Rod Dreher's Blog, page 100

How Dante Can Repair Our Country

Readers, I will shortly be on the road to Nashville. It’s a day-long drive, so please be patient about approving comments. I won’t get to them till tonight.

I want to share a couple of things with you. First, I was thinking the other day about what Dante has to say to us Americans in this moment. You might recall that the Divine Comedy, the Commedia, was written by a man whose life was ruined by the political intrigue and violence wracking Florence and Tuscany in general. Dante spent the rest of his life in exile from Florence; his great poem was his way of trying to make sense of what had happened to him and to his world.

Among other things, it’s a highly political poem. We don’t need to get into the details here, but I do want to share one thing with you (I’ve copied much of what follows from a post from six years back). At about the halfway point of Purgatorio — which means the halfway point of the pilgrim Dante’s entire journey through the afterlife — the pilgrim arrives on the Terrace of Wrath: the place in Purgatory where the tendency to the sin of anger is purged. This place is covered by a thick black hot cloud of smoke, and sparks — this symbolizing the blinding effect of wrath.

There Dante meets a man named Marco, and asks him what is to blame for the world today having been consumed by evil and chaos. The moral philosophy Marco espouses is at the heart of the Commedia‘s meaning. Here, from the Hollander translation, is how Marco responds:

First he heaved a heavy sigh, which grief wrung

to a groan, and then began: “Brother,

the world is blind and indeed you come from it.

 

“You who are still alive assign each cause

only to the heavens, as though they drew

all things along upon their necessary paths.

 

“If that were so, free choice would be denied you,

and there would be no justice when one feels

joy for doing good or misery for evil.”

Marco refers to the medieval habit of blaming moral failures on forces outside of man’s control — symbolized by the heavenly spheres (hence the belief in horoscopes). Marco’s point here is the same as Shakespeare’s: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Men believe that they can’t help themselves, that they are playthings in the hands of forces larger than themselves — but that isn’t true. Marco continues:

“Yes, the heavens give motion to your inclinations,

I don’t say all of them, but even if I did,

you still possess a light to winnow good from evil,

 

“and you have free will. Should it bear the strain

in its first struggles with the heavens,

then, rightly nurtured, it will conquer all.”

In less poetic language, Marco concedes that we all have inclinations toward sin, but we can still see good and evil, and have the power, through free will, to resist our sinful inclinations. If we refuse sin the first time, and keep doing so, there’s nothing within our own natures that we cannot overcome. This is what Purgatory is all about: straightening through ascetic labors the crooked paths within us, making ourselves ready for Heaven. Marco goes on to say that if we submit ourselves, in our freedom, to God (“a greater power”), we free ourselves from the forces of fate and instinct. Here’s the clincher:

“Therefore, if the world around you goes astray,

in you is the cause and in you let it be sought…”

Boom, there it is. If you want a world of peace, order, and virtue, then first conquer your own rebel mind and renegade heart. Quit blaming others for the problems in your life, and take responsibility for yourself, and your own restoration. God is there to help you reach your “better nature,” but because you are free, the decision is in your hands.

But you know Dante: there are always public consequences of private vices. In the next line, Marco turns to political philosophy, explaining that as babies, we are all driven by unformed and undirected desire. If we are not restrained in the beginning, we continue on this path, until we become ever more corrupt. This is why we have the law to educate and train us, and leaders to help us find our way to virtue. The problem with the world today, Marco avers, is bad government, secular and ecclesial — especially that of Pope Boniface VIII (his name cloaked here), a wicked man who leads his flock astray.

The rest of this canto concerns itself with analyzing great political questions of Dante’s time, in light of what comes before. For us, we should focus on how the failure of authoritative moral leadership in the family, in the church, in the school, and in other institutions, has brought about our current crisis. Remember how on the terrace of Envy, Guido railed against the progressive decline in moral order owing to parents not raising their children to love virtue? We see a similar judgment here. Yes, each person must be held accountable for his own sins. But it is also the case that the abdication of authority and responsibility by those who ought to be teaching, guiding, and forming the consciences of the young plays a role. Ignorance of the moral law is ultimately not an excuse, but as ever in Dante’s vision, we are not only responsible for ourselves, but also for our neighbors in the family of God (notice that Marco began his address by calling Dante “brother”). If society’s institutions fail to govern justly and teach rightly, the consciences of others will not be “rightly nurtured,” and will, therefore, be conquered by vice.

What do we do with that? Dante is telling us that if we rest in our anger, we will remain in blindness. If we react only by blaming the evil of the other side, and justifying whatever we choose to do by saying we couldn’t help ourselves, they forced us to do it — then we are surrendering to vice, and are lying to ourselves.

If we want to repair this disordered world, says Dante, we should start with the disorder within ourselves. And more, if we see disordered consciences everywhere, well, let us reflect on the failures of the teaching authorities, and ourselves, to form the consciences of the young. (In this canto, Dante is especially hard on the medieval Catholic Church, which had become deeply involved in politics.)

What is the alternative? The alternative is to dwell in the hot, blinding cloud of Wrath, and to keep tearing the world apart.

Along these lines, I received a very thoughtful e-mail back in October from a reader. I asked him permission to publish it. He said yes, but his response got lost in the daily deluge of e-mail I receive. He wrote back yesterday. Now I’m going to publish the slightly updated version. Here goes:

I have long thought I ought to write to you but in earnest did not know where to begin. I have purchased Live Not by Lies and am very much looking forward to reading it.  Your post “Deadly Sins of Left & Right” prompted me to reach out at long last.

The following note is long yet I hope informative. I hope you take away a few things. First, there are many of us on the left who are heavily debating what should be done about the alarming illiberal tendencies that have cropped up in our movement. Second, I and many others agree that we are living in a time of great cultural reformation and would be greatly aided by a conservative movement that is led by individuals interested in conserving in the first instance rather than destroying. Third, there are many areas of common cause between us should we be able to come to the table together.

Let me begin by saying I too am deeply frustrated by many of the sins Ruy Texeira lists although I’m unsure if I agree with his exact conceptualization (for example most leftists would happily shuck socialism as a term in exchange for a policy set they like). I’d like to add one deadly sin and then address a more general point about what I think is happening more broadly.

The deadly sin – I think the left often discards what I’ll call “lived experience”. The left is interested in thinking through at a high level what sets of policies we ought to adopt nationally (and occasionally regionally) but has given relatively little thought to what those policies mean for individuals and the communities in which they live. They assume that these broad policies will fix the social and economic ills that they rightly, in my estimation, identify as great wrongs to be addressed but dedicate virtually no time to how those policies will be implemented en masse. I honestly believe what most people want are lives in which they themselves, their families, and communities can be productive and flourish. I am unsure how much of the left writ large really cares about that these imperatives given how little attention they are paid. If they did, I think some of the difficulties with connecting to non-coastal elites around language and policy would be alleviated although that might be a vain hope.

I do strongly disagree with Ruy’s last sentence, namely “that debate is not currently happening”. That I think is patently false. I am a young scholar at very liberal, well resourced academic institution that many would call one of the bases of the young liberal left.  I assure you we are most certainly talking about it. No one likes cancel culture, everyone thinks the wokerati are deeply problematic, and most want more spaces and processes for addressing these concerns.

A huge problem for which we cannot easily solve is of course Trump and the conservative media and politicians who support him and his nativist impulses. As you have said on many occasions, Trump and the Republican Party’s primary goal is to enrage the media and demonize the left. If one is faced with a constant barrage of disorienting invectives, corruption, and norms shattering plus now mounting death and economic collapse, can you blame the left for going a little mad? Wasn’t that the point?

There is a broader issue that I would like to add that I think you skirt around often but I would like to bring to the fore. We are undergoing a cultural change of epic proportions at the present moment and it centers on the question of whose voice counts and when. One of the frustrating things about current discourse in the US is the disparate set of facts from which individuals of different political leanings draw and how they construct deeply flawed arguments around those incomplete fact sets. This is a problem that I sense most acutely exists on the right (the proliferation of QAnon being a terrifying example) but exists to a large extent on the left as well.

I generally think the right misunderstands or perhaps underestimates the importance of taking minority voices seriously that are not their own. However at the same time I believe the right is correct in that there are many knee-jerk reactions on the left that are paradoxical and nonsensical. New directives appearing daily and weaponized to determine relative social worth is dangerous for all the historical examples you provide.

I think for my white and male brethren this is a particularly painful process. Whilst some quieting and thoughtful listening is required one can reasonably ask how and under what circumstances. Those parameters are unclear and being worked out in real time which is unaided by the ricocheting around the social media sphere. As a Black man, I feel relatively insulated from this process because my cultural norms are not being reformatted and on balance my voice is being heard more rather than less. Furthermore what I have long known to be true about the world is now becoming common discourse. That incorporation isn’t pleasant for many who want to see themselves as the undisputed heroes in their cultural story.

The primary reason I want to point out these fissures is that I haven’t seen anyone name exactly what is going on which is a form of identity remaking and redefinition of the sacred and profane. Those things are painful and take time. To the great detriment of the US at the present moment, this work is typically the task of the more conservative members of society but they stand behind a man who is obviously immoral, flagrantly corrupt, and marching his supporters towards mass death (210,000 and counting at last check, Oct update: now 220,000 since my first draft, Nov update where are rounding on 240,000). How can one take conservative voices seriously if they shout and lay garlands on a man who fails on all accounts on which they say we should adjudicate our leaders. As a result, conservative voices are not included in these conversations and it is hard to argue that they should be.

The conservative movement has been increasingly angry and scared for years. Rather than create meaningful dialogue around very legitimate concerns, it has elected a leader who has made the left equally angry and scared. Congratulations. It is hard to place the current disastrous state of affairs in this country anywhere other than at the feet of conservatives for this reason alone.

As before, thank you for your thoughtful voice and writing. You continue to be a considered window into a world that I do not regularly inhabit and often struggle to understand.

Post Election Update: Although it seems the election has been decided, the Trump administration and his Republican sycophants are demonstrating exactly why they don’t deserve to govern. Elections are only valid insofar as they serve them. It’s sickening. And a quick rejoinder to “the left never accepted 2016”, HRC conceded immediately, called on her supporters to accept the election results, and reprimanded those who sought to overturn the clear results. Trump, in contrast, refuses to concede, has encouraged his supporters to overturn the result, and mobilized Republican leaders to do the same. The rot is at the center in the conservative movement.

I’m inclined to agree with this reader on the question of accepting the legitimacy of this election, not because I think it was fraud-free, but because, with Tucker Carlson and Erick Erickson, it seems to me that any fraud that might yet be uncovered will not be enough to swing the election. My belief is that Trump should concede that he has likely lost this election, and act as if he had (meaning, help with the Biden transition), while saying that his lawyers will continue to search for potential violations, and that he reserves the right to rescind his concession if they find them before Inauguration Day. (Remember, Al Gore rescinded his concession to George W. Bush in 2000.)

On the broader question that the reader’s letter raises, I think now would be a very good time for both Left and Right to turn inward and seek out the faults in ourselves that has made this country such a fractured and angry place — and what we can do personally, in our own lives, to repair it.

A friend texted me yesterday to say that his Biden-voting brother cursed him out for defending Trump voters. It was shocking and hurtful to him to hear a kinsman speak to him so viciously about politics. I know this man, the friend who texted me, and he is both a gentle man and a gentleman. The idea that anything he could say, or would say, could draw that kind of bitter response is shocking and saddening. But you know, it’s happening everywhere, on both sides. The world is blinded by wrath, and indeed we live in it.

