And a Note on the Gaza War

 

It is very clear that there will not be a truce in the Gaza war, and that neither side is interested in anything less than total victory.

Israel has made clear that any truce will merely be a pause to allow humanitarian supplies in and to allow civilians to leave Rafah before it moves in and finishes Hamas off once and for all.  Regardless of what one thinks of Hamas, one can hardly expect them to agree to such a proposal!

As for Hamas, it has made clear that it considers Israel withdrawing from Gaza and turning the strip back over to Hamas as a precondition for releasing any hostages.  Israel, very understandably, does not trust Hamas to keep its word.

In effect, each side has given the other what has been known as an "If you don't drop dead, I'll kill you," ultimatum.  Unsurprisingly, such ultimatums are never accepted.  

My guess is that there will be no clear, definitive end to this war.  It will gradually wind down to an occupation and manageable insurgency. Eventually -- probably years from now -- Israel will grow tired and withdraw.  But insurgencies can continue for a long time, and are invariably ugly.

One tiny glimmer of hope. Although I can't find the link, there was a rumor that the Hamas leadership was looking for a country that would accept them in exile.  To date, they had not found one.

More on the Pro-Hamas Left

 I must say, the rise of the pro-Hamas Left has been profoundly unsettling for me. Up till now I had assumed that, whatever problems Europe might have with unassimilated Muslims, US Muslims fit well within the larger society and should be seen as faithful Americans.  Some terrorists existed, but they did not represent the entire community.  Stories of Muslims cheering on 9-11 were false. And while there was no doubt that the violent fringes of Islam were altogether too large and too difficult to separate from the mainstream, the fact remained that most Muslims were decent people, most Muslims despised terrorists (who killed many Muslims, after all) and most Muslims condemned 9-11, reacted with appropriate outrage a the murder of Russian school children, and so forth.

But apparently all of that is different when the country in question is Israel.

I also assumed that charities that cared for war refugees were wholly worthy and uncontroversial causes. Now, after seeing the extent to which many (seemingly) worthy organizations have been coopted by Hamas, I have to wonder, does the same thing happen in other wars around the world?

Just to be clear, I still hold to many former beliefs.  I reject the hardcore pro-Israel crowd who insist than any criticism of Israel whatever inevitably leads to Hamas.  I reject the "no daylight" crowd who insist that in the wake Hamas' ghastly slayings, all criticism of Israel must be suspended and that our only acceptable response toward Israel is absolute and unconditional obedience  Some people seem to believe that Israel has no obligation to limit civilian casualties, or that if Israel thinks the best way to put pressure on Hamas is to cut off all supplies and induce mass starvation, who are we to question Israel?  And Israeli setter's abuses of West Bank Palestinians are an outrage.

So, yes, there is much to condemn about Israel. I am not complaining about people who oppose the war on humanitarian grounds. I also agree that it is not hypocritical to focus on a war being fought (largely) with American weapons, financed by American aid over one that does not involve us. We have a lot more leverage to stop a war we are arming and funding than one we are not.  And it is certainly not my place to criticize Palestinians in the US who have had family killed in the war and are outraged.*

Nor am I disputing that there are reasonable pro-Palestinian people.  But that is not what the "pro-Palestinian" movement about.  The "pro-Palestinian" -- I prefer pro-Hamas -- movement starts with the premise that Israel has no right to exist, and that anything -- anything -- dedicated to the destruction of Israel is justified.

Before Israel had fired a single shot -- before Hamas was fully dislodged from territory it had seized -- people were celebrating its action, proclaiming "Resistance is not terrorism," and chanting "From river to sea" -- a call for the destruction of Israel.  The existence of Israel is described as an "occupation," and resistance to the "occupation," i.e., to the existence of Israel, whether in the form of a Hamas rampage of murder, rape and torture; or in the form of the Houthi's indiscriminate blockage of shipping traffic; or in the form of Iran launching over 300 missiles and drones against Israel -- anything goes so long as it is dedicated to the destruction of Israel.  

And, it should be noted, cries of genocide went up against Israel from the very outset of the war.

A little background is in order.

Israel withdrew its occupying forces from Gaza in 2005. Pro-Hamas advocates argue that Gaza was still under occupation pre-October 7 because it was under blockade and had become "the world's largest open air prison."  Not mentioned -- Hamas continued to fire rockets at Israel and occasionally to cross over and commit acts of terrorism. And, yes, Israel did fire back and did inflict vastly more damage than it took. It is certainly fair to condemn this.  So far as I can tell, the position of pro-Hamas advocates is that Israel should have given free access to the people committing these acts because, under the laws of war, resistance to the occupying power is not only allowed, but a positive obligation, and the occupying power has no right of defense. In other words, Israel, as occupying power, was required to allow Hamas to attack at will and do nothing to oppose such attacks. 

Even if that is one's moral position, it seems a bit much to ask Israel -- or anyone else, for that matter -- to agree.**

My view tracks with Jonathan Chait. Israel's actions have been appalling.  There is no theoretical reason why there cannot be a liberal, humanitarian, universalist pro-Palestinian movement.  But the pro-Hamas movement coopted any such prospect before Israel had taken any action whatever:

Many students were attracted to these groups because of the horrendous human toll inflicted by Israel’s counterattack in Gaza. But the groups themselves are very clearly not advocating for “peace.” They are for war. Their objection is not to human suffering but that the wrong humans are suffering.

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*And, just for the record, what is my view on the war?  I generally see eye-to-eye with Kevin Drum.  "Hamas invaded Israel for the express purpose of slaughtering civilians. Israel may be guilty of not caring enough about civilian deaths in Gaza, but they are fundamentally fighting against a terrorist group which has the announced aim of destroying Israel."  And I do not see that as a legitimate goal.

**And it should come as no surprise that the laws of war say no such thing.  The official position of the Red Cross states:

 After effective occupation of territory, members of the territory’s armed forces who have not surrendered, organized resistance movements and genuine national liberation movements may resist the occupation. If they do so, they must distinguish themselves from the civilian population, or on the basis of GP I, at least carry their weapons openly during attacks and deployments. Civilians who take a direct part in such hostilities lose their protection against attack for the time of their direct participation, but not their civilian status. If they do not participate directly in hostilities or no longer do so (for example, if they are hors de combat), they are protected against attacks. You know this from the lesson on the conduct of operations. Indirect support for the resistance movement, such as providing information or non-military supplies, does not constitute taking a direct part in hostilities. Those so engaged are civilians and therefore protected against attack. They may, however, be in contravention of security laws passed by the occupying power. In that case, they can be tried and sentenced or their freedom of movement restricted

And again:

Civilians who take a direct part in hostilities against the occupying power may be prosecuted. Remnants of the occupied country’s armed forces who continue fighting are of course combatants and must be treated as such. If captured, they are entitled to POW status and treatment as laid down in the Third Geneva Convention. In particular, they cannot be tried for the simple fact of taking part in hostilities. If, however, they commit acts in violation of the law of armed conflict, they may be subject to prosecution.

We Have an Authoritarian Left in the US and It is Starting to Take and Interest in Elections

 

It get that it is not exactly news that the US has an authoritarian Left as well as our authoritarian Right.

And just to be clear, I am not talking about past historical instances of an authoritarian Left, such as 19th century anarchists and radical socialists, or the Communist Party, or 1960's terrorists..

