The Whited Sepulcher

By Kevin D. Williamson

Monday, August 28, 2023

 

As a politician, Barack Obama was remarkable for his chutzpah. My favorite example of this came in 2008, when a few members of the Washington press suddenly—and no one knows why—remembered they were reporters and started asking questions about Jeremiah Wright, the racist crackpot and Jew-hating weirdo pastor whose church Obama had been attending for years. The ensuing scandal threatened to undermine young Obama’s presidential ambitions—he hadn’t yet knocked off Hillary Rodham Clinton—and, so, something had to be done. 

 

Now, a normal person in that situation—the situation of having spent years in a close, intimate, spiritual relationship with an obvious bigot—might be tempted to apologize, to acknowledge that it had been an error in judgment, to resolve to be more selective about the company he keeps in the future. But Barack Obama is not a normal person, and so he responded by lecturing us—the country at large—on our racism, as though we had been the ones sitting in the pew with Reverend “Them Jews” and playing footsie with Louis Farrakhan. The message of Obama’s speech was clear: “Americans, you are culpably racist, and the only way to redeem yourselves is to vote for the black guy for president, whatever racist-crackpot/Jew-hating-weirdo baggage he has in his own political entourage.” It was brazen and amoral. It was also brilliant.

 

Mike Pence was paying attention. 

 

On January 6, 2021, President Donald J. Trump was in the midst of trying to overthrow the government of these United States in a soft coup d’etat, attempting to hold onto power illegally, illegitimately, and unconstitutionally while preventing the legitimately elected administration of (incredibly enough!) Joe Biden to take office. In order for this plot to work, Trump would have needed the cooperation of scores of state and local officials, judges, and members of Congress that, thankfully, did not materialize. One of the people Trump tried to bully into going along with the plot was Mike Pence, who served a key if largely ceremonial function in certifying the Electoral College results. Pence declined to go along with that. 

 

There are a couple of possible ways to read Pence’s refusal of Trump’s demand: We might be generous and assume that Pence is a patriot and a man of honor—one who takes seriously an oath ending in the words “so help me God”—and acted as he did out of the best of motives. But there is not much evidence that Pence is a patriot or a man of honor, one who takes seriously an oath ending in the words “so help me God.” I know that sounds harsh, and I’ll come back to it directly. 

 

The second possible explanation of Pence’s actions is that he knew he had ridden the Trump train as far as it was going to take him, that Trump’s daft coup d’etat was never going to succeed, that the people in charge of it were feckless has-beens like Rudy Giuliani and outright lunatics like Sidney Powell, that going along with those fools would be political suicide for a man who still hoped to be president himself one day, and that the mostly likely fruit to be born from that packet of poison seeds was a crop of felony indictments. Pence, who has been running for office since the 1980s (he failed to get himself elected to the House in 1988 and then again in 1990), is, lest we forget, a graduate of an accredited lawschool and a former lawyer: He knew enough not to go down with that sinking ship. 

 

To watch him strut and preen today about his actions on that day, you’d think that he did more than simply refuse to violate the most basic responsibilities of public life and clear the very lowest bar possible by not going out of his way to nuke his own political career and join an abortive coup attempt organized by a half-organized gaggle of clueless cretins who could not find their own asses with both hands and a map. Mike Pence is like the guy who wants brownie points for not cheating on his girl. 

 

Maybe Pence didn’t see January 6 coming—in which case, he isn’t smart enough to be in the presidency. Trump was always going to claim the election was stolen from him and try to hang on—he was going to say the election was stolen from him in 2016, when he expected to lose. That’s what he does.

 

For all Pence’s talk about cherishing the Constitution, the Trump-Pence administration was at best cavalier when it came to constitutional limits on presidential power and at worst positively hostile to the notion. You remember what the great constitutional scholar said: “I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” From stealing money from other federal programs to redirect to that wall the Mexicans were going to pay for to making a mockery of the constitutional appointments process with endlessly “acting” agency heads to making up phony “national security” pretexts to impose trade restrictions that couldn’t get through Congress, the Trump-Pence administration routinely treated the Constitution with contempt. If Pence saw anything wrong with that, he sure as hell kept quiet enough about it. In my mind, Pence either did not care about the Constitution in spite of his constant protests to the contrary, or he was—is—too much of a coward to have done anything about it when it mattered. Mike Pence is the Arthur Dimmesdale of modern American politics—a stern Puritan on the outside, Bill Clinton on the inside, a whited sepulcher if there ever were one. 

