RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://tomklingenstein.com/making-sense-of-trumps-mandate/

Anti-Trump conservatives struggle to interpret our current political moment. Some are the unfortunate victims of extreme cases of Trump Derangement Syndrome which, at this point, have permanently impaired their ability to perform political analysis. But there are others, still worth reading from time to time, who remain surprisingly blinkered by the stubborn march of history. These unfortunate conservatives seem unable or unwilling to acknowledge that the long twentieth century has come to an end. A new political analysis is needed for a moment altogether new.

Consider one scholar from whom I have learned much: Yuval Levin, who has in the past employed his background in political philosophy to explore the deep sources and undercurrents of contemporary politics. In 2014, he treated Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke as the distant founders of contemporary progressivism and conservatism, respectively. In 2016, he channeled Alexis de Tocqueville to diagnose the “fracturing of the American republic.” During the Age of Trump, he has written on the importance of renewing the fundamental institutions of American society and, most recently, on the prospects for a recovered constitutionalism to restore unity to the American polity despite our inevitable political disagreements.

For all his erudition, Levin seems unable to grasp the significance of the 2024 election. In a post-election essay for the Dispatch, he emphasizes “the continuity of our peculiar political era,” characterizing Trump’s victory as “a relatively narrow win owed almost entirely to negative polarization.” Levin dismisses the possibility that “Trump’s eccentric mix of interests and priorities” is “well aligned with the public’s hopes and fears.” In fact, he charges, “Most of what Trump himself is most eager to do, from mass deportations to steep tariffs, would likely prove fairly unpopular when actually put into practice.” 

Levin also expresses a contemptuous lack of curiosity about “the motley crew surrounding Trump, whose political instincts add up to an especially incoherent jumble.” He specifically disparages Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for his alleged fixation on “tak[ing] fluoride out of our drinking water.” Levin concludes by insisting on the continued relevance of his own brand of conservatism: Trump’s “victory does not mean that Trumpian populism alone will now own the right for good.”

https://www.thefp.com/p/paradise-lost-karen-bass-los-angeles-fires?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

The burning of L.A. is not just a natural disaster. It’s a man-made catastrophe.

The first job of the government is to keep people safe. Failing that, its job is to show that someone is in charge when crisis erupts. On 9/11, there was nothing then–Mayor Rudy Giuliani could do to keep the World Trade Center from falling. Yet he became, in that long-ago era, the most popular person in America by staying on the scene and leading at his city’s moment of greatest danger.

That brings us to the fires in Los Angeles—the most devastating in the history of the city, with a reported 27,000 acres burned and the fires mostly uncontained. There, authorities have failed not only at protecting its residents but at inspiring confidence that they had the situation in hand.

We start with Mayor Karen Bass. As the Palisades fire began to consume wide swaths of America’s second-largest city, she was in Ghana to watch the inauguration of that country’s new president.

Bass left Los Angeles on Saturday—two days after the National Weather Service warned that strong winds and “extreme fire weather conditions” would soon threaten the city. On Sunday, the NWS announced a fire weather watch. By Monday, the warnings had become much more urgent, with the NWS tweeting in all-caps that “A LIFE-THREATENING, DESTRUCTIVE, Widespread Windstorm” would hit L.A. imminently.

Yet Bass remained halfway around the world, effectively leaving the crisis to her deputies. They, in turn, insisted Bass could run the city from anywhere via phone and tablet.

https://swtotd.blogspot.com

Many Americans bemoan a decline in culture. But what do we mean by culture? Are we speaking of the arts, religion, traditions, or a shared history? Are we referring to behavior? In a review of Eliot Stein’s Custodians of Wonder, Brandy Schillace wrote in The Wall Street Journal: “Our lives are connected to the land and the animals. Yet we are also threads in the tapestry that stretches back into prehistory, a part of a superorganism that is culture itself.”

So, what is culture? Definitions have changed. Noah Webster, in his 1828 dictionary, defined the word according to its etymological roots: “The act of tilling and preparing the earth for crops.” Forty-three years later, Edward Burnett Tyler, in Primitive Culture, defined the term in words we better understand today: “Culture…is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” From the Oxford English Dictionary: “Culture –The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.” In 1952, U.S. anthropologists A.L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, cited 164 definitions of culture. I think of culture, first as a system of shared beliefs, values, behavior and practices – based on our Judeo-Christian heritage and embedded in our founding documents – and second as works of art, literature and music.

For most of our nation’s history differences ruled. Rural and immigrant communities were often distinct entities. Until the mid-19th Century, most Americans never ventured far from their homes. But from the mid 19th Century on, technological advances unified us in a way unknown to earlier Americans. First we had steam ships, trains and then, later, the automobile, which allowed people to experience the size of our country. Radio then television brought other parts of the country and the world into our lives. The number of newspapers began to shrink. So that by my generation, people read the same news, listened to the same music, watched the same TV shows, saw the same movies, and heard the same nightly newscasts. In 1956 (in a country half the size it is today), Elvis Presley sold 10 million copies of a single song, “Hound Dog.” According to Pew Research, every evening during the 1960s between 27 and 29 million people listened to Walter Cronkite’s news on CBS, an audience greater than today’s combined daily audiences for ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC.