Two Cheers for Techno-Marxism

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, December 30, 2022

 

The 11 scariest words in the English language, at least in some very specific circumstances, might be: “Let’s ditch the rules and do something really off the wall.” This is simply not something you’d want to hear from, say, your heart surgeon.  I imagine prostitutes don’t want to hear it from their clients, either. 

 

And maybe it’s not something you want to hear from me, either. But there’s nothing you can do to stop me (cue maniacal laugh).

 

I had a weird idea occur to me while recording The Remnant podcast this morning. I want to make the Marxist case for nuclear fusion. I know what you’re thinking: “Not that dead horse again.” But, as an early draft of Castaway had Tom Hanks saying before they changed his inanimate buddy from a lacrosse stick to a volleyball, “Stick with me.” 

 

Marx the poet.

 

I think I’ve established my street cred as an opponent of Marxism. But that doesn’t mean Marx isn’t worth reading. 

 

But let me make a few points up front to dispel any confusion. First, don’t get me wrong. Just because some of Marx’s stuff is very interesting and occasionally very insightful, doesn’t mean I think it’s necessarily correct or persuasive—never mind defensible.

 

Second, you can buy into vast amounts of Marx’s writing, and still believe that Marxism—i.e. the brand name for authoritarian policies and politics imposed on whole societies—is hot garbage. It’s sort of like how every Christian I know is willing to admit that some of the things done in the name of Jesus (never mind Paul’s!) teachings weren’t very Christian. Right now, there are Russians who insist the answer to “What would Jesus do?” is “Bomb Ukrainian children.”

 

I’d like to think there are very few sincere Christians who aren’t utterly disgusted by that. So it is with Marx and Marxism (also just to be very, very, clear: Marx was no Jesus). This is something pretty much all the sincere Marxists acknowledge today, in part because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t be able to bore the crap out of everyone at the co-op by shouting “Real Marxism has never been tried!”

 

Intoxicating ideas can make anybody drunk, but what often happens is that the intoxicant turns out to be insufficient and the idea turns into a mixer of sorts hiding the real high proof stuff: power. 

 

Marx wrote very little on how Communism would actually work, because as Paul Johnson and others argue, Marx was really a frustrated Romantic poet. “The poetic gift manifests itself intermittently in Marx’s pages,” Johnson writes in Intellectuals, “producing some memorable passages. In the sense that he intuited rather than reasoned or calculated, Marx remained a poet to the end.”

 

This is one of the things that makes Marx interesting to read because it was the poetry, not the analysis, that lit fires in the minds of men. 

 

This was George Sorel’s insight about Marx, that he should be read more as a prophet. He admitted that Das Kapital was pretty worthless as “scientific” analysis, but really useful as “myth.” It should be seen as an “apocalyptic text … as a product of the spirit, as an image created for the purpose of molding consciousness.” Sorel, by the way, was an immense influence on both Lenin and Mussolini. 

 

For all the clever marketing involved in calling his views of history’s unfolding “scientific”—what better way to fend off criticism than to accuse your opponents as science “deniers”—Marx’s vision was apocalyptic and fundamentally religious (even if he claimed to reject religion in all forms). In his 1856 speech commemorating the anniversary of the Chartist People’s Paper, he concluded with a kind of prophecy. He dubbed the “English working men” the new chosen people for his eschatological vision. And why not? History was supposed to make its great leap forward in industrial, capitalist Britain, not in the rural backwater of Russia. These “first-born sons of modern industry” in England would lead in the liberation of their class all around the world. Marx lamented that their struggles had not been showered in the glory they deserved because they had been “shrouded in obscurity, and burked* by the middleclass historian.” But the workers would get their vengeance. On this score he invoked the medieval institution of the Vehmgericht.

 

To revenge the misdeeds of the ruling class, there existed in the middle ages, in Germany, a secret tribunal, called the “Vehmgericht.”  If a red cross was seen marked on a house, people knew that its owner was doomed by the “Vehm.” All the houses of Europe are now marked with the mysterious red cross.

 

History is the judge—its executioner, the proletarian.

 

But what would come after the righteous slaughter of the bourgeoisie and the ruling classes, according to Marx? Good times! Specifically, a post-scarcity civilization where you could do pretty much whatever you liked and be whatever you wanted. 

 

You see, one of the things Marx hated the most about capitalism and industrialization—necessary evils according to Marx, by the way—was the specialization of labor. He hated the idea that you had to pick a lane to earn your daily bread. A plumber couldn’t be a poet—at least not if he wanted to make a living. The capitalist system erodes all “human and natural qualities,” he wrote in his Philosophical Manuscripts. It makes workers, “both physically and spiritually de-humanized (entmenschtes),” living in hovels that are worse than pre-modern caves because they were “poisoned by the pestilential breath of civilization.” Marx was like the dorm room loser who insists he could be a great novelist, musician, or inventor—or all three—if only the “system” (or the Man, the globalists, Wall Street, Jews, or Egg Council) didn’t keep him down. He reminds me of Zach Galifinakis in an episode of Between Two Ferns when he said the Jews want to keep him fat (or something like that).

 

This would all end under true communism. “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” he wrote in the Communist Manifesto.

 

Or as he put in The German Ideology:

 

For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

 

Marx put the “commune” in Communism. 

 

Now, a lot of this is warmed over Rousseau. What Marx wants is a return to the bogus idea of the noble savage who, according to Rousseau, lived in relative solitude and peace doing what he pleased when he pleased. 

 

As anthropology, this stuff is trash. And as economic prescription, the idea that humans—remember all humans—could live the way he imagined humans did in the past, this is more like science fiction.

 

Star Trek economics.

 

Which brings me to fusion. 

 

Among the fundamental problems with Marxist economics is an inability to deal with the problem of scarcity. If the market isn’t allowed to work its magic at figuring out how to allocate resources by using prices and profit, it has to fall to something, i.e. someone, else to do it. That’s why you need a party and a bureaucracy to figure out who gets toilet paper and who gets back issues of Pravda. Marxists are hardly alone in believing that planners, experts, and social engineers should—and can!—figure out the best way to distribute finite resources. But Marxists went the farthest with it. 

 

But what if the problems of scarcity can be “solved” not by planners but by technology and entrepreneurs? 

 

I’ve never really understood the economics of Star Trek, but it always seemed to me that they weren’t as nonsensical as they seemed given that they’d invented the “replicator.” This was a doohickey that used the same technology as the transporter to rearrange molecules to make just about anything, including food and clothing. It was a perfected form of 3D printing. 

 

Physical space was also no longer an impediment. In a universe where there are an infinite number of habitable planets, there’s real estate for everyone. Of course, all of this is only possible when you have enough energy to get where you want and replicate the materials and food you need. I’m not saying that the economics—or politics—of Star Trek actually make sense. I’m just saying they’re not as crazy as they seem. When the means of production have been truly democratized, who the hell knows what political economy would look like? 

 

And that’s why I think Marxists—and more generic leftists—should be stoked about fusion. Yeah, it’ll be a long time before it’s commercially viable at scale, but if and when it is, all sorts of impossibilities become possible. (Jim Pethokoukis has a great primer on the state of play in Fusion World.) 

 

There’s a rich tradition of Marxist/leftist/Green hostility to the idea of limitless, cheap, energy. Cheap energy fueled industrialization, deforestation, and all sorts of things that are at war with a “sustainable” environment. The environmental left hated oil because it was the lifeblood of capitalism before they hated it because of climate change.

