A hodgepodge post: Hogmanay in the Highlands plus miscellaneous thoughts on Biden, Trump, Musk, Sullivan, and more

Hogmanay in the Highlands

I shan’t give the name of the village or the establishment in question, but I had my favourite New Year’s Eve celebration this/last year. Some friends and I travelled up to a very small, very pretty, and very quiet Highlands village for Hogmanay. The outward and return journeys were full of inconveniences (buses breaking down and the like), but it was worth it.

Christmas holds less and less charm for me these days. I much prefer that strange, limbo-like period between December 25 and early January, and NYE has become my favourite celebration of the year. I don’t always get the opportunity to make an occasion of it—sometimes I stay at home, alone, with a glass of whisky in hand as midnight approaches and BBC Scotland makes a big deal of the countdown—but when I do, I invariably have the most memorable times.

And so, on the last day of 2024, we ended up in a small village pub. There were only the four of us, three locals, and the barman come midnight. The barman gave us all a free whisky to enjoy as the new year was born, and then one of the locals called on him to shut the windows, dim the lights, lock the doors, and bring out the ashtrays. Thus began my first lock-in. There were one or two more free whiskies, we smoked freely indoors, and we all got along quite merrily.

Oddly enough, the locals weren’t actually from the village originally. One was from Port Glasgow, another from Edinburgh, and another from England. The barman himself was a proper Cockney geezer who had been up in the Highlands for many years. They were all full of stories, the authenticity of which I can’t confirm but which were certainly entertaining. (The barman claimed that, in London, he had stabbed a man’s hand in self-defence and spent three years in prison for it.)

There were some discordant notes: a bit of casual racism and the old Port Glasgow guy rambling on about the myth of climate change (he was swaying after his many whiskies and only by the fast reflexes of some of us was he saved from crashing down on a nearby table). But on the whole, they were a friendly bunch. One of them drunk drove himself and his wife home—in the snowy winter of the Highlands, forsooth! This seemed to be a regular occurrence: when we popped into the pub again on our last night, he did the same.

The lock-ins might also be quite regular. After all, the ashtrays were very quickly to hand, and on our second visit to the pub, the drunk driver asked if he could smoke indoors and was happily obliged (we soon joined him). A different world, it seems—a parallel universe where Tony Blair never existed.

I was half-tempted to move to this rebellious little village (I still am). Interesting to note that for much of Scottish history, the main division was between Highland and Lowland Scots, not between Scottish and English. The Highlanders were savages, noble or otherwise, and then they were Jacobite traitors before becoming an integral part of the imperial conquering machine. And the cultural differences remain: the strange accents, the jokes we made on our way up about the rough, insular people we were about to meet. It all put me in mind of the Hogmanay episode of Still Game where Jack and Victor end up on a remote Scottish island and fail to endear themselves, shall we say, to the locals.

Happily, our experience was much more cordial.

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Biden’s four great failures

I’ve said before that, while I’m not overly keen on Joe Biden, he deserves a little credit for some things he’s done. Certainly, his term in the White House looks much rosier just two weeks into Donald Trump’s atrocious reign. But I think he made four great errors, the consequences of which will resonate for a long time to come.

The betrayal of Afghanistan. Biden chose to go along with Trump’s plan to leave Afghanistan to the mercy of the Taliban. He could have decided not to, and we would have been spared the terror and misery and theocratic totalitarianism that followed. The women of Afghanistan are once more enslaved, the limited but precious democratic gains of the 20-year Taliban-free interlude have been erased, and the country is again a haven and base for the Islamic fascists of al-Qaeda. Nice going.

Short-changing Ukraine. I once wrote of Biden that

he can never be forgiven for the Afghanistan betrayal, but he has shown great strength in the face of Vladimir Putin’s vicious assault on Ukraine and demonstrated his commitment to that beleaguered democracy. Thanks to Western assistance, the bulk of which comes from the U.S., the hardy soldiers of Ukraine are rolling back Putin’s armies. Biden’s commitment to and skill in this task (so far), whilst avoiding direct engagement with Russia and thus nuclear escalation (also so far), must count as one of the great foreign policy triumphs of any U.S. president.

…

Perhaps this is wishfulness. I doubt Biden will really do such a thing or anything like it [i.e. actively and explicitly siding with the revolutionaries of Iran to bring down the Islamic theocracy]. But if he did, he could end up as one of history’s great heroes of democracy, though Afghanistan will forever besmirch his record (but even there, as I have previously written, there are ways in which he could at least try to make at least some amends). Biden, the ultimate scourge of tyrants and tyranny, everywhere? Anything, as they say, is possible.

