(draft)
We drove from Oakland to LA (Santa Monica area) Friday, and returned home today, avoiding all the predicted holiday weekend traffic by leaving early each time, around 9am. We celebrated my birthday and my partner saw his new granddaughter for the first time. We stayed at the Luskin Conference Center Hotel on the UCLA campus (as we did at Christmas), and I had a chance to wander around the campus a bit more. This time, unlike last year, the Powell Library and UCLA bookstore were both open.
I remember both fondly. On my first visit to the campus, in August 1973 before the Fall Quarter started, I visited the bookstore and found books in the science fiction section I’d never seen before, not in the local paperback shops, or the Pickwick and Walden bookstores in the malls. In fact, they were Ballard’s THE VOICES OF TIME, Moorcock’s BEHOLD THE MAN, Disch’s CAMP CONCENTRATION, and Lafferty’s THE DEVIL IS DEAD. (I confess I never have gotten around to that last one.)
And the stacks in Powell were my favorite place to find an isolated cubicle to study or read in without an noise or disturbance.
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I only had a few minutes each day over the weekend to glance at my usual sites, and capture some links. I’ll catch up tomorrow, but here are a couple striking ones. Again, this is about human nature. And why, despite the high-minded ideals of American democracy, base human nature rebels against them.
Salon, Chauncey DeVega, 30 Aug 2025: Donald Trump is conservatism’s realization — not its betrayal, subtitled “He gave the GOP permission to be themselves, says historian Allan Lichtman”
…Trump and his MAGA movement did not take over the Republican Party and the right-wing. Their marriage was not forced. He simply gave today’s Republicans and conservatives enthusiastic permission to be their true selves and to drop the mask.
In my previous post, on Aug. 28th, I quoted a piece by Thom Hartmann that boiled the motivations of Republicans down to a single one: “greed.”
This piece is somewhat more nuanced.
[V]irtually everything that conservatives have been publicly professing for 100 years is false. They violate, in fundamental ways, everything that they’ve claimed to strongly believe in. Take, for example, free enterprise. Republican presidents have repeatedly enacted tariffs. Conservatives also subvert markets and free enterprise by picking and choosing “winners” and “losers” through special tax breaks, subsidies and loan guarantees for big business. Conservatives are destroying limited government through the buildup of ICE, suppressing LGBTQ rights, controlling education and taking away women’s reproductive rights. Those are examples of big government interventions and not support for limited government or free enterprise.
My comment: Conservatives like authoritative documents they can point to, like the Constitution or the Bible, but these seem to be merely totemic, since they obviously do not follow those principles (and likely haven’t read them or understood them).
An aside in this piece:
I have summed up American politics in one sentence: Democrats have no spine [and] Republicans have no principles.
Or, Democrats are reasonable and driven by principles, Republicans are aggressive and driven by power.
Here are the two things this analyst boils things down to.
[T]hey are protecting two core principles. The first is private enterprise. This is not the same as free enterprise. This explains the tax cuts, the deregulation, the tariffs, the subsidies for the rich and big business, the opposition to labor unions, etc.
The second thing that conservatives are protecting is their own distorted view of Judeo-Christian teachings. They are obsessed with homosexuality, abortion and the subordination of women, while they ignore the main teachings of Christianity and Jesus Christ, such as a distrust of greed and wealth. Christ also emphasizes the importance of truth. Today’s Republicans, conservatives and Donald Trump, especially, certainly have no use for the truth. Jesus Christ also emphasized the care for the poor, the stranger and the sojourner. Today, Republicans and conservatives trample on and violate the majority of Judeo-Christian teachings. Their politics shapes their religion.
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These understandings make this piece’s question easy to answer.
The Atlantic, Mike Nelson, 31 Aug 2025: The Enemy That Hegseth and Trump Insist on Honoring, subtitled “The U.S. won the Civil War. So why is the administration so keen on the Confederate side?”
I’ll quote from this piece just an example of what conservatives in general, and this administration in particular, are up to.
When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced earlier this month that he would return a Confederate memorial to Arlington National Cemetery, he blamed “woke lemmings” for it having been taken down. Created by the sculptor Moses Ezekiel, the statue in question, which Hegseth described as “beautiful and historic,” features sentimental images of Confederate soldiers and loyal Black slaves. It was first installed in the cemetery in 1914 and was removed in late 2023, as part of the Biden administration’s larger effort to remove memorials that glorified the Confederate cause and to rechristen bases whose names lionized traitors to the United States. The war against the Confederacy killed more than 300,000 members of the military that Hegseth leads—a grim fact that the defense secretary trivializes in his efforts to score political points against the left.
The easy answer: today’s conservatives are descendants of those from the South who *fought against* the Union with its Constitution and its principles. The South rejected them. They still do. They don’t care that the “U.S.” won the war. I’ll resist the temptation to spell this out even further.
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Another quote from Hannah Arendt, from Facebook
“The essence of evil is its refusal to think.”
— Hannah ArendtArendt’s chilling insight: wickedness isn’t always monstrous—it’s often mindless. The abandonment of critical thought enables atrocity. True morality demands engagement, not automation.
(borrowed from a Philosophy page)
This matches my observation that conservatives just *know* what they believe, without bothering to think anything through, or present evidence to justify those beliefs.