 

But cheap energy could also fix a lot of the problems—“externalities”—that the era of fossil fuels created. Fossil fuels would be relatively easy to phase out. Hydroelectric dams, environmentally gruesome edifices, could be torn down. All of the hideous solar and wind farms could also be mothballed, returning all of that land to nature or more productive uses. Desalination is crazy expensive in part because it’s so energy intensive. Fusion could solve that. Heck, it’d be crazy to try and scrub meaningful amounts of CO2 from the atmosphere with existing technology. But maybe with inexhaustible supplies of cheap energy it wouldn’t be? I’m not sold on genetically engineered meat yet, but it seems to me you could come up with some nifty stuff at scale with limitless energy supplies. Say goodbye to factory farming. 

 

Of course, cheap energy wouldn’t solve every problem, and it would undoubtedly create some new ones. But that’s true of every new form of energy. The question is whether the problems the new forms of energy creates are better problems than the old ones. 

 

More broadly, while I hate most of the “metaverse” stuff, if I were of a Marxist or hyper environmentalist bent, I’d be pretty psyched by its potential to keep people from using up natural resources. More to the point, in the physical world we can’t all be the Renaissance men that Marx envisioned, but in the virtual world? Why not? There’s a hell of a lot of scarcity in meatspace: a finite number of trees to make your cabin and a finite number of Walden Ponds to put them on. But in the virtual world? You can be as much of a hermit or socialite as you like. I don’t want to be a herdsman, hunter, and critic the way Marx did. But if that floats your boat, plug into the Zuckerverse and knock yourself out.

 

We’re already in the opening chapter of the Dematerialization Era. As my friend Jonathan Adler writes:

 

What is now being observed represents a fundamental decoupling of resource consumption from economic growth, such that as mature economies grow, they not only use fewer resources per unit of output, but they also consume fewer resources overall. In short, economic growth in the most developed nations increasingly coincides with a net reduction in resource consumption. The United States in particular is “post-peak in its exploitation of the earth,” according to Andrew McAfee in More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources — and What Happens Next

 

Dematerialization is a fancy way of saying that scarcity may no longer be the iron cage it once was. I suspect there will always be scarcity of some sort, not least the scarcity of human attention and time. 

 

But what I’m getting at is that because of the Marxists’ hostility to markets and all that comes with them, they might be missing the only viable route to the Heaven on Earth the Marxists promised but couldn’t deliver. 

 

Marxist economics is a boneheaded way to structure an economy precisely because it fails utterly to confront the problems of scarcity and the benefits of innovation. It pretends to be a “productivist” ideology but it sucks at producing the stuff normal people want, like wealth and improved living standards. Yeah, yeah, the Soviet Union delivered on this score for a while because they imposed technological advances—like replacing ox-carts with tractors— but they did that by using Western technology and killed a lot of folks in the process. And yes, the Chinese Communist Party lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, but they did that only by embracing markets and trade.

 

We’ll never get to the immanentized eschaton Marx envisioned, but the great irony is that we can get much, much, closer to it thanks to capitalism. In Henry Adams’ autobiography he has a chapter titled “The Virgin and the Dynamo,” in which he postulates that the Dynamo,  i.e. technology, had replaced the Virgin, traditional Christian religious notions, as the organizing passion of Americans. In effect, he was saying that “engineering,” broadly understood, was the new religion, an idea that in the Progressive Era (and perhaps today) seemed to be proven true.  There’s a lot that can be said about that, but I’m running very long. Still, it does provide a nice opportunity to bring up, again, my favorite quote by Eric Voegelin: 

 

When God is invisible behind the world, the contents of the world will become new gods; when the symbols of transcendent religiosity are banned, new symbols develop from the inner-worldly language of science to take their place. Like the Christian ecclesia, the inner-worldly community has its apocalypse too; yet the new apocalyptics insist that the symbols they create are scientific judgements.

 

But what I want to leave you with is the profound irony that the system Marxists and environmentalists so despise may not be what stands between them and the egalitarian romantic nirvana they yearn for but the best, and probably only, means of delivering it. Whether we should want to live in that nirvana is a subject for another time. 

 

Various & Sundry

 

Way back at the beginning of this “news”letter, I put an asterisk after the word “burked.” I did that because I wanted to offer a definition but I didn’t want to break the flow. Burke is an awesome word I had forgotten. It means: “to murder, as by suffocation, so as to leave no or few marks of violence” or “to suppress or get rid of by some indirect maneuver.” So you might say, the best assassins burke their victims. 

Japan Abandons Pacifism

By Mike Watson

Thursday, December 15, 2022

 

Taipei and Tokyo

 

Russia’s vicious attack on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure is drawing eyeballs and condemnations around the world, but an equally important story is unfolding on the other side of Eurasia. For more than a decade, Japan has been quietly countering China’s unfolding plan to dominate Asia, and it is taking an important new step. After decades of quasi-pacifism, Japan is initiating a massive rearmament program. When China looks to the east, the sun is not the only thing it sees rising.

 

As Japan rearms, it is exacerbating one of China’s thorniest dilemmas. The Chinese Communist Party rules a large country with an immense population and great resources, but that country is surrounded by powerful neighbors. Unlike the United States, which is bordered by Canada, Mexico, and fish, China is in the middle of an unfriendly neighborhood. It has four nuclear-armed neighbors — India, North Korea, Pakistan, and Russia — and nearby are two others, Japan and South Korea, that can acquire nuclear weapons as quickly as they deem necessary. Some of China’s smaller neighbors may not be members of the nuclear club, but they do pose other problems. Burma’s continued instability, some of which is due to Chinese instigation, threatens to unleash chaos on China’s southern border, and Vietnam is a pugnacious if soft-spoken opponent of China’s ambitions. Much like Kaiser Wilhelm before him, Xi Jinping has aspirations of global preeminence, but to realize his ambitions, he must find a way to seduce or neutralize his neighbors.

 

Xi is much further along this path than many Americans realize. There is a popular misconception that China’s influence over North Korea is enormous and North Korea would cease its belligerence if only the Chinese would tell their vassal to get in line. This is overstated, but Beijing and Pyongyang have reached a workable modus vivendi. Pakistan, one of the largest recipients of Belt and Road projects, has deepened its long-standing collaboration with China against their mutual adversary, India. Vladimir Putin has accepted a subordinate role in his “no limits” partnership with Xi rather than reach an accommodation with the West. He is meekly standing by as China undermines Russian influence in the former Soviet states of Central Asia, and Russian and Chinese aircraft now routinely conduct joint patrols near Japan and South Korea, demonstrating that their militaries are becoming more interoperable.

 

Japan and India are the Asian pillars of a balance of power against Chinese hegemony, and China is steadily working to encircle them and knock those pillars down. China’s advances near the Persian Gulf and in the Indian Ocean are well known at this point: The “string of pearls” that stretches from China’s overseas base in Djibouti through the Pakistani port in Gwadar to Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port, on which China acquired a 99-year lease in 2017, leaves India vulnerable on all sides if a conflict with China breaks out. Japan is slightly better off, but still in peril. As one Japanese interlocutor told me, the country is facing dangers on three fronts. China and North Korea threaten Japan’s west, Japan’s southwestern islands are already in danger of Chinese encroachment, and as China and Russia grow closer together, Japanese defense planners cannot rule out an attack from the north.

