The Centre Cannot Hold

Plus: A ‘governor kills dog’ story.

It’s a pivotal day, both for the conflict in Gaza and for our corresponding domestic pageant of Gaza-related campus disorder.

The Biden administration is forcefully pushing Hamas to accept Israel’s latest offer, delivered yesterday, of a ceasefire-for-hostages swap: “Hamas has before it a proposal that is extraordinarily, extraordinarily generous on the part of Israel,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at a World Economic Forum meeting in Riyadh yesterday. “In this moment, the only thing standing between the people of Gaza and a ceasefire is Hamas.”

This morning, however, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu tweeted that “the idea that we will stop the war before achieving all its goals is out of the question. We will enter Rafah and eliminate the Hamas battalions there—with or without a deal, in order to achieve complete victory.”

Meanwhile, anti-Israel U.S. student protests continue to rage: Protesters at New York’s Columbia University blew through a 2 p.m. dispersal deadline yesterday, then decided to seize a campus building overnight for good measure.

Donald Trump’s New York trial is back in session this morning after a three-day weekend. Happy Tuesday.

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Student demonstrators occupy the pro-Palestinian ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ on the West Lawn of Columbia University on April 29, 2024 in New York City. (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP) (Photo by TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP via Getty Images)

What If Yeats Is Right?

I like the poetry of W. B. Yeats, and I’m generally a sucker for snatches of verse. But even I’ve gotten a little tired of what I suppose are now Yeats’s most famous lines:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

And:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

It’s not Yeats’s fault that everyone cites these lines. But it does mean they can fall victim to an overuse that leads to overfamiliarity and then to a kind of dislike.

Still.

What else is supposed to come to mind when you wake up on a nice spring morning to the news that a student mob has taken over Hamilton Hall at Columbia, and that Tucker Carlson has just interviewed the Russian fascist thinker Aleksandr Dugin?

No, neither of these developments is of world-historical significance. But the second is emblematic of the fact that American conservatism has descended into Trumpism, and that Trumpism is closer to fascism than one might have thought. And the first suggests that the far Left is just as bad as people like me always thought it was.

Meanwhile, the liberals in the center seem once again to be doing their best to prove the wisdom of another great poet, Robert Frost: “A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.”

So you may be a bit tired of those lines of Yeats, but they still apply.

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Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919. It became so famous over the years because a) Yeats is a heck of a poet, and b) the poem came to seem prophetic. Over the next twenty years, in Europe, the center did not hold. Anarchy was loosed upon the world. Too many of the best lacked conviction, and of the worst were full of passionate intensity.

But then, from the late 1940s on, we could plausibly tell ourselves that we were proving Yeats wrong. And to a degree, we did. We reconstituted a civilized center in the late 1940s. And it has (mostly) held. Of course, it faltered at times, but it hung in there through the Cold War, and then more or less until about 2015.

More recently, in the immediate aftermath of January 6, 2021, and of  February 24, 2022, it seemed that the center was back again—maybe even reconstituting itself and strengthening.

But is it? I’ve got to say that I don’t know. What if we’re not in the early days of a strengthening and reconstitution of the center, but rather partway through the trajectory of another collapse?

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But enough of this poetic melancholy!

Yeats is wonderful, dark and deep. But we have prosaic work to do. We have to restore order to the campuses. To get Ukraine the weapons it needs. To defeat demagoguery and illiberalism on all sides. To defend the rule of law and strengthen liberal democracy.

When we’ve done all that, we can go back to Yeats.

 —William Kristol

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A ‘Governor Kills Dog’ Story

Even with everything else going on in the world, there’s some relatively pointless news stories that command your attention. For instance, did you hear the governor of South Dakota killed her dog?

Here’s The Guardian, which first reported the news out of Gov. Kristi Noem’s forthcoming book: 

“Cricket was a wirehair pointer, about 14 months old,” the South Dakota governor writes in a new book, adding that the dog, a female, had an “aggressive personality” and needed to be trained to be used for hunting pheasant.

The training, Noem wrote, didn’t work: Cricket would ruin hunts and once even savaged chickens at a nearby poultry farm. There was only one solution, Noem decided: Take the pup out to the local gravel pit and shoot it. “I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here,” she adds.

Dogs being relatively popular, the backlash was immediate. Within days, Noem was in damage-control mode: “I can understand why some people are upset” about the story, she tweeted Sunday, but she insisted the decision had been the right one: “I followed the law and was being a responsible parent, dog owner, and neighbor.”

Which, okay—we weren’t there! But even if Cricket had been a rabid baby-eating menace, “Kristi Noem defends dog slaying” is still the sort of headline most politicians would be very, very happy never to invite upon themselves. 

It was just the latest in a run of odd judgment calls and rake steps from Noem, who has for years been seen as a GOP rising star. Last month, reporters and strategists scratched their heads after Noem cut a pair of infomercial-type videos for small businesses—first a South Dakota-based shoe company that makes custom insoles, then a cosmetic dental office in Texas. 

