Think about it: two days ahead of Super Tuesday, an important Tea Party figure endorsed Trump, gutting Ted Cruz. But according to Trump today, Jeff Sessions only endorsed him to jump on the bandwagon and to benefit himself.
Knifing Sessions like that — it’s just dirtbag behavior. Anybody who trusts Donald Trump from now on out is a fool.
.. I find it hard to separate the utter lack of character and judgment displayed by Trump in the Sessions matter from the same qualities on display in the Boy Scout speech. What a revolting spectacle! Full transcript here. A president with a shred of common decency (to say nothing of common sense) would have been ashamed to turn an appearance before the Scouts into a political rally.
.. My friend Ryan Booth is a white Evangelical, a former state GOP committee member, and one of the most sensible, upright people I know. After this Sessions insanity, he writes:
Hillary would not have been worse, folks. As some of you know, I didn’t vote for either. But Donald Trump is an unstable lunatic. If he lasts until 2020, then I’ll likely end up voting for a Democrat for the first time in my life.
.. If he will do this to Jeff Sessions, there is no reason at all to expect that his next SCOTUS nomination will be Gorsuch II. Maybe it will, but how do we know that?
.. a psychological study comparing people who had been raised in an oppressive but stable environment with people who had been raised in a free but unstable environment. Those who grew up in the oppressive but stable environment were happier and had overall better life outcomes than the others. Why? The theory was that predictability had a huge effect on one’s inner state. People who did not know what to expect from day to day, and who therefore could never rest, were significantly less able to thrive.
.. a psychological study comparing people who had been raised in an oppressive but stable environment with people who had been raised in a free but unstable environment. Those who grew up in the oppressive but stable environment were happier and had overall better life outcomes than the others. Why? The theory was that predictability had a huge effect on one’s inner state. People who did not know what to expect from day to day, and who therefore could never rest, were significantly less able to thrive.
.. If you only encounter Trump’s words on TV news, in print, on the radio, or via Twitter, you will not have gotten a sense of how incoherent he is.
.. The camera from the broadcast I was watching didn’t take its focus off the president, but it did show him walking away from the podium and watching as security (apparently) hauled the protesters away. I don’t complain about security removing disruptive protesters from a speech. What was unseemly about it was the obvious pleasure Trump took in watching the protesters removed. With the second one, he sneered something like, “That one looked young. I guess they’re taking him home to Mommy.”
..Can you imagine Reagan acting that way? Can you imagine any American president behaving with such boorishness?
.. Those poor people need hope, hope in something real, not this carnival barker who showed up ranting about immigrants, Muslims, the Fake News, lying Obama, and the rest. What are they going to do when they can no longer deny that Trump is a con man? Who will they blame then?
.. I cannot say with confidence which one is worse, but I’m inclining toward Trump. Our country is in a terrible place now, and we’ve brought it onto ourselves. It is going to take a lot to put back together what Donald Trump has broken, and I don’t trust politicians in either party to do it.
.. the Right is divided into three basic factions:
- Those who hate liberals more than they love anything else;
- those Republican establishment regulars who think that everything can and should go back to being how it was before the Trump aberration; and
- a motley crew of conservatives, traditionalists, and religious folks who still hold on to the old ideals, but despair that there are few if any people in national public life who embody them.
.. Our political future is either Democratic establishmentarianism (whoever Hillary Clinton’s successor is), left-wing populism (whoever Bernie Sanders’s successor is), Republican establishmentarianism (Mike Pence), or Trumpian populism. There is no fifth option. Like I said, the country is in a bad way. If Trump’s treatment of Jeff Sessions isn’t a canary in the pro-Trump conservative coal mine, nothing is.
When Is A Sandwich Not Just A Sandwich?
The point is, Brooks’s young guest was freaked out by salami and tomatoes in a way she wasn’t by enchiladas and refried beans. Though the young woman might have been of Mexican background (Brooks doesn’t say), in a place like Texas, say, Mexican food is ordinary cuisine even working-class white people.
.. I had to live with the disdain of some members of my Louisiana family for my allegedly fancypants and inauthentic tastes. It was all class anxiety on their part, but they found a way to put the knife in emotionally over these things. They were reverse snobs, and were at times really mean about it. I don’t believe that is excusable. That said, the fact that I was far more comfortable moving in cosmopolitan settings, and had more cosmopolitan tastes, meant that I had doors open for me, professionally and otherwise, that they would not have had.
.. I mentioned that when I arrived in Paris, the Dutch friends who were supposed to meet me had left a message at my hotel saying they had to cancel.
“What did you do?” said my dad, with tremendous concern.
“Checked in and spent the next few days exploring Paris on my own,” I said, as if it was no big deal. Because it wasn’t.
My father was visibly astonished.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Said he, “I would have just sat there in the hotel until it was time to go back to the airport.”
He wasn’t joking. He was serious.
.. conservatives tend to be “low openness” individuals — that is, people who are much less willing to try new and unfamiliar things.
.. So when the culture redefines a major life milestone, such as marriage, it trivializes one’s own milestone experience by imbuing it was a sense of contingency, threatens to deprive one’s children of the same experience, and thus threatens to make the generations strangers to one another.