For me, one of the things I most love about practicing Orthodox Christianity is its emphasis on mastering the passions through prayer and fasting. Of course this means getting out of the way of the Holy Spirit, who does the work of clearing the air and smothering the consuming fire of the passions. This is a lifelong project.

Dante was no pacifist, but he also knew that passions unbridled by reason would destroy individuals, families, cities, and societies. He had lived it. His long walk through the Inferno and through Purgatorio revealed to him exactly how he and everyone he knew did that to themselves. It is true for us as well. We will not live in peace if we only seek to defeat and utterly crush our opponents. We have to also allow our own wrathful and vicious natures to be crushed by God. Only in that way can we hope to be fully healed of our blindness.

Look, I’m guilty of it too. We all are. I’m going to be thinking about this on the way to Nashville.

The post How Dante Can Repair Our Country appeared first on The American Conservative.

Woke Capitalism’s US Social Credit System

 

From Live Not By Lies, about how China uses its social credit system to compel conformity:

In theory, police don’t have to show up at the suspect’s door to make him pay for his disobedience. China’s social credit system automatically tracks the words and actions, online and off, of every Chinese citizen, and grants rewards or demerits based on obedience. A Chinese who does something socially positive—helping an elderly neighbor with a chore, or listening to a speech of leader Xi Jinping—receives points toward a higher social credit score. On the other hand, one who does something negative—letting his or her dog poop on the sidewalk, for example, or making a snarky comment on social media—suffers a social-credit downgrade.

Because digital life, including commercial transactions, is automatically monitored, Chinese with high social credit ratings gain privileges. Those with lower scores find daily life harder. They aren’t allowed to buy high speed train tickets or take flights. Doors close to certain restaurants. Their children may not be allowed to go to college. They may lose their job and have a difficult time finding a new one. And a social-credit scofflaw will find himself isolated, as the algorithmic system downgrades those who are connected to the offender.

The bottom line: a Chinese citizen cannot participate in the economy or society unless he has the mark of approval from Xi Jinping, the country’s all-powerful leader. In a cashless society, the state has the power to bankrupt dissidents instantly by cutting off access to the internet. And in a society in which everyone is connected digitally, the state can make anyone an instant pariah when the algorithm turns them radioactive, even to their family.

From a 2018 report in The Globe & Mail, here’s a real-life case of how it was used against a Chinese journalist who irritated the government by writing about corruption:

Liu Hu spent two decades pushing hard at the bounds of censorship in China. An accomplished journalist, he used a blog to accuse high-level officials of corruption and wrongdoing and to publish details of misconduct by authorities.

In late 2013, he was arrested and accused of “fabricating and spreading rumours.” Late in 2016, in a separate case, a court found him guilty of defamation and ordered him to apologize on his social-media account, which at the time had 740,000 followers. If he was unwilling to do that, the court said, he could pay verdict in an authorized news outlet. Mr. Liu paid the court $115, an amount he says he believed would cover publication costs.

Then, he said, the judge told him the entire verdict needed to be published, at a cost of at least $1,330.

But in the midst of Mr. Liu’s attempt to seek legal redress early in 2017, he discovered that his life had abruptly changed: Without any notice, he had been caught up in the early reaches of a social-credit system that China is developing as a pervasive new tool for social control – one expected to one day tighten the state’s grip on its citizens. Critics have called it an Orwellian creation – a new kind of “thought police.”

What it meant for Mr. Liu is that when he tried to buy a plane ticket, the booking system refused his purchase, saying he was “not qualified.” Other restrictions soon became apparent: He has been barred from buying property, taking out a loan or travelling on the country’s top-tier trains.

“There was no file, no police warrant, no official advance notification. They just cut me off from the things I was once entitled to,” he said. “What’s really scary is there’s nothing you can do about it. You can report to no one. You are stuck in the middle of nowhere.”

You cannot buy or sell unless you have the approval of the government. Notice this graf:

The development of social credit is also an attempt to regain the breadth of control the Communist Party once wielded over the country through work units and the state economy, before the rise of private enterprise eroded that power.

OK, but what would happen here in the West if private enterprise started imposing an informal social credit system on us? Gavin Haynes, writing for the UK commentary site UnHerd, says that it’s already happening to far-right people. He gives the example of white identitarians in the UK who were without warning refused service from their banks — including access to their money. There are other cases, including here in the US (e.g., Laura Loomer). Excerpt:

You don’t want to mess with the people who make the widgets that undergird the financial system. In 2018, in response to activist pressure, MasterCard began choking off various far-Right and internet Right figures. That in turn meant their often lucrative Patreon accounts were cancelled: YouTube ‘Classical Liberal’ Carl Benjamin lost $12000 a month. Now, in a post-Covid world, where we’re often being told that cash is no longer acceptable, some are also being told that electronic banking is no longer for them. It’s an interesting crossroads.

The likes of [far right activist Laura] Towler might be distasteful. But if that alone is the bar for the arbitrary exercise of power by, say, the PR department of NatWest, then all kinds of people — from Cat Bin Lady down — stand to be unpersoned.

Right of admission is always reserved — we all know this — and you might say that these examples are just the market at work. Except that some things are so fundamental to our everyday lives that they’re not so much markets as the thing that you need in order to use a market.

In the dying days of Gordon Brown, an attempt was made to guarantee every citizen’s right to a current account. It was quickly shot down by the Big Five banks (after all, it wasn’t as if they owed the government any favours). A decade on, that tide is further out than it has ever been.

Read it all. 

We had all better pay attention to this. If you think that the banks and other gatekeepers of the financial system are going to stop with far-right political extremists, you are deluded. I mentioned here the other day that conservatives ought to be pushing legislators to fight wokeness with substantive policies and legislation. Here’s one: pass a law guaranteeing every citizen a right to a bank account. Everyone — even the bad people.

As Gavin Haynes observes, this is different from a private business having the right to withhold its trade from unsavory clients, in a particular way: having a bank account is required to participate in the economy in more than a primitive way. To deny someone that is to exile them from modern life. Moreover, the more our economies move to the cashless model, the more difficult it will be for those without a bank account (and a debit card that goes with it) to participate at all in the economy.

It cannot be left to the HR and PR departments of these banks and financial companies to decide who does and doesn’t have the right to participate in the economy, certainly not based on whether or not they hold political, religious, or cultural views that tick off decision-makers in those private entities. If lawmakers don’t use the power of the state to keep access to the economy open to individuals that the ruling class finds deplorable, then we should understand that we are well on our way to allowing Woke Capitalism to create an American social credit system.

And, as I contend in Live Not By Lies, people who can tell which way the wind is blowing need to start organizing now, building up resilient networks and practices while we have the freedom to do so.

The post Woke Capitalism’s US Social Credit System appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Beginning Of A Great Emergency

I subscribed recently to the New York Review of Books because I got fed up with the urgently parochial liberalism of the New Yorker, but wanted a smart liberal magazine to read. I’m finding it very hard going now. I should have realized that NYRB would be no better. I suppose it’s important to read it, but I swear, it’s like living in a foreign country and listening in on conversations at a cocktail party, appreciating the fact that everybody is super-passionate, but not knowing what they’re talking about.

Seriously, the Trump years broke the brains of the American Left. The country they describe is a foreign place. For example, the novelist Darryl Pinckney offers an essay about the election (all of this is paywalled):

People are desperate to act, even destructively. We are a society on the verge of a nervous breakdown, not civil war. We are only at the beginning of a Great Emergency. Something suicidal and reckless is out there. Everyone gives a shove to a tumbling wall, the Chinese proverb has it. I live with a beautiful optimist, someone who has known war zones, revolution. Do not go to sleep angry; do not wake in the middle of the night suffocating from existential dread. Get up with hope. Let everyone be a risen sun, starting with yourself.

All the paragraphs preceding that in Pinckney’s essay, though, are pretty far from emanations of a hope-filled risen sun. For example:

The hijacking of the Republican Party by the Tea Party may still prove the last stand of white supremacy: such white people no longer represent the majority of white people as the nation and the world around them become ever more nonwhite. But who needs the Federalist Society, strict constitutional constructionists, libertarian contrarians, troops of the duped, or limits on Washington’s ability to support social engineering? To have no agenda is better than any expert’s advice. The only guideline is to undo whatever the previous and uppity White House occupant managed to change.

I think lots of people want to be hope-filled risen suns, or at least think they should aspire to be … but they just can’t do it. I get the divided mind of Darryl Pinckney. He’s coming at it from the Left — and I think he’s crackpotting hard — but I understand it from the Right. No doubt he thinks people like me are just as bonkers.

A reader writes:

It’s fascinating to see the aftermath of all of this.  There is a divide growing amongst both conservatives and liberals.  Each group has their hardliners now lashing out at those more moderate among their group.  I see the same thing happening on your comment sections.  Many people on both sides cannot see any gray any longer.  Every position is either black or white and anyone who doesn’t agree is a heretic.  I think Trump has contributed to this dynamic in some degree because many people wanted someone to fight back against the other side who had been pushing their nonsense on us during the Obama years.  I have no doubt that Obama created the desire for a “Trump.”

Some libs are making lists or threatening to “not forget” all of those who voted for “hate, etc.”  What they don’t realize is many of us who voted for Trump don’t feel like we had a choice.  Either give up control to the woke mob or vote for the one person who was available to stand up to them.  The danger is that they cannot see how anyone would not agree with their progressivism.  In their minds they are simply “right” and anyone who disagrees is, not just wrong, but must be converted or destroyed.

It is possible that cooler minds will prevail, but right now voices of hate from the left are being allowed all across the Twitterverse, while those who question anything about the election are being censored or silenced.  The goal, from an information point of view, is to suppress all non-approved ideas so to make them seem radical and out of the mainstream, thereby conditioning everyone else to draw that very conclusion.

I have heard more and more conservative friends say something like “blood may have to be shed.”  These are college educated professionals.  I think many of them believe Trump was the last stand for their side politically.  Now they think they may have to defend themselves physically.  Others have said they are tired of bending to the woke mob and aren’t going to stay silent any longer.  I think conservatives now realize that the other side will, in fact, do anything to achieve power.  Even if the steal cannot be proven, just about everyone I have spoken with feels like it happened and there probably isn’t anything we can do about it.  If Dems are going to be able to control elections then their power will go unchecked.  If that comes to pass get ready for the reconditioning camps.

Bloodshed? It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around that, but I know this source, and I know that he’s not making it up. Another conservative friend, this one in a very different part of the US, is saying that she’s seeing the same thing. She’s watching some far-right websites engaging in non-falsifiable catastrophizing of the sort that leads people to believe the only reasonable course is violent action.

What concerns her — aside from not wanting it to come to that — is that it will only take a few radicals resorting to violence to give the Left in power the excuse it needs to launch a crackdown. I don’t frequent the spaces, online or off, where conservatives talk like that, but my guess is that the new regime (the Democrat-led executive branch, plus its allies in corporations, universities, the media, and other institutions) will hasten the implementation of a social credit system as a way to prevent another Trump from emerging.

I strongly believe that conservatives and old-fashioned liberals need to start standing up to the woke mob. That’s easy for me to say, because my job is not at risk, but when you look at the courage of people like Jodi Shaw, taking a brave stand at Smith College, one of the most woke elite institutions in America, you may wonder: if she can do it, why can’t I?

