Politics

[Irish#1]

I doubt anything is going to happen with Mueller anyway.

Agree, I would have thought DJT would have done it already if he was going to do it.

 

[Legacy]

The constitutional question of firing Mueller and separation of power would be decided in SCOTUS, I imagine, should it come to that. I am not comfortable with the implications of a President having no check on his Executive power except impeachment going forward. Trump's lawyers assert that the President cannot obstruct justice in an investigation into collusion with a foreign power. With that in mind, Clinton - or any future President - could have fired Starr as Nixon did with Archibald Cox and not appeared before the Grand Jury. SCOTUS unanimously determined that Nixon could not claim executive privilege in denying the Watergate tapes. We don't know what motivated a bipartisan Judiciary Committee to vote to protect the Counsel or testimony in closed door sessions. Let's just hope it never comes to a firing or we have a Watergate all over again. Should recent Justices for SCOTUS have discussed this with Trump, they would need to recuse themselves. Perhaps Kavanaugh would need to recuse himself since he was part of the Starr investigation. As far as bipartisan oversight, that would be a concern if an acting Attorney General were to fire Mueller. That precedent would be unpalatable. So, we are probably in agreement as far as the direction of this and red lines crossed whether the President wants this or not.

 

[Irish YJ]

Murphy Brown got the hook already due to shitty ratings, shortly after their anit Trump/ICE show.

Kinda funny that they actually admitted before the premier that the show was only brought back because Trump was elected, and wanted to be anti Trump...

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Mark Lilla just published a surprisingly even-handed article in the New York Review of Books on Marion Marechal titled "Two Roads for the New French Right":

Last February the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held its convention in Washington, D.C. This annual gathering is a kind of right-wing Davos where insiders and wannabes come to see what’s new. The opening speaker, not so new, was Vice President Mike Pence. The next speaker, very new, was a stylish Frenchwoman still in her twenties named Marion Maréchal-Le Pen.

Marion, as she is widely called in France, is a granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the far-right National Front party, and a niece of Marine Le Pen, its current president. The French first encountered Marion as a child, beaming in her grandfather’s arms in his campaign posters (see illustration on page 46), and she has never disappeared from the public scene. In 2012, at the age of twenty-two, she entered Parliament as the youngest deputy since the French Revolution. But she decided not to run for reelection in 2017, on the pretext that she wanted to spend more time with her family. Instead she’s been making big plans.1

Her performance at CPAC was unusual, and one wonders what the early morning audience made of her. Unlike her hotheaded grandfather and aunt, Marion is always calm and collected, sounds sincere, and is intellectually inclined. In a slight, charming French accent she began by contrasting the independence of the United States with France’s “subjection” to the EU, as a member of which, she claimed, it is unable to set its own economic and foreign policy or to defend its borders against illegal immigration and the presence of an Islamic “counter-society” on its territory.

But then she set out in a surprising direction. Before a Republican audience of private property absolutists and gun rights fanatics she attacked the principle of individualism, proclaiming that the “reign of egoism” was at the bottom of all our social ills. As an example she pointed to a global economy that turns foreign workers into slaves and throws domestic workers out of jobs. She then closed by extolling the virtues of tradition, invoking a maxim often attributed to Gustav Mahler: “Tradition is not the cult of ashes, it is the transmission of fire.” Needless to say, this was the only reference by a CPAC speaker to a nineteenth-century German composer.

Something new is happening on the European right, and it involves more than xenophobic populist outbursts. Ideas are being developed, and transnational networks for disseminating them are being established. Journalists have treated as a mere vanity project Steve Bannon’s efforts to bring European populist parties and thinkers together under the umbrella of what he calls The Movement. But his instincts, as in American politics, are in tune with the times. (Indeed, one month after Marion’s appearance at CPAC, Bannon addressed the annual convention of the National Front.) In countries as diverse as France, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Germany, and Italy, efforts are underway to develop a coherent ideology that would mobilize Europeans angry about immigration, economic dislocation, the European Union, and social liberalization, and then use that ideology to govern. Now is the time to start paying attention to the ideas of what seems to be an evolving right-wing Popular Front. France is a good place to start.

The French left, attached to republican secularism, has never had much feel for Catholic life and is often caught unawares when a line has been crossed. In early 1984 the government of François Mitterrand proposed a law that would have brought Catholic schools under greater government control and pressured their teachers to become public employees. That June nearly a million Catholics marched in Paris in protest, and many more throughout the country. Mitterrand’s prime minister, Pierre Mauroy, was forced to resign, and the proposal was withdrawn. It was an important moment for lay Catholics, who discovered that despite the official secularism of the French state they remained a cultural force, and sometimes could be a political one.

In 1999 the government of Gaullist president Jacques Chirac passed legislation creating a new legal status, dubbed a pacte civil de solidarité (civil solidarity pact, or PACS), for long-term couples who required legal protections regarding inheritance and other end-of-life issues but did not want to get married. Coming not long after the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the PACS was largely conceived to help the gay community but soon became popular with heterosexual couples wanting a more easily dissolved bond. The number of straight couples pacsés annually is now approaching the number of those getting married, and the arrangement for gays and lesbians is uncontroversial.

To build on that success, during his campaign for the French presidency in 2012 the Socialist candidate François Hollande promised to legalize same-sex marriage and open up adoption and additional rights to gay and lesbian couples. Mariage Pour Tous—marriage for everyone—was the slogan. Once in office Hollande moved to fulfill his campaign promise, but he repeated Mitterrand’s mistake by failing to anticipate the strong right-wing reaction against it. Shortly after his inauguration, a network of laypeople drawn heavily from Catholic Pentecostal prayer groups began to form. They called themselves La Manif Pour Tous—the Demonstration for Everyone.

By January 2013, just before Parliament approved gay marriage, La Manif was able to draw over 300,000 people to a demonstration opposing it in Paris, stunning the government and the media. What especially surprised them was the ludic atmosphere of the protest, which was more like a gay pride parade than a pilgrimage to Compostela. There were lots of young people marching, but rather than rainbow banners they waved pink and blue ones representing boys and girls. Slogans on the placards had a May ’68 lilt: François resist, prove you exist. To top it off, the spokeswoman for La Manif was a flamboyantly dressed comedienne and performance artist who goes by the name Frigide Barjot and played in a band called the Dead Pompidous.

Where did these people come from? After all, France is no longer a Catholic country, or so we’re told. While it’s true that fewer and fewer French people baptize their children and attend mass, nearly two thirds still identify as Catholic, and roughly 40 percent of those declare themselves to be “practicing,” whatever that means. More importantly, as a Pew study found last year, those French who do identify as Catholic—especially those who attend Mass regularly—are significantly more right-wing in their political views than those who do not.

This is consistent with trends in Eastern Europe, where Pew found that Orthodox Christian self-identification has actually been rising, along with nationalism, confounding post-1989 expectations. That may indicate that the relationship between religious and political identification is reversing in Europe—that it is no longer religious affiliation that helps determine one’s political views, but one’s political views that help determine whether one self-identifies as religious. The prerequisites for a European Christian nationalist movement may be falling into place, as Hungarian president Viktor Orbán has long been predicting.

Whatever motivated the many thousands of Catholics who participated in the original Manif and similar demonstrations across France, it soon bore political fruit.2 Some of its leaders quickly formed a political action group called Sens Commun, which, though small, nearly helped to elect a president in 2017. Its preferred candidate was François Fillon, a straitlaced former prime minister and practicing conservative Catholic who vocally supported La Manif and had close ties to Sens Commun. He was explicit about his religious views during the primary of his party, the Republicans, at the end of 2016—opposing marriage, adoption, and surrogacy for gay and lesbian couples—and surprised everyone by winning. Fillon came out of the primary with very high poll numbers, and given the Socialists’ deep unpopularity after the Hollande years and the inability of the National Front to gain the support of more than one third of the French electorate, many considered him the front-runner.

But just as Fillon began his national campaign, Le Canard enchaîné, a newspaper that mixes satire with investigative journalism, revealed that his wife had received over half a million euros for no-show jobs over the years, and that he had accepted a number of favors from businessmen, including—Paul Manafort–style—suits costing tens of thousands of euros. For a man running on the slogan “the courage of truth,” it was a disaster. He was indicted, staff abandoned him, but he refused to drop out of the race. This provided an opening for the eventual victor, the centrist Emmanuel Macron. But we should bear in mind that despite the scandal, Fillon won 20 percent of the first-round votes, compared to Macron’s 24 and Marine Le Pen’s 21 percent. Had he not imploded, there is a good chance that he would be president and we would be telling ourselves very different stories about what’s really going on in Europe today.

The Catholic right’s campaign against same-sex marriage was doomed to fail, and it did. A large majority of the French support same-sex marriage, although only about seven thousand couples avail themselves of it each year. Yet there are reasons to think that the experience of La Manif could affect French politics for some time to come.

The first reason is that it revealed an unoccupied ideological space between the mainstream Republicans and the National Front. Journalists tend to present an overly simple picture of populism in contemporary European politics. They imagine there is a clear line separating legacy conservative parties like the Republicans, which have made their peace with the neoliberal European order, from xenophobic populist ones like the National Front, which would bring down the EU, destroy liberal institutions, and drive out as many immigrants and especially Muslims as possible.

These journalists have had trouble imagining that there might be a third force on the right that is not represented by either the establishment parties or the xenophobic populists. This narrowness of vision has made it difficult for even seasoned observers to understand the supporters of La Manif, who mobilized around what Americans call social issues and feel they have no real political home today. The Republicans have no governing ideology apart from globalist economics and worship of the state, and in keeping with their Gaullist secular heritage have traditionally treated moral and religious issues as strictly personal, at least until Fillon’s anomalous candidacy. The National Front is nearly as secular and even less ideologically coherent, having served more as a refuge for history’s detritus—Vichy collaborators, resentful pieds noirs driven out of Algeria, Joan of Arc romantics, Jew- and Muslim-haters, skinheads—than as a party with a positive program for France’s future. A mayor once close to it now aptly calls it the “Dien Bien Phu right.”

The other reason La Manif might continue to matter is that it proved to be a consciousness-raising experience for a group of sharp young intellectuals, mainly Catholic conservatives, who see themselves as the avant-garde of this third force. In the last five years they have become a media presence, writing in newspapers like Le Figaro and newsweeklies like Le Point and Valeurs actuelles (Contemporary Values), founding new magazines and websites (Limite, L’Incorrect), publishing books, and making regular television appearances. People are paying attention, and a sound, impartial book on them has just appeared.3

Whether anything politically significant will come out of this activity is difficult to know, given that intellectual fashions in France change about as quickly as the plat du jour. This past summer I spent some time reading and meeting these young writers in Paris and discovered more of an ecosystem than a cohesive, disciplined movement. Still, it was striking how serious they are and how they differ from American conservatives. They share two convictions: that a robust conservatism is the only coherent alternative to what they call the neoliberal cosmopolitanism of our time, and that resources for such a conservatism can be found on both sides of the traditional left–right divide. More surprising still, they are all fans of Bernie Sanders.

The intellectual ecumenism of these writers is apparent in their articles, which come peppered with references to George Orwell, the mystical writer-activist Simone Weil, the nineteenth-century anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, the young Marx, the ex-Marxist Catholic philosopher Alasdair Macintyre, and especially the politically leftist, culturally conservative American historian Christopher Lasch, whose bons mots—“uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots”—get repeated like mantras. They predictably reject the European Union, same-sex marriage, and mass immigration. But they also reject unregulated global financial markets, neoliberal austerity, genetic modification, consumerism, and AGFAM (Apple-Google-Facebook-Amazon-Microsoft).

That mélange may sound odd to our ears, but it is far more consistent than the positions of contemporary American conservatives. Continental conservatism going back to the nineteenth century has always rested on an organic conception of society. It sees Europe as a single Christian civilization composed of different nations with distinct languages and customs. These nations are composed of families, which are organisms, too, with differing but complementary roles and duties for mothers, fathers, and children. On this view, the fundamental task of society is to transmit knowledge, morality, and culture to future generations, perpetuating the life of the civilizational organism. It is not to serve an agglomeration of autonomous individuals bearing rights.

Most of these young French conservatives’ arguments presume this organic conception. Why do they consider the European Union a danger? Because it rejects the cultural-religious foundation of Europe and tries to found it instead on the economic self-interest of individuals. To make matters worse, they suggest, the EU has encouraged the immigration of people from a different and incompatible civilization (Islam), stretching old bonds even further. Then, rather than fostering self-determination and a healthy diversity among nations, the EU has been conducting a slow coup d’état in the name of economic efficiency and homogenization, centralizing power in Brussels. Finally, in putting pressure on countries to conform to onerous fiscal policies that only benefit the rich, the EU has prevented them from taking care of their most vulnerable citizens and maintaining social solidarity. Now, in their view, the family must fend for itself in an economic world without borders, in a culture that willfully ignores its needs. Unlike their American counterparts, who celebrate the economic forces that most put “the family” they idealize under strain, the young French conservatives apply their organic vision to the economy as well, arguing that it must be subordinate to social needs.

