Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of seventy-four. Sunrise is 5:52 AM and sunset 8:08 PM, for 14h 15m 40s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.4% of its visible disk illuminated. Today is the {tooltip}two hundred seventieth day.{end-texte}Days since Trump’s election, with 11.9.16 as the first day.{end-tooltip}
On this day in 1945, after years of war, the United States drops an atomic bomb on the Imperial Japanese city of Hiroshima. On this day in 1864, the 3rd Wisconsin Cavalry is among the Union forces that begin an expedition from Little Rock to Little Red River, Arkansas.
Recommended for reading in full —
Conservative Jennifer Rubin, surveying the GOP support for Trump, asks Does the GOP deserve to survive?:
….how Republicans behave from here on out will play a huge role in determining the extent of the housecleaning/destruction of the GOP required. It makes all the difference in the world whether Democrats (by winning elections) save the country from Trump or whether the GOP (by impeachment, support for prosecution, primary challenge) takes matters into its own hands to expunge Trump. The latter would not erase entirely the original sin they committed when they backed him, but a Republican revolt against Trump (finally) would suggest internal reformation is possible. Republicans in office, running for office, in think tanks and other right-leaning groups should think long and hard about how they want the Trump presidency to end; it will become the defining event in their personal and political legacies. And the manner of Trump’s political demise will largely determine whether the 2016 election was the last to produce a Republican president.
George Will observes that The GOP has become the party of the grotesque:
“Anything that comes out of the South,” said writer Flannery O’Connor, a sometime exemplar of Southern Gothic, “is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.” But, realistically, Alabama’s primary says more about Republicans than about this region. A Michigan poll shows rocker-cum-rapper Kid Rock a strong potential Republican Senate candidate against incumbent Debbie Stabenow. Rock says Democrats are “shattin’ in their pantaloons” because if he runs it will be “game on mthrfkers.”
Is this Northern Gothic? No, it is Republican Gothic, the grotesque becoming normal in a national party whose dishonest and, one hopes, futile assault on [Alabama candidate for the U.S. Senate Mo] Brooks is shredding the remnants of its dignity.
Jeff Greenfield describes The Ugly History of Stephen Miller’s ‘Cosmopolitan’ Epithet:
When TV news viewers saw Trump adviser Stephen Miller accuse Jim Acosta of harboring a “cosmopolitan bias” during Wednesday’s news conference, they might have wondered whether he was accusing the CNN White House reporter of an excessive fondness for the cocktail made famous on “Sex and the City.” It’s a term that’s seldom been heard in American political discourse. But to supporters of the Miller-Bannon worldview, it was a cause for celebration. Breitbart, where Steve Bannon reigned before becoming Trump’s chief political strategist, trumpeted Miller’s “evisceration” of Acosta and put the term in its headline. So did white nationalist Richard Spencer, who hailed Miller’s dust-up with Acosta as “a triumph”….
One reason why “cosmopolitan” is an unnerving term is that it was the key to an attempt by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin to purge the culture of dissident voices. In a 1946 speech, he deplored works in which “the positive Soviet hero is derided and inferior before all things foreign and cosmopolitanism that we all fought against from the time of Lenin, characteristic of the political leftovers, is many times applauded.” It was part of a yearslong campaigned aimed at writers, theater critics, scientists and others who were connected with “bourgeois Western influences.” Not so incidentally, many of these “cosmopolitans” were Jewish, and official Soviet propaganda for a time devoted significant energy into “unmasking” the Jewish identities of writers who published under pseudonyms.
What makes this history relevant is that, all across Europe, nationalist political figures are still making the same kinds of arguments—usually but not always stripped of blatant anti-Semitism—to constrict the flow of ideas and the boundaries of free political expression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, for example, has more and more embraced this idea that unpatriotic forces threaten the nation.
David A. Graham explains Why Trump Invokes ‘Common Sense’:
The recourse to “common sense” is probably not accidental, especially for a student of political movements like Miller. Nearly every contemporary politician is guilty of falling back on the phrase, but for centuries, populist movements in particular have invoked common sense as a justification for policy goals and as an antidote to expert opinion. Like President Trump, the people invoking it have often done so, as Sophia Rosenfeld writes in her book Common Sense: A Political History, as part of “a populist style of conservatism that celebrated authoritarian governance alongside the traditional ways, values, and language of ordinary people”….
“Common sense has … served to underwrite challenges to established forms of legitimate rule … in the name of the special kind of intuition belonging to the people,” Rosenfeld observes. “Common sense is typically evoked and held up as authoritative only at moments of crisis in other forms of legitimacy. Revolutions, which, by definition, result in divided loyalties and the upending of the rules to multiple domains at once, are a case in point. Otherwise common sense does not need to call attention to itself.”
Time and again, the Trump administration has embraced solutions that it has labeled common sense, but which are either highly disputed, wholly counter to expert consensus, or flat wrong. This has been true on immigration, on protectionism, on industrial policy, climate change, and a range of other issues.
Great Big Story presents Navigating Niagara Falls by Helicopter: