Leftists Are Crushed: Rebecca Traister, 'Today is the day that this nation sees, with eyes that are briefly clear, exactly how bad things are...'

The Court's abortion ruling this morning is a monumental defeat for the radical left, a political earthquake.

Some are calling for a "day of rage" in protest of the decision, though what good will that do? As noted earlier, inflation and the economy are tops on the list of concerns for voters, and the Democrats are foolish if they're looking to turn the November midterms into a referendum on the Supreme Court. What's done is done. The action now's at the state level, as it should be, really. Some states will maintain abortion rights --- California most definitely --- though others have "trigger laws" already in place that will ban abortion immediately, today, now that the Court has ruled. Other states have laws ready to go and could ban abortion in their states in the days or weeks ahead.

What you see on the left is utter despair in the face of bitter defeat, and if there are not literal violent attacks on crisis pregnancy centers (Dear God, no), etc., we'll at least have heated political rhetoric at the scale that would melt steel. Leftists are already degenerate, nasty, and violent. They'll be worse then ever now. It's a powder keg out there. The ruling means that abortion will be more polarizing than ever --- and that it will never go away as a divisive political issue. People will be fighting over this for decades. 

In any case, Rebecca Traister (whose writings are very good) certainly reflects the despondency of the moment, at the Cut, "The Necessity of Hope: Things are bad. They will get worse. But despair has never been an option":

Today is the day that this nation sees, with eyes that are briefly clear, exactly how bad things are, and exactly how bad they will become. No clouds today where I live. Only a stark and chilling truth in a bright blue sky: Roe is overturned, and so is Casey.

The dissent, co-authored by the Supreme Court’s three liberals, is explicit: “Whatever the exact scope of the coming laws, one result of today’s decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens.” They write that, in the wake of this decision, “from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of. A state can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs.”

So that, as they say, is that. Where we are. We can all see it, and so much more: Clarence Thomas, in his concurrence, openly declares that same-sex marriage and contraception are next. Gender-affirming health care, LGBTQ protections, voting rights, labor and environmental regulations — they are all prey to this ravening court and the party of malevolent ideologues and cynical tacticians that stands behind it.

Today also makes indisputable, thanks to Representative Jim Clyburn (who called today’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization “anticlimactic”) and his fellow House Democrats (who had the gall to stand outside the Capitol and sing “God Bless America” as protesters gathered at the Court and troops in riot gear marched to meet them), that those with the most power in the Democratic Party are as inept as their fiercest critics have claimed.

Today is wretched and plain. And it is not the bottom, as many people may feel it is. It will get worse; we will go lower. As the Court’s dissent insists, correctly, “Closing our eyes to the suffering today’s decision will impose will not make that suffering disappear.”

And so, with all this laid out, ugly and incontrovertible, the task for those who are stunned by the baldness of the horror, paralyzed by the bleakness of the view, is to figure out how to move forward anyway.

Because while it is incumbent on us to digest the scope and breadth of the badness, it is equally our responsibility not to despair. These two tasks are not at odds. They are irrevocably twined. As Dahlia Lithwick wondered just a few weeks ago, after the massacre in Uvalde, another clear and awful day: “What does it mean, the opposing imperative of honoring the feeling of being shattered, while gathering up whatever is left to work harder?”

It means doing the thing that people have always done on the arduous path to greater justice: Find the way to hope, not as feel-good anesthetic but as tactical necessity.

The prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba reminds us that “hope is a discipline.” It is also a political strategy and a survival mechanism. As Kaba has said, “It’s less about ‘how you feel’ and more about the practice of making a decision every day that you’re still gonna put one foot in front of the other, that you’re still going to get up in the morning. And you’re still going to struggle … It’s work to be hopeful.”

I am regularly asked, when I speak to groups in frank terms about the peril in front of us, about the temptation of hopelessness: “How can we keep going when the progress accumulated over our lifetimes has been reversed?” But we go forward because that progress was made against forces that will never stop trying to reverse it.

The failure to communicate that is a failure of our leaders, many of whom came of age in a period of progressive victories that they seemed to believe — due to naïveté or willful blindness — would continue to move in one expansive direction. It is no accident that many who believed this came from or moved into classes of power and privilege, where they could remain insulated from the erosions that have been grinding away this whole time, right under their noses.

This stubborn belief in a kind of Forever Progress has undergirded a political message that there was nothing to worry about. It has prevented a proper understanding of this country’s history and its foundational power imbalances. And now it is the shattering of this belief that pulls people toward despair.

But despair is poison. It deadens people when the most important thing they can do is proceed with more drive and force and openness than they have before. Which is why the work ahead is insisting on hope, behaving as if there is reason for hope, even if you feel, based on the ample available evidence, that there is not...

Still more.

The Sword Drops: Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade; Clarence Thomas Says Contraceptives, Gay Rights, and Homosexual Marriage on the Chopping Block (VIDEO)

The day has come. The Sword of Damocles has crashed down on the constitutional right to an abortion. The Court's decision is the most consequential in generations, and will make the abortion issue even more contentious and controversial than it's been already.

But contra the Democrats, especially President Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, it's doubtful that "abortion will be on the ballot" this fall. Bread and butter issues, kitchen table issues, will be on the ballot, and what better way for the radical Democrat Party to try to change the subject, try to turn the page on the misery the great majority of Americans are feeling amid the worst economy since the 1980s. 

It's a big day. 

At the Los Angeles Times, "In historic reversal, Supreme Court overturns Roe vs. Wade, frees states to outlaw abortion: The ruling marks the most significant curtailing of an established constitutional right in the Supreme Court’s history":

WASHINGTON — In a historic reversal, the Supreme Court on Friday overturned the landmark 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision and ruled states may again outlaw abortion.

The court’s conservative majority said the Constitution does not protect the rights of women to choose abortion and instead leaves these decisions in the hands of state lawmakers.

The 5-4 ruling marks the most significant curtailing of an established constitutional right in the court’s history.

The opinion written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. closely tracks a draft that was leaked by Politico in May.

“We hold that Roe and [the 1992 Planned Parenthood vs.] Casey must be overruled,” Alito wrote. “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision, including the one on which the defenders of Roe and Casey now chiefly rely — the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment.”

The opinion was joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. concurred but did not join the majority opinion in overturning Roe, saying he would have upheld only a Mississippi 15-week ban on abortion. That made the decision to uphold Mississippi’s law a 6-3 opinion.

“The court’s decision to overrule Roe and Casey is a serious jolt to the legal system,” Roberts wrote.

The court’s three liberal justices — Justice Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — dissented.

“Today, the court ... says that from the very moment of fertilization, a woman has no rights to speak of,” their dissent read. “A state can force her to bring a pregnancy to term, even at the steepest personal and familial costs.”

