#andrew sullivan

[blackswaneuroparedux]

You can make all sorts of solid arguments against a constitutional monarchy - but the point of monarchy is precisely that it is not the fruit of an argument. It is emphatically not an Enlightenment institution. It’s a primordial institution smuggled into a democratic system. It has nothing to do with merit and logic and everything to do with authority and mystery - two deeply human needs our modern world has trouble satisfying without danger.

- Andrew Sullivan

This is the genius of the British monarchy, supremacy exemplified in the late Queen Elizabeth II and now in King Charles III. Walter Bagehot was the first to really get to the heart of the matter.

Walter Bagehot, a journalist who would co-found and edit The Economist magazine was one of the greatest Victorians of the 19th century and he concerned himself with the workings and the reform of the delicate constitutional arrangements between parliament, the House of Lords, and the monarchy as so much is based on custom and unwritten practice.

Walter Bagehot published his classic work, The English Constitution in 1867 but it is the best way to understand the delicate balance of parliament and the monarchy. No one has written a finer work than Bagehot and his book remains the bible for many interested in constitutional matters regarding the monarchy.

In it he argued that the constitution was divided into two branches. The monarchy represents the “dignified” branch. Its job is to symbolise the nation   through pomp and ceremony. The government - Parliament, the cabinet and   the civil service - represents the “efficient” branch. Its job is to run the country by passing laws and providing public services. He was right to say that the dignified branch governs through poetry, and the  efficient branch through prose.

In Bagehot’s view, a politically-inactive monarchy served the best interests  of the United Kingdom; by abstaining from direct rule, the monarch levitated above the political fray of tribal politics (of left and right), and remained a respected personage to whom all subjects could look to as  a guiding light. The monarch was to stay severely neutral and be apolitical. Instead the monarch was to embody in the flesh the core values of a nation.

There is a tremendous burden tied to that kind of role. When Elizabeth Windsor became queen, she was tasked as a twenty-something with a job that required her to say or do nothing that could be misconstrued, controversial, or even interestingly human - for the rest of her life. She achieved that both stoically and heroically in many people’s eyes. King Charles III has taken on that inhuman mantle now. Time will tell if he can follow the late Queen’s example.

Duty, sacrificial service, and honour....without power. That’s the role of modern royalty.

It’s hard for non-British people to understand how a monarch can come to embody the psyche of the nation. The Crown represents something from the ancient past, a logically indefensible but emotionally salient symbol of something called a nation, something that gives its members meaning and happiness. As Bagehot says, it’s an act of imagination.

Some of my non-British friends particularly can’t quite grasp this connection; to them the British royal family functions mainly at best as a different form of celebrity. But to these friends as well as those republican friends sincerely opposed to monarchy can and should grasp something else - nations and cultures need people and institutions who transcend politics, which left to itself quickly descends into tribalism or worse, authoritarianism.

#sullivan #andrew sullivan #quote #monarchy #british monarchy #king charles III #united kingdom #crown #royalty #constitutional monarchy #history #custom #heritage #tradition #queen elizabeth II #bagehot #walter bagehot #society #politics

[stairnaheireann]

#OTD in Irish History | 22 November:

1773 – Lord John Beresford, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of all Ireland, is born in Dublin. 1830 – Justin McCarthy, politician, novelist and historian, is born in Cork. 1869 – Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, Fenian, contests and wins a Tipperary by-election in abstentia, but is declared ineligible as a convicted felon. 1912 – Birth in Dublin of poet, dramatist and lawyer, Donagh MacDonagh, son of…

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#irelandinspires #irishhistory #OTD #22 November #Andrew Sullivan #Birmingham Six Charged #C.S. Lewis #Drummuckavall Ambush #England #History #History of Ireland #Hunger-Striker #IRA #Ireland #Irish History #Jeremiah O&039;Donovan Rossa #John F. Kennedy Assasination #Lord John Beresford #Margaret Thatcher #Máire Drumm #Sinn Fein

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Stanko Abadzic

* * * *

Patrick Kurp reviews the work of Polish poet and essayist Zbigniew Herbert.

