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To set the table, here’s an excerpt from a July 2024 post titled “The Two Great Northern Migrations of the Early 20th Century”:

These two northward treks - whites out of Appalachia and blacks out of the Delta - cemented American music’s distinctiveness, but they also changed the face of our society in a more broadly sociocultural sense.

Both were emblematic of the American spirit in the same sense that, in the previous century, Americans of various types acted on the urge to see what kinds of possibilities lay to the west of the settled states they and their forebears had been living in for a few generations. It’s the quest for a brand new start, for an opportunity to invent one’s own way of life.

The great white migration was mainly about Appalachians wanting something other than coal mining work and tar paper shacks tucked into the hollers.

I’ll be bringing music into this general discussion, because, as I say, that was the first lens through which I learned about this and acquired the tools to ponder its significance.

Nashville was a thriving metropolitan area by 1925, when the WSM Barn Dance, a Saturday night radio broadcast changed its name to the Grand Ole Opry and established the template for similar shows out of Shreveport, Louisiana, Cincinnati and Chicago. The program had come out of record companies’ search for musical acts performing old-time string band music. That in turn had its roots in the 1893 paper that University of Wisconsin history professor Fredrick Jackson Turner presented to his academic field’s annual meeting. Turner posited that, with the most recent US census (1890), it could be seen that there was no more American frontier. The population was spread evenly enough from coast to coast , and there were enough urban areas on out to the Pacific, that the very character of the nation was now undergoing a profound change. This idea filtered down through the various levels of American culture and led to the search by record companies mentioned above, as well as revived interest in such quickly disappearing features of American life as quilting bees and old-time recipes.

But the city fathers in Nashville were none too keen on the effect this hillbilly music was going to have on the city’s image. It had heretofore had a rather buttoned-down atmosphere.

As alluded to above, much of the audience for hillbilly music, which waxed fondly about an idealized version of rural southern life, actually wanted to get out of there.

There’s something undeniably hokey about country music. George D. Hay, the WSM Barn Dance’s emcee, laid on the schtick for an audience keen to have its demographic identity affirmed and distinguished from others:

Hay billed himself as “The Solemn Old Judge”, though he was only 30 years old and not a judge^[3] The Barn Dance was broadcast after NBC‘s program Music Appreciation Hour, featuring classical music and grand opera. One day in December 1927, the final music piece on the Music Appreciation Hour included the sound of a rushing locomotive. After the show ended, “Judge Hay” began WSM Barn Dance with this announcement:

Friends, the program which just came to a close was devoted to the classics. Doctor Damrosch [host of the program] told us that there is no place in the classics for realism. However, from here on out for the next three hours, we will present nothing but realism. It will be down to earth for the ‘earthy’.

Hay then introduced a man he dubbed “The Harmonica Wizard,” DeFord Bailey, who played his classic train song, “The Pan American Blues,” named for the Louisville and Nashville Railroad passenger train The Pan-American. After Bailey’s performance, Hay commented, “For the past hour, we have been listening to music taken largely from Grand Opera. From now on we will present the Grand Ole Opry.”^{[4] [5]}

And early on, Opry and Hayride performers took to stage attire that was long on glitz meant to evoke a sparkling version of an out-on-the-range kind of vibe. Think typical Western movie costumes kicked up to a Liberace level.

It was out of this milieu that Dolly Parton began her trek to beloved-icon status.

I would imagine that she and her longtime television partner Porter Wagoner readily identified with each other early on. Like Dolly, he progressed in his career with the resources at hand:

His first band, the Blue Ridge Boys, performed on radio station KWPM-AM from a butcher shop in his native West Plains, where Wagoner cut meat.^[2] In 1951, he was hired by Si Siman as a performer on KWTO in Springfield, Missouri.^[4] This led to a contract with RCA Victor.^[1]

With lagging sales, Wagoner and his trio played schoolhouses for the gate proceeds . . .

Dolly has said that she’s proud of the hillbilly label. Her song “My Tennessee Mountain Home” bears this out eloquently.

In that 2024 post, I alluded to the fact that lots of Appalachian migrants to the north were keen to make the trek. But there was always a pride in roots that they brought with them. It’s why Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” was such a big hit. The hollers in which these songsters grew up were unique places, and memories of childhoods spent in them have surely been a source of comfort for those who sought opportunities in unfamiliar northern cities.

What made Dolly different from a lot of her country contemporaries was her clean living. Married to the same man for sixty-one years. No problems with alcohol or drugs. Some of the other great divas of classic country, such as the above-mentioned Loretta Lynn, and the great Patsy Cline, experienced turmoil such as the pressures of the road, and were, in both those cases, married to difficult men. But they didn’t struggle with personal dissolution.

Now, the men of country dealt in dissolution regularly and made it part of their artistic output. There’s probably never been as stark an example of that as Webb Pierce’s “There Stands the Glass.”

Dolly wrote in a country idiom, but she covered the subject of love in more mainstream ways. Her greatest song, “I Will Always Love You” is a gentle goodbye, a quiet acknowledgement of lives that, after some trying, cannot be made one.

What made her able to partner with figures from more of a rock background such as Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris and segue into movies was her widely recognized open-heartedness. She was proud of her demographic background, but keen to embrace humanity at large.

That open-heartedness is also apparent in her literacy work and the way she’s treated Dollywood employees.

She was the kind of figure destined to transcend the milieu that had brought her to wide public attention. She was also savvy and smart as a whip, which eased her integration into more mainstream entertainment ventures.

It was an amazing journey. It’s almost as if she knew from the days on the mountainside that she was destined to be what we call an American original. She has attained that status handily, and now occupies a place in a rarified pantheon.

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Canada, of all places.

A post-American visiting our northern neighbor would feel himself or herself to be in more familiar surroundings than in any other country. Their customs, language (save for Quebec, its predominance of French language and culture causing a recent controversy still surrounded in uncertainty, but which gave the Very Stable Genius an opportunity to flat-out call Prime Minister Mark Carney a liar), music (consider Oscar Peterson and Joni Mitchell for starters), whiskey and other features of North American life are not at all foreign. This is not to say there’s not a Canadian spin on these things, but to a degree that delights but doesn’t confound.

Canada stepped up to help us significantly in the Afghanistan war, providing over 40,000 troops, 158 of whom died.

But now we’re in a full-blown trade war with our neighbor. Pretty much anyone besides the drool-besotted understands that the Very Stable Genius has committed an unforced error on steroids. National Review called it pointless. The Wall Street Journal called it “The Dumbest Trade War in History.”

Look, Canada’s politics tend to lean left more than I like to see in a Western nation. But for crying out loud, it’s not like it’s Cuba. Mark Carney may have preoccupations like the climate the silly recognition of a Palestinian state, but he’s basically a technocratic centrist with a rich knowledge of economics. He conducts himself like a gentleman, in sharp contrast to the post-American president.

And so, at the latest juncture of retaliation and counter-retaliation,

. . . a new tariff of 50 percent is going into effect on Crown Royal whisky, Canadian milk, ice hockey equipment, cement, furniture, lighting fixtures, various tools, fence components, lumber, wood moldings, and a variety of plywood, fiberboard and veneered panels, among other goods. This is separate from the existing U.S. tariffs on steel, lumber and automobiles.

The prime minister of Ontario minces no words regarding his assessment:

[Doug] Ford highlighted that Trump keeps a portrait of Reagan near his desk and stated, “He’d be throwing up on him from the picture if he knew what was going on, spinning around in his grave right now.”

“He should maybe take that picture off the wall and move it somewhere else,” Ford continued. “Because right now, Ronald Reagan would be disgusted with President Trump.”

And of course the VSG had to chime in with a taunt about renaming Lake Ontario.

And speaking of lying, this whole thing is the result of a whopper the VSG has told about dairy tariffs:

To support his plan to increase tariffs, President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that the Canadian government charges U.S. farmers a 250% or 270% tariff on dairy products exported to Canada. That’s misleading. There are rates that high on the books, but they would only be charged if U.S. exports exceed predetermined tariff rate quotas, which the dairy exports don’t come close to meeting.

Below these quotas, American dairy sales to Canada face zero tariffs. The United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, or USMCA, a trade agreement negotiated by the first Trump administration, had raised the thresholds for the protectionist tariffs. Some American industry stakeholders argue that Canadian regulations impede the United States’ ability to reach these quotas, but U.S. dairy has never faced triple-digit tariffs.

During an interview with Sharyl Attkisson of Sinclair that aired on March 16, Trump claimed, “Nobody says that with Canada, that they charge, our farmers – think of this. They have for dairy products, some dairy products, 270% tariff. Nobody knows that.” He continued, “So we want to sell milk into Canada, and they throw a 270% price increase on the milk.”

Trump has repeatedly made similar claims regarding Canadian tariffs on U.S. dairy exports.

On at least two occasions, he has wrongly claimed that the Biden administration had allowed the tariffs to increase. “In Canada, we find that they’re charging us over 200% for dairy products. You know about that. And when I left, we had that well taken care of, but under Biden they just kept raising it — very difficult to deal with the Canadian representatives, 250 percent for dairy products, tariff,” Trump said during a discussion with reporters in the Oval Office on March 7. The over-quota rates on dairy exports to Canada as of January 2025 are virtually identical to the last year of Trump’s first term in office in 2020.

In 2024, the U.S. exported more than $1.1 billion in dairy products to Canada, a nearly 55% increase in exports since 2020. None of it was subject to triple-digit Canadian tariffs. Canada is the second-largest international recipient of U.S. dairy behind Mexico.

Let’s dive a little deeper:

Chuck Nicholson, associate professor in the department of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explained to us in an email that “both the US and Canada use a system of tariffs for dairy products that includes two elements, ‘Tariff Rate Quotas’ (TRQs) and ‘Over-Quota Tariffs.’” He continued, “TRQs indicate an amount of product that can enter the country at low tariff rates (or, in the case of US dairy products to Canada, generally zero tariffs).”

The tariff schedule published by the Canada Border Services Agency shows that for nearly all dairy products, American producers are fully exempted from paying tariffs so long as the quantity of exports remains below the quota (this is denoted by the label “UST” under the “Applicable Preferential Tariffs” column in the document).

Nicholson told us that the Canadian government implemented import quotas to increase the competitiveness of the nation’s domestic dairy industry through a supply management system. By limiting dairy imports through quotas, the Canadian government aids domestic producers by increasing minimum dairy prices. Kirsten Hillman, the Canadian ambassador to the U.S., told CBS News on March 9 that the quotas seek to “protect our farmers and families.”

As we’ve explained before, tariffs are customs duties paid by domestic importers — in this case, Canadian processors, distributors and retailers purchasing American dairy products. Therefore, Nicholson told us that over-quota tariff rates in the triple digits ensure that American imports stay below the quotas.

Nicholson also noted that “the US has a similar system of trade protection for dairy products, albeit with generally lower Over-Quota Tariff rates.” For example, he told us that while butter imported from Canada to the U.S. faces no tariffs under a predetermined quota threshold, it is subject to over-quota tariffs of about 24%, or up to 39%.

The current tariffs and quotas for the dairy industry were put in place by the USMCA — a trade agreement that Trump negotiated and signed into law in 2020. The USMCA replaced the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.

This is the second time in eight days Trump has defecated on a key US alliance. These toddler hissy fits not only insult the nations in question and leave ill feelings that are going to be hard to soothe, they endanger the US in a hair-raisingly volatile world. Who the hell is going to want to come to our aid when we’re directly violated?

Mr. President, Mark Carney is a good man. Volodomyr Zelensky is a good man. Kim Jong Un is not.

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At a gym where I was a member several years ago, I frequently ran into a guy I knew from a couple of other contexts. He’d come in with a group of guys. He was much smaller - shorter, and less buff, in fact, constantly striving to fend off chubbiness (he was a chef) - than the rest. They all talked trash and laughed a lot when they went through their training routine.

When the others were standing around him, coaching him through a particularly arduous rep of some exercise, these sinewy giants would stare at him and yell, “Where you at, Little Dawg?” They were checking in on his immediate mental and attitudinal state as he mustered the requisite perseverance to complete the motion.

The above vignette is from the first installment in this irregular series of check-ins on the state of my faith walk.

I don’t know that there’s a lot of evolution or spiritual formation to be detected over the course of the installments in this series. Maybe that’s because progress tends to look more like stasis to the person doing the progressing. One can feel like a spry thirty-year-old in outlook while it’s obvious to everyone else that you’re on in years.

And maybe checking for progress is a counterproductive way to go about spiritual formation. I’m aware that not only do you not have to clean up to come before Christ, you can’t. That seems to be what is meant by laying one’s burden at the foot of the cross.

But let me refer you to something I said in a March installment of the “Little Dawg” series:

I know dying to self is a pretty basic tenet of Christian faith. But I honestly don’t know how to do it.

I’m reminded of a Tom Waits lyric: “If I exorcise my devils, well, my angels may leave too / When they leave they’re so hard to find.”

I do feel that I’m learning more about extending grace. I can feel myself stepping back in situations - like talking to a technical support or customer service person and not ripping his or her head off - and seeing a human being who, like me, is trying to hang on to his or her little piece of the planet, who is a bundle of desires and fears and glimpses of the something-else, and ought to be cut a little slack. (I still have considerable progress to make in this area regarding other drivers on the road.)

Why extend grace? The most obvious and immediate reason is that it makes life a lot more pleasant. You don’t go through the day with your guts grinding.

But there’s also the wonderful fact that that we have had grace extended to us, pressed down and flowing over. And maybe I’m called to extend it to myself no less than to my fellow human beings.

I don’t know that I mean by this embracing human messiness, but at lest not being surprised by it. That may come from seeing that my dad, about whom I’ve written in this series several times, for all his anger and swearing, had a God-inclined heart, was fiercely loyal to anyone and everyone in his life, and valued cultivation of the intellect. In fact, I think that the electrical storm of the heart that killed him was the culmination of his frustration with a world that wouldn’t conform to what he thought it should be.

So maybe my quotient for compassion has increased. But believe me, I’m not looking for any medals. I’m still besotted with all manner of crud.

If you’re going to look beneath the veneer, please do so with some grace. And you might want to wear knee-high rubber boots.

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This essay by Bonnie Kristian titled “Tackiness Is Not a Sin”weighs in on something I’ve written about a few times here at Precipice - namely, the kitsch of contemporary praise music, although she expands the scope of the matter to include other lifestyle accoutrements that invelvitably go along with a certain kind of faith walk:

Last week, Griffin Gooch was kind enough to interview me on his Substack about In Defense of Evangelicalism. And in both that conversation and a note he posted while ahead of time, Griffin shared a quote from my book that he really liked:

For all that there is to critique, evangelicalism has much to offer its own. We have the resources we need. Sure, there’s detritus too. Lots of saccharine knickknacks and badly acted movies. I don’t especially like contemporary Christian music and don’t understand why so many do. But honestly, who cares? Tackiness is not a sin.

Now, it goes without saying that American evangelicalism is a much-debated topic. There were many things I said in our conversation that readers might have found unexpected or provocative or what have you. And that’s why Griffin and I were both surprised when the line that raised the most questions out of more than 3,000 words was that last one:

Tackiness is not a sin.

I won’t link to the replies about this, though you can go poke around in Griffin’s comment sections if you really want to see them.¹ The gist, though, was that some readers saw in the line a rejection of the importance of aesthetics.

If we say tackiness is not a sin, they worried, we excuse bad art, ugly church buildings, theologically sloppy worship music, wooden acting and preachy plots in Christian books and movies.

If we say tackiness is not a sin, we give tacit approval to flashy, shiny things with nothing of substance inside—the very antithesis of the sober, martyr-proved beauty of the early church.

If we say tackiness is not a sin, we consent to our coreligionists reducing Christ victorious, who trampled down death by death, into a stupid, cutesy figurine.

Now, I understand these objections very well because—not to put too fine a point on it—I myself am an aesthetic snob. You can see it in that very quote, in which I note that evangelicalism has “saccharine knickknacks and badly acted movies” and that I don’t like “contemporary Christian music and don’t understand why so many do.”

And these are not mild opinions: Some friends of ours joke that my opinions are, like Altoids mints, “curiously strong,” and this is as true of aesthetics as everything else. You will never find a Christian wall meme in my house, never a Precious Moments statue, never the merest hint of Thomas Kinkade. I can speak to you at length on floor plans and upholstery and tile. And do not even get me started on the excesses of contemporary Halloween decor!

But as she draws close to the conclusion, we see that she asserts, per her title, that tackiness is not a sin. Consider Dolly Parton:

Dolly Parton, for instance, is deliberately tacky whether in sequins or gingham.

Nor is it always about wealth or price. Parton famously quipped about “how much it costs to look this cheap,” and tackiness is there in the old money vs. new money dynamic of The Great Gatsby. The word comes from the American South, where a writer in 1890 defined it as concerning “persons of low ideas and vulgar manners, whether rich or poor,” who display “an absence of style.”

She starts tying it together a few paragraphs later:

And I say that tackiness is not a sin because, while sometimes it is right to link aesthetics and ethics, beauty and truth, it is also possible to link them too tightly. The Bible speaks of this about Jesus—“He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him”—while declaring him truth itself. This is the rightful warning in many of our folktales too: The girl becomes a princess because of her kindness to a disgusting toad; the ugly old beggar is revealed to be a powerful king.

And I say that tackiness is not a sin because I do look at lots of median American evangelical culture and think it tacky. I’m not just being self-deprecating calling myself a snob. I am that beholder having those class-coded thoughts.

And yet: In my better—more gracious, kindlier, more Christ-like—moments, I want to say, because I know it to be true, that having good taste does not reliably correspond to the imitation of Christ, and that having bad taste is never a justification for looking down on someone.

At the Hedgehog Review, Anna Ballan argues that when the analytic branch of psychology threw the Freudian baby out with the bathwater:

W.H. Auden’s remark that Freud had become “a whole climate of opinion/under whom we conduct our different lives” has become something of a commonplace, but today it holds true only partially. We are all, in Philip Rieff’s lexicon, psychological men: We speak of triggers, defenses, attachment styles, and unconscious motives with a fluency that would have startled Freud’s most jargon-happy disciples.

But while the language we use is ostensibly analytic, our worldview is something like the inverse. Freud, read against the assumptions of our own therapeutic times, becomes uncooperative. The psychological culture popularized on screens often assumes several things: that you actually want to get better; that insight leads frictionlessly to change; that naming an issue defuses it; that the self is a project to be perfected. Freud assumes that a part of you—perhaps the most salient part—does not want to get better; that apparent insight can deepen the problem and naming an issue can intensify its grip; that the self is a kind of battlefield. If the therapy of today’s screen culture holds a mirror up to a curated self-image, actual therapy, Freud would insist, is more like a light held up over a swamp.

Freud’s influence in the United States reached its peak in the 1950s through the 1970s, when he became an unquestioned sovereign of American intellectual and cultural life. Between the arrival of Freudian émigrés and the publication of new, authoritative translations—not to mention propagation by Erich Fromm, Erik Erikson, and others—Freud’s ideas took the college curriculum and popular imagination by storm. One need only watch early Woody Allen films to see the analyst treated as a kind of oracle, spoken of with the reverence one would ordinarily reserve for a sage or a rabbi. By the 1980s and 1990s, however, Freud had been effectively dethroned from his mid-century prestige. The rise of psychopharmacology, beloved by insurance companies for its cost-effectiveness, combined with the comparative efficiency of approaches such as cognitive behavioral therapy, started to eclipse the slow and narrative-based art of analysis. Not that these forms of treatment need be pitted against one another—each has its place, and they can work in tandem—but the overall trend was decisive: The American mind turned toward the quantifiable quicker fix. Psychoanalysis largely retreated into private practice and the academic humanities, and Freud himself was thrown out with the bath water—his blind spots and failures fairly taken to task, and his more outré flights of theory met with groans rather than knowing smiles.

The language of pop psychology, meanwhile, continued its absorption into the mainstream. Therapy found its way onto daytime television and bestseller lists; Oprah, Dr. Phil, and the self-help industry translated clinical concepts into everyday language. The burgeoning wellness industry coupled psychology with consumerism, while some corporate HR departments adopted their own therapeutic dialect (all the better to cushion mass layoffs). By the 2010s, Tumblr and other social-media platforms had made psychological vocabulary a kind of lingua franca, if only for an expanding cohort of plugged-in users. Even as the diffusion of that vocabulary brought clarity or relief to many—a point not to be minimized—for young people especially it seemed to dissolve into an insight-devouring churn, a talking-about-feelings rather than a working-through-them. Therapy-speak had been gaining ground, but the Freudian strand of it, with its attention to ambivalence, defenses, and drives, had been gradually sidelined. In its place arose a thinner idiom, one that promised empowerment through perpetual scrolling and self-disclosure rather than a plunge into the murkier depths of psychic life.

How’s this for a squirm-inducing pronouncement?

The more articulate we are, the more elaborate and agile our evasions may become. Pathological symptoms are not random errors, after all: they are solutions the psyche has devised, protective compromises that maintain a precarious psychic equilibrium—a panic symptom that holds in abeyance a deeper grief, a chronic independence that protects against the anxiety of dependency, a rigid scruple that helps fend off an inconvenient desire.

My excerpts so far have been rather lengthy. In the case of Colin Gillette’s piece at Frontporch Republic titled “They Chose Computer Farmer,” I’ll just offer these paragraphs as the tease:

Anne Lamott, who I have come to regard as the patron saint of messy writers and emotional honesty, reminds her readers in Bird by Bird of Flannery O’Connor’s belief: if you survive childhood, you possess enough material to write for the rest of your life. Listening to our son talk in our kitchen, I recognized the peculiar anguish of adolescence, even if my journey through those years erected different landmarks . . .

Anne Lamott understood something true about adolescence, though I suspect she understated the matter. Surviving those years does not merely furnish stories for later use; it teaches a person which pains pass, which linger, and which quietly compost into the rich, fruitful soil. Lamott writes, “what people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here.” Perhaps that is what adolescent hardships should prepare us for—we don’t need to enter adulthood ready to change the world, but we should be mature enough to begin the lifelong work of repair.

Here’s a splash of cold water by Mark Leonard at Foreign Affairs titled “The Abandoned Order: Learning to Live in a Post-American World”. I’ll set the table with the first few paragraphs and then give you some particularly bracing assertions:

Five years ago, the Chinese housing market crashed, leaving thousands of apartment buildings unfinished across the country. A generation of Chinese citizens who had bet all their savings on indefinite expansion suddenly found themselves homeless. Over time, however, some intrepid people moved into the ruins of these edifices, setting up tents on the concrete floors, using bed sheets as walls, cooking on makeshift stoves. The Chinese call these abandoned structures lanwei lou, a phrase that literally means “rotten-tail buildings,” signifying a project gone awry, a plan in suspension. The inhabitants of rotten-tail buildings repurpose the old and improvise to find a way of surviving an economic storm.

The state of the Chinese housing market is a good metaphor for the U.S.-led rules-based international order. After decades of expansion, it, too, is being abandoned. Never fully accepted by China and Russia and resented by newly assertive middle powers, its main financial backers—the American people—have lost interest in underwriting its further development. And as in the case of China’s failed housing projects, no alternative provider is stepping in to take over.

A rotten-tail world is emerging, one in which states will have to adapt cunningly, improvise new uses for elements of the old order that remain valuable, and adjust swiftly to the dramatic decay of others. But too many leaders still act as if the old order can somehow be salvaged or even perfected. The UN General Assembly still meets every year, despite being increasingly sidelined from diplomatic efforts. The World Trade Organization carries on adjudicating trade disputes, despite a surge in protectionism. UN climate change conferences convene to chart an increasingly hopeless path to net-zero emissions. International working groups still meet to discuss grand plans for a two-state solution, even as the Middle East burns.

The United States’ allies, in particular, simply do not understand yet that Washington has withdrawn its support from the old order and from them.

Now for the bracing assertions:

In a marriage that has gone wrong, the ties that bound a couple together in good times—the house, the children, the dog—become the weapons they use to hurt each other in bad times. Likewise, in today’s geopolitics, states are increasingly turning the systems that once connected them—energy routes, semiconductor supply chains, financial infrastructure, shipping lanes—into weapons. A country’s control over chokepoints is becoming a key marker of its power, just like its GDP and the size of its military.

And

Two broad ways of dealing with this new world are emerging: the method of the architect and the approach of the artisan. Architects develop blueprints for order and try to mold the world to their designs, developing universal norms and anchoring security in multilateral institutions. Artisans, on the other hand, don’t assume they have the power or resources to build grand structures from scratch. Instead, they use improvisation and flexibility to cope with a world that doesn’t lend itself to sweeping plans.

And

Well before Trump’s second term, changes in the global power structure had hollowed out the old order. And the forces of disruption are likely to accelerate. The next decades will be defined by explosive changes and waves of crises, not a reversion to the old order or the creation of a new one.

“Explosive change and waves of crises.” That’s going to be rattling around in my head all day.

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I hadn’t intended to write about the VSG again so soon, but this must be remarked upon:

President Donald Trump ordered the Pentagon on Sunday to scale back annual joint military exercises with South Korea, saying the ally declined to help with the war against Iran and citing his good relationship with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.

Trump said in a social media post that the exercises, which began Monday, are not only costly but “send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile” to North Korea, which he said “has been unthreatening and respectful” during his time in the White House.

“Therefore, and based on the fact that it is too late to cancel, I have instructed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to substantially reduce the Joint Military Exercises!” Trump wrote. The president added that he recently asked South Korea’s president if they would join the U.S. in the “denuclearization” of Iran, “and they said, ‘No thanks!’”

The move is the latest example of the president appearing to turn against an ally in favor of a leader that previous administrations have cast as an adversary. Trump and others in his administration have also railed against NATO allies over perceived lack of support for his war against Iran, even as they seek to confront an increasingly aggressive Russia in the Baltic region.

It is also a sharp turnaround from how his administration has viewed South Korea in recent months.

In May, Hegseth praised the longtime ally for its “commitment to increase defense spending” and its “leadership in assuming primary responsibility for the security of the Korean Peninsula” during a meeting at the Pentagon.

“It demonstrates alliance burden-sharing that all of America’s partners would do well to follow,” the defense secretary added.

“Unthreatening and respectful.” That’s rich indeed, in light of the ballistic missile North Korea fired in the direction of Japan not even a week ago. But then maybe the VSG doesn’t give a diddly about Japan anymore, either:

The apparent closeness between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at their recent Beijing summit – along with Trump’s deferential posture toward Xi – sent shockwaves through Tokyo . . .

The anxiety is especially acute for Prime Minister Takaichi Sanae.

No modern Japanese leader has adopted a more explicitly pro-Taiwan or hawkish China posture than Takaichi. Echoing the late Abe Shinzo’s famous formulation that “a Taiwan contingency is a Japanese contingency,” she argued in the Diet last November that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” under Japan’s security legislation.

From Beijing’s perspective, such remarks crossed a political red line, as Taiwan is regarded by China as “the core of its core interests.”

Relations deteriorated sharply in the months that followed. Beijing imposed economic countermeasures – reducing flights, suspending seafood imports, and tightening rare earth export controls – while cooling political exchanges with Tokyo.

Yet through it all, Takaichi held firm. The broader assumption underpinning her position was that Washington would continue supporting Japan’s harder line on Taiwan.

That assumption now appears increasingly uncertain.

Before departing for Beijing, Trump publicly questioned whether Japan had become too forward-leaning on Taiwan.

“It’s a little bit of a difference. But, you know, there’s a lot of support for Taiwan, from Japan and from countries from that area,” Trump said at the White House on May 11, referring to Tokyo’s increasingly robust support for Taipei, including Takaichi’s own remarks regarding a Taiwan contingency. At the same time, he downplayed the likelihood of a cross-strait conflict.

In Tokyo, the comments were widely interpreted as a sign that Trump was growing uncomfortable with Takaichi’s harder Taiwan posture. That perception was reinforced by earlier reports that, during a phone call with Takaichi on November 25, 2025, Trump privately cautioned Japan against provoking China unnecessarily.

And then there’s the personnel and materiel North Korea sends to Russia to support Russia’s rape of Ukraine.

Oh, wait, the VSG has already thrown Ukraine under the bus.

It was a year ago that Trump hosted Vladimir Putin for a summit in Alaska. It’s unmistakably clear that the VSG sees the world’s dictators as sitting at the cool kids’ table. In a 1980 interview with gossip journalist Rona Barrett, she asked him what distinguishes the supremely successful from everybody else and he replied that there are two kinds of people, those who have the killer instinct and those who don’t.

We’ve alienated Canada, Mexico, Europe, and now the Pacific rim. This is a fundamental shift in how America views itself, and is viewed, on the world stage. Trump is nothing but a mark to his idols, and the day will come when the US is directly threatened by one or more of them. Who’s going to come to America’s assistance? These erstwhile partners aren’t going to be keen on getting bitten again.

Many are trying to figure out how to ride the VSG phenomenon out: Zelensky, Lee, Takaichi, European leaders, Carney, Sheinbaum, election officials in the United States, the tiny remnant of Republicans who haven’t succumbed to the sycophancy, and the minuscule swath of the post-American populace that inhabits the Narrow Sliver of Terrain. The Left, I suppose, is also trying to figure it out, for reasons of wanting to replace it.

But I fear that too much has been fundamentally altered. What kind of president would restore the faith of the above-mentioned allies? No nation wants to conduct diplomacy in roller-coaster style.

This is a day of great shame for the United States. But this guy sits in the Oval Office, Congress isn’t going to confront him, and so we can expect further disgraces sooner rather than later.

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A number of tomes have come along over the past seventy-plus years that have made pretty decisive cases for the notion that the West has run out of cultural steam: The Quest for Community: A Study in the Ethics of Order and Freedom by Robert Nisbet, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert Putnam, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat.

Anyone who absorbs the common argument resonating throughout these works will surely at least have his or her sunny outlook tempered. Beyond whatever circle of community one has fashioned for oneself, the disjointedness of overall society is palpable.

As the fact that life has stages bears on me with particular impact in recent months (most recently in my decision to undergo my third bionic rodeo next month, with my left knee to go the way of my right shoulder and hip), I find myself with a few crotchety-Boomer habits. One is the local evening news on television. I realize that my demographic is about all those programs have left for an audience. It’s kind of ironic, because the reporters and even anchors are ever younger and more fresh-faced, while late summer turns to autumn for the viewers.

But the fact that it’s live, and therefore constitutes real-time interaction, even though it’s one-way, gives a certain regularity and connection to the five o’clock hour.

My wife and I usually dine together, and we like to socialize. But, as I said above, beyond that ring of frequency seen friends, there’s an undeniable sense that structure ain’t what it used to be.

Today at his Substack, Marvin Olasky interviews Douthat and the two flesh out what I’m striving to get across here:

The Decadent Society is probably the most depressing public policy book ever. Not wrong, just depressing.

It’s a bit depressing, yes, but I try to be reassuring at the same time. Liberals are panicked constantly about Donald Trump and my fellow conservatives are panicked constantly about progressivism taking over, so I’m trying to tell both sides that we’re not poised for dictatorship or fascism, but rather that we’re stuck in these repetitive cycles where we make the same superhero movies and have the same culture fights over and over again. A sense of futility and even despair hangs over Western civilization, even though the West has never been richer or more prosperous.

This ironic scenario is the backdrop for my certain-stage-of-life entertaining of questions about satisfaction and regret, legacy and dying to self, and that aloneness that hovers. I’ve reflected on making my peace with having lived where I have in a couple of posts here, one titled “Place,” and one titled “More Thoughts on Place.”

In the second one, I wrestle with an observation Aaron Renn had made about the country’s regions and and one’s life choices:

[T]he first post on the subject . . . sets the table for the thoughts I’ll be working out here. I bring in such looks at small-community mid-America as Norman Rockwell’s 1943 painting “Freedom of Speech,” the 1927 sociological study of Muncie, Indiana titled Middletown: A Study in American Culture, and Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel Babbitt.

