By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, October 06, 2025
In our political conversation, we have a tendency to lump
things together in an unproductive way: vicious things and virtuous things
both.
For example, we hear a good deal about things such as
bipartisanship, consensus, moderation, and civility. These are all desirable
things, at least in some circumstances, but they are different kinds of
desirable things, desirable in different ways for different reasons.
Bipartisanship and consensus are not desirable in and of themselves, inasmuch
as we can—and often do—see bipartisan consensus supporting very, very bad
policies.
Our national fiscal mess, for example, is the result of a
bipartisan consensus, enduring if seldom stated, that it is better to borrow
money for the time being in order to put off difficult and unpopular reforms to
the entitlement system, the tax code, and legislative procedure. There was a
fairly broad bipartisan consensus in favor of abortion rights, once upon a
time, if you recall, while the nascent anti-abortion movement also had a
bipartisan character in its early days, when Catholics leaned Democrat and
Republican-leaning evangelicals were only starting to embrace the cause.
Moderation is a virtue that is easy to mock, and
you don’t have to be Barry
Goldwater—“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is
no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice
is no virtue!”—to find faults with its misapplication. Should a husband vow to
be moderately faithful to his wife? Should a soldier show moderate
courage and discipline?
But moderation is a classical political virtue, from the
Roman republic to ours, one that is rooted not in half-heartedness but in humility:
Moderation is the virtue that you practice out of mindfulness that you and your
friends could be wrong about something, that the other guys might have a point,
that the best-intentioned policies may have unintended consequences, etc. You
could not guess it from the rhetoric and behavior of the right-wing
revolutionists who dishonestly call themselves conservatives in our
time, but moderation is a hallmark conservative virtue. T.S. Eliot understood
the moderating impulse, the necessity of not getting carried away with oneself
and one’s passions—and he also understood that the underlying virtue was never
going to be popular:
How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!
With his features of clerical
cut,
And his brow so grim
And his mouth so prim
And his conversation, so nicely
Restricted to What Precisely
And If and Perhaps and But.
(Readers who are unfamiliar with the conservative
intellectual movement, which used to be a thing, might be surprised to learn
that Russell Kirk’s famous book is titled The Conservative Mind: From Burke
to Eliot. There was, incredible as it may seem, a time when conservatives
cared what the poets and the literary critics were saying. The right learned
from Andrew Breitbart the maxim that “politics is downstream from culture,” and
then decided that “culture” could mean only Kid Rock, Ted Nugent, and the
collected works of Pat Sajak and Rob Schneider.)
Moderation is the little voice in your head asking:
“Strictly speaking, is it necessary to have ICE agents rappelling
out of helicopters into Chicago apartment buildings?” That would be a good
question for someone to be asking himself. Perhaps if someone pushed a Hefty
SteelSak full of $100 bills into Tom
Homan’s sweaty little hands, that would get his attention.
Civility, on the other hand, is good in and of itself.
When Union soldiers under the command of Gen. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain saluted
Gen. Robert E. Lee after the Confederate surrender, it could not have been easy
for many of them—for most of them—who had lost friends, brothers, fathers, or
sons in that awful war. Happily, they did not have a President Trump there to
advise them that the proper thing was to forsake their Christianity and obdure
their hearts to persist
in hating their enemies. Gen. Chamberlain did not order that salute because
Gen. Lee himself was a good man or because he fought in a good cause—he was a
rebel, and his cause was rebellion. But the civilized man understands that
there are good men and courage and valor on both sides of the fight—and
criminals and cowards and profiteers on both sides, too—and so Gen. Chamberlain
ordered that Gen. Lee and his men be treated with martial courtesy, reflecting
both the best aspirations behind the war the Union had fought and the best hopes
for the peace that was to follow.
If Abraham Lincoln et al. had held to the more ancient
way of doing things, then Gen. Chamberlain’s orders would have been to gut Lee
on the spot before hunting down Jefferson Davis for the same treatment. But it
was the Confederacy that held to the more ancient way of doing things—slavery
was a part of the ancient world and had no proper place in the new one
Americans were building. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman had unleashed
practically biblical terrors in the project of building that new world, and he
seems to have understood that there was no place for him in the political life
of the peace that followed, famously rejecting attempts to recruit him as a
presidential candidate: “I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if
elected.”