Back to the NYRB. I found myself getting really angry at the election issue, because there was the same rote left-wing intellectual bitching. No real insight — just repeating the leftist shibboleths you would expect to hear from the Battery to 125th Street. The one standout was a short piece by the journalist Ian Frazier, about his travels in the dying rural parts of the country. Excerpts:

The Rand McNally Road Atlas, that founding document of American optimism, includes who knows how many small towns across the country that exist today in name only. If you’re expecting to find, say, a gas station in any particular town that’s marked as such by a small dot on the thin line of road, you might be disappointed. It might be only a former town. Or—more often—it will have a gas station–convenience store and nothing else, and you’re grateful for even that. Today the emblematic image of the former small town is a pillar that once held an oval-shaped plastic sign for some local business like a muffler shop or a feed store, and the plastic is mostly broken and gone, and just the frame of the sign is still there.

Once-busy downtowns are vacant or occupied by thrift stores and studios that teach martial arts. Sometimes you find a historical society museum that’s open by appointment, and if you call the number on the door a jovial elderly resident will come from a house nearby and tell you about all the businesses that the town used to have, usually including two movie theaters. The town’s school is closed, and the few school-age kids who remain take a long bus ride to a consolidated school elsewhere.

In Nebraska I walked the main street of a former town district where the street and the curbs and the lines for angle parking were still there, but the rest of the place was just foundations and neatly tended grass. In western Kansas I drove through a boarded-up town with a sign along the highway asking passersby to pray for the town. Every county has a county seat. In those towns you used to be able to depend on finding at least one functioning motel. Nowadays you’d better be ready to drive on, because the one motel may be closed, with its signboard saying something like, “For Sale Make Offer Perfect Business Opportunity for Retired Couple.”

When you do drive on, the road is terrible. It’s been flooded, and the pavement has buckled, and you’re going past still-flooded fields with wheeled irrigation pipes up to their spokes in standing water. Or the road is apparently OK, but after a few miles you realize that it’s crumbling at the seams between the blocks of pavement, and every forty feet you hit a seam that makes a bump, and the road bumps beneath you like that for hours as you cross some out-of-the-way part of the state. The billboards advertise injury lawyers or warn of the dangers of crystal meth, with photos of addicts with purple teeth. The radio is filled with grievance—Rush Limbaugh is the best-known of the right-wing angry guys on the airwaves, but there are also lesser-known regional ones. Confederate flags, no longer flying at state houses and NASCAR races, proliferate along some of the less-traveled roads in the backcountry.

More:

Our system was designed to make it difficult to win a national election by winning only the cities. Rather than complaining about the unfairness of the Electoral College, and how it gives preference to states with few people, the Democrats could acknowledge that it’s here for at least the time being. They could start to pay more attention, FDR-style, to the less populated places. Who knows? Someday that attention might even bring in an extra electoral vote or three. The country once did a better job of looking after rural America. Judging just by what anybody driving around can observe, much of it is hurting right now.

We went through all of this after Trump was elected. None of it mattered to the Left. To read the Times, the Washington Post, and to listen to NPR this year was to be immersed in cultural leftism above all things.

And it didn’t really seem to matter to Trump, who was much better at talking than actually governing. I have a friend whose rural working-class white relatives, all Trump voters, went for Biden this year. Why? Health care. The president and his party didn’t do anything to help them, so they took a chance on the Democrats. The thing is, the party they voted for is also the party that despises them culturally. There is no reason why these people, in order to get the health care help they need, should have to vote for the party of transgender radicalism, anti-Christian spite, and white self-hatred. But that’s where we are. My hope is that the post-Trump GOP will actually try to make a more populist conservatism work in policy terms — including proposing and advocating substantive legislation against wokeness and all its pomps and works.

I can’t be a hope-filled rising sun, in the sense that Pinckney means, because I don’t see much reason to be optimistic. As I keep saying, hope is not the same thing as optimism, not for a Christian, at least. An optimist thinks everything is going to turn out for the best. A hopeful person, though, believes that good will eventually triumph — but that things could get quite bad first, and that one must prepare to endure through that. My book Live Not By Lies is about why optimism in our current situation is a sham, but hope is a requirement. It’s about how to find hope, and endure. It’s about how to be someone like Jodi Shaw — who, for all I know, is not even religious, but she has a stout heart and deep courage of the kind we all need.

Now is not the time for fantasizing about violence on the Right. Now is the time to keep cool heads, and strategize for the long run. Violence plays into the hands of those with the power, those who are looking for any excuse at all to turn the tools of the state, of technology, of institutional and economic power against us. Never forget this passage from Live Not By Lies:

Not every anti-communist dissident was a Christian, and not every Christian living under communist totalitarianism resisted. But here’s an interesting thing: every single Christian I interviewed for this book, in every ex-communist country, conveyed a sense of deep inner peace—a peace that they credit to their faith, which gave them ground on which to stand firm.

They had every right to be permanently angry over what had been done to them, to their families, their churches, and their countries. If they were, it didn’t show. A former prisoner of conscience in Russia told me that Christians need to have “a golden dream—something to live for, a conception of hope. You can’t simply be against everything bad. You have to be for something good. Otherwise, you can get really dark and crazy.”

Let’s not just be against whatever the Left throws at us. Let’s be for something good. We are not them. We are not the people who burn down cities. We cannot allow ourselves to be driven by panic and despair into becoming those people. Darryl Pinckney is right about this much: we really are only at the beginning of a Great Emergency. We need to be like Father Tomislav Kolakovic and his followers. One more passage from Live Not By Lies:

Sometimes, a stranger who sees deeper and farther than the crowd appears to warn of trouble coming. These stories often end with people disbelieving the prophet and suffering for their blindness. Here, though, is a tale about a people who heard the prophet’s warnings, did as he advised, and were ready when the crisis struck.

In 1943, a Jesuit priest and anti-fascist activist named Tomislav Poglajen fled his native Croatia one step ahead of the Gestapo and settled in Czechoslovakia. To conceal himself from the Nazis, he assumed his Slovak mother’s name—Kolaković—and took up a teaching position in Bratislava, the capital of the Slovak region. The priest, thirty-seven years old and with a thick shock of prematurely white hair, had spent some his priestly training studying the Soviet Union. He believed that the defeat of Nazi totalitarianism would occasion a great conflict between Soviet totalitarianism and the liberal democratic West. Though Father Kolaković worried about the threats to Christian life and witness from the rich, materialistic West, he was far more concerned about the dangers of communism, which he correctly saw as an imperialistic ideology.

By the time Father Kolaković reached Bratislava, it was clear that Czechoslovakia would eventually be liberated by the Red Army. In fact, in 1944, the Czech government in exile made a formal agreement with Stalin, guaranteeing that after driving the Nazis out, the Soviets would give the nation its freedom.

Because he knows how the Soviets thought, Father Kolaković knew this was a lie. He warned Slovak Catholics that when the war ended, Czechoslovakia would fall to the rule of a Soviet puppet government. He dedicated himself to preparing them for persecution.

Father Kolaković knew that the clericalism and passivity of traditional Slovak Catholicism would be no match for communism. For one thing, he correctly foresaw that the communists would try to control the church by subduing the clergy. For another, he understood that the spiritual trials awaiting believers under communism would put them to an extreme test. The charismatic pastor preached that only a total life commitment to Christ would enable them to withstand the coming trial.

“Give yourself totally to Christ, throw all your worries and desires on him, for he has a wide back, and you will witness miracles,” the priest said, in the recollection of one disciple.

Giving oneself totally to Christ was not an abstraction or a pious thought. It needed to be concrete, and it needed to be communal. The total destruction of the First World War opened the eyes of younger Catholics to the need for a new evangelization. A Belgian priest named Joseph Cardijn, whose father had been killed in a mining accident, started a lay movement to do this among the working class. These were the Young Christian Workers, called “Jocists” after the initials of their name in French. Inspired by the Jocist example, Father Kolaković adapted it to the needs of the Catholic Church in German-occupied Slovakia. He established cells of faithful young Catholics who came together for prayer, study, and fellowship.

The refugee priest taught the young Slovak believers that every person must be accountable to God for his actions. Freedom is responsibility, he stressed; it is a means to live within the truth. The motto of the Jocists became the motto for what Father Kolaković called his “Family”: “See. Judge. Act.” See meant to be awake to realities around you. Judge was a command to discern soberly the meaning of those realities in light of what you know to be true, especially from the teachings of the Christian faith. After you reach a conclusion, then you are to act to resist evil.

Václav Vaško, a Kolaković follower, recalled late in his life that Father Kolaković’s ministry excited so many young Catholics because it energized the laity and gave them a sense of leadership responsibility.

“It is remarkable how Kolaković almost instantly succeeded in creating a community of trust and mutual friendship from a diverse grouping of people (priests, religious and lay people of different ages, education, or spiritual maturity),” Vaško wrote.

The Family groups came together at first for Bible study and prayer, but soon began listening to Father Kolaković lecture on philosophy, sociology, and intellectual topics. Father Kolaković also trained his young followers in how to work secretly, and to withstand the interrogation that he said would surely come.

The Family expanded its small groups quickly across the nation. “By the end of the school year 1944,” Vaško said, “it would have been difficult to find a faculty or secondary school in Bratislava or larger cities where our circles did not operate.”

In 1946, Czech authorities deported the activist priest. Two years later, communists seized total power, just as Father Kolaković had predicted. Within several years, almost all of the Family had been imprisoned and the Czechoslovak institutional church brutalized into submission. But when the Family members emerged from prison in the 1960s, they began to do as their spiritual father had taught them. Father Kolaković’s top two lieutenants— physician Silvester Krčméry and priest Vladimír Jukl—quietly set up Christian circles around the country and began to build the underground church.

The underground church, led by the visionary cleric’s spiritual children and grandchildren, became the principle means of anti-communist dissent for the next forty years. It was they who organized a mass 1988 public demonstration in Bratislava, the Slovak capital, demanding religious liberty. The Candle Demonstration was the first major protest against the state. It kicked off the Velvet Revolution, which brought down the communist regime a year later. Though Slovak Christians were among the most persecuted in the Soviet Bloc, the Catholic Church there thrived in resistance because one man saw what was coming and prepared his people.

This is how you do it. This is how you build a resistance that deserves to triumph — and that ultimately will.

By the way, I’d like to invite you to subscribe to Daily Dreher, my new Substack newsletter, which is not about politics or the culture war, but more of a diary of other aspects of life, and other ideas. Read it and sign up to get it every day (for free!) here. 

The post The Beginning Of A Great Emergency appeared first on The American Conservative.

Me In Nashville At Q Ideas

This week I will be driving to Nashville to participate in the Q Ideas Virtual Town Hall. You can participate too, either in person or online. Click here to find out how. It will take place on Nov. 11 and 12.

Q is about strategizing for Christians to live in and minister to the modern world. Here’s a list of the speakers and topics. Actually, nobody will be speaking; it will be a Q&A format. There’s going to be a lot to learn from this event. I’ll be interviewed about Live Not By Lies and lessons going forward for Christians in the post-Trump era. If you register for the online part, you can see all the talks later, if you can’t watch in real time.

Because I’m driving to and from Nashville — ten hours from Baton Rouge — Tuesday and Friday are going to be slow days in this space. I really do hope you’ll sign up for Q Ideas, though. I’ve been to it twice before, and it’s always challenging, in a good way.

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The Other America Celebrates

The New Yorker‘s Sarah Larson reports from the ebullient streets of Manhattan’s East Village today:

People waved whatever they had in the air—a skateboard, a gardening rake, a foam middle finger, a puppy with a cone on its head. When a Postal Service van drove through the intersection, the driver raising a fist and honking, a loud cheer went up. On the west side of the street, Trinity Posey, a young actor in a mask and a black hoodie, stood alone, holding a small speaker, which played Nipsey Hussle’s “FDT” (“Fuck Donald Trump”). When she heard the news, Posey said, “I was on my roof meditating, and I heard people shouting. I grabbed this and ran down.” She was eager to see people remain engaged. “We’ve got one old guy leaving the White House and another one going in,” she said. “I’m hoping that people can stay active when it comes to advocating for the rights of everyone.” She voted absentee in her home state of Michigan, where she organized a protest over the summer.

More:

Under the all-seeing eye of a painted mural at the Horus Café, the horn-blaring was near constant, and a spontaneous group performance of “Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye” had begun. “This is wild,” a young Broadway-theatre staffer said, smiling at the scene. When I asked if she’d done any political volunteering, she said, “I’m actually a professional psychic. There’s a lot of witches around the area, and people would come into my store all the time, like, ‘What do I do to help?’ So I gave them binding spells against Trump.” Nearby, Julian Ribeiro, a skater and retail worker in flowered pants, a butterfly-print baseball cap, and a tattered Bauhaus T-shirt—“Most of these shirts are my mom’s”—had come from Brooklyn to experience the “revelry” in the East Village. “I watched a whole table at brunch in Williamsburg get up with full mimosas and go down the street like a parade,” he said. “Somebody was playing ‘Party in the U.S.A.,’ by Miley Cyrus.” What did he hope to see in the coming year? He’d like to get out of a mask, he said. Otherwise, “I’m hoping for unbounded sweetness.”

Something is unbound, but I’m not confident that it’s sweetness. We’ll see.

UPDATE: President-elect Biden quoted from the execrable Marty Haugen hymn “On Eagle’s Wings” tonight:

Somewhere in Manhattan, Father George Rutler spontaneously combusted.

UPDATE.2: If you play this clip, make sure no small children are in the room. This is positively Lincolnian in its republican dignity:

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at this moment pic.twitter.com/LIjfbZL7eF

— Asra Q. Nomani (@AsraNomani) November 8, 2020

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MAGA Blues And Bitter Klingers

The networks have just called the election for Joe Biden. Sic transit gloria MAGA. Even Rupert Murdoch knows this is reality, sending down word to the New York Post staff to take a tougher line on Trump. (N.B., In Murdoch world, the Post reflects Rupert’s true take on the world.)

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal revealed some important information:

Some advisers have privately said they see little path forward, politically or legally, that would prevent Mr. Trump from becoming the first president to lose reelection since 1992.

Among the president’s advisers, finger-pointing over the campaign’s legal strategy has intensified in recent days, White House and campaign aides said. Aides have expressed acute frustration over what many see as a slapdash legal effort, complaining that—even though Mr. Trump spent months telegraphing his intent to fight the election outcome in the courts—there wasn’t enough planning ahead of Election Day and has been little follow-through on decisions made this week. For days after the election, advisers said they didn’t know who was in charge of the strategy.

You got that? Trump has known for months that this thing might conclude with a hellacious legal fight, but hasn’t bothered to put together a legal team to fight it. The WSJ also reported that Trump has named longtime conservative political operative David Bossie to head his legal team. Bossie isn’t a lawyer. This is not a serious effort. MAGA is done.

I can’t see the up side of fighting for Trump at this point, not only because this Biden win seems decisive, but also because Trump hasn’t taken the fight to defend his presidency seriously. The Journal story is pretty incredible … but about what you would expect from a president whose mouth writes checks the rest of him can’t cash. Seriously, how is it that you spend months telling your supporters that you are going to fight this in court if you have to, but then half-ass the legal prep? When the GOP went down to Florida in 2000 to wage legal war in the Bush-Gore contest, they sent the lawyer equivalent of Seal Team Six. Now? The fact that Trump doesn’t take this seriously telegraphs to conservatives how seriously we should take him from now on.

Yesterday the WSJ editorialized that Republicans are correct to put an eagle eye on voting, especially in Philadelphia, but said that Trump is going to have to prove his allegations in court. So far, it doesn’t seem that Trump’s claims are very strong. My sense is that most Americans are going to want this thing settled, and don’t have the stomach for a long, drawn-out argument. Civil society is pretty fragile right now, and the Trump-voting conservative Baptist theologian Albert Mohler is correct to say that the president’s making unsubstantiated charges of voter fraud is dangerous. 

Unfortunately, control of the US Senate was not decided on Election Day for the Republicans, as many of us thought. This is absolutely critical. Biden is going to be in the White House, and he’s going to have a Democratic House of Representatives. The only thing that can obstruct his plans is a Republican Senate. As things stand now, both parties will have 48 seats in the next Senate, but both North Carolina and Alaska, where the Senate races haven’t been called yet, will probably go to the GOP. All conservative focus, energy, and money has to go towards the two Georgia runoffs on January 5. If the Democrats win both those races, they will have de facto control of the Senate, because Vice President Kamala Harris can be the tie-breaking vote. Assuming that NC and AK go to the GOP, the Republicans will only have to win one of the two Georgia races to keep the Senate.

The GOP does not need the distraction of a drawn-out fight to save Trump’s doomed presidency. MAGA was yesterday. Daniel McCarthy, former TAC editor and one of the most articulate pro-Trump intellectuals, makes important and necessary points in this TAC piece. Excerpt:

With the economic effects of COVID, establishment liberalism is headed quickly for a crisis—if not in two years, almost certainly in four. Biden would be a one-term president because of his age, if nothing else. But Biden will in fact have to contend with everything else. Four years from now, the Democrats will be looking for another nominee. And if Kamala Harris was lackluster in the 2020 primaries, she won’t be any stronger when she’s tied to a failed administration in 2024.

In fact, the greatest danger that Trumpism faces is that liberalism’s collapse will be so swift that a fraudulent populist—some establishment Republican simply emoting—will be able to take advantage of it. But during this time in opposition, if Biden becomes president, Trump Republicans will be able to hone their program as well as their pitch. Many of the best people in the Trump administration had little previous experience in government. Only now do they know what is required to implement a Trump-like agenda over the objections of the permanent bureaucracy and disloyal Republican hacks. They have the time to direct their studies to address the obstacles they encountered while in power—the better to remove those obstacles expeditiously next time.

The 2020 election showed that even in the midst of a recession and a pandemic, even after four years of relentless Russian collusion hype, four years of demonizing the president and his supporters as racists, even after impeachment and with the liabilities as well as the strengths of the president’s personality, the Trump message was capable of mobilizing a record number of voters for the GOP and making gains among blacks, Latinos, and Asians. Under the worst possible conditions, Trump and Trumpism performed well—much better than the pollsters and the pundits predicted. Think of what would have happened if not for COVID and the recession. Donald Trump would not be troubled by protracted vote counts; he would have been re-elected in a landslide. If Republicans learn from this and follow the path Trump has shown them, without stumbling over the historically unprecedented roadblocks that were in his way, they will go into 2022 and 2024 facing a divided, depleted Democratic Party. Joe Biden—who will start on his ninth decade under the sky before the next presidential election—is not the man to rejuvenate liberalism. He is rather its last gasp.

This is true. Now is the time for populists/national conservatives to build on the good things that Trump did, and fight for the future, not the past. Leadership of the Republican Party is up for grabs now. It cannot be allowed to return to the discredited pre-Trump status quo (note that the Never Trumper Lincoln Project is actually telling Georgia voters to vote Democratic in the Senate runoff!). Trump could have accomplished so much more if he had been able to get out of his own way. I’m actually feeling pretty good about the future of political conservatism, because though the American people rejected Trump, they did not embrace liberalism. The Right has a lot to work with, if it can keep itself from being consumed by rage over Trump’s loss.

Hillary Clinton’s shocking defeat by Trump did not cause any meaningful rethinking among the Democrats and liberal institutionalists. It only made them crazier. If it had not been for Covid, and Trump’s erratic handling of that crisis, they would probably today be left to wonder how in the hell they were defeated twice by the likes of Donald Trump. This is actually very good news for conservatives. Rather than grieving over the death of MAGA, and clinging bitterly to Trump’s personal grudges, we should be more bold in fighting for an economic structure that helps the working class, against Big Tech and Woke Capitalism, and against Wokeness in all its forms.

The militant left, which controls the elite institutions, will not be able to help itself. I take this, from a CNN contributor, to be a sign of things to come:

A friend just texted to say that his sister texted out a celebratory message re: Biden to everyone in her directory. He texted back to say that he was sad for America, because no matter who won this race, we are tearing ourselves apart. She responded by cursing him and telling him that he’s dead to her. Then she and her children cut him off.

This is what we are facing now. It is going to require us to be fully engaged. The Right cannot afford to divide its heart with internal recriminations, or lose its mind like the post-2016 Left. Trump did far better this week than anyone expected him to, and now new political opportunities have presented themselves to conservatives who are wise enough to take them.

UPDATE: Ross Douthat says it is possible that Trumpism will survive without Trump...

Trump was at his most unpopular when he behaved grotesquely and ceded policymaking to the Republican old guard, so his would-be successors need to act less like tinpot tyrants, eschew the ranting and the insults, and also make good on some of the policy promises Trump left by the wayside. A populism 2.0 that doesn’t alienate as many people with its rhetoric, that promises more support for families and domestic industry, that accepts universal health care and attacks monopolies and keeps low-skilled immigration low, all while confronting China and avoiding Middle East entanglements and fighting elite progressivism tooth and nail — there’s your new Republican majority.

… but not certain, because nobody can be sure yet that Trumpism can exist without the irreplaceable personality that is Donald Trump — nor can anybody count on Trump going gently into that good night, and allowing someone to succeed him.

 

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The Left’s Post-Trump Enemies List

That didn’t take long. Presenting the Trump Accountability Project:

 

They’re compiling public lists of these people:

The Post Millennial reports:

“Yes, we are,” answered former Obama administration staffer Michael Simon, citing the Trump Accountability Project. “Every Administration staffer, campaign staffer, bundler, lawyer who represented them — everyone.”

This is totalitarian, straight up. It’s a freaking blacklist! I don’t know yet who specifically is behind this.  A former Buttigieg staffer is claiming to be part of it:

We’re launching the Trump Accountability Project to make sure anyone who took a paycheck to help Trump undermine America is held responsible for what they did.

Join us and help spread the word.https://t.co/wtVxGIlYOK

— Emily Abrams (@emabrams) November 6, 2020

GLAAD, the well-funded gay activist group, has a something called the Trump Accountability Project. I’m not sure it’s the same exact entity, but they are doing the same thing: compiling a blacklist. They say:

The Trump Accountability Project (TAP) is a resource for journalists, editors, and other newsmakers reporting on the Trump administration, which catalogues the anti-LGBTQ statements and actions of President Donald Trump and those in his circle.

They want the media to participate in the witch hunt.

You still think I’m an alarmist with Live Not By Lies?

