In certain ways sexual predation actually was the culture in the years when Weinstein came of age, in the entertainment industry and the wider society it influenced and mirrored.
.. There is a liberal tendency to regard sexual exploitation as a patriarchal constant that feminism has mitigated, and a conservative tendency to regard it as a problem that’s gotten steadily worse since the sexual revolution.
.. You can remember some of it with ’70s statistics: Never so many divorces, never so many abortions, a much higher rate of rape, an S.T.D. crisis that culminated in the AIDS epidemic.
.. something new happenedin Catholicism between 1960 and 1980: The prevalence of pedophilia stayed about the same, but suddenly the rate of priests groping and seducing and raping teenagers shot way, way up. As went Bowie and Zeppelin, so went the most putatively-conservative institution in the country.
.. The coarse worldview I’ve called “Hefnerism” endured, as the victims of Weinstein and Bill Clinton and Donald Trump can well attest.
.. They featured our civilization’s last great burst of creative energy. Those predatory directors and rape-y rock stars made great movies and memorable music.
.. peace feels like cultural exhaustion.
Trump’s Empty Culture Wars
The secret of culture war is that it is often a good and necessary thing.
.. But in the sweep of American history, it’s the battles over cultural norms and so-called social issues — over race and religion, intoxicants and sex, speech and censorship, immigration and assimilation — that for better or worse have often made us who we are.
.. A bad culture war is one in which attitudinizing, tribalism and worst-case fearmongering float around unmoored from any specific legal question
.. a master, too, of taking social and cultural debates that could be important and necessary and making them stupider and emptier and all about himself.
.. he is unique as well in that unlike most culture warriors — who are usually initially idealists, however corrupted they may ultimately become — he has never cared about anything higher or nobler than himself, and so he’s never happier than when the entire country seems to be having a culture war about, well, Donald Trump.
.. Trump has made it much, much worse, by multiplying the reasons one might reasonably kneel — for solidarity with teammates, as a protest against the president’s behavior, as a gesture in favor of free speech, as an act of racial pride — and then encouraging his own partisans to interpret the kneeling as a broad affront to their own patriotism and politics.
.. So now we’re “arguing” (I use the term loosely) about everything from the free-speech rights of pro athletes to whether the national anthem is right-wing political correctness to LeBron James’s punditry on the miseducation of Trump voters … and the specific issue that Kaepernick intended to raise, police misconduct, is buried seven layers of controversy deep.
.. First, can we have the greater accountability for cops that activists reasonably demand, in which juries convict more trigger-happy officers and police departments establish a less adversarial relationship to the communities they police
.. Second, can we continue the move toward de-incarceration — supported, not that long ago, by Republicans as well as Democrats — without reversing the gains that have made many of our cities safe?
.. we need a social and cultural debate focused on the substance that Colin Kaepernick’s choice of protest unfortunately obscured, and Donald Trump’s flagsploitation has deliberately buried. Not an end to culture war, but a better culture war — in which victory and defeat can be defined, and peace becomes a possibility.
The Health Care Cul-de-Sac
What are the biggest threats to the American Dream right now, to our unity and prosperity, our happiness and civic health?
First, an economic stagnation that we are only just now, eight years into an economic recovery, beginning to escape — a stagnation that has left median incomes roughly flat for almost a generation, encouraged populism on the left and right, and made every kind of polarization that much worse.
First, an economic stagnation that we are only just now, eight years into an economic recovery, beginning to escape — a stagnation that has left median incomes roughly flat for almost a generation, encouraged populism on the left and right, and made every kind of polarization that much worse.
.. And if the Democrats, having blown up the insurance system once to implement Obamacare, really rallied around a Bernie Sanders-style proposal to do it all over again but on a bigger scale? Then not only would 2020 be a health care election, but if the Democrat won, the next two years would be consumed by outlandish single-payer expectations.
Where would that leave our two big problems, stagnation and the social crisis?
.. But when your main challenges involve men who aren’t working, wages that aren’t rising, families that aren’t forming and communities that are collapsing, constantly overhauling health insurance is at best an indirect response, at worst a non sequitur.
.. Democrats, meanwhile, could let single-payer dreams wait (or just die) and think instead about spending that supports work and family directly. They could look at proposals for a larger earned-income tax credit, a family allowance, and let the “job guarantee” and “guaranteed basic income”factions fight things out. If they want to go big in 2020, they could run on wage subsidies and public works, not another disruptive health care vision.
.. The country has bigger problems than its insurance system. It’s time for both parties to act like it.
Ross Douthat: Letting Trump Be Trump
most of the Republican leadership in Congress is opposed to Trumpism, preferring some shriveled thing called “the Ryan agenda” that nobody other than a few thousand of his constituents in a corner of Wisconsin can be plausibly said to have voted for. Worse, significant figures in his Cabinet, and even more in the second and third tiers of his Administration, also reject Trumpism – including, one notes, members of his own family
.. What if, just what if, the fact that Trump has surrounded himself with people (cabinet members and family members alike) who don’t believe in Trumpism, the fact that he has gone along with budgets and health care bills and foreign policy moves that are not obviously congruent with Trumpism, the fact that he generally seems to lack any zeal for a fight when his campaign promises collide with Republican and/or center-left establishment opposition … what if all of this means that he never really believed in Trumpism himself? Or that he never believed in it to the extent required to govern on it, as opposed to just sloganeering on the stump? Or – my basic view at present — that he has a vague but consistent-over-the-years belief that America is getting taken advantage of on trade and defense spending (a theme he apparently returned to today on the European leg of his grand tour), but that he lacks the
- mixture of intellectual curiosity,
- mental creativity,
- seriousness of purpose and
- personal discipline
required to actually make any set of policy ideas his own in the way that a successful populist president would need to do?
.. A talented mountebank with zero policy knowledge who exploited a set of ideas with underappreciated appeal but lacks the aptitude or zeal to implement them, preferring to rage against his cable-news coverage while House backbenchers write “his” budget and the Pentagon conducts “his” foreign policy and the Freedom Caucus amends “his” health care bill to make it still more politically toxic.
.. If this is the case then it’s correct but also a little beside the point to complain about how the wreckers and establishment types and Ryanists are all betraying the voters by submarining Trumpism. The betrayal starts at the top, with a president who doesn’t care enough and probably never really did.
.. But Trump himself is likely to be the primary teacher of that lesson here, and it should have been entirely predictable, from watching the man on the campaign trail and pondering his history, that he was likely to leave many of his supporters more disillusioned than he found them
.. insisting that conservatives or populists must stick with this president no matter his incompetence, lest the establishment prevail and Trumpism go down, becomes a horribly self-defeating sort of loyalty – because it only proves to future politicians, future demagogues, that they too can promise you revolution, deliver only politics-as-usual, and still keep your support.
.. That Trump has any “core principles” beyond self-interest and a certain instinct that America is getting a raw deal is a claim with no foundation in Trump’s business record, personal life or political career.
.. And the idea that the issues Zmirak cares most about – abortion, religious liberty and the persecution of Christians overseas – are also sincerely Trump’s own seems completely implausible, not least because the president himself barely even pretends to fervor on any religious-conservative cause, offering instead a transactionalism that’s almost admirable in its cynicism.
.. it’s striking to me that a writer who has been so cold-eyed and unsentimental about so many institutions that others drape in piety – including his own conservative Catholic subculture — could be so trusting about Trump’s stated commitments and in his celebrity businessman’s capacities.