MAKING SUBMISSION GREAT AGAIN:

One of the great commentators on the attractions of tyranny was Hannah Arendt (well described by Henry George here). In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt discusses the foundations of totalitarian practices in the violence of worldwide European colonialism and anti-Semitism. But the most innovative chapters come at the end when she tries to understand why such a sinister form of government would emerge in the 20th century. After all, colonial violence, racism, and anti-Semitism had persisted for centuries or millennia (defending on how one defines the issues). Arendt's conclusions were that it took a unique combination of modern technology and systems of governance, combined with the emergence of new kinds of ideologies and personalities for it to come to a head like it did in the 20th century. In particular, totalitarianism was able to institute a regime of total terror because modern individuals had lost the ability to trust their very selves because they had abandoned any sense of relation to one another. This is a complex point that speaks to the brilliance of her work. Arendt makes the argument that our capacity to know things for ourselves and think, even in isolation, depends, in part, by making meaningful connections with others. The common ties that bound communities had become uprooted, destroying the "common sense" we shared with one another and which was a prerequisite both to know who we are and to be criticize and become more. The result was a society where people were fundamentally lonely. Arendt, as the philosopher of loneliness, spoke of this with great poignancy:

"What makes loneliness so unbearable is the loss of one's own self which can be realized only in solitude, but confirmed in its identity only by the trusting and trustworthy company of equals. In this situation, many loses trust in himself as the partner of his thoughts and that elementary confidence in the world which is necessary to make experience at all. Self and world, capacity for thought and experience are lost at the same time....A lonely man, says Luther 'always deduces one thing from the other and thinks everything to the worst.' The famous extremism of totalitarian movements, far from having anything to do with true radicalism, consists in this 'thinking everything to the worst,' in this deducing process which always arrives at the worst possible conclusions." 

For Arendt, the loneliness of modern society creates the ideal conditions of the emergence of totalitarianism, as individuals left by themselves and increasingly not knowing who they are (or how to think) are yearning to submit themselves to anything which can provide a sense of fullness. The totalitarian movements offered the promise of not just belonging, but total belonging. The individual would be swallowed into the movement, becoming a single homogenous mass with one's fellows. 

THERE ARE TOO MANY EXAMPLES TO NEED TO LIE ABOUT THIS ONE:

THE CASE FOR KAVANAUGH:

For most of the book the writers take an omniscient Woodwardian tone, staying careful and balanced and not cluttering up every sentence with newspaper-style sourcing. But I couldn't help reading a lot into the title. On my own copy I idly scribbled "Mis" before the "Education," since it's clear that academic enrichment is not what the authors have in mind. In high school and college and even a little into law school, the main thing they portray Kavanaugh learning is how to expertly blend into the background hum of blasé misogyny and clubby competitive drinking.

The picture that emerges of Kavanaugh as an actual student is admirable if indistinct. He works hard, graduates near or at the top in his class. A college friend recalls him having a neat stack of books and papers he would move through like a machine. A couple of people remember him as special but just as many remember him as "straightforward and uncomplicated" -- or, as some college friends put it, "ham on white." My favorite observation about his college years is: "Along with playing and writing about sports, Kavanaugh enjoyed watching them in his downtime." Really, that could be anyone. In fact, when he got his big break as a clerk for Judge Alex Kozinski, the law professor who recommended him described him as a "good student" and not a "great one," but added, "I got to know his character from basketball."

Where Kavanaugh jumps off the page is in what might euphemistically be called "extracurriculars." He went to high school with classmates who had private pools and tennis courts and sometimes even private jets. He came of age during the era of "Porky's" and "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." That combination of extreme privilege and extreme license, which he seemed to take for granted as a teenager, in retrospect looks lethal. He lived in the athlete bubble and made fun of kids outside it. He was not known as a starter of trouble but as a joiner, signing on to the "100 Keg Club," riding in the Party Van, singing obnoxious songs about who was a good lay. His friends ran an underground paper called The Unknown Hoya, dispensing helpful tips such as "all it takes to have a good time with any H.H. (Holton Hosebag)" is a Montgomery County library card.

People who knew Kavanaugh said he was nice and well mannered except when he was drinking or hanging out with his friends and showed his "cocky dismissive side." In his confirmation hearings Kavanaugh bristled at his drinking being characterized as anything other than perfectly normal. And maybe it was perfectly normal by the standards of upper-middle-class white teenagers in the '80s, but the norm is sometimes worth examining. In Kavanaugh's case, it encouraged years of proud obnoxious partying, belligerent public behavior and a smugness about being above the rules. As he told a group of students in 2014 recounting his law school years, they had a motto: "What happens on the bus stays on the bus."