Now I want to turn to the recent observations of Aaron Renn. He’s a native Hoosier who lived in New York for a while when he was a scholar with the Manhattan Institute. He’s since moved back to Indiana, to Carmel, the fastest-growing of the Indianapolis suburbs . . .

In a recent post at his Substack titled “How To Pick a Place to Live,” he lists the following considerations for making that decision: organic connection, economic opportunity, amenities, cost, politics, personal considerations, and genuine affinity.

In the section on politics, he makes the interesting admission that Indy “is not really a great environment for someone like me these days.” He moved there, as he says in the section on personal considerations, because the great availability of services for his special-needs son was a major factor in his decision.

In the genuine affinity section, he warns that visiting a place and living there are two different critters:

A lot of people fall in love with the idea of a place, say a quaint small town in Vermont or even Austin, Texas or Miami, but then discover the reality of it is different than they thought. The cult classic film Funny Farm with Chevy Chase is a hilarious take on this expectations mismatch.

The experience of visiting a place is often very different from living there. You can visit a small town and love it. But if you moved there, you might discover that you exhaust its charms quickly. You’ll probably always be something of an outsider, even if you live there the rest of your life. You might discover that the culture is more stifling and conformist than you thought. (In a small town, simply doing something different from what everybody else does can be viewed as uppity, and be interpreted as you thinking you are too good for them). You might miss the amenities of a big city more than you think.

Similarly, you might like the idea of having a homestead farm type property, but radically underestimate how difficult it is simply to maintain your house and acreage, much less grow anything.

Cities too are like this. The experience of living in New York is completely different than the experience of visiting it.

You might also think you want to live somewhere that’s very aligned with your politics, is cheap, etc. For the conservative, a place like the Indianapolis suburbs checks a lot of the boxes. But if you are someone who’s used to being part of dense intellectual networks in DC, you might feel like you moved to a backwater. There’s a reason the majority of the conservative intellectual class lives in deep blue areas like New York or Washington.

Sometimes you don’t really know if you’ll fall in love with a place until you take the plunge and move somewhere. So you should be cautious and at least think about the possibility that you will hate it if you move to a place where you have no history, no organic connection, no network, etc. You might be falling in love with the idea of a place rather than the place itself. Or with the visitor experience of a place rather than the resident one.

For us, fortunately we love living in Carmel, though there are things we definitely miss about New York. In my ideal world, we’d have both our house here in Carmel and our old apartment back on the Upper West Side, and split time between them. This would be the perfect mix, as the cities are ideal complements for each other. But even if we had the money to do that, with a six year old, it’s not the right time to try to be enjoying New York City, so I’m very glad we are rooted here. If you follow me on X, you’ll see that I’m always posting about how great Carmel is. We don’t have any plans to leave and are acting like this is our long term home, though you never know where life takes you some time.

Here’s where, as a Boomer who is probably not up for any more moves for the foreseeable future, I have some peace-making to do with how things have turned out. I know in my gut I would have thrived better and been generally happier in a place with the “dense intellectual networks” of which he writes.

(For a while in the 1980s, the Hudson Institute had its headquarters in Indianapolis. At the time, I was president of the Indiana Council on World Affairs, and sometimes Hudson would host luncheons for the monthly guest speakers I lined up. Alas, Hudson eventually saw the need to have its main base of operations back on the east coast.)

Renn’s candor got more brutal in a tweet he posted yesterday:

People don’t move to these places because a) they are in the “Old North”, which is uniformly demographically weak (a hard and maybe insurmountable problem), and b) the culture repels people.

Places like Indiana and Ohio have incredible potential - but will probably never realize it because the people who live there like things they way they are. Indiana is actively supressive of the pursuit of excellence. If you want to be anything but mediocre - except in sports - it’s a tough social environment. Try to say that you want to improve your community to make it one of the nation’s best, and watch the naysayers come out. There’s remarkable little difference in terms of size, quality of built environment, and amenities between Indianapolis and Nashville, or to some extent Austin too. But the state of mind and the culture are completely different, at both the rank and file and elite level.

I get huge flack for saying, correctly, that Chicago’s biggest problem is that it attracts “B” tier talent vs the “A” talent on the coasts. Chicago is a quality of life city, not a where it happens city.

Go to Indiana and Ohio and you are now at tier “C.” These places are your basic middle America. You are definitely in the minor leagues. Most people want to live in more dynamic, growing, high opportunity, more forward looking places. Like Chicago, we have some of that (albeit less than the Windy City), but it’s not the norm. Yes, there are small towns where a group of people could move, buy up a bunch of houses and buildings, fix them up, start businesses, etc. and turn the place around and create a conservative community like the one in Moscow, Idaho. But it hasn’t happened, and it probably won’t happen. Because nobody here has that kind of ambition or drive. They don’t see or pursue possibilities. Big thinking is out of fashion - and is seen as out of line when someone dares do it.

Indiana is a bottom 10 state for educational attainment. And it’s one of the top 10 states for falling even further behind the country in education. It has cut education spending significantly, and is in the process of watering down its high school diploma standards. It’s far below national average incomes, and has been falling further behind. It’s a bottom ten state for health.

There’s no escaping this reality. And the cold, hard truth is that the people who live here like things they way they are. The top priority of the average Hoosier is probably to cut taxes some more rather than fixing any real problem in the state, much less trying to do something to make the place great.

There’s a lot I love about Indiana and its people. I don’t plan to leave it, but we have to face reality here. There’s no reason to think things are much different in Ohio.

One reason I like living in Carmel is that it’s a sort of exception case in the state. It’s a community where there’s been a vision to be great, ambitious leadership, etc. And where seeking to achieve things at the national or global level is welcomed. But, again, there’s a reason every other community around here says, “We don’t want to be like Carmel” as a sort of ritual incantation before their leaders propose a roundabout or some other improvement. Heaven forbid Indiana have more nice towns in the state. We wouldn’t want that!

I feel seen.

But today, Douthat offers a slightly different angle, saying that sometimes one is better off not wanting to be in some hub of raw ambition:

What opportunities are available for the have-nots?

The good news is that America is still a big sprawling, diverse country. It is still possible to work and live in a middle-sized or small American city instead of moving into a tiny apartment in San Francisco or New York and working incredibly long hours and knowing you’ll never have room or space to raise a family. But the search for power and influence pulls people to the Bay Area and the New York–Washington corridor. Once there, they scramble for influence and promotion and success in a world where those things are held by older generations that don’t want to give them up.

Maybe flyover country’s attractiveness lies in its having not forgotten to grapple with an essential question: Why is community important for human thriving?

Let me venture a possible answer: it’s only in community that we find purpose, and flyover country has done a better job of maintaining community.

I think it’s possible that Renn underestimates the number of interesting people (interesting by whatever one’s own criteria are) to be found in “third tier” locales. I play guitar in the local mandolin orchestra. We play dance tunes from the Renaissance, a Puccini piece, and some comtemporary classical mandolin pieces. There’s an old-books-and-wine emporium downtown owned by a couple I’m friends with that is a big draw. One can spend hours perusing their shelves. For years I taught jazz history and rock & roll history at our community college. Ethnic restaurants abound.

Is there a case that the atmosphere here is stultifying and that the city has an outsized notion of itself? Certainly, but that’s where individual agency comes in. I could have passed on the invitation to join the mandolin orchestra. Ditto some community theater I’ve done.

It seems to be kind of a back-and-forth cycle between enriching oneself (read, America!) and enriching the place where one lives.

The backdrop to our daily lives isn’t a pretty picture. But there’s still the opportunity to look at purpose.

It seems to me we’re here to become more human. Face it, if your fundamental impetus is anything else, you’re going to wind up a self-gratification machine, a closed circuit of onanistic energy. And, as C.S. Lewis puts it, you’ll be grumbling for all eternity.

Our Creator is all about connection between His creatures. He wants us to regard each other the same way He regards us. We are of infinite worth.

That means we have to connect or spiritually starve.

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We have to talk about the Very Stable Genius again. I’ve steered away from writing about him of late, and for about the same period of time, I’ve scrolled on with a shrug of the shoulders when I’ve come across his latest outrage. Not that I’m minimizing any of it. It’s just like an egregious bodily discomfort that one bakes into daily life. You have to keep moving through the arthritic flareups.

But the level of depravity is reaching new depths.

Consider how the Iran situation has devolved since I wrote this in June:

More unforced errors from the Very Stable Genius’s administration, most broadly the way the whole Iran war has been handled. There’s a pretty wide consensus across the global spectrum that post-America got taken to the cleaners with the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran. They’re keeping their missiles, keeping control of the Strait of Hormuz, and punting on the issue of proxy terrorist groups. How the “nuclear dust” (the VSG’s term for enriched uranium) is to be handled gets discussed in some vaguely envisioned future stage of talks.

And here’s the state of affairs in early August:

Iran has warned that it stands fully prepared to target key Israeli infrastructure and American energy installations throughout the region should it come under attack, following reports that Washington and Tel Aviv may be coordinating new military operations against the Islamic Republic.

A senior Iranian security official told Tasnim News Agency on Friday that Western media reports regarding prospective strikes on Iranian infrastructure represented "a kind of madness".

According to Tasnim, the official stated that Tehran has formulated comprehensive retaliatory strategies encompassing strikes on critical installations in Israel and US energy assets across the Middle East, asserting that Iran maintains complete readiness to execute these measures if provoked.

And a day ago the VSG shot off his mouth to the effect that Minnesotans were responsible for cyberattacks on municipal water systems in their state.

No, Occam’s razor is applicable here. The culprit is much more obvious:

And now, such attacks seem to have happened in six other states as well.

Or remember the one about radical vandals causing the peeling problem in the reflecting pool?

Man, has that backfired:

The Justice Department moved Friday to dismiss a criminal case charging a former Olympian with deliberately damaging the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, saying evidence prosecutors had recently received refuted the idea that vandals were to blame.

Government lawyers said in a 20-page court filing that additional documents provided by the Interior Department since the indictment of David Hearn show that the damage was the result of a botched installation by a contractor as well as “the rush to complete the project prior to events associated with the America 250 celebration in the weeks surrounding Independence Day 2026.” In addition, a recent visual inspection revealed damage throughout the pool, including in the middle — where prosecutors say a vandal would not likely have attempted to peel the lining.

“Given all of this newly discovered information, it is difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool to vandalism, let alone to establish that fact beyond a reasonable doubt,” said the filing from U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, which asked a judge to formally dismiss the case.

Where does Mr. Hearn go to get his reputation back?

Then there’s the way the VSG makes it clear the continuing ravaging of Ukraine by Russia is not what comes to mind for him when he thinks about Ukraine:

Aaron Rupar

@atrupar

20h

Trump: “Ukraine has very rich, very fertile soil in terms of rare earth. We have a contract signed having to do with rare earth, we can go in there at any time we want to take pretty much whatever we want.”

And then there’s the fact that he’s willing to forego Todd Blanche’s confirmation as actual Attorney General in order to dig in his heels regarding the anti-weaponization fund. Senators Tillis and Cornyn ain’t playin’:

President Trump’s threat to withdraw the nomination of acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is raising questions about the future of the “anti-weaponization” fund as well as the power of the Senate GOP.

Blanche faced a singular roadblock in winning GOP backing for his nomination: a call by many in the party to put in writing that the Justice Department would kill the $1.776 billion fund many see as a way for Trump to funnel money to his allies.

But weeks of negotiations over how to formally kill the fund have bubbled up into a feud, with Trump saying he would consider withdrawing Blancheto simply wait out the two lame-duck Republican senators holding him up, John Cornyn (Texas) and Thom Tillis (N.C.).

The move has left some Republicans bitter over Trump’s battles with his own party, particularly as the exiting Cornyn and Tillis take political cover for GOP colleagues who likewise oppose the fund but have not had to become the face of the issue.

For Democrats, it’s a sign Trump is simply not willing to give up the much-maligned fund as well as a related memo giving immunity to him, his children and businesses. That document would give Trump and his family broad protection, including over past tax filings.

I’m not the first to make the point that the reason it’s going to take a long, long time - at the least - for any possible repair of US relations with allies throughout the world is that those countries are considering that the American populace was willing to vote this grotesque being into office twice in a decade. What has become of American judgement?

It’s true he’s less well liked than ever. But who is in a position to stop him from inflicting this venality on us?

And what kinds of potential successors stand in the wings? There’s a thought to keep you up at night.

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I first wrote about this specifically in a post from May of last year. I still think about it from time to time.

Here’s one observation I’ve made that keeps it among my thought processes. There’s a music venue about twenty miles from my home that’s, I don’t know, maybe fifteen years old. When it opened, it brought in a certain type of heavy hitter: music legends that still had cache without overt oldies pandering. Brian Wilson, Art Garfunkel. Then they began focusing on the next tier: music legends that had had some kind of hugely successful album decades ago with which they’d become identified, even though their bodies of work were considerably more extensive. Example: I saw Little Feat, whom I’d seen twice in the mid-1970s, make a tour stop at this venue to play their entire Waiting for Columbus album in order, faithfully following the arrangements of the record (which was recorded live in the late 70s). Then it got a little more contemporary. I saw The Wallflowers, which was a happening band around the turn of the century, and was led, as it still is, by Bob Dylan’s son Jakob. Driving by the concert hall recently, I saw that the marquee was touting a show by a Queen tribute band.

I don’t get tribute bands at all. What does the conversation among attendees at their shows sound like as they leave the auditorium? Is the point to remark on how accurately the singer or guitarist nailed some particular musical passage? Is it just to enjoy some memories with the addition of a razzle-dazzle light show?

I suppose the argument can be made that tribute-band shows have their roots in the performances of big bands whose leaders had passed years earlier, but were still faithfully following the arrangements their aging fans had known and loved. Who wants to hear a Glenn Miller orchestra messing with “String of Pearls”? And Glenn’s progeny wear coats and ties, and there ain’t no stinkin’ light show.

But a difference is the aforementioned dazzle-dazzle. You can’t get an audience to come to a show without it. You even have a hard time getting people to a church service without it.

I’m going to switch gears for a moment and mention a fact I’ve touched on before - namely. that Americans don’t read books or even long essays or articles anymore.

Cultural atrophy is advanced in post-America. We want memorable artifacts from our own lifespans, but have no interest in what was being discussed in ancient Greece, medieval Italy, Restoration England or nineteenth century Russia. Which might be fine if there was some current output on a par with the works of those times.

Reading dense works is essential to cultivating worthwhile reflection and to more fully understanding human nature. For centuries, much has been written about virtue, vice, how to determine what’s important, and how to organize a just and thriving society. To lose that is to wipe out an advancement we so take for granted that we assume it’s a permanent backdrop to our own lives.

And now, with the advent of AI actors and singers, we’re a step closer to everyone being able to custom-tailor his or her own little distraction universe. Already been through the entirety of Otis Redding’s recordings but still hankering for that old soul feeling? Eddie Dalton is here to deliver.

Beyond movable thumbs and language, what makes human beings unique among God’s creatures?

If no one is reading Scripture, how does the concept of imago dei have any meaning for us? What is it about us that is indeed a replica of the mind of our Creator? Surely not our modern inclination to become machines that run on distraction.

I think that folks generally sense the cultural atrophy I mention above, and it leaves them starved for a substance that is in short supply. And it’s compounded by other factors, such as the federal government threatening prison time for state-level leaders who still uphold Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 of the Constitution*, where the Today show, which has broadcast unmolested from a studio on Rockefeller Plaza for 74 years, is interrupted by a racist wacko trying to get at one of the show’s hosts, where a president who ran on not getting the US into wars has gotten us into a humdinger, and where petroleum prices are rising again as a result.

It’s wild out there. Who isn’t looking for some kind of solace?

But I guess we’re still in the fun and games phase of our downward descent. There’s always a new tribute show coming to town.

But I daresay there’s coming a moment when we’ll wish we had given more thought to what is going to save us in a land that’s running on empty.

*The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

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At a gym where I was a member several years ago, I frequently ran into a guy I knew from a couple of other contexts. He’d come in with a group of guys. He was much smaller - shorter, and less buff, in fact, constantly striving to fend off chubbiness (he was a chef) - than the rest. They all talked trash and laughed a lot when they went through their training routine.

