Daily Archives: January 15, 2021

Nihilism was notably cited during U.S. Senate deliberations after rioting Trump supporters had been cleared from the Capitol.

Dont let nihilists become your drug dealers, exhorted Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse. There are some who want to burn it all down. Dont let them be your prophets.

How else to describe the incendiary rhetoric and grievances that Donald Trump has peddled since November? What else to call the denial of the electorates will and his deep disdain for American institutions and traditions?

In 2016, I wrote about how Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky had, in his work, explored what happens to society when people who rise to power lack any semblance of ideological or moral convictions and view society as bereft of meaning. I saw eerie similarities with Trumps actions and rhetoric on the campaign trail.

Fast-forward four years, and I believe the warnings of Dostoevsky particularly in his most most political novel, Demons, published in 1872 hold truer than ever.

Although set in a sleepy provincial Russian town, Demons serves as a broader allegory for how thirst for power in some people, combined with the indifference and disavowal of responsibility by others, amount to a devastating nihilism that consumes society, fostering chaos and costing lives.

Before Demons, Dostoevsky had been writing a novel about faith, The Life of a Great Sinner.

But then a disturbing public trial spurred him in a more overtly political direction. A young student had been murdered by members of a revolutionary group, The Organization of the Peoples Vengeance, at the behest of their leader, Sergei Nechaev.

Dostoevsky was appalled that politics could be dehumanizing to the point of murder. His focus turned not only to moral questions but also to political demagoguery, which, he argued, if left unchecked, could result in devastating loss of life.

The result was Demons. It featured two protagonists: Pyotr Verkhovensky, a former student with no political convictions beyond a lust for power, and Nikolai Stavrogin, a man so morally numb and emotionally detached that he is incapable of purposeful action and stands idly by as violence engulfs his society.

Through these two figures, Dostoevsky tells a broader story about the many flavors of nihilism. Pyotr infiltrates the towns local social circles, recruits a group of disciples to a revolutionary group and spins lies to band them together so they may do his bidding. Pretending to lead a broad movement of international socialism, Pyotr manipulates those around him into committing violent acts and insurrection against the local government. As a result, one woman is crushed by a mob, a mother and her baby die from chaos and neglect and a fire breaks out that kills multiple others.

Different townspeople espouse multiple and contradictory ideologies; none translates into purposeful action. Instead, they merely leave characters whiplashed and susceptible to being instrumentalized by Pyotor, the master manipulator.

But Pyotr would not prevail without the nihilism of Stavrogin, a local nobleman.

Many townspeople see him as a leader with a strong moral compass. Throughout the novel, Pyotr seeks to loop Stavrogin into his quest for power by either doing him favors that corrupt him or hinting that he will install him as dictator once he successfully carries out a revolution.

On some level, Stavrogin knows better: He should be protecting the town and its people. He ultimately fails to do so, out of sheer despondence and because of the emotional appeal of chaos and violence have for him; they seem to jolt him out of the ennui he often appears to feel.

When given the chance to restrain and turn in to the authorities the escaped convict who perpetrates most of the violence in town, Stavrogin captures him only to eventually let him go. Steal more, kill more, he says to a criminal who has already admitted to killing and stealing. Later, when the political climate gets so heated that it seems an insurrection is imminent, he flees town.

In surrendering his responsibility to serve as a moral guardian, Stavrogin becomes complicit in Pyotrs schemes. He ultimately kills himself perhaps, in part, out of guilt for his passivity and moral indifference.

Among the two men, Pyotr is the authoritarian figure. And he cleverly insists that members of the revolutionary group break the law together, cementing a loyal brotherhood of criminality.

By contrast, Stavrogin is the novels empty center, idly standing by while Pyotr incites violence.

He doesnt help Pyotr. But he doesnt stop him, either.

A range of nihilistic justifications each successively hollower than the rest seems to have shaped the violence at the U.S. Capitol.

The homegrown American insurrection lacked any sort of ideological foundation. Most ideas fueling it are negations of persons or facts. The immediate rallying cry of the insurrection was the falsehood that the election was stolen. Beyond denying the will of over 80 million people who voted for Joe Biden, this lie also qualifies not as an ideology, but as an absolute denial of truth.

Other ideas fomenting the insurrection such as America first or MAGA and even white supremacy itself are quintessentially founded on the denial of others, whether they are immigrants, foreign nationals or persons of color.

From what we have learned since, some of Trumps supporters were even imploring him to cross the Rubicon, a reference to Julius Caesars initiation of the civil war that eventually transformed Rome into a dictatorial empire, expressing a longing to smash American systems and eviscerate the republic.

The only real purpose that seems to have brought the group together was devotion to Donald Trump, who strikes me as the arch-nihilist in all this, the Pyotr Verkhovensky of this American tragedy. Then there are the other public figures who should have known better, who might have helped stop it all, but couldnt and didnt. Some, like Stavrogin, excused themselves and were silent for far too long, as the lie about the election grew bigger and bigger. And others seemed to outright encourage the lie through formalized objections in Congress last week.

Playacting at revolution at the behest of a man seeking to cling to power, the rioters ultimately only managed only to vandalize the building, though they left five people dead in their wake.

Nonetheless, to act violently on the basis of such fictions and to transgress against the humanity of others for nothing at all is perhaps the most nihilistic act of them all.

See the original post:

Dostoevsky warned of the strain of nihilism that infects Donald Trump and his movement - The Conversation US

From the very beginning, the truth has been central to Christian faith. Jesus said, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." In the one instant where Jesus engaged in a discussion with a sly political leader, Jesus said he came to testify to the truth, and Pilate rhetorically asked Jesus, "What is truth?" not actually expecting an answer. Pilate's essential nihilism has not endeared him in our religious history. He is remembered as the one under whom Christ was crucified, after all.

Lies cause harm. When such lies are perpetuated by those in power, including the president of the United States, they cause even greater harm. This week we have seen the dangerous impact of the failure of truth-telling in our nation -- a vacuous insurrection, devoid of any real purpose other than hooliganry. It's notable, is it not, that whatever the events of Jan. 6 were, they signified nothing at all, simply sheer frustration about a reality that doesn't exist. In Christian perspective, a nation has hit a low point when a senator gets a standing ovation simply for reminding his colleagues their responsibility is to tell people the truth.

People of authentic faith remember that truth resides in the space of testimony. Christians by and large are not relativists. We do not believe that all truths are relative; neither do we believe truth and lies are simply opposite sides of the same coin. Truth is truth. But in Christian perspective, truth is also not incontrovertible. It inhabits the space of discourse. We discern the truth. Returning to Jesus' statement in front of Pilate, he says he has come to "testify to the truth."

We have reliable systems for such testimony in our nation. States count votes, and governments certify them. Courts perform their role, hearing evidence when such counting and certification is contested. Then, once various forms of testimony are brought, the courts decide what is true. We discern truth in and through such processes and institutions.

This is how truth works. Truth is not an ever deferred and bald assertion by one powerful man who says, "Just wait, we're bringing more evidence. We won by a landslide." Nor is truth hidden away and sequestered by a special privileged few, insiders to the conspiracy. That's gnosticism, not Christianity, and that's simply not how truth works. Quite the opposite, that's how liars lie. They believe their subjective personal claim has greater validity than the vetted and communal process of the courts and states and nation.

A nation that offers itself, cravenly, to the lies of a demagogue is just so bound and beholden. It is no longer free. Jesus said if you know the truth, it will set you free. As a Christian pastor, I'm a little lost these days on how to share the truth with people so gullibly willing to believe race-baited lies and conspiracies, but I do know for sure that Christian faith does not travel such roads.

The Rev. Clint Schnekloth is lead pastor at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in Fayetteville. He blogs at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/clintschnekloth or email him at perichoresis2002@mac.com.

Originally posted here:

Clint Schnekloth: The way, the truth and the life - Arkansas Online

2021 is not off to the start any of us wanted, but at least there should be a lot of great music coming this year. With that in mind, we compiled a list of 60 albums we're particularly looking forward to, and then we asked you to let us know your No. 1 most anticipated release. Across social media, you expressed your excitement for new music from a host of different bands and artists: Tomahawk, Avenged Sevenfold, Jerry Cantrell, Poppy, Deafheaven, Wolfgang Van Halen's project Mammoth WVH. And of course, many of you just want anything from Tool. Five bands rose to the fore see the top vote-getters below.

