If Republicans can’t get their act together, they will pay at the polls.
.. Republicans reputedly control majorities in both houses of Congress. A GOP chief executive itches to deploy his signature pen. Regardless, senators from President Trump’s own party concoct excuses to avoid forwarding bills to his desk
.. The free-market, conservative movement is blessed with hardworking, dedicated, and idealistic (in the best sense) donors, scholars, opinion journalists, broadcasters, and activists. Alas, we are doomed by flaccid, nearly non-existent congressional leadership, “so-called Republicans” (in President Trump’s words) who crave big government, and libertarian utopians who — on too many issues — will reject significant policy improvements while demanding nothing less than a live-action version of Atlas Shrugged.
.. The free-market, conservative movement is blessed with hardworking, dedicated, and idealistic (in the best sense) donors, scholars, opinion journalists, broadcasters, and activists. Alas, we are doomed by flaccid, nearly non-existent congressional leadership, “so-called Republicans” (in President Trump’s words) who crave big government, and libertarian utopians who — on too many issues — will reject significant policy improvements while demanding nothing less than a live-action version of Atlas Shrugged.
.. he should have yanked their committee assignments. This perfectly illustrates McConnell’s problem: He is neither loved nor feared. He is barely respected. Mainly, he is disregarded
.. The end of reconciliation means that any new repeal-and-replacement bill will need 60 votes, rather than 51. The need to recruit at least eight Democrats to push a new healthcare bill over the filibuster threshold will move it, ipso facto, to the left of GCHJ. Perhaps Rand Paul and Ted Cruz can explain how this would advance capitalism and freedom.
.. “Collins’ state would have received a 43 percent increase in federal healthcare funding” from GCHJ, health-policy expert Betsy McCaughey of the London Center for Policy Research tells me. “She was cowed by the rhetoric and demagoguery.”
.. McCain left intact a calamitous law that lacked bipartisan support and jacked up the average Arizonan’s premiums last year by 116 percent.
.. Come 2018, the Republican Party will need these patriots to knock on doors, man phone banks, attend get-out-the-vote rallies, and of course, cast ballots. Watching Republicans stagger from one self-inflicted defeat to another will unleash a pandemic of learned helplessness on the Right. If repeatedly campaigning hard for Republican candidates achieves so little, why knock ourselves out a year from now?
.. GOP powerbrokers worry that inability to deliver while in full control of government will enrage the grassroots and depress turnout of a broader electorate that could wonder what’s the point of reelecting a Republican House and Senate.”
In Country Music, Nice Guys Finish First (for Now)
At the time, country music was still reckoning with its bro tendencies. For most of the 2010s, 20-something men in weathered baseball caps injected the genre with an almost comical masculinity — brawny, hip-hop-inflected sounds, lyrics that treated women as objects of lurid attention. Stars like Luke Bryan and Florida Georgia Line were making intriguing musical hybrids with often woeful gender politics.
.. Mr. Rhett sings gently, with the faintest hint of soul-music syrup in his barely-accented voice. “Die a Happy Man” was so straightforward it landed with a shock. It became Mr. Rhett’s breakthrough hit, topping the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart for 17 weeks.
As often happens, it also became a template: the country gentleman. And so Nashville’s bro tide is now receding, supplanted by a kindlier new generation of male country singers. They focus on uncomplicated, deeply dedicated love or, alternately, being hopeless on the receiving end of heartbreak.
.. They sing with voices light on drawl. They ooze respect, charm and, occasionally, dullness. At times they recall George Strait, the restrained cowboy superstar; at others, Earl Thomas Conley, the emotional ballad specialist of the 1980s.
.. More often than not, they have sturdy, approachable, single-syllable last names: Thomas Rhett, Brett Young, Chris Lane, Michael Ray.
.. They are the men next door, promising undying affection and emotional stability — a cliché, perhaps, but one more appealing than the last.
.. This surge also doubles as a response to the gender crisis that has been gripping country music the last few years, as captured in two parallel phenomena: the rise of the bro, and the disappearance of the female star.
.. For most of this decade, the genre’s male stars have been strutters: egocentric, bumblingly flirtatious, a little dunce-y.
At the same time, female singers have been getting squeezed ever more tightly
.. younger artists like Maddie & Tae and Kelsea Ballerini found success by positioning themselves in opposition to prevailing masculine narratives.
.. It dilutes the toxic levels of masculinity in the genre without offering women songs of their own to sing, instead plying them with ones that place them on a pedestal.
.. This is the emo side of the gentleman, looking inward for shortcomings, not outward.
