Happy Friday - thanks for reading.
Busy week this week - the House Republican caucus voted to keep Liz Cheney in a position of leadership after her vote to impeach Donald Trump. The House of Representatives voted to remove Marjorie Taylor Green from her committee positions in view of her largely unapologetic embrace of wild conspiracy theories (and the fact that said conspiracy theories played a key role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol building). And then there’s impeachment next week - and the House impeachment managers are demanding that Donald Trump appear as a witness.
But let’s talk about something else!
Maybe you’ve heard about this recent ordeal involving GameStop - the video game store - wherein a bunch of at-home investors who were fond of company decided to drive up the cost of the stock far above the price where it had resided. This earned cheers from circles on the far left and far right, though most economic observers recognized the inherent danger in the activity. (This isn’t the best summation, but you can find one pretty easily).
Enter Senator Josh Hawley, the same Josh Hawley who earned some well-deserved scorn for trying to overturn the election results in a couple of key swing states on January 6. Earlier this week, Hawley had a piece in First Things, the revered journal of religion and politics. You can read the piece here, but the long and short of it is that Hawley sees the GameStop investors as sticking it to Wall Street, though he expects, of course, that Wall Street will use its greed and influence to continue to rig the game in its favor, at the expense of the real Americans that - surprise! - Hawley represents.
But a funny thing happened on Thursday morning when one of Hawley’s former colleagues at the University of Missouri School of Law called Hawley out on Twitter. You can read the thread here. The argument from Professor Thom Lambert is pretty simple - Josh Hawley is lying. The situation around GameStop was halted because of liquidity problems in the market, not simply in order to “protect” hedge funds that were losing money. Lambert takes Hawley to task for crafting a populist narrative that is dishonest in service of his long-term goals.
Lambert than notes that the essay ran in First Things, a journal ostensibly dedicated to a properly ordered culture that would in turn created a properly ordered politics. Lambert argues that the magazine has, of late, failed at that task because it has placed political endeavors far head of efforts to influence culture in a particular way. Lambert doesn’t mention it, but case in point would be First Things editor Rusty Reno railing against masks quite early in the pandemic last year, or the infamous Against the Dead Consensus essay that ran two years ago, or the countless diatribes that New York Post editor Sohrab Ahmari has written in the magazine’s pages the last few years.
This all may seem like inside baseball to some of you, and in a way it is - but the issue encapsulates wear the right - including the religious right - has gone off the rails during the Trump years. Believing that ends largely justify means, far too many conservatives have engaged in bad faith argumentation, manipulation of both data and sentiment, or have overlooked the profound moral failings of Donald Trump and his cast of advisers and supporters all in service of their preferred policy goals.
In the case of Josh Hawley - and the fact that First Things ran the essay in the first place - that means making shallow arguments riddled with factual errors, all in the name of the common good. It’s all so unfortunate - too many conservatives thought that Trumpism was a beast they could domesticate, but in the end, they’ve been unable to contain it, and now they conduct themselves with every bit of acrimony they would have once denounced.
That’s all for now - have a great weekend.
I think one of the curious things about First Things over the past few years has been the difference in tone and quality between the web exclusives (which is what Hawley wrote, and has included some of the other more diatribe-like pieces) and the full articles from the magazine. The full articles from the print edition are still high-quality, thoughtful pieces, while the web exclusives often seem like contrarian blog posts or something of that nature. Sadly, First Things's reputation suffers somewhat because of the web stuff, while the continuing value of the print stuff gets overlooked. It's still a great magazine, but the name is somewhat tarnished.