Hero worship and politics: persons vs. principles

The New Neo Posted on by

After writing about NeverTrumper Max Boot’s motives yesterday, I decided I have more to say.

And it’s not just about Boot.

On that thread yesterday, commenter “Ann” offered a quote from a piece Boot wrote back in May of 2016. I don’t recall having seen the essay at the time it was written, but it’s an illuminating look at what Boot was thinking at the time, and why.

My guess is that his reasons were similar to those of a lot of his fellow NeverTrumpers. So let’s take a look:

My allegiance to the GOP was cemented during the 1980s, when I was in high school and college and Ronald Reagan was in the White House. For me, Reagan was what John F. Kennedy had been to an earlier generation: an inspirational figure who shaped my worldview. Reagan had his faults, like JFK, but he was optimistic and gentlemanly. He was pro-free trade and pro-immigration. He believed in limited government at home and American leadership abroad.

That’s what I believed in too — and that’s what I thought the Republican Party stood for. That’s why, despite my disagreements with social conservatives, I worked as a foreign policy advisor to John McCain in 2008, Mitt Romney in 2012 and Marco Rubio this year. All of those candidates, different as they were, recognizably represented Reagan Republicanism.

I don’t know about that; Reagan was certainly more conservative than McCain or Romney, and somewhat more conservative than Rubio, on most issues. I’m not even sure that I’d call McCain “gentlemanly” at all, either. But Romney was nothing if not gentlemanly, and all three were 1000% more “gentlemanly” than Trump is.

Just about everyone in the GOP is more “gentlemanly” than Trump is.

It was that word gentlemanly that practically leapt out at me when I saw it in Boot’s essay. I think the word is very telling—that, and his idea of Reagan as being an “inspirational figure.” Those two points made me suddenly see something even more clearly than before.

There’s a saying that you can’t reason someone out of a position that they weren’t reasoned into in the first place. I think what’s going on with Boot (and perhaps most other NeverTrumpers) is that he was initially inspired to become a Republican by hero worship of an inspirational figure and a gentleman, not by reason. The decision was emotional and the reasons were embedded in perception of the admirable personality of the emulated person.

Of course, Democrats are hardly gentlemanly. But Boot doesn’t really talk about that; apparently he doesn’t expect them to be, so it’s okay.

One conservative principle that Boot does mention being in favor of is “limited government,” but he is opposed to “social conservation” (although he doesn’t define that, and it can mean different things to different people). Boot is for the principles of “free trade” and “immigration,” and seems to think Reagan was as well.

So, if Boot and his fellow NeverTrumpers are looking for a gentleman for free trade and immigration—and if Boot defines the latter as including illegal immigration—then of course he will detest Trump with a white-hot passion.

But when I did a bit of research just now on Reagan’s attitude towards free trade, I mostly found short articles saying absolutely, he was for it. But then I found this, which was extremely interesting. It refers to a speech that Donald Trump made in July of 2016:

Part of his approach as president, [Trump] said, would be to “use every lawful presidential power” to remedy trade disputes.

“President Reagan deployed similar trade measures when motorcycle and semiconductor imports threatened U.S. industry,” Trump said. “I remember. His tariff on Japanese motorcycles was 45 percent, and his tariff to shield America’s semiconductor industry was 100 percent, and that had a big impact, folks. A big impact.”

Reagan did impose those penalties on overseas motorcycle and semiconductor producers, though there is some question about whether the motorcycle and semiconductor tariffs were effective. (Trump’s campaign didn’t respond to an inquiry, but his prepared remarks included footnotes.)

However, Reagan’s record includes both free-trade and protectionist stands — a nuanced profile that suggests that Trump’s portrayal was partially accurate, but somewhat incomplete.

In a 1985 speech to business leaders, Reagan said that “our trade policy rests firmly on the foundation of free and open markets — free trade. I, like you, recognize the inescapable conclusion that all of history has taught: The freer the flow of world trade, the stronger the tides for human progress and peace among nations.”

However, read in its entirety, Reagan’s speech articulates a distinct sense of balance about the merits and drawbacks of free trade.

“I believe that if trade is not fair for all, then trade is free in name only,” he said. “I will not stand by and watch American businesses fail because of unfair trading practices abroad. I will not stand by and watch American workers lose their jobs because other nations do not play by the rules.”

While Reagan said he would reject proposals by some in Congress and the private sector that were “purely protectionist in nature,” and while he reiterated that “our commitment to free trade is undiminished,” he added this: “Let no one mistake our resolve to oppose any and all unfair trading practices. It is wrong for the American worker and American businessman to continue to bear the burden imposed by those who abuse the world trading system.”

True to his words, Reagan’s record in office was equally mixed.

That’s certainly interesting. Trump apparently did his homework on Reagan.