The dissenting justices concluded, “Whatever the exact scope of the coming laws, one result of today’s decision is certain: the curtailment of women’s rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens.”

The ruling figures to set off a fierce political fight nationwide and state by state as politicians and voters weigh in on whether abortion should be restricted or prohibited entirely.

Opinion polls show most Americans support access to abortion, at least in the early months of a pregnancy. Nevertheless, half the states are expected to seek to quickly enforce laws that make most abortions illegal.

The decision is the high court’s most far-reaching reversal on a matter of constitutional rights since 1954, when the justices reversed six decades of precedent and struck down laws authorizing racial segregation.

But that unanimous decision in Brown vs. Board of Education expanded the rights of individuals and rejected conservative state laws, while today’s does the opposite. It empowers states and reverses what had been the most significant women’s rights ruling in the court’s history.

For the U.S. Catholic bishops as well as evangelical Christians who believe abortion ends a human life and is immoral, the ruling is a triumph decades in the making. They had refused to accept the idea the Constitution protected abortion as a fundamental right...

Keep reading.

 

He Was Just a Bitter Man With a Mob

From Andrew Sullivan, "A Man And A Mob: Our Constitutional crisis is due to Donald Trump. And Donald Trump alone":

“Frankly there is no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president,” - former veep Mike Pence.

There is a tendency, and I understand it, to view the crisis of democratic legitimacy in this country as multi-determined. The rank failure of elites this century, the intellectual barrenness of the pre-Trump GOP, the ever-further radicalization of the left, along with the cultural impacts of mass immigration and free trade, all count as contributing factors. You can tell the story in many different ways, with varying emphases, and assignations of blame.

But this complexity misses something important — the contingent importance of individuals in human history. And the truth is: we would not be where we are now without Donald Trump, and Donald Trump alone. He is unique in American history, a president who told us in advance he would never accept any election result that showed him losing, and then proved it. He tried to overturn the transfer of power to his successor by threats and violence. No president in history has ever done such a thing — betrayed and violated the core of our republic — from Washington’s extraordinary example onwards. The stain of Trump is as unique as it is indelible.

Without Trump, January 6 would never have happened. It was his idea, and his alone. No one in his closest inner circle believed he had won the election on November 3. They all knew that the Trump presidency was “the rotten carcass of a boat, not rigg’d, / Nor tackle, sail, nor mast.” None of them would have attempted to keep it afloat.

And, thanks to the January 6 Committee, we now know this for certain. Mike Pence, his vice president, didn’t believe Trump had won, let alone by a landslide — for which he was targeted to be hanged by the mob Trump gathered. (A new detail: Trump — after the violence had already broken out — incited the mob against Pence directly, and they surged to get within 40 feet of him.)

His daughter Ivanka and Jared Kushner also didn’t believe Trump had won — and we now know they planned to move to Miami only 24 hours after Trump declared he had been robbed. Trump’s beloved Hope Hicks didn’t believe he’d won. His campaign manager Bill Stepien didn’t either, and in a lovely understatement said he “didn’t think what was happening was necessarily honest or professional.” Even Kellyanne “alternative facts” Conway didn’t think he’d won.

Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, didn’t think he’d won either, and told him so: “I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the president was bullshit. And I didn’t want to be a part of it.” Here’s how Trump responded to his top cop telling the truth: “This is killing me. You must have said this because you hate Trump, you hate Trump.” For Trump, there is no objective reality; no actual facts to be considered. There is only his subjective reality, where non-facts are asserted with the intensity of a madman.

Who did believe that Trump had won? A shit-faced Rudy Giuliani on election night; the fruitcake — and now disbarred — conspiracist Sidney Powell; QAnon nutter Lin Wood, who wanted the vice president to face a firing squad for doing his job; and another deranged flunky, Peter Navarro. Then there was the disgraceful John Eastman, who crafted a legal strategy that he knew was unconstitutional, illegal and could lead to riots. “Garbage in, garbage out,” was how Trump’s former chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, described the clique and their plots.

The cockamamie scheme these oddballs constructed aimed at bullying Republican state legislators to provide alternative electors who would back Trump in the Electoral College, despite the votes in their states, and to coerce Mike Pence to refuse to certify the election on January 6, so they’d have time to overturn the results. (A freelancer to the fiasco, Ginni Thomas, wife of Clarence, pressed 29 legislators in Arizona to change their slate of electors.)

This required harassment of GOP officials in the states to simply “find” more votes for Trump. At this point, it’s only Trump, his new inner circle of nut-cases, Fox News, and mobs around the country. Nothing was ruled out. At one point, they considered seizing voting machines and calling out the military. Trump tweeted threats to individual office-holders to get them to bend the knee. Here is an account by one, a Republican commissioner in Philly, who looked into Giuliani’s claim that 8,000 dead people had voted in his city, found none, and said so:

[P]rior to that [tweet from Trump], the threats were pretty general in nature. Corrupt election officials in Philadelphia are going to get what’s coming to them. You’re what the second amendment is for. You’re walking into the lion’s den. All sorts of things like that.

After the President tweeted at me by name, calling me out the way that he did, the threats became much more specific, much more graphic, and included not just me by name but included members of my family by name, their ages, our address, pictures of our home. Just every bit of detail that you could imagine.

That’s Trump leveraging violence against election officials for defending the integrity of the vote. No surprise then that he repeated this strategy against his own “pussy” vice president and the Congress itself — egging on a mob he had summoned to ransack the Capitol building to stop the certification (“it’s going to be wild!”), and refusing repeatedly to intervene throughout the day to stop the violence, even as others begged him to. The night before the mayhem, Trump had left the White House door open — highly unusual for him. And this was winter in Washington. According to Costa and Woodward, when Trump was asked to shut it by shivering staffers, he responded: “I want to hear my people. Listen. They have courage. Listen.”

He was emphatically told he’d lost the election. He was told what he was trying to do was illegal and unconstitutional, days before he directed the mob. But he didn’t care and did it anyway. Eastman for his part knew he was committing a crime against the Constitution, a crime which might have set off rioting in the streets, which is why (we now know) he sought a preemptive pardon for his malfeasance. How’s that for an admission of guilt? But he didn’t care and did it anyway.

There are simply no precedents in history for this kind of assault on the core principles of the American republic. None. And there is no precedent for a president, having been exposed as a fantasist, to carry on, insisting that his fever dream remains reality, attacking the very legitimacy of our democracy, day after day. The idea that he could run again — or again become president — could only be entertained by those who wish to end the American experiment.