When the others were standing around him, coaching him through a particularly arduous rep of some exercise, these sinewy giants would stare at him and yell, “Where you at, Little Dawg?” They were checking in on his immediate mental and attitudinal state as he mustered the requisite perseverance to complete the motion.

The above vignette is from the first installment in this irregular series of check-ins on the state of my faith walk.

I’m still awkward at this.

I went to church as a kid, even got confirmed into the Presbyterian Church USA in ninth grade. I’ve gone over this before here, but suffice it to say that mine was a very typical middle class mid-twentieth century upbringing. My dad held several offices in the congregation. His life also included entrepreneurship - in his case, running a small manufacturing company. It also included sailing, golf and flying his beloved Cessna 210. Cigarettes and martinis. Republican politics. A flat-top haircut. Other forms of service, such as the Exchange Club Boy of the Month program, serving as a Boy Scout merit badge counselor, and recruiting high school students for his beloved Wabash College. Swearing and furiously roaring at me when he felt it was warranted.

How about my mom? She was a pretty decent portrait painter, but was so timid about it she never really charged what she was worth on commission projects. An avid reader, particularly Agatha Christie novels. A cook willing to stretch herself in planning meals for her family, usually with great success. A heavy smoker who, by the time I was an adolescent, was beset by several types of arthritis, osteoporosis, and breathing issues.

The point here is that faith was something we fit into an otherwise secular life. My parents were principled people, but they didn’t really couch their principles in faith-type terms. We certainly prayed before meals - the Catholic prayer my dad had learned from his German mother: Bless us O Lord, and these thy gifts, which we are about to receive through thy bounty, O Christ our Lord. Amen. To this day, it rolls off my tongue like my phone number. We didn’t attend church on Christmas Eve. We had neighbors in for shrimp cocktail and champagne.

I’ve also written about my headlong plunge into the dissolution that was so available in the 1970s. As Bruce Springsteen put it, “I took monthlong vacations in the stratosphere / and you know it’s really hard to hold your breath / Swore I lost everything that I ever loved or feared / I was a cosmic kid in full costume dress.”

So I didn’t have a background of intense devotional activity to prepare me when I got serious about a faith walk as a middle-aged man. Add to that the fact that I’m married to a spiritual-but-not-religious woman who attended a Sunday morning church with me for the first time a few weeks ago, when I underwent full-immersion baptism. (She actually also accompanied me to a Christmas Eve service a couple of years ago.)

I’m not very well-behaved for a committed believer. Those anger issues my father had? I learned them well. I’m maybe seven or eight percent better at extending grace to my fellow human being than I was twenty years ago.

I’m particularly impatient with any kind of bureaucracy. I got ejected from a hospital emergency room a couple of years ago. I couldn’t take the nurses’ annoying questions. More recently, my wife’s small business has been having phone issues with AT&T since February, and because she has to tend to the work of serving customers, it’s fallen to me to deal with the sundry departments and offices within that behemoth to try to get the situation resolved. I’m dealing mostly with people with a robotic mindset who can’t comprehend anything I say outside the parameters of their focus.

Some encounters I handle better than others, but I sure don’t seem to be able to muster consistent grace in navigating this Kafkaesque nightmare.

And I’m impatient. Very judgmental about other people’s driving when I’m on the public thoroughfares. I’ll even utter profanities when the water from the kitchen tap doesn’t heat up fast enough to suit me.

There’s also the (what I consider) dim prospects for our country. I don’t know how to purge my heart of contempt for the whole Trumpist movement, as well as for the grotesque hatred the Left has for the inherent order of creation. Each has left lasting deformities on American political life. It’s not like within two election cycles a feeling of normalcy will return. The damage runs deep.

There’s also the state of my health at age 70. I come by my arthritis honestly, per my recollection above about my mother. But it’s really affecting my ability to play guitar, which I do professionally, as well as stand for any length of time. I’ve also had a persistent abdominal pain for some years that has so far proven impervious to diagnosis. I can tell it affects my outlook.

What I still want to know more about how to do is laying these kinds of things at the foot of the cross.

I know the work has been done, and that I don’t have to be burdened by these tropisms. But why haven’t they disappeared?

I sense that there’s an unwillingness on my part to let go of something. I strive not to be self-absorbed. I write for periodicals and clients. I still play guitar in jazz settings. Maintain friendships. Serve in a variety of functions as a deacon at church. But there seems to be some kind of hurdle I have yet to surmount.

Would we call that pride? I’m not sure. I’m not proud of being a contemptuous hothead. Maybe it’s a matter of needing to deepen my level of confidence in God’s sustaining power. That was my dad’s problem. In a crunch time in his life, he’d belt out his favorite hymns and psalms when alone in his car, but in his gut he felt like the weight of his life was his to bear.

So I seek out insight regarding this, beginning, of course, with Scripture.

Maybe this is a prayer. Lord, deliver me from these chains. I know there’s more light where there are not fetters.

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I’m struck by the simultaneous occurrences of two events that have scads to say about the current state of (post?-) America in this summer of 2026.

Who doesn’t love the stories of foreign visitors here for the FIFA World Cup discovering Buc-ees, Bass Pro Shop, ranch dressing, national parks, barbecue and hospitality? These are undeniably magnificent things, each in its own way. We should thank our guests for inviting us to view them afresh.

And then there’s the flop of a national state fair on the National Mall in Washington. The idea itself is really cool, but was clearly misconceived. I can think of several notable things about several of our states. But the way the states are presented in the various booths comes off like a junior-high scrapbook project.

Part of the problem with the ill-fated fair is that it’s plopped down in a tragically sullied environment. Washington has been defiled by a bulldozed White House East Wing, a cage-fighting spectacle on the White House lawn, a reflecting pool that looks like the overflow from a septic tank, the now-thankfully-rectified addition of the Very Stable Genius’s name to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the prospect of a triumphal arch that would block the view of several revered landmarks, and those obscene banners of a scowling VSG hung at various cabinet-level department buildings.

I guess every country has its issues, countries being the aggregate of a particular cluster of fallen human beings. I therefore want to do what I can to ensure that my observations about where we are don’t amount to mere harping.

Still, much is unwell here.

I realize that politics is far from the most essential realm of human life, but it’s not unimportant. This is an election year, and decisions made in November will impact our lives, our range of choices about many things, and our bank accounts. And what of the two viable political parties from which we’ll (actually, make that “you’ll” since I’ll be staying home) do our choosing? One is in the death grip of a cult in thrall to an eighty-year-old toddler who cares for nothing but his glorification. The other is taking its century-plus leftward lurch to a new level with the victories of several Democratic Socialists of America members in primaries and general elections around the country.

There is the plethora of statistics about marriage and family formation rates, church attendance, teenagers’ lack of interest in cultivating their social selves, unfamiliarity with history and literature, and the withering of civic institutions. We’re now into the second or third generation of Americans who take the numbers for granted. How do we climb out from under that?

The folks here for the World Cup are getting a taste of one stratum of American culture, but what of that culture in its entirety?

What kinds of musical contributions has America made in this century? How do they stack up against Louis Armstrong, the Carter family, Duke Ellington, Arturo Toscanini, Frank Sinatra, Hank Williams, Chuck Berry, John Coltrane and Bob Dylan?

Where are the current century’s cinematic equals of Howard Hawks, John Ford, Billy Wilder, Frank Capra and Alfred Hitchcock, or the literary equals of Willa Cather, John Dos Passos, T.S. Eliot and Joan Didion?

So the question of how and why to be patriotic looms as we approach the 250th anniversary of our founding. Patriotism is generally deemed to be defined as love of country. And I suppose it’s a natural human sentiment to have a strong attachment to where one’s feet are planted. I feel a certain pride about the state from which I hail. The place is in my blood.

But on what basis does love for America find its grounding? A lot of people can tell you that, in the words of the supremely mawkish Lee Greenwood song, “at least I know I’m free.” But freedom needs a bit of discussion. Although it seems like a self-evident thing, the question of why freedom is to be valued is consequential.

For that discussion, we need to consult the minds from the lineage of thought that led to the Revolution and founding. John Locke, Montesquieu, Edmund Burke, Jefferson, Madison.

But who’s inclined to so consult? And thus do we turn our attention to distractions and stress.

I just can’t settle for a love of country merely based on its being vast and bustling, still leading the world in medical advances and welcoming sports stadiums. These are fine things, but the bottom line is that we’ve lost a core vibrancy, and that is because we’ve so badly lost sight of the transcendent.

So what role does patriotism play for me as we prepare for another annual day of grill-outs, fireworks and corny costumes?

I don’t know.

As longtime Precipice readers know, I often refer to this country as post-America, and I still think it’s valid. I love the above-mentioned hospitable nature of most of its citizens, and certainly the sweeping variety of its landscape. I love the cultural heritage it bequeathed. But I’m not alone in seeing our country as having lost sight of its original ideals.

And without them, a very sad question comes - or ought to come - to the forefront of what’s left of a national conversation in this polarized society: Why the hell should we continue to exist?

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Once again, I must ask for your graciousness concerning the dearth of recent posts. The immediate alibi is that our local mandolin orchestra, in which I play guitar, brought world-renowned classical mandolinist Carlo Aonzo to town for a weekend of concerts, workshops and receptions. There was some prep before he arrived as well. The orchestra bassist and I were to join Carlo on a couple of swing tunes, kind of a gypsy-jazz excursion. It all went well - Carlo is a great guy and the music was tight - but it required some woodshedding.

Then there’s also the ongoing state of affairs in which I go through life with my jaw dropped to the floor. More unforced errors from the Very Stable Genius’s administration, most broadly the way the whole Iran war has been handled. There’s a pretty wide consensus across the global spectrum that post-America got taken to the cleaners with the Memorandum of Understanding with Iran. They’re keeping their missiles, keeping control of the Strait of Hormuz, and punting on the issue of proxy terrorist groups. How the “nuclear dust” (the VSG’s term for enriched uranium) is to be handled gets discussed in some vaguely envisioned future stage of talks.

The VSG has enough of a track record of being publicly impressed by murderous dictators and autocrats for us to discern a pattern. The “beautiful letters” he purports to have received from Kim Jong-Un during the period of the three worthless summits, the Alaska summit with Putin even as Putin was ravaging Ukraine in real time. The taking of Delcy Rodriguez under his wing after Maduro’s ouster, even though she is ideologically joined at the hip with her predecessor. The will-we-help-or-invade tease with which he’s stringing Cuba along. Characterizing the Iranian leadership that has emerged following the April wave of assassinations as “smarter . . . sharper . . . and far less radical.”

And he continues to alienate erstwhile allies outright shamefully, most recently with his claim that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni begged him for a phot op at the G7 summit, which led to a fiery response from the spirited Meloni:

In her response, the Italian leader said she was “stunned” by Trump’s comments, before taking aim at Trump’s broader approach to international relations, suggesting he treats longtime Western allies with less respect than he shows their adversaries.

“I don’t know why the president of the United States behaves this way with his own allies,” Meloni said. “It’s not, after all, the first time this has happened.”

She appeared to be referring to an April interview Trump gave to Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera in which he criticized Meloni’s refusal to back U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. Meloni didn’t respond publicly at the time.

Their most recent clash quickly escalated as Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani condemned Trump’s comments as “serious” and “offensive” to the entirety of Italy.

He also announced that he was canceling a planned trip to the U.S. next week.

Video footage from the G7 appeared to show Meloni and Trump engaged in an extended one-on-one conversation while seated together on a small sofa.

But Trump portrayed the interaction as something he had granted rather than sought out.

“She’s probably happy I talked to her. I didn’t have to talk to her,” Trump told La7 after raising the subject of the Italian prime minister himself during the interview.

The VSG fully understands how he’s positioned himself. Flying home from the summit in France, he went on a Truth Social tear that included this nugget of insight:

In another post he shared a letter which compared Trump to Napoleon, Hitler, Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, while saying that Trump is more powerful than all of them due to his "global reach." US power combined with a man willing to use it makes Trump "by far the most powerful person that has ever walked this planet."

Sharing the essay, Trump wrote: "Presidential Historian Dave King — Sounds good to me!"

This ought to make the world’s hair stand on end. He’s got somebody he considers authoritative ranking him among history’s most notable conquerors. In a sense, he’s put himself in the same position as one of his idols, Putin, who has drained his country of just about every kind of resource, but intends to see his imperialistic design out to its logical conclusion nonetheless.

All of this gets us back to the question that has nagged some of us since 2016: what kinds of political choices to make, knowing what and who Trump is, but also knowing that the general thrust of Democratic policy orientation is a non-starter. It was once again the topic of my most recent post here.

Precipice readers know how I’ve handled it. In 2016 and 2020, I wrote in names of presidential candidates (Evan McMullin and Ben Sasse respectively) and voted straight Republican down-ticket. In 2024, I couldn’t take the complete sway Trumpism had proven to have over the GOP and stayed home.

At National Review today, Andrew McCarthy shares his thought processes about this dilemma:

Look, it’s a binary choice.” That’s how I’ve somehow rationalized voting — not once but three times — for Donald Trump, whose second term amounts to the worst presidency of my lifetime. I still think it’s true that a presidential election is a binary choice, even if that may paradoxically be self-delusional.

I believed in January 2021, and am even more convinced now, that President Trump should not only have been impeached but also convicted and disqualified from future office. This was after his soft coup attempt to remain in office after he got drubbed in the 2020 election. It was reckless and half-baked, yes, but hardly unpredictable. So how is it possible to convince oneself to vote for a person so uniquely unqualified for the presidency that he should already have been adjudicated as disqualified to hold the office?

. . . if we could redo November 2024, knowing what we know now, I don’t see how I could choose between the two abysmal alternatives on offer. Maybe the least bad option in such an election scenario really is to register dissent by casting a futile vote for a third person, or to decline to vote at all. But, for me, it always comes back to the same thing: Having had no patience for the occasional juror who refused to deliberate and thus subverted the justice system’s necessary function of making the hard decision, I can’t let myself off the hook so easily.

He comes to this conclusion:

So, I’m stuck — with an appalling Iran deal, with lawfare, with brazenly statist intercession in the economy, with a president who abominates America’s allies while indulging anti-American tyrants, with all of it. I didn’t want this. But I did vote for it. And when I look in the mirror, I can’t say it was unforeseeable.

I’d just add that it leads to the money question of them all: Is there a moral course of political action in post-America that isn’t futile?

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We’re approximately halfway through 2026. We’re in the midst of primary season around the country, setting table for the midterm elections in November.

Once again, I’m staying home for all of it. My feet remain firmly planted on the Narrow Sliver of Terrain, even though my sense of balance isn’t what it once was and my knees start to ache after standing a while.

Those who still adhere to the long-slog scenario, in which actual conservatives muster the patience of Job to endure several election cycles of marginalization while scouring the landscape for principled young activists to offer themselves as sacrificial lambs, frame political involvement as a moral imperative. Strike up conversations among neighbors and co-workers they say. Engage them on the level of ideas. Look around for sharp young citizens who can keep the voice of fusionism available in the national conversation. You can’t influence trends and events from the outside, they say.

I’m afraid it’s too late for that..

My state, Indiana, is as red as it gets. And a perfect example of how the political definition of “red” has shifted in the last eleven years.

Indiana went with Ronald Reagan over Gerald Ford in the 1976 primary, an indication of the sway actual conservatism once had over the state. It’s voted for the Republican candidate in every presidential election since 1980, with the exception of 2008, when it went with Barack Obama.

But now that it’s in a Trumpist stranglehold, power lust has elbowed out principle as the impetus behind voting behavior.

As in a lot of states, this year, there was a heated conversation in Indiana about redistricting. In some states, the effort came from Democrats and in others from Republicans. In both cases, the motivation was to maximize votes for the party pushing it. So much for respecting individual citizens as thinking human beings whose election-day behavior can’t necessarily be predicted by demographics. That stuff is for namby-pambies. We know who votes how, say the redistricting pushers, and we’re going to consolidate them.

My state senator, Greg Walker, has, in his six terms, compiled a scorecard with such groups as the American Conservative Union, the National Federation of Independent Business, the National Manufacturers’ Association, and the Indiana Family Institute that confirms his rightie bona fides.