A quote from Herbert’s essay “Animula:” "I always wished I would never lose the belief that great works of the spirit are more objective than we are. And that they will judge us. Someone very rightly said that not only do we read Homer, look at frescoes of Giotto, listen to Mozart, but Homer, Giotto, and Mozart spy and eavesdrop on us and ascertain our vanity and stupidity. Poor utopians, history’s debutants, museum arsonists, liquidators of the past are like those madmen who destroy works of art because they cannot forgive them their serenity, dignity, and cool radiance." Cool Radiance - The Daily Dish By Andrew Sullivan (Source: The Atlantic)

#Stanko Abadzic #Cool Radiance #Andrew Sullivan #Zbigniew Herbert #about art

[worldviewmazovian]

i graduated in 2016 from undergrad meaning there's been almost two entire 4 year undergrad classes who have graduated since me and ppl r still writing the same campus panic articles i was reading in like 2014. many from the exact same people.

every "adult world" institution (ie, businesses, the state, newsrooms) these guys said would be undone by callout culture and educating ppl about microaggressions has not only remained largely the same in this time but arguably have moved rightward in their internal cultures!

#cancel culture #callout culture #bari weiss #Katie herzog #andrew sullivan #liberalism #amerikan media meta

[vavavadoom]

Authority and Mystery

Quick sketch from @goldenboyreturns over an Andrew Sullivan quotation.

"The point of monarchy is precisely that it's not the fruit of an argument. It's a primordial institution smuggled into a democratic system. It has nothing to do with merit and logic and everything to do with authority and mystery."

#DOOM #victor von doom #Andrew Sullivan #Frankly with the state of the world Doom is surprised there are not more apologists for monarchy. #It is the middle road of failed democracy and brutal autocracy.

[arcticdementor]

(link)

#auron macintyre #andrew sullivan #twitter #screenshot

[grandhotelabyss]

“They” cancelled Karl Marx 45 years ago. It was practically the opening move in the game:

Karl Marx identified the notion of an Asiatic economic system in his 1853 analyses of British rule in India, and then put beside that immediately the human depredation introduced into this system by English colonial interference, rapacity, and outright cruelty. In article after article he returned with increasing conviction to the idea that even in destroying Asia, Britain was making possible there a real social revolution. Marx’s style pushes us right up against the difficulty of reconciling our natural repugnance as fellow creatures to the sufferings of Orientals while their society is being violently transformed with the historical necessity of these transformations. 

Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath the traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. 

England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution. 

Then, whatever bitterness the spectacle of the crumbling of an ancient world may have for our personal feelings, we have the right, in point of history, to exclaim with Goethe: 

Sollte diese Qual uns quälen Da sie unsere Lust vermehrt Hat nicht Myriaden Seelen Timurs Herrschaft aufgeziehrt (Should this torture then torment us Since it brings us greater pleasure? Were not through the rule of Timur Souls devoured without measure?)

The quotation, which supports Marx's argument about torment producing pleasure, comes from the Westöstlicher Diwan and identifies the sources of Marx’s conceptions about the Orient. These are Romantic and even messianic: as human material the Orient is less important than as an element in a Romantic redemptive project. Marx’s economic analyses are perfectly fitted thus to a standard Orientalist undertaking, even though Marx's humanity, his sympathy for the misery of people, are clearly engaged. Yet in the end it is the Romantic Orientalist vision that wins out, as Marx's theoretical socio-economic views become submerged in this classically standard image:

England has to fulfill a double mission in India; one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of the Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia.

The idea of regenerating a fundamentally lifeless Asia is a piece of pure Romantic Orientalism, of course, but coming from the same writer who could not easily forget the human suffering involved, the statement is puzzling. It requires us first to ask how Marx’s moral equation of Asiatic loss with the British colonial rule he condemned gets skewed back towards the old inequality between East and West we have so far remarked. Second, it requires us to ask where the human sympathy has gone, into what realm of thought it has disappeared while the Orientalist vision takes its place. 

—Edward Said, Orientalism (1978)

And Said had a point—a rather conservative point at that, almost Burkean. These things are never so simple as the easy left/right.

#edward said #karl marx #andrew sullivan #marxism #leftism

[bodyalive]

[from my files]

* * * * *

breath My favorite poem about breathing, by the way, is very, very Catholic and some of you may find it a bit much, but Gerard Manley Hopkins’ classic here is a linguistic treasure.

