This week, in my periodic role as obnoxious Twitter scold, I intemperately reprimanded famous Never-Trumper and #Resistance personage Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom), who had tweeted to his 328K followers something to the effect that Trump supporters don’t “care about anything but spite and resentment.” 

Why the reprimand? In part for the same reason I reprimanded Nancy Pelosi in this newsletter two weeks ago, after she conspicuously tore up her copy of Trump’s State of the Union speech. As I put it then, “Maybe you should ask yourself not only whether lots of people in your tribe will love that gesture, but how the people who aren’t in your tribe will perceive it.” Pelosi’s gesture plays into Trump’s persecution narrative—and Nichols’s tweet plays into Trump’s narrative that snobby cosmopolitan elites hold his supporters in contempt. 

In both cases, I think, what we see is our tribe taking Trump’s bait. He wants to enrage his detractors—us—so that we’ll do things that energize his supporters (by nourishing his narrative), thus making them more likely to get out and vote. 

Which leads to a question so good that I wish I’d thought of it myself. 

The question was posed by NZN reader Cary W., who, after reading what I said about Pelosi, wrote in an email: “So why is it that enraging detractors and energizing supporters is a politically beneficial tactic for Trump but a politically detrimental tactic for Democrats?” If it makes sense for Trump to do it, why doesn’t it make sense for Pelosi and Nichols to do it?

A few months ago I saw the Broadway version of To Kill a Mockingbird, a much-lauded production that, as shaped by playwright Aaron (“The West Wing”) Sorkin, significantly alters the tenor of the 1960 Harper Lee novel. 

There’s a lot about the play I liked. The seemingly weird decision to cast an adult as Scout, the novel’s child narrator, worked spectacularly. But ultimately, I think, Sorkin’s rendering of the story drives home this sad fact: If you want to get much lauded for a Broadway production, the safest route is to affirm the prejudices and moral blind spots of your time rather than challenge them. 

And here’s the irony: If Sorkin had wanted to challenge the prejudices and moral blind spots of our time, all he would have had to do is leave Harper Lee’s version of the story alone. In an important sense, the novel is actually more subversive now than it was in its original milieu. Sorkin, in trying to make the story edgier, has taken the edge off it. In trying to make it politically progressive, he has made it morally regressive. 

To put a finer point on it: Sorkin has written a play for the #Resistance, injecting the story with a subtext about Trumpism and how we should handle it. And that message reflects and reinforces some of the least enlightened and most counterproductive tendencies in the liberal reaction against Trump.   

One of the most famous lines in To Kill a Mockingbird comes during a conversation between Scout and her father, the lawyer Atticus Finch. He says to her: "If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."

I recently had a conversation (just posted on meaningoflife.tv and also available in The Wright Show podcast feed) with one of my favorite people: Bhikkhu Bodhi, a Buddhist monk who is also a renowned scholar of Buddhism and a prolific translator of ancient Buddhist texts.

One reason I like him so much is that when he laughs—and he laughs at more offbeat things than your average monk, I’d guess—it lights up the room. Consider, for example, this exchange, which started with him telling me what the Buddha said about eating meat:

This impeachment thing worries me. But don’t worry—I’m a worrier, so my worries are probably unwarranted.  

Still, if only for therapeutic reasons, I’d like to enumerate them, after which I’ll see if, upon reflection, I can dispel them.