I am talking about the authoritarian Left in its current incarnation. Also to clarify, by authoritarian I roughly mean a movement that does not respect the rules of democratic fair play, that does not respect the rights of people who disagree with it, that engages in violence, that is aggressively hostile and punitive, or that dehumanizes groups of people.  And, yes, the term is relative.  Not all authoritarian are equally authoritarian.

When did the current authoritarian Left get its start? Do anti-globalization protests in the 1990's that turned into riots count?  When did Antifa originate?  My understanding is that it began in the Pacific Northwest out of the clash between liberal coastal residents and conservative interior residents, including some genuine neofascists.  Violently breaking up right wing events, smashing windows and the like is certainly authoritarian.  And yes, it goes without saying that right wingers grossly exaggerate the extent and menace of Antifa and project many of their own authoritarian tenancies onto it.  But none of that should excuse Antifa's real authoritarianism, by which I mean not just its violence, but its desire to shut down opponents.

Occupy Wall Street was clearly not authoritarian in the sense that it had no leaders and no structure and required consensus before doing anything.  It was authoritarian in the sense of having a violent fringe, and having an offensive sense of entitlement that rules did not apply to it and it did not have to respect others or care about the disruptions they were causing.  

Black Lives Matter originated in 2014 to protest police brutality.  It clearly had a violent fringe, including cop killers, from the very start. It is not clear to me the entire movement was violent.  Riots broke out in 2014 in Ferguson and Baltimore, but they were short-lived and mild riots, that movement leaders did their best to quell. The 2020 riots were a different matter altogether.  The 2020 riots were widespread and massive (though still not as bad as many right wingers claimed).  Much of the violence was just random lawlessness, best characterized as opportunistic looting by people who were eager to seize any excuse.  But there was a decidedly ideological fringe to the outbreak, and all too many people on the left who were willing to excuse it. And there were also disturbing scene in with Black Lives Matter protesters demanded that random bystanders endorse their cause.

But all these authoritarian Left-wing movements of recent vintage had one notable thing in common.  None of them were much interested in electoral politics.  Like Trump supporters, they believed in the "uniparty" and saw any disputes within it as mere attempts to distract the masses.  Their difference from Trump supporters was that they saw Donald Trump as the very embodiment of the uniparty.

Well, this latest wave of anti-Israel, pro-Hamas protesters is a different matter altogether.  These ones are definitely interested in electoral politics and determined to set the terms of orthodoxy for Democrats.

I can definitely imagine right wingers responding with an impatient snort, and saying I am willing to condone the most violent and coercive behavior so long as it is targeted at regular folks, but get all upset when people in the corridors of power are targets.

And I will concede that I do not expect these pro-Hamas protests to break out into widespread rioting and mass looting of the kind we saw in summer of 2020.  We are unlikely to walk down the streets and see every store window smashed and the contents stolen.  And I agree that is all to the good.  I would also not expect pro-Hamas protests to lead to the sort of crime wave that followed the 2020 riots, again, very much to the good.

But violent (or potentially violent)  movements that target the corridors of power create a different set of problems.  Attempts to intimidate policy makers do affect policy making, after all, and in ways that affect a lot more people than just the policy makers being threatened.  They can also drive responsible people out of office and leave power to dangerous authoritarians.  Such has been the goal of the more violent precincts of MAGA.  

And, in any event, the distinction between targeting regular folks and targeting the corridors of power is not as clear as some people might think.  MAGA members and now pro-Hamas protesters don't just target the powerful in Washington, or even in state houses.  They also threaten and harass city counsel, school boards, and other organizations much closer to regular folks.  MAGA members have harassed and threatened rank and file election workers and volunteers and pulled over an AC repairman on the belief that he was smuggling fake ballots.  Hamas supporters are harassing and threatening Jewish students, random Jews, and businesses like Starbucks and Google that have stood up to them.  

And, of course, team Hamas is threatening to throw the election to Donald Trump.

And there is another, particularly insidious danger, noted by Jonathan Chait that happens when potentially violent authoritarians target the corridors of power.  "Because Democrats perceive some of the protesters as potential Biden voters, they have soft-pedaled their criticism of their tactics. The handful of critics have focused on the political ramifications of the protest movement."

That is, of course, exactly why Republicans are so reluctant to criticize MAGA or come out strongly against Trump -- and why their main criticism of Trump is his general unpopularity and likelihood of losing the election.

Forecast:  Rough sailing ahead.

I Still Don't Take the Hush Money Prosecution Seriously

Look, I know there is a growing consensus that there may actually be something to the prosecution of Donald Trump for paying hush money to Stormy Daniels.  But I still am not convinced.

The basic argument that the hush money prosecution is serious is that it is really an "election interference" prosecution, that the election might have gone the other way if the Stormy Daniels affair had come out, so really this is about unfairly swaying the 2016 election.

Sorry, but I still don't buy it.

Back during 2016 -- and 2017-2019, "election interference" referred to Russia's hack of the DNC and Tony Podesta servers and publication of the contents.  It was clearly illegal, both in the sense that the hack was illegal, and that foreign participation in our electoral process is illegal.  

It also violated certain unwritten rules of etiquette in the world of espionage, which recognizes that hacking sensitive information, though in violation of the domestic laws of the host country, is just what spies do, and therefore not blameworthy.  Publishing the contents in an attempt to sway an election outcome is a different matter altogether.  It is not considered to be just what spies do, and is seen as blameworthy.

Donald Trump and his supporters have attempted to obfuscate the reality of Russian interference in the 2016 by stretching the term beyond recognition to mean basically anything that can sway public opinion.  Really, taken to its logical conclusion, this makes the entire political campaign an exercise in election interference since it is intended to sway the outcome.  Everything becomes election interference, and if everything is election interference, then nothing is election interference.

Let's adopt Trump's terms.

In fact, this reminds me of nothing so much as Republicans back in the 1990's getting into a tizzy about Bill Clinton and acting as if he were our first chronic womanizer President, which he wasn't, by a long shot.  

Neither is Donald Trump our first candidate to attempt to cover up an affair, by a long shot.   If attempting to cover up an affair is "election interference," then the term is being diluted beyond all meaning.

Conclusion of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Volume V

 

The Senate Intelligence Committee finally wraps up Volume V of its report on Russian interference in the 2016 election with recommendations and partisan interpretations.

As for the recommendations (pp 931-938) I can only say, "Oh, isn't that cute!"  The recommendations seem extraordinarily naive today and would be repudiated as "weaponization of government" by Republicans everywhere including (I assume) the Committee members who made them.

The Committee recommends stronger enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), require registered foreign agents (lobbyists and other advocates) to disclose their status when engaged in political activity, foreign media outlets operating in the US to proclaim their affiliation, and US media outlets publishing information from FARA outlets to label them as such.  To which I can only say, ROTFLMAO. Can you imagine how Republicans today would react to any such requirements? They would see any such requirements of disclosure as an outrage against First Amendment rights and heroically stand up for the right of Republicans to accept all the foreign assistance they can get.

They also recommend the FBI giving campaigns briefing on how to recognize attempts at foreign influence and how to defend against it, and give recommendations for how political campaigns can protect themselves against attempts at foreign influence and report it.  To which my reaction is somewhere between a snort and an eye roll. Can anyone imagine a Republican campaign treating such advice with anything other than laughter and derision?*

 They also encouraged the FBI to be more aggressive when the victim of a foreign cyber attack is unwilling to cooperate, and urged legislation to mandate cyber security vendors to report indicators of nation state compromise to the FBI.  Given Republicans' current view of the FBI, and any sort of communications between government and tech companies, one can easily imagine how they would react to such a measure today.  

