Vive Le Résistance! But what is it? And where is it? And who is it? Good questions! Maybe too good!
According to reports from, well, you know, “around”, many Democrats are licking their chops looking forward to the 2026 mid-term elections, anticipating another “Blue Wave” election, similar to the big win in 2006, which presaged Barack Obama’s big win in 2008, and the big win in 2020, which seemed to suggest the end of Trumpery—how blind we were!
There are a few—and only a few—good reasons for believing this. Twenty-first century U.S. politics has seen a lot of off-year blow-outs—2006 and 2020 for the Democrats and 2010 and 2014 for the Republicans, and I wish I could be optimistic about 2026, but right now I can’t be, because the Republicans are uniquely united and the Democrats deeply divided, as is so often the case.
Donald Trump’s unique and horrible power—far greater than any other political figure in American history has ever possessed—lies in the utter devotion to his will of anywhere to 40 to 45 percent of the electorate—people who see Trump as their lord and master, their king, whose will should never be questioned. Like Snowball, Trump is always right. His strength is their strength. They applaud his cruelty and admire his rage.
Beyond the true believers is the enablers, the conservative elite, most notably the “Unholy Six” on the Supreme Court. As long ago as 1994, the “thinking class” of the Republican Party sold its soul to the forces of nihilism, and they have been operating on a policy of “Ruin, then Rule” ever since, something I have kvetched about ad nauseum in the many incarnations of Literature R Us down through the years.. The mob will follow Trump wherever he leads them, while the elite either comforts itself with the thought that he can’t live forever or the hope that maybe he can live forever.
But if the Republicans are united as no party in American history has ever been, the Democrats are as divided as they’ve ever been. Suddenly, it’s 1972, or 1976, or 1980 all over again! There is, when you think about it, a Jimmy Carteresque air to the brief, unfortunate reign of Uncle Joe, though most of Carter’s problems, especially in his last year, were not his fault, while all of Joe’s problems in his last year were most emphatically his fault. Still, you had a blandly moderate “leader” trying to bridge the gap between a sour “Old Guard” and a raging cohort of “Angry Youth”, a gap that was only bridged when an aging “Angry Youth” named Bill Clinton was able to unite the party (more or less), and that took a very long 12 years.1
As a seriously aging neoliberal, I concede that Youth Must Be Served! and that poor old Chuck Schumer needs to take a hike. On the other hand, the domestic policy ideas of the new generation of Democrats are uniformly awful, an incongruous mélange of unconscious virtue-signaling and “rage”, something I talked about in a couple of recent posts, Yo, Democrats! Forget about the working class! Worry about the upper class! and Zohran Mamdani is full of ideas, and every single one of them is bad.. If the price of gas doubles in the next 12 months, I think we’ll be in good shape. But other than that, I’m not so sure.
What do Dean Acheson and Donald Trump have in common? They both have someone they would like to shut up.
Dean Acheson, secretary of state under Harry Truman, was the son of an Anglican bishop, and he acted like it. Donald Trump is the son of a real estate hustler in the Outer Boroughs, and he acts like it too. But they did/do have something in common: They both have someone they would dearly like to keep happy.
In Dean’s case, it was the celebrated Soviet spy and former State Department official Alger Hiss. Back in 1950, when Hiss was convicted of perjury in connection with his feud with Whittaker Chambers, Acheson made a statement that confused many. Time magazine reported his statement as follows:
“Whatever the outcome of any appeal which Mr. Hiss or his lawyer may take,” said the Secretary of State. “I do not intend to turn my back on Alger Hiss.”
Dean Acheson spoke in a voice weighted with emotion. “I think every person who has known Alger Hiss . . . has upon his conscience the very serious task of deciding what his attitude is and what his conduct should be,” he said. “That must be done by each person in the light of his own standards and his own principles. For me, there is very little doubt about these standards or these principles. They were stated for us a very long time ago … on the Mount of Olives.”
The unattractive thing is, this overt and ponderous moralizing by Acheson, who was a lawyer, was a deliberate act of massive hypocrisy. Hiss’s case was not one of “sin” but of crime. He broke the law. Hiss lied under oath to conceal the fact that he and Chambers had engaged in espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union for years. Yet Acheson, in his little shell game, all but cast himself in the role of Jesus—“look forgiving I am! Just like Jesus! Unlike some people!”
In fact, as Allen Weinstein demonstrates in his justly famous book, Perjury The Hiss-Chambers Case, Acheson was consistently evasive about his relations with Hiss, trying to downplay them, and most of all wanting to discourage speculation about what was surely true, that he had no doubt but that Hiss was a communist and had very likely engaged in some sort of espionage. If Hiss had spoken—had “confessed”—and he never did—he could have ruined Acheson personally and probably brought down the Democratic Party as the party of “treason” for decades. It was imperative that Hiss get the message that his wife and his son would be taken care of—discreetly, of course—and that he himself would have a life of sorts to look forward to, when he had served his term in jail, which turned out to be about three and a half years.
And as with Dean, so with Donald. When Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested back in July of 2020, the Donald opined that “I just wish her well, frankly. I’ve met her numerous times over the years... I just wish her well, whatever it is.” Now, of course, Ghislaine has had the pleasure of a private chat with Trump’s former personal attorney and now deputy attorney general and has also been transferred to a minimum security prison, despite the fact that, considering the severity of her crimes, she isn’t supposed to be eligible for a transfer. And the fact that she got one is pretty outrageous, as Reason’s C.J. Ciaramella explains here. But for the Trump administration, of course, it was Tuesday.
I’d be surprised if Ghislaine had something seriously hot on Trump, except for one thing: he keeps acting like she does have something seriously hot on him.
Ross Douthat, looking for God in all the wrong places
The indefatigable—and indefatigably wrong—Ross Douthat is at it again, searching for the hand of God in human history and finding his own ego instead. Hey, they look so much alike! In his latest effusion for the far too tolerant New York Times, Why Did God Favor France?, we find Ross claiming, absurdly, that Joan of Arc’s career back in the early 15th century was so stunning and so successful in driving the English out of France that it could “only” be explained as a case of divine intervention, divine intervention undertaken, according to the preposterous Mr. Douthat, so that, centuries later, when England went Protestant, she wouldn’t take France with her.
Well, if God wanted to “keep France Catholic”, there are a Hell of a lot of other, and better, ways He could have gone about it. How about ensuring that only honest men achieved the Papacy, so that the Reformation never would have happened? Wouldn’t that be the cleanest way to do it? If that’s too much (and why should it be? The Guy’s God, after all!), how about not killing off the Marquis of Santa Cruz back in 1588, thus allowing the Spanish Armada to have a competent commander instead of a land lubber like Alonso Pérez de Guzmán y de Zúñiga-Sotomayor, 7th Duke of Medina Sidonia, aka “Alonso the Unlucky”, so that Phillip II of Spain could have conquered England as he “should” have? That would have worked too, wouldn’t it? Why doesn’t God ever think these things through? And why doesn’t Ross?
1. If only Bill had been able to rein in his raging penis as well. You can’t have it all, I guess.
