Evan McMullin for President

I watched almost none of the third and, mercifully, final presidential debate. I tuned in just long enough to see the candidates respond to a question about gun rights. In that minute I saw Hillary Clinton dissemble about her support for the Second Amendment, followed by an outright falsehood about the Heller case. Given a hole a mile wide to drive through and dismantle Clinton’s farcical response, Donald Trump did what Donald Trump does best: offer an utterly incoherent, babbling jumble of words about how Hillary was totally pissed – yeah Donald saw her that day and she was mad – about the decision.

And I wept. And then I went back to the baseball game.

As I said on twitter, imagine how great the response would have been if only Republicans had nominated the person who actually argued the Heller case before the Supreme Court. I was corrected – Ted Cruz wrote briefs, but did not argue the case. Nonetheless the overarching point still stood. It’s difficult to watch any of these debates and not visualize Ted Cruz meticulously slicing and dicing Hillary Clinton to shreds. Heck, despite his pre-New Hampshire primary debate meltdown, it’s difficult not to envision Marco Rubio absolutely destroying Hillary Clinton during these debates. Or, for that matter, just about any Republican capable of stringing together two complete, coherent sentences together (I’m being generous on his ability to get one out).

In a completely depressing election cycle, that might have been the lowest point. Indeed I was struck by a deep melancholy over what might have been. I know many of us snark and crack jokes on social media about the election, but last night it seemed so much less fun than usual. It really isn’t funny, in any way. Conservatives had literally the greatest opportunity in the history of this republic to finally put forward a capable, intelligent, stalwart candidate capable of winning a general election. For, contrary to what many have said, just about any in the Republican field, in particular Cruz and Rubio, would have wiped the floor with Clinton. And once either of them had been elected, they would have had much more stable Congressional majorities to work with than any of their GOP predecessors, at least since the New Deal era.

Instead we got Donald Trump, a man nominated on the backs of moderate “Republican” primary voters who never voted in primaries before. People saw the flashy red hats, the repeated incantations of a catchy slogans, and the constant blathering of an idiot who told them exactly what they wanted to hear, and they said, “That’s the man who will make America great again and stick it to the establishment RINOs.” You know, the guy who is the very definition of a political insider and is, literally, a Republican in name only.

I don’t want to go too far afield in this post, but I’m frankly done with all the apologies for Trump primary voters. I’ve read the approximately 8 million “this is why Trump was nominated” stories, and while many of them make good and true points, it doesn’t really nullify the fact that many of his most ardent supporters were conned, not to mention that yes, some of them truly are deplorable alt righters who absolutely should be shunned once the orange goblin has been defeated. Unlike some I won’t be calling for a round of purges (other than some of the more notorious elements of the infotainment industry), but there will be nothing wrong with Birching the alt right.

With all that out of the way, it’s time to pick an actual candidate. Yes, as I was reminded, four years ago I wrote “to cast a ballot for some third party is the equivalent of not voting for president.” Painful as it is, there is still some basic truth to that, but the circumstances have changed. Unlike four years ago, there was truly daylight between the two major party candidates, and despite his many flaws, Mitt Romney was worth voting for ahead of Barack Obama. I cannot say the same of Donald Trump with regards to Hillary Clinton.

We’ve also reached a point that there is much of a chance that Evan McMullin, the man whom I will be writing in for president, will be our next president as Donald Trump. No amount of fantasizing will make the polling chasm between Trump and Clinton disappear. And I say this as someone who was not completely dismissive of Trump’s general election chances at the outset. But he’s done.

I’ll admit we don’t have great options before us for third party options. Again, to quote myself, “It would be a curious choice for any Catholic to vote for Gary Johnson out of protest against [Donald Trump] considering that Johnson is pro-abortion, favors legalizing prostitution, and would have government out of the marriage business altogether. In other words, voting for him is truly cooperating with evil.” Johnson is a non-starter. As usual, the Constitution Party candidate has surface appeal until you start peeling back the layers. Jill Stein . . . no. And so there is Evan McMullin.

