By Kevin
D. Williamson
Monday,
June 12, 2023
I am
glad that The Dispatch has so many excellent
politics-and-policy reporters on the job—goodness knows they provide an
invaluable service. But the man we most need for our political moment has,
inconveniently, been off the job for 160 years, having died in 1863. I mean, of
course, Vanity Fair (the novel, not the magazine) author
William Makepeace Thackeray, who remains unequaled in his skill for describing
a world in which “everybody is striving for what is not worth the
having.”
Journalism
is all we have to rely on in a world that is beyond satire.
Late
last week, the political world was filled with great pith and moment as
Democrats enjoyed a festive mood over the 37-count federal indictment of former
President Donald Trump, while Republicans produced a whole Yoko Ono
greatest-hits album’s worth of shrieking and wailing.
At the
same time in Texas, the feds were arresting a guy you non-Texans had probably
never heard of: Nate Paul, a 36-year-old real-estate developer and political
sycophant who figures prominently in the troubles of Texas Attorney General Ken
Paxton, a Republican culture-war goof who has been impeached by the Republican
state house in response to a long and complicated tale of political corruption,
bribery, and retaliation.
Paul
enters into the Paxton story at a number of different points in ways that
suggest Paxton is not only corrupt but also not very good at being corrupt. For
example: Paxton’s staff snitched their boss to the FBI on several allegations
including that Paxton had illegally permitted a donor to pay his six-figure
house-remodeling bill. The staff informed the human-resources department of
what they had done, and Paxton later produced a bank statement showing the wire
transfer that proved he had paid the bill. The wire transfer was dated the same
day Paxton learned his staff had ratted him out to the feds, and the transfer
was to Cupertino Builders, a firm run by a friend of Nate Paul’s—a firm that
apparently didn’t do the work in question and that wasn’t even incorporated in
Texas until three weeks after the wire transfer. Cupertino Builders already has
been established as a front used for fraudulent wire transfers by Paul’s business
in a separate matter. Paul’s business also had Paxton’s mistress, Laura Olson,
on its payroll. Olson is a figure in the Paxton scandal and also a figure in a
whole different Texas political scandal involving a different paramour of hers,
Clayton Perry, a former San Antonio city councilman accused
in a DUI/hit-and-run case.
And that
aspect of the Paxton impeachment will be entertaining if only for the fact that
Paxton’s fate will be decided by the Texas Senate, whose members include his humiliated
wife, Sen. Angela
Paxton.
The
uxorial politics gets complicated: The last statewide official to be impeached
and removed from office in Texas, Gov. James E. “Pa” Ferguson, was eventually
succeeded by his wife, who served as his stand-in for two non-consecutive terms
as governor in the 1920s and 1930s.
If I may
be forgiven an aside about the Councilman Perry case, courtesy of the local news:
Staff at the bar told police they believed Perry did not sound drunk or
have slurred speech, but also said Perry has a history of walking out on tabs.
According to interviews with staff, Perry reportedly told a 17-year-old
cashier “I love you, I’m just here to see you” when he went through the Bill
Miller drive-thru without ordering anything later the same evening. Instead he
offered to pay for the order of the vehicle behind him, and tried to give the
manager his keys and wallet.
Perry left the restaurant and allegedly hit a Honda Civic at the
intersection of Jones-Maltsberger and Redland Road. SAPD body camera video
shows officers found Perry in his backyard with his Jeep still running in
the driveway.
He never explicitly told officers he was drinking that night, only
saying that he “had a good time.”
When the
police found him, he was passed out in his backyard, bleeding from his head,
smelling of alcohol, had urinated in his pants, which were unzipped, and—pay
attention, now!—“the officer departed because of lack
of probable cause and did not test Perry’s sobriety.” It really is good to be the king, or even a
lowly San Antonio city councilman.
But
perhaps, finally, we have found an answer to the persistent question: What does
it take, in Anno Domini 2023, to embarrass a Republican?
I had
thought it was impossible to embarrass a contemporary Republican. Donald Trump
called Sen. Ted Cruz’s wife ugly and suggested that his father was a
particularly vicious criminal, but Sen. Cruz kept right on polishing Trump’s
size-12 John Lobb oxfords with his tongue and continues doing so to this day.
Mike Pence was a knee-walking Trump sycophant right up until January 6, at
which point he grew a conscience at the most convenient moment—and then was
right back on his knees only a few weeks later. It is safe to predict that his
most recent bout of conscience will, like his earlier ones, last just as long
as it benefits him. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy is basically walking
around in a dog collar these days, with Marjorie Taylor Greene holding his
leash.
But
Republicans—Texas Republicans—impeached Ken Paxton.
It
probably won’t go anywhere. One smart Texas observer of Republican shenanigans
predicts: “They’ll fold in the senate, or the base will punish them next year.”
