The White House and the House of Representatives appear to be digging in their heels. Will we raise the debt ceiling and does it matter?

I wish that Mark Leonard had developed the thoughts he expresses in his piece at Japan Times about Chinese President Xi Jinping’s strategy more thoroughly. He does a pretty good job in outlining the weaknesses in the U. S. approach but doesn’t do as well in the part I actually read the piece for. Here’s the kernel:

By contrast, China — whose only treaty ally is North Korea — realizes that it cannot win a contest between competing alliances. Xi’s strategy therefore is to appeal to the non-Western world’s general preference for optionality and nonalignment. Presenting himself as the champion of these principles, he has developed a different notion of “democracy” based on the ability of all countries to emancipate themselves from Western dominance. This concept featured heavily in his rhetoric when he met with Putin in Moscow.

The contest between these two visions is deliberately asymmetrical. While the United States is betting on a polarized world, China is doing everything it can to advance a more fragmented one. Rather than trying to replace the U.S., it wants to be seen as a friend and ally to developing countries that want to have a greater say.

One of the problems is that I don’t think that any of that is true. I think that President Xi is trying to promote what he sees as China’s rightful place in the world—as the leading nation to which all other countries give deference.

Trey Dimsdale’s post at the Acton Institute, “Why Christianity Is Necessary for Liberty”, caught my attention. That in turn was a reaction to an article that took the contrary view.

I have problems with both of those articles but I would like to introduce a little of Marx’s thought into the conversation: the notion of inalienable rights is part of the superstructure of Christianity.

Among my objections to the articles is something I’ve written about here in the past—the notion that we in the West, the United States in particular, are the heirs to Rome and Greece. The irony of that claim appears to be completely lost on those who claim it. The Russians think the same thing. Considering Moscow as the “Third Rome” goes back to the 15th century. IMO the only way one could believe such a thing would be to be an individual, as Ben Jonson one said, with little Latin and less Greek. We owe rather little to Roman law and Greek philosophy and a lot more to Italian humanism. Anti-Papist as the Founding Fathers were they couldn’t say that so Greece and Rome it is! Practically everything of either Roman law or Greek philosophy that has been preserved was filtered through the pen of a Christian scribe. If you really wanted to know what life in ancient Greece or Rome were like I suggest you turn to traditional Arab culture which I suspect is a pretty fair representation of classical antiquity.

Will we be able to maintain quaint ideas like morality and inalienable rights in this post-Christian age? I have no idea but there are plenty of signs they are being abandoned.

Back when she was posting as “Jane Galt” on a Blogspot blog Megan McArdle proposed something she called “Jane’s law”: “The devotees of the party in power are smug and arrogant; the devotees of the party out of power are insane.” That’s what I thought of when I read Matt Taibbi’s Substack post, “House Democrats Have Lost Their Minds”:

Wow. When I think this iteration of the Democratic Party can’t sink any lower, it does.

I learned yesterday Virgin Islands Delegate and Ranking Member of the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of Government Stacey Plaskett is threatening me with prison, over her own error.

Robby Soave chimes in at Reason.com:

There’s a profound irony here. Plaskett’s likely agenda was to undermine the work of the subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, and the manner in which she chose to do this was to threaten a journalist with jail time. Weaponization, indeed.

I think they’re painting with too broad a brush. Concluding that an entire caucus has become insane based on the threats of a single relatively unimportant member is a bit much.

Still I think they have a point. I think the party needs to step away from such firebrands.

Sadly, I think the days of “Jane’s Law” are long past. Both parties have some pretty insane members saying outrageous things to get attention. And we wonder why the Congress accomplishes so little.

Daniel Henninger has a slightly different take on the security leak than mine, expressed in his Wall Street Journal column:

The revelation that for months the videogamer community was able to see highly classified intelligence documents allegedly pilfered from the U.S. government by a 20-something Air National Guardsman has repeatedly raised the question: How could this happen?

Maybe the better question for our times is: How could it not happen?

The U.S. has become a country where fantastic events occur almost weekly. If there is a sense that some normalizing function isn’t working as it should, the answer may be found in a once-familiar word—accountability.

Begin with the sprawling U.S. national-security bureaucracy, from which 21-year old Jack Teixeira allegedly took documents relating to Ukraine’s war with Russia and sensitive U.S. intelligence-gathering on allies and enemies. He allegedly shared them on a gamer messaging platform called Discord—a grimly fitting label for our current moment.

I attributed it to a lack of responsibility. Does responsibility require accountability?

Many people are familiar with the last part of this quote from the Spanish philosopher George Santayana but fewer recall the first part:

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Here’s something to reflect on. Of the U. S. cities with population of 400,000 or more, the fifty largest cities in the country, eleven have Republicans mayors. Some of those cities are in the South Atlantic census region (Virginia Beach, Miami, Jacksonville), some in the West South Central (Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Fort Worth), some in the Midwest (Omaha), some in the Mountain region (Colorado Springs, Mesa), and some in the West (Bakersfield, Fresno).

Every single one of those cities with Republican mayors has a white majority or even supermajority (60% or more). The converse is not true, i.e. not all cities with white majorities or even supermajorities have Republican mayors, e.g. Seattle and Portland both have white supermajorities and Democratic mayors.

Here in Chicago during the recent mayoral run-off even a lifelong Democrat was campaigned against as a crypto-Republican. It apparently worked.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal echo my reaction to the settlement between Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems:

The media cheering for Fox to lose were in effect cheering for a verdict that could have meant more lawsuits, many of them meritless, against journalists. Their hatred of Fox and conservatives is so strong that they ignored their self-interest.

One journalistic lesson of the Dominion case is not to indulge crank claims because your audience wants to hear them. That includes claims about Russian collusion or stolen elections. Mr. Trump could never admit he defeated himself in 2020, so he claimed the election was stolen. He tweeted a false “report” about Dominion, and the grifters who attend him, then and now, spread it.

Journalism is an imperfect craft, and mistakes are inevitable. That’s why the bar for proving libel should be high. But the obligation of a journalist is to discern the truth, or at least as close as one can get to knowing it, and tell it to your audience straight.

The philosopher George Santayana once wrote that fanaticism consists in redoubling your efforts when you have forgotten your aim. Media outlets are businesses so one of their objectives is to stay in business. As journalists they have another, higher objective is to tell the truth. When you abandon both of those objectives in trying to promote an ideology or a personality, what does that leave you with? Not much.

The same is true of the hatred of Fox News and of Trump. When pursuit of those objectives becomes your highest goal, above the truth or staying in business, you don’t have a lot left.

I suppose I ought to comment on the news of the day, Fox’s settling with Dominion for more than three-quarters of a billion (that’s billion with a “b”) dollars for its lies about voting machines manufactured by Dominion falsifying the 2020 election. Some are relieved; some are outraged.

Fox has saved itself several hundred million dollars, possibly more, and ongoing bad publicity which is probably even more damaging; Dominion has received vindication and will get its damages sooner.

IMO most of the media reports lamenting that Fox didn’t have to pay even more are misguided—they’ve dodged a bullet. If Dominion’s suit had gone to its conclusion and been upheld, there is a possibility that the very high standard for libel in American law would have been relaxed which would have made every major news organization vulnerable to suit. It would have been a mess.