In Boot’s 2016 piece he adds the following, after saying that Hillary Clinton would be a lot better than Trump:

My hope is that [Trump] will lose by a landslide, and the Republican Party will come to its senses, rejecting both his ugly, nativist populism and the extreme, holier-than-thou conservatism represented by Ted Cruz.

Another telling remark, because Boot displays almost as great an antipathy to Ted Cruz as to Trump, although for entirely differently reasons: Cruz is a conservative, but a “holier-than-thou” one. Is Boot objecting to the fact that Cruz is religious? Hard to say. But whatever makes Boot hate the conservative Cruz, it seems to again have much more to do with Cruz’s personality than with his policies.

I think that someone like Boot was initially attracted, not to conservatism’s principles, but to particular conservative figures he admired as people and as gentlemen who played by a rulebook that Boot has in his head. The rest was secondary to Boot, very secondary. It’s an odd approach to politics, by my way of thinking. I care far less about personalities than principles, and always have, whether I was a liberal or a conservative. In fact, I’ve not found any political figures in my lifetime “inspiring” with the sole exception of Winston Churchill, and by the time I heard of him he was on his last legs.

But apparently there are plenty of people on both sides who respond more to personalities than anything else. That was certainly apparent during the Obama era (remember David Brooks, who seems to have decided on the basis of Obama’s prefectly creased pantleg that he would become president). And it’s been extremely apparent with Trump’s candidacy and presidency. I’m always a bit surprised to discover pundits like Boot among that group, but I shouldn’t be at all surprised. Not at all. Emotion guides politics for a lot of people.

Max Boot joins George Will in saying that Democrats must win in order to purify the GOP, or something like that

The New Neo Posted on by

And in no uncertain terms:

Personally, I’ve thrown up my hands in despair at the debased state of the GOP. I don’t want to be identified with the party of the child-snatchers. ..

…a vote for the GOP in November is also a vote for egregious obstruction of justice, rampant conflicts of interest, the demonization of minorities, the debasement of political discourse, the alienation of America’s allies, the end of free trade and the appeasement of dictators.

That is why I join Will and other principled conservatives, both current and former Republicans, in rooting for a Democratic takeover of both houses in November. Like postwar Germany and Japan, the Republican Party must be destroyed before it can be rebuilt.

The GOP must be de-Nazified and de-Axisfied, get it? Because of course what’s happening now in the US with Republicans is exactly like that, and the Democrats are kind of like the Allies.

I bow to no one in my discussion of Trump’s flaws, but I recognize his strengths—particularly since taking office. I have seen no obstruction of justice, egregious or otherwise. Rampant conflicts of interest are part and parcel of Democrats, more so even than Republicans, and certainly part of politics in general. Republicans are not demonizing minorities—if Boot were to pay attention to what is actually being said for the most part rather than what his MSM colleagues say is being said. As for allies being alienated—well, it depends on the allies (Eastern Europe seems rather happy). And allies would disagree with the policies of any robust GOP, even if Will and Boot designed that policy. I’m not too happy with the trade situation, but I’m willing to see what happens, and I certainly don’t put “free trade” on a pedestal either. As for “appeasement of dictators”—that’s what I saw with Obama, not Trump. In fact, the Democrats Boot wishes to put in power don’t just appease dictators, they revere and wish to emulate them.

What is it with these guys, Boot and Will and their ilk? Their revulsion to Trump is so great that they have joined forces with people they have worked against their entire lives—Democrats, liberals, and particularly the left, which, if Boot has been paying any attention lately, has taken over the Democratic Party.

I understand Trump-revulsion—particularly in people who consider themselves to be elite, who are prone to virtue-signaling, who work in an otherwise-liberal environment, who care a lot about style and being intellectuals, and who are susceptible to emotional appeals about children in “cages” (temporarily, and also under Obama, by the way). But I fail to understand this idea that empowering the Democrats is a great way to deal with it.

I think people like Boot and Will feel trapped between two awful alternatives. It’s what’s called an avoidance-avoidance conflict in the psych biz. Their Trump-avoidant gradient seems to be so steep that they cannot countenance anything to do with him, and they see no other alternative than supporting Democrats.

Boot and Will must turn on their former allies who do not share their revulsion. If Trump is evil, therefore anyone who supports him is evil, therefore those who oppose him (Democrats) must be friends: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

[NOTE: Here’s my previous piece on George Will and his similar declarations.]

[NOTE II: And I wrote more on the topic of Boot and other Never Trumpers today, July 7: Hero worship and politics, persons vs. principles.]

ICE and DNA testing

The New Neo Posted on by

There are reports that the Trump administration is using DNA testing to reunite separated families at the border. According to Trump’s critics:

“This is a further demonstration of administration’s incompetence and admission of guilt. This further drives home the point we’ve been saying: They never registered parents and children properly,” RAICES communications director Jennifer K. Falcon said.

