What if Antonin Scalia hadn’t died?

Published on by D. G. Hart

These and other questions haunted James Hohmann six weeks after the election for POTUS (thanks to one of our Southern correspondents).

The question he fails to ask, which may be the most poignant of all: what if the United States is more like Donald Trump than Barack Obama? Different ways of being great, right, since no one is allowed to judge?

5 thoughts on “What if Antonin Scalia hadn’t died?”

  2. Dan, here’s the problem: “Trump as the ultimate revenge on upper-middlebrow cultural life. It’s the mannered and effete against the profane and immediate.”

    The cultural elite were fine with Lena Dunham and Larry David — as were most Americans. The gaping hole in the elite’s world — media, academy, Hollywood, and POTUS — was to apply a moral standard to only one segment of American culture — white conservative religious folks who drive trucks and carry guns. I’m still waiting for Meryl Streep to play a wife on Duck Dynasty.

    I’m all for gate keepers. I just want them to mind the gates.

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  3. Perhaps Lena Dunham and Larry David aren’t nearly as accepted by Americans as you might think, even as pure entertainment. But leave that aside. Last week, the New York Times underwrote a Safari to Texas to explore why people there drove pickup trucks. I laughed so hard I was literally in tears. And Streep has probably never ever watched MMA. Absent a recession or war (big ifs! ) Trump wins relection with 375 electoral votes.

    The problem with gatekeepers is that everybody thinks they are qualified to be one, and that there is an anxious world out there waiting for their verdicts. . Witness your colleagues who profess to being Evangelical (assuming they still use the term) Historians and their anti-Trump hissy fit, or the law professors who signed the circular letter against Sessions.

    I am having a real problem with schadenfreude these days, DGH. Not very Christian of me. Please pray for me.

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  4. Dan, does the Baptist god hear the prayers of a Calvinist?

    NYT’s safari on pick up trucks is precisely the issue here: the deplorables actually know about the other side. It’s impossible to live in a Hillbilly Elegy bubble because of the media and with it comes the Hollywood stars, the New Yorker’s writers, and Ivy League Professors. In other words, conservatives encounter progressives all the time and have lived with it. Sure “conservatives” have Fox and Rush, but after the news those people stream HBO and more. Progressives would never be caught dead with Fox or Rush. They rarely encounter someone who prays, drives a truck, or carries a gun.

    Which ironically makes conservatives far more tolerant than progressives.

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  5. DGH, I am trying to cover all the bases.

    Of course the NYT missed the real reason people in Texas drive pickups. Same as around here. Gun racks just don’t work in a Subaru.

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