Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will see scattered showers with a high of 60. Sunrise is 5:41 AM and sunset 8:01 PM for 14h 20m 38s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 26.5% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1916, Babe Ruth, then a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, hits his first major league home run.
Thomas Edsall writes With or Without Trump, the MAGA Movement Is the Future of the Republican Party:
“Anti-establishment conservatives found him refreshing,” [author of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism, Matthew] Continetti adds. “Not one iota of Trump was politically correct. He played by no rules of civility. He genuflected to no one. He despised the media with the same intensity as the conservative grass roots.”
Millions of voters may have found Trump “refreshing,” but there continue to be dissenters on the right who see the consequences as disastrous.
David French, a senior editor at The Dispatch, warned in an interview with Sean Illing of Vox:
Here’s what’s the terrifying thing on the right that can be a career- and reputation-ending allegation: “You’re weak. You’re a coward.” So the transformation, this flipping upside down of morality, turning bullying into strength, turning restraint into vice, all of that, what has then happened is it enables the Trumpists and the Trumpist world. They’re wielding this sword that is very sharp culturally in red spaces, this accusation of weakness and cowardice, as a weapon to keep people in line, because they’ve defined support for this movement as evidence of your strength.
Yuval Levin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (and a contributing Opinion writer for The Times), described a transformation on the right that began before Trump but has accelerated under his direction. Speaking at a March 2021 Harvard Kennedy School forum, Levin said: “I think conservatives are naturally defenders of a society’s institutions — not blindly, they’re also reformers — but they believe in the purposes of those institutions.”
The Republican Party, he continued,
has gradually become hostile to Americans’ institutions. It sees them as possessed by the other party. It sees them as corrupt. It looks at them through a populist lens as the source of the problem, rather than the source of solutions.
In the fall of 2016, with Trump as the Republican presidential nominee, Levin wrote in Politico magazine:
This election cycle has revealed serious fault lines and weaknesses on the right, and the Republican Party will be working to make sense of it all for years. But for conservatives — I mean those who champion some version of the difficult balance of traditionalism in the moral arena, market mechanisms for addressing our economic challenges, and American strength in a dangerous world — all bound by a limited-government constitutionalism — this sorry year’s lessons have one overarching implication: We can no longer treat the G.O.P. simply as our own.
Well, yes, what Trump has brought — at least what Trump has brought to the forefront — is the future of his party. To live in rural America, is to see that Trump has transformed (or unleashed) his party. See Man and Movement.
Trumpist appetites once whetted are nearly insatiable. The party that twice nominated Trump will not, in our time, be going back.
Splashdown! SpaceX Crew-3 astronauts back on Earth: