Republicans have had the virtue of not hiding their light under a bushel since Gingrich. They are very clear on who their enemies are and what they want to do about them. Tump's only innovation is to say the things usually kept to private discussions as loud as possible, punishing enemies rather than spreading freedom or some other boilerplate claptrap.
The Unitary Executive seems like bog-standard monarchism, but I wonder if the attraction of people like Bill Barr is that it's just so much more efficient, a nice streamlined fascist Leader at the top of our "not-a-democracy" republic. The fact that Barr debased himself so much to protect The Presidency, occupied by a man he clearly loathes, shows how much he's committed to the bit. I really like how you've outlined the push/pull roles of libertarians and authoritarians working together to aim the constraints of the System at other people and away from themselves.
It's hard to reconcile his words and actions as Trump's AG with everything since he quit with any other explanation. He's preserving that norm of precedence that apparantly has the force of law in the DOJ for when the right guy finally wins.
Aug 9, 2023·edited Aug 9, 2023Liked by Yastreblyansky
When Barr goes on TV these days and makes that fatigued, impatient grimace while doggedly explaining that the DOJ's investigations and indictments of Trump are perfectly legal and correct but then goes out of his way to stress that the Mueller investigation and the impeachments were just as illegal and incorrect ("overreaches") as he said at the time, I really want to know how that works in his head.
It's just too easy to say yeah, he's lying...and anyway I don't think he is. It's a perfect example of what you're describing: he's come up with a rational difference between the justice he likes and the justice he doesn't, or, he STARTS from that rational distinction and then Trump arrives and fits into that picture.
To me it's much more important to understand how people at that level do it, then how the red hats do it. I realize this puts me at odds with most leftists who wave away politicians' hypocrisy as "lying" while deeply probing into the mass delusions of MAGAs and where they come from. I'm not saying that's not important (the second half, at least) but it just doesn't interest me the way the thinking at the Brookings Institute level does.
God, that photo's incredible, isn't it? Worth a hundred million words.
(This reminds me that in the early days of JPEGs some wag wrote about how, from a data standpoint, "a picture REALLY IS worth a thousand words." I actually think this is a deep and profound idea.)
This is brilliant and crucial; a key that ties several important ideas together, from the past and the present. (I can’t write more right now — I don’t have time to expound in on these grandiose suggestions — but like the man said, I’ll be back.)
If the Presidency were as weak and the Executive Branch as small as in 1789, a unitary executive would be sensical and inoccuous. That's not going to return, so….
And alternately if the Senate were representative of the actual numbers of people per state/district/territory, and if the house was as representative of the people as it was in 1789, then those bodies might have the gumption to tell the executive unit to prod off.
Well, we'd need an entirely new Constitution to change the Senate, equal representation per state (as with a ban on the importation of African slaves by 1810) being unamendable. The House's lack of equitable representation bugs me a lot more, because that's the Senate's job.
If they had the gumption I'm not sure they'd use it: the Executive is generally a convenient blame-sink for at least half of the House….
In 1789 only white men of property could vote (with a religious test in some states. And far from all the eligibles voted, as well: VEP turnout in the 1788 election was 11.6%. https://www.electproject.org/national-1789-present
I was amused to read what I gathered was the most common pre-independence test in force in all colonies except, I believe Maryland and Pennsylvania, something like: 'I assert without equivocation that the bread and wine taken in Communion are bread and wine and no other thing and have no other nature or natures.'.
Aug 8, 2023·edited Aug 20, 2023Liked by Yastreblyansky
No, the Jesuits, so far as I know, were not allowed to lie: they were allowed to (and trained to) equivocate. I first learned about this is "The Name of the Rose"; in this [EDIT: I meant 'equivocation', the Jesuits post-date that book's setting] case I'd guess an appropriate equivocation—if it were permitted by the oath—would be to simultaneously think 'By "Communion" they are not referring to the Eucharistic Feast as celebrated by the One True Apostolic and Universal Church, but rather to its pale and heretical imitations conducted (e.g.) by these Anglicans, where the bread and wine remain just bread and wine.'. In "Macbeth"'s 'porter at the gates of Hell' routine one of the new arrivals is 'an equivocating Jesuit', so it goes back a ways.
Aug 8, 2023·edited Aug 8, 2023Liked by Yastreblyansky
If we had a new Convention I'm pretty sure that an improved Senate would fall off the agenda to make sure we got to declaring Jesus Official Alpha Dog, the Right to Bear Nukes, banning femmy stuff, making any image of the flag (Union or Confederate) inviolate on pain of death, making The Man official head of The Family—you know, the _important_ stuff.
As usual he was the only true radical in the place. In the only successful revolution of all the revolutions of 1848, Switzerland adopted one, and they still have it. Uruguay tried it in several constitutions between 1918 and 1967 but it didn't work out
No, in baseball there's just the one team with every player required to play both (batting = offense, in the field = defense, except the pitcher gets a sub when his team is batting, under the Designated Hitter rule, now adopted by the National League). In football it's literally two different teams on each side https://www.yourdictionary.com/articles/football-positions-abbreviations getting wholly replaced every time the offense team loses possession of the ball .
Aug 8, 2023·edited Aug 8, 2023Liked by Yastreblyansky
Note that modulo voter suppression and the constitution of the Electoral College—a big modulus I admit—it _is_ in fact anti-democratic not to give the President exactly what the President wants. This is a good thing: democracy by its nature can easily wind-up trampling minority rights.
The People should rule, but should be a constitutional monarch.
EDIT: Someone correct me if I've seriously,incorrectly, conflated Populism with {Illiberal Democracy with a likely side of racism or ethnocentrism}. They look the same to me, and not at all pretty. Maybe Populism tends to valourise/glorify passion more, or maybe I'm just confusing it with fascism.
No, I don't accept that at all. Congress is the people, and your formulation is very good applied to them. The president is an appointed CEO. One of the things the president could concentrate on is protecting minority rights, of course.
The President can and historically sometimes has argued that they're the only person elected by the entire nation, so if there's a net, democratically-measured, National Will they're the one to embody it. That this is nonsense, the President being not a mystical Embodier but one individual for whom people vote both because-of and in spite of the candidate's various positions, unfortunately doesn't mean that the notion isn't something a President can claim in public with a straight face.
That's better. I really hate the idea of a singular National Will.
"Populism" is a big vocabulary problem because it's been defined completely differently by people who intend to mean something they think is bad (mob rule) and people who intend to mean something they think is good (people power). I think NYTimes and the like started calling Trump "populism" meaning it seemed to belong to the ill-educated and ill-mannered (which they further confused as "the white working class"), but they didn't want to take sides against it because that would be journalistically improper. Then rich conservatives like Hawley and Cruz and Vance took it up with pitchforks, like they'd suddenly turned into the chorus of Les Miz.
I think "populism" was a coat of whitewash in their ongoing quest to squeeze Trump into a Just Another Politician straightjacket. They are desperate for Trump to just another character in the play, instead of a lunatic who has wandered on stage with a lit Molotov cocktail.
Aug 8, 2023·edited Aug 8, 2023Liked by Yastreblyansky
There's a fantastic line in David Hare and Robert Brenton's forgotten masterpiece "Pravda," a 1985 play — a satire of British journalism on a grand scale — that I was lucky enough to have seen in its debut at the National Theatre, with Anthony Hopkins (and Bill Nighy and others).
The opening scene shows the offices of an old-school regional newspaper in Leicester that has been doing the same creaky routine for a couple of centuries (and is about to be engulfed by the Murdoch-analog predatory investor, Hopkins, whose rise is the main story). The old editor is explaining the all-important style to a young reporter:
EDITOR: We didn't come out for Hitler you know.
REPORTER: Yes.
[pause]
EDITOR: Not that it wasn't a near thing.
REPORTER: Oh?
EDITOR: Yes. I caught this phrase: "Mr. Hitler is refreshingly dynamic." I thought, Oh dear not very wise. I changed it to "Mr. Hitler is unnecessarily dynamic."
Didn't Cheney get a similar routine going, meaning, establishing a sub-rosa "shadow government" system whereby he had offices in the house and senate and connections everywhere? The Scooter Libby army?
Republicans have had the virtue of not hiding their light under a bushel since Gingrich. They are very clear on who their enemies are and what they want to do about them. Tump's only innovation is to say the things usually kept to private discussions as loud as possible, punishing enemies rather than spreading freedom or some other boilerplate claptrap.
The Unitary Executive seems like bog-standard monarchism, but I wonder if the attraction of people like Bill Barr is that it's just so much more efficient, a nice streamlined fascist Leader at the top of our "not-a-democracy" republic. The fact that Barr debased himself so much to protect The Presidency, occupied by a man he clearly loathes, shows how much he's committed to the bit. I really like how you've outlined the push/pull roles of libertarians and authoritarians working together to aim the constraints of the System at other people and away from themselves.
Thanks! I think I agree on Barr.