Finally, the Committee favored giving Congress more power to enforce its subpoenas and overcome claims of executive privilege.  Somehow I think Republicans' support for such a measure would depend on which party controlled which branch of government.

Then there are the additional comments by the parties.  The Committee congratulated itself on its bipartisanship (pp. 5-7) and commented, "Following the interviews, witnesses were unable to identify which staff worked for the majority and which worked for the minority," (p. 7).  And for the actual report, that appears to be true.  The Committee made its report fearlessly and without hesitation to discuss the most alarming circumstances.  

So it is downright jarring to find an epilogue by the Republican members of the Committee (pp. 941-942) declare, "[T]he Committee found no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government in its efforts to meddle in the election. . . . After more than three years of investigation by this Committee, we can now say with no doubt, there was no collusion."  Um, guys, didn't you read your own report?  "No collusion" is not exactly what I would take away from it.

By contrast, the Democrats on the Committee apparently have read the report, because they follow it up with a section of their own (pp. 943-948) pointing out all the collision the Committee uncovered.  They point out that Paul Manafort while he was serving as Chairman of the Trump Campaign, regularly fed campaign polling data and discussed campaign strategy with a Russian intelligence agent.  George Papadopoulos appears to have received advance notice of the hack and leak operation (although he may not have realized the significance of what he was told).  And while there is no evidence that he passed the information on to the campaign, it seems decidedly odd that he would discuss it with foreign diplomats but not his own supervisors.  Trump sought advance information through Roger Stone of what to expect from Wikileaks, knowing that Wikileaks was publishing the fruits of a Russian hack.  And Donald Trump, Jr. eagerly met with Russian agents to learn of derogatory information about Hillary Clinton. Furthermore, Trump was campaigning on a pro-Russia platform while secretly pursuing a lucrative business deal in Russia.  None of this is exactly criminal but it is, as the main body of the report commented, "a grave counterintelligence threat."  

There is a second Democratic epilogue, by Senator Ron Wyden alone (pp. 949-952) saying that too much information was redacted, especially about Manafort and Kilimnik.  He also criticizes the Committee for not adequately investigating Donald Trump's financial ties to Russia.

Finally, the Democrats also make the point that  none of the redacted material is in any way exculpatory.  Instead, "[T]he redacted information makes the already alarming public findings even more granular, explicit, and concerning."  But (presumably) still not as juicy as whatever you are imagining.  

______________________________________________
*I suppose some old-fashioned national security Republicans might, but old-style national security Republicans are unlikely to be targets of foreign influence anyhow

The Most Disturbing Aspect of Lewis -- Life Expectancy

 

So, turning from what CS Lewis puts in the devil's mouth in the Screwtape Letters and what he says in earnest in Mere Christianity, we can make some attempt to understand some of his more potentially disturbing thoughts about Christian living and a Christian society.  He endorses social activism as a means to Christianity and rejects Christianity as a means to social activism.*  He endorses individual hobbies and does not address clubs addressed to hobbies.  He is not opposed to novelty in people's individual lives, only to endlessly chasing after new thrills and never seeing anything through, but does not address novelty in the larger society.  And he appears to endorse flexibility toward time, although this is not well addressed.

But there is an even more disturbing current seen repeatedly in the Screwtape Letters, which he does not address at all in Mere Christianity.  In the section on novelty I said, "[I]f we are to take Letter 25 at its word, really Christians should look and act exactly the same as they did back in Constantine's day . . . and that fact that anything at all has changed since then is the devil's work."  The obvious response to that is that if we still everything the same way we did in Constantine's day, doctors would still put leaches on their patients and there would be no vaccines against childhood illness.

Then again, Lewis -- or at least Screwtape -- might very well see that as altogether a good thing.  At least, that is the impression I get from Letter 5, Letter 28, and Letter 31, all of which distinctly seem to see longevity as a bad thing, and the shorter the life expectancy the better.  Letter 5, at the beginning of WWII, laments that war leads to many people dying young and makes people come face to face with their mortality.  Letter 31, the final one, laments the "patient" being killed by a bomb and going to Heaven, "No gradual misgivings, no doctor's sentence, no nursing home, no operating theatre, no false hopes of life; sheer, instantaneous liberation."  

But Letter 28 is the really creepy one.  Screwtape warns Wormwood not to let the "patient" be killed in the latest air raid or his soul will be lost.  He says that the majority of the human race dies in infancy (presumably before the devil had the opportunity to tempt) and a good many die young.  He also says that the young instinctively crave Heaven and lack attachment to this world.  The best chance of winning a soul, he says, is to keep the "patient" alive as long as possible to wear him down through disappointment and disillusionment -- or, alternately, to tempt him to worldliness by success.  He even says "[Humans], of course, do tend to regard death as the prime evil and survival as the greatest good.  But that is because we have taught them to do so."  

So apparently Lewis does not see the self-preservation instinct as our deepest seated instinct, but as a temptation by the devil that corrupts our natures.  And, indeed, he sees it as something that grows over time, while young people have no real attachment to staying alive at all.  If one takes Lewis at his word here, he sees the shorter the life expectancy the better and dying as young as possible as optimal.  Nor does he address this issue in Mere Christianity.  

He does say that since societies rise and fall but individuals have immortal souls, the individual is more important than the society, and that this is the difference between democracy and totalitarianism as well as between Christianity and atheism.  Presumably he would make an exception here, and say that it is important for some people to live long enough for the species to reproduce itself.  And by reproduce itself, I mean not just give birth to the new generation, but to raise them to adulthood -- at least the minority who live that long.

Still, if one takes Screwtape at his word, it would appear that Lewis's ideal is a society is a return to the good old days when women routinely had ten or twelve babies and saw half of them die in infancy and maybe a quarter die young.  Once the two or three who survive marry and start families of their own, the older generation has done its duty and the sooner it dies off, the better their chances of Heaven.  And yes, I know, the devil should not be taken at his word.  But if that is not Lewis's view, then he really should have clarified it in his more serious work.

What Was Hamas Thinking?

 

Look.  Clearly I will never be able to get into the head of a twisted death cult like Hamas, and it would be a mistake to expect them to be rational as we understand rationality.  But it does seem a safe assumption that the current war is not what Hamas had in mind.  Hamas may not be rational as you or I understand rationality, but I do expect them to be at least rational enough not to start a war unless they seem some possibility of winning.  And they must have understood that their October 7 attack necessarily meant war.

One suggestion has been that Hamas had great confidence in its underground tunnels and expected to wear the Israelis down in tunnel warfare until they gave up and left.  And, indeed, it is entirely possible, not to say probable, that the Israelis will end up deciding that they will never be able to root out Hamas and are facing an endless insurgency and withdraw, leaving devastation behind.  But it is hard to see the point there.  Given the choice between being invaded, having your country laid to waste, and wearing down the invaders until they give up and leave versus not being invaded in the first place, not being invaded in the first place seems like very much the better option, even for Hamas.