Peruse the 12-page letter Trump put out in response to the hearings. It is the work of someone with no grip on reality, absurd lie after lie after lie, barely literate, the kind of thing you’d think was written by a lunatic if you received it in the mail. Any other president would have conceded on election night. Others with a real case (unlike Trump’s) — Nixon in 1960, Gore in 2000 — knew what their duty was. They cared more about the republic than themselves — a concept simply outside Trump’s cognition. In four years, he never acted as a president. He only ever acted as Trump.

In the bitter end, he was just a man with a mob. Not a Republican. Not a politician. Not a president. Not a member of any political party but his own cult. A mindless, raging, bullying thug. The hearings have methodically and calmly revealed this, masterfully led by a Republican, Liz Cheney, through testimony supplied by Republican after Republican witness.

And yet just this week, Trump acolytes repeating his lies won primaries in Nevada and South Carolina. Republican election officials in some states have said they will decide the results of future elections — and not the voters. Steve Bannon has encouraged a wave of new candidates in positions overseeing elections to foment chaos. The crisis Trump — and Trump alone — has created is not over. Biden’s legacy — an abandonment of his mandate for moderation, soaring inflation, an imminent recession, yet another new war, and woker-than-woke extremism — has only deepened it.

So it’s up to Republicans to save us. In the words of Michael Luttig, “as a political matter of fact only the party that instigated this war over our democracy can bring an end to that war.” And here I just want to appeal to any conservatives or Republicans who might read this. You know I’m not a flaming liberal. You know I agree with many of you on the threat from the far left. So hear me out: The party of Lincoln cannot coexist with the cult of Trump. What Trump did to the republic has nothing whatsoever to do with conservatism. It’s the antithesis of conservatism, a revolutionary act to create a constitutional crisis, an assault on tradition, an attack on America itself. You may soon have a chance to run the country again. Don’t throw that away for the sake of a man who cares about nothing but himself...

Jedediah Bila 'LIVE' (VIDEO)

On Twitter, I find myself agreeing with Ms. Jedediah more than anyone else, man or woman. She nails things every time. A national treasure.

Her new podcast, at Valuetainment, debuted June 8th.

Here's yesterday's show, on parenting and more.

WATCH:

Sohrab Ahmari, The Unbroken Thread

At Amazon, Sohrab Ahmari, The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos.

A Manifesto on National Conservatism

This is a clarifying document with much to like (even more so, seeing it moved one writer at the Washington Post to attack it as "fascist"). 

Some parts are just okay, though. 

The document can't reconcile America's role as the "indispensable nation" in world affairs with the current domestic populist isolationist zeitgeist. The United States is simply too powerful to assume that we can completely shrink from what the authors call "liberal imperialism." Political fashions come and go. We've had major populist movements for reform previously, which, for example, later tailed-off into a more New Deal-style liberalism, that is, radical progressive statism, etc. The same in foreign policy. Should Russia and China agree to formally ally against the U.S., and to threaten U.S. interests beyond Ukraine --- say, with a Russian war in Western Europe or the establishment of Chinese forward operating bases in Latin America --- things will change, and the U.S., in its role as the world's liberal hegemon, will be forced to act according to the pressures of national security in an anarchic world of interstate competition and power shifts. 

The manifesto's a product of the Edmund Burke Foundation and is endorsed by such big name MAGA-esque figures as Michael Anton, Victor Davis Hanson, and Julie Kelly, among others.

See, "National Conservatism: A Statement of Principles." It's a ten-point program. Here's 8-10:

8. Family and Children. We believe the traditional family is the source of society’s virtues and deserves greater support from public policy. The traditional family, built around a lifelong bond between a man and a woman, and on a lifelong bond between parents and children, is the foundation of all other achievements of our civilization. The disintegration of the family, including a marked decline in marriage and childbirth, gravely threatens the wellbeing and sustainability of democratic nations. Among the causes are an unconstrained individualism that regards children as a burden, while encouraging ever more radical forms of sexual license and experimentation as an alternative to the responsibilities of family and congregational life. Economic and cultural conditions that foster stable family and congregational life and child-raising are priorities of the highest order.

9. Immigration. Immigration has made immense contributions to the strength and prosperity of Western nations. But today’s penchant for uncontrolled and unassimilated immigration has become a source of weakness and instability, not strength and dynamism, threatening internal dissension and ultimately dissolution of the political community. We note that Western nations have benefited from both liberal and restrictive immigration policies at various times. We call for much more restrictive policies until these countries summon the wit to establish more balanced, productive, and assimilationist policies. Restrictive policies may sometimes include a moratorium on immigration.

10. Race. We believe that all men are created in the image of God and that public policy should reflect that fact. No person’s worth or loyalties can be judged by the shape of his features, the color of his skin, or the results of a lab test. The history of racialist ideology and oppression and its ongoing consequences require us to emphasize this truth. We condemn the use of state and private institutions to discriminate and divide us against one another on the basis of race. The cultural sympathies encouraged by a decent nationalism offer a sound basis for conciliation and unity among diverse communities. The nationalism we espouse respects, and indeed combines, the unique needs of particular minority communities and the common good of the nation as a whole.

RTWT. 

Allan J. Lichtman, White Protestant Nation

At Amazon, Allan J. Lichtman, White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement.

Lincoln Project's Attack on Elise Stefanik is Evil

I don't think I've ever posted on the Lincoln Project. I've basically ignored "Never Trumpers" since President Trump was first elected, and even before. They're nothing to me. I do like Amanda Carpenter, as I've known her on Twitter a long time, though it bothers me she writes at the Bulwark, perhaps the home base of traditional conservative attacks on populist nationalism in the U.S., and especially Trump. 

But I gotta say, this Lincoln Project campaign spot is so over the top attacking Rep. Stefanik as evil, that it's evil. 

Demonizing your political opponents is just a thing in the online world. You'd think folks in elite Washington would take a step back and perhaps practice the teeniest moderation and civility. But no. Dehumanizing your political enemies is the best way to mobilize your base these days. It's off-putting, to say the least. 

A dark turn. 

WATCH:

PREVIOUSLY: "Rep. Elise Stefanik Rejects Allegations of Invoking 'Great Replacement Rhetoric' (VIDEO)."

Rep. Elise Stefanik Rejects Allegations of Invoking 'Great Replacement Rhetoric' (VIDEO)

She had a killer interview with Harris Faukner on Fox this morning. She's spunky and fired up. I love her message. Last night's primaries were a disaster for the Democrats, and she's expecting the GOP to sweep into power and start shutting down the left's radical agenda next January.

It's no wonder Democrats are now trying to destroy her, alleging her campaign spots have invoked the dreaded "great replacement theory."

At the Wall Street Journal, "GOP Leaders Face Calls to Denounce White Supremacy, ‘Replacement’ Theory":

Stefanik rejects any tie between party rhetoric and racist violence as Cheney criticizes Republican leadership.

