[Mark McDonnell]

Hi Roger,

I already watched the video when Matt first posted it. I got it and I like it. It's a brilliant satire of a thousand internet arguments. I don't think you understood my point though, or you didn't read it properly, or you're deliberately addressing a different one because it's easier. I know it was long, but I was trying to be very clear and precise in how I worded it.

Hi John,

I'm glad you think they're worthy questions, I thought you might have a go at answering them. I've never heard anyone else quibble at the term Democrat, it must not be a thing in England. It seems acceptable enough at the left-wing Guardian newspaper, who are usually quite careful about such things.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...-rashida-tlaib

[Julie Steiner]

Originally Posted by Mark McDonnell

I've never heard anyone else quibble at the term Democrat, it must not be a thing in England. It seems acceptable enough at the left-wing Guardian newspaper, who are usually quite careful about such things.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...-rashida-tlaib

But Mark, note that both incidences of the phrase "the Democrat Party" in that article from the Guardian are direct quotes by Donald Trump. [Edited to say: Or Donald Trump's quote of a quote. But close enough.] Using the wrong name for the Democratic Party is a tactic deliberately designed to annoy Democrats, and I'm confident that the Guardian's writers would never do that themselves:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet)

I think you and I are pretty much in agreement on your other point, with a few differences. Personally, I think it's 100% fair and accurate to compare supporters of xenophobic strongmen to Nazis; but on the other hand, I share your concern that making insecure people [Edited to clarify: I'm referring to rank-and-file supporters here, not to public figures like Kimball, whom, unlike you, I consider fair game] feel attacked and despised by calling them "Nazis" is probably 100% ineffective for persuading them to abandon their support of a strongman who says, "Look how my enemies attack and despise you wonderful people! They want to deprive you of the protection, power, and glory you deserve. But we'll destroy and humiliate them, won't we?"

[Quincy Lehr]

Is Kimball a Nazi? No. But he is, at least and without hyperbole, a fascist sympathizer whose publication has published and defended overt racists and has been one of the most strident defenders of the Bolsonaro regime in Brazil. Moreover, as a key writer for American Greatness, and overtly racist and hard nationalist publication, he has aligned himself with an explicit attack on branches of conservatism that still reference the legacy of nineteenth-century liberalism. It is an intellectual milieu that looks like this:

https://www.vox.com/2019/7/17/206965...nce-2019-trump

It’s not as if this is new, exactly. It’s more that the subtext has become the text, with a political establishment that may be able to hold onto a degree of power for the time being, but which is deeply distrusted, and rightfully so. The looming climate catastrophe poses two options—a massive move towards equality, democratic planning, and international solidarity, or genocide. Team Genocide, even as it fundamentally miscasts the crisis, is getting far less coy about what it’s willing to do to preserve its Cheesecake Factories, McMansions, and pretentious trust-fund magazines.

[John Isbell]

Hi Mark,

Yes, I've been posting my thoughts in this particular discussion for a bit already, as you'll note. As to your most recent worthy arguments - you do indeed often make those, to my mind - I'll just observe my longstanding feeling that when Hillary made the, again to my mind, calculated decision to call Trump supporters "a basket of deplorables," she did so in a catastrophic error of judgment from a tactical perspective.
Folks have noted that my comments tend to be shorter rather than longer. I think I'll do just that this time as well. As Pascal once wrote, "Please excuse this long letter. I had no time to make it short."

Cheers,
John

[Mark McDonnell]

Hi Julie!

I made reference to 'Democrat candidates' in the spirit that you might say 'she's a Democrat'; I didn't say the 'Democrat Party', which would just sound wrong to me anyway. I'd literally never heard of this particular semantic minefield, and John's picking me up on it just felt like a distraction, but fair enough, I'm happy to be corrected.

It's not that I don't consider Kimball 'fair game' or have any concern about him feeling attacked. As I said above 'I have no concern for the feelings of some smug, privileged, odious right-wing commentator who gets called a Nazi'. When I initially questioned Aaron about his calling him a 'Nazi fuck' it was through qualms about the feelings of Holocaust victims, and then later through a concern that calling someone a Nazi who isn't actually a Nazi could empower Trump. The same principle that makes you balk at calling rank-and-file supporters Nazis. I personally don't care what language Aaron uses to express his justifiable anger on this very niche website, I was just making a point about the usefulness of that sort of language becoming more common in the general political discourse vs the risk that it could backfire. It's a tricky one isn't it, because saying 'don't call Roger Kimball a Nazi' can easily be interpreted as 'Don't slander that poor man's reputation'. That's not my agenda here at all, it is the same as everyone else's: to encourage action that makes Trump's reelection the least likely scenario.

Hi Quincy - nothing there I don't agree with, and what I said to Julie.

Hi John - I'm still interested, from you or anyone else, in opinions on my first question about the motivations of the Holocaust museum and the description of their statement as 'spineless'. It's not a loaded question, I'd genuinely be interested in opinions, as someone concerned but removed from the issue by an ocean. The Pascal is always funny.

Cheers folks

Edit: the more I read about Bolsonaro, the more frightening he sounds. It's very important for any forces aligned against what he and Trump represent to play it right, if they're to be defeated democratically. God knows what that (the 'playing it right') means though really tbh.

[Julie Steiner]

I think a lot of Jews (and particularly Israelis) just can't believe that it's possible for someone to advance a pro-Israel agenda and an anti-Semitic agenda at the same time.