 

Instead of treating January 6 like what it was—an indictment of his own poor political judgment and an outrage for which he bears considerable personal culpability owing to his actions in the four years leading up to the natural climax of Trump-style politics—he treats it like a moral get-out-of-jail-free card. “Once I have helped lead the nation to the brink of disaster, you can count on me to do the right thing, one time, at the last minute, while trying to stay in good graces with the would-be tyrant I helped put in the White House” (if I may summarize loosely) is not quite as inspiring as Pence seems to think it is. The fact that this guy canonized himself in a subsequent book titled So Help Me God is the toxic icing on the raw-sewage cake. 

 

There are better and worse explanations for how Pence conducted himself during the Trump years—but there are not any good explanations. 

 

Setting aside the Constitution (because these guys have always been happy to set aside the Constitution when it suits them), Pence had an up-close-and-personal view of Trump’s personal moral grotesquerie for years on end. Pence—who famously goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid being alone with female colleagues—knew what kind of porn-star-chasing buffoon he was pairing up with. Pence may not be the smartest guy in the room, but he does know how to read, and the reading public has known what type of man Trump is since the 1980s. The hush-money payoffs to the pornographic actress, the endless lies, the blasphemy, the extortion—none of this could plausibly have surprised Pence. He can’t plead ignorance. 

 

But what did he do? “Sycophantic” isn’t a strong enough word to describe Mike Pence’s attitude toward Donald Trump. He was comically, neurotically servile. The Washington Post chronicled a stretch of one meeting during which Pence praised Trump every 12 seconds—if you had tried to write that into The Death of Stalin, the critics would have called it heavy-handed. Trump was what Trump always was—Pence knew it, went along with it, enabled it, attacked those who had the patriotism to criticize the administration and to call it by its right name, and abased himself in every imaginable way to further its power when he thought doing so would suit his own ends. 

 

And Pence wasn’t a mere bystander: He was right in the middle of the Michael Flynn mess, and lied about it, saying he had no knowledge of Flynn’s foreign dealings when he did. 

 

January 6 was hardly the first time Donald Trump showed himself to be morally unfit for the presidency. Pence treats his performance on that day like the red badge of courage, but what he deserves is a scarlet letter—not an “A” for adultery but an “I” for idolatry, a “C” for cowardice, and a “K” for knavery. 

 

Tell me you weren’t thinking “ICK!” when you watched him on that debate stage. 

 

And Furthermore …

 

While the flutes played, the drums beat, and the eunuch priests slashed themselves with knives, the religious excitement gradually spread like a wave among the crowd of onlookers, and many a one did that which he little thought to do when he came as a holiday spectator to the festival. For man after man, his veins throbbing with the music, his eyes fascinated by the sight of the streaming blood, flung his garments from him, leaped forth with a shout, and seizing one of the swords which stood ready for the purpose, castrated himself on the spot.

 

James George Frazer, The Golden Bough

 

One of the maddening things about the 2016 election is that there was a field of perfectly good, conservative, Republican candidates in the race—and no need, or even a good reason, to turn to a despicable demagogue such as Donald Trump. That isn’t true this time around—with Vivek Ramaswamy on the scene, Trump is not the only despicable demagogue seeking the nomination of a party that now swoons over despicable demagogues. Tim Scott seems like a decent guy. Nikki Haley has some pretty pronounced mustelid tendencies, but she’s a more or less normal politician. Chris Christie acts like a guy with a “YOLO” tattoo on his ass. (And that’s fine by me, for the purposes at hand.) Asa Hutchinson, who is basically a strip of Phil Gramm jerky, is functioning as an audience surrogate, looking around the stage at the field and saying, “Really? Are you f—–g kiddin’ me?” Doug Burgum … exists. 