To be honest I am not sure I’d even give Evan McMullin a second look if this were a Republican primary. He seems solidly pro life, even if his campaign website’s language is fairly milquetoast. His response to the Obergfell decision was cringe inducing, as was his later effort to distinguish between wanting justices to overturn Obergfell versus overturning Roe. He supports a path to legalization, and otherwise seems to take the John Kasich tact of ignoring threats to our national security and our sovereignty.

And yet he is the best of the lot that remains.

Perhaps my support for McMullin should put to rest the idea that I’m looking for ideological purity, for if I were, I’d just write myself in. I’m not looking for purity, but rather someone who can cogently defend some basic conservative principles. While not ideal, he is the only candidate I can even think of supporting, and so I will offer up my utterly useless, tepid endorsement.

Can he win? I’m not about to engage in the flights of fancy that translate a win in Utah into him somehow capturing an election thrown to the House of Representatives. As an historical curiosity he does seem somewhat likely to win Utah, which would make him the first third party candidate to win a state since 1968. Beyond that, he is not likely to make too much noise.

But why not? A majority of Americans are disgusted with both major party nominees. I don’t see a gun pointed at any of us forcing to vote for either. Why have we so lazily accepted this fate? Yes, I know what I said four years ago, but we’re presented with a situation in which both candidates are manifestly unfit and unworthy. It is beyond idiotic to be offered the choice of a turd sandwich, shit salad, and wedding banquet chicken breast, and insist on pretending that chicken breast isn’t there. So excuse me while I enjoy this utterly dry, tasteless, yet healthy and not foully offensive bit of chicken.

Scared Crooked

So this is a tweet that happened.

.@HillaryClinton Our 8 year old has been having trouble sleeping & finally she told us what she was worried about.”Gun violence” she sobbed.

— Busy Philipps (@Busyphilipps25) October 15, 2016

This has led to much scoffing on social media, including (pretty funny) tweets like this one:

My 1 year old son just looked up from his activity cube and said his first words: “It’s unfair there 6 sides to a cube but only 2 genders”. https://t.co/wROHABcFwI

— Kilgore Trout (@Beer__Wolf) October 15, 2016

 

While it’s easy to assume Ms. Busy is completely full of crap, I’m willing to to give her the benefit of the doubt. My oldest daughter is nearly eight years old, and she’s fairly clever and perceptive. At that age they are beginning to form something of a social conscience, and it would not surprise me to learn that Ms. Busy has lived up to her name in the parenting field and has indoctrintaed her child politically.

Yet, if true, her child’s statement is an indictment of Ms. Busy’s parenting and indoctrination. That an eight year old child (who likely lives in a well-insulated, gated community, as noted by another clever tweeter) fears gun violence to the point she’d break down in tears is a sign she has been trained to live in fear of unlikely events. Whether through her parents, friends, teachers, or television, this child has been brought up to fear an imaginary epidemic of gun violence that actual crime statistics suggest is not happening.

I’ll concede to Ms. Busy that she’s almost certainly as much a victim of media scaremongering as her daughter. We live in an age where parents face jail time and/or visits from CPS if they permit their children to walk home from school by themselves, all because of society’s irrational fear of the almost non-existent threat of stranger abduction. Statistics be damned, if you have seen a news story in the past ten years about a child who was abducted and nver seen again, it means all of our children are at risk. Similarly, every school shooting is a sign that our children are a day away from being picked off by a deranged gunman, or that the horrific stories of gang violence in Chicago means that the inner cities are in perpetual lockdown.

I do not mean to minimize the consequences or horrors of real world events that have taken place. That stranger abduction is rare doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, and the parents of the slain Sandy Hook elementary students are not comforted by crime statistics demonstrating how unlikely such events are. Yet to live in perpetual fear of these events taking place, and especially to allow our children to live in such fear, is grossly irresponsible.

This dovetails somewhat with a David French post I read this morning, detailing how blind rage on both sides of the political aisle has distorted our thinking and our actions. This probably merits its own post as it highlights one of the main issues I’ve been thinking about, and it’s how overreaction to very real issues has created this insane cycle of counter-overreactions. But the final sentence of French’s post is a good message to all of us, and in particular Ms. Busy.