Falcon also said it’s not possible the migrant children — some as young as two months old — are giving their consent to DNA testing.

The organization said they’d never heard of conducting DNA tests to reunite families before and they don’t support the move.

They may never have heard of it, but perhaps they’ve heard of Google? Because it’s not that difficult to find articles about it that pre-date Trump, such as this one from 2014:

The right to family reunification has been an integral part of many countries’ immigration policies, and is derived from the protection of the family as laid down in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights…However, many countries are enforcing more restrictive family reunification policies, imposing stricter requirements on those applying to enter the country. Even if applicants possess the documents required to prove their identities, the information is often rejected by immigration authorities, as they question their authenticity.

In this context, many countries resort to parental testing. Applicants are required to provide official documentation to prove their identities, such as birth and marriage certificates and passports. Providing such information is often difficult, especially in countries that do not use official documents to establish identity, or where those documents have been lost or destroyed due to politically unstable situations. But even if applicants possess the required documents, immigration authorities sometimes reject the information as they question their authenticity.

In the 1990s, some host countries began to use DNA analysis to resolve cases in which they considered the information presented on family relationships to be incomplete or unsatisfactory. Today, at least 20 countries around the world, including 16 European countries, have incorporated parental testing into decision-making on family reunification in immigration cases: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Malta, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, the UK, and the USA.

USA? Under Obama? Now, fancy that.

Now, it’s not the same circumstances as the current ones with illegal immigrants at the border. The article is mostly describing the sort of family reunification that involves legal immigrants already here, who have applied to bring over other family. However, the idea is similar—which is that they must prove these people are actually family. And as the family of legal immigrants, one would think their rights would and should be greater than those of illegal immigrants, not less. And yet they are still subject to DNA testing in circumstances in which the documentation is not sufficient.

More here, this time about Germany:

However, German immigration offices will not necessarily accept these pieces of evidence for an existing family relation, and even in cases where legal documents are provided, it is a common administrative practice to ask the applicants for a DNA kinship report. There has been press coverage of a case where more than ten pieces of evidence were provided to the immigration authorities, but not accepted. Moreover, the German Federal Foreign Office has published a list of over 40 countries whose documents are not acknowledged by German embassies at all, because they assume that their system of identity registration lacks systematic and sound procedures. Applicants from these countries will find it extremely difficult to prove a family relationship by means of official documents or alternative pieces of evidence. To obtain permission to reunite with family members, they generally have to resort to DNA testing. Even German citizens may be asked to provide DNA evidence for their biological relation if they apply for family reunification with a foreign spouse and children from one of these blacklisted countries.

The use of DNA testing is considered to be an appropriate measure to prevent fraudulent uses of family reunification.1

The article goes on to say it’s frequently used in Germany, not seldom used.

Here’s an article that focuses more on the US. It was published in February of 2016, so it’s also pre-Trump.

DNA testing policy was officially implemented [in the US] on July 14, 2000, through an administrative memorandum written by Michael D. Cronin, then Executive Associate Commissioner of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). The goal of the memorandum was to “provide guidance” to the USCIS field offices about using DNA testing for parentage verification within the family reunification process.

The policy has several key facets. It states that testing is voluntary in that the immigration official may only suggest, not require, DNA testing. The policy also cautions immigration officers that DNA testing should only be used when necessary. Per the policy, DNA testing must be paid for by the petitioners…Once the immigration official in charge of the case receives the test results, he or she weighs the test results in the context of other evidence and makes a decision.

Under the current policy, DNA testing essentially functions as the gold standard to validate the authenticity of the claimed relationship in cases where documents cannot validate it.

If it was fine then; why not now? Trump.

Here’s another article about what they do in Europe (it’s from December 2016), describing a situation more analogous to the one in the US that we’re talking about today: children who come with a purported relative who may not be a relative. It mentions that if the children are kept with that adult, it can entail serious risk because that person can be a smuggler or abusing the child:

According to the Protocol on unaccompanied children, DNA testing must be performed on children at risk. In practice, however, DNA tests are only carried out at sea-port border points – Algeciras, Tarifa, Motril and Malaga, all of which are in the Andalusian Autonomous Community – and in the Autonomous Cities of Ceuta and Melilla. Tests are not used for children arriving at the airport.

Establishing the family links between the child and the accompanying adult is often difficult given the lack of documentation or spelling mistakes when registering. The same family name is often spelled differently on the documents issued to the persons, which sometimes hampers proving a family connection.

DNA tests, as used in some parts of Spain and in some cases in Slovakia, are not a possibility available to all Member States given their high cost.

So, cost seems to often be a limiting factor.

