‘Either post-liberalism is something like, in [Patrick] Deneen’s case, a continuation of a certain sort of socially conservative Christian politics that has hardly been unfamiliar to American politics for decades, and so does not represent anything particularly new or radically challenging to liberalism. Or post-liberalism is a more full-blooded and genuine challenge to the liberal order. But when it takes that mode, like in [Adrian] Vermeule’s work, it becomes driven more by an irate, passionate fury against liberalism that ends up detaching it so far from reality that I do not think it deserves to be taken seriously as a political theory. It’s more like fantasy at that point. Indeed, I think a lot of the New Right could be described in that way. And while fantasies undoubtedly have a sort of causal force in politics in mobilizing and directing the people’s more negative emotions, this is not the same thing as a genuine intellectual challenge.’

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‘Vermeule recognizes that there is little support for post-liberalism today. Most people are too corrupted by liberalism and the liberal elite to know what is really good for them. They must be brought to see what is good for them. Their beliefs and values must be changed, through the use of political power (to be grasped via non-democratic means) and the law, so that they are better aligned with what will bring them true human flourishing (the common good). We must be transformed. And when we are, we will come to recognize that we have been brought to the light and thank our post-liberal rulers for having delivered us from moral error.  … Once you think politics no longer needs to be bound by people’s actual beliefs and values, as Vermeule does, then essentially your imagination is free to go wherever it wants. People, actual people, become nothing but abstractions, and the effects on them are inconsequential… [I]ntegralism is basically the idea that the Church should have authority over the State, at least in the pursuit of humans’ spiritual ends… Vermeule shrugs off claims that integralism is highly unrealistic in highly pluralistic societies like America by saying that once the right people get their hands on the levers of power, they will use that to make people more supportive of post-liberalism. However, what integralism also requires is that the Church is willing to do its bit, so to speak, by wanting to literally get involved in the ruling of countries. And to say that the Catholic Church has neither the appetite nor capacity for that would be an understatement. But Vermeule is entreating people to act as if the Pope were there just waiting for integralists to take over the US government so he can start governing citizens’ souls, which is so far removed from reality that I think we are in the realm of literal fantasy.’

UD is intrigued that Harvard University, of all places, harbors and honors Mr UFO (now a high ranking Trump official) and harbors and honors The Madness of King Adrian.

Economist Gabriel Zucman, who teaches at Berkeley, points out that

California billionaires’ wealth has increased approximately 144% from 2023-25 and totals approximately $2.31 trillion as of May… [F]rom 2023-25, California billionaires only paid approximately 0.2% of their wealth in state individual income tax annually.

America’s grotesque wealth inequality erodes its polity.

“Billionaires are the group [which] has been doing the best economically, with their wealth exploding in recent years and decades, and they are also the group that pays the least in taxes relative to their economic income,” [Zucman’s colleague Emmanuel] Saez said in an email. “Therefore, the time is ripe to make them contribute more to the public good.”

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With $55 trillion in assets, the richest 1 percent owns almost one-third of the country’s wealth — about the same as the bottom 90 percent. That gap, which far exceeds that of other developed economies, is the largest it has been since the Federal Reserve began tracking Americans’ wealth in 1989. 

Washington DC is about to experience Brightness at Noon:

‘Trump’s Name is Still on the Kennedy Center — Officials Say it will be Down by Noon’

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On Friday, Allerton Kilborn, 79, brought a book to occupy him while he waited for what he hoped would be the removal of Mr. Trump’s name. He had traveled to the Kennedy Center from his home in Chevy Chase, Md.

“For the adventure of it — this is history,” he said.

“I’m so old that I once met John Kennedy and have been an enormous fan of his,” he said. He said he thought the addition of Mr. Trump’s name had been a desecration of the memorial to Kennedy.

“I’m not religious,” he said, “but I see it in religious terms.”

Well, we’ll see if UD’s own Maryland can pull itself together to pass this. It would be a beautiful thing.

The Economist notes that such legislation is the wave of the future.

How the fuck did this become a legal case in the first place? What needs investigating is the mental health of the fanatics currently running the University of Washington. HUGE embarrassment for the institution.