Take a deep breath, America. We should be better than this.

29 Days to Go

So, quiet weekend, huh?

Let me take everything  in order. As one of the few Trump critics* who acknowledged he actually had a fighting chance in the general election, I really don’t get to say I told you so. Sure we all expected some October surprises, but I didn’t necessarily expect something of this magnitude, though in retrospect I’m not sure why. It should have been clear that someone who has lived so much of his life on camera, and without a filter, would have a bombshell such as this, and it’s likely to get much worse.

*I prefer not to use the #NeverTrump moniker, if for no other reason than it generally meant #NotCruzEither for much of the primary season. And though they are a minority element of #NeverTrump, some within the movement are so filled with disdain towards Trump that they’ve almost abandoned reason. If you regularly retweet leftist journalists, including Kurt Eicehnwald, it might be a sign you’ve taken you Trump disdain too far. 

The excuse-making is fairly sick, and if I’m to believe his sycophants, I’m the weirdo because I have never remotely spoken like Trump. Sure a lot of guys engage in crude sexual talk, and I’m not going to feign shock over that. But if you can’t recognize the difference between a bunch of 20-year olds talking in a locker room about all the action they got over the weekend and a 59-year old, married Trump bragging to a stranger about behavior bordering on sexual assault, then I promise you I’m not the one with the problem.

In order to defend Trump we’re to resort to labeling all men as sexual predators. Funny, I thought part of what fueled Trumpomania was revulsion towards the absurd exaggerations and stereotypes of Social Justice Warriors about men. I thought the Rolling Stone rape fabrications, and the ensuing cycle of stories about a rape epidemic on campus had enraged the very folks who saw in Trump a champion against these attitudes. And yet his very supporters are the ones who are implicitly attempting to validate the narrative.

The other defense of Trump, such as it is, is that Bill Clinton said and did worse. To which I reply: yep. Bill Clinton is every bit the pig he’s been made out to be over the years, and Hillary Clinton enabled him every step of the way. But again, I don’t think the argument of “Democrats rally around and enable their sexual predators, we should, too” is a winning one for conservatives.

And yet it must be said that most Clinton supporters  who are clutching their pearls at Trump’s words do need to be condemned as hypocrites. Just as Clinton being a monster doesn’t excuse Trump, Trump’s disgusting remarks don’t suddenly make Bill and Hillary saints. Trump’s little p.r. stunt of bringing in a bunch of Bill’s accusers may have been some revolting c.y.a. political theater, yet they serve as a reminder that a parade of victims only seems to be cheered on when it’s convenient to one’s political party.

As for the debate, I said on twitter that the first 30 minutes were  without exaggeration the low point in American democracy, and I stand by those words. When half an hour of a presidential debate is centered around which side is the worse sexual predator, and who is really the bigger liar, then we’re right and truly screwed as a nation. I also observed that just about every accusation Trump and Clinton hurled at one another was 100 percent accurate, and yet just about every word uttered in their own defense were blatant lies.

That being said, Trump did far better than could have reasonably been expected. Perhaps he’s being graded on his own low curve, but he beat Hillary at her own spin game. I’ll further observe that the collective fainting spells of the left at the supposed political prosecution Trump is promising of Clinton is just a little much. Trump is not promising a prosecution for the sake of a prosecution against a political opponent, as these purveyors of horse manure would have you all believe. Trump has cited a very real crime Clinton has in all likelihood committed, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with anything Trump said on this specific topic.

Yet Clinton may have won by Trump’s not losing. A disastrous performance by Trump could have had the rest of the Republican rats scurrying off the ship. Trump did just well enough to keep the GOP establishment at least partially in camp Trump. There was never really much of a chance of Trump being replaced at this point, but this guarantees it won’t happen. It also keeps the GOP tethered close enough to Trump that when the next bomb drops – and it will – it will sink not just Trump, but the entire party. Granted it may have already been too late to salvage the party, but November 8 could be far worse than we previously anticipated.

Burke and Rousseau (2)

Now where were we? Ah yes, Burke and Rousseau.