Civility is not only a character trait—it is a project,
something individuals and groups do. The Wall Street Journal reported
this weekend on civility movements that have emerged at the state level.
Minnesota, for example, has a civility caucus that puts on events for the
benefit of state legislators and, one assumes, for the edification of their
constituents.
While some officeholders worry
bipartisan cooperation will anger base voters, evidence actually suggests
political upsides, said Stanford University professor Robb Willer, who runs the
university’s Politics and Social Change Lab. A study he co-led tested responses
to ads featuring governors from both parties touting cordial disagreement. The
research, not yet published, found even partisan voters responded favorably.
“When people see it, they see it
as the leadership that it reflects, and it reflects a moral clarity that’s sort
of hard to deny,” Willer said.
The study examined the Disagree
Better campaign, launched in 2023 by the National Governors Association, then
co-chaired by GOP Utah Gov. Spencer Cox. The project arose from Cox’s viral
2019 ad with his Democratic opponent, calling for constructive dialogue.
Last month, Cox again called for
toned-down rhetoric after the assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah.
Conservative commentator Steve
Bannon dubbed Cox a “gutless Republican.” President Trump rails against
“radical left lunatics.” Some on the left label Trump fascist and
authoritarian.
And there, I suppose, is the problem: The mandate for
civility may at times be in tension with the superseding mandate to tell the
truth. Spencer Cox is not a “gutless Republican,” but Ted Cruz is. Bernie
Sanders is a “radical left lunatic,” no doubt, but John Hickenlooper isn’t. And
there are versions
of lunacy to which leftiness is only incidental. “Some on the left label
Trump fascist and authoritarian,” the Journal reported in the
value-neutral voice of the news page. True enough, and so do some on the
right—because it is true.
(If Trump is some degree short of formal fascism, it is
only because his political thinking is too disorganized and incoherent to
associate with a particular school, even one as vaguely defined as fascism. But:
authoritarianism, nationalism, contempt for the constitutionalism and the rule
of law, contempt for procedure, the aestheticization of politics, the
weaponization of the state in general and the military in particular against
domestic political opponents, masked agents bundling people into trucks to ship
them off to detention camps—you can put an asterisk after fascism, if you like,
but even such a persnickety editor as your favorite correspondent will concede
that fascism gets the job done, as a word.)
It surely is the case that Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez’s dopiest ideas and sometimes-shocking ignorance do not need to
be brought up in every conversation about (or with) her, but these are relevant
from time to time. We can be polite and even generous to such figures without
pretending that we do not know what we know about them. Trump’s
authoritarianism—which as always must be understood in light of the fact that
he attempted to stage a coup d’état at the end of his first
administration—is the most important fact in American political life today.
There are civil and uncivil ways of approaching that problem, it is true, but
there is no getting around the tautology: It is what it is.
I wish the nice people in Minnesota the very best with
their civility efforts, and I will do my best to do my own small part in a
similar spirit.
Of course, it is possible to weaponize the notion of
civility: I hear from Trump apologists every day who complain that I mistreat
the poor dear by criticizing him in such terms as I do. Procedure, norms,
convention—all of these things can be misused. But so can their opposite: the
sense that we are in special circumstances, in some sort of state of emergency
in which the usual rules of etiquette—or even legal procedure—cannot apply.
There are times when that is true, but usually it is simply an excuse to write
oneself a moral permission slip to treat one’s enemies contemptuously or
violently, usually while insisting on the protections of convention and
civility for oneself. Trump is, of course, the most prominent practitioner of
that double standard, threatening legal action against journalists
who have “hate in their hearts” while celebrating his own heart’s
hatred at a supposedly Christian memorial service. The ground underneath
our feet is uneven and tricky, and so we have to be on guard against everything
that would mislead us—including our own hearts.
Long on Lethality
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth went
on and on last week (I would write droned, but, you never know these
days!) about the need for the U.S. military to emphasize lethality.
