Yeah, philosophical gent that he is, ole Yuval likes to take the long perspective on things, and after some hemming and hawing about what’s been going on in the House of Representatives, comes up with this conclusion: Even if the spoils of the speaker fight [i.e., the “reforms’ demanded by the far right] aren’t transformative,…
Search Results for: Yuval Levin
Yuval Levin (and Ramesh Ponnuru and Ross Douthat) and the utter hypocrisy of the “responsible Republican”
Yuval Levin, hailed by none other than Lyin’ Paulie Ryan as a serious conservative thinker, has a ponderous, and thoroughly repulsive “think piece” up at the New York Times, Democrats, Voting Rights Are Not the Problem, in which he tries to pretend that there are good arguments for election law reform “on both sides”! Because…
Ramesh and Yuval, less than generous, less than ingenuous
Ramesh Ponnuru and Yuval Levin have a heavy rap on how to replace Obamacare over at the National Review, a piece that occasioned less than reverent comment on the left, to which Ponnuru and Levin respond, rather tartly, here. The piece has drawn some critical responses in the past few days — from Ezra Klein,…
Is Ron DeSantis inevitable? Well, maybe.
The National Review can’t get enough of Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and it’s easy to see why: DeSantis drooler in chief Rich Lowry’s review of DeSantis’ bad boy with a Harvard sheen swagger bears the following subhead: “A glimpse at what Trumpism without Trump can look like.” Okay, to some of us that can…
CRT v. Anti-CRT: Wait, Wait! You’re BOTH Right! Occasionally.
OCTOBER 6, 2022 UPDATE: In the course of this report—somewhere in the middle—I discuss crime data from the FBI. I should have pointed out that these data are estimates rather than complete tallies. We don’t know, for example, that there were 10,440 homicides in the U.S. in 2020, although the FBI says we do. I…
Twilight of Democracy: Anne Applebaum’s front-row seat to disaster
I have already written with great approval of Anne Applebaum’s recent article for the Atlantic, History Will Judge the Complicit, while snickering at Ramesh Ponnuru’s anguished protest—for surely the dude protested too much—that he was totally not—repeat not—“complicit”. He’s just friends with people who, it so happens, are complicit”.1 Which is like a totally different…
Topics
Articles of Lasting Interest: Jazz: I post a jazz video every week, usually but not necessarily featuring a performance of a composition of Thelonious Monk. These videos can be accessed as a group here. “Harvard douchebaggery not exclusively a left-wing phenomenon, study reveals” is an unfriendly take on Harvard Professor Robert Barro’s disingenuous claim that…
John McCain, Paul Ryan, and the Myth of the Virtuous Republican
John McCain is one of those guys who, when he dies, people say “he was the last of a dying breed.” No one will ever say that about Paul Ryan. John McCain was a genuine war hero, a man who preferred to face hardship, torture, and even death rather than abandon his comrades. Paul Ryan…
The Benedict Strategy, Spinoza Edition
I don’t know if you’re up on Rod Dreher, who moans and groans with varying degrees of accuracy regarding the woke folks over at the American Conservative. Rod, a floridly passionate Christian, seems to have undergone several denominational makeovers, rejecting the Catholic Church to settle, I think, somewhere in the fields of Eastern Orthodoxy. Awhile…
Political Notes from All Over
Turnout, Turnout, Turnout! Why Democrats love it and Republicans hate it. Ruy Teixeira, a Democratic political centrist after my own heart, has a post up at his Substack blog, The Liberal Patriot, How Not to Build a Coalition, arguing, correctly, in my opinion, “High turnout is just not the magic key to Democratic victories the…