An insider at NPR describes the woke-shrinkage effect that has left even daily listeners like Les UDs wondering why so much of the language coming from the station smacks of a re-education camp.

 In a document called NPR Transgender Coverage Guidance—disseminated by news management—we’re asked to avoid the term biological sex. (The editorial guidance was prepared with the help of a former staffer of the National Center for Transgender Equality.) The mindset animates bizarre stories—on how The Beatles and bird names are racially problematic, and others that are alarmingly divisive; justifying looting, with claims that fears about crime are racist; and suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives.

UD still gives NPR money. But she can’t stand the ideology-lecture feel of the place (not all the time; some of the time); she hates it that more and more of its stories/points of view make it sound like Chesa Boudin.

She gets that NPR has always leaned left. Les UDs do too. But Uri Berliner is right that lately it has tilted way the hell over.

[Danish PM Mette] Frederiksen emphasized that while individuals have the right to practice their religion, democracy must take precedence. “God has to step aside. You have the right to your faith and to practice your religion, but democracy takes precedence,” she told Danish news agency Ritzau.

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The Danes are probably going to extend their full face ban to schools and universities; the PM is also working to shut down prayer rooms there.

… in support of pro-liberal democracy presidential candidate Rafał Trzaskowski.

The just-elected pro-democracy president of Romania, Nicușor Dan, is among the marchers.

Photo taken by Mr UD’s cousin, Adam Soltan. (Click on pic for a better image.)

And with another pen stroke, a judge has just halted the Trump administration’s ban on international students at Harvard.

Surely, like all dictators and would-be dictators, Trump knows that unless he figures out a way to destroy America’s independent judiciary he’s not going to get all the goodies he craves.

A New Republic writer condemns as unpatriotic cowards the three Yale professors leaving Trumpian America for Canada. “[T]hey have decided to check out of their own communities long before they face actual state violence… [There is a difference between a person] who chooses to face down oppressors and one who ignores or betrays the call for solidarity in the face of oppression.”

Yet the author himself is here only because his father betrayed India, his native country. Does he also condemn his father’s preference to live in a freer, less corrupt, less tyrannical country? My grandfather hadn’t yet faced state violence when he left Cherkasy for the US. Should he have girded his loins and stayed?

Is the writer familiar with the excellent book, excellently titled Exit, Voice, and Loyalty? “In 1989, in the GDR it was the escalating dynamic of out-migration that led those who wanted to stay to take to the streets to demand change. Exit triggered voice, and both worked in tandem.” Many variants of exit and voice exist, and it’s quite possible that a powerful rejection by powerful intellectuals like the Yale Three will turn out to be far more galvanizing among protesters than their staying home.

The writer also overlooks the positive gesture toward Canada that their resettlement represents. Humiliated by the territorial rhetoric and economic targeting coming from the Trump administration, our far more democratic (at the moment) neighbor deserves as much support as we can give it, and few gestures of support are as powerful as actually going there and contributing, in this case, your prestige and institutional strength to a legitimate democracy under threat.

Well. You get what you vote for.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BZK35yCTD

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And a reminder of his tragic homeland:

Trump loses, and the rest of us learn not to jump to conclusions about the Supreme Court.

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And permit me a nyah-nyah — I’ve been telling my political friends for years that all is not lost with the Supreme Court. I’ve told them that the Supreme Court will surprise them. They have laughed at me when I said that.

That’s one for UD.

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UPDATE: ‘[W]e’ll find out [in subsequent rulings] whether the Supreme Court intends to serve as a bulwark against a president who is hell-bent on asserting the unilateral power to control federal spending. If not, yesterday’s order may come to look like a momentary, ephemeral reprieve in Trump’s ongoing assault on Congress’s power of the purse.‘

“What I have seen over the last six weeks is the United States behaving vilely, vilely to our friends in Canada and Mexico, vilely to our friends in Europe. And today was the bottom of the barrel, vilely to a man who is defending Western values, at great personal risk to him and his countrymen…

And I have — I first started thinking, is it — am I feeling grief? Am I feeling shock, like I’m in a hallucination? But I just think shame, moral shame. It’s a moral injury to see the country you love behave in this way.”

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David Brooks