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America

The Trumpening Marches On

The photo above is of a reader of this blog, “celebrating” Trump’s South Carolina victory (though I’m pretty sure he did so tongue-in-cheek, because he cannot get over how insane this campaign is). I can’t stop thinking about the semiotics of that image. That’s expensive French Champagne the dude is drinking. The reference on the t-shirt is to this Key & Peele skit. America!

So, what do you think? I think if I were a Republican Party official, I would have to be kept away from sharp objects, and have my belt and shoelaces confiscated for my own safety.

Of Popes and Populism

Ross Douthat finds that Pope Francis and Donald Trump have a lot in common:

Neoliberalism needs critics, as the Republican Party needs reinvention and the Catholic Church needs reform. At the same time, as Schmitz notes, what both Trump and Francis promise — deliverance “from inconvenient and unresponsive institutions, with all their strictures and corruptions” — downplays the value of rules, customs, and traditions in protecting people from the rule of novelty and whim.

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