Good point. And many early conservationists were, in fact, conservative. Teddy Roosevelt, for one. A big part of this has been the (very modern) equation of free markets with conservatism. Scruton was a critic of that.
The only issue here is that Roosevelt was never a conservative! He always considered himself to be a progressive Republican and when he thought his party was not progressive enough, he founded his own: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bull_Moose_Party
Before Roosevelt, the role of government was generally agreed to be limited to protecting the individual rights enumerated in the Constitution. Roosevelt had a more expansive interpretation of government’s role in “providing for the general welfare” of its citizens. In many ways, it would not be a stretch to call him the father of the modern progressive movement - though many would no doubt give that title to his cousin.
"Progressive" didn't mean what it means now and mapping late19th/early 20th century politics onto a modern political spectrum is often difficult and debatable. Whether Roosevelt counts as a conservative is one such case. You'll see this discussed at the beginning of the main Wikipedia article on Roosevelt's political positions. Personally, I think the case for calling him conservative is persuasive, particularly in the context of basic political philosophy, which is what I was discussing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Theodore_Roosevelt
The article you shared ends by discussing Roosevelt’s views on social justice which seem to reinforce my view that he would be more correctly classified as a “progressive”. The discussion in the beginning does refer to him as a “progressive conservative”. But it’s unclear to me what that means or how it differs from a “conservative progressive”.
To be honest, I find it a bit tedious to keep track of what “conservative” and “progressive” mean at different times based on the pronouncements of intellectuals or historians or the politicians themselves. I imagine it’s helpful in the literature to associate a specific “brand” of conservatism or progressivism with a specific set of policies and beliefs. I know scholars have also crafted specific terms like “paleo-conservatism” or “neoconservatism” to highlight such distinctions.
Unfortunately I’m a standard issue scientist, not a political one. It’s easier for me to think in terms of broad overarching principles rather than groupings of specific policies at specific times. Principles are only meaningful when they are consistent. Therefore I think the best definition of conservatism as a principle is something like “guided by systems, rules and norms that currently and persistently exist (ie conventional wisdom)”. I tend to regard conservatives as people who value the status quo.
Conversely, I view progressivism as “guided by a vision of what *should* exist” I think of progressives as people who seek change because they don’t see the wisdom in most conventions.
By my metric, Roosevelt would be a progressive because he sought to drastically change the role of government. Even his belief that government should have the right to set aside land for conservation was essentially a *progressive* idea because the government did not previously have that authority. In fact, some might argue that the government’s decision to prevent specific parcels of land from being sold or destroyed or used by private individuals would constitute a violation of an individual’s right to own property. They might argue that collecting taxes from private individuals to maintain and protect land that they do not personally own would also constitute a rights violation.
You may not agree with these arguments (I certainly don’t). But I can understand why someone who believes that government only has the right to exert authority in the service of “protecting the individual rights enumerated in the Constitution” might object to government based land conservation. I can understand why they might conclude that while “forests are nice to look at, trees were clearly not endowed by their creator with the inalienable right to life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness!”
Again, to be clear, I don’t share this view (for a variety of reasons). I just include it to illustrate why, at least in America, the concept of government based land conservation (as opposed to private initiatives) must necessarily be progressive.
Yes, this is a subject on which reasonable people can and do disagree, -- even at book length -- not least because the choice of perspective (our time or his?) and focus (programs or philosophies?) and benchmarks (again, our time or his?) will all change the analysis.
You mention the fact that Vance is likely familiar with Scruton, but is he serious about it? Vance seems to want others to take him seriously (much as Paul Ryan wanted people to take his budgets seriously) but that seriousness never seems to stop him from being willing to parrot the strangest lies or make friends with anyone who will elevate him (again like Paul Ryan).
Actually, conservatives do tend to be conservationists, in the right measure. Ducks Unlimited conserves wetlands. Museums used to conserve historical artifacts, until they were taken over by progressives who want to destroy (or at least crate and hide away) statues, murals, texts, etc. that are offensive to their ideology.
Are you implying that conservationists are unlikely to be politically conservative? Is there data to suggest that? How about this question: Why do so many environmentalists care nothing for environmental protection when it conflicts with industrial scale wind and solar projects?
According to Scruton then, the Left is definitely not conservative- open borders, defund the police, cancel culture, censorship, laws prohibiting free speech, attack on Western civilization and on and on. Illiberal if not authoritarian. Need we say more.
