By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, November 03, 2017
Thursday night, during the final commercial break on Special Report, host Bret Baier got word
through his earpiece that President Trump’s Twitter feed was . . . Gone.
“Gone? Like not there?” I asked.
“I think so,” Baier responded, sounding a bit like maybe
he really didn’t.
Since commercial breaks are largely considered off the
record, at least as far as I’m concerned, and Special Report is one of the few TV shows I actually care about
being on, I will spare you any further dialogue. But I will always remember
where I was during those eleven minutes when it seemed truly possible that the
tweeting was over.
The questions flooded into my mind. How will CNN and
MSNBC fill all the extra airtime? How will Sean do his opening monologue? Will
Bill Mitchell spend his days refreshing his browser like a cocaine-study monkey
hitting the lever over and over again, hoping this time it will pay off?
I thought of that scene in Excalibur when Lancelot and Guinevere discover King Arthur’s sword
betwixt their adulterously naked bodies.
The president without a Twitter feed! The land without a
president!
I joke of course (and alas), but it really is true that
whether you love it, hate it, or stare at it with unblinking befuddlement like
it’s that severed head that sprouts crab legs and tries to walk out of the room
in The Thing, Donald Trump’s Twitter
account has dominated our political life in profound ways.
Remember that scene in Good Will Hunting? No, not the idiotic one where Matt Damon
pretends that Howard Zinn is the pinnacle of historical scholarship. I mean the
good one, where Ben Affleck gives that little speech about how the best part of
his day is when he shows up at Damon’s house and thinks, for just ten seconds,
“he won’t be there.” I often wonder if John Kelly spends his mornings the same
way, when Trump’s Twitter feed is silent.
Or at least I used to.
Kelly’s Heroes
As I wrote in the wake of Kelly’s press conference and
George W. Bush’s speech a few weeks ago, I think Kelly has immense moral
authority, and he deserves respect for his talents and his service.
But I also think he’s spending it down, rapidly. First
there was his factual error regarding Frederica Wilson, which he should have
apologized for.
Then came his interview this week with Laura Ingraham, in
which he praised Robert E. Lee and offered his popular-but-wrong theory that
the Civil War was caused by a failure to “compromise.”
I think Adam Serwer is very persuasive when he argues
that this is simply untrue. Before the Civil War, the story of slavery in
America is the story of one compromise with evil after another, starting with
the three-fifths clause of the Constitution.
But it’s not simply untrue; it’s untrue in complicated
ways.
Writing about Kelly’s comments this week, my National Review colleague David French
gently concedes that Kelly was wrong about the compromise part. Instead, he
addressed the question of whether honorable men could fight in a dishonorable
cause:
I agree with General Kelly on his
core point. Honorable men could and did choose to fight for the Confederacy.
That does not mean that they fought for an honorable cause. The southern states
seceded to preserve slavery. That’s plain from their articles of secession.
While a free people have a right to self-determination — and that includes a
right of secession — the cause for which they seceded was repugnant and
reprehensible. No amount of revisionist history can permit the descendants of
Confederates to turn away from this terrible truth.
But many truths operate at once,
and here are others. In 1861, the invading northern army was not seeking to
free the slaves. It was attempting to restore the union by sheer force of arms.
The Confederates who lived in the southern states — even those who opposed
secession — saw themselves as citizens of their states, yes, but also as
citizens of an entirely different and new nation. One nation was invading
another, and invasions mean death, destruction, and despair.
I think David is right that many truths can operate at
once. This is true for every human being. Men and women of science can be
religious and superstitious. Self-described feminists and religious moralists
can be sexual harassers. Socialists can be money-grubbers, and passionate
capitalists can be, and often are, the most passionate philanthropists. Even a
pacifist can fantasize about beating someone with a tire iron when cut off in
traffic. We all love to condemn cognitive dissonance, but we’re all hypocrites
when we do so.
And what is true of individual humans is even more true
of human societies. There were honorable men scooped up in the Wehrmacht (I’m
not sure you can say the same about the SS). There were evil men fighting on
the side of the Allies and the Union alike. If you read, say, Roll Jordan, Roll, you’ll even
“discover” that some black slaves had complicated views about Southern society.
