The Kavanaugh hearings have me reading
The Atlantic again, though I am not sure how long that will last.
The Atlantic publishes the sorts of thoughtful, relatively lengthy pieces which are rare in a world of "three minute reads."
Three recent articles, I think are worth pointing out, even though I think that they probably say things most people here have at least always considered.
The first is by former W. speechwriter David Frum. He highlights something which has bothered me about the GOP under Mitch McConnell since they vowed to block Obama at any costs: the GOP has increasingly rejected procedural liberalism (Frum just calls it liberalism): the idea that for a society to thrive, certain norms such as majority rule, minority rights, and the marketplace of ideas must be preserved. I can trace this back to Gingrich with his "majority of the majority" rule and Jeb Bush's purge of the voter rolls, but the decline has accelerated since since the rise of the Tea Party movement led most Republican incumbents to fear primary challenges more than general election ones. Frum's analysis is (unsurprisingly) not as willing to damn the pre-Trump GOP over its illiberalism as I am, but it is still a very interesting read.
Another is by Peter Beinart. He pushes back against the idea that opponents of Kavanaugh opposed him because of tribalism. It's also oddly reassuring, the idea that we've been here before, that what we are seeing is essentially a reaction to #metoo in the same way that the Dixiecrats were a reaction to Civil Rights.
The last piece is by Tom Nichols, on why the Kavanaugh hearings have lead him to abandon the Republican Party. I find this interesting for two reasons. One is that I can relate: I have been a lifelong independent, and the Kavanaugh hearings have pushed me into supporting Democrats at the federal level for the foreseeable future. But the other is that I have been wondering since the Kavanaugh hearings whether there is anything left in the Republican Party, at least at a national level, which Barry Goldwater and William Buckley would recognize as conservative. This article says outright that no, there isn't.