Gaetz Drops Out

The American public was treated to a hearty sigh of relief last week when Matt Gaetz withdrew his name from consideration for attorney general, thus sparing the country an exhaustive round of questioning about a grown adult sleeping with teenagers.

Some of us saw this coming. Matt Gaetz was unlikely to be attorney general, although in today’s climate I was unwilling to rule it out entirely. Gaetz is disliked in Congress. His personal behavior is abhorrent. But more than that, his support for Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” efforts disqualified him from the position. In all likelihood, his replacement, Pam Bondi, will be confirmed. She may be sufficiently Trumpy to earn my disapproval, but she is a better pick that Matt Gaetz.

Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. are likewise unfit to fill the positions for which they have been nominated. The way things are going with Pete Hegseth’s nomination, I wouldn’t be surprised if he goes down, too. I would rather see Gabbard and Kennedy go, though. Gabbard is an Assad apologist whose anti-Americanism is palpable. Kennedy is a pro-choicer who supports socialized medicine, wants to jail libertarians for not doing enough to fight climate change, and believes vaccines cause autism. If the Senate has any spine left, it will deny both nominations.

In the Trump era, Republicans have become fond of rolling over and calling it “fighting.” Engaging in the most craven pandering which would embarrass any man or woman with a shred of fighting spirit is considered an example of “courage.” Cads like Matt Gaetz are hailed as “manly.” Which only shows us how low MAGA has set the bar for manliness. What is it that Gaetz has done which marks him as strong or tough? Surely not bedding underage girls. But as far as I can tell, the only distinguishing features of him are his promiscuity and his bootlicking sycophancy for Donald Trump. That and his willingness to say mean things about Democrats on cable television which, let’s face it, isn’t all that hard.

The MAGA movement is filled with weak men and women who are praised for their courage and milquetoast populists who are lauded for their “staunch conservatism.” But when I look at Trump’s movement, I struggle to see much in the way of strength. Hegseth served his country with distinction and Vance and Gabbard answered their nation’s call as well. But RFK Jr. has had life handed to him on a silver platter. Musk is a successful businessman, but he isn’t known for character or fortitude. Trump’s media backers are sloths like Charlie Kirk and grifters like Sebastian Gorka.

I suppose Donald Trump was right when he said, “You can do anything when you’re a star.” You can espouse left-wing positions on a third of any given set of issues, opt for weak-kneed centrism on most of the others, and make up in bombast what you lack in grit and people will call you an “alpha male” and a “true conservative.” You can lie about bone spurs to dodge the draft and people will say, “he fights.” And you can appoint cads and fools to your cabinet and people will say that you’reassembling a crack team to deliver on promises made to voters.

It’s all very silly. I hope someday the cult breaks, if only so that those of us who kept our heads can laugh at the people who tell us with a straight face that Donald Trump is an “alpha male.”

Israel Sanctioned at the ICC

Demonstrating its irrelevance, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and (former) Defense Minister Yoav Gallant last week. If I had my way, the court would be abolished. It is an illegitimate organization which serves no purpose other than to offer false legitimacy to dictators, terrorists, and basically any foreigner willing to peddle two-bit anti-Americanism as righteousness on the world stage. The fact that the campus left, which has ever been in favor of totalitarianism and terrorists except when either can be meaningfully said to be right-wing, eats up this sort of thing should be seen as damnation, not evidence in favor of the ICC. Naturally, the antisemitic left was all over the indictment of Benjamin Netanyahu as a war criminal.

As if to demonstrate its nonpartisan bona fides, the ICC issued a similar warrant for Mohammed Deif. Deif is currently rotting in hell, where the Israelis sent him this past summer, so this warrant is a meaningless gesture which will fool almost nobody.

Some will ask, “What would we put in place of the ICC if we abolished it?” Nothing. We will put nothing in place of the ICC.It serves no useful purpose except to perpetuate the fiction that there is such a thing as international law or a morally-righteous cooperative order comprised of the nations of the world. There is no such thing as either. The world is a jungle. There is hard power and soft power. At the end of the day both are merely power. The reason the international stage has been relatively high-minded the last eighty years is not that the human race has evolved to a higher plane, but because the United States of America sat atop it as the elephant in the room and instead of plundering the rest of the world threatened everyone to get along. This didn’t always work out, but it worked out much better than whatever we had before, because war deaths plummeted after 1945 and have remained low ever since(considering the scope of world history).

The ICC exists to put a patina of morality upon the rank antisemitism of the world, which holds the only Jewish nation to a different standard than literally any other nation. The creation of Israel may be controversial, but compared to what? The creation of the modern state of Greece? If anything, Greece should be more subject to foolish arguments about postcolonialism and settlers given the number of people who were displaced in the post-Ottoman-Empire effort to forge a nation which could lay claim to being one of the two ancient founts of Western Civilization. (For those slow on the uptake, the other ancient fount was… Israel.)