I stand by those words. There really was a period when Biden could have emerged, even after Afghanistan, as a great champion of global democracy. But ultimately, America did not do enough, nor did it do it quickly enough, for Ukraine. Yes, American (and others’) aid was and is indispensable for Ukrainian resistance, but just enough to stave off defeat, rather than achieve victory, was given. And now, with a president and vice president openly contemptuous of Ukrainian democracy, the future looks bleaker than ever. As Timothy Snyder put it last September,

In the end, we have almost always given the Ukrainians what they wanted, but after the delays that have kept Russia in the war.

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The Russian goal is to make the Biden team move slowly so that Russia can keep fighting until Trump arrives to save them. The next few months will reveal whether that plan has worked.

Has it worked? Probably not. Unless the Trump administration decides to stand firmly with Ukraine (unlikely), then Ukraine will continue to lose ground. As Nick Schifrin put it, citing retired colonel and Head of Research for the Eurasian Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute Robert E. Hamilton:

If [the Trump administration] wants Ukraine to have the most leverage at the negotiating table, it will have to increase weapons to Ukraine, as well as, most importantly, lift restrictions of how deep U.S. weapons can be fired into Ukraine, says Robert Hamilton.

Col. Robert Hamilton (Ret.):

It's not sufficient to change the outcome of the war, but I think it's necessary. Unless Ukraine is allowed to do that, I think we're in a position where their position will continue to erode.

Matt Johnson provides a more optimistic case, arguing that Trump’s self-interest might prevent him from betraying Ukraine. I can’t share Johnson’s limited confidence. A recent report from Reuters states that Trump and his special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, Keith Kellogg, are thinking of pressuring Zelensky into holding elections; this would undermine Zelensky’s position at a crucial moment and might even allow some pro-Russian stooge to take power in Kyiv. I have a terrible feeling that that might just be the outcome, and that it will be engineered by the Trump team with Putin. Also, the fact that the Putinist arselicker Tucker Carlson has joined in the cynical criticism of Zelensky for not holding an election ought to be a red flag for anyone concerned about the future of Ukraine.

Johnson (and Robert Kagan, whom Johnson cites on the point) is right that those in the West who want to negotiate with Putin are almost laughably naïve:

Putin has never expressed a willingness to accept anything less than the total destruction of Ukraine as a viable independent state. He won’t be content with the chunk of territory he has stolen in the country’s east. He won’t accept the survival of the Zelensky government, even if he secures assurances of neutrality on issues like NATO accession and EU membership. He wants to end Ukrainian sovereignty entirely, and this has always been his long-term goal.

But perhaps Putin would insincerely accept a deal which gave him those assurances, some territory, and the end of Zelensky, all of which he could spin as a victory of sorts, while waiting and rebuilding, ready to strike again at a war-weary, demoralised, abandoned Ukraine when the time is right. For Trump, too, such a deal would be a victory—he could claim that he has ended a Biden ‘forever war’ (and what a lame phrase that continues to be) and blame any resumption of hostilities on those ungrateful Ukrainians. (And if a resumption happened under a future Democrat administration, the MAGA crowd would, of course, blame it rather than the opportunistic Putin, who would no doubt encourage them. Perhaps he would even time a new assault with an eye to sowing such discord in America.)

Still, though I am more pessimistic now than I was in 2023 when I wrote a long essay on the war for Merion West, there remains every hope that Ukrainian resistance will continue whatever happens next. Perhaps even without American aid, Ukraine will triumph. If Ukraine hangs on, it stands a very good chance of victory in the long term. Helping them to do so must be the focus of Western statecraft for now. Maybe Putin is too old and too far gone to think as cleverly as I proposed above. Or maybe such long-term thinking is just not viable for a chastened and weakened Russia.

And in the end, as I wrote in that essay, ‘the invader has already lost, for whatever happens now, Ukraine will almost certainly survive as an independent nation.’ I think this is still true. Putin’s central ambition in launching the invasion was the eradication of an independent, democratic Ukraine. That has not happened and will not happen now, even if Ukraine is partitioned and Putin decides to retreat, lick his wounds, and try again another day. In this very important way, Putin was defeated in April 2022, when he was forced to abandon any hope of taking Kyiv. Small consolation, perhaps, but not nothing. Very, very far from nothing, actually.