Wild air, world-mothering air, Nestling me everywhere, That each eyelash or hair Girdles; goes home betwixt The fleeciest, frailest-flixed Snowflake; that’s fairly mixed With, riddles, and is rife In every least thing’s life; This needful, never spent, And nursing element; My more than meat and drink, My meal at every wink … For Hopkins, this was like the ubiquitous presence of the Blessed Virgin. For me right now, it’s just a reminder of how blessed we are … to breathe. — Andrew Permalink from The Daily Dish [alive on all channels]

#breath #Andrew Sullivan #The Daily Dish #Gerard Manley Hopkins #poetry #poem #Body Alive #Alive On All Channels

[redshift-13]

https://twitter.com/sullydish/status/1567935269009035264

How does anyone read Sullivan with anything more than bemused interest?

#queen elizabeth #andrew sullivan

[elegantzombielite]

"Monsters remain human beings. In fact, to reduce them to a subhuman level is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder -- just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing. Insisting on the humanity of terrorists is, in fact, critical to maintaining their profound responsibility for the evil they commit. And, if they are human, then they must necessarily not be treated in an inhuman fashion. You cannot lower the moral baseline of a terrorist to the subhuman without betraying a fundamental value."

Andrew Sullivan, writer (b. 10th August 1963)

#athoughtfortoday #andrew sullivan #monster #humanity #responsibility

[blackswaneuroparedux]

You can make all sorts of solid arguments against a constitutional monarchy - but the point of monarchy is precisely that it is not the fruit of an argument. It is emphatically not an Enlightenment institution. It’s a primordial institution smuggled into a democratic system. It has nothing to do with merit and logic and everything to do with authority and mystery - two deeply human needs our modern world has trouble satisfying without danger.

- Andrew Sullivan

This is the genius of the British monarchy, supremacy exemplified in Elizabeth II and King Charles III. Walter Bagehot was the first to really get to the heart of the matter.

Walter Bagehot, a journalist who would co-found and edit The Economist magazine was one of the greatest Victorians of the 19th Century and he concerned himself with the workings and the reform of the delicate constitutional arrangements between parliament, the House of Lords, and the monarchy as so much is based on custom and unwritten practice.

Walter Bagehot published his classic work, The English Constitution in 1867 but it is the best way to understand the delicate balance of parliament and the monarchy. No one has written a finer work than Bagehot and his book remains the bible for many interested in constitutional matters regarding the monarchy.

In it he argued that the constitution was divided into two branches. The monarchy represents the “dignified” branch. Its job is to symbolise the nation   through pomp and ceremony. The government - Parliament, the cabinet and   the civil service - represents the “efficient” branch. Its job is to run the country by passing laws and providing public services. He was right to say that the dignified branch governs through poetry, and the  efficient branch through prose.

In Bagehot’s view, a politically-inactive monarchy served the best interests  of the United Kingdom; by abstaining from direct rule, the monarch levitated above the political fray of tribal politics (of left and right), and remained a respected personage to whom all subjects could look to as  a guiding light. The monarch was to stay severely neutral and be apolitical. Instead the monarch was to embody in the flesh the core values of a nation. 

There is a tremendous burden tied to that kind of role. When Elizabeth Windsor became queen, she was tasked as a twenty-something with a job that required her to say or do nothing that could be misconstrued, controversial, or even interestingly human - for the rest of her life. King Charles III has taken on that mantle now.

Duty, sacrificial service, and honour....without power. That’s the role of modern royalty.

It’s hard for non-British people to understand how she came to embody the pysche of the nation. The Crown represents something from the ancient past, a logically indefensible but emotionally salient symbol of something called a nation, something that gives its members meaning and happiness. As Bagehot says, it’s an act of imagination.

Some of my non-British friends particularly can’t quite grasp this connection; to them the British royal family functions mainly at best as a different form of celebrity. But to these friends as well as those sincerely opposed to monarchy can and should grasp something else - nations and cultures need people and institutions who transcend politics, which in itself quickly descends into tribalism or worse, authoritarianism.

#sullivan #andrew sullivan #monarchy #quote #britain #republicanisl #bagehot #walter bagehot #constitutional monarchy #elizabeth II #society #culture #tradition #custom #queen elizabeth II #king charles III #charles III #history #british history

[stairnaheireann]

#OTD in 1871 – Alexander Sullivan, barrister and last King’s Serjeant of Ireland, is born in Dublin; best known as the leading counsel for the defence in the 1916 treason trial of Roger Casement.