 

Taiwan is the key to Japan’s security. A consensus is forming in Tokyo that keeping Taiwan out of China’s control is a national interest for Japan. The Chinese Communists’ rhetoric about “reunification” with Taiwan, which they have not controlled for a moment in the history of this galaxy, distracts from a core issue about Taiwan. The island sits along the trade routes that are vital for Japan’s economy. Fuel from the Middle East, food, and a significant portion of Japan’s other trade come from the southwest. If China gets Taiwan in its clutches, it will not only have Japan’s southwestern islands in easy reach; it will also have its hands around Japan’s throat. At that point, the pressure on Japan to make a deal with China would be enormous, a deal that Americans would have a hard time stomaching.

 

Japan’s independence may very well be the pivot on which the global balance of power turns. If China can neutralize Japan, or make it into a vassal, Americans and their remaining allies will have little chance of assembling a coalition that can compete effectively in the most strategically important region in the world.

 

This is the nightmare that the United States has sought to avoid since Great Britain lost its ability to maintain the global balance of power. During the 20th century, when Europe played an outsized role in global politics, hundreds of thousands of Americans died preventing Germany from dominating Europe, and hundreds of thousands more with thousands of nuclear weapons defended the industrial heartland of Europe from Soviet machinations during the Cold War. If China can pull Asia into its orbit, it will achieve in the 21st century what Germany and the Soviet Union could not in the 20th.

 

The United States would not automatically lose its independence in this scenario, but it would be hard-pressed to defend itself, let alone to assemble a new coalition to defend the free world. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s May 1941 speech about Hitler’s global ambitions is worth revisiting here: If Hitler conquered Europe, he warned, Germany could set the terms for a new economic order. American workers would be hardest hit. “The American laborer would have to compete with slave labor in the rest of the world.” To survive, American companies would have to go along with their new overseas masters. “Those in the New World who were seeking profits would be urging that all that the dictatorships desired was ‘peace.’ They would oppose toil and taxes for more American armament.” Fortress America would be a poor backwater: “Tariff walls — Chinese walls of isolation — would be futile. Freedom to trade is essential to our economic life. . . . It would not be an American wall to keep Nazi goods out; it would be a Nazi wall to keep us in.”

 

Americans have already gotten a foretaste of a China-dominated global economy, and it is bitter. David Autor argues that the “China shock” destroyed nearly six out of every ten lost manufacturing jobs from 2001 to 2019. China is not stopping with lower-value manufacturing: It aspires to shape global technology regulations to benefit Chinese companies and  gradually cut out Western ones. As Michael Lind warns, the United States “could decline into a deindustrialized, English-speaking version of a Latin American republic, specializing in commodities, real estate, tourism, and perhaps transnational tax evasion.” China has already tried to ruin the careers of Americans, such as Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey, who supported Hong Kong protesters. Imagine how much freedom of speech we would have if China could bring control of the global economy to bear on Americans who criticize Chinese policy.

 

Fortunately, Japan is aware of the danger and is rising to meet the challenge. The Japanese have received their own taste of China’s belligerence. In 2010, China escalated a long-running dispute over the Senkaku Islands by suspending exports to Japan of rare earth elements, a set of hard-to-mine minerals that are vital for high-tech manufacturing. During both of his stints as prime minister, the late Shinzo Abe maneuvered to prepare his country, which has been wary of employing force since World War II and was economically entangled with China, for the confrontation that he could see on the horizon. Abe was one of the foremost advocates of the “Quad” partnership with Australia, India, and the United States; he pushed Japan to reinterpret its pacifist constitution so that it could take a greater role in providing regional security; and he coined the phrase “free and open Indo-Pacific,” which the United States has since adopted.

 

Japan has quickened the pace in the last few years. A series of events has transformed Japan’s outlook on the global situation: The Covid pandemic demonstrated that China’s governance system is a source of risk for other countries, Xi could be even more assertive now that he has locked in his third term at the helm of the Chinese Communist Party, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine showed that great-power wars are back on the table, and the United States has become a less reliable ally on which Tokyo can no longer necessarily depend for security. Even my Japanese interlocutors who were the most complimentary of Donald Trump noted that his election was not a sign of American stability and predictability. Abe and Trump had a very close relationship, which served the American and Japanese people well, but the Japanese cannot rely on idiosyncrasies such as personal friendships when their country is at stake.

 

Hence, Japan’s rearmament. The first step will be the release of Japan’s new national-security strategy, which by all accounts will identify the challenge before Japan with a frankness that is unusual in government documents. Next, the government will drastically increase the defense budget, from roughly 5 trillion yen (less than $40 billion) currently to averaging over 8 trillion yen annually over the next five years. Having seen Russia’s and Ukraine’s enormous expenditure of munitions and materiel, the government is focused on buying munitions, spare parts, and other equipment that the Japanese forces will need if a conflict breaks out in the next few years. In addition, Japan will acquire new capabilities, such as long-range missiles that can strike enemy missiles on the launchpad, and it will invest in future high-tech capabilities in realms such as cyber and space. All told, Japan’s armed forces will fast become much more formidable.

 

Americans can be heartened by Japan’s rearmament, but it is a silver lining of a dark cloud that looms large. The United States has asked its allies for years to shoulder more of the load, but it is not because we have become more persuasive that they are moving in that direction. Rather, they are acquiring more weapons because their neighborhood has become more threatening and our security guarantees have become less convincing.

 

There is still much to do. A well-armed Japan will greatly complicate China’s ambitions in Taiwan or anywhere else in the Pacific, but there is no substitute for American power. Currently, the United States plans to shed old ships and planes over the next decade in order to save money and enter the 2030s with a modernized military. Since the American forces in Japan are already significantly underequipped as China’s military buildup continues, and thus the balance of power in the Western Pacific is tilting, this is an extraordinarily risky strategy. The Biden administration has not allowed the defense budget to keep pace with inflation, so the cuts will be even deeper, and the modernization even farther off, than we realize. Congress is adding $45 billion to this year’s defense budget, which will help but is insufficient to meet the demands of the moment.

 

More capabilities are important, but so too is better planning. Modern warfare is immensely complicated, and managing the various aerial, ground, and naval components is challenging even for the U.S. military, which has more experience with joint operations than most of its counterparts. The Japanese and American militaries operate together frequently, but in a war that could begin with massive salvos of supersonic missiles, speed would be at a premium, and closer cooperation would be necessary. There is almost no coordination between the Americans, Japanese, and Taiwanese, who would have to fight together to stave off a Chinese offensive. This is not a recipe for success.

 

After decades of struggling to take over, eventually Germany accepted a smaller role in Europe’s affairs. Japan too has become an important U.S. ally in part because the U.S.-led order has given Japan many of the benefits that it desired before Pearl Harbor. There may yet come a day when China accepts a role in Asia’s affairs that is beneficial to all. But Germany and Japan did not come to those realizations quietly, and a conflict with China would be catastrophic. Deterring China from taking up arms is the first step to right-sizing its ambitions. It is one that the Americans and Japanese are taking side by side.

Our German Ally: Tanking

By Andrew Stuttaford

Saturday, December 31, 2022

 

From Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest:

 

Jack: I have lost both my parents.