It’s also the case that DNA doesn’t help in a family in which adoption has purportedly taken place, or can cause problems when there has been infidelity on the part of the mother that led to the conception of the child.

[NOTE: Here’s a piece about abuse of the asylum system in the US.]

Entering the Thai cave: inherently risky

The New Neo Posted on by

This is one of the better articles I’ve seen describing the inherent risks of the cave rescue in Thailand.

And if you (like me) wonder why the coach and the boys went into the caves under these conditions, you’re not alone:

The Tham Luang Nang Non caves are known locally as off-limits, a dangerous place where parents warn their children not to go into, especially during monsoon season.

“I was very worried about what would happen to them. The caves are a dark and scary place. I wouldn’t dare to ever go in there,” says 14-year-old Kittichoke Konkaew, whose close friend, Nuttawut Takumsong, is among the 12 young teammates and their coach who inexplicably defied local warnings and wandered deep into the cave.

Reports are that it was some sort of initiation that the group cooked up, a kind of dare gone bad:

The 12 Thai footballers who have been found alive deep in a cave may have ventured in as part of an initiation, one of the divers who helped locate them has said.

The boys, aged 11 – 16, reportedly went into the Luang Nang Non Cave with their 25-year-old coach in an effort to write their names on the walls.

They were “wading in and trying to go to the end of the tunnel, sort of like an initiation for local young boys to… write your name on the wall and make it back,” Ben Reymenants told Sky News.

This makes a certain amount of sense as an explanation. Kids—and especially boys of that age, but kids in general—like to dare each other and do risky things. In a group, individuals will often take risks they wouldn’t have taken had they been alone. They egg each other on, and no one wants to appear to be a fraidy-cat in front of the others.

I did some risky things as a child in a group, after being dared, things I would never ever have done had I been by myself. Fortunately, none of those things resulted in anything other than a scary experience and an upsetting memory.

Rescuer dies in attempt to free Thai soccer team trapped in cave

The New Neo Posted on by

This is very bad news:

A former Thai Navy SEAL volunteering in the Tham Luang rescue has drowned in the cave after falling unconscious during his return dive from the trapped boys.

SEAL commander Arpakorn Yookongkaew told a news conference today that the rescuer was working in a volunteer capacity and died during an overnight mission in which he was moving oxygen canisters…

The death underlines the intense risks of the mission to rescue 12 boys and their soccer coach who have been trapped since June 23.

“Intense risks,” indeed. I have been disturbed and worried about the chances for rescue ever since I first heard the news about the trapped boys and an explanation of the physical realities of the situation. I deeply hope they are rescued and that not a single one of the other heroes (which I think is the proper word: heroes) trying to assist them has any sort of mishap.

We have become used to technology being able to conquer so many things and aid in so many situations. But it has its limits. Let’s hope those limits are not reached in this case:

So far, more than 130 million litres of water has been pumped out of the cave at a rate of 180,000 litres an hour, but rescuers are still struggling to plug every water source that flows into the cave and water levels beyond the T-junction where the boys are trapped has been agonisingly slow to drop.

Mr Narongsak told reporters overnight that it was still too dangerous to try and shepherd the boys out underwater…

Above ground, hundreds of infantry men and a number of volunteer “bird nesters” — men who scale mountains in search of the valuable and edible swallows nests that sell for hundreds of dollars — continued to hunt for alternative “chimneys” into the cave and a safer exit route for the boys.

New equipment is also expected to arrive today that can measure the thickness in the cave walls in the hope of finding a point that might be thin enough to drill through.

Perhaps that might be a better bet.

How SCOTUS became dangerous

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an excellent article on the history of the Supreme Court, written by Roger Kimball. Highly recommended.

An excerpt:

Responding to [Alexander] Hamilton [who felt the Supreme Court would be the “least dangerous” branch of government], the anti-federalist writer “Brutus” warned that the Constitution did not provide an effective mechanism for reining in judicial arrogance:

There is no power above them, to control any of their decisions. There is no authority that can remove them, and they cannot be controlled by the laws of the legislature. In short, they are independent of the people, of the legislature, and of every power under heaven. Men placed in this situation will generally soon feel themselves independent of heaven itself.

The place allocated to the judiciary by the Founders sought to circumvent the evils that “Brutus” envisioned. And had the judiciary kept within those bounds, all might have proceeded as the Founders intended. But we have had some 250 years of hermeneutical ingenuity expended on twisting the Constitution to serve partisan ends. The co-optation and perversion of the judiciary into a policymaking organ furthering a leftist agenda has been part of that process.

I will add that of course an institution will try to take on more power over time. The Supreme Court is certainly no exception. However, the justices of the Court are not actually completely independent of the executive or of the legislature, at least in theory—that is, prior to their taking office. After all, the executive appoints them and the Senate has to approve them. But after that, they are home free—unless they meet the standard for impeachment, which is a very high bar indeed.