Yes, and the corollary is that undoing those things as fast and as thoroughly as possible IS conservative - or at least relatively conservative. Scruton said good things are easy to destroy; he did not say that easily destroyed things are good. The fact that Trump is taking a hammer to a lot of very bad progressive things is not the danger to conservatism Dan thinks it is. He might be guilty of "affirming the consequent."
Dan, ALL of those agencies are deeply infected with the progressive idiocies mentioned at the top of this thread. Purging them of those influences is a conservative measure. Hiring extremists - if that's what they are - to do the critical job because moderate careerists don't have the stomach for it isn't exactly crazy from a conservative point of view.
LOTS of commentators have observed that the Democrats and Republicans have swapped their positions on major issues: (1) which party now supports the working class? (2) which party is now more isolationist, anti-war? (3) which party is now the party of government censorship (by clandestine means if not over)? (4) which party is now the party of medical transparency and choice? American conservatives want to get back to the old Democrat ways.
Like the Russians and the French, you and Trump spend a lot of time discussing what needs to be destroyed and precious little, if any, on how to rebuild it in a manner that minimizes the risk of it falling to ruin and needing to be destroyed again.
No, Maryah, you are wrong about me. I spend ALL of my time promoting individual liberty through smaller government. The government should do WAY less, WAY more efficiently. Let the people build social institutions through voluntary associations. Cooperation, not coercion, is the recipe for prosperity and peace.
I understand. I’m well acquainted with the idea of small or limited government.
My question is how do we get from here to your small government utopia? Like what are all the steps involved? How long will it take? Do we have any reason to believe this is actually what Trump wants and that he has a plan to get us there?
And my second question was what steps would this new government have to take to keep it from turning into a bloated bureaucracy that is fond of spending a lot of money again? We obviously started with limited government and grew to this point for a reason or many reasons. At some point, cooperation probably wasn’t cutting it…what do you think went wrong and what would you do to prevent it from happening again?
I don’t know you and I make no judgements about you. But there is absolutely nothing that Trump or any of his followers have said that leads me to believe that they have seriously considered any of the questions I posed - much less the answers. But I don’t spend that much time in right wing circles so if there’s something I’m missing, I’d love to hear it.
You are asking the $64trillion questions. I don't have a plan or a roadmap, and if I did it would be a book too long to write. There's a vast right-wing academic literature discussing how to wither away the state. I'm an incrementalist, though. There is human capital even rotten institutions, so you have to dismantle them slowly and carefully. But certain things are pretty obvious first steps, like dismantling censorship and re-instituting merit as the sole criterion for all placement decisions. Another key is to strengthen private property rights so that government encroachments are more difficult to legislate. It remains to be seen how well Vivek and Elon will manage the "creative destruction" of the US government agencies - and how much "beautiful trouble" the progressives will put in their path. And yes, I do believe that Vivek and Elon are sincere about cutting the waste in the federal government.
When I was a young philosophy student, it was popular for professors to advise their charges that if they truly wanted to understand someone they disagreed with or thought were bonkers, they had to "negate" their own perspective, adopt and immerse themselves in the world view of the writer. Only by reading someone "sympathetically" could you really see the sense in what they were saying. You might still disagree, but at least you would understand what they were saying - instead of ranting about stupid things. E.g. Richard Dawkins has faced decades of the stupid criticisms from people who don't understand his thesis because they are mislead by his use of the term "selfish gene."
This advice is especially true when interpreting what Donald Trump says. Trump typically speaks in enthymemes, with missing premises and assumptions. Trump rarely speaks syllogistically. So when he complains that Taiwan doesn't pay America protection money, he is actually contrasting the case with mob bosses who collect "protection money." What he means is this: The law of the jungle allows mobsters to collect money for "protecting" businesses from themselves, from the mob. The extortion is ironically called "protection money." But he isn't asking for "protection money" in the ironic, mobster sense. All he is asking is to be paid for the actual protection the USA is giving to its allies, from their enemies (China in the case of Taiwan; the Soviet Union in the case of Europe). That's pretty obviously what he means, because it is obviously the case that the USA is spending a lot of money to patrol the seas around Taiwan and Taiwan isn't paying for it. Trump is asking for protection money, not "protection money."
Ah. “What he means is…” then come a lot of words that aren’t Trump’s and reflect nothing in what Trump has said or done. I’ve seen this technique used to minimize the man for the past nine years, in which time I’ve seen those minimizations belied by his words and deeds time after time. You’ll forgive me if I don’t put any stock in your “interpretation.”
