That's what friends are for
David Weigel gets stabbed in the back; the Claremont Review of Books makes a point it likely never intended; and more evidence that Twitter is a real sewer.
This dispatch is free, but premium subscribers get access to it twelve hours early. For a 14-day trial premium subscription - which also gets you access to exclusive and paywalled posts, lets you leave comments, and boosts my ego - click here:
Shot: “So Lorenz is in trouble for alleged serious journalistic malpractice, and Weigel is taking fire for a bad Tweet. If I could bet on which one of them will more likely be fired, I know where I’m putting my money.”
Chaser: “The Washington Post has suspended journalist Dave Weigel after the reporter last week retweeted a post from another Twitter user containing a sexist joke, according to a new report.”
Like Donald McNeil, Weigel apologized. And as in the case of Donald McNeil, it didn’t save him. It never does.
After Felicia Sonmez, another reporter at the outlet, called attention to Weigel’s retweet, Weigel deleted the retweet and apologized.
CNN also reported that Sonmez called Weigel out in an internal company Slack channel, tagging him and asking, “I’m sorry but what is this?” She added that his retweet of the joke sent “a confusing message about what the Post’s values are.”
Post national editor Matea Gold reportedly weighed in during the discussion on Slack, writing, “I just want to assure all of you that The Post is committed to maintaining a respectful workplace for everyone. We do not tolerate demeaning language or actions.”
On Sunday, executive editor Sally Buzbee wrote to the entire newsroom and asked employees to treat one another with “respect and kindness.”
Sonmez responded by sharing a screenshot of Bizbee’s message to staff, saying it provided “fodder for more harassment” of female employees.
But you sometimes have to hurt the ones you love, you know:
If this is how “friends” treat each other, I’m thankful I don’t have any, amirite?
Aside from the whole “cancel culture” aspect of this (a strangely powerful phenomenon for something I’ve been assured doesn’t exist) we have yet another example of progressives fighting over pointless shit and score-settling at a time when democracy itself is supposedly under threat.1 Name a more iconic duo.
The Supreme Court of the United States may overturn Roe v. Wade this month. Just watch how quickly the resulting protest movement devolves into arguing about whether abortion is a “women’s rights” issue or whether it’s sexist to imply that only women can get pregnant.
Speaking of leftists losing a war against fascism in no small part because of internal divisions, I’ve been doing some reading about the Spanish Civil War lately. The Real Dictators podcast series about Franco piqued my interest, and then I came across an interesting piece by Nathan Pinkoski in The Claremont Review of Books that -
Okay, the leading inteleckshul journal of the MAGA movement is not a regular read for me. But this article, reviewing a book by historian Stanley Payne, does make a good argument that the origins of that destructive conflict were more complicated than we’ve been led to believe:
What accounts for the rise of revolutionary politics in Europe in the 1920s and ’30s? Some scholars stress the social and economic shocks of World War I and the Great Depression; others, the absence of liberal traditions across the half-formed democracies that collapsed during those decades. Payne grants that these theses explain some of Europe’s revolutions. But the Spanish case calls into question their overall explanatory power. Spain’s liberal and parliamentary traditions stretched back to the start of the 19th century. Moreover, the country had stayed out of the First World War and suffered relatively little economic damage during the Great Depression. No exogenous shocks explain the rise of revolutionary politics in Spain, the fall of the Spanish Republic, and the civil war. The Spanish brought revolution upon themselves.
Though a variety of parties helped set the revolution going, Payne argues that the chief culprits were the Spanish socialists. Unlike Bolsheviks, who seek to overthrow liberal constitutionalism by direct means, revolutionary socialists use the constitutional system to provide cover for their plan to dismantle it. They don’t overthrow the legal system, they exploit it. Legalists of the center and the Right struggle to respond to this tactic. In Spain, their failure was particularly acute. In The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, 1933–1936 (2005) and The Spanish Civil War (2012), Payne describes Spain’s descent into a brutal three-year war as the result of the socialist Left’s brazenness meeting the center’s carelessness and the Right’s pusillanimity.
Other European socialist movements began with revolutionary ambitions but mellowed as they grew older and came to respect constitutionalism and parliamentary norms. Over time, Spanish socialists became more radical. The most important leftist leader in Spain, Manuel Azaña (prime minister from 1931 to 1933 and again in 1936), contended that liberalism failed because it was too willing to compromise. He regarded the republican constitution as the beginning of a radical reform project—even calling it a “revolution.” Politicians who didn’t equate constitutionalism with leftism were ipso facto illegitimate.
