Steve's Diary

A new digest of news and observations

So today I’ll start a new feature, “Steve’s Diary,” hopefully every weekend but perhaps appearing at irregular times depending on my travel and such. I’m calling it a diary, though it will resemble the old “Loose Ends” series I used to do at irregular intervals on Power Line or short news items and oddball items. This series may be more personal, though, except I’ve already breached that wall with the “Memoir” section of this Substack (for recently arrived readers, check the subheading above). But I will have more things like today’s last item in this series.

Where diaries and articles get written, or inspired.

• THE FDR WARS: So I appear today in the New York Post’s “Post Script” section with what is called in the tabloid and magazine trade a “double-truck” spread (two full pages) on the theme of how the arc of history may be bending toward justice for FDR, at least if several recent books have anything to say about it. And they have a lot to say about it. I don’t have an online link for it yet, but here’s what it looks like in print, so head to your local newsstand:

• THESE ARE NOT THE VOIDS YOU’RE LOOKING FOR: The New York Times seems to be attempting a Jedi mind trick on Democrats and the American people with a series of news features intending to make us forget that Joe Biden was ever president, or if he was (because, well, you know, he wasn’t ever really president), that he sucked to bad at it that we should repudiate him. Recall that the whisperers of Democratic greatness, namely the complete mediocrities like Doris Kearns Goodwin and Jon Meacham, flattered Biden that he could be the greatest president since Franklin Roosevelt. Was this a good thing to tell someone as plainly vainglorious but totally mediocre like Biden? Strange that Meacham, et al, are being very quiet about Biden right now.

Last week was the last of several Times features about how Biden blew it on immigration. In How Biden Ignored Warnings and Lost Americans’ Faith in Immigration, the Times reports:

In the weeks after Joseph R. Biden Jr. was elected president, advisers delivered a warning: His approach to immigration could prove disastrous. . .

“Chaos” was the word the advisers had used in a memo during the campaign.

They offered a range of options to avert that crisis, by better deterring migrants. Mr. Biden seemed to grasp the risk. But he and his top aides failed to act on those recommendations. . . The warnings came true, and then some. . . First, they underestimated the scale of migration that was coming. Second, they failed to appreciate the political reaction to that migration.

This Times graph is the best one I’ve seen yet:

The real lede of the story was buried far down in the story, of course:

As border crossings jumped, advisers across the administration kept offering ideas to deter migrants. But political concerns remained.

“They were a little too sensitive to criticisms from the left,” Ms. Muñoz said.

Translation: The Bidenistas were terrified of the progressive base.

• MAYBE A BIDEN BOOKMOBILE? Again, let’s keep in mind all those liberal grandees who said Biden was so great he deserves to be put on Mount Rushmore, yet now the Democratic establishment is saying, “Joe who?”

The New York Times yesterday, with a headline so great you need to see it whole:

Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has raised only a small fraction of the money needed to construct a presidential library, leaving uncertainty about when a library might be built and its viability as a stand-alone project, according to public filings and interviews with his donors. . .

Mr. Biden’s foundation told the I.R.S. this year that it expected to bring in just $11.3 million, total, by the end of 2027. That would be far below the pace set by other recent presidents, and far less than the $200 million that Mr. Biden’s aides say they want to raise eventually. . .

Money quote of the story:

John Morgan, a longtime Democratic donor who was one of Mr. Biden’s top bundlers, said he would not give “a penny” to the former president’s library, citing poor treatment from Mr. Biden’s staff.

“The Biden staff, they ruined any type of good library for him,” Mr. Morgan said. “He’ll be lucky to have a bookmobile.”

Don’t blame it on staff: Slow Joe was the problem.

Maybe it will look like this—if he’s lucky:

• DO WE HAVE TO LISTEN TO THE PEOPLE? Politico Europe reports:

Hard-right and far-right politicians are now leading the polls in France, the U.K. and even Germany. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s approval rating is a dire 21 percent. His French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, is even lower, at 11 percent — and the mood is so grim that this fall’s spectacular theft at the Louvre is being treated by some as a giant metaphor for a country unable to manage its challenges. . .

Ignore the “hard right” label Politico is using. Though I hope they keep this up, because I suspect it is helping the populist parties. Anyway, here’s a useful map:

• THE TOWER OF BABEL IS BACK, AND IT IS CALLED ‘POSTMODERNISM.’ I’ll skip over the background, but for my sins I have been writing a complicated academic paper that involves a critique of postmodernist linguistics. And for reasons that, again, would take too long to explain, I dove back into Reinhold Niebuhr’s most famous book for the first time in 40 years, The Nature and Destiny of Man, for this passage in particular:

Man’s knowledge is limited by time and place. Yet it is not as limited as animal knowledge. The proof that it is not so limited is given by the fact that man knows something of these limits, which means that in some sense he transcends them. Man knows more than the immediate natural situation in which he stands and he constantly seeks to understand his immediate situation in terms of the total situation. Yet he is unable to define the total situation without coloring his definition with finite perspectives drawn from his immediate situation. The realization of the relativity of his knowledge subjects him to the peril of skepticism. The abyss of meaninglessness yawns on the brink of all his mighty spiritual endeavors. Therefore man is tempted to deny the limited character of his knowledge, and the finiteness of his perspectives. He pretends to have achieved a degree of knowledge which is beyond the limit of finite life. This is the ‘ideological taint’ in which all human knowledge is involved and which is always something more than mere human ignorance. It is always partly an effort to hide that ignorance by pretension.

There is a parallel passage in Leo Strauss’s justly famous lecture, “What Is Political Philosophy?” that runs as follows:

Philosophy, as quest for wisdom, is quest for universal knowledge, for knowledge of the whole. The quest would not be necessary if such knowledge were immediately available. The absence of knowledge of the whole does not mean, however, that men do not have thoughts about the whole: philosophy is necessarily preceded by opinions about the whole. I t is, therefore, the attempt to replace opinions about the whole by knowledge of the whole. Instead of “the whole” philosophers also say “all things”; the whole is not a pure ether or an unrelieved darkness in which one cannot distinguish one part from the other, or in which one cannot discern anything. A quest for knowledge of “all things” means quest for knowledge of God, the world, and man — or rather quest for knowledge of the natures of all things: the natures in their totality are “the whole.”

I know what you’re thinking: I can’ wait to read the whole thing! (Confession: I take on these project mostly to annoy my podcast partner “Lucretia.’ I need to give her a steady diet of things to mock.)

Anyway, I knew this collection would come in handy:

• ON THE HOME FRONT. The moment that every dog owner faces has come to our household. The family dog is failing by the day, almost by the hour, and will have to be put down this week.