Donald Trump, Decius, and the AHCA

Michael Anton, a Donald Trump adviser who went by the pen name "Decius" in making the intellectual case for Trump during the campaign, said this during an interview about Modern Conservatism's failures:

Economic freedom is a human right. But with finance having seized the economy by the … whatevers … and income inequality skyrocketing, should lower taxes really be top priority? Carried interest, 2 and 20? Or is fostering economic solidarity more important? Conservatives have conniptions at the very question. But Aristotle says that the greatest wealth gap in a good regime should be 5 to 1. I’m not saying we want that, but in what way does making hedge fund managers the ultimate winners in our society make any sense? It made sense to challenge the Soviet Union, as it still makes sense to maintain a strong defense. But “strong defense” has morphed into endless, pointless, winless war. 

In 1980, we had to unshackle the economy, rebuild the military and alliance structure, and recover from the ’60s-’70s orgy. Today our priorities are different—or should be. But conservatives only know the formula they learned from the crib sheet.

Today, the House of Representatives voted on a health care bill that will boot 24 million people from coverage. They did so to clear the way for giving millionaires a tax cut. And they celebrated this in the Rose Garden.

So much for "fostering economic solidarity."

Donald Trump's Civil War question actually isn't that stupid.

Donald Trump is wrong and stupid and evil about a lot of things. In a world where we entertain counterfactuals, though, it is not wrong and stupid and evil to ask the question, "Why was there a Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?" The sniffy responses are getting out of hand.

As a libertarian friend of mine is fond of pointing out, the UK abolished slavery decades before the U.S. did, and did so without a shot being fired. So it is within the realm of possibility that a nation which entertained slavery can end it and not end up torn to shreds over it.

I'm not endorsing Trump's point of view. I think counterfactuals are of limited use: History played out the way it did, probably for reasons. I just think it's silly — in a country where somebody's written a "What if the Nazis had won?" novel every year for the last 70 — to get sniffy about this question.

More to the point: History is not inevitable. We are its actors. The president is a uniquely powerful actor. If he's showing signs of intellectual curiosity, let's not discourage it, eh?

Yes, Donald is often wrong and evil and stupid. Let's try to distinguish focus on the real problems instead of acting like posing a Philip K. Dick question is a sign of trouble. I keep saying this: We who consider ourselves Trump's opposition need to be smarter, better, and have higher standards than we think is present on the other side. Otherwise, what's the point of being on the other side?

My philosophy about football and CTE, stated here for the record.

• Individual choices matter, as long as they're informed.

• The NFL settlement of a suit regarding this issue suggests that for many players prior to the last couple of years, they were not adequately informed of the dangers.

• Nonetheless, let's say they're adequately informed now.

• The incentives to play football still make playing football an attractive prospect to many people, disproportionately poor.

• Those incentives are created by the large audience for football, one that generates money as eyeballs for advertising and spends a good deal of money on the game directly.

• When taken together with college football and high school football, the sport has disproportionate cultural power to the benefit it generates, which makes its costs worthy of extra attention.

• The potential costs of football are high enough, that the incentives to play it are, essentially, incentives for grown men to injure, occasionally maim, and outright harm each other.

• The benefit? We're entertained.

• That imbalance has more implications for people creating the incentives.

• That doesn't preclude free choice. It does mean that choices aren't made in a vacuum. And it does mean that the ramifications of choices aren't contained to that single individual.

• (Ask Jovan Belcher's girlfriend. You can't! She's dead. Ask Jovan Belcher's young daughter then. She didn't choose to have two dead parents.)

• Given that the imbalance in cost and benefit is disproportionate and that individual choices — while valid and free, and even if incentives are largely reduced there are many young men who might play football for the joy of it — the more implications for the people creating incentives become more fraught yet.

• If, as a result, fewer people create incentives, that would probably be a good thing.

• The reduction of those incentives will probably mean a reduction in the number of people of playing football.

• The reduction of those incentives will probably lead to less weirdly gross bulking out among young men playing football, meaning the sheer mass involved in the collisions going forward might be reduced and, who knows, reduce the incidents of CTE among players.

• All of this is done without banning anything at all. It simply confronts the costs of choice and asks people to examine those costs. If you do not choose to watch football, you're not really implicated. If you think other things matter more, you can move on to other arguments.

