Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of 49. Sunrise is 6:29 AM and sunset 7:25 PM for 12h 55m 16s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 10.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Equal Opportunities Commission meets at 5 PM.
On this day in 1865, a day after Union forces capture Richmond, Virginia, President Lincoln visits the Confederate capital.
Populism requires new enemies and outrages to sustain itself. For all their talk of being sensible, the conservative populists are the opposite: easily slighted, hot-headed, and susceptible of ill-formed ideas. See Defining Populism, Conservative Populism Moves in One Direction Only, and Who Rampaged Better?
So from race, to transgender identity, to Disney as a supposed stream of perversion, the populists need someone and something to demonize.
At the Bulwark, Charlie Sykes and Tim Miller discuss the latest enemies of the populists’ kulturkampf. (This culture struggle, needless to say, has neither the objects nor the design of Bismarck’s original.)
A word on Sykes. As the conservative world has become a Trumpist one, Sykes (like a few other conservatives) left that world for a Never Trump one. By moving in this direction, Sykes has now become what libertarians (as I am) thought we’d years ago find in a loose association with conservatives.
We did not find a positive association with the conservatives of yesteryear, despite trying too often and too persistently (the effort was called ‘fusion’ among libertarians, and it was a compromising mistake that libertarians should never have made).
As it turns out, it’s only now, after the ruin of mainstream conservativism, that some of its Never Trump refugees are now closer to what libertarians had sought (but did not years ago find) in conservatives.
Not everything, mind you, but today more than yesterday, surely.
.