Quote (IceMage @ Sep 21 2022 09:31am)
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Is honor just an excuse weaklings make for weakness, masquerading their timidity as gallantry?
Not inherently, no. But honor requires some form of mutual recognition. During the Mongolian invasion of Japan, was it honorable for the samurai to demand from the Mongolians single combat, to the effect that they got shot dead on the beaches? No, it was foolish, albeit the result of a cultural misunderstanding. When old guard neoconservatives refuse to fight for civic nationalism, they're putting their own needs ahead of their country. Honor is a buzzword against something they're afraid to fight for. Their status quo is too comfortable.
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Ask a Dispatch reader to name an honorable politician and most would say Liz Cheney. Cheney has devoted herself single-mindedly to holding Trump accountable for plotting against the constitutional order.
But here we get to the crux of it. Liz Cheney has enriched herself for years at the public's expense. What do we have to show for it? The Iraq war? Astronomical debt? A dysfunctional government; imprudent tax cuts; collapsing civic virtue? It's better to say that Liz Cheney's loyalty is to the old regime, and a status quo that was a dysfunctional as it is now dead.
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Some anti-Trump conservatives speculate that Trump’s sycophants in Congress despise Cheney out of jealousy. Their own vestigial sense of honor is irritated by her example, the theory goes: They resent her because they lack the character to behave as virtuously as she has. I think that gives them entirely too much credit. Not for a moment do I believe that Elise Stefanik, say, lies awake at night tortured by her conscience, wondering why she can’t be more like the woman she elbowed aside to join the House GOP leadership.
Correct.
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To the extent Stefanik gives Cheney any thought at all, I suspect she feels contempt for her perceived personal weakness. Imagine giving up a path to the speakership over something as frivolous as a crisis of conscience. The opportunists in the party don’t disdain Cheney because they envy her or even because she’s aligned with Democrats against Trump. They disdain her because she’s a sucker, too soft-headed about gassy intangibles like duty to do what’s needed to claim power.
Incorect. Republicans despise Cheney because she works to the detriment of almost everything she professes to believe in.
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Politicians tend not to care about honor. They wouldn’t be politicians if they did. But voters do, or at least feel obliged to pretend that they do, and so Cheney’s example is trickier for rank-and-file Republicans to reckon with. The way they tend to do so is by accepting the premise that honor matters but challenging her claim to it. It’s why her critics so often accuse her of coveting a job on CNN or MSNBC as an anti-Trump talking head, as if being a loud and insistent Trump apologist isn’t a more lucrative career path for a conservative. They question her motives because they’re keen to assure themselves that she hasn’t actually behaved selflessly by defying Trump—rather, that she’s gained by doing so.
Or more simply, they don't think it's honorable for Cheney to destroy the future of the country in defense of a corrupt and dysfunctional status quo.
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More than that, they dispute that she’s behaved honorably by rejecting the idea that she’s behaved virtuously. That’s a hard pill for you or I to swallow, but for an ardent partisan it’s the easiest piece of this puzzle. Since concentrating power in the GOP and denying power to the Democrats is allegedly America’s only path to virtue, Cheney’s efforts to weaken the party by exposing Trump’s corruption are dishonorable per se. Loyalty too is a hallmark of honor, after all, and to a devout partisan the only way to show loyalty to the country is to show loyalty to the party. A willing dupe for Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats has betrayed the United States, by definition.
Bold - Absolutely.
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To call Trump dishonorable is true but uninteresting inasmuch as many politicians behave dishonorably. The interesting distinction between him and them is how he’s fashioned dishonor into a political virtue in its own right, the acid test of a strong leader’s resolve not to be deterred by conventional expectations of propriety when pursuing his interests.
It's more nuanced than that. Voters (if we trust polls) don't like Trump's persona. People who voted for him twice routinely tell pollsters they dislike the man. They want Trump to behave with propriety, and his support is continually punished when he fails, again and again, to live up to any sort of moral code. On the other hand, voters do want a ruthless politician who will actively pursue their interests. And for good reason, we don't want soft people in government. If there's anything to give Hillary Clinton credit for, it's that she's clearly ruthless.
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“I tend to think that we should seize the institutions of the left,” he said. “And turn them against the left. We need like a de-Baathification program, a de-woke-ification program.”
If these were neutral institutions, and Vance were suggesting that the right weaponize them, it would be an extremely destabilizing step, and would have to be judged accordingly in terms of what was gained versus lost. But they aren't neutral institutions, they're left controlled institutions that have already been weaponized for partisan gain. There is nothing to lose, and much to gain by neutralizing them. I don't necessarily agree with the rest of what he said, so I'll skip it.
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