Pogrebin and Kelly spend significant time digging into Blasey Ford's accusations and also those of Deborah Ramirez, a woman who says Kavanaugh put his penis in her face at a Yale college party. They track down any witnesses and friends willing to talk, comb through legal documents, do their best to find the house where Blasey Ford says the assault took place. They point out critical witnesses that the F.B.I., in its very limited investigation, did not have time to interview. In the end they turn up no smoking gun, no secret confession, no friend who comes forth to say Kavanaugh was lying all this time.

What they do instead is almost too cruel: use his mother's words against him. In an extremely satisfying epilogue, Pogrebin and Kelly invoke as a guide something Martha Kavanaugh, who was a state prosecutor, would often say at the dinner table: "Use your common sense. What rings true? What rings false?" With this standard they come to a generous but also damning conclusion, which is that Blasey Ford and Ramirez are believable and were in fact mistreated by Kavanaugh as teenagers, but that over the next 35 years he became a better person.

THE POINT BEING, THE rIGHT HATES AMERICA:

Whereas the Right in most of the world is ideologically rooted in much of the same tribalist and socialist traditions that we despise on the Left, American conservatism has historically offered a rare exception. For centuries, the American Right has stood up for the right of individuals and communities to foster their own moral order, rather than hand over unchecked authority to distant kings, be them London royals in 1776 or Washington bureaucrats in 2019.

This beautiful tradition is exactly what has made so many Americans prosperous and happy, and to abandon it would be a tragedy of historical proportions.

Indeed, it's disturbing how eager Ahmari and his fellow Catholic traditionalists are to eliminate the so-called neutral public commons, considering that Catholicism owes its prevalence in America today to the religious freedom that a neutral public common guaranteed. Catholic immigrants faced deep discrimination throughout most of American history, so much so that an entire political party, the Know Nothings, were formed primarily to oppose them.

Editorial cartoons depicted Catholics as failing to assimilate because of their supposed foreign allegiance to Rome. If Protestant populists with Ahmari's zeal for eliminating the neutral commons had taken power in early American history, Catholics like he and I would be second-class citizens, as religious minorities in much of the world are today.

Rather, it is precisely the individual liberties and neutrality of the commons enshrined in the Constitution that has allowed Americans of all colors and creeds to flourish.

Too often, we forget the fact that despite the political divisions that the nation faces today, we still live in one of the most diverse, wealthy, and peaceful societies the world has ever seen, thanks to the combination of capitalism and classical liberalism. This is the exception, not the norm, of human history. In Suicide of the West, Jonah Goldberg called it "the miracle."

We should think hard before radically re-adjusting the formula as Ahmari proposes.

Certainly, there are other ways to order society, as seen around the world. However, a recurring theme throughout most of them is political tribalism and economic socialism.

Much of the European Right, for example, is defined by big-government policies and ethnic hostility. 

MAYBE DON'T PUT STUFF OTHER THAN AIR IN OUR LUNGS?:

The U.S. investigation into hundreds of cases of life-threatening lung illnesses related to vaping has turned up a curious abnormality: Many of the victims had pockets of oil clogging up cells responsible for removing impurities in the lungs.

Dr. Dana Meaney-Delman, who has been leading the inquiry at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, wants to know where that oil came from. The answer will help explain whether these cells play a key role in the vaping-related outbreak that has killed seven people and sickened 530 so far. [...]

One possibility: The deposits are residue from inhaling vaping oils, such as those containing the marijuana ingredient tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) or vitamin E acetate. Both are considered possible contributors to the current illnesses.

Some researchers suspect the oils are formed inside the lungs as part of the body's natural response to chemicals found in many commercial vaping devices. One theory is that vaping these chemicals may impair the immune system, and make people who vape more vulnerable to respiratory distress, they say.

A study published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation earlier this month has fueled the latter theory.

It found that mice exposed to aerosols of propylene glycol and vegetable glycerin - common solvents used in conventional nicotine vaping devices - developed these same fat-clogged immune cells even though they were never exposed to vaping oils. These mice also had impaired immune systems compared to mice exposed to room air.

DEVIN'S MOTHER WEPT:

Did House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff have the inside details about the Trump whistleblower two weeks ago?