 

But the non-Trump field is decidedly less credible, on average, than it was in 2016, when it included: Christie, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, John Kasich, Marco Rubio, Carly Fiorina, and the usual buzzing swarmlet of gadflies and aspiring Fox News hosts. Ted Cruz was on the stage, too, before his cult-of-Attis-style campaign of ritual self-abuse. (Frazer described the literal version above; the metaphorical version is no less awful, in the long run, and the price of entry is a lot lower, too.) If I had had a guy in 2016, Ted Cruz would have been my guy. I have a folder labeled “You Are Not Smart,” which contains some stock-options paperwork and a few other items of memorabilia. I need to put some Ted Cruz 2016 swag in there. I’m going to have to get a shoebox.

 

Cruz is one of the many singing the totally-normal-and-not-at-all-weirdly-homoerotic praises of Donald Trump’s recent Fulton County Jail mugshot: “Trump’s mugshot where he looks like a pissed off and angry badass is an iconic historic photo. It’s going viral, and it’s making a heck of a statement.” Jesse Watters of Fox News, affirming his “unblemished record of heterosexuality,” said of Trump: “He looks good and he looks hard.” 

 

In reality, Trump looks like the Grinch after a makeover performed by John Wayne Gacy—I’d love to know what the last man booked into that jail while wearing that much makeup was charged with, and I’ll bet it was hilarious—but it is of interest to me what these guys with their unblemished records of heterosexuality think looks and seems tough. Donald Trump is a guy who has never lifted anything heavier than money and blasts Broadway show tunes and the Village People at his rallies for totally normal people who are by no means members of a cult. I don’t know how much time you can spend dancing to “Macho Man” before your record of heterosexuality gets a blemish, or at least a footnote. And then there’s the inevitable playing of the music from Cats.

 

Do you want to know what an actual tough guy looks like? This:

American soldier and actor Audie Murphy plays himself in the autobiographical film "To Hell and Back," 1955 (Photo by Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images)

That’s Audie Murphy, who was as close to a real-life Captain America as we’ve seen. Trying to volunteer for service in World War II, he was rejected by the Army, the Navy, and the Marine Corps for being too small (and too young) to fight. He eventually got the Army to accept him (in part by lying about his age) and off to war he went. But there wasn’t any comic-book super-soldier serum for him to take. He was, and remained, a little runt of a guy. All he had to rely on was courage and a certain inherent hardness, not the kind Watters imagines in Trump but the real thing, remarked on from time to time even by those who admired him. He famously held off—and pretty much massacred—an advancing company of Germans, alone, the last man at his post. As his Medal of Honor citation put it:

 

With the enemy tanks abreast of his position, 2d Lt. Murphy climbed on the burning tank destroyer, which was in danger of blowing up at any moment, and employed its .50-caliber machinegun against the enemy. He was alone and exposed to German fire from 3 sides, but his deadly fire killed dozens of Germans and caused their infantry attack to waver. The enemy tanks, losing infantry support, began to fall back. For an hour the Germans tried every available weapon to eliminate 2d Lt. Murphy, but he continued to hold his position and wiped out a squad which was trying to creep up unnoticed on his right flank. Germans reached as close as 10 yards, only to be mowed down by his fire. He received a leg wound, but ignored it and continued the single-handed fight until his ammunition was exhausted. He then made his way to his company, refused medical attention, and organized the company in a counterattack which forced the Germans to withdraw. His directing of artillery fire wiped out many of the enemy; he killed or wounded about 50. 2d Lt. Murphy’s indomitable courage and his refusal to give an inch of ground saved his company from possible encirclement and destruction.

 

One soldier who witnessed the event described it as “the greatest display of guts and courage I have ever seen.”

 

He was 19 years old. 

 

Murphy became famous and starred in a film based on his life. But, as you might expect, he also had terrible problems after returning to civilian life, including drug addiction. He needed money later in life but turned down lucrative endorsement opportunities because they came from alcohol and cigarette companies, and he did not want to set a bad example for the young men who looked up to him. 

 

He couldn’t have been more different from Generalissimo Strawberry Bonespurs.

 

Donald Trump, it should be remembered, is a coward. When his country came calling for him to serve, he invented a fake medical condition that magically went away as soon as the fear of being drafted did. He has never faced any kind of real danger without a phalanx of lawyers and bodyguards between him and whatever generally self-inflicted trouble he was facing. 

 

I suppose Trump identifies as tough.