This will be the final post where I discuss the philosophical roots of the founding era. While some of this has likely been a bit abstract, I believe it’s an important as a sort of frame of reference.

The previous post centered on Edmund Burke, so here I will focus more on Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Like Burke, Rousseau doesn’t fit exactly in the Enlightenment mold.  Rousseau shares many of the same values of the French Enlightenment philosophers, but is at variance with certain strains of thought.  Peter Gay, an academic whose focus was on the Enlightenment, suggests that “Rousseau was not wholly in the Enlightenment, but he was of it.” Another academic, Mark Huilling sees Rousseau as a critic of the Enlightenment, but as someone fundamentally within the movement.  He concurred with the philosophes’ rejection of original sin, and also believed that love of self can be a good thing and “conducive to the love of some others.”

However one labels Rousseau, the important thing to note is that he was an idiosyncratic thinker who had a very unique view of society and human nature. His was a philosophy that ran in direct contrast with someone like Thomas Hobbes.  Whereas Hobbes depicted life in the state of nature as one of “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Rousseau, however, paints a picture of man in a state of nature which is much more idyllic than that painted by Hobbes.  Instead of being a warlike creature, Rousseau writes that “nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state, when, placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man, and limited equally by instinct and reason to protecting himself from the harm that threatens him, he is restrained by natural pity from needlessly harming anyone himself, even if he has been harmed.”

Here Rousseau sounds like a cheerleader for humanity, but in many respects he is more pessimistic and wary of his fellow man than even Hobbes. In fact, Rousseau seems driven by a paranoia that colors the way he looks at the world.  Rousseau lived a life of misery, and his Reveries of a Solitary Walker reveals a soul tortured by the world.

I am now alone on earth, no longer having any brother, neighbor, friend, or society other than myself.  The most sociable and the most loving of human has been proscribed from society by unanimous agreement.  In the refinements of their hatred, they have sought the torment which would be cruelest to my sensitive soul and have violently broken all the ties which attached me to them.  I would have loved men in spite of themselves.  Only by ceasing to be humane, have they been able to slip away from my affection.  They are now strangers, unknowns, in short, nonentities to me – because that is what they wanted.

This is the voice of one who feels persecuted.  Fueled by paranoia, the Reveries belie Rousseau’s imagery of blissful and peaceful man as set forth in the Second Discourse.

Much of Rousseau’s writings reveal a man who is almost outside of the world. He did not really fit in, and said as much in the Reveries, writing, “the conclusion I can draw from all these reflections is that I have never been truly suited for civil society where everything is annoyance, obligation, and duty and that my independent natural temperament always made me incapable of subjection necessary to anyone who wants to live among men.”

In the words of Irving Babbitt, Rousseau was a daydreamer who created, in essence, an imaginary world or “dream society” that better fit his idea of how the world should be. My old professor Claes Ryn wrote that “the imagination becomes for Rousseau an almost constant refuge from what he considers the tyranny of society.” This constant reverie feeds Rousseau’s idealism, and fosters unrealistic expectations of the world.

There are specific elements of Rousseau’s political philosophy which sharply conflict with Edmund Burke. He disdained tradition and constitutionalism, or anything which would tie the hands of future generations. He was, superfically, much more democratic oriented. Ultimately, though, it’s this daydreamer-like utopianism which has connected Rousseau to future radicals, including Thomas Jefferson. One of the common threads of radicals through the ages is a refusal to see the world as it is, or to grasp the limits of human behavior. It’s an unusual attitude for people who seemingly most hate the world as it is, for they see far greater potential to transform this falling world into something like a utopia than those who, while having a more jaunidiced view of human nature, do not think the world needs to be completely reshaped.

This philosophical sketch is meant to explain the ideological currents that influenced early American thinkers. In the broadest terms, there are two basic views of society at war with one another. One is a conservative approach that cherishes the role of traditional institutions and which favors slow rather than radical change.  The other – and I will lump the philosophes with Rousseau here – favors radical change and an ordering of society to meet preferred ends. It is with this latter group that men like Jefferson throw their lot.

So with that groundwork laid, it’s time to turn to the Americans themselves.