Although it was originally published in The Spectator UK, this essay by Jeff Fynn-Paul, I found “The myth of the ‘stolen country'” well worth reading in a more durable PDF form. It’s ten pages long.
Here’s a telling quote:

The real reason to perpetuate such a disastrously one-sided view, it seems, is if one is in a tiny minority of activists who has ‘drunk the kool-aid’ of Cultural Marxism — an ideology bent on bringing maximum embarrassment to Capitalism, Democracy, Western Civilisation and Europeans in general, in the vain hope that this will somehow bring about a sort of… what? Revolution? Really? Let’s not be naive. The only reason to be this consistently, this unreasonably angry about things which happened centuries ago, is if one sees the entirety of experience through the lens of perpetual racism and victimisation, and crucially, if one does not believe in the power of democracy to correct these wrongs.

At base, such people do not believe in the democratic process. Marxists have always believed that a handful of self-appointed intellectuals are better suited to creating a ‘good society’ than the rough-and-tumble of real-world parliamentary debate.

I don’t completely object to de-mythologizing but I do disagree with re-mythologizing in a divisive way that is readily falsifiable. What I mean is that I don’t think you need to believe that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree or never told a lie but I do think you need to believe that the country he fought to form was worth making and that his act of refusing to be named king was important, unique, and formative.

IMO it’s important to love our country warts and all, for what it is and not just what it might become, refusing to replace a romanticized past with another romanticized past.

Well, Ezra Klein’s piece on David Shor is certainly attracting comment. Now it’s Megan McArdle getting into the act in her Washington Post column:

To me, Shor’s vision — sort your ideas by popularity, then “Start at the top, and work your way down to find something that excites people” — sounds less inspiring but more likely to help Democrats get and hold power. It doesn’t require Democrats to persuade voters that, say, an Asian American assistant professor has exactly the same interests as a rural, White call-center worker or a Hispanic plumber and that only a conspiracy of the very rich prevents them from realizing it. Democrats merely have to learn what voters already want.

But while Shor’s more prosaic strategy might be an easier sell to voters, it is apt to be a harder sell to the young idealists who staff campaigns and newsrooms. And the newsrooms might be a bigger problem than the political class.

As Matt Yglesias pointed out on Twitter, “A closed circle of young, college educated staffers is likely to end up further off-center the more they talk to themselves.” The mainstream media, and staffers’ internal fights spilling onto Twitter, are an important part of how the progressive vanguard talks to itself — and as the media skews ever-leftward, it helps sustain a rarefied bubble where divisive slogans such as “defund the police” can be questioned only with great delicacy, while significantly more popular propositions like “use the military to help police quell riots” cannot be defended at all.

and notice that she uses the same diction that I did. Vanguard.

I can only repeat that ideas appealing to a mostly white, mostly college-educated self-appointed vanguard are unlikely to be vote-getters, at least not until an extremely charismatic and persuasive champion appears on the scene and none is apparent at present. For my own part I find such champions, whether on the left or the right, peculiarly unappealing even off-putting but I also recognize that I’m in the minority in the view. Far too many, in Bill Clinton’s memorable phrase want to “fall in love”.

In his most recent Wall Street Journal column Daniel Henninger makes a very astute point:

The political class, a lagging indicator, is assimilating changes in the general culture, which has been transitioning for years from old-fashioned lies (“I didn’t do it”) to self-delusion (“What’s your problem?”). Donald Trump inhabited both worlds.

Social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram enabled people to assemble personal alternative universes, which became “real” when their friends embraced the fake persona. A similar manipulation away from plain reality has happened to politics on Twitter.

At Facebook’s scale, these reality-shifting habits and forces are unprecedentedly powerful. Conspiracy theories proliferate, from QAnon to the Russia-collusion narrative.

Euphemisms are an important tool for asserting alternative realities. Two of the most important are “reframe” and “reimagine.”

The focus of Mr. Henninger’s column was President Joe Biden. Those on the right are taking a certain amount of unseemly glee in Mr. Biden’s departures from reality (his “Build Back Better” spending bill will cost nothing, we have similar surges in immigration to that presently being experienced every year, etc.) but it surely must be recognized that isn’t a new phenomenon and Mr. Biden isn’t even its most obvious exemplar. Cataloguing his predecessor, Donald Trump’s departures from reality because a sort of cottage industry from 2016-2020. They included overstatements, exaggerations, wishful thinking, and plain departures from reality in lists of his lies, the most notable at this point being that he won the 2020 election which he and millions of his supporters continue to believe.