Saying that a military should be lethal is like saying that chocolate-chip
cookies should have chocolate chips in them. It is an impossible point to
argue.
But: Lethality? Really?
As if that were the problem.
Somebody apparently needs to explain to Secretary Pete
that the lethality of U.S. forces is the one thing the American military does
not really need to worry about. Running out of money? Sure. Being unable to get
the job done when the metric is lethality? Not a problem. Not even close.
U.S. forces have ably demonstrated, time and time again,
that they can do pretty much anything they are asked to do. If you told a
Marine expeditionary force to invade Bavaria for the purpose of building a
giant waterslide and told them you wanted it open in six weeks, you’d be eating
Käsespätzle and drinking Weihenstephaner and slip-sliding down that giant
waterslide in Munich in about a month and a half. Not to go all Professor Terguson on
you, but the ability of U.S. troops to kill people and break things is not in
doubt and has not been in doubt for a very, very long time: The limitation is
the politicians—and, ultimately, the people—who ask the military to begin long,
complex projects (say, nation-building in Iraq) that American voters do not
have the stomach or attention span to finish. I have seen the enemy, and it is
the collective prefrontal cortex of the American electorate.
The practical superiority of U.S. forces is remarkable.
Do you know when the last time U.S. ground forces were killed by manned enemy
aircraft was? 1953. They were killed by North Koreans, of all people, flying
fabric-covered biplanes, of all things, Soviet-made Polikarpov “Kukuruznik”
Po-2s. During our 20 years in Afghanistan, fewer than 2,000 U.S. troops were
killed in action—there were more than five times as many deaths from
homicides in Chicago during those same years.
U.S. forces are so impossible to beat in battle that they
have created, through no fault of their own, a kind of serious geopolitical
problem: Nuclear proliferation, development of weapons of mass destruction, and
terrorism are all driven in no small part by the fact that there isn’t a
conventional force on this Earth that can face the American military on a
battlefield without being turned into compost in great numbers. Lethality,
indeed, is the military’s calling card—but over at the State Department, the
White House, and the Capitol, they play with a different deck of cards
entirely, a deck with way too many jokers in it.
Economics for English Majors
One of the ways in which government policy can cause
economic distortions is by “pulling forward” consumption. Tesla, for example,
just enjoyed a record-breaking quarter for deliveries. Why? Because the
car-buying public suddenly has a lot of extra money to spend and has decided
that Elon Musk isn’t such a ridiculous creep after all? No—because EV tax
incentives are about to expire, and so people who might have been planning to
lease an EV in the near future decided to act now in order to take advantage of
that $7,500 federal subsidy. Most analysts expect that this quarter’s record
numbers will turn into a slump in the next quarter.
From Reuters:
“I’m skeptical that this will be
sustainable and I think we could see a soft couple of quarters,” said Elliot
Johnson, chief investment officer at Evolve ETFs, which manages investments in
Tesla.
The sales surge reflected
pulled-forward demand, possibly to lock in incentives, rather than growing
consumer interest, Johnson said, adding it would not be irrational for
investors to “sell the news” and buy again next year.
Tesla shares were down 3.4% in
afternoon trading. The stock has rallied recently—up nearly 14% this year as of
Wednesday’s close—after the company’s board proposed a mega pay package for
Musk, who has also bought more shares.
Tesla, like its rivals, received
the credits from the government and used them to offer attractive leases.
Following the expiry, Tesla has raised lease prices for its vehicles. The
prices of Tesla vehicles, excluding the credit, remained unchanged.
On a related note: Much has been made of Elon Musk’s gargantuan
potential payday, but a look at the performance goals the company has to
hit for Musk to fully realize that compensation—raising the firm’s market
capitalization eightfold, 20 million vehicle deliveries, 1 million
robotaxis in operation, and much more—makes the offer look proportionate. Would
you pay a guy $1 trillion to make you $7.5 trillion? Of course you would.
Tesla’s shareholders and board are not, in the main, fools.