Remember That Julia Roberts Ad?

Christine Rosen offers some excellent analysis on the Harris campaign’s failure to drive up numbers with women. She points to a New York Times roundtable in which one 23-year-old woman said of the infamous Julia Roberts Ad, “oh, my gosh. Is that what you think of married women, that we don’t have the confidence to marry men who are our equal partners? I cannot vote for a party that thinks that poorly of me.”

Some of us said at the time that this ad displayed a shocking level of condescension towards both women and men. When I first saw the ad, I wondered if the Harris campaign was trying to lose (it wasn’t, it was just that bad at reading voters). It turns out I wasn’t the only person. Harris may have actually managed to drive up turnout for Trump with that ad.

“What happens in the voting booth stays in the voting booth.”

Trump made a good attempt, but in the end Harris beat him on cringe-worthiness.

George Will at 50 Years

Too often I take a negative tone in this column, but George F. Will’s recent anniversary is a fitting occasion for celebration. The Washington Post ran a series of tributes to him last week to mark his fiftieth year as a syndicated columnist for the Post. Will is a giant, one of the last of the greats. After Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley Jr., and Irving Kristol, he was the most important conservative of the twentieth century. There is a weight to George Will’s words – when reading him one is impressed with a sense gravity and perspective.

Will is a man of an earlier era, who still holds the line on such lost causes as dressing professionally, proper grammar, and profanity. I enjoy reading Charlie Cooke, but when Will scolded him last year for using an obscenity in the pages of National Review of all places, I couldn’t help but cheer. We could use some good, old-fashioned, stick-in-the-mud conservatism these days, especially on the subject of profanity, which has become so widespread as to make it sound as though our politicians, journalists, and celebrities are conversing on a middle school playground.

The most trenchant feature of Will’s writing is his depth. Every sentence is packed with meaning. Both in 800-word columns and in 500-page books, he says more in a single sentence than many writers do in a page. One has to read Will carefully, lest one miss something. Every word matters and he often draws on complex historical arguments in a way that only the most erudite readers will follow. When one reads Will, one feels – as one did reading Charles Krauthammer or Irving Kristol – that here is a serious man, a man cut from a different cloth, a man from a time and place when words meant something. One feels a sense of inferiority about our own era, with its immaturity and unseriousness.

I think all young conservatives should read Will’s The Conservative Sensibility. Will has always leaned libertarian and has moved in a libertarian direction, but I think especially those of us who are conservative on matters of religion should take seriously Will’s criticisms of the religious right, which has failed both the right and religion in so many ways. There are some hard lessons in there. The best summation of the purpose of American conservatism and what it means in practice – the preservation of the American founding – comes from an atheist.

Will titled the book The Conservative Sensibility, not The Libertarian Sensibility. He rightly argues – as did Frank Meyer and William F. Buckley Jr. – that the American right must contain within it a libertarian streak (by which I mean, a “small government” or “anti-statist” streak). But he unlike many libertarians, he does not conflate that which ought to be legal with that which ought to be considered moral. Despite his atheism, a moral traditionalism runs throughout his writing, a traditionalism which led him to be a strident critic of Donald Trump, whose philandering and cowardice have been making a mockery of the American people since 2015.

At 83, Will may not have many years of column-writing left. When he does depart the scene, America will have lost something valuable. As the Grand Old Party descends into the fever of populist-nationalism, which bears little resemblance to the traditionalism or free-marketeering of old-fashionedAmerican conservatism, we need men of Will’s stature who can scorn the weakness of Matt Gaetz and Donald Trump and the thin gruel of the New Right. We can only hope that others of Will’s character will rise to the challenge, but I see no single individual today who could take his place.

In Conclusion – Gratitude

I will probably write something for Thanksgiving tomorrow or later this week, but I thought it would be fitting to close with a brief reflection on the most conservative holiday of the year. It is tempting for many to look at the state of American society today – our pornographic culture, the utter failure of elites at the highest levels of sports and politics and business and academia, the relentless assaults upon our institutions from progressivism and populism – and ask whether American conservatism has ever really conserved anything. The real question we should be asking is, “What would it look like without the hard work past generations have done to preserve that which is good in America?”

It would probably look a good deal worse.

The truth is that despite the challenges of our day, we have inherited great gifts. If given the choice to live anywhere in the world, at any time in human history, most people would choose to live in America right now. Conservatives, perhaps more than anyone else, recognize that we don’t get to choose the world into which we’re born. All we can choose is how best to live in it. If previous generations worked to preserve that which was good and right in America, and to resist the destructive forces of their day, we should be grateful. And out of that gratitude must come the realization that it is our duty to do the same in our day.