 

Lady Bracknell: To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.

 

From the Financial Times (December 19):

 

Germany sought to reassure Nato that it could still be relied on to lead the alliance’s rapid response task force even after all 18 of its most advanced armoured vehicles malfunctioned in a training exercise earlier this month.

 

All of them?

 

Putin has given any number of reasons (all of them nonsense) to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. One of them was that Russia was “threatened” by NATO’s expansion. That is, to put it mildly, unconvincing. Russia’s grumbling about Ukrainian independence dates back to the Yeltsin era, long before (the special case of the vanished East Germany aside) NATO had expanded to include any countries in the former Soviet bloc.

 

A more convincing explanation (so far as the Kremlin’s attitude to NATO was concerned) was that Putin had seen the alliance’s weakness and concluded that it would present Moscow with no problems in the event that Russia took back control over its neighbor. An important reason why the Kremlin might have seen things that way was the position of Germany, a supposedly key member of NATO, but one that had a distinctly, uh, nuanced view of what membership of the alliance meant.

 

One obvious sign of that was the country’s neglect of its armed forces throughout Angela Merkel’s dismal chancellorship.

 

Back in 2015, I quoted an extract from this story from the Washington Post:

 

The German army has faced a shortage of equipment for years, but the situation has recently become so precarious that some soldiers took matters into their own hands.

 

On Tuesday, German broadcaster ARD revealed that German soldiers tried to hide the lack of arms by replacing heavy machine guns with broomsticks during a NATO exercise last year. After painting the wooden sticks black, the German soldiers swiftly attached them to the top of armored vehicles, according to a confidential army report which was leaked to ARD . . .

 

To make matters worse, the broom-equipped German soldiers belong to a crucial, joint NATO task force and would be the first to be deployed in case of an attack. Opposition politicians have expressed concerns about Germany’s ability to defend itself and other European allies, given that even some of the most elite forces lack basic equipment.

 

As I wrote in 2015:

 

There was a time when the notion of the German army sweeping its way through Europe was rather less literal.

The GOP Braces for Divided Government—and a Divided Party

By Audrey Fahlberg

Friday, December 30, 2022

 

When the 118th Congress convenes for the first time on January 3, the wrangling will begin almost immediately—and there is little evidence that it will let up. This reality has left centrist Republicans wondering whether their deeply divided party can produce any meaningful legislation over the next two years. 

 

House Republicans have already said they plan to prioritize investigations of the origins of COVID-19, the Biden administration’s chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal, and Hunter Biden’s business dealings, among other issues. Turning legislation into law will be much harder: Even if House Republicans’ now 222-member conference can agree on a bill, it will still need President Joe Biden’s signature along with support from a narrowly blue Senate.

 

“If you pass legislation out of here, and it can’t pass a Democrat-controlled Senate, then you’ve done nothing for our country,” socially moderate GOP Rep. Nancy Mace said in a recent interview. Mace has stood apart from most House Republicans on a number of issues, including the  Respect for Marriage Act and the House-passed Right to Contraception Act.

 

Mace maintains that her independent-minded approach to policy issues is the reason she carried her swing district by 14 points in an otherwise lackluster midterm cycle for her party. “Leadership will need to look at the positions of more centrist-minded Republicans in order to be successful,” Mace said.

 

But House Republicans like Mace will be competing with hard-line members of their conference also jockeying for power—and opportunities to buck establishment figures like Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy. Next week, that means threatening to derail the Californian’s speakership bid. 

 

McCarthy needs 218 votes to win, though “present” votes or absences would lower that number. Currently, even five no-votes would trigger at least a historic second round of voting for the first time in 100 years: Only 14 House speakership elections in American history have gone to multiple rounds of votes, 13 of which preceded the Civil War.

 

Centrist Republicans have spent recent weeks campaigning for McCarthy with the message that they will not let a handful of members push them—on January 3 and beyond. 

 

“They’re undermining the whole conference, and they’re strengthening the hand of Hakeem Jeffries,” GOP Rep. Don Bacon said in a recent interview of House Democrats’  newly elected leader. “If we don’t act as a team, that forces the leader to have to get some Democrats on board on any bill.” He’s threatened to work with centrist Democrats to elect a moderate alternative to McCarthy if prospective defectors refuse to get in line.

 

One area of contention heading into next year is the Freedom Caucus’ preoccupation with reinstating a rule called the “Motion to Vacate the Chair,” which would allow any member to bring up a vote to oust the speaker at any time. The rule’s existence at the time precipitated former Speaker John Boehner’s resignation as speaker in 2015.

 

Fiscal hawkishness also remains a sticking point for the right-most flank of the party next year. Before Congress passed the $1.7 trillion omnibus government spending package last week, for example, 13 hardline House Republicans vowed in a December 19 letter to “oppose and whip opposition to any legislative priority of those senators who vote for this bill including the Republican leader.”

 

The strategy quickly paid dividends. McCarthy slammed the package, which had been championed by Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell and others. “This is one of the most shameful acts I’ve seen in this body,” McCarthy said of the omnibus package on the House floor ahead of the vote.

 

That rhetoric worked while Democrats controlled the House and stakes were low for McCarthy. But if he manages to clinch the speaker’s gavel next year, McCarthy will have to find ways to work with members who represent swing, or even modestly Republican, districts. 

 

One member to watch is Rep.-elect Anthony D’Esposito, who flipped a Democrat-held seat Biden carried by 14 points in 2020. “The reason why we prevailed was that a lot of moderate Democrats felt especially that their party was just too far to the left, and we appealed to a lot of the independents,” D’Esposito said in a recent interview. “If you govern too far to the right or too far to the left, you’re not going to be in this job very long.”

 

Newly elected swing district Democrats voice similar concerns about what the next Congress will look like. Take Rep.-elect Marie Gluesenkamp-Perez, an auto shop owner and Second Amendment-supporting rural Democrat who in November ousted GOP Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler in Washington’s Republican-leaning 3rd Congressional District.

 

“Extremists don’t pass bills,” Gluesenkamp-Perez said in a November interview. “You need to be able to build a coalition to do that.”

Something Short of Tragic

By Jonah Goldberg

Wednesday, December 28, 2022

 

I wrote my Los Angeles Times column on the sadness of Donald Trump’s life right now. I won’t reprise the whole thing here. I just want to use it as a jumping-off point. 

 

While I find Trump’s existence pitiable these days, I can’t really muster much actual pity in the technical sense. Pity involves notions of compassion and sorrow for another’s misfortune, and there are few people in public life I’m less inclined to allocate such feelings for. Even on issues where I am nominally on his side, I think he deserves all of the trouble he has invited upon himself. 

 

For instance, I do not think Congress should make his tax returns public because I think punitively releasing tax returns is a bad practice, even when done against people I think have it coming. 

 

This is a liberal—in the classical sense—point. I have no sympathy for murderers whose procedural rights have been violated by police or prosecutors, but that doesn’t mean I think it’s okay for the state to break the rules when it comes to guilty people. Conversely, I have a great deal of sympathy for the desperate migrants at the southern border, but that doesn’t mean I think we should throw all immigration laws aside. Rules matter. And they matter the most in the hard cases because it’s always easy to apply the rules in easy cases. 