The difference between a harmless fantasy and an untenable departure from reality, as Karl Popper observed a century ago, is falsifiability. Mr. Henninger appropriately quotes James Barry: “You just think lovely wonderful thoughts and they lift you up in the air.”

To some extent each of us inhabits our own alternative reality for the simple reason that we don’t have the equipment to know or even to apprehend the complete truth. But present developments are not trivial. When you embrace the falsifiable as truth, there is a categoric difference. Everything stops making sense.

In his most recent op-ed in the New York Times Thomas B. Edsall tries to synthesize a number of discussions I have touched on here, Teixeira and Halpin on the one hand and Kendi on the other, Shor on the one hand and Jamelle Bouie and Haney-Lopez on the other. He concludes:

In that light, it is all the more important for Democratic strategists of all ideological stripes to spell out what specific approaches they contend are most effective in addressing, if not countering, the divisive racial and cultural issues that have weakened the party in recent elections, even when they’re won.

Saying the party’s candidates should simply downplay the tough ones may not be adequate.

It makes for interesting if ultimately dissatisfying reading.

The trends do not favor the strategies being articulated by Mssrs. Kendi, Jamelle Bouie, Haney-Lopez, and Phillips which ultimately boil down to an appear to partisanship or, as some refer to it, “tribalism” for its own sake. Ten trends seem to suggest that people actually occasionally vote their interests rather than their affiliation although affiliation remains a strong indicator.

I would add that white, college-educated voters constitute a slender reed on which to base one’s plans for the future of the party. The highest percentage of college-educated people in any country hovers around 50%. Even if you have good reason to believe you can secure 100% of that segment—and there isn’t—it still doesn’t help if you lose enough of the rest.

For my part my family has been college-educated for approaching a century but I think that our national policies have been far too focused on higher education and insufficiently focused on the majority of the people who are not college-educated and whom we are unlikely to be able to send to college. I don’t see doubling down on that strategy and trying to buy off the rest with handouts makes for an appealing future.

The problems with carbon taxes are not limited to the fact that they’re regressive at this post at RealClearEnergy by Kevin Mooney correctly points out. It’s that carbon emissions increase with income. That means that the tax falls heaviest on those least able to limit their carbon emissions. That’s why this strategy:

But a leaked list of what Democrats on the U.S. Senate Finance Committee call “carbon pricing” within the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation package now gestating on Capitol Hill provides critical insight. The Senate Democrats are looking at “a per-ton tax on carbon dioxide of leading fossil fuels (e.g., coal, oil, natural gas) upon extraction, starting at $15 per ton and escalating over time…” and “a tax per ton of carbon dioxide emissions assessed on major industrial emitters (e.g. steel, cement chemicals)…” and “a per-barrel tax on crude oil,” according to the document.

isn’t the right one. The right one is along the lines of something I’ve mentioned before: a much higher tax with varying prebates that decrease with income.

Socialism means state control of the means of production (as opposed to control by owners of those assets). That’s actually a definition of “state socialism” but since in practice there is no other kind I think that’s sufficient. The most important means of production today is money.

All modern economies today are hybrids, consisting of some market forces alongside some central control. The argument today is over whether we need more or less central control of the economy; my view is that the way in which the federal government is controlling the economy should be changed. There should be less central control domestically and a lot more central control on international trade or, said another way, what we’ve been doing for the last half century has been almost completely backwards.

The irony of those who are arguing in favor of Scandinavian-style cradle-to-grave welfare systems for the United States is that they don’t really understand the systems in those countries. In general they’re even more capitalistic than we are. However, they are a lot more Lutheran. I do wish such advocates would provide examples that are multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and multi-confessional. That doesn’t describe the Scandinavian countries in any meaningful way at least not when their systems were set up and not until very recently. The closest example I can think of is the Soviet Union.