Most surprising for an American reader is the strong environmentalism of these young writers, who entertain the notion that conservatives should, well, conserve. Their best journal is the colorful, well-designed quarterly Limite, which is subtitled “a review of integral ecology” and publishes criticism of neoliberal economics and environmental degradation as severe as anything one finds on the American left. (No climate denial here.) Some writers are no-growth advocates; others are reading Proudhon and pushing for a decentralized economy of local collectives. Others still have left the city and write about their experiences running organic farms, while denouncing agribusiness, genetically modified crops, and suburbanization along the way. They all seem inspired by Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato si’ (2015), a comprehensive statement of Catholic social teaching on the environment and economic justice.

Coming out of La Manif, these young conservatives’ views on family and sexuality are traditionalist Catholic. But the arguments they make for them are strictly secular. In making the case for a return to older norms they point to real problems: dropping rates of family formation, delayed child-bearing, rising rates of single parenthood, adolescents steeped in porn and confused about their sexuality, and harried parents and children eating separately while checking their phones. All this, they argue, is the result of our radical individualism, which blinds us to the social need for strong, stable families. What these young Catholics can’t see is that gay couples wanting to wed and have children are looking to create such families and to transmit their values to another generation. There is no more conservative instinct.

A number of young women have been promoting what they call an “alter-feminism” that rejects what they see as the “career fetishism” of contemporary feminism, which unwittingly reinforces the capitalist ideology that slaving for a boss is freedom. They are in no way arguing that women should stay home if they don’t want to; rather they think women need a more realistic image of themselves than contemporary capitalism and feminism give them. Marianne Durano, in her recent book Mon corps ne vous appartient pas (My Body Does Not Belong to You), puts it this way:

We are the victims of a worldview in which we are supposed to live it up until the age of 25, then work like fiends from 25 to 40 (the age when you’re at the bottom of the professional scrap heap), avoid commitments and having children before 30. All of this goes completely against the rhythm of women’s lives.

Eugénie Bastié, another alter-feminist, takes on Simone de Beauvoir in her book Adieu mademoiselle. She praises the first-wave feminist struggle for achieving equal legal rights for women, but criticizes Beauvoir and subsequent French feminists for “disembodying” women, treating them as thinking and desiring creatures but not as reproducing ones who, by and large, eventually want husbands and families.

Whatever one thinks of these conservative ideas about society and the economy, they form a coherent worldview. The same cannot really be said about the establishment left and right in Europe today. The left opposes the uncontrolled fluidity of the global economy and wants to rein it in on behalf of workers, while it celebrates immigration, multiculturalism, and fluid gender roles that large numbers of workers reject. The establishment right reverses those positions, denouncing the free circulation of people for destabilizing society, while promoting the free circulation of capital, which does exactly that. These French conservatives criticize uncontrolled fluidity in both its neoliberal and cosmopolitan forms.

But what exactly do they propose instead? Like Marxists in the past who were vague about what communism would actually entail, they seem less concerned with defining the order they have in mind than with working to establish it. Though they are only a small group with no popular following, they are already asking themselves grand strategic questions. (The point of little magazines is to think big in them.) Could one restore organic connections between individuals and families, families and nations, nations and civilization? If so, how? Through direct political action? By seeking political power directly? Or by finding a way to slowly transform Western culture from within, as a prelude to establishing a new politics? Most of these writers think they need to change minds first. That is why they can’t seem to get through an article, or even a meal, without mentioning Antonio Gramsci.

Gramsci, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, died in 1937 after a long imprisonment in Mussolini’s jails, and left behind mounds of notebooks with fertile thoughts on politics and culture. He is best remembered today for the concept of “cultural hegemony”—the idea that capitalism is not only sustained by the relation of forces of production, as Marx thought, but also by cultural assumptions that serve as enablers, weakening the will to resist. His experience with Italian workers convinced him that unless they were freed from Catholic beliefs about sin, fate, and authority, they would never rise up and make revolution. That necessitated a new class of engaged intellectuals who would work as a counter-hegemonic force to undermine the dominant culture and to shape an alternative one that the working class could migrate to.

I don’t have the impression that these young writers have made their way through Gramsci’s multivolume Prison Notebooks. Instead he’s invoked as a kind of conversational talisman to signal that the person writing or speaking is a cultural activist, not just an observer. But what would counter-hegemony actually require? Up until this point I have portrayed these young conservatives, perhaps a little too neatly, as sharing a general outlook and set of principles. But as soon as Lenin’s old question comes up—What is to be done?—important and consequential divergences among them become apparent. Two styles of conservative engagement seem to be developing.

If you read a magazine like Limite, you get the impression that conservative counter-hegemony would involve leaving the city for a small town or village, getting involved in local schools, parishes, and environmental associations, and especially raising children with conservative values—in other words, becoming an example of an alternative way of living. This ecological conservativism appears open, generous, and rooted in everyday life, as well as in traditional Catholic social teachings.

But if you read publications like the daily Figaro, Valeurs actuelles, and especially the confrontational L’Incorrect, you get another impression altogether. There the conservatism is aggressive, dismissive of contemporary culture, and focused on waging a Kulturkampf against the 1968 generation, a particular obsession. As Jacques de Guillebon, the thirty-nine-year-old editor of L’Incorrect, put it in his magazine, “The legitimate heirs of ’68…will end collapsing into the latrines of post-cisgender, transracial, blue-haired boredom…. The end is near.” To bring it about, another writer suggested, “we need a right with a real project that is revolutionary, identitarian, and reactionary, capable of attracting the working and middle classes.” This group, though not overtly racist, is deeply suspicious of Islam, which the Limite writers never mention. Not just of radical Islamism, or Muslim men’s treatment of women, or the refusal of some Muslim students to study evolution—all genuine issues—but even of moderate, assimilated Islam.4

All this grand talk of an open culture war would hardly be worth taking seriously except for the fact that the combative wing of this group now has the ear of Marion Maréchal. Marion used to be difficult to place ideologically. She was more socially conservative than the National Front leadership but more neoliberal in economics. That’s changed. In her speech at CPAC she spoke in culture war terms, giving La Manif as an example of the readiness of young French conservatives to “take back their country.” And she described their aims in the language of social organicism:

Without the nation, without the family, without the limits of the common good, natural law and collective morality disappear as the reign of egoism continues. Today even children have become merchandise. We hear in public debates that we have the right to order a child from a catalogue, we have the right to rent a woman’s womb…. Is this the freedom that we want? No. We don’t want this atomized world of individuals without gender, without fathers, without mothers, and without nation.