Why? Because they’re humans, and humans, as John Locke observed, naturally come
to different positions based on different experiences and different
interpretations of their experiences.
None of this changes the fundamental moral issue: Slavery
was evil. Nazism was evil. Evil is evil — even if some people can’t see it for
what it is from their vantage point.
Serwer makes a very important observation:
What is strange is that the
circumstances surrounding the abolition of slavery and the preservation of the
Union are regarded as tragic. The issues debated on the eve of the
Revolutionary War were more amenable to compromise than those that rent the Union
in two in 1861. Many Americans died in the Revolutionary War; neither the
United States nor Great Britain today regards its outcome as lamentable. Few
regret that George Washington and King George III didn’t sit down at a table
and hash out a compromise. Almost no one wrings their hands today about the
uncivil tone of the Boston Tea Party, or the colonists’ stubborn insistence on
self-governance.
I’m a big defender of the American Revolution, but it’s
easy for me to concede the moral stakes in our fight with King George pale in
comparison to the moral stakes of the Civil War. And yet, if I say, “Benedict
Arnold was a villain,” no one but a few pedantic history buffs will bother to
argue with me. If I say, “Robert E. Lee was a villain,” my email box will
overflow with outrage.
Many people, mostly on the left, will claim such
responses are proof of racism or white supremacy. And, believe me, I am happy
to concede that is true for some people. But it’s not true for vastly more
people. For instance, there’s not a racist bone in David French’s body as far
as I can tell (the best proof of that is probably his adopted Ethiopian
daughter, but it’s hardly the only proof). Rather, people make complicated
distinctions that often fall afoul of narrow rational analysis. And sometimes
people look at the same set of facts and simply draw different conclusions from
them.
And that’s where the issue of compromise comes in. The
Civil War was fought over slavery and to save the Union. The war settled the
issue of slavery, but it was less clear at the time that it settled the
question of the Union. When we defeated Japan and Germany, the Allies
understood that needlessly humiliating our former enemies would be folly.
Indeed, the humiliation of Germany after the First World War was widely
understood to be one of the main causes of the Second.
Abraham Lincoln, who’d spent his political life with one
eye on principles and one eye on the compromises necessary to fulfill those
principles, understood this better than anyone. That is why, as the war was
rapidly concluding, Lincoln ended his Second Inaugural by saying:
With malice toward none, with
charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,
let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds,
to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his
orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among
ourselves and with all nations.
Allowing southerners to save face in the wake of
world-destroying defeat was the real compromise. One can run the
counterfactuals all day long: Perhaps things would have been better if the
Union took the approach of post-war German governments and banned any
expression of nostalgia for, or pride in, the antebellum regime. There was
certainly some of that during Reconstruction. Maybe there should have been
more. The sudden imposition of Jim Crow laws that came after Reconstruction
supports the idea that there should have been a tougher northern approach to
the post-war South. (I’d like to think I’d have been in the Radical Republican
camp myself.) But it’s hard for me to second-guess the wisdom of Lincoln’s
basic instincts.
What gets lost, however, in all the talk of compromise,
both before and after the war, is that compromise is not, strictly speaking, a
principle. As Oakeshott says, “A ‘compromise’ is not a position; it can only be
defended pragmatically.” I think this is right.
But there’s an irony to this view. Compromises aren’t
principles, but allowing for the possibility of compromise is a principle. It’s called “freedom” or “pluralism.” It is
axiomatic. In a free society, all people must be free. That’s why slavery had
to go and could not — ultimately — be
compromised with. But, after that, free people must be allowed to live how they
want to live so long as that doesn’t infringe on someone else’s freedom. That
requires compromise, not in law but in life. People have a right to be wrong.
Kelly’s Mistake
I really didn’t want to get into this stuff today. But I
felt compelled to because I did want to explain why I think Kelly’s comments in
his Fox interview were such a mistake. On Twitter the other day, I said that
Kelly “should stop giving interviews.” And for the next day or so, I was
inundated with demands to answer the question “But is he right?” I’ve tried to
answer that question above. But I think that question is irrelevant.
As a rule, chiefs of staff should work behind the scenes.