At Medium Ian Henry Lopez takes rather strong exception to the advice to Democrats offered by David Shor and reported by Ezra Klein in the NYT to which I linked earlier. He lists the areas with which he disagrees:

1. The conflicted voters in the middle who toggle between the two parties — and thus the voters who determine elections — are not “moderate.” They are low-information voters who are not paying attention (something Shor sometimes concedes).
2. Democratic messages fail to persuade conflicted voters when they center on policy issues.
3. Democratic messages alienate voters when they are predicated on a sense of identity that voters do not share.
4. The core problem for the Democratic Party is not too many young, liberal activists, per the Politico piece the followed up the Ezra Klein review.

but most importantly:

As the Ezra Klein piece reports, Shor “and those who agree with him argue that Democrats need to try to avoid talking about race and immigration.” This is Shor’s most dangerous piece of advice to Democrats (and gets surprisingly little attention from Klein). For Shor, this has become an article of faith — faith, rather than reason, in the sense that Shor does not substantially engage contrary evidence.

Maybe I’m misinterpreting Mr. Lopez but I detect a genuine note of disdain in his piece, disdain not just for Mr. Shor but for “conflicted” voters or, indeed, anyone who might disagree with him.

When Lenin was preparing to take over in Russia it was the first time that Marx’s theory of class conflict had even been tried in real life. One of the impediments he encountered was that the proletariat was was perversely disinterested in class conflict. They needed the (presumably benign) guidance of enlightened intellectuals to lead them to the worker’s paradise they so obviously needed. These intellectuals were the “vanguard of the proletariat”. Belief in the need for such a vanguard is called “vanguardism”.

In my view today’s “woke” progressives are engaging in a form of vanguardism. So, for example, ordinary black folk are a lot less interested in “defund the police” than they are. It’s not that they are ignorant or disengaged; it’s that they are more interested in preserving their lives and property than the progressives are.

Similarly with immigration. The most Democratic and Hispanic county in Texas is also one of the places most interested in enforcing the border and limiting immigration. That’s not because they are “low information”; quite to the contrary. It’s because they see themselves quite reasonably as being at greater risk.

Alyssia Finley’s Wall Street Journal column explores a mystery. What has delayed the release of Merck’s anti-COVID drug, molnupiravir? Was it the Trump Administration or was it a “whistleblower”?\

When Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics announced on Oct. 1 that their new antiviral pill reduced Covid hospitalizations by roughly half, some in the media blamed Donald Trump. An Axios headline: “Before Merck backed COVID antiviral, Trump admin turned it down.” In fact, Trump officials pushed for government funding to accelerate the development of the drug, molnupiravir. They were opposed by a career official, Rick Bright, whom Democrats praised as a “whistleblower.”

Mr. Bright joined the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority in 2010 and became Barda’s director in 2016. The authority, part of the Health and Human Services Department, is charged with preparing for and responding to public-health threats. After Mr. Bright repeatedly clashed with HHS officials, he was reassigned in April 2020 to a lower-level job at the National Institutes of Health. Mr. Bright then filed a complaint accusing Trump officials of pressuring him to fast-track unsafe drugs and award contracts “based on political connections and cronyism.”

He claimed that even before the pandemic, they were inappropriately pressing Barda to fund clinical studies of molnupiravir, which had shown promise against other viruses in lab experiments at Emory University. Mr. Bright’s complaint alleged that George Painter, CEO of Drug Innovation Ventures at Emory, and Trump HHS official Robert Kadlec had urged Barda in November 2019 to “invest millions of dollars into their ‘miracle cure.’ ” It noted that “similar experimental drugs in this class had been shown to cause reproductive toxicity in animals, and offspring from treated animals had been born without teeth and without parts of their skulls.” But similar effects hadn’t occurred with molnupiravir. Mr. Bright rejected the Emory funding request; the decision “clearly frustrated Dr. Kadlec and further strained their relationship,” according to the complaint.

I am unable to adjudicate it.

At 1945 James Holmes explains why Taiwan does not need nuclear weapons to deter China and would be prudent to focus its attentions in other direction:

So, it seems, a nonnuclear onslaught is what Taipei mainly needs to deter. History has shown that nuclear weapons stand little chance of deterring nonnuclear aggression. A threat to visit a Hiroshima or Nagasaki on, say, Shanghai in retaliation for low-level aggression would be implausible. Breaching the nuclear threshold would do little good strategically while painting the islanders as amoral—and hurting their prospects of winning international support in a cross-strait war.

An implausible threat stands little chance of deterring.

It’s something of a relief to read someone arguing along more prudent lines when we’re seeing so much of the opposite these days. Think of it as a “man bites dog” story.