The whole affair confirms a maxim first suggested by Ron DeSantis’s spectacular self-destruction in the GOP presidential primary: The COVID era was a terrible mechanism for surfacing the next generation of Republican talent.

First elected in 2018, Noem spent the first year of her term in small-state gubernatorial obscurity. (Her sole brush with national media that year involved a state anti-meth program with the eye-catching slogan “Meth: We’re On It.”) But in 2020, Noem distinguished herself as perhaps the nation’s single most laissez-faire governor when it came to the pandemic: never ordering businesses to close, never issuing a stay-at-home order, never mandating masks.

As Republicans began chafing at COVID restrictions that summer, Noem (like DeSantis) became a conservative folk hero, making regular appearances on Fox News and at CPAC. This was unsurprising: She had demonstrated a deep reservoir of the sort of distaste for the “official narrative” that is so fashionable on today’s right. But in a fuller sense her star had risen thanks to her doing nothing at all—she’d simply opted not to take actions the rest of the governors were doing at the time. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised this wasn’t sufficient to demonstrate her a capable executive—or a competent politician.

—Andrew Egger

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Catching up . . .

• GOP lawmakers say Marjorie Taylor Greene’s motion to vacate has fizzled: Axios

• Trump’s historic criminal hush money trial continues: CNN

• Lawyers for Hunter Biden plan to sue Fox News “imminently”: NBC News

• Senate GOP leader hopefuls swarm Kari Lake for MAGA cred: Axios

• Former NSA worker sentenced for selling secrets: Politico

• The IRS’s new tax software: Rave reviews, but low turnout: Washington Post

• How online donations are fueling the 2024 election: Politico

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Quick Hits

1. If He Wins

Time Magazine’s latest cover story, out this morning, is a must-read: “Donald Trump thinks he’s identified a crucial mistake of his first term: He was too nice.”

The feature, written by Eric Cortellessa after two lengthy, wide-ranging interviews with Trump, focuses on the question: What does Trump himself envision his second term looking like? Answer: He wants to fundamentally remake America in ways he himself barely dreamed of last time around.

• Would he consider pardoning every one of his “J6 patriots”? “Yes, absolutely.”

• Would he consider firing U.S. attorneys who refused his orders to prosecute someone? “It would depend on the situation.”

• Would he intend to prosecute Joe Biden, as he has previously suggested? “I wouldn’t want to hurt Biden. I have too much respect for the office.” But then, seconds later: “If [the Supreme Court] said that a president doesn’t get immunity, then Biden, I am sure, will be prosecuted for all of his crimes.”

• How would he carry out the mass deportations of millions of illegal aliens that he has promised? “If [the National Guard] weren’t able to, then I’d use [other parts of] the military.” What about the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the use of military force on civilians? “Well, these aren’t civilians. These are people that aren’t legally in our country.”

• Is he comfortable with states prosecuting women who have abortions? “It’s irrelevant whether I’m comfortable or not. It’s totally irrelevant, because the states are going to make those decisions.” Does that mean he’d veto bills like the Life at Conception Act, which would create a federal right to life at “the moment of fertilization”? “I don’t have to do anything about vetoes, because we now have it back in the states.”

“It can be hard at times to discern Trump’s true intentions,” Cortellessa writes:

In his interviews with TIME, he often sidestepped questions or answered them in contradictory ways. There’s no telling how his ego and self-destructive behavior might hinder his objectives. And for all his norm-breaking, there are lines he says he won’t cross. When asked if he would comply with all orders upheld by the Supreme Court, Trump says he would.

But his policy preoccupations are clear and consistent. If Trump is able to carry out a fraction of his goals, the impact could prove as transformative as any president in more than a century. “He’s in full war mode,” says his former adviser and occasional confidant Stephen Bannon. Trump’s sense of the state of the country is “quite apocalyptic,” Bannon says. “That’s where Trump’s heart is. That’s where his obsession is.”

There’s lots more where that came from. Go read the whole thing.

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2. The Pivotal Haley Voter

The Wall Street Journal notes Joe Biden is making a play for Nikki Haley voters in Pennsylvania, where 17 percent of Republicans pulled the lever for her in last week’s GOP primary:

Those Haley voters, largely insignificant in the primary, could play an outsize role come November in swing-state contests that could decide the election by razor-thin margins.

To win, Trump will have to overcome the challenges the results in Pennsylvania—and other primaries—highlight: persuading voters in cities and their surrounding suburbs where the population is younger, has more college education and higher household incomes. These findings, based on a demographic analysis of primary results so far, mirror Associated Press VoteCast surveys conducted in early primary states that found stronger support for Haley among wealthier voters with college degrees. . .

When Haley exited the race on March 6, she declined to endorse Trump, and a person close to her says she is no closer to doing so than she was that day. “It is now up to Donald Trump to earn the votes of those in our party and beyond it, who did not support him, and I hope he does that,” Haley said at the time. “At its best, politics is about bringing people into your cause, not turning them away. And our conservative cause badly needs more people.”

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