You remind me of Andrew Coyne and his gang of morons accusing Trump of wanting to put Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad. Or the "good people on both sides" hoaxers. Or the "Trump is using Hitler's language now" twits. You don't pay attention to context, or reality; you just take a phrase out of context and let your lurid imaginations run away with it. It's classic TDS.
Like, it's perfectly OK for Pelosi to meet with Assad; but if a Trump pick does it, she must be a Putin asset because Putin is on Assad's side. The absurdity of all of these hoaxes is so transparent, you really have to be suffering serious cognitive impairments not to see it.
Let's wait and see if Trump ever tries to extort payments from countries America doesn't spend treasure defending from real enemies. If that happens, I'll eat crow and admit you were right to characterize Trump as a mob boss. But if Trump never does that, will you eat crow and admit you are wrong to have so characterized him? Do we have a deal?
The man himself connected the two and you invented an elaborate explanation for why that doesn’t mean what it plainly means. I am quite confident that no matter what happens you will never need to eat crow because you will be proved right to your satisfaction.
Let me know when Trump, or any President for that matter, starts “charging” Israel “protection money” for the billions we spend every year defending that country from real enemies.
While not exactly the scenario you mention, you must admit that the policy of charging *some* allies for a service provided free of charge to others undermines your point (Or rather, Trump’s point that you so skillfully articulated on his behalf ;)
You make a valid point in principle. I'm not defending Trump's foreign policy; I'm merely trying to help Dan to not misunderstand it. If I were advising Trump, I would advise him to take it on a case-by-case basis. I would urge him to come down hard on freeloaders like Canada and some countries in Europe, while continuing to support special cases like Taiwan and Israel who are not capable of defending themselves form their much bigger enemies entirely on their own resources.
I don’t think very many people would say that Israel is incapable of defending itself. At least not after the last year. It now has one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world and boasts state of the art offensive and defensive systems.
But let’s say it was incapable of defending itself. I guess my question is:
1) How do you determine if defending a country is in the best interest of the United States?
2) How do you determine whether or not a country is “capable of defending itself”? Is this based on current military capability or GDP? What of countries that perhaps could afford to purchase weapons to defend themselves but don’t have them currently? Should we consider the probability of attack?
3) What if the probability of attack increases if we no longer participate in a treaty like NATO? After all isn’t part of the point of NATO to pre-empt invasions? I tend to think of NATO membership as a bit like a sign announcing that your house is “protected by X security system”. The security system will protect you if someone breaks in, but just the sign can send a signal to burglars to avoid your house. The sign doesn’t cost extra.
I don't know, but I have the impression that Israel was given a lot of American technology and money to build their defenses. Maybe not. But if Israel is defending itself without the need for American support, then Trump will be fine with that I'm sure.
The answer to all of your questions is: "Through discussion and debate." If you are looking for a simple a priori principle, you will be disappointed. These are complex and nuances decisions that have to be reviewed constantly as circumstances change. As for NATO, an alliance only works if every member is seen to be pulling its weight. Freeloading is the death of cooperation. Trump is right to get tough with the other members who aren't living up to their membership commitments. Remember, every member signed on to military spending targets and they should be held to the contract they voluntarily signed with the others.
This obsession pundits seem to have with Madison Square Garden is odd but very revealing. Yes, decades and decades ago, there was an American Nazi rally there. Does that mean it's forever tainted as a cursed place? A huge number of events have taken place there. It's not even the same location now as that time. But any political reference seems to set off this knee-jerk "ohmigod, ohmigod, *NAZIS*, that's the same places as ...". It's like there's one fact about it stuck in the pundit mind, which is constantly trotted out for emotional impact.
Sorry, you can't pin that on me. That was a parenthetical comment pointing to a bizarre little coincidence, no more. And I can prove it: Here is what I wrote shortly before Trump's MSG rally. https://substack.com/@dgardner/note/c-74293023
In fact, I could have co-signed your comment here.
Accepted, apologies, I was incorrect to attribute any of that to you.
But it's not a "bizarre little coincidence", at least to me since I grew up in New York. MSG is a big venue in the middle of New York City. It's a natural place in a novel to set a popular political event. It's not quite "Times Square", but that's the flavor, in that having something happen there in NYC very common.
Thanks. Yes, I get it. If you have a big event in NYC, you probably have it in MSG. What I found weirdly coincidental was not only that there was a (fictional) rally in MSG but that it was the last big event of the campaign, a point Lewis emphasized more than once. That was a little head-rattling when the Trump rally was being described the same way ad nauseam.
