Politics

The difficulty in trying to assess the behaviour of Democrats these days is thinking sufficiently low.  When I wrote about Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing in these virtual pages a couple of weeks ago, I predicted grandstanding from Cory ‘Spartacus’ Booker and Kamala Harris. I did not think low enough to suspect that the Democrats would help orchestrate a series of embarrassing outbursts from the NeverKavanaugh Left, but so it happened. Nor did I expect the Democrats to orchestrate a last-minute allegation of sexual abuse dating from 35 years ago when Kavanaugh was 17 and in high school.  As all the world now knows, that happened too.

Ron Unz is a curious man, both in the sense of being curious about things and in the sense of inspiring curiosity. Born in California into a Jewish family, Unz studied at Cambridge and Stanford before making millions through a financial-software firm. Some of us would have retired at that point to enjoy life with no more arduous pursuits than the occasional swim but not Unz. He began to involve himself with politics. In the 1990s, Unz was best known for the humble cause of promoting California Proposition 227, which attempted to promote monolingual education in Californian schools to advance immigrant assimilation. A somewhat bewildered CNN profile made note of his resourcefulness, intelligence and ambition — or, as they characterised it, his hubris.

It was a saturnine Manafort who appeared in court, but prosecutor Andrew Weissmann says that Manafort is already cooperating with the Mueller investigation, or, to use President Trump’s terminology, flipping. The likelihood is that Trump himself will flip out over this news. After all, he recently observed to Fox News, ‘It’s called flipping and it almost ought to be illegal.’ Now his decision to hire Manafort is becoming a case of the perils of Pauline for Trump. So much for hiring only the ‘best people.’ A week ago Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani proclaimed, ‘There’s no fear that Paul Manafort would cooperate against the president because there’s nothing to cooperate about and we long ago evaluated him as an honourable man.’ Yeah, right.

The Supreme Court nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh has been nasty. From protests and last minute document dumps to the raised voices and clamour to land the perfect ‘gotcha’ question, the highly partisan hearings have turned into a Democratic contest over who can hit Judge Kavanaugh the hardest. Consensus has formed that the junior senators from California and New Jersey, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, have done their respective name recognition among the Democratic faithful no harm should either of them seek the Democrat Party nomination in 2020. Which they both will.It’s not just Kavanaugh who has faced this Democratic barrage.

Andrew Cuomo has spent the better part of his tenure in New York engulfed by corruption and governance failure. As he lurches toward a third term of quasi-imperial gubernatorial rule, he has chosen to follow what has become the standard playbook for blemished Democrats needing self-absolution: just attack Trump. Even when Trump has nothing especially to do with the issues at hand, just attack him and hope it suffices for a plurality of the electorate. And so that’s what Cuomo has been doing at the few begrudging campaign stops he’s made in recent days, with actor Cynthia Nixon forcing him to at least give the appearance of seeking popular approval.

One rule of identity politics is that you get to choose your identity: ‘I identify as trans Latinx’. Another rule is that your identity is fated: ‘I was born trans Latinx’. The assumption of choice applies the logic of the market in a society of cheap credit and easy bankruptcy. The invoking of biological destiny is the crude mechanics of Victorian race theory. This is a pastiche of the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate. The purpose, though, isn’t the ‘identity’ part, solving the mystery of how we are made and become ourselves, but the ‘politics’ part. As in evolution, choice and heredity are complementary strategies, deployed for competitive advantage.

A couple of days ago, The New York Times took what it called the ‘rare step’ of publishing an anonymous op-ed column supposedly by a ‘senior official’ in the Trump administration. The column, which might have been written by Bill Kristol and then run through Pete Wehner’s patented Hand-Wringing Moralising Machine, is the perfect epitome of that emetic, holier-than-thou species of Never-Trump rhetoric practiced by newly irrelevant, nominally conservative pundits. ‘The root of the problem,’ writes this latter-day Mr Podsnap, ‘is the president’s amorality [unlike Hillary Clinton’s, I guess, who was the most corrupt candidate ever to run for the presidency].

It’s hard to avoid the impression that Donald Trump is being stalked by Anonymous, or anomious, as he mispronounced it twice at his rally last night in Billings, Montana (prompting another round of speculation about why he is slurring words). The proof came right as he was denouncing the Democrats for being nothing more than a bunch of lowdown, rotten ‘haters.’ Behind him stood an anonymous young man in a plaid shirt with a three-day stubble who became a sensation on Twitter as he made a bunch of animated facial expressions indicating a degree of skepticism and surprise in response to Trump’s complaints about everything from Bob Woodward’s character assassination to the assault by an op-ed writer in the New York Times.

There is a monumental hypocrisy at the heart of NeverTrump Republicanism. The president’s critics in his own party say that Trump is a danger to American institutions and the rule of law. Yet time and again, these opponents bend and break the rules of institutions stretching from the Republican Party to the federal government in an effort to sabotage the regular political process — a process whereby Republicans, and Americans in generals, have consistently repudiated the NeverTrumpers. They can’t win elections, so they can’t govern constitutionally. But they do everything in their power to seize the machinery of party and state nevertheless.

‘Boys come up, I’m going to be president.’ That’s what John Kerry, Massachusetts senator and the Democratic nominee, told a close group of sometime-advisers at 8 p.m. on election night in 2004, or so a source familiar recounts. That year, and his near unseating of George W. Bush, still shape most Americans’ public perception of the 74-year-old: regal but aloof. That campaign seems prehistoric now: pre-Twitter, and preceding the candidate himself using Twitter for the day’s cavil. But that would be giving 2004 short shrift: the contest was as acrimonious as any prior.

Should President Trump be afraid of Bob Woodward’s new 448-page book Fear: Trump in the White House? Both CNN and the Washington Post are featuring scoops from the book which is slated to be released on September 11. So far, the White House itself has remained mum about the book, which is a major mistake that indicates it is as ill-prepared for Woodward’s assault as it was for Michael Wolff’s. But it seems likely to elicit further fire and fury from Trump, at least in the form of aggrieved tweets that will inadvertently serve to confirm the veracity of the very statements they are meant to impugn.

The New Yorker’s cancellation of Steve Bannon’s appearance at the New Yorker Ideas Festival shows that the New Yorker has no idea what it is doing. Not because it invited Bannon to be interviewed on stage by New Yorker editor David Remnick, but because Remnick reneged on the invitation only eight hours later, and because the reneging was so hasty that it cannot be presented as a thoughtful statement of journalistic principle. It looks more like the result of panic and fear, the emotions that Steve Bannon, by his own admission, exploited so successfully in 2016. https://twitter.com/JuddApatow/status/1036732535957422080 The New Yorker in turn attempted to exploit Bannon’s whiff of sulphur.