Sullivan failed to win the case and Casement was sentenced to death. After Roger Casement’s capture on Banna Strand he was brought to London. During his interrogation on Easter Monday, news of the Rising filtered through, and by the end of the week, English public opinion of Casement had plummeted. He was presumed to have been the instigator of the Rising, although in reality he had come to…

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#Andrew Sullivan #Barrister #Dublin #England #First Serjeant #Ireland #Irish KC #King&039;s Third Serjeant-at-law #London #Second Serjeant #Sir Roger Casement

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Andrew Sullivan is increasingly, persistently and surprisingly a fan of Joe Biden. I agree with his take here, but I think the standard for reference in Biden's rhetoric and style is not Clinton, but rather FDR.

 "Perhaps most important was Biden’s decorum and cheerfulness — in contrast to the GOP’s aggressive surliness. He was the smiling cat to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s version of a scowling Real Housewife. He was playful. He toyed with the Republican rabble like a restaurant reviewer toying with his food. And here’s something that is perhaps the perfectly not-Trump passage:  

Some Republicans — some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset.  I’m not saying it’s a majority — other Republicans say — I’m not saying it’s a majority of you.  I don’t even think it’s a significant — but it’s being proposed by individuals. I’m not — politely not naming them, but it’s being proposed by some of you. 

Why is this not-Trump? It’s sophisticated and irrefutable, as opposed to crude and wrong. He is both bashing the GOP over the head with a big club, and showing he’s being fair, by acknowledging it isn’t all of them. As they heckled and booed, he merrily bantered. The faux-politeness was very old-school and reassuring that normalcy was returning. This was a reboot of the Clinton-Gingrich dynamic. Which was primarily good for Clinton.  And yes, Biden was triangulating hard. Stylistically, this was not-Trump at all. Substantively, it was Trump all the way. If Trump were not mentally ill, he’d sit back and bask in his legacy of reorienting US politics — including the Democrats — toward all the themes he stressed from 2015 on. He’d be happy to go down in history as populism’s bipartisan legitimizer. (But of course he’s out of his mind.)

Again and again, this was an America First speech. It was about building infrastructure, protecting entitlements, buying American, re-shoring industry, cutting drug prices, bringing the supply chain back to the homeland, and a high-tech industrial policy to compete more aggressively with the Chinese. This is a whole different world than Barack TPP Obama, let alone Bill NAFTA Clinton.  

And it suits Biden’s old-school working-class kind of liberalism: he genuinely likes unions, can identify with insecure working parents, and loves showering lots of borrowed money on people and things in general. His idea of a fun trip is to open a new construction site alongside the Republican congressman who voted against it. And this may be the first SOTU with a rhetorical flourish like this one: “Lumber, glass, drywall, fiber-optic cable.”

#political #SOTU #Biden Administration #Andrew Sullivan

[postersbykeith]

#quotes #Andrew Sullivan #I like the pluralism #insecure faith

[linusjf]

Andrew Sullivan: Monsters remain human beings

“Monsters remain human beings. In fact, to reduce them to a subhuman level is to exonerate them of their acts of terrorism and mass murder — just as animals are not deemed morally responsible for killing. Insisting on the humanity of terrorists is, in fact, critical to maintaining their profound responsibility for the evil they commit. And, if they are human, then they must necessarily not be…

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#Andrew Sullivan

[tonysaundersartist]

"When majorities supported gay couples getting married, they did not thereby support having their daughters forced to shower next to biological males in locker rooms, or compete with them in competitive sports; they did not support teaching kindergartners that their bodies have nothing to do with whether they are boys or girls; they did not support using unapproved drugs on troubled children to arrest their puberty, and sterilize them for life; and they did not support schools transitioning their children into the opposite gender without their knowledge.

They didn’t support these things because they have absolutely nothing to do with gay rights. And they didn’t support them because trying to abolish sex differences in society — differences that are among the most well-established facts of human existence — is insane. Sure, many Americans were and are open to helping transgender kids be accepted, to treating trans adults with sympathy and dignity — all the polls show that — but using the experience of this minuscule minority of humans as the default reality for all of us — and teaching that as fact to children — is not an example of inclusion. It is an example of a well-meant untruth, imposed by fiat. Of course we’ve seen a reaction."

—Andrew Sullivan, The Weekly Dish 6/23/23 excerpt blog post

#andrew sullivan