 

Donald Trump lied over and over again about his tax returns. He said he’d release them, then didn’t, claiming he couldn’t because he was being audited. He probably lied about the audit; he certainly lied that being audited prevented him from releasing them. He broke all sorts of rules—admittedly informal rules, but rules nonetheless—and as we’ve seen over and over again, when one “side” breaks the rules, it gives the other “side” psychological permission to break other rules in response. Trump invited the predicament he’s in. He wants the rules to benefit him, never to bind him. I’m willing to defend the rules, but not the conduct that invited the rule-breaking.

 

That’s one of the sources of his pitiable plight. There are rules to friendship that he has never observed or felt bound by. He is, by his own telling, a man without real friends. He knows famous and powerful people, and likes to use them in various ways—for flattery, publicity, status, bragging rights, sex, or financial benefit. But these relationships are all transactional. He may feel betrayed when these FINOs (friends in name only) act in ways not in his interest, but that’s what you get when you use people as instruments of your ambition; they end up using you, too. And that sense of betrayal is sad because it’s evidence he doesn’t understand what actual friendship is. 

 

The Pursuit of Happiness 

 

The more I think about it, the real sources of happiness come from different forms of identity. I don’t mean identity in the political jargon sense, but in the real-world sense of the different facets of the person you are. The more roles you have in life, the richer your life will be. Think about the different parts you play, starting with family: husband or wife, father or mother, daughter or husband, brother or sister. Then there are your friendships from different phases of your life or different aspects of your current life: high school, college, old jobs and current ones, neighbors, your kids’ friends’ parents, church, mosque or synagogue, bowling league, cigar shop, whatever. 

 

In all of these realms, you’re a somewhat different person, shaped by different shared experiences and different sets of obligations, institutional or otherwise. Every husband is one person to their wife and another to their buddy at the bar. Every daughter is different with their mother than with their sister or roommate. 

 

Ideally, you’re not a completely different person in every different context. There needs to be some moral or characterological core that holds relatively constant. Maybe that core is what we mean by integrity.  

 

I might be wrong about the source of happiness, but I think the lack of these different kinds of identity is a great source of unhappiness. If your only source of identity is who you are at work, or school, or on Saturday nights with your friends, you’ll eventually discover that’s not enough. Saturday Night You will not only have six other days of the week to contend with, but eventually your friends will find other sources of meaning and identity that outrank Saturday saturnalia. Most of us know this kind of person, in my experience usually men, who feel betrayed by buddies who start prioritizing work, or marriage, or fatherhood over keeping the good times rolling. Living for the weekend is great for a while, but it’s not actually a life. 

 

The larger point is that a rich and satisfying life involves checking a lot of boxes, not checking the same box over and over again until the combination of the ink and the pressure punches through the paper of your checklist. Moreover, some of these boxes require subordinating yourself to something greater than yourself. Virtually all meaningful institutions demand some sacrifice of yourself and your immediate wants to the greater good of the institution. The family is the first and most obvious example of this. You can’t be a good father or husband, mother or wife, if you expect your family to always put your needs first. But it’s also true of every remotely significant institution I can think of, from the military to Congress to softball teams. In some institutions you can be the leader who shines by example or authority. But in other institutions you have to be at peace with being a follower if you’re going to get anything out of it. Not every parishioner can be the pastor, not every employee can be the boss. 

 

The pursuit of happiness is not trod on a single road, but on many roads that branch out from you like spokes on a wheel. 

 

Trump and Reno

 

I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot for a while, but two articles called it to mind. The first was Olyvia Nuzzi’s profile of Trump alone at Mar a Lago, surrounded by an entourage of sycophants, mystified and depressed by the fact that his FINOs have abandoned him. The saddest thing about the man is he can’t understand the sources of his own sadness. 

 

The other article was this essay by R.R. Reno over at First Things. Long-time readers might recall that I am not a big fan of Reno—nor he of me. When my book Suicide of the West came out, he proclaimed that “Jonah Goldberg exemplifies the decadence and dysfunction of today’s public discourse.” It was a dumb and dishonest review, as I wrote here. What bothered me most was Reno and his coterie were among those intellectuals who welcomed the arrival of Donald Trump as a curative to our political decadence rather than recognize it as the apotheosis of it. 

 

Which is why I found his latest essay so ironic.  He begins by saying “Capitalism is best understood as the modern ambition to order and value all available resources solely on the basis of market principles.”

 

This, of course, is not true (as my friend David Bahnsen demonstrates in his response). But even if it were true, such a claim doesn’t do what he would like. As I wrote at length in my decadent book, capitalism is great for the things capitalism is great for. But I know of no serious capitalist who favors leaving every question to the market. I agree—and, again, wrote at great length in the book he apparently didn’t read—that the family is not a market institution (even though the market depends on families) and should not be treated as such. 

 

More broadly, contemporary society is drenched in examples of political combatants—on both sides—prioritizing things other than market efficiency. The environmental movement, for good and ill, is a response to capitalism and Americans are fine with taking chunks of our natural resources off the market. The culture wars are not about capitalist efficiency. Arguments about elections, civil rights, etc. all touch on market concerns but they aren’t about capitalism per se. 

 

But whatever the problem with contemporary society is, Reno sees the market as the villain. For instance, later in the essay, he makes a very good point that “sports mania” has led to a rise in Sunday morning high school sporting events and that this is a major threat to church attendance. He proposes “illiberal” legislative remedies to deal with it. I think that’s entirely defensible and really not particularly illiberal if you understand liberalism in the context of a democratic republic. But I am at a loss as to why capitalism is to blame for such scheduling conflicts. I’m not going to search for examples, but I am fairly confident that many openly socialist and communist nations scheduled athletic events during traditional church-going hours.

 

The market is superior to any other economic system for allocating economic resources, but it is not perfect and not every resource is purely an economic resource.  That is why people like me who defend capitalism tend to put it at the end of the phrase, “liberal democratic capitalism.”  

 

I could go on. But what really struck me was how Trump is precisely the kind of capitalist Reno should despise. To the extent Trump has any meaningful connection to Christianity it is through the “prosperity gospel,” which should be anathema to Reno. More broadly, Trump has spent his entire life worshiping at the altar of Mammon. He considered money the primary measure of success, meaning, and authority. The only thing more important than money was his own celebrity, which for Trump was deeply bound up with money. If Trump didn’t exist, he would be a strawman for all of the moral and spiritual ills that Reno attributes to our alleged market fundamentalism. He felt—feels—no meaningful obligation to norms of family, friendship, fair play, honest dealings, or the constitutional order itself. But because Trump’s manifest decadence proved useful to undermining the “old consensus” Reno despises, he found nothing to get worked up about. 

 

Anyway, back to my initial point. There are all manner of people who are jealous of Donald Trump, but I think he’s a cautionary tale. He spent his life prioritizing profit and personal fame over every other consideration. He refused to engage in the simple reciprocities of friendship and community, if such reciprocity required he subordinate his ego and desires to some other good. This is why he’d rather be the head of a ruined rump of a GOP than an important player in a viable party. He wants to be the Big Man in every room, every relationship, every institution. He had no use for notions of good character because good character impeded his covetous grasp like thick mittens on the hands of a groper. 