Alas, when the subject of redistricting was broached this year, Walker stated that he was uncomfortable with the idea of helping to start a trend that would dilute the long-in-place tradition of only revisiting district boundaries once a decade.

For that, he was defeated by a Trumpist last month.

This gave the execrable Jim Banks an opportunity to crow, gloat and drool over the completion of the state party’s transformation into a cult with no moral bearing:

“Everyone in Indiana politics should have learned an important lesson today: President Trump is the single most popular Republican among Hoosier voters,” Republican Jim Banks, Indiana’s [federal] junior senator, told The Indianapolis Star in a statement that Trump shared on his Truth Social platform. “Indiana is a conservative state and we deserve conservatives in our state Senate who have a pulse on Republican voters.”

Two groups aligned with Banks — Hoosier Leadership for America Inc. and the American Leadership PAC — spent a combined $9 million in advertising on Indiana state Senate races, per AdImpact.

The sycophantic Senator Banks is correct about his first point. The Very Stable Genius is indeed the single most popular Republican. But he couldn’t be more dead wrong about this being a conservative state. It’s a Trumpist state, and I have a hard time forgiving his likes for successfully conflating the two worldviews in the eyes of the Hoosier populace.

A state senate race is about as local as it gets. Walker lives in my city. He knows all the players. It was not enough to save him.

Or consider our Lieutenant Governor, Micah Beckwith, who seems to get off on running his mouth and causing dust-ups.

His latest was a completely unforced error. There was no reason whatsoever for him to open his pie-hole about religion, but open it he did:

Indiana Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith said Americans should be given “permission to hate again” and called Islam a “demonic death cult” during a recent appearance on a conservative web talk show, the latest in a series of public comments from the Republican portraying Islam as a threat to America.

“We’re giving people permission to hate again, and I know that sounds a little harsh at first, but we’ve seen this movement to eradicate hate in our culture, that is the worst thing we could do,” Beckwith said during aMay 21 appearance on FlashPoint, a Christian conservative program that frequently blends politics, religion and prophecy-themed commentary. Beckwith appeared on the program wearing a polo bearing the Indiana lieutenant governor insignia.

Beckwith argued that “God hates certain things” and later turned specifically to Islam.

“If radical jihadi mindset starts coming into our state, I’m going to hate it, and I’m going to hate it with everything that I am,” he said. “I’m going to call on others to hate it, because I hate Islam. It’s a demonic death cult.”

He added: “I love Muslims, because they make great Christians when Jesus gets a hold of them, but I hate Islam.”

After Muslim civil rights advocates and Indiana Muslim leaders condemned the remarks as reckless and inflammatory, Beckwith appeared to double down Thursday in a pair of social media posts.

“On the close of Eid, after much prayer and consideration after my recent interview, I would like to take this opportunity to wish all Muslims in Indiana the best,” Beckwith wrote, referring to the Muslim holiday Eid al-adha, one of Islam’s holiest days. “And by best I mean I hope you all become Christian.”

Governor Mike Braun’s lame attempt at clean-up was to say that Beckwith “probably” regretted the way he worded his sentiment.

And what of this figure to whom the post-American Republican Party is in utter thrall?

If you want the Precipice take, there are posts aplenty in the archive, most recently this one.

But since I published that, he’s outdone himself again, abruptly walking out of an interview with NBC News correspondent Kristen Welker, but not before subjecting her to a barrage of insults:

Trump criticized California for the delay in tallying, asking Welker, “Do you think it’s appropriate that they have an election and five days later, they’re nowhere close to picking a winner?”

The president then said that election officials in California are “crooked,” along with Welker and her media colleagues.

“They’re crooked, just like you’re crooked, your press is crooked. And ‘Meet the Press’ is crooked,” Trump remarked.

Welker replied, “To be fair. I’m not crooked,” and attempted to move the conversation along. She also repeatedly noted that there is no evidence that the 2020 presidential election or the California primary was rigged.

“You’re either crooked or you’re stupid,” the president responded. “You play right into their hands with this crap. You know that these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they’re rigged.”

Trump later said, “Your elections are crooked, and you’re crooked, and ‘Meet the Press’ is crooked.”

“And so is ABC and CBS and CNN.” He then called NBC News a “one-sided crooked network.”

“Sorry. Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time,” the president added, before taking off his microphone and tossing it to the ground.

Welker protested, stating that she “traveled all the way to Wisconsin” for the interview. Trump, though, was done.

Where do you stand on this exhibition of juvenile behavior, Senator Banks?

We have to conclude that Republican voters are fine with it. If it really disgusted them, we’d see a different landscape in a state like Indiana, even if that meant chaos.

Also consider the scandal-plagued Ken Paxton elbowing out longtime federal senator John Cornyn in Texas. Same dynamic.

There comes a point - or ought to - when someone who understands that progressivism - wealth redistribution, militant identity politics and climate alarmism - is no answer to post-America’s dilemmas can no longer swallow hard and vote for the Trumpist.

Our political system is offering us no hope - none - of viable choices in the foreseeable future.

It is moral to sit out elections in this environment. I’d encourage you to do it. Find a place on the Narrow Sliver of Terrain.

And pray. As darkness encloses the land, all earthly forms of light are flickering out.

Refuse to participate in the darkness’s completion.

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As you can see, I’ve been kind of focused, broadly speaking, on the subject of deepening one’s faith walk, with the last few posts.

This morning, I came across this piece which effectively covers some of this ground. It’s titled “How (Not) To Lose Your Christian Kids to the World,” and it’s at the Substack of Sarah Salviander, a “Bible-believing, weightlifting, cancer-surviving, PhD astrophysicist.”

Her first how-to bullet point touches on something I’ve felt Christian spiritual formation needs to get right for some time - namely, getting to the why of belief instead of being satisfied that kids are hewing to the believer’s life because you told them it was the right thing to do:

Christian kids know how to respond to questions like “Who is Jesus?” or “What did He do for us?” but most of them can’t tell you why they believe any of it. They can tell you Jesus is in their hearts, but they can’t defend serious questions like: How do you know God created the universe when science explains its origin? Why do you believe Jesus rose from the dead when that’s impossible? Where is God when bad things happen to good people?

If young Christians only encountered other believers, this might not be much of an issue. But they live in a world full of other religions and an increasing number of non-believers. If you send them to university, they will encounter serious challenges to their beliefs. Once they get on social media, they’ll face a tidal wave of objections—everything from the utterly moronic to the highly sophisticated. This deluge can wear down even the most committed Christian unless they are prepared. As Paul wrote in Ephesians 6, we need the full armor of God—and that includes knowing why we believe what we believe.

She says this in fleshing out point number two:

The truth is, strict religions succeed, mushy ones don’t. As a Star Wars nerd, I appreciated this deep dive on Mandalorian culture—specifically the strict “Children of the Watch” faction Mando belongs to—and how it relates to real-world religions. After the devastation of their home world, this group survived by doubling down on the old ways: never removing their helmets, adopting foundlings as true children, and constantly reinforcing “This is the way.” Scholars of religion show that high-demand groups like this survive by filtering out uncommitted people, creating powerful solidarity through costly practices (what they call “credibility-enhancing displays”), and building fictive kinship that treats adopted members as real family. For centuries, that described most Christian churches in the West. Today, it’s the same dynamic you see with the Amish, whose population in North America continues to double roughly every 20 years thanks to their strict practices and high commitment. These mechanisms help strict communities survive catastrophe and pass their beliefs on across generations, while loose, accommodating groups tend to fade away.

This set of questions related to point three found me guilty as charged:

It’s easy to model Christ-like virtues when things are going your way; but when life presents serious challenges, it can seem impossible. This is where real discipleship happens. If you’re tempted to take the easy way out, think about what that’s teaching your children. Do you gossip about the “losers” in your life or lapse into despair when something goes sideways? Do you snap when you’re impatient or curse in traffic while your kids are in the backseat? Your daily reactions are teaching them far more about Christian ethics than any sermon or youth group lesson on what a wonderful model Jesus was. (In case this sounds preachy: I’m talking to myself as much as to you.)

A great book review stands alone as an essay as well as wanting to make you read the book being reviewed. We get that from University of Virginia culture scholar Ryan S. Olson’s review at The Hedgehog Review of Cicero: The Man and His Works by Andrew R. Dyck.

Marcus Tullius Cicero was blessed to have a father who felt strongly about cultivating his son’s life of the mind:

Cicero hailed from Arpinum, southeast of Rome, from a noble family well established in local affairs. Being a provincial, Cicero “would have to forge an identity for himself and decide how to balance loyalties” in the great capital. His family had only become involved in Roman politics in his father’s generation, making him a relative newcomer—a novus homo, or “new man,” in the parlance of the day. This was a status that presented difficulties even for a man of Cicero’s brilliance and skill. And these challenges were heightened unimaginably in an era that turned out to be, in hindsight at least, the late Roman Republic. That historical fact points ahead to Cicero’s second education, in power.

Cicero’s tutelage aimed him at a life in politics, beginning with a legal career, which could only be provided with a secure home base in the city. Marcus Tullius senior provided an education for Marcus fils and his younger brother, Quintus, initially with a family connection, the famous orator Lucius Licinius Crassus. Cicero’s father bought a house in Rome to facilitate his children’s education—per Crassus’s advice, in Greek, with Greek tutors, and with Homer featuring, as always, most prominently. Following his bookish father, Cicero chose as his motto Homer’s line from the Iliad, “always excel [aristeuein] and overtop the rest.” If this seems bombastic, it was necessary for someone in his position: “Cicero needed such an emotional thrust,” wrote the towering Cicero scholar D.R. Shackleton Bailey, “to make his way among social superiors in a highly caste-conscious community.”

Having assumed the toga virilis, the traditional Roman coming-of-age marker worn on civic occasions, around age 16 (90 BC), Cicero was taken by his father to attend a prominent lawyer’s consultations, the equivalent of enrolling in law school. Around this time, Cicero also began, Dyck reports, “a lifelong practice of closely observing political events and public speakers,” including “almost daily attendance at political meetings called by magistrates (contiones).” The ambitious young law student always looked for “good oratorical models,” even during his obligatory military service, which happened to occur during the Social War, a struggle between groups on the Italian Peninsula.

As a teenager, Cicero also began to study philosophy, an avocation that would sustain him throughout his life. Cicero argued with all four of the major philosophical schools active during his lifetime: Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism. Stoicism was his first stop, with his tutor Diodotus, who oversaw his study of dialectic and whom he honored in the latter’s blind old age by making him a member of Cicero’s own household. Later, he studied with Phaedrus, who eventually presided over the Epicureans at Athens. Most influentially, Dyck argues, Cicero learned from the head of Plato’s Academy, Philo of Larissa, whose own intellectual grandfather was the famous skeptic Carneades, known for lecturing in a bellowing voice that could compete with the surf’s roar, and for stimulating a stream of interpretations that filled four hundred scrolls. Cicero would draw on this intellectual lineage as a lawyer, politician, and philosopher.

Cicero’s training as a lawyer would have been incomplete without extensive tutelage in rhetoric. Here the Greek masters were his guides during their visits to Rome, and Cicero began as a student to compose a detailed rhetorical handbook—not in Greek but, tellingly, in Latin. It marked the beginning of Cicero’s efforts to bring the best of Hellenism into a distinctively Roman style and approach to rhetoric and philosophy. He began arguing cases, married, and embarked on an extensive tour of Greece and Asia Minor to freshen his oratorical style.

He also benefitted from his personal acquaintances with some late-Roman-republic heavy hitters:

an education in power that unfolded through his civic friendships with leaders in the late era of the republic, especially Pompey, Julius Caesar, and Octavian. Each wielded authority in ways that challenged Cicero’s republican ideals and imposed practical lessons in the operation of power. These relationships became a living curriculum through which Cicero tested his paideia-born convictions about virtue, eloquence, and the state.

With Pompey, who recruited his own legions and called himself Magnus (“great one”), Cicero was painfully aware of a power gap between his own middling military career and the carefully propagandized triumphs of the self-styled “warden of earth and sea.” As Dyck notes, Cicero’s “position as a self-made ‘new man’ sharpened his sensitivity to the weaknesses of the traditional aristocracy…but also left him exposed…to the jealousy and resentment of Pompey.”

Cicero’s encomium to the general’s character and courage (virtus) and good luck (felicitas) oversold Pompey, who exercised power rooted in military success and the loyalty that accompanied it. Cicero admired and resented him in equal measure, borrowing Pompey’s patriotic rhetoric even as he worried about its populist appeal. In Pompey, Cicero saw both the ideal of republican service and the temptation of tyranny. His early orations, modeled partly on Pompey’s rhetoric of defending the republic, reveal this tension.

From Julius Caesar, whose murder he witnessed and whose conspirators he advised, Cicero learned how intellect could coexist with tyranny. Dyck describes Caesar’s deliberate cultivation of Cicero—offering loans and political favors—as “a calculated campaign to draw Cicero closer to him.” Caesar dedicated his treatise On Analogy to Cicero; Cicero responded with a poem praising Caesar’s British expedition. Dyck notes that Cicero “could relate on a literary level” to Caesar, accepting him as part of an “‘intellectual community,’ distinguished by…humane values…and literary learning.” The experience taught Cicero that power could masquerade as civility, and that eloquence could serve the ends of domination. His uneasy cooperation with Caesar shaped a crucial stage in his education—the realization that moral authority was, at least in the late Roman Republic, impotent against the organized might of legionary command and the prestige garnered by military triumphs.

Cicero’s final teacher was Octavian, who perfected the art of manipulation and, with Cicero out of the way, transformed himself into the princeps senatus: Augustus, the first emperor of Rome. As Dyck recounts, the young heir to Caesar’s name played to Cicero’s vulnerabilities as a novus homo, enlisting him “to save Rome a second time.” Believing he could guide the boy toward republican virtue, Cicero threw his influence behind Octavian’s cause and “took the lead in organizing resistance to Antony,” his rival.

That association with Octavian led to a grisly end, however:

Yet Octavian’s apparent deference concealed a ruthless pragmatism. Cicero learned too late that his eloquence was being instrumentalized for another man’s ascent. After Caesar’s murder, “the three-fold world divided” among Octavian, Marcus Antonius, and Lepidus, in Shakespeare’s telling, the triumvirs made sure that Cicero’s name led the list of political enemies to be eliminated in the year 43, a sentence he received, according to Livy’s tragic account, with the words, “I shall die in the homeland I have often saved.” Roman troops tracked Cicero down near his villa, where he extended his own neck to allow the soldier to sever his head cleanly. His head and hands were displayed in the Senate, symbols of the dismemberment of republican virtue. In Octavian, Cicero confronted the final stage of his education in power, realizing that charisma, cunning, and the rhetoric of moral restoration could be fused to overthrow the very republic they claimed to save.

Olson says of Dyck’s book that it’s “an extended meditation—every page inflected by historical depth and biographical breadth—on the limits of reason and rhetoric in an age when the republic itself was collapsing.”

Yuval Levin acknowledges at the outset that the title of his piece at The Dispatch - “Is the American Experiment Legitimate?” - is going to have a well-duh kind of effect on a lot of readers, but then also explains why we should hear him out:

Is our government legitimate?

Although we rarely ask that question quite so bluntly, it actually lies at the bottom of many of our deepest disputes. Those disagreements that really cut to the core of our politics tend to be less about the direction of public policy in one arena or another than about who should have power in our government, by what right, in what way, through what means, and to what ends.

These questions were at the very heart of the American Revolution, which took itself to be responding to an abdication of governmental legitimacy. And they were then crucial to the effort to frame a legitimate constitutional system in the revolution’s wake.

Some of the most fundamental political debates we have today are about whether that effort succeeded. There have long been critics of the U.S. Constitution who argue that the system lacks legitimacy. Some of them now teach in America’s leading law schools and occasionally populate the upper reaches of government. But even at their most intellectually serious, such critics too rarely engage with what our Constitution is really trying to achieve when it comes to legitimacy, and why.

So in this 250^th year of our republic, as we reflect on our history and also look forward, it is worth asking some basic questions: What did the American founders think a legitimate form of government needed to look like? Does their test of legitimacy still make sense? And does the form of government we inherited from them pass that test?

