Roger Kimball

The savage assassination of Charlie Kirk at a Turning Point rally at Utah Valley University yesterday prompts me to wonder, as I have often wondered, what is the leading characteristic of the left? There are several candidates. Intolerance is one. A rancid and anchorless do-goodism – think of Dickens’s Mrs. Jelleby and her “telescopic philanthropy” – is another.   But on balance I think that the late Australian philosopher David Stove was right: the leading characteristic of the left it is bloodthirstiness. Behind all the emollient rhetoric about brotherhood and equality, bloodthirstiness is the left’s most reliable calling card.   That is one reason that the nearly instant emission by prominent Democrats of their opposition to violence rings so hollow.

A buzzword of the moment is “lawfare.” What is lawfare? It’s one of those portmanteau words that Lewis Carroll taught us about. A combination of “law” and “warfare,” “lawfare” is distinctly less clever an invention than “chortle” – one of Carroll’s coinages, my beamish boy, which combines the words “chuckle” and “snort.” The word “lawfare” apparently dates back to the late 1950s, though the phenomenon – using and abusing the law in order to conduct political warfare – has come into its own only in the past couple of decades. The fact that there is now an eponymous website devoted to the subject is but one patent of its currency.

Yesterday, September 3, President Trump welcomed Karol Nawrocki, the newly inaugurated president of Poland to the White House. It was a stirring occasion, replete with a surprise military fly-over of F-16 and F-35 fighter jets flying in “missing man” formation to honor  Major Maciej “Slab” Krakowian, the Polish pilot who died in a crash in Radom, Poland, last Thursday.  Nawrocki, who narrowly won the presidency in June, is often described as “the Polish Trump.” It’s an accurate epithet. Nawrocki is as much a “Poland First” president as Trump is an “America First” president. The 42-year-old historian (Nawrocki holds a PhD in history) supports a list of policy initiatives that could have come right out of the MAGA playbook.

Readers of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter entertainments will recall that the number-one bad hat, Tom Marvolo Riddle, AKA Voldemort, had a clever way of preserving himself. Rightly worried that the forces of good might try to destroy him, the Dark Lord devised a way of infusing living bits of himself into various objects and people. The resulting magical charm was called a “Horcrux.”   “If the body of a Horcrux owner is killed,” we read in a Potter gloss, “that portion of the soul that had remained in the body does not pass on to the next world, but will rather exist in a non-corporeal form capable of being resurrected by another wizard.” Nice work if you can get it.

Remember Angela Davis? Few people under fifty do. Was Cambridge University counting on that historical ignorance when it decided to honor Angela Davis with an honorary degree?   In case you, Dear Reader, are a little fuzzy about Davis, I note for the record that the former Black Panther and two-time vice-presidential candidate on the Communist Party ticket with Gus Hall is the recipient of many honors, including the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize.  Cambridge University, of course, has long demonstrated a certain fondness for Commies, as the names “Kim Philby,” “Guy Burgess” and “Anthony Blunt” remind us.

Yesterday, I wrote about the revelations with which Tulsi Gabbard, Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, electrified the world.  We had all grown up chewing on the Russia Collusion Delusion, and most of us were happy to have that political enormity pass through the usual emunctory processes and be deposited in some far off midden or compost heap.   But Tulsi showed that, however expert we thought ourselves about the subject, that great precautionary motto – "things are always worse than they seem”– was pertinent even here.

I write at the very beginning of July. Where I live in Connecticut, people are unpacking flags and bunting in preparation for the July 4 festivities. Elsewhere, the trumpets sounding to accompany Donald Trump’s triumphant announcement of a ceasefire between Iran and Israel have subsided. It is clear that the President dearly wants peace. So does Israel. For its part, Iran wants the extermination of “the Zionist entity” and, beyond that, the eventual extinction of the “Great Satan,” America. How do I know? Iranian spokesmen keep telling the world just that. I wonder if Salman Rushdie has reached out to Trump now that he has joined the exclusive club of those upon whom the lunatics in charge of Iran have explicitly pronounced a fatwa – a death sentence.

Anyone who has perambulated through the groves of academe has encountered dumb smart people. They are clever, intellectually nimble, but they lack what Aristotle called φρόνησις and what the rest of us call “street smarts” or “practical wisdom.” In academia, dumb smart people often appear to be merely quaint or eccentric. In the realm of politics, they appear first as an exciting novelty, then as a destructive if naive force, cynically manipulated by the very people they hoped to replace.  In 1992, the billionaire Ross Perot epitomized the dumb smart political actor when he ran as an Independent candidate against George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He pretended to provide an alternative to both Bush and Clinton. In reality, Perot guaranteed Clinton’s victory.

What now? After the daring and what everyone is describing as a “flawlessly executed” attack by the United States on Iran’s hardened nuclear facilities Saturday night, Macbeth’s words must be on the minds of many: “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well / It were done quickly.” Things did not work out so well for the Thane of Cawdor, as Macbeth then was. But even though his attack was not “the be-all and the end-all” he wanted, everyone who wishes for peace must second his opening argument.

Political imbrioglios often take on the character of theological controversy. Back in the 6th century, the wise men of the Western Church, pondering the Trinity, decided to make an addition to the Nicene Creed. The Holy Spirit, they determined, proceeded not simply “ex Patre” (“from the Father”) but also “filioque,” “and from the son.” No big deal, right? Wrong. For reasons I shall refrain from dilating on now, the Eastern Church repudiated the addition. Controversy raged for centuries. Indeed, what became known as the “filioque controversy” culminated, in AD 1054, in the Great Schism between the Eastern Church and the West. For most of us mortals, the controversy now seems arcane, not to say bootless. But at the time it was a matter of life and death.

Today, you can choose to follow your inner adolescent and search for one of the Soros-funded “No Kings” protests cropping up wherever the number of Democrats is high and the collective IQ is low. Alternatively, you can pop down to the draining swamp of Washington, DC and watch the United States Army commemorate its 250th anniversary with a snazzy military parade among patriotically inclined Americans.If you think I have loaded the dice somewhat with charged rhetoric, you’re right. The whole “No Kings” wheeze is just anxious left-wing grandstanding that is as desperate as it is ineffectual. There is no Saint George Floyd around to act as a pretext this time.I have no doubt that those protests will be lavishly covered by the Irrelevant Media Complex.

Whom do you suppose wrote this: “Let me be clear: I made the decisions during my presidency. I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false”?  The one person I can assure you did not write it is its supposed author, former president Joseph R. Biden, who by the way is suffering from metastatic prostate cancer.  Moreover, pace Biden’s suggestions, it is clear that he did not sign many of the myriad “pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations” issued over his name.

The commentariat is awash with experts on prostate cancer. What precipitated this sudden acquisition of specialized medical expertise? Why, the announcement that former president Joe Biden is suffering from stage four of the big PC which, the news reports are gasping, has metastasized to his bones. Let me pause to join Donald Trump in expressing my best wishes to the former president for “a fast and successful recovery.” Let me also recall how suddenly the world became populated with epidemiologists after the Wuhan flu led Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx and the entire bureaucratic establishment to discover their inner totalitarian hankerings. The revelation about Biden’s health is a sort of synecdoche for a much larger universe of pain.