"In Haley’s eyes, everyone else was a squish...."

"What advice, she was asked, would she give Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in his war with Hamas? She said that she had already offered it to him: 'Finish them. Finish them.' This wasn’t exactly a surgical performance. Haley is a bludgeon. She is a practiced enough politician that she will often begin with some statement of empathy—'as the wife of a combat veteran'; 'as a mom'—but she is often quickly on the attack. ... Haley’s martial posture was so constant and omnidirectional that it somewhat masked the fact that she is fighting for things (a straightforwardly neoconservative approach overseas, gestures toward entitlement cuts) that Republicans in the Trump era were supposed to have set aside.... Politically, Haley is a loner—that has always been one of her limitations.... She doesn’t really belong to the Christian right or the libertarian extreme, but she isn’t a moderate, either. When I’ve seen her on the trail, she has tended to leave audiences cold—who, they seem to wonder, is this all for?..."

Writes Benjamin Wallace-Wells, in "Nikki Haley Takes On the Scum at the Third Republican Debate/Donald Trump has dominated the primary season, but his former U.N. Ambassador is the best debater in the field—and she would probably be the G.O.P.’s most effective candidate against Joe Biden" (The New Yorker).

"Of all the ways in which Trump broke the political model, a basic one was in the biography of a Presidential contender."

"Could anyone—at least anyone able to fund his own campaign—be President now? That idea, prevalent during the populist spring of 2016, has faded since. Fewer progressive outsiders have won national office than many on the left might have hoped, and the Republican Party has largely absorbed the MAGA movement, avoiding being displaced by it. The novice-candidate model hasn’t really been tested since 2016.... Watching Ramaswamy on the stump reminded me that Biden, who campaigned against Trump’s extremism in 2020 as a pragmatist and a steady hand, has not yet had to defend his investments in climate transformation and the Ukraine war, and made me wonder how effectively he would do so. For now, Ramaswamy’s rise is demonstrating that conservative populist energy hasn’t fully been tapped...."

 
Writes Benjamin Wallace-Wells in "In Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republicans Have Something New/The thirty-eight-year-old 'anti-woke' polemicist and political novice has become one of Trump’s main rivals" (The New Yorker).

"Self-identified libertarians have always been tiny in number—a handful of economists, political activists, technologists, and true believers."

"But, in the decades after Ronald Reagan was elected President, they came to exert enormous political influence, in part because their prescription of prosperity through deregulation appeared to be working, and in part because they provided conservatism with a long-term agenda and a vision of a better future. To the usual right-wing mixture of social traditionalism and hierarchical nationalism, the libertarians had added an especially American sort of optimism: if the government would only step back and allow the market to organize society, we would truly flourish.... Had you written a history of the libertarian movement fifteen years ago, it would have been a tale of improbable success. A small cadre of intellectually intense oddballs who inhabited a Manhattanish atmosphere of late-night living-room debates and barbed book reviews had somehow managed to impose their beliefs on a political party, then the country.... Ever since the George W. Bush Administration, the libertarian movement, as such, has been disintegrating...."

Writes Benjamin Wallace-Wells, in "The Long Afterlife of Libertarianism/As a movement, it has imploded. As a credo, it’s here to stay" (The New Yorker).

"[The Twitter] files have been at once among the most interesting and the most complicated journalistic documents of the Trump era..."

"... complicated in that their tone is often propagandistic and their evidence frustratingly partial but interesting in that they show how various political actors sought to influence a period in global politics....  After a careful read of the Twitter Files, I don’t think that the evidence suggests a coherent political agenda. It is certainly true that Twitter executives donated, overwhelmingly, to Democratic candidates for public office, and it seems equally true that they expressed mostly progressive views on social media.... Even if you believe—and I don’t—that Musk took a progressive thumb off the scale when he acquired the company, all he has done since is stick his own thumb—bigger and clumsier—on it. Musk could have made different choices. He could have opened the files to more journalists, with broader perspectives, rather than a group that largely shared his view.... The choices Musk did make suggest another aim—not neutrality, but counterbalance. If progressive ideas had been too amplified, he would now amplify conservative ones. Everything in the Twitter Files has had this see-saw quality...In this way, the Twitter Files have been trapped in the style of Twitter itself."

From "What the Twitter Files Reveal About Free Speech and Social Media/The company’s internal documents were supposed to prove a progressive agenda—mostly, they have exposed the limitations of the platform and its new owner" by Benjamin Wallace-Wells (The New Yorker).

"'Political correctness' is a dated term and, more importantly, doesn’t apply anymore. It’s not that elites are enforcing a set of manners and cultural limits..."

"... they’re seeking to reengineer the foundation of human psychology and social institutions through the new politics of race, It’s much more invasive than mere ‘correctness,’ which is a mechanism of social control, but not the heart of what’s happening. The other frames are wrong, too: ‘cancel culture’ is a vacuous term and doesn’t translate into a political program; ‘woke’ is a good epithet, but it’s too broad, too terminal, too easily brushed aside. ‘Critical race theory’ is the perfect villain... Its connotations are all negative to most middle-class Americans, including racial minorities, who see the world as ‘creative’ rather than ‘critical,’ ‘individual’ rather than ‘racial,’ ‘practical’ rather than ‘theoretical.’ Strung together, the phrase ‘critical race theory’ connotes hostile, academic, divisive, race-obsessed, poisonous, elitist, anti-American. [And critical race theory is not] an externally applied pejorative... it’s the label the critical race theorists chose themselves.”

Wrote Christopher Rufo to Benjamin Wallace-Wells, who produced this New Yorker article: "How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory/To Christopher Rufo, a term for a school of legal scholarship looked like 'the perfect weapon.'"

Is that headline correct? You know, I've got a thing about headlines that begin with "how." Are we really going to be told "how" or only "that"? But is it even true that Christopher Rufo invented the conflict over Critical Race Theory? The article shows the Rufo has been collecting information about anti-racism training sessions and, since late July 2020, communicating about what he's found and what he thinks of it.

Rufo didn't invent the term. He took a term that already had a life and he exposed it and critiqued it. What did he "invent"? He's accused of — credited with? — inventing the conflict about it. If something is already out there — having an effect — and someone comes along and raises questions about it, has he invented a conflict? 

This is what activists do. It's the same thing the Critical Race Theorists themselves did. They looked at how systems were operating, and they "invented a conflict" about it. They said the systems contained racism, furthered white supremacy, even covertly and unintentionally. Their technique was to "invent conflict" — wasn't it? — just as much as Rufo's technique was to invent conflict. If we're going to use the phrase "invent conflict," he invented conflict about the conflict they invented.

"The Conservative Case Against the Boomers/For bleakness, scope, and entropic finality, the progressive critique of the generation has nothing on the social-conservative one."

A column by Benjamin Wallace-Wells (in The New Yorker). 

In the view of an increasingly prominent cohort of Catholic intellectuals, Americans have, in the long span of the boomer generation, gone from public-spirited to narcotized, porn-addicted, and profoundly narcissistic, incapable not only of the headline acts of idealism to which boomers once aspired, such as changing the relations between the races or the sexes, but also of the mundane ones, such as raising children with discipline and care.... 

[Conservative writer Helen] Andrews... sums up the boomer legacy: “Drugged up, divorced, ignorant, and indebted, but at least they did it out of idealism.” This story, at least the way Andrews tells it, is about the establishment of a new aristocracy, and she structures it through six stories of prominent boomers: Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin, Jeffrey Sachs, Camille Paglia, Al Sharpton, and Sonia Sotomayor.