The sting of last week’s loss in the Wisconsin judicial election seems to be very acutely felt on the American Right. The proof of this is the Right’s desperate scramble to find something other than the Right’s own failures to blame for the loss.

Given that poor candidate quality has become a major issue for the Right in recent elections, it’s easy to blame its candidate in this race, Dan Kelly. Easy, but dead wrong – and the rush to shift blame to Kelly is hindering the Right from learning the lessons that it really needs to learn from this race if it wants to win in the future.

Should Judicial Conservatives Make Law from the Bench?

Abortion was the election’s most important issue, because Dobbs had brought Wisconsin’s century-old abortion ban back into force. I’ll put up my credentials as a militant pro-lifer against all comers, but the political facts on the ground are what they are: Voters who liked the return of the abortion ban were outnumbered in Wisconsin by voters who didn’t.

And voters who understood the distinction between the role of the judiciary and the role of the legislature in abortion policy were not just outnumbered but dwarfed by those who didn’t.

Some are blaming Kelly because he allegedly allowed the Left to define him on abortion. Ann Coulter, with all the characteristic nuance and restraint we’ve come to expect from her, holds up Kelly when making her case that the Right needs to change policy on abortion.

But this was a judicial election. Kelly consistently said the only right thing for him to say: That his job as a justice would be to interpret the law, not make it, so his personal views of abortion were irrelevant. The Right should consider: If judicial candidates ought to campaign for the bench by talking about their personal opinions about abortion, Roe was good law and should not have been overturned!

If our pro-life principles are not currently popular among voters, that’s not a Dan Kelly problem. That’s the Right’s problem.

Competence, Not Ideology?

Another knock on Kelly seems to be that he was supposedly a lackluster candidate. But the reason Kelly was the Right’s standard-bearer in the general election is because the woman who would have been the Right’s candidate if Kelly hadn’t been, Jennifer Dorow, was downright incompetent. Dorow only ran after she became a local celebrity, having had the good luck to preside – incompetently – over a sensational murder trial that garnered her tons of what is unfortunately called “earned” media.

Kelly’s critics say Dorow would have done better in the general election, but Kelly beat Dorow in the preliminary stage of this two-stage election because voters who actually heard Dorow speak could see that she was utterly unqualified for high office. Dorow was so unequal to the challenge of campaigning that she literally showed up to her first debate with a binder full of answers.

Throughout the whole debate, when asked a question, she just turned to the appropriate page and read her answer verbatim out of the binder.

A lot of people who now find it convenient to say that this woman who carries her brain around in a binder should have been the Right’s nominee enjoyed a good laugh when a recent judicial nominee from the Left couldn’t define a Brady motion. You can’t have it both ways. Standards either matter or they don’t.

Just as important, Dorow has no judicial record as a conservative. Empty of substance, she grasped at right-wing rhetoric for political advantage. She’d doubtless have continued to read some of her answers out of the Right’s binder while in office, but it’s unlikely she’d have been reliable – especially on the hard votes.

If the Right’s alternative to Kelly is a celebrity who can’t remember her own thoughts unless she’s reading them off a cue card, that’s not a Dan Kelly problem. That’s the Right’s problem.

The 800-Pound Celebrity in the Room

Speaking of celebrity candidates, the final knock on Kelly is that he was supposedly a Trumpist. Just at the moment Wisconsinites were going to the polls, Trump’s toxicity was thrust back into the spotlight, as he was forced to take a break from celebrating the January 6 rioters who tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power in order to appear in court to answer charges that he lied about how his cronies went about paying the porn star he committed adultery with to keep quiet while he was running for president. There is little doubt that Trump’s ill-timed return to the spotlight is the other major reason besides abortion the Right lost this election.

But the post-election attempt by some on the Right to depict Kelly as a Trumpist is outrageously unfounded. Kelly avoided any connection either to Trump and the illiberal authoritarianism for which he stands. One person who clearly understands this is Trump himself; he denounced Kelly when Kelly declined to kiss his ring.

There really was a Trumpist candidate in this election. It was Dorow, who spouted a nonstop flow of shallow nationalist crankery out of her binder right up until the day she conceded to Kelly. Once again, you can’t have it both ways.

 The reason Kelly’s general-election opponent was able to connect him to Trump in the voters’ minds is simple: Kelly once did some legal work for the Republican Party. That was all it took to allow his opponent to put Kelly’s face next to Trump’s face in all her advertising, with unfounded claims that Kelly was connected to every Trump outrage.

If merely working for the Republican Party makes you toxic to voters, that’s not a Dan Kelly problem. That’s the Right’s problem.

