Author: Andrew Sullivan

Walker, Paul, and Huckabee sit atop a very early Iowa poll:

Andrew Prokop calls Romney’s exit “great news for Scott Walker.” But Tomasky is unimpressed by the Wisconsin governor:

I finally sat myself down and watched that Scott Walker speech from last week that everyone is raving about. If this was the standout speech, I sure made the right decision in not subjecting myself to the rest of them. It was little more than a series of red-meat appetizers and entrees: Wisconsin defunded Planned Parenthood, said no to Obamacare, passed some kind of law against “frivolous” lawsuits, and moved to crack down on voter “fraud””—all of that besides, of course, his big move, busting the public-employee unions. There wasn’t a single concrete idea about addressing any of the major problems the country faces. …

He’s gained [in Iowa] because those items— kicking Planned Parenthood, denying your own citizens subsidized health-care coverage, pretending that voter fraud is a thing—are what pass for ideas in today’s GOP. Walker is even more vacuous on foreign policy, as Martha Raddatz revealed yesterday, twisting him around like a pretzel with a couple of mildly tough questions on Syria. The Democratic Party has its problems, but at least Democrats are talking about middle-class wage stagnation, which is the country’s core economic quandary.

Matt Latimer expects Christie to benefit:

In fact, right after his tweak of Jeb, Mitt Romney headed to a dinner with the “fresh face” he apparently had in mind: the New Jersey governor. Many would-be Romney donors are reportedly following his lead. Should he enter the race, the Christie campaign strategy is not a mystery: To let everyone take whacks at Bush while Christie clings to the most valuable quality in all of presidential politics: being underestimated. The New Jersey governor shares many of Jeb Bush’s strengths: experience running a complicated, politically diverse state; an appeal to moderates; and with his proximity to New York, ready access to big-dollar donors. But he also has a few traits that seem to be notably absent from the third would-be President Bush: a crackling speaking style and a reputation for ruthlessness.

Jennifer Rubin downplays Christie’s chances:

Sources in the donor community say that large numbers of freed up former Romney donors, especially outside the Northeast, are steering away from the camp of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. (Christie took another hit when, not long after an earnest appeal in the Freedom Summit, he clocked in at 6 percent in the Des Moines Register/Bloomberg’s Iowa poll – with a 54 percent unfavorable rating.)

Paul Mirengoff looks at the big picture:

[T]he main effect of Romney’s non-entry may be to move the race more quickly to where it probably would have been after the early going — a field dominated by an “establishment” candidate (now probably Bush), a Tea Party favorite or two (probably Cruz and/or Paul), a “bridge candidate or two (say Walker and/or Rubio), and maybe Mike Huckabee if he retains his popularity among evangelicals.

Nate Cohn argues along the same lines:

There is one crucial respect in which the race has not changed. The main challenge to Mr. Bush will be from his right, from a candidate with appeal to the party’s conservative grass roots yet with enough appeal to the establishment to secure the resources necessary to win the nomination.

Mitt Romney was hoping to be that candidate. The position remains open.

“Democracies don’t need agreement. They do need tolerance of disagreement. The politically engaged — progressives and conservatives alike — mock the disenchanted majority for asking, “Why can’t we all just get along?” In one way, they’re right: Politics divides, and it should. In another way, they’re wrong. Getting along doesn’t require milquetoast moderation, flaccid centrism or “moving beyond left and right.” However, it does require some willingness to compromise, some curiosity about what might be valuable in the other side’s point of view, and some minimal attention to the civic virtues of tolerance and restraint,” – Clive Crook.

Dish literary editor Matthew Sitman writes:

This fall I had the pleasure of sitting down with the poet and priest Spencer Reece to record a long interview about his work teaching English, by way of poetry, to the girls who live at the Our Little Roses orphanage in San Pedro Sula, Honduras – a place also known as the murder capital of the world. You can read the entire interview in Deep Dish, which now is out from behind our paywall, and which includes my brief introduction to Spencer’s own poetry and the projects – a selection of the girls’ verse published in Poetry last month and a forthcoming documentary about Our Little Roses especially – that emerged from his time there. For those interested in Spencer’s background you can read a short biographical sketch about him here. The Dish featured his poetry last year here, here, and here. The interview itself tells the story of how Spencer found himself in Honduras and what he experienced there.

Below is an excerpt from “A Memorable Form of Love: An Interview with Spencer Reece,” in which he explains why it was while living in Honduras that he truly became a priest:

I don’t think I understood what it meant. I don’t think I understood what it meant to be a Christian. I don’t think I understood what the Eucharist meant. I don’t think I really understood any of it. I could repeat it intellectually, or write something on an exam. I had studied all of it. But it was all book knowledge, it wasn’t heart knowledge. I knew I was moving in the right direction, but I really didn’t know what it meant. But when I was with them, as time went on it, I began to understand all of it.

The Eucharist is a moment of intimacy, eating together, looking at each other. Like on the Road to Emmaus. And when I put the wafers in the mouths of all those girls lined up, I think I began to understand it.

Also, they have nobody, so they belong to God. There’s just no other way to explain it.