U.K. metalcore veterans Architects have been redefining the genre (and themselves) for well over a decade. Their upcoming LP, For Those That Wish To Exist, due February 26th, continues that evolution. With 15 tracks (spanning an hour) and three big-time guest vocalists (Parkway Drive's Winston McCall, Royal Blood's Mike Kerr and Biffy Clyro's Simon Neil), it goes for the jugular, both sonically and thematically: As the band recently told Revolver, the album's lyrics navigate the push-pull of hope and nihilism in a world that's falling apart.

Over the course of 2020, Evanescence spent their quarantine working on The Bitter Truth, their first album of original music in a decade. They dropped singles as they progressed "Wasted on You," "The Game Is Over," "Use My Voice" and "Yeah Right" and vocalist Amy Lee making badass guest appearances on albums by diverse acts like Body Count and Bring Me the Horizon, making eager fans only more anxious. Your long wait will be over soon. Featuring 12 tracks, The Bitter Truth is set for a March 26th release.

photograph by Mcabe Gregg

If you thought cancer would stop Dave Mustaine, think again. The thrash OG was already working on songs while in the middle of chemotherapy in late 2019. If you thought COVID would stop him, think again again. The pandemic did sideline Megadeth's mega-tour with Lamb of God, but it also allowed the band to focus on finishing up their 16th album, tentatively titled The Sick, the Dying and the Dead. Mustaine's been quoted comparing it to Rust in Peace. Of course, you're stoked.

Atlantan progressive monsters Mastodon celebrated 20 years as a band last year with the excellent rarities compilation, Medium Rarities. Stuck at home, the band used the time to work on the follow-up to 2017's momentous concept record The Emperor of Sand. In August, drummer-vocalist-songwriter Brann Dailor told Revolver they had "too much material" but that's a good problem to have. "The new stuff, to me, is all over the place," he said. "It just sounds like us. It sounds like a Mastodon record."

photograph by Jimmy Fontaine

One of 2020's few silver linings was "Another World,"the majestic standalone single from Gojira. Discussing the song, frontman Joe Duplantier quoted Ferdinand Magellan: "It is with an iron will that we'll embark on the most daring of all endeavors, to meet the shadowy future without fear and conquer the unknown." Whatever the future holds, we know 2021 will at least bring the long-awaited follow-up to 2016's sweeping Magma. It's your hands-down pick for the most anticipated album of the year.

See the original post here:

Fan Poll: 5 Most Anticipated Albums of 2021 | Revolver - Revolver Magazine

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King (January 15, 1929 April 4, 1968)

Strength to Love is a collection of sermons by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that explains his convictions in terms of the conditions and problems of contemporary society.

One of the major contentions in this work, which was published in1963, is that God intended humans to be tough-minded but soft-hearted. By this, King meant that people should use reason and sort out truth from fiction.

Dictators have long used soft-mindedness among people to gain power, and King believed soft-mindedness is responsible for racism. King also believed people should practice love and compassion.

King saw nonviolence as the exercise of both soft-heartedness and tough-mindedness. He wrote that Jesus preached that people should forgive others, and that the church should remind people of the virtues of kindness and forgiveness.

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.

Following are excerpts from the book:

One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying. A persistent schizophrenia leaves so many of us tragically divided against ourselves. On the one hand, we proudly profess certain sublime and noble principles, but on the other hand, we sadly practise the very antithesis of these principles. How often are our lives characterised by a high blood pressure of creeds and an anaemia of deeds! We talk eloquently about our commitment to the principles of Christianity, and yet our lives are saturated with the practices of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we sadly practise the very opposite of the democratic creed. We talk passionately about peace, and at the same time we assiduously prepare for war. We make our fervent pleas for the high road of justice, and then we tread unflinchingly the low road of injustice. This strange dichotomy, this agonising gulf between the ought and the is, represents the tragic theme of man's earthly pilgrimage.

One day we will learn that the heart can never be totally right when the head is totally wrong

The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood.

Too unconcerned to love and too passionless to hate, too detached to be selfish and too lifeless to be unselfish, too indifferent to experience joy and too cold to express sorrow, they are neither dead nor alive; they merely exist.

Courage faces fear and thereby masters it"

Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction. So when Jesus says Love your enemies, he is setting forth a profound and ultimately inescapable admonition. Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies or else? The chain reaction of evilhate begetting hate, wars producing warsmust be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

This faith transforms the whirlwind of despair into a warm and reviving breeze of hope. The words of a motto which a generation ago were commonly found on the wall in the homes of devout persons need to be etched on our hearts:

Fear knocked at the door.