[…]
Three factors led to the collapse of the Spanish Republic. First, there was no agreement on the rules of the political game. The major party on the Right, the Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights (CEDA), won the 1933 election. Though its leaders engaged in rhetorical excesses and flirted with unspecified constitutional changes, they abstained from violence, even when supporters were assaulted and murdered by the Left. Yet the Left refused to accept CEDA’s electoral victory. The president of the republic, Niceto Alcalá-Zamora, had to reject four requests from the Left to cancel the elections. Eventually Zamora established a minority government of centrists. But the goalposts had shifted. Republicanism had come to mean that the Right could never form a legitimate government.
Second, the center and center-Left enabled the descent into revolutionary politics by winking at the Left’s violence and punishing the Right’s. The rise of the “anti-fascist” trope in the 1930s, recounted in Paul Gottfried’s excellent Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade (2021)—which Payne himself has recently praised in an essay for First Things—served to stain anyone who disagreed with the Left. In Spain, it excused the violence of young socialists. Centrist authorities were unable or unwilling to stop attacks on private property, businesses, churches, convents, and clergy. Instead, they blamed the victims, arresting not the actual perpetrators but scapegoating monarchists and conservatives. As cultural theorist René Girard understood, this scapegoating does not break the cycle of violence, but intensifies it. When revolutionaries attempt to purify a corrupt state and society through scapegoating, those whom they kill become martyrs, whose sacrifice becomes redemptive for nascent counterrevolutionaries. In Spain, scapegoating monarchists and conservatives converted large sections of the population from apathy to anger. By letting murders go unpunished and unjustly punishing innocents, the Left created martyrs throughout Spain—galvanizing the counterrevolution and turning the conflict into a religious war.
The centrist government assumed that only the Right threatened the republic. This was a bizarre position to take after October 1934, when socialists launched the most organized and well-armed insurrection in interwar western and central Europe. A revolt broke out in 15 of Spain’s 50 provinces, in some places lasting for weeks. The insurrection failed—with nearly 2,000 killed in the uprising and more than 15,000 rebels arrested—but after a strong initial response, the centrist coalition went soft. Hundreds of revolutionaries, guilty of capital crimes, were prosecuted; only two were executed. Though the Socialist Party had organized the insurrection, it was never outlawed. Just over a year later, its participants were allowed to stand for election, giving them the opportunity to gain legally the power they had failed to seize by force. By contrast, in the years that followed the Falange—a tiny far-Right fringe party that won 0.7% of the vote in the February 1936 elections—was subject to concerted political persecution. But this double standard had the opposite effect of what it intended. When the Falange was officially suppressed in the spring of 1936, its underground movement became far larger than the legal party ever had been.
The third factor in the collapse of the republic was the centrist endorsement of unconstitutional action in the name of saving the so-called liberal consensus—what French political theorist Pierre Manent has called “the fanaticism of the center.” In The Collapse of the Spanish Republic, Payne is especially critical of President Zamora in this regard. Placing himself above normal parliamentary procedure, Zamora manipulated the system to encourage a centrist party to emerge. In 1933, he had already disregarded the fundamental parliamentary convention of giving the head of the largest party (CEDA) the opportunity to form a government. Disregarding even the second-largest party of the Left, he asked instead the small party of centrists to take charge. CEDA was invited to become a junior partner in a coalition government. To be sure, there is some discretion in a parliamentary system for the president to select the prime minister. And CEDA, afraid of appearing too aggressive, acquiesced to this unconventional arrangement. Yet after late 1935, Zamora’s manipulations became particularly egregious. When the centrists were passing some controversial administrative reforms in September 1935 and several cabinet members resigned, Zamora could have offered the coalition partner, CEDA, the chance to form a government—or simply let the prime minister appoint new cabinet ministers. Instead, he handed the premiership to an independent. When, after three months, this government fell and the centrists were too embroiled in financial scandals to take the reins, Zamora could have given CEDA its chance. Yet he turned over the premiership to an old crony of his, Manuel Portela Valladares, who did not even have a seat in parliament. In the name of protecting centrism, Zamora was pushing de facto regime change. …
The thing is, reading this piece, I found that it made a very relevant point about American politics in 2022 - but likely not the one intended by Pinkoski and this right-wing journal.
When you compare Democrats and Republicans, which side is the one more likely to reject election defeat, threaten violence against its opponents, and generally use democracy in the way Recep Tayyip Erdogan described it: like a streetcar you use to get to your destination and then abandon it?
Not that there aren’t left-wingers who think the same way. These balaclava-clad louts rampaging through downtown Portland every evening have no interest in promoting or protecting a liberal democracy. But they’re disorganized, chaotic, as likely to fight each other as the police or MAGA protesters, and - most importantly - don’t control one of the two political parties.
I keep coming back to the point JVL made in 2020: go to an extreme-right event and you’ll see Trump swag everywhere. Go to an antifa event and just try finding anyone wearing merchandise with Biden’s name on it.
Q: Is this real?
A: Who cares?
See also AOC denouncing her colleagues for not embracing the term “Latinx,” because that should be Democrats’ top priority right now.