 

I’m not saying everybody has to be Audie Murphy. And there are plenty of genuinely hard men who are far from heroic: If Trump had found his way to the general holding cells, he might have encountered one or two of them. Hardness is a virtue only when it is directed toward virtuous ends. The capacity for violence that made Audie Murphy a hero is the same quality that made El Chapo a successful criminal—the quality of toughness is like a loaded gun: inherently dangerous but morally neutral in and of itself, capable of being put to admirable ends and wicked ones. Genuine toughness is not among Donald Trump’s personal qualities (he is afraid of birds, for Pete’s sake) but he does have some real talents—none of which has ever been directed at anything more worthy than his own petty self-aggrandizement or the service of his appetites and his vanity. 

 

Members of a political party and a political movement that crows about its embrace of “Judeo-Christian values” should not need all this explained to them. But these are pagan times, and these would-be priests of Attis are just getting started with the dance.  

 

Economics for English Majors

 

Paul Krugman, first-rate economist and third-rate newspaper columnist, sets a difficult task for himself: How to condemn Donald Trump’s boneheaded anti-trade economic nationalism while defending Joe Biden’s boneheaded anti-trade economic nationalism? Those of you who have met college sophomores or who have been college sophomores will recognize the sophomoric strategy: When the economics isn’t on your side, argue the politics; when the politics isn’t on your side, argue the economics. 

 

One dirty little secret of international economics is that while tariffs create inefficiency, according to standard models, these efficiency costs are fairly modest unless tariff rates are very high. Even in the late 19th century, when America had average tariffs of 30 percent to 40 percent, the best estimates suggest that the efficiency costs were less than 1 percent of gross domestic product. The direct economic effects of Trump’s tariff idea would probably be significantly smaller.

 

But the geopolitical effects of such a tariff would be disastrous.

 

…If America were to implement Trump’s proposal for a unilateral, across-the-board tariff, the country would in effect be seceding from the international order it did so much to create. The result would be a global wave not so much of retaliation — although that too — as of emulation, a free-for-all of tariffs imposed to cater to various interest groups. This would be bad for the world economy, but even more important, it would foster suspicion and hostility among nations that should be allies.

 

… Biden’s people aren’t free-trade purists; they’re pursuing industrial policies that include significant buy-American provisions — their policies are, in fact, nationalist enough to generate a backlash from some economists and protests from some of our trading partners. But their economic nationalism serves well-defined purposes. Some of it is intended to enhance national security by promoting crucial technologies, some to solidify political support for essential climate action and catalyze private investment in green energy.

 

You may or may not approve of Biden’s break with free-trade orthodoxy (I do), but it’s certainly not stupid.

 

A rhetorical point: When you don’t like the consensus of experts, it is “orthodoxy” held by “purists”; when the consensus of experts is on your side, then those who hold different priorities are exhibiting a “symptom of a broader disdain not just for expertise but for any kind of hard thinking.” Professor Krugman’s attempt to attribute the latter to “pretty much the whole Republican Party” isn’t any less weaselly as a rhetorical matter for being, you know, true. 

 

Our friend Daniel Hannan runs the Institute for Free Trade in the United Kingdom. It is a fine organization, the existence of which documents a kind of failure: One shouldn’t need to explain the case for free trade to the nation that invented free trade, but, there they are. The United States, being a (nearly) continental nation rather than an island, has always entertained delusions of autarkic self-sufficiency in a way our English cousins mostly haven’t, or hadn’t until recently. But one shouldn’t need to explain the virtues of a liberal international economic order to the country that invented that order and grew astoundingly rich as a result of it. 

 

In Other Econ-Adjacent News … 

 

I recommend to you Peter Coy’s New York Times newsletter on the problem of employees’ getting paid in stock options they do not understand. I found it eye-opening.

 

Words About Words

 

A reader asks me to weigh in on the difference between acculturation and assimilation, one of which he links to patriotism, the other to nationalism.

 

I am not sure the link is there.

 

The first dictionary to which I turned defines acculturation as assimilation, “to a culture, typically the dominant one.” Fowler’s offers no guidance, and none of the other usage guides I consulted acknowledged any acculturation–assimilation issue. 