A more likely explanation is that Hamas engaged in maximally provocative acts in order to provoke an Israeli over-reaction in hopes of setting off a wider war and (presumably) forcing other countries to come to their rescue and (presumably) destroy Israel while they were at it.  If that was the plan, the result is mixed.  Hezbollah has bombarded northern Israel, but without having any real effect on the war in Gaza. The Houthis are blocking shipping through the Red Sea.  But other than that, most Arab governments seem quite happy to see Hamas destroyed.  

And, in fact, thinking things through a little further, it increasingly appears that Hamas did not think things through.  If the Arab powers were to come to Hamas' rescue, who would that be?  Certainly not Hezbollah. Hezbollah is not unlike Hamas. It is a formidable defensive force, with the ability to wear down Israeli invaders until they give up and leave, but, like Hamas, it has no real offensive capacity.  Like Hamas, it can fire rockets and commit acts of terror and mayhem, but it has no power to seize and hold territory, or to conquer and subjugate. 

Furthermore, as a matter of basic geography, the only country with the proximity to come to Hamas's rescue is Egypt, a longstanding enemy of Hamas.  Jordan is the next best alternative -- it has not border with Gaza, but might come to the rescue if it could cut across Israel, something it shows neither the desire nor the capacity to do.  Syria might be willing to do such a thing, but is either mired in civil war or still recovering from civil war.  Iran is an ally, but is would have to cut through Iraq, Syria, and Israel to come to Hamas' rescue. 

As I understand it, Hamas also did itself no favors by not consulting with any of its allies in advance, and thereby sought to commit them to a larger war without asking first.  Hamas's allies were not amused.

Straits of Tiran

Houthi attacks on shipping are actually interesting.  It is true that in 1956 and again in 1967, Egypt sought to close the Straits of Tiran to Israel, cutting off Israel's sole port in the Red Sea.  In both cases, Israel saw that as an existential threat and went to war with Egypt (highly successfully, both times).  This time, the Houthis are cutting off traffic to the entire Red Sea and Israel appears to be greeting it with a shrug. Of course, the effect is to cut off traffic to the Suez Canal and force it around the African continent.  Presumably this means a significant loss of revenue for Egypt.  Maybe it is intended as a form of pressure on Egypt to come to the aid of Hamas.

More plausibly, Hamas' provocation of Israel to attack and actions to maximize civilian damage may have been intended to incite popular uprising throughout Arab countries and force them to come to Hamas' aid.  So far that has not happened, but Hamas may be hoping that it will if the war continues for long enough.  Certainly that would account for Hamas' insistence on utterly unrealistic conditions to any truce during negotiations ahead of Ramadan.  Ramadan seemed like the best opportunity to set up such a revolt, but so far it has not happened.  Personally, that remains my biggest fear.

The alternate explanation I have heard is that Hamas does not understand the nature of Israel. Hamas regards Israel as a settler-colonial state and hopes that if they keep up the pressure, they can induce Israel to give up and go home, just as the French eventually gave up and went home in Algeria.  If that is Hamas' believe, then they will be disappointed.  The Israelis are home.  They have nowhere to go.

Volume V: The Steele Dossier, at Last, Starting Page 846

 

So, after finding a "grave counter intelligence threat" from Paul Manafort's association with a Russian spy and secretly providing him information; after discussing Roger Stone acting as a conduit between the campaign and Wikileaks; after mentioning a strange suggestion by the Miss Universe president that the Trump Tower meeting with Russians was initiated when the Russians offered "emails from the Democrats and dirt on Hillary;" after finding evidence that George Papadopoulos was a useful idiot; and after finding what looks very much like evidence of criminal intent by the campaign when they told an informal agent scouring the dark web for e-mails:

I talked to Steve who will compel you to turn over to us all 30,000 emails you located and referred to Wikileaks. BB wants to publish them first. We do not give a rats ass what happens to you and will turn you over the the (sic) Feds for prosecution if you do not comply.

After all that, the Senate Intelligence Committee turns to the Steele Dossier on page 846 and finds it to be a total dud.  To be clear, just because the Committee found the Steele Dossier to be a dud does not mean that they considered it unimportant.  Volume V devotes about 84 pages to the Steele Dossier.  By way of comparison, that is less than the 142 pages devoted to Paul Manafort, less than the 140 pages devoted to the Trump Tower meeting, about the same as the 88 pages devoted to Roger Stone, more that the 62 pages devoted to George Papadopoulos, and much more than the 10 pages devoted to scouring the dark web.

 In general, the Committee found that the Steele Dossier contained dubious material, and that the FBI seriously exaggerated Steele's value as a source.*  Steele declined to be interviewed in person, but submitted written answers.  There is some discussion about the reliability of Steele's sub-sources, much of it (unsurprisingly) blacked out.  Discussion of possible disinformation is also largely blacked out. It also stressed (pp. 881-886) that Steele also did work for Oleg Deripaska, the oligarch who Manafort owed large amounts of money to, that Deripaska is likely to have become aware of what Steele was doing, and that may have been a source of disinformation.  There is no mention in the dossier of Deripaska's business ties to Manafort, or of Deripaska at all.  Steele and Fusion GPS also did work for Natalia Veselnitskaya, although they were apparently not aware that she met with the Trump campaign, nor did Veselnitskaya even know of Steele's existence.  

Most of what Volume V has to say about Steele's association with the FBI is old news, having already been discussed at length by the Office of Inspector General.  The Committee confirms that Steele was attempting to contact the FBI before it opened its investigation of the Trump campaign, but did not actually contact the investigating team until well after. It also confirms Steele's leak to Mother Jones and firing as a result.  Like the Inspector General, Volume V finds that Steele was not as reliable a source as claimed, that the FBI did not investigate him thoroughly enough before using his information to obtain a FISA warrant, and Steele continued to convey information to the FBI through the back door after he was fired, and other intelligence agencies distrust of Steele's materials.

What the Committee did reveal that was new was that Steele's reports, or at least notes summarizing the reports, were circulated in the upper echelons of the State Department, including to Secretary John Kerry.  The number of people in government who knew at least something about Steele's reports an did not leak them is a convincing refutation of any claims of a "deep state" plot against Trump.

Marc Elias

Also new were the report's discussion about Steele's relationship with the DNC.  I found the revelations rather disturbing -- not because the DNC as knowingly doing something improper, but because of the extraordinary lengths DNC personnel went to not to know what was going on.  It suggests that they knew the whole business was shady.  It is not news that Fusion GPS was originally hired by Trump's primary opponents to research his business background for shady dealings (pp 856-857). Owner Glenn Simpson apparently found enough to convince him that Trump should not be President.  When it became clear the Trump had the nomination secured, Simpson decided that, rather than let his services go to waste, he should offer them to the DNC, knowing that the DNC would pass any such information to the Clinton campaign (p. 857).  The DNC did not hire Fusion GPS directly but acted through its law firm, Perkins Coie, which acted through Marc Elias. This is apparently a routine practice and done to create an attorney-client privilege for any materials (pp. 857-858). Elias knows more about election law than anyone else in the country, and presumably knows how to stay within the letter of the law.  The whole business nonetheless feels profoundly sleazy.  Elias apparently thought so as well -- he hired a lawyer when the Committee wanted to interview him and answered only through counsel.