In the bro era, women were objects to be chased. In these songs, they’re porcelain, gleaming and precious.
The American Spirit Is Alive in Texas
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‘Hold the line,’ Jim Mattis exhorted soldiers. In the face of a disaster, civilians are doing just that.
Most Americans, including Texans, don’t have more than a few hundred dollars in available savings. Most live close to the edge, paycheck to paycheck. Most homeowners in Houston don’t have flood insurance. When they’re lucky enough to get out of the shelter, they’ll return to houses that are half-ruined—wet, moldy, dank, with no usable furniture—and with kids coming down with colds and stomach ailments from stress or from standing water that holds bacteria and viruses. It will be misery for months. When the trauma is over, there’ll be plenty of time for debate. Do we need to hold more in reserve for national disasters? Do local zoning laws need rethinking? All worthy questions—for later.
.. There is such a thing as tact. It has to do with a sense of touch—an ability to apprehend another’s position or circumstances, and doing or saying the right thing. There is, believe it or not, such a thing as political tact. It too involves knowing the positions of others, and knowing what time it is.
Politicians, don’t use this disaster to score points or rub your ideology in somebody’s face or make your donors smile by being small, not big.
.. “The only way this great big experiment you and I call America is gonna survive is if we’ve got tough hombres like you. . . . We don’t frickin’ scare, that’s the bottom line.
“You’re a great example for our country right now. It’s got some problems—you know it and I know it. It’s got problems that we don’t have in the military. And you just hold the line, my fine young soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines. You just hold the line until our country gets back to understanding and respecting each other and showing it, of being friendly to one another. That’s what Americans owe to one another—we’re so doggone lucky to be Americans.”
He ended: “I flunked retirement, OK? Only reason I came back was to serve alongside young people like you, who are so selfless and frankly so rambunctious.”
This was the voice of true moral authority, authority earned through personal sacrifice. Speeches like that come only from love.
Getting Radical About Inequality
I’m not in the habit of recommending left-wing French intellectuals, but I’m beginning to think that Pierre Bourdieu is helpful reading in the age of Trump. He was born in 1930, the son of a small-town postal worker. By the time he died in 2002, he had become perhaps the world’s most influential sociologist within the academy, and largely unknown outside of it.
His great subject was the struggle for power in society, especially cultural and social power.
.. A habitus is an intuitive feel for the social game. It’s the sort of thing you get inculcated with unconsciously, by growing up in a certain sort of family or by sharing a sensibility with a certain group of friends.
.. Every minute or hour, in ways we’re not even conscious of, we as individuals and members of our class are competing for dominance and respect. We seek to topple those who have higher standing than we have and we seek to wall off those who are down below. Or, we seek to take one form of capital, say linguistic ability, and convert it into another kind of capital, a good job.
.. Most groups conceal their naked power grabs under a veil of intellectual or aesthetic purity. Bourdieu used the phrase “symbolic violence” to suggest how vicious this competition can get, and he didn’t even live long enough to get a load of Twitter and other social media.
.. Different groups and individuals use different social strategies, depending on their position in the field.
People at the top, he observed, tend to adopt a reserved and understated personal style that shows they are far above the “assertive, attention-seeking strategies which expose the pretensions of the young pretenders.” People at the bottom of any field, on the other hand, don’t have a lot of accomplishment to wave about, but they can use snark and sarcasm to demonstrate the superior sensibilities.
.. Sometimes, the loser wins: If you’re setting up a fancy clothing or food shop you go down and adopt organic and peasant styles in order to establish the superior moral prestige that you can then use to make gobs of money.
.. Bourdieu helps you understand what Donald Trump is all about. Trump is not much of a policy maven, but he’s a genius at the symbolic warfare Bourdieu described. He’s a genius at upending the social rules and hierarchies that the establishment classes (of both right and left) have used to maintain dominance.
Bourdieu didn’t argue that cultural inequality creates economic inequality, but that it widens and it legitimizes it.
.. as the information economy has become more enveloping, cultural capital and economic capital have become ever more intertwined. Individuals and classes that are good at winning the cultural competitions Bourdieu described tend to dominate the places where economic opportunity is richest
.. Bourdieu reminds us that the drive to create inequality is an endemic social sin. Every hour most of us, unconsciously or not, try to win subtle status points, earn cultural affirmation, develop our tastes, promote our lifestyles and advance our class.
.. His work suggests that the responses to it are going to have to be more profound, both on a personal level — resisting the competitive, ego-driven aspects of social networking and display