Faith answered.

There was no one there.

Science investigates, religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power, religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts, religion deals with values. The two are not rivals. They are complementary. Science keeps religion from sinking into the valley of crippling irrationalism and paralysing obscurantism. Religion prevents science from falling into the marsh of obsolete materialism and moral nihilism.

On the parable of the Good Samaritan: "I imagine that the first question the priest and Levite asked was: 'If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?' But by the very nature of his concern, the good Samaritan reversed the question: 'If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?

What is more tragic than to see a person who has risen to the disciplined heights of tough-mindedness but has at the same time sunk to the passionless depths of hard-heartedness?

The Christians who engaged in infamous persecutions and shameful inquisitions were not evil men but misguided men. The churchmen who felt they had an edict from God to withstand the progress of science, whether in the form of a Copernican revolution or a Darwinian theory of natural selection, were not mischievous men but misinformed men.

To have serpentlike qualities devoid of dovelike qualities is to be passionless, mean, and selfish. To have dovelike without serpentlike qualities is to be sentimental, anemic, and aimless. We must combine strongly marked antitheses.

The tough mind is sharp and penetrating, breaking through the crust of legends and myths and sifting the true from the false. The tough-minded individual is astute and discerning. He has a strong austere quality that makes for firmness of purpose and solidness of commitment. Who doubts that this toughness is one of man's greatest needs? Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

Not ordinarily do men achieve this balance of opposites. The idealists are not usually realistic, and the realists are not usually idealistic. The militants are not generally known to be passive, nor the passive to be militant. Seldom are the humble self-assertive, or the self assertive humble. ...truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis that reconciles the two.

The greatness of our God lies in the fact that [He] is both tough minded and tender hearted. ... [God] expresses [His] tough mindedness in [His] justice and wrath and [His] tenderheartedness in [His] love and grace. ... On the one hand, God is a God of justice who punished Israel for her wayward deeds, and on the other hand, [He] is a forgiving father whose heart was filled with unutterable joy when the prodigal son returned home.

Violence brings only temporary victories; violence, by creating more social problems than it solves, never brings permanent peace. I am convinced that if we succumb to the temptation to use violence in our struggle for freedom, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to them will be a never-ending reign of chaos.

Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit.

Today we know with certainty that segregation is dead. The only question remaining is how costly will be the funeral.

Forgiveness is not an occasional act; it is a permanent attitude.

We cannot long survive spiritually separated in a world that is geographically together.

Man-made laws assure justice, but a higher law produces love. No code of conduct ever persuaded a father to love his children or a husband to show affection to his wife.

Slavery in America was perpetuated not merely by human badness but also by human blindness. True, the causal basis for the system of slavery must to a large extent be traced back to the economic factor. Men convinced themselves that a system which was so economically profitable must be morally justifiable. They formulated elaborate theories of racial superiority. Their rationalizations clothed obvious wrongs in the beautiful garments of righteousness. This tragic attempt to give moral sanction to an economically profitable system gave birth to the doctrine of white supremacy. Religion and the Bible were cited to crystallize the status quo.

But if we are to call ourselves Christians, we had better avoid intellectual and moral blindness. Throughout the New Testament we are reminded of the need for enlightenment. We are commanded to love God, not only with our hearts and souls, but also with our minds. When the Apostle Paul noticed the blindness of many of his opponents, he said, I bear them record that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. Over and again the Bible reminds us of the danger of zeal without knowledge and sincerity without intelligence.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. The true neighbor will risk his position, his prestige, and even his life for the welfare of others. In dangerous valleys and hazardous pathways, he will lift some bruised and beaten brother to a higher and more noble life.

Here is the original post:

Finding the strength as we celebrate Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's birthday - St. Louis American

In The Making of The President 1968, a deeply shocked Theodore H. White describes, first, the anarchic violence of student radicals ransacking university campuses, and then the furious backlash that propelled the third-party candidacy of George Wallace, the former governor of Alabama. In stoking the alienation of the white workingmen of America, White prophetically observed: George Wallace uncovered a reality that will be of concern for years.

