Welcome to the Tuesday, a weekly newsletter about the laughable, the ludicrous, and the lachrymose. To subscribe to the Tuesday — which I hope you will do — please follow this link.
The GOP Is Not Your Ex
As the political philosopher Neil Sedaka observed, “Breaking up is hard to do.”
Something you will no doubt have observed in your own life and in the lives of others is that the discord in a relationship — or the bitterness of its ending — is directly proportional to the intensity and closeness of the relationship itself: A romance consisting of three dates in six weeks might end without either party’s even quite noticing, but the dissolution of a 30-year marriage with children is always agonizing and potentially explosive; it is much more wrenching to leave a job you find personal meaning in than a job that is just a paycheck; with rare exceptions, you will never get as angry at your cousins as you do at your brother. Etc.
The thing conservatives need to keep in mind: The Republican Party is not your ex. Neither is the conservative movement. As it happens, I wrote this newsletter — except for the sentence you are reading — before Charlie Sykes’s latest — “A Governor Breaks Up with Trump” — landed in my in-box; the headline could not be more apt.
There was a time when sensible conservatives could take a realistic, instrumental view of the GOP and find it reasonably useful for our ends. The job of the Republican Party was to serve conservative interests — not the other way around. That has become complicated in two equally significant ways: One, political tribalism has done its awful work on conservatives as much as it has on anybody else, and many on the right today see advancing the electoral prospects of the Republican Party as, in effect, the whole of the conservative agenda per se; second, the Republican Party is today a much less able and reliable vessel of conservative policy than it was ten or 20 years ago, because it has been deformed by vulgar populism and infantile nationalism, to such an extent that certain important factions within the GOP have discovered a strange new respect for everything from heavy-handed and politically tinged antitrust regulation to economic redistribution to Vladimir Putin — and a positive loathing of free trade, free speech, the military, and the libertarian sensibility that Ronald Reagan famously described as “the very heart and soul of conservatism.” Down with Reaganism, up with Orbánism; down with Margaret Thatcher, up with Marine Le Pen.
For a certain kind of contemporary rightist, the relationship between the Chicago Boys and Augusto Pinochet is something that reflects poorly not on the economists but on the generalissimo. You’ll rarely meet a leftist who detests the thinking of Milton Friedman as much as our rage-addled new rightists do.
How should an unsentimental conservative think about the Republican Party?
Before the question of what we should think about the Republican Party, we might start with how we should feel about the Republican Party, about which I would advise — not very strongly.
If I am not quite politically where you’ll find, e.g., my friends over at the Bulwark, I am not emotionally where they are, either, and that may be more to the point. By this, I do not mean to cast any aspersions on that school of thought and its adherents. I would be very surprised if William Kristol did not have much stronger personal feelings about the Republican Party than I do: He served in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations (as chief of staff to the vice president in the latter case), advised (and even managed) Republican campaigns, led organizations with the word “Republican” in their name, etc. — and I didn’t. Joe Scarborough held office as a Republican. If you look at the résumés of conservatives most bitterly estranged from the Republican Party, you’ll see many former advisers, campaign operatives, Hill staffers, party officials, etc. These are people who didn’t casually date the Republican Party — they were married.
And when I talk with them or read their work, I often think: “I don’t especially disagree with any of that, but — holy crow! — are they ever angry!”
The ladies and gentlemen on talk radio and the cable-news shows talk admiringly about “passion,” while John Adams feared passion — and he was right to do so.
It is worth remembering that passion is another word for suffering.
My own view is that, looked at dispassionately, the Republican Party is an organization that has for a long time been only partly useful to conservatives and that is becoming less useful each day. And all of that angst and wailing from the likes of Sean Hannity and the rest of the Chicken Little crowd — the sky is falling, Joe Biden is the Antichrist, and we are only one election away from losing our country forever! — is verbal camouflage deployed by people who have political or financial interests in maintaining the myth that conservatism and the Republican Party as so closely identified as to be in effect a single instrument. You may have noticed that the two kinds of people who argue most intensely for the complete identification of the conservative movement with the Republican Party are professional progressives and entrepreneurs in the more commercial side of right-wing media — in this, and in much else, those interests are quite closely aligned.
