Tikvah Rufo Bari Weiss and Tikvah First Things Ross Douthat Make Their Post-Trump “Pivot”
David Shasha
Tikvah Rufo Bari Weiss and Tikvah First Things Ross Douthat Make Their Post-Trump “Pivot”
As we enter the week following the Trumploser Mid-Term elections, there are a number of things we can acknowledge in the Jewish community.
There has been a No-Red-Wave which has allowed Democrats to keep the Senate:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/12/politics/democrats-keep-senate/index.html
The House still remains an open question as I write this note, though it is highly unlikely that the Trumpublicans, if successful in gaining a majority, will have a decisive edge in numbers:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-elections/house-results
The New York Trumpscum Jews did not get Seditionist Lee Zeldin as governor:
The Trumpublicans are in free-fall, as they beat each other up, and blame it on Trumpty Dumpty:
https://nypost.com/cover/november-10-2022/
This does not mean that we are rid of the Zombie Orange Pig, but it does mean that the Right Wing is now in utter disarray:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/republicans-in-disarray-trump_n_636e881be4b09c4db1761364
And there is still the possibility that Banana Republic AG Merrick Garland will get out from under his desk and do the right thing by indicting him:
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/3720591-expected-trump-indictment-looms-over-midterm-election/
If the Trumpublican Seditionists take over the House, it will be fascinating to see how dysfunctional their dysfunction will be:
Indeed, we have been hearing that they have turned on arguably the most consequential Republican leader of our times, Moscow Mitch:
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/11/politics/trump-republican-senate-leadership-elections/index.html
It is hard to know what a Republican has to do to maintain the support of the base.
McConnell has proven his Evil Genius repeatedly, as only Liberals can truly appreciate:
He accurately predicted the No-Red-Wave:
And, of course, the No-Red-Wave has affected Tikvah Trumpscumworld:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/_q4kMjZ0GdE
In spite of this, Tikvahworld remains a dire threat to the Sephardic community, as it continues to infiltrate “our” institutions:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/17ztZKuPB08
And while Tikvah Tablet First Things Pitbully Liel Leibovitz and Tikvah SAPIR Bret Jewish Genius Stephens are not much likely to be impacted by the seismic Trumpshifts, Tikvah Rufo Bari Weiss and Tikvah First Things Ross Douthat, two young radical Right Wing up-and-comers who are deeply concerned with their brands and how to monetize and institutionalize those brands, have been affected in a serious way by the shift in the political winds.
On Sunday, Weiss indicated this shift and how it will impact her no Common Sense Substack page:
The complete article follows this note.
The Trumpshift was heralded in her first take on the No-Red-Wave reality and Trump’s eclipse:
It is not that she needs to make any real Trumpscum changes, she is all about SANITY – so, the election actually went her way!
Talk about denial.
As I already noted, the key can be found in the following assertion:
That doesn’t mean the culture war is over. It is raging. And one man is winning it.
Which is tied to her choice of photo for the article:
Her Sunday post comes from someone called Freddie deBoer, who I had not heard of before:
https://freddiedeBoer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work
https://freddiedeBoer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work-20
That’s right, big freekin’ surprise, deBoer is a Culture Warrior against the establishment!
He too is a proud Trumpscum polemicist:
https://freddiedeBoer.substack.com/p/orange-cheeto-man-bad
This is what that looks like, and it looks very Tikvah:
“Do you denounce Trump?,” in some form or another, has been a common cry for over five years now. To my dismay this has been true in the spaces usually associated with the radical left as well as more explicitly Democratic environments. I have myself denounced Trump, in writing, a dozen times, and I held my nose and voted for the guy the liberals wanted. It’s never enough. Not because of a difference of policy, or even of politics, but of affect. I and others are constantly asserted to be Trump-adjacent because we have not gone through the performance of panic and devastation that liberals have demanded for half a decade.
DeBoer does some good Troll the Libs too:
https://freddiedeBoer.substack.com/p/when-will-chris-hayes-learn-the-lessons
“Pity the American Liberal”!
What have we gotten instead of a real postmortem? An insistence that Russia stole the election, the attitude that the voters failed Hillary Clinton instead of the other way around, a remarkable tightening of the vice grip with which activists with bizarre niche politics hold the party’s messaging and values, and the utter nihilism of the widespread belief that the country’s simply too racist and thus no electoral losses are the party’s fault. That’s the tenor of the liberal position post-2016, that the country’s willingness to elect Donald Trump did not reflect any failures of Hillary Clinton or her party but rather that the electorate was full of unrepentant bigots who probably do not even deserve the wise and enlightened leadership of Democrats. Remarkable that the same people so recently laughed at the inability of their opponents to look critically at themselves.
When I think of this refusal to practice introspection, I think of MSNBC host Chris Hayes. I see two great impediments to the American liberal project, and Hayes embodies both: a fixation on Trump that nears the pathological, trapping liberalism perpetually in yesterday’s war, and a studious refusal to speak plainly and critically about the way that the Democratic party has become captured by donors and staffers whose politics are not just wildly out of step with the median American but with the median Democrat. Whether for ratings or to satisfy the contemporary lie that Trump is the worst president ever - you can read Hayes’s own writing from the Bush era to understand why it’s a lie - Hayes cannot quit Donald Trump, and thus like his party cannot settle on a remotely coherent political vision. He’s trapped.