In fact, several of those who voted to impeach Paxton already have primary
challengers awaiting them. “The lesson might be that there is no bottom for GOP
primary voters if you can paint yourself as a ‘fighter’—a fighter against other
Republicans first and foremost.”
On the
other hand, there are more than a few Texas Republicans, including some longtime
party activists and significant donors, who would not be sorry to see Paxton
go. He is, in their judgment, bad for the party and for the conservative
movement—and, more important, they already have replacement
candidates in mind.
The
problem for national Republicans is that Donald Trump, unlike Ken Paxton, is
irreplaceable.
I don’t
mean that as praise. For anybody.
Of
course, there are candidates who are more likely to defeat Joe Biden in a 2024
matchup. Ron DeSantis has good reason to think he is more likely to beat Biden
based on polls in battleground states. But if the Republican Party should
come to its senses and nominate a Tim Scott or a Nikki Haley, such a candidate
would have a fighting chance against Biden, too—in the unlikely event that Donald
Trump did not do his utmost to sabotage any other Republican nominee. Trump is
in trouble for many reasons, including the fact that he apparently is dumb enough to have
allowed himself to be taped providing the mens rea part of the
case against him,
which otherwise might have been difficult to pin down. So much winning.
But the
Trump movement is not about winning the White House in 2024—it never has been.
If the nationalist-populists (nappies?) in the Republican Party were serious
about winning the presidency, then they would not be rallying behind a proven
loser who already has fumbled away the office to Biden once. The whole
stolen-election narrative isn’t really a sincerely held belief in election
fraud—it is only a therapeutic narrative that gives Republicans permission to
continue backing the loser and to continue indulging what DeSantis calls the
“culture of losing.”
Trump
isn’t irreplaceable because he is the populist Right’s surest means of
returning to power—he is irreplaceable because he serves the populist Right’s
genuine needs, which are psychological rather than political. The Trump
movement is first and foremost a cult, and, as with any cult, the narrative and
the specific transcendent claims are secondary to the emotional needs the
association serves—all the rest can be revised as necessary. The Trumpists
would prefer to win, of course, but winning is not what they care about most:
What they care about is the sanctification of their misery. Trumpism represents
a low and degraded instance of the ancient mystical tradition of holy
suffering, but there is a reason his appeal is so intense among unchurched cultural
Evangelicals.
These
losers know they are losers, and they want to be sanctified losers.
Anyone
can be president—only Trump can be the golden idol they have made of him. Will
they be embarrassed out of their daft metaphysics?
Don’t
count on it.
Consider
the case of Sen. Josh Hawley. Following the most recent Trump indictment,
Hawley wrote: “If the people in power can jail their political opponents at
will, we don’t have a republic.” It is, of course, impossible to beat Sen.
Hawley—and damned hard to equal him—when it comes to moral cowardice. It is
precisely the most republican of our processes that are troubling Trump: He was
not indicted by Joe Biden, but by a grand jury, a panel of American citizens
selected for public duty in the ancient republican tradition. Trump will have
the opportunity to put his case to a trial jury, another fine republican
institution. It is neither democratic passion nor political whimsy that will be
most important in how this matter plays out, but legal procedure.
Trump’s
apologists on cable news and talk radio may whine that no former president ever
has been indicted and complain that Trump is being singled out, but what he is
being subjected to is a process based on the very republican idea that no one
is above the law, that there is no special legal category for former presidents
and others who have occupied high places. If Trump is indeed carted off to the
federal lockup in chains, it will be because we live in a republic.
The only vote that matters here is the one that happens inside the jury
room.
And if
Trump is found not guilty—innocent would be too strong a word—then
that, too, may be understood as a vindication of our republican system. The
legitimacy of our system is founded in procedure, not in outcomes.
Our
criminal-justice system is far from perfect, but what is truly dysfunctional
and depraved is our political culture. In a self-respecting society—or even a
truly self-interested one—Donald Trump would be as far from the levers of power
as are his real peers: Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Caitlyn Jenner, etc.
And so
we return to Vanity Fair: “That is the misfortune of beginning with
this kind of forgery. When one fib becomes due as it were, you must forge
another to take up the old acceptance; and so the stock of your lies in
circulation inevitably multiplies, and the danger of detection increases every
day.”
Detection—ha!
As
though that mattered.
Economics
for English Majors
A lesson
that has to be taught and re-taught every few years: Don’t invest money you can’t afford
to lose in a high-risk product traded in a market you don’t actually understand.
Seriously—don’t
do that. Don’t be a retired schoolteacher and invest your whole nest-egg in
exotic derivatives. (Or in, you know, derivatives.) Don’t be making
$77,000 a year and have $3 million in adjustable-rate mortgage debt on five
houses in California because you’re sure that housing prices will only go up
and that interest rates never will. Don’t do it.
