Firehose #118: Insufficiently Alarmed

Also: Maher-Miller eat a Moynihan sandwich.

Why the bonus weekend email? Because time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future; because Tuesday will mark a big before/after demarcation in the Timeline, and because there has already transpired too much Fif’-related content between Friday’s Firehose and Tuesday night’s many thousand livestreams (including our own planned hour-long efforts in the 9 pm & midnight ET slots). So let’s step to it.

* So there I was Friday night, minding my own damned business, viddying the Nuggets-Wolves game from the non-swing state of Brooklyn, when along came this evil election commercial:

What in HELL is this abomination, you might ask? Oh, just a half-million ad buy from the largest SuperPAC of the 2024 election (at a stunning $700 million and counting, including $50 million recently from Bill Gates), with the bulk of this particular spot being broadcast into the urban areas of swing states—Atlanta, Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee, and so forth. Silly heterodoxist, don’t you KNOW you can’t beat back incipient authoritarianism without scaring the bejeebus out of inner-city residents with an official-looking “National Voter Alert” warning that “your voter record will be updated” and that “your friends and family will be able to see how often you vote”?

* Speaking of the H-word, Thomas Chatterton Williams (veteran of Fifth Column episodes #121, #158, #188, #197, #373), in an Atlantic piece published Saturday, sought to figure out how in the world it can be that, “given the enormous stakes,” anyone “not already ensorcelled by the cult of MAGA could hesitate to support” Kamala Harris. So he consulted our Kmele, and also Coleman Hughes (#121, #144, #181, #188, #201, #379, #412 & #442), and put the results under the unfortunately telling headline of “When Heterodoxy Goes Too Far: Why are some contrarian independents still refusing to support Harris?” You will hear about some of this stuff in the next Members Only episode. Until then…

Kmele’s brief:

Foster is … a libertarian who seldom, if ever, feels represented by a mainstream politician, though he insists that he could vote for a more moderate Democrat. Foster is most concerned about “the excesses of the culture war” and how, “when they become a part of the bureaucracy, whether it’s on a university campus or within the federal government, [they] can actually become weirdly totalitarian,” he told me. He thinks the left is blind to the fact that it, too, has “a profound capacity for the abuse of power.” He pointed, among other examples, to “gender issues,” the movement to defund the police, and the criminal prosecutions of Trump, which, he said, have “a political taint” to them.

People who are concerned about Trump “deranging institutions” should have a similar concern about Democrats, Foster said. He brought up the idea floated by some prominent voices on the left of packing the U.S. Supreme Court with more justices in order to dilute the conservative majority, which he believes shows an alarming disregard for norms that goes unnoticed because “there’s a greater sophistication on the part of Democrats that makes it a lot less obvious that some of the things that they’re trying to do are bad.”

Coleman’s:

Hughes told me, when we spoke in September, that he sees Trump’s behavior around January 6, 2021, as “disqualifying.” Yet he listed two reasons he couldn’t bring himself to support Harris. The first had to do with a growing sense that the Trump threat had simply been exaggerated. “If I really felt that Trump was going to end American democracy or run for a third term if he wins, or start a nuclear war, I would vote for Kamala in a heartbeat,” he said. And indeed, he voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, because he found Trump’s rhetoric so alarming. “He spoke loosely about putting Muslims on a registry. He spoke loosely about using nukes,” he recalled. “I would’ve voted for basically Bugs Bunny over him.”

Despite his fears of Trump’s fascist tendencies, Hughes found the reality of the Trump administration much less dramatic. “He governed a lot more like a normal Republican,” he said. “In fact, many of his policies would be seen as not right-wing enough.” He’s learned, he told me, to “discount” much of what Trump says: “It’s basically just his businessman instinct. He literally talks about this in The Art of the Deal. You start by saying something crazy, and then you walk your way back to a point of leverage in negotiations.” […]

When it comes to foreign policy, “I haven’t seen even a 10-second clip of her impressing me by analyzing anything going on in the world related to geopolitics, foreign conflicts and so forth,” he told me. “I have basically zero signals of her competency as a manager or executive.”

TCW’s conclusion:

And yet, to a disconcerting degree, it all seems beside the point—as though we are debating the temperature of the water and the features and specifications of the life rafts as our proverbial ship is sinking. […]

As Mark Lilla, one of the [Harper’s] letter’s other writers, noted recently in The New York Review of Books, this election is not ultimately about change or policy, or even about blocking Trump; “it is more fundamentally about preserving our liberal democratic political institutions.”

If we cannot manage that, with whatever flawed custodian we have been provided, we may look back on these nuanced policy discussions as an extravagant luxury that we squandered.

Others publicly unsatisfied with Kmele’s reasoning here include Cathy Young, Patrick “Patterico” Frey, and (reportedly) Jesse Singal.