WASHINGTON—Some GOP lawmakers are calling for Republican Party leaders to forcefully denounce white supremacy, after the deadly shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., sparked renewed focus on political rhetoric related to race and immigration.

Eleven of the people shot at the supermarket were Black, and two were white. In documents posted online that police think the alleged shooter wrote and compiled, he cited racist conspiracy theories he discovered on Internet message boards. At several points, he condemns both Democrats and Republicans as being controlled by a Jewish conspiracy.

In the documents, the writer presents racist and anti-Semitic views and references the “great replacement,” a conspiracy theory centered on the notion that whites are being systematically replaced with other racial groups and immigrants. Police said he targeted the grocery store because of its location in a Black neighborhood. In one document, he attacks immigration as “ethnic replacement.”

In the aftermath of the shooting, in which 10 people were killed, Democrats and some Republicans who are vocal critics of former President Donald Trump and his political movement called for other GOP lawmakers to condemn white supremacist rhetoric. Mr. Trump rose to prominence during his first presidential campaign in part by deploying harsh language about illegal immigrants that his critics said often was dehumanizing and racist.

After a woman was killed at a 2017 march of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va., Mr. Trump wavered on condemning the marchers, at one point saying there were “very fine people, on both sides.”

Rep. Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.), who was kicked out of the Republican House leadership last year after sharply criticizing Mr. Trump over the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol, said House GOP leaders have enabled white nationalism and anti-Semitism and must renounce those views within the party. “History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse,” Ms. Cheney tweeted.

Back in February, she said party leaders should have been tougher on Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) for speaking at an event organized by a white nationalist.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R., Ill.) tweeted that the “replacement theory they are pushing/tolerating is getting people killed.” Mr. Kinzinger, who isn’t running for reelection, said Republicans need to oust Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 3 House Republican, along with Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.).

“We’ve never supported white supremacy,” Mr. McCarthy said Monday night. “The suspect is the very worst of humanity and for political individuals to try to make some political game out of this shows how little they are.”

A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump, Liz Harrington, said, “It is truly disgusting to use an evil act of mass murder by a mentally ill individual against your political opponents. But nothing is beneath the Democrat Party. Our prayers are with the victims and their families.”

Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House Republican Whip, said Republicans have been very vocal against white nationalism. He also referenced the 2017 shooting at a congressional baseball game practice that left him badly wounded, saying he knew from experience that the aftermath of a tragedy is a time for prayers, not ratcheting up the rhetoric and blame.

Ms. Stefanik, in a statement, said she was “heartbroken and saddened to hear the tragic news of the horrific loss of life” in Buffalo. Her camp rejected the idea that being tough on illegal immigration amounted to promoting white supremacy or racism.

Stefanik senior adviser Alex deGrasse said any attempt to tie the shooting to Ms. Stefanik “is a new disgusting low for the left, their Never Trump allies” and the media. “Ms. Stefanik has never advocated for any racist position or made a racist statement.”

The comments came after scrutiny of her past campaign ads. The Washington Post reported that Ms. Stefanik’s campaign committee paid for Facebook ads last year that said Democrats were seeking a “permanent election insurrection” by giving millions illegal immigrants citizenship in an attempt to bolster their election chances...

 

Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets

Well, considering how J.D. Vance won the Ohio GOP Senate primary last night, perhaps folks might be interesting in this.

At Vanity Fair, "They’re not MAGA. They’re not QAnon. Curtis Yarvin and the rising right are crafting a different strain of conservative politics."

Matthew Continetti, The Right

At Amazon, Matthew Continetti, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism.

The Return of the Old American Right

From Matthew Continetti, at WSJ, "The Trump GOP resembles the party of Calvin Coolidge in its commitment to economic protection, restricted immigration and non-intervention abroad":

It’s hard to think of two American presidents with less in common than Calvin Coolidge and Donald Trump. For one thing, Coolidge held a variety of public offices, from Massachusetts governor to vice president, before assuming office on Aug. 2, 1923. Mr. Trump had no government or military experience before his inauguration in 2017.

Coolidge, moreover, was a budget hawk who never met a line item he didn’t want to cut. Mr. Trump presided over record peacetime deficits even before federal spending took a quantum leap during the coronavirus pandemic. Coolidge was also a man of few words. Trump is not.

Yet these personal differences obscure important political similarities. Both Coolidge and Mr. Trump staked their presidencies on voter satisfaction with broadly shared prosperity. Both supported restricting immigration into the United States. Both wanted to protect American industry from foreign competition. Both sought to avoid overseas entanglements.

Mr. Trump’s views now dominate the Republican Party. For anyone who grew up with the GOP of Ronald Reagan, the two Bushes and John McCain, this can be strange and bewildering. But in many respects, it’s a return to the principles of the 1920s, of Coolidge and his predecessor Warren Harding. Their conservatism was delegitimized by the crises of the 20th century. The Great Depression robbed the right of its claim to promoting prosperity. FDR’s New Deal created a federal government that Republicans did not comprehend or control. Then World War II discredited the right’s noninterventionist foreign policy. What emerged from the rubble was a postwar conservative movement that embraced alliances, military intervention, forward defense, free trade and open immigration to defeat communism and fuel economic growth.

This postwar conservative internationalism—known to its critics on the right as “globalism”—may have been an aberration. Today, the GOP is reverting to its pre-World War II identity as the party of low taxes, economic protection, restricted immigration, wariness of foreign intervention and religious piety. This retro-Republicanism could turn out to be a popular mix, but history shows that it is also a combustible one.

By the beginning of the 1920s, the American electorate had soured on its experiences with the Progressive movement and the Great War. The influenza pandemic of 1918-20, the Red-hunting of Wilson administration officials A. Mitchell Palmer and J. Edgar Hoover, and postwar recession all contributed to civil unrest. Change came in the form of a garrulous Republican politician from Ohio named Warren Harding.

“Our supreme task,” President Harding said in his inaugural address, “is the resumption of our onward, normal way.” Harding promised to reduce social tensions. He disavowed foreign intervention and withdrew U.S. occupation forces from postwar Germany. His secretary of state pursued disarmament treaties with the great powers. He opposed Wilson’s League of Nations.

For Harding, “normalcy” meant nation-building at home. He raised tariffs and restricted imports. And he venerated the Constitution. In a speech delivered in 1920, he called the document “the very base of all Americanism, the ‘Ark of the Covenant’ of American liberty, the very temple of equal rights.”

When Harding died in office in 1923, Calvin Coolidge did not depart from this constitutionalist path. To Coolidge, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution offered the last words in a centuries-long argument over popular sovereignty. “If all men are created equal, that is final,” he said. “If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.”

Coolidge argued that success in self-government was related to religious faith. Political freedom depended on traditional morality and self-control. He called on Americans to preserve the inheritance of the Founders, to follow “the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed.”