It’s important to understand the fanaticism of these people, and how persecutorial and prosecutorial they are. Here’s a letter I received today from a graduate student at a major state university. He gave me permission to quote it if I took out his name and other identifying characteristics:

I’m writing mostly in response to your “Ketman and the Left’s Problem” post, which really spoke to me as a closeted conservative Christian in an intensely left-wing milieu. In this year of plague, one positive side-effect is that I’ve been fortunate enough to be back home and not on campus, finishing up my degree via Zoom calls and emailing professors. This should be my last semester, and I’m champing at the bit to be done with the grad school madhouse.

Since I was a little kid, I knew I wanted to be a historian (yeah, I was one of those weirdos), and I went through undergrad with that intention, getting my BA in history at [state university]. I chose my grad school because it had a well-respected group of medieval historians working there, and I was hoping to become a medievalist myself. That dream died around the end of my first year there, and I now want nothing to do with academia aside from perhaps retaining a few academic journal subscriptions. I’m now looking to find work somewhere else where I can use the research and writing skills that I’ve spent so long honing.

What killed that dream for me was the incredibly insular culture of the department at my university and the culture of academia as a whole. Grad school is where your professors train you to become their colleague, and they really let the mask slip once you’re in. As a result, I can confirm (for my neck of the woods) that what you’ve been writing about the inability of progressive academics to grasp the profound differences separating them from the rest of society is true. Before I break down my observations of this academic culture, however, I should make a distinction between the faculty of my institution and the grad students, because there is a very big difference between the two groups. Most (if not all) of the faculty are people of the left, but they are mostly products of an older American left that still tolerated discussion. They might disagree with you (even vehemently), but as long as you can argue your case in a logical and civil manner, they’ll allow it. I have great respect for most of the professors in my department for that reason.

That said, all the professors are (at least publicly) committed to progressive politics and advancing progressive talking points in class. When everyone was still on campus, professors would make snide comments about conservatives and Republican politicians and voters. One professor said in class that he thought evangelicals held too much power in this country (as though evangelical politicians have done anything to reverse the country’s leftward slide). When I took a pedagogy seminar on teaching history classes, the professor advised us to work into our lessons facts that might challenge students’ views. Of course, all of the professor’s examples of that were course readings that would challenge conservative views on things such as gender or religious orthodoxy. Questioning progressive ideas on things like the family and authority was clearly off-limits, and all of us in the class either didn’t think to or didn’t dare try it. In another instance, I (along with many other grad students and professors) was emailed a link to the current issue of an academic journal which is themed around “Activism in the Biblical Studies Classroom” (link: https://jibs.group.shef.ac.uk/current-issue/) by a professor of religious history with whom I’ve worked. If you choose to open the link, you’ll see that it’s all about how to make progressive activists out of one’s students.

Replies to the email were uniformly positive, and one professor even said that they would try and put some of the ideas contained therein to use in their classes. In a class on papal history, we read a book on the subject by an author with ties to Trump and his legal defense during the Russian collusion probe (the book wasn’t that good, but hey, I’m not the one with the doctorate and the publishing deal), and when we discussed it in class, plenty of dismissive comments about this “conservative culture warrior” (my professor’s words) were to be heard. Almost all of the faculty have very few good things to say about the very conservative and largely rural region in which the university is located, and a few of them are openly disdainful. There’s a real sense of “these people are ignorant peasants, and it’s up to us to drag them into the light whether they like it or not.”

The grad students, however, are much worse. There is a very strong contingent of self-proclaimed socialists among them, including a few students who have derided the Democratic Socialists of America for not being far-left enough. Most, however, are progressive technocratic liberals who see no enemies to their left. In our group chats, I see regular hysterical denunciations of Trump and the Republicans as fascists, racists, misogynists, and all the usual insults. I hate to admit it, but the Kavanaugh hearings and the impeachment trial brought about a sense of Schadenfreude in me upon seeing their reactions to things not going their way. One student even went so far as to post the personal information of a woman associated with a far-right group that was planning to hold some sort of demonstration in town, asking the rest of us if we should report her to her employer (of course barely anybody showed up for the event, which I wouldn’t have even known about had it not been shared in the group chat; pictures on social media suggested that the police officers monitoring the rally outnumbered the actual participants).

They’ve also made it clear that any questioning of the LGBT movement will result in shunning, with one student actually being shunned for foolishly admitting that they had absentee-voted for a Republican candidate running for senate in their home state because said candidate was “against the existence of LGBT people.” You can’t argue with these people, who honestly see no irony in their criticisms of medieval and early modern heretic-hunters as they try and root out heresy within their own ranks. Reflecting on this away from campus and their blend of hysteria and narcissism, I’ve come away with the impression that it’s the Puritans of Plymouth Colony, not the Jacobins, who are the true ancestors of today’s progressive zealots. The rigid legalism, the zombified narrative of oppression that lives on even after they’ve won institutional power (remember why the Puritans wanted to come to the New World in the first place?), the striving for utopia (ever on the horizon: just one more election, one more policy), it’s all there. Whether we want to admit it or not, there’s something very American in the way they operate – it’s been with us since the beginning.

There are a few closeted conservatives like me in the department, but we’ve learned to keep our mouths shut, and just nod along. Sometimes, though, when we can talk privately, we share our concerns and our displeasure regarding academia and the department. Misery loves company, after all! Funny enough, I initially heard about some of these students from other students gossiping about them and their “wrong” beliefs. Some others I figured out from the occasional conservative shibboleth uttered in a class or in the grad student break room. Nevertheless, I try to be friendly with everyone in the department, and I’m decent friends with more or less everyone that I’ve worked or had class with. I don’t talk politics except with the other conservatives and one of my liberal friends who is tired of identity politics and is suspicious of the trans movement. In fact, it’s that liberal who is my best friend in the department since we have shared tastes in most other things (I hope you take some comfort in knowing that not all young people choose friends based on ideology).

This is the mindset within many elite institutions. One of the things that has become so clear to me over the past few years of writing about Wokeness is how blind people my age (Gen X) and older are to the radicalism of the post-Boomer left. If I didn’t have regular contact with academics and others who work in progressive-heavy professional environments, I would assume that the institutional left was like the kindly liberal professors I had in college back in the 1980s — the kind of people who would never stand for things like the Trump Accountability Project blacklist. Those people are dying out. Emily Abrams and her generation are the present, and the future.

John M. Ellis, a professor at UC-Santa Cruz, writes in the WSJ:

In this election season it’s almost impossible to find pro-Trump bumper stickers or signs anywhere in my town. The reason is not lack of support but fear of vandalism, or worse: People nationwide have been physically assaulted and even threatened with loss of their livelihoods for no other reason than that they plan to vote as one half of the country does, and political goals are now commonly pursued by violent means. With this our civilization seems to be regressing to a more primitive stage of its development—a time when disputes were settled by force instead of rules, and before the First Amendment guaranteed the right to speak freely on the social and political issues of the day.

That’s bad enough in itself, but worse yet is that this social regression began on college campuses, of all places, before spreading to the national culture. On one-party campuses, radical-left faculty have established a political orthodoxy that student mobs enforce, and the political culture of the nation is poisoned as those students take home with them their professors’ habit of seeing opinions that differ from theirs as an evil not to be tolerated.

The left-wing political orthodoxy is also taking the place of traditional civics. Recent graduates know much less about U.S. government than older Americans do. In 2018 the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation gave a sample of Americans a test based on the exam for U.S. citizenship. Only 19% of people under 45 passed, while 74% of those over 65 did, meaning even elderly people who learned the material more than 40 years ago can summon it from memory better than recent grads. Similar studies have found a regression in knowledge of U.S. history. Today’s universities are presiding over a nationwide reversion to civic illiteracy. That’s a disaster for the country, but it suits campus radicals. A well-informed citizenry would hardly wish to be governed by people whose ideological kin have reduced so many countries to economic and political deserts.

America’s universities were once the leading edge of an advanced culture, reinforcing and expanding the country’s best features. They steered differences of opinion away from rancor and toward well-regulated, informed debate. They welcomed eccentric opinions, expanded the boundaries of thought and learning in every sphere, prepared students for citizenship by rooting them in their society’s government and history, and trained students for nonpartisan service in the specialized professions an advanced society needs.

None of that persists today. Far from being the leading edge of an advanced culture, the universities drag America back toward a more primitive state. They have contempt for the restraints and rules that define society, such as political neutrality in nonpolitical institutions. For radicals, politics takes precedence over everything, and every field within social science and the humanities eventually degrades into a mere channel to spread progressive orthodoxies.

Ellis concludes that the public should recognize that universities are poisoning our civic space, and “cut them off.” Read it all if you have a WSJ subscription. 

Where do you think the anti-Trump blacklisters come from? They’re going to collect names, store them online, and make these names available to fellow progressives when it comes to hiring, for example. Do you not think that the people educated in these universities, and moving into positions of leadership in corporations and other institutions, will not want to use these data to keep Deplorables out? Come on.

The people who are closeted in these spaces, like the grad student who wrote the e-mail, are sending us a message about how American elites think, and the kind of future they are planning for us. There’s a reason that people who once lived under communism, the people I talked to for Live Not By Lies, are freaked out by what’s happening: they get it. They can feel it in their bones. They are not surprised by things like the Trump Accountability Project. You shouldn’t be either.

UPDATE: Blacklisting. Widespread blacklisting. Destroying careers:

Warning to publishers considering signing someone who led a campaign to get Americans to hate each other – you will face a massive boycott led by the Trump Accountability Project. Not just of this book but your whole library.https://t.co/7z4tDKsSQb@mbsimon @emabrams https://t.co/YyKTQQonWl

— Hari Sevugan (@HariSevugan) November 6, 2020

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Disintegration Nation

A Christian friend writes to say that she is being inundated by propaganda from within her religious online circles. They’re making hysterical claims about voter fraud, a Democratic coup, and so forth. I’m getting some of that too, though far less of it because I’m not on Facebook. As I wrote on my Substack newsletter last night (you should subscribe; it’s free for now), I had dinner with a Christian friend who is a Democrat, and who is reeling from the things he’s reading from other Christians he knows and loves. He’s not politically engaged, and joined Facebook to be a part of their lives, but seeing the red-hot election takes, he’s wondering if he ever really knew those people at all. I assured him that liberals are doing the very same thing. Seems like everybody is venting their passions now.

Hate me if you wanna, but I am holding back. I cannot tell what’s true and what’s not. I remember being in a situation like this, in the march up to the Iraq War. I surrendered to the emotional tide within, and within my tribe, to believe what President Bush was saying. It felt so right, and so righteous. But it was not true. I’m not saying that the president was a liar, but that he was propagating a false narrative, perhaps unawares. It led to disaster for our country. I am not going to surrender to what this president is saying, not without solid evidence.

Do I believe vote fraud might have occurred in this election? Of course it might have. Where we have solid reason to suspect it, we should dispatch a phalanx of Republican lawyers to challenge it in court. But Donald Trump is exactly the kind of man who would make reckless, inflammatory allegations — and has done so. I have walked this walk before, and it leads nowhere good. Let’s be patient, and let the lawyers do their work. If you aren’t careful, you are going to talk yourself into believing that it is a metaphysical impossibility that Trump lost. You could not have convinced me in the summer of 2002 that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. You could not have convinced me that the facts and the logic were anything but clear: the US needed to go to war against Iraq. The only reason anybody could doubt that was that they were cowards or fools.

