A Double-dose of Thymos!

All that, plus he thinks that it was Libya, not Iraq, that was the greatest foreign-policy blunder of our time.

or actually maybe its the other way around, if the USA’s Weimar period is full of art connected to Neo-Nazi’s, then they shouldn’t get a totalitarian period next

I had a couple of classes with Chuck Kesler. Perhaps now I recognize some of the problems his class on Cicero had. This is probably too obscure, but what I would say is high among Cicero’s errors is a too glib rejection of communism (i.e. of Plato’s communism in the Republic). Cicero did not want to recognize that, while focusing on the Roman tradition was often helpful, that the philosopher stands utterly beyond any traditions. Many traditions can be useful, but they don’t ultimately bind either theorists or even the populance or the statesmen.

I am tempted to identify Kesler’s conservatism with Cicero’s failed conservatism. As the Roman Republic degrades, Cicero himself hastens it’s end by his own political radicalism and dictatorial acts. In the Republic’s final act, the conservatives (including Cicero) decided to put everything into Pompey’s hands. Pompey, for those not familiar with the history, was grotesquely not the right man for this. I wonder if American conservatives haven’t fallen into the same errors?

In New York, they think he’s a dishonest clown, and construction contractors absolutely loathe him. People I am one handshake away from were put out of business by his habit of refusing to pay.

I suppose this is not satire, alas.

Every republic eventually faces what might be called the Weimar problem. Has the national culture, popular and elite, deteriorated so much that the virtues necessary to sustain republican government are no longer viable? America is not there yet, though when 40% of children are born out of wedlock it is not too early to wonder. What about when Donald Trump is the Republican nominee for president? Many conservatives think that’s also sufficient reason to worry the end is near.

I understand the question, but the surer sign of comprehensive decline is not Trump’s success but the conservative candidates’ failure, one by one, all 16 of them.

If we are not in Weimar, Kesler says, we are close to it. But Kesler isn’t looking backward to the Kaiser. He’s looking forward … to Trump.

burritoboy 09.16.16 at 4:30 pm
“I had a couple of classes with Chuck Kesler. Perhaps now I recognize some of the problems his class on Cicero had. ”

Considering that he starts with a litany of falsehoods and works down from there, I’d say that the problems his class on Cicero had was that the teacher was a 100% liar.

Holbo will like this:

“You can call me Mike Anton. My pen name, Nicholas Antongiavanni, is not meant to obscure my real identity. It is kind of a two-pronged joke. One is to make the name sound more like Niccolò Machiavelli, who is the inspiration for the book and who gives the architecture for the book and for all kinds of literary devices. Second, it is meant to conjure this imagined figure of authority on men’s fashion. I pictured Nicholas Antongiavanni as a very dashing boulevardier who you might think was qualified to give you clothing advice.”

@Zamfir
Good point. I didn’t really notice that (implicit) contradiction in the piece.

Also there isn’t such a command and control structure, from the reporting that I’ve read. The purpose of the “nuclear” football was to make sure that the Soviets knew we could launch a devastating strike in the time between our detection of their launch and the arrival of their missiles, meaning that POTUS had to have a mechanism for giving the emergency order at any time, from any place, without going through layers of protocol. So the President gets a secure line with missile command, authorizes his identity, and gives the order. The only control over POTUS’ orders would be if the person actually responsible for carrying out the launch refused to obey. (Which is why, as has been reported many places, when Nixon’s paranoia and alcohol abuse began escalating in the period leading to his resignation, his senior staff also started becoming paranoid about what they could do to prevent him launching a nuclear strike.) So I don’t know what the author thinks he’s talking about.

bjk 09.16.16 at 6:53 pm
“It’s not Kesler it’s Michael Anton, a student of Harry Jaffa. Apparently he’s a snazzy dresser and there’s a video on youtube about some of his favorite haberdashers.”

Sorry.

So there’s this: “The country will go on, but it will not be a constitutional republic. It will be a blue state on a national scale.”

In other words, as I understand it, the population will be healthier, better educated and more affluent.

Damn. With that looming on the horizon, it truly is time for violent resistance.

Conservatives saying they don’t like oligarchy are pretty much always risible.

Trump says one thing, then he says the opposite, he denies the facts, he lies — and it doesn’t matter. His supporters do not care what he says. They are supporting him because he’s their guy, and they hate Hillary. It’s the in-group phenomenon of “motivated social cognition”, the modern tribalism in which facts are secondary, dismissible. It was always active in politics on both sides of course, but the GOP has been basing their message on an increasing number of lies for a few decades now, and Trump has laid it open, and they don’t even care.

If Trump is elected, it will be very bad for the country because he is teaching kids that it is all right to lie.

“Trump is a very American character, a very New York character, the businessman who understands the world: the sophos who could bring efficiency, toughness” etc

Trump might want to bring these qualities to his own businesses first – he might be able to avoid yet another bankruptcy & yet more expensive capital from russian oligarchs.