There are at least some who see what lesson the Right needs to learn from this election. Noah Rothman observed on election night: “Rs are gonna lose a consequential Supreme Court race in WI and watch the soft defund candidate win the mayoralty in Chicago tonight, and they’ll spend all day tomorrow talking about Trump. And no one will see the problem.”

Or as Jennifer Hayden put it: “The party of personal responsibility needs a long, hard look in the mirror.”

Dan Kelly – precisely because of his high qualifications and untouchable integrity – was the only candidate in this race who offered that mirror to the voters of Wisconsin. If they didn’t like what they saw, that’s not a Dan Kelly problem, either.

The first of my annual Independence Day reflection posts, in 2012, was not posted on or around July 4, but in September. This year, I renew that tradition – I plead that I was working furiously to finish my dissertation throughout July and August. I will still have revisions to make, but the main job is (Lord willing!) now over.

Part of the point of that original post was that the things that make America worth fighting for are things that don’t necessarily turn up where (or in this case when) you expect to see them. That is the whole point of America, as Charles’ own story illustrates:

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit to you that in the game of life, Ray Charles was dealt just about as bad a hand as it’s possible to get. He was born into the worst sort of poverty America had to offer in 1930; the son of sharecroppers in rural Georgia. He was a black man in the deep south; enough said. He started losing his sight at age five due to glaucoma, and was completely blind at age seven.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I defy you to show me any nation in the whole history of this world where that blind, black son of sharecroppers grows up to be Ray Charles. He was a superstar so huge that I can’t even begin to convey to you how huge he was without just copying and pasting his whole (impressively long) list of accomplishments on Wikipedia. If you’ve never seen it, pop on over and take a look. This is not just about selling millions of records – although God bless the man for selling millions of records! But this is about a true creative master, a man who left an indelible stamp on every genre of music. (Every genre? Sure. Try and tell me with a straight face that today’s country music wasn’t influenced by the soul sound Ray Charles and his peers invented in midcentury.)

From the long list, I’ll just put this one sample out there: Frank Sinatra – Frank Sinatra! – called Ray Charles “the only true genius in show business.”

The old songs – even the national anthem – may well be past saving as central cultural products. But we can always make new cultural products. And we clearly have deep resources upon which to draw. If it’s the good, true and beautiful you’re looking for, a country in which Ray Charles can grow up to be Ray Charles has a lot to offer.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, America has Ray Charles.

The defense rests.

I have spent ten years offering thoughts every Independence Day reflecting on the hopeful realism at the heart of that original post, with twists and turns into related subjects, and now on the tenth year since that original post I want to clear away the distractions and return to the original question:

Is there an America left worth saving?

Thinking today about the passing of Queen Elizabeth, I am reminded of all that we gave up when we chose to fight for our independence all those July 4s ago. Boris Johnson, whatever you think of him, gives a great speech, and he puts his finger right on the key issue:

Can we have democracy if we don’t have a living figure who represents the unity of the nation and the continuity of our traditions? Mustn’t all the symbols we rely on – the flag, the anthem, the Constitution itself – succumb to the fierce polarization that is congenital to all democracy, no matter how liberal?

But notice the subtext of his concluding passage about King Charles. He expresses robust hope that Charles will follow in his mother’s footsteps, and the house expresses robust assent.

Both he and they are really sending a message: “You’d better follow in your mother’s footsteps.”

It’s far, far too late.

Not only because of his personal scandals, although those do matter.

Charles has long been a highly ideological political activist. He has not, in fact, stood above the fray in the way his mother did.

And that’s a genie you can’t just put back in the bottle. Britons can now pretend they don’t know what Charles is, but they know, and everyone knows they know (most of all, he does).

Tocqueville was right. The solid rock of Elizabeth’s leadership – and if you want to know where that came from, it’s no secret, for she told us over and over again – could slow down the acid of democratic equality. Eventually, though, all the traditions will be eaten.

We must somehow learn how to make our way in a world where the controlling political commitments are equality and freedom – which means human rights – and where all political action must be philosophically justified on that basis.

That’s the whole reason Charles is an activist. The traditions simply aren’t self-justifying any more. In a world where equality and freedom have been made available, some argument must be made for anything not built on that basis.

Some people say, “he’s so privileged, how can he be so irresponsible about showing respect for the traditions that give him his privilege?” But the more privileged he is, the more he feels obligated to find some legitimization for that privilege. It seems clear to me that his political crusades aren’t an idiosyncratic personal hobby in his eyes, although that is how some others see them; they are there because the old world in which people felt no need to justify their traditions is unsustainable in the era of the smartphone.