Coolidge opposed immigration. He and Harding signed into law two restriction acts that shut off entry to the U.S. for the next 40 years. As he closed the door to mass migration, however, Coolidge also celebrated the contributions of earlier waves of immigrants. “Whether one traces his Americanism back three centuries to the Mayflower, or three years [to] steerage,” he told the American Legion in 1925, “is not half so important as whether his Americanism of today is real and genuine. No matter by what various crafts we came here, we are all now in the same boat.” But there was no room for additional passengers.

Coolidge was out of office for less than a year when the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression upended the established order. His Republican successor as president, former secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover, struggled to contain the economic fallout and social disorder. “This election is not a mere shift from the ins to the outs,” Hoover said in the run-up to the 1932 election. “It means deciding the direction our Nation will take over a century to come.”

The nation opted for New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal created a bureaucratic structure of government, centralized in the nation’s capital, which quickly won the enmity of conservatives. The upheaval of the 1930s drove the partisans of strict constitutionalism and nonintervention in economics and foreign affairs from positions of power and influence.

The GOP was a leaderless rump until the election of 1938, when it found a new spokesman in Ohio senator Robert A. Taft. As the son of President William Howard Taft, he had been raised to uphold the constitutionalist, free-market, noninterventionist traditions of his party. The reach of state power under FDR and its concentration in the executive branch reminded him of the new authoritarian governments in Europe. The New Deal, he said, was “absolutely contrary to the whole American theory on which this country was founded.”

Taft’s philosophy contained all the principles of his father, Harding and Coolidge. As he put it in 1938, “The regulation of wages, hours, and prices and practices in every industry is something which is, in effect, socialism; which is government regulation of the worst sort; which means a totalitarian state.”

For Taft, Roosevelt’s preparations for war against Germany were the foreign-policy equivalent of the New Deal. He had worked for Herbert Hoover at the American Relief Administration during the final years of the Wilson presidency, and what he saw amid the rubble of the Great War confirmed his loathing of great-power competition. Europe was a charnel house of nationalism, dynastic politics and class struggle. Taft wanted the U.S. to avoid it and warned against mobilizing American armed forces too quickly. “Our armament program should be based on defending the United States and not defending democracy throughout the world,” he said in response to Roosevelt’s 1939 State of the Union address, in which the president warned of the rise of Nazism and called for increased defense spending

The GOP was a leaderless rump until the election of 1938, when it found a new spokesman in Ohio senator Robert A. Taft. As the son of President William Howard Taft, he had been raised to uphold the constitutionalist, free-market, noninterventionist traditions of his party. The reach of state power under FDR and its concentration in the executive branch reminded him of the new authoritarian governments in Europe. The New Deal, he said, was “absolutely contrary to the whole American theory on which this country was founded.”

Taft’s philosophy contained all the principles of his father, Harding and Coolidge. As he put it in 1938, “The regulation of wages, hours, and prices and practices in every industry is something which is, in effect, socialism; which is government regulation of the worst sort; which means a totalitarian state.”

For Taft, Roosevelt’s preparations for war against Germany were the foreign-policy equivalent of the New Deal. He had worked for Herbert Hoover at the American Relief Administration during the final years of the Wilson presidency, and what he saw amid the rubble of the Great War confirmed his loathing of great-power competition. Europe was a charnel house of nationalism, dynastic politics and class struggle. Taft wanted the U.S. to avoid it and warned against mobilizing American armed forces too quickly. “Our armament program should be based on defending the United States and not defending democracy throughout the world,” he said in response to Roosevelt’s 1939 State of the Union address, in which the president warned of the rise of Nazism and called for increased defense spending.

In the view of Taft and other noninterventionist conservatives, war would expand government, lead to rationing, and invest FDR with a dangerous amount of authority. The U.S. should defend the mainland and the Caribbean basin, Taft said, but otherwise it should leave the conflagration in Europe to burn itself out. His priority was the home front. “There is a good deal more danger of the infiltration of totalitarian ideas from the New Deal circle in Washington,” he told a St. Louis audience on May 20, 1940, “than there will ever be from any activities of the communists or the Nazi bund.”

Taft neither joined nor spoke for the antiwar America First Committee, but he welcomed its appearance on the national stage. The organization was established in 1940 in Chicago. Its founders included graduates of some of the nation’s elite educational institutions, and it drew support from Republicans, Democrats, Progressives, conservatives and even figures within the Roosevelt administration....

In its protectionism, resistance to immigration, religiosity, and antipathy to foreign entanglements, Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement resembles the conservatism of the 1920s—with one significant difference. In the 1920s, the right was in charge. It was self-confident and prosperous. It saw itself as defending core American institutions.

A century later, in the early 2020s, the right has been driven from power at the federal level. It has been locked out of the commanding heights of American culture: technology, media, entertainment, the academy. Its rhetoric has often veered into apocalypticism and conspiracy theory...

 

Victor Davis Hanson for Hillsdale College (VIDEO)

Here's his book, The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America.

And the video:

The Republican Party in 2022

 From Amanda Carpenter, at the Bulwark, "What It Means to Be a Republican in 2022":

What does it mean to be a Republican in the year 2022? Being hated. Yes, by the left—but more importantly, also by members of your own party.

Here in the bad, red place, hardly anyone gets along. Especially after January 6th. Why? Consider this a simple question: Whom does Donald Trump actually like?

In the old days, all a Republican had to do to make Trump happy was kiss his ass with some cheap flattery. Say he’s the biggest, strongest, handsomest, smartest, richest dude in history and that would be enough. But today, being on Trump’s good side requires accepting his 2020 election lie and endorsing his various schemes to overturn the results.

And if you’re not gonna do that? Then GTFO. Trump doesn’t want you around. As long as Trump is in charge, your future in the GOP is dead.

Just ask Mike Pence.

Pence spent four years as vice president gazing adoringly into Trump’s profile and swooning over his broad shoulders only to be cast out when he refused to block Joe Biden’s certification as president. Trump told Pence, “I don’t want to be your friend anymore if you don’t do this.” When Pence didn’t, he was promptly sentenced to death, political and otherwise, by Trump’s troops who chanted “Hang Mike Pence” as they marauded the halls of Congress. Trump told ABC’s Jonathan Karl that his supporters wanted to hang Mike Pence “because it’s common sense, Jon.” Trump recently described Pence as “mortally wounded.”

Likewise, after Attorney General William Barr told a reporter there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election, Trump fumed at him: “You must really hate Trump.” Similarly, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger lost any goodwill they might have felt from the former president when they informed him they could not “find” enough votes for him to win that state. Ditto Arizona Governor Doug Ducey.

Heck, the number of Trump’s own cabinet officials whom the former president can’t stand—and who can’t stand him in return—is remarkable.

