myself included, have wondered how the Republicans are going to get their act together following the late stage disaster of the 2020 election.  The Democrats are providing the answer.

The Democrats just passed, but only barely, a massive COVID relief bill.  More money will not be spent, in real terms on relief for the pandemic than was spent on the New Deal.  Indeed, twice as much money is being flooded into the economy through the pandemic bills than was spent on the entire New Deal.  There's absolutely no way on earth that this isn't going to be damaging to the economy, none.  For retirees and near retirees, this may be the death knell of their retirements because if it isn't inflationary it will be simply stunning.  And if it turns out to be inflationary, the fact that the GOP had abandoned fiscal responsibility under Trump will be rapidly, and deservedly, for gotten.

Moreover, the Democrats have already flooded the legislative machinery with bills that leap to the left.  New gun control bills are being introduced and while the press routinely claims that the populace is for them, the voting populace never seems to be.  Democrats are dragging out the Equal Rights Amendment, a vestige from the 1970s that now would have little meaning, in part because the 1970s were the golden era of Democratic liberalism and the failure to pass the ERA was a failure.  They're also advancing bills regarding gender issues when the American public only recently came to accommodating itself to the Supreme Court's actions in the era, and if state legislatures are any clue, the legislative tide may be flowing in the opposite direction at the local level.

All of this is going to anger conservative and middle of the road voters.  If the GOP can get Donald Trump out of the way, and the simple operation of time may accomplish that, they're going to come roaring back and the Democrats will have themselves largely to blame.

A sane Democratic Party would concentrate on a few issues that have wide backing, and there are some, and push them through now, while, as Pentangli would have it, they have the muscle.

They won't.

Well, Reagan ran

Matthew McConaughey is considering running for Governor of Texas.  He is a Texan.  It's not clear what party his a member of.

The Texas gubernatorial race, like Wyoming's, is up next year.  He'd be running against the incumbent, Greg Abbott.

And why the heck not?  Abbott and McConaughey are both native Texans.  Abbott is a lawyer, and nobody like lawyers, and McConaughey is an actor who exudes authenticity.  Who knows if he's authentic or not, after all he's an actor, but the same could have been said about Reagan when he started off in politics.

And McConaughey is a good decade younger than Abbott, and therefore out of the Baby Boom generation.  He's married, moreover, to a hot Brazilian model who is a Latina Catholic, where as McConaughey is an Evangelical Christian, and they have three children, so he probably fits the rank and file younger Texan profile somewhat.

Grasping Statistics 

Regarding races, and this one the Wyoming House Race, a letter in the editor last weekend demonstrated a grasp of statistics beyond that commonly understood which those reporting on the alleged discontent with Liz Cheney should consider.

Indeed, as I've already noted, letters to the editor seems to show that more people support Cheney, by a huge margin, than oppose her. What the letter writer noted is that around 40% of Republicans are reported being really miffed at Cheney for her vote to impeach Donald Trump. That might be right, but the letter writer also noted that only about 1/3d of eligible voters casted votes.

I thought that must be wrong, but in actuality, it's worse than that.  About 50% of those eligible to vote registered to do so, and of those, only 1/3s showed up to vote.  That's horrifically bad.  But what that also means is that the cry that "Wyomingites" are mad at Cheney is probably pretty far off the mark.  That "40%" actually reflects less than 1/6th of the state's eligible voters.  When other factors are considered, Cheney probably has lost next to none of her support.

What that also means is this.  The hard right of the GOP is incredibly vulnerable to being turned out if average Republicans show up at the polls in 2022.  No wonder that the current party is trying to restrict voting.  The more people that actually vote, the less chance that the hard right keeps on keeping on.

It also means that the Democrats in the state have a lot more in the way of opportunity than the common evidence might suggest.  Wyoming is a "Republican state", but only half of Wyomingites are registering to vote which actually means that, as far as we can tell, less than half of Wyomingites are actually declared Republicans. That disinterested and disaffected remaining 50% is almost certainly outside of the diehard GOP camp.  They're not all Democrats, but probably a lot of them would have Democratic sympathies.

Finally, if the electorate gets really owly or just motivated, Cheney could swamp the hard right candidates next year.  It just depends on people showing up.

Shopify and CO2

Shopify has contracted with Carbon Engineering in Canada to contract for the latter's direct CO2 from the air removal process.

I've long wondered about this and strongly suspected it will become a viable technology.  Lots of places have been working on it and I've long thought it a viable technological pursuit.  Carbon Engineering is running a plant in Canada that does this right now, and Spotify may be pointing the way to the future on this.  But entering into a contract with Carbon Engineering, what Spotify is doing is contracting to remove its carbon footprint through directly removing the equivalency of what they re putting into the atmosphere.