It’s happening again. I’m not saying that there has not been Democratic voter fraud. I’m saying that we don’t know that for sure, and that the President of the United States does not know that either at this point. His rhetoric is destructive and reckless. Mobs are always bad. A right-wing mob is no better than a left-wing mob. Bank your fire, and let the lawyers work. And if Trump loses, so be it. The more important fight is going to be the one to save the Senate, and it’s going to take place in Georgia.

Peggy Noonan writes today:

It looks to be a long slog. Will some mess and incompetence be uncovered on state levels? Probably. Will we see some mischief appear to have been done in this city or that county? Probably. … But there’s a point at which we have to remember there are limits to all inquiries. Richard Nixon in 1960 didn’t challenge what had been done to him when the cemeteries went strong for JFK. He thought it wouldn’t be good for the country.

Do those involved understand that turning this election into a political street fight could result in literal fighting in the streets? Oh, for a president who could say something like, “Let’s let the system do its work in a hard election shaped by changed rules during a pandemic. Let’s trust in honest outcomes and see where we are at the end. For now from me a simple vow, to stick to tradition and respect the decision of the people.” Instead the president, as this is written is screaming on Twitter about “Voter Fraud,” “STOP THE COUNT,” “secretly dumped ballots.” He vows, based on nothing, to go to the Supreme Court. He ends as he began, playing with fire.

We will have to keep our cool and see to it that the law prevails.

Here’s what I’m afraid of: if Trump does not prevail, and Biden is sworn in as the next president, all the passion on the Right that should be going towards the building and expanding of a conservative majority, and a coherent new populist policy agenda for the Right, is going to go into nurturing a Trumpist Dolchstoßlegende — a backstabbing myth that maintains the reason Trump lost is that he was somehow betrayed. I also fear that this will be the response of many conservative Christians. The passion that they ought to have been pouring into preparing their communities for resistance and resilience under the coming soft totalitarianism will be wasted on Dolchstoßlegende.

The political scientist Eric Kaufmann has a very good piece at Unherd this morning saying that the pollsters really blew it when it came to predicting how educated conservatives would vote. Educated conservatives lied to pollsters, or withheld their views. Why? Because they work in environments in which they believe they would be likely to suffer if their political views were known. Kaufmann:

Across all racial groups, 80% of Americans say “political correctness is a problem in our country”. Only the small “Progressive Activist” 8% of the US population largely thinks it’s not. In practice, the burden of political correctness arguably falls most heavily on university-educated Republican supporters. Data from a recent Cato Institute survey shows that 88% of Trump-voting graduates compared to just 44% of Clinton-supporting graduates agreed that “The political climate these days prevents me from saying things I believe because others might find them offensive.”

Republican supporters with degrees tend to work in graduate-dominated environments, where organisations and peers are more likely to enforce norms of political correctness. As a result, it is highly-educated Republican supporters who are most shy about revealing their beliefs at work.

Kaufmann shows the charts documenting this. And more:

How does this affect polling? Republican pollster Frank Luntz told Emily Maitlis that Trump voters were over twice as likely as Biden voters — by a 19 to 9 margin — to conceal their intended vote from others. I would expect this ratio to be considerably higher among university graduates, which would, accordingly, skew predictions the most among graduates.

Pollsters claim to have overcome this problem by comparing telephone and online surveys and finding no difference. Since online surveys are anonymous, they reason, a ‘shy Trump’ effect should reveal itself by comparing these two methods, and they find none.

However, we also know that people who internalise social norms often conceal their views in online surveys. The psychologist George Herbert Mead referred to people’s ‘generalized other’, a kind of mental peer group we carry around in our heads that sits in judgement upon us is even if no one is actually watching. For instance, in a recent survey of North American academics, I found that just 23% of academics were willing to state they would discriminate against a Trump voter for a job, but the actual share when using a concealed technique called a ‘list experiment’ was 42%. Likewise, a 2010 study found that the share of white Americans willing to endorse zero immigration jumped from 39% to 60% when the question was concealed in a list, rather than asked openly.

Many educated conservatives know well that they have no reason to trust online surveys to guard their privacy. In my informal discussions with my circles of educated conservative friends, almost everyone is savvy enough about the Internet and surveillance capitalism to know that there is no reason to trust privacy. If you missed political scientist Jon Askonas’s New Atlantis piece on tech tyranny, now is the time to read it.

It is absolutely vital for conservatives to understand that the outcome of this presidential election will likely not make a meaningful difference in the spread of tech tyranny and soft totalitarianism. 

I use “meaningful” because it’s obvious that a Republican in charge of the executive branch will be better at fighting this stuff than a Democrat. But as the shy Trumpers of Eric Kaufmann’s essay know, conservatives are fighting a rich and powerful culture within the leading institutions of this society. There is no reason at all to believe that the woke tyrants within these elites cultures will rethink their views in light of Tuesday’s result. If anything, they will double down on them, on the theory that clearly they haven’t worked hard enough to de-Trumpify America. For the Woke, there is no problem that applying more Wokeness can’t solve.

So, even if Trump somehow manages to eke out a win in the courts, it will solve nothing, especially within elite circles. Remember this from Live Not By Lies:

In our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a crowd by denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies, intellectual and cultural elites determine its long-term direction. “[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks,” writes sociologist James Davison Hunter. Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites” working through their “well-developed networks and powerful institutions.”

This is why it is critically important to keep an eye on intellectual discourse. Those who do not will leave the gates unguarded. As the Polish dissident and émigré Czesław Miłosz put it, “It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.”

Again: a Trump win will do nothing to deter the elites in their well-developed networks and powerful institutions. If you, reader, are one of these closeted conservatives inside a corporate, academic, or media environment, I would love to hear from you about what your colleagues are saying this week, and what kind of workplace you expect to have post-election.

My belief is that the elites, especially in Silicon Valley, will regard this election, and its failure to fully repudiate Trump, as a sign that they need to work harder to control thought and discourse. This will be especially true if there are mass protests from the Right, or even violence. I look for them to accelerate the development and implementation of a social credit system. Jon Askonas wrote last year:

By pulling so much of social life into cyberspace, the information revolution has made dissent more visible, manageable, and manipulable than ever before. Hidden public anger, the ultimate bête noire of many a dictator, becomes more legible to the regime. Activating one’s own supporters, and manipulating the national conversation, become easier as well. Indeed, the information revolution has been a boon to the police state. It used to be incredibly manpower-intensive to monitor videos, accurately take and categorize images, analyze opposition magazines, track the locations of dissidents, and appropriately penalize enemies of the regime. But now, tools that were perfected for tagging your friends in beach photos, categorizing new stories, and ranking products by user reviews are the technological building blocks of efficient surveillance systems. Moreover, with big data and AI, regimes can now engage in especially “smart” forms of what is sometimes called “smart repression” — exerting just the right amount of force and nudging, at the lowest possible cost, to pull subjects into line. The computational counterculture’s promise of “access to tools” and “people power” has, paradoxically, contributed to mass surveillance and oppression.

But here’s the thing: all that information is available to Google, Facebook, Amazon, and all the other tech companies — non-state actors that have the capacity to engage in smart repression of their own by identifying who the Deplorables are, and deciding whether or not to do business with them. We are seeing now, in real time, conservatives being thrown off of Facebook and Twitter for posting innocent things critical of leftist priorities. Moreover, there’s this (again, from Live Not By Lies):

Nor is it hard to foresee these powerful corporate interests using that data to manipulate individuals into thinking and acting in certain ways. Zuboff quotes an unnamed Silicon Valley bigwig saying, “Conditioning at scale is essential to the new science of massively engineered human behavior.” He believes that by close analysis of the behavior of app users, his company will eventually be able to “change how lots of people are making their day-to-day decisions.”

Maybe they will just try to steer users into buying certain products and not others. But what happens when the products are politicians or ideologies? And how will people know when they are being manipulated?

If a corporation with access to private data decides that progress requires suppressing dissenting opinions, it will be easy to identify the dissidents, even if they have said not one word publicly.

In fact, they may have their public voices muted. British writer Douglas Murray documented how Google quietly weights its search results to return more “diverse” findings. Though Google presents its search results as disinterested, Murray shows that “what is revealed is not a ‘fair’ view of things, but a view which severely skews history and presents it with a bias from the present.”

Result: for the search engine preferred by 90 percent of the global internet users, “progress”—as defined by left-wing Westerners living in Silicon Valley—is presented as normative.

This is going to get much worse now. It will be even more difficult to tell what truth is. What we are seeing emerge now on the Right is the same indifference to the truth that has been so powerfully manifest on the Left. And this is why we are accelerating towards some kind of totalitarianism. From Live Not By Lies:

You can surrender your moral responsibility to be honest out of misplaced idealism. You can also surrender it by hating others more than you love truth. In pre-totalitarian states, Arendt writes, hating “respectable society” was so narcotic, that elites were willing to accept “monstrous forgeries in historiography” for the sake of striking back at those who, in their view, had “excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind.” For example, many who didn’t really accept Marx’s revisionist take on history—that it is a manifestation of class struggle—were willing to affirm it because it was a useful tool to punish those they despised.

In my book, I talk about the 1619 Project as an example of this. But we should not be under the illusion that the Right is not susceptible to the same passions. If you hate the libs more than you love the truth, then you will believe whatever Donald Trump tells you — even if it leads to disaster. Don’t do it. Don’t. Back in 2002, I hated radical Islam more than I loved the truth, and my weakness led me to support a bad war. There were tens of millions of us who made that mistake.

We are watching America tear itself apart. More than ever I believe that we Christians are living in a Kolakovic Moment. As I explain in the book, Father Tomislav Kolakovic, arriving in Slovakia in 1943 hiding out from the Gestapo, foresaw the advent of Communism in Eastern Europe after the eventual German defeat. He knew that Christians had only a limited time to prepare themselves and their communities for oppression and persecution. He got busy. The bishops criticized him as alarmist, but he knew how blind they were. The Iron Curtain came down in Czechoslovakia in 1948. Father Kolakovic’s network became the backbone of the underground church.

I don’t know what precisely is coming to this country, but I know it will be no good for social and religious conservatives, who will suddenly be in the position of being dissidents. We have no time to waste with pointless stab-in-the-back fights. Keep a cool head, let the lawyers do their work, and prepare for the long term resistance — while we have the freedom to do so. And please don’t forget: the things you do and say in the days to come could cause permanent rupture with close friends and family. Think hard about this. Is it worth it?

If you’re a reader of my book, these questions in the Study Guide will help you and your group think through what the preparation might look like for you.

And by the way, readers, I continue to write Daily Dreher, a Substack newsletter in which I reflect on quieter things, in a non-polemical way. You can read it all here for free, and have it delivered by email nightly. At some point I’ll probably charge for it, but for now, I’m enjoying the challenge of writing in a different mode, and people seem to like it, because I’m getting lots of sign-ups.

UPDATE: This:

This was all so obviously the next phase.

Figure out your off ramp because the purge is coming. https://t.co/7ZHDyeGgtB

— Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) November 6, 2020

The fight ahead is about so much more than the presidency. If Trump somehow pulls this out in the courts, it will change very little about the broad struggle. You have to keep that front to mind.

