Politics

They walk among us. The last of the Covidians. We see them every day, masked while walking their dog in the park, or alone in their car. We have that friend or loved one who badgers us about vaccines and boosters like a mid-level PR executive at Pfizer. There is also the social media warrior who will never admit they got anything wrong about lockdowns, that even with our economy and education system in shambles, we should be grateful. Let’s not forget the public health officials like Holy Saint Fauci, who we recently learned had a mega-millions windfall while Americans’ purchasing power plummeted into the poorhouse. “Oh no,” they warn, “don’t get complacent now! Winter is coming!

Tom Wolfe invented Al Sharpton in his 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. In the novel, he was called Reverend Bacon. In a splendid case of life imitating art, Sharpton took his place as a fixture in the metabolism of Democratic politics that same year when he hitched his star to the case of Tawana Brawley, then fifteen, who falsely claimed she had been abducted and raped by six white men, some of whom, she said, were police. For reasons that are part of the inscrutable workings of the universe, Sharpton’s histrionic fabrications in that case catapulted him to a position of tribal leadership among Democratic presidential candidates.

In 1958, the federal government surveyed the vast plains of the United States for the site that would launch the future of humanity and settled on... Greenbelt, Maryland, which had the advantage of a quick commute from the capital. On weekdays 7,000 people travel to NASA’s Goddard Space Center to work on those telescopes that go viral every few months with their high-definition photos of space. They were off for Labor Day weekend, so only a couple of hundred people were on hand to see the dawn of a political revolution.

After attending NatCon, the recent National Conservatism conference featuring academics, wonks, theologians, and politicians like Marco Rubio, Rick Scott, Josh Hawley, and Ron DeSantis, I realized there are two factions within American conservatism: Team Frodo and Team Boromir. Readers of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring remember Frodo as the hobbit tasked with destroying the Ring of Power lest it fall into the hands of the evil Sauron. Boromir was the traveling companion who urged Frodo to let him use the Ring’s power against their enemies. “Why should we not think that the Great Ring has come into our hands to serve us in the very hour of need?” he asked. “Wielding it the Free Lords of the Free may surely defeat the Enemy.

The Supreme Court is poised to grant a victory to religious conservatives via the First Amendment in blocking recognition of an LGBT club at Yeshiva University. Yeshiva is a Jewish law school which objects to the club on religious grounds. This is important news for other religious schools across America facing similar legal challenges. Though the Court as an intermittent step referred the case back to the lower courts as Yeshiva University v. YU Pride Alliance, Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Comey Barrett made no bones in their dissent that they would stand with the First Amendment when the full case comes before the Supreme Court, as it is expected the lower courts will demand Yeshiva recognize and fund the club.

Biden, Meloni and the meaning of democracy Speaking at a Democratic Party fundraiser on Wednesday night, Joe Biden delivered a familiar message about democracy. The fight between “democracy and autocracy” is domestic and international, he said. “Democracy is at stake,” he warned and, as evidence of the global threats to democracy he said, “you saw what’s happened in Italy in that election.” As you have probably read by now, the result of that election was that Italy now has its most conservative prime minister since World War Two: Giorgia Meloni, the triumphant leader of the Brothers of Italy Party. And the US president’s response to that outcome demonstrates the problem with the “democracy versus autocracy” prism through which he views the world.

You have to wonder what Liz Cheney feels her relationship to the Republican Party to be today. Having spent years denouncing Donald Trump as a faux Republican and a disgrace to the party, much of the past year implicitly accusing him of treason as vice-chair of the January 6 Committee and the two months since her defeat in the Wyoming primary characterizing half (at least) of the GOP as “very sick,” she is co-sponsoring a bill with Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, to reform the Electoral Count Act in order to “protect the rule of law and ensure that future efforts to attack the integrity of presidential elections can’t succeed.” Representative Lofgren was one of seven impeachment managers in President Trump’s trial for his first impeachment in 2020.