The Ceaseless Importation of Third World Foreigners With No Taste for Liberty (Part 2)

“The ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle." Michael Anton, AKA "Decius," The Flight 93 Election.
HuffPo:

A 22-year-old undocumented immigrant arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Jackson, Mississippi, on Wednesday after speaking to the media about her family’s detention, is set to be deported without a court hearing, her attorney said on Thursday.

Daniela Vargas, who came to the U.S. from Argentina when she was 7 years old, previously had a work permit and deportation reprieve under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. Her DACA status expired last November, and because she was saving money for the renewal — which cost $495 — her new application wasn’t received until Feb. 10.

If Trumpista worries about immigration were truly about liberty and "culture" you'd think that something could be done about the so called "Dreamers" — adult immigrants brought here as children — short of deportation. After all, these are a group of people largely raised as Americans;  they have spent lives immersed in our country and its traditions, and they do have the taste for and experience of American variety of liberty. With rare exception, they are assimilated.

So why is it so important to deport them? Why the resistance to any legal framework that lets them become citizens?

When Donald Trump Quotes the Bible, I Get a Little Crazy

Yeah, I find it jarring every time he affects to quote the Bible. We know already he's possibly — probably? — the least Biblically literate president ever, with a personal theology (to the extent he has one) is alien to almost any recognizable form of Christianity. So if you're a believer (I'm agnostic, but with strong feelings about the church communities I grew up in) that means he' pimping out the God of the Universe in the service of whatever self-aggrandizing message he's sending at the time.

That's arguably true of most presidents who quote the Bible. It's just so obviously true of this president that I wish he'd quit rubbing our noses in it.

Trumpistas: Trump = America

The folks over at the Trumpista website American Greatness have a new piece up defining their brand of conservatism as, well, "Americanism."

The party of Obama and Hillary is the Anti-American Party. They want to put the American experiment behind us, to complete the Progressives’ 100-year project of progressively overthrowing the Constitution. 

Donald Trump has called himself “a common sense conservative.” What, we may ask, is common sense conservatism? One thing is certain: it means loving America. Trump wants to save America by rallying the American people around the effort to save the republic.

To which the proper response is — well, unprintable.

America is more than a limited government view of the Constitution — and that I have to tell my Trumpist friends this astounds me, makes me sorry for the narrowly legalistic view of what America is, has been, and should be that they think the spirit of this country can and should be contained in a particular modern interpretation of words written more than 200 years ago.

The folks at American Greatness — I've spent some time with them before they launched their effort to put a shiny gloss of respectability on Trump's narcissism — strongly believe that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution are not really separate documents, but that the Constitution flows, spiritually, from the words of the Declaration. The writers of both documents were not demigods, but they were men — flawed, often hypocritical men.

But they gave us this very important sentence:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." 

That's an idea so broad that even the old white slaveholding men couldn't contain it.

Let's be clear: Trumpism holds that not all people are created equal. Today's AmGreatness piece includes this criticism of Democrats: "They are determined to flood our country with people from third world countries who are not interested in the American idea and Muslims who reject the American idea outright." It echoes the "Flight 93" sentence I quoted earlier today: “The ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle."

What you'll notice is that there is never any effort to recognize any folks from beyond our country's borders as individuals with varied ideas and tastes and beliefs. Instead, all brown people — let's be honest about who they mean here — are lumped together as secret tyrants who would mercilessly expose right-thinking Americans to the oppression of sharia, OSHA, and occasionally having to hear Spanish spoken in public.

This smearing of entire peoples, that's un-American.

The only way that the AmGreatness idea of "Americanism" makes sense is if "American" means, more or less, white and Christian.

Understand, though, that this will increasingly be the project of both Trump and his intellectual avatars. This isn't even the first time this week they've tried to define Trumpism as Americanism. They are wrong. They don't get to claim America for their ideas and their ideas only. And thank God. What an ugly, mean, selfish country this would be if they won.

We're Experiencing a Wave of Anti-Semitic Terrorism

Let's call the wave of anti-Semitic threats and grave desecrations what they are: Terrorism.

No, nobody's been hurt. Doesn't matter. Terrorism uses violence to achieve political aims. In this case, the violence is threatened and implied, but the aim is clear: To intimidate American Jews and their allies.

This is not a problem that can be mitigated with promises that "I'm the least anti-Semitic person you've ever met." It requires leadership.