Justice Kennedy, whose imminent retirement has sparked a lot of the current brouhaha about SCOTUS appointments, was one of the most powerful people in the US for many years, because he was the swing vote on the Court. And yet he was unelected. It was not a good situation, but that was the reality.

On ending Roe v. Wade

The New Neo Posted on by

Megan McArdle is pro-life, but she believes that Roe v. Wade rests on such shaky legal grounds that it needs to be reversed and the decision left to the states. What’s more, she does not think that would constitute a disaster; she thinks it would finally spark a more meaningful discussion of the issue and more fine-tuned laws than under Roe. It’s worth reading the whole thing.

I wish I could be as optimistic as McArdle. I perceive each side in the abortion argument to have large elements that are so intense they brook no compromise and no allowances for the opposite side. The two sides can be summarized as abortion is always murder and abortion is a basic right that should be allowed at any time on demand.

Just as an example, WaPo columnist Jen Rubin (who seems to hold the latter view) recently got a lot of traction for some remarks about Trump press secretary Sarah Sanders needing a “life sentence” of being made uncomfortable. But that publicity actually obscured a statement she voiced concurrently about the right to abortion.

Here’s the quote, in which Rubin is referring to Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and stating what should happen if these two Republican female senators vote to approve Trump’s (as-yet-unnamed) pick for SCOTUS [emphasis mine]:

“The message to those two women by Democrats by pro-choice women in those two states — by the entire states of Maine and Alaska — has to be simple. You vote for this, Ms. Collins, Ms. Murkowski, you have voted to criminalize abortion — this is on you. And we’re not going to accept these nonsense excuses that, ‘Well, because he said he was in favor of precedent, this won’t count, you can vote for him.’ No! It has to be all-out, on the ground in those states.”

She then suggested that they may be “phony” in claiming to be “pro-choice” as she added: “Those women Have to be put under a glaring light so that they finally have to make a choice that actually does go against their party. Unless they were just phony pro-choice women all along — which is distinctly possible.”

Later in the show, after claiming that Sanders’s criticism of the press amounts to an “incitement to violence,” claiming that journalists’ “lives are on the line,” Rubin recommended that a million protesters should mobilize to intimidate Sanders as well as Senators Collins and Murkowski.

“Let’s get a million people to go to Maine or a million people to go to Alaska and start putting pressure on those Senators. So it’s perfectly civil to do that — no one is telling them to be violent protesters, but we’re not going to let these people go through life unscathed. Sarah Huckabee has no right to live a life of no fuss, no muss, after lying to the press — after inciting against the press. These people should be made uncomfortable, and I think that’s a life sentence frankly.”

“These people” seems to have included Republican senators Collins and Murkowski. The idea of Rubin (and others) is that there can be no turning back; no allowing states to decide. Even a Republican who would facilitate that process is so guilty, so beyond the pale, that that person should be harassed for life. She (and many others) does not believe an anti-Roe position is a legitimate position with which she happens to disagree, but rather that such a position is an absolute evil.

And of course many of those who believe abortion is murder would say the same of the opposition to their point of view. I see the clash of these two extreme groups as escalating the conflict in this country in the next few years, if a Roe challenge is successful. And I say this despite the fact that I think—as does McArdle—that the legal reasoning in Roe was abominable and that overturning it would be the correct legal result.

[NOTE: My own views on abortion can be found here.]

On the Democratic Party: what was Perez thinking?

The New Neo Posted on by

You’d think that even if he thought it, he wouldn’t say it.

I’m referring to the statement of DNC chair Tom Perez that socialist Ocasio-Cortez represents “the future” of the Democratic Party.

Now, it’s possible that Perez—who has tilted left for many years—is a closet socialist, and that was what sparked his remark. Hey, maybe the entire Democratic Party is composed of closet socialists. But my real question is, whether Perez (or the Party in general) believes in socialism or not, why would he think it a good idea to say so? Why let the cat out of the bag, as it were?

In other words, why would he think this a winning strategy? Surely he’s aware that Ocasio-Cortez’s win was in a primary in a district with an atypical demographic and an election with extremely low turnout, against a fellow Democrat with low popular appeal. Does he think the future of the Party is to run increasingly leftist radical candidates in safely true-blue enclaves of large liberal cities? That won’t be getting the Party very far.

Does Perez (the child of legal Dominican immigrants, a doctor and the daughter of a diplomat) believe that the Democrats’ encouragement of illegal immigration and then amnesty and eventual citizenship will change the makeup of the US so much that it will soon resemble Ocasio-Cortez’s district?

Does he think the only thing that matters is that candidates like Ocasio-Cortez are young and telegenic, and that’s enough?

Does he think the Party’s only path to victory is to energize younger, more radical voters to come to the polls?

