Adios, Republican Party? (part 2)
The old order changeth, yielding place to new
The subtitle is a quote from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King” — or, more specifically, a poem in that cycle called “The Death of Arthur” (“Morte d'Arthur”, to imitate Sir Thomas Malory). It’s actually a quote from King Arthur himself to the last remaining knight of the Round Table, Sir Belvedere, who laments to a dying Arthur that he’s about to be abandoned among people who don’t share his thoughts or experiences:
For now I see the true old times are dead,
When every morning brought a noble chance,
And every chance brought out a noble knight. . . .
And I, the last, go forth companionless,
And the days darken round me, and the years,
Among new men, strange faces, other minds.
Arthur’s final words to Sir Belvedere begin with that legendary quote:
The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me?
I have lived my life, and that which I have done
May He within Himself make pure!
That morality tale of the times of King Arthur was required reading during my high school days over 50 years ago, although it no longer is, but the sentiment remains unchanged and is now a part of today’s reality for those of us who remember the Republican Party of even 10 years ago.
Part 1 of this story outlined the breakdown of the Whig Party in the late 1840s and the principles of the Republican Party as of 1854, when the party was created. It’s safe to say that the Republican Party has had periods where it failed to live up to some (or even, on occasion, most) of those principles during the first 160 years after its inception, but those principles would still have seemed palatable to most Republicans between 1854 and 2012, when Mitt Romney was the GOP presidential candidate. But Romney’s loss that year to the nefarious “pen and phone” demagogue and wannabe authoritarian Barack Obama seemed to break something within a significant portion of the Grand Old Party. Not all, mind you, but more than enough.
2015 gave us the rise of Donald John Trump. . . . and Tennyson’s words above proved prophetic. No longer was the GOP going to be a party for classical liberals based upon Jeffersonian ideals. Liberty? A fool’s game. The new GOP was going to move beyond freedom and dignity, beyond individual rights and independent thought — straight to top-down authoritarianism and the denial of reality, all in the service of and at the behest of the party’s leader and self-image: Trump himself.
Many of us denied that this was happening to the GOP, even as supposed party leaders such as Kevin McCarthy and Ted Cruz assumed the position of Trump rumpswabs (Cruz despite the fact that Trump had accused his father of being part of a Kennedy assassination plot). We believed, optimistically, that the presence of “adults” such as Mitch McConnell (who is probably the most effective Senate majority leader since Lyndon Johnson in the 1950s) and Bill Barr would prevent the Republican Party from running that far off the rails. There were some Trumpists who also seemed to believe this, because they covered their extremism with conventional rhetoric.
Well, as the 2022 election season has dramatically illustrated thus far, all of us doubting the future of Trumpism were almost completely wrong. To be honest, Trump and Trumpism are stronger than ever, and a lot of the façade has been removed. An interesting column from Alec Dent in The Dispatch (one of the few remaining bastions of what used to be “Republican thought” in the pre-Trump era) entitled “Socialism, Nationalism, and Tolkien” (yes, the analogy is to the fragment that Tolkien wrote about the fall of the civilization in Gondor that took place within 120 years after the events of The Lord of the Rings) makes the following point, which now appears undeniable (sorry for the lengthy excerpt, but you all should be reading The Dispatch anyway!):
In our time of unprecedented wealth and safety, the once-defeated foe of illiberalism has made a reappearence. Young leftists have increasingly positive views of socialism, while young right-wingers have increasingly positive views of nationalism. As Jonah Goldberg laid out in Suicide of the West, illiberal views in the West are due largely to a lack of appreciation for how good we have things right now, a lack of understanding of how we got here, and a lack of understanding of how a radical overhaul of society would alter the world as we know it. This is especially true of younger generations, who have little to no direct experience with the failures of illiberalism. Having not witnessed others try and fail, they’re more open to limiting free speech, race-based nationalism, polyamory, and a whole host of other ideas that were long thought unacceptable in America.