Because here’s the rub: To the former president, being “Trump’s friend” means never saying no to him. Even when it comes to acting on lies that caused an insurrection.

It’s the friendship of the mob boss: Do what he tells you and there won’t be any trouble. Which explains a lot of the behind-the-scenes grumbling in Republican politics. The guys paying protection money never actually like the mob boss...

Keep reading.

 

Wanting to Convince People to Support You is Not 'Popularism'

It's Freddie deBoer, "[I]t's just politics, it's just movement building, it's just power":

The “popularism” debate is, now, yesterday’s news, although I have a feeling it will crop back up around the 2022 midterms, particularly if the expected happens and the Democrats get walloped. Popularism is an awkward term that stresses the importance of, well, of politicians and political parties being popular with voters. (Crazy.) As Ezra Klein put it in a piece on these themes that centered on the pollster David Shor, “Democrats should do a lot of polling to figure out which of their views are popular and which are not popular, and then they should talk about the popular stuff and shut up about the unpopular stuff.” ...

Keep reading.

 

Beautiful Katie Pavlich for Halloween

She's a knockout. 

And smarter than a stack of encyclopedias. 

On Twitter:

Shaken, not stirred #007 🍸🖤https://t.co/pfbAwPHteN pic.twitter.com/0WLMFI4VEs

— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) October 31, 2021

Americans Stretch Across Political Divides to Welcome Afghan Refugees

This is fine with me, though, of course, not for most Trump supporters. 

As always, my concern is that jihadi terrorists will be admitted to the country along with Afghans who helped the U.S., and along with the tens of thousands of regular Afghans fleeing totalitarian terrorism. 

At NYT, "'Even the most right-leaning isolationists' are coming forward to help those fleeing Afghanistan, a pastor said. A mass mobilization is underway":

Wow.

Just one poll, but “Welcoming Afghan translators to the US” looks like the most popular and bipartisan policy idea I’ve seen in a long, long time pic.twitter.com/o09sWjrnXE

— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) August 22, 2021

PHOENIX — The hundreds of parishioners at Desert Springs Bible Church, a sprawling megachurch in the northern suburbs of Phoenix, are divided over mask mandates, the presidential election and what to do about migrants on the border. But they are unified on one issue: the need for the United States to take in thousands of Afghan evacuees, and they are passing the plate to make it happen.

“Even the most right-leaning isolationists within our sphere recognize the level of responsibility that America has to people who sacrificed for the nation’s interest,” said Caleb Campbell, the evangelical church’s lead pastor.

Last weekend, the church inaugurated a campaign to raise money for the dozens of Afghan families who are expected to start streaming into greater Phoenix in the next several weeks. Already, thousands of dollars have flowed into the church’s “benevolence fund.”

“This is a galvanizing moment,” said Mr. Campbell, 39.

Throughout the United States, Americans across the political spectrum are stepping forward to welcome Afghans who aided the U.S. war effort in one of the largest mass mobilizations of volunteers since the end of the Vietnam War.

In rural Minnesota, an agricultural specialist has been working on visa applications and providing temporary housing for the newcomers, and she has set up an area for halal meat processing on her farm. In California, a group of veterans has sent a welcoming committee to the Sacramento airport to greet every arriving family. In Arkansas, volunteers are signing up to buy groceries, do airport pickups and host families in their homes.

“Thousands of people just fled their homeland with maybe one set of spare clothes,” said Jessica Ginger, 39, of Bentonville, Ark. “They need housing and support, and I can offer both.”

Donations are pouring into nonprofits that assist refugees, even though in most places few Afghans have arrived yet. At Mission Community Church in the conservative bedroom community of Gilbert outside Phoenix, parishioners have been collecting socks, underwear, shoes and laundry supplies.

Mars Adema, 40, said she had tried over the past year to convince the church’s ministries to care for immigrants, only to hear that “this is just not our focus.”

“With Afghanistan, something completely shifted,” Ms. Adema said.

In a nation that is polarized on issues from abortion to the coronavirus pandemic, Afghan refugees have cleaved a special place for many Americans, especially those who worked for U.S. forces and NGOs, or who otherwise aided the U.S. effort to free Afghanistan from the Taliban.

The moment stands in contrast to the last four years when the country, led by a president who restricted immigration and enacted a ban on travel from several majority-Muslim countries, was split over whether to welcome or shun people seeking safe haven. And with much of the electorate still deeply divided over immigration, the durability of the present welcome mat remains unknown.

Polls show Republicans are still more hesitant than Democrats to receive Afghans, and some conservative politicians have warned that the rush to resettle so many risks allowing extremists to slip through the screening process. Influential commentators, like Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host, have said the refugees would dilute American culture and harm the Republican Party. Last week, he warned that the Biden administration was “flooding swing districts with refugees that they know will become loyal Democratic voters.”

But a broad array of veterans and lawmakers have long regarded Afghans who helped the United States as military partners, and have long pushed to remove the red tape that has kept them in the country under constant threat from the Taliban. Images of babies being lifted over barbed-wire fences to American soldiers, people clinging to departing planes and a deadly terrorist attack against thousands massed at the airport, desperate to leave, have moved thousands of Americans to join their effort.

“For a nation that has been so divided, it feels good for people to align on a good cause,” said Mike Sullivan, director of the Welcome to America Project in Phoenix. “This country probably hasn’t seen anything like this since Vietnam.”

Federal officials said this week that at least 50,000 Afghans who assisted the United States government or who might be targeted by the Taliban are expected to be admitted into the United States in the coming month, though the full number and the time frame of their arrival remains a work in progress. More than 31,000 Afghans have arrived already, though about half were still being processed on military bases, according to internal government documents...

 

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Ms. Hostetter

I mentioned how once in a while the New York Times does "get it right," or nearabouts, which, as noted, is why I still read the paper (along with the L.A. Times) on most days. 

Now, I'm not saying this article is perfect, but it's pretty good --- and darned interesting --- as it's a story that literally "hits close to home," in the O.C. where I live, and where, actually, there are indeed a lot of crazy nut cases (and while I don't know if Ms. Hostetter is crazy, her husband sounds questionable, which adds to the intrigue here, so, well, that's it). 

At NYT, "A Teacher Marched to the Capitol. When She Got Home, the Fight Began":

Kristine Hostetter was a beloved fourth-grade teacher. Then came the pandemic, the election and the Jan. 6 riot in Washington.

SAN CLEMENTE, Calif. — Word got around when Kristine Hostetter was spotted at a public mask-burning at the San Clemente pier, and when she appeared in a video sitting onstage as her husband spoke at a QAnon convention. People talked when she angrily accosted a family wearing masks near a local surfing spot, her granddaughter in tow.