Half a century later, in last weeks assault on the Capitol Buildingand thus on government itselfwe have witnessed a convergence that White could scarcely have imagined between the expressive violence of the 1960s left and the hate-filled politics of the contemporary right. The imagery has been disorienting. Those of us old enough to have participated in the mass demonstrations against the Vietnam War may have watched the scenes of bearded, placard-bearing men scaling the walls of the Capitol with a weird wrench of feeling. The muscle memory said, Right on, brother!; conscious thought cried, How dare you?

Extremists on both the far-right and left have long shared an affinity with romanticized and ritualized violence. In the apocalyptic atmosphere of the Sixties, Black Panther leaders like Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton enjoyed a lurid glamor; their place has been filled in our own time by the gun-toting cowpunchers who joined Cliven Bundy and his family at their 2014 melodramatic confrontation with federal officials over access to Western grazing. Many of outgoing U.S. President Donald Trumps rallies throbbed with a mood of violence that occasionally precipitated actual attacks against protestors or journalists. But rage and paranoia on the right was sated by a simple fact: Trump won. Had he lost in 2016, we might have seen the mayhem were witnessing today.

What was postponed has now arrived. Its all too possible that last weeks riot represents not the dying spasm of a defeated remnant, but the advent of a new era of violence carried out in Trumps name and with at least implicit blessing. The more that leading GOP officials part ways with Trump, as they have in recent days, the more he will tighten his grip on the acolytes whose dreams and nightmares he orchestrates. The mob awaits directions.

[To read FPs ongoing coverage of the aftermath of the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol, clickhere.]

The Sixties did, of course, include nihilistic violence that laid waste to whole neighborhoods in Newark, Detroit, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. And even peaceful protests can provide shelter for rioters and looters, as we saw during the Black Lives Matter protests last summer. But a protest march is not a riot; it is a form of expression that typically involves a great deal of speaking and listening. What I recall from the 1969 Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam was interminable speechifying from a platform much too far away for me either to hear or see much of anything. I found my way home in a bus chartered by the furriers union.

In short, while there can be left-wing mobs and right-wing mobs, the salient difference between that moment and this one is between purposefulness and nihilism. Protests are a form of political speech that seeks, and may be addressed by, a political response. Mob violence, insofar as it has political content at all, is more like a species of blackmail that seeks to terrorize authorities into submission. That was the goal of the armed crowd that tried to compel Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer to rescind coronavirus restrictions last summernot to mention of the small group that planned to kidnap her and other Democratic leaders, like a latter-day version of the Red Brigades. Mobs like last weeks are almost too inchoate to be said to have a goal, but these Trumpistas must have imagined that they could force Congress to overturn the results of the presidential election. The fact that they failed to change the outcome may matter less than the fact that they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in creating a spectacle.

Former President Lyndon B. Johnson could have taken the air out of the protest movement by calling a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam and forcing the Saigon government to negotiate with the North. President-elect Joe Biden wont be able to do anything to reach the kind of people who swarmed over the Capitol. Their only demand is to reverse historynot just the outcome of the election but all the forces that have diminished the status of the white American male. Bidens emollient language of bipartisanship will mean nothing to people who identify with neither party. Public officials will have no choice but to respond with force if a mob attacks the offices of a major newspaper or broadcaster, or an embassy or a foundation. That, in turn, will exacerbate the rioters mythology of exclusion and the depth of their alienation. And Trump will likely find ways to egg on hias hardhats from the club room at Mar-a-Lago. Mob violence could well prove self-perpetuating.

Trumps Svengali-like hold on one-third or so of the American people ensures that the toxins he has poured into the American system will not drain away soon. That said, the kind of violence we saw last week may repel many Americans with a residual sense of decency. In 1968, tens of millions of Americans came to conclude that the kids were right about Vietnam, even if they deplored their tactics; much the same can be said of the Black Lives Matter protests. Trump, however, will likely preside over a shrinking, if increasingly radicalized, faction.

The analogy with the 1960s, when, as White noted, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) radicalism inflated Wallaces popularity, might encourage progressives to predict a left-wing backlash to todays right-wing extremisma Reaganism of the left. But that misjudges the moment. The mob that attacked the Capitol does not stand for right-wing politics any more than their puppet master does; they are engines of destruction. Americans are not going to respond by rallying around Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. If there is a silver lining hereand how can you not hope for one?it is that Americans of all camps might respond by repudiating mob tactics, and by coming to terms with the restraints imposed by liberal democracy.

