National Conservatism, Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and The Law of Unintended Consequences.* **

 

Trump is “like a couch, bears the impression of the last person who sat on him.”

Ann Coulter, far right commentator, and former supporter of Donald Trump.

The entire time that Donald Trump has been in the news as a political figure, I've had a hard time figuring him out.  I can tell what most political figures stand for, claim to stand for, and whether they are sincere or not.

And they are certainly not all sincere, as the gaggle of Republican office holders who remain from the pre Trump days now buying all in to Trump demonstrate.

But Trump's hard to figure.

I think I've come to the conclusion that Ann Coulter, whom I generally really dislike, is quite correct. As Coulter, no matter what you think of her, actually believes what she says, she grew disgusted with Trump really early, determining basically that he was a phony.

I can't tell if Trump is, or was, even smart.¹ 

That's hard to judge at a distance.  Two Republican Presidents who were really smart were often sort of assumed, while in office, not to be.  One was Ronald Reagan, and the other was Dwight Eisenhower, both of whom had perfected the art of acting like they weren't all that sharp in order to use it to their advantage.

Eisenhower, as one of his biographers Carlo D'Este noted, had learned in the Army that it was often better to not appear to be the sharpest tool in the shed but to hang back, taking in the opinions, and trust, of others.  By the Second World War it was obvious to all that he was in fact extremely intelligence, but part of the manifestation of that was that once he was President, he reengaged the act to his advantage.  If you ever hear a recording of Eisenhower in a private speech, such as when Kennedy called him up to get advice on Indo China, it's a shock.  He doesn't even seem like the same person.

That same shock has been noted by people who spoke to Reagan privately.  Reagan perfected as an actor an "ah shucks" one of the crowd personality, but in reality he was extremely intelligent.  People who came in to discuss a topic with him were often stunned that his grasp of it was vast, while the public, particularly the American left, wondered if he was a doddling old fool right from the onset.  His mental decline by the end of his second term was obvious, but it wasn't there from the first.  It served him well, however, as it was possible to believe on something like the Iran Contra Scandal that maybe he didn't really know it was happening.

Trump, on the other hand, seems to me to genuinely not have all that sharp of an intellect.  That would explain some of the outrageous and stupid things he says, of which there are a plethora.  Being a wealthy man his entire life, he's gotten through life being able to say stupid outrageous things and not draw rebuke from those around him, and in turn be encouraged in his own belief that he's really smart.  Just as the political and economic class of current China tends to assume that everyone at the top is really smart, as they've been weeded out that way, Trump probably believes he's a genius as everyone has always told him he's a real smart guy.

If Trump doesn't have a great intellect, what he does have is another type of intelligence.  He's a good salesman.

I wouldn't say a great salesman, as he's had a lot of business failures and his enterprises have been bankrupt more than once.  But he is a good salesman.  He knows how to sell. And like good salesmen, he can sell what he's selling.  He doesn't have to believe it.

Over the years I've known several people who were good salesmen, some of whom were really intelligent. Their hallmark, however, was the ability to sell.  They'd often move between one sales job and another.  If you know them well enough, you'd sometimes find that they really didn't have all that great of interest in what they were selling, whether that was cars, houses, basketballs or whatever.  Sometimes they personally had a massive disinterest in the product they were selling.  It was the selling that they were interested in.

I strongly suspect Trump is like that.

At some point, for some reason, Trump decided to enter politics and his selling sense was that rank and file rust belt and lower middle class Americans were unhappy and disgruntled, with some very good reasons existing for that, so he sold them what basically amounted to snake oil in 2016.  Once in, he needed people to run the government and they came in and did it, defeating his wildest and most dangerous ideas.  People didn't buy the snake oil in sufficient quantities in 2020, so now he's turned to a new improved product.

Populist Outrage.

Populist Outrage is a dangerous cocktail in the US right now.  It includes everything from the New Apostolic Movement to the Hawk Tuah Girl, all one brew.  You literally have Mike Johnson quoting the Bible and some TikTok Tart describing spitting on male sex organs all in the same group.  But snake oil cures what ails ya, and people are buying.

J. D. Vance, on the other hand, is the real deal.

I really haven't followed Vance until now and while his book Hillbilly Elegy sounded interesting when it was released, I didn't read it and I'm not going to.  When it was released, what the general reaction was, wat that it was a well written elegy to his roots, and to the hillbilly class, now in desperate straits, from somebody who had rising up out of that class into affluence.  That might in part be right, but like McMurtry's contemporarily set novels, they were not only reflecting the people he came out of, but were also a more intellectual reflection of their virtues in spite of their vices.

Vance is genuinely fairly remarkable.  He came out of a real blue collar, hillbilly background and became very well educated. What was missed is that as he moved along, through education and influence, he became something other than what American liberals simply assume that education does.  He didn't become an educated liberal, looking back on his drug fueled hillbilly ancestors, but rather became an educated National Conservative intellectual.

He's not a populist, and isn't even ballpark close to one.

For good or ill, he's more in the nature of a Beloocian. I.e, if you brought Hilaire Belloc back today, made him an American, and had him run for office, you'd get J.D. Vance.

That's why he comes across to many on the left, and not a few on the right, as "weird".  All along he's been saying the things that National Conservatives and Illiberal Democrats have been saying.  If he sounds like a Christian Nationalist, that's because all National Conservatives are Christian Nationalist, even if they aren't observant, whereas not all Christian Nationalist are National Conservatives by any means.

Vance has a lot more in common with Viktor Orbán,, Giorgia Meloni, Philippe Pétain, and Francisco Franco than he does with Trump or Mike Johnson.

                               More this                                              than this.

We've dealt with National Conservatism here before, but we didn't address is how smart they've really been since 2020.  Unlike the goofball hordes that go to Trump rallies wearing absurd red, white and blue costumes.  It's actually fairly deep, and it early on set out it goals in print, as we've noted here:

Its founder in American politics, if not its overall founder, is Patrick Deneen and its backers can be found in the pages of R. R. Reno's First Things.  Quite frankly, that puts it in the intellectual heavyweight category.  It's issued a manifesto, and the signers of it include some well known conservative thinkers.  Deneen has issued at least two well regarded books on the topic. Its central thesis is that liberalism has failed, in part due to its success, and is now consuming itself, and the entire culture of the West with it, by a frenzied orgy of libertine, mostly sexually focused, individualism.  What needs to be done, it holds, is the preservation of democracy, but Illiberal Democracy, with the boundary lines of the culture externally enforced.  It sets its manifesto out as follows:

1. National Independence. We wish to see a world of independent nations. Each nation capable of self-government should chart its own course in accordance with its own particular constitutional, linguistic, and religious inheritance. Each has a right to maintain its own borders and conduct policies that will benefit its own people. We endorse a policy of rearmament by independent self-governing nations and of defensive alliances whose purpose is to deter imperialist aggression. 