DeBoer makes light of the Capitol Insurrection as well:
I see Hayes as a synecdoche for a broader tendency - a set of left-liberal Democrats who are relentlessly focused on Trump and Trumpism, January 6th, and their (incorrect) belief that this is an unprecedented threat to the United States. Their politics is resolutely retrospective, seeing in Trump the epitome of all that is wrong with American politics, to the exclusion of the deeper rot which afflicts the Republican party, yes, but also our politics, our institutions, and our people. They tend to be approaching middle age, white, and dudes. They hold some moderate instincts regarding culture war issues but have learned to keep them to themselves, for fear of getting dunked on. They would like very much to not get dragged into any particularly complex conversations about immigration, racism, or trans rights, thank you, preferring to know always where the good guys stand and to stand there. They think you must vote Democrat - you must, must vote Democrat - but allow some vague sense that the party is an impediment to progress. And while they may not go so far as to forbid criticism of social justice politics, or distaste for the toxicity of contemporary progressive culture, they want you to know that the problem is Trump. Always Trump.
Democracy, why worry?
This is the sort of person that Bari Weiss is attracted to.
If he did not exist, she would have to invent him!
His article on the new movie “Tar” is interesting, as yet another example of the Rufo War on Cancel Culture:
Complaints about Tár’s ambiguities misunderstand what makes the film so powerful: Its almost documentary tone, its insistence on keeping the story at arm’s length and dramatizing without lecturing, helps capture the strange moment we find ourselves in regarding MeToo. Many have suggested that the movement has run out of steam, and the Johnny Depp trial was represented at the time as a sign of brewing backlash. Stories like that of Aziz Ansari, whose attempted cancellation sparked fierce public debate about whether it was deserved, introduced a dose of uncertainty into what had been a simple narrative of good and evil. I say all of this as, more or less, a defender of MeToo’s goals and many of its outcomes. Ultimately, the chilly refusal to arrive at a pat conclusion makes Tár the movie it is. Field seems almost to be saying, “I’m not going to just hand you the conclusions; I tell the story, only you can judge.”
Indeed, though I have not seen the movie, I would trust Michelle Goldberg’s take on it over deBoer and Weiss:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/21/opinion/tar-movie-cancel-culture.html
The complete article follows this note.
Goldberg sees the movie as a rumination on Cancel Culture and Art:
Tár, then, isn’t a victim, except perhaps of the once-common assumption that profound talent licenses rapacious appetites. It’s true that the movie seems to ask if something is lost when a culture no longer makes room for its sacred monsters. The man who replaces Tár on the conductor’s podium is a mediocrity, and the final scene is an indelible image of artistic abasement. But while the film forces the viewer to identify with Tár, it doesn’t exonerate her. Her unraveling is gutting to witness, not because it’s undeserved but because she’s human.
I seriously doubt that many would see the movie as an exoneration of bad behavior, or as a post-#MeToo moment which would point to Johnny Depp as the end of judgmentalism.
But Weiss clearly believes that she must pivot from her many Trumpscum loser heroes, as she changes the subject.
David Sacks:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/xJwd9GeQcAk/m/WoFsCuO2AwAJ
Blake Masters:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/z6dDaQRaOuY/m/SgzOqlcUDQAJ
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/QAXOPff8IlI
Mehmet Oz:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/BMm1hyjR90E/m/b00nyJxnCAAJ
Oregon’s Christine Drazan:
And how has that Elon Musk thing worked out?
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/kea86BxduvQ/m/fXS90KKuBAAJ
Can anyone say BANKRUPTCY?
Indeed, the no Common Sense visit to Kari Lake’s election HQ did not go as expected:
And if she has a brain, she should start worrying about her other Trumpscum hero, re-elected DEATH SENTENCE, the Human Trafficker:
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/10/09/desantis-migrant-flights-voters-polls-00061061
Let us never forget who made DEATH SENTENCE the “man” he now is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1YP_zZJFXs
Indeed, Weiss should realize what a 2024 Republican Presidential primary will look like when DEATH SENTENCE and the Zombie Orange Pig go head-to-head:
As President Biden has rightly said, it will sure be entertaining!
And that leads us to Tikvah First Things Catholic Fascist Ross Douthat, who started off his Post-Election diagnosis by avoiding his fierce Trumplove and promoting DEATH SENTENCE:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/09/opinion/ron-desantis-midterms.html
He then moved to pretending that there is some positive aspect to the Democrat-Republican “stalemate,” as if the idea of mixed party governance is a real thing:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/opinion/midterm-elections.html
He finished off his Post-Trump trilogy with an impassioned article on the only thing he really cares about, Abortion:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/12/opinion/sunday/what-the-pro-life-movement-lost-and-won.html
All three columns follow this note.
As we ponder the pretzel-like contortions of Douthat and Weiss, I wanted to contrast their Trumpscum duplicity with an actual piece of rational thoughtfulness from Matthew Continetti:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/opinion/midterms-trump-republican-revival.html
The complete article follows this note.
He could not have put it more perfectly:
“Trump Is the Chief Obstacle to a Republican Revival”!
This is the sort of thing that you will not get from Tikvahworld, especially from Douthat and Weiss.
The reason for this is that both The Tikvah Fund and First Things are deeply tied to donors and readers who remain wedded to the Trumpvision.
Pity the poor Continetti, as he runs down – figuratively and literally – the current Trumpublican Bench:
Republican success at the state level shows what is possible. Mr. DeSantis has garnered the most attention, but he is far from alone in offering a popular model of conservative governance. From Mike DeWine of Ohio (who won re-election by over 25 points), Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, Greg Abbott of Texas and Brian Kemp of Georgia to the departing Charlie Baker of Massachusetts and Larry Hogan of Maryland, Republican governors have broadened the party’s appeal by meeting voters where they are — seizing the common-sense mainstream and addressing public concerns calmly and effectively and often without the sort of backlash Mr. Trump has inspired.
The “moderate” Republicans on the list are not really national figures that are known to most Americans, but Continetti is correct to be wary of DEATH SENTENCE. The list presents a motley crew of mismatched Republicans, who stand in shaky relation with the Alt-Right and its control of the Republican base.
https://morningconsult.com/2022/06/08/trump-2024-gop-primary-field/
But at least Continetti admits that things have gone off the rails since 2016, as Trump has proven to be deeply unpopular with Americans, and only won his election due to the anti-democratic aspects of the Electoral College:
Under Trump’s dominion, Republicans have lost the majority of Americans since 2016:
https://apnews.com/article/democrats-popular-vote-win-d6331f7e8b51d52582bb2d60e2a007ec
Can anyone spell L-O-S-E-R?
While Continetti, a macher at the American Enterprise Institute, knows well that Republicans need to reorganize, Douthat sees the current election as a good thing:
The repetitions come from politicians who can’t think beyond the path to a bare 51 percent, who can’t make the leaps that would be required to recreate a Reagan coalition, let alone a Rooseveltian one, and who struggle to govern under the broader conditions of economic stagnation and social-spiritual discontent. And repetition also flows from the structure of polarization in the West, which increasingly pits parties of populism against parties of meritocracy, with the former constantly self-undermining with incompetence and crankery and the latter with technocratic arrogance, in a mutually reinforcing loop.
His political gobbledygook masks the fact that one of the two political parties believes in Treason and Insurrection through violence, and has no governing strategy:
There is no there, there:
Treason is “Legitimate Political Discourse”:
If Marjorie Taylor Greene becomes House Majority Leader, expect Hunter Biden and Impeachment all day, every day:
Expect a return of John Durham!
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/9hNuRJ0H_YU/m/jnNoJBwOAQAJ
This is what Douthat thinks is a positive thing, because he has to keep his Trump-hopes alive, albeit in his own peculiar, gloomy Ratzinger Opus Dei way.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/12/opinion/catholic-church-second-vatican-council.html
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/EvsK2Vo4neU/m/ZoaoV3BkBQAJ
His final article in the trilogy is yet another embittered “victory” lap on Abortion:
A somewhat cynical view of abortion politics, in 2022 and beyond, is that the pro-life movement can sustain its gains so long as voters are effectively distracted, their pro-choice instincts muted by other economic or cultural concerns.
Another view, though, looks at the muddle of American opinion and sees a lot of people who would like to live in a society that protects human life in utero but think the full anti-abortion vision isn’t plausible, that in a modern society it just can’t be made to work.
That’s what the pro-life movement won for itself in this election, despite its more immediate defeats: a chance, in a big part of the country, to win some of these doubters to its side.
His tortured and tortuous view of the Trumpscum SCOTUS decision to Overturn Roe has none of the Alito Federalist Society swagger:
Which is not Alito’s first victory lap against women’s bodily autonomy:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/28/politics/samuel-alito-religious-liberty-notre-dame-rome/index.html
Douthat still frames Abortion in the Catholic Fascist manner:
You can strategize around these problems to some extent, contrasting incremental protections for the unborn with the left’s pro-choice absolutism. But when you’re the side seeking a change in settled arrangements, voters may still choose the absolutism they know over the uncertainty of where pro-life zeal might take them.
“Protections for the unborn.”
“Pro-choice Absolutism.”
These are intimidating usages, meant to scare those who choose to keep Abortion legal and safe under the Stare Decisis Rule of Law that has been shredded by the Trumpscum SCOTUS:
https://www.businessinsider.com/supreme-court-stare-decisis-roe-wade-dobbs-jackson-2022-6
And this leads to the real reason why Douthat will never get off the Trumptrain:
Douthat, the First Things Tikvah Fund manner, is against democracy and against the development of our Constitutional Rights as seen in the context of Privacy Rights under the 14th Amendment:
As he admits in the Abortion article, Americans have internalized these rights and are sanding against the unelected and anti-democratic Trumpscum SCOTUS radicals:
It’s easy to say what a triumphant midterm election would have looked like for opponents of abortion. The ballot initiative installing abortion rights into the Michigan Constitution would have failed. Pro-life measures in Kentucky and Montana would have succeeded. And Republicans would have enjoyed a sweeping victory in both the Senate and the House, making talk of a “Roevember” backlash against the Dobbs decision obsolete.
In each case the reverse happened: The pro-life side lost every statewide ballot — in liberal California and Vermont as well as in the states just listed — and the Republicans underperformed expectations. This has revived the summertime assumption that the Dobbs decision was a political disaster for the G.O.P. It’s confirmed professional Democrats in their abortion-centric campaign strategy. And it’s divided pro-lifers between optimists who think the Republicans just need to learn how to message more effectively about abortion and pessimists who think the results revealed a movement “dead in the water,” to quote the conservative writer Aaron Renn.
Douthat, as we keep seeing with David Brooks, is in a fog of incoherence. His tortured PILPUL on the election and what it means for the future of America shows the duplicity and hypocrisy of Tikvahworld and its challenge to Jews and Gentiles alike.
But, as we have seen, The Tikvah Fund represents a specific threat to Sephardim, as what little we have in terms of national community institutions has been co-opted by the White Jewish Supremacy.
And this means that Trumpism will continue to plague us, as it morphs into new demonic forms and iterations.
David Shasha
A Movie for the Post #MeToo Moment
By: Freddie deBoer
We tend to cover a lot of heavy subjects on Common Sense, and this past week, between the midterms and Silicon Valley meltdowns, has been no exception. On Sundays, we try to kick back, catch a movie, and read stories that don’t make us worry about the state of the American Empire. That’s for Monday.
So we're bringing in more culture reporting and criticism—you may have noticed our scary movie round-up for Halloween, or our breakdown of “Bros”—and today I’m excited to publish one of our favorite independent journalists, Freddie deBoer. Freddie, who you might remember from Honestly, writes extensively on media, education, mental health, and film. Here he is on the new movie everyone we know is talking about, Tár.
—BW
Todd Field's new, immensely ambitious film Tár begins with a neat trick: it puts the credits at the beginning. Like a film from the golden age of cinema, Tár runs its list of primary contributors upfront. I'm sure the internet is filled with theories about this stylistic choice. Me, I figure that the point is to underline that the film is about artistic creation, not as an abstraction but as an actual, corporeal, human activity. What better way to highlight the fact that art is made by (fallible, unsteady, selfish) humans than to put the humans that made the film first? One way or another, Tár is the first movie I can remember where the catering department is credited before the first line of dialogue.
Tár is the story of Lydia Tár, a brilliant conductor and composer played by a riveting Cate Blanchett. Lydia is celebrated, almost to the point of absurdity—she's got an EGOT, she guest teaches at Juilliard, her tony Berlin apartment is festooned with awards, her upcoming book is called “Tár on Tár.”
The first thing Tár gets right (and this is essential) is capturing the world of elite orchestral music. This is a movie that is very at home with gourmet musical tastes, and I will say up front that you have to have a stomach for a particular artistic world that many people find unbearably pretentious—there is certainly some critique of that culture to be found in the film, but the movie also luxuriates in the complexities of classical music and the people who create it at the highest levels. I frequently wished I knew a little bit more about the ins and outs of symphony orchestras while watching the film. There’s a lot of talk about adagios and Mahler.
But Tár is ultimately a kind of cancellation story, a #MeToo tale. Lydia stands accused of misconduct—misconduct, namely sexual grooming, that is gradually revealed to us in bits and pieces as we settle into her life.
Lydia has, at times, been in the position to mentor younger people, such as in the previously mentioned classes at Juilliard—during a guest lecture she reams a self-proclaimed “BIPOC pangender” student who refuses to play Bach, given that he was a misogynist and a dead white guy—and as she is an immensely celebrated artiste in the chosen profession of these people, she holds power over them.
The questions Tár poses is, one, whether she's guilty of abusing that position, and two, whether her obvious artistic genius complicates the question of her guilt.
It's here that the desire to avoid spoilers constrains me. What I will say is that the film's real triumph lies in its utterly dispassionate gaze, its bone-deep neutrality towards what it's depicting. The most deft choice Field has made is to render Lydia both beguiling and guilty. There are both frivolous and serious accusations against the titular character in this film, and it's momentarily unsure which will make the bigger difference. This uncertainty is existential. If the film were not willing to make Tár charismatic, it would be soulless; if it were not willing to make her guilty, it would be gutless.
I have seen this film represented as a pro-MeToo tale, and I’ve seen it dinged for failing to underline more explicitly Lydia’s guilt. At no point does Blanchett deliver a powerful speech, exposing her cancellation as an injustice; at the same time, while Lydia receives a stern comeuppance, it’s also an absurd one, which prevents the story from feeling like a pat tale of crime and punishment.
Complaints about Tár’s ambiguities misunderstand what makes the film so powerful: Its almost documentary tone, its insistence on keeping the story at arm’s length and dramatizing without lecturing, helps capture the strange moment we find ourselves in regarding MeToo. Many have suggested that the movement has run out of steam, and the Johnny Depp trial was represented at the time as a sign of brewing backlash. Stories like that of Aziz Ansari, whose attempted cancellation sparked fierce public debate about whether it was deserved, introduced a dose of uncertainty into what had been a simple narrative of good and evil. I say all of this as, more or less, a defender of MeToo’s goals and many of its outcomes. Ultimately, the chilly refusal to arrive at a pat conclusion makes Tár the movie it is. Field seems almost to be saying, “I’m not going to just hand you the conclusions; I tell the story, only you can judge.”
Less effective, for me, are some of the incidental choices. The trailer goes hard on the fact that Lydia is hearing phantom sounds, noises that appear to have no source. Early descriptions of the movie suggested it was almost a horror film, but I myself just don’t see it. Tár’s auditory hallucinations are indeed an element of the movie, but not one that's particularly... meaningful? Important? I personally would have dropped this dynamic; it adds very little to the story, in large measure because the movie can't seem to decide whether it really wants to go through with it. The character of Lydia's assistant is also utilized oddly—she becomes central to the plot machinations, but is shoved offscreen about halfway through the movie and never seen again. It left me feeling somewhat unmoored, especially given how important certain actions of hers will prove.
Ultimately, this is Blanchett's movie. I personally found her performance energizing, but also alienating, never letting the audience fully in. Lydia never asks to be liked - indeed, she seems utterly indifferent to affection - but can never be dismissed. It's as if Blanchett were holding the camera at arm's length, pushing the audience away, in order to better inhabit a character who demands attention but not popularity. The movie has been represented in some circles as a cancel culture fable, not incorrectly, but Tár refuses to advance any tidy conclusions about that phenomenon. If you can live with that, you'll find Tár transporting.
Freddie deBoer’s first book, The Cult of Smart, was published in 2020. You can subscribe to his daily newsletter here.
