Desirable Things and Their Limits

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Moderation is a virtue that is easy to mock, and you don’t have to be Barry Goldwater—“I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”—to find faults with its misapplication. Should a husband vow to be moderately faithful to his wife? Should a soldier show moderate courage and discipline?

But moderation is a classical political virtue, from the Roman republic to ours, one that is rooted not in half-heartedness but in humility: Moderation is the virtue that you practice out of mindfulness that you and your friends could be wrong about something, that the other guys might have a point, that the best-intentioned policies may have unintended consequences, etc. You could not guess it from the rhetoric and behavior of the right-wing revolutionists who dishonestly call themselves conservatives in our time, but moderation is a hallmark conservative virtue. T.S. Eliot understood the moderating impulse, the necessity of not getting carried away with oneself and one’s passions—and he also understood that the underlying virtue was never going to be popular:

(Readers who are unfamiliar with the conservative intellectual movement, which used to be a thing, might be surprised to learn that Russell Kirk’s famous book is titled The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot. There was, incredible as it may seem, a time when conservatives cared what the poets and the literary critics were saying. The right learned from Andrew Breitbart the maxim that “politics is downstream from culture,” and then decided that “culture” could mean only Kid Rock, Ted Nugent, and the collected works of Pat Sajak and Rob Schneider.)

Moderation is the little voice in your head asking: “Strictly speaking, is it necessary to have ICE agents rappelling out of helicopters into Chicago apartment buildings?” That would be a good question for someone to be asking himself. Perhaps if someone pushed a Hefty SteelSak full of $100 bills into Tom Homan’s sweaty little hands, that would get his attention.

Civility, on the other hand, is good in and of itself. When Union soldiers under the command of Gen. Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain saluted Gen. Robert E. Lee after the Confederate surrender, it could not have been easy for many of them—for most of them—who had lost friends, brothers, fathers, or sons in that awful war. Happily, they did not have a President Trump there to advise them that the proper thing was to forsake their Christianity and obdure their hearts to persist in hating their enemies. Gen. Chamberlain did not order that salute because Gen. Lee himself was a good man or because he fought in a good cause—he was a rebel, and his cause was rebellion. But the civilized man understands that there are good men and courage and valor on both sides of the fight—and criminals and cowards and profiteers on both sides, too—and so Gen. Chamberlain ordered that Gen. Lee and his men be treated with martial courtesy, reflecting both the best aspirations behind the war the Union had fought and the best hopes for the peace that was to follow. 

If Abraham Lincoln et al. had held to the more ancient way of doing things, then Gen. Chamberlain’s orders would have been to gut Lee on the spot before hunting down Jefferson Davis for the same treatment. But it was the Confederacy that held to the more ancient way of doing things—slavery was a part of the ancient world and had no proper place in the new one Americans were building. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman had unleashed practically biblical terrors in the project of building that new world, and he seems to have understood that there was no place for him in the political life of the peace that followed, famously rejecting attempts to recruit him as a presidential candidate: “I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected.”

Civility is not only a character trait—it is a project, something individuals and groups do. The Wall Street Journal reported this weekend on civility movements that have emerged at the state level. Minnesota, for example, has a civility caucus that puts on events for the benefit of state legislators and, one assumes, for the edification of their constituents.

And there, I suppose, is the problem: The mandate for civility may at times be in tension with the superseding mandate to tell the truth. Spencer Cox is not a “gutless Republican,” but Ted Cruz is. Bernie Sanders is a “radical left lunatic,” no doubt, but John Hickenlooper isn’t. And there are versions of lunacy to which leftiness is only incidental. “Some on the left label Trump fascist and authoritarian,” the Journal reported in the value-neutral voice of the news page. True enough, and so do some on the right—because it is true.

(If Trump is some degree short of formal fascism, it is only because his political thinking is too disorganized and incoherent to associate with a particular school, even one as vaguely defined as fascism. But: authoritarianism, nationalism, contempt for the constitutionalism and the rule of law, contempt for procedure, the aestheticization of politics, the weaponization of the state in general and the military in particular against domestic political opponents, masked agents bundling people into trucks to ship them off to detention camps—you can put an asterisk after fascism, if you like, but even such a persnickety editor as your favorite correspondent will concede that fascism gets the job done, as a word.)

It surely is the case that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s dopiest ideas and sometimes-shocking ignorance do not need to be brought up in every conversation about (or with) her, but these are relevant from time to time. We can be polite and even generous to such figures without pretending that we do not know what we know about them. Trump’s authoritarianism—which as always must be understood in light of the fact that he attempted to stage a coup d’état at the end of his first administration—is the most important fact in American political life today. There are civil and uncivil ways of approaching that problem, it is true, but there is no getting around the tautology: It is what it is.