 

Sure, he was a black swan in that it actually got him the presidency, but it also revealed the real man. The presidency was like a magnifying glass that leant him the image of being a Big Man, but with the lens gone, his smallness is on display. Nuzzi, in her New York magazine profile of him, writes: “As president-elect on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, he entertained everyone from Leonardo DiCaprio to Bill Gates. Post-presidency, on the second floor of Mar-a-Lago, he has welcomed QAnon believers and Holocaust deniers.”  Why? Because these are among the last dregs of people willing to tell him how great he is without bursting into laughter. Sure, he will always have Sebastian Gorka, but what solace is that? 

 

Trump may yet have a comeback, and that would be a tragic turn for America. But assuming he continues to spiral down the drain, Trump will never himself be a tragic figure as he sits alone wondering why the “quality people” want nothing to do with him. A tragic figure is someone who meets a sorry end despite his virtues. Trump, by his own choosing, never had use for virtue. His pathetic end—in this life and certainly in the history books—is the direct result of his admitted vices. As I’ve said from the beginning of all this, character is destiny.

Doomscrolling, Interrupted

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, December 29, 2022

 

Last week the New York Times published a quote that stuck with me. It came from the young chairman of a Republican committee in Pennsylvania who twice voted for Trump, first enthusiastically and later reluctantly. After the election he spoke up against other local GOP leaders who’d gotten too chummy with “rigged election” cranks and anti-vaxxers. He lost his chairmanship, of course.

 

“I just realized how much of a sham the whole movement was,” he told the Times of his experience. “The moment the veil is pulled from your face, you realize how ugly the face is that you are looking at.”

 

I know that feeling. If you subscribe to The Dispatch, you know it too. The veil of partisanship is thick, so when it’s suddenly torn away you may find yourself overwhelmed by the number of blemishes that mar the face of your former party. You might reproach yourself for not having seen them sooner and resolve to atone by counting every blemish, as loudly and defiantly as possible, in hopes that they’ll be addressed.

 

My colleague Kevin Williamson put it characteristically well in his piece today about the George Santos debacle: “In the Trump years the GOP showed itself to be not a party infected by the occasional scoundrel and prevaricator but a party with a corporate commitment to the worst and most obvious kind of dishonesty, a party in which embracing lies and furthering lies became, perversely, a test of virtue.” There are many, many blemishes to count.

 

But in counting, we shouldn’t blind ourselves again by ignoring evidence of improvement. As 2022 ends, there are fewer blemishes than we—or I, at least—expected to find at this stage of the party’s populist devolution. The complexion of our politics has cleared a bit.

 

A number of MAGA whiteheads have popped.

 

In fact, the young Republican from Pennsylvania was quoted in the Times story because he was one of many conservatives there who withheld his vote from Doug Mastriano, the GOP’s fringe candidate for governor. He was featured to illustrate the emergence of a small but possibly decisive bloc of conservative-leaning voters willing to punish anti-democratic Republicans at the polls. Our politics is in a better place now than most of us anticipated because the broad American right isn’t quite the caricature sketched by its most loathsome politicians and media personalities.

 

It was, all things considered, a bad year for authoritarians, a bad year for toxic narcissists, and a good year for the rest of us. And it’s been awhile since we could say that.

 

***

 

A few commenters in yesterday’s post grumbled that it’s tedious and shortsighted to obsess about populist Republicans day after day when they’re weaker now than they’ve been at any point since 2015. One can effectively demonize any group by “nutpicking” the worst elements within it and highlighting their foibles. Why not accentuate the positive about the GOP?

 

I’m inclined to respond that if you subscribe to a newsletter about the dangers of populism, you should probably expect a healthy amount of content about the dangers of populism.

 

But intellectual humility requires me to recognize that they have a point. We should all strive to resist being seduced by our preferred narratives. “The sky is falling” is a too-familiar read on the day’s events for anti-populist conservatives after seven years of Trump monarchy. If the sky has stopped falling, we should have the acuity to recognize it and the integrity to say so.

 

I have said so, though. Sort of.

 

A pessimist as devoted as me will never convert fully to optimism. The sky will always be falling at some greater or lesser rate. But if you used to read me at my old haunt, you might have been surprised by the sunny tone of some of my post-election newsletters this year. The midterm results were Trump’s nightmare scenario, I insisted, a “kook Waterloo” that amounted to Liz Cheney’s revenge on insurrectionists. I speculated that Trump’s chances at the nomination might collapse, that a crowded primary field could work against him, and that he might end up destroying his own legacy by turning against the party before Election Day 2024.

 

Even yesterday’s piece was more optimistic than pessimistic, I thought. The prospect of Jacobin deplorables rhetorically guillotining each other was supposed to make you feel warm and fuzzy. 

 

One must have a heart of stone to read this, for instance, without laughing.

 

For the record, and for the benefit of those fatigued by negativity and “nutpicking,” I think 2022 will be remembered for several important, inarguably positive developments.

 

1. Authoritarianism became a liability with voters. Populists won’t be reasoned out of their ruthlessness in angling to seize power even if they end up with fewer votes, but they might have that ruthlessness gradually beaten out of them at the polls. So we’re apt to see fewer Mastrianos and Kari Lakes on the ballot in 2024 as Republican voters turn toward more mainstream candidates. Ideally they would do so because they’ve realized that election denial is corrosive to America’s civic traditions; in reality, they’ll do so because they’ve realized election denial is costing them winnable races. We’ll have to settle for them doing the right thing for Machiavellian reasons, not because they care about democracy in principle. Good enough, I guess.

 

2. Authoritarianism became costly in other ways. Opinions will differ on whether the January 6 committee’s hearings drove voters away from election deniers but there’s little doubt that the hearings raised the social cost of coup-plotting. John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, and Mike Flynn are each infamous to a degree they weren’t a year ago. (Eastman may become more infamous still.) Future plotters will now need to worry about their dirty laundry being aired by hostile congressional committees if they abet any attempts at an autogolpe and fail.

 

The financial cost of coup apologetics has also risen thanks to Dominion, Smartmatic, and other plaintiffs who’ve held election conspiracy theorists accountable in court. My colleagues Sarah Isgur and David French have speculated that one reason there’s so little energy behind Kari Lake’s “stop the steal” effort in Arizona is that conservative media outlets won’t embrace it. The fear of defamation lawsuits is too high, another case of populists finally doing the right thing for grubby self-interested reasons. Their fear may abide going forward, making it harder for election cranks to find an audience.

 

3. The GOP’s authoritarian drift may have birthed an enduring new bloc of swing voters. To return to the point with which this piece began, once the veil of partisanship has been lifted one never sees his former party the same way again. Having glimpsed the blemishes, the memory will endure. Republicans and right-leaning independents who crossed the aisle this year or in 2020 out of antipathy to Trumpist populism may therefore find themselves more willing to consider Democratic candidates in the future. The taboo against voting for liberals, once broken, might no longer restrain them. If so, they could end up functioning as a durable centrist swing faction even after Trump is gone, forcing the GOP to moderate in order to woo them. Pressure toward the middle should, at the very least, lead Republican primary voters to be more discerning about the culture warriors they put forward as nominees.

 

4. Trump is now (probably) unelectable. If you worry about a second Trump term, and you should, you’re less worried now than you were a year ago. He remains the favorite to win the nomination, but a diminished one. Some polls show Ron DeSantis ahead of him already; the ones that don’t should see the gap close once DeSantis announces and begins introducing himself nationally. Even if Trump were to hold him off, the fact that so many anti-authoritarian voters turned out in November to oppose lesser election deniers and quash a midterm red wave suggests they’ll be out in force in November 2024 if the crank-in-chief ends up back on the ballot.

