Alan Jacobs

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“640”] Louis Lozowick[/caption]

From Ed Yong’s newsletter:

After the last newsletter, one reader wrote in asking me to stop linking to political pieces. He felt it "inappropriate" and said that he comes here to escape from politics. To people who share that view, some suggestions: Recognise how privileged it is to be able to "escape from politics". Be grateful that it isn't constantly in your face, and a matter of life and death. And consider scrolling to the bottom of this email, and click on the magic blue letters that say "Unsubscribe"; there lies your escape, because after the events of this week, and this year in general, the volume of political content in this newsletter will only be going up, not down.

I see your point, Ed. Unsubscribe it is.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500”] Frederick Ardley[/caption]

I almost never look at the replies to my public Twitter account. I only need to hear so many times that I’m a stupid reactionary, or, well — the things you hear when your surname is “Jacobs.” And I have never, not once in my nearly ten years on Twitter, had a really productive debate there with someone I disagree with. So I use that account almost wholly for posting links, without ever visiting Twitter to do so (thanks to the sharing functions in Mac OS and iOS).

Also, I often use the SelfControl app (image above) to prevent myself from accessing twitter.com.

So if you’d like to converse with me about anything, please send me an email. And if you don’t know what my email address is, Google is your friend.

Donald Trump spends eighteen months stoking the fires of racial and ethnic resentment and now says that it is time to bind up the nation’s wounds. Meanwhile, people who two weeks ago denounced Trump as a villainous cynic for even suggesting that the election could possibly be rigged are declaring that the election was rigged.

The reversals are giving me whiplash.

I can’t avoid the conclusion that if there’s one thing almost all Americans share, it’s this: their ethical and intellectual standards are, collectively, a wholly owned subsidiary of their political loyalties.

As the Quaker Amy Fowler says in High Noon: “There’s got to be some better way for people to live.”

This long and characteristically thoughtful post by Alastair Roberts — you should read it all, it covers so many important issues, some of which I hope to return to later — says of my Harper’s essay on Christian intellectuals, “Reading Jacobs’s … essay, I was struck by a curious absence at the heart of his analysis: the barely explored role of mainline churches in the developments he discusses.”

That “absence” was intentional — perhaps unwise, but intentional. Early in the essay I write,

If we wish to know why this species became extinct, the short answer is that the Christian intellectual was the product of World War II, and when that war was over, the epiphenomena it had generated simply faded away. But there is also a longer and more complex answer.

This answer will necessarily connect itself to the broader issue of the declining place of Christianity in American life — a subject of evergreen interest, it would seem, especially among Christians. In recent years we have seen Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, Joseph Bottum’s An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America, and George Marsden’s The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief.

All of those books consider in great detail the question Roberts raises. And it is because they deal with the question so thoroughly that I felt feee to explore the narrower matter of the American Christian intellectual, who may have been associated with several different traditions but did not feel obliged to speak specifically for any of them. As I’ve said several times before, Harper’s gave me 6000 words. I had to exclude many, many issues that were relevant to my topic.

Annie Karni in Politico:

But in general, Bill Clinton’s viewpoint of fighting for the working class white voters was often dismissed with a hand wave by senior members of the team as a personal vendetta to win back the voters who elected him, from a talented but aging politician who simply refused to accept the new Democratic map. At a meeting ahead of the convention at which aides presented to both Clintons the “Stronger Together” framework for the general election, senior strategist Joel Benenson told the former president bluntly that the voters from West Virginia were never coming back to his party.

There are many things, good and bad, one might say about Bill Clinton, but the first thing should always be this: He is the smartest politician of our era — the most gifted one of my lifetime, so far, and the race isn’t even close. And the people running Hillary’s campaign thought they were so much smarter than him that they could dismiss his arguments “with a hand wave.”

It’s always hubris, isn’t it? The story of disasters like the Hillary Clinton campaign is always hubris. And the people at the heart of the story never know. That’s why the title of the article is “Clinton aides blame loss on everything but themselves.” Well of course they do.

The Bush/Clinton era in American political history is definitively over.

Reaganism is over.

It is easier to shame people out of admitting how they’ll vote than to shame them out of voting how they want to.

Clinton had no clear vision, no clear program, nothing positive to offer except a claim to competence — and yet the evidence suggested that she isn’t very competent.

If in the next four years a younger politician can take up the mantle of Bernie Sanders, we’ll have a barn-burner of an election in 2020.

I am not at all confident that Trump will want more than four years of being President, no matter how well or badly his term goes.

Nothing succeeds like success, so anyone hoping that the GOP leadership will act to restrain Trump is whistling past the graveyard. They’ll fall in line.

But I also suspect that Trump is too lazy and disorganized to bring about major change.

Therefore the changes that do come will surely be generated by the GOP leadership in Congress, not by the executive branch.

In the next four years we’ll find out just how powerful the Deep State really is.

There’s a lot of talk about Trump dominating the evangelical vote, but most of the enthusiasm for him came from people who call themselves evangelicals but don’t go to church. Church-going evangelicals stayed home in large numbers. However: people who call themselves evangelicals but don’t go to church are the future of American evangelicalism.

To people saying this election is “the last stand of white supremacy”: if y’all don’t get your act together, it may well be the third-from-the-last stand. A great many of those Trump voters are still going to be voting in 2028, and if they’re producing more children than you are….

If the political and media establishments were merely out of touch with much of the country, that would be one thing. But it's worse than that. They presume to know, they presume to judge, and most astonishingly, they presume that this will work out at the voting booth.

— Damon Linker is right. Right now my friends on the left are angry, bitter, disbelieving, and I don't blame them. I'm shocked and awed myself, and believe the we have just elected the least qualified person ever put forth by a leading American political party.

But after a few days, or weeks, I hope self-reflection will kick in, and my friends on the left will get beyond simplistic denunciations — they hate women, they’re racists — and start to own some of their own responsibility, not just for Trump, but for a government that’s now entirely run by the GOP. They mocked people they didn’t have to mock; they supported policies that ran roughshod over people’s most deeply held beliefs; many of them treated everyone who disagreed with them with undisguised contempt. And they did all this because they felt that they stood for #Reason and #Data and #History — they were “on the right side of history” — they thought hashtags and cheap slogans were tools sufficient for the job of transforming America. Their smugness was titanic.

This morning my internet friend Kathleen Fitzpatrick, who is a supremely decent person, remembers how troubled she was by George Bush’s election in 2004 — and, interestingly, shared that with her students, who I suppose all (all?) shared her politics — and reflects on how different this election feels: “In 2004, I felt that I might have a lot that I could teach. Today, I cannot help but feel like I have much, much more to learn.” If the majority of the people on the left take this attitude, then there will be a good chance for the renewal of their hopes, and for them to win over politically complicated people like me … should they want to.

And we are about to commence the season of recriminations. The election won’t end anything except a certain form of speculation; all the hatreds will simply find new points of focus. It’s pointless to talk about the election being “over.” Weren’t you listening to Rust Cohle? “Nothing’s ever fulfilled, not until the very end. And closure - no, no no, nothing is ever over.”