From Common Sense with Bari Weiss, November 13, 2022
Finally, a Great Movie About Cancel Culture
By: Michelle Goldberg
Midway through the enthralling new film “Tár,” the heroine, a brilliant and imperious classical music conductor named Lydia Tár, is talking about the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer with her elderly former mentor.
“Schopenhauer measured a man’s intelligence against his sensitivity to noise,” her mentor says.
“Didn’t he once also throw a woman down a flight of stairs?” asks Tár.
“Yes,” he responds. “It was unclear that this private and personal failing was at all relevant to his work.”
This question — how to weigh a genius’s private and personal failings against her work — is at the center of “Tár.” It’s a movie about a woman, played by Cate Blanchett, who has built herself in the image of the great, arrogant male cultural titans of the 20th century, only to be undone by the less indulgent mores of the 21st century. In other words, it’s a film about cancel culture, making it the rare piece of art that looks squarely at this social phenomenon that has roiled so many of America’s meaning-making institutions.
There’s something odd about this rarity, given how dramatically juicy struggles over sex, race and power can be. Sure, there are films like “She Said,” the Hollywood version of The New York Times’s investigation of Harvey Weinstein’s abuse, which recently debuted at the New York Film Festival and opens next month. But that movie, while a captivating procedural, is morally simple. What we’ve been lacking are narratives that draw human complexity out of our combustible political debates.
Perhaps that’s because it’s really hard to do well. Reports of absurdly overzealous sensitivity reads suggest that publishers and producers fear backlash. There have been a couple of comedies that have taken on the idea of cancellation, but they’ve stacked the deck by making the person who gets canceled either totally innocent, as in the 2021 TV series “The Chair,” or absurdly guilty, as in the satire “Not Okay.” Stand-up comedians, for whom attempted cancellation is monetizable, have been less cautious. But a dramatic work that asks you to empathize — if not sympathize — with a tragic figure who has done a lot of harm is more difficult to pull off. (Apparently there was a clunky attempt in “The Morning Show,” which I haven’t seen.)
“Tár” itself stacks the deck in one important way — by making its protagonist a woman. A swaggering, magnetic figure in bespoke suits who worships high culture and seems to delight in tweaking social justice assumptions, she’d be insufferable as a man. (She might be insufferable as anyone not played by the wildly charismatic Blanchett.)
Early on, a young conducting student tells her that “as a BIPOC pangender person,” they are not into Bach because of his misogyny. Tár, a self-described “U-Haul lesbian,” humiliates the student before making an impassioned case for artistic universalism. “You want to dance the masque, you must service the composer,” she says fiercely. “You’ve got to sublimate yourself, your ego. And yes, your identity.”
The New Yorker critic Richard Brody, who dissented from the largely rapturous reception “Tár” has received, mentioned this scene while arguing that the film is bitter and reactionary. I saw it differently. Though a misleadingly edited version of the exchange appears later in the film, it has little to do with Tár’s downfall; this is not a movie complaining that you can’t say anything anymore.
Rather — stop reading here if you’re avoiding spoilers — Tár is destroyed because of the lives and careers she has ruined. The film unfolds like a thriller, but what is pursuing the protagonist are her own sins.
These sins reveal themselves slowly and obliquely. We learn that a former protégée, Krista, with whom Tár had some sort of romantic relationship, killed herself, and see evidence, which Tár tries to hide, that Tár had blackballed her. Speaking to her current assistant — with whom there’s also a hint of sexual impropriety — Tár is coldly dismissive of Krista: “She wasn’t one of us.” Later, we see Tár trying to groom a young cellist; in the service of her attempted seduction, she denies another musician a solo that should have been hers.
Tár, then, isn’t a victim, except perhaps of the once-common assumption that profound talent licenses rapacious appetites. It’s true that the movie seems to ask if something is lost when a culture no longer makes room for its sacred monsters. The man who replaces Tár on the conductor’s podium is a mediocrity, and the final scene is an indelible image of artistic abasement. But while the film forces the viewer to identify with Tár, it doesn’t exonerate her. Her unraveling is gutting to witness, not because it’s undeserved but because she’s human.
In my experience, most people, especially those who are middle-aged and older, have complicated and contradictory feelings about the rapid changes in values, manners and allowances that fall under the rubric of cancel culture. They’re glad to see challenges to elite impunity, and uncomfortable about what can seem like mob justice. The notion of separating the art from the artist has gone out of fashion, but a progressive version of old-fashioned morality clauses isn’t a satisfying replacement.
“Tár” demonstrates that all this flux and uncertainty is very fertile territory for art. Hopefully its success — many are predicting it will win a best picture Oscar — will encourage others to take on similarly thorny and unsettled issues. Hysteria about cancel culture can encourage artistic timidity by overstating the cost of probing taboos. In truth, there’s a hunger out there for work that takes the strangeness of this time and turns it into something that transcends polemic.
From The New York Times, October 21, 2022
Did Ron DeSantis Just Become the 2024 Republican Front-Runner?
By: Ross Douthat
A red wave swept Florida, but elsewhere, it barely lapped the shore. Endangered House Democrats are surviving all over, the battle for the Senate may be tilting toward the Democrats, and at best Republicans have won themselves a return to stalemate, not the victory that the circumstances seemed to promise.
If you’re a Republican, this is all reason for severe disappointment — unless, that is, you’re a Republican with your eyes and hopes on Ron DeSantis as a potential presidential candidate for 2024. A world where Florida delivers a Republican landslide while the G.O.P. underperforms elsewhere is quite possibly your ideal scenario, because it seems to vindicate the theory that DeSantis will be offering, should he become a candidate in ’24.