She then continued in a Gramscian vein:

Our fight cannot only take place in elections. We need to convey our ideas through the media, culture, and education to stop the domination of the liberals and socialists. We have to train leaders of tomorrow, those who will have courage, the determination, and the skills to defend the interests of their people.

Then she surprised everyone in France by announcing to an American audience that she was starting a private graduate school to do just that. Three months later her Institute of Social, Economic, and Political Sciences (ISSEP) opened in Lyon, with the aim, Marion said, of displacing the culture that dominates our “nomadic, globalized, deracinated liberal system.” It is basically a business school but will supposedly offer great books courses in philosophy, literature, history, and rhetoric, as well as practical ones on management and “political and cultural combat.” The person responsible for establishing the curriculum is Jacques de Guillebon.

Not many of the French writers and journalists I know are taking these intellectual developments very seriously. They prefer to cast the young conservatives and their magazines as witting and unwitting soldiers in Marine Le Pen’s campaign to “de-demonize” the National Front, rather than as a potential third force. I think they are wrong not to pay attention, much as they were wrong not to take the free-market ideology of Reagan and Thatcher seriously back in the 1980s. The left has an old, bad habit of underestimating its adversaries and explaining away their ideas as mere camouflage for despicable attitudes and passions. Such attitudes and passions may be there, but ideas have an autonomous power to shape and channel, to moderate or inflame them.

And these conservative ideas could have repercussions beyond France’s borders. One possibility is that a renewed, more classical organic conservatism could serve as a moderating force in European democracies currently under stress. There are many who feel buffeted by the forces of the global economy, frustrated by the inability of governments to control the flow of illegal immigration, resentful of EU rules, and uncomfortable with rapidly changing moral codes regarding matters like sexuality. Until now these concerns have only been addressed, and then exploited, by far-right populist demagogues. If there is a part of the electorate that simply dreams of living in a more stable, less fluid world, economically and culturally—people who are not primarily driven by xenophobic anti-elitism—then a moderate conservative movement might serve as a bulwark against the alt-right furies by stressing tradition, solidarity, and care for the earth.

A different scenario is that the aggressive form of conservatism that one also sees in France would serve instead as a powerful tool for building a pan-European reactionary Christian nationalism along the lines laid out in the early twentieth century by Charles Maurras, the French anti-Semitic champion of “integral nationalism” who became the master thinker of Vichy. It is one thing to convince populist leaders in Western and Eastern Europe today that they have common practical interests and should work together, as Steve Bannon is trying to do. It is quite another, more threatening thing to imagine those leaders having a developed ideology at their disposal for recruiting young cadres and cultural elites and connecting them at the Continental level for joint political action.

If all French eyes are not on Marion, they should be. Marion is not her grandfather, though within the soap-operatic Le Pen family she defends him. Nor is she her aunt, who is crude and corrupt, and whose efforts to put new lipstick on the family party have failed. Nor, I think, will her fortunes be tied to those of the Rassemblement National né Front National. Emmanuel Macron has shown that a “movement” disdaining mainline parties can win elections in France (though perhaps not govern and get reelected). If Marion were to launch such a movement and make it revolve around herself as Macron has done, she could very well gather the right together while seeming personally to transcend it. Then she would be poised to work in concert with governing right-wing parties in other countries.

Modern history has taught us that ideas promoted by obscure intellectuals writing in little magazines have a way of escaping the often benign intentions of their champions. There are two lessons we might draw from that history when reading the new young French intellectuals on the right. First, distrust conservatives in a hurry. Second, brush up your Gramsci.

 

[ACamp1900]

They don't connect to some because they're too smart for the unwashed... yet 90% of their messaging is dumbed down emotionally based garbage, and she apparently thinks they need more of it... I loved the 'not manipulative' comment too, L. O freakin L.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/dec/5/mazie-hirono-we-democrats-know-so-much-we-tend-ali/

 

[NorthDakota]

They don't connect to some because they're too smart for the unwashed... yet 90% of their messaging is dumbed down emotionally based garbage, and she apparently thinks they need more of it... I loved the 'not manipulative' comment too, L. O freakin L.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/dec/5/mazie-hirono-we-democrats-know-so-much-we-tend-ali/

LMAO I was literally thinking the same thing. The entire allure of left leaning policies are either support for big government...OR....an emotional appeal. She's an idiot.

 

[ulukinatme]

Murphy Brown got the hook already due to shitty ratings, shortly after their anit Trump/ICE show.

Kinda funny that they actually admitted before the premier that the show was only brought back because Trump was elected, and wanted to be anti Trump...

Alec Baldwin's show is soon to be canned too. It had abysmal ratings when it aired. They moved it to a different time/night and it resumes in two days, but it's going to need a miracle to keep going it looks like.

 

[Irish YJ]

Alec Baldwin's show is soon to be canned too. It had abysmal ratings when it aired. They moved it to a different time/night and it resumes in two days, but it's going to need a miracle to keep going it looks like.

No reviving that corpse lol...

Love that Rosanne's premier was a huge success until she got the ax. If she could have kept her trap shut, she'd be dusting on these snowflake retreads and angry men. Still can't believe how many passes Baldwin continuously gets. He punches a dude over a parking space. It's OK to punch a guy I guess.

 

[ACamp1900]

No reviving that corpse lol...

Love that Rosanne's premier was a huge success until she got the ax. If she could have kept her trap shut, she'd be dusting on these snowflake retreads and angry men. Still can't believe how many passes Baldwin continuously gets. He punches a dude over a parking space. It's OK to punch a guy if you're a lefty I guess.

fixed

 

[Irish YJ]

fixed

#true....

i still can't get past that leaked recording of him screaming at his kid.
such a douche

 

[EddytoNow]

Alec Baldwin's show is soon to be canned too. It had abysmal ratings when it aired. They moved it to a different time/night and it resumes in two days, but it's going to need a miracle to keep going it looks like.

No problem with his show being cancelled. But he's got to stay with SNL and his portrayal of the Orange Man.

 

[NorthDakota]

No problem with his show being cancelled. But he's got to stay with SNL and his portrayal of the Orange Man.

LMAO you are so predictable. This guy is literally NPC AF.

 

[Legacy]

Two articles on Comey testimony. Comey had initiated a lawsuit because he was concerned that a partisan version of his testimony would be reported in the media and that he would be muzzled. They reached an agreement that Comey would be able to speak about his testimony after 24 hrs. We'll have to wait to see what questions the DOJ lawyer advised him not to answer. Comey wanted to testify in public.