I admit, however, that I have been holding out hope for such a mass awakening for the last two or three years. I havent been proved right yet.

See the article here:

The Non-Politics of Trump's Mob Violence at the Capitol - Foreign Policy

Big Oil faces that old political dilemma. You know the one. On the one hand, the industry's chosen party has its back on regulation and climate policy. On the other, the same party also tried to overturn the result of a democratic election in favor of a president who encouraged a mob to attack the Capitol, thereby endangering our whole way of life; which underpins, among many other things, the ability for any industry, oil included, to conduct business.

It's a head-scratcher, all right.

Let's just get out of the way up front that any of the 147 Congressional Republicans who voted to undo the presidential election result deserve to be defunded into political oblivion. But corporate donations aren't about doing the right thing. They're about doing the useful thing.

Hence, it isn't that surprising oil companies have been cautious in joining the growing crowd of companies announcing they will pull contributions to offending GOP House and Senate members or the party in general. Some oil majors, such as ConocoPhillips and BP Plc, have said they will suspend all contributions to both parties for several months, while ExxonMobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. will "review" their practices.

This is probably a simple cost-benefit judgment. First, no oil company will likely garner much PR benefit from moving quickly on this. Critics won't rethink their opinion of Big Oil which is centered on the issue of climate change because it leaped to democracy's defense.

Second, the downside is potentially big. The surprising Democratic victories in Georgia's runoffs, giving the party narrow control of the Senate, leave Big Oil with some delicate political math to ponder. Senate Republicans are a critical bulwark against the passage of sweeping climate legislation, especially with the legislative filibuster still intact. Red states account for the overwhelming majority of fossil-fuel production and processing in the U.S. And the decades-long transformation of energy and climate stances into tribal markers in America's culture wars binds Congressional Republicans to the industry in a way that transcends mere output. The industry's contributions to both parties haven't been even remotely close for years.

So a 50/50 Senate, in the context of an administration committed to decarbonizing the economy, doesn't leave Big Oil with much room for further Republican losses. Come 2022, 20 out of 34 Senate races will involve Republican incumbents defending their seats from Democratic candidates and, potentially, Trumpist primary challengers (with the latter's radicalism increasing the odds of a seat being lost if they become the candidate).

Go inside New York politics.

By clicking Sign up, you agree to our privacy policy.

Of those 20, seven are in states with at least some oil and gas extraction, including five big ones: Alaska, Louisiana, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania. One of those, Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., features in the roster of eight senators who voted to overturn the election result although his 21-point margin in a state that went for President Donald Trump by a similar margin likely insulates him from opprobrium. At the other end of the scale is Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Penn., who won by just 1.5 points in a swing state that went for President-elect Joe Biden, and has been forthright in calling for Trump to quit office.

There is also risk around a dozen Republican Senators defending seats in states with no appreciable oil and gas business, blunting the usual appeal to job preservation in campaigning against climate policy. Half of those are in states that don't have much coal mining either, a traditional ally in opposing climate measures. On this front, Big Oil may harbor concerns about the likes of Richard Burr in North Carolina, who won by single digits in a state that went only narrowly for Trump. Or Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who, like Toomey, won a narrow victory in a state that went for Biden and has worked harder than many to sow doubt about the election result.

The risk of helping to unseat more Republicans by withholding cash, plus the prospect of few plaudits for doing so, dictates the logic of moving incrementally or on a both-sides basis. That isn't to say it's right or without risk. As I wrote here, the ideological pact between Big Oil and Republicans has been an effective shield for decades. But as climate has elbowed its way into the American consciousness and a swath of the GOP has embraced protectionism, populism and now electoral nihilism, the shield risks becoming an anchor.

One intriguing upshot of this is that more fossil-fuel money may flow toward Democrats, specifically those at the other end of the party's spectrum from Green New Dealers. When two Democrats won Georgia's senate races, Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., was the third winner, with leverage to largely dictate the scope and pace of climate policy. In a world where overt support for the Republican Party carries a stigma, Big Oil may regard Manchin as a more acceptable face for its defensive strategy.

Denning is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering energy, mining and commodities. He previously was editor of the Wall Street Journal's Heard on the Street column and wrote for the Financial Times' Lex column. He was also an investment banker.