.. This, by the way, is why I have a very short fuse for front-row pretenses to “diversity,” which are usually only skin deep. The white man who only has a high school education, and who lives in a trailer park on the outskirts of Bunkie, La., will never enjoy the privilege of, say, Jerelyn Luther, the black Yale student whose name lives in deserved infamy as Shrieking Girl. The refusal of the front-row Establishment to recognize the reality of class privilege, which is in large part cultural privilege, is a major barrier to meaningful reform. The way front-row kids in power assuage their status anxiety is by hiring more diversity deans, which is a lot easier than confronting the complexities of class.
Trump’s Derangement Deepens
The truth is Trump cannot abide any kind of investigation of his campaign or of himself by anyone. That would require him to defer to someone else, and his psyche cannot let that happen. (This is the core reason behind his refusal to release his tax returns.)
.. The very idea of actually wanting inspection to clear his name simply doesn’t occur to him. After a lifetime of lying, fraud, debt, secrecy, and bankruptcy, his instinct is always to deny everything and to do all he can to subvert any smidgen of accountability or transparency.
.. Asking him to subject himself to a neutral third-party inquiry comes as easily to him as it would to Putin or Duterte or Mugabe. It seems absurd to them — and they, like Trump, would react with incandescent rage.
.. But the president, in his anger, is now asserting that the FBI inquiry was initiated by nameless people who already knew that there was no basis to the allegations. Therefore the investigation is “the single greatest witch-hunt in American political history” — surpassing the lowest lows of McCarthyism no less. If Trump cannot stop the investigation, he is doing all he can to delegitimize it, whatever the costs to the credibility of our system of government.
.. Hence the spectacle of Newt Gingrich. A month ago, he called Mueller “a superb choice.” This past week, he tweeted that anyone who thinks Mueller will be fair in his investigation is “delusional.” Worse, actually: Mueller is “now clearly the tip of the deep state spear aimed at destroying or at a minimum undermining and crippling the Trump presidency.
.. A key barometer of Republican partisanship, the blogger Glenn Reynolds, endorses all of these arguments.
.. And so it seems to me completely plausible — even inevitable — that Mueller will be fired too at some point. More saliently, if his team’s work eventually exposes and proves Trump’s obstruction of justice, the only possible recourse, impeachment, will never happen. There will never be 18 Republican senators who will vote against the leader in this Congress or any other. We will have a criminal in the White House indefinitely, utterly impervious to sanction, and emboldened even further
Alas, All Societies Have Closets
- I think it is also obviously true that at least some of these people would have married and lived conventional heterosexual lives, and been satisfied in them. Why? Because the same-sex desire within them wasn’t as strong as it was in others, and they could manage it, or grow past it.
- On the other hand, the kind of society that gave them the psychological support for embracing exclusively heterosexual expression of their sexuality would also cause more suffering for those whose sexual desire is more strongly same-sex oriented.
- Can we have a society in which heterosexuality is considered normative, but homosexuality is tolerated, and gays and lesbians treated with respect, dignity, and love? I think it is possible in theory, but it seems to be utopian.
He is opposed to same-sex marriage but in favor of civil unions. In principle, he is against gay adoption, but in practice, he told me, “there are so many gay couples who are wonderful parents that I find it hard to maintain any ardor for stopping it.”
.. Hanby argues that, where we used to see human beings as possessing intrinsic properties—masculinity, femininity, the ability to glorify God through procreation—we now take a nominalist view of ourselves, seeing our bodies as subservient to our minds. We use technology, such as the birth-control pill, to subvert the natural way of things. Gay marriage, in this account, is a stepping-stone to a profoundly technologized society in which “the rejection of nature” is complete. Today, it’s sex-reassignment surgery and surrogacy; tomorrow, we’ll be genetically engineering our way into a post-human future.
.. as Christians, we cannot accept that homosexual desire is morally neutral. (Nor, I hasten to add, can we accept that heterosexual expression outside of marriage is morally neutral.)
.. how you answer this question: What is sex for?
.. Not, “what is gay sex for?” or “what is straight sex for?” but “what is sex for?” The Bible, and the teaching of the Church, has a clear answer to that. It is not the modern answer.
.. 15. The reason we cannot agree on what sex is for is that we don’t agree on the answer to the question, “What is a human being for?” Meaning, “What is our purpose in life?” Is it to live in harmony with God’s will? Is it to fulfill our desires? Is it something else? Again: traditional Christianity has clear and consistent answers to these questions — and they are not the modern answers.
.. 16. I have said it many times before, and I’ll say it again: I am glad the closet is gone, and would not want to see it return. I would like to live in a society that leaves gay people alone to live as they like. It is fair, though, for people like Andrew to ask how, exactly, I propose to privilege heterosexuality without in some form re-instituting the closet. I don’t have a satisfying answer to that question.
.. Is it possible to tolerate the expression of belief and behavior that gays and their allies believe is immoral, and doing damage to others? Or should orthodox Christian (and Jewish, and Muslim) belief regarding homosexuality be stigmatized socially for the sake of increasing social virtue, and bringing about a better society? If so, well, aren’t you saying that Christians (Muslims, Jews) should go into the closet with their beliefs?
.. 18. All of which is to arrive at the depressing conclusion that one way or the other, there’s going to be a closet. It’s already there for many orthodox Christians who work in academia and other professional circles, and it will expand. A lot of Christian kids will grow up feeling immense pressure to leave the faith or in some sense to be unfaithful to orthodox Christianity because of all the stigma heaped upon it over sexuality.