I wish the nice people in Minnesota the very best with their civility efforts, and I will do my best to do my own small part in a similar spirit.

Of course, it is possible to weaponize the notion of civility: I hear from Trump apologists every day who complain that I mistreat the poor dear by criticizing him in such terms as I do. Procedure, norms, convention—all of these things can be misused. But so can their opposite: the sense that we are in special circumstances, in some sort of state of emergency in which the usual rules of etiquette—or even legal procedure—cannot apply. There are times when that is true, but usually it is simply an excuse to write oneself a moral permission slip to treat one’s enemies contemptuously or violently, usually while insisting on the protections of convention and civility for oneself. Trump is, of course, the most prominent practitioner of that double standard, threatening legal action against journalists who have “hate in their hearts” while celebrating his own heart’s hatred at a supposedly Christian memorial service. The ground underneath our feet is uneven and tricky, and so we have to be on guard against everything that would mislead us—including our own hearts.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth went on and on last week (I would write droned, but, you never know these days!) about the need for the U.S. military to emphasize lethality. Saying that a military should be lethal is like saying that chocolate-chip cookies should have chocolate chips in them. It is an impossible point to argue.

But: Lethality? Really?

As if that were the problem.

Somebody apparently needs to explain to Secretary Pete that the lethality of U.S. forces is the one thing the American military does not really need to worry about. Running out of money? Sure. Being unable to get the job done when the metric is lethality? Not a problem. Not even close.

U.S. forces have ably demonstrated, time and time again, that they can do pretty much anything they are asked to do. If you told a Marine expeditionary force to invade Bavaria for the purpose of building a giant waterslide and told them you wanted it open in six weeks, you’d be eating Käsespätzle and drinking Weihenstephaner and slip-sliding down that giant waterslide in Munich in about a month and a half. Not to go all Professor Terguson on you, but the ability of U.S. troops to kill people and break things is not in doubt and has not been in doubt for a very, very long time: The limitation is the politicians—and, ultimately, the people—who ask the military to begin long, complex projects (say, nation-building in Iraq) that American voters do not have the stomach or attention span to finish. I have seen the enemy, and it is the collective prefrontal cortex of the American electorate.

The practical superiority of U.S. forces is remarkable. Do you know when the last time U.S. ground forces were killed by manned enemy aircraft was? 1953. They were killed by North Koreans, of all people, flying fabric-covered biplanes, of all things, Soviet-made Polikarpov “Kukuruznik” Po-2s. During our 20 years in Afghanistan, fewer than 2,000 U.S. troops were killed in action—there were more than five times as many deaths from homicides in Chicago during those same years.

U.S. forces are so impossible to beat in battle that they have created, through no fault of their own, a kind of serious geopolitical problem: Nuclear proliferation, development of weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism are all driven in no small part by the fact that there isn’t a conventional force on this Earth that can face the American military on a battlefield without being turned into compost in great numbers. Lethality, indeed, is the military’s calling card—but over at the State Department, the White House, and the Capitol, they play with a different deck of cards entirely, a deck with way too many jokers in it.

One of the ways in which government policy can cause economic distortions is by “pulling forward” consumption. Tesla, for example, just enjoyed a record-breaking quarter for deliveries. Why? Because the car-buying public suddenly has a lot of extra money to spend and has decided that Elon Musk isn’t such a ridiculous creep after all? No—because EV tax incentives are about to expire, and so people who might have been planning to lease an EV in the near future decided to act now in order to take advantage of that $7,500 federal subsidy. Most analysts expect that this quarter’s record numbers will turn into a slump in the next quarter.

From Reuters:

On a related note: Much has been made of Elon Musk’s gargantuan potential payday, but a look at the performance goals the company has to hit for Musk to fully realize that compensation—raising the firm’s market capitalization eightfold, 20 million vehicle deliveries, 1 million robotaxis in operation, and much more—makes the offer look proportionate. Would you pay a guy $1 trillion to make you $7.5 trillion? Of course you would. Tesla’s shareholders and board are not, in the main, fools.

And, in other business news …

It does strike me as a little odd that Ferrari, the storied automaker, has decided to become a fashion house. But the results are … pretty good.

“McDonald’s is chasing the bargain eater,” reports Salon.

“Think twice before a parasite cleanse,” Salon advises, possibly with the bargain eater in mind. Oh, well. Only 393 days until the next election.