The original plan was simply to investigate Trump's business background and look for dishonest dealings (p. 858). When Simpson suggested looking into Russia ties, Elias was eager, not because he suspected any ties between the campaign and Russia, but simply because he assumed that all business dealings in Russia be thoroughly corrupt (p. 861). Simpson hired Steele in May or June, 2016 to look into Trump's business dealings (p. 862).  Recall that the first sign of any Russian involvement in the campaign was on June 14, 2016 when the Russians were found to have hacked the DNC.  Steele delivered his first memo on June 20, 2016 (pp. 864-864).  That was the one with the sex tape being used for blackmail.  Simpson said, first, that this came as a complete surprise, and that in the clear light of hindsight, maybe he should have discounted it (p. 864).

Then there is the whole disturbing issue of who knew what -- or rather, who was at pains not to know what.  Simpson did not tell Elias that he was passing information on to the FBI.  Elias knew that Fusion has hired an overseas contractor, he refrained from asking any details and denied knowing that the contractor was providing non-public information (pp. 859-860).  Fusion GPS gave Elias weekly briefings, sometime the original documents and sometimes summaries (p 860).  Elias gave the Clinton campaign oral briefings, but generally refrained from putting anything in writing (p. 860).  The Committee was unable to determine how much information in the dossier was passed on to the DNC and the Clinton campaign (p. 860).  The campaign definitely did not receive the memos, and did not learn about Steele or the dossier until Buzz Feed published it (pp. 858-859).  The media appear to have known more about the dossier than the campaign (and refrained from publishing).  DNC Chair Donna Brazile apparently received a call from the press in November asking if she knew M1-6 was on their payroll.  Brazile asked Elias, who said, "You don't have to know."  Brazile did not inquire further (p. 859).

All in all, one comes away with the impression that Elias' actions, though not illegal, were at least irregular, and that he was doing his best to protect the DNC, the Clinton campaign, and even himself from knowledge that could be damaging.

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*And now, given recent developments regarding Alexander Smirnov, maybe it is time for the FBI to reconsider how it assesses source reliability.  I recognize that they need to use disreputable people to get close the the disreputable organizations they are spying on, but there needs to be a way to take disreputability into account.

Another Disturbing Aspect -- Must a Christian Society Reject Novelty?

 

Another disturbing aspect of what a Christian society might look like comes from Letter 25 of the Screwtape Letters.  In a number of places the Letters mock the idea of making the future better than the present and seem to suggest that you should be happy with what you have now.  Admittedly, this was written in the time of Communism, which showed a willingness to commit the most ghastly crimes in the present in the name of a better future, so it was a legitimate thing to worry about.  But Lewis seems to take this fear to extremes, perhaps even to the extent of rejecting anything new as the devil's work.

To be clear, Lewis is not opposed to all change.  To live in time, after all, is to experience a change. Something so simple as walking across the room is, after all a change. But there is good change and bad change.  And Lewis appears to define good changes as cyclical change -- the alternating of day and night, and of the seasons.  Bad change is non-cyclical change -- anything genuinely new.  

Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty.  This demand is entirely our workmanship. . . . Children, until we have taught them better, will be perfectly happy with a seasonal round of games in which conkers succeed hopscotch as regularly as autumn follows summer.  Only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up.

Well, now, if the desire for anything genuinely new is the devil's work, that has some rather disturbing implications. It would suggest that imagination, creativity and innovation are the devil's instruments as well, and that the godly think to do is copy and never create.  In Letter 2, Screwtape mocks the "patient" for subconsciously thinking of Christians as something out of Roman times and finding it unsettling to see them wear modern clothes and seem so ordinary.  But if we are to take Letter 25 at its word, really Christians should look and act exactly the same as they did back in Constantine's day (Constantine legalizing Christianity is presumably at least one novelty we can accept) and that fact that anything at all has changed since then is the devil's work.

So is Lewis's ideal of a Christian society one that makes an ideal of absolute stasis and rejects all things new as the devil's work?  I am not suggesting that such a thing would be possible, you understand.  If it is hopelessly utopian to expect a Christian society to have zero divorce and zero crime, it is even more absurd to expect it to have zero novelty.  But will it regard stasis as at least the hypothetical ideal and anything new as innately evil?

In reading Letter 25, I must admit I had never heard of conkers, so I looked it up in the Wikipedia.  Apparently conkers is a game in which two boys each put a horse chestnut on the end of a string attached to a stick and try to break each other's chestnuts.  Clearly it is an autumn game -- that is when the chestnuts come ripe.  One might object to it as a bit violent, but Lewis does not, so I will set that aside. More significantly, Wikipedia gives a history of the game, saying that the earliest reference to it is from 1821, at which time it was played with snail shells or hazelnuts.  Chestnuts came into vogue around 1848.  All of which raises an obvious problem.  Everything that is now traditional was once new, after all.  When conkers first came out, should all Christian parents have forbidden it simply because it was new?  And, if so, at what point did it become old enough to be acceptable.  If Christian parents catch their child with a new toy, should they take it away?  Or even destroy it?  And how is the spirit of tolerance toward individual tastes and interests to be maintained if any new taste or interest must be summarily rejected?

And, of course, people necessarily experience novelty in their lives.  The routine life cycle of growing up, getting married, finding a career, setting up a household, having children, etc., after all, calls for doing new things with one's own life, even if they are very old in the total scheme of things.  Which raises another question.  Assuming when at least hypothetically rejects all novelty on a society-wide basis, how far must individuals take it in their own lives?  No divorce, Lewis makes clear.  No shopping for a new church except (perhaps) under extreme circumstances (Letter 16).  So how far does one take that in other areas of life.  Once one finds employment, is finding a new job forbidden.  Once one sets up a household, is moving out of the question.  And must one reject any new hobby, new vacation spot and any new experience as the devil's work?  Buying new clothes or furniture will no doubt sometimes be necessary when old ones wear out.  Must they be exact replicas in order to avoid the temptation of novelty?  That will, presumably, be easily done in a society that never lets styles in clothing, furniture, etc. change.

So, am I caricaturing here?  Yes, I will admit I probably am.  Lewis really does address the issue of novelty more realistically in Mere Christianity.  He warns, reasonably enough, that the thrill of novelty invariably wears off, and that it a character fault to drop things when the novelty wears off and never see anything through:

[T]hrills come at the beginning and do not last. The sort of thrill a boy has at the first idea of flying will not go on when he has joined the R.A.F. and is really learning to fly. The thrill you feel on first seeing some delightful place dies away when you really go to live there.

Does this mean it would be better not to learn to fly and not to live in the beautiful place? By no means. In both cases, if you go through with it, the dying away of the first thrill will be compensated for by a quieter and more lasting kind of interest. What is more (and I can hardly find words to tell you how important I think this), it is just the people who are ready to submit to the loss of the thrill and settle down to the sober interest, who are then most likely to meet new thrills in some quite different direction. The man who has learned to fly and becomes a good pilot will suddenly discover music; the man who has settled down to live in the beauty spot will discover gardening. . . .  But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life.

So apparently new things are not bad after all.  What is bad is chasing after novelty and only novelty and never committing to anything.  Settling down and making a long-term commitment does not preclude delighting in something new later on.  So maybe the desire for novelty is not actually the devil's work after all.