Ex-FBI Director James Comey meeting with House committee behind closed doors (CNN, 38 minutes ago)

Former FBI Director James Comey is testifying Friday before members of Congress behind closed doors, setting the stage for him to spar with Republicans who have investigated the agency's probes into Hillary Clinton's private email server and Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Comey had fought the congressional subpoena in court, pushing for a public hearing before settling for some concessions. A transcript of the interview with members of the House Judiciary Committee will be released as soon as possible, perhaps in the next 24 hours.

When asked why they did not want Comey to testify in public as he requested, North Carolina Republican Rep. Mark Meadows, who will be taking part in the questioning, said they often discuss classified intelligence. "We would be giving him a pass that I don't think he deserves," added Meadows.

Lawyers stopping Comey from answering questions in Hill testimony, Issa says (Fox, 40 minutes ago)

"One of the disappointments of this deposition so far has been the amount of times in which the FBI believes that Congress doesn’t have a right to know," Issa said.

Issa said Comey has two attorneys, including one from the DOJ, who have “instructed” the former FBI director not to answer “a great many questions that are clearly items at the core of our investigation.” Issa said the instructions have been followed with Comey’s “gleeful acceptance.”

"The Department of Justice is going to have to agree to allow him to come back and answer a great many questions that currently he is not answering," Issa said.

Comey, who may publicly speak at some point Friday, initially fought the committee’s subpoena to appear in court but finally forged an agreement to appear. The committee is expected to release a transcript of the interview, perhaps as early as Saturday.

"The details of what's going on in there will remain private until after the deposition," Issa said. "... [T]here is an amazing amount of things that reasonably the public will need to know that the Department of Justice and FBI attorney are guiding him not to answer."

The Front page headline of the above Fox article has a different headline: "Comey Clams Up: Lawmakers Fume as 'Gleeful' ex-FBI boss is silenced by DOJ Lawyer"

 

[MJ12666]

Two articles on Comey testimony. Comey had initiated a lawsuit because he was concerned that a partisan version of his testimony would be reported in the media and that he would be muzzled. They reached an agreement that Comey would be able to release all the unredacted testimony after 24 hrs. We'll have to wait until tomorrow to see what questions the DOJ lawyer advised him not to answer. Comey wanted to testify in public.

Ex-FBI Director James Comey meeting with House committee behind closed doors (CNN, 38 minutes ago)


Lawyers stopping Comey from answering questions in Hill testimony, Issa says (Fox, 40 minutes ago)



The Front page headline of the above Fox article has a different headline: "Comey Clams Up: Lawmakers Fume as 'Gleeful' ex-FBI boss is silenced by DOJ Lawyer"

They put "Gleeful" in quotes because that is how Issa described Comey's response to the DOJ lawyer advising him (Comey) not to answer the question.

 

[Legacy]

They put "Gleeful" in quotes because that is how Issa described Comey's response to the DOJ lawyer advising him (Comey) not to answer the question.

Clearly. Isn't that characterization the point?

 

[Irish YJ]

Public hearings guarantee an easy out for witnesses to not answer. Closed door hearings are suppose to enable them to answer with "classified" or protected detail. Sounds like the FBI and DOJ think they are not accountable to Congress (or really anyone). Nothing but a stall tactic to make it to the new Congress.

 

[Legacy]

The agreement reached between the House Judiciary Committee chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), last week was that transcript for Comey's closed door testimony would be released and that Comey would not be bound by the confidentiality agreement so that he too could speak after he testifies if he agreed to appear. I imagine any classified information would be redacted or off-limits. However, I do see that the closed door testimony may well be used by the new Congress on some matters, perhaps negotiated by lawyers for the witnesses like with DJT, Jr., and that they too may advise their client not to answer certain questions.

 

[Irish YJ]

The agreement reached between the House Judiciary Committee chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), last week was that transcript for Comey's closed door testimony would be released and that Comey would not be bound by the confidentiality agreement so that he too could speak after he testifies if he agreed to appear. I imagine any classified information would be redacted or off-limits. However, I do see that the closed door testimony may well be used by the new Congress on some matters, perhaps negotiated by lawyers for the witnesses like with DJT, Jr., and that they too may advise their client not to answer certain questions.

Comey got the best of the agreement. Asked for transparency for what he wanted, but didn't answer any questions he didn't want to.

If the transcript shows him not answering Qs on Clinton, the dossier, or the FISA warrants, he's going to look bad regardless.

 

[connor_in]

Thank goodness there is no such thing as voter fraud

https://twitchy.com/sarahd-313035/2018/12/10/holy-sht-chicago-dems-caught-committing-epic-fraud-and-theyll-likely-get-away-with-it/

 

[Legacy]

The Woman Who Made Denver the Nation’s Best Place to Vote
(Governing Magazine)

Every year since 1994, Governing has honored individual state and local government officials for outstanding accomplishment by naming them Public Officials of the Year. Elected, appointed and career officials from any branch of state or local government are eligible. Our readers are invited to nominate individuals who have had a notable positive impact on their department or agency, community or state.

Governing annually receives several hundred nominations from individuals in the public and private sectors. In addition, Governing staff consults experts and scholars in the field, and also nominates outstanding individuals they encounter in the course of their work. Nominations are evaluated by a selection committee, which, after painstaking research, chooses the winners.

Two of the biggest problems our election system faces are keeping the voting process secure and boosting dismal voter participation. To Amber McReynolds, both of those problems have the same solution: better customer service. In seven years managing elections in Denver, McReynolds used technology and common sense to improve turnout and lower costs -- all while turning Denver into a national model of reform for election security. Her strategy was to make the process as simple and easy as possible for those casting the votes. “The entire elections process was never designed with the voters’ interest first,” McReynolds says. “It was designed for political parties and campaigns.”

During her tenure, which spanned 13 years at the elections division, Denver has been a veritable testing ground for improving the voter experience. Early on, McReynolds was instrumental in making Denver the first municipality to adopt Ballot TRACE, a tracking system for voters who mail in their ballots. The program, which has since been adopted by other municipalities, came about in response to the many calls McReynolds’ office received from voters on Election Day about the status of their mail-in ballots. Ballot TRACE works like a package tracking service. It notifies Denver voters of when their ballot has been printed, mailed, delivered and eventually received by the elections division. The approach is working -- after it was implemented, Denver’s call volume on Election Day went down by 90 percent.

That was just the beginning of innovations that have targeted the entire election process. For campaigners, McReynolds introduced a signature-gathering app called eSign so candidates and petitioners can collect electronic signatures on tablets and get instant verifications of the signatures’ validity. In 2015, McReynolds and her team launched a new voting system using scanners, printers and touchscreen tablets. Not only are these commercial products more familiar and intuitive to most voters, but the tablets come at one-tenth of the price of a standard voting machine. And Denver was one of five counties to pioneer a first-in-the-nation “risk-limiting audit,” a cheaper way to validate election results and one that was eventually adopted statewide.