2. Rejection of Imperialism and Globalism. We support a system of free cooperation and competition among nation-states, working together through trade treaties, defensive alliances, and other common projects that respect the independence of their members. But we oppose transferring the authority of elected governments to transnational or supranational bodies—a trend that pretends to high moral legitimacy even as it weakens representative government, sows public alienation and distrust, and strengthens the influence of autocratic regimes. Accordingly, we reject imperialism in its various contemporary forms: We condemn the imperialism of China, Russia, and other authoritarian powers. But we also oppose the liberal imperialism of the last generation, which sought to gain power, influence, and wealth by dominating other nations and trying to remake them in its own image. 

3. National Government. The independent nation-state is instituted to establish a more perfect union among the diverse communities, parties, and regions of a given nation, to provide for their common defense and justice among them, and to secure the general welfare and the blessings of liberty for this time and for future generations. We believe in a strong but limited state, subject to constitutional restraints and a division of powers. We recommend a drastic reduction in the scope of the administrative state and the policy-making judiciary that displace legislatures representing the full range of a nation’s interests and values. We recommend the federalist principle, which prescribes a delegation of power to the respective states or subdivisions of the nation so as to allow greater variation, experimentation, and freedom. However, in those states or subdivisions in which law and justice have been manifestly corrupted, or in which lawlessness, immorality, and dissolution reign, national government must intervene energetically to restore order.

4. God and Public Religion. No nation can long endure without humility and gratitude before God and fear of his judgment that are found in authentic religious tradition. For millennia, the Bible has been our surest guide, nourishing a fitting orientation toward God, to the political traditions of the nation, to public morals, to the defense of the weak, and to the recognition of things rightly regarded as sacred. The Bible should be read as the first among the sources of a shared Western civilization in schools and universities, and as the rightful inheritance of believers and non-believers alike. Where a Christian majority exists, public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private. At the same time, Jews and other religious minorities are to be protected in the observance of their own traditions, in the free governance of their communal institutions, and in all matters pertaining to the rearing and education of their children. Adult individuals should be protected from religious or ideological coercion in their private lives and in their homes. 

5. The Rule of Law. We believe in the rule of law. By this we mean that citizens and foreigners alike, and both the government and the people, must accept and abide by the laws of the nation. In America, this means accepting and living in accordance with the Constitution of 1787, the amendments to it, duly enacted statutory law, and the great common law inheritance. All agree that the repair and improvement of national legal traditions and institutions is at times necessary. But necessary change must take place through the law. This is how we preserve our national traditions and our nation itself. Rioting, looting, and other unacceptable public disorder should be swiftly put to an end. 

6. Free Enterprise. We believe that an economy based on private property and free enterprise is best suited to promoting the prosperity of the nation and accords with traditions of individual liberty that are central to the Anglo-American political tradition. We reject the socialist principle, which supposes that the economic activity of the nation can be conducted in accordance with a rational plan dictated by the state. But the free market cannot be absolute. Economic policy must serve the general welfare of the nation. Today, globalized markets allow hostile foreign powers to despoil America and other countries of their manufacturing capacity, weakening them economically and dividing them internally. At the same time, trans-national corporations showing little loyalty to any nation damage public life by censoring political speech, flooding the country with dangerous and addictive substances and pornography, and promoting obsessive, destructive personal habits. A prudent national economic policy should promote free enterprise, but it must also mitigate threats to the national interest, aggressively pursue economic independence from hostile powers, nurture industries crucial for national defense, and restore and upgrade manufacturing capabilities critical to the public welfare. Crony capitalism, the selective promotion of corporate profit-taking by organs of state power, should be energetically exposed and opposed. 

7. Public Research. At a time when China is rapidly overtaking America and the Western nations in fields crucial for security and defense, a Cold War-type program modeled on DARPA, the “moon-shot,” and SDI is needed to focus large-scale public resources on scientific and technological research with military applications, on restoring and upgrading national manufacturing capacity, and on education in the physical sciences and engineering. On the other hand, we recognize that most universities are at this point partisan and globalist in orientation and vehemently opposed to nationalist and conservative ideas. Such institutions do not deserve taxpayer support unless they rededicate themselves to the national interest. Education policy should serve manifest national needs. 

8. Family and Children. We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy. The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization. The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations. Among the causes are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life. Economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are priorities of the highest order. 

9. Immigration. Immigration has made immense contributions to the strength and prosperity of Western nations. But today’s penchant for uncontrolled and unassimilated immigration has become a source of weakness and instability, not strength and dynamism, threatening internal dissension and ultimately dissolution of the political community. We note that Western nations have benefited from both liberal and restrictive immigration policies at various times. We call for much more restrictive policies until these countries summon the wit to establish more balanced, productive, and assimilationist policies. Restrictive policies may sometimes include a moratorium on immigration. 

10. Race. We believe that all men are created in the image of God and that public policy should reflect that fact. No person’s worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test. The history of racialist ideology and oppression and its ongoing consequences require us to emphasize this truth. We condemn the use of state and private institutions to discriminate and divide us against one another on the basis of race. The cultural sympathies encouraged by a decent nationalism offer a sound basis for conciliation and unity among diverse communities. The nationalism we espouse respects, and indeed combines, the unique needs of particular minority communities and the common good of the nation as a whole.

And its been further developed since then, although Dinneen²  and Reno³ do not seem to be leading the charge any longer, nor is Rod Dreher⁴ , who for a while just urged societal retreat.  Now Kevin Roberts⁵. , head of the Heritage Society, is, and he's taking the movement into a concrete action oriented direction.  He's written a book, Dawn's Early Light, on that very topic.  It's Amazon write up states:

America is on the brink of destruction. A corrupt and incompetent elite has uprooted our way of life and is brainwashing the next generation. Many so-called conservatives are as culpable as their progressive counterparts.

In this ambitious and provocative book, Heritage Foundation President Dr. Kevin Roberts announces the arrival of a New Conservative Movement. His message is simple: Global elites — your time is up.

Dawn’s Early Light blazes a promising path for the American people to take back their country. Chapter by chapter, it identifies institutions that conservatives need to build, others that we need to take back, and more still that are too corrupt to save: Ivy League colleges, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, BlackRock, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, to name a few.