So then that began to make sense. I as a priest – as a shepherd, as a father, all those words that are used for priests – I literally became a father-like figure, which I’d never been, because I didn’t have children. I never thought I’d be in that position. That was happening to me. I believe what George Herbert wrote, that for him, he craved simplicity. And one of the things that he liked simple was his religion and his understanding of God, and that all God was, was love. As a priest, to communicate that message is what we’re supposed to try to do. We can’t do it perfectly, but that began to come through me. You know a priest really has to be there and not be there – the ego has to die in the spiritual life, so you have to kind of use yourself and not be there at the same time, so that God’s message can come through you. It’s not “Spencer’s” message. Of course it’s going to be some of my message, because it’s me, but you hope that there’ll be little sparks that are God’s that are coming through you. That seemed really important there with those girls.

Read the entire interview in Deep Dish – again, now without a paywall – here.

Earlier this month we featured a number of critiques of Eric Metaxas’ assertion that recent developments in our scientific understanding of the universe points to the existence of God. Theoretical physicist Lawrence M. Krauss lays into Metaxas as well, asserting that his arguments about the improbability of any planet meeting all the criteria for supporting life makes the “familiar mistake of elaborating all the factors responsible for some specific event and calculating all the probabilities as if they were independent”:

In order for me to be writing this piece at this precise instant on this airplane, having done all the things I’ve done today, consider all the factors that had to be “just right”: I had to find myself in San Francisco, among all the cities in the world; the sequence of stoplights that my taxi had to traverse had to be just right, in order to get me to the airport when I did; the airport security screener had to experience a similar set of coincidences in order to be there when I needed her; same goes for the pilot. It would be easy for me to derive a set of probabilities that, when multiplied together, would produce a number so small that it would be statistically impossible for me to be here now writing.

This approach, of course, involves many fallacies. It is clear that many routes could have led to the same result. Similarly, when we consider the evolution of life on Earth, we have to ask what factors could have been different and still allowed for intelligent life. Consider a wild example, involving the asteroid that hit Earth sixty-five million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs and a host of other species, and probably allowing an evolutionary niche for mammals to begin to flourish. This was a bad thing for life in general, but a good thing for us. Had that not happened, however, maybe giant intelligent reptiles would be arguing about the existence of God today.

(Photo by Paul Williams)

Facing it all:

Reviewing Drew Maciag’s Edmund Burke in America, Bradley Baranowski details the complicated reception of the British statesman’s ideas on this side of the Atlantic:

While the goal is to say something about the national visions Americans have held, Maciag does illuminate much about how Burke’s ideas fared in the new world. Today most of us know Burke through his reaction to the French Revolution. That emphasis, however, is recent. Nineteenth century American Whigs such as Rufus Choate and Joseph Story downplayed the importance of Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), largely ignoring the text. Other figures such as the historian George Bancroft followed the same pattern. While Burke’s cautious attitude toward social change and his call for prudent reforms were palatable to many, even conservative Americans knew better than to defend views that could undercut their nation’s own revolutionary founding.

Maciag’s approach also reveals a tradition of thought that does not easily fit within the contemporary liberal/conservative dichotomy.

Many of his figures combine political reformism with cultural conservatism, package in an understanding of society’s laws as expressions of underlying traditions. He provides a series of concise, well-written close readings of key figures to explicate this theme. Maybe the greatest strength of this approach is that it both revitalizes interest in figures that we are familiar with and revives figures who have largely languished at the fringes of American intellectual history. Cultural conservatism’s relation to political progressivism (of various stripes) appears as crucial to understanding the thought of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. The Nation magazine, a crucial platform for cultural and political debate among Gilded Age liberals, was shot through with these Burkean themes during the final decades of the nineteenth century.

In all these examples, Burke functions not as a great preserver of tradition alone but as a crucial component in the “transition to modern America.” Burke’s whiggish views of history helped figures such as Roosevelt and Wilson reconcile their visions of America as an exceptional nation to the homogenizing forces of modernization. The relationship between progress and tradition was a balancing act rather than irreconcilable ideas. All it took was great leaders to keep the two in line.

Recent Dish on Burke here, here, and here.

“For many folks, what’s most terrifying about death is the ending of their own being. Each of us is, naturally, at the center of a remarkably vivid life. We’re center stage in our own dramas of love and hardship, victory and defeat. The idea that it could just end, that we could just end, evokes nothing short of horror for many people. As Woody Allen famously put it: ‘Life is full of misery, loneliness and suffering — and it’s all over much too soon.’

This kind of existential terror never made a lot of sense to me. To explain why, I need you to know that when I was 9, my older brother was killed in an automobile accident. I saw him that afternoon, and he waved to me from across a field. Then I never saw him again. I was already an astronomically inclined kid, and that event, the most significant of my entire life, propelled me even deeper to questions about existence and time. Through all the grief and the questioning, one thought about death has always stayed with me:

I’m not concerned about the many years of my nonexistence before birth. Why then should I be concerned about the many years of my nonexistence that will follow death?

In other words, even though none of us existed 1,000 years ago, you don’t find many people worrying about their nonexistence during the Dark Ages. Our not-being in the past doesn’t worry us. So, why does our not-being in the future freak us out so much?

I am on record as being militantly agnostic about consciousness and death. I tend toward the ‘it’s all over when it’s over’ camp, but that, for me, is more of a hunch than a scientific position. Still, no matter how the universe is constructed with regard to death and its aftermath, empirically I think we can conclude that dread in any form is an unnecessary response. When it comes to our impending nonexistence, all we need do is let the past be our guide,” – Adam Frank, “What If Heaven Is Not For Real?”

(Photo: Sequoia rings by Gabriel Rodríguez)