(I’ll take this moment to recommend another essay of Snyder’s, in which he expresses the gratefulness we should all feel towards the people of Ukraine. Never mind the trillions the West has given Ukraine; we owe them much more than they owe us.)

In any case, Biden failed to give Ukraine all the support it needed when it needed it. The end of a free and whole Ukraine might be the consequence, and that would be a fatal blow to any kind of international liberal democratic order as well as a gift to autocrats the world over.

Running for president again. It seems quite clear that Biden’s determination to run for a second term despite his apparent (maybe that should be ‘evident’) senility and then the coronation of the mediocre Kamala Harris as the Democratic candidate at the last minute were two of the major reasons Trump won in November. By not making way for another candidate from the outset, Biden essentially handed the White House to fascistic thugs, Christian nationalists, and grifting oligarchs.

Those pardons. Little needs to be said about this except, in the words of Matt Johnson before the fact, that ‘Biden’s preemptive pardons would be a political disaster’. After the already stupid, selfish, and inherently unjust pardoning of his son, the pre-pardoning of Liz Cheney, Anthony Fauci, and others was unsurprising but not shocking. (There is still, I shouldn’t have to say, no equivalence—none at all—between Biden and Trump, or Democrats and Republicans.) Incidentally, I think that presidential pardons and the like should be abolished: they are a monarchical hangover.

Per Johnson:

Despite the immediate threat of Trump’s authoritarianism, his opponents must always remember that there will be a time after Trump. We can’t afford to detonate our institutions along the way in the name of saving them. The debate about pardons is one subject in an urgent conversation about democratic norms in the Trump era. Trump’s political opponents will have to decide which norms to uphold and which ones to challenge over the next four years. In each case, either decision will involve costs. The question is which costs are worth sustaining to ensure that American democracy can withstand Trumpism without compromising the features that have allowed it to withstand even greater threats throughout history.

These, then, are Biden’s four great failures, and he will surely go down as one of the worst presidents to ever inhabit the Oval Office—outdone, perhaps, only by his predecessor and successor.

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The unbearable godliness of Trump’s inauguration

2025 has been rather dispiriting thus far. Donald Trump returned to office, swearing to uphold the US Constitution, which only a few years earlier he had attempted to overthrow by fraud and force and which he had threatened to terminate during his latest election campaign. Wasting no time, he almost immediately demonstrated his contempt for the Constitution again, by attempting to ban birthright citizenship—i.e. attempting to nullify the 14th Amendment. His inauguration speech was unbearably pious, reflecting his continuing commitment to the now-mainstreamed Christian nationalist bloc (that sorry bunch, one of the central pillars of Trumpism, without whom he couldn’t have done any of it):

I was saved by God to make America great again. ... We will not forget our country, we will not forget our Constitution, and we will not forget our God. ... We are one people, one family, and one glorious nation under God. ... America will be respected again and admired again, including by people of religion, faith, and goodwill.

What that last sentence is meant to mean exactly is unclear, but the emphasis is firmly on the religious. And let's not be coy about what religion he means, either: 'our God'. (Strange, isn't it, that God had the time to divert the bullet from Trump's head but was absent on the day John Wilkes Booth snuck up behind Abraham Lincoln?) Recall that in 2023, Trump told the Faith and Freedom Coalition that

we’re warriors in a righteous crusade to stop the arsonists, the atheists, globalists and the Marxists — and that’s what they are — and we will restore our Republic as one nation under God with liberty and justice for all.

Among other things, I agree with the tweeter/xer who said, ‘the "reddit atheist" trope kinda feels like a psyop we need to bring back being unapologetically anti christian’.

The perfidy of Trump 2.0 was immediate from the outset. The attempted birthright citizenship ban, the reckless effort to freeze federal funding, the invasion and occupation of the Treasury by Elon Musk and his goons, Trump’s pardoning of the violent vandals who assaulted the Capitol in 2021 and his vicious retaliation against his political enemies, including those who had opposed his authoritarianism in 2020/21 (removing their security and leaving them wide open to the thugs he has essentially sanctioned by pardoning), the purging of federal workers in an attempt to create a loyal, Trumpist workforce, the ascension of the Christian nationalist Pete Hegseth and the cretinous, worm-addled RFK Jr, the brazenly corrupt self-enrichment (the Trump memecoin, for Christ’s sake…), the absurd and self-destructive imposition of high tariffs on Canada and Mexico, the mooting of a programme of ethnic cleansing in Gaza, the imperialist threats against Greenland and Panama…

One could go on for very much longer. And we’re only two weeks in!