As this technology develops, it will become more viable.  And at some point that's going to work its way into public policy as well as private effort.  Indeed, that day seems to have arrived.

This is, by the way, one of those industries Wyoming should look at.  So far the state's solutions to the rapid decline of the coal industry and the feared decline of the petroleum industry has been to try to require the operators of coal fired refineries to keep them in operation no matter what, and to invest in clean coal technology that has so far failed to yield results.  This technology is yielding results.  It'd make more sense to invest in this to offset the state's carbon footprint than to try to keep power plants generation that their operators wish to close.

Why not nuclear?

I have a separate post I'm doing on this, but with the Wyoming legislature working on bills to force coal fired plants to keep on keeping on, why isn't any thought given to the state building nuclear power plants?

I know, this will be "socialism", but it isn't exactly free market to force power companies to keep power plants into operation that they'd otherwise retire.

Wyoming once had a really viable uranium mining industry.  There are three still in operation.  There could be more.

Again, more on that coming up.

The House Judiciary Committee and Pop Tarts

Donny Osmond. . . um Matt Gaetz.  Superficial Gadfly.

Two Republican House Judiciary Affairs Committee members, Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordon, want the committee to hold hearings on Brittney Spears conservatorship.

Jim Jordon, right before he lost his sports coat, or started trying to look like the coach in The White Shadow. . . it isn't clear.

Wyomingites will recall Gaetz as the Donny Osmond second who came to the state to protest against Liz Cheney.  Cheney's record was actually more pro Trump that Floridian gadfly Gaetz up until she voted to impeach Trump for the January 6 insurrection.  Jim Jordon was the former coach who appeared consistently in hearings sans jacket, as if he was on the floor of an overheated basketball court.

This is really stupid.  It's been pointed out by Spears' father that she can file a motion to remove him as conservator or to terminate the conservatorship, but hasn't.  And no matter what the virtues of Spears may be, the fact of the matter that the national legislature wasting time on a state issue of this type is really absurd.

Supporters of Gaetz and Jordon, and they do have them, really ought to consider this. When Wyoming gets Gaetz flying in here to lambast Cheney, and then he next goes back to D.C. and declares that the former teen chanteuse's conservatorship is a matter of national importance, the state ought to brand him with the mark of superficiality.

How did Florida elect that guy?

Time Travelers

A group of U.S. Senators, a bipartisan group no less, has introduced a bill to make daylight savings time permanent.

Here's an idea. . . why not just ban daylight savings time and go back to the idea that time is connected to nature?

Superficiality tour de force

Æthelstan, King of the Anglo Saxons from 924 to 927, and King of the English from 927 to 939, the first English monarch to claim that broad of sovereignty and is widely regarded as the first King of England.  He never married and he had no children.  He's probably displeased over the current silliness in his kingdom.

There appears to be a serious flap involving the British Royal Family that stems from Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan's interview with Oprah.

If nothing else reveals the complete superficiality of the English speaking world at the moment, this certainly does.

I wonder to what degree that absurd fascination with the British Royal Family is an American deal.  I know that it happens in the UK too, but the American fascination is freakin' bizarre.  They aren't our Royal Family and they haven't been since we gave the King the middle finger salute in 1776.  Indeed, when we put the government together a few years later, we turned our back on all monarchs, a trend that we seemingly don't get much credit for launching as we didn't do what the French did and cut the head off of our former monarch. But then, he was right  there for the French. King George III was a long ways away.

Cutting off your king's head is a line of demarcation that, even if you bring kings back later, your society never gets over, so by and large the French don't get all atwitter wondering what the Bourbons are up to, and they're still around.  Some Bourbons would like the French to be fascinated with them but the French pretty much yawn and ignore them.  Probably more Reddit Rubes who are Americans or other English speakers care what is going on with the Bourbons than the French do.  Indeed, of all the English speaking peoples we seem to have the greatest fascination with the English monarchy.  You don't see Canadians or Australians lining up to interview Prince Harry.

Apparently we sure care what the Windsor's are up to for some reason, although I have no idea what it is.

We also care what Oprah has to say even though she's a superficial pop tartian.  Just having an opinion on everything and being able to write about it doesn't mean that your opinion is worth listening to or it has value.  Nonetheless, Oprah has come to virtually define the American Civil Religion in some ways.  You know. . all religions are valid . . you can get money just by thinking about it, and that sort of stuff.  

I didn't listen to interview of the Harry and Meghan so I'm ill equipped to comment on it.  I was amused, however, by the recent entry on James Proclaims, linked in on the right as a blog we follow, as he didn't either but still commented.  Apparently the ex pat royals have accused the Royal Family of being racist and went after the English press.