In fact, Lewis seems to see the endless desire for novelty as something else -- a corruption of the desire for Heaven.  Lewis does not pretend to know what Heaven means, and acknowledges that most of us are quite content in this world and are not aware of a longing for Heaven.  But, he argues, all of us really do yearn for Heaven without knowing it.  All novelty wears off.  Nothing of this world ever truly satisfies in the long run. Trying to satisfy this longing with worldly things can never lead to happiness:

He goes on all his life thinking that if only he tried another woman, or went for a more expensive holiday, or whatever it is, then, this time, he really would catch the mysterious something we are all after. Most of the bored, discontented, rich people in the world are of this type. They spend their whole lives trotting from woman to woman (through the divorce courts), from continent to continent, from hobby to hobby, always thinking that the latest is "the Real Thing" at last, and always disappointed.

Again, I agree, this is a character flaw.  It is also out of most people's price range, regardless.  Alternately, one can acknowledge that these yearnings will never be fulfilled and stop pursuing them. Lewis, instead, recommends recognizing that no earthly thing will ever fulfill these yearnings and see them as really a longing for Heaven.  "I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage."  Such an outlook is compatible with trying something new and enjoying it.  It just rejects making novelty an idol.

And really, if Lewis's true objection is not to doing anything new, but merely to making novelty an idol, one would think he could say so  more clearly, even when speaking through the devil.

Different Reasons to Oppose a Congressional Appropriation

 

Just for the record, I do not believe that the only logical, consistent, and principled reason to oppose any particular government appropriation is because of a blanket opposition to all government spending.  To the contrary, there are many perfectly logical, consistent, and principled reasons on might oppose any particular expenditure.

1. One could see the thing itself as something inherently immoral that should be forbidden outright.
2. One could see the thing as inherently immoral but not realistic to forbid.  However, even if the thing is not in itself forbidden, government should not fund it with taxpayer money because that forces all of us to be complicit in it.
3. One can see the thing itself as unobjectionable but not a legitimate government function that should be done by private actors. (Example:  Too Big to Fail).
4. One can see the thing morally worthy, but believe that it is not a legitimate government function and should be funded by private donations.  (Libertarians and some evangelicals see social spending in these terms).
5.  One can see the thing as a legitimate government function, but not a federal function and believe it should be debated and decided at the state level.
6. One can see the thing as an appropriate federal expenditure, but not a high enough priority to fund with limited resources.
7. Or one can see the thing as wonderful, but just too expensive.

All of these are perfectly reasonable reasons to oppose any given federal expenditure.

However, Republicans are not very good at articulating a lot of these reasons. Trained for decades in seeing all government spending as inherently bad, they have difficulty framing an expenditure in any terms other than an objection to the amount, which often does sound illogical, inconsistent and hypocritical.

I remember, for instance, when Bill Clinton introduced the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in 1994, Republicans were very much in favor of its coercive and punitive aspects.  But they were outraged that a small portion of the bill was dedicated to social spending, such as midnight basketball.  Midnight basketball was a program for giving young inner city males something to do during peak crime hours (roughly from two hours before to two hours after midnight), such as basketball.  And here was the thing.  Their objections were almost always voiced in terms of outrage over the expenditure, even though funding for midnight basketball was only $50 million out of a $33 billion bill, or about .15% of the total.  Republicans never objected to the the spending on coercive and punitive aspects of the bill (the great majority), but they were outraged that a small amount went to social programs.  It seems a safe assumption that the objection was not to the amount, but the purpose. When Republicans were more honest, they said that they objected to bribing people to obey the law.

Fast forward to today, and Republicans keep voicing their objections to military aid to Ukraine in terms of the price tag ($60 billion).  But balancing the budget by cutting Ukrainian aid would mean cutting by several thousand percent.  Furthermore, Republican keep claiming that aid to Ukraine competes on a zero-sum basis with any other spending priorities they might have -- aid to Israel, border security, disaster relief, etc.  Oddly enough, none of these other programs seem to be in competition with each other.

On the other hand, maybe I am being too generous to the Republicans.  Maybe their purported objections to the amount of spending conceals other motive that may not be mentioned in polite company.  The Wikipedia article on midnight basketball believes that Republicans' real objection to midnight basketball was that its beneficiaries tended to be Black.  And it seems quite clear that many Republicans' real objection to aid to Ukraine is that they want Russian aggression to succeed.

Another Disturbing Aspect of Lewis's Christian Society -- Attitudes Towards Time

 

So, CS Lewis' vision of a Christian Society appears to endorse personal hobbies so long as they are pursued temperately, do not become a source of vanity or snobbery, and -- possibly -- are solitary and not pursued in groups.  Letter 21 of the Screwtape Letters raises another possibility.  Must one's hobby be pursued with one's door open, allowing anyone who wants to walk in and interrupt?  Because there are some thing in that letter that seem troubling, at least from the perspective of today's society.  

In Letter 21, Screwtape gives advise on how to make the "patient" irritable. What makes him short-tempered more than anything else is having a tract of time he thought he ad at his disposal taken from him.  As examples, Screwtape offers an unexpected visitor when the "patient" had looked forward to a quiet evening, or looking forward to time with a friend and having the friend's talkative wife show up.  These are small things, Screwtape says.  The best way to aggravate them into real anger is to encourage a sense of ownership of time:

Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours.  Let him fee as a grievous tax that portion of his property which he has to make over to his employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which he allows to religious duties.  But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright. . . . [I]f the Enemy [God] appeared to him in bodily form and demanded that the total service for even one day, he would not refuse.  He would be greatly relieved if that one day involved nothing harder that listening to the conversation of a foolish woman; and he would be relieved almost to the pitch of disappointment if for one half-hour in that day the Enemy said 'Now go and amuse yourself'.  Now if he thinks about his assumption for a moment, even he is bound to realise that he is actually in this situation every day.

Well, yes, listening to the conversation of a foolish woman is hardly comparable to, say, Christians being fed to lions.  But then again, most Christians will never be in that situation and most people spend most of their time dealing with much more petty annoyances.  But then again, Lewis manages to discuss some of those other small things, such as dealing with another person's annoying habits (Letter 3) or having food not prepared quite the way you want (Letter 17) without taking it to such melodramatic extremes.

And note the unstated assumption in that passage.  After all, there are two people here, the interrupter and the person being interrupted.  Lewis appears to be aligning God unequivocally on the side of the interrupter against the interruptee.  This outraged statement that you have no right to any of your time, and that God sides with the interrupter is also somewhat at odds with Letter 26, which addresses the "generous illusion conflict."  The basic concept here is of people ostentatiously yielding to the other person's wishes mostly in the interest of point-scoring, and the resentments that it can provoke. Lewis concludes from all this that maybe a little selfishness isn't so bad by comparison.  But apparently the Generous Illusion Conflict does not apply to an unexpected visitor.  In that case, the visitor in unequivocally right and the person looking forward to a quiet evening must be the one to yield.

Allow me to propose an alternative explanation for what is going on. Most of us do not resent the truly unavoidable or emergency interruption such as (say) a fire or a car accident or a medical emergency.  We resent the person doing the interrupting because that person is being -- by the standards of our society -- impolite.  According to our society's standards, if you plan to show up at somebody's house, you should call ahead and ask what is a convenient time.  Likewise, when the friends were planning a get-together, the one should have asked if he could bring his wife along.  It may be that standards of politeness to not allow you to say no even if that is what you really want to do.  But at least the advance warning gives the opportunity to prepare and, perhaps, to adjust one's schedule accordingly.  And this, in turn, is consistent with another point raised in Letter 26 -- unselfishness as taking trouble for others, or unselfishness as not giving trouble to others.  Screwtape emphasizes that women focus on taking trouble and men on not giving trouble, but does acknowledge that a good Christian should practice both. The unexpected visitor is breaking that rule.