 

Whatever happens, Trump’s legacy among the American right has been damaged. The evidence that he’s been less of an electoral asset to his party than a liability is so overwhelming that it’ll be acknowledged in time by all but the most dead-end MAGA true believers, I suspect. Too many conservatives have invested too much in him emotionally to ever turn on him fully (unless he tanks the next presidential nominee’s chances out of spite), but he won’t have the sort of glittering legacy on the right that Ronald Reagan enjoys. Probably he’ll end up being known as The Great Martyr, the president who would have done great things if the left and the “deep state” hadn’t conspired to hamstring him and steal his rightful 2020 triumph away from him.

 

Taking all of the above into consideration, even cynics find themselves obliged to grudgingly admit that 2022 was a good year. “The American system is now engaged in a certain amount of healing,” Tom Nichols wrote, and healing does feel like the right metaphor. We’ve been sick for too long, at one point dangerously so, but our condition has brightened. Did you expect to see us on the mend at year’s end?

 

I didn’t.

 

***

 

Our national fever has dropped. That’s my concession to optimism, and to those demanding more “perspective” about the populist threat.

 

I wouldn’t say the fever has broken. We shouldn’t exaggerate the strength of populism after Trump’s miserable year and the midterm results but neither should we exaggerate its diminution.

 

Consider that the coming Republican presidential primary is likely to be fought entirely within the bounds of populism by serious contenders. We may see a Larry Hogan or Liz Cheney enter the race, but they’ll go nowhere. If the nominee isn’t Trump or DeSantis, it’s more likely to be a talented demagogue like Tucker Carlson than it is to be Mike Pence or Mike Pompeo.

 

Remember, DeSantis’ latest move to improve his odds against Trump has been to position himself as more anti-vax, not less.

 

If an obviously fake populist like Glenn Youngkin or Nikki Haley overperforms then we might plausibly say that the fever has broken on the right. If populist candidates start to underperform in primaries down ballot, that would be another reason to hope. Until then, we shouldn’t assume from the fact that much of the electorate has developed political antibodies to cartoonish conspiratorial types like Mastriano and Lake that the threat has passed. As long as authoritarians dominate the GOP, authoritarianism stands a meaningful chance of gaining power.

 

And they will continue to dominate for the near future. They’re a minority of the incoming House majority but enjoy sufficient numbers to exercise a veto over all official business, including Kevin McCarthy’s ascension to speaker. Assuming McCarthy does get the gavel, the Jacobin wing will retain enough power that few House Republicans believe he’ll last the entire term in the role.

 

There’s a consensus among many House Republicans, one that few would dare utter publicly, that if McCarthy starts the 118th Congress as speaker, he’s not likely to end it that way.

 

If he’s able to lock down the 218 votes he needs to be speaker, the thinking goes, he likely will have given away the store to conservatives — including the “Never Kevin” crowd’s demand to make it easier to call a vote to oust the speaker. Many Republicans are already predicting the Freedom Caucus will use that tool, known as the “motion to vacate,” against McCarthy as soon as he strays from a conservative hard line.

 

…

 

“You’ve got guys who came in saying they will never raise the debt ceiling. … We’re then going to be forced to go to the Democrats and give Dems concessions to vote for it — and it’s going to be very costly politically,” predicted one senior GOP lawmaker close with McCarthy. “Then they’ll turn around and do a motion to vacate to get rid of Kevin saying, ‘He cut deals with the Democrats!’”

 

There’s no reason to think they won’t continue to dominate conservative media too. Imagine Fox News jettisoning Tucker, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham and committing to a less populist lineup in primetime. How would that lineup do? Would the Fox audience stick around or would it decamp to Newsmax or streaming platforms adorned with crying eagle iconography to get its evening rage fix?

 

So long as the demand for conservative media comes mainly from populists strung out on catastrophism, supply will continue to meet it. If you’ve seen anything to suggest that it won’t, let me know in the comments. Nothing would make me more optimistic about 2023 than reason to believe that right-wing media has at last hit rock bottom.

 

I’ve been waiting for that for a long time. So long that it’s almost enough to convince a man to give up hope.

 

But that’s too dour a note on which to end a year that brought us Russian fascist hubris meeting its nemesis in Ukraine, Chinese communist hubris meeting its nemesis in the virus, and domestic authoritarian hubris meeting its nemesis at the polls. Insofar as there’s a flaw in Nichols’ analogy about healing, it’s that it’s simply not grand enough to capture the relief and encouragement classical liberals and small-D democrats will have taken away from 2022. If you had lost faith in the basic civic good sense of Westerners generally and Americans specifically, as I had, your faith was restored this year—a little. What a wonderful surprise. Take heart and celebrate.

 

Happy new year. May 2023 be even better.

If Not Mitch, Then Who?

By Jack Butler

Friday, December 30, 2022

 

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s recent comments to NBC News that he will “actively look for quality candidates” for 2024 Senate races, as he did not do for the 2022 midterms, instead mostly deferring to Donald Trump in primary contests, have occasioned some distemper at National Review. Dan McLaughlin gives McConnell credit for his tactical acumen and for having correctly identified candidate quality as a key factor in Republicans’ Senate underperformance this year, yet nonetheless urges Mitch to stay out of 2024 primaries. “He is a poor judge of political talent: His picks were repeatedly rejected by primary voters during the Tea Party era, and he even talked Trump into backing electoral losers such as Luther Strange in Alabama,” Dan writes. Phil Klein concurs, taking the argument even further than Dan does. “McConnell is also not a good judge of candidate ‘quality,’ because he is motivated primarily by picking candidates who, were they to win, wouldn’t be much trouble in Washington,” he writes. Phil also cites the example of Strange, in addition to McConnell’s initially backing Charlie Crist over Marco Rubio in 2010.

 

McConnell is not perfect. He has made some mistakes in this area. Though the debacle of Alabama strikes me as sui generis and difficult to blame on any one person, it is safe to conclude now that Crist over Rubio, for example, was a poor choice. In 2022, though, the problem didn’t seem to be too much Mitch, but rather not enough. In the NBC story, McConnell says that he stayed out of every primary but two: Alabama and Missouri. Everywhere else, he believed that he simply lacked the wherewithal to push candidates who could prevail over those backed by Trump. Regardless of whether McConnell could have done more, the triumph of what Charlie Cooke has called “Tim Burton Republicans” over the much-loathed “Generic Republicans” is why Republicans are still impotently wailing in the Senate minority. In this cycle, as John McCormack has noted, voters in key states wanted a Republican Senate but declined to vote for the Republican candidates on offer. The problems with modern Republican primaries are bigger than Mitch McConnell.

 

It is instructive to consider what might be the ideal situation. That would be to achieve something like the synthesis of 2014 that arose out of merging the populist energy of the Tea Party years with the establishment/electability concerns to which they were often opposed. Populism isn’t always popular; “electable” candidates aren’t always elected. Together, however, they are electorally powerful. But 2014 didn’t happen by accident. Rubio–Crist was a welcome example of establishment failure. Recent cycles saw plenty of failures in the other direction. In 2010, Sharron Angle blew a chance to knock out Harry Reid in Nevada, and Christine O’Donnell blew a winnable Senate race in Delaware. In 2012, Richard Mourdock (Indiana) and Todd Akin (Missouri) became casualties in the “war on women.”