Tolkien has a sharp understanding of this peace-time radical mindset, and in the little he wrote of The New Shadow he managed to capture not just how they think and are motivated, but how they operate in early stages as well. In The New Shadow, Saelon never outright says he’s in the cult. He hints at it, and tries to draw out Borlas’ view of it by using language and references that would be familiar to only those in the know. The radicals of today use the same strategies, using words that mean little to outside observers, but show a deeper, esoteric meaning to fellow travelers, like bringing up land acknowledgements to show that you’re a true believer on the far left or casually dropping the white nationalist Sam Francis’ name in conversation to show that you’re a true believer on the far right.
In deep-blue Massachusetts, where I live, the land acknowledgements are enough to drive anyone crazy — except for the true believers. At a recent event at Harvard, the current head of the Harvard Alumni Association took up the first few minutes of her talk blathering on about purely hypothetical uses of the land upon which Harvard sits by various Native American tribes — who may or may not even have occupied the site. But, as Forrest Gump’s mother would have said, stupid is as stupid does, even among Harvard grads.
I have to admit that I haven’t heard of Sam Francis, but this recent column of Dent’s (“The New Right Finds a Home at the Intersection of Populism and Elitism”) shows another young Republican (but not, to my way of thinking, conservative) writer, Nate Hochman of National Review, praising a different white nationalist, Nick Fuentes. William F. Buckley would have been horrified, but the old order changeth, and those of us who spearheaded the Reagan Revolution and even worked for the GOP in the past no longer have a place in today’s GOP.
Instead of renewing its commitment to the principles of the Republican Party of the 1850s, the party is instead morphing into a modern version of the American Party of the 1850s (the loser in the battle for former Whig voters, at least the ones north of the Mason-Dixon Line). As of now, we should recognize that the classic Republican Party has transitioned into the American Party, regardless of what it calls itself.
An overwhelming example of that took place in the recent Alaska elections (Aug. 16) to fill the remaining four months of the late Rep. Don Young’s term. Under current Alaska law, Alaska stages a “jungle primary”, and then the top four candidates from it advance to the general election, where “ranked choice voting” (RCV) applies. In the June primary, there were over 40 candidates on the ballot to pick the top four. The top four candidates were, in order, former governor Sarah Palin (27%) (ostensibly a Republican . . . or an American Party candidate), former Young campaign chairman Nick Begich III (19%) (also a nominal Republican; Begich’s grandfather had held the seat before passing away and being succeeded by Young, and his uncle Mark had been a Democratic U.S. senator from Alaska); independent Al Gross (13%); and Democrat Mary Peltola (10%). Before the general election, Gross withdrew and endorsed Peltola, and so there were only three candidates on the ballot for the general election. Ranked choice voting is simple, especially in a three person race: you just need to list the person you’d place second, in the event that your candidate didn’t win.
In the general election, Peltola got 40%, Palin got 31%, and Begich got 28.5%. That meant Begich was eliminated, and the second choice of Begich voters determined the election. You might think that, since both Begich and Palin were nominally Republicans, the second choice of Begich voters would overwhelmingly be Palin. You would be wrong. About 20% of Begich voters didn’t list a second choice. Over a third of the remaining Begich voters (approximately 36%) listed Peltola as their second choice, giving Peltola the victory.
Note: we can presume that those Begich supporters who left the second choice blank in a three-person race (so making a choice wasn’t rocket science, no matter what Palin supporters claim) had no interest in a Palin victory — meaning about half of Begich’s supporters (the 20% who didn’t list a second choice and the approximately 29% (36% x 80%) who backed Peltola) didn’t support Palin.
But hyperpartisan Republicans such as Palin, Trump, Sen. Tom Cotton, and many other among the GOP political class were furious that the will of the people — a majority preference for Sarah Palin to NOT win the House seat — was actually being done; they preferred that the people be stuck with Palin even after rejecting her at the ballot box. Does that sound like any other Republican politicians with whom you might be familiar?
Don’t believe me? Here’s Jim Geraghty, normally the most sensible of the National Review columnists after the great Kevin D. Williamson, complaining that the Alaska election was unfair because the leader after the PRIMARY didn’t win:
The worst aspect of a ranked-choice system is that the candidate who gets the most votes in the first round doesn’t necessarily win, and that’s what happened last night. The system effectively punishes a candidate who takes stances that are clear and bold, but potentially controversial. This also means the system effectively rewards candidates who are wishy-washy and inoffensive, and who avoid taking any stances that others might disagree with — mashed-potato candidates. A candidate’s best shot at winning is to be everybody’s second choice.