Did he think hardly anyone on the other side would even pay attention to what he said?

In contrast to Perez, Alan Dershowitz begs to differ. Of course, Dershowitz is not the chair of the Party. In fact, he’s being shunned, a prelude perhaps to being drummed out (as Joe Lieberman was):

Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz said Tuesday he won’t let radicals like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders steal the spirit of the Democratic Party and doubled-down on his attack on fellow liberals who “shunned” him at Martha’s Vineyard.

“I won’t let the Democrats steal my party from me. I want to regain the center,” Dershowitz told WABC Radio’s “Curtis and Cosby” show, noting that he will remain a Democrat as “as long as there’s some chance the Democratic Party can return to normalcy.”

“I want to make sure that the radical Left, the woman who got elected in the Bronx and Queens to Congress on the Democratic ticket, that they and Sanders and others don’t represent the Democratic Party,” he continued, referring to socialist Ocasio-Cortez who pulled off a shock victory last week against incumbent Democratic Rep. Joseph Crowley.

“I want a fight within the Democratic Party to restore it to the days when it was a great centrist party, when it united people rather than divided people,” he added.

I think Dershowitz is fighting a losing battle.

For the Fourth: He’s a Yankee Doodle Dandy

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly-edited repeat of a previous post.]

I saw that film on TV maybe 30 times when I was a child. Loved it, and in particular loved the idea that James Cagney—whom I already knew as a tough old gangster—could dance. His dancing fascinated me because it was so non-balletic and idiosyncratic—the strutting, graceful/ungraceful, artful/artless uniqueness of his movement. In particular I recall the wall-climbing part at the end, which delighted me then and still does now.

Cagney wasn’t just an actor and hoofer, although he certainly was both. He was also a political conservative and changer. Excerpts from his Wiki page:

He was sickly as a young child—so much so that his mother feared he would die before he could be baptized. He later attributed his sickness to the poverty his family had to endure…The red-haired, blue-eyed Cagney graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York City in 1918, and attended Columbia College of Columbia University where he intended to major in art…

Cagney believed in hard work, later stating, “It was good for me. I feel sorry for the kid who has too cushy a time of it. Suddenly he has to come face-to-face with the realities of life without any mama or papa to do his thinking for him.”

He started tap dancing as a boy (a skill that eventually contributed to his Academy Award) and was nicknamed “Cellar-Door Cagney” after his habit of dancing on slanted cellar doors. He was a good street fighter, defending his older brother Harry, a medical student, when necessary. He engaged in amateur boxing, and was a runner-up for the New York State lightweight title. His coaches encouraged him to turn professional, but his mother would not allow it…

In his autobiography, Cagney said that as a young man, he had no political views, since he was more concerned with where the next meal was coming from. However the emerging labor movement of the twenties and thirties soon forced him to take sides…He supported political activist and labor leader Thomas Mooney’s defense fund, but was repelled by the behavior of some of Mooney’s supporters at a rally. Around the same time, he gave money for a Spanish Republican Army ambulance during the Spanish Civil War, which he put down to being “a soft touch.”…He also became involved in a “liberal group…with a leftist slant,” along with Ronald Reagan. However, when he and Reagan saw the direction the group was heading in, they resigned on the same night…

Cagney was accused of being a communist sympathizer in 1934, and again in 1940. The accusation in 1934 stemmed from a letter police found from a local Communist official that alleged that Cagney would bring other Hollywood stars to meetings. Cagney denied this, and Lincoln Steffens, husband of the letter’s writer, backed up this denial, asserting that the accusation stemmed solely from Cagney’s donation to striking cotton workers in the San Joaquin Valley. William Cagney claimed this donation was the root of the charges in 1940. Cagney was cleared…

After [WWII], Cagney’s politics started to change. He had worked on Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidential campaigns…However, by the time of the 1948 election, he had become disillusioned with Harry S. Truman, and voted for Thomas E. Dewey, his first non-Democratic vote. By 1980, Cagney was contributing financially to the Republican Party, supporting his friend Ronald Reagan’s bid for the presidency…As he got older, he became more and more conservative, referring to himself in his autobiography as “arch-conservative.” He regarded his move away from liberal politics as “…a totally natural reaction once I began to see undisciplined elements in our country stimulating a breakdown of our system… Those functionless creatures, the hippies … just didn’t appear out of a vacuum.”

Cagney: hoofer, political changer. An original all the way.

Happy Fourth to you all!

To liberty: Happy Fourth of July!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post. It was written in the springtime quite few years ago, during a visit to New York.]

I’ve been visiting New York City, the place where I grew up. I decide to take a walk to the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, never having been there before.