A sidenote: I am stunned that Hillary Clinton received no blowback for her comments. Strictly from a tactical point of view, it was amazingly dumb. But worse... it was her! How could she not know that the one Democrat in American who should be quiet in the last month of the campaign is her?! Yet there she was, on TV, practically repeating the "basket of deplorable" gaffe. Gobsmacking.
I think the concept of conservatism is flawed in the manner in which it is typically used today. There is very little "conservative" in the burkean sense about modern america, and hasn't been for a long time. I would even say that the same is true for liberalism. Modern america is a mass democratic state, both in a political and in a broader cultural sense. The Trump movement ought to be viewed through this lense, not really as a break from old school conservatism, but as a final break from any nominally or substantive bourgeois-liberal ties (or pretensions, perhaps).
I appreciate your piece but on this point: "Donald Trump has far more in common with V.I. Lenin than Edmund Burke."
I think that the better comparison is Mao Tse Tung. When Mao was faced with his ouster (through term limits) he did not take it well and he launched the Cultural Revolution on the premise that a deep state (in his case of "Counter-Revolutionaries") had taken control of the country and was working to crush it with through invasions from outside and only he could literally make the PRC great again. That effort killed the legal system, or indeed the idea of law, in China forever, but it put him on top until he died 10 years later.
At heart Trump is about Trump and like Mao he surrounds himself by the weak (including family) so that he stays on top. And the end result is destruction for everyone else.
I appreciate you pointing out to Trumpian "conservatives" that they are not really conservatives - they're revolutionaries - and that most people who claim to be conservative nowadays have no right to claim Scruton. I think that the inversion that we see in contemporary politics, progressives becoming conservative and conservatives becoming revolutionary, should be made much more explicit. It is very interesting for me to see that Roger Scruton's books more and more populate the bookshelves of my progressive friends, for example. Being a progressive nowadays is about maintaing the social conquests of the 2010s and the 1990s liberal order on the domestic and world stage. It's literally progressive conservatism.
Having thought of this, I remained puzzled by the connection between progressivism and conservatism, until I read this passage in G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy:
"The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post."
Hopefully reactonary folks will stop appropriating Scruton, as wolves in a sheepskin vest. Also because I find Scruton a bit of a bore, and his conservatism superficial and simulated.
Did you read ‘What else actually is there?’ by Jenny Turner in the London Review of Books by any chance? I read that this week and it brought me to the same (obvious now) conclusion, that MAFA are revolutionaries, willing to break things and risk all that might happen as a result. (It was a review of a couple of works by Gillian Rise). Perhaps an interesting coincidence but right in line with how I’ve been thinking about ‘it all’
I can send you a pdf if you like (it’s very long, over 12,000 words), just let me know.
My note to self while reading the article was: “Trumpists want a revolution, they are not conservative at all. It is the instinct of destroying the status quo and running the risk of ‘recreating a terror, reinforcing lawlessness or strengthening bourgeois law in its universality and arbitrariness’(Rose). It’s the tear it-all-down mentality - Elon Musk thinks he’s mastered that… I think we’ll have some unintended consequences. This is the ‘destruction of the actual organisation of the world in the name of the organisation of the party’. It’s orthodox Marxism in that sense.”
The philosopher in question was Gillian Rose (not Rise, sorry about the typo) and she was writing about the Frankfurt School (Marxism) but my mind immediately connected it to MAGA and their, like you wrote, revolutionary as opposed to conservative core. Revolution appeals to me too, but the amount of unnecessary suffering generated through revolution and, as you said, the minuscule chance of success make it unpalatable.
Ah, I realized from your essay this is the real reason I find myself returning again and again to Sinclair Lewis. It's an earlier version of ourselves as smalltown Midwesterners. He was an astute ethnographer of his time and place.
I got addicted to The Rest is History several months ago but I find them quite mixed. The ones where they give a proper history lesson such as The Falklands War and The First World War stand out but others just sound like people down the pub chatting over a beer. I'm still addicted though. I just got through Dominic Sandbrook's book on Thatcher Times too — absolutely marvellous — and have the 70s queued up for my next read.
I swore off politics when I left the USA after Trump got elected last time around. It's time to swear off it again. It doesn't do me any good.
An old growth forest is a good thing that is easy to destroy and difficult to build.
How come more conservatives aren’t also conservationists?
Good point. And many early conservationists were, in fact, conservative. Teddy Roosevelt, for one. A big part of this has been the (very modern) equation of free markets with conservatism. Scruton was a critic of that.
