Amazing but true – delegates to the GOP convention are not bound by either law or tradition to cast their votes for any particular candidates, or at all, on any ballot. No nefarious back-room “changes to the rules” are needed; they are free, already, now, to vote their consciences. David French has chapter and verse.

The GOP has a last chance to do the right thing. I have seen many invocations of “party loyalty” in the last month, but there are no grounds for party loyalty if we believe that a party is literally nothing but whatever a plurality of the voters (many of them not party members) happen to demand it be at any given moment. What does “party loyalty” even mean if the “party” has no objective existence, and is no more than whatever you want it to be?

It’s bad enough that we allow now people who are very sick, unhappy and out of control to “identify” as something other than what they are. But at least they are willing to identify as something. How ridiculous would it be if Bruce Jenner simultaneously demanded that we acknowledge him to be a woman and call him Caitlyn, and that he continue to be allowed to compete in men’s swimming, out of some kind of groundless “athletic loyalty”?

You cannot have loyalty to an institution unless that institution exists for something. Does the GOP exist for anything? The outcome of the convention will give us our answer – either way.

Hey, I just want to be helpful to America’s Mussolini!

Great. No sooner do I finish expressing my regret at having admired Rick “Trump is a Cancer and I Want to Be His Veep” Perry than this happens.

Rubio asserts his willingness not only to attend the GOP convention but speak in support of the man he once called a “con artist,” saying: “I want to be helpful.”

Approximately ten nanoseconds later (I refer not to chronos time but to chairos time, which is what counts in politics) Trump tweets: “Poll data shows that @marcorubio does by far the best in holding onto his Senate seat in Florida. Important to keep the MAJORITY. Run Marco!”

I wonder if Rubio smacked his forehead at the indecorous lack of delay between the delivery of quid and the delivery of quo.

Ashleen Menchaca-Bagnulo doesn’t put it in these words, but she seems to regret having once admired Bill “Book of Virtues – and Vote Trump!” Bennett.

Just as I now regret having once admired Rick “Trump is a Cancer and I Want to Be His Veep” Perry. Mea culpa.

Like the man said in Magnolia:

Don’t ever let anyone ever say to you, “you shouldn’t regret anything.” Don’t do that! Don’t. You regret what you f—ing want. Use that. Use that.

As promised, after affirming prudence as a moral virtue in light of the current crisis, I now muddy the Aristotelian waters by treating reason as a moral virtue – thus breaking down the pagan dualism by which Aristotle separated “intellectual virtue” from “moral virtue.”

I hope you did the reading assignment. The president appears to have turned over foreign policy to a complete amateur, who proceeded to expertly manipulate an ignorant and willfully gullible media into saying pretty much whatever the administration wanted it to say. And then the amateur openly bragged about the national media’s ignorance and slavery, in the national media, and the fallout from all this has been essentially zero.

It would appear from this evidence not only that our national institutions are as strongly fortified against any influence from reason as they have been at any time, but that they have been so for a while. As with the idolatry of money (discussed previously), so with the idolatry of cheap rhetoric and hollow authority – Donald Trump did not create the problem, but only recognized and exploited the opportunities for mischief that the problem created. Which, of course, exacerbates the problem further.

Perhaps I’m late in recognizing the extent of the problem. If so, I repent. I am more ready to accept blame here than I was in the area of recognizing white racism. I do think the new white racism is substantially different from the old, and thus that the waning of white racism in the past few decades was real and not merely apparent. Here, on the other hand, it would appear the problem has always been worse than I recognized.

The failure here is on the part of journalists and other professionals whose job it is to care more about truth than about pageview data – even if that means risking business failure. The administration is very blameworthy for having been so dishonest, but those whose job it was not to be their slaves and puppets are even more so. Systematic reform begins with them.

Every society needs a teaching class, a class of people who are especially gifted and called to educate the public. Maintaining a teaching class without giving that class unaccountable power is of course a perennial problem, but not an insurmountable one.

The real challenge we face today is the loss of a professional sense of vocation (in the original sense) among our teaching classes. Where are the journalists who feel responsible to find out the truth and report it, clicks be damned, because that is what their profession exists to do?

Just as Trump has demonstrated that money is not in fact the source of all power in politics, he is also demonstrating that everyone (except Trump, of course) loses in an environment where truth is whatever gets clicks. That he has demonstrated this so clearly and irrefutably is a source of discouragement about the short term, and of possible encouragement about the long term. An enormous amount of damage will be done in the short term, and I’m not dismissing the importance of that. But let’s not make things worse by panicking, either.

Remember Herb Stein’s Iron Law: If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

There is so much to be said about the current unpleasantness, which we may soon be referring to as “the crisis,” that it’s paralyzing. How does one say anything without saying everything?

One lesson is that prudence is a moral virtue. A failing of advanced modernity has been the tendency to treat prudence as an intellectual virtue (to use Aristotelian language) rather than a moral one. Prudence does involve intellectual excellences but it also involves moral ones.

There would have been no room for Trump if one (1) of the more respectable candidates had moved to assuage popular anxieties about immigration and, more broadly, national identity and solidarity. This could very easily have been done in a responsible way, without catering to racism or nativism, or endorsing unwise proposals. Indeed, much of the I Have a Dream speech is devoted to countering a reliance on racism for national identity and solidarity by constructing non-racist sources of national identity and solidarity. We must do the same.

Why did not one of the other candidates take this prudent course of action? Because the party donors didn’t want them to, and our politics is dominated by idolatry of money. The power of agency and control over events is attributed not to the decison-making capacities of image-bearing human beings, but to the dumb idols made by human hands known as dollars.

Ironically, part of Trump’s shrewdness has been his recognition of how much it is possible to do in American politics, given the right conditions, without having to spend nearly as much money as is normally spent. As a result, the donors are now bowing the knee to a candidate rather than vice versa. The irony is almost biblical (the only thing about Trump that could be said to be so).

Coming soon: rationality as a moral virtue. Here is the reading assignment. Come to class having read that article and prepared to discuss its relevance to the current unpleasantness.