That theory, basically, is that there’s a decisive right-of-center majority there for the taking in American politics, an opportunity magnified by the Biden administration’s unpopularity. It’s a majority that Donald Trump pushed the party toward, by picking up working-class white voters in 2016 and then Hispanic voters in 2020 — proving that the G.O.P. coalition could be more blue collar and multiracial than its Romney-Ryan iteration and better optimized for Electoral College success.
But Trump himself is just too much, too erratic and polarizing and plainly dangerous, to complete the realignment on his own. And his influence on the party as a whole, manifest in the underperforming candidates he elevated in this cycle, is preventing the new G.O.P. majority from taking its natural shape. States like Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia and maybe even New Hampshire should have been easy Republican pickups; all they needed was a normal set of Senate nominees. Instead they got the kind of nominees Trump wanted, and the result is difficulty, defeat, disappointment and votes being counted late into the night.
Crucially, the DeSantis theory emphasizes, “normal” doesn’t have to mean “squishy.” Instead, his sweeping success in Florida proves that you can be an avatar of cultural conservatism, a warrior against the liberal media and Dr. Anthony Fauci, a politician ready to pick a fight with Disney if that’s what the circumstances require. You just also have to be competent, calculating, aware of public opinion as you pick your fights and capable of bipartisanship and steady leadership in a crisis. The basic Trump combination — cultural pugilism and relative economic moderation — can work wonders politically; it just has to be reproduced in a politician who conspicuously knows what he’s doing and who conspicuously isn’t Donald Trump.
Now, there are various ways that this analysis might overstate the DeSantis case. There are reasons apart from his political skills that Florida has trended sharply to the right, and his message and persona might not yield the same results elsewhere. You can’t base a 2024 campaign just on being the guy who kept a sunny vacation destination open for business in 2021 (and drew many right-of-center migrants in the process). You can’t assume that the Hispanic vote nationwide will follow the same patterns as in South Florida. You can’t count on DeSantis’s peculiar kind of anti-charisma playing nationally the way it has played in his home state.
But powerful narratives have a way of burying caveats and doubts, and right now it looks as if DeSantis will be able to sell himself as the Republican who overperformed amid general underperformance, the only Republican who fully exploited the openings the Biden Democrats gave the G.O.P., the Republican who actually achieved the kind of realigning victory that Trumpism’s theoreticians kept promising was just around the corner.
In a normal political world, a normal political party, you would say that DeSantis effectively became the 2024 Republican front-runner last night. Nothing about the G.O.P. has been normal since Trump descended that escalator in 2015, so I won’t be claiming anything so definite.
But the script has been written, the stage prepared: Now we’ll see whether the governor of Florida can play the part that’s waiting for him.
From The New York Times, November 9, 2022
The Midterm Elections and the Power of Stalemate
By: Ross Douthat
This newsletter aspires to offer very little horse-race political writing, but the week of midterm elections is a necessary exception. I resisted making too many specific predictions about the 2022 midterms, but I’m sure readers could tell what I expected: My pre-election columns emphasized the problems afflicting the Democratic Party, rather than the struggles of the G.O.P., and when The Times asked columnists to forecast a single race, I gave Pennsylvania to Mehmet Oz. (Ha!) I didn’t expect a red tsunami, but once the polls tightened after Labor Day, I thought that taking the generic ballot and giving Republicans an extra couple of points while expecting them to win most of the close Senate races was a reasonable way to bet.
It wasn’t, and once again it’s clear that I’m not a superforecaster (Philip Tetlock’s term for pundits who are actually really good at predicting specific outcomes) but rather a more normal sort of overcorrector, always inclined to read a little too much into the last electoral outcome when it comes time to predict the next one.
Thus, because the Republican establishment was able to push Mitt Romney through the primary in 2012, I expected it to be able to push back Donald Trump in 2016. Because Barack Obama beat Romney pretty easily, I expected Trump to likewise lose to Hillary Clinton. Then because the national polls were, contrary to much of the conventional wisdom, pretty accurate in Trump’s 2016 upset — giving Clinton a narrow lead at the end, not a big one — I expected them to be pretty accurate in 2020, and I assumed the race was all but lost for Trump when in fact he remained competitive to the end. And then, because so many 2020 polls underestimated G.O.P. resilience, I suspected we would see a similar effect in coin-flip races in 2022, only to watch the Democrats do much better this time around.
In most of these cases, my election handicapping would have benefited from less poll-parsing and more big-picture analysis. After all, one of my frequent big-picture themes is the power of sclerosis, gridlock and stalemate in Western life, and again and again in American politics, we see that tendency toward stalemate reasserting itself against partisan expectations of a landslide.
So, in 2016, you might have thought, the Democrats will crush the Republicans if they nominate Trump, but then the price of his unpopularity turned out to be much lower than expected. In 2022, you might have thought, Republicans will inevitably win big if inflation goes way up and Biden’s approval ratings stay low, but instead the Democrats seem to have fought them nearly to a draw. And this pattern holds even when dramatic, unexpected crises intervene, like a once-in-a-generation (God willing) pandemic. A lot of liberals hoped Trump would be thoroughly repudiated because of his mishandling of Covid-19, but instead he was just defeated by a normal, modest margin. Then a lot of conservatives expected a similar repudiation for Democrats who overreached on pandemic restrictions, based on what happened in the 2021 Virginia governor’s race — but by 2022 many voters had seemingly moved on.
The pattern of stalemate isn’t just a simple matter of repeated failure by the two parties. Instead, it reflects a mixture characteristic of American society nowadays — unimaginative repetitions and somewhat destructive forms of efficiency.