Earlier this month, the California Democrat announced a "wide-ranging investigation" into allegations President Trump was trying to pressure Ukraine's government into aiding his reelection campaign.

Schiff ordered the probe on Sept. 9, hours before he received the first of two letters from the intelligence community inspector general revealing the existence of a whistleblower complaint. Multiple news outlets reported this week that the complaint involved, at least in part, a phone conversation between Trump and recently elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Inspector General Michael K. Atkinson's letter didn't provide Schiff with the details, but some Republicans say they suspect Schiff knew them already and was orchestrating a headline-grabbing story from his perch on the Intelligence panel.

FORGET THE OPIODS....:

Flattery will get you everywhere with Donald Trump. The President demonstrated this powerfully on Wednesday, when he named the State Department's little-known hostage negotiator, Robert O'Brien, to be his latest national-security adviser, despite O'Brien having less relevant experience than anyone who's held the post in the nearly seven decades since it was created. In O'Brien's case, his ability to lavish praise on the boss was explicitly cited by the President as a factor in his appointment to one of the most powerful unelected positions in the world. There wasn't anything subtle about it.

On Tuesday, speaking with reporters on Air Force One, Trump said that O'Brien was one of five finalists, then quoted O'Brien as having told him, "Trump is the greatest hostage negotiator that I know of in the history of the United States." "He happens to be right," Trump added. The next morning, O'Brien got the job...

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

ANY ENEMY OF VLAD IS AN ENEMY OF DONALD:

The situation has also highlighted Mr. Trump's grudge against Ukraine, a close ally that has long enjoyed bipartisan support as it seeks to build a stable democracy and hold off aggression from its hostile neighbor to the east, Russia.

Mr. Trump has often struck a less-than-condemnatory tone toward Russian aggression, including its interference on his behalf in the 2016 presidential election, and its 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, which Mr. Trump said last month should no longer prevent Russia from rejoining the Group of 7 industrialized nations.

Only after Congress put intense bipartisan pressure on the administration did he release the military assistance package to Ukraine last week.

After delays in scheduling a White House meeting for Mr. Zelensky, and the cancellation of a trip by Mr. Trump to Europe during which the two would have met in person for the first time, a meeting was finally added to Mr. Trump's calendar for Wednesday in New York, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly.

Privately, Mr. Trump has had harsh words about Ukraine, a former Soviet state. He has been dismissive of his own administration's recommendations that he throw the full support of the United States government to Mr. Zelensky, a former comedian and political neophyte who is seen in the West as a reformer elected with a mandate to stop both Russian aggression and the political corruption that has long plagued the country.

In May, a delegation of United States officials returned from Mr. Zelensky's inauguration praising the new president and urging Mr. Trump to meet with him, arguing that Mr. Zelensky faced enormous headwinds and needed American support. The future of Ukraine, they said during an Oval Office meeting with Mr. Trump, would be decided in the next six months.

Mr. Trump was not sympathetic. "They're terrible people," he said of Ukrainian politicians, according to people familiar with the meeting.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

At least a dozen Iranian students who were set to begin graduate programs in engineering and computer science say their visas were abruptly canceled and they were barred from their flights to the United States this month.

The sudden batch of visa cancellations, which came at a time of heightened tensions between the United States and Iran, set off a scramble by university officials, lawmakers, the students' union and Iranian-American advocates to figure out what had happened.

WHEN SEPTEMBER ENDS:

Saudi Arabia requested what the secretary described as "extra defensive support," he said, and it will "send a clear message that the United States supports our partners in the region."

Five years before masterminding the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, Osama bin Laden laid out his strategy in a declaration of jihad "against the Americans occupying the land of the two holiest sites." The aim: "Expel the infidels from the Arabian peninsula." Bin Laden argued that the Saudi regime, whose rule derived from its safeguarding of Islam's holiest sites, had forfeited its legitimacy by ceding so much of its security to the "infidel" Americans.

Two and a half decades later, Bin Laden is dead, the U.S. still has troops patrolling his former safe haven in Afghanistan, and President Donald Trump, once billed as "the dove" in the 2016 election, is as closely tied to the Saudi leadership as perhaps any American chief executive in recent history, which is quite a remarkable statement in itself. He defended ruthless Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman after the de facto ruler's orchestrated murder of a U.S.-based Washington Post journalist; he sidestepped Congress to push through $8 billion in new "emergency" arms deals with the Saudi royals; he ritually and publicly touched the orb of global influence with Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz. Now, Trump is mulling military action against Iran in retaliation for a devastating drone attack on one of the Saudi regime's key oil-processing facilities on Saturday.

