The Best of Your Light
A quick note about Senator Flake. When he announced he wasn't running for reelection, some pundits observed that he probably wouldn't have won his primary anyway. He is weak, unlike Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski, because he has no constituency for his deviations from Trumpism. This observation was often delivered in a sort of scolding manner. Here is Josh Barro making the basic argument.
Now there are plenty of bad things to say about Flake, most notably that he has not in fact leveraged his political power to constrain Trump in the manner you would expect from such an ardent Trump critic. But fundamentally Flake's problem is that he doesn't live in Alaska or Maine. Scolding him for lacking a political base feels like scolding Poland or Norway for lacking an army that could stop Hitler. "Look at Britain! It didn't surrender!" would be a pretty obnoxious thing to say. Britain didn't surrender because it had a real navy and an effective air force, and a channel between it and the continent. I shudder to think what would have happened if the Wehrmacht had a land crossing.
I say all this because Flake's speech today was pretty good:
Flake lacks Gladstone's political skill and even more so his stomach for a fight, but his moral vision is Gladstonian, and I admire it.
Now there are plenty of bad things to say about Flake, most notably that he has not in fact leveraged his political power to constrain Trump in the manner you would expect from such an ardent Trump critic. But fundamentally Flake's problem is that he doesn't live in Alaska or Maine. Scolding him for lacking a political base feels like scolding Poland or Norway for lacking an army that could stop Hitler. "Look at Britain! It didn't surrender!" would be a pretty obnoxious thing to say. Britain didn't surrender because it had a real navy and an effective air force, and a channel between it and the continent. I shudder to think what would have happened if the Wehrmacht had a land crossing.
I say all this because Flake's speech today was pretty good:
Flake lacks Gladstone's political skill and even more so his stomach for a fight, but his moral vision is Gladstonian, and I admire it.
posted by James | 11:28 AM
1 Comments:
Britain had a real navy and an effective air force because it had an abundance of character and moral virtue. If Norway, or for that matter France, had had the same, things would have gone very differently.
In much the same way, what you attribute as Flake’s “circumstances” are not causes, but rather effects of Flake’s lack of character (in an absolute sense, he obviously has more relative character than other similarly situated folks).
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