When you approach the Promenade you can’t really see what’s in store. You walk down a normal-looking street, spot a bit of blue at the end of the block, make a right turn–and, then, suddenly, there is New York:

brookheights2.jpg

And so it is for me. I take a turn, and catch my breath: downtown Manhattan rises to my left, seemingly close enough to touch, across the narrow East River. I see skyscrapers, piers, the orange-gold Staten Island ferry. In front of me, there are the graceful gothic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge. To my right, the back of some brownstones, and a well-tended and charming garden that goes on for a third of a mile.

I walk down the promenade looking first left and then right, not knowing which vista I prefer, but liking them both, especially in combination, because they complement each other so well.

All around me are people, relaxing. Lovers walking hand in hand, mothers pushing babies in strollers, fathers pushing babies in strollers, nannies pushing babies in strollers. People walking their dogs (a preponderance of pugs, for some reason), pigeons strutting and courting, tourists taking photos of themselves with the skyline as background, every other person speaking a foreign language.

The garden is more advanced in time than gardens where I live, reminding me that New York is really a southern city compared to New England. Daffodils, the startling blue of grape hyacinths, tulips in a rainbow of soft colors, those light-purple azaleas that are always the first of their kind, flowering pink magnolia and airy white dogwood and other blooming trees I don’t know the names of.

In the view to my left, of course, there’s something missing. Something very large. Two things, actually: the World Trade Center towers. Just the day before, we had driven past that sprawling wound, with its mostly-unfilled acreage where the WTC had once stood, now surrounded by fencing. Driving by it is like passing a war memorial and graveyard combined; the urge is to bow one’s head.

As I look at the skyline from the Promenade, I know that those towers are missing, but I don’t really register the loss visually. I left New York in the Sixties, never to live there again, returning thereafter only as occasional visitor. The World Trade Center was built in the early seventies, so I never managed to incorporate it into that personal New York skyline of memory that I hold in my mind’s eye, even though I saw the towers on subsequent visits. So what I now see resembles nothing more than the skyline of my youth restored, a fact which seems paradoxical to me. But I feel the loss, even though I don’t see it. Viewing the skyline always has a tinge of sadness now, which it never had before 9/11.

I come to the end of the walkway and turn myself around to set off on the return trip. And, suddenly, the view changes. Now, of course, the garden is to my left and the city to my right; and the Brooklyn Bridge, which was ahead of me, is now behind me and out of sight. But now I can see for the first time, ahead of me and to the right, something that was behind me before. In the middle of the harbor, the pale-green Statue of Liberty stands firmly on its concrete foundation, arm raised high, torch in hand.

The sight is intensely familiar to me—I used to see it frequently when I was growing up. But I’ve never seen it from this angle before. She seems both small and gigantic at the same time: dwarfed by the skyscrapers near me that threaten to overwhelm her, but towering over the water that surrounds her on all sides. The eye is drawn to her distant, heroic figure. She’s been holding that torch up for so long, she must be tired. But still she stands, resolute, her arm extended.

#WalkAway

The New Neo Posted on by

You may have heard of the #WalkAway movement. That’s a Twitter hashtag for a group that’s right up my alley: people who recently have switched from liberal to—well, if not conservative, at least to non-liberal, or have become non-Democrats.

It’s unclear how big or important the movement may be. A group of a few thousand people may not make much of a difference unless it grows significantly. Remember the PUMAs of 2008, disgruntled Hillary supporters who supposedly were turning on Obama and might end up handing the election to the GOP? Hardly anyone else remembers them, either, because as a force that were much smaller than the hype.

But perhaps #WalkAway is something more. They are vocal, and they seem to be reaching a lot of other people. Time will tell. My impression is that these people are predominantly young but it’s not limited to the young. Their change seems to have begun as something non-ideological for the most part. It’s more of an emotional revulsion at the level of vitriol doled out by the Democrats these days, the emphasis on division and specially favored groups and the dissing of white men in particular, although quite a few of the #WalkAway spokespeople are black people or women or members of other groups that have traditionally been firmly in the Democrats’ camp.

Here’s more about the movement. It also reminds me somewhat of the “red pill” group, people who (like the #WalkAways) have made a great many YouTube videos (see this and this).

The #WalkAways also seem like somewhat of a variant on the famous old saw, “If you are not a liberal at 25, you have no heart. if you are not a conservative at 35 you have no brain.” Perhaps this is just a normal evolution for the people in question, something that would have happened anyway even without Trump and the rabid left.

But all I can say is that it feels a bit different than that, and people are reporting that it is fueled by the hate campaign on the left. It makes sense, too, that if a person was initially attracted to the left because he or she thought it was peace/love, that person’s got another think coming on seeing so much hate directed at people who just happen to think differently from the left.

Here are some quotes from the movement’s originator, gay man and would-be actor Brandon Straka:

“I was afraid of losing all my friends. As I began posting about these things on social media, people started attacking me and unfriending me.