All these need to be dissolved if the American way of life is to be passed down to future generations.

The good news is, we’re going to win.

The Swamp is so drunk on power that the elites don't realize the ground is moving beneath their feet. In Washington, they wear foreign flags on their lapels, but they don’t protect our border. They wave around the Constitution, but they don’t respect its wisdom. They appeal to Reagan, but Reagan would never put up with this non-sense.

Their decadence will be their downfall. A new day is here.

The forward to that book was written by one J. D. Vance.

That, National Conservatism in its most proactive form, is what J. D. Vance stands for.

Vance's biography really demonstrates this.  He didn't go from hillbilly poverty to populism.  He went from hillbilly poverty into the Marine Corps, and then into university where he met budding National Conservative type intellects and developed into one.  Along the way somewhere, he converted into Catholicism, which is the oldest and original Christian religion, and which has a deep sense of the existential and a profound tradition.  While its far from the case that all Catholics are National Conservatives or Illiberal Democrats, or anything like that, it is fair to say that observant Catholics are horrified by the cultural decay of the west and its unliking from an existential sense in a manner and way which protestants, including those in the New Apostolic Movement, are not, which is not to say that they are not.⁶ 

So what's with all this "cat lady" and pro natalism stuff?

It ties right into the overall world view of much of National Conservatism in its recent most radical form, and indeed in some ways is an evolution away from its original intellectual corps.

It's an undercurrent in conservatism, but there's definitely a strain of it which is genuinely intellectual that emphasizes, perhaps hyper emphasizes, traditionalism in a very definite sense, including traditional male and female roles to an extremely strong degree. They're not romanticizing the 1950s, or indeed, romanticizing anything at all, but looking back, way back, to a time and way of thinking in which this was not questioned in any fashion.  Indeed, in the corners of the Internet where they hang out, you can find them discussing the social norms of the Middle Ages in comparison to those of the present, and they're serious about it.  I need not and indeed don't have the bandwidth to go into all of that now, but it touches on a lot of topics, not all of which I'm not completely sympathetic to.

So is this "weird"?

Well at least some of Project 2025 is downright weird, as for example the proposal to create "Freedom Cities" in "unoccupied" portions of the public domain in the west. That is, well, Bat Shit Crazy.  And its hard not to listen to the Dr. Taylor Marshall⁷ and the Simone and Malcolm Collins⁸ of the world and not thing, "well, that's weird".

Other stuff is more in the nature, however, of Bellocian Traditionalism and by any measure, it's certainly no weirder than the tranvestite genital organ obsessed "woke" view of much of the left, which indeed is deeply weird. And here's where, in fact, much of instinctive populism and National Conservatism meets.  The MAGA crowed don't have the faintest clue who Hilaire Belloc is, or even grasp that it doesn't matter what your local Evangelical Free pastor said, divorce and remarriage is barred by Christianity, but they do grasp that in the natural order of things the Hawk Tuah girl may be gross, but she's not gender confused and something odd is going on here that needs to be addressed.

Put another way, some if it is scary James Watt Weird  ⁹ while some of it probably seems "weird" to you if the Mantilla Girls seem weird.  If they don't, it may make you uncomfortable depending on where on the social conservatism scale you fit, but its not really weird.  The fact that much of modern America and all of the left find it all weird is because of how far to the left hit needle has moved in the past forty years.

Trump, on the other hand, can be really weird.

The National Conservatives, unlike the populists, are pretty deep, and pretty smart.  Very smart, in fact.  And they've realized what the red, white and blue populist crowds have not.  Trump doesn't' really stand for anything.

They do.

They also know that they can't get a National Conservative elected into the Oval Office.

But what they've gambled on was two things.  One was that the populists are too dim, and Trump too lazy, to draft his own agenda.  They did that for him, through Project 2025.  They bet they can get a start on a National Conservative revolution, and that's how the chief of the Heritage Foundation has put it, through a lazy Trump.

They've placed a bet on a certainty, that being that Trump won't last an entire four year term.  He'll die within the next four years, assuming that old age and advancing intellectual decline doesn't get him before the election, and they gambled that they could get a Chief Executive into office who was one of their own through the Vice Presidency.

That figure is J. D. Vance.  And up until Joe Biden dropping out of the race, it looked like the bet was going to pay off for sure.

Vance has been willing to play the part, while never disavowing what he's always stood for.  He's sort of a National Conservatives Manchurian Candidate, with the National Conservatives waiting for age, disease, or senility to take out a sitting Donald Trump.  Trump, too shallow to really bother to care about it, was willing to go along with a seemingly fawning J. D. Vance, probably never realizing that Trump's merely a temporary vehicle for them to get into office, and start their revolution.

Now those plans seem to have been disrupted, maybe.

The problem, in part, is that they wrote a 900 page book.

Project 2025 was designed to be, as noted, a blueprint for a lazy President.  But once you publish a book, people start reading it, and they start asking questions about the people who wrote it.  Particularly if one of those authors has written a second book about his pending National Conservative revolution.

Now, when people are distracted due to mental fog and don't touch it, that's not much of a problem.  But once they do, if any of it is outside of the mainstream at all, and a lot of Project 2025 is, and if any of it is weird, which some of Project 2025 is, attention will start being paid in spades.

And that may very well spell the end of there being a chance that National Conservatives shall remake the nation via an electoral revolution.  Too confident in themselves, they seem to have shot their bolt.  Americans are now uncomfortable with the direction they want to take the country, which is in a direction the country's never really gone before.  

Footnotes

*  This thread was started several days ago, and its really worth noting that a lot of things have developed since I first started posting it, including a huge amount of attention on J. D. Vance, and discontent in Republican ranks regarding him.

**It'll be hard not to note all the references to various Catholic figures in National Conservatism, which may lead to the impression that National Conservatism is a Catholic thing.  It isn't.  Indeed, one of the primary figures in Illiberal Democracy is Viktor Orban, who is a Presbyterian.

What's probably notable here is that the deep intellectual history of Catholicism and Apostolic Christianity in general has lead some of those who realize how shallow modern Western Culture is into the Church.  That doesn't make it a movement of the Church, and as some Catholics have feared, these movements pose a risk to Catholicism at least in the US, where it is a minority religion.  Indeed, it's likely that some members of the New Apostolic Movement, thin theology that they have, do not even recognize Catholics as Christians when in fact they are the first Christians. 

