Delaware Liberal

DL Open Thread Sunday, Sept. 18, 2022

Wilmington is going to get an economic boost next month when media floods the city for the Elon Musk-Twitter showdown in Chancery Court. Background coverage has already begun, such as this profile of Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick.

The bus-the-immigrants stunt has succeeded in bringing national attention to a problem that affects mainly border cities in border states, but as is always the case with Republicans, it does so in the cruelest, most inept way. Joe Biden finally took the bait and spoke about it on Thursday.

If you want to follow the war in Ukraine, the mainstream media is little help. Daily Kos shows how much better crowdsourcing works — there are lots of ex-military people out there who are plugged into the military-industrial mediasphere and can make sense of the information that comes in. The resulting coverage is, if anything, overly detailed, but it’s great for armchair generals.

Trump destroyed the old Republican Party, but his anti-intellectualism hasn’t stopped right-wingers from trying to cobble together a philosophy for the new one. Shadi Hamid of the Atlantic has an interesting take on what’s emerging:

Earlier this week, self-described “national conservatives” descended upon Miami for a major conference of a movement whose members “understand that the past and future of conservatism are inextricably tied to the idea of the nation.” For them, the nation is a distinct cultural unit, whose independence and sovereignty must be jealously guarded against globalists, international institutions, and large-scale immigration. These are not neoconservatives or even just conservatives. For the national conservatives, the George W. Bushes and Mitt Romneys of the world are the problem.

The national conservatives view today’s liberals as woke cultural warriors who pose an existential threat to the nation and its traditions. In this sense, the new right is more concerned with who we are, and who we aren’t, than with what Congress does or doesn’t do. This is not an army of would-be policy wonks.

How he manages to get through his entire essay without once using the term “fascism” to describe what’s quite clearly fascism is an impressive feat.

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