The only issue here is that Roosevelt was never a conservative! He always considered himself to be a progressive Republican and when he thought his party was not progressive enough, he founded his own: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bull_Moose_Party
Before Roosevelt, the role of government was generally agreed to be limited to protecting the individual rights enumerated in the Constitution. Roosevelt had a more expansive interpretation of government’s role in “providing for the general welfare” of its citizens. In many ways, it would not be a stretch to call him the father of the modern progressive movement - though many would no doubt give that title to his cousin.
"Progressive" didn't mean what it means now and mapping late19th/early 20th century politics onto a modern political spectrum is often difficult and debatable. Whether Roosevelt counts as a conservative is one such case. You'll see this discussed at the beginning of the main Wikipedia article on Roosevelt's political positions. Personally, I think the case for calling him conservative is persuasive, particularly in the context of basic political philosophy, which is what I was discussing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Theodore_Roosevelt
The article you shared ends by discussing Roosevelt’s views on social justice which seem to reinforce my view that he would be more correctly classified as a “progressive”. The discussion in the beginning does refer to him as a “progressive conservative”. But it’s unclear to me what that means or how it differs from a “conservative progressive”.
To be honest, I find it a bit tedious to keep track of what “conservative” and “progressive” mean at different times based on the pronouncements of intellectuals or historians or the politicians themselves. I imagine it’s helpful in the literature to associate a specific “brand” of conservatism or progressivism with a specific set of policies and beliefs. I know scholars have also crafted specific terms like “paleo-conservatism” or “neoconservatism” to highlight such distinctions.
Unfortunately I’m a standard issue scientist, not a political one. It’s easier for me to think in terms of broad overarching principles rather than groupings of specific policies at specific times. Principles are only meaningful when they are consistent. Therefore I think the best definition of conservatism as a principle is something like “guided by systems, rules and norms that currently and persistently exist (ie conventional wisdom)”. I tend to regard conservatives as people who value the status quo.
Conversely, I view progressivism as “guided by a vision of what *should* exist” I think of progressives as people who seek change because they don’t see the wisdom in most conventions.
By my metric, Roosevelt would be a progressive because he sought to drastically change the role of government. Even his belief that government should have the right to set aside land for conservation was essentially a *progressive* idea because the government did not previously have that authority. In fact, some might argue that the government’s decision to prevent specific parcels of land from being sold or destroyed or used by private individuals would constitute a violation of an individual’s right to own property. They might argue that collecting taxes from private individuals to maintain and protect land that they do not personally own would also constitute a rights violation.
You may not agree with these arguments (I certainly don’t). But I can understand why someone who believes that government only has the right to exert authority in the service of “protecting the individual rights enumerated in the Constitution” might object to government based land conservation. I can understand why they might conclude that while “forests are nice to look at, trees were clearly not endowed by their creator with the inalienable right to life, liberty or the pursuit of happiness!”
Again, to be clear, I don’t share this view (for a variety of reasons). I just include it to illustrate why, at least in America, the concept of government based land conservation (as opposed to private initiatives) must necessarily be progressive.
Yes, this is a subject on which reasonable people can and do disagree, -- even at book length -- not least because the choice of perspective (our time or his?) and focus (programs or philosophies?) and benchmarks (again, our time or his?) will all change the analysis.
You mention the fact that Vance is likely familiar with Scruton, but is he serious about it? Vance seems to want others to take him seriously (much as Paul Ryan wanted people to take his budgets seriously) but that seriousness never seems to stop him from being willing to parrot the strangest lies or make friends with anyone who will elevate him (again like Paul Ryan).
Actually, conservatives do tend to be conservationists, in the right measure. Ducks Unlimited conserves wetlands. Museums used to conserve historical artifacts, until they were taken over by progressives who want to destroy (or at least crate and hide away) statues, murals, texts, etc. that are offensive to their ideology.
Are you implying that conservationists are unlikely to be politically conservative? Is there data to suggest that? How about this question: Why do so many environmentalists care nothing for environmental protection when it conflicts with industrial scale wind and solar projects?
According to Scruton then, the Left is definitely not conservative- open borders, defund the police, cancel culture, censorship, laws prohibiting free speech, attack on Western civilization and on and on. Illiberal if not authoritarian. Need we say more.
Yes, and the corollary is that undoing those things as fast and as thoroughly as possible IS conservative - or at least relatively conservative. Scruton said good things are easy to destroy; he did not say that easily destroyed things are good. The fact that Trump is taking a hammer to a lot of very bad progressive things is not the danger to conservatism Dan thinks it is. He might be guilty of "affirming the consequent."