1.  I'm hugely reluctant to opine on somebody's intelligence remotely, but at this point, it's hard not to. Some of the things Trump says are amazingly dumb.  So much so that it raises a lot of questions regarding a wide variety of topics.

It's notable that Trump fairly frequently brings up his own intelligence, which is something intelligent people rarely do.  

2.  Patrick Dineen is a professor at Notre Dame who has written on Illiberal Democracy and National Conservatism favorably.

3.  R. R. Reno is the editor of First Things, and a convert from the Episcopal Church to Catholicism.  He's also on the Dineen end of things, but not as pessimistic about democracy as Dineen is.

4. Rod Dreher is a writer who wrote The Byzantine Option.  He's moved to Hungary.  Dreher was a Protestant who converted to Catholicism, and then converted to Orthodoxy.

5.  Kevin Roberts is the main intellectual figure behind The Heritage Foundation and has a Wyoming connection, in that he was at one time the head of Wyoming Catholic College.

6.  It's worth noting here that members of this movement and those on the fringe of it, sometimes the very fringe, have seen some notable conversions to Catholicism in recent years.  These include Candace Owens, Tammy Roberts Peterson, wife of psychologist and author Jordan Peterson, and Eva Vlaardingerbroek.

7.  Dr. Taylor Marshall, also a convert to Catholicism, is an extreme traditionalist who has come to engage in conspiracy theories about the Vatican.  He's on the fringe right.

8.  Simone and Malcolm Collins come across as genuinely weird.  Their leaders of a pro natalist organization with Simone having indicated that she intends to have children until, basically, her uterus blows out.  The Collins are atheist and frankly have somewhat of a scary Social Darwinist view of the world.  They therefore fit into the really weird side of pro natalism, where Elon Musk can also be found, who have an incorrect feeling that but for massive procreation, society is going to fail, which is completely incorrect.

Showing, I suppose, how old school Neanderthal I am, Michael Collins looks so anemic, and Simone Collins so unattractive, that the thought of their fitting the bill in a basic way to create a lot of children is surprising.

Watt was Reagan's Secretary of the Interior and basically believed that as Christ was returning very soon, there was no reason not to use natural resources with a mind towards conserving them.

Related threads:

A Primer, Part I. Populists ain't Conservatives, and Liberals ain't Progressives. How inaccurate terminology is warping our political perceptions.

Lex Anteinternet: Project 2025. Breaking it down, part 1.

Christian Nationalism, National Conservatism and Southern Populism. Eh?

Additiona Labels: 2016 Election, 2020 Election, 2020s, 2024, 2024 Election, Donald Trump, Dwight Eisenhower, Joseph Biden, Kamala Harris, Mike Johnson, Patrick Dineen, Populism, R. R. Reno, Republican Party, Rod Dreher, Ronald Reagan,Catholic, Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, Mike Johnson, New Apostolic Reformation, Old Age, Pro Natalism, Project 2025, Protestant, religion, Simone and Michael Collins, Wokeism, Wyoming Catholic College

Memorial Day, a repeat.

 

A 2022 Memorial Day Reflection.

Today is Memorial Day.

I've done a Memorial Day reflection post a couple of times, and I did a short history of Memorial Day once on our companion blog here:

Memorial Day

Observers here may have noted that I failed to put up a post for Memorial Day when this post was first made, in 2012.

This is in part due to Memorial Day being one of those days that moves around as, in recent years, Congress has attempted to make national holidays into three day weekends. That's nice for people, but in some ways it also takes away from the holiday a bit.  At the same time, it sort of tells you that if a holiday hasn't been moved to the nearest Friday or Monday, next to its original location on the calendar, it means that the holiday is either hugely important, a religious holiday, or extremely minor.  The 4th of July and Flag Day, one major and one minor, do not get moved, for example.

Anyhow, Memorial Day commenced at some point either immediately after or even during the Civil War, depending upon how you reckon it, and if you are date dependent for the origin of the holiday.  In American terms, the day originally served to remember the dead of the then recent Civil War.  The holiday, in the form of "Decoration Day" was spreading by the late 1860s.  The name Memorial Day was introduced in the 1880s, but the Decoration Day name persisted until after World War Two.  The holiday became officially named Memorial Day by way of a Federal statute passed in 1967.  In 1971 the holiday was subject to the Uniform Monday Holiday Act which caused it to fall on the last Monday of May, as it does now.

The day, therefore, would have always been observed in Wyoming, which had Grand Army of the Republic lodges since prior to statehood. But, like many holidays of this type, observation of the holiday had changed over the years.  In the 1960s and 1970s, by my recollection, the day was generally observed by people visiting the grave sites of any deceased family member, and therefore it was more of a day to remember the dead, rather than a day to recall the war dead.  This, however, has changed in recent years to a very noticeable extent.  Presently, it tends to serve as a second Veterans Day, during which veterans in general are recalled.  This year, for example, Middle School children in Natrona County decorated the graves of servicemen in the county with poppies, strongly recalling the poppy campaigns of the VFW that existed for many years.

Wyoming has a strong military culture, even though the state has lost all but two of its military installations over the years. The state had the highest rate of volunteers for the service during World War Two, and it remained strongly in support of the Vietnam War even when it turned unpopular nationwide.  The state's National Guard has uniquely played a role in every US war since statehood, including Vietnam, so perhaps the state's subtle association with Memorial Day may be stronger than might be supposed.

On remembrance, we'd be remiss if we didn't point out our Some Gave All site.

It's worth remembering here that Memorial Day has its origin in a great act of national hatred, the Civil War.  That is, the day commenced here and there as an effort to remember the Civil War dead, which, at the end of the day, divide sharply into two groups; 1) those who gave their lives to keep their fellow human beings in cruel enslaved bondage, and those who fought to end it.

Now, no doubt, it can be pointed out that those who died for slavery by serving the South, and that is what they died for if they were killed fighting for the South, didn't always see their service that way.  It doesn't matter. That was the cause they were serving. And just as pointedly, many in the North who went as they had no choice were serving to "make men free", as the Battle Hymn of the Republic holds it, irrespective of how they thought of their own service.

And it's really that latter sort of sacrifice this day commemorates.

The first principal of democracy is democracy itself.

And because of that, it is inevitably the case that people will win elections whom you do not wish to.  Perhaps you may even detest what they stand for.

Democracy is a messy business and people, no matter what they claim to espouse, will often operate against democratic results if they don't like them.  In the 1950s through at least the 1990s, the American left abandoned democracy to a significant degree in favor of rule by the courts, taking up the concept that average people couldn't really be trusted to adopt a benighted view of the liberalism that they hoped for which would be free of anything, ultimately, liberally. An enforced libertine liberalism.