It's hard to reconcile his words and actions as Trump's AG with everything since he quit with any other explanation. He's preserving that norm of precedence that apparantly has the force of law in the DOJ for when the right guy finally wins.
It’s tribal, translated into legal pablum, which is the issue of every incipient-fascist age.
He wasn't ever doing it *for* Trump. Maybe he was doing it for the unborn babies or the Latin Mass. I still think he got boners from scheduling executions when they succeeded in bringing those back (which is of course extremely bad Catholicism), and that's why he didn't leave earlier https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/dpic-reports/the-federal-governments-2019-attempt-to-restart-federal-executions-an-analysis. Whatever, Trump is no longer useful to his project, that's why Barr's dumped him.
When Barr goes on TV these days and makes that fatigued, impatient grimace while doggedly explaining that the DOJ's investigations and indictments of Trump are perfectly legal and correct but then goes out of his way to stress that the Mueller investigation and the impeachments were just as illegal and incorrect ("overreaches") as he said at the time, I really want to know how that works in his head.
It's just too easy to say yeah, he's lying...and anyway I don't think he is. It's a perfect example of what you're describing: he's come up with a rational difference between the justice he likes and the justice he doesn't, or, he STARTS from that rational distinction and then Trump arrives and fits into that picture.
To me it's much more important to understand how people at that level do it, then how the red hats do it. I realize this puts me at odds with most leftists who wave away politicians' hypocrisy as "lying" while deeply probing into the mass delusions of MAGAs and where they come from. I'm not saying that's not important (the second half, at least) but it just doesn't interest me the way the thinking at the Brookings Institute level does.
God, that photo's incredible, isn't it? Worth a hundred million words.
(This reminds me that in the early days of JPEGs some wag wrote about how, from a data standpoint, "a picture REALLY IS worth a thousand words." I actually think this is a deep and profound idea.)
Garland finaly DID SOMETHING- but it's all TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE. He did that ON PURPOSE...
This is brilliant and crucial; a key that ties several important ideas together, from the past and the present. (I can’t write more right now — I don’t have time to expound in on these grandiose suggestions — but like the man said, I’ll be back.)
Take your time, I'll be around.
If the Presidency were as weak and the Executive Branch as small as in 1789, a unitary executive would be sensical and inoccuous. That's not going to return, so….
And alternately if the Senate were representative of the actual numbers of people per state/district/territory, and if the house was as representative of the people as it was in 1789, then those bodies might have the gumption to tell the executive unit to prod off.
Well, we'd need an entirely new Constitution to change the Senate, equal representation per state (as with a ban on the importation of African slaves by 1810) being unamendable. The House's lack of equitable representation bugs me a lot more, because that's the Senate's job.
If they had the gumption I'm not sure they'd use it: the Executive is generally a convenient blame-sink for at least half of the House….
In 1789 only white men of property could vote (with a religious test in some states. And far from all the eligibles voted, as well: VEP turnout in the 1788 election was 11.6%. https://www.electproject.org/national-1789-present
I was amused to read what I gathered was the most common pre-independence test in force in all colonies except, I believe Maryland and Pennsylvania, something like: 'I assert without equivocation that the bread and wine taken in Communion are bread and wine and no other thing and have no other nature or natures.'.
Fools, didn't they realize the Jesuits would train their acolytes to lie under oath?
No, the Jesuits, so far as I know, were not allowed to lie: they were allowed to (and trained to) equivocate. I first learned about this is "The Name of the Rose"; in this [EDIT: I meant 'equivocation', the Jesuits post-date that book's setting] case I'd guess an appropriate equivocation—if it were permitted by the oath—would be to simultaneously think 'By "Communion" they are not referring to the Eucharistic Feast as celebrated by the One True Apostolic and Universal Church, but rather to its pale and heretical imitations conducted (e.g.) by these Anglicans, where the bread and wine remain just bread and wine.'. In "Macbeth"'s 'porter at the gates of Hell' routine one of the new arrivals is 'an equivocating Jesuit', so it goes back a ways.
Strictly speaking we do need a new Constitution and what to do with the Senate is top issue. I realize it won't happen.
If we had a new Convention I'm pretty sure that an improved Senate would fall off the agenda to make sure we got to declaring Jesus Official Alpha Dog, the Right to Bear Nukes, banning femmy stuff, making any image of the flag (Union or Confederate) inviolate on pain of death, making The Man official head of The Family—you know, the _important_ stuff.
https://y.yarn.co/f2549731-fc8f-48cf-84de-e32d8a086f23_text.gif
A Constitutional Convention would make Carl Hiaasen look like Jimmy Breslin.