Do these idiot Trump fanboys know anything at all about businessman other than what they see in hollywood movies ?

k’stones
Hi John, thanks for the link to the Kesler critique of Trump from the right

All one need do is read the last three paragraphs of the Kesler piece, with its quotes from the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, to realize that this is a sympathetic critique. The message of Kesler’s conclusion is that Trump’s basic instincts are quite good but he pays insufficient attention to the founding documents of the republic etc etc. (If this is a critique, it’d be interesting to see what an endorsement would look like.) Of course, there’s more than one way to read the Declaration — see the CT forum on Danielle Allen’s bk. — and not all of them wd find favor w the Claremont RevBks people.

Barry@24: “I’ve ceased to wonder at these people; I now feel that they sincerely wish for the destruction of the USA. If they and theirs can’t run it, then they want to destroy it.”

I think this goes overboard. What these people want is another Reagan. The candidates who copied Reagan’s rhetoric most closely were the ones who lost. When it came down to Cruz and Trump, these folks were for Cruz. Trump is the one left standing, so they’re putting the best face on it.

Even if they want to “destroy” the country, some Straussian political theorists in California, i.e. the subjects of Holbo’s OP, aren’t going to be able to.

What BruceJ says at #18 is correct. Trump does most of his banking with Deutsche Bank.

Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE) said it would fight a $14 billion demand from the U.S. Department of Justice to settle claims it missold mortgage-backed securities, a shock bill that raises questions about the future of Germany’s largest lender.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-deutsche-bank-mortgages-idUSKCN11L2VQ

Chip Daniels (#4), speaking as a former carnival ring man (Inland Empire Shows, Summer 1982, for three or four stops), I am appalled to be associated with Mister Trump.

I don’t think that it’s very surprising that a right-wing journalist in a right-wing magazine is trying to establish grounds for supporting the (nominally) right-wing candidate in a national election. Nor is it very surprising that such a journalist expresses ideas which are often dubious or even downright wrong — dishonesty in the service of power is the staple of right-wing journalism.

I confess that I felt sick after reading the “Flight 93” piece, not because of the metaphor, but because of the deep-seated ugliness of the author’s agenda. However, this ugliness is simply Republicanism, and it is merely an extrapolation of the Democratic Party’s current agenda (which is, basically, extreme Reaganism with a touch of corporate power and without any ideology to sustain it). So, one should be afraid that what seems now to be gibberish will, in twenty years, be the staple of Washington Post editorials.

Meanwhile, as far as I can make out, the article displays an understanding of what is going on in the Trump phenomenon which nobody on the Democratic side is capable of grasping, probably because all comprehension of the Trump phenomenon must be subsumed to the urgent need of electing the Democratic Party’s horrible candidate. (Incidentally, the basic argument of the “Flight 93” article — that a Hillary election would be disastrous because she will put us all in camps supervised by death panels and destroy the economy while murmuring spells over her strap-on — is very much the basic Democratic argument against electing Trump, reflected in a mildly distorting mirror.)

@33

Après moi le déluge

Well, if he wants to fly the Republican party into the ground, hey, go for it.

Danielle Allen’s book got a fairly positive review from the Claremont Review

Interesting. I guess I’ll look up the review at some point.

I thought the most interesting thing about the original article was that he never explained the Flight 93 thing, i.e. why the plane of America will crash if we don’t do something right now . Why mightn’t the crash come in 10 years? Or 20 years? Or maybe it’s crashed already, maybe it’s already too late!

I had thought the “crashing” thing had something to do with the routine litany of conservative complaints that he goes through – everything going to hell in a handbasket – but it turns out not to be so. In the new piece, in answering various criticisms that apparently do not include “I left my central thesis as an exercise for the reader,” the explanation turns out to be electoral:

If Hillary wins, there will still be a country, in the sense of a geographic territory with a people, a government, and various institutions. Things will mostly look the same, just as—outwardly—Rome changed little on the ascension of Augustus. It will not be tyranny or Caesarism—not yet. But it will represent, in my view, an irreversible triumph for the administrative state. Consider that no president has been denied reelection since 1992. If we can’t beat the Democrats now, what makes anyone think we could in 2020, when they will have all the advantages of incumbency plus four more years of demographic change in their favor? And if we can’t win in 2016 or 2020, what reason is there to hope for 2024? Will the electorate be more Republican? More conservative? Will constitutional norms be stronger?

The country will go on, but it will not be a constitutional republic. It will be a blue state on a national scale. Only one party will really matter. A Republican may win now and again—once in a generation, perhaps—but only a neutered one who has “updated” all his positions so as to be more in tune with the new electorate. I.e., who has done exactly what the Left has for years been concern-trolling us to do: move left and become more like them. Yet another irony: the “conservatives” who object to Trump as too liberal are working to guarantee that only a Republican far more liberal than Trump could ever win the presidency again.

Still and all, for many—potentially me included—life under perma-liberalism will be nice.

What I think this guy should have done was write a companion piece from the progressive point of view, with a different routine litany of ills of course, where the “Flight 93 Election” was not electing Trump, it was electing Bernie.

You know, if progressives couldn’t beat Hillary, this was their last chance, now they face life under perma-neoliberalism!