You might read this as an argument for “whichever candidate gets the most votes wins” (that is, no RCV) — except that the candidate who got the most first-place votes in the general election was Peltola, with 40%, and she ultimately won, so that cannot be what Geraghty is advocating. Instead, he’s arguing that Palin (“the candidate who [got] the most votes in the first round”) should have won but didn’t due to RCV. Well, like Trump, Geraghty is entitled to his own beliefs but not to his own facts, and that take is simply nonsense.
Traditional American law (before RCV) is that whoever gets the most votes in the general election, not in the primary, wins. And that is exactly what happened here. In fact, this election was a resounding success for RCV, except for those people (such as Trump and Palin . . . and apparently Geraghty) who believe that any election not won by a populist is obviously illegitimate.
Another angry partisan sputterer and spewer at National Review is Dan McLaughlin, who once was a sensible lawyer and legal columnist before converting into whatever today’s GOP is. McLaughlin has already written two columns blasting the Alaskan electoral system for not reaching his preferred result. The first one blasted both jungle primaries and RCV, both of which he blames on Republican Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski, and McLaughlin sets himself up as the arbiter of true conservatism:
Lisa Murkowski continues to hold a Senate seat (to which she was originally appointed by her own father) despite being badly out of step with Republican base voters both nationally and in Alaska. A moderate in the Susan Collins mold may be tolerable in blue Maine, but it is deeply frustrating in reliably red Alaska, even given the state’s tendency toward big-government, socially libertarian Republicans. In 2010, Republican primary voters rejected Murkowski, so she ran as a write-in and won in the general election — and was promptly welcomed back into the Senate Republican caucus as if nothing had happened. It would be better for conservatives if she was replaced in the Senate. . . .
The changes were explicitly billed as an effort to boost moderate and independent candidates — such as Murkowski and the state’s former governor, Bill Walker, who was elected as a Democrat-aligned independent — at the expense of those favored by the parties’ bases.
The problem with McLaughlin’s position is that Alaska voters had the chance to oust Murkowski in 2010, when she lost the Republican primary to Tea Party crackpot Joe Miller. [NOTE: “crackpot” is me editorializing about Miller, who has now lost three races for the Senate from Alaska, and has (naturally) become a strong supporter of Trump.] That year, Murkowski had to run for re-election as a write-in candidate against both a Democrat and a Republican. She got 39.5% of the vote; Miller got 35.5%; and the Democrat got 23.5%. In other words, a plurality of Alaskan voters wanted her as their senator, no mater what McLaughlin and his “true conservatives” wanted and no matter that they had to write her in (and spell her name correctly, because the Alaska Secretary of State said before the general election that spelling would count!).
McLaughlin is also upset that the general election included two Republicans but only one Democrat: “The state’s Democrats united behind Peltola — she was even endorsed by Begich’s uncle, former senator Mark Begich — while Palin and Begich divided the Republican vote.” Except . . . a significant number of Begich supporters — just about half — either preferred Peltola to Palin or had no preference between them. When over 35% of Begich voters who declared a second choice picked Peltola, it’s impossible to make a compelling case that the 20% of Begich voters who didn’t list a second choice would overwhelmingly have chosen Palin.
An honest opinion columnist also would admit that Alaska is not as “reliably red” as McLaughlin claims, having elected a Democrat as senator in 2008 (Mark Begich, Nick’s uncle) and as governor in 2014 (Bill Walker, nominally an independent), and having re-elected Murkowski in a difficult write-in campaign in 2010 and then again in a more normal campaign in 2016.
McLaughlin used to be an honest columnist, just like Geraghty. But apparently a corrupting tide corrupts all.
On that note, I should mention that longtime (since 2005!) conservative blogger “Allahpundit”, who has been a Trump skeptic since Trump’s rise and then an outright opponent since Trump’s coup attempt on January 6, 2021 despite blogging on the pro-Trump site Hot Air, resigned from there effective September 2, 2022 and will become a columnist at The Dispatch as of the end of the month (under his real name, Nick Cattogio). The pressures to conform to Trump’s desires among the formerly conservative pundits (who now have largely turned into directionless partisans echoing Trump’s endless stream of bushwa) continue to hamper honest discourse.