Even in San Clemente, a well-heeled redoubt of Southern California conservatism, Ms. Hostetter stood out for her vehement embrace of both the rebellion against Covid-19 restrictions and the stolen-election lies pushed by former President Donald J. Trump. This was, after all, a teacher so beloved that each summer parents jockeyed to get their children into her fourth-grade class.

But it was not until Ms. Hostetter’s husband posted a video of her marching down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol on Jan. 6 that her politics collided with an opposite force gaining momentum in San Clemente: a growing number of left-leaning parents and students who, in the wake of the civil-rights protests set off by the police killing of George Floyd, decided they would no longer countenance the right-wing tilt of their neighbors and the racism they said was commonplace.

That there was no evidence that Ms. Hostetter had displayed any overt racism was beside the point — to them, her pro-Trump views seemed self-evidently laced with white supremacy. So she became their cause.

First, a student group organized a petition demanding the school district investigate whether Ms. Hostetter, 54, had taken part in the attack on the Capitol, and whether her politics had crept into her teaching. Then, when the district complied and suspended her, a group of parents put up a counter petition.

“If the district starts disciplinary action based on people’s beliefs/politics, what’s next? Religious discrimination?” it warned.

Each petition attracted thousands of signatures, and San Clemente has spent the months since embroiled in the divisive politics of post-Trump America, wrestling with uncomfortable questions about the limits of free speech and whether Ms. Hostetter and those who share her views should be written off as conspiracy theorists and racists who have no place in public life, not to mention shaping young minds in a classroom.

It has not been a polite debate. Neighbors have taken to monitoring one another’s social media posts; some have infiltrated private Facebook groups to figure out who is with them and who is not — and they have the screenshots to prove it.

Even the local yoga community, where Ms. Hostetter’s husband was a fixture, has found itself divided.

“It goes deeper than just her. A lot of conversations between parents, between friends, have already been fractured by Trump, by the election, by Black Lives Matter,” said Cady Anderson, whose two children attend Ms. Hostetter’s school.

Ms. Hostetter, she added, “just brought it all home to us.”

Complicating matters is Ms. Hostetter’s relative silence. Apart from appearing at protests and the incident at the beach, she has said little publicly over the past year, and did not respond to repeated interview requests for this article. People have filled in the blanks.

To Ms. Hostetter’s backers, the entire affair is being overblown by an intolerant mob of woke liberals who have no respect for the privacy of someone’s personal politics. Yet Ms. Hostetter’s politics, while personal, are hardly private, and to those who have lined up against her, she is inextricably linked to her husband, Alan, who last year emerged as a rising star in Southern California’s resurgent far right.

An Army veteran and former police chief of La Habra, Calif., Mr. Hostetter was known around San Clemente as a yoga guru — his specialty is “sound healing” with gongs, Tibetan bowls and Aboriginal didgeridoos — until the pandemic turned him into a self-declared “patriotic warrior.” He gave up yoga and founded the American Phoenix Project, which says it arose as a result of “the fear-based tyranny of 2020 caused by manipulative officials at the highest levels of our government.”

Throughout the spring, summer and fall, the American Phoenix Project organized protests against Covid-related restrictions up and down Orange County, and Mr. Hostetter’s list of enemies grew: Black Lives Matter protesters. The election thieves. Cabals and conspiracies drawn from QAnon, the movement that claims Mr. Trump was secretly battling devil-worshiping Democrats and international financiers who abuse children.

By Jan. 5, Mr. Hostetter, 56, had graduated to the national stage, appearing with the former Trump adviser Roger Stone at a rally outside the Supreme Court.

His appearance there and the next day at the Capitol prompted some of San Clemente’s more liberal residents to make bumper stickers that read: “Alan Hostraitor.” It also led the F.B.I. to raid his apartment in early February, though he was not arrested or charged with any crime. (He, too, did not respond to interview requests.)

Ms. Hostetter was there every step of the way, raising money and filming her husband as he rallied supporters at protests. When the American Phoenix Project filed incorporation papers in December, she was identified as its chief financial officer.

The Teacher

Ms. Hostetter grew up in Orange County back when locals still joked about the “Orange Curtain” separating its conservative and overwhelmingly white towns from liberal and diverse Los Angeles to the north. In the late 1960s, Richard M. Nixon turned an oceanside villa in San Clemente into his presidential getaway, christening it La Casa Pacifica. John Wayne kept his prized yacht, Wild Goose, docked up the coast in Newport Beach.

“Orange County,” Ronald Reagan once declared, “is where the good Republicans go before they die.”

It also was where surfers and spiritual seekers met cold warriors and conspiracy theorists, where some of the conservative movement’s most virulently racist, anti-Semitic and paranoid offshoots went. In the 1960s, Orange County saw a surge in the popularity of the John Birch Society, an anti-communist organization that in many ways presaged the rise of QAnon. In the 1980s, its surf spots became a magnet for neo-Nazis and skinheads. And in 2020, the onset of the pandemic produced a new generation of Orange County extremists.

If Ms. Hostetter had any strong political leanings before last year, she did not let on, said her niece, Emma Hall. She only picked up the first hint of her aunt’s rightward drift at small party to celebrate the Hostetters’ wedding in 2016.

“There were about six people, friends of theirs, that did not let up asking me if I was going to vote for Trump,” recalled Ms. Hall’s husband, Ryan.

Neither of the Halls gave it much thought. Ms. Hostetter seemed happy, and her new husband exuded the laid-back charm that typifies a certain kind of Southern California man in the American imagination...

More later.

 

G. Gordon Liddy, 1930-2021 (R.I.P.)

Gordon Liddy has passed away.

I'll just note, briefly, that Liddy was, of course, one of the MAJOR figures in the Watergate scandal, a topic I cover every semester, and teach the history of which, during my week of coverage on the presidency in my POLSC 1 classes. And of note, while Liddy himself has been really no interest to me all these years, the Watergate scandal has been. You see, in my very first "Introduction to American Politics Class," at Saddleback College, in 1986, our professor had all students read two books (besides the required textbook), and students were required to write a review and analysis of their chosen books, and I read two by the late, great American journalistic icon, Teddy White, who was, perhaps, one of the most important chroniclers of the Watergate scandal. These two tomes were, The Making of the President 1960, and Breach of Faith: The Fall of Richard Nixon, both of which I still have copies sitting on my bookshelf; and which, especially the latter, I read parts thereof, from time to time (especially when similar such scandals erupt in current politics, and I need to "get a grip" and perspective on things).

In any case, read the obituary, at the New York Times (with video here, featuring Judy Woodruff, at the P.B.S. News Hour, who is not a "newbie," and would actually know something about what happened back then), "G. Gordon Liddy, Mastermind Behind Watergate Burglary, Dies at 90":

G. Gordon Liddy, a cloak-and-dagger lawyer who masterminded dirty tricks for the White House and concocted the bungled burglary that led to the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in 1974, died on Tuesday in Mount Vernon, Va. He was 90.