* The charge of insufficient alarmism was also thrown at Michael Moynihan Friday by the Real Time tag-team of Tim Miller and Bill Maher. Here they are in the Overtime segment, talking about election denial and other topics with, er, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D – Maryland):

* Speaking of Cathy Young, on Friday she continued her long-running series policing the heterodoxosphere for bad politics, this time for Persuasion.:

But in recent years, and perhaps especially in this election season, there has also been a troubling rapprochement between parts of the formerly liberal “antiwoke” movement and the blatantly illiberal right, specifically Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” brand of populism. The unfortunate result is that a movement which should be opposing right-wing authoritarianism as much as the left-wing kind is, too often, de facto boosting Trumpian populism—by attacking only the left while ignoring threats to a free society from the right; by taking an “anti-anti-Trump” stance that saves most of its hostility for Trump critics; and, in some cases, by actively embracing Trump, either as “the enemy of my enemy” or even as an active good. […]

The Free Press, which published [Martin] Gurri’s essay [about voting for Trump], is not exactly pro-Trump (it also ran an anti-Trump essay by veteran journalist Joe Nocera on the same day, though it got about one-sixth the “likes”); but its general tenor exemplifies a milder form of Trump-enabling. […]  It’s not that The Free Press never challenges pro-Trump narratives (a recent investigative piece debunked Elon Musk’s conspiracy theory that the Biden administration was shuttling illegal immigrants to swing states in order to turn them blue). But the site’s overall anti-anti-Trump leanings—conservative activist Chris Rufo even called it a “beautiful off-ramp” for people defecting to the anti-woke right—are unmistakable.

* BTW, Free Press honcho Bari Weiss (#89, #115, #159, #180 & #187) on Wednesday published a piece characterizing, if not quite showing, how her allegedly Trump-enabling staff actually plans to vote. Excerpt:

We did, however, poll our staff at our recent retreat. We didn’t do it with the expectation of sharing the results. Rather, we did it on account of a relentlessly curious producer who took advantage of the fact that we were trapped together on a boat on the Hudson River. […]

The staff of The Free Press is split almost exactly three ways in this election: between Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and, well, neither (abstaining, writing in their preferred candidate, or remaining undecided). Yes, there are still undecideds! In other words, our editorial staff is mixed. Just like the country we write about. 

* How will Eli Lake (#52, #65, #141, #174, S.D. #51, #326, #368, #407, Members Only #184) vote? Beats me, but Free Press lovers and haters will each have material to take from his latest, “The Art of the Bullshitter,” which is also an Honestly episode. Snippet from the written:

I used to think the proper response to Donald Trump’s bullshit was through the sober, fact-based lens of journalism. But, over the past decade, I’ve changed my mind. I now think that asking journalists to pour the best years of their lives into fact-checking him is as daunting and pointless as asking Siskel & Ebert to review the entire Pornhub back catalog.

Most Trump supporters know it’s fake, and they don’t care. In fact, Trump’s propensity for bullshit is not a political liability, it’s a superpower. 

Let me explain. It’s not true that Haitians in Ohio were eating the cats and dogs. It is true that a lot of migrants have been arriving into the country illegally. And that’s an awkward fact for the Democrats in an election year. They’d rather the electorate look elsewhere, but Trump’s bullshit about eating cats forced voters to face a truth his opponents wished to conceal. 

* Have you not heard enough about the insufficiently alarmed? Well, Shikha Dalmia is back, being interviewed by Yascha Mounk (#124, #195) about why she just had to leave libertarianism behind. Excerpt (bolding and asteri*king will be mine):

The Libertarian Party has been completely taken over by the MAGA wing*, but the mainstream libertarian movement didn't quite line up behind Trump like some conservatives did, right? And yet, there is not a single Never Trump libertarian you could name**…. The neoconservatives and the paleoconservatives have actually spawned Never Trump movements. They are rump movements. They have broken away. But mainstream libertarianism could not actually support a single Never Trumper***. There is no major intellectual among libertarians who is identified as a Never Trumper****. The closest is George Will, and he works for a mainstream publication, The Washington Post. He doesn't work for a libertarian outfit. […]

That was the breaking point for me with libertarianism. They just did not take the threat of Trump seriously enough*****.

Some notes:

* The Mises Caucus wing of the Libertarian Party failed to nominate its preferred presidential candidate, losing out to Chase Oliver, who is widely loathed by the Mises types; thus suggesting the takeover was less than complete.

** “Justin Amash.”

*** So much here depends on the meanings of “mainstream libertarianism” and “support” and “Never Trumper,” but longtime Cato executive vice president David Boaz was, from National Review’s January 2016 “Against Trump” issue, to his dying days this very year, a very well supported mainstream Never Trumper.

**** See the preceding on both the specific counter-example and the definitions problem (“major intellectual,” “is identified as,” etc.). I have neither the status of nor aspiration to any of those terms (self-identifying as “Never Trump” would be about as sensical for me as “Never Bernie”; I am just not tethered to political parties), but I have also never been shy about sending Trump on blast, from “The Idiocracy Candidate” to “The Case Against Trump” to “J.D. Vance Completes Trump's Ideological Takeover of the Republican Party.” I have also been free to praise when appropriate. Put another way, there were (and are) plenty of people at the mainstream libertarian organizations Cato and Reason who have felt unconstrained about criticizing Trump’s voluminous anti-libertarian record; perhaps the perceived problem is that they fail to sew a big “NT” on their sweaters.

***** No use arguing with the eye of the beholder, but some publication dates: 12/2015, 10/2016, 03/2017, 05/2017, 03/2018, 06/2018, 05/2019, 02/2020, 04/2020, 04/2021, 10/2022, 10/2024.

* Photo break:

* Forgot to mention in Friday’s email that Moynihan last week went on the insanely popular Triggernometry podcast, to talk about the election, the candidates, and the media:

OK, that’s enuff! Walkoff music continues a recent theme: