"Where Do Republicans Go From Here?/The party looks brain-dead at every spot Trump touches. But off in the corners, there’s a lot of intellectual ferment."

That's just the new David Brooks column, but I'm linking to it because it has a very cool illustration by Tim Enthoven. And I like that it fits so squarely into my tag "what Trump did to the GOP" which you might enjoy clicking on for a trip down memory lane.

Here's some Brooks:

If you came of age with conservative values and around Republican politics in the 1980s and 1990s, you lived within a certain Ronald Reagan-Margaret Thatcher paradigm. It was about limiting government, spreading democracy abroad, building dynamic free markets at home and cultivating people with vigorous virtues — people who are energetic, upright, entrepreneurial, independent-minded, loyal to friends and strong against foes....

But somehow that wasn't enough. Other Republicans offered other "paradigms." First on the list, Brooks himself!

On Sept. 15, 1997, William Kristol and I wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal on what we called National Greatness Conservatism. We argued that the G.O.P. had become too anti-government.

They argued for "ambitious national projects, infrastructure, federal programs to increase social mobility." Brooks thinks John McCain, in 2000, represented their idea. George W. Bush, who won that year, had his own paradigm:  Compassionate Conservatism. That was, per Brooks, "an attempt to meld Catholic social teaching to conservatism." There were more paradigms offered up:

Sam’s Club Republicans, led by Reihan Salam and my Times colleague Ross Douthat, pointed a way to link the G.O.P. to working-class concerns. Front Porch Republicans celebrated small towns and local communities. The Reformicons tried to use government to build strong families and neighborhoods. The Niskanen Center is an entire think tank for people who have leapt from libertarianism.

"Seems like this advice, which will provide essentially no meaningful benefits to the world, is designed to achieve an exquisite balance..."

"... keep travelling but feel more virtuous by tweaking your usual routines with tiny sacrifices, while retaining some of the guilt and shame that appears necessary to be a genuine 'woke' person."

That's the top-rated comment on "How Guilty Should You Feel About Your Vacation?/And what can you do about it?" by Seth Kugel (in the NYT).

First, I highly recommend clicking through so you can see the fantastic illustration by Tim Enthoven (I see I recommended him before, here).

Now, to the text. Kugel is a travel writer. And the NYT makes money selling travel to its readers. The problem of air travel and carbon emissions is a huge conflict of interest for them, and it's painful or humorous to watch them try to writhe into a nonridiculous position.

So, O.K. How bad should we really feel? Well, first of all, no self-flagellation required for that week in Italy. It is true that your round-trip flight is probably the biggest single contributor to your carbon footprint this year (unless you moved from a studio apartment to a mansion or quit your job for the Nature Conservancy to become a coal lobbyist). But shame is the wrong emotion....

Why is shame the "wrong" emotion? And why does the text switch from "guilt" to "shame"? I thought the distinction was important! It's not even discussed. And the text goes on to suggest that the reason "shame" is "wrong" is because shaming isn't an effective way to get people to change what they are doing. It's not? Why not? Is that scientifically proven fact? You know, where you have the problem of people not wanting to believe the science about climate change, you ought to adhere closely to science, and yet you have nothing scientific about shaming (or guilt, which you unscientifically merge)!

It seems to me that shaming is often quite effective.

Is Gustave Doré's "Saintly throng in the shape of a rose" the source material for the illustration for the NYT article "Everything Is for Sale Now. Even Us"?

In Dante's "Paradiso" the souls in Heaven form a rose:

Dante sees an enormous rose, symbolising divine love, the petals of which are the enthroned souls of the faithful (both those of the Old Testament and those of the New). All the souls he has met in Heaven, including Beatrice, have their home in this rose. Angels fly around the rose like bees, distributing peace and love. Beatrice now returns to her place in the rose, signifying that Dante has passed beyond theology in directly contemplating God, and St. Bernard, as a mystical contemplative, now guides Dante further (Canto XXXI).

The 19th century illustrator Gustave Doré visualized the rose like this:



Here's the NYT article (by Ruth Whippman), "Everything Is for Sale Now. Even Us. The constant pressure to sell ourselves on every possible platform has produced its own brand of modern anxiety."

Almost everyone I know now has some kind of hustle, whether job, hobby, or side or vanity project. Share my blog post, buy my book, click on my link, follow me on Instagram, visit my Etsy shop, donate to my Kickstarter, crowdfund my heart surgery. It’s as though we are all working in Walmart on an endless Black Friday of the soul.

Being sold to can be socially awkward, for sure, but when it comes to corrosive self-doubt, being the seller is a thousand times worse. The constant curation of a salable self demanded by the new economy can be a special hellspring of anxiety.

Like many modern workers, I find that only a small percentage of my job is now actually doing my job. The rest is performing a million acts of unpaid micro-labor that can easily add up to a full-time job in itself. Tweeting and sharing and schmoozing and blogging. Liking and commenting on others’ tweets and shares and schmoozes and blogs. Ambivalently “maintaining a presence on social media,” attempting to sell a semi-fictional, much more appealing version of myself in the vain hope that this might somehow help me sell some actual stuff at some unspecified future time....

There's no explanation of how the illustrator, Tim Enthoven, developed his image, which I like very much and like even more if it's an intentional invocation of Doré's saintly throng:



Go to the article for a full-size version. The article is quite good and worth spending one of your free NYT views on, even without the bonus of the illustration. I love the inclusion of a Golden Retriever in the modern-day saintly throng.

I especially welcome comments that go deeply into the analogy of souls the internet — as visualized by Whippman and Enthoven — with the souls in Heaven — as visualized by Dante and Doré.

Whippman has a book, "America the Anxious: Why Our Search for Happiness Is Driving Us Crazy and How to Find It for Real."

And here's Tim Enthoven's Instagram page.