The Department of Defense is a very bad, progressive thing? HHS? The intelligence community? One-third of the federal budget?! Get serious.
Dan, ALL of those agencies are deeply infected with the progressive idiocies mentioned at the top of this thread. Purging them of those influences is a conservative measure. Hiring extremists - if that's what they are - to do the critical job because moderate careerists don't have the stomach for it isn't exactly crazy from a conservative point of view.
LOTS of commentators have observed that the Democrats and Republicans have swapped their positions on major issues: (1) which party now supports the working class? (2) which party is now more isolationist, anti-war? (3) which party is now the party of government censorship (by clandestine means if not over)? (4) which party is now the party of medical transparency and choice? American conservatives want to get back to the old Democrat ways.
Like the Russians and the French, you and Trump spend a lot of time discussing what needs to be destroyed and precious little, if any, on how to rebuild it in a manner that minimizes the risk of it falling to ruin and needing to be destroyed again.
No, Maryah, you are wrong about me. I spend ALL of my time promoting individual liberty through smaller government. The government should do WAY less, WAY more efficiently. Let the people build social institutions through voluntary associations. Cooperation, not coercion, is the recipe for prosperity and peace.
I understand. I’m well acquainted with the idea of small or limited government.
My question is how do we get from here to your small government utopia? Like what are all the steps involved? How long will it take? Do we have any reason to believe this is actually what Trump wants and that he has a plan to get us there?
And my second question was what steps would this new government have to take to keep it from turning into a bloated bureaucracy that is fond of spending a lot of money again? We obviously started with limited government and grew to this point for a reason or many reasons. At some point, cooperation probably wasn’t cutting it…what do you think went wrong and what would you do to prevent it from happening again?
I don’t know you and I make no judgements about you. But there is absolutely nothing that Trump or any of his followers have said that leads me to believe that they have seriously considered any of the questions I posed - much less the answers. But I don’t spend that much time in right wing circles so if there’s something I’m missing, I’d love to hear it.
You are asking the $64trillion questions. I don't have a plan or a roadmap, and if I did it would be a book too long to write. There's a vast right-wing academic literature discussing how to wither away the state. I'm an incrementalist, though. There is human capital even rotten institutions, so you have to dismantle them slowly and carefully. But certain things are pretty obvious first steps, like dismantling censorship and re-instituting merit as the sole criterion for all placement decisions. Another key is to strengthen private property rights so that government encroachments are more difficult to legislate. It remains to be seen how well Vivek and Elon will manage the "creative destruction" of the US government agencies - and how much "beautiful trouble" the progressives will put in their path. And yes, I do believe that Vivek and Elon are sincere about cutting the waste in the federal government.
When I was a young philosophy student, it was popular for professors to advise their charges that if they truly wanted to understand someone they disagreed with or thought were bonkers, they had to "negate" their own perspective, adopt and immerse themselves in the world view of the writer. Only by reading someone "sympathetically" could you really see the sense in what they were saying. You might still disagree, but at least you would understand what they were saying - instead of ranting about stupid things. E.g. Richard Dawkins has faced decades of the stupid criticisms from people who don't understand his thesis because they are mislead by his use of the term "selfish gene."
This advice is especially true when interpreting what Donald Trump says. Trump typically speaks in enthymemes, with missing premises and assumptions. Trump rarely speaks syllogistically. So when he complains that Taiwan doesn't pay America protection money, he is actually contrasting the case with mob bosses who collect "protection money." What he means is this: The law of the jungle allows mobsters to collect money for "protecting" businesses from themselves, from the mob. The extortion is ironically called "protection money." But he isn't asking for "protection money" in the ironic, mobster sense. All he is asking is to be paid for the actual protection the USA is giving to its allies, from their enemies (China in the case of Taiwan; the Soviet Union in the case of Europe). That's pretty obviously what he means, because it is obviously the case that the USA is spending a lot of money to patrol the seas around Taiwan and Taiwan isn't paying for it. Trump is asking for protection money, not "protection money."
Ah. “What he means is…” then come a lot of words that aren’t Trump’s and reflect nothing in what Trump has said or done. I’ve seen this technique used to minimize the man for the past nine years, in which time I’ve seen those minimizations belied by his words and deeds time after time. You’ll forgive me if I don’t put any stock in your “interpretation.”