Consider the decade-plus in which the founders saw what had been left undone by the Declaration:

The Constitution, like the Declaration, came together in the summer, in Philadelphia, in what we now call Independence Hall. The two documents were debated and approved in the same room, but 11 years apart. And the experience of those 11 years confirmed the difficulty of the challenge that the Declaration had sketched out.

They were seven years of war and four years of peace. The war was fought for self-government, and against abuses of power by a government that was not sufficiently accountable to the people it governed. The revolution came to be understood, at least by the end of the war, as what we might call a struggle for democracy. And the forms of government established in the states during and after the war tended to be radically democratic: Strong legislatures kept close to the people, in several cases through annual elections, and a kind of thoroughgoing majority rule.

There was general agreement in America that these republican forms were necessary, and in some respects that they were key to what the war was about. But by the end of the war, and especially in those first years of peace, it also became increasingly clear that these modes of government were not working well. They didn’t govern effectively, nor did they protect the rights of the people effectively. The populist governance of those years regularly devolved into mob rule, which led to widespread instability, governmental dysfunction, and in some cases, outright political violence.

Toward the end, he gets directly to the question that makes for his title:

When we take our system of government for granted, we tend to see only what it prevents us from doing and to ignore what it enables us to do. We see the bad but not the good. And that is precisely because of how extraordinarily effective our system has been at securing the good. Its success has led us to forget why it is necessary.

But if our form of government is going to last another 250 years, we will have to grasp just how successful it has been and therefore also just how necessary it remains. The greatest challenge we will face is the challenge we have faced from the start: the challenge of legitimacy.

In his June 3 post at his Substack Onward & Upward, Jay Nordlinger employs the random-thoughts format. Here are three random thoughts from it that tie together:

Again, young people might be shocked: Republicans once prided themselves on being “the party of ideas.” Let me walk down Memory Lane a little.

In 1980, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D., N.Y.) made a widely quoted statement: “Of a sudden, the GOP has become a party of ideas.”

Years later, I took a friend of mine, Howard Kissel, a well-known theater and music critic in New York, to a gathering at Bill Buckley’s. Afterward, he said, “It was so strange to attend something where everyone was talking about ideas. It was wonderful.”

***

On social media the other day, someone reacted to a statement of mine by saying, “The Buckleyites just won’t die off soon enough.”

I have terrible news for this fellow: I know some Buckley conservatives in their twenties. Not an army—but a decent platoon, for sure. Maybe even a company.

***

Every moment of every day, the snorters snort, the dunkers dunk, and the owners own. Bill (Buckley) referred to this as “attitudinizing.” He warned against it, arguing instead for recta ratio, or “right reason”—with flair, if possible.

(He even titled a collection of his “Right Reason.” It came out when I was in college, and I inhaled it.)

How much of what you and I are consuming, or producing, is “attitudinizing” and how much is something more substantial and edifying? I have thought about this lately—and by “lately,” I mean for the last many years …

Well, okay. That ought to while away the sultry hours this weekend. Can I get you another glass of lemonade while I’m up?

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“Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be ye therefore wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

Matthew 10:6

My baptism is coming up on Sunday, and it’s never out of my thoughts lately.

I asked my pastor if there was anything I needed to do to prepare, and he responded, “You’ve been preparing your whole life.”

Well, then. Does that include vandalizing houses as an eight-year-old, having an exploitative view of females as an adolescent, pumping myself full of substances for years, making weighty decisions impulsively and being riddled with regret as a result?

I guess I still haven’t shaken the sense that I have to clean up before I present myself to God.

Here’s the thing. As the share of Christians among the post-American populace continues to shrink, more and more of them are what we might call legacy Christians. They have been raised in the faith and familiarized with the basics of doctrine. They may have drifted away at some point, but generally not too far. Secular and agnostic moderns aren’t gravitating to the faith in droves.

Now, there is the other extreme. The Christian world has an abundance of people who found the faith at the depths of addiction and self-abasement. They are covered in tattoos they couldn’t remove in a lifetime. Although tats can be seen as a badge of survival, a way of showing that one has really been through the mill. It lends credibility in certain circles.

No tats on me. My fondness for material balms comes from an earlier era. I chose my poisons because I’d bought into the notion that they offered glimpses of life’s mystical essence, that they could equip us self-important Boomers to, you know, change the world, usher in a new age of communal binding of humanity.

(The closest I ever came to risking it all for some feel-good powder was doing some cocaine, but after burning through some serious money, I realized it was indeed a snare and I backed off.)

And I did attend church as a kid, but I’ve written several times about how it just didn’t stick. It was a mainline Protestant congregation and most folks exited the sanctuary at noon on Sunday only to engage the world with the same bundle of foibles with which they’d engaged it the previous week, month, year, decade.

As a deacon at my current church, I’m called upon to have something of an ambassadorial vibe, to evangelize.

This is also something I’ve written about with some frequency. It’s said that in sharing the Gospel, one has to meet people where they are. But are we really good at that?

I have done some jail ministry, and I can see that it can change lives. Again, it is most effective in the cases of those who have reached depths inconceivable to most of us. But even then, there are instances where it doesn’t stick. I know of one guy who wrote a letter to the editor of his local paper lauding the sheriff and jail staff for being supportive of the weekend and his readiness to say yes to Christ. A couple of years later, I found out he’d gone in an entirely different direction, and was involved with some kind of occult stuff.

And here we get to another aspect of modern evangelizing that doesn’t work for me at all: contemporary praise music. It’s what the house bands at those jail weekends play. It’s emotive and vapid, utterly lacking in theological depth. I’m not the only one who feels this way. Articles have been written about it, and I often see observation to that effect at social media sites such as Substack Notes.

This is no small thing. I realize my perspective may be due in some part to my being a musician, but trivializing the role of music in human life is a pet issue of mine.

A couple of years ago, I was having one of my occasional crackups (which, I’m pleased to report, are far less frequent now) and sharing in a text thread with the others in my Sunday school class, and one lady said I ought to turn off the news and tune into a Christian music radio station.

It was as disheartening as any bit of advice could have been, although I didn’t say so. I think most people in my current circle of fellow believers find that stuff uplifting and comforting. Again, these are generally people who were raised in environments of commitment and family reinforcement. Maybe it lands differently with them.

But that in itself is concerning. To lift our voices in utter devotion to our Creator is a fine thing, an important point of growth in our lives as God’s children. But if all one ever hears or sings is warmed-over pop chord progressions and insipid lyrics repeated endlessly, I don’t see how one becomes equipped to meet a lot of people where they are.

There is a huge world of actual music out there, and it’s perfectly fine with God for us to listen to it.

The same goes for literature. I seriously doubt that Christian versions of genres such as romance or mystery are having an impact on those dipping their toes in the water, considering a closer look at this faith that informs us. (Although G.K. Chesterton could deftly handle the detective genre.)

Christian fiction ought to have some meat on its bones. It ought to acknowledge the full panoply of the human condition. This is what we get from Dostoevsky, Flannery O’Connor, Milton.

When Christ admonishes us, per the quote from Matthew above, to be wise as serpents, it seems to me he’s saying we ought to acknowledge the stinkiness, the grittiness, that is our common bond as human beings. We have to know what lurks inside us before we can lay it at the foot of the cross.

Real faith brings forth the fullness of our humanity. We ought not to be afraid of what we’ve been, as it has shown us what we can slide into if we have no lodestar.

Saying yes to Jesus doesn’t mean becoming gooey. God elevated us from the primordial swamp by virtue of his grace, but we need to see how hard-won such a realization usually is. It doesn’t lend itself to easy formulas. It genereally involves coming face to face with the fact that there’s only one way out of the incompleteness with which our lives are otherwise saddled.

I guess I’m coming back to a point I’ve made here with some frequency. We need to recover our sense of being astounded by the Gospel message. Really astounded. While I’m not a big fan of those “he gets us” commercials, that really is true.

And that means that you can bring anything to Him.

I’ve been quite the hedonist in my day. I’ve been quite the hypocrite, the phony, the self-deceiver. So I have some acquaintance of how these things affect a life.

I really don’t mind that I’m a late-comer to all this. I understand skirting moral corners, even going off the rails, and I’m not afraid of seeing it in others. Increasingly, it means I don’t love anyone any less because they’re riddled with foibles.

What Christ says in that Matthew passage can look like a challenging balancing act, but it’s not really. If we grasp the full scope of what being human is all about, we’re being, in the popular parlance, authentic. We ought to be willing to show God the beautiful and horrible creatures that we are.

This is by no means a fully worked out thought process. I’ll no doubt have more to say on the subject.

But in the meantime, dear Lord, save me from gooiness.

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I ran across two pieces this morning that ought to be read in tandem. In fact, one is pretty much a response to the other.

And read them you should. Freya India makes an important point about cultural Christianity as brand-hustling, and O. Alan Noble responds by saying that’s good as far as it goes, but that real evangelizing takes place when the come-on of the app or podcast gets translated into solid faith in the only solid thing.

But they actually arrive at pretty congruous conclusions, as we’ll see shortly.

There are sections of each essay that I want to start with, however, because they reflect my own thoughts at this stage in my faith walk.

Freya India is a 26-year-old British writer whose work appears in several venues. Her first book is called Girls: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything. Her Substack is also called Girls.

Today’s post there is titled “The Commodification of Christianity.” The observations she makes as someone new to the faith speak to the postmodern challenge of keeping one’s sights on the real gem at the core of the sales pitch:

There is a lot of Christian content online. Learning about the faith feels easier than ever: follow Christian influencers, listen to Christian podcasts, scroll through Christian hashtags; the Bible is bite-size now! Of course this has been happening for a long time, Christianity being made easier and more convenient; Neil Postman warned in the 1980s that TV was turning faith into a form of entertainment. But now it feels as if all of Christianity can be done on a screen. To stay connected with God, all we need to do is subscribe, download, press play.

Then there’s the commodification of Christianity. This is nothing new either, the merchandise and celebrity pastors and nightclub churches. But now, with smartphones and social media, the market intrudes on almost every religious ritual and tradition. Pay $6 per month to pray, $399.99 to listen to the Bible for a lifetime. To become a Christian, begin your 7-day free trial now.

In the next paragraph, she makes a key statement:

lately I’m beginning to feel as if Christianity has become another thing to do on my phone.

This hasn’t been helpful as she tries to make church attendance (and commitment) central to her life - and this is the above-mentioned section I’m emphasizing because it’s my own experience:

if you are new to faith, you haven’t developed real habits. This is a huge hurdle, trying to stick to a routine, show up every Sunday, even remember that it’s Sunday and that this is something you do now. Embarrassing to admit but I’m always thinking of ways to duck out of church early, to ditch a weekend here and there. Sometimes I think I’ll just watch the Sunday live-stream in bed, maybe skip through it a bit, or actually you know what I’ll just listen to a Christian podcast instead while I get on with other things. All the Sermons are on Spotify anyway! The awful truth of it, I have to be honest, is that I put off going to church because I know that I can. I’ve got my phone.

I know the feeling. Often, my non-churchgoing wife would like to have me available before noon for brunch or a drive in the country. Or I’m in the middle of an important read when I notice it’s time to leave if I’m going to make the service on time. I just became wired that way during my secular-agnostic decades.

O. Alan Noble is a professor of English at Oklahoma Baptist University and author of You Are Not Your Own, To Live Well, and On Getting Out of Bed.

In his Substack post “Gen Z and Belonging to the Church,” he exhibits an optimism about the dilemma India has pointed out, asserting that retaining the tentative, cultural-Christianity church-goer is simply a matter of truly effective evangelizing:

I share Freya’s concern here. The Church, especially evangelicals (but Catholics are guilty here, too) has a history of adopting technology and then in retrospect discovering whether it is helpful or appropriate after it is too late and damage has been done. The excitement of progress draws us to develop things like gamified prayer apps in place of cultivating habits of prayer without a dopamine-driven point system. I see that and recognize the problem. I’m just not convinced that commercialized, digitized Christianity is that widespread and significant among younger generations. I do, however, see young people drawn to the faith for a sense of belonging. And sometimes that belonging isn’t a belonging to Christ and his Church, but to a kind of cultural Christianity, one that is mixed up with a political agenda. That concerns me, but even here I have hope that when the gospel is properly preached in churches, those who attend for the wrong reasons can be won over to the beauty of the gospel and a true belonging to something deeper, truer, and more complex than partisan politics.

I wish Noble had fleshed out his vision of the gospel properly preached a little more. This has been among my thoughts about the state of faith in our society for some time. Precipice readers know that I have stated on multiple occasions that, in evangelizing, we often only get one chance, and we can blow it by making assumptions about what the person to whom we’re evangelizing is receptive to hearing.

But he does offer a phrase that I think stands alone as something we ought to keep in mind:

the reality is that we all come to Christ with mixed motives. No one comes with a pure heart. None.

As I said I would at the outset, I want to show that India and Noble reach conclusions which enjoy a great deal of Venn diagram overlap.

Noble on what needs to happen when toe-in-the-water types enter our churches:

How are we going to invite people in our pews to the beautyof committing to the whole truth of the gospel and the wonder of belonging to Christ? I think we begin by showing that it is beautiful. And by cultivating embodied, committed communities that model what it means to walk in a manner worthy of the gospel.

And now, India. Doesn’t it sound quite a bit like the same message?

I think if Christians want to reach my generation, really reach us, they have to promise something totally separate from that, something otherworldly, something that doesn’t abide by market logic, something different, divine. Something, for once, that isn’t cheapened or commodified.

Sharing that message convincingly requires that we regain our sense of being astounded.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading the book of Acts straight through. It’s the story of people who were eyewitnesses to Immanuel walking among us, and then those who witnessed the healing power and unshakable conviction of one who encountered Immanuel after his ascension, in a flash of blinding light on the road to Damascus.

These people were so astonished by what they’d experienced that they couldn’t do otherwise than share it wherever possible.

India and Noble are right. For the full effect of that level of astonishment, we need to be in the physical presence of the astonished.

I’m still sifting my way through this. There’s nothing gooey about the way I practice my faith. And that’s precisely as it should be. Real astonishment isn’t performative. It’s not a midday mood lifter or a radio playlist.

It’s nothing less than the way things truly are, and that’s mind-blowing.

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I’ll launch today’s pondering with an excerpt from my previous dive, back in March:

I was telling my therapist about some particular Gordian knot that was vexing me at the moment when he said something I’ve been forced to chew on ever since: “I just try to die to myself.”

He’s a Christian, but he’s also a credentialed counselor, a consummate professional. Dr. B———. He doesn’t proselytize, but since he knows I’m a fellow believer (of the sort Johnny Cash was talking about when he characterized himself as a “C minus Christian”), he gently encourages thought processes in me that nudge me toward humanizing choices. He makes the fruit of the spirit discussed by Paul in Galatians 5 the cornerstone of his own daily practice and has given me exercises based on it.

And I know dying to self is a pretty basic tenet of Christian faith. But I honestly don’t know how to do it.

And, as I told you in a post earlier this month, I’m going to undergo full-immersion baptism at my church’s service on June 7.

I’m feeling tugged at by something, and I think I know what it is. It’s what got me into church-shopping some fifteen years ago after decades of secular - well, maybe vaguely curious about the matter of transcendence - living and thinking. I spent a year going to Mass at a local Catholic church. (No, I didn’t take communion) I spent the better part of five years at a little country Methodist church because a friend of mine, who’d climbed from the depths of dissolution to a ministerial career, was pastor there. When he left for a city church, a lot of the congregational vitality was drained. I then flitted about, and finally landed where I am now a deacon (And take communion weekly).

But something that has bugged me since I was a kid is that there seemed to be scant discussion in the entire Christian world of what God is.

I’ve told the story many times here of how first my dad, and then my mom, got a bad taste in their mouths about the Presbyterian church in which they’d raised me. It was becoming increasingly secular - specifically, more preoccupied with social-justice guilt-mongering.

The timing was interesting. I was in the ninth grade, and going through confirmation class. I don’t remember much about the class sessions. There was a map of Paul’s travels. One week, the assistant minister (who soon left for a career as a psychotherapist) got out paper and colored pens and had us draw how we were feeling. But nothing stuck to my ribs.