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Jodi Shaw, Part II

Jodi Shaw, the whistleblower at Smith College, has Part Two of her exposé of the anti-white racialism at the elite liberal arts school:

She said she doesn’t come to work to talk about religion, race, or anything. She just wants to do her work. But she was required by her employer to go to a retreat. The reader who sent me the link characterizes (accurately) Shaw’s discussion:

You may be aware that Jodi Shaw released another video yesterday. This one concerns thee days of diversity training that Smith College required her to participate in. On the first day, the diversity consultants asked Jodi and her co-workers, in a group setting, to describe their race in the context of their childhood, adolescence, and college years. Why anyone in a work setting would want to hear this, let alone feel entitled to know it, is beyond me.

For her part, and I can easily identify with this, Jodi did not want to share anything so personal (and unnecessary) with the group. When it was her turn, she simply said that she was uncomfortable talking about this subject and wanted to pass. Go to the 4:10 mark in the video to see how the diversity consultant responded later in the day. That individual told the group that any white person who expresses discomfort or distress when asked to comment on her race is not actually experiencing discomfort but is engaged in white fragility. Such a person, the consultant said, is merely engaged in a “power play.”

Jodi rightly described this experience as a public humiliation. She was insulted and shamed in front of her colleagues for reasons based upon the color of her skin. That a victim of a struggle session can be described as engaged in a power play only proves who actually holds the power in this ideological arena. Not her. It is astounding to me that an employer would allow this type of “training” to occur in the workplace, let alone pay big money to these consultants. The employer who demands this type of training is opening itself up to claims of a racially hostile work environment.

Consider, for example, some of the things that courts look at when determining whether a work environment is racially hostile: Was the conduct threatening or humiliating? Was it severe? How frequent was it? Did it unreasonably interfere with the employee’s job? In Jodi Shaw’s case, the answer to some of these questions is a resounding yes. She certainly felt humiliated, and it definitely impacted her ability to go to work without feeling shame and simply perform her job. One can argue that this struggle session was adequately severe. As for frequency, we know that Jodi experienced other, similar actions in the workplace that negatively impacted her because of her race.

The more the public becomes aware of these types of training sessions, the greater the disdain they will feel for the indoctrination that these diversity consultants are attempting to implement. All but the most woke will squirm with discomfort at the idea of being a mandatory participant in a struggle session. And the more often we see these training sessions occur, the greater the likelihood that they will become the subject of discrimination lawsuits, as well they should.

The reader is an employment lawyer.

She says that based on her specific experience in the mandatory training, she concluded that whites can no longer avoid talking about their own private beliefs. Silence isn’t enough. She said that when she declined to answer a diversity trainer’s question about how race affected her life as a child, she was publicly shamed by the trainer.

Would you want your kid to go to Smith, or any college, and be treated like this? Would you want your kid to be socialized into a system that treats others this way? No!

Sue them, Jodi Shaw. Sue the hell out of them.

In the video, she asks journalists to contact her, because she filed a 100-page formal complaint of a hostile workplace environment at Smith, but the college did not act on it. I contacted her when she first went public, but didn’t back from her. It could be because she described herself in her first video as a “lifelong liberal,” and she refuses to talk to conservative journalists. Or maybe there’s another reason. I know that there are some liberal journalists who read this blog. Please watch her videos, and tell her story. This is a liberal woman whom an elite institutions with a billion-dollar endowment is trying to crush because she will not conform to its hideous racial orthodoxies. The Left used to be on the side of people like her. Maybe some of you still are.

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A Divided Country

Here’s an interesting excerpt from a NYT election analysis by Matt Flegenheimer: 

“I honestly can’t say I know any institution that is working,” said Aalayah Eastmond, 19, a survivor of the Parkland, Fla., massacre and a first-time voter who has spent much of the year in Washington protesting racism and police violence. “But one thing I do know that is working is the power of the people.”

How much of the recent past can be undone, and how much the electorate wants it undone, is a question no campaign can resolve in full. There is danger in any sweeping assertion about the ideals of a country that narrowly chose to follow its first Black president with the man who pushed a racist conspiracy about that president’s birthplace.

But in some ways, given the distinctiveness of the choices, the decision in this election will be especially revealing about how America sees itself and what it expects of its leaders.

In interviews this fall, voters supporting each candidate described fears that the nation would soon appear unrecognizable to them, if it was not already. This campaign, they suggested, had doubled as a national X-ray, with both sides distressed about what might turn up on the scan.

“You learn a lot about yourself and other people and the country,” said Luke Hoffman, 36, standing outside the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia in a “Vote” mask before a recent televised forum with Mr. Biden. “The sheer polarization is terrifying.”

Katherine Smarch, 51, who traveled to Lansing, Mich., to see Eric Trump speak at a gravel pit last month, said that any pro-Trump sentiment she might express on social media was doomed to be met with taunting and hostility.

“It just feels so foreign,” she said. “This is the kind of thing that happens in a foreign country.”

Mr. Trump also understands well that many millions of people are with him, win or lose, holding him up as the figure girding the nation against would-be decline and leftward creep.

Mr. Trump also understands well that many millions of people are with him, win or lose, holding him up as the figure girding the nation against would-be decline and leftward creep.

“We didn’t vote for him to be our pastor or our husband,” said Penny Nance, the chief executive of Concerned Women for America, a conservative Christian group. “We voted for him to be our bodyguard.”

That’s a great comment, that Nance one, and it perfectly captures how a lot of us feel, even if we didn’t vote for Trump. I think it is very, very difficult for people on the Left to understand why we on the Right feel so threatened by them. They control all the heights of the culture, and even that is not enough for them. What is so bizarre is how they cannot imagine how they are perceived by so many of us. The progressive writer Jesse Singal gets it:

 

This Washington Post analysis of polarization frames it primarily as something Donald Trump created, and that Republican voters exacerbate. Quote:

Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher attributed the divide to more-sinister forces.

“Let’s stop pretending that it’s ‘economic anxiety,’ ” Belcher said. “That ugliness is about tribalism. . . . Many of the most hotly contested states are ground zero of the [demographic] changes happening in America: Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Michigan. Where this battle is hottest is where diversity is greatest.”

Is it “ugliness” when the progressive tribe turns on non-progressive whites, on religious conservatives, and on racial minorities or gays who don’t happen to be progressive? This is the thing that just drives me nuts about our journalistic and professional classes: they take their own view of the world as normative, and any deviation from it as evidence of wickedness.

The Wall Street Journal analysis is a lot closer to the truth. Excerpts:

Even if Joe Biden prevails against Mr. Trump, the margin of his victory is likely to be narrower than polls suggested and Democratic officials hoped. In some key states, the president was able to turn out white, rural areas in higher numbers than in 2016. Republican strategists say Democrats lost ground with these households not just on policy but also culturally, citing what GOP voters consider culture wars over political speech and social issues.

“It really is reflective of the transformative nature of the Trump presidency,” said Charlie Gerow, a longtime GOP strategist based in Pennsylvania. He described a fundamental shift within the party, toward more support from working-class Americans, particularly whites, and less emphasis on winning over elites, including in suburban areas.

More:

Trump voters were less likely than Biden voters to say racism was a serious issue in policing, or to say the criminal justice system needs an overhaul or major changes. When asked how serious a problem racism was in American society, 54% of Trump voters said it was very or somewhat serious, compared with 96% of Biden voters.

Still, 88% of Trump voters cited the protests over police violence as a factor in their voting decision.

House Republican leaders on Wednesday reveled in the effectiveness of their messaging tying Democrats to calls by progressive activists and some lawmakers to defund police departments.

National Republican Committee Chairman Tom Emmer (R., Minn.) said GOP attacks against Democrats over defunding was effective “everywhere that it was used.” He added: “You can’t equivocate. You either support the men and women of law enforcement or you don’t.”

Some Democrats acknowledged the strategy had worked. “I think the defund the police issue hurt a lot of our candidates,” said Rep. Tim Ryan (D., Ohio), who said Democrats in his state lost after facing attacks over the topic.

Law and order is so fundamental to the conservative stance towards the world. Had the BLM protests not been violent, they would not have stoked the Right so much. This is something that progressives deeply need to understand. On the Right, it’s not reaction against racial justice protests; it’s reaction against violence, and the justification of the violence we heard from many on the Left in the media. Joe Biden’s criticism of the protesters did not ring true.

One of this blog’s readers is a foreign student spending this academic year in a major American university in the Midwest. He told me that his university is a left-wing bubble, but on the occasion that he has gotten outside of it, he’s discovering a different America. He mentioned a conversation he had with a black female woman who works with the poor. She told the student that she was planning to vote for Trump. This surprised him; he thought all black people hated Trump. She told him that she was sick and tired of the Democrats’ idea that everything that’s wrong with the poor is society’s fault. This is not what she sees with her own eyes, in her work.

Writing in The Atlantic, the liberal George Packer is bereft by the fact that after four years of Trump, so many Americans were willing to vote for him. After wailing and gnashing his teeth, Packer finally says:

But the composition of Trump’s followers, with a large minority of Latino voters and a nontrivial number of Black voters, makes their motivations more various and complicated than the single, somehow reassuring cause that progressives settled on after 2016: racism. There turn out to be many different reasons different kinds of people want to fling themselves at the feet of a con man. The votes show that progressives’ habit of seeing Americans as molecules dissolved in vast and undifferentiated ethnic and racial solutions without individual agency is both analytically misleading and politically self-defeating, doing actual harm to the cause of equality.

Many of the most influential journalists and pollsters continue to fail to understand how most of their compatriots think, even as these experts spend ever more of their time talking with one another on Twitter and in TV studios. The local and regional newspapers around the country that could fill in the picture of who we are with more granular human detail continue to die out. All of us, professionals and otherwise, are to some extent prisoners of impermeable information chambers, in which the effort to grasp contrary narratives is morally suspect.

Why does Packer believe that the disappearance of local newspapers is contributing to this phenomenon? When I worked at The Dallas Morning News from 2003-2009, the few of us at the paper who identified as conservative joked constantly about how skewed to the left our paper was, and how most of its reporters and editors cared about people like us only insofar as we were a problem to be solved. And this, mind you, was in a very red state! When I worked in the mid-1990s at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, it was a similar deal. I once argued (in a friendly way) with our newsroom’s diversity coordinator, who was so proud of the fact that we had a good balance of men and women, Latinos, blacks, whites, etc.

“Yeah,” I said, “and everybody went to the same universities and has the same opinions about politics and culture.” I pointed out that there were a fair number of Pentecostals in south Florida, but the only Pentecostals in the newsroom were black secretaries. The point is that “diversity,” as conceived by the Left, is almost always a sham.

Reading Packer, it seems that he still cannot wrap his mind around why any sane person would vote for Donald Trump. This is more a fault with Packer than with Trump voters — though he’s right to point out that there are nuts in the GOP coalition:

There’s nothing remotely comparable to QAnon in the Democratic Party. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake for Democrats who proudly believe in climate science and counting every vote to imagine that they are immune to the distorting effects of information technology and hyperpolarization. Having a basically sane worldview can make it harder to detect the creeping influence of self-delusion. How many people do you know who refused to believe that Trump could win a fair election? Antisocial media has us all in its grip.

