NYT columnist, National Review film critic, author of The Decadent Society (2020) and The Deep Places (2021), newsletter: https://t.co/WBFQHVHblS
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Dec 19, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
On the implications of the Vatican document on blessings for same-sex couples, a brief thread. 1/X
In the pontificate's 1st stage I worried about Francis pushing the church over a "precipice" w/attempts at doctrinal change. But in the 2nd stage, after the family synods, there was a retreat to a strategy of ambiguous liberalization that avoided sharp doctrinal confrontation.
Excellent @mattyglesias though naturally I don't think it goes quite far enough: slowboring.com/p/why-are-youn…
To pick up the argument I made here, it's not just a cultural accident that current-era progressivism tends toward a catastrophizing, depressive mood; some of that unhappiness was baked in by the triumph of social liberalism that preceded the current era: nytimes.com/2023/02/18/opi…
Michael Gerson, RIP. A good man and a beautiful writer whose support for PEPFAR contributed to some of the most actually-effective altruism ever carried out by the US government. Here he is writing on his cancer, ten years ago: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2013/…
Gerson on sending your kids to college (I can attest that contemplating sending one to middle school is hard enough): washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/…
Nov 13, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
No need to choose a single scapegoat, Republicans can have simultaneous problems (a polycrisis?) with: 1) Trump's toxicity 2) base's preference for unelectable candidates 3) unpopularity of full pro-life position post-Dobbs 4) lack of middle-friendly economic agenda
The impact of each then varies by region/candidates -- e.g. economic disconnect maybe looms larger in Fetterman-Oz -
- abortion in MI/WI where pre-Roe laws are on books, Trump wherever stop-the-steal candidates are running, etc.
Nov 10, 2022 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
With so much focus on Trump, a short thread on other explainers for GOP underperformance. First, here's @SohrabAhmari in our pages arguing that the GOP still doesn't have a "worker's agenda" to fit its working-class base: nytimes.com/2022/11/10/opi…
I'm more skeptical than Sohrab that Republicans can hope to gain much ground with the post-grad precariat, but he's broadly right about the problem, and crucially even though inflation helped the GOP it also creates problems for would-be populists by making deficits matter again.
Nov 9, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
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Nov 2, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
My Wednesday column: How the Right Became the Left and the Left Became the Right: nytimes.com/2022/11/02/opi…
An acknowledgment/caveat: Obviously anti-institutionalism and the paranoid style existed on the right before Trump, and intense pro-institutionalism among progressives is not a novelty either.
Oct 26, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
This is a good little essay by @moveincircles whose working definition of "post-liberal" is instructively different from my own: reactionaryfeminist.substack.com/p/blasphemy-is…
If a "post-liberal" order is one in which ultimate questions are openly contested and factions compete to infuse the West's political system with spiritual ideas, then we are definitely post-liberal. But ...
Oct 16, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Good to see every new playoff evolution predictably making baseball worse:
Fundamentally the key point of divergence is here - one imagines a Western world responding to nuclear use with a mix of outrage and strategic sangfroid, the other imagines panic-from-below scrambling the ability of statesmen to manage the crisis:
Sep 26, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Relevant to NatCon debates, a predictably interesting review of Conservatism: A Rediscovery by @SWGoldman: isi.org/modern-age/con…
I think one possible rejoinder to this criticism is that the Founding-era conservatism @yhazony admires was sustained by the semi-political institutions of the Protestant semi-establishment, whose influence tends to be underrated in these genealogical discussions:
Sep 26, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Pope Francis, no less than certain secular governments, has made no effort to address anxieties of an important part of his flock, instead has vilified them, so instead of being an institutional brake on radicalization his Vatican been an accelerant.
I wrote about this dynamic in To Change the Church, the analysis still applies:
Sep 16, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This was always the obvious point of the stunt, not to show that NE liberals would mistreat migrants but to provoke a huge mobilization - National Guard! - and imply a contrast w/a liberal WH failing to help border communities dealing w/far larger influx.
And yes, if the stunt involved lying to/tricking the migrants (as alleged) it was an awful thing to do, regardless of the point it was trying to make.
Sep 12, 2022 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
A please-no-one take on some of the controversy around this piece: It's totally possible for a self-defeating sickness culture to layer itself atop chronic illnesses without the illnesses themselves being psychogenic: commonsense.news/p/hurts-so-good
The cultural politics of chronic illness in the Covid era are frustrating in part because very-online life exacerbates some of the sickness-culture tendencies that make people skeptical of chronic sufferers - even as the hard evidence for persistent infection gets stronger.
Sep 4, 2022 • 22 tweets • 5 min read
My Sunday column: Does Joe Biden Believe We're in a Crisis of Democracy?: nytimes.com/2022/09/03/opi…
Lots of interesting rejoinders out there, let's take on a couple.
Aug 31, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
My Wednesday column: On "House of the Dragon" and "The Rings of Power" and the Age of Blockbuster TV: nytimes.com/2022/08/31/opi…
From today's column, my take on what Tolkien and Martin have in common ...
Aug 12, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The dystopia is already here, it's just unevenly distributed: apnews.com/article/covid-…
Canada's most famous living novelist: Writes dystopian novels set in a fever-dream version of the United States.
Actual-existing liberal Canada:
Aug 11, 2022 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Essentially you can see the current Republican policy vacuum as a consequence of Trump moving the GOP to the center by abjuring Ryanism, but without establishing anything all that specific as the actual form that center-right policy should take:
So there's a faction in the party that wants to cut modest deals with Democrats - which is how you got all the small-ball bipartisanship of the last two years. There's a faction that wants to do something on family policy. There's an anti-trust faction. Etc.
Aug 11, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The public-health-expert-on-regional-NPR interview discussed by @jbarro here has to be read to be believed. joshbarro.com/p/how-not-to-t…
This answer alone is instantly immortal:
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