The internet is often full of aesthetic think pieces. It’s easy to write them–you identify some show or artist that’s captured the attention and the artistic sensibility of your readers, and you make some vague connection between the themes of that art and some current issue. On prestige websites, you can often find writers pumping out think pieces about prestige programs. Often it’s some big critical hit on HBO like Game of Thrones, or an edgy Netflix original series like House of Cards. These are thought to be the important shows, because they’re the shows our social, cultural, and political elite enjoy. Think pieces get lots of clicks, because they make us feel that the stuff we’re watching, reading, or listening to really matters. But do they matter? The most popular Game of Thrones episode was watched by about 8.9 million people. A new season of House of Cards gets seen by about 5 million. Meanwhile, every week, like clockwork, 10 million people watch Judge Judy.
Category: Politics
Concerning the nature of man and the state, and how best the latter can be structured to augment the former.
Corbyn’s Brexit Long Game
Initially I found British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexit strategy bizarre. He campaigned to remain in the EU, but not very hard. Then after leave won, he decided to have the Labour Party support the government’s decision to invoke Article 50, using a three line whip to punish Labour MPs who defied him. Two-thirds of Labour voters opposed Article 50–why was Corbyn so intent on preventing Labour MPs from voting their consciences, from voting the way their own supporters wanted them to vote? Why would Corbyn alienate so many party supporters and young activists who had opposed Brexit? Why wouldn’t he take this opportunity to place his party firmly in the remain camp, so that if and when the government’s Brexit plan fared poorly, Labour would be in position to say “I told you so” and reap electoral gains? Is Corbyn a fool after all, or is there some strategy to this that I was missing? I think I have this figured out–Corbyn does have a plan, but it’s not the sort of plan most people expect or want him to have.
The Left Cannot Defeat the Right Through Violence and Suppression
In radical left wing circles, there’s this notion going around that the right can be intimidated into going away, through no-platforming and physical violence. “Bash the fash,” they say. “Make racists afraid again.” “Any time, any place, punch a Nazi in the face.” In the past I’ve argued that this kind of censorship turns right nationalists into martyrs and generates public sympathy for them. But today I want to make another, related point–the left is structurally physically weaker than the right and cannot prevail by force.
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So Far Trump Has Been No Worse Than Expected–It’s Senate Dems Who are the Problem
Immediately after the election of President Trump, I wrote a post about what Trump was likely to do once in office. Many people this week have seemed surprised by Trump’s executive actions, but they conform remarkably well with what I anticipated. In this post I want to summarize what we’ve seen so far and what it indicates about where things are going.
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No One Should Want Trump to Be Like Andrew Jackson
Today I read that President Trump has hung a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the oval office. One of Trump’s spokespeople heaped praise on Jackson, calling him:
an amazing figure in American history — very unique so many ways
Jackson was indeed unique–uniquely terrible. Many on the left dislike Jackson because of his mistreatment of Native Americans, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Jackson was objectively and provably a disastrous president for all Americans, native or otherwise. I continue to see Trump get compared to Jackson, but none of these comparisons capture just how bad Jackson was for the country. The 1830s were so long ago that few now remember just how absurdly terrible they were. Let me tell you all about it.
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Benjamin Studebaker 