Admittedly, not all societies share this viewpoint.  In many societies, visitors drop in on each other at all hours and no advance announcement is needed.  Indeed, I recall a high school teacher describing a foreign visitor as saying he found nothing so astonishing about our society as that even social visits had to be scheduled in advance.  That, in turn, is a reflection of how our wider society treats time.  We had a rigidity about time that is mostly a product of the Industrial Revolution and does stand out as unusual, all things considered.  The Industrial Revolution has freed us, to a considerable extent, of the tyranny of circumstances, but in return it has subjected us to the tyranny of the clock.  Time is set in specific block -- a time to get up, a time to make preparations for work, a time to commute, work time rigidly set.  Even leisure activities are often pre-scheduled, and even the recreation of radio and television shows were set at specific, inflexible times.  Is it any wonder, under these circumstances, that people have come to view time as a scarce commodity to be jealously guarded?*

So that raises an obvious question.  Lewis identifies courtesy as one of the Christian virtues.  But courtesy appears to be something like propriety -- arbitrary and culture bound.  Lewis's view on propriety seems straightforward and reasonable.  It is more important to have a firm standard than what the standard is.  Setting a standard may be considered morally neutral in the sense that many different standards work in different societies.  But it nonetheless is a moral issue in the sense that people must respect the standard of propriety because to break it will cause either lust or embarrassment.

So, it would seem that the same thing applies to courtesy (and, indeed, that propriety is just a sub-category of courtesy). What is courteous in one society may be discourteous in another.  One society's standard of politeness may mean scheduling social visits in advance and not showing up without notice. Another may mean always being open to visitors.  So I suppose the real question is whether Lewis considers this essentially a morally neutral question, such that either standard of courtesy will work?  Or would he consider the idea of ownership of time to be so noxious that a Christian society must adopt the pre-industrial view that visitors are always welcome?  And, if so, would that be part of a larger project toward abandoning our society's general rigidity about time?**

I see only one hint in Mere Christianity -- the comment that committed Christians "will usually seem to have a lot of time: you will wonder where it comes from. "

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*I admit that even within our society, this rigidity about social visits is mostly a white collar phenomenon. Blue collar households are more likely to have relatives and friends drop in at all hours and to sit around and chat with the television playing in the background and no one paying attention.
**Another interesting point.  Our society is becoming less rigid about time in may ways.  Employers are instituting flexible hours.  Work from home is becoming an option.  Netflix and the like allows us to watch shows at the time of our choosing. And so forth.  Will this make people more flexible with their private time as well?

Some Disturbing Aspects of CS Lewis' Version of a Christian Society -- Secular Associations

 

So, in discussing what appears to be C.S. Lewis concept of a Christian society, I have generally thought it not so bad.  A bit repressive in matters of sex and family, perhaps, but very respectful of individual differences and tolerant on morally neutral matters.  And he seems to see many things as morally neutral, or at least morally complex in a way that does not allow for simple rules.  

But there are a few things in The Screwtape Letters that, if taken at face value, seem rather disturbing. Granted, not everything in The Screwtape Letters can be taken at face value. The devil is a liar, after all, and many of these issues are not addressed, or much less addressed in Mere Christianity, so maybe I am over-interpreting.  But let me raise them anyhow.

Secular Associations

Clearly in a Christian society, churches will hold great sway and influence. To all appearances, Lewis's concept of a Christian society would give a wide scope of individual tastes and interests in morally neutral matters. His view appears to endorse a wide range of hobbies and artistic expression.  So far, so good.  

But the unstated assumption appears to be that people will pursue their interests individually and in isolation. But this does not seem like a realistic assumption.  People who like, say, stamp collecting or building model airplanes do not necessarily pursue these interests alone.  They form stamp collecting clubs and model airplane clubs and so forth. What does Lewis think of that?  I ask because in Letter 25, Lewis puts in a plug for his other work by having Screwtape complain that the "patient's" new associates are merely Christian.  "They all have individual interests, of course, the the bond remains Christianity."  What does Lewis think of other social bonds, such a common interests?

The Screwtape Letters talks on several occasions about Christian participation in social activism.  Lewis is ambivalent on the subject.  On the one hand, social reform can be invaluable in building an actual Christian society, a thing that the devil naturally abhors.  On the other hand, Lewis sees two dangers in Christian social activism.  

One is the danger of people using Christianity as a means of advancing social reform, rather than social reform as a means of advancing Christianity.  "Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing."  (Letter 7). Lewis discusses the same idea in more serious terms in Mere Christianity, arguing that Christian social reformers (such as abolitionists) have achieved many great things, but only when they kept their eyes on the next world instead of this. This does not seem like too much of a danger in mere hobby clubs.  It seems unlikely that people will seriously confuse stamp collecting with their faith, or see Christianity mostly as an argument for how to build model airplanes.*

The other danger is more serious.  Lewis appears to endorse individual interests and tastes both as part of one's God-given nature and as having a sort of "innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness" and see liking "any one this in the world, for its own sake, and without caring two-pence what other people say about it" as a protection against vanity and snobbery.  (Letter 13).  But that assumes a solitary hobby.  Which leads to the other danger Lewis sees in social activism -- a general trust of institutionalized non-conformity:

Any small coterie, bound together by some interest which other men dislike or ignore, tend to develop inside itself a hothouse mutual admiration, and toward the outer world, a great deal of pride and hatred with is entertained without shame because the 'Cause' is its sponsor and it is thought to be impersonal. . . . We want the Church to be small not only that fewer men may know the Enemy but also that those who do may acquire the uneasy intensity and the defensive self-righteousness of a secret society or a clique.**

(Letter 7).  Note that these two things are essentially opposed to each other.  One is an argument for non-conformity, the other for conformity.  Of course, it is not clear that unfashionable hobbies will acquire quite the same sort of self-righteous intensity as unpopular religious or political organizations.  (Unfashionable artistic tastes might).  And people meeting to pursue the same hobby may give an opportunity to replicate the sort of vanity or snobbery that are unlikely to happen in solitary hobby.  On the other hand, at least some hobbies and interests -- team sports, for instance, or music -- seem necessarily to require associates and not be solitary.

Ultimately, Lewis is silent on this subject.

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*Although certain football players who are sure that God roots for their team may make you wonder.

**That is, of course, exactly the form the Christian Church took for its first few hundred years before the time of Constantine.  Lewis does not address that.

A Brief Comment on the War in Ukraine

 

I do recall my views on the war in Ukraine about a year ago.  In late 2022, Ukraine launched a counter-offensive and rapidly took significant swaths of land from the Russians.  The Russians launched a brutal bombing of Ukrainian power infrastructure in the winter, intended to freeze the Ukrainians into submission.  Russia also withdrew from the Black Sea wheat deal, raising the threat of global food shortages, and started bombing grain storage facilities and blockading Ukrainian ports.

So when 2023 rolled around and there was talk of another Ukrainian counter-offensive, I expected the ground offensive to be a success, just as it had been the previous year.  I had no idea if Ukraine would push the Russian forces all the way back to the 2014 borders, but I expected them to free vast swaths of territory.  But I did not expect even liberating all the territory back to the 1991 borders to mean peace, because the Russians would still have the ability to bomb Ukraine at will, and to blockade their exports.