“But I thought, ‘You know what, this is too important.’ Maybe it’s the fact that I’m a gay man and I’ve already been through this—people making up lies about what it means to be gay and trying to shame me. I was like, ‘I’m not doing it. I’m not doing this twice.’

“The more resentment I received, the stronger I got. Finally, I thought, ‘To hell with it. I’m just going to blow the lid off this whole thing and make this video.’”

The video has garnered 1.3 million views on his Facebook page and has been shared on many other popular pages. It is estimated to have reached some 5 million viewers so far.

There are some 27,000 followers of the Facebook group, with new people posting both video and text testimonials every day. Straka calls them “the patriots.”

“Initially, my focus was on the gay community because I was so angry at how they were [being terrorized],” Straka said. “Then I thought, why should I limit it to just us? They’re doing the same thing to black people. And Hispanic people. And frankly, they’re doing the same thing to everybody in one way or another.

Brave man.

I wish them all luck—welcome to the club!

Immigration and the Holy Family: department of incorrect metaphors

The New Neo Posted on by

A church in Indianapolis has mounted the following protest:

An Indianapolis church has placed statues of Mary, Joseph and the baby Jesus in a cage of fencing topped with barbed wired to protest the Trump administration’s zero tolerance immigration policy.

The statues were erected Tuesday morning outside Christ Church Cathedral on downtown Indianapolis’ Monument Circle and surrounded by the fencing.

The Episcopalian church’s dean and rector, the Rev. Stephen Carlsen, says the display that’s part of the church’s “Every Family is Holy Campaign” condemns the nation’s immigration policy that’s holding families in detention centers at the U.S.-Mexico border.

He says the Holy Family was “a homeless family with nowhere to stay” and that the Bible says “we’re supposed to love our neighbors as ourselves.”

I wonder whether Rev. Carlsen would be willing to take some of the families who are being held and house them in his own home’s stable, as it were.

But the strangest thing about his statement is that I assume that he, as a Christian clergyman, would be aware of the story of Mary and Joseph and their journey to Bethlehem, and know that they were neither migrants nor homeless, nor were they illegal immigrants. Au contraire.

You (or Rev. Carlsen) can find the actual story in many places online. The basics are that the Holy Family was traveling from their home to their ancestral home in order to comply with a law directing them to do so for a census.

Some details:

Mary and Joseph had to go to Joseph’s ancestral home due to Roman taxation policies. From time to time, the Romans conducted a census not merely to count people but also to find out what they owned so that they could be taxed. It was decreed in the year Christ was born (5 B.C.) that such a taxation census would be taken of the people.

1. Now it happened in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus (the first true Roman Emperor who ruled from 27 B.C. to 14 A.D.) that all the world should be registered. 2. (This registration first occurred when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) 3. Then all went to be registered, each to his own city. 4. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, to the city of David which is called Bethlehem, because he was from the house and lineage of David (Luke 2)

It couldn’t be further from the situation of the illegal immigrants of today whose detention the Reverend is protesting. Mary and Joseph were obeying a law that directed them to temporarily go from their home to another place where they had roots, and that’s why they were without a place to stay.

A while back I wrote this post on the attitude of Christianity towards immigration. I’m going to quote from it now:

A great many Christians seem to be arguing that we Westerners have a duty to accept all the refugees coming from war-torn countries such as Syria, or those in economic distress such as illegal immigrants from Mexico, whether the “we” be individuals here or in Europe. I’ve read many such arguments on blogs in posts and comments, and have seen them offered by talking heads on TV.

To me as a non-Christian, it is a puzzling argument. To me it seems that the prescription to give to charity, to help the needy, never requires that one help all the needy to the point of beggaring yourself. Nor does it require putting yourself in personal jeopardy. In other words, although Christianity has long admired the saintliness of martyrdom, it does not require it of individuals and certainly not of societies…

Another principle to remember is that generally any behavior that is rewarded will increase in frequency. So, issue an open invitation to your house saying that all who come will be fed and clothed there and given money, and see what happens if you broadcast it throughout the entire world…

I am not completely familiar with the tenets of Christianity, to be sure. But I can’t imagine that it requires such self-destruction in the name of good. To me, it seems that limits are necessary, and the proper topic for debate is the question of where to draw those limits.

Governments all over the world make rules about who can live in their country and who cannot, and while things are being sorted out, people are regularly detained. There is really no other way to do it except anarchy. There are certain groups—and religious groups and people are prominent among them—who don’t believe in any limits, or who would set the limits in such a way as to exclude almost no one.

[NOTE: One more thing—I wonder how the decision was made to erect the protest statues. Was it by the reverend himself? Or was some sort of board of directors involved as well? I very much doubt the entire congregation voted on it, although I suppose that’s possible.]