- Windows has deprecated WordPad, which makes my life more difficult;
- David French on a German thinker, Carl Schmitt, and the friend-enemy distinction, and how it informs current American politics;
- Latest thoughts from Heather Cox Richardson, about the cancellation of foreign aid, and Connie Willis, about Trump and the California wildfires;
- Music: Bob Dylan’s “Restless Farewell,” and Joan Baez’s sublime cover.
Microsoft Windows stopped me in my tracks a couple days ago to update itself, which took 10 minutes or so of downloading, then installing, the updates. And when I was able to use my computer again, I quickly discovered that they deprecated WordPad! WordPad is gone! This is extremely irritating. I Googled and found a statement from MS about how everything can be done with Word or Notepad. Well yes, but with more effort. Word wants to automatically instantiate http links; I write posts in text to copy into WordPress. NotePad is plain text, which entails hitting returns for every spacing between paragraphs, that WordPress will then require me to take out. Just now, I’ve compiled this post in NotePad, and will now copy here. Let’s see how this works. …Later: drafting posts in NotePad, and then copying into WordPress, seems to work. For now.
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Another variation on the idea that human nature has split into two. Conservative/progressive, tribal/cosmopolitan, whatever. A running theme here.
NY Times, David French, 26 Jan 2025: How a German Thinker Explains MAGA Morality. (Gift link.) (In the print paper today, under the headline “Us and Them Is All the Rage”)
French starts by noting how many of his friends have changed over the last decade. “They’ve gone from supporting Donald Trump in spite of his hatefulness to reveling in his aggression.” And, “what we’ve been witnessing in the last decade is millions of Americans constructing a different moral superstructure.” And then discusses the writings of Carl Schmitt. His key idea, from a 1932 book, is the “friend-enemy distinction.”
One of liberalism’s deficiencies, according to Schmitt, is a reluctance to draw the friend-enemy distinction. Failing to draw it is a fool’s errand. An enduring political community can exist only when it draws this distinction. It is this contrast with outsiders that creates the community.
French comments,
Schmitt was partly right. The friend-enemy distinction is an aspect of human nature, and we are constantly tempted to yield to it, to rationalize it and to indulge it. Rather than resist it, we want to find some way to make it right, often simply to preserve our self-conception that we are moral and decent people.
He was also right that the friend-enemy distinction is ultimately incompatible with the liberal democratic project. Pluralism seeks to create a community in which historical enemies can live in peace and flourish side by side. If the friend-enemy distinction is an essential feature of human nature, how can pluralism survive?
And then how the founders understood this, and tried to take it into account in their formulation of a nation built on equality. Later in the piece, French invokes themes that echo Lakoff’s idea that a government has a moral obligation to provide for all its citizens.
Virtue ethics certainly recognizes the existence of enemies, but it still imposes moral obligations on our treatment of our foes. The virtues Franklin listed are not simply the way you love your own political tribe; they are universal moral obligations that apply to our treatment of everyone.
Demonstrate these virtues, and your enemies can live with dignity and freedom even when they lose a political battle. When your enemies show the same virtues, you can still enjoy a good life even when you lose. That’s the social compact of pluralism. In a decent society, no defeat is ultimate defeat, and no victory is ultimate victory. And in all circumstances, your fundamental human rights must be preserved.
But this is not where we are. We are here:
Dive too deeply into the friend-enemy distinction, by contrast, and it can become immoral to treat your enemies with kindness if kindness weakens the community in its struggle against a mortal foe. In the world of the friend-enemy distinction, your ultimate virtue is found in your willingness to fight. Your ultimate vice is betraying your side by refusing the call to political war.
You see this principle at work in Trump’s decision to pardon or commute the sentences of the Jan. 6 rioters and to revoke Secret Service protection from one of his former national security advisers, John Bolton, and from one of his former secretaries of state, Mike Pompeo. Friends can get away with violent crimes. Bolton and Pompeo publicly criticized Trump, and now they’re enemies who have to pay the price.
The United States was built on principles to overcome the base tribal human nature. But human nature is winning out, and Trump is doing his best to undermine and defeat those principles.
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So much to keep up with every day, which is by their design. Let’s check in with my favorite commentators.
Heather Cox Richardson, January 24, 2025
The Guardian reported today that incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio has ordered a halt to almost all foreign aid, with the exception of military assistance to Israel and Egypt. The Guardian notes that this order is likely unlawful, since Congress sets the budget and in 1974 declared it illegal for the president to impound funds. Still, a source foresaw the end of the global influence the U.S. has had since World War II, telling The Guardian: “Freezing these international investments will lead our international partners to seek other funding partners—likely US competitors and adversaries—to fill this hole and displace the United States’ influence the longer this unlawful impoundment continues.”
As Peter Baker of the New York Times notes, new president Donald Trump is trying to break NATO by demanding that members increase military spending to 5% of their nations’ economies, although the U.S. currently spends about 3% of its GDP on defense. If we were to meet that requirement, Baker points out, the U.S. would have to increase its defense budget by $567 billion a year. Isabel van Brugen of Newsweek reports that an Italian news agency says that Trump intends to pull about 20,000 U.S. troops from Europe and wants Europe to pay to maintain the rest.
Trump has undertaken to dismantle the postwar democratic government at home, too. He has stopped the funding for repairing roads, bridges, airports, and ports that passed Congress in a bipartisan vote in 2022, as well as taken away funding for new solar manufacturing plants and other new systems to address climate change.
He has frozen all travel and communications at the Department of Health and Human Services, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. “We’ve never seen anything like this,” one researcher told Dan Diamond, Lena H. Sun, Carolyn Y. Johnson, and Mark Johnson of the Washington Post. “This is like a meteor just crashed into all of our cancer centers and research areas.”
It’s hard not to see Trump as a foreign agent bent on destroying the United States.
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Connie Willis, on Facebook 27 Jan 2025: Trump Picks a Fight with Colombia
Long post, concerning Colombia with many details, and Trump’s idiocy.
-Trump went to California about the fires and said to Governor Newsom (and no, I am not making this up) “The trees are loaded with water. They suck that water out of the ground. It’s called management of the floor. We shouldn’t be in a position where you have tumbleweed that’s dry as a bone. Even tumbleweed can be nice and green and rich and it’s not gonna burn. You don’t even have to remove it. It’s not gonna burn. But it’s just dry. So I hope you can all get together and say I’m so happy with the water that’s gonna be flowing down.”
–He also said, “Suppose they let the water flow. They didn’t let the water flow.”
–Former Republican Fred Wellman responded: “The dumbest motherfucker on Earth is President.”
–Just in case you don’t know about tumbleweeds, they are Russian thistles that are, in fact, green, and then, after they die, they become tumbleweeds. There is no way to make them green again just by giving them water. Also, Trump doesn’t seem to understand that certain sections of the United States are deserts.
–Trump also objected to the fact that people can’t go back into their burned houses until the hazardous waste is removed. He didn’t know what hazardous waste was and asked repeatedly what it was. He said people should be able to go back home right now.
But Trump has always been an idiot.
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I was never a Bob Dylan fan, exactly; I was a Joan Baez fan (rather by accident), and admired her songs including her renditions of Bob Dylan’s songs like this one. And admired his songs second-hand.
Bob Dylan’s version:
Joan Baez’s version:
Dylan is sincere. Baez is sublime.