Mitch McConnell, who is still trying to steer the GOP Senate into a conservative position, has to feel a lot like a piñata at this point. Democrats hate him because he opposes the progressive positions taken by Joe Biden and his far-left “kiddie corps” of believers (which include “Peter Pans” such as octogenarian Bernie Sanders and septuagenarian Elizabeth Warren and Biden himself, who have refused to grow up); Trumpists hate him because he opposes the whims of der möchtegern Führer, and the GOP’s Dear Leader has the same tolerance for not getting his way on everything as your average three-year-old. McConnell is going to have permanent scars from the whip marks left by all the people who are beating on him.
The hard part of the transition of the Republican Party into a new version of the American Party (even if it retains the Republican moniker for now) is that the current version of the Democratic Party is unbelievably incompetent, even worse than it was under Barack Obama. The old saying is that even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while, but I doubt that the combined intelligence of the current “brain trusts” of the 2022 versions of the Democratic and Republican Parties can find anything . . . except for what they loot and steal from the U.S. Treasury, because both are drawn to other people’s money. Instead of a government representing the hopes and dreams of all Americans, we are governed by kleptocrats promising, in the words of 1930s Peruvian president Óscar Benavides: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”
The least popular conservative columnist among the Republican/American Party crowd is David French of The Dispatch, another Harvard Law alum who is a fundamentalist Christian and focuses on the ethical shortcomings of Trump and his allies. In that regard, French is following the Biblical admonition of Jesus in Matthew 7:3-5:
And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.
But among the Trumpy Republican/American Party crowd, the focus must be upon the shortcomings of the other side, not their own. Despite the hatred directed at him, French refuses to change his focus, and his column today (not paywalled) is typical, in that it compares and contrasts the fiction of J.R.R. Tolkien and George R.R. Martin with regard to their views of humanity and the quest for power:
[In Tolkien’s view, o]ne cannot truly defeat the enemy with the enemy’s tools. The ends cannot justify the means, even if the cost of that virtue is ruin and destruction. Tolkien knew that the alternative, the grasp for ultimate power, meant that the contest between good and evil would be transformed into a contest between evils. The raw quest for power will corrupt all it touches. . . .
Why does America need to remember Tolkien again? Because we’re mired in Westeros, playing the game of thrones. When you hear words like “fight fire with fire,” or “make them play by their own rules,” or “punch back twice as hard,” or “wield power to reward friends and punish enemies,” you’re hearing an ethos that declares, “win or die.”
Tolkien wasn’t naive. He knew that world. He’d confronted it directly. That’s why characters like Boromir or Fëanor resonate so strongly. In the quest to confront the enemy, you become the enemy. Yet faithful people understand, in Faramir’s words, that they “do not wish for such triumphs.” Instead, they fix their eyes on the “high beauty” that is forever beyond the shadow’s reach.
That’s not a retreat. In many ways, it’s the most courageous form of confrontation. It’s an act of faith that often defies our senses. Everything in us screams at us to claim the ring—to reach for power—and in our frailty, we often yield to that call. But there are no stakes high enough for such a compromise. Even if America is “falling in ruin” and we alone could save her, using the instruments of darkness “for her good and [our] glory,” we cannot become what we oppose.
I’m not a Christian, but this ethos resonates deeply. I cannot understand the viewpoints of people who claim to be Christian but reject this and instead crave power. The entire ethos of Christianity is based around actions, not professed beliefs. We even have sayings to emphasize it, such as “actions speak louder than words” and “talk is cheap”. It simply isn’t true — it CANNOT be true — that merely declaring your belief in Christian theology WITHOUT changing your life to embrace Christian ethics is the key to salvation.
There is no exception to doing things the right way, even if the upcoming election is, as has been claimed about every election since 2016, a “Flight 93 election”, where a loss spells doom for truth, justice, and the American way. Tolkien understood this. The Republican/American Party does not. Perhaps that gives a new meaning to the American Party nickname: “Know Nothing”.
