Roger Kimball

More and more people, I suspect, are padding about muttering lines from Psalm 13: 'How long, O Lord,...How long must I take counsel in my soul/ and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?' These are good questions. As of April 9, 2020, however, we do not have a reliable answer. You might think that the reason we don’t have an answer to these questions is because we don’t really know the insidious strength of the enemy, the new coronavirus that, with the help of the Chinese back in December and January, has made its way around the world, sickening hundreds of thousands, from Prime Minister Boris Johnson on down. I think that is only part of the answer.

'Never let a good crisis go to waste.' When Rahm Emanuel said that during the economic meltdown of 2008-2009, his Machiavellian cynicism was instantly recognized as the calling card of the new breed of Democrat that he and his boss, Barack 'Bring-a-gun-to-the fight' Obama, embodied. We saw it then, when the gargantuan pseudo-stimulus package stimulated little apart from the federal debt, and we are seeing it again now as Democrats hold up an emergency spending bill (also gargantuan) in order to fill it with profligate and politically tendentious provisions.  As Rep. Jim Clyburn put it,  'This is a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.' Rahm Emanuel could not have put it any better.

The president delivered an address last night about the Wuhan flu, aka novel coronavirus, aka (if you want to sound scary/scientific 'COVID-19'). The speech was brief, but to the point. It outlined a number of practical steps that the administration has taken, and would be taking, to slow the spread of the disease, help those who contract it, and — just as important—rescue the market from the panic that has surrounded this malady. The wretched Jim Acosta, court jester on CNN, complained about Trump calling the virus ‘foreign’ and his identifying the source of the virus as China. That was 'smacking of xenophobia' said the babbling head.

There are few ironclad rules in American politics. But here is one: if you are a Republican, no tactic is too disreputable to be deployed against you. I think for example, of the disgusting campaign waged to keep Judge Robert Bork from the Supreme Court in the 1980s. 'Lion of the Senate' Ted Kennedy led that charge ('in Robert Bork’s America...'), though he was aided by a young senator named Joe Biden. Journalists went through Bork’s trash and reviewed the movies he rented for incriminating evidence. Other campaigns of vilification against Republican Supreme Court nominees include the one conducted against Clarence Thomas and, most recently, the extraordinary full-court press against Brett Kavanaugh. But the calumny is directed not just against judicial nominees.

Was I wrong, or only early? After Joe Biden’s win in the South Carolina primary, I wrote that his victory 'will not, as some pundits are claiming, "resuscitate" or "breathe life" into the ailing former vice president’s asphyxiating campaign. That ship has sailed, as we’ll all see on Tuesday when Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg divide up most of the delegate cake.' Biden certainly performed better than I thought he would, Bernie a little worse, and mini Mike, despite all his money, was nowhere to be seen. (Neither was the unpleasant female who is senior senator from Massachussetts, but that is another story, beside the point in a column about the race to secure the Democratic nomination for president.

The way our politics has shaped up (up? has it shaped up?), the South Carolina primary is a bit like the puppy bowl entertainment that precedes the Big Game with the leatherette ovoid every winter. On Tuesday, the Big Game in politics kicks off with primaries in Alabama, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Democrats Abroad, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont and Virginia. Big stakes. Still, people — some people — like the puppy bowl. It’s cute, and though it doesn’t really matter who wins, the contest is good for laughs and does get some people worked up. I was pretty worked up myself in 2012 when Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina primary and proclaimed himself the 'obvious' Republican nominee.

I like to keep a couple of books within easy reach of my desk to remind myself what sort of creature I am dealing with. As I often write about academics and academic administrators, one of these is Ralph Buchsbaum’s Animals Without Backbones: An Introduction to the Invertebrates, whose title perfectly captures the mushy, moist, moral manner of those matchless, modern martinets. Since I also often write about what Lionel Trilling called the ‘bloody crossroads’, where politics and culture meet, the other book within easy reach is Charles Mackay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.  The chief instigator of madness these days is Donald Trump. He is like that old-fashioned confection called Fizzies.