The American experiment is still an experiment, and it may fail.

But if we fail, the world will not be well until someone, somewhere, succeeds.

May God continue to bless the beautiful, powerful people of Taiwan, of Ukraine, and of every other Tom Doniphon country in our Brave New World.

While we wait for our Ransom Stoddard.

Hello, everyone! Apologies for my continued absence as I have finished up my dissertation. The first complete draft has been sent off to my advisors and I await their feedback with equal parts excitement and terror.

Alas, in the rush I missed posting my annual July 4 reflection. However, the very first such reflection I ever posted was not on July 4 itself, but on the occasion of a belated July 4 event being held in September of that year. So this year I will repeat the tradition (yes, it’s a “tradition” now, because I say so) and post my annual reflection in September again this year.

In the meantime, I did squeeze in a writing gig for the wonderful folks at the Eventide Center for Faith & Investing. Part one of a two-part series is titled “Can an Ancient Bible Guide Modern Investors?”

Most Christian investing today is shaped more by the culture than by the Bible. That’s a problem. Still, it’s not as surprising as it might seem. After all, how is it even possible for the Bible to inform contemporary investing, given that it was written millennia before the advent of our modern financial markets?

That may seem like a simple question – if we think the only contribution the Bible makes to our decision-making is to lay down a few broad ethical boundaries we have to stay within. But if we want the Bible to guide us in a deeper and more profound way, we have to ask how the Bible can play that role in an area like investing, where our social world is so vastly different from the one in which the Bible was written. 

Indeed, the only reason modern financial markets are even possible is because we figured out that some of the most clear and direct statements the Bible makes about investing (i.e., lending in the expectation of profit) simply don’t apply to the kind of investments we typically make now. As modern economic structures like corporations , banks, and insurance firms  began to form in the late medieval and early modern period, theological scholars (especially of the Salamanca School) showed that we could draw a clear distinction between the kind of loans that were empowering these new structures – loans to businesses, which can afford to take prudent risks – and the kind of loans forbidden in the Old Testament – loans to people in need, whose distress should not be exploited for gain.

But if modern financial markets only came into existence by drawing this distinction between the biblical world and ours, where does that leave us when it comes to applying the Bible to our investing? Fortunately, recent theological thinking points us in a helpful direction.

Part 2 coming your way next week, Lord willing!

Update: Here’s Part 2!

With the benefits of economic growth in mind, we can see that even making a return can be part of the good we can do through investing. Our primary purpose should be to serve others and bring life to the world. However, if we invest in enterprises that are doing genuinely good and life-giving work, then the growth of our portfolios is not only good for us, it’s good for the poor and for the common good. It reflects the fruitfulness that God has infused into his good world.

Ultimately, this is an important way we can participate in the biblical story of God’s creation of the world as a dynamic, growing and changing project entrusted to human stewardship. God did not just put Adam and Eve in the garden to maintain the world as it was. His intent was that we develop creation’s potential, so it would glorify God more and more over time. The modern stock investment system makes it possible to create new things and develop the world, taking our place in the biblical story of the growth of God’s world.

On the one hand, we are summoned to overcome the self-centered focus on returns for ourselves that dominates our cultural investing paradigm. On the other hand, we need not embrace – we actually ought to avoid – approaches that deprecate ordinary stock investing as having no moral value and no intrinsic place in God’s story of justice, or that recognize stock investing as valuable only in highly specialized contexts or only if certain very specific demands are met. Instead, we should explore how our portfolios can bring life to the world.

Jonah Goldberg knocks it out of the park holding two of the most important and influential integralists accountable for literally endorsing propaganda for the greatest mass slaughter in human history.

As I said in a recent movie review, the difference between the Romantic illiberalism of the left and right hardly matters. The question that matters is, will we prioritize justice and the love of neighbor over our desire to experience wholeness and a sense of belonging, or vice versa?

Also relevant.

The moral bankruptcy of western nations is so total that one struggles even to imagine the holder of any public office giving a speech like this.

Instead, we agreed that we would settle for the borders that we inherited, but we would still pursue continental political, economic and legal integration. Rather than form nations that looked ever-backward into history with a dangerous nostalgia, we chose to look forwards to a greatness none of our many nations and peoples had ever known.

The future belongs to those whose leaders eschew dangerous nostalgia and summon them forward – not forward to a materialistic techno-utopia, but forward to new ways of living together in peace.

We rejected irredentism and expansionism on any basis, including racial, ethnic, religious or cultural factors. We reject it again today.

Read more here and here.