And that is why the amount of religious support among Christians for Donald John Trump amazes me. . . until I remember that the American Party was much the same in the 1840s and 1850s — as well as its postwar imitator, the Ku Klux Klan. (To be sure, Trump supporters are not Klansmen, but the principle of supporting anti-Christian behavior while professing Christian belief (going so far as the use of crosses in KKK rituals) is the same.)
But the future of both parties — the Republican/American Party and the Democratic/Progressive Party — is up for grabs, so it isn’t enough to just focus on the GOP crack-up here. I’ve tended to withdraw from online groups that would consider the triumph of the current Republican/American Party (or the triumph of the current Democratic/Progressive Party) as a victory, because I don’t see how to bring people who are that far gone back to sanity. Instead, I’d like to share an online discussion with my friend Ihab A.B. Awad, which came out of a discussion about the promise of RCV and reflects what each of us believes underlies the dangerous moment at present.
This isn’t something I’d intended for this column. But I admit that I want to share it, perhaps because I had never put it into these terms in my own mind until this. As this discussion wasn’t written (by either of us) to be public, I’m happy to delete Ihab’s posts that I’ve included here if he so desires, and I’m also interested in how others react to this.
Awad: To me, RCV is the best method I know about to break the 2-party duopoly that has gripped my adopted homeland, and by my "vote", I'm ready to stomach some quite significant disadvantages to get that. But that's just me.
Decker: [Pointing out the weakness in the Geraghty claim about the winner of the first round not winning being a weakness of RCV, similar to my discussion above.]
Awad: I feel ya. I think though that, given the math that I fail to understand, elections are really a civic ceremony to achieve agreement, rather than a magical mathematical system to achieve correctness. It's all about agreement versus correctness. And so people's perceptions count. I mean, in a separate universe, "Smith got more votes but the chicken entrails reading indicated Jones is favored by the spirits" could be just as "logical" a way to decide the votes.
Decker: The problem that you run into is that there are two sizable factions out there that take it as a "given" that they represent a majority, and so anytime they lose is an example of unfairness. You'll never get them to acquiesce in their losses. It's a "Carthago delenda est" situation, because destruction of those factions is the only solution to the problem.
Awad: That's a whole 'nother other thing quite separate from electoral-math-which-ihab-does-not-understand. This is, I submit, a matter of group memetics.
The record has shown that y'all Murcans have organized y'all's brains according to the below map.
If it is to be believed, there is literally no way in which this mess can be "fairly" governed according to the established administrative boundaries. There is no land partition that fits the ideological partition.
For example, people in rural California are right to feel disenfranchised. Their choices may be "right" or "wrong" -- but they are largely overrun by the urban population centers. The result is a perception that the sparse red areas are basically provincial outlying areas, colonized by the dense blue.
I claim that the way *groups* of people deal with problems like this is by forming simple narratives. The way I think about things, groups of people, even if they have similar goals, must "virtue signal" to achieve solidarity and organize plans. This "virtue signaling" must be simple and easily transmissible. It also needs to fit neatly into the existing ideology so that, as a meme, it is infectious and easy to integrate and does not cause cognitive dissonance. Also (see another poster), mad props if the meme paints the "us" party as aggrieved and victimized, because that makes offensive action against "them" easy to justify without cognitive dissonance.
This is my conclusion after having seen ideological divides as a former Muslim and as an observer of the Middle Eastern Israeli / Palestinian fustercluck.
So what's an easy, portable, viral meme that can deal with this problem? "Unfair! We actually won!"
[ Notice I don't have a quick, easy solution.... ]
Decker: People in rural areas have felt disenfranchised by the large numbers in urban areas since the days of the Articles of Confederation. And movements to split up states are nothing new in US history: see Maine, West Connecticut (aka Connecticut's Western Reserve), and West Virginia for successful examples, along with many unsuccessful ones (including upstate NY/NYC). But the movement to declare any election that our side loses to be illegitimate has only two precedents in US history: 1860 and 1876.
Another poster: You wrote, “the movement to declare any election that our side loses to be illegitimate has only two precedents in US history: 1860 and 1876.” Don't forget 2000 and 2016, though!