The results of that have come home to roost in our own era as a counter reaction, building since the 1980s, has now found expression in large parts of the GOP which have gone to populism and Illiberal Democracy.  

We have a draft thread on Illiberal Democracy, which is a term that most people aren't familiar with, but it's best expressed currently by the Hungarian government of Viktor Orban, to the horror of Buckeyite conservatives like George F. Will. 

Defining illiberal democracy isn't easy, in part because it's most commonly defined by its opponents.  Setting aside their definitions, which it probably would be best defined as is a system in which a set of beliefs and values are societally defined and adopted which are external to the government and constitution of a county, and a democracy can only exist within it.  The best historical example, if a good one can actually be found, might be Vichy France, which contrary to some assumptions was not a puppet of Nazi Germany so much as a species of near ally, but which had a right wing government, with elections, that operated only within the confines of the beliefs of the far right government.

Much of what we see going on now in the far right of the country, which is now the province of the GOP, is described in this fashion, although not without its ironies.  Viewed in that fashion, the January 6, insurrection actually makes sense, as the election was "stolen" because it produced the wrong results, culturally.  I.e., if you assume that the basic concepts of the Democratic Party fall outside of the cultural features which the far right populist wing of the GOP holds as legitimate, such an election would be illegitimate by definition.

The United States, however, has never viewed democracy that way.  Not even the Confederate South, which may be the American example that treads on being the closest to that concept, did.  The Southerners felt comfortable with human bondage, but they did not feel comfortable instituting an unwritten set of values into an unwritten constitution.  Slavery, the core value of the South, was presumed justified, but it was written into the law.

Much of the nation now does.

Indeed, in the Trump wing of the GOP, or the wing which came over to trump, and brought populist Democrats into the party, that is a strong central tenant.  When the far right in the current GOP speaks about being a "Constitutional Conservative", they don't mean being Constitutional Originalists.  Rather, they are speaking about interpreting the Constitution according to a second, unwritten, and vaguely defined "constitution".

The ironies this piles on are thick, as the unwritten social constitution this piles on looks back to an American of decades ago, much of which has indeed unfortunately changed, but much of which the current backers of this movement are not close to comporting with themselves.  The imagined perfect America that is looked back towards, the one that we wish to "Make Great Again", was culturally an Anglo-Saxon Protestant country, or at least a European Christian one, with very strong traditional values in that area.  Those who now look at that past as an ideal age in part because social movements involving such things as homosexuality and the like need to appreciate that the original of the same set of beliefs and concerns would make heterosexual couples living outside of marriage and no fault divorce just as looked down upon.  Put another way, the personal traits of Donald F. Trump, in this world, would be just as abhorrent as those of Barney Frank.

This is not to discuss the pluses or minuses of social conservatism or of social liberalism in any form.  That's a different topic.  But American democracy, no matter how imperfect, has always rested on the absolute that its first principal of democracy is democracy.  Taken one step further, a central concept of democracy is that bad ideas die in the sunlight.  

That has always proven true in the past, and there's any number of movements that rose and fell in the United States not because they were suppressed, but because they simply proved themselves to be poor ideas.  In contrast, nations which tried to enforce a certain cultural norm upon their people by force, such as Vichy France or Francoist Spain, ended up doing damage to it, even where some of the core values they sought to enforce were not bad (which is not to excuse the many which were).

All of that may seem a long ways from Memorial Day, but it's not.  No matter how a person defines it, as the end of the day the lost lives being commemorated today were lost for that concept of democracy and no other.  Those who would honor them, from the left or the right, can only honor them in that context.

That means that those who would support insurrections as their side didn't win, aren't honoring the spirit of the day. And those who would impose rule by courts, as people can't be trusted to vote the right way, aren't either.

Related threads:

Tuesday, May 30, 1922. Lincoln Memorial Dedicated.Labels: Civil War, Commentary, Conservatism, Democracy, Illiberal Democracy, Liberal Democracy, Liberalism, Memorial Day, Populism, Slavery, The 2021 Insurrection, United States, Vichy France

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 62nd Edition. The trowel and musket edition.

Trowels and muskets.

BYU is taking flak for making its incoming students read Jeffrey Holland's "trowel and musket" speech regarding BYU's second century, which he delivered back in 2001.

Holland is a figure in the LDS's governing body.  His speech, is copyrighted, but under the fair comment exception I'm setting it out here.  It stated:

Someone once told me that the young speak of the future because they have no past, while the elderly speak of the past because they have no future. Although it damages that little aphorism, I who have no future have come to you as the veritable Ancient of Days to speak of the future of BYU, but a future anchored in our distinctive past. If I have worded that just right, it means I can talk about anything I want.

I am grateful that the full university family is gathered today—faculty, staff, and administration. Regardless of your job description, I am going to speak to all of you as teachers, because at BYU that is what all of us are. Thank you for being faithful role models in that regard. We teach at BYU.

I can’t be certain, but I think that it was in the summer of 1948 when I had my first BYU experience. I would have been seven years old. We were driving back to St. George in a 1941 Plymouth from one of our rare trips to Salt Lake City. As we came down old highway 91, I saw high on the side of one of the hills a huge block Y—white and bold and beautiful.

I don’t know how to explain that moment, but it was a true epiphany for a seven-year-old, if a seven-year-old can have an epiphany. If I had already seen that Y on the drive up or at any other time, I couldn’t remember it. That day I probably was seeing it for the first time. I believe I was receiving a revelation from God. I somehow knew that bold letter meant something special—­something special to me—and that it would one day play a significant role in my life. When I asked my mother what it meant, she said it was the emblem of a university. I thought about that for a moment, still watching that letter on the side of the hill, and then said quietly to her, “Well, it must be the greatest university in the world.”

My chance to actually get on campus came in June 1952, four years after that first sighting. That summer I accompanied my parents to one of the early leadership weeks—a precursor to what is now the immensely popular BYU Education Week held on campus. That means I came here for my first BYU experience sixty-nine years ago, with a preview of that four years earlier. If anyone in this audience has been coming to this campus longer than that, please come forward and give this talk. Otherwise, sit still and be patient. As Elizabeth Taylor said to her eight husbands, “I won’t be keeping you long.”

My point, dear friends, is simply this: I have loved BYU for nearly three-fourths of a century. Only my service in and testimony of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—which includes and features foremost my marriage and the beautiful children it has given us—have affected me as profoundly as has my decision to attend Brigham Young University. No one in my family had. In so testifying, I represent literally hundreds of thousands of other students who made that decision and say that same thing.