The New
York Times tells the story of two failed crypto bros as though the
indictment were self-evident: “Their Crypto Company Collapsed. They Went to
Bali.” I’ve been to Bali, and if I were very rich and very unemployed, I think
it would make an excellent sanctuary. There isn’t anything positively wrong, as
far as I can tell, in the reporting from Times’ crypto-beat
reporter David Yaffe-Bellany, but something missing: He writes the story as
though it should be obvious that his subjects—Three Arrows founders Su Zhu and
Kyle Davies—are engaged in some kind of moral abomination. As far as I can
tell, what they did was run a hedge fund based on a very risky, highly
speculative class of assets while parking enough of their own incomes in safer
investments that when the thing went bust they could afford to go surf and
consume psychedelic mushrooms and live that kind of beach-bum life in which
“you eat very fatty pork dishes, and you drink a lot of alcohol, and you go to
the beach and you just meditate.” Yaffe-Bellany doesn’t write anything about
sandals, but I’m inferring a lot of sandals in this story—probably very
expensive sandals.
How did
you think the crypto story was going to end? Happily ever after?
Yaffe-Bellany
quotes a rube who wrote that losing $30,000 he had in Voyager, a crypto
business wiped out by the failure of Three Arrows, “has been unbearable for my
family.” Voyager was something like a bank, but one that stored money in
crypto, and hence was outside the regular banking system. Thirty grand is a
pretty good pile of money, but it isn’t normally a world-changing sum: $30,000 flat won’t even get you a
new Honda Accord.
If losing $30,000 is the kind of thing that is going to ruin your family and
leave you in such a condition that you report that you “wake up most nights and
just walk up and down the stairs contemplating on my own mistakes,” then don’t
put your savings in crypto, dummy. What you want is something
FDIC-insured.
As
Yaffe-Bellany reports, the duo “pointed out that no government agency had sued
them or sought their arrests,” and it isn’t clear what they would be arrested
or sued for. Unlike, say, Sam Bankman-Fried, all that they
have obviously done wrong is make some pretty bad investments.
I’m open to any arguments that they have done something wrong, but
Yaffe-Bellany doesn’t make any or report any. The most that the Three Arrows
guys have faced is a mild reprimand from a financial regulator in Singapore who
says the firm made misleading statements to the government—that and the loss of
a yacht to have been christened the Much Wow (you may get the reference) when they couldn’t afford to make
the final payment.
(Very
insolvency, much sad.)
Making a
bad investment, having a failed fund, or presiding over a failed business is
not in and of itself evidence of malfeasance. Businesses fail all the time, and
many investments (though by no means all of them) are complementary: Every $1
in profit for one party is $1 in loss for a counterparty. One of the great
things we have in the United States is bankruptcy laws that make business
failure painful but something short of permanently ruinous—that is part of why
we have so much innovation and entrepreneurship in our economy. Smart
bankruptcy laws, plentiful venture capital, a (generally) investment-friendly
tax system—all that stuff matters. There is a lot to like about the Western
European model of business and the model of social welfare that goes along with
it, but there also is a reason that basically none of the significant
internet-age businesses that have driven the world economy for the past several
decades is based in Germany or France. Many of our most important and
profitable businesses were founded by people who had failed three or four times
before striking gold with the one that succeeded, just as many of our most
important older tech firms—Microsoft and Apple, notably—suffered for years from
the consequences of investment mistakes and misreading the direction of the
marketplace. Everybody likes to make fun of Paul Krugman for writing, once upon
a time, that the internet wasn’t going to be any more consequential than the
fax machine, but Bill Gates and his team at Microsoft misread the early
importance of the internet, too, and it took years for Apple to figure out
where its real strengths really were to be found. Look at the state Meta is in
today.
And that
is why people who can’t afford to lose $30,000 shouldn’t put all $30,000 into
Apple shares or Microsoft shares or Meta shares, either.
The
simile can be overdone, but markets work a lot like evolution: Failure is part
of the process.
Personally,
I wouldn’t give those crypto dorks 50 bucks, but I suppose I’m missing out on
some great opportunities, too.
Words
about Words
Four
related words: hotel, hospital, hospice, host.
All are derived from the group of words anchored by the Latin hospitalis,
meaning “related to the duties of a host or a guest.” A hospital or hospice
originally meant a place of lodging for travelers or pilgrims, or for people in
need, as travelers and pilgrims often tended to be. The commercial provision of
such services eventually gave us hotel in modern American
English, though in much of the world hostel refers both to purely commercial
establishments and to those with a more philanthropic character. The medieval
Order of Knights of the Hospital of Saint John of Jerusalem, also known as the
Knights Hospitaller, originally were associated with an institution dedicated
to caring for sick or poor pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land; the hospital
in that case was founded by Amalfi merchants and dedicated to St. John the
Baptist.
