ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

The philosophical genius of P.G. Wodehouse (WILLIAM FEAR, 7/22/24, Englesberg Ideas)

As one would expect, Jeeves has a rather more precise grip on philosophy than Bertie. He is a keen reader of Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century rationalist philosopher. This is noteworthy because Spinoza was known for his ardent determinism and his denial of free will. Jeeves is also familiar with Marcus Aurelius. He offers a quote of his to Bertie in a time of difficulty:

Does aught befall you? It is good. It is part of the destiny of the Universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part of the great web.

Bertie responds by saying: ‘Well, you can tell him from me he’s an ass.’

In Wodehouse’s world, the ‘the great web’ doesn’t equate to the bleak, windswept attitude of a pessimistic fatalist. Instead, it represents a kind of optimistic determinism. In other words: there’s a certain degree of equanimity that comes with resigning oneself to the fact that the future is decided, one being unable to change its course.

Wodehouse’s stoical optimism doesn’t just appear in the Jeeves novels, but in Wodehouse’s earlier work. His 1909 school story Mike makes a similar observation:

When affairs get into a real tangle, it is best to sit still and let them straighten themselves out. Or, if one does not do that, simply to think no more about them. This is Philosophy. The true philosopher is the man who says ‘All right,’ and goes to sleep in his arm-chair.

Wodehouse wasn’t merely a champion of the stiff upper-lip, but a true stoic. He believed in adapting the self to the world, rather than trying to change the world to fit around the self.

ALL JOE HAD TO DO WAS NOT BE DONALD:

The Dark Protectionism of Trump and Vance: Goodbye to competition; hello, inflation (ROGER LOWENSTEIN, JUL 18, 2024, Intrinsic Value)

The policy that will mark the Trump era in the history books is protectionism—a 180-degree pivot from seven decades of postwar, bipartisan support for free trade.

Trump’s venom for trade, a staple of his naïve fantasy to remake America as he imagines it used to be, is a bedrock belief. It’s one of few issues on which he has been consistent (something that cannot be said for his views on abortion, entitlements, or any number of others).

And it’s emblematic of his larger nationalism—his wish to fence in America and make it, like Trump himself, suspicious, hostile, and defensive. It expresses his essential pessimism, which darkens his view even of market competition and private enterprise. Better to let the economic commissar in the red necktie decide which products Americans can buy from whom: Don’t leave it to private businesses or consumers, that is, to the American people.

J.D. Vance has Trump’s populist, neo-interventionist instincts. If Mike Pence’s nomination in 2016 represented a ransom check to evangelist Republicans, Vance signals the former President’s wish to solidify and extend tariff policy and his (similarly harmful) anti-immigrant nativism.

In some ways, Vance is more Trump than Trump. As an economic populist, he is openly skeptical of business and an admirer of Lina Khan, President Biden’s FTC chairwoman, known for creative theories of antitrust and, so far, mostly losing litigation.

But Vance is a newcomer to protectionism. In Hillbilly Elegy, his 2016 memoir of growing up poor in Appalachia, the book that made him known, he recounted the widespread unease of folks in Middletown, Ohio—Vance’s hometown—when Kawasaki, a Japanese firm, bought a controlling share of Armco, a steel company. After the furor abated, Vance’s grandfather, who had worked at the steel plant, told him, “The Japanese are our friends now.” As Vance wrote, “If companies like Armco were going to survive, they would have to retool. Kawasaki gave Armco a chance.” In the interconnected global economy, cutting off capital from a foreign source would be self-destructive, as the Yale Law grad had come to understand.

Or had he?

No one can ever have expected Joe Biden to be an even mildly competent president, nevermind a thoughtful one, but his great tragedy is the degree to which he aped Trumpism on immigration and trade. Of course, the problem is that these are natural positions in his party while they are an alien infiltration of the GOP.