So, for the legions of us over the years, I say: Thank you. Thank you for what you do. Thank you for classes taught and meals served and grounds so well kept. Thank you for office hours and lab experiments and testimonies shared—gifts given to little people like me so we could grow up to be big people like you. Thank you for choosing to be at BYU, because your choice affected our choice, and, like Mr. Frost’s poetic path, “that has made all the difference.”

“A Trowel in One Hand and a Musket in the Other”

I asked President Kevin J Worthen for a sample of the good things that have been happening of late, and I was delighted at the sheaf of items he gave me—small type, single-spaced lines, reams, it looked like—everything from academic recognitions and scholarly rankings to athletic successes and the reach of BYUtv. Karl G. Maeser would be as proud as I was.

But President Worthen and I both know those aren’t the real success stories of BYU. These are rather, as some say of ordinances in the Church, “outward signs of an inward grace.”2 The real successes at BYU are the personal experiences that thousands here have had—personal experiences difficult to document or categorize or list. Nevertheless, these are so powerful in their impact on the heart and mind that they have changed us forever.

I run a risk in citing any examples beyond my own, but let me mention just one or two.

One of our colleagues seated here this morning wrote of his first-semester, pre-mission enrollment in my friend C. Wilfred Griggs’s History of Civilization class. But this was going to be civilization seen through a BYU lens. So, as preambles to the course, Wilf had the students read President Spencer W. Kimball’s talk “The Second Century of Brigham Young University”3 and the first chapter of Hugh Nibley’s book Approaching Zion.4

Taken together, our very literate friend said these two readings “forged an indestructible union in my mind and heart between two soaring ideals—that of a consecrated university with that of a holy city. Zion, I came to believe, would be a city with a school [and, I would add, a temple, creating] something of a celestial college town, or perhaps a college kingdom.”

After his mission, our faculty friend returned to Provo, where he fell under the soul-expanding spell of John S. Tanner, “the platonic ideal of a BYU professor—superbly qualified in every secular sense, totally committed to the kingdom, and absolutely effervescing with love for the Savior, his students, and his subject. He moved seamlessly from careful teacher analysis to powerful personal testimony. He knew scores of passages from Milton and other poets by heart, [yet] verses of scripture flowed, if anything, even more freely from the abundance of his consecrated heart: I was unfailingly edified by the passion of his teaching and the eloquence of his example.”

Why would such a one come back to teach at BYU after a truly distinguished postgraduate experience that might well have taken him to virtually any university in America? Because, our colleague said, “in a coming day the citizens of Zion ‘shall come forth with songs of everlasting joy’ [Moses 7:53]. I hope,” he wrote, “to help my students hear that chorus in the distance and to lend their own voices, in time, to its swelling refrain.”

Such are the experiences we hope to provide our students at BYU, though probably not always so poetically expressed. But imagine then the pain that comes with a memo like this one I recently received. These are just a half-dozen lines from a two-page document:

“You should know,” the writer said, “that some people in the extended community are feeling abandoned and betrayed by BYU. It seems that some professors (at least the vocal ones in the media) are supporting ideas that many of us feel are contradictory to gospel principles, making it appear to be about like any other university our sons and daughters could have attended. Several parents have said they no longer want to send their children here or donate to the school.

“Please don’t think I’m opposed to people thinking differently about policies and ideas,” the writer continued. “I’m not. But I would hope that BYU professors would be bridging those gaps between faith and intellect and would be sending out students who are ready to do the same in loving, intelligent, and articulate ways. Yet I fear that some faculty are not supportive of the Church’s doctrines and policies and choose to criticize them publicly. There are consequences to this. After having served a full-time mission and marrying her husband in the temple, a friend of mine recently left the Church. In her graduation statement on a social media post, she credited [such and such a BYU program and its faculty] with the radicalizing of her attitudes and the destruction of her faith.”7

Fortunately we don’t get too many of those letters, but this one isn’t unique. Several of my colleagues get the same kind, with almost all of them ultimately being forwarded to poor President Worthen. Now, most of what happens on this campus is absolutely wonderful. That is why I began as I did, with my own undying love of this place. But every so often we need a reminder of the challenge we constantly face here. Maybe it is in this meeting. I certainly remember my own experiences in these wonderful beginning-of-the-school-year meetings and how much it meant to me to be with you then. Well, it means that again today.

Here is something I said on this subject forty-one years ago, almost to the day. I was young. I was unprepared. I had been president for all of three weeks.

I said then and I say now that if we are an extension of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, taking a significant amount of sacred tithes and other precious human resources, all of which might well be expended in other worthy causes, surely our integrity demands that our lives “be absolutely consistent with and characteristic of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ.”8 At a university there will always be healthy debate regarding a whole syllabus full of issues. But until “we all come [to] the unity of the faith, and . . . [have grown to] the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ,” our next best achievement will be to stay in harmony with the Lord’s anointed, those whom He has designated to declare Church doctrine and to guide Brigham Young University as its trustees.

In 2014, seven years ago, then Elder Russell M. Nelson came to campus for a BYU leadership meeting. His remarks were relatively brief, but, tellingly, he said:

With the Church growing more rapidly in the less prosperous countries, we . . . must conserve sacred funds more carefully than ever before.

At BYU we must ally ourselves even more closely with the work of our Heavenly Father. . . .

A college education for our people is a sacred responsibility, [but] it is not essential for eternal life.

A statement like that gets my attention, particularly because just a short time later President Nelson started to chair our board of trustees, hold our purse strings, and have the final “yea” or “nay” on every proposal we might make—from a new research lab to more undergraduate study space to approving a new pickup truck for the physical facilities staff! Russell M. Nelson is very, very good at listening to us. We who sit with him every day have learned the value of listening carefully to him.

Three years later, in 2017, Elder Dallin H. Oaks, not then but soon to be in the First Presidency, where he would sit only one chair—one ­heartbeat—away from the same position President Nelson now has, quoted our colleague Elder Neal A. Maxwell, who had said:

In a way scholars at BYU and elsewhere are a little bit like the builders of the temple in Nauvoo, who worked with a trowel in one hand and a musket in the other. Today scholars building the temple of learning must also pause on occasion to defend the kingdom. I personally think this is one of the reasons the Lord established and maintains this university. The dual role of builder and defender is unique and ongoing. I am grateful we have scholars today who can handle, as it were, both trowels and muskets.

