Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  I begin by repeating my spoiler alert from last week. This concerns the final chapters of an E.L. Doctorow novel published in 2014, the last one he published (he died the following year). IF YOU WANT TO COME TO IT FRESH, YOU WILL NOT WANT THE REVELATIONS I AM ABOUT TO MAKE!  Anyone still here?  Okay, then.  Andrew's time as a teacher at a DC high school is brief. He soon, accidentally, and in a manner I won't relate, comes to the attention of President George W. Bush.  We learn only at this point that the two knew each other -- indeed, they had been roommates at Yale as undergrads.  They had both been involved in what seem like typical frat-boy hijinks, and in at least one such instance Andrew had taken the blame to help keep the Bush family crest clean re one such hijink, involving a Bunsen burner in a Yale lab. Someone in the Bush staff gets nervous that someone like that -- someone who could tell such tales to the press corps -- is in DC. So they press...

Now is a good time to wonder: do neoconservatives have any support in the broad voting population?  Or has the whole 'neocon" thing of the last 60 years or so been an elaborate game within the elites, intellectual policy-wonkish, and politically connected? This is a big question.  After all, the Cheney family is regularly classified as neocon. Dick and Lynne and Liz. Other prominent example of Trump-resisting Republicans fit the label pretty nicely: Bolton, Haley, the latest Podhoretz to be running COMMENTARY....  If we are headed for a rematch one would expect neocon sentiment to side with Biden over Trump after all the water under the bridge.  After Trump has made so clear his utter contempt for them. But ... does it matter? Do the neocons have the numbers to make themselves matter?  Here is a potentially relevant factoid. COMMENTARY says it has 1.2 million monthly page views on average. So there are at least that number of people willing to take neocon ideas ...

  There is reason to hope that the "stop the steal" stuff is on the retreat at last, away from the center toward the margin of political discourse in the United States.  In January, of course, the Republicans lost two critical seats in the U.S. Senate because of an impossibly mixed message to their base, "Your vote doesn't really matter. It will be changed by nasty Dominion voting machines and by the machinations of child-abusing traitors. Yet you ought to get out and vote!" The first part of that overwhelmed the second, the Democrats did get out their vote, and they won both Senate seats from Georgia. The mixed message wasn't quite as absurd and self-defeating as it seems, though. We have had reason to worry over the intervening months that the message is "elections don't matter in general, they are always a charade, so a military coup wouldn't be such a bad thing -- it would be just a little more honest." And THAT message is a truly vicio...