Ineffably Sad

(Instagram photo)

The assassination of Charlie Kirk, 31, is ineffably sad. I say this, not because I agree with many of Mr. Kirk's views but because a young father of two was shot for his political beliefs. He never called for violence against those who disagreed with him; in fact he encouraged college students to argue with him and abhorred moves to silence opponents of all stripes. (There are hundreds of videos showing his spirited, mostly civil engagements.)

Kirk became well-known for debating students in front of an audience in a public setting, offering a conservative, and often provocative, perspective. Videos of him sparring with liberal-minded students garnered millions of views online. According to videos of the attack, Kirk was debating a student about mass shootings involving transgender people when he was shot.

The act of political violence is a jarring coda to Kirk’s meteoric rise from college dropout to standard-bearer of the MAGA movement. Kirk left an indelible mark on the Republican party, drawing young voters to its ranks and influencing Trump’s presidency.

Kirk was a strong advocate for most of the president’s positions, which he discussed in detail during his podcast The Charlie Kirk Show and other media appearances. His support—and talent as an orator—helped him earn significant political sway with the president, with whom he spoke frequently.

Your humble blogger will not over-react by asserting the end of civil society occurred today; that might well have happened fourteen (14) months ago had then-candidate Trump not escaped with his life. Today's damage was grievous enough. R.i.P.

Picture and Words

National Review editor and writer Reihan Salam likens Donald Trump to Richard Nixon (though probably not in the way that first comes to your mind, dear reader):

Nixon would make peace with the New Deal and with activist government, having concluded that Goldwaterism was a dead end....Nixon believed that America had been betrayed by feckless, out-of-touch elites who had allowed the country to descend into chaos, and he effectively exploited both racial desegregation and crime as wedge issues. He promised to use the power of government on behalf of decent, law-abiding people—but not to dismantle the power of government.

(Reuters / WSJ graphic)

Reihan Salam evaluates major Republican figures over the last half-century across two dimensions: pro/anti-government and pro/anti-elite. Donald Trump and Richard Nixon are the only inhabitants of the pro-government, anti-elite quadrant.

2x2 matrices are both revealing and over-simplifications of reality. For example, Dwight Eisenhower was clearly pro-government in his sponsorship of "a vast network of highways and world-class research universities." However, Ike's most famous speech, his 1961 farewell address, cautioned against the dangers of big government (the military-industrial complex.)

Donald Trump has promoted border security and energy independence, both of which will indeed entail increases in spending.

In the Republican debate from last March Mr. Trump also said that he will reduce government, potentially by a lot:

As president, I will repeal every word of Obamacare. I will pull back the regulators that are killing small businesses.

And we will pass a simple flat tax and abolish the IRS. [snip]

[I will cut] Department of Education. We're cutting Common Core. We're getting rid of Common Core. We're bringing education locally. Department of Environmental Protection. We are going to get rid are of it in almost every form. We're going to have little tidbits left but we're going to take a tremendous amount out.

Richard Nixon not only increased government spending but government's mission by creating the EPA and OSHA. If Donald Trump is to be believed, he will seek to remove some major functions. Let's see if Mr. Salam puts his picture in the same place in four years.

Not an Idiot......Really

Probably the only Big Gulp she's had in years (WSJ video)

Politicians, like parents, always seem a lot smarter after they're out of power. No longer must they state their positions in 15-second sound bites or be afraid to acknowledge that some of the opposing arguments are valid.  No longer will they have to defend party members whose personal behavior is indefensible. They can reveal nuance, flexibility, and self-deprecation.

One politician whose public persona was a media caricature is Sarah Palin. (To be even-handed, another is Joe Biden, the current butt of late night humor.)

Your humble observer is of the opinion that comedy requires at least some intelligence, which Sarah Palin displayed at the recently concluded Conservative Political Action Conference.

At one point, Ms. Palin paused in her rabble-rousing speech to take a big sip from a Big Gulp she pulled out from behind the podium. “Bloomberg’s not around, our Big Gulp’s safe,” she said, a dig at the New York mayor’s attempted ban on large soft drinks. [snip]

She joked that young Republicans ought to be “thinking Sam Adams, not drinking Sam Adams.”

During her defense of the Second Amendment, she spoke admiringly of the gun rack her husband, Todd, bought her for Christmas and the gun she bought him to stock it. “He’s got the rifle. I got the rack,” she quipped.

Mrs. Palin won't be on a national ticket again, and it's anyone's guess where she'll settle in. But just as her VP nomination startled in 2008, she'll surprise us before she's done. © 2013 Stephen Yuen

Well Worth the Effort

Earlier this month author, columnist, and TV commentator George Will lectured at Washington University on religion and politics in American life (hat tip Ann Althouse). It's a sweeping overview that spends as much time in the 18th and 19th centuries as the 20th and 21st, but if one has 30-45 minutes to spare, the text is well worth the effort. Excerpts:

Next comes perhaps the most important word in the Declaration, the word "secure." To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men." Government's primary purpose is to secure pre-existing rights. Government does not create rights. It does not dispense them.

[Woodrow Wilson] criticized [the Declaration of Independence] root and branch, beginning with the doctrine of natural rights.

His criticism began there precisely because that doctrine dictates limited government, which he considered a cramped, unscientific understanding of the new possibilities of politics. Wilson disparaged the doctrine of natural rights as "Fourth of July sentiments." He did so because this doctrine limited progressives'' plans to make government more scientific in the service of a politics that is more ambitious.

Progressives tend to exalt the role of far-sighted leaders, and hence to exalt the role of the president. This, too, puts them at odds with the Founders.

The words "leader" or "leaders' appears just 13 times in the Federalist Papers. Once is a reference to those who led the Revolution. The other dozen times are all in contexts of disparagement. The Founders were wary of the people's potential for irrational and unruly passions, and therefore were wary of leaders who would seek to ascend to power by arousing waves of such passions.

William F. Buckley, Jr. wrote in 1955 that the purpose of his conservative magazine, the National Review, was to "stand[] athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it." After Mr. Buckley's passing, there are very few individuals with the heft and intellectual chops to stand against the tidal expansion of government and its overwhelming support from academia, entertainment, and mass media. One such voice is George Will; may he live long and prosper.

Not So Dumb After All

Bay Area residents whose politics are right-of-center (the center being quite to the left of the rest of the country) have learned to stay in the closet. They smile when jokes are made about conservative politicians, Mormons, and Southern Baptists. Their car bumpers are a politics-free zone for the sake of vehicular preservation. They refrain from questioning the dogma of anthropogenic global warming climate change, and quietly endure the chortling over scientific studies that "prove" that liberals are more intelligent that conservatives.

It was therefore startling to read yesterday's column by Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times:

Conservatives may not like liberals, but they seem to understand them. In contrast, many liberals find conservative voters not just wrong but also bewildering. [snip]

Moderates and conservatives were adept at guessing how liberals would answer questions. Liberals, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal,” were least able to put themselves in the minds of their adversaries and guess how conservatives would answer.

Now a fascinating new book comes along that, to a liberal like myself, helps demystify the right — and illuminates the kind of messaging that might connect with voters of all stripes. “The Righteous Mind,” by Jonathan Haidt, a University of Virginia psychology professor, argues that, for liberals, morality is largely a matter of three values: caring for the weak, fairness and liberty. Conservatives share those concerns (although they think of fairness and liberty differently) and add three others: loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity.

Nicholas Kristof analogizes the ability to grasp other world views to an ability to speak other languages [bold added]:

Another way of putting it is this: Americans speak about values in six languages, from care to sanctity. Conservatives speak all six, but liberals are fluent in only three. And some (me included) mostly use just one, care for victims.

One sign of empathy is the ability to put oneself in another's shoes. It would be asking too much for Mr. Kristof to take the final step and admit that conservatives as a group evidence an admirable personal quality in a greater quantity than liberals (like charitable giving) but at least he makes a start.

[Update - related: there's now evidence that real bilingualism increases intelligence.

The bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks.]

The Basis of Drama

David Mamet:

The basis of drama....is the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realizes that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilization and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable. The example Aristotle uses, of course, is Oedipus.

No Recognition

Speaking of liberal condescension, we are approaching the third anniversary of a prominent example-- Ellen Goodman’s column on climate change in the February 7, 2007 Boston Globe. Excerpts follow, with especially choice passages in bold:

By every measure, the U N 's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change raises the level of alarm. The fact of global warming is "unequivocal." The certainty of the human role is now somewhere over 90 percent. Which is about as certain as scientists ever get.

I would like to say we're at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let's just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.

There are astonishing gaps between Republican science and Democratic science. Try these numbers: Only 23 percent of college-educated Republicans believe the warming is due to humans, while 75 percent of college-educated Democrats believe it.

This great divide comes from the science-be-damned-and-debunked attitude of the Bush administration and its favorite media outlets. The day of the report, Big Oil Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma actually described it as "a shining example of the corruption of science for political gain." Speaking of corruption of science, the American Enterprise Institute, which has gotten $1.6 million over the years from Exxon Mobil, offered $10,000 last summer to scientists who would counter the IPCC report.

This works for some. But a lot of social science research tells us something else. As Ross Gelbspan, author of "The Heat is On," says, "when people are confronted with an overwhelming threat and don't see a solution, it makes them feel impotent. So they shrug it off or go into deliberate denial."

Ms. Goodman and her ilk aren't wrong necessarily; the record snowfalls burying the Atlantic coast don't disprove anthropogenic global warming. But developments since her column was written--the falsification of climate data, the manipulation of computer models, the substitution of conjecture as fact about glacial and rain-forest recession--should at least merit an apology from her for the calumnies ["Holocaust deniers"] heaped upon those who had questioned the "settled science." But such an apology from a dyed-in-the-wool liberal is as likely as her recognition that the President's call for civility applies to her as well as conservatives.

Irish Eyes

Irish journalist and film-maker Phelim McAleer on the Dennis Miller show:

I came to America looking for right-wingers obsessed with bedrooms and sex. Then I discovered all these left-wingers and liberals obsessed with every other room in the house.

They want to know what's in your fridge, is it bottled water, how much electricity your fridge uses, what's in your thermostat? How [do] you insulate your attic? What's in your garage? What's your car? They even want to know what's in your lightbulb, what's in your lamp?

In the tradition of de Tocqueville, some of the keenest observations about America are made by outsiders.