And, in other business news …
Go Fast, Sew Things
It does strike me as a little odd that Ferrari, the
storied automaker, has decided to become a fashion house. But the results are …
pretty
good.
Well, He Probably Doesn’t Run Very Fast
“McDonald’s
is chasing the bargain eater,” reports Salon.
I Think I Will
“Think
twice before a parasite cleanse,” Salon advises, possibly with the
bargain eater in mind. Oh, well. Only 393 days until the next election.
That being said …
(Lots of) Words About Words
Several items are on my language agenda this week. So,
here we go:
I Wonder How That Works?
A press release for a product that is somehow
simultaneously “waterless” and “ultra-hydrating.”
I’m excited to share that AROVE,
the clean haircare brand founded by celebrity hairstylist Michael Dueñas, has
just launched ILLUMINOUS, the first-of-its-kind concentrated waterless
Ultra-Hydrating Hair Oil + Leave-In Conditioner TODAY. A revolutionary two-in-one
product that redefines shine, nourishment, and haircare efficiency.
Hydrate literally means putting water into
something—from the Greek word for water.
I particularly hate the word “revolutionary” in marketing
copy. I once received an email from a real-estate agent boasting of his
“revolutionary” approach to selling houses. So I asked: “What’s different? Are
you not selling houses and then taking a commission?” Oh, no, came the
response, the revolutionary bit was that he intended to put customers first.
“Ahead of your commission?” And thus the conversation ended.
Shocking Usage
From the
New York Times:
Even if all your outlets are
structurally sound, you may have a few that could use updating. It’s a good
idea, for example, to replace any older outlet near a sink or tub a with modern
GFCI, or ground-fault circuit interrupter, outlet. They cut the power in
milliseconds if an electrical device gets wet, lessening the risk of
electrocution.
Electrocution is a portmanteau of the words electric
and execution, used to describe the intentional infliction of death on a
person via electricity, first used to describe the process of killing criminals
via electric chair. It is a legend that the term was cooked up by Thomas Edison
to cast discredit on the alternating-current technology being developed by
George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla. Edison did work to connect AC to
electrocution and published pamphlets claiming that it was dangerous, but he
does not seem to have coined the word. From Wikipedia:
[Electrocution] was not the only
choice of word people were considering. The New York Times editorial
column noted words such as “Westinghoused” (after the Westinghouse
Electric alternating current equipment that was to be used), “Gerrycide”
(after Elbridge Thomas Gerry, who headed the New York death penalty commission
that suggested adopting the electric chair), and “Browned” (after
anti-AC activist Harold P. Brown). Thomas Edison preferred the words
dynamort, ampermort and electromort. The New York Times
hated the word electrocution, describing it as being pushed forward by
“pretentious ignoramuses.”
Over time, the word came to be applied indiscriminately
both to intentional and accidental deaths via electricity, and then to
non-lethal electric shocks as well. I wish they had gone with Gerrycide, with
Elbridge Thomas Gerry joining his grandfather, Vice President Elbridge Gerry of
“gerrymander” infamy, in the ranks of great eponyms.
I’d prefer that electrocute be restricted to its original
capital-punishment sense on my usual grounds: We should have different words
for different things.
Represent!
I receive email from “the Office of Congresswoman Elise
Stefanik.” Congresswoman is a clunky usage. I think there’s a pretty
good argument to be made for congressman as a sex-inclusive word, like chairman
or mankind. But, in this case, we have the wonderful alternative of
using the correct word: representative.
Elise Stefanik is, for her sins and the nation’s, a
member of the House of Representatives, one of the two houses of Congress. We
do not use congressman to describe senators, but they are men and women
of Congress as much as members of the House are. Representative may
add a few syllables, but it also adds accuracy and a reminder that there is a
difference between what members of the House are there to do and what senators
are there to do. Oh, I’m still with Edmund
Burke, don’t get me wrong:
Certainly, gentlemen, it ought to
be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union,
the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his
constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion,
high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice
his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever,
and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own. But his unbiassed
opinion, his mature judgment, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to
sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not
derive from your pleasure; no, nor from the law and the constitution. They are
a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your
representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he
betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.