Franklin wanted an Executive Committee.
As usual he was the only true radical in the place. In the only successful revolution of all the revolutions of 1848, Switzerland adopted one, and they still have it. Uruguay tried it in several constitutions between 1918 and 1967 but it didn't work out
So interesting! I didn’t know this!
Ask Kosygin and Podgorny what can happen with that, or Malenkov and Beria—or Brezhnev and Molotov if you want a more positive assessment.
rule (2): rule (1) doesn't work right in Russia
And every meeting to open with the reading of that week's highlights from Skint Dick's Rag.
Damn thought that was going to be a piano piece.
I'm fer it, as long as it starts with a full 16-note Minsky pickup.
"like offensive and defensive teams in football, not even on the field at the same time"
That's baseball.
No, in baseball there's just the one team with every player required to play both (batting = offense, in the field = defense, except the pitcher gets a sub when his team is batting, under the Designated Hitter rule, now adopted by the National League). In football it's literally two different teams on each side https://www.yourdictionary.com/articles/football-positions-abbreviations getting wholly replaced every time the offense team loses possession of the ball .
You see me exposed as a fool.
My first reaction was panic--he's right!--and I changed the text. It took some work to calm myself down.
Note that modulo voter suppression and the constitution of the Electoral College—a big modulus I admit—it _is_ in fact anti-democratic not to give the President exactly what the President wants. This is a good thing: democracy by its nature can easily wind-up trampling minority rights.
The People should rule, but should be a constitutional monarch.
EDIT: Someone correct me if I've seriously,incorrectly, conflated Populism with {Illiberal Democracy with a likely side of racism or ethnocentrism}. They look the same to me, and not at all pretty. Maybe Populism tends to valourise/glorify passion more, or maybe I'm just confusing it with fascism.
I keep thinking you should be “Gerald Fjord” but I don’t want to step on your joke.
No, I don't accept that at all. Congress is the people, and your formulation is very good applied to them. The president is an appointed CEO. One of the things the president could concentrate on is protecting minority rights, of course.
The President can and historically sometimes has argued that they're the only person elected by the entire nation, so if there's a net, democratically-measured, National Will they're the one to embody it. That this is nonsense, the President being not a mystical Embodier but one individual for whom people vote both because-of and in spite of the candidate's various positions, unfortunately doesn't mean that the notion isn't something a President can claim in public with a straight face.
That's better. I really hate the idea of a singular National Will.
"Populism" is a big vocabulary problem because it's been defined completely differently by people who intend to mean something they think is bad (mob rule) and people who intend to mean something they think is good (people power). I think NYTimes and the like started calling Trump "populism" meaning it seemed to belong to the ill-educated and ill-mannered (which they further confused as "the white working class"), but they didn't want to take sides against it because that would be journalistically improper. Then rich conservatives like Hawley and Cruz and Vance took it up with pitchforks, like they'd suddenly turned into the chorus of Les Miz.
I think "populism" was a coat of whitewash in their ongoing quest to squeeze Trump into a Just Another Politician straightjacket. They are desperate for Trump to just another character in the play, instead of a lunatic who has wandered on stage with a lit Molotov cocktail.
It might not be the only thing that's true, but it's true
There's a fantastic line in David Hare and Robert Brenton's forgotten masterpiece "Pravda," a 1985 play — a satire of British journalism on a grand scale — that I was lucky enough to have seen in its debut at the National Theatre, with Anthony Hopkins (and Bill Nighy and others).
The opening scene shows the offices of an old-school regional newspaper in Leicester that has been doing the same creaky routine for a couple of centuries (and is about to be engulfed by the Murdoch-analog predatory investor, Hopkins, whose rise is the main story). The old editor is explaining the all-important style to a young reporter:
EDITOR: We didn't come out for Hitler you know.
REPORTER: Yes.
[pause]
EDITOR: Not that it wasn't a near thing.
REPORTER: Oh?
EDITOR: Yes. I caught this phrase: "Mr. Hitler is refreshingly dynamic." I thought, Oh dear not very wise. I changed it to "Mr. Hitler is unnecessarily dynamic."
Next thing you know they'll be stealing bread and sleeping under bridges!
Not to mention that meddling middleman the electoral college...
Yeah, the President is elected by the States, not The People. The one place the Constitution gets into micromanagement of a process.
Didn't Cheney get a similar routine going, meaning, establishing a sub-rosa "shadow government" system whereby he had offices in the house and senate and connections everywhere? The Scooter Libby army?