 

Republicans really ought to have had a majority by 2014; in that cycle, they acted like they wanted one. One step the National Republican Senatorial Committee took that year was to run a “candidate boot camp” in which office-seekers, among other things, “had to watch each other stumble, stammer, run from the cameras. They were drilled on policy, then had the cameras turned on them. They were briefed on common media mistakes, then had the camera turned on them. They were shown footage of Akin and Richard Mourdock making fools of themselves two years ago, then had the camera turned on them again.” To be clear: This is not a surefire approach.

 

Nor is it always a satisfactory one. Mike Castle, whom Christine O’Donnell defeated, might not have won in Delaware. And if he had, he would have undoubtedly frustrated Republicans. But would he have frustrated them more than Democrat Chris Coons has? Former South Carolina Republican senator Jim DeMint, who left the Senate to lead the Heritage Foundation and then left Heritage to serve as chairman of the Conservative Partnership Institute, once said, “I’d rather have 30 Marco Rubios in the Senate than 60 Arlen Specters.” Arlen Specter, the former Pennsylvania senator who switched parties from Republican to Democrat but lost to Republican Pat Toomey in 2010 anyway, was terrible; the Arlen Specters should be replaced wherever you can get away with it. But not every state or race has or can have a Marco Rubio. To pretend otherwise is a recipe for more of the sort of impotent minority wailing that DeMint’s logic, executed fully, would invite.

 

Nor should the results of the Republican primaries in the 2022 midterm cycle be seen as some sort of inviolable mandate. Forget even the fact that many of the candidates they produced lost in the general elections. It is incomplete to argue, as Michael Brendan Dougherty did earlier this month, that “whether a candidate can win a general election against a Democrat can’t be the only criterion for determining an ‘electable Republican.’ Whether he or she can win a Republican primary matters just as much.” In many of these primaries, the absence of a respectable alternative left the contest to an inferior, typically Trump-endorsed candidate by default. (Consider, as evidence, the retirements of such viable political figures as Rob Portman in Ohio and Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, and the decisions of other viable Senate contenders — Doug Ducey in Arizona, Larry Hogan in Maryland, Chris Sununu in New Hampshire — not to run.) Without serious respectable competition, inferior candidates could motivate a sufficiently large plurality to prevail against a majority of a primary electorate that opposed them.

 

As Charlie responded to Michael, “most primary elections are internal polls of one faction within one jurisdiction.” It’s representative of nothing other than a moment of indecision and/or inaction that one faction saw fit to take advantage of. McConnell’s own words give evidence of how this happened in 2022. This was a collective political failure. As Charlie elaborates, “pointing out that primary voters have not been very good at this recently is not “getting democracy backwards” or demanding “that voters solve problems for politicians”; it’s demanding that, within the democratic process that is the primary, voters get better at solving problems for themselves.”

 

But that wasn’t true in every primary this cycle. Move outside of the Senate: In Georgia and Nebraska, Republican gubernatorial candidates prevailed against Trump-backed challengers. It was easier for Brian Kemp, a popular incumbent who is better at politics than you are. In Nebraska, though, ultimate victor Jim Pillen had to cultivate both the grassroots and the respectable elements of the state political establishment to secure his victory. But that wouldn’t have happened if he and others in the state hadn’t worked toward it as an end, as tautological as that may sound. Gubernatorial races and Senate races are different beasts, to be sure — the former by definition more state-based than the nationalized contests Senate races have become. But they offer lessons here regardless.

 

Among those lessons: that moving past Trump, increasing Republican electoral viability, and regaining lost political power are all valid, and connected, goals. Further: that these things will not happen automatically. Ergo: Someone must act on them. The ideal vehicle is a state Republican Party apparatus such as Georgia’s, with a competent, principled, and self-interested leader such as Brian Kemp. But Brian Kemps will not always be at the helm. So what do you do then?

 

Certainly “nothing” is the wrong answer. Both Dan and Phil urge Mitch to beg off because, if nothing else, his interventions would be counterproductive. “The visible backing of McConnell makes it easy to pillory perfectly good Republican candidates as tools of an ‘establishment’ that doesn’t actually run much these days,” Dan writes. Phil adds: “There is no greater gift that McConnell could give to an upstart populist Senate candidate than to hand-pick somebody of his own and allow that candidate to serve as an avatar for everything that people hate about Washington and national Republicans.” Maybe so. But that seems like a really stupid and self-destructive state of affairs, one that Democrats took cynical but successful advantage of in this midterm cycle by promoting the weakest Republican-primary candidates and then defeating them in general elections. This state of affairs is to a considerable extent responsible for the Republicans’ current minority status and for the impotent wailing about said status that serves many of its more irresponsible members just fine.

 

If McConnell is not the one to challenge this perverse dynamic, then who? It has to be someone. The alternative is not that nothing will happen if no one does; it’s that selfish, electorally destructive actors will continue to take advantage of primary idiosyncrasies to narrow-plurality their way to further irrelevance and loss. The attempt to game out what McConnell should do based on what the prospective reaction might be strikes me as the same sort of inactivity-inducing logic that would have, say, National Review decline to criticize Trump because doing so is “exactly what Trump wants.” It’s indicative of, and conducive to, the same paralysis in which “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity” — allowing the latter to prevail by default.

 

In the NBC interview, McConnell states that he believes Trump’s clout has been “diminished.” But further diminution won’t happen automatically. It has to be worked toward consciously, by those who seek it as an end. Whatever the issues with his plans, at least he’s doing something. If not Mitch, then who?

The Father Rupnik Affair Is Really Bad for Pope Francis

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Thursday, December 29, 2022

 

I don’t know if our readers have been following it, but Catholic media are alight with the story of another priest who has been reinstated and rehabilitated despite accusations of sexual abuse, in part because he seems to be favored by Pope Francis. The subject is Father Marko Rupnik S.J. — a mosaic artist whose art (which I don’t esteem highly) is everywhere. From Catholic World Report:

 

There is no escaping it. Lourdes. Fatima. Padre Pio’s crypt in San Giovanni Rotondo. Pope St. John Paul II’s shrines in Krakow and Washington, DC. Madrid’s cathedral adoration chapel. Aparecida. The Redemptoris mater chapel of the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican. Even the image most closely associated with Pope Francis’s signature Year of Mercy.

 

Those are just a few of the Catholic places – several of them major pilgrimage sites – at which one cannot avoid the artwork of Fr. Marko I. Rupnik, SJ, the Jesuit priest and world-renowned mosaic artist accused of sexually, psychologically, and spiritually abusing at least nine women over several years.

 

Fr. Rupnik’s Jesuit superiors reportedly heard the allegations against him more than twenty years ago, but either turned a blind eye or actively covered for their guy, whose fame was growing and whose stock was high in the papal apartments.

 

The allegations are eye-popping. Rupnik is accused of sexually abusing nuns in a Slovenian convent he had founded. He’s also accused of one of the most serious church crimes a priest can commit: offering sacramental absolution of sin to his own sexual partner and co-conspirator.

 

The Jesuits were said to have put restrictions on Rupnik after this came to light, but the possibility of a full trial was waived, and Rupnik continued to be a celebrity priest and even preach a papal retreat. Read the whole sorry story here.