 

As far as I can tell, this seems to be an identity-politics driven thing, with some people arguing that acculturation suggests the maintenance of previous cultural practices and values while accommodating the dominant culture while assimilation suggests the rejection or annihilation of previously held cultural tendencies or values. For example:

 

The word acculturation is often confused with assimilation, but the two have marked distinctions. The first requires an individual to learn about and adapt to the practices of a culture very different from their own. Assimilation, however, is often a symptom of living within a foreign culture. They may not sound all that dissimilar, but it’s very easy for someone to assimilate without acculturation. The fear of losing one’s cultural identity is certainly valid even as assimilating and acculturating can be two positive sides of the same coin. While an individual is encouraged to assimilate with a new culture, acculturating leaves the choice up to that individual whether to truly devote him or herself to it or not.

 

Or this:

 

Acculturation refers to the adaptation process that occurs when two or more cultures come into contact. It most commonly happens when migrants move to a new culture, and involves adopting new beliefs, behaviors, and forms of culture of the dominant group in the new culture.

 

Assimilation is a more extreme form of cultural change and involves the complete adoption of the dominant culture as well as the rejection of the previous culture.

 

With due respect, that sounds to me like a lot of meaningless high-school-counselor talk, and I don’t have any use for it. 

 

(Also: extreme—almost always an indicator that the writer disapproves of the thing being written about. It’s a low base-stealing strategy.)

 

Assimilation does have a more comprehensive sense: Your body assimilates food you have eaten, the Borg assimilate other species. But the word acculturation already admits of degrees. I am reminded of all that nonsensical “melting pot” vs. “tossed salad” talk about immigration that public-school teachers starting coughing up in the 1980s or thereabouts, a prelude to a few decades worth of genuinely stupid “multiculturalism” talk. If multiculturalism means learning to read Don Quixote in Spanish, then I am for it; if it means indulging a lot of sentimental talk about “Latino” culture, then I don’t have time for it. In general, I find multiculturalism a lot less compelling than culture.

 

As for the patriotism/nationalism thing: My friend Jay Nordlinger often quotes William F. Buckley Jr.’s declaration: “I’m as patriotic as anyone from sea to shining sea, but there’s not a bone of nationalism in me.”

 

Nationalism is a word with two distinct meanings, and those who advocate the noxious sense of nationalism—cultish, exclusionary, authoritarian—very often willfully conflate it with the more anodyne sense of nationalism, which describes a particular people’s drive for national independence. As a matter of politics and language, Scottish nationalism—the desire of some Scottish people to secede from the United Kingdom or otherwise take on a more independent political character—is a very different thing from, say, Donald Trump’s nationalism. The Jew-hating weirdos one encounters in public discourse from time to time sometimes argue, “I’m a nationalist, the Israelis are nationalists—we’re just alike, so how can you call me a bigot?” This is the white man’s version of, “Black people can’t be racists.”

 

In Closing

 

We play a lot of dumb word games that amount to what I have sometimes called anti-discourse, meaning communication that is intended to prevent the exchange of facts, ideas, and perspectives rather than to facilitate such exchange. 

 

About that, I will say this:

 

Under the First Amendment, you have a right to say more or less any dumb thing that comes into your head, but that doesn’t mean you have a right to be taken seriously—and, it should be noted in the context of current events, that doesn’t mean that speech or political activism cannot be part of a crime. You don’t get a pass on trying to illegitimately install Donald Trump as president of the United States just because you went to court and tried to get a judge to sign off on your batty little coup d’etat. 

 

Consider a parallel case: 

 

You have a right to kill someone in self-defense. If somebody breaks into your house at 4 a.m. and you shoot him, you don’t usually go to prison for murder; but if you break into someone else’s house at 4 a.m. and shoot him, you can call it “self-defense” all day, but you are still going to prison. That doesn’t mean that you have somehow lost the right to use lethal force in self-defense—it means that your claim of self-defense is, in the case in question, absurdly implausible. What Donald Trump and his gang did was try to replace the legitimately elected government of the United States—the incoming Biden administration—with an illegitimate one installed in part by guile and in part by force. It just turned out they were better at the force than the guile, although they weren’t particularly good at the force bit, either. 

 

There isn’t any good-faith interpretation of January 6 and the related events—and nobody who pretends that there is deserves anything more than derision. Or, where justified by other criminal misdeeds, a good long spell of incarceration.