Read more from the original source:

Why Big Oil isn't slashing its ties to Republicans yet - Newsday

Anton wrote as if the end of the republic were upon us, and theres nothing like a rabble storming a citadel of American democracyassaulting police officers, ransacking the place and disrupting a constitutional procedureto shake confidence in the stability of our system.

Of course, it was the man Anton believed could be our savior who whipped up and urged on this crowd. The mob didnt charge the cockpit metaphorically, but charged the Capitol literally, in the grip of a more extreme, rough-hewn version of Antons logic and narrative.

Anton, who briefly served as a Trump official, is obsessed with a coming Democratic tyranny or coup. So, too, are President Donald Trump and his most fanatical supporters, who werent content simply to write highfalutin essays about how to resist the coup, or Stop the Steal.

No. If the pen is mighty, only baseball bats and projectiles can really make Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi afraid.

Make no mistake: A Flight 93 mentality led to the January 6 presidency, now defined not by any of the good it accomplished over the past four years but by a hideous act of extremism in its desperate, spittle-flecked final days.

In Antons defense, he never said he believed that Trump knew how to fly a plane. In the future, when hiring someone to pilot the most advanced jetliner on the planet, he might want to add that to the job description, and check a couple of references.

Anton wrote in the Flight 93 essay that only in a corrupt republic, in corrupt time, could a Trump rise.

Rather than concluding that this spoke poorly of Trump, he made it into a kind of virtue. Anton poured scorn on anyone who fixated on Trumps character flaws. Yes, Trump is worse than imperfect, he wrote. So what?

So what, indeed.

Trump's most stalwart defenders have spent years justify everything Trump does because he supposedly wins when other Republicans are hopeless losers. Anton mocked conservative writers and politicians opposed to Trump in 2016 as the Washington Generals, on the court simply to provide a hapless opposition.

In the fullness of time, its clear how misguided this Trumpist triumphalism was.

Trump won a fluky victory in 2016, with just 46.1 percent of the vote. Predictably, he lost the House in a drubbing in the 2018 midterms. He failed in his reelection bid, this time with a slightly increased 46.9 percent of the vote (although still less than Mitt Romney in 2012). He then proceeded to concoct conspiracy theories for why he lost and lash out at Republican officeholders in Georgia, contributing to unnecessary Republican losses in two Senate runoff races and ending the GOP Senate majority. Trump thus completed a trifecta of defeat, wiping out any Republican control in Washington.

Meanwhile, almost every cultural institution has lurched further left, partly in reaction to Trump.

He proved himself a politician of considerable power, no doubt, but his support was too narrow to achieve all the winning his boosters expected from him.

He also indisputably did worthy things in office. Yet these werent saving-America-from-the-apocalypse-type victories, as one would have expected from Antons hysterical advocacy. Instead, they were the sort of solid achievements one would expect of a standard Republican with a populist bentin other words, tax cuts with some tariffs and new immigration restrictions.

In the end, though, Trump threw away his presidency, in large part because of the character flaws that Anton dismissed or valorized.

It is darkly amusing that in his Flight 93 essay, Anton gleefully attacked his conservative enemies as caring only about their careers and money, while throwing in with a rank egoist who fetishizes his wealth and status, who didnt care enough about his supporters or his own political cause to work a little harder in office or moderate his behavior slightly, who led his most committed supporters into a box canyon of lies and conspiracy theories after the election because he couldnt stand to admit that he lost.

Tens of millions of good people made the simple calculation in 2016 that Trump, despite his failings, would be better than Hillary Clinton, and thought the same about Trump and Joe Biden in 2020.

If this was all that Anton had argued in his essay, it wouldnt have been particularly notable. What made his essay so bracing was an undercurrent of nihilism, a sense that character and norms dont matter, not when all is nearly lost and we are engaged an existential struggle for power.

Trump has acted in keeping with an exaggerated version of this ethic in the postelection period, throwing aside truth and the law in pursuit of a second term to which he is not entitled.

We have seen that this path isnt suited to saving the republic but to tearing it apart and embarrassing it before the world. It cant and shouldnt work, and produced an immediate backlash and second impeachment.

Its not really fighting. Its giving up.

See the original post here:

Opinion | The Crash of the Flight 93 Presidency - POLITICO