My dad just quit going to church, although he avidly read Unity “New Thought” literature, kind of a surprising move for a guy with a flat-top who had a metal-stamping company, smoked cigarettes and swore like a sailor when at the end of his rope.

My mom also immersed herself in New Thought, but it took a different form. She’d been raised a Christian Scientist, so she returned to that. I started going to services and Sunday School with her. (I did retain my association with the Presbyterian senior high fellowship, because that’s where the girls and hayrides and ski trips were.)

But one thing that I did appreciate about my Christian Science period was that it provided the first attempt I’d ever seen at defining God. Mary Baker Eddy said there were seven synonyms for God: mind, spirit, soul, principle, life, truth and love.

Now we were getting somewhere. I did ease off on my involvement in Mrs. Eddy’s denomination, due to some health issues that proved intractable to the Christian Science premise of non-medical healing.

(Years later, in graduate school, in a course on the history of American religion, the textbook asserted that Mrs. Eddy had been on morphine from her 1866 fall until her death.)

But until I had some kind of handle on what it - He - was that I was instructed to pray to, I couldn’t get very serious about the matter.

Serious Christians have not shied away from the task of getting their brains around a definition of God.

I find Thomas Aquinas’s five ways argument and, particularly, the first cause argument, pretty darn solid:

If there is no first cause, then the universe is like a great chain with many links; each link is held up by the link above it, but the whole chain is held up by nothing. If there is no first cause, then the universe is like a railroad train moving without an engine. Each car's motion is explained proximately by the motion of the car in front of it: the caboose moves because the boxcar pulls it, the boxcar moves because the cattle car pulls it, et cetera. But there is no engine to pull the first car and the whole train. That would be impossible, of course. But that is what the universe is like if there is no first cause: impossible.

Aquinas elaborates:

FAQs

The First Cause Argument

The most famous of all arguments for the existence of God are the “five ways” of Saint Thomas Aquinas. One of the five ways, the fifth, is the argument from design, which we looked at in the last essay. The other four are versions of the first-cause argument, which we explore here.

The argument is basically very simple, natural, intuitive, and commonsensical. We have to become complex and clever in order to doubt or dispute it. It is based on an instinct of mind that we all share: the instinct that says everything needs an explanation. Nothing just is without a reason why it is. Everything that is has some adequate or sufficient reason why it is.

Philosophers call this the Principle of Sufficient Reason. We use it every day, in common sense and in science as well as in philosophy and theology. If we saw a rabbit suddenly appear on an empty table, we would not blandly say, “Hi, rabbit. You came from nowhere, didn’t you?” No, we would look for a cause, assuming there has to be one. Did the rabbit fall from the ceiling? Did a magician put it there when we weren’t looking? If there seems to be no physical cause, we look for a psychological cause: perhaps someone hypnotized us. As a last resort, we look for a supernatural cause, a miracle. But there must be some cause. We never deny the Principle of Sufficient Reason itself. No one believes the Pop Theory: that things just pop into existence for no reason at all. Perhaps we will never find the cause, but there must be a cause for everything that comes into existence.

If there is no first cause, then the universe is like a great chain with many links; each link is held up by the link above it, but the whole chain is held up by nothing.

Now the whole universe is a vast, interlocking chain of things that come into existence. Each of these things must therefore have a cause. My parents caused me, my grandparents caused them, et cetera. But it is not that simple. I would not be here without billions of causes, from the Big Bang through the cooling of the galaxies and the evolution of the protein molecule to the marriages of my ancestors. The universe is a vast and complex chain of causes. But does the universe as a whole have a cause? Is there a first cause, an uncaused cause, a transcendent cause of the whole chain of causes? If not, then there is an infinite regress of causes, with no first link in the great cosmic chain. If so, then there is an eternal, necessary, independent, self-explanatory being with nothing above it, before it, or supporting it. It would have to explain itself as well as everything else, for if it needed something else as its explanation, its reason, its cause, then it would not be the first and uncaused cause. Such a being would have to be God, of course. If we can prove there is such a first cause, we will have proved there is a God.

Why must there be a first cause? Because if there isn’t, then the whole universe is unexplained, and we have violated our Principle of Sufficient Reason for everything. If there is no first cause, each particular thing in the universe is explained in the short run, or proximately, by some other thing, but nothing is explained in the long run, or ultimately, and the universe as a whole is not explained. Everyone and everything says in turn, “Don’t look to me for the final explanation. I’m just an instrument. Something else caused me.” If that’s all there is, then we have an endless passing of the buck. God is the one who says, “The buck stops here.”

If there is no first cause, then the universe is like a great chain with many links; each link is held up by the link above it, but the whole chain is held up by nothing. If there is no first cause, then the universe is like a railroad train moving without an engine. Each car’s motion is explained proximately by the motion of the car in front of it: the caboose moves because the boxcar pulls it, the boxcar moves because the cattle car pulls it, et cetera. But there is no engine to pull the first car and the whole train. That would be impossible, of course. But that is what the universe is like if there is no first cause: impossible.

Here is one more analogy. Suppose I tell you there is a book that explains everything you want explained. You want that book very much. You ask me whether I have it. I say no, I have to get it from my wife. Does she have it? No, she has to get it from a neighbor. Does he have it? No, he has to get it from his teacher, who has to get it. . . et cetera, etcetera, ad infinitum. No one actually has the book. In that case, you will never get it. However long or short the chain of book borrowers may be, you will get the book only if someone actually has it and does not have to borrow it. Well, existence is like that book. Existence is handed down the chain of causes, from cause to effect. If there is no first cause, no being who is eternal and self-sufficient, no being who has existence by his own nature and does not have to borrow it from someone else, then the gift of existence can never be passed down the chain to others, and no one will ever get it. But we did get it. We exist. We got the gift of existence from our causes, down the chain, and so did every actual being in the universe, from atoms to archangels. Therefore there must be a first cause of existence, a God.

If there is no independent being, then the whole chain of dependent beings is dependent on nothing and could not exist.

In more abstract philosophical language, the proof goes this way. Every being that exists either exists by itself, by its own essence or nature, or it does not exist by itself. If it exists by its own essence, then it exists necessarily and eternally, and explains itself. It cannot not exist, as a triangle cannot not have three sides. If, on the other hand, a being exists but not by its own essence, then it needs a cause, a reason outside itself for its existence. Because it does not explain itself, something else must explain it. Beings whose essence does not contain the reason for their existence, beings that need causes, are called contingent, or dependent, beings. A being whose essence is to exist is called a necessary being. The universe contains only contingent beings. God would be the only necessary being—if God existed. Does he? Does a necessary being exist? Here is the proof that it does. Dependent beings cannot cause themselves. They are dependent on their causes. If there is no independent being, then the whole chain of dependent beings is dependent on nothing and could not exist. But they do exist. Therefore there is an independent being.

Saint Thomas has four versions of this basic argument.

First, he argues that the chain of movers must have a first mover because nothing can move itself. (Moving here refers to any kind of change, not just change of place.) If the whole chain of moving things had no first mover, it could not now be moving, as it is. If there were an infinite regress of movers with no first mover, no motion could ever begin, and if it never began, it could not go on and exist now. But it does go on, it does exist now. Therefore it began, and therefore there is a first mover.

Second, he expands the proof from proving a cause of motion to proving a cause of existence, or efficient cause. He argues that if there were no first efficient cause, or cause of the universe’s coming into being, then there could be no second causes because second causes (i.e., caused causes) are dependent on (i.e., caused by) a first cause (i.e., an uncaused cause). But there are second causes all around us. Therefore there must be a first cause.

Third, he argues that if there were no eternal, necessary, and immortal being, if everything had a possibility of not being, of ceasing to be, then eventually this possibility of ceasing to be would be realized for everything. In other words, if everything could die, then, given infinite time, everything would eventually die. But in that case nothing could start up again. We would have universal death, for a being that has ceased to exist cannot cause itself or anything else to begin to exist again. And if there is no God, then there must have been infinite time, the universe must have been here always, with no beginning, no first cause. But this universal death has not happened; things do exist! Therefore there must be a necessary being that cannot not be, cannot possibly cease to be. That is a description of God.

Fourth, there must also be a first cause of perfection or goodness or value. We rank things as more or less perfect or good or valuable. Unless this ranking is false and meaningless, unless souls don’t really have any more perfection than slugs, there must be a real standard of perfection to make such a hierarchy possible, for a thing is ranked higher on the hierarchy of perfection only insofar as it is closer to the standard, the ideal, the most perfect. Unless there is a most-perfect being to be that real standard of perfection, all our value judgments are meaningless and impossible. Such a most-perfect being, or real ideal standard of perfection, is another description of God.

Where does the moral component figure into this? Put differently, why does stuff have meaning for us humans?

I would venture that the concept of imago dei is helpful here. We’re unique among the species of animals on this planet in that we can conceive of things like meaning, beauty, truth and justice. That indicates to me that God - this almighty First Cause, had particular intentions in mind when he gave the formless void a shove. He had us in mind when the galaxies were still forming. There’s Biblical support for this, particularly Christ’s statement that “before Abraham was, I am”.

This fills me with awe. It humbles me before the particular way God has designed this universe. He designed it this way, and not another. Why he did so is the privilege of sovereignty.

And then there’s the matter of sin. It’s a willful separation from the way things are designed to be. You can do it, but you’ll have a feeling that you’re swimming against some basic tide. Wishing we could cut corners where divine law is concerned isn’t much more that a little kid’s game of “what if.”

So I may be inching closer to a full embrace to this notion of dying to oneself. The self I’ve always lugged around was a jumble of varying ways I was bucking the tide. At this stage I’m looking for something less abrasive. It’s getting to where it feels more natural to discern the tide and swim with it. It’s not because I’m blindly doing what I’m told, but rather it makes increasing sense.

Writing is my job, and Precipice is the most important form that takes. I realize there’s no end to the clamoring for your hard-earned dollars, and this is a time of economic uncertainty. But if you feel this site makes an important contribution to the national discourse, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

Along with cookouts, water skiing, baseball and festivals, summer is an opportune time to reflect on what it means to be an American. Three distinctly American holidays frame the season, bookended as it is by Memorial Day and Labor Day, with Independence Day at midpoint. One’s thoughts - mine, anyway - turn to the unprecedented nature of the nation’s founding, upon an idea (that all human beings have the right to freedom and dignity), the lineage of thought leading up to that (the Magna Carta, Locke, Montesquieu), the irresistible urge to check out the entire continent spread out before those on the east coast, the costly purging of the “peculiar institution,” the gathering of industrial might and the flowering of inventiveness, the formation of a distinctly American culture, manifested in everything from cowboy ballads to jazz to the aforementioned baseball to literature, cinema and television. The mid-20th-century peak on all these levels of national greatness.

I certainly haven’t done an exhaustive study of when the subject of decline entered our national conversation. I would imagine the word was used in some quarters in the 1930s when FDR offered collectivism as an antidote to the economic collapse with which he was faced upon becoming president. I probably heard grownups mutter it in the 1960s, when the prototype for campus unrest was launched. The ignominious abandonment of South Vietnam, inflation, an energy crisis and Soviet advances in Afghanistan, southern Africa and Central America gnawed hard at our national confidence. Even as Reagan brought good sense to realms such as economic and foreign policy, the culture continued to deteriorate.

You know the story since then. We embarked on wars without a clear sense of what would constitute a suitable victory. A president got impeached for lying about a dalliance with a dizzy 21-year-old intern. A community organizer steeped in the theories of Alinsky and Cloward and Piven got elected president and did much to socialize health care, demonize fossil fuels and apologize for America’s very presence on the world stage.

And then came the Very Stable Genius. About him Precipice has had much to say, most recently in the post titled “Yeah, Character Is the Deciding Factor.”

His China trip this week marked a particularly accelerated moment in decline. He was pretty explicitly warned by Xi not to prepare to defend Taiwan. He got no assurances of help opening the Strait of Hormuz or bringing Russia’s attack on Ukraine to an end. The subject of China’s theft of post-America’s artificial intelligence know-how was not broached. The whole visit had the aura of “‘a widening mismatch between Beijing’s highly strategic and security-centric framing of the bilateral relationship in comparison to Washington’s more transactional, economically oriented approach.’”

While Trump was “focused” on east Asia, Defense Secretary Hegseth was quite suddenly nixing the deployment of 4,000 troops to Poland, the nation that spends the largest budget percentage on defense of any European state (4.8%) and is sure to be Russia’s next morsel of interest if Russia completes its project of subjugation in Ukraine. And this move - which was a surprise inside the Pentagon - comes on top of his withdrawal of 5,000 troops from Germany.

Completion of Russia’s project is not assured, however, as Ukraine has become a globally recognized master of drone technology, hitting an oil refinery, a fertilizer plant, and military aircraft well inside the aggressor country recently, as well as providing sales and training to several Gulf states. The memory of Trump telling Zelensky in the Oval Office that Zelensky “had no cards” is fairly fresh, and becomes richer in irony daily.

We’re now more than a quarter way into the present century. Can anybody credibly claim that it’s shaping up to be another American century? Sure, we can send our best to circle the moon, but the realignment of Earthly powers is outpacing the long-term possibilities opened up by a return to space. Canada and Europe are proceeding as a bloc without post-America. Iran holds quite an ace with the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. One would be hard-pressed to think of a Latin American nation that is keen to be in a close partnership with the US. And Asia knows that China is a force that must be reckoned with, for good or ill.

And, of course, post-America continues to be hollowed out culturally and spiritually.

I know some fellow inhabitants of the Narrow Sliver of Terrain - that infinitesimal piece of real estate where the pillars of actual conservatism are remembered and still revered - who place great hope in prying the Republican Party loose from the deeply embedded claws and fangs of Trumpism by engaging it at the grassroots level. It would indeed do the heart good to become a precinct committee person or run for county council and encounter a budding Ben Sasse, or Mia Love, or Jack Kemp, or Ronald Reagan with whom to plant a local seed and tend to its growth.

But consider the recent experience of my home state, Indiana. Trump and the sway he holds over the party demonstrated that primarying the disloyal is definitely a thing. My own state senator, Greg Walker, a thoughtful and articulate conservative who had been sufficiently well regarded to be elected to the legislature many times, was defeated - over his opposition to mid-decade redistricting.

The question I have for those who encourage a patient slog through several election cycles, without the backup of institutions that allow us to remember our original national purpose, is still this: Is there time to see that through?

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At a gym where I was a member several years ago, I frequently ran into a guy I knew from a couple of other contexts. He’d come in with a group of guys. He was much smaller - shorter, and less buff, in fact, constantly striving to fend off chubbiness (he was a chef) - than the rest. They all talked trash and laughed a lot when they went through their training routine.

When the others were standing around him, coaching him through a particularly arduous rep of some exercise, these sinewy giants would stare at him and yell, “Where you at, Little Dawg?” They were checking in on his immediate mental and attitudinal state as he mustered the requisite perseverance to complete the motion.

The above vignette is from the first installment in this irregular series of check-ins on the state of my faith walk.

I’m going to get baptized the first Sunday in June. Actually, I did get water sprinkled on my head when I was about six weeks old.

I’m not saying that such a form of that sacrament can’t be a pivotal moment, but I think it may have less of a chance of sticking, unless the baptized infant went on to be raised in a consciously Christian household, receiving a steady dose of guidance and support. My own upbringing was full of mixed messages. More on that in a bit.

But sometimes I consider my late sister, and how the fact that one of her sons is still, now well into middle age, a basically secular agnostic. He even remarked at his mother’s (my sister’s) memorial service that it was the first time he realized his own sons did not know the Lord’s Prayer by heart. My sister one time said, “He’s all equipped if he’d just say yes. He’s been baptized.”

So . . .

It’s interesting that my sister, a philosophy major, got really, well, churchy early in adulthood, shortly after she got married. It took me several decades to embark on a serious faith walk.

We were raised in a Presbyterian Church USA congregation, and my dad held several positions. But the PCUSA and our local church were tilting leftward and becoming more preoccupied with secular concerns. By the time my friends from church and I were in high school, our conversations were about (secular) music, girls, and where we could get a bottle of wine.

My parents left the church when I was about that age. The final straw was the PCUSA contributing to Angela Davis’s defense fund.