That being said …

Several items are on my language agenda this week. So, here we go:

A press release for a product that is somehow simultaneously “waterless” and “ultra-hydrating.”

Hydrate literally means putting water into something—from the Greek word for water.

I particularly hate the word “revolutionary” in marketing copy. I once received an email from a real-estate agent boasting of his “revolutionary” approach to selling houses. So I asked: “What’s different? Are you not selling houses and then taking a commission?” Oh, no, came the response, the revolutionary bit was that he intended to put customers first. “Ahead of your commission?” And thus the conversation ended.

From the New York Times:

Electrocution is a portmanteau of the words electric and execution, used to describe the intentional infliction of death on a person via electricity, first used to describe the process of killing criminals via electric chair. It is a legend that the term was cooked up by Thomas Edison to cast discredit on the alternating-current technology being developed by George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla. Edison did work to connect AC to electrocution and published pamphlets claiming that it was dangerous, but he does not seem to have coined the word. From Wikipedia:

Over time, the word came to be applied indiscriminately both to intentional and accidental deaths via electricity, and then to non-lethal electric shocks as well. I wish they had gone with Gerrycide, with Elbridge Thomas Gerry joining his grandfather, Vice President Elbridge Gerry of “gerrymander” infamy, in the ranks of great eponyms.

I’d prefer that electrocute be restricted to its original capital-punishment sense on my usual grounds: We should have different words for different things.

I receive email from “the Office of Congresswoman Elise Stefanik.” Congresswoman is a clunky usage. I think there’s a pretty good argument to be made for congressman as a sex-inclusive word, like chairman or mankind. But, in this case, we have the wonderful alternative of using the correct word: representative.

Elise Stefanik is, for her sins and the nation’s, a member of the House of Representatives, one of the two houses of Congress. We do not use congressman to describe senators, but they are men and women of Congress as much as members of the House are. Representative may add a few syllables, but it also adds accuracy and a reminder that there is a difference between what members of the House are there to do and what senators are there to do. Oh, I’m still with Edmund Burke, don’t get me wrong:

That said, the House of Representatives is expected—and designed—to be more reflective of public opinion than the Senate is: That is why there are more House members, why they (generally) represent smaller populations than senators, and why they are elected much more frequently.

Perhaps Elise Stefanik is representative of the views of her constituents. There is much else of which she is representative, including Republicans’ supine servility toward Donald Trump and Congress’ general abandonment of its duties.

Last week, I mentioned that dope Rep. Derrick Van Orden, a former Navy SEAL who once served as a Navy SEAL during the period in which he was a Navy SEAL (I am summarizing his press literature), which was before he, a former Navy SEAL, portrayed a Navy SEAL in a low-budget movie about Navy SEALs. I referred to the fact that Van Orden, a former Navy SEAL, once got into trouble for trying to carry a 9mm handgun through airport security. “Tut-tut,” came the predictable replies, “you mean semiautomatic.”

Careful readers would know better than to try to out gun-nut me.

It is true that the pistol in question was a semiautomatic 9mm and not a fully automatic one. But fully automatic handguns are not called automatics—they are called machinepistols or submachine guns, depending on the configuration. The convention of using automatic to distinguish a semiautomatic handgun from a revolver is well more than a century old, which is why common cartridges used in semiautomatic pistols have names such as 10mm Auto (as opposed to “10mm Semiauto”) or .45 ACP (and not .45 SCP). On those rare occasions when one must specify something exotic—say, a Glock 9mm that has been converted to fully automatic fire—it is best to spell the thing out, accurately and completely. Unhappily, one rarely sees that in American journalism when it comes to questions involving firearms.

When Gen. Sherman left the military, he published a memoir, one of the first Civil War figures to do so. His account of Gen. Ulysses S. Grant was frank, to such an extent that Grant’s minions ran to him like little tattletales to point out how critical Sherman had been. But Grant did not see things that way. “When I finished the book,” he wrote, “I found I approved every word; that ... it was a true book, an honorable book, creditable to Sherman, just to his companions—to myself particularly so—just such a book as I expected Sherman would write.”

Grant himself was one of the finest writers—and surely the finest memoirist—among the presidents. Perhaps Sherman was buoyed a little in the final years of a hard life as a hard man who spent his best years doing hard things.

If you are feeling nausea, you are nauseated; if you cause nausea, you are nauseous.

And, now, we can move on …

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On the weaponization of convention and etiquette, consult The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. One scene finds the innocent young Isabel Archer implicitly chiding the villainous Gilbert Osmond for being conventional. Osmond advises her:

Convention itself. There is real power in that, and all such power is liable to be abused.