I would like to direct George Packer back to the incredible story he wrote in The Atlantic about “the progressive dystopia of New York City public schools.” (I’m linking to the blog post I did at the time; I don’t want to use up my limited number of free stories at The Atlantic.) It’s a story about how he and his wife — good urban liberals — got mugged by destructive wokeness in their kids’ public schools. He wrote:

Around 2014, a new mood germinated in America—at first in a few places, among limited numbers of people, but growing with amazing rapidity and force, as new things tend to do today. It rose up toward the end of the Obama years, in part out of disillusionment with the early promise of his presidency—out of expectations raised and frustrated, especially among people under 30, which is how most revolutionary surges begin. This new mood was progressive but not hopeful. A few short years after the teachers at the private preschool had crafted Obama pendants with their 4-year-olds, hope was gone.

At the heart of the new progressivism was indignation, sometimes rage, about ongoing injustice against groups of Americans who had always been relegated to the outskirts of power and dignity. An incident—a police shooting of an unarmed black man; news reports of predatory sexual behavior by a Hollywood mogul; a pro quarterback who took to kneeling during the national anthem—would light a fire that would spread overnight and keep on burning because it was fed by anger at injustices deeper and older than the inflaming incident. Over time the new mood took on the substance and hard edges of a radically egalitarian ideology.

At points where the ideology touched policy, it demanded, and in some cases achieved, important reforms: body cameras on cops, reduced prison sentences for nonviolent offenders, changes in the workplace. But its biggest influence came in realms more inchoate than policy: the private spaces where we think and imagine and talk and write, and the public spaces where institutions shape the contours of our culture and guard its perimeter.

Who was driving the new progressivism? Young people, influencers on social media, leaders of cultural organizations, artists, journalists, educators, and, more and more, elected Democrats. You could almost believe they spoke for a majority—but you would be wrong. An extensive survey of American political opinion published last year by a nonprofit called More in Common found that a large majority of every group, including black Americans, thought “political correctness” was a problem. The only exception was a group identified as “progressive activists”—just 8 percent of the population, and likely to be white, well educated, and wealthy. Other polls found that white progressives were readier to embrace diversity and immigration, and to blame racism for the problems of minority groups, than black Americans were. The new progressivism was a limited, mainly elite phenomenon.

Politics becomes most real not in the media but in your nervous system, where everything matters more and it’s harder to repress your true feelings because of guilt or social pressure. It was as a father, at our son’s school, that I first understood the meaning of the new progressivism, and what I disliked about it.

If you read Packer’s story, you’ll see that he concludes that the new progressivism is destroying these schools as well as the foundations of liberal democracy. And yet, here he is two days after the election, flabbergasted as to why anybody voted for Trump!

Maybe, George, they voted for Trump because they see him as their bodyguard. Liberals like you haven’t stopped the woke crazies. How can anybody possibly think Joe Biden can?

By the way, when I posted that piece about the Packer story in September 2019, a black reader sent in this response:

I am a product of NYC public schools and even though I live in DC now, I’m disgusted by what DeBlasio, Carranza, and the Grievance Industrial Complex in education are doing to the school system. My parents came here from the Caribbean and were fortunate enough to get me into a gifted program (another thing those two are trying to destroy)–a foundation that laid the path for a solid K-12 education. The worst part of this story is that it’s not just a New York problem. The same militant wokeness can be seen in DC’s government and public charter schools. You see it in the desperate push for “diversity” above achievement, as if black kids need white classmates more than quality schools. I don’t know how the Left can see a black girl in 12th grade at an all-black high school as being subjected to the evil forces of segregation but celebrate her acceptance into Spelman College or Howard University as an opportunity for a culturally-enriching education experience.

The biggest threat, however, is in the curriculum. For example, the DC Educators for Social Justice supports the early education curriculum includes having pre-schoolers watch a video from I am Jazz and teaches THREE YEAR OLDS the meaning of “non-binary” and “transgender”. And here’s the thing, this ideology is smuggled in through the front door during Black Lives Matter at Schools Week. Most people think of BLM as being against police violence directed at African Americans but the words “police” and “brutality” don’t appear once in any of their 13 principles. You know what else doesn’t? “Father”, “husband”, or “son”. In fact, here’s the text of BLM’s “Black Villages” principle:

“We are committed to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, and especially “our” children to the degree that mothers, parents and children are comfortable.”

Is this what anybody thinks of when they hear the proverb about taking a village to raise a child? And does anyone think that the biggest problem in the black community is TOO MANY nuclear families? This stuff is desperately wicked. And not a single person I’ve talked to about it (and there have been many, lol) even knew that BLM had 13 principles, let alone their content. I fear for the state of public education in our country, especially in large urban school districts. I finally see why many Christians have such deep skepticism of “government schools”. And in cities like NYC and DC where the majority of black students are doing math and English below grade level, why does anyone think a second of school time should be spent reading A is For Activist? What good is teaching Jamal to be a protestor if he has to go to Brad to write his signs?

One thing I do not get about the Republican Party: why are they so damned afraid to openly and directly criticize wokeness? It’s like they have accepted the media’s narrative that to be against this stuff is to out yourself as a bigot.

Anyway, the cognitive dissonance between the George Packer who can write with admirable honesty about how wokeness is destroying public schooling in his city, and the George Packer who is poleaxed by the lack of a Biden landslide, tells you something about the blindness of the leadership class. Along those lines, do you remember the big NYT podcast by Chana Joffe-Walt, titled “Nice White Parents,” from this summer? In it, she talks about race in the NYC public school system. Her basic point is that white parents are to blame for de facto school segregation. I’m not going to go back into the piece now, but I want to point out that at no point in the five-part series did she mention the black anti-Semitism that came forth in the 1968 NYC teacher’s strike. How can you tell the story of race and white flight in the NYC public schools without bringing up that? You can if the story you want to tell is one of white guilt.

This is the only story of America that progressives have to tell, or so it seems. This was not the story of America that Barack Obama told. This country elected a black man president, twice. You think that suddenly we quit being that kind of country? Packer is right: something changed in this country in 2013, 2014.

Look, it’s not just the Left. I get that. You should see some of the comments that I send straight to the trash, from people on the Right who accuse me of all kinds of things because I’m not 100 percent aboard the Trump Train. But the Left, which controls the public discourse, and shapes it to its standards, has made it increasingly impossible for people to express difference, or doubt, in good faith.

The question the Left can’t ask itself: What is wrong with us that even after four years of Donald Trump, so many Americans — even minorities — voted for him? 

Last point. A couple of weeks ago, I was up in my rural hometown buying chicken feed for our hens. As I was checking out at the tractor supply, I saw a very old white man toddling into the store on a walker. He looked to be World War II veteran age. He had a patriotic mask on and a red MAGA hat. His voice was so weak that the checkout clerk couldn’t hear what he was saying through his mask. Finally someone in line interpreted it for her: he wanted to know where he could find brackets to mount his flagpole on his front porch. It was like something out of a Spielberg movie — but of course you would never see anyone wearing a MAGA hat in a Hollywood movie, except as a villain.

I don’t even know who that old man was — his mask covered most of his face — but he loves his country, and wanted to fly the flag. Not a Trump flag — the American flag. Now, consider Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, the founder of The 1619 Project, which teaches that America was founded in iniquity: for the sake of preserving slavery. It’s factually untrue, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that it’s legitimately contestable. This narrative has become standard in American media, and among many progressives. Can you imagine someone who believes what Nikole Hannah-Jones does wanting to fly the American flag from their front porch?

If not, then what does that tell you about why so many Americans chose to vote for Trump, despite his many grievous faults?

We are going to remain a divided country. The election solved nothing. The idea, though, that if only we could have gotten rid of Donald Trump, then things would heal, was always an absurd fantasy. We are a divided country because we have lost the core narratives that bound us: a shared Christian faith (however attenuated), and a shared commitment to the historical narrative of America as an imperfect country that always strives to make life better for the next generation than the one that came before it.

We can’t even agree on what America is for anymore.

I’ll leave you with this letter from a reader, who says that it shouldn’t be a mystery as to why more minorities vote Republican:

In New Jersey, the state just implemented new learning standards saturated with references to gender identity. It’s to be taught in grade school, promoted in middle school (yes, promotion by the school is in the standards), with high school students advocating regarding gender identity as a curricular requirement. In addition, my school district has a state-endorsed policy that permits the school to socially gender transition a child without parental notice/consent.

In response to the above, I ran as a candidate for the school board. I advocated reversal of the policy eliminating parents from such a consequential decision. Given the widespread presence of gender identity in the learning standards, I also advocated for teaching students about the harms of “gender transition” procedures, i.e., puberty-blockers, hormones, etc.

In our suburban, overwhelmingly white, half-conservative/half-liberal, town, since the summer, there has been a group of activists who protest each week endorsing BLM, antiracism, equity, diversity, inclusion, trans rights, etc. They, of course, have a right to advocate for what they believe. Some of them come to each Board of Ed meeting to tell the community how racist, intolerant, bigoted it is. It’s clear they consider themselves the community’s moral conscience.

Predictably, in response to my specific concerns regarding policy and teaching, some members of this group called me homophobic, bigoted, extremist, etc. They also asserted that my presence on the Board of Ed would be harmful and a danger to students. Though, of course, the effect of my proposals would be to make the schools safer in restoring parental rights and providing needed information. Still, the accusations that I was a “danger” were within the realm of expectations.

I’m an immigrant from Egypt and a naturalized citizen. What I didn’t expect was that my ethnicity also would be become an issue and a target of the activists. The claim was the reason I believed such awful things (again, look at what I’m actually proposing, which they label as extremist, dangerous, etc.) is because of my Egyptian upbringing. My being from Egypt was publicly and specifically stated as a reason to oppose me, urging that someone like me shouldn’t be on our Board of Education.

I know you know this. But, the notion that progressives and progressivism are tolerant, inclusive, for diversity, (insert more buzz words), etc., is preposterous. They are for their ideology and the ideological meaning of such terms (different from their plain meaning), period. And, if you are a minority who dares to oppose their determination to redefine reality according to their will and whim, they will come after you with all they have, including disparaging your race, ethnicity, etc.

I am for civic tolerance and inclusion. I seek to express my convictions regarding what is right and good and true with clarity, while extending respect and friendship to those who differ. That is why I am not a progressive and would not and could not vote for Democrats. I know that many of my liberal friends are for what I’m for too. But, the views expressed by the progressives activists in our suburban town are who the Democrats/progressives are, as a matter of core conviction, and permeate every place they have power. A vote for Democrats is a vote for people who hate me and want me and my family excluded from society. And, yes, this apparently includes contempt for who I am ethnically. Contemporary progressivism is moral self-righteousness, zealotry, and indignation, justifying actual racism.

That is the reality of where we are. Accordingly, I vote Republican because they are the party who are inclusive and tolerant of difference. Are there knaves and fools and even actual racists who are Republican? Sure there are. But, as a Christian, I don’t look to them to advance all of my beliefs or to advance a vision of a righteous society. That’s what the Church is for. And, that’s not where our society is at anyway. I don’t seek “purity” in my political party or alignments. What I seek, at this point especially, is simply a space for civic peace. And what the Democrats are wholly committed to is eliminating such space and people like me along with it.

A vote for Democrats is a vote for people who hate me and want me and my family excluded from society. Yes, I agree. It’s not always true — my state has a Democratic governor, and I voted for him twice — but generally speaking, this is correct. I see no real reason to believe that voting Republican is about hate and exclusion. Progressives tend to see a failure to be progressive as aggression.  People see this, and vote accordingly.

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