I see that various pundits are competing to write the political epitaph for Joe 'son-of-a-bitch' Biden. That’s entirely understandable. It’s been clear for some time that Biden is on the threshold of senility, and it is only my charitable disposition that prevents me from speculating about which side of the threshold he occupies. And then there was the desolation wrought by the Democrats’ impeachment entertainment. From the start, it was clear that the chief casualty of that amateur theatrics was going to be Joe Biden and his sniff, sniff, sniffing son Hunter. Everyone who is not Bill Kristol understood that the bullet of that purely partisan hit job would miss President Trump.

One of the many things that F. Scott Fitzgerald said that sound good but isn’t true is this: 'There are no second acts in American lives.' Consider the life of Donald Trump. Five years ago he was a dubious real estate developer and professional celebrity. Now he is not only president of the United States, but he is, three years into his first term, the most ostentatiously successful president in memory. Donald Trump is a walking refutation of what is perhaps Fitzgerald’s second most quoted line. Possibly Fitzgerald’s first most quoted line is this: 'The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.' That isn’t true, either.

I address you, Dear Reader, from some 36,000 feet above the fruited plain. But since, before embarking, news that Sen. Lamar Alexander, though a reliable Trump basher, had decided to do the right thing and vote 'no' on calling more witnesses in the impeachment trial of President Trump, I can say with confidence that the jig is up, at least for this installment of the Democrats’ febrile effort to rid themselves of the duly elected president of the United States. The phrase 'sea change', I believe, comes to us from The Tempest. It occurs in one of of Ariel’s songs: 'Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea change/Into something rich and strange.' I suspect we are on the cusp of a sea change in public sentiment that I have been expecting for some time.

It’s actually sort of cute, at least from a distance. There the Democrats are, playing on their hobbyhorses with all the other neighborhood children. Wobbly Chris Matthews is there, rubbing his leg and shouting. Hello, Chris! There’s Don Lemón and Rachel Maddow and Pastor David French and Bill Kristol all in a circle with their little friends from the New York Times and the Washington Post. They’re doing their nervous war dances, sending smoke signals, and hopping along on their make-believe mares, tilting at that giant windmill called Donald Trump, the evil genie they assemble daily to subject to ritual excoriation. What would they do without him?

A couple of days ago, members of the United States House of Representatives processed with all their accustomed pomp and dignity to file, formally, two articles of impeachment against President Trump. Yesterday, Chief Justice John Roberts swore in the senators, who promised, scout’s honor, to deliberate with all the impartiality for which that great legislative body is known, i.e., to deliver their verdict almost exclusively on party lines. They didn’t say that, of course, because niceties must be preserved in these august chambers, especially when the television cameras are running, but everyone knows that is what is mean by 'impartial' in our political life today.

In July 55 BC, in the midst of his campaigns to civilize Gaul, Julius Caesar was troubled by the Germans. They would cross the Rhine, wreak havoc, and then disappear back across the mighty river, whose depth and swift currents made the Germans regard it as an impregnable barrier. To teach them that it wasn’t, Caesar had his engineers construct a bridge across the Rhine. As Caesar recounts in Book IV of his commentaries on the Gallic War, they did this in an astonishing 10 days. Caesar and his troops crossed over, stayed for a few days in German territory, 'burned all their villages and other buildings, and cut down the grain in their fields'. They then crossed back over and destroyed the bridge.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Galileo famously said that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. But what made him so important in the history of science was his further insight that mathematics, in order to reveal the laws of nature, had to be empirically tested. Mathematical formulae described what he thought would happen; he had to clamber up the leaning tower of Pisa and drop the two balls to convince us that objects of different masses fall at the same speed. I am not sure that most modern pollsters have taken Galileo’s second insight fully on board. The modern pollster tends to be in love with his model.

Did we just witness an historic event, the impeachment of only the third president in the entire history of the Republic? Or was this a case of accusatio interrupta: impeachment interrupted by an untimely withdrawal from Nancy Pelosi? The speaker of the House, unhappy at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s obvious contempt for the House proceedings, has suggested that she might not file the charges with the Senate. In which case, the Senate could not hold a trial. In which case, Donald Trump could neither be exonerated nor convicted. In which case, he would not have been impeached by the House, but only 'impeached'. It’s amazing what semantic potency can reside in a pair of quotation marks.