To this, Elder Oaks then challengingly responded, “I would like to hear a little more musket fire from this temple of learning.” He said this in a way that could have applied to a host of topics in various departments, but the one he specifically mentioned was the doctrine of the family and defending marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Little did he know that while many would hear his appeal, especially the School of Family Life, which moved quickly and visibly to assist, some others fired their muskets all right, but unfortunately they didn’t always aim at those hostile to the Church. We thought a couple of stray rounds even went north of the Point of the Mountain!

My beloved brothers and sisters, “a house . . . divided against itself . . . cannot stand,” and I will go to my grave pleading that this institution not only stands but stands unquestionably committed to its unique academic mission and to the Church that sponsors it. We hope it isn’t a surprise to you that your trustees are not deaf or blind to the feelings that swirl around marriage and the whole same-sex topic on campus—and a lot of other topics. I and many of my Brethren have spent more time and shed more tears on this subject than we could ever adequately convey to you this morning or any morning. We have spent hours discussing what the doctrine of the Church can and cannot provide the individuals and families struggling over this difficult issue. So it is with a little scar tissue of our own that we are trying to avoid—and hope all will try to avoid—language, symbols, and situations that are more divisive than unifying at the very time we want to show love for all of God’s children.

If a student commandeers a graduation podium intended to represent everyone getting diplomas that day in order to announce his personal sexual orientation, what might another speaker feel free to announce the next year, until eventually anything goes? What might commencement come to mean—or not mean—if we push individual license over institutional dignity for very long? Do we simply end up with more divisiveness in our culture than we already have? And we already have far too much everywhere.

In that spirit, let me go no farther before declaring unequivocally my love and that of my Brethren for those who live with this same-sex challenge and so much complexity that goes with it. Too often the world has been unkind—in many instances crushingly cruel—to these, our ­brothers and sisters. Like many of you, we have spent hours with them, and we have wept and prayed and wept again in an effort to offer love and hope while keeping the gospel strong and the ­obedience to commandments evident in every individual life.

But it will assist all of us—it will assist ­everyone—trying to provide help in this ­matter if things can be kept in some proportion and balance in the process. For example, we have to be careful that love and empathy do not get interpreted as condoning and advocacy or that orthodoxy and loyalty to principle not be interpreted as unkindness or disloyalty to people. As near as I can tell, Christ never once withheld His love from anyone, but He also never once said to anyone, “Because I love you, you are exempt from keeping my commandments.” We are tasked with trying to strike that same sensitive, demanding balance in our lives.

Musket fire? Yes, we will always need defenders of the faith, but “friendly fire” is a tragedy—and from time to time the Church, its leaders, and some of our colleagues within the university community have taken such fire on this campus. And sometimes it isn’t friendly, wounding students and the parents of students—so many who are confused about what so much recent flag-waving and parade-holding on this issue means. My beloved friends, this kind of confusion and conflict ought not to be. Not here. There are better ways to move toward crucially important goals in these very difficult matters—ways that show empathy and understanding for everyone while maintaining loyalty to prophetic leadership and devotion to revealed doctrine.

My Brethren have made the case for the metaphor of musket fire, which I have endorsed yet again today. There will continue to be those who oppose our teachings—and with that will continue the need to define, document, and defend the faith. But we all look forward to the day when we can “beat [our] swords into plowshares, and [our] spears into pruninghooks” and, at least on this subject, “learn war [no] more.”16 And while I have focused on this same-sex topic this morning more than I would have liked, I pray you will see it as emblematic of a lot of issues our students, our communities, and our Church face in this complex, contemporary world of ours.

But I digress! Back to the blessings of a school in Zion! Do you see the beautiful parallel between the unfolding of the Restoration and the ­prophetic development of BYU, notwithstanding that both will have their critics along the way? Just as has the Church itself, BYU has grown in spiritual strength, in the number of people it reaches and serves, and in its unique place among other institutions of higher education. It has grown in national and international reputation. More and more of its faculty are distinguishing themselves, and, even more important, so are more and more of its students.

Reinforcing the fact that so many do understand exactly what that unfolding dream of BYU is that President Worthen spoke about, not long ago one of your number wrote to me this marvelous description of what he thought was the “call” to those who serve at BYU: “The Lord’s call [to those of us who serve at BYU] is a . . . call to create learning experiences of unprecedented depth, quality, and impact. . . . As good as BYU is and has been, this is a call to do [better]. It is . . . a call to educate many more students, to more . . . effectively help them become true disciples of Jesus Christ, [and] to prepare them to . . . lead in their families, in the Church, [and] in their [professions] in a world filled with commotion. . . . But [answering this call] . . . cannot be [done successfully] without His . . . help.” The writer, one of you, concluded, “I believe that help will come according to the faith and obedience of the tremendously good people of BYU.”

I agree wholeheartedly and enthusiastically with such a sense of calling here and with that reference to and confidence in “the tremendously good people of BYU.” Let me underscore that idea of such a call by returning to President Kimball’s second-century address focused on by President Worthen.

Our bright, budding new commissioner of education, Elder Clark G. Gilbert, is one of my traveling companions today. You may be certain that Elder Gilbert loves this institution—his alma mater—deeply and brings to his assignment a reverence for its mission and its message. As part of his introduction to you, I am asking Elder Gilbert to come on campus on any calendar date he and President Worthen can work out, and whether those visits are formal or casual or both, I hope they can accomplish at least two things:

First of all, I hope you will come to see quickly the remarkable strengths Elder Gilbert brings to his calling, even as he learns more about the flagship of his fleet and why our effort at the Church Educational System would be a failure without the health, success, and participation of BYU.

Second, noting that we are just a few years short of halfway through those second hundred years of which President Kimball spoke, I think it would be fascinating to know if we are, in fact, making any headway on the challenges he laid before us and of which Elder David A. Bednar reminded the BYU leadership team just a few weeks ago.

When you look at President Kimball’s talk again, may I ask you to pay particular attention to that sweet prophet’s effort to ask that we be unique? In his discourse, President Kimball used the word unique eight times and the word special eight times. It seems clear to me in my seventy-three years of loving it that BYU will become an “educational Mt. Everest”19 only to the degree it embraces its uniqueness, its singularity. We could mimic every other university in the world until we got a bloody nose in the effort, and the world would still say, “BYU who?” No, we must have the will to be different and to stand alone, if necessary, being a university second to none in its role primarily as an undergraduate teaching institution that is unequivocally true to the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. If at a future time that mission means foregoing some professional affiliations and certifications, then so be it. There may come a day when the price we are asked to pay for such association is simply too high and too inconsistent with who we are. No one wants it to come to that, least of all me, but if it does, we will pursue our own destiny, a “destiny [that] is not a matter of chance;  . . . a matter of choice; . . . not a thing to be waited for, . . . a thing to be achieved.”