Another
such facility, still in operation, is the Great St. Bernard Hospice, the Swiss
alpine home of the Canons Regular of the Hospitaller
Congregation of Great Saint Bernard and birthplace of the St. Bernard dog
breed. (The story of St. Bernards running around with little casks of brandy
strapped to their necks is mostly—but not entirely!—fictitious.) The St. Bernard Pass
is one of the 10 or 15 most beautiful places in the world, I suppose. Not far
away is an institution based on a different sense of hospitality, the Ecole
hôtelière de Lausanne, generally considered the finest hospitality school
in the world, the Harvard of hotel-management and other similar
service-oriented fields.
Hospitality is such an ancient human
tradition that it is, like the family, pre-religious, though it figured
prominently in the religions of the Greco-Roman world, figures prominently in
Christianity and Islam, in Confucian philosophy, and in much else. The
violation of hospitality is a big part of the morality of Macbeth.
Taboos related to guests and hosts are among our most ancient extant
beliefs.
But what
does hospitality really mean? Room and board and, maybe, a
generous spirit? Father Henri Nouwen put it:
“Hospitality
means primarily the creation of free space where the stranger can enter and
become a friend instead of an enemy. Hospitality is not to change people, but
to offer them space where change can take place. It is not to bring men and
women over to our side, but to offer freedom not disturbed by dividing
lines.”
In
Closing
Charles
Spurgeon (not Mark Twain) wrote that “a lie will go round the world while truth
is pulling its boots on”—more economical than Cardinal Newman’s account of the
phenomenon:
The story runs, that Don Felix Malatesta de Guadalope, a Benedictine
monk of Andalusia, and father confessor to the Prince of the Asturias, who died
in 1821, left behind him his confessions in manuscript, which were carried off
by the French, with other valuable documents, from his convent, which they
pillaged in their retreat from the field of Salamanca; and that, in these
confessions, he frankly avows that he had killed three of his monastic brothers
of whom he was jealous, had poisoned half-a-dozen women, and sent off in boxes
and hampers to Cadiz and Barcelona thirty-five infants; moreover, that he felt
no misgivings about these abominable deeds, because, as he observes with great
naiveté, he had every day, for many years, burnt a candle to the Blessed
Virgin; had cursed periodically all heretics, especially the royal family of
England; had burnt a student of Coimbra for asserting the earth went round the
sun; had worn about him, day and night, a relic of St. Diego; and had provided
that five hundred masses should be said for the repose of his soul within eight
days after his decease.
Tales such as this, the like of which it is very easy to point out in
print, are suitably contrived to answer the purpose which brings them into
being. A Catholic who, in default of testimony offered in their behalf,
volunteers to refute them on their internal evidence, and sets about (so to
say) cross-examining them, finds himself at once in an untold labyrinth of
embarrassments. First he inquires, is there a village in Calabria of the name
of Buonavalle? is there a convent of S. Spirito in the Sicilian town specified?
did it exist in the time of Charlemagne? who were the successive confessors of
the Prince of the Asturias during the first twenty years of this century? what
has Andalusia to do with Salamanca? when was the last Auto da fé in
Spain? did the French pillage any convent whatever in the neighbourhood of
Salamanca about the year 1812?—questions sufficient for a school examination.
He goes to his maps, gazetteers, guidebooks, travels, histories;—soon a
perplexity arises about the dates: are his editions recent enough for his
purpose? do their historical notices go far enough back? Well, after a great
deal of trouble, after writing about to friends, consulting libraries, and
comparing statements, let us suppose him to prove most conclusively the utter
absurdity of the slanderous story, and to bring out a lucid, powerful, and
unanswerable reply; who cares for it by that time? who cares for the story
itself? it has done its work; time stops for no man; it has created or deepened
the impression in the minds of its hearers that a monk commits murder or
adultery as readily as he eats his dinner.
Men forget the process by which they receive it, but there it is, clear
and indelible. Or supposing they recollect the particular slander ever so well,
still they have no taste or stomach for entering into a long controversy about
it; their mind is already made up; they have formed their views; the author
they have trusted may, indeed, have been inaccurate in some of his details; it
can be nothing more. Who can fairly impose on them the perplexity and whirl of
going through a bout of controversy, where “one says,” and “the other says,”
and “he says that he says that he does not say or ought not to say what he does
say or ought to say?” It demands an effort and strain of attention which they
have no sort of purpose of bestowing.
I myself
have observed that it can take hundreds of words to correct a nine-word lie, or even an honest nine-word error.
We are about to be on the receiving end of about 7 billion overwrought and
generally dishonest words claiming that Donald Trump has not done that which he
has been pretty well-documented doing. These words could be refuted, of course,
but not for the true believer, whose commitment is beyond fact and beyond
evidence. But remember who says what in the next few months, and keep
remembering it.
No comments:
Post a Comment