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Today’s Ruminant finds Jonah preparing for an epic journey to the Pacific Northwest, and he’d appreciate podcast recommendations for the long and lonely trip. With Thanksgiving approaching, he’s feeling grateful, but he’s also concerned about the conservative movement’s gradual shift away from the classical liberalism embedded in American culture. How do societies emerge? Will mankind ever learn not to immanentize the eschaton? And has American life officially become crazier than a late night Japanese game show?
Show Notes:
- Wednesday’s regrettable G-File, released to the masses
- The Remnant with Will Saletan
- Nine Days and the making of an existential crisis
- Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order
Jonah you said you thought the impeachment after January 6th should have had committees investigating the events, getting records, having Republican managers.
And you also said they should have impeached him within a week.
First, these two recommendations are mutually exclusive.
Second, Trump isn't even President any more and they still haven't been able to get any records from the archives yet - what makes you think they'd have been able to get them while he was still President?
Third, most Republicans on January 7th were talking a big game about how they were really for serious done with Trump this time. And then all but a handful changed their tunes within weeks. How exactly was Pelosi supposed to accurately predict which ones would hold strong and which ones (especially if they were made impeachment managers) would suddenly find that Trump was just a misunderstood mega-patriot?
I get the desire to apportion blame equally all around, but the "a pox on both your houses" routine is wearing thin. The Republican party is embracing fascism by continuing to hold up as their leader a man who tried to commit a coup, and purging any voices who disagree. The Republican party is tolerating and promoting naked racist white supremacists like Paul Gosar and batshit crazy idiots like MTG and Cawthorn. And apparently *this* Republican party is going to be in charge in 2022.
Do you feel that as a thought leader in politics, you have a responsibility or a role to play in preventing this eventuality? Do you think that role involves anything other than complaining that Democrats are turning off voters? Do you see your role in any way as educating voters to prevent a fascist GOP from coming jnto power - in particular the center-right and center-left voters who are the Dispatch's natural audience?
Most importantly, do you see your role as akin to Buckleys "standing athwart history yelling Stop" or simply as "standing by history and commenting on it as it happens"?
A problem with viewing society as a single organism (the "body politic") is that it inevitably leads to a collectivist view of a society (a) that has a single, unified goal, and (b) for the good of which individuals can be sacrificed. We routinely remove appendixes and gall bladders to keep patients alive, but appendixes and gall bladders are not analogous to human beings, much less whole categories of human beings such as Blacks, Jews, Uyghurs, or the unborn.
Societies are much more closely analogous to complex ecosystems populated by individuals who have different, often conflicting, goals. That model leads to a search for means by which conflicting goals can be peacefully accommodated, rather than for ways to eliminate inconvenient people or groups of people.