Well, the exact opposite happened  The ground offensive failed to take any significant territory, and Ukrainians are facing the prospect of significant territorial losses.  But they have been highly successful in the air and sea wars, sinking about a third of the Russian's Black Sea Fleet,* breaking the blockade, and now doing significant damage in the air as well.

No real point here, just that things can be surprising.

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*Most of Russian's navy remains intact, but barred passage through the Straits of Bosporus.

When Did it All Go Wrong?

 

A healthy democracy does not choose Donald Trump as its President. And certainly, once he tries to overturn an election, a healthy democracy recognizes that he is a menace and bars him from office.

Which means that it didn't start with Trump.  America's slide from a healthy democracy has been going on for a long time.  So when did it start?  I have heard various candidates.  Once is the rise of Fox News, which distorted people's viewpoints.  Others point to Rush Limbaugh and talk radio, or Newt Gingrich and the new class of Republicans he brought to Congress.

Others have gone back further, to the passage of the Civil Rights Act.  The US has had at least two illiberal strains for a long time.  Both can be considered right wing, but they did not used to be partisan.  One was the the right wing illiberalism of Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society, mostly a Republican phenomenon.  The other were Southern segregationists, who were Democrats.  Each party had an illiberal faction, but its chances on a national scale were best if each party held its illiberal wing in check.  With Democrats embracing the Civil Rights movement in the 1960's, southern racists migrated over to the Republicans, allowing the illiberal forces to capture a party.  

But if that is so, it didn't happen over night.  When did the rot begin?

I do not claim to know, but I can say that the first hint I got of it was in the 1988 election.*  Ronald Reagan had won two successive landslides, but he was term limited out and showing signs of mental decline.  Democrats were feeling hopeful that it was their turn. And then Bush, Senior got nasty.  There was an ugliness to the election that I (admittedly quite young at the time) had not seen before, as if the prospect of a Democrat winning were some sort of outrage against the natural order.

Well, Bush Senior won, by a landslide, though not so wide a landslide as either Reagan election. His government was quite reasonable and moderate. And then in 1992, Bill Clinton ran and won. The election had not of the nastiness of 1988.  (Bush's campaign manager, Lee Atwater, author of the 1988 campaign, had died in the interim).  

But no sooner did Clinton take office that Republicans began their freak out that has not ended since.  Led by Gingrich, Republicans won control of Congress during the midterms and made clear that a Democrat in the White House was an outrage that could not be allowed to stand.  The investigated everything from the use of White House personnel to answer letters to the White House cat to rumors of a Clinton body count.  They shut down the government and threatened a default on the national debt.  They appointed a special counsel to find grounds for impeach and ended up with nothing worse than an attempt to cover up an affair.  They impeached anyhow.  And paramilitary groups trained in the woods for violent revolution.

All of this during a time of unprecedented peace and prosperity, with steadily falling crime rate, and even a successful balanced budget.

My conclusion was that somewhere along the time Republicans had developed what all conservatives claim to hate most -- a sense of entitlement.  In this case, entitlement to hold the Presidency.  And maybe other offices as well.  Republican reactions to an Obama or Biden presidency has been part and parcel of the same, except with serious problems on a national scale.

But looking back on it, even that may not be the whole story.  Looking back on it, there were signs of something very wrong in the late Bush, Sr. presidency.  Again, I first noticed in 1989 when a man in Stockton, California aimed an AK-47 semi-automatic, modified to by fully automatic, at a school yard full of children and started gunning them down.  To me, it was obvious that something so lethal had no place on the street.  I soon found that not everyone shared my view.  In fact, it was then that I first started hearing the argument that the whole point of the Second Amendment was to make military firearms widely available so that the people could engage in violent revolution against their government, and that taking military-style firearms off the streets was "idiotic" and the work of "lunatics."  The in 1992, Randy Weaver, a white supremecist in Idaho with a large arsenal, had an armed standoff with the FBI.  An alarming number of people turned out to express their support for Weaver.  The FBI and ATF badly mishandled the situation and ended up killing Weaver's unarmed wife and son.  Dealing with fanatics with military style weaponry who considered armed resistance to government as their constitutional right was unfamiliar at the time. And the rise of Rush Limbaugh and all sorts of paranoia about the United Nations also got started at this time.

This was the reaction to having a moderate Republican in the White House.  So, looking back with the clear light of hindsight, I can only conclude that sometime beneath the surface, not only did Republicans develop a sense of entitlement to the White House, but MAGA Republicans (not that the word existed yet) developed a sense of entitlement to control of their party.

The country has not recovered yet.

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*Though not related, 1988 was also the first time Joe Biden sought the presidential nomination.

The Trouble with Man Bites Dog Stories

 

One of the reasons that stories about how dangerous Trump is are not getting any attention is that he was President once, after all, nothing disastrous happened (not counting 2020, but everyone seems willing to give him a pass on that and say it was not his fault).  So it can be hard to convince people that this time will be different.

The other reason is basically that our news media see Trump's worst antics as a dog bites man story. Everyone knows that Trump is a vindictive lunatic, so announcing that is not news.  Of course, everyone knows that Biden is old and that Hillary sent State Department e-mails on a private server, and somehow that managed to get regular coverage.

But OK, Trump is crazy is old news, it is dog-bites-man, whereas the latest criticism of Biden can be portrayed as man-bites-dog.

And I understand why the news prefers to focus on man-bites-dog stories.  They are rare and exciting.  But if all you get in the news is man-bites-dog and never dog-bites-man, it can give people a distorted idea of what is going on in the world.  It can make people fear to let their dogs out in the yard or take them walking because of all those crazed dog-biting men out there.

And it can make people lose their healthy fear of vicious dogs. After all, who ever heard about a dog biting a man?

How Democracies End

 

I don't usually do a blog post based entirely on quotes, and I don't approve of the practice, but this one from Bulwark is too good to pass up. (Much of it paywalled).

The author believes that most Republicans really do support liberal democracy and do not want to live in a dictatorship, not even a mild, Orban-style dictatorship.  Part of me thinks that is giving Republicans too much credit.  On the other hand, the performance of most Republicans in this regard has pleasantly surprised me. Since the 2021 insurrection, all defeated Republicans, with the exceptions of Kari Lake and Solomon Pena have accepted the results.  

So maybe Trump really is an aberration, and maybe if he can be kept out of the White House, our democracy can recover after he dies or becomes incapacitated.  But right here and now in the real world, he is knocking on the White House door and all polling suggests he will be admitted.  Republicans have not been able to stop him so far and won't be able to stop him in the future.  Jonathan Last, the author, explains:

I absolutely believe that a majority of Republican/conservative elites have no interest in authoritarianism.  The don't want to live in an Orbanist illiberal democracy.

It's just that they have other incentives that they want much more than they want *not* to live in an Orbanist illiberal democracy.

. . . . . .

It's just a matter of incentives.  If your highest incentive is something other than the survival of liberal democracy, then you will eventually become a tool for authoritarianism, because the aspiring authoritarian will align your incentives with his own.

I agree with the premise that when an authoritarian menaces democracy, the only way to save it is for the democratic forces all across the spectrum to set aside their differences and  join forces for the sake of democracy.  Such statesmanship has been all too uncommon.

And I see no sign of such statesmanship in the US today.  We are sleepwalking our way toward dictatorship and I have no idea how to stop us.