McReynolds’ approach has increased participation in the election process while lowering overall costs. In the 2016 general election, turnout in Denver was at 72 percent -- up six points from 2008 and 10 points higher than the national average. Meanwhile, costs had decreased by one-third, to $4.15 per voter.

In 2013, McReynolds was a key player in bringing about change at the state level. Reforms she helped design require a ballot to be mailed to all registered voters, and extend voter registration through Election Day. “Elections are for the most part run by local officials and they’re the ones who can make the biggest difference,” says Jonathan Brater of the Brennan Center for Justice. “Amber’s an example of someone who can bring the importance of that discussion to state and other policy officials.”

This summer, McReynolds made the leap from administrator to policy advocate when she stepped down from her post in Denver to head up the National Vote at Home Institute. “If I can make it easier for one voter, let alone many,” she says, “then I know I’ve done something in this world.”

 

[Legacy]

Savannah Hopkinson: The expiration of the Violence Against Women Act says a lot about women's rights (Deseret News)

 

[Whiskeyjack]

This Tucker Carlson monologue (which aired last week) has generated a lot of discussion online over the intervening days:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mSuQ-AyiicA" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

 

[Wild Bill]

"For generations, Republicans have considered it their duty to make the world safe for banking while simultaneously prosecuting foreign wars."

Careful, Tucker.

He's being criticized by the people you'd assume would criticize him for delivering this monologue. It'll be hard to de-program the right with respect to capitalism and the "free market", and how certain aspects of the two negatively impacts our culture. The "capitalist right" has piles of money, and they're willing to use it to push their agenda, whether it's think tanks, non-profits, media, etc. The other issue is the right/left paradigm in American politics is difficult to overcome when the the alternative to the GOP is the Democrats and their platform.

I had to take a long hard look at some of my own ideas, and it's uncomfortable to admit I was wrong about many of them. I have some hope it's possible to shift the opinion of the masses despite the many hurdles that must be overcome.

 

[IrishLax]

This Tucker Carlson monologue (which aired last week) has generated a lot of discussion online over the intervening days:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mSuQ-AyiicA" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

IMO that's like 85% spot on and about 15% cringe. For example, he basically drew a straight line from women having good jobs => destruction of families + drug addiction + suicide. I'm sorry, I know the whole "childcare is the devil, the woman's place is in the home, two-income-trap" thing is in vogue on here... but that's not an acceptable hot take, and I don't think it's rooted in fact the way he thinks it is. He talks about it being related to the disappearance of "good," "male" jobs and that kind of myth is proven time and time again to be BS.

For starters, people don't want to do the manufacturing jobs that exist. There are thousands of good manufacturing jobs paying $15+ for unskilled and $25+ for skilled labor that go unfilled yearly.

Second, I work with tons of Latinos who have big families and are happy working construction. And I doubt these jobs even rise to the standard Mr. Carlson is pining for. The real reason uneducated white, rural Americans are not getting married... and becoming drug addicts and killing themselves... is not because "good jobs for normal people" don't exist. It's because for the last 20 years we've been telling everyone they're so special, and for the last 10 years we've been holding up Kim Kardashian as the paragon of success. Nobody is content anymore to be a normal person raising a normal family... they're setting all the wrong goals, and when they realize they can't achieve them they get depressed.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

IMO that's like 85% spot on and about 15% cringe. For example, he basically drew a straight line from women having good jobs => destruction of families + drug addiction + suicide. I'm sorry, I know the whole "childcare is the devil, the woman's place is in the home, two-income-trap" thing is in vogue on here... but that's not an acceptable hot take, and I don't think it's rooted in fact the way he thinks it is.

I don't think he's implying such a simple correlation. And it's hardly a hot take to suggest that children do best: (1) when raised by their mother and father; and (2) when one of their parents stays home to focus on them. Thus, economic policies that result in few well-paying jobs capable of supporting a family on a single salary, and that require the vast majority of citizens (including women) to be engaged in wage labor, are hostile to the best interests of children and the future of the nation in general.

He talks about it being related to the disappearance of "good," "male" jobs and that kind of myth is proven time and time again to be BS.

There's plenty of research to support it (click through to the Twitter thread):

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">1. Gotta disagree w/ much of <a href="https://twitter.com/DavidAFrench?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@DavidAFrench</a> here for underplaying the role that elites and major economic, political, civic & cultural forces have played in the fall of the American working class<a href="https://t.co/V19RZ7yinU">https://t.co/V19RZ7yinU</a></p>— W Bradford Wilcox (@WilcoxNMP) <a href="https://twitter.com/WilcoxNMP/status/1081581237624598528?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 5, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

For starters, people don't want to do the manufacturing jobs that exist. There are thousands of good manufacturing jobs paying $15+ for unskilled and $25+ for skilled labor that go unfilled yearly.

"Labor" isn't a perfectly fungible input that instantly redistributes according to demand. It's real people, rooted in certain communities, with specific skillsets, family needs, etc. Slack in one sector of the labor market != anyone who really wants a job can find one.

Second, I work with tons of Latinos who have big families and are happy working construction. And I doubt these jobs even rise to the standard Mr. Carlson is pining for.

Construction jobs are often hard to fill because they require a specialized skillset that most Americans don't have. And those Hispanics on your crews are far more likely than the average American to sacrifice in order for one parent to stay home and raise those large families.

The real reason uneducated white, rural Americans are not getting married... and becoming drug addicts and killing themselves... is not because "good jobs for normal people" don't exist. It's because for the last 20 years we've been telling everyone they're so special, and for the last 10 years we've been holding up Kim Kardashian as the paragon of success. Nobody is content anymore to be a normal person raising a normal family... they're setting all the wrong goals, and when they realize they can't achieve them they get depressed.

