Enjoying the view from Limbo
In a little over two months, the identity of the next President of the United States will be determined. I choose my words carefully. I say that the identity of the next president will be determined, not that it will be revealed. To be fair, there is a vague sense, which may be more a factor of one man’s marketing genius than of...
A few notes on the Democratic National Convention, a political event I would be even less likely to watch than a Republican National Convention. At least this year’s RNC (of which I watched a total of about one minute) involved some intrigue concerning how the party was going to frame itself so as to hold the wide range of voters it needs in...
2024 U.S. Election / America Descending / Ideas and Reflections
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 20, 2024 · Last modified July 25, 2024
I watched approximately thirty seconds of the Republican National Convention live on the internet. The first fifteen of those seconds were devoted to a careful examination of the first half of a sentence by Donald Trump’s former press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The second fifteen second block was my intensive study of the vice presidential nomination speech of J. D. Vance, which only...
2024 U.S. Election / America Descending / Ideas and Reflections
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 19, 2024 · Last modified July 25, 2024
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting at Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Pennsylvania, there has been a lot of talk, on both sides of the false dichotomy that declares itself the whole truth of American politics, about how crimes like this are the “result” of the alarmist and life-or-death rhetoric that characterizes political speech today, the only debate being over which side...
2024 U.S. Election / America Descending
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 15, 2024 · Last modified July 16, 2024
The fatal shooting at Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Pennsylvania — the state to which Barack Obama was referring when he spoke of the uneducated underclass “clinging to their Bibles and their guns,” interestingly — is the kind of moment in American politics that tends to crystallize divisions, blur rational judgment, and send the media (all forms) into seizures of exploitation mania. I...
2024 U.S. Election / America Descending / Ideas and Reflections
by Daren Jonescu · Published July 4, 2024
Much of the discussion about the U.S. presidential election has revolved around the question of Joe Biden’s fitness for office, and above all his fitness to serve a prospective second term. This narrative feeds all too well into the general tenor of our progressive late modernity with regard to the question of age, wherein it has become increasingly common and disturbingly easy to...
I assume he did it, although I don’t pretend to be an expert on the relevant laws, or even to know exactly what he is accused of having done. But I base my good-faith assumption that the New York jury of his peers got it right on the reflection that Trump is a conniving, two-faced, self-serving New York real estate liar who has...
Columbia University is under siege, 1960s style, by violent “protesters” whose goals are, shall we say, mixed. From a brief news clip survey of the ongoing mess at Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, it appears that some of these “students” are merely hoping to win a Muslim holy war against Israel by screaming about it from the cozy campus of an elite American university. Others,...
Victor Davis Hanson, the favorite historian of American conservatives, continues the magic thinking of the MAGA cult’s educated minority, which finds ever more imaginative ways of persuading itself and its lobotomized audience (the MAGA majority) that Donald Trump is somehow the solution to all the problems he causes. The key to this magic thinking is the not-so-subtle art of obscuring or denying the...
Donald Trump is the Republican Party establishment. This is true not merely in the sense that there must always, of necessity, be an established leading force within any nation or faction. It is true in the very sense most despised by the self-described establishment-haters who comprise the Trump cult, namely that Trump, their god, is absolutely embedded within, and inseparable from, the old...
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