‘Direct Action,’ ‘Emergency Rule,’ &c.

On mobs, bullies, Bukele, Maxwell, Pirro, Ferrari, and more

Photo by Cristian Castillo on Unsplash

Earlier today, I was talking, offline and on, with Daniel Hannan, the British writer-politician (whose website is here). We were discussing an old theme. There had been protests in Britain, concerning immigration. Dan tweeted the following:

He followed one tweet with another:

Many years ago, I had a realization, which I wrote about in an article or two: At the root of my politics is dislike of bullies. And, related to that, dislike of mobs. Bullying and mobocracy are curses on humanity, and always have been. The best liberal-democratic politics curbs, counters, and stands up to those things.

The responses to Dan were very interesting. They went essentially as follows: You’re a softie. We can’t afford the likes of you anymore—you polite types, always going on about the “rules” and the “process.” What have you “conservatives” ever conserved? We don’t have the luxury of the old politics anymore. It’s time to smash the other side in the mouth.

I am intimately familiar with this line, as my critics have hit me with it for ten years. It has been almost my daily bread (baked by unsavory bakers).

Here is but one response to Hannan:

That phrase “direct action” made my ears prick up. When I was coming of age, there was a terror group on the French left: Action Directe. They were like the Red Brigades in Italy, the Red Army Faction in West Germany, etc.

Since my middle teens, I have been wary of the phrase “direct action.” I think this wariness is justified. Burkean conservatism may be boring, but, when it comes to the political arena, boring is good (and one should realize this more with every passing year).

(Dan is right, by the way: Law-and-order conservatives—by-the-book conservatives—are very thin on the ground. May they—may we—have a revival.)

***

Nigel Farage, the right-wing leader in Britain, said something that made my blood run a little cold. I suspect he is right. “I’m not in Andrew Tate’s camp,” he told the (London) Times, “but I see why he’s doing well.”

Who is Tate? You can read about him at Wikipedia, here. He is a king, or the king, of the “manosphere” and a defendant in several sex-crime cases. He is a darling of the nat-pop Right in Britain, America, and elsewhere.

I will quote from the Times article I have linked to:

[Farage] hopes young men will turn to him to give them a voice “because if I don’t, you wait till what comes after me”.

He added: “Those who try to demonise me could be in for a terrible shock once I’m gone. That’s why we say we believe that we are the last chance to restore confidence in the democratic system, to change things.”

After Farage—après Farage—nothing but skinheads and outright fashies?

***

A report from the Associated Press begins,

The party of El Salvador President Nayib Bukele approved constitutional changes in the country’s Legislative Assembly on Thursday that will allow indefinite presidential reelection and extend presidential terms to six years.

Under the old rules—pre-Bukele—a presidential term was five years, and you could not serve two in a row. Bukele was first elected president in 2019. After some rigging, he ran again in 2024. Think he’ll run again?

Bukele has ruled by emergency decree since March 2022. Mubarak, in Egypt, ruled by emergency decree for 30 years.

Nayib Bukele could rule El Salvador for a very, very long time ...

***

In a column on Friday, I wrote about the Left and the Right, and how the two have the habit of blending. One paragraph, please:

What is Putin, by the way? Is he left-wing or right-wing? He is a former KGB colonel who has re-Sovietized Russia. Yet he is admired by people on the nationalist-populist right throughout the world.

In that same spirit: What is Nayib Bukele? He started out in the FMLN, the party that grew from the leftist guerrillas. He was elected mayor of San Salvador, his nation’s capital, as an FMLN-er. After losing an internal power struggle, he started a party of his own, Nuevas Ideas. But, of course, the ideas aren’t new at all. On the contrary.

***

You may have seen this news:

Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime associate of Jeffrey Epstein now serving a 20-year prison sentence for sexually exploiting and abusing teenage girls, has been moved from a federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas ...

(For the full story, from the New York Times, go here.)

Possibly, this is a prelude—a prelude to a pardon, or to the commutation of a sentence. What if Trump springs Maxwell? Will there be an uproar? For a day or two, probably—but then, things will go back to normal (or what is normal in the present era).

I think of January 6th, and that physical assault—that mob assault—on the U.S. Congress. Trump sprang all of them—all 1,500 or so—within hours of being sworn in the second time. And America yawned.

The national moral sense, I believe, has been dulled. The frog is pretty much boiled.

***

You have seen this news, too:

The Senate on Saturday approved the nomination of Jeanine Pirro, an ardent loyalist of President Trump and a Fox News fixture, confirming the cable news personality to a top prosecutor post in Washington, D.C.

The vote was 50 to 45.

An unthinkable “normal” becomes a “new normal” in no time. Consider something with me, please.

What if I had said the following to you a year ago? “If Trump is given a second term, he will nominate Kash Patel to be the director of the FBI; Pete Hegseth to be the secretary of defense; Tulsi Gabbard to be the director of national intelligence; Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the secretary of health and human services ...”

You might have accused me of TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome). And yet Trump did make those nominations—and, quickly, it all seemed ... normal?

Jeanine Pirro may be a perfect Fox News personality—but should she be entrusted with important legal responsibility, governmental responsibility? Well, the president and his fellow Republicans in the Senate have done just that.

I have heard joking about “Justice Jeanine.” I’m sure (pretty sure) Trump would never nominate Pirro to the Supreme Court. (I’m less sure that Republicans would defy him, if he did.) But I think we’ve all learned to be careful about what we joke about.

***

Let’s get away from government and go to civil society—sweet civil society. Here is Jaimie Ding, reporting for the AP from Los Angeles:

The smell of frying garlic and ginger is inescapable as it wafts through the room, while a row of fidgety kids watches an older woman in a blue plaid apron cooking in front of them.

“When I was growing up my mom used to make this a lot,” she says, showing a chicken stir fry recipe.

At this “Intergenerational Summer Camp” in a Southern California suburb, the grandmas are in charge. Every week, they taught a group of 8-to-14-year-olds how to cook a new dish and a do a handicraft such as sewing, embroidering, clay jewelry and card marking.

“Isolation and loneliness is something that seniors are challenged with, and they love having younger people around them,” said Zainab Hussain, a program manager at Olive Community Services ...

Maybe two more sentences:

In between activities, the small room bustled with energy as the girls chatted and munched on snacks. Some of the volunteer grandmas milled around and watched, content to just be around the youngsters.

I love it so. “Sweet” is the word—as in “sweet civil society”—even if what’s cookin’ is chicken with garlic and ginger.

***

Here is an article about Zohran Mamdani, the probable next mayor of New York. Could be disastrous—his tenure, I mean, not the article. But I don’t want to talk about Mamdani just now. I want to congratulate the publication on its English: “Mamdani’s opponents have homed in on his relatively limited political and management experience ...”

Yes, homed in. Thank you! (“Honed in” is a solecism.)

***

Oh, I have a lot more to say, but I’ve gone on and on, and you’ve got work to do, and so much to read. Thank you for being here. Maybe I could end on a Ferrari? I realize that the classic Ferrari is red, but here was a yellow one, sittin’ pretty in New York, early of a Sunday morning:

That’s not too bad, is it? You can always go back to your red one, when you tire of your yellow.

Later, my friends.