You remind me of Andrew Coyne and his gang of morons accusing Trump of wanting to put Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad. Or the "good people on both sides" hoaxers. Or the "Trump is using Hitler's language now" twits. You don't pay attention to context, or reality; you just take a phrase out of context and let your lurid imaginations run away with it. It's classic TDS.
Like, it's perfectly OK for Pelosi to meet with Assad; but if a Trump pick does it, she must be a Putin asset because Putin is on Assad's side. The absurdity of all of these hoaxes is so transparent, you really have to be suffering serious cognitive impairments not to see it.
Let's wait and see if Trump ever tries to extort payments from countries America doesn't spend treasure defending from real enemies. If that happens, I'll eat crow and admit you were right to characterize Trump as a mob boss. But if Trump never does that, will you eat crow and admit you are wrong to have so characterized him? Do we have a deal?
The man himself connected the two and you invented an elaborate explanation for why that doesn’t mean what it plainly means. I am quite confident that no matter what happens you will never need to eat crow because you will be proved right to your satisfaction.
My offer stands, Dan.
Let me know when Trump, or any President for that matter, starts “charging” Israel “protection money” for the billions we spend every year defending that country from real enemies.
While not exactly the scenario you mention, you must admit that the policy of charging *some* allies for a service provided free of charge to others undermines your point (Or rather, Trump’s point that you so skillfully articulated on his behalf ;)
You make a valid point in principle. I'm not defending Trump's foreign policy; I'm merely trying to help Dan to not misunderstand it. If I were advising Trump, I would advise him to take it on a case-by-case basis. I would urge him to come down hard on freeloaders like Canada and some countries in Europe, while continuing to support special cases like Taiwan and Israel who are not capable of defending themselves form their much bigger enemies entirely on their own resources.
I don’t think very many people would say that Israel is incapable of defending itself. At least not after the last year. It now has one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world and boasts state of the art offensive and defensive systems.
But let’s say it was incapable of defending itself. I guess my question is:
1) How do you determine if defending a country is in the best interest of the United States?
2) How do you determine whether or not a country is “capable of defending itself”? Is this based on current military capability or GDP? What of countries that perhaps could afford to purchase weapons to defend themselves but don’t have them currently? Should we consider the probability of attack?
3) What if the probability of attack increases if we no longer participate in a treaty like NATO? After all isn’t part of the point of NATO to pre-empt invasions? I tend to think of NATO membership as a bit like a sign announcing that your house is “protected by X security system”. The security system will protect you if someone breaks in, but just the sign can send a signal to burglars to avoid your house. The sign doesn’t cost extra.
I don't know, but I have the impression that Israel was given a lot of American technology and money to build their defenses. Maybe not. But if Israel is defending itself without the need for American support, then Trump will be fine with that I'm sure.
The answer to all of your questions is: "Through discussion and debate." If you are looking for a simple a priori principle, you will be disappointed. These are complex and nuances decisions that have to be reviewed constantly as circumstances change. As for NATO, an alliance only works if every member is seen to be pulling its weight. Freeloading is the death of cooperation. Trump is right to get tough with the other members who aren't living up to their membership commitments. Remember, every member signed on to military spending targets and they should be held to the contract they voluntarily signed with the others.
This obsession pundits seem to have with Madison Square Garden is odd but very revealing. Yes, decades and decades ago, there was an American Nazi rally there. Does that mean it's forever tainted as a cursed place? A huge number of events have taken place there. It's not even the same location now as that time. But any political reference seems to set off this knee-jerk "ohmigod, ohmigod, *NAZIS*, that's the same places as ...". It's like there's one fact about it stuck in the pundit mind, which is constantly trotted out for emotional impact.
https://www.msg.com/madison-square-garden/history
[Update: Not to apply to our host, see clarification and apology below]
Sorry, you can't pin that on me. That was a parenthetical comment pointing to a bizarre little coincidence, no more. And I can prove it: Here is what I wrote shortly before Trump's MSG rally. https://substack.com/@dgardner/note/c-74293023
In fact, I could have co-signed your comment here.
Accepted, apologies, I was incorrect to attribute any of that to you.
But it's not a "bizarre little coincidence", at least to me since I grew up in New York. MSG is a big venue in the middle of New York City. It's a natural place in a novel to set a popular political event. It's not quite "Times Square", but that's the flavor, in that having something happen there in NYC very common.
Thanks. Yes, I get it. If you have a big event in NYC, you probably have it in MSG. What I found weirdly coincidental was not only that there was a (fictional) rally in MSG but that it was the last big event of the campaign, a point Lewis emphasized more than once. That was a little head-rattling when the Trump rally was being described the same way ad nauseam.