His death, at the home of his daughter Alexandra Liddy Bourne, was confirmed by his son Thomas P. Liddy, who said that his father had Parkinson’s disease and had been in declining health.

Decades after Watergate entered the lexicon, Mr. Liddy was still an enigma in the cast of characters who fell from grace with the 37th president — to some a patriot who went silently to prison refusing to betray his comrades, to others a zealot who cashed in on bogus celebrity to become an author and syndicated talk show host.

As a leader of a White House “plumbers” unit set up to plug information leaks, and then as a strategist for the president’s re-election campaign, Mr. Liddy helped devise plots to discredit Nixon “enemies” and to disrupt the 1972 Democratic National Convention. Most were far-fetched — bizarre kidnappings, acts of sabotage, traps using prostitutes, even an assassination — and were never carried out.

But Mr. Liddy, a former F.B.I. agent, and E. Howard Hunt, a former C.I.A. agent, engineered two break-ins at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in Washington. On May 28, 1972, as Mr. Liddy and Mr. Hunt stood by, six Cuban expatriates and James W. McCord Jr., a Nixon campaign security official, went in, planted bugs, photographed documents and got away cleanly.

A few weeks later, on June 17, four Cubans and Mr. McCord, wearing surgical gloves and carrying walkie-talkies, returned to the scene and were caught by the police. Mr. Liddy and Mr. Hunt, running the operation from a Watergate hotel room, fled but were soon arrested and indicted on charges of burglary, wiretapping and conspiracy.

In the context of 1972, with Mr. Nixon’s triumphal visit to China and a steam-rolling presidential campaign that soon crushed the Democrat, Senator George S. McGovern, the Watergate case looked inconsequential at first. Mr. Nixon’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler, dismissed it as a “third-rate burglary.”

But it deepened a White House cover-up that had begun in 1971, when Mr. Liddy and Mr. Hunt broke into the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, looking for damaging information on him. Over the next two years, the cover-up unraveled under pressure of investigations, trials, hearings and headlines into the worst political scandal — and the first resignation by a sitting president — in the nation’s history.

Unlike the other Watergate defendants, Mr. Liddy refused to testify about his activities for the White House or the Committee to Re-elect the President, and drew the longest term among those who went to prison. He was sentenced by Judge John J. Sirica to 6 to 20 years, but served only 52 months. President Jimmy Carter commuted his term in 1977.

“I have lived as I believed I ought to have lived,” Mr. Liddy, a small dapper man with a baldish pate and a brushy mustache, told reporters after his release. He said he had no regrets and would do it again. “When the prince approaches his lieutenant, the proper response of the lieutenant to the prince is, ‘Fiat voluntas tua,’” he said, using the Latin of the Lord’s Prayer for “Thy will be done.”

Disbarred from law practice and in debt for $300,000, mostly for legal fees, Mr. Liddy began a new career as a writer. His first book, “Out of Control,” (1979) was a spy thriller. He later wrote another novel, “The Monkey Handlers” (1990), and a nonfiction book, “When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country” (2002). He also co-wrote a guide to fighting terrorism, “Fight Back! Tackling Terrorism, Liddy Style” (2006), and produced many articles on politics, taxes, health and other matters.

In 1980, he broke his silence on Watergate with his autobiography, “Will.” The reviews were mixed, but it became a best seller. After years of revelations by other Watergate conspirators, there was little new in it about the scandal, but critics said his account of prison life was graphic. A television movie based on the book was aired in 1982 by NBC.

Mr. Liddy found himself in demand on the college-lecture circuit. In 1982 he teamed with Timothy Leary, the 1960s LSD guru, for campus debates that were edited into a documentary film, “Return Engagement.” The title referred to an encounter in 1966, when Mr. Liddy, as a prosecutor in Dutchess County, N.Y., joined a raid on a drug cult in which Mr. Leary was arrested.

In the 1980s, Mr. Liddy dabbled in acting, appearing on “Miami Vice” and in other television and film roles. But he was better known later as a syndicated talk-radio host with a right-wing agenda. “The G. Gordon Liddy Show,” begun in 1992, was carried on hundreds of stations by Viacom and later Radio America, with satellite hookups and internet streaming. It ran until his retirement in 2012. He lived in Fort Washington, Md.

Mr. Liddy, who promoted nutritional supplements and exercised, was still trim in his 70s. He made parachute jumps, took motorcycle trips, collected guns, played a piano and sang lieder. His website showed him craggy-faced with head held high, an American flag and the Capitol dome in the background.

George Gordon Battle Liddy was born on Nov. 30, 1930, in Brooklyn to Sylvester J. and Maria (Abbaticchio) Liddy. He grew up in Hoboken, N.J., a fearful boy with respiratory problems who learned to steel himself with tests of will power. He lifted weights, ran and, as he recalled, held his hand over a flame as an act of self-discipline. He said he once ate a rat to overcome a repulsion, and decapitated chickens for a neighbor until he could kill like a soldier, “efficiently and without emotion or thought.”

Like his father, a lawyer, Gordon attended all-male St. Benedict’s Prep School in Newark and Fordham University in the Bronx. After graduating from Fordham in 1952, he took an Army commission with hopes of fighting in Korea, but was assigned to an antiaircraft radar unit in Brooklyn. In 1954, he returned to Fordham and earned a law degree three years later. In 1957, he married Frances Ann Purcell. The couple had five children. Along with his son Thomas and daughter Alexandra, he is survived by another daughter, Grace Liddy; two other sons, James Liddy and Raymond J. Liddy; a sister, Margaret McDermott; 12 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Mr. Liddy’s wife died in 2010.

From 1957 to 1962, Mr. Liddy was an F.B.I. field agent in Indianapolis, Gary, Ind., and Denver, and a supervisor of crime records in Washington. He then worked in patent law for his father’s firm in New York for four years. He joined the Dutchess County district attorney’s office as an assistant prosecutor in 1966.

In 1968, he began a dizzying, three-year rise from obscurity in Poughkeepsie to the White House. Challenging Hamilton Fish Jr. in a primary for the Republican nomination for Congress in what was then New York’s 28th District, he fell short, but his consolation prize was to take charge of the Nixon campaign in the mid-Hudson Valley, which the president won handily.

His reward was a job at the Treasury Department in Washington as a special assistant for narcotics and gun control. He helped develop the sky marshal program to counteract hijackers. Impressed, Egil Krogh, a deputy assistant to the president, recommended him in 1971 to John N. Mitchell, the attorney general, who recommended him to John D. Ehrlichman, the president’s domestic policy adviser...

Still more.