They are White House information-flow managers, not spokespeople. For reasons
that should be quite familiar now, that role is more important in the Trump
administration than any other in memory. This president likes to rely on
fawning reviews from click-bait outlets, shows such as Fox & Friends, and the sewage-recycling system of his own
Twitter feed. Kelly is supposed to be one of the “grown-ups,” who not only
protects the president from bad information, but the country from what he might
do with that information.
For reasons that Noah Rothman lays out in detail, Kelly
has opted to trade his non-partisan stature to lend aid and comfort to
President Trump’s culture-war games. Willingly or reluctantly, Kelly is making
himself into a spokesman for Trumpism. In doing so, he’s putting intellectual
meat on the thin bones of Trump’s Twitter outbursts. If you are all-in for
MAGAism, this probably doesn’t bother you. But if you’re among the majority of
Americans who have problems with the way Trump divides the country, this is a
worrisome turn.
And if you’re a Republican who takes some pride in the
fact that the GOP is the Party of Lincoln and that it was founded as an
abolitionist party, then watching Kelly and Trump defending “our heritage” of
the Confederacy, then you might be watching the spectacle with unblinking befuddlement.
Allahu Akbar! This
Is a Dumb Controversy!
Never let it be said that the New York Times is above a little trolling. Yesterday, the Times tweeted
“Allahu akbar” has somehow become
inextricably intertwined with terrorism. Its real meaning is far more innocent.
https://t.co/HO5PIE3p77
— The New York Times (@nytimes)
November 2, 2017
As I joked, that “somehow” is carrying so much weight,
it’s going to get a hernia. Of course, in the article, the Times does get around to acknowledging, perhaps a bit too
reluctantly, that the reason the phrase gets “intertwined” with terrorism is
that pretty much whenever Islamic terrorists kill people, they shout “Allahu
akbar!”
The suggestion that it’s weird for people to connect the
two is what’s weird.
If a radical faction of Amish terrorists shouted
“Rumspringa!” every time they galloped their horse carts through civilians,
would we really be so shocked that the word became associated with (terribly
ineffective) terrorism? Ditto if a cult of Sonny Bunch worshippers blew
themselves up right after shouting, “Sucker
Punch is genius!”
Now, if you know anything about Islam, you should know
that “Allahu akbar” is not solely a villain’s catchphrase. Muslims also say it
at weddings, births, Bar Mitzvahs — wait no, strike that last one — and
countless other joyful events. Or, at least, I thought we all knew that.
CNN’s Jake Tapper said as much the other day in the wake
of the New York terror attack. And the reaction from some corners proved me
wrong. Sean Hannity threw an extended
hissy fit over the comment.
My favorite part was in the beginning when Hannity says,
“liberal fake news’ CNN’s fake Jake Tapper.”
Wait, Fake Jake Tapper said something? Well, what did the
real Jake Tapper say? Why does CNN use Fake Jake Tapper? Is the real Jake in
CNN prison or something? I want to hear more about this doppelganger.
Anyway, both Hannity and the Times seem to be working from equally incorrect premises. Hannity
thinks it’s ridiculous to point out that, for countless millions of Muslims,
Allahu akbar has nothing to do with terrorism. Meanwhile, the Times seems to think that it’s bizarre
that Islam’s signature phrase has been associated at all with terrorism. The Times doesn’t put it as bluntly as, say,
Hillary Clinton, who said that Muslims have “nothing whatsoever to do with
terrorism,” but it’s still missing the point.
It seems to me that the sane position is where the Venn
Diagram overlaps. Islam isn’t purely about terrorism –terrorists kill more
Muslims than non-Muslims, by a wide margin. But Islamic terrorism is Islamic. It draws on Islamic scripture,
and the leaders of ISIS, al-Qaeda, and Iran know far more about Islam than any
of the Westerners who say that Islam has nothing whatsoever to do with
terrorism.
And even if you think such distinctions are incorrect,
and you truly believe that all of Islam is the problem, not just the terrorist
sliver of it, think about what that means as a matter of policy. Billions of
people are Muslims — as are millions of Americans, including many in our
military. Treating them all as terrorists wouldn’t simply be unjust, it would
be idiotically suicidal. By all means, let’s crush the terrorists. But that
requires help from Muslims, not treating them all as evil. Lincoln understood
this about the South. The Allies understood this about Germany and Japan. You’d
think more people could understand this about Islam.
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