But I continued to go to senior high fellowship on Sunday evenings, because it was hip. We had hip youth ministers and lay adult mentors. There used to be an old two-story house next to the church campus and the church ran a coffee house in it. It quickly became a place for local hippies to gather. In fact, the FBI paid a visit, because someone had painted an upside down American flag over the men’s room door.

My dad was big into character formation. He taught sailing in the summer time at Culver military academy. Was a scoutmaster, even scoutmaster of the Hoosier Hills Council troop that went to the 1951 National Jamboree at Valley Forge. He was involved with the Exchange Club’s Boy of the Month Program. He tried his best to get me on the program, but the countercultural influence prevailed.

And I think that, in the end, was the main level on which he engaged with religion. He could recite the Apostle’s Creed by heart, but I know for a fact that when he came upon crunch moments in life, such as a couple of downturns in his business, he had doubts about anything beyond his own resources for facing them. He had anger issues and swore with great regularity pretty much all his life.

So I think that partaking in immersive baptism as an adult, part of which will involve proclaiming that Jesus Christ is my Lord and savior, will be a way of sealing the deal, letting God have me.

Put another way, I think it’s the next step in exploring this notion of dying to self, which was the subject of the most recent installment of the Little Dawg series.

Maybe I’m just afraid of dying to myself. Would the nature of my thought patterns change? What happens to viewpoints and preferences?

I think baptism can be a chance to get a glimpse of one’s factory settings, the design by which God fashioned a person, before sin, that pesky perennial of the human condition, gummed up the works.

I like C.S. Lewis’s keyhole model for the relationship between individuality and one’s status as a child of God:

“The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions.

Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it -- made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.”

―C.S. Lewis,The Problem of Pain

It’s not something one has to worry about. You couldn’t possibly be anyone but you.

So I’m taking this next step, mainly because I know I can’t escape from the fundamental truth about this universe, which is that God rules over it with inexhaustible love.

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I truly don’t understand how anyone who accurately sized up Donald Trump from the get-go can change his or her mind, especially at this late date.

Today’s specific catalyst for this thought is two current pieces at National Review, both by editor Rich Lowry. Lowry’s been at the NR helm for a while and oversaw the January 2016 issue entirely devoted to essays by prominent conservatives opposed to the Very Stable Genius. The editorial that kicks off the issue succinctly covers the gamut of objections that follow. And, while specific issues and events have morphed in the decade since, the piece accurately points out Trumpian reactions to them that apply today:

On foreign policy, Trump is a nationalist at sea. Sometimes he wants to let Russia fight ISIS, and at others he wants to “bomb the sh**” out of it. He is fixated on stealing Iraq’s oil and casually suggested a few weeks ago a war crime — killing terrorists’ families — as a tactic in the war on terror. For someone who wants to project strength, he has an astonishing weakness for flattery, falling for Vladimir Putin after a few coquettish bats of the eyelashes from the Russian thug. All in all, Trump knows approximately as much about national security as he does about the nuclear triad — which is to say, almost nothing.

Indeed, Trump’s politics are those of an averagely well-informed businessman: Washington is full of problems; I am a problem-solver; let me at them. But if you have no familiarity with the relevant details and the levers of power, and no clear principles to guide you, you will, like most tenderfeet, get rolled. Especially if you are, at least by all outward indications, the most poll-obsessed politician in all of American history. Trump has shown no interest in limiting government, in reforming entitlements, or in the Constitution. He floats the idea of massive new taxes on imported goods and threatens to retaliate against companies that do too much manufacturing overseas for his taste. His obsession is with “winning,” regardless of the means — a spirit that is anathema to the ordered liberty that conservatives hold dear and that depends for its preservation on limits on government power. The Tea Party represented a revival of an understanding of American greatness in these terms, an understanding to which Trump is tone-deaf at best and implicitly hostile at worst. He appears to believe that the administrative state merely needs a new master, rather than a new dispensation that cuts it down to size and curtails its power.

Boomity.

So what explains Lowry’s gush-fest today about where Trump will rank among US presidents?

Donald Trump is one of the most indomitable figures in the history of our politics. No matter how much he’s mocked or hated, no matter how intense the controversy or how impossible the fix, no matter how dramatic the situation, he never breaks or loses his sense of command.

The ever-ebullient Teddy Roosevelt, who once gave a speech from shot-through notes immediately after an assassination attempt, might tip his cap. (TR takes the cake for badassery in the face of a threat to his life, given that he delivered that 1912 campaign speech while bleeding and with the bullet still lodged in his chest.)

A fundamental part of the Trump ethos is, as he said right after the dinner attack when everything was still confused, “Let the show go on.” For him, the show must never stop, and he’s always at the center of it.

This is one reason that he had the instinct to pump his fist in the air in Butler, Pa., after he’d been bloodied and nearly killed by an assassin’s bullet, demonstrating fight and lack of fear in an instantly iconic moment.

Anyone inclined to dismiss this trait as that of a mere entertainer should consider how showmanship has always had an outsized role in high-level politics; FDR referred to himself, in a positive way, as one of the top actors in the country.

Trump’s belief that he’s always going to prevail, and that if he doesn’t, he’ll find a workaround, gives him an invincible self-confidence. It doesn’t mean that he won’t retreat if necessary, but whether he’s being firm or flexible, he’s equally upbeat and assured about his position.

He couples this with a hyperactive energy.

Just look at Washington, D.C. He’s deployed the National Guard to fight crime, cleaned up homeless encampments and public parks, vowed to make the grass look greener and the water in the Reflecting Pool look bluer, hosted a military parade, brought the coming attractions of an IndyCar race and an enormous fair on the National Mall, started construction of a massive new White House ballroom, and stated his intention to build a 250-foot triumphal arch.

His omnipresence, ambition, and willingness to exercise power across two presidencies — spanning twelve years with the Biden interregnum — are going to make him one of the most dominant figures in American political history, up there with the likes of Reagan, FDR, and TR in the modern era.

Lowry’s other piece that’s up today is about former VSG enthusiasts who now vehemently oppose him. The focus is on Tucker Carlson and Sohrab Ahmari, but there are some other recent examples of figures who have done that particular 180.

I’m not so interested in those, though. I suspect that their turnabouts have a lot to do with grift, or at least the assumption that they’ll get a pass for such a radical change of position because they’re established media stars or former legislators.

Some folks want to keep these discussions on the level of policy. Okay, let’s talk a little policy.

Europe - and Canada - have awakened to the great Western divorce. Donald Tusk, Georgia Meloni, Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer, Alexander Stubb, Friederich Merz, Kaja Kallas and, of course, Volodymyr Zelensky understand that this is no momentary hiccup, but rather a long-lasting schism. These people are serious about forging a security architecture that doesn’t depend on a United States that has abnegated its national character.

Iran and the US are still blockading the Strait of Hormuz, and the world is experiencing a full-blown oil crisis as a result.

Japan, under prime minister Sanae Takaichi, is revamping its security strategy:

Addressing the meeting of experts on Monday, Takaichi said Japan “must proactively pursue a fundamental strengthening of our defence capabilities”.

She called on the country to learn from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the situation in the Middle East to advance its response to new forms of warfare and “prepare for long-term conflicts”.

But enough of that. I want to discuss the main thing that ought to have disqualified the VSG from the day he descended the gold escalator.

I won’t exhaustively list every aspect of the character question. I’ve done that here, here, here, here and here, for starters.

But let’s do run through some of the most prominent greatest hits.

• His sexual history - three marriages, all undermined by cheating, the Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal affairs, the civil court that found him liable for sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll, the Billy Bush and Howard Stern interviews, his willingness to appear on the cover of Playboy, and, of course, his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.

• The remark about having hated all his political opponents, the glad-he’s-dead response to Robert Mueller’s death, the slandering of Ted and Heidi Cruz in a National Enquirer story, calling Charles Krauthammer a “dummy” and “overrated clown,” the attempt to bully Jerome Powell out of his chairman role at the Federal Reserve, the leaving of Mike Pence to the Capitol-storming crowd on January 6, 2021, and the election denial that led up to that moment.

• The poop video, the Gaza-as-resort-paradise video, complete with a gold Trump statue on a main boulevard, the calendars, the new passport cover, the ballroom plans (that include, yes, another gold statue), the presidential library plans (a high-rise hotel in Miami), the vulgarization of the Oval Office, the addition of his name to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the US Institute of Peace.

• Endless merch hawking while in office, everything from commemorative coins to crypto currency to guitars. the huge banner featuring his trademark scowl that hung from the front of the Department of Labor Building,

That this can be associated in any way with conservatism is the end product of the conflation that has been pushed by both the Left and Trumpists. Each cam p has its own reasons. Leftists want to strengthen the association between the VSG phenomenon and conservatism in the voting public’s minds to strive for the Right’s defeat. Trumpists use it to mock and indeed stomp into the dust actual conservatives so that sound ideas about economics, foreign policy, culture, and, indeed, character are jettisoned from the landscape.

And here’s where the Narrow Sliver of Terrain gets real narrow: I still refuse to sign on to the Bulwark-type position that an alliance with leftists is a viable answer. Um, no. I am as glad I didn’t vote for Kamala Harris as I am that I didn’t vote for the VSG.

Something fundamental has changed since we shifted our Overton Window regarding character. Hypocrisy, being the tribute that vice pays to virtue, permitted John F. Kennedy to credibly conduct himself as a statesman and gentlemen in public, find the resolve to navigate the Cuban missile crisis, and display a level head regarding income tax policy.

Other examples abound. The point is that there was a broad common understanding of what bringing humanity and dignity to one’s work, especially in the public sphere, and finding violations of it to be unacceptable.

Say what you will about Britain - and it has enormous problems - but its current king, in his speech to Congress, pointed up a stark contrast between the aforementioned humanity and dignity a seasoned leader summons for the occasion and the sludge that regularly spews forth from post-American “leadership.”

Look, a great number of writers whom I know from being fellow contributors to various publications continue to call balls and strikes. Good Trump, bad Trump.

I’m sorry, but reread the portion of this post in which I enumerate a plethora of reasons why Donald Trump is outside the pale.

He is so unfit, he’s exacerbating every factor that has been eroding actual American greatness for some time. He feeds on our national acceptance of his nastiness and solipsism.

Along with Charles III, let me point to another figure who reminds us of a time when character counted. The Ben Sasse 60 Minutes interview permits us to re-examine what it is we find admirable.

For those who ask why we can’t have a public sphere full of such people, I would nod and say that there is no more pressing question in post-America today.

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As I occasionally do, I’m launching today’s train of thought by riffing off a previous post - this one from March 2024. It’s titled “What Causes Ideological Conversion Experiences?”
I don’t discuss my own conversion in that one, but I have elsewhere. It was the mid-1980s. I was a snot-nosed lefty who had basically gotten that way by denying to myself that progressive moral preening was hollow at its core. Progressivism had a hipness cachet that overwhelmed the culture, even as Reaganism was ascendant in many areas.

At the time, I had a job that settled me into a routine of perusing the Indianapolis Star over coffee at a local diner before I headed to work each morning. Because my innate curiosity was stronger than any urge to sign on to any trend, I gave the columnists on the opinion pages - Norman Podhoretz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol, folks who had had their own conversion experiences and therefore gave the most compelling reasons for reconsidering basic positions - a fair-minded reading. It started to have its effect:

(The moment of epiphany was, while a clueless Unitarian-Universalist, I heard a guest speaker at a Sunday service who’d been on a “fact-finding” mission to Central America, try to make the region’s Marxist-Leninists out to be good guys.)

Once I realized what I was - and wasn’t - I plunged in headlong. Subscribed to Commentary, National Review, Insight, and The American Spectator. Read Whittaker Chambers’s Witness. Became a conference junkie.

The apex of the conference-junkie period was attending the Committee for the Free World’s three-day summit at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington in the spring of 1987. The Committee was a project of Donald Rumsfeld’s and Midge Decter’s. Decter was a much-published contributor to magazines such as those enumerated above, along with The Atlantic, The New Republic and others. She was married to Norman Podhoretz , one of the original New York Intellectuals, the group from which the original neoconservatives emerged.

My realization that the era’s “peace” movement was a shill for the bad side in the Cold War fired a real ideological zeal in me for the first time. And I consider myself fortunate that I got a grounding in solid, fusionist conservatism before I encountered the fringe stuff: Ayn Rand’s objectivism, Birch Society paranoia and paleo ossification. Once I realized that Chronicles, a paleo periodical enamored not just of the Southern Agrarians but flirtations with racist assumptions, as exemplified by such contributors as Thomas Fleming and Samuel Francis, was proudly positioned on the fringe, I dropped my subscription.

But I delved into what I did delve into with such zeal that I often, in those early days, settled for the arguments made by columnists without the underpinnings. Getting a master’s degree in history did a lot to deepen my understanding of this thing that I had intuited was right, true and good. From there I mined my recently-passed father’s book collection, which was heavy on the great minds of free-market economics - Adam Smith, Hayek et al. In the last few years, I’ve immersed myself in philosophy, because I knew that Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Locke and Montesquieu were essential to the overall picture of the worldview with which I’d aligned myself.

But that early zeal had a combative element to it. This was the days of talk radio’s ascendancy, with Rush Limbaugh at the top of that phenomenon. I was charmed by his style, which I later came to see as bombast. But in those early days, I couldn’t get enough of his skewering of feminism, environmentalism and militant homosexuality.

I sometimes look back at my first attempt at a blog, circa 2006, and cringe at the little monikers I came up with for my villains. There’s a term for the way I came at my polemics: smugness.

I hung onto my enthusiasm for talk radio for a bit longer, but I eventually tired of Limbaugh’s digressions into accounts of his golf game or sitting in hospitality suites at NFL games, and I got wise to Hannity’s modus operandi of shutting down lefty callers by simply calling them liberals, as if that settled everything.

And I now see that Limbaugh’s braggadocio (“the big voice on the Right!”) made his early enthusiasm for Trump make sense. Both were peddling to the American people a notion of success that was primarily materialistic, for all the talk about freedom, tradition and reverence.

I shut down that original blog and channeled my energies into a new one, Late in the Day, to which I still occasionally post. And of course, since 2019, I’ve focused on Precipice, which I strive to make the place where I ask deeper questions, such as how to cultivate humility, how to deal with my remaining sticking points about Christian faith, the role of persuasion in navigating a polarized society, and parsing real absolutism from absolutism as a posture.

If I’m grateful for anything about the Trumpist phenomenon, it’s that it made me see the dead end that is “owning the libs.” I never fell for the nicknames, the stunts, the demand for one-way loyalty.

What kind of society is actual conservatism striving to achieve? It’s clearly not one in which libs have been stomped into the dust, silenced and relegated to the furthest margins. Isn’t it one in which they have become convinced that Burke’s comparison of the American (for liberty) and French (for equality) revolutions makes sense? One in which they can see that free market economics has its basis in an understanding of individual sovereignty? One in which they can see why centuries of tradition and institutions ought to be heeded as we formulate public policy about very basic aspects of human life?

Once again, this is why I don’t call balls and strikes when discussing particular developments. Actual conservatism has no truck with Trumpism - none at all.

And this is why I have a needle to thread regarding the Iran war. It would have been a great idea at any point over the last 47 years to topple the Iranian regime, but only with buy-in from allies (and certainly not hurling insults at them), extensive planning, and a clear articulation of aims. In other words, the absence of these things is why every development, such as the current blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, is fraught with uncertainty.

Searching for the essence of conservatism is a bit like the question of what the first rock and roll record actually was. I daresay, though, that that essence involves answering the question of what human flourishing is, and how to fashion a society that maximizes it. And because we’re conservatives, we know it doesn’t come from maximizing “self-actualization,” nor does it come from shoving aspects of our worldview down society’s throat via governmental measures. We can see that such imposition cuts off the chance for our ideas to take root organically and have their full effect.

I don’t reject policy moves because they’re put forth by guys I happen not to like. I reject them if they ignore the comprehensive aim of a well-grounded Right.

Real conservatism - the sweet, fine stuff that provides answers neither progressivism nor Trumpism can provide - aims for nothing less than a world that works for everybody.