A sidenote: I am stunned that Hillary Clinton received no blowback for her comments. Strictly from a tactical point of view, it was amazingly dumb. But worse... it was her! How could she not know that the one Democrat in American who should be quiet in the last month of the campaign is her?! Yet there she was, on TV, practically repeating the "basket of deplorable" gaffe. Gobsmacking.
It is possible to break a very large number of eggs and not have anything resembling an omelet to show for it..
I think the concept of conservatism is flawed in the manner in which it is typically used today. There is very little "conservative" in the burkean sense about modern america, and hasn't been for a long time. I would even say that the same is true for liberalism. Modern america is a mass democratic state, both in a political and in a broader cultural sense. The Trump movement ought to be viewed through this lense, not really as a break from old school conservatism, but as a final break from any nominally or substantive bourgeois-liberal ties (or pretensions, perhaps).
I appreciate your piece but on this point: "Donald Trump has far more in common with V.I. Lenin than Edmund Burke."
I think that the better comparison is Mao Tse Tung. When Mao was faced with his ouster (through term limits) he did not take it well and he launched the Cultural Revolution on the premise that a deep state (in his case of "Counter-Revolutionaries") had taken control of the country and was working to crush it with through invasions from outside and only he could literally make the PRC great again. That effort killed the legal system, or indeed the idea of law, in China forever, but it put him on top until he died 10 years later.
At heart Trump is about Trump and like Mao he surrounds himself by the weak (including family) so that he stays on top. And the end result is destruction for everyone else.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-150034070
I appreciate you pointing out to Trumpian "conservatives" that they are not really conservatives - they're revolutionaries - and that most people who claim to be conservative nowadays have no right to claim Scruton. I think that the inversion that we see in contemporary politics, progressives becoming conservative and conservatives becoming revolutionary, should be made much more explicit. It is very interesting for me to see that Roger Scruton's books more and more populate the bookshelves of my progressive friends, for example. Being a progressive nowadays is about maintaing the social conquests of the 2010s and the 1990s liberal order on the domestic and world stage. It's literally progressive conservatism.
Having thought of this, I remained puzzled by the connection between progressivism and conservatism, until I read this passage in G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy:
"The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post."
Hopefully reactonary folks will stop appropriating Scruton, as wolves in a sheepskin vest. Also because I find Scruton a bit of a bore, and his conservatism superficial and simulated.
Did you read ‘What else actually is there?’ by Jenny Turner in the London Review of Books by any chance? I read that this week and it brought me to the same (obvious now) conclusion, that MAFA are revolutionaries, willing to break things and risk all that might happen as a result. (It was a review of a couple of works by Gillian Rise). Perhaps an interesting coincidence but right in line with how I’ve been thinking about ‘it all’
No, interesting. I’ll have to look that up.
I can send you a pdf if you like (it’s very long, over 12,000 words), just let me know.
My note to self while reading the article was: “Trumpists want a revolution, they are not conservative at all. It is the instinct of destroying the status quo and running the risk of ‘recreating a terror, reinforcing lawlessness or strengthening bourgeois law in its universality and arbitrariness’(Rose). It’s the tear it-all-down mentality - Elon Musk thinks he’s mastered that… I think we’ll have some unintended consequences. This is the ‘destruction of the actual organisation of the world in the name of the organisation of the party’. It’s orthodox Marxism in that sense.”
The philosopher in question was Gillian Rose (not Rise, sorry about the typo) and she was writing about the Frankfurt School (Marxism) but my mind immediately connected it to MAGA and their, like you wrote, revolutionary as opposed to conservative core. Revolution appeals to me too, but the amount of unnecessary suffering generated through revolution and, as you said, the minuscule chance of success make it unpalatable.
Ah, I realized from your essay this is the real reason I find myself returning again and again to Sinclair Lewis. It's an earlier version of ourselves as smalltown Midwesterners. He was an astute ethnographer of his time and place.
Exactly. I read him less as literature than as history. He takes me there.
I got addicted to The Rest is History several months ago but I find them quite mixed. The ones where they give a proper history lesson such as The Falklands War and The First World War stand out but others just sound like people down the pub chatting over a beer. I'm still addicted though. I just got through Dominic Sandbrook's book on Thatcher Times too — absolutely marvellous — and have the 70s queued up for my next read.
I swore off politics when I left the USA after Trump got elected last time around. It's time to swear off it again. It doesn't do me any good.