The repetitions come from politicians who can’t think beyond the path to a bare 51 percent, who can’t make the leaps that would be required to recreate a Reagan coalition, let alone a Rooseveltian one, and who struggle to govern under the broader conditions of economic stagnation and social-spiritual discontent. And repetition also flows from the structure of polarization in the West, which increasingly pits parties of populism against parties of meritocracy, with the former constantly self-undermining with incompetence and crankery and the latter with technocratic arrogance, in a mutually reinforcing loop.
But the efficiencies matter as well. In last week’s newsletter, I quoted a Derek Thompson essay about how professional baseball has been partially ruined by data nerds who treated the game “like an equation, optimized for Y, solved for X, and proved in the process that a solved sport is a worse one.” The analogy to politics is a little inexact, but there is a way in which something similar happens with the two parties’ strategists and activists nowadays. The strategists are quite good at never leaving too many votes on the table, on maximizing turnout and base mobilization within the larger constraints I’ve just described. The activists are quite good at keeping constant pressure on the party leadership to go as far as possible in its preferred direction, and increasingly good at creating interlocking pressure, all the different activist groups reinforcing one another’s messages — the A.C.L.U. sounding like Planned Parenthood, which echoes the Sierra Club and so on. And like the Moneyball quants in baseball, together they’ve created a more efficient and ideologically coherent form of national politics that’s probably bad for the country overall.
This was one part of Trump’s peculiar allure, in 2016 especially, even to some people who opposed him — that he bucked both the strategists and ideological enforcers in the G.O.P. and won anyway, proving that a more unpredictable, category-blurring political style could still flourish in America.
In every way after that initial shock, however, Trumpism failed to discover a real path out of stalemate. Now the question for Republican voters is whether they think that will somehow change — the path widening, the sunlit uplands beckoning — if they give Trump himself just one more try.
From The New York Times, November 11, 2022
What the Pro-Life Movement Lost and Won
By: Ross Douthat
It’s easy to say what a triumphant midterm election would have looked like for opponents of abortion. The ballot initiative installing abortion rights into the Michigan Constitution would have failed. Pro-life measures in Kentucky and Montana would have succeeded. And Republicans would have enjoyed a sweeping victory in both the Senate and the House, making talk of a “Roevember” backlash against the Dobbs decision obsolete.
In each case the reverse happened: The pro-life side lost every statewide ballot — in liberal California and Vermont as well as in the states just listed — and the Republicans underperformed expectations. This has revived the summertime assumption that the Dobbs decision was a political disaster for the G.O.P. It’s confirmed professional Democrats in their abortion-centric campaign strategy. And it’s divided pro-lifers between optimists who think the Republicans just need to learn how to message more effectively about abortion and pessimists who think the results revealed a movement “dead in the water,” to quote the conservative writer Aaron Renn.
Let’s start with what the pro-life pessimists get right. Tuesday’s results confirm the anti-abortion movement’s fundamental disadvantages: While Americans are conflicted about abortion, a majority is more pro-choice than pro-life, the pro-choice side owns almost all the important cultural megaphones, and voters generally dislike sudden unsettlements of social issues.
You can strategize around these problems to some extent, contrasting incremental protections for the unborn with the left’s pro-choice absolutism. But when you’re the side seeking a change in settled arrangements, voters may still choose the absolutism they know over the uncertainty of where pro-life zeal might take them.
However, when abortion wasn’t directly on the ballot, many of those same voters showed no inclination to punish politicians who backed abortion restrictions. Any pro-choice swing to the Democrats was probably a matter of a couple of points in the overall vote for the House of Representatives; meanwhile, Republican governors who signed “heartbeat” legislation in Texas, Georgia and Ohio easily won re-election, and there was no dramatic backlash in red states that now restrict abortion.
In other words, Republicans in 2022 traded a larger margin in the House and maybe a Senate seat or two for a generational goal, the end of Roe v. Wade. And more than that, they demonstrated that many voters who might vote pro-choice on an up-down ballot will also accept, for the time being, pro-life legislation in their states.
For a movement that’s clearly a moral minority, that’s an opportunity, not a death knell. Yes, blue and most purple states will remain pro-choice in almost any imaginable version of the 2020s, and some red states as well. But the fact that abortion is illegal with exceptions in 13 states, while heartbeat laws survived a key political test in Georgia and Ohio, is hardly an abstract or Pyrrhic victory.
My colleagues at The Upshot recently reported on data indicating that these restrictions prevented about 10,000 abortions across the first two months following the Dobbs decision. The pro-life scholar Michael New has suggested that the true figure is higher, based in part on abortion and birthrate data from Texas following the passage of its heartbeat law in 2021. But even just the lower figure adds up to 60,000 fewer abortions in a post-Dobbs year, thousands of babies across the bloc of pro-life states who will live because Roe was overturned.
From the pro-life movement’s perspective, nothing is more important than making sure that bloc holds up. Yes, you need effective swing-state strategies, and yes, the movement needs to push the national G.O.P. toward a more capacious and generous family policy.
But even national efforts need to be especially concerned with what happens inside the existing pro-life states. Can their life-of-the-mother exceptions prove flexible and humane? Can they find ways to improve maternal health? Can state policy and pro-life philanthropy offer alternatives to abortion that reduce the number of women crossing state lines to end their pregnancies? Can their pro-life coalitions hold up against internal pro-choice organizing and pressure from outside?
Above all, can they model a regional way of life, a mix of law and policy and culture, that seems attractive to the country as a whole?
