Full Circles Do Occur in Nature
Where this starts… This morning I checked Citizen Free Press the way I always do, to make sure the President is still alive and nukes aren’t raining down on Ukraine, and I found this:
The blue teasers are all about the same guy. I took the link to the NYT feature, which was uncharacteristically out from behind the pay wall, meaning they want us to see it, even us irredeemables. CFP was right to spotlight the first seven paragraphs. Here they are:
FTA: <<Not too long ago, I felt a civic duty to be rude to my wife’s younger brother.
I met Matt Kappler in 2012, and it was immediately clear we had nothing in common. He lifted weights to death metal; I jogged to Sondheim. I was one of President Barack Obama’s speechwriters and had an Ivy League degree; he was a huge Joe Rogan fan and went on to get his electrician’s license. My early memories of Matt are hazy — I was mostly trying to impress his parents. Still we got along, chatting amiably on holidays and at family events.
Then the pandemic hit, and our preferences began to feel like more than differences in taste. We were on opposite sides of a cultural civil war. The deepest divide was vaccination. I wasn’t shocked when Matt didn’t get the Covid shot. But I was baffled. Turning down a vaccine during a pandemic seemed like a rejection of science and self-preservation. It felt like he was tearing up the social contract that, until that point, I’d imagined we shared.
Had Matt been a friend rather than a family member, I probably would have cut off contact completely. As it was, on the rare and always outdoor occasions when we saw each other, I spoke in disapproving snippets.
“Work’s been good?”
“Mhrmm.”
My frostiness wasn’t personal. It was strategic. Being unfriendly to people who turned down the vaccine felt like the right thing to do. How else could we motivate them to mend their ways?>>
The rest of the essay (link here) was consistent and conveyed a transition from bemused contempt to a friendship with differences (akin to the ‘friends with benefits’ category, not sexual but still an exception from the usual). The tone was an attempt at gentle, even self-deprecatory humor underneath the carapace of “haven’t really changed each other’s minds on major national issues.” What are the differences? One is still the smarter, better educated, more accomplished, and more politically astute. The other is cooler than he once seemed when you get to know him. Your see? We can all get along.
Sound too harsh? The line “He lifted weights to death metal, I jogged to Sondheim” wasn’t a throwaway; it WAS the essay:
Of course there’s no death metal counterpart to this ruefully melancholy ballad. Enough said?
Having gotten this far, I looked up the author on Wiki. Eureka.
Now I’m in it up to my eyeballs. How I get lost in things. The pic immediately reminded me of the ObamaCare poster boy up top. The mini-bio was perfect too, QED on the Sondheim inference — born in New York City, elite Manhattan prep school, Yalie politico, and a lucky(?) shortcut to prominence as a boy speechwriter for Valerie Jarrett before the Obama gig.
About that shortcut… I looked up the ‘West Wing Writers.’ Something about the name obviously. They’re a thing. Were a thing anyway.The site doesn’t look to have been updated recently. It still has an FYI link to its eponymous origin:
Our boy wonder David Litt is knowable to a large extent without much digging. What isn’t clear is why the New York Times has given him a platform at this moment in time. What is the potential or perceived value of Litt in the current political context?
The Democrat Party is in the process of dying by suicide. The power vacuum left by the disgraced prior administration has energized the far left’s ambition to take over the entire party. The Dems aren’t just marching off a cliff; they appear to be whipping up a stampede off the cliff. There are many damaging erosions of their traditional constituencies, but the biggest and hardest to get to in terms of numbers is men. Without the women’s vote, the 2024 election would have been the most lopsided landslide in American history.
The strategists of the left know this. They just don’t know how to fix it. What they’d like is to regain some of the moderate appeal that Bill Clinton had once upon a time before Hillary eclipsed him and remade his image as her accomplice. They don’t need all the men, just the ones who think the Dems have gotten too carried away with their rhetoric and policies regarding toxic masculinity, reparations for women in the form of DEI, and compulsory media confrontations with categories of sexuality that physically repel them. They want the moderates back. Not moderate policies, mind. But people who like to be regarded as open-minded and forward-looking without having to brandish signs or wear funny hats.
Thinking they want to renovate the image of ObamaCare Boy into a role model that moderate men might actually find an acceptable way to view themselves.
Which is when my thinking turned automatically in the direction of Ann Althouse. When InstaPundit was ruling the blogosphere on the right, and Democrat Underground ruling on the left, Ann Althouse was the sweet voice of reason in the middle. Unless there was both more and less than met the eye with her than she let on. For me she seemed a useful focus of the fuzziness that always accompanies the so-called moderate constituency of the body politic. I paid attention to what she wrote and did. (It was almost like a Summit Meeting of the blog world when she was photographed having dinner with Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.) Since I was a critic of the whole social network enterprise, I satirized both the left and the right, if not equally at least not with one eye closed and squinched. When I compiled a representative list of posts in the main page of Instapunk.com (70 to 80 titles), the column on the left was a big chunk of it; the excerpt is from one of the posts listed:
I was still following her career while Obama served out his two disastrous terms as President and, hoping and changing us into the statist crisis that inspired the Trump phenomenon. Recalling this piece, I thought she might be a vehicle for satirizing the squishy logic of those who were sitting on the fence, obstructing Trump like old-style liberals while making excuses for those who hated him enough to destroy him utterly. I started work on a Blogger website called “Anna Althorse.” I came up with a detailed backstory for her and for her boyfriend, a more macho-looking version of ObamaCare Boy who had anti-American passions to die for:
All I ever finished were the two introductory posts of what I’d planned as an epistolary record of the fight between the Democrats and the Republicans during the Trump Presidency. But within weeks, all the moderates had vanished from the stage, and my two fictional blog characters no longer had any plausible clout. There was material for more collected and stored, but there was never another post. I still like the look of the site and the Althorse voice I was imagining. Here’s the link. She just had nowhere to go. And neither did he.
Which is what I’m thinking about David Litt and the New York Times. They don’t get it. Any of them. Just imagine how far up your ass your head would have to be to think Tim Walz was a broadly appealing male figure on the Democrat ticket. I’m sure Litt and the NYT think they get it, but manliness isn’t what they think it is. It’s not surfing or hard rock or having a beer or high fives or being loud or joking about chicks or even trusting somebody to drive your car. It’s in the eyes. What men look for. There is a universal ritual of man to man acknowledgment that occurs millions of times every day. A man is walking somewhere and his path takes him near enough to another man that the eyes connect for a nanosecond. This is acknowledged by an infinitesimally small nod, with no word or change of facial expression. It’s not a requirement. There are plenty of males a man doesn’t notice. When he does and he is autonomically triggered, there’s the nod, which may be returned or not, depending on the time factor. The return isn’t even necessary. The eye contact is enough. It’s simple recognition, mutual. It’s not friendship, trust, interest, or display. It’s just men passing in the street.
Of course now you’ll be looking for it in yourself and won’t be able to prove to yourself that you do it. But you do it. Unless you’re an ObamaCare Boy. (Cue the title of the post.) Unless you think you’re some kind of meta-male, able to fit in by stooping, compartmentalizing, and patting yourself on the back for how skillfully you live in what you think is a superposition of states, which are available to the gifted and sorely needed during our trans-human migration. But your superposition is only a shallow mask hiding your disdain for your betters.
The Dems can’t get men back into their coalition. Everybody’s obsessed with the difficulty of defining what a woman is. Except for the billions of us who know what a woman is. They’ve completely to forgotten to ask what a man is, or wonder why nobody’s asking the asking the question. Even though millions upon millions of men know exactly what a man is and why he won’t be voting for Democrats.
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