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Vichy America?

I was rather taken with John Ganz’s argument that there is now a 'Vichy America’:

If you want an analogy for the present state of America it’s perhaps not an out-and-out fascist regime, but a Vichy regime. It’s partly fascist but mostly just a reactionary and defeatist catch-all. It’s a regime born of capitulation and of defeat: of the slow and then sudden collapse of the longstanding institutions of a great democracy whose defenders turned out to be senile and unable to cope with or understand modern politics. It’s a regime of born exhaustion, nihilism, and cynicism: the loss of faith in the old verities of the republic. A regime of national humiliation pretending to be a regime of restoration of national honor. It claims to be at once a national revolution and a national restoration. It’s a hybrid regime: a coalition that includes the fascist far right, of course, but also technocratic modernizers who might have once called themselves liberals, the big industrialists, and old social conservatives. Even some disaffected socialists and leftists for whom liberalism was always the main enemy want to give it the benefit of the doubt. It’s a regime of collaboration and sympathy: the #resistance may have dominated the political style of the first Trump administration, but now, as Trump says, everyone wants to be his friend.

Ganz’s analysis of that salute is also worth reading and, I think, shows the vacuity of attempts to downplay or excuse it, including those by liberal opponents of Musk and Trump. Here I might cite the great Helen Pluckrose. I agree with her on a great deal, but I think she is wrong in this. And I think she gives too much credit to so-called ‘ethical conservatives’, failing to understand that American conservatism is more or less fully poisoned by Trumpism. Ethical conservatives—where?! This is where sensible liberal appeals fall short, I’m afraid.

As an addendum, my old chum Father Calvin Robinson recently gave his own Elon salute and was defrocked by his new church for his trouble. On Twitter/X, I said: ‘I predicted ages ago that the Padre would end up going to Rome. He’s edged closer and closer. Maybe it’s time? But I doubt he’ll go for Rome proper, (‘woke’ Francis). He’ll go for some weird, fanatical sect - maybe he and Mel Gibson will get together?’

Where now, Padre, where now?

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Sully’s surrender

One of those ‘ethical conservatives’ is Andrew Sullivan, who has long been a staunch anti-Trumper. Alas, he’s been drifting towards the orange uplands for some time now, and his reflections on the beginning of Trump’s second term demonstrate a surrender of integrity and decency:

To say I have conflicted feelings after a week or so of Trump’s return to power would be an understatement. Some of his early decisions remind me why I couldn’t vote for him. His decision to pardon even those among the J6 mob who assaulted cops jibes with his own instinctual love of vigilante justice against anyone in his way. That’s why his egregious withdrawal of security detail from John Bolton and Mike Pompeo is so instructive. Trump is no longer fond of these men, so he has all but invited a foreign hostile government to murder them. His embrace of anti-police vigilanteism at home is matched by his removal of sanctions on the violent settlers in the West Bank this week. He’s a thug who loves thugs.

But for all this, a large part of me is exhilarated by this first week. Yes, exhilarated. Liberated even. I wasn’t quite expecting this, but I can’t deny it. I suddenly feel more oxygen in the air as the woke authoritarianism of the last four years begins finally to lift. And let me put the core reason for this exhilaration as simply as I can. On the central questions of immigration and identity politics, what Trump is proposing is simply a return to common sense — a reflection of the sane views of the vast majority of Americans, who support secure borders and oppose unfairness in sports and medical experiments on children. My conservative soul is glad.

I ask: have you ever seen such a craven paragraph transition? Sure, Trump might have ‘all but invited a foreign hostile government’ (not to mention ‘those among the J6 mob’) to slaughter people he dislikes, and all Sullivan can muster is that he has ‘conflicted feelings’ because Trump has supposedly returned us to the centre on gender and immigration! (By the way, is it a centrist position to attempt to rip apart the Constitution by fiat? The 14th Amendment begs your pardon. Sullivan doesn’t mention that at all, by the way.)

Perhaps he’s sucking up to the Trumpists in his audience and/or ridding himself of those troublesome foundational principles because his conservative soul is otherwise sated. I’m not taking any position on gender and immigration here, please note. I am merely lamenting the surrender of democratic, liberal principles on the part of one who, for all his flaws, has been one of their most devoted champions in recent years. Sullivan has done exactly what most American conservatives and Republicans have done: gone from anti-Trumper to yes-man because Trump has power and they’ll get something out of the relationship.

How to sum up Sullivan’s surrender? Feeble and, yes, deplorable.

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