A somewhat cynical view of abortion politics, in 2022 and beyond, is that the pro-life movement can sustain its gains so long as voters are effectively distracted, their pro-choice instincts muted by other economic or cultural concerns.
Another view, though, looks at the muddle of American opinion and sees a lot of people who would like to live in a society that protects human life in utero but think the full anti-abortion vision isn’t plausible, that in a modern society it just can’t be made to work.
That’s what the pro-life movement won for itself in this election, despite its more immediate defeats: a chance, in a big part of the country, to win some of these doubters to its side.
From The New York Times, November 12, 2022
Trump Is the Chief Obstacle to a Republican Revival
By: Matthew Continetti
The final votes have yet to be counted, but so far the 2022 midterm campaign bears a striking resemblance to the midterm elections of 1998. A quarter century ago, Republicans were convinced that historical precedent and the manifest flaws of the incumbent Democratic president would bring them a landslide victory.
Instead, the party found itself losing ground in the House of Representatives and gaining nothing in the Senate. Conservatives felt demoralized and diminished. Within a week, Speaker Newt Gingrich announced his resignation from Congress. “This will give us a chance to purge some of the poison that is in the system,” he was reported to have said at the time.
The setback led to renewal. The Republicans turned to one of the big winners of the 1998 election, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas, to redefine the party and restore it to power. Its strategy worked two years later (with help from the Supreme Court).
The party may be in a similar position today. A disappointing election has rattled conservatives. The nation’s most influential Republican, Donald Trump, is implicated in the unsatisfying result. But a dazzling performance in one state has presented the party with an opportunity to think again about renewal — and to embrace a popular alternative to Mr. Trump’s abrasive style and divisive leadership.
Of course, even if a new standard-bearer has more widespread appeal, the party must still move beyond Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump will have a say in that, too: He may not allow the Republican Party to disenthrall itself from him without a costly fight.
For conservatives, this is a fight worth having. Since his takeover of the party in 2016, Mr. Trump’s G.O.P. has lost the House, the White House and the Senate. If Republicans do end up taking both houses of Congress this year, it won’t be because of Mr. Trump, but despite him.
There may be a silent majority of “normie” Americans open to Republican leadership — but those voters run in the other direction at the first sight of Mr. Trump and his most devoted supporters. Mr. Gingrich saw that the party’s interests were best served under different leadership. Mr. Trump sees no interest but his own. He is the chief obstacle to a Republican revival.
In 1998, one silver lining for Republicans was Mr. Bush, who won re-election for governor by nearly 40 points. In 2022, foremost among a cohort of Republican leaders is Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who won a second term by 20 points.
Mr. Bush and Mr. DeSantis share certain strengths. They knitted independents, Hispanics and suburbanites into a broad coalition. They raised a record-breaking amount of money. Mr. Bush demonstrated that conservative values could be blended with a “compassionate” approach to education, immigration and faith-based charitable reform. Mr. DeSantis combines competent administration and conservative principles with a Trump-like pugilism and grass-roots suspicion of liberal elites and expert opinion.
Mr. Bush offered Republicans a way out of their 1990s dilemma. Decades later, America and the Republicans have changed, but the party’s problems — among them, the perception that it is beholden to extremists — have not.
Republicans have taken the popular vote in a presidential election just once in 34 years. The last time they won independent voters at the national level was 2016, and it was a plurality (48 percent). They went from losing moderate voters by nine points in 2016 to 15 points in 2022. Their narrow margin in the suburbs, where most voters reside, has remained nearly unchanged since 2016. To win a national majority, Republicans must rack up big margins among independents and suburbanites and narrow their differences with moderates.
After Tuesday, it is obvious to all but his most blinkered fans that Mr. Trump has made the task more difficult.
Republican success at the state level shows what is possible. Mr. DeSantis has garnered the most attention, but he is far from alone in offering a popular model of conservative governance. From Mike DeWine of Ohio (who won re-election by over 25 points), Chris Sununu of New Hampshire, Greg Abbott of Texas and Brian Kemp of Georgia to the departing Charlie Baker of Massachusetts and Larry Hogan of Maryland, Republican governors have broadened the party’s appeal by meeting voters where they are — seizing the common-sense mainstream and addressing public concerns calmly and effectively and often without the sort of backlash Mr. Trump has inspired.
Doug Ducey of Arizona, who is also stepping down, recently signed the most expansive school choice bill ever. Glenn Youngkin’s win in last year’s Virginia governor’s race, Mr. Kemp’s re-election after standing up to Mr. Trump in 2020 and the almost 10-point swing toward Mr. DeSantis in Florida from 2018 to 2022 show that a different version of the G.O.P. is waiting in the wings — a party that can rise above the self-imposed limits of Mr. Trump’s coalition without giving much up. Republican governors run the gamut from abortion-rights moderates to anti-abortion MAGA culture warriors. What makes Mr. Kemp, Mr. Youngkin and Mr. DeSantis unique is their ability to exploit the weaknesses of the cultural left without frightening the center of the electorate.
Still, Mr. Trump, who is widely expected to announce for president soon, is the undisputed front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination. He has a sizable lead over Mr. DeSantis in national polls. What’s more, Mr. Trump says he is willing to use the same scorched-earth personal attacks against potential rivals that he deployed in 2016.
If Mr. DeSantis enters the presidential stakes, then, he will have to win over conservative media and wrest control of the G.O.P. from Mr. Trump. It might even come at the risk of driving Mr. Trump to start an independent candidacy.
But only then will the party have a chance to purge some of the poison that is in the system.
Matthew Continetti (@continetti) is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism.”
From The New York Times, November 13, 2022