A battle for the future of conservatism is in effect being fought between anti-Trump conservatives—those who, like Eliot A. Cohen, David Frum, and Stuart Stevens, see him as a sinister mountebank who is destroying true conservative principles—and pro-Trump conservatives associated with the Claremont Institute, which for years has been discussing the Federalist Papers, the dangers of progressivism, and, above all, the wisdom of the German exile and political philosopher Leo Strauss. For some both in and out of government, the Trump presidency is a deliverance—or at least offers tantalizing promises of an audacious new conservative era in domestic and foreign policy.
Books
Theresa May’s Blue Monday
Britain’s agreement to accept Ireland’s demands over Brexit and the border is an expression of its weakness: it can’t even bully little Ireland anymore. And this would have been bad enough for one day. But there was another humiliation in store. Having backed down, May was then peremptorily informed by her DUP coalition partner that she was not even allowed to back down. It is a scarcely credible position for a once great state to find itself in: its leader does not even have the power to conduct a dignified retreat.
Michael Flynn: What We Know, What Mueller Knows
In the efforts to figure out how much damage Flynn’s plea will do to Trump and other senior administration officials, most observers seem to have overlooked one of the few available metrics on the Mueller investigation: the size of his team. While the numbers have fluctuated, Mueller has somewhere in the neighborhood of sixteen prosecutors. Thus far, we’ve seen official notice of what just half of them have been up to. Robert Mueller has put only a few of his cards on the table.
In Merkel’s Crisis, Echoes of Weimar
The recent setback to coalition talks in Berlin has heralded Germany’s most intractable political crisis in modern times. The deadlock created after the Free Democratic Party quit talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right bloc and the Greens has left only what the major protagonists have previously ruled out as unacceptable alternatives: for the chancellor to try governing with a parliamentary minority, and for the Social Democrats to agree to enter a “Grand Coalition” once again; or for Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, to call new elections. Germany owes its difficulty to the results of September’s election for the Bundestag, in which a party of the nationalist far right won seats for the first time in decades.
Lies
Dear Norma,
I am writing from San Juan, from the one and only hotel here. I visited Mother this afternoon—a half-hour drive along a tortuous road. Her condition is as bad as I had feared, and worse. She cannot walk without her stick, and even then she is very slow. She has not been able to climb the stairs since returning from the hospital. She sleeps on the sofa in the living room. She tried to have her bed shifted downstairs, but the men said it had been built in situ, could not be moved without being taken to pieces first. (Didn’t Penelope have a bed like that—Homer’s Penelope?)
Her books and papers are all upstairs—no space for them downstairs. She frets, says she wants to get back to her desk, but can’t.
The Poet’s Pencil
I knew a poet who could only write his poems with a stub of a pencil. Nothing else worked for him as well. What he loved about writing with a stub is that it made his scribble mostly illegible. That way, he never felt embarrassed by what he had written. He’d look at it, and look at it, afterward, while trying to guess what in the name of God he had said.
Britain’s Game of Thrones
In an era of unbridled populism, however, personalities matter more than arguments. The current heir to the throne was jealous of his first wife, resenting the attention she got during public engagements; now he will have to accommodate a glamorous daughter-in-law trailing photographers and camera crews wherever she goes. Charles hasn’t spent years planning his coronation only to discover that the only question on anyone’s lips is “What will Meghan wear?”
More Light!
The current retrospective of over sixty years of David Hockney’s work—reaching back to a teenager drawing what he saw in the mirror in 1954—brings together portraiture, landscape, and still life in every kind of combination. It reveals a wonderfully resourceful artist, but one whose working moods have seemed to veer between studious and strident.
Rachel Whiteread’s Solid Air
There’s something cool yet passionate about Rachel Whiteread’s work. It is calmly paradoxical, domestic but monumental, tactile but detached, nostalgic but austere: objects and dwellings from everyday lives are lifted to a different sphere, a dance in space. In a new exhibition celebrating twenty-five years of her career as an artist, Tate Britain has removed the partitions that usually divide separate rooms, creating a huge open space with white walls and glowing, pale wood floor. She asks us to see things we know—tables and chairs, the inside of a room—from the opposite of our normal perspective, looking at the space instead of the walls, the gaps instead of the frames, making the air itself solid.
This Poisonous Cult of Personality
Donald Trump’s election last year exposed an insidious politics of celebrity, one in which a redemptive personality is projected high above the slow toil of political parties and movements. As his latest tweets about Muslims confirm, this post-political figure seeks, above all, to commune with his entranced white nationalist supporters. Periodically offering them emotional catharsis, a powerful medium of self-expression at the White House, Trump makes sure that his fan base survives his multiple political and economic failures. This may be hard to admit but the path to such a presidency of spectacle and vicarious participation was paved by the previous occupant of the White House.
Sig Nordal 