“Mom, what is that big Y on that mountain?”

“Jeff, it stands for the university here in Provo: Brigham Young University.”

“Well, it must be the greatest university in the world.”

And so, for me, it is. To help you pursue that destiny in the only real way I know how to help, I leave an apostolic blessing on every one of you this morning as you start another school year. In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and with gratitude for His holy priesthood and as if hands were on your head—had we time to do that, we surely would—I bless you personally, each one of you personally. I bless the students who will come under your influence, and I bless the university, including its marvelous president, in its campus-wide endeavor. I bless you that profound personal faith will be your watchword and that unending blessings of personal rectitude will be your eternal reward. I bless your professional work that it will be admired by your peers, and I bless your devotion to gospel truths that it will be the saving grace in some student’s life. I bless your families that those you hope will be faithful in keeping their covenants will be saved at least in part because you have been faithful in keeping yours. Light conquers darkness. Truth triumphs over error. Goodness is victorious over evil in the end, every time.

I bless each one of you with every righteous desire of your heart, and I thank you for giving your love and loyalty to BYU, to students like me and my beloved wife. Please, from one who owes so much to this school and who has loved her so deeply for so long, keep her not only standing but standing for what she uniquely and prophetically was meant to be. And may the rest of higher education “see your good works, and glorify [our] Father which is in heaven,” I pray, in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

Now, I'm not a Mormon.  Far from it. I'm an Apostolic Christian, and more particularly a Latin Rite Catholic.  Mormon's believe in a Great Apostasy that conclusively be demonstrated never to have occured.  That fact, amongst others, makes the underpinnings of Mormon theology hugely problematic.  

But here's the thing.  BYU is a Mormon university, and Mr. Holland is basically simply saying a Mormon institution must defend its beliefs.

That is, frankly, correct.

The required reading has provoked the ire of some civil libertarians and more particularly the LGBTQ+ community, which supposedly finds it "dangerous".

Well, whatever.  What the reaction really demonstrates is the "cake and eat it too" attitude of modern Westerners, which want all the benefits of believing in something, with no duty or obligation of any kind being imposed by it.

As noted, I'm not a Mormon, and I think the Mormon faith is manifestly incorrect.  But that a Mormon institution would defend its faith makes sense.  Otherwise, it wouldn't have a point.

Which is a lesson that Catholic higher educational institutions, and post Kennedy Catholicism in the US in general, failed to learn to a large degree.

Missing the point, maybe.

On a somewhat related item, an item I saw in the Trib, in the local advice column:

"Am I getting hung up by this country’s puritanical attitudes toward sex and my Roman Catholic upbringing. . . "

I'll skip the background, which had to do with his daughter, but;

1. Have you lived in the United States since 1968?  
2. The way this is posed suggests that no matter what is "getting hung up", the author ought to take his "Roman Catholic upbringing" more seriously.

More broadly, while I don't know as I don't know the asker, the broader question is whether this fellow retains some lapsed armchair Catholic concerns but didn't do anything to really be serious about anything, and is now bothered by that, or if he was faithful, in which case this question need not even be asked.

I suspect I know which it is.

More from Pope Francis

No sooner had the Pope been in the news for responding poorly, again, to a press interview than we learn that he's now released a memoir.

Weary.

I'm not going to read it, but one of Pope Francis' problems is that we hear from him too darned much.  Every time we turn around, we have to learn about something he's said, and then the reaction to it.  It's too much.

Apparently, and with stories about the Pope, he made a comment in his memoir regarding retaining fully the Catholic belief on the gravely sinful nature of sex outside of marriage, including homosexual sex outside of marriage, while also saying he supports civil unions.

There's some logic to that, but only if you don't follow it too far. The logic would be that it would be unjust to deprive a homosexual couple the benefits of the civil law, as it pertains to death, and other things. At first blush, that makes some sense, but once you go down the logic rails, it fails pretty badly.

The same could be said of any sexual union, we'd note, licit and illicit.  That's not a reason to sanction them through the law.  And the law's goals here in the first place are not supposed to be tied to emotion, let alone love, in any of its forms, but the protection of children and property.  You can argue the latter is served by this, but only if you really begin to tinker with the underpinnings of the law to the point you have undermined them.

And there are vehicles within the law that any person can otherwise use, so the situation which a person is attempting to address can actually always be legally addressed, without the undermining.

Trump as a Godly man

I keep hearing this from his supporters.

Are they dense?

He's a liar on serious matters, which is gravely sinful.  He's a serial polygamist, which is gravely sinful.

And he's just not a very decent or nice person.

Misrepresenting wealth.

People have noted that financial statements involving real property are frequently off the mark, as nobody really knows what the values are.  Hence, the prosecution of Trump in unjust, they argue.

Maybe what that really means is that taking on fabrications in these things was long overdue.  We note, FWIW, that he can't post his bond in spite of supposedly being vastly wealthy.  Now, on that, his assets may indeed be vast, but not liquid.  Be that as it may, nobody is willing to take on the bond, which suggest that no bonding entity feels they are sufficiently secure, or clear, as to attach them.

We need to force a ceasefire.

This is constantly said about the war in Gaza.

Are these people dense?  The US can't decree a cease fire and cause it to happen. We're not in the war.

Civilian casualties.

Levantine casualties in the Hamas Israeli War grossly outnumber the murdered Israeli civilians who were killed, and sometimes raped and then killed, at the onset of the war.

Right from the onset of the there have been protests that the Israeli response was disproportionate.  But how do you really deal with Hamas?  I have yet to hear anyone suggest anything realistic.  Simply stating "we need a ceasefire" is, quite frankly, lame.

Human being need to quit killing each other.  That's a given. But seeing as they haven't yet, is a pacifistic response to being attacked going to do anything?  Hamas wants to completely eject Jews from Israel.

The problem with voicing suggestions from afar is that you don't really have to expect them to be carried out.  But logic occasionally demands that it be pondered. What would happen? What is the proposal?

There is, I'd note, a solution to this.  It's one that simply won't be done, however.

The Levantine population has to be moved.  More on that in a separate post coming up.

Last prior edition:

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist, 61st Edition. Illiberal Democracy. . . coming soon to a republic near you and boosting the birth rate.