1. It has been that kind of week: the ones where you wonder if you will be telling young people some day “I remember when that happened.” Things seem to be escalating, and though I pray I’m wrong, I suspect they’ll get worse before they get better.

2. All states have factions. States tend to disintegrate when one major faction views the other as an existential threat; one so dangerous that it must be stopped at all costs. Sulla and Marius authorizing alternating massacres of each other’s supporters and that sort of thing.

Unfortunately, Republican structures incentivize political factions to make the other side look as bad as possible, since the worse you can make the other side look, the more secure your own base will be. This isn’t a corruption of Republicanism: this is Republicanism taken to its logical conclusion and absent corrective influences.

3. The safety valve is for there to be a clear common identity between major factions: an acknowledged common identity and source of loyalty. The US had it in the form of the American Civic religion (though we still had plenty of issues with political violence) and a basic common morality grounded in general Christianity. But we destroyed that in the 1960s and 70s. Now we no longer have competing political methods, but competing political religions, both of which want the soul of the nation.

4. Something that clicked for me this week:

Liberalism emerged out of Christianity and is a corruption of it. This is why Liberalism must be hostile to Christianity and seek to subdue it.

The newer idea must always subordinate the older, because it must be able to claim that it is the ‘true’ or ‘purer’ version of the idea.

Liberalism can tolerate Christianity, but only if it accepts a subordinate place: a personal or cultural thing which makes one a better citizen, not a standard to which Liberal ideas must submit to.

This is why Liberalism is less hostile to Islam that to Christianity, despite being more expressly at odds with it, because Islam represents a different intellectual tradition and so not in direct competition with Liberalism.

5. My own assessment is that a good historical comparison for Trump would actually be Franco. Which is to say, he’s a last-ditch reaction against a revolutionary movement that has threatened to get completely out of hand, to which all counter-revolutionary movements attach themselves for survival, temporarily ignoring their mutual incompatibility.

This being America, our version of Franco is much less forceful than the European version.

Of course, the big problem Franco ran into was that he wasn’t able to form a coherent political ideal that transcended his own person, so that once he was out of the picture, his movement fell apart. Time will tell whether Trump tops him in this regard.

6. On a lighter note, movie night this week was the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice. My conclusion was that it was tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me.

On the plus side, Keira Knightly was surprisingly excellent as Elizabeth, and Rosamund Pike, Donald Sutherland, and Judi Dench were excellently cast as Jane, Mr. Bennet, and Lady Catherine, respectively. The cinematography was pretty good and there were some well-judged artistic touches, like how everyone else in the room vanishes when Darcy and Elizabeth have their dance. And overall it was a fairly decent adaptation that more-or-less conveys the story in a relatively short run time.

7. On the negative side, Matthew Macfayden was a dude as Darcy: a handsome pretty boy, but with none of the austere, stern, commanding personality that Darcy had in the book or the BBC version. As a good example: in the 2005 version of the first proposal, when Elizabeth accuses him of separating Jane and Bingley, Darcy tries to babble out an explanation and they get into a shouting match over it. In the book and the BBC version, Darcy simply admits it and says he’s glad he succeeded, then explains himself in a letter when he’s calmer. In the latter, Darcy keeps himself under control even in the midst of emotional turmoil, while also showing the arrogance and myopia that he genuinely needs to correct. In the former, it’s simply a misunderstanding.

He’s also not nearly rude or haughty enough in the first half, making it less a change on his part than a revelation on Elizabeth’s, losing most of his character development.

So, don’t like their version of Darcy. Mr. and Mrs. Bennet are also too functional of a couple, with Mrs. Bennet not being nearly stupid enough to justify her mistakes or Mr. Bennet’s retreat from his responsibilities. There are a lot of bizarre choices, like having Lady Catherine show up for her confrontation with Elizabeth in the middle of the night, or the whole Meryton assembly pausing and bowing to the Bingley party as if they were the Royal Family, or changing Darcy’s family portrait gallery to a sculpture gallery (which apparently is part of Chatsworth House, where it was filmed, but still feels jarringly out of place). And, naturally, the whole thing feels like a modern writer’s fantasy of Regency Era England rather than anything close to the real thing: you never buy that you’re looking at people from a different time and place for a second.

Overall it’s not bad, but it’s kind of mediocre and forgettable, with a few genuine highlights. 2005 seemed to be a year for that kind of film.