"Saudi Arabia oil supply was attacked," Trump tweeted out of the blue Sunday evening. "There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what terms we would proceed!"

Call it the curse of Osama bin Laden: The harder an American administration fights against the terrorist's enduring challenge, the harder it becomes to quit Saudi Arabia. Here is an administration not merely ready to defend Saudi soil as if it were a NATO member, but asking the Saudis how to proceed.

THE GLOBALIZATION LEFT/RIGHT WHINE ABOUT:

TRUMPONOMICS:

If you ask her, Peggy Stanley can give you a rough running tally of the money that Blackjewel Mining owes her husband.

First, there are the paychecks. One was supposed to be sent out mid-July, after the company filed for bankruptcy, but it never came. There's also the one that was sent out in the middle of June but bounced two weeks later when the company ran out of funds, causing the Stanleys' account to be frozen. Peggy estimates those checks amount to around $5,000.

There's also the money in their 401k, which the couple has been unable to access. And then there's the mining equipment. Peggy's husband, John, was on his shift at a mine in western Virginia when he was told to stop working on July 1. He left his supplies--including two pairs of boots, a light, and a hard hat--in his locker, thinking he could come back later to get them.

Since then, the gates have been locked. No employees have been allowed to go in, and Peggy says they were told the $400 worth of supplies in the locker had been stolen.

And for John and Peggy, who are in limbo as they wait for news about John's job, every little bit of money counts right now.

"We're wondering how we will pay the next bill or get food," Peggy said.

The meltdown at Blackjewel, which currently owes millions of dollars to more than 1,000 workers in four different states, shows just how tenuous the coal industry can be for workers.

Six coal companies filed for bankruptcy in the last year, putting workers in dire straits. In 2018, only around 80,000 people nationally were employed at coal mines--the lowest level on record. The collapse of coal threatens not just miners, but their neighbors in mining communities. A recent analysis identified 26 counties so dependent on coal for employment and tax revenue that they risk "fiscal collapse" because of the continuing decline of the industry.

PROUD BOYS:

QUESTION: WHAT IS the connection between controversial Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi -- who is visiting Houston this Sunday for the "Howdy, Modi" summit, as well as a meeting with President Donald Trump -- and a spate of white nationalist terrorist attacks across the West?

Answer: Anders Breivik.

You remember Breivik, right? The homicidal Islamophobe who massacred 77 people in Norway in 2011? Brevik, who was sentenced to 21 years in prison, is now viewed as a "saint" by far-right activists. Christopher Hasson, the Coast Guard lieutenant and self-proclaimed white nationalist accused of plotting the assassination of prominent Democrats and journalists, has cited Breivik as an influence. The Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant described the Norwegian mass murderer as his "true inspiration" and even suggested that they had been in contact, while the El Paso shooter Patrick Crusius, in turn, expressed support for the "Christchurch shooter and his manifesto," as did the San Diego synagogue shooter.

But where did Breivik himself draw inspiration from? It probably won't shock you to hear that he name-checked a range of conservative and far-right commentators from the U.S. and the U.K. in his rambling and racist manifesto. But it might surprise you to discover that this modern icon of white nationalist terrorism also mentioned India, and in particular Hindu nationalism, on a "remarkable 102 pages" of his 1,518-page screed.

For Breivik, it is essential that far-right, Islamophobic movements in Europe and India "learn from each other and cooperate as much as possible."

BREIVIK CALLS ON his "Hindu Nationalist brothers" to "rise up" against the Muslim conquerors of India, and extols Hindu nationalist groups because "they dominate the streets" and "do not tolerate the current injustice and often riot and attack Muslims when things get out of control." However, he complains, "this behaviour is nonetheless counterproductive."

"Instead of attacking the Muslims," he continues, "they should target the category A and B traitors in India and consolidate military cells and actively seek the overthrow of the cultural Marxist government."

For Breivik, it is essential that far-right, Islamophobic movements in Europe and India "learn from each other and cooperate as much as possible" because "our goals are more or less identical." He even provides a list of online resources for his readers -- and it includes the website of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh among them.

The RSS is a far-right, male-only paramilitary volunteer organization, founded in India in 1925. Breivik may have been lauding the RSS in 2011; but back in the 1920s and 1930s, the founders of the RSS were heaping praise on Europe's far-right, totalitarian regimes -- from Mussolini's fascists in Italy to Hitler's Nazis in Germany.