I expected to finish an article about Pax Americana quickly over the weekend while working on my taxes, but it took all the way until yesterday to finally be posted. So here’s another relatively quick aggregation post discussing what’s happening in the world that writing these long articles doesn’t let me address.
Celebrity Apprentice from TFG, part 2
I was far from the only person to notice that The Former Guy’s list of 2022 endorsements is heavy on celebrities. Former New York Times editorial page editor Gail Collins was one of the many others who noticed, and she and Brett Stephens had a written “conversation” about it and other topics (link here, but subscription required). But National Review columnist Jim Geraghty thinks she revealed more about her viewpoint that she intended, and he addressed it in a segment of his own daily news aggregation column. As he says, after she dismisses the alternative candidates by noting that they are “noncelebrities” and are “without reality-TV careers”:
Those non-celebrity, and non-reality-TV-star Republican senatorial candidates may be a lot better or more qualified, but Collins can’t be bothered to learn any of their names. She chuckles that “the Republican Party is going to become the Home for Unwillingly Retired Entertainers” but doesn’t bother to tell readers anything about any of the other options.
And he’s correct. But, after he complains (at length) about the “sound-bite fever” that afflicts the mainstream media’s compression of stories as part of a competition for eyeballs, he touches on the real reason that the generally-Democratic media members want to focus on the celebrity GOP candidates and ignore the others at the very end of his piece:
Few Democrats or left-of-center media voices have any genuine preferences among competing Republicans; most left-of-center media voices just want every Republican primary to turn into a demolition derby.
And that is a large reason why American politics on both sides of the aisle have become so ugly. The exact same bias exits among Republicans, who want the same thing in Democratic primaries. And every day we see comments by Democrats that they could never vote for a Republican and comments by Republicans that they could never vote for a Democrat, while each side engages in nut-picking from the other side.
It’s turning me into an advocate for “jungle primaries” (technically called nonpartisan blanket primaries), where all the candidates for an office face off in the first round, which serves as the primary, and the top two candidates face off in the second round. As more and more Americans become independent of party affiliation (a process that, in my case, resulted specifically from TFG), I’m beginning to feel that jungle primaries are the only real way to return to sanity, because increasingly polarized parties are increasingly selecting candidates who represent only their fringe of the electorate in partisan primaries.
Your mileage may vary.
”Ding Dong! The masks are dead!”
In a Florida case at the end of last week, a federal judge struck down the federal masking mandates on mass transportation, including buses and airplanes. There are a wide variety of legal issues encompassed in that ruling, and the federal judge (a former Supreme Court clerk for Clarence Thomas in 2018-19, since we were just discussing that with regard to Ketanji Brown Jackson) gave a blanket opinion that covered all of them, which seemed like overkill to some lawyers (including me), perhaps reflecting the judge’s inexperience at handling controversial cases with many unclear constitutional issues. But instead of me trying to wade through all the issues, I’m going to link to two articles on the Volokh Conspiracy that address the ruling, from law professors Samuel Bray of Notre Dame and Ilya Somin of George Mason. Note that Professor Somin had previously written that he thought the mask mandate was problematic but permissible, so he may have a personal incentive to highlight areas where he might disagree with the ruling.
From my own perspective, I tend to agree with the ruling on a fairly narrow technical issue, but I’ll defer to the full-time commentariat.
ADDENDUM: Long after I sent this out, Andrew McCarthy, a conservative attorney and columnist for National Review, published an article that exactly coincides with my view of this ruling: basically, that Judge Mizelle was correct in striking this regulation down for its violation of the Administrative Procedures Act, was wrong in striking it down as a textual matter, and also was wrong in issuing a nationwide injunction. Since I skirted this issue earlier, I figured I’d add Andy’s analysis here (instead of doing this in another aggregation post) so that everything is in one place.
Religious schisms in the Russian Orthodox Church?
Who would have thought that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could cause doctrinal problems among some Christian churches during Easter? But there are good reasons for that, as this article from the New York Times (not a subscriber-only link) discusses. The Moscow Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church has expressly turned the church into a state church, and so he has offered prayers for the success of Russian troops. Perhaps I’m showing my age, but it reminded me of the Eric Burdon and the Animals’ song “Sky Pilot”, which was performed live with a background film, as captured in this 8-minute video (with pre-recorded backing music) from the 1960s:
In words that a much-younger me used when this song was new: this is just sad.
CNN+ on life support
There have been few mainstream media flops in recent history that have played out more painfully in real time than that of CNN+. An Axios article from yesterday notes that it looks doomed, and it’s hard to say that this comes as a surprise. The article says that new Warner Brothers owners Discovery Network intend to blend the parts of CNN+ that they want to keep with HBOMax. Frankly, it’s almost impossible to understand from a business perspective why that wasn’t the original approach taken to CNN+ — but it’s easy to understand from a Hollywood empire-building perspective. Then again, I thought that part of the reason that Ted Turner located CNN in Atlanta in the first place was to make sure that it didn’t fall in to a Hollywood perspective. I guess those days are over.
The longstanding horrors of the Russian Empire
Swedish writer John Gustavsson has a lengthy piece in The Dispatch highlighting the bleak history of Russia. This piece shows a large part of the reason why I’ve resisted writing about events from a Russian perspective: to a large extent, I’m not sure that I can do it justice. A significant part of the reason that Peter the Great moved the Russian Empire capital from Moscow to St. Petersburg was to break with the past of the Russian Empire and bring it in line with European standards (since so much of Russia is in Europe), but I’ve often felt that European standards in Russia are more honored by being ignored. Part of the reason that Mikael Gorbachev received such worldwide respect was that he seemed more European than Russian. However, even though Vladimir Putin spent much of his younger life in Germany and is clearly fluent in European standards, he seems to have the ability to disconnect from them and become a tsarist throwback when in Moscow.
Quick hitters
Two points that I heard on Zoomcasts this week that I just want to bring up here, even though I don’t have a link to them. The first came from a writer based in England, who was discussing going to Egypt during the Arab Spring and talking to a young Egyptian man who was working for a major international bank there. The conversation was going normally — until the young man referenced a monument to the major Egyptian victory over Israel on 6 October 1973. When the Englishman said that the war came out very differently, with Israel about to seize both Cairo and Damascus at the end of the war before the cease-fire, the young man didn’t believe him. The example was intended to point out the long-term harm that propaganda can do, even among people who had received enough education and outside contact to have been exposed to the idea that the beliefs were propaganda, and thus to point out that there will be a long time before a post-Putin Russia could ever rejoin Europe.
The second came from a market researcher commenting on a marketing study done on the continuing hold of TFG on his core audience (and I mentioned this already in a comment on the TFG article). The researcher had found that the core of TFG’s appeal was that his fans felt that he cared about them in a way that no other politicians did, and a key part of that came from TFG’s reaction to the 2017 Charlottesville riots over the town removing the statue of Robert E. Lee from Lee Park. After the riots, TFG said that there were “very fine people on both sides”. As the Wikipedia article (at the link above) discusses, there was a lot of commentary about whether TFG was intending to include the white nationalists and other racial-purity groups in that characterization, especially because TFG later in his speech explicitly excluded them. But the researcher said that the core audience had ignored that part and believed that Trump, like Mr. Rogers, liked them just the way they are.
So perhaps the question of what TFG actually meant should be resolved in favor of what his supporters understood him as meaning. That should give us pause whenever we read any of TFG’s comments asking for peace in Ukraine, because the Russians may read that differently than the rest of us would!
Be seeing you.
No one tell Paul I would pay for this ....