My worthy colleague says, his
will ought to be subservient to yours. If that be all, the thing is innocent.
If government were a matter of will upon any side, yours, without question,
ought to be superior. But government and legislation are matters of reason and
judgment, and not of inclination; and what sort of reason is that, in which the
determination precedes the discussion; in which one set of men deliberate, and
another decide; and where those who form the conclusion are perhaps three
hundred miles distant from those who hear the arguments?
To deliver an opinion, is the
right of all men; that of constituents is a weighty and respectable opinion,
which a representative ought always to rejoice to hear; and which he ought
always most seriously to consider. But authoritative instructions; mandates
issued, which the member is bound blindly and implicitly to obey, to vote, and
to argue for, though contrary to the clearest conviction of his judgment and
conscience,--these are things utterly unknown to the laws of this land, and
which arise from a fundamental mistake of the whole order and tenor of our
constitution.
That said, the House of Representatives is expected—and
designed—to be more reflective of public opinion than the Senate is: That is
why there are more House members, why they (generally) represent smaller
populations than senators, and why they are elected much more frequently.
Perhaps Elise Stefanik is representative of the views of
her constituents. There is much else of which she is representative, including
Republicans’ supine servility toward Donald Trump and Congress’ general
abandonment of its duties.
Auto-Reply
Last week, I mentioned
that dope Rep. Derrick Van Orden, a former Navy SEAL who once served as a Navy
SEAL during the period in which he was a Navy SEAL (I am summarizing his press
literature), which was before he, a former Navy SEAL, portrayed a Navy SEAL in
a low-budget movie about Navy SEALs. I referred to the fact that Van Orden, a
former Navy SEAL, once got into trouble for trying
to carry a 9mm handgun through airport security. “Tut-tut,” came the
predictable replies, “you mean semiautomatic.”
Careful readers would know better than to try to out
gun-nut me.
It is true that the pistol in question was a
semiautomatic 9mm and not a fully automatic one. But fully automatic handguns
are not called automatics—they are called machinepistols or submachine
guns, depending on the configuration. The convention of using automatic
to distinguish a semiautomatic handgun from a revolver is well more than
a century old, which is why common cartridges used in semiautomatic pistols
have names such as 10mm Auto (as opposed to “10mm Semiauto”) or .45 ACP (and
not .45 SCP). On those rare occasions when one must specify something
exotic—say, a Glock 9mm that has been converted to fully automatic fire—it is
best to spell the thing out, accurately and completely. Unhappily, one rarely
sees that in American journalism when it comes to questions involving firearms.
A Very Fine Book Review
When Gen. Sherman left the military, he published a
memoir, one of the first Civil War figures to do so. His account of Gen.
Ulysses S. Grant was frank, to such an extent that Grant’s minions ran to him
like little tattletales to point out how critical Sherman had been. But Grant
did not see things that way. “When I finished the book,” he wrote, “I found I
approved every word; that ... it was a true book, an honorable book, creditable
to Sherman, just to his companions—to myself particularly so—just such a book
as I expected Sherman would write.”
Grant himself was one of the finest writers—and surely
the finest memoirist—among the presidents. Perhaps Sherman was buoyed a little
in the final years of a hard life as a hard man who spent his best years doing
hard things.
I Know How This Makes Jonah Feel
If you are feeling nausea, you are nauseated;
if you cause nausea, you are nauseous.
And, now, we can move on …
In Closing
On the weaponization of convention and etiquette, consult
The
Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. One scene finds the innocent young
Isabel Archer implicitly chiding the villainous Gilbert Osmond for being
conventional. Osmond advises her:
“Do everything that’s proper; I
go in for that. Excuse my being so patronising. You say you don’t know me, but
when you do you’ll discover what a worship I have for propriety.”
“You’re not conventional?” Isabel
gravely asked.
“I like the way you utter that
word! No, I’m not conventional: I’m convention itself. You don’t understand
that?” And he paused a moment, smiling. “I should like to explain it.”
Convention itself. There is real power in that,
and all such power is liable to be abused.
No comments:
Post a Comment