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In praise of authoritarianism
Not from me; I say it’s spinach, and to hell with it. But others find it a good election message:
I don’t know if Ms. Berlinski endorses the particulars of D muthafargery. I don’t know if she just liked the swinging’-Richard coq-of-the-walk posture of muthafargery from an internet videosthat cherrypick moments from charismatic politicians who really said some things, y’all. But she’s on to something; weakness is not an effective message in 2020.
Still, it’s hard not to infer a trill of joy that the Ds are doing this, and hence will win. So.
Is it just me, but when the Ds have embraced every statist “solution” and intrusion into the economy, elevated identity politics to a religion, let cities burn, lost their voice when it came to condemning mobs that spatter every civic structure with obscenities, shrug at Jew-hatred when the popular people say it, promise to make citizens of illegal aliens, and recast the national narrative to conform to the 1619 project – complete with witch trials and struggle sessions for anyone who does not parrot the new history – well, perhaps your enthusiasm for competent, ruthless people might be less than enthusiastic?
Maybe it’s just me! But I’m trying to imagine a scenario in which ruthless statists is a concept that makes conservatives stand up and cheer.
Competent, ruthless people weld people’s doors shut to keep them inside when Covid strikes. Competent, ruthless people billyclub citizens who do not wear masks.
Competent, ruthless people enforce compliance with their ideas with every tool in the arsenal – legal, social, economic – because after all, the personal is the political.
Competent, ruthless people pack the Supreme Court.
Competent, ruthless people gun down protestors.
Sorry, reductio ad absurdum there, utterly unmoored from history. Sorry! It’s different in this context, because “ruthless” in American politics means an unwavering desire to pursue the necessary policies through the established system by whatever means necessary, yet scrupulously adhering to laws, norms, and conventions. That’s all!
Whatever: at least we have a standard. Competency is not enough. The necessity of defeating Trump requires not just the absence of ruth but its abolition. It needs a hard, pitiless heart, and this sentiment is best expressed with Quentin Tarantino dialogue to make sure we get the point. You know people are serious when they use the really bad swears.
Published in General
‘Decorum’ conservatives value comity on their side above everything else. They do not care if the other side acts like storm troopers, and — were Biden to win in November — would likely also revel in the Democrats putting the hammer down on conservative individuals and groups in 2021, if it meant those people could be taken out so they could get ‘their’ Republican Party back.
Of course, the first time they objected to some position the new administration or their underlings were taking and the hammer came down on them, they’d be completely outraged by this inexcusable treatment that they never, ever could have seen coming. And they’d also know it was all Donald Trump’s fault for making them vote for Joe Biden and down-ballot Democrats in 2020.
I agree. She certainly loves attention; and must be a bit confused about why a lot of her readership has vanished.
She’s quoted and retweeted stuff from the New York Times (which I quit reading in ’94 when the only part of the Sunday paper I still enjoyed was the crossword puzzle) and The Atlantic (which after the death of Michael Kelly swiftly degenerated into a double acrostic and not much else).
Most Europeans get their information from those kinds of sources, or from their local sources who do.
The left’s obsession with vulgarity, and in particular with the “f-word,” is weirdly consistent. I think I get it, the radical’s compulsion to break rules and shatter norms, but I’m often surprised by how predictable it is. It’s a tell, and a tiresome one.
That video…John Kerry, Tammy Duckworth, a parade of various other pols who were in the military at one point, saying that Trump used the military against protestors. Lying liars who lie.
Actually, I think that video points out their own perceived vulnerability. At some level the Mt. Rushmore speech struck an actual nerve, and not simply because they read about it in the NYT or the Swamp Post.
She was and is very nice, although she did call me a “Turkish ultra-nationalist Islamist” once.
If the shoe fits . . . .
It has a lot to do with why they can’t accomplish anything either. I’ve spent years around the music industry in New Orleans. All my time around studios, I can’t recall a single time any “artists” said that they were going into the studio to try to make a great song that people will enjoy. Instead they say, “We’re going to put some [fecal matter] together.”
Yep. That’s about what they get. Impervious to failure…. and to success.
Massively different. Truly. Their worldview is radically different, and for all we might notice the disdain and bewilderment of American journalists for American culture, at least they grew up in it and understand it to a point. For many Europeans? They don’t even have that – their formative preconceptions of America were fed by American movies, music, and TV, and they cannot see past that.
Years ago, Steve Martin put out a book of essays and stories called “Pure Drivel”. It is wonderful. Steve is a native Californian, though, and has a love for his state. He penned a story called (I think) “A Hissy Fit” (might have been “temper tantrum” or something similar). It describes a New Yorker having to fly out to California on business, and resenting the entire experience. He’s so perpetually angry and aghast at California and its weirdness that he misses the lovely weather, the relaxed culture, the food, and spends the entire brief trip in a condemning funk – a days long hissy fit until he returns home. I think a lot of European journalists are the same when they come here.
As someone with a rather vulgar tongue offline myself, I cast no stones here. I agree it has no place in journalism, but behind the wheel, or when dressing down someone who well deserves it? Well…
Maybe she mistook you for a pipe bomb.
He does tend to set off metal detectors.
And I’ll defend to the death (well, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that) your right to speak your mind as colorfully as you wish.
But I think it’s a barbarism, and I don’t like it.
Well Claire may have spent too much time in France. The French have sanitized the French Revolution and it’s Reign of Terror. Liberté, égalité, fraternité all sounds well and good, but none of it was provided by the revolutionaries. Polite society in France demands that the slaughter never be mentioned. The slaughter of the peasants, that as one revolutionary said will be treated like cattle if they did not follow the dictates of the planning boards.
Lenin admired, and studied the French Revolution, the only failure he saw was that the revolutionaries were not ruthless enough. Lenin, and his successor Stalin remedied that failure in Russia.
Remember the Vendée?
Bingo.
I believe she has become totally absorbed in her Francophilia.
If there were a Turkish version of you he’d pretty much have to be an ultra-nationalist Islamist.
He’d still be a squish about Dairy Queens, though.
It’s a shame that the Gary Robbins-es-es-es and etc can’t – or won’t – see that.
Nope. Washington Rollovers.
Ummmm…is it possible that Claire is being sarcastic?
The reason to think Kennedy would have changed is that all his family did and in only one direction just as the Democrats have changed in only one direction. The Kennedys are political animals (and chameleons) above all else and will occupy the center of gravity within the party. Bobby went from being a staffer for Sen. McCarthy to being an anti-war candidate of 1968. Ted went from being anti-abortion to being pro-abortion. You’ve shown how Jack changed in foreign policy though you didn’t mention Vietnam. Frankly, Jack was a foreign policy disaster showing up in Vienna high as a kite leading to Cuba and then the Diem coup. He also changed in domestic policy voting against civil rights legislation in the 1950s to being cautiously pro-civil rights.
That didn’t even occur to me, but is a very good question.
It occurred to me, but given her other recent and some not-so-recent writing and speaking, it seemed relatively easy to dismiss.
It’s possible but the mf bomb is a distraction from one’s ability to see the comment as such.
I’m sad that my kids are old enough now that I don’t hear giggles from the back seat after I speak my mind about another driver in traffic.
Re-reading it, it’s really unclear what she means. I don’t think it’s sarcasm, just lack of clarity.
That is one of the reasons I almost never tweet. The format is too short.
That’s even worse.