What conservatives will have to do in the post-Trump era is what conservatives have always had to do — take our wins where we find them, be realistic about our prospects, and expect to be disappointed by politicians. I am always happy to see a Ben Sasse rising in the world and would be pleased to see such figures rise farther; on the other hand, Lindsey Graham and figures like him are a net loss for the republic irrespective of whether what we are talking about is a Brand R Sycophant or a Brand D Sycophant — and if your sense of loyalty necessitates pretending that this is not the case, then you are loyal to the wrong things.
The Republican Party as it currently is constituted is not the only instrument available to us, nor is it the only possible instrument that might be available to us. Those who speak despairingly about the prospects of third parties should remember that the GOP began as one. But this is not mainly a question of forming new parties or engaging in some kind of endless Tracy Flick–ism, in which the ambitious and the frustrated start new organizations to give themselves something to be in charge of. In the long term, ideas are and always have been the most powerful force in politics: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”; “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!”; “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer!”; “It is accordingly our wish and our command that the English Church shall be free, and that men in our kingdom shall have and keep all these liberties, rights, and concessions, well and peaceably in their fullness and entirety for them and their heirs, of us and our heirs, in all things and all places forever.”
This should figure more prominently in our political thinking than does the question of the party registration of the next man to be elected chief dog-catcher of Penobscot.
Words About Words
The word eponym refers to two things: a word derived from a person’s name and the person whose name formed the word. Boycott is an eponym, and its eponym is Charles C. Boycott, a 19th-century victim of the now-familiar pressure-campaign strategy. An eponym I did not know about until National Review’s Dale Brott mentioned it to me last week is derrick, which we think of as the pyramid-shaped structure over an oil well (a usage dating to the 19th century) but which originally meant a kind of gallows. It was named for a famous London executioner, Thomas Derrick, his surname being a variation of both Dietrich and Theodoric. Derrick the executioner is referred to in a few works of Elizabethan drama.
The (possibly embellished) story is that Derrick was a convicted rapist who was spared execution for his crime by volunteering to become the London executioner, a job no one much wanted. He was appointed to the position by the Earl of Essex, whom he would later execute. Essex elected for beheading rather than hanging — big mistake: Derrick was an innovative hangman but apparently not very good with an ax, and he took several swings to finally do in the earl.
The famously eponymous (and famously incompetent) Earl of Sandwich had somewhat better luck in his patronage. And see if the famous description of him applies to anybody you can think of in contemporary politics: “Seldom has any man held so many offices and accomplished so little.”
Rampant Prescriptivism
Continuing on that theme, a common question is: When does one use hanged and when does one use hung? There isn’t really a grammatical rule in play here; the issue is that we treat hang the execution method as a different verb from hang meaning “suspend.” So hanged is used only when you are writing or speaking about an execution — otherwise, hung.
You might think the same thing would be at work in lit vs. lighted, but it isn’t quite that. Both words have been around for a very long time as the past tense of light in both British and American English. Lighted is more common in adjective uses (“a well-lighted room”), and it is no surprise to see the noun light transformed into an adjective in a way familiar from such phrases as “a well-propertied man” or “the moneyed classes.”
Send your language questions to TheTuesday@NationalReview.Com
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A Lass Unparallel’d
After almost 15 years of giving my family unmixed and unreserved joy, our older dachshund, Katy-May, passed away over the weekend. She was my friend, sidekick — and, not infrequently, taskmaster — for the last third of her life, and my wife’s constant companion since she was a puppy.