The English press is nasty, but it has been for some time. That's nothing new.  Being a Royal puts you in the crosshairs of the British press. That's just the way that is.  Indeed, even before the English press was that, the English themselves delighted on dissing the Royals, who have traditionally given people plenty of stuff to diss them on. Prince Harry surely knew that all along.  If Duchess Meghan didn't, well she should have.

On racism and the Royal Family, I don't know if individual members of the family harbor racist ideas but  would note that the King and Prince Consort are crowding 100 years old.  People will instantly say "that shouldn't matter" but frankly when somebody is approaching the centennial mark you have to cut them some slack if for no other reasons you can't expect people on death's door to be changing whatever attitude they've held for 10% of a millennium.  Both the Queen and the Prince Consort were born into an era when people still pretended that the British Empire mattered, even though it was fading.  Fading thought it was, however, all sorts of people all over the globe still took the view that the English had the right to rule all sorts of other people as they were English.  And at that time, and indeed up until fairly recently, nobility took all the rules pertaining to marriage, or should we say intermarriage, very seriously, which would also be bound to give you an odd view of the world.  People who were expected to marry only their cousins, the prime consideration in their marital choices, and one of the primary reasons for the social and physical ills that they suffer, on the basis that their interrelated blood lines were "special", can't be expected to shed themselves of some retained concept of that now that it isn't, particularly as the fact that it now isn't demonstrates how weird monarchy really is in the first place.

That's all faded but, if anything, the European Royals have all proven themselves to be amazingly adaptable.  Frequently the titular heads of state churches, they switch religions quickly for marital convenience and have long intermarried in spite of national allegiance.  If anything, the oddity of the most recently Royal marriages is that they're tending to go British, with Markle being an exception.  The Prince Consort, Prince Phillip, is from the deposed Greek royal family and grew up in the Greek Orthodox Church before becoming an Anglican for marital purposes, something that would make very little sense for anyone who took Orthodoxy seriously.  One of the Queen's great grandfathers was an Austrian.  This all fits into the common pattern of royals in which a Lutheran princess ends up the Russian Orthodox Czarina.  You get the picture.  For a class of people that Monarchist hold stand for the traditions of their countries, Royals really don't..  They just adopt them.  In recent years that's meant adopting the concept that average folks can be royals too, and that's been the pattern everywhere from England to Japan, but that's a fairly recent concept.  Earlier, they could abandon countries and faiths, but abandoning the royal bloodlines was an anathema.  Now it isn't.

That's actually return to monarchical origin, in which the King was kin and just head of the family, but expecting that to be picked up overnight by centenarians is asking for a lot, particularly when at least the Queen is next to uneducated.

And the whiny approach of Harry is really a bit much.  Harry has always been a whiner, seemingly, although he seemed to have found a home in the British Army.  Meghan, however, made him a whiner again and he gave up at least one of his more many pursuits, although its one engaged in by women as well, that being hunting.  That sort of behavior used to be defined by a crude term I'd hear a lot when younger which was something not admired at all when men were still allowed to be that in common culture but which is now something of an anathema itself.

Biological Attack

USS Connecticut

The USS Connecticut, an American submarine, has a bed bug infestation. 

That's gross.

It's also a serious problem.  Bug infestations have always been a problem that submariners  have tried to guard against.  Once you got one rolling, it'd be hard to address it.

A more serious infestation problem was recently gamed by the Navy.

The U.S. Navy recently ran a war game in which the US is the subject of a surprise Chinese military biological strike on Naval and air installations.  In the game, the U.S. rapidly lost and the Red Chinese invaded Taiwan.

The American public may not be paying that much attention to it, but the Department of the Navy is seriously concerned that the U.S. is going to get attacked by China.  Indeed, in historical terms, the Navy is essentially where it was at in the 1920s and 1930s when it was studying an oncoming war with Japan that it was convinced was coming.  

In that case it was right, and there's real reason to be concerned that its right again.

China isn't analogous so much to Imperial Japan of the 1930s as it is to Imperial Germany of the 1890s-1910s, or even the 1930s-1940s, and that's the problem.  Its a massive country with resources and its occupying other cultures against their will.  It's flexing its muscles and in the same way that Germans in the first half of the 20th Century dreamed of an Anschluss of the German speaking peoples, and in particular Austria, China dreams of the same with all the  Chinese speaking peoples.  It's pretty much crushed the special status that Hong Kong once had and it seems to be seriously aiming to drag Taiwan back into Peking governance.  It's been building a navy.

Our Navy is gaming the future war.  The Marine Corps under President Trump determined to adopt a plan to re invent itself, the same way it did after World War One with Japan in mind, with China now in mind, and that's an extremely serious development.  The Army doesn't seem focused on it, but it would have no real reason to be until that time came. The Air Force has quietly been building some forces with China as an anticipated enemy.

Something to be concerned about.