There are certainly some cultural factors at play. Poor uneducated whites have moral agency like everyone else. But suicide and drug addiction are symptoms of despair, and a lot of that is directly attributable to the fact that the economy we've built over the last several decades just has no use for large swaths of our population. Oren Cass recently published a book on the subject called The Once and Future Worker.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Here's another short Twitter thread that's relevant to this debate, Lax:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Let me tell you what, from my perspective, gave us Trump and Trumpism, Tucker Carlson's rant, much of the Red/Blue schism, and more. Let's go to Greenville, Michigan. 1/20</p>— Tom Ferguson (@ferguson_twf) <a href="https://twitter.com/ferguson_twf/status/1082034421434368001?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 6, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[IrishLax]

Here's another short Twitter thread that's relevant to this debate, Lax:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Let me tell you what, from my perspective, gave us Trump and Trumpism, Tucker Carlson's rant, much of the Red/Blue schism, and more. Let's go to Greenville, Michigan. 1/20</p>— Tom Ferguson (@ferguson_twf) <a href="https://twitter.com/ferguson_twf/status/1082034421434368001?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 6, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

My main point is captured in the irrefutable falseness of his point #11.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">"New tech always comes along to save the day" does not apply. The late 19th-Century farm workers who flocked to Henry Ford for jobs after the last great labor upheaval have nowhere to go this time. 11/20</p>— Tom Ferguson (@ferguson_twf) <a href="https://twitter.com/ferguson_twf/status/1082034429567086593?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 6, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Greenville is 3 hours from Chicago. Any one of those 3000 unemployed factory workers could've taken a job there making $15+/hr with no skills. This is a fact. I'm telling you that literally my father in law tried for months on end to find someone (anyone!) to fill open machinist jobs and couldn't. And this same story is occurring in a lot of cities across the country.

The problem is that people in Appalachia, dead Midwest factory towns, and the like do not want to relocate for jobs. They expect someone to "bring them back" which -- with a few exceptions -- is completely unrealistic. The irony is that these people ended up in these towns because at some point they/their family left Europe and came to the United States to try to make a better life. And then they migrated throughout to towns where they could find gainful employment. Fast forward a few decades, and they're unwilling to pick up and move a couple hours to take an open job in a major metropolitan area.

That's the 15% that is cringe. All the victimhood nonsense related to "male jobs disappearing" when they're still there.

 

[Bluto]

If I’m remembering correctly according to all of studies I have read children who go to “high quality” daycare have outcomes on par and sometimes better than children that had a stay at home parent. So the quality of the daycare was the key. Dr. Laura was notorious for misrepresenting those particular studies way back when. Maybe there’s been new research that contradicts this. Anyhow, interesting discussion.

 

[GowerND11]

I feel like I rambled and just put some thoughts together, but... yeah, here's my take:

My rural area has been hit hard by loss of jobs (anthracite coal first then factories), population, tax money, etc. Towns are run down, there's no more downtowns, drug addiction is a major problem. I can go on. Many of those who go to college, get out and stay out of the area, visiting their family for the holidays. Those that go to college and come back work as nurses, teachers, social workers, etc. Some lawyers and doctors. A few engineers. I have lost 6 teammates from high school football (1 being my own cousin) to overdoses and I'm out of high school 11 years.

My point in all of this is simple: There are so many variables as to what is going on these are all symptoms. There are better paying factory jobs around still. Hydro (formerly Sapa) is the largest aluminum product producer in the world I believe, is constantly looking for new employees starting out at about $18/hr at their largest plant in the nation. Really good money in the area. I think Lax is onto something about the last 20 years. People don't want to work hard, programed that things will be provided. Wood shoes, silk slippers stuff.

What I see so much more lately than ever before is, while teen pregnancy may be down overall, I see such a lack of committed two parent households in my area. So many (great) moms doing it on their own. Dad is there on the weekends (maybe, but usually not), and mom is doing everything. While working on my Master's I've stumbled upon stuff like this about the increases. We are at a crossroad in our nation as it pertains to families, and unfortunately I see the family becoming politicized, which is never good.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

My main point is captured in the irrefutable falseness of his point #11.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">"New tech always comes along to save the day" does not apply. The late 19th-Century farm workers who flocked to Henry Ford for jobs after the last great labor upheaval have nowhere to go this time. 11/20</p>— Tom Ferguson (@ferguson_twf) <a href="https://twitter.com/ferguson_twf/status/1082034429567086593?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 6, 2019</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Greenville is 3 hours from Chicago. Any one of those 3000 unemployed factory workers could've taken a job there making $15+/hr with no skills. This is a fact. I'm telling you that literally my father in law tried for months on end to find someone (anyone!) to fill open machinist jobs and couldn't. And this same story is occurring in a lot of cities across the country.

The problem is that people in Appalachia, dead Midwest factory towns, and the like do not want to relocate for jobs. They expect someone to "bring them back" which -- with a few exceptions -- is completely unrealistic. The irony is that these people ended up in these towns because at some point they/their family left Europe and came to the United States to try to make a better life. And then they migrated throughout to towns where they could find gainful employment. Fast forward a few decades, and they're unwilling to pick up and move a couple hours to take an open job in a major metropolitan area.

That's the 15% that is cringe. All the victimhood nonsense related to "male jobs disappearing" when they're still there.

There's undoubtedly some truth to this. And it's complicated by the familial/ cultural factors described by Gower below. Their ancestors also didn't have Netflix, Pornhub, XBox and fentanyl to inexpensively numb the pain and despair caused by growing up in a dying town held together by rapidly fraying social bonds. But the solution is never so simple as "just learn computers" or "move to Chicago". I understand why those who are invested in the current system want to make it sound like there's no crisis, these people are the source of their own problems, etc. But I don't think that's really true.

If I’m remembering correctly according to all of studies I have read children who go to “high quality” daycare have outcomes on par and sometimes better than children that had a stay at home parent. So the quality of the daycare was the key. Dr. Laura was notorious for misrepresenting those particular studies way back when. Maybe there’s been new research that contradicts this. Anyhow, interesting discussion.

That was definitely the consensus for a while. But most studies showing significant benefits to "high quality daycare" and other forms of early childhood intervention have since been debunked, because whatever benefits accrue virtually disappear by 3rd or 4th grade.

What I see so much more lately than ever before is, while teen pregnancy may be down overall, I see such a lack of committed two parent households in my area. So many (great) moms doing it on their own. Dad is there on the weekends (maybe, but usually not), and mom is doing everything. While working on my Master's I've stumbled upon stuff like this about the increases. We are at a crossroad in our nation as it pertains to families, and unfortunately I see the family becoming politicized, which is never good.

That's one of Carlson's points. You can't separate the cultural from the economic here. Our current system is hostile to stable family formation, and thus undermines itself by producing increasingly dysfunctional generations of "workers".

The Week's Matthew Walther just published an article about Carlson's monologue:

If anyone had suggested to me five years ago that the most incisive public critic of capitalism in the United States would be Tucker Carlson, I would have smiled blandly and mentioned an imaginary appointment I was late for. But that is exactly what the Fox News host revealed himself to be last week with an extraordinary monologue about the state of American conservative thinking. In 15 minutes he denounced the obsession with GDP, the tolerance of payday lending and other financial pathologies, the fetishization of technology, the guru-like worship of CEOs, and the indifference to the anxieties and pathologies of the poor and the vulnerable characteristic of both of our major political parties. It was a masterpiece of political rhetoric. He ended by calling upon the GOP to re-examine its attitude towards the free market.