As is so often the case, the sadness is mostly for us, the ones who have a little sausage-shaped hole in our family, rather than for Katy, who had an excellent life and who, though elderly, spent her last years mostly undiminished except for a few short days at the very end. She was still going up and down stairs on her own — a sign of real vigor in a creature who was by the conventional measure about 98 in human years and who possessed legs that were about four inches long.
Katy traveled the world, romping through Central Park in her early Upper West Side days, trotting along the boulevards of Paris and the beaches of California and Costa Rica, hiking in the Swiss Alps and the Rockies, a natural tourist and happy to go wherever life took her, on airplanes or trains or boats. On a trip to Aspen, we made a point of hiking up Smuggler’s Mountain every day, which Katy was happy to do — until she wasn’t, at which point she would sit down, definitely, and no amount of cajoling or persuasion or leash-tugging could convince her to take another step. Then she would go into the backpack, poking her head out at times or curling up and going to sleep, napping being her second-favorite activity, behind breakfasting.
Her gift for marathon napping was such that she could make the whole of an international flight unnoticed by her fellow passengers. The first few minutes of a car ride always made her a little nervous, but, once she had settled in, a sunny spot in the passenger’s seat (or in the passenger’s lap) contented her very well, as did the necessary closeness of automobile travel. I don’t know how many times she crossed the country, but it was more than a few. Her last long road trip was to pick up our other dachshund, Pancake, whom Katy approached in her characteristic way with strangers — initially with skepticism bordering on positive hostility and then settling into aristocratic indifference — until it became clear that the puppy was part of the family, after which she taught the younger dog about important things such as yogurt, pushing open the back door, and the all-important 5 a.m. reveille.
It was clear to me that, from her point of view, I filled two roles in Katy’s life: leader of the pack and full-time live-in butler. If she saw any contradiction or incompatibility in those roles, she never indicated it. She preferred to take her morning nap in sunny spots and, if the sun moved into an inconvenient position, she would nudge me and complain about it, apparently believing that I had the power to move the sun. If I could, I would have.
It is easy to make too much of the love we have for dogs. But it is also easy to make too little of it.
The Stoics believed that the world has an ineffable and incomprehensible perfection in it, and that most human unhappiness comes from our inability to perceive — or to accept — the necessities of that perfection. Christians, in a similar way, believe that God has a plan for us, individually and together, and that we do well to depend on Providence when the complexity and subtlety of the divine plan and its requirements are beyond what we can know. I take it as a token of His omnipotence that the Architect of Universes can put a full measure of His grace and goodness into small, simple, short-lived things. I am not saying Katy never misused a rug, which she most certainly did, or that she was particularly generous when it came to sharing treats, which she most certainly was not, but what she was, she was a perfect example of. I cannot think of any way in which she could have been improved.
Good dogs are good to us, but what really attaches them to our hearts is that they give us an opportunity to be good to them, to care for something innocent whose uncomplicated needs we can meet in an uncomplicated way. Katy never lacked for a warm, soft place to snooze, was never hungry, never afraid, never lonely. (Never legitimately hungry; she always thought she was hungry.) Beyond the occasional bit of invasive grooming or a trip to the dentist, she never really suffered any stress or anxiety. People were instinctively good to her: Once, when we had to board her for three weeks during a trip we could not bring her on, one of the people who ran the kennel took her home at night to give her a little extra attention and comfort — she was that kind of dog, and she knew it.
Sometimes, when she was let off her leash for a romp and roll in some lovely green place, she would glance over her shoulder with a little look of astonishment and gratitude, as though to say: “For me?”
Yes, I like to think that it was.
In Closing
On this day 230 years ago, President George Washington handed down the first presidential veto — of a bill having to do with the apportionment of House members that Washington believed to be unconstitutional. The example is one that subsequent presidents have sometimes failed to follow, signing into law bills that they believe to be unconstitutional, leaving it to the Supreme Court to sort it out for them. Washington’s example, as usual, deserves to be heeded.
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