Decker: 2000 and 2016 are objectively very different. 2000 was a legitimate toss-up election in one state (Florida) that just happened to be the determining state. The winner of the election would be decided by the rules set up for the vote recounts, but the authority of the federal courts over this process had no precedent. Ultimately, the US Supreme Court (7-2 GOP majority, but 5-4 GOP voting split) overruled the Florida Supreme Court (5-2 Democratic majority; 4-3 decision for Gore) to halt the selective county recounts that Gore had asked for, saying that a whole-state recount had to be done (7-2 decision) but there was no longer time (5-4 decision). Later ballot examination by the Miami Herald showed that the selective recounts would have given the state to Gore, but the full-state recount would have kept the state with Bush.
To analogize that situation to 2020 is to trivialize the real issues in 2000, similar to all-in partisanship. It's a lot like trying to claim that if you took a PPP loan, which were designed as grants but designated loans for procedural reasons, that was the equivalent of the unlawful Biden "student debt cancellation" of actual loans -- a claim frequently made by partisan bozos who know better.
2016 is a closer call, and you may be right about it. Although Hillary actually conceded (which Trump did not), she then spent the next four years trying to walk it back. So, on the one hand she admitted defeat, but on the other hand she denied it. Now, that may not be as bad as 100% denying defeat, but it's still unworthy of a presidential candidate in the US.
Awad: Yes, and thank you for your solid grasp of history that I lack. However, unless we postulate some genetic degradation in the quality of humans on United Statesian soil, perhaps due to cosmic rays or the action of space aliens, we must find circumstances that led us to where we are.
Cheap targeted media and cheap air transportation, and the newly accelerated patterns of economic and social development they enable, are my best guess. I could be wrong.
The 1800s splits had enough geographical affinity that each side was able to mobilize a formal army, with formal uniforms and flags and tactics and generals. I would be hard pressed to see such an affinity with today's splits.
Broadly, I think it's interesting to see how you and I think. I don't know which (if any) is "right" but I find it cool and this is why I value our discussions.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you tend to think in terms of laws and precedent and argument and logic. I won't elaborate much because this is, if anything, yours to describe more deeply.
My thinking tends to be about humans as self-organizing groups of mutually suspicious chimps.
Level 0 chimps scratch and bite at their enemies.
Level 1 chimps throw feces.
Level 2 chimps throw rocks.
Level 3 chimps have a chimp screaming party, then collaborate to hurl one huge rock (which they individually cannot move) down the mountainside at their rival band.
... and so on up the chimp levels until ...
Level X chimps recruit their best engineers to build guns and airplanes and hurl depleted uranium rounds at the crap that the rival bands' engineers have made.
Level X chimps find their most eloquent clerics and story tellers and have them weave myths so that the band acts with unity even when they are separated from each other.
Level X chimps create complex arguments and legal theories and use them to prove that the other bands of chimps are bereft of thinking.
This is clearly an "engineer's" view of the human experiment. It's by no means the only view.
Decker: I have a different take on the human tendencies of the issue. Of course, the issue of slavery was an overriding issue in the previous two divisions, and that was a geographic issue (thanks to the fact that tobacco and cotton only grew well in the South).
But after slavery, the US had unifying wars against the native Americans, the Spanish, WWI, WWII, Korea, and the Cold War; even the dissonance of Vietnam only affected wannabe "reds" like Bernie Sanders. But the current divisions reflect the long-promised "peace dividend" after the Cold War ended: without a unifying opposing force, we form factions to fight among ourselves!
Awad: Interesting. So you assign "blame" to the lack of an external (or easily culturally differentiated) enemy for our current travails?
Decker: To a large extent, yes. That's why we see so much "othering" going on.
Awad: That's brilliant. I think "your" and "my" explanations are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but this is one I have not thought about. Thank you. [Separately, I shudder to contemplate your crafty solution...]
Decker: As do I (shudder, that is). I've wondered whether bringing back the draft or some type of "public service" obligation that couldn't be dodged (which is the way I think of Israel's military service rules) would compensate, but that's far enough outside of my area of expertise that I don't really have a view on its desirability.
Awad: To the potential futility of this otherwise excellent idea, many of my friends where I live would suggest a climate change reconstruction corps. Young people of diverse stripe coming together to solve problems that apply to all our -- oh wait, never mind.
And on that note, I think I’m going to devote a few columns to non-political topics. Be seeing you.