Carlson's monologue is valuable because unlike so many progressive critics of our social and economic order he has gone beyond the question of the inequitable distribution of wealth to the more important one about the nature of late capitalist consumer culture and the inherently degrading effects it has had on our society. The GOP's blinkered inability to see beyond the specifications of the new iPhone or the latest video game or the infinite variety of streaming entertainment and Chinese plastic to the spiritual poverty of suicide and drug abuse is shared with the Democratic Socialists of America, whose vision of authentic human flourishing seems to be a boutique eco-friendly version of our present consumer society. This is lipstick on a pig.

Just as insightful as Carlson's monologue itself were the responses from various right-of-center commentators. J.D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy and a conservative who is known to hold somewhat heterodox views about the value of free markets, was given the space to praise Carlson in National Review. The movie critic Kyle Smith writing in the same publication called to mind what Auden said about "The romantic lie in the brain / Of the sensual man-in-the-street." Elsewhere Ben Shapiro raved about the cheap price of various products and pretended not to know the difference between the lifetime of good wages capable of supporting a family enjoyed by factory workers of my grandfather's generation and the fraught horror of hourly benefit-free employment at Nissan plants in the Deep South today.

But far and away the worst of the responses came from David French, alas, also in National Review. For French the chief problem with Carlson's argument was that it was grounded in something called "victim politics," which is post-Tea Party boomer code for "the feelings of people who are not as wealthy or as clever or as socially adept and culturally astute as I am." I wonder whether it occurs to French that "victim" could ever mean something other than a slur. What are mothers who sign away their minimum wage paychecks at 400 percent interest if not victims? And why should we excuse the grotesque behavior of their exploiters in the name of some windy nonsense about "freedom"? There is, one would think, a great deal of ideological space which reasonable persons might inhabit between Lin Biao and Ayn Rand, one where we can agree with the moralists of all ages and climes that, for example, usury is wicked.

It is difficult for me to understand exactly why conservatives have come around to their present uncritical attitude toward unbridled capitalism. It cannot be for electoral reasons. Survey after survey reveals that a vast majority of the American people hold views that would be described as socially conservative and economically moderate to progressive. A presidential candidate who spoke capably to both of these sets of concerns would be the greatest political force in three generations.

The answer is that for conservatives the market has become a cult. No book better explains the appeal of classical liberal economics than The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer's history of magic. Frazer identified certain immutable principles that have governed magical thinking throughout the ages. Among these is the imitative principle according to which a favorable outcome is obtained by mimicry — the endless chants of entrepreneurship, vague nonsense about charter schools, calls for tax cuts for people who don't make enough money to benefit from them. There also is taboo, the primitive assumption that by not speaking the name of a thing, the thing itself will be thereby be exorcised. This is one reason that any attempt to criticize the current consensus is met with whingeing about "socialism." This catch-all talisman is meant to protect against everything from the Cultural Revolution to modest restrictions on overdraft fees imposed at the behest of consultants.

Whatever their public image might suggest, not all conservative commentators are pampered elites. If it were simply a matter of a privileged class attempting to secure its privileges by telling falsehoods, the ubiquitousness of market worship would be easier to understand — and to defeat. But the horrifying truth is many of them make arguments like "Payday lending is the best way to empower America's poorest people financially" because they somehow believe these things to be true.

This was not always the case. Attempting to discuss "conservatism" as if it were a concrete historical phenomenon or a ideology is a mug's game, but it is clear that on the whole those who might find themselves in sympathy with someone like Carlson today have been at best indifferent to and more often hostile towards commerce and the Anglo-American philosophical tradition of liberalism. L. Brent Bozell, the brother-in-law of William F. Buckley who helped to found National Review and served as Barry Goldwater's ghostwriter, came to reject all the tenets of fusionist conservatism because they appeared fundamentally at odds with all of those things he once believed they were meant to conserve. Russell Kirk, the author of The Conservative Mind, rejected the free market and indeed many elements of modern commercial and technological life, albeit in an occasionally affected and cloying manner. Christopher Lasch, the great cultural historian, was essentially a kind of Tory Marxist, a reactionary who agreed with the authors of The Communist Manifesto that capital would leave the "bonds and gestures" of civilization "pushed to one side / like an outdated combine harvester." Even Irving Kristol, the godfather of neoconservatism himself, could only summon up "two cheers" for capitalism and argued for the moral necessity of a broad and generous welfare state.

Going beyond the legacy of avowedly conservative thinkers, many opponents of capitalism, such as Theodor Adorno and Eric Hobsbawm, recognized the fundamental incompatibility of endless creative destruction not only with human dignity but with other more tangible things that intellectual conservatives claim to value, such as classical music and literature. In the so-called "global south," there is a thriving anti-capitalist discourse organized around the assumption that the Gates Foundation and the IMF — and not fundamentalist Islam — pose the greatest threat to the survival of traditional values. Conservatives should engage with these writers and thinkers — and going further back, with Keats and Beethoven and Dickens and Wagner and Heidegger, with all those who have valued what is fundamentally human for its own sake.

Fortunately there are already signs that the right-wing libertarian consensus is starting to come apart. In Why Liberalism Failed, a somewhat clunky book recently praised by Barack Obama of all people, Patrick Deneen argued that American conservatives are wrong to look to the Founding Fathers and to libertarian ideology for solutions to our present discontents. At American Affairs, the splendid magazine founded in 2016 by Julius Krein and Gladden Pappin, you can read conservative arguments for things like postal banking alongside articles by Marxist writers like Slavoj Zizek. Andrew Willard Jones, a talented young historian, has launched a new journal called Post-Liberal Thought to examine the question of how religious people can look beyond the political and philosophical legacy of liberalism. The conservative turn away from the market to the question of the human person and its innate metaphysical dignity has begun.

As with any revolution, there are certain obvious pitfalls to be avoided here. It is not a simply a question of turning back the clock — to 1966 or 1946 or some more remote date. A new political and social life founded upon the principle of solidarity, and not upon those of indulging our acquisitive instincts or congratulating our fellow achievers on having performed the rituals of competence, is one that will not be realized by role-playing characters from a preferred historical moment. Nor will it come about through modest reforms, however valuable some of these may be in the short term. Institutions will have to be altered — but so will hearts and minds. This is not an argument for quietism but for radical and difficult change.