"Look, Trump and his conservative Christian supporters have officially recognized Jerusalem as the capital of the state of Israel, which is what we've wanted America to do for decades now! Look, he's aggressively going after people who have expressed support for the BDS (Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions) movement! Look, he has a Jewish son-in-law! How could Trump possibly be advancing an anti-Semitic agenda?"

They don't understand that many nominally "pro-Israel" Christians actually think that the Biblical phrase "the people of Israel" applies mostly to themselves. Christians tend to see themselves rising from the dead in Ezekiel's "dry bones" vision, and themselves in the jubilant crowds in the New Jerusalem of the last book of the Christian Bible. They see themselves in Jacob--later renamed Israel--who managed to transfer both the birthright and blessing of Abraham and Isaac from his unworthy elder brother to himself. They feel entitled to all of the benefits of God's Biblical covenants, with few of the responsibilities. (Sts. Paul and Peter managed to get Christians off the hook for those unpleasant circumcision and dietary requirements, and even the Ten Commandments seem a lot more negotiable when you can just confess and be totally forgiven. Which is why so many conservative Christian politicians in America who cloak their homophobic policies in the mantle of "defense of marriage" have been so demonstrably bad at honoring their own marriage vows.)

The confusion of some Jews about simultaneously pro-Israel and anti-Semitic American politicians is similar to the confusion of American Christians about whether it's possible for someone to support "family values" and "the family as the basic unit of society" while simultaneously breaking up immigrant families and warehousing children in pens, like so much livestock.

"Look, Trump has given us anti-abortion federal justices! He has defended our [perceived] right as employers to deny our employees contraceptives, and our [perceived] right to deny services to same-sex couples, and he even champions our [perceived] right to have random strangers wish us a Merry Christmas instead of non-specific Happy Holidays! We admit that he's not a paragon of Christian virtue himself, but surely God is using him to promote Christianity. So who are we to stand in Trump's way, if he is the instrument of God's holy will?"

[Mark McDonnell]

Thanks for answering my question, Julie. That all sounds both utterly insane and yet completely feasible. Thank god I'm an atheist.

[Jim Moonan]

x
Julie: They don't understand that many nominally "pro-Israel" Christians actually think that the Biblical phrase "the people of Israel" applies mostly to themselves. Christians tend to see themselves rising from the dead in Ezekiel's "dry bones" vision, and themselves in the jubilant crowds in the New Jerusalem of the last book of the Christian Bible. They see themselves in Jacob--later renamed Israel--who managed to transfer both the birthright and blessing of Abraham and Isaac from his unworthy elder brother to himself. They feel entitled to all of the benefits of God's Biblical covenants, with few of the responsibilities. (Sts. Paul and Peter managed to get Christians off the hook for those unpleasant circumcision and dietary requirements, and even the Ten Commandments seem a lot more negotiable when you can just confess and be totally forgiven. Which is why so many conservative Christian politicians in America who cloak their homophobic policies in the mantle of "defense of marriage" have been so demonstrably bad at honoring their own marriage vows.)

The confusion of some Jews about simultaneously pro-Israel and anti-Semitic American politicians is similar to the confusion of American Christians about whether it's possible for someone to support "family values" and "the family as the basic unit of society" while simultaneously breaking up immigrant families and warehousing children in pens, like so much livestock.

"Look, Trump has given us anti-abortion federal justices! He has defended our [perceived] right as employers to deny our employees contraceptives, and our [perceived] right to deny services to same-sex couples, and he even champions our [perceived] right to have random strangers wish us a Merry Christmas instead of non-specific Happy Holidays! We admit that he's not a paragon of Christian virtue himself, but surely God is using him to promote Christianity. So who are we to stand in Trump's way, if he is the instrument of God's holy will?"


Julie, if you could put this whole passage into a pithy rallying cry we might have our message for defeating in 2020 what we had thought to be just a basket of deplorables but has turned out to be a pit of snakes (just sticking to the biblical language).

I never understood how HRC's depiction of the Trump supporters as a basket of deplorables could have been her fatal mistake. It was an understatement. (Her big mistake was in her campaign strategy). And to think of all the egregious things Trump has said and done during his campaign and presidency that have confirmed his (and their) venomous intentions yet doesn't poison the pit they lie in.
x
x

[James Brancheau]

Hey Gregory~ I don't know why we are tiptoeing around the deplorables thing. It was tough, honest and direct. If anything, Hillary needed more of that, not less. Especially with the pig who occupies the white house now who says whatever to keep his base ginned up. Bibles and guns didn't trip Obama up. Trump's an idiot. Slap him around more and then see what comes out of his mouth.

[John Isbell]

I don't know. I still think the deplorables line did little to motivate Clinton supporters to get out and vote, and did quite a bit to motivate the Trump base. It was also kind of coy - it sounded to me like they'd tested it in a room full of Clinton staffers, who all thought it was cool. Not in the wider American marketplace. But then, her whole campaign made that impression on me.
She was, of course, robbed. I think a missed opportunity was when Trump crept up behind her as she spoke in that debate. She should have smacked him hard. He's a bully and a predator, and a coward, to put it succinctly, and that was a golden opportunity to crush him IMO. It's very tough being a woman candidate in the US though. And hindsight is 20/20.

Cheers,
John